There’s a question as to why that fake consensus emerged. But I think the more troubling question is: How did people let the original story of what Tom Cotton even said go so badly awry? Essentially Cotton said something that was then transformed into a fake claim of a Chinese bio-attack, then the fake claim was debunked, and then the debunking was applied to the real claim with little attention paid to ongoing disagreement among researchers.
I think this part of the text really sums up everything I hated about reading the news and social media in 2020. Each site seemed to be funneling you into a single source of truth and way of not only thinking, but FEELING about an event. I don't like being reminded of corporate sponsored social movements if I open facebook/google/amazon/twitter. I don't want my app reminding me to vote/get vaccinated(I did both btw) every time I open it without a way to dismiss and select 'I already did, stop reminding me.' I don't want reddit creating a central sub-page for discussing [Current Event] within the narrow bounds of what their moderators think is acceptable. I don't like non-dismissable context text on twitter and under youtube videos that are often off topic and triggered by bad speech detection that simply take you to a link dump of regular news articles. I don't like the idea that there's an oligopoly on "truth" and "credible sources." No amount of branding will convince me that "fact checkers" are any more objective and impartial than regular newspaper columnists; fact checkers are what editors are supposed to be. There's no academic rigor to fact checking, and the reality that so much casual skepticism on a variety of topics was suppressed and equivocated with being a flat-earther is sickening.
Each site seemed to be funneling you into a single source of truth and way of not only thinking, but FEELING about an event.
Which is a big problem. In the intelligence community, people are taught to distinguish between data items from different sources, which may indicate confirmation, and data items from the same source via different paths, which don't.
I think this is a good place for authorship attribution AI's. A plugin that will identify text that resembles known PR and propaganda and links to the original source.
Is this a real review or is this person writing their review from a script? Am I interacting with a real person or someone paid to sway the public opinion of something on a forum?
Edit: Maybe we could prevent more influence by Satya @ MS and the like. "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..." https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-201...
> "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..."
Wow! That was unexpectedly - what should I say - candid?
And I actually appreciate you all being here : )
But please distinguish between
- "helping customers where they are" which is a great idea and
- secretly pushing an agenda.
And if anyone wonders about how do you distinguish between those two here's a rule of thumb:
in the first case if someone realizes you work for that company it feels good. In the second case it probably feels bad.
> A plugin that will identify text that resembles known PR and propaganda and links to the original source.
Certainly such a tool might be useful to someone analyzing disinformation campaigns, but it only goes so far.
If the intent with such plugins and other forms of human/AI moderation is merely identify the source of what looks like disinformation, you're going to disappointed to hear that those who are influenced by disinformation don'tcare what "the source" is. It's why meatheads on Fox News can blabber non-stop garbage and get the highest news media ratings in history.
Dealing with this problem with "plugins", at best, is entering an infinite game of wack-a-mole. It's fundamentally not a technological problem.
This kind of stuff has always existed, and yes, now it's hopped-up on internet speed and naive countermeasures now need AI to keep up. But it's still qualitatively the same thing as it was in the 1930's. It requires a long game to battle it involving leadership, an educated populace and a government that isn't grossly polarized and dysfunctional.
Sadly, I don't think we're up to the challenge at least in the USA.
Agreed about the whack-a-mole. Would be hard. Only a few people have the ability to lead projects that require so much mole whacking. I'm thinking of gorhill and ublock origin, for example.
> It's why meatheads on Fox News can blabber non-stop garbage and get the highest news media ratings in history.
Interesting how you had to throw a right wing site in there with your underhanded attack. So you think the left is immune to this? Can you actually get through a CNN article without wanting to vomit?
To be honest, I do feel that CNN and MSNBC have fallen off a cliff as far as quality is concerned in the last 10+ years. All cable news is pretty much a wasteland.
But there's a special place in hell reserved for Fox News.
As bad as CNN can get with its cloying reductive stories, they at least try. Fox News is end-to-end garbage. Sorry.
The site https://www.churnalism.com/ tried to do something like this before ML was accessible, but it seems to have died on the vine just a year later.
> what was most notable about this episode is that it was not just CNN which reported this fraudulent story. An hour or so after the network shook the political world with its graphics-and-music-shaped bombshell, other news networks — including MSNBC and CBS News — claimed that they had obtained what they called “independent confirmation” that the story was true.
> All of this prompted the obvious question: how could MSNBC and CBS News have both purported to “independently confirm” a CNN bombshell that was completely false? The reason this matters is because the term “independently confirm” significantly bolsters the credibility of the initial report because it makes it appear that other credible-to-some news organizations have conducted their own investigation and found more evidence that proves it is true. That is the purpose of the exercise: to bolster the credibility of the story in the minds of the public.
> But what actually happens is as deceitful as it is obvious. When a news outlet such as NBC News claims to have “independently corroborated” a report from another corporate outlet, they often do not mean that they searched for and acquired corroborating evidence for it. What they mean is much more tawdry: they called, or were called by, the same anonymous sources that fed CNN the false story in the first place, and were fed the same false story.
> NBC News pretended they had obtained “independent confirmation” when all they had done was speak to the same sources that fed CNN.
The US "intelligence community" is the CIA, NSA, etc.[1] Intelligence analysis is the business of trying to extract useful info from of noisy and deceptive data. Here's an introduction to the field.[2] See especially section 4.
4-11. Analyst have found the following rules helpful in dealing with deception:
- Avoid over-reliance on a single source of information.
- Seek and heed the opinions of those closest to the reporting.
- Be suspicious of human sources or sub-sources who have not been met with personally or for whom it is unclear how or from whom they obtained the information.
- Be suspicious of information that appears to be too easy to collect and is too perfect of a picture.
- Always look for material evidence (documents, reports, imagery) rather than relying exclusively upon what someone says.
- Look for a pattern where a source’s information has seemed correct and accurate initially, but then proven to be false.
- Generate and evaluate a full set of hypotheses at the outset of a task.
- Know the limitations as well as the capabilities of collection assets, sources, and potential deceivers.
This kind of analysis used to be needed only by intelligence specialists. Now this should probably be taught in schools.
>> This kind of analysis used to be needed only by intelligence specialists. Now this should probably be taught in schools.
Not just schools, this should be taught to everybody.
One wonders how propaganda would react if this were to happen. Right now it is mostly non-physical information.
But when you have a critical mass of people & environment which is not conducive to standard propaganda, perhaps it will resort to creating a physical reality as a base to anchor upon. Not that this hasn't happened earlier, but it will become pervasive.
So anything anonymously sourced from US govt. Officials should be considered "too easy to collect... etc "...seemed correct and accurate initially, then proven to be false."
"Material evidence..."
Yeah if we did this the CIA would have a much harder time spreading bullshit. But yeah they'll still try with the "OMG you love Putin" To those in the media who actually exercise these recommendations. Maybe it's not even a totally baseless and disgusting slur every single time but it has happened so often now it's safe to assume anyone any good has been accused of being a Putin stooge at least once. Hilary accusing Bernie is my personal favourite. You may have others. Greenwald, Mate, Taibbi, Tulsi Gabbard, Assange, Snowden. Zero evidence for any of it, sure, but it's still possible one or more of them is. No reason at all not to treat that with total contempt given that each has presented evidence opposing in the interests of national security state propaganda and there's none at all for these Putin stooge smears.
Feel free to keep loathing Putin, I do, I just don't see him under the bed and switch my brain off the instant he's invoked. If you haven't seen that the CIA, NSA have real issues of criminality that is in need of serious reform, and many inside will eagerly break the law to avoid it consider what would get you to change your mind on that?
The corruption inside is a far, far greater threat to the USA than Putin (or Osama bin L. or Saddam or.. the next objectively evil bogeyman) could be in their wildest fantasies. Failure to reform is incredibly dangerous and weakens defenses massively.
I think they're saying that feeling the event instead of thinking about it is a problem.
A lot of times the news is all on about something as an emergency that will do something terrible if you don't pay attention to it. There may be some seed of importance in there to lend it credibility, but a large portion of the time it's simple manipulation and I ignore it on principle for that reason.
In other words, I usually tune it out because of that and instead go look for primary sources on whatever is making the news, instead, and even when I read the articles, I care only about the sources and whether I can verify them. I simply skip all the sections that are opinion.
This 1000 times. Any news org trying to invoke an emotional response should be treated as toxic. Get what important details you can from the article and move on. I don’t want AI to tell me what’s true, I want AI to remove the author’s bias.
If we're going to talk about the intelligence community, then the same criticism that gets used against the media needs to be brought up: the Iraq WMD.
> In the intelligence community, people are taught to distinguish between data items from different sources
Where on earth do you get this from?
In additional to the yellow cake fiasco, remember the pressure US and British intelligence came under find kompromat on UN security council members to bully them into voting for the Iraq invasion.
> No amount of branding will convince me that "fact checkers" are any more objective and impartial than regular newspaper columnists; fact checkers are what editors are supposed to be. There's no academic rigor to fact checking
Matt Taibbi recently published an article about how the role and visibility of fact-checking has changed over recent years (the meat of this is in the second half of the article)
This was an interesting read, but I think there's something missed with fact-checkers. They seem to be caught in a strict binary of true and false when there's often a third possibility: we do not have the necessary information to either prove or disprove a claim/statement.
The other issue is that they fail to categorise their "opponents" arguments into strong and weak claims.
So you often end up with articles arguing against strawmen, where the strawmen is considered to be the only view held by the other side. This isn't really useful.
There are alternatives ( at least around the World ), that include a limited range of conclusions from "true", "imprecise", "out of context", "manipulated" to "false".
I agree but I think it has to do with credibility and authoritative sources that used to be credible within some reason no longer being so.
I remember watching one of those movies like Zeitgeist 15 years ago (but it was about physics) and being enthralled by it and eagerly shared everything I learned with a bunch of people for months.
I eventually learned like 80%+ of that movie was made up BS, purposefully made to look more credible than it actually was.
That ruined the entire thing for me. It wasn't ethical or right to pick and choose pieces from a dishonest source -- The whole thing was thrown out much like not credible witnesses in a court case.
Again, I totally agree with the consequences of this and that it's not a good thing but if you met someone who talked about the flat earth nonstop and then told you about global warming, would you listen with the same openness if they believed the earth was round?
It’s be fairly confused if a flat earther talked about GLOBAL warming.
On a serious note I’ve learned to not take anything as gospel. Facts aren’t binary, they sit on a spectrum and also in an ecosystem. Given the natural information compression that exists in thought and language it’s impossible to be too sure of anything. The one thing I’ve stopped however is being 100% sure of anything. Of course I will dismiss obvious BS from sociopaths but on the other end of the spectrum I also tread more lightly.
From the OP: "There is just more disagreement and dissension than you would know unless you took the time to reach out to people and speak to them in a more relaxed way.
My strong suspicion is that this is true across domains of expertise, and is creating a lot of bubbles of fake consensus that can become very misleading. And I don’t have a solution."
I've also found this to be true on HN, though slightly less so. The above comment might be an example, where it oversimplifies something and everyone just appears to agree.
> There is just more disagreement and dissension than you would know unless you took the time to reach out to people and speak to them in a more relaxed way.
That's been my biggest problem with most conversation I have. Nuance has been lost.
> fake consensus that can become very misleading
It's PREFERENCE FALSIFICATION / Social desirebility bias: Preference falsification is the act of misrepresenting one’s wants under perceived social pressures. It shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities. Preference falsification is the act of communicating a preference that differs from one's true preference. The public frequently convey, especially to researchers or pollsters, preferences that differ from what they truly want, often because they believe the conveyed preference is more acceptable socially. It include the unexpected fall of communism, the paucity, until recently, of open opposition to affirmative action in the United States, and the durability of the beliefs that have sustained India’s caste system:
Why would anyone admit to being a [Insert anything against the establishment/mainstream media narrative]? You just get vilified and attacked.
I know several people and many qualified people (doctors) who got banned from YouTube, FB, IG, Twitter, Reddit and got "Disinformation" label slapped on their posts. Even on HN itself, there was a strange stink in the responses to a few of my comments simply stating that we shouldn't simply ignore this theory. Most people were responding with links to places like Snopes, Politifact, NYTimes, WaPo, MSNBC etc - places which have shown their biases several times in history but people kept trusting them as "authoritative" sources. The "fact checkers" were doing nothing more than narrative control but it was enough to chastise people. Some were really mean comments. I would expect such responses from Reddit but I wasn't expecting it on HN. The biggest irony was that we were being accused of being in a cult.
Does anyone think these platforms will now go back and "uncensor" those accounts? Will apologies be issued? I doubt it.
You really hit the nail on the head with this comment.
Frankly I wish you were a journalist more than this author that we are commenting on. He lacks your judgment.
Just to add to your point the most obvious tell for these kinds of suppression activities is the utter lack of curiosity.
It should have been a trigger for curiosity and investigation immediately that this virus happened to emerge in the same city as China's only BSL4 lab. You know the BSL4 lab with NIH and NAID grants specifically specifying taking bat born Corona viruses and infecting humanized mice with them.....
Curious journalists would have identified these earlier.
Unfortunately, journalist these days appear to really really enjoy dunking on each other on Twitter and doing anything they can to own the right winger / white supremacist / whatever they are calling people that don't agree with everything they say.
That doesn't take much brains it just takes an affinity for sadistic behavior.
Many HN users seem confident they know the truth, and that they know which sources are credible, and are comfortable suppressing anything contrary to what they already think, often without explanation. I don't think HN is quite an echo chamber yet, but it's well on its way.
Lots of people who are extremely educated (i.e. vocational training) fail to grasp very simple concepts of arguing, debating and behave quite childish and immature in many other aspects of their life.
I spent about 20 years in academia, among the most "highly intelligent and prepared people" in the world, yet know 14-15 year olds who behave in a much more honorable way.
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> I don't want my app reminding me to vote/get vaccinated(I did both btw) every time I open it
I basically agree with the sentiment, but some of this stuff is tricky. We really do need everyone to get vaccinated, in the same way we need everyone to not dump their sewage in the middle of the street, in order to protect the health of the public at large.
Imagine we were living during WWII and having this discussion. Would you feel differently? Because I don’t think we could have won the war if we were simultaneously having major internal debates about who the good guys were.
Which "we" are you speaking for here - since you're saying you won the war I guess you must be Soviet? You were having major debates about who the good guys were at the time - you had a non-aggression pact with Japan right up until the final weeks, and that very much affected the course of the war.
The same goes for everyone else. France had major internal debates about who the good guys were. So did the UK. So did the USA. So did Ireland. Everyone took took particular actions on particular timelines, made particular compromises, and they were right to do so.
As far as I can tell this is a false premise. The scientific consensus on zoonotic origin was never really considered conclusive by anyone and was never really sold as being conclusive. There was a very strong backlash against the ridiculous theories spread by people like Tom Cotton that virus was engineered that absolutely soured the debate. And people like Trump and his sycophants who didn't just suggest lab leak but declared it as being overwhelmingly likely. That made honest debate extremely difficult. And even know the hand-wringing of "oh now they were right all along" is even worse. There was not then nor is there now sufficient evidence to declare this a settled debate. Trump is and was wrong. And Cotton shot himself the foot by ruining his credibility before trying to reset his opinion. In reality, we don't know. Zoonotic remains most likely. More investigation is warranted but is unlikely to turn up a smoking gun.
How can you read this then casually say Tom Cotton was spreading ridiculous theories that covid was engineered? One of the main points in the article is he never said that and what he did say was pretty reasonable. It’s ok if you think the article is wrong about that, but you should at least give a source for your claim at this point.
He speculated that it could have been a bioweapon that was accidentally or deliberately released. You and I can speculate on twitter but a US senator should keep his trap shut on social media.
I guess I'm not seeing the problem with those tweets?
I mean, he lists four options, and identifies natural release as the most likely and intentional release as very unlikely. And it's expressed clearly, in full sentences.
By the standards of republican politicians on twitter, that's actually pretty good.
"By the standards of republican politicians" is a low bar and also a relevant topic. Cotton was more careful with his words than a lot of his comrades but he was very tightly allied with people (like Trump himself) who were well known for spouting complete horseshit. Cotton also did himself no favors when he was one of 6 senators to vote against protection for Asian-American victims of hate crimes.
There is no source for these claims. Just like with Trump, people get angry and upset with what they think he said based on the impression from the media, not what was actually said. Just look at the 'fine people on both sides' comment that was taken ridiculously out of context.
This same thing happened to Sarah Palin with the 'I can see Russia from my house' phrase, which she never said. It was part of a comedy sketch, yet it was used to attack her. It is absolutely ridiculous. No one is interested anymore in what is said, just what they think someone 'like that' would say.
The fine people on both sides was truly as horrific as it was made out to be. They had a torchlight nazi parade where they chanted jews will not replace us and they murdered people.
Here is a pic of people flying as they were hit by a car.
On February 20th 2020 Tom Cotton speculated that it was possible that China deliberately released the virus or that it could be a bioweapon that had been released.
This isn't a hypothesis a US senator should throw out on twitter because the right wing completely ignored the speculative nature or any qualifications and completely ran with Tom says they Chinese attacked us.
The grandparent didn't say nothing bad happened at the protest, they said that Trump's comments were taken out of context, which is completely true. Read the thing in context (here: https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trump...) and it's clear that he's not defending white supremacists or anything of that sort.
The context was reported at the time and it still means exactly what people think it means. Here's his attempt to clarify
"I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general. "
Trump knows full well that this is a lie. No one was there because Lee was so great of a general and they love military tactics. They were there because he fought to protect slavery. There was absolutely no "both sides" about anything. In context he's still saying protestors were as much to blame as the counter protest and the counter protest had as much validity to their complaint as the protestors. These is exactly what everyone took his meaning and all the context and clarification make it very clear that he meant murdering racists are the same as peaceful protestors against violence.
I'm sorry but you personify the issue stated in this article.
The guys holding tiki torches were definitely white supremacists.
Most protesters who are in favor of preserving Confederate monuments aren't doing so because of slavery. I don't agree with them but I grew up around them in Virginia and it's much more complicated than "derp they love slavery derp".
The confidence you possess in your ability to read people's minds is likely unfounded since I've never met any human being who can successfully read others minds.
I hate to ad hominem but this statement is so disgustingly naïve it's difficult to fathom. The Confederacy existed to preserve slavery. It is theoretically possible for someone just be really into that 3.5 year span of history so, so much that they can't bear the thought of fewer statues or else they'll forget about it but I think that is far-fetched. I also don't believe they literally want to reinstitute slavery in 2021, but they are absolutely fighting to lionize people who fought to protect it. It is 100% equivalent to defending a statue of a Nazi general. And it is 100% racist whether they consciously accept it or not. There is absolutely no plausible explanation. And none of the explanations put forward by apologists are remotely convincing. The same people who think taking down statues is "erasing our history" are passing emergency laws to ban the 1619 Project from being taught.
You’re incorrect on nearly all of this and haven’t “broken out” of the forced narrative. All I can suggest is you go back to the primary sources yourself. Don’t take my word for it, don’t take your preferred media outlet’s word for it. Dig it up and decide.
The lab leak is overwhelmingly likely. It’s the Occam’s Razor without question. It’s still a hypothesis to be clear. It’s not proven. It could be wrong. But if we are assigning probabilities, it’s extremely one sided. It should have been the leading hypothesis from the beginning.
But Trump said it, so it must be wrong. We must find reasons for it to be not only wrong, but worthy of ridicule. And when those narratives fall, we must keep shifting the goal posts. And when that doesn’t work anymore, we must blame our failure on republicans in some roundabout way.
Sorry, that’s not how we science. We have to put the damn political tribal warfare away for a minute.
The lab leak theory is not Occam's razor. We've had many, many pandemics and epidemics and none have been associated with research labs. We've had SARS outbreaks in China that are not associated with a lab. There is also no proof beyond circumstance to associate it with the lab.
And it's not wrong because Trump said it. He may end up being partly correct. The fact remains he had no reason to be as confident in his pronouncement as he was aside from political expediency. Cotton was far more measured in his statements even if he was still stretching. I'm also saying that the MSM and scientific consensus only really threw a fit over the bioweapon theory and inflammatory rhetoric. Even the infamous WHO study said accidental lab leak was possible.
The fact that you aren't aware of the 1970s flu in the Soviet Union which was caused by a lab leak is telling. Again confident absolute statements from someone who doesn't really understand the topic they are commenting on.
There have been numerous lab leaks that are recorded in history and they happen every year.
After SARS it only took 4 months to identify the intermediate host which was a civet. After MERS, it took nine months to identify a camel as an intermediate host.
18 months later with vastly more scientific resources at their disposal and also technology that didn't exist for the other two like smartphones, no intermediate mammal host has been found yet.
The Occam's razor suggestion for this is the reason for this is the only intermediate mammal host that exists is a humanized mouse with human ACE2 receptors lining its lungs.
You know, the humanized mice that were specifically mentioned as being present in the Wuhan Institute of Virology by multiple sources including grants applied for and received directly stating this.
This entire comment is the personification of a person who has taken their political identity and with no self-awareness applied it to science. You have no basis for your confidence other than the hatred of your political enemies.
I watched brainwashed GOP folks cling to the WMD in Iraq myth for years after it was proven false. You might not be do different from them.
Its only recently that research labs could engineer these viruses. Only recently have you been able to engineer mice with human ACE2 receptors, and breed viruses in them. History is not what you base your conclusions on in 2020’s biochemistry.
It has been strongly asserted by the scientific community that Covid-19 bears no hallmarks of an engineered virus. In fact, no one in this thread is even suggested it was engineered. That's the whole point of the article. The "accidental leak" theory is being conflated with "engineered weapon theory". The only options on the table are "animal -> human" or "animal -> lab -> human". Both are plausible and we have no conclusive evidence one way or the other.
Engineering a virus, in the sense that you're talking about, is not what was meant. Allowing the virus to naturally mutate in an animal host, over thousands of generations, will get you to the same endpoint. This is gain of function research, the whole point is to find out if the virus could naturally evolve some feature you are interested in. Engineering it to do so would defeat the point.
This is not exactly accurate. But it’s easier to get to the full story if people accept the lab leak of an unmodified virus as a possibility. However, the “assertions” are misleading and have been debunked. The virus does appear to be chimeric. There is a missing link in both hypotheses, but the lab leak hypotheses offers a few possible explanations. The zoonotic hypothesis still doesn’t have an explanation for that part.
You're not actually refuting any argument the parent made.
First, pointing out that other pandemics have happened absent lab accidents doesn't negate all the evidence pointing in that direction this time. As far as evidence and probability goes (with regard to the potential evolutionary paths the virus would have had to have taken in the wild), the lab leak hypothesis is very strong. The simplest answer is that it leaked from the lab a few miles away studying this exact family of viruses.
Second, the parent wasn't saying anything about whether or not Trump was twisting the truth or being dramatic. His whole point is that the discussion was able to be hijacked by the simple act of a divisive figure talking about it. It's fine if people dismiss Trump (the smart thing to do honestly), but allowing that to bias you in the opposite direction without any evidence is making the exact same mistake he did.
> And it's not wrong because Trump said it. He may end up being partly correct. The fact remains he had no reason to be as confident in his pronouncement as he was aside from political expediency.
except his CDC head claimed after the new administration took over that Trump's administration did have additional classified evidence that made it more likely. It is extremely likely that the intelligence community knew of the chinese researchers who had gone to the hospital (and maybe more) way before it was released to the public. By the time these facts are made public, they have been researched and assigned a high level of confidence.
This should be the top comment. Social media companies can either be monopolies or they can put limits on the speech of their platform... but they can't do both.
While not against the law of freedom of speech, political moderation processes are certainly against the intent. Every once in a while we get a case like this where an unpopular fringe opinion becomes mainstream and underlines the point. But this isn't just a matter of Facebook / Twitter / YouTube needing a better moderation process - this is more fundamental. No person or organization - no matter how benevolent or wise - should have the power to declare truth in a society.
Fringe opinions need constitutional protection - regardless of the era or the technology.
IMO I think it's useful to avoid getting moderates and people who don't know better caught up in the mess.
For people who are already convinced, they're already convinced. Banning the content entirely also doesn't help. People are very good at spreading information, even if you manage to ban all conspiracies from the internet, you have TV, the newspaper, private networks, and just word-of-mouth.
Another good tool would be to teach kids how to identify misinformation. You don't have to worry about belief perseverance when there's no belief yet.
Of course this is undoubtedly true. However, deleting the information creates a Streisand effect and a much stronger belief perseverance and backfire effect compared to annotating the information with a counter-argument.
Between the three options of "delete", "annotate", and "leave untouched", I think the least-bad option is probably the middle one. It's not going to dissuade many people and will only reinforce beliefs for many, but there's not much else that can be done.
I've been on Facebook since you needed an edu address. I've never had anything I posted flagged in anyway until recently during the Colonial Pipeline shutdown. A friend posted a photo of a person filling up buckets with gasoline. I responded with "An oldie but goodie" and a photo of a woman filling up plastic shopping bag with gasoline. A couple days later I got a notification from Facebook that I was spreading disinformation. The image I posted was from 2019, not 2021 their notification said. As punishment, my future posts for a unspecified amount of time will get low ranked in everyone's feeds. Problem is, I never claimed the image was from 2021. I even called it an oldie. I've never run into trouble with Facebook's truthiness machine before but now I'm in some sort of penalty box for who knows how long. As far as I can tell, there's no way to appeal this or even let them know that their process is flawed. Facebook has labeled me as the spreader of disinformation and that's the end of it. Nothing else can be done. Their judgement is final. These are the people we want controlling the flow of information and this is the process we want them to use to do it?
I would expect that this was fully automatic response, so there was nobody reading your message. Facebook somehow detected that your photo was too old. On the internet "fake" photo's are frequently posted and it is understandable that Facebook takes countermeasures. It is really difficult to find a good solution.
> claim it’s fake news being pushed by “the elite.”
The "fake news" part is always disputable on a case by case basis, but the "elite" part is indisputable. A very small number of very wealthy people get to decide the range of opinions that are acceptable, and the deviations that get administrative comments. The mods aren't the auteurs - mods that correct incorrectly will be fired. Close calls rattle up the chain of command until they hit the CEO/Founder, who is often a billionaire, always very wealthy, always of a particular demographic.
