@Ricter @gwb-trading If you ever dismissed the lab leak theory as a “conspiracy,” congratulations—you’ve proven yourself incapable of basic critical thinking. The lab leak has always been the most obvious explanation, as clear as 1 + 1 = 2. Yet, the NYT and their dem sycophants spent years gaslighting the public, smearing repubs, and parroting China’s propaganda to bury the truth. Now, as irrefutable evidence published by NYT confirms the GOP was right all along, the NYT’s despicable role in this cover-up is exposed for the world to see. While repubs fought for transparency, dems and their mindless media puppets—utterly incapable of critical thought or basic discernment—mindlessly regurgitated China’s lies, crushed dissent, and helped ignite a pandemic that killed millions. The NYT’s betrayal isn’t just journalistic failure; it’s proof that dems and their so-called “fact-checkers” are either dangerously incompetent or outright liars. They are now busy rewriting history and patting themselves on the back for their staggering incompetence. https://archive.is/eJIYq#selection-759.1-759.59 Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers. Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world — no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization. So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission — it certainly seemed like consensus. We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax. a recent paper in Cell, a prestigious scientific journal. Researchers, many of whom work or have worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (yes, the same institution), describe taking samples of viruses found in bats (yes, the same animal) and experimenting to see if they could infect human cells and pose a pandemic risk. Sounds like the kind of research that should be conducted — if at all — with the very highest safety protocols, as W. Ian Lipkin and Ralph Baric discussed in a recent guest essay. But if you scroll all the way down to Page 19 of the journal article and squint, you learn that the scientists did all this under what they call “BSL-2 plus” conditions, a designation that isn’t standardized and that Baric and Lipkin say is “insufficient for work with potentially dangerous respiratory viruses.” If just one lab worker unwittingly inhaled the virus and got infected, there’s no telling what the impact could be on Wuhan, a city of millions, or the world. You’d think that by now we’d have learned it’s not a good idea to test possible gas leaks by lighting a match. And you’d hope that prestigious scientific journals would have learned not to reward such risky research. Why haven’t we learned our lesson? Maybe because it’s hard to admit that this research is risky now and to take the requisite steps to keep us safe without also admitting it was always risky. And that perhaps we were misled on purpose. Take the case of EcoHealth, that nonprofit organization that many of the scientists leaped to defend. When Wuhan experienced an outbreak of a novel coronavirus related to ones found in bats and researchers soon noticed the pathogen had the same rare genetic feature that the EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan researchers had proposed inserting into bat coronaviruses, you would think EcoHealth would sound the alarm far and wide. It did not. Were it not for public records requests, leaks and subpoenas, the world might never have learned about the troubling similarities between what could easily have been going on inside the lab and what was spreading through the city. Or take the real story behind two very influential publications that quite early in the pandemic cast the lab leak theory as baseless. The first was a March 2020 paper in the journal Nature Medicine, which was written by five prominent scientists and declared that no “laboratory-based scenario” for the pandemic virus was plausible. But we later learned through congressional subpoenas of their Slack conversations that while the scientists publicly said the scenario was implausible, privatelymany of its authors considered the scenario to be not just plausible but likely. One of the authors of that paper, the evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, wrote in the Slack messages, “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” Spooked, the authors reached out for advice to Jeremy Farrar, now the chief scientist at the World Health Organization. In his book, Farrar reveals he acquired a burner phone and arranged meetings for them with high-ranking officials, including Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Anthony Fauci.Documents obtained through public records requests by the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know show that the scientists ultimately decided to move ahead with a paper on the topic. Operating behind the scenes, Farrar reviewed their draft and suggested to the authors that they rule out the lab leak even more directly. They complied. Andersen later testified to Congress that he had simply become