Don’t forget the talking with his hands.
8 Likes
Those who believe Paul over Fauci aren’t necessarily accepting of the vaccine.
6 Likes
It’s Schrodigers disease. It is both a bio weapon paid for by Faucii to use against republicans, and it, at the same time, is all fake news, not real, and a lie made up to trick people into injecting tracking microchips into themselves.
How do you fight that kind of thinking? None of those people will ever accept the truth (diseases happen, and we make vaccines to prevent their spread). It’s all nothing but a conspiracy to them.
11 Likes
I think the only rational conclusion is clear: Fauci is really just a colony of coronavirus in a trench coat trying to trick us into wearing masks and getting vaccines to help it spread.
9 Likes
I’m imagining some scenario where someone – perhaps Dr. Fauci, perhaps someone else – has the thankless task of being questioned by Paul and/or Cruz or similar. The interrogatee understandably runs out of patience, and the interrogating senator warns “I’ll have you charged with contempt of Congress!” And the person testifying says “Charge me? I’ll save you the trouble. I have nothing but contempt!”
Can’t see it ending real well but I can also see the same happening in some court.
3 Likes
Looking at what has been happening in the world for the last two years and concluding that viruses in China are not something important to study is…well, it’s quite a bold take, to say the least.
18 Likes
Health organizations like Doctors’ Without Borders, awesomesauce.
But collaboration with a state that harvests Falun Gong organs and forced sterilizes Uighurs?
Fuck Rand Paul, but OMG, why was/is this potentially nasty technology being funded by our tax dollars in China of all places? Whatever, not the most boneheaded thing the US has done.
No, the US government was not funding Chinese bioweapon development. See above for details.
11 Likes
Hmm, maybe I should phrase it as: Why are we funding offshoring of medical research to a country that has a consistent pattern of unethical medical behaviour?
(but yeah, viral research in general can be weaponized)
Vaccinated and vote democrat, and my mom died of Covid April 2020. But I am not going to discount this just because of political leanings.
They were studying coronaviruses in China because that is where they are. It would be great if we only needed to worry about viruses that are native to the area in Atlanta right around the CDC labs, but that’s not how it works. The fact that this thing came from China makes it more difficult to assess the epidemiology due to the very tight controls that government has put on the required data, but that it would arise in that area was predicted and expected, and indeed that is where it happened. Which is why we were funding studies there.
22 Likes
Do we study live viruses for Ebola in sub_Saharan Africa or import them to Atlanta? Indeed, it happened right in the city where the lab was located, but that is the chicken/egg argument that is clouded by politics.
Are you saying that research funded by the US government should only be done by labs in the US?
6 Likes
Aside from specific field operations, like say we want to video bonobos or collect virus samples from a cave, yes, I think that would be a wiser option. But hindsight is 2020 in this instance. In general, I think politics has gotten in the way of science on both the right and the left in the US, in the case of Covid. But maybe I am cracked, I am totally open to that possibility.
If you want to study how the virus arises and what the expected threats could be then removing it from it’s native locality is pointless. And it is not an either or, we do both. We cannot, however, expect to conduct research into emerging pathogens without going where they are.
19 Likes
Please forgive the massive derail but there is disagreement on the context of the phrase about climbing a mountain “because it’s there”. IIRC the phrase was reported at the time from a press conference but there is disagreement on the question. Some say he was asked “why are you going to Chile to climb Cerro Torre?”, to which the logical, exasperated answer is “because it’s there!”. Not some phenomenological discourse on mountain climbing, just one on geography.
End derail.
4 Likes
We did. It was a whole big thing when there was an accident at one of the CDC’s lab. (See the book “The Hot Zone”)
7 Likes
Isolating states and blaming health care professional for the sins of the states they live in doesn’t help shit. It makes pandemics like this MORE likely to happen if we don’t work across national boundaries.
And no, as others said INCLUDING DR. FAUCI, we are not funding bioweapons.
Then we should not fund our own medical research which has experimented on people within the US… Women in state custody have been sterilized as recently as LAST YEAR. We have a very long history of force sterilizations and experimenting on human beings here in the states… including prisoners, including POC, including poor, white women, including the mentally handicap. 
Right?
You can’t just do that and expect to understand the virus. You have to study it in other environments.
13 Likes
Does anyone actually have a link to the paper that Paul is waving around?
I’m sorry about your mom 
11 Likes
Wow, that’s a looooooooong con.
1 Like
