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Haha. No. It’s because of politics and TDS. People were taught that this was a Trump theory. That’s all the media needs to say to ensure that nobody will take i

Haha. No. It’s because of politics and TDS. People were taught that this was a Trump theory. That’s all the media needs to say to ensure that nobody will take it seriously and nobody will tolerate anyone else who takes it seriously.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
Except that it was a Trump theory. That doesn't mean it cannot be true. It does mean that after 3 years and several thousand fully documented outright lies, the presumption of truth was no longer being granted.
- fragileone 5y ago
  Except he was proven right yet again that social media and old media orgs will censor others and lie to the public when it fits their political agenda.
  - kaesar14 5y ago
    Right - instead of trying to debate the veracity of the argument, it was immediately cast as a political battle, and being on the same side as Trump in most urban and most media circles was asking to be ostracized. It’s absolutely poisonous.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      How as anybody going to "debate the veracity of the argument"? What information was anybody going to use? Even so, in the intervening period, even when Trump was still president, several US agency reports concluded that the virus likely did not originate from a lab, and one assumes that they had more information than anybody else.
      - willcipriano 5y ago
        >What information was anybody going to use? I used these three pieces of evidence to come to this conclusion for myself last year. 1. Wuhan is the epicenter of the outbreak. 2. Wuhan has a lab that works with bat covid. 3. China initally tooks steps to hide the virus from the world until that was no longer possible. >several US agency reports concluded that the virus likely did not originate from a lab. Keep that in mind next time.
        knowaveragejoe 5y ago
        Do you believe in anything else considered a "conspiracy theory" by the scientific or academic community? This is roughly the level of reasoning people use when arguing that 9/11 was an inside job.
        willcipriano 5y ago
        Not really. I believe Armstrong walked on the moon, Oswald shot Kennedy and 911 was a bunch of mostly Saudis flying planes into buildings. I question the attribution of hacks to Russia that often happens, not because I trust Russia or anything but because I'm capable of pulling off some of those attacks myself and I can do so without leaving evidence of what nation I'm in. I assume a team of elite Russian hackers would be more capable than me and could do the same.
        lawnchair_larry 5y ago
        Why did you say “anything else”? This isn’t a conspiracy theory. They only detail that is even in question is whether or not one of their samples leaked. Nothing else about what that lab is, or what that lab does, is even in question. They go 1000 miles away to get bats and bat poop and bring it to the WIV to study bat coronaviruses and they modify them to be more transmissible. This is basic virology in 2021 and they have been proudly telling the world that they do this for years. None of that is speculation. The question of whether one of their viruses leaked out again (yes, again!) that was a bat coronavirus found right by the bat coronavirus lab, or whether it was a remarkable cascade of coincidences that still has no viable complete hypothesis (the “modified” virus doesn’t infect bats anymore), is not one of “conspiracy”.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    > Except he was proven right yet again that social media and old media orgs will censor others and lie to the public when it fits their political agenda. And this differs from "new media" how? You don't like what certain social media and "old media orgs" did? Fine, no problem. There's no media on the planet that doesn't do this to some extent, least of all contemporary conservative US media outlets. Whether you consider what was done to Trump and others regarding their posts/speeches about COVID and cures for it as censorship depends a lot on how you see the world. Your mileage may vary (because mine certainly does).
  - knowaveragejoe 5y ago
    > proven right yet again Really depressing to hear this nonsense on HN of all places.
    - badmadrad 5y ago
      God forbid people that don't share your politics coexist on a tech forum with you.
      - dang 5y ago
        We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political/ideological battle. That's against the HN guidelines because it destroys the intended purpose of the site—and for that reason, we ban accounts that do it, regardless of which politics/ideology they're battling for. Crossing into personal attack is also egregious and not allowed here. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
      - knowaveragejoe 5y ago
        Your "politics" are antagonism and scapegoating of The Other. If you were actually conservative, you should be appalled and distancing yourself as much as possible from the MAGA cult.
        lawnchair_larry 5y ago
