All things political. Coronavirus Edition. (11 Viewers)

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    Maxp

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    I fear we are really going to be in a bad place due to the obvious cuts to the federal agencies that deal with infectious disease, but also the negative effect the Affordable Care act has had on non urban hospitals. Our front line defenses are ineffectual and our ability to treat the populous is probably at an all time low. Factor in the cost of healthcare and I can see our system crashing. What do you think about the politics of this virus?
     
    MT15 said:
    This is all just conspiracy theory hogwash. There is no way there was a huge conspiracy about the lab research in Wuhan. It’s ridiculous. But so on brand for you, lol.
    Click to expand...
    As the tweet I posted earlier said:

    At this point, there is sufficient evidence to conclude, beyond reasonable doubt, that SARS-CoV-2 entered humans through a lab accident.

    But keep your head in the sand if you like. And you claiming something is a conspiracy means nothing. You don't point out any facts thay contradict the lab leak based on what we know now. All you have done in the past is post articles from years before that weren't even relevant anymore. You continue to hide behind vague pronouncements.
     
    SaintForLife said:
    As the tweet I posted earlier said:

    At this point, there is sufficient evidence to conclude, beyond reasonable doubt, that SARS-CoV-2 entered humans through a lab accident.

    But keep your head in the sand if you like. And you claiming something is a conspiracy means nothing. You don't point out any facts thay contradict the lab leak based on what we know now. All you have done in the past is post articles from years before that weren't even relevant anymore. You continue to hide behind vague pronouncements.
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    There is no proof of what you say. And some really specific proof that it came from the marketplace through an animal vector. It’s really hard to refute actual genetic proof, but you are still tilting at windmills and proclaiming a vast conspiracy.
     
    MT15 said:
    There is no proof of what you say. And some really specific proof that it came from the marketplace through an animal vector. It’s really hard to refute actual genetic proof, but you are still tilting at windmills and proclaiming a vast conspiracy.
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    Denial is not just a river in Egypt.
     
    MT15 said:
    You are the one in denial. I waited until there was genetic evidence. You’ve been tilting at the vast conspiracy windmill since day 1.
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    There was no genetic evidence that shows it was from another animal. If so post it. If you claim you don't have time or want to post it then it's obvious you are in denial.
     
    SaintForLife said:
    There was no genetic evidence that shows it was from another animal. If so post it. If you claim you don't have time or want to post it then it's obvious you are in denial.
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    I have posted it in this very thread. This is a stock tactic of yours. You claim it was never posted and if I won’t go look it up and post it again it PROVES I’m in denial. That’s an idiotic statement. You have a search function. It’s in this thread. You look it up.
     
    MT15 said:
    I have posted it in this very thread. This is a stock tactic of yours. You claim it was never posted and if I won’t go look it up and post it again it PROVES I’m in denial. That’s an idiotic statement. You have a search function. It’s in this thread. You look it up.
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    I don't know what to search for. If you posted it here then post a link.
     
    faceman said:
    Is John Hopkins good enough for you?

    publichealth.jhu.edu

    Origins of SARS-CoV-2 | Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

    A new report confirming a Wuhan seafood market as SARS-CoV-2’s origin shines a light on the need for critical research to prevent future pandemics.
    publichealth.jhu.edu publichealth.jhu.edu
    Click to expand...
    Kristian Andersen was an author of the paper you linked to. Andersen was also a co-author of the discredited Proximal Origins paper. Recently released private messages between Andersen and other scientists show that Andersen and others thought the lab leak was a possibility initially despite them saying publicly it was a conspiracy theory.



    1000004035.jpg




     
    SFL, you should know better than to post this crap. Of course scientists would consider the lab leak theory at first. Scientists wouldn’t eliminate any possibility out of hand. It wasn’t until the genetic studies were completed that the scales tipped toward animal origin.

    The people you are quoting in the tweets are purposefully twisting what happened to keep the conspiracy theory alive. You should have enough background in science to dismiss this sort of claptrap.

    Did you even read the article? It’s not a paper, it’s an easy to read summation of findings on the origin of the virus. Kristian Anderson isn’t the author of the article. It’s an interview of a different scientist. Anderson isn’t the only scientist who has seen this data, and believes the animal origin is most likely.
     
    MT15 said:
    SFL, you should know better than to post this crap. Of course scientists would consider the lab leak theory at first. Scientists wouldn’t eliminate any possibility out of hand. It wasn’t until the genetic studies were completed that the scales tipped toward animal origin.

