AKA the senate republicans. Sorry, they're not a credible source on anything scientific. This makes me think it was a natural accident even more, frankly.
Thanks, this is the kind of information I'm after.
So, the Senate is not a trustworthy source of information? I'm not clued up on US politics so I really have no idea how the system works, upper/lower houses, senate is lower? Like the house of commons in the UK?
e.g. could an analogy be this is like a small party of Brexiteers making a document on how leaving the EU is economically a sound idea? There is no requirement for it to be evidence-based?
Finally, have you read the document and is there anything in particular that is egregiously incorrect? Just because we don't agree with someone's political stance on something doesn't mean what they're saying isn't necessarily true.
When it comes to documentation from the US government, you have to consider the source agency, think of them like individual sources rather than all part of "the government".
Most agencies are fine, you have to be careful when you see things coming from Congress though.
However, if there is a report from any committee, you have to vet it more carefully.
Step 1 see if it was written by a bipartisan committee, if not, it's probably trash. I'm a liberal but I wouldn't blindly trust reports from any partisan committee, but GOP committees tend to focus on creating propaganda for political purposes rather than actual actionable plans or reliable data. They focus on blaming whatever the topic is on Democrats above all else.
Reports from bipartisan committees TEND to be better, and ones endorsed by the entire Congress are pretty bulletproof, like the Warren Commission or the 9/11 report.
> the Senate is not a trustworthy source of information?
A partisan report, in the U.S., is not a credible source. There is simply no culture of intellectual rigour in partisan debate. (The Senate has nonpartisan research arms which are highly credible.)
- The CCP have been routinely supressing any hypothesis on COVID-19 being a lab-borne virus.
- The CCP have been stoic on their approach to zero-COVID
- IF the virus was lab-borne, and IF the CCP know it was, is it not (very, very remotely) possible they know more about the consequences of this virus?
That line of reasoning is pretty conspiratorial, but given that the CCP have been incredibly cagey about the whole affair, I don't think it's unreasonable to be doubtful.
I think it is FAR more likely that it is a face-saving exercise, but I also think it's worth keeping an open mind
Their behaviour is not that weird for an authoritarian regime and easily explainable without this theory imo. (As you say as well.)
What would be an example of a piece of knowledge which they could have about the virus and which would warrant (in our eyes if we knew) 0 covid policy forever? Maybe I lack the imagination.
Edit: Please don't downvote replies to this comment with fabricated not-real scenarios. That's exactly what I asked for!
If that was what it is going to do, wouldn’t we know that by now? Hasn’t it been the most funded r&d ever for multiple years now due to the entire planet combining its strength to understand the virus?
I agree, this is over extrapolating. There was no opportunity for them to not get to this point really unless COVID had gone away at this stage.
It strikes me this is a face saving exercise at this point but they can also use it to stress test supply chains, stress test a general emergency situation, stress test their surveillance.
Not much downside for an authoritarian regime.
To assume they have hidden knowledge on long term dangers doesn't fit the observations IMO. Really, my guess is that the whole thing from the start is a facing saving exercise because of an accident in a culture obsessed with saving face.
Makes people distrust authority. That is where all the covid deniers and hoaxers come from. Created to further divide the US. Never intended to run rampant in China. Zero covid is a last ditch effort to prevent the otherwise unpreventable protests, revolts and finally the downfall of the cccp ;)
> IF the virus was lab-borne, and IF the CCP know it was, is it not (very, very remotely) possible they know more about the consequences of this virus?
Huh?
Suppose it did come from a lab, by malice, incompetence, bad luck, or otherwise. Why would this imply that China knows more about it than anyone else?
(Sure, China would have known more about it in the first few months. And they surely did regardless of whether it came from a lab: after all, it was primarily in China for a little while, and China extensively studied its cases. But it’s been years, and the world has studied Covid far more than any one lab could possibly have studied it.)
I guess the idea is that China was studying SARS-like viruses in animals, maybe mutating or genetically modifying them to learn more about them, and at some point, one escaped through incompetence. Especially early on this would obviously give China a big information advantage, as they had all their existing research to look at, and might have a more complete picture than anyone else (regarding heritage and other strains). Now that SARS-CoV-2 has been in the wild for three years its questionable if they would still have an advantage. But they might have better data about long-term effects, if only from animal tests, simply because they would have had more than three years to study it.
> Suppose it did come from a lab, by malice, incompetence, bad luck, or otherwise. Why would this imply that China knows more about it than anyone else?
Because the Chinese government started reacting to it as early as fall 2019, despite the best efforts of American big tech companies to cover it up.
Because people made the very reasonable assumption that the unusual and highly virulent form of COVID that originated right near one of the only places on the planet where they were specifically creating that virus actually came from that lab.
I am still in awe of people's continued denial about this.
Even the mainstream media is reluctantly admitting it now, just search for "lab leak" on Google News.
Anyone that paid any attention to so called "conspiracy" news sources knew about COVID well in advance. Back in December 2019 I saw countless videos of Chinese soldiers in hazmat suits rounding up civilians
while they begged for their lives.
