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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

#601

Post by b112 »

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…

Seeing as at the start, it was 100% known that covid spreads for weeks, prior to showing symptoms, that people may never show symptoms and spread, and further that tests did not exist for months, and were in short supply thereafter, any mask policy predicted upon being aware of infection would be negligent, incompetent, and just plain dumb.

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

#602

Post by Axien »

kdbg wrote: post #516
roenxi wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It lead to some number of deaths, probably 10s of thousands in the UK Is there solid evidence anywhere that masks are important one way or the other? While it is plausible that a mask could prevent an infection in an encounter, I've not yet seen anyone waving something conclusive around that masks prevent infections over the course of a pandemic. I've managed to avoid the coronavirus for 2 years now and as far as I…

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069 Unfortunately many parts of this paper are beyond me, but this study does appear to find that community level masking has an impact, but it is a study that used actual communities and tracked compliance (and impact of different interventions on encouraging making)

Actually look at the peer review of that study done by Cornell and released this December. When the actual data was analyzed it showed masks had no effect.

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

#603

Post by hoffs »

headsoup wrote: post #508
causi wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CDC and WHO are still spouting off about cleaning surfaces without, to my knowledge, one single well-documented case of surface transmission.

It's not a long stretch to question if anything the CDC recommends actually comes from caring for public health at all rather than private interests. The US is becoming more and more the outlier in over-hyped fear and infantalism vs a world moving on.

It is a long stretch

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

#604

Post by baobabKoodaa »

chimprich wrote: post #577
Wiseacre wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus" - Surgeon General, Feb 29, 2020 Please stop spreading misinformation.

I am not spreading misinformation. Please don't throw accusations around. Previous Surgeon General Jerome Adams is not the same person as Fauci. I'm not in the USA, but looks like your surgeon general in Feb 2020 was not an ideal choice for the post. He sounds like a political Trump appointee. Even so, the full tweet read: "Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from…

You can't even keep your own arguments straight.

In grandparent post you stated "There seemed to be genuine uncertainty early on in the pandemic about whether masks would be helpful".

In this post you are stating "mask use was partly being discouraged to avoid pressure on sourcing masks for medical professionals".

So which is it? Were they recommending against mask use because masks are not helpful, or were they recommending against mask use because masks are so helpful that we actually need to conserve them for medical professionals? Which is it?

If you're going to lie, at least make up a consistent story.

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

#605

Post by hoffs »

newsclues wrote: post #598
op00to wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this didn’t happen.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-ottawa-face...

Yeah, they shipped it because they didn't expect they will need it even when WHO was suggesting that there is a likelihood of cases in other countries...

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

#606

Post by tilolebo »

The people in charge of the investigation should be totally independent from these scientists.

That would otherwise be an obvious conflict of interest.

Hopefully they will be as independent as the credit rating agencies are from the financial institutions they evaluate...

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

#607

Post by callmeal »

Might be a good time to remember the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect:

  “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray [Gell-Mann]'s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
  
  In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

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

#608

Post by alevskaya »

brigandish wrote: post #388
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…

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…

I was a genetic engineer for two decades:

- Clear signs of molecular manipulation in the sars-cov-2 sequence. There are none. Almost all of the alleged manipulations would have left unmistakeable, damning evidence in a recognizable vector. The only remotely interesting thing at all in the sequence is the furin site, but plenty of coronaviruses have those, and it just likely indicates selection/propagation in a secondary host species... exactly like the ones that caused SARS-1 and MERS.

- Failing that, even a scrap of evidence that anyone was even culturing (not just sequencing) this new sub-clade. You're not going to catch a respiratory virus by accident from a sterile rna-stabilized swab or a database entry. Compared to the vast, unregulated wild-meat industry in China this is such an unlikely vector.

- Any epidemiological connections to WIV? There aren't any, just the original fact that the outbreak happened in Wuhan (...across the river, in an animal market with known coronavirus hosts species.) All of the index cases are associated w. the market - not WIV. There were a number of western scientists interacting w. WIV researchers in Nov/Dec at the start of the outbreak and no independent reports of any sickness or anything out of the ordinary.

There's no evidence for a lab-leak. Increasingly febrile accusations of conspiracy and speculative just-so stories aren't evidence. Someone like me would be easily, readily convinced by some hard facts... but none have been presented. As a biologist that's what I and many of my colleagues find frustrating about this... it just seems like people emotionally crave a human agency to blame. I used to think René Girard was silly... but maybe he was right about humanity and scapegoats.

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

#609

Post by daveaiello »

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…

> But Trump, his party, and many many people in the West would care only for the political capital they could make from it, with potentially catastrophic results that would make COVID look relatively minor.

There are plenty of people who voted for Trump and other Republican candidates who have scientific and engineering backgrounds. If I had to try to characterize those people, in terms of what makes them different from the science and engineering people who tend to vote Democratic, it is that the Trump / Republican supporters tend to be the entrepreneurs or senior management people in private industry, while the Democratic supporters are often management and staff at institutions in or aligned with government, health, and education.

It’s not fair at all to say that Republican-supporting science and engineering people care only for the political capital they can make. They actually want many of the same things as the Democratic-supporting scientists and engineers do— to prevent this from happening again.

The difference is that in this case, the Republican-supporters wanted their viewpoints to be freely debated, not denigrated by the mainstream media and/or censored by social media.

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

#610

Post by enkid »

Wiseacre wrote: post #560
chimprich wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least Fauci, WHO, and Finnish health authorities HAVE come out afterwards and admitted that they lied about masks This is not true. I think Fauci etc. admitted that a reason masks weren't recommended early on was partly to conserve masks. That's quite different from the claim that they actively lied about them.

"Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus" - Surgeon General, Feb 29, 2020 Please stop spreading misinformation.

This is 1) obviously about supply chain issues, so upfront with the reasons and 2) seems to be genuine about not believing masks are effective in preventing COVID. If that is accurate this is not a lie, because there is no intent to deceive.
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