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China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

theguardian.com

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Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#91

Post by roenxi »

dlubarov wrote: post #65
meowface wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, there's basically no current evidence to suggest it was engineered, and plenty of evidence to suggest it was zoonotic and evolved naturally. One possibility that can't be totally ruled out is that maybe this was one of many viruses collected from local animals which their virology lab had stored for current or future study, and some kind of mistake led to it escaping, perhaps through an employee unknowingly g…

> Wuhan is a massive city and economic hub Let's dig into this a bit more though. The WIV's location on Google Maps apparently changed after the incident [1]. I don't know if it was a legitimate correction or what, but for the sake of argument let's suppose that the old location was correct. Then the lab is 8.6 miles from the wet market, or ~14 km. It looks like the population density in that area is around 10,000 pe…

You can apply the same logic to a specific license plate number seen near a murder meaning that the car's owner was almost surely the murderer. That isn't a high enough standard of evidence as any specific event is unlikely in hindsight.

A pandemic was likely to start somewhere densely populated and first be detected in a city centre. Somewhere densely populated was likely to have a specialised biological research lab. That it was BSL4 instead of BSL3 is evidence but it isn't particularly compelling.

More to the point; it doesn't really make much of a difference whether it came from a Chinese lab or not. Horrible pandemics have happened before and will happen again.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#92

Post by Vomzor »

cc81 wrote: post #82
cm2187 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bill Maher has an amusing monologue on that topic [1]. I don't think it is wrong to call it the Wuhan virus, and if the Chinese don't want the bad publicity associated with the virus, they should do something about these wet markets. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEfDwc2G2_8

On the other hand we did not call the "Swine Flu" the "North American flu"

It’s called Mexican flu in Dutch.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#93

Post by sv9 »

godtoldmetodoit wrote: post #41
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember a scientific paper on HN a few months ago by Chinese authors saying Covid came from that lab and that it came from bats that had infected workers there, or that was the assumption. That is my memory of the article. I cannot find that paper anymore. Does anyone remember this?

Tucker Carlson did a piece talking about how the bats that this jumped from do not live within ~900km of Wuhan, but that the lab in Wuhan did testing on the bats that they imported. It definitely seems plausible they were doing research on these bats, and that due to some improper controls it jumped over to a human working in the lab and that was our patient 0. It definitely seems feasible to me that it could have "c…

Non-US readers should know that Tucker Carlson is a Fox News pundit, and to say that he has credibility issues would be an incredibly charitable interpretation of things.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#95

Post by andromeduck »

cm2187 wrote: post #75
radicalbyte wrote: post #13

The the American leadership constantly calling it by the region name you can understand why an authoritarian regime would want to control discussion of the origins by experts. The risk is of their research being weaponized by said demagogues.

Bill Maher has an amusing monologue on that topic [1]. I don't think it is wrong to call it the Wuhan virus, and if the Chinese don't want the bad publicity associated with the virus, they should do something about these wet markets. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEfDwc2G2_8

Hilariously it was the CCP that pushed the Wuhan virus name in the first place, instead of SARS-like which was what the doctors were calling it, so as to not appear incompetent for having repeated the mistakes of SARS and in order to distance themselves and make sure it's the local baeurucrats that take the blunt of the heat.

Then they went on claiming everything was good again, 0 new cases nationally, so the head honchos could take credit for showing leadership and whatnot. Now they're blaming new cases on foreigners, especially Africans, most of whom never even left the country since this whole ordeal started both to stoke nationalism + rally around the flag effect and so as to evade responsibility for not actually having stopped it yet.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#96

Post by rumanator »

meowface wrote: post #79
papermachete wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just as much China's (or anyone else's in the interest of science) to prove the lab had zero correlation to this incident. If only to appease a crowd.

What? That's not how evidence works. The onus is on the person making the claim to provide positive evidence. Not actively insisting they have to prove a negative.

> What? That's not how evidence works. The onus is on the person making the claim to provide positive evidence.

