US Politics Thread 2021-24

[mapuc]

Thou more I read thou more I come think of a great author

John le Carré

If it wasn't written by you in our US politic thread I would think you was describing a book by John le Carré.

Markus

[Rockstar]

“China's Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), located just miles from the market where the first COVID-19 outbreak was detected, previously received funding from Fauci's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases via the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance.

The EcoHealth grant partially funded research at WIV that involved analyzing bat specimens collected from caves in China to study their potential for infecting humans. EcoHealth's work in China started in the aftermath of the 2002–2004 SARS epidemic, which also likely originated from bats.

Shi Zhengli, a lead researcher at WIV, was known from public documents to be conducting controversial gain-of-function experiments, which involve genetically modifying viruses to make them more infectious in an effort to better understand them, according to the Washington Post.

Shi has said that the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus that caused the pandemic does not match bat viruses that the lab had earlier sampled from caves in China. However, the Chinese government's lack of transparency about the early days of the outbreak has raised questions that weren't fully answered by a WHO-led investigation earlier this year.”

Originally Fauci contradicted the president’s thinking of the lab leak hypothesis and the liberals loved him for it. Why? Fauci now says it’s possible it was a lab leak. Why? When grilled by Senator Rand Paul the only defense the Democrat boot lickers hero had was to deflect, dodge and straw man arguments while desperately looking around for someone to come to his rescue. But with 4 million dead, nobody lifted a hand and I seriously doubt now anyone will touch him with a ten foot barge pole.

Tic toc tic toc, inner circles, low hanging fruit and all that.

[Buddahaid]

Even a broken watch is right twice a day. I will still believe peer reviewed science over political grandstanding.

[mapuc]

Originally Posted by Buddahaid

Even a broken watch is right twice a day. I will still believe peer reviewed science over political grandstanding.

Read somewhere that WHO was in a way owned by the Chinese.

Can we trust WHO then if this is correct and others who may say the same as WHO are they independent or are they just following WHO ?

What's true here I can't say.

Markus

[Reece]

Switzerland.

[Catfish]

Can we please finally put an end to all this bull and conspiracy sh!t?


I know it all is so boring without conpiracies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EcoHealth_Alliance


The LA Times (not only) writes:

"The new speculation about the origins of COVID-19 has caused some stock-taking by the press, which is accused of ridiculing the lab-leak theory in all its manifestations during 2020 merely because it was promoted by President Trump.

That’s treated as another strike against the “liberal media” supposedly marching in lock-step to disdain conservatives. The mainstream press, wrote Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine, “took Donald Trump’s bait, answering the former president’s dissembling with false certainty of their own.”

What’s missing from all this reexamination and soul-searching is a fundamental fact: There is no evidence — not a smidgen — for the claim that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory in China or anywhere else, or that the China lab ever had the virus in its inventory. There’s even less for the wildest version of the claim, which is that the virus was deliberately engineered. There never has been, and there isn’t now.

No one disputes that a lab leak is possible. Viruses have escaped from laboratories in the past, on occasion leading to human infection. But “zoonotic” transfers — that is, from animals to humans — are a much more common and well-documented pathway."

www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-06-03/lab-leak-covid-origin

@Rockstar
referring to your insinuated claim of me having an obsession with Trump: If he stopped talking bull i would maybe give more than a rat's anus about his or his minions' claims, but surely not as things were and are.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Catfish

What’s missing from all this reexamination and soul-searching is a fundamental fact: There is no evidence — not a smidgen — for the claim that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory in China or anywhere else, or that the China lab ever had the virus in its inventory. There’s even less for the wildest version of the claim, which is that the virus was deliberately engineered. There never has been, and there isn’t now.

I do not take sides in this discussion on Wuhan, becasue I know that I do not know for sure. I only point out, Catfish, that if China had invested efforts to hide its own originatorship, then it would be no wonder that there is no evidence as the quote above implies.

