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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

#541

Post by oska »

hotpotamus wrote: post #209
TechBro8615 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived alone, stayed isolated, kept healthy and exercised, took reasonable precautions while outside, and... because this is what you're really asking... chose not to get any vaccination, because data by July 2021 showed its effectiveness waned after three months and I had no plans within the next six months to interact with any crowds or expose myself to another individual for more than fifteen minutes. Then in Dec…

Interestingly, you did much the same thing I did despite my belief that the virus arose naturally (seemed reasonable since viruses have risen naturally for give or take a billion years). I practiced the extreme social distancing for about a year since the vaccines were not available and wore KN95 masks the rare and brief times I was indoors with anyone else. I did start getting the vaccines at some point in 2021 thou…

> Interestingly, you did much the same thing I did despite my belief that the virus arose naturally

Except they decided not to get the injection (so called 'vaccination'), while you did. That's a crucial difference in the eyes of most (on both sides) so I wouldn't agree that they did 'much the same thing' as you.

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

#542

Post by enkid »

geuis wrote: post #225

I don't trust this article at all . > Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have leaked the pandemic virus. > It is unclear who in the U.S. government had access to the intelligence about the sick WIV workers, how long they had it, and why it was not shared with the pub…

How would they actually know (unless there was very specific evidence of something like a lab accident associated with it) that these people were actually the first to fall ill and not just very early infections?

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

#543

Post by rdtsc »

> “Ever since I put out my [May 2020] preprint [research paper] saying that an accidental lab origin was possible, I was criticized as a conspiracy theorist,” said Chan. “If this info had been made public in May of 2020, I doubt that many in the scientific community and the media would have spent the last three years raving about a raccoon dog or pangolin in a wet market.”

That was so bizarre and strange. Both the shadiness of Chinese government and the complete confidence of many US scientists that the origin was definitely not related to the lab.

Anyone who suspected anything was just a conspiracy theorist. I can understand skepticism one way or another, and a desire to learn. I thought, well these scientists who spend years researching and conducting lengthy studies, somehow immediately new with 100% confidence it definitely had nothing to do with the bio-lab. It's like someone waving their hands in front of a building with smoke coming out and saying "nothing to see here, look the other way, please".

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

#544

Post by dvzk »

harry8 wrote: post #493
dvzk wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I've never seen anyone question the accuracy of the Church Committee's disclosures. People who talk about such things are normally eager to say that the US Congress and the CIA can't be trusted. It's just selective skepticism.

>eager to say that the US Congress and the CIA can't be trusted. This is a truth universally accepted, no? I mean maybe not by some actual, genuine believers in totalitarianism but surely there aren't many of those? Surely? You never trust people with power. You trust a system of checks and balances precisely because of this. You could even found a nation on that and expect continued support of it.

Sure, but the same people who frequently say this also cite the CIA's declassified MK-ULTRA documents as if they are unimpeachable fact (and not possibly falsehood or strategic disinformation). At the end of the day, the average forum skeptic trusts the CIA more than most normal people do.

I think trusting in our system of checks and balances is a reliable way to avoid the infinite regress of Pyrrhonian skepticism, but that's increasingly seen as a libcuck opinion.

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

#545

Post by fwungy »

rnk wrote: post #458
fsckboy wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think it would have made the doofuses who took ivermectin act differently though from NIH https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7539925/ "Ivermectin: an award-winning drug with expected antiviral activity against COVID-19... with demonstrated antiviral activity against a number of DNA and RNA viruses, including severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)" Whether or not ivermectin ul…

I just don't buy the international conspiracy to block ivermectin. I've considered it and discussed it with my poor father who became convinced by Fox News and endless Facebook forwarded postings. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of drugs and substances that have an antiviral effect. Ivermectin was one that was tested and there were some early results that were positive but then later with more thorough testing…

People were blocked from getting ivermectin prescriptions. Doctors were told not to write them. Pharmacies were told not to fill them. There was no conspiracy. It was done completely openly. It was just decided by "the scientists" and effectively banned from the mainline medical system. Any doctor working in a network healthcare system (most of them) was basically told they could not prescribe it.

Given it's long history and safety, why was this necessary? Much is learned in medicine by practitioners trying things and sharing their results amongst each other.

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

#546

Post by throwawaymaths »

lockhouse wrote: post #394
wk_end wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW my understanding is that the labs were only BSL-2.

> Prior to and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, coronavirus research at the WIV has been conducted in BSL-2 and BSL-3 laboratories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology

Even if they had done it in the BSL-4 parts, the french partners in the facility actually left it after they saw how poorly the bsl-4 was implemented, only one French researcher stayed.

