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China

Data Withheld From WHO Team Probing COVID-19 Origins in China: Tedros (reuters.com) 148

Data was withheld from World Health Organization investigators who travelled to China to research the origins of the coronavirus epidemic, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said this week. From a report: The United States, the European Union and other Western countries immediately called for China to give "full access" to independent experts to all data about the original outbreak in late 2019. In its final report, written jointly with Chinese scientists, a WHO-led team that spent four weeks in and around Wuhan in January and February said the virus had probably been transmitted from bats to humans through another animal, and that a lab leak was "extremely unlikely" as a cause. One of the team's investigators has already said China refused to give raw data on early COVID-19 cases to the WHO-led team, potentially complicating efforts to understand how the global pandemic began. "In my discussions with the team, they expressed the difficulties they encountered in accessing raw data," Tedros said. "I expect future collaborative studies to include more timely and comprehensive data sharing."
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Data Withheld From WHO Team Probing COVID-19 Origins in China: Tedros

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  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Thursday April 01, 2021 @02:27PM (#61225454)

    I am shocked. SHOCKED!

    Well, not that shocked.

    • Maybe they have HIPAA too?

      • The same government that black-bags people off the street if they cough and welds people into their apartments cares about privacy?

        You must be quite stupid to assume that anyone else is stupid enough to believe what you wrote.

      • by chispito ( 1870390 ) on Thursday April 01, 2021 @02:48PM (#61225542)

        Maybe they have HIPAA too?

        HIPAA allows your healthcare provider to share data with public health officials without your consent. https://www.cdc.gov/privacyrul... [cdc.gov] (see pagr 8)

        The only privacy the CCP is truly concerned with is its own. It's not about the patients.

      • If I had mod points, I'd give the Funny points to both in this branch and the next branch, too. Even better if I were capable of writing funny. I mean funny ha-ha, not funny unintelligible, per my default style. For example, I think it's still April Fool's Day in most readers' time zones... Or my new Subject could be the basis of some sort of "Who's on first" bit.

        However mostly I want to comment on the problems with WHO, but I can't provide the link to the video of the interview I listened to recently. Basi

      • Maybe they have HIPAA too?

        I went to a doctor's office in China when my daughter was sick.

        The nurse had a desk in the waiting room. She saw the patients first. They sat at her desk, in full view and earshot of the other waiting patients, and explained their problem. For 90% of the patients, she made a quick diagnosis, gave them a pack of pills (sometimes herbal, sometimes real), and sent them home. The other 10% saw the doctor.

        There was no concept of patient privacy at all.

        It actually sped up the process, because instead of expla

        • Bedroom doors with locks!? I'm from the UK and that concept is foreign to me.

          • Bedroom doors with locks!? I'm from the UK and that concept is foreign to me.

            Locking bedroom doors are common in America.

            That may explain our higher birthrate.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 )

      Granted it is China MO. However it is normally politically better to give them a chance to to the right thing and admonish them for not. vs just assuming they are not going to do it in the first place.

      If you give them the option to do the right thing, and they failed. It is their issue.
      If you assume that they will not do the right thing and take preemptive measures, than you are the one who is looking like the bad guy.

      This is part of a Trust but verify mentality.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        If you give them the option to do the right thing, and they failed. It is their issue.

        This has been the case with China for a long time. China is largely responsible for covid-19 being released to the world. They have committed human rights abuses for many decades, and continue to do so.

        After such inaction on their side for so long, the rest of the world must speak up.

        China IS the bad guy. There is no modern, sane country that actually believes or trusts China or the corrupt Chinese polititians (aka the CCP).

      • If you give them the option to do the right thing, and they failed. It is their issue.

        This is about an ongoing global pandemic. It's everyone's issue.

        If you assume that they will not do the right thing and take preemptive measures, than you are the one who is looking like the bad guy.

        If you assume that they will not do the right thing then you look like the smart guy, because you learned the lessons of history.

