Some people like the topic and want it discussed here, others feel the opposite. The tug of war between upvotes and flags is the most normal phenomenon that exists on HN. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27268101, and please don't post any more off-topic flamebait.
Why can't the Nazi racist trump supporters just leave the poor Chinese alone. It's a cultural thing. Lab leak is a conspiracy tin foil hat story. Just ignore it and move on with your life.
- everything I've read here after raising this months ago.
You are living in a fantasy land world. My good friend lived in China for five years. Needless to say, he doesn’t speak highly of their ethics, politics, and human policies. I temporally lived in S. Korea for a few months and there were solid blocks of days the air quality was so bad you could barely be outside. Of course the pollution made its way down from China’s unregulated factories. I quickly realized South Koreans are frankly quite racist against the Chinese.
> I temporally lived in S. Korea for a few months and there were solid blocks of days the air quality was so bad you could barely be outside. Of course the pollution made its way down from China’s unregulated factories. I quickly realized South Koreans are frankly quite racist against the Chinese.
If I couldn't go outside for days in a row because of pollution from China, I'd probably be pretty pissed at them too.
Pretty sure they don't like china because china sides with North Korea and fought against South Korea during the korean war.
Ironically china citizens just threw a hissyfit at South Korea because one of the k-pop groups thanked the US government for supporting South Korea during the korean war, and didn't thank the china government. I thought that was pretty funny.
It’s not just Koreans. Nearly all countries near China hate Chinese (probably except North Korea). The air pollution has been definitely the reason why it got worse but largely it’s been historical reasons
Yes, I remember when these concerns were shouted down by HN. Of all the pejoratives HN used to describe the lab leak theory, 'flat-earth' seems to be my favorite. Intellectual curiosity indeed.
If the above comment is inflammatory, then perhaps moderators should look at the derisive behavior that is cultivated here. The poster's sarcasm and frustration is understandable.
This very irresponsible reporting, that you don’t see often on Reuters.
People get sick, especially in autumn. And they infect each other. Reporting that some people working at the lab were sick, without any knowledge about kind of sickness is only going to add fuel to the conspiracy theories.
And what conspiracy theory is that? Are you suggesting that the lab leak is a conspiracy theory? Until it is discredited through contradictory evidence, it is still a plausible theory.
While "conspiracy theory" is often intended to be dismissive of an idea, it does not automatically mean the idea is false. Conspiracy theories occasionally end up being true, or close to the truth.
This theory doesn't even involve people conspiring, just an accident occuring. Except I guess if you believe the CCP is conspiring to prevent certain facts related to the early days of COVID's emergence from being known. What an outrageous suggestion that is.
Yes, virology experts like Vincent Racaniello claim it’s bs conspiracy. I’m not virology expert, but trust people who actually know what they’re talking about vs fear mongers.
One of the challenges is that the further we get from the time, the harder it is to determine. We may never know.
I suspect I had COVID-19 in the US late December 2019, but as of yet, the CDC doesn't acknowledge that possibility, and I've had enough exposure since that time that there's no reasonable way to test the hypothesis.
At a certain point, some of the investigations stop being practical to investigate further.
Before you were vaccinated you could have donated blood and they would have tested for antibodies. A possible indication, but not something that would confirm it is if you had a reaction to the first shot. A number of folks I know who had covid had a more serious reaction to the first dose.
I had separate exposure to COVID-19 before vaccination, and before it was super easy to get tested for antibodies. The reality is, whether or not I had exposure or not hardly matters at this point, and it's impossible to prove one way or the other.
It may be very hard to determine if people sick in 2019 had COVID-19 or something else at this time.
I also suspect this with the same timeline and a large number of my coworkers here in NY had a severe illness at the same time.
I was laid out in bed with the worst upper respiratory infection of my life for most of late December and then again for two more weeks in early January after a brief recovery.
A handful of our coworkers had been in Wuhan in the 3-4 weeks prior.
That would be in line with France's findings of COVID-19 cases from November [1], and Italy finding traces in waste water [2,3].
IIRC, public toilets due to fecal matter were a possible infection vector (I hope I am using the term correctly) [4], which suggests that there had been covid cases since December in Italy as the traces were in waste water [2,3].
Some hypothesise that covid had been circulating in humans long before the market outbreak [5], this hypothesis does seem to corroborate the hypothesis that the virus had long spread before the first 'official' outbreak in Wuhan.
As a casual observer this seems really relevant, clearly something that could be important down the road as we learn more. It might not be COVID-19, but it’s the kind of transparency I expect out of government.
If they were hospitalized with symptoms consistent with COVID - is very relevant, I agree.
But that’s not what this story is about. It’s just about being hospitalized, which means nothing, without any additional data. It’s like running a story that Obama visited Kenya, when birth conspiracy was rampant. It’s something you’d expect from CNN/Foxnews, but not from a reputable journalist organization.
So theoretically it's possible that three workers at the lab were sick -- and hospitalized -- but with, say the seasonal flu. The original reports from the State Department about this even specified that the workers had been sick with symptoms "consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness."
>The workers at the lab "were tested and there was no evidence found of Covid antibodies."
Tested by whom and how? If a trustworthy disinterested party positively identified the workers, took their blood samples, and tested them via a procedure with a low false-negative rate, then the test results are meaningful. Otherwise, there is reason for doubt.
Sure, I'll grant you that there's reason for doubting that the lab workers' tests were authentic. But I guess by that same logic, just trying to be accurate and fair here, there'd also be a reason for doubt -- and also for genuine credibility -- in all three of these scenarios.
1. The testing showing no Covid-19 antibodies was fraudulent and faked.
2. That testing was not faked. The workers did not have Covid-19 antibodies; their illness was caused by some other illness.
3. The report of the lab workers' illness is faked. (It came from a conservative newspaper, from unnamed officials citing an unnamed international partner -- where somewhere along that chain, someone had the proper motivation.)
I'm not arguing for any one of these things. We just honestly do not know.
They were tested back in November for antibodies for something that China won't acknowledge even existed yet and we didn't put a name on for another month or two?
The article says: ‘"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."’
>... is only going to add fuel to the conspiracy theories.
That's a bad thing only if the conspiracy theory is false. At this point, the theory that the Chinese Communistic Party conspired to cover up a lab leak is not implausible. There are multiple known occurrences of pathogens escaping from laboratories.
The communist party has conspired to cover up worse, genocides perpetuated by their dictatorship for example. The people who claim it's an outlandish suggestion they might have covered up a lab leak are uninformed or CCP apologists.
It would not be in the least surprising if this was a lab leak, and it is no more "harmful" to speculate that it was than to speculate that it was a wild virus.
> several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019 ... with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses."’
Do you realise that this is very easily true for any company or office at that time of the year?
Does the US government "have reason to believe that several teachers in a high school in Milan became sick in autumn 2015 with symptoms consistent with both Covid and seasonal flu"? Yes, it does! Good job, US government!
>That's a bad thing only if the conspiracy theory is false.
Well that depends on your objective. If it's to push a certain narrative, then it's bad if it contradicts that narrative; whether or not it's true is secondary.
I think "sought hospital care" is the key phrase. If a few people from that lab got sick AND ended up in the hospital... considering this is supposed to be very infectious, then why is that line so hard to draw?
This is journalist or journalism of our mordern world.
What is "sought hospital care"? To get some Vitamin C or get some serious surgery? (In China people go to hospital more often I guess, as people tend to deal with ailments relying on doctors a lot, rather than letting it go by itself.)
I read things with a grain of salt, by the way. It's getting tiresome to disclaim every comment.
Anyway assuming it's at least not a lie, "sought hospital care" would mean it's not just a trivial cold. Again, I'll be waiting for more details, I just think Occam's razor is converging here, and there are more hurdles to dance around with the other explanations.
That was Feburary 2019 in Australia. Wuhan’s flu season would have been November 2019. Different severity, the flu season in the northern hemisphere 2019 was not especially severe.
Further, the researchers were surely in the 18-49 age bracket. CDC’s estimates for the 2017-18 flu season in that age bracket were 58.8 per 100,000. That is 0.0588% per person per year.
And that’s the whole flu season. To have odds of being hospitalized in november you’d cut that in four at least.
And then the odds of three people in the same lab all needing hospitalization also needing hospital treatment? Even less likely.
Not impossible, but it’s not so simple as suggesting there was a bad flu season. There wasn’t in china then, and flu hospitalization is damned rare in non elderly.
(It is possible that the “hospital care” in the article doesn’t match “hospitalization” as cdc defines it, but any kind of hospital care for a young person from the flu is still rare)
> Further, the researchers were surely in the 18-49 age bracket. CDC’s estimates for the 2017-18 flu season in that age bracket were 58.8 per 100,000. That is 0.0588% per person per year.
They're using CDC figure for the wrong year to say that younger people were not particularly affected. The 2019 flu season in Australia was
1) much rougher than the 2018 flu season in the US
2) much earlier than normal
Both of these mean that it could well have been an early, rough, flu season in Wuhan that hospitalised these people.
I understand that people really want this to be lab escape, but the way to show it's lab escape is to be honest when you're discounting everything else.
Australia has a different winter and different flu strain from Wuhan. Sure, Australia's flu came a couple of months early but it's also 10 months removed from when Wuhan would have been getting the flu in 2019. And that's what the parent was addressing in the first sentence and you repeatedly choose to skip over.
>>> Wuhan’s flu season would have been November 2019. Different severity, the flu season in the northern hemisphere 2019 was not especially severe.
I'm not ignoring their first sentence. I'm explaining that their first sentence is wrong, and that isn't changed by looking at US figures for the year before.
China doesn't follow normal flu seasonal patterns. Instead of a single winter peak China sees flu all year with dual peaks in summer and winter - and the summer peak is higher. Flu starts in the south of China, and moves north over the year.
This particular type of flu was early, not just in Australia but world wide.
> The season has started slightly earlier than usual. It is too soon to predict how the season will develop in terms of peak week, severity and duration.
About severity: we can look at death. This flu season showed increased mortality. And we can look at hospitalisation. It had increased rates of hospitalisation. We can look at ages affected: some strains affected younger people.
> A(H3N2) is typically associated with serious health impact in older age groups.Some countries, such as the United Kingdom, are already seeing increased rates of influenza hospitalisation. There is no evidence of significant excess mortality at this early stage, however experience during past seasons suggests a significant mortality impact on the elderly during A(H3N2) dominated seasons.
> B virus circulation might be associated with a higher burden on younger age groups, as already observed in Portugal.
I know flu strains differ year to year - that's the point. The world pays attention to the flu in Australia because that tends to predict the strains in flu seasons elsewhere. This is part of the flu surveillance work to develop seasonal flu vaccines. This flu surveillance recommended that the vaccination included Australia strains:
> On 18–20 February 2019 in Beijing, China, the World Health Organization (WHO) agreed on the recommended composition of the quadrivalent influenza vaccine for the northern hemisphere 2019–2020 influenza season: an A/Brisbane/02/2018 (H1N1)pdm09-like virus, a B/Colorado/06/2017-like virus (B/Victoria/2/87 lineage), a B/Phuket/3073/2013-like virus (B/Yamagata/16/88 lineage) and an A(H3N2) virus component to be announced on 21 March 2019. The recommendation for the A(H3N2) component was postponed in light of recent changes in the proportions of genetically and antigenically diverse A(H3N2) viruses to allow more time for the selection of the appropriate virus strain. It is recommended that the influenza B virus component of trivalent vaccines for use in the 2019–2020 northern hemisphere influenza season be a B/Colorado/06/2017-like virus of B/Victoria/2/87-lineage.
My point is that there was a severe flu strain in Australia in 2019; this strain started making its way around the world; it would be unsurprising to see it in China at the time the article talks about; and that talking about the US stats for 2018 mean nothing because that was a different flu season with different flu strains.
The dual flu season is only in south china. Northern china follows normal winter patterns. Wuhan is center, more towards the north, and had a fairly chilly winter.
For all of China, in November 2019, it looks like less than 2000 positive test swabs. The number of hospitalizations would be lower.
What are the odds that three hospitalizations would come from a single lab in healthy people? Not impossible, but not probable. Flu hospitalizations are very much clustered in the elderly and very young.
I agree - it's been about 55% in favor of a lab leak for over a year amongst people who follow the origin story, and has increased recently with the former US officials talking about it, and the disclosure that the original doctors criticizing the lab theory as all being WHO staff with links to WIV.
There has been no info contradicting the lab theory.
Well, that article was useless. Some people got sick in the middle of flu season. Ok. How about some details like out of how many people that worked there? What did they do?
Just more low effort agitprop. Apparently most people in my country (US) will believe anything as long as it wears the correct team jersey.
At least in the US a fair amount of patients show up at the ER first. The Wikipedia page for healthcare in China says there is a tiered system but also a shortage of primary care doctors in clinics. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_China
I haven’t known many people who had to go to a doctor of any kind for a flu who weren’t quite old or with a chronic condition. Perhaps the three people in question were all elderly
In China, it's not unusual to go to the hospital for a cold.
(I find the lab theory credible & worthy of investigation, just pointing out that in China a hospital visit doesn't imply anything about the severity of symptoms).
Is that true though? I was under the impression that people have to personally pay their medical bills and visits in China, like in large parts of Asia, so generally they'd only go if it was something severe.
You’re right, they mostly do have to pay their medical bills but everyday treatments are inexpensive, and seeking professional medical attention is given very high priority. In my (10+ year) experience the average Chinese person is far more likely to visit the hospital for a minor complaint than the average Brit (where it’s free).
You touched on one thing I've been wondering: how many people worked at the lab? (The facility is 3,000 square meters, according to Wikipedia.) So is it 30? 100? 1,000?
This would be good to know if we're going to try speculating about what happened
I'm trying to keep an open mind about things, but I just find is so suspicious that the articles blaming China for Covid get upvoted so enthusiastically that people forget to post in the first 10 minutes before they hit the front page.
I'm not trying to reject any hypothesis but I do reject the fervor. And then people come out of the woodwork and try to defend the Wuhan Lab as the source with a load of coincidences that trend to conspiratorial thoughts. Like how we only know of a related Covid strain in bat hundreds of miles away from Wuhan... but bats are not endemic to just Yunnan where the closest Covid-19 match was from. Does Wuhan not have bats?
HN tends to upvote counternarratives. The Wuhan lab leak hypothesis was dismissed as either "debunked" or "discredited" in the mainstream media early, but now is considered possible, or even likely.
That is not true. HN is lagging behind mainstream when it comes to disputed issues. You will be downvoted to hell if you post anything that is only beginning to take a hold in the mainstream
Some of the evidence is not co-incidence based, for example, the documents that appear to show the US was funding GOF research on bat coronaviruses at the WIV.
