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Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid
- th0ma5 3y ago[flagged]
- TimTheTinker 3y agoDid you read TA? It summarizes existing known info, but it also includes new, original research.
- th0ma5 3y ago[flagged]
- yawnxyz 3y agoI love how people who don’t read the article ask “did you read the article”. Agree there’s nothing new here, and most things presented as new are mostly conjecture or hear say
- pcrh 3y agoI read the article, it fails to correctly summarize, and also misrepresents existing known info.
- fuckyah 3y ago[dead]
- fuckyah 3y ago[dead]
- ricksunny 3y agoThe sourcing and style will raise eyebrows. The revelations are valuable, and clear enough to be verifiable through one channel or another. And given that we are at 7 days remaining before the 90-day WIV intel disclosure deadline, old journo hands expect that info leaks are more likely to happen. https://twitter.com/mbalter/status/1667668700885819395?s=20 https://twitter.com/mbalter/status/1667668700885819395?s=20
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- th0ma5 3y ago[flagged]
- pinewurst 3y agohttps://archive.ph/L2BSO https://archive.ph/L2BSO
- terramex 3y agonon-paywall link: https://archive.ph/22j9L https://archive.ph/22j9L
- LeonB 3y agoEarly on the article makes a conjecture that others also make which I think is part of why the topic is so hot: “Whether the virus emerged as a result of a leak from a laboratory or from nature has become one the most controversial problems in science.” The words “in science” are my problem here: people thinking this is a “scientific” question. It’s a history question, a political question, and could be made into a forensic question. But science does not ask this kind of question! Is it possible for a lab to leak a virus? That’s a question science can ask, but it doesn’t answer this one. So we end up with a belief that scientists can answer this question… but it isn’t a “scientific” question in the first place.
- qup 3y agoPlease, scientists, no need to peer review Wuhan.
- pyuser583 3y agoThere was a peer reviewed paper earlier in the pandemic where scientists used their knowledge of viral anatomy to argue it wasn’t engineered. Subsequent scientific have disagreed. But this isn’t purely historical.
- LanceH 3y agoApologies to those accused of being conspiracy theorists, xenophobic, and spreading misinformation will be going out shortly.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- th0ma5 3y ago[flagged]
- camillomiller 3y agoThey will not, because those accusations came from people who intended to use them to discredit Chinese people in general, or that closely associate the leak with the Chinese way of doing things and so on. These accusation led to racist attacks against Asian people all over the us.
- laserbeam 3y agoThis is the kind of writing you need to properly discuss the lab leak hypothesis. It's not perfect, there are no good links to sources which suggests a lot of it is made up. However, this kind of writing should only happen after years or months of investigation. You can't do the lab leak panic 2 days into the pandemic. You can't even really do it half way through the pandemic. I'm glad such investigations are being caried out. I only wish links to whatever is declassified from the investigations to be made public for such publications. Authors need to prove their research effort when it comes to such news.
- th0ma5 3y ago[flagged]
- laserbeam 3y agoI mean... There are references to names, institutions carrying out certain investigations, references to experiments done prior to the pandemic. Yeah, some of it can be congecture. Which is why I really want the direct links to data, not just mentions to the events. I'm not sure it's a conspiracy theory. I think it's a legitimate thing to investigate by an international entity like the UN (not the US), and the outcome (if it turns out to be true) should likely be some proportional sanction/payments by China.
- th0ma5 3y agoSure, but the article is implying there something new that actually would have some kind of bearing or meaning.
- oneshtein 3y agoRussians started to clean up evidence, which points to BSL4 lab "Vector". IMHO, this article is a part of their disinformation campaign. The name of their vaccine "Sputnik V" (Follower 5) suggests that there was "Something","Sputnik I", "Sputnik II", "Sputnik III", "Sputnik IV" before "Sputnik V". It's impossible for Russians to produce 5 vaccines in row in such short span of time, just few months, which took billions of dollars and year of time for western companies. IMHO, Russians started developing of their vaccine since SARS-CoV-1 outbreak in 2003.
- yyyk 3y agoLeaving aside the question of where and how the virus emerged, it's interesting to note that the lab was nigh useless during the pandemic, despite its main specialty was investigating Coronaviruses! It looks like a lot of dangerous research went on, and even if nothing bad happened because of that research, nothing was gained. A lot of risk for nothing.
