[HN Gopher] First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at...
___________________________________________________________________
First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US
government sources
Author : larsiusprime
Score : 317 points
Date : 2023-06-14 16:28 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (public.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (public.substack.com)
| AmenBreak wrote:
| [flagged]
| Imnimo wrote:
| It is hard to tell from the writing - are the sources claiming
| that they know the researchers were sick with Covid-19
| specifically, or are they saying they know the researchers with
| sick with something, and that they had symptoms consistent with
| covid-19?
|
| We go from:
|
| >Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest
| people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping,
| and Yan Zhu.
|
| To:
|
| >not only do we know there were WIV scientists who had developed
| COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019,
|
| Is it Covid, or Covid-like?
| rightbyte wrote:
| I can't make sense of this article. It is a bit rambling and
| seems to mix quotes from different times.
|
| "Politicians, scientists, journalists, and amateur researchers
| for years now have zeroed in on the possibility that Covid-19
| may have resulted from U.S.-funded gain-of-function research
| conducted in China."
|
| And the authors leave it at that. Maybe some references to
| articles would be nice? Or should I just trust their meta-
| analysis or what.
| [deleted]
| jleyank wrote:
| There seems to have been covid cases in Europe in last-quarter
| 2019, which suggests it was there or brought there before the
| outbreak that made the news in 2020. Doesn't rule out leaks and
| crossovers, just moves them elsewhere or else when. Viral
| pneumonia was occurring, symptoms turned out to match covid and
| nobody was saving or testing blood samples. Outside of a few
| places in Dec. But people had aggressive, surprising lung
| problems that didn't present flu symptoms. Maybe that was a pre-
| covid leak or they're incorrect when the leak occurred.
|
| It also hit the initial sites very quickly, which suggests very
| contagious or already present in some form. To put my tin foil
| hat on, was omicron the "antidote" virus that was deliberately
| released to put the fire out? It was very different genetically
| and even more contagious.
| midnightauro wrote:
| [dead]
| hammock wrote:
| The Wuhan Games, at which 10,000 athletes from the worlds'
| armies participated, wrapped October 27, 2019, after which
| people left Wuhan to return to their homes all over the world,
| including to Italy where many of the first cases outside of
| Wuhan occured
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games
| zmgsabst wrote:
| WIV took down their database and upgraded their ventilation
| circa September 2019. [0]
|
| Event 201 wargame about just such a disease was held in
| October 2019 -- where people "role played" many of the
| policies we saw enacted. [1]
|
| Trump signed for flu vaccine research in September 2019,
| developing new technologies and an influenza task force. [2]
|
| I'm sure that's all just coincidence.
|
| [0] - https://news.yahoo.com/wuhan-lab-air-circulation-
| systems-135...
|
| [1] - https://centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/tabletop-
| exerci...
|
| [2] - https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-09-24/pdf/2
| 019-2...
| jvm___ wrote:
| So the plot of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six comes true, release a
| virus at the Olympics closing ceremonies and it will spread
| globally almost immediately.
| baja_blast wrote:
| I heard from a friend from Taiwan that there were rumors of
| some kinda of virus spreading around by mid 2019 in China. The
| thing is if there were blood samples showing a much earlier
| date of covid spreading in China there is zero chance we would
| ever hear about it. It is also worth noting that the region hit
| hardest in Italy early on just so happens to be a huge textile
| manufacturing center with a huge Chinese population.
| sp0rk wrote:
| > It is also worth noting that the region hit hardest in
| Italy early on just so happens to be a huge textile
| manufacturing center with a huge Chinese population.
|
| If you're talking about Prato, your information is completely
| wrong.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| I remember the sudden freak out in the media about vaping in
| late 2019 because young people were being hospitalized with
| lung damage. Have to wonder if that was actually covid and the
| vapes were just coincidence, they'd been around for years at
| that point so them all of the sudden having media hysteria
| around them was weird to me at the time
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/10/health/vaping-outbreak-2019-e...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| there was a new chemical introduced into the black market
| supply chain in 2019 causing lung injury
| Symmetry wrote:
| That was found to be black market vape cartridges using
| vitamin E acetate, which you don't want in your lungs.
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/s.
| ..
| [deleted]
| nso wrote:
| I got ill in a way I'd never really gotten ill before, in
| November/December 2019 -- after having travelled from Mexico to
| Norway. I was barely out of bed for the month I was in the
| country. I thought it might be dengue, but one of the first
| days there I got checked out in the hospital -- and they said I
| had an unidentified viral infection, but not dengue. After
| being released I got incredibly ill, but not much you can do
| with viral infections anyways so I just rode it out.
|
| Having had Covid 3 times since it was named, I've got a pretty
| good grip on what it feels like -- and I've many times wondered
| if I didn't have it back then in 2019 as well, as the symptoms
| lined up too well.
| duderific wrote:
| I had a really bad cold-like illness in late November 2019,
| which left behind a severe sore throat which lasted about
| three weeks. It was notable because it wouldn't go away, to
| the point where I went to both urgent care and my primary
| doctor on separate occasions (I'm not one to go to the doctor
| unless I really need to.) Both times they took a look at my
| throat, proclaimed it to be a viral infection, and sent me on
| my way.
|
| I too have wondered if I actually had Covid, but nobody knew
| how to diagnose it at that time.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| I got a worse-than-ever-experienced respiratory infection
| after a trip to Europe arounds Thanksgiving 2019 as well: I
| wasn't well enough to ski even a month later and had
| mysterious lung-scarring on my X-rays which in retrospect
| looks very much like an early Covid infection too.
| nidhalbt wrote:
| There's a problem, covid was in Italy as early as September 2019.
| (see Dr John Campbell's video on this) Cases in November 2019
| aren't early, it started probably six months earlier.
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| I was at Madrid airport in June 2019 and waiting in the long
| line for border control to leave there was a man who was
| displaying extreme flu-like symptoms. Coughing, sweating, pale
| as a ghost. Mind you, this is the height of summer. Even back
| then, prior to the pandemic, I actively avoided him because he
| looked really unwell.
|
| I know there is no way of knowing and at best it is a fanciful
| mental exercise, but I think to myself 'what if'?
| dwater wrote:
| "John Lorimer Campbell is an English YouTuber and retired nurse
| educator known for his videos about the COVID-19 pandemic.
| Initially, the videos received praise, but they later veered
| into misinformation. He has been criticised for suggesting
| COVID-19 deaths have been over-counted, repeating false claims
| about the use of ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment, and
| providing misleading commentary about the safety of COVID-19
| vaccines.
|
| ...
|
| He holds a diploma in nursing from the University of London, a
| BSc in biology from the Open University, an MSc in health
| science from the University of Lancaster, and a Ph.D. in
| nursing from the University of Bolton. He received the Ph.D.
| for his work on developing methods of teaching via digital
| media such as online videos."
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Campbell_(YouTuber)
|
| For anyone wondering who this is and if he is a reliable
| source.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| Sounds like a guy with some pretty relevant credentials.
| Accusations of misinformation are a dime a dozen, and
| probably made oddly enough by people with fewer relevant
| credentials.
| xdavidliu wrote:
| agreed that that is absolutely not a legit source. I was
| curious so I googled, and found something more legit-
| sounding:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-
| tim...
|
| > ROME (Reuters) - The new coronavirus was circulating in
| Italy in September 2019, a study by the National Cancer
| Institute (INT) of the Italian city of Milan shows, signaling
| that it might have spread beyond China earlier than thought.
| tap-snap-or-nap wrote:
| Tricks Dr John Campbell uses to spread DISINFORMATION on
| YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQC0tTECvQ
| euix wrote:
| I am really interested in the social-political dimension of this.
| Was the initial hypothesis of a lab leak suppressed during the
| initial part of the pandemic primarily due to Western
| government's fear of a diplomatic breakdown (like Russia) with
| China? The economies are far more interdependent than compared to
| Russia and there is a far more economically important Chinese
| diaspora in the West.
|
| What would it take to get a honest investigation within China?
| Presumably not under the current regime - if it were true, the
| magnitude of the disaster would be 100x what Chernobyl was for
| the Soviet Union, it wouldn't just be an accident at that point.
|
| Would it totally legitimize the Chinese state in the eyes of its
| people and the world? And for that reason, could we ever expect a
| honest accounting? Too much blood (literal and metaphorical) has
| been spilled and with the lockdowns, vaccine mandates, passports,
| school closures, etc and everything else that has happened, most
| elite institutions, state actors, businesses, media, corporations
| have become complicit in some way in abuses, lies, deliberate
| obfuscation of one type or another.
|
| It feels like a breakpoint in history to me.
| sva_ wrote:
| > I am really interested in the social-political dimension of
| this. Was the initial hypothesis of a lab leak suppressed
| during the initial part of the pandemic primarily due to
| Western government's fear of a diplomatic breakdown (like
| Russia) with China? The economies are far more interdependent
| than compared to Russia and there is a far more economically
| important Chinese diaspora in the West.
|
| I wonder to what extent the hypothesis has been shutdown
| because the people who were considered to be qualified to make
| that assessment are interested in the continuation of gain-of-
| function research.
|
| > What would it take to get a honest investigation within
| China? Presumably not under the current regime
|
| You answered it yourself, impossible under the CCP. It seems
| that they convinced their population that the virus has
| actually emerged somewhere in the west, and that was the end of
| it for them.
| [deleted]
| dekhn wrote:
| Somewhere, the gods of propaganda and susceptibility are
| chortling with delight at how easily even ostensibly smart people
| can believe things based on very limited data.
| kneebonian wrote:
| Um yikes sweaty this is actually misinformation we all know that
| the Wuhan Institute of Virology was not associated with this at
| all despite them studying bat like coronaviruses at the WIV. For
| suggesting such racist misinformation the OP should probably be
| put in jail or at very least not allowed on the internet anymore.
| mullingitover wrote:
| Unless someone has specimen samples from the sick WIV scientists,
| this doesn't really prove anything. Nasty respiratory viruses
| with Covid-like symptoms aren't actually that rare, and there's a
| lot of overlap between a bad respiratory infection and a mild
| Covid infection. I've talked to numerous people in the US who
| swore they had the full checklist of Covid symptoms well before
| the November 2019 date they're talking about in this article, but
| these claims are not borne out by the observed data in viral
| surveillance.
|
| It's really unfortunate that there isn't some kind of rigorous
| global pathogen surveillance program that's regularly sampling
| the world's population and doing sequencing for novel pathogens.
| The only reason we discovered Covid in the US early on was
| because the Seattle Flu Study kinda broke the rules and went back
| through their samples to test for Covid when they weren't
| _technically_ allowed to do it. Ideally we 'd have global
| wastewater surveillance as well as individual anonymized sample
| gathering. It sounds expensive, which is why nobody wants to do
| it, but Covid really shows how badly it's needed.
| swang wrote:
| a close family member swore they got covid at CES 2020. they
| went to vegas and came back real sick for a couple of days.
|
| i remember in 2020 or so they were also talking about covid
| being in the sewage in some european city (i think in italy?
| and/or spain?) but my assumption was they were detecting things
| that were also common in other influenza strains.
| lamontcg wrote:
| If SARS-CoV-2 was all over CES 2020 on Jan 7-10 then people
| would have already been unmistakably dying. Once you've
| infected around 1,000 people in a geographic location it has
| already spilled over into an elder care facility and rips
| through there and kills about a third of them.
|
| The first such incident in the US wasn't until a patient got
| sick on Feb 19th in Kirkland, WA.
|
| The fact that the virus doubled every 3 days and slaughtered
| people in elder care facilities means that it isn't credible
| to think that it was floating around CES 2020.
|
| The doubling rate of 3 days and the high level of mortality
| means that the virus doesn't really hide for that long,
| although due to exponential spread it is first very slow and
| then it quickly becomes very, very fast.
|
| It is good at cryptic spread for 1-2 months, where it is very
| difficult to detect and the first several hundred people
| mostly just get colds and nobody notices and it actually
| spreads fairly poorly and cryptically, but then it reaches a
| critical mass and the superspreading events start popping off
| and someone gives to one of those elder care facilities and
| then it can't be ignored.
|
| If it was all over CES or any other tight cluster in early
| Jan (the usual "everyone at work was sick in Jan I bet it was
| COVID" idea) then that would have marked a point where the
| virus was changing from cryptic spread to announcing itself.
| You once that happens, you can't avoid the virus slaughtering
| a care facility before the month is out. Since that didn't
| happen, then the infections at CES didn't happen.
| [deleted]
| karmicthreat wrote:
| There was a really bad flu that went around just before
| Covid. It was a bad enough flu for me that I actually had to
| take a Ventolin inhaler. When I finally got covid in late
| 2022, I would say the flu I picked up in 2020 was worse.
| tap-snap-or-nap wrote:
| We can only guess, RSV also seems to have worse effect on
| people than covid and flu and it is not uncommon to
| encounter this monster. Unless we have the sample of the
| pathogen to analyse, it is all hearsay.
| ipqk wrote:
| I know a bunch of NYCers that swore they got covid in Jan
| 2020, but it's both mathematically impossible for all of them
| to have had it based on the circulating numbers at the time,
| and then when they actually got Covid in the coming
| months/years they changed their tune.
| taeric wrote:
| Oddly, I assumed I had it early in the waves. Never got a
| positive test, as folks weren't testing back then. Finally
| had our first positive test this year. And whatever I had
| at the start was way way worse than when I had covid. Such
| that I can understand a lot of folks being very confused on
| all of this.
| lamontcg wrote:
| A common cold that turns into bronchial pneumonia can be
| substantially worse than SARS-CoV-2 in any given person.
|
| That doesn't make the common cold worse than SARS-CoV-2
| on average.
| taeric wrote:
| Honestly, odds are high I did have an early covid case.
