Earlier quoted context omitted.
The CCP lies about everything from its GDP numbers to COVID infection rate and deaths. You simply cannot believe anything the Chinese government puts out.
This is largely from the NIH.
NIH got the data from China.
Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic
131–140 of 281 posts
Re: Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic
#132The one thing that makes me think the Lab Leak theory is true is that the Chinese government very very strongly denies the story and does anything it can to deflect or redirect the discussion to some other theory. For anyone reading these kinds of stories and reports but is not a regular China follower, there is one thing you really should know. Anytime the Chinese government reacts very negatively to a story (Denial…
No post body was provided.
Re: Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic
#133The one thing that makes me think the Lab Leak theory is true is that the Chinese government very very strongly denies the story and does anything it can to deflect or redirect the discussion to some other theory. For anyone reading these kinds of stories and reports but is not a regular China follower, there is one thing you really should know. Anytime the Chinese government reacts very negatively to a story (Denial…
> The one thing that makes me think the Lab Leak theory is true is that the Chinese government very very strongly denies the story
...well, yes, of course they do. But they would also strongly deny the story if they thought it was untrue.
> Anytime the Chinese government reacts very negatively to a story (Denial, attacking, undermining, deflecting), it usually means the story is true.
So if they don't react negatively and deny something, then the story is... false? That doesn't make any sense.
Re: Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic
#134The same visual analysis, when showing the location of the lab, could lead to other conclusions. Here’s a link to that, if we’re open to differing perspectives. https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/lie-exposed-bbc-says-covid...
Just to add to this, in the linked paper by Worobey et. al., Fig 2(B) shows something they label as "Centroid of Blue Cases". That centroid appears to be almost squarely on the location of the Wuhan Institute of Infectious Diseases. For some reason, neither the locations of the Wuhan Institute of Infectious Diseases or the Wuhan Institute of Virology are mentioned in the linked paper.
This is correct, but the paper does observe that these second-stage cases (mostly reported around January and February) occur in an area of high density housing with a preponderance of elderly people.
Re: Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic
#135If, unlike most of the other top commenters I see, you read the paper and its sibling[0], which isn't very long or difficult to understand, you'll find an interesting and thoughtful analysis. They talk a lot about ascertainment (sampling) bias. They find the data points to the market even after they threw out the 1/3+ of the people who lived closest to it. And the cases not linked to the market lived closer to it than the cases that were:
> One of the key findings of our study is that ‘unlinked’ early COVID-19 patients, those who neither worked at the market or knew someone who did, nor had recently visited the market, resided significantly closer to the market than patients with a direct link to the market. The observation that a substantial proportion of early cases had no known epidemiological link had previously been used as an argument against a Huanan market epicenter of the pandemic. However, this group of cases resided significantly closer to the market than those who worked there, indicating that they had been exposed to the virus at, or near, the Huanan market. For market workers, the exposure risk was their place of work not their residential locations, which were significantly further afield than those cases not formally linked to the market.
This makes sense, but it's probably not something I'd have thought of myself.
I also find figure 4[1] fascinating. Evidence points not just to the market, but to just a handful of stalls within it.
The sibling study tracks two lineages in the early spread, both clustered around the market. The first study, citing this sibling, says:
> This, along with the lineage A cases we report in close geographical proximity to the market in December, challenges the suggestion that the market was simply a superspreading event, which would be lineage-specific. Rather, it adds to the evidence presented here that lineage A, like lineage B, may have originated at the Huanan market then spread from this epicenter into the neighborhoods surrounding the market and then beyond.
They conclude that they are likely the result of separate animal-to-human transmissions and that there were probably more jumps that quickly died off. This suggests that the virus was well-suited to infect humans before it jumped:
> Successful transmission of both lineage A and B viruses after independent zoonotic events indicates that evolutionary adaptation within humans was not needed for SARS-CoV-2 to spread (49). We now know that SARS-CoV-2 can readily spread after reverse-zoonosis to Syrian hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus), American mink (Neovison vison), and white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), indicating its host generalist capacity (50–55).
