Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

telegraph.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 833 posts

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

#481

Post by cocoggu »

dgb23 wrote: post #376
secondcoming wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand your point. Trump is the only leader who gave people the truth and was lambasted for it.

Both the US and the Chinese governments downplayed and lied about the severity of the virus. For months.

I don't know much about US, but for China it didn't last for months, 1 or 2 weeks maybe. It has been notified to the WHO at the beginning of January, on 23 January Wuhan was going full lockdown. And not lockdown like in the West, citizens were not allowed to step a foot outside even for groceries and the army was bringing rations to the people.

I remember then in March, a French newspaper highlighting how PRC hid the severity of the virus... I mean if they took these extreme measures in Wuhan, it's certainly not for a mild virus.

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

#482

Post by cortic »

chimprich wrote: post #435
cortic wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happened in the UK as well, Boris (and to be fair the WHO) told us masks were counter productive. That they might get you to stand closer to people and touch your face more, increasing your chances of getting Covid.. All presumably to save a mask shortage; But we know, and they should have known, that the public doesn't buy the same kind of masks that our NHS buys and there never was going to be any shortage. This en…

> All presumably to save a mask shortage I don't think so. There seemed to be genuine uncertainty early on in the pandemic about whether masks would be helpful. We didn't know if the virus was airborne and there was a question about whether the masks would actually be helpful. For example, the masks could have had very low benefit but encouraged people to touch their face more. Whitty in March 2020: "In terms of wear…

>wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all.

I remember this, at the time we knew people who were infected (and infectious) could take more than 10 days to show symptoms, and if they didn't wear a mask they could infect hundreds. We also knew that anything less than an N95 wasn't designed to protect the wearer anyway (though as it turns out it does), but rather everyone else from the wearer. So it was really disingenuous of them to suggest your mask doesn't protect you, as they knew its everyone else's mask than protects you..

By the time it hit Italy we knew it was airborne, even if not by official measure, out government and the WHO kept this BS up for months after that.

Maybe we watch different media, as i have seen nothing about this issue. A few articles online, hidden away, nothing proportional to the seriousness of the issue.

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

#483

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #396
brigandish wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would that evidence look like? The House Committee on Oversight and Reform have a press release with more detail[1], which the Telegraph mentions - it's how I found it - and you can download a pdf which contains the partially redacted emails. It doesn't seem to me that the Telegraph has misled anyone regarding this news at all. Perhaps you could read it and be more precise as to where you think they're providing…

Evidence that would convince an independent panel of people trained in the field that it confirms a lab leak. Given the odds against that evidence would likely have to be fairly hard.

[deleted]

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

#484

Post by throw8932894 »

scotty79 wrote: post #467
throw8932894 wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This "natural" origin theories kind of sound like conspiracy. Bats, mice, lemurs.. Somehow wildly different DNA parts combine, and virus perfectly adapted for human population emerges from cave with zero prior human contact... If Omicron evolved in mice, we should be able to find it in wild mice population. Or maybe partially replicate its evolution in lab on mice population. We know virus synthesis is possible, it i…

Not all mice, some mice, somewhere. This virus in the form we encountered, spreads among humans best, but it also can spread between a ton of other animals. Most probable explanation is that it originated from civets (second best) and infected a single person with immunity sufficient to suppress it but insufficient to eradicate it. In this person it multiplied and mutated learning how to infect human cells best and f…

It stayed in single person for months, and somehow it got more infectious in this person, without infecting anyone. It is perfectly adapted to stain airborne and pass lungs, but it gained that inside person! And it only gained mutations related to higher infection rate and severity, nothing else, no other random changes.

Omicron DNA was "forked" in July 2020. It was not detected until now, when it spread like wild fire. Unless we find missing links in nature, I find natural origin very unlikely.

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

#485

Post by KingOfCoders »

edumucelli wrote: post #479

I have read this ( https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-... ) about the origins of Covid and one phrase that called my attention was: "Dr. Richard Ebright, board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, said that from the very first reports of a novel bat-related coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, it took him “a nanosecond or a picosecond” to consider a link t…

I don't know who is right.

