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First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

685 points by larsiusprime 3y ago

tim333 3y ago
These articles go on a bit. There is a good summary of the science evidence for a lab leak from on twitter from Richard H. Ebright (Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers): https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1567569810745356289 https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1567569810745356289 that was from Sept 22. Since then we've had >They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa. in the recent Times article https://archive.is/zRoAn https://archive.is/zRoAn and the names of the researchers, Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu, in this article. It's all looking quite likely that this is the source, though further information will probably come out.
LatteLazy 3y ago
Erg, more bullshit nonsense that takes 3 minutes to produce and 3h to refute.
jleyank 3y ago
There seems to have been covid cases in Europe in last-quarter 2019, which suggests it was there or brought there before the outbreak that made the news in 2020. Doesn’t rule out leaks and crossovers, just moves them elsewhere or else when. Viral pneumonia was occurring, symptoms turned out to match covid and nobody was saving or testing blood samples. Outside of a few places in Dec. But people had aggressive, surprising lung problems that didn’t present flu symptoms. Maybe that was a pre-covid leak or they’re incorrect when the leak occurred. It also hit the initial sites very quickly, which suggests very contagious or already present in some form. To put my tin foil hat on, was omicron the “antidote” virus that was deliberately released to put the fire out? It was very different genetically and even more contagious.
- hammock 3y ago
  The Wuhan Games, at which 10,000 athletes from the worlds' armies participated, wrapped October 27, 2019, after which people left Wuhan to return to their homes all over the world, including to Italy where many of the first cases outside of Wuhan occured https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games
  - zmgsabst 3y ago
    WIV took down their database and upgraded their ventilation circa September 2019. [0] Event 201 wargame about just such a disease was held in October 2019 — where people “role played” many of the policies we saw enacted. [1] Trump signed for flu vaccine research in September 2019, developing new technologies and an influenza task force. [2] I’m sure that’s all just coincidence. [0] - https://news.yahoo.com/wuhan-lab-air-circulation-systems-135007775.html https://news.yahoo.com/wuhan-lab-air-circulation-systems-135... [1] - https://centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/tabletop-exercises/event-201-pandemic-tabletop-exercise https://centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/tabletop-exerci... [2] - https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-09-24/pdf/2019-20804.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-09-24/pdf/2019-2...
    - Izkata 3y ago
      > Event 201 wargame about just such a disease was held in October 2019 — where people “role played” many of the policies we saw enacted. On that one, remember how monkeypox seemed to come out of nowhere in early 2022? In early 2021 there was a similar pandemic scenario for monkeypox, and the scenario's in-game start date was only about a week off of when it started in the real world.
  - jvm___ 3y ago
    So the plot of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six comes true, release a virus at the Olympics closing ceremonies and it will spread globally almost immediately.
- baja_blast 3y ago
  I heard from a friend from Taiwan that there were rumors of some kinda of virus spreading around by mid 2019 in China. The thing is if there were blood samples showing a much earlier date of covid spreading in China there is zero chance we would ever hear about it. It is also worth noting that the region hit hardest in Italy early on just so happens to be a huge textile manufacturing center with a huge Chinese population.
  - sp0rk 3y ago
    > It is also worth noting that the region hit hardest in Italy early on just so happens to be a huge textile manufacturing center with a huge Chinese population. If you're talking about Prato, your information is completely wrong.
  - Izkata 3y ago
    > It is also worth noting that the region hit hardest in Italy early on There was a paper released early/mid 2020 that was attempting to group the virus into various strains (this was before the "variant" terminology emerged), that attempted to identify changes in the virus's behavior and classified different mutations with things like L, LL, and M. For the most part it was either ignored or ridiculed as being too early, that there hasn't been enough time for mutations that change its behavior to have accumulated. Thing is, I distinctly remember it identified one mutation that seemed to originate in Italy, was trackable as it reached the US East coast, and every place it spread to had a spike in deaths that coincided with when it overtook the previous variants in prevalence for that location.
- ren_engineer 3y ago
  I remember the sudden freak out in the media about vaping in late 2019 because young people were being hospitalized with lung damage. Have to wonder if that was actually covid and the vapes were just coincidence, they'd been around for years at that point so them all of the sudden having media hysteria around them was weird to me at the time https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/10/health/vaping-outbreak-2019-explainer/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/10/health/vaping-outbreak-2019-e...
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    there was a new chemical introduced into the black market supply chain in 2019 causing lung injury
  - Symmetry 3y ago
    That was found to be black market vape cartridges using vitamin E acetate, which you don't want in your lungs. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/severe-lung-disease.html https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/s...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- nso 3y ago
  I got ill in a way I'd never really gotten ill before, in November/December 2019 -- after having travelled from Mexico to Norway. I was barely out of bed for the month I was in the country. I thought it might be dengue, but one of the first days there I got checked out in the hospital -- and they said I had an unidentified viral infection, but not dengue. After being released I got incredibly ill, but not much you can do with viral infections anyways so I just rode it out. Having had Covid 3 times since it was named, I've got a pretty good grip on what it feels like -- and I've many times wondered if I didn't have it back then in 2019 as well, as the symptoms lined up too well.
  - NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
    I got a worse-than-ever-experienced respiratory infection after a trip to Europe arounds Thanksgiving 2019 as well: I wasn't well enough to ski even a month later and had mysterious lung-scarring on my X-rays which in retrospect looks very much like an early Covid infection too.
  - duderific 3y ago
    I had a really bad cold-like illness in late November 2019, which left behind a severe sore throat which lasted about three weeks. It was notable because it wouldn't go away, to the point where I went to both urgent care and my primary doctor on separate occasions (I'm not one to go to the doctor unless I really need to.) Both times they took a look at my throat, proclaimed it to be a viral infection, and sent me on my way. I too have wondered if I actually had Covid, but nobody knew how to diagnose it at that time.
    - nso 3y ago
      Well to be fair it wasn't known at the time
- midnightauro 3y ago
  I suddenly developed “exercise asthma” in March 2020 and was told it was too early to have been COVID. But I had been pretty sick in January and had lots of contact with the public at work. I always wonder. Maybe it did just suddenly develop, I was 30 that year. And sure, I’m kinda fatass, though I was working out hard at that point. But my tin foil hat still fits me and sometimes I consider it might have a point.
- jsnell 3y ago
  That theory is total nonsense. Covid was extremely infectious, and had severe symptoms. It could not have stayed under the radar for that long. It was also unlikely to fizzle out: once a country had one case, it would turn into thousands of cases within a month. If Covid had been circulating that widely that early, the trajectory of the disase in December 2019-March 2020 would have been totally different. There would not have been an initial outbreak in Wuhan followed by individual cases popping up in various other countries, followed by a gradual buildup of cases in those countries. By the time we got a test, there would have been hundreds of thousands ill all over the world, all being detected as cases simultaneously. It would have been impossible to e.g. trace cases to specific super spreader events, because there would have been so many sources of infections. Basically none of what happened would have been the expected outcome if Covid actually was spreading in the wild that early. All the reports of early Covid cases outside of China are just the expected false positives from tests that don't have 100% specificity (which is pretty much anything other than full sequencing).
  - jleyank 3y ago
    There were no tests except for blood samples preserved by hospitals. People are referring to symptoms that were different than flu, viral pneumonia and (looking back) showed similarity to covid. Might have been a different viral pneumonia as it didn’t respond to antibiotics. Recall exponential growth starts slowly and it was flu season. https://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/press-release/2020/study-suggests-possible-new-covid-19-timeline-in-the-us.html https://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/press-rele... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0300891620974755 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03008916209747... https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00716-2 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00716-2
    - jsnell 3y ago
      I am not talking of tests in 2019. I'm talking of the tests done in 2020 after, well, tests became available. If Covid had been growing exponentially in Europe for the latter part of 2019, the tests would have found massive amounts of infections. They didn't. Likewise the after the fact findings of antibodies in blood samples would show an exponential growth. Neither of the studies you linked to shows that. The Just look at the numbers from that Italy study. They're claiming that 10% of their sample had already had Covid on September 2019. "Exponential growth starts slowly" doesn't explain that. But somehow that went unnoticed and caused no detectable blip in the mortality rate, while a few months later an outbreak that could be tracked to a single event decimated the elderly in Lombardy. It's noteworthy that neither of these studies tried analyzing blood samples from say the winter of 2018 to establish a definite baseline. But if they'd done that, they probably wouldn't have much of an article to write. "We found the expected level of false positives from this test" isn't exactly newsworthy.
indigodaddy 3y ago
Isn’t the gist of this fairly old news? Or did they just not have the names before?
- larsiusprime 3y ago
  Being able to tie it specifically to the lab this concretely, by identifying the first patients by name, and having that (allegedly) from US government officials, is all new information, AFAIK.
  - indigodaddy 3y ago
    Yes, this would seem to be a bit of a game-changer on the question. Too bad this appears it’s going to be buried within the HN algo and likely won’t be reported upon seriously in MSM either..
    - dang 3y ago
      It spent 12 hours on HN's front page.
- hwillis 3y ago
  Very. This was put out in the state department Jan 2021, 2.5 years ago: https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan-institute-of-virology/index.html https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan... > The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.
  - sixQuarks 3y ago
    You’re very giddy to try to brush this under the rug. The truth is that big tech and Fauci colluded to suppress the lab leak theory, there are leaked emails that prove it. YouTube and Twitter were censoring and demonetizing channels that would talk about the lab leak theory. What do you have to say about that?
indigodaddy 3y ago
‘Said Metzl, “Had US government officials including Dr. Fauci stated from day one that a COVID-19 research-related origin was a very real possibility, and made clear that we had little idea what viruses were being held at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, what work was being done there, and who was doing that work, our national and global conversations would have been dramatically different. The time has come for a full accounting.”’ Seems doubtful that Daszak (and possibly Fauci) had little idea what was going on in that lab..
- ajkjk 3y ago
  Why?
  - tim333 3y ago
    Re Daszak knowing what was going on, he was a main funder of the lab and a drinking buddy with Shi the head researcher there. He also wrote a proposal on inserting a cleavage site into a coronavirus in pretty much the way you would have to to make covid (defuse grant proposal which was leaked, not revealed voluntarily). Asked what was going on at WIV he's said stuff more like sorry I can't say as we have a confidentiality agreement rather than no idea.
  - mandmandam 3y ago
    It would take a long-form article to clearly enumerate all of the reasons with citations, but long story short, the pair of them were caught lying over and over again the past few years. For example, Daszak's paper in the Lancet claiming the virus was almost certainly of natural origin was used as the basis for justifying the censorship of tens or hundreds of millions of posts. He failed to declare his conflict of interest, as did something like 25 out of the 26 other authors. This was a broad failure among academia and news, as his reasoning in the paper was specious. Fauci was caught telling fibs about his beliefs on natural origin as well, with a private position that it was quite likely. He also lied about funds sent to Wuhan, and the type of research they were doing.
