There seems to have been covid cases in Europe in last-quarter 2019, which suggests it was there or brought there before the outbreak that made the news in 2020. Doesn’t rule out leaks and crossovers, just moves them elsewhere or else when. Viral pneumonia was occurring, symptoms turned out to match covid and nobody was saving or testing blood samples. Outside of a few places in Dec. But people had aggressive, surprising lung problems that didn’t present flu symptoms. Maybe that was a pre-covid leak or they’re incorrect when the leak occurred.
It also hit the initial sites very quickly, which suggests very contagious or already present in some form. To put my tin foil hat on, was omicron the “antidote” virus that was deliberately released to put the fire out? It was very different genetically and even more contagious.
The Wuhan Games, at which 10,000 athletes from the worlds' armies participated, wrapped October 27, 2019, after which people left Wuhan to return to their homes all over the world, including to Italy where many of the first cases outside of Wuhan occured
> Event 201 wargame about just such a disease was held in October 2019 — where people “role played” many of the policies we saw enacted.
On that one, remember how monkeypox seemed to come out of nowhere in early 2022? In early 2021 there was a similar pandemic scenario for monkeypox, and the scenario's in-game start date was only about a week off of when it started in the real world.
I heard from a friend from Taiwan that there were rumors of some kinda of virus spreading around by mid 2019 in China. The thing is if there were blood samples showing a much earlier date of covid spreading in China there is zero chance we would ever hear about it. It is also worth noting that the region hit hardest in Italy early on just so happens to be a huge textile manufacturing center with a huge Chinese population.
> It is also worth noting that the region hit hardest in Italy early on just so happens to be a huge textile manufacturing center with a huge Chinese population.
If you're talking about Prato, your information is completely wrong.
> It is also worth noting that the region hit hardest in Italy early on
There was a paper released early/mid 2020 that was attempting to group the virus into various strains (this was before the "variant" terminology emerged), that attempted to identify changes in the virus's behavior and classified different mutations with things like L, LL, and M. For the most part it was either ignored or ridiculed as being too early, that there hasn't been enough time for mutations that change its behavior to have accumulated.
Thing is, I distinctly remember it identified one mutation that seemed to originate in Italy, was trackable as it reached the US East coast, and every place it spread to had a spike in deaths that coincided with when it overtook the previous variants in prevalence for that location.
I remember the sudden freak out in the media about vaping in late 2019 because young people were being hospitalized with lung damage. Have to wonder if that was actually covid and the vapes were just coincidence, they'd been around for years at that point so them all of the sudden having media hysteria around them was weird to me at the time
I got ill in a way I'd never really gotten ill before, in November/December 2019 -- after having travelled from Mexico to Norway. I was barely out of bed for the month I was in the country. I thought it might be dengue, but one of the first days there I got checked out in the hospital -- and they said I had an unidentified viral infection, but not dengue. After being released I got incredibly ill, but not much you can do with viral infections anyways so I just rode it out.
Having had Covid 3 times since it was named, I've got a pretty good grip on what it feels like -- and I've many times wondered if I didn't have it back then in 2019 as well, as the symptoms lined up too well.
I got a worse-than-ever-experienced respiratory infection after a trip to Europe arounds Thanksgiving 2019 as well: I wasn't well enough to ski even a month later and had mysterious lung-scarring on my X-rays which in retrospect looks very much like an early Covid infection too.
I had a really bad cold-like illness in late November 2019, which left behind a severe sore throat which lasted about three weeks. It was notable because it wouldn't go away, to the point where I went to both urgent care and my primary doctor on separate occasions (I'm not one to go to the doctor unless I really need to.) Both times they took a look at my throat, proclaimed it to be a viral infection, and sent me on my way.
I too have wondered if I actually had Covid, but nobody knew how to diagnose it at that time.
That theory is total nonsense. Covid was extremely infectious, and had severe symptoms. It could not have stayed under the radar for that long. It was also unlikely to fizzle out: once a country had one case, it would turn into thousands of cases within a month.
If Covid had been circulating that widely that early, the trajectory of the disase in December 2019-March 2020 would have been totally different. There would not have been an initial outbreak in Wuhan followed by individual cases popping up in various other countries, followed by a gradual buildup of cases in those countries. By the time we got a test, there would have been hundreds of thousands ill all over the world, all being detected as cases simultaneously. It would have been impossible to e.g. trace cases to specific super spreader events, because there would have been so many sources of infections. Basically none of what happened would have been the expected outcome if Covid actually was spreading in the wild that early.
All the reports of early Covid cases outside of China are just the expected false positives from tests that don't have 100% specificity (which is pretty much anything other than full sequencing).
There were no tests except for blood samples preserved by hospitals. People are referring to symptoms that were different than flu, viral pneumonia and (looking back) showed similarity to covid. Might have been a different viral pneumonia as it didn’t respond to antibiotics.
Recall exponential growth starts slowly and it was flu season.
I am not talking of tests in 2019. I'm talking of the tests done in 2020 after, well, tests became available. If Covid had been growing exponentially in Europe for the latter part of 2019, the tests would have found massive amounts of infections. They didn't.
Likewise the after the fact findings of antibodies in blood samples would show an exponential growth. Neither of the studies you linked to shows that. The
Just look at the numbers from that Italy study. They're claiming that 10% of their sample had already had Covid on September 2019. "Exponential growth starts slowly" doesn't explain that. But somehow that went unnoticed and caused no detectable blip in the mortality rate, while a few months later an outbreak that could be tracked to a single event decimated the elderly in Lombardy.
It's noteworthy that neither of these studies tried analyzing blood samples from say the winter of 2018 to establish a definite baseline. But if they'd done that, they probably wouldn't have much of an article to write. "We found the expected level of false positives from this test" isn't exactly newsworthy.
Being able to tie it specifically to the lab this concretely, by identifying the first patients by name, and having that (allegedly) from US government officials, is all new information, AFAIK.
Yes, this would seem to be a bit of a game-changer on the question. Too bad this appears it’s going to be buried within the HN algo and likely won’t be reported upon seriously in MSM either..
> 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.
You’re very giddy to try to brush this under the rug. The truth is that big tech and Fauci colluded to suppress the lab leak theory, there are leaked emails that prove it. YouTube and Twitter were censoring and demonetizing channels that would talk about the lab leak theory. What do you have to say about that?
Wasn’t the comment just a validation that this story has been out there previously? (not to this extent with the names and a lot more info/context, but thats indeed what I was trying to get clarification on). How does clarifying a news item lead to some bias or stance on the matter, or trying to “brush under the rug?” I think you have read into that comment way too much..
I think that despite the efforts of any of those people, I never stop hearing about these "bombshells" which are trivially disproven. There has been no new evidence or anything of lab leaks since early 2020 and I am just tired of hearing the same things over and over.
‘Said Metzl, “Had US government officials including Dr. Fauci stated from day one that a COVID-19 research-related origin was a very real possibility, and made clear that we had little idea what viruses were being held at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, what work was being done there, and who was doing that work, our national and global conversations would have been dramatically different. The time has come for a full accounting.”’
Seems doubtful that Daszak (and possibly Fauci) had little idea what was going on in that lab..
It would take a long-form article to clearly enumerate all of the reasons with citations, but long story short, the pair of them were caught lying over and over again the past few years.
For example, Daszak's paper in the Lancet claiming the virus was almost certainly of natural origin was used as the basis for justifying the censorship of tens or hundreds of millions of posts. He failed to declare his conflict of interest, as did something like 25 out of the 26 other authors. This was a broad failure among academia and news, as his reasoning in the paper was specious.
Fauci was caught telling fibs about his beliefs on natural origin as well, with a private position that it was quite likely. He also lied about funds sent to Wuhan, and the type of research they were doing.
Re Daszak knowing what was going on, he was a main funder of the lab and a drinking buddy with Shi the head researcher there. He also wrote a proposal on inserting a cleavage site into a coronavirus in pretty much the way you would have to to make covid (defuse grant proposal which was leaked, not revealed voluntarily). Asked what was going on at WIV he's said stuff more like sorry I can't say as we have a confidentiality agreement rather than no idea.
Also... I mean, unless I've created a false memory, I specifically remember that the discussion at the time was about a the virus literally being a bio-weapon, and not actually the entirely plausible, accidental escape of a virus.
I've always had a completely open mind about it, even if experts have repeatedly suggested that it's plausible, but unlikely.
Those prattling on about how "people called us crazy" that it was a WIV lab leak seem to completely misremember what was actually being discussed in April-May of 2020, and also seem to be trying to score political points in American politics, when it seems very obvious that the CCP should take the lion's share of any blame regarding any lack of transparency.
The most popular human origin theory was a lab leak. It was easier to argue against the crazies claiming a bioweapon so that's what most did and that's what got the most press. But the primary human origin story was an accidental release.
Bioweapons research and got infected in a lab that was at BSL 2 ARE incompatible. If you expect it to be able to infect humans, you are going to take more precautions.
The theory here is that they were doing research on animal models and didn't think that humans could catch it from mice. Therefore they took too few precautions, and it escaped through them.
Specifically remember a columnist at Parool, a Dutch local newspaper, talking about it how he was pressured by colleagues days after just mentioning a column it might be from the Lab.
There was a consensus in the West it didn't came from the Lab, and those who suggested otherwise were non-scientific lunatics.
Shit, I remember arguing with people like him back when the whole pandemic started that it was a distinct possibility, one of several, that should be fairly evaluated like every other. And people like him just waved it off as conspiracy theory garbage like we're seeing here. Same shit, different day, except now with the flavour of gaslighting along with it.
People were being banned from twitter, youtube, facebook ext for mentioning lab leak... Now you want to gas light everyone saying "it was perfectly ok to talk about in 2020
I remember learning a lot of the reasoning behind why I thought it was most likely a lab leak from a video I got as a top recommendation on youtube from a rather large channel that had near or over a million views at the time, so anecdotally I think perhaps a lot of the people who got banned for their discussion on the topic were either grouped up with people positing more extreme possibilities, or just an example of over reach. Either way, I personally don't remember people presenting the possibility of a lab leak being shredded (at least on youtube, I can't speak for the other platforms as I use them very infrequently).
Not everyone is terminally online mate. My experience mirrors theirs, lots of speculation and jokingly considering the various conspiracies at the time.
Bioweapon was definitely one of the options that was boosted by china's outlandishly overreacting at the start, welding people into their home etc
> Facebook made a quiet but dramatic reversal last week: It no longer forbids users from touting the theory that COVID-19 came from a laboratory.
> "In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps," the social media platform declared in a statement.
> [...]
> Consider that Facebook's new declaration sits atop its About page, just above the site's previous policy on coronavirus-related misinformation—dated February 8, 2021—which was to vigorously purge so-called "false claims," including the notion that the disease "is man-made or manufactured." The mainstream media had deemed this notion not merely wrong but dangerously absurd, and tech companies followed suit, suppressing it to the best of their abilities.
Do you have any examples of someone who was banned simply for saying it could have leaked, as opposed to lying about it being a man-made bio weapon? The latter was common in right-wing circles because it excused their leaders’ incompetent handling of the pandemic and scientists pretty quickly established there weren’t signs of genetic modification, but throughout the process there were people discussing the possibility of a sample leaking through a lab safety failure.
It was facebook[1] stated policy to prevent all discussion, so even if there was not a user level bann they were removing all posts and discussions about it
Twitter banned lots people for it (and other COVID "misinformation") it would be hard to point to a perfect example as often people that wanted to discuss lab leak also talked about masking, masking policy, vaccine efficacy, and Vaccine mandate policies. All of which were also forbidden topics. If you dared to speak out against "The Experts" at the cdc or WHO then you were either shadow-banned (i.e posts hidden, de-ranked, etc) or outright banned
There were lots of narratives. The main one that was coming out was that it did NOT come from the WIV. That gain of function was NOT happening at the WIV. That it likely came from people outside Wuhan who brought it to Wuhan and that the the Wet market was not the source either (though the CCP was pushing that narrative, others were making it more vague saying it came from the hinterlands). A second narrative by skeptics/conspiracists was that it had escape the WIV and that the WIV was conducting gain of function research. A third fringe theory was that it was a bio-weapon (this idea is idiotic given the guaranteed blowback/footgun you would get)
Also people were being banned, shadowbanned, demonetized, etc. for proposing a lab-leak theory. But, I guess that's par for the course. Remember when politicians (I mean Nancy) said, unmasked, don't worry, go back to Chinatown and do business (slightly before they then imposed restrictions)
Also, don't forget, people who saw strange unexpected repetitions (filler) in the sequencing were scoffed at.
> Also... I mean, unless I've created a false memory, I specifically remember that the discussion at the time was about a the virus literally being a bio-weapon, and not actually the entirely plausible, accidental escape of a virus.
If you've created a false memory, then I've created a similar one.
I remember very early some member of Congress saying it was a Chinese engineered bio-weapon deliberately released to cripple the US economy.
I have a few family members very deep in the weeds (QAnon, Cabal, One World Order type of crap) and they love to play this narrative. In reality it seemed like it was rather obvious to anybody who looked at the facts that this pandemic had dubious origins. Just a few of these were the close proximity, same family of viruses being researched, mysterious personnel changes around the time of the initial spread, etc., yet those same family members have turned any reluctance on my part to flat out declare this pandemic as a manufactured Chinese bioweapon into flat out denial of any chance of it being anything more than a big coincidence.
I guess it boils down to conspiracy theorists believing that you're either all in, or not in at all, and there exists no middle ground to wait for more facts before coming to a conclusion one way or the other.
I also feel like noting that I didn't engage in discussion on the topic with many other people outside of aforementioned family members on the topic, so who knows, maybe I would've been ridiculed for sitting on the fence, but anecdotally I definitely remember people seeing either source as a possibility (minus the Cabal manufactured pandemic to sterilize the human race one, of course).
By "the “conspiracy theorists” keep turning out to be right" do you mean like how Trump won the election in 2020, Biden is an actor, Obama has been hung for treason, people around the globe are dropping dead from the vaccine, etc.? These are the people I'm talking about when I speak about conspiracy theorists, people reasonably sitting on the fence when there is conflicting information are not. You speak in absolutes about how _everybody_ who presented the possibility of a lab leak was banned and labeled a xenophobe, and while I cannot speak onto your anecdotal experiences, I never saw this in any platform I participated on at the time, in fact (as I shared in another comment on this thread), I leaned towards the likelihood of a lab leak after getting recommended a very popular youtube video on the topic from a very popular channel. As far as I know, that video is still available, although it has obviously been a long time since I last watched it.
Part of how cults are started is creation of a us versus them mentality, often where it doesn't exist. I believe this is why so many conspiracy theorists with more extreme beliefs might misconstrue their experiences in discussion around the topic, when in reality those discussing the very legitimate possibility of a lab leak never got much flak (anecdotally, as I said).
Precisely this. I don't care to speculate, read, or give a single care in the world about this. I think the hope for stopping GoF research is about as high a chance as the world "putting a pause" on AI. And this thread is littered with all of the usual conspiracy head-nods.
I think we should know more about the origins of COVID but I haven't seen a single discussion of this that doesn't immediately dove-tail into various other conspiracies or whistles.
And I'm not making excuses for anyone or saying the CDC/Trump/Biden are blameless and innocent, but I kinda don't know what the point of these conversations are at this point.
No, sorry not sorry, I don't really put much stock in the analysis of people that immediately link this into their unsubstantiated handwavey global conspiracies.
I've seen articles, research, professionals talking about the evidence. Which aren't headnods and whistles. And I read it. And that's why I don't have any strong opinion, contrary to whatever I think is being implied in your comment. But comments? Public discussion? It's the same thing every time.
Skepticism is this cool thing where instead of assuming an unclear premise and then immediately linking it to bigger, even less substantiated conspiracies theories that thereby reinforce how "true" my assumptions must be!!... I accept that I don't have the full picture.
> I haven't seen a single discussion of this that doesn't immediately dove-tail into various other conspiracies or whistles.
> None ever will from your perspective if you're citing "head nods" and dog whistles.
It means that if you consider mentioning the lab leak theory an automatic dogwhistle for bioweapon then of course every single discussion about these lab leak immediately dove-tails into various other conspiracies or whistles. It's circular reasoning and you're making it impossible to express nuance.
Well now you're definitely making up stuff I didn't say and don't think. Thanks but no thanks. Like, I'm pretty annoyed that what I did say managed to get that twisted in your head, especially when I took multiple attempts at indicating that I am doing my own research and keeping an open mind, but thanks for kinda just demonstrating my point. Waste of time. Speculative nonsense and infighting so someone gets to be right. It's just silly.
So we're very clearly, I absolutely 0% think that talking about a lab leak means the speaker thinks that it was an intentional bioweapon leak or something. At all. Like, that's just straight up strawmanning in my head, but you kinda just projected that on me...
> And this thread is littered with all of the usual conspiracy head-nods.
> I think we should know more about the origins of COVID but I haven't seen a single discussion of this that doesn't immediately dove-tail into various other conspiracies or whistles.
You literally said "I haven't seen a single discussion of this [the lab leak theory] that doesn't immediately dove-tail into various other conspiracies or whistles"
So where are the head nods and dogwhistles in this thread? At what point did this discussion, just like every single lab leak discussion you've seen, dove-tail into conspiracies and whistles? Because I don't see the whistles and head nods in the current thread about this (this being the lab leak theory). They're all either deleted or flagged at this point for me.
And Twitter's files showed that the government (through multiple departments), members of Congress, and private companies were directly sending lists of hundreds of names of people to ban or deemphasize for talking about it.
From your own article, we learn that your claim is wrong:
> we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps
This illustrates the problem nicely: because there was so much blatant lying about the virus being a bio weapon, people forget that there was all along more sober discussion about it being a possible leak of a natural virus and that those discussions were never banned.
You’re similarly misrepresenting what little was in the “Twitter files”, no doubt because terms of service violations are a lot less exciting.
I'm pretty sure your memory is very faulty. Of all those saying it could be a lab leak, very few were talking it being a bio-weapon.
> Those prattling on about how "people called us crazy" that it was a WIV lab leak seem to completely misremember what was actually being discussed in April-May of 2020
It is the sense of Congress that--
(2) there is reason to believe the COVID-19 pandemic may
have originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology;
People saying "people called us crazy" do deserve apologies, not downvotes.
EDIT: just to be clear... I'm not saying it was or it wasn't a lab leak. I'm saying that there's a Congress bill from march 2023 saying there's reason to believe it was a lab-leak. And hence all those who said it was a lab-leak and who were called "conspiracy theorists" do deserve apologies.
Until a cause is completely identified, there will always be "reason to believe". That doesn't mean that it's the most likely source or the most reasonable hypothesis.
The President was also claiming the virus came from WIV back in May 2020. It was a common theory in some media circles
That same president also claimed it would be gone by the summer of 2020. The same president even claimed it would never make it to the USA! Maybe this will be a case of a broken clock being correct twice a day but it was certainly thrown in with quite a bit of incorrect information that was being spewed at those daily briefings. I don’t blame anyone for being skeptical of the information coming out of the Trump administration during that time.
Isn’t it equally truthful to say there is reason to believe the COVID-19 pandemic may have originated elsewhere? Josh Hawley writing this into the bill does not make it anymore valid than the counter point to that statement.
Even back then, there weren't any good counter-arguments against the "lab leak" theory (except "it's racist" because somehow "the Chinese are so filthy their food markets cause pandemics" isn't racist?!), so to censor it, the powers that be (Big Tech, Mainstream Media) instead attacked the adjacent, but very different "bioweapon" theory.
I knew this would happen, so much so I'm pretty sure I even called it ahead of time. This happens so frequently that there ought to be a word for it.
Yes, some conservative personalities early on had pushed some dumb conspiracies about COVID-19 being a bioweapon. No, that was not the crux of the argument that the many scientists, journalists and internet commenters had when they argued in favor of the lab leak hypothesis. Now I personally was never very attached to the theory, but I absolutely believed that we should have researched whether or not COVID-19 was indeed leaked from a lab. An actual argument against my position was that we shouldn't as it would only further fuel racism, xenophobia and geopolitical tensions even if it were true. There was also a lot of backlash against researchers who wanted investigation into the lab leak theory, probably for similar reasons.
