The most disappointing part of the pandemic has been the utter lack of curiosity and professional duty displayed by journalists. The only other time I can think of such blatant dereliction of duty was the beginning of the war in Iraq.
I don’t disagree with you, but it’s precisely the journalists job to lay bare these opacities and contradictions. What happened instead is that the lab leak hypothesis was treated as mere conspiracy theory.
Edit: your comment also ignores the involvement of the USA in the purported lab leak. That’s easier to investigate. There is no excuse for the collective behavior of journalists.
I suspect it’s easier not to do it. Rather than grind at an investigative journalism piece, it’s easier (and likely more beneficial to one’s career) to cultivate a network of influential persons and to churn out “exclusive quotes”.
Nothing about investigative journalism is easy. I am lamenting that our journalists have no sense of duty.
What would you have them do? Go sneaking around the Chinese Science Academy in Wuhan trying to find hard evidence in the dumpsters 4 years later?
I'm not a fan of some "journalists" saying, "it's just the flu" and worried more about Trump's re-election than those that they no doubt killed, but I'm actually not sure what real journalists should have done either. Also, people were crying out for their blood while indulging in deranged conspiracies against them just for pointing a camera at their master and letting him talk. Even if they could fly over to China and investigate, being caught in Wuhan investigating would have both the Chinese government and the deranged conspiracy nuts crying out for your death, the latter claiming they found it too "suspicious" you were in Wuhan at all.
They have tried something similar (getting to the bat cave in Yunnan), but the Chinese put literal roadblocks in their way (parking a truck in the middle of the road to stop them from getting to the cave) https://www.businessinsider.com/china-policing-bat-caves-sci...
Getting any information from China has been made extremely difficult. I think it's reasonable to draw some conclusions from that.
Why can't they sanction China for obstructing this effort? They've got a real nice economy, it would be a shame if we piled on sanctions to help compound their current economic woes if they refus to allow this work to be done. That they were already read to go in blocking that cave suggests they already knew and are being obstructive.
This is effectively what is happening. The key phrases to look out for are "strategic interests" and "critical infrastructure". See: repatriation of chip-manufacturing, for example.
I don't see (given their environment about secrecy and not wanting to give their bosses/politicians the bad news when there are failures) how this could be successfull. Its hard to innovate when your family risks being disappeared when you inevitably fail at some point of the larger effort and on the way to results that transcend the faults of that overall developmental process.
I realize too, its kind of hard to think about the next step after this line of analysis terminates. Like, ok, China was running sketch experiments and was not scrupulous enough in their oversight and safety practices, blah blah blah(!), what now? Are you gonna charge them the tabulated bill all over the world? It would destroy them or more accurately, give them a situation where they become Germany after WWI and have nothing to lose.
There needs to be an effort where they are held accountable and the zen koan paper tiger bullshit threats can be summarily sliced through but that still allows them to somehow save face on the world stage and domestically. I know it can't be easy to run that tight a ship without making powerful enemies no matter which step or direction you take.
> It is blatantly and patently clear that is where the virus came from.
I don't think it's so clear. However, rejecting the lab leak is deeply unscientific.
From a Bayesian standpoint, before anything was known, it was silly to dismiss the probability. Estimates from before the pandemic suggested the annual risk was ~2.4% [1], or roughly less than a 50-year recurrence interval. Compare that to the base-rate of roughly 1% of natural spill-over once-every-hundred-year pandemics and it seems foolish to dismiss it. I tended to think the escape estimates were a bit overstated and so I reduced that to ~1% which puts it at about 50/50 without much additional knowledge.
After all the information to date has come in, there's circumstantial evidence in favor of both hypotheses. Unfortunately, it's quality is such that I doubt it pushes my truth estimate much beyond 60/40 one way or the other, so 50/50 remains a decent educated guess. The US top intelligence agencies mostly came to exactly the same conclusion.
The vehement rejection of it out of not wanting to anger China speaks volumes to its credibility. The truth is always the opposite of what that regime says.
Nothing happened in Tiananmen Square -> We massacred pro democracy students
There is no food shortage -> There is a food shortage
We are not interning Uighers in concentration camps -> We are doing ethnic cleansing on native populations
Taiwan is not a country -> Taiwan is a fully sovereign state
So, applying that same logic, it's pretty easy to figure this one out.
