The biggest difference between all of those and this virus is that those were leaks of already-known viruses. SARS-CoV-2 wasn't known to exist before 2019 and there's no known precursor virus. There's a somewhat closely related virus that infected the miners in Yunnan but it was only 96% similar. There's nothing at all in this article on how SARS-CoV-2 was discovered or created.
The problem I have is that China isn't interested in investigating the start of the pandemic. They've thrown away their wastewater samples, there's some evidence WHO found of SARS-CoV-2 spreading locally prior to December 2019, but no backtesting of any samples. Nobody seems to be looking at the bats in Hubei for sarbecoviruses.
By blocking study of the zoonotic origin of the pandemic, they can use the theory it was imported in food for domestic propaganda. For external propaganda they're happy to have conspiracy theories flying about this lab leak theory creating a "firehose of falsehoods" and distractions. They can rely on American scientists to get engaged with the conspiracy theory and debunk it, wasting their efforts and then they can use that also for domestic propaganda.
Meanwhile nobody gets fucking outraged that China isn't properly investigating the origin of the virus and isn't aggressively looking at the bats in Hubei and any animal farms in the surrounding area. My suspicion is that animal farms (like minks) functioned as a bioreactor that had many opportunities to spillover from bats and then the close contact allowed it to spread well and mutate to optimize it for a more human-like ACE2 receptor, then the mink contact with humans allowed multiple spillover events until it started to spread epidemically in humans.
CCP would also not release serology from blood banks and other blood from before dec which from what I understand would be a gold mine showing earlier spread.
Which wouldn't that be in China's interest?
I don't get why the 'cover up' (maybe i'm too biased with that term, utter lack of cooperation) beyond just the top down controlling nature of the CCP.
Their actions don't lend us any trust so we do have to ask why..
I’ve come to terms in understanding China’s actions by this assumption, which is made up by me, but seems true enough and maybe even true for most nation states when pushed against a wall:
They are acting without any concern for the outside world - not for how they are perceived, not for any consequences. They are acting with pure self-determination. This works because they know they can be self sufficient and have a long term plan to get there.
Controlling the information/narrative domestically is the only variable they need to manipulate that matters. So as an outsider, it all seems quite inexplicable, but if you see it as a way to achieve long term political and infrastructure goals while maintaining social harmony locally - most of their actions make sense, even if they may not be morally justifiable to some/many/all people in some/many/all situations :)
I think this is an oversimplification. Chinese culture places a lot of value on saving face — so low and mid-level bureaucrats will massage the numbers so as not to appear to be the weak link in the chain. Do this at every level of an enormous country and you can see how hard it is to even know the truth when the first instinct is to cover everything up, even if it’s a scandal that won’t be published outside China.
Of course, all this allows the media to disclaim the party’s responsibility for basically everything.
Also, yeah; they view China as a self-determined empire stretching back 5000 years. The Chinese generally view Americans as arrogant children and not that smart. I suggest any white person who doesn’t understand racism go to China — they don’t give a fuck that you’re white and in many places will actively disdain you. If you tried to date a Chinese woman outside the large coastal cities you’d likely be literally run out of town. They are reaching the point where they don’t really need us; their own internal consumption is overtaking their exports to the US.
I've read a lot about this structure where local party leaders lie - often times to save face - and keeps getting passed up.
Chernobyl is a great example of this with deadly consequences. COVID is far worse sadly.
I don't think we could have contained it within China if they had a best response it was already out - well maybe 99.99% chance a not that educated guess - but we could probably have given ourselves a good amount more time. And hard shut down borders quickly if we knew the true vast numbers & death rates in early Wuhan. Then put out the 'embers' locally.
Gives at least some countries a chance of keeping it under control within their borders. Though I don't have faith our (US) CDC would have been up to the task...
Because the intermediate animal is likely animal farming, and they don't want to take the economic and political hit of shutting down an entire industry. We don't have the will to do that either, we still haven't shut down our mink farms.
And just for domestic propaganda reasons. If it came from China they could be blamed for it, and they want to deny/deny/deny and defect blame. Serves their propaganda purposes to have people believe it was imported and generates an us-vs-them bunker narrative where the rest of the world is unfairly blaming them. That leaves their citizens questioning the rest of the world and not their own government.
Those wildlife farms were linked to the Huanan Seafood Market which we pretty much at this point know were not the source. That was not ground zero. It is more likely that larger and more economically important fur farming or agriculturally significant animals were responsible. The articles you link to all talk about shutting down exotics (which confines the economic and political damage for China).
