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China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

theguardian.com

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

#291

Post by codekilla »

kds3 wrote: post #279
chillacy wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand the logic to shutting down pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen if you're a party member and your political system is at stake. This type of thing (sadly) happens all around the world. But I don't see what was to be gained. Take in mind there are a not insignificant number of people who believe that the US planned 9/11 and Pearl Harbor as well. It just seems like in all these cases (9/11, Pearl Harbor…

9/11 is not a good example here. It allowed US to pass important PRISM-like PATRIOT acts without much opposition from US citizens, just in time for the rise of the Internet. It also provided a great narrative to start Iraq war and forced them to accept USD for their oil, strengthening the economy. So it clearly was in both government and (some) citizens interest for 9/11 to happen. It's not easy to find any Coronavir…

Don’t forget the anthrax used here either a month after 911.

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

#292

Post by ausjke »

ausjke wrote: post #58
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.

a few weeks ago CCP issued a new law to manage virology labs, and yes historically virus escaped its labs multiple times.

I simply stated a fact which is easily verifiable by checking news from its government, so why the downvotes, I hope it's not that we have CCP watchers here at HN.

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

#293

Post by cma »

dependenttypes wrote: post #154
radicalbyte wrote: post #13

The the American leadership constantly calling it by the region name you can understand why an authoritarian regime would want to control discussion of the origins by experts. The risk is of their research being weaponized by said demagogues.

I was under the impression that they started intentionally calling it the Wuhan virus only after the Chinese government started making propaganda that the virus came form aboard.

They started calling it the Chinese virus after that, Wuhan virus was earlier (if you are referring to the NYT timeline article from yesterday).

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

#294

Post by StandardFuture »

tanilama wrote: post #57
StandardFuture wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This paper is only about engineering a virus using a common backbone virus as a starting point. That does not mean the virus could not be derived within a lab using recombination methods in other animals and sourcing the starting novel virus from bats. In fact, this type of research was the exact research being done at the Wuhan Virology lab.

> the exact research being done at the Wuhan Virology lab I would like to see the exact research they tried to do there. Navigating through their published research list, I couldn't locate any, but I am not an expert: http://www.whiov.cas.cn/kycg_105248/lwqk/index.html

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00705-010-0729-6

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

#295

Post by dependenttypes »

abc-xyz wrote: post #252
dependenttypes wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see anything in that image.

I don’t know about you but I find it very concerning that mods of major subreddits like r/worldnews and r/coronavirus are censoring comments like: > “Yeah but you can’t trust any of those numbers coming out of China. It’s gotta be way worse than they’re letting on”

I am glad that you can see this text because I can't see anything other than blur.

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

#296

Post by dependenttypes »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #284
dependenttypes wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was under the impression that they started intentionally calling it the Wuhan virus only after the Chinese government started making propaganda that the virus came form aboard.

Other way around. People started saying it was developed by the Chinese as a weapon almost immediately, and the originator of the "Chinese propaganda" specifically called out such claims before blaming the US.

We are talking about politicians specifically though.

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

#297

Post by jhanschoo »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #147
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…

- 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

If you have sources for these, you will have convinced me that it's more likely that it originated from the lab than the market.

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

#298

Post by Throwawayaerlei »

fspeech wrote: post #287
andromeduck wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natrualy occuring viruses escape from labs all the time, particularly in China. Infact SARS is known to have escaped twice in Beijing. That the virus originated zoonotically does not precude a lab accident + leak theory of origin in fact we know that one of the labs actively experimenting on bats there was within half a kilometer of the market. You combine that with a significant fraction of the first known hospitali…

I don't know where the "within half a kilometer" meme came from. Wuhan Institute of Virology is about 13.5km from the market by road or 30 minutes by car. And the two are separated by the Yangtze river: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/12D2/production/... (in case one wonders the source of the map is BBC https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp/chinese-news-51388024 ) With Wuhan's population it would not surprise…

It comes from the fact there's a Wuhan Center for Disease Control that's across the river from the Institute for Virology and much closer to the wet market. Which is mentioned in the fine Daily Mail article, which gets a whole lot of basic facts correct, or nearly so (it differs in the distance it claims between the Center and the wet market, and the number of days that it took for the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center to be closed by the Chinese Communist Party for "rectification" after they broke the embargo on publishing genome sequences; would that any Western researchers show as much courage as those did).

And that Wuhan CDC has BSL-3 labs, although the Daily Mail passes on the entirely plausible rumor that bat coronavirus research was being done at both locations in BSL-2 labs. Lots of scientists all over the world do research in labs that aren't really at the level that should be used for what they're doing, the higher the level, the more obnoxious and difficult it is to do anything. A security/convenience trade-off we should be all to familiar with.

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

#299

Post by jhanschoo »

godelski wrote: post #215
knzhou wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. It's incredible that it doesn't even take supporting the outgroup to be accused of shilling -- these days even failing to laser focus on condemning the outgroup is enough. Reddit is having a lot more posts about America just because there's a lot going on in the country right now. In late February there were tons of posts about Italy. In early February there were tons of posts about China. The posts about China…

I'd argue that Reddit has a more US centric voice because... it has a more US centric userbase. [0] I don't think it is because there is more going on in the US but more that people tend to be focused on the things that are closer to them. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/325144/reddit-global-act...

While it is not mentioned explicitly, the comment you're replying to seems to be talking specifically in regards to coronavirus news.
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