Zerohedge was reporting this early on, and Twitter banned them for "misinformation".
Local mainstream “fact checkers” have even called Covid-19 a “right-wing conspiracy theory” in early 2020.
Would love a citation or two. I remember the right-wing administration saying it would disappear as if by magic and Fox News saying "0 deaths" and that playing up covid was a left wing invention at least up to april or so.
At first the loosely defined right-wing were panicking about the virus. Myself included, although I wasn't really panicking, just getting myself mentally prepared that this might possibly be the second black plague that could wipe out a similar percentage of the population. Meanwhile the loosely defined left-wing was ridiculing it, laughing about it, saying that there is no evidence that the virus is dangerous and calling people fearmongers and racists (?). And then everything switched. As it turned out, the virus wasn't as nearly dangerous as I initially though it'd be and the left-wing suddenly started acting like we're all going to die.
Regarding:
> calling people fearmongers and racists (?)
I remember asian (or of asian descent) acquaintances being spit on and yelled at in the vein of "you're killing us!" on the subway for ostensibly looking Chinese (I'm guessing), at a time when the virus was already likelier to spread from other countries, and I'd say the more left leaning were pointing this out. People doing that don't reach that stage of racebased profiling independently without someone drumming up "chinavirus" as soon as it was no longer feasible to shrug it off. Is that maybe what you're referring to?
I've seen people talking about the rise in anti-asian hate crimes and it being incorrectly blamed on white supremacy, but that happened somewhat recently. At the point in time we're talking about I haven't really heard about anything too much, although it's not hard to imagine it being the case. I think it's to be expected, what are you supposed to do about it? Should you ignore the actions of Israel, because it's associated with Jews? Or actions of Russian government, because someone could discriminate a Russian person over that? Or what happens in some Islamic country? And we're fine with talking about about "systemic white supremacy", so I find these concerns to be hypocritical frankly. I also don't believe that pretending like the virus didn't originate in China would help anything. People might be stupid, but they're smart enough to figure out that this is just BS.
I think we are in disagreement. I don't remember such a switch, nor can identify one browsing backwards.
> I think it's to be expected, what are you supposed to do about it? Should you ignore the actions of Israel, because it's associated with Jews? Or actions of Russian government, because someone could discriminate a Russian person over that? Or what happens in some Islamic country?
I doubt everyone in Israel agrees with the decisions of the state of Israel, just as half of Americans don't agree with any current administration. Even further beyond that you shouldn't equate every jew with Israel, just as you shouldn't every muslim with Iran.
Talking about China as it relates to covid is fine. Calling it "chinavirus" (repeatedly) has no practical benefit, and is only used as a polemic.
> And we're fine with talking about about "systemic white supremacy", so I find these concerns to be hypocritical frankly.
I don't equate every white person with white supremacy, including myself. I don't see the hypocrisy.
The “engineered” component is about the Furin cleavage site on the sars-cov-2 spike protein.
The virus shares 92% genetic similarity to bat coronaviruses, except the spike protein, which is nearly identical to a pangolin coronavirus(which is otherwise only ~38% similar) with one key exception: The Furin cleavage site using “lab standard” sequences.
The gene sequence for the amino acids in the furin site in CoV-2 uses a very rare set of two codons, three letter words so six letters in a row, that are rarely used individually and have never been seen together in tandem in any coronaviruses in nature. But these same ‘rare in nature’ codons turn out to be the very ones that are always used by scientists in the laboratory when researchers want to add the amino acid arginine, the ones that are found in the furin site. When scientists add a dimer of arginine codons to a coronavirus, they invariably use the word, CGG-CGG, but coronaviruses in nature rarely (<1%) use this codon pair. For example, in the 580,000 codons of 58 Sarbecoviruses the only CGG pair is CoV-2; none of the other 57 sarbecoviruses have such a pair.Well, I definitely remember left-leaning people ridiculing it when people were buying out the toilet paper, saying that there is no virus and stuff.
> I don't equate every white person with white supremacy, including myself. I don't see the hypocrisy.
And I don't equate every Chinese person with the virus or the Chinese government. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the criticism is that the narrative or the words you use, even if factually correct, might cause some people to have prejudice against the members of a certain group. You're (maybe not you specifically, I don't know) concerned about backlash against Chinese people over the virus, but you aren't concerned about the backlash against white people over systemic racism theory. That's what I find hypocritical.
But yeah, "china virus" might be a little bit over the top.
I can't scroll to find the original tweets but many Trump loyalists were very early on the Covid concerns– while the left was ridiculing any concern with articles like what I linked above. See https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/03/coronavirus-mik... and https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/why-some-early-maga-.... Tucker Carlson talked constantly about the Covid from very early on as well.
From your vanityfair link:
> As Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and much of the GOP parroted the president’s no-worries line, MAGA originals like Steve Bannon and Mike Cernovich sounded the alarm.
I did notice the difference in Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity coverage, but you're right, there seems to have been a split within the grouping. Seeing as how many on the right are Trump loyalists (to a fault), that was the generalization I was drawing.
Yeah, the Vox one is bad.
I didn't even realize buying up toilet paper during early pandemics was partisan, but I definitely remember memes about how inconsiderate it is to buy up years worth of toilet paper at once, emptying the cache for everyone else with no indication that toilet paper manufacturing was affected. I admit I made fun of this too, but drew no political association to it. It had nothing to do with (the existence of) the virus.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the criticism is that the narrative or the words you use, even if factually correct, might cause some people to have prejudice against the members of a certain group.
Yeah, I guess, but I don't think there's any valid and accurate criticism that would lead anyone to blame random Chinese people.
