This article points out that a lab outbreak could have happened in the United States and many places in the world. We need to avoid demonizing China over this if we want to ever find out the truth and learn how to prevent another pandemic outbreak.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200214144447/https://www.resea...
not that outbreak. US stopped doing that GoF research and funded it in those Wuhan labs instead - basically like any other outsourcing of environmentally dangerous manufacturing/etc. to China. My pet conspiracy theory is that as part of that GoF the virus was tested on humans there - say some prisoners happily volunteering for a couple weeks break from hard labor to spend it in a nice hospital with a "flu".
And if the virus had totally natural - accidental freak of Nature - origin, why would you give 4 year prison to a journalist who was covering the beginning of the pandemic in Wuhan?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2021/12/28/china-h...
The suppression of any information is totally in-line with some deep f&ck-up and/or government potentially looking very bad if real picture sees the light of day. Even Chernobyl wasn't suppressed to that degree.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.07.184374v1....
Because of this, Nature has placed an editor's note on their pangolin paper:
> 11 November 2020 Editor's Note: Readers are alerted that concerns have been raised about the identity of the pangolin samples reported in this paper and their relationship to previously published pangolin samples. Appropriate editorial action will be taken once this matter is resolved.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2313-x
No one is seriously proposing pangolins anymore, not even Daszak and the Chinese. The proximal host for MERS (camels) was identified in a little over a year, and for the original SARS (palm civets) in a little less. For SARS-CoV-2, despite the much greater effort, we're still waiting.
> Understanding the bat origin of human coronaviruses is helpful for the prediction and prevention of another pandemic emergence in the future.
China has clearly contributed valuable research into bat coronaviruses. They had all the motivation to look into these after the first deadly SARS. I think it’s silly to presume CCP engineered a virus as part of some warfare strategy, or even to vilify/sanction them for a lab leak if it indeed was the cause (mistakes happen). However, CCP’s resistance to a proper thorough study of the origins of COVID is IMO not exactly appropriate.
Active research was taking place in the vicinity of suspected ground zero. Lab escapes happen—there are well-documented cases of the original SARS virus leaking from a lab in Beijing in 2004 (killing at least one person). Why was this time such a scenario discarded as so ridiculously impossible at first, and is still considered “extremely unlikely”? Is it politics?
[0] https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12985-...
I really wouldn't attach that much meaning to the prison sentence handed out. It is entirely in line with the CCP's behavior in the past. They strongly repress any information or people they perceive as causing them to lose face or look bad.
Now, an unintentional leak would be theoretically possible with these initial intentions but then wouldn’t China still have a leg up on developing treatments? If so, wouldn’t we have seen that in their vaccine development?
Of course you this is all uneducated speculation. Quite possible that engineering a deadly and very infectious virus is easier than creating a cure or a vaccine by orders of magnitude.
Then why hide information and prevent world-wide collaboration then?
It’s rather simple to do the so called ’gain of function’, you let the virus have it’s run with bat cells and add lots of human cells in petri with them. Because there is no immune system, the virus have not much to stop it. Slowly it adapt to human cells, you can change the type of cells so it can adapt to other receptors and so on. Those articles where published before the whole crisis erupted.
"Moderna designed its coronavirus vaccine in 2 days" was a headline I saw. And it's been approved by the FDA. So that seems demonstrably false.
Multiple companies have come up with a vaccine by now, too.
Definitely not a super villain at least I hope/highly doubt the intention was a weapon (you could surely create a better weapon?).
I'm not judging the value of that research, it does sound valuable but maybe not more so than the (small?) risk of an accident.
There is also reporting WIV was doing top secret research for CCP military.
So bad guys depends on your worldview.
https://www.newsweek.com/controversial-wuhan-lab-experiments...
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin...
It’s obvious in hindsight that what you say is likely true, but there is no feasible political route for the CCP to take blame, as their lives would be at stake due to unrest.
It is, in fact, highly suspect. I’m not at all positive that it indeed leaked from a lab in Wuhan, but the fact they won’t let an independent investigation anywhere near it makes me lean more strongly towards that as a possibility.
The description of the last investigation into the origins of the virus felt more like a ‘guided tour’.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8163761/Chinese-mar...
It's a pure mapping problem. There are thousands of known viruses that affect humans. But most viruses don't have thousands of vaccines.
Additionally, there are constraints. The only contraint on a virus is that is needs to reproduce, and cause harm. Any kind of harm will do, and any kind of spreading is fine. But the vaccine needs to not hurt the person (at least, don't hurt them worse than the virus would).
Even if both processes involved similar techniques, the constraints on virus production are more favorable to the researcher than vaccine production.
To get back to whether China or any nation would intentionally create a biological weapon, however...: most industrialized countries realized a long time ago that bioweapons tends to be a bad strategy. Most western countries stopped their bioweapons programs back in the 70s for the simple reason that there was no reasonable use-case for a bioweapon that isn't done better by simply bombing something (or more recently-hacking their infrastructure). Bioweapons are strategically useful for small nations, and terrorist groups.
If a nation actually did that (release a bioweapon and pre-immunize their own citizens)... well World War is probably overselling it, but I could certainly imagine contained conflicts, sinking of cargo vessels, shooting down of planes, targeted assassinations... etc. It's very likely that every nation would have highly vested interests in making sure that whoever authorized that weapon was removed from this planet.
