The "argument" that "if you've got nothing to hide then you have nothing to worry about" is is just as worthless when promoting encryption backdoors as it is now.
I think you oversimplified to get to this binary view. Where does "national security" fit in this "transparent or corrupt" philosophy? State secrets? Classified information and intelligence?
Can the Chinese (or other) authorities simply raise deep concerns about whatever they want and expect US (or other) authorities to provide information as needed to prove the contrary?
People are accusing them of building the virus in a lab with literally zero evidence. Give the US a bunch of raw data to spin and it just makes that easier.
Maybe with people like Trump in the world who would definitely capitalize on that type of thing to cast blame there is inherent risk, but at least amongst civilized educated people, its obvious a virus could show up anywhere and disseminating information shows a clear desire to fight the virus as a member of the world, rather than a desire to use it as a political tool or to gain an advantage because china can execute more draconian mitigation measures than a "free" country like America would be able to.
Where China is clearly to blame is the reduced amount of information clearly inhibited the fight against coronavirus, in the world's fight against this thing china defected rather than cooperated.
Before any whataboutism is mentioned, Trump also defected and made a mess out of a response, lying to the public, and hiding cases. That doesn't make either correct and neither one justifies the other's actions. Both countries are clearly very in the wrong for their COVID reactions.
We knew or should have known the virus was coming for months before it was a problem in the US. It would take an incredibly enlightened politician not to try and scapegoat China for our failures, and they know this. Why gamble on our goodwill amidst all this rhetoric?
China's behavior is concerning.
Even with this data US and other western countries dismissed it as non-threat for over 3mos while ridiculing China for 'draconian measures' and violating human rights.
I don't think there is a lot of evidence for malice, but there is definitely evidence worthy of contemplation:
https://project-evidence.github.io/
Here is a study from 2007: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258702/
> In this study, we investigated the receptor usage of the SL-CoV S by combining a human immunodeficiency virus-based pseudovirus system with cell lines expressing the ACE2 molecules of human, civet, or horseshoe bat.
That is literally building of viruses in a lab.
I guess I should have specifically said covid-19 rather than "the virus", but I thought that would be clear from context.
This is a densely-populated, agriculture-heavy third-world part of the world that had bird flu and sars in the previous 15 years... random-ass diseases materialize there. Occam's razor says it's another one of those.
Clearly a lab studying coronaviruses is interesting. Clearly its possible that the lab could have had a leak. Clearly it's possible a farmer could have wandered into a cave, or run into a bat in the wild. Clearly it's possible that it didn't originate in China.
There is certainly enough evidence to investigate the lab being a possibility. It definitively being responsible or not is definitely of interest. There was a lot of cover up at the beginning, which implies to me a party who knows they are responsible.
From everything I've read on the topic, the best going theory that I understood is that in order for the lab to perform tests on coronavirus found in bats, coronavirus samples are collected from bats. A person must collect these bats from caves, not in Wuhan. A person might have collected the samples improperly or with insufficient gear, resulting in contracting and then spreading the disease.
That's not a "controversial" (read: conspiracy) theory, that's not an act of the state being evil. That's something that could happen anywhere in the world. That's something that could happen on accident. That's something that could be prevented by improved process/standards/equipment. By denying the possibilities of such things, it makes it look like there was a coverup or an explicitly guilty party. Everyone should want to know the nature of it's origin. It should obviously be a possibility.
> Occam's razor says it's another one of those.
To me occam's razor says that Wuhan is a first apparent epicenter. So it stands to believe it's the first place with major outbreak. Wuhan has a lab that studies this very disease specifically for it's epidemic properties. The most simple occam's razor explanation to me is that it has to do with the lab.
1) Bat->Livestock->Human transmission
2) Direct bat->human transmission (your example fits here as a tiny subset, I don't think specifically employees of that one lab are the only people who could have had contact with a bat)
3) Lab leak
I'm rating the probabilities as I see them. Your scenario is possible! It's just not the most probable, and even if it were, there are a lot of possibilities.
The funny thing is that people in China use neither of these acronyms, they just refer to "the government" or "the party". This is probably the safest terminology to avoid being seen as biased one way or the other.
What's so interesting to me, is that even your choice of a three letter acronym, which literally means the exact same thing just with a different word order, is considered to be taking a side. It goes to show just how fraught conversation on China has become that it's even considered important.
It is the party's choice for its English language representation.
I'm not making any political statements here. I am suggesting that we use common nomenclature while pointing out a hazard of a specific instance of dated terminology.
My point was that turning one's choice of synonymous terminology into a marker of political bias is itself an interesting comment on how difficult it is for people to engage in curious discussion about China. Given that at HN we are expected to assume good faith, I think it's fair to assume that most people who use CCP (or CPC) are not deliberately trying to take a side, they are just using a convenient acronym.
Yet the comment I sacrificed Karma to inform of "potentially unconscious bias of language" was willing to offer nothing more than postulation that a political party is responsible for "hiding the data", and the repetition of the CCP identification.
