Not sure what crazy publications you all were reading.
I don’t recall a single instance of this. A year ago, people were saying on this site and elsewhere was that the issue was conflating “lab leak” with “intentionally engineered”. A year before that, people argued that the issue was conflating “lab leak” with “leaked from WIV”, when WIV was established in that location due to the prevalence of novel coronaviruses in the region.
The goalposts keep moving.
I recall it being every single instance of it.
I never met anyone who didn't equate "lab leak" with an intentional act by china
The theory was on the table and was discussed at the time ...
Most efforts however were focused on dealing with the immediate danger.
The likes of Alina Chan and Richard Ebright are "easy mode" counterexamples for your statement.
I'll swing for the fences: Even Tom Cotton was -- at least once, I am exceedingly uninterested in combing through all his tweets and media appearances -- careful to distinguish between "lab leak" and "intentional act", despite being brazenly political and probably inspired by anti-China animus.
From the thread beginning at https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126:
"Let me debunk the debunkers. @paulina_milla and her “experts” wrongly jump straight to the claim that the coronavirus is an engineered bioweapon. That’s not what I’ve said. There’s at least four hypotheses about the origin of the virus:
1. Natural (still the most likely, but almost certainly not from the Wuhan food market)
2. Good science, bad safety (eg, they were researching things like diagnostic testing and vaccines, but an accidental breach occurred)
3. Bad science, bad safety (this is the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis, with an accidental breach)
4. Deliberate release (very unlikely, but shouldn’t rule out till the evidence is in)
Again, none of these are “theories” and certainly not “conspiracy theories.” They are hypotheses that ought to be studied in light of the evidence, if the Chinese Communist Party would provide it.
We ought to be transparent with the American people about all this. Maybe some of these so-called experts think they know better. I don’t. And they really don’t either."
It's trivial to find people inside your echo-chamber being well-behaved --- this doesn't answer what a platform's moral responsibility is to society.
Huge roiling waves of conspiratorial alarmism leading, eg., to Jan 6th -- now occur around trivial events like elections. Can you imagine what unadulterated social media might have done during lockdowns? I'm suprised there weren't roving militias pointing guns at local post office officials.
Social media is putting society in a routinely ungovernable state. Looking at the words of Tom Cotton isn't relevant.
Platforms are daily trying to prevent the sharing of abject none-sense to massive amounts of people forming pique'ing cliques of loons ready to riot at a pin-drop.
Unfortunately, we do have an issue. Ignoring that it is one will not solve it, nor will brushing it under the rug by the lame attempts at disinformation removal. We need to face the fact that a decent amount of our population is acting out of anger and fear, often irrationally and without evidence, and that they were used and manipulated for political and monetary gain and it has gotten passed the point where it can be walked back.
Social media is a vector but not the cause. I don't know what the answer is, but we certainly do have an issue.
am i advocating for this? of course not, however, we have countless examples where conspiracies and just plain paranoid thinking spun out and resulted in very very real atrocities. significant atrocities that were much more real and much more severe than “oh woe is me, i was muted on a social media site.”
again, i’m not advocating for this, but any conversational talking point surrounding this topic which ignores those issues is not a serious one.
"In the first four months of the pandemic, there were 145 reports to the NYC Commission on Human Rights of coronavirus-related Anti-Asian hate incidents. That’s 12x the year before."
"⅓ of Americans report they have witnessed blame on Asians for the outbreak"
Violence (including mass shootings and church burnings) inspired by replacement theory and incelism.
Anti-vax beliefs led to more deaths due to COVID, and greater economic and systemic stress than otherwise would have occurred had a significant number of people afraid of adrenochrome harvesting and the New World Order not purposely undermined pandemic control efforts.
Currently the "groomer" conspiracy theories seem to be headed towards some mass cultural violence event towards trangender people, with politicians openly calling for the "elimination" of transgerism, but that remains to be seen.
But let's ask what atrocities have ever been prevented by conspiracy theories? None. QAnon has been more of a hindrance to efforts to combat child abuse and human trafficking than a benefit, and they were entirely focused on "decoding" the Podesta emails and "exposing" satanic rituals in the Democratic Party while Epstein was going about his business.
It should go without saying that none of the doomsday scenarios the COVID conspiracy theorists predicted came to pass. All they accomplished was making the pandemic worse. And no doubt the seeds of paranoia and mistrust they laid will make the next pandemic worse as well.
Hell, even MKUltra wasn't uncovered by conspiracy theorists - it was exposed by accident through an unrelated FOIA leak. NSA spying? The Simpsons did a bit about that before Snowden, but conspiracy theorists were going on about mind-control rays being beamed through televisions and mass hypnosis.
