US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins • Hacker News Board

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

#381

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Feb 14, 2021, 5:07 AM UTC

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #332

kmonsen wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What you mention deserves to be repeated. The chinese people and the CCP are not the same thing, just as the national security apparatus of the US... and US citizens are separate too. its natural to catch flak, but it happens to both sides. The saudi arabia govt is friendly to our govt, but the vast majority of their population thinks its totally OK to blow up US citizens. Iranian leadership is constantly at odds wit…

[deleted]

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

#382

Post by refenestrator » Sun, Feb 14, 2021, 5:07 AM UTC

unishark wrote: post #374

refenestrator wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because ulterior motives are the best motives! There's a huge incentive to blame China for our fuckups. Really, it should be assumed unless proven otherwise. After all, aside from the whole "no evidence" thing, what does it matter if it's a lab accident or a bat bite or whatever? We had months of warning and fucked it up badly. They were blindsided and recovered nicely. Clearly this must be their fault.

> After all, aside from the whole "no evidence" thing, what does it matter if it's a lab accident or a bat bite or whatever? Indeed because both of those leading theories point the blame at China. So if people want to blame china nothing is stopping them. Except perhaps those claiming it came from Europe or the US first. Perhaps that's the point of the stonewalling, to provide cover for being able to claim alternativ…

Yeah, whatever % of Chinese who blame the West are the mirror image of westerners blaming China, and they're all absolute morons. It doesn't matter where the virus showed up first, it's here and we all have to deal with it.

> Who is the "we" you are referring to? The western world? The US?

I was thinking US -- I guess it goes to varying extents to the rest of the "western world", depending on how you define that.

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

#383

Post by dboreham » Sun, Feb 14, 2021, 5:09 AM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #319

cratermoon wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they had just responded to the outbreak instead of trying to cover it up initially and been a little more open with the international community they would have been lauded for their handling of the situation Are we talking about China or the Trump administration?

I'm no fan of the Trump administration or their handling of COVID, but they didn't throw doctors in jail or censor their research. Entirely different level of screwup.

Like this? https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.yahoo.com/amphtml/seattle-...

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

#384

Post by jedmeyers » Sun, Feb 14, 2021, 5:10 AM UTC

izzydata wrote: post #377

ttz wrote: post #53

First gen Chinese, grew up in NA. Have contact with relatives "on the ground". My own experience: Don't ever trust the Chinese government on issues that could potentially involve the reputation of the party. Note that I'm not saying don't trust what CCP says, ever (sometimes they actually do good things) - just not on issues that involve anything to do with how the world might perceive them. Which is exactly what thi…

I don't know why whenever people bring up that the virus might have come from a lab it always gets dismissed because the virus doesn't look artificial. Why is it never brought up that it could just be an accident? It doesn't need to be a weapon. Just poor safety during research.

And it might have been a wild virus extracted from animals that escaped from the lab due to the poor safety protocols in place. Not the first time this would have happened. Soviets released the anthrax spores due to the filter not being in place, for example.

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

#385

Post by mxcrossb » Sun, Feb 14, 2021, 5:15 AM UTC

yurlungur wrote: post #291

ttz wrote: post #53

First gen Chinese, grew up in NA. Have contact with relatives "on the ground". My own experience: Don't ever trust the Chinese government on issues that could potentially involve the reputation of the party. Note that I'm not saying don't trust what CCP says, ever (sometimes they actually do good things) - just not on issues that involve anything to do with how the world might perceive them. Which is exactly what thi…

No need for you to preach to the choir about not trusting the Chinese government. As can be seen in the thread, people would much prefer to trust conspiracy theorists and fringe scientists before they put any trust in the Chinese government. To me, the only constructive discussion that can be had at this point needs to be around actual evidence, and not the absence of it. The first documented cases, first traces of p…

We’re just not following a good process of discerning truth here. We started with a blatant, baseless conspiracy theory “this is a weapon China created”. Then we white wash the theory to “China created it, but maybe it was an accident”. Then suddenly the burden of truth is on China to disprove this claim. It’s just not a sensible process, rooted in the fallacy of the middle ground; as you said we need to start from the evidence and not from what you want to be true.

