- 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.
It’s just a matter of time here. The question is mostly what to do with the information once it’s confirmed.
Edit: reference for cave samples
> The closest wild strain of CoVID happens in bats living thousand kilometres from Wuhan
That's weak evidence to claim that the lab hypothesis is more likely or even just to claim that the virus in humans originates from Wuhan.
Wuhan is a transport hub within China. In relation to dates it might be worth taking into account that hundreds of millions of Chinese travel around the country in early October and that the outbreak in Wuhan was detected in November/December. Coincidence? maybe, maybe not.
Additionally, we can also look at SARS (i.e. SARS-Cov-1, while Covid-19 is SARS-Cov-2): That epidemic started with an outbreak in Guangdong province in November 2002 (again, note the relative proximity with early October). Since then the origin of the virus has been traced to a colony of bats in Yunnan province [1] (perhaps also worth noting that this took 15 years). If you look at the map that is quite far away (1000+ km) and domestic transport networks have vastly improved since then.
Based on this, I don't see why the exact same scenario as the beginning of SARS would not be the more likely explanation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
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).
How about those several million minks in Denmark?
https://www.who.int/csr/don/03-december-2020-mink-associated...
Everything listed by GP was known a year ago, which is why it was so frustrating to get dismissed as conspiracy theory.
In general, my trust for the media has fallen through the floor in the last decade. I used to think that the media was mostly trustworthy, but that they would cater to the establishment on certain issues (e.g., WMDs and the general Iraq/Afghanistan war effort) but apart from those obvious high-profile issues they were mostly trustworthy. Now I can't tell if I was wrong the whole time and I've just wisened up recently or if the quality of the media has plummeted (especially with respect to ideological issues) or both. I strongly suspect that the media has become considerably more ideological (abandoning aspirations for neutrality and objectivity in favor of activism and proselytizing, at least to a degree), but I've probably (and hopefully) wisened up a bit as well.
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.
Problem with that assertion is that knowing what we know today about the virus, this should have generated superspreader event situations along the travel path, which would have transported the virus to other locations in china.
Instead the opposite happened, and china tried to contain the virus to wuhan.
Many people, including in the media, would have preferred that theory was actively censored.
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.
Depends what you mean by government officials. Trump was in power and his statements on this were called conspiracy theories. So the media wasn’t exactly taking the government side on this, they were dismissing statements by the government as conspiracy.
Whether right or wrong, it’s extremely embarrassing for the media. They are slowly politicizing themselves into untrustable entities.
It's not obvious to me that superspreading events should have happened along the way.
But the media dismissed it before that was proved. Because trump said it.
Now imagine a hypothetical scenario where it actually worked. Just because trump was using it, the media would have potentially killed people just because they can’t agree with a single thing trump says.
This is not journalism. It’s not objective reporting in the slightest. And it was by media outlets who claim to be doing real journalism and claim they are objective. At least fox doesn’t claim to be objective. It’s shameful propaganda.
My general position is that if something is reported by a mainstream media outlet, there's a good chance that the opposite is true.
Edit: it is factually true to say Trump lied in manipulative ways constantly, and easy to confirm. This is not a partisan statement, it’s a fact that can be checked. Here are 5276 examples: https://projects.thestar.com/donald-trump-fact-check/
In civil trials there is the principle of “adverse inference”. When the defendant has either destroyed evidence or else has not produced evidence they would have been reasonably expected to have, the jury is instructed to assume they are what the plaintiff characterizes them to be.
I think this principle holds in this case. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence for the Wuhan lab leak theory. The Chinese government has destroyed a lot of evidence and host gone to great lengths to keep documents and people away from investigators.
Based on all this, I think the preponderance of evidence is in favor of it being a lab leak.
Our "intellectual elites" have a bad problem now with moral/intellectual fashions, which are constantly changing. Social media has considerably exacerbated this problem.
Fox lawyers even argued that the Tucker show is not "news", and should not be treated as such.