    • by guygo ( 894298 )

      "I expect future collaborative studies to include more timely and comprehensive data sharing." And I expect the Easter Bunny to deliver $1 million to me this Sunday. I'd say the odds of either is about the same.

  • Trump (Score:1, Troll)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 )

    Trump was totally bamboozled by the Chinese and the globalists .. sad.

    • Globalization allows one to enjoy products from around the world. So we all have been "bamboozled".

      • Everyone already knows who you must be talking about, even if we don't have to care about him anymore. If a certain governor of Florida had any brains, he'd build a YUGE and impenitrible wall around a certain golf course... "The better to ignore you."

        Mostly just an attempt to change the Subject, even if it started as a joke. As for the substance, I mostly concur, per my earlier reply.

        How about a Slashdot poll about the biggest bamboozlement? Oh, wait. Isn't the current poll about NFT? I'm too slow again.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Even if China was to give raw data, unless the data admits that there was a lab leak, the west is always going to continue to think that China is doctoring the data, and therefore withholding data.

    • by Tailhook ( 98486 ) on Thursday April 01, 2021 @02:43PM (#61225518)

      The "west" can be satisfied. Our establishment dearly wants to exonerate China, and it keeps trying to exonerate China and its labs and anything else that needs exonerating at every opportunity. But the fact is China won't provide the level of access necessary to rule anything out.

      • Bollocks. I've seen how the 'Russia BAD' campaign went. Once it builds up momentum everyone goes 'Hey the Russians are saying 2+2=4 but you can't trust them, I'll take our trusted sources who say it's 5'. China is the same thing. They couldn''t say the sun is shining without everyone here going 'Can't trust them'.

        If I'd have to score how well every country has been doing China may not get an A+ but they did outperform most of the world. The underperformers on the other hand are also those who blame China th

    • There is no way to satisfy a conspiracy theorist. However often even a country when they try to hide data they are obvious holes. If they were to give all the data and it made sense, then they would be happy with it.
      A conspiracy nut, will just see the data and just disbelieve it even if it does properly fill the holes and comes with a good conclusion that the data is backing, And put in a narrative that they bothered to change a lot of data, often taking a ton of man hours, and resources and finding who t

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      Have you not followed the news? It's unscientific denialism to even consider it a possibility that it escaped the lab at this point.

      Normies think the media and scientists are full of it, but the media and the scientific consensus are on your side. What more do you want? Tanks to grind some normies into paste to convince them to stop talking about it?

    • Why do you defend a murderous genocidal totalitarian regime ?

    • I agree. There's no way to win, so why bother.

  • ...reflecting the political objectives of their owners since... forever.

    Right now that ownership is involved in misinformation warfare vs Russia and China.

    Move along, nothing credible to see here.

  • by necro81 ( 917438 ) on Thursday April 01, 2021 @02:40PM (#61225504) Journal
    Wouldn't it have been a good idea for the Director General of the WHO to publicly voice these concerns, I dunno, before his agency released the report?
    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • No not really.

      Having the big boss man call the alarm, without data could cause mistrust of the data when it is released, especially if a good portion of the data is actually good.
      Second it shows that he may not have trust in his staff to do their job.
      Third it would make it seem that the WHO is pre-censoring information before it becomes public.

  • I know one thing for sure. Wouldn't buy a used car off Tedros. How do you get a job like Director-General of WHO anyways?
  • by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Thursday April 01, 2021 @02:46PM (#61225534)

    Absense of evidence is not evidence of absence.

    Evidence of a conspicuous coverup is not evidence of an absence of evidence.

    Motive to lie is self-evident.

    Influence operations through US media channels are neither inconceivable nor unheard of.

    • Shouldn't jump to conclusions. China doesn't want to hide their coronavirus program, it's all in the open.

      The reason they actually want to hide is their weaponized ebola program. Can't have knowledge about that getting out, even if it means they are wrongly accused of releasing coronavirus.

