Can and did. I think china are getting it in the neck not so much for its origins but the way they mishandled it early on.

China is criticized for its handling of the epidemic, but the "it was made in a lab in China" conspiracy theories are very very common.

There is always the possibility that it was not created in a lab but that it leaked from a lab where such viruses were studied. Accidents happen.

IIRC, that happened w/ Ebola in a VA monkey lab. The strain just happened to be Marburg, rather than the more infectious, deadlier Zaire strain.

Good read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hot_Zone

Those views are idiotic, but also irrelevant to my post.

It is evidence based, given the suppression of known information by china, and therefore reasonable.

China screwing up was really not a big point here but in trying to cover for them you're just going to provoke people into posting more about china's screwup and attract more attention to it, sort of streisand effect.

I'm not really trying to cover for them. I'm pointing out that it wouldn't have changed anything.

I remember very well how it was like back in January. People had so little trust in China (and frankly a lot of it was racism) that they saw Wuhan, a city the size of NYC, being locked down, and that was really bad for us.

As far as people being aware of the screw-up, as far as I'm concerned that's a good thing. What's important is that one knows that we're not where we are because of them. We're where we are because we fucked up, hard. The popular narrative right now is that if China didn't fuck up we wouldn't be in the mess we are right now, and that's false. We're in the mess we are right now 100% because we didn't take it seriously.

This is just misdirection.

> that it wouldn't have changed anything

Perhaps. Justify that. I might even agree, but still, justify that.

> and frankly a lot of it was racism

It is not. Anti-chinese-government attitude is not related to anti-chinese-people racism. You're trying to comflate the two so you can dismiss it as just racism. It isn't.

> The popular narrative right now is that if China didn't fuck up we wouldn't be in the mess we are right now,

We'd possibly be in a similar mess from the stupidity in various western governments, inc. mine in the UK. See my past posts where I make this ever so plain, indeed using phrases like 'we fucked up'.

But that does not let the chinese gov't off the hook WRT their fuckups and armtwisting the WHO and general appalling behaviour. This does not let them off the hook in the same way it does not let eg. boris johnson off the hook, or trump, or bolsonaro.

The first Chinese doctor, that was censored, was in late December. Meanwhile, French doctors saw cases with ground-glass lung occlusions unexplained by other illnesses (in other words, exactly what was detected late December in Wuhan), in mid November : http://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20200520-scans-show-french-patie...

And old blood tests were found to be positive in France dating from December.

Since no doctor in China was able to detect this illness before late December, and it was without a shadow of a doubt in Europe by mid December and probably even by mid November, we know without a shadow of a doubt that not delaying the release of the info via censoring the doctor for over a week before receiving the sample from the national laboratory made absolutely no difference at all. Even if they completely shut their borders as soon as the doctors had even a hint of a new disease, we would have likely seen exactly the same result.

As far as I'm concerned, sure China made a mistake by temporarily covering up the disease. But that didn't matter, at that was likely part of the calculus by Chinese authorities - do we release the information now, and risk panic over what might not be a very contagious virus or even much of an issue at all, or do we let the doctor speak about it on social media? It is very likely that they thought that it would be too late if the disease was highly contagious, and if it was weakly contagious that the risk of a false positive warranted the possible lost time. Indeed, it's not like they muzzled the doctor then went to twiddle their thumbs, they were re-analyzing the pathogens and sending them to state labs then eventually took the decision to do a surprise lockdown.

Now, as a citizen I would always rather have the information and be free of censorship. But as far as it went, the muzzling in China was without much consequence. Because it did not and could not have consequences similar to the bad decisions made by our governments. And I don't mean just BoJo, Trump or Bolsonaro. Almost all Western countries were guilty of making irresponsible recommendations that went directly against observations in China. For example, the Canadian health ministry told us that there is almost no risk, that you should continue to use public transport without worrying, to hug people, and that masks are ineffective and will make you sicker even though we had evidence to the contrary for years. Unlike in China, there was no real doubt.

So no, China muzzling a doctor for a few weeks is absolutely not comparable to the failings of our government. It was inhumane, but it did not have bad consequences to an extent comparable to those of the vast majority of Western countries.

We should condemn it of course, but to paint it as equivalent to the very materially relevant catastrophies by our governments when the impact it had is completely negligible in comparison, and when they were much more understandable, is borderline politically motivated misdirection by politicians that want to deflect blame.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23730288.