faetal on 23/9/2021 at 11:29
Quote Posted by Cipheron
And anyway, this just says that NIH is willing to *look* at the research applications. There's one issue however, it's the fact that THIS is the document that's being offered as proof, instead of the actual research applications themselves. That is actually evidence in favor of the idea that there were in fact no relevant research proposals. Otherwise people would have linked those documents, and not this one.
It's a good point. Just trying to be very clear on what is actually being modified, since modifying live virus would be a worry, whereas it seems all of the research details are concerning pseudovirus, which is no risk to anyone.
Seems the media and the numpties are bending over backwards to decide that there's some kind of bio-warfare slant to the pandemic.
Like, this is the THIRD coronavirus to make the jump into humans (that I'm aware of).
Cipheron on 23/9/2021 at 23:33
Quote Posted by faetal
It's a good point. Just trying to be very clear on what is actually being modified, since modifying live virus would be a worry, whereas it seems all of the research details are concerning pseudovirus, which is no risk to anyone.
Seems the media and the numpties are bending over backwards to decide that there's some kind of bio-warfare slant to the pandemic.
Like, this is the THIRD coronavirus to make the jump into humans (that I'm aware of).
Well it's the third one where we were aware of the event. The other multitude of coronaviruses we get must have jumped at previous times. And there need to be countless ones that tried but weren't up to the job of sustained infection in humans. Most people even shrug off Covid-19, so it's not unlikely that there have been many other zoonotic coronaviruses which just caused mild symptoms in one or a few people, got shrugged off as just a cold, but weren't up to sustained spreading.
So that is a perspective that explains how this could happen: it's happening all the time in those places with concentrations of both humans and animals. Also consider that there hypothetically might be an immuno-compromised person involved, meaning it's not actually all that random after all. Infecting a person with a weak immune system may give the virus the chance to adapt to that host, then spread to other hosts.
Nicker on 24/9/2021 at 03:41
Remember "Obama Care Death Panels"?
Well (
https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/2021/09/22/alaska-activates-crisis-standards-of-care-for-entire-state-to-help-covid-overwhelmed-hospitals/) Alaska effectively has them now, no fault of #44.
Quote:
Alaska is activating crisis standards of care for the entire state and bringing in contracted health workers as staff shortages and influx of COVID-19 patients make it difficult for hospitals to operate normally.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy and top health officials announced the hospital support on Wednesday, the same day Alaska's new single-day cases hit another record as the highly infectious delta variant drives infections.
A combination of short staffing and high numbers of COVID-19 patients is overwhelming medical facilities in Anchorage, Mat-Su and Fairbanks. Rural hospitals say they struggle to transfer patients to urban centers for higher care. At least one patient died recently when a bed in Anchorage wasn't available.
Starker on 24/9/2021 at 11:49
Possibly a step closer to learning about the origins of the virus: (
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2) Closest known relatives of virus behind COVID-19 found in Laos
In before conspiracy theorists start to accuse Laos of developing bio-weapons.
faetal on 24/9/2021 at 14:02
Quote:
Researchers say that parts of their genetic code bolster
claims that the virus behind COVID-19 has a natural origin — but their discovery also raises fears that there are numerous coronaviruses with the potential to infect people.
Claims? Isn't the simplest explanation kind of meant to be the default until proven otherwise? This makes it sound like we should assume it is engineered, while we prove the claims tha it isn't.
Quote:
Particularly concerning is that the new viruses contain receptor binding domains that are almost identical to that of SARS-CoV-2, and can therefore infect human cells. The receptor binding domain allows SARS-CoV-2 to attach to a receptor called ACE2 on the surface of human cells to enter them.
That is a concern, but it might also mean that the immunity from the vaccines might offer some protection against other strains if the important regions are similar enough.
Quote:
“When SARS-CoV-2 was first sequenced, the receptor binding domain didn't really look like anything we'd seen before,” says Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. This caused some people to speculate that the virus had been created in a laboratory. But the Laos coronaviruses confirm these parts of SARS-CoV-2 exist in nature, he says.
Note this down, crazies.
Quote:
The Laos study offers insight into the origins of the pandemic, but there are still missing links, say researchers. For example, the Laos viruses don't contain the so-called furin cleavage site on the spike protein that further aids the entry of SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses into human cells.
