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The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

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Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#601

Post by IAmGraydon »

peter422 wrote: post #56
yumraj wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did any of them originate a few miles from a pathogen research lab that handled such pathogen that caused those outbreaks?

I don’t dispute it is one point of suspicion, but Wuhan is also one of the 10 biggest cities in China. It isn’t a surprise the first US outbreak was in the biggest city. The first cases could have been anywhere. If there were more evidence that it was lab made then the location would be another point, not to me without further evidence it doesn’t mean all that much. And there have been 2 emerging coronavirus outbreak…

The first US outbreak was in Washington state.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#602

Post by justAnIdea »

sbagel wrote: post #587

The amount of wildly delusional oppression complex in this thread is staggering, HN has really gone downhill. On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants. No grand conspiracy. Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence. There were tons of ar…

Just by reading your post containing the "deaf democrat" trident of a) lying by omission, b) ad hominem attacks and c) argument from authority, you kinda discredit your entire point.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#604

Post by thu2111 »

jtbayly wrote: post #368
jcrawfordor wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would Fauci have even known? Budget numbers say NIAID clears around $5 billion in grant funding per year and this grant was more at the $100k per year level. Another source shows that NIAID receives around 3,000 grant applications per year and that's just in two of their multiple grant types. It seems most likely to me that the grant was approved and funded by a subject-area committee without Fauci being involved at…

Would Fauci have known that gain of function research was now legal again?! Of course he would. Whether or not to fund that sort of risky research that has gone back and forth in legality is precisely the kind of thing that his job required him to know, isn't it?

According to Wade's article it's actually even murkier than that. Only Fauci or one other person could have actually overridden the ban to keep the money flowing and prevent oversight of it:

The moratorium, referred to officially as a “pause,” specifically barred funding any gain-of-function research that increased the pathogenicity of the flu, MERS or SARS viruses. It defined gain-of-function very simply and broadly as “research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease.”

But then a footnote on p.2 of the moratorium document states that “An exception from the research pause may be obtained if the head of the USG funding agency determines that the research is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.”

This seemed to mean that either the director of the NIAID, Dr. Anthony Fauci, or the director of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, or maybe both, would have invoked the exemption in order to keep the money flowing to Dr. Shi’s gain-of-function research, and later to avoid notifying the Federal reporting system of her research.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#605

Post by iforgotpassword »

gary_0 wrote: post #509
Gatsky wrote: post #164

Assuming the chance of a lab leak is non-zero, it is worth considering how this will ever end. - If there was any hard evidence actually proving they had SARS-CoV-2 in the lab before the pandemic, it will be long gone. Only an independent full access forensic level investigation would ever find any sign that evidence was destroyed, and that is never going to happen. - It seems extremely unlikely to me that anyone fro…

> What actually can and should happen Not to mention fixing all of the other failures that allowed COVID to kill millions worldwide. Everyone's pointing fingers but hardly anybody's talking about improving epidemiology and public health policy (which the US is long overdue for a reckoning on). One of those failures, by the way, was the seeming assumption that whatever state a global health emergency started in would…

My takeaway was the huge denial most of the rest of the world put itself into.

When it was still only Wuhan, everyone assumed it would go down like sars again, it's just "a Chinese thing" and could never happen in the developed world. We feasted on the images of overcrowded hospitals, people collapsing in waiting rooms, and felt good about or country.

Then when it became clear that China messed up containing the spread and it would not only hit other cities in China but the rest of the world too, we did.... Nothing. Like a toddler we tried solving the problem by ignoring it. Forgotten were the images of chaos and death from Wuhan, politicians would assure us "that it's under control and go away soon". Just how can you suddenly pull such a 180 as soon as it arrives at your country? Then the first cases popped up and "we did contact tracing and stopped the chain". Great, but hoe does it prevent new cases from entering the country?

I came from beijing back to germany on Feb 26, 2020. Getting out of the plane there was... nothing. No temperature checks, no masks, no form to fill in, no "hey please stay at home for two weeks". It went from sitting in a plane for 8 hours with a mask to just randomly boarding a train across germany with nobody giving a shit. It was unreal.

