"Lipsitch’s activists (calling themselves the Cambridge Working Group) sent around a strong statement on the perils of research with “Potential Pandemic Pathogens,” signed by more than a hundred scientists. The work might “trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible to control,” the signers said. Fauci reconsidered, and the White House in 2014 announced that there would be a “pause” in the funding of new influenza, SARS, and MERS gain-of-function research." [0]
In December 2017, the US began funding gain-of-function research on these deadly diseases again. This research creates deadly diseases that may not have existed otherwise.
This pandemic has been enough for me to strongly believe that there should be a global ban on gain-of-function experiments on deadly viruses and bacteria. I'd like to help prevent a future pandemic, and that's one clear way we can help.
[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
It is unenforceable from the start. All the major world powers would continue their research (perhaps slightly less openly) simply from a MAD angle (it is irresponsible to ignore the value of a pathogen that no one else has seen and you have the antibiotics for).
We are living in dark times in terms of our technological capability and the aggressiveness of state actors.
I would argue that the only chance we have is to reign in the behaviours of our states. Crazy and seemingly impossible, but stopping science/tech is far beyond reach.
So, while it may not be 100% foolproof, it would be quite meaningful.
I don't think there's anything that we could learn from gain-of-function research on deadly viruses and bacteria that would be worth risking millions of deaths.
It doesn't matter how good your intentions are when your behavior is extremely dangerous and can (and possibly did) result in a global pandemic that kills millions of people. Risk/reward calculations should be performed without regard to intent.
>Banning it would reduce the amount done greatly.
It would also reduce the risk of a man-made virus killing millions of people.
Is there a reliable reference that the US is no longer researching biochemical weapons?
Wikipedia claims: "Both the U.S. bio-weapons ban and the Biological Weapons Convention restricted any work in the area of biological warfare to defensive in nature. In reality, this gives BWC member-states wide latitude to conduct biological weapons research because the BWC contains no provisions for monitoring or enforcement.[74][75] The treaty, essentially, is a gentlemen's agreement amongst members backed by the long-prevailing thought that biological warfare should not be used in battle.[74]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_biological_weapo...
How do you know this?
Now, try to apply that same reasoning to your allegation without looking silly. Yes, the USG has secretly run certain aspects of a public biowarfare program - and when it came to light they paid. Boom, they couldn't keep it secret and they couldn't escape the consequences (lots of very damaging legal cases and hearings). Finally, do they have an incentive? No - as I said, it makes no sense for them to reduce the cost of yet another world ending weapon. Now you could point to Russia getting caught with massive stockpiles of Anthrax after they claimed to end the program... but their nuclear program's credibility isn't comparable - they've always demonstrated clear signs of insecurity about it. That isn't the case for the USG.
This seems like a supremely bad idea.
Only inside level four labs, of course. But early warning (and this work on mitigation) seems important.
Must be in rural isolation, NOT a city.
The administrators and janitors and everyone has to sleep inside the fence.
Getting out requires spending 40 days in a quarantine hotel in a different nearby fenced area.
Armed guards patrol the fence.
(EDIT: To be clear. BSL-5 doesn't exist yet... but it should.)
Anyway Murphy's law is always applicable and we need the capability to fight fires even more.
As an RE geek, and a biologist, the Movies were so f'ing awful... I'm playing the new reboot of the Outbreak series, my favorite of all, RE: Resistance and its pretty awesome and still does way more with genre of survival horror in what was simply an add-on DLC cash-in to sell an updated RE3 then all the horrible movies combined. Online play was always more fun, but now that you're the villainous 'master mind' behind the plot kill the subjects for your own gain is absolutely brilliant, something sorely lacking the same Raccoon City Outbreak universe.
They simply did what Hollywood always does: make shit up and refused to speak about the Cyberpunk-esque undertones of Umbrella and the T virus in any adequate way. This works for comic book stuff because it's audience is so self-serving, but it's also why it's so boring and suffers from the repeated one dimensional story telling.
Instead of following the manga-style adaptions they have in Japanese cinema Hollywood made a series of mindless 2 hour brain drains of of zombie shooting banality, and then made up characters the main character (Jovovich) doesn't even exist in the lore, they deviated so far from the plot that they even managed to get Jill's character so bad I literately pissed of my date when we went I was nerd-raging so hard about how bad it was and how much a missed opportunity it was to inspire more like me to enter into biology--we were both freshman in University and I was at my peak of biopunk naivety and advocacy.
The animated series were way better, as is the case with Batman stuff and shows how gritty and dire these subjects are when properly told from the right platform and setting.
As for COVID, I witnessed how resurgance of the yellow movement in HK was being quelled by the CCP and PLA since that Summer, and I personally feel the theory that an accidental leaked gain of function virus makes sense but that nothing 'damning' will ever be uncovered as the floods that impacted Wuhan provided perfect cover to do any successful form of epidemiology, the wet markets are no longer a source of valid data and it was clear how the WHO who were refused at first from entering) is not to be trusted given their alliances to the CCP and refusal to acknowledge the efforts Taiwan had during this pandemic.
Sadly, political theater will always undo anything Science can prove (or not prove) even when it results in the death of 2+ million people. Let it not be forgotten the CCP was jailing, disspeaing and going fafter people on Social media for talking about the deadliness and serious nature of what was happening. Mainland Citizen-journalists who exposed the dire situation and the pathetic state of these make shift hospitals over run by are still not accounted for and are presumed to be either dissapeared in a black-site re-education camp, or simply murdered at this point.
That's why the CCP is such a threat, and its reliance needs to be broken from and decoupled: cheap labour and trinkets aren't worth having them be the vanguard for Human or even environmental health and denying and hiding, getting rid of any and all evidence when it suits them--which includes but is not limited to disspearing people and committing war crimes and acts of genocide while Xi speaks at DAVOS about creating a more 'diverse' system as it extinguishes ethnic groups it see's as threat to it's divisive death cult (CCP).