And that, more than anything else, is why we should be suspicious of "exotic" theories like human intervention. It's an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary proof. You seem to be arguing the opposite, when Occam is clear that we should be betting on natural evolution.
Researchers have gone to a particular region of China and otherwise gone to great effort to find these particular bat viruses. I agree it is possible that they could be ignorant of the fact that the virus is in their own backyard. But it must a lower probability event that people got infected by such city bats given that we already know for certain the labs were transporting the bat viruses directly. Additionally, I would be surprised if they have not been testing nearby bats for such viruses since the outbreak happened. If they got a match it would be highly publicized.
But it would still result in heads rolling and a constant stream of embarrassing revelations. Consider the Fukushima investigation. Every revelation of bad process and ignored warnings is another news cycle with everyone outraged at them. "Bad luck" is something you are not forgiven for if there's any negligence to point at.
"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity (or accident)".
In general, yes. In this case, no so much.
The feart that it could happen here is why the USA restricted gain of function research in 2014. And only reopened it in 2017 with stricter safety controls.
If China had made the same policy decisions, would COVID-19 have become much less likely? That's an important question to answer. Whether or not it DID happen that way, as a planet we need a more consistent way to evaluate such risks.
Any investigations will have the goal not of finding the truth, but of minimising damage to the political powers that control it.
This is a government that bans talking about multiple periods of the country's history.
We're at 500,000 now with the virus, I think?
That's more Americans than have been killed in all the 20th Century wars combined [1].
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...
But China knew about the virus in 2019 and kept it quiet. They silenced scientists. China is complicit in this pandemic and should pay reparations.
People underappreciate just how complicated and time-consuming this is.
Immune systems are terrifying things, on trigger alert (they have to be!), and you have to tickle it just right without making everything explode.
People really need to stop and think, because next time that lab could be in your country. With icebergs and permafrost melting, you can bet there's going to be more pandemics in the pipeline. This really isn't a time for people's crass and nihilistic takes on foreign governments, science, or even your own government. When you leave room for people and systems to screw up, then things get better; if you're hypercritical then all you incentivise is the burying of evidence and lies.
If leaks are a problem, then certifications should be better enforced.
Burying our head in the sand and waiting for nature to kill us is a losing move.
The latter is highly likely, the former is ludicrous.
Regardless, the CCP were clearly hiding something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#Co...
The Bayesian probability suggests the odds that it would evolve by chance AND first become an issue right next to one of the top three bat virus research centers in the world are pretty slim.
It would be like a new mosquito disease first being an issue in human population next the CDC headquarters in Atlanta instead of somewhere in Africa of South America. Sure - there are mosquitos everywhere - but the chance that a new disease would start in Atlanta are very slim.
Instead, the media often attempts to disprove the lab leak by pointing out that COVID-19 differs from the viruses that were being worked on in the Wuhan Lab. But that in itself implies that China is being transparent. To the contrary, we know that China would take every measure to obfuscate the lab leak if they believed it was the origin of the virus.
But your point is still a good one
China stonewalls pretty much every attempt by the international community to interfere with their internal control.
So this is more "business as usual" than "Clouseau found the smoking gun."
Or China can start to be more honest if it does not want to be demonized.
Having been in Hong Kong for just under a decade, I've seen several cases of bureaucrats making tone-deaf statements partly because they aren't used to dealing with a free(-ish) press. I have journalist friends, and I wish the relationship with the press were different, but bullying the press is less a sign of a cover-up when officials aren't used to dealing with a free press.
The specific bats that host the ancestor of COVID-19 are quite a bit far away from those labs. The disease was first noticed near the labs.
Looking at the mechanics of the thing¹, I'd put a lab leak on similar odds of some village near the bats being infected and spreading it from there.
1 - I know nothing of their policy and competence to judge those.
August 2019 - "Vape flu" appears in the US.
October 2019 - World Military Games in Wuhan, 300 US military men and women attend.
November 2019 - SAR-COV2 appears in Wuhan.
Let's not discount this sequence of events as well.
imagine another lab-virus just as contagious but one with higher infant mortality, we'd be extinct!!
The other source is a nature news article [1] which has by now following disclaimer:
> Editors’ note, March 2020: We are aware that this story is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.
It also states at the end:
> Without the experiments, says Baric, the SHC014 virus would still be seen as not a threat. Previously, scientists had believed, on the basis of molecular modelling and other studies, that it should not be able to infect human cells. The latest work shows that the virus has already overcome critical barriers, such as being able to latch onto human receptors and efficiently infect human airway cells, he says. “I don't think you can ignore that.” He plans to do further studies with the virus in non-human primates, which may yield data more relevant to humans.
So it might just as well be that these experiments warned us about that potential, and now that it actually happened, some people interpret the original warning as the cause.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/
[1] https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debat...
There have been examples of bats excrement contaminating fruits on fields as a transmission chain. Accounting for these, often undiscovered, interactions is extremely difficult in terms of probability.
> we already know for certain the labs were transporting the bat viruses directly
In research from 5+ years ago, research which warned exactly about the fact how the virus already had overcome critical barriers to infect human cells [0]. A very plausible interpretation here can also be that said research was a warning about things to come, and is now mistaken as the original cause for it.
[0] https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debat...
