OT: COVID-19 thread #4

[DuckIII]

Conspiracy theory is just a saying to disrespect another opinion. Why is it a conspiracy to have a different opinion? Isn't it way more important and interesting to discuss the reasoning of someone's opinion and learn about other ideas, instead of just brushing it off?

Where do I draw the line? Which of the following am I to spend time learning about rather than dismissing?

Bush was behind 9/11 which was actually controlled demolition?

Sandy Hook and Aurora, CO are false flags and never happened?

The Holocaust never happened?

The Democratic Party and the liberal Hollywood and academic elite are run by a global cabal of cannibalistic child molesters?

Trump actually won the Presidency but on January 6th or some time February, I mean March, I mean sometime in August he will reveal the truth and sweepingly arrest said liberal child molesting cannibals?

COVID was never real and the vaccines contain microchips?

Just let me know.

[Michael Jackson]

I mean if you trusted the science and got the vaccine...why would you not trust the science behind the efficacy of it and stop wearing masks?

I stopped wearing mine. Still have one handy if people b*tch about it but noone has.

My opinion is that the length of "lockdown" and mask mandates were overkill (but sadly necessary). If the gov't was competent enough, they would have encouraged and developed rapid testing. Once you have blanket tested, you can isolate the pockets of outbreaks and protect the immunocompromised. Instead the virus became political. SMH.

If you have been vaccinated and are in good health, I see no major fear of going out without a mask, unless you did previously because of fear of catching other horrible strains of the flu. If you want to wear a mask you should absolutely do so though too. There is more than Covid to catch out there and it will protect to an extent against other airborne virus plus covid. I have zero issue either way with the way a person wants to proceed. If you have anxiety going out without a mask, why suffer that anxiety? If you have been vaccinated and hate masks, don't wear one.

In the past week, we have had more travel with work and going into customers etc... It is pretty much mask free everywhere I go now. Stores are still a split, but higher percentage no mask each and every day from what I have seen. Just do what makes you comfortable.

[HomoSapien]

you guys still wearing masks in public?

seems like the the train/bus are the only place the are mandatory now.
my building you're supposed to wear them in the lobby and public areas but not everyone is and no one is enforcing it.

but I'm still not totally comfortable in crowd of folks without it, esp if I'm close to people.

I'm still not sure it's really 'gone', I don't expect it to ever just vanish. I kinda think there are some variants and other mutations that are gonna hit in waves, esp when the weather gets colder and were locked inside and people are gathering sans masks.

I think we have always lived in a world where respatory viruses exists, but this is like a new generation of them on steroids that were years from really understanding. It will be interesting decades form now when we look back and see what we really have learned from this whole pandemic. I found it interesting when they discussed the 1918 pandemic during this pandemic and how we just don't have a lot of data and memories, stores from that pandemic because most of the peopel who died were poor folks no one cared about.

I'm still going with the mask. How about you?

Yeah, I'm feeling similar. I don't wear a mask outside and have recently done indoor dining (honestly didn't feel great about doing that yet), but I'm still wearing a mask at the grocery store. LA just lifted the mask ban on the 15th, but I'd say about 95% of the customers at my local Trader Joe's were still wearing masks. The Delta variant is in the back of my mind as a potential concern.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/two-doses-vaccine-highly-effective-against-delta-variant-u-k-n1270776

The new analysis found that two doses of the Pfizer vaccine were 96 percent effective against hospitalization from the Delta variant, and two doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine were 92 percent effective.

Random comments:
- This doesn't mean that if you had an mrna vaccine, you have a 4% chance of being hospitalized by the delta variant. It means you have 1/25th the chance of being hospitalized as an unvaccinated person.
- That doesn't even do it justice. Across the US, hospitals are reporting that the vaccinated people they are seeing are almost always older and immune compromised.

End result is that if you had a mrna vaccine and you are healthy, your chances of getting a severe case of covid are damn near zero.

Totally don't dispute or disagree with any of this. For me personally, it's just the mental side of getting back to normal. Where I live, things just opened up fully 48 hours ago. That said, I've done a ton of normal stuff lately -- went to the movies, played pickup basketball with strangers, indoor dining, went to the mall, etc.