There's always amnesia about things like this, but I'm pretty sure COVID-19 has become a case study on how not to handle a pandemic. A lot of what happened gave people a legitimate reason to distrust authority, and if we pretend that never happened things will simply continue to get worse as it repeats indefinitely.
Again, I do agree that it was annoying seeing it become a political culture war issue about a conspiracy vs "trusting the science", but that is certainly not what I believe the majority of the lab leak hypothesis was angling for.
Wikipedia even helpfully separates the two ideas into separate articles.
> Yes, some conservative personalities early on had pushed some dumb conspiracies about COVID-19 being a bioweapon. No, that was not the crux of the argument that the many scientists, journalists and internet commenters had when they argued in favor of the lab leak hypothesis.
It's totally insane. GP is literally rewriting history and getting upvoted for it. I post a link to a Congress bill (linked from TFA), from 2023 under the Biden administration (so not Trump), saying "there's reason to believe COVID may have originated at the Wuhan lab" and I immediately get two downvotes.
It's as if the shills who tried to bury the lab leak posts back then (not the bioweapon ones, just the lab leak ones) were still actively trying to control the narrative. This time by explaining why it was normal to label everyone who talked about lab leak a "conspiracy theory cracknut" because they'd supposedly all be talking about bio-weapon (which they weren't).
> There's always amnesia about things like this, but I'm pretty sure COVID-19 has become a case study on how not to handle a pandemic. A lot of what happened gave people a legitimate reason to distrust authority, and if we pretend that never happened things will simply continue to get worse as it repeats indefinitely.
The bill called for the declassification of any information related to the theory. Not a bill affirming where it came from. If there is no classified information confirming the theory, there is no reason for Biden not to sign it.
It's not 'some conservative personalities' and it's amazing to see people here so blatantly try to gaslight others. It was the president of the United States pushing the lab leak hard before any evidence fell down and then republican officials following up with the argument that it was a bioweapon. The reason why they did it was because they wanted to give people a reason to distrust authority. That was part of the M.O even though the person pushing this stuff held the highest authority office in the land!
I'm skeptical of the lab leak theory regardless if it's Trump or Biden pushing it because ultimately the US government is going to use whatever it can as a political weapon against other countries. This doesn't mean it's not potentially true, nor does it make China right, but it means people should be inherently skeptical of any positions the US takes on stuff like this.
> the discussion at the time was about a the virus literally being a bio-weapon,
This was the part that media outlets and government seized upon to call any discussion of the lab leak theory racist. There was no "discussion" about covid being a "bio-weapon," it was a bunch of anti-China hawks repeating it over and over again based on absolutely nothing. They were so obviously nationalist anti-Chinese that the theory that covid happened because Chinese people are dirty and eat weird diseased things was able to be sold as the not-racist theory.
The media argued against the most outrageous and conspiratorial version of the lab leak theory to discredit it. They successfully made you associate lab leak with racist conspiracy
Trump was trying to play that “blame China” card. And was disclosing classified reports left and right. Fauci was not exactly on Trump’s side. And not playing the blame game was a good option back then.
But, it’s not a good idea to reward Wuhan’s Institute type of research. And there should be some accountability in the end.
In Daszak own words https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AksKoMZon6Y. At around 1h15m he answers a question about how they were doing gain of function research on SARS and SARS related virus with his colleagues in China (WIV).
This guy then lead the sham "WHO" inspection of WIV. And Fauci funded him to work around the Obama prohibition on gain of function research.
Removed at the behest of powerful government groups and advertising agencies/pharma companies.
Listen to The Zuck on lex fridman admitting (paraphrasing) “yeah we got some stuff wrong, censored things we shouldn’t have when they later turned out to be evidence based.”
I believe this ,”very very minor”, admission of major guilt is in the first half.
Or the Twitter files and FBI offices in social media etc. or the Wikipedia bias and astroturfing.
So… finally what lots of people were claiming but got censored on social media as well as mainstream media during the pandemic is being acknowledged and verified by the government.
Follow up. Given statements to congress by government officials to Congress, under oath, that would contradict this conclusion, will there be repercussions for misleading the public, lawmakers and the scientific community?
PS: It was never a credible bio-weapon attack (people are now trying to conflate this to instill FUD in people's memories --go do a google search with date ranges). Bio-weapons are terrible weapons of war. They are likely to affect the target as well as the deployer.
> 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.
I recall reading credible scientists talking about a lab leak from day one, and I always considered it a possibility. Yet many of the people pushing it on social media were pushing it as a 100% certainty and even that it was some kind of intentional bio-weapon attack. The people getting banned for this were conspiritainment grifters and people pushing fascist politics.
The most effective way to cover something up is to have Alex Jones and Steve Bannon talk about it. If Fauci really is running some horrible conspiracy maybe he's paying these people to talk about it to make sure nobody takes the idea seriously.
Then there were the people pushing the Ukraine bioweapons nonsense, which is a transparent Russian attempt to copy Bush II's "WMDs in Iraq" bullshit.
Huh? What got censored on social media was the idea that this was an engineered bioweapon. This isn't even the same lab people were pointing fingers at.
>Given statements to congress by government officials that would contradict this conclusion, will there be repercussions for misleading the public, lawmakers and the scientific community?
The fact that a broken clock is right once a day doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a broken clock, and after being identified as such doesn’t get to claim oppression after rightfully being relegated to the garbage bin.
The same people who asserted things about the origins of covid were the same as those peddling quack “cures” to church groups and reposting Q anon memes.
With respect to your follow up, as much as I would like to see the former president punished for his lies, misleading statements, and general scientific incompetence, I don’t think that’s in the spirit of the First Amendment.
If that terminally online person was vaccinated against covid, they were far less likely to die than the terminally online conspiracy of the week anti vax crowd.
Your comment just shows that you are still deeply caught in the propaganda. I wonder how you and people like you will psychologically cope when you'll inevitably learn the truth over the next decades.
It's one thing to be wrong, it happens to all of us, but quite an other to literally believe the opposite of the truth and be so smug, superior and self-righteous about it.
Note that this is NOT the Wuhan CDC, which is the building across the river from the wet market. They did not do any research there. This building is ~10 miles south, well outside the main city.
> 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.
> Based on number of visitors, Worobey estimated the odds at only 1 in 10,000 that the market would be the first superspreading event in Wuhan.
> Although it didn’t receive a lot of traffic, the market was one of only 4 places selling wild animals in Wuhan. It’s one of the most likely places for a wildlife spillover.
> As we’ll see later, there may actually have been two jumps from animals to people at the market. Now we’re talking about odds of 1 in 100 million, that the virus made it from the lab to the market twice but showed up nowhere else in Wuhan.
Did they "end up in the hospital" or did they go to the hospital to get a diagnosis? I live in a city, and my PCP is in the local hospital. "seasonal illness symptoms" sounds FAR more like they were just sick and went to the doctor, like anyone else would. For medicine.
And what exactly does "hospital" mean in China? I know in India a hospital can basically be a small clinic, not unlike an urgent care center in the USA.
Outbreaks can only happen in places of high density/congregation, by the nature of the required proximity. It could have been dancing around the perimeter for some time.
Maybe my perspective is incorrect, but this seems trivially possible to me. This problem with proximity is why kids didn't go to school.
That's not really relevant. The cases are all still very far away from the WIV, which is itself far from anywhere the thread implicates eg residential areas.
I also suspect the thread is just flat wrong- the people most relevant to viral spread are NOT the ones who are only spending part of their day in the city. Its the people who live there and spend all their time there.
.... written by a geoscientist. There are limits on the ability to transfer knowledge between domains (although this doesn't mean the geoscientist is necessarily wrong, and often even amateurs can find big problems with papers that got through peer review).
The geoscientist in question is actually arguing that some of the flaws in the paper are due to the authors' lack of expertise in geospatial analysis.[1]
that may be- I am not qualified to say after reading the twitter thread, but my money is still on the peer reviewed paper written by the virologist, based on a large collection of priors. Note taht the "geoscientist" is really a hydrologist who works on oil and gas, so their ability to comment on the centering model is still suspect. From what I can tell, "dawalker" is just a retired hydrologist with no special skills in this sort of analysis, especially in an biological contexgt.
We are dealing with situations where smart people are using social media to promote propaganda in response to academic publications. Twitter as a medium is not really the best place to carry out these sorts of discussions- for exmaple, when I read walker's tweets, they jump all over the place and make many different arguments which are incomplete. If he really has a problem he should take his case to retraction watch and get the paper retracted if it contains invalidating errors.
If you read the linked thread, you might actually be able to engage with the argument on its merits, without resorting to ad hominems and appeals to authority.
The peer-reviewed literature on COVID origins has been unusually bad. I assume you don't think SARS-CoV-2 came from pangolins; but Nature published "Isolation of SARS-CoV-2-related coronavirus from Malayan pangolins", and took more than a year to correct it. (They said the virus was widespread among pangolins, based on multiple positive samples; but in fact multiple papers had been written about one batch of smuggled pangolins.)
Map-based arguments for the exact site of introduction seem generally like noise to me. Worobey has made aggressive claims in preprints and media interviews, but even his Science paper falls back to just "epicenter", a weaker term without standard epidemiological meaning. SARS-CoV-2 must have been introduced into the Americas at air and seaports; but even with the advance warning to public health officials, that's not where the first clusters were found.
Definitely not. But if you just want to hold up credentials, then David Baltimore seems pretty convinced that SARS-CoV-2 arose unnaturally, and I'm pretty sure a Nobel prize beats a paper in Science. So I hope you now agree credentialism is dumb?
Some areas of the origins debate require deep knowledge of the evolutionary biology of related viruses (e.g. the extent to which the coding of the FCS suggests engineering), but most of the debate is understandable with only basic molecular biology and math. From your post history, I'd guess you're better-placed to understand something like Pekar's epidemiological model than most of his reviewers were. So if you're interested enough to comment here, then I'm not sure why you wouldn't try?
I don't change my opinion of David Baltimore or of SARS-CoV-2 based on his belief (I am actually completely undecided and have been waiting for convincing evidence of any kind for some time). Baltimore is actually a bit kooky, he's not the first Nobellist to do/say dumb things: the inventor of PCR, Kary Mullis, was an HIV-causes-AIDS denier https://www.ihv.org/news/2023-News/USA-Today-Fact-check-Rese... Anyway, Baltimore recanted some time ago, agreeing that he was far too strong in his claims (this is a common problem in science- people who are convinced often get really angry and insistent about their beliefs).
To be honest, I'm so unhappy with modern medical literature that even starting to try to understand a specific model would be highly unpleasant for me- generally, my experience has been that once I start pulling the threads on a paper that isn't strictly strong quantitative biophysics, the sweater comes apart. The vast majority of medical literature requires extensive analysis and a thorough understanding of all the context before you can even really start to make useful criticisms.
My general statement remains: my priors still place a higher weight on trusting papers in major journals that haven't been retracted yet, than on out-of-domain scientists on twitter. It may not even be true in this case- perhaps dawalker is actually totally right and you can't conclude much from the WOrobey paper. But more importantly: nobody yet has shown any true "smoking gun evidence" for the origin of SARS-CoV-2. I am not even going to get remotely excited about it for at least a decade, since that's about how long it takes for the community to calm down and start thinking rationally again.
I'd tend to agree that Baltimore initially overstated the significance of the FCS, though his updated position seems close to my own. I'd certainly agree that whatever Kary Mullis saw wasn't a physical glowing raccoon, that megadoses of vitamin C won't cure cancer, etc. That's basically my point, though. Prestige--personal, institutional, or otherwise--is no guarantee of quality.
It's not meaningless either, and in general I'd also place higher weight on a paper in a major journal than on a random Twitter thread. As to COVID origins in particular, I believe major journals have published unusually poor-quality work. This continues an unfortunate pattern set in past biosafety incidents (1977 flu, Sverdlovsk, etc.), of dismissing the possibility of an unnatural cause until the evidence was incontrovertible.
The math in the Worobey papers isn't really that inaccessible, and I'd consider some of it as good work if it weren't so grossly oversold. I agree there's no definite evidence for any origin of SARS-CoV-2, and I don't think the article linked here adds much. I do think revelation of the DEFUSE proposal did, and that UNC's and the EHA's prior silence on that is inexcusable.
Definite proof may never come, but for now the American government continues to fund high-risk virological research. That seems terrifying to me. Reckless agricultural practices also continue to risk novel pandemics (in the West too; our use of antibiotics on healthy animals may get remembered as a crime against humanity). The risk of reckless virological practices is additive to that though, and much more easily controlled, simply by defunding. I therefore believe it deserves attention now.
"Epicenter" does not mean "origin", by any definition of the word. The epicenter is a statistical thing, in this context, not an origin thing. The epicenter of COVID in the US was New York [1]. The origin of COVID was not New York. This is no different than the epicenter being the wet market, but the origin possibly being somewhere else.
"Epicenter: the part of the earth's surface directly above the focus of an earthquake"
It's all probability of intercept. Density and frequency are important. Relative-to-a-mall probably isn't super useful, in a city with 11 million.
That's the CDC, a totally unrelated building which even then isn't very close to the wet market, which is not a very popular spot in the city. The WIV was many miles outside the city.
Slightly off topic, but thanks to your first link I was just doing some satellite image sightseeing of Wuhan and noticed that on Google maps the streets are offset about 3 blocks east of where they should be.
It's fairly obvious here [1] where the curved road extends out into a lake.
Not saying this means anything, just found it amusing.
A bit different. The GPS restriction was to prevent GPS on a device moving over 400 mph (I think that's roughly the speed?), and to limit accuracy to within a few meters rather than a few centimeters. The restrictions were intended to prevent the use of civilian GPS systems in precision missiles.
Not a lot of civilian uses require anywhere near that speed or accuracy.
It's a lot harder to justify grossly inaccurate geographic data as not hurting civilian uses.
you're referring to the CoCom Limits on GPS receives, which limits functionality when the device is moving faster than 1,900 km/h aka 1,200 mph) and/or at an altitude higher than 18,000 m (59,000 ft), so you can't build a home made ICBM with it. Technically it's supposed to be and and not or, and high altitude amateur aerial ballonists tend to hit that flight ceiling, and so have a list of chipsets they can use in their balloons that don't stop working when they get too high.
I never understood how this works, at least effectively. Isn’t this just a device DRM? If you can build an ICBM you can probably hack a gps receiver, or build an unlocked one, no? If that encryption key is in every gps device, surely it must be available on eg darknet. And thus you could use existing gps infrastructure (ie avoid the expensive part of launching your own satellites). What am I missing?
It wasn't a pre-set error, rather each satellite was originally configured to broadcast a low-precision coarse signal and a high-precision signal and the high-precision signal could only be decoded using an encryption key. They later released the encryption key when civilian applications took off.
iirc there still are several signals broadcast, a rare public high precision signal (for land surveyors), a high precision stream (military) and a high enough precision stream (public navigation)
Sort of. It uses a pre-defined transformation that doesn't interfere with street navigation. If you're on a street it will precisely reflect that value as well as any other GPS. But it makes it difficult to perform purely GPS-based instrument navigation, which in theory makes it harder to conduct eg missile strikes.
I just want to add to this that when I first heard about this virus I searched the WIV on Google Maps. I believe that was 14 January 2020. When I searched it again a few weeks later, the location on Google Maps had changed.
I have no screenshots of this, but I did find it quite odd at the time.
Addresses of things change on Google maps. They fix problems and find issues and it's entirely possible that an address changing means something was updated. Or there's an international address conspiracy that Google is part of, you'll have to decide for yourself!
This change of address is initated by an authority of that region or owner of that business.
What exactly is your motivation is spreading FUD on this matter?
I don't think it's fine. When I worked at Google, we got updated address information for businesses periodically and we had an official process that applied updates to the data we had stored. It was actually a colossal pain in the butt. I could see that still being the way that addresses can get updated?
omniglottal, I wish you'd comment further about address info changing. Like the other responder to you, third parties can ask to update address info. It's absolutely not conspiratorial. Can we agree it's not a conspiracy?
You don't have to be a business owner to change the location of a business on Google Maps. They rely on the general public to correct inaccuracies - I've done this a few times for certain locations near me. Presumably they use some kind of scoring system to determine whether the request to make the change is valid.
Which is useless in this day. I was in China last week and Google Map’s street layer was aligned correctly to where I was, but the satellite imagery was not.
This demonstrates that Google already knows the correct coordinates of street in China, including those of an airport finished in 2021. For some reason they have spent no time manually aligning the imagery.
Coordinates on the globe are constant whether China likes it or not, my only guess is that Google doesn’t want to spend time fixing data in a country that blocks them entirely.
Google is doing no business in China, so they don’t “have to.” They could easily bypass that by internally mapping the imagery to the vectors, they have thousands of developers who could do this.
Even if they had to buy it, they’re not buying it because again they don’t do business there.
I haven't looked at where Ben Hu's lab is, but epidemiological distance in urban areas doesn't necessarily follow map distance. In particular, proximity to a shared subway or bus line can be more important than physical proximity, since many commuters will put up with longer travel times if they can tune out, and a packed rush hour subway car is a great place for the spread of airborne infectious diseases. (In US cities one might consider two homes epidemiologically close despite a 10 mile separation if their children take the same school bus.)
Cases were roundly distributed, not along any particular artery. Note that the WIV is not even close to being in frame there- that's how much farther away it is.
>became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses
I was in Thailand in february 2019 and came down with SARS-like symptoms that were very similar to Covid-19 once that became known.
SARS-like viruses have been going around for a while, meaning they affect the respiratory system. Doesn't mean it was covid-19, what even differentiates SARS from covid-19? I have no idea, I'm just a layman who happened to get sick.
Covid-19 is the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
From [0]:
> Through DivErsity pArtitioning by hieRarchical Clustering-based analyses,5 the newly emerged coronavirus was deemed not sufficiently novel but is a sister virus to SARS-CoV, the primary viral isolate defining the species. The SARS-CoV species includes viruses such as SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV_PC4-227, and SARSr-CoV-btKY72. SARS-CoV-2 is the newest member of this viral species. The use of SARS in naming SARS-CoV-2 does not derive from the name of the SARS disease but is a natural extension of the taxonomic practice for viruses in the SARS species. The use of SARS for viruses in this species mainly refers to their taxonomic relationship to the founding virus of this species, SARS-CoV. In other words, viruses in this species can be named SARS regardless of whether or not they cause SARS-like diseases.
Sort of but what made me think I had SARS specifically was the fact that I had this weird cough that persisted for a month after I recovered from the worst of the flu symptoms. That was very unusual to me.
During the actual week or two I was sick I had all the symptoms of Covid, diarrhea, shortness of breath, and the rest of normal flu symptoms. And when I recovered I remember eating a protein shake just because I couldn't eat anything else and I needed energy, and I remember not tasting it.
I'm not saying it went unnoticed for a year, it's just an interesting thing that happened to me that I didn't pay attention to until after covid was detected.
I even know how I got sick, it was on the plane from Copenhagen to Doha. Two thai guys were sitting next to us and one of them was visibly sick. We felt pity on him and offered him a pillow or candy sometimes. Then 1 day after we landed in Udon Thani we both got sick.
Neat, thanks for that last link. It could use a table of contents but it did contain more information related to the DEFUSE grant proposal which is what I have thought of as being indicative of a lab leak.
Sadly that article doesn't disprove that theory, but it does detail its weaknesses which is a good enough jumping off point for further reading.
>As we’ll see later, there may actually have been two jumps from animals to people at the market.
Mixing fact with speculation is never a great sign for an argument. Many people pushing the lab leak theory are doing this, but the people pushing against it don't need to start. If there were two spillovers, that needs a very good explanation, particularly because events like this tend to fall into the categories "one" and "many" — if there were two spillovers, why not three or four? Why not a whole gaggle of infected raccoon dogs?
