All things political. Coronavirus Edition. (3 Viewers)

[Maxp]

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?

 

[Farb]

so your answer is the vaccine was useless?
So, how do you explain the death rate of vax vs unvax with Covid (other than a conspiracy theory )?

Useless? Nope. Didn't say that did I?
Was it was what the 'experts' told us it was?

 

[MT15]

Useless? Nope. Didn't say that did I?
Was it was what the 'experts' told us it was?

Yep, it sure was. Up until the virus mutated, which they also told us was a big risk because people were not getting the vaccine. We had a brief window to stop this disease in its tracks. But right wing conspiracy theories about microchips in the vaccine, and fear of the vaccine altering your DNA kept gullible people from getting vaccinated. It may have mutated anyway, but we had a slim chance to make this disease go the way of earlier SARS.

The doctors who have been spreading the lies are losing their medical privileges, one by one. The politicians and right wing media who spread the lies will probably get away with it. But if you are religious, then you believe in a judgement day, when they will have to answer for the needless deaths they were part of. It is what it is.

 

[Bigdaddysaints]

Yep, it sure was. Up until the virus mutated, which they also told us was a big risk because people were not getting the vaccine. We had a brief window to stop this disease in its tracks. But right wing conspiracy theories about microchips in the vaccine, and fear of the vaccine altering your DNA kept gullible people from getting vaccinated. It may have mutated anyway, but we had a slim chance to make this disease go the way of earlier SARS.

The doctors who have been spreading the lies are losing their medical privileges, one by one. The politicians and right wing media who spread the lies will probably get away with it. But if you are religious, then you believe in a judgement day, when they will have to answer for the needless deaths they were part of. It is what it is.

medical people losing that stuff is just a wutch hunt by the deep state.. get with the program man!

 

[MT15]

Oh, and I read the other day a somewhat depressing fact. There are a whole gamut of similar viruses to this one in the animal population. They estimated within the next 7-10 years we will see another one make the jump to humans. Hopefully we will keep working on a more generic vaccine for these viruses.

 

[Farb]

Yep, it sure was. Up until the virus mutated, which they also told us was a big risk because people were not getting the vaccine. We had a brief window to stop this disease in its tracks. But right wing conspiracy theories about microchips in the vaccine, and fear of the vaccine altering your DNA kept gullible people from getting vaccinated. It may have mutated anyway, but we had a slim chance to make this disease go the way of earlier SARS.

The doctors who have been spreading the lies are losing their medical privileges, one by one. The politicians and right wing media who spread the lies will probably get away with it. But if you are religious, then you believe in a judgement day, when they will have to answer for the needless deaths they were part of. It is what it is.

How did the tyrannical CCP in China do with their total lockdown and herd vaccinations an the no covid policy work? So there was in fact no way to stop the virus as your medical experts told (lied) to you.

And you follow it up with that because I didn't believe your people and take an experimental shot that I killed those that did the experimental shot that was supposed to stop them from getting the virus. How does that work exactly in your mind?

What was the going narrative on vaccine side effects when they came out and your side wanted to force everyone to take it?

 

[Farb]

Oh, and I read the other day a somewhat depressing fact. There are a whole gamut of similar viruses to this one in the animal population. They estimated within the next 7-10 years we will see another one make the jump to humans. Hopefully we will keep working on a more generic vaccine for these viruses.

I also read about a gain of function break through that makes the one released in china looks like a common cold. If I remember right, it was in Michigan.

Edited to add: Nevermind, it was in Boston

https://www.forbes.com/sites/steven...thought-this-was-a-good-idea/?sh=5d6eee825ca3

 

[SaintForLife]

I just can’t with you. You’re ridiculous.

Speaking of debunking, this article and video do a pretty good job of debunking the narrative that the lab leak theory is a conspiracy theory.

Journalists and scientists routinely dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as a crackpot theory and even as "racist," up until the summer of 2021 when science journalist Nicholas Wade published an influential article, and a viral rant by Jon Stewart pushed it into the mainstream. Until that point, social media platforms had been removing or throttling posts that took it seriously. Anthony Fauci, who didn't respond to our interview request, said it wasn't worth even considering the possibility that COVID could have originated in a lab.

More recently, emails made public through the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that Fauci, National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins, and other prominent public officials took the possibility of a lab origin far more seriously than they were letting on.

"Top virologists, sort of giants in this field, were looking at the genome and freaking out, basically," says health reporter Emily Kopp, who works at the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know, an organization that has obtained thousands of pages of official documents and correspondence, some of which reveal an orchestrated effort by scientists to downplay the lab leak theory. It's also extensively analyzed emails obtained via a lawsuit by Buzzfeed's Jason Leopold that reveal the huge disconnect between what health officials were telling the public and what they were saying in private.