- scoofy 3y ago
  Also... I mean, unless I've created a false memory, I specifically remember that the discussion at the time was about a the virus literally being a bio-weapon, and not actually the entirely plausible, accidental escape of a virus. I've always had a completely open mind about it, even if experts have repeatedly suggested that it's plausible, but unlikely. Those prattling on about how "people called us crazy" that it was a WIV lab leak seem to completely misremember what was actually being discussed in April-May of 2020, and also seem to be trying to score political points in American politics, when it seems very obvious that the CCP should take the lion's share of any blame regarding any lack of transparency.
AmenBreak 3y ago
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kneebonian 3y ago
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jmclnx 3y ago
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- salad-tycoon 3y ago
  Removed at the behest of powerful government groups and advertising agencies/pharma companies. Listen to The Zuck on lex fridman admitting (paraphrasing) “yeah we got some stuff wrong, censored things we shouldn’t have when they later turned out to be evidence based.” I believe this ,”very very minor”, admission of major guilt is in the first half. Or the Twitter files and FBI offices in social media etc. or the Wikipedia bias and astroturfing.
- treeman79 3y ago
  Facebook just admitted that the government was asking them to censor information that was, in fact true. https://youtu.be/ixCKd8lUrKw https://youtu.be/ixCKd8lUrKw
  - janalsncm 3y ago
    If that is shocking to you I would suggest reading up on the Pentagon Papers: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers The Snowden leaks are in the same vein.
mc32 3y ago
So… finally what lots of people were claiming but got censored on social media as well as mainstream media during the pandemic is being acknowledged and verified by the government. Follow up. Given statements to congress by government officials to Congress, under oath, that would contradict this conclusion, will there be repercussions for misleading the public, lawmakers and the scientific community? PS: It was never a credible bio-weapon attack (people are now trying to conflate this to instill FUD in people's memories --go do a google search with date ranges). Bio-weapons are terrible weapons of war. They are likely to affect the target as well as the deployer. For the nonbelievers of Censorship, read up on Matt Taibbi's reporting or read some other media than usual: https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-covid-censorship-machine-social-media-facebook-meta-executive-rob-flaherty-free-speech-google-11673203704?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-covid-censorship-ma...
- hwillis 3y ago
  "finally"? This was put out in the state department Jan 2021, 2.5 years ago: https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan-institute-of-virology/index.html https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan... > The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- api 3y ago
  I recall reading credible scientists talking about a lab leak from day one, and I always considered it a possibility. Yet many of the people pushing it on social media were pushing it as a 100% certainty and even that it was some kind of intentional bio-weapon attack. The people getting banned for this were conspiritainment grifters and people pushing fascist politics. The most effective way to cover something up is to have Alex Jones and Steve Bannon talk about it. If Fauci really is running some horrible conspiracy maybe he's paying these people to talk about it to make sure nobody takes the idea seriously. Then there were the people pushing the Ukraine bioweapons nonsense, which is a transparent Russian attempt to copy Bush II's "WMDs in Iraq" bullshit.
hwillis 3y ago
Note that this is NOT the Wuhan CDC, which is the building across the river from the wet market. They did not do any research there. This building is ~10 miles south, well outside the main city. https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology&params=30_22_35_N_114_15_45_E_type:landmark_region:CN-42 https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Wuhan_Ins... The fact that researchers were sick with flu-like symptoms has been openly stated by the US for a long time. This was put out in the state department Jan 2021, 2.5 years ago: https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan-institute-of-virology/index.html https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan... > The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. Here's a good post that outlines the frankly huge amount of evidence against the WIV being involved: https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/the-case-against-the-lab-leak-theory-f640ae1c3704 https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/the-case-against-the-... > Based on number of visitors, Worobey estimated the odds at only 1 in 10,000 that the market would be the first superspreading event in Wuhan. > Although it didn’t receive a lot of traffic, the market was one of only 4 places selling wild animals in Wuhan. It’s one of the most likely places for a wildlife spillover. > As we’ll see later, there may actually have been two jumps from animals to people at the market. Now we’re talking about odds of 1 in 100 million, that the virus made it from the lab to the market twice but showed up nowhere else in Wuhan.
- onethought 3y ago
  Which still doesn’t really draw the line of how an outbreak occurred at the wet market. Also common seasonal illness isn’t exactly a smoking gun
  - MarkMarine 3y ago
    not really typical for healthy researchers in their 30s to end up in the hospital with seasonal illness symptoms though.
    - 3y ago
squalo 3y ago
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- mvdtnz 3y ago
  Play the ball, not the player.
  - yellow_postit 3y ago
    If the player has been known to use a weighted bat?
    - mvdtnz 3y ago
      Weigh the bat.
      - squalo 3y ago
        I'm more inclined to hit him with it
      - userbinator 3y ago
        ...and quarantine it. (Sorry, could not resist.)
  - derstander 3y ago
    This is a nice sentiment but it just doesn’t hold up in the real world. I’m making this statement generally as opposed to about Matt Taibbi: I don’t really follow him so I’m not evaluating him personally, just your statement in general. I have a finite amount of time. I don’t have time to “play the ball” given how many balls are out there. Particularly if the player has proven to be a low signal-to-noise ratio source in the past. I even do this with colleagues as well as media sources. I give people the benefit of the doubt in the beginning, but if you’ve got a track record of not having useful information for me, then I will disregard what you have to say. I’m not going to be mean about it. I might even try to give a heads up about why I think you’re not correct. But I value my time and eventually it’s just not worth the expenditure. So no, I’m not going to play the ball: I’ll play the player if their track record is poor. Am I going to miss out on occasion? Sure. But I just don’t have infinite time so I use heuristics and accept imperfection. There’s another dimension of this discussion about sphere of awareness versus sphere of influence and the utility (or lack thereof) when the former is much larger than the latter. But I will sum my position up by saying that I mostly try to align them.
rovolo 3y ago
The title says "sickened by Covid-19", but the text says "developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019".
- mlyle 3y ago
  Yes. We don't have swabs that we can perform PCR on. On the other hand, this report, if true: - Sickened about a month before COVID-19 was formally detected - In close proximity to where COVID-19 was formally detected - While doing research on gain of function in coronaviruses. This is strongly suggestive circumstantial evidence.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    Would love to have the denominator.
  - onethought 3y ago
    Close proximity is a bit of a stretch. This shows people catching colds in winter. The rest is speculation
    - mlyle 3y ago
      > This shows people catching colds in winter. And hospitalized? That's a bit more uncommon than catching a cold.
      - onethought 3y ago
        No it isn’t.
  - mort96 3y ago
    It's much less impressive when you add: - with symptoms associated with common seasonal illness Not saying it wasn't COVID-19. Just saying that claiming it was is a bit of a stretch.
    - 3y ago
drcongo 3y ago
I don't know who the other two are, but I sure as hell don't believe a word Matt Taibbi writes after his farcical lack of fact checking in "the twitter files".
jb12 3y ago
> "If you knew that this was likely a lab-enhanced pathogen, there are so many things you could have done differently" I'm curious - if we knew in March 2020 that covid came from a lab, what _would_ we have done differently?
- usefulcat 3y ago
  If it came from a lab, then we need to seriously re-evaluate the risk-reward ratio for such research.
- LatteLazy 3y ago
  Literally nothing.
- ChemSpider 3y ago
  If the lab leak story is correct, the WIV people knew somewhere inbetween September...November 2019 that the virus leaked.
  - onethought 3y ago
    That’s not true, a leak could occur without them realising. Getting cold and flu symptoms in winter wouldn’t raise too many suspicions. Given they didn’t start any containment procedures either they didn’t know or that’s not how it happened
    - Natsu 3y ago
      The article doesn't just say "people got sick" it says that researchers were hospitalized. That doesn't sound like "normal seasonal illness" to me.
      - onethought 3y ago
        Then you haven’t spent time in China and realise they use their hospital system very differently. Often people will go to hospitals for minor fevers.
nidhalbt 3y ago
There's a problem, covid was in Italy as early as September 2019. (see Dr John Campbell's video on this) Cases in November 2019 aren't early, it started probably six months earlier.
- andrewinardeer 3y ago
  I was at Madrid airport in June 2019 and waiting in the long line for border control to leave there was a man who was displaying extreme flu-like symptoms. Coughing, sweating, pale as a ghost. Mind you, this is the height of summer. Even back then, prior to the pandemic, I actively avoided him because he looked really unwell. I know there is no way of knowing and at best it is a fanciful mental exercise, but I think to myself 'what if'?
- dwater 3y ago
  "John Lorimer Campbell is an English YouTuber and retired nurse educator known for his videos about the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially, the videos received praise, but they later veered into misinformation. He has been criticised for suggesting COVID-19 deaths have been over-counted, repeating false claims about the use of ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment, and providing misleading commentary about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines. ... He holds a diploma in nursing from the University of London, a BSc in biology from the Open University, an MSc in health science from the University of Lancaster, and a Ph.D. in nursing from the University of Bolton. He received the Ph.D. for his work on developing methods of teaching via digital media such as online videos." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Campbell_(YouTuber) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Campbell_(YouTuber) For anyone wondering who this is and if he is a reliable source.
  - xdavidliu 3y ago
    agreed that that is absolutely not a legit source. I was curious so I googled, and found something more legit-sounding: https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-timing/researchers-find-coronavirus-was-circulating-in-italy-earlier-than-thought-idUSKBN27W1J2 https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim... > ROME (Reuters) - The new coronavirus was circulating in Italy in September 2019, a study by the National Cancer Institute (INT) of the Italian city of Milan shows, signaling that it might have spread beyond China earlier than thought.
deleted 3y ago
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subsubzero 3y ago
Here are two good articles as well that document the lab leak(for further reading): https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-grant-darpa/ https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra... and https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-nonprofit-at-the-center-of-the-lab-leak-controversy https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-no...
- hwillis 3y ago
  https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/the-case-against-the-lab-leak-theory-f640ae1c3704 https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/the-case-against-the-...
local_crmdgeon 3y ago
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- culopatin 3y ago
  It’s silly to think that international relationships are that simple.
  - local_crmdgeon 3y ago
    Are you implying that Dr. Fauci might have lied for political gain????
    - culopatin 3y ago
      I’m implying that dr fauci doesn’t operate in a vacuum all by himself talking to the public.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
LarsDu88 3y ago
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MarkMarine 3y ago
It's pretty incredible to see the US Government shift around these conflicting narratives, moving toward (apparently 3 letter agency by agency) this lab leak origin. Especially considering the vilification of anyone (including the president at the time) for saying things that were in this vein. I think they owe us a complete release of the data they have and an actual assessment, from the government, explained by the head of the government... millions of people were directly effected by this. I think we're owed the truth. This method, where there are leaks or unsourced articles, but the 3 letter agencies disagree with the probable origin, it's impossible for a regular person to decipher. Maybe that is the point, but it's a really shit situation.