> Based on number of visitors, Worobey estimated the odds at only 1 in 10,000 that the market would be the first superspreading event in Wuhan.
This is based on a location analysis of early cases around Wuhan. That doesn't imply that the first event was at the market, only near the market. In particular, the market is across the street from a railway station and one block away from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology Tongji Medical College Union Hospital. Huazhong University of Science and Technology is one of China's top ten universities and might have a pretty good hospital.
> In particular, the market is across the street from a railway station
Which can be trivially ruled out, because then the spread would have been all up and down the rail line. The first infection point would have been on the train, among all those people getting off at all different stops. It would not have suddenly become infectious just as that person stepped off the train.
> and one block away from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology Tongji Medical College Union Hospital.
The evidence for zoonotic origin is how people regularly found or contracted SARS-like coronaviruses from animals. The evidence there was any relevant research at that university is zero. It's not a government lab, those projects would have been public.
Taibbi was the first journalist to report on twitter files. Absolutely mindblowing what was going on behind the scenes of Twitter, had heard rumors of FBI pushing narratives but no one really had any idea how bad it was.
This is a nice sentiment but it just doesn’t hold up in the real world.
I’m making this statement generally as opposed to about Matt Taibbi: I don’t really follow him so I’m not evaluating him personally, just your statement in general.
I have a finite amount of time. I don’t have time to “play the ball” given how many balls are out there. Particularly if the player has proven to be a low signal-to-noise ratio source in the past.
I even do this with colleagues as well as media sources. I give people the benefit of the doubt in the beginning, but if you’ve got a track record of not having useful information for me, then I will disregard what you have to say. I’m not going to be mean about it. I might even try to give a heads up about why I think you’re not correct.
But I value my time and eventually it’s just not worth the expenditure.
So no, I’m not going to play the ball: I’ll play the player if their track record is poor. Am I going to miss out on occasion? Sure. But I just don’t have infinite time so I use heuristics and accept imperfection.
There’s another dimension of this discussion about sphere of awareness versus sphere of influence and the utility (or lack thereof) when the former is much larger than the latter. But I will sum my position up by saying that I mostly try to align them.
The symptoms reportedly included loss of smell and "ground glass opacities" in the lungs.[1] That's not necessarily COVID, either, but a few too many coincidences for me.
I have a friend that has had COVID-19 at least one, and he swears he also got it in 2019 along with the friends he was hanging out with that weekend. There are probably lots of instances like this and we may never know for sure.
> ..."developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019".
My partner and her siblings developed a COVID-19-like illness in November 2019. It was far worse than any flu they'd ever had and even put one of them, an otherwise healthy 30 year old, in the hospital for several weeks.
I wouldn't be surprised if COVID-19 was spreading as early as October.
I don't know who the other two are, but I sure as hell don't believe a word Matt Taibbi writes after his farcical lack of fact checking in "the twitter files".
Almost certainty, the population already had a sense about the spread of natural viruses and their dangers—whether valid or not. Launched from a lab is a different ballgame altogether and not having experienced the problem before people would have been much more wary.
The first thing we would have done would have been to put an immediate halt to all "gain of function" research - including all of the "gain of function" research that is currently ongoing (that Fauci and his ilk insist isn't really "gain of function" research). This would include severe penalties for those who funneled money to third party researchers. Instead, the global health authorities peddled the absurd "wet market" hypothesis and continue(d) to pour money into "gain of function" research that makes another lab leak inevitable (at some point).
I'm referring to the gain of function research currently being funded by the US government. We funded the gain of function research in Wuhan through the Eco Health Alliance. I don't mean to suggest we have any power to stop other countries from engaging in this dangerous research, but certainly we can stop being a party to it (and likely would have stopped if people knew there was a strong possibility that Covid resulted from a lab leak instead of a "wet market").
We could stop this research in it's tracks if the US government forced journals to not only refuse to publish dangerous research but also report the researchers to the authorities. Once you remove this incentive the whole demand and motivation for such reckless research collapses.
This comment is laden with rhetoric, but, to address your point regardless: 'military arms' are widely available. The equipment and knowledge to perform advanced virology work is not. It's much simpler to restrict.
Being unwilling to enforce something is not the same as being incapable of enforcing something, and stopping complex state-level research(especially nuclear) is something the US has been doing in many countries for decades. It's why so few countries have advanced bio/nuclear weapons. Your comparison makes no sense.
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Not censored millions upon millions of posts discussing the idea, for one thing. The conversation and narrative was warped, and a lot of people are now rather extremely divorced from the reality around this issue.
Gain of function research would have been examined much more closely, and with the origins known we may have had much less fumbling around protocols for containment, such as knowing much sooner that it was airborne.
I believe many people likely died as a consequence of this mass deception, and its ripple effects. And many more might die yet, if we don't reign in irresponsible bio research.
You are correct. I guess people can't handle that. This is from the article, it tracks with your sentiment:
Said Metzl, “Had US government officials including Dr. Fauci stated from day one that a COVID-19 research-related origin was a very real possibility, and made clear that we had little idea what viruses were being held at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, what work was being done there, and who was doing that work, our national and global conversations would have been dramatically different. The time has come for a full accounting.”
That doesn't track with their sentiment at all? "Our national and global conversation would have been dramatically different" is not the same as "many fewer people would have died".
Any response to your question is hypothetical at this point (disclaimer) so here's my hypothetical explanation of how conversation would have led to less deaths:
A lot of people believed the lab leak "consipracy theory", but Fauci and company were so adamant to contradict the "conspiracy theorists" that it practically destroyed those people's willingness to heed any of the CDC directives.
Of course I can only say anecdotally violating CDC guidelines results in more deaths, but that's the gist of my hypothetical.
Certainly, a weird coincidence that many of the people worried about it being a lab leak early on, also had downplayed it and practice little caution to avoid getting it.
Are we actually claiming that "Virus leak from scary china" would've gotten people to wear masks more or isolate more, versus "Virus killing people keeps spreading?" Or am I missing the point?
I think it would have. A huge portion of early deniers (generally people of a conservative disposition) were in the "it's just a flu" camp. I think "scary virus from China" would have made those people stop and think "there's no telling WHAT this thing could do!"
I think you're understanding the point. Consider what you would call an average Trump supporter. Consider what they would think if Trump declared "This China flu isn't a normal flu. The Chinese designed it in a lab and now it's out in the world. I urge every American to wear masks and get vaccinated to stop this Chinese flu."
How do you think the average Trump supporter would respond to that? Now consider what would have happened if he went all out and said the Chinese released it on purpose? It's scary to think that if he pushed the bioweapon angle it's likely that Republicans would have been lining up for vaccines and the other side taking the advice of Jenny McCarthy and refusing it.
There is so much wrong with how the pandemic was handled and the #1 things were making it a political issue, using xenophobia as a reason to not implement effective policies, and not treating it like the medical emergency that it was.
Please explain the connection you see to extra deaths. Because as I see it, nothing about how governments responded to this was conditional on COVID having occurred naturally; social distancing and mask use would still have been the correct response even if we knew with certainty that it leaked from a lab, and I see no reason why the early blunders like recommending against masking or over-emphasizing hand sanitizer would've been any different.
Why, for example, would we have known much sooner that it was airborne?
Yep, can confirm this took me by surprise when working with chinese colleagues in our company. Eg. I would read someone's out-of-message saying "OoO, going to hospital today" and be freaking out. But then they would be just out for couple days sick leave for fever or something. Only after like 3rd time that happening it clicked to me that 'hospital' for them means something completely different than I would have thought.
Whether that is just a misunderstanding of language or actual difference in healthcare system I never thought about.
So typically they have a "fever ward" and you will go there and receive an IV of Tylenol or something similar. I would be surprised if they didn't call that "hospitalisation". You are admitted, given a bed, a chart... not sure what else you'd call it.
The article claims multiple researchers got sick. I mean, we can posit that this wouldn't ring any alarm bells... but if they have any competence at all, it should've rung some alarm bells and resulted in more testing. And if we'd developed tests for this in November, it wouldn't have been spreading undetected for months.
I had personally decided by April 2020 that there was sufficient information for me to believe that Covid was a lab-enhanced pathogen that was accidentally released by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. My "source" was mainly common sense (the simplest solution is usually the right one, and guilty people doth protest too much), an understanding of probability (there is a lab studying the pathogen right next to the wet market which an authoritarian regime claims was the source), and an unbiased reading of history (like looking at 2001 articles on CNN about the last time SARS leaked from a lab).
For better or worse, I'm not a policymaker, so my opinion is meaningless and would have had no outcome on what "we" could have done differently (aside: I dislike this kind of rhetoric that shifts the blame to the amorphous "we" rather than the specific policymakers with names and titles who "we" should be blaming and holding responsible for their failures). But I've at least saved some sanity by listening to my gut instincts instead of subjecting myself to the whiplash that would have come with a world view determined by appeals to authority.
It seems this is more and more necessary these days - if you rely on authority as a heuristic for truth, your reality can shift under you at the whims of politicians who manipulate it for their own selfish reasons. It's best to stay above the fray. Sure, gut instinct can be wrong, but when I'm not a policymaker and only need to be concerned with my own health and well-being, the consequences of incorrect critical thinking are usually less bad than the consequences of trusting the wrong authority. I will continue to prioritize my "gut feeling" - informed by critical reading of publicly available data, and careful triangulation of the motives and biases of stakeholders in the current political reality - over any blessed truth that "we" have anointed as "consensus."
I lived alone, stayed isolated, kept healthy and exercised, took reasonable precautions while outside, and... because this is what you're really asking... chose not to get any vaccination, because data by July 2021 showed its effectiveness waned after three months and I had no plans within the next six months to interact with any crowds or expose myself to another individual for more than fifteen minutes. Then in December 2021, Omicron became the dominant strain, with much lower risk than previous strains, so I decided there was no sense introducing unknown variables associated with a vaccine for diminishing protection against a strain of a virus that presented risks I felt personally comfortable with accepting. (At some point I was also of the opinion that Omicron itself was an engineered strain, but I had stopped paying sufficient attention by that point to have much confidence in that opinion.)
I never felt any need to tell others what decisions they should make, and I understood my circumstances gave me relatively rare affordances of being able to remain isolated for long periods of time. Had those circumstances changed, maybe my decision regarding vaccination would have changed too. But by the time of Omicron, any risk analysis I made seemed to lead to the same conclusion that vaccination was not worthwhile, and if anything, that I should hope to contract the Omicron strain since it might confer the most effective immunity, with the lowest risk of complications, against future strains of the virus.
As of today, as far as I'm aware, I've never contracted any strain of COVID-19. Knock on wood.
Interestingly, you did much the same thing I did despite my belief that the virus arose naturally (seemed reasonable since viruses have risen naturally for give or take a billion years). I practiced the extreme social distancing for about a year since the vaccines were not available and wore KN95 masks the rare and brief times I was indoors with anyone else. I did start getting the vaccines at some point in 2021 though I was hardly in a rush and then pretty much dropped most precautions in March 2022 figuring that 2 years was about as much as I wanted to do. And then I finally got a confirmed covid case in April of this year which left me pretty weak but functional for about 36 hours and then it passed. I do think that getting a vaccine now and again probably kept the illness mild, but I suppose who can say - I certainly recommend them to people based on my experience. While I have a friend who was practically laid out by the innoculation, all I got was a little soreness.
> Interestingly, you did much the same thing I did despite my belief that the virus arose naturally
Except they decided not to get the injection (so called 'vaccination'), while you did. That's a crucial difference in the eyes of most (on both sides) so I wouldn't agree that they did 'much the same thing' as you.
I don't either and this is coming from a 4x vaxxed who (I'll shamefully admit) was part of the crowd who shamed everyone who didn't get the vaccine.
I still think if you live in a big city or any dense living arrangements, medical field, interacting with the immunocompromised, etc. you 100% should be getting it. But I now recognize if you wanted to roleplay lumberjack living alone in the woods or had a rural lifestyle it really isn't as important.
75% of all new infectious diseases come from animals. Isn't the simplest solution that COVID also came from animals? Just because it was a bad one doesn't make it less likely. Where did smallpox come from? Polio? Spanish flu?
Is it strange that the lab was near the wet market where it supposedly started? There are about 40,000 wet markets in China as of 2019. It might be more strange if it was nowhere near a wet market. It's a little bit like a psychic helping the police saying "the body will be found near water." Fantastic, most humans live near water.
And yet it happened to spillover in a wet market in a city with the premier coronavirus research labs in the country. It also happened to happen far away from where these types of viruses originate. There are only a handful of labs in the county that do this type of research and WIV is the top one.
So why did not not appear in a wet market in Yunnan or Guangdong?
We've had two spillovers now of sarbecoviruses and the first one hit a completely unrelated city. The other one happened in Wuhan, which is the biggest city in central China and its "catchement area" is probably fairly wide around it.
It does appear that they spillover in wet markets in big cities.
The level of coincidence here may look like rolling a 1d20 two times and the second time getting a natural 1.
> The level of coincidence here may look like rolling a 1d20 two times and the second time getting a natural 1.
Or a more related and much bigger coincidence: a man was killed by a nerve agent in what appeared to be a targeted attack on the home of a Russian defector approximately 10 miles from the UK's main lab studying nerve agents. Which is a similar distance between the Wuhan lab and wet market, though the UK version is a rural backwater rather than a major regional capital. Sometimes relative geographical proximity coincidences are just that. (if you think there's something to the geographic proximity of Porton Down to the Salisbury poisonings, you have to try to explain away an even more remarkable coincidence that two Russians protected by the Russian government took a very short holiday to 'see the cathedral' and somehow stumbled into the same boring suburb the nerve agent was left in on the same day. And the decision of presumed target Sergei Skripal to live there... )
Wuhan would look like less of a coincidence if it had been accompanied by a characteristic Chinese coverup "the researchers have retired and wish to spend their time not talking to the media" rather than something very uncharacteristic of a Chinese government coverup (scientific papers releasing data on origins which unconnected non-Chinese virologists and epidemiologists generally find credible) or if China had been way out ahead rather than miles behind in their vaccine efforts.
Lab leaks are enough of a known phenomenon not to be ruled out as wildly improbable, but the coincidence of the virus that leaks out of the Wuhan lab happening to be one they hadn't documented and happening to plausibly spread from an epicentre which contained the other most likely vector for the transmission of zoonotic viruses in Wuhan sounds... pretty much as big as the coincidence of a zoonotic virus being in the same major city as a lab for studying zoonotic transmissions of similar viruses prevalent in that large region.
> Or a more related and much bigger coincidence: a man was killed by a nerve agent in what appeared to be a targeted attack on the home of a Russian defector approximately 10 miles from the UK's main lab studying nerve agents.
That's a good one, I'm going to have to try to remember that.
But it's not, the head of the WIV even stated how unexpected it was for a SARS outbreak to happen in Wuhan and area not endemic to SARS like coronaviruses. If they wanted to be near the source they should have built it in Yunnan or even Guangdong where the last one broke out.
The lab is there for the same reason there are labs in Boston or NYC. Proximity to major research institutions
I mean the original appearance, thousands of years ago, when it definitely was not a lab leak. The point is that our worst viruses have come from nature, likely zoonotic sources.
>Isn't the simplest solution that COVID also came from animals?
No, you don't get to leave information out of consideration and call your conclusions the simplest theory. Most viruses are from animal spillovers. Also SARS has been leaked from labs on more than one occasion.
>It might be more strange if it was nowhere near a wet market.
It's not strange that it was near a wet market. It is strange that it was near a lab studying coronaviruses that was at least thinking of doing GoF research of the kind needed to create COVID-19 if indeed it was created.
The spillover theory leaves too many unexplained coincidences for it to be the simplest theory.
Simplest given the known facts I think. I mean all viral pandemics in the past have come from nature. However in this case where everyone agrees it came from a bat coronavirus, the nearest similar viruses were in nature 600km+ away or at the WIV 10km away. If natural you'd have to explain how it covered that distance without infecting people en route. Also why no infected animals were found. Also the WIV lab was advertising for coronavirus researcher on its job page at the time of breakout so obviously that stuff was going on.
I'm "agnostic" whether it's lab leak or natural/from the market, but I'd like to ask how you can be certain that your gut feeling is right? I think to be certain is to be ignorant/dismiss other possibilites, and confirmation bias doesn't help in that regard, you start dismissing evidence that don't conform to your "gut feeling". I also shook my head at all the scientists that loudly proclaimed that "I'm certain it can't be from a lab, it's natural!" (A scientist should be aware, that like in a math exam, if they can be certain of something, they need to show proof/show the work!), but I'm not going to prescribe motives like a Bill Gates + Rotschild + pharma industry conspiracies behind these scientists proclaiming this. Although I am curious what did motivate them to make these very non-scientific proclamations.
If you ask me why the Chinese authorities were secretive, I can come up with many theories, it could've been a lab leak, yes, but it could also be them wanting to save face rather than face the embarassment of admitting the virus started there (is there anything to be embarassed about, or is the CCP, like many political bodies, full of men with grade-school level emotions?), heck their internal propaganda blames the US, saying they brought in the virus through the Wuhan 2019 Military World Games. Or the Chinese refusals could be them not wanting foreign organizations looking around their labs. Heck, if a virus started in Atlanta and the WHO said some their investigators from many countries, including China and Russia, would like to inspect the CDC lab there, Americans would probably scream the same amount...
Well, I suppose I'm "agnostic," too. That's my point. I have no need to be certain one way or the other, so it's better to have "good enough" confidence, which I prefer to get from a (well-informed!) "gut feeling," rather than delegating my confidence metrics to some authority who can deliver me the latest proclamations of truth from on high.
Did it actually impact me in any way to decide whether I thought a natural or lab origin was more likely? No, probably not. But I'm an avid internet commenter and so naturally I spent time reading and posting about this stuff.
But there is one tangible benefit to the time I invest in researching controversies like this when the news story first breaks: I can save time in the future when the narrative changes, by skimming stories to see if they contain new information or merely reframe existing data. At least, that's how I justify the amount of time I spent reading about this stuff in 2020...
Fun fact, I created this pseudononymous HN account to post wrongthink about Covid origins - one of my first posts [0] about it was flagged (and unflagged about a year later when I complained about it in a similar comment to this one).
If it was developed in lab, presumably there would be a substantial amount of information available on it. Lab notes, testing results, transmission rates, all sorts of things we had to discover in the wild.
We could have used that data to make progress on a vaccine (and adjust our overall response) much, much faster.
How and why would they have that kind of data available if the virus only existed in the lab? At most they could have had computer simulations, but no real data.
The only information they would have had is the DNA sequence, but that was rapidly sequenced anyway, and design of the original vaccines followed in short order. What took time was testing and manufacturing the vaccines, but none of this would have been accelerated even if the lab theory were true and if they had any data on the details of the virus.
This whole discussion is ultimately useless, and the people pushing for it were never interested in finding solution, but only in finding someone to blame, which has no impact on the outcome.
> How and why would they have that kind of data available if the virus only existed in the lab? At most they could have had computer simulations, but no real data.
I'm not a virologist, but this doesn't make sense to me. If we work under the assumption that this was a lab-made virus that leaked, then they plainly must have actually created it. What's the point of having a real virus if you aren't using it to generate real data?
Even in the unlikely scenario where they made it, stuck it on a shelf, and did nothing: they could share information about how it was created, which would give insight into it's potential current and future behavior.
> The only information they would have had is the DNA sequence, but that was rapidly sequenced anyway, and design of the original vaccines followed in short order.
This isn't true. They would have information on how it was created, any work that they had done to devise a vaccine for it, and any other data they had accumulated on it.
> This whole discussion is ultimately useless, and the people pushing for it were never interested in finding solution, but only in finding someone to blame, which has no impact on the outcome.
