We need to know the origin of Covid-19
desmoinesregister.com
desmoinesregister.com
So, while we may not be able to know for sure how COVID-19 originated, we can certainly draw an adverse inference from the behavior of the Chinese government.
They've got a political and ideological character that requires controlling narratives and erasing any trace of incompetence(this threatens the illusion of supreme power).
If I have an espresso every morning, the fact that I have one tomorrow morning means nothing. If I don't have one tomorrow, if I deviate from my usual behaviour, that might mean something significant. But following one's normal routine is just… normal.
The "routine" of burying evidence, silencing dissidents, and constant propaganda does absolutely reduce China's trustworthiness. To the point where we can and probably should always assume the worst of that regime.
What you said (and which I agree with) is that they always want to control the narrative. Not when they've done anything wrong, but always. I agree with that part — it's aregime that wants to control the narrative always, just so the populace won't get used to the existence of anything beyond control of the regime.
However, since the regime always wants to control the narrative, you cannot assume that wanting to control a particular narrative means anything more than "they're acting as usual". You can assume that the regime is untrustworthy in general, but you cannot assume anything particular about this instance.
Your argument is tantamount to "any control freak can and probably be assumed guilty of everything".
When dealing with a compulsive liar, you don't approach any situation with "This time maybe they aren't lying". They make up lies constantly about everything in order to obscure when they are actually lying.
You're right that you cannot make assumptions about what the truth is in any particular instance, but in every instance it is reasonable to assume they are lying and then go about finding the truth.
And frankly I suspect that China lies all the time not just to obscure their real lies, but because they are actually engaged in shitty behavior all the time. It's not even a secret that they are currently involved in genocide. If that's not out of the question for them then I don't think anything is, including engineering a plague.
People seem to forget that China was claiming for a long while that the virus wasn't transmissible (I'm sure people will equivocate that they really claimed there was no evidence of transmission, but it's tantamount), only shortly after for all the videos to surface with people passing out in the streets and the police welding people in their houses, etc.
I read a timeline once, and from what I remember it was a considerable number of days. But not more days than I would expect from any big organisation. It takes time to push data and wording up and down an orgchart until all the necessary people have signed off.
I've waited longer for routine code reviews in supposedly agile teams.
> we can certainly draw an adverse inference from the behavior of the Chinese government.
> it is assumed that that evidence would have been unfavorable to the party which concealed or destroyed it.
This is a good model only within the US sphere of influence. Outside, you might as well be shooting darts as people play by other incentives.
In any case, they should have sent out the alarm, and worked quickly and cooperatively to halt it. For example, they should have cancelled outbound flights from Wuhan while the virus was raging there and they were barricading apartment blocks. It looks, at best, negligent that they did not.
There is a very fine line between destroying evidence, and refusing an investigation.
...and, don't get me wrong - I believe it's entirely possible that covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan Lab - but a refusal to be party to a politically charged investigation should not infer guilt.
Your rational is similar to assuming someone is guilty because they refuse to answer police questions.
But, let's assume for the sake of argument that your analogy is the correct one. You know where they assume that if you don't let the police search your house, or if you don't answer police questions, you must be guilty? China.
So, we can just as easily judge the Chinese government by another heuristic: The Golden Rule
Are they our role-model now? Should we destroy our own principles in this case because that's what they would do?
Then how do you treat this Anthrax archive destruction done with the blessing from FBI? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks
But the author of this article is not an epidemiologist.
He is not an expert on infectious diseases.
He is a former Republican congressman and a retired plastic surgeon.
Since Republican leaders have consistently lied about the pandemic for their own political advantage, and this author has no particular expertise in the matter, I'll make the inference that he has nothing constructive to add to this conversation.
Before the war, Saddam was acting unquestionable suspect by not allowing inspectors free access to locations and constantly moving material and persons around. In truth, it was a presence. A chemical weapons program was expensive, and hard to keep safely hidden so Saddam simply pretended that it existed by acting like he had something to hide.
As for China, it could be something as simple as regional managers hiding poor response times and safety violations that would have their heads rolling. It doesn't mean that there was a leak intentionally or unintentionally.
Disclaimer: I'm playing the devil's advocate here. Having a corona virus outbreak in the same city as your military installation studying corona virus is suspect.
That's an understatement; I would actually go as far as to say that if you write an entire article and this your conclusion, it was a waste of time to write the article.
Do we really need to know? Lab leaks are nothing new and regardless need to prevented at all cost. Maybe there needs to be an independent international regulatory setup that inspects these labs.
If this were the case and we had more details on the engineering of the virus, we could have (could still) improved our approach to dealing with it.
