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Exactly. In 2020, I didn't care if started with wild bats, bat soup, a lab leak, or Santa Claus. I cared about: * Waiting a week after patient 1 to close the b

Exactly. In 2020, I didn't care if started with wild bats, bat soup, a lab leak, or Santa Claus. I cared about: * Waiting a week after patient 1 to close the borders * Intentional efforts to suppress testing * "Covid won't happen here because we closed the borders" (a month into exponential covid case growth in the US) * "...but if it does, it's barely worse than the flu" * "...but even if it is, hydroxychloroquine is a miracle cure." * "...but even if it isn't, we shouldn't lock down because it won't stop the spread" * "...and even if we do, a silent first wave means we're all immune now that the first wave is slightly trending downwards and we should do a full reopen" * Anti-mask * Anti-vax and more. Those fights had actual public health impact. "Whodunnit" had 0x the public health importance and 10x the flamewar potential, which is saying something, because we had plenty of flamewars as it was. Steering the conversation away from lab-leak steered the conversation towards things that mattered.

BobbyJo 5y ago
Did it actually steer toward things that mattered though? I think politicizing rational inquiry, especially when China did a lot to help the virus leave its borders, was equivalent to trying to deflect, and just added more obfuscation to a meaningful dialogue about what we should do and what we should learn.
- XorNot 5y ago
  The inquiry wasn't political until Trump made it political...as a tool to distract from his ongoing desire to ignore the pandemic as an issue. In 2020 the questions people wanted answers to were "what was the government doing" and "when was relief coming" and "we need masks and ventilators are you going to distribute them". The only people who seemed to think the answer to all those questions was "well firstly we need to consider if this is China's fault..." was the White House.
  - BobbyJo 5y ago
    It wasn't just the White House though. The whole reason there is this resurgence of the issue 18 months after the fact is that all of the people asking the question who weren't Donald Trump crazy, were treated like they were. I genuinely worry about all the people that believed it was a conspiracy theory, and still think they are on team science. They aren't.
    - XorNot 5y ago
      It is a conspiracy theory, because there's no evidence beyond allegations of conspiracy that this is what happened. It keeps being asked for the same reason that 9/11 truthers came into existence: because the idea that bad things can happen randomly to good people is a more scary idea then the one that bad things happen because someone planned for them to. "It escaped from a lab" is an appealing idea because the very next conclusion will be "there should be no more virus labs!". Zoological origins, like SARS, or Swine Flu before it, offers no solutions - it's an ongoing problem.
ryandrake 5y ago
I still don't care how it started. Until it's gone, the world needs to spend their cycles on getting past it. There will be time to point fingers and blame later. It's like being in the middle of a house fire, looking for a way past the burning hallway to the door, and then someone else in there with you arguing "Don't worry about how to get out. What's really important is who started the fire!"
himinlomax 5y ago
The Chinese dictatorship initially protested against countries closing their borders, calling it racist.
- est 5y ago
  because closing one country's border doesn't work. Strict screening travellers do. While there were indeed recorded imported Chinese cases in west coast, US's epidemic mostly started off the east coast.
  - xdennis 5y ago
    > While there were indeed recorded imported Chinese cases in west coast, US's epidemic mostly started off the east coast. This seems like a distinction without a difference since both coasts got the virus ultimately from the same country.
    - est 5y ago
      No it wasn't. The Wuhan strain pretty much died in last April.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    You have to do both, and this is clear in hindsight because of the challenges involved in setting up effective screening. Eg, close border until effective screening is in place
  - taneq 5y ago
    Yeah nah it works.
  - himinlomax 5y ago
    > because closing one country's border doesn't work Worked very well for Taiwan, Australia.
    - est 5y ago
makomk 5y ago
See, this is the real problem - it's not just the lab leak theory, the efforts to get Trump out of office seeped into and warped every aspect of the media coverage of Covid-19. For example, border closures. Putting aside the fact that at the time the entire mainstream establishment insisted that imposing them at all was dangerous, counter-productive xenophobia, the US had the only remotely sensible early border closures in the Western world - and that was an infinitely bigger problem than whether Trump should've imposed it a week earlier. In particular, Italy massively dropped the ball and ended up with a huge outbreak spreading infections to the US and the rest of Europe whilst somehow reporting zero cases. (Even US testing wasn't that broken!) There is approximately zero chance that the US could've banned travel from them in time to stop this - there was absolutely no justification for this at the time, given they were reporting zero cases unlike the USA. Then the American media pointed to the fact that Italy had banned direct flights from China (much too late) as proof travel bans didn't work. Of course it didn't - Italy has borderless travel with the rest of the EU, everyone could just fly in to a different airport, it's the equivalent of Texas or California banning direct flights in a futile attempt to keep the virus out. The US took the more sensible approach of restricting based on where people had travelled recently, regardless of where they were travelling from - pretty much everyone else now seems to have copied this approach. The media also seems to have misled everyone about what went wrong with Covid testing in the US. As far as I can tell, the USA had the earliest, most aggressive attempted rollout of testing out of all the countries in the West at least, maybe in the world. There certainly wasn't any lack of enthusiasm for it from the top-level, politically appointed levels of the government. The problem was the non-partisan career parts of the CDC screwed up, first by contaminating the testing reagents and then covering it up and letting them ship out to labs anyway, causing confusion and delays as the labs couldn't work out why they failed quality checks.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  > the entire mainstream establishment insisted that imposing them at all was dangerous, counter-productive xenophobia Closing the borders before patient 1 or almost immediately after patient 1 (plus aggressive contact tracing) would have been good public health policy. Closing the borders after a week of exponential growth and lack of aggressive contact tracing was hopeless. Good for appearances only -- and the good appearances came largely from xenophobia because the public health cat was well out of the bag by that point. See the difference? I'm sure you can find plenty of bad liberal media takes on the issue, but that's completely beside the point as they were not in charge of anything. The bad (xenophobic) conservative takes didn't just come from the media, though, they also came from the president. Repeatedly and persistently. > As far as I can tell, the USA had the earliest, most aggressive attempted rollout of testing out of all the countries in the West at least, maybe in the world. There certainly wasn't any lack of enthusiasm for it from the top-level Just one tiny little problem with that narrative: Trump said the quiet parts out loud, multiple times, confirming what would otherwise have "just" been rumors and leaks. He didn't just fight and stall the testing, he publicly bragged about it later. "When you do testing to that extent you're going to find more people, you're going to find cases. So I said to my people, 'Slow the testing down, please.' They test and they test. We got tests for people who don't know what's going on."
skocznymroczny 5y ago
In 2021 I care about: * we only have to lockdown for two weeks to flatten the curve * ok, two more weeks and then we can reopen * well, we can't reopen, but we'll have vaccines soon so we'll be able to reopen * ok, we vaccinated 70% of people so we can reopen now * Vaccines work! * Well, they don't work in that country because those are the worse vaccines * Israel and UK having another surge? Oh it's only amongst unvaccinated people * Uh oh, Delta Plus is coming, better stay home!
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  Chinese vaccines do work. It's bad reporting that says it doesn't. In those countries they did not reach the percentage needed for herd immunity with less effective vaccines. They were still hugely protective against severe disease. So they work.

