We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/opinion/covid-pandemic-lab-leak.html

by jbegley • 1 year ago

48 18 1 year ago

Fricken2• 1 year ago

This is from the Covid Timeline on Wikipedia:

According to an ABC news report, the American National Center for Medical Intelligence shared intelligence in late November, based on analysis of wire and computer intercepts and satellite images, regarding a potential respiratory disease in Wuhan. This was denied by the Pentagon.[4] On 13 March 2020, the South China Morning Post reported that Chinese government records suggest that the first case of infection with COVID-19 could be traced back to a 55-year-old Hubei resident on 17 November.

Now, I swear to god I passed over a news item about a respiratory illness spreading around Wuhan in late November, and that people were being quarantined. It sounded serious, I wondered what it's chances were of spreading everywhere. I did some googling around, I learned about the Wuhan institute of Virology, it's relationship with other biosafety level IV labs around the world, and NIH funded gain-of-function research happening there.

A couple months later when the rest of the world was paying attention, I went to look up the information and couldn't find any of it. I gave up on trying to sort fact from fiction because there was so much bullshit going around.

42772827• 1 year ago

You watched the narrative get built in real time. The same thing happened with Luigi.

treetalker• 1 year ago

Not to go all aluminium-foil hat, but around that same time the NYT broke the unidentified aerial phenomena story, and that up and vanished from its pages all of a sudden.

netsharc• 1 year ago

I went to look up the information and couldn't find any of it

I'm surprised there isn't a constant archive of what news sites put into the "memory hole". Maybe Google being shit isn't them failing, but deliberate (I don't seriously believe this).

But I wonder how much of your story could've been the Mandela Effect. I remember looking back that I was at a busy European airport in December 2019 and thinking about "At that time, there must've been Chinese tourists there with the virus!", but I remember as well that when I was at the airport I wasn't worried if anyone was coughing or sneezing, i.e. Covid wasn't in my sphere of concern in December 2019.

_zagj• 1 year ago

I'm surprised there isn't a constant archive of what news sites put into the "memory hole". Maybe Google being shit isn't them failing, but deliberate (I don't seriously believe this).

archive.is

etempleton• 1 year ago

I think it would be fairly hard to erase the story entirely. Presumably there would be printed copies of The NY Times floating around still and it would be archived somewhere online officially and unofficially. Links on social media that would now be broken. It would also be difficult to silence all of the NY Reporters and staff who would still be aware and remember the story. Not just the management who could conceivably be in on such a cover up, but the rank and file (Once enough people know about something the odds of keeping it quiet becomes exponentially harder).

It is of course also possible it did and does exist in some form but has been suppressed to become less discoverable. But to what end?

The questions are did the US and other countries know or suspect it was likely a lab leak. And if they intentionally chose to suppress that information, why?

The most likely reason for suppressing the information at the time, would be one of two reasons:

1. It is unhelpful to blame another country and call them out for lying when we all need to work together to solve this pandemic. China had the most experience and knowledge of COVID-19 in those first months.

2. The US, through collaborative involvement, would have also been culpable.

I think number one is most likely.

Fricken2• 1 year ago

At that time I was just clicking around in the various virology lab public facing web pages, glancing over their various research projects, the funding sources, the names of the scientists involved, it was all there, super transparent and open. I was just following my curiosity at that point, I was not suspicious or skeptical.

So I'm Canadian, and I recall reading something about Canadian and Chinese scientists moving back and forth between the Wuhan and Winnipeg labs. It was all very open and collaborative. Of course, some time later sensational and scandalous headlines blew up about Chinese spies all up in our high security bio-labs.

So I would say that if it is a lab leak, then China is culpable, the US is culpable, and they're culpable because they trusted the good judgement of the international science community that decides how labs such as the one in Wuhan are run. All parties have incentives to manage the narrative.

borgdefenser• 1 year ago

My strangest memory were these videos from China of people just falling over dead in the street in early 2020.

A guy just standing there and then does a face plant on the street.

I really have no idea what that was all about.

uppost• 1 year ago

If only there was a credible news agency or group of influential elites that could have given some pushback against the "misleading" of the public, I would gladly subscribe. It seems like that may be an even bigger problem than GoF lab leaks; an unintelligent intelligentsia.

dlcarrier2• 1 year ago

The Hill still puts some honest effort into hosting competing viewpoints, which is vanishingly rare for legacy media, these days.

There's also Reason magazine, which thinks every political view point is wrong, especially their own, because they're libertarians.

jgalt212• 1 year ago

All I need to know about COVID is encapsulated in the market caps of big tech in late 2019 vs the market caps of big tech now.

rayiner• 1 year ago

Scientists and public health officials made the mistake of projecting certainty and confidence that wasn’t justified by the state of the research. This is why lawyers are trained to always qualify their opinions—you can never really know anything for certain.

I pray none of this overconfidence and unjustified certainty applied to the mRNA vaccines. It would be a disaster if 20 years from now there’s some findings about long term impacts from first-gen mRNA vaccines. (I say that out of pure self interest—I’m vaccinated with Pfizer shot and so is my wife and eldest daughter.)

dlcarrier2• 1 year ago

Why are conspiracy theories considered the crazy ones? Aren't a significant perron of crimes prosecuted as a conspiracy? Wouldn't a lone actor committing a complex act be far less likely than two or more conspiring to do the same?

clown_strike• 1 year ago

It never ceases to amuse me that our entire economy is manipulated according to economic theory, the Department of Justice's playbook is deferential to race theory, for the last decade we've been teaching kids about sexuality through a framework of queer theory, advocating for women's rights based on feminist theory, validating every form of hardship as oppression under critical theory and letting WEF dictate the fate of the world based on game theory.

But the only time we denounce theory as being unsubstantiated and inactionable is when it comes to speculation about criminal collusion by individuals otherwise above the law:

Conspiracy theory.

Because it is absolutely unfathomable that elite criminals might cooperate to avoid detection and accountability.

mitchbob• 1 year ago

https://archive.ph/5CGFM

sega_sai• 1 year ago

Apparently this opinion piece, which i initially took at face value is not fully straight with the facts. I.e. on misleading journalists, here is the rebuttal based on the official testimonies: https://medium.com/@K_G_Andersen/its-not-about-getting-the-s...

starspangled• 1 year ago

This should be a very good introspective learning experience for people who blindly trusted governments and their "experts", social media and "news" corporations, "fact checkers", etc., and who believed that all being in it together meant that anybody who doubts or even questions the accepted narrative should be bullied and censored and silenced.

I doubt many will take advantage of the opportunity, but we can only hope.

hoseja• 1 year ago

I remember learning about the furin cleavage site in the first weeks. Massive smoking gun.

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

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