        Antagonism and scapegoating of The Other was, and is, currently the playbook of the democrats at the moment. They don’t have a monopoly on it, but they’re way more guilty of this. It just doesn’t seem like it, because you haven’t heard the other side of the story, and haven’t realized how much has been a total lie from the left. Everyone believes it all, uncritically, for the same reason they dismissed the lab leak. Folks reflecting on this and saying, what else did we have completely wrong are asking the right question. Folks who think this was a one off, well, it absolutely wasn’t. I doubt there is even a single “MAGA” person on HN, but you folks like to throw that epithet around to shut down dialog. It’s shameful. And nobody needs to distance themselves from anyone. If you make a false association, that’s your fault, not theirs. Judge them on what they actually do and say, not on what you (incorrectly) assume they might think.
  - IgorPartola 5y ago
    I keep seeing this and it just doesn’t make sense. What is more likely, a global conspiracy theory amongst all the tech giants who normally try to outcompete each other into the ground as quickly and with as much humiliation as possible and the Federal government, which they try to evade and subvert at every opportunity? Or the idea that when COVID first hit it was the conspiracy theorists screaming the loudest about the lab leak origin and given the sudden interest of the US in xenophobia and specifically the anti-Chinese sentiment(hint: it’s not that sudden), it would have potentially resulted in violence against Asian people. And at the same time the crossover theory was pretty much as likely if not more based on what we knew then. Now that more info has been gathered everyone is doing an about-face on covering this issue since it’s become a serious conversation and not a crackpot fringe theory shared with the intent to spread hate. Maybe what had happened was that initially we knew little and everyone was a bit panicked. Then the crackpots started spreading FUD via the most convenient COVID origin theory to their message. The old media mostly ignored this, dismissing it swiftly without giving it more airtime. Social media was too busy with conspiracy theorist and right wing activists spreading the lab leak theory so they viewed it as false (if 99% of the time what a person says is a lie, why would this particular thing be true?). Then articles like these revived that theory with new information. Most people took in the information as just “hey new data” and left it at that. A few people who were spreading the conspiracy theory version of this story felt vindicated while simultaneously upset because their low quality memes were not really allowed while new the WSJ, the NYT, and Vanity Faire is getting front page treatment because of course excellent writing is more compelling than some guy on YouTube angrily vaping in his mother’s basement.
    - lawnchair_larry 5y ago
      Nope. False dichotomy. Nothing was revived with any new information. The Venn diagram that includes the circle of people who were following and investigating this, and the circle of conspiracy theorist Trump supporters, did not ever overlap. One of these circles was about some bill gates funded bioweapon to implant 5G or some nonsense which they suspected was being done in WIV. The other was scientists who have known about the work at WIV for years, not based on suspicion, but based on the papers they kept releasing, media interviews, sequencing the genome, and doing science. But you all TDS’d so hard that you wrote the latter off as the former, and the media went along with it. It isn’t even a conspiracy theory. It had nothing to do with collusion by tech giants. Their hyper partisan employees just fell into the same TDS trap and decided “lab = conspiracy misinformation, no ifs ands or buts” and started purging people talking about it. The Vanity Fair article is actually quite poorly researched and written, and misattributes much of the source and timeline, but at least people are snapping out of their partisan blindness on this issue now.
- temp8964 5y ago
  No. It was not a Trump theory. It was commonly believed among Chinese political dissidents. Any Chinese people who don't believe the CCP have speculated this long before Trump even had any thought on this. Please stop relating everything to Trump.
tehwebguy 5y ago
I mean, fair enough right? Figuring out if it started in a lab has zero effect on the mortality rate while Trump making up new lies every day for months about how it's just about to just go away anyway led people to their deaths, plenty of whom probably weren't his followers.
knowaveragejoe 5y ago
This is a totally fair reaction to all "trump theories".
- FriendlyNormie 5y ago
  Kill yourself you fucking retarded cunt. You should be stabbed to death.
- chitowneats 5y ago
  It's so bizarre to me to view him in this way. "Trump thinks something; therefore I must be against it". I understand not taking his word for anything. But it's such an important issue. To just dismiss it and not try to investigate it, even at the highest levels of our government and public health bureaucracies, strikes me as negligent at best.
  - knowaveragejoe 5y ago
    > To just dismiss it and not try to investigate it, even at the highest levels of our government and public health bureaucracies, strikes me as negligent at best. But this is the opposite of what's happened.
    - chitowneats 5y ago
      Apparently you haven't read the Fauci FOIA emails.
      - knowaveragejoe 5y ago
        You said "dismiss it and not try to investigate it".
- garmaine 5y ago
  No, it is not. Judge ideas on their own merits please. These same people ridicule the Space Force, for example, despite it being a reorganization of US Space Command that had bipartisan approval years before Trump even ran for office. A broken clock is still right twice a day.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