BobbyJo 5y ago

Did it actually steer toward things that mattered though? I think politicizing rational inquiry, especially when China did a lot to help the virus leave its borders, was equivalent to trying to deflect, and just added more obfuscation to a meaningful dialogue about what we should do and what we should learn.

XorNot 5y ago
The inquiry wasn't political until Trump made it political...as a tool to distract from his ongoing desire to ignore the pandemic as an issue. In 2020 the questions people wanted answers to were "what was the government doing" and "when was relief coming" and "we need masks and ventilators are you going to distribute them". The only people who seemed to think the answer to all those questions was "well firstly we need to consider if this is China's fault..." was the White House.
- BobbyJo 5y ago
  It wasn't just the White House though. The whole reason there is this resurgence of the issue 18 months after the fact is that all of the people asking the question who weren't Donald Trump crazy, were treated like they were. I genuinely worry about all the people that believed it was a conspiracy theory, and still think they are on team science. They aren't.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    It is a conspiracy theory, because there's no evidence beyond allegations of conspiracy that this is what happened. It keeps being asked for the same reason that 9/11 truthers came into existence: because the idea that bad things can happen randomly to good people is a more scary idea then the one that bad things happen because someone planned for them to. "It escaped from a lab" is an appealing idea because the very next conclusion will be "there should be no more virus labs!". Zoological origins, like SARS, or Swine Flu before it, offers no solutions - it's an ongoing problem.

ryandrake 5y ago

I still don't care how it started. Until it's gone, the world needs to spend their cycles on getting past it. There will be time to point fingers and blame later. It's like being in the middle of a house fire, looking for a way past the burning hallway to the door, and then someone else in there with you arguing "Don't worry about how to get out. What's really important is who started the fire!"

