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Comment by actuator | Hacker News Reader

How is this even going to work? PRC will never allow access to the actual data if it was a lab escape/origin. The sort of propoganda happening on Twitter shows that even discussion is going to be difficult.

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Even if the west simply refuses to 100% accept the natural origin story it will have geopolitical consequences.

If experts can make a decent argument that the lab escape is the most likely scenario, then the PRC can choose to let us have access to the data, or look 100% guilty and be treated accordingly.

So guilty unless proven innocent?

if they are indeed innocent isn’t fair and unbiased investigation in their best interest?

No because there's no such thing as a fair and unbiased investigation.

Politics will be inexorably intertwined in such an investigation.

Yes, by Chinese citizens. Not by foreigners.

For anybody who has power, absolutely. I am beyond tired of police, countries and politicians getting away with horrible crimes.

For ordinary citizens, of course not.

You don't believe data can be manufactured/erased to tell a story if someone is willing to? There is enough time as well to generate a new trail of breadcrumbs.

I don't think we will get the true answer or an answer that is going to satisfy everyone, just a lot of geopolitical posturing.

No, all the choices have already been made.

The data have already been destroyed. The Wuhan lab where this research was taking place also had a leadership change, and is now run by someone in the military. That happened in March or April of 2020, IIRC.

Chinese researchers and journalists disappeared in that time frame (their work was deleted from online archives, their names removed from public employment listings... etc.).

I have family in China, and we watched all this happen. These are the things that happened in public. The Western press was too busy with "oh my gosh, we should probably stop flights now" to take serious notice. Then the whole thing became politicized (in the U.S., at least) and if you made statements like "this started in Wuhan, in the lab there, not in the animal market next to it," you were called racist, even though race had nothing to do with it.

We can ask until the cows come hom. The evidence is gone, disposed of by a series of decisions made more than a year ago.

> if you made statements like "this started in Wuhan, in the lab there, not in the animal market next to it," you were called racist, even though race had nothing to do with it.

Honestly I always felt like "a scientist working with dangerous pathogens had an accident" is way less racist than "someone ate a weird animal from a wet market"... And yet the backlash was stronger for the lab leak scenario, almost as if the opinions were influenced by someone.

To be fair the lab escape scenario looks a lot like a conspiracy theory. One should remember that around that time the "flat earth" theory was still going on (IIRC), and there are similar lab escape theories about AIDS.

It doesn't at all look "like a conspiracy theory". Many past lab leaks have been documented (edit: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1394327678136852488), there had been widespread debate among virologists for years about whether the risk of a lab leak was too high to fund such research, the Obama administration banned it for a while for that reason, the State Department had expressed concerns about lax safety at the Wuhan lab, and so on. It's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. If anything "looks like a conspiracy theory" it's the way that the topic was so harshly suppressed for the last year. I don't think that was a conspiracy either, though, I think it was just political polarization. Hopefully the winds are shifting now to reduce that, on this particular issue.

> It doesn't at all look "like a conspiracy theory"

Maybe for someone well informed like you. But I assure you it does look like a conspiracy theory for "the mere mortal". This is precisely what I was trying to explain. Please don't shoot the messenger.

The "conspiracy" part of the theory isn't the leak itself but that hundreds or thousands of people are involved in covering it up and the effort is being lead by an über-competent cabal of unnamed government officials. That is what makes this theory different from historical lab accidents and makes it seem pretty crackpot.

That's a strawman, though. Pretty similar to when someone is talking about government overreach with regards to restrictions or the effectiveness/negative effects of lockdowns or PCR tests as ways to deal with a pandemic and people call them "covid deniers" as if they were denying the existence of the virus.

There have always been conspiracy theories but I think it's more relevant to note how quickly this theory was co-opted by anti-asian racism and converted into a version where that lab escape was interpreted to be an intention action to cause a world wide pandemic.

I really sympathize with both sides here - I think it's quite possible a lab accident was involved with the virus escaping into the world... but the benefit we'd get from knowing that would mostly involve labs being a lot more careful with PPE and I think we've seen PPE usage tick way up and the dangerous involved with disease handling get a lot larger of a spotlight. And, I also think that beating up or harassing Asian-Americans is wrong and if we need to tell a big societal level lie to people to get them to stop then I'm okay with that.