I meant RE though
I'd genuinely like to know what we would get out of it that would warrant such risk taking?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_virus_retention_debat...
https://www.wired.com/2014/07/cdc-found-pox/ https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/blog/scab-story
Would you make the same argument for software vulnerability research? I think the arguments against both are the same, and with the same result: white-hat researchers will halt their work, leaving more of the field available to black-hat researcers.
It is also much easier to stop bad software than bad biology. Software is much simpler than the human body.
A failed experiment? Maybe a bit more likely, but still I don't think so
Sars-Cov-2 looks like pretty much what it is: a zoonotic virus that "doesn't know what's going on"
Hence why only the recent mutations made its transmission more efficient.
Now, if it escaped unbeknownst from a research lab, that I would put on the plausible category. Would be more possible if it wouldn't have had a perfect virus breeding ground right next to it.
What you can do is follow chains of mutations and infections and try to get somewhere.
It was actually remarkably stable in the early days suggesting it was used to reproducing in human cells. Or so Professor Petrovsky says https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8356751/How-COVID-1...
As how that could have happened lab wise here's Daszak saying they routinely infect human cells with coronavirus in the lab https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1701&v=IdYDL_RK--w&feature=y...
Or maybe it was in humans a bit before it took off. I see Daszak's kind of changed his tune a bit these days to not mention anything like that lab stuff.
The common Flu can infect horses and even chickens. "stability in human cells" means pretty much nothing
If the penalty for lying and being caught is the same league as screwing up, people are going to cover up problems.
That is to say, if the punishment for any kind of crime is death, no matter how serious or how trivial, you might as well go ahead and commit the much more serious one and try and cover that up instead.
Either way you're fucked, so why not go all in?
Not what I was expecting, but still a really interesting story.
Of course democracies are just as vulnerable to all the bad stuff as they are run by humans, but transparency is at least possible. Sadly we see national security being used as reason to avoid transparency, and of course corruption follows.
Man it took forever for someone to make this point. There's a lot of bad Chinese Gov behavior that US Gov players absolutely aspire to.
It’s not a new thing. The (paraphrased) quote “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance” is at least a couple hundred of years old. In practice however it’s not a very simple proposition at all. People typically agree with endlessly granting government additional powers when it’s for a policy they agree with.
The difference between the US (or France, or Germany, or the UK...) and China however, is that we actually have some mechanisms for holding our government to account (however flawed they might be). Whereas Chinese citizens have none at all.
This is true of any hierarchical power structure, but is especially bad in overtly authoritarian ones.
> This is true of any hierarchical power structure
is only true if everyone in the hierarchy is a madman.
Or in this case, how covid19 export case numbers from places like Taiwan, HK, SK, Singapore, Australia, Newzealand all indicate Chinese numbers are not grossly exaggerated - China only exported a fraction of covid19 cases compared to Europe or North America because covid19 never exploded in China due to harsh restrictions. The article you're citing is also sourcing figures from _Chinese_ CDC on antibody prevalence rate which is expected to be higher than pure testing data seen in similar studies in other countries. So again, it's official Chinese numbers being useful and comporting to similar measures elsewhere. The difference is western media like BBC attempting to spin as the numbers being uniquely nefarious and useful idiots eating it up, just like in this NYT article.
Then, nothing happened. Not one country stopped their domestic travel, no one prepared and mandated a ‘3 month summer staycation’ (my poor attempt at marketing a terrible circumstance with some positive spin)... and we all started blaming each other.
That was sickening to me... it’s bad enough when we don’t take the proper action to protect our fellow neighbor, but even after acknowledging the cause is basically lost, we turn on each other.
So my quip was in that jaded poor taste, when I saw the finger pointing beginning again... and I should have just commented this to begin with...
Isn't this the point of public forums? To encourage discussion?
Also, I don’t think he went about it in an effective way at all, it seems like the ccp was betting on him just going away after a while and just suffering the pain for a while.
its natural to catch flak, but it happens to both sides.
The saudi arabia govt is friendly to our govt, but the vast majority of their population thinks its totally OK to blow up US citizens.
Iranian leadership is constantly at odds with the US military leadershp, but iranians themselves welcome tourists from the US with open arms , love US culture and movies, and want americans to visit.
Furthermore, it's an integral part of Chinese society with overwhelming support among its citizens (>90%). The CCP is continuation of past dynasties operating under the 'Mandate of Heaven' to serve the people. Failure to do so and it will be replaced.
So no, this often repeated fallacy by the west that they condemn CCP not the Chinese people is not only ignorant but supremely arrogant and condescending in assuming 1.4B are somehow mindless robots at the mercy of the few.
Demonizing the CCP, is in effect, directly insulting the Chinese people.
How can you claim they the CCP has support with a straight face? First, says who? CCP-controlled media? Second, would the average Chinese person answer honestly? Third, the Chinese have never experienced real democracy. Asking them if they support the CCP is meaningless. It’s like asking a third-gen Red Sox fan if they support the Rex Sox.
As for 'real democracy' no country has it least of all the US which more accurately an oligarchic plutocracy with power held by select few/wealthy(ie top 1%).
I will not respond to your whataboutism argument as it is beside my point.
HKrs fomenting riots/violence and breaking the law have rightfully had their passports confiscated to face consequences of their actions.
The CCP is an institution. Your argument implies that belonging to an institution means agreeing 100% with every single decision of the institution.
As, an example, imagine we are talking about a specific action Google took. While you could argue that all Google employees have some kind of responsibility in action s the company takes, would you argue that the millions of the company employees agree with every decision the institution takes?
One can be offended for anything. I fail to see what is arrogant or condescending about criticising an institution (even if millions of people belong to it).
P.S. I am ignoring the dynamics/incentives of being a member of an institution, which could be many more than agreeing with everything the institution does or say.
What distinguishes CCP from western governments is that party membership and advancement is based on meritocracy not populism resulting in only the most qualified/accomplished rising to positions of leadership.
What makes the CCP like the West, though it's different in other ways, is that advancement in the CCP is based largely on the convenience of your views and actions to the established elites, which is only “meritocracy” to the extent that “advancing the interests of the established elites” is “merit”.
There is no concept of 'established elites' because even the poorest can rise to top as President Xi has.
