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.

Because it was a conspiracy theory.

Newly surfaced evidence may point in the direction of the conspiracy hypothesis, but that would be just a coincidence.

>>manuel+Hu1
The issue most people rightly have here, is almost all mainstream news outlets said with certainty that it wasn’t a lab leak. That certainty also needs evidence. Or should.

Coming to conclusions either way without evidence, when it suits certain anti government narratives, is partisanship.

>>zpeti+7y1
You are right. Coming to a conclusion without evidence, is partisanship. That is why scientists spoke of "no evidence" back then: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/05/scientis...

It was a conspiracy theory, and it may still be, because the WSJ only mentions that lab workers were "ill" and presented symptoms similar to those caused by COVID-19, which could be... really anything. The main strain of the flu in 2019 was H1N1. It could have been that. It may not have been. We don't know yet.

I don't think there is anything wrong about "mocking" people for peddling conspiracy theories with zero evidence. Let's be honest, even if some of their ideas end up being true, it would have been just a coincidence. It's like arriving to the correct solution to a math problem, but through a completely wrong process.

>>manuel+0B1
Well, luckily for you most big discoveries for humanity were made by people who were mocked, so it didn’t work.

Still doesn’t seem like the right thing to do though, especially if we consider ourselves an advanced scientific civilization.

>>zpeti+0D1
> Well, luckily for you most big discoveries for humanity were made by people who were mocked, so it didn’t work.

I'm going to need a source for that, because that's definitely not how science works. At all.

Again, making random assertions with no evidence does not make them right. And of that, there are uncountable examples out there.

>>manuel+8E1
History is littered with people dismissed for out of the ordinary ideas.

Galileo, Semmelweis, Heisenberg. Women’s right, abolishing slavery.

But even the current mRNA vaccine developers were dismissed for 15-20 years as unimportant.