Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

thetimes.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

761–770 of 1001 posts

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#761

Post by anthonypasq »

boston_clone wrote: post #726
anthonypasq wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Oppositions to lockdowns were always about tradeoffs and whether they were worth it. Its just such a boring critique. Fully agreed; saving lives / community responsibility is the noble choice. Unfortunately, many folks in states with poor education (e.g., Texas), would make remarks questioning the actual existence of the virus - even after Trump contracted it and was treated at Walter Reed. But, work on a vaccine b…

yes "started." there was literally no guarantee we would even have a vaccine at all. There was absolutely no historical precedent for development and deployment of a vaccine with a year of virus discovery. it was incredible achievement and government official literally bet the entire world economy on it for some reason i still cant understand.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#762

Post by revelio »

sampo wrote: post #742
revelio wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is revisionism. The only place in Europe that didn't lock down was Sweden and they were viciously attacked in the media for it, additionally Anders Tegnall was also attacked by other epidemiologists. I followed it all very closely at the time. Tegnall and his mentor stood alone. With the exception of the Great Barrington crew and maybe Ioannidis, all the other so-called experts were loudly and vocally demanding…

> all the other so-called experts were loudly and vocally demanding lockdowns as a strategy This is not true. Denmark, Finland, Netherlands and UK [1] had their own versions of "Tegnell". That is, epidemiologists who recommended the let-it-rip, "herd immunity" strategy. In these countries, politicians finally decided to follow the majority consensus among countries, and ignore those epidemiologists who were among the…

Vallance is in no way comparable to Tegnell. Valance and the other UK/SAGE "experts" were quite happy to invert their advice overnight on the basis of nothing. Like all the others they were making decisions based on politics and ideology, not a mature of understanding of science. Tegnell picked one position and stuck with it because there was no reason to change it, in that he was virtually alone.

> Maybe because it was somewhat fringe, definitely non-consensus, and would kill millions?

It's amazing how many people still never got the memo that lockdowns and masks had no effect whatsoever. This isn't even up for debate anymore, the data is openly available and has been analyzed to death. These interventions simply did not work, and it was known from the start that they wouldn't work. Heck the idea they wouldn't work was the consensus right before 2020, which is why a "consensus" of these idiots is worth less than the electrons used to transmit it.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#763

Post by Manjuuu »

realjhol wrote: post #756
Manjuuu wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The NHS now has chronic shortage of nurses. Why? Because it's not an attractive profession nowadays. Not for the few hundreds of deniers that were fired. > You're rather proving my point. So many people are just not ready to have a rational conversation about these narratives. It's all just tribalism and dogma, and we will have to wait years for people like you to calm down to the point where you are able to have r…

So did you watch the montage? If so, please admit that you were wrong when you made this comment: > 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. My montage showed you (if you had watched it), many talking heads and officials at the time accusin…

Nope, I don't plan to watch anything, feel free to indulge in your beliefs.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#764

Post by rtkwe »

lordfrito wrote: post #730
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 find it deeply disturbing that excuses as flimsy as "hate" or "possible hate crime reaction" would be used as justification to suppress the truth, especially with a situation as grave as COVID-19. Who is to say whether the uptick with Asians is causation and not just correlation? Meanwhile, thousands of Americans were dying daily during the peak of the pandemic. Everyone was scared, needed to know what was going on…

It wasn't just the lab leak theory going around though, it was extremely tightly coupled with the "COVID bioweapon" conspiracy which really tainted it especially in the early days when there really wasn't much more info available other than it was first detected as a big outbreak in the same city as the coronavirus lab. In an ideal situation they'd be separable but they were so closely deployed trying to address the bioweapon conspiracy caught a lot of less out there discussion of the lab leak.

Also important though is it never really went away. For all the talk of censorship and suppression the possibility of a lab leak never left the investigation. It's also a very difficult thing to investigate without access to the labs to see what strains they were working on looked like which we still don't have afaik. It's been a process of eliminating other possiblities to some extent as other vectors that could be looked into were and turned out to be less likely.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#765

Post by Manjuuu »

anthonypasq wrote: post #758
Manjuuu wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as having a 95% effectiveness against transmission for the original strain. 95% reduction of serious illness. The objective of the mass vaccination was having as much people as possible survive the pandemic. Herd immunity was just noise. There were a lot of noise and nonsense. > Cloth masks are objectively useless for personal protection. Proper masks are effective as measured multiple times, tons of statistics on…

[flagged]

Actually I was not sure which kind of masks you meant so I pointed out that real masks worked, but yes, obviously cotton/silk/lines/whatever masks without any kind of filter are useless.

Don't post random "he said this, he said that" links please, there has been 0 doubt in my mind that since the release of the vaccines the only effect they had was to reduce the probability of serious illness, as repeated multiple times above.

> or are just gaslighting me as covidians have a tendency to do.

