WHO scientists: NYT misquoted us to fit a prescribed narrative

There was (and is), but you're not going to find many that agree on here. (Even in the comment section of a supporting data point.)

People who dislike Trump (the majority of HN readers) are strongly biased to react negatively at the very mention of his name.

Ironically, a not-insignificant contributing reason for this is... corrupt and biased news media.

I'll patiently await my tribal downvotes, now...

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More and more "news" is just meant to fit an agenda. Trump just called it out and gave it a term.

“Chinese officials urged the W.H.O. team to embrace the government’s narrative about the source of the virus, including the unproven notion that it might have spread to China from abroad, according to several members of the team. The W.H.O. scientists responded that they would refrain from making judgments without data.”

‘“It was my take on the entire mission that it was highly geopolitical,” Dr. Fischer said. ‘

“lack of detailed patient records both from early confirmed cases, and possible ones before that.”

‘“We asked for that on a number of occasions and they gave us some of that, but not necessarily enough to do the sorts of analyses you would do,” said Dominic Dwyer, an Australian microbiologist on the W.H.O. team, referring to the confirmed cases.’

‘In the end, the W.H.O. experts sought compromise, praising the Chinese government’s transparency, but pushing for more research about the early days of the outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019.’

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/world/asia/china-world-he...

After following this for over a year, witnessing China manipulating or withholding information, reading the article in question, and reading all of the associated tweets, it is clear every team involved has inherent biases.

The WHO investigation team is just as much political as it is scientific. The team needs to seem cooperative in order to get more information, which they desperately need. The team said they would not come to any outcomes without all of the data first yet they did exactly that by saying, the virus likely came from food that was imported and it is not likely that it came from the lab. China is clearly still trying to cover up. The US is still trying to investigate any possible origin story, but don’t seem particularly keen on a lab origin story. It’s mostly far right Republicans like Tom Cotton who originally proposed and perpetuated the lab origin theory in the first place, not exactly New York Times’ bread and butter butter customers.

NYT does not have a prescribed narrative of a lab origin story. WHO scientist have a very strong interest in continuing to gather information from China through cooperative means. So I’m not surprised they would throw shade on a New York Times article saying that they were greeted with lots of hesitation from China. The only part of this I don’t understand is why there is a the Hacker News post with links to scientist’s tweet that all but confirms the bias and intent already illustrated by said NYT story.

TLDR: WHO scientist are not happy to see themselves being quoted as having difficulty working with the Chinese, as they need to continue working with the Chinese. They would probably like the New York Times story redacted, so they are claiming to have been misquoted... nothing to see here folks, moving along

I would guess it is this one: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-journalistic-tattletale...

It basically describe the now pretty common practice of trawling social media sites and forums for something which can be made into news, conducted by very large news papers like NYT.

In my view its a kind of low effort data mining when there is news droughts. Nothing to report? Then go and look up the all the employed truck drivers in the nation and see if you can find one that does not have a driver license (it most likely exist one or two). It does not ask if the portion of truck drivers that have lost their license is higher than the overall population, or provide any insight into the profession, but rather just want to attract reader attention by highlighting something which look controversial.