  • by DeplorableCodeMonkey ( 4828467 ) on Thursday April 01, 2021 @02:49PM (#61225546)

    Whenever you say "the outbreak originated from the lab," you get inundated with responses from neckbeards, 95 IQ public intellectuals and 50 cent army shills crying "muh conspiracy theory" and claiming you're citing the "debunked" theory** that the virus was artificially created.

    They do this because they don't want you to look at the prospect that one of two things happened:

    1. It was released by accident from the lab.
    2. It was released on purpose from the lab by state orders.

    Neither of those require a formal weapons program, genetic engineering, etc. They only require:

    1. A lab with biological samples collected from the wild.
    2. Fallible human beings.
    3. Optionally, an angry leader willing to subvert international law.

    I guess we're just crazy looking at a government that runs concentration camps, uses gang rape as a weapon against ethnic minority women, is actively genociding the people of Tibet and has credible accusations of harvesting organs from political dissidents and thinking they might have it in them to play a game of "share the infected blankets" with a few infected bats.

    • In 2010 a bunch of Russian spies were arrested in the northeast US. They weren't there to break into defense contractors or kidnap and extort policymakers. They were there to make friends and eventually influence people.

      China has been sending students to American universities for long enough that some of the people they might have befriended in college are now in positions of editorial influence at places like NYT and Wapo and the rest.

      It ain't rocket science to surmise that the China-friendly information o

    • 2. It was released on purpose from the lab by state orders.

      That seems incredibly unlikely.

      • I agree. That conjecture fails the plausibility laugh test. But an accidental release, whether in gathering, transporting, or studying specimins is not at all implausible.

        Best not to conflate the craziest implausible version of the idea with the more reasonable, but no less damning, version.

        • I agree. That conjecture fails the plausibility laugh test.

          As I said, this is a government that routinely wipes its ass with international law on horrendous issues like putting vast numbers of conquered minorities in concentration camps, mass gang-raping their women into compliance and harvesting organs from political prisoners.

          But sure, "laugh it off" knucklehead. COVID-19 is the perfect bioweapon because it kills mainly in a demographic that China already wants less off (old and fat people) and that are s

          • If they did it deliberately, they wouldn't have done it in a way that points so obviously to them. They would have done it in a way that would have enabled them to sweep to the rescue and put the west to shame, not in a way that requires them "deal" with who scrutiny, such as it is.

            It's possible covid was engineered as a bioweapon. I have no reason to believe or doubt that. But that's not the point in contention. The point in contention is if it came from nature, sloppy hygiene, or a lab accident.

            Let's stic

            • If they did it deliberately, they wouldn't have done it in a way that points so obviously to them.

              That assumes a high level of competence. The CCP has never needed that. They have the people so thoroughly controlled that they can act hamhandedly left and right and their own people will believe the bullshit they're sold. That's why to so many Chinese Tienanmen square is just a place where some idiot protestors were schooled, if that.

              It's possible covid was engineered as a bioweapon. I have no reason to believe or doubt that.

              Experts have said it wasn't, because if it was there would be signs of same. There's no signs that China has developed biotech that the rest of us don't have, so that remains

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )

      They do this because they don't want you to look at the prospect that one of two things happened:

      1. It was released by accident from the lab.
      2. It was released on purpose from the lab by state orders.

      Or they do it because 3. The conclusion that it did not come from a lab at all is actually eminently reasonable, all things considered.

      The notion that this virus was artificially created rests entirely on conjecture, not on any evidence that makes such a conclusion statistically probable.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        The notion that this virus was artificially created rests entirely on conjecture

        The poster is not suggesting it's artificial. Why conflate accidental release with artificially created?

        • by mark-t ( 151149 )

          There's no evidence that it ever came from a lab either...

          Such a conjecture is not any more sustainable in rational discourse.

    • by Beryllium Sphere(tm) ( 193358 ) on Thursday April 01, 2021 @03:32PM (#61225748) Journal

      One thing we know for sure about lab accidents is that they happen, and more often than we should accept.

