Of course, the PRC covered up the origins of a killer virus and refused to allow for outside inspections, thereby hampering the global response.

let's say that china actually DID cover up the origin of the killer virus, 100% certainty, no argument left proof, they lied, delayed global response, etcetc. every person on the planet is a victim, no question.

- what in actual realness is your idea of what should NOW happen?

That’s not science, it’s a coverup.

let's say that china actually DID cover up the origin of the killer virus, 100% certainty, no argument left proof, they lied, delayed global response, etcetc. every person on the planet is a victim, no question.

- what in actual realness is your idea of what should NOW happen?

Absolutely nothing is the answer. It just means Republicans (or whomever believes this is a major issue) can win a talking point. It means there's an evil boogeyman *other* that can be blamed.

Absolutely nothing is the answer. It just means Republicans (or whomever believes this is a major issue) can win a talking point. It means there's an evil boogeyman *other* that can be blamed.

You didn't answer BBC's question on what should be done if COVID did in fact originate in a lab in Wuhan. I assume that's because you don't have an answer to that, other than to use it as a verbal cudgel. Hence my answer.

Imagine if Russia!!! had donated millions of dollars to schools connected to Trump, as the PRC did with Biden via the Universities of Pennsylvania and Delaware? No impeachment and conviction would have been fast enough for some here.

509. cHiEf iMpaCt oFfiCEr JE Posted: February 27, 2023 at 04:33 PM (#6118905)

You didn't answer BBC's question on what should be done if COVID did in fact originate in a lab in Wuhan. I assume that's because you don't have an answer to that, other than to use it as a verbal cudgel. Hence my answer.

Because it was a ridiculous question coming from a "Who cares?!?" questioner.

But for kicks and giggles...

1. Everyone in the US public health sphere who participated in the cover-up should be investigated for criminal wrongdoing and, at minimum, be sh1tcanned from whatever gig they currently hold and, like healthcare workers who objected to being vaxxed, should also lose access to unemployment insurance.

2. American universities and research institutions should be prohibited from accepting funding from China.

3. Deny all non-tourist visa applications to doctors and researchers from China.

4. No US taxpayer $ should be appropriated to Chinese labs or other research facilities.

Of course, the Russian oligarchs bought a ton of Trump properties over the years, but I don't recall that count in any of the impeachment proceedings. Did I miss it?

- it is NOT a ridiculous question, seeing as how you and other people talk about this a LOT

HOW do you plan to have consequences for china without punishing ourselves more than them?

HOW do you plan to have consequences for china without punishing ourselves more than them?

Except Trump, who was a corporate real estate developer, has been investigated for everything under the sun, including accusations of Kremlin ties.

There can't be any substantive consequences for another nation's massive wrongdoing?

There may be an open question about the extent of Trump's ties to Russia, but there's no question that Russia was hoping for Trump's election.

What exactly do you see as China's massive wrongdoings?

I don’t recall Obama working on Moscow real estate during the campaign.

an this is why i say stuff like, WHAT should we actually DO (besides not having their electronic stuff and not giving them money for "research")

Good grief. How about starting with China covering up whatever evidence it has about the origin of the virus, as well as its flat refusal to let WHO conduct a more thorough probe than its faulty one from two years ago (most of the data used had been collected by Chinese scientists before a WHO team arrived to pore over the info).

What's the point, when you won't even endorse the considerably more minor demands posted?

Again, what would you actually do with that information?

Start with #509.

the phrase “It’s OK to be white” is a right-wing troll that originated in the forums of 4Chan. As the Washington Post chronicled in 2017, the term was originally intended as a covert way to force an overreaction from progressives, including liberal journalists, if it started to spread, which in turn would show “lefties” hate white people. Soon, signs did crop up on campuses and other places around the country. The hysteria never arrived, but as Mitchell notes, the Anti-Defamation League did mark the phrase a “hate slogan”—reasonably, given that it was white supremacists (most notably David Duke) who really ran with the 4Chan prank in the first place.

Rasmussen apparently assumed its audience would be too stupid to know any of that, and in the case of Scott Adams, it was clearly right

From the 2021 report, it does not appear that one undecided agency picking a lane would have much impact on the intelligence community’s overall assessment. That’s because, different conclusions aside, the agencies actually agreed on a lot.