A lab that does bat related research and is located where bats have traditionally shown these viruses, it's hard to determine cause and effect.

"When I first heard about the Arctic, I thought about that Arctic ice research institute in a nano second. There are only two places. There are not a dozen places, it's two places."

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

#486

Post by konfin »

dTal wrote: post #380
secondcoming wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand your point. Trump is the only leader who gave people the truth and was lambasted for it.

That's a laughably generous take. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Dona...

No post body was provided.

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

#487

Post by KingOfCoders »

raxxorrax wrote: post #320
randomsearch wrote: post #313

I have mixed feelings about this, and I certainly think it’s not as clear cut as HN is converging on, although I share the same instincts. On the one hand, yes, science should be completely open and unhindered by geopolitics. But recall that Trump was in the White House at the time. We are a community of generally highly educated nerds with a strong understanding of science and engineering. We understand that all lab…

Trump is irrelevant here, in fact I believe a lot of people voting for him out of spite because they felt they had been lied to by the other party. You will not improve the situation with more paternalism. That is has degraded to "owning the libs" is a predictable result. Yes, people jump to conclusion, but if you want to build a society of trust, you let some people jump. Others will hit the breaks if no conclusive…

No post body was provided.

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

#488

Post by scratcheee »

zarzavat wrote: post #453
thathndude wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Plus it's simply ineffective. Enough people saw through the lies such that all the masks sold out anyway . I reckon an honest approach and appeal to morality would have seen more masks donated to hospitals than simply telling people that they don't work.

That's a fair point, although in this case drawing attention to the shortage would have made it even more newsworthy, and might have made the few greedy profiteers more fervent in their desire to buy up all stock, even as the average person reduced their buying. Appealing to morality works better when each person gets an approximately equal vote. If one arsehole can counteract the good behaviour of 10, that weakens the honest approach.

Whether it would have actually been worse or better I can't really guess, but I do see your point that it might have worked and definitely wouldn't have weakened public trust the way the dishonest approach did, so yeah, I'll concede that was probably a bad call.

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

#489

Post by gurkendoktor »

thathndude wrote: post #411
scratcheee wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not only distrust of politicians. I'd say the mainstream media have suffered from a similar loss of trust over the last years because most outlets simply repeat official guidance from the WHO or national agencies.

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

#490

Post by rixed »

rixed wrote: post #284
suifbwish wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facts are facts. The fact is in 2019 there were 39,397 wet markets in China. How many virology labs were there in China handling Corona-viruses? TWO. One of which was TWO BLOCKS from where the wet market from where the original Covid-19 virus which started the pandemic has been traced to. One might be forgiven for being curious as to the likelihood of the virus emerging from this particular wet market as opposed to a…

This line of reasoning forget a very important information: research labs are not built at random. This lab studying coronavirusses was built there precisely because this is a place where new coronavirusses have appeared in the past. Will add a source later when not on mobile.

Couldn't find the source I was looking for, which was I believe from a french scientist (likely from the French CIRI that co-founded the Wuhan lab studying coronavirusses). So I will have to softer my above assertion that the lab was build "precisely" in Wuhan because it was a place where coronavirusses have appeared in the past, into the less convincing: this lab was build in China because that's were coronavirusses responsible for SARS have come from.

Still not completely random. And yes labs and wild animal markets tend to met in high population density area, so that's another non-random factor I presume.

This coincidence is indeed troubling, but before jumping to conclusions it's good to remember why there is such consensus against lab leak theory, by (re)reading the original report on the origin of SARS-Cov2 (https://zenodo.org/record/5075888) and the short history of SARS past outbreaks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS#Outbreak_in_South_China - which interestingly lists several past lab leaks).

I don't find any of the competing theory very obvious to be honest. What is very obvious though, and was made even more obvious to me when I was looking for that source, is the amount of political manipulation around this topic. The epidemic of manipulation of opinion is a greater concern that the epidemic of that virus if you ask me.

Can we refrain from posting articles about science from political newspapers, maybe?

Post reply on HN