But then, when it eventually got real bad in the West, we pulled yet another 180 and stopped ignoring covid and started going "well China should have prevented it", when we got a head start of about a month where we could perfectly see what this virus does, yet didn't take any measures on our side whatsoever and just let it happen. I know, it's always easier to blame someone else across the planet, but I'm most surprised and disappointed by my own government. I'm wondering how things would have gone if this had originated in Germany.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#606

Post by ethanbond »

colechristensen wrote: post #271
bostonsre wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just playing devil's advocate, not convinced fauci had any malicious intentions, but he has one of the most highly public jobs in America, he gets to keep his job/power and maintain a future in politics. But he definitely does not seem like some power hungry egomaniacal player to me. His beliefs before and after and actions after the outbreak seemed to be consistent with someone that was trying to do the right thing…

I don't know about malice, but covering up or downplaying the possibility of a global pandemic being caused by activities he was involved in or encouraged... shit can be corrupt even if a person is not trying to take advantage of a situation. Placing blame isn't really all that important. Making sure none of this happens again for the same reasons is. If I was placing a bet, I'd say Wuhan researchers regularly got a…

So you’re criticizing a scientist for expressing skepticism toward a scenario that had (especially at the time) very limited evidence, and then just placing your own bet on a far more extreme, also non-substantiated version?

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#607

Post by cedilla »

tomp wrote: post #547
harryf wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gets worse - gain of function research was banned under Obama until the ban was lifted in 2017 under Trump - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3... I can’t find sources for this right now but apparently Dr Anthony Fauci played a key role in getting the ban lifted. He’s also the head of the NIAID ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Fauci ) which (apparently) is the ultimate source for…

Fauci in2017: > Fauci said the Trump administration will not only be challenged by ongoing global health threats such as influenza and HIV, but also a surprise disease outbreak. https://www.healio.com/news/infectious-disease/20170111/fauc... https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/07/29/fact...

Well, of course. Disease outbreaks happen all the time. Just from the top of my head I remember tropical fevers (like Zika and yellow fever), Ebola, Corona viruses (such as MERS and SARS), zoonotic flues outbreaks that threatened to become a pandemic. This happens every other year. Fauci said "thing that happens every 1-2 years likely to happen during a 4-8 year period".

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#608

Post by toshk »

bartart wrote: post #2

This is the most shocking article I have ever read in my life. I'd ask everyone to please read it because it is incredible. One thing I did not realize is that US researchers who conducted gain of function research tried to downplay and discredit the possibility of the virus originating from the wuhan lab. There was an anti-lab theory Lancet statement signed by scientists, and "Daszak had not only signed but organize…

The strong sentiment that it couldn't have come from the lab was suspicious from day one. It was not even allowed to be a consideration.

Also, here on this forum, I was downvoted for saying it shouldn't be ruled out that the lab might be the source.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#609

Post by thu2111 »

geofft wrote: post #149
harryf wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... The conflict of interest is: was this statement actually what he believed to be true at the time, or was it to draw attention away from the Wuhan lab, so there wouldn't be ugly questions about why his organisation provided fu…

When I do incident command at my workplace, there are two goals in dealing with an incident: solving the problem, and preventing it from happening again. They are both extremely important, but they happen in order. While the incident is ongoing, any attempts to prevent the problem from happening in the future are a complete distraction. Write down notes and ideas somewhere so we don't forget, but the priority is on s…

And I certainly don't see the conflict of interest - what was Fauci gaining? His continued role?

Yes. Obviously you don't put an arsonist in charge of fighting fires, so if this information had come out early last year then he would have lost not only his role much sooner, but also his social status and career. If what's coming out now came out last year, Trump's replacement of him with Scott Atlas would have been more widely supported (maybe), and Biden may not have dared to put him back in his post.

That would have been a huge financial hit. Fauci does very well out of his position. "Very well" might even be an understatement. He is the highest paid federal employee [1], earning more in 2019 alone than the US President. Despite this fact, he has deflected questions about conflicts of interest by laughing it off and saying he has a "government salary", creating the impression he is paid far less than he really is.

Fauci charges between $50,000 and $100,000 per hour for motivational speeches [2].

Despite being theoretically in charge of a crisis situation in which nobody has time to ask how it started, Fauci has found time to write a book called, "Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward". He has also appeared on TV more than 300 times [3].

This is not a man who is too busy to investigate basic questions that may have direct relevance to developing treatments for the virus. And given that knowing where it came from would be of immense scientific value yet he has every incentive to cover it up, he is also not a man who should be running things.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/01/25/dr-...

[2] https://leadingmotivationalspeakers.com/speakers/anthony-fau...

[3] https://www.aier.org/article/fauci-has-chalked-up-300-media-...

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#610

Post by krona »

sbagel wrote: post #587

The amount of wildly delusional oppression complex in this thread is staggering, HN has really gone downhill. On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants. No grand conspiracy. Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence. There were tons of ar…

Oppression complex? How about orthodox privilege?
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