What I saw was the opposite: proponents of "came from a lab" were generally clear about distinguishing whether they meant "escape" or "release", while anyone trying to discredit them were the ones conflating the two - by starting with the ambiguous phrase "came from a lab", ignoring the rest of the argument, and then debunking "created + deliberate release".

Maybe people in general don't know about any "good" reasons to keep viruses in labs (eg research for new vaccines), and would reinterpret anything they heard as "intentionally released" or "bioweapon".

So I wonder if, even if trying to be clear about any virus escape probably having been an accident, maybe somewhat many people still would have interpreted it differently (as if it was intentional), and that type of "news" gets more attention, spreads faster, right.

Some of the debunking relied on the analysis showing that it wasn't the result of Gain of Function research. Whereas an accident could certainly be a release of a natural sample they were originally working on.

The original article that our thread here is about cites a Wuhan researchers relief that the wild virus is not genetically close to anythibg they had in their lab. That's a complete contrast to what you are speculating.

My impression is that China and China influenced corporate press in the US conflated "lab escape" with "deliberate release" so as to be able to demonize anyone who was asking serious questions. This is a pretty standard propaganda move, pretend the accuser said something that is adjacent to the real accusation but also relatively absurd, then argue against that. Never address the serious accusation.

Another example of this happening is the corporate press conflating "lab created" with "gene editing" instead of using the broader interpretation which would include things like "gain of function research" (much more likely). This allowed China and the WHO to explicitly claim they did not create the virus (by gene editing) while cautiously never really addressing whether it was created via gain of function research.

What do you call a cabal of American newspapers, tech companies (policing social media), and politicians (attacking Trump/conservatives) simultaneously conflating the two theories (malicious artificial virus versus leak of natural virus), attacking anyone suggesting an accidental lab leak aggressively, and censoring discussion of the same? It isn’t just “China influenced corporate press”. It’s the entirety of the left and left-leaning institutions (news, tech) that voluntarily participated in this mass gaslighting.

People often stir up fears of foreign influence but in the last few years it really has seemed like the biggest sources of inorganic influence and “propaganda” has been domestic.

There has been a massive, concerted effort by the PRC to deflect culpability. I'm a long time china observer/sinophile, and Chinese social media was abuzz with conspiracy theories that the virus was released by the US military before all the nonsense conspiracies started in the States. In review, China has accused the USA, Japan, Italy, Korea, and probably some others I'm forgetting for releasing the virus.

> conflating the two theories (malicious artificial virus versus leak of natural virus)

I have certainly been puzzled by this, for example in a Washington Post article. By conflating the two, lab escape became a "fringe conspiracy theory" rather than a hypothesis that should be investigated.

It seemed like sloppy journalism at best.

The people who work at these institutions were often educated in the best universities in the country. And yet they speak in lockstep fashion in this "sloppy" manner. I think you give them too much credit.

They also changed wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Wuhan_coronavi...

to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic

> My impression was that "lab escape" was conflated with "deliberate release" by conspiracy types early on

No, the conflating was done by the media and this is exactly how I know it’s actually the most probable theory. The same thing happened for other few big "accidents", where the media/government were prompt to demonize a particular option and push a less convincing one.

Conspiracy theorists are always going to weave conspiracy theories, though. That doesn't absolve the media or the rest of us from being the adults in the room.

Yes but when when people consistently bring up the mostly unfalsifiable theory that is most associated with conspiracy theories it's basically impossible to separate the conspiracy theorists from everyone else, and sadly much more productive to just not engage.

Wait people can't debunk dumdum conspiracy theories? sad

There's an evolutionary theory of conspiracy theories (that I just made up) that they self-select for plausible unfalsifiability. If a theory has a weakness can be proven incorrect, people will eventually patch it with an ephemeral insinuation that "you know what happened here" and move on.

But some things make no sense at all. The most populated country on the planet - a vast, vast population across the area almost as big as the US - has been inexplicably reporting almost zero infections since like March 10, 2020 (way before any vaccines) while the rest of the world (except small and isolated regions), the richest and presumably the most advanced societies still can't get their shit together, are still FUDdding over the upcoming Nth wave and locking down again (see EU today). How???

When the Chinese GOVT says "stay at home", you-better-stay-at-home. That's the difference with the EU, and don't let me start on the US.

Australia, NZ and many countries in Asia did just fine. You just need a government that has its shit together and a populace that complies with the government. When you're missing one or both of those elements of course you're going to have problems with a pandemic.

So both China's government and 1.4B populace have their shit together, fully solved at ~0 infections pre-vaccine for one full year now, but the US, the EU, the newly non-EU UK, and (to a lesser extent) Japan all failed miserably?

