Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid • Hacker News Board

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#781

Post by tmaly » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 5:20 PM UTC

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…

> But the Wuhan institute withheld information about the mine deaths from EcoHealth and the US government.

This reads more like CYA piece

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#782

Post by zolland » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 5:21 PM UTC

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.

This is maybe more interesting.

Anti-Asian 2019: 0.2%

Anti-Asian 2020: 10%

Anti-Asian 2021: 25%

EDIT: Regarding an uptick in anti-jewish etc.

Anti-Jewish 2019: 57%

Anti-Jewish 2020: 43%

Anti-Jewish 2021: 37%

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#783

Post by cygx » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

anthonypasq wrote: post #759

Mechanical9 wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pushing cases into the future was always the stated goal of lockdowns. That was what "flatten the curve" meant. The idea was to accept some temporary consequences in order to prevent deaths until vaccines could be made. I also don't think it was any stroke of luck that resulted in vaccines being made quickly. Our scientific establishments correctly devoted their resources to developing vaccines. A lot of us were clos…

When "flatten the curve" came out as a slogan they told us 2 weeks. Absolutely no one in public health believed that would be true. It doesnt make sense on any level whatsoever. i mean it just beggars belief that they told the public that with a straight face. the only person i recall in early days of 2020 saying this was going to be many months if not years was Mike Osterholm which i respect for not gaslighting the…

and i still havent been given an explanation why

I'm just guessing, but an obvious reason would be because the vaccines were not as effective against the new variants? As in, while the vaccines still protected the vaccinated person, they did not effectively prevent spread of the disease, so other ways to do so remained relevant...

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#784

Post by th0ma5 » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

denton-scratch wrote: post #275

th0ma5 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The NYT is a reputable organ, known for checking it's sources. Unlike Wikipedia, newspapers don't generally cite their sources; but if a reliable source states something like that as fact, they've probably checked. You're right: they haven't said they can prove it. [Of course, it could be propaganda, government or otherwise; or it could be a damned lie concocted by the reporter or editor. They've said they have sourc…

What does the NYT have to do with this?

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#785

Post by tripletao » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

pcrh wrote: post #559

tripletao wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You should also know that SARSCoV2 1) is not a chimeric virus, There is no basis for this claim. Genomic evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a chimera of any two previously-known viruses. No possible genomic evidence could exclude a chimera of two previously-unknown viruses, and the WIV was the world's leading collector of such novel sarbecoviruses from nature. They proposed to make chimeras of them in DEFUSE. Th…

We know SARSCoV2 is not a chimeric virus because similar viruses have been identified from other locations, and the pattern-matching (sequence alignment) shows that SARSCoV2 does not have any insertions or deletions that have a different evolutionary origin compared to its close relatives.

That doesn't make any sense. I'm assuming by "chimera" that you mean, for example, the spike from natural virus A on the backbone of natural virus B. The WIV could have taken the spike from a virus similar to BANAL-20-52, the backbone from a different, unpublished virus that they'd sampled from nature, and a human-designed FCS. This is basically what they proposed in DEFUSE (in collaboration with Baric at UNC), and what this Times article is now saying they did internally after DEFUSE got rejected.

Of course such a virus could also have evolved naturally by a similar path; lots of sarbecoviruses are just a single mutation away from that FCS, and perhaps there's some yet-unknown natural animal host where that gets selected for. The point is that no genomic evidence can distinguish between these two cases, though.

For emphasis, it seems like you're assuming that we know all the natural viruses that the WIV was working with. Sampling of novel coronaviruses from nature was a core part of the WIV's research, so that's not a reasonable assumption. RaTG13 was sampled in 2013, but not fully published until 2020. At least one novel coronavirus was identified in contamination of rice samples sequenced on the same equipment that the WIV used:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2

That's a merbecovirus, so it couldn't possibly have any relationship to SARS-CoV-2; but if they had one unpublished novel virus, then it's hard to reject the possibility that they had more.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#786

Post by spookthesunset » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 5:24 PM UTC

lock-the-spock wrote: post #565

nonethewiser wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need the same for the complete 180 on lockdowns. From universally against to forced lockdowns. I think people forget how strong the consensus (including medical) against lockdowns was. I was in China during the outbreak. All western media and healthcare experts had to say about lockdowns was that they were counterproductive and have never been part of the medical playbook. And that it violates civil rights. A mont…

There was never a consensus for or against lockdowns. Cant speak for the US and it's utterly broken media landscape but in Europe experts were asking for this from day one. It is also a known tool of any epidemic/pandemic management, it just has rarely been necessary at such scale given the intensity and wide distribution of COVID.

