Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The media's lab leak fiasco

slowboring.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 736 posts

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#151

Post by codeulike »

cratermoon wrote: post #29

"If the question is “are both hypotheses possible?” the answer is yes. Both are possible. If the question is “are they equally likely?” the answer is absolutely not. One hypothesis requires a colossal cover-up and the silent, unswerving, leak-proof compliance of a vast network of scientists, civilians, and government officials for over a year. The other requires only for biology to behave as it always has, for a fami…

People keep conflating 'lab leak' with 'made in a lab'.

Think about this: If it was a natural virus that escaped from a lab, China wouldn't necessarily even know about the escape for sure. We could imagine a scenario where maybe China started to suspect that might be what happened around Jan/Feb 2020. So then you don't need a collosal cover up, because hardly anyone knows for sure anyway - you just need to obstruct anyone asking questions that lead in that direction, and obfuscate any clues (publications from the lab saying what they were working on, reports of staff illness etc)

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#152

Post by 99_00 »

908B64B197 wrote: post #43
partiallypro wrote: post #4

To me what gives me credence to the "lab leak theory" more than anything, was China's behavior during and initially after the outbreak. Where they thwarted any investigations from WHO or anyone else and arrested journalists even attempting to cover it. Now we have additional information of lab workers being sick back in November...I genuinely wonder why people immediately jumped in to defend China's actions through t…

Interesting how media coverage completely changed. Under the previous administration it was considered racist to even mention the theory and it's proponents were considered racists or conspiracy theorists. Why such a sudden change? China certainly didn't change its position on the issue...

Mainstream media no longer sees CCP as an ally against their domestic political opponents.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#153

Post by johncena33 »

cratermoon wrote: post #142
johncena33 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you considered the possibility that it first appeared in the vicinity of a lab that experiments on similar viruses is because if it had appeared elsewhere, there would have been no sufficiently-equipped lab to isolate it? You are essentially arguing for lab leak theory. Initially there was only one cluster of COVID and that was at Wuhan. That's why lab leak hypothesis is more plausible. It was not the case tha…

The initial cluster was found at Wuhan, because there's a lab there. We have no idea how many sub-pandemic clusters arose and fell before this particular mutation got into a population sufficiently dense and mobile to spread it. Did you know that 1918 flu arose in Haskell County, Kansas, killed many, and then just .. died out? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC340389/

> The initial cluster was found at Wuhan, because there's a lab there

Citation needed. This seems hand-wavy at best. As a matter of fact, people were uncertain about disease itself [1]. I havent seen any article yet that asserts the fact that Wuhan cluster was detected because of the lab. Furthermore, Wuhan lab is a research lab. It's not some diagnostic lab that people go there to get tested for new variant of SARS viruses.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50984025

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#154

Post by Lammy »

estaseuropano wrote: post #147
yawaworht1978 wrote: post #37

Call me cynical...but... What would any government do about it if it was proven to be a lab leak? They could declare it an accident (probably this would be true) and that would be the end of the story. No country would dare to impose sanctions or engage beyond diplomacy. I do not think that the Chinese governments reaction or handling of the case is suspect, they likely want to shut down potential fake news. To label…

You miss that china also has internal politics. Not everything is about what the US/western countries think/do/want.

Everyone forgot about Hong Kong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_Hong_Kong_pr...

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#155

Post by realce »

thundergolfer wrote: post #44
deadalus wrote: post #5

Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory. Youtube accounts also got demontized/banned.

Have you got a link to examples? I’m wondering if they weren’t also saying that China deliberately leaked the virus. Saying “it is possible but very unlikely that the virus leaked from a Wuhan lab” is talking about the lab-leak theory. Saying “the virus was cooked up and leaked from a Wuhan lab to hurt Trump’s re-election chances” is also talking about the lab-leak theory.

And the amount of evidence in both cases is equal right now - slim and circumstantial. Just because one is political doesn't make it more worthy of censorship if you're removing content based on "misinformation." There's no real evidence underlying either statement.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#156

Post by kristofferR »

generalizations wrote: post #131
dylan604 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The evidence?