However, the reaction of the Chinese authorities (destroy all the evidence, block any investigation) is pretty much the definition of a conspiracy. I'm not sure it merits the term theory anymore - when the authorities are very visibly covering up all the evidence related to a critical event, that's what a conspiracy is. The only question now is what is the conspiracy hiding? Well, there's only one obvious possibility, isn't there?
The way this virus attacks multiple systems and has such a wide range of symptoms, I am convinced it is a man-made supervirus. I am leaning towards it was accidental in how it was released but I have no idea what's going on anymore and the media only confuses me more.
There are already variants and these vaccines will need booster shots to stay effective from what I was told. I'm not sure though. Is this true?
Covid has taught me a few things:
- Health is as important as wealth, living well is making time for both. It takes good health to build lasting wealth and to enjoy it. It takes at least some wealth to invest in good food, living space, life experiences.
- Living in Maui and working remotely is like semi-retiring in my 30s. I can make money and enjoy life at the same time without taking years off my life due to commutes and stress. Why didn't I do this in my 20s? I was learning the skills and figuring out what exactly I wanted in life. Now I know.
- I don't need a lot of people to be happy, just a handful of high-quality people. More than anything, I should give myself a lot of what I expect from others.
- Nature is more resilient than we know, Earth really be fine with or without humans. We can change if we want to but we can't agree on anything anymore. I'm hoping for the best but prepared for the worst.
The big difference here is that now we have the added problem of dealing with ACE2 bindings which affect human lungs/liver/heart/pancreas/etc.
This is a dangerous difference.
> SARS-CoV recognizes angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) as its receptor, whereas MERS-CoV recognizes dipeptidyl peptidase 4 (DPP4) as its receptor.
SARS-COV-1 also used ACE2 receptors. In fact your article specifically discusses that, and suggests there was potential to use SARS-COV-1 vaccine development to create SARS-COV-2 vaccines.
Thanks. I've learned that a group of lawyers from Germany are filing a massive lawsuit. one of the lawyers took on VW a few years back for the whole Dieselgate thing and won.
As a rule, any parasite, invasive bacteria, or virus harms its host, but over time they usually evolve towards exploiting the host more efficiently, which often includes being less harmful.
Among these, viruses integrate quite closely with their host, so viruses that jump into a new species should normally infect less well, but sometimes they infect fine and just harm the host excessively. SARS, MERS, etc.
If I was making a super virus I’d make it a bit more super. COVID sucks but most people live through it without serious or chronic symptoms. What am I, the evil mastermind, achieving with a virus mildly inconveniencing my enemies? And which surely can’t be controlled enough to spare my friends?
Thanks for pointing that out. The first part of my question was only rhetorical. I didn't claim that it was the result of my or anyone's professional journalistic endeavours. If that seemed like a "nationalistic flamewar comment", I sincerely apologise.
But the second part of the comment doesn't contain an iota of nationalistic element to it. It simply is a fact as reported by numerous newspapers and felt by many businesses here in Australia. The CCP is punishing Australian businesses as the Australian government is pushing for a proper investigation into a disease that originated in Wuhan and has killed (reportedly) close to a million people so far. In fact It's important to note that it's not a reflection on the people of China, rather the government. I'm happy to be downvoted, probably with nationalist intentions! But I haven't said anything wrong here.
There are numerous reasons why we need a proper investigation into this. If this came out of WIV, we need to determine exactly why these bat coronaviruses were being studied with regards to human ACE2.
This ACE2 binding is causing numerous issues, including damage to human heart, lung, kidney, and pancreatic cell death.
This is serious stuff. If anyone is looking at the "low" mortality rate, they are missing the big picture.
Role of angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) in COVID-19
You broke several of the HN guidelines with this. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules, we'd appreciate it. Your comment would be fine without that initial swipe.
It should go without saying, but I'll add that I'm not at all commenting on which of you is right or wrong factually. But if you're the one who's right, then you should take better care with the truth, because stooping to cheap attacks discredits what you're saying, and one is responsible for how one handles the truth one's in possession of.
>we need to determine exactly why these bat coronaviruses were being studied
Why do we need evidence of why a lab would do research in viruses that is a danger to people in the country? It's pretty self-explanatory. ACE2 isn't specific to SARS-CoV-2 as your own links says.
thowaway959125 says> "it would be great if we took this opportunity to actually end biological weapons research globally."
The genii is out of the bottle so ending biological weapons research will never happen. If we aren't hit by a nation-state using biological warfare then we'll be hit by someone who does biochem in his garage for fun.
The best strategy is to advance the research while taking such steps as creating super-vaccines to make this type of biowarfare obsolete:
The wsj article is more specific about the 3 hospital visits:
> several researchers at the lab, a center for the study of coronaviruses and other pathogens, became sick in autumn 2019 “with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness.”
It is an old story. Published earlier by Sputnik News last year. Got an official response. And the source is a mistranslated document (samples of sick human misread as sick employees).
"with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses"
So 3 staff had gotten sick that flu season. Staff who work with infectious diseases and probably get every cough and cold checked out just in case. Seems pretty baseline average to me.
I have no idea if that's baseline average or not, personally I find the article frustrating.
There's no discussion of how many people work at the lab, how many staff visited hospital the year before that, whether it is in fact common for those staff to visit hospital when they have seasonal flu, or any other factors that would put this in any sort of context at all.
This could well be reason to prohibit such research. When things go wrong, they will be covered.
It took WHO over a year to be able to enter China. And what did they do? Release a memo denying laboratory theory without any evidence. No bat, nor intermediate has been found (not the case with SARS/MERS). Sure there is no evidence on lab theory either. The Chinese army has been running that lab since this started.
It's a large lab. Perhaps a couple hundred work there.
...but even still, 3 admitted to hospital for flu symptoms in that demographic is very high, statistically - even if literally ALL employees caught the seasonal flu at the same time.
What data are you using? In China people go to the hospital for a cold routinely. People also used to do so in my country until the government cracked down on it, fwiw.
And no its not a couple hundred. 600 people work at that lab. So 3 people with seasonal illness out of 600 at one time is incredibly unremarkable.
sudosysgen says>" In China people go to the hospital for a cold routinely. People also used to do so in my country until the government cracked down on it, fwiw."
Yes, but these were three staff who work with infectious diseases and so would not be expected to use hospital resources frivolously. In fact, they would be considered shirkers to do so for a cold. If a doctor at a hospital needs an aspirin he merely takes it - he doesn't check into the hospital, take a bed, etc.
Again, I don't think you understand the context. There is no claim they took a bed or took any resources beyond going to see a someone, not even necessarily a doctor, and then leaving, perhaps for as little as 30 minutes.
I don't see that they're necessarily using any resources in a detrimental way, I'd expect that if they were this practice would be curbed. It is China after all.
Considering how contagious COVID is and how serious it was when it was new and we hadn't yet figured out effective treatments, wouldn't only 3 being admitted to hospitals be way too low statistically if what they had was COVID and they worked at the source of the outbreak?
> and probably get every cough and cold checked out just in case
I work with infectious disease lab workers, and this isn't correct. None of them get every cold checked out just in case. Labs have no procedure for that. If anything, it's the opposite as they are confident of their immune system.
People in China routinely go to hospitals for colds. It's cheap, and it makes you feel better, so why not.
Its already incredibly common for average Chinese people to go to a hospital for a cold, and I'd expect someone working in a virology lab would be even more likely to do so.
But looking at the sibling comment, you'd have to be right about it being ordinary not for general citizens but for experts in infectious disease - which is unlikely. Those kinds of people don't seek treatment for a virus unless it's serious. They already know there is no treatment. I even know that and don't seek treatment, and I'm no expert.
It's not true that there is no treatment for the symptoms of viral infections. IV fluids, codeine, and ibuprofen will make you feel much better, even if it doesn't improve the underlying infection.
Those are exactly the things a Chinese hospital will administer.
If you were presenting to a hospital with Covid beyond what you might feel for a flu, you would be reporting difficulty breathing or loss of smell and taste.
However, they had symptoms consistent with seasonal illness.
So it's pretty obvious that the typical Chinese reaction is the best fit.
Not at all obvious. It's really your idea of how they would behave versus mine. I'd need to see more information to have a better idea of who's closer to the truth in this one.
It's quite obvious. One interpretation conflicts with the available data, the others don't.
You can assume they were seriously sick with COVID beyond anything a flu or cold is likely to do. We know that this means either anosmia, difficulty breathing, and low blood oxygenation, with viral pneumonia visible on X-Ray.
None of these symptoms that characterize COVID serious enough to require medical attention, more than what one would expect from a bad flu or a bad cold, are compatible with the report citing symptoms consistent with seasonal illness.
There are two other possibilities.
One is that they had seasonal illnesses that were serious enough to require some medical attention, but not COVID. This is consistent with the report, and not implausible. This is just as possible whether they have similar attitudes towards medical attention for seasonal illness as other staff.
The other is that they had seasonal illnesses that were not very serious, but sought medical attention anyways. This is expected to happen if virology staff have similar attitudes towards the issue as the rest of Chinese society.
No matter which way you slice it, there is no indication they had COVID. Even if you remain ambivalent on their behaviour.
sudosysgen says> "People in China routinely go to hospitals for colds. It's cheap, and it makes you feel better, so why not."
Yes, but these were three staff who work with infectious diseases and so would not be expected to use hospital resources frivolously. In fact, they would be considered shirkers to do so for a cold. If a doctor at a hospital needs an aspirin he merely takes it - he doesn't check into the hospital, take a bed, etc.
That's a good point. These are the kind of people least likely to seek treatment for a suspected virus - because they know time and rest is basically all there is. I know that, so I don't see a doctor if I get sick. They'd only go if it's really serious.
Is going to see a nurse to get a cold checked out really a detrimentally frivolous waste of resources? Unless the hospitals are congested, I don't see why this would be the case.
As for the cultural attitudes over doing this in Chinese virology labs, neither of us has any data for it to be any different from the general population. Personally if I had such a job and I was in a country where such a thing was normal I would do it.
Don't forget, for example, social pressure from friends and family.
The Wall Street Journal's original report (upon which this article is based) adds a really interesting detail about the timing of this story:
The disclosure of the number of researchers, the timing of their illnesses and their hospital visits come on the eve of a meeting of the World Health Organization’s decision-making body, which is expected to discuss the next phase of an investigation into COVID-19’s origins.
It is just me, or does it seem suspicious to anyone that this information existed, and wasn't reported in 2019 or 2020, or even in early 2021....but only just reached the press on the very evening of the WHO meeting.
> It is just me, or does it seem suspicious to anyone that this information existed, and wasn't reported in 2019 or 2020, or even in early 2021....but only just reached the press on the very evening of the WHO meeting.
Not really. The original source was "a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report." It's quite plausible that the report had been on the shelf in 2019 or 2020, or only accessible to people who knew how to keep secrets, but then was more widely disseminated to prepare for this meeting, after which a leaker got hold of it.
A person gets sick after interacting with bats in the area, and then they talk to their virologist friend who works at the Wuhan Virology Institute and suddenly there are a rash of illnesses.
Remember that people at the lab were dicking around with bat coronavirus alterations!
While one might say that the same thing was happening in the market via natural gene replication and disease transmission, don't you think that someone intentionally altering parts of genes with the sole purpose of "gain-of-function" (making a more deadly virus) would be more likely to generate something like Covid-19 than a fishmonger who slaps another tilapia onto the ice?
""Gain-of-function" is the euphemism for biological research aimed at increasing the virulence and lethality of pathogens and viruses. GoF research is government funded; its focus is on enhancing the pathogens' ability to infect different species and to increase their deadly impact as airborne pathogens and viruses.
Here's something from the complete story from the Wall Street Journal (upon which Reuters based its report). They spoke to "officials" familiar with the report, one of whom specifically said it was "still in need of further investigation and additional corroboration."
I tend to flag most of the COVID lab leak stories. They’re perfect fodder for pointless flame wars: no one here is in a position to confirm or disprove the theory, and there are no consequences for being wrong. So everyone can just argue their point of view vociferously, while no one learns anything.
If the lab leak theory was easy to confirm, it would have been done already. Maybe someday it will be confirmed or ruled out and I’ll happily upvote that story. This isn’t it, though, even if it is the WSJ.
yes, especially these stories have been nearly entirely poo-flinging, but most covid stories largely exhibit the same tribalist impulses rather than critical examination of not only mechanisms, risks, and likelihoods, but also sociologies and real-world empirical evidence. ideally, commenters would present evidence without adding any ‘us vs. them’ color, but those underlying emotional impulses are hard to ignore, especially with various media relentlessly prodding it on for their own benefit.
snowrestler says>"If the lab leak theory was easy to confirm, it would have been done already. Maybe someday it will be confirmed or ruled out and I’ll happily up-vote that story. "
Yes. These medical researchers are very good and very persistent so I trust them to do their detective work. They have always been my heroes.
For example, a recent claim is that they have found the earliest case of AIDS/HIV in humans. An excerpt:
"^By DANIEL Q. HANEY, AP Medical Editor, CHICAGO (AP)
Scientists have pinpointed what is believed to be the earliest known case of AIDS an African man who died in 1959 and say the discovery suggests the virus first infected people in the 1940s or early '50s...
The virus in the sample had degraded, but the scientists were able to isolate four small fragments of two viral genes. One gene holds instructions for assembling the outer coat of the virus, while the other is code for one of the proteins the virus needs to reproduce...
HIV mutates quickly. About 1 percent of its genetic material changes each year. So the scientists compared the genes from the 39-year-old sample of HIV with those carried by current versions of HIV."
Take time to read the (short) article. It is a credit to our medical/biomedical scientific researchers and explorers and a glowing tribute to what good science can do.
The flags look normal. All but one or two of the users who flagged it are legit HN contributors who have been here for years. We can only guess why users flag things, but if I look at their flagging histories it seems clear that, as usual, (a) some have a strong view about the topic which causes them not to want the story to be on HN, while (b) others just have a problem with sensational/inflammatory topics or otherwise feel the post wasn't in keeping with the site guidelines. In my experience, the A-flags usually aren't enough to win out over upvotes on a story; it takes a coalition between A-flags and B-flags.
HN's front page is mostly determined by a tug of war between upvotes and flags [1]. It's common, indeed typical, for a sensational story to get a lot of initial upvotes, make the front page, and then provoke a "WTF why is this on HN" reaction from others, who flag it. With enough of the latter, the story falls off the front page, leading to a wave of "WTF why is HN censoring this story" from the first crowd. This is the cycle of life on HN. Recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27240048.
We do sometimes intervene to switch off flags, but only when a story is intellectually interesting and contains enough significant new information (SNI) to create conditions for a substantive discussion [2]. I considered doing that in this case but decided not to, because (a) it's not obvious that this is SNI, and (b) there have been several lab-leak threads recently. The most important thing to understand is that interestingness decays under repetition [3, 4].