    The people you are quoting in the tweets are purposefully twisting what happened to keep the conspiracy theory alive. You should have enough background in science to dismiss this sort of claptrap.

    Did you even read the article? It’s not a paper, it’s an easy to read summation of findings on the origin of the virus. Kristian Anderson isn’t the author of the article. It’s an interview of a different scientist. Anderson isn’t the only scientist who has seen this data, and believes the animal origin is most likely.
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    They have been exposed as frauds for trying to cover up the lab leak and the US involvement in funding gain of function research in Wuhan. You should catch up on the news.
     
    SaintForLife said:
    They have been exposed as frauds for trying to cover up the lab leak and the US involvement in funding gain of function research in Wuhan. You should catch up on the news.
    Click to expand...
    No they have not. You should actually read a reliable article instead of listening to conspiracy theorists. They’re playing you for a fool.

    Who is they? Does this conspiracy involve hundreds or thousands of scientists?
     
    Newly released chats and emails between the authors of a crucial scientific paper leave no doubt: an unprecedented official disinformation campaign accompanied the arrival of Covid-19

    On February 5th, 2020, as a small group of scientists were crafting a Nature magazine paper that would become the basis of years of reports insisting Covid-19 had natural origins, one of the co-authors, Tulane’s Dr. Robert Garry, wrote in group email:

    "Accidental release is a scenario many will not be comfortable with, but cannot be dismissed out of hand."

    As detailed in an explosive Public story today, Garry’s thinking changed suddenly when then-New York Times reporter Donald McNeil asked the next day: “Is there any possibility that it could be from the Wuhan lab?”

    1000004037.jpg


    Garry warned McNeil was “credible,” but “like any reporter can be mislead [sic],” cheering colleague Dr. Andrew Rambaut’s scientific version of a non-denial denial as a “good honest response.”

    Last week, House members investigating origins of Covid-19 accidentally released a trove of Slack chats and emails between the authors of Nature’s seminal paper from March 17, 2020, The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2. The Proximal Origin paper delivered a single line that for years helped authorities slam a lid on theories of human intervention in Covid-19: “It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation.”

    Chats showing Proximal Origins authors saying things like “The truth will never come out (if lab escape is the truth)” were published first by independent researcher Francisco Del Asis of the independent investigatory group DRASTIC, after which the story was picked up by Ryan Grim of The Intercept. From there, health officials did their best to ignore the material — “Many of them remained silent with this revelation,” is how De Asis puts it — almost as if they were waiting for another shoe to drop.

    That other shoe is dropping. Public and Racket last week obtained a full complement of the “Proximal Origins” communications examined by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, revealing a story far worse than previously believed. While today’s Public story details the unprecedented scientific cover-up, the letters and chats examined here at Racket show how health officials and scientists constructed perhaps the most impactful media deception of modern times, exceeding even the WMD fiasco both in scale and brazen intentionality. Because House investigators uncovered such a wealth of material, some of the Proximal Origin communications — which shed light on other Covid-related controversies — will be addressed in a second part of this series later this week. For now, however, the degree to which these communications blow up years of news stories stands out.

    The released communications mainly center around four of the five Proximal Origin authors: the aforementioned Dr. Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh, Tulane’s Dr. Garry, Scripps Research Professor Dr. Kristian Andersen, and University of Sydney Virologist Edward “Eddie” Holmes. There are also email communications with the fifth author, Columbia’s Dr. Ian Lipkin, who is not on the Slack chats but does figure in the story.

    The core four on the Slack chat — Andersen, Garry, Rambaut, and Holmes — never appear far from thoughts about the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and famed scientist Shi Zhengli. Affectionately dubbed “Bat Woman” by Chinese colleagues, Shi received grants to research bat viruses, including a recent one called “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” in which she partnered with Peter Daszak of the U.S-based EcoHealth Alliance on so-called gain-of-function experimentation.

    At one point, Andersen complains about containment procedures at the WIV, noting, as biosafety expert James Le Duc would write in an email later that year, that the facility was conducting very dangerous experiments as Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3), while the higher BSL-4 would normally be considered necessary. “I’m all for GOF experiments, I think they're really important,” Andersen writes. “However performing these in BSL-3 (or less) is just completely nuts!”

    Andersen goes on to say he’s “evolved” on the question of gain-of-function research, saying he’s not sure if such knowledge is “actionable,” while “of course being exceptionally dangerous. It only takes one mistake.”

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    It later came out that WIV was performing some of its experiments at an even lower level. “Keep in mind that WIV actually performed a lot of their coronavirus work at BSL2, which is what ultimately prompted Ian Lipkin to change his mind,” says DRASTIC founder, referring to comments by Lipkin to McNeil in May of 2021, saying “My view has changed.”