- justanotheratom 3y ago"nothing was gained" I see the irony (gain of function)
- lapama 3y agoGain of risk
- brutusborn 3y agoDon’t forget gain of funding
- th0ma5 3y ago[flagged]
- akomtu 3y agoHN should limit the rate of comments per user per post. This user is seriously worked up to mute this discussion and spams in every comment thread. Edit: this user wrote 26 out of 88 comments here.
- th0ma5 3y agoAnd they should ban throwaway accounts too which you can also see spreading more conjecture.
- yorwba 3y agoHN already has a rate limit. You get the message "You're posting too fast" when you exceed it. Though I think it's also tied to karma and might not trigger when all those comments get upvoted. And if you try to downvote them all, you'll run into the protections against mass-downvoting. Tuning the feedback loops to encourage good discussions while damping flamewars is a difficult problem.
- arisAlexis 3y agoI remember still when it was considered a conspiracy theory and we got downvoted here and banned on reddit for even implying the possibility. Unfortunately something similar is happening with AI x-risk right now.
- oneshtein 3y agoAccusation without evidence is witch-hunting. We still have no strong evidence for lab leak from BSL4 lab in Wuhan, while we have some evidence (two early strains of SARS-CoV-2: A, then B; B was in Wuhan in December; where and when was parent of A and B?) that suggests start of epidemic outside of China in mid-September 2019. Russians start to delete videos about blast at their BSL4 lab "Vector" in Novosibirsk on Sep 16 2019[0], which suggests that this information may cause harm for them. So, "Lab leak" theory may be right, while "lab leak from BSL4 lab in Wuhan" theory may be wrong. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200407175030/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w7SAeNcXA8 https://web.archive.org/web/20200407175030/https://www.youtu...
- arisAlexis 3y agoWe are playing with words. Accusation vs possibility vs open to options vs etc. The problem is that it was called which hunting anything that was not natural origin.
- jansan 3y agoSame with pointing out at the first studies that indicated that the virus was airborne. I got downvoted to oblivion here for posting a link to the study.
- th0ma5 3y ago[flagged]
- asynchronous 3y agoDespite that becoming at least partially true years later when the CDC admitted it.
- turtleyacht 3y agoFrom the article, > You infect the mice, wait a week or so, and then recover the virus from the sickest mice. Then you repeat. From The Hardware Hacker (2017) by "bunnie" Huang: > So, a single base-pair change--simply flipping two bits--might be all you'd need to turn the H1N1 swine flu virus into a deadlier variant... for just over $1,000. > [Influenza] packs a deadly punch in 3.2 KB... and we [still] haven't eradicated it. Could influenza do hacks like the one I just described on its own already? The short answer is yes. > ... on average, every copy of an influenza virus has one random mutation. > [H1N1] was probably just a couple of mutations away from being a bigger health problem. > ... novel H1N1 acquired a mix of RNA snippets that gave it high transmission rates and made it something humans weren't innately immune to. That's the perfect storm for a pandemic. > If there were a computer analogy to this RNA-shuffling model, [random relinking of virus "files" at runtime]... would also proliferate a diverse set of viruses in the wild... Fortunately for swine flu at least, > ... a patient [had] a novel antibody... to confer immunity to all 16 subtypes of influenza A. Against Covid, research by Dr. Weismann and Dr. Karikó led to the development of the mRNA vaccine: https://www.bu.edu/articles/2021/how-drew-weissman-and-katalin-kariko-developed-mrna-technology-inside-covid-vaccines/ https://www.bu.edu/articles/2021/how-drew-weissman-and-katal...
- bredren 3y ago> Witnesses are said to have told the US investigation that Zhou fell from the roof of the Wuhan institute, although this has not been verified. This guy who published a suspiciously early patent on a covid 19 vaccine fell off a roof three months later? That’s kind of buried in the article a bit but was this claim been made anywhere else? Also, the section on activity at the lab at the time of the outbreak does not mention analysis of private app data. IIRC, one of the early discredited reports suggesting lab origin had relied, in-part, on commercially available app data. The kind of adware built into “free” apps that violate user privacy. This data supposedly showed clear activity supporting a temporary shutdown of the Wuhan lab. This information always seemed the easiest to latch on to. Not to prove origin but at least offer an important fact for a pattern. US military bases have had their locations and perimeters out on the public web thanks to fitness apps. Was the WIV associated app data not real? If it was, why isn’t it included in this article? The article relates a study “by academics at Wuhan University located the hotspots in Wuhan where people were reporting on social media that they needed treatment for Covid.” How would this be more compelling than raw app data showing movement of employees or security workers in and around WIV?
