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
I agree. This seemed obvious even a year ago, and it seemed like the media and certain public officials were doing everything they could to avoid acknowledging it. And yet now they are starting to acknowledge it.

What changed? Mostly the party in power. At the time it was politically expedient to say that Trump was being racist or xenophobic against China, so it was deemed necessary to paint comments by him or his supporters as xenophobic conspiracy theories. Then when he states something reasonable like the lab leak hypothesis they can portray him and his supporters as conspiracy nuts. And if it could influence the election even 0.1%, that would be bonus points for some people, although I would call that a dishonest influence.

Now that he isn’t in power, they’ve decided it’s no longer necessary to avoid telling the truth.

>>epicur+Gm1
I don't know anyone who associated the lab escape theory with racism or xenophobia. Closing down flights from China (and only China) after it spread throughout Europe, that I do understand being associated with racism.

I do know that, unless you want to advocate nuking China (the official US government response to biowarfare) or you think they have a secret cure, it's meaningless.

And, yes, I'm glad that it got ignored while Trump was in power. I think the odds that he would decided to launch nukes in response was unacceptably high (as in, not zero.)

>>HWR_14+l72
There are other solutions, like handing them a bill for damages, and nationalizing all their property we can get our hands on if they don't pay it.

>>epicur+Rl2
We gain so much more by fomenting international resentment toward China. The whole situation exemplifies how authoritarianism and lackadaisical safety practices can reduce costs and improve efficiency while increasing the incidence of disasters that wipe out all those benefits.

Trying to quantify harms and seize assets makes the pandemic seem like a unary problem rather than the result of profound ideological weaknesses.