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SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
- Start date
I haven’t changed my mind since day one. In my opinion, this was accidentally released from one of the Wuhan labs. Too much of a coincidence.
Funnily enough he leaves out that former journalist who insisted on shaking hands early on
However there's a huge difference between being ignorant and wrong about something and inciting violence. Even if the former leads to worse consequences. We can't really have any discussion if we don't allow people to say wrong things.
It's not about being wrong, it's willfully spreading disinformation or a public health message they've got no expertise in. We all know Toby Youngs aim and it's not genuine debate. Papers shouldn't allow opinion pieces from non-experts on something so dangerous.
The MP in that article regularly flags Toby Young's tweets but no surprise Toby has him blocked and doesn't respond. Toby 'free speech/no censorship' Young has also recently gone back and deleted all the tweets he was horribly wrong on.
It does seem a little suspicious that the new super-spreading bat-derived coronavirus shows up in the backyard of the only Chinese lab doing gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses, I'll give you that.
I suspect we'll never be sure of the origins one way or the other. I guess at this point it doesn't really matter anyway, other than lessons about how to prevent future outbreaks.
Yeah, it’s kind of a moot point. Particularly interesting to read how US funding is so wrapped up in a possible man-made cause for the “China virus”
Flake news?
Boom!
I’ll wafer there’s something in it, I guess we don’t know the original sauce of the story to be sure
I don't want to defend this Toby Young person, I know nothing about him. But the bold part is true for pretty much every western government during this disease. From a UK PM talking about handshakes, to a German chancellor talking about masks, and lets not even mention the US, they all took part in spreading wrong information about something they knew feck all about. (Infuriatingly even after people in this thread knew. And we knew because of the WHO reports early on, it really shouldn't have been beyond governments to come to grips with it)
Journalists doing so for commercial reasons aren't really any worse than politicians doing it for political ones, so I won't take their pawns seriously when they come complaining about it.
The other theory is that sometimes the security guards make a little cash on the side by selling off animals to the wet markets. So if they did that with a few bats, it could very well have originated from the lab and spread via the wet markets
That sounds extremely unlikely. Security guards won’t have access to any animals innoculated with novel viruses. As per the article above, there doesn’t need to be anything sneaky or underhand for these lab viruses to get out. Just need one scientist to make a mistake with their PPE, or not notice a bite/scratch from one of their animals. Once they leave the lab they become patient zero. Then they can pop into the wet markets to pick up some dinner and the rest is history.
100% my feelings as well pal.
Wish tennis players would stop complaining about hotel quarantine in Melbourne. There’s Victorians in NSW that can’t get home and Australians overseas that have been stuck for months. Not sure the tournament should have gone ahead, not like tennis has the best track record with covid cases. Comes across as pretty out of touch moaning about not being able to train when you apparently get $100k for losing in the first round.
It would probably be easier to swallow from somebody who wasn’t part of a party who were happy to claim face masks didn’t help whenever there were shortages, claimed schools were perfectly safe a day before shutting them, or told the nation it was their duty to go to the pub.
My fear has turned into anger. Everytime I think of this poxy virus and how it stopped the world in its tracks for a year, and still no end in sight, is extremely frustrating. Then reading these potential origin stories just compounds my anger. One thing we know is a fact, if the CCP and that Winnie the Pooh looking cnut didnt try to cover up the virus in the beginning we probably wouldn't be dealing with a pandemic.
Or insisted on shaking hands with every person in the hospital and then got Co-vid.
Should the Chinese Govt admit to it, if they know it was their fault - even if it was an accident?
When do governments ever admit to something that isn't good?
"But I keep returning to the basic, puzzling fact: This patchwork pathogen, which allegedly has evolved without human meddling, first came to notice in the only city in the world with a laboratory that was paid for years by the U.S. government to perform experiments on certain obscure and heretofore unpublicized strains of bat viruses — which bat viruses then turned out to be, out of all the organisms on the planet, the ones that are most closely related to the disease. What are the odds? "
Seems very possible and traceable it was taken from the mineshaft to labs, rewired and got out in Wuhan. Like is said in the article this virus is ready to rock out the gate.
It's important to find out how and where, it's not trying to blame anyone in China and if anything this is tied to US scientists training and funding others to find obscure threats while creating one themselves. Humans are so accident prone and it can become an unhealthy obsession. The people indirectly responsible will just think we have to be more careful.
Seems very possible and traceable it was taken from the mineshaft to labs, rewired and got out in Wuhan. Like is said in the article this virus is ready to rock out the gate.
It's important to find out how and where, it's not trying to blame anyone in China and if anything this is tied to US scientists training and funding others to find obscure threats while creating one themselves. Humans are so accident prone and it can become an unhealthy obsession. The people indirectly responsible will just think we have to be more careful.
Same. The worse part is that their government will not face any significant consequences either in terms of sanctions or trade.
To be fair to that MP, Tory or not, he’s been consistently on the right side of this, and has consistently been calling out the “sceptics” for the dangerous bullshitters they are. So I’d give hIm a break on this - he’s right.
it was possible for countries like the UK and US to do a far better job of managing the pandemic than they did. Hold our own governments to account before blaming someone else’s (who have done a much better of stamping it out than we have).
China massively down played the severity of the situation. And you even had the WHO claiming it couldn’t transfer amongst humans. How are other governments responsible when that’s the advice given to them?