>The problem I have is that China isn't interested in investigating the start of the pandemic.
Why should they be interested? We know how SARS type viruses can spread to humans, we know what other species are vulnerable, and we know what things make it more or less likely. A new outbreak was not a surprising result. What benefit is there to aggressively investigating the exact transmission method?
If your mink idea was found to be accurate, would you advocate closing mink farms? It being the source this time doesn't make it likely to cause the next transferrable virus.
Science is about collecting data, verifying, collecting more, in a repeating never ending cycle. Stopping science (especially in areas of active present day research) in the belief that we know and are done with it, just isn't sound logic. Viruses are not yet solved.
I am not arguing to stop science, I don't see the benefit we're hoping to get out of aggressively researching various theories about how exactly the 2019 covid virus spread to humans.
Presumably a better understanding of the origins of the 2019 virus would be useful for predicting the likelyhood of a similar outbreak from the same source, or allow people to alter practices to reduce that likelyhood.
Our current understanding of everything you mention is already good, and there have been no indications that I'm aware of that this case happened in a way that would alter that understanding.
To show my point, even if we aggressively investigate the source and discover it did not originate in a lab, nobody would then argue that it's alright to lower security on such biolabs.
I think this data will only lead to results orientated thinking, where we ignore all the other sources we know possibly could have caused it. Heavily financing research into finding the exact source provides no benefit I can find, and could cause further harm.
Why would we not "aggressively" research it? What if we could have stopped it by catching it early?
Knowing whether it was a lab leak or zoonotic would be a massive hint in the direction to invest in. N=1, but it's a big 1 that would have massive public support.
>What if we could have stopped it by catching it early?
So we should be aggressively researching all the known possible future causes, not wasting time trying to figure out what the exact cause this time was.
>Knowing whether it was a lab leak or zoonotic would be a massive hint in the direction to invest
We know both are possible causes, investing in just the one that caused this leaves us open to the other.
That means that mink, and particularly the practice of mink farming is likely to lead to another outbreak (or whatever the actual species is determined to be). That animal would have sufficiently similar biology to humans, including the ACE2 receptor so that zoonotic transmission could happen. Those farms would definitely need to be closed.
I have not researched this mink idea, so I don't know how likely they are to lead to cross species contamination, but remember the swine flu? We already know pigs are capable of such transmission and we still farm them.
Lots of mammals are capable of this, and we can determine which ones are even if we don't isolate the cause of thie pandemic.
Minks (and other mustelids) are extraordinarily capable of transmitting human respiratory viral diseases. Ferrets (same genus as Minks) are used as an animal model for human influenza research for that reason.
SARS-CoV-2 also spreads exceptionally well on mink farms. Out of a total of 128 mink farms in the Netherlands, at least 69[0] had an outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, with more suspected cases. On at least two farms, there were confirmed transmissions from the animals to farm workers. It is likely mink would form a natural reservoir SARS-CoV-2 if allowed to spread in the wild.
Mink farming has subsequently been banned since early 2021 in the Netherlands.
In any case, the original statement is silly in light of the fact that the origin of the much smaller SARS epidemic was still diligently researched and traced for 15+ years until it was finally found, in 2018: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9
While I have you: could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=community%20identity%20by:dang...
The problem I have is that China isn't interested in investigating the start of the pandemic. They've thrown away their wastewater samples, there's some evidence WHO found of SARS-CoV-2 spreading locally prior to December 2019, but no backtesting of any samples. Nobody seems to be looking at the bats in Hubei for sarbecoviruses.
By blocking study of the zoonotic origin of the pandemic, they can use the theory it was imported in food for domestic propaganda. For external propaganda they're happy to have conspiracy theories flying about this lab leak theory creating a "firehose of falsehoods" and distractions. They can rely on American scientists to get engaged with the conspiracy theory and debunk it, wasting their efforts and then they can use that also for domestic propaganda.
Meanwhile nobody gets fucking outraged that China isn't properly investigating the origin of the virus and isn't aggressively looking at the bats in Hubei and any animal farms in the surrounding area. My suspicion is that animal farms (like minks) functioned as a bioreactor that had many opportunities to spillover from bats and then the close contact allowed it to spread well and mutate to optimize it for a more human-like ACE2 receptor, then the mink contact with humans allowed multiple spillover events until it started to spread epidemically in humans.