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Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

thetimes.co.uk

621–630 of 1001 posts

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank God 99% of all the other countries were in on it otherwise they would have looked really foolish as one of the only countries without lockdowns.

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The Dems didn't make Trump bet everything on "ignore it and it will go away." He could have pushed for public health measures in February 2020 ("Stop the China Virus, wear a MAGA mask!"). He didn't. He squandered the opportunity to use gentle R reduction, so we had to jump to strong R reduction with lockdowns.

I know that following the science doesn't come naturally to Republicans, but this is basic shit. If you had figured it out then, you wouldn't need to be on Trump daiper duty in 2023.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Covid has a novel mutation never seen in any natural coronavirus. Further there was a grant proposal from 2018 to insert the identical mutation as found in covid. There was a plan to engineer covid 2ish years before covid existed. But I'm sure nature evolving this exact mutation coincidentally in a relatively short period after scientist documented their plans to engineer it is an equally likely outcome.

Which mutation are you talking about?

"""However, with analogy to influenza, it was shown many years ago that the simple insertion of a polybasic site into an H3 virus does not result in a high pathogenicity phenotype7 and is likely to only function in the context of a series of other genomic changes provided by a process of natural selection."""

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5...

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I don't have any mildly interesting anecdotes about dating a bat who got sick in a cave, so I guess all the evidence points to a lab leak.

It’s worth investigating the lab to gather evidence. I think that is the point of the anecdote; things happen.

I was under the impression that there already were investigations, so if your assumption is true, then the anecdote would be too late.

But it's intellectually dishonest of you to pretend that was in fact the purpose of the anecdote, and not to serve as evidence of a lab leak.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#624
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…

I think the problem is that moderates think you can have democracy without having to participate in politics which can sometimes become costly. Extremists already accepted the costs and reap the rewards (control, influnce, power) because people won't stand up to them.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#625
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…

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 has never been any strong consensus (including medical) against, quite the opposite. That's why the lockdowns were done in the first place.

Don't try to turn your personal beliefs into accepted reality.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Last time I checked our democracies are still running on the premise of informed voters. If discussion of hypothesis needs to be suppressed during a 3-year-long "emergency" then we have an issue.

I’d love “informed voters” though from what I see of social media, it does anything but inform through its creation of cliques and upvoting based on popularity, not veracity or even reasoned argument.

One example is the switch to paid blue checkmarks on Twitter. Prior to the switch, there’d be some semblance (not great) of debate on comments. Now, all the musk fans and RW-oriented subscribers completely dominate so all you see in response to a Dem or “RINO” tweet is reflexive comments calling the OP lies, incorrect whataboutism, conspiracy theory of the day, etc, with more reasoned fact checking buried way down.

This is particularly pronounced with any tweet about the Trump indictment with little discussion of the substance of the indictment. The crackpot hypothesis/meme of Paul Pelosi’s attack being a gay love spat is another example. The participants didn’t even want to read the police report before moving on to another conspiracy theory about the report’s generation. Reasoned discussion would be great. It’s just not happening.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange, I have the exact opposite experience. I have personally have felt ostracized multiple times for suggesting it was likely there was an unintentional lab leak. I often got criticized for suggesting it was a bio-weapon, while I never thought that and never even said those words. Sometime in the past 12 months this disappeared.

> Sometime in the past 12 months this disappeared. We're trying to groom public appetite for war with China. Anything that paints them in the worst possible light is acceptable now. After artificial chip shortages, the weather balloon incident, and TikTok, now it's suggested China was responsible for COVID. Expect more to follow.

What I don't get is that people automatically equate a lab leak in China with a lab leak by China. It's uncontroversial that American funding was involved. The most likely intentional scenario would be a leak caused by the United States to harm the Chinese economy. If it hadn't spread beyond China's borders, the epidemic would have been a massive win for the US.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#628
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…

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Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#629
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…

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Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#630
post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

This article from the Guardian says there was an uptick

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/21/asian-americ...

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