What? Cmon.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#766

Post by stormfather »

shlant wrote: post #659
stormfather wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the “lab leak” theory tends to be people pushing an unsubstantiated theory to either For me it's just common sense. It probably came from the coronavirus lab with a bad safety record it popped up next to. Duh. And I "push" it because I value the truth and want to live in a rational society where the truth isn't gamed for emotional or political reasons. And that's probably the same for most of us.

> For me it's just common sense > Duh This is the kind of argument one makes when they don't have an argument

It's so obvious that an appeal to common sense is all that's necessary. How many markets do you think are in China? 100,000? 1,000,000? And how many of those are within driving distance of the one lab where:

- They study novel coronaviruses - They sampled the same regions where the closest relatives to the virus were found - They applied to put a furin cleavage site in a coronavirus before the pandemic - They were cited in diplomatic cables for poor safety standards - The database containing records of the viral sequences was taken down right before the pandemic - A scientist working at the lab at the time of the origin disappeared - A scientist who patented a coronavirus vaccine a few months into the pandemic "jumped off the roof"?

Does a lab accident not immediately jump out as the obvious leading possibility to you?

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#767

Post by Manjuuu »

Izkata wrote: post #760
anthonypasq wrote: post #758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

And here's some links from a few months earlier showing we knew it was never tested for preventing infection/transmission: https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/02/covid-19-vaccines... https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronav... https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2020/12/covid-... Here's Pfizer's press release: https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta... Notice how…

A lot of people were extremely confused during the pandemic and that's why they couldn't differentiate between actual verifiable information being shared and some random newscaster saying, wrongly, that vaccines prevented infection. A few years later they don't even know what is true anymore.

> The 95% they're claiming came straight from the press release which was only about sickness, not infection.

Yep, I repeated this so many times that toward the end I started just insulting people for not knowing.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#768

Post by pfannkuchen »

stef25 wrote: post #487
throwaway485 wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're too far removed from the time and place to accurately determine what happened. Even if we had first-hand witnesses or documentation, the disinformation 'aura' around the whole thing makes it impossible to get the honest truth out. There's no chain of custody for evidence that you, yourself would trust. That's what I mean that at this point it doesn't matter what the reality was, the damage is still compounding…

> 1 of my aunts - an RN - is getting reinstated after 2 years because she was fired for telling people "the jab will kill you". This was after she tried to convince my other aunt - another RN - that she should not get the vaccine while being in a risk category It's crazy how many nurses don't trust science and news reports. Here in Belgium it was a big problem too. So many of them seem to be very cynical about and ha…

They do get to see how the sausage is made. Are you sure that the reality around patient drug experiences is so positive? Is it more likely that such nurses are completely delusional, or that they have information or experience that you or I don’t? Keep in mind that everyone in medicine has a financial and career incentive which points towards aligning with and advocating for the system they are so invested in, so there would be a tendency for this point of view to be under expressed, if anything.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#769

Post by stormfather »

oneshtein wrote: post #685
stormfather wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the “lab leak” theory tends to be people pushing an unsubstantiated theory to either For me it's just common sense. It probably came from the coronavirus lab with a bad safety record it popped up next to. Duh. And I "push" it because I value the truth and want to live in a rational society where the truth isn't gamed for emotional or political reasons. And that's probably the same for most of us.

There is significant delay between lab leak in mid-September-mid-October 2019 and start of epidemic in December in Wuhan. Can such contagious virus as SARS-CoV-2 cross the distance between lab in Wuhan and wet market in Wuhan in few days? Of course. In few months? No way.

Not all the early cases could be traced back to the wet market, so there is no reason to suspect it started there if you don't already suspect a zoonotic spillover origin. And exponential curves ramp up slowly at first.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#770

Post by cygx »

shri_krishna wrote: post #751
fumar wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No it is not normal. Even post 9/11 no conversation was censored in US media No true. 9/11 was a nearly perfect military industrial play and no one could publicly question the US actions post the event. It felt like a lockstep war machine with vengeance at an all time high. You must’ve not lived through it.

Was born in late 80s. Lived through all of the major events post that. And no you could publicly question everything back then. There were no calls for cancellations or boycotts just because you believed in controversy theories. Look up 9/11 Truthers movement and "Bush Did It!" to get an idea of the conspiracy theories that emerged right after 9/11. The "Bush Did It!" rallies took place in September 2002, just 1 year…

> And no you could publicly question everything back then.

You're remembering things through rose-colored glasses. Ellen DeGeneres and Laura Dern, Bill Maher and the Dixie Chicks can tell stories of what happened in the 90s and 2000s when you went against the mainstream. In fact, people were cancelled over the silliest things (remember nipplegate?). Government censorship was also alive and well: Under the Bush junior administration, NASA and EPA scientists were not allowed to use the phrase 'global warming'.

Post reply on HN