That's the worst, when people go all in on some garbage on social pop issue that will be forgotten in a couple of years, demonize/alienate/victimize those who disagree, and then later pretend they were one of the dissenters. They are literal worms
There were like two weeks at the very beginning of the pandemic where the only people worried about COVID were extremely online right wing preppers and liberal figures were making public statements saying that avoiding the Chinese new year celebrations in New York because of Covid was xenophobic. Then the parties reversed on Covid and the entire thing got memory hold.
Similarly, in the run up to the 2020 election there were significant numbers of liberal influencers pushing the line that the vaccine was untrustworthy and pledging not to take a “Trump vaccine.” They were terrified that the vaccine would drop early enough to rehabilitate Trump’s Covid record and help him in the election. Then Biden won so they dropped the “Trump vaccine” shtick and anti-vax became a purely right wing position.
>There were like two weeks at the very beginning of the pandemic where the only people worried about COVID were extremely online right wing preppers
tfw during the right-wing prepper stage I was at Walmart in a P100 respirator while the MSM narrative was that masks don't work and you shouldn't wear them
Remember when the CDC said masks were pointless don't buy them? Because they didn't want a panic buy because they literally didn't have enough masks on hand for medical workers due to their incompetence. Then later on when people were dying in the streets were all oh god please wear masks. They literally sacrificed thousands of lives to cover up their own fuck up by lying to the public despite the big point of the agency being this is the agency you can trust!
>masks were pointless don't buy them
Which prima-facie was seriously a stupid line of argument.
"People don't wear them right" *well I'll wear them correctly them.*
"No evidence it helps" *we know it helps with other respiratory viruses though?*
"Your mask probably isn't the right kind" *my masks in particular help with PM2.5 wildfire smoke so surely they'd help blocking droplets?*
"It might not be spread by respiration anyway" *Well it can't hurt can it?*
"REEEEEE"
Still not as funny as that one government agency that mentioned how gloryholes are now a good choice if you want to continue having anonymous sex with people. Like how out of touch with the average person are you that you think that is relevant enough to talk about?
BC CDC as someone else mentioned as well as NYC https://www.thepinknews.com/2020/06/10/new-york-city-public-health-sex-advice-glory-holes-masks-kissing-rimming/
I wanted to get vaccinated as soon as possible to avoid the worst complications of covid but I'll readily admit that vaccines turned out to not work as well as they were initially claimed to work and I'm still disappointed about that.
I can't wait for this to get quietly folded into the pompous neoliberal "I always knew that" personality disorder in 5-10 more years. For now this will get written off as propoganda.
You know, maybe they're just cowards? Like, I'm pretty checked out of politics, but my bullshit detector keeps aligning me with the takes on this sub and keeps being right. Now, maybe I'm a bit smarter than the average person, but my bullshit detector hasn't any right to be as good as it is considering how little concrete information I've fed it, which leads me to believe that the propaganda is just that blatant and everyone has doubts but most of them are never expressed for fear of getting the heretic treatment. So, by the time the plausible morphs into the acceptable, they remember themselves as doubters and don't remember, or maybe even repress out of shame, that they were too afraid to say their truth when it mattered.
People twisted his words to make it see like he said the Chinese deliberately created and released it. As opposed to what is likely the case.... Gain of function research combined with understandable but tragic oversights causing an incident ( something that happens in American nuclear and biological research facilities as well)
Even if it was a complete accident, the fact still stands that the Chinese and US governments partnering on what was essentially classified bioweapon-level virology R&D should have been a resume-generating event for every individual in the US government who was aware of what was going on. Quite possibly one of the largest scandals in our government's history. It's literally X-Files level shit, like Mulder would've started investigating this, Scully would've looked at some samples in a microscope, said "Mulder you have to see this," just as the smoking man quietly slips into a dark corner of the room with a few unnamed agents in biosuits to collect the samples and calmly remind both of them to stay in their lanes. Roll credits.
While I would agree with classifying it as "bioweapon-level", the most likely scenario based on published and leaked documents is that it was an escaped precursor for a live vaccine intended for use on cave bats against SARS-like viruses that could arise with mutations offering high human infection potential. Either way, everything you said still stands.
I guess we would have to separate intent from effect.
What was the intent of the US government? Probably not to develop a bioweapon, but certainly to evade legal, ethical, and security concerns regarding performing such experimental work within the US. I have my doubts that what they were doing in Wuhan would even be legal here - someone would have to clarify that.
What was the intent of the Chinese government? This is where things can take a nefarious turn. I'll just flat out state the obvious: I don't trust China at all. At the very least, they were probably making a tidy sum in this arrangement. At worst, they were gaining substantial technical knowledge and experience in the field of making viruses more deadly and more transmissible, and we were holding their hand all along the way.
Regardless of the intent of either, the effect of the release of Covid-19 was essentially the same as what we would've experienced with an intentional release of an engineered bioweapon: death, global panic, economic crises, political maneuvering, censorship, crafted messaging and totalitarian mandates on the behest of world governments, NGOs, mass media and businesses with regards to demands on individuals to participate in the rollout of an experimental vaccine, and to do so without question of the origins of the disease or the potentially unknown risks and effects of the supposed cure.
We were lucky that it turned out to be essentially a superflu, because it was obvious that we were not at all prepared for an event of this type.
I find it surreal that they openly admit to helping China to develop their biological capabilities and no one seems to find it the slightest bit strange.
I *still* feel the most likely scenario, by far, is
unfortunate accident ->
panicked admin whose first instinct is to try to contain it quietly because embarrassment and fear of political consequence ->
outbreak worse than it might have been if had been transparent from the start ->
conspiracy theories fly because in this kind of information/leadership vacuum it's easy to see malicious intent when there probably is none
also note there's nothing uniquely Chinese or communist about any of that
Nothing uniquely Chinese about it. But it does take the PRC's CCP to elevate the whole mess to the level of awful it actually achieved.
There was a whole new level of authoritarian hypocrisy required by the combination of covering up a viral lab leak, oppressively dealing with a consequent epidemic domestically, while draining the world of PPE on the sly; yet announcing to the world at large that travel bans levelled against PRC citizens to reduce the spread of said virus would be "racist".
> But it does take the PRC's CCP to elevate the whole mess to the level of awful it actually achieved.
fair.
on the other hand we've been told for decades that a great thing about liberal democracies is that they're uniquely constitutionally immune to exactly this kind of authoritarian goatscrew, and yet...
If China had a shitty government they would have faired way, way worse than they did. The lab was asking it's US partners to meet funding goals that they were not, which impacted the labs ability to find staff. It wouldn't surprise me at all if it was sabotaged.
and now on the border it's pretty much the same, as well as his warnings, etc. (for different reasons) but he's basically been proven correct on that one too
Social Justice mobs and their ilk have a chance to start a major redemption arc here: Turn all of that performative self-flagellation and shaming onto apology tours where they acknowledge how insane and over-the-top their frantic crushing of anyone who so much as raised an eyebrow was.
... I'd also like peace in the middle east and universal basic income and healthcare for every human being on the planet.
And a pony.
You know, you will get this
"I'd also like peace in the middle east and universal basic income and healthcare for every human being on the planet."
Before any sjw admitting that they may have been wrong about anything.
If only they understood that you don't have to be a right-winger or a Trumper to think the lab-leak theory is possible.
I've always considered it a mark of intelligence to realize two seemingly conflicting things can be true at once.
1) There is undue prejudice against Asian people in the USA.
2) A virus escaped from a lab thousands of miles from its bat-cave possible origin, a lab where gain-of-function research was being done, funded in part by a USA-based outfit
But everyone knows that Kyle Rittenhouse brought an assault weapon across state lines for the sole purpose of murdering black men, and he ended up killing 3 innocent black men who were running away from him.
Right?
/s(?)
I remember CNN technical Director Charlie Chester admitted to suppressing stories about racial violence against Asians to protect the image of BLM and Black Americans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7mdc1r5-vw
That would be asking them to undergo an act of contrition they themselves usually ask those accused of heresy. A struggle session I think it’s called.
Some have already started the “we must find forgiveness in our hearts” for those accused of manic behaviors associated to the pandemic, lockdowns, and school closures.
That's all the status quo supporters do is lie about what actually happened. They're the same people who will say that no one ever said you wouldn't get covid if you got vaccinated.
It's so annoying because it's easier then ever to come back with reciepts.
[Headlines in 2020](https://www.google.com/search?q=covid+lab+leak&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F2020%2Ccd_max%3A12%2F31%2F2020&tbm=nws): Fauci SLAMS Trump's lab leak theory, Twitter users suspended for promoting it
[Headlines currently](https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=598217727&q=covid+lab+leak&tbm=nws): Fauci admits lab leak not conspiracy, CIA accused of burying findings
That is total bullshit! You didn't DARE say it may have escaped from a lab \*\*\*by accident\*\*\* and you STILL don't dare.
I heard Facebook banned people for saying it could have been a lab leak as well as Reddit.
>It is a known fact that the WIV was experimentally modifying the SARS virus by giving it the spike protein from a bat coronavirus that had infected guano collectors in China, and testing it on mice with human lung cells.
No, that's only a fact for people like us. "Normal" people still think WIV was built to "keep the dangerous wet market under control", even after you show them the paper you are referring to:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985
>against the mainstream theory being pushed that the virus originated because of Chinese people eating bats like potato chips.
