Jen Psaki tests a new kind of Psaki bomb when Peter Doocy asks about Covid originating in a lab

I know this guy. In 2014 he authored a fairly dishonest book about human genetics which was universally contested by the very experts whose work it was based on. Charles Murray wrote a favorable review, thought it nicely buttressed his infamous bell curve theories. 139 professors of biology and genetics penned an open letter critiquing Nicholas Wade’s interpretations of the science, he waved them off by accusing them of being purely politically motivated. His dubious assertion near the top of your link about academics being afraid to speak up about what he thinks he’s uncovered regarding covid belies he hasn’t changed much in the last 7 years. He definitely has an agenda here beyond simple fact-finding, I would tread carefully.

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Ah, Doocy. A chip drip off the old block slime.

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That was weird, she threw a giant cookie of suggesting there needs to be an investigation, and that we’d trust China on it. Enough rope, but he couldn’t chase it up before the moment was gone?

The Psaki Policytails Sinker? Psaki Policytails Left Field Grounder?

Time to grab Harrison Ford for the ‘It belongs in a histological sample museum! Gross.’ quotes. “Bats and pangolins, why’d it have to be bats and pangolins?” “Um…your shoe’s untied? Also let me get your approval on this great pandemic idea I’m working up with my cohort in Jiangsu Normal U. … Not today?”

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Has there been a Q drop yet that suggests Doocy is a Democrat stooge, offering up softballs for the Biden administration to crush? Because if so, I might start buying the whole Qanon thing.

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Can you prove that Santa Claus did not eat my cookies?

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BTW - what’s the difference between circumstantial evidence and significant circumstantial evidence?

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I would have countered with a question: Would these be the same Republicans who believe [insert idiotic conspiracy theories here]?

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The mistake you’re making is thinking that facts should lead to conclusions. This is not the mindset of the Trump fanatic. The process is: Trump is always right about everything he does or says. Reality then shifts around that. Reality sometimes has to shift several times within a very short period to line up with whatever the latest bit of BS Trump has said.

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Again, I’m going to go with none of this being “amused”. She’s predatory… and I love it!

These press interactions look just like what happens when some small animal comes across a cat.

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Of course there needs to be an investigation. We thoroughly need to understand how these viruses jump to humans.

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They have the best circumstantial evidence. The circumstantialest. That makes it the significantest too.

Wot a nob.

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Although it cannot be precluded that Covid-19 didn’t originate in a lab, her answer to his dumb question is the correct one.

GOP reps have circumstantial evidence and flimsy conjecture. His calling it “significant” did not make it so, any more than it was significant last year when Trump was pumping the same conspiracy. Using “significant” followed by “circumstantial” is a weasel way of getting around the fact the evidence they have is weak at best, and strung together with flimsy conjecture, poor logic, a lack of science knowledge, and some seriously daft conspiracy thinking.

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I think Trump’s best PR move was to call the vaccine effort “Warp Speed”. It convinced a whole lot of his followers that he did everything possible with all due haste. Truth in advertising would have led to it being called “Operation well, ignoring it isn’t making it go away, so let’s put some money into it, but without too much oversight so some can be skimmed by friends”

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Well, we know it’s pretty much instant hot radioactive garbage then…

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Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

-1984

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Lies and fabricated-from-whole-cloth complete BS.

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Understanding the source of the outbreak is valuable, insofar as preventing future pandemics goes. However it’s fairly moot at this point. What would it change? Say the US did discover evidence of a negligent or purposeful release by China. What consequence could be imposed that wouldn’t further damage US interests?

The idea of the purposeful lab-release conspiracy is to deflect blame from 12 months of gross negligence by the Trump administration and whip up nativist sentiment. And all this from the party of personal responsibility.

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Psaki shut him down because Biden doesn’t want the GOP driving his political agenda, but I think they screwed up here because it is just reifying this as a left-right political issue when it shouldn’t be. Fox is supporting this to vindicate Trump and cause trouble, and Psaki/Biden are just walking into their trap instead of defusing it, making it look like a cover-up. This, despite the lab leak remaining viable even as other hypotheses have been proposed and failed. The WHO investigation doesn’t look legitimate and Fauci should never have defended it so strongly. It was led by someone with vested corporate interests in shifting blame because of his own gain-of-function research. The naturalist accounts haven’t found the link to humans despite trying to blame wet markets or pangolins or people eating bats. The fact that COVID-19 seems especially well-suited to transmission indoors and almost impossible outdoors suggests it evolved in an indoor environment as well. They need to support real scientific investigation here whether or not it points to a lab leak, rather than trying to win political points or bizarrely defend Chinese government and corporate interests. Otherwise the GOP will bengazi them with it, and it really won’t matter where it came from.

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The concept of an intentional release is pure crazytown. They could have had agents among the millions of Chinese tourists who visited the US. There’s plenty off the shelf bugs where the sequence is well known, that wouldn’t have suggested a Chinese origin. Or shipped it throughout the country by all the Amazon deliveries. They could have engineered a lethal flu virus, or used the 1918 bug, or any of the other well known lethal viruses/bacteria and easily introduced it into the country. If they engineered it, they could have spent a couple years developing vaccines to it. The idea is they’d just throw it into a central city in China and then hope it hops to the US? The Chinese have as much “circumstantial evidence” as we do that the US is behind it all, it makes just as much sense. Which is none, as it’d be nonsensical for either country to want to do this. A pandemic is not going to spare any country.

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