[throwaway485]

There was a brief window at the beginning where it would have mattered to know the origin of the virus. Intervention at a wet market or in a wuhan lab could have happened. However, this theory was circulated and promoted to inspire hatred and distrust of many authority figures. Authorities who put significant resources forward to save lives. Even today we're still seeing thousands die from what may very well be a conspiracy theory.

Both can be true: It originated in a lab, and the distrust that inspired is still killing many. It's dangerous to talk about it because it's still killing people.

If we found out 100% the lab theory is false, you'd still have millions who want it to be true and who want to be enraged. You have millions who want to put themselves at risk. There are larger problems with society than this virus. That's what this conspiracy uncovered.

[pfannkuchen]

Uh if it came from the lab we could still today have a shot at finding out what went wrong and then use that to improve safety at other labs worldwide. Assuming relevant records weren’t destroyed, anyway. If we can tell that they were destroyed, then USA et al should immediately stop supporting Chinese virology research in any way and pressure them to close the facilities via sanctions etc. In order to find out either of these things, we need an investigation. This all seems pretty straightforwardly true, and it totally drowns out any other second order concerns IMO.

[throwaway485]

We're too far removed from the time and place to accurately determine what happened. Even if we had first-hand witnesses or documentation, the disinformation 'aura' around the whole thing makes it impossible to get the honest truth out. There's no chain of custody for evidence that you, yourself would trust. That's what I mean that at this point it doesn't matter what the reality was, the damage is still compounding from it. The absolute worst thing out of the last 3 years is the terrible messaging from authority figures to unify around public safety. To say 1 thing and impress upon everyone the legitimacy of the danger, without distracting from that message and leveling conspiracies. From an objective historical point of view we want to know what happened, but no one will be able to confirm the legitimacy of that now.

It's still killing people. I directly vaccinated thousands in Los Angeles, I had several family members die, and 1 of my aunts - an RN - is getting reinstated after 2 years because she was fired for telling people "the jab will kill you". This was after she tried to convince my other aunt - another RN - that she should not get the vaccine while being in a risk category.

Never have we seen disinformation used to harm so many. It's too dangerous to talk about, and if we found the truth no one could corroborate it or convince others of it. It is done, millions are dead.

As a sidelong thought, I'm convinced in this information age that there is no truth. The truth is anything you want it to be if you can inspire a viral cult around a contrarian thought. I'm sorry if I just sound so jaded.

I still remember assisting a woman who /wanted/ the vaccine while her husband screamed at us outside the tape line with officers nearby - screaming about how the government was trying to kill black Americans and citing events like Tuskegee. We earned that, and I still see the fear in his eyes when we swabbed her arm.

[kiltedpanda]

You might want to look into what disinformation you were personally subjected to that brought you to your own perspective. People who aired their own personal vaccine adverse event experiences were maligned, shamed and cancelled. What makes you think you have the correct information on vaccine adverse events?

I personally know 3 people who have had life altering negative effects due to the vaccine, including myself. You no doubt think that is a lie or a statistical anomaly. What you've missed is that it is ridiculously hard to register an adverse event, due to procedural process, and the negative bias of medical practitioners such as yourself who are unwilling to attribute an event to a recent vaccine, or blame it on the virus itself (without any symptoms of course).

The 'Trusted News Initiative' is one mans life-saving purveyor of truth, and another mans very obvious propaganda network.

I would encourage you to look at an Israeli study "Survey of reported symptoms after a third vaccination Of Pfizer against 19-COVID".

4% of men experienced chest pain after vaccination (page 16) 7% of women experienced chest pain after vaccination (page 16)

A survey based approach is more likely to get better statical results IMO because it removes the laborious reporting procedure as well as medical practitioner bias.

I'm fed up of self-righteous do-gooders who think they have an exclusive view of 'the truth'. I wouldn't care so much about it were it not for the negative effect those do-gooder's actions can have on other people's health, as it did in my own case.

[throwaway485]

What I'm saying is no one has the truth here.

Also, the team lead I worked with for 3 months was 1 of the 100,000 or so that saw adverse effects. Last day of our deployment in LA county, he received the vaccine in preparation to go home. He was in the hospital for 2 weeks because fluid started to pool in the sac that contains your heart. He nearly died before they could get that under control. He went home for a month and then went back out again on another deployment.

I think this goes to the "is 1 life more important than 100,000" argument. The vaccine saved millions and we are barely celebrating that fact. Even if you say "well there are long-COVID effects" -> the alternative is death. The alternative is nothing happens to you and you become a vehicle for someone else's death. Unless you were planing to isolate for the rest of your life, you became an inherent risk to others for a virus that was spreading too fast.