- mindslight 3y ago
  > considering the vilification of anyone (including the president at the time) for saying things that were in this vein It's very weird that you frame this as if the vilification including the President was an indicator of it being unreasonable, when the actual situation was that the President himself was one of the main drivers of why this topic couldn't be discussed rationally. Once the conversation is hijacked by a hollow suit blowhard, the only way to get back to rationality is to soundly reject the broken clock, disregarding that it might coincidentally be correct.
  - MarkMarine 3y ago
    Before I get painted as a Trump supporter and therefore blind to my team, I’m not. Don’t support him, and when listening to him yell about China virus and then listening to people calmly say that was racism, I went with the calm people. But the man did get the PDB every day. Maybe he heard some of this intelligence and made some leaps to suit his purpose. But if we were all lied to about the origin, our family and friends died because of this, and xenophobia or racism was used as a shield to deflect criticism from the people and research techniques that got us into this mess… that isn’t something you just handwave away. There are hollow suit blowhards hijacking every avenue of conversation around every important topic, right now. That research mechanism, gain of function or splicing together viruses… it’s being done again. To say that we have to reject what the blowhard says even if they are right about something, I can’t buy that. If this is true, that research is too dangerous and needs to be stopped and treated like nuclear weapons, because it is.
muglug 3y ago
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- Willish42 3y ago
  Thank you for saving me some clicks to figure out who this guy is. I was a bit skeptical about how sensationalized the article is relative to the substantive content of his sources
- stainablesteel 3y ago
  in my experience, a pure reputation destruction post is generally non-credible, and you posted an establishment media interview on someone who supports twitter: of course they have a bone to pick. for the sake of honest conversation, can you list what conspiracy theories you're referring to? because the last few conspiracy theories i can remember somehow all turned out to be true. so i'm really concerned with what is truthful here, i hope you can help. edit: i'm even more genuinely interested now because i was initially rapidly downvoted, but all i'm seeing in that interview is the tv host interrupting matt every time he tries to answer a question, this is so weird to me.
  - donohoe 3y ago
    Not really. You can easily find this information. Perhaps start here? https://thebanter.substack.com/p/matt-taibbis-puff-piece-on-tucker https://thebanter.substack.com/p/matt-taibbis-puff-piece-on-...
    - stainablesteel 3y ago
      > there is a chance that the NSA did intercept Carlson’s attempts to secure an interview with Vladimir Putin they did, this isn't insane to believe either, they did this to jeff bezos too. US intelligence excels at signal intelligence, this isn't a conspiracy. it then goes on to make even less sense: > Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the Agency duh, but obviously putin is, why are they deflecting? this is low quality reasoning that fails to address any meat of the arguments. plus, what does any of this have to do with matt? and covid? its like every time i ask a question there's more and more deflections away from the original topic. its so strange.
TipiKoivisto 3y ago
Here another plausible scenario how it went down, which follows the same plot: https://youtu.be/mfLycFHBsro https://youtu.be/mfLycFHBsro
boomboomsubban 3y ago
Why name the researchers that got sick? Even if one of them is the source for COVID, which really isn't clear from this, I don't think they deserve the harassment articles like this are bound to cause.
- kneel 3y ago
  You don't think causing a global pandemic and millions of death from dangerously careless research deserves criticism?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - boomboomsubban 3y ago
    Criticism? Maybe. Harassment from billions? No.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  Because that's really all the information the article has. You boil it all down and the article is just rehashing everything for the hundredth time, along with claiming "US government sources say" and dropping the three names to make it appear to be credible. There's no details about how these government sources know this. It also seems to be a rehashing of a New York Times story from a year or so ago which also claimed that there were three workers that were sick (without having any details) and was written by the same journalist that wrote the Iraq/Niger Yellow cake Uranium story back around 2002 that led us into the War in Iraq (and the same plot line that led to the Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson/Dick Cheney affair).
Imnimo 3y ago
It is hard to tell from the writing - are the sources claiming that they know the researchers were sick with Covid-19 specifically, or are they saying they know the researchers with sick with something, and that they had symptoms consistent with covid-19? We go from: >Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. To: >not only do we know there were WIV scientists who had developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019, Is it Covid, or Covid-like?
- tim333 3y ago
  At that point there were not good diagnostics for covid as it was probably brand new. The supposition that it was covid is based on other evidence like them doing research on coronaviruses.
- deleted 3y ago
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- rightbyte 3y ago
  I can't make sense of this article. It is a bit rambling and seems to mix quotes from different times. "Politicians, scientists, journalists, and amateur researchers for years now have zeroed in on the possibility that Covid-19 may have resulted from U.S.-funded gain-of-function research conducted in China." And the authors leave it at that. Maybe some references to articles would be nice? Or should I just trust their meta-analysis or what.
arisAlexis 3y ago
I don't understand how long it got for humanity as a whole to see the elephant. New virus, research center close by, Chinese denying but not letting investigation. It's like seeing your your husband exiting a brothel but still need proof he cheated.
- croes 3y ago
  There were stranger coincidences in the past, and China always denies an investigation, so it's nothing special in this case. Especially with Trump as president and we all remember the proofs of the WMDs in Iraq. BTW there are multiple reasons to enter a brothel without cheating, they need electricians and plumbers too. According to you they all are proven cheaters. >Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. >When a source was asked how certain they were that these were the identities of the three WIV scientists who developed symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, we were told, “100%” That isn't the same as saying one of the three was Patient Zero.
  - arisAlexis 3y ago
    "they need electricians and plumbers too. According to you they all are proven cheaters" Humanity acted like its stupid and a conspiracy to ask if this man is anything else than a plumber. I mean if you see someone exiting a brothel and the first thing you think is that he is an electrician, there is some problem with logical thinking there. It's not that there is 0% chance. It's not not the default. Our default was that he is a plumber which should have been immensely less probable.
- isitmadeofglass 3y ago
  [dead]
- epicureanideal 3y ago
  > It's like seeing your your husband exiting a brothel but still need proof he cheated. But it happened to be a Chinese brothel, so if you accuse him of cheating, you'll be called an ignorant, xenophonic, scapegoat-seeking racist.
euix 3y ago
I am really interested in the social-political dimension of this. Was the initial hypothesis of a lab leak suppressed during the initial part of the pandemic primarily due to Western government's fear of a diplomatic breakdown (like Russia) with China? The economies are far more interdependent than compared to Russia and there is a far more economically important Chinese diaspora in the West. What would it take to get a honest investigation within China? Presumably not under the current regime - if it were true, the magnitude of the disaster would be 100x what Chernobyl was for the Soviet Union, it wouldn't just be an accident at that point. Would it totally legitimize the Chinese state in the eyes of its people and the world? And for that reason, could we ever expect a honest accounting? Too much blood (literal and metaphorical) has been spilled and with the lockdowns, vaccine mandates, passports, school closures, etc and everything else that has happened, most elite institutions, state actors, businesses, media, corporations have become complicit in some way in abuses, lies, deliberate obfuscation of one type or another. It feels like a breakpoint in history to me.
- sva_ 3y ago
  > I am really interested in the social-political dimension of this. Was the initial hypothesis of a lab leak suppressed during the initial part of the pandemic primarily due to Western government's fear of a diplomatic breakdown (like Russia) with China? The economies are far more interdependent than compared to Russia and there is a far more economically important Chinese diaspora in the West. I wonder to what extent the hypothesis has been shutdown because the people who were considered to be qualified to make that assessment are interested in the continuation of gain-of-function research. > What would it take to get a honest investigation within China? Presumably not under the current regime You answered it yourself, impossible under the CCP. It seems that they convinced their population that the virus has actually emerged somewhere in the west, and that was the end of it for them.
- dirtyid 3y ago
  What would it take to get a honest investgation within US? The fundemental issue is why would PRC entertain US lab leak propaganda narrative? Let alone submit to basically weapons inspection tier scrutiny that no sane sovereign would permit. Keep in mind "lab leak" hypothesis was conjectured by PRC netizens along with US Fort Detrick lab influenza and Wuhan military games conspiracy theories. Obviously US politicians and "intelligence" would conveniently converge on the theory that looks bad for PRC. Is US going to cooperate to address the other PRC conspiracy theories and let WHO investigate USAMRIID? The realistic answer is covid will become distant memory and origin will be relegated to conjecture based on domestic politics.
AnonCoward42 3y ago
This information slipped over 2 years ago (probably right at the beginning). Wiesendanger did a study and referenced that a lab worker was suspected as patient zero¹ as a hint. ¹:https://www.uni-hamburg.de/newsroom/presse/2021/pm8.html https://www.uni-hamburg.de/newsroom/presse/2021/pm8.html (German, sorry)
_aleph2c_ 3y ago
From the top comment of the article: “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not today.” Apoorva Mandavilli, "science" reporter for the New York Times.
mullingitover 3y ago
Unless someone has specimen samples from the sick WIV scientists, this doesn't really prove anything. Nasty respiratory viruses with Covid-like symptoms aren't actually that rare, and there's a lot of overlap between a bad respiratory infection and a mild Covid infection. I've talked to numerous people in the US who swore they had the full checklist of Covid symptoms well before the November 2019 date they're talking about in this article, but these claims are not borne out by the observed data in viral surveillance. It's really unfortunate that there isn't some kind of rigorous global pathogen surveillance program that's regularly sampling the world's population and doing sequencing for novel pathogens. The only reason we discovered Covid in the US early on was because the Seattle Flu Study kinda broke the rules and went back through their samples to test for Covid when they weren't technically allowed to do it. Ideally we'd have global wastewater surveillance as well as individual anonymized sample gathering. It sounds expensive, which is why nobody wants to do it, but Covid really shows how badly it's needed.
- swang 3y ago
  a close family member swore they got covid at CES 2020. they went to vegas and came back real sick for a couple of days. i remember in 2020 or so they were also talking about covid being in the sewage in some european city (i think in italy? and/or spain?) but my assumption was they were detecting things that were also common in other influenza strains.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ipqk 3y ago
    I know a bunch of NYCers that swore they got covid in Jan 2020, but it's both mathematically impossible for all of them to have had it based on the circulating numbers at the time, and then when they actually got Covid in the coming months/years they changed their tune.
    - taeric 3y ago
      Oddly, I assumed I had it early in the waves. Never got a positive test, as folks weren't testing back then. Finally had our first positive test this year. And whatever I had at the start was way way worse than when I had covid. Such that I can understand a lot of folks being very confused on all of this.
cmpb 3y ago
Obviously, we should try to figure it out and learn from our mistakes, increase security, etc., but what accountability can we really expect from knowing that the pandemic started due to a lab leak? Accountability is almost meaningless compared to the scale of the total global loss. I'm reminded of a line from an episode of Star Trek TNG where a very powerful alien destroys an entire race by thinking them out of existence in a momentary lapse of judgement, and Picard simply says "We're not qualified to be your judges -- we have no law to fit your crime."
