zlacker

>>pseudo+(OP)
Current bottom line:

- 1st response to CoVID occurrence was certainly in Wuhan.

- The closest wild strain of CoVID happens in bats living thousand kilometres from Wuhan

- Wuhan had two institutes which, on record, did gain of function experiments on bat coronaviruses

- Beijing purposefully destroyed DNA evidence, and obliterated the team who first sequenced the CoVID genome

- Chinese authorities were scrambling, and suppressing reporting as early as November, seemingly with a very good idea what they are up to.

>>baybal+5u
This story continues to evolve and it's exciting to watch the new reporting come to light and slowly flesh out the details. The "lab escape hypothesis" was disregarded by many (if not most) media outlets as a conspiracy theory early on.

This feels so much like the Iraq "weapons of mass destruction" fiasco. Any time news outlets are credulously repeating the words of "government officials," you need to seriously devalue the reporting. Reporting isn't just being a mouthpiece for the state, and these outlets fail us when they express such a high degree of certainty before there's any independent verification of the facts.

Of course, everything you describe is still "circumstantial," and it's wise to remain skeptical. However, even if we somehow eventually confirm this was not a lab escape, there's absolutely no excuse for the certainty expressed by the NYT et al in their early reporting (which is true for so much of the other COVID-19 media coverage - the media did a terrible job of expressing uncertainty with very incomplete information throughout the entire affair).

>>Jeremy+K81
>The "lab escape hypothesis" was disregarded by many (if not most) media outlets as a conspiracy theory early on.

I have seen this claim made recently, but as I remember the 'disregarded' conspiracy theory was actually that the virus was genetically engineered (ie codon sequence edited) in a lab. The virus' genetic code seems to discount engineering, but not serial passaging/hybridization.

>>jasonl+vp1
No, this was the sleight of hand by the media. Almost all people dismissed as conspiracy theorists said most likely lab escape doesn’t mean genetically engineered. But straight away that’s how it was reported in the media. Basically twisting words and lying. Shameful.

>>zpeti+0q1
Tangentially related, I have another comment from a separate post observing some additional media (NYT specifically) sleight of hand WRT the Damore "memo":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27254877

>> [Damore] argued that biological differences and not a lack of opportunity explained the shortage of women in upper-tier positions.

> This is an unfortunate way of characterizing Damore’s argument. It’s technically true in that Damore IIRC was arguing that there was more variation among men than women (more men at the top and at the bottom but fewer in the middle, but Google hires from the top hence more men). So yeah, technically biological differences, but when the average person hears that they’re going to assume he was arguing that women in general are dumber than men in general or some such. That said, this also represents much more earnest coverage of Damore considering the initial coverage overtly lied on many accounts (calling it an anti diversity screed, claiming he sent it as a memo to the company, etc).