There were even videos of chinese scientists trying to get the word out about the virus and the lab leak liklihood. There was plenty of evidence, if you knew where to look. 'Evidence' is tangential to the decision making behind misinformation tags.

The problem is that "evidence" is pretty easy to find. Even the wildest conspiracy theories has pages and pages of links to their evidence.

Who should evaluate the evidence for its credibility?

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#157

Post by shkkmo »

cheeseomlit wrote: post #23
danboarder wrote: post #12

One problem with politically charged issues is that one's bias can significantly color unresolved factual issues. In the article the early 'red flags' pointed out in the January 2020 study by The Lancet left clear open questions regarding the Seafood Market hypothesis, but many in the media glossed over these red flags. Now that additional facts are coming to light including the fact that multiple scientists at the l…

>I think this will result in a rethink of how we tag unresolved topics as "False Information" or before enough facts are gathered. Wishful thinking perhaps, somehow I doubt most of the media/gov't figures who dismissed these claims did so in good faith to begin with.

Please be explicite iF you are going to make such accusations. What "bad faith" reason do you postulate motivated these actions?

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#158

Post by tonystubblebine »

scottrogowski wrote: post #72
deadalus wrote: post #5

Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory. Youtube accounts also got demontized/banned.

This should be the top comment. Social media companies can either be monopolies or they can put limits on the speech of their platform... but they can't do both. While not against the law of freedom of speech, political moderation processes are certainly against the intent. Every once in a while we get a case like this where an unpopular fringe opinion becomes mainstream and underlines the point. But this isn't just…

Not all opinions deserve equal airtime. Fringe opinions should have to work harder to get to the mainstream. Isn’t that exactly what happened here? This is the fringe opinion that had the most inherent value and it’s proved that by breaking through. IMO I wish the platforms had censored more bad info than this. It’s crazy to me that there isn’t more friction for bad ideas.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#159

Post by wearywanderer »

yawaworht1978 wrote: post #37

Call me cynical...but... What would any government do about it if it was proven to be a lab leak? They could declare it an accident (probably this would be true) and that would be the end of the story. No country would dare to impose sanctions or engage beyond diplomacy. I do not think that the Chinese governments reaction or handling of the case is suspect, they likely want to shut down potential fake news. To label…

It may change the cost/benefit analysis of viral research. If the risk of a lab escape is presently worse than the risk of a natural virus arising, then there are numerous things governments could do to remedy this. Even if a total research ban isn't warranted, it's probably a good idea to consider banning these labs in cities. The labs could be relocated to remote areas where workers are kept quarantined-by-default.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#160

Post by ximeng »

fsckboy wrote: post #83

Not just the media, folks, also the rest of our "sense making apparatus". Wikipedia has been suppressing lab leak discussion, and still to this moment will not allow the old Lab Leak Hypothesis page back. It still redirects to a declared "Misinformation!" page https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=COVID-19_lab_leak... And guess where else lab leak was suppressed? Here on HN. Yes, dang, you suppressed discussion…

“This virus was likely man-made because gain of function man made viruses are quite common in research” - this doesn’t seem a convincing argument on its own (ignoring the comments on conspiracy / sense-making / politicisation).

Gain of function research seems valuable precisely in the sense it is identifying the mechanisms that govern infectivity. We wouldn’t have this discussion on furin cleavage sites without it.

The most likely case if we accept the lab leak hypothesis is that there was a base virus that was modified, with a similar virus that had a slightly different spike protein. This then infected staff and from there entered society.

This gains plausibility from the fact that it wouldn’t be readily distinguishable from a natural virus, as it would just be a combination of the two genomes.

However this is exactly why we can’t say for certain either way whether the source is natural or not - they’d be indistinguishable genetically.

It is more likely on the face of it that evolutionary pressure on the virus to spread and the natural process of mutation and selection caused the mutations in question, simply because of the volume of natural mutations versus artificial mutations.

Post reply on HN