Except that it was a Trump theory. That doesn't mean it cannot be true. It does mean that after 3 years and several thousand fully documented outright lies, the presumption of truth was no longer being granted.

fragileone 5y ago
Except he was proven right yet again that social media and old media orgs will censor others and lie to the public when it fits their political agenda.
- kaesar14 5y ago
  Right - instead of trying to debate the veracity of the argument, it was immediately cast as a political battle, and being on the same side as Trump in most urban and most media circles was asking to be ostracized. It’s absolutely poisonous.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    How as anybody going to "debate the veracity of the argument"? What information was anybody going to use? Even so, in the intervening period, even when Trump was still president, several US agency reports concluded that the virus likely did not originate from a lab, and one assumes that they had more information than anybody else.
    - willcipriano 5y ago
      >What information was anybody going to use? I used these three pieces of evidence to come to this conclusion for myself last year. 1. Wuhan is the epicenter of the outbreak. 2. Wuhan has a lab that works with bat covid. 3. China initally tooks steps to hide the virus from the world until that was no longer possible. >several US agency reports concluded that the virus likely did not originate from a lab. Keep that in mind next time.
      - knowaveragejoe 5y ago
        Do you believe in anything else considered a "conspiracy theory" by the scientific or academic community? This is roughly the level of reasoning people use when arguing that 9/11 was an inside job.
        willcipriano 5y ago
        Not really. I believe Armstrong walked on the moon, Oswald shot Kennedy and 911 was a bunch of mostly Saudis flying planes into buildings. I question the attribution of hacks to Russia that often happens, not because I trust Russia or anything but because I'm capable of pulling off some of those attacks myself and I can do so without leaving evidence of what nation I'm in. I assume a team of elite Russian hackers would be more capable than me and could do the same.
        lawnchair_larry 5y ago
        Why did you say “anything else”? This isn’t a conspiracy theory. They only detail that is even in question is whether or not one of their samples leaked. Nothing else about what that lab is, or what that lab does, is even in question. They go 1000 miles away to get bats and bat poop and bring it to the WIV to study bat coronaviruses and they modify them to be more transmissible. This is basic virology in 2021 and they have been proudly telling the world that they do this for years. None of that is speculation. The question of whether one of their viruses leaked out again (yes, again!) that was a bat coronavirus found right by the bat coronavirus lab, or whether it was a remarkable cascade of coincidences that still has no viable complete hypothesis (the “modified” virus doesn’t infect bats anymore), is not one of “conspiracy”.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > Except he was proven right yet again that social media and old media orgs will censor others and lie to the public when it fits their political agenda. And this differs from "new media" how? You don't like what certain social media and "old media orgs" did? Fine, no problem. There's no media on the planet that doesn't do this to some extent, least of all contemporary conservative US media outlets. Whether you consider what was done to Trump and others regarding their posts/speeches about COVID and cures for it as censorship depends a lot on how you see the world. Your mileage may vary (because mine certainly does).
- knowaveragejoe 5y ago
  > proven right yet again Really depressing to hear this nonsense on HN of all places.
  - badmadrad 5y ago
    God forbid people that don't share your politics coexist on a tech forum with you.
    - dang 5y ago
      We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political/ideological battle. That's against the HN guidelines because it destroys the intended purpose of the site—and for that reason, we ban accounts that do it, regardless of which politics/ideology they're battling for. Crossing into personal attack is also egregious and not allowed here. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
    - knowaveragejoe 5y ago
      Your "politics" are antagonism and scapegoating of The Other. If you were actually conservative, you should be appalled and distancing yourself as much as possible from the MAGA cult.
      - lawnchair_larry 5y ago
        Antagonism and scapegoating of The Other was, and is, currently the playbook of the democrats at the moment. They don’t have a monopoly on it, but they’re way more guilty of this. It just doesn’t seem like it, because you haven’t heard the other side of the story, and haven’t realized how much has been a total lie from the left. Everyone believes it all, uncritically, for the same reason they dismissed the lab leak. Folks reflecting on this and saying, what else did we have completely wrong are asking the right question. Folks who think this was a one off, well, it absolutely wasn’t. I doubt there is even a single “MAGA” person on HN, but you folks like to throw that epithet around to shut down dialog. It’s shameful. And nobody needs to distance themselves from anyone. If you make a false association, that’s your fault, not theirs. Judge them on what they actually do and say, not on what you (incorrectly) assume they might think.
- IgorPartola 5y ago
  I keep seeing this and it just doesn’t make sense. What is more likely, a global conspiracy theory amongst all the tech giants who normally try to outcompete each other into the ground as quickly and with as much humiliation as possible and the Federal government, which they try to evade and subvert at every opportunity? Or the idea that when COVID first hit it was the conspiracy theorists screaming the loudest about the lab leak origin and given the sudden interest of the US in xenophobia and specifically the anti-Chinese sentiment(hint: it’s not that sudden), it would have potentially resulted in violence against Asian people. And at the same time the crossover theory was pretty much as likely if not more based on what we knew then. Now that more info has been gathered everyone is doing an about-face on covering this issue since it’s become a serious conversation and not a crackpot fringe theory shared with the intent to spread hate. Maybe what had happened was that initially we knew little and everyone was a bit panicked. Then the crackpots started spreading FUD via the most convenient COVID origin theory to their message. The old media mostly ignored this, dismissing it swiftly without giving it more airtime. Social media was too busy with conspiracy theorist and right wing activists spreading the lab leak theory so they viewed it as false (if 99% of the time what a person says is a lie, why would this particular thing be true?). Then articles like these revived that theory with new information. Most people took in the information as just “hey new data” and left it at that. A few people who were spreading the conspiracy theory version of this story felt vindicated while simultaneously upset because their low quality memes were not really allowed while new the WSJ, the NYT, and Vanity Faire is getting front page treatment because of course excellent writing is more compelling than some guy on YouTube angrily vaping in his mother’s basement.
  - lawnchair_larry 5y ago
    Nope. False dichotomy. Nothing was revived with any new information. The Venn diagram that includes the circle of people who were following and investigating this, and the circle of conspiracy theorist Trump supporters, did not ever overlap. One of these circles was about some bill gates funded bioweapon to implant 5G or some nonsense which they suspected was being done in WIV. The other was scientists who have known about the work at WIV for years, not based on suspicion, but based on the papers they kept releasing, media interviews, sequencing the genome, and doing science. But you all TDS’d so hard that you wrote the latter off as the former, and the media went along with it. It isn’t even a conspiracy theory. It had nothing to do with collusion by tech giants. Their hyper partisan employees just fell into the same TDS trap and decided “lab = conspiracy misinformation, no ifs ands or buts” and started purging people talking about it. The Vanity Fair article is actually quite poorly researched and written, and misattributes much of the source and timeline, but at least people are snapping out of their partisan blindness on this issue now.
temp8964 5y ago
No. It was not a Trump theory. It was commonly believed among Chinese political dissidents. Any Chinese people who don't believe the CCP have speculated this long before Trump even had any thought on this. Please stop relating everything to Trump.