It's not useless at all. If it turns out to be true, there are plenty of meaningful ramifications:
1. In the pursuit of stopping fake news and propaganda, real information from whistleblowers and researchers was suppressed and careers were ended. It would be a useful lesson in free speech and the open exchange of ideas.
2. It shows there are clearly deficiencies in these labs. Inspections could be more frequent, standards could be raised, all sorts of changes could be made to prevent it from happening again.
3. And, yes, if there is someone or some entity worthy of blame, they should be blamed. Why should their fault be hand-waved?
> If we work under the assumption that this was a lab-made virus that leaked, then they plainly must have actually created it. What's the point of having a real virus if you aren't using it to generate real data?
Assuming experiments had been completed by then they'd have, what, some figures for how infectious it was in humanized mice. Maybe months down the line they'd've written a paper showing that this splice made it 40% +/-25% more infectious than the strain it was derived from or whatever. So yes, there would be data, but it's hard to imagine it would be a meaningful data compared to what was already being measured with a) humans rather than mice, and more importantly b) orders of magnitude larger sample sizes.
> This isn't true. They would have information on how it was created,
The how would be that they ran up that DNA sequence and inserted it into a blank virus. There's nothing that knowing "how it was created" tells you that you don't already know from the DNA sequence.
> any work that they had done to devise a vaccine for it
> Re: most of this: an actual virologist has responded and explained the data that would have typically been collected and how it would have helped.
I think they're looking at the best case scenario. Yes, if people were studying the virus then they were hoping to learn something about its effects on humans. But whatever experiments they were performing were presumably in-progress rather than complete, and the odds that they were working on antibodies or the like are pretty narrow.
> Says who? If they lied about accidentally releasing it, why wouldn’t they lie about what they were doing with it in the first place?
What they were working on was public record dating back to years before there was any reason to hide anything. And it makes very little sense to work on a vaccine for a virus that doesn't exist in the wild.
>I'm not a virologist, but this doesn't make sense to me. If we work under the assumption that this was a lab-made virus that leaked, then they plainly must have actually created it. What's the point of having a real virus if you aren't using it to generate real data?
I am a virologist. It also doesn't make sense to me.
There's so much data that would have been helpful. If only the DNA sequence mattered, we wouldn't have the field of virology.
Data such as rate of evolution would have been hugely important in stategizing the vaccine and could have saved thousands of lives. Data on transmission, even in animal models could also have saved lives. Structural information may have been available. Antibodies and antibody binding information may have already been available which would help in identifying conserved structural motifs for vaccine development.
We don't know how long they had it, what data they had available (if it's a chimera, data from multiple viruses might have been relevant), but saying nothing would have changed is insane. That's like saying there was no point to the SARS research over the last 3 years, because we already had the sequence after a couple days.
They worked with it because they had a question they were trying to answer. That question probably had relevance to human health, and they probably had data from trying to answer that question.
> What's the point of having a real virus if you aren't using it to generate real data?
I think you're conflating the data existing vs the data being public. My wife has a PhD in psychology. She did research at a state school using US gov't grants. The only "data" available is the papers they wrote and presented. I don't expect a virology lab to be any less protective - in fact I expect them to be more.
In 2020 Luc Montagnier identified Covid-19 as a lab creation and predicted that, because the original strain was unnatural, later strains would be less problematic as the virus reverted to its true (less problematic) nature. In contrast, the public health conversation was about a permanent threat and how much worse can it get and generally government running around hair-on-fire.
Maybe the initial quarantine recommendation would have been the same--or even stronger-- but the pandemic impacted all aspects of life everywhere, and elements of that would have been different. EcoHealth would be a bad dream, no one would be running interference for Fauci. Vaccinations would have been a different conversation, because this would have been recognized as a temporary threat.
> because the original strain was unnatural, later strains would be less problematic as the virus reverted to its true (less problematic) nature
Is it possible for someone to speed up this process in a lab somewhere, like South Africa, and release the less problematic version to the public to achieve the herd immunity quicker?
I doubt it. However, luckily for us someone has already invented called a vaccine that is far safer and plays a similar role in achieving herd immunity ; )
There are curious aspects of Omicron's emergence – more closely related to older less-circulating strains, many adaptations bursting onto scene all at once – that make people think that even if the original Wuhan strains weren't lab-creations, Omicron was – as a natural & contagious 'vaccine' against worse variants.
How does the virus have a "true nature", and why would it revert to it?
My understanding is that that viruses are well known to become more infectious and less symptomatic as they mutate over time. The reason for this is that causing the host to quickly hole up reduces the chance of replication.
Unfortunately Luc's hypothesis was not explored because, as you will see from googling his name, he became the topic of debunking and adhomenim. And maybe some of his views on other topics were wrong, but his comments on this subject have aged well.
After an hour of googling I finally found a reference to his original hypothesis.
"According to him, the altered elements of this virus are eliminated as it spreads: “Nature does not accept any molecular tinkering, it will eliminate these unnatural changes and even if nothing is done, things will get better, but unfortunately after many deaths.”"
But this is just magical thinking, some variation of the naturalistic fallacy. Nature absolutely will accept molecular tinkering if it provides an evolutionary advantage.
Another commenter pointed out that, for a while, the virus became more dangerous over time, not less. And the extent to which COVID has become less dangerous over time (which probably has as much to do with widespread immunity either via vaccination or prior infection, along with the fact that most people particularly vulnerable to COVID have already died), there's no indication that it had anything to do with undo'ing any kind of "unnatural change" - in particular, the furin cleavage site that's one of the more likely candidates for being "unnatural" is still there.
So no, I wouldn't say his comments on the subject have aged particularly well.
Everything is relative, and Luc's view has aged better than authoritative admonitions that the virus might never moderate in severity.[1] I mean, Luc was a Nobel prize winner in this field. His ideas were creative, sure, but magical? It's not hard to see the logic-- these kinds of molecules subside in evolution because they didn't arise from evolution in the first place. I mean, his opinion was a first take when the world was Cloroxing bananas, There's more info now, but this still is an example of how the conversation may have gone differently had governments taken the view that lab-origin was viable.
If the virus was reverting to its "true nature" or "undoing" molecular tinkering, then I would expect to see a clear pattern of progress/equilibration towards a specific strain. That doesn't appear to be the case; the virus is continually branching out into a host of sub lineages, some of which are more transmissible, some more virulent, some less affected by vaccines.
It's a rule of thumb that variants which are more transmissible and less virulent are more likely to succeed over time, and I remember discussing this with people early in the pandemic. By no means does this provide credence for a lab leak hypothesis.
I think "magical" is quite an accurate description of the idea that even viruses have a "true nature" that they will revert to. That's some Plato-level adherence to the rigidity of nature.
If we knew it was from a lab much of the confusion over H2H transmission, Airborne transmission, asymptomatic infections would have been known much earlier. We would have take the correct measure earlier and saved lives.
Closing the borders wouldn't have been seen as racist, it would have identified as a valid tool to stop the spread, and we would have had an extra 2 months early on in the pandemic preventing the spread in a major way.
There's a problem, covid was in Italy as early as September 2019. (see Dr John Campbell's video on this)
Cases in November 2019 aren't early, it started probably six months earlier.
I was at Madrid airport in June 2019 and waiting in the long line for border control to leave there was a man who was displaying extreme flu-like symptoms. Coughing, sweating, pale as a ghost. Mind you, this is the height of summer. Even back then, prior to the pandemic, I actively avoided him because he looked really unwell.
I know there is no way of knowing and at best it is a fanciful mental exercise, but I think to myself 'what if'?
"John Lorimer Campbell is an English YouTuber and retired nurse educator known for his videos about the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially, the videos received praise, but they later veered into misinformation. He has been criticised for suggesting COVID-19 deaths have been over-counted, repeating false claims about the use of ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment, and providing misleading commentary about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.
...
He holds a diploma in nursing from the University of London, a BSc in biology from the Open University, an MSc in health science from the University of Lancaster, and a Ph.D. in nursing from the University of Bolton. He received the Ph.D. for his work on developing methods of teaching via digital media such as online videos."
> ROME (Reuters) - The new coronavirus was circulating in Italy in September 2019, a study by the National Cancer Institute (INT) of the Italian city of Milan shows, signaling that it might have spread beyond China earlier than thought.
Sounds like a guy with some pretty relevant credentials. Accusations of misinformation are a dime a dozen, and probably made oddly enough by people with fewer relevant credentials.
It's pretty incredible to see the US Government shift around these conflicting narratives, moving toward (apparently 3 letter agency by agency) this lab leak origin. Especially considering the vilification of anyone (including the president at the time) for saying things that were in this vein. I think they owe us a complete release of the data they have and an actual assessment, from the government, explained by the head of the government... millions of people were directly effected by this. I think we're owed the truth. This method, where there are leaks or unsourced articles, but the 3 letter agencies disagree with the probable origin, it's impossible for a regular person to decipher. Maybe that is the point, but it's a really shit situation.
> considering the vilification of anyone (including the president at the time) for saying things that were in this vein
It's very weird that you frame this as if the vilification including the President was an indicator of it being unreasonable, when the actual situation was that the President himself was one of the main drivers of why this topic couldn't be discussed rationally. Once the conversation is hijacked by a hollow suit blowhard, the only way to get back to rationality is to soundly reject the broken clock, disregarding that it might coincidentally be correct.
Before I get painted as a Trump supporter and therefore blind to my team, I’m not. Don’t support him, and when listening to him yell about China virus and then listening to people calmly say that was racism, I went with the calm people. But the man did get the PDB every day. Maybe he heard some of this intelligence and made some leaps to suit his purpose.
But if we were all lied to about the origin, our family and friends died because of this, and xenophobia or racism was used as a shield to deflect criticism from the people and research techniques that got us into this mess… that isn’t something you just handwave away.
There are hollow suit blowhards hijacking every avenue of conversation around every important topic, right now. That research mechanism, gain of function or splicing together viruses… it’s being done again. To say that we have to reject what the blowhard says even if they are right about something, I can’t buy that.
If this is true, that research is too dangerous and needs to be stopped and treated like nuclear weapons, because it is.
If there was reliable evidence that China had created a coronavirus, it would have been widely disseminated because it's the fantasy of the Republicans in the US to put it on China, and if not China then put it on Dr. Fauci. But it doesn't seem like it would have changed anything about treatment of the horrible coronavirus.
I don't really understand why people are so hot to talk about gain of function research, that just seems like a distracting point from the fact that we don't have very good public health and now politically, the US has been convinced to be against public health officials, so when the next terrible virus or disease sweeps the world, again, the US will have a failure to deal with it because of all the paranoids.
WIV collected dangerous coronavirus, mixed those virus's genetic material to make more infectious strains. They wrote scientific papers about this themselves, you can read them yourself. They tested these mixed viruses (called chimeric virus) on mice with human-like lungs to find the most dangerous and infectious ones. You can read about this in the grant funding for WIV.
Then proposed splicing in the furin cleavage site into these dangerous chimeric viruses. The US funders balked at this last step, splicing the furin cleavage site in, and didn't give a grant grant money for this proposed step. It's not proven, but it sure seems like they actually did the research, because the furin cleavage site seems to be main thing that makes COVID-19 so infectious. They proposed testing these viruses on mice with human lungs and circulatory systems.
so... do you now understand why people are talking about gain of function? Viruses like this don't exist in nature, and scientists are making them and then testing them on animals that have been genetically engineered to have human-like organs, so they can figure out how to make the most dangerous ones.
This isn't new, there is a mission impossible movie where a chimeric virus is the boogie man.
Making mice with human lungs and CRISPER is new, and then doing this level of research in place with the same level of biosafety as a dental office is a new wrinkle.
The way humans convince each other of the merits of our ideas is by describing our thought processes. The problem isn't actually something being said by someone who "is" a blowhard, but rather that the thing is being said in a blowhard manner - aggressively asserted, with poor supporting reasoning. If there were concrete supporting evidence for the assertion of "China Virus", it would have been mentioned. There wasn't.
When the blowharding is done by the usual talking heads who have a following but lack actual power, it can generally be ignored - the partisans are already crazy. The problem is when it's done from a position of governmental leadership, it requires continual active refutation lest an unquestioned drumbeat turn into action real quick. The fish rots from the head.
Most certainly the reaction to this can be (could've been) used as a cover to deflect from the truth. But blame for that doesn't lay at the feet of the anti-anti-intellectuals working to counter the anti-intellectualism, but rather the initial anti-intellectuals for creating the memetic fog that prevented rational analysis to begin with.
I have to say, this reliance on the government telling the populace the truth if it has it just doesn’t ring true to me.
In recent memory, I’ll point to going to war with Afghanistan, telling the Taliban to pack sand when they offered up Bin Laden, while ignoring Saudi Arabia. Going to war with Iraq over “wmds” and lying to the world about it.
Would the govt tell us that China, a country that owns most of our debt, and is probably the most important trade environment, started this thing and covered it up? They might not.
I understand your instinct to push back against blowhards that confidently proclaim some bullshit, which they only do when it’s expedient and helpful to them. I’m just saying that instinct that I also had might not be good. To discount a whole tree of idea ideas because some jackass is shaking it, maybe just ignore the jackass and still evaluate the ideas.
I'm not arguing that "government" will tell population the truth. Rather that if a President is making an extraordinary claim that is actually based on some concrete details in a classified briefing, then we would expect that President to reference those details - especially a President who readily publicized classified information. That he did not points to the claim as being from the same vein of political misinformation as non-existent "wmds".
> To discount a whole tree of idea ideas because some jackass is shaking it, maybe just ignore the jackass and still evaluate the ideas.
Sure, this is valid if one is taking the time to sit down and examine the topic themselves from first principles and thoroughly verified facts. But, at least to me, the aspect of where Covid came from didn't deserve that effort of investigation, especially compared to analyzing things like how to protect myself.
Without analyzing everything from scratch, one is left to examine other people's arguments. And the problem created by someone in a strong leadership position spewing bullshit is that it creates a strong attractor for many other people to choose the same conclusion, and then work backwards fleshing out the details to support it. So it's not that the whole tree of ideas should be ruled out, but rather that legitimate arguments supporting that tree of ideas become practically indistinguishable from bad faith ones. This isn't a desirable state of affairs, but rather the pragmatic reaction to strong distortion of the information landscape - especially when the distortion is pushing towards a destructive course of action.
I understand your reasoning here, I agree without spending an inordinate amount of time doing first person research on every topic we all basically have to fall back to listening to other people's reasoning on a subject and then decide, but I'm curious, has discussing this and reading the article (and probably some of the other information around) caused you to rethink COVID origin possibilities or at least do some more reading about it?
You're asking in the context of me personally, rather than in the context of the topic.
That answer is "no". The importance I give to a topic is mostly based on what is actionable, which for this topic would seem to be limited to posting my resulting opinion on social media.
Just like I never bought into the "China virus" narrative, I also never bought into the "no, it's definitely not from a lab" narrative. I am comfortable with leaving a topic undecided in my mind.
Contrast with say masking, where I looked at the details and decided to start wearing a P100 respirator in public in February. That was something I could do, where the downside was really small (oh weird looks in a store, boo hoo), and the possible upside was much larger.
In the context of the topic, I didn't find my skim of this article particularly compelling. No smoking guns stuck out at me, and it would seem that other ways of the main claim happening aren't as uncorrelated as one would think at first brush (eg virus circulating publicly in Wuhan, these researchers get it, which is then noticed and recorded because they care about such things for lab workers). But in line with what I said above, that isn't a rejection of the article and "no that definitely didn't happen!", rather it just didn't move my needle much, and I am comfortable with it remaining ambiguously unknown.
The main claim of the article is the bat coronavirus researchers at WIV were hospitalized with Covid symptoms in November. The wet market outbreak was in December into January.
Thank you for saving me some clicks to figure out who this guy is. I was a bit skeptical about how sensationalized the article is relative to the substantive content of his sources
in my experience, a pure reputation destruction post is generally non-credible, and you posted an establishment media interview on someone who supports twitter: of course they have a bone to pick.
for the sake of honest conversation, can you list what conspiracy theories you're referring to? because the last few conspiracy theories i can remember somehow all turned out to be true. so i'm really concerned with what is truthful here, i hope you can help.
edit: i'm even more genuinely interested now because i was initially rapidly downvoted, but all i'm seeing in that interview is the tv host interrupting matt every time he tries to answer a question, this is so weird to me.
> there is a chance that the NSA did intercept Carlson’s attempts to secure an interview with Vladimir Putin
they did, this isn't insane to believe either, they did this to jeff bezos too. US intelligence excels at signal intelligence, this isn't a conspiracy. it then goes on to make even less sense:
> Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the Agency
duh, but obviously putin is, why are they deflecting? this is low quality reasoning that fails to address any meat of the arguments.
plus, what does any of this have to do with matt? and covid? its like every time i ask a question there's more and more deflections away from the original topic. its so strange.
Mehdi Hasan is proof that MSNBC can air someone who's as much of a shouty partisanship-addled blowhard as Fox's Sean Hannity.
Investigative journalist Lee Fang goes deeper into Hasan's allegations about Taibbi – plus Hasan's history of plagiarism & viewpoint-flexible controversialism-for-pay at:
Anyone who has seen the interview knows Mehdi wiped the floor with Taibbi and pointed out humiliating mistakes in his reporting -- even Taibbi accepted that.
As for the plagiarism, the article in question is from over 20 years ago, hardly a slam dunk nor is it a representative of his journalistic career. The only reason Fang wrote that is because Mehdi accused him of Islamophobia, it's just petty and desperate nonsense.
So, Hasan was a plagiarist as he fluffed powers-that-be for partisan credibility – including an example Fang cites from Hasan's 2012 book).
The other Fang allegations – including that Hasan now condemns & slurs people for the same sorts of socially-conservative views Hasan once espoused (& maybe still holds in his heart?) also seem well-sourced.
Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity have also "wiped the floor" against remote guests, on their shouty home-field cable TV shows. It's a medium for idiocy: slick & shameless verbal bullies win there, and anyone who adopts their news/views from such interactions remains stuck in a partisanship-addled haze.
I did watch it. Mehdi Hassan found two errors in the entire body of work: One acronym (Taibbi wrote CIS when it was supposed to be CISA), and one date that he got wrong.
Then he hammered Taibbi for an hour on those two errors, as if he were a career fraudster, instead of a lion of journalism.
Mehdi Hasan is a fraud, an establishment actor on a failing corporate propaganda news network no one takes seriously. A tool of his billionaire owners and of the Biden neocons.
Not to say that this is wrong, but it is a biased source. Statements like, "This whole pandemic could have been reshaped" have no content. It misleading presents that the furin cleavage site had to come from gain of function. It doesn't address why the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market cluster exists at all. It is based on rehashing public information and anonymous sources. All signs point to misinformation.
> It misleading presents that the furin cleavage site had to come from gain of function
it did. this isn't debatable anymore. there's literally grants written by american scientists proposing this pre-covid, the lab in wuhan was doing the legwork.
They are also already present in wild coronoviruses and the initial cluster don't support a lab leak theory, even if they were sloppily working on gain of function via that mechanism.
"Harrison and Sachs’s (1) claim that alignment of sarbecovirus Spike amino acid sequences illustrates“the unusual nature of the [SARS-CoV-2] FCS” is misleading. FCSs are common in coronaviruses, and present in representatives of four out of five betacoronavirus subgenuses (8). The highly variable nature of the S1/S2 junction is easily ascertained by inspecting a precise alignment of sarbecovirus Spikes (Fig. 1C)."