If there hadn't been major threads on the topic recently, would we have turned off flags on this one? Well, the odds of that would be higher—but I still think probably not, because the new information in the story probably isn't enough to support a substantive discussion. If you look at those past discussions, you'll notice that in nearly all the cases, the articles themselves were among the most substantive ones that exist on the topic, and in most cases included SNI.
My GP comment had two purposes: it points people to interesting relevant discussions, but it also pre-empts the objection "WTF why is HN censoring this story". Users who post the latter have usually not yet learned to use the search box at the bottom of every page:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
@dang, just wanted to say thank you for providing related threads, and also thank you for your even-handed moderation even on items you might disagree with; your care really shows on contentious threads and certainly elevates the level of discourse on HN.
Washington Examiner does not have the pedigree of a NYT but the writer discussed in that piece wrote for NYT and Science. I think it is a topic is noxious hence I will flag it thing. :shrug:
"The Coronavirus might have been spreading quietly in humans for years, or even decades, without causing a detectable outbreak – Dr Francis Collins, Director, The National Institutes of Health."
https://johnmenadue.com/who-had-covid-first/
Nopah virus, ebola, these are two examples where we have been very lucky, and the only reason they did not spread too much internationally was that they originated in regions with very strong political regimes.
In my opinion it’s like Japanese government announcements. They’re telegraphed by rumors and hearsay for quite a while before they’re actually announced.
It’s just a matter of time here. The question is mostly what to do with the information once it’s confirmed.
There has to be consequences, not only for the CCP but also for WHO and everyone involved in exporting the virus. I have little faith any of this will come to bear though.
I think you make a really interesting point. The way this story is becoming mainstream feels very orderly to me, as if the public is being prepared for a dramatic turnaround. I know that sounds nutso conspiratorial, but actually I think it's exactly the right thing to do if the story is true or, at minimum, if the authorities genuinely have reason to believe that it's the most likely explanation. You can't just spring the opposite on people overnight, especially when the question, which ought to be a purely factual one, became so entangled in domestic politics.
I also agree with you that if this is the outcome we're headed for, then we haven't gotten near any of the big icebergs yet. How's it going to play out and what will the real-world consequences be? I hope that the Biden people will be smart enough to approach this multilaterally and not make it the US vs. China spectacle that you-know-who would have. The fact that they're quietly confirming the facts that have been coming out, but otherwise not yet making a big deal out of it, gives me some hope that they're not idiots.
This is all silly-level speculative and it's possible that nothing will come of it, but I'd place a (small) bet otherwise. The way in which, one by one, the dominos are flipping is truly fascinating. Fauci has flipped, Daszak has flipped. Every few days there's another small but notable change.
I recall a time where evaluation of this was forbidden, with well-coordinated charges of racism. Talking points are a real thing, intense coordination happens intentionally and not among US media. Orthogonal messages, particularly those viewed as adversarial, are suppressed and discouraged. In China government coordination is explicit and acknowledged. The US and UK simply get the same thing through the corporate-government looking glass.
I was wondering about this. Because yeah these minks don't grow up in the wild, but at the same time, domestication is an actual evolutionary process. So can they be considered domesticated just because they were raised in a cage?
> So can they be considered domesticated just because they were raised in a cage?
Yes, most definitely. Over many generations. They're the same species as wild minks, but domesticated (just as dogs are same species as wolves, but domesticated).
It's true that they've not been domesticated as long as dogs, for example, but there are clear morphological differences between the two.
Most importantly for our conversation, infectious diseases can behave very differently in wild and domestic populations, for reasons of population density, immune status, etc.
while immune systems in domestic and wild animals can vary, my point was that the source of infection was more likely human caretakers. Chances of a wild mink catching covid from an infected human are probably lower than getting hit by lighting 10 times in a row
Quite, also they're definitely downstream of human hosts. The comment that was replied to was implicitly talking about strains in wild animals that could have been the source of the whole malaise.
exactly. there were also reports of zoo animals catching covid, but no animal infected with the virus was ever found in the wild. at this time, it does not look like institutional narrative of covid being purely zoonotic was ever backed by evidence.
> 1st response to CoVID occurrence was certainly in Wuhan
> The closest wild strain of CoVID happens in bats living thousand kilometres from Wuhan
That's weak evidence to claim that the lab hypothesis is more likely or even just to claim that the virus in humans originates from Wuhan.
Wuhan is a transport hub within China. In relation to dates it might be worth taking into account that hundreds of millions of Chinese travel around the country in early October and that the outbreak in Wuhan was detected in November/December. Coincidence? maybe, maybe not.
Additionally, we can also look at SARS (i.e. SARS-Cov-1, while Covid-19 is SARS-Cov-2): That epidemic started with an outbreak in Guangdong province in November 2002 (again, note the relative proximity with early October). Since then the origin of the virus has been traced to a colony of bats in Yunnan province [1] (perhaps also worth noting that this took 15 years). If you look at the map that is quite far away (1000+ km) and domestic transport networks have vastly improved since then.
Based on this, I don't see why the exact same scenario as the beginning of SARS would not be the more likely explanation.
"taking into account that hundreds of millions of Chinese travel around"
Problem with that assertion is that knowing what we know today about the virus, this should have generated superspreader event situations along the travel path, which would have transported the virus to other locations in china.
Instead the opposite happened, and china tried to contain the virus to wuhan.
This story continues to evolve and it's exciting to watch the new reporting come to light and slowly flesh out the details. The "lab escape hypothesis" was disregarded by many (if not most) media outlets as a conspiracy theory early on.
This feels so much like the Iraq "weapons of mass destruction" fiasco. Any time news outlets are credulously repeating the words of "government officials," you need to seriously devalue the reporting. Reporting isn't just being a mouthpiece for the state, and these outlets fail us when they express such a high degree of certainty before there's any independent verification of the facts.
Of course, everything you describe is still "circumstantial," and it's wise to remain skeptical. However, even if we somehow eventually confirm this was not a lab escape, there's absolutely no excuse for the certainty expressed by the NYT et al in their early reporting (which is true for so much of the other COVID-19 media coverage - the media did a terrible job of expressing uncertainty with very incomplete information throughout the entire affair).
I agree. This seemed obvious even a year ago, and it seemed like the media and certain public officials were doing everything they could to avoid acknowledging it. And yet now they are starting to acknowledge it.
What changed? Mostly the party in power. At the time it was politically expedient to say that Trump was being racist or xenophobic against China, so it was deemed necessary to paint comments by him or his supporters as xenophobic conspiracy theories. Then when he states something reasonable like the lab leak hypothesis they can portray him and his supporters as conspiracy nuts. And if it could influence the election even 0.1%, that would be bonus points for some people, although I would call that a dishonest influence.
Now that he isn’t in power, they’ve decided it’s no longer necessary to avoid telling the truth.
It was extremely worrying to me that the same happened with Hydroxychloroquine. Now I know that the scientific community proved that it doesn’t work. Fine, good.
But the media dismissed it before that was proved. Because trump said it.
Now imagine a hypothetical scenario where it actually worked. Just because trump was using it, the media would have potentially killed people just because they can’t agree with a single thing trump says.
This is not journalism. It’s not objective reporting in the slightest. And it was by media outlets who claim to be doing real journalism and claim they are objective. At least fox doesn’t claim to be objective. It’s shameful propaganda.
The same thing happened with Ivermectin as a prophylaxis. All of a sudden anything that was years old with a history of safe use in humans was off the table. They all also happen to be old enough that patent protection is gone. It's almost like people wanted this to be more dangerous and less treatable for some reason.
Look, taking advice from Trump on medical issues is dumb. Injecting bleach (or drinking it or whatever) is a bad idea, and it was hopefully a joke, but you can't tell what is a joke and what isn't.
But that means you have to ignore his advice, not take it as an indicator of something bad. From what I can tell, there was plenty of activity trying out anything that seemed plausible, including Hydroxychloroquine. And it went through the usual medical science news cycle of study showing it totally works, study showing it might work, study showing it actually doesn't do a whole lot, with a pretty quick progression.
About the only thing the negative media coverage may have done is discourage people from actively soliciting for a mostly untested experimental treatment. But then again, probably not by much; or maybe they asked for other malaria drugs instead.
An assertion without evidente is a lie. Pointing out that someone is making assertions without evidente is not a lie.
If Trump were to say that the sky is actually orange, and provided no evidence, would you take on the media for reporting that what he said had no foundation on reality?
I recall several early articles in mainstream media reporting early research showing positive effects from Hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID. Then when flaws were found in the early research, and newer research showed that it didn't help, they reported that. It had nothing to do with Trump.
Media reporting that dismisses the use of a potentially harmful drug to treat an illness without a full peer-reviewed study should be standard operating procedure.
Sadly, CNN/Nbc are hard left propagandists. I don’t know enough of the history to say that was always the case as it is for Fox/Sky, but it certainly is today.
It’s disheartening to think that even once respected papers like the Guardian have become so departed from objective journalism. I can’t help but think that journalistic freedom of speech is ultimately on borrowed time if the situation becomes much worse.
I’ve taken to following Reuters for news now, but even then I don’t know if what I’m watching is well sourced or it just happens to agree with my own biases more often than not.
Oh, come on. Trump said all sorts of things that the media didn't oppose. And some of the battles that he fought actually made some sense. He also spouted some ridiculous BS pretty frequently.
The reason why the Hydroxychloroquine suggestions were dismissed is simple: science involves an empirical epistemology and that means undemonstrated hypotheses are not treated as true.
I don't know anyone who associated the lab escape theory with racism or xenophobia. Closing down flights from China (and only China) after it spread throughout Europe, that I do understand being associated with racism.
I do know that, unless you want to advocate nuking China (the official US government response to biowarfare) or you think they have a secret cure, it's meaningless.
And, yes, I'm glad that it got ignored while Trump was in power. I think the odds that he would decided to launch nukes in response was unacceptably high (as in, not zero.)
The closing of flights from China took place on January 31st. There was no notion of a spread through Europa whatsoever at that time.
You might be interested to know, that Trump was already informed about the seriousness of the outbreak in Wuhan in early January. However at that time he chose not to act on it because it might harm the ongoing negotiations over a trade deal with China.
So if you want to blame Trump for something, it would actually make more sense to blame him for closing the flights from China too late.
That's not something that has happened in over a century between countries, because last time it was attempted some Austrian guy convinced Germany that the best way to get back the financial losses was to start a second world war.
We gain so much more by fomenting international resentment toward China. The whole situation exemplifies how authoritarianism and lackadaisical safety practices can reduce costs and improve efficiency while increasing the incidence of disasters that wipe out all those benefits.
Trying to quantify harms and seize assets makes the pandemic seem like a unary problem rather than the result of profound ideological weaknesses.
This is what Trump meant by "fake news". As much as the HN crowd hates him, he's right about that. We don't have a regular report-the-news media in the US anymore, we have a propaganda arm of the authoritarian left and a satellite network of reactionary right wing outlets that are about as bad. Glenn Greenwald has had some excellent writing about this recently.
My general position is that if something is reported by a mainstream media outlet, there's a good chance that the opposite is true.
It’s very easy to come to that conclusion about your own sides media. Perhaps you should ask some republicans about how objective the NYT is, and ask for evidence. You might be surprised.
CNN or the NYT are also reporting differing arguments/facts and correct themself if they made a mistake. Havent seen that happening on OANN or NewsMax without a court order.
For a contrasting point of view, here's an article from a conservative, religious writer who follows how the media covers religion stories from 2014. In this article (and is a common theme in his writing), he discusses "Kellerism" a term named after Bill Keller, a former New York Times editor who said in 2011 how the New York Times does not seek balance in a whole bunch of areas. The author, Terry Mattingly, has over the years documented many cases in which CNN, NYT and other similar outlets don't cover stories that intersect with religion or religously affiliated people or communities fairly (seemingly, in many cases, because the authors covering the stories lack the basic knowledge to even raise questions allowing for balance).
The remarks that sparked the analysis are hardly proof of the NYT being "unfair" to conservatives, unless stating that, say, creationism is not science, and gay marriage is legal, could be considered as such.
My point is not that NYT and co are reporting according to some arbitrary fair and balanced standard. The point is that they are reporting differing views/arguments at all which is not something OANN or NewsMax do.
I can't say I've ever read OANN or NewsMax, even though I am conservative. I have read the New York Times before though, and as the linked article and several others by the same journalist indicate, evidently the Times is selective about showing differing views.
Also we are in a thread where reporting on a virus that has killed 3m people is in question at these big outlets. There are few bigger issues. This is very worrying for these supposedly less partisan outlets.
This is a straw-man. People are not legitimately comparing NYT to OANN and NewsMax, they are comparing NYT to the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal and Fox News.
Of course we know fox is partisan, but it's certainly not because they admit it about themselves. They vaunt themselves as "fair and balanced", while clearly acting otherwise. Is this so different from the NYT presenting itself as "objective and not really partisan", even when we know otherwise?
> satellite network of reactionary right wing outlets that are about as bad
Predictably, as is custom at this point, our respective appraisals of the other side depend on the side we're on. Fine - but that's beside the point. CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, et. all are, most charitably, factories of lies by omission. It's been clear to a lot of us that COVID was born of a colossal mistake by CCP scientists doing GoF research since February or March of 2020. The mainstream so-called news knew just as long - they're not stupid, they're manipulating you along an undisclosed agenda.
Just because you can point to someone else you believe to mislead in a more egregious fashion doesn't somehow alleviate the fact that we have exactly zero credible news sources.
I do not think it is clear at all, even today. What is completely clear though is that corporate media and academia went to great lengths to protect bat/wet-market origins theory and went completely inquisitional on anyone who raised doubts. This is not how media or science supposed to work unless we live in China or USSR
He's wrong about those outlets being reliable, but those outlets weren't considered reliable before his presidency either. The term "fake news" wasn't even in the lexicon before 2015-16, and it certainly wasn't something that most people considered would be coming from outlets like NYT or the Washington Post. That's absolutely something that he was right about. It may be a case of a broken clock being right twice a day, but that doesn't mean he wasn't right.
> The term "fake news" wasn't even in the lexicon before 2015-16
Not the exact term itself, but the significancy of it. The "lying press" is a pejorative used since at least the XIX century [1].
Are we looking for 100% reliability here? Then, yes, we could call the NYT or the WP "fake news". But that is just hyperbole, directed at creating doubt and uncertainty where it does not exist. Once Trump followers had a excuse to label the NYT as "partisan" or "fake", it was easy for Trump to steer the narrative any way he wanted.
