On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants. No grand conspiracy. Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence.
There were tons of articles and threads on it everywhere including HN, no one was being silenced, give me a break. The oppression complex is really out of control, as if people were being visited by the secret police and forced to immediately cease all discussion about the lab leak theory. It just had no credibility due to lack of evidence. As more info comes to light it's being given more credence, simple as that.
Really seems many want to feel like they've been oppressed and silenced when that couldn't be further from reality, reaching absurd levels of delusion here.
The thing is, no new info supporting the lab-leak theory has come to light. It remains pure speculation, just as it always has been. All the evidence still points to the Wuhan Institute of Virology not having had SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic, and all the new evidence is consistent with the default prior - that SARS-CoV-2 spilled over from animals, just like every other novel virus in history.
The "human story," conflicts of interests and such, gets most of the attention... unfortunately. Some of those interests were/are personal. The most onerous interests seem to be narrative. One narrative or the other suits a grander political narrative, for a variety of reasons. That kind of stuff sucks us in, unfortunately.
There can be a fine line between skepticism and orthodoxy though. Skepticism defaults to ambiguity. I'm sure that ambiguity is the majority position, but "I don't know" isn't a position that gets much journalistic and political attention.
Media, both new and traditional, gravitates towards hard positions... poop slinging and human conflict stories.
Saying you have ‘no evidence’ of something is not a reason to discard a hypothesis. On the contrary, it is a reason to figure out how to get more data, a reason to figure out how to falsify the hypothesis.
It’s a common logical fallacy to conflate absence of evidence with evidence of absence.
On hackernews the most you would get is downvotes. On Facebook or youtube? Things were deleted and banned.
Social medias implemented CCP-style censorship on their platform on anything related to the lab leak theory for more than a year.
Posts and comments were systematically deleted, users accounts were suspended.
At some point you couldn't even share a link in a private message as it was blocked.
You are the one reaching absurd levels of delusion here.
If you read the Nicholas Wade article, the PLOS blog, or even this article, you will know the evidence is not pointing in any one direction at the moment, but there is solid evidence of a cover-up and blame shifting by the Chinese government and the virology / national defense establishment.
Until relatively recently lab leak discussion was censored from Twitter and Facebook. I didn't see much of it in the period Feb 2020 - May 2021.
> On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture
There was no brilliant evidence for any source of the coronavirus. Regardless of that, the idea of a lab leak was quickly ruled out and that was unjustified.
I think the problem for the media was that a controversial American president publicly endorsed the lab leak theory, as it supported his broader agenda, and that made people in the media prefer to disbelieve it, even to wrongly suggest that it was not credible. In short: bias.
This is an absurd equivalence. Viruses spill over from nature all the time. There are millions of people coming into contact every day with animal populations that harbor myriad SARS-related coronaviruses. Every known novel virus that has entered the human population has done so through spillover. This is the default hypothesis, which must be overwhelmingly favored at the outset of any discussion. Everything we know so far is perfectly consistent with this default assumption, and there is precisely zero evidence of a lab leak.
> If you read the Nicholas Wade article
I've read it, and it is appalling that an article by someone who does not understand the subject they are writing about is getting so much circulation.
> there is solid evidence of a cover-up
There is no evidence at all of a cover-up of a lab leak. Everything we know so far points to the lab not even having had SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic. It appears to be a completely novel virus, not closely related to anything else known before, which is precisely what you'd expect for a novel virus that spilled over from an unknown animal population. If there were a major outbreak of a virus that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had (such as WIV-1), that would be a different matter, but there isn't.
Here's one case of someone stating the true goals of those who promote the lab leak hypothesis is to promote anti Asian sentiments...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26547263
It's hard to believe how one can reach such a daft conclusion.
There are many others.
Even if it turns out to be a false hypothesis, it’s outrageous that it was treated the way it was for so long, with such vitriol, and with such unanimity before any real investigation had been done.
I’ve got no dog in this fight, but the way this hypothesis was treated gets my libertarian hackles up.
It was just the earliest suspected point of where the animal to human transmission happened, the reservoir was always presumed to be somewhere else.
Do you disagree? Do you think it might have been political?
What is absolutely terrible is for the media and big tech to ACT like they are the absolute authority in any field they have interest in. We're heading towards "ministry of truth" levels of censorship.
I think an unintentional lab leak is going to create less issues for Asians than the other theory of "dirty" Asians eating bats, don't you think?
Virtually none of the evidence being discussed here, aside from 3 workers at the lab getting sick in November, is new. Its all the same info that has been available for well over a year. And much of it not coming from "misinfo merchants".
> Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence.
This cuts both ways. There have been many who haven't been saying that the lab-leak is definitively the source of the virus, but simply saying that its a credible possibility with at least as much evidence as any other theory, and should therefore be investigated. Throughout the last year, it was pretty consistently called a conspiracy theory or "debunked", when clearly it was neither. Declaring something to be misinformation when it is not, isn't any more skeptical that declaring something to be the truth with no evidence.
You can try and poo-poo all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that the mainstream narrative, both on social media and in the mainstream media, has been wildly off about this for over a year, and virtually nothing has changed from an evidence perspective to warrant their about face. The general narrative was simply wrong, due to a combination of hubris, partisanship, and lack of skepticism.
I like your reasoning. My question is: do you think that is why the mainstream media completely rejected the idea of lab leaked virus?
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2020/09/09/alina-chan-br...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-and-m...
If it came from a lab, does anything change? No, not really. It's still a virus that we need to protect against.
The only thing that would change any sort of response is if COVID was deliberately released. And that doesn't even change the medical side of the response, just the political side.