geuis 3y ago
I don't trust this article at all. > Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have leaked the pandemic virus. > It is unclear who in the U.S. government had access to the intelligence about the sick WIV workers, how long they had it, and why it was not shared with the public. At absolutely no point in this article are any new "sources" pointed out. The authors make that statement early on so as to make the reader think something new in the article is going to be revealed. Instead we get multiple paragraphs of links to various quotes and suppositions from various people, some of whom were involved in investigating the origins and some who work in the field.
- NoGravitas 3y ago
  Yeah, reading this to see what the evidence is, it all comes down to "anonymous State Department sources", and some informed speculation from people in the field. I don't actually think an accidental lab leak is all that unlikely, but I'm also not being presented with any evidence for it.
- wbsun 3y ago
  My sources on the planet Earth say that nowadays this is the way to write news, essays, blogs, podcast videos, and books in order to attract attentions.
- letmevoteplease 3y ago
  You won't have to wait long for confirmation. The Director of National Intelligence will be required by law to declassify information about the infected researchers on June 18th, including their names, symptoms, date of onset and role at WIV.[1] [1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/619/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/619...
  - geuis 3y ago
    Hey that's a cool link. I'm kinda embarrassed to say I didn't know you could track bills like this going through Congress. Thanks for the lead.
dragonelite 3y ago
So the US is going to do a new bioweapon propaganda round...??
fqye 3y ago
[dead]
givemeethekeys 3y ago
I keep asking myself, "who gives a shit?". When the virus was first discovered, it was important to pin down who and where Patient zero was. Now? Pure politicking. It isn't even a slow news day!
- streptomycin 3y ago
  10 million people are dead. I find it hard to believe how anyone could not be at least mildly interested in obtaining more details about the origin of Covid-19, whether it's from the market or the lab or somewhere else.
- lmm 3y ago
  Figuring out what we did wrong and what we can do better is important. This isn't going to be the last global pandemic.
- NotYourLawyer 3y ago
  Politicking was spending 2 years calling anyone racist who talked about the lab leak theory. This is just a reaction.
  - givemeethekeys 3y ago
    Absolutely. That was politicking too. Almost every PR response from both parties was terribly executed for the entire period.
- TMWNN 3y ago
  What are the odds that exactly three years ago, your response to the same question was "The experts told us that this was definitely, positively not a lab leak, and anyone who says otherwise is a racist"?
zvmaz 3y ago
In an interview with biologist Richard Lenski (of the famous experiment), the latter discusses controversial research on selecting H5N1 viruses for greater transmissibility and their potential to be airborne viruses that are of public health concern [1]. That was in 2017... I have no definitive opinion on the origin of Sars-Cov-2 (will we know the truth one day?), but I don't think the lab leak theory is crazy. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQr8ldEeO04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQr8ldEeO04
yk 3y ago
> Next week, the Directorate of National Intelligence is expected to release previously classified material, which may include the names of the three WIV scientists who were the likely among the first to be sickened by SARS-CoV-2. Why publish speculation now, instead of publishing when there is actually something to report?
dekhn 3y ago
Somewhere, the gods of propaganda and susceptibility are chortling with delight at how easily even ostensibly smart people can believe things based on very limited data.
HWR_14 3y ago
Can someone please explain to me what difference it makes. AFAIK, no one is claiming this was a bioweapon or intentional assault. So what difference could it possibly make where COVID originated from. I think the lab leak theory is wrong, but even if it was true I no idea how that should change anything.
- NotYourLawyer 3y ago
  I’m a lot more interested in how we weren’t allowed to talk about it for a couple years than whether or not it’s ultimately true.
  - object-a 3y ago
    The President of the United States was claiming that COVID was engineered in China as early as May 2020. I don't know how someone can claim they weren't allowed to talk about it.
    - parineum 3y ago
      Did he claim that or did he just call it the "China Virus"? Honest question.
      - object-a 3y ago
        https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52496098 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52496098
    - NotYourLawyer 3y ago
      And people called him racist for it. And anyone else who speculated that the obvious, simplest answer might be true was likewise considered racist.
      - HWR_14 3y ago
        No, people called him a racist for things like calling it the Kung Flu, and some of his positions with regard to Chinese (and Asian in general) people and other racist things he did. No one cared about the lab leak theory, or associated it with being racist, until Trump decided to morph it into a dog whistle for racists.
thsksbd 3y ago
Ppl really need to look at the HM history and use the search function to look at disease stories from late '19 early '20. The story was already leaking in December, January
dboreham 3y ago
Interesting that the virus the rest of us contracted subsequently had the property that 80% of those infected didn't know they had it. But that wasn't true for the first few cases?
deleted 3y ago
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kornhole 3y ago
Here is an interview with the author today on this topic. https://youtu.be/moVBjWk-Nww https://youtu.be/moVBjWk-Nww
electrondood 3y ago
[flagged]
leric 3y ago
[dead]
berniedurfee 3y ago
> When a source was asked how certain they were… we were told, “100%” That’s not good enough for you? /s
gigel82 3y ago
Yes, and? This was obvious to anyone with a brain since early 2020. Are we going to ask China for reparations?
- est 3y ago
  WIV doesn't work on its own, and the GoF research was mostly funded by Fauci & NIH
ada1981 3y ago
This is the sort of thing that should bankrupt a country, and they should be required to make up for the damage their negligence inflicted on the world population. The Chinese cannot be trusted with power.
- adultSwim 3y ago
  This analysis but for the invasion of Iraq
  - ada1981 3y ago
    Exactly so.
- bagacrap 3y ago
  Uhh, what does a random Chinese citizen have to do with the lab leak? Bankrupting a country would mainly punish a bunch of innocent peasants.
  - ada1981 3y ago
    You don’t get to have the benefits of a country but not the costs. They can revolt, stop paying taxes, all sorts of things.
jrochkind1 3y ago
So here's the thing, whether covid came from an accident in gain of function research in Wuhan, or whether it's just totally plausible that it did, the correct response is basically the same: Banning gain of function research everywhere. Yeah, including here. It's too dangerous, whatever scientific benefits to any positive thing that improves lives is not worth it, just stop doing it and demand that everyone else stop doing it. So we pretty much already know enough to know that's what we should do, I wish more people could get interested in demanding it instead of talking about whether or not there's what kind of proof that it did come from that, and trying to sift through the multi-source competing disinformation. Plausible is enough, let's try to keep it from happening in the future whether it's for the first or second time who cares?
djkivi 3y ago
[flagged]
55555 3y ago
Why aren't countries/people suing China in civil court for money? Isn't this going to happen? Has anyone tried?
rdtsc 3y ago
> “Ever since I put out my [May 2020] preprint [research paper] saying that an accidental lab origin was possible, I was criticized as a conspiracy theorist,” said Chan. “If this info had been made public in May of 2020, I doubt that many in the scientific community and the media would have spent the last three years raving about a raccoon dog or pangolin in a wet market.” That was so bizarre and strange. Both the shadiness of Chinese government and the complete confidence of many US scientists that the origin was definitely not related to the lab. Anyone who suspected anything was just a conspiracy theorist. I can understand skepticism one way or another, and a desire to learn. I thought, well these scientists who spend years researching and conducting lengthy studies, somehow immediately new with 100% confidence it definitely had nothing to do with the bio-lab. It's like someone waving their hands in front of a building with smoke coming out and saying "nothing to see here, look the other way, please".
- heyoni 3y ago
  No one was hand waving anything. There were studies looking at several attributes of the virus’s genome that concluded (not definitively, nothing ever is) that the virus was probably naturally occurring. Some looked at base pair distributions (some GC to AT ratios are required for stability), others looked for sites where enzymes could splice and whether they were commonly found in this species while others looked for any obviously transplanted. Of all the studies I’m aware of, which isn’t all of them, there is no smoking gun. This isn’t a burning building and that analogy is incorrect. No weird GFP producing genes or any common genetic markers commonly found in lab made species were found anywhere. This isn’t to say it wasn’t a lab leak or that there aren’t opposing theories as to whether such and such base pair distribution is considered normal…but the evidence just isn’t there.
etempleton 3y ago
It has always seemed to me far too coincidental that a lab studying coronaviruses was located at the epicenter of a coronavirus outbreak. Sometimes there are coincidences, but if you are looking for the most obvious answer it has always been right there and I never understood why it was dismissed so easily. With that being said, I don’t buy into any conspiracy theories about this being intentional or anything else. There were poor controls and a virus mutated.
eftychis 3y ago
Instead of replying in spirit the same message to various comments here, I generalized the skepticism in one. To people commenting that "experts had repeatedly suggested that it is unlikely to be a leak." Experts, that is people studying in biochemistry/biology/virology labs were and will always be saying that it is likely. Working in such a lab without accidents would be a historical miracle. That is one of the reasons working actively with and producing bioweapons was "ditched" effectively by a lot of countries including the U.S. (Or at least I hope.) I suggest starting with the wikipedia rabbithole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_warfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_warfare Let us be clear: Political announcers were saying it is unlikely for diplomatic/cover-our/their-asses reasons. Recall/research the USSR/Russian anthrax in Yekaterinburg of 1979. To this day it is a closed off area. No person that has worked in a lab would say "unlikely..." And to top it off in a summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity... Check the 2004-04 event. P.S. Literally, we had a known leak in Taiwan in 2021 while they were trying to study the SARS-COV-2 virus.
- waterhouse 3y ago
  And SARS 1 itself was leaked from a lab four times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS#Laboratory_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS#Laboratory_accidents
lazyeye 3y ago
Ockhams razor.
lazyeye 3y ago
I wonder what the long-term consequences are of western forums being flooded with people advocating CCP talking points whilst all counter-CCP arguments are blocked within China for everyone. What is going to be the impact over time?
wly_cdgr 3y ago
Kinda moot tbh. Virology lab? Wet market? China is responsible either way.
Guthur 3y ago
I'm still a little baffled at what people believe will change if anything is proven about the origin of covid-19. It's indisputable that many governments went well beyond their legal remit in response to the virus, and yet many have silently or openly accepted it. Powerful people will do horrible things and we have little to no way to stop them because the majority of us are weak and passive. We do what we're told and applaud that we were told to do it.
bryanrasmussen 3y ago
I admit when stuff like this comes up I think of the world analogically, the analogy being a big company with lots of divisions (countries, international orgs) working on a big important project "keeping the world on track" Sometimes people make mistakes in the company and you realize this big mistake these people made make our "keeping the world on track" project go over budget this year etc. but hey, mistakes happen (sure we've made mistakes too, but really those idiots over on the AI department really screwed up though, huh right guys hah hah) so we're just going to keep going through it, try to iron over the mistakes, write some documents that hide the mistakes from shareholders etc. and keep working on the project "keeping the world on track" because we've got metrics to hit! In short I think probably people realized early on in various other divisions of the big world organization that this was probably the China divisions fault - that is to say an actual 'fuck-up' and not just an accident of nature - and it was just useful to pretend it wasn't their fault until at such a point that things were reasonably back on track and then some reports can be filed indicating which divisions in the company suck and which are super cool divisions to be working at. I'm probably a cynical type of guy.
Giorgi 3y ago
ooh, this goes against hacker news hivemind about virus origins being of a natural causes, watch their mental gymnastics as they try to burry everything that contradicts their idea.

