Things like this usually come down to incentives. And right now I don’t see how almost any major power’s leaders have any incentive to push an investigation forwards.
We are too dependent on China to piss them off, and so far experience shows we are much more likely to follow their demands than follow our own (Hollywood, NBA, Hong Kong, blizzard, albeit only one of those is geopolitical).
It's important to realize that the world's dependence on China is actually interdependence.
People fear what might happen if China suddenly blocked all exports to their country, and rightly so. China is a country where the government wields that kind of totalitarian power. However, this hasn't happened even once yet. The Chinese government knows that, once they play that particular card on one nation, every other nation in the world is going to freak out, stop talking about diversifying away from Chinese manufacturing, and actually do it.
The world absolutely should press the Chinese government to behave in an open and responsible manner on COVID and on many other fronts. China will respond with their usual hostage-taking and "wolf warrior" diplomacy, but it's a sham backed by thin air. China needs the world as its customers even more than the world needs cheap Chinese manufacturing. If the world's governments are willing to show a little solidarity then much can be accomplished.
i wouldnt too sure about that. Most of the things that china imports have super low ramp up time, so a planned exodus is significantly easier for them.
It's unlikely to happen in the short term but it's entirely possible in a decade or two if nothing significant changes in the meantime.
The issue is not so much with frivolous consumerism as it is with cheap crap flooding the market, taking over certain product categories altogether. If you're in the market for any kind of electronics, toys, small tools, etc., chances are your only option is to buy a variation of the same cheap mass produced crap with a different temporary or nonexistent brand and thousands of fake 5-star reviews. Even searching for name brands you run the risk of getting a counterfeit. The system is rigged to the point where quality, and thus more expensive, brands simply can't compete.
The change needs to start on the manufacturer and retailer side. Stop prioritizing cost savings from cheap Chinese factories and start building locally and in factories that prioritize quality and respect human labor and the environment. As a consumer I'd happily pay for that overhead if that option was available and was given a fair chance to compete.
Ok we’re obviously making stupid black and white arguments. But it’s patently true in many companies there is plenty of profit to be reduced and redistributed as wages (also exec comp)
>Double my wage, I’ll buy made in the UK/EU much more often.
Sounds like you're suggesting that made in UK/EU is too expensive, and if only people were paid enough they would be buying local. Is there any evidence that's actually the case? Do SV engineers, doctors, and lawyers buy US made goods significantly more than anyone else?
As long as we are discussing potential incentives, it seems reasonable to have a modicum of curiosity concerning the incentives for a biosecurity state.
Simply blaming one state actor over another appears as a set of false alternatives. A convenient distraction which inspires tribalism and identity.
CBDC, "verified digital identities" and a host of other dystopian solutions grow into rationalized necessities from the germ of the COVID crisis. We need not look very far to see many of the same actors involved have advocated for these dystopian innovations for years, if not decades. If some of those actors hosted a simulated coronavirus pandemic exercise in October of 2019, is it appropriate to dismiss it as a mere coincidence?
At a certain point you have to concede the probability of a duck being the source of the waddling and quacking.
Well, if we are going to play the game where covert research implicates overt funding that specifically hinges on the funds not being used on such covert research (gain-of-function studies), we will definitely be barking up the wrong tree.
That's a circular argument. You're using the assumption of foul play to characterize the response as a cover-up, and the putative existence of a cover-up as evidence of foul play. Be better.
I think it’s undeniable now that the US did fund reaserch in the WIV, why do I need further evidence for that when Fauci himself has admitted so?
The cover-up was Daszak and co. pre-emptively denouncing lab leak theories as an attack on science and branding them as crazy conspiracies.
The only remaining thing to determine is whether the funding went into gain-of-function research, which Fauci vehemently denies but given his track record of lying it’s only natural to be hesitant in believing him. I’m far from an expert but according to the BBC[1] there do exist experts who believe Fauci not admitting it is just relying on semantics.
Maybe we should be pushing our political and business leaders to fix that. If a nation.. openly hostile to our interests is able to cause a worldwide pandemic that no one can investigate because it might upset that nations feefee's. That imo is much bigger problem than the pandemic itself
Part of the problem is that the entire mainstream media narrative of the pandemic was warped by using it to get Trump out of office, which lead to downplaying how important China's actions were. In particular, I remember a lot of the press harping on about how the Obama administration wrote a pandemic plan and how much better everything would've gone if Trump followed it... except the plan wasn't exactly as described by the media. The most important thing, according to the document, was something none of the media coverage mentioned - it wasn't mask wearing, or lockdowns, or vaccinations or anything they talked about, it was actually getting accurate information from the country where the pandemic started. It hammered away on the fact that every other part of the pandemic response fundamentally relied on that information, there was no way to do without it, and if the pandemic started in a developing country without the staff to gather it the US should deploy their own mission there to get it. There was no advice on what to do if the country was a near-peer of the US which refused to release that info for internal political reasons. An accurate description of that document would've put a lot more of the blame on China, and that just wouldn't do politically.