Chinese citizens elect leaders at local level who in turn elect those above them and this continues to the highest levers where only the most competent rise to the top.
Communism is a misnomer when applied to China. It is no more communist than US is a democracy. In fact in many ways China is more democratic than US whereby it's govt of 90M+ members more accurately represent interests of Chinese society.
To me, the only constructive discussion that can be had at this point needs to be around actual evidence, and not the absence of it. The first documented cases, first traces of positive samples etc etc. It's clearly still in the early stages of discoveries so all theories are just theories. That said I don't expect this to remain a mystery forever. It will just take time, because eventually the natural origins will be pinned down and reasonable chain of events of first spread will be identified.
Our prior is that novel viruses come from zoonotic sources. We haven't ever experienced a pandemic derived from a laboratory leak. It seems fanciful, because it would be unprecedented. But, what would it look like if it did happen? How would it be any different than what we've seen?
Given the situation, yes, we cannot make any conclusions without evidence. And this implies a burden of proof on governments. The fact that this outbreak began in China is unfortunate, but it does not make it right for them to withhold information on the origins of the virus. They should share every scrap of information and evidence that they have, or expect exactly the kind of reaction that you are critiquing.
There is no fallacy of middle ground here. There is simply a lack of hard evidence to confirm a particular hypothesis about where this virus came from. And, there is an uncomfortable abundance of circumstantial evidence pointing in a highly unusual direction. This is not an issue that you can align with the US political spectrum. And it can be approached without needing to make any claims about how good or bad the Chinese government is. You cannot claim to know what this virus is without information that is not available.
Claims that it is zoonotic are unfortunately just as baseless as any conspiracy theories about weapon development that you've been hearing. The argument for zoonotic origin are based on a single piece of evidence that came out of the labs in the very city where the virus was first found: the sequence of a related SARS-like virus, and one with some very unusual sequence features and publication parameters. Doubt is reasonable. We should fully accept the possibility that humans were able to generate such a construct, and be ready for the next time it happens. The basic fact is that we know how to make such a virus, and that information is now out in the open whether or not this particular virus came from a lab.
On the other hand asking if a bat type coronavirus could have come from the nearest place with lots of bat type coronavirus doesn't seem that unreasonable to me.
Great expression! I have the same strange feeling but couldn't put in correct words. Other than the topic of this thread, there's a meta topic which reflects some interesting human natures showing up more often among politicians and lawyers: Spread bias opinions without being caught misleading, disguise subjective speculations under objective delicately organized articulation.
Being constructive in discussion is extremely difficult. Sometime I watch the debate with fun on meta topics other than topics.
They can probably start by capping payments from any one country as to minimize the effects of soft power.
An under-funded WHO is better than a biased WHO.
“ Though the US paid $446.5m in 2019 compared with China’s $43m, the bulk of American funding was voluntary; the organization only receives 17% of its funding through “assessed” contributions, AKA country membership dues. The bulk of its budget is funded through voluntary donations, for which countries can earmark specific use, because President Ronald Reagan passed a “zero-growth policy” for WHO funding in the 1980s. With the assessed dues frozen at 1990s levels, the WHO has been forced to increasingly rely on donated funds.”
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/oct/19/john-oliver-...
On the other hand, the WHO after the pandemic had clearly emerged continued to appear biased, seriously damaging its reputation.
Kansas
And, as pertains to the virus's origin, COVID-19 did come from China, and we know that. We have epidemiology to guide us here, and the situation is altogether different from 1918 w/r/t speed of communication and the state of science.
That doesn't disprove xenophobia at all. The Spanish press reported on it first because every nation involved in WWI very aggressively censored any mention of the flu. After the war, they had every incentive to play into people's natural xenophobia rather admit to covering up the disease. Here you see the Spanish Flu depicted as a flamenco lady:
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/G386J3/the-spanish-flu-epidemic-ov...
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...
"There's no doubt that the novel coronavirus ... originated in China."
As a response to the statement: "COVID-19 did come from China" in the previous post, the article you linked directly confirmed that statement.
No, it tended to be called the Spanish Flu because Spanish newspapers simply reported more about the epidemic:
>...Spain was not involved in the war, having remained neutral, and had not imposed wartime censorship.[17][18] Newspapers were therefore free to report the epidemic's effects, such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII, and these widely-spread stories created a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit.
Some theorize it might have first originated in Kansas:
>...The first confirmed cases originated in the United States. Historian Alfred W. Crosby stated in 2003 that the flu originated in Kansas,[61] and popular author John M. Barry described a January 1918 outbreak in Haskell County, Kansas, as the point of origin in his 2004 article.
But then again:
>...A 2018 study of tissue slides and medical reports led by evolutionary biology professor Michael Worobey found evidence against the disease originating from Kansas, as those cases were milder and had fewer deaths compared to the infections in New York City in the same period. The study did find evidence through phylogenetic analyses that the virus likely had a North American origin, though it was not conclusive. In addition, the haemagglutinin glycoproteins of the virus suggest that it originated long before 1918, and other studies suggest that the reassortment of the H1N1 virus likely occurred in or around 1915.
Some theorize it might have first originated in Europe:
>...The major UK troop staging and hospital camp in Étaples in France has been theorized by virologist John Oxford as being at the center of the Spanish flu.[63] His study found that in late 1916 the Étaples camp was hit by the onset of a new disease with high mortality that caused symptoms similar to the flu.[64][63] According to Oxford, a similar outbreak occurred in March 1917 at army barracks in Aldershot,[65] and military pathologists later recognized these early outbreaks as the same disease as the Spanish flu.[66][63] The overcrowded camp and hospital at Etaples was an ideal environment for the spread of a respiratory virus.
>...A report published in 2016 in the Journal of the Chinese Medical Association found evidence that the 1918 virus had been circulating in the European armies for months and possibly years before the 1918 pandemic.[67] Political scientist Andrew Price-Smith published data from the Austrian archives suggesting the influenza began in Austria in early 1917.
