China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest • Hacker News Board

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#141

Post by yutyut » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 11:01 PM UTC

Medicalidiot wrote: post #123

Razengan wrote: post #90

Tinfoil hat: I'm not keeping active track, but I passively perceived a sheer drop in mentions of the fact that Wuhan has China's first "biosafety level 4" laboratory, coinciding with an increased lambasting of the US's handling of their infections in the general media (" The Wuhan virus is now the American virus "), along with a streak of random US-critical posts (" What is the worst thing the US government has done?…

I'm annoyed with the connection between SARS-CoV-2 and bioweapon. This is such a garbage bioweapon for two reasons: This doesn't kill military aged men and it cannot be readily shut off. American scientists have nailed down when the cross over event occurred and how it happened. The world's top virologists also have said multiple times that this is not a bioweapon, people who have studied viruses for decades. But peo…

To play devil's advocate here: something doesn't need to kill to be an effective Bioweapon.

"The line between disorder and order lies in logistics." -Sun Tzu

COVID has been a logistical nightmare. For everyone.

For the record, no--I don't believe anybody 'engineered' it [or has used it]* as a bioweapon.

*Edit for clarity

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#142

Post by nikofeyn » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 11:02 PM UTC

Razengan wrote: post #90

Tinfoil hat: I'm not keeping active track, but I passively perceived a sheer drop in mentions of the fact that Wuhan has China's first "biosafety level 4" laboratory, coinciding with an increased lambasting of the US's handling of their infections in the general media (" The Wuhan virus is now the American virus "), along with a streak of random US-critical posts (" What is the worst thing the US government has done?…

that's a tinfoil hat indeed. you have no evidence of anything, so you're spreading baseless rumors just like others. i find it unacceptable on a site that supposedly has rules against these things. nothing you've said can be verified or unverified, and your link is to wikipedia, edited by who knows who.

take a step back and notice the level of anti-chinese posts and comments on hacker news and wonder if you yourself are being fed propaganda.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#143

Post by knzhou » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 11:02 PM UTC

taiwanboy wrote: post #111

Razengan wrote: post #90

Tinfoil hat: I'm not keeping active track, but I passively perceived a sheer drop in mentions of the fact that Wuhan has China's first "biosafety level 4" laboratory, coinciding with an increased lambasting of the US's handling of their infections in the general media (" The Wuhan virus is now the American virus "), along with a streak of random US-critical posts (" What is the worst thing the US government has done?…

On 1/22, Xi jinping and CCP blocked internal transportation such as railways, subways, ferries, trains and domestic flights in and out of Wuhan. But still let international flights in and out of Wuhan. If the coronavirus wasn’t weaponized with that intent I don’t know what is.

Those international flights were allowed to let countries evacuate their own citizens out. If they were banned, you would be making the exact same complaint but reversed: "China held other countries' citizens hostage in Wuhan." Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#144

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 11:03 PM UTC

markdown wrote: post #131

riyadparvez wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If animals to human transmission can happen in a wildlife market, then it can also happen unintentionally in a virology lab researching very same family of virus. In the absence of substantial evidence, both theories are equally plausible to me.

And you think your opinion on this should be regarded as equal to that of a study published in Nature?

[deleted]

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#145

Post by legolas2412 » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 11:03 PM UTC

andromeduck wrote: post #25

dchyrdvh wrote: post #18

My favorite theory is that the Wuhan virus lab created the virus and used bats in experiments. One bat escaped and infected other bats that eventually ended up on the wet market in Wuhan. Edit: a more plausible theory is that one researcher got bitten by an infected bat and chose to hide this fact.

My understanding is that nobody has found signs of that in the sequenced genome. By all accounts the jump to humans appears to have been natrual.

> By all accounts the jump to humans appears to have been natrual.

Is it natural if you put a bat coronavirus and a pangolin coronavirus in a petri dish? Because the receptor proteins are similar to a pangolin coronavirus based on the above study.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#146

Post by knzhou » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 11:05 PM UTC

rumanator wrote: post #107

ueudrjjj wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the researchers at that lab was also effectively dissapeared. I don't believe the conspiracy crowd saying this was some kind of weapon, but there's reasonable evidence to suggest that this is a case of embarrassing government incompetence (which the CCP loaths) followed by attempts to cover up said incompetence while a solution was persued.

> One of the researchers at that lab was also effectively dissapeared. Source?