[HomoSapien]

How disappointing is this:

Read on Twitter

[Ice Man]

Conspiracy theory is just a saying to disrespect another opinion.

If I carry on about how physicists are wrong about string theory, I don't deserve an audience, because that's gibberish. I don't know enough about the subject to have a valid viewpoint.

The same goes for vaccines. My view is useless, and unless you are trained deeply in the subject, so is yours.

[dice]

It has always felt odd to me that there had been a recent rise in anti-vaxxing conspiracy theories over the past few years leading up to Covid. Obviously, it could be purely coincidental, but with the way misinformation has been weaponized it does make me wonder if there's something more here.

This whole century, especially this whole covid situation, is a information war, are you sure who tells the truth?

Conspiracy theory is just a saying to disrespect another opinion. Why is it a conspiracy to have a different opinion? Isn't it way more important and interesting to discuss the reasoning of someone's opinion and learn about other ideas, instead of just brushing it off?





Sent from my POT-LX1 using RealGM mobile app

Try asking your primary care doctor what he or she thinks. There is no real information war - the facts are out there if you want them. There is certainly a misinformation war which is based on internet clicks and people trying to monetize crazy. Opinions aren't facts. You can say it is your opinion that the color red is actually green and that 9x9=82, but it doesn't make it true. Intelligent people are able to spot the phonies, but alas 49 percent of the planet has below average intelligence.

and intelligent humans can be ignorant of many things

[dice]

Below is a recent good article from Nature:
The COVID lab-leak hypothesis: what scientists do and don’t know
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01529-3?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=7511c53de9-briefing-dy-20210616&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-7511c53de9-45255538
There’s not yet any substantial evidence for a lab leak. Why are scientists still considering it?
What are the key arguments for a lab leak?
Is it suspicious that no animal has been identified as transmitting the virus to humans?
Is it suspicious that the WIV is in Wuhan?
Does the virus have features that suggest it was created in a lab?
etc

This is from Scientific American:
Why Scientists Tweak Lab Viruses to Make Them More Contagious
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-scientists-tweak-lab-viruses-to-make-them-more-contagious1/?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=747f58759f-briefing-dy-20210614&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-747f58759f-45255538

Is it suspicious that the WIV is in Wuhan?
Virology labs tend to specialize in the viruses around them, says Vincent Munster, a virologist at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories, a division of the National Institutes of Health, in Hamilton, Montana. The WIV specializes in coronaviruses because many have been found in and around China. Munster names other labs that focus on endemic viral diseases: influenza labs in Asia, haemorrhagic fever labs in Africa and dengue-fever labs in Latin America, for example. “Nine out of ten times, when there’s a new outbreak, you’ll find a lab that will be working on these kinds of viruses nearby,” says Munster.

Researchers note that a coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan isn’t surprising, because it’s a city of 11 million people in a broader region where coronaviruses have been found. It contains an airport, train stations and markets selling goods and wildlife transported there from around the region5 — meaning a virus could enter the city and spread rapidly.

This is either inaccurate or highly misleading. There are only 3 viral labs in the world working on coronaviruses as of 2019. Two of them are in the US, one is in Wuhan. Beyond that, Wuhan is far away from where the bat populations in China primarily are. Just as a crappy analogy, it would be like a lab in Ohio studying alligators and when one got out people saying "well alligators are native to the US, so that alligator in Ohio could have come from nature."

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins

Dr. Richard Ebright, board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, said that from the very first reports of a novel bat-related coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, it took him “a nanosecond or a picosecond” to consider a link to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Only two other labs in the world, in Galveston, Texas, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, were doing similar research. “It’s not a dozen cities,” he said. “It’s three places.”

i'm not questioning your overall thrust, but where the bat populations are isn't really relevant. it's where they're coming into contact with humans. and there's no denying the dangerousness of the wuhan markets. it would be interesting to have numbers in terms of commercial bat markets around the world

[dice]

I mean if you trusted the science and got the vaccine...why would you not trust the science behind the efficacy of it and stop wearing masks?

I stopped wearing mine. Still have one handy if people b*tch about it but noone has.

My opinion is that the length of "lockdown" and mask mandates were overkill (but sadly necessary). If the gov't was competent enough, they would have encouraged and developed rapid testing. Once you have blanket tested, you can isolate the pockets of outbreaks and protect the immunocompromised. Instead the virus became political. SMH.