So, no, he was not right about this either. He just peddled the idea that the only credible broadcasts were the ones praising him.
Because it was a conspiracy theory.
Newly surfaced evidence may point in the direction of the conspiracy hypothesis, but that would be just a coincidence.
Yes, most definitely. Over many generations. They're the same species as wild minks, but domesticated (just as dogs are same species as wolves, but domesticated).
And the scientific community agrees. For example, see this paper: https://bioone.org/journals/wildlife-biology/volume-15/issue...
It's true that they've not been domesticated as long as dogs, for example, but there are clear morphological differences between the two.
Most importantly for our conversation, infectious diseases can behave very differently in wild and domestic populations, for reasons of population density, immune status, etc.
A good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_d...
The gist is that in the 80s nuclear winter was portrayed as apocalyptic by Carl Sagan and others using shoddy models in order to advance an arms control agenda. More recent work depicts far more modest climactic effects that are highly variable based on the season the nuclear war would occur in (worst in the summer, very modest to non-existent in the winter). The issue seems to be not so much the bombs themselves; but how cities burn, how much soot would be produced, and how it would move through the atmosphere.
This is also worth reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in.... Sagan's nuclear-winter modeling team predicted in 1990 that 100 oil well fires would produce a small-scale global nuclear winter. In 1991 Iraq started 800 oil well fires, which caused no such thing. The only effects were localized and stopped soon after the fires were put out.
So I have to pipe in here as I recall this vividly. What crystalized this for me was of all things an op-ed piece by a conservative (not neocon) writer that essentially came down to this (paraphrased):
> There are essentially two possibilities here:
> 1. Iraq has no WMD. In this case the invasion is unjustified; or
> 2. Iraq has WMD. In which case, why wouldn't they give them up to avoid a US invasion?
This was such a simple and undeniable logical fallacy in the Iraq WMD invasion narrative it blew my mind.
I've been skeptical about the lab leak theory. But you can be skeptical about the theory and still recognize that the WHO just hasn't pursued enough leads to debunk the theory to a sufficient degree. Examples include:
1. China had an online database of coronaviruses. This was taken offline in late 2019 and hasn't been online since. The WHO investigation team has not examined it nor sought to do so. While the timing is certainly curious, it's not necessarily damning. But it warrants investigation (IMHO); and
2. Chinese labs have been less than forthcoming about what coronaviruses they have.
Chinese authorities have been less than fully cooperative here. Again, that's not damning. I consider it much more likely that Chinese authorities simply don't know if Covid leaked from a Wuhan lab but there's literally zero upside in finding out if that's the case.
Would you want to be a member of the CCP that released information that allowed the WHO to establish that Covid-19 came from a Wuhan lab allowing critics of China to "blame" China for this?
Nope, I wouldn't either. So why cooperate?
There was zero evidence, at the time, that the virus escaped from a Chinese lab. There is still zero evidence that the virus was created in a lab, or that its purpose is to be a biological weapon.
At least with fox and oann you know they are fully partisan.
Coming to conclusions either way without evidence, when it suits certain anti government narratives, is partisanship.
But that means you have to ignore his advice, not take it as an indicator of something bad. From what I can tell, there was plenty of activity trying out anything that seemed plausible, including Hydroxychloroquine. And it went through the usual medical science news cycle of study showing it totally works, study showing it might work, study showing it actually doesn't do a whole lot, with a pretty quick progression.
About the only thing the negative media coverage may have done is discourage people from actively soliciting for a mostly untested experimental treatment. But then again, probably not by much; or maybe they asked for other malaria drugs instead.
thus, the mainstream media, however mistrusted, is still the arbiter of widespread "truth." they still control the Overton Window. if they say a thought is unacceptable, most people won't accept it, until they say it's acceptable once again.
absolutely fascinating to watch
If you are making decisions not based on evidence but on personalities, you are going to make huge mistakes.
It was a conspiracy theory, and it may still be, because the WSJ only mentions that lab workers were "ill" and presented symptoms similar to those caused by COVID-19, which could be... really anything. The main strain of the flu in 2019 was H1N1. It could have been that. It may not have been. We don't know yet.