Because much of it is fake news being pushed by the elite. Look at precisely what we're discussing: the lab leak scenario, which Facebook labeled with warnings (at best) or simply banned/deleted/removed (at worst).
And now, the media establishment is doing some kind of re-think, and it turns out that while far from proven, a lab leak (which covers a variety of scenarios, most not involving any kind of "engineered" virus) is a reasonable hypothesis. If that's so, why the capricious banning and warning labels?
We've seen similar situations play out in the past year with masks (at first, they were unnecessary and racist, then absolutely critical, now it's changing again). How about just let people decide for themselves? There will always be some conspiracists on both the left and right, but most people figure this stuff out in a reasonable manner.
> but most people figure this stuff out in a reasonable manner.
That's getting tenuous. Fully 25% of the populace believe "alternative facts" that their Representatives claim are true, but those Representatives cite those very people as the source of truth! It's "citogenesis" in the real world!
You are assuming that the net negative for society is never high enough to justify kicking liars and crazy people off your platform. That seems like a remarkable conclusion. Lets take for example Alex Jones spreading the lie that kids didn't die in school shootings and the people talking about their dead kids are making it up. Do you keep spreading it until a whack job kills somebody? Until some parent commits suicide?
What about health misinformation that if propagated will kill thousands? How many dead is enough to act?
What if false info about vaccines keeps enough from being vaccinated long enough for a new variant to emerge that infects the previously immune and the net effect is millions die?
I don't think you want to be elected Emperor over this at all its a shittier job than you imagine.
Good thing they aren't monopolies, then. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and Reddit are are all very popular places for people to post their views. And that's not counting the myriad lesser places like the one we're using now. And of course anybody can drop a few bucks on a blog of their own.
I also disagree that sites moderating is against the intent. Freedom of speech is one right, but so is freedom of association. Should HN be required by law to platform anybody with an "unpopular fringe opinion"? I'd say no. Using government power to force participation in speech someone finds odious is just as bad as using government power to shut down speech.
>And of course anybody can drop a few bucks on a blog of their own.
And no one will read it unless you can post links on facebook, twitter and reddit. In the end, almost all communication online runs through a limited set of american megacorps who all act in the same ways, have the same rules and align to the same culture.
It's no surprise China and Russia ban American sites because those sites control the debate and culture of the places that use them.
I do think there is a problem with how tightly some big corporations have locked down social media - but the 1st amendment (and equivalent laws elsewhere) don't cover the requirement that anyone actually listen to your speech.
I think if we see social media as being a necessary modern medium for speech then we're going to need to get a government sponsored something in the mix - whether that is a common required protocol for messaging or a full blown nationalized social network is an open debate we can have. The main issue is that as long as we're blindly trusting the market to fix itself - it has decided the fix is that monopolies are great when nobody is breaking up big tech companies.
> And no one will read it unless you can post links on facebook, twitter and reddit.
I suppose the question is how long that list of websites really is, and how long it needs to be before people stop calling all those websites "monopolies." Obviously it would be fairly absurd to say "no one will read your website unless you can post links on site 1, site 2, site 3, ... site 3,109,550, and therefore those 3.1 million websites are monopolies."
Long enough that they don't co-ordinate, essentially, which would show in how they acted. When facebook, twitter and reddit all announce the same kind of moderation changes within a few months of each other, you can tell that they're a de-facto cartel, and the specifics of how that happens (such as whether they directly communicated with each other) are kind of irrelevant.
Google is just another social network that people are gaming (with the lazy consent of the people who run it.) Even if you make it, you can be wiped off google as easily as off twitter, no matter what your traffic.
I'm more or less in agreement with you on all of those companies except Twitter. Twitter is a notable exception and absolutely does have a monopoly on the social media sector as a "public square" - one which features almost every major politician, journalist, analyst, and activist on the platform, including at times, the US President and many other heads of state. And because of the network effect, this monopoly is unlikely to be challenged in the coming years.
Twitter sought out exactly this kind of political influence, so I'm not sympathetic to any complaints they may have now that they have that influence and are in the spotlight.
In an ideal world, Twitter would have been created as a government site and thus subject to the 1st Amendment, but given that we're not in that world, legislation is needed. I'm willing to concede the other social media companies you cited have competition and/or don't play the central role Twitter plays in the US political process.
Finally, there would be Freedom of Association on Twitter even if it were subject to 1st Amendment rights - no one is forced to follow anyone, and everyone is free to block anyone at all. It should be almost exactly analogous to real-life: you should have the right to associate with whomever you like in our country, but you should not have the right to expel them from the country.
I think a very important reason for Twitter's influence is that it is very easy to include tweets in an article. This saves editorial work. There is no need to paraphrase/extract parts of a longer article and so it mostly avoids the problems around incorrect quotes. It also makes attribution of your sources easier because the tweet is the source itself.
Of course, Twitter is a horrible platform for nuanced opinions, but these do not seem to be very popular nowadays.
The First Amendment has always applied to private property "town squares" that are open to public, originally this was decided in the case of indoor shopping malls.
I think/hope there would be raised eyebrows if government agencies set up shop in private malls. Malls have realistic alternatives. Twitter doesn't, even for some government services.
If Twitter's so incredibly powerful and important, why is it worth 5% of Facebook or 2% or Amazon (which owns Twitch) or Google (which owns YouTube)? That doesn't sound like a dominant market position to me.
A large proportion of the people you mention are active on multiple platforms. Some of them aren't active on Twitter at all. Twitter does have a particular market niche, but it's only the 16th most popular platform in terms of global active users: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
And freedom of association is a right that Twitter's owners also have. They are not obliged to serve anybody they don't want to.
So, I’m not going to claim if it’s a monopoly or not directly, but just provide new angles on this debate…
Twitter may have an x% of market valuations of other companies… but that doesn’t have to be the only metric we base decisions off of. Amazon is more than twitch, so has a bigger evaluation. But obviously that other business doesn’t compete with Twitter.
Twitter might account for (eg) 25% of phone use time (and say fb accounts for another x%). So maybe we define the market as user attention. That might make more sense than a strictly financial approach.
Or maybe, like the OP said, Twitter has 90% of all political actors on it, when the next platform has only 25%. Or maybe it has 75% of all public political discourse. Maybe defining the market as saturation of politicians. After all, it’s way harder to compete if you have to convince all existing politicians to move.
These metrics are harder to gather, but might be more useful to gauge how dominant Twitter is in the political sphere. When people discuss monopoly, they often don’t care about the (vague and interpreted) laws per se, they actually care about how a company has somehow come to be dominant and influential in a negative way.
Throughout American history, antitrust rules has been used against mostly large businesses that were unpopular (politically and colloquially). Business and society had changed a lot, especially with the internet, so if there is a political push, defining monopoly policies against another target and definition is inevitable.
Sure. Many things are possible. Twitter could be using an embedded hypnotron in their apps to control elite opinion. But when people are talking about effectively nationalizing one company because they don't like its moderation policies, I think we need more than speculation.
And you might not care about why we have antitrust laws or how monopoly impairs free markets. But I sure do.
If somebody wants to make the claim that Twitter has too much power in some way unrelated to monopoly, they're welcome to take a swing at that. But that's a very hard claim to make in that without an actual monopoly, I don't see a plausible mechanism for unfair dominance. Not only is it possible to compete with Twitter, many companies, some of them with vastly more resources, already do. I'd say the rise of TikTok demonstrates there's no particular barrier to entry, and Gab and Parler are eternally claiming success in attracting millions of users.
> Gab and Parler are eternally claiming success in attracting millions of users.
So Gab and Parler should be absolutely free to operate as they wish, in accordance with US laws?
(Because there many folks who like Twitter's moderation who also believe Gab and Parler should be run off the internet, and have tried their best to do so)
I think Gab and Parler should face no legal sanction for hosting content that is legal but awful. But people critical of that also have freedom of speech, and everybody involved has freedom of association. Telling Gab's vendors that maybe they should stop helping Nazis is just as much "in accordance with US laws" as anything on Gab, so I don't see on what grounds you could object to it.
Except there's no barrier of entry to Twitter's marketplace. Twitter doesn't somehow prevent users installing other apps. They aren't a natural monopoly, seeing as how Facebook has been taking shots at that space for years.
This bizarre HN notion that every big company is a "monopoly" needs to die. Being popular doesn't make you a monopoly.
I'm not really arguing from an antitrust perspective. My argument is more focused on the central role that Twitter plays in our political process. If you have a better word to use for that concept than "monopoly", I'll edit my post. But I'm sure you disagree with my thesis either way.
That said, from an antitrust perspective, there are strong arguments against some social media companies, particularly Facebook. Furthermore, there is a barrier to entry for Twitter: the network effect. It's an incredibly strong barrier.
Finally, of course not every big company is a monopoly.
The network effect is a big barrier until it isn't, and this can happen rather quickly.
Digg. Myspace. Snap. Tumblr. Honestly even Facebook itself; how many young people are opening new accounts on Facebook? For now people have moved onto Instagram but this is the only trick I'm aware of pulled off successfully.
You are not entitled to an audience. A monopoly requires an actual barrier, not a social one: i.e. physically limited space in telecommunication conduits in cities, for example.
And I think you've put your finger on it. A lot of people confuse a right to free speech with a right to be heard. They are BIG MAD that they don't have a god-given right to a large platform. Not that they built the platform and not that they contribute to its upkeep. But they still have strong feelings of entitlement.
> My argument is more focused on the central role that Twitter plays in our political process. If you have a better word to use for that concept than "monopoly"
What's the concept then, other than that Twitter is doing things that you don't like? That's obviously not a sufficient argument, and if antitrust law isn't the reason for legal action to be taken against them, what's the reason? The only other legal course I could imagine is significant changes to media laws (which I'm certainly not opposed to, but those seem more difficult to argue for than antitrust action), or perhaps going at it from the other side and changing the laws around how public figures must communicate with the public.
A business doesn’t have to be a monopoly per the current legal definition for it to be subject to regulation. We can simply require social media companies to accept all customers. We can make political views a protected class that prevents denial of service at businesses in general. We can treat these tech companies as utilities because they operate the public town square. There are numerous routes for us to fix the current situation, where a small number of employees controlling these companies with billions of users, can become the sole arbiters of can communicate and what they can communicate. It just requires that we start talking about it, educate people about the problem, and build political will.
We probably can't "simply" do that, in that the Constitution is a document with actual meaning.
I would also note that there are existing platforms that effectively make political views a protected class. It turns out they are not very popular, because most people don't want to hang around with people for whom the 14 Words are an important political view.
In practice, a platform can either have haters or the people they hate. Insisting a platform accept all the haters means you're guaranteeing the people they hate will go elsewhere. That's why Twitter has moved away from the sort of policies you favor. As an example, look at when Milo Yiannopoulos led a wave of racist abuse toward Leslie Jones. Twitter had to choose between keeping her (and a lot of her fans and people who just don't like open racism) or Yiannopoulos and his fans.
So the notion that we should override the Bill of Rights to make Twitter platform everybody is not only anti-freedom, but also won't in practice work. If somebody doesn't like Twitter's rules, they should do what you're doing: post somewhere else. There are platforms ready and waiting to take them.
Monopoly is mostly a political definition throughout American history. The policies and laws have been shaped to target businesses not always strictly based on actual market definition in a textbook sense.
1. You're using the technical definition of monopoly in a debatable way to hand-wave away the issue. Each of these companies have excessive market influence.
2. All of these companies are already in bed with the government (e.g. illegal NSA spying). They also try to enact policies that are in agreement with politicians agenda as a bargaining chip to get more favorable legislation and enforcement.
Facebook has 3 billion users. Their efforts in censoring / shaping public opinion / propagandizing are broader and more influential than any government. I don’t want to argue about whose definition of monopoly should win. The fact remains that this is a problem and it needs to be addressed with regulation, just like we regulate power utilities. Social media is just utility communication like anything else we call “telecom”, except with massive barriers to competition due to network effects and no requirement for interoperability.
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Corporations do not have inalienable rights. Only their human members do. They are chartered by the government, to promote the General Welfare.
If the CEO of YouTube wants to flex her rights, she should do it herself, not behind the veil of a corporation.
Companies do face more constraints than individuals, but the government can't just do whatever it wants. One obvious reason being that companies have owners, and they do have rights.
This argument seems to assume that Internet hosting is like air — a natural resource which by default is available for everyone to use, but social media companies restrict unfairly.
As everyone here should know, it’s not like that: hosting can be awfully expensive, especially for media content. Social media companies receive money from advertisers, and use that money to host content from users and partners that hopefully makes those ads look appealing too. It’s that simple.
Should these companies be compelled by the government to display content that makes their customers (advertisers) look bad? That seems like an awfully deep intrusion into a private business.
If the social media companies truly were monopolies, that would be another thing. But it’s hard to make that argument when new entrants like Snap and TikTok are able to conquer entire market segments and reach $100B valuations in a matter of years.
Real estate is expensive too, but there are "town square" doctrines in some states where presenting yourself as a public space means you must not discriminate on usage.
This goes further -- in some states where such doctrine does not exist it was kind of synthesized because some electoral districts have, say, 80% of the electorate in an apartment building which a judge ruled must be accessible to candidates who run.
A comment section on a blog presents itself as a public space. Does this mean nobody can moderate comments anymore?
Or if the rule only applies to political expression, can spammers just adopt the formula: “I love candidate $X because he buys viagra at http:yyy”
Or, if the rule is that big enough sites suddenly become “town squares”, that seems like a major disincentive to American companies to grow. Others would walk in without these limitations, like Chinese already did with TikTok.
> A comment section on a blog presents itself as a public space. Does this mean nobody can moderate comments anymore?
A blog comment section usually presents itself as a curated space, and the flip side is that blog owners take some level of responsibility for the contents of their comments.
You can be a private club, or you can be a public space. But you can't be both. We make that kind of distinction in the real world too.
> Or if the rule only applies to political expression, can spammers just adopt the formula: “I love candidate $X because he buys viagra at http:yyy”
Of course not, come off it, judges and juries are not actually complete idiots.
> Or, if the rule is that big enough sites suddenly become “town squares”, that seems like a major disincentive to American companies to grow. Others would walk in without these limitations, like Chinese already did with TikTok.
Then ban those sites from the US, like India does. If you can't support US-style freedom of speech then you shouldn't get access to the US market.
A direct analogue is the concept of an easement. If you get large enough and enough people use your site, that is when the public square doctrine would kick in. Similar to how eventually if you let people keep walking through your yard it becomes public use land.
Usually you have multiple chances to fight it. The owner of a square continues to own it because it makes them money.
It’s not about hosting. It’s about distribution and eyeball minutes. As long as social media sites deliver content through an algorithmic feed, there are a limited number of slots available for the “next page.” The user will stop scrolling eventually. Their limited attention is valuable real estate. It’s also why social media has an incentive to maximize the time on feed.
The best regulatory approach to social media is simple: any algorithmic newsfeed must be opt-in. It must default to a chronological option. The default preference must also be applied retroactively for all existing users.
How would you feel if we swapped out "social media sites" and "algorithmic" for "newspapers" and "editorial" in that first paragraph? There are a limited number of slots in the newspaper. Should the government step in a guarantee that the New York Times needs to publish any crackpot theory I come up with?
NYT can also be held liable for things like slander though, right? If social media sites try to claim they are not responsible for any content posted, that does feel a bit like trying to have their cake and eat it too.
I'm not sure the goal here. Do you want increased or decreased moderation? Repealing 230 and making social media companies liable will lead to more moderation and bans not less.
The goal is clear lines of responsibility. If Facebook is responsible for every post, that's ok. If every individual is responsible for their posts, that's also ok. It's when it's blurry that there's a problem.
I'm not the one that was originally asking for regulation on the social media companies, I just think there are too many fundamental differences between current social media sites and newspaper editorials for that analogy to work.
Personally I feel social media sites have taken some of the moderation too far. I don't have a problem (in a legal sense) with the algorithmic feed downweighting various topics or adding links to countering sources or whatever, but I think if these sites don't want to be held liable for content they should error way on the side of allowing individual user pages to be uncensored.
What was even crazier to me was when Twitter blocked DMs containing that Hunter Biden story. The story was suspect obviously, but to moderate private messages like that is a huge overreach IMO.
The Hunter Biden story deserves so much more investigation. It’s a huge story that nobody wanted to touch because it might mean Trump wins again. They went as far as banning even discussion of it. A massive editorial failure that’s going to hurt media’s credibility for a long time.
I agree with you in spirit, though I feel like the issue is more about whether social media are common carriers [1] or publishers.
They shield themselves when they claim to be a carriers, yet act like publishers. The monopoly aspect, I agree, would be more important to speech, given they behave as publishers of what you may as well consider on-spec content.
I'd like to get clear on to what degree they should be considered carriers or publishers.
Not all opinions deserve equal airtime. Fringe opinions should have to work harder to get to the mainstream. Isn’t that exactly what happened here? This is the fringe opinion that had the most inherent value and it’s proved that by breaking through. IMO I wish the platforms had censored more bad info than this. It’s crazy to me that there isn’t more friction for bad ideas.
1. Who decides what is a "fringe" theory? You? The Government? The scientific community? Facebook/Twitter etc...?
2. ..Fringe opinions should have to work harder to get to the mainstream... No they shouldn't it is you the reader of those news who should make the decision of how much "brain time" this "fringe" news get.
3. Denying airtime to certain topics doesn't make them go away or sways people that believe them otherwise.
Well, since you asked if I should decide what a fringe theory is, yes, sometimes I do make that decision. But when I'm wrong those things have a habit of breaking through. I remember being pretty skeptical of intermittent fasting for awhile. I'd held it out of a study we did in 2014 and then held it out of our publishing. Something about it smelled like anorexia light. So on the one hand I kept hearing people swear by it and then on the other hand I hadn't done enough research to be comfortable. I ended up having a detailed conversation with a doctor about the physiological side and then with a therapist about eating disorders (especially in men) before I was ready to allow it into our work. So for about a year I was wrongly gatekeeping on this topic. But that's what I mean about fringe ideas need to work harder. The fringes is where those ideas get stress tested and refined. And since ideas break out of the fringes all the time, I don't have any real fear that gatekeeping other places is overly oppressive.
How is that contrary? MSM got one wrong in the same time that alternative media has gotten hundreds wrong. MSM isn't just better at rejecting misinformation, it's a lot better.
Wrong. The things it does get wrong have more impact. Russiagate is just one prior example. It was patently false from the outset, but led to mass delusions, promotions of fake news propagandists to the point that they are now embedded within and celebrated by the MSM, the discrediting of the media and the intelligence community, breakdown of trust of those institutions by those who had been clear-headed, and fever-dream level hysteria by those who were misled, greatly fracturing Americans who were already divided.
It may be true that they get fewer specific points wrong, but if the ones they do get wrong count for a lot more, that's not better. That's worse.
> Russiagate is just one prior example. It was patently false from the outset
What is "Russiagate"? What about it was "patently false"?
The Mueller investigation got multiple indictments against Russian nationals. They also obtained convictions of people working in the Trump campaign or administration for election-related offenses. They found evidence of Russian attempts to influence voters in swing states by illegally buying ads on social media. That Russia attempted to meddle in the 2016 elections isn't in doubt - only whether the meddling worked.
IIRC, a lot of misunderstandings about it (e.g. misunderstanding the proven claims that Russia made signficant efforts to interfere with the election as a claim that they successfully rigged it).
This is a very interesting comment for future historians, as it shows how people convince themselves that they have absorbed substance when in fact there is no such substance.
Virtually no aspect of your statement extends beyond press headlines, where the content and follow-on of each of these stories entirely defused the substance of the respective headline. That is why the whole thing that you believe is very important amounted to a pile of dust.
DOJ indicted ham-sandwich Russians, then later retreated. Only process crimes charged (lying, interfering). Buying ads on social media isn't illegal, and the amount was de minimus (< $30k). FARA crimes were reverse-engineered, selectively prosecuted, and didn't related to Russia in any way. Everything about these headlines is an utter farce.
> indicted ham-sandwich Russians, then later retreated.
Citation needed.
> Only process crimes charged (lying, interfering).
Why lie or interfere if you didn't commit any crimes? These aren't random Joes with bad/no legal representation who didn't know what they were doing. You have to assume they were doing it to cover up more serious crimes and assumed they would be pardoned. Which turned out to be true.
> Buying ads on social media isn't illegal
Foreigners buying political ads is illegal. Citizens using money owned by foreigners to buy political ads is also illegal.
>Citation needed.
read the docs
> Why lie or interfere if you didn't commit any crimes?
Fundamental misunderstanding of justice and the US justice system.
> buy political ads
"political"
Not here to open your eyes for you, but again I appreciate you exposing your perspectives to the light.
> Fundamental misunderstanding of justice and the US justice system
Because the people committing those crimes didn't know the Fifth Amendment? You don't have to say anything. There's really no reason to lie; other than to cover up something worse. Explain the pardons.
There's also systematic censorship and disinformation against prophylaxis and early treatment information, which could prevent millions of hospitalisations and deaths. [1]
e.g. YouTube recently censored the Ivermectin Global Summit, in which doctors and scientists showed the overwhelming scientific evidence for Ivermectin from around the world. [2]
A recently released meta—analysis from the British Medical Journal suggests that the evidence base for ivermectin’s efficacy in treating COVID-19 is low.
If you'll look carefully, you'll see that's a non peer-reviewed opinion piece.
That's a prime example of disinformation, and indeed the most reputable journals unfortunately play a role in it.
Just to rebut the first thing random thing I saw:
"An important controversial point to consider in any rationale is the 5 µM required concentration to reach the anti-SARS-CoV-2 action of ivermectin observed in vitro,17 which is much higher than 0.28 µM, the maximum reported plasma concentration achieved in vivo with a dose of approximately 1700 µg/kg (about nine times the FDA-approved dosification)"
They are bringing up the in-vitro studies initially done on monkey kidney cells, and then claiming that you'll need such a high dose in a clinical setting. The doses for prophylactic and early treatment are an order of magnitude lower (0.2mg/kg) [1], and in that dose it's safer than paracetamol.
"Ivermectin was generally well tolerated, with no indication of associated CNS toxicity for doses up to 10 times the highest FDA-approved dose of 0.2mg/kg." [2]
In my second link, there's a talk rebutting the in-vitro safety concerns in detail: [3]
There are over 50 studies showing that Ivermectin is effective, and more are coming in every day. [4]
> That's a prime example of disinformation, and indeed the most reputable journals unfortunately play a role in it.
I'm going to trust an opinion in the BMJ over:
> There are over 50 studies showing that Ivermectin is effective
There have been a vast number of junk studies produced during the pandemic and rolling out 50 of them means very little. How many of them are pre-registered RCTs? How many of them are in low-quality journals?
"Different websites (such as https://ivmmeta.com/, https://c19ivermectin.com/, https://tratamientotemprano.org/estudios-ivermectina/, among others) have conducted meta-analyses with ivermectin studies, showing unpublished colourful forest plots which rapidly gained public acknowledgement and were disseminated via social media, without following any methodological or report guidelines. These websites do not include protocol registration with methods, search strategies, inclusion criteria, quality assessment of the included studies nor the certainty of the evidence of the pooled estimates. Prospective registration of systematic reviews with or without meta-analysis protocols is a key feature for providing transparency in the review process and ensuring protection against reporting biases, by revealing differences between the methods or outcomes reported in the published review and those planned in the registered protocol."
To be fair the c19ivermectin site only states: Database of all ivermectin COVID-19 studies. If you want a meta-analysis that picks for you the quality studies from that list that's also avilable: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8088823/
If that opinion contains patently false information and assumptions (e.g. early in-vitro study needed a high dose, therefore that same dose must be required in clinical patients), then that opinion is not trustworthy, regardless of whether it's on the BMJ website or not.
See also here [1] under the "Big Science" heading, why the current system is broken.
Notice how if the same censorship rules were applied here, this entire conversation would be disallowed, and no learning on the topic could take place.
This is kind of doing the same thing that the “fact checkers” are doing. There is indeed a lack of proper studies to validate it. That’s the problem. There are mountains of evidence that show it as very promising and worthy of a proper study. That’s what people are asking for. The FDA keeps saying not to use it, because we don’t know for certain that it works, because we haven’t had any rigorous RCTs to validate it, even though it appears by all accounts to be an extremely valuable tool. They don’t claim that it doesn’t work. They don’t claim that it’s harmful (we know it’s not, it’s been broadly deployed for like 30 years and is known to be far safer than the vaccines, which are already quite safe, at least in the short to medium term). Also, this article is misinformed on the dosage requirement, which has been raised and addressed - looks like sibling comment called this out as well. See, it’s clear who actually follows the science, and who disregards the science but brow beats others with phrases like “follow the science.” Other things known to people following the science? Schools are safe to open and masks don’t do shit outdoors because the probability of infection is < 0.1%. Many of us knew this was the latest science long ago, but again, we weren’t allowed to talk about it, lest someone call us the R word (republican).
To not drop everything and study this aggressively is criminally negligent imo. I believe I read that we have finally decided to fund looking into validating what appears to be strong evidence. But it’s 30 years old, dirt cheap, and not patented. And all of this only came to light well after we sunk billions into vaccines. So, there is not exactly a profit motive or a strong appetite to potentially upend all of that. But if people unwilling to be vaccinated are willing to take that instead, it might be the only hope for herd immunity. Because there is no way we will get there by vaccines alone. Too much of the population are refusing the vaccines.
Effectiveness is not the only criteria that experts need to evaluate for treatments. Ivermectin is fairly easy to overdose on, and people started self-treating prophylactically because it was easy to find from veterinary supply chains.
The majority of available Ivermectin also contained inactive ingredients that had no been safety tested on humans, again because of its primary veterinary uses.
WHO looked at these facts and data from 16 trials that yielded “very low certainty" of efficacy before recommending against its use, but leaving the door open for further research suggesting additional trials were needed.
This is exactly what is being put into discussion. This “very low certainty" doesn't stand against the amount of research that is being released on a daily basis.
It's also weird that so many people can selectively blindly trust the WHO on this topic, while at the same time, commenting on how the whole scientific apparatus can be so wrong on a related subject.