Fact is that the Chinese have lied a whole awesome lot, time and again. Fact is that they have hinderd the WHO team trying to research at location, and delayed their travels to China and then their reach into wanted places. Fact is that certain raw data they had been asked for had not been given, or not given before being heavily filtered by Chinese authorities. The completeness of these edited data sheets is seriously in doubt, too.

Then to just claim: "there is no evidence, so the suspicion is not true" - that is a bit thin.

China, that is the party, and the party if infallible, is always right, cannot err, always is in control, always can master things, always is the great protector from any harm, the giver of anythign good, the protector of the peoole, the shield of the Xi empire. They will never admit that it were them if it would be the case that indeed it were them. And they will move all heavens and all Earth to hide it.

In other words: the Chinese claims are worth nothing.

This does not prove their guilt nor their innocence. But it says that that quoted part simply is naive.


P.S. And think of this. Any state allowing to be held responsible for the pandemic, considering the costs in lives but also in economic development, financial losses, global disruptions, could make its testimony and then switch off the lights. There would be calls for compensations and reparations, punishement and retaliations, on a scale absolutely unimaginable. This could also easily lead to a third world war. Thats also a reason why China will always lie if they were responsible, and even lie if the evidence would be given in truckloads and then emptied right into and onto their faces they think are so precious to keep.

[Catfish]

^ Again, evidence?
I have no sympathy with the People's republic Xi Jinpings dictatorship of China, and their stand. But as far as i read in the Sc. American the virus may not even have originated in China but "somewhere else in South Asia". It seems to have spread from pangolins to bats, to humans. The risk of similar coronavirus outbreaks in the future remains high, more research is obviously needed.
Of course, a forensic analysis of whatever happened in the institute in Wuhan is not in the scope of virus scientists, nor do they have the means.

And now there's the lambda variation ..
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/texas-...ry?id=78943641

[Skybird]

"May not have" is not the same like "has not for sure".

Just minutes ago I red that British scientists just found a new Corona virus, new type, in bats in GB, and it is even a close relative to Sars Cov 2, apparently, though currently it cannot jump from bats to humans. But what does that prove pro or contra regarding the Wuhan thing?
Correct. Nothing.

The Chinese have every interest to let any possible evidence against them not being discovered, never. And they have lied, delayed, rejected, manipulated oin evertyhign regarding Corona, even persecuted their own scientists ringing the alarm on the pandemic early. They do not play with you, they play AGAINST you. Understand that.

That there is so far no evidence for the lab theory, means not much. Could be there is no cadaver and no murder happened. Could be the cadaver is well hidden just has not been found. Could be the cadaver has been dissolved in acid, and is no more.

[Rockstar]

It’s not the liberals favorite Wikipedia but for those with a rational mind it will do


https://childrenshealthdefense.org/d...tion-campaign/

The Defender is experiencing censorship on many social channels. Be sure to stay in touch with the news that matters by subscribing to our top news of the day. It's free.

For most of 2020, the notion that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, was treated as a thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory. Only conservative news media sympathetic to President Donald Trump and a few lonely reports dared suggest otherwise. But that all changed in the early months of 2021, and today most outlets across the political spectrum agree: the “lab leak” scenario deserves serious investigation.

Understanding this dramatic U turn on arguably the most important question for preventing a future pandemic, and why it took nearly a year to happen, involves understanding contemporary science journalism.

A conspiracy to label critics as conspiracy theorists

Scientists and reporters contacted by The BMJ say that objective consideration of COVID-19’s origins went awry early in the pandemic, as researchers who were funded to study viruses with pandemic potential launched a campaign labelling the lab leak hypothesis as a “conspiracy theory.”

A leader in this campaign has been Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit organization given millions of dollars in grants by the U.S. federal government to research viruses for pandemic preparedness. Over the years EcoHealth Alliance has subcontracted out its federally supported research to various scientists and groups, including around $600 000 (£434 000; €504 000) to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Shortly after the pandemic began, Daszak effectively silenced debate over the possibility of a lab leak with a February 2020 statement in the Lancet “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” said the letter, which listed Daszak as one of 27 coauthors. Daszak did not respond to repeated requests for comment from The BMJ.

