8 ms·

Well, first and foremost, perhaps the media could pause and reflect on their treatment of anyone who raised the lab leak hypothesis for the past year. And, we

• mschuster91 5y ago
  > Well, first and foremost, perhaps the media could pause and reflect on their treatment of anyone who raised the lab leak hypothesis for the past year. Most didn't stop at "maybe this escaped from the lab in Wuhan", but went down the real rabbit hole accusing the Chinese government of manufacturing and releasing a bioweapon. In any case there won't be any proof ever for any origin theory, the Chinese government has made certain of that.
  • jghn 5y ago
    This is precisely why it is so touchy. There’s been a strong correlation between people who believe lab leak and people who believe the Chinese were doing something bad. As an anecdote, someone recently asked me if we could tell if the COVID genome had come via animals/natural origin or engineered in some way. I said that most likely, yes that should be possible. Their immediate reaction was that this meant I didn’t believe in lab leak. That’s not at all what I had said
    • pjc50 5y ago
      > if we could tell if the COVID genome had come via animals/natural origin or engineered in some way. I said that most likely, yes that should be possible How?
      • garblegarble 5y ago
        There's quite a comprehensive document compiled by a virologist on reddit discussing what the options for engineering would be, and what traces they would leave, I found it quite interesting: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kAHSEx9-eIyVIahczH8itHaUm9jI9WX7/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kAHSEx9-eIyVIahczH8itHaUm9j...
        • baybal2 5y ago
          No engineering, I want to underline it. This is not precluding a natural virus leak with, or without gain of function experiment involvement. Current facts on the ground: - 1st response to CoVID occurrence was certainly in Wuhan. - The closest wild strain of CoVID happens in bats living thousand kilometres from Wuhan - Wuhan had two institutes which, on record, did gain of function experiments on bat coronaviruses - SARS had a record of lab escapes past the previous pandemic even without live animal hosts.
          • jghn 5y ago
            The story with the miners[1] has caught my attention. A group of miners fell ill w/ a SARS-like virus via bat droppings. In retrospect it sounds a heck of a lot like COVID. Wuhan was known to have investigated the case. Perhaps a researcher manages to get infected, or something like that. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7606707/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7606707/
      • jghn 5y ago
        garblegarble's link explains it better than I could, but the tl;dr is that there are patterns that occur with natural evolution. Messing with those patterns would look, well, unnatural.
  • yanderekko 5y ago
    >Most didn't stop at "maybe this escaped from the lab in Wuhan", but went down the real rabbit hole accusing the Chinese government of manufacturing and releasing a bioweapon. I don't think it's fair to say that "most" of these people thought it was deliberately released, whether or not they believed it was a bioweapon.
• slightwinder 5y ago
  To be fair, the lab-theory was hijacked from the beginning by conspiracy-believers who told everyone it was a bio-weapon and released on purpose. The idea of an accidential leak of reasearch-material is poisoned till today, because any hint of a proof will be fuel for the nutheads. And at the moment there many nutheads and racists aiming at asians because of the pandemia.
  • yostrovs 5y ago
    To be fair, you are exactly the type that the parent comment was referring to... People that effortlessly dismiss reasonable ideas. You add smears of racism on top of it to make sure the side that you disagree with is hated. Please reflect as the parent comment suggests.
    • yanderekko 5y ago
      Precisely. "This theory is popular with crazy racists" leads to "if you believe this then I am forced to assume that you're a crazy racist and disparage you accordingly" pretty effortlessly in 2021. This sort of bad-faith ad hominem is the real problem.
    • duckfang 5y ago
      You can say that, but I've heard the diatribes that the "China virus" was because they were playing with 5G and viruses and it escaped into bats and those chinamen ate the bats and...(cringe). Just go look up the conspiracies if you think I'm out of line - this is the mild version. Most of the mouthbreathers talking earlier about the "China virus" labs was predominately with pro-trump, anti-vaxxer, anti-masker individuals (well, starting with trump first). It was political grandstanding at its best, combined with 'us vs them' mentality, and a hefty scooping of conspiracy theory. So yes, the bulk of us thinking peoples justly figured this was what it appeared to be: yet another Anti-Chinese diatribe done by a white nationalist conspiracy nut (aka: trump).
      • eplanit 5y ago
        Your comment makes mostrovs point in the comment above.