Also I'm not buying into this theory that we shouldn't allow an effective treatment, just because someone is supposedly overdosing the veterinary version of the drug. It might be partially true for addicting drugs I suppose, but even in this case, that's why we have doctors and prescriptions.
Ivermectin is at least an order of magnitude safer than paracetamol. There's 30 years of safety data, more than 3.7 billion doses, and on average less than 1 death per year.
In the talk above, the Ivermectin safety profile is specifically discussed here: [1]
"Ivermectin was generally well tolerated, with no indication of associated CNS toxicity for doses up to 10 times the highest FDA-approved dose of 0.2mg/kg." [2]
The only way you can overdose is if you use horse paste, and get the dose wrong by more than an order of magnitude. Even then, it's unlikely to result in hospitalization or death. The only reason people have to use horse paste is because they are unable to safely obtain Ivermectin by other means.
Yeah I don't buy it. You're moving the goalposts. Censorship is when they prohibit information being distributed. It looks like Government Health Agencies are just not believing the evidence and are therefore not recommending it. They're not saying "don't talk about it" they're not saying "don't research it" they're saying "the evidence so far is inconclusive, we don't recommend treating with it"
They literally have policies saying if you're posting anything about Ivermectin, it's misinformation, and it will get removed. How is that not censorship?
You have to be careful though because we've seen medical journals engage in deceptive practices recently around drugs that could potentially treat COVID. For example, the data showing hydroxychloroquine to be harmful to COVID patients was completely made up or non-existent. Unfortunately, medical academia, in some failed attempt to 'stick to the facts', have led themselves to have a lower a priori assumption of correctness.
Yes. Hydroxychloroquine ultimately turned out to be nothing, but the media and journals did a shameful job covering it. The media made it the latest episode of the Trump show with all that entails, and journals published garbage quickly to back them up. The result is that Trumpers would never believe it didn't work, and the #resistance would never believe it did, no matter what the science would ever say.
It's fine to point at the journals as the definers of what smart people should believe, but can't we say that the Lancet sucks for starting the anti-vax movement by publishing a shit paper by Wakefield, and damaged the integrity of science in general during an epidemic by publishing the hydroxychloroquine trash? Can we point out that they started some of our scariest antiscience trends?
There was a disinformation campaign against Hydroxychloroquine as well. In the failed JAMA study, they administered a nearly toxic dose at late stage patients (when there's no viral replication). This is now being investigated [1].
The largest peer-reviewed study on HCQ (29K patients) showed 70% reduction in death with early treatment. [2]
I mean if a benign intervention doesn't actually work and it causes people to avoid a real intervention that is problematic. There's definitely plenty of alternative medicine misinformation out there that makes similar arguments about safety and history.
That said, it is wrong for YouTube to be removing these videos IMO. First of all, who at YouTube reviewed the material? Do they actually have the expertise necessary to filter out fake claims? There are plenty of natural treatments out there that actually can be helpful, and I doubt YouTube hired a doctor familiar with the relevant literature for its fact checking operation.
Second of all, why is YouTube so fixated on removing COVID-related videos? Is this sort of content about possible preventative measures really more harmful than countless videos that exist on YouTube about natural "cures" for cancer?
And really these are just implementation concerns, there's also potentially more fundamental problems with silencing information like this. I haven't read enough on what the OP posted to comment on how real it may be, but even supposing it were false information, deleting the videos entirely may not be a net positive.
> Second of all, why is YouTube so fixated on removing COVID-related videos?
How about lawsuits? People who followed advice on YouTube (or their relatives) could sue YouTube. YouTube already has the technical means to remove video's (e.g. porn), so they will have to defend why they did not do that in this case. There have been a large number of people in the U.S. that died or were infected, so the number of potential litigants is also large.
I've had COVID, and this is why I will not get vaccinated, despite CDC recommendations. It's very creepy how they've buried treatments and promoted experimental vaccines.
I think GPs point is that if you were optimizing for the best health outcomes, you wouldn't demonize promising, or at least benign, non-vaccine treatments. Doing so makes it seem like the vaccine push is optimizing for something else.
Not GP, but I am not until a vaccine is approved by the FDA for non-emergency use. And even then, I think I will wait for more data to come out about the long-term effects of the vaccines.
One of the criteria for FDA Emergency Use Authorization is that there's no adequate, approved, and available alternatives (https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/mcm-...) so if they started looking into alternative treatments it could have jeopardized approval of the vaccines.
You'd hope that if there had been promising candidates for prophylactic/therapeutic treatment involving off-patent/generic drugs that the regulator and the medical establishment would have considered them on their merits, and not systematically squashed them with bad studies and half-truths in favor of top-shelf Big Pharma products. It would be unconscionable for people in these positions of authority to have shown partiality towards the pharmaceutical industry in a matter like this which would have delayed access to treatment and which gives rise to serious concerns about patient safety, especially considering the difference in the amount of medium and long-term safety data that is available about them (months compared to decades).
Facebook's policy page only mentions censoring content suggesting that the virus was "man-made". Did Twitter actually ban users who suggested _only_ that the virus leaked from a lab? I'd be surprised because I follow some fairly big accounts there which have posted about the lab leak theory.
There's a bit of a fuzzy overlap between "man made" and "lab leak".
Specifically, the lab leak theory more or less assumes that the virus was collected from the mine, taken to Wuhan, and some research and experiments were done on it, resulting it some changes. Certainly the lab was doing research; there's an ongoing debate over what they did, who funded it, whether what they did technically qualifies as "gain of function" research, what practical impact the research could reasonably have been predicted to have, etc.
Still, if your theory is that the lab took a bat virus, performed some research on it such as "serial passaging" to determine if it could mutate to become more infectious to humans, the virus does mutate (thus proving the hypothesis), and then a sample of the mutated virus is accidentally leaked...
...that seems like a plausible theory, and it's now showing up in mainstream discussions; eg, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca.... But I could easily imagine that being considered a suggestion the virus was "man-made", and censored.
> Specifically, the lab leak theory more or less assumes that the virus was collected from the mine, taken to Wuhan, and some research and experiments were done on it, resulting it some changes.
I disagree, the lab leak hypothesis is independent from the lab [inadvertently or deliberately] mutating the virus. The lab may have merely possessed the virus, having made only the mistake of transporting the virus from a remote region into the middle of a city and then subsequently losing control of it.
That would help explain how the virus got from the mine to Wuhan; it does not help explain how the virus mutated from a bat virus unable to infect humans to a virus that was extremely good at infecting humans with, so far, no intermediate stages identified.
Much of the problem with the zoonotic explanation is that no evidence of the process has been found. Was a third virus involved? We haven't identified it. Was a third host species involved? We haven't identified one. Were there any half-way variants that were slightly capable of infecting humans, and then mutated further to reach their final form? We haven't identified any. There was some initial speculation about the wet market, but that hasn't panned out. Pangolins were briefly considered as a possible intermediate host, but I think that's also been ruled out.
So if the lab collected the virus, flew it to Wuhan, stored it, and then accidentally leaked it in its original form, we still have no idea what happened next. It's a bat virus, so it infected a local Wuhan bat, and then what? And whatever the theory is, why have we been unable to find any evidence of it so far?
Assuming RaTG13 was indeed the source of COVID-19, the question of "how it got to Wuhan" is, I think, much less interesting than "how did it mutate into COVID-19" (and "why can't we find evidence of that process?"). And I think when people talk about "lab leak" versus "zoonotic", they're generally focused on the latter questions.
I generally agree with you, my guess is the virus was messed with and accidentally got out. However I don't feel comfortable ruling out alternative scenarios, such as:
1) The sample the lab received was from the 'third host' and not from a bat; e.g. a field researcher mailed the lab a slice of pangolin.
2) A guano miner or lab researcher received a massive viral dose and inadvertently became a one-man walking "GoF lab"
> Assuming RaTG13 was indeed the source of COVID-19, the question of "how it got to Wuhan" is, I think, much less interesting than "how did it mutate into COVID-19" (and "why can't we find evidence of that process?").
'Interesting' is subjective, but I think both questions are important. Particularly, the wisdom of locating a lab like this inside a city should probably be called into question. Whether the lab was doing GoF research on this virus prior to outbreak is certainly an important question; arguably the more important of the two. But unless we are dealing with 'zero-sum importance', that does not diminish the importance of figuring out why and how the virus was transported into a city.
> However I don't feel comfortable ruling out alternative scenarios
I haven't suggested we should, not do I think that would be wise. We're in the uncomfortable position of having effectively no evidence in favour of any theory of COVID-19s origin, so we're reduced to trying to imagine which bits of missing evidence are the least likely to have been missed.
It seems true that Wuhan is outside the flight range of the horseshoe bats living in the mine, and that a sample of RaTG13 was brought from the mine to the lab in Wuhan. If RaTG13 was a direct predecessor of COVID-19 (likely), and if the lab in Wuhan was the direct source of the initial infections in Wuhan (hard to estimate), then I think Occam's Razor suggests we have a good enough explanation for how RaTG13 got to Wuhan. It would be a remarkable coincidence if a sample of RaTG13
was in Wuhan to be studied, then RaTG13 independently mutated into an unknown COVID-19 precursor outside of Wuhan, then the precursor was separately brought to Wuhan to be studied, then the precursor leaked and became COVID-19!
...but as ever with this mess, I don't know of a reason we could rule it out. At most we can try and estimate the odds of the lab having a closer precursor than RaTG13 but not realising or, if they realised it, not admitting it, but I'm not sure how to even start evaluating that scenario, so...
and the WHO researchers themselves engage in (and fund) the same type of experiments as the Wuhan lab (and the Wuhan lab itself), and so had very little incentive to investigate or implicate themselves either...
So here's the thing: the more improbable thing about the lab leak hypothesis is that the lab would even have had enough virus, in virion form, to cause even 1 human infection.
Biological materials are hard to grow and store. Very few people have ever been infected from handling corpses from much more pathogenic viruses (i.e. the black death was one of the only significant ones, and that's because it's a bacterium). And that's about 70kg and trillions of bacteria to "maybe" end up contaminated.
In-vitro scale research on viruses has been going on for a long time, in BSL2 facilities (your university bio-labs for students probably met this standard), and people getting infected from much more contagious human-viruses in those settings just doesn't happen.
The scale of difference in quantity between a smear of virus particles on a petridish (pretty much immobilized, and, as we know, at serious risk of being destroyed by the trace UV from fluorescent lighting) and the quantity from an active infection in a human cough is multiple orders of magnitude (also a massive difference in exposure path: COVID spreads principally by going in through mucus membranes as aersolized droplets - dead tissue doesn't produce these, neither do immobilized particles).
No one pushing "lab leak" has ever proposed a mechanism by which it happened - they just assume it can, because they don't work in a biology lab and have no idea about what biological research actually looks like.
> So here's the thing: the more improbable thing about the lab leak hypothesis is that the lab would even have had enough virus, in virion form, to cause even 1 human infection.
I reject that. Lab leaks have been known to occur, with human casualties:
> "After the outbreak of SARS in 2003, labs around the world began studying the virus, which had come perilously close to causing a global pandemic. Since that time, there have been no less than six lab leaks of SARS. The first took place in at the National University of Singapore, where a graduate student contracted the disease from a contaminated sample. This was followed by an incident in Taiwan, when a researcher contracted it, most likely during a botched decontamination of laboratory waste. Then several leaks took place at China’s National Institute of Virology. In one case, a researcher passed the infection to her mother, who died of SARS. In each case, human error, most likely exacerbated by inadequate safety protocols, accounted for the leaks."
> By 1960, hundreds of American scientists and technicians had been hospitalized, victims of the diseases they were trying to weaponize. Charles Armstrong, of the National Institutes of Health, one of the consulting founders of the American germ-warfare program, investigated Q fever three times, and all three times, scientists and staffers got sick. In the anthrax pilot plant at Camp Detrick, Maryland, in 1951, a microbiologist, attempting to perfect the “foaming process” of high-volume production, developed a fever and died. In 1964, veterinary worker Albert Nickel fell ill after being bitten by a lab animal. His wife wasn’t told that he had Machupo virus, or Bolivian hemorrhagic fever. “I watched him die through a little window to his quarantine room at the Detrick infirmary,” she said.
> In 1977, a worldwide epidemic of influenza A began in Russia and China; it was eventually traced to a sample of an American strain of flu preserved in a laboratory freezer since 1950. In 1978, a hybrid strain of smallpox killed a medical photographer at a lab in Birmingham, England; in 2007, live foot-and-mouth disease leaked from a faulty drainpipe at the Institute for Animal Health in Surrey. In the U.S., “more than 1,100 laboratory incidents involving bacteria, viruses and toxins that pose significant or bioterror risks to people and agriculture were reported to federal regulators during 2008 through 2012,” reported USA Today in an exposé published in 2014.
In 2015, the Department of Defense discovered that workers at a germ-warfare testing center in Utah had mistakenly sent close to 200 shipments of live anthrax to laboratories throughout the United States and also to Australia, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and several other countries over the past 12 years. In 2019, laboratories at Fort Detrick — where “defensive” research involves the creation of potential pathogens to defend against — were shut down for several months by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for “breaches of containment.” They reopened in December 2019.
Humans make mistakes. Accidents happen. And even at the most secure labs in the US, sometimes people die. Yes, we (hopefully) learn from our mistakes; a fatal accident in the 50s or 60s doesn't mean these things still happen today. Maybe (hopefully!) all those recent breaches and safety incidents were relatively minor. Perhaps China is much better about such things than other nations. And even if mistakes can happen that doesn't mean a mistake happened here, in this instance!
But if your prior is just "BSL-2 and higher labs are safe, they would never have a containment failure" I think you may want to re-evaluate it.
Your first example there is literally an attempt to mass produce live virus for biological weapons, with human infectious viruses. As are most of your examples. This all changes if the literal goal of research is "mass produce liters of viable virus".
But viral research in general doesn't do that, because it's a huge hazard, and unnecessary (and expensive, labor intensive etc.)
What I am drawing contention on is what physically would have to happen for a lab leak to occur (and the other side problem: if it's a natural borne virus already capable of human infectivity...then it was already in the wild).
Take the 1977 issue: the suspicion is not that it was an accident with a preserved sample. The suspicion is that the Russians were actively growing up the virus (a human infectious virus) - for some type of work, probably a vaccine trial.
So we've got two basic problems: why would the Wuhan lab be growing up large quantities of this specific virus (and is there evidence they were?)...and if it was already human infectious though, why is it more likely it escaped the lab, when such a thing would already have to be in the wild to have been recovered?
There'd be no reason, having discovered COVID-19, to start growing up the virus before it had been sequenced. And there'd be no reason, without already knowing what it does, to not publish a paper describing the act of isolating and sequencing a new coronavirus, which is the type of research the Wuhan lab put out all the time. Researcher's operate on publish or perish, and Chinese researchers publish everything they can.
Those are good questions, but I think the link I provided gives some decent potential answers.
I don't know, and I'm not asserting, that any of this is true. But given what is known about the types of research being done, this doesn't seem like something we can rule out either.
For one example, the article quotes Shi Zhengli, a lab director at the Wuhan Virology Institute, who had been doing research on RaTG13, and who upon realising COVID-19 was related to RaTG13 was immediately was concerned it had leaked from her lab. According to the article, she lost sleep over this, and was enormously relieved when she could prove that the outbreak in Wuhan was not any strain that the lab had a record of storing.
I find it surprising that you are so much more convinced than a lab director of the lab in question that no such leak was possible. To be sure, perhaps she was suffering from an excess of caution...but if she found the thought plausible enough that she lost sleep over it, perhaps we, vastly further away and with much less information, should not rule the risk out entirely?
In any case, if you feel comfortable, based on your knowledge, concluding that you can rule out the lab leak hypothesis, that's great, but it does seem to put you at odds with basically every expert I've seen quoted so far.
So the director of one lab, hearing about COVID-19, apparently went "oh shit, that could have come from MY lab!" Later, she publicly announced that it's fine, it didn't come from her lab after all, then the lab was shut down, all records suppressed, and China has prevented any independent investigation.
Even if we take this at face value, and the denials were fully truthful, this tells us that:
1) it didn't leak in that form from that specific lab (of the several operating at the Virology Institute), assuming they had good record keeping. But it might have leaked from a different lab, or it might have leaked from her lab and then mutated prior to being discovered. (And, while it might seem unlikely that it mutated without any trace of intermediate forms being found, that's the exact assumption the zoonotic theory already requires...)
2) Someone in a position to know believed that a leak was plausible based on her knowledge of the types of research being performed, the quantities of material they had on hand, the safety protocols they were following, etc.
I suppose I just find that less reassuring than you do. :)
> Biological materials are hard to grow and store.
In general, many diseases are highly species specific and/or affect only certain cell types. When you don't have a suitable cell line, the only real option is to keep live hosts. But these hosts could cross-contaminate other species/cell lines within the lab facility.
Bat physiology is very different from most other mammals.
If you want to study viruses in bats, it makes sense to use real animals, because you can be certain that the virus replicates in vivo, but it can be difficult to find a good in vitro environment.
The whole purpose of the lab was to grow and study these viruses, and to promote their growth in order to study how they might grow. Hard to understand how they would not have had enough virus, as you say.
Indeed, a lab leak includes all of these possible priors of how the virus ended up in the lab in the first place.
But the only serious contender for the prior hypothesis is that the researchers produced a highly infectious chimeric coronavirus through gain-of-function/serial passage.
At least one researcher who has worked with the head of the Wuhan lab has accused her of shoddy adherence to safety practices, so it's also quite possible that simple negligence led to cross-contamination and subsequently to human exposure.
It would certainly explain how the predecessor candidates simultaneously acquired all of the necessary mutations: all of the most genetically similar coronaviruses were all being studied in the lab; if precautions were not taken to avoid cross-contamination then they could picked up the mutations in a relatively benign environment without external stressors. (One of the initial reasons given for the man-made theory was due to the fact that COVID19 was unlikely to arise naturally in the wild because any combination of mutations among the predecessor strains short of the entire package of mutations that ended up in COVID19 would have resulted in a strain less able to reproduce than existing competing strains.)
Similarly, lax attention to safety practices would also explain why the first known cluster of COVID19 cases occurred among Wuhan lab workers.
while you are correct that lab-leak is "theoretically" a distinct hypothesis, in this specific case the apparent splicing of pangolin virus parts together with bat virus parts is a highly suggestive smoking gun for man-made, especially when you consider that this lab does splicing experiments
From what I understand, this lab and those like it likely have/had a large backlog of samples they had received from field researchers but had not yet had an opportunity to identify, sequence, or otherwise mess around with. A procedural error in handling a sample in that backlog could have occurred, at least in theory.
What’s the difference? I suppose it is possible that the Wuhan bat hunters found this virus occurring naturally and just, you know, kept it around without telling anyone...
There is a huge difference! For one, suggesting it was man-made lends credibility to the conspiracy theory crowd ("plandemic", "they manufactured it to enslave you", etc), which is probably why the press over-indexed on debunking it. Also, it could imply that there was some intent behind it appearing when and where it did, when there may have been none (Hanlon's razor applies until a proof to the contrary appears). My understanding was that the theory that the virus was man-made was debunked, but I have not been paying much attention to what was happening to the stories saying it may have been an accidental leak from a lab, and given China's record, I wouldn't be too surprised to learn that there was research happening on it, it got out, and that was then covered up.
If the virus was man-made, then its release was either accidental or deliberate. Both of these possibilites need to be allowed until disproven. If it was deliberate, then why?
This seems obvious. I don't think it was deliberate. But whether deliberate or not, the virus achieved many policy goals for the ccp.
Firstly it got rid of Trump who was before covid in charge of one of the best economies in the USA and would have had an easy path to reelection. The virus was a black swan event that caused that to go away and trump.to make several mistakes. It also got joe biden elected which we know the CCP preferred.
Secondly, it embarrassed america on the world stage while china came away initially looking very good. China's centralized government came out looking better than the chaotic american way. This helps China's foreign investment image. Wouldn't you rather do business with stable countries?
Finally, of all countries, china had the best economic outcome. It's economy was never totally shut. They continued to profit from masks and other PPE.
Basically, the virus was a clear win for the ccp.
Personally my belief is that whether the virus is natural, a leak, or a man made weapon, once it was out, the ccp clearly weaponized the pandemic to effectively achieve several policy goals.
> Firstly it got rid of Trump who was before covid in charge of one of the best economies in the USA and would have had an easy path to reelection. The virus was a black swan event that caused that to go away and trump.to make several mistakes. It also got joe biden elected which we know the CCP preferred.
This sounds super far fetched. When Covid began to spread the democratic candidate wasn't chosen yet and this theory completely relies on the Trump administration to completely screw up in the eyes of the public. I don't have a high opinion of Trump, but the US government is a lot larger than him.
And then if they're caught it turns the entire planet against them. It sounds like a massive risk just to get rid of a somewhat annoying president 4 years early, it's not like he was threatening war or anything like that.
There’s only a spec of difference. I don’t know anyone suggesting that the lab leak was of a natural origin. The theory is that the lab created the virus and it leaked.
I think there’s some nuance here. The virus could have a perfectly natural origin in bats, but not be able to infect humans in its original form. There are many ways the virus could have come to infect humans, such as by manipulating it directly, via gain of function research, or even just by a random mutation that managed to infect a lab worker (seems unlikely since it’s alleged there may have needed to be an intermediate species). Whether you could consider the virus “lab created” or “man-made” at that point is maybe a matter of debate. Even the Guardian article on Facebook’s policy changes seemed to conflate these scenarios, so I’m not entirely sure what the changes were.
But they’re all a far cry from the more extreme narrative of “this was deliberately engineered to infect humans and/or as a bioweapon”, which is not what is being suggested here (nor, it seems, was that ever what Tom Cotton suggested).
I know I got downvotes already but I guess that’s what I meant, that in a lab setting human researchers would have been manipulating the virus. I meant that I don’t think anyone is saying that researchers captured a novel COVID variant in nature and just held it in a lab until it leaked.
If the lab theory holds any water, it’s almost certain that humans were manipulating the virus in some form.
That’s why I don’t see much of a distinction between a lab leak theory and a human-made or human-manipulated virus.
I think there's a genuine spectrum between man-made bio-weapon (not very believable IMO), through gain of function research (I've read enough that - if true - the RNA evidence suggests that it probably wasn't this), through to leak from animal studies.
Gain of function, if it isn't ruled out by RNA or other approaches, isn't quite man-made and is at least somewhat plausible. Gain of function research on the flu is (as I understand it) how the flu vaccine is created ahead of the season.
Evans NG, Lipsitch M, Levinson M
The ethics of biosafety considerations in gain-of-function research resulting in the creation of potential pandemic pathogens
Journal of Medical Ethics 2015;41:901-908.
This paper proposes an ethical framework for evaluating biosafety risks of gain-of-function (GOF) experiments that create novel strains of influenza expected to be virulent and transmissible in humans, so-called potential pandemic pathogens (PPPs). Such research raises ethical concerns because of the risk that accidental release from a laboratory could lead to extensive or even global spread of a virulent pathogen.
Some techniques of manipulating the virus would leave "fingerprints". Others would not. My understanding is that the sweeping assertions that COVID-19 would show clear signs of being manipulated have been largely debunked. Many ultimately traced back to a letter written by a group of virologists led by Kristian Andersen and published in Nature, but all that letter did was assert that some techniques (not all!) were unlikely (but even then, not impossible).
I'm unaware of any reputable experts who are willing to assert that manipulation via, eg, serial passaging, can be ruled out. The closest you'll get is assertions that a natural zoonotic origin is, in their estimation, more likely.
I'm generally in favour of the actions taken against misinformation but this situation surprises me. Lab leak always seemed plausible and non-crazy even if you think the odds are against it.
I don't envy the task of making a call on any of this stuff.
If we accept that taking action against misinformation is good, then this sort of mistake will inevitably happen.
If you're in favor of taking action against misinformation, then you should be willing to accept this situation as an acceptable failure. I'm not willing to accept that.
I believe that censorship is more harmful than misinformation.
Censorship is a bottom down initiative. It requires a few bad actors or 'mistakes' to completely change the information landscape. Misinformation is bottom up. It still needs to compete with a whole bunch of other ideas and it requires far more effort to spread. You also don't create a pretence that all available information is correct.
Censorship carries far larger risks, with small short term gains. It's like picking pennies in front of steamroller.
Except this in an example of the exact opposite of what you describe. As the misinformation was coming from the top and the censorship requests were coming from the bottom.
The reason this question became politicized and labelled as misinformation is that politicians started spreading this rumor for purely political purposes rather than based on scientific evidence. It is hard to imagine misinformation being more top down than senators, cabinet members, and even the President spreading it. The fact they may end up being right in the end doesn't mean they were acting in good faith at the time.
The reason this was censored was because there was bottom up support for it to be censored. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have repeatedly shown that their preference is for less moderation rather than more. Moderation costs them money and they don't want to spend money. The reason they increase moderation is because their users demand it.
> Misinformation is bottom up. It still needs to compete with a whole bunch of other ideas and it requires far more effort to spread
Lmao no, the truth needs effort to spread. Because the truth is usually boring and lame.
Lies, misinformation, conspiracy theories are juicy. They make the reader feel smart - either by confirming their biases, or giving them the feeling of being "in" on something that's not widely known. People love being the first to pass on some hot goss to their group.
Except it was never misinformation. It's always been not only plausible, but the null hypothesis given the location of the lab, the nature of research there, and the early cases along the train line.
When Jack banned zerohedge for their article, there were other reasons than "misinformation". Only he and his masters know those reasons.
This sort of illustrates the problem here. It was plausible to you but what you think doesn't matter if the powers that be decide it's misinformation. You can't just come by after the fact and say "it was always obviously not misinformation" to dismiss the fact that anti-misinformation controls failed here, in a way that ultimately suppressed reasonable speech.
My opinion: in the grand scheme of things this comes down to just letting people express things online, even if they are outlandish or ridiculous or whatever. Letting people speak their mind without being censored even when I don't agree with them ensures that I get to speak my mind without getting censored when I'm in the minority, which is a right I value.