These people want the world to believe they are the the ones constantly telling truth to power, the only ones who can see the dark truths hidden behind the curtain, and they'll insist they are always right. But at best they only coincidentally appear to be right, in the same way as a stopped clock, and always in a way that does more harm than good.
May you live in interesting times indeed.
1. Larped as a Viking 2. Stole a podium 3. Placed feet on a desk 4. Broke a window 5. Caused a woman, who was not in the same building, to cry
There were several other terrible acts committed by these evil people, but these were the most commonly cited ones. Sicknick's death was widely publicized at first, but then magically got blackholed later when it turned out that a group of QAnon-influenced platelets formed a blood clot that killed the poor patriot.
Fortunately for us, these evil insurrectionists were denied their due process rights for years, and our hallowed and beloved Congress members spent a full month of their valuable time on hearings to get to the bottom of this genocide.
January 6th: Never Again.
"What man does not understand, he fears; and what he fears, he tends to destroy." - William Butler Yeats
Plenty of sources on the uptick in attacks during the AIDS crisis, but here are three:
* https://review.gale.com/2017/05/17/the-homophobic-aids-crisi...
* https://www.apa.org/pi/aids/resources/exchange/2012/04/discr...
* https://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/23/us/violence-against-homos...
One example is the switch to paid blue checkmarks on Twitter. Prior to the switch, there’d be some semblance (not great) of debate on comments. Now, all the musk fans and RW-oriented subscribers completely dominate so all you see in response to a Dem or “RINO” tweet is reflexive comments calling the OP lies, incorrect whataboutism, conspiracy theory of the day, etc, with more reasoned fact checking buried way down.
This is particularly pronounced with any tweet about the Trump indictment with little discussion of the substance of the indictment. The crackpot hypothesis/meme of Paul Pelosi’s attack being a gay love spat is another example. The participants didn’t even want to read the police report before moving on to another conspiracy theory about the report’s generation. Reasoned discussion would be great. It’s just not happening.
aka, you're on the other side now.
I am not a Republican, Tom Cotton is incredibly far away from anything which could be considered my "echo chamber", and I never claimed he was well-behaved.
I chose him specifically to make the specific and narrow point that even brazenly political actors were careful to explicitly distinguish between accidental/unintentional release and an intentional release; and also made clear that "intentional release" was the possibility they regarded as least likely. This was in response to the comment I replied to, whose author said "I never met anyone who didn't equate "lab leak" with an intentional act by china".
I think most people -- political leaders and otherwise -- are perfectly capable of distinguishing between "high-risk research goes tragically wrong" and "a bioweapon was released on purpose".
If anything, these hamhanded efforts (equating a prosaic "people and/or equipment messed up" scenario to "intentional release of bioweapon", making spurious accusations of racism, claiming that the case for a natural origin is ironclad, government agencies refusing to hand over relevant documents to Senators with the right to see them, etc) to censor discussion and impede investigation of the former has fueled incredibly noxious conspiratorial thinking.
We're trying to groom public appetite for war with China. Anything that paints them in the worst possible light is acceptable now.
After artificial chip shortages, the weather balloon incident, and TikTok, now it's suggested China was responsible for COVID. Expect more to follow.
Why some people are willing to believe the nonsense spouted by both I don't understand, but the fact that people do explains why so many view it as an intentional act by China.
What gives me pause is that our collective national security apparatus saw fit to let it traverse the entire fucking country before doing anything about it. And in the end, America even acknowledged that it was blown off course-- which is what the Chinese were saying from the start.
I don't trust the Chinese-- at all. I don't trust America either though. I remember the certainty with which they said there was evidence of WMDs in Iraq.
You must have a very conspiratorial group of friends / contacts !
I followed the whole covid story pretty closely, and as I recall "lab leak" was taken by almost everyone as "accidental lab leak". Was the lab perhaps doing some type of "gain of function" research that they were not meant to be doing? TBD, but the massive (as it turns out) initial over-reaction to covid in China certainly doesn't look like something they intended to inflict on themselves (as well as eventually the rest of the world).
I saw the birth of r/WuhanFlu and other related subreddits that were created in early 2020, and accusations of it being a bioweapon were there from the start, and once someone looked up "Wuhan" on Google Maps and saw the virology institute, people were saying it was a lab leak.
> China and the WHO intentionally developing and deploying bio-weapons as a means of global population control
This is what I mean about moving goalposts - these two theories might both assert that it was a bioweapon, but they are otherwise very different.