> You're (maybe not you specifically, I don't know) concerned about backlash against Chinese people over the virus, but you aren't concerned about the backlash against white people over systemic racism theory. That's what I find hypocritical.
I haven't experienced any backlash against white people for any and all systemic racism built by other white people. I still do not see your point.
Concerns about COVID were being cast as "racist" by the Left and the media (but I repeat myself) in the beginning: https://news.yahoo.com/pelosi-denies-she-downplayed-coronavi...
https://twitter.com/newsmax/status/1246131288664408064
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JZ0Ruh89f0
If you don't remember that, then you should question your information sources. I remember the accusations of racism online quite vividly as I voiced my concerns in early February that people should start taking precautions: buying quarantine supplies, PPE, etc.
Tucker Carlson had some early reports on COVID and was attacked for fear-mongering by his usual left-leaning political opponents.
> I haven't experienced any backlash against white people for any and all systemic racism built by other white people. I still do not see your point.
And I'm really glad you didn't. Not every Chinese experienced any backlash either. That's great for them too. But not everyone was so fortunate. Example from a BLM protest: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5ebji8
There was no trend or array of stories. Just one lady who said she had someone denying it on their deathbed with zero corroboration, and then she got 2 days of news cycle.
This is Fauci (serving under Trump) saying in January 2020 that he didn't think it was a threat, or am I missing something?
Are you saying that a then Trump official, now Biden official was speaking out of partisanship?
> I remember the accusations of racism online quite vividly as I voiced my concerns in early February that people should start taking precautions: buying quarantine supplies, PPE, etc.
I stocked up on ~3-4 weeks worth of supplies too, and replenished bi-weekly since early february, as well as many of my friends, neither of whom politicised it.
> Tucker Carlson had some early reports on COVID and was attacked for fear-mongering by his usual left-leaning political opponents.
Do you mean his fellow network hosts?
https://i.insider.com/5e5959a6fee23d09e47eae94?width=951&for...
https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/imag...
There was an article from a popular outlet I've been particularly surprised about, since left-wing media otherwise mostly took the pandemic seriously here and around the world, and tried to stay science-based.
This article remained in my memory because they present themselves as fact checkers and are popular with many prominent people in my primary political and media spectrum.
They politicised covid early on and claimed it is just an anti-open-borders / anti-foreigners campaign: "The secret reasons why conservatives want you to be afraid of coronavirus": https://www.volksverpetzer.de/politik/rechte-panik-corona-vi...
This is from 27th January 2020, while many people here on HN likely have read the first concerning reports about this virus at the end of December 2019. I started being careful from mid January.
Until today this page self-righteously claims that "the available facts at that time" pointed towards nothing to be concerned about in the Western world, which is simple not true if you took your research seriously.
I mentioned that Men in Black scene. There were several other topics where I could find concerning evidence by carefully browsing otherwise questionable sources very early on – the lab leak theory (ProjectEvidence, Zerohedge), the aerosol transmission, that mask wearing is reasonable, the unclear and potentially harmful effects of the spike protein itself –, while I've been completely ignoring such websites before covid. ( Other things like people just dropping dead on Chinese streets did not turn out true ofc. )
According to Andersen, the CGG codon isn't quite as rare in coronaviruses. He also comments that the stability of the CGG codon in the Furin cleavage site has been remarkably high over the course of the pandemic, which is a hint that the CGG codon may be selected for and crucial for the virus.
Quoting him:
> Now, the codons. Here, Baltimore is talking about the two codons coding for the first two arginines (R) following the P - CGG. The CGG codon is rare in viruses because it's an example of an unmethylated "CpG" site that can be bound by TLR9, leading to immune cell activation.
> Despite being rare, however, CGG codons are found in all coronaviruses, albeit at low frequency. Specifically, of all arginine codons, CGG is used at these frequencies in these viruses:
> SARS: 5% SARS2: 3% SARSr: 2% ccCoVs: 4% HKU9: 7% FCoV: 2%
> Nothing unusual here.
> Furthermore, if we go back to the FCoV sequences and compare them to SARS-CoV-2 at the nucleotide level you'll see that FCoV also uses CGG to code for R immediately following the P. The next R is CGA (non-CpG) in FCoV, while it's CGG in SARS-CoV-2 - one nucleotide difference.
> We see CGG multiple times in different ways - here's an example comparing another "PR" stretch between SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, and SARS-CoV in the N gene. Note how SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 both use CGG, while SARS-CoV-2 uses CGC for the first R, while later R's are coded by CGT or AGA
> One final point about the CGG codons in the FCS - if they were somehow "unnatural", we'd see SARS-CoV-2 evolve away from "CGG" during the ongoing pandemic. We have more than a million genomes to analyze, so what do we find if we look at synonymous mutations at the "CGG_CGG" site?
> Remarkably stable. Specifically, CGG is 99.87% conserved in the first codon and 99.84% conserved in the second.
> This is very strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 'prefers' CGG in these positions.
So its not like this crazy stuff is hard to prove is prevalent (pun intended) among certain groups.
What is hard is actually putting figures on it when worldviews get so warped due to circular logic. This is bad, because there are real reasons people are upset. Underlying reasons that need to be properly addressed.
CGG-CGG is the most potent furin cleavage site because it works on the outer cell membranes and on the interior. Viruses that have it will outcompete all others -- but all this means is that SARS-Cov-2 with the CGG-CGG FCS has been well adapted to humans since the beginning of the pandemic and less potent mutations haven't been able to keep up. There's no "natural/unnatural" axis to consider. The most infectious virus "prefers" to be the most infectious, indeed. It's tautological. Evidence of efficacy doesn't disprove laboratory alteration.
Hell, if you're rural, it's pretty likely to have a nurse who doesn't really believe the current understanding of COVID