But then again:
>...A 2009 study in Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses found that Spanish flu mortality simultaneously peaked within the two-month period of October and November 1918 in all fourteen European countries analyzed, which is inconsistent with the pattern that researchers would expect if the virus had originated somewhere in Europe and then spread outwards.
Some theorize it was China:
>...In 1993, Claude Hannoun, the leading expert on the Spanish flu at the Pasteur Institute, asserted the precursor virus was likely to have come from China and then mutated in the United States near Boston and from there spread to Brest, France, Europe's battlefields, the rest of Europe, and the rest of the world, with Allied soldiers and sailors as the main disseminators.[70] Hannoun considered several alternative hypotheses of origin, such as Spain, Kansas, and Brest, as being possible, but not likely.[70] In 2014, historian Mark Humphries argued that the mobilization of 96,000 Chinese laborers to work behind the British and French lines might have been the source of the pandemic. Humphries, of the Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John's, based his conclusions on newly unearthed records. He found archival evidence that a respiratory illness that struck northern China (where the laborers came from) in November 1917 was identified a year later by Chinese health officials as identical to the Spanish flu.
On the other hand:
>...A report published in 2016 in the Journal of the Chinese Medical Association found no evidence that the 1918 virus was imported to Europe via Chinese and Southeast Asian soldiers and workers and instead found evidence of its circulation in Europe before the pandemic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
So far the historical and epidemiological data cannot identify the geographic origin of the Spanish flu.
I don’t understand this point.
I am honestly laughing like this needs to be communicated to the HN folks, like it bares any insights, like it is not already the default political correctness for majority here.
The top comment is as useless as to say the OP would believe whatever he/she would love to believe whatever the evidence presented.
New Yorker puts it well:
"The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness"
When described as you (OP) put it, it seems that abstractly, the Chinese Communist party is just the state religion.
I'm not trying to play a game of whataboutism. I'm curious why these structures seem to rise, regardless of what we intend or call the them. What is it about the human experience that so often results in this.
I apologize if this is overtly stereotypical, naive, assuming, or disrespectful. It wasn't meant to offend or annoy. Just cautiously curious.
A Chinese friend once described to me the week he discovered YouTube after going to study in America, when for the first time he saw videos of Chinese leaders (2000-era) behaving very rudely toward reporters. He found that shocking, and over the next few weeks and more research, accepted that much of what he’d been taught about his history was fabrication. The experience was pretty traumatizing for him. He’s back living in China now, but with a very different perspective.
I was what you might call a fundamentalist Christian for most of my life, until I was exposed to enough of the counter-arguments that some of them finally stuck. The deprogramming process took a year and a half and was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done.
In both cases, the in-group is well-protected from “improper information” (as the CCP calls it). In China they have the great firewall and the domestic censorship apparatus; in religion believers are inoculated against trusting information from “worldly” sources (though the motives of those involved in the actual suppression may differ). Neither system could survive in its current form if this information weren’t suppressed — that’s obvious by looking at what happens when individuals are exposed to alternate points of view and take them seriously.
That said, the firewall is easily bypassed with VPN by many with the means to do so. Chinese govt does not view this as contradiction with their policy as it is deemed those able to read Englis/foreign news are educated enough to discern the truth.
The line tends to be more that this sucks but we tried voting in the other lot and that sucked too.
If you suggest eliminating private property to mitigate certain ills engendered by capitalism, or express another view that is truly antithetical to capitalism then you will find yourself marginalized to the point you cannot influence the system.
Private property is inextricably linked with capitalism. If there is no private property there can be no private ownership of the means of production, hence no capitalism. Conversely, within capitalism there is private ownership of the means of production hence there can be no private property, only personal property.
Would you say “Microsoft is just a corporate religion”?
I think a religion is about more than just an entity that tries to avoid negative PR.
is that not the default mode for families? elementary/middle/highschool/universities? work? any communities you spend a lot of time in?
Why is it never brought up that it could just be an accident? It doesn't need to be a weapon. Just poor safety during research.
Then a small group favors their stories to happen because of malicious intent. Like saturday morning cartoon villain style of obvious evilness. And that is often mixed with a "them (evil) and us (good)" type of self-assertive tribe behavior as well as the bitching and bickering that stems from relating social status. (USA and China are not humans, they are nations, but people anthropomorphise them)
A story about poor standards and accidents is more about empathy and carefulness, and while a wise man might tell it to his children, it is not the thing people gossip about. Everyone agrees that bio-labs should have highest standards and that is it, there is little difference to "it happened randomly", and more importantly there is little blame and fame. Have you heard what <china> did? has another ring to it.
The human mind operates on stories, not on facts. Working with facts is hard and even the most pious intellectual can and will fall prey to nature. So it is no wonder that the most scandalous stories are the ones that get around a lot.
Certain actors have a narrative they would like to push.
Recall how much the situation changed in 2020 between the beginning of January and the end of March...
Even if we just had an handful of cases at the beginning of October, by the end of December we would have got massive clusters of cases, tens of thousands of people hospitalized with the same symptoms
And then suddenly, when we started to look for it in January/February, we found only a few clusters and the disease grew (again?) From almost nothing
Covid19 is not something that you can keep hidden:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-...
Now, it still most likely came from China but this adds to the reasonable suggestion that the Wuhan market was simply the first large outbreak but not near the origin of the virus.
My 2c is that the virus will be found (if we do find its origin) to come from a rural area in Southern China.
A US intelligence contractor that collects location data from apps on phones made a presentation that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was shut down from October 7 to 24, 2019. This was reported in the popular US press [1]. You probably missed that in the nightmare flood of last year. I did when it was first reported...
Thus far, the earliest-detected SARS-CoV-2 in the EU has been in November. I would bet that no evidence is ever found for it globally before late October, 2019. We may look for a long time.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/report-sa...
I was disappointed that having looked at evidence of early spread in France and Italy through wastewater samples and patient blood samples that the Chinese response instead of doing similar research was to say all wastewater samples have been chucked and looking at blood samples is illegal.
The cynic in me perhaps asks why they would do that.
I mean, name any other country that has a lot of biological weapons labs all over the world.
2) The Wuhan virus lab has been experimenting with corona viruses for a long time, including gain of function, and it had a history of problems.