| Was like an asthma attack with a few nights of fever. And
| I had every symptom. (Though, my understanding is loss of
| smell came and went as symptoms? I can't remember what
| the final call on that was.) I never got a confirmed
| test, as they weren't testing then.
|
| Mostly irrelevant, as I don't think it would change
| anything else. Keep your distance and try not to get
| people sick is still good advice. I just offer it as
| understanding that there is a lot to be confused about on
| this. Kind of like early claims that kids couldn't get
| it. Which is asinine on evidence of everything kids
| spread through the family.
| lamontcg wrote:
| My understanding is that the loss of smell from early
| COVID tends to be fairly profound. It makes food
| disgusting. You can burn food on the stove and not smell
| it even after the fire alarm goes off. And it recovers
| slowly. It isn't like the usual changes in taste/smell
| during an infection which are mostly due to the symptoms
| of rhinitis and clear up when they clear up.
| taeric wrote:
| Yeah, that was my understanding, and is what I had. Was
| odd to find I could breath just fine, but couldn't smell
| coffee.
|
| Had a similar thing happen a year ago, where I couldn't
| even smell menthol rub. Could breath, just couldn't
| smell. That time, though, I was testing and never got a
| positive test. I thought, at the time, the general idea
| was that loss of smell wasn't a thing, anymore. Maybe
| not?
| kcplate wrote:
| I didn't have anything early (I've never caught it
| despite multiple direct exposures, but I rarely get sick
| from anything anyway), but both my wife and son-in-law
| came back from separate business trips in late
| January/early Feb 2020 with all the classic symptoms.
| Both subsequently caught Covid in 2022 and both described
| the experience as very similar to their 2020 experiences.
|
| No way to know for sure if it was Covid in 2020 since no
| testing at the time of their illness, but I would not be
| willing to bet against the possibility despite all the
| "it would have been impossible due to..." theorizing some
| folks have said on this thread.
| geuis wrote:
| I don't trust this article _at all_.
|
| > Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest
| people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping,
| and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have
| leaked the pandemic virus.
|
| > It is unclear who in the U.S. government had access to the
| intelligence about the sick WIV workers, how long they had it,
| and why it was not shared with the public.
|
| At absolutely no point in this article are any new "sources"
| pointed out.
|
| The authors make that statement early on so as to make the reader
| think something new in the article is going to be revealed.
|
| Instead we get multiple paragraphs of links to various quotes and
| suppositions from various people, some of whom were involved in
| investigating the origins and some who work in the field.
| websap wrote:
| > Just moments ago, an NGO called U.S. Right to Know released
| heavily-redacted U.S. State Department cables that it obtained
| under the Freedom of Information Act. One July 2020 cable
| reads, "Initial Outbreak Could Have Been Contained in China if
| Beijing Had Not Covered It Up."
|
| From - https://substack.com/@shellenberger
| letmevoteplease wrote:
| You won't have to wait long for confirmation. The Director of
| National Intelligence will be required by law to declassify
| information about the infected researchers on June 18th,
| including their names, symptoms, date of onset and role at
| WIV.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-
| bill/619...
| geuis wrote:
| Hey that's a cool link. I'm kinda embarrassed to say I didn't
| know you could track bills like this going through Congress.
| Thanks for the lead.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| >You won't have to wait long for confirmation.
|
| Confirmation that they were sick. Not confirmation of what
| they were sick with.
| Reason077 wrote:
| Given the location, the timing, the symptoms, the severity
| of the illness (it's unusual for 'flu to put health young
| adults in hospital) I think we can be pretty confident in
| our guess.
| freeopinion wrote:
| Except, of course, we don't know who they were, let alone
| whether they were otherwise healthy or whether they were
| young adults. Whether somebody is confident in your
| guesses is up to them I guess.
| wavefunction wrote:
| My Aunt was killed by the flu. She had a pre-existing
| unknown heart-condition and despite her healthy lifestyle
| the flu weakened her heart enough that she needed a
| heart-transplant in her early 20s. She died at age 27.
|
| I tell this story whenever it is possible, to educate
| people about what the flu is capable of doing, whenever
| someone says the flu is "no big deal." Statistically,
| perhaps not. Unless you're the statistic that is.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Not really relevant here though.
| jjulius wrote:
| They are replying directly to a tangential comment that
| someone else made. It might not be relevant to this
| overall thread, but it's relevant to this particular
| comment chain.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Roll an N-sided die representing all possible locations for
| possible human/bat human/animal interactions.
|
| What percentage of those facets are city centers near level
| 4 bio labs that research these types of viruses?
| wk_end wrote:
| FWIW my understanding is that the labs were only BSL-2.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| People need to start thinking of politically-impactful truths
| in terms of probability distributions and outcome possibility
| spaces, rather than absolutely.
|
| _If_ it were a lab leak, there are probably a handful of
| eyewitnesses.
|
| Any information (not leak; was leak) would have serious
| ramifications to the political systems of the two largest
| economies in the world (the US and China).
|
| What are the chances that we'll ever hear the true story?
|
| Which isn't a suggestion that "They're covering {specific
| thing} up." It's a suggestion that we will never hear evidence
| of _any_ of the possible outcomes.
|
| And beyond that, what would "the truth" in this case change?
|
| >> _Said Metzl, "Had US government officials including Dr.
| Fauci stated from day one that a COVID-19 research-related
| origin was a very real possibility, and made clear that we had
| little idea what viruses were being held at the Wuhan Institute
| of Virology, what work was being done there, and who was doing
| that work, our national and global conversations would have
| been dramatically different. The time has come for a full
| accounting."_
|
| Yes, the national and global conversations would have been
| substantially _worse_ and _less effective_.
|
| Once the cat's out of the bag with a global pandemic, any
| breath blaming its origin is wasted.
|
| Can you imagine how many scarce resources would have been
| mispent if SARS-CoV-2 had begun with worldwide knowledge that
| China was responsible?
| kneebonian wrote:
| For me it isn't about the effectiveness or the blame it was
| that we spent 2 years where many fundamental and basic rights
| were suspended because of fear. For me it is not about blame
| it is about reminding people how fragile our rights are and
| that there are people all to willing and eager to take them.
|
| Combined with the massive redistribution of wealth that
| happened as a direct result of government action that further
| widened wealth inequality.
| rnk wrote:
| We had an emergency health situation and the government
| made emergency rules. Those roles were rescinded later when
| the emergency was reduced, partly because of widespread
| vaccination. This is not the first time that during a
| health emergency the US govt at various levels made
| temporary stringent rules. It turned out that our political
| argument against the rules is probably why the u.s had a
| much higher death rate from covet than other industrialized
| countries.
| basisword wrote:
| I'm sure the millions that died are also frustrated our
| rights were infringed temporarily due to...fear.
| mistermann wrote:
| What rights are those? Do all humans share these rights
| regardless of geographical location or geopolitical
| affiliation?
| brvsft wrote:
| You'd have a point if these actions saved lives, but they
| didn't. And it turns out in some cases, the actions
| probably led to more deaths, e.g. NY quarantining
| patients in nursing homes.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| > Can you imagine how many scarce resources would have been
| mispent if SARS-CoV-2 had begun with worldwide knowledge that
| China was responsible?
|
| OTOH if we knew that China was responsible, won't the future
| be better served by putting safeguards to prevent a worse
| thing happening again?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I'm of two minds on that.
|
| On one hand: yes, more data will inform future technical
| approaches and procedures.
|
| On the other hand: no, people are technically ignorant,
| xenophobic, and more willing to scapegoat and project anger
| than reflect on their own behavior.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| I've lived in many US states, including in the south, and
| I have not met very many of these ignorant, xenophopic,
| scapegoat-seeking people that everyone claims to be
| worried about. Seems like those people, if they exist in
| any significant numbers, are just an excuse to lie to the
| public "for their own good".
| ajross wrote:
| Seems like the future would be better served by putting
| safeguards in whether or not China was responsible. What
| safeguards specifically are you proposing, and why do they
| demand a culprit?
| willcipriano wrote:
| China wouldn't be solely responsible, this was a US
| project.
| kornhole wrote:
| The Ecohealth Alliance received funding from NIH for the
| gain of function research which means it would not be just
| China to blame.
| https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-says-grantee-
| fai...
| tonetheman wrote:
| [dead]
| wbsun wrote:
| My sources on the planet Earth say that nowadays this is the
| way to write news, essays, blogs, podcast videos, and books in
| order to attract attentions.
| wsatb wrote:
| All you need to do is take a quick look at one of the author's
| other stories[1] and your skepticism will grow further.
|
| [1] https://substack.com/@shellenberger
| ajross wrote:
| Likewise Taibbi burned any credibility he may have had on the
| Twitter Files spin job.
|
| Even taking this at face value and ignoring the authors: the
| sourcing is basically nonsense: "According to multiple U.S.
| government officials interviewed as part of a lengthy
| investigation by Public and Racket". That could be anyone! Do
| they know or do they not know? Is their knowledge first or
| second-hand? Have they been the source for similar stories?
| Were they right? Even the most top-tier, trusted Times or
| Post reporter couldn't get that past an editor. Come on.
| mistermann wrote:
| It is perhaps noteworthy that this is the writing form that
| a lot of mainstream news articles take (advantage of?).
|
| I also am not a fan of it, but I must confess I do enjoy
| seeing it used in the other direction.
| kneebonian wrote:
| A stellar example of adhominem in the wild.
|
| Attack the argument not the person.
| mock-possum wrote:
| > Why Politicians Are Trying To Take Your Children
|
| > California legislation would punish parents who don't
| affirm gender dysphoria
|
| wow yeah that's a take
| rnk wrote:
| Also, how the media is really mean to RFK junior, the crazy
| RFK by the way. Supporting him puts you on the Bozo list.
| kornhole wrote:
| Or it could do the opposite. Both Taibbi and Shellenberger
| are independent investigative journalists with no party
| loyalties. Their funding comes directly from readers rather
| than corporations or billionaire owned outlets. They can make
| a few mistakes from time to time but own up to them. Their
| opinions are their own, but they rarely report anything not
| factual.
| mmcwilliams wrote:
| The claim that the funding doesn't come from a "billionaire
| owned outlet" doesn't really track if you look at the
| investors[0] in Substack. I count at least one billionaire-
| run fund in that list.
|
| There was also an incident a couple months ago where Elon
| Musk accused Taibbi of working for Substack, which he
| denied, but in leaked texts says they "originally hired"
| him[1], which I find confusing.
|
| [0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/substack/compan
| y_fin...
|
| [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/04/10/elon-
| musk-...
| GolfPopper wrote:
| Um, among the "mistakes" Taibbi recently "owned up to" is
| falsifying information in his Twtter Files reporting. Among
| other things, he deliberately misrepresented mentions of
| the non-profit Center for Internet Security (CIS) as the
| federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
| (CISA). It's clear that was not a mistake, but a choice he
| made in order to further a specific narrative - one that he
| only admitted when confronted about it. [1]
|
| 1. https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/07/mehdi-hasan-
| dismantles-t...
| rnk wrote:
| I didn't see apologizing from shellenberger about his RFK
| junior article.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Isn't the gist of this fairly old news? Or did they just not have
| the names before?
| larsiusprime wrote:
| Being able to tie it specifically to the lab this concretely,
| by identifying the first patients by name, and having that
| (allegedly) from US government officials, is all new
| information, AFAIK.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| [flagged]
| hwillis wrote:
| Very. This was put out in the state department Jan 2021, 2.5
| years ago: https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-
| the-wuhan...
|
| > The U.S. government has reason to believe that several
| researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before
| the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms
| consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.
| sixQuarks wrote:
| You're very giddy to try to brush this under the rug. The
| truth is that big tech and Fauci colluded to suppress the lab
| leak theory, there are leaked emails that prove it. YouTube
| and Twitter were censoring and demonetizing channels that
| would talk about the lab leak theory. What do you have to say
| about that?
| hwillis wrote:
| > What do you have to say about that?
|
| I think that despite the efforts of any of those people, I
| never stop hearing about these "bombshells" which are
| trivially disproven. There has been no new evidence or
| anything of lab leaks since early 2020 and I am just tired
| of hearing the same things over and over.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Wasn't the comment just a validation that this story has
| been out there previously? (not to this extent with the
| names and a lot more info/context, but thats indeed what I
| was trying to get clarification on). How does clarifying a
| news item lead to some bias or stance on the matter, or
| trying to "brush under the rug?" I think you have read into
| that comment way too much..
