Ok, I see, I could not make myself understood, probably partly due as well to the fact that English is not my mother tongue. I do not wish to continue this discussion therefore I kindly ask the moderator to shut down this thread or, if possible, to cancel it altogether. I think I’ll withdraw.
Do you understand the difference between opinion and news, and that just because someone tells you what you want to hear it has no bearing whatsoever on its accuracy?
Unfortunately, things don’t work like that around here.
Please understand that the criticism is aimed at the New York Times, not at you.
Here are Zeynep Tufekci’s core arguments:
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Influential experts were saying one thing in public but the opposite thing in private.
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The scientific community was divided on whether the lab-leak theory was plausible. Legitimate scientists were lumped in with the ideologically motivated conspiracy theorists. [To quote from her remarks in the comments section:] “I have interviewed more than one heartbroken scientist who was vilified and ignored simply for calling for better biosafety and refusing to mislead the public.”
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It is indeed important whether the Covid-19 pandemic happened due to a lab leak, because the laxness of current lab protocols could cause another pandemic.
Zeynep Tufekci does not need to be an epidemiologist or indeed any sort of expert in order to credibly pose these arguments. She could be a high-school journalist and still document the contradiction between what the same scientists were saying in public and in private.
The worst thing revealed in the article is that scientists are apparently still doing gain-of-function experiments in low bio-security environments, which is alarming if true. Putting a stop to that shouldn’t depend on knowing exactly what happened in China, which is unlikely to happen short of the CCP being overthrown.
The secondary issue is the attempt to manipulate the public as to the true likelihood of each explanation, and scientists trying to cover up their own culpability in risky experiments and potentially in the pandemic. It would be nice to think that seeing this backfire and result in even more people believing conspiracy theories would put them off trying something like this again, but I’m afraid that’s too optimistic.
The problem that I see five years later isn’t really the origin. The problem is that it became politically incorrect to even consider the possibility of a lab leak as a pure mistake and failure of containment while it was somehow perfectly fine to blame some hypothetical Chinese dude eating a bat or something. That it was the start of multiple years of everything regarding response being heavily politicized and compounded by obvious mistakes in public health communication such as wearing a face mask. Which was further exacerbated by other things going on in 2020 and lies about every event from both sides.
Then add on the varying restrictions based on jurisdiction and the back and forth starting in 2021 after initial vaccine rollout–restrictions off, restrictions back on, another mandatory stay at home order, schools open, schools not open, and so on. Or what often seemed like theater regarding restrictions if you wanted to eat in a restaurant, for example. As late as September 2022 I could fly domestically with no restrictions, but then had to wear a mask on a transatlantic flight because of German restrictions, but not once when I was the Frankfurt airport, but yes on the subways and train, but not in the train or subway station, and not while drinking with tens of thousands of other people in Munich. Or while doing anything else touristy for that matter, as long as I wasn’t on public transit.
The whole thing should be studied as a massive failure in public health communication and loss of public trust. And while it doesn’t really matter what the initial vector was, not even being allowed to consider a very reasonable possibility because of politics helped set the tone for at least the next two years.
Yeah, I’m also surprised that a brand new deadly disease with an unknown transmission method wasn’t perfectly handled by all of the various federal, state, local, and international health authorities, and that recommendations changed as more was learned about how it was transmitted. Shocked, I tell you!
Fire investigators tend to do the bulk of their (very important) work after the fire is extinguished.
And for very good reason, IMHO.
My complaint is not about around March 2020, but about around March 2021. Or 2022. But masking is a good example of poor communication: from “masks don’t work” to “mask with anything, even if you make it from an old T-shirt” to “well, you really need at least a surgical mask or even better an N-95” combined with the initial guidance of “masks don’t work” was effectively knowingly wrong.
Yes, conditions shifted. But I’m of the opinion most people were reacting to the combination of instability in procedures and requirements combined with at least some perceived hypocrisy based on politics. Especially in 2020.
Yeah, some people are idiots looking for an excuse not to take precautions. I understood at the time that they were saying don’t mask because they wanted to save masks for workers who really needed them. They advised us to wipe everything down, because that’s a good way to stop the transmission of other diseases.
Later, when masks became plentiful and it was clear that aerosol transmission was the main method of infection, they encouraged mask wearing. And, old t-shirts probably helped a lot if everyone wore them – protecting others, not yourself. But if you wanted to protect yourself, you needed something better.
None of this was mystifying, unless you wanted it to be mystifying so you could avoid doing anything.
None of this is really on-topic, I guess, either.
I made myself read the cited article, to see what it did and did not say. A couple of things leapt out at me.
The first two hyperlinks in the opening paragraph -
Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.