3) There's no indication--as in zero--that any other country had covid-19 cases before China. And in this case, lack of evidence IS evidence for lack, because case records are open (except in China, it seems).
Now if you want to debate this point further, I suggest that you establish with us that you are not a CCP hack. So repeat after me: Premier Xi looks like Winnie the Pooh.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03008916209747...
Also, if you look closely, notice that the reason we have no earlier samples then september is, because we have no earlier samples. Can't test one from august, if you don't have one from august.
Perhaps people noticed it when it hit Wuhan and freaked out because of the Research Institute thinking “oh shit, is this what they’re playing with?”
While I don't trust the CCP a bit, I also doubt that China is pursuing bioweapons research, for the same reason: a bioweapon is too likely to backfire. If the covid-2 virus came from a lab in Wuhan, it's not because they were pursuing it as a potential bioweapon, it's because they--and others--wanted to understand how to protect against it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Detrick#2019_closure_and_...
I don't think the US has labs abroad but other countries such as the UK and Russia have mucked around with bioweapons research in the past. Probably China too as it has a general policy to keep up with the opposition.
Now go and check (it contains a story about FOIA requests to the UK government on Assange's case)
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/11/18/signs-of-u-k-misconduc...
It is the 6th (!) year that the litigation to obtain the information goes on.
The people were informed, they reacted as much as they are going to, and until new information comes out, the issue is where it is.
Obviously I wish they hadn't done this, but they didn't arbitrarily try to hide it.
If there was a 'coverup' it was by local municipal authorities which should not be conflated with central govt. Even if true, the actual reporting of first case was only delayed by 1 week with the genome sequenced shared w/WHO rest of world less 2wks later.
Are we talking about China or the Trump administration?
The tone and tenor of the investigation has always been to find a way to absolve local politicians of responsibility for their incompetence in managing this issue by blaming China.
All for the punchline of "so you're then going to do what to China in response?" Of which the answer is nothing. The genocide of the Uyigur people certainly hasn't motivated any strong international action.
The WHO chief just blindly parroted whatever the CCP said for nearly 2 months while the pandemic spread and got out of control. That man deserves to be stripped out of his position. But he will face no justice for the many, many lives he has taken.
The entire timeline of tweets and statements by the WHO is open on the internet - don't see the need to quote them verbatim here.
The only nation in the world raising flags was Taiwan - and their warnings were ignored until it was too late.
I fully agree that Trump could have handled the virus better. Unfortunately, ALL media attention was focused on his impeachment at the time and he was derided as a racist and tyrant for banning China travel.
He should had the courage to ban all international travel immediately when the virus got to the EU and begun to initiate national readiness. Some nations did this and suffered far less as a result. Sadly, he - like so many national leaders - took the virus seriously far too late.
The final verdict on the efficacy of masks against this virus is still TBD once we have more information and the passage of time removes the political agenda's that cloud this conversation. Your "own the libs" certainly doesn't help either.
Though IMHO, given the role vitamin D deficiency seems to have on mortality rates, I think the harshest criticism (charges?) should be reserved for any mayor who ordered tanning beds to close in his or her city.
"Based on the available information there is no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission."
"Additional investigation is needed to ascertain the presence of human-to-human transmission, modes of transmission, common source of exposure and the presence of asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic cases that are undetected. It is critical to review all available information to fully understand the potential transmissibility among humans."
"Data collected through detailed epidemiological investigation and through the deployment of the new test kit nationally suggests that human-to-human transmission is taking place in Wuhan. More analysis of the epidemiological data is needed to understand the full extent of human-to-human transmission."
In my small European countries, no public measures were taken based on all this info until early March (more than 2 weeks after Northern Italy was overwhelmed, while our countrymen had been traveling all over Europe), because there were no confirmed cases in our country yet. The only initial measures in early March were advices to "wash your hands", "don't shake hands" and "sneeze in your elbows".
So I don't think the WHO confirming human transmission on 14 Jan instead of 22 Jan would have changed a thing. People only take painful measures when bad things happen to people they know, and politicians only when bad things happen to people in their own country. Trying to shift the blame on the WHO or China is not very common amongst politicians here (though anecdotally it's not rare among citizens), that seems to be mostly an American (specifically, Republican party) thing.
[1] https://www.who.int/csr/don/14-january-2020-novel-coronaviru...
[2] https://www.who.int/china/news/detail/22-01-2020-field-visit...
https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ani/taiwan-wa...
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3904054
Please note that the WHO confirmation statement on 22nd Jan came about after independent confirmation of human to human transmission and only after China's health ministry itself confirmed human to human transmission on Jan 20th. Just a mere week after strong denial, the casualties could not be hidden anymore after several whistleblowers spoke up and China was forced to backtrack.
The WHO merely acknowledged what China stated with a wishy-washy "more data is needed". I suspect if China hadn't itself come clean they would have simply followed what the CCP stated well into the future!
If the WHO had chosen to acknowledge Taiwan's concern in December, performed the most minimum of followups and raised the alarm early, this disaster could have been nipped in the bud. A lot of second and third-world nations put faith in the WHO and outside the EU and the US, the anger at the WHO is palpable.
https://apnews.com/article/a0b22f45f0cbc8e83e7d496dd2e09556
China cracked down harshly and sufficiently that countries that immediately listened to WHOs advice to test/trace/isolate managed to contain the virus well because very few cases ever made it abroad as seen in import cases statistics from many countries. Expatriation flights meant leakage was inevitable, but screening procedures were mostly theatre, temperature checks instead of 14day quarantines. The problem is very few countries listened to WHO's advice, and still don't.
Being skeptical is acceptable but not to the extent of rejecting the evidentiary process.
Also, Taiwan News is notably anti-China and is associated with Taiwanese nationalists.
Being skeptical is necessary when considering China's terrible past track record. The SARS epidemic also started with a denial and cover-up by China.
There are many other news sources apart from Taiwan News. You can check out the FT. You can check out Reuters. (Decrying Taiwan News as comprising of anti-Chinese nationalists is rather strange considering the CCP's stance against Taiwan)
https://archive.is/nqiKV https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-taiwan...