"As more bat CoVs are sampled, it is possible that another SARSr-CoV will be discovered with an S1/S2 FCS insertion. FCSs have evolved naturally in other non-sarbecovirus families of betacoronaviruses (Wu and Zhao 2020). Therefore, an S1/S2 FCS emerging in a sarbecovirus is consistent with natural evolution. Even so, the knowledge that scientists had a workflow for identifying novel cleavage sites in diverse SARSr-CoVs and experimentally characterizing these cleavage sites in SARSr-CoVs—likely in a manner that makes the resulting recombinant SARSr-CoV practically indistinguishable from a rare SARSr-CoV with a naturally emerging FCS—makes it challenging to rule out an artificial origin of the SARS-CoV-2 S1/S2 FCS"
It's saying they can arise naturally and it's hard to distinguish origin. Your claim is debatable on its own, and sar-covid-19 GoF resource origin is extremely debatable, even unlikely. At any rate, this article doesn't appear to add anything new to the discussion beyond mixing some anonymous sources with existing public information in a sensationalized way.
edit: let me add, I don't want you downvoted. It may be that this it came from gain of function research at WIV and that the Huanan market cluster was a result of this research. But as of right now, there are other better explanations. I await the Directorate of National Intelligence declassified information this article claims is coming. I do not see how this would have changed the global response to the pandemic.
edit 2: I can't reply to you, stainablesteel. HN thinks I'm posting too much. I am done after this, maybe they are right. I would reply to you with this, though:
---
The furin cleavage site did not have to come from gain of function research. My "wall of text" explains that pretty clearly, even for a layman. That claim is what I said was debatable.
Whether or not it came from GoF research remains to be seen. This article didn't expose any new information, with the possible exception of the names of the WIV researchers.
I have a question for you: what do you think would change the lab origin theory were proven? What should have everyone have done differently during the pandemic? What should we do differently now? I genuinely want to understand your opinion.
there is literally a grant written by an american scientist who sent money for that exact research to that exact lab. a literal paper trail as a grant, and a paper trail in funds.
Sure its evolutionarily possible to insert 12nt. Inserts are not common though. Whats key is that the insert -in a 30kbp sequence was at exactly a position that would give it functional properties to allow the virus much higher tropism for human tissues. Furin cleavage site appear to selected against in bats.
There is no known source from where it came from, coronaviruses often recombine, but there is no other known sarbecovirus from where the fcs could have come from.
Bob Garry tries to explain away his documented "I cant think of a plausible natural scenario for how this 12nt insert occurred" in an interview here.
What is often totally ignored by virologists and evolutionary biologists with potential funding to loose if a kab origin is proven is that the WIV was partner in a proposal to insert exactly the sort of furin cleavage site we see in SARS-CoV-2
Then like magic (a unicorn as Bob Garry says) a SARS-related CoV appears, appears down the road from the lab, that is highly infectious to humans, with the first ever furin cleavage site in a sarbecovirus, which even Zhengli Shi says was a recent inroduction to humans: "almost identical sequences of this virus in different patients imply a probably recent introduction in humans"
Lab escape through a lab acquired infection with a SARS related virus is by far the most likely scenario and should be the default hypothesis to disprove.
Natural origin scenario requires a series of events to occur, each very unlikely.
All you need for a market cluster is one infected person to visit once, & pass the infection along to one or more people who then also spend time there and pass it on. There's no challenging "why" needed.
Yes, but the coincidence of 3 gain-of-function researchers being the very 1st simultaneous infectees would be far more remarkable than a crowded place being the 1st spot that's noticed as a cluster.
No matter the origin of a new highly-nfectious respiratory disease, certain dense public places will quickly turn up as locations-of-spread.
But 3 researchers with likely larger-than-average scrupulosity about infection risks, working on increasing the virulence of bat viruses? Pretty sus!
"Ad hominem" is a great defense used frequently people with bad reputations for serially lying and misleading. If someone is a repeat offender of passing along misinformation, what they claim should be discounted regardless of whether one likes the claims or not. The people associated with this story have shit reputations and the article rests on anonymous sources. It may not be wrong, but someone would have to be a fool to ignore the credibility and reputation of their sources.
Taibbi, Shellenberger, Greenwald — these are not people with “shit reputations.” These are serious and credible journalists with views outside the mainstream. You may not like them, but I strongly dispute their reputations merit serial dismissal of their views. This is precisely what’s wrong with the current discourse on the left.
Maybe you're actually the one falling prey to false information, and harming others by spreading it. From the article:
The Taibbi-Hasan debate speaks to the sorry state of affairs in the U.S. news media. Every journalist gets things wrong occasionally. Taibbi has conceded that he made an error in one of his tweets, though not in his congressional testimony, and swiftly corrected it. Many of Hasan’s claims have been debunked, including his false claim, first flagged by journalist Aaron Mate, that he “never said a word about the Hunter Biden story" and of course this CISA-EIP issue. Hasan’s version of journalism means never correcting his own falsehoods. But since Hasan works for a cable news network where exciting a polarized audience is the chief performance metric, he is sure to benefit from the gotcha-style assault on Taibbi.
The statement that “there are objects that appear to be flying that we sometimes fail to immediately identify” is not something that most people would allege is a conspiracy theory.
The statement that “those UFOs are populated by aliens and the government knows this!” is a conspiracy theory, and has little evidence.
There was no conspiracy about the sacklers and the opioid epidemic. It was obviously true the first article that was written about it.
On Hunter Biden's laptop, somehow there's terrible evidence but the Republicans in the house are supposed to have the laptop and somehow there's no evidence to share? Why is it the Republicans keep having all this great evidence that they can never share with us? Also see the MyPillow guy and his election stealing evidence. Most recently the Republicans said we've lost the guy that was going to give us all the great evidence. Somehow. We won't share his name with you but we can't find him.
Another example is Hillary Clinton and Benghazi. That was a horrible tragedy, but they've had 10 investigations of it and spent millions and millions of dollars and they never came up with anything more than we hate Hillary Clinton and she's terrible. Sometimes these conspiracy theories have real information behind them, but much more commonly they're just created to demonize someone. I'm certainly willing to consider that Biden or his son could have done something bad, but where's the evidence?
What specifically is the actual conspiracy around "Hunter Bidens laptop"?
I am not trying to be dense. I just don't understand I think where the conspiracy is.
> How many former spooks signed a letter claiming it had all the hallmarks of a russian information operation to influence an election? 50?
This was then promoted to "russian disinformation" and treated as fact far and wide across the media.
The Hunter Biden laptop did reek of a Russian operation. It was clearly an attempt to hurt Biden in the 11th hour.
Even if the content is genuine, which everything I've seen appears to be, the story behind it is clearly fabricated in an attempt to launder hacked/stolen data. Unless you believe that Rudy Guiliani is a paragon of honesty.
Anyways, I think it's wrong that the White House attempted to discredit and aggressively remove the content under false pretenses.
At the same time, I think it's important to recognize that the content can be real AND a foreign intelligence campaign at the same time. Russia tried to interfere with the 2017 French election by dumping hacked information[0]; in my opinion, they learned from that failure and realized they needed to launder future leaks so they werent transparently hostile foreign interference. Enter the Hunter Biden laptop.
But 1) Russian had nothing to do with Hunter's laptop and his Jared-Kushner-Roger-Stone level sleaze. A level of sleaze we consider normal because "But them! They do it! They're worse and they hate us." Repubs and Dems both say it about the other and excuse their own. All of it is utterly revolting outside of partisan divides and has led to ever increasing levels of contempt for government and the media covering it. That's a big problem. Bigger?
2) There was no alfa bank server. That one is astonishing that it wasn't a joke from the first 5 seconds of being tried on and tried on it really was. The source of it is interesting, have a look.
3) There were no russian bounties in Afghanistan. Undermining an elected president pursuing a policy with popular support with a lie. And it worked until Biden picked up that policy and took it forward to completion. Wow. Jaw meet floor.
4) The Steele dossier and every story (and everything, including warrants based on it), is a total joke.
So there's 4 occasions where our (entirely valid?) fears were used against us such that our /right/ to forming our own opinion was taken away. And we need to be honest that our revulsion of Trump was also an influence. That same thing tried on Biden would not have passed the sniff test as these should not have. Do we trust democracy or just end it now? I'm going with the former - even when I don't like who gets elected.
Russia couldn't have done that more effectively. Russia has been used as an excuse and a motivation and method to do that. Our fears have been used as a tool. Doesn't make Putin a good guy and neither was Saddam. WMD being a lie didn't make Saddam a better guy either. Same playbook, no?
Do you think Sanders was supported by Russia as was claimed? He had a huge popular support. Maybe he was? Evidence?
I was surprised to learn the FBI never examined the DNC email servers claimed to be hacked by Russia and the contents published by wikileaks. The source has the credibility affected the Alfa bank made-up-story. Maybe it was Russia? Evidence is not what I thought it was. You?
Which is worse for democracy. Russian interference? Or Interference using the fear of it? The second should not be a thing.
The moniker “conspiracy theory” seems somewhat limited on the whole. I can’t think of a better name right now, maybe “public theory” vs “academic theory” ?
There is nothing wrong with theorizing either, but conspiracy theories often start with the conclusion, and then try to find what facts can fit that narrative. That’s how you can discern more critical theories from just made up stuff or disjointed data points to fit the narrative.
It's more peculiar that I've seen more and more folks make this claim, even though it seems not to be true at all. The person responding to you is using RFK Jr as proof? Yikes.
It's only one claim in a large body of independent evidence pointing to bat coronavirus research at WIV being the source of the pandemic. Additionally, the collaboration between US-based coronavirus researchers and the Wuhan group dates back to 2013. The fact that the virus appeared pre-adapted to replicate rapidly in humans also is not aligned with previous zoonotic origins, where an adaptation process could be tracked over time as the genetic sequence evolved. Furthermore, the Ecohealth Alliance grant proposals to DARPA etc. for work to be done at WIV involved direct modification of the spike protein sequence, which in Sars-CoV2 has a codon usage pattern optimal for human cells. The question of whether WIV had the original bat coronavirus sequence that was modified into Sars-CoV2 is opaque due to WIV's deletion of their online database of sequences and further refusal to cooperate with investigations.
Overall, the most plausible scenario is that WIV researchers collected the original bat coronavirus sequence from cave(s) in southern China, then applied various research procedures such as serial passage through humanized mice lines and cell cultures, along with specific CRISPR-type modification of the spike protein, to generate a virus with optimal properties for replication in humans, which accidentally spread to human researchers and the people around them (including a superspreader event in the wet market). From there it spread globally by train and then airplane, causing millions of deaths and trillions in economic damage.
Why does it matter what the origin was? This kind of reckless and irresponsible research must be strictly curtailed to prevent it from happening again. There are dozens of mammalian viruses in nature that are harmless to people but which could be modified by these processes into novel pandemic threats to which human populations have little innate immunity.
Are you looking for cnn, msnbc, fox, or one of the other media corporations fueled by pharma alone to write an editorial telling you why something is true?
Go read the damn twitter files. That is the source.
Are you questioning the veracity of the data given in the twitter files? Because even the executive branch didn’t do that.
> Are you looking for cnn, msnbc, fox, or one of the other media corporations fueled by pharma alone to write an editorial telling you why something is true?
I am looking for specific evidence that substantiates the claim that was made. "Go read the damn Twitter files" is not evidence anymore than "Google it".
> Are you questioning the veracity of the data given in the twitter files? Because even the executive branch didn’t do that.
This means nothing to me, because you have not provided any supporting evidence for your claims.
The Twitter files were a conspiracist field day. Very easy for people to take random quotes or figures out of context and use them to support their preconceived notions. It's amazing how many people are handwaving "look in the Twitter files" as proof of their claim that has no evidence otherwise, or has even been long since disproven. It's not surprising at all to see the same polemicists and grifters tout the same line every time something happens that can be spun to "prove" their point.
When people with influence confidently label and laugh at conspiracy theories, and one or more turn out to be true, it becomes easier for some to trust the people who find conspiracies everywhere.
One can, but in practice it seems like more people just won't believe the "official story" anymore. That's the behavior that I've seen manifesting lately.
Well that's kinda my point: trusting the official story is known to be not rational behavior, where rational ~= "aspiring to have a maximally accurate / minimally inaccurate model of reality.
I’d argue that when he was muckraking against Goldman Sachs and the “Great Vampire Squid” of investment banking, he was already at least bordering on “pat conspiracy” territory.
People noticed less because he was muckraking for the “right side”.
Why name the researchers that got sick? Even if one of them is the source for COVID, which really isn't clear from this, I don't think they deserve the harassment articles like this are bound to cause.
Because that's really all the information the article has.
You boil it all down and the article is just rehashing everything for the hundredth time, along with claiming "US government sources say" and dropping the three names to make it appear to be credible.
There's no details about how these government sources know this.
It also seems to be a rehashing of a New York Times story from a year or so ago which also claimed that there were three workers that were sick (without having any details) and was written by the same journalist that wrote the Iraq/Niger Yellow cake Uranium story back around 2002 that led us into the War in Iraq (and the same plot line that led to the Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson/Dick Cheney affair).
It is hard to tell from the writing - are the sources claiming that they know the researchers were sick with Covid-19 specifically, or are they saying they know the researchers with sick with something, and that they had symptoms consistent with covid-19?
We go from:
>Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu.
To:
>not only do we know there were WIV scientists who had developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019,
I can't make sense of this article. It is a bit rambling and seems to mix quotes from different times.
"Politicians, scientists, journalists, and amateur researchers for years now have zeroed in on the possibility that Covid-19 may have resulted from U.S.-funded gain-of-function research conducted in China."
And the authors leave it at that. Maybe some references to articles would be nice? Or should I just trust their meta-analysis or what.
At that point there were not good diagnostics for covid as it was probably brand new. The supposition that it was covid is based on other evidence like them doing research on coronaviruses.
I don't understand how long it got for humanity as a whole to see the elephant. New virus, research center close by, Chinese denying but not letting investigation. It's like seeing your your husband exiting a brothel but still need proof he cheated.
There were stranger coincidences in the past, and China always denies an investigation, so it's nothing special in this case.
Especially with Trump as president and we all remember the proofs of the WMDs in Iraq.
BTW there are multiple reasons to enter a brothel without cheating, they need electricians and plumbers too. According to you they all are proven cheaters.
>Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu.
>When a source was asked how certain they were that these were the identities of the three WIV scientists who developed symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, we were told, “100%”
That isn't the same as saying one of the three was Patient Zero.
"they need electricians and plumbers too. According to you they all are proven cheaters"
Humanity acted like its stupid and a conspiracy to ask if this man is anything else than a plumber. I mean if you see someone exiting a brothel and the first thing you think is that he is an electrician, there is some problem with logical thinking there. It's not that there is 0% chance. It's not not the default. Our default was that he is a plumber which should have been immensely less probable.
I am really interested in the social-political dimension of this. Was the initial hypothesis of a lab leak suppressed during the initial part of the pandemic primarily due to Western government's fear of a diplomatic breakdown (like Russia) with China? The economies are far more interdependent than compared to Russia and there is a far more economically important Chinese diaspora in the West.
What would it take to get a honest investigation within China? Presumably not under the current regime - if it were true, the magnitude of the disaster would be 100x what Chernobyl was for the Soviet Union, it wouldn't just be an accident at that point.
Would it totally legitimize the Chinese state in the eyes of its people and the world? And for that reason, could we ever expect a honest accounting? Too much blood (literal and metaphorical) has been spilled and with the lockdowns, vaccine mandates, passports, school closures, etc and everything else that has happened, most elite institutions, state actors, businesses, media, corporations have become complicit in some way in abuses, lies, deliberate obfuscation of one type or another.
> I am really interested in the social-political dimension of this. Was the initial hypothesis of a lab leak suppressed during the initial part of the pandemic primarily due to Western government's fear of a diplomatic breakdown (like Russia) with China? The economies are far more interdependent than compared to Russia and there is a far more economically important Chinese diaspora in the West.
I wonder to what extent the hypothesis has been shutdown because the people who were considered to be qualified to make that assessment are interested in the continuation of gain-of-function research.
> What would it take to get a honest investigation within China? Presumably not under the current regime
You answered it yourself, impossible under the CCP. It seems that they convinced their population that the virus has actually emerged somewhere in the west, and that was the end of it for them.
What would it take to get a honest investgation within US? The fundemental issue is why would PRC entertain US lab leak propaganda narrative? Let alone submit to basically weapons inspection tier scrutiny that no sane sovereign would permit. Keep in mind "lab leak" hypothesis was conjectured by PRC netizens along with US Fort Detrick lab influenza and Wuhan military games conspiracy theories. Obviously US politicians and "intelligence" would conveniently converge on the theory that looks bad for PRC. Is US going to cooperate to address the other PRC conspiracy theories and let WHO investigate USAMRIID? The realistic answer is covid will become distant memory and origin will be relegated to conjecture based on domestic politics.
This information slipped over 2 years ago (probably right at the beginning). Wiesendanger did a study and referenced that a lab worker was suspected as patient zero¹ as a hint.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 364 ms ] threadIt also hit the initial sites very quickly, which suggests very contagious or already present in some form. To put my tin foil hat on, was omicron the “antidote” virus that was deliberately released to put the fire out? It was very different genetically and even more contagious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games
Event 201 wargame about just such a disease was held in October 2019 — where people “role played” many of the policies we saw enacted. [1]
Trump signed for flu vaccine research in September 2019, developing new technologies and an influenza task force. [2]
I’m sure that’s all just coincidence.
[0] - https://news.yahoo.com/wuhan-lab-air-circulation-systems-135...
[1] - https://centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/tabletop-exerci...
[2] - https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-09-24/pdf/2019-2...
On that one, remember how monkeypox seemed to come out of nowhere in early 2022? In early 2021 there was a similar pandemic scenario for monkeypox, and the scenario's in-game start date was only about a week off of when it started in the real world.
If you're talking about Prato, your information is completely wrong.
There was a paper released early/mid 2020 that was attempting to group the virus into various strains (this was before the "variant" terminology emerged), that attempted to identify changes in the virus's behavior and classified different mutations with things like L, LL, and M. For the most part it was either ignored or ridiculed as being too early, that there hasn't been enough time for mutations that change its behavior to have accumulated.
Thing is, I distinctly remember it identified one mutation that seemed to originate in Italy, was trackable as it reached the US East coast, and every place it spread to had a spike in deaths that coincided with when it overtook the previous variants in prevalence for that location.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/10/health/vaping-outbreak-2019-e...
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/s...
Having had Covid 3 times since it was named, I've got a pretty good grip on what it feels like -- and I've many times wondered if I didn't have it back then in 2019 as well, as the symptoms lined up too well.
I too have wondered if I actually had Covid, but nobody knew how to diagnose it at that time.
But I had been pretty sick in January and had lots of contact with the public at work.
I always wonder. Maybe it did just suddenly develop, I was 30 that year. And sure, I’m kinda fatass, though I was working out hard at that point.
But my tin foil hat still fits me and sometimes I consider it might have a point.
If Covid had been circulating that widely that early, the trajectory of the disase in December 2019-March 2020 would have been totally different. There would not have been an initial outbreak in Wuhan followed by individual cases popping up in various other countries, followed by a gradual buildup of cases in those countries. By the time we got a test, there would have been hundreds of thousands ill all over the world, all being detected as cases simultaneously. It would have been impossible to e.g. trace cases to specific super spreader events, because there would have been so many sources of infections. Basically none of what happened would have been the expected outcome if Covid actually was spreading in the wild that early.
All the reports of early Covid cases outside of China are just the expected false positives from tests that don't have 100% specificity (which is pretty much anything other than full sequencing).
Recall exponential growth starts slowly and it was flu season.
https://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/press-rele...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03008916209747...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00716-2
Likewise the after the fact findings of antibodies in blood samples would show an exponential growth. Neither of the studies you linked to shows that. The
Just look at the numbers from that Italy study. They're claiming that 10% of their sample had already had Covid on September 2019. "Exponential growth starts slowly" doesn't explain that. But somehow that went unnoticed and caused no detectable blip in the mortality rate, while a few months later an outbreak that could be tracked to a single event decimated the elderly in Lombardy.
It's noteworthy that neither of these studies tried analyzing blood samples from say the winter of 2018 to establish a definite baseline. But if they'd done that, they probably wouldn't have much of an article to write. "We found the expected level of false positives from this test" isn't exactly newsworthy.
> 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.
