A “Safety Emergency” Happened at Wuhan Institute of Virology in November of 2019

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/a-safety-emergency-happened-at-the-wuhan-institute-of-virology-in-november-of-2019.html

by themgt • 4 years ago

51 46 4 years ago

marginalrevolution.com

wellthatsawrap1• 4 years ago

I'll let you in on something else that used to be a conspiracy and is now true. They did it on purpose. Between sanctions and tarifs the Chinese economy was being crushed by Trump. They needed a way to reset the world economy.

yieldcrv2• 4 years ago

The issue with conspiracies is that they require competence

Alternatively, there are opportunists ready when presented with a reality

Here, it relies on damning China for having a vaccine ready so fast. China’s vaccine doesn’t work and their population is still susceptible to covid. They take a separate opportunity for just waiting for weaker strains to evolve and circulate.

It isn’t competence. There is no tree of plans. It is just reactions that seem beneficial at the time.

rasz4• 4 years ago

Letting it lose? No f way. That would be nuts.

Shutting down ALL internal Chinese travel from Wuhan, but letting international departures - that did happen, after all the more the merrier, let the world share our misery. Additionally let our stooge at WHO keep parroting how air travel is safe and essential!

shaobo5• 4 years ago

It did not.

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/05/trumps-flawed-china-travel...

incomingpain• 4 years ago

I'll let you in on something else that used to be a conspiracy and is now true. They did it on purpose. Between sanctions and tarifs the Chinese economy was being crushed by Trump. They needed a way to reset the world economy.

Who is they? I find it difficult to believe China's government is behind it. They a reversing course on their one child policy because they realize the collapse coming from their low fertility rate. Better yet, they introduced significant incentives in order to fix this rate. Their zerocovid policy is incidentally so crazy because they fear population decline.

Worse yet, this ongoing issue is exacerbating the huge wealth disparity of east-west in china and imminent peasant revolt is likely. China isn't in a spot where they want to do this.

I would certainly see it the other way. the USA was quite involved in the wuhan lab. The USA could certainly have been the 'they' though obviously this whole Meng Wanzhou and Huawei thing in Canada ties together with the winnipeg lab and chinese national sending viruses to wuhan.

cochne• 4 years ago

Can you provide evidence for such a claim?

errantmind• 4 years ago

It is actively harmful to divert discussion away from all of the information in the well-sourced original publication, regardless of the truth of your statement.

jvandonsel• 4 years ago

U.S. imports from China year by year. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/imports-from-chin...

The Chinese economy was not “crushed by Trump”.

mindslight9• 4 years ago

As much as I think it's ridiculous to heap too much credit on a hollow conman, that chart shows a gradual increase year over year and then a 20% drop for 2019.

Though if OP felt like making the case for willfulness with any type of elaboration or reference, that would be nice.

cbeach• 4 years ago

Remember how the “fact checkers” of Facebook and co systematically disallowed discussion of this?

https://unherd.com/2021/05/how-facebook-censored-the-lab-lea...

Sadly we’ll now see even more “fact checking” thanks to the EU’s Digital Services Act.

lost_tourist• 4 years ago

they censored unbacked speculation and not this particular report. I bet you can find it all over facebook right now with nary a complaint about it being taken down because propublica vets their stuff before they publish or speculate.

origin_path6• 4 years ago

The speculation was never unbacked - the mere fact that the first cases happened right next to one of the world's only CoV virology labs was itself backing.

ksec2• 4 years ago

Not sure if any of these are "news". All air transport to Wuhan was shutdown by mid November. In cases anyone not aware, this cant happen without highest level of CPP approval.

shaobo5• 4 years ago

Do you have a source for this?

ksec2• 4 years ago

Example.

https://www.hongkongpost.hk/en/about_us/whats_new/notices/in...

mindslight9• 4 years ago

A lot of people are going to hold up this renewed discussion as vindication, and that is somewhat correct. But the hard truth is that now is the right time to focus on this, and the beginning of the pandemic was simply not.