Taiwan's independence. The emergence of TSMC is pretty critical at this point in time and the US and other European countries have paid them a lot of money to open plants in their territories.
China now has to either pretend is has way more nuclear missiles or actually make them (and maintain them).
The US and China are in this constant state of "our biggest trade partner is also our current biggest rival". I'm not really sure what the end game of that entails but I'm really hoping it just maintains at dick waving status.
It's going to be very interesting if/how China steps into Afghanistan. That was basically Russia's vietnam. The current US situation with it should be pretty obvious to everyone at this point.
We specifically did pacific theatre exercises with the japanese self defense force and the south korean military with shit like launching land based JSDF missles from USN ships target guidance and plenty of other joint operations to show China(maybe Russia?) the capabilities of the US armed forces and it's allies.
inb4 "the usa started it". Yeah probably. China has been playing the military dick measuring game for the last 10 years pretty hard tho. I didn't think any country was as stupid as the USA to put as much money into defense spending but here we are (I am a US citizen).
tl;dr China is openly hostile to US military and economic influence in SE Asia.
Even if the true origin was irrefutably confirmed, and it was manmade, so what? What is there to be gained rather than just dealing with the problem? Finger-pointing and violence?
The world needs a proper investigation into how the pandemic was handled way more than this. Viruses will come again as they always have done and mounting a less disastrous response would be really nice.
If you want to chase a conspiracy that actually matters, go find out who is pushing the narrative that COVID is fake and vaccines are dangerous. That conspiracy is literally killing thousands of people.
Why does the origin story matter, outside of political motivations? If we knew 100% how it came into being, what specific information does that give us that helps the world eradicate it, or deal with future pandemics?
The whole "lab leak investigation" is a political side show attempt to distract people away from the real question, which is how did almost every country on earth utterly fail to control the spread and avert catastrophe? Both questions are fine to answer, but one of them might provide actionable information for future pandemics, and the other one is purely political blame-game.
Are you kidding? Of course the origin story of COVID matters, enormously. Knowing where a virus originated and whether it leaked from a lab accident or came to us through a natural cross-over is enormously important for clinical reasons and in the case of this vast global pandemic, for simple historical reasons of firmly establishing what happened and how right down to the first sequence of events. In no way is wanting to find that out a political sideshow if you have any notion of careful research and establishment of facts. People will be writing about the COVID pandemic for decades to come. It's absurd that you or anyone would dismiss something so basic as wanting to concretely know its origin. That sort of reasoning is a much more obvious example of politically motivated sideshow drama.
The most obvious reason would be this: preventing a repeat occurrence.
We can't learn from our mistakes if we are prevented from finding out what the mistake was...
If the virus did get released from a supposedly secure research facility, this has huge implications for research policy and biosecurity standards worldwide. If the virus did originate from gain-of-function research, this again has implications upon whether we permit it or ban it worldwide. It was already banned in the US and other Western nations on safety grounds; maybe it's not safe anywhere in the world given that it could result in a global pandemic.
But without concrete evidence and open discussion, it won't be possible to make policy based upon rational discussion and decision-making.
Given the global impact of the pandemic, it would behoove us to give such investigation a high priority, given its profound importance to our long-term health and prosperity.
Swindlers and liars need to be exposed, and held outside of politics. It's not ok to stand in front of hundreds of millions of people and lie right in their faces. We've seen how such mental assaults ended before.
No, it would be a conspiracy only they conspired to do so.
I don't think that's the case with most of them. There are a lot of movements coming from different backgrounds, believing in different things that are meeting at "it's not real, don't get vaccinated". The Bill-Gates-Wants-To-Kill-Us-people aren't conspiring with the Big-Pharma-Wants-A-Perpetual-Vaccine-Business-People, they just happen to come to the same conclusion ("don't do it").
From what little exposure I had to them, I think they're honest in their ideas. I believe they're wrong on most counts, but I don't think they're sitting at home scheming how to fool the masses. I'm sure there are some who seek to influence public opinion by spreading false narratives, but the large majority seems to just have lost pretty much all trust in Western governments and looks for alternative theories that explain the state of the world.