This is wildly misstating the science. That bat virus is a relative, not an "ancestor". And it's not known to be limited to those "specific, far away" bats, that's merely where it was documented. Believe it or not we don't routinely test every animal species for an exhaustive catalogue of virus variants. It's just shotgun science.
And as it happens there was a close relative to covid found on the same continent in a species group that exists in a broad continuum basically everywhere. A bat-to-bat transmission to Wuhan is a bleedingly obvious hypothesis.
And yet we have to talk about all this Andromeda Strain nonsense anyway, based largely on jingoist US politics.
The reality is that epidemiology is not a straight forward nor simple field of research, finding concrete and solid answers is usually way more difficult than most people assume when they want answers to point fingers.
"We have a researcher who was removed by the RCMP from the highest security laboratory that Canada has for reasons that government is unwilling to disclose. The intelligence remains secret. But what we know is that before she was removed, she sent one of the deadliest viruses on Earth, and multiple varieties of it to maximize the genetic diversity and maximize what experimenters in China could do with it, to a laboratory in China that does dangerous gain of function experiments. And that has links to the Chinese military."
i doubt their narrative because they where not transparent and kept making up conspiracy theories that it came from the US, then it was Italy, frozen fish etc etc all the while preventing any international investigations.. We also know labs do leak and even China had many leaks in the past including SARS and other viruses so its not unbelievable to think it was just a accident and if they where doing gain of function we need to know and we need to figure out a plan and have better systems in place to prevent leaks.
Who suffered consequences for getting Iraq wrong, or the financial crisis? Fortune passes everywhere.
I'm not condoning or advocating conspiracy theories, but where they are wrong, they should be penalised.
One of the keys there is that's not uniquely Chinese as a problem. Those researchers were talking about American labs.
"Has this been causing small, stochastically limited outbreaks for some time before we picked it up?" is a question that has dogged several recent outbreaks.
Also, the alternative is not burying our head in the sand. It's monitoring and studying nature, instead of forcing the issue in a lab, and investing in infrastructure and capacity that work against a broad range of pathogen threats.
Another example of this happening is the corporate press conflating "lab created" with "gene editing" instead of using the broader interpretation which would include things like "gain of function research" (much more likely). This allowed China and the WHO to explicitly claim they did not create the virus (by gene editing) while cautiously never really addressing whether it was created via gain of function research.
The article of this post talks a lot about how we do have inspections in the US, and that the inspectors are often the same department as the lab!
To be better it seems like we need some damn strong consequences & a regulatory power that can't be overruled.
None of the people most qualified to speak on this issue want their funding cut or the research to stop.
The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
A coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan China miles away from a Virology Lab that studies coronavirus and has in the past exercised gain of function research on cornoviruses specifically with novel lung ACE2 bind may have had a lab accident and a live virus broke out if the lab.
The problem is the media labeling common sense as conspiracy and conflating the two.
I beg to differ. How many pandemic causing viruses have their ground zero right outside an instition that for the last decade has been cranking out study after study derived from GoF research? A place that also was receiving information from American university researchers on how to develop chimeric mutations? Which just happened to share genetic material with strains known to have been researched for bioweapon applications? All at the same time as an uptick in censorship of academic papers.
There's coincidence, and then there's coincidence. I don't think anyone was out to make the darn thing, or intentionally release it. When I see a bunch of virology going on, and a pandemic starts up next door, I'm not looking 1000 miles away for the source.
Wasn't this discovered to be due to contaminated vape fluid, not anything contagious?
Transportation by lab personnel is the only way that RaTG13 is known to have come to Wuhan. Any animal transport is possible but only speculative. This entirely flips what should be the assumed scenario vis a vis Occam's razor.
So I wonder if, even if trying to be clear about any virus escape probably having been an accident, maybe somewhat many people still would have interpreted it differently (as if it was intentional), and that type of "news" gets more attention, spreads faster, right.
People often stir up fears of foreign influence but in the last few years it really has seemed like the biggest sources of inorganic influence and “propaganda” has been domestic.
Its far from settled that the benefits of gain of function research outweigh the benefits. This is a debate that has raged among the scientific community for years (a debate which would over if it was discovered that COVID came from a lab involved in gain of function research).
Meanwhile in the US, hysterical partisans attacked Trump for correctly naming the virus along with its origin. This resulted in a societal unwillingness to direct blame at the Chinese government for all their numerous missteps, starting with suppression of early reports of a new pneumonia like illness in late 2019. How many deaths could have been avoided with just the most basic level of transparency and responsibility?
I have certainly been puzzled by this, for example in a Washington Post article. By conflating the two, lab escape became a "fringe conspiracy theory" rather than a hypothesis that should be investigated.
It seemed like sloppy journalism at best.
It's lack of motivation for us to boycott the China. They are too far away from our live. We may take it serious until the nuclear submarine appearing offshore.
We don't know the New Appeasement would come out with real peace or WWIII. The deaths caused by CoVid are already more than the number of American killed in WWII.
The discussion is good, but we are not ready to face the issues come up with China. It's helpful for the labs in other countries to have new SOP. However, the problem is still there.
Btw, I don't think we can ever find out the truth. It's been over a year, and China has all the time to clean up and conceal every piece of evidence. The WHO scientific team's visit to Wuhan is no difference to investigating a murder scene a year after the event, with the murderer living in it all that time. Nothing but a joke.