On top of that, people trying to somehow decry that this is "republican" or "racist" are ignorant themselves, facts stand on their own merit, and there is nothing racist about any of these accusations. It is a pathetic appeal to partisan identity politics where there should be none.
Typical… during peace time nations often get complacent. During healthy time, nations often get complacent. I thought it would take longer given just two years ago most stuff was shut down.
Do they account for the covid deaths during the pandemic? Since a lot of vulnerable people died early, the number of deaths due to other causes like heart attacks, cancer, old age, diabetes etc. would be lower now than if covid never had happened.
I mostly look at the total deaths as a benchmark. The way they counted covid deaths changed and had new financial incentives which impacts numbers. Also, I would personally question the early accuracy of false/positive covid testing.
The numbers you suggest gets complicated by the fact that many people delayed care due to fear of leaving their houses, much less going to a covid-infested hospital.
2400 die every day from heart disease in the US, but those who are still terrified of Covid today generally aren't allocating 24x of their fear budget towards heart disease and starting a regular running habit or improving their diet to flatten that curve.
Life belongs to those who learn proper fear prioritization.
I hate it when I catch an avoidable memetic infection from somebody a couple seats behind me on a plane because of the relaxed memetic infection rules.
Who cares? Everyone has been vaccinated at this point unless you're so deluded from reality you missed the vaccination campaigns in every country on Earth.
A few years ago I got the 'rona and recovered. A few weeks later I went to doctor who got me blood test to confirm antibodies. He wrote letter stating I had it, I fully recovered, and the vaccines are not recommended. On a lark I got another antibody blood test recently and the markers are as strong as the first blood test - no waning.
I'm not talking about a fear budget, I'm talking about actual money. In 20 years we had SARS, MERS, ebola, H1N1, and then SARS 2. It makes no sense to shut down a program that keeps an eye on potential pandemics.
Perhaps the complacency was assuming people would treat dangerous viruses as deadly weapons, and we've decided it's not worth the risk.
So not:
"Scientists working in this field might say—as indeed I have said—that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks."
(Of course, common sense would say that if you're not willing to do this in your own backyard, you probably shouldn't let people with laxer standards and do it in theirs)
Why is yours the top comment when it's obvious you didn't read the article? Canceling this program is a move to prevent future pandemics by reducing the chance of gain-of-function research to go awry and result in accidental release of augmented viruses.
There are other types of research on viruses, zoonotic virus reservoirs, all sorts of topics that don't involve intentionally making a sample more and more contagious or deadly.
Obama also instituted a moratorium on US federal funding for this class of research during his tenure. This is a bipartisan issue. Nothing controversial for anyone other than grant recipients who need this money to keep their business afloat.
This is fantastic news. I recommend listening to Rob Reid's interview with Kevin Esvelt on the topic.
The gist is the program was designed to find potential viruses, then share them openly so countries without resources for this research could still prepare for future viruses. Obviously, open access to recipes for pandemic-grade viruses means they could also be used for nefarious means.
It's worth listening to the analysis as Rob Reid is an excellent interviewer and Kevin Esvelt is an expert in the field (he's at the forefront of gene drives).
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of who or what you're for or against. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Ditto for trolling.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with; it will eventually get your main account banned as well.
> DEEP VZN drew especially sharp scrutiny because the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that specializes in sampling animals in attempts to prevent emerging diseases, played a central role in the PREDICT consortium. (EcoHealth also had a long-standing collaboration with the Wuhan lab at the center of the lab-leak theory.)
This is why it actually matters to try to figure out if the lab leak is the most probably cause, taking into account adverse interference based on the Chinese government's massive destruction of evidence. If the lab leak was the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic, then it is very reasonable to shut down related programs.
Regardless of whether it is, even if the probability of a leak is in general low, we have seen that the expected number of deaths is likely in the millions.
Airplanes had far far fewer deaths for the aerospace industry to reach current safety regulations and requirements.
Given that, the regulations and requirements when dealing with pathogens should increase accordingly to match the potential damage.