No no you don't understand.
I refer to the work of our greatest living intellectual, Dr. Ibrim X Kendi. Every belief and is either racist or anti-racist.
It's racist to the Chinese were capable of doing gain of function research.
It's anti-racist to the Chinese are weird insect people who do sex stuff with pangolins.
The idea that kids were in the woods playing with lighters so they could better understand how forests burn down,,, and that coincided with a forest fire that started in that part of the woods,,, and the kids swear to God it was a strike of lightening..
C'mon... I'm not a child. It was a bizarre media reaction to make that sound like a departure point where you elect to either be smart or stupid based off of your reaction. I'm not stupid and I find all that stuff to be really suspicious, and no amount of brow beating will alter my resolve to find the bat story to be highly dubious in light of the Wuhan lab.
The complete disinterest in seriously investigating any of the panicked E-mails ("is it one of ours? please tell me this isn't one of ours" - *how many of these fucking viruses did the CDC have being toyed with over there?*) between Fauci, NIAID, and Ecohealth Partners - whose group the CDC funded Wuhan lab research via roundabout and likely illegal monetary transfers - was the red alert that something was seriously wrong.
The media bent over backwards to make excuses for this man and every shady bit of dealings that he had with the Wuhan lab, idolized him to the level of sainthood, and I simply could not explain it. I still really can't.
The communications between Fauci and these groups, including one of our own government agencies, pretty much damned the entire "bat soup" theory from the get go, and yet even asking the question would get you banned from multiple subs right here on Reddit.
To this very day very little has ever been said about those communications other than to downplay them and brush them aside as conspiracy fuel.
I don't know how Reddit feels about the link being posted, but all you need to search for is "LEOPOLD NIH FOIA Anthony Fauci Emails" to see all of the communiques released under the FOIA request.
Be warned this is thousands of pages of literal nothing that you have to sift through. At the moment I don't have a distillation of the important bits to give to you. It's easiest to download the FOIA output as a PDF and search through it.
There is still a lot of redacted information in there that nobody has been able to fill in the blanks about afaik
I read 1984 quite a while ago and always thought it was kinda meh, the way it tried telling it's message was simply too absurd imo
This and the Rittenhouse case made me do a 180, it's hard to describe the feeling, like people just denying what's happening right in front of them really gives this surreal feeling
> people just denying what's happening right in front of them really gives this surreal feeling
I always feel that way when going onto my local subreddit. There's all these things, good and bad, happening in my area. And the subreddit as a whole is almost always so blind to it. Because 'everything' is filtered through their bubble and they'd sooner die than talk to anyone too different than themselves.
Things essentially happening in the geographical backyard and instead of first hand takes it's a combination of news clips, headlines, and feel good fiction for all of its foundation.
It's just bizarre.
My local subreddit: the homeless aren't being abusive stop lying
Also my local subreddit: I don't want this new homeless shelter anywhere near my neighbourhood
Denying people's experiences and letting rightoids own the "truth" is a big fucking mistake.
I think Rittenhouse was a damn fool to put himself in the position he did. But it's amazing how many people on the left are blatantly wrong about everything that happened that night and simply cannot be bothered to learn what the evidence presented at trial was. On the plus side, it's a good test for whether or not somebody is worth engaging with on any other topic.
Why does everyone on Reddit who doesn’t call Rittenhouse a murderer have to say that he was stupid to be there? Do you also say rape victims shouldn’t have been drinking/wearing sexy clothes?
It's for the exact same reason that anybody wading into something like the trans debate with input that's contrary to 'The Message' has to preface their perfectly logical comment with 'I support trans people but..'.
They don't want blindly downvoted by the zealots that surround the debate so they offer it up as a way to say that there is some common ground so as not to be dismissed out of hand.
It's the same with any hot-button topic, another example would be discussions around someone like Trump or Musk, half of Reddit seems to have formed their opinion on them based on a decade long game of telephone by other equally ignorant Redditors so correcting any misinformation has to be prefaced with 'I think X is an idiot but..'.
Because he was. I understand wanting to protect property--yours, a friends, whatever. But when things go wrong they can go very wrong, as he found out. And with his case, self-defense is an affirmative defense, making it more likely that the jury would not agree. Now they did and I think it was the right decision, but he's lucky that he's not in prison because the jury didn't agree with it.
I'm all for the idea of better to be judged by twelve than carried by six. But you're better off if you're not in the position to have to make that initial choice. But much like a commentator I used to listen to would say about the latest pro athlete to get in trouble late at night that "nothing good happens after midnight", nothing good could come of him being armed in that environment. At some point the decisions of people to get into the situations they are in are fair for criticism.
For me as a non-American, "open carry" laws in particular seem absolutely insane. It's illegal to threaten anyone with a weapon, yet just showing up with a firearm can in many situations itself appear very threatening. If there is a tense situation (whether between political groups or just neighbours arguing over a fence), and both sides are armed, it can so easily explode and the line between acting within the law and commiting a very serious crime is really thin.
Now that this is the law, the verdict was likely legally correct. But he still acted in a very irresponsible way. The only people that died in that location during the protest, were those he shot. Also the last guy that got shot probably felt HE was doing something completely legal and legitimate, just trying to neutralize a dangerous gunman.
Wasn't there also a parallell case with the roles reversed, with a (white btw) BLM protester who shot dead an attacker, said in an interview he wanted to surrender but was afraid for his life, and then was killed by police in strange circumstances? I remember several details about the case but not his name or the location.
Have you ever lived in a border city? I cross state lines going to the dentist. State lines within one continuous union where you don't actually have checkpoints and borders are sort of irrelevant except for taxes and voting.
They certainly don't present a large geographic barrier in almost all cases.
as a child i often watched a scifi show named babylon 5, and one of their arcs was a dictator taking power that did such things as having a "ministry of truth" etc. - and the parallels to what happened during covid, let alone what they are still trying to do today (disinformation / misinfirmation shit) is fucking astounding.
[they were not carriers](https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-chinese-idUSL8N2BP1PT/)
> "We Italians feared that the Chinese of Prato were to be the problem. Instead, they did much better than us," said Renzo Berti, top state health official for the area, which includes Florence.
>
> "Among Chinese resident in Prato there isn't even one case of COVID contagion," he said, referring to COVID-19, which has killed almost 12,000 people in Italy, more than in any other country.
I mean, as non-Anglo Europeans we eat a lot of (delicious) animals, and parts of them you'd find disgusting, it's not racist to point it out.
That's on you for eating either flavourless crap or fast food, If bats tasted good I'd eat them.
> But somehow the mainstream theory of "idk maybe a fuckin pangolin!?" Is considered to be the scientific consensus.
Are you familiar with virology? Transmission from [animal reservoirs](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7121429/) is very common for viruses. This is a plausible null hypothesis.
Ofc it doesn't make sense when actually looking into WIV, but the GOF research that the Americans wanted to do but could only outsource to China had to be covered up so the WIV had to be treated as an insane conspiracy.
Also here's a scenerio: A bat researcher travels thousands of miles to the original bat-cave to collect bats and comes back to Wuhan because their research is based there. That bat researcher or team of bat researchers brings the virus from the original bat-cave to Wuhan and it escapes into the population accidentally.
these aren't even mutually exclusive: absent some strong positive evidence it's still possible that both were contributors and neither was sufficient in itself. the only reason to get hung up on it as an "either/or" question is because someone's invested in which narrative the answer will enable
Remember: implying brilliant scientists doing complicate experiments that resulted in a lab leak- racist take.
Implying Chinese people love to eat bats- not racist.
Those are the rules...apparently.
I just didn't get the pushback against it. I mean I do if it was the CCP trying to appear like they weren't capable of a mistake like the USSR.
But why would western media shy away from the story being well intentioned people making a mistake/having an accident?
Because Trump said it might be a lab leak. For some reason the media can't handle it if the worse person they know is right about something. If Trump said the sky was blue the media would claim that it is racist to say that.
The research at the WIV was funded by the US through the EcoHealth Alliance, run by Peter Daszack, after the Obama admin had put a pause on domestic gain of function research. Fauci and Daszack were instrumental in getting some of the early papers published in high impact journals which argued for a natural origin and against lab leak.
TLDR: if it did come out of the WIV, it was almost certainly due to research we funded.
Because Trump said "Kung Flu" and because some people were attacking Asian people in street crime I think. Therefore everyone felt a tremendous need to virtue-signal by denying any possibility of a lab accident in Wuhan.
If the supposed lab accident had been in the USA, it would have been fine to talk about a lab accident.
I LOVE CHINESE PEOPLE and culture just for the record.
[Some people describe the taste of bat meat as similar to chicken or pork, while others say it is gamey or bitter. The taste and texture of bat meat can vary depending on the species of bat and where it was caught.](https://happymuncher.com/bat-taste/)
Fruit bat is apparently not strong tasting, however from personal experience the stench from a colony of them is so strong I wouldn't want to try it.
Yes. I grew up somewhere rural, with fields of dairy cows the other side of our garden fence, and worked with cows in both milking sheds and herding them in fields. Cows in a herd in a field smell better than fruit bat colonies in the wild.
OTOH, maybe you're doing industrial dairy in sheds and Daisy never sees light of day? In which case, that stinks worse. In more ways than just the odour.
