*"According to the directive issued by the Ministry of Education’s science and technology department, “academic papers about tracing the origin of the virus must be strictly and tightly managed.” *
Chinese researcher quoted saying:
*“I think it is a coordinated effort from (the) Chinese government to control (the) narrative, and paint it as if the outbreak did not originate in China,” the researcher told CNN. “And I don’t think they will really tolerate any objective study to investigate the origination of this disease.”
“The Chinese researcher who requested anonymity said under the new restrictions, however, coronavirus research that contradicted the official narrative could be suppressed by Beijing.”*
So either this is just to fit the narrative that the virus didn’t originate in China or it’s done to only obfuscate the point of origin and circumstances of the outbreak.
For context, coronavirus in bats and the risk to humans has been a topic of research in Chinese laboratories, as it should be; I don’t know for sure if that was being carried out in the laboratory a couple hundred meters from the wet market in Wuhan, but clearly there is the possibility of an accidental release and it’s undeniable that the Chinese government, that sees saving face as a primary concern, would try to suppress that scenario if it would be true.
If students of human nature want to learn about how crack-pot conspiracy theories become mainstream just look at this and similar threads and the progression in opinion as time has gone on.
I get it. COVID19 has buggered the US and the UK senseless. That an indescribable tragedy. Almost as many people are dying a day in the US as did in China during the whole outbreak there. Its going to make normal otherwise well-adjusted people suspicious. The US Government, state and Federal have been caught flat-footed by this (and they are far from the only or worst exampe of that worldwide OTH, the Chinese actually handled it fairly well, they built hospitals, cracked up production of ventilators and PPE, while the US is resorting to outright theft of consignments ordered by others. The UK seems to have basically zilch clue what to do.
It’s psychologically easier to blame others (like those foreign “not like us” Chinese) rather than what it is, a combination of incompetence and (mostly) bad luck and random chance.
On what are you basing your trust on the information given out by the Chinese government?
Secondly, what are these “crackpot conspiracy theories” you are talking about?
Most of the posts on this topic qualify.
As far as trusting the Chinese Government, I trust them to the same level as the USG. A great power, who regularly has incentive to lie. And does so.
The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory.
The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control.
Really close? I don’t know the address but the washington post says it’s 30km away. There are probably many thousands of public buildings, workplaces and other facilities closer to the biolab than the wet market is.
And yet, the majority of early cases were in the single other place in Wuhan where such exposure was a possibility.
From what you posted you take what the Chinese government claims as being the truth, now you say they regularly lie, so why do you chose to believe them about this?
Saying that someone else lies too is not an answer, it’s a logical fallacy at best.
Is it a crackpot theory to consider that the outbreak could have originated from an accidental infection at a laboratory that had been working with this type of virus? What is “crackpot” about that?
I have to say that II see a lot of thought-terminating flimflam in these discussions.
<regarding the lab being only 300m away from the wet market>
I have to go sleep now, so I just did a quick google around.
The lab mentioned as being 30km away in the WP article (as well as others) is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, one of the primary virology labs in China.
I can’t find much about the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention. It may be more of an advisory organization (like the Beijing CDC) than a research lab. But I’ll take a look tomorrow.
So, since U.S. government officials have been known to lie, we should take seriously the theory that HIV was invented in a U.S. lab? And are 9/11 conspiracy theories due respect, because MK Ultra?
Maybe there’s something to the idea that a Chinese laboratory’s careless procedures led to a virus escaping into the environment, maybe not. It is reasonable to be skeptical when 1) no one knowledgeable/in authority has gone on record as finding it credible, 2) supporting documents have not been released, and 3) the story (including a claim that the WHO was “complicit”) happens to have leaked just as the Administration is taking a shellacking over plans to try to defund the WHO.
Practically speaking, if the local bat population has the disease and the local human population has a wet market - where they cut up bats and spray their blood everywhere - and a bioresearch facility - where they carefully pull blood out of bats into glass vials in minute quantities, while wearing rubber gloves and protective equipment - it’s far more likely that the first location is going to be the source.
That the woman has been disappeared is, indeed, curious. And I would probably expect it to have some relevance to Coronavirus. But I would find it more likely that it had something to do with her doing something naughty like telling the truth about the virus, and how dangerous it was, than her being patient 0 or anything.
I would also like to make some further notes on the general topic:
It’s largely irrelevant whether it was an accident in a lab or an accident in a supermarket. In either case, the problem is that the local bats developed a novel coronavirus. There’s nothing to stop American deer from getting some new disease and infecting the mass human populace and, one would expect, eventually something like that will occur.
In some ways, China is about as good a place as you could want for a disease to start. As an authoritarian state that is run by relatively sane people, they can go all-out trying to stop it before it goes wide and do so in a fairly reasonable way. (Granted, that seems to have been somewhat undone by the high quantity of fraud at the lower levels of the command structure. It’s difficult to react correctly when everyone is lying to you about what the status is.) If a disease went public in Oklahoma, it’s not clear that we’d be able to do much but accept its spread. Though, we’d be more honest about it.
The actual fatality rate and what all happened in China does seem to have been covered up in various ways. And, more importantly, China regularly lies about lots of things and that’s part of the whole reason that so many people were looking for a confrontation with them, for the last decade or so. Whether this one particular thing is X or Y is sort of irrelevant when (supposedly) we’re already mid-fight with them about that general issue of their behavior. I mean, what do you want, a more biggerer Trade War about Chinese dishonesty and fraudulent practices?
Some people who live in the USA are stupid, crazy, and have access to things that can kill people. When people started to band around theories about George Soros paying Hondurans to come to America, a crazy person went and murdered a bunch of random, unassociated Jewish people at a synagogue.
