> However, CCP’s resistance to a proper thorough study of the origins of COVID is IMO not exactly appropriate.
It is, in fact, highly suspect. I’m not at all positive that it indeed leaked from a lab in Wuhan, but the fact they won’t let an independent investigation anywhere near it makes me lean more strongly towards that as a possibility.
The description of the last investigation into the origins of the virus felt more like a ‘guided tour’.
I think many bureaucrats everywhere view the press as an annoyance, but in places where they're used be being able to push the press around, pushing the press around becomes standard operating procedure even when there's nothing in particular to hide. Also, without a free press, nobody is incentivized short-term to dig deeper if a cursory investigation doesn't turn anything up. The end result is predictable stonewalling if a cursory investigation came up with nothing, even if the officials are pretty sure they have nothing to hide. (Also, due to incentives, it's harder for officials to be certain they really have nothing to hide.)
Having been in Hong Kong for just under a decade, I've seen several cases of bureaucrats making tone-deaf statements partly because they aren't used to dealing with a free(-ish) press. I have journalist friends, and I wish the relationship with the press were different, but bullying the press is less a sign of a cover-up when officials aren't used to dealing with a free press.
For that very reason, we cannot accept their narrative at face value. We certainly don't have enough information to confidently eliminate the lab escape theory. The media has largely suggested that the lab escape theory has been disproved.
The smoking gun is that labs in Wuhan were studying different coronaviruses in bats at the time the virus emerged. One of those labs was right near the seafood market which had one of the first documented outbreaks.
It's all circumstantial evidence of course, but that's really all you're going to get with a country like China. We can be damn well sure that they would never admit to the virus originating from a lab leak. To me, this is the clearest and most likely source of the outbreak.
> The smoking gun is that labs in Wuhan were studying different coronaviruses in bats at the time the virus emerged.
As far as I know, those labs always study coronaviruses in bats -- it's a large part of what they do. That makes it less of a suspicious coincidence than your way of putting it implies.
By which I don't mean it didn't happen. There's just not enough information one way or the other.
If anything, it makes it inevitable. The probability of a coronavirus from a bat eventually escaping a lab that regularly studies coronaviruses in bats almost certainly approaches 100% over time.
Also, it's not like they can actually find out what happened now, a year later. Not without a time-machine or perfect recordings showing some sort of ridiculously straightforward sequence of events. E.g. They find a recording showing a bat biting someone in a lab and that person hiding it and then later showing him touching fish at the market. Come on, who thinks it'd be that easy?
What they'd most likely output is a "report" with "findings" that "point to" or "suggest" certain things like bad protocols or insecure procedures or disconnected safety sensors etc. Hardly evidence, and not really actionable even if they were allowed to get there and eventually publish it.
This is the same kind of crap as with the "election" report in the US. They couldn't find hard-evidence because despite this being 2020, camera's aren't everywhere, evidence isn't readily available, and not everyone is keep ridiculous-level audit logs and collating as much info as we want. All they eventually put in their report were discrepancies, not-installed windows updates, internet-connected machines, etc. No smoking gun, and understandably so because even if it did happen, there is no easy and straightforward way to prove it.
> What they'd most likely output is a "report" with "findings" that "point to" or "suggest" certain things like bad protocols or insecure procedures or disconnected safety sensors etc. Hardly evidence, and not really actionable even if they were allowed to get there and eventually publish it
The WHO team wasn't even allowed near the labs, much less enter it. They got a very curated tour of Wuhan (which isn't surprising).
This article, and some top comments, are shifting the narrative to how we must not "demonize" China, and must work to deal with lab leaks in future, in effect, presuming the assumption that China is unequivocally to blame, covering it with the mere color of reasonableness and fairness. So with such careful narrative massaging, we get to hold onto our desire to pretend China is 100% to blame, but frame it reasonably.
This sort of bias, or propaganda, or narrative massaging, under the guise of reasonableness, and non-demoization is pernicious.
These sentiments are like, we can frame our China-blaming as reasonable, via pretending the assumption[0], so under the guise of "not demonizing China", "giving credit were due but still holding to account" we can hold onto our excuse to blame China, we can pretend the assumption that China is unequivocally to blame.
Bullshit. Unhelpful, bs. If you want to pretend that you are doing this under the guise of actually discovering the cause, you can to satisfy your own need to pretend that, but it's dishonest, and not actually helpful to discovering the cause.
Blaming the enemy of the day for the pestilence of the season is as old as the hills, and makes boring, and biased, history. And makes you all propagating such cant, useful idiots, manipulated puppets.