Lab leak or not, they agreed with full confidence that COVID was not a biological weapon and were confident that China did not see the pandemic coming. Most agencies also agreed that COVID wasn’t genetically engineered, leaving less nefarious lab-leak options like mis-handling animals or viruses.

The agencies also agreed on what shape a smoking gun would take. To prove a lab-leak theory, they would need evidence, “that a laboratory in Wuhan was handling SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor virus before COVID-19 emerged.” To prove the natural spread hypothesis, they would need evidence that “allows them to determine the specific pathway for initial natural contact with an animal,” states the report.
[...]
since the original intelligence agency report, there has been new evidence for natural spread. Two related papers published in Science in July 2022 combined epidemiologic methods and genomics to map the earliest known COVID cases. They found that cases centered on one particular live-animal market in Wuhan, China, and that two slightly different variants emerged there within a few weeks. This implies that the virus was mutating in infected animals being sold on-site, rather than originating in research labs across the river.

The lab-leak debate has raged for three years now, without reaching a universally accepted resolution. There may not be a conclusive answer for a while: It took 29 years to definitively identify the source of Ebola, 26 years for HIV/AIDS, and 15 years for SARS.
[...]
The lab-leak debate, regardless of which side is right, has little to contribute to the question of where the threat of future pandemics lies or how to respond to that threat. The public health implications of the debate are already settled: Few scientists on either side would argue against the conventional wisdom that the major source of the threat of future pandemics is spillover of pathogens from animals to people. And few would argue against the need for tight safety precautions at laboratories doing research on potentially deadly microbes.
[...]
Most mass media have reported the lab-leak debate as a bitter debate between two groups of scientists. In fact, the debate is asymmetrical. On the one side, the overwhelming weight of opinion among virologists, epidemiologists, evolutionary biologists, and other scientists with experience and expertise in studying epidemic viral diseases is that COVID reached humans directly from an animal host or hosts. Although a few such experts have supported the lab-leak side, the most prominent proponents of a lab-leak origin are journalists, economists and public policy experts, politicians, postdoctoral fellows, and more-senior scientists who lack relevant expertise or experience.
[...]
Even the concept of a lab leak has been a shifting target: Initially, the concern was often that the source of SARS-CoV-2 was bioweapon research. Later, accusations flew that SARS-CoV-2 had been created by laboratory manipulation of less dangerous viruses. Other voices raised suspicions about sloppy handling of virus-bearing bats or carelessness with lab samples or problems arising in the course of testing a vaccine.
[...]
The animal-origin story is much more complex: What animals are natural reservoirs for the virus? Why didn’t those animals die before passing the disease on to us? What other kinds of animals did they transmit it to? How did the animal disease evolve to become deadly to humans? How did people come into contact with sick animals? Why are diseases that start in animals occurring more often and spreading more rapidly than in the past? If the disease were already in animals, why didn’t people catch it sooner? Why are there reports of people who may have been ill with what was later called COVID-19, several months before the pandemic emerged? Why haven’t we found animals in the Wuhan wet market with the virus? And so forth.

The answers to these questions are not simple

An analysis by experts from the U.S. national laboratory complex — including members of a storied team known as Z-Division — prompted the Energy Department to change its view earlier this year about the likely cause of the 2019 coronavirus outbreak, the officials said. Though initially undecided about covid-19’s origins, Energy officials concluded as part of a new government-wide intelligence assessment that a lab accident was most likely the triggering event for the world’s worst pandemic in a century.

But other intelligence agencies involved in the classified update — completed in the past few weeks and kept under wraps — were divided on the question of covid-19’s origins, with most still maintaining that a natural, evolutionary “spillover” from animals was the most likely explanation. Even the Energy Department’s analysis was carefully hedged, as the officials expressed only “low confidence” in their conclusion, according to U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a classified report.

The overall view — that there is as yet no definitive conclusion on the virus’s origin — has not changed since the release of an earlier version of the report by the Biden administration in 2021, according to the officials.

“The bottom line remains the same: Basically no one really knows,” one of the officials said. ...

U.S. officials confirmed that an updated assessment of covid-19’s origins was completed this year, and said the document was based on fresh data as well as new analysis by experts from eight intelligence agencies and the National Intelligence Council.

But the agencies are united, the official said, in the view that the virus was not man-made or developed as a bioweapon.

