You are absolutely correct.
My thoughts were brought back to this due to a news piece about the coming election where someone was musing over the changes in party registration numbers due to COVID deaths and noting that given Trump’s margins last time the loss of Republican voters would flip the election the other way.
It will be interesting. We try to stay out of politics, but it (politics) does affect a lot of things. Covid also. I think churches have been changed a lot due to the pandemic, and those changes are persistent.
I know a Lutheran church that switched from the common chalice to those little individual plastic cups for the Eucharist and they show no sings of switching back. That shocked me.
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After four years living in his basement as a hermit, terrified of Covid, Howard Stern finally got Covid.
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Beating a dead horse. Essentially no change from his position published in 2021 (and probably earlier, but that was the reference that popped up.)
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A dead horse?
A moderator on this forum told me that the lab leak theory was on par with believing the moon landing was faked. Quite a slap in the face!
He asked for credible sources. I would have sent it in a private message, but he closed that path.
I am trying to answer that request.
More than that. The lab leak killed millions.
If you are compelled to believe a lab leak is the unquestionable certainty, you may believe exactly that.
You have confused the dead horse with those who succumbed to COVID. That says something about reliability of thinking.
Well, the disease did. Epidemiological evidence still best supports the market as the origin, and no substantial evidence to the contrary, last I read. No doubt China knows the sequences of any unpublished research viruses and thus the truth regarding the lab pro or con, but it is unlikely we ever will. The way this thing mutates, my bet is that it was transmitted in a less virulent form from animals, then mutated into a more virulent form in the community, perhaps in an immune compromised host. But, just conjecture.
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With a highly transmissible respiratory virus, you can slow spread by behavioral changes, but you can’t eliminate the disease. As soon as behavior reverts to something more normal, transmission will increase again.
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Quite true. In the case of covid, however, delaying the inevitable until after vaccines were available meant saving millions of lives and saving many more from long-term disability – and that’s just in the US. Had there been less resistance to vaccination, many thousands of additional lives could have been saved.
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Anyone who is compelled to believe the lab leak is as likely as the moon landing being faked may believe that, and that has been a stated opinion on the forum.
I believe a lab leak is the most likely source of the pandemic.
It is strange that you think the lab leak is less likely, and that you also think China will not release information they have that would clear the lab of leaking the virus.
I see an internal conflict in your opinions.
Perhaps you meant “epidemiological evidence” only, while other evidence (deleting records, denying acces, etc.) points elsewhere.
Twisting things a bit. I said China knows, not what they know. They may well know it did not come from the lab, as they have maintained. If you state you have not cheated on your taxes, it is not evidence that you have and are covering it up.
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Well, Phil, it does not appear I expressed my point clearly. I will try again.
China’s deletion of data and records and unwillingness to share information is strong evidence of a cover up.
Why cover up a natural disease outbreak from a wet market? There is no reason.
Why cover up gain-of-function research and a leak from a lab getting large grants from a foreign country? Many reasons.
And, of course, there is evidence from before the cover up, such as the $600 million request for a new ventilation system at the lab in the summer before the airborne virus pandemic began and the early fall cases of respiratory illnesses among lab workers.
I could go into more detail, but the horse is dead—yet still stinks to high heaven.
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My baseline assumption was that the Chinese government would hide data and stonewall outsiders as their default behavior. I’ve worked with the Chinese CDC on a much less politically loaded issue than this, and I think it was likely that they lied to us about it.
Because an outbreak starting from a wet market, when everyone knew that wet markets were one of the biggest risks for starting a pandemic, and after China had claimed to have shut down wet markets, is also highly embarrassing to the state.
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