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Can someone please explain to me what difference it makes. AFAIK,
| no one is claiming this was a bioweapon or intentional assault.
| So what difference could it possibly make where COVID originated
| from.
|
| I think the lab leak theory is wrong, but even if it was true I
| no idea how that should change anything.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| I'm a lot more interested in how we weren't allowed to talk
| about it for a couple years than whether or not it's ultimately
| true.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| I keep asking myself, "who gives a shit?".
|
| When the virus was first discovered, it was important to pin down
| who and where Patient zero was.
|
| Now? Pure politicking. It isn't even a slow news day!
| lmm wrote:
| Figuring out what we did wrong and what we can do better is
| important. This isn't going to be the last global pandemic.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Politicking was spending 2 years calling anyone racist who
| talked about the lab leak theory. This is just a reaction.
| streptomycin wrote:
| 10 million people are dead. I find it hard to believe how
| anyone could not be at least mildly interested in obtaining
| more details about the origin of Covid-19, whether it's from
| the market or the lab or somewhere else.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| 'Said Metzl, "Had US government officials including Dr. Fauci
| stated from day one that a COVID-19 research-related origin was a
| very real possibility, and made clear that we had little idea
| what viruses were being held at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
| what work was being done there, and who was doing that work, our
| national and global conversations would have been dramatically
| different. The time has come for a full accounting."'
|
| Seems doubtful that Daszak (and possibly Fauci) had little idea
| what was going on in that lab..
| ajkjk wrote:
| Why?
| mandmandam wrote:
| It would take a long-form article to clearly enumerate all of
| the reasons with citations, but long story short, the pair of
| them were caught lying over and over again the past few
| years.
|
| For example, Daszak's paper in the Lancet claiming the virus
| was almost certainly of natural origin was used as the basis
| for justifying the censorship of tens or hundreds of millions
| of posts. He failed to declare his conflict of interest, as
| did something like 25 out of the 26 other authors. This was a
| broad failure among academia and news, as his reasoning in
| the paper was specious.
|
| Fauci was caught telling fibs about his beliefs on natural
| origin as well, with a private position that it was quite
| likely. He also lied about funds sent to Wuhan, and the type
| of research they were doing.
| scoofy wrote:
| Also... I mean, unless I've created a false memory, I
| specifically remember that the discussion at the time was about
| a the virus literally being a bio-weapon, and not actually the
| entirely plausible, accidental escape of a virus.
|
| I've always had a completely open mind about it, even if
| experts have repeatedly suggested that it's plausible, but
| unlikely.
|
| Those prattling on about how "people called us crazy" that it
| was a WIV lab leak seem to completely misremember what was
| actually being discussed in April-May of 2020, and also seem to
| be trying to score political points in American politics, when
| _it seems very obvious_ that the CCP should take the lion 's
| share of any blame regarding any lack of transparency.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| No you misremember.
|
| Here I was ridiculed.
|
| Specifically remember a columnist at Parool, a Dutch local
| newspaper, talking about it how he was pressured by
| colleagues days after just mentioning a column it might be
| from the Lab.
|
| There was a consensus in the West it didn't came from the
| Lab, and those who suggested otherwise were non-scientific
| lunatics.
| Sakos wrote:
| Shit, I remember arguing with people like him back when the
| whole pandemic started that it was a distinct possibility,
| one of several, that should be fairly evaluated like every
| other. And people like him just waved it off as conspiracy
| theory garbage like we're seeing here. Same shit, different
| day, except now with the flavour of gaslighting along with
| it.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| It was wild.
|
| The most obvious theory was ridiculed.
|
| Some groups are very good at creating narritives in
| western media.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| People were being banned from twitter, youtube, facebook ext
| for mentioning lab leak... Now you want to gas light everyone
| saying "it was perfectly ok to talk about in 2020
|
| That is not accurate at all...
| methodical wrote:
| I remember learning a lot of the reasoning behind why I
| thought it was most likely a lab leak from a video I got as
| a top recommendation on youtube from a rather large channel
| that had near or over a million views at the time, so
| anecdotally I think perhaps a lot of the people who got
| banned for their discussion on the topic were either
| grouped up with people positing more extreme possibilities,
| or just an example of over reach. Either way, I personally
| don't remember people presenting the possibility of a lab
| leak being shredded (at least on youtube, I can't speak for
| the other platforms as I use them very infrequently).
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| Not everyone is terminally online mate. My experience
| mirrors theirs, lots of speculation and jokingly
| considering the various conspiracies at the time.
|
| Bioweapon was definitely one of the options that was
| boosted by china's outlandishly overreacting at the start,
| welding people into their home etc
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Facebook made a quiet but dramatic reversal last week: It
| no longer forbids users from touting the theory that
| COVID-19 came from a laboratory.
|
| > "In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of
| COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we
| will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made
| or manufactured from our apps," the social media platform
| declared in a statement.
|
| > [...]
|
| > Consider that Facebook's new declaration sits atop its
| About page, just above the site's previous policy on
| coronavirus-related misinformation--dated February 8, 2021
| --which was to vigorously purge so-called "false claims,"
| including the notion that the disease "is man-made or
| manufactured." The mainstream media had deemed this notion
| not merely wrong but dangerously absurd, and tech companies
| followed suit, suppressing it to the best of their
| abilities.
|
| https://reason.com/2021/06/04/lab-leak-misinformation-
| media-...
| mc32 wrote:
| There were lots of narratives. The main one that was coming
| out was that it did NOT come from the WIV. That gain of
| function was NOT happening at the WIV. That it likely came
| from people outside Wuhan who brought it to Wuhan and that
| the the Wet market was not the source either (though the CCP
| was pushing that narrative, others were making it more vague
| saying it came from the hinterlands). A second narrative by
| skeptics/conspiracists was that it had escape the WIV and
| that the WIV was conducting gain of function research. A
| third fringe theory was that it was a bio-weapon (this idea
| is idiotic given the guaranteed blowback/footgun you would
| get)
|
| Also people were being banned, shadowbanned, demonetized,
| etc. for proposing a lab-leak theory. But, I guess that's par
| for the course. Remember when politicians (I mean Nancy)
| said, unmasked, don't worry, go back to Chinatown and do
| business (slightly before they then imposed restrictions)
|
| Also, don't forget, people who saw strange unexpected
| repetitions (filler) in the sequencing were scoffed at.
| tzs wrote:
| > Also... I mean, unless I've created a false memory, I
| specifically remember that the discussion at the time was
| about a the virus literally being a bio-weapon, and not
| actually the entirely plausible, accidental escape of a
| virus.
|
| If you've created a false memory, then I've created a similar
| one.
|
| I remember very early some member of Congress saying it was a
| Chinese engineered bio-weapon deliberately released to
| cripple the US economy.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > the discussion at the time was about a the virus literally
| being a bio-weapon,
|
| This was the part that media outlets and government seized
| upon to call any discussion of the lab leak theory _racist._
| There was no "discussion" about covid being a "bio-weapon,"
| it was a bunch of anti-China hawks repeating it over and over
| again based on absolutely nothing. They were so obviously
| nationalist anti-Chinese that the theory that covid happened
| because Chinese people are dirty and eat weird diseased
| things was able to be sold as the _not-racist_ theory.
| methodical wrote:
| This.
|
| I have a few family members very deep in the weeds (QAnon,
| Cabal, One World Order type of crap) and they love to play
| this narrative. In reality it seemed like it was rather
| obvious to anybody who looked at the facts that this pandemic
| had dubious origins. Just a few of these were the close
| proximity, same family of viruses being researched,
| mysterious personnel changes around the time of the initial
| spread, etc., yet those same family members have turned any
| reluctance on my part to flat out declare this pandemic as a
| manufactured Chinese bioweapon into flat out denial of any
| chance of it being anything more than a big coincidence.
|
| I guess it boils down to conspiracy theorists believing that
| you're either all in, or not in at all, and there exists no
| middle ground to wait for more facts before coming to a
| conclusion one way or the other.
|
| I also feel like noting that I didn't engage in discussion on
| the topic with many other people outside of aforementioned
| family members on the topic, so who knows, maybe I would've
| been ridiculed for sitting on the fence, but anecdotally I
| definitely remember people seeing either source as a
| possibility (minus the Cabal manufactured pandemic to
| sterilize the human race one, of course).
| zaroth wrote:
| I can never understand if someone actually believes this or
| is just actively gaslighting.
|
| Anyone trying to discuss even the possibility of a lab leak
| was called xenophobic, a conspiracy theorist, banned from
| socials...
|
| Funny thing when the "conspiracy theorists" keep turning
| out to be right.
| methodical wrote:
| Except they haven't at all, lol
|
| By "the "conspiracy theorists" keep turning out to be
| right" do you mean like how Trump won the election in
| 2020, Biden is an actor, Obama has been hung for treason,
| people around the globe are dropping dead from the
| vaccine, etc.? These are the people I'm talking about
| when I speak about conspiracy theorists, people
| reasonably sitting on the fence when there is conflicting
| information are not. You speak in absolutes about how
| _everybody_ who presented the possibility of a lab leak
| was banned and labeled a xenophobe, and while I cannot
| speak onto your anecdotal experiences, I never saw this
| in any platform I participated on at the time, in fact
| (as I shared in another comment on this thread), I leaned
| towards the likelihood of a lab leak after getting
| recommended a very popular youtube video on the topic
| from a very popular channel. As far as I know, that video
| is still available, although it has obviously been a long
| time since I last watched it.
|
| Part of how cults are started is creation of a us versus
| them mentality, often where it doesn't exist. I believe
| this is why so many conspiracy theorists with more
| extreme beliefs might misconstrue their experiences in
| discussion around the topic, when in reality those
| discussing the very legitimate possibility of a lab leak
| never got much flak (anecdotally, as I said).
| pessimizer wrote:
| You're remembering incorrectly or your experience was
| narrow. At facebook, censoring discussion of a possible
| lab leak was literal written policy which wasn't changed
| until June of 2021: https://reason.com/2021/06/04/lab-
| leak-misinformation-media-...
|
| And Twitter's files showed that the government (through
| multiple departments), members of Congress, and private
| companies were directly sending lists of hundreds of
| names of people to ban or deemphasize for talking about
| it.
| predictabl3 wrote:
| Precisely this. I don't care to speculate, read, or give
| a single care in the world about this. I think the hope
| for stopping GoF research is about as high a chance as
| the world "putting a pause" on AI. And this thread is
| littered with all of the usual conspiracy head-nods.
|
| I think we should know more about the origins of COVID
| but I haven't seen a _single_ discussion of this that
| doesn 't immediately dove-tail into various other
| conspiracies or whistles.
|
| And I'm not making excuses for anyone or saying the
| CDC/Trump/Biden are blameless and innocent, but I kinda
| don't know what the point of these conversations are at
| this point.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I haven't seen a single discussion of this that doesn't
| immediately dove-tail into various other conspiracies or
| whistles.
|
| None ever will from your perspective if you're citing
| "head nods" and dog whistles.
| predictabl3 wrote:
| I don't know what that's supposed to mean.
|
| No, sorry not sorry, I don't really put much stock in the
| analysis of people that immediately link this into their
| unsubstantiated handwavey global conspiracies.
|
| I've seen articles, research, professionals talking about
| the evidence. Which _aren 't_ headnods and whistles. And
| I read it. And that's why I don't have any strong
| opinion, contrary to whatever I think is being implied in
| your comment. But comments? Public discussion? It's the
| same thing every time.
|
| Skepticism is this cool thing where instead of assuming
| an unclear premise and then immediately linking it to
| bigger, even less substantiated conspiracies theories
| that thereby reinforce how "true" my assumptions must
| be!!... I accept that I don't have the full picture.
| evandale wrote:
| > I haven't seen a single discussion of this that doesn't
| immediately dove-tail into various other conspiracies or
| whistles.
|
| > None ever will from your perspective if you're citing
| "head nods" and dog whistles.
|
| It means that if you consider mentioning the lab leak
| theory an automatic dogwhistle for bioweapon then of
| course every single discussion about these lab leak
| immediately dove-tails into various other conspiracies or
| whistles. It's circular reasoning and you're making it
| impossible to express nuance.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > I mean, unless I've created a false memory
|
| I'm pretty sure your memory is very faulty. Of all those
| saying it could be a lab leak, very few were talking it being
| a bio-weapon.
|
| > Those prattling on about how "people called us crazy" that
| it was a WIV lab leak seem to completely misremember what was
| actually being discussed in April-May of 2020
|
| Not at all. You are trying to rewrite history.
|
| Here's the bill from Congress, march 2023:
|
| https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-
| bill/619... It is the sense of Congress
| that-- (2) there is reason to believe the
| COVID-19 pandemic may have originated at the Wuhan
| Institute of Virology;
|
| People saying "people called us crazy" do deserve apologies,
| not downvotes.
|
| EDIT: just to be clear... I'm not saying it was or it wasn't
| a lab leak. I'm saying that there's a Congress bill from
| march 2023 saying there's reason to believe it was a lab-
| leak. And hence all those who said it was a lab-leak and who
| were called "conspiracy theorists" do deserve apologies.
| kelnos wrote:
| Not disagreeing with the overall premise, but:
|
| > _I 'm saying that there's a Congress bill from march 2023
| saying there's reason to believe it was a lab-leak._
|
| Congress writing up a bill asserting stuff like this isn't
| exactly something I consider persuasive either way.
| dahfizz wrote:
| You fell for the straw man.
|
| The media argued against the most outrageous and
| conspiratorial version of the lab leak theory to discredit
| it. They successfully made you associate lab leak with racist
| conspiracy
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I definitely remember it being discussed as a lab leak on HN
| sometime from December 2019 to March 2020
| tomp wrote:
| You've created a false memory.
|
| Even back then, there weren't any good counter-arguments
| against the "lab leak" theory (except "it's racist" because
| somehow "the Chinese are so filthy their food markets cause
| pandemics" isn't racist?!), so to censor it, the powers that
| be (Big Tech, Mainstream Media) instead attacked the
| adjacent, but very different "bioweapon" theory.
| [deleted]
| jchw wrote:
| I _knew_ this would happen, so much so I 'm pretty sure I
| even called it ahead of time. This happens so frequently that
| there ought to be a word for it.
|
| Yes, some conservative personalities early on had pushed some
| dumb conspiracies about COVID-19 being a bioweapon. No, that
| was not the crux of the argument that the many scientists,
| journalists and internet commenters had when they argued in
| favor of the lab leak hypothesis. Now I personally was never
| very attached to the theory, but I absolutely believed that
| we should have researched whether or not COVID-19 was indeed
| leaked from a lab. An actual argument against my position was
| that we shouldn't as it would only further fuel racism,
| xenophobia and geopolitical tensions even if it were true.
| There was also a lot of backlash against researchers who
| wanted investigation into the lab leak theory, probably for
| similar reasons.
|
| There's always amnesia about things like this, but I'm pretty
| sure COVID-19 has become a case study on how _not_ to handle
| a pandemic. A lot of what happened gave people a legitimate
| reason to distrust authority, and if we pretend that never
| happened things will simply continue to get worse as it
| repeats indefinitely.
|
| Again, I do agree that it was annoying seeing it become a
| political culture war issue about a conspiracy vs "trusting
| the science", but that is certainly not what I believe the
| majority of the lab leak hypothesis was angling for.
|
| Wikipedia even helpfully separates the two ideas into
| separate articles.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation#Bio-
| we...