convinced that a lab leak, while theoretically possible, was not plausible. Later chat logs obtained by Congress show the paper’s lead authors discussing how to mislead Donald G. McNeil Jr., who was reporting on the pandemic’s origin for The Times, so as to throw him off track about the plausibility of a lab leak. a letter published in early 2020 in The Lancet. The letter, which described the idea as a conspiracy theory, appeared to be the work of a group of independent scientists. It was anything but. Thanks to public document requests by U.S. Right to Know, the public later learned that behind the scenes, Peter Daszak, EcoHealth’s president, had drafted and circulated the letter while strategizing on how to hide his tracks and telling the signatories that it “will not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person.” The Lancet later published an addendum disclosing Daszak’s conflict of interest as a collaborator of the Wuhan lab, but the journal did not retract the letter. And they had assistance. Thanks to more public records requests and congressional subpoenas, the public learned that David Morens, a senior scientific adviser to Fauci at the National Institutes of Health, wrote to Daszak that he had learned how to make “emails disappear,” especially emails about pandemic origins. “We’re all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them,” he wrote. It’s not hard to imagine how the attempt to squelch legitimate debate might have started. Some of the loudest proponents of the lab leak theory weren’t just earnestly making inquiries; they were acting in terrible faith, using the debate over pandemic origins to attack legitimate, beneficial science, to inflame public opinion, to get attention. For scientists and public health officials, circling the wagons and vilifying anyone who dared to dissent might have seemed like a reasonable defense strategy. That’s also why it might be tempting for those officials or the organizations they represent to avoid looking too closely at mistakes they made, at the ways that, while trying to do such a hard job, they might have withheld relevant information and even misled the public. Such self-scrutiny is especially uncomfortable now, as an unvaccinated child has died of measles and anti-vaccine nonsense is being pumped out by the top of the federal government. But a clumsy, misguided effort like this didn’t just fail; it backfired. These half-truths and strategic deceptions made it easier for people with the worst motives to appear trustworthy while discrediting important institutions where many earnestly labor in the public interest. After a few dogged journalists, a small nonprofit pursuing Freedom of Information requests and an independent group of researchers brought these issues to light, followed by a congressional investigation, the Biden administration finally barred EcoHealth from receiving federal grants for five years. recently updated its assessment of how the Covid pandemic began, judging a lab leak to be the likely origin, albeit with low confidence. The Department of Energy, which runs sophisticated labs, and the F.B.I. came to that conclusion in 2023. But there are certainly more questions for governments and researchers across the world to answer. Why did it take until now for the German public to learn that way back in 2020, their Federal Intelligence Service endorsed a lab leak origin with 80 to 95 percent probability? What else is still being kept from us about the pandemic that half a decade ago changed all of our lives? To this day, there is no strong scientific evidence ruling out a lab leak or proving that the virus arose from human-animal contact in that seafood market. The few papers cited for market origin were written by a small, overlapping group of authors, including those who didn’t tell the public how serious their doubts had been. Only an honest conversation will lead us forward. Like any field with the potential to inflict harm on a global scale, research with dangerous, potentially supertransmissible pathogens cannot be left to self-regulation or lax and easily dodged rules, as is the case now. The goal should be an international treaty guiding biosafety, but we don’t have to be frozen in place until one appears. Leading journals could refuse to publish research that doesn’t conform to safety standards, the way they reject research that doesn’t conform to ethical standards. Funders — whether universities or private corporations or public agencies — can favor studies that use research methods like harmless pseudoviruses and computer simulations. These steps alone would help disincentivize such dangerous research, here or in China. If some risky research is truly irreplaceable, it should be held to the highest safety conditions and conducted far from cities. We may not know exactly how the Covid pandemic started, but if research activities were involved, that would mean two out of the last four or five pandemics were caused by our own scientific mishaps. Let’s not make a third.
