Live data from Hacker News

The media's lab leak fiasco

slowboring.com

301–310 of 736 posts

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What I would do, if elected Emperor over this, is to add warnings or links to debunkings of fringe theories, but never delete them. The power to silence will always be abused.

Facebook already does this and people just claim it’s fake news being pushed by “the elite.”

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#302
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On paper they're directly under the command of the CCP, but Xi Jinping only has so many hours in his day like any other human and can't personally monitor everything that's happening in a billion-person country. That seems to leave plenty of room for government branches to have their own internal politics and interests in practice.

So why the hundreds of thousands of mouths of Chinese Doctors and Nurses and medical researchers are kept shut now? Well, apparently the CCP told the truth, the whole truth to the world. Authoritarian regime doesn't work. /s

As far as I can tell from the outside, there were actually multiple overlapping cover-ups within China by different organisations with different interests that resulted in doctors, nurses and medical researchers being silenced - starting with local-level coverups that tried to keep the national government from knowing there was a problem, and ending with multiple national-level coverups, including attempts to cover up the fact the local government had covered stuff up because that in itself was embarrassing to China as a country.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#303
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bit of a fuzzy overlap between "man made" and "lab leak". Specifically, the lab leak theory more or less assumes that the virus was collected from the mine, taken to Wuhan, and some research and experiments were done on it, resulting it some changes. Certainly the lab was doing research; there's an ongoing debate over what they did, who funded it, whether what they did technically qualifies as "gain of func…

> Specifically, the lab leak theory more or less assumes that the virus was collected from the mine, taken to Wuhan, and some research and experiments were done on it, resulting it some changes. I disagree, the lab leak hypothesis is independent from the lab [inadvertently or deliberately] mutating the virus. The lab may have merely possessed the virus, having made only the mistake of transporting the virus from a re…

That would help explain how the virus got from the mine to Wuhan; it does not help explain how the virus mutated from a bat virus unable to infect humans to a virus that was extremely good at infecting humans with, so far, no intermediate stages identified.

Much of the problem with the zoonotic explanation is that no evidence of the process has been found. Was a third virus involved? We haven't identified it. Was a third host species involved? We haven't identified one. Were there any half-way variants that were slightly capable of infecting humans, and then mutated further to reach their final form? We haven't identified any. There was some initial speculation about the wet market, but that hasn't panned out. Pangolins were briefly considered as a possible intermediate host, but I think that's also been ruled out.

So if the lab collected the virus, flew it to Wuhan, stored it, and then accidentally leaked it in its original form, we still have no idea what happened next. It's a bat virus, so it infected a local Wuhan bat, and then what? And whatever the theory is, why have we been unable to find any evidence of it so far?

Assuming RaTG13 was indeed the source of COVID-19, the question of "how it got to Wuhan" is, I think, much less interesting than "how did it mutate into COVID-19" (and "why can't we find evidence of that process?"). And I think when people talk about "lab leak" versus "zoonotic", they're generally focused on the latter questions.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#304
post #5

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

There's also systematic censorship and disinformation against prophylaxis and early treatment information, which could prevent millions of hospitalisations and deaths. [1]

e.g. YouTube recently censored the Ivermectin Global Summit, in which doctors and scientists showed the overwhelming scientific evidence for Ivermectin from around the world. [2]

1. https://covid19criticalcare.com/videos-and-press/flccc-relea...

2. https://www.reddit.com/r/ivermectin/comments/nj9713/ivermect... (video with timestamps and my summary of the key points)

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#305
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US absolutely knew there were risks here. US diplomats knew that the lab had insufficient safety systems for the research that we already know was being done in Wuhan. Those diplomats explicitly warned the US of the dangers several years ago but the US did nothing. [0] If anything, the Wuhan lab needed more US funding that was primarily focused on safety. Edit: If you want to prevent certain types of dangerous re…

Just throwing more money a any particular situation is no guarantee the situation will improve. In this case, the Wuhan lab is controlled by China and will conform to Chinese laws and regulations.

true, but also many problems can be solved by throwing more money at them

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#306
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bit of a fuzzy overlap between "man made" and "lab leak". Specifically, the lab leak theory more or less assumes that the virus was collected from the mine, taken to Wuhan, and some research and experiments were done on it, resulting it some changes. Certainly the lab was doing research; there's an ongoing debate over what they did, who funded it, whether what they did technically qualifies as "gain of func…

> Specifically, the lab leak theory more or less assumes that the virus was collected from the mine, taken to Wuhan, and some research and experiments were done on it, resulting it some changes. I disagree, the lab leak hypothesis is independent from the lab [inadvertently or deliberately] mutating the virus. The lab may have merely possessed the virus, having made only the mistake of transporting the virus from a re…

Indeed, a lab leak includes all of these possible priors of how the virus ended up in the lab in the first place.

But the only serious contender for the prior hypothesis is that the researchers produced a highly infectious chimeric coronavirus through gain-of-function/serial passage.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#307
Wasn’t this all just to be contrarian to Trump? Trump says lab leak? Can’t be lab leak! Trump says travel ban? Travel bans are racist!

Now that Trumps out the lab leak is something to look into and everyone has done some level of travel ban without being labeled racist.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#308

Over the last several years, it's become clear to me what the large social media companies want to be: de facto world governments. They won't admit that, and you'll hear a lot of gab about algorithms and cooperation with various governments, but at heart it appears to me that this is cooperation with various governments as a government themselves. It's a negotiation among equals. We can provincially argue about who c…

The US federal government is basically a giant case of regulatory capture so many people understandably confuse power and influence. However the distinction remains and it is of essential importance. None of the big tech companies have any real power, all they have is influence. In countries where they don’t have politicians under their influence they are helpless.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are making very very wrong suggestion now. Because some people can link Chinese government to all Asians, so we can't criticize the Chinese government? Because Chinese government = Chinese people = Chinese Americans = Asian Americans? I think this kind of automatic linking Chinese government to Chinese / Asian Americans is itself racist. What you are suggesting is implicitly accepting this racist idea. To stand a…

We can criticize the Chinese government. But if we do we should have facts, not wild speculations. I agree automatically linking Asian-looking people to the actions of China's government is racist. And there are a lot of racists out there. Given the ongoing spike in anti-Asian hate crimes [1] and online anti-Asian hate tied specifically to coronavirus [2] I think we should be unusually careful about excited speculati…

I don't understand your logic. Are you saying if the lab leak theory is proved to be true, then the racists turn out to be more justified racists? The rightful racists? If the lab leak theory is proved to be false, then the racists turn out to be less justified racists? The wrongful racists?

How does criticizing the Chinese government has anything to do with racism? Because we can't give racists ideas to be racists, so we should restrict ourselves in criticizing the authoritarian (actually also racist) regime? Your logic is strangely twisted.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#310
post #5

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

CNN and WP ran headlines on how Fauci shattered Trumps' lab leak lies in 2020. The scorn and derision was palpable.

Fauci has now completely inverted his statement...

Post reply on HN