5 ms·

I'm not sure I understand. How does "lab-leak vs non-lab-leak" relate to this?

laputan_machine 4y ago
- The CCP have been routinely supressing any hypothesis on COVID-19 being a lab-borne virus. - The CCP have been stoic on their approach to zero-COVID - IF the virus was lab-borne, and IF the CCP know it was, is it not (very, very remotely) possible they know more about the consequences of this virus? That line of reasoning is pretty conspiratorial, but given that the CCP have been incredibly cagey about the whole affair, I don't think it's unreasonable to be doubtful. I think it is FAR more likely that it is a face-saving exercise, but I also think it's worth keeping an open mind
- yreg 4y ago
  Their behaviour is not that weird for an authoritarian regime and easily explainable without this theory imo. (As you say as well.) What would be an example of a piece of knowledge which they could have about the virus and which would warrant (in our eyes if we knew) 0 covid policy forever? Maybe I lack the imagination. Edit: Please don't downvote replies to this comment with fabricated not-real scenarios. That's exactly what I asked for!
  - Filligree 4y ago
    “99% lethality at five years” is something you could conceivably engineer. I find this extremely unlikely, but that’s the sort of thinking being pointed at.
    - ohyes 4y ago
      How would one engineer that? I would expect there to be some signs that it would be lethal in the future… a continued decline rather than full recovery. I haven’t had it yet, I suppose I should prepare to be practically the last person alive. This seems far-fetched
      - Filligree 4y ago
        It is, indeed, extremely far-fetched.
    - codealot 4y ago
      If that was what it is going to do, wouldn’t we know that by now? Hasn’t it been the most funded r&d ever for multiple years now due to the entire planet combining its strength to understand the virus?
      - Filligree 4y ago
        Yes, probably.
  - smallnix 4y ago
    Makes people distrust authority. That is where all the covid deniers and hoaxers come from. Created to further divide the US. Never intended to run rampant in China. Zero covid is a last ditch effort to prevent the otherwise unpreventable protests, revolts and finally the downfall of the cccp ;)
  - baandam 4y ago
    I agree, this is over extrapolating. There was no opportunity for them to not get to this point really unless COVID had gone away at this stage. It strikes me this is a face saving exercise at this point but they can also use it to stress test supply chains, stress test a general emergency situation, stress test their surveillance. Not much downside for an authoritarian regime. To assume they have hidden knowledge on long term dangers doesn't fit the observations IMO. Really, my guess is that the whole thing from the start is a facing saving exercise because of an accident in a culture obsessed with saving face.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > know more about the consequences of this virus Than all the other medical and scientific communities in the rest of the world?
  - c-fe 4y ago
    the developers of a software know more about its behaviour than all users/hackers in the world
    - rpadovani 4y ago
      Usually not, I always find amusing seeing reactions of game developers to videos of speedrunning: "You can do what?"
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      This is why software is famously vulnerability free. Really, software devs only know what the software should probably do and which bugs they run into regularly.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      Not if everybody abandons the original fork and uses a different one.
- amluto 4y ago
  > IF the virus was lab-borne, and IF the CCP know it was, is it not (very, very remotely) possible they know more about the consequences of this virus? Huh? Suppose it did come from a lab, by malice, incompetence, bad luck, or otherwise. Why would this imply that China knows more about it than anyone else? (Sure, China would have known more about it in the first few months. And they surely did regardless of whether it came from a lab: after all, it was primarily in China for a little while, and China extensively studied its cases. But it’s been years, and the world has studied Covid far more than any one lab could possibly have studied it.)