If you have been vaccinated and are in good health, I see no major fear of going out without a mask, unless you did previously because of fear of catching other horrible strains of the flu. If you want to wear a mask you should absolutely do so though too. There is more than Covid to catch out there and it will protect to an extent against other airborne virus plus covid. I have zero issue either way with the way a person wants to proceed. If you have anxiety going out without a mask, why suffer that anxiety? If you have been vaccinated and hate masks, don't wear one.

In the past week, we have had more travel with work and going into customers etc... It is pretty much mask free everywhere I go now. Stores are still a split, but higher percentage no mask each and every day from what I have seen. Just do what makes you comfortable.

i feel like i was pretty vigilant during the whole thing. reported a few asses at the gym who were brazenly flouting mask requirements, pretty much avoided touching doorknobs when almost nobody was doing that (and which i will continue to do!). but given that i am fully vaxxed, once the mask requirements were lifted i was one of the first to take mine off. felt a little weird being one of the few at the gym or at trader joe's w/o a mask, but others quickly followed suit

weirdly, just a few days ago i tried to get some fries at buffalo wild wings while walking home. didn't have my mask with me, didn't think i needed it. all the employees, most of whom were in the very warm kitchen, were wearing masks. i was refused service. no big deal, but during the height of the pandemic many of the employees there were very lax about their mask wearing

[Dresden]

It's just way too coincidental that the first case of of Covid19 shows up down the street from that Wuhan lab that just happened to be doing gain of function research on bats with coronavirus. I think it's getting more and more obvious everyday what happened.

Oh yeah, then there's this.....

https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-on-sick-staff-at-wuhan-lab-fuels-debate-on-covid-19-origin-11621796228

The Wall Street Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch (of Faux news)...

Sent from my SM-F707U using RealGM mobile app

The WSJ is just one of hundreds of outlets that this story has been reported by..... Rupert Murdoch doesn't own all these. I mean this is getting to point of looking up and saying the sky is yellow and the sun is blue territory. There is just so much evidence pointing to the origin of the virus. Biden has finally called for an investigation after stopping the ones that were already going on.. nearly every scientific mind out there without bias is saying... "hey, on second thought, it sure looks like this is what happened"..

Like Duck just said. People need to stop politicizing this and just realize and speak the truth.

I'm not disputing the possibility of this being a lab leak, but I'm definitely not taking anything from Fox News as actual news either. Let's wait until a non right leaning publication confirms this.

Murdoch doesn't own these...

https://www.livescience.com/covid-lab-leak-wuhan.html

https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-medical-records-wuhan-lab-staff-sick-in-2019-2021-6

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210524/wuhan-lab-researchers-illness

To my knowledge, it's not true at all that "every scientific mind out there without bias is saying..."it sure looks like this is what happened" (meaning it came from a lab). I think that idea is being re-evaluated, but there still is no evidence whatsoever to substantiate that theory. As for the sick workers at Wuhan, the lead scientist from that lab recently gave a news conference and denied this, asking reporters to please tell her the names of the supposedly sick employees, and no one could.

[johnnyvann840]

The Wall Street Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch (of Faux news)...

Sent from my SM-F707U using RealGM mobile app

The WSJ is just one of hundreds of outlets that this story has been reported by..... Rupert Murdoch doesn't own all these. I mean this is getting to point of looking up and saying the sky is yellow and the sun is blue territory. There is just so much evidence pointing to the origin of the virus. Biden has finally called for an investigation after stopping the ones that were already going on.. nearly every scientific mind out there without bias is saying... "hey, on second thought, it sure looks like this is what happened"..

Like Duck just said. People need to stop politicizing this and just realize and speak the truth.

I'm not disputing the possibility of this being a lab leak, but I'm definitely not taking anything from Fox News as actual news either. Let's wait until a non right leaning publication confirms this.

