641–650 of 1001 posts
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Several were HOSPITALIZED with a respiratory illness, in a lab studying bat viruses on humanized mice. The cognitive dissonance you are suffering is painful, I'm sure, but it's obviously clouding your judgment.
Those same people were tested for antibodies and they were negative. Or I guess that is also part of the cover up.
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Trump didn't exactly follow Fauci's advice, so it's odd that you'd blame Fauci's "method of approaching pandemics" for "this mess." Was there some other, better, established method?
> Was there some other, better, established method? We may learn from Taiwan*. Quote: "Extensive public health infrastructure established in Taiwan pre-COVID-19 enabled a fast coordinated response, particularly in the domains of early screening, effective methods for isolation/quarantine, digital technologies for identifying potential cases and mass mask use." https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS266…
Unfortunately, all the media reporting on which countries have succeeded or failed and why seems to have been incredibly inaccurate and blatantly partisan.
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Or all the effort to not call it China Virus/Wuhan flu because that's racist and we don't name viruses after places anymore. Virus variants named after places on the other hand are apparently perfectly fine. So we don't have the Chinese virus but we do have British, Brazilian and Indian variants.
This is incorrect given the new WHO guidelines https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/01/covid-19-varia...
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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…
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.
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…
Also interesting to note that (per the leaked emails) Fauci was in regular correspondence with the guy who thinks everyone should die by age 75 or else they're a waste of space[1]....Discussing strategy on the pandemic that primarily kills people over 75. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/10/why-i-h...
They were released under the FOIA, not leaked.
> the guy who thinks everyone should die by age 75 or else they're a waste of space
You linked to an article where he expresses the opinion that he personally doesn't want to live past the age of 75. That's a far cry from advocating mass murder of the elderly.
> Fauci was in regular correspondence... Discussing strategy on the pandemic
Emanuel is the head of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy. It would be unusual if he wasn't in regular correspondence.
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Except that we still don't actually know very much about the origins of this virus.
We know enough to calculate a joint probability. Just update your estimate with new information. This should be pretty non-controversial. Everybody does this every day especially in the face of uncertainty.
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I'm quite astounded and confused at the sudden shift in discourse towards assuming that the lab leak theory must be true. It's not so much the theory itself that's surprising. Lab leak remains plausible but less probable then natural origins. The sudden shift is just baffling to me though. This huge new furor is due to anonymous CIA sources saying three people got sick? That's extremely tenuous evidence, as you state…
Natural origin and lab leak are in no way exclusive. The lab was collecting viruses and creating new ones - either one could have leaked. I don't have strong views as it's incredibly difficult to prove a negative (that it was not a leak), essentially you would have to identify and prove exactly the actual vector and even then it might be difficult to be conclusive. Lab leak seems however like a very likely scenario a…
1. The Wuhan institute for virology collected a naturally occurring virus then did gain of function research which subsequently resulted in infected lab workers. There's not a known virus with close enough genome sequence similarity to SARS-Cov19 for this to be plausible. It would be a monumental undertaking to induce >1k mutations in the closest known relative virus. If someone pokes around WIV or a cave in the area and finds a virus with much, much higher but not identical sequence similarity, then that's very strong evidence for gain of function research followed by a leak. In the meantime it seems unlikely that WIV would start doing gain of function research without first publishing about their newly discovered virus.
2. SARS-Cov19 in more or less its current state was naturally occurring in a location that WIV researchers sampled. The virus then escaped while WIV researchers were characterizing it. This requires one to believe that WIV workers, in a biosafety lab, were the first humans to encounter and contract and spread this virus. This is in contrast to the alternate hypothesis that unprotected workers shoveling guano, or maybe a wet market vendor got the virus. I know which possibility I would bet money on.
The point is that we don't have to prove a negative, just weigh the evidence.
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Pretty sure if I ran an organization that funds a bunch of labs that do virus research, and a global pandemic started in the neighborhood of a lab doing virus research, and people started floating the theory that the virus leaked from that lab, one of the first things I'd do is call my grant-funding team and ask them if we funded that lab. If Fauci didn't do that, he's a strange dude.
100K from a 5B budget is peanuts and you couldn't reasonably expect the person at the top to know the details of what each recipient of 100K is doing exactly. If all of the 5B is spent on coronavirus research then it's a different story. Most likely it's spent on an incredibly wide array of topics.
The person at the top might not know what each recipient is doing, but is still accountable for the funding decisions that were made (and oversaw the people and process that made those decisions on the organisations behalf).
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…
The rational thing was to agree the lab leak was a perfectly decent theory from the beginning. Saying you have ‘no evidence’ of something is not a reason to discard a hypothesis. On the contrary, it is a reason to figure out how to get more data, a reason to figure out how to falsify the hypothesis. It’s a common logical fallacy to conflate absence of evidence with evidence of absence.
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>The marketplace of ideas is better than trusting gatekeepers of knowledge. That's such a simplification of the real situation that it's harmful to apply as an axiom. There are many levels of the marketplace of ideas. Ideally, the gatekeepers of knowledge also create a marketplace of ideas so that expert opinion is varied and shifts as new information come in. This is in inline with what we're seeing here. The market…
No one argued that it should be applied as an axiom. You're responding to an argument that wasn't made. Also, the "gatekeepers of knowledge" have a mostly.....negative past when you look at the sum of recorded human history. Are you arguing that humans today are just way better and far more trustworthy than the rest of history?
The gatekeepers of knowledge have a past that reflects those that are in power. People that challenge them can be on the right or wrong side of history. Just because they were wrong in the middle ages doesn't mean the gatekeepers of today are wrong. If the gatekeepers can and do apply scientific principles, then logically it is a self-correcting system. This is in theory what we see more or less today (or should at least).
Furthermore, the gatekeeper system is not mutually exclusive to the marketplace of ideas model, as the latter operates on many levels. However, by bringing down the gatekeeper model, it is harder to enforce discussion based on scientific principles, merit and sound arguments. This is the exact reason why we have moderation in almost all forums, and the ones that don't end up as cesspits of people shouting crazy ideas at each other and hence counterproductive places.
Giving everyone a voice doesn't necessarily mean we are bound to give everyone a equal voice in everything. Any weighing is in essence introducing a gatekeeper.