"A really central part of this entire story that maybe is not talked about enough is the fact that so many mainstream publications have completely overlooked really key pieces of evidence in this story," says Kopp. "We see a lot of health editors and health reporters prioritizing a tidy narrative about Anthony Fauci over providing the truth to their readers."

U.S. Right to Know is devoting significant resources to its "COVID-19 Origins" research with the mission of "investigating the origins of Covid-19, the risks of gain-of-function research and mishaps at Biolabs where pathogens of pandemic potentials are stored and manipulated."

Kopp has assembled a comprehensive timeline that lays out substantial evidence that Fauci, Collins, and a number of influential scientists misled the public. Whether or not the lab leak theory is correct, it's now clear that these public officials concealed their conflicts of interest with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and minimized their own roles in providing government funding for unsupervised gain-of-function research that may have led to the pandemic.

Among other things, Kopp's research has revealed that virologist Kristian Andersen, who didn't answer our interview request, wrote privately to Fauci that he and three other scientists thought that the virus that causes COVID-19 looked unnatural and "inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory." Just four days later, after participating in a series of teleconferences with Fauci and Collins, Andersen called the lab leak theory "crackpot."

Other emails revealed that Fauci knew that his agency was funding gain-of-function research with SARS-like coronaviruses in Wuhan by late January 2020, yet he publicly denied it before Congress 18 months later, claiming that the research didn't meet the U.S. government's technical definition of research that aims "to increase the ability of infectious agents to cause disease by enhancing its pathogenicity or by increasing its transmissibility."

In an October 2021 letter to Congress, NIH Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak admitted that the NIH had funded a grant to an NGO called EcoHealth Alliance that was working with scientists in Wuhan. These experiments resulted in mice becoming sicker when infected with a lab-manipulated coronavirus that had a known ability to bind to human receptors. EcoHealth Alliance has claimed that because this result was "unexpected," it wasn't gain-of-function research. But the organization didn't cease experimentation after achieving these results. The NIH sent EcoHealth Alliance compliance letters two years after receiving the data about the enhanced virus, but NIH leadership didn't pull the funding.

"For some reason, NIH carved out this exception to its own gain-of-function regulations for EcoHealth Alliance," says Kopp. "There are also real questions about whether EcoHealth Alliance has published all of the data it has access to, which is, I think really scandalous because EcoHealth Alliance…accepts our public tax dollars."

Emails between U.S. scientists and those working in the Wuhan lab confirm that many viral sequences from that lab remained unpublished as of 2021.

The question of COVID-19's origins still remains an open one. In February of 2022, The New York Times published an article citing new research claiming "dispositive evidence" for the theory that the virus originated at the Wuhan market. But after peer review, those findings are far less conclusive.

The lab leak deception

Public officials concealed their conflicts of interest and role in funding research that may have caused the pandemic, says health reporter Emily Kopp.

reason.com

 

[MT15]

How did the tyrannical CCP in China do with their total lockdown and herd vaccinations an the no covid policy work? So there was in fact no way to stop the virus as your medical experts told (lied) to you.

And you follow it up with that because I didn't believe your people and take an experimental shot that I killed those that did the experimental shot that was supposed to stop them from getting the virus. How does that work exactly in your mind?

What was the going narrative on vaccine side effects when they came out and your side wanted to force everyone to take it?

So China didn’t use the mRNA vaccines, they developed their own. It didn’t work. So no, their whole strategy didn’t work. Their lockdowns were draconian, but they did work, for a while. If their vaccine had been as good as either one of our mRNA vaccines, they would have been better off than we were. But because their vaccine was crap, their strategy failed. They have contributed to global inflation because of their failure.

I don’t believe I ever said you killed anyone. But it’s indisputable that people have died because they refused to take the vaccines. Not a few, but maybe into the hundreds of thousands. And the vaccines have full approval now, so you can stop calling them experimental. Billions of people have taken the vaccines by now.

As I said before - the vaccines did what they were designed to do on the original strain. When it mutated into the Delta strain they still worked, but at a reduced capacity. This is normal for vaccines and to be expected. The vaccines still protected against hospitalization and death at a really high rate on both Delta and Omicron.

There aren’t any significant side effects from the mRNA vaccines.

 

[MT15]

Speaking of debunking, this article and video do a pretty good job of debunking the narrative that the lab leak theory is a conspiracy theory.

Journalists and scientists routinely dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as a crackpot theory and even as "racist," up until the summer of 2021 when science journalist Nicholas Wade published an influential article, and a viral rant by Jon Stewart pushed it into the mainstream. Until that point, social media platforms had been removing or throttling posts that took it seriously. Anthony Fauci, who didn't respond to our interview request, said it wasn't worth even considering the possibility that COVID could have originated in a lab.

