posted on May 24, 2021 08:34 PM by
u/ProfColdheart
49
u/Epistaxis36 pointsat 1621902544.000000
I don’t understand why it’s so inconceivable to all the conspiracy
theorists that the Xi government would engage in a thorough coverup if
the virus came from a zoonotic transfer at the wet market as expected. I
think they’re underestimating the CCP’s insecurity about bad news and
saving face.
Most of them aren't interested in what's true, they're interested in what serves their agenda, or confirms their prejudices.
If China is putting one over on them, that would be bad, so exposing the deception would be a win. If China's not doing that, it doesn't really matter as long as it can't be proved either way - accuse them anyway. These people don't recognize any downside to that, since they don't think in terms of concepts like international relations - their worldview is much more simplistic than that.
The early missteps in Jan 2020 were pretty epic and plenty to be embarrassed about!
China really fucked us over. There is evidence suggesting they might been fighting covid all fall, and they basically suppressed evidence.
Also people underestimate the extent to which the Australian
parliament is run by narcissistic incompetent fuckups who will say any
shit about China to scare up votes from their racist base.
Maybe the virus came from a lab. Maybe there is enough circumstantial
indicators that starting an independent investigation would be
warranted.
Australia would still say the same shit if there wasn’t
because Australia’s domestic politics runs on fossil fuels, Rupert
Murdoch, and xenophobia.
> Also people underestimate the extent to which the Australian parliament is run by narcissistic incompetent fuckups
Oh, so like the British Parliament? Or the US Congress?
Closer to the UK than the USA.
Where the USA Congress is awash with various big money special interest groups and corporations throwing money at campaigns and political lobbying, in Australia its literally like three people - Gina Reinhart, Rupert Murdoch, and Clive Palmer.
Where the UK at least makes token fig leaf dog whistles to racism, in Australia its a foghorn. I mean, they literally had an offshore concentration camp for asylum seekers. (Contrast with the USA's on-shore ICE concentration camps i suppose)
Anything that Boris or Trump did, Oz did 4 years earlier, but for lower stakes and on a pettier scale.
I remember when they said ‘it came from a lab some secret service
looked at some phone data and people from the lab did something highly
suspicious gps wise before the breakout’, which later turned out to be
just regular phone movement which had occurred before, and it was about
3 phones only. (So they looked at like 3 phones for over the period of a
month or something else crazy low data, and initially didnt look at the
larger dataset (and im not even sure how they would get this data, iirc
I heard it being discussed on a security podcast somewhere)).
A lot of people who have phds and think they are smart are going to
discover they are not immune to conspiracy theories im afraid.
This pattern is also interesting relevant scientists : ‘could be
manmade we dont know we should keep researching it’ -> non relevant
people ‘there is evidence for it being man made!’ (With Pauls reasoning
here being an example (e: he says lab leak however), there can be other
reasons for a more adversarial relation between Australia and China than
covid lab theory, the article even mentions that China also refuses to
share HIV data for example).
I kinda want to have a discussion about this but it’s frustrating the
subject has become such a culture war issue. I just read this
and I’m still thinking about it. Full disclosure the author did write a
controversial science book however this medium article feels well
presented and well researched.
Does anyone have anything to say? I wasn’t too concerned before but
this piece has made me more curious.
For the record that Nicholas Wade is the same one who wrote a book so racist and misinformed that almost every expert in human evolutionary bio wrote a letter condemning it. Also most of his points about stuff like the furin cleavage site are not correct. [https://twitter.com/K\_G\_Andersen/status/1391507230848032772?s=20](https://twitter.com/K_G_Andersen/status/1391507230848032772?s=20)
Okay thank you. I took a glance at his Wikipedia page but didn’t really do a deep dive. Anyway you could link me more conversations surrounding some of his points? I’m not sure if there’s somewhere online this discussion has been playing out and I’m just not aware of it yet.
I've mostly seen discussion on twitter. I follow Angie Rasmussen, Kristian Andersen, Carl Bergstrom. There are threads like these:
[https://twitter.com/MoNscience/status/1396240581651742724?s=20](https://twitter.com/MoNscience/status/1396240581651742724?s=20)
[https://twitter.com/K\_G\_Andersen/status/1392945446591418371?s=20](https://twitter.com/K_G_Andersen/status/1392945446591418371?s=20)
Personally I haven't seen any convincing, hard evidence that favors any kind of lab leak. At a certain point it is impossible to tell the two apart, but the fact remains that basically every pandemic and epidemic before this has started from natural zoonosis.
