[deleted]
Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt
361–370 of 833 posts
Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 informat…
yeah, but what if you send the letter to an official of another country?
countries and people are different things; countries are generally much more secretive than people.
Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. I'm a case in point. At the beginning of this thing i went along with the mainstream narrative like a good sheeple. Now that i've watched how a narrative can go from 'your a crazy person to believe there COULD have been a lab leak' to 'yahhh it was probably a lab leak the whole time'...my faith has probably been permenantly destroyed in main-stream sources of information. Which sucks because idealy i just want t…
The nail in the coffin for me was when they would make articles about “700 people fired from X company for not getting vaccine.” When that company has like 85k people (which they don’t mention in the article and you have to look up yourself, of course), and it’s like “so less than 1% of the employees refused the vaccine?” Even when they tell the technical truth, it’s so full of deception to sell ads I just can’t.
I assume you're talking about the Mayo clinic firing 700 people for not getting the vaccine(given it was exactly 700 people and it was 6 days ago).
I opened the first 15 results on Google and every single one mentions the number of people as proportion of the overall company size. The vast majority are in paragraph 1 or 2.
Could you link to the article (hopefully from a reputable source) that doesn't mention the company size?
Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt
#364If 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 p…
The telegraph is a mix of fox news and the daily mail, but with plummy vowels [0]
[0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/plummy
Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt
#365The 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.
I think many don't fear unemployment, they fear loss of access (funding). Science isn't cheap. Proper facilities are important. Good virologists may not be independently wealthy (and they need good colleagues).
I'm sure many would continue their work unemployed, but that too would be part of the fear. If a leak can happen in a BSL4 facility and you know some would rather continue their work in their basement than give it up entirely, that alone should terrify you/everyone.
Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt
#366I find it important to note that "believed" suggests that their beliefs were based on as-of-yet insubstantial data to prove this was the case. Not that this really stopped this hypothesis from being explored in the public (even people like Trump jumped on it).
The way social media works today, I find it reasonable not to share all of your beliefs without gathering enough proof to either prove or disprove something.
I completely believe in open debate, but that's not what modern media provides: it usually goes for the most sensationalist angle it can get. And it leads to overarching reactions from the public when none is needed.
Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt
#367You 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)…
> I remember vividly president Macron (a person that I respected before that) very serious in TV explaining to all the citizens of the republic that we should not buy nor wear masks.
I don't remember this from Macron, but rather from Véran (Health Minister), but I could be wrong. anyway, at the time this was a more than reasonable request.
Because the very first persons we had to protect were health professionals, and we didn't have enough masks for everyone. (We didn't even have enough for health professionals)
> If we did that we would be safe, no need of masks.
I'll need to check again what he said, because I really don't remember that part, and I remember that the "L’usage du masque en population générale n’est pas utile" made sense to me, precisely because we had to protect health professionals first, which contradicts that part.
Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt
#368Did anyone else enjoy the irony of a group of scientists engaging in a conspiracy (of silence) in order to stop conspiracy theorists dominating a conversation about a probable (in their own eyes!) conspiracy?
You couldn't make it up.
Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt
#369You 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)…
[deleted]
Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt
#370An interesting tidbit.
The image of Wuhan on the map in the article shows WIV down the road across the river from the wet market.
Something that gets zero screen time is the Chinese CDC is literary across the road from the wet market. They have since moved / unlisted that address.
This does not mean a lab leak, but its a weird thing to be left out of the conversion.