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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

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are saying that both theory have the same credibility. I don't agree, because you can actually go see the sources linked in the video description. So why don't you go see the sources? Is your claim that laowhy86 is divorced, and that his judgement is clouded, substantiated? I didn't think so, so to me it looks like plain old smear. This lab accident, on the contrary, is NOT unsubstantiated claims, and acting as i…

The Wuhan lab leak theory has as much credible endorsement as Fort Detrik - i.e. none. Both are replete with connect the dot sources conjured by Chinese /r/conspiracy equivalents, the latter complete with corresponding proof drawn from US media sources. And if you believe CIA's recent allegations evidence of virus in Wuhan dating back to November... then the timeline actually syncs up with the US military games theor…

Regarding laowhy86 and serpentza, you're being disingenuous at best. Everything you say about them is false. Their channels are not about view whoring conspiracy theories. It's pretty obvious why they've been negative recently: they are no longer living in China, because they were being harassed by police. When they lived in China, they had to watch everything they said, so they kept the message upbeat. I don't think they claim to be experts about infectious disease, nor do they claim with certainty that this is cause of the outbreak.

Have you spent much time in China? Have you lived there, or is your knowledge all second hand?

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

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This market is not known to have sold bats and by all accounts it did not. Consuming bats is a southern thing not a central thing. Your theory also doesn't along with the evidence, that the first known cases had a significant population with no known connection to the market, 27 with connection, 14 without; and that other than the market there are no other obvious connections. If it were just some hawker you'd expect…

I had a theory around guano used for fertilizer acting as a fomite, but found some research an hour ago that suggests SARS doesn't remain viable via that route, so SARS-CoV-2 probably doesn't either. Do we know that bats are the only (or only likely) nonhuman host? Was there a significant population of cases with a known connection to the lab?

Pangolins Malasia I think are the next closest source genetically. China imports from there as well as Africa for TCM so but the known strains from bats are still match much much better.

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

#363
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't mean it didn't come from a lab though. "Coming from a lab" does not = man made. If they were doing research on the bats in this lab, looking to identify potential scary viruses to be ready, it is entirely possible the virus jumped from bat to researcher there and that was our patient 0.

Yeah but the story matters only if it's man made. However what's the story ? "they made a mistake in a lab" ? great.

The story is that "they made a mistake in a lab"...

1. while doing research that has been banned in other nations due to the extreme hazard

2. despite having a history of lab virus escapes that killed people

3. and then they covered it up

BTW, the virus is at least sort of man made. The lab was breeding viruses. There is no evidence that gene editing technology was used, but we do know that the lab has published multiple research papers about making coronaviruses more infectious in humans.

I think there needs to be a damn good justification for purposely making viruses more able to infect and harm humans. Why would you do that????? Mere scientific curiosity is not a proper justification for putting all of humanity at risk.

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

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree it seems incredibly illogical and unlikely that China would deliberately do something like this. But putting on my devil's advocate hat, the "no political motive" angle isn't as strong a rebuttal as it could be. The Chinese government has a long track record of fearing problems that this sort of virus would solve, problems like: 1. A heavy dependency on economic growth for legitimacy, threatened by an impendi…

I see what you're getting at, but a virus that can infect everyone and easily spread is impossible to use in any sort of directed way. A student could easily catch it from another student at school, then go home and infect their father, who may be an older high-ranking CCP official, for example. It does way more than discourage large gatherings, kills pretty indiscriminately (beyond some factors like age and history…

Kills pretty indiscriminately? It is far more targeted at the elderly than other diseases I know of. Even the flu harms children and this one doesn't at all. Age and general weakness is by far the strongest signal that someone may die of it.

The hit is massive but it's a relative hit - China probably ends up doing better than the rest of the world because it didn't really lock down everywhere, primarily just Wuhan. And bear in mind, China's government has a long history of doing extreme things that cripple its own economy. That's why places like South Korea and Taiwan were so far ahead (and still are, China's still a poor country). Communism isn't famous for being good for GDP, after all.

Yes, there's a risk of CCP officials getting it of course. The whole 'escape from the lab' theory doesn't suggest it would have escaped at the right time or in the right way. A truly evil government would wait until there was enough vaccine for officials and other important people but not enough for everyone.

I guess any virus theory would assume it must spread all over the world. Given it's not very deadly that doesn't seem like a big deal if the goal is an excuse to establish lockdowns whenever the government requires one for its own stability. Just announce a sudden uptick in cases (a claim which can only come from official stats) and off you go.

I think the biggest reason why the theory doesn't work is that eventually it'd become suspicious because everyone would have had it, and the co-incidence of sudden outbreak at times of civil unrest might become too obvious for everyone. Unless of course the virus is used as an excuse to control mass gatherings permanently.

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

#365
post #363
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but the story matters only if it's man made. However what's the story ? "they made a mistake in a lab" ? great.

The story is that "they made a mistake in a lab"... 1. while doing research that has been banned in other nations due to the extreme hazard 2. despite having a history of lab virus escapes that killed people 3. and then they covered it up BTW, the virus is at least sort of man made. The lab was breeding viruses. There is no evidence that gene editing technology was used, but we do know that the lab has published mult…

> the lab has published multiple research papers about making coronaviruses more infectious in humans.

that's frightening. Do you have any more information about those papers?