The null hypothesis in this case is certainly animal origin. The idea of a null hypothesis is to identify what the data would look like if they are purely due to chance, if there's no intervening effect to be discovered.
In fact this is part of what makes the lab leak hypothesis weak: it'll be difficult to rule out the null hypothesis without fairly direct evidence of a lab leak, and the lab leak has low probability for many reasons, not least of which is that it's a low probability occurrence in general.
The whole idea is just an excuse for people to larp as CIA analysts.
Exactly, the misinformation argument is a red herring. The evidence for the lab leak theory was assembled and publicly available by February of last year. It has not changed in the intervening 15 months. The only explanation I can come up with is TDS—otherwise intelligent people (including some of my close friends) who simply could not consider an idea supported by Trump to be credible. Didn’t matter how clear and convincing the evidence was, they just assumed that it must be faulty and untrustworthy.
It's really hard to view this as suppressing scientific inquiry. Scientists don't use public Facebook posts to collaborate on their research, nor to share their final results with the rest of the scientific community. It's also very hard to picture social media giants ever blocking users from posting anything that comes from peer-reviewed published science.
> If you're in favor of taking action against misinformation, then you should be willing to accept this situation as an acceptable failure.
We can believe taking action against misinformation is a generally good principle while still believing that both our definition of "misinformation" and the kinds of actions we take may need to be improved.
I disagree. The market and political forces are too strong, the "misinformation" umbrella will always expand to fit the needs of the wealthy and powerful.
When the stakes are high, exactly the time when you need radical honesty, the benefits of censoring information are also high.
Some might say, "hasn't this always been the case?" And you'd be correct. The difference today is that it is now a fashionable political position to cheer for censorship of any controversial ideas. This prevailing attitude combined with centralization of the public square (social media) is a dangerous combination, and we will continue to pay the price of this well into the future.
The trust in traditional institutions is plummeting, as it should for anyone who has witnessed their actions the past year.
I still remember the "hug a Chinese person" campaign in Italy.
You still have to be willing to accept that whatever actions you take against misinformation will occasionally be taken against things that are actually true.
That also means that over time, the credibility of the entities that flag 'misinformation' will inevitably erode: as more people are exposed to things they know, perhaps first-hand, are true, but are flagged as 'misinformation'.
Yeah this is how I came to be more skeptical of MSM and Gov't authorities. I think by the time one hits ~30-40 most people have probably been through enough news cycles and been the subject of or close enough to some newsworthy event to have an inside look of the accuracy/fairness of the process and it's probably why older people tend to be more conservative cynical.
The current situation was justified with examples like yours.
A year ago, most people in favor of banning misinformation would have classed the lab leak hypothesis in the same obviously-false bucket with your examples.
This is a good example of why opponents to actions against misinformation oppose it. Nobody should make these calls because the wrong call will be made eventually, and the power to silently mediate and manipulate discourse is very tempting.
There were even videos of chinese scientists trying to get the word out about the virus and the lab leak liklihood. There was plenty of evidence, if you knew where to look.
'Evidence' is tangential to the decision making behind misinformation tags.
"Evidence" is not a person, and can't make decisions. Decisions are made by people, who we hope are informed by evidence. Who are these people and how are they chosen? What mechanisms exist to evaluate their effectiveness and recall them when they fail? These questions are currently being answered by American corporations, which is not confidence inspiring.
>Decisions are made by people, who we hope are informed by evidence.
That hope is lost. It's really easy to get overwhelmed in how doomed we seemed to be because of it. People are believing things in spite of evidence, and are absolutely rooted in that belief to society's detrement. How much further could be be if beliefs were no longer held onto once evidence were present that shows that belief to just not be correct? Sadly, I don't think we will ever know.
Some people will believe stupid things no matter the evidence until the day they die. I don't consider this such a severe problem as to warrant putting some people in charge of what others should believe. Just the contrary in fact...
Speculation and conjecture is not always evident, but is many times useful in determining the evidence. But this type of discussion was axed from many forums as "misinformation".
If your pursuing a misinformation campaign it does make since to occasionally publish some facts. That way people can wring their hands if they should ban you or not, and so your supporters have something to say that you were right about.
I'm not sure whether it's plausible to non-experts like you or me is a valuable way to categorize it. But the reason to be cautious about it is the potential for violence. Both at an individual level against people perceived as Asian and at a global level of a hot war. A good example here is after 9/11. The US had a rash of violence against people who people thought looked Muslim, like the Sikh gas station owner Balbir Singh Sodhi [1]. We ended up invading not just Afghanistan but Iraq and we still haven't brought all the troops home.
You are making very very wrong suggestion now. Because some people can link Chinese government to all Asians, so we can't criticize the Chinese government? Because Chinese government = Chinese people = Chinese Americans = Asian Americans?
I think this kind of automatic linking Chinese government to Chinese / Asian Americans is itself racist.
What you are suggesting is implicitly accepting this racist idea.
To stand against this kind of racist idea, what we should do is to explicitly separate the Chinese government from Chinese people, from Chinese Americans. We should directly call out Xi Jingping the dictator and CCP the dictatorial regime, instead of implying Xi Jingping and CCP own Chinese people and somehow also own Chinese / Asian Americans.
We can criticize the Chinese government. But if we do we should have facts, not wild speculations.
I agree automatically linking Asian-looking people to the actions of China's government is racist. And there are a lot of racists out there. Given the ongoing spike in anti-Asian hate crimes [1] and online anti-Asian hate tied specifically to coronavirus [2] I think we should be unusually careful about excited speculation.
I don't understand your logic. Are you saying if the lab leak theory is proved to be true, then the racists turn out to be more justified racists? The rightful racists? If the lab leak theory is proved to be false, then the racists turn out to be less justified racists? The wrongful racists?
How does criticizing the Chinese government has anything to do with racism? Because we can't give racists ideas to be racists, so we should restrict ourselves in criticizing the authoritarian (actually also racist) regime? Your logic is strangely twisted.
I am not saying any of those things. I am saying that because fact-free speculation about Chinese responsibility for something many were already calling the "china virus" could drive mob violence against Asians, we should be especially careful about it.
The first article you linked states that between 2019-2020 hate crimes against Asians increased dramatically in New York and Los Angeles: from 3 to 28 in the former and from 7 to 15 in the latter.
I think that characterizing this fact as an “ongoing spike in anti-Asian hate crimes” is a breathtakingly broad generalization.
Ok? I don't think it's my job to provide internet randos with infinite links until they're satisfied. If you want more information, feel free to Google. But along the way try to notice whether you proof standard is this high for everything you read, or just when somebody points out racism in action.
> Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory.
Can we define/refine the concept of "lab-leak theory" a bit? Because some of the stuff floating around a year ago was a bit unhinged from reality:
> You’ve probably heard the rumor: The new coronavirus is a bioweapon. Some malicious country—perhaps the United States, maybe China, depending on who’s talking or tweeting—purposefully unleashed the virus that causes Covid-19 on the world.
> Ebright helped The Washington Post debunk a claim that the COVID-19 outbreak can somehow be tied to bioweapons activity, a conspiracy theory that’s been promoted or endorsed by the likes of US Sen. Tom Cotton, Iran’s supreme leader, and others.
> But Ebright thinks that it is possible the COVID-19 pandemic started as an accidental release from a laboratory such as one of the two in Wuhan that are known to have been studying bat coronaviruses.
"In the Shadow of Biological Warfare: Conspiracy Theories on the Origins of COVID-19 and Enhancing Global Governance of Biosafety as a Matter of Urgency":
> Two theories on the origins of COVID-19 have been widely circulating in China and the West respectively, one blaming the United States and the other a highest-level biocontainment laboratory in Wuhan, the initial epicentre of the pandemic. Both theories make claims of biological warfare attempts. According to the available scientific evidence, these claims are groundless.
This is classic “nurse vs. feminist nurse” cognitive distortion. Whether the virus was developed as a bio weapon, or simply as a product of well-intentioned gain-of-function research, is irrelevant to the factual basis of whether or not it escaped from the lab. We don’t need to establish how and why it was created, only that it was, in order to assess the likelihood of lab release as a root cause of the pandemic.
That's nice in theory, but a couple of things. First of all, there was a complete lack of actual evidence that there was a lab leak (this is also true of the Wuhan market hypothesis, it was all quite circumstantial) but we have seen similar viruses arise naturally in the past so our priors would favor the market hypothesis over the lab leak. Second, the lab leak hypothesis and the intent of the virus were tightly entangled in the original reports, especially from the US Administration, that is that China created the virus to harm the US. Third, intent absolutely matters. If this is a bio-weapon that was designed to be used in an attack, then the consequences of such actions are vastly different then if this was a naturally occurring virus that was collected in bats that happened jump to a human host and escaped the lab.
While I increasingly believe that the lab leak hypothesis may be the true origin, my priors still favor a natural jump at this point.
These are also not the only two possible scenarios, just demonstrating that there are different consequences for different intentions, it is literally why the US Penal code has Murder (1,2,...) and Manslaughter (...) as well as Self-Defense protections built into it.
Exactly what many were warning about with big tech censorship and getting vilified for it. But it's good if it fails quickly and conclusively, instead of taking years to get to that point.
Google have been manipulating search results for years, putting their fingers on the scale both in terms of censorship and boosting of results.
When you control weights behind search results and news articles, you quite literally control the flow of information.
Google is an actively malicious company, and this was not done with good intentions. Anti-science rhetoric by Dr Fauci, the WHO and the mainstream media establishment was never based on any evidence other than politicized opinion.
Dr Fauci was vehemently against closing the border with China in January 2020. He was vehemently against masks. He was vehemently against lab leak theory (calling it "impossible"). He falsely claimed the Wuhan Institute of Virology was not doing gain-of-function research.
These are malicious acts which have a real cost. The cost is human life. How many additional people died on the back of his anti-mask rhetoric in March?
Remember, the discussion of the lab leak theory is strongly correlated with a rise in hate crimes against Asian-Americans. There were also lots of links made between the lab leak theory and needing to tighten immigration policies to keep out "undesirables".
> Remember, the discussion of the lab leak theory is strongly correlated with a rise in hate crimes against Asian-Americans
By black people, the group least likely to be part of the party whose leader's immigration policy you decry, and who have always had anti-asian sentiment after the LA riots.
Are we sure that was the lab leak theory, and not just the emergence of a novel pandemic disease in China? The kind of people who attack random Asians in the street don't need a lab leak to justify it: they just need the fact that the virus spread outward from Wuhan.
How many hate crimes have been committed? There have been 3.5 million COVID-19 deaths officially. Sorry but the truth is more important. Hate crimes are already illegal.
The theory that "SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the Wuhan lab" overlaps some with the theory that "SARS-CoV-2 was man-made", but they're not the same thing. According to the article Facebook's policy change is towards posts saying "SARS-CoV-2 was man-made". Did Facebook's policy ban posts which supported the "lab leak" theory but didn't claim the virus was "man-made"?
It's not clear to me what you mean by "they don't overlap at all". If I create a truth table for the two binary possibilities of 'leaked?' and 'created?', I get something like this:
Created, Leaked: It was created in a lab, and accidentally got out.
Not Created, Leaked: It was being studied in a lab, and accidentally got out.
Created, Not Leaked: It was created in a lab and deliberately released (the biowarfare hypothesis.)
Not Created, Not Leaked: The lab had nothing to do with it at all (the wet market hypothesis.)
Created/leaked are independent, but since both or either could be true or false, there seems to be 'overlap.'
Twitter users got banned in early February 2020 because they were sharing images and videos from locked-down Wuhan that were deemed as inappropriate.
I know that my main information source on the virus back at the time was a Chinese lady expat living in the States who was writing for Epoch Times, not the most credible source generally speaking but on this she was ahead of the MSM by at least a day, that is when the MSM wasn’t ignoring what was happening in China completely.
Note: The documentation isn’t even new... all those people banned and censored via Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc [1], have been saying this the entire time. Its kind of amazing to watch both realities (left wing media va alternative media) collide. Gives me hope to be honest.
Also a reminder that "right wing" is such a wonderful term. Mention it, and all the discussion that you don't like can be easily shrugged off, or better, attacked.
Really, why is it so important that we need to pitch left against right? Why can we establish facts, carry out reasoning, and be explicit about interpretation vs conclusion?
How many countries can thrive when all that matters is partisanship or moralizing everything? Maybe Americans should learn a little history about Ming dynasty: The Tung-lin-tang turned everything into evil vs. good, to the point that the government couldn't get anything done and the ruling class couldn't get any fact straight. A dynasty with hundreds of millions of people was conquered by a barbarous tribe, and the entire nation became the laugh stock of the world in merely 150 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macartney_Embassy).
By the way, Tung-lin-tang were experts of mind reading. Their most effective method of attacking their political opponent is to attack their motive. To them, narrative was all that matters.
This is true of almost all the social media "censorship" by the way. They have multiple governments either directly passing laws requiring content removal, or pressuring them to remove more.
Facebook, Twitter, and much of the news media have been in the service of CCP as part of an influence operation and suppression of dissent.
There needs to be an investigation. The people involved in these decisions need to be put under oath and testify how they came to the decision to ban users. Emails and messages should be subpoenaed to see if there was illegal coordination across services. There needs to be an complete investigation if any of the people involved were being influenced by or were agents of the CCP.
Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory. Youtube accounts also got demontized/banned.
Let's call it for what it is - employees of Facebook and Twitter and Google were complicit in a coverup of malfeasance that cost hundreds of thousands of lives if not more. Named individuals set these policies and put them into action - they need to be exposed and held accountable.
It's one more example of how yesterday's "misinformation" can become tomorrow's "information", and how dangerous it is for sites to censor entire conversations because they (or their so-called 'fact checkers') believe in one side of a narrative.
Will there be apologies given to the people banned, isolated from participating in socialization during a pandemic where online communication was a vital tool for human connection?
Have you got a link to examples? I’m wondering if they weren’t also saying that China deliberately leaked the virus.
Saying “it is possible but very unlikely that the virus leaked from a Wuhan lab” is talking about the lab-leak theory. Saying “the virus was cooked up and leaked from a Wuhan lab to hurt Trump’s re-election chances” is also talking about the lab-leak theory.
A Infamous case was Twitter baning Zerohedge because of it.
And all that Zerohedge did was point out a lot of public documents, nothing private, and no bioweapon theory. (Twitter claimed Zerohedge had doxxed the scientist, but Zerohedge only had shown the official lab website and documents from it).
> The article, posted under the pseudonym "Tyler Durden" (the fictional character played by Brad Pitt in the movie "Fight Club"), was titled "Is This Man Behind The Global Coronavirus Pandemic?" It included a photograph of a scientist at Wuhan's Institute of Virology and suggested that anyone curious about the epidemic might want to pay him "a visit."
Thanks for calling that out. This is the only example I've been offered and it's exactly the kind of "talking about the lab-leak theory" that I suspected was less innocent than posed by OP.
That quote of paying “a visit” makes the Zero Hedge article sound more sinister than it actually is. The full sentence from Zero Hedge’s article is: “Something tells us, if anyone wants to find out what really caused the coronavirus pandemic that has infected thousands of people in China and around the globe, they should probably pay Dr. Peng a visit.”
I don’t see anything wrong with that statement. Peng was the publicly listed face of this research lab at WIV, and his name, photo, and contact info were openly displayed on the website as public facing content.
Zero Hedge was banned because the possibility of a lab leak was politicized by those on the left, including tech companies who operate social media platforms, and they unfairly censored and banned this content because they were biased against Trump/Republicans to a point where legitimate speculation was disallowed.
> A little-noticed study was released in early July 2020 by a group of Chinese researchers in Beijing, including several affiliated with the Academy of Military Medical Science. These scientists said they had created a new model for studying SARS-CoV-2 by creating mice with human-like lung characteristics by using the CRISPR gene-editing technology to give the mice lung cells with the human ACE2 receptor — the cell receptor that allowed coronaviruses to so easily infect human lungs.
The fact remains that this type of speculation about bioweapons should never have been banned. Doing so granted the CCP a huge relief from accountability and transparency, one we may never be able to correct for with all the time that has passed.
Zerohedge getting banned from Twitter for publishing an expose of the Wuhan Lab which is pretty close to what is acknowledged as a probable story these days is the most high profile example.
No? Censor sources that have proven time and time again to provide verifiably false information. Zerohedge and Infowars specifically fit into that bucket and it's completely reasonable to shine a light on their lack of trustworthiness.
A lot of folks are saying, "let the people decide what is false!" Well, here's the thing: People are really mind-numbingly stupid. Spend some time using a roundabout in the USA and you'll learn real fast that the average person can't be trusted to be left to their own devices.
To quote Tolstoy: "The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."
Methinks it's all just some form of propaganda, or another, camouflaged as crappy infotainment. So if you are into being brainwashed, you could also don your sunglasses, and have at least some fun, skimming between the lines.
And the amount of evidence in both cases is equal right now - slim and circumstantial. Just because one is political doesn't make it more worthy of censorship if you're removing content based on "misinformation." There's no real evidence underlying either statement.
Thanks for speaking this out loud. I've been feeling the same thing. What's weird is I've been having identical conversations with people from multiple US states and several European countries. There used to be an enormous gap between people from different areas and countries, each existing in their own cultural bubble. Now that's changed, and I'm not talking about "closer" I'm talking "the exact same."
Our opinions have always been easily shaped by the media, mass entertainment and political campaigning. But lately it seems like there's less an ocean of information and more like a small puddle we're all trying to drink from at once. At the same time, the Overton Window seems to be slamming shut.
I have been suspecting this has all been a dress rehearsal for the societal changes that are coming soon to address climate change, a sort of "powering up" of the collective consciousness.
I agree and have experienced what you wrote, except I have no idea what your last paragraph means. What are you referring to / talking about? It feels like maybe an example of the phenomenon we're talking about lol
What I mean is to really address climate change all 8 billion of us are going to have to come together and make huge changes to our lives and each make personal sacrifices for the greater good. There will be new government mandates and it will affect how we live and work. There will be a huge social pressure to conform and a huge backlash. But we will have no choice because our environment will have changed to be more dangerous to our survival. Sounds a bit like the last year, doesn't it?
Please take all that with a grain of salt everyone:
comments like this is for me a good signal that this whole climate change thing is just a front for something else.
Please note: I have no shares in fossil companies, I work for railway companies, I buy my stuff used and reuse and sort waste so much my wife gets crazy.
So I'm almost there already but for other reasons: I belive in ecology. Not wasting wildlife areas. Not polluting.
Climate? Anthropogenic changes?
Look at a globe. Put your fingers at the oil fields. Then think that all CO2 from these fields has to be spread out thin across the whole rest of the globe.
Or do something else: try to ask someone about some real numbers. I've been interested in those numbers.
I never get any numbers. I get dismissed rudely for using the "Just Asking Questions" tactic, a tactic I didn't know until I was told that I used it.
The only number I get is 2500 infallible scientists and as far as I now know a fair number of them weren't scientists but authors etc.
Society definitely needs to learn the internet is not the end all and be all. Take it with a large grain of salt unless you’re literally reading peer reviewed articles from reputable sources. Or it’s like a cooking recipe that you can verify for yourself and the stakes of being wrong are low. Even news should only be taken as a springboard for what’s going on.
There used to be a lot of media, with a lot of different motivations. Now there are only a couple of major companies running most of it, and a small number of sources that everyone else rewrites.
I might believe that more if all the people I know IRL who talk about being afraid of being fired/cancelled/whatever weren't also the exact same people shitting out talking point after talking point from the exact same news sources with no critical thought whatsoever.
People stopped reading the source material, and started just parroting the talking points. It's even gotten to the point where people are even convinced the talking points are the source material.
My shit test for "is this article likely a bunch of FUD or just outright BS" is if they actually link to the source material. If they don't, I usually continue reading it but make a mental note that they're likely pushing some specific version of the event or facts in question.
It’s challenging to do this without being swayed— particularly if the writer is a good rhetorician. Listening to propaganda over and over again, even while knowing that it is propaganda, tends to influence your opinions. I don’t know what the solution to that is. But it does feel like reading the news requires a mental rigor that is both rare and exhausting.
Someone recommended that I supplement my news reading with newsprint from 20 years ago, just to get perspective on what matters and what doesn’t, and on how full of crap most of it is.
Genuine question: were people ever reading the source material? Seems like a dubious claim that folks of yesteryear read deeply into original sources. Most people read headlines and attention grabbing quotes and this was just as true 100 years ago. I recently read about the Russian revolution and it was similar to today.
100 years ago an appreciable portion of people were reading from the western canon during their free time. Today, it's joe rogan. Just compare the first televised presidential debate versus the most recent one, and see just how far the bar has fallen in terms of the substance of public discourse from not even 100 years ago to today.
There's very little real reporting. Most of it is regurgitation of one source article for any given story. Very often that source article is fabricated for a purpose.
"Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation." The Machine Stops, page 18
Absolutely. Discussion with friends about the goings ons of the world frequently just turns into taking turns regurgitating what we can recall from NPR and NYT's The Daily.
It's ironic to even call those experiences discussions when no new ideas are exchanged. It's just people of the same worldview taking turns chanting verses of their creed. Nothing learned nor imparted.
Totally. Here's the thing: 95% of the time I see someone argue what you're arguing online, it's from someone who only believes completely false news sources (rather than biased).
It's insane to me that anyone on this site is even asking this. What's next: Should I be led to believe those little ads at the bottom aren't scams? The ones that say something like, "SHOCKING! Dentists in <your area> don't want you to know this trick that could save you thousands." Maybe the guy trying to sell me speakers from his van really is a trustworthy guy. I just got a call from someone saying my laptop is infected with malware and needs $400 wired to India to fix. I can't prove definitively he's lying, so I guess I should consider him a valuable resource.
Just go look at Infowars or Zerohedge for 5 minutes. I'm not sure what to tell you, if you come out of that thinking that they're not trying to take advantage of suckers.
It was a rhetorical question, but since you tried to earnestly answer it I’ll bite.
If you read Matt Levine’s Bloomberg column (I highly recommend it) then you’ll eventually encounter a point he repeatedly makes about institutional investing: the best opportunities are always right at the edge of comfortable. Hidden gems tend to hang out in the same neighborhoods as outright frauds, metaphorically speaking.
I check ZeroHedge daily, not because I “trust” it as a news source, but in accordance with the principle I alluded to above: the really good stuff is probably going to be hidden among outright conspiracy theories and psyops. Most of the crap on ZH is just crossposts from various blogs anyway so it’s pretty easy to filter through it.
”Part-time Portlander here! You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Please stop basing your worldview on Infowars talking points.”
I’ve obviously never seen anything produced by infowars and this was a dismissive epithet, doing exactly the problem described here. You’re one of them. And my point you were responding to was objectively true.
Isn't that how it's always been. People just regurgitate the media they consume. It used to be sermons at church. Then it moved to print, radio and tv. Now it expanded to the internet/social media. Whether we like it or not, we've all been programmed by the media that we consume.
"Whoever controls the media controls the mind" - Jim Morrison
To honestly make that statement, it would first require conscious awareness of it. I believe that this is the root problem: people, even smart people, are literally unable to realize that they do not know under certain conditions. On certain topics (fight or flight mode?), it's like the mind stops supporting trinary logic and downgrades to binary only.
Consider this: how frequently do you find the logical styles so common in this thread in threads where the topic is technology or things of that sort?
"everyone is just repeating talking points they read online"
The collective narrative has existed in other media for as long as I've been alive. It's now invaded the internet.
People have always listened to the radio, watched cable news, read magazines to get talking points so they can repeat them and appear well informed and intelligent. To look good in front of others and convey status. People who counter the narrative are seen as low status, conspiracy theorists, cranks, disagreeable. My advice to anyone is to just repeat the narrative. I haven't and I have suffered. In the end, no one will remember that you were right. It's not worth it. Keep your contrary opinions to yourself or share them anonymous online, take positions to make money when you are proven right, but don't declare it. Unless your business is being counter narrative.
It's been a while but I think the chapter “WHAT MAKES A MESSAGE REPEATABLE? Techniques to Convince Others to Repeat Your Words” from the book “Impossible to Ignore.” by Carmen Simon discusses the science of how to make this happen.
This has been a horrifically sad accepted reality of US higher education for a generation. Students are easily-influenced, naive, and economically vulnerable.
A thread about how the mainstream media is eating crow over being so wrong here is not really the best place in the world for you to grind your axe with Zerohedge.
> The article --- published Wednesday titled, "Is This The Man Behind The Global Coronavirus Pandemic?" --- shared the name and personal information of a Chinese doctor and researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and linked him to a theory claiming the new virus is an engineered bioweapon.
If you in good conscience think the above is at all similar to the current claim that the virus might have been an accidental leak, then there's no point in further engaging with you.
Yeah I’m curious too..like do people remember a time when everyone formed unique and contrasting views about national subjects they didn’t personally have in depth domain knowledge of? Whats the expectation here?
It's an interesting question because there has been a dominant narrative that back when there were only 3 channels and everyone trusted what Walter Cronkite said there was a lot more consensus.
That was true in the sense that centre-left and centre-right points of view were expressed on all networks (by law because of the fairness doctrine), also because the cold war gave a broad framework for crafting a consensus within, consolidation of newspapers left only 1 or 2 major newspapers in most markets, and because the two parties were each much more ideologically diverse. There was a consensus, but it bounced around the centre, and on topics where there were large disagreements usually you could still count on people to at least be able to articulate the countering sides' views and why someone might hold them. There was a greater appetite for trying to figure out an issue by hearing the best arguments from the other side (watch old episodes of Firing Line on YouTube to get an idea of how it was).
When climate change first became an issue in the late eighties there were a wide range of opinions on it, even though people had no more expertise on the subject than they do now. But people had less confidence that their views were right and people with contrasting views were deplorable or had a secret agenda. Even in early naughts Gingrich and Pelosi did a commercial together about how it was an important issue [0], even though there were pro-growth republicans who didn't want to take action, and pro-labour democrats who wanted to preserve working class jobs that disagreed with them. It was more common to see someone's opinion move in the course of a conversation because the culture war lines weren't so sharply defined. Politicians also had less to gain by exploiting divisions because the structure of the political system rewarded politicians who could pull voters over the centre line instead of just firing up the base.
