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So I generally give like zero weight to conspiracy theories. That being said, I don't believe anyone can reasonably claim with any degree certainty that Covid w
by cletus 5y ago
So I generally give like zero weight to conspiracy theories. That being said, I don't believe anyone can reasonably claim with any degree certainty that Covid was a lab-leak BUT the WHO investigation simply hasn't done their due diligence to a sufficient degree to eliminate this theory.
Unfortunately the WHO's credibility is trained here. In the early days of the pandemic the WHO bent over backwards not to upset China. More to the point, it took China's denials on face value.
So it's more than a year after the pandemic started before the WHO investigators got any sort of access to investigate (which, incidentally is not a good look for neither China or the WHO).
But here are two demonstrable and known shortcomings of the WHo investigation:
1. In 2019 there was a database of coronaviruses that China had. In late 2019 it was taken offline. Super-weird timing. By itself that doesn't prove anything but the WHO hasn't investigated it. Did they ask? If not, why not?
2. Wuhan labs do investigate coronaviruses. The WHO has never been given access to what coronaviruses they have.
It is weird that 1-1.5 years later we're still unsure of the origin (unlike, say, SARS or MErS).
Oh and, for the record, I don't believe for a second this virus was in any way engineered.
- tawa10093 5y agoIf you believe RaTG13 is genuine, then you should look past no where. At the same time (2012-2013), same place (TongGuan, Yunnan), some miners are infected by a virus with symptoms very similar to covid, and WIV was involved during the time and has the samples from the patients which have never been released. All this is documented in a graduate thesis by a student from a local college in 2013.
- lwf 5y agos/trained/strained/
- scarmig 5y agoStrained is closer in Levenshtein distance, but I'd bet tainted was the original word.
- Judgmentality 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance TIL. Thank you.
- nighthawk454 5y agoIt's also closer in "typo" distance (https://xkcd.com/1530/ https://xkcd.com/1530/), although perhaps not with autocorrect. edit: although now that I think of it, I suppose a "typo" distance is something of a weighted Levenshtein
- jMyles 5y ago> So I generally give like zero weight to conspiracy theories It needn't have been a conspiracy; it's plausible that it was accidental, or even if intentional, the work of a single disgruntled individual.
- AndrewBissell 5y agoBut that at the very least implies a conspiracy to conceal the virus's origin, and possibly even crucial details about its transmissibility or treatments.
- bigyikes 5y agoWhile that is denotatively a conspiracy, most people think of conspiracies as something outlandish, not business as usual for the CCP. I think that’s what the parent comment was getting at, anyway.
- jMyles 5y agoNo, that's not what I was saying. Instead, I was saying that it might have been leaked by a single person, and everyone else might not know (well, in their hearts, they probably do) whether the virus escaped from a lab or came from the same place from which they took their sample (presumably the "nearby" bat caves).
- jMyles 5y agoWhy? If it was a lab escape, the most likely scenario is that the virus is from a bat sample. It's even possible that, if it's a lab leak, the person who leaked it doesn't even know that they leaked it, and is actively reassuringly themself with the wet market theory.
- ekianjo 5y ago> It needn't have been a conspiracy We have so used to calling "conspiracy theories" anything that deviates the official narrative, we don't even notice what it means anymore...
- baggy_trough 5y agoWhy do you call it a conspiracy theory? There's nothing conspiratorial about it. Any politically sensitive organization will inherently do whatever it can do avoid blame. That's as natural as the force of gravity. I also don't understand why you say so vehemently that you don't believe it was engineered. Gain of function experiments are something they do in these labs!
- whatshisface 5y agoI don't know what the OP was saying, but a lot of people use "engineered" as a byword for "released on purpose."
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wutbrodo 5y agoI don't know that people are plucking the word out of its context like that. "The pandemic was engineered" is a substantially different claim than "the virus was engineered", and I have seen vanishingly few claims of the former (in the mainstream; you can nutpick literally any claim in the Internet era).
- cbHXBY1D 5y ago> There's nothing conspiratorial about it. Any politically sensitive organization will inherently do whatever it can do avoid blame. This implies multiple high ranking officials and organizations conspired to hide information and cover up evidence. We have a word for this: conspiracy theory. Americans tend to equate the word "conspiracy theory" with being crazy or ridiculous, but that is not always the case. Many conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Look at the recent Pentagon disclosures on UFOs for instance. Or look at any of the plans the CIA had in the 50s-60s which turned out to be true: MKULTRA, COINTELPRO, Operation Mockingbird, etc. These were "conspiracy" theories that turned out true.
- baggy_trough 5y ago
- ekianjo 5y agoHaving an open mind about alternative explanations than the official one from the WHO is not believing in conspiracy theories. Its just not believing in propaganda.
- TearsInTheRain 5y agoImho calling the lab leak theory a conspiracy theory is a form of gas lighting. It is telling people that it isnt legitimate to use basic common sense to question why the bat coronavirus outbreak happened down the street from the lab studying bat coronaviruses. You must deny what is plainly in front of your eyes.
- kelnos 5y agoNine miles away is "down the street" now?
- geoduck14 5y agoYes. It is.
- whipaway 5y agoEspecially when considering transit lines.