Trump was hot garbage and nothing he said could be taken seriously, at best it was his demented world view at worst it was outright lies to soothe his white-racist base. News is obviously biased but your statement of "if something is reported..." is also conspiratorial nonsense. Sure they fuck up but mostly they are dead on when you extract the facts from the the opinion.
That's not at all what Trump meant by "fake news" - what he meant by "fake news" was, "their narrative goes against mine, it's a like, so buy into the narrative from this other media outlet that supports me instead."
> Of course, everything you describe is still "circumstantial," and it's wise to remain skeptical. However, even if we somehow eventually confirm this was not a lab escape, there's absolutely no excuse for the certainty expressed by the NYT et al in their early reporting (which is true for so much of the other COVID-19 media coverage - the media did a terrible job of expressing uncertainty with very incomplete information throughout the entire affair).
In general, my trust for the media has fallen through the floor in the last decade. I used to think that the media was mostly trustworthy, but that they would cater to the establishment on certain issues (e.g., WMDs and the general Iraq/Afghanistan war effort) but apart from those obvious high-profile issues they were mostly trustworthy. Now I can't tell if I was wrong the whole time and I've just wisened up recently or if the quality of the media has plummeted (especially with respect to ideological issues) or both. I strongly suspect that the media has become considerably more ideological (abandoning aspirations for neutrality and objectivity in favor of activism and proselytizing, at least to a degree), but I've probably (and hopefully) wisened up a bit as well.
"Nuclear Winter" is a good example of a past consensual media gang bang; the notion was obvious horse shit but no one was allowed to say so. Mid 80s. That wasn't the first instance of mass media holding a remarkably consistent propaganda line, but I think it might have been one of the first where it escaped from state control.
Do you have a citation on nuclear winter not being a thing? The last thing I read on the subject was that even a full blown exchange between india and pakistan would be enough to wreak havoc on agriculture in large swaths of the world for a year or two
> Do you have a citation on nuclear winter not being a thing? The last thing I read on the subject was that even a full blown exchange between india and pakistan would be enough to wreak havoc on agriculture in large swaths of the world for a year or two
The gist is that in the 80s nuclear winter was portrayed as apocalyptic by Carl Sagan and others using shoddy models in order to advance an arms control agenda. More recent work depicts far more modest climactic effects that are highly variable based on the season the nuclear war would occur in (worst in the summer, very modest to non-existent in the winter). The issue seems to be not so much the bombs themselves; but how cities burn, how much soot would be produced, and how it would move through the atmosphere.
This is also worth reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in.... Sagan's nuclear-winter modeling team predicted in 1990 that 100 oil well fires would produce a small-scale global nuclear winter. In 1991 Iraq started 800 oil well fires, which caused no such thing. The only effects were localized and stopped soon after the fires were put out.
Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent” should be on your bookshelf. Goes into great detail especially regarding the need that media has to toeing the government line. It keeps them relevant and included in general news at all. Telling the truth or at least failing to omit it could equate to biting the hand that feeds you other stories.
I should probably read it sometime, but I don't think "toeing the government line" aptly characterizes the media from 2016-2020. On the contrary, the media has had little except harsh criticism for the government in this time frame (which isn't to say that some or all of the criticism is undeserved, only that it seems to contradict the notion that the media toes the government line).
National politics is a very specific topic - where I agree, depending on your outlet’s leaning (assuming a person listens to only one) you got a very different picture. In truth much of the aforementioned book takes an international look, but I think the timeframe you present is just a local version of our international information spin/silence problems. You do recall when the United States’ previous president barred certain outlets from briefings https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/24/media-blocke... this is probably more rare for how brazen it was rather than common
Haven't read it since the 90's but the "toeing the line" bit sounds like the criticism that the media are uncritically dependent on official sources. A reporter's dependence on a particular official as a source of information and the resultant reluctance to alienate such a source was proposed to explain why media outlets have the effect of uncritically promulgating government policy or propaganda.
I don't think this situation has changed in essence. Media outlets may now filter first on party affiliation, but they haven't replaced their dependence on official sources with better independent investigative reporting, for instance.
> On the contrary, the media has had little except harsh criticism for the government in this time frame
Or glowing, fawning reverence. It depends on the media outlet and the official (really the official's party) in question. The screw turned for Cuomo, but I imagine for every Cuomo, there are more darlings that go unchallenged.
A more modern analysis can be found in The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri.
His hypothesis is that what was once an information trickle has become a virtual tsunami with the internet + cell phones + satellite television, etc. Governments have no control over the flow of information, which they had at least a semblance of pre-2000. This wave of information has not only exposed the worst excesses of the elites, but has also exposed the enormous gap between their authoritative promises and the actual results they produce.
This has pissed off a lot of very entitled people, who don't take the fact that the gap has always existed into consideration, who for historical reasons place very high expectations on government, and as a result attribute bad intentions to the previously mentioned poor results.
Not only is the media courting those people, they are made up of those people. So you get a media that just heaps negation on even the smallest failure of government. It's not just for clicks -- they are true believers in that they think they're doing the right thing.
That’s an interesting theory and I certainly think the difference in the way we access information plays a role, but I don’t think it accounts for the stark contrast in media reporting between Obama and Biden. I don’t think things got bad for the elected the moment Trump became a serious candidate and then became good again the moment Biden took office; however, that’s roughly the portrait the media gave us. Trump comes into office and basically continues Obama’s immigration policy and suddenly we have an immigrant crisis and America is a white supremacist hellscape. Trump leaves office and (barring the Jan 6 riots) America is peachy-keen per the media. It certainly seems manufactured, but not by the government and not reflecting the discontent of the elites. I genuinely don’t have a good hypothesis to put forward. :/
Matt Taibbi's _Hate, Inc._ was also a great look at how journalism has (and has not) changed in recent. He cites _Manufacturing Consent_ as an important influence on him.
According to the chatter among the talking heads earlier this year, the theory of a lab escape was “misinformation” that was “dangerous” and “fomenting discord” among the population.
Many people, including in the media, would have preferred that theory was actively censored.
The conspiracy theory arguably sparked a new tide of anti Asian hate attacks. So, yes, it was and is dangerous and it fomented discord among population.
There was zero evidence, at the time, that the virus escaped from a Chinese lab. There is still zero evidence that the virus was created in a lab, or that its purpose is to be a biological weapon.
>The "lab escape hypothesis" was disregarded by many (if not most) media outlets as a conspiracy theory early on.
I have seen this claim made recently, but as I remember the 'disregarded' conspiracy theory was actually that the virus was genetically engineered (ie codon sequence edited) in a lab. The virus' genetic code seems to discount engineering, but not serial passaging/hybridization.
No, this was the sleight of hand by the media. Almost all people dismissed as conspiracy theorists said most likely lab escape doesn’t mean genetically engineered. But straight away that’s how it was reported in the media. Basically twisting words and lying. Shameful.
Tangentially related, I have another comment from a separate post observing some additional media (NYT specifically) sleight of hand WRT the Damore "memo":
>> [Damore] argued that biological differences and not a lack of opportunity explained the shortage of women in upper-tier positions.
> This is an unfortunate way of characterizing Damore’s argument. It’s technically true in that Damore IIRC was arguing that there was more variation among men than women (more men at the top and at the bottom but fewer in the middle, but Google hires from the top hence more men). So yeah, technically biological differences, but when the average person hears that they’re going to assume he was arguing that women in general are dumber than men in general or some such. That said, this also represents much more earnest coverage of Damore considering the initial coverage overtly lied on many accounts (calling it an anti diversity screed, claiming he sent it as a memo to the company, etc).
I doubt if there's little doubt if you go with the lab theory that this virus wasn't genetically modified to be more virulent to humans (or possibly some species similar to humans). I think the big one is whether it was a lab accident, which seems like the most likely scenario barring jumping species naturally which still seems to be the most likely scenario.
No, that's just not true. The media repeatedly mocked even a lab escape scenario and boosted a handful of experts were favored a wild reservoir for the disease.
Our "intellectual elites" have a bad problem now with moral/intellectual fashions, which are constantly changing. Social media has considerably exacerbated this problem.
How many do you want? If I post one link, you'll likely say it's not enough. Same with two links, etc. I'm hesitant to engage with this kind of request, but I did.
In any case, I can tell you that there was a definite narrative in the media that the lab escape scenario was not only very unlikely, but "xenophobic" and "conspiratorial".
Perhaps the most telling example of all my links below is this one, which is very open to the possibility of a lab escape. The latter half of the article is full of example of the efforts of the media and scientific establishment (for whatever reason, mostly political) to quash the lab escape hypothesis. One key quote:
"Antonio Regalado, biomedicine editor of MIT Technology Review, put it more bluntly. If it turned out COVID-19 came from a lab, he tweeted, 'it would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom.'"
"After the story published, Cotton as part of a series of tweets made a distinction between the possibility the coronavirus is a man-made result of biological weapons research – which experts say should be dismissed – and other possibilities such as a lab accident. He also continued to list the engineered virus as a “hypothesis.”
So doesn't this imply it was Tom Cotton himself who was initially conflating an engineered origin with a lab leak (which could be wild type or engineered virus)?
It shows that he was previously conflating two distinct concepts (genetically engineered virus and lab escape) and then got called out on it. One is wrong and one could be correct.
While unlikely, it's also premature to call the genetically-engineered scenario "wrong". I agree it appears improbable at this point, but when the most likely scenario appears to be a lab escape, I'm hesitate to categorically rule out that the virus had been genetically altered at all.
You are conflating multiple theories to maximize outrage. The article is clear that the origin theory described as ‘fringe’ is that the virus was a manufactured bio weapon and intentionally released. It even mentions that Cotton had to ‘walk back’ his support for this theory.
I know this is confusing, but gain of function genome alterations is one class of genetic engineering.
Other approaches involve literally trying to change the codon sequence in a supercomputer to see what happens in the folding and conformation changes, but it is very esoteric since bio is so complicated.
So my understanding is that GoF can involve genetic engineering (editing the codon sequence/geneotype) OR serial passaging (growing successive generations of microorganisms under various conditions to influence phenotype).
The disregarded conspiracy theory, as I understood it, was that Chinese researchers were doing the former, NOT the latter. It is also my understanding that the virus' genetic code does not show any evidence of the former (editing codon sequence).
> I have seen this claim made recently, but as I remember the 'disregarded' conspiracy theory was actually that the virus was genetically engineered (ie codon sequence edited) in a lab.
For the better part of a year now, the lab leak theory and the genetic engineering theory have been lumped in together by those trying to discredit them as conspiracies. The issue is that every time someone would point at circumstantial evidence of a potential lab leak, people would point at the scientists saying there was loads of evidence it wasn't genetically engineered, when those two things aren't remotely the same thing.
> This feels so much like the Iraq "weapons of mass destruction" fiasco. Any time news outlets are credulously repeating the words of "government officials," you need to seriously devalue the reporting.
Depends what you mean by government officials. Trump was in power and his statements on this were called conspiracy theories. So the media wasn’t exactly taking the government side on this, they were dismissing statements by the government as conspiracy.
Whether right or wrong, it’s extremely embarrassing for the media. They are slowly politicizing themselves into untrustable entities.
Or, they were skeptics of the words of a compulsive serial liar and manipulator. It’s not partisan to stop trusting somebody like that.
Edit: it is factually true to say Trump lied in manipulative ways constantly, and easy to confirm. This is not a partisan statement, it’s a fact that can be checked. Here are 5276 examples: https://projects.thestar.com/donald-trump-fact-check/
> Or, they were skeptics of the words of a compulsive serial liar and manipulator. It’s not partisan to stop trusting somebody like that.
The issue here is that, as journalists, their job is to look at facts and weight evidence independently, rather than simply base judgements on the person making the statements. There has been ample evidence to at least consider a lab-leak theory very plausible, or even likely, but those were largely ignored. Instead, the media seemed content to report that Trump is claiming this thing, and Trump sucks, so this thing must also suck. Not exactly inspiring behavior from the "fourth estate".
That’s fair, but this isn’t an ordinary liar. If a known con artist is raving about his new youth serum, after being caught lying thousands and thousands of times in the last 4 years, it’s not inappropriate for the press to respond with “this known con artist has no evidence to support his claims” after a short glance - they are so busy dealing with the other 1000 recent lies that they don’t have time to investigate everything this person says in depth. The magnitude of the lies and manipulation was unheard of.
The fact is, you need to hear the story from somebody credible before it becomes worth investigating, otherwise we would still have journalists trying to uncover the alleged thousands of murders by immigrants kept secret by bizarre conspiracies (which, again, lacks evidence) - the claims have to come from somebody capable of basic truth telling.
Sorry you're getting downvoted, but you are correct. He literally told thousands of blatant lies and nothing that was coming out of his mouth could be trusted. The collective amnesia of republicans is astonishing. "Trust" in the source is quite important for reporting the facts. Not every reporter has the time to wade through tons of horseshit to find a single nugget of truth.
The issue most people rightly have here, is almost all mainstream news outlets said with certainty that it wasn’t a lab leak. That certainty also needs evidence. Or should.
Coming to conclusions either way without evidence, when it suits certain anti government narratives, is partisanship.
It was a conspiracy theory, and it may still be, because the WSJ only mentions that lab workers were "ill" and presented symptoms similar to those caused by COVID-19, which could be... really anything. The main strain of the flu in 2019 was H1N1. It could have been that. It may not have been. We don't know yet.
I don't think there is anything wrong about "mocking" people for peddling conspiracy theories with zero evidence. Let's be honest, even if some of their ideas end up being true, it would have been just a coincidence. It's like arriving to the correct solution to a math problem, but through a completely wrong process.
Only Galileo would be a candidate here. And he was not mocked, he was put on trial for something most academics knew since ancient times.
What you call "dismissive", is just reactionary traditionalism.
Also, all of these provide evidence to support their claims.
> But even the current mRNA vaccine developers were dismissed for 15-20 years as unimportant.
This. This is the problem, right here.
You believe that mainstream media works like science, and it does not. So when big headlines hit the public opinion with things like "this woman was mocked and now her work on mRNA is the basis of the new vaccines", you take that the academic world actually dismissed those novel ideas.
Science does not work like that. And the media like hyperbole. And that hyperbole is what stucks the most in the public memory.
She wasn't. She was denied funding, and for that you can blame the bureaucrats, not the academia.
"In 1990 she was offered a tenure track position at the University of Pennsylvania. Around this time, a different group of researchers developed a technique for injecting mice with RNA in such a way that those mice started to produce the proteins encoded by the RNA. [...] After six years of work at the University of Pennsylvania, due in part to a lack of interest from funding agencies in supporting her work, Karikó was demoted from her tenure track position. This type of demotion generally leads to the end of a scientific career. In the same year, she was treated for cancer and her husband encountered a visa problem, leaving him temporarily stuck in Hungary."