      This reporter has been following pathogen lab safety for years. Most of the horror stories of course are from relatively open societies, the ones where the accidents are harder to cover up.

      https://www.usatoday.com/in-de... [usatoday.com]

      It would make sense to me to have a worldwide treaty about lab safety. A toxic chemical spill only affects the area where it happens. A loose contagious pathogen is a problem for the entire world.

    • by The Snazster ( 5236943 ) on Thursday April 01, 2021 @03:43PM (#61225780)
      I believe the presence of that particular lab in such close proximity to the outbreak is too hard to dismiss as coincidence.

      But I do not believe it was released intentionally. They would have taken it far away from that lab and probably outside their borders had they wished to release it. But there seems no motivation to release it, in any case. Not yet, at least.

      If you want conspiracy theory, in twenty years the Chinese (and their vaunted economy, military, etc.) are going to be drowning in senior citizens and very few working age stiffs to support them. A truly amoral government would prepare for all possibilities in order to keep options open. Such as preparing a disease that would have been further modified for many years to come until it was much more targeted on the old, much more lethal, perhaps even more contagious, and vaccines had been thoroughly researched and tested so that senior leadership (which tends to be made up of older folks itself) and its families could be fairly well assured of personal survival.

      But that's just the stuff for a technothriller conspiracy novel. No way a nice country that keeps concentration camps, turns dissidents into live organ donors, and routinely commits genocide, would ever actually be doing such a thing.

      Never mind that, in ancient times, when two provinces were experiencing famine, and very near open rebellion, the traditional response was to send the army to take all the food from one and give it to the other. The starved province could not rebel, and the other province would then be loyal to the leadership which had saved them. Problem solved. If this seems incomprehensible to you then chances are you are from a different culture. Perhaps a less pragmatic culture.
      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by edwdig ( 47888 )

        I believe the presence of that particular lab in such close proximity to the outbreak is too hard to dismiss as coincidence.

        Outbreaks require a large number of people in close proximity to each other, which is much easier to find in a major city.

        Research labs are located in major cities because it's much easier to find talented people in a city than in the middle of the nowhere.

        That's your link. You're looking at two things that both work better with a dense population.

        We've already seen that the virus was spreading in rural areas for months before the outbreak in Wuhan. We've also seen evidence that the virus was spreading in E

        • by Whibla ( 210729 )

          We've already seen that the virus was spreading in rural areas for months before the outbreak in Wuhan.

          You either have a different definition of evidence, or you've seen different papers, to me.

          I am certainly aware of claims that one possible origin of the virus were rural 'wildlife' farms. If that was the case it's rather odd then that the significant outbreak occurred in just one city within China.

          We've also seen evidence that the virus was spreading in Europe before it hit Wuhan.

          I've seen one paper, from Italy, that suggests this, but the numbers within it do not pass the sniff test. There's also an analysis of sewage, from Spain I believe, but again the numbers (hospitalisation, mortali

    • by MikeMo ( 521697 )
      Yeah, if you look carefully at all the reports, all they ever really say is that this is not an engineered virus, that the mutations that make it deadly to humans occurred naturally. Nothing about whether or not it could have "leaked" from the lab in Wuhan.
    • There are too many people posting well crafted deflections and strawman counter arguments for that to be dismissed as a coincidence. Sure, the internet can be an echo chamber, and it can be a well paying profession to produce talking points for ones side. But if Americans like David Brock can sponsor people to go out on social media, then so can foreign actors, and when working in tandem with volunteers who appreciate their well worded arguments, they can be a Feersum presence on the internet.
    • The real question is why people like you insist, against all common sense, on believing in a theory for which there is absolutely zero evidence of ?

      You know what other theory there is zero evidence of ? That the virus was created and released by aliens. Why don't you and others like you try to push this theory also ? After all, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, right ? So it must be aliens !