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Yes, some conservative personalities early on had pushed
| some dumb conspiracies about COVID-19 being a bioweapon.
| No, that was not the crux of the argument that the many
| scientists, journalists and internet commenters had when
| they argued in favor of the lab leak hypothesis.
|
| It's totally insane. GP is literally rewriting history and
| getting upvoted for it. I post a link to a Congress bill
| (linked from TFA), from 2023 under the Biden administration
| (so not Trump), saying _" there's reason to believe COVID
| may have originated at the Wuhan lab"_ and I immediately
| get two downvotes.
|
| It's as if the shills who tried to bury the lab leak posts
| back then (not the bioweapon ones, just the lab leak ones)
| were still actively trying to control the narrative. This
| time by explaining why it was normal to label everyone who
| talked about lab leak a "conspiracy theory cracknut"
| because they'd supposedly all be talking about bio-weapon
| (which they weren't).
|
| > There's always amnesia about things like this, but I'm
| pretty sure COVID-19 has become a case study on how not to
| handle a pandemic. A lot of what happened gave people a
| legitimate reason to distrust authority, and if we pretend
| that never happened things will simply continue to get
| worse as it repeats indefinitely.
|
| I totally agree.
| WoahNoun wrote:
| The bill called for the declassification of any
| information related to the theory. Not a bill affirming
| where it came from. If there is no classified information
| confirming the theory, there is no reason for Biden not
| to sign it.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Good comment
| fzeroracer wrote:
| It's not 'some conservative personalities' and it's amazing
| to see people here so blatantly try to gaslight others. It
| was the president of the United States pushing the lab leak
| hard before any evidence fell down and then republican
| officials following up with the argument that it was a
| bioweapon. The reason why they did it was because they
| _wanted_ to give people a reason to distrust authority.
| That was part of the M.O even though the person pushing
| this stuff held the highest authority office in the land!
|
| I'm skeptical of the lab leak theory regardless if it's
| Trump or Biden pushing it because ultimately the US
| government is going to use whatever it can as a political
| weapon against other countries. This doesn't mean it's not
| potentially true, nor does it make China right, but it
| means people should be inherently skeptical of any
| positions the US takes on stuff like this.
| [deleted]
| treis wrote:
| The most popular human origin theory was a lab leak. It was
| easier to argue against the crazies claiming a bioweapon so
| that's what most did and that's what got the most press. But
| the primary human origin story was an accidental release.
| qclibre23 wrote:
| Accidental release and bioweapons research are not
| incompatible.
| btilly wrote:
| Bioweapons research and got infected in a lab that was at
| BSL 2 ARE incompatible. If you expect it to be able to
| infect humans, you are going to take more precautions.
|
| The theory here is that they were doing research on
| animal models and didn't think that humans could catch it
| from mice. Therefore they took too few precautions, and
| it escaped through them.
| startupsfail wrote:
| Trump was trying to play that "blame China" card. And was
| disclosing classified reports left and right. Fauci was not
| exactly on Trump's side. And not playing the blame game was a
| good option back then.
|
| But, it's not a good idea to reward Wuhan's Institute type of
| research. And there should be some accountability in the end.
| christkv wrote:
| In Daszak own words
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AksKoMZon6Y. At around 1h15m he
| answers a question about how they were doing gain of function
| research on SARS and SARS related virus with his colleagues in
| China (WIV).
|
| This guy then lead the sham "WHO" inspection of WIV. And Fauci
| funded him to work around the Obama prohibition on gain of
| function research.
| AnonCoward42 wrote:
| This information slipped over 2 years ago (probably right at the
| beginning). Wiesendanger did a study and referenced that a lab
| worker was suspected as patient zero1 as a hint.
|
| 1:https://www.uni-hamburg.de/newsroom/presse/2021/pm8.html
| (German, sorry)
| jmclnx wrote:
| [flagged]
| salad-tycoon wrote:
| Removed at the behest of powerful government groups and
| advertising agencies/pharma companies.
|
| Listen to The Zuck on lex fridman admitting (paraphrasing)
| "yeah we got some stuff wrong, censored things we shouldn't
| have when they later turned out to be evidence based."
|
| I believe this ,"very very minor", admission of major guilt is
| in the first half.
|
| Or the Twitter files and FBI offices in social media etc. or
| the Wikipedia bias and astroturfing.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Facebook just admitted that the government was asking them to
| censor information that was, in fact true.
|
| https://youtu.be/ixCKd8lUrKw
| janalsncm wrote:
| If that is shocking to you I would suggest reading up on the
| Pentagon Papers:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers
|
| The Snowden leaks are in the same vein.
| subsubzero wrote:
| Here are two good articles as well that document the lab leak(for
| further reading):
|
| https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
|
| and
|
| https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-no...
| hwillis wrote:
| https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/the-case-against-the-...
| cmpb wrote:
| Obviously, we should try to figure it out and learn from our
| mistakes, increase security, etc., but what accountability can we
| really expect from knowing that the pandemic started due to a lab
| leak? Accountability is almost meaningless compared to the scale
| of the total global loss.
|
| I'm reminded of a line from an episode of Star Trek TNG where a
| very powerful alien destroys an entire race by thinking them out
| of existence in a momentary lapse of judgement, and Picard simply
| says "We're not qualified to be your judges -- we have no law to
| fit your crime."
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| [flagged]
| culopatin wrote:
| It's silly to think that international relationships are that
| simple.
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| Are you implying that Dr. Fauci might have lied for political
| gain????
| culopatin wrote:
| I'm implying that dr fauci doesn't operate in a vacuum all
| by himself talking to the public.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| I don't understand how long it got for humanity as a whole to see
| the elephant. New virus, research center close by, Chinese
| denying but not letting investigation. It's like seeing your your
| husband exiting a brothel but still need proof he cheated.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| > It's like seeing your your husband exiting a brothel but
| still need proof he cheated.
|
| But it happened to be a Chinese brothel, so if you accuse him
| of cheating, you'll be called an ignorant, xenophonic,
| scapegoat-seeking racist.
| mc32 wrote:
| So... finally what lots of people were claiming but got censored
| on social media as well as mainstream media during the pandemic
| is being acknowledged and verified by the government.
|
| Follow up. Given statements to congress by government officials
| to Congress, under oath, that would contradict this conclusion,
| will there be repercussions for misleading the public, lawmakers
| and the scientific community?
|
| PS: It was never a credible bio-weapon attack (people are now
| trying to conflate this to instill FUD in people's memories --go
| do a google search with date ranges). Bio-weapons are terrible
| weapons of war. They are likely to affect the target as well as
| the deployer.
|
| For the nonbelievers of Censorship, read up on Matt Taibbi's
| reporting or read some other media than usual:
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-covid-censorship-ma...
| api wrote:
| I recall reading credible scientists talking about a lab leak
| from day one, and I always considered it a possibility. Yet
| many of the people pushing it on social media were pushing it
| as a 100% certainty and even that it was some kind of
| intentional bio-weapon attack. The people getting banned for
| this were conspiritainment grifters and people pushing fascist
| politics.
|
| The most effective way to cover something up is to have Alex
| Jones and Steve Bannon talk about it. If Fauci really is
| running some horrible conspiracy maybe he's paying these people
| to talk about it to make sure nobody takes the idea seriously.
|
| Then there were the people pushing the Ukraine bioweapons
| nonsense, which is a transparent Russian attempt to copy Bush
| II's "WMDs in Iraq" bullshit.
| mc32 wrote:
| You see... a grain of truth. Yes, in the very beginning is
| was allowed, but come May and June, it was verboten.
| api wrote:
| The best nonsense has grains of truth here and there. Makes
| it go down easier. The problem is that whatever truth is
| there is used to sell a larger agenda.
|
| I do wish we could just rationally discuss things. It's
| getting harder and harder to do that without everything
| being weaponized.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Yes, the barrage of downvoting on this thread on both
| sides is mindnumbing. Upvoting wherever I can to balance
| out the insanity
| bandrami wrote:
| Huh? What got censored on social media was the idea that this
| was an engineered bioweapon. This isn't even the same lab
| people were pointing fingers at.
| AHOHA wrote:
| >Given statements to congress by government officials that
| would contradict this conclusion, will there be repercussions
| for misleading the public, lawmakers and the scientific
| community?
|
| Laws are created to control the poor, else mostly will find a
| way to twist it. https://files.catbox.moe/pkkzal.jpeg
| janalsncm wrote:
| The fact that a broken clock is right once a day doesn't change
| the fact that it's still a broken clock, and after being
| identified as such doesn't get to claim oppression after
| rightfully being relegated to the garbage bin.
|
| The same people who asserted things about the origins of covid
| were the same as those peddling quack "cures" to church groups
| and reposting Q anon memes.
|
| With respect to your follow up, as much as I would like to see
| the former president punished for his lies, misleading
| statements, and general scientific incompetence, I don't think
| that's in the spirit of the First Amendment.
| aimbivalent wrote:
| Well, we also said masks and lockdowns don't work and that
| the vaccines are dangerous and useless. So that right there
| is 5-0 for us crackpots. I goddamn relish the taste of
| victory. Yes, I knew better than all of you and I kept my
| family safe and sane.
|
| I do wonder what the survival rate of a 5x boosted, sun,
| dietary fat and colesterol avoiding, queer, terminally
| online, city dwelling mainstream following sheep that's
| cutting itself over climate change anxiety has to be but it
| can't be good. I am sorry, we tried to warn you but you like
| self-important suffering more than knowing the truth.
| hwillis wrote:
| "finally"? This was put out in the state department Jan 2021,
| 2.5 years ago: https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-
| at-the-wuhan...
|
| > The U.S. government has reason to believe that several
| researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before
| the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms
| consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.
| [deleted]
| _aleph2c_ wrote:
| From the top comment of the article: "Someday we will stop
| talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist
| roots. But alas, that day is not today." Apoorva Mandavilli,
| "science" reporter for the New York Times.
| hwillis wrote:
| Note that this is NOT the Wuhan CDC, which is the building across
| the river from the wet market. They did not do any research
| there. This building is ~10 miles south, well outside the main
| city.
|
| https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Wuhan_Ins...
|
| The fact that researchers were sick with flu-like symptoms has
| been _openly_ stated by the US for a long time. This was put out
| in the state department Jan 2021, 2.5 years ago:
| https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan...
|
| > The U.S. government has reason to believe that several
| researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the
| first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent
| with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.
|
| Here's a good post that outlines the frankly huge amount of
| evidence against the WIV being involved:
| https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/the-case-against-the-...
|
| > Based on number of visitors, Worobey estimated the odds at only
| 1 in 10,000 that the market would be the first superspreading
| event in Wuhan.
|
| > Although it didn't receive a lot of traffic, the market was one
| of only 4 places selling wild animals in Wuhan. It's one of the
| most likely places for a wildlife spillover.
|
| > As we'll see later, there may actually have been two jumps from
| animals to people at the market. Now we're talking about odds of
| 1 in 100 million, that the virus made it from the lab to the
| market twice but showed up nowhere else in Wuhan.
| burnished wrote:
| Neat, thanks for that last link. It could use a table of
| contents but it did contain more information related to the
| DEFUSE grant proposal which is what I have thought of as being
| indicative of a lab leak.
|
| Sadly that article doesn't disprove that theory, but it does
| detail its weaknesses which is a good enough jumping off point
| for further reading.
| onethought wrote:
| Which still doesn't really draw the line of how an outbreak
| occurred at the wet market. Also common seasonal illness isn't
| exactly a smoking gun
| nomel wrote:
| Outbreaks can only happen in places of high
| density/congregation, by the nature of the required
| proximity. It could have been dancing around the perimeter
| for some time.
|
| Maybe my perspective is incorrect, but this seems trivially
| possible to me. This problem with proximity is why kids
| didn't go to school.
| hwillis wrote:
| The wet market was one of the less densely trafficked areas
| of the city: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9
| 348750/figure/...
|
| Check out the other figures in that paper. The epicenter
| was the wet market itself.
| baja_blast wrote:
| Here is a thread explaining the flaws in Worobey's paper
| https://twitter.com/danwalker9999/status/1595653898572042
| 240
| hwillis wrote:
| That's not really relevant. The cases are all still very
| far away from the WIV, which is itself far from anywhere
| the thread implicates eg residential areas.
|
| I also suspect the thread is just flat wrong- the people
| most relevant to viral spread are NOT the ones who are
| only spending part of their day in the city. Its the
| people who live there and spend all their time there.
|
| 2/3rds of the population of Wuhan lives in the urban
| districts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan#Administra
| tive_divisions
|
| The people commuting in/out are a small minority. No
| model is perfect.
| dekhn wrote:
| .... written by a geoscientist. There are limits on the
| ability to transfer knowledge between domains (although
| this doesn't mean the geoscientist is necessarily wrong,
| and often even amateurs can find big problems with papers
| that got through peer review).
| Sunhold wrote:
| The geoscientist in question is actually arguing that
| some of the flaws in the paper are due to the authors'
| lack of expertise in geospatial analysis.[1]
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/search?q=(from%3Adanwalker9999)%2
| 0expert...
| graeme wrote:
| The market is extremely close to the lab. Within walking
| distance
| hwillis wrote:
| That's the CDC, a totally unrelated building which even
| then isn't very close to the wet market, which is not a
| very popular spot in the city. The WIV was many miles
| outside the city.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| not really typical for healthy researchers in their 30s to
| end up in the hospital with seasonal illness symptoms though.
| hwillis wrote:
| Did they "end up in the hospital" or did they go to the
| hospital to get a diagnosis? I live in a city, and my PCP
| is in the local hospital. "seasonal illness symptoms"
| sounds FAR more like they were just sick and went to the
| doctor, like anyone else would. For medicine.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| I read it was hospitalized, but who knows with this kind
| of reporting.
| ipqk wrote:
| And what exactly does "hospital" mean in China? I know in
| India a hospital can basically be a small clinic, not
| unlike an urgent care center in the USA.
| hwillis wrote:
| This is a very large, very modern city. I'm very willing
| to believe they went to real hospitals.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan#/media/File:Wuhan_Yan
| gtz...