Almost all of the information supporting a lab-leak has been available for nearly a year. There isn't "newly surfaced evidence", it's people finally starting to take previously surfaced evidence seriously.
> This feels so much like the Iraq "weapons of mass destruction" fiasco.
So I have to pipe in here as I recall this vividly. What crystalized this for me was of all things an op-ed piece by a conservative (not neocon) writer that essentially came down to this (paraphrased):
> There are essentially two possibilities here:
> 1. Iraq has no WMD. In this case the invasion is unjustified; or
> 2. Iraq has WMD. In which case, why wouldn't they give them up to avoid a US invasion?
This was such a simple and undeniable logical fallacy in the Iraq WMD invasion narrative it blew my mind.
I've been skeptical about the lab leak theory. But you can be skeptical about the theory and still recognize that the WHO just hasn't pursued enough leads to debunk the theory to a sufficient degree. Examples include:
1. China had an online database of coronaviruses. This was taken offline in late 2019 and hasn't been online since. The WHO investigation team has not examined it nor sought to do so. While the timing is certainly curious, it's not necessarily damning. But it warrants investigation (IMHO); and
2. Chinese labs have been less than forthcoming about what coronaviruses they have.
Chinese authorities have been less than fully cooperative here. Again, that's not damning. I consider it much more likely that Chinese authorities simply don't know if Covid leaked from a Wuhan lab but there's literally zero upside in finding out if that's the case.
Would you want to be a member of the CCP that released information that allowed the WHO to establish that Covid-19 came from a Wuhan lab allowing critics of China to "blame" China for this?
the interesting part, in my opinion, is how many people have been saying this for months, but the mainstream media narrative labeled these ideas as those of "conspiracy theorists." it is only now that the mainstream media is starting to shift the narrative, that people are starting to be willing to see this whole debacle being a kind of "Iraq Has WMDs 2.0."
thus, the mainstream media, however mistrusted, is still the arbiter of widespread "truth." they still control the Overton Window. if they say a thought is unacceptable, most people won't accept it, until they say it's acceptable once again.
> This feels so much like the Iraq "weapons of mass destruction" fiasco. Any time news outlets are credulously repeating the words of "government officials," you need to seriously devalue the reporting. Reporting isn't just being a mouthpiece for the state, and these outlets fail us when they express such a high degree of certainty before there's any independent verification of the facts.
Interestingly, the inverse happened here. Most of the initial claims of a lab-origin for Covid were being disputed by mainstream media in no small part because the Trump administration was echoing them. A lot of them pointed to scientists claiming that there was no evidence of lab manipulation or gene editing as proof that it was conspiratorial thinking, despite the fact that that was not the same thing as a lab-leak. Very little of the evidence we have to support a lab-leak hypothesis wasn't available and known a year ago. But literally within a couple weeks of the Biden administration taking office, mainstream outlets like the Washington Post started publishing pieces supporting the credibility of lab-origins of the virus.
I am no Trump-fan by any means, but I've found this whole saga, and much of the last 4 years, to be a very mask-off period for the media, to the point where its hard to take much of anything being said too seriously.
While the lab was correlated to the outbreak, it still may not be the cause of the outbreak. It may just be that those with expertise in bat coronavirus transmission to humans were in Wuhan so that is where it was first detected. Unfortunately, due to their secrecy and loose relationship with the truth, China's officials lack credibility in this so we're stuck wondering.
> Beijing purposefully destroyed DNA evidence, and obliterated the team who first sequenced the CoVID genome
In civil trials there is the principle of “adverse inference”. When the defendant has either destroyed evidence or else has not produced evidence they would have been reasonably expected to have, the jury is instructed to assume they are what the plaintiff characterizes them to be.
I think this principle holds in this case. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence for the Wuhan lab leak theory. The Chinese government has destroyed a lot of evidence and host gone to great lengths to keep documents and people away from investigators.
Based on all this, I think the preponderance of evidence is in favor of it being a lab leak.
Covid is the disease. The virus, SARS-CoV-2, has never been found in the wild. The closest known relative, RaTG13, was found in Yunnan. But SARS, a very similar disease (caused by SARS-CoV-1) broke out in Guangzhou, which is 1000km from Yunnan. So there doesn't seem to be any obvious reason why SARS-CoV-2 couldn't originate in animals and break out in Wuhan.
> Beijing purposefully destroyed DNA evidence, and obliterated the team who first sequenced the CoVID genome
You have a reliable source for this, of course. Would you be so kind as to share it?
"Gain of function research" is when you stimulate micro-organisms so that they gain new attributes. For viruses these properties could be infectiousness or antibody resistance.
One way you can do that is by putting evolutive selection pressure on the micro-organisms. For instance, submit a colony of bacteria to something they are vulnerable to. Stop when 90% of the colony is dead. Cultivate the colony back to a full size, then repeat the protocol until you get bacteria that are fully resistant.
Imho, it's an interesting question but we will never know whether the virus started at the lab or the market (or somewhere else).
Either way, it's China's incompetence and reckless endangerment of the rest of the world that has caused this. So the more important question is what we will do about it?
So far the answer seems to be "nothing because the price of cheap plastic shit might go up 2p a tonne and that's more concerning than a global pandemic".
> Either way, it's China's incompetence and reckless endangerment of the rest of the world that has caused this.
After seeing the response from Western countries, (delays, denialism, half measures, etc.) I really doubt we would have done any better. Probably worse.
We already did much better: we never created a pandemic in the first place. You don't need to be great at dealing with plagues if you don't make them. That's the take away here, China can be as denialist as we are, but they have to fix their food hygiene (and lab security maybe?)...
(none of this excuses how shit my government, UK, have performed)
>we will never know whether the virus started at the lab or the market
It didn't start at the market. They tested every animal there and found nothing, yet they found many infected people there and found the virus all over surfaces there. The market was an early superspreader event, not the origin.
I think there are too many unknowns to state either case as a fact: Did they test every animal that had been there? How? Weren't half of them sold and gone already? Do we know none got loose or came from outside?
Another two cases needed to investigate is a) whether many of the cases are along the railway between Wuhan lab and the airport to where the bat lived and b) there was a case of infection well before that on bat to Human during the bat study.
The whole thing is sad that it is humanity at stake but we have a country so powerful it is in the way to prevent further study.
I expect the fact that this virus emerged in Wuhan during the World Military Games makes the Chinese very cautious about allowing in 'investigators' from countries that potentially deployed this biological weapon.
Interesting that this is downvoted without a reply. I guess people have conclusive evidence that a foreign country didn't just attack China? Feel free to share/link it if you do.
HN feels like the same kind of echo chamber that would have attacked me for saying not to invade Iraq in the early 2000s... Anything our historically dishonest intelligence agencies imply about foreign countries is eaten up like gospel truth without any skepticism.
From Nicholas Wade's article (it's now the canonical reference for this stuff):
"Steven Quay, a physician-researcher, has applied statistical and bioinformatic tools to ingenious explorations of the virus’s origin, showing for instance how the hospitals receiving the early patients are clustered along the Wuhan №2 subway line which connects the Institute of Virology at one end with the international airport at the other, the perfect conveyor belt for distributing the virus from lab to globe."
This highlights further damage to Dr Fauci's credibility, after his lies about masks not working and his insistence that the U.S. not close international arrivals from China.
Dr Fauci recklessly claimed in May 2020 that it's "very, very strongly" impossible for this to have come from a lab. [1]
When will public officials actually be held to account for their flip flopping, often times leading to massive distrust from the population and killing people?
How many people are refusing vaccines because officials like Dr Fauci have lied repeatedly?
Well, he said it was "very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated".
There are multiple related claims that fall under the umbrella of lab leaks:
1. Did it escape from a lab?
2. Was that lab manipulating the RNA of the virus?
3. Was the lab doing so for nefarious/biowarfare related ends?
The CNN article is the usual manipulative bilge we might expect from them, because the headline is "Anthony Fauci just crushed Donald Trump's theory on the origins of the coronavirus", but Trump was claiming the virus escaped from a lab (claim 1) and then Fauci makes a counter-claim that it wasn't manipulated by a lab (claim 2).
The claim it escaped from a lab was always pretty strong given the long history of lab leaks and where it started. The claim the lab was manipulating it originally had to rely on RNA evidence, which is rather complex to understand, ambiguous and disputed. But recently people seem to have dug up documentary evidence that the US NIAID (led by Dr Fauci) was directing funding to the WIV specifically to manipulate bat coronaviruses, so claim (2) is starting to look pretty strong too.
Claim 3 looks very weak and is getting far less attention as a result. There's no evidence for it and COVID makes for an objectively very poor bio weapon. It's also not the most parsimonious explanation that works. Virology researchers had convinced themselves that GOF research was something important that they should be doing, and were able to work around US bans on it by doing it abroad and getting it approved by high level enough figures who could override the bans. They had clear incentives to do the work at low bio-safety levels, and appear to have done so (again from documentary evidence). As is often the case they thought they were doing something good for the world, and that the ends justified the means. They were wrong. No more complex explanation is necessary.
there was a lot of mismanagement in this pandemic, from all sides. CDC and WHO advising against masks for an airborne disease!! The president being an anti-masker against the advice of all doctors 2 months later.
Then even Biden and the democrats eroding the trust in vaccines saying they won't get vaccinated if Trump rushes the antivirus. Well, what do you know, the next week after the election we discovered that the antivirus is effective and all adults should vaccinate.
How many anti-vaxxers did Biden create with that irresponsible political statement?
I’m guessing those political purposes were something like - “we don’t need an international conflict at the same time as trying to contend with this virus”. Or maybe even just a generic desire not to point fingers.
I’m not saying this isn’t bad - just that it’s pretty easy to understand why people would downregulate the lab leak hypothesis without anything special going on.
385 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadThey're getting more powerful...
(this comment will also get flagged.)
Contacting the mods (use the contact link in the footer) and asking them to review can be effective.
Is there anything that offsets a flag? Does a single flag click create the flag label, or does it take several clicks?
It seems unfair that a single person could trigger an unremovable flag label.
They're getting more powerful...
(an earlier version this comment also got flagged.)
(*) an earlier version of this comment also got flagged.
This thread got well over 300 comments and there have been at least half a dozen major threads about the ongoing story. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27268921.
Some people like the topic and want it discussed here, others feel the opposite. The tug of war between upvotes and flags is the most normal phenomenon that exists on HN. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27268101, and please don't post any more off-topic flamebait.
- everything I've read here after raising this months ago.
If I couldn't go outside for days in a row because of pollution from China, I'd probably be pretty pissed at them too.
Ironically china citizens just threw a hissyfit at South Korea because one of the k-pop groups thanked the US government for supporting South Korea during the korean war, and didn't thank the china government. I thought that was pretty funny.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If the above comment is inflammatory, then perhaps moderators should look at the derisive behavior that is cultivated here. The poster's sarcasm and frustration is understandable.
People get sick, especially in autumn. And they infect each other. Reporting that some people working at the lab were sick, without any knowledge about kind of sickness is only going to add fuel to the conspiracy theories.
It’s often stated that the CCP is lying about COVID deaths, as they state there were only a few thousand.
Maybe they are NOT lying and the virus was engineered to have minimal effect on Han Chinese.
I suspect I had COVID-19 in the US late December 2019, but as of yet, the CDC doesn't acknowledge that possibility, and I've had enough exposure since that time that there's no reasonable way to test the hypothesis.
At a certain point, some of the investigations stop being practical to investigate further.
It may be very hard to determine if people sick in 2019 had COVID-19 or something else at this time.
I was laid out in bed with the worst upper respiratory infection of my life for most of late December and then again for two more weeks in early January after a brief recovery.
A handful of our coworkers had been in Wuhan in the 3-4 weeks prior.
IIRC, public toilets due to fecal matter were a possible infection vector (I hope I am using the term correctly) [4], which suggests that there had been covid cases since December in Italy as the traces were in waste water [2,3].
Some hypothesise that covid had been circulating in humans long before the market outbreak [5], this hypothesis does seem to corroborate the hypothesis that the virus had long spread before the first 'official' outbreak in Wuhan.
[1] https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20210311-surprises-about-french...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-...
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53106444
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiegold/2020/06/18/new-scient...
[5] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/mar-27-covid-pandemic-origin...
But that’s not what this story is about. It’s just about being hospitalized, which means nothing, without any additional data. It’s like running a story that Obama visited Kenya, when birth conspiracy was rampant. It’s something you’d expect from CNN/Foxnews, but not from a reputable journalist organization.
The workers at the lab "were tested and there was no evidence found of Covid antibodies."
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/23/politics/us-intelligence-repo...
So theoretically it's possible that three workers at the lab were sick -- and hospitalized -- but with, say the seasonal flu. The original reports from the State Department about this even specified that the workers had been sick with symptoms "consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness."
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-report-of-illnesses-at...
Tested by whom and how? If a trustworthy disinterested party positively identified the workers, took their blood samples, and tested them via a procedure with a low false-negative rate, then the test results are meaningful. Otherwise, there is reason for doubt.
1. The testing showing no Covid-19 antibodies was fraudulent and faked.
2. That testing was not faked. The workers did not have Covid-19 antibodies; their illness was caused by some other illness.
3. The report of the lab workers' illness is faked. (It came from a conservative newspaper, from unnamed officials citing an unnamed international partner -- where somewhere along that chain, someone had the proper motivation.)
I'm not arguing for any one of these things. We just honestly do not know.
>... is only going to add fuel to the conspiracy theories.
That's a bad thing only if the conspiracy theory is false. At this point, the theory that the Chinese Communistic Party conspired to cover up a lab leak is not implausible. There are multiple known occurrences of pathogens escaping from laboratories.
It would not be in the least surprising if this was a lab leak, and it is no more "harmful" to speculate that it was than to speculate that it was a wild virus.
Do you realise that this is very easily true for any company or office at that time of the year?
Does the US government "have reason to believe that several teachers in a high school in Milan became sick in autumn 2015 with symptoms consistent with both Covid and seasonal flu"? Yes, it does! Good job, US government!
Well that depends on your objective. If it's to push a certain narrative, then it's bad if it contradicts that narrative; whether or not it's true is secondary.
What is "sought hospital care"? To get some Vitamin C or get some serious surgery? (In China people go to hospital more often I guess, as people tend to deal with ailments relying on doctors a lot, rather than letting it go by itself.)
Nothing told.
Anyway assuming it's at least not a lie, "sought hospital care" would mean it's not just a trivial cold. Again, I'll be waiting for more details, I just think Occam's razor is converging here, and there are more hurdles to dance around with the other explanations.
Further, the researchers were surely in the 18-49 age bracket. CDC’s estimates for the 2017-18 flu season in that age bracket were 58.8 per 100,000. That is 0.0588% per person per year.