I don't think there is anything wrong about "mocking" people for peddling conspiracy theories with zero evidence. Let's be honest, even if some of their ideas end up being true, it would have been just a coincidence. It's like arriving to the correct solution to a math problem, but through a completely wrong process.
Other approaches involve literally trying to change the codon sequence in a supercomputer to see what happens in the folding and conformation changes, but it is very esoteric since bio is so complicated.
NYT may be partisan, yes, but, qualitatively speaking, it's laughable to compare NYT and OANN or NewsMax. They are not even in the same business.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27254877
>> [Damore] argued that biological differences and not a lack of opportunity explained the shortage of women in upper-tier positions.
> This is an unfortunate way of characterizing Damore’s argument. It’s technically true in that Damore IIRC was arguing that there was more variation among men than women (more men at the top and at the bottom but fewer in the middle, but Google hires from the top hence more men). So yeah, technically biological differences, but when the average person hears that they’re going to assume he was arguing that women in general are dumber than men in general or some such. That said, this also represents much more earnest coverage of Damore considering the initial coverage overtly lied on many accounts (calling it an anti diversity screed, claiming he sent it as a memo to the company, etc).
The disregarded conspiracy theory, as I understood it, was that Chinese researchers were doing the former, NOT the latter. It is also my understanding that the virus' genetic code does not show any evidence of the former (editing codon sequence).
Still doesn’t seem like the right thing to do though, especially if we consider ourselves an advanced scientific civilization.
That would have been a coincidente. Are you willing to gamble your wellbeing on a lucky hunch?
I still don't understand this logic process. Asserting something with no evidence is arguably worse, than pointing out the absurdity of it.
I'm going to need a source for that, because that's definitely not how science works. At all.
Again, making random assertions with no evidence does not make them right. And of that, there are uncountable examples out there.
> satellite network of reactionary right wing outlets that are about as bad
Predictably, as is custom at this point, our respective appraisals of the other side depend on the side we're on. Fine - but that's beside the point. CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, et. all are, most charitably, factories of lies by omission. It's been clear to a lot of us that COVID was born of a colossal mistake by CCP scientists doing GoF research since February or March of 2020. The mainstream so-called news knew just as long - they're not stupid, they're manipulating you along an undisclosed agenda.
Just because you can point to someone else you believe to mislead in a more egregious fashion doesn't somehow alleviate the fact that we have exactly zero credible news sources.
Galileo, Semmelweis, Heisenberg. Women’s right, abolishing slavery.
But even the current mRNA vaccine developers were dismissed for 15-20 years as unimportant.
Interestingly, the inverse happened here. Most of the initial claims of a lab-origin for Covid were being disputed by mainstream media in no small part because the Trump administration was echoing them. A lot of them pointed to scientists claiming that there was no evidence of lab manipulation or gene editing as proof that it was conspiratorial thinking, despite the fact that that was not the same thing as a lab-leak. Very little of the evidence we have to support a lab-leak hypothesis wasn't available and known a year ago. But literally within a couple weeks of the Biden administration taking office, mainstream outlets like the Washington Post started publishing pieces supporting the credibility of lab-origins of the virus.
I am no Trump-fan by any means, but I've found this whole saga, and much of the last 4 years, to be a very mask-off period for the media, to the point where its hard to take much of anything being said too seriously.
Both are just as bad as each other.
What you call "dismissive", is just reactionary traditionalism.
Also, all of these provide evidence to support their claims.
> But even the current mRNA vaccine developers were dismissed for 15-20 years as unimportant.
This. This is the problem, right here.
You believe that mainstream media works like science, and it does not. So when big headlines hit the public opinion with things like "this woman was mocked and now her work on mRNA is the basis of the new vaccines", you take that the academic world actually dismissed those novel ideas.
Science does not work like that. And the media like hyperbole. And that hyperbole is what stucks the most in the public memory.