It totally feels orchestrated. Someone somewhere in the US establishment needed an excuse to not discuss about the lab leak theories. So the attacks on people of Asian descent turned out to be the perfect excuse. That's what it comes across to me as an observer of US politics. There is literally no reason for censoring information on discussion of a lab leak that did not even happen on US soil but in Wuhan. If you can discuss Russia, 9/11, terror attacks in various parts of the globe, without US citizens going bonkers and attacking people of those races, I am pretty sure discussing lab leak theory would not piss US citizens off that much. But bring in race attacks angle and you have the people by your side asking for and justifying censorship.
Let me ask you another question: How do you think people in Asia discussed the COVID pandemic? Did people in China not question their own government (CCP) and its role in the pandemic? How sure are you that they all believed that the virus did not come from the Wuhan lab but, as per CCP, came from the West?
Quoting https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/03/03/anti-russia...
As Putin’s invasion of Ukraine intensifies, some Russian-themed businesses and Russian Americans in the United States are suddenly getting a frosty reception — and in a few cases, experiencing outright hostility. A Russian restaurant in Washington, D.C., called Russia House, was vandalized and the owner indicated that he thought anti-Russian sentiment might be to blame. Some Russian Americans say their children are being bullied at school.
“Americans were encouraged to sympathize with the people of Russia rather than the government. And that seems to me to be what is really different from what we’re seeing now, where you see people at protests with signs saying all Russians are to blame for Putin’s aggression,” he said.
Thulien pointed to another incident in which the parents of a close friend, a couple in their 80s, had their car scratched and vandalized overnight this week.
Also note that in the context of the US culture war, Russia is seen as an ally against the 'woke left', leading to the bizarre situation where Putin himself made references to Harry Potter author JK Rowling in a speech about the invasion of another sovereign country. This might shield Russians against at least some antagonism from that part of the political spectrum.
When Russians complain they're being victimised, it might behold you to consider that "Russian" is pretty much not an identifiable group amongst the wide range of eastern Europeans who have immigrated - including Ukrainians.
So when Russians complain they're being mistreated, is worth asking what they were doing at the time. Because it tends to be vocally supporting the Russian invasion[1] or the whole idea of it is being straight up invented and pushed by Kremlin propaganda agents[2].
[1] https://www.rferl.org/a/germany-pro-russia-rallies-discrimin...
[2] https://time.com/6257372/russia-ukraine-war-disinformation/
Claims of an anti-Russian bias or set of hate crimes is literal Kremlin propaganda which amongst other things was used to justify the Ukraine invasion, the South Ossetia invasion in Georgia, and has been a general talking point as to why Russia should consider invading many other of its neighbours.
Wuhan was hit by strain B in December. Strain A, original virus, was released about 2 months before that. Where it was for 2 months?
I am pretty sure 9/11 - War on Terror saw a rise in aggression of muslim looking people even though it concerned less people than covid did.
You're pretending there was no such thing as people on TV blaming it on people eating "bat soup" and stuff like that.
When lab leak hypotheses were able to rise above the conspiracy theories thanks to reasonable argumentation, it was finally heard. At first only on HN, thanks to which I first gave credence to the hypothesis and now you here you have it in mainstream media. It all takes time and debate, it's normal.
The only conspiracy I see is from people, whether in the state apparatus or the scientific community that really did not want people to look too much into Gain OF Function research. I think the existence of such research and democratic control over is the debate now worth having.
And what does it have to do with State censorship of information? The State has no societal relationships (like grandpa/grandma/brother/sister/husband/wife/son/daughter etc) that can pressure it to shutdown flow of information. We are talking about State apparatus censoring information here. With Big Tech actively aiding it.
> You're pretending there was no such thing as people on TV blaming it on people eating "bat soup" and stuff like that.
I am not pretending anything. Also people blaming people eating "bat soup" has nothing to do with lab leak theory. Both are totally different issues altogether. I don't see how they are related?
> At first only on HN, thanks to which I first gave credence to the hypothesis and now you here you have it in mainstream media.
Many of us knew it from the very beginning once the censorship started that it has to do with lab leak. The only ones interested in suppressing information are the ones who have something to hide. Age old adage.
> It all takes time and debate, it's normal.
No it is not normal. Even post 9/11 no conversation was censored in US media. Even conspiracy theories were not snubbed or wiped off. Censorship was rampant only post COVID. It only tells me, as an observer of US politics, that the people high up in the US establishment, who had a stake in the Wuhan lab, had something really nasty to hide.
> The only conspiracy I see is from people, whether in the state apparatus or the scientific community that really did not want people to look too much into Gain OF Function research. I think the existence of such research and democratic control over is the debate now worth having.