And that’s the whole flu season. To have odds of being hospitalized in november you’d cut that in four at least.
And then the odds of three people in the same lab all needing hospitalization also needing hospital treatment? Even less likely.
Not impossible, but it’s not so simple as suggesting there was a bad flu season. There wasn’t in china then, and flu hospitalization is damned rare in non elderly.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm
(It is possible that the “hospital care” in the article doesn’t match “hospitalization” as cdc defines it, but any kind of hospital care for a young person from the flu is still rare)
> Further, the researchers were surely in the 18-49 age bracket. CDC’s estimates for the 2017-18 flu season in that age bracket were 58.8 per 100,000. That is 0.0588% per person per year.
They're using CDC figure for the wrong year to say that younger people were not particularly affected. The 2019 flu season in Australia was
1) much rougher than the 2018 flu season in the US
2) much earlier than normal
Both of these mean that it could well have been an early, rough, flu season in Wuhan that hospitalised these people.
I understand that people really want this to be lab escape, but the way to show it's lab escape is to be honest when you're discounting everything else.
I'm not ignoring their first sentence. I'm explaining that their first sentence is wrong, and that isn't changed by looking at US figures for the year before.
China doesn't follow normal flu seasonal patterns. Instead of a single winter peak China sees flu all year with dual peaks in summer and winter - and the summer peak is higher. Flu starts in the south of China, and moves north over the year.
This particular type of flu was early, not just in Australia but world wide.
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/inf...
> The season has started slightly earlier than usual. It is too soon to predict how the season will develop in terms of peak week, severity and duration.
About severity: we can look at death. This flu season showed increased mortality. And we can look at hospitalisation. It had increased rates of hospitalisation. We can look at ages affected: some strains affected younger people.
> A(H3N2) is typically associated with serious health impact in older age groups.Some countries, such as the United Kingdom, are already seeing increased rates of influenza hospitalisation. There is no evidence of significant excess mortality at this early stage, however experience during past seasons suggests a significant mortality impact on the elderly during A(H3N2) dominated seasons.
> B virus circulation might be associated with a higher burden on younger age groups, as already observed in Portugal.
I know flu strains differ year to year - that's the point. The world pays attention to the flu in Australia because that tends to predict the strains in flu seasons elsewhere. This is part of the flu surveillance work to develop seasonal flu vaccines. This flu surveillance recommended that the vaccination included Australia strains:
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-events/who-recommendation...
> On 18–20 February 2019 in Beijing, China, the World Health Organization (WHO) agreed on the recommended composition of the quadrivalent influenza vaccine for the northern hemisphere 2019–2020 influenza season: an A/Brisbane/02/2018 (H1N1)pdm09-like virus, a B/Colorado/06/2017-like virus (B/Victoria/2/87 lineage), a B/Phuket/3073/2013-like virus (B/Yamagata/16/88 lineage) and an A(H3N2) virus component to be announced on 21 March 2019. The recommendation for the A(H3N2) component was postponed in light of recent changes in the proportions of genetically and antigenically diverse A(H3N2) viruses to allow more time for the selection of the appropriate virus strain. It is recommended that the influenza B virus component of trivalent vaccines for use in the 2019–2020 northern hemisphere influenza season be a B/Colorado/06/2017-like virus of B/Victoria/2/87-lineage.
My point is that there was a severe flu strain in Australia in 2019; this strain started making its way around the world; it would be unsurprising to see it in China at the time the article talks about; and that talking about the US stats for 2018 mean nothing because that was a different flu season with different flu strains.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3321959/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan
For all of China, in November 2019, it looks like less than 2000 positive test swabs. The number of hospitalizations would be lower.
What are the odds that three hospitalizations would come from a single lab in healthy people? Not impossible, but not probable. Flu hospitalizations are very much clustered in the elderly and very young.
There has been no info contradicting the lab theory.
Just more low effort agitprop. Apparently most people in my country (US) will believe anything as long as it wears the correct team jersey.
At least in the US a fair amount of patients show up at the ER first. The Wikipedia page for healthcare in China says there is a tiered system but also a shortage of primary care doctors in clinics. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_China
(I find the lab theory credible & worthy of investigation, just pointing out that in China a hospital visit doesn't imply anything about the severity of symptoms).
This would be good to know if we're going to try speculating about what happened
I'm not trying to reject any hypothesis but I do reject the fervor. And then people come out of the woodwork and try to defend the Wuhan Lab as the source with a load of coincidences that trend to conspiratorial thoughts. Like how we only know of a related Covid strain in bat hundreds of miles away from Wuhan... but bats are not endemic to just Yunnan where the closest Covid-19 match was from. Does Wuhan not have bats?
If you lay all the pieces of data out on a table, it's pretty easy to deduce this virus most likely originated from Wuhan.
The fact that China is not fully complying with releasing early COVID records and that the WHO is being sued says a lot...
Some of the evidence is not co-incidence based, for example, the documents that appear to show the US was funding GOF research on bat coronaviruses at the WIV.
However, the reaction of the Chinese authorities (destroy all the evidence, block any investigation) is pretty much the definition of a conspiracy. I'm not sure it merits the term theory anymore - when the authorities are very visibly covering up all the evidence related to a critical event, that's what a conspiracy is. The only question now is what is the conspiracy hiding? Well, there's only one obvious possibility, isn't there?
There are already variants and these vaccines will need booster shots to stay effective from what I was told. I'm not sure though. Is this true?
Covid has taught me a few things:
- Health is as important as wealth, living well is making time for both. It takes good health to build lasting wealth and to enjoy it. It takes at least some wealth to invest in good food, living space, life experiences.
- Living in Maui and working remotely is like semi-retiring in my 30s. I can make money and enjoy life at the same time without taking years off my life due to commutes and stress. Why didn't I do this in my 20s? I was learning the skills and figuring out what exactly I wanted in life. Now I know.
- I don't need a lot of people to be happy, just a handful of high-quality people. More than anything, I should give myself a lot of what I expect from others.
- Nature is more resilient than we know, Earth really be fine with or without humans. We can change if we want to but we can't agree on anything anymore. I'm hoping for the best but prepared for the worst.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_respiratory_synd...
This is a dangerous difference.
> SARS-CoV recognizes angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) as its receptor, whereas MERS-CoV recognizes dipeptidyl peptidase 4 (DPP4) as its receptor.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41423-020-0400-4
The ACE2 receptor affinity is not novel.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-020-0184-0
That's what was being researched in Wuhan from what I've read in the media.
The 2004 SARS was suspected to be lab leak. (I'm not sure if this conclusion has been revised since.)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/
Convinced how?
I don’t understand the reasoning. It’s not unusual for a virus to attack multiple systems or to have varying symptoms.
Among these, viruses integrate quite closely with their host, so viruses that jump into a new species should normally infect less well, but sometimes they infect fine and just harm the host excessively. SARS, MERS, etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But the second part of the comment doesn't contain an iota of nationalistic element to it. It simply is a fact as reported by numerous newspapers and felt by many businesses here in Australia. The CCP is punishing Australian businesses as the Australian government is pushing for a proper investigation into a disease that originated in Wuhan and has killed (reportedly) close to a million people so far. In fact It's important to note that it's not a reflection on the people of China, rather the government. I'm happy to be downvoted, probably with nationalist intentions! But I haven't said anything wrong here.
This ACE2 binding is causing numerous issues, including damage to human heart, lung, kidney, and pancreatic cell death.
This is serious stuff. If anyone is looking at the "low" mortality rate, they are missing the big picture.
Role of angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) in COVID-19
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7356137/
The genetic structure of SARS‐CoV‐2 does not rule out a laboratory origin
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7744920/
SARS-CoV-2 infects human pancreatic β-cells and elicits β-cell impairment
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(21)...
ACE2 was part of mechanism of action of previous coronaviruses. Here's first search result for SARS and ACE2 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1287568/
I stand by the science and I would love any evidence of something like natural zoonotic spillover.
It should go without saying, but I'll add that I'm not at all commenting on which of you is right or wrong factually. But if you're the one who's right, then you should take better care with the truth, because stooping to cheap attacks discredits what you're saying, and one is responsible for how one handles the truth one's in possession of.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Thank You.
Thanks dang, you help keep this place a truly special corner of the internet!
Why do we need evidence of why a lab would do research in viruses that is a danger to people in the country? It's pretty self-explanatory. ACE2 isn't specific to SARS-CoV-2 as your own links says.
> Here we show that SARS-CoV, but not HCoV-NL63, utilizes the enzymatic activity of the cysteine protease cathepsin L to infect ACE2-expressing cells.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1142358/
1. We don't (yet) inherit antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 from our mothers.
2. SARS-CoV-2 has not been forced to make evolutionary sacrifices to evolve to escape immunity.
The virus has the freedom to become optimally bad and our immune systems were optimally naive.
Over time the warfare between our immune system and the virus should cause SARS-CoV-2 to look a lot more like HCoV-NL63.
That's a sufficient explanation of the differences in disease severity without having to troll through medical articles.
The genii is out of the bottle so ending biological weapons research will never happen. If we aren't hit by a nation-state using biological warfare then we'll be hit by someone who does biochem in his garage for fun.
The best strategy is to advance the research while taking such steps as creating super-vaccines to make this type of biowarfare obsolete:
https://weather.com/en-IN/india/coronavirus/news/2021-04-21-...
But that also moves us one step closer to the "grey goo" scenario:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo
> several researchers at the lab, a center for the study of coronaviruses and other pathogens, became sick in autumn 2019 “with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness.”
https://twitter.com/ZichenWanghere/status/139663272094448435...
It is an old story. Published earlier by Sputnik News last year. Got an official response. And the source is a mistranslated document (samples of sick human misread as sick employees).
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-report-of-illnesses-at...
For those that have run out of free articles.
Edit: Here's the WSJ article.
https://archive.ph/fF82W
Clear your browser cookies for the site.
So 3 staff had gotten sick that flu season. Staff who work with infectious diseases and probably get every cough and cold checked out just in case. Seems pretty baseline average to me.
There's no discussion of how many people work at the lab, how many staff visited hospital the year before that, whether it is in fact common for those staff to visit hospital when they have seasonal flu, or any other factors that would put this in any sort of context at all.
It took WHO over a year to be able to enter China. And what did they do? Release a memo denying laboratory theory without any evidence. No bat, nor intermediate has been found (not the case with SARS/MERS). Sure there is no evidence on lab theory either. The Chinese army has been running that lab since this started.
...but even still, 3 admitted to hospital for flu symptoms in that demographic is very high, statistically - even if literally ALL employees caught the seasonal flu at the same time.
And no its not a couple hundred. 600 people work at that lab. So 3 people with seasonal illness out of 600 at one time is incredibly unremarkable.
Yes, but these were three staff who work with infectious diseases and so would not be expected to use hospital resources frivolously. In fact, they would be considered shirkers to do so for a cold. If a doctor at a hospital needs an aspirin he merely takes it - he doesn't check into the hospital, take a bed, etc.
Again, I don't think you understand the context. There is no claim they took a bed or took any resources beyond going to see a someone, not even necessarily a doctor, and then leaving, perhaps for as little as 30 minutes.
I don't see that they're necessarily using any resources in a detrimental way, I'd expect that if they were this practice would be curbed. It is China after all.
I work with infectious disease lab workers, and this isn't correct. None of them get every cold checked out just in case. Labs have no procedure for that. If anything, it's the opposite as they are confident of their immune system.
That would be unusual. Given the proximity to the covid19 outbreak, there's a high probability that's the first known cases of covid19 - if confirmed.
People in China routinely go to hospitals for colds. It's cheap, and it makes you feel better, so why not.
Its already incredibly common for average Chinese people to go to a hospital for a cold, and I'd expect someone working in a virology lab would be even more likely to do so.
Maybe you're right, let's see how it plays out.
But looking at the sibling comment, you'd have to be right about it being ordinary not for general citizens but for experts in infectious disease - which is unlikely. Those kinds of people don't seek treatment for a virus unless it's serious. They already know there is no treatment. I even know that and don't seek treatment, and I'm no expert.
Those are exactly the things a Chinese hospital will administer.
If you were presenting to a hospital with Covid beyond what you might feel for a flu, you would be reporting difficulty breathing or loss of smell and taste.
However, they had symptoms consistent with seasonal illness.
So it's pretty obvious that the typical Chinese reaction is the best fit.
You can assume they were seriously sick with COVID beyond anything a flu or cold is likely to do. We know that this means either anosmia, difficulty breathing, and low blood oxygenation, with viral pneumonia visible on X-Ray.
None of these symptoms that characterize COVID serious enough to require medical attention, more than what one would expect from a bad flu or a bad cold, are compatible with the report citing symptoms consistent with seasonal illness.
There are two other possibilities.
One is that they had seasonal illnesses that were serious enough to require some medical attention, but not COVID. This is consistent with the report, and not implausible. This is just as possible whether they have similar attitudes towards medical attention for seasonal illness as other staff.
The other is that they had seasonal illnesses that were not very serious, but sought medical attention anyways. This is expected to happen if virology staff have similar attitudes towards the issue as the rest of Chinese society.
No matter which way you slice it, there is no indication they had COVID. Even if you remain ambivalent on their behaviour.
Yes, but these were three staff who work with infectious diseases and so would not be expected to use hospital resources frivolously. In fact, they would be considered shirkers to do so for a cold. If a doctor at a hospital needs an aspirin he merely takes it - he doesn't check into the hospital, take a bed, etc.
As for the cultural attitudes over doing this in Chinese virology labs, neither of us has any data for it to be any different from the general population. Personally if I had such a job and I was in a country where such a thing was normal I would do it.
Don't forget, for example, social pressure from friends and family.
The disclosure of the number of researchers, the timing of their illnesses and their hospital visits come on the eve of a meeting of the World Health Organization’s decision-making body, which is expected to discuss the next phase of an investigation into COVID-19’s origins.
It is just me, or does it seem suspicious to anyone that this information existed, and wasn't reported in 2019 or 2020, or even in early 2021....but only just reached the press on the very evening of the WHO meeting.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-report-of-illnesses-at...
Not really. The original source was "a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report." It's quite plausible that the report had been on the shelf in 2019 or 2020, or only accessible to people who knew how to keep secrets, but then was more widely disseminated to prepare for this meeting, after which a leaker got hold of it.
The interesting thing about that theory is: I don't know how to assess which of those two scenarios is more likely.
Do we still get to blame the lab for a leak?
There are no discovered bat populations in the Wuhan region with a SARS-COV2 ancestor, that's more likely.
That the only source of bats infected with a SARS-COV2 relative is in the Yunnan province, that's pretty unlikely.
> With over 100 species recognised, China has one of the richest bat faunas in the Palaearctic.