Also, how is everyone forgetting the childhood lesson that the one so eager to point the finger of blame is often the one with something to hide, so desperate to deflect suspicion away from themselves?
Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention (WHCDC) is 300 m from the market.
Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), with the more highly classified work, is 14 km away, but linked to the PLA Hospital, WHCDC and seafood market on Line 2 of the Wuhan metro:
The idea it spread via the seafood market has been largely debunked even by CCP and WHO -- there were cases before those occurred, there were no traces found there, etc...
It can be pride over shame of incompetence maybe ? the wuhan labs are said to be lacking in standard safety biohazard practices.. so investigating may reveal that.
Every time when there's a question about China's bad behaviour, someone will point out that it happens everywhere.
Yes, but in a vastly different degree, China goes to an extreme of making it political and look good.
In US, most leaks don't look good. Sure, US tries to make some problems look good, but they don't try very hard (or there's more balance in how an issue is investigated with multiple different parties).
That is true, but the difference is the lack of accountability, which is cultural/societal/political - there are virtually no external forces to counter a potentially dishonest official narrative.
A one party state means that there is no pressure from political opponents (political battles inside the party will never trump the party itself). And there is no pressure from journalists - China has the worst score for press freedom [1] (bar Eritreaa, Turkmenistan and North Korea) with a downward trend over the last decade. If there's no one to hold your feet to the fire, there's little incentive to self-incriminate.
In theory that might be true, and it's the way they teach it in American civics class.
In practice, Xi went on an 'anti-corruption campaign' that purged all his political enemies from power as his first initiative. The exact opposite of what your theory predicts, and actually a stronger cyclical purge than our typical repubs->dems->repubs one.
The campaign was a unique event in decades of party history and the Wikipedia page for the campaign lists 4 different theories for political motives. I'm not sure you can view it as a sign of a culture of healthy accountability.
The point remains that they have politics. It's not some lockstep monolith.
As far as which culture has more healthy accountability.. plenty of corruption to go around on all sides, the comparison would be pretty nuanced.
I'd say that China has a lot more low-level corruption, as a bigger % of their economy, what with large swaths of the country being pretty third-world, but also more accountability for senior people who fuck up badly. They executed a baby food exec who poisoned kids, while nobody saw a day in jail for poisoning the city of Flint. Rick Snyder probably has a nice lobbyist job.
Or, look at Covid -- the mayor of Wuhan and governor of Hubei were sacked over their poor initial handling. Is NY gonna elect a Republican over it? TX elect a Democrat? No way in either case. Maybe we have less accountability in some ways specifically due to the 2-party system's polarization. Arguably Trump lost over it, but the guy literally got covid, right before the election, after downplaying it for 6 months and still got the 2nd most votes in history.
I think it is probably more accurate to say that they have "factionalism," rather than "politics." China has had a one-party system with strikingly low participation (~6% of national population) for the past seven decades.
They have politics, but (in the absence of parties) not partisanship in the narrow sense. Elections and parties aren't politics, they are just key mechanisms of politics in liberal democratic states.
>Or, look at Covid -- the mayor of Wuhan and governor of Hubei were sacked over their poor initial handling. Is NY gonna elect a Republican over it? TX elect a Democrat?
I mean, whoever they replace the mayor of Wuhan and governor of Hubei with will certainly still be members of the Chinese Communist Party. NY and TX might not flip their governing parties, but I'd be much more willing to assure you that the process of choosing their replacements will be more transparent than that for Wuhan and Hubei.
They won't flip parties and no incumbent is ever at serious risk of a primary challenge. You can call it transparent I guess but it's also a foregone conclusion.
It’s certainly widespread but the cultural component is important to how strong the reaction is. China certainly isn’t alone in having it but the political stakes are a powerful amplifier.
I don't know about China, but the whole science around COVID seems to have a really strong cultural component that before was totally unfamiliar to me.
When looking at some German Epidemiologist blog I found something like: "Next thing on the list is to proof that government measures worked"
I would have expected something like: "I'm looking at data - and want to find out what helps"
Okay, think about that one a bit: in the U.S., power shifted peacefully and a bunch of Republicans left the Bush administration to the private sector and academia because we have a strong tradition of not pursuing political opponents. That is not true of China’s system and not having separate power hierarchies means that you can’t just say, pull a Katrina, and fail upwards into a well-paid private job with no impact on your family. Nobody’s kids are being banned from going to Yale because their dad was publicly shown as incompetent or dishonest. The more that isn’t true, the more it’s unsurprising to see people have the instinct to reach for political damage control when the problem is still raging.
yeah I agree that political context acts as an amplifier.. every country have it's own flavor but China like USSR is still fond of secrecy and murder..