Please note that even in Feb, the WHO chief was saying travel bans. are not needed https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who-idUSKBN1...
"The head of the World Health Organization said on Monday there was no need for measures that “unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade” in trying to halt the spread of a coronavirus that has killed 361 people in China, and he lauded China’s efforts to contain it." (real figure as we learnt later was already >10x by that time)
“It’s no reason to really panic now,” he said. “The chances of getting this going to anywhere outside China is very low, and even in China, when you go to other provinces, it’s very low.”
"The WHO continues to advise against the application of travel or trade restrictions to countries experiencing COVID-19 outbreaks"
I think you have this backwards. The obsession has always been first and foremost with US domestic politics because so many americans on the internet have an unhealthy obsession with domestic politics. Present discussion is a yet another example.
There's an unsolved mystery we would like to see solved. Specifically right at the heart of one of the most traumatic and pivotal events of our lifetime. Why do you care so much about finding ulterior motives for people interested in that mystery?
There's a huge incentive to blame China for our fuckups. Really, it should be assumed unless proven otherwise.
After all, aside from the whole "no evidence" thing, what does it matter if it's a lab accident or a bat bite or whatever? We had months of warning and fucked it up badly. They were blindsided and recovered nicely. Clearly this must be their fault.
Indeed because both of those leading theories point the blame at China. So if people want to blame china nothing is stopping them. Except perhaps those claiming it came from Europe or the US first. Perhaps that's the point of the stonewalling, to provide cover for being able to claim alternative theories? Since you're so into ulterior motives.
Who is the "we" you are referring to? The western world? The US?
> Who is the "we" you are referring to? The western world? The US?
I was thinking US -- I guess it goes to varying extents to the rest of the "western world", depending on how you define that.
But you're a westerner blaming the west, so that's cool?
Anyway doesn't one of the sides have the majority of facts on their side? I can't imagine the virus would have been eliminated by anything the west did, as it surely spread to the developing world at the same time anyway. I really don't think there's much the US could have done to lock down either. Trump floated the idea of restricting travel to the NYC region and Cuomo threatened to sue. You want Trump seizing emergency powers and suspending the constitution?
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/24/birx-says-someone-was-giving...
Dr. Deborah Birx, the Trump White House coronavirus response coordinator, said in a CBS interview released on Sunday that former President Donald Trump had been reviewing “parallel” data sets on the coronavirus pandemic from someone inside the administration.
"Rebekah Jones, the data scientist who helped create Florida's COVID-19 dashboard, has turned herself in to police, in response to an arrest warrant issued by the state. " https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...
Not unlike Fauci and the CDC being censored and forced to send information through the DHS...
So you are right entirely different level of screwup - China Censored a single Dr, US censored the CDC.
To answer your question: If NYC had a virus lab that actively mutated bat coronaviruses so that they could become infectious in humans, and then one day a human-infecting virus with 96% similarity to a bat coronavirus started popping up in New York City with no known origin… Yes, people would start asking questions about that lab.
Check out this commentary from 2015. This type of research was being subcontracted out to the Wuhan lab, despite public concerns that safety wasn’t tight enough there.
https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debat...
I get that people don’t want to discriminate against China, but this is very clearly a hypothesis worth investigating further.
If it was intentionally released, it’s even more important to know by who and why.
Because it doesn't matter if it's accidentally released from a lab, if you're going to catch it from a bat cave anyway. You haven't eliminated it from the world.
So yeah, it is important to find out what the origin of this virus was because whatever the reason was we want to ensure that it isn’t the same reason for the next big pandemic.
To me it seems like the lab escape story has only developed because of journalist brain. It's convenient if you'll only accept a narrative that involves blaming a human and not a natural system.
Anyway, the story doesn't seem to be developing in that direction:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/14/health/who-mission-china-intl...
I like how the WHO investigator calls the original patient "dull and normal".
Yeah ok.
How about this China, find out what cave the market was getting their bats from. Go in there, confirm the bats have it, and release some data.
Do you believe the devil doesn't exist?
A -> CCP. OP -> a concerned citizen.
A -> Race/Color/Religion/Gender. OP -> Racist/Sexist.
A -> Trump. OP -> a concern citizen.
A -> Scientist. OP -> conspiracist.
But one thing that I am sure is that it'll never ever be constructive. Not mean to be disrespectful, but I do hope this type of comment won't ever get to the top of HN.
[1] https://www.thedailybell.com/all-articles/editorials/wendy-m...
You can blame an individual, even sentence them to death, but you cannot ever criticise the system/party. Nor shine a light at any evidence that the system is wrong. This is a deadly sin.
For the party to admit, there's flaws in the system, would collapse their whole authority.
So are they or are they not mindless robots? It's not only ignorant but supremely arrogant and condescending to assume the 1.4B can't tell the difference between real and fake news and need to be restricted in what information they can consume. Qubit000 has the same username on reddit and twitter. He posts lots of pro-CCP garbage
It's not about 1.4G people: it's about 7G people... The whole of humanity is suffering because a small vocal minority has been deceived and is causing problems for others.
Before the pandemic, I thought just like you that control of the mass media... Some kind of censorship was incontrovertibly a bad thing
Now I think otherwise: if it allows us to save 2.4M lives (and counting!) I'm ok with censorship, as long as you can still use VPNs, TOR or other ways to circumvent it... And the fines for violating censorship are just little bit more than a slap on the wrists
Every Asia-focused analyst will tell you that the only aspect of China's state-reported numbers you can assume with a high degree of confidence is that they're heavily massaged for PR purposes.
> shocked at all if it was a lab virus
That's a useless statement. It's just a weak appeal to authority with no proof in any direction. I live in the US. Me saying that "I wouldn't be surprised" it came from the US wouldn't mean jack squat without evidence.
Did you even read what I wrote, or are you just knee jerking?
- do I trust the WHO - do I trust the CCP
I don't really trust either - but this is just my opinion, based on my interpretation of historical events and evidence. We are all adults here, we can choose to agree or disagree - that's what makes forums and free speech really work.