More recently, emails made public through the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that Fauci, National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins, and other prominent public officials took the possibility of a lab origin far more seriously than they were letting on.

"Top virologists, sort of giants in this field, were looking at the genome and freaking out, basically," says health reporter Emily Kopp, who works at the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know, an organization that has obtained thousands of pages of official documents and correspondence, some of which reveal an orchestrated effort by scientists to downplay the lab leak theory. It's also extensively analyzed emails obtained via a lawsuit by Buzzfeed's Jason Leopold that reveal the huge disconnect between what health officials were telling the public and what they were saying in private.

"A really central part of this entire story that maybe is not talked about enough is the fact that so many mainstream publications have completely overlooked really key pieces of evidence in this story," says Kopp. "We see a lot of health editors and health reporters prioritizing a tidy narrative about Anthony Fauci over providing the truth to their readers."

U.S. Right to Know is devoting significant resources to its "COVID-19 Origins" research with the mission of "investigating the origins of Covid-19, the risks of gain-of-function research and mishaps at Biolabs where pathogens of pandemic potentials are stored and manipulated."

Kopp has assembled a comprehensive timeline that lays out substantial evidence that Fauci, Collins, and a number of influential scientists misled the public. Whether or not the lab leak theory is correct, it's now clear that these public officials concealed their conflicts of interest with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and minimized their own roles in providing government funding for unsupervised gain-of-function research that may have led to the pandemic.

Among other things, Kopp's research has revealed that virologist Kristian Andersen, who didn't answer our interview request, wrote privately to Fauci that he and three other scientists thought that the virus that causes COVID-19 looked unnatural and "inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory." Just four days later, after participating in a series of teleconferences with Fauci and Collins, Andersen called the lab leak theory "crackpot."

Other emails revealed that Fauci knew that his agency was funding gain-of-function research with SARS-like coronaviruses in Wuhan by late January 2020, yet he publicly denied it before Congress 18 months later, claiming that the research didn't meet the U.S. government's technical definition of research that aims "to increase the ability of infectious agents to cause disease by enhancing its pathogenicity or by increasing its transmissibility."

In an October 2021 letter to Congress, NIH Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak admitted that the NIH had funded a grant to an NGO called EcoHealth Alliance that was working with scientists in Wuhan. These experiments resulted in mice becoming sicker when infected with a lab-manipulated coronavirus that had a known ability to bind to human receptors. EcoHealth Alliance has claimed that because this result was "unexpected," it wasn't gain-of-function research. But the organization didn't cease experimentation after achieving these results. The NIH sent EcoHealth Alliance compliance letters two years after receiving the data about the enhanced virus, but NIH leadership didn't pull the funding.

"For some reason, NIH carved out this exception to its own gain-of-function regulations for EcoHealth Alliance," says Kopp. "There are also real questions about whether EcoHealth Alliance has published all of the data it has access to, which is, I think really scandalous because EcoHealth Alliance…accepts our public tax dollars."

Emails between U.S. scientists and those working in the Wuhan lab confirm that many viral sequences from that lab remained unpublished as of 2021.

The question of COVID-19's origins still remains an open one. In February of 2022, The New York Times published an article citing new research claiming "dispositive evidence" for the theory that the virus originated at the Wuhan market. But after peer review, those findings are far less conclusive.

The lab leak deception

Public officials concealed their conflicts of interest and role in funding research that may have caused the pandemic, says health reporter Emily Kopp.

reason.com

This is an old article that describes the normal questioning process that happened when the lab leak theory was being explored. Very recently studies have discredited the lab leak theory.

When I first said that the lab leak theory had recently been discredited, weren’t you the one who posted a 1 1/2 year old article about Biden requesting that the theory be investigated and ask, then why did Biden say this? Then you turn around and say that Biden suppressed the lab leak theory. This is why it’s hard to take you seriously on this. You’re all over the place.

 

[UriUT]

So China didn’t use the mRNA vaccines, they developed their own. It didn’t work. So no, their whole strategy didn’t work. Their lockdowns were draconian, but they did work, for a while. If their vaccine had been as good as either one of our mRNA vaccines, they would have been better off than we were. But because their vaccine was crap, their strategy failed. They have contributed to global inflation because of their failure.

I don’t believe I ever said you killed anyone. But it’s indisputable that people have died because they refused to take the vaccines. Not a few, but maybe into the hundreds of thousands. And the vaccines have full approval now, so you can stop calling them experimental. Billions of people have taken the vaccines by now.