“‘Lab’ does not equal ‘man-made,’ the official said. “Even if it was a leak from a lab, they still think it would be a naturally occurring virus.” ...

Neither of the leading theories — a natural spillover or a lab leak — have been conclusively validated, in part because of China’s refusal to allow independent investigators access to environmental samples and other raw data from the earliest weeks of the outbreak. ...

OTOH it's hard not to be suspicious of a country that's blocked any sort of independent inspection:
Neither of the leading theories — a natural spillover or a lab leak — have been conclusively validated, in part because of China’s refusal to allow independent investigators access to environmental samples and other raw data from the earliest weeks of the outbreak. ...

That said, the consensus among the virology community is pretty strongly on the side of natural spillover. The reason for this is not some kind of Big Brotherish groupthink, it's because their research has persuaded them it's the most likely explanation—and they're among the few with the scientific chops to fully understand the evidence.

How someone reaches - and then lives - in a world where nefarious cabals lurk around every corner is quite beyond me.

Were I similarly inclined, I might ask if people I don't like conspired to do GoF research to spread paranoia like a virus.

How someone reaches - and then lives - in a world where nefarious cabals lurk around every corner is quite beyond me.

Desperate to win back the Trump supporters, Fox News and the Fox Business Network turned at least a dozen times to a pro-Trump attorney named Sidney Powell who, when pressed for evidence, forwarded a memo entitled "Election Fraud Info" to Fox anchor Maria Bartiromo. Bartiromo hosted Powell on her Fox News show the day after receiving it.

The author of the memo in which Powell and Bartiromo put so much stock offered detailed and utterly false claims of how Dominion Voting Systems helped rig the election for Biden. She also shared a bit about herself, writing that she gains insights from experiencing something "like time-travel in a semi-conscious state."
[...]
Powell's source also volunteered that the wind tells her that she's a ghost, though she doesn't believe it.

Monkeys need no excuse or encouragement to do their dance.

Again, that’s only part of the renewed debate on the Lab Leak Theory. The other issue is the failure to properly investigate it in the first place, when those raising the issue (even those with impeccable scientific credentials) were ignored or denounced as racist for suggesting it was worthy of inquiry. That’s not science, it’s a coverup, and Congress (or other appropriate investigative body) should look at the role of those who funded & received federal funds for gain of function research in China.

FBI thinks otherwise.

Moving the goal post quite a bit there. The issue isn’t the precise certainty there now is on the Lab Leak Theory, or even what there may be in the future, but rather why it wasn’t seriously investigated in the first place, and why were those involved in funding gain of function research in China able to get others to derail reasonable efforts to investigate the matter by false claims of racism and other dubious tactics. Again, a coverup is a coverup.

Again, how is talking about this a LOT even remotely controversial? There can't be any substantive consequences for another nation's massive wrongdoing? If so, then why are we bothering to lift a finger to help Kyiv?

Right, so 499:1 for lab leak. Don't blame God for sloppy scientists doing dubious research.

563...The Bruins were outshot last night 55 to 20 and still won. Unlikely outcomes happen.

A Washington woman with tuberculosis who has refused treatment for over a year is set to be arrested as a result. According to the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, the woman had repeatedly disobeyed court orders to stay isolated until she completed treatment. A local judge has now issued a warrant for her arrest this Friday, and officials plan to treat her at a nearby detention facility.
[...]
In January 2022, for instance, the health department asked for and won its first court order that the woman be involuntarily isolated at home (outside of required medical care) until she was no longer considered a public health threat. The department argued that she had begun but stopped the months-long regimen of treatment needed to eradicate the bacteria and refused to continue. Over the next year, the woman reportedly flouted court orders to stay isolated. More recently, she was alleged to have visited an emergency department following a car accident, where she avoided telling staff that she had tuberculosis, potentially exposing them to infection.
[...]
“In each case like this, we are constantly balancing risk to the public and the civil liberties of the patient. Seeking to enforce a court order through a civil arrest warrant is always our last resort,” department spokesperson Nigel Turner told KOMO News. It’s reportedly only the third time in 20 years that Tacoma officials have sought someone’s arrest to force tuberculosis treatment.

Am I crazy to think that 3 arrest warrants in 20 years for TB quarantine indicates an alarmingly high rate of the disease in Tacoma?

Have the Chinese developed drugs widely used by us?