Murdoch doesn't own these...

https://www.livescience.com/covid-lab-leak-wuhan.html

https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-medical-records-wuhan-lab-staff-sick-in-2019-2021-6

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210524/wuhan-lab-researchers-illness

To my knowledge, it's not true at all that "every scientific mind out there without bias is saying..."it sure looks like this is what happened" (meaning it came from a lab). I think that idea is being re-evaluated, but there still is no evidence whatsoever to substantiate that theory. As for the sick workers at Wuhan, the lead scientist from that lab recently gave a news conference and denied this, asking reporters to please tell her the names of the supposedly sick employees, and no one could.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/world/asia/china-covid-wuhan-lab-leak.html

Just try using common sense. The lead scientist at that lab is shady as far as I'm concerned She has been warned and chastised by many in the scientific community for her risky behavior. Of course she is going to deny this when she was the one in charge. I wouldn't believe anything that Shi Zhengli says. For years she has conducted risky experiments despite being warned by scientists around the World. Not to mention China as a country and their government is untrustworthy and as the Times put it "their habitual secrecy make her claims hard to validate". Ask yourself this... Why won't China allow an investigation into the lab? Why are they being so secretive? What are they hiding? Many are asking these questions today and not just right wing wackos. People from every political party and scientists everywhere are starting to change their tune about it.

By the way, the New York Times isn't exactly a conservative paper, quite the contrary.

[Dresden]

What do we do about the possibility or even likelihood that the virus began in a lab? Are there international laws against virus manipulation?

These are not rhetorical. I’ve pretty much ignored origin theories to this point because both theories seemed viable and it seemed far more important to me to focus on mitigations and treatment at the time.

I wonder where we go even if a consensus is formed that it was created in a lab. Unless the international community can determine the release was intentional (which to me is extremely hard to believe for a variety of reasons), what happens? Outlaw it internationally? Is it already outlawed? Create an international standard for security protocols?

The people I know in the “real world” seem to be politicizing this issue (shocker) and I don’t really understand why (again).

Quick summary:
- There are 3 labs in the world that investigate bat coronaviruses. Wuhan, North Carolina and Texas.
- There have been many known virus lab leaks across the world. Some in the US. At least twice, SARS-1 accidentally got out of a lab in China and infected people.
- Labs do "gain of function" experimentation on viruses. They find a virus and they try to teach it to infect human cells (for example), to see if its possible. This process is complicated but its functionally directed evolution. We do not know if Wuhan was doing this.
- There is a report on politico that the lab in Wuhan had found a new bat coronavirus that attached to ACE2 receptors.
- In general, bat coronaviruses don't just jump to humans and never do it well. There is almost always an intermediary species. For MERS, its camels. For OC43 it was cows. For N229E, it was alpacas. There are huge reservoirs of the viruses there. We never found the intermediary species for SARS-1 or covid19.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no smoking gun anywhere. Anyone who completely dismisses the possibility is playing a political angle at best. Many people focus on the "China" part of this but when you read about "gain of function" experimentation and the american leaks, I think the whole industry needs to get shut down. This is incredibly arrogant and dangerous with little benefit for humanity.

To your last point about bat coronaviruses not jumping to humans:

"Scientists had thought spillovers were rare — that bat coronaviruses weren't generally capable of infecting humans, so it took complicated steps. Step one: A bat coronavirus would have to infect some animal species that had closer contact with people than bats do. Step two: While in that other animal's body, the virus would need to pick up new genetic code.

But the sampling project found that those steps are not needed, says Olival.

"What we showed was that SARS-related viruses in these bat populations have the potential to go directly into human cells and do not need that extra mutational step [of] infecting another host."



https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/02/20/807742861/new-research-bats-harbor-hundreds-of-coronaviruses-and-spillovers-arent-rare

[Dresden]

This is either inaccurate or highly misleading. There are only 3 viral labs in the world working on coronaviruses as of 2019. Two of them are in the US, one is in Wuhan. Beyond that, Wuhan is far away from where the bat populations in China primarily are. Just as a crappy analogy, it would be like a lab in Ohio studying alligators and when one got out people saying "well alligators are native to the US, so that alligator in Ohio could have come from nature."

This is just not true. Bats are found all over China, except in north and northwest. This article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17687-3

shows where researchers found coronaviruses living in bats, and Wuhan is just about in the center of the region where bats are prevalent.

And while it's suspected that bats are the likely source of the virus that caused the pandemic, other species, such as pangolins, have not been ruled out as the source either, as they have been found to host coronaviruses as well.

