[frickenhamster]

China supported this in a psyop. Remember when they tried repeatedly to push the origin of the virus to Italy? I'm ethnically Chinese, so I'm in contact with a lot of mainlanders. The brainwashing is very effective. Even if most mainlanders know that their state media is bogus, and that Xi is a dictator, they'll take it deeply personally when you say anything that threatens the whole China # 1 narrative. All they had to do was hire a few shitposters, feed a few media narratives and the US fights with itself over stuff like anti-china, racists etc, while the CCP takes over Hong Kong.

[CorrectHorseBat]

Or all the effort to not call it China Virus/Wuhan flu because that's racist and we don't name viruses after places anymore.

Virus variants named after places on the other hand are apparently perfectly fine. So we don't have the Chinese virus but we do have British, Brazilian and Indian variants.

[glitchcrab]

This is incorrect given the new WHO guidelines https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/01/covid-19-varia...

[cm2187]

Except it is TVs and newspapers that were lecturing us that it was racist to call it the chinese flu and that are now happily using the xx-variant designation. It is the obvious bad faith that I find appalling.

[zarzavat]

Because there was no other name they could use. Blame the WHO for moving at the speed of molasses on this issue.

[cm2187]

By the time it is deemed a variant, it has been sequenced number of times across the country and the health authorities always have a code or name to refer to this particular strain.

[zarzavat]

They had a code but not a name. The media can't refer to things by a confusing jumble of letters and numbers, they need a name, and if there's no official name then the media will create one themselves. Hence "India variant".

This is basic PR, e.g. when Heartbleed was disclosed it was given a name so that people could discuss it and attach meaning to it.

[CorrectHorseBat]

I guess it's good that they realized that, but I don't really understand why this time it took half a year. We'll see if the newspapers follow it.

[glitchcrab]

It's good, but it's not exactly easy to remember. Hence why the papers here in the UK now tend to say something like 'the Delta variant, which was first seen in India' - that's only marginally better than 'the Indian variant' tbh.

[logifail]

> It's good, but it's not exactly easy to remember [[.]

Saying "$origin virus" is _definitely_ easier to remember than - say - something like "Covid19".

Except that we were told that using "$origin" was racist, so we had to stop, and we had to use the non-easy-to-remember version.

Where we are the media has been happily talking about "the British variant" and "the Indian variant", but no-one seems to be calling _that_ racist. At least no-one who the media cares about.

[croon]

Sure, let's just all blame it on the greeks!

[bildung]

Nobody in the world except the US right called it that, and it is indeed uncommon to name viruses after its place of origin.

[zpeti]

Literally any new variant has been called by its origin in the last year: -kent/brit variant -indian variant -california variant

What are you on about?

[bildung]

> What are you on about?

Not those variants, obviously.

[blululu]

Back in the early days Singapore very quickly created a fantastic web based information panel on the state of the Virus in the city. It's still running but they no longer use the original url: http://wuhanvirus.sg

[finnthehuman]

Mers, lyme, west nile, Rocky Mountain, Zika, hanta, Ebola.

[avereveard]

Except for the Spanish flu, the Brazilian flu, almost every single mammarenavirus strain...

[bildung]

The Spanish Flu most probably originated in the US, not Spain. Spain just had a pretty free press and published much about it. Never heard about the Brazilian Flu and couldn't find out when and where this was supposed to be, so can't comment here.

[KMag]

The question wasn't historically if the place-of-origin names were accurate. The question was if they were historically common.

I think naming diseases after places is a bad practice we should probably do away with, but it certainly has precedent. Offhand, there's also the Marburg virus. My understanding is also that it was unusual to name the Ebola virus after the nearby river instead of the nearby town.

[brippalcharrid]

Isn't it similar to naming medical conditions after the people that discover them? After all, it's naming pathogens after the place where there were was adequate diagnostic expertise to identify them and in which there was sufficient scientific and press freedom to report on them. And geography is obviously important in the context of epidemics/pandemics. No country or locality should receive special treatment in this regard, but much of the MSM appears to have been bought or cowed into submission by the geopolitical influence of the CCP.

[DemocracyFTW]

> we do have British, Brazilian and Indian variants

which will now be re-named by Greek letter names

[myko]

Context matters. The trump administration used those phrases to stir up anti-Chinese and racist sentiments.

[CorrectHorseBat]

Context matters, but consistency too. If it's racist too call it the Wuhan flu (which I can agree with) then the Indian variant is too.

[mixmastamyk]

Sounds placist to me.

[lugu]

Not to forget WIV1 virus..

[SV_BubbleTime]

Does no one else remember the videos out of China with people laying dead in the streets, falling over as they walked, convulsing behind the steering wheels of cars? Who paid for all that acting, scenes, and filming and then have it presented as “news”?