I think you've made a category error. We're not talking about the lost schmucks who've bought into this claptrap - we're talking about whose bright idea it was in the first place, and who's making an effort to spread it. Someone is providing those "alternative theories". You dig around a little and you find dubiously funded websites and media outlets pushing this stuff, as well as the more unsavory elements of media we call "mainstream". It's not nearly as organic as it seems, and we shouldn't let the bad actors hide behind social media as the scapegoat. "Astroturfing" is not new.
So, who benefits when Americans lose faith in their government?
Expecting such an outcome is starkly irrational. Its exact opposite is far more likely, as evidenced by the fact that we're already well down exactly that road to exactly that destination.
Why on earth would it? The government is the engine of social cooperation. Losing faith in it puts you on the road away from civilization, not towards.
If I look at the groups in America who appear to have lost faith in their government, I see a lot of groups - Proud Boys, antivaxxers, antimaskers, anti-CDC people - who could not be remotely categorized as critical thinkers. Their behaviors have caused a longer loss in personal liberty because the pandemic continues. And, to look at the Capitol insurrectionists - there's not much accountability.
I just don't think there's much evidence that losing faith in government leads to any of those benefits. And my experience tells me that it does the opposite.
> Someone is providing those "alternative theories".
I'm not sure they are. I mean, sure, for some things, there's likely someone somewhere making it up, but others just come to live by themselves.
A lot of them remind me of the preppers. They also have plenty of scenarios and end up in similar places on practical questions. And companies around that also were created or took up some of the content to market to them. This might be the same here: websites trying to attract these people for other reasons instead of those websites being the source of the ideas.
Since a lot of it is happening online, I guess it should theoretically be/have been visible, do you know of any reports that trace it back to those who created the different conspiracy theories?
Do you also believe that correlation implies causation? Because it's practically the same thing. A conspiracy requires that people conspire, i.e. coordinate. Correlated action is entirely possible without conspiracy, as is evident during any traffic jam or holiday shopping rush.
I've observed this frequently on this site and elsewhere. Dissent is pejoratively associated with flat-earth, antisemitism and other nonsense. As a mainstream narrative, it is an effective way to shut down the discussion. Perhaps some might even call that a disinformation conspiracy.
I am not sure which is the cause and effect, brain control 5G chips were the work of Bill Gates (who as far as I know is not of the Jewish faith) and are outlandish enough. As if to 'prove' these claims are possible and indeed real, gravitas is added to the claim by saying it was in conjunction with the Rothschilds and the Soros Foundation. It did not require me to associate an entire religion with the 'theory', it's in the theory itself, as a cornerstone of supposed proof.
The conversation gets shut down at the retarded assertion that a fake virus was invented in order to inject the population of the world with a brain control device operating, very specifically, on the 5G spectrum.
The phenomenon you are really observing is that stupid people are pejoratively associated with stupid people, especially when they cobble together stupid broad statements like 'all the astronauts and satellites are paid off by the deep state to perpetuate the lie that the earth is round' or 'just ask any Jew and they will confirm they were all told not to go to New York on 9/11'.
So the a conspiracy that causes people to respond poorly to the threat is worse than the conspiracy that released the threat into the world in the first place?
Of course you you have a source for that right. All official sources I can find say the virus is traced to October or November 2019 origination on china with first cases in Spain from January 2020
Then they ran tests on samples taken between January 2018 and December 2019 and found the presence of the virus genome in one of them, collected on March 12, 2019.
“The levels of SARS-CoV-2 were low but were positive,” research leader Albert Bosch was quoted as saying by the university.
quote must have been taken out of context for propaganda purposes
1. No additional verification has been found since, leading to the probability that it was a false positive
2. The researches final paper and subsequent research only talks about finding indicators after Jan 2020
3. The original March 2019 only had 2 of 5 indicators, and seemed to be a data anomaly we should not be writing sensationalist news stories on data anomalies
4. No other samples from 2019 seem to have the same abnormal results... Given what we know about COVID it is unlikely that is appeared in March 2019, then disappeared only to reappear again in Jan 2020...
Covid-19 Started in Wuhan, I know you desperately want to believe it did not start in China, likely do not your political basis but there is literately zero evidence to claim it did not start in China
Directly from the study you have referenced that is the topic of discussion here [1].
"All samples came out to be negative for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 genomes with the exception of March 12, 2019, in which both IP2 and IP4 target assays were positive. This striking finding indicates circulation of the virus in Barcelona long before the report of any COVID-19 case worldwide."
