Understanding the likelihood of a natural origin, but considering dear leader’s habitual tic of deflection and projection, his current vendetta to investigate China over the virus might make me start to worry that it may have somehow fallen out of the US’s back pocket and Trump’s actions are an attempt to get ahead of the game before anyone looks too closely at American overseas facilities or personnel.
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What about this expert?
" Professor Richard Ebright of Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology, a biosecurity expert who has been [speaking out] on lab safety since the early 2000s, does agree with the Nature Medicine authors’ argument that the new coronavirus wasn’t purposefully manipulated by humans, calling their arguments on this score strong. Ebright helped The Washington Post debunk a claim that the COVID-19 outbreak can somehow be tied to bioweapons activity, a conspiracy theory that’s been [promoted or endorsed] by the likes of US Sen. Tom Cotton, Iran’s supreme leader, and others.
But Ebright thinks that it is possible the COVID-19 pandemic started as an accidental release from a laboratory such as one of the two in Wuhan that are known to have been studying bat coronaviruses."
I agree. It’s another - LOOK, A UNICORN! - tactic of the current incompetent administration.
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Thread on the evolution of this particular narative:
…
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I would classify this as a “name the devil and he shall appear” fallacy. The virology lab in Wuhan was studying a bat coronavirus because they suspected (based on previous experience with SARS) that it could make the jump to humans. It subsequently did, in fact, make that leap. I don’t think it was because they did anything wrong, just that their suspicion was correct. Can I prove that? I cannot. I think it fits the known facts unless there are more that we are not aware of.
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Facts, reality, truth - none of these matter to the American right. All they are concerned about is themselves and some lost cause grasp for power.
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It begins in the far-right Twittersphere, then it gets amplified by Trump, then it gets reported by the “liberal” networks, then it becomes the accepted common-knowledge consensus. It’s a cooperative effort.
The empire is bipartisan.
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Once again:
Just how blatant do they have to get before people stop falling for this bullshit? There is a point at which “they lied to me” no longer cuts it as an excuse.
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Thank you for your condescending remarks as if I didn’t understand or follow the issue. Once again.
I realize you will take every chance possible though, to interject your American power narrative. Please see my past posts on politics to see how much they align with yours, and then realize you may in fact be muddying the waters here, and kindly back the fuck off.
If you had read the whole thing, it doesn’t paint it as one side of the political spectrum either, only that the origins and a lot of the agenda aligns with the far right. Honestly, get off the damn hobby horse.
Or were you summarizing it because you felt the summary wasn’t good enough?
The point of the thread was to show how what started as right wing propaganda, evolved into a general narrative that becomes more acceptable to people of all political stripes.
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I was intending to add to your comment, not critique it. My apologies for any offence.
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One of the first orders Xi gave in response to the outbreak was to improve and increase security and containment at the two Wuhan virus labs. It is highly doubtful that this directive would have been given in response to the outbreak if it had originated from elsewhere.
Even if the virus did specifically escape from that lab, nearly the same argument would still apply. The very fact that it turned out to be a threat justifies its presence in a lab working against such threats, so the most that could possibly be exposed is deficient safety procedures (in the opinion of Fox pundits with a BA in Hair & Makeup from Liberty University).
And of course the people pushing this story know that. But, like every single other “investigation” launched by the right-wing genius patrol, the point is not to get to the bottom of anything, it’s to keep the descent going as long as possible. You can monger a lot more fear and hate with questions than with answers.
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It is plausible that one or more persons collecting new bat samples were infected during collection, were a bit casual about the isolation procedures when they got the samples back to the lab, or the procedures were not paranoid enough, and they became infected.
Ebola at Reston
Smallpox in London
Marburg virus in Germany and Yugoslavia
Plague (killed the wildlife biologist who dissected the animal)
Undocumented, from personal communications:
Brucellosis (infected person several doors down)
Q Fever (infected a group of visiting schoolchildren. Lab was closed to tours!)
It’s a known problem!
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C32&q=lab-acquired+infections&btnG=
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I was overly touchy myself. Sorry for snapping at you. Acknowledging systemic issues while trying to have a conversation about things at the tactical level is a balancing act, and I was a bit bothered by the idea the low level on the ground stuff would get lost if steered back towards topics most here have been familiar with since reading Chomsky in the '80’s.
That and we’re all stressed out and overloaded. I should have walked away from the keyboard and waited to think about what you were trying to add, before commenting.
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I want to believe…
Birmingham is part of London in the same way that Chicago is part of New York
It might seem pedantic, but if you are looking for the case it is important. A search for smallpox cases in London just brings up lots of pages about natural outbreaks before 1977.
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