You need to prove a negative. You need to prove the bats in Wuhan don't have Covid. More and more bats in Yunnan doesn't do that.
While one might say that the same thing was happening in the market via natural gene replication and disease transmission, don't you think that someone intentionally altering parts of genes with the sole purpose of "gain-of-function" (making a more deadly virus) would be more likely to generate something like Covid-19 than a fishmonger who slaps another tilapia onto the ice?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=gain+of+function
""Gain-of-function" is the euphemism for biological research aimed at increasing the virulence and lethality of pathogens and viruses. GoF research is government funded; its focus is on enhancing the pathogens' ability to infect different species and to increase their deadly impact as airborne pathogens and viruses.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=gain+of+function&t=opera&ia=web&ia..."
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-report-of-illnesses-at...
Not disputing that. But it'd be nice to know who that partner was...
How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27184998 - May 2021 (235 comments)
More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27160898 - May 2021 (341 comments)
The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432 - May 2021 (537 comments)
Edit: also these:
Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26750452 - April 2021 (618 comments)
Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26540458 - March 2021 (985 comments)
The Lab Leak Hypothesis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25640323 - Jan 2021 (229 comments)
It seemed like a reputed source article of interest to a lot of folks here, so I was surprised.
Meanwhile the actual real people on the WHO team said they investigated and didn't find anything more than seasonal flu.
The thing is people doesn't trust WHO.
I think people have somewhat good reasons not to trust WHO blindly now.
I can't say however if this is a good or a bad thing.
If you do not share even a small dose of doubt over WHO by now, well I guess we could label it as agree to disagree.
If the lab leak theory was easy to confirm, it would have been done already. Maybe someday it will be confirmed or ruled out and I’ll happily upvote that story. This isn’t it, though, even if it is the WSJ.
If a zoonotic event in the wild with SARS-COV2 was easy to confirm, it would have been done already.
Either hypothesis has circunstancial evidence. But there isn't an equal effort of investigate both candidate theories.
Yes. These medical researchers are very good and very persistent so I trust them to do their detective work. They have always been my heroes.
For example, a recent claim is that they have found the earliest case of AIDS/HIV in humans. An excerpt:
"^By DANIEL Q. HANEY, AP Medical Editor, CHICAGO (AP)
Scientists have pinpointed what is believed to be the earliest known case of AIDS an African man who died in 1959 and say the discovery suggests the virus first infected people in the 1940s or early '50s...
The virus in the sample had degraded, but the scientists were able to isolate four small fragments of two viral genes. One gene holds instructions for assembling the outer coat of the virus, while the other is code for one of the proteins the virus needs to reproduce...
HIV mutates quickly. About 1 percent of its genetic material changes each year. So the scientists compared the genes from the 39-year-old sample of HIV with those carried by current versions of HIV."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-earliest-aids-case/
Take time to read the (short) article. It is a credit to our medical/biomedical scientific researchers and explorers and a glowing tribute to what good science can do.
HN's front page is mostly determined by a tug of war between upvotes and flags [1]. It's common, indeed typical, for a sensational story to get a lot of initial upvotes, make the front page, and then provoke a "WTF why is this on HN" reaction from others, who flag it. With enough of the latter, the story falls off the front page, leading to a wave of "WTF why is HN censoring this story" from the first crowd. This is the cycle of life on HN. Recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27240048.
We do sometimes intervene to switch off flags, but only when a story is intellectually interesting and contains enough significant new information (SNI) to create conditions for a substantive discussion [2]. I considered doing that in this case but decided not to, because (a) it's not obvious that this is SNI, and (b) there have been several lab-leak threads recently. The most important thing to understand is that interestingness decays under repetition [3, 4].
If there hadn't been major threads on the topic recently, would we have turned off flags on this one? Well, the odds of that would be higher—but I still think probably not, because the new information in the story probably isn't enough to support a substantive discussion. If you look at those past discussions, you'll notice that in nearly all the cases, the articles themselves were among the most substantive ones that exist on the topic, and in most cases included SNI.
My GP comment had two purposes: it points people to interesting relevant discussions, but it also pre-empts the objection "WTF why is HN censoring this story". Users who post the latter have usually not yet learned to use the search box at the bottom of every page: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27089774
Washington Examiner does not have the pedigree of a NYT but the writer discussed in that piece wrote for NYT and Science. I think it is a topic is noxious hence I will flag it thing. :shrug:
- 1st response to CoVID occurrence was certainly in Wuhan.
- The closest wild strain of CoVID happens in bats living thousand kilometres from Wuhan
- Wuhan had two institutes which, on record, did gain of function experiments on bat coronaviruses
- Beijing purposefully destroyed DNA evidence, and obliterated the team who first sequenced the CoVID genome
- Chinese authorities were scrambling, and suppressing reporting as early as November, seemingly with a very good idea what they are up to.
It’s just a matter of time here. The question is mostly what to do with the information once it’s confirmed.
I also agree with you that if this is the outcome we're headed for, then we haven't gotten near any of the big icebergs yet. How's it going to play out and what will the real-world consequences be? I hope that the Biden people will be smart enough to approach this multilaterally and not make it the US vs. China spectacle that you-know-who would have. The fact that they're quietly confirming the facts that have been coming out, but otherwise not yet making a big deal out of it, gives me some hope that they're not idiots.
This is all silly-level speculative and it's possible that nothing will come of it, but I'd place a (small) bet otherwise. The way in which, one by one, the dominos are flipping is truly fascinating. Fauci has flipped, Daszak has flipped. Every few days there's another small but notable change.
I recall a time where evaluation of this was forbidden, with well-coordinated charges of racism. Talking points are a real thing, intense coordination happens intentionally and not among US media. Orthogonal messages, particularly those viewed as adversarial, are suppressed and discouraged. In China government coordination is explicit and acknowledged. The US and UK simply get the same thing through the corporate-government looking glass.
How about those several million minks in Denmark?
https://www.who.int/csr/don/03-december-2020-mink-associated...
Yes, most definitely. Over many generations. They're the same species as wild minks, but domesticated (just as dogs are same species as wolves, but domesticated).
And the scientific community agrees. For example, see this paper: https://bioone.org/journals/wildlife-biology/volume-15/issue...
It's true that they've not been domesticated as long as dogs, for example, but there are clear morphological differences between the two.
Most importantly for our conversation, infectious diseases can behave very differently in wild and domestic populations, for reasons of population density, immune status, etc.
Edit: reference for cave samples
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/03/new-killer-virus-chi...
> The closest wild strain of CoVID happens in bats living thousand kilometres from Wuhan
That's weak evidence to claim that the lab hypothesis is more likely or even just to claim that the virus in humans originates from Wuhan.
Wuhan is a transport hub within China. In relation to dates it might be worth taking into account that hundreds of millions of Chinese travel around the country in early October and that the outbreak in Wuhan was detected in November/December. Coincidence? maybe, maybe not.
Additionally, we can also look at SARS (i.e. SARS-Cov-1, while Covid-19 is SARS-Cov-2): That epidemic started with an outbreak in Guangdong province in November 2002 (again, note the relative proximity with early October). Since then the origin of the virus has been traced to a colony of bats in Yunnan province [1] (perhaps also worth noting that this took 15 years). If you look at the map that is quite far away (1000+ km) and domestic transport networks have vastly improved since then.
Based on this, I don't see why the exact same scenario as the beginning of SARS would not be the more likely explanation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
Problem with that assertion is that knowing what we know today about the virus, this should have generated superspreader event situations along the travel path, which would have transported the virus to other locations in china.
Instead the opposite happened, and china tried to contain the virus to wuhan.
It's not obvious to me that superspreading events should have happened along the way.
This feels so much like the Iraq "weapons of mass destruction" fiasco. Any time news outlets are credulously repeating the words of "government officials," you need to seriously devalue the reporting. Reporting isn't just being a mouthpiece for the state, and these outlets fail us when they express such a high degree of certainty before there's any independent verification of the facts.
Of course, everything you describe is still "circumstantial," and it's wise to remain skeptical. However, even if we somehow eventually confirm this was not a lab escape, there's absolutely no excuse for the certainty expressed by the NYT et al in their early reporting (which is true for so much of the other COVID-19 media coverage - the media did a terrible job of expressing uncertainty with very incomplete information throughout the entire affair).
Everything listed by GP was known a year ago, which is why it was so frustrating to get dismissed as conspiracy theory.
What changed? Mostly the party in power. At the time it was politically expedient to say that Trump was being racist or xenophobic against China, so it was deemed necessary to paint comments by him or his supporters as xenophobic conspiracy theories. Then when he states something reasonable like the lab leak hypothesis they can portray him and his supporters as conspiracy nuts. And if it could influence the election even 0.1%, that would be bonus points for some people, although I would call that a dishonest influence.
Now that he isn’t in power, they’ve decided it’s no longer necessary to avoid telling the truth.
But the media dismissed it before that was proved. Because trump said it.
Now imagine a hypothetical scenario where it actually worked. Just because trump was using it, the media would have potentially killed people just because they can’t agree with a single thing trump says.
This is not journalism. It’s not objective reporting in the slightest. And it was by media outlets who claim to be doing real journalism and claim they are objective. At least fox doesn’t claim to be objective. It’s shameful propaganda.
But that means you have to ignore his advice, not take it as an indicator of something bad. From what I can tell, there was plenty of activity trying out anything that seemed plausible, including Hydroxychloroquine. And it went through the usual medical science news cycle of study showing it totally works, study showing it might work, study showing it actually doesn't do a whole lot, with a pretty quick progression.
About the only thing the negative media coverage may have done is discourage people from actively soliciting for a mostly untested experimental treatment. But then again, probably not by much; or maybe they asked for other malaria drugs instead.
If you are making decisions not based on evidence but on personalities, you are going to make huge mistakes.
That would have been a coincidente. Are you willing to gamble your wellbeing on a lucky hunch?
I still don't understand this logic process. Asserting something with no evidence is arguably worse, than pointing out the absurdity of it.
Both are just as bad as each other.
This couldn't be further from the truth.
An assertion without evidente is a lie. Pointing out that someone is making assertions without evidente is not a lie.
If Trump were to say that the sky is actually orange, and provided no evidence, would you take on the media for reporting that what he said had no foundation on reality?
That's nuts.
Even that I'm not so sure about. This is a collection of all the HCQ studies: https://c19hcq.com/
Early treatment at lower dosages (lower compared to the "negative results" studies) seems to show positive results pretty consistently.
Consider thalidomide:
https://helix.northwestern.edu/article/thalidomide-tragedy-l...
“Fair and balanced” I believe the slogan is.
Nonetheless, you are correct.
Fox/Sky are shameless hard right propagandists.
Sadly, CNN/Nbc are hard left propagandists. I don’t know enough of the history to say that was always the case as it is for Fox/Sky, but it certainly is today.
It’s disheartening to think that even once respected papers like the Guardian have become so departed from objective journalism. I can’t help but think that journalistic freedom of speech is ultimately on borrowed time if the situation becomes much worse.
I’ve taken to following Reuters for news now, but even then I don’t know if what I’m watching is well sourced or it just happens to agree with my own biases more often than not.
The reason why the Hydroxychloroquine suggestions were dismissed is simple: science involves an empirical epistemology and that means undemonstrated hypotheses are not treated as true.
I do know that, unless you want to advocate nuking China (the official US government response to biowarfare) or you think they have a secret cure, it's meaningless.
And, yes, I'm glad that it got ignored while Trump was in power. I think the odds that he would decided to launch nukes in response was unacceptably high (as in, not zero.)
You might be interested to know, that Trump was already informed about the seriousness of the outbreak in Wuhan in early January. However at that time he chose not to act on it because it might harm the ongoing negotiations over a trade deal with China. So if you want to blame Trump for something, it would actually make more sense to blame him for closing the flights from China too late.
Trying to quantify harms and seize assets makes the pandemic seem like a unary problem rather than the result of profound ideological weaknesses.
My general position is that if something is reported by a mainstream media outlet, there's a good chance that the opposite is true.
Fox lawyers even argued that the Tucker show is not "news", and should not be treated as such.
So, no, he was not right about this either. He just peddled the idea that the only credible broadcasts were the ones praising him.
At least with fox and oann you know they are fully partisan.
NYT may be partisan, yes, but, qualitatively speaking, it's laughable to compare NYT and OANN or NewsMax. They are not even in the same business.
The fact that a group of people believe certain lies, doesn't make those lies acceptable, either.
I couldn't care less about what republicans think of NYT versus OANN. Yes, they may think that OANN is a better source. Still, they would be wrong.
https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2014/8/2/this-keller...
Don't confuse that with having an ideology or a commitment to certain ideas.
You can be partisan (or have an ideology) and still be trustworthy, but the trouble with that is, you actually have to be trustworthy.
I'd rather compare the NYT with The Economist on this point.
> satellite network of reactionary right wing outlets that are about as bad
Predictably, as is custom at this point, our respective appraisals of the other side depend on the side we're on. Fine - but that's beside the point. CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, et. all are, most charitably, factories of lies by omission. It's been clear to a lot of us that COVID was born of a colossal mistake by CCP scientists doing GoF research since February or March of 2020. The mainstream so-called news knew just as long - they're not stupid, they're manipulating you along an undisclosed agenda.
Just because you can point to someone else you believe to mislead in a more egregious fashion doesn't somehow alleviate the fact that we have exactly zero credible news sources.
This is a belief. This is a believer speaking.
Not the exact term itself, but the significancy of it. The "lying press" is a pejorative used since at least the XIX century [1].
Are we looking for 100% reliability here? Then, yes, we could call the NYT or the WP "fake news". But that is just hyperbole, directed at creating doubt and uncertainty where it does not exist. Once Trump followers had a excuse to label the NYT as "partisan" or "fake", it was easy for Trump to steer the narrative any way he wanted.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lying_press
In general, my trust for the media has fallen through the floor in the last decade. I used to think that the media was mostly trustworthy, but that they would cater to the establishment on certain issues (e.g., WMDs and the general Iraq/Afghanistan war effort) but apart from those obvious high-profile issues they were mostly trustworthy. Now I can't tell if I was wrong the whole time and I've just wisened up recently or if the quality of the media has plummeted (especially with respect to ideological issues) or both. I strongly suspect that the media has become considerably more ideological (abandoning aspirations for neutrality and objectivity in favor of activism and proselytizing, at least to a degree), but I've probably (and hopefully) wisened up a bit as well.
A good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_d...
The gist is that in the 80s nuclear winter was portrayed as apocalyptic by Carl Sagan and others using shoddy models in order to advance an arms control agenda. More recent work depicts far more modest climactic effects that are highly variable based on the season the nuclear war would occur in (worst in the summer, very modest to non-existent in the winter). The issue seems to be not so much the bombs themselves; but how cities burn, how much soot would be produced, and how it would move through the atmosphere.
