6 ms·

“ China is never goiing to allow an actual investigation to happen.” - any reasonable person should be now asking “Why?”

by option 4y ago

bagels 4y ago
Maybe you're trying to imply lab escape hypothesis, but probably any origin in China, including natural sources causes them discomfort due to the fact that the initial response was denial.
- option 4y ago
  the world needs to know, this is bigger than China and their “discomfort”
  - autoexec 4y ago
    China doesn't want anyone to start following up on that line of reasoning either. A lot of problems in China are "bigger than China". I doubt they'd want us snooping around looking into the specific sources of the air pollution they spread either (https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/03/518323094/rise-in-smog-in-western-u-s-is-blamed-on-asias-air-pollution https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/03/518323094...) China's problems involving climate change, human rights, censorship, manufacturing, product/consumer safety, and the economy all have global impacts but you can bet they don't want the rest of the world at their gates wanting to "do something" about any of it.
  - kbelder 4y ago
    > this is bigger than China How sympathetic is China going to be to that argument?
    - option 4y ago
      if they draw limits on cooperation with the world on such an important issue, the world should start imposing limits on cooperation with China in this and possibly other areas.
      - lazide 4y ago
        Sounds like a good way to go broke. Good luck with that!
- chitowneats 4y ago
  China restricted their entire society for almost 3 years, yet they've done ~nothing to shut down wet markets or convince average Chinese that wild/exotic meat is dangerous. What conclusions should we draw from this?
  - anenefan 4y ago
    The important aspect of a wet market / farmer's market is the removal of exotics from the trade. [1][2] There is a movement that simply doesn't like live animals prepared into food at the markets, or raw meat products hung in non sterile conditions and wrongly attribute aspects of the trade for any emerging disease. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00677-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00677-0 [2] https://says.com/my/news/china-finally-bans-trading-and-consumption-of-exotic-animals-amidst-covid-19-crisis https://says.com/my/news/china-finally-bans-trading-and-cons...
  - birdyrooster 4y ago
    CCP is fucking useless and we have nothing to fear of their invasion of Taiwan. They seem to have found the least intelligent people of China to run the country and exported the smartest citizens.
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    > What conclusions should we draw from this? Imagine the 2009 H1N1 pandemic originated on a pig farm on the US and not in Mexico, and that the pandemic death toll was as big as SARS-CoV-2. Now imagine the shit show that happens if Obama banned bacon.
    - chitowneats 4y ago
      > Now imagine the shit show that happens if Obama banned bacon. It would have been, and should've been, a shit show! Which side exactly are you in arguing in favor of?
      - lamontcg 4y ago
        Substitute: H1N1 => SARS-CoV-2 USA => China Bacon => Civit Cats, Racoon dogs and the wildlife trade in China This is why China doesn't want to discover where it came from, because they'd have to take highly unpopular steps to ban the trade. Everyone here thinks they could do it tomorrow and just take a write down on the their balance sheet and move on. There would be a political cost to cracking down in China ("Obama banning bacon") in addition to a more stoic financial hit. And China really doesn't crack down that hard on wildly popular things because they don't want unrest. They'd rather have the West blame it on a lab leak and they can throw up a smokescreen claiming it came to China from Italy for their own domestic consumption, block any research into the zoonotic transfer, and not have to take any unpopular political actions.
- tootie 4y ago
  There's no political upside for them. The Trumpian wing of western politics are going to believe whatever they want no matter what evidence comes out. There's a chance an investigation uncovers wrongdoing or recklessness at some level of Chinese bureaucracy be it a lab leak or just unsanitary meat handling or something else. Or they turn over every rock in Wuhan and still don't find conclusive proof of anything.
arp242 4y ago
The simple though somewhat superficial explanation is that the Chinese government is allergic to criticism and that anything that's less than "China is a paradise on Earth" is perceived as "criticism". No matter what the origins are (lab leak, wet markets, or something else) it's going to be due to something Chinese people did. "Blameless post-mortem" doesn't seem to be a concept the Chinese government is familiar with, and in general doesn't really seem to be an aspect of Chinese culture. Plus there really is plenty of blame to go around; they absolutely botched the initial response to COVID for seemingly no other reason than to "save face". Doctors who raised the alarm early on were rewarded with reprimands. This is already widely known, but they have no interest to bring more attention to it. It's entirely plausible (albeit far from a certainty, partly because China is so uncooperative) that the entire global pandemic could have been prevented if they just hadn't botched the initial response.
- andrewflnr 4y ago
  To be fair, blameless postmortem is at most dubiously part of anyone's culture, except at the smallest scale. It's not something that comes naturally to humans, and I only know of a few cases where it's stable at any large scale. The US NTSB comes to mind, but I bet they have to fight everyone else's urge to play the blame game on every investigation.
  - arp242 4y ago
    That's true to some degree, but in general there is far more willingness to find the truth. And in some cases blame also should be assigned; "never assume blame" is just as foolish as "always assign blame". There's often a bit of tension there.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  > It's entirely plausible (albeit far from a certainty, partly because China is so uncooperative) that the entire global pandemic could have been prevented if they just hadn't botched the initial response. Based on the earliest found wastewater samples in Italy, along with what we know about how the virus spreads, this is very unlikely. By the time China was reprimanding doctors the virus was already spreading in Europe.
rhaway84773 4y ago
Because China tried to cover up the existence of COVID at the beginning. Because they didn’t want to hurt their economy. They suppressed their scientists from sharing data. They insisted it didn’t transmit between humans. And they insisted it wasn’t very contagious while erecting massive facilities to deal with it overnight. Add to that the fact that the local administration deliberately wiped out evidence of illegal animals being sold at the market very early because they were worried about literally being sent to the gallows by the national government if this could be proven, the Chinese have been wiping evidence right from the evidence but for completely explainable non conspiratorial reasons.