It's not so much about having their shit together as having a terrifying autocratic government of the kind the UK government are still pretending (unconvincingly) they don't dream of emulating.

Also there may well be areas of China where the virus never reached. I gather internal travel isn't massively widespread, and the severity of the lockdowns they imposed exceeded anything seen in the US or UK.

I haven't compared the severity of lockdowns or intensity of travel in China and other countries. I've never been to China. But, I've read that it's a very complex society with tons of different ethnic groups, massive inequality, massive migration waves back to the cities and forth, massive problems like tuberculosis rate 20x the TB rate in the States, so saying how they just lock every single human down seems like a bit of an oversimplification to me. But what do i know.

There is no silver bullet here - China is not exactly your friendly democracy.

Also beware that there are reports of China having started vaccinations long before safety and efficacy results.

The flipside of exponential growth is exponential fall: In the best case if you can eliminate all social contact for 5-14 days the virus is essentially gone. But very few Western democracies are able to agree on super strict lockdowns, and if they do, they need their neighbouring countries to follow.

The difference is that the US, EU and UK are highly individualistic democracies, where governments are really weak at enforcing anything. It's no surprise that they suck at handling disease compared to societies with effective authoritarian governance.

Individuals who don't care exist everywhere, but in China government can force them to do the right thing. In the West it can't do that easily. I guess it's the price of individual freedoms.

Do you even remember the early responses from these countries? If you do that does not sound that unlikely

I remember China had uncontrolled community spread for about a month and a half before even admitting there was a new virus, let alone taking action (earliest confirmed case was backtracked to mid-November).

After china finally admitted it and spoke out warnings, america did not admit its dangerious for months to come, some european countries basically run the same shit campaign. Splitting society more than anything else in recent history

If you disobey the CCP, you won't stay around for long. Also they have ironclad grip on the press, so it's no surprise that they are reporting zero cases. Not to put a tinfoil hat on, but it's not exactly like the Soviet Union, and China in the past, haven't been known for prettyfing their news.

It took NYC, which is much richer than any part of China, 100 years to build the Second Avenue subway line, whereas China can build several new subway systems every decade.

Wealth doesn’t necessarily translate to organizational agility.

Some sick people had the doors to their homes welded shut by the government in China so that they wouldn't spread COVID.

Not just sick people. Videos showed how this was done on entire apartment buildings, if you happened to live in one you’re out of luck even if you didn’t get infected.

FWIW my office works closely with an office in Nanjing. They've all been back in the office for ages (and we can see the conference room on the video call). If they were having outbreaks like the rest of the world, there would be bodies piling up like mad. They tried to hide the bodies back in Jan / Feb 2020 and failed, so I don't think they're hiding bodies now. Which means there aren't any bodies; which means their lockdown must have actually been effective at containing the virus.

The rest of us could have done what Taiwan did, and almost entirely avoided becoming infected. Or we could have done what China did -- clamp down hard for three weeks and then go back to normal.

A lot of the area is countryside and is to large extent ignored. Read articles on one-child policy, which was mostly followed in large cities only and resulted in millions of “extra” children growing up essentially outside of the system with no access to healthcare or education.

It seems plausible that infection stats from deep country are not faithfully reported or even collected. That said, what they did do is really complicate domestic travel, which means infections stay contained as a result.

With this logic you can criminalize all of Chinese success...how convenient...

Absolve, no. Explain... maybe.

That's been my impression too fwiw. There's now a large segment of people who are primed to immediately accept the conspiracy theory over the Hanlon's Razor principle:

"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity (or accident)".

Sure. We could also invoke Occam's Razor.

The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

A coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan China miles away from a Virology Lab that studies coronavirus and has in the past exercised gain of function research on cornoviruses specifically with novel lung ACE2 bind may have had a lab accident and a live virus broke out if the lab.

The problem is the media labeling common sense as conspiracy and conflating the two.

Exactly. If there were an Anthrax outbreak in Ft. Detrick, MD, everyone would be immediately assuming the lab was involved. Wuhan is the Ft. Detrick of Coronaviruses.

I wrote this on 2020-01-24 (when that speculation was fairly new), and wonder why that sort of simple statistical argument has rarely been made explicit:

It certainly is an interesting coincidence that the only lab in China that can deal with it happens to be in Wuhan. The question is, how big of a coincidence. If the disease hit a random person randomly uniformly anywhere in China, the probability that it would have happened in Wuhan is a bit less than 1% (as there are about 10+m people in Wuhan, and 1400+m people in China).

If you think it might have struck randomly any city above a million people in China uniformly, it’s also roundabout 1% (as there are about 100 of those).

So this is by no means proof that something fishy happened, but it is significant enough to warrant investigation.