685 points by larsiusprime 3y ago

These articles go on a bit. There is a good summary of the science evidence for a lab leak from on twitter from Richard H. Ebright (Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers): https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1567569810745356289 https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1567569810745356289 that was from Sept 22. Since then we've had >They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa. in the recent Times article https://archive.is/zRoAn https://archive.is/zRoAn and the names of the researchers, Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu, in this article. It's all looking quite likely that this is the source, though further information will probably come out.

LatteLazy 3y ago

Erg, more bullshit nonsense that takes 3 minutes to produce and 3h to refute.

jleyank 3y ago

There seems to have been covid cases in Europe in last-quarter 2019, which suggests it was there or brought there before the outbreak that made the news in 2020. Doesn’t rule out leaks and crossovers, just moves them elsewhere or else when. Viral pneumonia was occurring, symptoms turned out to match covid and nobody was saving or testing blood samples. Outside of a few places in Dec. But people had aggressive, surprising lung problems that didn’t present flu symptoms. Maybe that was a pre-covid leak or they’re incorrect when the leak occurred. It also hit the initial sites very quickly, which suggests very contagious or already present in some form. To put my tin foil hat on, was omicron the “antidote” virus that was deliberately released to put the fire out? It was very different genetically and even more contagious.

hammock 3y ago
The Wuhan Games, at which 10,000 athletes from the worlds' armies participated, wrapped October 27, 2019, after which people left Wuhan to return to their homes all over the world, including to Italy where many of the first cases outside of Wuhan occured https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  WIV took down their database and upgraded their ventilation circa September 2019. [0] Event 201 wargame about just such a disease was held in October 2019 — where people “role played” many of the policies we saw enacted. [1] Trump signed for flu vaccine research in September 2019, developing new technologies and an influenza task force. [2] I’m sure that’s all just coincidence. [0] - https://news.yahoo.com/wuhan-lab-air-circulation-systems-135007775.html https://news.yahoo.com/wuhan-lab-air-circulation-systems-135... [1] - https://centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/tabletop-exercises/event-201-pandemic-tabletop-exercise https://centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/tabletop-exerci... [2] - https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-09-24/pdf/2019-20804.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-09-24/pdf/2019-2...
  - Izkata 3y ago
    > Event 201 wargame about just such a disease was held in October 2019 — where people “role played” many of the policies we saw enacted. On that one, remember how monkeypox seemed to come out of nowhere in early 2022? In early 2021 there was a similar pandemic scenario for monkeypox, and the scenario's in-game start date was only about a week off of when it started in the real world.
- jvm___ 3y ago
  So the plot of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six comes true, release a virus at the Olympics closing ceremonies and it will spread globally almost immediately.
baja_blast 3y ago
I heard from a friend from Taiwan that there were rumors of some kinda of virus spreading around by mid 2019 in China. The thing is if there were blood samples showing a much earlier date of covid spreading in China there is zero chance we would ever hear about it. It is also worth noting that the region hit hardest in Italy early on just so happens to be a huge textile manufacturing center with a huge Chinese population.
- sp0rk 3y ago
  > It is also worth noting that the region hit hardest in Italy early on just so happens to be a huge textile manufacturing center with a huge Chinese population. If you're talking about Prato, your information is completely wrong.
- Izkata 3y ago
  > It is also worth noting that the region hit hardest in Italy early on There was a paper released early/mid 2020 that was attempting to group the virus into various strains (this was before the "variant" terminology emerged), that attempted to identify changes in the virus's behavior and classified different mutations with things like L, LL, and M. For the most part it was either ignored or ridiculed as being too early, that there hasn't been enough time for mutations that change its behavior to have accumulated. Thing is, I distinctly remember it identified one mutation that seemed to originate in Italy, was trackable as it reached the US East coast, and every place it spread to had a spike in deaths that coincided with when it overtook the previous variants in prevalence for that location.
ren_engineer 3y ago
I remember the sudden freak out in the media about vaping in late 2019 because young people were being hospitalized with lung damage. Have to wonder if that was actually covid and the vapes were just coincidence, they'd been around for years at that point so them all of the sudden having media hysteria around them was weird to me at the time https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/10/health/vaping-outbreak-2019-explainer/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/10/health/vaping-outbreak-2019-e...
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  there was a new chemical introduced into the black market supply chain in 2019 causing lung injury
- Symmetry 3y ago
  That was found to be black market vape cartridges using vitamin E acetate, which you don't want in your lungs. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/severe-lung-disease.html https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/s...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
nso 3y ago
I got ill in a way I'd never really gotten ill before, in November/December 2019 -- after having travelled from Mexico to Norway. I was barely out of bed for the month I was in the country. I thought it might be dengue, but one of the first days there I got checked out in the hospital -- and they said I had an unidentified viral infection, but not dengue. After being released I got incredibly ill, but not much you can do with viral infections anyways so I just rode it out. Having had Covid 3 times since it was named, I've got a pretty good grip on what it feels like -- and I've many times wondered if I didn't have it back then in 2019 as well, as the symptoms lined up too well.
- NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
  I got a worse-than-ever-experienced respiratory infection after a trip to Europe arounds Thanksgiving 2019 as well: I wasn't well enough to ski even a month later and had mysterious lung-scarring on my X-rays which in retrospect looks very much like an early Covid infection too.
- duderific 3y ago
  I had a really bad cold-like illness in late November 2019, which left behind a severe sore throat which lasted about three weeks. It was notable because it wouldn't go away, to the point where I went to both urgent care and my primary doctor on separate occasions (I'm not one to go to the doctor unless I really need to.) Both times they took a look at my throat, proclaimed it to be a viral infection, and sent me on my way. I too have wondered if I actually had Covid, but nobody knew how to diagnose it at that time.
  - nso 3y ago
    Well to be fair it wasn't known at the time
midnightauro 3y ago
I suddenly developed “exercise asthma” in March 2020 and was told it was too early to have been COVID. But I had been pretty sick in January and had lots of contact with the public at work. I always wonder. Maybe it did just suddenly develop, I was 30 that year. And sure, I’m kinda fatass, though I was working out hard at that point. But my tin foil hat still fits me and sometimes I consider it might have a point.
jsnell 3y ago
That theory is total nonsense. Covid was extremely infectious, and had severe symptoms. It could not have stayed under the radar for that long. It was also unlikely to fizzle out: once a country had one case, it would turn into thousands of cases within a month. If Covid had been circulating that widely that early, the trajectory of the disase in December 2019-March 2020 would have been totally different. There would not have been an initial outbreak in Wuhan followed by individual cases popping up in various other countries, followed by a gradual buildup of cases in those countries. By the time we got a test, there would have been hundreds of thousands ill all over the world, all being detected as cases simultaneously. It would have been impossible to e.g. trace cases to specific super spreader events, because there would have been so many sources of infections. Basically none of what happened would have been the expected outcome if Covid actually was spreading in the wild that early. All the reports of early Covid cases outside of China are just the expected false positives from tests that don't have 100% specificity (which is pretty much anything other than full sequencing).
- jleyank 3y ago
  There were no tests except for blood samples preserved by hospitals. People are referring to symptoms that were different than flu, viral pneumonia and (looking back) showed similarity to covid. Might have been a different viral pneumonia as it didn’t respond to antibiotics. Recall exponential growth starts slowly and it was flu season. https://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/press-release/2020/study-suggests-possible-new-covid-19-timeline-in-the-us.html https://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/press-rele... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0300891620974755 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03008916209747... https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00716-2 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00716-2
  - jsnell 3y ago
    I am not talking of tests in 2019. I'm talking of the tests done in 2020 after, well, tests became available. If Covid had been growing exponentially in Europe for the latter part of 2019, the tests would have found massive amounts of infections. They didn't. Likewise the after the fact findings of antibodies in blood samples would show an exponential growth. Neither of the studies you linked to shows that. The Just look at the numbers from that Italy study. They're claiming that 10% of their sample had already had Covid on September 2019. "Exponential growth starts slowly" doesn't explain that. But somehow that went unnoticed and caused no detectable blip in the mortality rate, while a few months later an outbreak that could be tracked to a single event decimated the elderly in Lombardy. It's noteworthy that neither of these studies tried analyzing blood samples from say the winter of 2018 to establish a definite baseline. But if they'd done that, they probably wouldn't have much of an article to write. "We found the expected level of false positives from this test" isn't exactly newsworthy.

indigodaddy 3y ago

Isn’t the gist of this fairly old news? Or did they just not have the names before?

larsiusprime 3y ago
Being able to tie it specifically to the lab this concretely, by identifying the first patients by name, and having that (allegedly) from US government officials, is all new information, AFAIK.
- indigodaddy 3y ago
  Yes, this would seem to be a bit of a game-changer on the question. Too bad this appears it’s going to be buried within the HN algo and likely won’t be reported upon seriously in MSM either..
  - dang 3y ago
    It spent 12 hours on HN's front page.
hwillis 3y ago
Very. This was put out in the state department Jan 2021, 2.5 years ago: https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan-institute-of-virology/index.html https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan... > The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.
- sixQuarks 3y ago
  You’re very giddy to try to brush this under the rug. The truth is that big tech and Fauci colluded to suppress the lab leak theory, there are leaked emails that prove it. YouTube and Twitter were censoring and demonetizing channels that would talk about the lab leak theory. What do you have to say about that?

indigodaddy 3y ago

‘Said Metzl, “Had US government officials including Dr. Fauci stated from day one that a COVID-19 research-related origin was a very real possibility, and made clear that we had little idea what viruses were being held at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, what work was being done there, and who was doing that work, our national and global conversations would have been dramatically different. The time has come for a full accounting.”’ Seems doubtful that Daszak (and possibly Fauci) had little idea what was going on in that lab..

ajkjk 3y ago
Why?
- tim333 3y ago
  Re Daszak knowing what was going on, he was a main funder of the lab and a drinking buddy with Shi the head researcher there. He also wrote a proposal on inserting a cleavage site into a coronavirus in pretty much the way you would have to to make covid (defuse grant proposal which was leaked, not revealed voluntarily). Asked what was going on at WIV he's said stuff more like sorry I can't say as we have a confidentiality agreement rather than no idea.
- mandmandam 3y ago
  It would take a long-form article to clearly enumerate all of the reasons with citations, but long story short, the pair of them were caught lying over and over again the past few years. For example, Daszak's paper in the Lancet claiming the virus was almost certainly of natural origin was used as the basis for justifying the censorship of tens or hundreds of millions of posts. He failed to declare his conflict of interest, as did something like 25 out of the 26 other authors. This was a broad failure among academia and news, as his reasoning in the paper was specious. Fauci was caught telling fibs about his beliefs on natural origin as well, with a private position that it was quite likely. He also lied about funds sent to Wuhan, and the type of research they were doing.
scoofy 3y ago
Also... I mean, unless I've created a false memory, I specifically remember that the discussion at the time was about a the virus literally being a bio-weapon, and not actually the entirely plausible, accidental escape of a virus. I've always had a completely open mind about it, even if experts have repeatedly suggested that it's plausible, but unlikely. Those prattling on about how "people called us crazy" that it was a WIV lab leak seem to completely misremember what was actually being discussed in April-May of 2020, and also seem to be trying to score political points in American politics, when it seems very obvious that the CCP should take the lion's share of any blame regarding any lack of transparency.

