define oppose. I think we still can't know but the possibility of the lab escape certainly has gone up, compared to a year ago when most people were thrown off by the Lancet study claiming it couldn't have been engineered.

It's also possible it wasn't engineered and escaped the lab all the same.

And it's also still possible it came about naturally.

As I noted earlier, one of the problems is undisclosed Intel is supposed to support the lab theory and it's flatly denied by China. It's likely we'll never know because we're not getting all the available information to begin with.

It wasn't too long ago the very mention of the theory would result in censorship on social media, and those who did believe it were derided as deluded conspiracy theorists. At any rate, we were not really allowed to talk about it wherever people controlled the discourse.

I’m not aware of the Lancet study, but the one article in The Lancet that condemned the theory immediately raised my own suspicion.

Why would it raise suspicion? Generally the lancet is a good peer review journal and I think for laymen to trust it is a reasonable heuristic.

I find that scientists who rails against misinformation, dissent and wrong-think are worried more about their politics and power than any science. But put simply, their theory was yet to be proven.

Please have short, and often selective memories;


From the BBC, 5/1/20:

At the White House on Thursday, Mr Trump was asked by a reporter: "Have you seen anything at this point that gives you a high degree of confidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the origin of this virus?"

"Yes, I have. Yes, I have," said the president, without specifying. "And I think the World Health Organization [WHO] should be ashamed of themselves because they're like the public relations agency for China."

He also told reporters: "Whether they [China] made a mistake, or whether it started off as a mistake and then they made another one, or did somebody do something on purpose?"

This is typical Trump bullshit - "I know but a can't tell you". He does not go so far as to claim it was released on purpose, but by raising the question he suggests it was. If he really did know what happened then it seems likely he would know whether or not it was released intentionally.

This is a very different picture than simply inquiring about its origin and denying the lab origin based on the evidence available at the time.

And that's the problem. Indeed there has been a conspiracy. The one where China wasn't open and truthful about the epidemic at the first place. — ssu

All that you describe here is a typical reaction to anything out of the ordinary in China. Assuming the prevailing natural origin hypothesis, this is exactly how you would expect authorities there to act. This is no evidence or even a cause for suspicion, one way or another. And all this has been known and documented, there haven't been any significant new revelations emerging lately.

As so many Republicans talk about the lab theory, the unfortunate will happen and this topic will irredeemably be made a US political partisanship issue. — ssu

Yes, unfortunately, everything about the pandemic has been highly politicized right from the start. And outside politics, you can see how the depressingly predictable dynamics unfolds: people get into arguments on- and offline, stake out positions, which then polarize and harden to the point where no evidence or reason has any chance of changing minds.

Sydney should have had a hard lockdown a week ago.

It's be over now.

Yes, unfortunately, everything about the pandemic has been highly politicized right from the start. And outside politics, you can see how the depressingly predictable dynamics unfolds: people get into arguments on- and offline, stake out positions, which then polarize and harden to the point where no evidence or reason has any chance of changing minds. — SophistiCat

If you would just erase away the US debate and just focus on what it has been in other Western countries (and somehow they wouldn't be influenced by the vitriolic US narrative), that would be a healthy start. Trump messed so much up (which was actually what many of his voters wanted him to do).

But yes, the problem then can become that people simply have separate narrative which are based on separate totally opposite data, which makes it hard to know just what the facts are. And that might be an objective for some. And political incentives create a base why there is no reason to try to reach an objective truth on the matter.

I learnt this following the debate around nuclear energy in Europe. The totally different realities could be seen from things like asking just how many people died in the Chernobyl accident. If the UN states that it caused 4 000 long term deaths and Greenpeace argues that it caused over 1 million deaths...

Sydney should have had a hard lockdown a week ago. — Banno

Should be ok. The most vulnerable are already vaccinated. Every now and then it takes out an otherwise healthy young person. That info should go out to light a fire under those delaying vaccination.

Here is a historical case where a lab leak was passed off as a natural disaster. It took a regime change for the truth to come out: Soviets Once Denied a Deadly Anthrax Lab Leak. U.S. Scientists Backed the Story. (Open the link in incognito/private window if you run into a paywall.)