I think that despite the efforts of any of those people, I never stop hearing about these "bombshells" which are trivially disproven. There has been no new evidence or anything of lab leaks since early 2020 and I am just tired of hearing the same things over and over.
Seems doubtful that Daszak (and possibly Fauci) had little idea what was going on in that lab..
For example, Daszak's paper in the Lancet claiming the virus was almost certainly of natural origin was used as the basis for justifying the censorship of tens or hundreds of millions of posts. He failed to declare his conflict of interest, as did something like 25 out of the 26 other authors. This was a broad failure among academia and news, as his reasoning in the paper was specious.
Fauci was caught telling fibs about his beliefs on natural origin as well, with a private position that it was quite likely. He also lied about funds sent to Wuhan, and the type of research they were doing.
I've always had a completely open mind about it, even if experts have repeatedly suggested that it's plausible, but unlikely.
Those prattling on about how "people called us crazy" that it was a WIV lab leak seem to completely misremember what was actually being discussed in April-May of 2020, and also seem to be trying to score political points in American politics, when it seems very obvious that the CCP should take the lion's share of any blame regarding any lack of transparency.
The theory here is that they were doing research on animal models and didn't think that humans could catch it from mice. Therefore they took too few precautions, and it escaped through them.
Here I was ridiculed.
Specifically remember a columnist at Parool, a Dutch local newspaper, talking about it how he was pressured by colleagues days after just mentioning a column it might be from the Lab.
There was a consensus in the West it didn't came from the Lab, and those who suggested otherwise were non-scientific lunatics.
The most obvious theory was ridiculed.
Some groups are very good at creating narritives in western media.
That is not accurate at all...
Bioweapon was definitely one of the options that was boosted by china's outlandishly overreacting at the start, welding people into their home etc
> "In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps," the social media platform declared in a statement.
> [...]
> Consider that Facebook's new declaration sits atop its About page, just above the site's previous policy on coronavirus-related misinformation—dated February 8, 2021—which was to vigorously purge so-called "false claims," including the notion that the disease "is man-made or manufactured." The mainstream media had deemed this notion not merely wrong but dangerously absurd, and tech companies followed suit, suppressing it to the best of their abilities.
https://reason.com/2021/06/04/lab-leak-misinformation-media-...
Twitter banned lots people for it (and other COVID "misinformation") it would be hard to point to a perfect example as often people that wanted to discuss lab leak also talked about masking, masking policy, vaccine efficacy, and Vaccine mandate policies. All of which were also forbidden topics. If you dared to speak out against "The Experts" at the cdc or WHO then you were either shadow-banned (i.e posts hidden, de-ranked, etc) or outright banned
[1] https://reason.com/2021/06/04/lab-leak-misinformation-media-...
Also people were being banned, shadowbanned, demonetized, etc. for proposing a lab-leak theory. But, I guess that's par for the course. Remember when politicians (I mean Nancy) said, unmasked, don't worry, go back to Chinatown and do business (slightly before they then imposed restrictions)
Also, don't forget, people who saw strange unexpected repetitions (filler) in the sequencing were scoffed at.
If you've created a false memory, then I've created a similar one.
I remember very early some member of Congress saying it was a Chinese engineered bio-weapon deliberately released to cripple the US economy.
I have a few family members very deep in the weeds (QAnon, Cabal, One World Order type of crap) and they love to play this narrative. In reality it seemed like it was rather obvious to anybody who looked at the facts that this pandemic had dubious origins. Just a few of these were the close proximity, same family of viruses being researched, mysterious personnel changes around the time of the initial spread, etc., yet those same family members have turned any reluctance on my part to flat out declare this pandemic as a manufactured Chinese bioweapon into flat out denial of any chance of it being anything more than a big coincidence.
I guess it boils down to conspiracy theorists believing that you're either all in, or not in at all, and there exists no middle ground to wait for more facts before coming to a conclusion one way or the other.
I also feel like noting that I didn't engage in discussion on the topic with many other people outside of aforementioned family members on the topic, so who knows, maybe I would've been ridiculed for sitting on the fence, but anecdotally I definitely remember people seeing either source as a possibility (minus the Cabal manufactured pandemic to sterilize the human race one, of course).
Anyone trying to discuss even the possibility of a lab leak was called xenophobic, a conspiracy theorist, banned from socials…
Funny thing when the “conspiracy theorists” keep turning out to be right.
By "the “conspiracy theorists” keep turning out to be right" do you mean like how Trump won the election in 2020, Biden is an actor, Obama has been hung for treason, people around the globe are dropping dead from the vaccine, etc.? These are the people I'm talking about when I speak about conspiracy theorists, people reasonably sitting on the fence when there is conflicting information are not. You speak in absolutes about how _everybody_ who presented the possibility of a lab leak was banned and labeled a xenophobe, and while I cannot speak onto your anecdotal experiences, I never saw this in any platform I participated on at the time, in fact (as I shared in another comment on this thread), I leaned towards the likelihood of a lab leak after getting recommended a very popular youtube video on the topic from a very popular channel. As far as I know, that video is still available, although it has obviously been a long time since I last watched it.
Part of how cults are started is creation of a us versus them mentality, often where it doesn't exist. I believe this is why so many conspiracy theorists with more extreme beliefs might misconstrue their experiences in discussion around the topic, when in reality those discussing the very legitimate possibility of a lab leak never got much flak (anecdotally, as I said).
I think we should know more about the origins of COVID but I haven't seen a single discussion of this that doesn't immediately dove-tail into various other conspiracies or whistles.
And I'm not making excuses for anyone or saying the CDC/Trump/Biden are blameless and innocent, but I kinda don't know what the point of these conversations are at this point.
None ever will from your perspective if you're citing "head nods" and dog whistles.
No, sorry not sorry, I don't really put much stock in the analysis of people that immediately link this into their unsubstantiated handwavey global conspiracies.
I've seen articles, research, professionals talking about the evidence. Which aren't headnods and whistles. And I read it. And that's why I don't have any strong opinion, contrary to whatever I think is being implied in your comment. But comments? Public discussion? It's the same thing every time.
Skepticism is this cool thing where instead of assuming an unclear premise and then immediately linking it to bigger, even less substantiated conspiracies theories that thereby reinforce how "true" my assumptions must be!!... I accept that I don't have the full picture.
> None ever will from your perspective if you're citing "head nods" and dog whistles.
It means that if you consider mentioning the lab leak theory an automatic dogwhistle for bioweapon then of course every single discussion about these lab leak immediately dove-tails into various other conspiracies or whistles. It's circular reasoning and you're making it impossible to express nuance.
So we're very clearly, I absolutely 0% think that talking about a lab leak means the speaker thinks that it was an intentional bioweapon leak or something. At all. Like, that's just straight up strawmanning in my head, but you kinda just projected that on me...
> And this thread is littered with all of the usual conspiracy head-nods.
> I think we should know more about the origins of COVID but I haven't seen a single discussion of this that doesn't immediately dove-tail into various other conspiracies or whistles.
You literally said "I haven't seen a single discussion of this [the lab leak theory] that doesn't immediately dove-tail into various other conspiracies or whistles"
So where are the head nods and dogwhistles in this thread? At what point did this discussion, just like every single lab leak discussion you've seen, dove-tail into conspiracies and whistles? Because I don't see the whistles and head nods in the current thread about this (this being the lab leak theory). They're all either deleted or flagged at this point for me.
And Twitter's files showed that the government (through multiple departments), members of Congress, and private companies were directly sending lists of hundreds of names of people to ban or deemphasize for talking about it.
> we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps
This illustrates the problem nicely: because there was so much blatant lying about the virus being a bio weapon, people forget that there was all along more sober discussion about it being a possible leak of a natural virus and that those discussions were never banned.
You’re similarly misrepresenting what little was in the “Twitter files”, no doubt because terms of service violations are a lot less exciting.
I'm pretty sure your memory is very faulty. Of all those saying it could be a lab leak, very few were talking it being a bio-weapon.
> Those prattling on about how "people called us crazy" that it was a WIV lab leak seem to completely misremember what was actually being discussed in April-May of 2020
Not at all. You are trying to rewrite history.
Here's the bill from Congress, march 2023:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/619...
People saying "people called us crazy" do deserve apologies, not downvotes.EDIT: just to be clear... I'm not saying it was or it wasn't a lab leak. I'm saying that there's a Congress bill from march 2023 saying there's reason to believe it was a lab-leak. And hence all those who said it was a lab-leak and who were called "conspiracy theorists" do deserve apologies.
> I'm saying that there's a Congress bill from march 2023 saying there's reason to believe it was a lab-leak.
Congress writing up a bill asserting stuff like this isn't exactly something I consider persuasive either way.
The President was also claiming the virus came from WIV back in May 2020. It was a common theory in some media circles
My point isn't whether it's credible, just that one of the most powerful people in the world expressed support for Lab Leak very early on
Even back then, there weren't any good counter-arguments against the "lab leak" theory (except "it's racist" because somehow "the Chinese are so filthy their food markets cause pandemics" isn't racist?!), so to censor it, the powers that be (Big Tech, Mainstream Media) instead attacked the adjacent, but very different "bioweapon" theory.
Yes, some conservative personalities early on had pushed some dumb conspiracies about COVID-19 being a bioweapon. No, that was not the crux of the argument that the many scientists, journalists and internet commenters had when they argued in favor of the lab leak hypothesis. Now I personally was never very attached to the theory, but I absolutely believed that we should have researched whether or not COVID-19 was indeed leaked from a lab. An actual argument against my position was that we shouldn't as it would only further fuel racism, xenophobia and geopolitical tensions even if it were true. There was also a lot of backlash against researchers who wanted investigation into the lab leak theory, probably for similar reasons.
There's always amnesia about things like this, but I'm pretty sure COVID-19 has become a case study on how not to handle a pandemic. A lot of what happened gave people a legitimate reason to distrust authority, and if we pretend that never happened things will simply continue to get worse as it repeats indefinitely.
Again, I do agree that it was annoying seeing it become a political culture war issue about a conspiracy vs "trusting the science", but that is certainly not what I believe the majority of the lab leak hypothesis was angling for.
Wikipedia even helpfully separates the two ideas into separate articles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation#Bio-we...
It's totally insane. GP is literally rewriting history and getting upvoted for it. I post a link to a Congress bill (linked from TFA), from 2023 under the Biden administration (so not Trump), saying "there's reason to believe COVID may have originated at the Wuhan lab" and I immediately get two downvotes.
It's as if the shills who tried to bury the lab leak posts back then (not the bioweapon ones, just the lab leak ones) were still actively trying to control the narrative. This time by explaining why it was normal to label everyone who talked about lab leak a "conspiracy theory cracknut" because they'd supposedly all be talking about bio-weapon (which they weren't).
> There's always amnesia about things like this, but I'm pretty sure COVID-19 has become a case study on how not to handle a pandemic. A lot of what happened gave people a legitimate reason to distrust authority, and if we pretend that never happened things will simply continue to get worse as it repeats indefinitely.
I totally agree.
I'm skeptical of the lab leak theory regardless if it's Trump or Biden pushing it because ultimately the US government is going to use whatever it can as a political weapon against other countries. This doesn't mean it's not potentially true, nor does it make China right, but it means people should be inherently skeptical of any positions the US takes on stuff like this.
This was the part that media outlets and government seized upon to call any discussion of the lab leak theory racist. There was no "discussion" about covid being a "bio-weapon," it was a bunch of anti-China hawks repeating it over and over again based on absolutely nothing. They were so obviously nationalist anti-Chinese that the theory that covid happened because Chinese people are dirty and eat weird diseased things was able to be sold as the not-racist theory.
The media argued against the most outrageous and conspiratorial version of the lab leak theory to discredit it. They successfully made you associate lab leak with racist conspiracy
But, it’s not a good idea to reward Wuhan’s Institute type of research. And there should be some accountability in the end.
This guy then lead the sham "WHO" inspection of WIV. And Fauci funded him to work around the Obama prohibition on gain of function research.
Listen to The Zuck on lex fridman admitting (paraphrasing) “yeah we got some stuff wrong, censored things we shouldn’t have when they later turned out to be evidence based.”
I believe this ,”very very minor”, admission of major guilt is in the first half.
Or the Twitter files and FBI offices in social media etc. or the Wikipedia bias and astroturfing.
https://youtu.be/ixCKd8lUrKw
The Snowden leaks are in the same vein.
Follow up. Given statements to congress by government officials to Congress, under oath, that would contradict this conclusion, will there be repercussions for misleading the public, lawmakers and the scientific community?
PS: It was never a credible bio-weapon attack (people are now trying to conflate this to instill FUD in people's memories --go do a google search with date ranges). Bio-weapons are terrible weapons of war. They are likely to affect the target as well as the deployer.
For the nonbelievers of Censorship, read up on Matt Taibbi's reporting or read some other media than usual: https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-covid-censorship-ma...
> 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.
The most effective way to cover something up is to have Alex Jones and Steve Bannon talk about it. If Fauci really is running some horrible conspiracy maybe he's paying these people to talk about it to make sure nobody takes the idea seriously.
Then there were the people pushing the Ukraine bioweapons nonsense, which is a transparent Russian attempt to copy Bush II's "WMDs in Iraq" bullshit.
Laws are created to control the poor, else mostly will find a way to twist it. https://files.catbox.moe/pkkzal.jpeg
The same people who asserted things about the origins of covid were the same as those peddling quack “cures” to church groups and reposting Q anon memes.
With respect to your follow up, as much as I would like to see the former president punished for his lies, misleading statements, and general scientific incompetence, I don’t think that’s in the spirit of the First Amendment.
It's one thing to be wrong, it happens to all of us, but quite an other to literally believe the opposite of the truth and be so smug, superior and self-righteous about it.
https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Wuhan_Ins...
The fact that researchers were sick with flu-like symptoms has been openly stated by the US for a long time. This was put out in the state department Jan 2021, 2.5 years ago: https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan...
> The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.
Here's a good post that outlines the frankly huge amount of evidence against the WIV being involved: https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/the-case-against-the-...
> Based on number of visitors, Worobey estimated the odds at only 1 in 10,000 that the market would be the first superspreading event in Wuhan.
> Although it didn’t receive a lot of traffic, the market was one of only 4 places selling wild animals in Wuhan. It’s one of the most likely places for a wildlife spillover.
> As we’ll see later, there may actually have been two jumps from animals to people at the market. Now we’re talking about odds of 1 in 100 million, that the virus made it from the lab to the market twice but showed up nowhere else in Wuhan.
The issue was that a whole bunch of them did, rapidly, and in non-trivial numbers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan#/media/File:Wuhan_Yangtz...
Maybe my perspective is incorrect, but this seems trivially possible to me. This problem with proximity is why kids didn't go to school.
Check out the other figures in that paper. The epicenter was the wet market itself.
I also suspect the thread is just flat wrong- the people most relevant to viral spread are NOT the ones who are only spending part of their day in the city. Its the people who live there and spend all their time there.
2/3rds of the population of Wuhan lives in the urban districts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan#Administrative_divisions
The people commuting in/out are a small minority. No model is perfect.
[1] https://twitter.com/search?q=(from%3Adanwalker9999)%20expert...
We are dealing with situations where smart people are using social media to promote propaganda in response to academic publications. Twitter as a medium is not really the best place to carry out these sorts of discussions- for exmaple, when I read walker's tweets, they jump all over the place and make many different arguments which are incomplete. If he really has a problem he should take his case to retraction watch and get the paper retracted if it contains invalidating errors.
Map-based arguments for the exact site of introduction seem generally like noise to me. Worobey has made aggressive claims in preprints and media interviews, but even his Science paper falls back to just "epicenter", a weaker term without standard epidemiological meaning. SARS-CoV-2 must have been introduced into the Americas at air and seaports; but even with the advance warning to public health officials, that's not where the first clusters were found.
Some areas of the origins debate require deep knowledge of the evolutionary biology of related viruses (e.g. the extent to which the coding of the FCS suggests engineering), but most of the debate is understandable with only basic molecular biology and math. From your post history, I'd guess you're better-placed to understand something like Pekar's epidemiological model than most of his reviewers were. So if you're interested enough to comment here, then I'm not sure why you wouldn't try?
To be honest, I'm so unhappy with modern medical literature that even starting to try to understand a specific model would be highly unpleasant for me- generally, my experience has been that once I start pulling the threads on a paper that isn't strictly strong quantitative biophysics, the sweater comes apart. The vast majority of medical literature requires extensive analysis and a thorough understanding of all the context before you can even really start to make useful criticisms.
My general statement remains: my priors still place a higher weight on trusting papers in major journals that haven't been retracted yet, than on out-of-domain scientists on twitter. It may not even be true in this case- perhaps dawalker is actually totally right and you can't conclude much from the WOrobey paper. But more importantly: nobody yet has shown any true "smoking gun evidence" for the origin of SARS-CoV-2. I am not even going to get remotely excited about it for at least a decade, since that's about how long it takes for the community to calm down and start thinking rationally again.
It's not meaningless either, and in general I'd also place higher weight on a paper in a major journal than on a random Twitter thread. As to COVID origins in particular, I believe major journals have published unusually poor-quality work. This continues an unfortunate pattern set in past biosafety incidents (1977 flu, Sverdlovsk, etc.), of dismissing the possibility of an unnatural cause until the evidence was incontrovertible.
The math in the Worobey papers isn't really that inaccessible, and I'd consider some of it as good work if it weren't so grossly oversold. I agree there's no definite evidence for any origin of SARS-CoV-2, and I don't think the article linked here adds much. I do think revelation of the DEFUSE proposal did, and that UNC's and the EHA's prior silence on that is inexcusable.
Definite proof may never come, but for now the American government continues to fund high-risk virological research. That seems terrifying to me. Reckless agricultural practices also continue to risk novel pandemics (in the West too; our use of antibiotics on healthy animals may get remembered as a crime against humanity). The risk of reckless virological practices is additive to that though, and much more easily controlled, simply by defunding. I therefore believe it deserves attention now.
The Alina Chan archetype would beg to differ. The journal gatekeeping on tbis topic has been off the charts.
"Epicenter: the part of the earth's surface directly above the focus of an earthquake"
It's all probability of intercept. Density and frequency are important. Relative-to-a-mall probably isn't super useful, in a city with 11 million.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6946a2.htm
It's fairly obvious here [1] where the curved road extends out into a lake.
Not saying this means anything, just found it amusing.
1. https://maps.app.goo.gl/reVDkMAhfMRbv1uJ8
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
Not a lot of civilian uses require anywhere near that speed or accuracy.
It's a lot harder to justify grossly inaccurate geographic data as not hurting civilian uses.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_Committee_for_M...
What am I missing?
The collective intelligence --- or lack thereof --- of the bureaucracies that come up with these laws.
The Chinese one is effectively a warped coordinate system, see GCJ02: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_d...
Considering the satellite imagery exists this seems silly. Glad I didn't drive into a lake!
I have no screenshots of this, but I did find it quite odd at the time.
This demonstrates that Google already knows the correct coordinates of street in China, including those of an airport finished in 2021. For some reason they have spent no time manually aligning the imagery.
Coordinates on the globe are constant whether China likes it or not, my only guess is that Google doesn’t want to spend time fixing data in a country that blocks them entirely.
Even if they had to buy it, they’re not buying it because again they don’t do business there.
The distribution of cases also strongly contradicts you: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9348750/figure/...
Cases were roundly distributed, not along any particular artery. Note that the WIV is not even close to being in frame there- that's how much farther away it is.
I was in Thailand in february 2019 and came down with SARS-like symptoms that were very similar to Covid-19 once that became known.
SARS-like viruses have been going around for a while, meaning they affect the respiratory system. Doesn't mean it was covid-19, what even differentiates SARS from covid-19? I have no idea, I'm just a layman who happened to get sick.