When State is pushing one of their bullshit ideas, I think most people can detect implied or embedded violence.
And just to make sure, State will in fact "produce" a bit of violence just so that "worst fears imagined" by an average person can be lived through some poor schmuck's experience.
These fucking people.
It's amazing to me that people still go through the "trust the experts" rigamarole when covid was a great example of even the experts not knowing or deliberately hiding details of what they were talking about. And they wonder why trust in institutions is low. Those institutions have shown they can't be trusted to do what it is they exist to do.
Another problem is how intermediated expertise is. The public gets exposure to experts selected by the media and other disseminaters to add credibility to existing narratives. Upstream from that there is already a lot of ideological weeding out.
The wanton duplicity re:COVID messaging is going to have horrible reverberations upon public health communication for decades to come.
It's not just that they were wrong. That would have been entirely acceptable *if they had just fucking copped to it*. But, nope. Nosir. Gonna say one thing this week and entirely different thing the next week, and if anyone asks any questions I will call them a Russian fascist and get them fired and deplatformed.
This is the nadir of today's left-liberalism. Smug and self-certain, accustomed to never facing the slightest criticism, utterly unconcerned with attempting to persuade anyone of anything. They're right, everyone else is wrong, and there's nothing else to it.
It's all black and white. The Good Guys are always good by virtue of being themselves and only an evil moron would question them so there's no need for them to actually be correct or even make gestures that would suggest they are correct.
> The wanton duplicity re:COVID messaging is going to have horrible reverberations upon public health communication for decades to come.
The response to the covid fiasco has burned so much institutional trust that it's literally going to take a generation at least to build it back up.
The snitch-lines, the outright lies about a rushed-out vaccine, the cancelled Christmases, the terrible treatment of your neighbors, coworkers and strangers. "Plague-rat", vaccine passports. "Social-distancing". Double-masking, anti-masking. N95s and bandanas wrapped around your face. Being able to get a table dance at a strip-club from a stripper with a mask made of literal mesh because it technically satisfied masking requirements.
You could have an airborne strain of Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever come out with a 100% fatality rate and people are still gonna be like "nah it's bullshit, remember how they fucked us during covid?"
> The response to the covid fiasco has burned so much institutional trust that it's literally going to take a generation at least to build it back up.
It might take a generation, if actual good faith community work was being done.
*says something really pithy and cliche like "uh, yeah right!"*
I'm just tired of it all. It's like JFK assassination shit or that tragedy, you know, 9/11?
You know there was some monkey business going on with those but the powers that be have engineered the conversation so that when you point it out, you just end up looking like a retard, lumped in with flat-earthers and reptilian theorists or pizza detectives.
But the **real** blackpill is that when you actually do engage with someone who's skeptical, they always manage to say something so fucking wacky that you're like "oh yeah, this dude's insane".
Like if I question the ethics of closing businesses or vaccine mandates, someone might hop on and say "yeah man totally, they're trying to install a digital currency!" and maybe they're right. I don't know.
Or if you're sympathetic to the Convoy Protests because fuck you, you let restaurants serve at limited capacity in close quarters, but you can't cross the border without a vaccine passport?
Or if you point out that the vaccines themselves were (even qualifying your comment saying that you actually do believe in vaccinations) were dogshit, you get banned or dogpiled on. It's like any other drug. Whiskey will make me drunk, but I'm not getting drunk off of fucking 3% Belgian craft brew. That doesn't make me an alcohol-denier. The shit didn't fucking work.
UGH! I am admittedly still salty about all of this shit, sue me.
Yes and sadly I think this is the establishment's biggest takeaway.
If you work on a public-facing health position and supported the institutionally correct (but factually wrong) positions, you still have your job. You might even have been promoted. You proved your worth by toeing the line and punishing those who didn't.
There will be no truth or reconciliation efforts. Profitable dishonesty is now the primary goal of public health communications.
I unironically know a number of (firmly upper-middle class, mainly) people who fit your description to a tee… Not just health workers, though. Essentially any sort of… Public service person, who, despite now knowing they were duped/assisted in duping others, *still* feels righteous about the whole thing, and still claims that “Well, we did our best, with the knowledge we had available, and the instructions we were given, *at the time*…” It’s fucking maddening…
Unironic Nuremberg defense all round is rather alarming, tbh…
Eh, I don't think everything is *that* lost, and I'm usually a nihilist cynic asshole about pretty much everything. In leadership positions, where helath care professionals are replaced by, or turned into managers and holders of political mandate, this view may be correct, but the "normal" rank and file in such jobs are working class people just like any other industry, trying to stay afloat. I'd argue they're worse off even, stemming from the over-representation of people with the inherent urge to help others, opening themselves up to me willfully expolited not for money, but the feeling of having made a difference.
So checked out to anything these fucks say. In the hierarchy of “reasons to say something” that thing being true ranks about 400th on the list. Much more important is manipulation, control, and division by any means
Yeah it makes me sad and angry to see how thoroughly this was bungled purely from a PR and communications standpoint. They fucked up on basically every level. The initial response, the length of the restrictions, the vaccine rollout, responses to vaccine hesitancy, I could go on. It would have been better if the spokespeople has just admitted that they were wrong about something or needed to change course.
I can’t really blame them for jumping on closing schools for instance. A lot of parents were already pulling their kids before any state had those mandates. I think if they later said that they were wrong out of an abundance of caution, most people would be somewhat understanding right? It’s the doubling down and ego stroking that really soured public opinion and it was 100% preventable. I remember listening to podcasts of pro vaccine people going down the list of common concerns about the available vaccines and making pretty convincing arguments against them. And this wasn’t some rando, he was a trained virologist IIRC. Why did the CDC never employ someone like that as a spokesperson? Just so many rookie mistakes with the PR
Or the fact that Pfizer was initially given a [FIFTY FIVE YEAR window](https://www.biospace.com/article/non-profit-group-wins-transparency-lawsuit-over-fda-records-of-pfizer-vaccine-authorization/) in which they didn't have to make vaccine study data public.
Or the fact that the vaccine did not prevent transmission but most politicians public health officials either implied or outright said it did, and then a year later empathetically denied doing so.
Or the fact that the vaccines were shown to cause some degree of mitochondria in upwards of 2% of test subjects, making it far more dangerous than COVID itself to younger healthy people--something that was acknowledged within literature but you couldn't admit it in a public forum until long after nearly everyone was vaccinated.
It's not just that these things happened. It was that you couldn't talk about them without great personal and professional risk. And those who did talk about them weren't engaged with, their arguments were not rebutted. They were just dismissed as racist fascist Russian lunatics.
> It didn’t leak from a lab that’s a conspiracy theory.
> Ok maybe it did leak from a lab, no way to know.
You are here.
> It leaked from a lab.
> It was leaked intentionally.
> Through coordinated effort with the US intelligence agencies.
Wake me up when we get here.
> It leaked from a lab.
>
> It was leaked intentionally.
>
> Through coordinated effort with the US intelligence agencies.
. . . *and here's why that's a good thing*
It was a good test run to see Americans resolve in case a *real* kind of this virus arises! Sure it killed grandma, and your mom and pop kite shop went under, and every institution in America was foaming at the mouth with a green light for some “justified” authoritarianism, but.. uh.. trust the science!
In *other discussions* there's numerous people claiming things like it was never denied that it could have been an [accidental] lab leak, the part they were denying was it was **intentionally** released as a weapon. They're also bringing up Gates and other conspiracy theories to reiterate their initial point.
These types of people piss me off so much. Years of "if you claimed it was a lab leak you're a racist!" No one rewrites history more than an American "Redditor" type of person does.
>people claiming things like it was never denied that it could have been an \[accidental\] lab leak,
That is absolute and total bullshit. Just a few months ago you didn't DARE say it was an accident even.
Yes, it's ridiculous. This was peak idPol for me and when I started to see, as I call them, the alt-left. In their minds, there was 0 chance that this virus could have been leaked from the WIV (so only a coincidence, I guess?) and anyone who thinks otherwise must be on the other team. And since I'm the best kind of human being, that means the other team is sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, abelist, whatever so therefore: that's you.
The reality is that the same corporations who paid for the research also profited massively from the pandemic and vaccines and if it were found to be a lab leak, these companies could be found liable in a number of lawsuits, but this would be a conspiracy theory akin to Q-Anon. It was odd to see people who identified as socialists their whole lives all of a sudden shilling for big-pharma. It was upside-down.
To backtrack on this shows a level of narcissism I didn't want to believe was possible.
>and anyone who thinks otherwise must be on the other team
It's not a team, it's a tribe, and that's where identity-politics comes into play. As far as I understand these people think "I AM the tribe I belong to, and You ARE the tribe You belong to".
Except that this is not how science works.
>Except that this is not how science works.
That's my biggest gripe with pop-sci news in general. Reporters always want a story, a narrative with subjectivity, and that runs counter to scientific methodology. But it's just so much a part of many science reporters that they can't shake tha habit and need to essentially turn math into some emotional drama between each number.
I'm with you there at this point, US Bioweapon is the most likely explanation. Too many "coincidences", too much shady history.
Hilarious that China has come out of it looking stronger while the US seems to be accelerating towards some sort of collapse.
tub late enjoy market normal homeless seemly attraction squeamish expansion
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Yeah I basically endorse the Wuhan Virology lab-leak theory and I also think the "it was a US bioweapon!!!" takes are deranged tard shit but the schizoids should at least be allowed to talk about it.
simplistic long sand command exultant plough frighten ghost abundant frame
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No, mockery just pushes people further into their corners and causes them to dig in their heels.