    • I agree with the Germans that it probably came from very lax safety protocols at the Wuhan lab. Some bat poor poop scraper wearing flip-flops shorts and a t-shirt was probably bit by a bat.

      To many, it seems that China is an uncivilized country really trying hard to technologically catchup with the Superpowers but just like a child playing with matches China keeps burning down the house.

      This time they almost burned down the Worlds' house.

      Is China is taking on too much risk and moving too fast?

      • Some bat poor poop scraper wearing flip-flops shorts and a t-shirt was probably bit by a bat.

        Why is that hypothetical incident more likely to have happened inside a BSL-4 facility instead of... in a bat cave? Say a lab employee was patient zero. I don't know if that's based on anything credible, but go with it. Why is an accident in the lab more likely than an accident in the field? The scientists must have done some field work, or been exposed to others that do.

        The whole lab accident thing is too specific a conclusion based on what we know, maybe it happened, but maybe any of a hundred other t

        • This time they almost burned down the Worlds' house.

          Well it didn't help that when China and the WHO said to start spraying flame retardant.
          Trump decided to spray gasoline instead.

    • China's to blame either way though. So why is there so much effort to blame a lab?

      Because that blames individuals. Blaming what scientists are saying is the cause (deforestation & wet markets increasing interspecies contact and resulting in more genetic mutations) blames systems.

      There's two players here.

      1st, China, they would love it for you and me to blame individuals because that lets them off the hook for their systemic problems.

      2nd, and no easy way to say this, Republicans. They were
      • So both sides, China & the GOP, are happy to push the lab narrative

        Wow.

        So you're actually saying that China, [abc7.com] who has vigorously [cnn.com] and repeatedly [fmprc.gov.cn] denied [ndtv.com] "the lab narrative", [newsweek.com] is in fact happily pushing "the lab narrative"?

        Regular readers here are familiar with your frequent claims that are in direct conflict with reality, but this is pretty "out there" even by your standards.

        You feeling OK buddy?

        • misdirection is a thing. China would very much like NOT to be blamed for COVID. But that ship has sailed, circumnavigated the globe, and returned ladened with exotic spice.

          So the next best thing is to blame a lab. That way we don't start calling for them to stop slash and burning forests, running wet markets full of unregulated wild animals and other stuff that helps keep their otherwise weak rural economies going besides taking some of the money their kleptocratic rules are hoarding and spend it on peo
        • you're only counter argument is that China has put out pressers saying it didn't come from a lab, but you didn't address the core of my argument: Which is that forced to pick one or the other (lab or deforestation/wet markets) and to take the blame one way or another, which one is more beneficial to the Chinese government?

          Mind you, not the Chinese people, nobody cares about them, the Chinese Government.

          Fixing Deforestation/Wet Markets would cost them a ton of money.

          Blaming it on a lab accident i
          • Heh, OK. I'll play along a little bit longer. Should be good for a few more yuks. I hope you don't mind if I consolidate both your replies here.

            So the next best thing is to blame a lab.

            Uh huh. Can you provide one single example of the Chinese government blaming a lab? ANY lab? It's quite clear that China has been pushing against the lab accident theory since the beginning. I've given you multiple sources proving it. Of course for you, facts that contradict your reality are immediately rejected.

            That way we don't start calling for them to stop slash and burning forests, running wet markets full of unregulated wild animals and other stuff

            The entire world IS calling for them to stop r

    • The problem with your CT, is that it is not enough to state it is "possible". You have to provide positive evidence this IS the case. FFS one may as well pretend it was engineered by exposing both human and bat by a terrorist group in saudi arabia (without RNA engineering) and then released as a test in the Wuhan market. See what I did ? I offered another possibility. You can offer an infinite number of less likely than the most likely explanation , the one in the report. You CANNOT exclude *ANY* of those p
  • by flatt ( 513465 ) on Thursday April 01, 2021 @02:55PM (#61225570) Journal
    Wow, I mean if you can't trust the Chinese Communists, who can you trust? I don't know who to believe any more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
  • What are the chances this was one in a long list of unusual sars viruses the wuhan kab was analysing, one if the scientists accidentaly got infected and had few or no symptoms and proceeded to spread it around the city. Maybe they even shopped in a wet market tne same day.

