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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

#961

Post by boston_clone »

thedrbrian wrote: post #929
anthonypasq wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes "started." there was literally no guarantee we would even have a vaccine at all. There was absolutely no historical precedent for development and deployment of a vaccine with a year of virus discovery. it was incredible achievement and government official literally bet the entire world economy on it for some reason i still cant understand.

give how many people seem to catch covid after having the vaccine, was it worth it?

Considering the risk of dying was unequivocally reduced, this is an obvious “yes”.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#962

Post by George83728 »

Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #908
shwaj wrote: post #882

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half of this very thread is saying that China intentionally released this virus? Let’s grant you that half of this thread is saying that China likely engineered Covid as a weapon (very arguable). Are you unable to distinguish that assertion from the assertion that the engineered weapon was intentionally deployed? I don’t understand why you’re conflating the two.

> Half of this very thread is saying that China intentionally released this virus? I was being slightly hyperbolic. A good chhunk outright said it, another good group was using plausible deniability, which means if pressed they might say thats not what they meant. Makes separating them quite hard > Are you unable to distinguish that assertion from the assertion that the engineered weapon was intentionally deployed? I…

The word you're looking for is lying.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#963

Post by Ancapistani »

idiotsecant wrote: post #844
Ancapistani wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Of course I did, but that's not what was posited in the parent post:

> China and the WHO intentionally developing and deploying bio-weapons as a means of global population control

This is what I mean about moving goalposts - these two theories might both assert that it was a bioweapon, but they are otherwise very different.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#964

Post by snowwrestler »

wizofaus wrote: post #825
snowwrestler wrote: post #794

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s absolutely not common sense, we have tens of thousands of years of evidence that viruses can evolve to cause human illness, and zero documented examples of a man-made novel virus doing so. It would be an extraordinarily rare and noteworthy event in human history. The bar to prove that it happened to cause COVID is very high and the direct evidence (not circumstantial) for it is so far very low.

Did GP imply if a virus was leaked it must be man-made? Obviously the fact that the exact virus hadn't been seen before is suggestive of that but it's not inconceivable the lab happened to have samples of a never-before-seen naturally occurring virus that they were planning to do research on. That wasn't the same lab that released the first genome sequencing of the virus though (I gather it was in Shanghai). Not sure…

> Did GP imply if a virus was leaked it must be man-made?

This is what the “lab leak” theory is. It’s why every conversation of lab leak is tied up with comments about gain of function, etc.

The interesting thing about SARS-COV-2 is that it can infect humans and cause illness (unlike the vast majority of known viruses). When people talk about the origin of the pandemic, it is the origin of this property specifically that they mean. The lab leak theory is that this property originated in a lab.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#965

Post by gmarx »

sampo wrote: post #865
gmarx wrote: post #845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Due to large numbers of immigration, Sweden has younger population than comparable nearby countries. Too many excess death analyses just take the average of 5 previous years (2015-2019) as the baseline, to compare yearly or weekly deaths to. But in countries with ageing population, number of yearly deaths have been on a slowly increasing linear trend already for a long time. If you ignore the trend, and only compare…

All valid things to check but would also need to be checked for other OECD countries. I would not assume the OECD methodology does not take account of the aging. Also I would not assume this had much of an effect. The way it might would be if a lot of younger people moved to Sweden during the pandemic . In general cross border movement slowed during that time

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#966

Post by mensetmanusman »

startupsfail wrote: post #890
sh34r wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can the lab be sued out of existence for damages? It's in China, not America. Come on now. The CCP might remove the lab from existence, but they're not gonna do it with a lawsuit.

There is certain amount of justice present in China. They can do it internally. It’s not like they haven’t suffered internally from it.

The citizens of China have suffered, but that doesn't really matter to the CCP. Covid has been great for strengthening their central government and all of the technology tools of suppression.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#967

Post by lamontcg »

shwaj wrote: post #900
lamontcg wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Chinese government has certainly acted like it was covering something up. Yes, they covered up the existence of racoon dogs and other susceptible animals at the market.

I’m reading this as sarcasm, am I wrong? If so, it is such a bad faith response. It is well reported that China was highly uncooperative in providing records about the research that was occurring at WIV.

No its quite serious. China covered up the existence of susceptible animals at the market. If you want to take the actions of a cover up as being proof, then you have to look at that cover up as well. What people do instead, though, is pick and choose -- the actions surrounding the lab are evidence China is hiding a lab leak, while the actions surrounding the market are not evidence China is trying to hide a zoonotic spillover. There's nothing "bad faith" about that at all, unless you're so bought into the lab leak theory that any question of it is bad faith.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#968

Post by naasking »

boston_clone wrote: post #841
naasking wrote: post #811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 in…

> Individual rights have been recognized long before the founding of the United States, though.

Yes, and? Is it not true that we have progressively recognized more rights over time, often at the cost of blood? That our "rulers" do not and should not have de facto power over our lives to impede our movements, that they should not have power over what we choose to believe or decide with whom we may associate?

Furthermore, in none of the examples cited in the link you provided do the quarantine measures impact whole cities, states or nations, so I fail to see the relevance. Where quarantine measures were broad, they were widely recognized as shameful and discriminatory in retrospect (like imprisoning 30,000 prostitutes to stem venereal disease).

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

Irresponsible? Do you think you have some responsibility to manage other people's lives for them? This really gets to the crux of the issue doesn't it, you think some people should have the right to make such decisions for others because those "others" aren't intelligent or well-informed enough to make these decisions for themselves. It's patriarchal, condescending and anti-democratic.

As for whether it's impossible, that's literally untrue. Sweden is proof by counterexample: they did exactly this and it turned out just fine. By the time the first lockdowns happened, we already had a reasonable assessment of the risks.

Instead the heavy-handed, duplicitous and authoritarian measures made the whole issue partisan, and so the US had one of the worst outcomes of all developed countries.

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

Except it's not unrelated, it's just another example of curtailing civil liberties in the name of some ill-defined "collective good". People advocating for these positions simply take it as a given that their vision of the collective good needs no justification.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#969

Post by firstlink »

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…

The good news is that everything else the US government suppressed really was outrageous lies that are only supported by racists, like the mRNA vaccines being completely ineffective and often fatal.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#970

Post by dang »

th0ma5 wrote: post #901
dang wrote: post #899

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to correct false information by providing correct information neutrally, you're welcome to do so. But it's not ok to get triggered into posting a bunch of low-information objections. That kind of thing just contributes to general degeneration, and we're trying to avoid that here.

I do apologize and I do also appreciate your time. If something isn't even wrong, what neutral information can even be posted in response?

If something isn't even wrong then it probably is just noise. In that case the best thing to do is downvote (if you have the karma, which your account does), chalk it up to the internet being wrong, and move on.
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