16 ms·
China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest
- ycombonator 6y agoThey are afraid where it will lead to.
- andromeduck 6y agoHuge change of tone from 2 months ago, ok m guessing it's because because they fear that the lab accident theory will gain more traction academically or they fear people will reveal the scale of the damage to the public vs the clearly fabricated stats we have now. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/01/30/asia-pacific/science-health-asia-pacific/chinas-top-court-rebukes-police-virus-rumor-crackdown/#.XpNyy0EifDt https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/01/30/asia-pacific/sc... www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/all-signs-point-to-china/ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8188557/amp/Did-coronavirus-leak-research-lab-Wuhan-Startling-theory-no-longer-discounted.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8188557/amp/Did-cor... https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/experts-know-the-new-coronavirus-is-not-a-bioweapon-they-disagree-on-whether-it-could-have-leaked-from-a-research-lab/amp/ https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/experts-know-the-new-coronav...
- leeoniya 6y agohmm, i was assured 9 days ago that i was obviously wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22771035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22771035
- tanilama 6y agoI don't think dailymail or nationalreivew are reputable source other than presenting a story. There is an article on Nature one month ago on this topic: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 > Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus
- godtoldmetodoit 6y agoThat doesn't mean it didn't come from a lab though. "Coming from a lab" does not = man made. If they were doing research on the bats in this lab, looking to identify potential scary viruses to be ready, it is entirely possible the virus jumped from bat to researcher there and that was our patient 0.
- jotakami 6y agoHow many times do we need to repeat this... everyone assumes that “came from a lab” means “engineered bioweapon”. No! Also, people quickly forget that humans have been selectively evolving plants and animals for thousands of years without touching the actual genomes.
- Klinky 6y agoHow did it come from a lab? I've heard "workers got sprayed with blood and infected", "someone screwed up"(vague), "mishandled lab waste". Just saying it "came from a lab", makes it sound man made. If you don't want misunderstandings, you need spell it out and make it absolutely clear. It doesn't even sound like there is a clear narrative about how it "escaped from the lab", just a lot of rumors. Rumors about a rumor, certainly doesn't sound more credible than China's official stance, and their credibility is already very low.
- andromeduck 6y agoYou get it from a bat the same way you get it from another person you touch the bat and touch your face or you clean the cage drop get . You dump out the litter box/tray and huff some particles. You draw a blood sample and a drop of it gets on your visor/goggles. You take it off late and touch your face. It's nothing sexy. Note that that the Wuhan CDC, the lab ~300m from the market, the lab that was experimenting on bats, is not the BSL4 Wuhan Institute of Virology miles away from the seafood market, that everyone loves taking about. It's probably a level 2 or 3 lab. Escape from a lab doesn't imply man made any more than tiger escaped from zoo implies that the tiger was born there. SARS escaped from BSL3 labs on China on multiple occasions, that doesn't imply that SARS was man made.
- cameldrv 6y agohttps://harvardtothebighouse.com/2020/01/31/logistical-and-technical-analysis-of-the-origins-of-the-wuhan-coronavirus-2019-ncov/ https://harvardtothebighouse.com/2020/01/31/logistical-and-t...
- zapttt 6y ago"Despite its name, the geosciences university announced elsewhere on its website that it was carrying out coronavirus research." incredible journalists repoting on the academy doesn't know what geoscience/geology department studies nowadays. most of them are indistinguishable from sociology thanks to all the urban and policy planing. they also do a great deal od recent history because it's a base for the above.
- boomboomsubban 6y agoGiven the response articles saying it would be possible to engineer the virus have caused, this doesn't seem that extreme. The "origin" of the virus has become a political issue that fringe extremists in many countries are using to attack other countries.
- epx 6y agoWho the hell doesn’t know that?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gnusty_gnurc 6y agoIn lieu of evidence that the “wet market” story is true, the accidental lab release is pretty compelling. Interesting to see how people react to it though - as though the idea is outlandish that a laboratory working with pathogens from actual bats could mishandle things. Is there even any evidence people ate bats at the wet market?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agoI remember a scientific paper on HN a few months ago by Chinese authors saying Covid came from that lab and that it came from bats that had infected workers there, or that was the assumption. That is my memory of the article. I cannot find that paper anymore. Does anyone remember this?
- redis_mlc 6y agoYes, there's a youtube documentary that talks about 2 animal labs in Wuhan, one specializing in bats.
- godtoldmetodoit 6y agoTucker Carlson did a piece talking about how the bats that this jumped from do not live within ~900km of Wuhan, but that the lab in Wuhan did testing on the bats that they imported. It definitely seems plausible they were doing research on these bats, and that due to some improper controls it jumped over to a human working in the lab and that was our patient 0. It definitely seems feasible to me that it could have "come out of a lab" while still being entirely natural in origin and without any ill intent on the Chinese part. I'm not endorsing this as true, I don't know if it's true or not, but I did find it interesting and worthy of additional research.