As for your assumption of my personal beliefs. You could not be more wrong, nevertheless, I am responding to your statements which are directly refuted by the information you yourself have provided.
First, the study didnt exist, then the text didnt say what it did say, then it did say what it said, but they didnt mean it. One by one your comments have been, well baffling to say the least. What exactly is your agenda? What are your political biases? Its like having a real life conversation with Tucker Carlson.
It is 100% (99.99999%) established that it originated in China, but to deny basic facts, basic logic, basic everything in pursuit of, well I dont know what you are trying to prove? You can hate China as much as me and not just make shit up, there is adequete evidence without going all fox news on random people on the internet.
Edit: Forgot to mention one thing. I don't care about either China or US. They are both just as bad as far as I'm concerned. Different faces of totalitarianism.
>>On that same note I see you desperately want to believe it started in China.
No, it is a clear fact that it started in China. The only open question is was that a natural transfer or a lab leak
I believe it was a Lab leak from China, and that china should be held responsible for that.
Now I freely admit that my bias is anti-china, I believe the government of china is one of, if not the single greatest threat to individual freedom in the world today.
I do care about US, I think the US is the greatest nation on the planet. I think the US for all its faults is still a Beacon on the Hill for individual freedom, though we are losing that as the government try;s to make us More EU like with very limited freedom.
To call the US totalitarian like China means you are willfully ignorant or or soo opposed to individual freedom/ pro collectivism that you do not even know that totalitarianism is anymore
If by now you mean June 2020, then yes it is funny.
Could very well be false positives, probably is, could be that researchers were carrying out instructions from their 5g chips. Posted in response to people stating categorically that the parent comment made up a fact that does not exist and it was impossible to source, nothing more.
I think @White_Wolf is talking about a study [0] done in 2020 by the university of Barcelona. But at the time the study was still in peer review phase.
The discovery of virus genome presence so early in Spain, if confirmed, would imply the disease may have appeared much earlier than the scientific community thought.
There was the potential for a false positive due to the virus’ similarities with other respiratory infections.
The research has been submitted for a peer review.
why does the world need a proper investigation into that? Sometimes it seems to me that it’s just because we want someone to blame. Not because it would actually help anyone.
If there aren’t ever any consequences to making huge mistakes that kill millions of people, what are the incentives in the future to not do it again?
The CCP knowingly hid information about infections. This whole thing could have been contained in China with the right information at the right time. If it was a lab accident that could be avoided in the future too with better protocols.
I’m baffled that after millions have died some people just think we should let this go. Would you let it go if the us government accidentally killed millions of people in a nuke test or a chemical spill or any other accident of the same magnitude?
The problem is that even with an investigation there will be no consequences. For one thing, too much evidence has already been lost. Whether that is deliberate or due to mere passage of time doesn't matter; either way, we'll barely be more certain after an investigation than before. For another, even if we were absolutely certain, geopolitical concerns would preclude any real repercussions. Again, whether that's realpolitik or corruption/collusion doesn't matter; either way, anyone who does get punished will surely be a scapegoat while the real culprits walk free.
The only thing an investigation at this point will do is waste time and money and divert experts from more useful tasks (like finding the next potentially catastrophic pathogen). I believe that demands for one should be considered purely performative. The only thing they achieve is to declare allegiance to one group and drum up discrimination against another.
Let go of what? It's pretty much impossible to prove COVID was an accidental lab leak, unless there's a huge smoking gun. Even if there was a proof, what would be the point of revenge? Did any country take revenge for Chernobyl?
It seems like COVID has caused much more global damage than Chernobyl. The USSR also suffered a high percentage of the total damage, whereas China has suffered somewhat proportionally but not say 80-90% of the total damage.
You are right; in light of available circumstantial evidence such as the instatement of an army bioweapons commander in WIV and the deletion of their sample database, it would seem much more likely that it was an intentional lab leak.
> The CCP knowingly hid information about infections. This whole thing could have been contained in China with the right information at the right time.
This can and should be investigated and dealt with on it's own, irrelevant to if the source was a lab or natural causes.
My theory has always been that if you look at what was happening with China on a world stage at the time of the outbreak, HK protests, building military bases on atolls, Uyghur Camps, perhaps more. China was in a pretty bad place.
Then along comes this virus, and I'm sure they were like "oh crap, lets not bring any more attention to ourselves, maybe this will all just go away". Of course, it didn't. It was 100x worse than they probably imagined.