AmenBreak 3y ago

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kneebonian 3y ago

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jmclnx 3y ago

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salad-tycoon 3y ago
Removed at the behest of powerful government groups and advertising agencies/pharma companies. Listen to The Zuck on lex fridman admitting (paraphrasing) “yeah we got some stuff wrong, censored things we shouldn’t have when they later turned out to be evidence based.” I believe this ,”very very minor”, admission of major guilt is in the first half. Or the Twitter files and FBI offices in social media etc. or the Wikipedia bias and astroturfing.
treeman79 3y ago
Facebook just admitted that the government was asking them to censor information that was, in fact true. https://youtu.be/ixCKd8lUrKw https://youtu.be/ixCKd8lUrKw
- janalsncm 3y ago
  If that is shocking to you I would suggest reading up on the Pentagon Papers: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers The Snowden leaks are in the same vein.

mc32 3y ago

So… finally what lots of people were claiming but got censored on social media as well as mainstream media during the pandemic is being acknowledged and verified by the government. Follow up. Given statements to congress by government officials to Congress, under oath, that would contradict this conclusion, will there be repercussions for misleading the public, lawmakers and the scientific community? PS: It was never a credible bio-weapon attack (people are now trying to conflate this to instill FUD in people's memories --go do a google search with date ranges). Bio-weapons are terrible weapons of war. They are likely to affect the target as well as the deployer. For the nonbelievers of Censorship, read up on Matt Taibbi's reporting or read some other media than usual: https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-covid-censorship-machine-social-media-facebook-meta-executive-rob-flaherty-free-speech-google-11673203704?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-covid-censorship-ma...

hwillis 3y ago
"finally"? This was put out in the state department Jan 2021, 2.5 years ago: https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan-institute-of-virology/index.html https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan... > The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
api 3y ago
I recall reading credible scientists talking about a lab leak from day one, and I always considered it a possibility. Yet many of the people pushing it on social media were pushing it as a 100% certainty and even that it was some kind of intentional bio-weapon attack. The people getting banned for this were conspiritainment grifters and people pushing fascist politics. The most effective way to cover something up is to have Alex Jones and Steve Bannon talk about it. If Fauci really is running some horrible conspiracy maybe he's paying these people to talk about it to make sure nobody takes the idea seriously. Then there were the people pushing the Ukraine bioweapons nonsense, which is a transparent Russian attempt to copy Bush II's "WMDs in Iraq" bullshit.

hwillis 3y ago

Note that this is NOT the Wuhan CDC, which is the building across the river from the wet market. They did not do any research there. This building is ~10 miles south, well outside the main city. https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology&params=30_22_35_N_114_15_45_E_type:landmark_region:CN-42 https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Wuhan_Ins... The fact that researchers were sick with flu-like symptoms has been openly stated by the US for a long time. This was put out in the state department Jan 2021, 2.5 years ago: https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan-institute-of-virology/index.html https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan... > The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. Here's a good post that outlines the frankly huge amount of evidence against the WIV being involved: https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/the-case-against-the-lab-leak-theory-f640ae1c3704 https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/the-case-against-the-... > Based on number of visitors, Worobey estimated the odds at only 1 in 10,000 that the market would be the first superspreading event in Wuhan. > Although it didn’t receive a lot of traffic, the market was one of only 4 places selling wild animals in Wuhan. It’s one of the most likely places for a wildlife spillover. > As we’ll see later, there may actually have been two jumps from animals to people at the market. Now we’re talking about odds of 1 in 100 million, that the virus made it from the lab to the market twice but showed up nowhere else in Wuhan.

onethought 3y ago
Which still doesn’t really draw the line of how an outbreak occurred at the wet market. Also common seasonal illness isn’t exactly a smoking gun
- MarkMarine 3y ago
  not really typical for healthy researchers in their 30s to end up in the hospital with seasonal illness symptoms though.
  - 3y ago

squalo 3y ago

[flagged]

mvdtnz 3y ago
Play the ball, not the player.
- yellow_postit 3y ago
  If the player has been known to use a weighted bat?
  - mvdtnz 3y ago
    Weigh the bat.
    - squalo 3y ago
      I'm more inclined to hit him with it
    - userbinator 3y ago
      ...and quarantine it. (Sorry, could not resist.)
- derstander 3y ago
  This is a nice sentiment but it just doesn’t hold up in the real world. I’m making this statement generally as opposed to about Matt Taibbi: I don’t really follow him so I’m not evaluating him personally, just your statement in general. I have a finite amount of time. I don’t have time to “play the ball” given how many balls are out there. Particularly if the player has proven to be a low signal-to-noise ratio source in the past. I even do this with colleagues as well as media sources. I give people the benefit of the doubt in the beginning, but if you’ve got a track record of not having useful information for me, then I will disregard what you have to say. I’m not going to be mean about it. I might even try to give a heads up about why I think you’re not correct. But I value my time and eventually it’s just not worth the expenditure. So no, I’m not going to play the ball: I’ll play the player if their track record is poor. Am I going to miss out on occasion? Sure. But I just don’t have infinite time so I use heuristics and accept imperfection. There’s another dimension of this discussion about sphere of awareness versus sphere of influence and the utility (or lack thereof) when the former is much larger than the latter. But I will sum my position up by saying that I mostly try to align them.

rovolo 3y ago

The title says "sickened by Covid-19", but the text says "developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019".

mlyle 3y ago
Yes. We don't have swabs that we can perform PCR on. On the other hand, this report, if true: - Sickened about a month before COVID-19 was formally detected - In close proximity to where COVID-19 was formally detected - While doing research on gain of function in coronaviruses. This is strongly suggestive circumstantial evidence.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  Would love to have the denominator.
- onethought 3y ago
  Close proximity is a bit of a stretch. This shows people catching colds in winter. The rest is speculation
  - mlyle 3y ago
    > This shows people catching colds in winter. And hospitalized? That's a bit more uncommon than catching a cold.
    - onethought 3y ago
      No it isn’t.
- mort96 3y ago
  It's much less impressive when you add: - with symptoms associated with common seasonal illness Not saying it wasn't COVID-19. Just saying that claiming it was is a bit of a stretch.
  - 3y ago

drcongo 3y ago

I don't know who the other two are, but I sure as hell don't believe a word Matt Taibbi writes after his farcical lack of fact checking in "the twitter files".

jb12 3y ago

> "If you knew that this was likely a lab-enhanced pathogen, there are so many things you could have done differently" I'm curious - if we knew in March 2020 that covid came from a lab, what _would_ we have done differently?

usefulcat 3y ago
If it came from a lab, then we need to seriously re-evaluate the risk-reward ratio for such research.
LatteLazy 3y ago
Literally nothing.
ChemSpider 3y ago
If the lab leak story is correct, the WIV people knew somewhere inbetween September...November 2019 that the virus leaked.
- onethought 3y ago
  That’s not true, a leak could occur without them realising. Getting cold and flu symptoms in winter wouldn’t raise too many suspicions. Given they didn’t start any containment procedures either they didn’t know or that’s not how it happened
  - Natsu 3y ago
    The article doesn't just say "people got sick" it says that researchers were hospitalized. That doesn't sound like "normal seasonal illness" to me.
    - onethought 3y ago
      Then you haven’t spent time in China and realise they use their hospital system very differently. Often people will go to hospitals for minor fevers.

nidhalbt 3y ago

There's a problem, covid was in Italy as early as September 2019. (see Dr John Campbell's video on this) Cases in November 2019 aren't early, it started probably six months earlier.

andrewinardeer 3y ago
I was at Madrid airport in June 2019 and waiting in the long line for border control to leave there was a man who was displaying extreme flu-like symptoms. Coughing, sweating, pale as a ghost. Mind you, this is the height of summer. Even back then, prior to the pandemic, I actively avoided him because he looked really unwell. I know there is no way of knowing and at best it is a fanciful mental exercise, but I think to myself 'what if'?
dwater 3y ago
"John Lorimer Campbell is an English YouTuber and retired nurse educator known for his videos about the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially, the videos received praise, but they later veered into misinformation. He has been criticised for suggesting COVID-19 deaths have been over-counted, repeating false claims about the use of ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment, and providing misleading commentary about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines. ... He holds a diploma in nursing from the University of London, a BSc in biology from the Open University, an MSc in health science from the University of Lancaster, and a Ph.D. in nursing from the University of Bolton. He received the Ph.D. for his work on developing methods of teaching via digital media such as online videos." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Campbell_(YouTuber) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Campbell_(YouTuber) For anyone wondering who this is and if he is a reliable source.
- xdavidliu 3y ago
  agreed that that is absolutely not a legit source. I was curious so I googled, and found something more legit-sounding: https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-timing/researchers-find-coronavirus-was-circulating-in-italy-earlier-than-thought-idUSKBN27W1J2 https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim... > ROME (Reuters) - The new coronavirus was circulating in Italy in September 2019, a study by the National Cancer Institute (INT) of the Italian city of Milan shows, signaling that it might have spread beyond China earlier than thought.

deleted 3y ago

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subsubzero 3y ago

Here are two good articles as well that document the lab leak(for further reading): https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-grant-darpa/ https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra... and https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-nonprofit-at-the-center-of-the-lab-leak-controversy https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-no...

hwillis 3y ago
https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/the-case-against-the-lab-leak-theory-f640ae1c3704 https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/the-case-against-the-...

local_crmdgeon 3y ago

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culopatin 3y ago
It’s silly to think that international relationships are that simple.
- local_crmdgeon 3y ago
  Are you implying that Dr. Fauci might have lied for political gain????
  - culopatin 3y ago
    I’m implying that dr fauci doesn’t operate in a vacuum all by himself talking to the public.
deleted 3y ago
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LarsDu88 3y ago

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MarkMarine 3y ago

It's pretty incredible to see the US Government shift around these conflicting narratives, moving toward (apparently 3 letter agency by agency) this lab leak origin. Especially considering the vilification of anyone (including the president at the time) for saying things that were in this vein. I think they owe us a complete release of the data they have and an actual assessment, from the government, explained by the head of the government... millions of people were directly effected by this. I think we're owed the truth. This method, where there are leaks or unsourced articles, but the 3 letter agencies disagree with the probable origin, it's impossible for a regular person to decipher. Maybe that is the point, but it's a really shit situation.