Great article.

A lab leak happening in the Soviet Union (or China) will automatically create a discussion on how safe our laboratories are and if they ought to study such things. And some will think this will be very bad and assume people cannot fathom that safety-cultures really differ from place to place. So there is a reason why to go along with the official line, even if privately you are suspicious about it.

With for example the public discussion around nuclear energy, I do understand these fears.

Should be ok. — frank

Nuh. Melbourne got it right. It's getting away from Berejiklian. She fucked up.

Israel had 80% of their population vaccinated, so they opened up to tourism and immediately had an outbreak of the delta variant. Even vaccinated people got it, but they didn't get very sick.

I hope it doesn't get bad in Australia, but those people need to get vaccinated.

A dual fuck up; failing to mount an effective vaccination program at the Federal level and failing to lock down at the state level.

Both the result of adherence to Liberal ideology.

Fucking liberals.

Fucking liberals — frank

No; Fucking Liberals.

Edit: It's not liberal philosophy that is to blame here. Liberal philosophy could have quite happily followed the science and vaccinated as many as possible and locked the city down ten days ago. What is to blame is the Liberal Party of Australia's adherence to an ideology.

They're like Trump supporters?

It appears that Canadian soldiers participating in the military world games in Wuhan were getting sick with covid-like symptoms back in October of 2019. They said Wuhan was a ghost town, almost as if it was on lockdown. The communist party lied, of course, and told them it was like a ghost town just to make it easier for the athletes to get around. Commies lied; people died.

https://financialpost.com/diane-francis/diane-francis-canadian-forces-have-right-to-know-if-they-got-covid-at-the-2019-military-world-games-in-wuhan

Getting vaccinated doesnt keep you from spreading the delta variant. It just lowers your risk of death.

It's survival of the fittest time in the US.

I thought vaccination did lower spread as well, since not everybody gets sick and asymptomatic infection happens but also at a lower rate than symptomatic?

I hope I am not misplacing the context. IOW there were potentially good reasons to support the CCP line, because of people, read US citizens, not realizing that important research like this can be carried out well in the US for example. Here however we have a situation where one of the key people deciding to support the CCP line was Fauci, who was supporting research in that Chinese lab, which included gain of function research that is illegal in the US. Someone else, who could not be judged as having made errors in collaborating with an unsafe lab, should have made that call. And then also, if it wasn't gain of function research (on Corona viruses in bats), shouldn't he have pushed to do the research in the US? where it would be safer? And there were warnings from two US state dept. officials before the pandemic started that the lab did not follow or did not have good safety protocols. IOW it would have been several mistakes, not just the choice to do the research there in the first place, but also to continue.

A secondary weakness, I think, with this defense is...it leads to more distrust. If all this was a kind of noble lie, and the people arguing that (thinking more of any government official arguing it rather than someone like you) the have to take some serious responsibility for conspiracy theories. You can't sell bat soup as a well grounded, rational hypothesis while not only immediately the Wuhan lab hypothesis as mere conspiracy theory AND do this with either your request or tacit expectation that digital media will remove posts and videos about the lab hypothesis AND publish fact checker denials that this is a mere conspiracy theory

and not consider yourself responsible, in part, for many conspiracy theories to come.

From them, and not from you, this becomes a kind of 'hey, I had to lie, because you are irrational excuse. But then since rational arguments and statement were treated as irrational. Fact checkers used faulty logic and acted as if they knew for sure that this had been debunked, you have undermined a fundamental trust on many levels. It would be short term gain for long term losses. which of course is a pretty common formula in politics and business.

The last point I would make is this defense assumes it knows the motives of the people involved. Which at this point would be mind reading. Kind of a reverse conspiracy theory. These people meet in secret and make benevolent decisionsl. Or email in secret. There's no need for smoke filled rooms anymore.

I thought vaccination did lower spread as well, since not everybody gets sick and asymptomatic infection happens but also at a lower rate than symptomatic? — Benkei

I was talking specifically about the delta variant. Our experience so far suggests that herd immunity doesn't exist for this variant. Both the previously infected and vaccinated can carry it.

