Live data from Hacker News

US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

reuters.com

281–290 of 664 posts

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#281
post #17
post #4

Related: China refused to provide WHO team with raw data on early COVID cases, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-ch...

If the CCP is innocent why not prove it to the world by sharing their data? Why hide things?

They dont want data sharing methods being revealed

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#282

What's weird is that a number of WHO investigation team members a week ago said China was very transparent, cooperative and helpful. Some have tweeted against the NYT who spun the WHO team's accounts into anti-China propaganda. https://mobile.twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/13605511085659... https://mobile.twitter.com/TheaKFischer/status/1360590441817...

They would say that, wouldn't they? At every turn they have parroted the CCP line, and never once have they publicly criticised them (as they have with the US and the EU).

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/04/world-h...

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#283

What are we to make of the National Cancer Institute study that found Covid-19 in Italy as early as September 2019? https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...

WHO confirmed it was in China months before its confirmation in December.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#284
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, both the official explanation and the conspiracy theory are both embarrassing for China and the CCP. SARS was supposed to have originated the same way -- in these disgusting third-world wet markets. The CCP shut them down after SARS for the sake of optics, but was too inept to "up" their health standards, and they conceded to pressure and reopened the disgusting third-world wet markets again. If this was some…

In the lab scenario their lax standards wiped out 2 million people and they covered it up. In the wet market scenario, it mostly reflects on the local inhabitants doing the usual black market stuff most local inhabitants of most countries do, and the CCP can only do so much to control their people. Plus, lab source has many other possible implications that are concerning, e.g. engineering bioweapons, IP theft, more n…

What faked dataset are you referring to? The bat source was sequenced several years ago after guano harvesters fell sick. And the most likely lab scenario actually involves either gain of function research on that sample or that sample being exposed to animals and / or humans where it recombined to allow human to human transmission.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we / did we even have the tech co be able to build this in a lab? I don't think we do. It MIGHT have been possible but Occam's Razor says it's more plausible it evolved naturally and just jumped species. FAR FAR FAR more plausible.

There was a great article in New York Magazine covering the background here and the possibilities. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca... It turns out we've been doing "serial passage" research for some time, which is where we leverage natural selection to do our genetic engineering for us, rather than manually editing genes. This is how we engineer viruses to jump species - on purpose. > The…

Right, and combine this with a history of lab leaks both in China and the west (which the article outlines) and a lab leak scenario is perfectly plausible. It is however hard to tell whether it was a lab origin because serial passage is also the route the virus would have taken if it naturally evolved outside a lab to infect humans.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#286
post #53

First gen Chinese, grew up in NA. Have contact with relatives "on the ground". My own experience: Don't ever trust the Chinese government on issues that could potentially involve the reputation of the party. Note that I'm not saying don't trust what CCP says, ever (sometimes they actually do good things) - just not on issues that involve anything to do with how the world might perceive them. Which is exactly what thi…

To me, both the official explanation and the conspiracy theory are both embarrassing for China and the CCP. SARS was supposed to have originated the same way -- in these disgusting third-world wet markets. The CCP shut them down after SARS for the sake of optics, but was too inept to "up" their health standards, and they conceded to pressure and reopened the disgusting third-world wet markets again. If this was some…

> in these disgusting third-world wet markets

That's old information. The first cases of the virus had no connection with the wet market, and no connection could later be found other than it was the first major subsequent point of spreading for the virus. So it's much more likely that people spread it at the market, rather than that it came from there.

However, they are indeed disgusting third-world wet markets and the practice of consuming bush meat as well as having live wild animals of all different kinds together in a wet market is an experiment we shouldn't be conducting. The risk to reward ratio is way too high. Remember that HIV likely came from butchering and consuming contaminated chimpanzees in Africa. The world needs to put those kinds of practices behind us, it has cost us far more than it can ever be worth.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#287
post #53

First gen Chinese, grew up in NA. Have contact with relatives "on the ground". My own experience: Don't ever trust the Chinese government on issues that could potentially involve the reputation of the party. Note that I'm not saying don't trust what CCP says, ever (sometimes they actually do good things) - just not on issues that involve anything to do with how the world might perceive them. Which is exactly what thi…

It's crazy that at this point we still keep with this delusion. Of course this is a lab virus. This info is getting old: https://project-evidence.github.io/ https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-origins-genome-analy... Who was really behind this, and the whole history of it, is something surely we won't know for know. "When war is declared, truth is the first casualty"

a lot of this is just really bad, like just off the top of my head 96 percent related genetics is not very much, thats the same similarity between humans and monkeys

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#288
post #284
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the lab scenario their lax standards wiped out 2 million people and they covered it up. In the wet market scenario, it mostly reflects on the local inhabitants doing the usual black market stuff most local inhabitants of most countries do, and the CCP can only do so much to control their people. Plus, lab source has many other possible implications that are concerning, e.g. engineering bioweapons, IP theft, more n…

What faked dataset are you referring to? The bat source was sequenced several years ago after guano harvesters fell sick. And the most likely lab scenario actually involves either gain of function research on that sample or that sample being exposed to animals and / or humans where it recombined to allow human to human transmission.

I'll have to refind the tweet, but a researcher found the read dataset could not be assembled into the bat coronavirus assembly.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#289
post #53

First gen Chinese, grew up in NA. Have contact with relatives "on the ground". My own experience: Don't ever trust the Chinese government on issues that could potentially involve the reputation of the party. Note that I'm not saying don't trust what CCP says, ever (sometimes they actually do good things) - just not on issues that involve anything to do with how the world might perceive them. Which is exactly what thi…

The funny thing in this case is there was no reason for the CCP to cover this up. If they had just responded to the outbreak instead of trying to cover it up initially and been a little more open with the international community they would have been lauded for their handling of the situation.

Authoritarian regimes develop a knee jerk response to anything that might reflect negatively on them, even if it ends up actually harming their long term interests.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#290
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, both the official explanation and the conspiracy theory are both embarrassing for China and the CCP. SARS was supposed to have originated the same way -- in these disgusting third-world wet markets. The CCP shut them down after SARS for the sake of optics, but was too inept to "up" their health standards, and they conceded to pressure and reopened the disgusting third-world wet markets again. If this was some…

In the lab scenario their lax standards wiped out 2 million people and they covered it up. In the wet market scenario, it mostly reflects on the local inhabitants doing the usual black market stuff most local inhabitants of most countries do, and the CCP can only do so much to control their people. Plus, lab source has many other possible implications that are concerning, e.g. engineering bioweapons, IP theft, more n…

My conspiracy theory as to why someone might with good intention trigger the pandemic and then fast track the mRNA vaccine is to pave the way for gene therapy to reverse genetic entropy and reverse aging and consequently eliminate the genetic basis of death, granting us a sort of immortality. Eliminating death for untold numbers of people would justify the death of a few million from a utilitarian perspective. In fact, there is really no limit to the number you can kill in your research if the payoff is immortality for all, which would then give researchers time to bring about the singularity and digitally resurrect those sacrificed along the way. Sounds crazy, but does seem to be how a lot of tech elite think: utilitarianism, anti death, singularity, everything is ultimately a technical problem. It is also the logical conclusion if materialism is true, but tragically misguided if materialism is false. Just like all the other materialism based utopian ideologies of the past couple centuries that have killed hundreds of millions of people.
Post reply on HN