NIH restarts bat virus grant

1. Once something like this escapes its confines and starts spreading as COVID did, it is here to stay and any lockdowns that are not to avoid hospital capacity problems just prolong the inevitable

2. Compromised people due to health conditions and age should definitely lay low when there is an outbreak. But locking down a populace at great financial and other costs does not help them. In fact it probably causes more harm as the cycle is prolonged. The more healthy people that recover the better.

Trump did his things based on stubbornness and stupidity. Persisting lockdowns and draconian restrictions past the hospital situation being resolved was also not wise either. I live in NY and in April 2020 locking down was essential. It was very bad with the hospitals and nursing homes being ravaged.

This does not match my recollection. Not to get all political, but I was headed to a conference in Belgium just weeks prior to the lockdowns starting wearing a full-face respirator and got made fun of by the TSA agents in the Atlanta airport because the CDC was telling people that masks were unnecessary/didn't work. I was wearing said respirator, because I had been deeply attuned to the news of what was going on around the world well ahead of any real concern or alarm bells in the US. I remember very clearly that the first major action to be taken by the US government was a travel restriction/travel ban on flights entering the US from China, and this was done via an executive order by Trump which was lambasted broadly in the news media and by politicians across the aisle as being racist and bigoted. I remember just months later that those same talking heads were happy to say that not enough had been done soon enough and that we should have instituted a similar travel ban earlier and more broadly.

Trump's administration definitely screwed up the pandemic response, not the least of which by basically throwing out the playbook on exactly how to respond to a pandemic that had been built painstakingly after the previous challenges we had with SARS, MERS, and H1N1. I am in no way defending Trump here, but I think making this political and trying point fingers isn't an accurate recollection. The entire US government failed to appropriately respond, this includes elected officials from both political parties, as well as the appointees and bureaucrats. Yes, this /very much/ includes the CDC that bald-faced lied about the effective usage of masks for months in the beginning of the pandemic. Luckily many people, like myself, are capable of understanding the basic physics of air movement and understand that masks can very much be effective if worn properly and so we went out and did just that. I managed to avoid being infected until early 2022 (Omicron) despite being required to travel multiple times, including internationally, because I effectively used PPE.

The most infuriating thing about all of this, as the OP of this thread points out, is that very likely the entire pandemic was caused by a lab leak after the virus was created during gain of function research, and yet, we will never actually know. The evidence of what occurred has been destroyed or muddled for political reasons by everyone involved, including both parties in the US, not just the Chinese. It's a huge mess, and a huge failure of governments around the world, and everyone involved is hoping that normal folks will forget about it and move on with their lives like nothing happened, or better yet, argue about it politically for the dumbest reasons. Your comment equates to "Trump bad, CDC good", but actually the truth is "Trump bad, CDC bad, everyone involved pretty much bad".

- the virus could have been 100% natural, in containment at a lab that was accidentally mishandled and then exposed to a huge population center. This would be a man-made disaster

- the virus could have been man-altered, as in naturally evolved via man-directed evolution and the escape could have happened.

- the virus could have been edited, “artificial” in this sense, then escaped

- the virus could have been edited and intentionally released

- the virus could have been natural and intentionally released

- the actor is not monolithic, a rogue employee could have maliciously acted to expose people while the broader entity covered it up to save face

There are a lot of variables here, but all we know for sure is that the Chinese government has worked hard to conceal the truth and that ground zero is suspiciously close to a research lab studying these specific virus types. We also know that, unlike most other pandemics at this point, no preexisting natural reservoir of CV19 has been found. Make of that what you will.