So to the extent that damage to life and prosperity could have been at least partially mediated, yes, we need(ed) to know.
You & I don't need to know.
We need to understand the actual risk associated with these labs. One mitigation I can think of right now would be to build the labs in very remote locations, and require anyone leaving to isolate themselves for a month to check for disease. But no measures of that severity will be undertaken without evidence supporting the risks.
What do you mean by this?
“ In 2020, the United States Department of Education launched an investigation of the Galveston National Laboratory regarding any past interaction with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Consulate-General,_Hou...
“ Within the hours after the announcement, videos emerged on Houston's locally broadcast KPRC-TV showing documents being burned in barrels in the courtyard of the consulate.[12] Local police and fire departments received reports of the fires at around 8 pm local time,[18] and as first responders arrived at the consulate, they were denied entry.”
While I was in the military I sometimes operated a secure shredder. It is a long time ago but I remember this: despite its rather large size the speed and the number of pages it would process was really limited.
It had one thing going for it though: the output was thinly sliced :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embassy_of_the_United_States,_...
"The Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line published documents seized in the embassy (including painstakingly reconstructed shredded documents) in a series of books called "Documents from the US Espionage Den" (Persian: اسناد لانه جاسوس امریكا, Asnād-e lāneh-e jasusi Amrikā).[10] These books included telegrams, correspondence, and reports from the United States Department of State and Central Intelligence Agency, some of which remain classified to this day."
I just find it bizarre that NIH was funding any work in China when US and China are not friendly.
There is a legitimate question about how this pandemic started, and the CCP apologists come out in droves to shift blame onto western governments.
The origin of COVID-19 will never be known for certain for logistical, factual, and most of all political/diplomatic reasons.
What I know for sure though is the media will chew that topic and spin soft-conspiracies around it for years to come. It's a TV pundit dream to have a topic like this. No one knows for sure, which means their opinions can boldly go into speculation and science-fiction and nobody could claim otherwise for sure.
As a thought experiment, imagine that outbreak did start from a lab accident. Say they collected a sample originated from nature, then had an a accident with it.
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Now how do you prove that this didn't happen?
The virus will have no indication of being man-made (it's not) so you get to wave off scientists who are telling you it's not man-made.
The lab will never admit that there was an accident because of how many layers of pressure there are to never admit this (not just from a high level, but from individuals who don't want to be "responsible" for a global pandemic).
So you get to wave off their claims of innocence too.
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You're essentially saying you don't accept proof this didn't happen, but you want proof it did... without falsifiability that "proof" will never be anything scientifically sound.
It's like if a child says you have cooties (the imaginary ones, not a louse). You can't prove them wrong because cooties don't exist and the definition is in their hands (you: I can check with a microscope; child: They're completely invisible and too small for that).
No logic will ever counter their claim, the only responses are emotional. Accepting that you do have them and move on, or stoically choosing not to engage.
Weird way to start out the article, given that we don't actually know where the Spanish flu came from.
It is all fine. Human race who care.
Was it a lab leak? We need to know if safety protocols were followed and to develop better protocols if needed.
By your logic, we would never investigate any accident. Why look into the cause of a fire, it won't help bring back the victims or restore the damage. We should only look into how the response of the firefighters could've been better? No. We should look into both.
We even investigate every single airplane incident even if there were no victims and develop new safety protocols around them.
Where would you pull this from? You seem needlessly pointed in your reply here. I'm simply of the opinion that understanding the origin isn't all that useful.
Do you really think wuhan labs haven't revisited their safety protocols after being suspected of cv19 leaks? You seem to be of the impression that only if we prove the origin would any of those precautions be taken and that's simply not true, those precautions and revisiting procedures happened a long time ago.
Or do you appoint an independent investigator that issues mandatory changes and evaluates how they're implemented?
I stuck "we" in quotes since I too am concerned that people may interpret this is a blame game. It is far more important to have regulations in place to reduce the likelihood of this happening again than it is to hold anyone accountable. We, the public, don't need to know the actual source in this context. On the other hand, regulators probably do.
Yes.
I don't know if the title reflects the content. I would probably describe it something closer to :
"Summary of what we know about the origin of COVID-19"
Instead of asking the question “Did something go wrong with a research process?”, it focused on the culpability of China, but assigns accountability for the US involvement (ie. Funding the research) as a personal act of Fauci.
In other words, it’s yet another political doctor using the credibility of his profession to peddle a stupid political angle.
Obviously COVID-19 is not an effective biological warfare mechanism — it’s too virulent and not deadly enough. The whole narrative is dumb, more about keeping the low-IQ voting base titillated with bread and circus.
