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Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#341

Post by jacquesm »

If this comment thread is the way the self proclaimed smartest forum on the web deals with articles like this then we're doomed.

This article contributes zero actual evidence, is littered with out of context quotes (including of all places the title), doesn't appear to understand the science or the probabilities involved and finally is clearly written with an agenda.

It shouldn't have been posted to HN in the first place, it just serves to divide, not to find fact. If there is an article that deals with the actual evidence available in a neutral manner it would be nice to read, but opinion-masquerading-as-fact is not.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#343

Post by ArnoVW »

staplers wrote: post #253
vasco wrote: post #241

You know this effect, when you've been reading the news for years, and finally your favorite source has a story about something you studied or worked on, and you realize how low quality or outright wrong it is? The spell is broken and you realize how little they know about anything they write. Once government officials and scientists gaslight us about what they think they should, how does one know they wouldn't for a…

Getting into crypto around 2012 dramatically highlighted this for me. Many in here still regurgitate the same talking points I saw published then.

I think the discussion over crypto is, like many other discussions currently, broken. Two groups of people arguing their side, not realising they are both wrong (and both right).

Good for you on getting in early. Crypto, as a concept, is extremely neat. It is a libertarians dream. It is an interesting movement, in this time of centralisation and consolidation of power.

Crypto, as a tool however, is a solution looking for a problem. A problem that most people do not have. The only reason that crypto is currently huge, is because it (currently) is a Make Money Fast scheme. Should crypto ever become a mainstream way of performing transactions, it will still have to abide by the rule of law, or risk becoming illegal.

If Bitcoin could develop and improve, all the while without being a ponzi-scheme, it would be great. And who knows, if POS ever worked out and we manage to transition the whole ecosystem, it may find some usecases in smaller applications. But as it is, POW is generating the CO2 of a large country, providing money to the wrong people (and I'm not talking about you), and preparing financial crash.

If you're sitting on a pile of bitcoins since 2012, I understand your point of view. But I'm not convinced it's a net benefit to us all.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#344

Post by say_it_as_it_is »

The science community played ball because government pays their checks. The problem they were trying to avoid is unemployment. You can't hold it against them for protecting their fundamental interests. They were acting so as to protect science only to the extent that people would no longer be able to receive funding for being honest with the public.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#345

Post by ZeroGravitas »

vasco wrote: post #241

You know this effect, when you've been reading the news for years, and finally your favorite source has a story about something you studied or worked on, and you realize how low quality or outright wrong it is? The spell is broken and you realize how little they know about anything they write. Once government officials and scientists gaslight us about what they think they should, how does one know they wouldn't for a…

Climate change is mostly that barometer for me.

So when I see this article cites Viscount Ridley, the climate change denier, I pretty much put it in the same category of bullshit as all of that stuff

This is assuming I've not spotted its in the Telegraph first, which is enough to know its almost certainly lies and misrepresention.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#346

Post by cm2187 »

enriquto wrote: post #324
vasco wrote: post #241

You know this effect, when you've been reading the news for years, and finally your favorite source has a story about something you studied or worked on, and you realize how low quality or outright wrong it is? The spell is broken and you realize how little they know about anything they write. Once government officials and scientists gaslight us about what they think they should, how does one know they wouldn't for a…

> Once government officials and scientists gaslight us about what they think they should, how does one know they wouldn't for anything at all they decide to? For me it was the masks. The masks were my tipping point. At some point at the beginning of the pandemic they said that the disease was totally not airborne and that masks were useless. I remember vividly president Macron (a person that I respected before that)…

Even before the masks, they were presenting "case fatility rates" as "infection fatility rates" (by just calling them "death rate", which everyone understands as risk of death when infected), when there was hardly any test. Of course if you only test people who show up at the ICU, you will get a very high death rate. That was obvious from the outset and I think deliberate disinformation as a scare tactic.

It is not before June that they started admitting that the IFR was way below 1%, when the first serology studies started showing up (though I came to believe that this number is meaningless, you need to look at IFR by age).

Sam Harris invited Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease MD from John Hopkins in early April 2020, and his estimate at that time was around 0.5%. So it's not like the information wasn't there.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#348

Post by bArray »

> But a leading scientist told Sir Jeremy that “further debate would do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular”. Dr Collins, the former director of the US National Institutes of Health, warned it could damage “international harmony”.

COVID-19: the time where Scientists pretended to be politicians and politicians pretended to be Scientists.

Also if their intention was to not hurt China, we now see one of the largest decentralisation efforts away from Chinese manufacturing we have seen in quite some time. Any future outsourced research to China will be under extreme scrutiny.

> Later emails showed that by February 4, Sir Jeremy had revised his estimate of a laboratory leak to 50:50, while Professor Eddie Holmes, of the University of Sydney, gave a 60:40 estimate in favour of an accidental release.

When you consider how the CCP and all staff involved have behaved, the odds appear higher. You have a major opportunity to show openness and lack of wrongdoing - and yet choose to act closed and actively prevent investigations.

> An email from Dr Ron Fouchier to Sir Jeremy said: “Further debate about such accusations would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.”

Unnecessary harm? If it was as a result of a lab leak, it would be completely necessary harm. For all we know, COVID-X is just around the corner. Bare in mind many labs around the world have been processing COVID samples and performing experiments on it in order to figure out how it may mutate.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#349

Post by krisoft »

slg wrote: post #322
eloisius wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably true, but constant suspicious behavior shouldn't normalize behaving suspiciously.

It is really weird how HN talks about this in comparison to similar topics. For example, this is the exact same logic that leads people to believe that encrypting data or using Tor is evidence of someone trying to hide criminal behavior. Almost everyone here would object to that type of thinking, but when it comes to China it suddenly becomes "Why would they object to transparency unless they had something to hide?".

Yes. Countries and people are two different thing and the expected and acceptable behaviours are different too.

If you write an officially sounding letter to your neighbour demanding to know how they come to choose the paint to repaint their bikeshed you are a weirdo and they are in their right to ignore you.

If you write the same letter to a city official about a public bikeshed you are sending a freedom of information request and they are expected to respond promptly and accurately.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#350

Post by krsdcbl »

Stumbled upon this thread on a related post here on hn and had to come to the conclusion that apparently news outlets are currently picking up some out of context details that seem to have long be debunked:

https://virological.org/t/tackling-rumors-of-a-suspicious-or...

Does anybody have further reading on this subject?

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