- meowface 6y agoThat would be plausible if it's true. Can you cite the sources Carlson was referring to?
- ninetyfurr 6y agoIronically in censorsed domains, the absence of information is a very clear indicator of truth. It happens everywhere - there are many true things you are not allowed to post on the internet. You know the old saying, "Just because you read it on the internet, doesn't mean it's true"? Consider the inverse: Just because you haven't read it on the internet, doesn't mean it's not true.
- treeman79 6y agoSame thing happening now with Hydroxychloroquine. Lots of interesting articles on how it might help. Media decides it’s a political football. No more articles
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- acdha 6y agoYour “lots of interesting articles” were what made it a political football. Before it was picked up by the right-wing propaganda network there was one obviously flawed study and some fringe non-experts promoting it to people anxious for a cure, followed by a bunch of actual experts urging caution.
- acdha 6y agoFor the people who might not have followed this closely, here’s a history of the spread: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/13/how-false-hope-spread-about-hydroxychloroquine-its-consequences/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/13/how-false...
- cooper12 6y ago> No more articles https://news.google.com/search?q=hydroxychloroquine https://news.google.com/search?q=hydroxychloroquine
- sjg007 6y agoNo it doesn’t mean that.
- swiley 6y agoCombined with the researcher at the lab that was disappeared this is pretty convincing.
- Aperocky 6y agoLOL everyone in China 'disappear' when they decide to not post on social media for X amount of days. Of course you never hear story that they're 'found' by posting or doing something again - despite the fact that they almost always do.
- ggggtez 6y agoThe guy was in police custody. And he died shortly after. Come on now, at least try to follow along.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- abc-xyz 6y agoHer name was Huang Yan Ling (黄燕玲) for anyone who might be interested in learning more about the potential patient 0. The evidence is very compelling and this video does a good job at presenting it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU https://youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU
- radicalbyte 6y agoThe the American leadership constantly calling it by the region name you can understand why an authoritarian regime would want to control discussion of the origins by experts. The risk is of their research being weaponized by said demagogues.
- champagneben 6y agoGiven that this clamping down came about earlier than any discussion of this matter by the American leadership, I don't think that's a good explanation for this. *Reading this comment again, perhaps I should have phrased it more carefully - I'm not saying that any clamping down that is happening now has come earlier, but that China started clamping down on this from the very beginning.
- miked85 6y agoAre you suggesting the virus didn't originate in Wuhan?
- cm2187 6y agoBill Maher has an amusing monologue on that topic [1]. I don't think it is wrong to call it the Wuhan virus, and if the Chinese don't want the bad publicity associated with the virus, they should do something about these wet markets. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEfDwc2G2_8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEfDwc2G2_8
- gerdesj 6y agoI don't buy the escaped/released from a lab theories espoused here and on Facebook and the like. Apparently the mutations within the SARS-COV-2 found in humans compared to the bat virus are purely random and hence the thing is not or very unlikely genetically engineered. My source is a recent New Scientist article. So the bloody thing is simply a virus that affects all people, everywhere, without fear or favour. Simply ... Pretty much all stats I've seen relating to this thing are painfully awful. Here in the UK (in England), care home deaths are not reported in the main death stat etc etc ad nauseam. Scotland reports in its own way as does NI (or not bother) compared to England and Wales. We have minimal testing anyway so who knows what is actually going on? Anyway, one thing I am absolutely certain of is that whilst the stats in Europe and the US, CA etc are a bit wonky at best they are at least a decent attempt to have a go at reporting the situation. I think that the CN and other results that are so way off the curve that other nations and territories are reporting are complete fiction and dangerous fiction at that.
- meowface 6y agoAgreed, there's basically no current evidence to suggest it was engineered, and plenty of evidence to suggest it was zoonotic and evolved naturally. One possibility that can't be totally ruled out is that maybe this was one of many viruses collected from local animals which their virology lab had stored for current or future study, and some kind of mistake led to it escaping, perhaps through an employee unknowingly getting infected or taking home something with a contaminated surface. edit: Rewrote everything below here to make my probability beliefs more clear. I think it's extremely likely to be zoonotic and not spread by anyone intentionally. As for the chance it was an unintentional lab escape, it's difficult to assess what the probability of that may be. I don't think you can just simply assume "virology lab in proximity = likely source of outbreak" without looking at a lot of other factors. Wuhan is a massive city and economic hub, a lot bigger than NYC and the surrounding area. From what I've heard, there's basically every kind of facility and institute one could imagine there. It could be a coincidence that the lab was there due to the size, density, and economic importance of the area. Or maybe the lab could've been established there because they knew the area was biologically diverse and close to many species of animals carrying viruses which could jump to humans, and that such animals were commonly hunted and sold for food there. If that's true, then it would be a confounding variable, and one would expect outbreaks to be more likely to occur near the lab regardless of whether they originated in the lab. There appear to be other potentially credible pieces of evidence which may support the lab escape hypothesis, but I think the whole case needs to be analyzed very robustly and carefully, with all of the possible priors and evidence taken into account.