Absent evidence, this whole China Lab theory is literally just tinfoil hat speculation. As gets repeated ad nauseum every time this comes up, there is absolutely nothing about the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 that is even remotely difficult to explain as a natural process. It's a close relative of a virus known to exist on the same continent in a species group known to transit large distances easily.
People who insist on "asking questions" here aren't people who are curious, they are people who really, really want the answer to conform to their priors about modern geopolitics (or, frankly, just people who want to have an enemy to hate). It's not healthy, and it's not going anywhere. We need to stop.
I feel like that's a bit cold. This is a virus whose closest relatives are known to exist in animals that are the specific animals that they specialise in, in that lab where they also do science around viruses like this one.
Sure, it might not be this but there's a fair bit of co-incidence going on here isn't there? Enough at least to take it beyond the realm of tin foil.
You accuse people of serious crimes when you have evidence. Not before.
It's not like evidence would be hard to find if it existed. Is there a whistleblower? No. Is there a specific feature of SARS-CoV-2 that matches other known genes that would be difficult to explain by natural evolution? No.
Stop chasing coincidence and clicking on partisan opinion essays that confirm your priors and go find some evidence.
Perfect! Chimes the CCP.
Your whole theory relies on the idea of China being a monolithic evil entity able to contain reporting of what would be the most important work of journalism in the last half century.
So demanding that it must be true because China is a monolithic evil entity seems a bit circular.
Evidence. Go get some evidence. Then put the tinfoil on your head.
Due to our lack of evidence everything remains open and to avoid people betting on the coinky-doink of their lab we need to obtain evidence. Evidence that as of yet isn't there, which is why people still look at the lab.
And once more: this is the hallmark of a conspiracy nut. Serious evaluation of evidence and estimates of probabilities isn't "closing doors", it's merely applying reason and logic.
I'm not saying that improbable or unfounded things are impossible. I'm saying that your demand that we treat "Questions!" about them as "Important!" in the absence of likelihood or evidence is bad logic, and will lead you (and, likely, has led you) to bad decisions.
> And once more: this is the hallmark of a conspiracy nut.
We are done here mate, you didn't need to dress me up as your shower argument, that's obnoxious.
And? His term ended in 2003, this article is purely an opinion post and is labeled as such at the top.
> People who insist on "asking questions" here aren't people who are curious, they are people who really, really want the answer to conform to their priors about modern geopolitics (or, frankly, just people who want to have an enemy to hate).
Some pretty big leaps you're making there. China isn't doing themselves any favors by their lack of transparency. At any rate, the question remains important regardless of anyone's 'feelings' on the subject.
That's not how it works in other arguments. Is "the question" of your habit of beating your wife equally important?
Relentless focus on "The Question" and its "Importance" despite the lack of any real world evidence (and in this case, convincing evidence to the contrary) is the mark of a conspiracy theory.
This is Q all over again. When it turned out that the child molesters in the deep state didn't actually exist and the power structure everyone thought was going to prove everything lost and went home, people just dialed up the next enemy in the rolladex and continued on.
But, both orgs have stated both privately and in public that that is not the believable case.
The question should be raise purely on China health concerns as the world will still face it taking 5 to 6 years to vaccinate China.
But at the same time we want China to accept the vaccine help rather than harm that effort in over-asking them to endure public pain of their health focus failings.
There will be no fast and easy answers here
> But, both orgs have stated both privately and in public that that is not the believable case.
Do you have a citation for that? The public statements last week had it as one of the two scenarios they were studying (along with a lab leak) which is not as strong as the claim you’re making.
A very similar virus (SARS-CoV-1) came very close to sparking a global pandemic in 2004. In late 2017 that virus was found in bats in a cave in Yunnan, China.
The closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2 has no name, just the code RaTG13. In 2013 three miners cleaned out bat shit from a mine in China and all three died of viral pneumonia caused by RaTG13. Why that didn't spark a pandemic is not known, but basically we got lucky for the second time.
Then, in 2019, we had the third incident, but this time we didn't get lucky.
In theory this virus could have come from a lab, but it's far, far more likely it came from wild bats. And its cousin SARS-CoV-1 is still out there in bats. It could be let loose for the second time at any moment.
That lab doesn't worry me. Bats do.
What kind of stats do we have on BL4 lab leaks historically? Or that lab in particular?
Is there validity to the state department claim that the lab reported flu like symptoms in its scientists months prior to COVID breaking out? Or is that trump admin bluster?
SARS-CoV-2019 isn't some kind of novel deadly supervirus. It's pretty much the kind of virus that has been predicted for years to cause a pandemic eventually. Yet most of the world was woefully underprepared because we didn't take the risk seriously.