CCP screwed up massively. Was the screw up in a lab or not is secondary. They had the opportunity to stop it, but they didn't. That's the breakdown that needs to be discussed. I don't think that is a breakdown that is as politically charged or questionable.
> The CCP knowingly hid information about infections. This whole thing could have been contained in China with the right information at the right time.
Maybe they weren't really the ones responsible. But if someone is powerful enough to avoid the CCP-internal punishment and have others take the blame, they're not going to let themselves be inconvenienced by foreign investigators.
Because if it’s human negligence or malfeasance that created the virus it should be studied on so that we can take better measures in the future. I’d argue that in the latter possibility the people responsible should also be tried for crimes against humanity, both for justice and as a disincentive for future bad actors.
Slightly torn on this. Surely it would be good to understand it better so that it might be recognised earlier next time. However the world’s mostly shambolic response is probably the better focus for inquiry. Can’t help feeling that the former issue is being used as a smokescreen for the latter.
> Can’t help feeling that the former issue is being used as a smokescreen for the latter.
It certainly looks that way. Given pandemics are a naturally occuring event, the origin of the event itself doesnt excuse the breakdowns in government, policy and to a certain extent personal human behaviour. It is not promisiong as there were precedents and plans in place, but we learnt nothing from inquiries into past pandemics.
Every person probably needs to have their own personal inquiry, no matter which side; 'its jsut the flu' to 'this is the end of humanity' and everywhere in between.
The flu killed an estimated 50 million people in 1918, which if it was in current times would be about 250 million. People always get mad when others say it is just like the flu, but actually the flu has had way worse outbreaks than covid.
If we are looking for patient zero I agree, it's not relevant to place blame.
If this thing leaked from a lab, of course we would want to know! There can be lessons learned to prevent this in the future, and if the chinese government knew and covered it up, the world should definitely hold them accountable.
I’m not a biologist but as I understand, viruses very rarely go from being common in one species to another. It has to do with mutation and how you want many hosts with high viral load to stumble on an effective change.
There are cases where someone close to animals might get it, a farmer typically, but it rarely becomes transmissible between humans — not unless it mutated first and for that it would need to be endemic among farmers. When we observe cases among relatives of the farmers who are not exposed, that’s when we panic. Swine flu and bird flu would fall in that case: there had been many cases among farmers, for decades, and they learned to dismiss them (making cases harder to track). When relatives got sick, epidemiology authorities were suddenly a lot more worried, to the puzzlement of farmers who had been sick prior.
More so, viruses are endemic in bats (who have notoriously poor immunity) but most of them can’t be transmitted to an animal with high immunity, like humans; not without going through mutation and selection through another animal with a more selective immunity, hence the idea of an intermediary host. The pangolin was suggested for a while, if you remember. There was a lot of talk about which animal, but what those stories didn’t really clarify is the “the” in “the pangolin”: whether virologists were expected:
1. widespread infection among pangolins living together; the meaning the species — but then we would have noticed entire groups being sick; or
2. if one single animal was infected by a bat, and someone was unlucky enough to be host to a human-compatible mutation (very unlikely) and then that human was host to another mutation that made it human-to-human-transmissible (also unlikely).
A lot of the early debate on Covid was surprised at how it seemed to have skipped that middle step, or how we couldn’t find it. If you are more familiar with physics, that’s a bit like saying you saw the tunnel effect at the human scale. Sure, we know it’s possible in theory, but… so unlikely, we would probably need to change the science to account for it anyway. Physicists would naturally side with whomever is trying to debunk the observation. That’s how science works: the burden of the proof is on who is making an unlikely claim given current model. The natural history explanation of Covid is possible, but extremely unlikely given “species barrier”.
Once again: I’m not a biologist, but a lot of the scenario that would make that possible would change our approach to epidemiology:
1. if the virus was undetected among humans close to bats for a while, and mutated to become transmissible, we’d need to think of monitoring asymptomatic humans;
2. if the virus was present and undetected in an intermediary species, that’s more likely but still very worrisome and would require significant changes to veterinary practices;
3. if there was a genetic manipulation towards gain of function, the political consequences would be a shit-show but it would preserve our understanding of how frequently and consistently viruses mutate.
In that particular case, the instinct of scientists was split, between people who see the gains-of-function research valuable and those who defend the model — which is why there isn’t a clear view of what “scientists” think. However, don’t let that disagreement confuse you: clarifying what happened will have scientific impact, be it ban a controversial approach, or change our understanding of inter-species viral transmission.
