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
> This story continues to evolve

Everything listed by GP was known a year ago, which is why it was so frustrating to get dismissed as conspiracy theory.

>>Izkata+Ik1
This is what Trump meant by "fake news". As much as the HN crowd hates him, he's right about that. We don't have a regular report-the-news media in the US anymore, we have a propaganda arm of the authoritarian left and a satellite network of reactionary right wing outlets that are about as bad. Glenn Greenwald has had some excellent writing about this recently.

My general position is that if something is reported by a mainstream media outlet, there's a good chance that the opposite is true.

>>xanaxa+qs1
Trump was hot garbage and nothing he said could be taken seriously, at best it was his demented world view at worst it was outright lies to soothe his white-racist base. News is obviously biased but your statement of "if something is reported..." is also conspiratorial nonsense. Sure they fuck up but mostly they are dead on when you extract the facts from the the opinion.