- dchyrdvh 6y agoMy favorite theory is that the Wuhan virus lab created the virus and used bats in experiments. One bat escaped and infected other bats that eventually ended up on the wet market in Wuhan. Edit: a more plausible theory is that one researcher got bitten by an infected bat and chose to hide this fact.
- andromeduck 6y agoMy understanding is that nobody has found signs of that in the sequenced genome. By all accounts the jump to humans appears to have been natrual.
- legolas2412 6y ago> By all accounts the jump to humans appears to have been natrual. Is it natural if you put a bat coronavirus and a pangolin coronavirus in a petri dish? Because the receptor proteins are similar to a pangolin coronavirus based on the above study.
- jotakami 6y agoIt’s also “natural” to take your mare over to the prize stallion to get impregnated. Humans can control all the conditions around the “natural” process.
- jstepka 6y agoIt's us vs them. And by us, I mean western democracy. I fully support crushing them under the heal of our boot.
- justicezyx 6y agoHi guys, As a Chinese living in US. Please be mindful that a lot of people do not distinguish China the government, and the Chinese people, living in or outside of China mainland. This type of news, are of course worth discussion. But meanwhile, please refrain from politicizing beyond the facts. Think about not letting what a few political figures have started, i.e., politicizing the event without considering the impact, into actual hate crimes targeted at minority groups. Thanks!
- oh_come_on 6y agoWe’re in a worldwide lockdown because of rhetoric from the CCP and Chinese surrogates that calls any criticism or discussion of their role in this racism or white supremacy. We’ve had 20k American deaths so far, I think we get to discuss this.
- abc-xyz 6y agoForeigners all over the world are likely to be targeted as long as they stand out. For instance, in China, Africans are being kicked out of their homes and forced to sleep on the street (because no hotel/apartment will accept them), countless stores, including a McDonald’s restaurant, are refusing to serve foreigners (blacks are in particular targeted). Please be mindful that it’s not just Chinese or Asians being targeted, and that the racism foreigners are experiencing in China right now is far worse than what the Chinese are experiencing elsewhere.
- _iyig 6y agoHere is what the parent post refers to: http://shanghaiist.com/2020/04/13/even-mcdonalds-is-now-turning-away-black-customers-in-guangzhou/ http://shanghaiist.com/2020/04/13/even-mcdonalds-is-now-turn... If we're to shift the conversation towards hate crimes targeted at minority groups, I think it's fair to consider hate crimes perpetrated by government mentioned in the article, crimes which are perpetrated for much the same reasons as the suppression of coronavirus research.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Razengan 6y agoTinfoil hat: I'm not keeping active track, but I passively perceived a sheer drop in mentions of the fact that Wuhan has China's first "biosafety level 4" laboratory, coinciding with an increased lambasting of the US's handling of their infections in the general media ("The Wuhan virus is now the American virus"), along with a streak of random US-critical posts ("What is the worst thing the US government has done?") being massively updated on Reddit (which has a major investment from Tencent.) This is from the country which forces foreign companies to remove flags of countries it likes to bully (Taiwan, Japan) from their products. It's not inconceivable that they are filtering the narrative about themselves in something actually serious, such as this pandemic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#Concerns_as_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#Co...
- sergiotapia 6y agoTake a look at reddit to see how legions of paid government actors are actively shaping the discussion on mainstream platforms.
- paulcole 6y agoI don’t buy this. Why would governments pay people to shitpost on Reddit when so many of us gladly do it for free?
- joering2 6y agoTo get specific narrative via majority posting similar “shit”. Aka propaganda.
- 2019-nCoV 6y agoMany govs use astroturfing, the CCP in particular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
- abc-xyz 6y agoThere’s a lot of value in paying/blackmailing the moderators. You can clearly certain subreddits, such as r/worldnews, becoming increasingly pro-China. The mod team played a huge role in this, as they have been perma banning people who post a lot of anti-China comments. I’ve for instance had several accounts banned (one simply for sarcastically saying “Thanks China”) - there were also a thread on r/China where plenty of people mentioned they had been banned for similar reasons. If you follow r/WatchRedditDie then you can see this anti-China censorship on a daily basis.. for instance, this is on the frontpage right now: https://i.imgur.com/RuHpkC5_d.jpg https://i.imgur.com/RuHpkC5_d.jpg
- ngcc_hk 6y agoThey have been very successfully control who. With the same technique controlling access, we might never know and any whistleblower ... china not open up and free, we are playing Russian or shall we say china lottery. With humanity fate. No freedom of press and academic research and human rights, china pose a danger to humanity. And regards to they might kill themselves, noticed that they have kill 30m+ in Great Leap Forward. Not even one Memorial Or Day is in. How many 30m we have outside china. Wuhan virus is the 2nd wake up call. Hard to wake up people who pretend to sleep. I would try again WakeUp.