> It is also a known tool of any epidemic/pandemic management, it just has rarely been necessary at such scale given the intensity and wide distribution of COVID.

That must be why all the pandemic planning guides from various national health agencies specifically said do not do lockdowns, do no close schools and don't force masks...

It was never a "known tool" to anybody. It was an insane, unproven pharmaceutical intervention that somehow, suddenly, became something "we always knew about".

What we did for covid was absolutely insane.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#787

Post by godelski » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 5:27 PM UTC

oilchange wrote: post #669

jcranmer wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But most major countries are working on biological weapons. If you think the US, Russia, China, UK, France, Germany, Japan, Israel, etc aren't running bio-weapons labs, then you are being too trusting at best or too naive at worst. Or maybe I'm just being too cynical. https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch... covers this in some detail (it's geared towards chemical weapons, but biological weap…

> For major militaries, there's no point in using them, which is why the "big" military powers have all signed up to the anti-chemical weapons and anti-biological weapons treaties If chemical and biological weapons aren't useful, why does one need a treaty to ban them? Makes one wonder? Is there are treaty to ban feathers as weapons? The fact that there is an anti-biological weapons treaty is proof enough that countr…

> If chemical and biological weapons aren't useful, why does one need a treaty to ban them?

Serious question, are you surprised governments do things that aren't useful? That they'll focus more on signaling than utility? That's literally 80% of politics: show.

> The fact that there is an anti-biological weapons treaty is proof enough that countries are working on biological weapons, just like the anti-nuclear weapons treaty is proof that countries are working on nukes.

Now that we got the above out of the way, maybe notice that China, Russia, and the US have all signed the Biological Weapons Convention[0] (outlaw bio weapons). All signed during the cold war. Then maybe notice that China, Russia, and the US have NOT signed the ban on the use of nuclear weapons[1].

> The ability to think is a far greater tool than reading silly blogs

I agree. I mean just the dichotomy of [0] and [1] really tells a lot. You make a good point that governments are difficult to discuss because you can't take anything they do at face value so you have to dig in and think about their actions and what signals they are making.

[0] https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/bwcsig

[1] https://treaties.unoda.org/t/tpnw

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#788

Post by spookthesunset » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 5:27 PM UTC

boston_clone wrote: post #612

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…

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…

> Unsurprisingly, the people attempting to debate this typically had no medical background whatsoever.

You don't need to have a "medical background" to debate lockdowns or masks. The decision to use those should never have been made exclusively by people with "medical backgrounds". It isn't their job. Just because the "medical people" say it's gonna work, doesn't mean it is worth the cost to society. And it isn't at all the place of people with "medical backgrounds" to figure out what those costs are and if they are worth it...

"Experts" shouldn't be decision-makers. They should only inform decision-makers. A good decision-maker should take input from everybody who will be impacted. This was never done at all. Had it been done openenly and transparently we'd never have done lockdowns, school closures or anything else. Such things are completely insane no matter how much "medical experts" suggest to use them.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#789

Post by boston_clone » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 5:29 PM UTC

Izkata wrote: post #704

boston_clone wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't try and have other people do your research for easily answered questions. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3559034/

The article is conflating quarantines with lockdowns. They're not the same thing. Quarantines are more like the much-derided Great Barrington Declaration.

TFA is generalizing that type of response to various outbreaks, and notes the differences.

A related comment of mine has a link with examples for the last several hundred years.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#790

Post by spookthesunset » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 5:31 PM UTC

Mechanical9 wrote: post #689

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…

Pushing cases into the future was always the stated goal of lockdowns. That was what "flatten the curve" meant. The idea was to accept some temporary consequences in order to prevent deaths until vaccines could be made. I also don't think it was any stroke of luck that resulted in vaccines being made quickly. Our scientific establishments correctly devoted their resources to developing vaccines. A lot of us were clos…

> Pushing cases into the future was always the stated goal of lockdowns. That was what "flatten the curve" meant. The idea was to accept some temporary consequences in order to prevent deaths until vaccines could be made.

The idea we needed to "flatten the curve until a vaccine" was obsolete the day many states closed their completely unused field hospitals. That should have been the indicator that covid wasn't nearly as bad as predicted. That was the day everything should have gone back to complete normal.

These lockdown "experts" never had an end game. They kept pushing the goal posts further and further until they completely lost the plot. That was one of my first objections to such mitigations. There was zero success criteria. Fuckers were just winging it. Which might be okay for some minimally invasive crap like enhanced handwashing protocols but it is absolutely bat-shit insane for something as impacting as lockdowns.

What we did was insane. I still have no idea how people look back, given all the data, and say "yup, what we did made sense". None of it make a single ounce of sense at all...