The intelligence of groups scales something like the inverse of Metcalfe's law. More people means more memetic mass repeating poor local optima, severely curtailing everyone's ability for rational thought. So in a large group the bandwidth to quickly converge on nuanced truths just isn't there.

We couldn't even get wearing a basic respirator, as demonstrated in countless movies about pandemics, to become accepted as common sense until 22 months into the pandemic. That's how paralyzed we were as a society. The last thing we needed was even more energy being dumped into jingoistic (and other zero-sum) red herrings rather than taking basic care of ourselves.

origin_path6• 4 years ago

Your evidence for masks working is ... movies?

This has come up so often, but clearly, repetition must continue. Masks and mask mandates had no effect on COVID at any point. Even a cursory amount of time spent with the case graphs and start/end dates will show that to be clear. You simply cannot find inflection points in the case graphs that correlate with mask mandates being added or removed. The reason is, masking assumed SARS-CoV-2 spreads via large water droplets. The mask was supposed to catch these droplets if you were infected and coughed. But actually SARS-CoV-2 spreads like a gas, via invisible aerosols that can float in the air.

The article discusses this briefly:

Animal experiments to test the efficacy of vaccines generated highly infectious aerosols that are “difficult to detect,” the interim report says, adding that “there were concerns about conducting this type of research in a BSL2 laboratory.”

and

Two and a half months earlier, according to the interim report, procurement officials at the WIV posted a call for bids on a government website seeking a costly air incinerator. The post was dated Nov. 19, 2019, the very day that the visiting CAS safety official arrived to address a “complex and grave” situation there … If somehow the HEPA filter system failed, because there was a tear or breach … then your quick fix would be to bring in an air incinerator.

This was actually known from the start by people paying attention. The Diamond Princess cruise ship proved it. The whole ship was placed in lockdown, where people weren't allowed to leave their cabins, and the initial infections were also confined to quarters. Yet very quickly COVID was cropping up all over the ship despite the lack of contact. Therefore it must have been spreading via the air ducts as a consequence. This sort of thing was to be expected because SARS-1 was found by investigators in Hong Kong to have spread within an apartment building placed in lockdown via the drain pipes connecting bathrooms, and even between buildings, via aerosol spread. Search for "Environmental transmission of SARS at Amoy Gardens" to see.

The outbreak on the Diamond Princess revealed not only that lockdowns wouldn't work, but also that lots of people appeared to have prior immunity, somehow. Unfortunately even though this rather 'useful' outbreak happened very early on, the results were ignored by epidemiologists. The reason is fairly clear if you read their papers: they have developed a culture of ignoring inconvenient data and replacing it with assumptions. Epidemiology papers and models will routinely have dozens or even hundreds of assumptions in them, even about variables that have observational data available, and always to the same end of exaggerating both severity of an epidemic along with the ability to control it. Aerosol spread would have rendered epidemiologists entirely useless, as there's no known way to contain or reduce the spread of such a virus, so they'd have had nothing to contribute. Hence the replacement of observational data with the assumption of highly localized droplet spread, to which several different containment strategies could be applied.

mindslight9• 4 years ago

And here we go, again.

Your evidence for masks working is ... movies?

Not evidence. Graphical demonstration of common sense behavior by other humans that can be mimicked, because if someone is operating at the level of "masks don't work" or "a cloth mask will protect" then that is apparently what's needed. An individual doing a menial task of spraying paint or grinding metal and then blowing out black snot quickly understands the purpose of air filtration, but social media is a hell of a drug.

"Masks" having no effect on Covid isn't an indicator of much, because >90% of the population never wore real respirators that provided actual incoming air filtration. You're essentially beating the strawman of the people wearing cut up t-shirts to "protect others", which I agree was also dumb tribal behavior.

Putting it simply - why has air filtration been standard operating procedure in bio labs, long before Covid? The question about Covid specifically isn't some "yes/no", but ultimately an engineering problem of what type of filtration is effective.

mint2• 4 years ago

“But the hard truth is that now is the right time to focus on this, and the beginning of the pandemic was simply not.”