And most "informed" people were in denial until February or March 2020.
So, perhaps if you can admit you were wrong about COVID at the start of the pandemic, perhaps you are also wrong about it now?
This is why software is famously vulnerability free. Really, software devs only know what the software should probably do and which bugs they run into regularly.
If the virus originated in a lab, then it is very likely that the CCP knows a lot about its behavior. The grandparent comment is implying that the CCP is acting based on something they know that they haven’t shared with the rest of the world.
If it's a lab-leak it means the virus was potentially well studied before the leak, and it's effects known. Therefore the government could know a lot more about it than they claim.
Yes but what "knowledge" would be relevant at this stage? The virus has been through multiple rounds of mutation and has been well-studied. The amount of things that are a) possible to discern before it was released c) a surprise to the scientific community and c) is still applicable feels like it would be very small - barring sci-fi scenarios.
As someone with no deep knowledge in virology, epidemiology or even biology, I tend to agree with you. However I also understand how having the virus originating from China , maybe, or maybe not, from a lab leak, and having china so hell bent on a 0 covid policy going so far as boarding and ceiling the doors of appartment buildings might be frightening even if the virus has been well studied.
Let's say you're the head of a fancy lab with all the equipment and a team that does everything you ask gratis. You go to have lunch and get some soup. The owner comes to you with your soup and say " Here is you soup, nothing's wrong with it, just a normal, regular soup I can assured you that nobody dipper their balls in it or added anything dubious to it haha, go ahead and eat" and then turns around and yell at the kitchen staff that they better not eat the soup .
You decide not to eat the soup, you take it back with you and run every possible test on it. All the tests come back normal you can't find anything weird in it. Do you eat the soup ? More importantly do you brush the weird behavior of the owner off or do you keep wondering what the hell have they done to the soup ?
I'm not saying this is a perfect analogy but just trying to explain why some things might make us uneasy even if logic tells us we shouldn't.
That is quite a terrible analogy. In the real world, one can logically guess why the CCP's acting "weird" (general political cluelessness, wanting to save face), but in your analogy there are not a lot of other possible explanations to the weird behaviors.
God, the last few days HN has disappointed me more and more...
That being said I disagree. the CCP going as far as chaining/nailing doors seems more than excessive (remember that officially there has been about 5000 deaths from covid in China) and not as esaily explainable as you suggest.
The explanations you give make sense but they wouldn't be unique to China. A lot of authoriatian countries share the same concerns and want to show they have things under control and to save face. Yet no other country went as far as china did. When you add together the fact that the virus originated from China, that a lab leak can't be completely excluded and that there response to it is unique and seems irrational , I can't blame people for having a bad gut feeling about it. It doesn't mean that the suspicions of the people that find it fishy are founded, just that them feeling that way is somewhat understandable.
> If it's a lab-leak it means the virus was potentially well studied before the leak, and it's effects known
Even if the lab-leak theory is true: knowing how it behaves in the laboratory (in vitro or in animal testing) doesn’t tell you much about how it will act in humans.
Don't you think that what they know about the virus is part of public research? What could be hidden there? Side question: could you include a timer in a virus to launch again a date?
I think creating such a timer, one that would both survive the large number of mutations covid has gone through and also remain undetected in one of the most heavily studied genomes would be a practical impossibility that is far, far beyond the capabilities we have today.
Simpler hypothesis: if's it's a lab-leak, all the dead can be blamed on the Party itself because it failed securing the labs and it ended up killing it's own citizens. Thus you have an incentive to do everything possible to minimize the number of dead, thus lockdowns.
I wouldn't call a partisan congressional report a trusted source.
More importantly, I'm not sure what difference it makes. China is pursuing zero COVID because there's an extreme amount of vaccine hesitancy among their elderly population. Nearly half of elderly Chinese people haven't had any vaccine dose at all.
The truly perplexing thing is that they've chosen to be authoritarian about lockdowns and quarantine rather than just mandating the vaccine.
It seems the simpler and more likely explanation is that they're using "Covid Zero" restrictions as an excuse to control the movement of citizens, which they want to do in order to suppress protests related to their economic downturn.
If we had the same media landscape back in 1986 as we have now, I am convinced that Chernobyl would have been framed as nothing more than an unfortunate naturally occurring radiological phenomenon, having nothing at all to do with the nearby reactor meltdown.
Anyone who said otherwise would be said to be spreading dangerous and untrue misinformation, and should be permabanned from everything. And you're probably spreading problematic anti-russian racism, too.
Whatever you do, don't hoard iodide tablets or geiger counters, because that will just start a panic. Meanwhile, our elites hoard radiation protective gear for themselves.
Facebook and Twitter would work feverishly to delete any videos people uploaded of the evacuation.
And you would be gaslit for saying that perhaps the nuclear meltdown had something to do with the radiation. And perhaps the corrupt and authoritarian government cut corners and allowed this to happen.
