Absolute mugs
You do not like peace or love
Good to see Nathan Jones back involved in the big time.
The only thing better than one zelensky is …
He’s been gone too long
Could someone do the needful.
As stated before, this was a manufactured virus which leaked intentionally or otherwise from a lab.
No surely it was pure coincidence the pandemic started in Wuhan. Obviously it was some rural chinese lad who ate a bat that fucked a pangolin.
Covid lab leak theory wasn’t so batty after all
Gerard BakerFebruary 23 2023, 9.00pm GMT
The idea that the Covid-19 virus might have originated in a leak from a laboratory was always at the more plausible end of the “conspiracy theory” scale. Wuhan, the city in central China where by common consent it first appeared, is home to two of the world’s largest centres for virology research, where scientists spend their days examining and conducting experiments with respiratory viruses. So you never needed to be a swivel-eyed graduate of the “Bill Gates is controlling my brain” school of politics to raise questions about the official story: that a respiratory virus originated in a human exchange with an exotic animal at a “wet market” in the city.
But in the first few months of the pandemic and for some time since, Occam’s razor was blunted by a powerful coalition of American officials, scientists and eagerly complaisant journalists. Anyone who dared to suggest the bleeding obvious was deemed guilty of that gravest of modern crimes — misinformation.
Now that the US energy department has joined the FBI this week in concluding that Covid did, after all, leak from a Wuhan lab, it’s time to ask how this groupthink coalition came to denounce anyone who posited the most likely explanation, and what their conspiracy — for that’s what it is — tells us about the state of public debate in America.
It should be noted that there’s still no consensus on the origins of the virus. Other US intelligence agencies continue to think it probably started in the wet market. A high level of uncertainty remains. But we do have enough credible testimony to say at least that the lab leak story is a highly plausible one — as it always was. Republicans in Congress are seizing on the latest findings to intensify their scrutiny of US officials and others in helping to suppress the lab leak hypothesis.
We learnt a year into the pandemic that some of the research going on in Wuhan had been funded by US agencies. Anthony Fauci, the US government’s official face of the pandemic, told Congress in 2021 that the National Institutes of Health allocated $600,000 for the Wuhan Institute of Virology over a five-year period.
There was a concerted effort by scientists and officials in the first days of the pandemic to shut down theories that the virus might have emerged from a laboratory. In early 2020, scientists in the US and the UK thought a lab leak was at least plausible but the article they wrote for the journal Nature Medicine a month later strangely ruled out any “laboratory based scenario”. Another article in The Lancet that denied any possibility of a lab leak turned out to have been orchestrated by Peter Daszak, a researcher who had worked with the Wuhan institute.
All this hints at the possibility that many officials and scientists may have had reasons other than the pursuit of scientific truth to quickly endorse the Chinese Communist Party’s explanation for the origins of Covid and to reject any alternative theory. The larger question is why many of our self-appointed information gatekeepers in the media were so quick to back the official explanation and to denounce those who questioned it.
The army of deniers who have spent the last few years trying to suppress the lab leak theory have been offering explanations for their own misguidance this week. One favoured excuse is that they were somehow bravely but simply standing up to Donald Trump’s racism, since he was an early proponent of the lab leak idea.
“The best explanation I can come up with is that Trump’s racist ‘China virus’ bullshit, which resulted in lots of anti-Asian bigotry and attacks on Asian people, put liberals understandably on the defence against any theory that seemed to blame China for Covid,” tweeted Jill Filipovic, a CNN columnist who was especially vocal in shouting down official theory sceptics.
But this makes no sense. Everyone agreed the virus started in China — the only question was how. What’s more racist — to suggest it slipped out of a laboratory where world-class scientific research was being conducted or that it emerged from the culturally particular eating habits of Chinese peasants, tucking into bowls of bat soup or pangolin chop suey?
Of course the proffered explanation reveals a deeper reality that has undermined trust in modern American journalism. On the basis of no scientific knowledge whatsoever reporters and analysts seized on anything they could that would make Trump and his associates look bad.
But there’s an even larger problem than this partisanship. It’s the troubling tendency of many so-called journalists these days to side instantly with voices of authority. It used to be that reporters would treat official statements and explanations with a healthy scepticism, demanding proof for some claim.
Today, too many in the media are themselves part of the authority class. They identify as technocrats alongside like-minded establishment figures. They know so much more than the rest of us and must teach the ignorant hicks out there.
Covid provided many examples where this expert class was enabled by a media to promote its highly inconclusive conclusions — on lockdowns, face masks, vaccine efficacy. In rubbishing the lab leak theory they reveal how little they can be trusted.
Good to know that Chinese wet markets are apparently completely safe now and always were, or something like that.
Only if you’re wearing a mask apparently
Ewan Joe Rogan and trump were right. again.
Sure there’s never been a time where they haven’t been right.
At least according to themselves.
It’s racist to suggest the virus came from a lab guys
Therein lies the problem. They lie so unremittingly that the truth occasionally falls out and is disbelieved
For something to be believed as the truth in a situation such as this there has to be evidence for it.
We don’t have much of that.
The same people who tell us to never believe the FBI are now suddenly telling us to believe the FBI.
The same people who previously told us wet markets in China were a breeding ground for zoonotic disease have been telling us breathlessly for the last two years to disregard all that because the lab leak or even better the bioweapons theories suddenly looked much juicier in terms of how much blame could be put on the Chinese regime.
Lockdowns, restrictions etc were a cod seems to gathering steam in the media lately, pity it’s 3 years late and they just revered the likes of Holohan, Whitty et al at the time and anyone that questioned it was a pariah. Interesting to read the NPHET member Dr Cormican saying in the Indo last week that Sweden’s approach was correct. Those that advocated that approach back in March/April 2020 were lambasted.
The same people who tell you never to believe the media are now telling you to believe media clickety click.
Sweden chose their approach and that went pretty disastrously for them compared to their neighbours.
Those who trumpet Sweden’s approach don’t ever bother comparing population densities, average number of people in dwellings etc., functioning health systems etc.
That would be too complicated.
40% of households in Sweden are single person households. The figure in Ireland is far lower.
We already have ample evidence of what happened when restrictions were done away with too quickly or not implemented quickly enough. It was a disaster.
By God. For a lad who’s obediently spent years regurgitating every spoonful of propaganda, this is quite the surprise. Was it the rand corporation’s ‘extending russia’ report that brought you round?
I think I’ve been consistent enough in saying it was most likely a lab leak. But what is a bit terrifying is the Chinese knew exactly what they were dealing with and then acted like it was the black death. What do the cunts know that we don’t?