This is also worth reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in.... Sagan's nuclear-winter modeling team predicted in 1990 that 100 oil well fires would produce a small-scale global nuclear winter. In 1991 Iraq started 800 oil well fires, which caused no such thing. The only effects were localized and stopped soon after the fires were put out.
I don't think this situation has changed in essence. Media outlets may now filter first on party affiliation, but they haven't replaced their dependence on official sources with better independent investigative reporting, for instance.
> On the contrary, the media has had little except harsh criticism for the government in this time frame
Or glowing, fawning reverence. It depends on the media outlet and the official (really the official's party) in question. The screw turned for Cuomo, but I imagine for every Cuomo, there are more darlings that go unchallenged.
His hypothesis is that what was once an information trickle has become a virtual tsunami with the internet + cell phones + satellite television, etc. Governments have no control over the flow of information, which they had at least a semblance of pre-2000. This wave of information has not only exposed the worst excesses of the elites, but has also exposed the enormous gap between their authoritative promises and the actual results they produce.
This has pissed off a lot of very entitled people, who don't take the fact that the gap has always existed into consideration, who for historical reasons place very high expectations on government, and as a result attribute bad intentions to the previously mentioned poor results.
Not only is the media courting those people, they are made up of those people. So you get a media that just heaps negation on even the smallest failure of government. It's not just for clicks -- they are true believers in that they think they're doing the right thing.
Many people, including in the media, would have preferred that theory was actively censored.
There was zero evidence, at the time, that the virus escaped from a Chinese lab. There is still zero evidence that the virus was created in a lab, or that its purpose is to be a biological weapon.
I have seen this claim made recently, but as I remember the 'disregarded' conspiracy theory was actually that the virus was genetically engineered (ie codon sequence edited) in a lab. The virus' genetic code seems to discount engineering, but not serial passaging/hybridization.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27254877
>> [Damore] argued that biological differences and not a lack of opportunity explained the shortage of women in upper-tier positions.
> This is an unfortunate way of characterizing Damore’s argument. It’s technically true in that Damore IIRC was arguing that there was more variation among men than women (more men at the top and at the bottom but fewer in the middle, but Google hires from the top hence more men). So yeah, technically biological differences, but when the average person hears that they’re going to assume he was arguing that women in general are dumber than men in general or some such. That said, this also represents much more earnest coverage of Damore considering the initial coverage overtly lied on many accounts (calling it an anti diversity screed, claiming he sent it as a memo to the company, etc).
Our "intellectual elites" have a bad problem now with moral/intellectual fashions, which are constantly changing. Social media has considerably exacerbated this problem.
Do you have any links?
In any case, I can tell you that there was a definite narrative in the media that the lab escape scenario was not only very unlikely, but "xenophobic" and "conspiratorial".
Perhaps the most telling example of all my links below is this one, which is very open to the possibility of a lab escape. The latter half of the article is full of example of the efforts of the media and scientific establishment (for whatever reason, mostly political) to quash the lab escape hypothesis. One key quote:
"Antonio Regalado, biomedicine editor of MIT Technology Review, put it more bluntly. If it turned out COVID-19 came from a lab, he tweeted, 'it would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom.'"
Article:
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2020/09/09/alina-chan-br...
And here is a handful of links, of many:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/01/could-covid-19...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/31/health/lab-leak-coronavirus-t...
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/04/politics/coronavirus-intellig...
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/17/politics/mike-pompeo-coronavi...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-much-more-lik...
"Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...
So doesn't this imply it was Tom Cotton himself who was initially conflating an engineered origin with a lab leak (which could be wild type or engineered virus)?
He suggested that the virus may have come from the Wuhan lab.
NYT slammed him for this "fringe theory" in February 2020:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronaviru...
Other approaches involve literally trying to change the codon sequence in a supercomputer to see what happens in the folding and conformation changes, but it is very esoteric since bio is so complicated.
The disregarded conspiracy theory, as I understood it, was that Chinese researchers were doing the former, NOT the latter. It is also my understanding that the virus' genetic code does not show any evidence of the former (editing codon sequence).
For the better part of a year now, the lab leak theory and the genetic engineering theory have been lumped in together by those trying to discredit them as conspiracies. The issue is that every time someone would point at circumstantial evidence of a potential lab leak, people would point at the scientists saying there was loads of evidence it wasn't genetically engineered, when those two things aren't remotely the same thing.
Depends what you mean by government officials. Trump was in power and his statements on this were called conspiracy theories. So the media wasn’t exactly taking the government side on this, they were dismissing statements by the government as conspiracy.
Whether right or wrong, it’s extremely embarrassing for the media. They are slowly politicizing themselves into untrustable entities.
Edit: it is factually true to say Trump lied in manipulative ways constantly, and easy to confirm. This is not a partisan statement, it’s a fact that can be checked. Here are 5276 examples: https://projects.thestar.com/donald-trump-fact-check/
The issue here is that, as journalists, their job is to look at facts and weight evidence independently, rather than simply base judgements on the person making the statements. There has been ample evidence to at least consider a lab-leak theory very plausible, or even likely, but those were largely ignored. Instead, the media seemed content to report that Trump is claiming this thing, and Trump sucks, so this thing must also suck. Not exactly inspiring behavior from the "fourth estate".
The fact is, you need to hear the story from somebody credible before it becomes worth investigating, otherwise we would still have journalists trying to uncover the alleged thousands of murders by immigrants kept secret by bizarre conspiracies (which, again, lacks evidence) - the claims have to come from somebody capable of basic truth telling.
I guess it refers to the Deep State. Which also officially doesn't exist, and is also just a conspiracy theory.
Because it was a conspiracy theory.
Newly surfaced evidence may point in the direction of the conspiracy hypothesis, but that would be just a coincidence.
Coming to conclusions either way without evidence, when it suits certain anti government narratives, is partisanship.
It was a conspiracy theory, and it may still be, because the WSJ only mentions that lab workers were "ill" and presented symptoms similar to those caused by COVID-19, which could be... really anything. The main strain of the flu in 2019 was H1N1. It could have been that. It may not have been. We don't know yet.
I don't think there is anything wrong about "mocking" people for peddling conspiracy theories with zero evidence. Let's be honest, even if some of their ideas end up being true, it would have been just a coincidence. It's like arriving to the correct solution to a math problem, but through a completely wrong process.
Still doesn’t seem like the right thing to do though, especially if we consider ourselves an advanced scientific civilization.
I'm going to need a source for that, because that's definitely not how science works. At all.
Again, making random assertions with no evidence does not make them right. And of that, there are uncountable examples out there.
Galileo, Semmelweis, Heisenberg. Women’s right, abolishing slavery.
But even the current mRNA vaccine developers were dismissed for 15-20 years as unimportant.
What you call "dismissive", is just reactionary traditionalism.
Also, all of these provide evidence to support their claims.
> But even the current mRNA vaccine developers were dismissed for 15-20 years as unimportant.
This. This is the problem, right here.
You believe that mainstream media works like science, and it does not. So when big headlines hit the public opinion with things like "this woman was mocked and now her work on mRNA is the basis of the new vaccines", you take that the academic world actually dismissed those novel ideas.
Science does not work like that. And the media like hyperbole. And that hyperbole is what stucks the most in the public memory.
She was denied tenure.
"In 1990 she was offered a tenure track position at the University of Pennsylvania. Around this time, a different group of researchers developed a technique for injecting mice with RNA in such a way that those mice started to produce the proteins encoded by the RNA. [...] After six years of work at the University of Pennsylvania, due in part to a lack of interest from funding agencies in supporting her work, Karikó was demoted from her tenure track position. This type of demotion generally leads to the end of a scientific career. In the same year, she was treated for cancer and her husband encountered a visa problem, leaving him temporarily stuck in Hungary."
https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/pioneers-in-science-kata...
She was on the tenure track, and didn't get tenure.
That's denial of tenure.
Funding agencies provide funding based on grant reviews by... academics. So yeah, academics dismissed her novel ideas.
So the evidence is still not there, and this is a poor exercise of journalism.
So I have to pipe in here as I recall this vividly. What crystalized this for me was of all things an op-ed piece by a conservative (not neocon) writer that essentially came down to this (paraphrased):
> There are essentially two possibilities here:
> 1. Iraq has no WMD. In this case the invasion is unjustified; or
> 2. Iraq has WMD. In which case, why wouldn't they give them up to avoid a US invasion?
This was such a simple and undeniable logical fallacy in the Iraq WMD invasion narrative it blew my mind.
I've been skeptical about the lab leak theory. But you can be skeptical about the theory and still recognize that the WHO just hasn't pursued enough leads to debunk the theory to a sufficient degree. Examples include:
1. China had an online database of coronaviruses. This was taken offline in late 2019 and hasn't been online since. The WHO investigation team has not examined it nor sought to do so. While the timing is certainly curious, it's not necessarily damning. But it warrants investigation (IMHO); and
2. Chinese labs have been less than forthcoming about what coronaviruses they have.
Chinese authorities have been less than fully cooperative here. Again, that's not damning. I consider it much more likely that Chinese authorities simply don't know if Covid leaked from a Wuhan lab but there's literally zero upside in finding out if that's the case.
Would you want to be a member of the CCP that released information that allowed the WHO to establish that Covid-19 came from a Wuhan lab allowing critics of China to "blame" China for this?
Nope, I wouldn't either. So why cooperate?
thus, the mainstream media, however mistrusted, is still the arbiter of widespread "truth." they still control the Overton Window. if they say a thought is unacceptable, most people won't accept it, until they say it's acceptable once again.
absolutely fascinating to watch
Interestingly, the inverse happened here. Most of the initial claims of a lab-origin for Covid were being disputed by mainstream media in no small part because the Trump administration was echoing them. A lot of them pointed to scientists claiming that there was no evidence of lab manipulation or gene editing as proof that it was conspiratorial thinking, despite the fact that that was not the same thing as a lab-leak. Very little of the evidence we have to support a lab-leak hypothesis wasn't available and known a year ago. But literally within a couple weeks of the Biden administration taking office, mainstream outlets like the Washington Post started publishing pieces supporting the credibility of lab-origins of the virus.
I am no Trump-fan by any means, but I've found this whole saga, and much of the last 4 years, to be a very mask-off period for the media, to the point where its hard to take much of anything being said too seriously.
In civil trials there is the principle of “adverse inference”. When the defendant has either destroyed evidence or else has not produced evidence they would have been reasonably expected to have, the jury is instructed to assume they are what the plaintiff characterizes them to be.
I think this principle holds in this case. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence for the Wuhan lab leak theory. The Chinese government has destroyed a lot of evidence and host gone to great lengths to keep documents and people away from investigators.
Based on all this, I think the preponderance of evidence is in favor of it being a lab leak.
> Beijing purposefully destroyed DNA evidence, and obliterated the team who first sequenced the CoVID genome
You have a reliable source for this, of course. Would you be so kind as to share it?
One way you can do that is by putting evolutive selection pressure on the micro-organisms. For instance, submit a colony of bacteria to something they are vulnerable to. Stop when 90% of the colony is dead. Cultivate the colony back to a full size, then repeat the protocol until you get bacteria that are fully resistant.
Either way, it's China's incompetence and reckless endangerment of the rest of the world that has caused this. So the more important question is what we will do about it?
So far the answer seems to be "nothing because the price of cheap plastic shit might go up 2p a tonne and that's more concerning than a global pandemic".
After seeing the response from Western countries, (delays, denialism, half measures, etc.) I really doubt we would have done any better. Probably worse.
(none of this excuses how shit my government, UK, have performed)
It didn't start at the market. They tested every animal there and found nothing, yet they found many infected people there and found the virus all over surfaces there. The market was an early superspreader event, not the origin.
The whole thing is sad that it is humanity at stake but we have a country so powerful it is in the way to prevent further study.
Sigh. Let us see.
HN feels like the same kind of echo chamber that would have attacked me for saying not to invade Iraq in the early 2000s... Anything our historically dishonest intelligence agencies imply about foreign countries is eaten up like gospel truth without any skepticism.
"Steven Quay, a physician-researcher, has applied statistical and bioinformatic tools to ingenious explorations of the virus’s origin, showing for instance how the hospitals receiving the early patients are clustered along the Wuhan №2 subway line which connects the Institute of Virology at one end with the international airport at the other, the perfect conveyor belt for distributing the virus from lab to globe."
https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...
(third to last paragraph)
Dr Fauci recklessly claimed in May 2020 that it's "very, very strongly" impossible for this to have come from a lab. [1]
When will public officials actually be held to account for their flip flopping, often times leading to massive distrust from the population and killing people?
How many people are refusing vaccines because officials like Dr Fauci have lied repeatedly?
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/05/politics/fauci-trump-coro...
There are multiple related claims that fall under the umbrella of lab leaks:
1. Did it escape from a lab?
2. Was that lab manipulating the RNA of the virus?
3. Was the lab doing so for nefarious/biowarfare related ends?
The CNN article is the usual manipulative bilge we might expect from them, because the headline is "Anthony Fauci just crushed Donald Trump's theory on the origins of the coronavirus", but Trump was claiming the virus escaped from a lab (claim 1) and then Fauci makes a counter-claim that it wasn't manipulated by a lab (claim 2).
The claim it escaped from a lab was always pretty strong given the long history of lab leaks and where it started. The claim the lab was manipulating it originally had to rely on RNA evidence, which is rather complex to understand, ambiguous and disputed. But recently people seem to have dug up documentary evidence that the US NIAID (led by Dr Fauci) was directing funding to the WIV specifically to manipulate bat coronaviruses, so claim (2) is starting to look pretty strong too.
Claim 3 looks very weak and is getting far less attention as a result. There's no evidence for it and COVID makes for an objectively very poor bio weapon. It's also not the most parsimonious explanation that works. Virology researchers had convinced themselves that GOF research was something important that they should be doing, and were able to work around US bans on it by doing it abroad and getting it approved by high level enough figures who could override the bans. They had clear incentives to do the work at low bio-safety levels, and appear to have done so (again from documentary evidence). As is often the case they thought they were doing something good for the world, and that the ends justified the means. They were wrong. No more complex explanation is necessary.
Then even Biden and the democrats eroding the trust in vaccines saying they won't get vaccinated if Trump rushes the antivirus. Well, what do you know, the next week after the election we discovered that the antivirus is effective and all adults should vaccinate.
How many anti-vaxxers did Biden create with that irresponsible political statement?
It's starting to look like a lot of people took big steps to spread false information, perhaps for political purposes.
I’m not saying this isn’t bad - just that it’s pretty easy to understand why people would downregulate the lab leak hypothesis without anything special going on.