Live data from Hacker News

Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

thetimes.co.uk

641–650 of 1001 posts

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#641
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…

There are folks who were speaking out early despite harsh criticism. RFK JR (who happens to be running for president on the democratic ticket in the US) has another book coming out soon that will likely be very thoroughly researched around this topic.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#642
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…

Chris Martenson did a lot of this as it was ongoing- of course his YouTube videos got flagged. As another commenter mentioned Dazik had a big role- he lead the delegation that went to China to investigate the origin even though he had an obvious conflict of interest. 60 minutes interviewed him without digging into the conflict of interest. There are now public emails between Fauci and others coordinating the NIH position that there was no lab leak. That silences much of the scientific community that doesn’t want problems with their grants. Not to mention Fauci constantly going on TV doing interviews to try to control the conversation.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

and that right there is how you promulgate a social suppression campaign.

No, that right there is how I remind you that if you want your hypothesis to be taken seriously you need proofs or at least a very compelling argument. There was neither.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’d love “informed voters” though from what I see of social media, it does anything but inform through its creation of cliques and upvoting based on popularity, not veracity or even reasoned argument . One example is the switch to paid blue checkmarks on Twitter. Prior to the switch, there’d be some semblance (not great) of debate on comments. Now, all the musk fans and RW-oriented subscribers completely dominate so…

That's probably because for the years prior the same people were bashed into the ground for their beliefs. Now that it turns out it's more true than not, they're probably mad.

aka, you're on the other side now.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bayesian reasoning is that your prior is a 99.999% chance that the virus is natural, as all other viruses are. The probability that a virus would crop up in Wuhan out of all cities in China is 1/70. Feel free apply Bayes' formula.

Where's the part with the virus being collected and brought to a lab in Wuhan where gain of function research was done prior to the outbreak? Feel free to include that in your formula.

There is no evidence SARS-COV-2 was being studied.

But even if you were to accept that, the bayesian reasoning would be that you'd say that the probability it's from Wuhan it's a leak is 100%, and 0% for any other city. You could go further and look at the viruses that have caused zoonoses in China in the past (the evidence is that hundreds of SARS-like coronaviruses have) and compare it to what was being studied. Even then, if you apply Bayes' formula, you'd have overwhelming odds towards a natural origin.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's untrue. Viruses which spillover may spread across humans at a low level of efficiency for months, mutating for higher affinity towards humans, and only becoming pandemic once a high level of affinity has been achieved. All viruses which have higher affinity for humans spilled over, didn't they?

That's what happened with H1N1 but we know that hasn't happened with Sars2 because Sars2 only spreads efficiently with a furin cleavage site but the furin cleavage site also makes it more pathogenic so it would definitely not spread undetected.

Studies have found that people living near bats in Yunnan have immunity against this class of coronaviruses due to exposure, which would strongly blunt pathogenicity. There is also more to pathogenicity than you let on.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#647
post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think you’d find that in just about every significant crisis of any significant timeframe plenty of examples of clamping down on witch-hunts in these very democracies. am i advocating for this? of course not, however, we have countless examples where conspiracies and just plain paranoid thinking spun out and resulted in very very real atrocities. significant atrocities that were much more real and much more severe…

Could you please elaborate on what atrocities were caused by conspiracy theories?

As public awareness of HIV increased and became the AIDS Crisis, so too did incidents of attacks on homosexuals.

"What man does not understand, he fears; and what he fears, he tends to destroy." - William Butler Yeats

Plenty of sources on the uptick in attacks during the AIDS crisis, but here are three:

* https://review.gale.com/2017/05/17/the-homophobic-aids-crisi...

* https://www.apa.org/pi/aids/resources/exchange/2012/04/discr...

* https://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/23/us/violence-against-homos...

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#648
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…

> These conspiracy theories lead to a marked rise in violent attacks on anyone of Asian descent in the US, It should be noted that the statistics don't support the media narrative and there was no wave of white supremacist attacks on Asians. Here are the stats from New York ("Arrest Statistics by Bias Motivation"): https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/stats/reports-analysis/hate-cr...

From your own link "hate-crime-complaints-by-motivation-annual" 2020 vs 2021:

+Anti-Asian 2019: 1

Anti-Asian 2020: 27

Anti-Asian 2021: 131

*+ Edit: Added 2019 as suggested below

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#649

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]

bizarre. it's even in the name, "leak". very weird to pretend there weren't a lot of people who thought a lab worker contracted it and passed it to the food market

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#650
post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please elaborate on what atrocities were caused by conspiracy theories?

The obvious example is the Holocaust. Violence (including mass shootings and church burnings) inspired by replacement theory and incelism. Anti-vax beliefs led to more deaths due to COVID, and greater economic and systemic stress than otherwise would have occurred had a significant number of people afraid of adrenochrome harvesting and the New World Order not purposely undermined pandemic control efforts. Currently t…

As a conspiracy theorist, it kind of burns my britches to be mocked by a clairvoyant in public and not be able to do anything about it.

May you live in interesting times indeed.

Post reply on HN