“It’s become a label you pin on something you don’t agree with,” says Nicholas Wade, a science writer who has worked at Nature, Science and the New York Times. “It’s ridiculous, because the lab escape scenario invokes an accident, which is the opposite of a conspiracy.”

But the effort to brand serious consideration of a lab leak a “conspiracy theory” only ramped up.

Filippa Lentzos, codirector of the Centre for Science and Security Studies at King’s College, London, told the Wall Street Journal, “Some of the scientists in this area very quickly closed ranks.” She added, “There were people that did not talk about this, because they feared for their careers. They feared for their grants.”

Daszak had support. After he wrote an essay for the Guardian in June 2020 attacking the former head of MI6 for saying that the pandemic could have “started as an accident,” Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust and co-signer of the Lancet letter, promoted Daszak’s essay on Twitter, saying that Daszak was “always worth reading.”

Daszak’s behind-the-scenes role in orchestrating the statement in the Lancet came to light in November 2020 in emails obtained through freedom of information requests by the watchdog group U.S. Right To Know.

“Please note that this statement will not have EcoHealth Alliance logo on it and will not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person,” wrote Daszak in a February email, while sending around a draft of the statement for signatories. In another email, Daszak considered removing his name from the statement “so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way.”

Tell Schools/Universities No Vaccine Mandates for Children/Young Adults!
Several of the 27 scientists who signed the letter Daszak circulated did so using other professional affiliations and omitted reporting their ties to EcoHealth Alliance.

For Richard Ebright, professor of molecular biology at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a biosafety expert, scientific journals were complicit in helping to shout down any mention of a lab leak. “That means Nature, Science and the Lancet,” he says. In recent months he and dozens of academics have signed several open letters rejecting conspiracy theory accusations and calling for an open investigation of the pandemic’s origins.

“It’s very clear at this time that the term ‘conspiracy theory’ is a useful term for defaming an idea you disagree with,” says Ebright, referring to scientists and journalists who have wielded the term. “They have been successful until recently in selling that narrative to many in the media.”

The Lancet’s editor in chief, Richard Horton, did not respond to repeated requests for comment but, after The BMJ had sent him questions, the Lancet expanded Daszak’s conflicts of interest on the February statement and recused him from working on its task force looking into the pandemic’s origin.

The Lancet letter ultimately helped to guide almost a year of reporting, as journalists helped to amplify Daszak’s message and to silence scientific and public debate. “We’re in the midst of the social media misinformation age, and these rumors and conspiracy theories have real consequences,” Daszak told Science.

Months later in Nature, he again criticized “conspiracies” that the virus could have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and complained about “politically motivated organizations” requesting his emails.

That summer Scientific American, one of the oldest and best known popular science magazines in America, published a complimentary profile of Daszak’s colleague, Shi Zhengli, a center director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has been funded by EcoHealth Alliance.

EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology earned additional sympathetic reporting after the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) cancelled its grant to EcoHealth Alliance in April last year — allegedly on President Trump’s order — because of its ties to Wuhan, a decision protested by 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies. (The NIH has subsequently awarded EcoHealth Alliance new funding.)

Efforts to characterize the lab leak scenario as unworthy of serious consideration were far reaching, sometimes affecting reporting that had first appeared well before the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, in March 2020 Nature Medicine added an editor’s note (“Scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus”) to a 2015 paper on the creation of a hybrid version of a SARS virus, co-written by Shi.

Wade explains, “Science journalists differ a lot from other journalists in that they are far less skeptical of their sources and they see their main role as simply to explain science to the public.” This, he says, is why they began marching in unison behind Daszak.

The U turn

By the end of 2020, just a handful of journalists had dared to seriously discuss the possibility of a lab leak. In September, Boston magazine reported on a preprint that found the virus unlikely to have come from the Wuhan seafood market, as Daszak has argued, and that it seemed too well adapted to humans to have arisen naturally.

