I don't expect to. Just feel the need to ask.

Of course you do

At least I get my facts straight.

Debatable

Hardly.

You guys are better off debating ducktails.

Therein lies the entire problem. If one is to have a discussion about anything, one must enter into the discussion without assuming anyone who disagrees with them is, by definition, wrong, rather than granting the possibility that, indeed, other conclusions may be reached. THAT is science...and human mutual respect.

That's the thing though. LantanaFRS never has a discussion. It's troll posts that try to instigate or go nowhere. Or just posts links but no thoughts or opinions. So he doesn't try to engage in discussion. So over the past few pages I'm just returning the favor.

At this point, there isn't anything to discuss though. The Fauci situation will always be politicized and the same people who thought COVID/the vaccine as BS never changed their minds. Same for those who thought it was a serious concern and that the vaccine is the only way.

:laughabove: :bellyroll:

Again, I think it's worth asking yourself, why are you so emotionally invested in this topic right now?

If there's gonna be war and economic collapse over this, then we're all screwed. There's nothing you can do about it in that case.

Or, you could realize that there is a bigger chance journalists are just full of s*** like usual. The people in the intelligence services obviously are trying their best to find evidence, and in its absence will try their best to exaggerate or fabricate, just like they did in the past to justify wars that we now think were a mistake (e.g. Gulf of Tonkin). People like Josh Rogin or Matt Pottinger are politically motivated to do the same, and journalists like Nicholas Wade have an inflated sense of self-importance and competence from their career, plus a direct incentive to exaggerate "breaking news". If they're right, then yea the Communist Party will probably be in trouble, and then some politicians and journalists will be celebrating and gloating while the average person has to deal with the worst economic depression and possibly a war. You really won't enjoy this and you really don't want this to happen, no matter how much certain politicians tell you China needs to be destroyed at any cost.

Either way, the only productive things you can do are invest in a bunker and live your normal life. I am not really optimistic enough about life in a bunker to go invest in one, I'll take my chances and assume the lab leak people will never produce evidence of a cover-up, and meanwhile enjoy my new expensive watch and opulent car in case the world is ending lol.

It's worth recognizing there is a lot of room to bend facts, embellish the story, and misrepresent information. "Hospitalized researchers" could very well be "visited a hospital for antibiotics for a bad cold" (you go to public hospitals to do that in China). "Nearby lab" => there are level 2 labs in major cities around the world that you could blame for any outbreak anywhere. "Coronavirus GoF research" => doesn't mean the virus is the same or even remotely related, we're >90% genetically similar to tons of unrelated animals.

Again think about the most disturbing narrative that people are going nuts speculating about: Lab leak => outbreak discovered => intentionally covered up by higher ups and allowed to spread for a month or more.

Does this really make any sense to you? If it is SO obvious that the virus would be linked back to the WIV, I can think of much better ways to obfuscate the origin, like planting it in wild animals ahead of time so you can point towards that as a natural reservoir, planting it in the USA to sow doubt (just as I think it's pretty much equally likely CIA agents planted it in Wuhan to make it look like a lab leak, all the GoF research is public and they would know what virus to plant to make it look suspicious). If you assume people will do very reckless things with far-fetched goals in mind (and let's be real, the CIA DOES have the longest known track record of this), where do you stop? Was 9/11 an inside job to justify the Patriot Act? Are vaccines secretly designed to extend the pandemic and usher in more government control? Did the Democrats conspire with Asian allies to say lockdowns are needed when in fact everyone was secretly being dosed with miracle cure HCQ, to make Trump look bad? Is the New World Order responsible for planning the release of this virus to transition everyone to a centralized digital currency that they can use to track every person on Earth? Once you allow leaps in logic where someone does A so that B can happen, even though it's very difficult or impossible to predict that B actually will follow from A, you can claim just about anything you want, and it will never be falsifiable.

And once again, let me point out that knowing the incubation time, the virus was found in many countries in 2019, placing the November estimate of the true index case in question (October-November 2019 is a good estimate for the beginning of the Wuhan outbreak, but crowded cities are a much better place for viruses to spread quickly, especially one that causes a lot of very mild asymptomatic infections, so it is definitely possible it had fizzled out in some smaller village elsewhere). This is even if you want to assume the March 2019 Spanish sewage sample coming up positive was just lab contamination, or if the ~10 positive samples from Italy in September and October 2019 were also just contaminated (man that is a lot of lab contamination going on!). All of China was quarantined pretty much in one go, so it is very viable for other small outbreaks to have burned out without anyone knowing.

Emotionally invested? Hardly. As a matter of fact I've never pussied out by messaging the site administrator because someone's opinion was different from mine. I've also never suggested anyone subscribe to any particular view. I started a thread on a topic of interest to me and obviously others as well. Nice insight in your post btw. Certainly food for thought.

I will say another thing I find disturbing about Nicholas Wade's article (and a non-trivial number of people consider him just a quack journalist) is that he says there's a big conspiracy or mass denial by the virology community to hide the truth.

He's basically setting up a reverse halo effect among the general population towards researchers. Oh no, researchers are biased, we can't trust any of them! Except there are plenty of researchers who have been opponents of GoF research who still don't think the leak-coverup story is plausible. Not to mention some of the lab-leak proponents have questionable political affiliations themselves.

I really don't think this is the path we want to go down as a society. In the modern world, we have no choice but to trust experts on most things, because there is too much complexity for any person to learn fully. The whole point of public universities, public research, peer reviewed open journals, is so that the process is as open as possible while keeping out people who haven't made the personal investment in gaining enough knowledge. Science can be political and the integrity of research has been a mixed bag, but it is definitely positive information value overall, and I definitely do not want laymen's opinions to be trusted over scientific consensus even when it can be wrong at times (especially in the medical field), because laymen's opinions are usually even more wrong.