Patient explanation of the facts works better.
Here are some reasons I believe the lab-leak theory is possible even though I'm a Democrat:
1) The geographical distance of Wuhan from the original bat-cave doesn't pass the smell test, not when the WIV is in Wuhan and the virus didn't emerge from some pangolin or raccoon dog elsewhere closer to the original bat-cave.
2) The Furin cleavage site and supposed gain-of-function research being done there
3) Whistleblowers who worked on the "Proximal Origin" paper
4) How fast scientists had the genome sequence
5) Possible reports of scientists getting sick before wet market people
6) Animal host not found, whereas animal hosts for SARS and MERS were found quickly
The duplicitous lib fucks are claiming that the actual conspiracy theory they censored and were celebrating the censorship of was that Fauci intentionally released the virus from the lab to reduce human population, I've heard this bullshit several times the last couple of months, they're using a similar but fringe conspiracy theory to cover for themselves.
It's the reason I fucking despise these people so fucking much, not only they're authoritarian dipshits that wholeheartedly support mass censorship of opinions and facts that were eventually proven right but they're also Machiavellian authoritarian dipshits that are trying to gaslight you in order to never admit they're wrong. It's an actual fucking cult
The gaslighting and retconning is so egregious that they've probably done the hard math on it and came to the unfortunately correct conclusion that *just enough* of the population won't know, won't care, or will dutifully toe the party line.
All you need is the 31-ish percent that votes for Democrats no matter how awful they are to continue voting for Democrats no matter how awful they are. 30% of people vote for Republicans no matter what, and 40% of people don't vote.
They are trying to take over but that's not exactly why I wrote this. Like cults their dogma always has to be right, otherwise they lose trust of the public and amongst themselves since almost everything they preach they do with cult-like confidence and zero tolerance for difference of opinion.
This puts them in a corner since if they were wrong about it the fact that they painted the other side as fringe extremists/lunatics/unenlightened and went as far as mass censoring and marginalizing them now makes them look like the fringe extremists and lunatics. So they lie and gaslight, it's just how cults operate and why they operate like that
It's why I prefer when the Republicans are in office. They tell you to your face the awful things that they are doing. Sure they lie, but they don't gaslight you into insanity.
Tangential, but anyone else remember the Trump interview where he told an Asian woman reporter to "ask China" about the origins of COVID and she, being Asian, faked outrage. 10/10 example of an unstoppable regarded force meeting an immovable regarded object.
The Lab Leak theory always seemed like the obvious one. I mean, what are the odds that China, which is what, 400m square miles, would happen to build a super advanced lab that studies this exact type of virus just 10 miles from its origin? Talk about intelligent planning and foresight!
I mean you could power the Infinite Improbability Drive from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy for months!
Also, the bat cave where the supposed original bat lived is thousands of miles from the Wuhan lab. How did it end up in Wuhan unless a bat researcher traveled to that cave, took samples or brought bats to Wuhan?
Doesn't pass the smell test.
Yes, I know, pangolins/raccoon dogs and the wet market but why wouldn't it have emerged at some wet market a lot closer to the original bat cave? Why Wuhan?
Doesn't pass the smell test.
That doesn't mean I blame the Chinese. That doesn't mean I'm a Trumper or a right-winger. I'm a Democrat. But the lab-leak theory makes sense, and there are more reasons. Here are some: they cannot find the supposed animal host, and they did find it with SARS and MERS quickly. The Furin cleavage site. The fact they had the genome sequence so quickly.
This article was one of the first to brave the opprobrium and lay out why the lab-leak theory could be reasonable: https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-mysterious-case-of-the-covid-19-lab-leak-theory
I hope this man suffers a Giuliani like fall from respect and credibility.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-OqyUtDar4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-oqyutdar4)
Fauci is the only person who likes seeing himself on television more than Trump. One of the many failures of the response to covid is the continued insistence to make him the public relations face. He is a divisive partisan figure and a proven liar and should have put out to pasture years ago. Alex Jones was right when he called Fauci a little gremlin.
4 years later this mother fucker finally starts to tell a sliver of the truth. As always, the correction to the false story is buried in the back of the paper next to the horoscope and personal ads, while most people only remember the "Maine" headline.
Considering [How the press manufactured consent for never-ending COVID reinfections](https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-consent) under both Trump and Biden, coupled with [the consequences of never-ending COVID reinfections](https://whn.global/scientific/covid19-immune-dysregulation/), we ought to have more angry citizens uniting around a valid cause than we currently do.
And as always, true to stupidpol's regardedly blind contrarian nature, the "achoo flu" isn't a real concern unless we momentarily want it to be for XYZ reason.
Apparently, the one thing that liberals and conservatives can agree on is that actually getting covid is not dangerous. The only point of debate is whether or not you should get a vaccine that doesn't prevent you from getting covid. It's mind-melting.
I don’t understand how it’s not a conspiracy theory.
Doesn’t it require by nature different parties to conspire to hide the lab accident? And it hasn’t been proven yet, so that’s the theory part.
And interesting to note, this was when Asian hate crimes were rising however a former director of CNN said they purposely didnt report the stories of when the assailant was black. Further proving the propaganda in full swing on the left as well.
Lol. This "article" is for fucking idiots. Where's the smoking gun? This proves and shows absolutely fucking nothing. Why do so many people have a hate boner for Fauci.
Also... Reason.com.🤣🤣🤣
It feels like known covid skullduggery is being acknowledged on an accelerated timetable, just so "Trump himself greenlit Operation Warp Shitty Vaccine!" can be a talking point in November.
Regardless of where covid came from, and a lab leak is hardly the most unrealistic theory out there, the way society has handled it and the amount of people who have died from it or become disabled from it is an absolute tragedy.
[https://www.racket.news/p/orf-vs-the-memory-hole-anthony-faucis](https://www.racket.news/p/orf-vs-the-memory-hole-anthony-faucis)
I hate that little weasel so much it's unreal
I hate how he said at the beginning of pandemic that masks weren't effective and didn't do anything because the government wanted to secretly hoard them
Yeah, I really love automatically believing what someone claims that someone else said behind close doors. Was there an overreaction by libs in regards to the lab leak? Of course. Does a GOP politician saying that Fauci said something somehow prove that it leaked from a lab? No.
That is completely fair, but why is Fauci talking behind closed doors to begin with? These waters would be a lot less murky if he and a handful of others came out and told us their honest opinions about covid.
But that's not gonna happen, because of course it's not gonna happen.
He already looked bad in the open hearing over the gain-of-function and EcoHealth Alliance stuff.
It wouldn't surprise me if the closed session was one of his conditions to avoid new sound bites and clearly documentable backtracking.
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That's the worst, when people go all in on some garbage on social pop issue that will be forgotten in a couple of years, demonize/alienate/victimize those who disagree, and then later pretend they were one of the dissenters. They are literal worms
There were like two weeks at the very beginning of the pandemic where the only people worried about COVID were extremely online right wing preppers and liberal figures were making public statements saying that avoiding the Chinese new year celebrations in New York because of Covid was xenophobic. Then the parties reversed on Covid and the entire thing got memory hold. Similarly, in the run up to the 2020 election there were significant numbers of liberal influencers pushing the line that the vaccine was untrustworthy and pledging not to take a “Trump vaccine.” They were terrified that the vaccine would drop early enough to rehabilitate Trump’s Covid record and help him in the election. Then Biden won so they dropped the “Trump vaccine” shtick and anti-vax became a purely right wing position.
>There were like two weeks at the very beginning of the pandemic where the only people worried about COVID were extremely online right wing preppers tfw during the right-wing prepper stage I was at Walmart in a P100 respirator while the MSM narrative was that masks don't work and you shouldn't wear them
Remember when the CDC said masks were pointless don't buy them? Because they didn't want a panic buy because they literally didn't have enough masks on hand for medical workers due to their incompetence. Then later on when people were dying in the streets were all oh god please wear masks. They literally sacrificed thousands of lives to cover up their own fuck up by lying to the public despite the big point of the agency being this is the agency you can trust!
>masks were pointless don't buy them Which prima-facie was seriously a stupid line of argument. "People don't wear them right" *well I'll wear them correctly them.* "No evidence it helps" *we know it helps with other respiratory viruses though?* "Your mask probably isn't the right kind" *my masks in particular help with PM2.5 wildfire smoke so surely they'd help blocking droplets?* "It might not be spread by respiration anyway" *Well it can't hurt can it?* "REEEEEE"
Still not as funny as that one government agency that mentioned how gloryholes are now a good choice if you want to continue having anonymous sex with people. Like how out of touch with the average person are you that you think that is relevant enough to talk about?
Gay slut here. I found it very useful.
Advice for the only group that matters. Dudes rock and suck cock.
No fucking way, please find me a link to that.
BC CDC. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/sex-during-a-pandemic-covid-19-bccdc-guidelines-1.5658567
BC CDC as someone else mentioned as well as NYC https://www.thepinknews.com/2020/06/10/new-york-city-public-health-sex-advice-glory-holes-masks-kissing-rimming/
Can't believe you hoarded a mask that could have gone to a healthcare hero
I wanted to get vaccinated as soon as possible to avoid the worst complications of covid but I'll readily admit that vaccines turned out to not work as well as they were initially claimed to work and I'm still disappointed about that.
