Well. It leaked, they kept quiet as they always do. We will keep finding the smoking gun forever and they will never admit it. It was an accident though. Let’s hope they learned their lesson.

its still not evidence of a lab leak.

a state wide coverup a potential global health issue, sure.

To me, I find that China stopping internal travel while allowing International flights to continue to be more damming than whether or not the source was a lab.

This is an urban legend.

Wuhan's international airport was completely shut down. The only flights allowed out were specially chartered evacuation flights, organized by foreign governments.

I'm not sure if this discovery will ever amount to a "beyond reasonable doubt" standard of proof of a cover-up, especially in an internationally accepted judicial setting, but I do wonder if, in general, there needs to be a legal principle that hiding evidence of something has to be punished as harshly as the worst plausible crime that the evidence could be hiding.

Such a principle would, admittedly, lead to many defendants being punished for crimes they didn't actually commit (i.e. they were only covering up lesser crimes), but without such a principle, a guilty person will always face a rational choice of covering up their crime and risking only an additional "destruction of evidence" charge (for example), as opposed to being caught for the actual crime and incurring the (presumably harsher) punishment for that.

For such a principle to pass the smell test, though, it should first and foremost apply to government record laws, covering everything from politician's official emails to police body-cam footage. A society which elects politicians willing to be held to that standard can be assumed to be mature enough to have this principle applied to other criminals.

Then encrypting your hard drive could hide your planned murder plot. Secret communications on encrypted messengers hides your instructions to friends to blow up parliament at dawn. Using the dark web means you are covering your tracks for the kiddie porn you sold.

This seems like the worst idea with the best sales pitch that I've heard in 2021 so far.

I haven't thought out the lesser scenario where hiding evidence is illegal (something something working on your own conviction), but at least this "gets you convicted for the worst possible crime" seems like a terrible, terrible idea if you don't want to live in a place worse than North Korea.

> This seems like the worst idea with the best sales pitch that I've heard in 2021 so far.

I guess I'll take that as a compliment, thank you.

You're right to point out the unintended consequences of my idea, though, and I see now that it would need significant changes to be workable. Firstly, I don't think that encryption should count as a cover-up in any circumstance, just as the undisclosed contents of your own brain aren't covered up in any way that's punishable by the law.

In general, I think that a cover-up means irretrievably destroying evidence that would naturally exist (like an item of clothing, or a book of accounts) or that you had a statutory duty to create and preserve in the first place (like body-cam footage or internal government communications). Defining what "naturally" means when applied to something like a "no logs VPN" might be tricky, but I think a reasonable line could be drawn.

> I do wonder if, in general, there needs to be a legal principle that hiding evidence of something has to be punished as harshly as the worst plausible crime that the evidence could be hiding

There are various formulations of the adverse inference rule, but worse still is the false-exculpatory-statement / consciousness-of-guilt jury instruction. As a defense attorney, I have pled serious cases out based on a fear of that instruction.

That's exactly the thing - individually there's deniability. But taken in toto, the circumstantial evidence of lab leak is stunning and obvious. It's even quickly entering "it was designed as a bioweapon but 'probably' leaked by accident but maybe not" territory. This news, for example, raises that question strongly.

Such a strange thing to make, a highly transmissible airborne quickly mutating virus as a bioweapon?

It's far too unpredictable as a weapon, bordering on insanity. How could it ever be used as a weapon?

At least anthrax spores settle down and can be decominated. no such option with coronaviruses.

It can be used as a weapon when you have a culture of conformity, a stockpile of masks, a huge manufacturing and scientific base, and zero tolerance for conspiracy theories. Combine COVID with a disinformation campaign and use democracy's messy freedom against it.

It's possible in theory, but incredibly high risks.

Not much different from launching a full out nuclear war, hoping that your defences will sustain the counterattack.

Absolutely nuts.

The principle you describe is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_inference

beyond reasonable doubt is not the standard in civil suits, internationally or not.

Any laws or contracts only have meaning if backed by some remedy and enforcement.

International "law" is essentially "might makes right", nothing else.

> International "law" is essentially "might makes right", nothing else.

All law is "might makes right" if you want to be completely reductionist about it.

A more nuanced take is that, just as civilised people choose to submit to a system of laws which punish those who break the social contract between people, so civilised nations choose to submit to a system of international law which can pass rulings against (and occasionally punish) nations that fail to respect the accepted boundaries that apply to the actions of nations.

What we see in practice is that, of course, nations don't like being particularly limited in what they can do, so international law only tends to cover things that almost every nation almost never wants to do (like commit genocide or bomb foreign hospitals). In the rare cases that a pariah nation does transgress one of the few constraints on it, though, the international community has various means to bring the nation back into compliance, such as economic sanctions.

The fact that America wasn't convicted in an international court for the Crime of Aggression when it invaded Iraq, for example, isn't so much a failure of international law as it is a reflection of the support the US received from countries who would in some sense constitute the jury of its peers (even though that's not exactly how international law is intended to function).

The article says this was "according to a report from researchers in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia." I wish it included a link.

Original report: https://internet2-0.com/whitepaper/procuring-for-a-pandemic/

Bloomberg article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-04/china-pcr...

Looking at the graph in the Bloomberg article, the PCR spending increases began years ago, so the evidence for the conclusion isn't overwhelmingly compelling.

Email with link to original report doesn't deliver a document. Appreciate if someone can post here.

mind you this source is bias but does have the report available to download; https://humanevents.com/2021/10/04/breaking-china-pcr-test-o...

I don't understand why archiving and linking source material isn't the norm.

This is about as reliable as the reports claiming that 20 million Chinese people had died because of a dip in the number of cell phone contracts early on in the pandemic.

The idea that the virus was spreading to any significant extent in Wuhan in May 2019 is absurd. The outbreak only reached sufficient proportion to be noticed in late December 2019, when hospitals first started noticing clusters of pneumonia patients. And by all appearances, the Chinese government was completely unprepared for the outbreak - the response in late December 2019 through mid-January 2020 was chaotic and ineffective. The idea that the government had been secretly preparing for more than half a year in advance of the first known outbreak in Wuhan just doesn't make any sense at all.

It's a sad statement on the state of journalism that this sort of nonsense gets any traction in mainstream media, and it's an even sadder statement on the level of anti-Chinese paranoia that people buy it.