101–110 of 255 posts
edit Changed "character" to "structure" because my intent is being misunderstood. This is ultimately about human psychology (as in homo sapiens), not particular nations or peoples. Each of us could very well have but for chance been placed in any of these boats, and our behavior would change to match because we're not morally special. There are a number of things at play here that stoke up distrust, mainly due to Chi…
The accidental lab leak theory proven would actually be great news, as the alternative is that civilization has reached the threshold where we have a hyper connected population in contact with so many natural disease reservoirs that pandemics are emerging spontaneously. If it’s a lab leak we change pathogen containment practices, otherwise we curtain our freedom of movement and association
Are you claiming that Covid is particularly severe relative to historical pandemics, or that Covid-level issues are a particularly modern phenomenon? In fact the opposite is true. If it had emerged in any other century, Covid would barely even be on anyone’s radar.
Surely you can't be serious. I mean, I think we would have noticed. In fact, it would have been on a lot of people's radar. They definitely would have noticed in India, Italy & Brazil.
I mean, are comments like this hyperbolic, and I'm just not in on the joke?
> It spawned racist rumors like “Chinese labs sell their dead experimental animals in food markets.” First, I don't see how is this racist. Second, this is not rumor, there are Chinese articles about how some lab members were punished. The author lost credibility here.
Suggesting that because it has happened before in China, "Chinese labs" do it, is indeed racist.
So I generally give like zero weight to conspiracy theories. That being said, I don't believe anyone can reasonably claim with any degree certainty that Covid was a lab-leak BUT the WHO investigation simply hasn't done their due diligence to a sufficient degree to eliminate this theory. Unfortunately the WHO's credibility is trained here. In the early days of the pandemic the WHO bent over backwards not to upset Chin…
You know it was once a conspiracy theory to say the Earth wasn't flat. And it was once considered blasphemy to say putting leeches on your body didn't help an illness.
There's a reason why the term "conspiracy theory" is thrown around by the media so much...it's because they know a certain subset of people have been socially conditioned to bypass critical thinking if the term has any association with the underlying topic.
How is questioning and discussing things worse than blindly believing what you're told? Even when what you're told has no backing by science or logic when compared to the associated "conspiracy theory"? (for example, covid began by someone eating a bat-burger vs. the "conspiracy theory" that the Wuhan lab, with public documents showing funding signed off by Fauci, was experimenting with super-viruses, and one of the workers in close proximity caught the virus.) I'll never understand this.
McNeil Jr also references this letter from epidemiologists and biologists in Science [1] calling for a new investigation. [1]: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1
Reason magazine wrote about this letter and circumstantial evidence that has been piling up in support of exploring the lab leak hypothesis further: https://reason.com/2021/05/12/did-covid-19-leak-from-a-wuhan...
Was this shown to be false?
Working out the initial cause of this Covid outbreak is far far far less important/actionable than working out what we should do differently when (not if) another virus starts spreading. This concept should be familiar to those in tech already: https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/
I disagree. If it was indeed gain of function research in China that caused covid we should immediately stop doing that sort of research and ban it. There’s a reason it’s been controversial and many virologists have jobs on the line when it comes to its origins
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that virus was genomically identical to another virus in the 1950s. These thing's aren't being made in labs, they're being stored there but the actual reality is this: none of the countries being so interested in this have any ability to influence the country's these things happen in. So your effective response protocol may as well just blackbox the problem: "there is a new novel virus, how do we respond?" No…
Exactly. This is what I meant by "not actionable".
So I generally give like zero weight to conspiracy theories. That being said, I don't believe anyone can reasonably claim with any degree certainty that Covid was a lab-leak BUT the WHO investigation simply hasn't done their due diligence to a sufficient degree to eliminate this theory. Unfortunately the WHO's credibility is trained here. In the early days of the pandemic the WHO bent over backwards not to upset Chin…
Early last year (2020), whole Chinese internet social media was looking for "黄燕玲" - a missing researcher in Wuhan lab. She disappeared around Oct/Nov 2019. Chinese social media suspected she was patient-0. The messages showed up multiple times in my wechat feeds for couple days. They all got taken down a few days later.
Government officials still claimed she was alive but was not able to produce any proof.
If WHO really want to investigate, they just need ask :
If "黄燕玲" worked for Wuhan lab? Where is she now? Where is her families, friends, co-workers? Can we talk to any of them?