You’ve hit on one of the biggest issues of the debate.

Early on many of the posts acted like if everyone got on board with a lab leak theory or if it turned out to be a lab leak, then we would be able to get back to normal and also the government would be blameless for their terrible prep.

Neither of those made sense. The virus could have been from a lab, from a meteor, from an angry pine cone god willing it into existence, or from evolution making a virus jump species. It wouldn’t effect the proper response or change the situation.

While the virus is still a concern, we’re out of the acute phase so now it’s appropriate for a retrospective cause analysis in order to prevent it from happening again. The start it would have served no purpose except distract from what actually needed focus.

Also, even today it seems almost moot whether it was from the market or the lab. That both are very plausible scenarios really should be enough to take appropriate measures for making sure neither could spawn a new one.

jorgesborges• 4 years ago

But the hard truth is that now is the right time to focus on this, and the beginning of the pandemic was simply not.

That’s not what happened. We didn’t shelve the discussion to focus on other priorities, we created a propaganda campaign to prohibit the discussion from taking placing and actively censored and stigmatized well-meaning individuals who explored it.

There’s so much condescension in the post-rationalization of these decisions. We couldn’t tell people that masks might not work, or that the virus may have come from a lab. Why? All it did was destroy the credibility of our institutions.

taolegal4• 4 years ago

All it did was destroy the credibility of our institutions.

They're stuck in a death spiral too, cause admitting fault now would unravel years of digging themselves into a hole, insisting that they make no errors and if they do it's cause "the science changed."

yieldcrv2• 4 years ago

Should have just linked to the propublica article, not the article from the fringe website about feeling vindicated from The Left’s national standing committee

https://www.propublica.org/article/senate-report-covid-19-or...

metadat• 4 years ago

Corresponding discussion:

Covid-19 Origins: Investigating a “Complex and Grave Situation” Inside Wuhan Lab

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377145

(31 points, 2 comments)

origin_path6• 4 years ago

The amount of evidence in the ProPublica article/senate report is quite staggering. What's interesting is that it's clear that US intelligence knew it was a lab leak very early on. Trump's comment makes that clear:

In April 2020, Trump declared at a press conference that COVID-19 — or “kung flu,” as he soon began calling it — had come from a lab in China. When pressed on the evidence for this claim, he declared: “I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that.”

So he had been briefed with secret intel he wasn't allowed to repeat, probably NSA intercepts of some kind. And yet despite this clear statement, it was immediately censored all over the place by tech workers and others who thought they were better than the general public at knowing what's true and also better at it than a US President with access to secret intelligence reports.

ThePowerOfFuet• 4 years ago

Why are we linking to the rehash instead of the actual article it's referring to?

https://www.propublica.org/article/senate-report-covid-19-or...

@dang perhaps replace the URL?

yucky• 4 years ago

I, for one, am grateful that our technocratic overlords protected us from this information for so long. We can't be trusted with the truth, it could impact our spending habits.

isitmadeofglass• 4 years ago

it “unusual” that two military COVID-19 vaccine development teams were able to reach early milestones even faster than the major drug companies who were part of the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed program.

That’s such an odd narrative. The major drug companies didn’t join warp speed, and the first western vaccine took 2 days to develop. The slow part wasn’t development it was clinical tests, and getting to market.

LargoLasskhyfv• 4 years ago

I'll just leave this here (again). It made its limited rounds at the beginning of 2020, and allowed me to prepare a little bit. Since it was obvious from that article alone, that it would be going global and causing chaos.

This is not speaking about lab-leak. That wasn't on the radar at all, at the time. Just the 'denial' in the beginning from the apparatshiks (globally), and then the panicked lockdown actionism.

https://chinamediaproject.org/2020/01/27/dramatic-actions/

(Loads slowly, give it time.)

A “Safety Emergency” Happened at Wuhan Institute of Virology in November of 2019

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