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Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

thetimes.co.uk

601–610 of 1001 posts

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#601
post #431

I'd like for someone to throughly research and write about how it became taboo to discuss the virus leak theory. How researchers who discussed it were shunned, tagged as racists, and in some cases had their posts banned from Social Media. About how almost the entire scientific community discarded the idea as impossible. How during the early pandemic years, no mainstream news media dared talk about the possibility. Te…

The problem was that the epidemic started in the middle of the US election campaign. At some point the Trump team started to support the lab leak theory. And then it became political; Biden supporters started framing them as conspiracy theorists, anybody who dared to support the leak theory was labeled as a Trump supporter etc. In China some people must have been amazed how the US was arranging such a thorough cover-…

So basically the timeline is Orange Man Bad

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need the same for the complete 180 on lockdowns. From universally against to forced lockdowns. I think people forget how strong the consensus (including medical) against lockdowns was. I was in China during the outbreak. All western media and healthcare experts had to say about lockdowns was that they were counterproductive and have never been part of the medical playbook. And that it violates civil rights. A mont…

There was never a consensus for or against lockdowns. Cant speak for the US and it's utterly broken media landscape but in Europe experts were asking for this from day one. It is also a known tool of any epidemic/pandemic management, it just has rarely been necessary at such scale given the intensity and wide distribution of COVID.

> There was never a consensus for or against lockdowns.

So when was the last lockdown before covid?

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you overstate how much the lab leak and the bioweapon stories were being conflated. I recall that most people were able to distinguish between them, and that the most prominent figures raising red flags about a potential leak weren't talking about bioweapons. In any case, the most alarming aspect of the lab leak hypothesis is that gain-of-function research is STILL being done, and that the same thing could ha…

> the most alarming aspect of the lab leak hypothesis is that gain-of-function research is STILL being done, and that the same thing could happen AGAIN. This right here is an example of why we can’t have reasoned discussion around the topic. You can explain one of the many reasons why gain of function research is necessary: anticipating next year’s version of the flu, designing drugs and vaccines such that resistance…

To be fair, vaccines can be created in a matter of days now so the benefit of gain of function research to anticipate the virus that will cause the next pandemic is modest at best.

Temper this proposed modest benefit with the potential cost in terms of human adapted viruses being accidentially/intentionally released in the wild given the vagaries of both biolab security protocols in the labs accross the world conducting this kind of research and individual human psychology makes the justification of such research a pretty hard sell.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#605
post #448
post #431

I'd like for someone to throughly research and write about how it became taboo to discuss the virus leak theory. How researchers who discussed it were shunned, tagged as racists, and in some cases had their posts banned from Social Media. About how almost the entire scientific community discarded the idea as impossible. How during the early pandemic years, no mainstream news media dared talk about the possibility. Te…

At a high level, it's pretty simple. There was a very well coordinated and intentional conflation of the term "lab leak" with the conspiracy theories around China and the WHO intentionally developing and deploying bio-weapons as a means of global population control. These conspiracy theories lead to a marked rise in violent attacks on anyone of Asian descent in the US, and generally fed into the wet dream fantasies o…

> These conspiracy theories lead to a marked rise in violent attacks on anyone of Asian descent in the US,

It should be noted that the statistics don't support the media narrative and there was no wave of white supremacist attacks on Asians.

Here are the stats from New York ("Arrest Statistics by Bias Motivation"): https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/stats/reports-analysis/hate-cr...

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Think about it Did you consider that maybe the reason this proposal was written was because this mutation was the most likely way this kind of virus could mutate to infect humans? I don’t understand why people keep throwing around all kind of unsubstantiated facts like if they suddenly made things clearer. The facts are not that complicated. Could the pandemic be linked to an accidental leak from a gain-of-function…

Discussing this isn't pointless just because we don't have definitive proof. We need to determine what happened based on what we do know. 7+million people are dead. Gain of function is happening in labs all over the world. Humanity can do something here to reduce risk.

Despite rather intense searching the closest strain to C19 in the wild split ca 50 years ago. Please tell how do you introduce this famous mutation not into any of the commonly found covid viruses but create C19 differing from these.

Who in a right mind (just leaving for a moment how) would do that? As: create a separate strain of coronavirus just to introduce one specific mutation.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#607
post #448
post #431

I'd like for someone to throughly research and write about how it became taboo to discuss the virus leak theory. How researchers who discussed it were shunned, tagged as racists, and in some cases had their posts banned from Social Media. About how almost the entire scientific community discarded the idea as impossible. How during the early pandemic years, no mainstream news media dared talk about the possibility. Te…

At a high level, it's pretty simple. There was a very well coordinated and intentional conflation of the term "lab leak" with the conspiracy theories around China and the WHO intentionally developing and deploying bio-weapons as a means of global population control. These conspiracy theories lead to a marked rise in violent attacks on anyone of Asian descent in the US, and generally fed into the wet dream fantasies o…

Yea, unfortunately the conspiracy theorists hijack talking points and social media platforms amplify their bullshit to the extreme.

Meanwhile they ignore all the near misses the US seems to have with anthrax and smallpox being misplaced in US labs every year lol.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you overstate how much the lab leak and the bioweapon stories were being conflated. I recall that most people were able to distinguish between them, and that the most prominent figures raising red flags about a potential leak weren't talking about bioweapons. In any case, the most alarming aspect of the lab leak hypothesis is that gain-of-function research is STILL being done, and that the same thing could ha…

> the most alarming aspect of the lab leak hypothesis is that gain-of-function research is STILL being done, and that the same thing could happen AGAIN. This right here is an example of why we can’t have reasoned discussion around the topic. You can explain one of the many reasons why gain of function research is necessary: anticipating next year’s version of the flu, designing drugs and vaccines such that resistance…

[deleted]

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#609
post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think you’d find that in just about every significant crisis of any significant timeframe plenty of examples of clamping down on witch-hunts in these very democracies. am i advocating for this? of course not, however, we have countless examples where conspiracies and just plain paranoid thinking spun out and resulted in very very real atrocities. significant atrocities that were much more real and much more severe…

Could you please elaborate on what atrocities were caused by conspiracy theories?

https://www.stuyalumni.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Anti-A...

"In the first four months of the pandemic, there were 145 reports to the NYC Commission on Human Rights of coronavirus-related Anti-Asian hate incidents. That’s 12x the year before."

"⅓ of Americans report they have witnessed blame on Asians for the outbreak"

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