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> There was a very well coordinated and intentional conflation of the term "lab leak" with the conspiracy theories around China and the WHO intentionally develo

> There was a very well coordinated and intentional conflation of the term "lab leak" with the conspiracy theories around China and the WHO intentionally developing and deploying bio-weapons as a means of global population control. I don’t recall a single instance of this. A year ago, people were saying on this site and elsewhere was that the issue was conflating “lab leak” with “intentionally engineered”. A year before that, people argued that the issue was conflating “lab leak” with “leaked from WIV”, when WIV was established in that location due to the prevalence of novel coronaviruses in the region. The goalposts keep moving.

mjburgess 3y ago
[flagged]
- dahfizz 3y ago
  I think this says more about you than others. "every single instance" is a gross exaggeration. This is your personal bias at play so that when you read "lab leak", you perceive "racist conspiracy theory"
- ChemSpider 3y ago
  That is nonsense. Even highly qualified people like Alina Chan were pushed in the conspiracy camp during the first year - just for saying that the lab leak is one (of many) possible sources of the virus.
- LightBug1 3y ago
  Utter rubbish. The theory was on the table and was discussed at the time ... Most efforts however were focused on dealing with the immediate danger.
- zkms 3y ago
  > I never met anyone who didn't equate "lab leak" with an intentional act by china The likes of Alina Chan and Richard Ebright are "easy mode" counterexamples for your statement. I'll swing for the fences: Even Tom Cotton was -- at least once, I am exceedingly uninterested in combing through all his tweets and media appearances -- careful to distinguish between "lab leak" and "intentional act", despite being brazenly political and probably inspired by anti-China animus. From the thread beginning at https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126 https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126: "Let me debunk the debunkers. @paulina_milla and her “experts” wrongly jump straight to the claim that the coronavirus is an engineered bioweapon. That’s not what I’ve said. There’s at least four hypotheses about the origin of the virus: 1. Natural (still the most likely, but almost certainly not from the Wuhan food market) 2. Good science, bad safety (eg, they were researching things like diagnostic testing and vaccines, but an accidental breach occurred) 3. Bad science, bad safety (this is the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis, with an accidental breach) 4. Deliberate release (very unlikely, but shouldn’t rule out till the evidence is in) Again, none of these are “theories” and certainly not “conspiracy theories.” They are hypotheses that ought to be studied in light of the evidence, if the Chinese Communist Party would provide it. We ought to be transparent with the American people about all this. Maybe some of these so-called experts think they know better. I don’t. And they really don’t either."
  - mjburgess 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - the8472 3y ago
      Last time I checked our democracies are still running on the premise of informed voters. If discussion of hypothesis needs to be suppressed during a 3-year-long "emergency" then we have an issue.
      - Eisenstein 3y ago
        > If discussion of hypothesis needs to be suppressed during a 3-year-long "emergency" then we have an issue. Unfortunately, we do have an issue. Ignoring that it is one will not solve it, nor will brushing it under the rug by the lame attempts at disinformation removal. We need to face the fact that a decent amount of our population is acting out of anger and fear, often irrationally and without evidence, and that they were used and manipulated for political and monetary gain and it has gotten passed the point where it can be walked back. Social media is a vector but not the cause. I don't know what the answer is, but we certainly do have an issue.
      - toofy 3y ago
        i think you’d find that in just about every significant crisis of any significant timeframe plenty of examples of clamping down on witch-hunts in these very democracies. am i advocating for this? of course not, however, we have countless examples where conspiracies and just plain paranoid thinking spun out and resulted in very very real atrocities. significant atrocities that were much more real and much more severe than “oh woe is me, i was muted on a social media site.” again, i’m not advocating for this, but any conversational talking point surrounding this topic which ignores those issues is not a serious one.