This will be the part that the dickheads quote (while excluding the rest) as further proof it was engineered (until we find the natural origin for the furin cleavage site, possibly in pangolins or another intermediate).
Starker on 24/9/2021 at 15:44
Quote Posted by faetal
Claims? Isn't the simplest explanation kind of meant to be the default until proven otherwise?
Well, we don't know for sure, do we? Rather than "the default explanation" it would probably be more accurate to say "our best guess as far as where the evidence points to". Anyway, the TWIV podcast is going to discuss the paper in a future (possibly the next) episode, so it's going to be interesting to see how far we have come in understanding the origins of the virus and how the latest evidence fits into the bigger picture.
Cipheron on 24/9/2021 at 21:03
Quote Posted by faetal
Note this down, crazies.
Good luck with that bit. If there's one thing that I learned researching the PizzaGate/Q stuff it's that there's a chain of inference, but it's only scaffolding. You make the connection, but if the connection is then severed, rather than reject the following chain of inference, you double down on it. For example if you have "A implies B, which implies C, which implies D" then if "A" is disproven you just double down. So now "B" is itself questionable since it doesn't have "A" to back it up, but then you point at the *chain itself* as the proof: "Sure A was proven wrong, but check it out, if B WASN'T true then how unlikely would it be that B proved C and C proved D!" ... so they literally just reverse the chain of causation or link it back to itself.
So, for Pizzagate the original thing was that "CP" is online slang for "child porn" and then pointing out that the initials "CP" could also mean "cheese pizza". so "pizza" was just a code, for child rape. However, notice that by this point you've ALREADY dropped the CP thing AND the "cheese pizza" thing. Those were not a chain of proof as is normally allowed, but temporary scaffolding to get to the point where you're just insinuating that "pizza" is code for little girls.
but then you notice that whenever they're referencing the "pizza" it's in relation to an *actual* pizza joint. So you ditch the ENTIRE "it's a code" part and just outright say that with your pizza order there's an optional side-dish of demonic rituals and child sacrifice. At this point the only evidence remaining is that Podesta went out for pizza *often* and that he scheduled 1 hour meetings at the pizza joint - the argument is now that it doesn't take 1 hour to eat a pizza, as if that makes the idea it was actually a satanic ritual / rape / torture / murder party more "plausible".
Back in reality, Podesta was a very busy person running an election campaign, and you still need to eat every day, and you'd only have time to eat take-out. So if "pizza" was just a code and there wasn't pizza, we have to assume that Podesta was eating different take-out in between those times, and that he NEVER talked about what he's actually eating. So now they take statements like "i'll grab a pizza on the way home" to mean that this guy with an incredibly demanding schedule doing 16 hour days is going to abduct a child on his way home for a full night of torture/rape. And what he actually had for dinner, it's something he apparently kept to himself.
So no, for the Covid thing, disproving the key points doesn't actually matter. They'll just retroactively rewrite the theory to route-around any logical inconsistencies and chains of inference that are later broken.
faetal on 24/9/2021 at 21:12
Occam's razor. Naturally occurring coronaviruses several times already?
For the assumption to sit on the fence would be absurd.
Cipheron on 24/9/2021 at 22:04
Quote Posted by faetal
Occam's razor. Naturally occurring coronaviruses several times already?
For the assumption to sit on the fence would be absurd.
That's the post TV world we live in really. They'll debate the flat Earth by getting one scientist, and one layman on the world-is-round side, meanwhile on the other side of the panel they'll get one flat earther who has an engineering degree along with another flat earther who has zero qualifications whatsoever, and that's how we do balanced coverage.
But the deeper problem is what I said, that the preponderance of evidence doesn't matter here. Basically if you remove the arguments, they'll re-route through whichever points back up their preconceived conclusion. And the fallback is always that the scientists are "fake news".
Yeah, so it is handy to point out that the spike protein of Covid-19 has been found in numerous wild bat species already, because that at least shuts down the argument that that part of the virus was man-made. but that's not enough to switch people away from the lab-leak hypothesis since they'll just come up with another ad-hoc explanation now. "nefarious secret stuff" is magic glue that can always make any conspiracy theory work. So they'll just say that the Chinese just secretly already collected those viruses, but didn't record them in their samples, for secret nefarious reasons: so the lack of anyone having samples of the virus already *becomes* the proof that they had the virus in a lab.