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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

#661

Post by chiefalchemist »

s5300 wrote: post #592
IgorPartola wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wrong. The Obama administration did quite a bit to prevent future pandemics and the Trump administration dismantled it all pretty much immediately. Three things come to mind: the pandemic playbook, the pandemic response office, and the public health observers in China that were all recalled under Trump.

I love the reaction you get when you tell people there was literally something created & called “Pandemic Playbook” which was devised because they were expecting a pandemic in the next decade or two. & what happened to the Pandemic Playbook created by the 44th presidential administration? It was completely discarded by the 45th presidential administration. What proceeded to happen during the 45th presidential adminis…

And I love when ppl are so sucked into a particular narrative that they ignore the question being asked:

Where were the stockpiles of appropriate equipment? Or did the playbook say such things would fall out of the sky, like manna from heaven?

Fact: The 45th didn't discard them. In fact, the gov bought masks from Facebook and (I think) Google who did have a stockpile (but evidently not for pandemic purposes).

You're loving the playbook but missing the fact that some basic and necessary execution never happened.

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

#662

Post by deviantbit »

alevskaya wrote: post #608
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…

I was a genetic engineer for two decades: - Clear signs of molecular manipulation in the sars-cov-2 sequence. There are none. Almost all of the alleged manipulations would have left unmistakeable, damning evidence in a recognizable vector. The only remotely interesting thing at all in the sequence is the furin site, but plenty of coronaviruses have those, and it just likely indicates selection/propagation in a second…

If you were a genetics engineer, then I am an astronaut, not a computer scientist, studying computational epidemiology. Detecting bioengineering is near impossible for a virus. To make these claims is dangerous. The developer of the engineered organism doesn't leave their name on it.

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

#663

Post by [deleted] »

afpx wrote: post #657
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jesus Christ, son of Mary, please don't bring Occam's razor in yet another internet discussion that tramples all over it. There is no reason to assume a lab leak when every disease we know that affects humans is _not_ the result of a lab leak. A natural origin is the most likely explanation and we don't need any other explanation unless there is strong evidence that something different happened, which we absolutely d…

Scientists must do a better job of explaining how natural origin is the likely explanation, then. Otherwise, a lot of smart and educated people are going to put the wrong dots together.

[deleted]

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

#664

Post by ErikVandeWater »

ratg13 wrote: post #509
cocoggu wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If an article is headlined "Firefighters rescue cat from tree" Is your assumption that all firefighters were involved in the rescue?

Also, the scientists with the most power were the ones doing the misleading. For whatever reason, the power structure has been such that the scientists willing to mislead are elevated to positions where they are given the opportunity to mislead the most people, and not challenged by other scientists^1 like you would expect in a community dependent on debate to find the truth.

And it's not as if this is leading to a substantial change in the community. If we're being honest, scientists with positions of power are just as likely to mislead us in the future when they believe the truth might be harmful to their funding.

1 in a substantial way

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

#665

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

afpx wrote: post #657
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jesus Christ, son of Mary, please don't bring Occam's razor in yet another internet discussion that tramples all over it. There is no reason to assume a lab leak when every disease we know that affects humans is _not_ the result of a lab leak. A natural origin is the most likely explanation and we don't need any other explanation unless there is strong evidence that something different happened, which we absolutely d…

Scientists must do a better job of explaining how natural origin is the likely explanation, then. Otherwise, a lot of smart and educated people are going to put the wrong dots together.

The natural origin is the default explanation and nobody needs to have an IQ of 130 and a degree in biology to figure that out. It suffices to know that diseases are a natural thing. Most people who have gone to school will know that already.

It really hurts me that you believe "smart and educated people" believe that nonsense. Everytime anyone with any relevant education has commented on HN it's to say that "lab leak" is rubbish. And let me not get started on how people on HN think they're smart because they're on HN where people think they're smart.

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

#666

Post by marvin »

emn13 wrote: post #532
marvin wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was banned from the biggest national (Norway) Facebook discussion group on the pandemic for posting a comment reasoning about mask usage and whether the official guidelines might be factually incorrect. That's far into propaganda and censorship territory.