Seriously? We should lie and deceive on a global scale in order to prevent a tiny number of people from being assholes when you know very well that they’re just going to find another reason to be hateful. Lying to everyone isn’t going to prevent hate, I really don’t understand this reasoning. Any time I’ve come across people who express hateful opinions about other groups of people it’s always due to the fact that a) they don’t have any close interactions with people of that group and b) their own social group is similarly isolated and ignorant. Lying to people in situations like that will never change their opinions, the only thing that will is direct face to face communication where trust can be built with them and their peers.

No, a lab escape scenario is an accident theory. The Chinese military sending infectious people to our country on purpose sounds like a conspiracy theory.

Dropping 'flat earth' every time someone questions something off the official narrative is such a weak cop out.

We went pretty quickly from "it started somewhere in China" to beating elderly asian people to death in the streets. I think the backlash was more against the justifications people use to be awful.

Who is “we”? The line of thinking that starts with COVID19 and ends with violence against grandmothers seems so preposterous that it should be tested objectively to see if it exists. There are reports of huge increases in hate crimes during a year full of brazen violence and media-fueled racial tensions. This is most easily explained by a trend in classification rather than victimization. That is, law enforcement is now documenting something that has been going on for a long time. This is certainly true of the national crime victimization survey, which listed Asians for the first time in the 2018 report, released at the end of 2019. I do expect to see increases in Asian victimization in the 2020 report, but the motivations are most likely under the banner of social justice. Nobody was looting and burning down cities in protest of the coronavirus.

>The line of thinking that starts with COVID19 and ends with violence against grandmothers seems so preposterous that it should be tested objectively to see if it exists.

Okay

>There are reports of huge increases in hate crimes during a year full of brazen violence and media-fueled racial tensions.

You don't think #ChineseVirus had anything to do with those racial tensions?

>This is most easily explained by a trend in classification rather than victimization. That is, law enforcement is now documenting something that has been going on for a long time. This is certainly true of the national crime victimization survey, which listed Asians for the first time in the 2018 report, released at the end of 2019.

Here's the report from 2010: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/cv10.txt

It lists Asians.

>I do expect to see increases in Asian victimization in the 2020 report, but the motivations are most likely under the banner of social justice.

What?

Specifically, what the fuck?

>Nobody was looting and burning down cities in protest of the coronavirus.

No, but they're torching Chinese restaurants because they are Chinese. Here's one example among many:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/officials-look-into-chi...

I don't think a lot of people dismissed the "lab theory" per se. The people who were coopting the theory were also the folks who called in intentional/by design. We had evidence for neither and yet suddenly it had become an excuse to yell epithets at random people on the street.

No. The response was overwhelmingly political and censorious and it has everything to do with the extremist culture around politics where if Trump said "A" it must be "not A" and viceversa.

You're justifying that censorship saying that the "wrongthink people" were close to this so that's why it was mostly shunned.

It's disingenuous. This whole year and counting (specially in places with slow vaccine rollouts) has been full of instances where certain challenges to the official local government doctrine where combated heavily with not much argument other than personal attacks and requests for faith in the "one true narrative".

> No, all the choices have already been made. The data have already been destroyed

You don't know that. You'd need an investigation to conclude that. Using it as an excuse not to investigate seems like assuming the conclusion.

Even if some data have been destroyed, it doesn't follow that every last piece of data everywhere has. Who knows what might turn out to be significant? There may well be relevant data in many countries, too, since the research was international.

There are still the American scientists and foundations that were involved in offshoring this research to China.

Project EVIDENCE has records-ish of some of those deletions.

https://project-evidence.github.io/

That's a great page. I'm always looking for fact based news (they say evidence based). Having it as a git repository that people can clone and push to is a great way of doing it. Thanks.

As we learned in the last election cycle, the Truth is a matter of populism.

If Wuhan lab leak were 'truth' - without hard evidence and a bold international campaign to forcefully make people aware ... then China would be able to hide behind a cloud of whataboutery and changing the subject.

Unless there is some kind of genetic linkage etc..

I also feel that some US authorities wouldn't want the truth to be fully known lest there be unpredictable repercussions and 'worries about Anti Asian Hate Crime' and those kinds of things, preferring to handle it 'behind closed doors'.

It would be great if we could arrive at some kind of objective truth, not holding my breath.

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