It's all circumstantial evidence of course, but that's really all you're going to get with a country like China. We can be damn well sure that they would never admit to the virus originating from a lab leak. To me, this is the clearest and most likely source of the outbreak.
lol care to share those numbers
They had a choice to make: country-wide lockdown and travel ban or lie about it and make it spread worldwide. The former would leave their economy in a disadvantaged state while the latter would level the playing field for the rest of the world and give China opportunity to even earn some dough in the process (PTE sales). Now, this may be a cynical view but so are China's leaders. If you're someone who strongly believes this scenario could not have transpired, you're just naive.
When looking at some German Epidemiologist blog I found something like: "Next thing on the list is to proof that government measures worked"
I would have expected something like: "I'm looking at data - and want to find out what helps"
The original I read had such helpful statements as ‘the chinese government insisted that every outside researcher was accompanies by a chinese partner’, ‘the government took days to procure the data, and when they finally did, a lot was missing’ and ‘a visit to x was denied for unclear reasons’.
I’m sorry, I’m vaguely remembering these, so they may not be 100% accurate.
Then the western researchers made one gloriously ambiguous statement while still in China, and turned about after they left the country.
I'm sorry, but in this case, China is the country who told the rest of the world what to do and the west, with its superiority mentality over the east, ignored it and got a while year economy down the drain.
In my book, conspiracies will always make their way to those who want to believe them.
Unfortunately, SARS-CoV-2 is a very contagious virus, so it's hard to contain. A lot of ink has been spilled about the Wuhan BSL-4 lab, but these viruses were only considered to be a BSL-3 pathogen, and were handled in Baric's lab at UNC in their BSL-3. I would assume that they would also have been handled at the WIV's BSL-3. There had been reports of biocontainment lapses at the WIV, and there have been a number of lab escapes of various pathogens including SARS at other Chinese labs.
Social scoring, mass surveillance, the Great Firewall, forced labor, harvesting organs from healthy people, Uyghur genocide, Falun gong murders, Tiananmen square massacre...
And actively trying to cover up every crisis, torturing and murdering anyone who speaks up. From environmental disasters to COVID-19 to party corruption.
This seems sufficient to explain why China wouldn't be interested in a foreign investigation into their labs.
Yes, but in a vastly different degree, China goes to an extreme of making it political and look good.
In US, most leaks don't look good. Sure, US tries to make some problems look good, but they don't try very hard (or there's more balance in how an issue is investigated with multiple different parties).
Also waste water samples from Spain and Italy show COVID-19 much earlier than reported in Wuhan.
Spain, March 2019, 1 sample https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-...
Italy, 18. December 2019 https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL8N2DW1YK
So there are only two alternatives, and we just need to compare which sounds more likely? Or could it be that you exclude about a million other alternatives here, while also ignoring that just a little bit more information about context often makes unlikely scenarios more likely and vice versa?
Not arguing any of the theories here, just looking at the approach. The first task might not be to make assumptions, but to understand the situation better.
The second was a more nebulous investigation into the yet unsolved 2001 anthrax attacks.
He spent months doing nothing in preparation, and denying there was an issue then when it turned out there was an actual problem decided it was all China's fault ... even though they had it largely under control by that point. That's why people were "hysterical" - he saw it coming, did nothing and refused to take any responsibility, but blamed someone else. He wasn't trying to accurately identify the source of the virus, he was trying to save his own skin.
Sure it's frustrating that we only found out in (I think) December that it was spreading human-to-human, and it'd be good to see some actual investigation from China. But Trump's finger-pointing was all just desperate attempt to save face and deflect from his own poor management and nothing more. Your question should be rephrased "How many deaths could have been avoided with just the most basic level of competency?" and directed at Donald Trump and his administration.
Also there may well be areas of China where the virus never reached. I gather internal travel isn't massively widespread, and the severity of the lockdowns they imposed exceeded anything seen in the US or UK.
Also beware that there are reports of China having started vaccinations long before safety and efficacy results.
The flipside of exponential growth is exponential fall: In the best case if you can eliminate all social contact for 5-14 days the virus is essentially gone. But very few Western democracies are able to agree on super strict lockdowns, and if they do, they need their neighbouring countries to follow.
It certainly is an interesting coincidence that the only lab in China that can deal with it happens to be in Wuhan. The question is, how big of a coincidence. If the disease hit a random person randomly uniformly anywhere in China, the probability that it would have happened in Wuhan is a bit less than 1% (as there are about 10+m people in Wuhan, and 1400+m people in China).
If you think it might have struck randomly any city above a million people in China uniformly, it’s also roundabout 1% (as there are about 100 of those).
So this is by no means proof that something fishy happened, but it is significant enough to warrant investigation.
If you assume that this could only have happened in a city with, say, more than 5m people, Wuhan is one of about 15 to 20 of those (so we're just above the "usual" 5% significance threshold).
Still, an independent investigation of that lab seems warranted. Of course it’s China, so unlikely to happen...
(I must say that I think the comment has stood the test of time, so far.)
I'm afraid we'll never know the truth though, China would never admit it was a lab leak.
Maybe it‘s just me, but I do not have enough trust in humans that they will say „hey shit happens, do just better next time“. I mean, we are pretty good today in blaming others just so someone gets blamed.
