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To me what gives me credence to the "lab leak theory" more than anything, was China's behavior during and initially after the outbreak. Where they thwarted any

• tristanj 5y ago
  The biggest sign for me is how the Chinese government threatened to charge medical workers with espionage if they speak about what happened during the early stages of the outbreak. https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2020/11/9833532bb925-chinas-authorities-issue-gag-order-about-virus-to-doctors-in-wuhan.html https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2020/11/9833532bb925-chin... Consider the following: How can a medical worker speaking about their own experience working at a hospital in any way constitute espionage? If found guilty of espionage, by law they can be executed. Anyone who speaks up can be killed.
  • bsder 5y ago
    The problem is that this is Standard Operating Procedure(tm) for China for anything which might upset the hoi-polloi. Trying to predict what China will execute people for is like reading entrails.
    • wombatmobile 5y ago
      > The problem is that this is Standard Operating Procedure(tm) for China When you say "China", do you mean the Department of Health, or the Department of Defense, or the Department of Trade, or the Chinese government, or the Chinese people, or some Chinese guy? It makes as much sense to attribute a Standard Operating Procedure to "China" as it does to attribute something like that to "America", or to say "Americans think...", which is not very much at all, because America, like all societies of more than one person, is a pluralist society. China is 1.3 billion people. If you treat it as a collection of different interests and points of view, your analyses and predictions will have more cogency.
      • bsder 5y ago
        > When you say "China", do you mean the Department of Health, or the Department of Defense, or the Department of Trade, or the Chinese government, or the Chinese people, or some Chinese guy? We call this deflecting. And it's a rhetorical device used when you are on the wrong side of the argument. And the answer is "All Of The Above". All parts of the Chinese government leaders see very little problem with executing those who might upset their status quo.
      • temp8964 5y ago
        What you said does not make sense at all. All Chinese government branches are directly under the command of the CCP. Even China's top court rejects the idea of juridical independence [1]. To say China is equivalent to U.S is totally ignorant. 1 . https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-policy-law/chinas-top-judge-warns-courts-on-judicial-independence-idUSKBN14Z07B https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-policy-law/chinas-t...
        • wombatmobile 5y ago
          I haven't said China is the same as USA. I’ve said China is a huge set of different interests. Can you see the difference between those two propositions? Apparently not, if you’re quoting one western account of one Chinese guys statement, and imaging that represents all of China monolithically.
          • temp8964 5y ago
            Lol. You can imagine whatever you want, at the end of the day, CCP makes the final call.
          • totalZero 5y ago
            China is more monolithic than the USA because uniformity is what their culture is structured to establish. In the West, we have an underlying belief that dissent and debate result in better decisions and more circumspect awareness of complicated situations. We tolerate insolence, dissent, and other unpleasant behaviors specifically because we know they serve a purpose. That doesn't happen with a top-down ("democratic centralist") system. The vast majority of people have absolutely no power to change the course of decisions. Political offices do not turn over from party to party in a way that shakes up underlying corruption. The police enforce political assertions in addition to the laws of the land. Your argument boils down to "there are many many people in China, so they must be ideologically and behaviorally diverse." Or, "as X approaches infinity, the number of viewpoints also approaches infinity." It's just not true for human behavior in an authoritarian collectivist society.
  • whydoibother 5y ago
    Do you have any other source on this? Searching around showed nothing.
• e40 5y ago
  I think it was because the Trump admin had a history of China bashing and many of us just thought this was more of the same.
  • vmception 5y ago
    My experience was people using the authorities as assuming credentialed people actually looked into it and subsequently ruled it out Thats been a recurring assumption on this virus that I find frustrating
  • throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
    I'm surprised nobody paid trump a ton of money to bash a crypto currency so that all the trump "haters" would buy it up and increase the price. Or why trump didn't just do that himself. Then maybe he wouldn't be as scared to show his tax returns in 2024 lol. The whole politicization of America is such a problem right now.
  • imwillofficial 5y ago
    Then I think your critical thinking filter needs adjusting.
  • hpcjoe 5y ago
    From my perspective, this is sadly, the likely explanation. The media and opposition party was so worked up, that anything at all that came from Trump or his admin, was simply wrong, a lie, etc. That, in part, was why no one took this thing seriously at the beginning in the US. In retrospect, the constant hounding and attacks on Trump damaged all US citizens, simply by blunting messages, by causing unnecessary conflict. While Trump is out of office, the leaders who caused this confusion are still in office. And that is wrong. They need to be fired. Indeed, a reasonably large contingent of those hesitant to get a vaccine, are parroting the (then) opposition politicians, who cast doubt on the processes. How much damage, how many lives have been lost, because these fools wanted to win a political contest, and score political points? The media bear significant responsibility in this as well. Their consistent efforts at painting the former administration as "full of crap" all the time, as lying all the time, blunted and confused many messages, and forced secretaries of departments to have to try to handle/answer often idiotic questions. So here we are today. Lab leak, far from being a paranoid fantasy, is a real possibility. And yet, the media is still playing these games. We in the US, need, need ... to fire all the pols responsible for this. To no longer consume the media products of the organizations that encouraged this. And to stop believing that just because someone on one side says something that the other side has free rights to attack that without regards for facts. I'm quite disgusted with the interplay between politics, media, and the pandemic.