“ China is never goiing to allow an actual investigation to happen.” - any reasonable person should be now asking “Why?”

by option 4y ago

“ China is never goiing to allow an actual investigation to happen.” - any reasonable person should be now asking “Why?”

bagels 4y ago

Maybe you're trying to imply lab escape hypothesis, but probably any origin in China, including natural sources causes them discomfort due to the fact that the initial response was denial.

option 4y ago
the world needs to know, this is bigger than China and their “discomfort”
- autoexec 4y ago
  China doesn't want anyone to start following up on that line of reasoning either. A lot of problems in China are "bigger than China". I doubt they'd want us snooping around looking into the specific sources of the air pollution they spread either (https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/03/518323094/rise-in-smog-in-western-u-s-is-blamed-on-asias-air-pollution https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/03/518323094...) China's problems involving climate change, human rights, censorship, manufacturing, product/consumer safety, and the economy all have global impacts but you can bet they don't want the rest of the world at their gates wanting to "do something" about any of it.
- kbelder 4y ago
  > this is bigger than China How sympathetic is China going to be to that argument?
  - option 4y ago
    if they draw limits on cooperation with the world on such an important issue, the world should start imposing limits on cooperation with China in this and possibly other areas.
    - lazide 4y ago
      Sounds like a good way to go broke. Good luck with that!
chitowneats 4y ago
China restricted their entire society for almost 3 years, yet they've done ~nothing to shut down wet markets or convince average Chinese that wild/exotic meat is dangerous. What conclusions should we draw from this?
- anenefan 4y ago
  The important aspect of a wet market / farmer's market is the removal of exotics from the trade. [1][2] There is a movement that simply doesn't like live animals prepared into food at the markets, or raw meat products hung in non sterile conditions and wrongly attribute aspects of the trade for any emerging disease. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00677-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00677-0 [2] https://says.com/my/news/china-finally-bans-trading-and-consumption-of-exotic-animals-amidst-covid-19-crisis https://says.com/my/news/china-finally-bans-trading-and-cons...
- birdyrooster 4y ago
  CCP is fucking useless and we have nothing to fear of their invasion of Taiwan. They seem to have found the least intelligent people of China to run the country and exported the smartest citizens.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  > What conclusions should we draw from this? Imagine the 2009 H1N1 pandemic originated on a pig farm on the US and not in Mexico, and that the pandemic death toll was as big as SARS-CoV-2. Now imagine the shit show that happens if Obama banned bacon.
  - chitowneats 4y ago
    > Now imagine the shit show that happens if Obama banned bacon. It would have been, and should've been, a shit show! Which side exactly are you in arguing in favor of?
    - lamontcg 4y ago