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Perfectly normal for regular, healthy folks to occasionally
| come down with seasonal flu. Sometimes people get sick, it
| happens.
|
| The issue was that a whole bunch of them did, rapidly, and
| in non-trivial numbers.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Supposedly there was a problem for a long time with
| researchers selling used lab animals on the street to make a
| bit of extra cash.
| hwillis wrote:
| That's ridiculous. The animals are transgenic mice.
| Vrondi wrote:
| If a single staff person caught a virus, then anyone they
| interacted with and gave it to went to the market, then
| that's all it would take.
| hwillis wrote:
| Incredibly unlikely. There are _thousands_ of locations
| that are far more trafficked than the wet market: https://w
| ww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9348750/figure/...
| autokad wrote:
| just a guess, but mid august was the first outbreak and
| September 21st was when they realized it was out of control.
| INTPenis wrote:
| >became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case
| of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19
| and common seasonal illnesses
|
| I was in Thailand in february 2019 and came down with SARS-like
| symptoms that were very similar to Covid-19 once that became
| known.
|
| SARS-like viruses have been going around for a while, meaning
| they affect the respiratory system. Doesn't mean it was
| covid-19, what even differentiates SARS from covid-19? I have
| no idea, I'm just a layman who happened to get sick.
| [deleted]
| pests wrote:
| Covid-19 is the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
|
| From [0]:
|
| > Through DivErsity pArtitioning by hieRarchical Clustering-
| based analyses,5 the newly emerged coronavirus was deemed not
| sufficiently novel but is a sister virus to SARS-CoV, the
| primary viral isolate defining the species. The SARS-CoV
| species includes viruses such as SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV_PC4-227,
| and SARSr-CoV-btKY72. SARS-CoV-2 is the newest member of this
| viral species. The use of SARS in naming SARS-CoV-2 does not
| derive from the name of the SARS disease but is a natural
| extension of the taxonomic practice for viruses in the SARS
| species. The use of SARS for viruses in this species mainly
| refers to their taxonomic relationship to the founding virus
| of this species, SARS-CoV. In other words, viruses in this
| species can be named SARS regardless of whether or not they
| cause SARS-like diseases.
|
| [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7133598
| quad_eye_oh wrote:
| I haven't looked at where Ben Hu's lab is, but epidemiological
| distance in urban areas doesn't necessarily follow map
| distance. In particular, proximity to a shared subway or bus
| line can be more important than physical proximity, since many
| commuters will put up with longer travel times if they can tune
| out, and a packed rush hour subway car is a great place for the
| spread of airborne infectious diseases. (In US cities one might
| consider two homes epidemiologically close despite a 10 mile
| separation if their children take the same school bus.)
| hwillis wrote:
| The CDC is smack in the center of the city (on the other side
| of the river). The WIV is way outside the urban area, past a
| very large industrial park.
|
| The distribution of cases also strongly contradicts you: http
| s://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9348750/figure/...
|
| Cases were roundly distributed, not along any particular
| artery. Note that the WIV is not even close to being in frame
| there- that's how much farther away it is.
| [deleted]
| notjulianjaynes wrote:
| Slightly off topic, but thanks to your first link I was just
| doing some satellite image sightseeing of Wuhan and noticed
| that on Google maps the streets are offset about 3 blocks east
| of where they should be.
|
| It's fairly obvious here [1] where the curved road extends out
| into a lake.
|
| Not saying this means anything, just found it amusing.
|
| 1. https://maps.app.goo.gl/reVDkMAhfMRbv1uJ8
| inetknght wrote:
| It's fairly well-known [0] that China messes with maps data
| and forces Google to do so.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic
| _dat...
| CommitSyn wrote:
| Is this similar to how the US used to mandate that civilian
| use of GPS was off by a certain amount?
| rsaxvc wrote:
| No, the US one is basically error(like noise) injection
| and has been disabled:
| https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/modernization/sa/
|
| The Chinese one is effectively a warped coordinate
| system, see GCJ02: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restri
| ctions_on_geographic_d...
| dmoy wrote:
| Yes, it's ostensibly still for defense purposes in China
| Apes wrote:
| A bit different. The GPS restriction was to prevent GPS
| on a device moving over 400 mph (I think that's roughly
| the speed?), and to limit accuracy to within a few meters
| rather than a few centimeters. The restrictions were
| intended to prevent the use of civilian GPS systems in
| precision missiles.
|
| Not a lot of civilian uses require anywhere near that
| speed or accuracy.
|
| It's a lot harder to justify grossly inaccurate
| geographic data as not hurting civilian uses.
| fragmede wrote:
| you're referring to the CoCom Limits on GPS receives,
| which limits functionality when the device is moving
| faster than 1,900 km/h aka 1,200 mph) and/or at an
| altitude higher than 18,000 m (59,000 ft), so you can't
| build a home made ICBM with it. Technically it's supposed
| to be _and_ and not _or_ , and high altitude amateur
| aerial ballonists tend to hit that flight ceiling, and so
| have a list of chipsets they can use in their balloons
| that don't stop working when they get too high.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_Committee_fo
| r_M...
| [deleted]
| connicpu wrote:
| Sort of. It uses a pre-defined transformation that
| doesn't interfere with street navigation. If you're on a
| street it will precisely reflect that value as well as
| any other GPS. But it makes it difficult to perform
| purely GPS-based instrument navigation, which in theory
| makes it harder to conduct eg missile strikes.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| It wasn't a pre-set error, rather each satellite was
| originally configured to broadcast a low-precision coarse
| signal and a high-precision signal and the high-precision
| signal could only be decoded using an encryption key.
| They later released the encryption key when civilian
| applications took off.
| rustymonday wrote:
| I just want to add to this that when I first heard about
| this virus I searched the WIV on Google Maps. I believe
| that was 14 January 2020. When I searched it again a few
| weeks later, the location on Google Maps had changed.
|
| I have no screenshots of this, but I did find it quite odd
| at the time.
| lancewiggs wrote:
| It's fine on Apple Maps.
| notjulianjaynes wrote:
| Huh, I guess I wasn't aware of this previously. Figured it
| was a bug or something.
|
| Considering the satellite imagery exists this seems silly.
| Glad I didn't drive into a lake!
| quad_eye_oh wrote:
| That's Chinese map data obfuscation. The idea is to make it
| marginally harder for an adversary to target missiles using
| public map data.
| zvmaz wrote:
| In an interview with biologist Richard Lenski (of the famous
| experiment), the latter discusses controversial research on
| selecting H5N1 viruses for greater transmissibility and their
| potential to be airborne viruses that are of public health
| concern [1]. That was in 2017...
|
| I have no definitive opinion on the origin of Sars-Cov-2 (will we
| know the truth one day?), but I don't think the lab leak theory
| is crazy.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQr8ldEeO04
| MarkMarine wrote:
| It's pretty incredible to see the US Government shift around
| these conflicting narratives, moving toward (apparently 3 letter
| agency by agency) this lab leak origin. Especially considering
| the vilification of anyone (including the president at the time)
| for saying things that were in this vein. I think they owe us a
| complete release of the data they have and an actual assessment,
| from the government, explained by the head of the government...
| millions of people were directly effected by this. I think we're
| owed the truth. This method, where there are leaks or unsourced
| articles, but the 3 letter agencies disagree with the probable
| origin, it's impossible for a regular person to decipher. Maybe
| that is the point, but it's a really shit situation.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Remember when insinuating the Chinese lab leak theory meant you
| were a racist? Good times, really united the country during a
| time of crisis.
|
| Country has become so divided that if the other side says the
| sky is blue, then you have to believe it's red.
|
| Orange man bad though right...
|
| I voted for Biden before everyone piles on.
| mindslight wrote:
| > _considering the vilification of anyone (including the
| president at the time) for saying things that were in this
| vein_
|
| It's very weird that you frame this as if the vilification
| including the President was an indicator of it being
| unreasonable, when the actual situation was that the President
| himself was one of the main drivers of why this topic couldn't
| be discussed rationally. Once the conversation is hijacked by a
| hollow suit blowhard, the only way to get back to rationality
| is to soundly reject the broken clock, disregarding that it
| might coincidentally be correct.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| Before I get painted as a Trump supporter and therefore blind
| to my team, I'm not. Don't support him, and when listening to
| him yell about China virus and then listening to people
| calmly say that was racism, I went with the calm people. But
| the man did get the PDB every day. Maybe he heard some of
| this intelligence and made some leaps to suit his purpose.
|
| But if we were all lied to about the origin, our family and
| friends died because of this, and xenophobia or racism was
| used as a shield to deflect criticism from the people and
| research techniques that got us into this mess... that isn't
| something you just handwave away.
|
| There are hollow suit blowhards hijacking every avenue of
| conversation around every important topic, right now. That
| research mechanism, gain of function or splicing together
| viruses... it's being done again. To say that we have to
| reject what the blowhard says even if they are right about
| something, I can't buy that.
|
| If this is true, that research is too dangerous and needs to
| be stopped and treated like nuclear weapons, because it is.
| [deleted]
| squalo wrote:
| Anything from Matt T is suspect at this point.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Play the ball, not the player.
| derstander wrote:
| This is a nice sentiment but it just doesn't hold up in the
| real world.
|
| I'm making this statement generally as opposed to about Matt
| Taibbi: I don't really follow him so I'm not evaluating him
| personally, just your statement in general.
|
| I have a finite amount of time. I don't have time to "play
| the ball" given how many balls are out there. Particularly if
| the player has proven to be a low signal-to-noise ratio
| source in the past.
|
| I even do this with colleagues as well as media sources. I
| give people the benefit of the doubt in the beginning, but if
| you've got a track record of not having useful information
| for me, then I will disregard what you have to say. I'm not
| going to be mean about it. I might even try to give a heads
| up about why I think you're not correct.
|
| But I value my time and eventually it's just not worth the
| expenditure.
|
| So no, I'm not going to play the ball: I'll play the player
| if their track record is poor. Am I going to miss out on
| occasion? Sure. But I just don't have infinite time so I use
| heuristics and accept imperfection.
|
| There's another dimension of this discussion about sphere of
| awareness versus sphere of influence and the utility (or lack
| thereof) when the former is much larger than the latter. But
| I will sum my position up by saying that I mostly try to
| align them.
| yellow_postit wrote:
| If the player has been known to use a weighted bat?
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Weigh the bat.
| squalo wrote:
| I'm more inclined to hit him with it
| sixQuarks wrote:
| Why do you say that? What evidence do you have that his
| reporting is suspect?
| squalo wrote:
| I take it you haven't been keeping up with the twitter files
| controversy?
| kneel wrote:
| Taibbi was the first journalist to report on twitter files.
| Absolutely mindblowing what was going on behind the scenes
| of Twitter, had heard rumors of FBI pushing narratives but
| no one really had any idea how bad it was.
| toomim wrote:
| You throw out an accusation without evidence.
|
| Then someone asks you for evidence, and you throw out an
| accusation at that person instead of giving any evidence.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| His involvement there makes him the opposite of suspect.
| muglug wrote:
| Article was written by Matt Taibi, a gonzo journalist who has
| recently fallen prey to pat conspiracies:
|
| https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/07/mehdi-hasan-dismantles-t...
| kyleblarson wrote:
| It is peculiar how all of these recent "conspiracy theories" as
| named by corporate media eventually turn out to be true.
| prox wrote:
| The moniker "conspiracy theory" seems somewhat limited on the
| whole. I can't think of a better name right now, maybe
| "public theory" vs "academic theory" ?
|
| There is nothing wrong with theorizing either, but conspiracy
| theories often start with the conclusion, and then try to
| find what facts can fit that narrative. That's how you can
| discern more critical theories from just made up stuff or
| disjointed data points to fit the narrative.
| aredox wrote:
| It is peculiar that not many of these conspiracy theories
| eventually turn out to be true.
|
| See Twitter's own lawyers:
| https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/06/tech/twitter-files-
| lawyer...
| whatwhaaaaat wrote:
| You're going to want to read your own link if you're going
| to keep using that as some sort of proof.
| kneebonian wrote:
| Ya
|
| Just MKUltra
|
| Iraqi WMDs
|
| Tuskegee Syphillis
|
| Free Brittney
|
| Hunter Bidens laptop
|
| Iran Contra
|
| NSA surveillance
|
| Watergate
|
| CIA and the crack epidemic
|
| The Sackelers and the opioid epidemic
|
| Robert Kennedy coverup
|
| Need I continue....
| ChatGTP wrote:
| UFOs...maybe? At least some high profile government
| people are saying they exist.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| It's only one claim in a large body of independent evidence
| pointing to bat coronavirus research at WIV being the source of
| the pandemic. Additionally, the collaboration between US-based
| coronavirus researchers and the Wuhan group dates back to 2013.