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

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Wuhan lab leak theory has as much credible endorsement as Fort Detrik - i.e. none. Both are replete with connect the dot sources conjured by Chinese /r/conspiracy equivalents, the latter complete with corresponding proof drawn from US media sources. And if you believe CIA's recent allegations evidence of virus in Wuhan dating back to November... then the timeline actually syncs up with the US military games theor…

Regarding laowhy86 and serpentza, you're being disingenuous at best. Everything you say about them is false. Their channels are not about view whoring conspiracy theories. It's pretty obvious why they've been negative recently: they are no longer living in China, because they were being harassed by police. When they lived in China, they had to watch everything they said, so they kept the message upbeat. I don't think…

I said this specific video is peddling conspiracy theory, otherwise they're nothing more than ex-travel bloggers who has recently pivoted to click-bait China bashing after they were pressured out of the country. Yes I was an expat in China in the mid 90s to mid 00s and still have ongoing dealings there.

The point is they are not only not experts in infectious disease, they're not experts in any particular Chinese subjects at all. Living in China is not itself a remarkable qualification. If I were to ask people to find me two youtubers from China who moved to US to do travel blogs that I should base most of my opinions about China on, it would be an impossibly asinine exercise because US is a large, complex country. So is China. That's why you have thousands of institutions and entire industries of specific experts trying to grasp the larger realities. This industry exists for Chinese affairs, yet a surprising amount of people insist on posting generalized, personal reflections of a couple youtubers instead of relevant subject matters for each respective topics which, again exists.

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

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since that post was made, there has been widespread reporting that US intelligence agencies are quite sure that China's numbers regarding the infection have been fabricated and underreported by quite a large amount. [0] Keep in mind that the Chinese government doesn't have to be pursuing a centralized disinformation campaign for it to occur. It would appear that at least a decent amount of the misinformation is occur…

1. I'm well aware of that. Is that the only new evidence that's come to light since the piece I linked to though? Would have expected something more solid than unnamed sources from inside national security (see: big hack) 2. I'll grant that that's possibility in the exact same sense in which I grant the centralized cover-up theory to be a possibility, and in which I grant both the lab creation and the lab accident or…

> 1. I'm well aware of that. Is that the only new evidence that's come to light since the piece I linked to though? Would have expected something more solid than unnamed sources from inside national security (see: big hack)

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of stories produced by national security forces, but there are far more reasons to be skeptical of stories being produced by the CCP. If it's a question of who to believe, I don't know why one would pick the Chinese government.

> 2. I'll grant that that's possibility in the exact same sense in which I grant the centralized cover-up theory to be a possibility, and in which I grant both the lab creation and the lab accident origin theories to be possibilities. But I'm not interested in possibilities. What I'm interested in is positive evidence supportive of this or that theory.

I just gave you positive evidence, and you dismissed it as propaganda. CIA sources are saying that is exactly what is happening on the ground. But if you need more, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence coming from non-intelligence sources. About a month ago on the "This Week in Virology" podcast, one of the visiting virologists who is an expert on coronaviruses said that China had come out and said they won't be conducting any widespread serology testing, which would be necessary for determining how widespread the outbreak got. He said the only reason for not doing this is if you didn't want to know the answer. The implication being that China knows its much worse than has been reported and they don't want the world or their own people to know, as it challenges the narrative of a competent response. And secondly, its been widely reported that China is not including asymptomatic patients in their infection counts, which is absurd, given that we now know they make up anywhere from 20-50% of infections, and are capable of spreading the disease. Again, the only reason for this is if you want to make it seem like there are fewer infections than there actually are.

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

#368
post #359
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Please don't use HN for nationalistic flamewar. Or ideological flamewar. Also in the site guidelines ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ): please don't post insinuations about astroturfing to HN. The data is clear that this is almost always in the eye of the beholder, i.e. people imagine it as an explanation for things they dislike, and they're far more likely to notice those than other things. For a…

[deleted]

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

#369
post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't make sense to apply the same prior to "the CIA planted COVID-19 in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market", because there are many such markets in China, and only one BSL-4 facility. I didn't make an error. The way the conspiracy theory goes in China is that the Military World Games [0] were held in Wuhan just before the outbreak. In other words, they knew the US military was in Wuhan specifically (in fact,…

Yes, I assumed that if the virus is not from the WIV, then all areas of China (weighted by population) would be equiprobable candidates for the outbreak location. Of course this is an imperfect model, but I think it's a reasonable one. This alternate conspiracy seems way more farfetched to me (why would US intelligence need such any such event to get an agent into China?), but if someone believed that it should be gi…

Thanks for using Bayes theorem. Although it does not provide evidence, it should guide us to where we should look for evidence.

I am also very surprised at people throwing probabilistic equivalence between foreign-agent conspiracy, and an accident in a lab. It seems that the latter is so much more probable.

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

#370
post #359
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Please don't use HN for nationalistic flamewar. Or ideological flamewar. Also in the site guidelines ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ): please don't post insinuations about astroturfing to HN. The data is clear that this is almost always in the eye of the beholder, i.e. people imagine it as an explanation for things they dislike, and they're far more likely to notice those than other things. For a…

https://www.npr.org/2020/04/14/828565428/bloomberg-news-kill...

I didn't realize such selectively enforced standards were a thing? Should I report any post that criticizes government actions for nationalism?

So is criticizing a any government's actions in an comment section about an article criticizing the same government is nationalism? I didn't realize being in support of common human rights was a controversial ideology. I apologize for my actions and welcome the new mod community standards.

I hope this statement will please current and potential YCombinator investors.

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