Exactly. But having a debate now is mostly useless anyways. Whatever window of opportunity we had to investigate lab leak theory is now long gone. All the actors who wanted to cover their tracks have now had enough time to do so. So even if you are able to prove that lab leak did occur (to some degree) it won't lead to any indictments. And with an authoritarian CCP, good luck getting any leads directly from the labs itself.
Most post COVID conspiracy theories have actually come true. Be it mask mandates, lockdowns, GoF, harmful vaccine side effects or lab leak theories. In a couple of years we will have even more information about why information was censored and who were behind this censorship. Such things cannot be hidden for long. That's a given. But what we lose out now on is the scale of the things that went on behind the scenes. Now that these nefarious actors have had enough time to clean their evidence, even if you find any evidence it would be really weak leading to no indictments/charges forget prosecutions and convictions.
No true. 9/11 was a nearly perfect military industrial play and no one could publicly question the US actions post the event. It felt like a lockstep war machine with vengeance at an all time high. You must’ve not lived through it.
Look up 9/11 Truthers movement and "Bush Did It!" to get an idea of the conspiracy theories that emerged right after 9/11. The "Bush Did It!" rallies took place in September 2002, just 1 year after 9/11.
Personally I don't believe in the 9/11 Truthers movement but I wouldn't even know about it if COVID level censorship was adopted back in 2001. Mainstream media was very different back then. Compared to what it has devolved into now.
You're remembering things through rose-colored glasses. Ellen DeGeneres and Laura Dern, Bill Maher and the Dixie Chicks can tell stories of what happened in the 90s and 2000s when you went against the mainstream. In fact, people were cancelled over the silliest things (remember nipplegate?). Government censorship was also alive and well: Under the Bush junior administration, NASA and EPA scientists were not allowed to use the phrase 'global warming'.
> Also people blaming people eating "bat soup" has nothing to do with lab leak theory. Both are totally different issues altogether. I don't see how they are related?
Because the bat soup people where the first one to jump on the lab-leak theory. That did not help the cause. We use network of trust to digest information. I don't have no trust in people saying crazy stuff even though they might sometimes be right.
> Exactly. But having a debate now is mostly useless anyways. Whatever window of opportunity we had to investigate lab leak theory is now long gone. All the actors who wanted to cover their tracks have now had enough time to do so. So even if you are able to prove that lab leak did occur (to some degree) it won't lead to any indictments. And with an authoritarian CCP, good luck getting any leads directly from the labs itself.
I don't agree. It didn't matter more at the time to know if it was a lab-leak or not, situation had to be handled. Now that there's less urgency maybe we can investigate the dark corners and do something about it so it won't happen again. It m atters more than ever.
> Most post COVID conspiracy theories have actually come true. Be it mask mandates, lockdowns, GoF, harmful vaccine side effects or lab leak theories
How are mask mandates and lockdowns conspiracists predictions turned true... ? The real conspiracy was not telling people they should wear masks to protect others because there wasn't enought for everybody. How was lockdown a conspiracy rather that government trying to pretend they were doing something ? I don't think the economy benefited fromt that\
Harmful vaccine side effects ? What about getting covid side-effects ? Listen you would have caught it no matter what and it would probably be worse. The discrepancy between deaths of vaccinated and unvaccinated people should tell you much.
GOF was known before too, it just wasn't in the public eye
And yet there was no censorship on conspiracy theories about the CIA being behind 9/11, for instance.
In contrast to the lab leak theory which made the front page more than once, was actually the was much more heavily "censored".
> At the time the US had a president that routinely used race-baiting as a divisive political technique
What exactly did the US President, at that time, say specifically that exacerbated attacks on Asians, after breakout of COVID, and more importantly could be used as a justification for Worldwide censorship of lab leak theory? Don't forget that the lab leak theory was being suppressed on behest of the US Government by Big Tech and that suppression of information was not limited to just the US but entire World. As far as I remember, Trump was only the President of USA. He wasn't the President of the World. So you can't blame Trump if Big Tech is doing a Worldwide censorship of lab leak theory. I don't buy that argument at all.
The lab leak theory and weaponization theories were never squelched. The right wing in this country fantasizes that their viewpoints are marginalized while having their most extreme viewpoints broadcast on the top watched news programs in history. The idea that the lab theories were squelched was floated by those very same programs as part of their promotional formula.
This is at least as true now and in 2015
In any case, the most alarming aspect of the lab leak hypothesis is that gain-of-function research is STILL being done, and that the same thing could happen AGAIN. Since this risks creating another pandemic, suppressing the story because of concerns about street crime is very misguided.
I never thought the leak was intentional though.