More than anything it was more acceptable to have heterodox views. You could be a pro-choice republican or pro-life democrat because on the balance you had more things in common with the party of you choice than you didn't. Did everyone have quixotic or unique views? No, but you didn't have to self-censor as often if you did. It was a lot easier to be intellectually curious and learn things from others.
The theory at the time was that the 500 channel universe and the internet would break the old consensus and there would be a whole universe of opinions available. But it seems that "the big sort", the weakening of the parties and strengthening of PACs through campaign finance reform, the modern primary system and how it allows activists to influence and take over the parties (which is really only 40 years old), filter bubbles and people discovering that they prefer not to read stuff they disagree with, and algorithmic newsfeeds that optimize for engagement (ie outrage and out-group homogenization)... all of that has formed 2 consensuses that are more doctrinaire because they are so clustered apart from each other.
It's increasingly uncommon for people to have many or any friends with different political ideologies than them. 50 years ago a majority of Americans said they would not be ok with their child marrying outside of their race now the vast majority are ok with it, but inter political marriage is the exact opposite with it becoming increasingly uncommon and socially unacceptable.
I tried to follow a range of non-political commentators over the last year, and always thought that lab leak was a hypothesis that couldn't be ruled out given what we know, but made a zoom birthday call go silent when I voiced that opinion because everyone on it was sure that only a right wing loon could consider such a thing. While there was persistent coverage of the hypothesis in alternate media like the Dark Horse podcast, and posts on medium by postdocs sticking their necks out, the liberal media seems to have committed epistemic closure on the topic, with the NY Times COVID reporter just yesterday bemoaned the hypothesis's "racist roots" [1] (despite, as Greenwald points out, that the wet market theory sounded a lot more racist than a mistake at an NIH funded lab). Even the NY Times' previous COVID reporter tried to excuse his blind spot by falsely claiming that the hypothesis was confined to right wing kooks. [2] Of course it's no more racist to blame the pandemic on a mistake made at an NIH funded lab than to blame it on wet markets, but once the lines were drawn it was more important to score short term points against the other side and never admit that someone like Tom Cotton, might have made a reasonable point.
The extinction of species and even languages triggers mass self-examination. But entire cultures are currently evolving at a speed and in a direction that will essentially lead to their extinction within two or three generations, and few people are mourning the loss yet.
Human nature being what it is, my unborn American great-grandson will feel he has little in common with any randomly-chosen Cambodian of his time, but the truth is that they'll listen to the same music, play the same video games, watch the same movies, argue across the same political spectrum, speak the same language, and get their education and news from an elite that is even more globally homogeneous than they are.
The media is so disappointing these days. A lot of people don't remember this, but the mainstream media outlets were actually playing down the coronavirus pandemic at the start. Then they attacked the travel ban to China. Then did a complete U-turn. Pelosi was dancing in the streets of Chinatown San Francisco to prove how safe and not racist she is. It seemed like they hated Trump and would fight anything he did.
I saw a viral clip of the Kayleigh McEnany pointing out this hypocrisy and the immediate response as she dropped the mic and walked off was someone in the press shouting "you were prepared for that!". No shit she was prepared for that? That's her job? How is that a bad thing? Oh, because your gotcha question didn't work. Ridiculous.
> Pelosi was dancing in the streets of Chinatown San Francisco to prove how safe and not racist she is.
Why does this keep coming up?
This was literally a problem at the time: a pandemic in China was resulting in a huge amount of local racism and ostracism of American Chinese descendants and expats, people who, by you know, being in a completely different country, weren't somehow magically more dangerous then anyone else.
The absolute most racist and non-sensical reaction people had to COVID-19 was to immediately decide that local asian people were immediately dangerous viral vectors.
No that does not shock me. But the point is that one strategy can be good for one goal but bad for another. Going around Chinatown and encouraging the populous to do the same "to combat racism" is obviously at odds with "be careful and social distance due to covid". Does that shock the shit out of you? I'll be honest as well, I think Pelosi's real motive there is to do the opposite of what Trump wants, rather than combat any racism, but that's just my personal opinion. Maybe she genuinely wanted to combat racism, I don't know, I'm not inside her head. But it's a terrible strategy to combat covid.
She did it at a time when there were zero incidents of COVID in the US and before the Republican party decided that to get ahead of the issue they'd create a racist flamewar instead of trying to handle the problem.
Doing the opposite of what reality dictates was Trump's schtick, not Pelosi's.
Yeah, the other team "decided to create a racist flamewar". They met in a room, those angry old white men, and decided, together, that the best strategy is to create a racist flamewar. Someone suggested they should try to handle the problem, but everyone else disagreed. Someone else was like, fuck it, a racist flamewar is clearly the best strategy to get ahead, and his cisgendered straight colleagues all agreed that would be the best strategy. Meanwhile Pelosi, the hero of the piece, boldly went into Chinatown to combat this. Thank you Pelosi for your sacrifice and dedicated service. Your hair looks lovely by the way. A couple weeks later San Francisco went into full lockdown of course, but it was still a good idea she encouraged everyone to go to Chinatown when she did. The incoming pandemic and racism was handled incredibly well in liberal San Francisco, and if anything did go wrong, it was because of the racist and incompetent Republicans.
When Trump and company knew the virus was going to be a threat, they allowed air travel to maintain at current levels to pack people into airports like sardines. Their response was NOT to be responsible but instead try to pretend that the problem did not exist and to scapegoat the Chinese by calling it "China Flu," "Kung Flu", and "Wuhan Virus."
And you are so INCREDIBLY triggered that you needed to bring "cisgendered straight colleagues" into the discussion when it wasn't even warranted.
I love how you object to mentioning "cisgendered straight colleagues" but not "angry white men', because the latter is non-ironically relevant in your mind. I feel sorry for you that you see the world through that lens, and yeah, I'm not bothering to give you serious replies because you aren't either. "Decided to create a racist flamewar" was when I stopped bothering. We're obviously not going to see common ground at all if you actually see it that way. Nobody decided to create a racist flamewar.
Also:
German Measles
Zika virus, from the Zika forest
Spanish Flu
MERS: Middle East Respiratory Syndrome
Ebola, from the Ebola river.
But sure, Wuhan virus was obviously racially motivated. Bad angry white men. Very bad!
So they actually decided to create a racist flamewar did they? They just called it "wuhan flu" to "scapegoat the Chinese". That's all 100% accurate in your head.
Your problem is you're assuming malicious intent as fact. It's completely impossible to know what someone is thinking, so you should just assume they're not evil racists planning racist flamewars I think.
I'm not disappointed the media got Covid wrong at various points in time. Most people got Covid wrong at the beginning. And almost everyone, including me, has had a bad Covid take at least once.
I didn't see Covid coming. And if someone really saw it coming, they could have made thousands/millions shorting the stock market (and some people did).
Point is, I don't view this as grounds to attack the media. I do find it disappointing that the media is usually not willing to admit their mistakes, and usually doesn't do a good job at expressing scientific uncertainty.
None of the articles you cite demonstrate what you seem to think they do. When the number of cases was minuscule, the threat to Americans was low and those articles were spot on: Keep vigilant, get your flu shot, but don't stress too much yet. Citing Pelosi visiting San Francisco (at a time when there were zero cases in the region, but a growing number of anti-Asian hate crimes) again doesn't make a point to any reasonable person. These claims speak only to zealots.
More critically, you have a higher standard of every random article in every newspaper than you do of agencies actually responsible. Which is truly dystopian.
Speaking of which, Trump's "travel ban" (that wasn't a travel ban) was the single action taken after the virus was already spreading uncontrolled in NY, Washington State, and Europe. It did nothing to restrict US citizens traveling to and from the affected areas unrestrained, which thousands continued to do, even if we believed it would be remotely effective at that point. It did nothing for testing or tracing. It was the laziest, least-effort action possible. And to be clear, long after all of these things, Trump declared that the number of cases would soon be 0. He made similar "nothingburger" comments for months.
No, every bit of cynicism about the media coverage of travel bans seems 100% justified. For context, I'm from the UK where we have a right-wing Brexit-supporting government that's perceived very much as a Trump analogue - except they didn't impose travel bans on places like China early in the pandemic. Which means that over here, people blame our pandemic deaths on the supposed fact that our Government avoided placing restrictions on travel because they're evil right-wingers who were too worried about the damage to the economy that would cause. There was literally a talking point where the Guardian dug up an estimate that imposing travel restrictions on China would've delayed the outbreak here by something like a month, but it had to be a ban on all travellers who'd been in China within 14 days and not just direct travel - that is, it specifically had to be a Trump-style travel ban, an Italy-style one would not have worked. Meanwhile, their US coverage was attacking Trump for his travel ban.
Also, remember that the current US president literally went from using the idea that travel bans were dangerous, counterproductive and made things worse in his electoral campaign to reinstating them with the exact same rules as Trump used as his first act in office, and the mainstream media cheered him on every step of the way...
I love that my other comment is at -4 already. The "MAGA" side of HN is flooding in, desperately thinking this is their moment of redemption.
"but it had to be a ban on all travellers who'd been in China within 14 days and not just direct travel"
Weird to call that "Trump-style" given that Trump's travel "ban" excluded Americans and their family members which already comprised the bulk of people traveling to and from China. One critic of the ban pointed out that in a single day, 30 aircraft from China landed in San Francisco, full, during the "ban".
"Also, remember that the current US president literally went from using the idea that travel bans were dangerous, counterproductive and made things worse"
This is either ignorance or an intentional lie. Which is it?
Contrary to the shrill lies from a certain camp, zero Democratic leaders opposed the "ban". They opposed that it was the singular action taken during a very dangerous period. That quarantines or even tracing weren't put in effect. Etc. That the literal implementation of it was "only people carrying other passports can possibly be carrying COVID".
And I mean...we all know how things turned out, right? Maybe this "he was right" victory lap might be in poor taste, 600,000 dead Americans later.
The "all" part is, from what I can tell, considerably less important than the "not just banning direct travel" part... the model assumed that only most of the travel from China was stopped, and that was still enough to cause a huge delay in the outbreak. It is far better to have 30 aircraft from China landing in San Francisco than to have 30 aircrafts' worth of travellers originally China spread out across hundreds of aircraft from other destinations, such that you have no idea who the travellers are, where they are, they could be spreading it to completely unrelated travellers from different destinations - which is what Italy effectively did.
"This is either ignorance or an intentional lie. Which is it?"
Joe Biden literally got up on stage and claimed that the travel bans made the US outbreak worse - and was quoted in the mainstream media as doing so.
"They opposed that it was the singular action taken during a very dangerous period. That quarantines or even tracing weren't put in effect. Etc."
Errrm... that's not actually true though. There was definitely plenty of contact tracing in the US, it just didn't get a huge amount of media coverage. Also, I can't imagine locking up US citizens of Chinese origin en masse going down well at the time when it would actually have to have been done... especially since it ultimately wouldn't have helped all that much. The contact tracing and other indications, like genetic analysis of the Covid strains which spread in the US, suggest that the measures the US took were effective enough that spread from China isn't what ultimately ended up causing their big outbreaks. Not taking measures against spread from Italy when that country was reporting zero cases is probably what did it, and realistically that wasn't going to happen.
> More critically, you have a higher standard of every random article in every newspaper than you do of agencies actually responsible. Which is truly dystopian.
> But you find issue with the media.
> Incredible.
The HN topic is about the media, so I'm talking about the media.
> Speaking of which, Trump's "travel ban" (that wasn't a travel ban) was the single action taken after the virus was already spreading uncontrolled in NY, Washington State, and Europe. It did nothing to restrict US citizens traveling to and from the affected areas unrestrained, which thousands continued to do, even if we believed it would be remotely effective at that point
I'm not defending Trump. I'm pointing out media hypocrisy. What did they do? Call the travel ban racist. Their behaviour has been very partisan, often at the expense of the truth. Exhibit A: the lab leak theory in the OP.
The intent of my comment was to point out the media's bias in calling out and fighting everything from one side at the expense of the truth, but hiding and underreporting anything negative from their side. That's all. I don't care to talk about which administration is right or wrong about specific issues, but you seem intent to go down that road and you've convinced yourself I'm from the "MAGA-verse".
I’m quoting the person you’re talking about. You claimed they’re saying you’re from the magaverse, when they were explicitly referring to "other comments".
It is very conditional. I make no bones about the fact that I absolutely despise the cult of stupidity that has afflicted the United States. It is the downfall of the nation. There is a paradox that the "MAGA" crowd is the greatest setback to US achievement in centuries and still will likely destroy the country within the decade.
So yeah, I _hate_ those people with every fiber of my being. It is hilarious that this thread is full of pearl clutchers who gasp and groan about how unfair this is, they're just patrons of the truth and non-partisan fairness...and then you look at their history, and they are precisely what you expected them to be. Antiscience cretins who put forth the most absurdly disingenuous nonsense purely for an audience of other cultists.
> This whole "see, we wuz right!" thing is a bit bizarre given that no, people didn't ignore evidence early on. They ignored a theory based upon literally nothing, generally put forward by people arguing that it was somehow weaponized and intentional. If there is evidence it should be pursued, but that doesn't give credence to hysterical conspiracies.
It's not so much that they just ignored the theory, but that they made it taboo.
Now, I empathize somewhat with the people who made it taboo (I probably helped in an amateur capacity, throwing the baby out with the bathwater), but in retrospect it's embarrassing and one would have hoped the professionals would have done a better job.
> It did nothing to restrict US citizens traveling to and from the affected areas unrestrained, which thousands continued to do
I thought the federal government does not even have the legal power to do so. Personally, though, I think giving local government more power is a genius design by the founding fathers.
> was the single action taken after the virus was already spreading uncontrolled in NY, Washington State, and Europe.
I'm not sure if this claim is true, either. Trump did at least two things: 1. Signed a deal with pharma companies to promise that the federal government would buy their vaccines to every American so the companieswould be all in to develop vaccines. 2. Promised to give resources to state governments. Both Cuomo of NY and Newsom of CA thanked government for keeping its promises.
The federal laws on trade and immigration actually have a lot of carve outs for infection control. The executive can quarantine any vessel, demand health documentation on passengers, and turn noncompliant vessels away.
This last year alone has made me lose more faith in the democratic party and the media altogether. Not only did they push a radical agenda with retribution, they did it like religious people used to do centuries ago. Don't challenge the status quo or face reprecussions (fine, demobilization, banned). Now egg on their faces.
Over the last several years, it's become clear to me what the large social media companies want to be: de facto world governments.
They won't admit that, and you'll hear a lot of gab about algorithms and cooperation with various governments, but at heart it appears to me that this is cooperation with various governments as a government themselves. It's a negotiation among equals.
We can provincially argue about who can say what in the US on which platforms, or what the rules _might_ be to demonetize and/or kick people off platforms, but at the end of the day, the platforms themselves, through means mostly opaque to us, are negotiating as if they were our local tyrannical government with complete control over the public square and public places.
I understand that for many this is completely far-fetched and I'm making a mountain out of a molehill. This is a difficult thing to freely admit and grasp. It's also very difficult for those that are currently happy with whatever the most recent decisions are.
Yes, the net is still (mostly) free and open, and competitors _might_ come along and take the place of the current major social networks, but at heart this is a problem based on generalizing and universally abstracting social interactions. You could split up and/or dismantle every major player today and be in the exact same spot five or ten years from now when the next ones come along.
I am happy that more and more people are finally waking up to the danger here. If we are allowed to adequately describe the nature of this problem, we might have a shot at fixing it.
Social media companies just want to make money. It's people who want social media companies to act like government. Originally, Facebook was pro free speech because in a vacuum that's what would make the most money. Facebook only started censoring when people started complaining about it.
That's a pretty bizarre take considering how incredibly narrow their authority is. The hottest hot takes on this topic all came from elected officials and second-rate professional media.
The US federal government is basically a giant case of regulatory capture so many people understandably confuse power and influence. However the distinction remains and it is of essential importance. None of the big tech companies have any real power, all they have is influence. In countries where they don’t have politicians under their influence they are helpless.
I _almost_ am completely on your side in this discussion. The facts of the matter are as you describe.
I disagree, however. Influence at the scale these companies have is its own power. There's a reason Zuckerberg is a fan of Caesar Augustus; with the proper and delicate application of influence in the right places, you can get whatever it is you want.
The game they're playing is not direct application of political power, it's subtly using influence over a decade or two to position world governments where they want them. If I had to guess, they'll leave those governments in place as polite fictions, much as the Roman Senate continued to "defend" the Republic for a long, long time after Augustus changed all of that.
By the way, astute observers in various governments know the game being played, it's just very difficult to directly move against companies that appear to be cooperating. Folks want their Farmvilles. My money says that we'll see a lot more regulatory capture with various reforms over the next few years, the political calculus being that it's better to absorb them than fight them (at least short term, which is good enough to get elected a few more times).
I have remarked before that Zuckerberg wants to be the Murdoch of the 21st century. To wield his media influence as a "kingmaker" (mostly quietly and behind the scenes, but with those seeking to gain or hold power knowing they will need Facebook's co-operation). And ensuring as compensation an unchallenged position for Facebook, and minimal taxation and other interference.
This seems to presume a greater degree of predictability and control over the masses than recent events suggest. Most of Facebook's activity comes from users amplifying news they have encountered elsewhere.
How would Facebook be unchallenged in a global world?
I would think his presidential ambitions would be be more obtainable than cyberpunk hegemon.
One problem with politically charged issues is that one's bias can significantly color unresolved factual issues. In the article the early 'red flags' pointed out in the January 2020 study by The Lancet left clear open questions regarding the Seafood Market hypothesis, but many in the media glossed over these red flags. Now that additional facts are coming to light including the fact that multiple scientists at the lab were hospitalized with Covid like symptoms in late 2019, the facts are starting to pierce through the early dismissal of the lab leak theory by many journalists. I think this will result in a rethink of how we tag unresolved topics as "False Information" or before enough facts are gathered. Perhaps a "Controversial" tag would be preferred. I really like the site https://www.allsides.com/ that provides Left/Center/Right bias indicators for any story so you can read all sides and get the gist of how politics is coloring current stories in the media.
I wouldn't use the word bad faith, but I think for a lot of people it was very likely motivated by political/social pressure more than by trying to find the truth. In a positive light one could interpret some of the dismissal as an effort to combat anti-Asian racism occuring here. In a somewhat more negative light one might think it was simply the move to make to avoid
even remotely aligning with conservatives. There were probably also dynamics going on with foreign politics, but even just on US soil there was more than enough politicization of the issue.
I see a very different dynamic reading the article. Remember, at the time this all happened Trump was still very publicly backing the Chinese government's response. Tom Cotton was very much bucking the party line in calling the CCP liars.
What I see over and over throughout all of this is repeated conflation of "lab-leaked" and "man-made".
Tom Cotton absolutely never even insinuated that the virus was man-made, only that a china was lying about the market and that a lab leak was a possible origin
This distinction was quickly lost, but it is not clear that was due to malice or even partisanship. In this very article, with the benedit of hind site, the author repeatedly conflates the two an switches which concept is being discussed.
At the time there was no basis to reject the lab-leak theory. There was at the time some preliminary basis to reject the man-made hypothesis. As far as I cam tell, we are just really bad at protraying any nuance when all the incentives reward sensationalizing everything.
Yes I agree there was a lot of conflation of man made and lab leak, but I much more frequently saw people dismiss lab leak because of arguments focusing on man made, than people saying they believed the man made hypothesis because it could be a lab leak. That might just be my social circle though.
Similarly, I can't recall a time that lab leak wasn't considered a conservative conspiracy among my social circles, and that does include a conservative group from my hometown. In the exact same groups I do recall a rapid swapping of position on masks however.
That is of course anecdote, but in general Trump has been very critical of China, and also issued travel bans relatively early on that were painted as racist by the media. Additionally, Trump and his fans childishly insisted on calling COVID the "China flu" for awhile there.
So the origin of the lab leak hypothesis may not have been conservative, but from what I can tell they pretty quickly latched onto the potential for anti-China sentiment there. And not too long after that we had another situation where the Democrats decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater because they didn't like the ideas that had picked up steam with Trump supporters.
But maybe you're right it's a more untargeted lack of ability for nuance. Certainly in this case that's possible, as it's a more difficult technical topic. I just see the way some of my friends hedge fairly benign statements these days, out of fear of being associated with Trumpers. I actually know someone who got rid of the couple of red baseball caps they had because they were afraid people might think it's some sort of MAGA statement. Nuance is even harder when there's a fear of saying anything that might get you out-grouped.
> Similarly, I can't recall a time that lab leak wasn't considered a conservative conspiracy among my social circles, and that does include a conservative group from my hometown. In the exact same groups I do recall a rapid swapping of position on masks however.
That seems to imply what I was saying: The confusion wasn't purely partisan. Though, partisanship certainly didn't help with nuanced communication.
I found the partisanship on both sides of the aisle absolutely appalling during this pandemic.
Yeah that's fair, it's never going to be easy for the general public to stay correctly informed on rapidly evolving technical topics. But once some piece of misinformation got too deeply entrenched on one side the partisanship took over pretty hard. Maybe that's nothing new, I am relatively young, but something about it does feel like it's getting worse.
> I think this will result in a rethink of how we tag unresolved topics as "False Information" or before enough facts are gathered. Perhaps a "Controversial" tag would be preferred.
If anything, it will taint the credibilty of people who claim they have the insight to tag the information's credibility in the first place.
Weren't scientists from the Chinese CDC actually authors of the Lancet article that everyone cited? It doesn't seem like they were trying to push any seafood market hypothesis either.
The author of that article is actually Peter Daszak of Ecohealth Alliance, that was funding the Wuhan lab for gain of function research, seemly using money from US government (NIH and another department I can't recall now).
EDIT: why people are downvoting this? I got something wrong? The Peter Daszak that signed the article is not the same one that runs Ecohealth Alliance?
You are correct that this is the same Peter Daszak that is president of EcoHealth and he appears as an author on some papers put out by WIV concerning bat coronavirus research. He was also the only American representative the WHO allowed on the Wuhan visit and investigation earlier this year, after the WHO rejected three other nominees from the Trump administration. There are massive conflicts of interest all over his involvement in this tale.
The other department you are thinking of is NIAID, which is a sub agency of the NIH. Fauci runs NIAID. The EcoHealth grant which went to WIV was from NIAID/NIH. You can find links to the actual grant from this fact check (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/05/04/fac...), which ironically is one of these deceptive fact checks that claims something is false in the headline, then claims deep in the text that it is only partially false,
all while the original claim is actually essentially true.
There were also a number of HN stories posted early in the pandemic concerning the lab-leak hypothesis. These paint a ... complicated ... picture of that theory and those who advocated for it. Few of the submissions had any significant discussion, I'm simply going off what was submitted to HN.
(Note that there may well have been other submissions which were flagged and killed, or which don't match my search terms --- I included one such addition based on a variant of terms.)
In general the early claims of a lab leak:
- Lacked any specific proof.
- Came from sources with questionable credibility.
- Were rejected by others with no specific allignment to those claiming the leak, and with general credibility.
I'll note that the leak hypothesis remains unproven, though the evidence supporting a serious, independent, and pointedly, non-Chinese-led investigation is mounting. I found the Bulletin of Concerned Scientists article a week or so back persuasive.
But the point remains that attributing an original cause to some event is complex, and requires a reality-based investigation grounded in facts rather than ideology or motivated reasoning. Much (though not all) of the lab-leak advocacy has been lacking in this objectivity, and even the most persuasive arguments to date make a case for the possible origin, not a certainty.
I'd argue that for the current outbreak the origin all but certainly does not matter in terms of steps taken to contain and end the outbreak. Preventive measures (themselves reflecting an evolution of understanding over time) and vaccines (rejected by a disappointing fraction of lab-leak enthusiasts) remain the most potent tools we have.
Consideration for costs, and prevention (or early alerting) of future outbreaks do depend in part on determining ultimate origin. That's something to keep an eye on, but not the principle concern of the moment.
> I'd argue that for the current outbreak the origin all but certainly does not matter in terms of steps taken to contain and end the outbreak
It would have mattered a lot back in early 2020, when the (circumstantial) evidence for the lab leak theory was assembled. And I’m not sure what your point is—are you implying that the world is incapable of both handling the pandemic and investigating its origins simultaneously? Like, we are going to get collectively distracted or something? No—investigate the origins now. This is not something to delay on.
The others seem to either have no comments or in one case (the Montagnier one) to be more of a distraction. If I missed any other actual threads, please let me know.
I know your focus is generally pointing to prior discussion. Just to be clear, I'm looking at the evolution of the story itself, at least as reflected through HN submissions (survival bias noted).
IMO, determining the origin of the virus is of much more consequence than who was right and who was wrong back in 2020. If the virus crossed over naturally, it's reasonable to conjecture that this sort of thing is going to happen more and more often in the future. If it was human error in a lab, I would actually be relieved -- this seems like something that's much easier to correct. FWIW, I do think available evidence supports a lab leak more than any other hypothesis.
I agree that it's extremely important. If it was a lab leak, there are many safety process and regulation improvements we might be highly motivated to make. It's a thing we can actually have some control over. If it was a natural virus, there's good reason to collect and study more pathogens so we have a head start if one of them crosses into humans. Not that both of these things aren't good responses to the pandemic, but having a specific answer will direct more funding at the problem.
Politics has made it very likely that we will never know where it started, but that's okay. More important is how the next one could start, which is being investigated more thoroughly now. If we survive the current and future variants of covid we'll be better placed for the next plague. If not for the systems put in place because of SARS-CoV-1, SARS-CoV-2 could have spread far more widely before being detected.
Regardless of the politics, it's likely that many labs have reviewed their procedures to be sure people won't be infected by their work/contaminate their work.
Is it? We can assume that both things happened and prepare better for both types of development in the future. In the case of lab release, details would have to emerge to be reactive about fixing any issues with procedures. That doesn't mean that we can't be proactive in analyzing current procedures and trying to find and correct weaknesses.
We certainly can take proactive measures, I just think it will be taken more seriously if we can point to a specific cause. It's the difference between you not receiving a package you were expecting so deciding to be more aware of the expected delivery time in the future versus seeing your neighbor run off with your package.