But cross species transmission is known for quite a lot of pathogens. Ebola is a recent example. Asserting it is so unlikely as to be dismissed out of hand doesn’t match knowledge in the field.
It happens, especially between closely related species, in both genetic and physical proximity, like monkeys and humans, but it’s rarer between further apart groups. More importantly, it follows patterns (first a few opportunistic infections, then more common ones, then transmission between new hosts) that were not observed with Sars-Cov-2. Hemorrhagic fevers were occasionally described among bushmeat hunters before Ebola became endemic. There were effort to discourage the practice precisely because of a fear of future contamination beyond that small group.
I’m not dismissing that it happen —I can’t imagine you’ve read anything like that in my comment— but the natural origin theory changes our understanding of how fast it can happen.
Because a specific category of people want to blame either China or Russia for anything without any proof.
In this particular case there were reports that the virus was present in Spain and Italy before China. They seem to ignore that and keep screeching that CHina is to blame.
This is just blatant fake news. We all know the virus first appeared in Wuhan China and then spread to the world. Please state you source before saying such an obvious lie.
Did they redo the tests as requested by the Dutch (and other teams) as all the news only points to the original findings and then nothing. So maybe it was a false positive? Or contaminated sample?
The problem with this, if it were true, is that it will be very difficult to explain why there were not a lot of cases of misdiagnosed respiratory diseases in 2019 as we do know now that it is very contagious and what the symptoms are; they were not reported and definitely not on any scale.
We know it was in Wuhan well before January 2020 so that other sample from that month in Spain or other places would not be strange. A year earlier of course would be.
To find out where it came from, you have to look at conspiracy theories to be honest. There is nothing in the mainstream media even remotely true about its origins.
It will only fuel anti-science sentiment all over the world and put scientists under scrutiny and attacks.
We need more science, not more science attacks.
It will also vindicate Trump like anti-scientists just when we need more science to tackle climate change, inequality, gender gap, and yes, search for viruses with pandemic risk due to human encroachment on wild life so we can be ready for them.
Any sort of lab leak confirmation will basically destroy the science of virology just when we need it most.
Just look at what Fukushima did to nuclear energy acceptance. Now more people die of coal burning radioactivity than ever died because of nuclear energy one. Do we really want to do the same with virology and molecular engineering, which are life saving sciences?
I hate to be be the one to tell you this, (just kidding, I get a little sadistic thrill out of it) but if you think the best way to defend science is to shy away from searching for truth, you may possibly have missed the entire point of the enterprise.
Wow. This is perhaps the most foolish reply I’ve seen on HN in months. Yes, let’s just bury our heads in the sand so we can learn nothing from our mistakes. Unbelievable.
So, covering up science fuck ups is legimitate because it protects science, and we need science to promote other agendas to promote other dodgy agendas which are scientifically still unproven or unprovable (I don't know how science can even explain gender gap...)?
Possibly the scariest thing I see at the moment; 'we can't say/do that as it will give fuel to the anti-vaxers'.
Antivaxers will just make shit up - properly exploring the science is not strengthening their argument, refusing to do so is strengthening their argument.
I'm pro vax. I think this vaccine is worth the risk but this is the highest risk vaccine we've had in a long time and that part of the equation is getting swept under the rug.
Being labeled as anit-vax for this sort of thought is rather awkward. This should not be controversial at all, especially how moderate this is vs the 5g brain control something that this sweeping under the rug is trying to counter.
What’s crazy to me is there’s still no inactive virus, normal vaccine option in the Western world.
Ok - if you’re going to ban me from restaurants, gyms and events, if you’re going to make me lose my job… but I’m willing to take a normal vaccine like Sinopharm why not just approve that? Why not let me import that vaccine for $10k so I could save my job? Or even better let me prove I have better protection than vaccinated because I had prior infection. That proof is also meaningless because the vaccine is somehow magical - even though there are a ton of breakthrough cases and boosters will be needed after 8 months.
Give people alternatives if they don’t trust RNA. Is that too much to ask? Apparently yes it is - to whoever really runs the US Gov.
Why? What would that change, apart from distracting everyone into another giant anti-china campaign? Would we solve covid if we knew how it came to be synthesized?
For one, we could take action to help prevent another Covid from happening.
It’s really not that hard to see how it could be useful to know about the origins of Covid. Really tired of people making it about racism (or whatever) against China. And I say that as a Chinese person.
How would we make sure another Covid couldn't happen if we knew that this one stems from a lab and was intentionally released? Do we ban the creation and release of highly contagious bio-weapons? We already have, haven't we?