        gordian-mind 3y ago
        Could you please elaborate on what atrocities were caused by conspiracy theories?
- trentearl 3y ago
  Strange, I have the exact opposite experience. I have personally have felt ostracized multiple times for suggesting it was likely there was an unintentional lab leak. I often got criticized for suggesting it was a bio-weapon, while I never thought that and never even said those words. Sometime in the past 12 months this disappeared.
  - jstarfish 3y ago
    > Sometime in the past 12 months this disappeared. We're trying to groom public appetite for war with China. Anything that paints them in the worst possible light is acceptable now. After artificial chip shortages, the weather balloon incident, and TikTok, now it's suggested China was responsible for COVID. Expect more to follow.
    - atlantic 3y ago
      What I don't get is that people automatically equate a lab leak in China with a lab leak by China. It's uncontroversial that American funding was involved. The most likely intentional scenario would be a leak caused by the United States to harm the Chinese economy. If it hadn't spread beyond China's borders, the epidemic would have been a massive win for the US.
      - Jochim 3y ago
        What's not to get? Trump, Fox news, and a vanguard of the Republican party framed Coronavirus as a Chinese attack on the world in an attempt to boost their support. Why some people are willing to believe the nonsense spouted by both I don't understand, but the fact that people do explains why so many view it as an intentional act by China.
    - mistermann 3y ago
      In Canada, China "interfering with our democracy" is all the latest rage... At one point about a month ago, 11 out of the top 20 posts on /r/Canada had some negative reference to China (most being related to the democracy interference story, but a few others I can't remember the topic of).
- mda 3y ago
  I always thought when people mentions lab leak theory they meant an accident. Never heard the bio weapon thing before honestly.
- drexlspivey 3y ago
  Totally bollocks answer to the point that either the commenter is trolling or is deep into the Qanon nutjob circles
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
  > I never met anyone who didn't equate "lab leak" with an intentional act by china You must have a very conspiratorial group of friends / contacts ! I followed the whole covid story pretty closely, and as I recall "lab leak" was taken by almost everyone as "accidental lab leak". Was the lab perhaps doing some type of "gain of function" research that they were not meant to be doing? TBD, but the massive (as it turns out) initial over-reaction to covid in China certainly doesn't look like something they intended to inflict on themselves (as well as eventually the rest of the world).
- mannykannot 3y ago
  In this post and the one it is replying to, we see an example of how dichotomization gets in the way of discussing complex issues, and anecdotal dichotomization doubly so.
- emptysongglass 3y ago
  Hi me! And a veritable ton of Hacker News folks back then. I have plenty of misgivings about China but I am also a reasonable person. Turning this into an everybody weaponized it against Asians argument is handing a lot of us a weapon we never picked up.
- nayrf 3y ago
  bizarre. it's even in the name, "leak". very weird to pretend there weren't a lot of people who thought a lab worker contracted it and passed it to the food market
heavyset_go 3y ago
> I don’t recall a single instance of this. I saw the birth of r/WuhanFlu and other related subreddits that were created in early 2020, and accusations of it being a bioweapon were there from the start, and once someone looked up "Wuhan" on Google Maps and saw the virology institute, people were saying it was a lab leak.
callalex 3y ago
What goalposts? Just because you didn’t personally experience something doesn’t mean it prant exist/didn’t happen.
idiotsecant 3y ago
You didn't see any 'Wuhan flu' bioengineering conspiracy theories about how china made covid on purpose to attack America? If not, you're either intentionally not seeing it or I want to use your media filter because it was literally everywhere.
- Ancapistani 3y ago
  Of course I did, but that's not what was posited in the parent post: > China and the WHO intentionally developing and deploying bio-weapons as a means of global population control This is what I mean about moving goalposts - these two theories might both assert that it was a bioweapon, but they are otherwise very different.