If I were a ~~betting man~~ Bayesian, I might consider the fact that all the people who know what the fuck they're talking about seem to agree there isn't any substantial evidence for the lab-leak hypothesis, whereas all the conspiracy theories about it are repeatedly coming from people who are notorious for being wrong about things outside their expertise. I mean, that non-technical fact is at least as compelling as the non-technical fact that the Chinese government is embarrassed.
It is weird seeing so many people trip over themselves to act like the lab leak is particularly likely or on a level playing field as normal zoonosis. Like there's still no evidence supporting it. Keep researching if you want but maybe cool it until real evidence shows up.
Yeah, even if the circumstantial case for a lab leak is really good, all it would tell us is that we should more thoroughly look for hard evidence. Preferably without the ridiculous conflicts of interests that were involved in the previous investigations. (The US investigator for the WHO team was a funder of the wuhan lab)
I don’t think there is much consensus as your comment implies. There are some experts who seem to regard lab leak as more likely than zoonotic transfer.
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-nightly/2021/05/19/experts-weigh-in-on-the-wuhan-lab-leak-hypothesis-492915
As far as I know the three people quoted are not actually experts in this particular area. Two of them have been borderline conspiratorial for much of the discourse. Of course a lab leak might have happened and we can investigated but it is far from the more likely origin and more relevant experts are pretty clear on thats
It's very hard to tell by looking at journalistic reports what is the actual expert consensus, because of the well-known "both sides" bias of even credible media organizations. On the other hand, it does appear to me that there is too much doubt about the origins of the virus to banish the lab-leak hypothesis into the conspiratorial fringe. Some bastions of scientific credibility seem to be at least entertaining the possibility.
here are some pieces by actual experts: response to most recent WHO report: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1, thorough interview with experienced Stanford biologist: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/05/david-relman-on-investigating-origin-of-coronavirus.html.
bottom line: China destroyed way too much evidence, which they should not have done, and so we are likely never to know, but should do everything we can to find out.
the mutations between the last known animal version of the related virus and the first known human one are major enough (and unlikely to occur in bats, the animal host) that we really need to know more about how they happened. The fact that the outbreak occurred near the Wuhan lab and 1000 miles away from the last known animal (bat) host is an important piece of anecdotal evidence. that's basically all we've got.
one thing I agree with in the Current Affairs piece is that Peter Daszak's prior role in the Wuhan lab and relatively open opposition to some lines of inquiry that many others say should be open until disproved suggest that he isn't the best person to be part of ongoing & future investigations.
I found [this article](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/05/the-stakes-of-finding-covid-19s-origins) pretty interesting, but it does take rely a lot on the wade piece. I would say an accidental lab leak scenario is plausible, but I think it's a bit ridiculous to assign actual probabilities to it without any hard evidence at all.
What is true is that the investigations of the theory have been inadequate and filled with major conflicts of interest, so it's at least worth a further look.
that's amazing. Current Affairs heavily citing Nicholas Wade on a topic replete with xenophobia without mentioning why his remarks might be taken with caution regarding subjects relevant to xenophobia. i'd say "now i've seen everything," but clearly there is no bottom to the everything we might see.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.politico.com/amp/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin-chaos-under-heaven-wuhan-lab-book-excerpt-474322
Yeah. It's what happens you have a conspiracy nut flooding the zone with shit.
It might be true. It's not like the PRC is less incompetent or evil.
I mean, it’s not impossible that COVID-19 escaped from a lab by
accident.
The sad thing is that it became such a political topic that you can’t
really argue about the origins without people thinking you have an
agenda
Well, for example, the conspiracy that it was a deliberately engineered and released bioweapon is ridiculous and makes zero logical sense (nobody actually benefits from a pandemic).
The idea that someone at a lab made a fuckup and got infected is orders of magnitude more likely, as lab infections have occurred before, and it isn't at odds with basic logic. Still nowhere near the most likely scenario, as it would require a small coverup and there is no hard evidence in support of it.
But there are some indices:
* no intermediate host animal has been found that has transmitted the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen from bats to humans.
* the SARS-CoV-2 viruses could couple "amazingly well" to human cell receptors and penetrate human cells
* Another argument against the theory that the virus originated from bats at the fish market in Wuhan is that no bats are on sale there
* the city's virological institute has one of the world's largest collections of bat pathogens
* there are documented safety deficiencies in the laboratory
* Another indication of a laboratory accident is that a young female scientist at the virology institute in Wuhan was the first to be infected, back in October 2019.