This right here is an example of why we can’t have reasoned discussion around the topic.
You can explain one of the many reasons why gain of function research is necessary: anticipating next year’s version of the flu, designing drugs and vaccines such that resistance mutations reduce evolutionary fitness.
You can explain how it is done: lots of computational simulations, and some benchtop with results feeding back into computational methods.
You can explain some of the safeguards in place: BSL 3/4 facilities, regulatory / institutional oversight, security services, etc.
And then someone will stand up on a chair and yell “SUPER VIRUS!”
Anyway from my perspective, the “lab leak” theory tends to be people pushing an unsubstantiated theory to either (1) blame China for an “act of god/nature” or (2) argue for a moratorium on infectious disease / vaccine / therapeutic research.
Please note that no one here is calling you a racist. But I think calling parts of your comment uninformed or misinformed is fair game for discussion.
Temper this proposed modest benefit with the potential cost in terms of human adapted viruses being accidentially/intentionally released in the wild given the vagaries of both biolab security protocols in the labs accross the world conducting this kind of research and individual human psychology makes the justification of such research a pretty hard sell.
For me it's just common sense. It probably came from the coronavirus lab with a bad safety record it popped up next to. Duh. And I "push" it because I value the truth and want to live in a rational society where the truth isn't gamed for emotional or political reasons. And that's probably the same for most of us.
> Duh
This is the kind of argument one makes when they don't have an argument
- They study novel coronaviruses - They sampled the same regions where the closest relatives to the virus were found - They applied to put a furin cleavage site in a coronavirus before the pandemic - They were cited in diplomatic cables for poor safety standards - The database containing records of the viral sequences was taken down right before the pandemic - A scientist working at the lab at the time of the origin disappeared - A scientist who patented a coronavirus vaccine a few months into the pandemic "jumped off the roof"?
Does a lab accident not immediately jump out as the obvious leading possibility to you?
So, 'things happened before' are heavily tilted towards 'nature did it' in any case.
https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/207501This is why "common sense" is very often wrong and we have to refer to data instead. You're making assumptions that are very wrong.
The wet market was over 50,000 square metres in size and one of the largest in China. The idea that there are hundreds or millions of these things is completely backwards.
The conditions were unsanitary, animals were slaughtered on site, and large numbers of wild animals were sold.
This is exactly the sort of place you'd expect a zoonotic spillover event to occur. It was flagged beforehand as a danger site.
It's not impossible that it could have been a lab leak, but consider that this market had hundreds of thousands of animals being kept, slaughtered and sold, in unsanitary conditions, shitting and pissing on each other, bleeding everywhere and biting humans and each other.
Now compare that to a secure biolab holding a small number of samples whilst following biosecure protocols. Even if they weren't perfect, which environment provides the best chance of a spillover event?
And sure, the wuhan market is a great place for a zoonotic spillover to occur, but any wet market would be, so the wuhan market in particular isn't the exact place you would expect. In fact I would expect it to occur at a market much closer to where the most similar viruses were found.
However, since the wuhan market is the enormous unsanitary market near the novel coronavirus lab, it is the exact place I would expect the first super spreader event to occur following a leak at that lab.
Can such contagious virus as SARS-CoV-2 cross the distance between lab in Wuhan and wet market in Wuhan in few days? Of course. In few months? No way.
It's unfortunate in so many way - admit a mistake was made, acknowledge the problem, and clean it up is so much more respectful of everybody's time and resources. Between Asian traditions of saving face, and US traditions of lawyers suing anything that moves, that approach never stood a chance of course.
Also, Russian media informed about spike of pneumonia cases in November 2019[1].
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7813667/
Note: This page below crashes my browser (Firefox at Fedora Linux) even when requested from Wayback archive. Beware!
[1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20191119113457/https://www.1tv.ru...
If someone went to Novosibirsk to check situation after blast at BSL4 lab "Vector", then (IMHO!) he may contracted the virus and spreaded it in USA after return, which (IMHO!) explains why USA three letter agency covers that blast.
It would be an extraordinarily rare and noteworthy event in human history. The bar to prove that it happened to cause COVID is very high and the direct evidence (not circumstantial) for it is so far very low.
https://twitter.com/emilyakopp/status/1620884457032155136?t=...
This is what the “lab leak” theory is. It’s why every conversation of lab leak is tied up with comments about gain of function, etc.
The interesting thing about SARS-COV-2 is that it can infect humans and cause illness (unlike the vast majority of known viruses). When people talk about the origin of the pandemic, it is the origin of this property specifically that they mean. The lab leak theory is that this property originated in a lab.
Letting viruses evolve in-vivo is the problem especially when they are so viral.