- th0ma5 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ricksunny 3y ago>This guy who published a suspiciously early patent on a covid 19 vaccine fell off a roof three months later? >That’s kind of buried in the article a bit but was this claim been made anywhere else? As someone who's followed the debate closely, (with the submission history to demostrate that), I can tell you that the parent article is the first time the assertion that Zhou fell from the roof has ever been made in tbe public-facing side of the debate.
- pcrh 3y agoAfter a quick read of the article, it presents no new data, and is replete with innuendo pointing at the Wuhan lab, rather than any direct evidence. Most importantly, the general reader should know that all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses. After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses. So the fact that the Wuhan lab worked on coronaviruses is not in itself an indication of any ill-intent. Additionally, the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been identified (RaTG13) was found in a cave in Mojiang county in Yunnan, over 1,000 km away, with no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab. Further, genetic clocks show that RaTG13 and SARSCoV2 diverged almost 50 years ago. The map presented upfront from is also misleading, the early cases clustered around the market not the lab [0]. Furthermore, several different isolates were found in the market, indicating that SARSCoV2 had been circulating before the epidemic took off. [0] The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
- inciampati 3y agoNo, not all labs working on viruses do research on dangerous viruses. Bacteriophages for instance, are a deep research topic, and (aside from potential effects on our microbiome) are completely benign to humans. That's just one of many counterexamples.
- th0ma5 3y ago[flagged]
- inciampati 3y agoThey prefaced the statement with "most importantly" so it seems they thought it was their key point.
- th0ma5 3y agoWhat secure labs don't work on dangerous viruses? I guess I now wonder about your correction heh.
- hayst4ck 3y agoIf anyone's in for a long read, despite the hokey sounding name, I found this to be one of the best contemporaneous explorations of Covid in china that I've seen to date: https://project-evidence.github.io/ https://project-evidence.github.io/
- th0ma5 3y ago[flagged]
- hayst4ck 3y agoBecause exploring the truth is a worthwhile endeavor particularly in the face of an oppressive regime that made it very clear they did not want the truth to be explored. Just to be clear what I posted seemed like Chinese people exploring what actually happened more than a blame based document or fear mongering based document. I would really encourage you to give it a chance because it is very impressive investigative work and, really, an impressive exercise of investigative journalism from a country that hates investigative journalists.
- th0ma5 3y ago[flagged]
- tuxguy 3y agonon-paywall version : https://archive.md/Edw0k https://archive.md/Edw0k
- aaplok 3y ago> The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power. This part doesn't make sense to me. Coronavirus is known to mutate constantly and rapidly. Having a vaccine against a strand might provide a temporary advantage, but that advantage would subside quickly. Coronaviruses would make poor bioweapons considering how impossible it would be to control them. If an army wants to develop a virus-based weapon wouldn't there be better viruses to base it from than COVIDs?
- revelio 3y agoViruses mutate because they are constantly exposed to the immune systems of people who were already previously infected, so they have to mutate in order to dodge prior natural immunity. That isn't a concern if most people who get infected die. Moreover, the first SARS-CoV-2 variant took a long time to start mutating and even then it was only minor mutations. If you release an extremely infectious very deadly virus and you have a vaccine for it, then at that moment it's a Deus Ex scenario and whoever can manufacture the vaccine can take over the world because your enemies are now collapsing and will do anything to obtain the vaccine including giving up their own autonomy. Guess that's the theory, at least. As to why SARS-CoV-2: because it's airborne and can spread long distances via gas-like clouds (which is why lockdowns, masks, wiping surfaces etc didn't work). You can't really get better if you want to very rapidly infect a whole country.
- 2devnull 3y agoGovernments investigate imperfect weapons. Consider LSD.