| The fact that the virus appeared pre-adapted to replicate
| rapidly in humans also is not aligned with previous zoonotic
| origins, where an adaptation process could be tracked over time
| as the genetic sequence evolved. Furthermore, the Ecohealth
| Alliance grant proposals to DARPA etc. for work to be done at
| WIV involved direct modification of the spike protein sequence,
| which in Sars-CoV2 has a codon usage pattern optimal for human
| cells. The question of whether WIV had the original bat
| coronavirus sequence that was modified into Sars-CoV2 is opaque
| due to WIV's deletion of their online database of sequences and
| further refusal to cooperate with investigations.
|
| Overall, the most plausible scenario is that WIV researchers
| collected the original bat coronavirus sequence from cave(s) in
| southern China, then applied various research procedures such
| as serial passage through humanized mice lines and cell
| cultures, along with specific CRISPR-type modification of the
| spike protein, to generate a virus with optimal properties for
| replication in humans, which accidentally spread to human
| researchers and the people around them (including a
| superspreader event in the wet market). From there it spread
| globally by train and then airplane, causing millions of deaths
| and trillions in economic damage.
|
| Why does it matter what the origin was? This kind of reckless
| and irresponsible research must be strictly curtailed to
| prevent it from happening again. There are dozens of mammalian
| viruses in nature that are harmless to people but which could
| be modified by these processes into novel pandemic threats to
| which human populations have little innate immunity.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| Michael Shellenberger has done the same -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shellenberger has
| details, and see criticism of the Breakthrough Institute. Alex
| Gutentag seems to be a contributing editor to Compact, writing
| things like https://compactmag.com/article/how-mask-mandates-
| defaced-us. A brief review of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_(American_magazine) shows
| a lot of familiar names of people that push ideologically
| similar content like Greenwald, Tracey.
| https://theweek.com/media/1011628/the-new-journal-hoping-to-...
| reviews their backers. The glowing Berlusconi tribute is a
| clue, too https://compactmag.com/article/death-of-a-statesman
|
| Not to say that this is wrong, but it is a biased source.
| Statements like, "This whole pandemic could have been reshaped"
| have no content. It misleading presents that the furin cleavage
| site had to come from gain of function. It doesn't address why
| the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market cluster exists at all. It
| is based on rehashing public information and anonymous sources.
| All signs point to misinformation.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| > It misleading presents that the furin cleavage site had to
| come from gain of function
|
| it did. this isn't debatable anymore. there's literally
| grants written by american scientists proposing this pre-
| covid, the lab in wuhan was doing the legwork.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| They are also already present in wild coronoviruses and the
| initial cluster don't support a lab leak theory, even if
| they were sloppily working on gain of function via that
| mechanism.
|
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2211107119
|
| _" Harrison and Sachs's (1) claim that alignment of
| sarbecovirus Spike amino acid sequences illustrates"the
| unusual nature of the [SARS-CoV-2] FCS" is misleading. FCSs
| are common in coronaviruses, and present in representatives
| of four out of five betacoronavirus subgenuses (8). The
| highly variable nature of the S1/S2 junction is easily
| ascertained by inspecting a precise alignment of
| sarbecovirus Spikes (Fig. 1C)."_
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8689951/
|
| _" As more bat CoVs are sampled, it is possible that
| another SARSr-CoV will be discovered with an S1/S2 FCS
| insertion. FCSs have evolved naturally in other non-
| sarbecovirus families of betacoronaviruses (Wu and Zhao
| 2020). Therefore, an S1/S2 FCS emerging in a sarbecovirus
| is consistent with natural evolution. Even so, the
| knowledge that scientists had a workflow for identifying
| novel cleavage sites in diverse SARSr-CoVs and
| experimentally characterizing these cleavage sites in
| SARSr-CoVs--likely in a manner that makes the resulting
| recombinant SARSr-CoV practically indistinguishable from a
| rare SARSr-CoV with a naturally emerging FCS--makes it
| challenging to rule out an artificial origin of the SARS-
| CoV-2 S1/S2 FCS"_
|
| It's saying they can arise naturally and it's hard to
| distinguish origin. Your claim is debatable on its own, and
| sar-covid-19 GoF resource origin is extremely debatable,
| even unlikely. At any rate, this article doesn't appear to
| add anything new to the discussion beyond mixing some
| anonymous sources with existing public information in a
| sensationalized way.
|
| edit: let me add, I don't want you downvoted. It may be
| that this it came from gain of function research at WIV and
| that the Huanan market cluster was a result of this
| research. But as of right now, there are other better
| explanations. I await the Directorate of National
| Intelligence declassified information this article claims
| is coming. I do not see how this would have changed the
| global response to the pandemic.
|
| edit 2: I can't reply to you, stainablesteel. HN thinks I'm
| posting too much. I am done after this, maybe they are
| right. I would reply to you with this, though:
|
| ---
|
| The furin cleavage site did not have to come from gain of
| function research. My "wall of text" explains that pretty
| clearly, even for a layman. That claim is what I said was
| debatable.
|
| Whether or not it came from GoF research remains to be
| seen. This article didn't expose any new information, with
| the possible exception of the names of the WIV researchers.
|
| I have a question for you: what do you think would change
| the lab origin theory were proven? What should have
| everyone have done differently during the pandemic? What
| should we do differently now? I genuinely want to
| understand your opinion.
| whatwhaaaaat wrote:
| Now do gp120!
| randomperson01 wrote:
| Sure its evolutionarily possible to insert 12nt. Inserts
| are not common though. Whats key is that the insert -in a
| 30kbp sequence was at exactly a position that would give
| it functional properties to allow the virus much higher
| tropism for human tissues. Furin cleavage site appear to
| selected against in bats.
|
| There is no known source from where it came from,
| coronaviruses often recombine, but there is no other
| known sarbecovirus from where the fcs could have come
| from.
|
| Bob Garry tries to explain away his documented "I cant
| think of a plausible natural scenario for how this 12nt
| insert occurred" in an interview here.
|
| https://youtu.be/4-FhwghrSLs
|
| What is often totally ignored by virologists and
| evolutionary biologists with potential funding to loose
| if a kab origin is proven is that the WIV was partner in
| a proposal to insert exactly the sort of furin cleavage
| site we see in SARS-CoV-2
|
| https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-
| gra...
|
| Then like magic (a unicorn as Bob Garry says) a SARS-
| related CoV appears, appears down the road from the lab,
| that is highly infectious to humans, with the first ever
| furin cleavage site in a sarbecovirus, which even Zhengli
| Shi says was a recent inroduction to humans: "almost
| identical sequences of this virus in different patients
| imply a probably recent introduction in humans"
|
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.22.914952
| v1
|
| Lab escape through a lab acquired infection with a SARS
| related virus is by far the most likely scenario and
| should be the default hypothesis to disprove.
|
| Natural origin scenario requires a series of events to
| occur, each very unlikely.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| > Your claim is debatable on its own
|
| there is literally a grant written by an american
| scientist who sent money for that exact research to that
| exact lab. a literal paper trail as a grant, and a paper
| trail in funds.
|
| no amount of text wall can deflect this.
| gojomo wrote:
| All you need for a market cluster is one infected person to
| visit once, & pass the infection along to one or more people
| who then also spend time there and pass it on. There's no
| challenging "why" needed.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| The same explanation works in the other direction.
| gojomo wrote:
| Yes, but the coincidence of 3 gain-of-function
| researchers being the very 1st simultaneous infectees
| would be far more remarkable than a crowded place being
| the 1st spot that's noticed as a cluster.
|
| No matter the origin of a new highly-nfectious
| respiratory disease, certain dense public places will
| quickly turn up as locations-of-spread.
|
| But 3 researchers with likely larger-than-average
| scrupulosity about infection risks, working on increasing
| the virulence of bat viruses? Pretty sus!
| hcurtiss wrote:
| >All signs point to misinformation.
|
| What does that even mean? That you don't trust these people?
| Isn't that, definitionally, ad hominem?
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| "Ad hominem" is a great defense used frequently people with
| bad reputations for serially lying and misleading. If
| someone is a repeat offender of passing along
| misinformation, what they claim should be discounted
| regardless of whether one likes the claims or not. The
| people associated with this story have shit reputations and
| the article rests on anonymous sources. It may not be
| wrong, but someone would have to be a fool to ignore the
| credibility and reputation of their sources.
| twoodfin wrote:
| I'd argue that when he was muckraking against Goldman Sachs and
| the "Great Vampire Squid" of investment banking, he was already
| at least bordering on "pat conspiracy" territory.
|
| People noticed less because he was muckraking for the "right
| side".
| whatwhaaaaat wrote:
| [flagged]
| richbell wrote:
| > The twitter files gave proof governments have been using
| social media to censor legal speech paid for by the tax
| payer.
|
| Source?
| whatwhaaaaat wrote:
| Are you looking for cnn, msnbc, fox, or one of the other
| media corporations fueled by pharma alone to write an
| editorial telling you why something is true?
|
| Go read the damn twitter files. That is the source.
|
| Are you questioning the veracity of the data given in the
| twitter files? Because even the executive branch didn't do
| that.
| richbell wrote:
| > Are you looking for cnn, msnbc, fox, or one of the
| other media corporations fueled by pharma alone to write
| an editorial telling you why something is true?
|
| I am looking for specific evidence that substantiates the
| claim that was made. "Go read the damn Twitter files" is
| not evidence anymore than "Google it".
|
| > Are you questioning the veracity of the data given in
| the twitter files? Because even the executive branch
| didn't do that.
|
| This means nothing to me, because you have not provided
| any supporting evidence for your claims.
| whatwhaaaaat wrote:
| I'm not here to feed you sources or convince you. If
| you've ignored the twitter files for months no link from
| me is going to change your mind.
|
| Have a nice day.
| aredox wrote:
| Twitter's own legal team has categorically said that the
| "Twitter Files" show no such thing.
| https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/06/tech/twitter-files-
| lawyer...
|
| The COVID vaccine reduce transmission, as demonstrated by the
| analysis of infections in prisons.
|
| COVID causes far more heart complications than the COVID.
|
| COVID totally has caracteristic found in nature; see SARS
| epidemic in 2003, or MERS.
| whatwhaaaaat wrote:
| do you even know what you linked? That article is about if
| the actions amounted to
|
| " amounted to government coercion to censor content or,
| worse, that Twitter had become an actual arm of the US
| government."
|
| More so this is filed in their defense in a lawsuit. Hardly
| proves anything
|
| There are studies (Boston I recall) showing medical workers
| got infected more frequently the more shots they had.
|
| I haven't seen a single study that shows covid caused any
| heart complications at all. Just drivel on social media. We
| know for sure the mRNA shots cause various forms of heart
| problems.
|
| Covid having some characteristics found in nature and some
| not found in any other coronavirus in nature does not prove
| your point.
| verall wrote:
| The sky is blue
|
| Exercise is good for you
|
| The government has assigned an agent to follow you when you
| leave your home, and listens to you through your cellular
| telephone
|
| Excess refined sugars is bad for you
|
| Isn't this an interesting argument structure?
| whatwhaaaaat wrote:
| When filled with facts sure.
| verall wrote:
| They're all facts - just try debunking any of them
| Willish42 wrote:
| Thank you for saving me some clicks to figure out who this guy
| is. I was a bit skeptical about how sensationalized the article
| is relative to the substantive content of his sources
| batch12 wrote:
| When people with influence confidently label and laugh at
| conspiracy theories, and one or more turn out to be true, it
| becomes easier for some to trust the people who find
| conspiracies everywhere.
| mistermann wrote:
| * * *
| [deleted]
| verall wrote:
| Does he even qualify as a gonzo journalist if he always seeks
| to represent his writing as objective truths?
| kneel wrote:
| His reporting on the twitter files has been great, the msnbc
| attack interview isn't really revealing anything. It's just
| hackery.
| ipqk wrote:
| So great and compelling that Musk shadowbanned them on
| Twitter after the two got in a little squabble. Yeah...
| PathOfEclipse wrote:
| https://www.leefang.com/p/msnbcs-mehdi-hasan-gets-basic-fact...
|
| Maybe you're actually the one falling prey to false
| information, and harming others by spreading it. From the
| article:
|
| The Taibbi-Hasan debate speaks to the sorry state of affairs in
| the U.S. news media. Every journalist gets things wrong
| occasionally. Taibbi has conceded that he made an error in one
| of his tweets, though not in his congressional testimony, and
| swiftly corrected it. Many of Hasan's claims have been
| debunked, including his false claim, first flagged by
| journalist Aaron Mate, that he "never said a word about the
| Hunter Biden story" and of course this CISA-EIP issue. Hasan's
| version of journalism means never correcting his own
| falsehoods. But since Hasan works for a cable news network
| where exciting a polarized audience is the chief performance
| metric, he is sure to benefit from the gotcha-style assault on
| Taibbi.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| in my experience, a pure reputation destruction post is
| generally non-credible, and you posted an establishment media
| interview on someone who supports twitter: of course they have
| a bone to pick.
|
| for the sake of honest conversation, can you list what
| conspiracy theories you're referring to? because the last few
| conspiracy theories i can remember somehow all turned out to be
| true. so i'm really concerned with what is truthful here, i
| hope you can help.
|
| edit: i'm even more genuinely interested now because i was
| initially rapidly downvoted, but all i'm seeing in that
| interview is the tv host interrupting matt every time he tries
| to answer a question, this is so weird to me.
| donohoe wrote:
| Not really. You can easily find this information. Perhaps
| start here?
|
| https://thebanter.substack.com/p/matt-taibbis-puff-piece-
| on-...
| stainablesteel wrote:
| > there is a chance that the NSA did intercept Carlson's
| attempts to secure an interview with Vladimir Putin
|
| they did, this isn't insane to believe either, they did
| this to jeff bezos too. US intelligence excels at signal
| intelligence, this isn't a conspiracy. it then goes on to
| make even less sense:
|
| > Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of
| the Agency
|
| duh, but obviously putin is, why are they deflecting? this
| is low quality reasoning that fails to address any meat of
| the arguments.
