Comment by tripletao | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tripletao | Hacker News Reader

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If SARS-CoV-2 emerged due to the WIV's research activities, then it was potentially with the knowledge and funding of the American government, via the EcoHealth Alliance. Racism is always stupid, but in this case it's particularly so.

This absolutely shouldn't be China vs. USA, and it's deeply unfortunate that the Trump administration's early, characteristically unsupported rhetoric made it so. The WIV's safety was probably below American standards, but probably closer than a wet market is to American agricultural standards. So it's ridiculous to think a lab vs. natural origin makes it "more China's fault". If the CCP is currently covering up a lab accident, then they're probably quite unhappy that they've been "forced" to do so, and wishing in retrospect they'd instead decided a year ago to publicly blame the rogue, American-funded researcher.

Long before the pandemic, this was an obscure academic debate, between virologists who wanted to perform certain risky experiments and others who thought they presented an unacceptable risk:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097416/

With the possibility (absolutely not proven; but not disproven either) that such an experiment has just killed 2.9M people, that debate takes on a terrible new significance.

Anti-Chinese racism is stupid and toxic, yes, but you're missing the point.

People here generally aren't blaming China because that's where COVID-19 originated. That would be stupid.

No, they're blaming the CCP for covering it up in the early days, which allowed it to spread and become the global pandemic which it became. Big difference.

It's not China's fault that COVID originated there (lab leak or otherwise). It is their fault for covering up the scale of the problem and thereby helping it spread.

The article is about the earliest origins of SARS-CoV-2, whether that arose from the activities of the WIV or naturally. My comment is as well.

Once the pandemic emerged, the CCP's response was certainly terrible in many well-known ways (e.g., their attempt to suppress Yan Limeng's initial alarm, and the disappearance of multiple citizen journalists from Wuhan), though it's impossible to know whether a better response could have suppressed its worldwide spread. That's a separate question from those earliest origins, though.

Agreed that it's a separate question.

I just don't think the anti-CCP sentiment is unjustified, though.

Whether it was a lab leak is important but a misdirection.

Their cover-up of the true scale of the problem (lab leak or not) made it hard for politicians in other countries to lock down quickly. It helped it spread intentionally to multiple countries and by then it was too late.

If they were blasting their sirens early in 2021 instead of covering it up we might have had swifter border closures etc.

> Their cover-up of the true scale of the problem (lab leak or not) made it hard for politicians in other countries to lock down quickly. It helped it spread intentionally to multiple countries and by then it was too late.

I disagree. The actions from a lot of countries were absolutely lacking, even when they could see how bad it was given both China's data, and Italy, Israel's initial incidents.

China locked down super hard towards late February/mid-March.

During this time there was countless reports about the "ridiculous" and "draconian" lockdowns that occurred in China. The West basically pointed fingers, laughed, and said we'd be fine. And yet they're still not.

> If they were blasting their sirens early in 2021 instead of covering it up we might have had swifter border closures etc.

I agree that even earlier warning would have been good. I just don't see it changing anything. Countries only started to take it seriously when it really started to affect them. They didn't want to risk a political/ financial hit on taking the measures that were needed, and they paid for it.

Well said. China botched it at the beginning. They could have prevented a worldwide pandemic, but they started acting to late. However, what I know now is that pretty much any western country couldn't have prevented a pandemic, if the origin of the virus would have been them.

I'm in Germany and the whole situation is a joke. Incompetence in any way possible, everywhere. Half heated "soft lockdowns" whenever things get worse, reopen everything as soon as it gets a little better, then be all surprised that incidents are on a rise again, rinse and repeat. Obviously every state does this without any coordination with neighboring ones.

And it's not surprising. Do you think any politician is even remotely qualified for the position they have? Usually you get your position as minister of health, or defense, or whatever, but because everything in Germany just goes its way and nothing is wrong, you do your four years, pass a few meaningless bills, and that's it. Now that we have a pandemic at our hands and the minister of health would have to actually do something for the first time in several decades, the whole spiel falls apart.

I don't think we disagree? There's plenty of reason to dislike the CCP, in relation to their handling of SARS-CoV-2 and otherwise. I just don't think SARS-CoV-2 originating in a WIV lab accident would add to that.

It would add to it, because it would significantly increase the number of lies they told the rest of the world, given that they've been maintaining that it isn't a lab leak.

Depending on the official, the CCP also seems to be maintaining that SARS-CoV-2 didn't originate naturally in China either, thus their (entirely unsupported) frozen food theory and push for sampling in other SE Asian countries. So I again see plenty of reason to dislike the CCP, but little specific to actual lab vs. non-lab origin.

I'm absolutely not saying the origin doesn't matter for anything--if 2.9M people died due to a particular class of research, then that absolutely should affect our judgment as to whether that research should be funded or permitted (though that cost/benefit tradeoff seems grossly unfavorable to me regardless). The link between that question and China's perceived culpability just seems bizarrely overstated to me, divorced from the reality that the USA was entirely supportive of that research pre-pandemic.

Isn't that just one rogue official on Twitter? The mainstream CCP narrative is that it originated in a Wuhan market.

So a lab leak, if true, would indeed significantly increase the number of lies being told.

As far as I can tell, the mainstream CCP narrative is basically everywhere except China:

https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1181292.shtml (USA, misidentified as vape lung)

https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1183658.shtml (something with Fort Detrick)

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202101/1214376.shtml (not the Huanan market, maybe imported seafood)

I guess you could try counting up and comparing the total lies implied by each origin, but the volume is so high that seems pointless to me. Their strategy seems more like a general fog of confusion to me than a particular story intended to be believed.

The thing with covid was it caught everyone by surprise. It’s not like the US even caught on first. It devastated Italy before we even flinched, so that alone is evidence that, at least for the US response, we would have gone to shit no matter who warned us.

The counterfactual is hard to reason about. SARS-1 was contained because international travel was restricted immediately after the first few cases. Once you seed multiple countries with it, competence matters for little.

Sars 1 made it to the US and many countries. Short story was it was contained because it was much more deadly, and transmission was tied to symptoms so it was more easily detected.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-did-the-world-shut-...

One of the first things done by the Trump administration was close borders with China, but it was not enough.

We should also blame the CCP for screwing up containment. Chinese culture is still deeply corrupt in ways that prevent honest and open discussion of safety issues. Honest and open discussion of safety issues should be table stakes for facilities like that in Wuhan. The rest of the world should be pressuring China to not operate these sorts of high-risk enterprises.

Heh?

Who is we? Who is pressuring the US to do anything?

DPRC is a sovereign state and can do as they damn well please just like the US.

Get off your high horse.

Countries pressure other countries to do or not do stuff all the time, no?

No. They don't. I think my question was objectively straight forward too. who pressures the US to do anything?

So either you're trolling me and pretending geopolitical hierachy doesn't exist or you may think my question is stupid. Either way...

I don't mean to troll. It just seems obvious to me that countries are pressuring other countries to do stuff all the time. Of course some countries have more power than others. Malawi isn't going to be able to lean on Poland in the same way the U.S. will be able to.

Let’s be honest if Xi Jinping called up Trump and told him to shut down borders and instate mandatory curfews he’d have done the opposite.

The Trump white house was a superspreader

By the way, one of the big proponents of gain-of-function research was Anthony Fauci. It makes sense that he came out and tried to control the narrative around the virus given that he may have been responsible for its creation.

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