    The core four also repeatedly pored over the problem posed by the “furin cleavage site,” a distinctive feature of the Covid-19 genetic sequence. As is now known to the general public thanks again to the digging of the DRASTIC group, which leaked the material in the fall of 2021, researchers at the University of North Carolina led by Dr. Ralph Baric had sent a proposal to the Pentagon seeking to introduce “human-specific cleavage sites” into bat coronaviruses, for a program called DEFUSE. Baric and Shi had worked together on more than one occasion, and even co-authored a paper in 2015 demonstrating that a coronavirus spike protein can infect human cells.

    In any case, with these and other issues in mind, all five scientists express belief that escape from the Wuhan lab was at least possible, if not probable:

    Andersen: “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely because they were already doing this work…

    Garry: “The major hangup I have is the polybasic cleavahe [sic] site… it’s not really a natural process.” Also: “It’s not crackpot to suggest this could have happened given the GoF research we know is happening.”

    Lipkin: “[A draft of the paper] does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of the bat CoV research pursued there… we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess.”

    Holmes (replying to Lipkin): “I agree… Seems to have been pre-adapted for human spread since the get go. It’s the epidemiology that I find most worrying.”

    Rambaut: “I am quite convinced it has been put there by evolution (whether natural selection or artificial).”

    The community of scientists who work on the specific area of “pathogen spillover” and gain-of-function is “tiny,” says one researcher from that world, who asked to remain anonymous. Within that insular group, the characteristics of the Wuhan outbreak and the virus’s genetic sequence — while not offering definitive proof of human intervention — conjured obvious and immediate concerns, as Andersen’s “so friggin likely” remarks show.

    “I can just tell you,” says the researcher, who has experience working with bat viruses, “that if someone proposes to insert a furin cleavage site in a bat SARS coronavirus in Wuhan, and then one year later we see a bat SARS coronavirus with a furin cleavage site in Wuhan, that is highly unlikely to be a natural event.”

    In addition to referencing “GOF” work, the researchers also repeatedly referenced concern over the political consequences of publicly suggesting any kind of human intervention caused the outbreak, even if that happened to be the truth. “Destroy the world based on sequence data. Yay or Nay?” asked Andersen:

    1000004041.jpg

    Rambaut cited an erroneous analysis from the past. “Remember when during the swine flu outbreak Adrian Gibbs suggested it was a lab escape? Caused a huge shirt show.” Garry concurred, saying, “The public space is not the place to discuss this, which WHO should be aware of [realizing that in itself will pour gas on the fire].” Later, Andersen added: “I hate when politics is injected into science — but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstances.”
    1000004043.jpg

    open.substack.com

    "So Friggin' Likely": New Covid Documents Reveal Unparalleled Media Deception

    Newly released chats and emails between the authors of a crucial scientific paper leave no doubt: an unprecedented official disinformation campaign accompanied the arrival of Covid-19
    open.substack.com open.substack.com


    This is the 1st part of a long detailed article.
     
    Optimus Prime said:
    I honestly don't think that much of anything would have changed

    Why would there be less resistance to the vaccines? I believe that anti-asian rhetoric and attacks would have skyrocketed from where it was

    There would have been new conspiracies, "China has the cure right now", "China is intentionally trying to destroy the American economy" etc.
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    I went looking for an intelligent opinion on the issue and found what I posted. I do think the reaction may have been different in some ways but just how different and in what ways I can't say.
     
    Taurus said:
    Trump still would have lost his water in abject cowardice. He was told in January 2020 that Covid was coming and that it'd be bad. His response was to curl up in a corner, suck his thumb and pretend it wasn't happening.
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    I think you're right in that regard.
     
    SFL: there were 18 authors for the article that you disregarded because one of the authors. Were all 18 involved in a conspiracy? Do you know how many people would be involved in 18 different labs? Probably over 100. My brother runs a research lab and I worked in one in college. There are at least 10 people for every lab involved in producing the research for that article. Post-docs, student employees, and such. Are they all in on it? Do you know how ridiculous this all is?

    Anyhoo-just came across this and it looks like good news on the mRNA front. They also have a treatment for pancreatic cancer in the pipeline.

    www.freethink.com

    Moderna’s mRNA cancer vaccine works even better than thought

    Adding Moderna’s mRNA cancer vaccine to a standard melanoma treatment dramatically reduces the risk of death or recurrence.
    www.freethink.com www.freethink.com
     

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