Individuals who don't care exist everywhere, but in China government can force them to do the right thing. In the West it can't do that easily. I guess it's the price of individual freedoms.
As far as I know, those labs always study coronaviruses in bats -- it's a large part of what they do. That makes it less of a suspicious coincidence than your way of putting it implies.
By which I don't mean it didn't happen. There's just not enough information one way or the other.
Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), with the more highly classified work, is 14 km away, but linked to the PLA Hospital, WHCDC and seafood market on Line 2 of the Wuhan metro:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-and-the-laboratorie... (contains link to google maps)
https://zenodo.org/record/4119263
https://zenodo.org/record/4119263/files/COVID%20Pandemic%20B...
I make no comment about the content of the video linked in GGP's post.
That being said, the following is publicly known (but unverified by me) and quite apt to affect impartiality (whether under his control or not, whether consciously or not):
1. He was persecuted in China by the authorities and barely escaped with the posessions on his body.
2. He is currently under attack by brigades and agents of the persons he is critical of. The attacks follow standard psychological warfare patterns, including death threats to himself and the family.
Additionally, some speculation from me:
3. He has no journalistic training, both his business partner and his peers in the wider YT/Patreon business don't have either, and to me it seems both content producer and audience have come to a shared understanding that the shows are primarily entertainment and should not be held to the same rigour of journalistic integrity one would expect from e.g. a traditional print periodical. Adv Media's income entirely depends on YT/Patreon, and employing sensationalism – which results in uneven amplification of the reported reality – brings in more money. I haven't seen a completely sober/dry video.
That being said, I don't know how the origin would help us right now. We have working vaccines. So the solution is to push vaccinations as fast as possible. The origin of the virus isn't that important right now.
What they'd most likely output is a "report" with "findings" that "point to" or "suggest" certain things like bad protocols or insecure procedures or disconnected safety sensors etc. Hardly evidence, and not really actionable even if they were allowed to get there and eventually publish it.
This is the same kind of crap as with the "election" report in the US. They couldn't find hard-evidence because despite this being 2020, camera's aren't everywhere, evidence isn't readily available, and not everyone is keep ridiculous-level audit logs and collating as much info as we want. All they eventually put in their report were discrepancies, not-installed windows updates, internet-connected machines, etc. No smoking gun, and understandably so because even if it did happen, there is no easy and straightforward way to prove it.
Eventually, computational biological modeling is going to be good enough for mutation exploration purposes. From the papers I've seen during this pandemic, it largely already is.
At that point, it becomes straightforward (not easy, but not unknown) to share and realize those modeled organisms.
But at some point, we don't know what we don't know. And putting strains into biological models is important.
Investing in infrastructure and capability against a broad range of threats is important too. mRNA-based rapid vaccine platforms (and especially lipid encapsulation) will probably win a Nobel in a few years, and thank god we've spent the last 30+ years working on them.
I'm not sure that's terribly extraordinary and exotic.
Many such examples exist. China did not lead by example, at all. What a strange take.
A one party state means that there is no pressure from political opponents (political battles inside the party will never trump the party itself). And there is no pressure from journalists - China has the worst score for press freedom [1] (bar Eritreaa, Turkmenistan and North Korea) with a downward trend over the last decade. If there's no one to hold your feet to the fire, there's little incentive to self-incriminate.
No, the conflating was done by the media and this is exactly how I know it’s actually the most probable theory. The same thing happened for other few big "accidents", where the media/government were prompt to demonize a particular option and push a less convincing one.
China is actively engaging in genocide and nobody wants to even speak up about it because "cultural differences". I think we should much rather be scared of running even more cover for them, than less cover for them. They already have enough people white knighting for them.
Western companies are demonizing the west for profit, and running cover for china for profit, just another example of how capitalism always wins.
All of this is sickening and it needs to stop now.
The rest of us could have done what Taiwan did, and almost entirely avoided becoming infected. Or we could have done what China did -- clamp down hard for three weeks and then go back to normal.
I don't think it would have mattered. We had documentaries such as The Lockdown [1] in the end of February 2020, yet still most Western countries spent much of March 2020 still debating whether they should react somehow or not.
At this juncture maliciousness or negligence is just splitting hairs. How they handled the negligence might as well have been malicious.
Both sides cant be taken at face value.
We could have double the death rate and I still wouldn't concede this. And I wear a mask, wife and I wfh. Kid is still at home.
Even if thats the case its still the shitty response in the west, ignoring any chinese advice, that made this a global thing.
Post-hoc analysis of waste water and patient samples in Europe shows that it was circulating in Europe by mid-late 2019, way before the patient 0 in Wuhan.
So the leak hypothesis, while feasible, would have to address why the virus was seemingly abroad before it became a problem in Wuhan itself.
Of course it's a reasonable hypothesis, but putting it as number 1 is kind of reframing the whole picture.
All they did was try to downplay it and cover it up, until it had spread not only throughout China, but the rest of the world. That's despite having systems in place for exactly the purpose of catching viruses like covid-19 early and quickly.
It's a great example of why ineffective bureaucracy, combined with a bad system of governance and a culture where saving face is hugely important, is harmful to humanity.
Wealth doesn’t necessarily translate to organizational agility.
Sanction the CPC for non-transparency and their constant lies to their and the world's population. Demand liability.
It's been treated as an irrefutable endpoint at best and as a spell at worst. I find it a convenient false authority for lazy thinking.