Do we start a nuclear war to make sure China is no more and therefore they can't do it again (but anyone else could)?
I'm not suggesting there's no use in finding out how it came to be, but unless it was some guy eating a bat and we can all agree on not doing that anymore and create a bat police to enforce that, I don't see how knowing who did it would prevent anyone else from doing it.
Potentially for the same reason you'll usually have far-reaching amnesties after civil wars etc, if you want freedom going forward.
Doing an investigation to find "the real truth", which from what I gather in most threads here would be essentially "where did it come from and why was it the Wuhan lab that intentionally released it?", wouldn't really get us anywhere.
None of the large powers would cooperate if they felt threatened and there's nothing to win unless we believe that we automatically get a perfect cure if only we find the GPS coordinates where patient zero got infected. Would it? I don't think so.
I also believe that there's nothing we can do to stop another similar event by knowing where it came from. What's more relevant is how it spread so quickly around the globe, and as far as I understand, we have a pretty good understanding of that and it's mainly international air-plane travel. I don't think we'll see a lasting change in that regard, but maybe we will, and we will have fever-checks before boarding planes or non-regional trains.
> Doing an investigation to find "the real truth", which from what I gather in most threads here would be essentially "where did it come from and why was it the Wuhan lab that intentionally released it?", wouldn't really get us anywhere.
We shouldn't be conflating the result from a professional investigation with the prevalent popular opinion.
> I also believe that there's nothing we can do to stop another similar event by knowing where it came from.
Your viewpoint kind of hinges on this point and you haven't really supported it yet besides making the assertion. Why would we gain absolutely nothing from having more information about its origin, with respect to either dealing with current or future COVIDs? That conclusion seems very nonobvious to me.
> We shouldn't be conflating the result from a professional investigation with the prevalent popular opinion.
Maybe I'm too cynical, but professional investigations tend to be politically charged and popular opinion tends to be created by the same interests who create politics.
And it's not that we totally, absolutely wouldn't learn anything that would ever help us. It's just that we likely won't find a magic bullet (which would be worth a lot of trouble), but will probably create conditions where countries will cooperate less and mislead more the next time it happens. I mentioned amnesties previously, and I believe they work in a similar fashion. Hunt down the evil-doers who lost a civil war, if you want to remain in a perpetual state of civil war. Don't do it if you want to return to some kind of normalcy and peace.
But China is already uncooperative wrt investigations. That’s probably the main reason why so many people want an ivestigation. It just looks extremely shady.
So, what I don’t understand is how accepting uncooperativeness is going to make them more cooperative in the future. I see how it would work with a group of individuals. But we’re at a different level of abstraction here, dealing with federal governments.
I would actually like to know exactly why I had to stay locked in my house for a couple of months while nice military men were out on the streets with big guns.
You might make a case that it would actually help, or not. I don't know. I don't particularly care, not next to the huge magnitude of wanting the tiniest bit of truth and justice.
>>would actually like to know exactly why I had to stay locked in my house for a couple of months while nice military men were out on the streets with big guns.
Well even if it was a lab leak. A response to a pandemic with totalitarian lock down using the military is something you need to address with your government
That is NOT a proper response to a illness for any nation claiming to value individual rights and individual liberty
First and foremost I am opposed to any use of the military on the citizens of their own nation. That in itself IMO should be considered off limits. A nations military has the primary purpose to eliminate or destroy the nations enemies, if the military is being used on the citizens that means the citizens have become the enemy...
Can you imagine saying, we don't care what happened at chernobyl because it's anti russian.
Where does this weird narrative come from? The idea that properly investigating an event that completely shook the world to its core is somehow "insensitive".
I mean, let's just not investigate anything where we might not like the answer... Is that really a legitimate strategy in your mind.
there was already an investigation, and it's pretty clear that any further investigation would involve threats to china. It's not about 'sensitivity'. We can just assume that the virus was leaked from the lab, unless the chinese prove otherwise. What does that change?
I remember when HN was full of intelligent, well thought out discourse. More and more lately, we’ve been seeing people like the poster I’m replying to. I hope the mods get it under control.
What would it change? How about knowledge that could help prevent a future pandemic and the deaths of millions of people? Why do I even have to make this statement?
It almost certainly wasn't man made and intentional. That's the only case we really need to know the origin story for, and I don't think anyone serious thinks that is plausible.
Otherwise, the worst case is that it was a lab accident of some kind. It'd be fun to point and blame China for it and all, but is it something we really need?
We don’t know if it was man made or not, or intentional or not.
