Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt
451–460 of 833 posts
Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt
#452Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
This may be unpopular, but I'm actually fine with polititians manipulating the truth in that scenario (_if_ we accept as a starting point that the shortage of masks was already unavoidable, and the best option for public health was to convince the public to minimise purchases). Part of the job of politicians is to act as a rudder for the general public, and if tragedy of the commons applies to a scenario, a politicia…
I get your point. But the long term damage doesn’t justify the lie. That’s a race to the bottom. And what happens when the scientist and politician is in a hybrid role, like Fauci? Folks don’t trust Fauci because credibility, in general, has been harmed. Q conspiracy theorists thrive in a world of distrust. Chronic distrust of politicians is too high a price to pay to justify the use of the occasional manipulation.
Plus it's simply ineffective. Enough people saw through the lies such that all the masks sold out anyway. I reckon an honest approach and appeal to morality would have seen more masks donated to hospitals than simply telling people that they don't work.
Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt
#454You 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…
> 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)…
Would it have been different for you if he had elaborated on the reason for the changed policy, and apologized for what he said earlier?
Also, in the first case, did he express it very categorically, or did he say something like "to the best of our knowledge, the virus..."?
Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt
#455If this comment thread is the way the self proclaimed smartest forum on the web deals with articles like this then we're doomed. This article contributes zero actual evidence, is littered with out of context quotes (including of all places the title), doesn't appear to understand the science or the probabilities involved and finally is clearly written with an agenda. It shouldn't have been posted to HN in the first p…
I don't believe this article but I give it more lenience at this point since this is what I see with articles of other publications.
I do think it still holds valuable information though and that the subject that it criticizes in in dire need of more criticism. And I don't mean the lab or China of course.
Let us not pretend these topics are discussed with only the scientific quality in mind.
Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt
#456You 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…
> 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)…
Same thing happened in the US. It made no sense to everyone and degraded public trust at a critical juncture.
Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
> literal concentration camps I've seen this repeated hundreds of times, approximately 0 times with proof. Can I find these camps somewhere? Are there photos? As it stands, a casual reader must conclude this is part of a propaganda campaign vilifying China.
I didn’t think I had to cite sources, since it’s been incredibly well covered but if you want to get started down a dark road here’s a link to the top hit on duckduckgo https://nypost.com/2020/08/28/chinas-260-concentration-camps... The general lack of action by governments and corporations means a casual reader must conclude nobody with any power cares, since they’re all getting rich off china.
That article doesn't say much to me. They've found... buildings? And how do they know what goes on in them?
Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt
#458If this comment thread is the way the self proclaimed smartest forum on the web deals with articles like this then we're doomed. This article contributes zero actual evidence, is littered with out of context quotes (including of all places the title), doesn't appear to understand the science or the probabilities involved and finally is clearly written with an agenda. It shouldn't have been posted to HN in the first p…
Evidence? The hypothesis of the article is that certain scientists did believe a lab leak was likely, but hid their views. The article provides ample evidence for this. If you also want it to conclusively prove the lab leak hypothesis in the same breath then I'd say your expectations are too high. Better publications have tackled the subject anyway: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...
Then the title of the article is highly misleading.
Using "Scientists" instead of "Some scientists" implies that the great majority of the scientists believed in this hypothesis, and there is no evidence for that.
Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wear…
As far as I know, the advice that wearing a mask doesn't protect you very well from getting Covid has held up pretty good; they're a lot better at protecting everyone else from the mask wearer.
The logical flaw then was that telling people to just wear masks if they're infected doesn't work very well if highly contagious people don't know they're infected, which turned out to be the case. I can see where it might have taken awhile to figure that out, but still the lack of transparency about how these decisions were made and the resulting credibility deficit is a problem.
Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm Italian and the events in February and March 2020 made it very clear to me how the anglo press largely just ignores foreign sources. The "debate" about lockdown in the UK mirrored the Italian one almost day by day, with a delay of 3 weeks between here and Italy. Italian sources and discoveries were either ignored or discounted. It was like watching a child "discover" on their own how to start a fire. If they do t…
... and if Italy learned the lessons from Asian countries, the initial spike in Italy would not have been so devastating. I think a more fair take would be that most countries did not take COVID19(in particular, the early variants which were much more dangerous) seriously enough until there was a major source of infections in their country, at which point it was obviously too late. There are some exceptions(in partic…
The world tends to respect the anglo press more than the rest, because they work in the world's current lingua franca, they are historically less subject to governmental influence, and effectively report (and affect) the state of the biggest superpower on the planet. In some cases (covid, Judith Miller, etc), it becomes evident that such high respect is often unwarranted. I say this from a place of sadness, not anger. It's not a criticism of anglo countries per se, but of cultural attitudes around certain sectors, inside and outside such countries.
> in particular, New Zealand, which is in the Anglo world that you malign
NZ and Australia largely benefited from their geographical and economic periphery to achieve the level of safety that they did. By the time the virus got there in critical numbers, it had already been taken seriously in the anglosphere as a whole because of the UK debacle. I'm not saying their lockdowns didn't help (they very much did), but it's easier to enforce controls on entrance in far-flung corners of the world rather than around the backbone of the world economy.