Kansas Crimson

I was going to keep the politics and anti-vax bit out of this but since that ain't happening.

I assume you're in Kansas. It could have been a lot worse in Texas.

Again, I'm sorry for your loss. Just horrific.

jhawks99 wrote: ↑Wed Jun 21, 2023 11:49 am I was going to keep the politics and anti-vax bit out of this but since that ain't happening.

I assume you're in Kansas. It could have been a lot worse in Texas.

Again, I'm sorry for your loss. Just horrific.

We're in Michigan now, but have lived in both Kansas and Texas in the recent past. Thankful that we had the options that are available here. This child would have been profoundly disabled if she survived at all.

fascinating findings

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanm ... st%20virus.

36 YOUNG volunteers

50% became infected; viral emission mostly after symptom onset and NOT correlated to severity (some remained asymptomatic); some subjects were superspreaders, without correlation to symptoms; severity and contagiousness varied enormously between subjects

How to sum up covid in one meme

You have to be tested to know you have cancer.

Randy is - like me and I’d guess most of the folks here - clearly not old enough to be personally, individually aware of the horrors of the diseases that are prevented by all of the mandatory vaccines that 99.968% of us don’t throw shit-fit temper tantrums over (polio, and so on).

But Randy is not capable of conceiving that things that have not impacted him personally and individually even exist, let alone are worth worrying about.

One fun thing - “snowflake” gets thrown around a lot. It’s not just that snowflakes (like Randy) simply melt when heated up, it’s that they think they are unique and precious. Special. Different. As if not being exactly the same as any other example means they are not subject to the same rules.

Of course that’s not true; all snowflakes melt.

Some snowflakes persist for eons in deepest regions of space. Then become a comet's tail.

That is too funny. Too sad, but funny.

These are not serious people, except, they are...

Feral wrote: ↑Mon Jun 26, 2023 9:20 pm That is too funny. Too sad, but funny.

These are not serious people, except, they are...

When you start from a conclusion (Covid isn't real) and then work backward, you end up doing things like blaming stock culture war targets for what is actually just science.

jfish26 wrote: ↑Tue Jun 27, 2023 10:38 am

Feral wrote: ↑Mon Jun 26, 2023 9:20 pm That is too funny. Too sad, but funny.

These are not serious people, except, they are...

When you start from a conclusion (Covid isn't real) and then work backward, you end up doing things like blaming stock culture war targets for what is actually just science.

Nothing personal, but you sound woke.

Fraudsters likely stole over $200 billion in Covid relief aid, watchdog says

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/06/28/busi ... index.html

Those insisting the pandemic was human-made are ignoring the known facts

People who believe the novel coronavirus was the result of a lab experiment don't have any evidence to support their theory.

Today, Americans are more likely to believe that the novel coronavirus, which causes Covid, came from a lab rather than from an animal infecting a human, even though most studies overwhelmingly suggest the opposite. For months, proponents of the idea that the novel coronavirus escaped from a lab have been hotly anticipating a declassified U.S. intelligence report on the origin of the pandemic. Now the report is out… and it was kind of a dud for the “lab leak” theory.

The report found “no indication” that Chinese labs were working with any close progenitors of SARS-CoV-2 or of any “specific research-related incident” occurring inside a lab that could have caused the pandemic.

And yet “lab leak” advocates are claiming vindication anyway.

How? They point to two recent news reports they say back their claim that Covid came from a lab, rather than from an animal infecting a human in a marketplace.

The Wall Street Journal reported in February that the Department of Energy changed its intelligence assessment to conclude that the novel coronavirus “most likely arose from a laboratory leak.” This month, several outlets reported that unnamed intelligence sources claimed that a U.S.-funded scientist researching coronaviruses was among three people working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who in November 2019 “became sick with an unspecified illness.”

But these stories are not the smoking guns lab leak proponents make them out to be.

Let’s start with how the scientific evidence for the origin of the novel coronavirus evolved. In March 2020, The Lancet published an open letter from more than two dozen eminent scientists, experts on viruses and epidemiology, that condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”

That said, one did not have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder if the virus may have accidentally escaped from a lab. Some leading virologists did wonder about it. In a January 2020 email to Dr. Anthony Fauci about the virus, Kristian Andersen, a virologist from Scripps, said “some of the features (potentially) look engineered” and that he and his colleagues “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”

Then in May 2021, a group of more than a dozen scientists — including evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey — published a peer-reviewed letter in Science calling for more investigations into Covid-19’s origin, and maintaining that both a natural origin and an accidental lab leak remained viable theories.