There needs to be limitations on what R is allowed to be produced in-vivo, even more so because calculating the risk of virality of the outbreak is trivial if in-vitro studies are done.
And why are you worried about humanized mice and not human cell lines like HEK or CALU? Why not primary cells or organoids? Somewhere the “Outbreak” monkey is crying.
I admit that I am being a bit snarky and passive aggressive here; but for the past few years I have watched people butcher bioscience in online discussions. Imagine being a classically trained pianist and having to watch people misattribute all of Mozart’s work to Brahms. It is enough to drive anyone mad.
I mean it sucks if it hurts your career or impacts your profession, but highly dangerous work needs to be reviewed and banned if need be!
Humanity > Your personal career
None of these require gain of function research.
> You can explain some of the safeguards in place: BSL 3/4 facilities, regulatory / institutional oversight, security services, etc.
All of these have a long history of failures [1,2]. And those are just the acknowledged, some have actually been covered up [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
[2] https://www.amazon.ca/Pandoras-Gamble-Leaks-Pandemics-World/...
[3] https://health.wusf.usf.edu/health-news-florida/2023-04-25/d...
Please elaborate on this. How should I go about anticipating which mutations in which genes / protein will result in resistance to a candidate therapy / molecule / mechanism that I am considering advancing into phase 1 trials?
If this research indeed caused the pandemic (and might cause more), do those things make the juice worth the squeeze?
A chance at a better flu vaccine doesn't seem like enough reward for what we all went through.
A few problems with this. First modifying wild animal viruses to be infectious towards humans is different than modifying human viruses to model potential mutations. Modifying animal viruses to be infectious towards humans has done nothing but cause risks. Despite this research being conducted for almost a decade it has yet to predict or prevent any pandemic and probably started this one.
Additionally the idea that modifying animal viruses to easily transmit towards humans will allow us to develop vaccines is absurd. You can't test a vaccine that is not circulating in humans, so trails can not start until the pandemic has already started.
So yes, there should be moratorium on research that modifies infectious diseases! The public has a right to consent on whether such research is worth the risks.
Especially if done near population centers.
See any issues there?
Where? Can you back this up with clear evidence? And assuming this claim isn't simply made up, in what universe would it be a good strategy to address a USA specific problem by systematically and globally destroying the credibility of the entire scientific, media and public health establishment? The solution to violence is police; no one in their right mind would decide the best solution to this would be to establish a global conspiracy.
No, the above is all retroactive justification. We have the emails from the virologists as they planned the letter that claimed it was all a conspiracy theory. They weren't motivated by violent attacks. They were worried about being blamed for it, and that maybe it'd be harder to fund work in China in future. They say that, in writing.
Why? Because China was behind on vaccine development, and when they finally produced on it was not only late, but barely functional.
Late is one thing - if you release a bioweapon, it's far too suspicious to release a co-developed vaccine simultaneously.
But ineffective?
When it got out the WHO was parroting China's talking points from day one - it's not airborne, that's just a racist conspiracy. It was nuts.
And from the same group that was ignoring the big red flags from Taiwan's early warning system (Taiwan, who incidentally is refused membership as part of the world's China appeasement policy).
Then China shutdown domestic travel from Wuhan, while still allowing it internationally.
They didn't develop it as a bioweapon - but that did not stop them from weaponising it after the fact.
Lie[0]:
> On April 21, Ferguson provided an “update” to his April 5 column in which he acknowledged, “Data from sensors tracking actual flight paths would seem to indicate that no flights left from Wuhan itself to other countries in the world after January 23.”
[0] https://www.factcheck.org/2020/05/trumps-flawed-china-travel...
The biggest difference was that we didn't have someone like Gro Harlem Bruntlant [1] to competently handle the WHO's response [2] and call them out for their bullshit.
Both China and Taiwan looked at the SARS outbreak, and made efforts to prevent it from happening again.
Taiwan set up a robust early warning system in order to detect and contain such outbreaks in the future.
China on the other hand, set out to inject themselves into the WHO to protect themselves from future embarrassment [3].
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gro_Harlem_Brundtland
[2] - https://www.who.int/news/item/05-07-2003-sars-outbreak-conta...
It should be noted that the statistics don't support the media narrative and there was no wave of white supremacist attacks on Asians.
Here are the stats from New York ("Arrest Statistics by Bias Motivation"): https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/stats/reports-analysis/hate-cr...
Anti-Asian 2020: 27
Anti-Asian 2021: 131
Also worth to know that anti-asian hate was also a narrative pushed by the CPC to label things like supporting Hong Kong democracy protests or criticizing uighur genocide as "anti-asian hate", which happened after the CPC noticed the effectiveness of BLM protests in sowing us discord (mid-2020) so to trust any stats post 2020 it would at least need to segregate the two use cases.
