251–260 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't doubt your account --but that's a distraction. There were many people in bioscience, virology, etc. who said it was possible and should not be discounted, but those people were hounded and shut up.
Shutting them up doesn't appear to have been particularly successful. The lab leak theory has continued to be discussed in all kinds of media and many parts of the culture over the last year.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's been practice for centuries to initially name it after where it was first originated. Spanish flu ring a bell? But yeah Trump's racist for saying China flu.
The first observations of illness and mortality of the Spanish Flu were actually in the US. The origin of the name of the Spanish Flu is due to it being reported in the news most freely and widely in Spain as many other nations were limiting reporting due to being embroiled in WWI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We’ve been trying to find the zoonotic origin of Ebola for decades without any success. We don’t have anywhere near a complete catalog of animal diseases, and of those only a fraction have been sequenced.
We didn’t have the same confluence of other circumstantial evidence we do in this case. There’s no good reason to think Ebola came from a lab.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are getting downvoted because it's muckraking. There is nothing shady about NIAID giving a (verrrry small for this type of research) grant to a foreign research lab, which is doing research about a topic of interest. That's how you ensure the U.S. government gets a copy of the results.
I'm not saying it's shady to provide that funding. What I'm saying is it demonstrates conflict of interest. Last year in May 5 2020 Fauci dismissed the idea that the virus came from a lab that his own organisation was providing funds to - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthony-fauci-wuhan-lab-coronav... Whether or not anything shady was happening, the conflict of interest is clear.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason it's coming out now is because Trump is gone. During the election, most of the media decided to ignore anything they were afraid would help Trump or hurt Biden. Whether an activist media is good or bad is left as an exercise for the reader.
There’s an alternate interpretation. It’s not that the media wanted to avoid helping Trump or hurting Biden, even going so far as to withhold reporting the truth of the pandemic’s origin. But rather that the media had a higher threshold of evidence for publishing accusations of malfeasance against another nationstate than Trump did, and hadn’t met that threshold till recently. Trump was notoriously flippant, with low…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's been practice for centuries to initially name it after where it was first originated. Spanish flu ring a bell? But yeah Trump's racist for saying China flu.
The Spanish flu didn't originate in Spain -- its origins are disputed, but it was first observed in the US. I'm surprised you didn't get this memo by now, but Spain gained that ignominy only by being the sole country to not apply censorship regarding the topic at the time ("Land of the Free" included). It's utter nonsensical bullshit like this that made us collectively move away from naming diseases after countries.
While this article is quite illuminating on the political side of the lab leak theory, on the evidence side it's mostly a rehash of some long-standing speculations. The only recent evidence it contains is the fact that 3 researchers from WIV sought hospital care back in autumn of 2019 with symptoms similar to COVID. However, this piece of evidence is hardly consequential without further details: - First, most common…
I was under the impression that the symptoms were quite different to the common cold and more inline with influenza (fever, dry-cough, aches, no mucus production – symptoms that are rarely caused by the cold).
Another pretty good article, certainly higher quality than you'd consider given the source[0]. What switch flipped to make all these come out right now? [0]: https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-how-amateur-sleuths-broke...
The reason it's coming out now is because Trump is gone. During the election, most of the media decided to ignore anything they were afraid would help Trump or hurt Biden. Whether an activist media is good or bad is left as an exercise for the reader.
This is why people say "do your own research". Because trusting some other authority will end badly, just like this.
> "do your own research" How? I barely have enough time to do my day job. You think I have the time or expertise to research the origins of a virus? Where does it end? Do I grow my own food? Make my own clothes? Build my own car after mining ore, smelting it and doing a million other things?
(The most important takeaway is to ignore Twitter - not "social media", but specifically Twitter).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shutting them up doesn't appear to have been particularly successful. The lab leak theory has continued to be discussed in all kinds of media and many parts of the culture over the last year.
This claim is laughable. It was all labeled conspiracy theory, fringe, even racist. Twitter and FB had policies against it and even now, today Twitter suspended the account for the Fauci email leaker(s). So much for open discussion.
Several media organizations (washington post, buzzfeed) submitted FOIA requests for the emails, and as per federal law, they were released. No leak, normal federal government policy process, driven by mainstream-y media outlets AFAICT.
Twitter has not banned discussion of the theory. Here's a thread from May 27th (Nate Silver) discussing it in some detail:
https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1397869883585708034
Here's Ryan Delk from May 23rd saying it even more clearly:
https://twitter.com/delk/status/1396583148524212226
They did have policies related to the lab leak theory, but it seems like a mischaracterization to say that the banned discussion of it.
The only person I can find who has lost their account over related matters is a NY Times reporter who closed her own account after making some fairly dumb remarks about the theory.