Consider a statement like: "an expressive programming language is necessary to manage a resource distribution system such as a food production, processing, and delivery system." One could quote Occam and say "nah let's hunt and gather," but how is that consistent with our values? Ergo, Occam's quote is a selectively applied false authority. We need to use our heads and put it to bed!
It wasn't the ccp, it was Peter Daszak and co.
I think it was western scientists like Peter Daszak who suppressed lab leak theory in fear that their research will be demonized forever.
It wasn't CCP who called everyone consipiracy theorists it was Peter Daszak and co [1]. I don't understand how he can be the WHO investigator of his own lab [2].
1. RaTG13 came from the copper mine in Mojiang in 2013. (The TG in RaTG13 refers to TongGuan, a township in Mojiang, all per Shi Zhengli's accounting of the sequence's provenance).
2. Prior to which and also in 2013, six miners in this same Mojiang mine came down deftly ill with a respiratory illness. Three of them died from their illness.
3. One report on their cases says they had IgM antibodies to SARS. Another report says they had IgG.
4. There's been no data to support Shi Zhengli's assertion that they died of a fungal infection. (That said, independent of her account, there is a background precedent that there have been examples of people who have had strong fungal infections from exposure to bat guano in certain caves).
5. Shi Zhengli's team returned to the same Mojiang cave again and again to sample for viruses from the mine's bats and rodents. (Goal for this and the broad purpose of her teams' research is to demonstrate for pandemic prevention purposes which viruses are evolutionarily close enough to be able to hop to humans).
https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1279755695382986757?s=20 (Starting-point source for the above: Broad Institute genomics postdoc Alina Chan)
Multiple coronaviruses gathered from this mine remain unpublished, despite a year into the pandemic and an entire WHO-convened study group to Wuhan. https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1372383456081027076?s=... (source: Bloom Lab of Fred Hutch Institute)
If you're interested in learning more, I would highly recommend following members of the Washington Post-cited DRASTIC team.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/05/coronavir...
The DRASTIC folks, some of them postdocs themselves, have been at this for a year, gathering & archiving evidence like the case reports described above (that unsurprisingly typically become scrubbed from the source after getting brought to light).
The twitter hashtag #DRASTIC is a reasonable place to start.
Of course I still don't know and my ideas regarding the latter have changed because of this article but I'm now pretty sure that I don't have enough information to invoke Occam's Razor in any kind of insightful or effective way.
In practice, Xi went on an 'anti-corruption campaign' that purged all his political enemies from power as his first initiative. The exact opposite of what your theory predicts, and actually a stronger cyclical purge than our typical repubs->dems->repubs one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-corruption_campaign_under...
The WHO team wasn't even allowed near the labs, much less enter it. They got a very curated tour of Wuhan (which isn't surprising).
As far as which culture has more healthy accountability.. plenty of corruption to go around on all sides, the comparison would be pretty nuanced.
I'd say that China has a lot more low-level corruption, as a bigger % of their economy, what with large swaths of the country being pretty third-world, but also more accountability for senior people who fuck up badly. They executed a baby food exec who poisoned kids, while nobody saw a day in jail for poisoning the city of Flint. Rick Snyder probably has a nice lobbyist job.
Or, look at Covid -- the mayor of Wuhan and governor of Hubei were sacked over their poor initial handling. Is NY gonna elect a Republican over it? TX elect a Democrat? No way in either case. Maybe we have less accountability in some ways specifically due to the 2-party system's polarization. Arguably Trump lost over it, but the guy literally got covid, right before the election, after downplaying it for 6 months and still got the 2nd most votes in history.
Undoubtedly after looking at the sequences of that paper, there were some alignments, but how they were structured doesn't point to being engineered, but rather of co-infection, which did not match the conclusions of the paper.
What they do actually indicate might even be more politically inflammatory. That the virus evolved out of a recombination event in an HIV infected person infected with a SARS-like virus, and repackaged as a new SARS-CoV-2 virus.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/15/world-health-org...
Their experiences living in China line up with mine. I haven't seen an instance of them compromising their integrity.
Besides, why at all trying to blame anyone on this? It's a natural disaster that could happen to anyone anywhere. The real culprit is, that as long as the wealthy don't try to vaccinate everyone in this world as quickly as possible, the virus still has potential to mutate to sth. where current vaccines don't protect against ..
now this is what's called a conspiracy theory.
It could be that a precursor was already spreading prior to the major outbreak but only detected when it hit Wuhan because so many coronavirus experts were concentrated in that area.
> Have you seen their older videos?
I am subscribed since late 2016.
> Their experiences living in China line up with mine.
same
I mean, whoever they replace the mayor of Wuhan and governor of Hubei with will certainly still be members of the Chinese Communist Party. NY and TX might not flip their governing parties, but I'd be much more willing to assure you that the process of choosing their replacements will be more transparent than that for Wuhan and Hubei.
It is fucked up and not but governments are reflexively secretive so I don't think it says much about China. A superpower or nation-with-delusion-of-superpowerdom would refuse to disclose something like that regardless unless forced by internal political pressure - meaning there isn't anything to read in. They would likely rationalize resistance as "going transparent because enough of the world thinks this opens up rumormongering as a form of intelligence!".
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...