Yes, it's good to know where the virus originated and if it was caused by a lab containment breach it's important for the international community to be able to learn from the mistakes. But that won't prevent the next pandemic and it won't help us deal with the next pandemic when it happens.
Climate change has already been predicted to make future pandemics more likely and more frequent. Prevention is important, yes, but crisis management is much more important. As members of an IT-centric community HNers should know that "just don't make mistakes" is not a good strategy for dealing with bugs or incidents.
China seems to have the situation somewhat under control following the initial catastrophic outbreak. Some other countries, especially in Asia (e.g. Vietnam), have also successfully managed the pandemic despite having close ties to China in general and the Wuhan region in particular.
The common thread seems to be ruthlessly fact-based policies (e.g. no early "dialing back" of lockdowns) and free access to testing, vaccinations and general support (e.g. food) while under quarantine. The countries currently hit the worst either simply failed to act at all or (like Germany) kept riding the R=1.0 edge by going constantly back and forth out of a fear for "the economy" (despite epidemiologists and economists explicitly warning against this).
What we do know is the disease made its first mass appearance in Wuhan and the Chinese government did their level best to cover it up. That doesn't necessarily point to a leak, but it does show the Chinese knew there was a novel disease that was quickly spreading and causing severe problems. It's apparent they tried to contain the disease and failed.
It could still be the case the disease originated outside of Wuhan but took root there first. It may take years to figure out the origin of this disease.
And honestly, how knowing the origin is useful other than flamming sinophoby? I don't remember the world blaming americans on H1N1.
What we need to know is why some countries are keeping vaccines for themselves, even if they don't plan to use them. A virus leak is an accident, monopolizing vaccines is genocide.
Viruses can escape labs. Happened in the U.K. too. The amount of cover-up and unwillingness of world leaders to really talk about the potential origin makes sense because they don’t want to create anti-Asian sentiments.
We are already seeing some of that recently (attacks on Asians by morons and racists). Trump was willing to stoke the flames. He called it the China Virus specifically because of this - I think he was pissed off that it happened given his anti-China rhetoric and that world leaders probably agreed not to probe into it too much and to keep distance from the theory to prevent racist hate attacks and violence (which was probably the right thing to do).
For China, well, can’t ever admit anything bad happened and all that with the authoritarian regime. So the motivation there is obvious.
To me this group of actions would make the most sense geopolitically, subject to new information.
or scheming.
Let’s say the CCP sees the original SARS, sees the economic destruction it can wreak, quietly prepares for a pandemic - not so much that it’ll look obvious, but enough that they’ll recover significantly quicker than other nations - then releases the virus in a place known to have wet markets and a viral lab, giving them extra plausible deniability.
The virus tears through the west, giving the quickly recovered and happily subsided Chinese businesses space to jump in and fill the void left by dying and dead western companies.
It’s similar to what they did with the steel industry. They subsidised their steel for so long that the western steel companies went out of business from being unable to compete, then they raised their prices, and were left dominant in the market
I mean yes, this conspiracy theory is post hoc bullshit... But what makes it any worse than the one suspecting the CCP?
> ...
> Second, the Chinese equivalent of our CDC tested 41 species in the market and to date no intermediary species carrying the virus capable of transmitting the virus to humans has been identified.
If you don't trust the Chinese government, why do you take their evidence against a competing theory at face value? Shouldn't they protect equally their research institutions, their meat markets, their public health authorities, and anybody else who might have committed a serious mistake?
Of course, reading not very much between the lines, this piece looks like an attack by some right-wing clique with accounts to settle against Anthony Fauci, prominently noted as supporting the animal market hypothesis and having funded WIV coronavirus research; propaganda for a semi-smart audience.
Fun fact: virus found in a place does not mean anything about its origination. Check the infectious disease history
The solution seems to be: stop using animals for our food/pleasure/clothing/medicine.
We knew this before C19. But sadly the solutions is most advertised are: more virus research labs (which also needs animals), more vaccines, more distancing... These are not actual solutions.
I'm of the opinion we have a long way to go before our primary defense against viruses is _not_ our immune system. If I'm correct I think many of our strategies to limit exposure and pretend we can hide from pathogens is very misguided.
Our primary strategy to limit exposure is to not have contact with animals with novel coronaviruses or others that can cross species.
So we have to rely on our immune systems as our primary protection.
Vaccines, theraputics, and public health measures are the only other strategies we have.
I don't understand which problem laying the blame addresses. We have a vaccine. We should be solving the problem of getting that vaccine into as many people as possible, which is a problem that the WHO can help with.