Are actually to the same 2014 (!) article, about historical risks of research facilities having a risk of release. Which, rather than the post-fire analysis of a current fire comparison, is more like saying “Some fires in the past may have been arson, this one could be as well!” - to which the obvious rejoinder from the experts in such fields, and in this one is that, well, Yes, it’s possible, and we lack the information to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it couldn’t have.
But okay, sure, so this part is a nothingburger with no directly relevant cites from 6-7 years before the outbreak, related to the historical practice of such by a different nation.
The second point of the cited article is that reporters were being misled by scientists for fear of political consequences. Now reading That Link, we see it’s from a fellow NYTimes reporter, who is currently selling his book about how he was “misled” by scientists on the subject. IE, he’s advertising to a specific crowd. Permit me to doubt his motivations in such a case, especially since he was fired in 2021 from the NYT for repeating a racial slur used by a third party when reporting. The Telegraph, which is where the link leads btw, has a noticeable lean politically, which in and of itself doesn’t mean anything, but it’s another point to review.
Even in the Telegraph article, what they say largely boils down to what we’ve already discussed: it was a possibility, seemed unlikely, and yes there was concern about upsetting the Chinese government, which, duh, makes sense in that they already had been unhelpful in sharing information. Which, yes, out of an abundance of paranoia could absolutely be due to a coverup, but isn’t again proof of a coverup.
I could go on, but the majority of the original article is about the risks of our research becoming the next pandemic, which is absolutely a non-zero issue. But mostly it reads like a study of sensationalism, full of “what ifs” and “maybes” and mostly unsupported supposition. It’s sources are extremely problematic, but provided without even doing the most minor vetting or check for their own bias as I did above.
I treat it as a fluff piece, designed to generate outrage and sell papers. Which, well, is one of the key points of Opinion pieces in newspapers. But considering it “good research” or a solid cite? Nope.
Apologies in advance for a stupid question, but I only came into this forum for the first time in years because someone (I forget who) recently told me that a lab release was presumed the likely source. They accompanied that assertion with the claim that the evidence supporting the wet market bat eaters was weak.
I was dubious - but this certainly was nothing I studied in depth, or kept up on recently. (TBH, I’ve been skimming A WHOLE LOT OF the news lately.) If it is not too much trouble, could someone point me to what you consider a credible (news/scientific) source(s) addressing the most likely (virus) source (and possibly discrediting the claim of lab release?)
The person was probably referring to the recent “revelations” from the German BND and/or the US CIA. But the German assessment is from 2020 and the CIA assessment was with “low confidence”. Neither agency released any evidence to support these conclusions (duh, they’re intelligence agencies) and all public evidence and scientific analysis points toward a natural origin.
If you visit the official covid.gov website. it’s been repurposed as an expose of the lab leak, casting the blame for everything on the Chinese, Antony Fauci and Joe Biden.
It’s strangely silent about who appointed Fauci to handle the pandemic, and who was President of the US during the lockdowns and business closure phase of the pandemic.
On reading your comment, I think I’d rather just get COVID.
For the OP:
One item of evidence against Wuhan is that the director of the institute was going around, telling people about how dangerous the working conditions are.
Why would someone do that? Would Elon Musk go around telling people how dangerous his own cars are? He’s the person in charge, and he’s telling us that he’s poorly managing things! That makes no sense.
My take is that these quotes are misinterpretations of the director going around to potential funding sources. He’s trying to make a case for budget increases. If he thinks that they’re susceptible to scares, then he can make the points that he’s working to save them from disease, by doing good research but also pointing out that such activities pose an amount of risk. If you’re afraid of the ramifications of disease then you need to fund the research and you need to fund the safety equipment. It’s risky, dangerous stuff and bad equipment would invalidate everything else that you’re doing.
People did consider it. They considered it enough to look at the evidence. They just concluded from the evidence that it probably wasn’t true.
The fact that scientists decide against a hypothesis does not mean that they never considered it.
You’re missing my point. It’s not what the scientists with the knowledge and experience to investigate and try to come to a conclusion did. It was the reaction in politics, by media and social media companies, that made it sometimes literally impossible to discuss the possibility.
Many institutions took a large hit to trust and credibility to at least some of the public. The insistence very early on that a lab leak wasn’t possible and to even consider it was also somehow racist was a mistake.
It wasn’t impossible to discuss the possibility, as evidenced by the fact that scientists did discuss the possibility. As did plenty of non-scientists, in government and the media.
I’m happy to stand corrected, but my recollection was that there was an insistence, absent evidence, that a Chinese lab leak was to blame, and that was the original racist “sin”. It absolutely created an atmosphere in the public discourse where considering the possibility of a lab leak meant tacet agreement with the jingoistic, nationalistic party line being promoted by the governing party of the US at the time. This state of affairs was caused by the US government, not scientists or the media.