• bdcravens 5y ago
  The response to "conspiracy theories" is: show us your proof. Otherwise we will wait to give it any credibility. If time and data prove out your claims, then we will give it the proper attention it has earned. (ie, science > social media)
  • jtdev 5y ago
    The media didn’t ask for proof of animal origin… in fact the media largely ran with animal origin with zero evidence to back that up. There’s always been more evidence to support the lab leak theory for those paying attention.
    • bdcravens 5y ago
      The problem with "more evidence" is that much of it has been hearsay. Person A tells person B something. Person B repeats person A's claim to person C. Person A then talks to person C, and person C says it must be true because they've heard it from multiple sources. I have no doubt there's good evidence pointing to the lab leak origin, but virtually everything I've been exposed to over the last year are typically rumors or graphics shared on social media. Hearing something a lot doesn't give it additional credibility.
    • bdcravens 5y ago
      According to the article, it's both: "researchers had assembled an archive of cave-bat-borne coronaviruses" Researchers were studying viruses that had an animal origin. The lab leak would be from not following proper safety protocols.
      • jtdev 5y ago
        Ah yes, the phrasing tricks have been a media favorite when discussing covid origins… conflating lab origin with natural origin through the almost certainty that the viral material used at the WIV originated in nature is pure intellectual dishonesty.
      • bingbong70 5y ago
• arbitrage 5y ago
  the media has an interest in being right with their reporting. they won't apologise and say they were wrong; why would their customers continue reading & sharing their content if they're so fallible? it's perverted interests and motivations.
  • JoBrad 5y ago
    Respected media outlets frequently post retractions. That’s part of what makes them respectable, and attracts readers who are looking for honest reporting.
• moolcool 5y ago
  There's legitimate stories where there's a lot of smoke, and a lot of credible speculation (the Epstein story and lab-leak theory are two good examples). The problem is that these get coopted by qanon and affiliated groups and start to become less credible in the public eye as a result. There's some tragic irony to the fact that potentially well-meaning crackpots are being used as a smokescreen for those who are actually doing wrong.
  • scarmig 5y ago
    This isn't about the public eye, primarily. It's about the "expert" voices in media who report on these things. Most of what can reasonably called the mainstream media was misrepresenting lab leak theories as racist QAnon ramblings for a year before it entered the "it's okay to believe this" realm. This kind of dismissal ends up being the default mode for any idea which doesn't fall within a very narrow approved view of reality.
  • slibhb 5y ago
    This is not what happens. What happens is, people discuss something plausible for which there exists circumstantial evidence (e.g. lab leak theory). Then, the media, left and right, pretends it has defininitve answers and uses "q anon" as an excuse to claim the plausible theory is wrong.
    • moolcool 5y ago
      Why can't both be true? Actual qanon types absolutely latch on to stories like this-- kind of a broken clock situation.
      • slibhb 5y ago
        Why do we care about q anon? Why has this tiny group of flat-earthers (at least half of whom are probably screwing around on the internet) become nationally known?
        • moolcool 5y ago
• dstroot 5y ago
  Media’s role is to a) entertain us, or b) inform us. Under a: say whatever gets you clicks. Period. Under b: hypotheses and theories cannot be reported as truths. Hard evidence is needed. There are two ways a virus evolves- naturally or guided/engineered. Without proof of the latter it is safe to assume former. No humility needed. If/when we have evidence of latter we can now report that.
• throwawayzRUU6f 5y ago
  This has been the saddest part of the pandemic to me. The epistemology of health policy is completely broken - fully reliant on arguments from authority, impervious to contrary evidence, initial beliefs clutched onto until the bitter end. Opinion makers are unable to distinguish between entertaining an idea and embracing it. This lead to predictable debacles on mask usage, airborne spread, everyone's pet theories of innate population immunity, seasonality of the virus, virus origins, etc. And yet - there are zero calls for introspection, blameless post-mortems. Nobody seems to care.
  • loopz 5y ago
    This is just "bread and circus". Those who look deeper down will see more going on underneath the layers of policymaking. Though, the real workers will need support for new ideas and improvements later.
  • recursivedoubts 5y ago
    tragically underrated post i view the last decade (perhaps two) as a complete shattering of nearly all epistemology and social trust we are all now wandering in a forest of mirrors or perhaps, rather, this is not a new condition, and we merely understand it
    • loopz 5y ago
      Nobody expects the Spanish I^Hpandemic, that only happens once every 100 years or so. This should be expected, and the previous administration did everything to demolish whatever was left of pandemic response teams and plans, before it hit.
• LatteLazy 5y ago
  Still waiting for the actual evidence...