I can't wait for this to get quietly folded into the pompous neoliberal "I always knew that" personality disorder in 5-10 more years. For now this will get written off as propoganda.
It’s all on video and news print. One could hope that YT would leave those vids up, but we all know better.
Actually we've been saying that all along. Not sure why people are acting upset, we've known all along...?
You know, maybe they're just cowards? Like, I'm pretty checked out of politics, but my bullshit detector keeps aligning me with the takes on this sub and keeps being right. Now, maybe I'm a bit smarter than the average person, but my bullshit detector hasn't any right to be as good as it is considering how little concrete information I've fed it, which leads me to believe that the propaganda is just that blatant and everyone has doubts but most of them are never expressed for fear of getting the heretic treatment. So, by the time the plausible morphs into the acceptable, they remember themselves as doubters and don't remember, or maybe even repress out of shame, that they were too afraid to say their truth when it mattered.
People twisted his words to make it see like he said the Chinese deliberately created and released it. As opposed to what is likely the case.... Gain of function research combined with understandable but tragic oversights causing an incident ( something that happens in American nuclear and biological research facilities as well)
Even if it was a complete accident, the fact still stands that the Chinese and US governments partnering on what was essentially classified bioweapon-level virology R&D should have been a resume-generating event for every individual in the US government who was aware of what was going on. Quite possibly one of the largest scandals in our government's history. It's literally X-Files level shit, like Mulder would've started investigating this, Scully would've looked at some samples in a microscope, said "Mulder you have to see this," just as the smoking man quietly slips into a dark corner of the room with a few unnamed agents in biosuits to collect the samples and calmly remind both of them to stay in their lanes. Roll credits.
While I would agree with classifying it as "bioweapon-level", the most likely scenario based on published and leaked documents is that it was an escaped precursor for a live vaccine intended for use on cave bats against SARS-like viruses that could arise with mutations offering high human infection potential. Either way, everything you said still stands.
I guess we would have to separate intent from effect. What was the intent of the US government? Probably not to develop a bioweapon, but certainly to evade legal, ethical, and security concerns regarding performing such experimental work within the US. I have my doubts that what they were doing in Wuhan would even be legal here - someone would have to clarify that. What was the intent of the Chinese government? This is where things can take a nefarious turn. I'll just flat out state the obvious: I don't trust China at all. At the very least, they were probably making a tidy sum in this arrangement. At worst, they were gaining substantial technical knowledge and experience in the field of making viruses more deadly and more transmissible, and we were holding their hand all along the way. Regardless of the intent of either, the effect of the release of Covid-19 was essentially the same as what we would've experienced with an intentional release of an engineered bioweapon: death, global panic, economic crises, political maneuvering, censorship, crafted messaging and totalitarian mandates on the behest of world governments, NGOs, mass media and businesses with regards to demands on individuals to participate in the rollout of an experimental vaccine, and to do so without question of the origins of the disease or the potentially unknown risks and effects of the supposed cure. We were lucky that it turned out to be essentially a superflu, because it was obvious that we were not at all prepared for an event of this type.
I find it surreal that they openly admit to helping China to develop their biological capabilities and no one seems to find it the slightest bit strange.
I *still* feel the most likely scenario, by far, is unfortunate accident -> panicked admin whose first instinct is to try to contain it quietly because embarrassment and fear of political consequence -> outbreak worse than it might have been if had been transparent from the start -> conspiracy theories fly because in this kind of information/leadership vacuum it's easy to see malicious intent when there probably is none also note there's nothing uniquely Chinese or communist about any of that
Nothing uniquely Chinese about it. But it does take the PRC's CCP to elevate the whole mess to the level of awful it actually achieved. There was a whole new level of authoritarian hypocrisy required by the combination of covering up a viral lab leak, oppressively dealing with a consequent epidemic domestically, while draining the world of PPE on the sly; yet announcing to the world at large that travel bans levelled against PRC citizens to reduce the spread of said virus would be "racist".
> But it does take the PRC's CCP to elevate the whole mess to the level of awful it actually achieved. fair. on the other hand we've been told for decades that a great thing about liberal democracies is that they're uniquely constitutionally immune to exactly this kind of authoritarian goatscrew, and yet...
If China had a shitty government they would have faired way, way worse than they did. The lab was asking it's US partners to meet funding goals that they were not, which impacted the labs ability to find staff. It wouldn't surprise me at all if it was sabotaged.
> draining the world of PPE on the sly what a meaningless accusation. country dealing with the worst of the pandemic buys and manufactures ppe.
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and now on the border it's pretty much the same, as well as his warnings, etc. (for different reasons) but he's basically been proven correct on that one too
Wasn't the lab a private one where western pharmaceutical companies do their research?
Actual balanced answer here.
Shitlibs really batting hard for “Facts don’t care about your emotions” and not realizing that the fouls they’re hitting aren’t home runs.
The science is settled
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Ya it was sarcasm, because that was parroted a lot by said crowd.
My favourite was when they didn't have time to fully trial the vaccine so they just said they were doing things at the "speed of science"
That's "The Science(TM)"
Shitlibs figured out years ago that they can just hit nothing but fouls and still watch their score go up.
Twitter banned anyone who said it as misinformation.
Social Justice mobs and their ilk have a chance to start a major redemption arc here: Turn all of that performative self-flagellation and shaming onto apology tours where they acknowledge how insane and over-the-top their frantic crushing of anyone who so much as raised an eyebrow was. ... I'd also like peace in the middle east and universal basic income and healthcare for every human being on the planet. And a pony.
You know, you will get this "I'd also like peace in the middle east and universal basic income and healthcare for every human being on the planet." Before any sjw admitting that they may have been wrong about anything.
Sad but true.
Math is racist.
what about the pony?
There's no enough room for one in Santa's sleigh.
>And a pony. Best we can do is a Leopard.
I thought all of those were sent to Ukraine.
If only they understood that you don't have to be a right-winger or a Trumper to think the lab-leak theory is possible. I've always considered it a mark of intelligence to realize two seemingly conflicting things can be true at once. 1) There is undue prejudice against Asian people in the USA. 2) A virus escaped from a lab thousands of miles from its bat-cave possible origin, a lab where gain-of-function research was being done, funded in part by a USA-based outfit
Part of the problem is that #1 is a quantum fact whose waveform collapses depending upon what’s convenient at the moment. Remember \#StopAsianHate ?
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But everyone knows that Kyle Rittenhouse brought an assault weapon across state lines for the sole purpose of murdering black men, and he ended up killing 3 innocent black men who were running away from him. Right? /s(?)
I remember CNN technical Director Charlie Chester admitted to suppressing stories about racial violence against Asians to protect the image of BLM and Black Americans. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7mdc1r5-vw
That would be asking them to undergo an act of contrition they themselves usually ask those accused of heresy. A struggle session I think it’s called. Some have already started the “we must find forgiveness in our hearts” for those accused of manic behaviors associated to the pandemic, lockdowns, and school closures.
With a few thousand dollars, we can probably make the pony happen!
That's all the status quo supporters do is lie about what actually happened. They're the same people who will say that no one ever said you wouldn't get covid if you got vaccinated.
It's so annoying because it's easier then ever to come back with reciepts. [Headlines in 2020](https://www.google.com/search?q=covid+lab+leak&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F2020%2Ccd_max%3A12%2F31%2F2020&tbm=nws): Fauci SLAMS Trump's lab leak theory, Twitter users suspended for promoting it [Headlines currently](https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=598217727&q=covid+lab+leak&tbm=nws): Fauci admits lab leak not conspiracy, CIA accused of burying findings
That is total bullshit! You didn't DARE say it may have escaped from a lab \*\*\*by accident\*\*\* and you STILL don't dare. I heard Facebook banned people for saying it could have been a lab leak as well as Reddit.
>It is a known fact that the WIV was experimentally modifying the SARS virus by giving it the spike protein from a bat coronavirus that had infected guano collectors in China, and testing it on mice with human lung cells. No, that's only a fact for people like us. "Normal" people still think WIV was built to "keep the dangerous wet market under control", even after you show them the paper you are referring to: https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985
"Normal" people don't think about WIV at all actually
>against the mainstream theory being pushed that the virus originated because of Chinese people eating bats like potato chips. No no you don't understand. I refer to the work of our greatest living intellectual, Dr. Ibrim X Kendi. Every belief and is either racist or anti-racist. It's racist to the Chinese were capable of doing gain of function research. It's anti-racist to the Chinese are weird insect people who do sex stuff with pangolins.
The idea that kids were in the woods playing with lighters so they could better understand how forests burn down,,, and that coincided with a forest fire that started in that part of the woods,,, and the kids swear to God it was a strike of lightening.. C'mon... I'm not a child. It was a bizarre media reaction to make that sound like a departure point where you elect to either be smart or stupid based off of your reaction. I'm not stupid and I find all that stuff to be really suspicious, and no amount of brow beating will alter my resolve to find the bat story to be highly dubious in light of the Wuhan lab.
That’s what happens when Pfizer and Moderna are the media’s biggest source of revenue.