My great uncle was put into an old folks home to sequester with the others in that risk category, and 1 of the nurses spread it among the staff. 13 people died. Disinformation convinced reckless people that there's reasons to not get the vaccine, and then they went out and did reckless things because they doubted the legitimacy of the danger. People who walked into hospitals without masks, who spit at others taking their own precautions, people who violently attacked service staff in supermarkets because they felt the whole thing was an attack on their livelihood and freedom.

I remember being in Marana, AZ the week that Pfizer was cleared for kids 12 and up. We were stationed outside a school, and for the last 2 days we had watched teachers going in and out of the facility back and forth to their cars to get random things. Every time 1 walked past we asked if they had questions for us, if they wanted to know about the vaccine, and that they could talk to us without committing to anything. Surely these educators were interested in protecting their students? AZ was a strange place. They were more concerned with recounting the election for the 2nd time. The state gov was actively hostile and tried to keep us out so the county we were working within took them to court citing a clause in their constitution that they could request assistance if it was a health concern. We moved from that site a day later, we had vaccinated just 27 people.

To put things in perspective, in LA we did nearly a million vaccinations. In AZ we reached just under 13,000 over 3 months.

I am acknowledging that we were both surrounded by propaganda/disinformation, and both affected by it. You will not find the objective truth to any of this 3 years later, so far from Wuhan, and with this much political influence behind investigating it.

The deaths were right in front of them, but the party told them to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears. The org I work for was actually responsible for vaccinating my own grandparents. My grandpa still caught covid and seemed like he was coming out of it. Then he got pneumonia as a complication from it and died that July 4th weekend I got home.

I'm glad I have a monopoly on truth as a self-righteous, do-gooder it really helped me preserve my family tree . I hope in posterity people understand how amazing it was to see the world support this humanitarian mission, for all its faults. May you live a long life.

[kiltedpanda]

I'm not sure where you got the 1 in 100,000 from. As I mentioned in the previous post, an Israeli Ministry of Health survey of 2000 people found that 4% of men and 7% of females experienced chest pain after a booster shot.

Additionally a Pfizer report dated Aug 2022 showed the company observed 1.6 million adverse events covering nearly every organ system:

•73,542 vascular disorders •696,508 nervous system disorders •61,518 eye disorders •47,000 ear disorders •225,000 skin and tissue disorders •178,000 reproductive disorders •190,000 respiratory disorders •77,000 psychiatric disorders •127,000 cardiac disorders •100,000 blood disorders •3,711 tumors

This company has been fined billions for their shady practices. Not sure why anyone would trust their data. Plenty of information available about how dodgy their initial trials were conducted and reported for anyone who cares to look.

Huge incentives to hospitals for reporting any deaths as covid (around $30k per person if I remember correctly), and huge disincentives to report adverse events (threat of revoking medical license, difficult reporting procedure, biased doctors etc). As a result, the stats are skewed extremely in favor of vaccination.

Add into the mix lockdowns causing huge collateral damage. While you pat yourself on the back for protecting your family, it is entirely plausible that the vaccination campaign along with the lockdowns caused more deaths than they actually saved. Reports from John's Hopkins and the Fraser Institute found this to be true.

Good intentions are well and good, and I'm glad that you're proud of your achievements. Next time I hope there's more humility amongst proponents of mRNA vaccines and lockdowns, and that they consider the possibility that they could be wrong, and their actions may actually cause more damage than if they did nothing at all. Humility was missing.

[throwaway2037]

I'm confused by your post.

    "the jab will kill you"

Why did, an educated RN, believe this? And why was she trying to spread the idea? Is this RN also (generally) an anti-vaxxer? I'm not sure if it is the location of so many media outlets, but Los Angeles County (and Orange County) does seem to be the epicenter of anti-vaxxer culture in the US.

[throwaway485]

A presidential campaign lured in my educated aunt. It will never make sense.

[throwaway2037]

Thank you to share your story. I'm sorry that you lost family members.

[stef25]

> 1 of my aunts - an RN - is getting reinstated after 2 years because she was fired for telling people "the jab will kill you". This was after she tried to convince my other aunt - another RN - that she should not get the vaccine while being in a risk category

It's crazy how many nurses don't trust science and news reports. Here in Belgium it was a big problem too. So many of them seem to be very cynical about and have serious distrust in big pharma while they themselves administer drugs that make (most) patients better. How they can just overlook that and keep their jobs is beyond me (no offense meant to your family)

[pfannkuchen]

They do get to see how the sausage is made. Are you sure that the reality around patient drug experiences is so positive? Is it more likely that such nurses are completely delusional, or that they have information or experience that you or I don’t? Keep in mind that everyone in medicine has a financial and career incentive which points towards aligning with and advocating for the system they are so invested in, so there would be a tendency for this point of view to be under expressed, if anything.