From [0]:
> Through DivErsity pArtitioning by hieRarchical Clustering-based analyses,5 the newly emerged coronavirus was deemed not sufficiently novel but is a sister virus to SARS-CoV, the primary viral isolate defining the species. The SARS-CoV species includes viruses such as SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV_PC4-227, and SARSr-CoV-btKY72. SARS-CoV-2 is the newest member of this viral species. The use of SARS in naming SARS-CoV-2 does not derive from the name of the SARS disease but is a natural extension of the taxonomic practice for viruses in the SARS species. The use of SARS for viruses in this species mainly refers to their taxonomic relationship to the founding virus of this species, SARS-CoV. In other words, viruses in this species can be named SARS regardless of whether or not they cause SARS-like diseases.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7133598
Aren’t SARS-like symptoms just flu-like? I heard the same exact thing from an European friend and again I think it’s Barnum effect-like.
Given the transmissibility of the virus, I doubt that it was in the wild unnoticed for 12+ months before suddenly affecting millions in weeks.
During the actual week or two I was sick I had all the symptoms of Covid, diarrhea, shortness of breath, and the rest of normal flu symptoms. And when I recovered I remember eating a protein shake just because I couldn't eat anything else and I needed energy, and I remember not tasting it.
I'm not saying it went unnoticed for a year, it's just an interesting thing that happened to me that I didn't pay attention to until after covid was detected.
I even know how I got sick, it was on the plane from Copenhagen to Doha. Two thai guys were sitting next to us and one of them was visibly sick. We felt pity on him and offered him a pillow or candy sometimes. Then 1 day after we landed in Udon Thani we both got sick.
Sadly that article doesn't disprove that theory, but it does detail its weaknesses which is a good enough jumping off point for further reading.
Mixing fact with speculation is never a great sign for an argument. Many people pushing the lab leak theory are doing this, but the people pushing against it don't need to start. If there were two spillovers, that needs a very good explanation, particularly because events like this tend to fall into the categories "one" and "many" — if there were two spillovers, why not three or four? Why not a whole gaggle of infected raccoon dogs?
> Based on number of visitors, Worobey estimated the odds at only 1 in 10,000 that the market would be the first superspreading event in Wuhan.
This is based on a location analysis of early cases around Wuhan. That doesn't imply that the first event was at the market, only near the market. In particular, the market is across the street from a railway station and one block away from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology Tongji Medical College Union Hospital. Huazhong University of Science and Technology is one of China's top ten universities and might have a pretty good hospital.
You're the only one who's speculating, because in the page that sentence links to a scientific paper: https://zenodo.org/record/6342616#.Y_WrmnbMJD-
> In particular, the market is across the street from a railway station
Which can be trivially ruled out, because then the spread would have been all up and down the rail line. The first infection point would have been on the train, among all those people getting off at all different stops. It would not have suddenly become infectious just as that person stepped off the train.
> and one block away from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology Tongji Medical College Union Hospital.
The evidence for zoonotic origin is how people regularly found or contracted SARS-like coronaviruses from animals. The evidence there was any relevant research at that university is zero. It's not a government lab, those projects would have been public.
Then someone asks you for evidence, and you throw out an accusation at that person instead of giving any evidence.
(Sorry, could not resist.)
I’m making this statement generally as opposed to about Matt Taibbi: I don’t really follow him so I’m not evaluating him personally, just your statement in general.
I have a finite amount of time. I don’t have time to “play the ball” given how many balls are out there. Particularly if the player has proven to be a low signal-to-noise ratio source in the past.
I even do this with colleagues as well as media sources. I give people the benefit of the doubt in the beginning, but if you’ve got a track record of not having useful information for me, then I will disregard what you have to say. I’m not going to be mean about it. I might even try to give a heads up about why I think you’re not correct.
But I value my time and eventually it’s just not worth the expenditure.
So no, I’m not going to play the ball: I’ll play the player if their track record is poor. Am I going to miss out on occasion? Sure. But I just don’t have infinite time so I use heuristics and accept imperfection.
There’s another dimension of this discussion about sphere of awareness versus sphere of influence and the utility (or lack thereof) when the former is much larger than the latter. But I will sum my position up by saying that I mostly try to align them.
On the other hand, this report, if true:
- Sickened about a month before COVID-19 was formally detected
- In close proximity to where COVID-19 was formally detected
- While doing research on gain of function in coronaviruses.
This is strongly suggestive circumstantial evidence.
And hospitalized? That's a bit more uncommon than catching a cold.
- with symptoms associated with common seasonal illness
Not saying it wasn't COVID-19. Just saying that claiming it was is a bit of a stretch.
[1] https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2021/08/23/josh-rogin-the-sick-r...
My partner and her siblings developed a COVID-19-like illness in November 2019. It was far worse than any flu they'd ever had and even put one of them, an otherwise healthy 30 year old, in the hospital for several weeks.
I wouldn't be surprised if COVID-19 was spreading as early as October.
I'm curious - if we knew in March 2020 that covid came from a lab, what _would_ we have done differently?
At least some of this funding happened during a ban. Doing it offshore was the workaround to avoid it.
Can you elaborate on why this was worth pointing out for the parent comment, but not GP?
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Gain of function research would have been examined much more closely, and with the origins known we may have had much less fumbling around protocols for containment, such as knowing much sooner that it was airborne.
I believe many people likely died as a consequence of this mass deception, and its ripple effects. And many more might die yet, if we don't reign in irresponsible bio research.
Said Metzl, “Had US government officials including Dr. Fauci stated from day one that a COVID-19 research-related origin was a very real possibility, and made clear that we had little idea what viruses were being held at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, what work was being done there, and who was doing that work, our national and global conversations would have been dramatically different. The time has come for a full accounting.”
A lot of people believed the lab leak "consipracy theory", but Fauci and company were so adamant to contradict the "conspiracy theorists" that it practically destroyed those people's willingness to heed any of the CDC directives.
Of course I can only say anecdotally violating CDC guidelines results in more deaths, but that's the gist of my hypothetical.
See this article:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2021/06/16/heres-w...
How do you think the average Trump supporter would respond to that? Now consider what would have happened if he went all out and said the Chinese released it on purpose? It's scary to think that if he pushed the bioweapon angle it's likely that Republicans would have been lining up for vaccines and the other side taking the advice of Jenny McCarthy and refusing it.
There is so much wrong with how the pandemic was handled and the #1 things were making it a political issue, using xenophobia as a reason to not implement effective policies, and not treating it like the medical emergency that it was.
Why, for example, would we have known much sooner that it was airborne?
Given they didn’t start any containment procedures either they didn’t know or that’s not how it happened
Whether that is just a misunderstanding of language or actual difference in healthcare system I never thought about.
For better or worse, I'm not a policymaker, so my opinion is meaningless and would have had no outcome on what "we" could have done differently (aside: I dislike this kind of rhetoric that shifts the blame to the amorphous "we" rather than the specific policymakers with names and titles who "we" should be blaming and holding responsible for their failures). But I've at least saved some sanity by listening to my gut instincts instead of subjecting myself to the whiplash that would have come with a world view determined by appeals to authority.
It seems this is more and more necessary these days - if you rely on authority as a heuristic for truth, your reality can shift under you at the whims of politicians who manipulate it for their own selfish reasons. It's best to stay above the fray. Sure, gut instinct can be wrong, but when I'm not a policymaker and only need to be concerned with my own health and well-being, the consequences of incorrect critical thinking are usually less bad than the consequences of trusting the wrong authority. I will continue to prioritize my "gut feeling" - informed by critical reading of publicly available data, and careful triangulation of the motives and biases of stakeholders in the current political reality - over any blessed truth that "we" have anointed as "consensus."
I never felt any need to tell others what decisions they should make, and I understood my circumstances gave me relatively rare affordances of being able to remain isolated for long periods of time. Had those circumstances changed, maybe my decision regarding vaccination would have changed too. But by the time of Omicron, any risk analysis I made seemed to lead to the same conclusion that vaccination was not worthwhile, and if anything, that I should hope to contract the Omicron strain since it might confer the most effective immunity, with the lowest risk of complications, against future strains of the virus.
As of today, as far as I'm aware, I've never contracted any strain of COVID-19. Knock on wood.
Except they decided not to get the injection (so called 'vaccination'), while you did. That's a crucial difference in the eyes of most (on both sides) so I wouldn't agree that they did 'much the same thing' as you.
I still think if you live in a big city or any dense living arrangements, medical field, interacting with the immunocompromised, etc. you 100% should be getting it. But I now recognize if you wanted to roleplay lumberjack living alone in the woods or had a rural lifestyle it really isn't as important.
https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/zoonotic-diseases.html
75% of all new infectious diseases come from animals. Isn't the simplest solution that COVID also came from animals? Just because it was a bad one doesn't make it less likely. Where did smallpox come from? Polio? Spanish flu?
Is it strange that the lab was near the wet market where it supposedly started? There are about 40,000 wet markets in China as of 2019. It might be more strange if it was nowhere near a wet market. It's a little bit like a psychic helping the police saying "the body will be found near water." Fantastic, most humans live near water.
And yet it happened to spillover in a wet market in a city with the premier coronavirus research labs in the country. It also happened to happen far away from where these types of viruses originate. There are only a handful of labs in the county that do this type of research and WIV is the top one.
So why did not not appear in a wet market in Yunnan or Guangdong?
We've had two spillovers now of sarbecoviruses and the first one hit a completely unrelated city. The other one happened in Wuhan, which is the biggest city in central China and its "catchement area" is probably fairly wide around it.
It does appear that they spillover in wet markets in big cities.
The level of coincidence here may look like rolling a 1d20 two times and the second time getting a natural 1.
Or a more related and much bigger coincidence: a man was killed by a nerve agent in what appeared to be a targeted attack on the home of a Russian defector approximately 10 miles from the UK's main lab studying nerve agents. Which is a similar distance between the Wuhan lab and wet market, though the UK version is a rural backwater rather than a major regional capital. Sometimes relative geographical proximity coincidences are just that. (if you think there's something to the geographic proximity of Porton Down to the Salisbury poisonings, you have to try to explain away an even more remarkable coincidence that two Russians protected by the Russian government took a very short holiday to 'see the cathedral' and somehow stumbled into the same boring suburb the nerve agent was left in on the same day. And the decision of presumed target Sergei Skripal to live there... )
Wuhan would look like less of a coincidence if it had been accompanied by a characteristic Chinese coverup "the researchers have retired and wish to spend their time not talking to the media" rather than something very uncharacteristic of a Chinese government coverup (scientific papers releasing data on origins which unconnected non-Chinese virologists and epidemiologists generally find credible) or if China had been way out ahead rather than miles behind in their vaccine efforts.
Lab leaks are enough of a known phenomenon not to be ruled out as wildly improbable, but the coincidence of the virus that leaks out of the Wuhan lab happening to be one they hadn't documented and happening to plausibly spread from an epicentre which contained the other most likely vector for the transmission of zoonotic viruses in Wuhan sounds... pretty much as big as the coincidence of a zoonotic virus being in the same major city as a lab for studying zoonotic transmissions of similar viruses prevalent in that large region.
That's a good one, I'm going to have to try to remember that.
The lab is there for the same reason there are labs in Boston or NYC. Proximity to major research institutions
Which time?
Lab leaks are pretty common, all three of those have leaked from labs (smallpox 5 times): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
And keep in mind these are just the leaks we know about.
I mean the original appearance, thousands of years ago, when it definitely was not a lab leak. The point is that our worst viruses have come from nature, likely zoonotic sources.
No, you don't get to leave information out of consideration and call your conclusions the simplest theory. Most viruses are from animal spillovers. Also SARS has been leaked from labs on more than one occasion.
>It might be more strange if it was nowhere near a wet market.
It's not strange that it was near a wet market. It is strange that it was near a lab studying coronaviruses that was at least thinking of doing GoF research of the kind needed to create COVID-19 if indeed it was created.
The spillover theory leaves too many unexplained coincidences for it to be the simplest theory.
If you ask me why the Chinese authorities were secretive, I can come up with many theories, it could've been a lab leak, yes, but it could also be them wanting to save face rather than face the embarassment of admitting the virus started there (is there anything to be embarassed about, or is the CCP, like many political bodies, full of men with grade-school level emotions?), heck their internal propaganda blames the US, saying they brought in the virus through the Wuhan 2019 Military World Games. Or the Chinese refusals could be them not wanting foreign organizations looking around their labs. Heck, if a virus started in Atlanta and the WHO said some their investigators from many countries, including China and Russia, would like to inspect the CDC lab there, Americans would probably scream the same amount...
Did it actually impact me in any way to decide whether I thought a natural or lab origin was more likely? No, probably not. But I'm an avid internet commenter and so naturally I spent time reading and posting about this stuff.
But there is one tangible benefit to the time I invest in researching controversies like this when the news story first breaks: I can save time in the future when the narrative changes, by skimming stories to see if they contain new information or merely reframe existing data. At least, that's how I justify the amount of time I spent reading about this stuff in 2020...
Fun fact, I created this pseudononymous HN account to post wrongthink about Covid origins - one of my first posts [0] about it was flagged (and unflagged about a year later when I complained about it in a similar comment to this one).
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22912353
We could have used that data to make progress on a vaccine (and adjust our overall response) much, much faster.
The only information they would have had is the DNA sequence, but that was rapidly sequenced anyway, and design of the original vaccines followed in short order. What took time was testing and manufacturing the vaccines, but none of this would have been accelerated even if the lab theory were true and if they had any data on the details of the virus.
This whole discussion is ultimately useless, and the people pushing for it were never interested in finding solution, but only in finding someone to blame, which has no impact on the outcome.
I'm not a virologist, but this doesn't make sense to me. If we work under the assumption that this was a lab-made virus that leaked, then they plainly must have actually created it. What's the point of having a real virus if you aren't using it to generate real data?
Even in the unlikely scenario where they made it, stuck it on a shelf, and did nothing: they could share information about how it was created, which would give insight into it's potential current and future behavior.
> The only information they would have had is the DNA sequence, but that was rapidly sequenced anyway, and design of the original vaccines followed in short order.
This isn't true. They would have information on how it was created, any work that they had done to devise a vaccine for it, and any other data they had accumulated on it.
> This whole discussion is ultimately useless, and the people pushing for it were never interested in finding solution, but only in finding someone to blame, which has no impact on the outcome.
It's not useless at all. If it turns out to be true, there are plenty of meaningful ramifications:
1. In the pursuit of stopping fake news and propaganda, real information from whistleblowers and researchers was suppressed and careers were ended. It would be a useful lesson in free speech and the open exchange of ideas.
2. It shows there are clearly deficiencies in these labs. Inspections could be more frequent, standards could be raised, all sorts of changes could be made to prevent it from happening again.
3. And, yes, if there is someone or some entity worthy of blame, they should be blamed. Why should their fault be hand-waved?
Assuming experiments had been completed by then they'd have, what, some figures for how infectious it was in humanized mice. Maybe months down the line they'd've written a paper showing that this splice made it 40% +/-25% more infectious than the strain it was derived from or whatever. So yes, there would be data, but it's hard to imagine it would be a meaningful data compared to what was already being measured with a) humans rather than mice, and more importantly b) orders of magnitude larger sample sizes.
> This isn't true. They would have information on how it was created,
The how would be that they ran up that DNA sequence and inserted it into a blank virus. There's nothing that knowing "how it was created" tells you that you don't already know from the DNA sequence.
> any work that they had done to devise a vaccine for it
They weren't working on that.
To the last point though:
> They weren't working on that.
Says who? If they lied about accidentally releasing it, why wouldn’t they lie about what they were doing with it in the first place?
I think they're looking at the best case scenario. Yes, if people were studying the virus then they were hoping to learn something about its effects on humans. But whatever experiments they were performing were presumably in-progress rather than complete, and the odds that they were working on antibodies or the like are pretty narrow.
> Says who? If they lied about accidentally releasing it, why wouldn’t they lie about what they were doing with it in the first place?
What they were working on was public record dating back to years before there was any reason to hide anything. And it makes very little sense to work on a vaccine for a virus that doesn't exist in the wild.
I am a virologist. It also doesn't make sense to me.
There's so much data that would have been helpful. If only the DNA sequence mattered, we wouldn't have the field of virology.
Data such as rate of evolution would have been hugely important in stategizing the vaccine and could have saved thousands of lives. Data on transmission, even in animal models could also have saved lives. Structural information may have been available. Antibodies and antibody binding information may have already been available which would help in identifying conserved structural motifs for vaccine development.
We don't know how long they had it, what data they had available (if it's a chimera, data from multiple viruses might have been relevant), but saying nothing would have changed is insane. That's like saying there was no point to the SARS research over the last 3 years, because we already had the sequence after a couple days.
They worked with it because they had a question they were trying to answer. That question probably had relevance to human health, and they probably had data from trying to answer that question.
I think you're conflating the data existing vs the data being public. My wife has a PhD in psychology. She did research at a state school using US gov't grants. The only "data" available is the papers they wrote and presented. I don't expect a virology lab to be any less protective - in fact I expect them to be more.
It’s very important to know how this happened, especially if it wasn’t an accident.
Maybe the initial quarantine recommendation would have been the same--or even stronger-- but the pandemic impacted all aspects of life everywhere, and elements of that would have been different. EcoHealth would be a bad dream, no one would be running interference for Fauci. Vaccinations would have been a different conversation, because this would have been recognized as a temporary threat.
Is it possible for someone to speed up this process in a lab somewhere, like South Africa, and release the less problematic version to the public to achieve the herd immunity quicker?
My understanding is that that viruses are well known to become more infectious and less symptomatic as they mutate over time. The reason for this is that causing the host to quickly hole up reduces the chance of replication.
After an hour of googling I finally found a reference to his original hypothesis.
"According to him, the altered elements of this virus are eliminated as it spreads: “Nature does not accept any molecular tinkering, it will eliminate these unnatural changes and even if nothing is done, things will get better, but unfortunately after many deaths.”"
https://www.gilmorehealth.com/chinese-coronavirus-is-a-man-m...
Another commenter pointed out that, for a while, the virus became more dangerous over time, not less. And the extent to which COVID has become less dangerous over time (which probably has as much to do with widespread immunity either via vaccination or prior infection, along with the fact that most people particularly vulnerable to COVID have already died), there's no indication that it had anything to do with undo'ing any kind of "unnatural change" - in particular, the furin cleavage site that's one of the more likely candidates for being "unnatural" is still there.
So no, I wouldn't say his comments on the subject have aged particularly well.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Health/debunking-idea-viruses-evolve-...
It's a rule of thumb that variants which are more transmissible and less virulent are more likely to succeed over time, and I remember discussing this with people early in the pandemic. By no means does this provide credence for a lab leak hypothesis.
I think "magical" is quite an accurate description of the idea that even viruses have a "true nature" that they will revert to. That's some Plato-level adherence to the rigidity of nature.
The real question is if there is little to no regulation or even acknowledgement of failures, it's only a matter of time before this happens again.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/covid-coronavirus-pandemic-...
I know there is no way of knowing and at best it is a fanciful mental exercise, but I think to myself 'what if'?
...
He holds a diploma in nursing from the University of London, a BSc in biology from the Open University, an MSc in health science from the University of Lancaster, and a Ph.D. in nursing from the University of Bolton. He received the Ph.D. for his work on developing methods of teaching via digital media such as online videos."
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Campbell_(YouTuber)
For anyone wondering who this is and if he is a reliable source.
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...
> ROME (Reuters) - The new coronavirus was circulating in Italy in September 2019, a study by the National Cancer Institute (INT) of the Italian city of Milan shows, signaling that it might have spread beyond China earlier than thought.
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
and
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-no...
It's very weird that you frame this as if the vilification including the President was an indicator of it being unreasonable, when the actual situation was that the President himself was one of the main drivers of why this topic couldn't be discussed rationally. Once the conversation is hijacked by a hollow suit blowhard, the only way to get back to rationality is to soundly reject the broken clock, disregarding that it might coincidentally be correct.
But if we were all lied to about the origin, our family and friends died because of this, and xenophobia or racism was used as a shield to deflect criticism from the people and research techniques that got us into this mess… that isn’t something you just handwave away.