There’s a lot of conflicting evidence. What we do know is the ccp is blocking any sort of investigation into the origin and possible cause. They began trying to sweep it under the rug just like SARS.
The downside of all this is that the people of China suffer, when it’s not china that’s to blame. It’s the ccp.
Boeing has been fined $2.5bn by the US justice department after being charged with fraud and conspiracy in connection with two fatal crashes of its 737 Max airliner.
Determining how Covid started would be extremely important imo if there was a chance its release was intentional. But every virologist take I've read suggests that the virus does not look man-made. Nor would it seem that covid's effects and behavior could have possibly been known to any usable degree without the worldwide experiment that we've all been part of the last year and a half. And finally it's really hard to come up with an incentive for intentional release - assuming the suspect is China and not some Bond villain madman.
So we're left with determining if this was a possible accidental release. Which I agree is important. It's just orders of magnitude less important than determining the source of an intentional release, imo. If China accidentally released this, they screwed themselves, very hard. If it was an accidental release, and they know it, one would assume they have a strong incentive to clean up protocols in the future. If the U.S. had accidentally released something like this, they'd certainly try to cover it up, but also try to make sure it never happens again.
> If China accidentally released this then the world deserves to know what happened
"China" didn't accidentally released anything, and is easy to see why. The group of scientists that were working in Wuhan (some Chinese, other not) don't represent the government or the entire country. How they could?
Would be so absurd as to claim that "US" or "Italy" released accidentally covid-19 because a few scientists from US or Italy worked in the same project. The reason to use the words in this way and to use the mass media to fix this wrong idea in the people is 100% political and should be a red flag about the real purpose of this (gain leverage with post-truth, instead to find the truth).
The problem is that post-truth could mes enough to bury the truth forever, and all actors are interested into saving face and sneaking their own version.
We know lots about lab leaks, there have been 1000s of compromising incidents over the years. Each one is a lottery ticket. The winning lottery ticket doesn't really teach us anything that we can't learn from the losing tickets.
If it was an intentional release, obviously that's a completely different class of problem. That would be an act of war against the rest of the world, using a weapon of mass destruction, in addition to the collateral suffering of China's own population. Only very fringe groups are suggesting this was intentionally leaked to begin with. However, there's still the problem of Wuhan air travel lockdown. What possible reason was there not to lock down international travel from Wuhan when they locked down domestic travel, other than to ensure China wouldn't be alone in suffering the fallout? That alone is dangerously close to an act of war, even if the initial release was accidental. Or even if it was completely natural in origin... it really doesn't matter where it came from, that decision alone is a serious problem.
An accidental release is still the host country's responsibility, though. If that's what happened, it's important to understand how it happened to reduce the chance of it ever happening again. Such a conclusion would also lead to international demands for compensation which could put a damper on China's political and economic aspirations.
You have blinders on if "every virologist take [you've] read suggests that the virus does not look man-made." You probably formed this opinion prior to spring 2021. Before that, "trusted" authorities were all declaring that a lab leak was virtually impossible. Things have changed dramatically, with disclosure of some of Fauci's emails and a bunch of virologists now backtracking, saying they're either unsure or think the lab leak hypothesis is more likely.
Email from a virus researcher at Scripps to Fauci, early on (2020/01/31), suggested in a preliminary assessment that small portions (probably the portion of the spike protein everyone's concerned with) look potentially engineered:
wsj and nyt (2021/06): Not specifically by virologists, but two of the more mainstream articles suggest it was a lab leak, and cite evolving opinions of virologists:
Lab leak does not imply "man made" at all. Chinese virology labs are quite far from safe and stuff leaks out all the time. There's a whole lot of circumstantial evidence that this virus came from a bat to begin with and was not created in the lab.
I don't know what you mean by "man made" or "created". The origin of the vast majority of the genome of SARS-CoV-2 was a bat virus. If that makes it automatically natural in your view, you're correct by definition, but only because your definition of natural includes most modifications that could have been done in a lab.
Directed evolution in a lab (e.g. serial passage in humanized mice, or even captive bats) would be one thing. Would you consider that "man made" or "created", or is it natural?
Small genome sequence edits for experimental purposes would be another type of modification. Would you consider that "man made" or "created", or still natural?
Full genetic synthesis base pair by base pair is more difficult (longer sequences become much more difficult), but as I understand it is technologically possible... barely. If someone takes the genome from a natural virus genome sequence and synthesizes it that way in a lab, possibly with minor edits, would that be "man-made" or "created", or still natural?