I read spillover a few years ago, which is all about zoonotic crossover events, would recommend it, even if it is a bit dry in parts.
The problem is, as an expansionist species we're naturally going to encroach on natural reservoirs for pathogens.
The smoking gun of people working at the virology institute may yet turn out to be nothing more than a red herring, if they live and work in the epicentre of where the outbreak started, it only stands to reason they'd also run the risk of catching it.
I wanted to add -- the two most compelling pieces of information I've seen that make the lab accident theory more plausible to me are:
1) The verified existence of the bat-originating corona virus that killed 3 miners with Pneumonia some years ago being housed/researched in the WIV
2) David Baltimore of Cal Tech's remark ""When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus. These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2"
But then again other people have explained the furin cleavage site exists in other beta coronaviruses - so making a definitive "smoking gun" statement without further research seems premature.
Thanks for the recommendation. I will check this out asap!
To return the favor, I recommend checking out the Lapham's Quarterly issue on "Epidemic" that collected historical writings across many instances of widespread plague and disease.
Am I the only one who feels like this is mostly a non-issue. I feel like the case of if this came from a lab for from a market is mostly taking a political side against China - if it came from a lab, or for China - if it was naturally developed.
If it came from a Chinese lab as part of a conscious effort of weaponizing a virus, sure, that's important, but I don't think anyone is saying that.
If it came from a lab accidental breach, it is important that the parties involved are aware of that, and steps are taken to improve security.
However, this is an event that happens every century. It's not a one-time thing. We had been warned it was coming. So now it's here.
If the source had been Belgium (just as an example), would the source be covered by the media at all?
Does anybody else feel this way? Yes, the WHO etc needs to continue researching to understand the source. But I don't believe the amount of energy the average person is expending on their "thoughts" really amounts to much at all. It's just the story of the hour.
It matters if it was caused due to gain of function research. These virologists purposely try to make viruses stronger so that they can research how to counteract or fight one if a stronger similar version of them appears from the wild. If this came from making a SARS virus more potent, we should ask the question if the gain of function research that these people do is actually worth the potential costs of that potent variant leaking out.
As well, that kind of research can be repaired with weaponization of viruses. So we need to ask if the research they were doing had a military angle to it at all.
The hard part with authoritarian governments is that they will cover up things even if they are not in the wrong. They don't make mistakes. So they may cover up things that don't actually need to be covered up.
It is very possible that this was just a person being infected with a sample they got from the field. But it seems the Chinese government Doesn't actually want to tell us the truth.
The virus had global implications with a massive economic and global impact.
If a single institution was responsible for this event then it would be clear that we need to improve regulations and safety standards around the entire field of gain of function research.
If a lab leak is a possible explanation, the implication for future gain of function research and associated regulations are massive. It's not as simple as letting the lab in question make their process changes to avoid future global pandemics.
If we can entertain the possibility that this disaster came from gain of function research then surely that field should be reconsidered regardless of what actually happened in this particular case.
Right. As the article argues, it doesn't seem like it would make any difference where the virus came from, which makes the reaction seem strange.
What surely deserves attention is how an idea like "could have come from a lab" is able to shift from 'mild' to 'fringe/controversial' to 'plausible/reasonable to discuss'.
no, the choice is not as you put it, "weaponization vs lab leak of virus that happens to be under study". The likely scenario that's being proposed for the lab-leak is a man-made virus that is quite routine to see in labs like this, in every advanced technology country in the world. The making of dangerous viruses for the purposes of research is quite common, and in order to take steps to improve security, we need openness and transparency about what is going on.
China does, though, very much lack openness and transparency when it comes to owning up to mistakes.
A possible lab leak has seemed reasonable, given the circumstances, since early on. If it weren't for all the politics around it, I think it should have gotten a more careful treatment.
Unfortunately, it also became a political football. US-China trade wars were still in full swing at the time and both countries were jockeying for advantages in negotiations. There were lots of political people here that saw "blame China" as a way to force trade concessions, and others who muddied the waters further by going beyond an accident and wondering out loud if it was an engineered weapon.
On The Media recently had a little bit of coverage of this [1] and the guest, Alina Chan, had the completely reasonable conclusion that a science-based approach to investigating a lab leak is merited, that lab accidents do happen, and that if it was discovered to have been a lab leak, then the reaction ought to be to move labs like this one away from dense population centers and enact some quarantining protocols for researchers working with infectious diseases.
But this is still a subject that's going to be difficult to have a grounded discussion about because now it's being used as a political football against perceived media biases and censorship and the failings of liberalism and yadda yadda yadda.
I think further public and political pressure is still needed to ensure a proper investigation occurs (I'm not confident one is ongoing). There is an inflection point at which more pressure becomes actively unhelpful of course.
But I also think the current evidence for a lab leak is far weaker than proponents claim (2 somewhat contradictory unnamed US intel sources saying WIV staff were sick in Nov '19, haven't found the reservoir animal yet, closest match is far away, lab exists in part of Asia where such viruses are known to emerge and also where it would be a good place to put a lab...)
To answer your question before my unprompted musing, I agree. I think the majority of people won't get anything out of understanding the nitty-gritty detail of this discourse, and will spend a lot of energy fending off bipartisan "WE TOLD U SO" bickering along the way. However, appropriate authorities should keep working on the problem, even if just to determine that there's no data to get to the bottom of this at all.
> but I don't think anyone is saying that.
Part of the timeline that seems to miss from some discussions, including the article brought by the OP, is that Donald Trump did in fact make that sort of statements, on several occasions[1], even though you unlikely mean that the same way. While e.g. Cotton's words have not been treated with due rigour by some journalistic media outlets, the social media platform crackdown on the associated terms, in my memory, did happen after Trump's statements had a measurable hate crime effect.
> “But we’re going to find out. You’ll be learning in the not-too-distant future. But it’s a terrible thing that happened - whether they made a mistake or whether it started off as a mistake and then they made another one. Or did somebody do something on purpose?” he said.
In my subjective opinion, the conversation in general both was and still is overall chaotic, often conflating at least some of the following:
1. Natural virus transmitted from source animal. Sensible zoonosis scenario.
2. Natural virus transmitted from "incubating" animal. Sensible zoonosis, again.
3. Natural virus leaving lab due to a storage safety failure. Sensible lab accident scenario.
4. Natural virus leaving lab due to an operations safety failure. Sensible lab accident scenario.
5. Natural virus modified successfully by the lab, doing 3-4. Often deemed less likely, but nonetheless a fundamentally sensible scenario.
6. Natural virus modified successfully by the lab, intentionally released from the lab by the Chinese government. Sometimes this flavour also implies that the virus was modified not with gain-of-function research goal, but with biological warfare goals straight up. Feels the same thing on paper, but in terms of language used the latter is substantially more visceral, evoking defensive reaction. Either way, this does not make any much sense, given economic stakes. CCP may have a heavy-handed enforcement of their interests, but they count their own money better than anyone else.
7. Artificially created virus, doing a 3 or 4. Sometimes with intentionality implication. There doesn't seem to be any significant research supporting this as a plausible scenario.
8. Intentionally (to harm the proverbial West) designed artificial virus, doing a 6. Straight up Tom Clancy's book material.
I've seen "lab leak" applied by some journalists to anything from 3 to 8 including. The problem here is that 6-8 predominantly are political rallying calls for a base eager for a confrontation with China, potentially to detract from anticipated fallout from the domestic containment effort. Much easier to say "woe betide us, this sophisticated oriental bioweapon", than to say "well we have this entire government agency designed to handle this, but everything we've done has fallen flat". The end result of this final bunch of theories was a spike of anti-Asian hate crimes, e.g., someone in my town got imprisoned for anti-Chinese hatred incitement. The last case like that in my memory was in the noughts.
Maybe people will start to understand that it’s very hard to be a unbiased arbitrator of truth and that beyond illegal speech the media and social platforms should let people talk. You have to wonder if the parties were reversed and it was a democrat incumbent president making these claims, would the reaction have been the same. I think if we are being honest to ourselves we know the truth.
What the article forgets to mention is that there is a world power (cough China cough) which would use all its (social-) media manipulation skills and influence to make sure that the lab leak theory was written off as crazy conspiracy talk…
Under those circumstances, and without a concerted effort by the US and other democracies to counter China’s preferred narrative, no wonder that the debate turned very lopsided.
Not to mention many of the early proponents were notorious conspiracy theorists, racists, and nut jobs who spoke with absolute certainty, cited virtually no evidence and clearly had no idea what they were talking about. Could they, in their wild speculation, been right about a few things? Sure, that’s always possible, but they didn’t actually know that at the time.
This isn’t a science or mainstream media problem; both require something resembling empirical evidence to make factual claims. It’s a problem of bullshitters, who can just stay stuff. If you want to be clear that they’re full of it, you run the risk that they actually guessed right.
> ... Evidence in favor of leak theory lowers the status of the media and raises the status of Tom Cotton but doesn’t drastically alter the policy landscape.
That's a very peculiar statement coming from someone who just admitted to missing the 21st century's biggest story to date. And I suspect he's now being too quick to discount the effect on not only the political landscape, but the journalistic landscape as well.
It's incredible. If the lab leak theory is true, then a virus escaped from a lab in China and caused the deaths of millions of people. And at the time this happened, the Chinese government did everything it could to hide that from the world. And for some reason, a large part of the US media and tech establishments went along with the ruse and were nice enough to censor or attempt to discredit/destroy anyone who suggested that the virus didn't come from a wet market, but instead possibly came from the Institute of Virology down the street.
And if we somehow find that all of the above is true, there are people who say that this isn't really a big deal from a policy perspective? What in the actual fuck??
If it had been a lab in Colorado, under the nominal supervision of some Trump crony, I think it indeed would have been something of “a big deal from a policy perspective”!
I like Yglesias, but it’s pretty blinkered to limit “policy impact” to “what to do about biological threat research”. Maybe this means having unanswerable autocracies around is bad and we should try (however ineffectually) to change that state of affairs?
Note: The documentation isn’t even new... all those people banned and censored via Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc [1], have been saying this the entire time. Its kind of amazing to watch both realities (left wing media va alternative media) collide. Gives me hope to be honest.
This story is a real clusterfuck and really hammers home the point that humans are bad at dealing with probabilities and uncertainty. You mix some nationalism in and it becomes completely impossible to have a reasonable discussion.
This article already starts with a false dichotomy: "I missed the furious initial skirmish in what’s become the Long Discourse Wars over the idea that the SARS-CoV-2 virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology rather than originating naturally in bats."
Those aren't conflicting hypotheses. If you're having a "war" over that question you need a cold shower and to go offline for a bit. If the institute was somehow involved in spreading the virus, the simplest story is still that they got it from bats. No matter what anyone tells you, there is zero evidence that any part of the virus is engineered (and it isn't even entirely clear what such evidence would look like, in general!).
Either way, no new hard information has become available. The only thing that has changed is we've gone from pure, wild speculation based on the mere existence of the Wuhan virology institute, to wild speculation paired with some suggestive, anecdotal reports that need to be investigated further.
I would agree that this has somewhat changed the probabilities that we should assign to different hypotheses about the origins of the virus, but it's way too early to have strong convictions.
In the absence of any evidence, and in the heated climate of early 2020, it was and will always have been the correct call to ignore the speculation about how the virus might have come from the Wuhan virology institute.
At the present time, there's nothing you can do except hope that more facts will come to light at some point in the future, even if that's somewhat disappointing. Jumping on the story because it's so juicy and fits so great with "China bad" preconceptions is totally unnecessary.
We haven't found an animal host for SARS-CoV-2 yet, after more than 12 months. It took six months to find an animal host for SARS and less than a year for MERS. The incentive for the Chinese government to find a SARS-CoV-2 animal host is much much higher than for either of those viruses. Failure to find the host is not proof of lab origin, but the longer the search goes on unsuccessfully, the more the probabilities shift.
> it was and will always have been the correct call to ignore the speculation about how the virus might have come from the Wuhan virology institute.
No, it was not the correct call, because it means that possibility was not investigated when it should have been.
We've already found animal hosts for SARS-COV2, be haven't found the origin animal.
It took two years to find the bats as likely source and another twelve to find the specific species and location, the horseshoe bat.
For MERS we only know that dromedary camels are a major reservoir host for MERS-CoV and an animal source of MERS infection in humans. The exact role of dromedaries in transmission of the virus and the exact route of transmission is unknown.
AFAIK we have found that SARS-CoV-2 can infect certain animals but no-one has found it in any animals that are plausible candidates for the original zoonotic transfer. (If such candidates have been found, I'd like to learn about it!) For SARS and MERS we had identified candidates already by this stage.
> No, it was not the correct call, because it means that possibility was not investigated when it should have been.
Wuhan is in China, and the government there is relatively unfazed by social media excitement in other countries. It would not have changed a thing.
In early 2020, literally the only thing the story had going for it was that it was more exciting than the alternative, and that it made China look bad. That absolutely is the kind of story you ignore. I'm sure you remember those were heady times, and there was a lot of bullshit to sift through. Some of that bullshit we still have to deal with today.
Based on what we know now, we shouldn't discount the possibility of some involvment of the lab, but that is absolutely not the same thing as believing that it was responsible, or even that the virus was made in some research programme.
I really wish we would see a little bit more of the cool professionalism that you often see in air crash investigations, where everybody understands that assigning blame before the facts are known is quite likely to make you look like a fool later on, and will hurt people for no reason.
> No matter what anyone tells you, there is zero evidence that any part of the virus is engineered (and it isn't even entirely clear what such evidence would look like, in general!).
I'm not a biologist so I don't really know what any of this means, but there seems to be debate around the presence of a "furin site" [0], which apparently could have emerged naturally, but also could have been artificially spliced in the course of gain-of-function research. Is that how GOF research is normally conducted? I don't really know anything here, but at least some people believe there are genetic markers indicating potential lab manipulation, thus adding another datum in the long list of circumstantial evidence.
Yeah, that's why I wrote "no matter what anyone tells you". I am a biologist, and I can say for sure that that's a complete red herring. Of course it could have been added in the lab, but that's literally true for any genetic sequence. It doesn't mean anything. The logic here is 1) new coronavirus is new 2) ??? 3) therefore, it's probably engineered.
The United States directly and indirectly funded the Wuhan laboratory, and so bears some responsibility for the virus. It also appears Fauci and others were aware of the deficiencies of the institution. The US should end its support for dangerous research in institutions outside of its purview.
Back during early pandemy when not only some US politicians blamed China, Chinese politicians blamed US, when people asked me in person about it, I would explain that both are saying the truth.
Obama banned gain of function research in 2015, right after some papers about Coronavirus specifically attracted attention.
The fact that US government continued not just gain of function research, but research into Coronavirus exactly, that was what caused the ban in first place, is something I think the US citizens really need to figure out what to do about it.
Fauci would have been pushed aside, along with EcoHealth Alliance.
The biggest policy consequence is in the headline-- our leaders in health and media would have possessed a lot more credibility than they do now. The consequences of 'polarization' of facts can't be overstated.
It's interesting looking at the timeline before Western media picked it up -- in the very early stages, chatter online referencing a leak, (or there was something released deliberately) seemed to be fear of it being a SARS 'biological weapon'. there was overlap with the newly emerging health crisis and the Hong Kong protests, which seems to have fueled that speculation. A good analysis of that time period was done by the Atlantic Council [0]
I have also been archiving different web findings pertaining to all forms of 'leak' speculation in the form of a timeline [1]
I thought this was a fascinating read. I’d love to see more analysis like this of what exactly people said, and how it was quoted and characterized in the media.
"This is not to apologize for the bad coverage but, if anything, to underscore how egregious it was to lean so heavily into the Tom Cotton Is Wrong narrative"
Call me cynical...but...
What would any government do about it if it was proven to be a lab leak?
They could declare it an accident (probably this would be true) and that would be the end of the story.
No country would dare to impose sanctions or engage beyond diplomacy.
I do not think that the Chinese governments reaction or handling of the case is suspect, they likely want to shut down potential fake news. To label it as potential espionage is an ok measure until there was a conclusive investigation.
If this happened in other nations, they would just declare it as a matter of national security and incarcerate whistle blowers too. Look no further than Manning and Snowden.
In other words, China will not face any harsh consequences.
If you don't think the CCP handling of the case is suspect, why has Huang Yanling disappeared?
If we knew SARS-CoV-2 was leaked from a lab, that would add a lot of weight to the calls for tighter restrictions on lab security and gain-of-function research, worldwide, that have been going on since before COVID.
Sure, Chinese labs might go on doing whatever they want, but science is an international community. Scientists who break international norms aren't able to collaborate with other scientists or receive cross-border funding.
The very question demonstrates part of the problem here: there are ways that it could have been 'released' by the lab without being 'created' in the lab (or any lab). It's not clear to me that people are aware of this when the lab origin theory is discussed. Please don't prematurely make an assumption about what was going on in the lab.
It's possible that some researcher went into a cave, took some biological samples from bats back to the lab. Thereafter, lack of proper protocol led to an infection that resulted in the pandemic.
Embarrassing for China? yes, and I'd imagine they'd want to cover it up (although such accidents have happened at other worldwide facilities).
This is what I think is very likely given the storage of bat samples in Wuhan.
I hate that lab leak is being conflated with engineered.
I also think while we want to believe scientists are all honorable individuals that would always speak the truth there are a lot of incentives to not fess up to this and a lot of incentives of other scientists to downplay this theory.
This is the smartest comment. Lab leaks happen frequently, it's part of medical research. There's no hard evidence that this virus was engineered or human modified. China didn't create the concept of a virus. Mistakes happen
The US absolutely knew there were risks here. US diplomats knew that the lab had insufficient safety systems for the research that we already know was being done in Wuhan. Those diplomats explicitly warned the US of the dangers several years ago but the US did nothing. [0]
If anything, the Wuhan lab needed more US funding that was primarily focused on safety.
Edit: If you want to prevent certain types of dangerous research, simply cutting funding is a bad way to do it because it can reduce safety. Instead you need to use other diplomatic or legal tools that won't increase risk.
Just throwing more money a any particular situation is no guarantee the situation will improve. In this case, the Wuhan lab is controlled by China and will conform to Chinese laws and regulations.
It may change the cost/benefit analysis of viral research. If the risk of a lab escape is presently worse than the risk of a natural virus arising, then there are numerous things governments could do to remedy this. Even if a total research ban isn't warranted, it's probably a good idea to consider banning these labs in cities. The labs could be relocated to remote areas where workers are kept quarantined-by-default.
> What would any ... do about it if it was proven to be a lab leak?
Exactly what was done when Chernobyl was proven to be caused by humans: show the world how reckless and callous the USSR's government really was.
Chernobyl was a huge factor in the eventual collapse of the soviet government. They played a very risky game and it had existential consequences for the power structure that caused it.
There is no way anything can be "proven" in the first place. Does anything think China will will let international investigators waltz into the Wuhan lab and collect samples or something? There will be a ton of meaningless online speculation and people will get bored and move on.
The far right will use this as a reason to curtail research. Maybe just curtail "dangerous" research at first. Then whatever other research they can convince their followers is also dangerous.
What incentive would the US government have to lie about this though? They were funding research at that lab, I don't understand why they would want people to think lab leak is correct all of a sudden - if that's what you're claiming?
> What incentive would the US government have to lie about this though?
It's not the US government here, it's some unnamed official that we don't actually know, and if they work for the government, are a contractor, a former CIA employee, could be anything. Could be someone like Rand Paul or Tom Cotton who is politically motivated to both implicate China and embarrass their own government, as long as they can blame "the other side".
The US probably isn't lying, the foreign source they got the info from might be. We won't know more unless the matter is further declassified or investigated.
Read the original report carefully. The wording is important, and as usual, it's not making any direct assertions. Someone says "we have intelligence suggesting.." or "there are reports from sources...". Both of those statements can be 100% true: someone does have a report that says such and such thing. But nowhere does anyone make hard claims about the veracity of those reports, or even the reliability of unnamed source.
It's a leak, purposely calculated to suggest something is true without every committing to making it verifiable.
> What incentive would the US government have to lie about this though?
The US government hasn't even made any statement.
> They were funding research at that lab, I don't understand why they would want people to think lab leak is correct all of a sudden - if that's what you're claiming?
No they weren't? You need to either get off the internet until you turn 18 or learn some serious critical thinking skills. The fact you're even considering the theory that the US is covertly funding virology research in it's biggest geopolitical enemy territory is completely unhinged and is classic schizophrenic type delusion.
It went through a non-profit, but trust me there is careful accounting of where money goes with NIH grants, there is no way the government was not aware that some of it's money was funding research at WIV. Especially because they suspended the funding once COVID blew up, per that article.
The commenter was implying the info didn't come from real intelligence but is actually a fabricated leak. I saw the other reply about Iraq and thought the implication was the US wanted to mislead about this, but it indeed could be another country.
Note that the NIH funding was cancelled under the Trump administration. That administration also attacked its own public health officials, denied the science, catastrophically failed in its response, and was generally incompetent. There's no reason to believe the cancellation was anything other than posturing for political reasons, coming from an Oval Office that never stopped referring to COVID-19 as the "Chinese Virus" while pushing hydroxychloroquine and suggesting that a cure was as simple as shoving a flashlight up your butt while drinking bleach.
I never made a comment one way or the other about whether the cancellation was logical, I was just responding to the claim that there was no funding to begin with.
It isn't media fiasco. Media is a business, and they have been selling what has been selling well - i.e. people were buying it very well.
It is fiasco of people believing media without applying basic reality check. In this particular case, the people would easily believe in the coincidence of a very low probability that a virus would jump to humans at the same time and right near, yet without any connection to, the lab where the virus was being bred to do exactly that (the "gain of function research") while dismissing outright the much more probable no-coincidence version of events. Pointing that more than a year ago cost me some karma, and will probably cost me today too :)
After such profound failure of the basic thinking, the people instead of recognizing the failure on their part are still and again blaming media. And the next time the media comes with a well selling, yet failing basic logic/probability/reality/etc check, story the people would again believe in it whole heartedly. Ad infinitum...
Btw, how is that for conspiracy theory - associating the lab leak idea with conspiracy theorism, right wing nut-jobbery and racism was just a successful "damage control" PR operation by China government (and probably by some actors in US as US was partially funding that research in the Wuhan labs after closing such research in US because of the dangers of that research).
In 2017 Marc Lipsitch, a leading epidemiologist at Harvard, warned already for the risk of a pandemic caused by gain of function research: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-08837-7 (end of article)
That same Marc Lipsitch was one of the scientists that signed a letter in May that asked for a deeper and objective investigation about the origins of Covid-19: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1
He explained his motivation for the letter in an interview:
https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2021/05/16/scientists-inve...
In this interview he also expressed his regret that the discussion about the COVID origin had become so polarized.
The man was right in 2017 but sadly most people didn't hear him ..
Tom Cotton has made bombastic statements for years. He makes a another seemingly bombastic statement and rightfully gets ignored, ridiculed, or scorned - and now I'm supposed to be concerned that happened? Tom Cotton is the boy who cried wolf. He has earned the privilege of being ignored. I'm not going to blame the media for ignoring him.
Now a year later and we still haven't determined where this virus came from. People who haven't earned the privilege of being ignored are now starting to present evidence that perhaps the Wuhan Lab was involved in some way. The media is paying attention to those people. They're also paying attention to Beijing being less that forthcoming in helping to get to the bottom of the issue.
I honestly don't see a big smoking gun with the media's coverage of this issue. Certainly nothing warranting the term fiasco.
This article encapsulates the problem with modern media. Yglesias spends a large portion of the article debating the finer points of Tom Cotton's take on the lab leak theory.
As if a junior senator from Arkansas, who's not on any relevant committees (aside from maybe intelligence) is some kinda Rosetta Stone for understanding the media's lack of pushback on the lab leak denials from China and the WHO.
Yglesias labels senator Cotton a "China Hawk," as if that's enough for the story to live and die on his thoughts and quotes.
To examine the lab leak hypothesis through the lens of a Republican senator under the pretext of blaming the senator for the media's assessment of a possible lab leak, turns this article into just another liberal think piece masquerading as objective journalism with irrelevant timelines and a puffed up word count.
One of the reporters Matt Yglesias mentions as having done a decent job of reporting on covid-19 in the early days is Julia Belluz at Vox. My startup rates how informative news stories are and we found that Julia was among the top 10 reporters on covid in the early days. https://blog.thefactual.com/credible-journalists-covid-19.
I don't know if all the reporters on our list parroted the same narrative on covid's origins but I suspect they collectively remain a generally reliable source of information on healthcare issues.
Good article but author is wrong about "Cotton attributed this to malice". That's not what his statement said. He simply stated that there is a level 4 super lab in Wuhan which works with similar viruses. That alone is not malice. The virus could have leaked from the lab by accident because of poor practices - that's not malice. Malice would be if it was intentionally leaked. The intention is what scientists and intelligence is supposed to do. One could also say that China banning on national flights and closing off areas while allowing international flights and not providing correct info/warnings to other countries is what real malice is.
> But Cotton did one thing that those other sources didn’t do — he speculated a little. At the end of that clip he says “we still don’t know where coronavirus originated. Could have been a market, a farm, a food processing company. I would note that Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.”
> Where Cotton differed from the consensus is that he attributed this to malice, which is not what the scientific articles said (but also isn’t a scientific question) and was not the NYT’s preferred interpretation of events.
> “Cotton’s views should be associated with conspiracy theories and misinformation,” even though his core factual claim was not particularly different from what anyone was else was saying.
Does the author not know how conspiracy theories and misinformation campaigns work?
I'm not sure how useful it is doing a hotwash on how we could have been so remiss as to ignore the comments of a public official whose views are often associated with conspiracy theories and misinformation, even if this one time they were not.
And guess where else lab leak was suppressed? Here on HN. Yes, dang, you suppressed discussion of a perfectly reasonable hypothesis many times.
So, while I have your attention, the real problem vis a vis Covid19 is not the lab leak. The real problem is "gain of function" research, using gene splicing to make more virulent-to-humans pathogens. And don't read into anything I'm saying, please pay attention to literally what I say here; if you have to reword what I say to cast doubt, you're not playing fair.