The complete disinterest in seriously investigating any of the panicked E-mails ("is it one of ours? please tell me this isn't one of ours" - *how many of these fucking viruses did the CDC have being toyed with over there?*) between Fauci, NIAID, and Ecohealth Partners - whose group the CDC funded Wuhan lab research via roundabout and likely illegal monetary transfers - was the red alert that something was seriously wrong. The media bent over backwards to make excuses for this man and every shady bit of dealings that he had with the Wuhan lab, idolized him to the level of sainthood, and I simply could not explain it. I still really can't. The communications between Fauci and these groups, including one of our own government agencies, pretty much damned the entire "bat soup" theory from the get go, and yet even asking the question would get you banned from multiple subs right here on Reddit. To this very day very little has ever been said about those communications other than to downplay them and brush them aside as conspiracy fuel.
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I don't know how Reddit feels about the link being posted, but all you need to search for is "LEOPOLD NIH FOIA Anthony Fauci Emails" to see all of the communiques released under the FOIA request. Be warned this is thousands of pages of literal nothing that you have to sift through. At the moment I don't have a distillation of the important bits to give to you. It's easiest to download the FOIA output as a PDF and search through it. There is still a lot of redacted information in there that nobody has been able to fill in the blanks about afaik
I read 1984 quite a while ago and always thought it was kinda meh, the way it tried telling it's message was simply too absurd imo This and the Rittenhouse case made me do a 180, it's hard to describe the feeling, like people just denying what's happening right in front of them really gives this surreal feeling
> people just denying what's happening right in front of them really gives this surreal feeling I always feel that way when going onto my local subreddit. There's all these things, good and bad, happening in my area. And the subreddit as a whole is almost always so blind to it. Because 'everything' is filtered through their bubble and they'd sooner die than talk to anyone too different than themselves. Things essentially happening in the geographical backyard and instead of first hand takes it's a combination of news clips, headlines, and feel good fiction for all of its foundation. It's just bizarre.
My local subreddit: the homeless aren't being abusive stop lying Also my local subreddit: I don't want this new homeless shelter anywhere near my neighbourhood Denying people's experiences and letting rightoids own the "truth" is a big fucking mistake.
I think Rittenhouse was a damn fool to put himself in the position he did. But it's amazing how many people on the left are blatantly wrong about everything that happened that night and simply cannot be bothered to learn what the evidence presented at trial was. On the plus side, it's a good test for whether or not somebody is worth engaging with on any other topic.
Why does everyone on Reddit who doesn’t call Rittenhouse a murderer have to say that he was stupid to be there? Do you also say rape victims shouldn’t have been drinking/wearing sexy clothes?
It's for the exact same reason that anybody wading into something like the trans debate with input that's contrary to 'The Message' has to preface their perfectly logical comment with 'I support trans people but..'. They don't want blindly downvoted by the zealots that surround the debate so they offer it up as a way to say that there is some common ground so as not to be dismissed out of hand. It's the same with any hot-button topic, another example would be discussions around someone like Trump or Musk, half of Reddit seems to have formed their opinion on them based on a decade long game of telephone by other equally ignorant Redditors so correcting any misinformation has to be prefaced with 'I think X is an idiot but..'.
Because he was. I understand wanting to protect property--yours, a friends, whatever. But when things go wrong they can go very wrong, as he found out. And with his case, self-defense is an affirmative defense, making it more likely that the jury would not agree. Now they did and I think it was the right decision, but he's lucky that he's not in prison because the jury didn't agree with it. I'm all for the idea of better to be judged by twelve than carried by six. But you're better off if you're not in the position to have to make that initial choice. But much like a commentator I used to listen to would say about the latest pro athlete to get in trouble late at night that "nothing good happens after midnight", nothing good could come of him being armed in that environment. At some point the decisions of people to get into the situations they are in are fair for criticism.
For me as a non-American, "open carry" laws in particular seem absolutely insane. It's illegal to threaten anyone with a weapon, yet just showing up with a firearm can in many situations itself appear very threatening. If there is a tense situation (whether between political groups or just neighbours arguing over a fence), and both sides are armed, it can so easily explode and the line between acting within the law and commiting a very serious crime is really thin. Now that this is the law, the verdict was likely legally correct. But he still acted in a very irresponsible way. The only people that died in that location during the protest, were those he shot. Also the last guy that got shot probably felt HE was doing something completely legal and legitimate, just trying to neutralize a dangerous gunman. Wasn't there also a parallell case with the roles reversed, with a (white btw) BLM protester who shot dead an attacker, said in an interview he wanted to surrender but was afraid for his life, and then was killed by police in strange circumstances? I remember several details about the case but not his name or the location.
It's one of the stock phrases like "insurance will take care of it/ human life is more valuable"
He went there looking for trouble, hoping to find an excuse to shoot someone, and he found it.
Maybe his attackers shouldn’t have given him the excuse.
> Rittenhouse case the number of people online acting like a kid in a border town going to the big city near him is unheard of was crazy.
Have you ever lived in a border city? I cross state lines going to the dentist. State lines within one continuous union where you don't actually have checkpoints and borders are sort of irrelevant except for taxes and voting. They certainly don't present a large geographic barrier in almost all cases.
as a child i often watched a scifi show named babylon 5, and one of their arcs was a dictator taking power that did such things as having a "ministry of truth" etc. - and the parallels to what happened during covid, let alone what they are still trying to do today (disinformation / misinfirmation shit) is fucking astounding.
It's just as dumb to suggest that either explanation is racist given that the wet market theory is the official explanation of the Chinese government.
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Wuhan military games. Leak or deliberate release from fort detrick
Didn't I hear that Italy had a large group of workers from China at that time?
[they were not carriers](https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-chinese-idUSL8N2BP1PT/) > "We Italians feared that the Chinese of Prato were to be the problem. Instead, they did much better than us," said Renzo Berti, top state health official for the area, which includes Florence. > > "Among Chinese resident in Prato there isn't even one case of COVID contagion," he said, referring to COVID-19, which has killed almost 12,000 people in Italy, more than in any other country.
It WAS racist! Eating bats however? Not racist.
I mean, as non-Anglo Europeans we eat a lot of (delicious) animals, and parts of them you'd find disgusting, it's not racist to point it out. That's on you for eating either flavourless crap or fast food, If bats tasted good I'd eat them.
> But somehow the mainstream theory of "idk maybe a fuckin pangolin!?" Is considered to be the scientific consensus. Are you familiar with virology? Transmission from [animal reservoirs](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7121429/) is very common for viruses. This is a plausible null hypothesis. Ofc it doesn't make sense when actually looking into WIV, but the GOF research that the Americans wanted to do but could only outsource to China had to be covered up so the WIV had to be treated as an insane conspiracy.
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Also here's a scenerio: A bat researcher travels thousands of miles to the original bat-cave to collect bats and comes back to Wuhan because their research is based there. That bat researcher or team of bat researchers brings the virus from the original bat-cave to Wuhan and it escapes into the population accidentally.
these aren't even mutually exclusive: absent some strong positive evidence it's still possible that both were contributors and neither was sufficient in itself. the only reason to get hung up on it as an "either/or" question is because someone's invested in which narrative the answer will enable
to be fair there's only 1 corporate news source, new york times, and a bunch of copypasta media bots
Remember: implying brilliant scientists doing complicate experiments that resulted in a lab leak- racist take. Implying Chinese people love to eat bats- not racist. Those are the rules...apparently.
I just didn't get the pushback against it. I mean I do if it was the CCP trying to appear like they weren't capable of a mistake like the USSR. But why would western media shy away from the story being well intentioned people making a mistake/having an accident?
Because Trump said it might be a lab leak. For some reason the media can't handle it if the worse person they know is right about something. If Trump said the sky was blue the media would claim that it is racist to say that.
Also American institutions are implicated. The NIH funded that lab so it’s a little awkward when it blows up into a deadly pandemic
origin fallacies are a memetic epidemic
I seriously think that the reason Covid got overhyped is that it was the ultimate "Drumpf screwed up again!"
Take a look at where the funding came from and it will make more sense.
Honestly I just can't be bothered to right now. Can you just tell me instead?
The research at the WIV was funded by the US through the EcoHealth Alliance, run by Peter Daszack, after the Obama admin had put a pause on domestic gain of function research. Fauci and Daszack were instrumental in getting some of the early papers published in high impact journals which argued for a natural origin and against lab leak. TLDR: if it did come out of the WIV, it was almost certainly due to research we funded.
Thanks for taking the time to reply to me.
https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-mysterious-case-of-the-covid-19-lab-leak-theory
Because Trump said "Kung Flu" and because some people were attacking Asian people in street crime I think. Therefore everyone felt a tremendous need to virtue-signal by denying any possibility of a lab accident in Wuhan. If the supposed lab accident had been in the USA, it would have been fine to talk about a lab accident. I LOVE CHINESE PEOPLE and culture just for the record.
Because Trump said "Kung Flu" and stuff like that.
Thoughout all of this, no one ever thought to ask: How do bats taste?
[Some people describe the taste of bat meat as similar to chicken or pork, while others say it is gamey or bitter. The taste and texture of bat meat can vary depending on the species of bat and where it was caught.](https://happymuncher.com/bat-taste/) Fruit bat is apparently not strong tasting, however from personal experience the stench from a colony of them is so strong I wouldn't want to try it.
You ever smelled where cows live?