One did not have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder if the virus may have accidentally escaped from a lab. Some leading virologists did wonder about it.

But here’s where it gets interesting. The same scientists who initially found a lab leak scenario plausible — Kristian Anderson and Michael Worobey — reached the opposite conclusion after they studied the virus.

Last summer, Worobey and Anderson co-authored two major peer-reviewed studies looking at the earliest cases of Covid-infected patients in Wuhan, concluding that “the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 occurred through the live wildlife trade in China” and that the wet market that hosted that wildlife trade “was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

There’s been nothing equivalent to those findings in the published literature on the lab leak theory side of the debate. There just hasn’t.

As Worobey told The Associated Press for a story published in February, “The scientific literature contains essentially nothing but original research articles that support a natural origin of this virus pandemic.”

On the other hand, the lab leak theory is built not on hard evidence, but on circumstantial stuff. It’s a theory based wholly on questions, not actual findings.

For example, lab leakers ask, if Covid was natural in origin, why haven’t scientists yet discovered the exact animal from which the virus crossed into humans?

Forgive me but, so what that they haven’t? As a January article in Slate pointed out, “It took 29 years to definitively identify the source of Ebola, 26 years for HIV/AIDS, and 15 years for SARS.” So the lack of an identifiable source, especially this soon, does not suggest a lab leak.

The lab leak theory is built not on hard evidence, but on circumstantial stuff. It’s a theory based wholly on questions, not actual findings.

Meanwhile, scientists continue to pile up evidence that points strongly to an animal source. In March, Andersen and Worobey, along with more than a dozen other scientists, analyzed the genetic data from samples taken at the wet market in the early days of the outbreak and in one significant Covid-positive sample found fragments of raccoon dog DNA, exactly the kind of evidence you’d expect to find if animals were the origin of the pandemic.

In fact, the history of pandemics is a history of viruses crossing over from animals to humans, not escaping labs and infecting humans.

That’s not to say accidents don’t happen at labs. They happen plenty. They just haven’t yet, that we know of, resulted in wider outbreaks.

[...]

Now, does that mean the lab leak theory is therefore false? No. Of course it remains possible that Covid leaked out of a lab in Wuhan. I am not saying it didn’t, nor are the scientists who think it had a natural origin and came out of the wet market. They just want to see hard evidence for the lab leak theory, as do I. We haven’t seen any yet, even after the intelligence community released declassified material behind their assessments! If that elusive evidence does emerge, I’ll say, "Sure, I was wrong on this, as were most of the scientists I trusted."

[...]

Well . . . deep state and all of that . . . ya know . . .

Randy saw some dude's tweeter that proves you wrong.

defixione wrote: ↑Sun Jul 02, 2023 8:52 am Well . . . deep state and all of that . . . ya know . . .

jhawks99 wrote: ↑Sun Jul 02, 2023 9:02 am Randy saw some dude's tweeter that proves you wrong.

^^^

Randy is a guy who tells it like it is,
even when it isn't.

Lab leak theory = starting from a conclusion and then working backwards. It is a feature, not a bug, that lab leak cannot be disproven.*

* It could, of course, be PROVED. And just like similar culture war articles-of-faith (like Biden’s corruption, or trickle-down economics), the fact that those who would be benefited the MOST from proving them have NOT in fact proven them, despite time and resources to do so, tells you a lot about the likelihood of the thing in question).

jfish26 wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 9:51 am Lab leak theory = starting from a conclusion and then working backwards. It is a feature, not a bug, that lab leak cannot be disproven.*

* It could, of course, be PROVED. And just like similar culture war articles-of-faith (like Biden’s corruption, or trickle-down economics), the fact that those who would be benefited the MOST from proving them have NOT in fact proven them, despite time and resources to do so, tells you a lot about the likelihood of the thing in question).

I'll be sure to send you the videos of Tucker and Rand Paul my sister shared with me that will show you once and for all, that you're wrong.

we all know darn well what china did.