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Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

thetimes.co.uk

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Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#741

Post by Manjuuu »

realjhol wrote: post #722
Manjuuu wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hoping that in a decade or so, people will stop using "vaccines never prevented transmission" as an argument since it has been said at least a billion of times since the beginning, VACCINES PREVENTED SERIOUS ILLNESS. Same thing about the imaginary widespread side-effects or the mask being useless. Depressing. Personally I'm more worried about the people that went full retard about covid alternative views and cons…

> I'm hoping that in a decade or so, people will stop using "vaccines never prevented transmission" as an argument since it has been said at least a billion of times since the beginning, VACCINES PREVENTED SERIOUS ILLNESS. No. They said vaccines prevent transmission. Over and over. You may have forgotten what was said at the time, but we won't: https://twitter.com/i/status/1665770269418614784 It's the reason I was pr…

I don't forget anything. As I can't forget all the times that I had to explain, since the beginning, that the only statistics available where about reducing to 0 the risk of serious illness. Don't try to change history, please.

And don't link me some random idiot's tweet as proof, we are better than this.

Just stop now and accept reality, it's a good thing that they got rid of your mother in law, I wonder in how much more pseudo science she believes in.

Where I live, people that refused the vaccine were treated as utter idiots but still welcome in hospitals, most of the famous local covid denier died there too.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#742

Post by sampo »

revelio wrote: post #571
lock-the-spock wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was never a consensus for or against lockdowns. Cant speak for the US and it's utterly broken media landscape but in Europe experts were asking for this from day one. It is also a known tool of any epidemic/pandemic management, it just has rarely been necessary at such scale given the intensity and wide distribution of COVID.

This is revisionism. The only place in Europe that didn't lock down was Sweden and they were viciously attacked in the media for it, additionally Anders Tegnall was also attacked by other epidemiologists. I followed it all very closely at the time. Tegnall and his mentor stood alone. With the exception of the Great Barrington crew and maybe Ioannidis, all the other so-called experts were loudly and vocally demanding…

> all the other so-called experts were loudly and vocally demanding lockdowns as a strategy

This is not true. Denmark, Finland, Netherlands and UK [1] had their own versions of "Tegnell". That is, epidemiologists who recommended the let-it-rip, "herd immunity" strategy. In these countries, politicians finally decided to follow the majority consensus among countries, and ignore those epidemiologists who were among the "herd immunity" school of thought.

Even in New Zealand it was a somewhat close call, would the government listen to Michael Baker [2] as they eventually did, or Simon Thornley [3].

> Great Barrington meanwhile was viciously attacked, described as fringe, non-consensus, would kill millions etc.

Maybe because it was somewhat fringe, definitely non-consensus, and would kill millions?

[1] "For a time, he advocated a herd immunity approach."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Vallance#COVID-19_pand...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Baker_(epidemiologist)...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Thornley#Covid_Plan_B_gr...

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#743

Post by jcranmer »

oilchange wrote: post #669
jcranmer wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But most major countries are working on biological weapons. If you think the US, Russia, China, UK, France, Germany, Japan, Israel, etc aren't running bio-weapons labs, then you are being too trusting at best or too naive at worst. Or maybe I'm just being too cynical. https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch... covers this in some detail (it's geared towards chemical weapons, but biological weap…

> For major militaries, there's no point in using them, which is why the "big" military powers have all signed up to the anti-chemical weapons and anti-biological weapons treaties If chemical and biological weapons aren't useful, why does one need a treaty to ban them? Makes one wonder? Is there are treaty to ban feathers as weapons? The fact that there is an anti-biological weapons treaty is proof enough that countr…

Your attempts at "gotchas" here are unpersuasive. If the point of treaties is to be broken, why bother signing up to them in the first place? Perhaps more interestingly, why would a country sign up to some treaties banning weapons but not others, if its intent were to use all those weapons?

Yes, countries can break treaties. But there is a real cost to doing so. The point of treaties (especially the anti-war treaties) is essentially to break a prisoner's dilemma: all parties can agree to do something that is mutually beneficial for everybody, but only when no one defects. The first arms control treaty was the Washington Naval Treaty, which was signed when most countries were literally unable to find the resources to keep up with the naval arms race and proposed by the one country that could.