However, the story failed to garner much attention, similarly to a little noticed investigative report by the Associated Press in December that exposed how the Chinese government was clamping down on research into COVID-19’s origins.

In January this year, New York magazine ran a sprawling story detailing how the pandemic could have started with a leak from the lab in Wuhan.

The hypothetical scenario: “SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist’s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine.” Scientists and their media allies swiftly criticized the article.

But mainstream outlets from the New York Times to the Washington Post are now treating the lab leak hypothesis as a worthy question, one to be answered with a serious investigation. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Shi denied that her lab was ever involved in “gain of function” experiments (See: What is “Gain of Function research” below) that enhance a virus’s virulence.

But the newspaper reported that her lab had been involved in experiments that altered the transmissibility of viruses, alongside interviews with scientists who said that far more transparency was necessary to determine the truth of SARS-CoV-2’s origins.

[Rockstar]

A play by play of questioning how the Democrats man god of science and truth Fauci was able to continue funding gain of function experiments to his good friend Dr. Daszak and his cronies at EcoHealth Alliance..

Warning: NSFW LANGUAGE Jimmy goes on a potty mouth tirade

[Catfish]

I do not disagree with all you say, mind you, although i always ask myself what covid or a sack of rice has to do with "democrats". Wiki may have its flaws, but not as much as this

Originally Posted by Rockstar

It’s not liberals go too vault of truth Wikipedia but I guess it will have to do,
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/d...tion-campaign/"The Defender is experiencing censorship on many social channels.

One might say and rightly so:
"Overall, we rate the Children’s Health Defense a strong conspiracy and quackery level advocacy group that frequently promotes unsupported claims. We also rate them low for factual reporting due to the promotion of propaganda as well as several failed fact checks."

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/child...ealth-defense/

[Rockstar]

Originally Posted by Catfish

I do not disagree with all you say, mind you, although i always ask myself what covid or a sack of rice has to do with "democrats". Wiki may have its flaws, but not as much as this

One might say and rightly so:
"Overall, we rate the Children’s Health Defense a strong conspiracy and quackery level advocacy group that frequently promotes unsupported claims. We also rate them low for factual reporting due to the promotion of propaganda as well as several failed fact checks."

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/child...ealth-defense/

Shibbolethink?

[Buddahaid]

Originally Posted by Skybird

"May not have" is not the same like "has not for sure".

Just minutes ago I red that British scientists just found a new Corona virus, new type, in bats in GB, and it is even a close relative to Sars Cov 2, apparently, though currently it cannot jump from bats to humans. But what does that prove pro or contra regarding the Wuhan thing?
Correct. Nothing.

The Chinese have every interest to let any possible evidence against them not being discovered, never. And they have lied, delayed, rejected, manipulated oin evertyhign regarding Corona, even persecuted their own scientists ringing the alarm on the pandemic early. They do not play with you, they play AGAINST you. Understand that.

That there is so far no evidence for the lab theory, means not much. Could be there is no cadaver and no murder happened. Could be the cadaver is well hidden just has not been found. Could be the cadaver has been dissolved in acid, and is no more.

You can't prove a negative.

[Rockstar]

Originally Posted by Catfish

I do not disagree with all you say, mind you, although i always ask myself what covid or a sack of rice has to do with "democrats". Wiki may have its flaws, but not as much as this

One might say and rightly so:
"Overall, we rate the Children’s Health Defense a strong conspiracy and quackery level advocacy group that frequently promotes unsupported claims. We also rate them low for factual reporting due to the promotion of propaganda as well as several failed fact checks."

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/child...ealth-defense/

What does your biased bias fact checking tell you about the fact the so-called right wing Children’s Health Defence and a left wing socialist Jimmy Dore are saying the same thing?

What’s important is the content of the article not q- anonymous contributors on Wikipedia or what ones politics are.


Shibbolethink!