[coldfish]

This is either inaccurate or highly misleading. There are only 3 viral labs in the world working on coronaviruses as of 2019. Two of them are in the US, one is in Wuhan. Beyond that, Wuhan is far away from where the bat populations in China primarily are. Just as a crappy analogy, it would be like a lab in Ohio studying alligators and when one got out people saying "well alligators are native to the US, so that alligator in Ohio could have come from nature."

This is just not true. Bats are found all over China, except in north and northwest. This article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17687-3

shows where researchers found coronaviruses living in bats, and Wuhan is just about in the center of the region where bats are prevalent.

And while it's suspected that bats are the likely source of the virus that caused the pandemic, other species, such as pangolins, have not been ruled out as the source either, as they have been found to host coronaviruses as well.

Here is where the information came from:

Any theory of the pandemic’s origins had to account for the fact that the outbreak of the novel coronavirus—or, by its official name, SARS-CoV-2—first appeared in Wuhan, on the doorstep of the lab that possessed one of the world’s largest collections of bat coronaviruses and that possessed the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, a virus known as RaTG13 that Shi identified in her lab.

Shi, in her March interview, said that when she was first told about the virus outbreak in her town, she thought the officials had gotten it wrong, because she would have guessed that such a virus would break out in southern China, where most of the bats live. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China,” she said.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin-chaos-under-heaven-wuhan-lab-book-excerpt-474322

See the large font words. What I posted is 100% accurate.

Please stop interacting with me on covid. You have a political angle here and you continue to twist things like you did here. Its irritating.

[_txchilibowl_]

How disappointing is this:

Read on Twitter

Disappointing for sure. Stockton sounds one assist shy of a triple-double, if you catch my meaning....

[dice]

This is either inaccurate or highly misleading. There are only 3 viral labs in the world working on coronaviruses as of 2019. Two of them are in the US, one is in Wuhan. Beyond that, Wuhan is far away from where the bat populations in China primarily are. Just as a crappy analogy, it would be like a lab in Ohio studying alligators and when one got out people saying "well alligators are native to the US, so that alligator in Ohio could have come from nature."

This is just not true. Bats are found all over China, except in north and northwest. This article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17687-3

shows where researchers found coronaviruses living in bats, and Wuhan is just about in the center of the region where bats are prevalent.

And while it's suspected that bats are the likely source of the virus that caused the pandemic, other species, such as pangolins, have not been ruled out as the source either, as they have been found to host coronaviruses as well.

Here is where the information came from:

Any theory of the pandemic’s origins had to account for the fact that the outbreak of the novel coronavirus—or, by its official name, SARS-CoV-2—first appeared in Wuhan, on the doorstep of the lab that possessed one of the world’s largest collections of bat coronaviruses and that possessed the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, a virus known as RaTG13 that Shi identified in her lab.

Shi, in her March interview, said that when she was first told about the virus outbreak in her town, she thought the officials had gotten it wrong, because she would have guessed that such a virus would break out in southern China, where most of the bats live. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China,” she said.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin-chaos-under-heaven-wuhan-lab-book-excerpt-474322

See the large font words. What I posted is 100% accurate.

Please stop interacting with me on covid. You have a political angle here and you continue to twist things like you did here. Its irritating.

i think we're missing the forest for the trees in this whole debate. even IF the virus was leaked from the wuhan lab, the absolute best way to prevent a coronavirus from spreading amongst humans in the future is to shut down wet markets. any way you...slice it, COVID-19 started to spread in wuhan and it shouldn't have. the wuhan COVID lab should be operating under the strictest of standards and the huanan seafood wholesale market should not exist. if it's determined that the lab leaked the virus, maybe it should be shut down as well

[jnrjr79]

The Wall Street Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch (of Faux news)...

Sent from my SM-F707U using RealGM mobile app

The WSJ is just one of hundreds of outlets that this story has been reported by..... Rupert Murdoch doesn't own all these. I mean this is getting to point of looking up and saying the sky is yellow and the sun is blue territory. There is just so much evidence pointing to the origin of the virus. Biden has finally called for an investigation after stopping the ones that were already going on.. nearly every scientific mind out there without bias is saying... "hey, on second thought, it sure looks like this is what happened"..

Like Duck just said. People need to stop politicizing this and just realize and speak the truth.