|
| plus, what does any of this have to do with matt? and
| covid? its like every time i ask a question there's more
| and more deflections away from the original topic. its so
| strange.
| gojomo wrote:
| Mehdi Hasan is proof that MSNBC can air someone who's as much
| of a shouty partisanship-addled blowhard as Fox's Sean
| Hannity.
|
| Investigative journalist Lee Fang goes deeper into Hasan's
| allegations about Taibbi - plus Hasan's history of plagiarism
| & viewpoint-flexible controversialism-for-pay at:
|
| https://www.leefang.com/p/mehdi-hasan-plagiarized-pro-
| spanki...
| athesyn wrote:
| Anyone who has seen the interview knows Mehdi wiped the
| floor with Taibbi and pointed out humiliating mistakes in
| his reporting -- even Taibbi accepted that.
|
| As for the plagiarism, the article in question is from over
| 20 years ago, hardly a slam dunk nor is it a representative
| of his journalistic career. The only reason Fang wrote that
| is because Mehdi accused him of Islamophobia, it's just
| petty and desperate nonsense.
| TipiKoivisto wrote:
| Here another plausible scenario how it went down, which follows
| the same plot: https://youtu.be/mfLycFHBsro
| fqye wrote:
| [dead]
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| [flagged]
| rovolo wrote:
| The title says "sickened by Covid-19", but the text says
| "developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019".
| mlyle wrote:
| Yes. We don't have swabs that we can perform PCR on.
|
| On the other hand, this report, if true:
|
| - Sickened about a month before COVID-19 was formally detected
|
| - In close proximity to where COVID-19 was formally detected
|
| - While doing research on gain of function in coronaviruses.
|
| This is strongly suggestive circumstantial evidence.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Would love to have the denominator.
| onethought wrote:
| Close proximity is a bit of a stretch. This shows people
| catching colds in winter. The rest is speculation
| mlyle wrote:
| > This shows people catching colds in winter.
|
| And hospitalized? That's a bit more uncommon than catching
| a cold.
| onethought wrote:
| No it isn't.
| mort96 wrote:
| It's much less impressive when you add:
|
| - with symptoms associated with common seasonal illness
|
| Not saying it wasn't COVID-19. Just saying that claiming it
| was is a bit of a stretch.
| mlyle wrote:
| See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36332373
| letmevoteplease wrote:
| The symptoms reportedly included loss of smell and "ground
| glass opacities" in the lungs.[1] That's not necessarily
| COVID, either, but a few too many coincidences for me.
|
| [1] https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2021/08/23/josh-rogin-the-
| sick-r...
| hahamrfunnyguy wrote:
| I have a friend that has had COVID-19 at least one, and he
| swears he also got it in 2019 along with the friends he was
| hanging out with that weekend. There are probably lots of
| instances like this and we may never know for sure.
| richbell wrote:
| > ..."developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019".
|
| My partner and her siblings developed a COVID-19-like illness
| in November 2019. It was far worse than any flu they'd ever had
| and even put one of them, an otherwise healthy 30 year old, in
| the hospital for several weeks.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if COVID-19 was spreading as early as
| October.
| yk wrote:
| > Next week, the Directorate of National Intelligence is expected
| to release previously classified material, which may include the
| names of the three WIV scientists who were the likely among the
| first to be sickened by SARS-CoV-2.
|
| Why publish speculation now, instead of publishing when there is
| actually something to report?
| drcongo wrote:
| I don't know who the other two are, but I sure as hell don't
| believe a word Matt Taibbi writes after his farcical lack of fact
| checking in "the twitter files".
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Why name the researchers that got sick? Even if one of them is
| the source for COVID, which really isn't clear from this, I don't
| think they deserve the harassment articles like this are bound to
| cause.
| kneel wrote:
| You don't think causing a global pandemic and millions of death
| from dangerously careless research deserves criticism?
| lamontcg wrote:
| Because that's really all the information the article has.
|
| You boil it all down and the article is just rehashing
| everything for the hundredth time, along with claiming "US
| government sources say" and dropping the three names to make it
| appear to be credible.
|
| There's no details about how these government sources know
| this.
|
| It also seems to be a rehashing of a New York Times story from
| a year or so ago which also claimed that there were three
| workers that were sick (without having any details) and was
| written by the same journalist that wrote the Iraq/Niger Yellow
| cake Uranium story back around 2002 that led us into the War in
| Iraq (and the same plot line that led to the Valerie
| Plame/Joseph Wilson/Dick Cheney affair).
| jb12 wrote:
| > "If you knew that this was likely a lab-enhanced pathogen,
| there are so many things you could have done differently"
|
| I'm curious - if we knew in March 2020 that covid came from a
| lab, what _would_ we have done differently?
| mc32 wrote:
| Presumably the people there would have knowledge of the virus's
| characteristics, behavior and better prepare us for dealing
| with it.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| I had personally decided by April 2020 that there was
| sufficient information for me to believe that Covid was a lab-
| enhanced pathogen that was accidentally released by researchers
| at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. My "source" was mainly
| common sense (the simplest solution is usually the right one,
| and guilty people doth protest too much), an understanding of
| probability (there is a lab studying the pathogen right next to
| the wet market which an authoritarian regime claims was the
| source), and an unbiased reading of history (like looking at
| 2001 articles on CNN about the last time SARS leaked from a
| lab).
|
| For better or worse, I'm not a policymaker, so my opinion is
| meaningless and would have had no outcome on what "we" could
| have done differently (aside: I dislike this kind of rhetoric
| that shifts the blame to the amorphous "we" rather than the
| specific policymakers with names and titles who "we" _should_
| be blaming and holding responsible for their failures). But I
| 've at least saved some sanity by listening to my gut instincts
| instead of subjecting myself to the whiplash that would have
| come with a world view determined by appeals to authority.
|
| It seems this is more and more necessary these days - if you
| rely on authority as a heuristic for truth, your reality can
| shift under you at the whims of politicians who manipulate it
| for their own selfish reasons. It's best to stay above the
| fray. Sure, gut instinct can be wrong, but when I'm not a
| policymaker and only need to be concerned with my own health
| and well-being, the consequences of incorrect critical thinking
| are usually less bad than the consequences of trusting the
| wrong authority. I will continue to prioritize my "gut feeling"
| - informed by critical reading of publicly available data, and
| careful triangulation of the motives and biases of stakeholders
| in the current political reality - over any blessed truth that
| "we" have anointed as "consensus."
| stubybubs wrote:
| > My "source" was mainly common sense (the simplest solution
| is usually the right one
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/zoonotic-diseases.html
|
| 75% of all new infectious diseases come from animals. Isn't
| the simplest solution that COVID also came from animals? Just
| because it was a bad one doesn't make it less likely. Where
| did smallpox come from? Polio? Spanish flu?
|
| Is it strange that the lab was near the wet market where it
| supposedly started? There are about 40,000 wet markets in
| China as of 2019. It might be more strange if it was nowhere
| near a wet market. It's a little bit like a psychic helping
| the police saying "the body will be found near water."
| Fantastic, most humans live near water.
| [deleted]
| Izkata wrote:
| > Where did smallpox come from? Polio? Spanish flu?
|
| Which time?
|
| Lab leaks are pretty common, all three of those have leaked
| from labs (smallpox 5 times): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
| /List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
|
| And keep in mind these are just the leaks we know about.
| baja_blast wrote:
| > 40,000 wet markets in China as of 2019
|
| And yet it happened to spillover in a wet market in a city
| with the premier coronavirus research labs in the country.
| It also happened to happen far away from where these types
| of viruses originate. There are only a handful of labs in
| the county that do this type of research and WIV is the top
| one.
|
| So why did not not appear in a wet market in Yunnan or
| Guangdong?
| lamontcg wrote:
| Guangdong was SARS-CoV-1.
|
| We've had two spillovers now of sarbecoviruses and the
| first one hit a completely unrelated city. The other one
| happened in Wuhan, which is the biggest city in central
| China and its "catchement area" is probably fairly wide
| around it.
|
| It does appear that they spillover in wet markets in big
| cities.
|
| The level of coincidence here may look like rolling a
| 1d20 two times and the second time getting a natural 1.
| yibg wrote:
| Maybe because the lab is located where the virus is
| abundant?
| baja_blast wrote:
| But it's not, the head of the WIV even stated how
| unexpected it was for a SARS outbreak to happen in Wuhan
| and area not endemic to SARS like coronaviruses. If they
| wanted to be near the source they should have built it in
| Yunnan or even Guangdong where the last one broke out.
|
| The lab is there for the same reason there are labs in
| Boston or NYC. Proximity to major research institutions
| kneebonian wrote:
| Chalmers: Yes, I should be--good lord, what is happening in
| there?! Skinner: A zootonic coronavirus
| outbreak Chalmers: A coronavirus
| outbreak?! Down the street from a virology lab, studying
| bat-like coranaviruses, 2000 miles away from where the bats
| are normally located, is entirely zootonic in origin?!
|
| Skinner: Yes.
|
| Chalmers: ...May I see the original data?
|
| Skinner: ...No.
| netsharc wrote:
| I'm "agnostic" whether it's lab leak or natural/from the
| market, but I'd like to ask how you can be certain that your
| gut feeling is right? I think to be certain is to be
| ignorant/dismiss other possibilites, and confirmation bias
| doesn't help in that regard, you start dismissing evidence
| that don't conform to your "gut feeling". I also shook my
| head at all the scientists that loudly proclaimed that "I'm
| certain it can't be from a lab, it's natural!" (A scientist
| should be aware, that like in a math exam, if they can be
| certain of something, they need to show proof/show the
| work!), but I'm not going to prescribe motives like a Bill
| Gates + Rotschild + pharma industry conspiracies behind these
| scientists proclaiming this. Although I am curious what did
| motivate them to make these very non-scientific
| proclamations.
|
| If you ask me why the Chinese authorities were secretive, I
| can come up with many theories, it could've been a lab leak,
| yes, but it could also be them wanting to save face rather
| than face the embarassment of admitting the virus started
| there (is there anything to be embarassed about, or is the
| CCP, like many political bodies, full of men with grade-
| school level emotions?), heck their internal propaganda
| blames the US, saying they brought in the virus through the
| Wuhan 2019 Military World Games. Or the Chinese refusals
| could be them not wanting foreign organizations looking
| around their labs. Heck, if a virus started in Atlanta and
| the WHO said some their investigators from many countries,
| including China and Russia, would like to inspect the CDC lab
| there, Americans would probably scream the same amount...
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Well, I suppose I'm "agnostic," too. That's my point. I
| have no need to be certain one way or the other, so it's
| better to have "good enough" confidence, which I prefer to
| get from a (well-informed!) "gut feeling," rather than
| delegating my confidence metrics to some authority who can
| deliver me the latest proclamations of truth from on high.
|
| Did it actually impact me in any way to decide whether I
| thought a natural or lab origin was more likely? No,
| probably not. But I'm an avid internet commenter and so
| naturally I spent time reading and posting about this
| stuff.
|
| But there is one tangible benefit to the time I invest in
| researching controversies like this when the news story
| first breaks: I can save time in the future when the
| narrative changes, by skimming stories to see if they
| contain new information or merely reframe existing data. At
| least, that's how I justify the amount of time I spent
| reading about this stuff in 2020...
|
| Fun fact, I created this pseudononymous HN account to post
| wrongthink about Covid origins - one of my first posts [0]
| about it was flagged (and unflagged about a year later when
| I complained about it in a similar comment to this one).
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22912353
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Ok, given your prescience about the origin of COVID, how did
| that influence the actions you took to mitigate its effects?
| dfee wrote:
| Perhaps not mitigate its effects, but instead refocus our
| efforts on accountability - both in the US and in China.
| Vecr wrote:
| I hope it included PAPR helmets and full face respirators.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| I lived alone, stayed isolated, kept healthy and exercised,
| took reasonable precautions while outside, and... because
| this is what you're really asking... chose not to get any
| vaccination, because data by July 2021 showed its
| effectiveness waned after three months and I had no plans
| within the next six months to interact with any crowds or
| expose myself to another individual for more than fifteen
| minutes. Then in December 2021, Omicron became the dominant
| strain, with much lower risk than previous strains, so I
| decided there was no sense introducing unknown variables
| associated with a vaccine for diminishing protection
| against a strain of a virus that presented risks I felt
| personally comfortable with accepting. (At some point I was
| also of the opinion that Omicron itself was an engineered
| strain, but I had stopped paying sufficient attention by
| that point to have much confidence in that opinion.)
|
| I never felt any need to tell others what decisions they
| should make, and I understood my circumstances gave me
| relatively rare affordances of being able to remain
| isolated for long periods of time. Had those circumstances
| changed, maybe my decision regarding vaccination would have
| changed too. But by the time of Omicron, any risk analysis
| I made seemed to lead to the same conclusion that
| vaccination was not worthwhile, and if anything, that I
| should _hope_ to contract the Omicron strain since it might
| confer the most effective immunity, with the lowest risk of
| complications, against future strains of the virus.
|
| As of today, as far as I'm aware, I've never contracted any
| strain of COVID-19. Knock on wood.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Interestingly, you did much the same thing I did despite
| my belief that the virus arose naturally (seemed
| reasonable since viruses have risen naturally for give or
| take a billion years). I practiced the extreme social
| distancing for about a year since the vaccines were not
| available and wore KN95 masks the rare and brief times I
| was indoors with anyone else. I did start getting the
| vaccines at some point in 2021 though I was hardly in a
| rush and then pretty much dropped most precautions in
| March 2022 figuring that 2 years was about as much as I
| wanted to do. And then I finally got a confirmed covid
| case in April of this year which left me pretty weak but
| functional for about 36 hours and then it passed. I do
| think that getting a vaccine now and again probably kept
| the illness mild, but I suppose who can say - I certainly
| recommend them to people based on my experience. While I
| have a friend who was practically laid out by the
| innoculation, all I got was a little soreness.
| kneel wrote:
| Dangerous virus research has continued in the interim.
|
| The real question is if there is little to no regulation or
| even acknowledgement of failures, it's only a matter of time
| before this happens again.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| This is what I've always wondered - would those who downplayed
| the virus and eschewed masks and vaccines have changed their
| tune?