53 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadEdit: your comment also ignores the involvement of the USA in the purported lab leak. That’s easier to investigate. There is no excuse for the collective behavior of journalists.
Nothing about investigative journalism is easy. I am lamenting that our journalists have no sense of duty.
I'm not a fan of some "journalists" saying, "it's just the flu" and worried more about Trump's re-election than those that they no doubt killed, but I'm actually not sure what real journalists should have done either. Also, people were crying out for their blood while indulging in deranged conspiracies against them just for pointing a camera at their master and letting him talk. Even if they could fly over to China and investigate, being caught in Wuhan investigating would have both the Chinese government and the deranged conspiracy nuts crying out for your death, the latter claiming they found it too "suspicious" you were in Wuhan at all.
Getting any information from China has been made extremely difficult. I think it's reasonable to draw some conclusions from that.
There needs to be an effort where they are held accountable and the zen koan paper tiger bullshit threats can be summarily sliced through but that still allows them to somehow save face on the world stage and domestically. I know it can't be easy to run that tight a ship without making powerful enemies no matter which step or direction you take.
I don't think it's so clear. However, rejecting the lab leak is deeply unscientific.
From a Bayesian standpoint, before anything was known, it was silly to dismiss the probability. Estimates from before the pandemic suggested the annual risk was ~2.4% [1], or roughly less than a 50-year recurrence interval. Compare that to the base-rate of roughly 1% of natural spill-over once-every-hundred-year pandemics and it seems foolish to dismiss it. I tended to think the escape estimates were a bit overstated and so I reduced that to ~1% which puts it at about 50/50 without much additional knowledge.
After all the information to date has come in, there's circumstantial evidence in favor of both hypotheses. Unfortunately, it's quality is such that I doubt it pushes my truth estimate much beyond 60/40 one way or the other, so 50/50 remains a decent educated guess. The US top intelligence agencies mostly came to exactly the same conclusion.
[1] https://sci-hub.st/10.3389/fpubh.2014.00116
Nothing happened in Tiananmen Square -> We massacred pro democracy students
There is no food shortage -> There is a food shortage
We are not interning Uighers in concentration camps -> We are doing ethnic cleansing on native populations
Taiwan is not a country -> Taiwan is a fully sovereign state
So, applying that same logic, it's pretty easy to figure this one out.
On top of that, people trying to somehow decry that this is "republican" or "racist" are ignorant themselves, facts stand on their own merit, and there is nothing racist about any of these accusations. It is a pathetic appeal to partisan identity politics where there should be none.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm...
The numbers you suggest gets complicated by the fact that many people delayed care due to fear of leaving their houses, much less going to a covid-infested hospital.
Life belongs to those who learn proper fear prioritization.
So not:
"Scientists working in this field might say—as indeed I have said—that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3484390/
(Of course, common sense would say that if you're not willing to do this in your own backyard, you probably shouldn't let people with laxer standards and do it in theirs)
There are other types of research on viruses, zoonotic virus reservoirs, all sorts of topics that don't involve intentionally making a sample more and more contagious or deadly.
Obama also instituted a moratorium on US federal funding for this class of research during his tenure. This is a bipartisan issue. Nothing controversial for anyone other than grant recipients who need this money to keep their business afloat.
The gist is the program was designed to find potential viruses, then share them openly so countries without resources for this research could still prepare for future viruses. Obviously, open access to recipes for pandemic-grade viruses means they could also be used for nefarious means.
It's worth listening to the analysis as Rob Reid is an excellent interviewer and Kevin Esvelt is an expert in the field (he's at the forefront of gene drives).
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr28XeVYm8U
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5qWiCan9lAMnVrWqzpdHoI?si=0...
Ditto for trolling.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with; it will eventually get your main account banned as well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is why it actually matters to try to figure out if the lab leak is the most probably cause, taking into account adverse interference based on the Chinese government's massive destruction of evidence. If the lab leak was the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic, then it is very reasonable to shut down related programs.
What does this mean?
Airplanes had far far fewer deaths for the aerospace industry to reach current safety regulations and requirements.
Given that, the regulations and requirements when dealing with pathogens should increase accordingly to match the potential damage.