[stef25]

> They do get to see how the sausage is made

Not sure what sausage they see being made. They're trained to evaluate patients, carry out emergency procedures, take measurements and administer medicine as instructed by a doctor. It's a hell of a job, hard, stressful, thankless and underpaid. But that's irrelevant.

> Are you sure that the reality around patient drug experiences is so positive?

Well yes, by definition. Generally, and simply put, a drug can't enter the market unless it's better than the current standard treatment.

Hundred years ago a simple infection could kill you, or result in a limb being amputated sans anesthesia. The difference between then and now is the work of research and pharma companies.

[stcroixx]

Nobody should be trusting news reports anymore.

I worked in pharma for a few years on clinical trial systems. What I learned of the dishonesty in the industry made me decide to only take anything they produce if it’s an extreme emergency and I have no other choice. The FDA is a revolving door of pharma execs with financial incentives so they can’t be trusted either.

[stef25]

> I worked in pharma for a few years on clinical trial systems

Same here. What did you see that didn't make you lose trust?

What I saw if anything was the rigorous work required to get a drug on the market. FDA inspections were feared because if you've made mistakes in your trial everything risks going to the trash.

> to only take anything they produce if it’s an extreme emergency

How high would you toddler's fever or painful your tooth ache have to be for it to be an extreme emergency, before you administer some paracetamol? What about anxiety? What about illnesses your ageing parents may have? There's a very large gap between comfort and near-death.

[stcroixx]

Lying was absolutely commonplace about anything, software validation testing included. Our company 'managed' their relationships with the FDA so we didn't have to fear them, so bribery basically. When I worked there, it was less than a decade since all the rules regarding bribing doctors had changed, so there was still a lot of that going on. All expenses paid trip to Hawaii for doctors and PI's for a week to optionally attend your 2 hour talk on a new drug, that kind of thing. Golf was a big carrot that was used. This was in an area that was a pharma co. hub geographically, so most people had worked at the other companies and all knew each other as well the the FDA people and this helped to grease the wheels. Our company did most of their trials in India, where it's apparently legal to do things to humans with drugs and therapies you can't get away with in the states, so we really leaned into that. Might not have been legal, but it's what was happening anyway.

I don't force my own preferences on my family. I'd not go to a doctor complaining of pain again - they're in over-correction mode over killing so many people with opiates that you can't get help with that for the time being. I'd never personally take any of the medication peddled for anxiety - too many of those meds don't have long term studies or the AE's were swept under the rug for approval.

[bondarchuk]

>However, this theory was circulated and promoted to inspire hatred and distrust of many authority figures.

Don't forget that some people just want to know the truth, and don't like being lied to. I don't think it's a good principle that whenever the truth is used as an excuse for bad things (insofar as "distrust of authority figures" is even a bad thing), it is justified to lie.

>Even today we're still seeing thousands die from what may very well be a conspiracy theory.

And how many past and future deaths can be attributed to the lack of trust caused by trying to cover up the truth? Many more, I'd wager. There's a crucial irony in trying to maintain trust by hiding the truth. Many people just can't or don't want to understand this.

[kubectl_h]

> There was a brief window at the beginning where it would have mattered to know the origin of the virus.

This is such a fatalistic and cynical way of looking at the world. It mattered then -- as it matters now -- because we can act on information. Everything that happened after that "window" was not overdetermined.

[bruce511]

To me fair the folk dying today are tangential to the origin story.

I'm not sure the origin story mattered a whole lot along the way, other than being a useful political distraction. I don't think it informed personal or medical behaviour.

Of course discussions around vaccines, masks, social distancing etc did have a huge impact on personal behaviours, so those are far more impactful both than and in hindsight.

The different strategies applied, the messaging, the outcomes, from New Zealand to Sweden and everything in-between will be disected by anthropogists for decades to come.

The actual origin is a red-herring, it really doesn't matter. Viruses come from lots of places. We can't prevent that. What we can control is our response. As long as our first question is "who to blame" our outcomes will be similar, or worse, the next time around.

[inciampati]

The actual origin is critical to understand, because it will happen again. We should be ready and able to watch out for where it might come from.

