Yes but as @Heyyoubehindthebushes has pointed out, to beat a mentaller, you need to be even more of a mentaller. Fact.
I was telling TFK this in March 2020 and being laughed at.
Lads with PhDs in shitposting dismissing clear genomic data clearly showing it was man made.
The lads arguing against it on Twitter are all on the take from China.
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You’re the same person that stated here that 95% of US academics were on the payroll of the Chinese regime. Yeah, not nuts at all, or anything like that. 
Here, chew on some reality.
REVEALED: reporters at @thetimes working alongside the internet’s most prominent SARS-CoV-2 origins conspiracists combined the world’s most idiotic lab leak theories to create this long read of nonsensical reheated horseshit. …
So let’s get into this tepid excuse for journalism
Unroll available on Thread Reader
I already knew this was going to be a doozy just by looking at the photo. This is what happens when you prompt an AI image generator with “suspicious-looking masked CCP official or military scientist with a coronavirus-themed PRC flag inspired by racist stereotypes”
And the actual non-AI photos & captions aren’t any more concerned with basic facts. No, the pandemic is not “widely believed to have originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology” except in Twitter discussions that aren’t burdened by the need for evidence to support such claims.
This “investigation” is actually just rehashing documents from the US government, including this citation-free “fact sheet” that Mike Pompeo’s state department rushed out during his last week in office.
2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-act…
And this one summarized the investigative efforts by the entire US intelligence community.
It simply says the US IC was unable to reach a conclusion, but most ICs were either undecided or favored zoonosis. The summary was published in summer 2021.
dni.gov/files/ODNI/doc…
In October 2021, the summary was declassified. Here are key points the entire IC agreed on:
The virus was not created as a bioweapon, was not genetically engineered, and Chinese government officials were not aware of the virus before it emerged in 2019.
The declassified report on which this piece is primarily based is no longer even current, considering the evidence that has emerged since—animals at Huanan market, early cases occurring near the market & not WIV, environmental samples localizing virus w/ susceptible animals…
This piece largely dismisses this evidence in favor of bold statements from unidentified investigators with extreme confidence in a lab origin. Yet they are anonymous, which conveniently avoids accountability for their claims, which are…different from the government reports.
However, the 3 allegedly sick WIV workers that made the investigator “rock-solid confident” provides a clue regarding their identity.
David Asher led the US State Dept efforts to investigate SARS-CoV-2 origins & presumably wrote Pompeo’s fact sheet.
2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-act…
These 3 workers have never been identified. This claim remains completely unverified. Even if it is true, there’s no reason to think people at WIV weren’t getting respiratory viruses in a bad flu season. Flu incidence in China hit a 10 year peak in 2019.
China: influenza incidence rate 2021 | StatistaThis statistic shows the influenza incidence rate in China from 2015 to 2021.https://www.statista.com/statistics/861143/influenza-incidence-rate-in-china/
Dr. Asher has made a crusade out of proving a lab leak, regardless of whether that actually happened or not. As far as his absurd claims go, the sick WIV workers are pretty blasé. Take this hypothesis that zoonosis is the consequence of cross-species sex.
hudson.org/foreign-policy…
Transcript: The Origins of COVID-19: Policy Implications and Lessons for the FutureView Transcript Following is the full transcript of the March 12th, 2021 Hudson event titled The Origins of COVID-19: Policy Implications and Lessons for the Futurehttps://www.hudson.org/foreign-policy/transcript-the-origins-of-covid-19-policy-implications-and-lessons-for-the-future
It is my professional opinion as a virologist doing origins research who considers zoonosis most likely that “maybe a bat fucked a pangolin” is not a plausible hypothesis for zoonotic origin. Anyone who says it is betrays their gross lack of qualification.
And Dr. Asher’s own former colleague Christopher Ford, an Assistant Secretary & Under Secretary of State, has described extensively how Asher’s assertions on origins were “insane” & how hard he fought to simply get them vetted by actual experts.
**The “Lab-leak” inquiry at the State Department:**An Open Letter by former Assistant Secretary Christopher Fordhttps://christopherashleyford.medium.com/the-lab-leak-inquiry-at-the-state-department-96973cff3a65
Dr. Ford’s account sounds like it would have been supremely frustrating trying to put the brakes on this crazy train enough to see if Asher’s theories could be confirmed by outside experts before Secretary Pompeo accused China of violating the BWC.
BTW, there were 3 “investigators” interviewed. Per Dr. Ford’s story, Tom DiNanno & Miles Yu are prime candidates for the other 2, given their no technical expertise, incorrectly calling different viruses “variants,” & inventing new Mojiang mine viruses out of thin air & vibes.