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

#547

Post by heyoni »

rdtsc wrote: post #543

> “Ever since I put out my [May 2020] preprint [research paper] saying that an accidental lab origin was possible, I was criticized as a conspiracy theorist,” said Chan. “If this info had been made public in May of 2020, I doubt that many in the scientific community and the media would have spent the last three years raving about a raccoon dog or pangolin in a wet market.” That was so bizarre and strange. Both the sh…

No one was hand waving anything. There were studies looking at several attributes of the virus’s genome that concluded (not definitively, nothing ever is) that the virus was probably naturally occurring.

Some looked at base pair distributions (some GC to AT ratios are required for stability), others looked for sites where enzymes could splice and whether they were commonly found in this species while others looked for any obviously transplanted.

Of all the studies I’m aware of, which isn’t all of them, there is no smoking gun. This isn’t a burning building and that analogy is incorrect. No weird GFP producing genes or any common genetic markers commonly found in lab made species were found anywhere. This isn’t to say it wasn’t a lab leak or that there aren’t opposing theories as to whether such and such base pair distribution is considered normal…but the evidence just isn’t there.

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

#548

Post by retrac »

claytongulick wrote: post #533
retrac wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alabama had a ban on interracial marriage in its state constitution. Struck down in the 60s by SCOTUS but still on the books after that. When they put it to a referendum to repeal it from the text of the law - the vote was surprisingly close: > The amendment was approved with 59.5% voting yes, a 19 percentage point margin, though 25 of Alabama's 67 counties voted against it. That was in 2000.

And Oregon didn't repeal its black exclusion laws until 2002. And just over 20 years before that there were riots in Boston over desegregation of schools. It's so funny, this romantic notion that many from the north have of how supposedly enlightened they are, while the south is a bunch of backwater hicks. I know, I used to have it too, as did my wife then, who was Canadian. People thought we were crazy when we moved…

As a Canadian I was tempted to use my own experiences of people spouting stuff that made me think I had fallen in a time warp to the 1950s. But that's subjective. And the above thread was about the southern USA.

I was not trying to pile on the south bashing so much as to simply point out that pockets most people would consider remarkably regressive persist, not specifically in the south per se, as just in North America at all. I was particularly interested in the last bit: 60% majority in favour, yet 25 counties majority against. Localized, varies by community. It's like that in Ontario too.

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

#549

Post by jsnell »

jleyank wrote: post #2

There seems to have been covid cases in Europe in last-quarter 2019, which suggests it was there or brought there before the outbreak that made the news in 2020. Doesn’t rule out leaks and crossovers, just moves them elsewhere or else when. Viral pneumonia was occurring, symptoms turned out to match covid and nobody was saving or testing blood samples. Outside of a few places in Dec. But people had aggressive, surpri…

That theory is total nonsense. Covid was extremely infectious, and had severe symptoms. It could not have stayed under the radar for that long. It was also unlikely to fizzle out: once a country had one case, it would turn into thousands of cases within a month.

If Covid had been circulating that widely that early, the trajectory of the disase in December 2019-March 2020 would have been totally different. There would not have been an initial outbreak in Wuhan followed by individual cases popping up in various other countries, followed by a gradual buildup of cases in those countries. By the time we got a test, there would have been hundreds of thousands ill all over the world, all being detected as cases simultaneously. It would have been impossible to e.g. trace cases to specific super spreader events, because there would have been so many sources of infections. Basically none of what happened would have been the expected outcome if Covid actually was spreading in the wild that early.

All the reports of early Covid cases outside of China are just the expected false positives from tests that don't have 100% specificity (which is pretty much anything other than full sequencing).

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

#550

Post by verisimilidude »

api wrote: post #420
nancyhn wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird how many smart people still haven't realized they are being lied to by the legacy media and establishment figures. Even after repeatedly discrediting themselves. Taibbi and Shellenberger aren't perfect either, but they are more reliable and honest. Taibbi is still the investigative journalist he's always been.

I realize the MSM lies. I just also realize that “alternative” media lies as well, especially when it’s full of hyper-partisan or ideologue hacks. Taibbi is clearly a partisan hack that only attacks one side, ever. I don’t know the other one but his feed has a strong new right hack feel to it. There are plenty of lefty hacks around too. It’s not a one sided phenomenon.

He published a book called “Insane Clown President” just a few years ago. It seems you don’t understand the first thing about Taibbi or his work.
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