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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

#541

Post by the8472 »

mjburgess wrote: post #534
zkms wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

[flagged]

Last time I checked our democracies are still running on the premise of informed voters. If discussion of hypothesis needs to be suppressed during a 3-year-long "emergency" then we have an issue.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#542

Post by ovi256 »

ajross wrote: post #238
kevinmchugh wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't an oppressive regime change the math here? The ability to suppress potential whistleblowers means the absence of whistleblowers isn't all that convincing. Compared to moon landing conspiracy theories, where this argument is very convincing imo

Again, these are scientists. You really don't think one of them could move to a post at Stanford or wherever and spill the tea? No one has an old copy of an incriminating memo they can forward to a friend in Taipei? And regardless, the PRC does not in fact have a great record in the opsec department even within its military and espionage arms. How many "Chinese spies" get arrested every year? Part of any conspiracy t…

> You really don't think one of them could move to a post at Stanford or wherever and spill the tea? No one has an old copy of an incriminating memo they can forward to a friend in Taipei

Not after the top PLA vaccine researcher, Zhou Yusen died, allegedly "falling off the roof of the WIV" in May 2020. That sends a loud message.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#543

Post by ahartmetz »

realjhol wrote: post #517

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…

Your positions, if these are all yours, are quite maximalist in one direction, and in some cases I have read pretty credible studies that contradict you. So, you may not get your Iraq moment.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#544

Post by cnity »

aaplok wrote: post #72

> The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power. This part doesn't make sense to me. Coronavirus is known to mutate constantly and rapidly. Having a vaccine against a strand mig…

You don't do research and development on things that are already perfect. You do it on things you hope one day might be refined into something more useful. Similarly you don't halt all research on all other possible avenues because one single avenue _might_ be better.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#545

Post by heavyset_go »

Ancapistani wrote: post #482
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…

> 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…

> I don’t recall a single instance of this.

I saw the birth of r/WuhanFlu and other related subreddits that were created in early 2020, and accusations of it being a bioweapon were there from the start, and once someone looked up "Wuhan" on Google Maps and saw the virology institute, people were saying it was a lab leak.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#546

Post by 015UUZn8aEvW »

px43 wrote: post #448
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…

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…

I think you overstate how much the lab leak and the bioweapon stories were being conflated. I recall that most people were able to distinguish between them, and that the most prominent figures raising red flags about a potential leak weren't talking about bioweapons.

In any case, the most alarming aspect of the lab leak hypothesis is that gain-of-function research is STILL being done, and that the same thing could happen AGAIN. Since this risks creating another pandemic, suppressing the story because of concerns about street crime is very misguided.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#547

Post by ionwake »

I’m just annoyed I was given -3 downvotes here on HN for saying there was research indicating artificial/lab gene markers were discovered indicating it probably had a lab origin. I didn’t say anything else just mentioned a research paper and I got downvoted here on HN. :(

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#548

Post by skissane »

PierceJoy wrote: post #457
coding123 wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Very sorry about your Dad, but you have no evidence vaccination was related to his ALS. Hundred of millions of people were vaccinated in short period of time, and there is obviously a group of people who were always going to develop ALS within that time frame. Given the large n of the first group, overlap was inevitable. Temporal proximity doesn't establish causation when there's an overlap.

There is tentative evidence that COVID vaccines may rarely trigger onset of ALS in susceptible individuals - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10035647/

It is possible you are right and it was just a coincidence - but it is also possible that the vaccine was the trigger for ALS to develop. We don’t have enough evidence yet to confidently say

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#549

Post by revelio »

px43 wrote: post #448
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…

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…

> These conspiracy theories lead to a marked rise in violent attacks on anyone of Asian descent in the US

Where? Can you back this up with clear evidence? And assuming this claim isn't simply made up, in what universe would it be a good strategy to address a USA specific problem by systematically and globally destroying the credibility of the entire scientific, media and public health establishment? The solution to violence is police; no one in their right mind would decide the best solution to this would be to establish a global conspiracy.

No, the above is all retroactive justification. We have the emails from the virologists as they planned the letter that claimed it was all a conspiracy theory. They weren't motivated by violent attacks. They were worried about being blamed for it, and that maybe it'd be harder to fund work in China in future. They say that, in writing.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#550

Post by Symmetry »

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…

Matthew Yglesias wrote a whole thing on how the idea initially became politicized in the US. The short of it was that when Trump was downplaying the danger of human-to-human transmission early on because his friend Xi told him that wasn't happening Senator Tom Cotton started talking up the idea that the Chinese government might be lying about because it escaped from a government lab. But then there was a game of telephone and it turned into the idea it was a Chinese bioweapon.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-medias-lab-leak-fiasco

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