mindslight 3y ago
> considering the vilification of anyone (including the president at the time) for saying things that were in this vein It's very weird that you frame this as if the vilification including the President was an indicator of it being unreasonable, when the actual situation was that the President himself was one of the main drivers of why this topic couldn't be discussed rationally. Once the conversation is hijacked by a hollow suit blowhard, the only way to get back to rationality is to soundly reject the broken clock, disregarding that it might coincidentally be correct.
- MarkMarine 3y ago
  Before I get painted as a Trump supporter and therefore blind to my team, I’m not. Don’t support him, and when listening to him yell about China virus and then listening to people calmly say that was racism, I went with the calm people. But the man did get the PDB every day. Maybe he heard some of this intelligence and made some leaps to suit his purpose. But if we were all lied to about the origin, our family and friends died because of this, and xenophobia or racism was used as a shield to deflect criticism from the people and research techniques that got us into this mess… that isn’t something you just handwave away. There are hollow suit blowhards hijacking every avenue of conversation around every important topic, right now. That research mechanism, gain of function or splicing together viruses… it’s being done again. To say that we have to reject what the blowhard says even if they are right about something, I can’t buy that. If this is true, that research is too dangerous and needs to be stopped and treated like nuclear weapons, because it is.

muglug 3y ago

[flagged]

Willish42 3y ago
Thank you for saving me some clicks to figure out who this guy is. I was a bit skeptical about how sensationalized the article is relative to the substantive content of his sources
stainablesteel 3y ago
in my experience, a pure reputation destruction post is generally non-credible, and you posted an establishment media interview on someone who supports twitter: of course they have a bone to pick. for the sake of honest conversation, can you list what conspiracy theories you're referring to? because the last few conspiracy theories i can remember somehow all turned out to be true. so i'm really concerned with what is truthful here, i hope you can help. edit: i'm even more genuinely interested now because i was initially rapidly downvoted, but all i'm seeing in that interview is the tv host interrupting matt every time he tries to answer a question, this is so weird to me.
- donohoe 3y ago
  Not really. You can easily find this information. Perhaps start here? https://thebanter.substack.com/p/matt-taibbis-puff-piece-on-tucker https://thebanter.substack.com/p/matt-taibbis-puff-piece-on-...
  - stainablesteel 3y ago
    > there is a chance that the NSA did intercept Carlson’s attempts to secure an interview with Vladimir Putin they did, this isn't insane to believe either, they did this to jeff bezos too. US intelligence excels at signal intelligence, this isn't a conspiracy. it then goes on to make even less sense: > Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the Agency duh, but obviously putin is, why are they deflecting? this is low quality reasoning that fails to address any meat of the arguments. plus, what does any of this have to do with matt? and covid? its like every time i ask a question there's more and more deflections away from the original topic. its so strange.

TipiKoivisto 3y ago

Here another plausible scenario how it went down, which follows the same plot: https://youtu.be/mfLycFHBsro https://youtu.be/mfLycFHBsro

boomboomsubban 3y ago

Why name the researchers that got sick? Even if one of them is the source for COVID, which really isn't clear from this, I don't think they deserve the harassment articles like this are bound to cause.

kneel 3y ago
You don't think causing a global pandemic and millions of death from dangerously careless research deserves criticism?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- boomboomsubban 3y ago
  Criticism? Maybe. Harassment from billions? No.
lamontcg 3y ago
Because that's really all the information the article has. You boil it all down and the article is just rehashing everything for the hundredth time, along with claiming "US government sources say" and dropping the three names to make it appear to be credible. There's no details about how these government sources know this. It also seems to be a rehashing of a New York Times story from a year or so ago which also claimed that there were three workers that were sick (without having any details) and was written by the same journalist that wrote the Iraq/Niger Yellow cake Uranium story back around 2002 that led us into the War in Iraq (and the same plot line that led to the Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson/Dick Cheney affair).

Imnimo 3y ago

It is hard to tell from the writing - are the sources claiming that they know the researchers were sick with Covid-19 specifically, or are they saying they know the researchers with sick with something, and that they had symptoms consistent with covid-19? We go from: >Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. To: >not only do we know there were WIV scientists who had developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019, Is it Covid, or Covid-like?

tim333 3y ago
At that point there were not good diagnostics for covid as it was probably brand new. The supposition that it was covid is based on other evidence like them doing research on coronaviruses.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rightbyte 3y ago
I can't make sense of this article. It is a bit rambling and seems to mix quotes from different times. "Politicians, scientists, journalists, and amateur researchers for years now have zeroed in on the possibility that Covid-19 may have resulted from U.S.-funded gain-of-function research conducted in China." And the authors leave it at that. Maybe some references to articles would be nice? Or should I just trust their meta-analysis or what.

arisAlexis 3y ago

I don't understand how long it got for humanity as a whole to see the elephant. New virus, research center close by, Chinese denying but not letting investigation. It's like seeing your your husband exiting a brothel but still need proof he cheated.

croes 3y ago
There were stranger coincidences in the past, and China always denies an investigation, so it's nothing special in this case. Especially with Trump as president and we all remember the proofs of the WMDs in Iraq. BTW there are multiple reasons to enter a brothel without cheating, they need electricians and plumbers too. According to you they all are proven cheaters. >Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. >When a source was asked how certain they were that these were the identities of the three WIV scientists who developed symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, we were told, “100%” That isn't the same as saying one of the three was Patient Zero.
- arisAlexis 3y ago
  "they need electricians and plumbers too. According to you they all are proven cheaters" Humanity acted like its stupid and a conspiracy to ask if this man is anything else than a plumber. I mean if you see someone exiting a brothel and the first thing you think is that he is an electrician, there is some problem with logical thinking there. It's not that there is 0% chance. It's not not the default. Our default was that he is a plumber which should have been immensely less probable.
isitmadeofglass 3y ago
[dead]
epicureanideal 3y ago
> It's like seeing your your husband exiting a brothel but still need proof he cheated. But it happened to be a Chinese brothel, so if you accuse him of cheating, you'll be called an ignorant, xenophonic, scapegoat-seeking racist.

euix 3y ago

I am really interested in the social-political dimension of this. Was the initial hypothesis of a lab leak suppressed during the initial part of the pandemic primarily due to Western government's fear of a diplomatic breakdown (like Russia) with China? The economies are far more interdependent than compared to Russia and there is a far more economically important Chinese diaspora in the West. What would it take to get a honest investigation within China? Presumably not under the current regime - if it were true, the magnitude of the disaster would be 100x what Chernobyl was for the Soviet Union, it wouldn't just be an accident at that point. Would it totally legitimize the Chinese state in the eyes of its people and the world? And for that reason, could we ever expect a honest accounting? Too much blood (literal and metaphorical) has been spilled and with the lockdowns, vaccine mandates, passports, school closures, etc and everything else that has happened, most elite institutions, state actors, businesses, media, corporations have become complicit in some way in abuses, lies, deliberate obfuscation of one type or another. It feels like a breakpoint in history to me.

sva_ 3y ago
> I am really interested in the social-political dimension of this. Was the initial hypothesis of a lab leak suppressed during the initial part of the pandemic primarily due to Western government's fear of a diplomatic breakdown (like Russia) with China? The economies are far more interdependent than compared to Russia and there is a far more economically important Chinese diaspora in the West. I wonder to what extent the hypothesis has been shutdown because the people who were considered to be qualified to make that assessment are interested in the continuation of gain-of-function research. > What would it take to get a honest investigation within China? Presumably not under the current regime You answered it yourself, impossible under the CCP. It seems that they convinced their population that the virus has actually emerged somewhere in the west, and that was the end of it for them.
dirtyid 3y ago
What would it take to get a honest investgation within US? The fundemental issue is why would PRC entertain US lab leak propaganda narrative? Let alone submit to basically weapons inspection tier scrutiny that no sane sovereign would permit. Keep in mind "lab leak" hypothesis was conjectured by PRC netizens along with US Fort Detrick lab influenza and Wuhan military games conspiracy theories. Obviously US politicians and "intelligence" would conveniently converge on the theory that looks bad for PRC. Is US going to cooperate to address the other PRC conspiracy theories and let WHO investigate USAMRIID? The realistic answer is covid will become distant memory and origin will be relegated to conjecture based on domestic politics.

AnonCoward42 3y ago

This information slipped over 2 years ago (probably right at the beginning). Wiesendanger did a study and referenced that a lab worker was suspected as patient zero¹ as a hint. ¹:https://www.uni-hamburg.de/newsroom/presse/2021/pm8.html https://www.uni-hamburg.de/newsroom/presse/2021/pm8.html (German, sorry)

_aleph2c_ 3y ago

From the top comment of the article: “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not today.” Apoorva Mandavilli, "science" reporter for the New York Times.

mullingitover 3y ago

Unless someone has specimen samples from the sick WIV scientists, this doesn't really prove anything. Nasty respiratory viruses with Covid-like symptoms aren't actually that rare, and there's a lot of overlap between a bad respiratory infection and a mild Covid infection. I've talked to numerous people in the US who swore they had the full checklist of Covid symptoms well before the November 2019 date they're talking about in this article, but these claims are not borne out by the observed data in viral surveillance. It's really unfortunate that there isn't some kind of rigorous global pathogen surveillance program that's regularly sampling the world's population and doing sequencing for novel pathogens. The only reason we discovered Covid in the US early on was because the Seattle Flu Study kinda broke the rules and went back through their samples to test for Covid when they weren't technically allowed to do it. Ideally we'd have global wastewater surveillance as well as individual anonymized sample gathering. It sounds expensive, which is why nobody wants to do it, but Covid really shows how badly it's needed.

swang 3y ago
a close family member swore they got covid at CES 2020. they went to vegas and came back real sick for a couple of days. i remember in 2020 or so they were also talking about covid being in the sewage in some european city (i think in italy? and/or spain?) but my assumption was they were detecting things that were also common in other influenza strains.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ipqk 3y ago
  I know a bunch of NYCers that swore they got covid in Jan 2020, but it's both mathematically impossible for all of them to have had it based on the circulating numbers at the time, and then when they actually got Covid in the coming months/years they changed their tune.
  - taeric 3y ago
    Oddly, I assumed I had it early in the waves. Never got a positive test, as folks weren't testing back then. Finally had our first positive test this year. And whatever I had at the start was way way worse than when I had covid. Such that I can understand a lot of folks being very confused on all of this.

cmpb 3y ago

Obviously, we should try to figure it out and learn from our mistakes, increase security, etc., but what accountability can we really expect from knowing that the pandemic started due to a lab leak? Accountability is almost meaningless compared to the scale of the total global loss. I'm reminded of a line from an episode of Star Trek TNG where a very powerful alien destroys an entire race by thinking them out of existence in a momentary lapse of judgement, and Picard simply says "We're not qualified to be your judges -- we have no law to fit your crime."

geuis 3y ago

I don't trust this article at all. > Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have leaked the pandemic virus. > It is unclear who in the U.S. government had access to the intelligence about the sick WIV workers, how long they had it, and why it was not shared with the public. At absolutely no point in this article are any new "sources" pointed out. The authors make that statement early on so as to make the reader think something new in the article is going to be revealed. Instead we get multiple paragraphs of links to various quotes and suppositions from various people, some of whom were involved in investigating the origins and some who work in the field.