• dbt00 5y ago
  The problem with this thinking is assuming the government of China actually knows the truth and is acting to protect itself from a dangerous reveal. They might not have known then (or now!) and are simply acting based on some probability it could be true, default secrecy, and organizational fear.
  • fastball 5y ago
    This seems less plausible. Presumably the PRC knows exactly what kind of research was happening in Wuhan. It should be fairly clear to anyone who worked in that lab if COVID-19 came from there.
    • mschuster91 5y ago
      (Real)communist countries are notorious for local party representatives falsifying or mis-representing data to their superiors. Incentives gone wrong - when you risk getting gulag'd for missing your quarterly numbers, you will fudge your numbers.
    • dbt00 5y ago
      The PRC is made up of people, some of whom may or may not tell each other the truth, or may or may not know the truth of what they say. Just like any other organization made up of people. I don't know if COVID leaked from a lab or not. I think it's possible and very much worth investigating. What I'm against is these kind of "social proof" arguments which can seem convincing but are are often vacuous. Investigate the evidence. Pressure the PRC to show their records and allow external investigations. Publicly bluster that refusal to open up in the face of legitimate questions should be considered evidence of culpability if they refuse to open up! But don't actually consider a repressive government being repressive by default as actual proof of anything.
  • dylan604 5y ago
    Isn't this basically the default behavior of China and/or other communist/dictator countries? I just rewatched HBO's Chernobyl, and that was the underlying premise about how badly the gov't wanted the thing to be played down until it was just too much to hide. The superiority of those in charge cannot be brought into disrepute in any way. Same thing with COVID-19. I just think that Bejing has a tighter grip on things than Moscow did at the time. Not that I'm equating global nuclear disaster and a viral pandemic on the same level.
• Spooky23 5y ago
  I think given the demagogue POTUS and the mob of crazy followers, it was in the public interest to avoid agitating the mob. Even Facebook had the sense to realize that. As it stands, asian people are getting targeted for attacks in the street by deranged individuals.
  • narrator 5y ago
    That's why I'm always careful to say CCP instead of China or Chinese when referring to who the bad guy is in all of this. People should take care never to confuse the Chinese ethnicity with the corrupt CCP government.
    • iammisc 5y ago
      Do people get offended when people say america invaded Iraq? Do we blame an Eskimo because the federal government invaded the middle east? Of course not. Nobody blames random citizens of countries for their government misdeeds. Man this shifting of standards is ridiculous. I've just started calling covid West Taiwan virus to piss everyone off.
  • imwillofficial 5y ago
    Yes yes, the ole “We lie to you about important aspects of a global pandemic for your own good” Nice
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • galangalalgol 5y ago
    That is called guilding the lilly. Long term the erosion of trust causes more damage than the white lies avoid. And it shouldn't be Facebook's call.
    • Spooky23 5y ago
      Long term it’s good to erode trust in Facebook as it’s a malevolent force in society.
• hogFeast 5y ago
  It is generally very hard to read too much into what the Chinese govt does because govt behaviour is typically a function of domestic situation, and their domestic situation is very different to ours. The Chinese govt tends to over-react, there is a weird tug of war between local and national politicians, authority in Chinese politics (to me) seems very situational and freewheeling in a way that US politics isn't (an odd point given Chinese criticism of democracy)...it is tricky to read anything into their behaviour. As an example, it is possible that this was a lab leak but that this fact was suppressed by the local govt, and no-one in the central govt is any the wiser. Defending China was because Trump was anti-China. I don't think money was anything to do with it, there is always going to be a section of the media (on both sides) that defines their view as the opposite of what "the other side" believes. There is nothing complicated about this, it is just a terrible idea to think this way and it will almost always backfire. Trump, in particular, brought out this characteristic to an unprecedented level...if Trump had said that grass was green, some sections of the media would have had pundits on an hour later expressing how dangerous that sentiment was and that, whilst grass appears green to the laymen, it is actually a very, very, very subtle shade of brown (even Obama didn't trigger this kind of neuralgia on the right).
• HappySweeney 5y ago
  I think, like me, many dismissed the lab-leak theory because it sounded like yet-another attempt to push the blame for all the unnecessary death from Trump to China, as well as the cavalcade of doctors stating that the DNA of the virus was clearly not artificially constructed.
