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Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

thetimes.co.uk

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Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#841

Post by boston_clone »

naasking wrote: post #811
boston_clone wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems you may be looking to only discredit an argument instead of arguing the merits. FTA: > However, the use of quarantine and other measures for controlling epidemic diseases has always been controversial because such strategies raise political, ethical, and socioeconomic issues and require a careful balance between public interest and individual rights. Here’s a list of about 30 examples since the 15th century…

> Here’s a list of about 30 examples since the 15th century where various governments have prevented the free movement of their people (because even then, they recognized that public health is more important than individual travel). You mean those centuries before we truly recognized individual rights? Not a compelling argument. Again, quarantine of people who had possibly had exposure is very different than the proa…

> You mean those centuries before we truly recognized individual rights?

I'm not sure what this means. Individual rights have been recognized long before the founding of the United States, though.

> Inform the public and let them personally assess the level of risk they're willing to accept.

This is impossible and irresponsible when you cannot accurately assess the risk.

The question of a draft is so unrelated I'm intentionally ignoring it.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#842

Post by baja_blast »

cygx wrote: post #707
cubefox wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. There were plenty of arguments from the very beginning for the lab leak theory. The alternative "bat cave" hypothesis had plenty of implausiblies (e.g. huge distance) and was far from being "proven".

There is, however, quite a bit of precedent for bat coronaviruses eventually infecting humans, most likely through zoonotic spillover via an intermediate species (e.g. HCoV-NL63, HCoV-229E, SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV, SADS-CoV), and thanks to humans shipping animals all over the globe, huge distances aren't necessarily a deal breaker.

The difference between previous spillovers like SARS1 and MERS was these viruses rapidly mutated as they adapted towards humans allowing for the identification of the intermediate species within months. SARS2 on the other hand was already pre-adapted towards humans, had almost no adaptive mutations and no intermediate host has been found. And guess what when a virus crosses into humans the virus does not suddenly go extinct in the intermediate species, it continues to circulate, for example we still to this day find camels infected with MERS. But SARS2 we just can't seem to find this progenitor virus circulating.. . . very strange isn't it?

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#843

Post by DocSavage »

Izkata wrote: post #760
anthonypasq wrote: post #758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

And here's some links from a few months earlier showing we knew it was never tested for preventing infection/transmission: https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/02/covid-19-vaccines... https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronav... https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2020/12/covid-... Here's Pfizer's press release: https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta... Notice how…

Of course it was tested for preventing infection. It was tested for that as well as efficacy against severe disease: "Efficacy against laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 (with an onset of >= 7 days after receipt of the second dose) and against severe COVID-19.. was assessed among the participants 12 years of age or older." https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2110345

You seem to be conflating the vaccine having efficacy against infection and whether a vaccinated individual who still catches COVID-19 (since protection against infection is obviously not 100%) can transmit it. The efficacy against original COVID-19 strain infection was high (91.3% for the Pfizer vaccine).

Your first link speaks to the situation of a breakthrough infection being further transmitted. Since it wasn't clear HOW MUCH it curbed infection (under non-ideal/trial conditions), quarantines and caution were reasonable.

Here's a chart that showed the original test results across a number of vaccines. The efficacy vs infection dropped quite a bit with variants though the efficacy vs severe disease holds up better:

https://jbiomedsci.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12929...

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#844

Post by idiotsecant »

Ancapistani wrote: post #482
px43 wrote: 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…

> 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. I don’t recall a single instance of this. A year ago, people were saying on this site and elsewhere was that the issue was conflating “lab leak” with “intentionally engineered”. A year bef…

You didn't see any 'Wuhan flu' bioengineering conspiracy theories about how china made covid on purpose to attack America? If not, you're either intentionally not seeing it or I want to use your media filter because it was literally everywhere.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#845

Post by gmarx »

cygx wrote: post #803
revelio wrote: post #762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vallance is in no way comparable to Tegnell. Valance and the other UK/SAGE "experts" were quite happy to invert their advice overnight on the basis of nothing. Like all the others they were making decisions based on politics and ideology, not a mature of understanding of science. Tegnell picked one position and stuck with it because there was no reason to change it, in that he was virtually alone. > Maybe because it…

It's amazing how many people still never got the memo that lockdowns and masks had no effect whatsoever. Do you have a source for that? It's been a while since I've looked at Covid numbers, so the only research I know off the top of my head that claims there was no effect is a meta-analysis by some economists, which originally claimed lockdowns only prevented 0.2% of deaths. After criticism, they had to re-evaluate t…

Perhaps your April 2020 number is correct but I think it's irrelevant because it is too time-boxed. I did an analysis (matching those by others) using the OECD excess deaths data and if you extend the time period through last fall, Sweden did either best (according to other's analysis) or second best (according to mine). Excess deaths actually continued after the pandemic has subsided in many countries (US and UK at least I recall) and I think it reasonable to assume the pandemic and pandemic policy had something to do with it. To judge overall success of policies you need to look at the whole time of the pandemic and its aftermath and the Swedes did better than almost everyone

