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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

#751

Post by ricksunny »

tripletao wrote: post #747
dekhn wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't change my opinion of David Baltimore or of SARS-CoV-2 based on his belief (I am actually completely undecided and have been waiting for convincing evidence of any kind for some time). Baltimore is actually a bit kooky, he's not the first Nobellist to do/say dumb things: the inventor of PCR, Kary Mullis, was an HIV-causes-AIDS denier https://www.ihv.org/news/2023-News/USA-Today-Fact-check-Rese... Anyway, Balti…

I'd tend to agree that Baltimore initially overstated the significance of the FCS, though his updated position seems close to my own. I'd certainly agree that whatever Kary Mullis saw wasn't a physical glowing raccoon, that megadoses of vitamin C won't cure cancer, etc. That's basically my point, though. Prestige--personal, institutional, or otherwise--is no guarantee of quality. It's not meaningless either, and in g…

>in general I'd also place higher weight on a paper in a major journal than on a random Twitter thread.

The Alina Chan archetype would beg to differ. The journal gatekeeping on tbis topic has been off the charts.

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

#752

Post by irthomasthomas »

Reason077 wrote: post #656
irthomasthomas wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> "At one point, the UK was recording any death where the person had a positive COVID test at any time prior." Not entirely true. The UK definition was death _within 28 days_ of the first lab confirmed, positive Covid test. Not "any time prior".

I said "at one point". E.g. from August 2020:

  In England, a new weekly set of figures will also be published, showing the number of deaths that occur within 60 days of a positive test. Deaths that occur after 60 days will also be added to this figure if COVID-19 appears on the death certificate. This will provide an additional measure of the impact of the disease over time.

  This follows concerns raised by academics from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine about the original measure, which counted anyone who had ever tested positive as a COVID-associated death. They called for the introduction of a 21-day measure in order to accurately assess the impact of the virus on mortality rates
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-uk-wide-methodology-a...

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

#753

Post by kcplate »

iudqnolq wrote: post #749
kcplate wrote: post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might be over generalizing “the right”. He certainly aligns on specific things with the right, but not everything—only where there is common overlap to his personal politics. Same as on the left… It’s ok to be on a “side” and still be critical of that side. No one would rightly accuse Bill Maher or Jimmy Dore of being conservatives, but they are damn sure critical of certain perspectives as of late of the…

It's fascinating to see what different bubbles we live in. I and most everyone I respect and run into the opinions of would consider Maher and Dore small-c conservatives.

Bizarre. Both were very vocal supporters of Bernie Sanders in 2016/2020 DNC primaries and have multiple occasions pushed democratic socialism as their ideal political paths for America, but because they are also occasionally critical of leftist authoritarianism tactics or ineptitude of democratic politicians they get lumped to be conservative?

I guess if your bubble is pulling it’s identity from the leftist dogma du jour anyone who departs from that orthodoxy would be dismissed as conservative.

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

#754

Post by harry8 »

mmcwilliams wrote: post #742
harry8 wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taibbi is paid by his subscribers. The end. He's not influenced by the vendors of his pen or his pc or any of his other suppliers. Each of those supplier companies has owners and nobody need care. If substack the company don't like his writing and try /anything/ at all, he takes _his_ business away from substack. Substack work for Taibbi. Taibbi is the customer. Substack have as much influence on the stories he repor…

You're making the claim that Substack is making no money on the subscriptions? And that the infrastructure they provide to process these subscriptions is completely decoupled from their company to the point that if they banned a writers account their subscribers are totally portable? This is an impressive feat, if true.

Taibbi pays bank fees. And tax. And his isp. And for stationary. And substack to provide his cms and payment gateway. He is the customer in /all/ of those transactions.

There is no credible claim of substack trying to influence writers. Unsurprisingly substack is used by wonderful journalists and idiotic charlatans alike.

Glenn Greenwald has left substack for locals for his own reasons, i don't think he has any argument with substack. Seems to have been frictionless including transfer of subscriber credit from one platform to another.

