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

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

#841

Post by bryanwb » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 2:40 PM UTC

arrosenberg wrote: post #37

harryf wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

It isn't muckraking. Fauci has a clear conflict of interest. Further he argued in favor of GoF research while acknowledging it could lead to a pandemic. He literally wrote that in an academic paper. https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fauci-argued-benefits-of...

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

#842

Post by bryanwb » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 2:43 PM UTC

harryf wrote: post #6

bartart wrote: 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…

_IF_ Covid-19 is the result of a lab leak on research that Fauci funded and promoted AND he colluded w/ a group of scientists to hide this fact, it literally is the greatest conspiracy of our generation.

It isn't a big if. The recently released e-mails support this line of reasoning but don't confirm it. To argue the opposite of this, you should have better than ad hominem attacks.

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

#843

Post by bryanwb » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 2:44 PM UTC

Rapzid wrote: post #769

bglazer wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite astounded and confused at the sudden shift in discourse towards assuming that the lab leak theory must be true. It's not so much the theory itself that's surprising. Lab leak remains plausible but less probable then natural origins. The sudden shift is just baffling to me though. This huge new furor is due to anonymous CIA sources saying three people got sick? That's extremely tenuous evidence, as you state…

It's like everyone has forgotten or never even knew the context of the original strong pushback. It wasn't against the possibility of a lab leak, it was against the rhetoric (lies) coming out of our own Whitehouse trying shift blame to China. Lies that were dangerously feeding anti-asian sentiment in the USA. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...

You didn't read the article. Any medical professional who seriously considered the lab leak was ostracized.

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

#844

Post by loopercal » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 2:46 PM UTC

whitepaint wrote: post #724

SiempreViernes wrote: post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, nobody ever claimed that the seafood marked was some sort of natural reservoir. It was just the earliest suspected point of where the animal to human transmission happened, the reservoir was always presumed to be somewhere else.

The point I was trying to make is that the idea of it naturally occurring was mainstream. If you tried to guess it might have come from the lab, it'd be just dismissed completely. However, both of these claims had no evidence, so why was just one claim labeled as a conspiracy theory and dismissed entirely by the mainstream media? Do you disagree? Do you think it might have been political?

Historically, and happy to be proven wrong here, we've never seen a lab-leak of a novel virus cause a widespread outbreak. We have seen zoonotic transmission cause an epidemic/pandemic. So at least for me, I was working off of, "Is it likely that we're seeing something for the first time? Or is it likely this happened the way it's happened before?"

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

#845

Post by myfavoritedog » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 2:48 PM UTC

altcognito wrote: post #826

myfavoritedog wrote: post #732

I know that most people won't; but if this article is some kind of major a revelation to you, I hope that you take some time to re-evaluate your information sources. You really should think more carefully about how you detect bullshit. There were those who were sounding the alarm about this lab leak hypothesis well over a year ago. The overwhelming media narrative to look away from that hypothesis and smear those who…

Im still curious what you think this article really reveals. It makes a lot of unsupported claims. Fox News Is mainstream news. It literally is the most watched network, well beyond all those you listed as being “mainstream news”. Yet they serve the same biased, lack of balanced coverage as the sites you listed. In fact, the article even points out how White House advisors (on Fox, OAN) put out the WIV origin story o…

Fox News Is mainstream news. It literally is the most watched network

If you view Fox News as one of many competing news outlets, sure, it's got a big voice. But I'd urge you to view it in terms of collective narrative. The left-leaning narrative bubble is far larger than Fox News by more than an order of magnitude. When CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS, the AP, NYT, WaPo, ESPN, late-night comedy hosts, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are all driving the same narrative that it's conspiracy theory to consider the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a possible source of COVID... Fox News' mild protestations to the contrary are insignificant in terms of bandwidth into the American psyche.

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

#846

Post by philliphaydon » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 2:49 PM UTC

armada651 wrote: post #624

isolli wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're misreading the context. The furor comes from the fact that the lab leak hypothesis (distinct from the engineered virus hypothesis) was dismissed by fact checkers as a debunked conspiracy theory for a year based on nothing but assurances from the few scientists they interviewed. This is just one example I could find quickly, but there are many more... https://twitter.com/JoePCunningham/status/139718591836522496…

The fact checkers were definitely too eager to mark this as debunked, but it still lacks real evidence. No fact checker would mark this theory as true even now. So let's not make the same mistake by eagerly jumping to conclusions that it was engineered in a lab based on assurances from a different set of scientists.

> but it still lacks real evidence

Well any evidence is probably long gone and cleaned up and swept under the rug now.

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

#847

Post by flavius29663 » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 2:51 PM UTC

frickenhamster wrote: post #306

mc32 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other astonishing things is the sudden about face by the media. I'm glad they allowed themselves the liberty of looking at alternative origins. But... they were SO adamant and complicit in any discussion about alternative theories being shut down under the guise of conspiracy, Trumpism, anti-China, etc. (These are the same people who have no qualms about attributing anything to Russia even if evidence is thin, so…

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…

That's the weird think about propaganda. Even if you know it's propaganda, it works pretty well when it's heavily pushed. I come from a former communist country, and most people despised the communist party and risked their lives in a revolution. After the revolution, they began to parrot the same talking points the heard in the decades before. Even with all the information we have today, the talking points induced by communist propaganda remain alive.

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

#848

Post by gfodor » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 2:53 PM UTC

Of course, there is still another “conspiracy theory” that was dismissed out of hand without any real investigation due to the immense ideological cost of even acknowledging it could be true. It’s still not even safe to suggest publicly, and, unlike the lab leak theory, it will almost certainly stay in the box given the catastrophic consequences if it were investigated properly and shockingly confirmed.

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

#849

Post by Workaccount2 » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 2:53 PM UTC

toshk wrote: post #757

texasbigdata wrote: post #694

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.

You don't seem to understand China. Hollywood actor Cena just begged in Mandarin for forgiveness after mentioning Taiwan is a country (which it is). Local Amsterdam politicians are not allowed to go on the photo with Taiwanese politicians etc. The Communist Party is overly controlling and will not allow anything that will challenge their vision. While Europe and the US were busy with their internal quarrels the last…

Busy with their quarrels?

You mean directly funding China's transformation with an insatiable appetite for cheap shit?

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

#850

Post by flavius29663 » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 2:56 PM UTC

istjohn wrote: post #781

sbagel wrote: post #587

The amount of wildly delusional oppression complex in this thread is staggering, HN has really gone downhill. On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants. No grand conspiracy. Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence. There were tons of ar…

The media also insisted masks were useless for the general public. The media demonstrated a real inability to critically evaluate the statements authority figures feed to them over the past year.

You can attribute that to being unprofessional. Which is not great, but not terrible.

What is absolutely terrible is for the media and big tech to ACT like they are the absolute authority in any field they have interest in. We're heading towards "ministry of truth" levels of censorship.