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    I guess the idea is that China was studying SARS-like viruses in animals, maybe mutating or genetically modifying them to learn more about them, and at some point, one escaped through incompetence. Especially early on this would obviously give China a big information advantage, as they had all their existing research to look at, and might have a more complete picture than anyone else (regarding heritage and other strains). Now that SARS-CoV-2 has been in the wild for three years its questionable if they would still have an advantage. But they might have better data about long-term effects, if only from animal tests, simply because they would have had more than three years to study it.
  - apostacy 4y ago
    > Suppose it did come from a lab, by malice, incompetence, bad luck, or otherwise. Why would this imply that China knows more about it than anyone else? Because the Chinese government started reacting to it as early as fall 2019, despite the best efforts of American big tech companies to cover it up. Because people made the very reasonable assumption that the unusual and highly virulent form of COVID that originated right near one of the only places on the planet where they were specifically creating that virus actually came from that lab. I am still in awe of people's continued denial about this. Even the mainstream media is reluctantly admitting it now, just search for "lab leak" on Google News. Anyone that paid any attention to so called "conspiracy" news sources knew about COVID well in advance. Back in December 2019 I saw countless videos of Chinese soldiers in hazmat suits rounding up civilians while they begged for their lives. And most "informed" people were in denial until February or March 2020. So, perhaps if you can admit you were wrong about COVID at the start of the pandemic, perhaps you are also wrong about it now?
matt123456789 4y ago
If the virus originated in a lab, then it is very likely that the CCP knows a lot about its behavior. The grandparent comment is implying that the CCP is acting based on something they know that they haven’t shared with the rest of the world.
- mattmanser 4y ago
  Or far more likely are the reasons listed below. Sad to see these conspiracy theories voted higher than the more plausible scientific explanation below.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
jillvs34 4y ago
If it's a lab-leak it means the virus was potentially well studied before the leak, and it's effects known. Therefore the government could know a lot more about it than they claim.
- andybak 4y ago
  Yes but what "knowledge" would be relevant at this stage? The virus has been through multiple rounds of mutation and has been well-studied. The amount of things that are a) possible to discern before it was released c) a surprise to the scientific community and c) is still applicable feels like it would be very small - barring sci-fi scenarios.
  - Altho00 4y ago
    As someone with no deep knowledge in virology, epidemiology or even biology, I tend to agree with you. However I also understand how having the virus originating from China , maybe, or maybe not, from a lab leak, and having china so hell bent on a 0 covid policy going so far as boarding and ceiling the doors of appartment buildings might be frightening even if the virus has been well studied. Let's say you're the head of a fancy lab with all the equipment and a team that does everything you ask gratis. You go to have lunch and get some soup. The owner comes to you with your soup and say " Here is you soup, nothing's wrong with it, just a normal, regular soup I can assured you that nobody dipper their balls in it or added anything dubious to it haha, go ahead and eat" and then turns around and yell at the kitchen staff that they better not eat the soup . You decide not to eat the soup, you take it back with you and run every possible test on it. All the tests come back normal you can't find anything weird in it. Do you eat the soup ? More importantly do you brush the weird behavior of the owner off or do you keep wondering what the hell have they done to the soup ? I'm not saying this is a perfect analogy but just trying to explain why some things might make us uneasy even if logic tells us we shouldn't.
    - netsharc 4y ago
      That is quite a terrible analogy. In the real world, one can logically guess why the CCP's acting "weird" (general political cluelessness, wanting to save face), but in your analogy there are not a lot of other possible explanations to the weird behaviors. God, the last few days HN has disappointed me more and more...