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

#755

Post by bunga-bunga »

kuhewa wrote: post #665
bunga-bunga wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is useless in this day. I was in China last week and Google Map’s street layer was aligned correctly to where I was, but the satellite imagery was not. This demonstrates that Google already knows the correct coordinates of street in China, including those of an airport finished in 2021. For some reason they have spent no time manually aligning the imagery. Coordinates on the globe are constant whether China lik…

The wiki above explains it. Technically they are supposed to purchase a shift algorithm.

Google is doing no business in China, so they don’t “have to.” They could easily bypass that by internally mapping the imagery to the vectors, they have thousands of developers who could do this.

Even if they had to buy it, they’re not buying it because again they don’t do business there.

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

#756

Post by adultSwim »

ada1981 wrote: post #492

This is the sort of thing that should bankrupt a country, and they should be required to make up for the damage their negligence inflicted on the world population. The Chinese cannot be trusted with power.

This analysis but for the invasion of Iraq

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

#757

Post by taeric »

lamontcg wrote: post #748
kcplate wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh certainly could have been another respiratory ailment, but the abundance of coincidence to timing, symptoms (which were quite severe), and a general assumption that it’s not over here just make me skeptical of claims that “it couldn’t be covid because…”

You can't diagnose COVID on the basis of severity though. I caught absolutely the worst flu of my adult life (in fact might have been the only case of flu I've caught in my adult life), but it was 12 months earlier in Jan 2019 so I'm positive it wasn't COVID. Ran a 103F fever for 72 hours straight, probably should have gone to the ER, was wiped out for about a month afterwards with post-viral fatigue. Had it happened…

This does make me wonder if having covid and h1n1 circulating at the same time wasn't much more of the problem than either one in isolation.

Specifically, something was different about that first wave of covid. Yes, it stayed deadly. Early waves that were overwhelming hospitals, though, were tiny compared to what came later.

I also still can't but think covid was far more widespread than we understand, even today. By the time that folks acknowledged that schools could be spreading it, it is hard not to think basically every kid hadn't been exposed.

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

#758

Post by iudqnolq »

kcplate wrote: post #753
iudqnolq wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fascinating to see what different bubbles we live in. I and most everyone I respect and run into the opinions of would consider Maher and Dore small-c conservatives.

Bizarre. Both were very vocal supporters of Bernie Sanders in 2016/2020 DNC primaries and have multiple occasions pushed democratic socialism as their ideal political paths for America, but because they are also occasionally critical of leftist authoritarianism tactics or ineptitude of democratic politicians they get lumped to be conservative? I guess if your bubble is pulling it’s identity from the leftist dogma du…

It's quite well known that many prominent Bernie supporters turned into right wing or right wing adjacent.

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

#759

Post by jacquesm »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #737
jacquesm wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoonotic jumps can still happen in a lab. They are simply jumps from one species to another.

Thanks for the explanations. Admittedly, my introduction to the term “zoonotic” was from playing Plague Inc: Evolved (if one is not familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_Inc:_Evolved ) so you might see where I’m coming from. I do roughly understand this to be the meaning.

Interesting. I noticed that one of my kids picked up a lot about how electricity works as well as simple and/or/not/nand gates. But that doesn't mean he knows anything about electricity, merely how the game logic presents it, which is close but not quite how it really works. That doesn't mean he knows nothing either, but it does mean that such knowledge should always be verified with proper sources to ensure you're not accidentally learning something isn't quite true.

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

#760

Post by MarkMarine »

mindslight wrote: post #517
MarkMarine wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to say, this reliance on the government telling the populace the truth if it has it just doesn’t ring true to me. In recent memory, I’ll point to going to war with Afghanistan, telling the Taliban to pack sand when they offered up Bin Laden, while ignoring Saudi Arabia. Going to war with Iraq over “wmds” and lying to the world about it. Would the govt tell us that China, a country that owns most of our debt, a…

I'm not arguing that "government" will tell population the truth. Rather that if a President is making an extraordinary claim that is actually based on some concrete details in a classified briefing, then we would expect that President to reference those details - especially a President who readily publicized classified information. That he did not points to the claim as being from the same vein of political misinfor…

I understand your reasoning here, I agree without spending an inordinate amount of time doing first person research on every topic we all basically have to fall back to listening to other people's reasoning on a subject and then decide, but I'm curious, has discussing this and reading the article (and probably some of the other information around) caused you to rethink COVID origin possibilities or at least do some more reading about it?
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