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    A week after taking my day 2 and day 8 tests (taken 25 and 26 may). The results are still showing as pending.

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      Originally posted by San Bernardhinault View Post
      I've only read the first third of that article but - as with almost everything I've read arguing in favour of the lab-leak theory - it seems to have no evidence and loads of innuendo. It reads like a version of an Erich von Danicken book. There's lots of implications of conspiracy - by pointing to two letters in medical journals and claiming that they're the main reason people believe the disease is zoonotic (I think that's the right word), the author is then able to point to flaws in the authors of those letters. I've yet to see anything of substance backing lab-leak. Yet, as the author notes, previous respiratory pandemics have jumped from animals.

      What is worse, most people who are on the lab-leak train seem to have other agendas, mostly distracting from the appalling mismanagement of the crisis in the west and trying to pin the blame on someone else.

      The way that this has been picked up in the media is also telling. There's one article like this. Then someone writes a piece saying "A respectable journal is now questioning lab leak theory", then a bunch of other people write about it, and suddenly the articles are "lab leak theory is gaining a lot of traction among scientists and journalists" and suddenly one slightly weird article becomes mainstreamed.

      It might be a lab leak, but there's nothing yet that I've seen that backs the theory up
      I'd be really interested in what you thought after reading the whole article. He only critiques those letters to say that these are the main efforts used to indicate that there was no lab-leak. Having found them wanting in terms of offering anything like evidence, he then compares lab-leak versus zoonotic development. I'm not scientifically qualified enough to be able to critique his critique, but it reads compellingly to me - but as I'm not qualified to critique it, I posted here in the hope that people with such knowledge might help me understand how bollocks/not bollocks this is.

      Comment


        Originally posted by NHH View Post
        He only critiques those letters to say that these are the main efforts used to indicate that there was no lab-leak.
        As far as I can tell, they aren't the main efforts used to indicate there was no lab leak. There seem to be reams of reports saying "it seems overwhelmingly likely to be zoonotic", including from the WHO investigators and so on. The author, though, puts those two letters on his pedestal so he can take them down. It is a tactic of the conspiracy theorist.

        As I said, it could be a lab leak. The article does nothing to push forward the theory.

        His critique of the second letter, for instance, says that it's wrong because, basically, there might be DNA strands which we don't know about which were being used in manipulating coronavirus DNA in the lab in Wuhan; and they might be using techniques to deliberately conceal the presence of genetic manipulation; and they might have deliberately made the new coronavirus to be unlike usual genetically manipulated virii and actually make it marginally less effective.

        There's an absolute mountain of "mights" and "coulds" here without one iota of anything backing them up.

        He then follows on by implying that the entire virology community are complicit in defending their funding and therefore didn't point out the "glaringly huge holes" in the argument rather than wondering if the holes aren't, actually, glaringly huge. Rather than that, he implies a massive pseudo-conspiracy suggesting that no scientist dare step out of line. This is the nonsense argument of the climate change deniers who think that the entire climate science community is scared of saying anything that would rock their funding.

        Then, after a few paragraphs explaining that virus researchers were, shockingly, researching the viruses that triggered the last two potential pandemics (SARS1 and MERS), he goes on to say that the mysterious Chinese bat lady scientist was creating "set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells". If she was doing that, she would have used the strongest binding spike protein, which we've previously learned they didn't do. His argument was that "they might not have done, so the studies that said it didn't have the strongest binding protein were wrong" at the same time as being "they made it as infectious as possible".

        Beyond that the author is using a lot of paragraphs to say not very much, as far as I can tell.

        Down at the bottom of the article there are a couple of tell-tale phrases, too, that make me question the author's purported neutrality:

        "The virologists’ omert? is one reason...."
        and
        "Another reason, perhaps, is the migration of much of the media toward the left of the political spectrum"
        Last edited by San Bernardhinault; 01-06-2021, 19:22.

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          I'll add that there is a single piece of circumstantial evidence in favour of lab leak theory - which is the presence of the virology lab in Wuhan. This is the only reason that you'd not completely dismiss the theory as total crackpot paranoia and elevate it to "unlikely but possible" which is the position that all the adult scientists appear to have taken all along.

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            The other piece that has been mentioned is the report that three workers showed symptoms in the fall, but the very veracity of that report, let alone its significance, seems to be caught up in this pissing contest among various US intelligence agencies, each of whom are leaking to credulous members of the press.

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              Aren't we in the realms of "it came from animals and accidentally leaked from a lab" versus "it came from animals", which really at best might mean it is COVID-17 and not COVID-19?

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                The article NHH linked to is very clear in implicating "gain of function" research, rather than just being an animal virus that leaked from a lab.

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                  Some other articles

                  New Scientist says it didn't come from a lab (undated) https://www.newscientist.com/definit...irus-come-lab/

                  Forbes report on the WHO conclusions that's it's likely not from a lab (April 2021) https://www.forbes.com/sites/coronav...rys-still-out/

                  Nature article from February 2021 about the WHO investigation https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00375-7

                  All taken from a Google search. There are lots of stories across a range of publications since January discussing whether it was a lab leak. There is no hard evidence. There isn't really any soft evidence. If there was it would have been published, even if only to critique the claims.