This virus was likely man-made because gain of function man made viruses are quite common in research; and this is not a coverup conspiracy caused by the Chinese tendency for face-saving, swept under the carpet, "truths", though there is plenty of that. This scandal was caused by western experts: our best virologists are themselves engaging in gain of function research right here in our very own cities. If you ask them, as the media did, "what likely happened here", their answer is not going to point the finger at themselves, too much funding is at stake.
And surprisingly, it is easy for lay people to read/listen and follow because Yuri Deigan is not a virologist, just a really smart educated guy.
and it wasn't just the mainstream media and HN and wikipedia who suppressed the information from you all; sadly it was also because of the politicization, your politicization, of this crisis. If Trump said something, to most of you it just had to be wrong, and for some reason, opening our economy to the Chinese and disliking Russia were sacred cows to the Democrats, and anything Trump did that went the other way just had to be undone.
That is what covered up this most obvious and likely HYPOTHESIS from being discussed: that of a man made, gain of function virus escaping from a lab in Wuhan where the virus broke out.
Was there any Chinese military goal here, as a true conspiracy theory would allege? Sadly, frankly, there doesn't need to be. That's because advanced virology research is of deep interest to every military around the world. See the history of anthrax research. It is publicly acknowledged that it's part and parcel of germ warfare research both for defensive and offensive purposes.
"And guess where else lab leak was suppressed? Here on HN."
And maybe is still getting suppressed? This post was #1 on HN one minute, and then, less than an hour later, it's down on page 3, ranked #88. Does the HN ranking algorithm really bury stuff that quickly?
I was just dismayed to see the story sink so fast (but I get it now) — the article involves an interesting discussion of how scientific consensus is represented in the media and how it relates to social media, which seem like very HN-friendly topics… shame that so many are eager to flag something like this based on (as seems likely) some sort of forbidden-topic litmus test
thanks for the list. The suppression I'm talking about occurred before your earliest link, threads closed, cut off, etc. I remember because I learned about Yuri Deigin's research in April and no discussion of it was allowed on HN which should be a place for reasoned discussion
Reasoned discussion has a fraught relationship with large groups.
I'd be a bit careful about the word "allowed" because that posits an "allower" when much of the process you're describing is stochastic. I'm not trying to evade responsibility for the part that we play (at least I hope I'm not), but it's so much more complicated than just "allow v. unallow".
you think of the problem you are solving as "avoid flamewars including through automation to make the task easier on a no-profit forum"
I think there needs to be more room for "(perhaps heated) discussion of actual science in the face of an ongoing existential threat to vast swathes of western civilization and the third world"
I think there needs to be more room for discussion of a seemingly real, Orwellian-Huxleyan ideological takeover of important cultural institutions like wikipedia, the NY Times, Google, Apple, Facebook, etc., a left wing doppelganger to the Red Scare of the 50's.
full disclosure: I'm a former leftie, I know the propaganda I used to spew in the name of the earnest conviction of what morally superior people we lefties were compared to those awful troglodytes, and I remember how easily the centrists would be convinced to go along by nice words. I mean, black lives DO matter, right? but BLM Inc(tm) is a Marxist led radical coalition that sees further violence as helping the cause by proving their case.
It's a black box from an outside perspective, but generally I imagine it's factors such as appearing political or the sort of thing that would be reported in mainstream media (both of which are somewhat discouraged by site guidelines), or being repetitive (there have been a number of articles discussed recently on this topic).
This is not a new issue. Here's a discussion on the subject:
“This virus was likely man-made because gain of function man made viruses are quite common in research” - this doesn’t seem a convincing argument on its own (ignoring the comments on conspiracy / sense-making / politicisation).
Gain of function research seems valuable precisely in the sense it is identifying the mechanisms that govern infectivity. We wouldn’t have this discussion on furin cleavage sites without it.
The most likely case if we accept the lab leak hypothesis is that there was a base virus that was modified, with a similar virus that had a slightly different spike protein. This then infected staff and from there entered society.
This gains plausibility from the fact that it wouldn’t be readily distinguishable from a natural virus, as it would just be a combination of the two genomes.
However this is exactly why we can’t say for certain either way whether the source is natural or not - they’d be indistinguishable genetically.
It is more likely on the face of it that evolutionary pressure on the virus to spread and the natural process of mutation and selection caused the mutations in question, simply because of the volume of natural mutations versus artificial mutations.
"this doesn’t seem a convincing argument on its own"...
you're right, I should have said that "man made gain of function viruses-that-infect-humans are quite common in research and many times moreso than random mutation zoonotic species-jumping viruses are in nature"
"Gain of function research seems valuable"...
and then I will note that I must have scored a point in that sentence even as I wrote it, because the next thing you do is hurry to defend gain-of-function research. I wasn't attacking it, I was simply pointing out that the public is not aware how prevalent it is in urban virology centers in their own cities. I'm a sciency type, I like research, but I'm sure the average Joe would take a much dimmer view.
"This gains plausibility from the fact that it wouldn’t be readily distinguishable from a natural virus, as it would just be a combination of the two genomes. However this is exactly why we can’t say for certain either way whether the source is natural or not - they’d be indistinguishable genetically."
you really need to read the Yuri Deigin page I linked: for exactly the reason you cite, it actually is plausibly readily distinguishable as man-made because the bats and the pangolin viruses that were spliced together don't occur in the same geographic areas and the Wuhan lab published papers about them before their more recent info was wiped from view, and in nature the likelihood of such a clean crisp (CRISPR!) gene splice would be astronomically the worst luck ever as a mutation, but quite likely for exactly the research goals you defend above.
"It is more likely on the face of it that evolutionary pressure on the virus to spread and the natural process of mutation and selection caused the mutations in question, simply because of the volume of natural mutations versus artificial mutations."
again, nope, artificial splicing (not mutation) is quite common and becoming much moreso as the cost of doing it has dropped within reach (something like $100K IIRC) of just about anybody. Natural mutations that follow the path of precisely covid-19's genetics, quite uncommon.
Read the Yuri Deigin piece, listen to the youtube. If you're in too big a hurry, skip the first 25% of each and jump in later, still completely clear to grok.
How are you not attacking gain-of-function with “the real problem vis a vis Covid19 is not the lab leak. The real problem is "gain of function" research, using gene splicing to make more virulent-to-humans pathogens.”?
Perhaps I’ve misunderstood but you seem to be saying it’s a problem without any caveats regarding any potential benefits.
Artificial splicing is common, I agree, but we are talking a handful of mutations per paper rather than the billions of natural mutations that occur. I wasn’t arguing for frequency of mutations that follow the exact path of Covid 19 genetics, I would expect those to be very uncommon, but you only need one in a billion or more.
I've read the Yuri Deigin paper now. It touches on convergent evolution as a possible explanation for the existence of similar protein spike morphologies, but dismisses it without argument ("Talk about Intelligent Design!). It also seems to miss the key point of "computational analysis" when deciding exactly which viruses to synthesise.
The problem isn't synthesising a virus given its genome, it's choosing the genome of the virus to synthesise. As Yuri states, it took 30 days for a Swiss team to synthesise the virus given the genome. You just can't iterate this process very many times, and the chance of getting a virus that spreads effectively is not very high with each mutation (or recombination).
Your Yuri Deigin link was interesting. I was hoping he addressed something I saw elsewhere [0]:
> what about the polybasic cleavage site and the o-linked glycan? We have seen, with other viruses, the ability to develop polybasic cleavage sites when put under just the right conditions for long periods of time. While unlikely, this piece of the virus could plausibly be developed through selection in a lab setting. However, what is near impossible is the development of the o-linked glycan addition motif. This is because the pressure to develop this glycan shield requires avoiding an intact immune system. This type of selection cannot occur using cell culture, and there is no known animal model that would allow for selection of human-like ACE2 binding and avoidance of immune recognition. This strongly implies SARS-CoV-2 could not have been developed in a lab, even by a system of simulated natural selection.
Your statement follows a pattern of, ‘the person was doing X therefore the unjustifiable response was justified.’ This fails the commonly adopted Rawlsian theory of justice (Veil of Ignorance), and it is known as victim blaming.
If you're not trying to justify it, then no, it doesn't make sense at all. The media failed (or purposefully sought not) to deliver information in a useful form.
Delivering such information is supposedly the reason the media exists. There's no merit or utility in extending that abject failure to the information source or destination.
This is pretty anemic self reflection. He never even mentions how the scientific establishment was corralled into compliance with the favored narrative by the Lancet letter organized by Daszak, who was a key player funding gain of function research that involved Wuhan and how that letter was the basis for a year of “fact checking” and cancellation.
He didn’t mention how the Washington Post just changed a 15-month-old headline (of the story he links to) to make themselves look better.
This reporter and his ilk are now busily ignoring or downplaying connections of the US government and Fauci to funding of gain of of function research in which the Wuhan lab was involved. (Cuz Rand Paul already made up his mind or something.)
They won’t really learn anything from this sorry episode.
By March, it didn't matter whether the virus had come from a lab or a spillover event, because a bigger, more pressing issue had emerged: what to do now that the virus was outside China. Now that that threat is starting to abate, it seems discussion has picked up where it left off.
The media really aren't the story here. their credibility couldn't be any lower. what is interesting is how the scientists stayed quiet, how big tech continues to use fact checkers to censor, and how the Chinese communist party and their allies were able to call discussion of lab leak theory causing hate but the notion of Chinese eating bat soup would not.
Thank you. Had to scroll to the next page to find this comment. The lab leak theory never made any sense, because it does not fit the timeline of the viral spread. Nor does it explain why some countries already had T-cell immunity to the virus.
well, it could make sense, but it's not the simplest scenario because the first cases were outside. It would be more reasonable if the earliest cases were actually close to it. And as far as I know there is no suspicion that it comes from another lab.
"Suppose the media had been more open to Cotton’s point"
I sincerely have trouble imagining such discourse taking place. Isn't that sad?
Seriously, which mainstream media personality would actually entertain an idea from Tom Cotton long enough to seriously consider whether it's true or not?
If you spout a bunch of nonsense about Climate Change being a hoax, don't be too surprised when a lot of people start ignoring or even deriding the things you say. Even if the wolf does eventually show up.
So this is the fault of the people who were probably right. And it is not the fault of the people who told them to be quiet and that they believed in conspiracy theories.
No, I’m not assigning blame per se. I’m saying that no one listened to a specific set of politicians who had previously cried wolf, and told everyone else not to listen either. And I still think that’s good advice.
But if the information comes from someone I can actually trust, I’ll pay attention. That’s how trust works, in a world where it’s not possible for me to personally be an expert on everything and I have to take others at their word.
I think the harmful thing is not that no one listened, it was that you were actively told to not listen by major media outlets, and that they were conspiracy theories, or racist.
I think that politicians have a responsibility to not tell obvious lies. If they do, then I'm going to stop paying attention to the things they say, and I'll tell everyone else to do the same.
If they eventually say something insightful, well, that's a shame, but they no longer have my attention.
All politicians tell obvious lies. It's part of their career. Biden tells obvious lies. Trump told obvious lies. So did Obama. So did bush. Part of critical thinking is determining which statements are lies and which are not.
Because it’s irrelevant and assumes that anyone participating in the discussion was listening to any politician of any kind to begin with. The problem isn’t with ignoring the politicians - something that is nearly always prudent - it’s assuming that we weren’t also completely ignoring Trump.
This investigation was happening among scientists regardless of whatever Trump or Biden or Cotton or Paul or whoever else had to say. But the mainstream left treated them as though they must be dumb backwards thinking Q anon Trumpers who got this idea from him or Alex Jones or some conspiracy nut.
The way that people following this were treated was bad enough, but the most worrisome part is the reputational attacks, largely coordinated by Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth alliance, that these scientists faced. It was a huge risk on their part to challenge someone of his standing in the community, and he was relentless in spreading the meme that these were fringe quacks deserving of nothing but derision for their “conspiracy theories”. In another massive media failure, they were happy to use him as their subject matter expert without bothering to disclose that he’s the one who ran the very same program. And to a lesser extent, Fauci as well.
To be clear, no one suspects that Daszak and Fauci were anything but well-intentioned in their original pursuits when starting and funding this research program. But it’s obvious why anyone faced with the possibility that their decision may have been the reason that this all happened in the first place. And the implications - that their entire organization and much of their life’s work will be shut down immediately - may put even the most reasonable mind in an extremely difficult position.
How would you react upon realizing that your program may very well have killed millions around the globe and destroyed economies? I’d imagine that must be quite a burden on the conscience for anyone who is not a completely sociopathic murderer.
> This investigation was happening among scientists regardless of whatever Trump or Biden or Cotton or Paul or whoever else had to say. But the mainstream left treated them as though they must be dumb backwards thinking Q anon Trumpers who got this idea from him or Alex Jones or some conspiracy nut.
Maybe I just wasn't following the discourse closely enough? My main memory of this story early-on was in a Vox.com podcast in late Spring of 2020. They went through all of the circulating conspiracy theories about the Coronavirus—that it was caused by 5G, that it was a ploy to embed microchips, etc—and ended on the possibility of a lab leak.
I remember them saying something like "yeah, this is the one theory that could actually be true, and we should investigate further."
The 'media' has a bias towards team-alignment. This makes sense. The Washington Post is more like Arsenal Fan TV than it is like The Lancet. You don't go there for truth. You go there to either yell at your team or support your team, but ultimately you go there to be with your team.
This isn't because they're dumb or anything. It's just a natural result of what we, as consumers, want.
It happened with masks, it happened with this nonsense, it will happen again.
Actually I believe it would be better if we never find the true origin of COVID-19.
It has drawn attention to:
- Improving handling of live animals
- Improving lab procedures for biological materials
If we would know the true origin, less attention would be given to other scenario's that are also quite possible for other diseases.
Also, the current attacks on China will only cause it to be even more suspicious about foreign contacts, and that could hurt international cooperation in future pandemics.
To me what gives me credence to the "lab leak theory" more than anything, was China's behavior during and initially after the outbreak. Where they thwarted any investigations from WHO or anyone else and arrested journalists even attempting to cover it. Now we have additional information of lab workers being sick back in November...I genuinely wonder why people immediately jumped in to defend China's actions through the entire thing. I feel like it was in part because of money interests and also because it was something Trump touted as true.
> The problem is that this is Standard Operating Procedure(tm) for China
When you say "China", do you mean the Department of Health, or the Department of Defense, or the Department of Trade, or the Chinese government, or the Chinese people, or some Chinese guy?
It makes as much sense to attribute a Standard Operating Procedure to "China" as it does to attribute something like that to "America", or to say "Americans think...", which is not very much at all, because America, like all societies of more than one person, is a pluralist society.
China is 1.3 billion people. If you treat it as a collection of different interests and points of view, your analyses and predictions will have more cogency.
What you said does not make sense at all. All Chinese government branches are directly under the command of the CCP. Even China's top court rejects the idea of juridical independence [1]. To say China is equivalent to U.S is totally ignorant.
On paper they're directly under the command of the CCP, but Xi Jinping only has so many hours in his day like any other human and can't personally monitor everything that's happening in a billion-person country. That seems to leave plenty of room for government branches to have their own internal politics and interests in practice.
As far as I can tell from the outside, there were actually multiple overlapping cover-ups within China by different organisations with different interests that resulted in doctors, nurses and medical researchers being silenced - starting with local-level coverups that tried to keep the national government from knowing there was a problem, and ending with multiple national-level coverups, including attempts to cover up the fact the local government had covered stuff up because that in itself was embarrassing to China as a country.
That's what you get with authoritarianism. Both the carrots (political advancement) and the sticks (punishment from above) encourage underlings to obey what they think their superiors would command, even when those superiors are not involved.
The pithiest example is the death of Li Wenliang. The doctor who was threatened and silenced for warning others of a SARS outbreak, himself died of the disease when it spread due to inaction.
China is more monolithic than the USA because uniformity is what their culture is structured to establish.
In the West, we have an underlying belief that dissent and debate result in better decisions and more circumspect awareness of complicated situations. We tolerate insolence, dissent, and other unpleasant behaviors specifically because we know they serve a purpose.
That doesn't happen with a top-down ("democratic centralist") system. The vast majority of people have absolutely no power to change the course of decisions. Political offices do not turn over from party to party in a way that shakes up underlying corruption. The police enforce political assertions in addition to the laws of the land.
Your argument boils down to "there are many many people in China, so they must be ideologically and behaviorally diverse." Or, "as X approaches infinity, the number of viewpoints also approaches infinity." It's just not true for human behavior in an authoritarian collectivist society.
Have you ever been to China? There are rich kids there with Lamborghinis and polo shirts. And families with iPads at MacDonalds. And peasants on bikes pulling rickshaws. And an amazing variety of vegetables. And steak Dianne. And lobster Thermidor. And aluminium siding salesmen. And scientists trying to cure malaria. And clerks who commute on Vespas. And gorgeous 18 year old women with legs as long as giraffes dancing in discos. And grandmothers who do Tai Chi in the park at dawn. And violin players. There are even people a lot like you there. And trains. And theatres. And fireplaces and haystacks. And poodles. And nurses who stay up all night. And newlyweds, optimistic for the future who are already saving to send their not yet new born babies to college. And industrial designers. And floor polishers. And bums who want a cigarette. And guys who think they are Bruce Lee. And pretzels. And red wine.
The fundamental underpinnings of China's government and way of life are entirely different from what we Westerners are accustomed to. The simple fact that there are more individuals involved does not prove plurality of thought, because the organizational structure actively punishes dissent and silences critics.
Not every society of more than one person is pluralistic. Extrinsic forces and incentives make a major impact on human behavior.
> When you say "China", do you mean the Department of Health, or the Department of Defense, or the Department of Trade, or the Chinese government, or the Chinese people, or some Chinese guy?
We call this deflecting. And it's a rhetorical device used when you are on the wrong side of the argument.
And the answer is "All Of The Above". All parts of the Chinese government leaders see very little problem with executing those who might upset their status quo.
The problem with this thinking is assuming the government of China actually knows the truth and is acting to protect itself from a dangerous reveal. They might not have known then (or now!) and are simply acting based on some probability it could be true, default secrecy, and organizational fear.
It's also possible that there is something unrelated to the coronavirus outbreak that a thorough investigation might stumble upon which they are trying to keep secret. The WIV was china's first biosafety level-4 lab and has close ties to China's military.
from [0]:
> Despite the WIV presenting itself as a civilian institution, the United States has determined that the WIV has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.
If I had done some work in the past on biological weapons that I didn't want the world to know about, I'd be very concerned about letting a bunch of international investigators examine labs that might be literally right down the hall. Alternatively if I were a government hostile to china who knew damn well what china was doing down the hall but can't find a good way to call them out on it, the opportunity to send investigators in for an unrelated reason would be a godsend.
This seems less plausible. Presumably the PRC knows exactly what kind of research was happening in Wuhan. It should be fairly clear to anyone who worked in that lab if COVID-19 came from there.
The PRC is made up of people, some of whom may or may not tell each other the truth, or may or may not know the truth of what they say. Just like any other organization made up of people.
I don't know if COVID leaked from a lab or not. I think it's possible and very much worth investigating. What I'm against is these kind of "social proof" arguments which can seem convincing but are are often vacuous.
Investigate the evidence. Pressure the PRC to show their records and allow external investigations. Publicly bluster that refusal to open up in the face of legitimate questions should be considered evidence of culpability if they refuse to open up! But don't actually consider a repressive government being repressive by default as actual proof of anything.
Yeah, I'm not throwing out the lab leak hypothesis, but the "China is being secret" thing doesn't hold water. They've got some degree of decentralization mixed with always-be-secret where each gov piece doesn't want to accidentally release something from a different gov piece.
The notorious case of the Chinese spy needing spy auth docs to prove that she's a bona fide spy to the Chinese consulate in the US is an example. Surely they could have authed her using her passport, but no, she needed the auth docs and she got caught for having them.
Isn't this basically the default behavior of China and/or other communist/dictator countries? I just rewatched HBO's Chernobyl, and that was the underlying premise about how badly the gov't wanted the thing to be played down until it was just too much to hide. The superiority of those in charge cannot be brought into disrepute in any way. Same thing with COVID-19. I just think that Bejing has a tighter grip on things than Moscow did at the time. Not that I'm equating global nuclear disaster and a viral pandemic on the same level.
Well. The upper estimates for Chernobyl-related deaths is 6000. Legasov's projections in the 80s cited 40000. That's nothing compared to COVID, and COVID is more global for sure (meaning that most people in most coutries experienced the effects of the pandemic on themselves).
Nuclear disaster sound scary, but COVID is actually objectively scarier.
(Not sure which way you meant the comparison goes)
I meant if Moscow kept a lid on the Chernobyl situation and did not allow them to "fix" it as that would have admitted that Soviet engineering was falible. Had the various nightmare scenarios been allowed to happen (meltdown reaching the water table, etc) due to pride, then Chernobyl could have been so much worse. Could COVID had been mitigated from becoming a global pandemic if "pride" had not affected Bejing?
China forbade sharing covid-19's genome. When a Chinese scientist published it his lab was shut down the next day.
>The Chinese government had prohibited labs from publishing information about the new coronavirus, though Zhang later said he did not know about the prohibition. The next day, the Shanghai Health Commission ordered Zhang's laboratory to close temporarily for "rectification". While some media reports argued that the closure was retaliation for Zhang's decision to publish the genome, Zhang disputed this, saying that officials were right to have the lab improve its biosafety protocols.
Interesting how media coverage completely changed. Under the previous administration it was considered racist to even mention the theory and it's proponents were considered racists or conspiracy theorists.
Why such a sudden change? China certainly didn't change its position on the issue...
There's a world of difference in considering this theory, and with calling it the "Asian Flu" or "Kung Flu" etc. One act addressed what happened, the other tars entire nations/cultures/regions with a wide brush.
Pretty simple to refer to it as COVID, no? West Nile Virus was named in 1937, so hard to really say it's equivalent. Ebola is named after a river, I doubt it gets offended by the association. MERS is widely acknowledged as a mistake in naming by the WHO.
Because there's not a daily sh*tshow occurring in the White House any more so the media need something that bleeds to lead. There's no losing in covering the issue regardless of outcome/findings, and in the mean time ratings will benefit from the eyeballs.
People ask this as some sort of weird gotcha, but it’s actually not that interesting, nor should it be surprising. After all, the previous administration was filled with habitual liars at every level who kept pushing “alternative facts” over observable reality and shat on the media at every opportunity. As such, everything they claimed was viewed as a likely lie, and rightly so.
New developments have happened as well, though. I believe we recently started hearing about Wuhan lab employees starting to get sick around late 2019 and early 2020. I don’t think we had known that before.
> To me what gives me credence to the "lab leak theory" more than anything, was China's behavior during and initially after the outbreak [...]
That all sounds to me just like a massive authoritarian government bureaucracy dealing with a quick moving disaster on their soil where the beaurocrats didn't know what was happening, because the scientists couldn't tell them, so they leaned in on trying to control everyone.
The argument rephrased reads to me like "The reason why I believe in the lab leak theory is that an authoritarian country behaved like an authoritarian country, when I would have expected them to behave like my western democracy".
I think they defend China because it makes them feel as if China needs their defense, even though it is far more powerful than they are prepared to admit.
It is generally very hard to read too much into what the Chinese govt does because govt behaviour is typically a function of domestic situation, and their domestic situation is very different to ours. The Chinese govt tends to over-react, there is a weird tug of war between local and national politicians, authority in Chinese politics (to me) seems very situational and freewheeling in a way that US politics isn't (an odd point given Chinese criticism of democracy)...it is tricky to read anything into their behaviour.
As an example, it is possible that this was a lab leak but that this fact was suppressed by the local govt, and no-one in the central govt is any the wiser.
Defending China was because Trump was anti-China. I don't think money was anything to do with it, there is always going to be a section of the media (on both sides) that defines their view as the opposite of what "the other side" believes. There is nothing complicated about this, it is just a terrible idea to think this way and it will almost always backfire. Trump, in particular, brought out this characteristic to an unprecedented level...if Trump had said that grass was green, some sections of the media would have had pundits on an hour later expressing how dangerous that sentiment was and that, whilst grass appears green to the laymen, it is actually a very, very, very subtle shade of brown (even Obama didn't trigger this kind of neuralgia on the right).
I think given the demagogue POTUS and the mob of crazy followers, it was in the public interest to avoid agitating the mob. Even Facebook had the sense to realize that.
As it stands, asian people are getting targeted for attacks in the street by deranged individuals.
That's why I'm always careful to say CCP instead of China or Chinese when referring to who the bad guy is in all of this. People should take care never to confuse the Chinese ethnicity with the corrupt CCP government.
Do people get offended when people say america invaded Iraq? Do we blame an Eskimo because the federal government invaded the middle east? Of course not. Nobody blames random citizens of countries for their government misdeeds. Man this shifting of standards is ridiculous.
I've just started calling covid West Taiwan virus to piss everyone off.
> I feel like it was in part because of money interests and also because it was something Trump touted as true.
I agree on both counts. With respect to the latter, I yearn for a time when we can dissect the media's coverage of Trump somewhat dispassionately without being branded a Trump Supporter (as though there is some kind of firm dichotomy in which we must be one of Team Trump or Team Media).
CCP's complete lock down of internal flights while leaving international outgoing flights wide open right at the start out this is more damming than the lab leak hypothesis.
I'm surprised nobody paid trump a ton of money to bash a crypto currency so that all the trump "haters" would buy it up and increase the price. Or why trump didn't just do that himself. Then maybe he wouldn't be as scared to show his tax returns in 2024 lol.
The whole politicization of America is such a problem right now.
From my perspective, this is sadly, the likely explanation. The media and opposition party was so worked up, that anything at all that came from Trump or his admin, was simply wrong, a lie, etc.
That, in part, was why no one took this thing seriously at the beginning in the US.
In retrospect, the constant hounding and attacks on Trump damaged all US citizens, simply by blunting messages, by causing unnecessary conflict. While Trump is out of office, the leaders who caused this confusion are still in office. And that is wrong. They need to be fired.