> HN has really gone downhill.
Yes, it has, but mentioning the reason for that will bring the brigade of the very same element that has made it go downhill.
Also, the Wuhan Institute of Virology is not exactly "nearby" the seafood market. It's 25 km away, well across the city and on its outskirts.
> On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants.
As far as I can tell, it makes two logical errors, 1) that absence of evidence is reason to not take an idea seriously, in a space of known unknowns, & 2) that a possibility can be discredited because dishonest people are pushing it.
On the former point: "evidence = likely" does not necessarily imply "no evidence = unlikely" as you seem to believe (if by evidence you mean like courtroom evidence; we use probabilistic reasoning in the absence of such "evidence" for any one explanation.) we have gathered 0 evidence for many (probably most) true things.
Finally, there's a lack of understanding of how power works in the US. If you could get censored for saying something that the US government knew for months, then yes, you were being silenced, the absence of literal NKVD notwithstanding.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ends-ban-on-posts-asse...
Posts were removed for 'Asserting Covid-19 Was Man-Made' which is very different from discussing the possibility and calling for further investigation.
> Facebook in February began the ban on claims the virus was man-made or manufactured as part of a list of misleading health claims that aren’t allowed.
During that period with the widespread dangerous misinformation spreading all over socials (questioning mask usage, recommending false treatments etc) it's easy to see how this was caught by that web.
Still waiting for a citation of your claims of 'censorship on their platform on anything related to the lab leak theory for more than a year.' or users being suspended for discussing it, not asserting it, which are very different.
Right. And so too do viruses not uncommonly spill over from labs into the public. SARS1 escaped the lab four times. Pandemic flu is thought to have escaped once.
> it is appalling that an article by someone who does not understand the subject they are writing about
In that case, a point by point rebuttal should be written by people who do know what they are writing about. The ad hominem isn't really persuasive.
> There is no evidence at all of a cover-up of a lab leak.
I did not refer to a cover-up of a lab leak. I referred to a cover-up of something, which may be a lab leak. There is certainly no denying that there is a cover-up:
1. WIV removed their virus database from the web on Sept 19, 2019, and their staff/student bios from the web in late Jan 2020.
2. China has mandated that all papers concerning Covid-19 be approved by the government before publication since Feb 2020.
3. Access of investigators to the WIV has been blocked. Free staff interviews with foreign investogators have not been permitted.
4. Statements made by the Shi lab are mutually inconsistent in their details.
5. The US gain of function establishment has pre-emptively sought to associate any talk of lab leaks with social stigma and conspiracy theories.
All these are detailed in the Vanity Fair article which started this comment chain. Thanks for revealing that you didn't read it.
No novel virus has ever spilled over from a lab. Every novel virus in history has been a zoonosis.
The only lab escapes were of existing, highly infectious viruses that were being intensively studied, cultured in large quantities, etc. Such escapes are rare, and there are very good systems in place to detect them. The Wuhan Institute of Virology regularly tests its workers for antibodies against various viruses (including coronaviruses), and the workers are negative for SARS-CoV-2. The pandemic flu you're talking about was likely the result of a large-scale vaccine study, not a lab leak.
There is no sign that anyone knew of SARS-CoV-2 before the outbreak, much less that any lab was working with it. There is, on the contrary, good evidence that it was not known about. The WIV never published the genome of SARS-CoV-2 before the outbreak, in contrast to other related coronaviruses (for example RaTG13 was published in 2016, and the WIV has never even isolated it - it exists purely as RNA fragments and data on a hard drive). The set of coronaviruses that the WIV works with are publicly known, and SARS-CoV-2 is not among those worked with pre-2020.
> The ad hominem isn't really persuasive.
If a person who clearly does not know anything about programming writes a long screed about programming, filled with basic errors that illustrate that the person does not understand basic programming concepts, it's not ad hominem to point out that the person doesn't know anything about programming. The question is why the media is hyping an article by someone who doesn't understand basic virology.
> WIV removed their virus database from the web on Sept 19, 2019
This part of the conspiracy theory requires the WIV to have known about a lab leak in September 2019. That really is stretching any sort of plausibility. This database was only online for a few months in the first place, and they say that they took it down because it was insecure. The alternative explanation that the conspiracy theorists are pushing - that the WIV knew about a lab leak months before anyone in China showed any sign whatsoever of reacting to the outbreak - is just not plausible.
> their staff/student bios from the web in late Jan 2020.
I don't know what bios you're talking about. However, there was a conspiracy theory about a postdoc who left the lab in 2015, whose picture was "missing" from the website. Based on this, internet conspiracy theorists jumped to the conclusion that she was patient zero, that she had been secretly cremated, and all sorts of other nonsense. The obvious explanation is that she left the lab years ago, and that for whatever reason, nobody has bothered to put her picture up on the website.
> Access of investigators to the WIV has been blocked. Free staff interviews with foreign investogators have not been permitted.
This is false. The WHO team was given full access to the lab, and interviewed many of the staff. They got detailed information about all the coronavirus research at the lab.
> The US gain of function establishment has pre-emptively sought to associate any talk of lab leaks with social stigma and conspiracy theories.
I don't know what the "gain of function establishment" is. Virologists generally view the lab leak as extremely unlikely and completely unsupported by evidence. Some virologists do what might be characterized as "gain-of-function" research. Does that make them the "gain of function establishment"? There isn't some big conspiracy to shut down truth-tellers. There are experts who are annoyed that an extremely unlikely theory that is unsupported by any evidence is being hyped by non-experts who don't know what they're talking about.