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Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

thetimes.co.uk

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Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#511

Post by cassepipe »

shri_krishna wrote: post #484
px43 wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a high level, it's pretty simple. There was a very well coordinated and intentional conflation of the term "lab leak" with the conspiracy theories around China and the WHO intentionally developing and deploying bio-weapons as a means of global population control. These conspiracy theories lead to a marked rise in violent attacks on anyone of Asian descent in the US, and generally fed into the wet dream fantasies o…

It is funny how you say it so nonchalantly that the reason for not discussing lab leak theory is it lead to "marked rise in violent attacks on anyone of Asian descent". However none of this applies to rhetoric against Russia, Middle East or any such country where US is at War with right now. How come no US citizen is attacking Russians, or Middle Easterners (Libyans, Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans etc) in US soil when the…

Because you can't blame dear grandpa's death on Russia maybe however you try ?

I am pretty sure 9/11 - War on Terror saw a rise in aggression of muslim looking people even though it concerned less people than covid did.

You're pretending there was no such thing as people on TV blaming it on people eating "bat soup" and stuff like that.

When lab leak hypotheses were able to rise above the conspiracy theories thanks to reasonable argumentation, it was finally heard. At first only on HN, thanks to which I first gave credence to the hypothesis and now you here you have it in mainstream media. It all takes time and debate, it's normal.

The only conspiracy I see is from people, whether in the state apparatus or the scientific community that really did not want people to look too much into Gain OF Function research. I think the existence of such research and democratic control over is the debate now worth having.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#512

Post by kortilla »

th0ma5 wrote: post #133
kortilla wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s possible aliens came from space and dropped the virus off to see how we would handle it. How much effort should we put into preventing that pandemic path? Nearly every airline regulation that results in air travel being so safe today is because we spend such an enormous amount of resources investigating the root causes of accidents with the NTSB. Try suggesting to them “it doesn’t matter why the plane crashed, l…

The limit is five why's and often you can't even get that. Planes still crash. Perhaps we've pulled on this thread as much as we can. Especially with long ass articles like this that say nothing new. Seriously, what are we expecting to learn. This is like a plane at the bottom of the ocean never to be found. We'll never know what happened to this plane, and we don't have to. We know that situation was probably poor p…

> The limit is five why's and often you can't even get that. Planes still crash.

This is a shockingly ignorant statement or willfully misleading. Air safety has improved by at least an order of magnitude[1] because of the culture of seeking out the truth, regardless of how disruptive or inconvenient.

It is very rare to have a commercial airline crash now and significantly rarer to not understand exactly why (MH370 being a notable exception).

Wherever you got that “often you can’t even got that” is complete and utter bullshit.

1. https://news.mit.edu/2020/study-commercial-flights-safer-eve...

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#513

Post by zkms »

mjburgess wrote: post #496
Ancapistani wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was a very well coordinated and intentional conflation of the term "lab leak" with the conspiracy theories around China and the WHO intentionally developing and deploying bio-weapons as a means of global population control. I don’t recall a single instance of this. A year ago, people were saying on this site and elsewhere was that the issue was conflating “lab leak” with “intentionally engineered”. A year bef…

[flagged]

> I never met anyone who didn't equate "lab leak" with an intentional act by china

The likes of Alina Chan and Richard Ebright are "easy mode" counterexamples for your statement.

I'll swing for the fences: Even Tom Cotton was -- at least once, I am exceedingly uninterested in combing through all his tweets and media appearances -- careful to distinguish between "lab leak" and "intentional act", despite being brazenly political and probably inspired by anti-China animus.

From the thread beginning at https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126:

"Let me debunk the debunkers. @paulina_milla and her “experts” wrongly jump straight to the claim that the coronavirus is an engineered bioweapon. That’s not what I’ve said. There’s at least four hypotheses about the origin of the virus:

1. Natural (still the most likely, but almost certainly not from the Wuhan food market)

2. Good science, bad safety (eg, they were researching things like diagnostic testing and vaccines, but an accidental breach occurred)

3. Bad science, bad safety (this is the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis, with an accidental breach)

4. Deliberate release (very unlikely, but shouldn’t rule out till the evidence is in)

Again, none of these are “theories” and certainly not “conspiracy theories.” They are hypotheses that ought to be studied in light of the evidence, if the Chinese Communist Party would provide it.

We ought to be transparent with the American people about all this. Maybe some of these so-called experts think they know better. I don’t. And they really don’t either."