The fact that a group of people believe certain lies, doesn't make those lies acceptable, either.
I couldn't care less about what republicans think of NYT versus OANN. Yes, they may think that OANN is a better source. Still, they would be wrong.
This couldn't be further from the truth.
An assertion without evidente is a lie. Pointing out that someone is making assertions without evidente is not a lie.
If Trump were to say that the sky is actually orange, and provided no evidence, would you take on the media for reporting that what he said had no foundation on reality?
That's nuts.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/03/new-killer-virus-chi...
Even that I'm not so sure about. This is a collection of all the HCQ studies: https://c19hcq.com/
Early treatment at lower dosages (lower compared to the "negative results" studies) seems to show positive results pretty consistently.
For the better part of a year now, the lab leak theory and the genetic engineering theory have been lumped in together by those trying to discredit them as conspiracies. The issue is that every time someone would point at circumstantial evidence of a potential lab leak, people would point at the scientists saying there was loads of evidence it wasn't genetically engineered, when those two things aren't remotely the same thing.
The issue here is that, as journalists, their job is to look at facts and weight evidence independently, rather than simply base judgements on the person making the statements. There has been ample evidence to at least consider a lab-leak theory very plausible, or even likely, but those were largely ignored. Instead, the media seemed content to report that Trump is claiming this thing, and Trump sucks, so this thing must also suck. Not exactly inspiring behavior from the "fourth estate".
I guess it refers to the Deep State. Which also officially doesn't exist, and is also just a conspiracy theory.
In any case, I can tell you that there was a definite narrative in the media that the lab escape scenario was not only very unlikely, but "xenophobic" and "conspiratorial".
Perhaps the most telling example of all my links below is this one, which is very open to the possibility of a lab escape. The latter half of the article is full of example of the efforts of the media and scientific establishment (for whatever reason, mostly political) to quash the lab escape hypothesis. One key quote:
"Antonio Regalado, biomedicine editor of MIT Technology Review, put it more bluntly. If it turned out COVID-19 came from a lab, he tweeted, 'it would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom.'"
Article:
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2020/09/09/alina-chan-br...
And here is a handful of links, of many:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/01/could-covid-19...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/31/health/lab-leak-coronavirus-t...
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/04/politics/coronavirus-intellig...
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/17/politics/mike-pompeo-coronavi...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-much-more-lik...
Not the exact term itself, but the significancy of it. The "lying press" is a pejorative used since at least the XIX century [1].
Are we looking for 100% reliability here? Then, yes, we could call the NYT or the WP "fake news". But that is just hyperbole, directed at creating doubt and uncertainty where it does not exist. Once Trump followers had a excuse to label the NYT as "partisan" or "fake", it was easy for Trump to steer the narrative any way he wanted.
So the evidence is still not there, and this is a poor exercise of journalism.
"Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...
Consider thalidomide:
https://helix.northwestern.edu/article/thalidomide-tragedy-l...
She was denied tenure.
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.)
"In 1990 she was offered a tenure track position at the University of Pennsylvania. Around this time, a different group of researchers developed a technique for injecting mice with RNA in such a way that those mice started to produce the proteins encoded by the RNA. [...] After six years of work at the University of Pennsylvania, due in part to a lack of interest from funding agencies in supporting her work, Karikó was demoted from her tenure track position. This type of demotion generally leads to the end of a scientific career. In the same year, she was treated for cancer and her husband encountered a visa problem, leaving him temporarily stuck in Hungary."
https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/pioneers-in-science-kata...
> Beijing purposefully destroyed DNA evidence, and obliterated the team who first sequenced the CoVID genome
You have a reliable source for this, of course. Would you be so kind as to share it?
You might be interested to know, that Trump was already informed about the seriousness of the outbreak in Wuhan in early January. However at that time he chose not to act on it because it might harm the ongoing negotiations over a trade deal with China. So if you want to blame Trump for something, it would actually make more sense to blame him for closing the flights from China too late.