Anyway, whoever the sources (cough Asher & friends), it seems that both @Arbuthnott and @JCalvertST also failed to perform any basic fact-checking about the technical and scientific details in their piece.
For example, they describe Ralph Baric generating a chimeric virus by “recreating the genes from the microscopic spikes that protrude from its sides.”
Guys, the viral genome encodes the viral genes, not the spike protein. It’s right there in the name “genome”.
And Richard Ebright’s tiresome “dentist office” trope is not an accurate description of BSL-2 containment, either in terms of infrastructure, regulation, or practices.
K18-hACE2 transgenic mice just have one gene added to their genome—human ACE2 (the receptor for SARS-CoV-2). Human ACE2 alone doesn’t cause one animal to grow organs from another species. They do not develop human respiratory or vascular systems. They do not have human lungs.
And SARS & SARS2 can be 100% lethal with high viral loads in hACE2 transgenic mice. It does not reflect infectivity, transmissibility, or virulence in people, much less indicate that a “super-coronavirus” was made; neither SARS nor SARS2 have 100% mortality in humans.
But it wasn’t just all chimeric fun with furin cleavage sites…omg, they also did serial passage.
Serial passage is common, like when you are making a mouse-adapted virus to study pathogenesis in animals. As the name implies, it produces a virus adapted to MICE, not humans.
Because ACE2 is not the only host factor that a virus needs to interact with to establish a productive infection. And “humanized” mice with just human ACE2 will still yield viruses adapted to those other proteins, all of which will be the mouse versions. Hence, mouse-adapted.
Here comes breast oncologist & Bayesian nonsense entrepreneur Steven Quay to remind us once again he knows fuck-all about viruses. Many bat viruses directly infect & kill people: rabies, Nipah, Marburg, Ebola, the list goes on.
And of the Mojiang mine viruses they are talking about, the closest one (RaTG13) is still different by over 1100 mutations. Even adding a suboptimal, out-of-frame furin cleavage site followed by serial passage in hACE2 Tg mice could not make a Mojiang mine virus into SARS-CoV-2.
It’s also incorrect to say that SARS-CoV-2 was “remarkably well adapted to infect humans.” We know SARS-CoV-2 can infect lots of species. If it was so well-adapted, we wouldn’t see variants emerge, as they are evidence of the virus adapting to humans via real world serial passage
The whole article reads like a kitchen sink attempt to create a story out of nothing based on anonymous sources & a handful of avowed lab leak proponents with no subject matter expertise misrepresenting virology, & ignoring the actual evidence.
So let’s throw in some bioweapons
One reason the bioweapon theory has been dumb going on 3 years now is that SARS-CoV-2 would make a shitty bioweapon. It’s highly infectious so doesn’t only affect the enemy, predominantly impacts older or medically vulnerable people so not soldiers, & has a low mortality rate.
An effective bioweapon by military standards would be one that preferentially & reliably kills or disables enemy soldiers without spreading to your own. By this account, these evil elite Chinese military scientists sound spectacularly incompetent at illegal bioweapon development.
But you can’t make a nefarious bioweapons plot omelette without defenestrating some eggs. According to the Times, maybe this guy allegedly making the SARS2 bioweapon vaccine got tossed off the roof of WIV! At least according to the unverified accounts of unnamed witnesses.
And the attempts at epidemiology in this piece are as incorrect & amateurish as the attempts at exposing the development of the world’s most poorly conceived bioweapon. Social media hotspots in late January don’t reflect where the pandemic began in late November/early December.
Michael Worobey previously analyzed the verified early cases to locate and date them. He found they lived in neighborhoods surrounding the Huanan market, not the WIV.
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abm4454?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
Led by Dr. Worobey, a group of us did a more detailed analysis. We found that even cases with no link to the market formed essentially a target on a map of Wuhan, with Huanan market at the center. That center is where these cases radiated outward from. It’s 10 miles from WIV.
Unroll available on Thread Reader
We already knew there were live animals sold at the market, including several species that were either implicated in the SARS-CoV-1 epidemic (civets, badgers) and those known to be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 (raccoon dogs, mink, foxes).
Animal sales from Wuhan wet markets immediately prior to the COVID-19 pandemic - Scientific Reportshttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2
Environmental samples collected by the Chinese CDC confirmed that these animals were present at the Huanan market prior to its closure, clustered along with SARS-CoV-2 positive samples in the SW corner, exactly where we predicted in Worobey 2022.
And our preliminary analysis confirmed the CCDC results and identified RNA as well as DNA, indicating the animals were there recently prior to sampling.