- azjps 5y agoI think its worth clarifying that there are multiple virology labs in Wuhan; the WIV BSL-4 lab is indeed ~12km away from the wet market, but the WHCDC BSL-2 lab in use since around 2018 is located a couple hundred meters away from the market. Ref the last page of https://img-prod.tgcom24.mediaset.it/images/2020/02/16/114720192-5eb8307f-017c-4075-a697-348628da0204.pdf https://img-prod.tgcom24.mediaset.it/images/2020/02/16/11472... There are some claims (debatable?) that bat coronavirus studies were conducted at the WHCDC lab. There is more information about the laboratory locations and biosafety concerns in this report: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350887648_3_WUHAN_LABORATORIES_BAT_RESEARCH_AND_BIOSAFETY https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350887648_3_WUHAN_L... (written by members of the drastic project; I'm not sure how much of this information is substantiated by other sources but at least the maps appear to be reasonably accurate).
- oogabooga123 5y ago> So I generally give like zero weight to conspiracy theories. Why? Assigning a prior probability of zero to anything is a recipe for disaster, it means you can never change your belief. Looks like you had enough of an open mind to hear some of the arguments in favor of this one, and it increased your posterior probability somewhat, so I guess “like zero” is your way of saying “close to zero but not zero”. Have you tried giving other conspiracy theories a chance? I think you’ll find mixed results.
- jb775 5y ago> So I generally give like zero weight to conspiracy theories You know it was once a conspiracy theory to say the Earth wasn't flat. And it was once considered blasphemy to say putting leeches on your body didn't help an illness. There's a reason why the term "conspiracy theory" is thrown around by the media so much...it's because they know a certain subset of people have been socially conditioned to bypass critical thinking if the term has any association with the underlying topic. How is questioning and discussing things worse than blindly believing what you're told? Even when what you're told has no backing by science or logic when compared to the associated "conspiracy theory"? (for example, covid began by someone eating a bat-burger vs. the "conspiracy theory" that the Wuhan lab, with public documents showing funding signed off by Fauci, was experimenting with super-viruses, and one of the workers in close proximity caught the virus.) I'll never understand this.
- xmprt 5y agoI think people usually give zero weight to conspiracy theories not because they're never true but because it's much likelier that the experts know better than you do.
- notriddle 5y agoAlso, because they’re trying to compensate for biases that cause people to see patterns where none exist.
- swader999 5y agoThis article shows how funding and fear of losing funding might have influenced all these experts to back the wrong narrative.
- silicon2401 5y agoThat's a logical fallacy: appeal to authority. Didn't the CDC claim that masks don't help against the virus just last year? Expertise didn't prevent them from (knowingly) making a false claim back then, and there's nothing wrong with healthy skepticism now.
- 5y ago
- tkinom 5y agohttps://youtu.be/bpQFCcSI0pU?t=255 https://youtu.be/bpQFCcSI0pU?t=255 Early last year (2020), whole Chinese internet social media was looking for "黄燕玲" - a missing researcher in Wuhan lab. She disappeared around Oct/Nov 2019. Chinese social media suspected she was patient-0. The messages showed up multiple times in my wechat feeds for couple days. They all got taken down a few days later. Government officials still claimed she was alive but was not able to produce any proof. If WHO really want to investigate, they just need ask : If "黄燕玲" worked for Wuhan lab? Where is she now? Where is her families, friends, co-workers? Can we talk to any of them?
- baryphonic 5y ago> So I generally give like zero weight to conspiracy theories. That being said, I don't believe anyone can reasonably claim with any degree certainty that Covid was a lab-leak BUT the WHO investigation simply hasn't done their due diligence to a sufficient degree to eliminate this theory. It's okay, you're among open-minded people here! FWIW, I think we should stop couching any critical examination of the received theory as if we're defending Heliocentrism in front of the Inquisition. The evidence for gain-of-function lab leak is at this point entirely circumstantial, but that at least is evidence, not just speculation (or, worse, blind zealotry flying in the face of evidence). It's not a water-tight theory, but it's not ludicrous. What we need is an investigation that follows those circumstantial leads and uncovers the truth. The CCP being the strongly authoritarian regime that is, often immune to impolitic truths, this may be politically impossible. But we shouldn't waver in at least discussing what could be true, even if the hypothesis ends up proven false.
- AstralStorm 5y agoDoes it matter which kind of regime it is? Should similar thing happen in the USA, let's say American flu of 2030, you'd see identical levels of lies and lack of cooperation and propaganda.
- baryphonic 5y agoYes, it does matter. In America, I can freely criticize my government, publish ideas they find horrific and suffer no consequences from them. I somehow doubt Winnie the Pooh would afford me such liberties, especially considering how his CCP thugs have clamped down on Hong Kong. The American government would certainly "spin" and use propaganda, but at least in America people are free to discuss hypotheses without fear of being officially censored or sent to a penal camp and/or firing squad. There has been a worrying wave of private censorship in America over the past decade or so, but it is not (directly) enforced by the government. Also, let's not act like there's moral equivalence between the CCP and the US government, as deeply flawed as the latter is (and I am a major critic of my government). Recently, the CCP regime launched its "Long March" rocket, and subsequently lost control of the booster. By dumb luck, the booster landed in the ocean and didn't harm anyone, but no one in the CCP regime bothered to make safety contingency plans. Few in the West realize this, but the CCP regime also launches rockets over populated areas, and its rockets or boosters have even destroyed Chinese villages before. In America, these things would be unthinkable.
- jedmeyers 5y ago> I don’t believe for a second this virus was in _any way_ engineered. Does ‘selection’ constitutes engineering in your vocabulary. And if yes, then why don’t you believe that this virus was carefully selected during the gain of function research?
- Sophistifunk 5y agoIt's not a conspiracy theory. It's a perfectly reasonable theory that will never be proved one way or another, because of an actual conspiracy of the CCP to prevent investigation. They've been openly waging a trade war and ever-increasing threats of kinetic war against Australia for a year now, simply because the PM publicly called for an enquiry to determine where it came from.