There are hollow suit blowhards hijacking every avenue of conversation around every important topic, right now. That research mechanism, gain of function or splicing together viruses… it’s being done again. To say that we have to reject what the blowhard says even if they are right about something, I can’t buy that.
If this is true, that research is too dangerous and needs to be stopped and treated like nuclear weapons, because it is.
I don't really understand why people are so hot to talk about gain of function research, that just seems like a distracting point from the fact that we don't have very good public health and now politically, the US has been convinced to be against public health officials, so when the next terrible virus or disease sweeps the world, again, the US will have a failure to deal with it because of all the paranoids.
WIV collected dangerous coronavirus, mixed those virus's genetic material to make more infectious strains. They wrote scientific papers about this themselves, you can read them yourself. They tested these mixed viruses (called chimeric virus) on mice with human-like lungs to find the most dangerous and infectious ones. You can read about this in the grant funding for WIV.
Then proposed splicing in the furin cleavage site into these dangerous chimeric viruses. The US funders balked at this last step, splicing the furin cleavage site in, and didn't give a grant grant money for this proposed step. It's not proven, but it sure seems like they actually did the research, because the furin cleavage site seems to be main thing that makes COVID-19 so infectious. They proposed testing these viruses on mice with human lungs and circulatory systems.
so... do you now understand why people are talking about gain of function? Viruses like this don't exist in nature, and scientists are making them and then testing them on animals that have been genetically engineered to have human-like organs, so they can figure out how to make the most dangerous ones.
This isn't new, there is a mission impossible movie where a chimeric virus is the boogie man.
Making mice with human lungs and CRISPER is new, and then doing this level of research in place with the same level of biosafety as a dental office is a new wrinkle.
When the blowharding is done by the usual talking heads who have a following but lack actual power, it can generally be ignored - the partisans are already crazy. The problem is when it's done from a position of governmental leadership, it requires continual active refutation lest an unquestioned drumbeat turn into action real quick. The fish rots from the head.
Most certainly the reaction to this can be (could've been) used as a cover to deflect from the truth. But blame for that doesn't lay at the feet of the anti-anti-intellectuals working to counter the anti-intellectualism, but rather the initial anti-intellectuals for creating the memetic fog that prevented rational analysis to begin with.
Yeah, that's the perfect phrase for it. SCP fan; or did you make that up?
In recent memory, I’ll point to going to war with Afghanistan, telling the Taliban to pack sand when they offered up Bin Laden, while ignoring Saudi Arabia. Going to war with Iraq over “wmds” and lying to the world about it.
Would the govt tell us that China, a country that owns most of our debt, and is probably the most important trade environment, started this thing and covered it up? They might not.
I understand your instinct to push back against blowhards that confidently proclaim some bullshit, which they only do when it’s expedient and helpful to them. I’m just saying that instinct that I also had might not be good. To discount a whole tree of idea ideas because some jackass is shaking it, maybe just ignore the jackass and still evaluate the ideas.
> To discount a whole tree of idea ideas because some jackass is shaking it, maybe just ignore the jackass and still evaluate the ideas.
Sure, this is valid if one is taking the time to sit down and examine the topic themselves from first principles and thoroughly verified facts. But, at least to me, the aspect of where Covid came from didn't deserve that effort of investigation, especially compared to analyzing things like how to protect myself.
Without analyzing everything from scratch, one is left to examine other people's arguments. And the problem created by someone in a strong leadership position spewing bullshit is that it creates a strong attractor for many other people to choose the same conclusion, and then work backwards fleshing out the details to support it. So it's not that the whole tree of ideas should be ruled out, but rather that legitimate arguments supporting that tree of ideas become practically indistinguishable from bad faith ones. This isn't a desirable state of affairs, but rather the pragmatic reaction to strong distortion of the information landscape - especially when the distortion is pushing towards a destructive course of action.
That answer is "no". The importance I give to a topic is mostly based on what is actionable, which for this topic would seem to be limited to posting my resulting opinion on social media.
Just like I never bought into the "China virus" narrative, I also never bought into the "no, it's definitely not from a lab" narrative. I am comfortable with leaving a topic undecided in my mind.
Contrast with say masking, where I looked at the details and decided to start wearing a P100 respirator in public in February. That was something I could do, where the downside was really small (oh weird looks in a store, boo hoo), and the possible upside was much larger.
In the context of the topic, I didn't find my skim of this article particularly compelling. No smoking guns stuck out at me, and it would seem that other ways of the main claim happening aren't as uncorrelated as one would think at first brush (eg virus circulating publicly in Wuhan, these researchers get it, which is then noticed and recorded because they care about such things for lab workers). But in line with what I said above, that isn't a rejection of the article and "no that definitely didn't happen!", rather it just didn't move my needle much, and I am comfortable with it remaining ambiguously unknown.
Country has become so divided that if the other side says the sky is blue, then you have to believe it's red.
Orange man bad though right...
I voted for Biden before everyone piles on.
for the sake of honest conversation, can you list what conspiracy theories you're referring to? because the last few conspiracy theories i can remember somehow all turned out to be true. so i'm really concerned with what is truthful here, i hope you can help.
edit: i'm even more genuinely interested now because i was initially rapidly downvoted, but all i'm seeing in that interview is the tv host interrupting matt every time he tries to answer a question, this is so weird to me.
https://thebanter.substack.com/p/matt-taibbis-puff-piece-on-...
they did, this isn't insane to believe either, they did this to jeff bezos too. US intelligence excels at signal intelligence, this isn't a conspiracy. it then goes on to make even less sense:
> Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the Agency
duh, but obviously putin is, why are they deflecting? this is low quality reasoning that fails to address any meat of the arguments.
plus, what does any of this have to do with matt? and covid? its like every time i ask a question there's more and more deflections away from the original topic. its so strange.
Investigative journalist Lee Fang goes deeper into Hasan's allegations about Taibbi – plus Hasan's history of plagiarism & viewpoint-flexible controversialism-for-pay at:
https://www.leefang.com/p/mehdi-hasan-plagiarized-pro-spanki...
As for the plagiarism, the article in question is from over 20 years ago, hardly a slam dunk nor is it a representative of his journalistic career. The only reason Fang wrote that is because Mehdi accused him of Islamophobia, it's just petty and desperate nonsense.
The other Fang allegations – including that Hasan now condemns & slurs people for the same sorts of socially-conservative views Hasan once espoused (& maybe still holds in his heart?) also seem well-sourced.
Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity have also "wiped the floor" against remote guests, on their shouty home-field cable TV shows. It's a medium for idiocy: slick & shameless verbal bullies win there, and anyone who adopts their news/views from such interactions remains stuck in a partisanship-addled haze.
Then he hammered Taibbi for an hour on those two errors, as if he were a career fraudster, instead of a lion of journalism.
Mehdi Hasan is a fraud, an establishment actor on a failing corporate propaganda news network no one takes seriously. A tool of his billionaire owners and of the Biden neocons.
Petty and desperate nonsense indeed.
Not to say that this is wrong, but it is a biased source. Statements like, "This whole pandemic could have been reshaped" have no content. It misleading presents that the furin cleavage site had to come from gain of function. It doesn't address why the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market cluster exists at all. It is based on rehashing public information and anonymous sources. All signs point to misinformation.
it did. this isn't debatable anymore. there's literally grants written by american scientists proposing this pre-covid, the lab in wuhan was doing the legwork.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2211107119
"Harrison and Sachs’s (1) claim that alignment of sarbecovirus Spike amino acid sequences illustrates“the unusual nature of the [SARS-CoV-2] FCS” is misleading. FCSs are common in coronaviruses, and present in representatives of four out of five betacoronavirus subgenuses (8). The highly variable nature of the S1/S2 junction is easily ascertained by inspecting a precise alignment of sarbecovirus Spikes (Fig. 1C)."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8689951/
"As more bat CoVs are sampled, it is possible that another SARSr-CoV will be discovered with an S1/S2 FCS insertion. FCSs have evolved naturally in other non-sarbecovirus families of betacoronaviruses (Wu and Zhao 2020). Therefore, an S1/S2 FCS emerging in a sarbecovirus is consistent with natural evolution. Even so, the knowledge that scientists had a workflow for identifying novel cleavage sites in diverse SARSr-CoVs and experimentally characterizing these cleavage sites in SARSr-CoVs—likely in a manner that makes the resulting recombinant SARSr-CoV practically indistinguishable from a rare SARSr-CoV with a naturally emerging FCS—makes it challenging to rule out an artificial origin of the SARS-CoV-2 S1/S2 FCS"
It's saying they can arise naturally and it's hard to distinguish origin. Your claim is debatable on its own, and sar-covid-19 GoF resource origin is extremely debatable, even unlikely. At any rate, this article doesn't appear to add anything new to the discussion beyond mixing some anonymous sources with existing public information in a sensationalized way.
edit: let me add, I don't want you downvoted. It may be that this it came from gain of function research at WIV and that the Huanan market cluster was a result of this research. But as of right now, there are other better explanations. I await the Directorate of National Intelligence declassified information this article claims is coming. I do not see how this would have changed the global response to the pandemic.
edit 2: I can't reply to you, stainablesteel. HN thinks I'm posting too much. I am done after this, maybe they are right. I would reply to you with this, though:
---
The furin cleavage site did not have to come from gain of function research. My "wall of text" explains that pretty clearly, even for a layman. That claim is what I said was debatable.
Whether or not it came from GoF research remains to be seen. This article didn't expose any new information, with the possible exception of the names of the WIV researchers.
I have a question for you: what do you think would change the lab origin theory were proven? What should have everyone have done differently during the pandemic? What should we do differently now? I genuinely want to understand your opinion.
there is literally a grant written by an american scientist who sent money for that exact research to that exact lab. a literal paper trail as a grant, and a paper trail in funds.
no amount of text wall can deflect this.
There is no known source from where it came from, coronaviruses often recombine, but there is no other known sarbecovirus from where the fcs could have come from.
Bob Garry tries to explain away his documented "I cant think of a plausible natural scenario for how this 12nt insert occurred" in an interview here.
https://youtu.be/4-FhwghrSLs
What is often totally ignored by virologists and evolutionary biologists with potential funding to loose if a kab origin is proven is that the WIV was partner in a proposal to insert exactly the sort of furin cleavage site we see in SARS-CoV-2
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
Then like magic (a unicorn as Bob Garry says) a SARS-related CoV appears, appears down the road from the lab, that is highly infectious to humans, with the first ever furin cleavage site in a sarbecovirus, which even Zhengli Shi says was a recent inroduction to humans: "almost identical sequences of this virus in different patients imply a probably recent introduction in humans"
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.22.914952v1
Lab escape through a lab acquired infection with a SARS related virus is by far the most likely scenario and should be the default hypothesis to disprove.
Natural origin scenario requires a series of events to occur, each very unlikely.
No matter the origin of a new highly-nfectious respiratory disease, certain dense public places will quickly turn up as locations-of-spread.
But 3 researchers with likely larger-than-average scrupulosity about infection risks, working on increasing the virulence of bat viruses? Pretty sus!
What does that even mean? That you don't trust these people? Isn't that, definitionally, ad hominem?
Maybe you're actually the one falling prey to false information, and harming others by spreading it. From the article:
The Taibbi-Hasan debate speaks to the sorry state of affairs in the U.S. news media. Every journalist gets things wrong occasionally. Taibbi has conceded that he made an error in one of his tweets, though not in his congressional testimony, and swiftly corrected it. Many of Hasan’s claims have been debunked, including his false claim, first flagged by journalist Aaron Mate, that he “never said a word about the Hunter Biden story" and of course this CISA-EIP issue. Hasan’s version of journalism means never correcting his own falsehoods. But since Hasan works for a cable news network where exciting a polarized audience is the chief performance metric, he is sure to benefit from the gotcha-style assault on Taibbi.
See Twitter's own lawyers: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/06/tech/twitter-files-lawyer...
The statement that “those UFOs are populated by aliens and the government knows this!” is a conspiracy theory, and has little evidence.
On Hunter Biden's laptop, somehow there's terrible evidence but the Republicans in the house are supposed to have the laptop and somehow there's no evidence to share? Why is it the Republicans keep having all this great evidence that they can never share with us? Also see the MyPillow guy and his election stealing evidence. Most recently the Republicans said we've lost the guy that was going to give us all the great evidence. Somehow. We won't share his name with you but we can't find him.
Another example is Hillary Clinton and Benghazi. That was a horrible tragedy, but they've had 10 investigations of it and spent millions and millions of dollars and they never came up with anything more than we hate Hillary Clinton and she's terrible. Sometimes these conspiracy theories have real information behind them, but much more commonly they're just created to demonize someone. I'm certainly willing to consider that Biden or his son could have done something bad, but where's the evidence?
What specifically is the actual conspiracy around "Hunter Bidens laptop"? I am not trying to be dense. I just don't understand I think where the conspiracy is.
The Hunter Biden laptop did reek of a Russian operation. It was clearly an attempt to hurt Biden in the 11th hour.
Even if the content is genuine, which everything I've seen appears to be, the story behind it is clearly fabricated in an attempt to launder hacked/stolen data. Unless you believe that Rudy Guiliani is a paragon of honesty.
Anyways, I think it's wrong that the White House attempted to discredit and aggressively remove the content under false pretenses.
At the same time, I think it's important to recognize that the content can be real AND a foreign intelligence campaign at the same time. Russia tried to interfere with the 2017 French election by dumping hacked information[0]; in my opinion, they learned from that failure and realized they needed to launder future leaks so they werent transparently hostile foreign interference. Enter the Hunter Biden laptop.
[0] https://www.csis.org/analysis/successfully-countering-russia...
But 1) Russian had nothing to do with Hunter's laptop and his Jared-Kushner-Roger-Stone level sleaze. A level of sleaze we consider normal because "But them! They do it! They're worse and they hate us." Repubs and Dems both say it about the other and excuse their own. All of it is utterly revolting outside of partisan divides and has led to ever increasing levels of contempt for government and the media covering it. That's a big problem. Bigger?
2) There was no alfa bank server. That one is astonishing that it wasn't a joke from the first 5 seconds of being tried on and tried on it really was. The source of it is interesting, have a look.
3) There were no russian bounties in Afghanistan. Undermining an elected president pursuing a policy with popular support with a lie. And it worked until Biden picked up that policy and took it forward to completion. Wow. Jaw meet floor.
4) The Steele dossier and every story (and everything, including warrants based on it), is a total joke.
So there's 4 occasions where our (entirely valid?) fears were used against us such that our /right/ to forming our own opinion was taken away. And we need to be honest that our revulsion of Trump was also an influence. That same thing tried on Biden would not have passed the sniff test as these should not have. Do we trust democracy or just end it now? I'm going with the former - even when I don't like who gets elected.
Russia couldn't have done that more effectively. Russia has been used as an excuse and a motivation and method to do that. Our fears have been used as a tool. Doesn't make Putin a good guy and neither was Saddam. WMD being a lie didn't make Saddam a better guy either. Same playbook, no?
Do you think Sanders was supported by Russia as was claimed? He had a huge popular support. Maybe he was? Evidence?
I was surprised to learn the FBI never examined the DNC email servers claimed to be hacked by Russia and the contents published by wikileaks. The source has the credibility affected the Alfa bank made-up-story. Maybe it was Russia? Evidence is not what I thought it was. You?
Which is worse for democracy. Russian interference? Or Interference using the fear of it? The second should not be a thing.
Would be interesting to know the process and details that led to that.
There is nothing wrong with theorizing either, but conspiracy theories often start with the conclusion, and then try to find what facts can fit that narrative. That’s how you can discern more critical theories from just made up stuff or disjointed data points to fit the narrative.
Overall, the most plausible scenario is that WIV researchers collected the original bat coronavirus sequence from cave(s) in southern China, then applied various research procedures such as serial passage through humanized mice lines and cell cultures, along with specific CRISPR-type modification of the spike protein, to generate a virus with optimal properties for replication in humans, which accidentally spread to human researchers and the people around them (including a superspreader event in the wet market). From there it spread globally by train and then airplane, causing millions of deaths and trillions in economic damage.
Why does it matter what the origin was? This kind of reckless and irresponsible research must be strictly curtailed to prevent it from happening again. There are dozens of mammalian viruses in nature that are harmless to people but which could be modified by these processes into novel pandemic threats to which human populations have little innate immunity.
Source?
Go read the damn twitter files. That is the source.
Are you questioning the veracity of the data given in the twitter files? Because even the executive branch didn’t do that.
I am looking for specific evidence that substantiates the claim that was made. "Go read the damn Twitter files" is not evidence anymore than "Google it".
> Are you questioning the veracity of the data given in the twitter files? Because even the executive branch didn’t do that.
This means nothing to me, because you have not provided any supporting evidence for your claims.
Have a nice day.
The fact that you refuse to link to any specific evidence makes it seem like you know this and aren't acting in good faith.
The COVID vaccine reduce transmission, as demonstrated by the analysis of infections in prisons.
COVID causes far more heart complications than the COVID.
COVID totally has caracteristic found in nature; see SARS epidemic in 2003, or MERS.
Exercise is good for you
The government has assigned an agent to follow you when you leave your home, and listens to you through your cellular telephone
Excess refined sugars is bad for you
Isn't this an interesting argument structure?
People noticed less because he was muckraking for the “right side”.
Wet markets and gain of function research should both be banned.
You boil it all down and the article is just rehashing everything for the hundredth time, along with claiming "US government sources say" and dropping the three names to make it appear to be credible.
There's no details about how these government sources know this.
It also seems to be a rehashing of a New York Times story from a year or so ago which also claimed that there were three workers that were sick (without having any details) and was written by the same journalist that wrote the Iraq/Niger Yellow cake Uranium story back around 2002 that led us into the War in Iraq (and the same plot line that led to the Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson/Dick Cheney affair).
We go from:
>Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu.
To:
>not only do we know there were WIV scientists who had developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019,
Is it Covid, or Covid-like?
"Politicians, scientists, journalists, and amateur researchers for years now have zeroed in on the possibility that Covid-19 may have resulted from U.S.-funded gain-of-function research conducted in China."
And the authors leave it at that. Maybe some references to articles would be nice? Or should I just trust their meta-analysis or what.
But it happened to be a Chinese brothel, so if you accuse him of cheating, you'll be called an ignorant, xenophonic, scapegoat-seeking racist.
Especially with Trump as president and we all remember the proofs of the WMDs in Iraq.
BTW there are multiple reasons to enter a brothel without cheating, they need electricians and plumbers too. According to you they all are proven cheaters.
>Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu.
>When a source was asked how certain they were that these were the identities of the three WIV scientists who developed symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, we were told, “100%”
That isn't the same as saying one of the three was Patient Zero.
Humanity acted like its stupid and a conspiracy to ask if this man is anything else than a plumber. I mean if you see someone exiting a brothel and the first thing you think is that he is an electrician, there is some problem with logical thinking there. It's not that there is 0% chance. It's not not the default. Our default was that he is a plumber which should have been immensely less probable.
What would it take to get a honest investigation within China? Presumably not under the current regime - if it were true, the magnitude of the disaster would be 100x what Chernobyl was for the Soviet Union, it wouldn't just be an accident at that point.
Would it totally legitimize the Chinese state in the eyes of its people and the world? And for that reason, could we ever expect a honest accounting? Too much blood (literal and metaphorical) has been spilled and with the lockdowns, vaccine mandates, passports, school closures, etc and everything else that has happened, most elite institutions, state actors, businesses, media, corporations have become complicit in some way in abuses, lies, deliberate obfuscation of one type or another.
It feels like a breakpoint in history to me.
I wonder to what extent the hypothesis has been shutdown because the people who were considered to be qualified to make that assessment are interested in the continuation of gain-of-function research.
> What would it take to get a honest investigation within China? Presumably not under the current regime
You answered it yourself, impossible under the CCP. It seems that they convinced their population that the virus has actually emerged somewhere in the west, and that was the end of it for them.
¹:https://www.uni-hamburg.de/newsroom/presse/2021/pm8.html (German, sorry)