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

That's not fair. But excesses like that are related to the same underlying problem, which is lack of nuance, trust, and honesty in public debate.

Additionally, I think you should consider the fact that facebook simply is not a great venue for discussing such things. They cannot tell fraud from fact, don't have a process for doing so, and instead have social dynamics that encourage irrational conspiracies. What exactly should have been done? I get that they certainly ban the wrong things at time, but the real problem here is the platform, which kind of makes it inevitable that either that happens, or that misinformation spreads like wildfire.

But really: the moment to allow a public discussion like that to come to it's own (unguided) conclusions is not in the initial chaos of uncertainty. The consequences of uninformed, unmoderated speculation running wild are still visible everywhere. On the one hand, mostly everybody accepts that healthy debate is a useful social tool, but on the other hand the current zeitgeist is one in which we've not socially learned to distinguish between the right to shout whatever we feel is truthy from the wisdom of relying on that to form public opinion.

Clearly, mistakes were made - but we need to consider the alternative to partially incorrect guidance by experts, which is sometimes extremely dangerous widely and deeply held beliefs formed by social media echo chambers.

Hopefully future generations will have better habits when it comes to dealing with this kind of information overload, and a greater ability to put one's own suspicions in perspective relative to experts, but that's clearly not an easy task. We don't know who to trust, why to trust them; we do our own research, but poorly and with terribly limited resources; we trust others that appear to be like us without having a way to really judge how great their interpretations are nor to recognize which are flawed, and all this is spiced up by the fact that some of these beliefs about facts blur into deeply held moral axioms - which we as a society don't universally share, leading to easily exploitable deep divisions.

...so, while it's deeply unfortunate that your potentially valid observations were silenced, I'm not sure I really believe the alternative would have been better, on facebook.

Yep, I (in the UK - no asian heritage) was also aware of this by around February/March 2020 due to posts here on HN. But even otherwise smart and well informed people that I know seemed clueless about these things until many months later.

I think this is more nuanced.

In the beginning, testing was very sparse and unavailable so it's hard to blame anyone for just looking at the obvious infections. It took a while until we even understood that the majority of cases are asymptomatic and very mild.

The 1% IFR is trueish across all age groups but not so much when you look at specific age groups. You can clearly see it in current German data: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105512/coronavirus-covi...

You might have an asysmptomatic child with a 0.003% IFR and hand them to your grandparents for caretaking, with a quite high chance of putting them into the ICU if infected. So it's not so easy to deal with like a cold.

Also, variants might change the distribution and death isn't the only negative outcome of a COVID infection. It's a systemic disease affecting all organs which will put a strain on the health systems for a long time to come, especially if it becomes endemic and people will just keep reinfecting themselves year after year. It's too shortsighted to just dismiss it as a cold just because cases are often very mild.

This is exactly the problem. No matter what it is not ok for someone to lie for what they perceive is the greater good, but scientists who we thought we could trust show that's exactly what they do and keep doing.

Trust is what our entire society is built upon and the foundation of science.

Agree that banning individuals from expressing ideas (more like completely plausible theories) has done great harm.

> this is a propaganda instrument

What exactly is this "propaganda instrument"? Just trying to latch on to what you're trying to suggest.

There might have been lies, distortions of the truth, misunderstandings, assumptions, ignorance, but "propaganda" implies some kind of motive and objective by a particular actor or set of actors.

With perhaps the exception of parties responsible hiding any remnants of the truth in order to avoid blame (aka a cover up), what was the motive/objective and by whom?

For me, the purpose of the lab in China and the possibility of a contagion leak makes complete sense with no conspiracy theories needed. Even the Chinese Government/CCPs response makes sense (not defending it, just obvious based on their track record).

I can imagine multiple ways in which the resulting pandemic could be used as an instrument to cause and inflict political harm in order benefit rivals or perhaps entire states and regimes. But the only way I can describe what has actually resulted is an all out frenzy and turmoil.