Anti-Asian 2019: 0.2%
Anti-Asian 2020: 10%
Anti-Asian 2021: 25%
EDIT: Regarding an uptick in anti-jewish etc.
Anti-Jewish 2019: 57%
Anti-Jewish 2020: 43%
Anti-Jewish 2021: 37%
> hate crime
These are not the same thing and especially when comparing over time you need to take into account how the definitions for the categories themselves change.
2019 is the pre-covid default state.
2020 is when covid rhetoric was hot.
2021 is Vaccines and Biden is president
2019 stats are in the archive at the bottom of the page. I’d pull them but on a phone.
2021 values could be the result of 2020's rhetoric.
BLACK: 11 (55%)
WHITE HISPANIC: 5 (25%)
BLACK HISPANIC: 2 (10%)
WHITE: 2 (10%)
Total: 20
2021:
BLACK: 31 (53%)
HISPANIC: 15 (26%)
WHITE: 7 (12%)
ASIAN / PACIFIC ISLANDER: 5 (8%)
UNKNOWN: 1 (2%)
Total: 59
2022:
BLACK: 39 (49%)
WHITE HISPANIC: 20 (25%)
WHITE: 17 (22%)
ASIAN / PACIFIC ISLANDER: 2 (3%)
BLACK HISPANIC: 1 (1%)
Total: 79
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/21/asian-americ...
I hope one day we can look back at this period and think about how to better critically think about these things without applying personal biases and fears to a whole population.
> A lot of dog whistling with sentiments like, "I'm criticizing the Chinese government, not the Chinese people." (spoiler alert: it was both)
Did you have some extra context there? Or do you just assume that anyone criticizing the ccp is also criticizing chinese people? Because I feel like that's a reasonable stance towards any nation.
It seems like sometimes people aggressively read between the lines (probably because of real past experiences with shitty people), and it makes it so that reasonable people now can't express reasonable ideas and have other people understand what they're actually saying.
I especially notice this in online forums where some topics have been discussed in depth by a subset of the population. Through all that discussion, they've basically invented a whole field of study, and turned everyday phrases into jargon with unintuitive subtext.
Then someone new comes along, says something that seems completely innocuous, and the community jumps on them for the subtext that they're not even aware exists.
This is a reasonable thing to say. I think mainland Chinese are oppressed by the Chinese Communist Party, and I hope I live to see the end of this cruel regime.
'Dog-whistling', meaning they don't overtly say it and you infer that they mean it. If they make it overt such that it doesn't need to be inferred, they're not longer dog whistling.
How do you know your inference is correct and that is their intent? How can you be sure that wasn't just an impression given to you by [social] media? The CCP has a vested interest in conflating any criticism of itself or the PRC generally with racist criticism of all Asians. They also say that criticism of their Uyghur genocide is dog whistling anti-Asian racism. The CCP say this of anything that criticizes them, and their narratives do not stop dead at their borders. I've heard it echoed by some of my coworkers, PRC nationals working in America, and even western media that might not endorse such narratives will still give voice to consideration of those narratives.
Now allow me to be frank; during the supposed surge of anti-Asian hatred ostensibly motivated by Trump and perpetrated by white nationalists, much of anti-Asian crimes that were being reported had been perpetrated by African Americans. It was probably crime motivated by class/social/economic inequality, and insofar as it disproportionately targeted Asian Americans at all (rather than selective reporting merely creating that appearance) it probably had nothing to do with any politician's covid rhetoric and was instead was an artifact of geographic proximity and inequality in policing (Asian American neighborhoods receive less protection from the police, making Asian Americans an easier target for crime.) In this last regard, you can easily show that racism against Asian Americans played a role, but such inequalities in policing are problems that go back many generations and have little if anything to do with covid.
The above commenter’s experiences will ring true for many Chinese living in the US, because we are the ones who experience and are impacted by sinophobia (this can also extend to other E/SEA diaspora to an extent). Whereas the commenters claiming that we’re biased or influenced by propaganda, as if they are uniquely exempt from such things, are not.
Criticisms of the Cuban government are absolutely independent of criticisms of individual Cubans like myself. If another Cuban person felt that they were being individually criticized when other people criticize Cuba, I'd tell them they need to learn to distinguish between the two - it's not the responsibility of the public to avoid any criticism of the Cuban government. This isn't an attempt to "deflect the discussion", it's using another country as an example to make it clear that this is a distinction we're perfectly capable of making for other ethnic group.