If hypothetically a novel virus caused a global pandemic originated within the US they certainly would say the magic words "national security" and refuse to cooperate and take a hardline against whistleblowers if one of their government labs was suspected. The US Government has a pattern of slapping top secret on their mistakes because people getting rightfully mad at them would be "bad for national security".
It is fucked up and not but governments are reflexively secretive so I don't think it says much about China. A superpower or nation-with-delusion-of-superpowerdom would refuse to disclose something like that regardless unless forced by internal political pressure - meaning there isn't anything to read in. They would likely rationalize resistance as "going transparent because enough of the world thinks this opens up rumormongering as a form of intelligence!".
I uh, don’t see anything in this article except fluff? It basically says ‘researchers were in wuhan’.
The original I read had such helpful statements as ‘the chinese government insisted that every outside researcher was accompanies by a chinese partner’, ‘the government took days to procure the data, and when they finally did, a lot was missing’ and ‘a visit to x was denied for unclear reasons’.
I’m sorry, I’m vaguely remembering these, so they may not be 100% accurate.
Then the western researchers made one gloriously ambiguous statement while still in China, and turned about after they left the country.
Also an interesting thing - the WIV used to put all their virus sequences in a publically available database. Around autumn 2019 they took it down they said because people were trying to hack it. I think it's still confidential even to the WHO. I mean if they were worried about hackers they could just publish a copy of the data.
> It emerged last week that the team had not even asked to see the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s online database, locked since September 2019 and taken down altogether in the spring of 2020. That database is known to contain 22,000 samples, mostly of viruses, 16,000 of them from bats. These include eight viruses very closely related to the virus causing the pandemic but whose genome sequences have not been published. They were collected in 2015 from a disused mineshaft, a thousand miles away, where in 2012 six men fell ill with a disease very like Covid.
Fair points about the one year delay etc., and the initial WHO response. The Chinese government is hardly renowned for transparency. I was just replying to a claim that the investigation hadn't been allowed anywhere near the lab: they did get a cursory visit after a one year delay.
I make no moral judgement about impartiality. Work out the implications yourself.
I make no comment about the content of the video linked in GGP's post.
That being said, the following is publicly known (but unverified by me) and quite apt to affect impartiality (whether under his control or not, whether consciously or not):
1. He was persecuted in China by the authorities and barely escaped with the posessions on his body.
2. He is currently under attack by brigades and agents of the persons he is critical of. The attacks follow standard psychological warfare patterns, including death threats to himself and the family.
Additionally, some speculation from me:
3. He has no journalistic training, both his business partner and his peers in the wider YT/Patreon business don't have either, and to me it seems both content producer and audience have come to a shared understanding that the shows are primarily entertainment and should not be held to the same rigour of journalistic integrity one would expect from e.g. a traditional print periodical. Adv Media's income entirely depends on YT/Patreon, and employing sensationalism – which results in uneven amplification of the reported reality – brings in more money. I haven't seen a completely sober/dry video.
Have you seen their older videos? They had to hold back any criticism, and everything was mostly peachy. Now, the gloves are off, and they do have an ax to grind, unquestionably. However, just because they have to respond to tons of wumaos and tankies doesn't mean what they say isn't true. Furthermore, they do not pretend to be journalists, so I don't think this criticism has integrity.
Their experiences living in China line up with mine.
I haven't seen an instance of them compromising their integrity.
You have not understood me well. I did not say that I think "what they say isn't true". I did not say that I think they "pretend to be journalists". You interpret things into my post and attempt to refute that are not there, which is a shame because I took great deliberation to formulate it precisely the way it is. The topic under discussion is impartiality, not integrity! Be mindful of the difference.
> Have you seen their older videos?
I am subscribed since late 2016.
> Their experiences living in China line up with mine.
I see, I agree. I don't think it's a particularly insightful observation to say they are impartial- they have a very clear voice. When I hear someone labelled impartial, I assume that's an attempt to discredit their character.
It is, in fact, highly suspect. I’m not at all positive that it indeed leaked from a lab in Wuhan, but the fact they won’t let an independent investigation anywhere near it makes me lean more strongly towards that as a possibility.
The description of the last investigation into the origins of the virus felt more like a ‘guided tour’.