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Almost certainty, the population already had a sense about
| the spread of natural viruses and their dangers--whether
| valid or not. Launched from a lab is a different ballgame
| altogether and not having experienced the problem before
| people would have been much more wary.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| The first thing we would have done would have been to put an
| immediate halt to all "gain of function" research - including
| all of the "gain of function" research that is currently
| ongoing (that Fauci and his ilk insist isn't really "gain of
| function" research). This would include severe penalties for
| those who funneled money to third party researchers. Instead,
| the global health authorities peddled the absurd "wet market"
| hypothesis and continue(d) to pour money into "gain of
| function" research that makes another lab leak inevitable (at
| some point).
| dzader wrote:
| this isn't related to this particular stupid comment you made
| - but looking through all of your stupid comments you really
| love to use quotation marks. next time you go to use them
| realize whatever youre saying is stupid as fuck.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| If you mean the US would have done that, I'd note that the US
| is incapable of preventing its own citizens from using
| military arms on students in schools, so I have a hard time
| picturing them preventing another sovereign nation from
| ceasing scientific research. That said, I'm all for stopping
| biological, chemical (I think this one is pretty much a
| solved problem already sadly), nuclear, and AI weapons
| research in all nations, but I'm not optimistic about that .
| ozr wrote:
| This comment is laden with rhetoric, but, to address your
| point regardless: 'military arms' are widely available. The
| equipment and knowledge to perform advanced virology work
| is not. It's much simpler to restrict.
| neither_color wrote:
| Being unwilling to enforce something is not the same as
| being incapable of enforcing something, and stopping
| complex state-level research(especially nuclear) is
| something the US has been doing in many countries for
| decades. It's why so few countries have advanced
| bio/nuclear weapons. Your comparison makes no sense.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| I'm referring to the gain of function research currently
| being funded by the US government. We funded the gain of
| function research in Wuhan through the Eco Health Alliance.
| I don't mean to suggest we have any power to stop other
| countries from engaging in this dangerous research, but
| certainly we can stop being a party to it (and likely would
| have stopped if people knew there was a strong possibility
| that Covid resulted from a lab leak instead of a "wet
| market").
| baja_blast wrote:
| We could stop this research in it's tracks if the US
| government forced journals to not only refuse to publish
| dangerous research but also report the researchers to the
| authorities. Once you remove this incentive the whole
| demand and motivation for such reckless research
| collapses.
| Izkata wrote:
| > We funded the gain of function research in Wuhan
| through the Eco Health Alliance.
|
| At least some of this funding happened during a ban.
| Doing it offshore was the workaround to avoid it.
| [deleted]
| mandmandam wrote:
| Not censored millions upon millions of posts discussing the
| idea, for one thing. The conversation and narrative was warped,
| and a lot of people are now rather extremely divorced from the
| reality around this issue.
|
| Gain of function research would have been examined much more
| closely, and with the origins known we may have had much less
| fumbling around protocols for containment, such as knowing much
| sooner that it was airborne.
|
| I believe many people likely died as a consequence of this mass
| deception, and its ripple effects. And many more might die yet,
| if we don't reign in irresponsible bio research.
| mort96 wrote:
| Please explain the connection you see to extra deaths.
| Because as I see it, nothing about how governments responded
| to this was conditional on COVID having occurred naturally;
| social distancing and mask use would still have been the
| correct response even if we knew with certainty that it
| leaked from a lab, and I see no reason why the early blunders
| like recommending against masking or over-emphasizing hand
| sanitizer would've been any different.
|
| Why, for example, would we have known much sooner that it was
| airborne?
| UberFly wrote:
| You are correct. I guess people can't handle that. This is
| from the article, it tracks with your sentiment:
|
| Said Metzl, "Had US government officials including Dr. Fauci
| stated from day one that a COVID-19 research-related origin
| was a very real possibility, and made clear that we had
| little idea what viruses were being held at the Wuhan
| Institute of Virology, what work was being done there, and
| who was doing that work, our national and global
| conversations would have been dramatically different. The
| time has come for a full accounting."
| ribosometronome wrote:
| Dr. Fauci was quite clear about it being dangerous, no? Of
| all the government officials to name for downplaying COVID,
| that's an interesting one.
| mort96 wrote:
| That doesn't track with their sentiment at all? "Our
| national and global conversation would have been
| dramatically different" is not the same as "many fewer
| people would have died".
| CrimsonCape wrote:
| Any response to your question is hypothetical at this
| point (disclaimer) so here's my hypothetical explanation
| of how conversation would have led to less deaths:
|
| A lot of people believed the lab leak "consipracy
| theory", but Fauci and company were so adamant to
| contradict the "conspiracy theorists" that it practically
| destroyed those people's willingness to heed any of the
| CDC directives.
|
| Of course I can only say anecdotally violating CDC
| guidelines results in more deaths, but that's the gist of
| my hypothetical.
|
| See this article:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2021/06/16/here
| s-w...
| ribosometronome wrote:
| Certainly, a weird coincidence that many of the people
| worried about it being a lab leak early on, also had
| downplayed it and practice little caution to avoid
| getting it.
| predictabl3 wrote:
| Are we actually claiming that "Virus leak from scary china"
| would've gotten people to wear masks more or isolate more,
| versus "Virus killing people keeps spreading?" Or am I
| missing the point?
| [deleted]
| defen wrote:
| I think it would have. A huge portion of early deniers
| (generally people of a conservative disposition) were in
| the "it's just a flu" camp. I think "scary virus from
| China" would have made those people stop and think
| "there's no telling WHAT this thing could do!"
| ozr wrote:
| If it was developed in lab, presumably there would be a
| substantial amount of information available on it. Lab notes,
| testing results, transmission rates, all sorts of things we had
| to discover in the wild.
|
| We could have used that data to make progress on a vaccine (and
| adjust our overall response) much, much faster.
| this_user wrote:
| How and why would they have that kind of data available if
| the virus only existed in the lab? At most they could have
| had computer simulations, but no real data.
|
| The only information they would have had is the DNA sequence,
| but that was rapidly sequenced anyway, and design of the
| original vaccines followed in short order. What took time was
| testing and manufacturing the vaccines, but none of this
| would have been accelerated even if the lab theory were true
| and if they had any data on the details of the virus.
|
| This whole discussion is ultimately useless, and the people
| pushing for it were never interested in finding solution, but
| only in finding someone to blame, which has no impact on the
| outcome.
| jankyxenon wrote:
| Knowing when it was global issue #1 would have been a
| catalyst for much strong go-forward mitigation.
|
| It's very important to know how this happened, especially
| if it wasn't an accident.
| ozr wrote:
| > How and why would they have that kind of data available
| if the virus only existed in the lab? At most they could
| have had computer simulations, but no real data.
|
| I'm not a virologist, but this doesn't make sense to me. If
| we work under the assumption that this was a lab-made virus
| that leaked, then they plainly must have actually created
| it. What's the point of having a real virus if you aren't
| using it to generate real data?
|
| Even in the unlikely scenario where they made it, stuck it
| on a shelf, and did nothing: they could share information
| about _how_ it was created, which would give insight into
| it 's potential current and future behavior.
|
| > The only information they would have had is the DNA
| sequence, but that was rapidly sequenced anyway, and design
| of the original vaccines followed in short order.
|
| This isn't true. They would have information on _how_ it
| was created, any work that they had done to devise a
| vaccine for it, and any other data they had accumulated on
| it.
|
| > This whole discussion is ultimately useless, and the
| people pushing for it were never interested in finding
| solution, but only in finding someone to blame, which has
| no impact on the outcome.
|
| It's not useless at all. _If_ it turns out to be true,
| there are plenty of meaningful ramifications:
|
| 1. In the pursuit of stopping fake news and propaganda,
| real information from whistleblowers and researchers was
| suppressed and careers were ended. It would be a useful
| lesson in free speech and the open exchange of ideas.
|
| 2. It shows there are clearly deficiencies in these labs.
| Inspections could be more frequent, standards could be
| raised, all sorts of changes could be made to prevent it
| from happening again.
|
| 3. And, yes, if there is someone or some entity worthy of
| blame, _they should be blamed_. Why should their fault be
| hand-waved?
| lmm wrote:
| > If we work under the assumption that this was a lab-
| made virus that leaked, then they plainly must have
| actually created it. What's the point of having a real
| virus if you aren't using it to generate real data?
|
| Assuming experiments had been completed by then they'd
| have, what, some figures for how infectious it was in
| humanized mice. Maybe months down the line they'd've
| written a paper showing that this splice made it 40%
| +/-25% more infectious than the strain it was derived
| from or whatever. So yes, there would be data, but it's
| hard to imagine it would be a meaningful data compared to
| what was already being measured with a) humans rather
| than mice, and more importantly b) orders of magnitude
| larger sample sizes.
|
| > This isn't true. They would have information on how it
| was created,
|
| The how would be that they ran up that DNA sequence and
| inserted it into a blank virus. There's nothing that
| knowing "how it was created" tells you that you don't
| already know from the DNA sequence.
|
| > any work that they had done to devise a vaccine for it
|
| They weren't working on that.
| somebody78978 wrote:
| I don't understand, the whole point of studying a virus in
| a lab is to gather data on it.
| ChemSpider wrote:
| If the lab leak story is correct, the WIV people knew somewhere
| inbetween September...November 2019 that the virus leaked.
| onethought wrote:
| That's not true, a leak could occur without them realising.
| Getting cold and flu symptoms in winter wouldn't raise too
| many suspicions.
|
| Given they didn't start any containment procedures either
| they didn't know or that's not how it happened
| Natsu wrote:
| The article doesn't just say "people got sick" it says that
| researchers were hospitalized. That doesn't sound like
| "normal seasonal illness" to me.
| onethought wrote:
| Then you haven't spent time in China and realise they use
| their hospital system very differently. Often people will
| go to hospitals for minor fevers.
| D13Fd wrote:
| Why is that true? I would think you could have an undetected
| leak.
| Natsu wrote:
| The article claims multiple researchers got sick. I mean,
| we can posit that this wouldn't ring any alarm bells... but
| if they have any competence at all, it should've rung some
| alarm bells and resulted in more testing. And if we'd
| developed tests for this in November, it wouldn't have been
| spreading undetected for months.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| In 2020 Luc Montagnier identified Covid-19 as a lab creation
| and predicted that, because the original strain was unnatural,
| later strains would be less problematic as the virus reverted
| to its true (less problematic) nature. In contrast, the public
| health conversation was about a permanent threat and how much
| worse can it get and generally government running around hair-
| on-fire.
|
| Maybe the initial quarantine recommendation would have been the
| same--or even stronger-- but the pandemic impacted all aspects
| of life everywhere, and elements of that would have been
| different. EcoHealth would be a bad dream, no one would be
| running interference for Fauci. Vaccinations would have been a
| different conversation, because this would have been recognized
| as a temporary threat.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Well, that logic fell down with the Delta variant.
| jedmeyers wrote:
| > because the original strain was unnatural, later strains
| would be less problematic as the virus reverted to its true
| (less problematic) nature
|
| Is it possible for someone to speed up this process in a lab
| somewhere, like South Africa, and release the less
| problematic version to the public to achieve the herd
| immunity quicker?
| twoWhlsGud wrote:
| I doubt it. However, luckily for us someone has already
| invented called a vaccine that is far safer and plays a
| similar role in achieving herd immunity ; )
| jedmeyers wrote:
| Which vaccine specifically provided the "immunity"?
| gojomo wrote:
| There are curious aspects of Omicron's emergence - more
| closely related to older less-circulating strains, many
| adaptations bursting onto scene all at once - that make
| people think that even if the original Wuhan strains
| weren't lab-creations, Omicron was - as a natural &
| contagious 'vaccine' against worse variants.
| n4r9 wrote:
| How does the virus have a "true nature", and why would it
| revert to it?
|
| My understanding is that that viruses are well known to
| become more infectious and less symptomatic as they mutate
| over time. The reason for this is that causing the host to
| quickly hole up reduces the chance of replication.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| Unfortunately Luc's hypothesis was not explored because, as
| you will see from googling his name, he became the topic of
| debunking and adhomenim. And maybe some of his views on
| other topics were wrong, but his comments on this subject
| have aged well.
|
| After an hour of googling I finally found a reference to
| his original hypothesis.
|
| "According to him, the altered elements of this virus are
| eliminated as it spreads: "Nature does not accept any
| molecular tinkering, it will eliminate these unnatural
| changes and even if nothing is done, things will get
| better, but unfortunately after many deaths.""
|
| https://www.gilmorehealth.com/chinese-coronavirus-is-a-
| man-m...
| baja_blast wrote:
| If we knew it was from a lab much of the confusion over H2H
| transmission, Airborne transmission, asymptomatic infections
| would have been known much earlier. We would have take the
| correct measure earlier and saved lives.
| usefulcat wrote:
| If it came from a lab, then we need to seriously re-evaluate
| the risk-reward ratio for such research.
| evandale wrote:
| Closing the borders wouldn't have been seen as racist, it would
| have identified as a valid tool to stop the spread, and we
| would have had an extra 2 months early on in the pandemic
| preventing the spread in a major way.
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/covid-coronavirus-pandemic-...
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