And furthermore, we also know from my colleagues’ work that there had to be at least 2 introductions of SARS-CoV-2 into humans to result in 2 distinct early lineages. This is inconsistent with lab origin hypotheses that can only account for 1 spillover.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8337
All this evidence points in one direction: zoonotic spillover from live animals at Huanan market. But this is ignored by the Times authors in favor of unqualified hangers-on who have tossed up a pseudoscience salad of unqualified opinions, speculation, and intrigue.
But this is not only harmful in an abstract sense to science and to the citizens of the world who deserve to know how this catastrophic pandemic occurred. Even the self-proclaimed “civil” lab leak proponents are calling for prosecution based on the opinions of unnamed sources.
I’ve been getting “see you at Nuremberg” correspondence for long enough to know personally how damaging disinformation can be. Journalists who lack the integrity to ensure they are accurately reporting the facts can cause great damage and for what—clicks? Engagement? Page views?
The stakes here are high because we are all stakeholders—the pandemic profoundly affected us all. It has made the world a less stable & more inhospitable place. But just because a lab leak is a compelling story doesn’t make it true.
And if journalists aren’t pursuing the truth in their reporting, then they harm us all. We don’t need more thrilling conspiracy stories about the pandemic’s origin. We need the truth. @thetimes failed monumentally in that simple task with this piece.
You had a superb pandemic tbf. I remember a former poster swearing blind that an escaped pangolin hooked up with an escaped bat so we all have to ate dinners with pints. The poor bastard.
2 Likes
Lolz
Poor Labane, even his wife beater white knight is unintentionally taking the piss out of him now.
Listened to it over the last few days. He seems an alright sort with good intentions but some wacky ideas on the face of it. Is he actually running for president of the US? I’d never heard the guy before but no way he can win with the way he talks I’d imagine. Obviously some medical issue and he looks physically fit for a guy his age but he sounds like a 90 year old.
A bat to a pangolin to a human was the working theory for a few months. .
Until the data from a CCP source was found to be fraudulent.
You’re welcome.
Yeah my thoughts too. Well intentioned and definitely has some valid points regarding how big pharma has bulldozed so many products, particularly vaccines, on to the market, but some utter bat shit ones too.
He has spasmodic dysphonia. It causes involuntary movement in his larynx. Just another of the random conditions people in their 30s can randomly get
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There’s nothing remotely well intentioned about Kennedy. He’s an extremely dangerous charlatan and he’s backed by the worst people on the planet.
If Joe Rogan likes him, my hands are tied I’m afraid. I have to support him
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Generally that seems to be the way it works with youse lot alright.
RFK Jn is a thoroughly alright sort. Has devoted his life to environmental and health causes, especially the obesity crisis among US children. No surprise the pharma shills and food shills hate him.
3 Likes
He’s an expert, just the wrong type of expert for the covid fanatics
Kennedy is supported by the world’s biggest shills for corporate harm. His disgraceful positions on vaccines and his denial of the link between HIV and AIDS stand to cost millions of lives.
So of course you like him, because, like a typical right-wing American nutcase, you want to see the world burn.
Naomi Klein is well on to him.
Myth #1: He would be a climate champion.
Because RFK Jr is so eloquent about pollution, many assume he would support policies that would tame the raging climate crisis. While that may have been true in the past, the facts have radically changed. In recent interviews, he claims climate science is too complex and abstract to explain and that, “I can’t independently verify that.” He also says that the climate crisis is being used to push through “totalitarian controls on society” orchestrated “by the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates, and all of these megabillionaires” – a green-tinged reboot of the same, all-too familiar conspiracy theories he rode to pandemic stardom, when he opposed virtually every Covid public health measure, from masks to vaccines to closures. Now he is marshaling the same arguments against climate action.
He told Breaking Points: “In my campaign I’m not going to be talking a lot about climate. Why is that? Because climate has become a crisis like Covid that the Davos groups and other totalitarian elements in our society have used as a pretext for clamping down totalitarian controls.”
This about-face has earned him friends among the most prominent and dangerous climate-change deniers, including the Republican-aide-turned-disinformation-dealer Marc Morano, who says Kennedy is “undergoing a genuine transformation over his views on the climate agenda.” In podcast interviews, especially with rightwing hosts, RFK Jr now says he would leave energy policy to the market and describes himself as “a radical free marketeer.” It should go without saying that the markets are incapable of decarbonizing our economies in anything like the narrow slice of time left.
Yeah real normal stuff here. Not like Rogan’s anti-vaccine fanbois are cult are a cult of extremely dangerous headbangers or anything.
Sure I mean what could be wrong with incitement to murder.
https://twitter.com/FenixAmmunition/status/1671158032812900353
Is he going to drink donkey semen on camera? 