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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

#671

Post by somenameforme »

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…

This is a weird topic to me, because I'm unsure if I live in a different bubble, or we're all just kind of playing the euphemism game (with a bit of self censorship on top) or what. Because what happened is hardly ambiguous. One thing, more than any, that the Twitter files provided evidence of was various governmental organizations, and individuals, pressuring at least one large tech company to censor for often arbitrary, and sometimes overtly fake, reasons. I think the chances of that behavior being limited to Twitter, or even tech companies in general, are zero.

The tech companies are obviously, at the minimum, complicit. Because "pressure" is just that - pressure. When the 'Russian trolls' narrative was being built up in Congress, Twitter knew it was entirely fabricated, and even referred to the requests as coming from "Congressional Trolls", and then they gave those said trolls nearly everything they wanted, and remained absolutely silent about what was happening. That strongly reflects upon the character, or lack thereof, of former Twitter leadership - but the source is the government.

The large scale centralization of speech has created an angle shoot of the 1st amendment. Pressure a handful of companies into censoring whatever you want censored and you likely achieve even more than a law would have, since you end up censoring it on a far larger scale than just domestically. Expecting politicians of a country to actually care about the intent of the constitution of that country is clearly no longer a reasonable expectation to have.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#672

Post by Izkata »

015UUZn8aEvW wrote: post #546
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…

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 ha…

There was a lot of conflation, but it was almost entirely from the people attempting to debunk it, using the bioweapon one to claim no leak could happen. It was like they just couldn't understand those were two different things no matter how much people said "no, that's not what I'm saying".

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#673

Post by pimpampum »

l5870uoo9y wrote: post #664

The central issue is that the extremely dangerous gain-of-function experiments were being undertaking and potentially still are. I would advocate for a worldwide ban of gain-of-function research and strict regulation of potential dangerous medical research in a similar manner as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation agreement. Even as imperfect as it would be. Issues regarding funding, laboratory security, military involveme…

I agree, but without a way to detect it or control it, it would be hard to enforce.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#674

Post by throwawaymaths »

naasking wrote: post #665
speff wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Looks like there was a general increase in complaints as lockdowns eased. From the data, there were upticks in anti-jewish, anti-gay, anti-muslim and more. Asians still saw relatively more of an uptick than other motivations.

That could be an increase in reporting. After all you'd expect the uptick to happen in 2020-- it was COVID-19 after all.

Also worth to know that anti-asian hate was also a narrative pushed by the CPC to label things like supporting Hong Kong democracy protests or criticizing uighur genocide as "anti-asian hate", which happened after the CPC noticed the effectiveness of BLM protests in sowing us discord (mid-2020) so to trust any stats post 2020 it would at least need to segregate the two use cases.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#675

Post by heliodor »

speff wrote: post #648
peppermint_gum wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Shouldn't you be looking for these numbers as a percent of total crime?

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#676

Post by anthonypasq »

Manjuuu wrote: post #637
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…

I'm hoping that in a decade or so, people will stop using "vaccines never prevented transmission" as an argument since it has been said at least a billion of times since the beginning, VACCINES PREVENTED SERIOUS ILLNESS. Same thing about the imaginary widespread side-effects or the mask being useless. Depressing. Personally I'm more worried about the people that went full retard about covid alternative views and cons…

the issue is that the conversation is so polarized and religious its literally impossible to discuss any of these issues. the poster you are responding to states some things which are reasonable and others which are complete nonsense. Its like people cant help themselves once picking a side to just wholesale accept every position all the way to "covid isnt real" on one end and "no one should ever leave their house again" on the other end.

The initial batch of vaccines were explicitly marketed as having a 95% effectiveness against transmission for the original strain. This was the entire basis of the herd immunity narrative and it was true for about 3 months until delta happened and the medical community did an egregiously bad job of communicating that.

Cloth masks are objectively useless for personal protection.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#677

Post by doom2 »

peppermint_gum wrote: post #605
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…

> 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...

As a personal anecdote, living as an Asian in a US city with a population over 1M people, I definitely saw a change in peoples' stance towards Asians in general and Chinese in particular, and not in a good way. There was a lot more suspicion about Asians, their businesses, etc. It wasn't the same level of suspicion as during post-9/11 America but it had a similar vibe. A lot of dog whistling with sentiments like, "I'm criticizing the Chinese government, not the Chinese people." (spoiler alert: it was both) Maybe that didn't result in violent crime, but it was not (and still isn't) a good time to be Chinese or display pride in one's Chinese heritage.

I hope one day we can look back at this period and think about how to better critically think about these things without applying personal biases and fears to a whole population.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#678

Post by bena »

hospitalJail wrote: post #616
Zetobal wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go ahead.

EDIT: Disclaimer, this was for one of the most principled politicians I've ever met. To this day, he will say he is an anarchist in public. (Although, he would say it in a pleasurable way) Sure, so to change 0.5% of the vote, we would find people with demographics that people vote for. For instance, if there is a women on the ballot, run another women because at least 0.5% of people vote for a women, so this splits t…

Well, if you said it, it must be true and we must accept these anecdotes as the complete truth and you as the best source of it.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#679

Post by whimsicalism »

anthonypasq wrote: post #670
boston_clone wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A scientific consensus is significantly different than media opinion. Second, there is no "debate" regarding efficacy of masks and limiting exposure via quarantining. Masking reduces the likelihood of contracting SARS from others, and staying home reduces the spread to others and strain on hospitals. Unsurprisingly, the people attempting to debate this typically had no medical background whatsoever. Millions died in…

Oppositions to lockdowns were never about whether they would reduce deaths or not in the short term. Anyone with a brain could understand that if people weren't in a position to breath on each other, the virus wouldnt spread as quickly. Oppositions to lockdowns were always about tradeoffs and whether they were worth it. Its just such a boring critique. My main question still remains, what would your plan have been if…

> The only thing lockdowns do is push cases into the future.

Even without vaccination, mortality from covid is significantly lower than it was early in the pandemic.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#680

Post by bruce511 »

cirgue wrote: post #581
bruce511 wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 100% does matter. It demonstrates that some kinds of virus research pose an existential threat to humanity if not handled properly. That seems relevant, especially when simultaneously Covid demonstrated that such research is also really important to do . Like the origin actually does pose some serious, non-trivial ethical questions about disease research that the public absolutely has a right and obligatio…

>> some kinds of virus research pose an existential threat to humanity if not handled properly.

I mean, I'm not trying to be a dick, but ... duh. This has been the primary plot point of a zillion movies for forever.

Oh, and accidents at labs happen more often than you'd like[1]. And the frequency seems to be going up, not down. >> the public absolutely has a right and obligation to participate in.

I'm sure the "public" (by which I assume you mean random people on social media) are not qualified in the slightest to participate in this discussion. If you feel that you have an "obligation" to weigh in, then by all means feel free. No-one is stopping you. It's completely possible to have discussions on lab safety without having to point fingers at a specific incident.

As you point out there's a really strong tension at play here - it's very important to be able to do virus research. Working with viruses is dangerous. It can be made as safe as possible, but it's still dangerous. There is a very fine line here, which is best walked by people highly qualified and working in this space. Given they are the most likely first victims of any accident, I'm sure they are highly motivated to be safe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

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