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, that's just not true. The media repeatedly mocked even a lab escape scenario and boosted a handful of experts were favored a wild reservoir for the disease.

Our "intellectual elites" have a bad problem now with moral/intellectual fashions, which are constantly changing. Social media has considerably exacerbated this problem.

>>monoid+Jt1
>The media repeatedly mocked even a lab escape scenario

Do you have any links?

>>jasonl+Vw1
I still remember this article which seemed to conflate lab escape with bioengineering:

"Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...

>>musica+wV1
"After the story published, Cotton as part of a series of tweets made a distinction between the possibility the coronavirus is a man-made result of biological weapons research – which experts say should be dismissed – and other possibilities such as a lab accident. He also continued to list the engineered virus as a “hypothesis.”

So doesn't this imply it was Tom Cotton himself who was initially conflating an engineered origin with a lab leak (which could be wild type or engineered virus)?

>>jasonl+Rt2
Clarifying something he said previously doesn't imply retraction, disavowal, or even modification of the prior statement.

>>totalZ+ye4
It shows that he was previously conflating two distinct concepts (genetically engineered virus and lab escape) and then got called out on it. One is wrong and one could be correct.

>>jasonl+Om4
That is not true.

He suggested that the virus may have come from the Wuhan lab.

NYT slammed him for this "fringe theory" in February 2020:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronaviru...

>>totalZ+ih5
You are conflating multiple theories to maximize outrage. The article is clear that the origin theory described as ‘fringe’ is that the virus was a manufactured bio weapon and intentionally released. It even mentions that Cotton had to ‘walk back’ his support for this theory.