I'm not disputing the possibility of this being a lab leak, but I'm definitely not taking anything from Fox News as actual news either. Let's wait until a non right leaning publication confirms this.

Murdoch doesn't own these...

https://www.livescience.com/covid-lab-leak-wuhan.html

https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-medical-records-wuhan-lab-staff-sick-in-2019-2021-6

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210524/wuhan-lab-researchers-illness

To my knowledge, it's not true at all that "every scientific mind out there without bias is saying..."it sure looks like this is what happened" (meaning it came from a lab). I think that idea is being re-evaluated, but there still is no evidence whatsoever to substantiate that theory. As for the sick workers at Wuhan, the lead scientist from that lab recently gave a news conference and denied this, asking reporters to please tell her the names of the supposedly sick employees, and no one could.

When you say there is no evidence of the lab leak theory, I think what you really mean is there is no direct evidence (just as there is no direct evidence the virus came from a bat/wet market). However, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence for the lab leak. Obviously, the mere existence of this unique type of lab studying coronaviruses being located where the original outbreak occurred is a huge piece of circumstantial evidence. Then, in addition, you have the untrustworthiness of the PRC regime, the fact that Chinese COVID case are obviously underreported, the fact the wet market was scrubbed before it could be studied, reports of lab workers potentially haven fallen ill, etc. When you apply Occam’s Razor to this, the lab leak theory certainly seems to be the most plausible explanation, though I agree it is not proven, may never be proven, and other possible explanations exist.

[molepharmer]

Below is a map showing a sampling of bat coronavirus sequences within China. China has over 100 different species of bats. Wuhan is located in the CN region (Hubei province). The SO region includes the Guanghong province. Guanghong is where SARs originated in 2002 killing ~800 individuals and where Swine Acute Diarrhea originated killing 25,0000 pigs. The SW region includes the Yunnan province where the horseshoe bat population with a sequence close to SARS-CoV-2 is primarily located. The SO and SW regions have the most CoV sequence diversification and likely where Avian Influenza A viruses originated as well.

[Dresden]

This is either inaccurate or highly misleading. There are only 3 viral labs in the world working on coronaviruses as of 2019. Two of them are in the US, one is in Wuhan. Beyond that, Wuhan is far away from where the bat populations in China primarily are. Just as a crappy analogy, it would be like a lab in Ohio studying alligators and when one got out people saying "well alligators are native to the US, so that alligator in Ohio could have come from nature."

This is just not true. Bats are found all over China, except in north and northwest. This article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17687-3

shows where researchers found coronaviruses living in bats, and Wuhan is just about in the center of the region where bats are prevalent.

And while it's suspected that bats are the likely source of the virus that caused the pandemic, other species, such as pangolins, have not been ruled out as the source either, as they have been found to host coronaviruses as well.

Here is where the information came from:

Any theory of the pandemic’s origins had to account for the fact that the outbreak of the novel coronavirus—or, by its official name, SARS-CoV-2—first appeared in Wuhan, on the doorstep of the lab that possessed one of the world’s largest collections of bat coronaviruses and that possessed the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, a virus known as RaTG13 that Shi identified in her lab.

Shi, in her March interview, said that when she was first told about the virus outbreak in her town, she thought the officials had gotten it wrong, because she would have guessed that such a virus would break out in southern China, where most of the bats live. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China,” she said.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin-chaos-under-heaven-wuhan-lab-book-excerpt-474322

See the large font words. What I posted is 100% accurate.

Please stop interacting with me on covid. You have a political angle here and you continue to twist things like you did here. Its irritating.

Perhaps you just don't like being challenged? The scientific paper I referenced showed a map of where bats were found that carried coronavirus- and Wuhan was on of those regions. So this is hardly akin to alligators being found in Ohio.

I have no political angle. I am not pro-Chinese, pro-communist, or whatever else you think my angle may be. I do get tired of people pointing fingers at other countries when it's far from clear there is a problem. In this case, there still is nothing more than speculation that the virus came from the Wuhan lab. If that's what you consider a "political angle", what you're really saying is that anyone that disagrees with you can be dismissed with that label.