CCP owns Hong Kong, that was over in 1997, the only surprising thing about HK is that China waited this long to make it better known. Now... The country of Taiwan on the other hand, it’s going to be a bit more tense there for some time.

EDIT: Added links from Jan, most videos have been removed but the articles and screenshots are there. The one I specifically wanted was removed from YouTube and I can’t find it, showed a guy being checked by a PPE marshmallow then nearly immediately going into spasms in his car.

EDIT2: To whoever might have been upset at my thoughts on Taiwan; I updated it with some italics for you.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7923981/Coronavirus...

https://www.ibtimes.sg/china-virusnew-videos-wuhan-show-coro...

Here is snopes with an eye roll worthy fact check https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/people-collapsing-coronavi... “Unproven” ok, thanks for that guys.

[justicezyx]

> Does no one else remember the videos out of China with people laying dead in the streets, falling over as they walked, convulsing behind the steering wheels of cars?

Could you provide a link? I never saw such video on YouTube.

[ordiman85]

These videos [1] were published by a number of tabloids such as The Daily Mail [2] and The Sun [3]. I also remember that a very popular french TV show (Quotidien [4]) published them as well.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/people-collapsing-coronavi...

[2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7923981/Coronavirus...

[3] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10808633/coronavirus-wuhan-zom...

[4] https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/2020/01/31/les-videos-di...

[sen]

I saw the videos but they weren’t on YouTube. There were pastebins listing dozens of links to videos and photos BUT there was also zero proof it was connected to the virus or any timestamps, so who knows.

[generalizations]

I can confirm the videos existed. Saw them when they were posted, back in Jan 2020. They were never on youtube, though, that I'm aware of.

[carlivar]

I saw these too, mostly on Twitter. I shorted Boeing based on them and made some nice money. My friends didn't believe me that this was looking real bad.

[richrichardsson]

> didn't believe me that this was looking real bad

I think the problem was the world also didn't believe it. Perhaps if every other country had had the balls to just shut down travel in/out of China for a month or so back at the very start it might never have been so bad. I remember when the very first reports of a novel Coronavirus in Wuhan were making the news that it had the potential to be really bad, but also had some wishful thinking that it was probably just a storm in a teacup.

[rorykoehler]

China should have shut down international flights. Instead they shut down internal travel and happily exported the virus to the world. They have lost the last bit of good will I had for them and I suspect this is a sentiment shared the world over. The WHO are also complicit.

[SV_BubbleTime]

Hang on a second, remember Trump was called racist and xenophobic for shutting down travel to China?

And how weird that Zuckerburg sent an email to Fauci about vaccine funding and offers of help exactly the same time Nancy’s Pelosi was literally saying come to Chinatown and hug and Asian person. How were they talking about a vaccine at that point?

There seems to have been a lot of public and private statements going on, and everyone wants to memoryhole it.

[coupdejarnac]

There is a guy on r/China I think who archived a bunch of disturbing videos from last January /February. I think I saved them or links, but I'm away from my computer. Will update if I find it.

[rorykoehler]

Please share

[coupdejarnac]

Well, this is genuinely irritating. I'm pretty sure I saved the post on reddit, saved a link, or saved some videos, but I cannot find anything. I must not have wanted to have a bunch of videos of people dying, so I think I might have just saved the post on reddit... Other reddit posts with a link to the archive had been deleted, so I should have taken more care.

[coupdejarnac]

Someone posted a video below that includes some of the videos i saw a year ago. Some busybody must have flagged it, as the comment is marked as dead.

[throwaway_wuhan]

https://streamable.com/fc5jls

[justicezyx]

> Even if most mainlanders know that their state media is bogus, and that Xi is a dictator

I am an ethnic Chinese, I don't see this impression at all.

Disclaimer: this is quite normal, China is huge with 1.4b people, there are a lot of social bubbles. And the readers should read this comment and the parent of proving that. Not that this comment or the parent is true.

[ngc248]

Well its turtles all the way isnt it, "And the readers should read this comment and the parent of proving that. Not that this comment or the parent is true.".

The same standard would apply to your comment.

[justicezyx]

Yes, of course, my comment and the parent are to show that there cannot be a simple truth about a nation with 1.4b people.

Realizing that, is the first step to reach any meaningful truth about China.

That's true even to native Chinese people. That's even more true to outsiders (obviously).

[tim333]

I'm curious with Wikipedia which is normally neutral but was very anti lab leak in this case, whether China directly had people work as editors there.

[guywhocodes]

Citation Needed

[flavius29663]

That's the weird think about propaganda. Even if you know it's propaganda, it works pretty well when it's heavily pushed. I come from a former communist country, and most people despised the communist party and risked their lives in a revolution. After the revolution, they began to parrot the same talking points the heard in the decades before. Even with all the information we have today, the talking points induced by communist propaganda remain alive.

[ddalex]

> blame Italy

I would like to remind everybody that this happened in Milano just before the outbreak

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o_uXF9B4KI