What does it mean to graciously disagree about COVID?

[pevaquark (Matthew Pevarnik)]

@03Cobra

The discussion of the lab leak was shut down in this country.

Is this a joke? You honestly think that discussion of the lab leak was shut down? Discussion amongst who? Because I had plenty of conspiratorial friends who were sharing and talking about it and discussing it over and over and over from the beginning of the pandemic. People were going on major media outlets. It seemed like an entire political party got behind the lab leak idea and kept repeating it and sharing it and repeating it and sharing it. We discussed it at various points here on these forums as various people talked about it.

Here are some of the major threads that tended to popup everytime the public was discussing things:

From September 2020:

What is evidence that Covid came from nature and not out of a lab?

What is the evidence that Covid 19 came from nature? Has it been found in nature?

From May 2021:

Origin of Covid — Following the Clues

Has anyone seen this article or have thoughts on it? Long but fascinating…also, more generally, I really can’t understand the gain-of-function research…

From October 2021:

Origin of Covid revisited

Just read an interesting article outlining the progression and ongoing efforts to find the origin of the Covid virus. Spoiler: we still don’t know. It does seem a natural origin is a strong possibility, with one investigator commenting that evolution in nature can come up with things that a human designer could not imagine, just to paraphrase, and that the Covid virus was the platypus of viruses. In any case, as pretty long article, but worth the read. What other viruses might be lurking out …

From July 2022:

Definitive Proof the Pandemic began in nature, not the lab

A whole bunch of conspiracy theorists owe Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci an apology. The pattern of cases radiates from the Huanan market selling live animals, just like an earthquake spreads from an epicenter. Screenshots and a link to one of the primary author’s Twitter threads follow. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715 Abstract Understanding how severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) emerged in 2019 is critical to preventing zoonotic outbreaks befo…

Today, people remarkably claim discussion was “shut down.” And remarkably they now say statements by the FBI presented with no evidence are to be taken on authority, while probably not even a month ago dismissing many things that the FBI says without a shred of thought. The same people also have an impressive skill of rejecting or ignoring the evidence that points to a natural origins and have throughout the entire pandemic. They follow bloggers who scour the CDC site and find random tidbits of information that they then misunderstand and take out of context, as if they know better than actual scientists. And thus the CDC becomes a lying organization who publishes misleading statistics, but secretly has true statistics at the same time that real scientists are too incompetent to understand.

The “true discussion” was shut down argument is one of the oldest tricks in the book for pseudoscientific positions. You can literally and lazily do it for humans causing climate change, young earth creationism, anti-evolution positions, flat earth positions, the electric universe nonsense, etc.

The whole thing seems quite absurd to me. Especially because many people who are convinced of the lab leak and how serious of an issue this is- Also downplayed the pandemic every chance they got. So the virus is really no big deal, yet it’s a really really really really really really really really really really really really big deal that it leaked out of a lab and Anthony Fauci needs to answer to Marjorie Taylor Greene and the American people for the evil that he’s done for this virus that’s no big deal yet is the biggest deal in the entire world.