This is just the same false claim that Josh Rogin made nearly a year ago. If you actually read the cables, they do not claim that the lab is dangerous or poorly run. They say that the lab cannot yet (as of 2018, before it opened) operate at full capacity, because it does not yet have enough trained staff. The lab was operating safely at less than full capacity. That's not surprising for a new lab that has not even officially opened yet.
The context is that the US diplomats were asking for continued US funding for a program that trained Chinese lab technicians. The people writing this memo were not even experts. They were diplomats, and were merely relating what their Chinese hosts at the lab had told them - that the US training program was important and should be continued. Rogin has been trying to twist that into a claim that the lab was unsafe, and that diplomats were raising red flags.
> Instead? That royal kid and his actress wife. Despair doesn't cover it.
It's funny how the whole story is dripping in the victimization narrative too, proving that you can be literal royalty and claim oppression & injustice.
They're among the most privileged people on the planet, and we're supposed to think this speaks to anything important, especially given the state of the world and immense suffering of average people.
Completely agree. On a more fundamental level, it just annoys me that I should even know who they are. I'm not sure who decides what the story of the day is, but it feels like once there's a consensus, the entire legacy media competes to give the most over-the-top coverage. It's all utterly unfit for purpose.
> it just annoys me that I should even know who they are
Bingo, there's a weird curation of news and pop culture that seeks to fit everything into the media narrative.
So you've got the upper echelon of society portrayed in ways that are supposed to key into the narrative applied to common people, as though there's anything relatable between the two.
Of course, the people that inhabit the media are anything but down-to-earth, so it's an uphill battle already.
They've got their own class bias and relatively monolithic, conformist worldview as a starting point.
As far as anyone can generalize an entire profession like that, it seems like this is the only way to explain the mismatch between society & media.
The conversation doesn't seem to correspond with reality or any sense of proportion.
If you're surprised that this wasn't the default narrative from the mainstream US news networks then you should look into China's ownership stake in the big news networks.
That doesn't make sense. That virus that's causing the pandemic was the result of two related virus, one from bats and the other from pangolins somehow meeting each other somewhere in China though a human host, most likely in Wuhan. The only way that could have happened is at a wet market. That is the most likely explanation. It doesn't help that China has a history of being secretive sadly.
Yes. That lab they talked about only had the bat coronavirus. That doesn't normally infect humans so even if there was a leak, it would be traceable though analysis. This would be a different story if they also had the pangolin coronavirus there as well. But they didn't.
The PRRA polybasic furin cleavage site somehow managed to get into just the right part of the virus structure so that it was really effective at getting into humans cells (but not at infecting bats, or pangolins for that matter). The closest known relative (itself a major discovery) was somehow forgotten about for the last five or so years, and by the time news of it came to public attention, it just so happened that all of the physical samples of it had been destroyed
I'm starting to become bemused at the people are now talking about the lab origin as having been somewhat obvious all along.
The context is that the US diplomats were asking for continued US funding for a program that trained Chinese lab technicians. The people writing this memo were not even experts. They were diplomats, and were merely relating what their Chinese hosts at the lab had told them - that the US training program was important and should be continued. Rogin has been trying to twist that into a claim that the lab was unsafe, and that diplomats were raising red flags.