- th0ma5 3y ago[flagged]
- Fomite 3y agoTo be frank, given SARS-CoV-1 as well as MERS, and the known prevalence of coronaviruses in and near China, if I was the military I think I'd be justified into looking at viruses not as potential bioweapons but as a force readiness problem. The U.S. has done this, and indeed, most of our public health infrastructure is an outgrowth of it.
- marsven_422 3y ago[dead]
- Xen9 3y agoI personally believe in Rootlclaim's Bayesian analysis (https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COVID-19-SARS-CoV-2 https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COV...) which states that "the virus was developed during gain-of-function research and was released by accident (89% probability)" This is consistent with David Martin's speech in Europe: https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1661698114917646336 https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1661698114917646336 I haven't checked the "publicly available references" but many who inssist on a natural cause read about the bat theory in the first few months and then haven't updated & aren't willing to update their models. If you find any faults that can really change the results in the analysis Rootclaim made, I would be interested.
- th0ma5 3y ago[flagged]
- cubefox 3y ago> But why do you think it is important to prove a lab leak? Perhaps because it is slightly interesting what caused the worst pandemic since the Spanish flu? Because millions of people died? Because knowing the cause could perhaps prevent something similar happen again? Perhaps prevent millions of deaths? I'm astonished by this question.
- anonzzzies 3y ago[flagged]
- th0ma5 3y ago[flagged]
- soeptical 3y agoDaszak/ecohealth alliance and by extension NIH and us govt are also culpable for a Wuhan lab originating virus
- maeil 3y agoYou're right that Daszak and the Ecohealth Alliance are culpable, but it must be noted that various USG orgs were not supportive of his actions > The report he finally did submit stated that scientists planned to create an infectious clone of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a novel coronavirus found in dromedaries that had emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and killed 35% of the humans it infected. The report also made clear that the NIH grant had already been used to construct two chimeric coronaviruses similar to the one that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in 2002 and went on to cause at least 774 deaths worldwide. (A chimeric virus is one that combines fragments of different viruses.) These revelations prompted the NIH’s grant specialists to ask a critical question: Should the work be subject to a federal moratorium on what was called gain-of-function research? > But the [2015 research paper he cited](https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985 https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985) was not particularly reassuring. In it, Shi Zhengli and a preeminent coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina, Ralph Baric, mixed components of SARS-like viruses from different species, and created a novel chimera that was able to directly infect human cells. (Baric did not respond to written questions seeking comment.) > If anything, the MERS study Daszak proposed was even riskier. So he pitched a compromise to the NIH: that if any of the recombined strains showed 10 times greater growth than a natural virus, “we will immediately: i) stop all experiments with the mutant, ii) inform our NIAID Program Officer and the UNC [Institutional Biosafety Committee] of these results and iii) participate in decision making trees to decide appropriate paths forward.” > This mention of UNC brought a puzzled response from an NIH program officer, who pointed out that the proposal had said the research would be performed at the WIV. “Can you clarify where the work with the chimeric viruses will actually be performed?” the officer wrote. Ten days later, with still no response from Daszak, the program officer emailed him again. On June 27, Daszak responded, buoyant as ever: > “You are correct to identify a mistake in our letter. UNC has no oversight of the chimera work, all of which will be conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology…. We will clarify tonight with Prof. Zhengli Shi exactly who will be notified if we see enhanced replication…my understanding is that I will be notified straight away, as [principal investigator], and that I can then notify you at NIAID. Apologies for the error!” > Allowing such risky research to go forward at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was “simply crazy, in my opinion,” says Jack Nunberg, director of the Montana Biotechnology Center. “Reasons are lack of oversight, lack of regulation, the environment in China,” where scientists who publish in prestigious journals get rewarded by the government, creating dangerous incentives. “So that is what really elevates it to the realm of, ‘No, this shouldn’t happen.’” In general, his actions make clear he's much more aligned with the Chinese government than the US, so extending Daszak to US govt purely based off of nationality seems unjust. > On January 30, Daszak went on CGTN America, the U.S. outpost for Chinese state television, and said two things that proved to be spectacularly wrong. “I’m very optimistic…that this outbreak will begin to slow down,” he said. “We’re seeing a small amount of human-to-human transmission in other countries, but it’s not uncontrollable." He went on to conclude that the Chinese government was taking all necessary steps “to be open and transparent, and work with WHO, and talk to scientists from around the world, and where necessary, bring them in to help. They’re doing that. It’s exactly what needs to happen.”