      Substitute: H1N1 => SARS-CoV-2 USA => China Bacon => Civit Cats, Racoon dogs and the wildlife trade in China This is why China doesn't want to discover where it came from, because they'd have to take highly unpopular steps to ban the trade. Everyone here thinks they could do it tomorrow and just take a write down on the their balance sheet and move on. There would be a political cost to cracking down in China ("Obama banning bacon") in addition to a more stoic financial hit. And China really doesn't crack down that hard on wildly popular things because they don't want unrest. They'd rather have the West blame it on a lab leak and they can throw up a smokescreen claiming it came to China from Italy for their own domestic consumption, block any research into the zoonotic transfer, and not have to take any unpopular political actions.
tootie 4y ago
There's no political upside for them. The Trumpian wing of western politics are going to believe whatever they want no matter what evidence comes out. There's a chance an investigation uncovers wrongdoing or recklessness at some level of Chinese bureaucracy be it a lab leak or just unsanitary meat handling or something else. Or they turn over every rock in Wuhan and still don't find conclusive proof of anything.

arp242 4y ago

The simple though somewhat superficial explanation is that the Chinese government is allergic to criticism and that anything that's less than "China is a paradise on Earth" is perceived as "criticism". No matter what the origins are (lab leak, wet markets, or something else) it's going to be due to something Chinese people did. "Blameless post-mortem" doesn't seem to be a concept the Chinese government is familiar with, and in general doesn't really seem to be an aspect of Chinese culture. Plus there really is plenty of blame to go around; they absolutely botched the initial response to COVID for seemingly no other reason than to "save face". Doctors who raised the alarm early on were rewarded with reprimands. This is already widely known, but they have no interest to bring more attention to it. It's entirely plausible (albeit far from a certainty, partly because China is so uncooperative) that the entire global pandemic could have been prevented if they just hadn't botched the initial response.

andrewflnr 4y ago
To be fair, blameless postmortem is at most dubiously part of anyone's culture, except at the smallest scale. It's not something that comes naturally to humans, and I only know of a few cases where it's stable at any large scale. The US NTSB comes to mind, but I bet they have to fight everyone else's urge to play the blame game on every investigation.
- arp242 4y ago
  That's true to some degree, but in general there is far more willingness to find the truth. And in some cases blame also should be assigned; "never assume blame" is just as foolish as "always assign blame". There's often a bit of tension there.
lamontcg 4y ago
> It's entirely plausible (albeit far from a certainty, partly because China is so uncooperative) that the entire global pandemic could have been prevented if they just hadn't botched the initial response. Based on the earliest found wastewater samples in Italy, along with what we know about how the virus spreads, this is very unlikely. By the time China was reprimanding doctors the virus was already spreading in Europe.

rhaway84773 4y ago

Because China tried to cover up the existence of COVID at the beginning. Because they didn’t want to hurt their economy. They suppressed their scientists from sharing data. They insisted it didn’t transmit between humans. And they insisted it wasn’t very contagious while erecting massive facilities to deal with it overnight. Add to that the fact that the local administration deliberately wiped out evidence of illegal animals being sold at the market very early because they were worried about literally being sent to the gallows by the national government if this could be proven, the Chinese have been wiping evidence right from the evidence but for completely explainable non conspiratorial reasons.