himinlomax 5y ago

The Chinese dictatorship initially protested against countries closing their borders, calling it racist.

est 5y ago
because closing one country's border doesn't work. Strict screening travellers do. While there were indeed recorded imported Chinese cases in west coast, US's epidemic mostly started off the east coast.
- xdennis 5y ago
  > While there were indeed recorded imported Chinese cases in west coast, US's epidemic mostly started off the east coast. This seems like a distinction without a difference since both coasts got the virus ultimately from the same country.
  - est 5y ago
    No it wasn't. The Wuhan strain pretty much died in last April.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  You have to do both, and this is clear in hindsight because of the challenges involved in setting up effective screening. Eg, close border until effective screening is in place
- taneq 5y ago
  Yeah nah it works.
- himinlomax 5y ago
  > because closing one country's border doesn't work Worked very well for Taiwan, Australia.
  - est 5y ago

makomk 5y ago

See, this is the real problem - it's not just the lab leak theory, the efforts to get Trump out of office seeped into and warped every aspect of the media coverage of Covid-19. For example, border closures. Putting aside the fact that at the time the entire mainstream establishment insisted that imposing them at all was dangerous, counter-productive xenophobia, the US had the only remotely sensible early border closures in the Western world - and that was an infinitely bigger problem than whether Trump should've imposed it a week earlier. In particular, Italy massively dropped the ball and ended up with a huge outbreak spreading infections to the US and the rest of Europe whilst somehow reporting zero cases. (Even US testing wasn't that broken!) There is approximately zero chance that the US could've banned travel from them in time to stop this - there was absolutely no justification for this at the time, given they were reporting zero cases unlike the USA. Then the American media pointed to the fact that Italy had banned direct flights from China (much too late) as proof travel bans didn't work. Of course it didn't - Italy has borderless travel with the rest of the EU, everyone could just fly in to a different airport, it's the equivalent of Texas or California banning direct flights in a futile attempt to keep the virus out. The US took the more sensible approach of restricting based on where people had travelled recently, regardless of where they were travelling from - pretty much everyone else now seems to have copied this approach. The media also seems to have misled everyone about what went wrong with Covid testing in the US. As far as I can tell, the USA had the earliest, most aggressive attempted rollout of testing out of all the countries in the West at least, maybe in the world. There certainly wasn't any lack of enthusiasm for it from the top-level, politically appointed levels of the government. The problem was the non-partisan career parts of the CDC screwed up, first by contaminating the testing reagents and then covering it up and letting them ship out to labs anyway, causing confusion and delays as the labs couldn't work out why they failed quality checks.

jjoonathan 5y ago
> the entire mainstream establishment insisted that imposing them at all was dangerous, counter-productive xenophobia Closing the borders before patient 1 or almost immediately after patient 1 (plus aggressive contact tracing) would have been good public health policy. Closing the borders after a week of exponential growth and lack of aggressive contact tracing was hopeless. Good for appearances only -- and the good appearances came largely from xenophobia because the public health cat was well out of the bag by that point. See the difference? I'm sure you can find plenty of bad liberal media takes on the issue, but that's completely beside the point as they were not in charge of anything. The bad (xenophobic) conservative takes didn't just come from the media, though, they also came from the president. Repeatedly and persistently. > As far as I can tell, the USA had the earliest, most aggressive attempted rollout of testing out of all the countries in the West at least, maybe in the world. There certainly wasn't any lack of enthusiasm for it from the top-level Just one tiny little problem with that narrative: Trump said the quiet parts out loud, multiple times, confirming what would otherwise have "just" been rumors and leaks. He didn't just fight and stall the testing, he publicly bragged about it later. "When you do testing to that extent you're going to find more people, you're going to find cases. So I said to my people, 'Slow the testing down, please.' They test and they test. We got tests for people who don't know what's going on."

skocznymroczny 5y ago

In 2021 I care about: * we only have to lockdown for two weeks to flatten the curve * ok, two more weeks and then we can reopen * well, we can't reopen, but we'll have vaccines soon so we'll be able to reopen * ok, we vaccinated 70% of people so we can reopen now * Vaccines work! * Well, they don't work in that country because those are the worse vaccines * Israel and UK having another surge? Oh it's only amongst unvaccinated people * Uh oh, Delta Plus is coming, better stay home!

sudosysgen 5y ago
Chinese vaccines do work. It's bad reporting that says it doesn't. In those countries they did not reach the percentage needed for herd immunity with less effective vaccines. They were still hugely protective against severe disease. So they work.