- smohare 3y ago[dead]
- throwawayio 3y ago[flagged]
- chihuahua 3y agoPeter Daszak says no.
- QuantumGood 3y agoSummary: The Case for a Lab Leak, from a Sunday Times investigation (C): (1) The institute sought funding to research something (A), which Covid could result from. (Said later they didn't do the planned research), but funding from the military appears to have been given. (1.1) They planned to do the research at the time and approximate place where Covid later emerged. (2) Protections at the lab were not what they should have been. (2.2) Lab scientists had previously created a highly infectious super-coronavirus (not Covid-19) with a very high kill-rate that in all probability would never have emerged in nature. Their tests showed no known (at that time) way to effectively limit its spread were it to leak. (3) NO animal testing was reported in a wide vicinity around the the Hunan market. Samples of Covid found in the market were NOT from animals (B). (3.1) The market is a busy place in the center of the city where the virus would almost certainly be once it's spreading between people. (3.2) There is some evidence that researchers from the lab were hospitalized with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019, and one of their relatives died. (4) The biggest hotspot of people reporting illness via social media (in the month before the province was locked down on January 23) was at the institute, though this was partly hidden in initial reports. The first case in Britain was recorded a week later. (A) The Wuhan Institute of Virology sought funding for inserting a furin cleavage site. The institute is a 40-minute drive from the Huanan Seafood market. (B) In January 2020, Chinese officials cleared the market without testing live animals. The presence of SARS-CoV-2 was from environmental samples (animal cage, hair-and-feather–removal machine, etc). Covid-susceptible animals were present but NOT tested. The study of those samples was criticized for not having any animal samples. (C) Information above drawn from archive.ph/L2BSO and comments and links here in this HN thread. --------------------------- "The Sunday Times has reviewed hundreds of documents, including previously confidential reports, internal memos, scientific papers and email correspondence that has been obtained through sources or by freedom of information campaigners in the three years since the pandemic started. We also interviewed the US State Department investigators — including experts on China, emerging pandemic threats, and biowarfare — who conducted the first significant US inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak. The closest relatives to Covid known were too far from Covid to have developed into Covid on their own in a short time. So bringing in dangerous viruses and accidentally leaking them is an unlikely cause." Earlier reporting by the Times: archive.ph/Mkqox Genome statistical estimates indicate the "relatives" are decades away from Covid. In February 2020, RaTG13 was identified as the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, sharing 96.1% nucleotide identity. It was found near the town of Tongguan in Mojiang county in Yunnan, China. However, in 2022, scientists found three closer matches 530 km south, in Feuang, Laos, designated as BANAL-52 (96.8% identity), BANAL-103 and BANAL-236. However, it is alleged that one virus at the Wuhan institute was an even closer match to Covid-19 than RaTG13. Note that bat viruses had never been known to harm humans. Intermediate animals apparently catching a virus from bats and passing it to humans had been known to happen. In the lead-up to the pandemic, the Wuhan institute frequently experimented on coronaviruses alongside the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a research arm of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In published papers, military scientists are listed as working for the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, which is the military academy’s base.
- lifelong 3y agohttps://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statements/nih-lifts-funding-pause-gain-function-research https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statem... Also posted on HN 2 years ago with ... zero comments" https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nih.gov%2Fabout-nih%2Fwho-we-are%2Fnih-director%2Fstatements%2Fnih-lifts-funding-pause-gain-function-research https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nih.gov%2Fabout-...
- th0ma5 3y ago[flagged]
- frank_bb 3y ago[dead]
- mannyv 3y agoIf there is any truth to this it'll come out once the regime changes...and the new regime will use this info to discredit the old regime.