Does vaccination help by reducing the viral load people are exposed to? I think it would have to.

You can't sell bat soup as a well grounded, rational hypothesis while not only immediately the Wuhan lab hypothesis as mere conspiracy theory AND do this with either your request or tacit expectation that digital media will remove posts and videos about the lab hypothesis AND publish fact checker denials that this is a mere conspiracy theory — Bylaw

This is the problem. And that those who have a lot to lose (who even might face legal suits) then being on the WHO team looking at the Wuhan lab possibility doesn't raise the confidence.

The confidence can be also lost by the totally absurd line when the pandemic erupted that "masks don't work". That was the low point of trying not to have people hoarding them when even health care workers had problems to get them. A far better line would have been: "Masks work, but now there is such a bottleneck in the production that we advise ordinary people not to use them before the supply issues are resolved". Face the truth, say how things are. (And btw, market mechanism did work and now there are enough masks)

This isn't helping much as there are so many totally bonkers views spreading distrust about vaccination and about modern medicine in general. Unfortunately public discourse is totally incapable of separating the loony from the more credible arguments and the typical line today is to censure everything by simple algorithms.

So, I'm seeing that the Delta strand is now ravaging the world. It's already pretty ugly in the UK, South Africa is a disaster as well as South America and the Caribbean.

It looks like the US will be quite ugly given 6 weeks or so. Damn, this is very long...

I see socialization of costs by those who hate socialism. I really don't have a problem with people getting what they have coming to them. I just wish they'd keep it to themselves. If I die from the vaccine, I'm not killing anyone else because I took it.

That's the problem. And I understand that people want a life and are tired of confinement and local business are having a horrible time. That's to be granted.

But it's as you say, the carelessness of other people can cost the life of me or my loved ones. And the damn virus would be much weaker by now if everybody got a vaccine.

As long as many people continue to resist vaccination, the longer this will go, quite apart from the severe problems of vaccine distribution in developed vs developing countries, which all but guarantees this will go on for quite a while.

I guess a compromise would be best: keep things partially open, no masks in OPEN places in which other people are far away, that kind of thing. But to have sports stadiums full of people, or in door restaurants, is quite risky.

And the damn virus would be much weaker by now if everybody got a vaccine. — Manuel

I also believe it would have disappeared without the vaccine if everyone would have done what they were told. I know damn well how offensive that phrase is, and I hate it myself: "do what you're told." But once you politicize something, all bets are on: on your life, your neighbors life, etc. All you have left is karma and I don't even have a clue if that is something I even believe in. Oh well, the toothpaste is out of the tube.

An example of the conundrums: Fauci says "don't were a mask" when he really means "save the masks for the health care workers" because he doesn't want a run on masks (ala shit paper). He knows that if he said what he meant, every mask would disappear, ala the tragedy of the commons. In other words, he is correctly anticipating the stupid people. But then, later, when masks are spun up, he says wear them. Then all the stupid people think they caught him in an inconsistency. And we fight over shit like that, and where it came from, blah, blah, blah. I know civilians aren't subject to the ethos of the military but when the Sgt. says this and you want to argue with him, you get your head shot off or you get someone else' head shot off. I love to question authority but I try not to do it at someone else' expense. And I try to believe the Sgt. isn't out to get me.

Yeah, Fauci could have said what he should have said, but it wouldn't have made a difference. Only Trump could have done that to an extent, in relation to the stupid people. Problem is, outside the US, lots of countries in Europe listen to Fauci, and that could have well helped the deniers.

But outside of totalitarian countries and a few exceptions in Asia and Oceania, there is a segment of the population who just don't listen. I don't know when such attitude could lead to charges of second degree murder.

And who knows if the mutation after the Delta variant will be much worse. Just mind-boggling.

And who knows if the mutation after the Delta variant will be much worse. — Manuel

:100:

I know what Trump could have done with a PSA, a white mask of any caliber, and a cigarette. But no, just be Trump.

:roll:

Good riddance. He murdered several hundreds of thousands of his countrymen/woman and yet they are the ones that riot against him losing an election.

But he was not alone, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Modi in India, Johnson in Britain, etc.

And we all pay the price for such sycophants.