If you read the post I linked (I suspect you did not, as you are only reacting to my comments and not other material within the post), you'll see that there are many other lines of evidence we can use to ascertain the inutility of chemical weapons, not least of which is the lack of its use in conflicts after WWI, even in existential state conflicts like WWII or the Arab-Israel wars.

> If chemical and biological weapons aren't useful, why does one need a treaty to ban them?

The same reason why we have laws against murder. The existence of the treaty isn't to keep people from doing something useful (indeed, if you look at which treaties are acceded to, it's the treaties that keep people from doing something useful that don't get the signatories). Instead, it's to signal the unwillingness to use it and to pressure others not to consider its use. And if you know sufficiently few people are willing to use it, then you can avoid spending the money on countermeasures to chemical weapons.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#744

Post by realjhol »

Manjuuu wrote: post #741
realjhol wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm hoping that in a decade or so, people will stop using "vaccines never prevented transmission" as an argument since it has been said at least a billion of times since the beginning, VACCINES PREVENTED SERIOUS ILLNESS. No. They said vaccines prevent transmission. Over and over. You may have forgotten what was said at the time, but we won't: https://twitter.com/i/status/1665770269418614784 It's the reason I was pr…

I don't forget anything. As I can't forget all the times that I had to explain, since the beginning, that the only statistics available where about reducing to 0 the risk of serious illness. Don't try to change history, please. And don't link me some random idiot's tweet as proof, we are better than this. Just stop now and accept reality, it's a good thing that they got rid of your mother in law, I wonder in how much…

> And don't link me some random idiot's tweet as proof, we are better than this.

Watch the video clip in the tweet. It shows a montage of officials and talking heads claiming that the COVID vaccines would prevent you from getting COVID and transmitting it.

Here's another one if you prefer:

https://twitter.com/alliemarie777/status/1667561378398318592

> Just stop now and accept reality, it's a good thing that they got rid of your mother in law, I wonder in how much more pseudo science she believes in.

No it isn't. The NHS now has chronic shortage of nurses.

If there were a problem with pseudoscience, then they should have fired her for that, not some vague proxy.

You're rather proving my point. So many people are just not ready to have a rational conversation about these narratives. It's all just tribalism and dogma, and we will have to wait years for people like you to calm down to the point where you are able to have reasonably conversations on these topics again.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#745

Post by ricksunny »

jeswin wrote: post #431

I'd like for someone to throughly research and write about how it became taboo to discuss the virus leak theory. How researchers who discussed it were shunned, tagged as racists, and in some cases had their posts banned from Social Media. About how almost the entire scientific community discarded the idea as impossible. How during the early pandemic years, no mainstream news media dared talk about the possibility. Te…

I HN-submitted the parent article originally. By way of demonstrating topic familiarity, I have a track record of submitting origns content to HN. (It usually founders or gets user-flagged). I didn't guess that this one would garner quite so much attention.

>I'd like for someone to throughly research and write about how it became taboo to discuss the virus leak theory

IMO part of it was a lot of self-preservation instinct of biomedical research scientists, operating in the context of a calcified monopsony of a national funding organization. In other words, any biomedical scientist's legitimizing LLH too stridently would not necesssrily have healthy to one's grant fundng prospects.

Caveating that 'none of the content of this comment necessarily reflects the opinion of BiosafetyNow', I also serve on BiosafetyNow's leadership team. BN was formed in the wake of the wagon-circling & gaslighting of the lab leak hyp. https://biosafetynow.org/ (Richard Ebright, mentioned elsewhere in the comments, is also on the leadership team. More familiar names are Colin Butler, & Milton Leitenberg).

We recently released a petition to ban ePPP research (i.e. 'GoF')

https://www.change.org/prohibit-ePPP.

It just passed 1000 signatures yesterday. I would love for concerned visitors to these comments to add their name. Despite that we advocate a simple ban today, our org has in its mission statement to see a moratorium on ePPP research until sufficent biosafety measures are put in place whereupon it becomes (highly) regulated ePPP researxh instead of out-and-out banned. The definition of 'sufficient' is not left to scientists alone to determine, and I contribute toward representing the non-scientist public to advocate for what should be considered sufficient biosafety measures.(Pro-tip: More representation of the non-scientist public remains needed here :) )

The nonprofit still operates on a shoestring budget, so if readers were inclined to help with that, it would be most appreciated. (Can also find origins censorship-themed merchandise which some folks might find fun :) )

If you'd like to volunteer your talents - software and otherwise - to BiosafetyNow's advocacy effort, it would be similarly most welcome.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#746

Post by nradov »

jstarfish wrote: post #574
trentearl wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange, I have the exact opposite experience. I have personally have felt ostracized multiple times for suggesting it was likely there was an unintentional lab leak. I often got criticized for suggesting it was a bio-weapon, while I never thought that and never even said those words. Sometime in the past 12 months this disappeared.