- highfrequency 3y agoThe idea that Covid19 was accidentally leaked from the Wuhan lab has moved from conspiracy theory to mainstream view of many US gov't agencies with the most classified information available to them. John Ratcliffe, former Director of National Intelligence: “My informed assessment, as a person with as much or more access than anyone to our government’s intelligence during the initial year of the virus outbreak and pandemic onset, has been and continues to be that a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science and by common sense. From a view inside the IC, if our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak theory was placed side-by-side with our intelligence and evidence pointing to a naturally occurring “spillover” theory, the lab leak side of the ledger would be long and overwhelming while the “spillover” side would be nearly empty.” https://oversight.house.gov/release/covid-origins-part-2-hearing-wrap-up-intelligence-community-officials-provide-further-evidence-that-covid-19-originated-in-a-wuhan-lab/ https://oversight.house.gov/release/covid-origins-part-2-hea... The Furin cleavage site is one of the more compelling pieces of evidence. 1.5 years before the outbreak, the Wuhan Institute applied for a grant from Darpa to explore mutating coronaviruses to make them more infectious to humans, particularly through the addition of a Furin cleavage site. (Darpa declined to fund the research). The Covid-19 virus is notable for being the only coronavirus to have a Furin cleavage site. Not only that, but it appears to be basically a perfect mutation that specifically modifies the 12 nucleotides necessary for the Furin site, without modifying other base pairs. Here's a quote from email excerpt included in the recent Congress hearing: "Before I left the office for the ball, I aligned nCoV with the 96% bat CoV sequenced at WIV. Except for the RBD the S proteins are essentially identical at the amino acid level – well all but the perfect insertion of 12 nucleotides that adds the furin site. S2 is over its whole length essentially identical. I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from the bat virus or one very similar to it to nCoV where you insert exactly 4 amino acids 12 nucleotide that all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function – that and you don’t change any other amino acid in S2? I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. Do the alignment of the spikes at the amino acid level – its stunning. Of course, in the lab it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you wanted." https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Letter-Re.-Feb-1-Emails-011122.pdf https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Lette...
- 3y ago
- johnea 3y agoToo bad the article is from a UK equivalent to the National Inquirer...
- Biorealism 3y agoNonsense. The Times is one of the main UK publications along with the Guardian and The Telegraph.
- th0ma5 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoYou posted 68 (!) comments in this thread, most of which were either unsubstantive (like this one), or flamebait, or both. That's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We have to ban accounts that post like this, so please don't do it again. The idea here is: if you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully; if not, please don't comment until you do. And please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the guidelines in the future.
- th0ma5 3y agoI just don't like it when conspiracy theories are featured for days on the front page to be perfectly honest. That's not news for nerds, and it feel likes the community wants that flamebait if they keep promoting and engaging things that are simply not based in fact. > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity. This is every single post in this thread in my opinion, so when I see it, I feel compelled to respond. I also don't think that most were unsubstantiated, most were pointing out the logical fallacies and lack of facts of posts, or other things like people accusing me of being pro china simply because I think this is all unknowable. Sorry to keep editing. Additionally, this thread started late at night, and while many reasonable comments with great exhaustive expressions of my same opinion did get posted by calmer people, before that happened, it was a lot of conspiracy pile on. My opinion was that thinking a leak did happen wasn't some kind of conservative gotcha they think it is, and that maybe didn't happen isn't some kind of leftist thing or whatever the problem is with it not being a leak. Not enough people talk about just doing something about the ongoing world crisis and instead want to frame it in ways that are politically advantageous, and you see it the vast majority of comments I replied to, this mindset that someone must be blamed, and then people who are ashamed of that claim they really just want to find out the truth, but the people who know anything about epidemiology really wonder what use that would be at this point. This is the majority of my comments here and this feels pretty substantive, and the real discussion that people elsewhere are having on this topic. So, I also felt like I wasn't doing anything wrong here. I could've just down voted but people also say you shouldn't just downvote if you disagree?
- christkv 3y agoNobody will ever want the truth because if it did come from the lab it implicates the Chinese government as well as the US government given that the US funded research in Wuhan through the EcoHealth Alliance to get around the ban on Gain of Function research in the US.
- tim333 3y agoThe general public want the truth. It seems to be gradually leaking out.
- christkv 3y agoThe public sure, the governments no.
- tim333 3y agoIt's gone oddly partisan in the US with the republicans wanting to investigate lab leaks and the dems not. Not sure I really understand that one. Seems to me that from the point of view of public health and not having millions die unnecessarily it would be good to figure what went on. Then if it's a lab leak you could restrict that stuff and if natural you could up research on nature.