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

#386

Post by WarOnPrivacy » Sun, Feb 14, 2021, 5:16 AM UTC

kmonsen wrote: post #272

AmericanChopper wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Sadly we see national security being used as reason to avoid transparency, and of course corruption follows.

Man it took forever for someone to make this point. There's a lot of bad Chinese Gov behavior that US Gov players absolutely aspire to.

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

#387

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Feb 14, 2021, 5:16 AM UTC

ttz wrote: post #53

First gen Chinese, grew up in NA. Have contact with relatives "on the ground". My own experience: Don't ever trust the Chinese government on issues that could potentially involve the reputation of the party. Note that I'm not saying don't trust what CCP says, ever (sometimes they actually do good things) - just not on issues that involve anything to do with how the world might perceive them. Which is exactly what thi…

[deleted]

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

#388

Post by blackrock » Sun, Feb 14, 2021, 5:17 AM UTC

izzydata wrote: post #377

ttz wrote: post #53

First gen Chinese, grew up in NA. Have contact with relatives "on the ground". My own experience: Don't ever trust the Chinese government on issues that could potentially involve the reputation of the party. Note that I'm not saying don't trust what CCP says, ever (sometimes they actually do good things) - just not on issues that involve anything to do with how the world might perceive them. Which is exactly what thi…

I don't know why whenever people bring up that the virus might have come from a lab it always gets dismissed because the virus doesn't look artificial. Why is it never brought up that it could just be an accident? It doesn't need to be a weapon. Just poor safety during research.

Perhaps the virus was a lab leak. But maybe you’re looking at the wrong country for it.

I mean, name any other country that has a lot of biological weapons labs all over the world.

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

#389

Post by physicles » Sun, Feb 14, 2021, 5:17 AM UTC

travisgriggs wrote: post #335

ttz wrote: post #53

First gen Chinese, grew up in NA. Have contact with relatives "on the ground". My own experience: Don't ever trust the Chinese government on issues that could potentially involve the reputation of the party. Note that I'm not saying don't trust what CCP says, ever (sometimes they actually do good things) - just not on issues that involve anything to do with how the world might perceive them. Which is exactly what thi…

Is it just me or is there a deep irony here? I find it interesting that one of the oft maligned attributes of religious communities, especially those in authority in said communities, is this same behavior. Do good things and be open, but also very much protect the brand. As a naive westerner I've hear/learned/assumed that Chinese communism/society was areligious. When described as you (OP) put it, it seems that abst…

The experience of changing from someone who believes all aspects of the “orthodoxy”, to someone who accepts that there are flaws in it, can be strikingly similar.

A Chinese friend once described to me the week he discovered YouTube after going to study in America, when for the first time he saw videos of Chinese leaders (2000-era) behaving very rudely toward reporters. He found that shocking, and over the next few weeks and more research, accepted that much of what he’d been taught about his history was fabrication. The experience was pretty traumatizing for him. He’s back living in China now, but with a very different perspective.

I was what you might call a fundamentalist Christian for most of my life, until I was exposed to enough of the counter-arguments that some of them finally stuck. The deprogramming process took a year and a half and was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done.

In both cases, the in-group is well-protected from “improper information” (as the CCP calls it). In China they have the great firewall and the domestic censorship apparatus; in religion believers are inoculated against trusting information from “worldly” sources (though the motives of those involved in the actual suppression may differ). Neither system could survive in its current form if this information weren’t suppressed — that’s obvious by looking at what happens when individuals are exposed to alternate points of view and take them seriously.

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

#390

Post by rsync » Sun, Feb 14, 2021, 5:17 AM UTC

mgamache wrote: post #79

If anyone is tempted to associate 'lab leak' with xenophobia or anti-Chinese sentiment, please remember the WIV lab was in partnership with the U.S. NIH (National Institutes of Health). https://www.biospace.com/article/1nih-awards-ecohealth-allia...

"If anyone is tempted to associate 'lab leak' with xenophobia or anti-Chinese sentiment, please remember the WIV lab was in partnership with the U.S. NIH ..."

Thank you. I'm curious ... how many virology labs, like this one, are extant in the world and how many study coronaviruses as they did ?

Is it tens of thousands of virology labs like this one and hundreds that study coronaviruses ?

Or is it hundreds of virology labs like this one and a handful study coronaviruses ?