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US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

reuters.com

271–280 of 664 posts

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#271

The WHO is a useless organization. For political reasons, it will be necessary to engage, but hopefully US authorities will not treat it as an information source. The US should use its own primary sources in future to evaluate disease spread. China will lie to the WHO and the WHO will protect it. But to know the truth, we should use our modern equivalents of Key Hole. There is no truth but that which you have examine…

You mean primary sources like the program that had US scientists embedded in Chinese laboratories that Trump dismantled in 2019? Also, you clearly don’t understand what the WHO does and how critical it has been in the reduction and even eradication of disease spread across the world over decades. Further, the WHO, much like most multilateral organizations is dependent on its member states for strength. When the most…

"embedded" could be used in a spy context, but is not the right word for describe scientists. I would suggest cooperating or simply working instead.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the kind of behavior you see in organizations where the penalty for making mistakes is overly severe, the only recourse for people is to lie and cover-up the truth at all costs. This is how projects at some companies continue despite being way behind schedule and overbudget until eventually the weight of the truth brings everything crashing down.

Everybody will always have a motive to prevent others from discovering their failures. A democratically elected politician has just as much reason to want their failures covered up as a CCP member does. The reason governments like the CCP have such a hard time dealing with that issue is that their entire system is set up so that you have one party, with no opposition, all working in concert to conceal the truth from…

This is also why dictatorship always have corruption. They cannot have transparency which means there will be corruption.

Of course democracies are just as vulnerable to all the bad stuff as they are run by humans, but transparency is at least possible. Sadly we see national security being used as reason to avoid transparency, and of course corruption follows.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#273
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not necessarily lab created but it could have been leaked from a lab (which studies coronaviruses and bats) even if it wasn’t artificial. It matters because it lays more blame on China and creates the political expediency needed for sanctions. I do agree that there should be consequences for the Chinese government regardless of whether the virus was a leak or not (or artificial or not), and that it isn’t depende…

> It’s not necessarily lab created but it could have been leaked from a lab (which studies coronaviruses and bats) even if it wasn’t artificial. I've heard this multiple times as a reasonable possibility, and yet it seems absurd if you think about it: are you trying to accuse someone of leaking into the environment a virus that actually comes from the environment? And how do you even prove something like that?

Whatever the leak was, it was likely something mutated (either naturally or artificially) compared to what is present in the environment.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#274

Forgive my ignorance but even if it was lab created, so what? I don’t really understand why it matters or not. Didn’t the entire world basically have a nearly 3 month heads up on this either way?

It was supposedly practically impossible for that to happen so at least someone should be held responsible. Once a guy is dead, does it matter who killed him?

> Once a guy is dead, does it matter who killed him?

So... murder shouldn't be punished ?

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#275
post #4

Related: China refused to provide WHO team with raw data on early COVID cases, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-ch...

Release of raw patient data to international researchers from most countries would be unusual, and even if a strong case were made it would have to undergo ethics committee approval, which would take months.

> The team had requested raw patient data on 174 cases that China had identified from the early phase of the outbreak in the city of Wuhan in December 2019, as well as other cases, but were only provided with a summary, said Dominic Dwyer, an Australian infectious diseases expert who is a member of the team.

> Such raw data is known as “line listings”, he said, and would typically be anonymised but contain details such as what questions were asked of individual patients, their responses and how their responses were analysed.

> “That’s standard practice for an outbreak investigation,” he told Reuters on Saturday via video call from Sydney, where he is currently undergoing quarantine.

I can't claim to know much about what's standard practice for outbreak investigations, but I'm inclined to believe him on this more than - no offense - a random HN user.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being down-voted but this is exactly what my friends who live in China have told me. People were also downvoting big time back in March when I and others were saying that the numbers China was quoting were made the heck up. Suddenly the western media realizes that's true[1] yet we don't see a mass back-lash against China as a result... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55481397

In Trump circles, the narrative has been "FUCK CHINA FOR THIS VIRUS" since day 1. Seriously, this has their mantra the entire pandemic. Everything from being a lab virus to lying about numbers are what they've discussed. Really funny to see them on the same page with some Chinese.

Although disagree with almost everything about trump, I think he was in some way right about China. I don’t think it has anything to do with the Chinese people though.

Also, I don’t think he went about it in an effective way at all, it seems like the ccp was betting on him just going away after a while and just suffering the pain for a while.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#277

Um I shared analysis 15 days ago from a doctor who did an in-depth analysis and determined it to be from a lab. My post got one comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25965751

My father watched a video on youtube from such a doctor, and now not only thinks COVID is a hoax, but that so is HIV.

The PCR Pandemic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LToSnpz8A4

Fuck these lone doctors and fuck Youtube for spreading their unfounded theories through the general population, putting millions of lives at risk.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#278
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It disingenuous and lazy to make broad statements of equivalence like this. There are very obvious differences in how the world’s governments operate.

Oh yes? Shall we trust the US government in a good investigation on their motives to finance the bloody disaster that is the civil war in Syria? How about we send a Chinese delegation to check the documents inside the Pentagon or the CIA?

Regardless of your view point, there is still has freedom of speech, mostly free information and elections that matters so if the people dislike the policy they can change it.

Not saying it’s all golden, but these are very meaningful differences.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#279

What's weird is that a number of WHO investigation team members a week ago said China was very transparent, cooperative and helpful. Some have tweeted against the NYT who spun the WHO team's accounts into anti-China propaganda. https://mobile.twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/13605511085659... https://mobile.twitter.com/TheaKFischer/status/1360590441817...

Peter Daszak isn't impartial, and quite frankly his presence on the team alone makes its conclusions suspect. From this [1] excellent investigation into the subject from New York Magazine:

> Peter Daszak, is a zoologist and bat-virus sample collector and the head of a New York nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance — a group that [...] has channeled money from the National Institutes of Health to Shi Zhengli’s laboratory in Wuhan, allowing the lab to carry on recombinant research into diseases of bats and humans.

> [...]

> Daszak, for his part, seems to have viewed his bat quests as part of an epic, quasi-religious death match. In a paper from 2008, Daszak and a co-author described Bruegel’s painting The Fall of the Rebel Angels and compared it to the contemporary human biological condition. The fallen angels could be seen as pathogenic organisms that had descended “through an evolutionary (not spiritual) pathway that takes them to a netherworld where they can feed only on our genes, our cells, our flesh,” Daszak wrote. “Will we succumb to the multitudinous horde? Are we to be cast downward into chthonic chaos represented here by the heaped up gibbering phantasmagory against which we rail and struggle?”

There's much more in there; it's clear that he's good friends and business partners with the WIV and it would be deeply his interest to suppress any consideration of the lab-escape hypothesis.

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that true? It's hard for me to imagine anything China does being 'lauded' in western media, they're very much a media/political boogeyman (not necessarily saying that's unwarranted).

I kind of find it the opposite? They run concentration camps and acknowledge mass rape but the western media mostly shrugged. I find it hard to find anything the media take seriously these days. We are all so easily distracted, myself included.

The problem is that news stops being, well, new after it has been reported and if nothing changes, attention goes elsewhere.

The people were informed, they reacted as much as they are going to, and until new information comes out, the issue is where it is.

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