It is plausible that the virus was spread before recognized and treated as a global pandemic. Few flights were banned for months. Chinese tourists were in Italy up until the lockdowns.
But very often this "appeared outside China" is deflection and falsely invoked. Mind you that Reuters write: "it might have spread beyond China earlier than thought". Not: It came from Italy to China, and only became problematic in Wuhan. Every time China is reluctantly forced to move back the timeline on its patient 0, it starts pushing a narrative of COVID outside of China just a few months before their patient 0. It is a tiring use of an obvious and plausible bait-and-switch.
We already knew that Western expats and their relations in Wuhan got viral pneumonia in November 2019, while by January 2020, China did not consider it wise to inform the world of human-to-human transmission.
It seems plausible that infection stats from deep country are not faithfully reported or even collected. That said, what they did do is really complicate domestic travel, which means infections stay contained as a result.
We now know about viral pneumonia in November 2019, but hindsight is a very comfortable position to judge from.
Going from that to establishing that by January 2020 China should know everything about the virus and disease is reaching quite a bit.
That whole argument reminds me way too much of that propaganda narrative by Fox citing a WHO tweet [0] about one preliminary Chinese investigation not finding evidence for H2H, in that particular investigation, to turn that around into: "WHO and China say there is no H2H!".
But a lack of evidence in one particular investigation is not the same as claiming there's no H2H.
H2H isn't just some binary thing, it's a spectrum of vectors that take time and effort to properly establish, that's why all the official recommendations from the WHO at the time was to treat this as very H2H.
[0] https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?lang=en
eg https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/job-ad-experts-bats...
Let's backtrack a bit.
First patient in France confirmed to be in late December 2019[0].
Retrospective wastewater analysis in Brazil shows the virus was present from November 2019 onwards, 3 months before their first reported case.[1]
Further down the line we have SARS-CoV-2's RdRP specific antibodies found during retrospective testing of samples of 111 (of 959) healthy volunteers of a lung cancer study in Italy[1]; samples taken in October 2019, meaning they got infected at least at some point in September 2019, 4-5 months before the first detected case. These antibodies also target RaTG13's RdRP, given that this protein is identical in both.
Even further down the line, and widely interpretable, we have the Barcelona case:
> "Coronavirus traces found in March 2019 sewage sample, Spanish study shows. The discovery of virus genome presence so early in Spain, if confirmed, would imply the disease may have appeared much earlier than the scientific community thought." [2]
The paper is here [3]. The fact that IP2/IP4 fragments of the RdRP gene are perfect match means that at least a virus very similar to SARS-CoV-2 (and RaTG13, its closest relative) was present in Spain back in March 2019.
It's not conclusive, as other markers tested negative, but it's also true that these other markers tend to degrade faster (for example, N1 marker wasn't detectable in May 25 2020, despite the pandemic ongoing). But this fact also rules out a case of sample contamination, because then N1 would have been detectable. It's also remarkable that the positive sample is from 2 weeks after the World Mobile Congress, leading to a self-contained outbreak hypothesis.
Now take all that information and combine it with the fact that no trace of SARS-CoV-2 has been found on any sample from Wuhan before December 1st, 2019.
While there's high probability that SARS-CoV-2 appeared within Chinese borders, mainly because the closest viral relatives have been known to live there (or Japan and South East Asia, if you ignore RaTG13), it's still highly speculative.
What is clear is that everything points in the direction of Wuhan, and the Huanan Seafood Market in particular, being just the first detected superspreading event, and the WIV was the reason why it was detected first, rather than the source of the virus itself.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-france...
[1] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200701/SARS-CoV-2-circul...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-...
[4] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v...
In my mind, it can not be excused that China either: did not know about H2H, when the West, as an outsider, was well aware of the raging crisis. Or worse, it did know, but tried to stall. I am not giving China the benefit of incompetence, so in my mind, it is worse.
I did not say: China claimed there is no H2H. I said: China did not thought it was wise to inform of H2H. I agree that these are different, and that Fox pushed a narrative there.
It takes time to establish patient 0, and find epidemiological explanations. But they had doctors falling severely sick at start of December! That should ring a bell about H2H!
> official recommendations from the WHO at the time was to treat this as very H2H
No, WHO sat in China's lap, and tweeted out your quote tweet: No strong evidence for H2H. We had to trust that China could keep this internal, without outside help, but they completely botched one of the basic things to figure out. WHO official messaging was: Do not wear masks, only wear one if you are ill, when China was already buying up protective equipment en masse.
Do you have anything concrete on that? Because right now I'm drawing a blank what you are even trying to allude to.
But for additional context I should point out that in November 2019 China also recorded an outbreak of the pneumonic plague [0], something that gets conflated a lot with the COVID-19 narrative.
> I said: China did not thought it was wise to inform of H2H. I agree that these are different, and that Fox pushed a narrative there.
How is it different when you are pretty much exactly pushing the Fox narrative there? You stipulate that China knew about H2H in January and allegedly had it well established but didn't share it with the rest of the world, where is your actual evidence for that?
Sounds a lot like that whole Taiwan e-mail to WHO mess where Taiwan claimed to have warned the WHO about H2H, when the actual e-mail didn't say anything like that.
> But they had doctors falling severely sick at start of December! That should ring a bell about H2H!