- verisimi 3y agoI've never seen a virus in my life! So how did they make one in Wuhan? I'm pretty convinced that media departments are real though!
- KoftaBob 3y agoIronic that their research aimed at giving them a head start on vaccine development, and yet China’s covid vaccine ended up being garbage compared to the American and European ones.
- hn_thrwn 3y ago[flagged]
- paulwilsondev 3y agoIn the morning!
- redreceipt 3y agoCan I read the article for free anywhere?
- Alifatisk 3y agoSomeone posted the archive link
- old_reddit_user 3y ago[flagged]
- MagicMoonlight 3y agoThe response to Covid tells you that it came from their bioweapons lab. Their first response was to start burning people with flamethrowers and sealing in entire cities. You don’t do that if it’s a random virus you’ve never seen before.
- whimsicalism 3y agoTheir first response was to try to suppress it. Burning people with flamethrowers is propaganda, plain and simple. I challenge you to source that.
- jeswin 3y agoI'd like for someone to throughly research and write about how it became taboo to discuss the virus leak theory. How researchers who discussed it were shunned, tagged as racists, and in some cases had their posts banned from Social Media. About how almost the entire scientific community discarded the idea as impossible. How during the early pandemic years, no mainstream news media dared talk about the possibility. Tech companies too had a role to play here. For the sake of free speech, what happened here is worth discussing.
- WastingMyTime89 3y agoWas it really taboo? I didn’t get this feeling where I live (admittedly not the USA). It’s just that it became clear pretty quickly that the investigation was going nowhere as China wasn’t going to honestly cooperate. That didn’t leave much to discuss. For the official response, it was to be expected. The UN does plenty of compromises with authoritarian countries for the sake of being able to operate. It would have been surprising to see the WHO press China.
- ra1231963 3y agoIt was absolutely taboo. If you tried to bring it up you were shouted down as a far right conspiracy theorist, or racist. Mashup of clips from the news: https://youtu.be/zl-X-Lgrlf0 https://youtu.be/zl-X-Lgrlf0 Jon Stewart was the first to call this into question publicly, which was brave at the time. Watch Colbert push back on Stewart’s line of reasoning: https://youtu.be/sSfejgwbDQ8 https://youtu.be/sSfejgwbDQ8 Honestly questioning anything covid-related was taboo at that time, including the vaccines, masks, ivermectin, etc. Please note, I am not making any claims about these things, other than it was taboo to question anything “official sources” stated.
- liberty-DNBWM 3y agoI just don't understand this at all. Is it not obivous that US government discovered this virus a long time ago and started researching? There are too many proofs on this. How the fuck is this related to Wuhan? Are these publishers not thinking normal people too stupid and easy to be manipulated?
- whimsicalism 3y agoFrom the start, the claims about the Mojiang are unproven and they don't have a shred of evidence to back it up [0]. I don't think you can divorce the newfound popularity of the lab leak from the new cold war we're entering. [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8490156/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8490156/
- NovaDudely 3y agoThe only thing I have said about the whole lab leak theory for the last 3 years is this. IF it was a lab leak, that is the best case scenario. It means the virus was a part of peoples hubris and messing around with viruses. I potentially one time accident. If it isn't the lab leak, that means it is because of our intrusion on the wild world via agriculture and eventually the conditions of factory farming. If that is what it is, Covid will be the first of many like it.
- realjhol 3y agoIt's going to take a long time before the mainstream is ready to think critically about the COVID narratives, but it's good to see first steps toward the recovery of rationality. But there's still a lot to cover: - Lockdowns did little to prevent the spread of COVID and lead to increased deaths by other causes, egregious violation of people's fundamental rights, massively destruction of the economy, and many people's mental health. - Cloth masks were pointless security theatre - The vast majority of people except the very elderly and obese were in very little danger - The vaccines never prevented transmission - The vaccines only offered very limited protection for a brief period - The rate of side effects (including serious side effects up to and including death) is a lot higher than anyone wants to admit. - To most segments of the population, the danger of death by vaccine side effects is greater than the danger of death by COVID-19 I'm hoping in a decade or so, we'll get towards something approaching a "sorry, you were right", like we did with the Iraq war, but there's still a long way to go.
