Live data from Hacker News

The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

vanityfair.com

831–840 of 1001 posts

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#831
post #803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China supported this in a psyop. Remember when they tried repeatedly to push the origin of the virus to Italy? I'm ethnically Chinese, so I'm in contact with a lot of mainlanders. The brainwashing is very effective. Even if most mainlanders know that their state media is bogus, and that Xi is a dictator, they'll take it deeply personally when you say anything that threatens the whole China # 1 narrative. All they had…

I'm curious with Wikipedia which is normally neutral but was very anti lab leak in this case, whether China directly had people work as editors there.

Citation Needed

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#832
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are getting downvoted because it's muckraking. There is nothing shady about NIAID giving a (verrrry small for this type of research) grant to a foreign research lab, which is doing research about a topic of interest. That's how you ensure the U.S. government gets a copy of the results.

I'm not saying it's shady to provide that funding. What I'm saying is it demonstrates conflict of interest. Last year in May 5 2020 Fauci dismissed the idea that the virus came from a lab that his own organisation was providing funds to - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthony-fauci-wuhan-lab-coronav... Whether or not anything shady was happening, the conflict of interest is clear.

The conflict of interest is with Trump. He lifted the ban and should take all the blame for any bad outcome from gain-of-function research. Instead he pushed a deliberate leak conspiracy as cover.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#833

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would Fauci have known that gain of function research was now legal again?! Of course he would. Whether or not to fund that sort of risky research that has gone back and forth in legality is precisely the kind of thing that his job required him to know, isn't it?

According to Wade's article it's actually even murkier than that. Only Fauci or one other person could have actually overridden the ban to keep the money flowing and prevent oversight of it: The moratorium, referred to officially as a “pause,” specifically barred funding any gain-of-function research that increased the pathogenicity of the flu, MERS or SARS viruses. It defined gain-of-function very simply and broadly…

The moratorium was rescinded in 2017.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#834

Several thoughts: 1) If covid _did_ come out of lab - I'm emphatically not saying that I believe that it did - I have pretty high confidence in the ability of the any government to cover it up. 2) There is some class of people who will accept whatever 'evidence' of a lab leak as completely convincing for a variety of reasons (conspiracy minded thinking, anti-chinese sentiments, etc) 3) It seems impossible to strongly…

Not investigating would provide fuel to group 2a, the people who will defend China at any cost and against all evidence, and their Western enablers who engage in performative anti-racism.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#835

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is the most shocking article you have ever read in your life, I feel you haven't read many articles in your life. There is absolutely no evidence in it. Just a pile of conjecture. It is absolutely the stuff of conspiracy theories. The truly shocking thing is that world does not hold China liable for this disaster. It really doesn't matter if it started in a lab or in one of their wet markets; it was incompete…

There is absolutely no evidence in it. Just a pile of conjecture There is much more evidence in the article for a lab leak than there was for the wet market story which was uncritically parroted in the media for over a year.

> There is much more evidence in the article for a lab leak than there was for the wet market story which was uncritically parroted in the media for over a year.

There was zero evidence of a lab leak in the article, only conjecture. So the bar of "same amount of evidence as the article for lab leak" is pathetically easy to reach. The fact you are throwing the "parroting" term around is ridiculously ironic as well, the "lab leak" has been parroted around the world since day one.

More importantly, who gives a shit even if *was* a lab leak? It's literally the less evil/worse of the two possibilities (wet market vs lab leak). Since that means it was "only" a lapse in lab security (one which will probably be learned from and not repeated) rather than the result of negligence in keeping open these markets despite being told over and over again that they are going to cause outbreaks just like this one, and these markets are still open!

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#836
post #2

This is the most shocking article I have ever read in my life. I'd ask everyone to please read it because it is incredible. One thing I did not realize is that US researchers who conducted gain of function research tried to downplay and discredit the possibility of the virus originating from the wuhan lab. There was an anti-lab theory Lancet statement signed by scientists, and "Daszak had not only signed but organize…

The state department memo disclosing the sick researchers story isn't anywhere near as strong as the article implies. It's not US original reporting and there is disagreement about how strong the unnamed sources really are. I'm also going to attack the sources... This was strongly pushed by the Trump administration which was looking for this result. And originally reported by in the WSJ by Michael R. Gordon who is al…

After reviewing most of the arguments in favor of a lab leak origin, I eventually concluded that when confronted to their counter arguments, the Occam's razor would be in favor of a natural origin for the sars-cov2.