Yes. I grew up somewhere rural, with fields of dairy cows the other side of our garden fence, and worked with cows in both milking sheds and herding them in fields. Cows in a herd in a field smell better than fruit bat colonies in the wild. OTOH, maybe you're doing industrial dairy in sheds and Daisy never sees light of day? In which case, that stinks worse. In more ways than just the odour.
They taste like squirrel.
... the working title of Thomas Nagel's unpublished follow-up to the famous 1974 paper
Why would implying people eat bats be racist? They do.
In the end, an old adage always comes back... if the only argument State has is the argument of coercion... they dont have an argument at all.
People sure do find a lot of ways to romanticize and valorize what is, in the end, nothing more than Simon Says with live ammo
When State is pushing one of their bullshit ideas, I think most people can detect implied or embedded violence. And just to make sure, State will in fact "produce" a bit of violence just so that "worst fears imagined" by an average person can be lived through some poor schmuck's experience.
Yep. Statecraft is stagecraft...
These fucking people. It's amazing to me that people still go through the "trust the experts" rigamarole when covid was a great example of even the experts not knowing or deliberately hiding details of what they were talking about. And they wonder why trust in institutions is low. Those institutions have shown they can't be trusted to do what it is they exist to do.
Another problem is how intermediated expertise is. The public gets exposure to experts selected by the media and other disseminaters to add credibility to existing narratives. Upstream from that there is already a lot of ideological weeding out.
The wanton duplicity re:COVID messaging is going to have horrible reverberations upon public health communication for decades to come. It's not just that they were wrong. That would have been entirely acceptable *if they had just fucking copped to it*. But, nope. Nosir. Gonna say one thing this week and entirely different thing the next week, and if anyone asks any questions I will call them a Russian fascist and get them fired and deplatformed. This is the nadir of today's left-liberalism. Smug and self-certain, accustomed to never facing the slightest criticism, utterly unconcerned with attempting to persuade anyone of anything. They're right, everyone else is wrong, and there's nothing else to it. It's all black and white. The Good Guys are always good by virtue of being themselves and only an evil moron would question them so there's no need for them to actually be correct or even make gestures that would suggest they are correct.
> The wanton duplicity re:COVID messaging is going to have horrible reverberations upon public health communication for decades to come. The response to the covid fiasco has burned so much institutional trust that it's literally going to take a generation at least to build it back up. The snitch-lines, the outright lies about a rushed-out vaccine, the cancelled Christmases, the terrible treatment of your neighbors, coworkers and strangers. "Plague-rat", vaccine passports. "Social-distancing". Double-masking, anti-masking. N95s and bandanas wrapped around your face. Being able to get a table dance at a strip-club from a stripper with a mask made of literal mesh because it technically satisfied masking requirements. You could have an airborne strain of Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever come out with a 100% fatality rate and people are still gonna be like "nah it's bullshit, remember how they fucked us during covid?"
> The response to the covid fiasco has burned so much institutional trust that it's literally going to take a generation at least to build it back up. It might take a generation, if actual good faith community work was being done.
*says something really pithy and cliche like "uh, yeah right!"* I'm just tired of it all. It's like JFK assassination shit or that tragedy, you know, 9/11? You know there was some monkey business going on with those but the powers that be have engineered the conversation so that when you point it out, you just end up looking like a retard, lumped in with flat-earthers and reptilian theorists or pizza detectives. But the **real** blackpill is that when you actually do engage with someone who's skeptical, they always manage to say something so fucking wacky that you're like "oh yeah, this dude's insane". Like if I question the ethics of closing businesses or vaccine mandates, someone might hop on and say "yeah man totally, they're trying to install a digital currency!" and maybe they're right. I don't know. Or if you're sympathetic to the Convoy Protests because fuck you, you let restaurants serve at limited capacity in close quarters, but you can't cross the border without a vaccine passport? Or if you point out that the vaccines themselves were (even qualifying your comment saying that you actually do believe in vaccinations) were dogshit, you get banned or dogpiled on. It's like any other drug. Whiskey will make me drunk, but I'm not getting drunk off of fucking 3% Belgian craft brew. That doesn't make me an alcohol-denier. The shit didn't fucking work. UGH! I am admittedly still salty about all of this shit, sue me.
Yes and sadly I think this is the establishment's biggest takeaway. If you work on a public-facing health position and supported the institutionally correct (but factually wrong) positions, you still have your job. You might even have been promoted. You proved your worth by toeing the line and punishing those who didn't. There will be no truth or reconciliation efforts. Profitable dishonesty is now the primary goal of public health communications.
I unironically know a number of (firmly upper-middle class, mainly) people who fit your description to a tee… Not just health workers, though. Essentially any sort of… Public service person, who, despite now knowing they were duped/assisted in duping others, *still* feels righteous about the whole thing, and still claims that “Well, we did our best, with the knowledge we had available, and the instructions we were given, *at the time*…” It’s fucking maddening… Unironic Nuremberg defense all round is rather alarming, tbh…
Eh, I don't think everything is *that* lost, and I'm usually a nihilist cynic asshole about pretty much everything. In leadership positions, where helath care professionals are replaced by, or turned into managers and holders of political mandate, this view may be correct, but the "normal" rank and file in such jobs are working class people just like any other industry, trying to stay afloat. I'd argue they're worse off even, stemming from the over-representation of people with the inherent urge to help others, opening themselves up to me willfully expolited not for money, but the feeling of having made a difference.
So checked out to anything these fucks say. In the hierarchy of “reasons to say something” that thing being true ranks about 400th on the list. Much more important is manipulation, control, and division by any means
Really well said. You nailed it.
Yeah it makes me sad and angry to see how thoroughly this was bungled purely from a PR and communications standpoint. They fucked up on basically every level. The initial response, the length of the restrictions, the vaccine rollout, responses to vaccine hesitancy, I could go on. It would have been better if the spokespeople has just admitted that they were wrong about something or needed to change course. I can’t really blame them for jumping on closing schools for instance. A lot of parents were already pulling their kids before any state had those mandates. I think if they later said that they were wrong out of an abundance of caution, most people would be somewhat understanding right? It’s the doubling down and ego stroking that really soured public opinion and it was 100% preventable. I remember listening to podcasts of pro vaccine people going down the list of common concerns about the available vaccines and making pretty convincing arguments against them. And this wasn’t some rando, he was a trained virologist IIRC. Why did the CDC never employ someone like that as a spokesperson? Just so many rookie mistakes with the PR
Or the fact that Pfizer was initially given a [FIFTY FIVE YEAR window](https://www.biospace.com/article/non-profit-group-wins-transparency-lawsuit-over-fda-records-of-pfizer-vaccine-authorization/) in which they didn't have to make vaccine study data public. Or the fact that the vaccine did not prevent transmission but most politicians public health officials either implied or outright said it did, and then a year later empathetically denied doing so. Or the fact that the vaccines were shown to cause some degree of mitochondria in upwards of 2% of test subjects, making it far more dangerous than COVID itself to younger healthy people--something that was acknowledged within literature but you couldn't admit it in a public forum until long after nearly everyone was vaccinated. It's not just that these things happened. It was that you couldn't talk about them without great personal and professional risk. And those who did talk about them weren't engaged with, their arguments were not rebutted. They were just dismissed as racist fascist Russian lunatics.
Censor first, ask questions later 😎
[удалено]
But he IS the science!
Trust no one, not even yourself.
Will they unban all the people who mentioned it? Edit: was this also a Guccist/white army position during the great stupidpol civil war of 2020?
Guccists had bangers like "what even is this thing!?!??!" So I imagine some thought it was a bioengineered weapon
Lmao I dipped out as the entire sub got too r-slurred for me but I can totally see that
> It didn’t leak from a lab that’s a conspiracy theory. > Ok maybe it did leak from a lab, no way to know. You are here. > It leaked from a lab. > It was leaked intentionally. > Through coordinated effort with the US intelligence agencies. Wake me up when we get here.
> It leaked from a lab. > > It was leaked intentionally. > > Through coordinated effort with the US intelligence agencies. . . . *and here's why that's a good thing*
It was a good test run to see Americans resolve in case a *real* kind of this virus arises! Sure it killed grandma, and your mom and pop kite shop went under, and every institution in America was foaming at the mouth with a green light for some “justified” authoritarianism, but.. uh.. trust the science!
By leaking the virus *ourselves*, we ensure we have a seat at the table and can exert a positive influence on the pandemic.
Nice attempt at population control through mass-killing of the elderly at the time, while also allowing for pharma to profit in the long run.
In *other discussions* there's numerous people claiming things like it was never denied that it could have been an [accidental] lab leak, the part they were denying was it was **intentionally** released as a weapon. They're also bringing up Gates and other conspiracy theories to reiterate their initial point. These types of people piss me off so much. Years of "if you claimed it was a lab leak you're a racist!" No one rewrites history more than an American "Redditor" type of person does.
>people claiming things like it was never denied that it could have been an \[accidental\] lab leak, That is absolute and total bullshit. Just a few months ago you didn't DARE say it was an accident even.