No point in hurting the ordinary people. IF it can be proven without doubt then I’m sure some kind of political backlash will follow. I doubt it can ever be proven though
I think we've messed it up here, should have done loads better. And annoyingly continue to make mistakes.
I agree. Like I said there were warning signs that we had from Lancet papers with chinese authorship showcasing how nasty it was. I think they did make an effort to stop its spread locally and maybe internationally too. But not enough I think. And I'm honestly not coming at it from an anti-chinese sentiment/angle, just a personal opinion.
Has he also consistently called out those in his party? If not, he’s a hypocrite.
Dunno. But it is possible for people with whom you disagree politically, to be right occasionally. So take the win. He’s making the right arguments.
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I’m certainly not absolving China or the WHO (although nobody was clear on how it was spread at the start, so I think we should be careful about blaming people for gaps in knowledge at the beginning). But this was essentially an act of god, and our government is accountable for how well it protects us, not China’s.
The argument for lab escape is well-made but a bit contradictory. A lot is made of the fact that there has been no intermediate host determined between bat and human (section). Then, a paper from a US-China collaboration showing that bat corornaviruses do not need an intermediate host is mentioned in a different context and described as useless in its scientific impact (section)
e - thought about it a bit more, i think the article makes a few other missteps. will maybe write about it a bit more when i have time. the basic issue is that it seems to try to fit everything wrong into sars-cov-2.
so it is a result of passaging, a technique where the final product is indistinguishable from natural evolution, but also a product of site-directed mutagenesis, (the furin cleavage site). i dont think the latter fits in with the rest of the evidence, especially given that it's only a 4 amino acid site (i.e. not hard to evolve naturally). just looking at this figure from the article makes me very skeptical of human site-directed genetic changes from blue to yellow. would have been helpful if he labeled the furin and ace2 sites on that graph.
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I think China were far more open that we might have normally expected. And given that there was enough information for many countries to act I think it is obvious that incompetence and a lack of willingness to act on the science is the biggest factor in how bad it has been in places like the UK.
Thank you fellas. The well wishes are truly appreciated.Kinell. I won't be asking you to pick lottery numbers this week mate
Glad you are feeling better and fingers crossed for your folks.
Just an update: my mom seems to have a similar case to mine. She's experiencing very similar symptoms to what I had. My dad, however, is being hit much harder. He's a fighter... was captain of a football team that won 4 championships in a row, captain of a championship wrestling team, was a Chief Petty Officer in the US Navy... so he has it in him to flip a switch into the fighter mindset and go to battle, but he's older now and his body isn't as good at fighting as his mind still is. Thankfully, his blood oxygen is still between 93-95% at any given time, but he is having a very bad time with fever and nausea. When the nausea and fever finally subside and he tries to eat, his fever and nausea spike back up again, so he's feeling really weak even though he can still breathe relatively well. I dropped some Pedialyte powder off at their house today so he doesn't have to drink as much fluid to keep his electrolytes up. Hopefully that will help him some. Today is Day 10 since his symptoms began, so hopefully he only has to hang in there for a couple/few more days.
Except the Wuhan Wet Market wasn't the origin most likely but rather a site where significant human to human transmission occured. There were loads of early cases not connected to the wet market which makes it unlikely that the virus jumped species there. We know that this wasn't a genetically engineered virus and we know it is most closely related to a bat Coronavirus in another region - the one found in Wuhan is very different. That doesn't mean that it is impossible for it to have infected someone at a research lab that isn't genetically engineering viruses but it still means that the most likely explanation is zoonosis via an intermediate host as with SARS and MARS.
It would be interesting to find out more about those early cases but even if China has nothing to hide they are likely to be quite secretive given the effort being put into throwing them under the bus.
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The level of entitlement and lack of self awareness is astounding.
We have brought down the number of cases to 10k per day though on reduced testing and with 500-600 deaths per day still, but today many businesses in Poland are opening against restrictions so I expect the number to climb back up shortly. In mountain resorts most opened their doors last week so there's plenty of tourists going that direction now. Restrictions are still in place but owners think they can fight it in court and they are mostly right as they have been winning so far.
Vaccinations have been going very slowly so I do not expect things to get much better this year. Even if they were going fast we are still probably looking at 30% of population being willing to get it anyway which will slow it down but not erase the problem.
Vaccinations have been going very slowly so I do not expect things to get much better this year. Even if they were going fast we are still probably looking at 30% of population being willing to get it anyway which will slow it down but not erase the problem.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.th...ption-for-lockdown-fever-20210118-p56uxe.html
Djokovic: I demand ............
Dan Andrews: No
I saw some article saying some US states have opened up vaccinations to everyone and people are traveling cross states to get a jab..
Will they open up to visitors to the US as well ?
Will they open up to visitors to the US as well ?
Totally agree with this. It comes over as in very bad taste. My "favourite" quote from the linked article is "What I don't understand is that, why no-one ever told us, if one person on board is positive the whole plane need to be isolated... I would think twice before coming here." How could you possibly not understand that?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-55693223
Hope they both get well soon.
I think that it something to do with how media were portraying things and where they were looking. The medical communities were being flooded with data coming out of China as soon as it all kicked off in January.
I'm not sure we can even be 100% certain it originated in China at this stage. It was seemingly in Italy in November 19. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/bjd.19804
Indeed. And one of the only countries who have a booming economy.