Feel free to believe what you believe. But let’s all be mindful about how much blame we feel like casting around on public forums.
There is evidence that the Chinese government has and continues to control the narrative of where the virus originated and it’s total impact on the population.
For some reason apparently you, and others, chose to ignore that fact and trust their information as being the truth, and as of yet I haven’t seen a single compelling argument for doing so.
They have a motivation to suppress and distort information, they’ve been found out doing that multiple times, and yet some still argue that such and such is so, why? because the Chinese government says so.
Your points:
The Chinese government has suppressed people who have came forward with information that contradicted their narrative.
I cited an order by the Chinese government to have all research on the origin of the virus be subjected to vetoing by the government; so these documents you are talking about will say what the Chinese Communist Party allows them to say.
There has been discussion over the possibility that the virus was accidentally released from a lab for months already, . But there lays what I think motivates the flimflamery: Trump speaks up against China, everything Trump does is wrong and evil, therefore China must be defended.
@Ale My perspective is not that I am trying to defend China, it’s that I am being skeptical of conspiracy theories. I think CTs are really a problem for modern society; no matter what happens, many people choose to believe whatever fits with their preconceived notions.
And shadowy china always lies is a standard meme in the West.
Yes, the Chinese government lies some of the time. And did try to keep this outbreak quiet in the first couple weeks. However, that does not make any CT a person thinks of automatically correct.
In fact, think about it: the suppression of the doctors’ report (and their arrest) was worldwide news around about the same time the virus itself was. This shows how hard it can be to keep secrets. The idea that hundreds of thousands or even millions could have died and been kept secret is laughable.
I’d also like to see some acknowledgement that some of the popular memes have already been debunked:
The idea that Taiwan warned the WHO of human-to-human transmission long before China or the WHO confirmed it. Well, the email between Taiwan and WHO has been made public, and it says no such thing.
The virology lab is just 300m from the wet market.
Well “a” medical facility is within 300m, probably found by looking for something scary-sounding on Amap (Google map equivalent in China).
The Wuhan Virology Lab though, which most of the conspiracy theories concern, is actually 30km away, about as far away as you could be and still be in the same city.
No prizes for guessing that these two facilities seem to get conflated on the conspiracy sites (“The Wuhan biolab is only 300m from the wet market!”)
Missed edit window. I got the various CT threads mixed up there
I meant: the idea that the virus leaked from a virology lab and made its way to the other end of Wuhan, to the only other place that it could have originated from, is baseless at this time.
OK, this is like, the 8th time I’ve had to debunk this horseshit video.
Some things this guy doesn’t tell you:
Nobody knows when or even if 黄燕玲’s data was removed from the website. They only know her data wasn’t there as of Feb 15th but nobody is able to show an earlier version of the website where her data is there. The website is some janky academic page that doesn’t even have a domain name, it’s hosted on a raw IP. There’s a bajillion reasons why someone’s data could be gone and this is the entire “evidence” this CT hinges on.
Nobody knows what she actually looks like. The only “photo” of her is a group shot where she is presumed to be a certain person through the process of elimination. But there’s not a single photo of 黄燕玲, alone, with some kind of identifying tag.
Her research was on Staphylococci and Streptococci bacteria which doesn’t have anything to do with bat viruses. She wasn’t even in the same research group as Shi Zhengli.
There’s not “an army of Chinese” trying to find her. If you Google for “黄燕玲” and restrict your search results to Feb, 99% of the results are from between Feb 15th and Feb 17th. The story died down and people stopped paying attention to it until this guy resurrected it.
She stopped publishing papers in 2015, the same year she is meant to have left the lab. You can’t stay employed at a lab in China for 5 years and not be constantly publishing, that’s not how the Chinese system works. You also can’t scrub a publication record from the internet.
A newspaper talked to her current employer in Sichuan who confirmed that she is alive and well and understandably didn’t want to talk to any media since she is a female internet user in 2020 and knows the torrent of psycho abuse she would be receiving if she gave the theory any oxygen.
All of these points were discussed on the Chinese internet when this theory was first floated in Feb but the video maker doesn’t include any of it in his CT video, relying on the fact that most Westerners have no idea how to do even the most basic research on the Chinese internet.
Yes, it’s clear that the Chinese government wants to present itself in the most favorable light possible and suppresses free speech on this and other matters. That doesn’t mean that all CTs involving China are true.
The “documents” are supposedly damning ones referred to in the Fox News story, and could be from U.S. or other sources as far as we know. But we have no confirmation on what they say or if they even exist.
“Flimflammery” is defined in my book as drumming up conspiracies without the facts to back them up.
No, flimflamery is what you just did:
*
"The “documents” are supposedly damning ones referred to in the Fox News story, and could be from U.S. or other sources as far as we know. "*
I cited a CNN story, not Fox News, the story links to an archived page from a Chinese University website showing those orders from the Chinese central government.
Just so it’s clear, taken from the article:
“The document was first posted Friday morning on the website of the Fudan University in Shanghai, one of China’s leading universities.
When CNN called a contact number left at the end of the notice,** a staff member of the Education ministry’s science and technology department confirmed they had issued the directive.**
“It is not supposed to be made public – it is an internal document,” said the person, who refused to reveal his name.
…
The China University of Geoscience in Wuhan also posted a similar notice about the extra vetting on Covid-19 papers on its website. The page has since been deleted, but a cached version of it remains accessible.”
So when you say this "(the documents) could be from U.S. or other sources as far as we know. " plus this “Flimflammery” is defined in my book as drumming up conspiracies without the facts to back them up.", you just hoisted yourself by your own petard.
Also, this is a strawman “it’s clear that the Chinese government wants to present itself in the most favorable light possible and suppresses free speech on this and other matters. That doesn’t mean that all CTs involving China are true”