tehwebguy 5y ago

I mean, fair enough right? Figuring out if it started in a lab has zero effect on the mortality rate while Trump making up new lies every day for months about how it's just about to just go away anyway led people to their deaths, plenty of whom probably weren't his followers.

knowaveragejoe 5y ago

This is a totally fair reaction to all "trump theories".

FriendlyNormie 5y ago
Kill yourself you fucking retarded cunt. You should be stabbed to death.
chitowneats 5y ago
It's so bizarre to me to view him in this way. "Trump thinks something; therefore I must be against it". I understand not taking his word for anything. But it's such an important issue. To just dismiss it and not try to investigate it, even at the highest levels of our government and public health bureaucracies, strikes me as negligent at best.
- knowaveragejoe 5y ago
  > To just dismiss it and not try to investigate it, even at the highest levels of our government and public health bureaucracies, strikes me as negligent at best. But this is the opposite of what's happened.
  - chitowneats 5y ago
    Apparently you haven't read the Fauci FOIA emails.
    - knowaveragejoe 5y ago
      You said "dismiss it and not try to investigate it".
garmaine 5y ago
No, it is not. Judge ideas on their own merits please. These same people ridicule the Space Force, for example, despite it being a reorganization of US Space Command that had bipartisan approval years before Trump even ran for office. A broken clock is still right twice a day.