[0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8337 [1] https://www.science.org/cms/10.1126/science.abp8715/asset/86...
Re: Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody is "checking the details" in this thread - they're just wildly speculating based on their feelings and asserting that the absence of evidence about the virus originating at the WIV is very clearly suspicious...
Speaking generally, every single time a new study is discussed on HN, the first comment talks about how it doesn't do what it is supposed to. For e.g., a topic about "X cures cancer" has a comment that's at the very top that claims "No, X doesn't cure cancer, except in these narrow cases" and then sources the details in the paper. That seems to me the right thing to do. HN does that very well.
If you read closer, you'll notice that it's not at all what is happening here. Maybe 1/10th of the comments are about the actual paper? Fewer? It's just mindless evidence-free conspiracy mongering including fun little subthreads about how you can't rule out that the US actually created the pandemic to punish China;
Re: Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic
#137The one thing that makes me think the Lab Leak theory is true is that the Chinese government very very strongly denies the story and does anything it can to deflect or redirect the discussion to some other theory. For anyone reading these kinds of stories and reports but is not a regular China follower, there is one thing you really should know. Anytime the Chinese government reacts very negatively to a story (Denial…
> It is perfectly reasonable that some lab somewhere would collect and study the COVID virus. What is unreasonable is that the lab or a lab worker just got sloppy and accidently released that virus out to the world.
Is this still true? It is unfortunate that it took an event like this to prove what we already knew: lab workers, who are of course fallible humans, will make mistakes.
Given that Covid was released upon the world likely due to a lab accident and all of the damage it did over a span of years, it would seem reasonable to rethink whether unlimited experimentation and especially enhancement with viruses should be allowed. This in itself has proven to be a source of denial by the very virus experts (like Fauci) that do not want their area of science to be restricted.
Re: Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic
#138It's been fascinating and terrifying watching people (in general and on here) jump to answers that are nice but wrong (China did it on purpose, You can cure it with X, it's just the flu, etc) over the last few years. We will never know for certain what happened. It's honestly killed me support for democracy. 95% of people seem to be incapable of thinking about uncertainty and living with not knowing. They just jump h…
I generally find that, while there are a worrying amount of people with insane takes on things, often reaching 30% in various polls when something becomes "political", that the majority generally gets it right. If only there was a bit more democracy, a lot of bad things could be avoided. Having said that, I looked up the polling on lab leaks and American democracy loses on this one: https://morningconsult.com/2021/06…
Read up on selectorate theory for a good argument as to why majorities often don't matter. It's a well developed elaboration of the truism that politicians prefer to pick their voters, and it is absolutely employed strategically.
Re: Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic
#139I wonder how many people who are seemingly willing to believe the self-serving CCP party-line on this, would be just as believing of the owners of a nuclear power plant in their town, once the drinking water became radioactive, claiming "it didn't come from the plant, someone else down the street must have done it" - that is just about as believable as this.
Hypothetically speaking, if it were a lab-leak and if it were a malicious lab tech or an that was mad at the world or compromised by a political actor, they could have dumped/micronize sprayed a vial [1] into the food market which would make the statement not entirely false. This is of course a lazy theory and would be nearly impossible to test out. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksrWmPMZGiY [video, gets NSFW…
> This is of course a lazy theory and would be nearly impossible to test out.
Even this hypothetical theory doesn't explain the early lineage A / lineage B split and is not supported by existing data.
Re: Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic
#140Conspiracy theories aside, Worebey's Science paper is not unanimously well received by the scientific community, and the data analysis was shown to be partly flawed. Here's a discussion on inference pointing to references and sources that argue against the results of the paper: https://inference-review.com/article/thunder-out-of-china It also raises eyebrows the fact that no animal has ever been found to be positive…
> No source animal was found. Since this was a food market, it's possible and likely that all the source animals were eaten by the time the study was being done.
And this is more likely than a lab leak?