There are no sources. I've personally looked into tens of claims about people being "disappeared" in China over the past few years, and literally every time the only evidence has been "they haven't tweeted for 12 hours". The person reappears soon after, but by that point the lie's damage is done, and nobody ever hears the correction.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#147

Post by MrBuddyCasino » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 11:05 PM UTC

gerdesj wrote: post #16

I don't buy the escaped/released from a lab theories espoused here and on Facebook and the like. Apparently the mutations within the SARS-COV-2 found in humans compared to the bat virus are purely random and hence the thing is not or very unlikely genetically engineered. My source is a recent New Scientist article. So the bloody thing is simply a virus that affects all people, everywhere, without fear or favour. Simp…

> I don't buy the escaped/released from a lab theories espoused here and on Facebook and the like. Apparently the mutations within the SARS-COV-2 found in humans compared to the bat virus are purely random and hence the thing is not or very unlikely genetically engineered.

Only the conspiracy theorists claim it was an "engineered bio-weapon". The most likely explanation is that it just escaped involuntarily from the lab. Why from the lab, and not the wet market?

- that lab was specifically researching coronavirii in bats

- there are reports researchers there got splashed with blood and fecies of bats [0]

- the researcher in question (Huang Yan Lin), the likely patient zero, disappeared without a trace, both physically and online [0]

- the horseshoe bats that most likely hosted the virus weren't even sold on the wuhan wet market, according to several eye witnesses

- there are no known horseshoe bat colonies in a 900km diameter around wuhan

- the lab is just 280 meters away from the wet market, so the market was a very convenient scape goat

And why was COVID-19 not engineered? Simple, it is not necessary to explain the pandemic potential. All of this is not new and there were warnings about exactly this happening:

- it was long known that horseshoe bats were a dangerous reservoir of SARS-CoV like virii [1]

- there were US simulations held on how to respond to a respiratory virus with chinese origin in 2019 [2]

- there were WHO warnings on how respiratory RNA virii are prime candidates for the next pandemic [3]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU (starts at ~3:00) [1] https://twitter.com/_benoux_/status/1245381552672059392?s=20 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimson_Contagion [3] https://twitter.com/bmiloy/status/1238541860542377984/photo/...

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#148

Post by roenxi » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 11:05 PM UTC

dlubarov wrote: post #130

roenxi wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can apply the same logic to a specific license plate number seen near a murder meaning that the car's owner was almost surely the murderer. That isn't a high enough standard of evidence as any specific event is unlikely in hindsight. A pandemic was likely to start somewhere densely populated and first be detected in a city centre. Somewhere densely populated was likely to have a specialised biological research la…

In the murder scenario, we would have something like P(individual is guilty) = 1 / 7 billion P(individual's car on same block | individual is guilty) = 1 P(individual's car on same block | individual is innocent) = 50 / 7 billion P(individual is guilty | individual's car on same block) = 1 / 50 (from Bayes' rule) You might disagree with the priors, but I'm pretty sure the argument is sound.

The soundness of the argument isn't the issue. The problem is the world model where P(Virus starts in Wuhan) = 1.

That probability is only 1 in hindsight, where the probability of everything is 1 because it has already happened. In foresight the probability was not 1. And whatever city the virus started in was going to have a BSL-2+ facility studying infectious diseases. I'm probably sitting within 2-4km of a BSL-3 facility studying infectious diseases as I type this, because I am in a city.

The fast that WIV is BSL-4 is significant, but it isn't going to get you to 97%. Even 75% is high. Particularly if WIV is located where it is because there are good local sources of coronaviruses to study.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#149

Post by FpUser » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 11:05 PM UTC

gnusty_gnurc wrote: post #8

In lieu of evidence that the “wet market” story is true, the accidental lab release is pretty compelling. Interesting to see how people react to it though - as though the idea is outlandish that a laboratory working with pathogens from actual bats could mishandle things. Is there even any evidence people ate bats at the wet market?

Let me extrapolate you logic: major UK facility for chemical and biological weapons research in Porton Down was close to a place where novichok poisoning happened. Your conclusion ... ?

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#150

Post by abc-xyz » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 11:05 PM UTC

paulcole wrote: post #108

sergiotapia wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at reddit to see how legions of paid government actors are actively shaping the discussion on mainstream platforms.

I don’t buy this. Why would governments pay people to shitpost on Reddit when so many of us gladly do it for free?

There’s a lot of value in paying/blackmailing the moderators. You can clearly certain subreddits, such as r/worldnews, becoming increasingly pro-China. The mod team played a huge role in this, as they have been perma banning people who post a lot of anti-China comments. I’ve for instance had several accounts banned (one simply for sarcastically saying “Thanks China”) - there were also a thread on r/China where plenty of people mentioned they had been banned for similar reasons.

If you follow r/WatchRedditDie then you can see this anti-China censorship on a daily basis.. for instance, this is on the frontpage right now: https://i.imgur.com/RuHpkC5_d.jpg