[HN Gopher] China PCR test orders soared before first reported C...
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       China PCR test orders soared before first reported Covid case
        
       Author : johntfella
       Score  : 27 points
       Date   : 2021-10-04 20:17 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (asia.nikkei.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (asia.nikkei.com)
        
       | csense wrote:
       | The article says this was "according to a report from researchers
       | in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia." I wish it included a link.
        
         | kaezon wrote:
         | I don't understand why archiving and linking source material
         | isn't the norm.
        
       | dane-pgp wrote:
       | I'm not sure if this discovery will ever amount to a "beyond
       | reasonable doubt" standard of proof of a cover-up, especially in
       | an internationally accepted judicial setting, but I do wonder if,
       | in general, there needs to be a legal principle that hiding
       | evidence of something has to be punished as harshly as the worst
       | plausible crime that the evidence could be hiding.
       | 
       | Such a principle would, admittedly, lead to many defendants being
       | punished for crimes they didn't actually commit (i.e. they were
       | only covering up lesser crimes), but without such a principle, a
       | guilty person will always face a rational choice of covering up
       | their crime and risking only an additional "destruction of
       | evidence" charge (for example), as opposed to being caught for
       | the actual crime and incurring the (presumably harsher)
       | punishment for that.
       | 
       | For such a principle to pass the smell test, though, it should
       | first and foremost apply to government record laws, covering
       | everything from politician's official emails to police body-cam
       | footage. A society which elects politicians willing to be held to
       | that standard can be assumed to be mature enough to have this
       | principle applied to other criminals.
        
         | redis_mlc wrote:
         | > beyond reasonable doubt
         | 
         | It's already far, far beyond a reasonable doubt in any US court
         | that one of the Wuhan labs was the source of corona, and that
         | the CCP covered it up at every step.
         | 
         | What's ugly is that Fauci funded it to a significant extent and
         | has been allowed to cover it up by two administrations.
         | 
         | (For those who don't know, Fauci gave 65 grants to WIV,
         | including GoF research, plus grants to 26 other labs in China.
         | Yet he lied to Congress multiple times about GoF, and never
         | mentioned 90+ grants. In addition, WIV asked for a grant to
         | release corona into a bat population. The grant was denied, but
         | we don't know if the project stopped.)
         | 
         | One of the weirdest things is that NIH has PR staff, yet Fauci
         | is on TV daily. Just like a crooked accountant who never goes
         | on vacation so he can keep juggling the balls in the air.
         | 
         | If you recall, the CCP said, "It came from the US." I think
         | they meant Fauci asked them to do GoF research and funded it.
         | CCP statements fall into 2 groups: fairly factual, and
         | hyperbole. It's fairly easy to separate the two, and I think in
         | this case it was a fairly factual statement. The reason it was
         | not more detailed is because their main audience is internal,
         | and they did not want to share blame for the corona release.
        
         | xyzzy21 wrote:
         | That's exactly the thing - individually there's deniability.
         | But taken in toto, the circumstantial evidence of lab leak is
         | stunning and obvious. It's even quickly entering "it was
         | designed as a bioweapon but 'probably' leaked by accident but
         | maybe not" territory. This news, for example, raises that
         | question strongly.
        
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       (page generated 2021-10-04 23:02 UTC)