271–280 of 868 posts
So there’s a new president and the main intelligence agency changes its position radically in alignment with the new government. Why should we be confident in any other claim they made in the past?
Or, in a parallel universe, there's an old president who preemptively pardoned the person who might have been involved in GOF research leading to a lab leak.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have family that have worked on developing NBC equipment for the military. The first thing they said when covid was spreading was that it was most likely from a lab. That was before anyone in the news was saying that. So an independent first-look assessment by someone with experience, followed by later finding out that there was in fact a lab there, has me heavily leaning towards it being true. But it doesn't reall…
You should realize experience in a tangentially related field and there being a lab somewhere in the area is not the same as insight and evidence. That’s like saying that if a new flu came out of Atlanta, the fact the CDC is there proves it came from a lab, and must be true because someone’s janitor cousin who worked there one summer said it was true. “Low confidence” means that there is a lack of evidence and the st…
Well in this case it’s more like if if a new flu burst onto the scene with the following all being true:
- the epicenter of the outbreak being within a few miles of the CDC
- the CDC working specifically on gain of function for new strains of the flu
- the CDC being cited in whistleblower reports to the outbreak for poor safety and security protocols in the years prior to the outbreak
- inability to find the natural reservoir the virus crossed over from, despite years of searching in the biggest virus hunt in human history
- the closest naturally occurring relative of the virus being found in bats that are only native in areas hundreds of miles away (in this analogy, something like the upper Midwest), that also happen to be among the species of bats being studied by the lab at the CDC
- several CDC employees being among the earliest discovered cases, so early that they occurred before the disease was even picked up in the radar and were only discovered when searching for the earliest cases
- the US government preventing any none government health officials in or out of the area of the infection for several weeks after the outbreak
- the sole other identified potential outbreak location, the wet market nearby, was completely sterilized by the US government within the first two weeks of the outbreak, over the protests of international investigators who hadn’t yet been given access to it, thereby preventing them from ever being able to confirm or deny if it was the actual ground zero of the outbreak.
“Low confidence” doesn’t mean there is a lack of evidence, it means there is a lack of direct evidence. Problem is there is a lack of direct evidence for any alternative theory as well. There is, however, and overwhelming about of circumstantial evidence supporting the lab leak. The CIA isn’t going to issue accusations like this without a smoking bullet, which they will never have.
The reality is that had this occurred under any other administration, the lab leak hypothesis wouldn’t be so taboo. But Trump is a serial conspiracy theorist and pugilistic nationalist, so the second he floated it everyone on the left, which includes much in academia, immediately disputed it in a knee jerk reaction, despite not having much evidence either way. Since then what evidence exists has increasingly supported the lab leak theory, but many are walking back from entrenched positions. If this had happened when Obama was president I don’t think anyone would be pushing back on this with the evidence that exists.
It also gives conspiracy theorists and low-trust communities a bone to chew on, since UFO hysterias are proving to have an increasingly short shelf life.
> 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…
> But the real goal of the constant back-and-forth over where it came from is not about finding the truth; that much seems quite obvious to me. Yes, the annoying thing is that "the truth about covid" literally only matters to culture war grievances, it has no relevance whatsoever to the actual world. If it was a lab leak, then China needs to improve their BSL-4 safety... but they need to do that anyway[0]. If it was…
Things that are true: "Officials said the agency was not bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time." The Department of Energy concluded with low confidence that it was a lab leak. The FBI concluded with moderate confidence that it was a lab leak. The CIA's new report also concludes that they have low confidence that it was a lab leak. It's important to note that…
Things that are true: The first large cluster of infections was associated with the Huanan Seafood Market, and retrospective analyses of influenza-like-illness patients and blood donations in Wuhan found no evidence of earlier circulation. Sampling of many individuals prior to December 2019 showed no positives for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, suggesting that the virus did not spread widely before the market outbreak. The W…
The Wuhan lab collected samples from that area and the lab is only ~10 miles away from the market.
Those wet markets are huge vectors for a viral spread, so a virus being spread there doesn't necessarily mean it started there.
Why that market in Hubei and not first at a market closer to Yunnan? It might be more profitable to transport and sell them there, but it's still a long way to travel and avoid spreading during that time just to end up at a market so close to that lab.
A lot of reasoning around whether a lab leak is more likely doesn't require it to be engineered or modified in any way.
So there’s a new president and the main intelligence agency changes its position radically in alignment with the new government. Why should we be confident in any other claim they made in the past?
Even if the lab leak theory is true, why Trump was so confident about it? Does he have sources that CIA does not? I would be so confident in it only in the case if I myself caused that virus leak...
https://sundayguardianlive.com/news/fauci-described-indian-r...
"...Indian researchers wrote that the composition of the 'inserts' in the Covid virus was similar to one found in HIV-1."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
FTA: The absence of CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG from any mammalian or viral genome in the BLAST database makes recombination in an intermediate host an unlikely explanation for its presence in SARS-CoV-2. You can verify for yourself that there are no other sequences with an exact match. The subsequent comment about statistics of blast searching is irrelevant.
"Unfortunately, the authors did not provide details of their BLAST research. The patent database that they used contained 24,712 sequences. Yet, by querying BLAST, we obtained a database of 46,121,617 patent sequences with an average length of 560 nucleotides." is that not relevant?
Sources documenting this: National Review, New York Post & Daily Express US.
US government lies, and then calls "misinformation" on people who call out the truth. Now they are being held accountable to go back to the truth. Which is why the CIA is now switching 180-degrees from a Lie to the truth (non-Lab to Lab).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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And don’t forget that TikTok should be banned and now it should be saved.