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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

#681

Post by NoGravitas »

api wrote: post #462
kcplate wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Taibbi is clearly a partisan hack that only attacks one side, ever. You should probably expand your reading to his articles in Rolling Stone, particularly those from 4-5 years ago. You would not say “ever” if you did that. But…for a writer that admittedly leans left in his politics, he is willing to call out that side when a story leads there. He is much like Glenn Greenwald in that respect. Both he and Glenn get a…

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I think Greenwald started his rightward journey with "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", or at least, an acceptance of the fact that right-wing media were the only people willing to platform him criticizing the centrist consensus, even when he was still criticizing it from the left. But over time he's been so love-bombed by right-wing media that he's actually switched sides.

I disagree about a lot of the rest of what you say, but I think you're on point with regard to Taibbi and Greenwald.

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

#682

Post by tim333 »

Imnimo wrote: post #89

It is hard to tell from the writing - are the sources claiming that they know the researchers were sick with Covid-19 specifically, or are they saying they know the researchers with sick with something, and that they had symptoms consistent with covid-19? We go from: >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. To: >not o…

At that point there were not good diagnostics for covid as it was probably brand new. The supposition that it was covid is based on other evidence like them doing research on coronaviruses.

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

#683

Post by tim333 »

These articles go on a bit. There is a good summary of the science evidence for a lab leak from on twitter from Richard H. Ebright (Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers):

https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1567569810745356289

that was from Sept 22. Since then we've had

>They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.

in the recent Times article https://archive.is/zRoAn

and the names of the researchers, Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu, in this article.

It's all looking quite likely that this is the source, though further information will probably come out.

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

#684

Post by aredox »

whatwhaaaaat wrote: post #231
aredox wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter's own legal team has categorically said that the "Twitter Files" show no such thing. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/06/tech/twitter-files-lawyer... The COVID vaccine reduce transmission, as demonstrated by the analysis of infections in prisons. COVID causes far more heart complications than the COVID. COVID totally has caracteristic found in nature; see SARS epidemic in 2003, or MERS.

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

#685

Post by [deleted] »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #630
spacemadness wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This list of articles is right out of a conspiracy theorists fever dream. Great intellectual content here HN, thanks for sharing. Now go outside and take a walk before you go off the deep end.

The whole "lab leak" thing was one of those conspiracies that got you censored on facebook, reddit and many other sites. Three years later, it's becoming a mainstream discussion and it became a realistic possibility.

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

#686

Post by hwillis »

scythe wrote: post #467
hwillis wrote: post #16

Note that this is NOT the Wuhan CDC, which is the building across the river from the wet market. They did not do any research there. This building is ~10 miles south, well outside the main city. https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Wuhan_Ins... The fact that researchers were sick with flu-like symptoms has been openly stated by the US for a long time. This was put out in the state department Jan 2021, 2…

>As we’ll see later, there may actually have been two jumps from animals to people at the market. Mixing fact with speculation is never a great sign for an argument. Many people pushing the lab leak theory are doing this, but the people pushing against it don't need to start. If there were two spillovers, that needs a very good explanation, particularly because events like this tend to fall into the categories "one"…

> Mixing fact with speculation is never a great sign for an argument.

You're the only one who's speculating, because in the page that sentence links to a scientific paper: https://zenodo.org/record/6342616#.Y_WrmnbMJD-

> In particular, the market is across the street from a railway station

Which can be trivially ruled out, because then the spread would have been all up and down the rail line. The first infection point would have been on the train, among all those people getting off at all different stops. It would not have suddenly become infectious just as that person stepped off the train.

> and one block away from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology Tongji Medical College Union Hospital.

The evidence for zoonotic origin is how people regularly found or contracted SARS-like coronaviruses from animals. The evidence there was any relevant research at that university is zero. It's not a government lab, those projects would have been public.

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

#687

Post by dekhn »

tripletao wrote: post #521
dekhn wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that may be- I am not qualified to say after reading the twitter thread, but my money is still on the peer reviewed paper written by the virologist, based on a large collection of priors. Note taht the "geoscientist" is really a hydrologist who works on oil and gas, so their ability to comment on the centering model is still suspect. From what I can tell, "dawalker" is just a retired hydrologist with no special skill…

The peer-reviewed literature on COVID origins has been unusually bad. I assume you don't think SARS-CoV-2 came from pangolins; but Nature published "Isolation of SARS-CoV-2-related coronavirus from Malayan pangolins", and took more than a year to correct it. (They said the virus was widespread among pangolins, based on multiple positive samples; but in fact multiple papers had been written about one batch of smuggled…

Are you a professional scientist with experience in this area or not?

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

#689

Post by evandale »

jedmeyers wrote: post #241
twoWhlsGud wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it. However, luckily for us someone has already invented called a vaccine that is far safer and plays a similar role in achieving herd immunity ; )

Which vaccine specifically provided the "immunity"?

GP said "herd immunity" not "immunity" and herd immunity has nothing to do with 100% of the population being 100% immune.

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

#690

Post by harry8 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #608
harry8 wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mainstream media has "owners" who "fire" editors when they don't like the stories being written. Journalist pitch stories at those editors. See Rupert Murdoch and the Times of London, The News of the World, The Sun, The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal and Fox News. For example, note how many times Tony Blair and separately Gordon Brown sought audiences with Rupert Murdoch. You subscribe to the NYT or WSJ you u…

Individual reporters making money with a blog (instead of employment with a news outlet) certainly have worse fact checking. The best news sources in the world have huge fact checking teams that help to verify everything. This small mistakes that Tabbi made would be much less likely to slip if he were part of a major news org.

I'm old enough to remember when any journalist who didn't check their facts wasn't worth reading for anything beyond entertainment value. P.J. O'Rouke would need someone to do the work for him. Sy Hersh, not so much.

I look at Taibbi's work and haven't found uncorrected error. NYT? WaPo? Well it's not fair, there are orders of magnitude more opportunities for them to mess it up but yep, they sure have, often, on stories Taibbi didn't.

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