"Ringing bells" is not the same as having solid and established H2H vectors. Which, as I mentioned before, is not something that's binary. Something isn't just "H2H or not", there are different vectors and different gradients, establishing them is not easy, that's why even one year after the fact we still struggle to fully map out transmission routes and vectors.
You can't hand-wave such a complicated problem away when it persists to this day.
> No, WHO sat in China's lap, and tweeted out your quote tweet: No strong evidence for H2H.
This is 100% the Fox news interpretation. The WHO tweet was about that one particular Chinese investigation, all it said how that particular investigation didn't yield evidence.
Which is not the same as saying "there is no H2H", interpreting it like that is misinterpreting very concise language on purpose while ignoring literally every other release from the WHO at the time. Case in point: Here are the WHO interim guidance for laboratory testing of human suspect cases of NCoV infection from 10 January 2020 [1].
Read trough them and you will realize that the WHO was and is very vocal about respiratory transmission and how to best prevent it. That's only one out of the many WHO releases at the time that warn about the very real, but yet having to be established with actual evidence, H2H nature of the virus.
> Do not wear masks, only wear one if you are ill, when China was already buying up protective equipment en masse.
This is once again completely wrong, WHO messaging was to prioritize masks for at risk groups and HCWs due to the massive mask shortages at the time. Case in point: Here are the WHO's interim guidance on use of masks from 29 January 2020 [2]
It's astounding that over one year after the fact this kind of misinformation is still circulated, out of all the places here on HN.
The reality is that the WHO was a bit slow to react for one simple reason: They have become way more reluctant about "crying wolf" after the 2009 pandemic didn't turn into the deadly thing they feared it would. Which back then resulted in wide-spread criticism of the WHO for allegedly being "alarmist" when the multi-million death toll didn't actually materialize.
Trying to turn this into "WHO in pocket of China!" is just trying to tie this whole narrative into the current US foreign policy context of antagonizing China. That's also why US officials were among the first [3] to globally spread conspiracy theories about this being an engineered Chinese bio-weapon escaped from a lab.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/18/china-records-...
[1] https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/330374/WHO-...
[2] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/documents/advice-on-...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronaviru...
I’ve also seen plenty of valid conversations about this on various web forums where it didn’t come to name calling.
I’ve also seen plenty of aggressive and disingenuous arguments by angry people, who proclaim their suspicions are true facts instead of probability assessments, and then perch their discussions on the assumed truth of those suspicions.
A tale of two billboards:
https://i.redd.it/uv1iz4w4sgk41.jpg
https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/28ce46391425d4b406fe55a2...
> bit slow to react for one simple reason: They have become way more reluctant about "crying wolf" after the 2009 pandemic didn't turn into the deadly thing they feared it would.
That is not the simple reason you think it is. It is the WHO, who should prioritize world health above all, not worry about "crying wolf" when every graph with heavily underreported numbers showed that COVID was going to crash Swine Flu and leave it as nothing but a memory. But they were slow to react, due to politics.
When the CDC was confronted with an outbreak of Hantavirus in 1993, they found some relations to Indian tribes, and news media picked up on that. This lead to panic and fear of Indian tribes. They learned lessons there that they now implementing.
> This is 100% the Fox news interpretation
Just because US media is ugly, showtime, broken, and partisan, does not give you the right to beat down anything when it happens to align with one of your hated "news" channels. But perhaps CNBC is more to your liking: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/02/china-delayed-releasing-coro...
Yes, there is a logical difference between: "China knew masks would help. China communicated that masks would not help, but started hoarding protective equipment" and "China knew masks would help. China communicated nothing about that to the WHO or the world, but started hoarded protective equipment."
We saw that unwillingness to communicate with masks and H2H. (The doctors who treated the doctors who fell ill in start of December, treating pneumonia patients, started falling ill mid-end December, can you not hear the bell toll?). We saw blatant lying when China was fighting interdomestic flight of 5 million people from Wuhan, threatening to nail them on the pillars of shame for eternity, while actively instructing the WHO to say there was zero reason to ban flights from China. This was repeated every meeting, alongside the "decreasing window to act", up until having to call a pandemic (all technical qualifications were already there, this was not WHO acting rapidly and decisively). Mike Ryan was far from happy with the pressures applied on the WHO.
Not talking about the expats, as I realized there are some things too dangerous to speculate about. You can ignore that.
> A tale of two billboards:
And? Many countries had the progression of "only health workers" to "only health workers and people with symptoms" to "everyone" according to the available supply, even though many others skipped the mid step.
This sort of bias, or propaganda, or narrative massaging, under the guise of reasonableness, and non-demoization is pernicious.
These sentiments are like, we can frame our China-blaming as reasonable, via pretending the assumption[0], so under the guise of "not demonizing China", "giving credit were due but still holding to account" we can hold onto our excuse to blame China, we can pretend the assumption that China is unequivocally to blame.
Bullshit. Unhelpful, bs. If you want to pretend that you are doing this under the guise of actually discovering the cause, you can to satisfy your own need to pretend that, but it's dishonest, and not actually helpful to discovering the cause.
Blaming the enemy of the day for the pestilence of the season is as old as the hills, and makes boring, and biased, history. And makes you all propagating such cant, useful idiots, manipulated puppets.
Also, how is everyone forgetting the childhood lesson that the one so eager to point the finger of blame is often the one with something to hide, so desperate to deflect suspicion away from themselves?