mjburgess 3y ago

[flagged]

dahfizz 3y ago
I think this says more about you than others. "every single instance" is a gross exaggeration. This is your personal bias at play so that when you read "lab leak", you perceive "racist conspiracy theory"
ChemSpider 3y ago
That is nonsense. Even highly qualified people like Alina Chan were pushed in the conspiracy camp during the first year - just for saying that the lab leak is one (of many) possible sources of the virus.
LightBug1 3y ago
Utter rubbish. The theory was on the table and was discussed at the time ... Most efforts however were focused on dealing with the immediate danger.
zkms 3y ago
> I never met anyone who didn't equate "lab leak" with an intentional act by china The likes of Alina Chan and Richard Ebright are "easy mode" counterexamples for your statement. I'll swing for the fences: Even Tom Cotton was -- at least once, I am exceedingly uninterested in combing through all his tweets and media appearances -- careful to distinguish between "lab leak" and "intentional act", despite being brazenly political and probably inspired by anti-China animus. From the thread beginning at https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126 https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126: "Let me debunk the debunkers. @paulina_milla and her “experts” wrongly jump straight to the claim that the coronavirus is an engineered bioweapon. That’s not what I’ve said. There’s at least four hypotheses about the origin of the virus: 1. Natural (still the most likely, but almost certainly not from the Wuhan food market) 2. Good science, bad safety (eg, they were researching things like diagnostic testing and vaccines, but an accidental breach occurred) 3. Bad science, bad safety (this is the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis, with an accidental breach) 4. Deliberate release (very unlikely, but shouldn’t rule out till the evidence is in) Again, none of these are “theories” and certainly not “conspiracy theories.” They are hypotheses that ought to be studied in light of the evidence, if the Chinese Communist Party would provide it. We ought to be transparent with the American people about all this. Maybe some of these so-called experts think they know better. I don’t. And they really don’t either."
- mjburgess 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - the8472 3y ago
    Last time I checked our democracies are still running on the premise of informed voters. If discussion of hypothesis needs to be suppressed during a 3-year-long "emergency" then we have an issue.
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      > If discussion of hypothesis needs to be suppressed during a 3-year-long "emergency" then we have an issue. Unfortunately, we do have an issue. Ignoring that it is one will not solve it, nor will brushing it under the rug by the lame attempts at disinformation removal. We need to face the fact that a decent amount of our population is acting out of anger and fear, often irrationally and without evidence, and that they were used and manipulated for political and monetary gain and it has gotten passed the point where it can be walked back. Social media is a vector but not the cause. I don't know what the answer is, but we certainly do have an issue.
    - toofy 3y ago
      i think you’d find that in just about every significant crisis of any significant timeframe plenty of examples of clamping down on witch-hunts in these very democracies. am i advocating for this? of course not, however, we have countless examples where conspiracies and just plain paranoid thinking spun out and resulted in very very real atrocities. significant atrocities that were much more real and much more severe than “oh woe is me, i was muted on a social media site.” again, i’m not advocating for this, but any conversational talking point surrounding this topic which ignores those issues is not a serious one.
      - gordian-mind 3y ago
        Could you please elaborate on what atrocities were caused by conspiracy theories?
trentearl 3y ago
Strange, I have the exact opposite experience. I have personally have felt ostracized multiple times for suggesting it was likely there was an unintentional lab leak. I often got criticized for suggesting it was a bio-weapon, while I never thought that and never even said those words. Sometime in the past 12 months this disappeared.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  > Sometime in the past 12 months this disappeared. We're trying to groom public appetite for war with China. Anything that paints them in the worst possible light is acceptable now. After artificial chip shortages, the weather balloon incident, and TikTok, now it's suggested China was responsible for COVID. Expect more to follow.
  - atlantic 3y ago
    What I don't get is that people automatically equate a lab leak in China with a lab leak by China. It's uncontroversial that American funding was involved. The most likely intentional scenario would be a leak caused by the United States to harm the Chinese economy. If it hadn't spread beyond China's borders, the epidemic would have been a massive win for the US.
    - Jochim 3y ago
      What's not to get? Trump, Fox news, and a vanguard of the Republican party framed Coronavirus as a Chinese attack on the world in an attempt to boost their support. Why some people are willing to believe the nonsense spouted by both I don't understand, but the fact that people do explains why so many view it as an intentional act by China.
  - mistermann 3y ago
    In Canada, China "interfering with our democracy" is all the latest rage... At one point about a month ago, 11 out of the top 20 posts on /r/Canada had some negative reference to China (most being related to the democracy interference story, but a few others I can't remember the topic of).
mda 3y ago
I always thought when people mentions lab leak theory they meant an accident. Never heard the bio weapon thing before honestly.
drexlspivey 3y ago
Totally bollocks answer to the point that either the commenter is trolling or is deep into the Qanon nutjob circles
HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
> I never met anyone who didn't equate "lab leak" with an intentional act by china You must have a very conspiratorial group of friends / contacts ! I followed the whole covid story pretty closely, and as I recall "lab leak" was taken by almost everyone as "accidental lab leak". Was the lab perhaps doing some type of "gain of function" research that they were not meant to be doing? TBD, but the massive (as it turns out) initial over-reaction to covid in China certainly doesn't look like something they intended to inflict on themselves (as well as eventually the rest of the world).
mannykannot 3y ago
In this post and the one it is replying to, we see an example of how dichotomization gets in the way of discussing complex issues, and anecdotal dichotomization doubly so.
emptysongglass 3y ago
Hi me! And a veritable ton of Hacker News folks back then. I have plenty of misgivings about China but I am also a reasonable person. Turning this into an everybody weaponized it against Asians argument is handing a lot of us a weapon we never picked up.
nayrf 3y ago
bizarre. it's even in the name, "leak". very weird to pretend there weren't a lot of people who thought a lab worker contracted it and passed it to the food market

heavyset_go 3y ago

> I don’t recall a single instance of this. I saw the birth of r/WuhanFlu and other related subreddits that were created in early 2020, and accusations of it being a bioweapon were there from the start, and once someone looked up "Wuhan" on Google Maps and saw the virology institute, people were saying it was a lab leak.

callalex 3y ago

What goalposts? Just because you didn’t personally experience something doesn’t mean it prant exist/didn’t happen.

idiotsecant 3y ago

You didn't see any 'Wuhan flu' bioengineering conspiracy theories about how china made covid on purpose to attack America? If not, you're either intentionally not seeing it or I want to use your media filter because it was literally everywhere.

Ancapistani 3y ago
Of course I did, but that's not what was posited in the parent post: > China and the WHO intentionally developing and deploying bio-weapons as a means of global population control This is what I mean about moving goalposts - these two theories might both assert that it was a bioweapon, but they are otherwise very different.