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                    I'm fairly certain that if someone had the evidence and published it then it wouldn't be career suicide. That person would be world famous.

                    The whole "they know it but they won't say it because [conjectured reasons]" is pure conspiracy brain vomit.

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                      Thanks all!

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                        Locally, daily new cases under 200 for the first time since mid-October, and no deaths from covid today.

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                          Originally posted by Patrick Thistle View Post
                          I'm fairly certain that if someone had the evidence and published it then it wouldn't be career suicide. That person would be world famous.

                          The whole "they know it but they won't say it because [conjectured reasons]" is pure conspiracy brain vomit.
                          Steven Soderbergh predicted this would happen years ago - including the details about bat shit and pigs in China - just by talking to the experts so he could make a film.

                          Everyone who knew warned this would happen more or less exactly how it has happened, which, incidentally doesn’t reflect well on China, it must be said, but there’s no justification for supposing it had to be on purpose.

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                            There is virtually zero chance that Peru is alone in this

                            https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1399727376813236230

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                              I’d have thought there’d still be more excess deaths beyond the revised COVID-19 totals.

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                                That graph from Peru really shows the winter impact of the disease (given they are southern hemisphere).

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                                  I'm away for work for a couple of weeks from the 25th June and of course they scheduled my second jab for the middle of that period (the 2nd July), but I called them this morning IVO a couple of the other things said on this thread and they brought it forward to a week Monday, which is extremely useful.

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                                    So, at one point, the UK had got down to only around 14,000 new confirmed cases of Covid-19 per week. It's now up to over 24,000 new cases in the last seven days. But deaths are still low and possibly still falling so I think the government may try and push ahead with the June 21st reopening of everything.

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                                      Highest daily new recorded UK cases figure today (4,330) since 1st April, so since more than 2 months ago. Average new UK cases rising at approx 30% per week, which would compound to a high size pretty quickly. The Daily Heil and other shitrags made a massive deal today out of the bank holiday zero deaths figure yesterday (12 new UK deaths today, surprise surprise), and the Heil referred to an "insidious" campaign to prevent full relaxation of all restrictions. No doubt the utter scum will be silent about the current rising cases trend and about the 12 new deaths. Referring to concerned scientists sharing their insights and concerns as "insidious" is barely short, in terms of utter vileness, of their "enemies of the people" label for judges doing their constitutional job. Few people in the UK deserve a dire COVID fate more than the Heil owners and editors.
                                      Last edited by Evariste Euler Gauss; 02-06-2021, 16:31.

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                                        It's very difficult to look at anything they do without thinking, 'the cruelty is the the point".

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                                          If the cases are mostly very mild ones because people are vaccinated, then I would think it's not a massive problem. But I see no data on the severity of cases.

                                          We only know that people aren't dying - which is good, of course, but you'd also rather prevent people being incredibly miserable with a long covid tail like a number of people I know. They might not be.

                                          We are told that vaccination massively reduces the severity. It might also be that most of the new cases are in kids - who are, after all, the largest unvaccinated population - and therefore mostly not very serious.

                                          Basically, we don't have the data to know whether it's a real problem or not. And with the UK government's track record earlier in the pandemic on finessing the data and opening up too early it's easy to assume the worst.

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                                            Peru's readjusted Covid-19 death toll has given it a death rate of 5.538 deaths per thousand population, or 1 in every 180 people dying from Covid-19, nearly twice as high as Hungary which held the previous record. If the world ever reached that death rate, we'd see a worldwide death toll of around 43.75 million people.

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                                              It also means Peru has now reported more deaths from Covid-19 in total than the UK, pushing the UK into 6th position worldwide.

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                                                Originally posted by Balderdasha View Post
                                                It also means Peru has now reported more deaths from Covid-19 in total than the UK, pushing the UK into 6th position worldwide.
                                                The UK has had the 15th worst outbreak going by deaths per million head of population. But it is also worth considering that we have tested more and lots of deaths that would have gone down as other causes have also gone down as covid.
                                                COVID deaths worldwide were highest in Hungary, topping a list that compares deaths per million in 204 countries worldwide.

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                                                  The Peru horror story is a depressing example of how the news "moves on", while the virus doesn't. The excess death numbers are like a tsunami or earthquake, killing thousands but without the pictures to shock and bring it all home.

                                                  I'm sure it's big news in Latin America but in much of the world it's just another graph, given less coverage than the debate about returning to normal even as the pandemic rages. It also destroys forever the "just a bad flu" myth, and yet it won't.

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                                                    The Peru horror story has at least been openly acknowledged now. As ursus noted, it won't be the only country which has been understating COVID deaths by a large factor. I forget who it was (apologies!) but someone posted an excellent article on here from a science journal a few weeks back - a global country by country examination of excess death rates etc which produced reasonable range estimates of the true COVID death levels around the world. Headline: massive understatement is widespread. For example, Egypt, iirc, is likely to have a true COVID death toll around 20 times the official figure

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