I mentioned no conspiracy theory. I simply state that neither of us knows who the first people infected were.
So your statement is unjustifiable.
You have no evidence as to who the first were. The secrecy of the CCP is restricting information. We do know that several lab employees had Covid-like symptoms in November 2019.
I am surprised by the lack of logic in your statement.
āAnd half of the first cases may have been lab personnel, but the CCP is keeping those data secret.āā03Cobra
How am I supposed to take you seriously?
Yes, we do. The first evidence of infections was recorded in China, and half of the infected were associated with the Wuhan market.
You are impervious to evidence. There is no evidence that will every sway you.
What I wrote is absolutely true. We donāt have the data to know due to CCP secrecy.
We donāt know that.
The CCP has great incentive to keep any evidence of lab staff infections secret, and they have!
It is not a conspiracy theory that China hasnāt cooperated. Even the WHO said that.
Letās talk about substance abuse. Many are in denial they have a problem though, as is transparent here.
Concerning the earlier article that the spread may have begun in September:
āFauci was speaking after Dr. Robert Redfield, the former head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a congressional panel that the evidence points to the Wuhan lab.
Redfield cited how the Wuhan lab deleted sequences, how the lab was under military control, and how a contractor redid the ventilation system there.
āThere is strong evidence there was a significant event in that laboratory in September 2019,ā he said.ā
The lab spent $606 million to redo their air handling system just before the pandemic broke out:
From the CNN interview of Dr. Fauci last weekend:
āThe other possibility is someone takes a virus from the environment that doesnāt actually spread very well in humans, and manipulates it a bit, and accidentally it escapes or accidentally infects someone and then you get an outbreak.ā
Thank you so much, @T_aquaticus, @glipsnort, and others for your patient persistence to continue showing where evidence does (and doesnāt) lead on these COVID source disputes. It is illuminating here to see which side goes beyond the evidence (and even in spite of existing evidence) to push a narrative they are unable to depart from, and which side is able to incorporate, listen to various narratives, acknowledge possibilities (but distinguish those from plausibilities and probabilities) while they stay with the evidence on hand.
Were it not for your level-headed, evidence-please responses here, many of us who donāt have the expertise or free time to do good research (or falling short of that, browse online among our exclusively favored talking heads) would be much more vulnerable to just accepting ideologicaly driven conclusions. This is a golden space where we can witness exactly how this works. Youāre golden.
For me, the debate is mostly a pointless distraction. Iād like to prevent the next pandemic and the one after that (if only because Iād prefer not to die in them). Both lab leaks and zoonotic spillovers can lead to pandemics, so I think we should address risks from both. Iād like to see better enforcement of lab biosafety protocols and stricter limits on gain of function research. Iād also like to see real bans on wet markets and bushmeat hunting, vaccination of poultry farms, and better funding for public health generally.
The next pandemic is much more likely to have a zoonotic origin, simply because there are far more zoonotic introductions of pathogens than lab leaks. But there are a lot fewer labs to police than there are interactions between humans and wildlife, so both sorts of risk should be addressed.
But in reality we probably wonāt do anything to mitigate any of the risks of a new pandemic. Instead, weāll sit around working ourselves into self-righteous indignation about how Those Other Guys are responsible for the current one. Iām starting to think weāre not very bright as a species.
I needed to hear that.
So thanks for that too.
Or maybe a slightly less unflattering way to put it is ā¦ We all have a finite amount of attention to spread around, and no matter how smartly we spread that, there will always be things it would have been good for us to know that we nevertheless overlooked - or took somebodyās word for it instead.
Granted, nearly everyone could rightly be challenged to improve on what (or who all) we give our finite attentions to.
Hey, Iām indulging my inner curmudgeon here. Donāt go injecting nuance.
Yet much of what was posted was more assertion than evidence.
An excellent example is the claim that the intelligence services had found ānothing.ā āNothing!ā
Of course, there is no way to know what the intelligence services found and did not release, so to claim they found ānothingā was an unsupported assertion.
What we do know is that the FBI, with its access to classified intelligence, found the lab leak the mostly likely source of Covid. So did the Department of Energy.
The claim to know what the majority of scientists think was another assertion without evidence.
The SPCA has complained about equine abuse in this thread, so will close as nothing new or beneficial seems to be forthcoming.
āLet your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.ā -Colossians 4:6
This is a place for gracious dialogue about science and faith. Please read our FAQ/Guidelines before posting.