Indeed, a reasonably large contingent of those hesitant to get a vaccine, are parroting the (then) opposition politicians, who cast doubt on the processes. How much damage, how many lives have been lost, because these fools wanted to win a political contest, and score political points?
The media bear significant responsibility in this as well. Their consistent efforts at painting the former administration as "full of crap" all the time, as lying all the time, blunted and confused many messages, and forced secretaries of departments to have to try to handle/answer often idiotic questions.
So here we are today. Lab leak, far from being a paranoid fantasy, is a real possibility. And yet, the media is still playing these games.
We in the US, need, need ... to fire all the pols responsible for this. To no longer consume the media products of the organizations that encouraged this. And to stop believing that just because someone on one side says something that the other side has free rights to attack that without regards for facts.
I'm quite disgusted with the interplay between politics, media, and the pandemic.
I think, like me, many dismissed the lab-leak theory because it sounded like yet-another attempt to push the blame for all the unnecessary death from Trump to China, as well as the cavalcade of doctors stating that the DNA of the virus was clearly not artificially constructed.
There was no evidence to review. Even now the whole reason we are having this discussion is because over a year later there has still not been an adequate investigation and lots of statements made early on have since been shown to be false.
And frankly, in the absence of evidence, some guy getting sick from bad meat at a market is a much simpler explanation than an artificially created virus escaped from an institution with good safety standards. Only after an extensive search for the host has come back empty and the institution's actions have been found to be questionable does occam's razor meaningfully shift, and even then it's still hardly certain that this alternative theory is actually correct.
The only conclusion I came to was that the virus was not artificial in origin. I did suspect it was not a lab-leak, though, due to the purported difficulty of a virus escaping a level 4 facility.
I'm just going to say it - no one in their right mind would want Donald Trump leading a military war against our strongest frenemy in the world.
You don't have to hate Trump to admit that he lacks complex strategy and communication skills, as well as a very week, if not incompetent, cabinet.
Politically speaking, being in a "justified war" would have done nothing but hurt the democrats chances. It's hard to unseat a president at 4 years already, but with an ongoing war it's even harder.
Yes, not that I want him to kick one off either though. His cabinet is no nonsense, he has 8 years in office working with the top mill brass already, and also he doesn't tweet the first thing on his mind. It seems like an inocuous jab, but let's not forget Trump literally tweeted a classified intel picture from our mill satellites. That's the type of incompetence that can't be tolerated.
I think there's a difference between making an extreme claim in the early days of this thing without giving evidence to back it up, compared to now where there's been a year's worth of putting the pieces together. And even now we don't know-- it's just better informed speculation (although the intelligence community may have more to go on that we don't know about.)
The media isn't great about reporting science, but I don't fault them for being critical of an unsupported claim made at a time when it was in the political interests of a person's party to cast blame in China's direction.
Calling that a fiasco is itself ignoring the contexts involved as reporting changed. Making an unsupported accusation that turns out to be correct doesn't mean it was right to make the accusation at that time.
Hopefully people will start to realize that questioning norms and diversity of thought should be accepted on social media. Silencing and suppression of questions and thought by media is rampant and occurs here on Hacker News as well.
The population as a whole (especially under the age of 30) feels like a bunch of sheep to me these days. They can't think freely, question things, or ask hard questions. They all just want to fit in. Ideology that doesn't align with bit tech and social media agendas is quickly dismissed as right-wing idiocracy.
No sure why it is a big deal? Some people (like Cotton) said that the virus escaped a Chinese lab, but had not hard proofs. Lots of scientists said there are no hard proofs. Then we moved on... until we get more proofs.
Anybody can claim anything including truth, but until it is proven to be true, it would be discredited. In this case, finding the truth with hard proofs is not trivial.
If we find out tomorrow that it was indeed a virus escaped from a Chinese lab, then so be it. I expect from media to find the truth among the sea of noise and misinformation. Sometimes it takes time.
Even if the US gov knew about the source of the virus, back in Feb. 2020, I can understand that they decided to sit on it. Fighting the pandemic was the priority, before pointing fingers.
It would be interesting to see, if the virus was indeed escaped from a Chinese lab, what would be the consequences ? Will all countries would come to some kind of agreement to stop playing with bioweapons ? Or they would double down on bioweapons (e.g. with a vaccine before being released) ? Or do like before, and hoping for the best ?... we gonna wipe us out of this planet !
There has been an attempt by some researchers to determine when the first cases of covid were detected in wastewater samples. There are three known studies so far.
So Tom Cotton is owed an apology, and the American people can stand to remember they were badly misled by 'scientists' and the media just before a presidential election.
It's not like people are allowing themselves to be led around and told what to think or something.
"If the question is “are both hypotheses possible?” the answer is yes. Both are possible. If the question is “are they equally likely?” the answer is absolutely not. One hypothesis requires a colossal cover-up and the silent, unswerving, leak-proof compliance of a vast network of scientists, civilians, and government officials for over a year. The other requires only for biology to behave as it always has, for a family of viruses that have done this before to do it again. The zoonotic spillover hypothesis is simple and explains everything. It’s scientific malpractice to pretend that one idea is equally as meritorious as the other. The lab-leak hypothesis is a scientific deus ex machina, a narrative shortcut that points a finger at a specific set of bad actors. I would be embarrassed to stand up in front of a room of scientists, lay out both hypotheses, and then pretend that one isn’t clearly, obviously better than the other"
The cover up didn't need to be colossal, just for everyone to point to occams razor and call anyone with a hint of curiosity a racist.
The fact that the origin of the outbreak appears to be in the same vicinity as a lab that experiments on similar viruses alone is sufficient reason to want a thorough investigation.
Otherwise, the odds that nature produced such a virus, in such a location, make for a crazy coincidence, given that we havent been facing this problem every year for decades.
We had SARS-1 crop up in Guangdong in 2003 when the nearest known related virus has been found in Yunnan some ~700 miles away.
There just wasn't a lab there to leak from.
This time it popped up about ~700 miles away again, but where there was a lab.
The actual chances of that happening are probably about 1-in-10 / 1-in-20 if we understood the movement of people and animals within China that produced both outbreaks. That isn't actually that crazy of a coincidence.
It's not an impossible coincidence, but what prior estimate of the probability that an arbitrary pandemic is lab-origin are you applying that to? Of the ~dozen pandemics in the last fifty years, one (the 1977 flu pandemic[1], which killed ~700k people) was probably lab-origin. A 1/12 prior plus a 1/10 coincidence in favor of lab origin is pretty close to even odds, so what evidence takes it back down? You can't just say "because pandemics are usually natural", since that's what the 1/12 prior already captures.
You present many reasonable arguments that natural origin is possible, and I agree that it is. That doesn't mean lab origin is impossible though, and it doesn't mean the possibility is negligible unless your prior is very heavily biased against it. Considering that a lab-origin pandemic has probably happened before (and has even been dismissed as clearly natural by the WHO[2], before the later scientific consensus corrected that!), I don't see where you're getting the confidence you've expressed in other comments that the origin of this one is certainly natural.
As to exact numbers, I agree that it's reasonable to consider only the urban population, since emergence would probably be in a city. There's no reason to limit the population to China, though--natural emergence elsewhere in SE Asia would also have been possible, and the WIV's research program is distinctive not just in China but in the world. It seems like our disagreement hinges mostly on that first prior (considering that a pandemic emerged, but no other information), though.
The 1977 flu pandemic was a known virus though which was released. It was highly plausible that the virus could have been in a lab.
This virus is literally unlike any other known virus. The closest known virus to it is RaTG13 which is only 96% homologous and the 4% differences across all its basepairs is very high. We have a closer relationship to apes than SARS-CoV-2 does to RATG13.
And we had SARS-1 in 2003 and H1N1 in 2009 and MERS in 2012, where there's no lab involvement at all. Not to mention Ebola, Zika. It estimated that some 30+ viruses have spilled over from animals to humans since the 1970s, and there's been one lab leak.
And we know that Yunnan province has bats with very similar viruses, with one virus having been identified which is almost certainly the precursor to SARS-CoV-1 and another virus which is the cousin of SARS-CoV-2, and we have a spillover event that happened in 2003 to Guangdong with SARS-CoV-1 showing that this can certainly occur without the involvement of any labs.
What remains that is objectionable about the spillover theory of SARS-CoV-2 is the "wild coincidence" of the WIV lab being in the same city as where the spillover happened. This time. But a large city is likely where it would have been identified first. Estimates from the genetic clock of the virus is that the spillover happened sometime as early as October. It would have been spreading in rural areas before it hit the nearest big city and caused a superspreading event and was noticed. To accurately determine the likelihood that the spillover was in Wuhan and not somewhere else you need to accurately know the distribution of the bats in China, the distribution of the sarbecoviruses in the bats, and the intermediate animals that might have been involved and their movement and the movement of humans. We know from SARS-CoV-2 that the virus jumping from bats in Yunnan to Guangdong can happen. We can expect it would be unlikely for the virus to leapfrog all the way to Beijing.
We don't have all that information, so it now becomes pulling numbers out of butts time. To me that feels more like rolling a natural 20 on 1d20. With SARS-CoV-1 we rolled a 6 and it turned up in Guangdong. If we rolled a 11 or 12 maybe it winds up in Congquing. But we have no idea what the intermediate species might be, which might make spillovers in Congquing unlikely if those animals aren't farmed near there. And we still have no idea of the mechanism by which SARS-CoV-2 wound up in Guangdong, but we know it did, and it didn't involve a lab.
It seems like you have a lot more confidence than I do that we know everything the WIV was working on? I agree that SARS-CoV-2 is unlikely to be derived (naturally, artificially, or otherwise) from any known virus, including RaTG13; but a distinctive characteristic of the WIV's research was their sampling of novel viruses from remote bat caves that no other humans routinely entered. That presents a pathway for emergence of novel, naturally-evolved pathogens beyond what normal agricultural etc. activity already risked, whether through a researcher infected in the field or through a literal lab accident back in Wuhan.
So specifically considering their group, the novelty of the pathogen doesn't seem to me like significant evidence against lab origin. The public focus on gain-of-function research actually seems excessive to me--while I do think it's possible that the origin of SARS-CoV-2 involves lab manipulation (e.g., genetic engineering or serial passage) of the virus, the WIV's library of novel natural viruses seems to me like at least as big a part of the danger. In any case, their database went offline on Sep 12 2019, around when that genetic clock suggests SARS-Cov-2 began spreading in humans:
That timing could be coincidence, and their flimsy explanation for its continued unavailability ("hacking attempts") could just be the reflexive secrecy of an authoritarian regime. It's a second weird coincidence, though. The WIV has claimed to have published everything they have to GenBank; but Deigin et al. were able to assemble a novel Merbecovirus from contamination of agricultural datasets from a team that shared sequencing equipment with the WIV:
That Merbecovirus obviously has nothing to do with SARS-CoV-2; but if they had one unpublished virus, it seems reasonable to wonder if they have more.
If you're going to extend the field of zoonoses to include events that didn't become major pandemics, then it seems like you should extend the field of lab leaks too? But let's say negligible probability of lab origin is p < 1/1000, which in an expected value sense is still roughly a 9/11 worth of deaths. Then even taking a prior of p = 1/30 that an arbitrary pandemic is lab-origin and considering the emergence in Wuhan, I don't see how you get to negligible unless the novelty of the pathogen decreases that by a factor of >100 (which per above I don't see).
Have you considered the possibility that it first appeared in the vicinity of a lab that experiments on similar viruses is because if it had appeared elsewhere, there would have been no sufficiently-equipped lab to isolate it? This is the streetlight effect: you find things where you (are able to) look for them.
In other words, it couldn't have appeared somewhere far from a properly-equipped lab, because there would be no properly-equipped lab to detect it.
SARS-CoV-2 came to the world's attention because so many people in Wuhan got sick that clinicians noticed the unexpectedly high volume of patients. No special skill in virology is required to detect that, and there's no indication that the WIV was involved in doing so; if you believe it was, please post a reference. The genome of SARS-CoV-2 was first published not by the WIV but by Professor Zhang Yongzhen at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre:
Of course it's possible that the WIV had discovered the outbreak earlier by more sophisticated means, and the CCP has chosen to conceal this fact. I don't think it's even that unlikely, considering all the other early warnings they tried and failed to conceal (e.g., the reports from Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist unaffiliated with the WIV); but the question would then become why.
> Have you considered the possibility that it first appeared in the vicinity of a lab that experiments on similar viruses is because if it had appeared elsewhere, there would have been no sufficiently-equipped lab to isolate it?
You are essentially arguing for lab leak theory. Initially there was only one cluster of COVID and that was at Wuhan. That's why lab leak hypothesis is more plausible.
It was not the case that there were dozens of clusters all over the world and Wuhan lab was first able to identify the virus. Your argument would have _some_ validity if there are lot of clusters of outbreaks at the same time. But that was not the case. The initial cluster was only at Wuhan.
The initial cluster was found at Wuhan, because there's a lab there. We have no idea how many sub-pandemic clusters arose and fell before this particular mutation got into a population sufficiently dense and mobile to spread it.
> The initial cluster was found at Wuhan, because there's a lab there
Citation needed. This seems hand-wavy at best. As a matter of fact, people were uncertain about disease itself [1]. I havent seen any article yet that asserts the fact that Wuhan cluster was detected because of the lab. Furthermore, Wuhan lab is a research lab. It's not some diagnostic lab that people go there to get tested for new variant of SARS viruses.
If the CCP didn't have such a startling surveillance system and tight grip over any international narrative, I'd be inclined to agree with you.
But they have done themselves no favors in their handling of the situation.
I'm not sure the coverup would require a vast network of people. Maybe 1-2 dozen in a lab, max, (depending on who knew which experiments were being done) and a bunch of CCP members who I would not be surprised are tight lipped.
The counter questions are equally as troubling.
- Why haven't we found the host species? Typically it takes a few months, but we're going on 1.5 years. You'd think the CCP would have it very high on their priority list to find.
- How did this virus mutate a series of genetic sequences, none of which are found in other corona viruses? The series of mutations in SARS-COV2 seems very unlikely to have been a natural fluke.
There's a lot of questions here on both sides.
For me, I'd still put it at 50-50. I will not be surprised if a smoking gun is found one way or the other.
Why does it require a cover-up so vast? All you need to keep the secret is blocking access from international investigators and the silence of the very few people originally involved. There's tons of precedent of harsh and inhumane penalties for saying things the government doesn't want you to from within China. And international investigation is quite simple to decline, you just say no. I don't think it's as complicated as you're trying to make it sound.
I mean, citations please. If it really was a lab leak, who is to say it wasn't from a small specialized research team, maybe some academics who were aware of the science but not the implementation, and a couple people in management? The project does not need to have been a huge, nefarious, x-files program. That sounds like the conspiracy theory to me.
I think you might be vastly overestimating how many people would even have been knowledgeable about it in the first place.
Maybe people are terrible at keeping secrets, but also everyone who spills the secret is immediately branded a conspiracy theorist and deplatformed, the end result is the same...
People keep conflating 'lab leak' with 'made in a lab'.
Think about this: If it was a natural virus that escaped from a lab, China wouldn't necessarily even know about the escape for sure. We could imagine a scenario where maybe China started to suspect that might be what happened around Jan/Feb 2020. So then you don't need a collosal cover up, because hardly anyone knows for sure anyway - you just need to obstruct anyone asking questions that lead in that direction, and obfuscate any clues (publications from the lab saying what they were working on, reports of staff illness etc)
This is the entire reason the media took actions like banning the very topic from being discussed. Someone else mentioned it higher up in the thread but there was a huge overlap between people claiming to simply sincerely investigate the possibility of a lab leak, and the group of people who believed that the virus was a bioengineered weapon released on purpose by China to disrupt other nations.
> silent, unswerving, leak-proof compliance of a vast network of scientists, civilians, and government officials for over a year
I was watching translated videos early last year made by chinese scientists trying to get the word out, at the risk of their lives. Compliance is simple: you talk, you "disappear".
The Great Firewall blocks in both directions, and is very good. Additionally, the West had already decided that it was politically expedient to ignore lab leak possibility. That meant the primary avenue for such leaks were more underground sources, like 4chan.
> Additionally, the West had already decided that it was politically expedient to ignore lab leak possibility. That meant the primary avenue for such leaks were more underground sources, like 4chan.
Both this and the originally linked article are long on politics and conspiracies and short on science, which is why the responses end up being political. The interesting questions here are not about CCP secrecy but about mutation rates in different environments and how effectively scientists can engineer mutations versus evolving them. It would be much more convincing evidence of lab leaks if examples of effective gain of function mutations being injected by scientists (or some kind of accelerated evolution by manipulating lab conditions) could be discussed and explained.
There won’t be a scientific conclusion based on an analysis of what media leaked what when.
The zoonotic spillover doesn't seem to address geography. Why would the virus first appear in a city near a virology institute instead of out in the country near bat habitats? The speculation from scientists like Dr. Daszak is that someone ate an infected live bat from "southern China."
I've seen the studies about air flows in restaurants and buffets and none seem to indicate that Covid is food borne. So we have someone in the wet market about to bite into some delicious live bat and they give it a big sniff right as the bat expels some of its last little virus contaminated breaths. "Squee, squee" says the bat. "Hmm-mm finger licking good" says the world's unluckiest connoisseur of things that flutter in the night.
Alternatively, someone was careless in a lab studying the same family of bats and viruses. In the sense that one need not attribute to malice that which is explained by incompetence, the leaked virus need not have been some "biowarfare" effort, maybe just something a bit entrepreneurial or a side experiment to see if something could work.
> Why would the virus first appear in a city near a virology institute instead of out in the country near bat habitats?
Have you considered the possibility that it first appeared in the vicinity of a lab that experiments on similar viruses is because if it had appeared elsewhere, there would have been no sufficiently-equipped lab to isolate it? This is the streetlight effect: you find things where you (are able to) look for them.
In other words, it couldn't have appeared somewhere far from a properly-equipped lab, because there would be no properly-equipped lab to detect it.
Pretty sure this doesn't make sense at all. If I remember rightly, the way Covid-19 was originally identified was that two or three different private sector labs which don't normally work with this kind of virus at all managed to sequence it well enough to identify what it was - it had nothing to do with the virology institute. Not only that, the fact that they weren't officially meant to be handling this kind of virus was used to shut them up and get them to destroy the virus sequences they'd found.
- There's still no evidence that WIV was doing GOF research there. The SARS-1 GOF research was done in the USA.
- There are horseshoe bats with sarbecoviruses in Hubei province, their range is large.
- Similar to this virus, for SARS-1 there closest known virus in bats is in Yunnan, but SARS-1 emerged in Guangdong, about the same distance away from Yunnan as Wuhan is.
- Calling it a "Chimera" is not accurate and is a loaded term. It is not a Chimera of RaTG13. You can't get from RaTG13 to SARS-2 by splicing some other backbone and then shipping it through a couple dozen generations of mice. RatG13 is also a few decades of evolution away from SARS-2.
- A furin cleavage site has emerged spontaneously in coronaviruses at least 6 times now (not including SARS-2) in both circulating human coronaviruses and in MERS. It has also now been found in sarbecoviruses in Thailand, so we know that nature produces furin cleavage sites in this kind of virus.
- Efforts by China to suppress information sound like an authoritarian government acting like an authoritarian government. This is completely unsurprising.
- Efforts by WIV to do political damage control after the pandemic broke also sound like a lab under an authoritarian government reacting to protect itself and by its people reacting to protect themselves (there may have been relatively banal stuff like financial embezzlement going on in the lab which is being suppressed). This is also completely unsurprising.
- There's no evidence that WIV had live RaTG13 virus either, they took samples from the mine in Yunnan and sequenced it, but that isn't cultured, viable infectious virus.
> vast network of scientists, civilians, and government officials
Few corrections:
* CCP government officials, who have every single incentive to participate in cover-up
* I am not sure how much cover-ups needed by any civillian, let alone vast network of civillians. An average civillian is probably not aware of lab leak to begin with, unless they were informed by media.
* again, not vast network of scientists is needed for cover-up. Mostly researchers and officials in Wuhan Lab. Like CCP officials, who have every single incentive to participate in cover-up
The author is making the "vast network of scientists, govt. officials, and civillians" argument, which doesn't even pass the BS test. Few dozens researchers in Wuhan lab and CCP officials are more than enough to accomplish the cover up.
So I can wave the red, white, and blue all day with my TXSSAR membership, 2 flag triangles, and good life.. but still there are deeper, fundamental, metastasized cancerous problems with the shining city on the hill that have tarnished it.
Under such conditions of weak debate ethics and sensible balance, democracy gives oxygen to the crazies and drives policy and attention to satisfy the conspiracy theorists who demand a particular investigational outcome. It's not that free speech needs to go away, but that the leadership shouldn't kowtow to idiocy or even consider what's popular if it's existentially-vital. This can only be accomplished with ethical leadership, which I don't see happening anytime soon since celebrity straw puppets are typically installed to continue serving the interests of the 1%.
If it were possible, leadership means putting on the Big Boy™ pants and not bending and shifting focus on the whims of idiots. There are no political figures anywhere that I've seen who aren't duplicitous, have a backbone, and are empathetic and sane individuals.
Perhaps political parties and elections should be disbanded and revert to "jury duty" public administration for a fixed term (1 year) from a pool of random, qualified,
competent professionals.
Remember what a democratic idiocracy did to Socrates. "Democracy" is another word for "mob rule." Combine mob rule with vulture capitalism selling off public infrastructure to corporations and corruption, then you have basically the recipe for a third-world country fighting over the last scraps of what was once a nearly shiny city on a hill (minus the genocides, training of death squads, banana wars, and Monroe doctrine).
The only way for the human species to survive is to crawl-out from under greed, dogma, conflict, laziness, material comfort, and ignorance and do many thing to defeat the threats to our very survival.
This is a post mortem for a corpse that was already dead.
Trump derangement syndrome guaranteed this outcome.
Reap what you sow. American mainstream media is pure propaganda, full stop. The national voice is the pr teams of our most valuable corporations. The patient is dead.
When was the last time you thought about what Julian Assange is going through?
Another political article about how it's not possible that the Chinese were studying the virus and some underpaid lab tech screwed and and exposed himself and then did what humans always do, the tech tried to cover up the mistake.
Nobody has still explained how the Chinese knew they had a problem in early December when they only had a handful of cases, like less than 100 cases. This is the question that needs to be answered. Until this question is answered satisfactorily the lab leak is the most reasonable explanation.
The normal ways you detect a new virus is because:
a) you have novel symptoms, COVID presents as the flu and early on tests didn't exist.
b) you have a statistically significant number of cases, early on the number of cases didn't exceed the seasonal variability of the flu.
c) you have a statically significant number of deaths, early on the number of death's didn't exceed the seasonal variability of the flu.
When the Chinese knew they had a problem, there was NOTHING that would indicate anything out of the ordinary was taking place, so then how did the Chinese know they had a problem?
If the virus really jumped species in the wet market, the Chinese wouldn't have known they had a problem until either the cases or the death totals started to exceed the normal variability of the flu. If that had happened we wouldn't have know about COVID until Late Jan or early Feb, and then it would have been really, really ugly. But that's not what happened, the Chinese knew about it in early December. The only way they could have known is if they had prior knowledge.
They were no wild animals sold at the seafood market, only seafood product. Picture of people eating bat soup were taken in Palau island. Wild animal market pictures were taken in Guilin, Gongguan or even Tomohon market in Indonesia. Youtube, Twitter and Facebook were spammed with fake videos claiming to be from Wuhan wet market although they were from these other locations.
An interview in a Japanese documentary in Wuhan:
https://youtu.be/N4ABOJ1y5iM?t=429
COVID was detected as SARS when Wuhan doctors started harboring suspicions and requested analysis of some patient samples. So it was immediately known that a SARS outbreak or something very much like it was in progress.
"Another political article about how it's not possible that the Chinese were studying the virus and some underpaid lab tech screwed and and exposed himself and then did what humans always do, the tech tried to cover up the mistake."
no, you're wrong. You need to focus attention not on the lab-leak, which could be small mistake by an underling, but instead on the gain-of-function research that is the goal of labs like Wuhan and likely created this virus with approval of the highest levels of the lab.
i think the story is that doctors noticed cases of unusual pneumonia and investigated further. not impossible, especially in a country with SARS experience
This article correctly notices at the very start that asking this question is of no value in resolving the current situation. Then the author seems to think they've uncovered a massive secret instead of continuing the thought.
Who wants this question in the public's mind? What are their goals in constantly pushing it, even though it does nothing to improve people's lives? What are the actual effects of pushing this question as if it was important?
I think it's better to not contribute to an environment of hatred towards large groups of people. Is the question potentially interesting? Sure, I suppose. But there's a huge difference between idly thinking about something and telling everybody else that they should as well. The latter has consequences, and you can't just ignore them.
So we should hide information because it might cause people to have a negative view towards the country of China? How about this - let all information, whether it goes with your far left anti-racist view or not, be put freely out to the public and let the public decide how they want to react. Of course some people will take it to the extreme, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t entitled to this info. Anyone who lost a loved one, had their livelihoods reduced, or fell ill absolutely deserve to know what was done and what steps we are going to take to never allow it to happen again.
I never need censorship of any information by anyone, no matter how noble or misguided their deed.
I think this part of the text really sums up everything I hated about reading the news and social media in 2020. Each site seemed to be funneling you into a single source of truth and way of not only thinking, but FEELING about an event. I don't like being reminded of corporate sponsored social movements if I open facebook/google/amazon/twitter. I don't want my app reminding me to vote/get vaccinated(I did both btw) every time I open it without a way to dismiss and select 'I already did, stop reminding me.' I don't want reddit creating a central sub-page for discussing [Current Event] within the narrow bounds of what their moderators think is acceptable. I don't like non-dismissable context text on twitter and under youtube videos that are often off topic and triggered by bad speech detection that simply take you to a link dump of regular news articles. I don't like the idea that there's an oligopoly on "truth" and "credible sources." No amount of branding will convince me that "fact checkers" are any more objective and impartial than regular newspaper columnists; fact checkers are what editors are supposed to be. There's no academic rigor to fact checking, and the reality that so much casual skepticism on a variety of topics was suppressed and equivocated with being a flat-earther is sickening.