> 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-...
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.
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.
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’.
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.
"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity (or accident)".
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...
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.
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."
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.
Who suffered consequences for getting Iraq wrong, or the financial crisis? Fortune passes everywhere.
One of the keys there is that's not uniquely Chinese as a problem. Those researchers were talking about American labs.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
The second was a more nebulous investigation into the yet unsolved 2001 anthrax attacks.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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!".
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.
eg https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/job-ad-experts-bats...
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?