If you assume that this could only have happened in a city with, say, more than 5m people, Wuhan is one of about 15 to 20 of those (so we're just above the "usual" 5% significance threshold).

Still, an independent investigation of that lab seems warranted. Of course it’s China, so unlikely to happen...

(I must say that I think the comment has stood the test of time, so far.)

If this was an attack it would be similar to being locked in a crowded elevator, getting into a fight with another passenger, and deciding to throw a hand grenade at your enemy instead of taking any other approach.

Many countries have shown they are stupid/shortsighted enough to do this, history makes this very clear.

Study the actions of SAIMR in Africa and their plot to drive Africans to extinction using the AIDS virus and fake vaccines, purely for the sake of controlling African resources...that was the UK/US/SA/etc... govts and IA at work...they even assassinated a UN secretary general in the process.

I wish man/nation-states/intelligence-agencies were as wise as you assume but history says no.

That's kind of my point. Your examples still show planning into the selection of the attack vector and preparing for its effects... even if this is some 4D-chess to move the US off of the global supply chain, there are cheaper ways (and better germs) to do it.

Interesting that UK/US/SA always the "bad" actor in your posts? Axe to grind? Couldn't this just as easily be construed as a 4D-chess move by China/Russia/SeaLand/MoonPeople to weaken the US economy since pandemic conditions naturally favor governments that can enforce stricter lockdowns? At the end of the day this type of speculation is a waste of time without substantiation.

I can't ascribe specific motives to the actors but it is clear (has been clear for the past century) that large western economies/powers know exactly what they will lose with China rising.

>Interesting that UK/US/SA always the "bad" actor in your posts? Axe to grind?

China doesn't have a history of attacking Africans (ref. to my earlier example) or foreign countries in general for that matter...I specify this group (UK/US/SA/etc...) because they have a long history of putting economic interests over human life (especially foreign/indigenous life), continue to show that propensity to this day (zero sum mentality), and have deployed bioweapons around the world at various points over the centuries, in most cases, specifically for economic reasons.

History says the shoe fits...not too long ago the US was testing bioweapons on their own unaware domestic population, older Californians are aware of this history.

There were two incidents at that facility. The first led to a building being condemned.

The second was a more nebulous investigation into the yet unsolved 2001 anthrax attacks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Hatfill#Lawsuits

Yup, though to nitpick, Occam's Razor actually says that the explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely the correct one. Subtle but important difference. Otherwise, /agree, especially with the media being confused.

Why do people rush to differentiate, e.g, the diffs bt correlation and causation, but never question Occam's razor (I'm officially leading the charge to cease its capitalization), which isn't science, isn't a law, but merely a design principle.

It's been treated as an irrefutable endpoint at best and as a spell at worst. I find it a convenient false authority for lazy thinking.

Consider a statement like: "an expressive programming language is necessary to manage a resource distribution system such as a food production, processing, and delivery system." One could quote Occam and say "nah let's hunt and gather," but how is that consistent with our values? Ergo, Occam's quote is a selectively applied false authority. We need to use our heads and put it to bed!

I invoked Occam's Razor when I wondered what was more likely: that it was spread via a wet market or escaped from a lab with biosecurity protocols staffed by professionals?

Of course I still don't know and my ideas regarding the latter have changed because of this article but I'm now pretty sure that I don't have enough information to invoke Occam's Razor in any kind of insightful or effective way.

When the virus broke out there was an early paper, later retracted, which tried to link the virus with engineered HIV carrier strains.

Undoubtedly after looking at the sequences of that paper, there were some alignments, but how they were structured doesn't point to being engineered, but rather of co-infection, which did not match the conclusions of the paper.

What they do actually indicate might even be more politically inflammatory. That the virus evolved out of a recombination event in an HIV infected person infected with a SARS-like virus, and repackaged as a new SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Or conflated with that by people using it as a straw man to debunk more likely scenarios, your pick.

It happens in the comments here still, and not necessarily a malice. A kneejerk reaction to any claim amplified by the former administration, even if it's "the sky is blue". Same reason many otherwise sane folks mourned Soleimani.

Nobody was mourning Soleimani. This is a ridiculous straw man. Soleimani's assassination was problematic on a number of fronts, and people were right to criticize it.

Plenty were mourning Soleimani, and Twitter just couldn't shut up for a while about how the world is on the way to WW3 over this. It however turned out to be perhaps the most useful FP action of that administration.

If there was a lab leak.. The resistance to independent investigation, the disappearing of doctors who reported on this early on and such makes them just as guilty as if it was done on purpose.

At this juncture maliciousness or negligence is just splitting hairs. How they handled the negligence might as well have been malicious.

Indeed. The virus itself may not have been weaponized, but the aftermath most certainly was.