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#514

Post by trentearl »

mjburgess wrote: post #496
Ancapistani wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was a very well coordinated and intentional conflation of the term "lab leak" with the conspiracy theories around China and the WHO intentionally developing and deploying bio-weapons as a means of global population control. I don’t recall a single instance of this. A year ago, people were saying on this site and elsewhere was that the issue was conflating “lab leak” with “intentionally engineered”. A year bef…

[flagged]

Strange, I have the exact opposite experience. I have personally have felt ostracized multiple times for suggesting it was likely there was an unintentional lab leak. I often got criticized for suggesting it was a bio-weapon, while I never thought that and never even said those words. Sometime in the past 12 months this disappeared.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#515

Post by christkv »

tim333 wrote: post #354
christkv wrote: post #301

Nobody will ever want the truth because if it did come from the lab it implicates the Chinese government as well as the US government given that the US funded research in Wuhan through the EcoHealth Alliance to get around the ban on Gain of Function research in the US.

The general public want the truth. It seems to be gradually leaking out.

The public sure, the governments no.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#516

Post by russdill »

zosima wrote: post #491
russdill wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it the expectation that the specific strain would be noted in the wild before the start of a pandemic? Is there precedent for such a thing?

Yes, the zoonotic origins of e.g SARS and MERS were found shortly after the outbreaks. In fact COVID seems somewhat unique amongst modern maladies to not have a clear zoonotic origin.

It doesn't appear that there is a clear zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-1 and MERS either. The case is circumstantial in a similar way to SARS-CoV-2. Yes there are several animal reservoirs that carry similar viruses, but there wasn't a specific one found from which any of the 3 strains came.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#517

Post by realjhol »

It's going to take a long time before the mainstream is ready to think critically about the COVID narratives, but it's good to see first steps toward the recovery of rationality.

But there's still a lot to cover:

- Lockdowns did little to prevent the spread of COVID and lead to increased deaths by other causes, egregious violation of people's fundamental rights, massively destruction of the economy, and many people's mental health.

- Cloth masks were pointless security theatre

- The vast majority of people except the very elderly and obese were in very little danger

- The vaccines never prevented transmission

- The vaccines only offered very limited protection for a brief period

- The rate of side effects (including serious side effects up to and including death) is a lot higher than anyone wants to admit.

- To most segments of the population, the danger of death by vaccine side effects is greater than the danger of death by COVID-19

I'm hoping in a decade or so, we'll get towards something approaching a "sorry, you were right", like we did with the Iraq war, but there's still a long way to go.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#518

Post by cheaprentalyeti »

bruce511 wrote: post #450
throwaway485 wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a brief window at the beginning where it would have mattered to know the origin of the virus. Intervention at a wet market or in a wuhan lab could have happened. However, this theory was circulated and promoted to inspire hatred and distrust of many authority figures. Authorities who put significant resources forward to save lives. Even today we're still seeing thousands die from what may very well be a con…

To me fair the folk dying today are tangential to the origin story. I'm not sure the origin story mattered a whole lot along the way, other than being a useful political distraction. I don't think it informed personal or medical behaviour. Of course discussions around vaccines, masks, social distancing etc did have a huge impact on personal behaviours, so those are far more impactful both than and in hindsight. The d…

The origin story matters because we had the authoritarian bureaucrats who helped create the virus AND LIED ABOUT IT running the virus response in this country and they took all of their new powers and produced one of the highest per capita death rates from the virus in a so-called advanced country.

It looks a lot worse than suspicious.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#519

Post by cheaprentalyeti »

secondcoming wrote: post #136
pcrh wrote: post #55

After a quick read of the article, it presents no new data, and is replete with innuendo pointing at the Wuhan lab, rather than any direct evidence. Most importantly, the general reader should know that all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses. After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses. So the fact that the Wuhan lab worked on coronaviruses is not in itself an indication of any i…

Some janitor or whatever sold an infected animal to the market.

If they were doing experiments with serialized passage through so-called humanized mice and they escaped you'd have the engineered virus suddenly showing up being carried by many different species at the wet market in spite of natural viruses jumping species much more slowly.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#520

Post by BurningPenguin »

jeswin wrote: post #431

I'd like for someone to throughly research and write about how it became taboo to discuss the virus leak theory. How researchers who discussed it were shunned, tagged as racists, and in some cases had their posts banned from Social Media. About how almost the entire scientific community discarded the idea as impossible. How during the early pandemic years, no mainstream news media dared talk about the possibility. Te…

Not from the US, but i don't see how it was ever a "taboo". The general gist was "we don't know" or "unlikely". However, what i did see on Social Media, was a bunch of nutjobs pushing their nonsense about "deep state", "population control" and so on.
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