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#846

Post by gmarx »

boston_clone wrote: post #612
revelio wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is revisionism. The only place in Europe that didn't lock down was Sweden and they were viciously attacked in the media for it, additionally Anders Tegnall was also attacked by other epidemiologists. I followed it all very closely at the time. Tegnall and his mentor stood alone. With the exception of the Great Barrington crew and maybe Ioannidis, all the other so-called experts were loudly and vocally demanding…

A scientific consensus is significantly different than media opinion. Second, there is no "debate" regarding efficacy of masks and limiting exposure via quarantining. Masking reduces the likelihood of contracting SARS from others, and staying home reduces the spread to others and strain on hospitals. Unsurprisingly, the people attempting to debate this typically had no medical background whatsoever. Millions died in…

I have a medical background and when the pandemic started I did a literature to see if masks had helped with other respiratory virus epidemics (as masking had been common for years in many Asian countries ). the results were decidedly unimpressive and I concluded masks might to something but it was not a big effect at a societal level. The mistake that many smart people without medical backgrounds make is assuming that if a measure "makes sense" from a basic science point of view, it must have a real effect in a patient or a society. Counter-intuitively this almost always turns out to be wrong.

I did a study of mask based on self reports early in the pandemic and I did show a significant slowing of the progress of the pandemic in states that had a high claimed rate of mask use. I had (I thought) some clever ways of eliminating other differences between states in my analysis and was surprised to see so much slowing. However, I am not sure which way the causality runs. I can easily see heavy masking making it such a bummer to go to bars (e.g.) that the lack of socialization caused the slowing.

But in summary, to your point, to the medically knowledgeable there was a lot of evidence before that masks would not do much (not nothing) and there is a lot more now that masks didn't do much

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#847

Post by DocSavage »

ahartmetz wrote: post #543
realjhol wrote: post #517

It's going to take a long time before the mainstream is ready to think critically about the COVID narratives, but it's good to see first steps toward the recovery of rationality. But there's still a lot to cover: - Lockdowns did little to prevent the spread of COVID and lead to increased deaths by other causes, egregious violation of people's fundamental rights, massively destruction of the economy, and many people's…

Your positions, if these are all yours, are quite maximalist in one direction, and in some cases I have read pretty credible studies that contradict you. So, you may not get your Iraq moment.

Agreed. His first position on lockdowns is a GBD talking point that is strongly opposed by Sweden vs Norway through mid-2021 (the end of major vaccine rollout) when they had different positions on lockdown but shared many other characteristics. Sweden had 10x more deaths during that time period, about 1200 extra deaths per million people. It also completely ignores the morbidity introduced by all the extra cases while focusing on non-COVID morbidity.

That vaccines never did anything to prevent transmission is a pretty ridiculous contention for the initial wave.

That vaccines posed more of a danger to most of the population compared to COVID-19 itself is also ridiculous. The US had the largest vaccination drive in its history in early 2021, peaking at 3.5 million jabs per day in April. Excess death dropped dramatically throughout the rollout and kept falling past mid-2021.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#848

Post by lordfrito »

rtkwe wrote: post #764
lordfrito wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it deeply disturbing that excuses as flimsy as "hate" or "possible hate crime reaction" would be used as justification to suppress the truth, especially with a situation as grave as COVID-19. Who is to say whether the uptick with Asians is causation and not just correlation? Meanwhile, thousands of Americans were dying daily during the peak of the pandemic. Everyone was scared, needed to know what was going on…

It wasn't just the lab leak theory going around though, it was extremely tightly coupled with the "COVID bioweapon" conspiracy which really tainted it especially in the early days when there really wasn't much more info available other than it was first detected as a big outbreak in the same city as the coronavirus lab. In an ideal situation they'd be separable but they were so closely deployed trying to address the…

> Also important though is it never really went away.

Sort of true -- but only because you can't kill the idea, the need to find the cause of the pandemic to avoid a repeat.

This is cold comfort to the people who were getting banned had their accounts cancelled for suggesting things that turned out to be actually true.

There's was a lot of collateral damage here, all in the name of... well I'm not sure. Trust is hard to build, and once broken takes a long time to regain.

The point is, as a society we're heading in the wrong direction. Freedom of speech is becoming freedom for those who keep their mouths shut.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#849

Post by cygx »

gmarx wrote: post #845
cygx wrote: post #803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing how many people still never got the memo that lockdowns and masks had no effect whatsoever. Do you have a source for that? It's been a while since I've looked at Covid numbers, so the only research I know off the top of my head that claims there was no effect is a meta-analysis by some economists, which originally claimed lockdowns only prevented 0.2% of deaths. After criticism, they had to re-evaluate t…

Perhaps your April 2020 number is correct but I think it's irrelevant because it is too time-boxed. I did an analysis (matching those by others) using the OECD excess deaths data and if you extend the time period through last fall, Sweden did either best (according to other's analysis) or second best (according to mine). Excess deaths actually continued after the pandemic has subsided in many countries (US and UK at…

I haven't run the numbers, but it seems hard to believe just visually comparing excess mortalities for, say, Sweden and Denmark:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...

April 2020 did a real number on that country...

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#850

Post by HaZeust »

px43 wrote: post #448
jeswin wrote: 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…

I can, and will, continue to advocate and affirm that criticizing the Chinese Communist Party - and people with Chinese descent - are 2 very different things, and that the former is acceptable.
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