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First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

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Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#181

Post by stubybubs »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #92
jb12 wrote: post #30

> "If you knew that this was likely a lab-enhanced pathogen, there are so many things you could have done differently" I'm curious - if we knew in March 2020 that covid came from a lab, what _would_ we have done differently?

I had personally decided by April 2020 that there was sufficient information for me to believe that Covid was a lab-enhanced pathogen that was accidentally released by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. My "source" was mainly common sense (the simplest solution is usually the right one, and guilty people doth protest too much), an understanding of probability (there is a lab studying the pathogen right n…

> My "source" was mainly common sense (the simplest solution is usually the right one

https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/zoonotic-diseases.html

75% of all new infectious diseases come from animals. Isn't the simplest solution that COVID also came from animals? Just because it was a bad one doesn't make it less likely. Where did smallpox come from? Polio? Spanish flu?

Is it strange that the lab was near the wet market where it supposedly started? There are about 40,000 wet markets in China as of 2019. It might be more strange if it was nowhere near a wet market. It's a little bit like a psychic helping the police saying "the body will be found near water." Fantastic, most humans live near water.

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#182

Post by gojomo »

stainablesteel wrote: post #131
muglug wrote: post #77

[flagged]

in my experience, a pure reputation destruction post is generally non-credible, and you posted an establishment media interview on someone who supports twitter: of course they have a bone to pick. for the sake of honest conversation, can you list what conspiracy theories you're referring to? because the last few conspiracy theories i can remember somehow all turned out to be true. so i'm really concerned with what is…

Mehdi Hasan is proof that MSNBC can air someone who's as much of a shouty partisanship-addled blowhard as Fox's Sean Hannity.

Investigative journalist Lee Fang goes deeper into Hasan's allegations about Taibbi – plus Hasan's history of plagiarism & viewpoint-flexible controversialism-for-pay at:

https://www.leefang.com/p/mehdi-hasan-plagiarized-pro-spanki...

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#184

Post by mullingitover »

Unless someone has specimen samples from the sick WIV scientists, this doesn't really prove anything. Nasty respiratory viruses with Covid-like symptoms aren't actually that rare, and there's a lot of overlap between a bad respiratory infection and a mild Covid infection. I've talked to numerous people in the US who swore they had the full checklist of Covid symptoms well before the November 2019 date they're talking about in this article, but these claims are not borne out by the observed data in viral surveillance.

It's really unfortunate that there isn't some kind of rigorous global pathogen surveillance program that's regularly sampling the world's population and doing sequencing for novel pathogens. The only reason we discovered Covid in the US early on was because the Seattle Flu Study kinda broke the rules and went back through their samples to test for Covid when they weren't technically allowed to do it. Ideally we'd have global wastewater surveillance as well as individual anonymized sample gathering. It sounds expensive, which is why nobody wants to do it, but Covid really shows how badly it's needed.

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#185

Post by kneel »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #86

Why name the researchers that got sick? Even if one of them is the source for COVID, which really isn't clear from this, I don't think they deserve the harassment articles like this are bound to cause.

You don't think causing a global pandemic and millions of death from dangerously careless research deserves criticism?

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#186

Post by predictabl3 »

pessimizer wrote: post #160
predictabl3 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely this. I don't care to speculate, read, or give a single care in the world about this. I think the hope for stopping GoF research is about as high a chance as the world "putting a pause" on AI. And this thread is littered with all of the usual conspiracy head-nods. I think we should know more about the origins of COVID but I haven't seen a single discussion of this that doesn't immediately dove-tail into var…

> I haven't seen a single discussion of this that doesn't immediately dove-tail into various other conspiracies or whistles. None ever will from your perspective if you're citing "head nods" and dog whistles.

I don't know what that's supposed to mean.

No, sorry not sorry, I don't really put much stock in the analysis of people that immediately link this into their unsubstantiated handwavey global conspiracies.

I've seen articles, research, professionals talking about the evidence. Which aren't headnods and whistles. And I read it. And that's why I don't have any strong opinion, contrary to whatever I think is being implied in your comment. But comments? Public discussion? It's the same thing every time.

Skepticism is this cool thing where instead of assuming an unclear premise and then immediately linking it to bigger, even less substantiated conspiracies theories that thereby reinforce how "true" my assumptions must be!!... I accept that I don't have the full picture.

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#188

Post by hwillis »

MarkMarine wrote: post #81
onethought wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which still doesn’t really draw the line of how an outbreak occurred at the wet market. Also common seasonal illness isn’t exactly a smoking gun

not really typical for healthy researchers in their 30s to end up in the hospital with seasonal illness symptoms though.

Did they "end up in the hospital" or did they go to the hospital to get a diagnosis? I live in a city, and my PCP is in the local hospital. "seasonal illness symptoms" sounds FAR more like they were just sick and went to the doctor, like anyone else would. For medicine.

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#189

Post by kneel »

squalo wrote: post #108
sixQuarks wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say that? What evidence do you have that his reporting is suspect?

I take it you haven't been keeping up with the twitter files controversy?

Taibbi was the first journalist to report on twitter files. Absolutely mindblowing what was going on behind the scenes of Twitter, had heard rumors of FBI pushing narratives but no one really had any idea how bad it was.

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#190

Post by whatwhaaaaat »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #156
stainablesteel wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It misleading presents that the furin cleavage site had to come from gain of function it did. this isn't debatable anymore. there's literally grants written by american scientists proposing this pre-covid, the lab in wuhan was doing the legwork.

They are also already present in wild coronoviruses and the initial cluster don't support a lab leak theory, even if they were sloppily working on gain of function via that mechanism. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2211107119 "Harrison and Sachs’s (1) claim that alignment of sarbecovirus Spike amino acid sequences illustrates“the unusual nature of the [SARS-CoV-2] FCS” is misleading. FCSs are common in coronav…

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