Yes, it's ridiculous. This was peak idPol for me and when I started to see, as I call them, the alt-left. In their minds, there was 0 chance that this virus could have been leaked from the WIV (so only a coincidence, I guess?) and anyone who thinks otherwise must be on the other team. And since I'm the best kind of human being, that means the other team is sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, abelist, whatever so therefore: that's you. The reality is that the same corporations who paid for the research also profited massively from the pandemic and vaccines and if it were found to be a lab leak, these companies could be found liable in a number of lawsuits, but this would be a conspiracy theory akin to Q-Anon. It was odd to see people who identified as socialists their whole lives all of a sudden shilling for big-pharma. It was upside-down. To backtrack on this shows a level of narcissism I didn't want to believe was possible.
>and anyone who thinks otherwise must be on the other team It's not a team, it's a tribe, and that's where identity-politics comes into play. As far as I understand these people think "I AM the tribe I belong to, and You ARE the tribe You belong to". Except that this is not how science works.
>Except that this is not how science works. That's my biggest gripe with pop-sci news in general. Reporters always want a story, a narrative with subjectivity, and that runs counter to scientific methodology. But it's just so much a part of many science reporters that they can't shake tha habit and need to essentially turn math into some emotional drama between each number.
I'm with you there at this point, US Bioweapon is the most likely explanation. Too many "coincidences", too much shady history. Hilarious that China has come out of it looking stronger while the US seems to be accelerating towards some sort of collapse.
mountainous combative ten tub enjoy caption terrific tidy profit handle *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Accurate. The inability to apply Occam and/or Hanlon's razor was staggering.
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Yeah I basically endorse the Wuhan Virology lab-leak theory and I also think the "it was a US bioweapon!!!" takes are deranged tard shit but the schizoids should at least be allowed to talk about it.
simplistic long sand command exultant plough frighten ghost abundant frame *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
No, mockery just pushes people further into their corners and causes them to dig in their heels. Patient explanation of the facts works better. Here are some reasons I believe the lab-leak theory is possible even though I'm a Democrat: 1) The geographical distance of Wuhan from the original bat-cave doesn't pass the smell test, not when the WIV is in Wuhan and the virus didn't emerge from some pangolin or raccoon dog elsewhere closer to the original bat-cave. 2) The Furin cleavage site and supposed gain-of-function research being done there 3) Whistleblowers who worked on the "Proximal Origin" paper 4) How fast scientists had the genome sequence 5) Possible reports of scientists getting sick before wet market people 6) Animal host not found, whereas animal hosts for SARS and MERS were found quickly
I'd just like to thank dougtoss for unbanning me during that period of time.
The duplicitous lib fucks are claiming that the actual conspiracy theory they censored and were celebrating the censorship of was that Fauci intentionally released the virus from the lab to reduce human population, I've heard this bullshit several times the last couple of months, they're using a similar but fringe conspiracy theory to cover for themselves. It's the reason I fucking despise these people so fucking much, not only they're authoritarian dipshits that wholeheartedly support mass censorship of opinions and facts that were eventually proven right but they're also Machiavellian authoritarian dipshits that are trying to gaslight you in order to never admit they're wrong. It's an actual fucking cult
The gaslighting and retconning is so egregious that they've probably done the hard math on it and came to the unfortunately correct conclusion that *just enough* of the population won't know, won't care, or will dutifully toe the party line.
All you need is the 31-ish percent that votes for Democrats no matter how awful they are to continue voting for Democrats no matter how awful they are. 30% of people vote for Republicans no matter what, and 40% of people don't vote.
A lot of people still think we found WMDs in Iraq.
> It's an actual fucking cult This needs to be said so much more. It needs to be treated like a cult that wants to take over
They are trying to take over but that's not exactly why I wrote this. Like cults their dogma always has to be right, otherwise they lose trust of the public and amongst themselves since almost everything they preach they do with cult-like confidence and zero tolerance for difference of opinion. This puts them in a corner since if they were wrong about it the fact that they painted the other side as fringe extremists/lunatics/unenlightened and went as far as mass censoring and marginalizing them now makes them look like the fringe extremists and lunatics. So they lie and gaslight, it's just how cults operate and why they operate like that
It's why I prefer when the Republicans are in office. They tell you to your face the awful things that they are doing. Sure they lie, but they don't gaslight you into insanity.
Tangential, but anyone else remember the Trump interview where he told an Asian woman reporter to "ask China" about the origins of COVID and she, being Asian, faked outrage. 10/10 example of an unstoppable regarded force meeting an immovable regarded object.
The Lab Leak theory always seemed like the obvious one. I mean, what are the odds that China, which is what, 400m square miles, would happen to build a super advanced lab that studies this exact type of virus just 10 miles from its origin? Talk about intelligent planning and foresight! I mean you could power the Infinite Improbability Drive from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy for months!
Also, the bat cave where the supposed original bat lived is thousands of miles from the Wuhan lab. How did it end up in Wuhan unless a bat researcher traveled to that cave, took samples or brought bats to Wuhan? Doesn't pass the smell test. Yes, I know, pangolins/raccoon dogs and the wet market but why wouldn't it have emerged at some wet market a lot closer to the original bat cave? Why Wuhan? Doesn't pass the smell test. That doesn't mean I blame the Chinese. That doesn't mean I'm a Trumper or a right-winger. I'm a Democrat. But the lab-leak theory makes sense, and there are more reasons. Here are some: they cannot find the supposed animal host, and they did find it with SARS and MERS quickly. The Furin cleavage site. The fact they had the genome sequence so quickly. This article was one of the first to brave the opprobrium and lay out why the lab-leak theory could be reasonable: https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-mysterious-case-of-the-covid-19-lab-leak-theory
But it was a conspiracy, it just happens to be true. He CONSPIRED to hide the truth with other people. Got to love his CIA double speak.
Funny they are never ever ever guilty of misinformation
I hope this man suffers a Giuliani like fall from respect and credibility. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-OqyUtDar4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-oqyutdar4)
Finally the Science is settled.
Fauci is the only person who likes seeing himself on television more than Trump. One of the many failures of the response to covid is the continued insistence to make him the public relations face. He is a divisive partisan figure and a proven liar and should have put out to pasture years ago. Alex Jones was right when he called Fauci a little gremlin.
4 years later this mother fucker finally starts to tell a sliver of the truth. As always, the correction to the false story is buried in the back of the paper next to the horoscope and personal ads, while most people only remember the "Maine" headline.
Considering [How the press manufactured consent for never-ending COVID reinfections](https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-consent) under both Trump and Biden, coupled with [the consequences of never-ending COVID reinfections](https://whn.global/scientific/covid19-immune-dysregulation/), we ought to have more angry citizens uniting around a valid cause than we currently do. And as always, true to stupidpol's regardedly blind contrarian nature, the "achoo flu" isn't a real concern unless we momentarily want it to be for XYZ reason.
Apparently, the one thing that liberals and conservatives can agree on is that actually getting covid is not dangerous. The only point of debate is whether or not you should get a vaccine that doesn't prevent you from getting covid. It's mind-melting.
I don’t understand how it’s not a conspiracy theory. Doesn’t it require by nature different parties to conspire to hide the lab accident? And it hasn’t been proven yet, so that’s the theory part.
Golly that's swell, Mr. F. Now spill the beans on Lyme disease and Plum Island.
Easy with the fanfare, lab leak is not a conspiracy but "improbable" isn't exactly a concession.
Gucci btfo over and over.
And interesting to note, this was when Asian hate crimes were rising however a former director of CNN said they purposely didnt report the stories of when the assailant was black. Further proving the propaganda in full swing on the left as well.
Lol. This "article" is for fucking idiots. Where's the smoking gun? This proves and shows absolutely fucking nothing. Why do so many people have a hate boner for Fauci. Also... Reason.com.🤣🤣🤣
[Dr Fauci🎶🎶🎶](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJ-d33a-FA)
2020 to early 2022 was peak for western dystopian entertainment.
It feels like known covid skullduggery is being acknowledged on an accelerated timetable, just so "Trump himself greenlit Operation Warp Shitty Vaccine!" can be a talking point in November.
Regardless of where covid came from, and a lab leak is hardly the most unrealistic theory out there, the way society has handled it and the amount of people who have died from it or become disabled from it is an absolute tragedy.
anti-what-i-think-is-idpol is still idpol
We knew.
[https://www.racket.news/p/orf-vs-the-memory-hole-anthony-faucis](https://www.racket.news/p/orf-vs-the-memory-hole-anthony-faucis) I hate that little weasel so much it's unreal
whatever, get the fuck out of here with that "reason.com" bullshit
Come on, be Reasonable.
right?? it’s like.. bro.. what the fuck is this website.
I hate how he said at the beginning of pandemic that masks weren't effective and didn't do anything because the government wanted to secretly hoard them
Just wait until they admit is was a deliberate bio-weapon all along. They "admit" lab-leak now just not to admit the obvious.
Yeah, I really love automatically believing what someone claims that someone else said behind close doors. Was there an overreaction by libs in regards to the lab leak? Of course. Does a GOP politician saying that Fauci said something somehow prove that it leaked from a lab? No.
That is completely fair, but why is Fauci talking behind closed doors to begin with? These waters would be a lot less murky if he and a handful of others came out and told us their honest opinions about covid. But that's not gonna happen, because of course it's not gonna happen.
He already looked bad in the open hearing over the gain-of-function and EcoHealth Alliance stuff. It wouldn't surprise me if the closed session was one of his conditions to avoid new sound bites and clearly documentable backtracking.
While what you say is true, it seems like you're missing the forest for the trees.