    • by mark-t ( 151149 )

      Still a lot lower than the chance that this virus happened to make the jump to humans through close contact outside of a lab.

      Deforestation rates are bringing humans into closer contact with creatures that would ordinarily never come into contact with society. The fact that a novel pathogen from such a creature found a suitable human host was practically inevitable.

      And it's going to happen again someday. Count on it.

  • Don't forget that if Covid did originate from the lab in Wuhan as many scientists are now saying is likely, it it in part due to our very own Dr. Fauci funding the wuhan lab [indiatimes.com].

  • by fintux ( 798480 ) on Thursday April 01, 2021 @03:12PM (#61225656)
    They sent a team, China gave them a guided your in the Wuhan institute of virology, after blocking their entry for over a year, and then co-operatively wrote a report with the Chinese authorities, stating that the pandemic didn't originate from the lab. The lab, steps away from where the first cases were discovered, the lab that studies bat coronaviruses and does experiments on the viruses. Viruses that are found only hundreds of miles away from the lab in the nature. And these come to the conclusion that a lab escape is unlikely, and that the origin is animals somehow, without any decent evidence. What a load of bullshit. My tax money is being spent on this. The organization that said better keep travelling to China when the epidemic started, in order to save the economy. The organization that said for months on, that COVID-19 isn't airborne. While the organization does a lot of good things, too, it is too political. A thorough clean up is needed for the WHO. Oh by the way, a few lab staff members had in late 2019 some strong "flu" with at least one person needing hospital care. Go figure, almost as if the person had COVID-19! But it's impossible, as the animals only brought it to the nearby market some weeks later.
    • that's why we used to have boots on the ground in China. We took those boots off the ground, so we were left with "Trust" but no "Verify".

      The current administration is going to try and fix that, but it's easy to pull the boots out, it's much, much harder to get them back in...
      • The problem, which I'm not saying is a reason not to have boots on the ground in China, is that their government has every motive to make sure the people wearing those boots are misled. And that's precisely what they have been doing, and further, what they have done historically. They know their current practices are unsustainable. They're trying to move towards sustainability. But they give no shits who they shit upon in the process. You know, kind of like the USA.

  • by gacattac ( 7156519 ) on Thursday April 01, 2021 @03:32PM (#61225746)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    Please watch one minute from 00:32 onwards to 01:30 or so.

    One minute will teach you more about WHO than a hundred press releases.

  • I really don't understand why people think this is so important. There is no credible reason to think this was an intentional release. COVID was most likely accidentally transmitted from animals (likely Bats) to human in a food market. If it turns out it was accidentally transmitted from animals to humans in a lab what changes? COVID was brought to many countries because other countries failed to contain it. Is there some idea of global multi-trillion $ lawsuits as everyone tries to prove whose fault it
    • Because if it happened the way the Chinese say:

      1. It could happen again, with a different virus or other animal species, and,
      2. China has shown that it can't prevent virus transmission to other countries.
      3. Therefore, the only way to mitigate a future pandemic is to ban trade/travel/etc... with China

      On the other hand, if it escaped from a lab, even by accident:

      1. The lab director/employee can be held responsible, and
      2. The mitigation strategy is to shutdown the lab, (rather than ban trade/travel...) or refo
      • It could happen again, with a different virus or other animal species,

        That is 100% true, or rather it will happen with a different virus and other animal species. The question is when, not if.

  • It does not matter to the virus whether it is natural or lab grown. China knew before Chinese New Year there was a contagion. They could have isolated Wuhan before New Year to stop / slow the spread. I understand why they did no stop the migration/spread.
  • slashdot for keeping this present in the news feeds.
  • Tedros is getting religion rather late. He must see impending doom -- his doom.

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