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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

#411

Post by thathndude »

scratcheee wrote: post #375
enriquto wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)…

This may be unpopular, but I'm actually fine with polititians manipulating the truth in that scenario (_if_ we accept as a starting point that the shortage of masks was already unavoidable, and the best option for public health was to convince the public to minimise purchases). Part of the job of politicians is to act as a rudder for the general public, and if tragedy of the commons applies to a scenario, a politicia…

I get your point. But the long term damage doesn’t justify the lie. That’s a race to the bottom.

And what happens when the scientist and politician is in a hybrid role, like Fauci? Folks don’t trust Fauci because credibility, in general, has been harmed. Q conspiracy theorists thrive in a world of distrust. Chronic distrust of politicians is too high a price to pay to justify the use of the occasional manipulation.

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

#412

Post by marvin »

raxxorrax wrote: post #333
emn13 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this view is overly negative. First of all, consider the timing of this all; this was super early days. People, including many experts, had much less facts then, and the topic was sensitive. I think it's perfectly reasonable and even necessary that ill-founded but hard-to-disprove theories such as the lab leak theory at the time are examined critically, but to do so requires a healthy debate - in particular,…

We had people banned from the discussion for suggesting ideas that run counter the official story. This isn't reasonable anymore, this is a propaganda instrument and not something that was nuanced at all. The mistakes that were made need correction. Don't advertise diversity, live up to it.

I was banned from the biggest national (Norway) Facebook discussion group on the pandemic for posting a comment reasoning about mask usage and whether the official guidelines might be factually incorrect. That's far into propaganda and censorship territory.

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

#414

Post by ricardobayes »

mandmandam wrote: post #372
prof-dr-ir wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you're incorrect? The lab leak theory is still widely considered to be an unlikely possibility.

Quoted post unavailable.

Why didn't it have road or mobile traffic for a week? Is this a fact? That said, even if it was manufactured, its release is probably a freak accident.

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

#415

Post by causi »

prof-dr-ir wrote: post #355
larryflint wrote: post #254

Earlier 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…

But you're incorrect? The lab leak theory is still widely considered to be an unlikely possibility.

There is a vast difference between responding to someone by saying it's unlikely and responding to someone by calling them a Republican/racist/Nazi, which is how several of my questions about the origins of Covid-19 with regards to its seemingly unique and varied symptoms were responded to during the first year of the pandemic.

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

#416

Post by thathndude »

enriquto wrote: post #403
Fiahil wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Ah! This one is actually a story of "the lesser of two evils". You can't really tell people to buy masks where there is none available, and you can't really tell there is nothing to do unless you want to put every one in panic mode. You…

> I guess it was easier to take a slight (...) reputation hit, Not a reputation hit. A credibility hit. Essentially 100% of what they say now is lies to my ears. If their policy is to lie to me "for the global good", this is the most rational position. I'd have preferred if they had told the truth as they knew it (the disease is airborne, masks help you to avoid infect people, please leave all masks to health personn…

Precisely this. The occasional manipulation to try and prevent a run on toilet paper or gas stations is not worth a total loss of credibility.

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

#417

Post by rozab »

jacquesm wrote: post #341

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 p…

Evidence? The hypothesis of the article is that certain scientists did believe a lab leak was likely, but hid their views. The article provides ample evidence for this.

If you also want it to conclusively prove the lab leak hypothesis in the same breath then I'd say your expectations are too high. Better publications have tackled the subject anyway: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...

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

#418

Post by jokethrowaway »

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)…

To be fair, I believe more the criticism about masks and I'm on the side that they're pretty useless. Their first explanation made more sense.

People are certainly reusing them, they keep touching their face to adjust them, they don't respect distancing rules because they have a mask on, a lot of masks are not filtering enough.

On top of this they're annoying.

With the risk of covid being so low, masks are too much of a hassle for me to bother and I wear them only to avoid fines from the totalitarian regime I live in (and I'm certainly not changing them or buying any, I'm still using some I managed to get for free).

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

#419

Post by iqanq »

jacquesm wrote: post #406
iqanq wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://republicans-oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2... Page 8.

You don't seem to understand the material you are linking to at all. That's fine by me but this does not constitute evidence in the scientific sense of the word and that's what I am getting at.

No post body was provided.

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

#420

Post by klabb3 »

minerva23 wrote: post #351
khazhoux wrote: post #287

Jon Stewart's take is brilliant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSfejgwbDQ8&t=170s > "The name of the disease is printed on the lab's business cards!!" But the reason the Left in the US couldn't even consider Wuhan as the source, is because the Right (well, Trump himself) wanted to say that because it was " Chi na's fault", that his Administration bore no responsibility for dealing with it.

Doesn't it make sense to establish a lab near a source of what you're studying? You don't establish a tropical botany lab in Antarctica. Left/right (false binary) politics aside, doesn't it make sense to focus on finding a solution prior to focusing on prevention/blame?

If by near, you mean the same continent, then yes. The candidate bat caves for the zoonotic origins of sars-cov-2 are spread out over east and southeast Asia, and are nowhere near Wuhan.

The lab received funding from the US, and GoF research happens all over the world, so the China bad narrative overlaps quite poorly with the lab leak theory. The proper reaction to the lab leak theory would be more along the lines of reconsidering the cost-benefit analysis on gain of function research, where a single leak can lead to tens of millions dead and perhaps more next time.

> doesn't it make sense to focus on finding a solution prior to focusing on prevention/blame?

Why not both? One reason to hurry the hell up is that evidence may be destroyed and the people who know something may be silenced or disappeared.

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