[source](https://www.deepl.com/translator#de/en/Bisher%20sei%20kein%20Zwischenwirts-Tier%20gefunden%20worden%2C%20welches%20den%20SARS-CoV-2-%20Erreger%20von%20Fledermäusen%20auf%20Menschen%20übertragen%20habe.%20Außerdem%20könnten%20die%20SARS-CoV-2-Viren%20%22erstaunlich%20gut%22%20an%20menschliche%20Zellrezeptoren%20ankoppeln%20und%20in%20menschliche%20Zellen%20eindringen%20-%20laut%20Wiesendanger%20ein%20Hinweis%20darauf%2C%20dass%20der%20Virus-Ursprung%20nicht%20natürlich%20sei.%20Gegen%20die%20Theorie%2C%20dass%20das%20Virus%20über%20Fledermäuse%20auf%20dem%20Fischmarkt%20von%20Wuhan%20stammt%2C%20spreche%20auch%2C%20dass%20dort%20keine%20Fledermäuse%20angeboten%20würden.%20Gleichzeitig%20gebe%20es%20aber%20im%20virologischen%20Institut%20der%20Stadt%20eine%20der%20weltweit%20größten%20Sammlungen%20von%20Fledermauserregern.%20Außerdem%20gebe%20es%20dokumentierte%20Sicherheitsmängel%20in%20dem%20Labor.%20Ein%20weiteres%20Indiz%20für%20einen%20Laborunfall%20sei%2C%20dass%20sich%20eine%20junge%20Wissenschaftlerin%20des%20virologischen%20Instituts%20in%20Wuhan%20als%20erste%20infiziert%20habe%20und%20zwar%20bereits%20im%20Oktober%202019.)
Edit: [source](https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/hamburg/Hamburger-Forscher-Coronavirus-stammt-wohl-aus-Labor,corona6764.html)
umm, that source appears to be just a translated block of text, whats the original source?
regardless, all this evidence is fairly circumstantial. Nobody has found the intermediate animal for ebola either, so it's not that unusual. And the virus performing well on humans is a prerequisite for it starting a global pandemic, so that's kind of baked in already (we wouldn't be discussing this if it wasn't). And the rest only prove the *possibility* of a lab-leak origin, not that it actually happened.
exactly, nothing is 'impossible', but unlikely.
why do certain type of people (referring to jingoistic right wing people in my country) are 'concerned' about this. Of course, everyone wants to know origin to prevent other viruses. But you can't put forward something without definitive proof.
I don’t understand why it’s so inconceivable to all the conspiracy theorists that the Xi government would engage in a thorough coverup if the virus came from a zoonotic transfer at the wet market as expected. I think they’re underestimating the CCP’s insecurity about bad news and saving face.
Also people underestimate the extent to which the Australian parliament is run by narcissistic incompetent fuckups who will say any shit about China to scare up votes from their racist base.
Maybe the virus came from a lab. Maybe there is enough circumstantial indicators that starting an independent investigation would be warranted.
Australia would still say the same shit if there wasn’t because Australia’s domestic politics runs on fossil fuels, Rupert Murdoch, and xenophobia.
I remember when they said ‘it came from a lab some secret service looked at some phone data and people from the lab did something highly suspicious gps wise before the breakout’, which later turned out to be just regular phone movement which had occurred before, and it was about 3 phones only. (So they looked at like 3 phones for over the period of a month or something else crazy low data, and initially didnt look at the larger dataset (and im not even sure how they would get this data, iirc I heard it being discussed on a security podcast somewhere)).
A lot of people who have phds and think they are smart are going to discover they are not immune to conspiracy theories im afraid.
This pattern is also interesting relevant scientists : ‘could be manmade we dont know we should keep researching it’ -> non relevant people ‘there is evidence for it being man made!’ (With Pauls reasoning here being an example (e: he says lab leak however), there can be other reasons for a more adversarial relation between Australia and China than covid lab theory, the article even mentions that China also refuses to share HIV data for example).
Lab Leak is possible, but why the fuck would Paul G have any meaningful insight on this? He’s a fucking VC!
I kinda want to have a discussion about this but it’s frustrating the subject has become such a culture war issue. I just read this and I’m still thinking about it. Full disclosure the author did write a controversial science book however this medium article feels well presented and well researched.
Does anyone have anything to say? I wasn’t too concerned before but this piece has made me more curious.
It’s entirely possible. But people aren’t saying it because it’s “possible”, they’re saying it because they want it to be true.
I mean, it’s not impossible that COVID-19 escaped from a lab by accident.
The sad thing is that it became such a political topic that you can’t really argue about the origins without people thinking you have an agenda