Indeed, when I heard of the report about WIV workers being sick with covid-like symptom I immediately checked who reported that, and ended up with the same conclusion as you.

While a lab leak origin cannot be entirely dismissed, one should keep in mind that all this fuss is politicaly motivated.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#837

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this is naive, but what the issue here? These people are alive, the documents exist, the physical locations are accessible. This isn’t archeology. Couldn’t we ... just... check? Like maybe the UN or the group of 7 or something similar? You shut down the globe for a year, seems like it’d be worth running down all the Rabit holes.

>Couldn’t we ... just... check? Like maybe the UN or the group of 7 or something similar? China could have been forthright from the start (regardless if this was a lab-leak or not), but they weren't, and you can't make them.

In all honesty, why would they be? Without them addressing anything, the west, particularly the U.S., has had their pitchforks out and ready since day one. With our idiotic president calling it the Chinese virus from the start, why in the hell would China want to be upfront about what they knew about the origin if it indeed was a lab leak? I wouldn’t. That’s all on the assumption that they themselves even knew or know. If our president had been less like a child, it would have been a better environment to get to the truth.

You and others act like this is some elementary school incident where honesty is the best policy. But with politics involved and the already prevalent mass hysteria and propaganda going on everywhere, it makes sense, on a realist and not idealist level, why one would not be forthright.

There’s also the idea that the U.S. was terribly ill-prepared and ill-equipped to handle the virus. The U.S. needs to be prepared for such viruses, no matter their origin, because zoonotic crossover events will remain a possibility with even higher likelihood going forward. My worry is if the virus origin is or is even believed to be of lab-based origin, that will weaken the prerogative and narrative to be prepared for zoonotic diseases. Because then, it was something “done to us” rather than a natural event we should be prepared for, an event which remains a big possibility even if this particular virus was of lab origin.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#838

The article claims "the Lancet statement rejected the lab-leak hypothesis", which is a bit misleading considering what the Lancet statement actually did was reject a human origin of the virus, based on genome sampling and other evidence. The two are not equal, the virus could be of natural origin but leaked from a lab, that scenario is still very much possible even in the context of the Lancet statement. Gilles Deman…

>the virus could be of natural origin but leaked from a lab, that scenario is still very much possible even in the context of the Lancet statement. That's absolutely true, but one of the main corollary claims is also that SARS-CoV-2 may have resulted in part from gain of function research. People making that claim have said that the virus seems to be particularly effective against humans despite no intermediate forms…

We weren't talking about gain functions 1.5 years ago. That term has just recently appeared in the media. And now that phrase is the new "scape-phrase".

"Gain function" now means there's now a great way to confuse man-made and natural. I find it both a more concise scientific term, but anathema to politics.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#839
post #6
post #2

This is the most shocking article I have ever read in my life. I'd ask everyone to please read it because it is incredible. One thing I did not realize is that US researchers who conducted gain of function research tried to downplay and discredit the possibility of the virus originating from the wuhan lab. There was an anti-lab theory Lancet statement signed by scientists, and "Daszak had not only signed but organize…

It gets worse - gain of function research was banned under Obama until the ban was lifted in 2017 under Trump - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3... I can’t find sources for this right now but apparently Dr Anthony Fauci played a key role in getting the ban lifted. He’s also the head of the NIAID ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Fauci ) which (apparently) is the ultimate source for…

Upvoting because you are right. All roads of investigation lead to Fauci. Many seem in denial about this.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#840

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it's good that they realized that, but I don't really understand why this time it took half a year. We'll see if the newspapers follow it.

It's good, but it's not exactly easy to remember. Hence why the papers here in the UK now tend to say something like 'the Delta variant, which was first seen in India' - that's only marginally better than 'the Indian variant' tbh.

> It's good, but it's not exactly easy to remember [[.]

Saying "$origin virus" is _definitely_ easier to remember than - say - something like "Covid19".

Except that we were told that using "$origin" was racist, so we had to stop, and we had to use the non-easy-to-remember version.

Where we are the media has been happily talking about "the British variant" and "the Indian variant", but no-one seems to be calling _that_ racist. At least no-one who the media cares about.

Post reply on HN