  • imwillofficial 5y ago
    So you’re saying you formed an important opinion on a impactful topic without reviewing the evidence? Maybe you should change that
    • CoastalCoder 5y ago
      GP was adding to the discussion by stating his/her thought process at the time. Not advocating that approach for the future.
    • jjk166 5y ago
      There was no evidence to review. Even now the whole reason we are having this discussion is because over a year later there has still not been an adequate investigation and lots of statements made early on have since been shown to be false. And frankly, in the absence of evidence, some guy getting sick from bad meat at a market is a much simpler explanation than an artificially created virus escaped from an institution with good safety standards. Only after an extensive search for the host has come back empty and the institution's actions have been found to be questionable does occam's razor meaningfully shift, and even then it's still hardly certain that this alternative theory is actually correct.
      • vimy 5y ago
        There was plenty of evidence from the start.[1] There isn’t really much new evidence now, the only thing that changed is that Trump is gone. [1] https://project-evidence.github.io/ https://project-evidence.github.io/
    • HappySweeney 5y ago
• ganzuul 5y ago
  I think they defend China because it makes them feel as if China needs their defense, even though it is far more powerful than they are prepared to admit.
• 99_00 5y ago
  China forbade sharing covid-19's genome. When a Chinese scientist published it his lab was shut down the next day. >The Chinese government had prohibited labs from publishing information about the new coronavirus, though Zhang later said he did not know about the prohibition. The next day, the Shanghai Health Commission ordered Zhang's laboratory to close temporarily for "rectification". While some media reports argued that the closure was retaliation for Zhang's decision to publish the genome, Zhang disputed this, saying that officials were right to have the lab improve its biosafety protocols. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Yongzhen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Yongzhen
• whydoineedthis 5y ago
  I'm just going to say it - no one in their right mind would want Donald Trump leading a military war against our strongest frenemy in the world. You don't have to hate Trump to admit that he lacks complex strategy and communication skills, as well as a very week, if not incompetent, cabinet. Politically speaking, being in a "justified war" would have done nothing but hurt the democrats chances. It's hard to unseat a president at 4 years already, but with an ongoing war it's even harder.
  • kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
    Genuinely curious, are you indicating that the current POTUS is better qualified to be leading potentially that same military action?
    • whydoineedthis 5y ago
      Yes, not that I want him to kick one off either though. His cabinet is no nonsense, he has 8 years in office working with the top mill brass already, and also he doesn't tweet the first thing on his mind. It seems like an inocuous jab, but let's not forget Trump literally tweeted a classified intel picture from our mill satellites. That's the type of incompetence that can't be tolerated.
• 908B64B197 5y ago
  Interesting how media coverage completely changed. Under the previous administration it was considered racist to even mention the theory and it's proponents were considered racists or conspiracy theorists. Why such a sudden change? China certainly didn't change its position on the issue...
  • greedo 5y ago
    There's a world of difference in considering this theory, and with calling it the "Asian Flu" or "Kung Flu" etc. One act addressed what happened, the other tars entire nations/cultures/regions with a wide brush.
    • tomjen3 5y ago
      Current the major concern is the Indian mutation. But we are not allowed to call it the Chinese or Wuhan virus.
      • greedo 5y ago
        Pretty simple to refer to it as COVID, no? West Nile Virus was named in 1937, so hard to really say it's equivalent. Ebola is named after a river, I doubt it gets offended by the association. MERS is widely acknowledged as a mistake in naming by the WHO.
        • 908B64B197 5y ago
          But it did originate in China, no? And the Chinese government did hide critical data from the WHO and international partners to save face, no?
        • tomjen3 5y ago
          Things that ryme are easier to remember, so wuhan virus would be the most accurate and easiest to remember.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• throwaway894345 5y ago
  > I feel like it was in part because of money interests and also because it was something Trump touted as true. I agree on both counts. With respect to the latter, I yearn for a time when we can dissect the media's coverage of Trump somewhat dispassionately without being branded a Trump Supporter (as though there is some kind of firm dichotomy in which we must be one of Team Trump or Team Media).
• lamontcg 5y ago
  > To me what gives me credence to the "lab leak theory" more than anything, was China's behavior during and initially after the outbreak [...] That all sounds to me just like a massive authoritarian government bureaucracy dealing with a quick moving disaster on their soil where the beaurocrats didn't know what was happening, because the scientists couldn't tell them, so they leaned in on trying to control everyone. The argument rephrased reads to me like "The reason why I believe in the lab leak theory is that an authoritarian country behaved like an authoritarian country, when I would have expected them to behave like my western democracy".
• swader999 5y ago
  CCP's complete lock down of internal flights while leaving international outgoing flights wide open right at the start out this is more damming than the lab leak hypothesis.