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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

#631

Post by ajsnigrutin »

rnk wrote: post #387
CrazyPyroLinux wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes him crazy? Disagreeing with the New York Times or something?

It's because he makes constant clearly incorrect scientific claims, says conspiratorial things about vaccines that are obviously wrong. We haven't hidden the deaths of millions of people who got the COVID vaccine. We just haven't. And for all the billions of people who got the vaccine, I'm sure there were a handful of people that had serious reactions. But contrast that with the millions of people who literally died…

Let's be fair... the vaccine conspiracies have a lot of backing by the gaslightng of our own government and media. I live in a small country of slovenia, we didn't approve any of the russian or chinese vaccines, so for normal people, there were four options - astrazeneca, J&J, moderna and pfeizer vaccines. All of them were marketed as safe, the marketing material from our government was that the 90-95% of the vaccinated won't get a symptomatic covid, and that everyone should get vaccinated "now", with any of the vaccines.

Then a few people died nearby, and astrazeneca was temporarily removed from the list of options and wasn't recommended anymore. But the other three vaccines were safe and effective.

Then a young girl died here from from a J&J vaccine (the popular choice, due to it being a single-shot one), and we stopped using that. Suddenly the "classic" vaccines were not ok anymore, and the "all four are safe and effective" became "you should get a mRNA vaccine".

Then a bunch of young men ended up with heart issues after the moderna vaccine, and suddenly only pfizer is "safe and effective".

Also the "95% chance you won't get symptomatic covid" became a slightly "lower chance of hospitalizaton or death".

All of this of course came after the "masks are ineffective and you don't need them" that almost literally overnight (it was over a weekend) changed to "masks are mandatory in xyz places".

I mean sure.... science, conspiracies... but if you want to fuel a conspiracy theory, the best way to do it is to say something, then change what you said, and ban people who continue saying what you said a few days earlier.

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

#632

Post by zoklet-enjoyer »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #606
anon291 wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically, many people's bayesian priors are severely skewed against the lab leak hypothesis because it is associated with Donald Trump, and even intelligent people find it difficult to separate the message from the messenger.

The fact that one of the authors of this is Shellenberger makes me assume the opposite is true. He's clearly a grifter. Can grifters sometimes be correct? Yes. On a topic that happens to be culture war catnip? The odds reduce greatly.

I never heard of him. If the facts are:

1. The lab was doing gain of function experiments on coronaviruses

2. They wore limited PPE while working with these viruses

3. The first reported cases were near the lab

then I think there's a high likelihood the virus came from the lab. I don't know why this would be controversial.

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

#633

Post by zimpenfish »

fsckboy wrote: post #415
rnk wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that we would have done anything differently if we knew that China was responsible. It wouldn't have changed our treatments or vaccination strategies or anything. Could it have made some people who are crazy against China feel differently? Maybe. I don't think it would have made the doofuses who took ivermectin act differently though.

> 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…

> Firstly, it is important to note that the drug was only tested in vitro using a single line of monkey kidney cells engineered to express human signaling lymphocytic activation molecule (SLAM), also known as CDw150, which is a receptor for the measles virus

> Also, ivermectin has not been tested in any pulmonary cell lines, which are critical for SARS-CoV-2 in humans

> Furthermore, these authors did not show whether the reduction seen in RNA levels of SARS-CoV-2 following treatment with ivermectin would indeed lead to decreased infectious virus titers.

> Importantly, the drug concentration used in the study (5 μM) to block SARS-CoV-2 was 35-fold higher than the one approved by the FDA for treatment of parasitic diseases

"demonstrated" is doing a lot of lifting in that abstract given those caveats (and there's several more pages of caveats and "could", "maybe", "might", "may" hedging after those.)

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

#634

Post by zimpenfish »

lmm wrote: post #591
rnk wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had an emergency health situation and the government made emergency rules. Those rules were rescinded later when the emergency was reduced, partly because of widespread vaccination. This is not the first time that during a health emergency the US govt at various levels made temporary stringent rules. It turned out that our political argument against the rules is probably why the u.s had a much higher death rate fr…

Why do you believe that? The best available evidence (e.g. the cochrane review) suggests those stringent rules were not effective. Where I live (Japan) there were very few stringent rules and despite a high population density and an elderly population the number of excess deaths in covid waves was negative. Conversely China imposed some of the strictest rules in the world and has had one of the worst affected populat…

> Where I live (Japan) [...] the number of excess deaths in covid waves was negative.

Not in 2021 or 2022 according to [1]: "Japan had excess deaths of up to 113,000 in 2022, more than double the figure of up to 50,000 the year before, according to newly released health ministry statistics"

[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/04/06/national/scienc...

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

#635

Post by ricksunny »

letmevoteplease wrote: post #258
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…

You won't have to wait long for confirmation. The Director of National Intelligence will be required by law to declassify information about the infected researchers on June 18th, including their names, symptoms, date of onset and role at WIV.[1] [1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/619...

Assuming DNI chooses to divulge that tidbit formally. Per Biden's published interpretation of that law, they can withhold anything on grounds of 'national security' (note not the narrower 'sources and methods' scope).

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

What could 'national security' be construed as? : https://twitter.com/gdemaneuf/status/1669165325722722306?t=M...

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

#638

Post by jtode »

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…

You could have skipped reading entirely; it's conspiracy clickbait. To the puzzle-solving mind, an anomalous clue is the unicorn you spend your whole life chasing. There is a well-known conspiracy community around covid. It follows that this is trying to harvest a couple thousand in revenue by baiting people who are playing with covid conspiracies, by enticing them with the false promise of an anomalous clue.

I hope the author is reading these comments and sees me calling him a piece of shit.

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

#639

Post by aimbivalent »

janalsncm wrote: post #468
aimbivalent wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If that terminally online person was vaccinated against covid, they were far less likely to die than the terminally online conspiracy of the week anti vax crowd.

Your comment just shows that you are still deeply caught in the propaganda. I wonder how you and people like you will psychologically cope when you'll inevitably learn the truth over the next decades.

It's one thing to be wrong, it happens to all of us, but quite an other to literally believe the opposite of the truth and be so smug, superior and self-righteous about it.

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

#640

Post by irthomasthomas »

logifail wrote: post #598
jlmorton wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Importantly, Covid very rarely results in severe symptoms for middle aged adults. In the vast majority of adults, the symptoms are mild and nonspecific. So the idea that all of these researchers would have contracted Covid and present with symptoms specific/indicative of Covid is absurd. The chances of that must be infinitesimally small. If they had the typical, flu- and cold-like symptoms that most people experience…

> Covid very rarely results in severe symptoms for middle aged adults Correct, but I don't recall this being the narrative the media were following in 2020, despite stuff like this: "After nearly 45,000 Covid deaths in England and Wales, we can see that people of different ages have been exposed to dramatically differing risks. Fatalities among school-children have been remarkably low. Taking women aged 30–34 as an e…

It's even worse than that. Those numbers are for deaths "with" COVID, not "of COVID". At one point, the UK was recording any death where the person had a positive COVID test at any time prior. Cancer victims and car accidents where recorded as COVID deaths. So, the odds of dying after catching COVID where highly exaggerated.
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