“Fair and balanced” I believe the slogan is.
Nonetheless, you are correct.
Fox/Sky are shameless hard right propagandists.
Sadly, CNN/Nbc are hard left propagandists. I don’t know enough of the history to say that was always the case as it is for Fox/Sky, but it certainly is today.
It’s disheartening to think that even once respected papers like the Guardian have become so departed from objective journalism. I can’t help but think that journalistic freedom of speech is ultimately on borrowed time if the situation becomes much worse.
I’ve taken to following Reuters for news now, but even then I don’t know if what I’m watching is well sourced or it just happens to agree with my own biases more often than not.
https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2014/8/2/this-keller...
I also agree with you that if this is the outcome we're headed for, then we haven't gotten near any of the big icebergs yet. How's it going to play out and what will the real-world consequences be? I hope that the Biden people will be smart enough to approach this multilaterally and not make it the US vs. China spectacle that you-know-who would have. The fact that they're quietly confirming the facts that have been coming out, but otherwise not yet making a big deal out of it, gives me some hope that they're not idiots.
This is all silly-level speculative and it's possible that nothing will come of it, but I'd place a (small) bet otherwise. The way in which, one by one, the dominos are flipping is truly fascinating. Fauci has flipped, Daszak has flipped. Every few days there's another small but notable change.
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)?
The fact is, you need to hear the story from somebody credible before it becomes worth investigating, otherwise we would still have journalists trying to uncover the alleged thousands of murders by immigrants kept secret by bizarre conspiracies (which, again, lacks evidence) - the claims have to come from somebody capable of basic truth telling.
I don't think this situation has changed in essence. Media outlets may now filter first on party affiliation, but they haven't replaced their dependence on official sources with better independent investigative reporting, for instance.
> On the contrary, the media has had little except harsh criticism for the government in this time frame
Or glowing, fawning reverence. It depends on the media outlet and the official (really the official's party) in question. The screw turned for Cuomo, but I imagine for every Cuomo, there are more darlings that go unchallenged.
Don't confuse that with having an ideology or a commitment to certain ideas.
You can be partisan (or have an ideology) and still be trustworthy, but the trouble with that is, you actually have to be trustworthy.
I'd rather compare the NYT with The Economist on this point.
His hypothesis is that what was once an information trickle has become a virtual tsunami with the internet + cell phones + satellite television, etc. Governments have no control over the flow of information, which they had at least a semblance of pre-2000. This wave of information has not only exposed the worst excesses of the elites, but has also exposed the enormous gap between their authoritative promises and the actual results they produce.
This has pissed off a lot of very entitled people, who don't take the fact that the gap has always existed into consideration, who for historical reasons place very high expectations on government, and as a result attribute bad intentions to the previously mentioned poor results.
Not only is the media courting those people, they are made up of those people. So you get a media that just heaps negation on even the smallest failure of government. It's not just for clicks -- they are true believers in that they think they're doing the right thing.
She was on the tenure track, and didn't get tenure.
That's denial of tenure.
Funding agencies provide funding based on grant reviews by... academics. So yeah, academics dismissed her novel ideas.
The reason why the Hydroxychloroquine suggestions were dismissed is simple: science involves an empirical epistemology and that means undemonstrated hypotheses are not treated as true.
Trying to quantify harms and seize assets makes the pandemic seem like a unary problem rather than the result of profound ideological weaknesses.
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...
One way you can do that is by putting evolutive selection pressure on the micro-organisms. For instance, submit a colony of bacteria to something they are vulnerable to. Stop when 90% of the colony is dead. Cultivate the colony back to a full size, then repeat the protocol until you get bacteria that are fully resistant.
I recall a time where evaluation of this was forbidden, with well-coordinated charges of racism. Talking points are a real thing, intense coordination happens intentionally and not among US media. Orthogonal messages, particularly those viewed as adversarial, are suppressed and discouraged. In China government coordination is explicit and acknowledged. The US and UK simply get the same thing through the corporate-government looking glass.