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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

#731

Post by ifyoubuildit »

doom2 wrote: post #677
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...

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'…

Sorry you had to go through that. But I have to ask about this:

> A lot of dog whistling with sentiments like, "I'm criticizing the Chinese government, not the Chinese people." (spoiler alert: it was both)

Did you have some extra context there? Or do you just assume that anyone criticizing the ccp is also criticizing chinese people? Because I feel like that's a reasonable stance towards any nation.

It seems like sometimes people aggressively read between the lines (probably because of real past experiences with shitty people), and it makes it so that reasonable people now can't express reasonable ideas and have other people understand what they're actually saying.

I especially notice this in online forums where some topics have been discussed in depth by a subset of the population. Through all that discussion, they've basically invented a whole field of study, and turned everyday phrases into jargon with unintuitive subtext.

Then someone new comes along, says something that seems completely innocuous, and the community jumps on them for the subtext that they're not even aware exists.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#732

Post by cookiengineer »

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…

I have a treat for you:

https://the-eye.eu/public/Random/wuhan%20coronavirus/

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#734

Post by Jochim »

shri_krishna wrote: post #490
misja111 wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem was that the epidemic started in the middle of the US election campaign. At some point the Trump team started to support the lab leak theory. And then it became political; Biden supporters started framing them as conspiracy theorists, anybody who dared to support the leak theory was labeled as a Trump supporter etc. In China some people must have been amazed how the US was arranging such a thorough cover-…

> The problem was that the epidemic started in the middle of the US election campaign. At some point the Trump team started to support the lab leak theory. And then it became political; Biden supporters started framing them as conspiracy theorists, anybody who dared to support the leak theory was labeled as a Trump supporter etc. You hit the nail on the head. > In China some people must have been amazed how the US wa…

> He was warning how CCP was arresting scientists who put out information about the virus and even sharing videos of doctors who had recorded themselves warning about the virus itself (one of the first few who treated patients of the virus and fell sick themselves). I can't, for the life of me, find that channel on Youtube anymore. But yeah there was, and still is, a lot of censorship aided and abetted by Big Tech.

The death of the doctor was widely reported on throughout the pandemic[0][1][2].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/06/whistleblower-...

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-55963896

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#735

Post by cassepipe »

shri_krishna wrote: post #540
cassepipe wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Because you can't blame dear grandpa's death on Russia maybe however you try ? And what does it have to do with State censorship of information? The State has no societal relationships (like grandpa/grandma/brother/sister/husband/wife/son/daughter etc) that can pressure it to shutdown flow of information. We are talking about State apparatus censoring information here. With Big Tech actively aiding it. > You're pre…

State is mainly concerned with public order as far as I can tell. What you call "State censorship" I call State asking politely CEOs who are in the same social class as most politicians to stop the spreading of (alledgedly false) rumors. And rumors, howevever false, have often cause a great deal of social unrest. The reason it happens now and it did not happen it 2001... Well had you heard of Youtube in 2001 ? Facebook ? Probably not, I know I didn't. All powers have somewhat regulated information, the US is a society where you can say almost anything except calling people to go and kill ${group). I haven't heard of a lab-leak these proponent having been arrested, nor websites taken down etc... This my friend is state censorship. Now if your concern is that most media is owned by billionaires and private law is law on their platform, well ok, but that's another concern.

> Also people blaming people eating "bat soup" has nothing to do with lab leak theory. Both are totally different issues altogether. I don't see how they are related?

Because the bat soup people where the first one to jump on the lab-leak theory. That did not help the cause. We use network of trust to digest information. I don't have no trust in people saying crazy stuff even though they might sometimes be right.

> Exactly. But having a debate now is mostly useless anyways. Whatever window of opportunity we had to investigate lab leak theory is now long gone. All the actors who wanted to cover their tracks have now had enough time to do so. So even if you are able to prove that lab leak did occur (to some degree) it won't lead to any indictments. And with an authoritarian CCP, good luck getting any leads directly from the labs itself.

I don't agree. It didn't matter more at the time to know if it was a lab-leak or not, situation had to be handled. Now that there's less urgency maybe we can investigate the dark corners and do something about it so it won't happen again. It m atters more than ever.

> Most post COVID conspiracy theories have actually come true. Be it mask mandates, lockdowns, GoF, harmful vaccine side effects or lab leak theories

How are mask mandates and lockdowns conspiracists predictions turned true... ? The real conspiracy was not telling people they should wear masks to protect others because there wasn't enought for everybody. How was lockdown a conspiracy rather that government trying to pretend they were doing something ? I don't think the economy benefited fromt that\

Harmful vaccine side effects ? What about getting covid side-effects ? Listen you would have caught it no matter what and it would probably be worse. The discrepancy between deaths of vaccinated and unvaccinated people should tell you much.

GOF was known before too, it just wasn't in the public eye

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#736

Post by pclmulqdq »

bruce511 wrote: post #686
cheaprentalyeti wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't say which country is "this country" - but from the context I'm assuming China? And sure if it was created in a lab then that opens the door to lots of political questions. But the source of the virus remains less important to the folk that died from it. They're no less dead because it escaped from a lab than if it came from a wet market. Responses in every country were different. Which ones were the right o…

I think OP meant the US. Anthony Fauci was one of the main individuals in the government responsible for sponsoring gain of function research, including funding some of it at the Wuhan institute. It was incredibly odd that a virologist with no public health background (and a very questionable role in past HIV policy) effectively commandeered the CDC's job here, but it makes sense if you think about it as a " cover my ass" move from him.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#737

Post by ifyoubuildit »

pfisherman wrote: post #589
015UUZn8aEvW wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. This right here is an example of why we can’t have reasoned discussion around the topic. You can explain one of the many reasons why gain of function research is necessary: anticipating next year’s version of the flu, designing drugs and vaccines such that resistance…

> You can explain one of the many reasons why gain of function research is necessary: anticipating next year’s version of the flu, designing drugs and vaccines such that resistance mutations reduce evolutionary fitness.

If this research indeed caused the pandemic (and might cause more), do those things make the juice worth the squeeze?

A chance at a better flu vaccine doesn't seem like enough reward for what we all went through.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#738

Post by Manjuuu »

anthonypasq wrote: post #681
Manjuuu wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When there were zero evidences? Yeah, go figure.

there was zero evidence for either scenario, yet only 1 of them got you labeled a conspiracy theorist

Only the one that resembled a textbook conspiracy, the first one had some evidence and is still considered part of where the issue started.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#739

Post by foobiekr »

antonvs wrote: post #393
startupsfail wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can the lab be sued out of existence for damages? It is quite clear that they did amplification research as they’ve planned. And had inserted the furin site into the coronavirus . And they’ve mismanaged the research and they’ve let the virus to spread. This had caused a lot of damage, in particular the deaths, economical damage, long-covid damages, mental illnesses and diminished IQ (covid brain fog). There’ve been s…

> And had inserted the furin site into the coronavirus A claim was made about that, but it’s far from settled. One could argue it has been debunked. See “SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site was not engineered”: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2211107119 > And they’ve mismanaged the research and they’ve let the virus to spread. That’s speculation. Irresponsible speculation, in fact, which has been pushed by people wh…

Engineered is a very careful word choice. None of the properties they call out are things you would not expect from research involving gain of function by evolutionary means.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#740

Post by Izkata »

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…

> Additionally, the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been identified (RaTG13)

A closer relative was found like a year or so later, can't remember the name though.

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