For that matter, sincere requests for clarification are not immediately followed by attempts to dismiss the underlying concern as invalid. This inherently makes the request insincere.
Remember, allegations of "dog-whistles" are really just saying "I'm assuming other people are implying XYZ." My conservative relatives think words like "diversity" or "inclusion" are dog-whistles for anti-white discrimination. They're earnest when they say the feel attacked, but that's entirely on account of their own assumptions and does not indicate any actual racism. If doom2 wants to make point, they should actually explain what they witnessed that was bigoted or hateful - don't just allege "dog-whistling" and do nothing to substantiate that claim.
Add to that that there are many Russians publicly supporting the war and/or their government. The same goes for the Chinese and for corona specifically you had a lot of them travelling the world while the virus spread was heating up.
Ultimately, humans are pattern seeking animals and if you fit into a pattern of shitty people you better make sure that you make it clear you are not one of them. It would be better if people could be more discerning but I'd rather take this than not having any pushback for countries and other groups of people misbehaving.
I don't think we've worked out a better way to deal with this yet, and it will always be a factor of the way populations are broadly responsible for their governments in democracies and even semi-democracies.
There are many white people being racist towards white people, should I give all white people the cold shoulder so one day it will end racism?
I think it is unkind to treat people in a punitive manner for something that is beyond that individual person.
> you fit into a pattern of shitty people
What an awful thing to say to another person
Annual for 2019: 1 out of 420
Annual for 2020: 27 out of 265
Is that not enough of a percentage increase for you? Edit: Apologies for not seeing the other users' replies who have already made this point.
You’re conflating hate crime with white on everyone else hate crime and the law (and stats) don't reflect that
You went as far as to add those words, which is fascinating to say the least
Meanwhile they ignore all the near misses the US seems to have with anthrax and smallpox being misplaced in US labs every year lol.
The average person was much more worried about the potential harm to millions of citizens than a much smaller uptick in one particular sector. It's of paramount importance that we don't repeat the mistakes that led to the pandemic in the first place. The only way we can do that is getting to the bottom of what happened.
If "possible Asian hate crimes" was the best excuse that the censorship industrial complex could come up with, then it is clear to me that any excuse would have done, and the conclusions I draw is that the suppression was 100% politically motivated. I want to know who was involved in making the decision to suppress, and to what ends they were trying to shape public opinion. At the minimum I want to know who I should be working to vote out of office.
How can I know who to vote for when we're normalizing lying as a justifiable policy up and down the chain of government communication and mass media?
Also important though is it never really went away. For all the talk of censorship and suppression the possibility of a lab leak never left the investigation. It's also a very difficult thing to investigate without access to the labs to see what strains they were working on looked like which we still don't have afaik. It's been a process of eliminating other possiblities to some extent as other vectors that could be looked into were and turned out to be less likely.
Sort of true -- but only because you can't kill the idea, the need to find the cause of the pandemic to avoid a repeat.
This is cold comfort to the people who were getting banned had their accounts cancelled for suggesting things that turned out to be actually true.
There's was a lot of collateral damage here, all in the name of... well I'm not sure. Trust is hard to build, and once broken takes a long time to regain.
The point is, as a society we're heading in the wrong direction. Freedom of speech is becoming freedom for those who keep their mouths shut.
Only by those wishing to shutdown legitimate discussion.
So back to the original question. Who was behind trying to change the narrative.
Dr. Fauci’s emails have shown he orchestrated deceiving the public. I’m not sure that is sufficient to explain the total media backlash against a lab-leak.
Few people want war with China. But I know of plenty that think China should be footing the bill and paying the entire world damages for their incompetence (or malice) in mishandling their bioweapon.
Communists have no integrity. ChiComs blamed the US for the virus, which is ironic, since the NIH knowingly or unwittingly (incompetence) funded it through Eco Health Alliance.
Extremely dubious.
Your first paragraph was on point. Then you descend into ideologically driven speculation. You also seem to not grasp the basic chronology of how the early pro-China slant of the WHO plays into the whole gestalt. And overlook the fact that social media companies are filled with government workers who are paid to manipulate (censor) views that don’t align with those of the government, a government who in this case funded the research that caused the pandemic.
These conspiracy theories lead to a marked rise in violent attacks on anyone of Asian descent in the US, and generally fed into the wet dream fantasies of western warlords looking for any excuse to enter that eternal war against Eastasia.
Any time that anything relating to information around Wuhan labs was released, there was a massive flood of how the "lab leak" theories were right all along, and China is, in fact, trying to kill us all. This is the sort of virulent hatred that no social media company wants to help propagate.