Can you agree that, if it was generated by human activity that we can control, it'd be critical to know this and spread information about it widely?

[bruce511]

Absolutely. Perhaps it was grown in a lab, perhaps it was released, or perhaps it escaped. All happened before, all will happen again.

Given that I don't think we -can- control human behavior, there are good labs, there are bad labs, etc, I think the ability to -respond- I paramount. While the origin is interesting in an historical way, lessons from the response will be more useful going forwards.

We need to respond in a way that is independent of origin. That will ultimately lead to better outcomes, and incidentally reduce the risk of bio-terrorism.

[Aside - if it was lab grown I don't think it was released on purpose (it wouldn't have been released locally). Which means some sort of failure in the safety protocols, which likely means human error. General discussion on that topic I useless except for a tiny sliver of people doing that work. I'm not sure discussing it on social media really achieves anything. ]

[JoshuaDavid]

Well if it did come from a lab, there is the obvious question of whether the type of research that lab was doing had benefits commensurate with the risks, and also whether the middle of a dense city is the best place to conduct that kind of research.

[cheaprentalyeti]

The origin story matters because we had the authoritarian bureaucrats who helped create the virus AND LIED ABOUT IT running the virus response in this country and they took all of their new powers and produced one of the highest per capita death rates from the virus in a so-called advanced country.

It looks a lot worse than suspicious.

[bruce511]

You don't say which country is "this country" - but from the context I'm assuming China? And sure if it was created in a lab then that opens the door to lots of political questions.

But the source of the virus remains less important to the folk that died from it. They're no less dead because it escaped from a lab than if it came from a wet market.

Responses in every country were different. Which ones were the right ones are valuable lessons moving forward, and anthropologists will be studying that data for decades.

[pclmulqdq]

I think OP meant the US. Anthony Fauci was one of the main individuals in the government responsible for sponsoring gain of function research, including funding some of it at the Wuhan institute. It was incredibly odd that a virologist with no public health background (and a very questionable role in past HIV policy) effectively commandeered the CDC's job here, but it makes sense if you think about it as a " cover my ass" move from him.

[cheaprentalyeti]

I should have checked in on this thread yesterday, but yes, I meant the US.

[cirgue]

The origin 100% does matter. It demonstrates that some kinds of virus research pose an existential threat to humanity if not handled properly. That seems relevant, especially when simultaneously Covid demonstrated that such research is also really important to do. Like the origin actually does pose some serious, non-trivial ethical questions about disease research that the public absolutely has a right and obligation to participate in.

[bruce511]

>> some kinds of virus research pose an existential threat to humanity if not handled properly.

I mean, I'm not trying to be a dick, but ... duh. This has been the primary plot point of a zillion movies for forever.

Oh, and accidents at labs happen more often than you'd like[1]. And the frequency seems to be going up, not down. >> the public absolutely has a right and obligation to participate in.

I'm sure the "public" (by which I assume you mean random people on social media) are not qualified in the slightest to participate in this discussion. If you feel that you have an "obligation" to weigh in, then by all means feel free. No-one is stopping you. It's completely possible to have discussions on lab safety without having to point fingers at a specific incident.

As you point out there's a really strong tension at play here - it's very important to be able to do virus research. Working with viruses is dangerous. It can be made as safe as possible, but it's still dangerous. There is a very fine line here, which is best walked by people highly qualified and working in this space. Given they are the most likely first victims of any accident, I'm sure they are highly motivated to be safe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

[kiltedpanda]

Perhaps it matters so that we can hold those responsible to account to reduce the chances of it happening again? Wouldn't you want to know if a rogue group had a gain-of-function project rejected by DARPA and then secretly moved it to China to avoid oversight and then that project caused a pandemic?

And perhaps the people that did that shouldn't be in charge of how to handle the pandemic and shouldn't be in charge of determining how the pandemic started?

[stcroixx]

Matters to me. If it was made in a lab I want to know how it will prevented next time and if it can’t be prevented I want that type of research stopped.

[AeiumNE]

It's very arrogant to take your understanding of the benefit of the truth, finding it lacking, and then assuming that this is same negligible benefit the truth will have for everyone else.

[VoodooJuJu]

>It's dangerous to talk

A bear charging at you is dangerous. Talking is not.

[sacrosancty]

With some of these controversial topics, there always seem to be people who prefer disinformation over truth for the reason that the general public can't be trusted with the truth since it might motivate them to do bad things.

The question then is, does it apply to yourself, or are you special? What knowledge motivates you to do bad things? Do you wish that was hidden from you so you weren't such a harmful person?