Maybe you should have led with that?
Maybe OP disagrees on the party authority to define language including naming itself.
This is like making a statement about the demonrats and expecting to be taken seriously.
It has the intellectual power of intentionally misgendering someone as a means of insulting them.
There is a reason that neoconservatives like Mike Pompeo are revitalizing your preferred acronym.
Recall when BP changed their logo last: months after a horrible oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The singular reason why BP changed their logo was an attempt to trick the public. It wasn’t a changing of identity. Changing the CCP’s name when they haven’t even done it themselves would be the same kind of disingenuousness.
For an example, there are many similarly charged terms "commonly used" to identify geographic areas surrounding Israel, but in modern discourse we use "Occupied Palestinian Territory" since 1999.
North Korea remains North Korea. CCP remains CCP. Blackwater remains Blackwater, not Akademi or Xe or whatever bloody thing they're called now. I'm not going to just go along with whatever rebranding their PR agency told them to do.
> Such raw data is known as “line listings”, he said, and would typically be anonymised but contain details such as what questions were asked of individual patients, their responses and how their responses were analysed.
> “That’s standard practice for an outbreak investigation,” he told Reuters on Saturday via video call from Sydney, where he is currently undergoing quarantine.
I can't claim to know much about what's standard practice for outbreak investigations, but I'm inclined to believe him on this more than - no offense - a random HN user.
Yet for some reason the West seemed intent on pursuing lockdowns, demonising countries like Sweden and Belarus which didn't.
Hospitals have never been overloaded (apart from places like New York where symptomatic patients were sent back into nursing homes - or Italy, with generally inadequate pandemic preparations) and in places like Sweden deaths in 2020 are up only single-digits against 2018:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
As soon as we realised we were over-intubating patients, and that proning and oxygen treatment were sufficient for serious admissions, and that Vitamin D and C (and other cheap and generic treatments) were enough for the general population, the potential for hospital overload (beyond what flu waves incur anyway) was also eliminated.
And yet we still persist with lockdowns despite them causing a greater amount of harm than the virus itself due to factors like interrupted education, mental damage, and interrupted regular medical treatment.
There were political games afoot in both China and the West in terms of this virus. The fact that the American economy was booming just before the re-election of a non-mainstream, anti-China president, and that pandemic responses justified mail-in voting on an unprecedent scale is too coincidental to ignore.
Earlier last year, Sweden was being highly praised for its approach, until they ended up with a much higher per-capita death rate than neighbours and comparable countries.
"Sweden deaths in 2020 are up only single-digits against 2018"
Sweden is a low population, sparsely populated country with a relatively wealthy, healthy and homogenous population and the highest percentage of people who live alone of any country.
While Sweden did not lock down like other countries, they issued instructions to reduce travel and work from home if possible, and - as Swedes have an atypically high level of trust in the government - they complied: if you look at Google mobility reports, you find that Sweden's non-mandatory lockdown had a similar real world effect as the various lockdowns in the US and Spain. Sweden was not entirely without lockdown rules either, which got more severe as criticism within the country and from neighbours intensified.
"Hospitals have never been overloaded [..] the potential for hospital overload (beyond what flu waves incur anyway) was also eliminated."
While the hospital system was not overloaded in the UK, individual hospitals were, and the system as a whole came very close to overload during the peaks. Were it not for the first lockdown, and using the time that bought us to massively increase the capacity, they absolutely would have been overloaded.
The hospital my girlfriend works at ran out of PPE, oxygen and staff (due to illness), and the conditions for staff were beyond awful, including multiple of her colleagues in their 40s and up being killed. This isn't just because the UK health system was poorly prepared, prior to the pandemic, we were considered the second most prepared country in the world for a pandemic.
I am not saying lockdown is the right approach -- I don't know, and indeed lockdown carries with it a huge number of economic and health harms. But to characterise this as just a normal flu-season and say that hospitals coped fine is clearly wrong. The only reason hospitals weren't overloaded was because of a combination of heroic efforts from staff and measures to limit the number of incoming patients. One reason the UK likely got so much closer to being overloaded and has a higher number of deaths (besides demographic differences and population density) was that we left it relatively late to lock down and our lock down was relatively tame compared to many in Europe.
Look at raw gdp growth data and that was without major tax cuts. Nothing proves that the previous US president did anything more than "ride the wave".
Also, debts were greatly increased even before covid and the current president will have to fix that, again...
Additionally, lockdowns have an additional reason, namely to not overload healthcare so the situation doesn't get out of control. While rural areas can play denial, that's not an option for bigger and more dense areas/cities. A lot of hospitals were running on the edge, where >90% of capacity was for covid and delaying all other ( even urgent) surgeries.
Ps. Sweden has a very low population density. Not everything there applies elsewhere.
They even admitted they were wrong with having no lockdowns.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-ch...