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Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#431

Post by enriquto »

ricardobayes wrote: post #390
enriquto wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once government officials and scientists gaslight us about what they think they should, how does one know they wouldn't for anything at all they decide to? For me it was the masks. The masks were my tipping point. At some point at the beginning of the pandemic they said that the disease was totally not airborne and that masks were useless. I remember vividly president Macron (a person that I respected before that)…

Politicians will never or very rarely correct their statements. It is for the same reason as football referees. I took up refereeing as a hobby and we were taught very firmly by the ref coach that no matter what decision we take, we stick to it and never change it. Because that is a sign of weakness and will degrade the quality of the game even more than that individual decision.

I'd hope that our elected representatives did not treat us as adversarial football players, but maybe I'm asking to much.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#432

Post by Fiahil »

enriquto wrote: post #403
Fiahil wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I remember vividly president Macron (a person that I respected before that) very serious in TV explaining to all the citizens of the republic that we should not buy nor wear masks. Ah! This one is actually a story of "the lesser of two evils". You can't really tell people to buy masks where there is none available, and you can't really tell there is nothing to do unless you want to put every one in panic mode. You…

> I guess it was easier to take a slight (...) reputation hit, Not a reputation hit. A credibility hit. Essentially 100% of what they say now is lies to my ears. If their policy is to lie to me "for the global good", this is the most rational position. I'd have preferred if they had told the truth as they knew it (the disease is airborne, masks help you to avoid infect people, please leave all masks to health personn…

> I'd have preferred if they had told the truth as they knew it

This is perfectly understandable, however, in this situation, the truth or any version of it weren't available. If you tell everyone that masks are the best way to avoid getting infected, but there is none available, then you are creating and invoking the worst case scenario immediately: No masks available for anyone, No idea when you will get shipments, and 60M panicked citizens to manage.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#433

Post by teen »

hkt wrote: post #424
mandmandam wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I'd be intrigued to see any sources on those claims, can you provide some links?

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#435

Post by chimprich »

cortic wrote: post #398
enriquto wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once government officials and scientists gaslight us about what they think they should, how does one know they wouldn't for anything at all they decide to? For me it was the masks. The masks were my tipping point. At some point at the beginning of the pandemic they said that the disease was totally not airborne and that masks were useless. I remember vividly president Macron (a person that I respected before that)…

Happened in the UK as well, Boris (and to be fair the WHO) told us masks were counter productive. That they might get you to stand closer to people and touch your face more, increasing your chances of getting Covid.. All presumably to save a mask shortage; But we know, and they should have known, that the public doesn't buy the same kind of masks that our NHS buys and there never was going to be any shortage. This en…

> All presumably to save a mask shortage

I don't think so. There seemed to be genuine uncertainty early on in the pandemic about whether masks would be helpful. We didn't know if the virus was airborne and there was a question about whether the masks would actually be helpful. For example, the masks could have had very low benefit but encouraged people to touch their face more.

Whitty in March 2020: "In terms of wearing a mask, our advice is clear: that wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all. So we do not advise that. The only people we do sometimes use masks for are people who have got an infection and that is to help them to stop it spreading around."

I think this was a mistake: common sense suggests that they should have had some effect (and the evidence ended up supporting this). But I don't see any evidence for it being deliberate misinformation to avoid pressure on mask sourcing.

I also think that this one mistake should not be held up as the key problem in the pandemic. Public health information in the UK has generally been very good. Most of the missteps in the pandemic were from poor governmental decisions.

> no talk of this in the media

This is absolutely not true. I've seen this issue discussed ad nauseum.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#436

Post by denton-scratch »

larryflint wrote: post #254
vasco wrote: post #241

You know this effect, when you've been reading the news for years, and finally your favorite source has a story about something you studied or worked on, and you realize how low quality or outright wrong it is? The spell is broken and you realize how little they know about anything they write. Once government officials and scientists gaslight us about what they think they should, how does one know they wouldn't for a…

Yep. I'm a case in point. At the beginning of this thing i went along with the mainstream narrative like a good sheeple. Now that i've watched how a narrative can go from 'your a crazy person to believe there COULD have been a lab leak' to 'yahhh it was probably a lab leak the whole time'...my faith has probably been permenantly destroyed in main-stream sources of information. Which sucks because idealy i just want t…

> your a crazy person to believe there COULD have been a lab leak

I'm not really bothered about the true origin of the virus, except inasmuchas scientists lying about their true beliefs is incredibly damaging to public confidence, and energises conspiranoids. Lying about the benefits of mask-wearing was bloody stupid.

I no longer pay attention to statistics about infection rates and fatality rates. They are presented in the press without context (e.g. "It's a Monday, so results are skewed because some clinics report numbers for the whole weekend"). We get numbers with spurious precision. How can they know it's 251 cases, and not 249? Where are the error-bars?

It's really annoying; if you want to understand what's happening, you really do have to "do your own research". I feel ashamed to have just typed that, because that's a phrase mainly used by antivaxxers and QAnon conspiraloons, people who generally don't have the critical-thinking capacity to distinguish their left hand from their right, let alone evaluate research.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#437

Post by [deleted] »

pelasaco wrote: post #386

Probably when Trump started to brag about it, saying that "he knew" it came from China, he was leaking some CIA information that he couldn't talk about it. Unfortunately it transformed the issue in a political issue and therefore people couldn't talk freely about it without the risk to be canceled.

[deleted]

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#439

Post by MrPatan »

vasco wrote: post #241

You know this effect, when you've been reading the news for years, and finally your favorite source has a story about something you studied or worked on, and you realize how low quality or outright wrong it is? The spell is broken and you realize how little they know about anything they write. Once government officials and scientists gaslight us about what they think they should, how does one know they wouldn't for a…

Yes, the fog of Gell-Mann's amnesia is lifting. It's probably peer to peer communication like this. What would you do before? Send a letter to the editor of the very same news source to tell them they were full of shit?

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#440

Post by brigandish »

jacquesm wrote: post #396
brigandish wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would that evidence look like? The House Committee on Oversight and Reform have a press release with more detail[1], which the Telegraph mentions - it's how I found it - and you can download a pdf which contains the partially redacted emails. It doesn't seem to me that the Telegraph has misled anyone regarding this news at all. Perhaps you could read it and be more precise as to where you think they're providing…

Evidence that would convince an independent panel of people trained in the field that it confirms a lab leak. Given the odds against that evidence would likely have to be fairly hard.

Evidence does not need to be able to convince on its own, you seem to be picking an arbitrarily high bar that would dismiss all evidence until such time as it would confirm a leak. That's not even the bar used in law to begin a prosecution, when they know that reasonable doubt will need to be overcome.

Regardless, this is evidence of a conspiracy of silence, not evidence that there was a lab leak. The two should not be mixed up nor conflated.

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