- wensheng 6y agoThis[0] claimed it's bio-engineered. Disclamer: epochtime is Falungun media channel, Falungun is prosecuted by CCP, so it's more conspiracy theory. For example, the India paper has been refuted by US scientists. I personally believe its accidental leak. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gdd7dtDaYmM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gdd7dtDaYmM
- ferest 6y agoBecause academic research can't be rushed. One of the requirements for an advanced degree is publishing papers, and if coronavirus related can easily bring attention and get the paper published, students would try taking the fast track. This is not good for research in general. There was a huge debate back in late Jan. early Feb. on Chinese social network about a paper didn't get peer-reviewed spreading all over places with misinformation. Hence the Fudan University post in Chinese was to tighten the publish review, and nothing about delaying the research. This guardian news only showed the story without context, which is pretty misleading.
- TechBro8615 6y agoIt’s disingenuous to suggest that China has inserted a chain of government committees in between researchers and journals, for the purpose of improving the veracity of the research. Given the CCP’s history of censorship boards, it looks like a case of the usual CCP strategy of filtering the release of information in order to save face.
- idjeudbdh 6y agoOh really? There was a huge debate on Chinese social media about peer review and academic research? LOL okay and on the 4th of June 1989 Chinese students had tea at Tiananmen square. Its not even that people like you are ignorant, you're just a piece of shit asshole who's happy to be pimped out.
- nsoonhui 6y agoYou don't "tighten the publish review" by submitting the research papers to government body for approval.
- nikkwong 6y agoI'm trying to be a good bayesian reasoner here but the particulars of this specific case are all so tangled and piecemeal. The conspiracy theorists among us are having an absolute field day with the current events and it's easy to see why. According to my bayesian analysis, I believe that the most likely cause of this virus is a wet-market infection, followed by a slip-up at a lab, with—by high margin, in very very last place at, say, 1% probability, that this was concocted by a nefarious player (the CCP being a favorite candidate). The conspiracy theorists (my Facebook friends especially) seem to rank the likelihood of this list in reverse (i.e. clearly this was concocted by the chinese government). With how secretive and disingenuous the CCP is even on a good day, it's easy to see why their argument has a few credence points (like any good conspiracy). But I can't reconcile that there's not much for the CCP to gain on the world stage by releasing this thing. The US was already so politically tumultuous, and the 2016 Russian disinformation campaign was so much more effective at breaking our democracy apart, with the added benefit of not sending our economy into a global recession as a byproduct. What has the CCP gained here? Xi's power as a leader has only weakened, and their position as the world's factory is now only slipping faster. So this is kind of like 9/11 to me. The people who would be the most likely to profiteer off a tragedy like this would have not in any capacity been able to pull it off, and the ones who are powerful or otherwise sophisticated enough to pull it off don't have much incentive to anyways. So that's why bayesian reasoning leads me to believe that yes, we know these viruses jump from animals to humans from time to time, and this seems to likely be one of those instances. What am I missing?
- banads 6y ago>I can't reconcile that there's not much for the CCP to gain on the world stage by releasing this thing. Is causing the social, political, and economic collapse of an arch rival nation state not the natural perogative of empire scale nations?
- shadowprofile77 6y agoNot when whatever is happening also causes the political, social and economic collapse of your own nation state. There are simpler ways to compete with a rival superpower, ways much less prone to exploding in any perpetrator's face. One of them is simply, well, doing nothing but outpacing them economically through more or less usual means. Not too hard to consider for a productive country with 5 times the population of its main rival.
- redorange11 6y agoWow the amount of account's quite obviously botting for the CCP in this thread is concerning. What is HN moderation doing to keep these unwanted accounts out?
- Gatsky 6y agoNow things are starting to settle down, everyone can get back to being their usual selves, whether it is a totalatarian surveillance state or a conspiracy theorist.
- AzzieElbab 6y agoThis is basically the end game for China. Either they buy off everything while their economy is still running, or they face isolation. They fd us all way too hard this time
- nojvek 6y agoPeople want cheap goods. They don't care if their Nike shoes come from a slaveshop, just like we don't really give much thought that most of the milk we drink come from cows in very miserable conditions. It's business as usual for China. As long as they keep on making those affordable goods, other countries will consume. If Apple moves off their entire production from China to US, and still is competitive, then I'll be a believer.
- AzzieElbab 6y agoIt is not about ethics, it is about risk