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The media's lab leak fiasco

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Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#371

Post by dang »

dredmorbius wrote: post #315
dang wrote: post #149

Related threads: Wuhan lab staff sought hospital care before Covid-19 outbreak disclosed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27259953 - May 2021 (343 comments) How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27184998 - May 2021 (235 comments) More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27160898 - May 2021 (341…

There were also a number of HN stories posted early in the pandemic concerning the lab-leak hypothesis. These paint a ... complicated ... picture of that theory and those who advocated for it. Few of the submissions had any significant discussion, I'm simply going off what was submitted to HN. Search, bound from 2020-1-1 to 2020-6-1: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1593475200&dateRange=custom&... 26 March 2020: Exper…

Thanks! I've added these two to the above list:

Wuhan lab did research on bat viruses, but no evidence of accidental release - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23070031 - May 2020 (76 comments)

Experts disagree on whether Covid-19 could have leaked from a research lab - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22695825 - March 2020 (6 comments)

The others seem to either have no comments or in one case (the Montagnier one) to be more of a distraction. If I missed any other actual threads, please let me know.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#372

Post by cratermoon »

caddemon wrote: post #192
cratermoon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They never will, because there is no such intelligence, it was reported as a statement from an unnamed intelligence official. It's garbage.

What incentive would the US government have to lie about this though? They were funding research at that lab, I don't understand why they would want people to think lab leak is correct all of a sudden - if that's what you're claiming?

> What incentive would the US government have to lie about this though?

It's not the US government here, it's some unnamed official that we don't actually know, and if they work for the government, are a contractor, a former CIA employee, could be anything. Could be someone like Rand Paul or Tom Cotton who is politically motivated to both implicate China and embarrass their own government, as long as they can blame "the other side".

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#373

Post by PragmaticPulp »

pedalpete wrote: post #222

Am I the only one who feels like this is mostly a non-issue. I feel like the case of if this came from a lab for from a market is mostly taking a political side against China - if it came from a lab, or for China - if it was naturally developed. If it came from a Chinese lab as part of a conscious effort of weaponizing a virus, sure, that's important, but I don't think anyone is saying that. If it came from a lab acc…

The virus had global implications with a massive economic and global impact.

If a single institution was responsible for this event then it would be clear that we need to improve regulations and safety standards around the entire field of gain of function research.

If a lab leak is a possible explanation, the implication for future gain of function research and associated regulations are massive. It's not as simple as letting the lab in question make their process changes to avoid future global pandemics.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#374

Post by refurb »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #158
scottrogowski wrote: post #72

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…

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.

This is some impressive mental gymnastics.

Why was the lab leak claim labeled “fringe” in the first place?

You want Zuckerberg deciding what ideas you should and shouldn’t see?

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#375

Post by wearywanderer »

fsckboy wrote: post #362
wearywanderer wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

while you are correct that lab-leak is "theoretically" a distinct hypothesis, in this specific case the apparent splicing of pangolin virus parts together with bat virus parts is a highly suggestive smoking gun for man-made, especially when you consider that this lab does splicing experiments

From what I understand, this lab and those like it likely have/had a large backlog of samples they had received from field researchers but had not yet had an opportunity to identify, sequence, or otherwise mess around with. A procedural error in handling a sample in that backlog could have occurred, at least in theory.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#376

Post by simonsarris »

arduinomancer wrote: post #137

I hate how it feels like there's such a "collective narrative" for everything now days with the internet. Whenever I talk to people about recent news stories in real life it feels like everyone is just repeating talking points they read online. Its like we've been absorbed into the internet consciousness and talking to a person is like talking to "the internet brain".

I think it's an unfortunate effect of mass media. If anything however I think the internet made it 1% better, not worse.

I wrote about the change from a world of actual dialogue to one of mass media, here: https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/are-we-still-thinking

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#377

Post by XorNot »

gamblor956 wrote: post #325
jkhdigital wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At least one researcher who has worked with the head of the Wuhan lab has accused her of shoddy adherence to safety practices, so it's also quite possible that simple negligence led to cross-contamination and subsequently to human exposure. It would certainly explain how the predecessor candidates simultaneously acquired all of the necessary mutations: all of the most genetically similar coronaviruses were all being…

Stored in what form.

A lab having a bunch of samples in a refrigerator doesn't mean that a spill causes them all to spontaneously recombinate.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#378

Post by wearywanderer »

XorNot wrote: post #370
wearywanderer wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

So here's the thing: the more improbable thing about the lab leak hypothesis is that the lab would even have had enough virus, in virion form, to cause even 1 human infection. Biological materials are hard to grow and store. Very few people have ever been infected from handling corpses from much more pathogenic viruses (i.e. the black death was one of the only significant ones, and that's because it's a bacterium). A…

> So here's the thing: the more improbable thing about the lab leak hypothesis is that the lab would even have had enough virus, in virion form, to cause even 1 human infection.

I reject that. Lab leaks have been known to occur, with human casualties:

> "After the outbreak of SARS in 2003, labs around the world began studying the virus, which had come perilously close to causing a global pandemic. Since that time, there have been no less than six lab leaks of SARS. The first took place in at the National University of Singapore, where a graduate student contracted the disease from a contaminated sample. This was followed by an incident in Taiwan, when a researcher contracted it, most likely during a botched decontamination of laboratory waste. Then several leaks took place at China’s National Institute of Virology. In one case, a researcher passed the infection to her mother, who died of SARS. In each case, human error, most likely exacerbated by inadequate safety protocols, accounted for the leaks."

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-27/covid-...

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#379

Post by monoideism »

edgyquant wrote: post #301
BurningFrog wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.”

Because much of it is fake news being pushed by the elite. Look at precisely what we're discussing: the lab leak scenario, which Facebook labeled with warnings (at best) or simply banned/deleted/removed (at worst).

And now, the media establishment is doing some kind of re-think, and it turns out that while far from proven, a lab leak (which covers a variety of scenarios, most not involving any kind of "engineered" virus) is a reasonable hypothesis. If that's so, why the capricious banning and warning labels?

We've seen similar situations play out in the past year with masks (at first, they were unnecessary and racist, then absolutely critical, now it's changing again). How about just let people decide for themselves? There will always be some conspiracists on both the left and right, but most people figure this stuff out in a reasonable manner.

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