231–240 of 868 posts
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So what you're saying is that we shouldn't put our trust into people who pride themselves on being master manipulators and deceivers?
The head of a underpants subscription telemarketing firm is probably trusting his underlings more than the head of the CIA.
And ultimately it doesn't matter. If a contagious virus is coming to your country, your best response is independent of its origins. And if your response was a complete shitshow, finding a scapegoat in Wuhan won't make your response any less of a shitshow.
The US's response to covid under Trump was a ridiculous shitshow. Nothing more to it.
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Hopefully this helps people realize how meaningless it is to be labeled a conspiracy theorist.
I think the conspiracy theorist label is associated with common patterns (believing in a cover up in cases where there's no incentive / the cover up would be more expensive than the crime / the evidence would be impossible to cover up, etc) but in this case these patterns don't apply. The lab leak theory was extremely plausible even assuming no secret conspiracy at all. Lab leaks do happen, that lab did do gain of fu…
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There was a nucleotide sequence in the covid strain that did not show up in any of the proposed hosts or progenitor viral sequences, which is where leaked documents showed NIH (Fauci included I believe) discussing the non-natural origin of the nucleotide sequence. It's possible to search for articles about the Fauci NIH emails, and whether they mean anything scandalous. Here's a technical article at NIH discussing th…
This is an open access journal by two people whose publication history you can look up if you want to draw your own conclusions. Read the disclaimer at the top of the link. Don’t bootstrap its credibility by linking it to being at NIH (which does mean something) anymore than saying something found on Google is from the company itself.
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TBF, the idea of two zoonosis event, at the same, and virtually at the same time, do not rank very higher in the probability scale either.
Multiple zoonosis events is actually exactly what you expect from natural spillover. If the virus is spreading in farmed animals, it will have many chances to spill over into humans. In fact, this is exactly what happened with the original SARS in 2002. It's striking how similar the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak is to the original SARS outbreak. Almost every detail of the spillover is identical: unknown coronavirus emerges at…
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Both the FBI and DOE, which have their own foreign intelligence gathering capabilities, had previously assessed that COVID was caused by a lab leak with moderate confidence. So while I agree with you that the truth will likely remain shrouded in some mystery, most of us that believed it originated from zoonosis at first (and I would include myself in that camp) should update our priors both based on the CIA assessmen…
Are the FBI or DOE assessments public? What I last read in the peer-reviewed public literature seemed to point strongly to animal origin and not from a lab.
> The agency made its new assessment with “low confidence,” which means the intelligence behind it is fragmentary and incomplete. I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain. --- One thing that is, however, quite certain: there are very real political reasons to favor one theory or another. For example, Sen. Tom Cotton is quoted as…
> I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain. There's never going to be any conclusive evidence of the source of covid, and anyone claiming they have certainty (who wasn't a witness to a lab leak) is simply lying to you. What they're doing is going along with everyone else worth listening to, who find the coincidence that we were f…
It's not, zoonotic transmission has happened many times, lab leak is the extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence
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Censoring views that it came from a lab leak with zero evidence isn't any better. In fact I remember being lied to by major news outlets at the time saying that the evidence points to a non lab origin.
It did though. Animal origin only stopped being the most favored explanation because we haven't found the link in 5 years.
"Dr Robert Redfield, who led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the Trump administration, told Vanity Fair that he received death threats from fellow scientists when he backed the Wuhan lab leak theory last spring. "I was threatened and ostracised because I proposed another hypothesis," Dr Redfield said. "I expected it from politicians. I didn't expect it from science."[1]"
The US State Department were told to not to explore claims of Gains of Function research:
"According to an investigation in Vanity Fair magazine published on Thursday, Department of State officials discussed the origins of coronavirus at a meeting on 9 December 2020. They were told not to explore claims about gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan lab to avoid attracting unwelcome attention to US government funding of such research, reports Vanity Fair.[2]"
We may never know the truth, but its clear that there was politics being played since the beginning of the pandemic to obscure the truth, and not just by China.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57352992
[2] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...