[Dresden]

The WSJ is just one of hundreds of outlets that this story has been reported by..... Rupert Murdoch doesn't own all these. I mean this is getting to point of looking up and saying the sky is yellow and the sun is blue territory. There is just so much evidence pointing to the origin of the virus. Biden has finally called for an investigation after stopping the ones that were already going on.. nearly every scientific mind out there without bias is saying... "hey, on second thought, it sure looks like this is what happened"..

Like Duck just said. People need to stop politicizing this and just realize and speak the truth.



Murdoch doesn't own these...

https://www.livescience.com/covid-lab-leak-wuhan.html

https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-medical-records-wuhan-lab-staff-sick-in-2019-2021-6

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210524/wuhan-lab-researchers-illness

To my knowledge, it's not true at all that "every scientific mind out there without bias is saying..."it sure looks like this is what happened" (meaning it came from a lab). I think that idea is being re-evaluated, but there still is no evidence whatsoever to substantiate that theory. As for the sick workers at Wuhan, the lead scientist from that lab recently gave a news conference and denied this, asking reporters to please tell her the names of the supposedly sick employees, and no one could.

When you say there is no evidence of the lab leak theory, I think what you really mean is there is no direct evidence (just as there is no direct evidence the virus came from a bat/wet market). However, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence for the lab leak. Obviously, the mere existence of this unique type of lab studying coronaviruses being located where the original outbreak occurred is a huge piece of circumstantial evidence. Then, in addition, you have the untrustworthiness of the PRC regime, the fact that Chinese COVID case are obviously underreported, the fact the wet market was scrubbed before it could be studied, reports of lab workers potentially haven fallen ill, etc. When you apply Occam’s Razor to this, the lab leak theory certainly seems to be the most plausible explanation, though I agree it is not proven, may never be proven, and other possible explanations exist.

Actually, most scientists who study these things still believe the most likely explanation is a jump from bats to humans in the wild. Some are now giving more credence to the possibility that this came from a lab, and say it should be investigated further, but all the sources I have read still say it's much more likely to have come from the wild.

[Dresden]

This is just not true. Bats are found all over China, except in north and northwest. This article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17687-3

shows where researchers found coronaviruses living in bats, and Wuhan is just about in the center of the region where bats are prevalent.

And while it's suspected that bats are the likely source of the virus that caused the pandemic, other species, such as pangolins, have not been ruled out as the source either, as they have been found to host coronaviruses as well.

Here is where the information came from:

Any theory of the pandemic’s origins had to account for the fact that the outbreak of the novel coronavirus—or, by its official name, SARS-CoV-2—first appeared in Wuhan, on the doorstep of the lab that possessed one of the world’s largest collections of bat coronaviruses and that possessed the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, a virus known as RaTG13 that Shi identified in her lab.

Shi, in her March interview, said that when she was first told about the virus outbreak in her town, she thought the officials had gotten it wrong, because she would have guessed that such a virus would break out in southern China, where most of the bats live. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China,” she said.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin-chaos-under-heaven-wuhan-lab-book-excerpt-474322

See the large font words. What I posted is 100% accurate.

Please stop interacting with me on covid. You have a political angle here and you continue to twist things like you did here. Its irritating.

i think we're missing the forest for the trees in this whole debate. even IF the virus was leaked from the wuhan lab, the absolute best way to prevent a coronavirus from spreading amongst humans in the future is to shut down wet markets. any way you...slice it, COVID-19 started to spread in wuhan and it shouldn't have. the wuhan COVID lab should be operating under the strictest of standards and the huanan seafood wholesale market should not exist. if it's determined that the lab leaked the virus, maybe it should be shut down as well

I don't think it's wet markets per se that are the problem, rather it is the raising and selling of so many different species of animals- species that are possible vectors of new viruses. China has encouraged small farmers to raise these kinds of exotic animals to sell for meat as a way of reducing rural poverty. But the more species you have in close proximity to each other, the more likely it is that viruses will jump from one to another, picking up crucial, and sometimes deadly mutations in the process.

There is a similar risk in the US agricultural industry, when poultry and pigs are raised close together. Avian flus can migrate into pigs and vice versa. It's a breeding ground for new virus strains.

So it's really those kinds of livestock practices that need to be curbed. Selling various kinds of live seafood is not the problem. It's when you have rabbits, next to pheasants, next to pangolins, next to who knows what, that you're asking for trouble.