Finally, the author of this article has made it extremely clear that they would only accept one answer. I'm all for rooting out accountability once the pandemic is over, but such blatant refusal to entertain any other explanations is definitively a which hunt.
We know that it came from animals and that human activity (be it meat markets or laboratories) made the bridge.
What we really need is an efficient global infrastructure to quickly research and deliver vaccines to everyone on the planet.
The Nipah virus, Ebola, we were already too much lucky that they did not turn in to global catastrophes, and many more viruses are waiting for us in the future.
"When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”
― George R.R. Martin
Oh and it's also completely false and a conspiracy theory that only months before covid; deadly viruses were being sent to Wuhan Lab.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/canadian-scientist-s...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/chinese-researcher-e...
That the RCMP removed this Chinese viral researcher from the lab and then never issued anything about it. You can read it right there in those CBC articles. Those Chinese researchers have also never been heard from since the RCMP got involved.
But dont worry, this is all a conspiracy theory as proposed by the CBC.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/china-coronavirus-on...
Wait the CBC is calling themselves conspiracy theorists? No factual basis for the previous 2 CBC articles?
https://globalnews.ca/news/7723161/coronavirus-phac-governme...
Wait the University and public health no longer oppose their firing and won't actually say why they were fired? Just that there was indeed a policy breach?
https://ipolitics.ca/2021/03/31/health-agency-ordered-to-rel...
They have until today to release the documents and public health is refusing to obey the government orders? Can they even do that?
It's a good thing this is all just a conspiracy theory.
Right, but remember that censorship isn't just bad because it silences truth-tellers. It is also bad because it can amplify falsehoods.
> It's a good thing this is all just a conspiracy theory.
Your sarcasm is ambiguous. Perhaps you mean that it's unlikely that all the topics your discussing are conspiracy theories. Perhaps you meant that they are all true and are all being painted as conspiracy theories. Perhaps you meant something in between.
Generous interpretation requires me to ask you what you meant, at which point you can choose any of the above adventures.
The irony is that to me that kind of hedging and sarcasm starts to smell a lot like conspiracy theory rhetoric.
True.
>Your sarcasm is ambiguous. Perhaps you mean that it's unlikely that all the topics your discussing are conspiracy theories. Perhaps you meant that they are all true and are all being painted as conspiracy theories. Perhaps you meant something in between.
I think a third option of 'I dont have a clue.' It sure sounds fishy that these are so established as at least something that should be discussed? That the fishy factor is making me think there's actually truth to it.
>The irony is that to me that kind of hedging and sarcasm starts to smell a lot like conspiracy theory rhetoric.
What did I ever say or assert? I provided links which are hilarious. The story possibly had absolutely nothing to do with covid19.
Do you believe in coincidences? To this degree? Why is discussion about this immediately shot down as conspiracy theories? Why cant we discuss these things?
A lunatic can ask more questions than a genius can ever answer. Picking a likely theory and arguing for it is much more difficult than arguing that any of the available theories has a nonzero chance of being true.
Don't get me wrong: it's very fun. I love conspiracy theory as recreation. But engaging in actual good faith debate is a different sport entirely. It's both much more difficult, and a much better way to arrive at truth.
So intellectual honesty == conspiracy theorist? I feel like admitting that I don't know is better.
>A lunatic can ask more questions than a genius can ever answer. Picking a likely theory and arguing for it is much more difficult than arguing that any of the available theories has a nonzero chance of being true.
I provided sources including CBC. It's not an unfounded position, there's plenty of meat to discuss. What can I assert? Nothing, I'm not in manitoba and the only source of knowledge(CBC) is calling themselves conspiracy theorists or unfounded. Which is hilarious to me.
>Don't get me wrong: it's very fun. I love conspiracy theory as recreation. But engaging in actual good faith debate is a different sport entirely. It's both much more difficult, and a much better way to arrive at truth.
Nobody is going to find out the truth if it's a huge coincidence or not. There is no arriving to the truth. The interesting discussion is how you're not allowed to discuss the subject. This is the same mechanism as why the CBC are calling themselves conspiracy theorists. Which can only be seen as political propaganda.
This is something that being right at the time gives no advantages and which time will reveal.
Given the first two statements, does it really matter much whether COVID escaped from a Chinese lab or was of natural origin? The same actions should be taken either way.
The big difference is that the knowledge enables a Chinese witch hunt.
That's a big fucking upside you see to China's research.
You can make these statements when you are still talking about hypothetical risk. But we already have one outcome, i.e. the current pandemic and its costs. So what you are saying here is: The cost benefit of China doing novel disease research is at least as valuable as all the costs of COVID-19 so far.
I'm not falsifying your conclusion, but you will need to back up the first statement with something at least.