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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

#211
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not true, a leak could occur without them realising. Getting cold and flu symptoms in winter wouldn’t raise too many suspicions. Given they didn’t start any containment procedures either they didn’t know or that’s not how it happened

The article doesn't just say "people got sick" it says that researchers were hospitalized. That doesn't sound like "normal seasonal illness" to me.

Then you haven’t spent time in China and realise they use their hospital system very differently. Often people will go to hospitals for minor fevers.

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

#212
post #77

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It is peculiar how all of these recent "conspiracy theories" as named by corporate media eventually turn out to be true.

It is peculiar that not many of these conspiracy theories eventually turn out to be true.

See Twitter's own lawyers: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/06/tech/twitter-files-lawyer...

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

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Michael Shellenberger has done the same - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shellenberger has details, and see criticism of the Breakthrough Institute. Alex Gutentag seems to be a contributing editor to Compact, writing things like https://compactmag.com/article/how-mask-mandates-defaced-us . A brief review of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_(American_magazine) shows a lot of familiar names of people that p…

>All signs point to misinformation. What does that even mean? That you don't trust these people? Isn't that, definitionally, ad hominem?

"Ad hominem" is a great defense used frequently people with bad reputations for serially lying and misleading. If someone is a repeat offender of passing along misinformation, what they claim should be discounted regardless of whether one likes the claims or not. The people associated with this story have shit reputations and the article rests on anonymous sources. It may not be wrong, but someone would have to be a fool to ignore the credibility and reputation of their sources.

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

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mark…

> 40,000 wet markets in China as of 2019

And yet it happened to spillover in a wet market in a city with the premier coronavirus research labs in the country. It also happened to happen far away from where these types of viruses originate. There are only a handful of labs in the county that do this type of research and WIV is the top one.

So why did not not appear in a wet market in Yunnan or Guangdong?

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

#215
post #25

The title says "sickened by Covid-19", but the text says "developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019".

> ..."developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019".

My partner and her siblings developed a COVID-19-like illness in November 2019. It was far worse than any flu they'd ever had and even put one of them, an otherwise healthy 30 year old, in the hospital for several weeks.

I wouldn't be surprised if COVID-19 was spreading as early as October.

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

#216
post #77

[flagged]

[flagged]

The sky is blue

Exercise is good for you

The government has assigned an agent to follow you when you leave your home, and listens to you through your cellular telephone

Excess refined sugars is bad for you

Isn't this an interesting argument structure?

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

#217

Here are two good articles as well that document the lab leak(for further reading): https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra... and https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-no...

https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/the-case-against-the-...

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

#218
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was developed in lab, presumably there would be a substantial amount of information available on it. Lab notes, testing results, transmission rates, all sorts of things we had to discover in the wild. We could have used that data to make progress on a vaccine (and adjust our overall response) much, much faster.

How and why would they have that kind of data available if the virus only existed in the lab? At most they could have had computer simulations, but no real data. The only information they would have had is the DNA sequence, but that was rapidly sequenced anyway, and design of the original vaccines followed in short order. What took time was testing and manufacturing the vaccines, but none of this would have been acce…

Knowing when it was global issue #1 would have been a catalyst for much strong go-forward mitigation.

It’s very important to know how this happened, especially if it wasn’t an accident.

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fairly well-known [0] that China messes with maps data and forces Google to do so. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...

Is this similar to how the US used to mandate that civilian use of GPS was off by a certain amount?

No, the US one is basically error(like noise) injection and has been disabled: https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/modernization/sa/

The Chinese one is effectively a warped coordinate system, see GCJ02: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_d...

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

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I read it was hospitalized, but who knows with this kind of reporting.
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