As I said before - the vaccines did what they were designed to do on the original strain. When it mutated into the Delta strain they still worked, but at a reduced capacity. This is normal for vaccines and to be expected. The vaccines still protected against hospitalization and death at a really high rate on both Delta and Omicron.

There aren’t any significant side effects from the mRNA vaccines.

I saw a little while ago that China demands that pfizer give them the technique and formula of their covid vaccine. Lol

I think folks are a little under appreciative of this mrna technique to produce vaccines. Surely beats incubating via eggs.

 

[UriUT]

This is an old article that describes the normal questioning process that happened when the lab leak theory was being explored. Very recently studies have discredited the lab leak theory.

When I first said that the lab leak theory had recently been discredited, weren’t you the one who posted a 1 1/2 year old article about Biden requesting that the theory be investigated and ask, then why did Biden say this? Then you turn around and say that Biden suppressed the lab leak theory. This is why it’s hard to take you seriously on this. You’re all over the place.

Conspiracy theories to distract from the failure of the last administration to react appropriately. I would say that's censorship of appropriate discussion of the covid virus. Energy having to correct and veer the discussion towards continuous rabbit holes.

 

[SaulGoodmanEsq]

People thinking Fauci is anything other than a civil servant who (understandably) got in over his head are deluding themselves to paint the world in their own narrative.

 

[Farb]

I saw a little while ago that China demands that pfizer give them the technique and formula of their covid vaccine. Lol

I think folks are a little under appreciative of this mrna technique to produce vaccines. Surely beats incubating via eggs.

I think the mrna tech is great and will be very benifitial down the road. I just don't think the roll out and the tech might not be just there yet, but you are right, they are close and that tech is a great thing for the future.

 

[Farb]

People thinking Fauci is anything other than a civil servant who (understandably) got in over his head are deluding themselves to paint the world in their own narrative.

He did make a lot of money for being in over his head and that led to just about all incorrect calls on how to manage that pandemic.

 

[MT15]

I think the mrna tech is great and will be very benifitial down the road. I just don't think the roll out and the tech might not be just there yet, but you are right, they are close and that tech is a great thing for the future.

The roll out was rushed by necessity. When you have something revolutionary like that and around what, 50,000 people a week were dying at that time? You go with it. The vaccines are just fine. They worked exactly as intended, it wasn’t until the virus mutated that we started having breakthrough infections. And they couldn’t have foreseen how the virus was going to mutate ahead of time. All they had to go on was the original strain.

The technology will probably improve, but there isn’t anything wrong with it now either.

 

[Farb]

The roll out was rushed by necessity. When you have something revolutionary like that and around what, 50,000 people a week were dying at that time? You go with it. The vaccines are just fine. They worked exactly as intended, it wasn’t until the virus mutated that we started having breakthrough infections. And they couldn’t have foreseen how the virus was going to mutate ahead of time. All they had to go on was the original strain.

The technology will probably improve, but there isn’t anything wrong with it now either.

The jab worked exactly as intended? Do you mean they were never intended to actually stop the spread? That is correct because the BigPharma are actually saying that now.
Then why were we told the complete opposite of that over and over by our health 'officials'? To me, that is what needs to be investigated and my hope after this Tuesday, we will have that looked into.

 

[MT15]

The jab worked exactly as intended? Do you mean they were never intended to actually stop the spread? That is correct because the BigPharma are actually saying that now.
Then why were we told the complete opposite of that over and over by our health 'officials'? To me, that is what needs to be investigated and my hope after this Tuesday, we will have that looked into.

- I feel like you aren’t understanding what the mutation meant or the significance of it.

There were definitely some unknown factors with a new vaccine. I cannot help it if you didn’t and don’t understand what was said. I do remember a lot of caveats when the vaccines first came out, and that they did stop the spread initially. As I keep saying - Delta was essentially a new ball game. We lucked out in that the mRNA vaccines still protected very well against serious disease and death. The mutation could have been such that the virus would evade the immunity from the vaccines entirely. And then we would have seen much more death and serious illness than we did.

I think maybe people who aren’t biologists or virologists probably over-simplify the process of immunity. It’s not a light switch. It‘s more like an internal combustion engine, with lots of moving parts and the ability to run without being completely tuned up. Once Delta emerged, our immunity was like an engine not quite running on all cylinders. It had just enough power to get us there - we could avoid death and serious illness - but it wasn’t running well enough to prevent mild infections or completely stop the spread at that point.

 

[SaulGoodmanEsq]

He did make a lot of money for being in over his head and that led to just about all incorrect calls on how to manage that pandemic.

Fittingly enough, even science is not an exact science. Especially when dealing with a new virus. If only it were as infallible as religion...

And I'm not aware of any money he made outside of his salary. Is he getting some kickbacks or something?