NoGravitas 3y ago
Yeah, reading this to see what the evidence is, it all comes down to "anonymous State Department sources", and some informed speculation from people in the field. I don't actually think an accidental lab leak is all that unlikely, but I'm also not being presented with any evidence for it.
wbsun 3y ago
My sources on the planet Earth say that nowadays this is the way to write news, essays, blogs, podcast videos, and books in order to attract attentions.
letmevoteplease 3y ago
You won't have to wait long for confirmation. The Director of National Intelligence will be required by law to declassify information about the infected researchers on June 18th, including their names, symptoms, date of onset and role at WIV.[1] [1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/619/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/619...
- geuis 3y ago
  Hey that's a cool link. I'm kinda embarrassed to say I didn't know you could track bills like this going through Congress. Thanks for the lead.

dragonelite 3y ago

So the US is going to do a new bioweapon propaganda round...??

fqye 3y ago

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givemeethekeys 3y ago

I keep asking myself, "who gives a shit?". When the virus was first discovered, it was important to pin down who and where Patient zero was. Now? Pure politicking. It isn't even a slow news day!

streptomycin 3y ago
10 million people are dead. I find it hard to believe how anyone could not be at least mildly interested in obtaining more details about the origin of Covid-19, whether it's from the market or the lab or somewhere else.
lmm 3y ago
Figuring out what we did wrong and what we can do better is important. This isn't going to be the last global pandemic.
NotYourLawyer 3y ago
Politicking was spending 2 years calling anyone racist who talked about the lab leak theory. This is just a reaction.
- givemeethekeys 3y ago
  Absolutely. That was politicking too. Almost every PR response from both parties was terribly executed for the entire period.
TMWNN 3y ago
What are the odds that exactly three years ago, your response to the same question was "The experts told us that this was definitely, positively not a lab leak, and anyone who says otherwise is a racist"?

zvmaz 3y ago

In an interview with biologist Richard Lenski (of the famous experiment), the latter discusses controversial research on selecting H5N1 viruses for greater transmissibility and their potential to be airborne viruses that are of public health concern [1]. That was in 2017... I have no definitive opinion on the origin of Sars-Cov-2 (will we know the truth one day?), but I don't think the lab leak theory is crazy. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQr8ldEeO04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQr8ldEeO04

yk 3y ago

> Next week, the Directorate of National Intelligence is expected to release previously classified material, which may include the names of the three WIV scientists who were the likely among the first to be sickened by SARS-CoV-2. Why publish speculation now, instead of publishing when there is actually something to report?

dekhn 3y ago

Somewhere, the gods of propaganda and susceptibility are chortling with delight at how easily even ostensibly smart people can believe things based on very limited data.

HWR_14 3y ago

Can someone please explain to me what difference it makes. AFAIK, no one is claiming this was a bioweapon or intentional assault. So what difference could it possibly make where COVID originated from. I think the lab leak theory is wrong, but even if it was true I no idea how that should change anything.

NotYourLawyer 3y ago
I’m a lot more interested in how we weren’t allowed to talk about it for a couple years than whether or not it’s ultimately true.
- object-a 3y ago
  The President of the United States was claiming that COVID was engineered in China as early as May 2020. I don't know how someone can claim they weren't allowed to talk about it.
  - parineum 3y ago
    Did he claim that or did he just call it the "China Virus"? Honest question.
    - object-a 3y ago
      https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52496098 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52496098
  - NotYourLawyer 3y ago
    And people called him racist for it. And anyone else who speculated that the obvious, simplest answer might be true was likewise considered racist.
    - HWR_14 3y ago
      No, people called him a racist for things like calling it the Kung Flu, and some of his positions with regard to Chinese (and Asian in general) people and other racist things he did. No one cared about the lab leak theory, or associated it with being racist, until Trump decided to morph it into a dog whistle for racists.

thsksbd 3y ago

Ppl really need to look at the HM history and use the search function to look at disease stories from late '19 early '20. The story was already leaking in December, January

dboreham 3y ago

Interesting that the virus the rest of us contracted subsequently had the property that 80% of those infected didn't know they had it. But that wasn't true for the first few cases?

deleted 3y ago

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kornhole 3y ago

Here is an interview with the author today on this topic. https://youtu.be/moVBjWk-Nww https://youtu.be/moVBjWk-Nww

electrondood 3y ago

[flagged]

leric 3y ago

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berniedurfee 3y ago

> When a source was asked how certain they were… we were told, “100%” That’s not good enough for you? /s

gigel82 3y ago

Yes, and? This was obvious to anyone with a brain since early 2020. Are we going to ask China for reparations?

est 3y ago
WIV doesn't work on its own, and the GoF research was mostly funded by Fauci & NIH

ada1981 3y ago

This is the sort of thing that should bankrupt a country, and they should be required to make up for the damage their negligence inflicted on the world population. The Chinese cannot be trusted with power.

adultSwim 3y ago
This analysis but for the invasion of Iraq
- ada1981 3y ago
  Exactly so.
bagacrap 3y ago
Uhh, what does a random Chinese citizen have to do with the lab leak? Bankrupting a country would mainly punish a bunch of innocent peasants.
- ada1981 3y ago
  You don’t get to have the benefits of a country but not the costs. They can revolt, stop paying taxes, all sorts of things.

jrochkind1 3y ago

So here's the thing, whether covid came from an accident in gain of function research in Wuhan, or whether it's just totally plausible that it did, the correct response is basically the same: Banning gain of function research everywhere. Yeah, including here. It's too dangerous, whatever scientific benefits to any positive thing that improves lives is not worth it, just stop doing it and demand that everyone else stop doing it. So we pretty much already know enough to know that's what we should do, I wish more people could get interested in demanding it instead of talking about whether or not there's what kind of proof that it did come from that, and trying to sift through the multi-source competing disinformation. Plausible is enough, let's try to keep it from happening in the future whether it's for the first or second time who cares?

djkivi 3y ago

[flagged]

55555 3y ago

Why aren't countries/people suing China in civil court for money? Isn't this going to happen? Has anyone tried?

rdtsc 3y ago

> “Ever since I put out my [May 2020] preprint [research paper] saying that an accidental lab origin was possible, I was criticized as a conspiracy theorist,” said Chan. “If this info had been made public in May of 2020, I doubt that many in the scientific community and the media would have spent the last three years raving about a raccoon dog or pangolin in a wet market.” That was so bizarre and strange. Both the shadiness of Chinese government and the complete confidence of many US scientists that the origin was definitely not related to the lab. Anyone who suspected anything was just a conspiracy theorist. I can understand skepticism one way or another, and a desire to learn. I thought, well these scientists who spend years researching and conducting lengthy studies, somehow immediately new with 100% confidence it definitely had nothing to do with the bio-lab. It's like someone waving their hands in front of a building with smoke coming out and saying "nothing to see here, look the other way, please".

heyoni 3y ago
No one was hand waving anything. There were studies looking at several attributes of the virus’s genome that concluded (not definitively, nothing ever is) that the virus was probably naturally occurring. Some looked at base pair distributions (some GC to AT ratios are required for stability), others looked for sites where enzymes could splice and whether they were commonly found in this species while others looked for any obviously transplanted. Of all the studies I’m aware of, which isn’t all of them, there is no smoking gun. This isn’t a burning building and that analogy is incorrect. No weird GFP producing genes or any common genetic markers commonly found in lab made species were found anywhere. This isn’t to say it wasn’t a lab leak or that there aren’t opposing theories as to whether such and such base pair distribution is considered normal…but the evidence just isn’t there.

etempleton 3y ago

It has always seemed to me far too coincidental that a lab studying coronaviruses was located at the epicenter of a coronavirus outbreak. Sometimes there are coincidences, but if you are looking for the most obvious answer it has always been right there and I never understood why it was dismissed so easily. With that being said, I don’t buy into any conspiracy theories about this being intentional or anything else. There were poor controls and a virus mutated.

eftychis 3y ago

Instead of replying in spirit the same message to various comments here, I generalized the skepticism in one. To people commenting that "experts had repeatedly suggested that it is unlikely to be a leak." Experts, that is people studying in biochemistry/biology/virology labs were and will always be saying that it is likely. Working in such a lab without accidents would be a historical miracle. That is one of the reasons working actively with and producing bioweapons was "ditched" effectively by a lot of countries including the U.S. (Or at least I hope.) I suggest starting with the wikipedia rabbithole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_warfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_warfare Let us be clear: Political announcers were saying it is unlikely for diplomatic/cover-our/their-asses reasons. Recall/research the USSR/Russian anthrax in Yekaterinburg of 1979. To this day it is a closed off area. No person that has worked in a lab would say "unlikely..." And to top it off in a summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity... Check the 2004-04 event. P.S. Literally, we had a known leak in Taiwan in 2021 while they were trying to study the SARS-COV-2 virus.

waterhouse 3y ago
And SARS 1 itself was leaked from a lab four times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS#Laboratory_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS#Laboratory_accidents

lazyeye 3y ago

Ockhams razor.

lazyeye 3y ago

I wonder what the long-term consequences are of western forums being flooded with people advocating CCP talking points whilst all counter-CCP arguments are blocked within China for everyone. What is going to be the impact over time?

wly_cdgr 3y ago

Kinda moot tbh. Virology lab? Wet market? China is responsible either way.

Guthur 3y ago

I'm still a little baffled at what people believe will change if anything is proven about the origin of covid-19. It's indisputable that many governments went well beyond their legal remit in response to the virus, and yet many have silently or openly accepted it. Powerful people will do horrible things and we have little to no way to stop them because the majority of us are weak and passive. We do what we're told and applaud that we were told to do it.

bryanrasmussen 3y ago

I admit when stuff like this comes up I think of the world analogically, the analogy being a big company with lots of divisions (countries, international orgs) working on a big important project "keeping the world on track" Sometimes people make mistakes in the company and you realize this big mistake these people made make our "keeping the world on track" project go over budget this year etc. but hey, mistakes happen (sure we've made mistakes too, but really those idiots over on the AI department really screwed up though, huh right guys hah hah) so we're just going to keep going through it, try to iron over the mistakes, write some documents that hide the mistakes from shareholders etc. and keep working on the project "keeping the world on track" because we've got metrics to hit! In short I think probably people realized early on in various other divisions of the big world organization that this was probably the China divisions fault - that is to say an actual 'fuck-up' and not just an accident of nature - and it was just useful to pretend it wasn't their fault until at such a point that things were reasonably back on track and then some reports can be filed indicating which divisions in the company suck and which are super cool divisions to be working at. I'm probably a cynical type of guy.

Giorgi 3y ago

ooh, this goes against hacker news hivemind about virus origins being of a natural causes, watch their mental gymnastics as they try to burry everything that contradicts their idea.