> Sometime in the past 12 months this disappeared. We're trying to groom public appetite for war with China. Anything that paints them in the worst possible light is acceptable now. After artificial chip shortages, the weather balloon incident, and TikTok, now it's suggested China was responsible for COVID. Expect more to follow.

What "weather balloon incident"? China intentionally sent a spy balloon into US airspace to gather intelligence and test our response. You can't seriously expect us to believe that it was for weather observations.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#747

Post by [deleted] »

jeswin wrote: post #431

I'd like for someone to throughly research and write about how it became taboo to discuss the virus leak theory. How researchers who discussed it were shunned, tagged as racists, and in some cases had their posts banned from Social Media. About how almost the entire scientific community discarded the idea as impossible. How during the early pandemic years, no mainstream news media dared talk about the possibility. Te…

[deleted]

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#748

Post by Manjuuu »

brutusborn wrote: post #651
Manjuuu wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hoping that in a decade or so, people will stop using "vaccines never prevented transmission" as an argument since it has been said at least a billion of times since the beginning, VACCINES PREVENTED SERIOUS ILLNESS. Same thing about the imaginary widespread side-effects or the mask being useless. Depressing. Personally I'm more worried about the people that went full retard about covid alternative views and cons…

It’s depressing that public institutions mishandled this so badly that a huge segment of the population has lost trust in them. I can agree that the messaging I got was that the vaccine was meant to prevent serious illness. Regardless, the absurd policies, suppression of information and discussion on vaccine side effects was unforgivable. People went full retard because the institutions meant to provide them with goo…

Yeah, the handling was not great but sadly I'm not really sure if the population was ready for detailed debate, considering that a good chunk of it ended up misunderstanding most of the official notices and falling for the most stupid conspiracy theories.

We need to improve education, by A LOT. And it's everyone responsibility.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#749

Post by Manjuuu »

anthonypasq wrote: post #676
Manjuuu wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hoping that in a decade or so, people will stop using "vaccines never prevented transmission" as an argument since it has been said at least a billion of times since the beginning, VACCINES PREVENTED SERIOUS ILLNESS. Same thing about the imaginary widespread side-effects or the mask being useless. Depressing. Personally I'm more worried about the people that went full retard about covid alternative views and cons…

the issue is that the conversation is so polarized and religious its literally impossible to discuss any of these issues. the poster you are responding to states some things which are reasonable and others which are complete nonsense. Its like people cant help themselves once picking a side to just wholesale accept every position all the way to "covid isnt real" on one end and "no one should ever leave their house ag…

> as having a 95% effectiveness against transmission for the original strain.

95% reduction of serious illness. The objective of the mass vaccination was having as much people as possible survive the pandemic. Herd immunity was just noise. There were a lot of noise and nonsense.

> Cloth masks are objectively useless for personal protection.

Proper masks are effective as measured multiple times, tons of statistics on it.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#750

Post by shri_krishna »

Jochim wrote: post #734
shri_krishna wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem was that the epidemic started in the middle of the US election campaign. At some point the Trump team started to support the lab leak theory. And then it became political; Biden supporters started framing them as conspiracy theorists, anybody who dared to support the leak theory was labeled as a Trump supporter etc. You hit the nail on the head. > In China some people must have been amazed how the US wa…

> He was warning how CCP was arresting scientists who put out information about the virus and even sharing videos of doctors who had recorded themselves warning about the virus itself (one of the first few who treated patients of the virus and fell sick themselves). I can't, for the life of me, find that channel on Youtube anymore. But yeah there was, and still is, a lot of censorship aided and abetted by Big Tech. T…

I am talking about before the mainstream media took it seriously (few days before that video of the doctor became viral). If I could find the Korean Youtuber I would have linked it here. Can't remember the name. The other prolific one who was giving daily updates was "Koreana Jones". Was following these two Youtubers for updates.
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