- The CCP have been routinely supressing any hypothesis on COVID-19 being a lab-borne virus. - The CCP have been stoic on their approach to zero-COVID - IF the virus was lab-borne, and IF the CCP know it was, is it not (very, very remotely) possible they know more about the consequences of this virus? That line of reasoning is pretty conspiratorial, but given that the CCP have been incredibly cagey about the whole affair, I don't think it's unreasonable to be doubtful. I think it is FAR more likely that it is a face-saving exercise, but I also think it's worth keeping an open mind

yreg 4y ago
Their behaviour is not that weird for an authoritarian regime and easily explainable without this theory imo. (As you say as well.) What would be an example of a piece of knowledge which they could have about the virus and which would warrant (in our eyes if we knew) 0 covid policy forever? Maybe I lack the imagination. Edit: Please don't downvote replies to this comment with fabricated not-real scenarios. That's exactly what I asked for!
- Filligree 4y ago
  “99% lethality at five years” is something you could conceivably engineer. I find this extremely unlikely, but that’s the sort of thinking being pointed at.
  - ohyes 4y ago
    How would one engineer that? I would expect there to be some signs that it would be lethal in the future… a continued decline rather than full recovery. I haven’t had it yet, I suppose I should prepare to be practically the last person alive. This seems far-fetched
    - Filligree 4y ago
      It is, indeed, extremely far-fetched.
  - codealot 4y ago
    If that was what it is going to do, wouldn’t we know that by now? Hasn’t it been the most funded r&d ever for multiple years now due to the entire planet combining its strength to understand the virus?
    - Filligree 4y ago
      Yes, probably.
- smallnix 4y ago
  Makes people distrust authority. That is where all the covid deniers and hoaxers come from. Created to further divide the US. Never intended to run rampant in China. Zero covid is a last ditch effort to prevent the otherwise unpreventable protests, revolts and finally the downfall of the cccp ;)
- baandam 4y ago
  I agree, this is over extrapolating. There was no opportunity for them to not get to this point really unless COVID had gone away at this stage. It strikes me this is a face saving exercise at this point but they can also use it to stress test supply chains, stress test a general emergency situation, stress test their surveillance. Not much downside for an authoritarian regime. To assume they have hidden knowledge on long term dangers doesn't fit the observations IMO. Really, my guess is that the whole thing from the start is a facing saving exercise because of an accident in a culture obsessed with saving face.
andsoitis 4y ago
> know more about the consequences of this virus Than all the other medical and scientific communities in the rest of the world?
- c-fe 4y ago
  the developers of a software know more about its behaviour than all users/hackers in the world
  - rpadovani 4y ago
    Usually not, I always find amusing seeing reactions of game developers to videos of speedrunning: "You can do what?"
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    This is why software is famously vulnerability free. Really, software devs only know what the software should probably do and which bugs they run into regularly.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Not if everybody abandons the original fork and uses a different one.
amluto 4y ago
> IF the virus was lab-borne, and IF the CCP know it was, is it not (very, very remotely) possible they know more about the consequences of this virus? Huh? Suppose it did come from a lab, by malice, incompetence, bad luck, or otherwise. Why would this imply that China knows more about it than anyone else? (Sure, China would have known more about it in the first few months. And they surely did regardless of whether it came from a lab: after all, it was primarily in China for a little while, and China extensively studied its cases. But it’s been years, and the world has studied Covid far more than any one lab could possibly have studied it.)
- wongarsu 4y ago
  I guess the idea is that China was studying SARS-like viruses in animals, maybe mutating or genetically modifying them to learn more about them, and at some point, one escaped through incompetence. Especially early on this would obviously give China a big information advantage, as they had all their existing research to look at, and might have a more complete picture than anyone else (regarding heritage and other strains). Now that SARS-CoV-2 has been in the wild for three years its questionable if they would still have an advantage. But they might have better data about long-term effects, if only from animal tests, simply because they would have had more than three years to study it.
- apostacy 4y ago
  > Suppose it did come from a lab, by malice, incompetence, bad luck, or otherwise. Why would this imply that China knows more about it than anyone else? Because the Chinese government started reacting to it as early as fall 2019, despite the best efforts of American big tech companies to cover it up. Because people made the very reasonable assumption that the unusual and highly virulent form of COVID that originated right near one of the only places on the planet where they were specifically creating that virus actually came from that lab. I am still in awe of people's continued denial about this. Even the mainstream media is reluctantly admitting it now, just search for "lab leak" on Google News. Anyone that paid any attention to so called "conspiracy" news sources knew about COVID well in advance. Back in December 2019 I saw countless videos of Chinese soldiers in hazmat suits rounding up civilians while they begged for their lives. And most "informed" people were in denial until February or March 2020. So, perhaps if you can admit you were wrong about COVID at the start of the pandemic, perhaps you are also wrong about it now?

matt123456789 4y ago

If the virus originated in a lab, then it is very likely that the CCP knows a lot about its behavior. The grandparent comment is implying that the CCP is acting based on something they know that they haven’t shared with the rest of the world.

mattmanser 4y ago
Or far more likely are the reasons listed below. Sad to see these conspiracy theories voted higher than the more plausible scientific explanation below.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

jillvs34 4y ago

If it's a lab-leak it means the virus was potentially well studied before the leak, and it's effects known. Therefore the government could know a lot more about it than they claim.

andybak 4y ago
Yes but what "knowledge" would be relevant at this stage? The virus has been through multiple rounds of mutation and has been well-studied. The amount of things that are a) possible to discern before it was released c) a surprise to the scientific community and c) is still applicable feels like it would be very small - barring sci-fi scenarios.
- Altho00 4y ago
  As someone with no deep knowledge in virology, epidemiology or even biology, I tend to agree with you. However I also understand how having the virus originating from China , maybe, or maybe not, from a lab leak, and having china so hell bent on a 0 covid policy going so far as boarding and ceiling the doors of appartment buildings might be frightening even if the virus has been well studied. Let's say you're the head of a fancy lab with all the equipment and a team that does everything you ask gratis. You go to have lunch and get some soup. The owner comes to you with your soup and say " Here is you soup, nothing's wrong with it, just a normal, regular soup I can assured you that nobody dipper their balls in it or added anything dubious to it haha, go ahead and eat" and then turns around and yell at the kitchen staff that they better not eat the soup . You decide not to eat the soup, you take it back with you and run every possible test on it. All the tests come back normal you can't find anything weird in it. Do you eat the soup ? More importantly do you brush the weird behavior of the owner off or do you keep wondering what the hell have they done to the soup ? I'm not saying this is a perfect analogy but just trying to explain why some things might make us uneasy even if logic tells us we shouldn't.
  - netsharc 4y ago
    That is quite a terrible analogy. In the real world, one can logically guess why the CCP's acting "weird" (general political cluelessness, wanting to save face), but in your analogy there are not a lot of other possible explanations to the weird behaviors. God, the last few days HN has disappointed me more and more...