You might have had a point if the Chinese regime wasn't putting it's propaganda machine into overdrive spewing conspiracy theories on how covid19 was created by the US to attack China.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#97

Post by throwanem »

andromeduck wrote: post #61
throwanem wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be lots of things. The focus on a possible escape from containment as the source seems odd given that - among other more likely causes - bat guano is also widely used as fertilizer, and bats, like humans, shed coronaviruses in their feces. Except that where we do so only occasionally and only when actively infected, bats' generally higher viral load and the high intraspecific transmissibility of a lot of the…

Except this started in the heart of a city the size of New York, near a market not known to have sold bats, within half a kilometer of a lab known to have been doing research collecting bats from neighboring provinces near villages with people confirmed contracted SARS like viruses from bats per their own state media documentary. And then there's the behavior of the CCP.

No one knows where this started. We know where the first confirmed case was reported, but that's not the same thing.

I carry no brief for the CCP. But I do find it difficult to say nothing in the face of what looks like a struggle among a variety of factions, none openly declared, to establish a narrative of responsibility for a world-altering catastrophe, with no closer or more consistent reference to facts of any kind than is judged useful in support of whatever claim is being pushed at the moment - and, most notably, with the only reference to potentially contradictory facts being to claim either that they're unfounded, or presented with ulterior intent, or both.

Last time I saw something play out that looked like this, it followed the World Trade Center attack and resulted in the Iraq war. That was a catastrophe from both a humanitarian perspective and one concerned with enhancing the geopolitical power of the US - but it was, at least, relatively minor in both respects. This one, if it plays out similarly, seems likely to be much worse.

And aside from all of that, what the hell, is your time of no value? If you're going to peddle what may very well prove to be war propaganda, at least you should have the self-respect to refuse to do it for free.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#98

Post by sjg007 »

andromeduck wrote: post #61
throwanem wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be lots of things. The focus on a possible escape from containment as the source seems odd given that - among other more likely causes - bat guano is also widely used as fertilizer, and bats, like humans, shed coronaviruses in their feces. Except that where we do so only occasionally and only when actively infected, bats' generally higher viral load and the high intraspecific transmissibility of a lot of the…

Except this started in the heart of a city the size of New York, near a market not known to have sold bats, within half a kilometer of a lab known to have been doing research collecting bats from neighboring provinces near villages with people confirmed contracted SARS like viruses from bats per their own state media documentary. And then there's the behavior of the CCP.

You have previous known infections in the villagers who interact with bats and then travel to say the Wuhan live market. We study these viruses because we know they infect humans. The Spanish flu was a bird flu. There were no biosafety level 5 labs back then. We get viruses from other animals all the time.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#99

Post by Razengan »

leetcrew wrote: post #48
meowface wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, there's basically no current evidence to suggest it was engineered, and plenty of evidence to suggest it was zoonotic and evolved naturally. One possibility that can't be totally ruled out is that maybe this was one of many viruses collected from local animals which their virology lab had stored for current or future study, and some kind of mistake led to it escaping, perhaps through an employee unknowingly g…

I don't see any evidence to suggest the virus was engineered or released deliberately. why would you deliberately release a bioweapon in a densely populated part of your own country? doesn't make sense. the lab in wuhan is not just any virology lab though; it's one of only two biosafety level 4 labs in all of china and samples of similar coronaviruses are held and studied there. it may very well be a coincidence; imp…

> why would you deliberately release a bioweapon in a densely populated part of your own country? doesn't make sense.

Historically, China has not been above harming their own citizens. There is probably still a substantial "Greater Good" philosophy there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#100

Post by [deleted] »

ueudrjjj wrote: post #55
andromeduck wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natrualy occuring viruses escape from labs all the time, particularly in China. Infact SARS is known to have escaped twice in Beijing. That the virus originated zoonotically does not precude a lab accident + leak theory of origin in fact we know that one of the labs actively experimenting on bats there was within half a kilometer of the market. You combine that with a significant fraction of the first known hospitali…

One of the researchers at that lab was also effectively dissapeared. I don't believe the conspiracy crowd saying this was some kind of weapon, but there's reasonable evidence to suggest that this is a case of embarrassing government incompetence (which the CCP loaths) followed by attempts to cover up said incompetence while a solution was persued.

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