Purpose of dem disinformation and propaganda campaign. Democrats’ Propaganda Agenda: The left’s suppression of the lab leak theory was a deliberate effort to blame Trump for the pandemic. Had they told the truth, public opinion would have rightly focused on China’s culpability instead of scapegoating Trump. Gaslighting the Public: By lying and gaslighting, Democrats and the NYT manipulated the narrative to shield China and attack Trump, ensuring the blame fell on him rather than where it belonged. Key takeaways: Republicans Were Right All Along: While the GOP sounded the alarm on the lab leak theory, the New York Times and Democrats dismissed them as conspiracy theorists. Now, overwhelming evidence proves Republicans were correct. NYT’s Shameful Complicity: The New York Times actively silenced skeptics, misled its own reporters, and parroted China’s narrative, playing a key role in burying the truth about COVID-19’s origins. Democrats’ Critical Thinking Failure: Democrats and their media allies demonstrated a stunning inability to discern truth, blindly pushing a false narrative while vilifying anyone who dared question it. Scientists’ Deception Exposed: Emails and documents reveal that scientists privately believed the lab leak was likely while publicly dismissing it as “implausible,” with the NYT aiding in the cover-up. Global Catastrophe Unleashed: By suppressing the lab leak theory, the NYT and its allies helped obscure the truth, delaying accountability and potentially enabling the conditions for a global pandemic. China’s Narrative Parroted: The NYT and Democrats uncritically echoed China’s claims about a natural origin, ignoring glaring red flags and evidence pointing to the Wuhan lab. Journalistic Malpractice: The NYT’s role in this scandal isn’t just biased reporting—it’s a complete betrayal of journalistic ethics and public trust. Accountability Avoided: Despite mounting evidence, Democrats and the NYT refuse to admit their mistakes, doubling down on their failures rather than owning up to their catastrophic errors. Lab Leak Theory: Obvious from the Start: The lab leak theory was always the most plausible explanation, as clear as 1 + 1 = 2. Those who dismissed it were either willfully ignorant or complicit in the cover-up. A Call for Honesty and Reform: This scandal underscores the need for transparency, accountability, and a complete overhaul of how dangerous pathogen research is conducted—and how it’s reported.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57268111 Covid origin: Why the Wuhan lab-leak theory is so disputed The institute is a 40-minute drive from the Huanan wet market where the first cluster of infections emerged.
Oh great, more low-order intelligence fever-dream nonsense. He can't even make something coherent with AI holding his hand. Impressive failure. "Key Takeaways" I could do with a Chinese takeaway for lunch but Chinese food around here makes your mouth sad.
BTW -- I never dismissed the theory that the Covid virus was leaked by mistake from a Chinese lab due to lack procedures. In fact many times I stated that this is likely what happened. I dismissed that the Covid virus was intentionally leaked from Chinese military lab in order to deliberately inflict it on people across the globe. Remember the conspiracy theorists were hard-core pushing that the Covid virus was intentionally leaked -- not that it was inadvertently released. Let's provide the proper context to the nonsense you are pushing.
I've always wondered what the Chinese released with those ballons that Joe Biden allowed to roam all over the country. Bird flu perhaps?
What annoys me is that the mushroom* conspiracy guys can't even keep in their heads consistently that there were two labs, one only had naturally found coronaviruses and the other, 16KM is the only place that could have tailored a virus. They latch onto fragments of information that fit their narrative but can’t even hold onto the basic structure of the argument. If they actually wanted to make a case, they’d need to at least acknowledge: 1. Two different labs exist, One near the market (WHCDC, which handled natural coronaviruses) and one much farther away (WIV, which could have altered viruses). 2. The wet market theory isn’t disproven, It’s still a legitimate possibility, the animals were I guess mostly eaten before anyone could test them and poop washed / bleached away. 3. If it was a leak from either lab, how did it travel? If the claim is that a lab-altered virus from WIV got to the market, or just got out, there should be a plausible mechanism. However the reality is that TLTM (They Lied To Me) don't have a clue. But they don’t care about internal consistency, just the vibe of “They lied to us!” Intellectual rigor? More like rigor mortis. *Fed on shit and kept in the dark.