- Nemrod67 3y agolooking at the majority of comments here, I'd say it'll take more than a decade... People just seem to blank out anything really bad done by "their team" (be it either orange man bad or clinton is a traitor). I fear for the future of Human civilization
- whimsicalism 3y agoIt might also just be because most of those claims are wrong. Unless you use 'prevent' to mean 'fully eliminate', every single one of those claims is wrong except for potentially the last one, which I am not sure of because I haven't researched.
- slikrick 3y agolooking at the amount of people delving into their personal fantasies and projecting on to the world is and will always be hilarious
- ahartmetz 3y agoYour positions, if these are all yours, are quite maximalist in one direction, and in some cases I have read pretty credible studies that contradict you. So, you may not get your Iraq moment.
- lakomen 3y agoWeird, I'm getting ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH on the archive.ph link in Chrome on Android via 4G.
- ionwake 3y agoI’m just annoyed I was given -3 downvotes here on HN for saying there was research indicating artificial/lab gene markers were discovered indicating it probably had a lab origin. I didn’t say anything else just mentioned a research paper and I got downvoted here on HN. :(
- mellosouls 3y agoIf people spend time answering your questions (eg about copilot) and you can't be bothered acknowledging or even upvoting them, probably best not to be moaning about the voting system. </harumph>
- major505 3y agoRemember when someone would acuse you of being paranoid when you said that was the most problable couse of covid pandemic? Yeah...
- Manjuuu 3y agoWhen there were zero evidences? Yeah, go figure.
- anthonypasq 3y agothere was zero evidence for either scenario, yet only 1 of them got you labeled a conspiracy theorist
- saalweachter 3y agoI mean, one of the scenarios involves a conspiracy to cover up the accidental or intentional release of a virus. The other one doesn't involve a conspiracy of raccoon dogs to sneak a sick member into the city to punish the humans for their consumption. It can't really be symmetrical.
- Manjuuu 3y agoOnly the one that resembled a textbook conspiracy, the first one had some evidence and is still considered part of where the issue started.
- major505 3y agoCientists and medical professionals being arrested, a history of poor containament protocols, a fucking lab that did gain of function in the ground zero of the pandemic, China attempts to hide the situation before the rest of the world could starting preparing for it, and the destruction of evidence. Yeah.... no evidences whatsoever.
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- Gasp0de 3y agoThis article does a lot of finger pointing, but there are no suggestions on what should be done differently. Its all "The chinese military is at fault!" but no serious discussion on whether or not gain-of-function research should be prohibited or not.
- l5870uoo9y 3y agoThe central issue is that the extremely dangerous gain-of-function experiments were being undertaking and potentially still are. I would advocate for a worldwide ban of gain-of-function research and strict regulation of potential dangerous medical research in a similar manner as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation agreement. Even as imperfect as it would be. Issues regarding funding, laboratory security, military involvement, country of origin, responsibility of scientists, institutions and leadership involved are all secondary. Edit: Fixed typing error and wording.
- pimpampum 3y agoI agree, but without a way to detect it or control it, it would be hard to enforce.
- l5870uoo9y 3y agoIt would be imperfect but better than nothing.
- LatteLazy 3y agoIt honestly terrifies me that people in this very thread are still pushing conspiracy theorys. Not just the technically possible ones ("the CCP did it all on purpose") but the just plain factually wrong ("vaccines are more deadly than covid"). Such comments remain popular. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36276268&p=2#36290411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36276268&p=2#36290411
- GivinStatic 3y agoLab origin is a conspiracy theory too.
- andelink 3y agoI’m getting paywalled even on the archived links?
- aadvark69 3y agoAmerican Leftists declared it wrongthink and Big Tech overlords banned anyone who wanted to discuss it.
- th0ma5 3y agoSo many comments and not any of them, nor this article, have any new facts.
- randomperson01 3y agoFor some excellent COVID-19 origins discussions I' d recommend the Straight Talk MD podcast by Frank Sweeny. Great coverage -from initial coverup of cases, silencing of doctors and deliberately misleading the world on human to human transmission (when Wuhuan authorities knew full well), to the Proximal Origin fraud and Raccoon Dog gate https://straighttalkmd.com/episodes/valentin-bruttel https://straighttalkmd.com/episodes/valentin-bruttel