Some of my reasons for my choice to not trust the CCP:
The Chinese government has numerous reports of it conducting human rights abuses against Uighurs and other populations (Falun Gong, etc). There is constant state denial, but in my eyes, the evidence is compelling. Let's not play the "oh but other countries do this too" - other countries are not relevant to the issue at hand, and my opinion on them is similarly irrelevant here.
If you want to be absolutely pedantic, sure, we have no evidence to conclusively say anything - we also can't say evolution is correct, but it's the most likely theory given prior evidence. Note that my original post says that we have no smoking gun evidence (and again, I'd really want to stress, my original post was OPINION. It was meant in passing, but somehow it got the attention of people on both sides who clearly have a bone to pick).
But, in the "balance of probabilities", my priors suggest to me that I wouldn't trust the CCP. I'm not saying I'm right. I'm not saying you need to believe me. I am simply exercising my right to say my opinion, based on what I think are fairly reasonable priors given CCP track record.
CCP isn't an evil regime, which I feel like is what some of the stauncher replies in this thread feel that any criticism of the party secretly says. They've done great things for the country and its people. Healthcare, stability, infrastructure, and tried to right the wrongs of Mao and the GLF. But that doesn't mean you have to trust everything a government says. Your parents provide you with food and shelter, it doesn't mean you need to blindly believe that they are incapable of doing dishonest things.
This is also not an attack on the Chinese people, contrary to some silly posts I've seen saying "demonizing the CCP means demonizing thr Chinese people". I totally understand why Chinese people tolerate the government. When you emerged from a generation that suffered incredible rural poverty, like my own family, a government that promises you a stable paycheck, food, and housing seems reasonable to support and stay loyal to. I am fortunate enough that my father was talented and lucky enough to be able to leave for a country where we could obtain those things without needing to profess that loyalty unflinchingly.
They could deny killing JFK, as well, and it shouldn't change anything.
Seems this holds true for every government and party.
It's also disingenuous and lazy to ignore a century or more of empirical evidence.
>There are very obvious differences in how the world’s governments operate.
Are there?
https://www.amazon.com/All-Governments-Lie-Times-Journalist/...
Not saying it’s all golden, but these are very meaningful differences.
Freedom of speech is irrelevant if speech doesn't have consequences to those in power. Even less so if there are plenty to tow the establishment's lines anyway...
>and elections that matters so if the people dislike the policy they can change it
LOL, yeah, they can vote between one or the other corporatist neoliberal party, complicit in everything except a few token issues they use to lure their faithful. Such choice...
Turkey is often unfairly criticised by western media, which obviously prefers military dictators in power.
Having separate and distinct parties and competitive elections also puts parties in the position of doing this to each other using the levers of power available to them.
How is this different from any other country? Do you think that the United States government, or any other western government, would accept any damaging rumors that would cause embarrassment to them?
Just look at their hypocrisy when it comes to Assange or Snowden. But at least these two are still alive. For now. Too bad for the Australian guy that exposed Australia’s recent war crimes, he got pleasantly suicided. That’s the penalty for upsetting the western world order. Thanks for playing.
...Or has this logic changed since the election fraud controversy? (and no, it's not really a different situation if you think about it)
Japan's deputy prime minister calls the WHO the "Chinese Health Organization": https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2020/04/29/commentary/w...
> are we saying that the international group that entered china were some how in league with the CCP?
There may be reason to expect that they or their superiors are ... biased.
Really... Japan... because there is no history of tension between China and Japan that would make me doubt Japan's agenda here.
WHO is an international organisation, literally people from around the world work there... are ALL of these people actually secretly Chinese agents? Tell me how that works.
They still have confirmed that it is not a lab grown virus, and have consistently confirmed it’s from the wild.
It MIGHT have been possible but Occam's Razor says it's more plausible it evolved naturally and just jumped species.
FAR FAR FAR more plausible.
A random virus, no. This one, we do.
We can't build a virus from scratch. But we can combine pieces of different viruses to build a new one. The same thing also happens naturally when an animal is sick with 2 viruses at once. If both get into the same cell, you get various mixes created and sometimes a mixture will turn out to be a better virus than either parent.
This virus looks like a combination of apparently unrelated viruses. See https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-origins-genome-analy... for confirmation. That happens to be something that can happen either naturally or artificially.
Where conspiracy theorists get going is that a few years ago there were papers from the lab near Wuhan suggesting that a combination much like COVID-19's actual combination should be particularly effective in humans. So this looks like an extension of a known line of research from a lab involved in military work. Combine that with the local coverup and you can see how people go down the rabbit hole.
I would discount the possibility that this was bioweapons research - the US was funding serial passage and gain-of-function research at this lab, of which the express purpose is to make viruses more infectious in different species, including humans.
At any rate, I don't think we can expect anything to be definitively proven. It is absolutely possible that this came out of the wild. But as the NY Magazine "Lab Leak" article illustrates, we should probably be open to the idea it came out of a lab. I also think we should reconsider whether or not serial-passage and gain-of-function research is something that can be ethically conducted. Anywhere.
Earlier in March, Zhao Lijian, an outspoken Chinese diplomat, raised a suspicion on his personal Twitter account that it might have been the US army representatives to the Military World Games who brought the novel coronavirus to Wuhan in October 2019, after a top US health official admitted detecting coronavirus infections on some deceased flu patients. Zhao urged the US to disclose further information, exercise transparency on coronavirus cases and provide an explanation to the public.
But, there is more than one conspiracy theory here. And probably will be forever. As a hopefully rational third party, I would like it investigated.
But I'm currently giving good odds to "accidental release from program intended to research possible future pandemics". And if that winds up seeming at all likely, I believe that the whole world should commit to having better controls on this type of research to avoid future accidental releases. Because accidental mass murder isn't OK.
Given that the CDC and commercial companies were doing research in that lab, is the US just as culpable as China?
What was the reason for the CDC working with that lab? Aside from rationalizations, was it essentially just outsourcing the dirty work like any other polluting industry?
See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/ for one of their previous lines of research that look similar to the actual COVID-19 virus.