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 exactl…

I agree that there's merit to some of your points. But at the same time, some of this borders on the tautological when it comes to the challenges of our time.

On a personal level, I find this story to be more of a funny (tragic?) anecdote than a degrading violation of rights. What does it say about the direction our society is headed? Facebook is the only public forum where I (or any of most people) could have significant reach in this discussion.

Letter to the editor? Couldn't have gotten it published at the time. My Slack groups of highly-educated, economically powerful friends and acquaintances? Sure, and through those channels we all had access to much better curated information than any official channel. Friends and family? You bet. Local Reddit groups? Sure, all of the 30 people who read it.

This isn't only an issue regarding times of crisis. Access to precise information in matters big and small is increasingly filtered through similar mechanisms. Economic decisions, career advice, knowledge of how to best position oneself in the world and so on. All trends channel these advantages to a smaller and smaller elite that is capable of making sense of the world, where finding the useful truths in a sea of uncertain signals is increasingly difficult.

I'm not really suggesting a solution, rather pointing out that this is an insidious challenge with great potential to cause strife if we can't figure out a way to properly democratize it. It works well if you're really smart or well-connected. Not so much otherwise.

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

#667

Post by ErikVandeWater »

mike_d wrote: post #238
partiallypro wrote: post #157

What really raises the most suspicion of the lab leak theory in my mind was how the Chinese government acted towards the rest of the scientific community...well before it was a theory at all. Not allowing foreign scientists in, destroying evidence, arresting journalists, etc. That just screams cover-up, even if there was none (in terms of a lab leak.) Then Western scientists that rely on grants with Chinese ties, etc…

> Not allowing foreign scientists in, destroying evidence, arresting journalists, etc. That is par for the course. The Chinese government would have acted this way regardless of if it was a lab leak, natural event, or space aliens.

> Not allowing foreign scientists in, destroying evidence, arresting journalists, etc.

The Chinese government does all these things because it is routinely covering up illegal behavior. The fact that they followed standard operating procedure means they were probably simply continuing with the standard operating procedure of tacitly allowing illegal behavior. Illegal behavior in the context of a lab enhancing viruses is likely to result in a lab leak of a very dangerous virus.

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

#668

Post by enriquto »

scratcheee wrote: post #375
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)…

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…

> This may be unpopular, but I'm actually fine with polititians manipulating the truth

Sadly, this not unpopular.

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

#669

Post by NLips »

himinlomax wrote: post #611
NLips wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To get the 1% figure you have to include an unstated assumption, which is that a novel virus is just as likely to emerge from this lab as from all top 100 cities put together. If we try to make a rough calculation from an unknowledgeable starting position, it might be more reasonable to say "just as likely to come from each 1M+ city as to come from each lab [of which there is one]". Then, if we didn't know the geogra…

Fact is, there's nothing that points to Wuhan as being a more likely source of viruses in the first place. It's not a tropical rainforest area, for instance. And indeed, the closest wild relatives we know of have been found much farther south.

I agree? In the above I'm assuming equal likelihood between each lab and each city, rather than equally likely to have come from any lab vs any city. The second is a poor starting point as it suggests having two, 100, or 1M labs would mean no increased chance of coming from a lab vs 1 lab. That's why I suggest the first.

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

#670

Post by steve76 »

bsder wrote: post #94
torstenvl wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you find that [a government] has lost, destroyed, or failed to preserve any evidence whose contents or quality are material to the issues in this case, then you may draw an inference unfavorable to the [government]." West Virg. Jury Inst. 5.03

Okay. China created it. Now what? I have yet to see anyone explain what they would do with the result that is somehow beneficial. Does knowing this help fight it? Does it help stop it? Does it help treat it? Does it help stop the spread? Let's say China even INTENTIONALLY did it. Then what? You gonna invade China? Exactly how are you gonna make someone like Apple pull out of China when they should already be doing th…

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