Yes.
> your comment is worthless otherwise.
No.
Occam's Razor says the only (non-vet) BSL4 lab in China, studying bat coronaviruses, several miles from known first virus reports, that has had multiple previous virus leaks, with huge information shutdown by China for a year, is the more plausible culprit.
Why wouldn’t CCP stop all suspicion on this and say the virus originated in another part of China? It almost feels like a murderer trying to use reverse psychology by hiding in plain sight. Like, it can’t be from Wuhan Lab because they actually reported that it came from Wuhan (what idiot that’s trying to cover it up do that?). A calculated person would make such a calculation.
The truth might be weird here.
There's a rational reason to study this one, since SARS (1.0) was a big deal in the early 2000's, and anyway why wouldn't you study something you don't fully understand as a matter of course. It's not a stretch if it was found that it leaked from the lab by accident and a cover-up ensued.
E.g. "killer bees" are a product of human scientists trying to engineer a better bee - the release was accidental. It's not like we have the ability to genetically engineer a bee from the ground up. But as a species humans have been purposefully manipulating the traits of living things for thousands of years.
China has had multiple SARS escape accidents.
More likely than building the virus is studying it and accelerating it’s development.
Now I’m not saying that’s what happened here however without the cooperation of the CCP we’ll have no idea what the truth of the matter is
The general evidence is this is yet another reason why wet markets are terrible for humanity, not that it was made in a lab and got away. But you can build lots of things.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
It turns out we've been doing "serial passage" research for some time, which is where we leverage natural selection to do our genetic engineering for us, rather than manually editing genes. This is how we engineer viruses to jump species - on purpose.
> They did it using serial passaging: repeatedly dosing a mixed solution of mouse cells and hamster cells with mouse-hepatitis virus, while each time decreasing the number of mouse cells and upping the concentration of hamster cells. At first, predictably, the mouse-hepatitis virus couldn’t do much with the hamster cells, which were left almost free of infection, floating in their world of fetal-calf serum. But by the end of the experiment, after dozens of passages through cell cultures, the virus had mutated: It had mastered the trick of parasitizing an unfamiliar rodent.
In fact, "we" (meaning humanity) have even been experimenting with serial passage into humans.
> A few years later, in a further round of “interspecies transfer” experimentation, Baric’s scientists introduced their mouse coronavirus into flasks that held a suspension of African-green-monkey cells, human cells, and pig-testicle cells. Then, in 2002, they announced something even more impressive: They’d found a way to create a full-length infectious clone of the entire mouse-hepatitis genome. Their “infectious construct” replicated itself just like the real thing, they wrote.
The whole article is really worth a read.
If this was some sort of lab mistake, as the conspiracy angle suggests, IMO that's much less embarrassing. In the "real" explanation, thousands of mainlanders are regularly eating food contaminated with bat shit, with zero health standards. In the "conspiracy", they're a first-world country doing groundbreaking science, and an accident occurred.
I think they're probably telling the truth.
That's old information. The first cases of the virus had no connection with the wet market, and no connection could later be found other than it was the first major subsequent point of spreading for the virus. So it's much more likely that people spread it at the market, rather than that it came from there.
However, they are indeed disgusting third-world wet markets and the practice of consuming bush meat as well as having live wild animals of all different kinds together in a wet market is an experiment we shouldn't be conducting. The risk to reward ratio is way too high. Remember that HIV likely came from butchering and consuming contaminated chimpanzees in Africa. The world needs to put those kinds of practices behind us, it has cost us far more than it can ever be worth.
Yes
> The idea that this is only a problem in Africa and Asia is entirely nonsensical.
No, this statement of yours is nonsensical. What I'm saying is the practice of eating bush meat, and these kinds of wet markets bring very little value by themselves. Compared to animal husbandry in general, not even 1% of the total value. However, they represent an outsized proportion of the risk. So it's a bad idea. One could improve the risk-reward ratio by eliminating them - entirely logical.
If the wet market is at fault, it can be blamed on the local party leadership, which was easy enough to do because they continued to screw up during the early stages of the pandemic. One memorable one is when they hosted a massive dinner for 20000 people in close proximity when it was starting to really heat up.
If it's the lab, that squarely falls on the national government, which in all things can and must do no wrong.
A poster above said it perfectly, when your authority comes from competency, you need to show your competent. The CCP has this precarious position in China where the people support it strongly because they've been doing a good job giving people better lives, at least from their perspective. If that turns badly in any way, it could break them.
The (theorized) problem was that wild-caught land-animals happened to be part of the selection.
Of course you are making some other argument, but I doubt it's the poor people in Wuhan that are eating pangolins.
"Mislabeled SRA entry is one thing but - it’s clear that it’s impossible (in my hands at least with a -very good- pipeline) to assemble the reference that is in GenBank from the data in SRA"
https://project-evidence.github.io/
https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-origins-genome-analy...
Who was really behind this, and the whole history of it, is something surely we won't know for know.
"When war is declared, truth is the first casualty"
COVID-19 is ~30,000 base pairs long (10,000) codons. The 4% difference is 400 codons. That's not a lot. There are many singular proteins longer than that.
Is that proof? No, the same way gravity is just a theory.
or other things like assuming someone is dead based on the fact that they dont have a picture online and dont wanna talk to press
ive seen youtube conspiracy videos more convincing
If you ask people from any developing countries, they would express the same attitude (as you do for CCP) towards their own government. The reason is that the officials and way of work is stuck behind current standard, and that's why it is called developing country.
Personally I don't care too much about if it was a lab virus or something else, it becomes all political. Could it be better? I don't think so. If it was developed in a bio-weapon lab, China would have handled it well because it would be prepared.
My own experience: Don't ever trust the Chinese government on issues that could potentially involve the reputation of the party. Note that I'm not saying don't trust what CCP says, ever (sometimes they actually do good things) - just not on issues that involve anything to do with how the world might perceive them.
Which is exactly what this issue is about.
That's not to say we have compelling evidence that this was a lab virus, either. I think, for me, it's a, "we don't know, but I wouldn't be shocked at all if it was a lab virus".