And, were any humility to arise out of that exercise, perhaps they could direct that newfound and unfamiliar trait towards some other things they currently dismiss as "conspiracy theories".
There’s always been more evidence to support the lab leak theory for those paying attention.
I have no doubt there's good evidence pointing to the lab leak origin, but virtually everything I've been exposed to over the last year are typically rumors or graphics shared on social media. Hearing something a lot doesn't give it additional credibility.
"researchers had assembled an archive of cave-bat-borne coronaviruses"
Researchers were studying viruses that had an animal origin. The lab leak would be from not following proper safety protocols.
Mistaking one for the other is highly probable.
In the case of covid there seemed to be universal belief in the media that covid originated in animals. There was no proof of this claim.
It’s one thing to just simply pick a claim and believe in it. It’s quite another to attack people who are providing an alternative claim.
The same thing rings true with regard to what is a “correct” thing to say. “China Virus” is apparently repugnant. However, naming the country of origin for variants is not. South African Variant is fine.
As for origins of COVID, I personally believe there is a good chance it came from bats, but also a good chance that it came from a lab experiment that had accidentally escaped. The theory that it was deliberately developed as a bio weapon or that it was released on purpose does not seem to hold water as there are no clear plausible beneficiaries of that action.
You can replace "main stream media" with any other group as well. (for example, the group that think masks and vaccines are part of a "plandemic" to undermine our economy and track everyone via 5g towers controlled by lizard people, while giving credence to medications recommended by politicians rather than medical professionals)
This centralized system of information dissemination has tremendous flaws.
No, the response was to ridicule people making those arguments and to censor them.
Like Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post telling Ted Cruz last May:
"I fear @tedcruz missed the scientific animation in the video that shows how it is virtually impossible for this virus jump from the lab. Or the many interviews with actual scientists. We deal in facts, and viewers can judge for themselves."
Or like "Twitter bans Chinese virologist claiming that coronavirus was made in a lab".
As usual, best summed up by the Babylon Bee:
"World-renowned fact-checking website Snopes has unveiled a brand new fact check rating called "False For Now." This will allow them to provide a rating for claims that are just conspiracy theories uttered by deranged far-right people until they later turn out to be true".
Point stands though. Lacking the ability to argue the case, the press often derive authority from the ability to slander, censor and humiliate.
Heck, US has a mature president now even acknowledging there are two major competing hypotheses. Seeing leaders embracing uncertainty is rare, so it seems humanity is going through a learning phase right now, having to face up to uncertainty and fear.
There are examples of these in these comments, so if you doubt that these things are true (and cannot find examples in this thread) then please narrow it down to one - this isn't a wikipedia articles, theres as much burden on you to disprove something you disagree with, and you haven't yet stated you disagree with anything.
So there's nothing further to discuss.
Further more, the media needs to maintain that standard themselves:
- No more anonymous, un-interrogatable sources;
- No accusations of bad motive (e.g. racism) without proof - such as those implied of the conspiracy theorists.
The claim that the virus might have originated in the lab? No.
Most of the mouthbreathers talking earlier about the "China virus" labs was predominately with pro-trump, anti-vaxxer, anti-masker individuals (well, starting with trump first). It was political grandstanding at its best, combined with 'us vs them' mentality, and a hefty scooping of conspiracy theory. So yes, the bulk of us thinking peoples justly figured this was what it appeared to be: yet another Anti-Chinese diatribe done by a white nationalist conspiracy nut (aka: trump).
1. COVID wasnt caused by 5G. Nor vice versa.
2. We've seen MERS, SARS, and other coronavirus diseases previously in the region. This isn't the only one, and wont be the last.
3. "Chinaman virus" is a point that comes from racism. It only highlights racist beliefs, and is no way any proof. (Why wasnt the "Spanish Flu" called "Kansas Kough" - it started on a Kansas military base?)
4. The most vehement supports of this conspiracy also loudly proclaim that masks don't work, and the vaccine is microchipped.
5. Masks work, of different efficacy depending on filter levels
6. No, the vaccine has no microchips.
And if you want to dig deeper, go watch the "Plandemic" video. That's an hour or so of conspiracy, including the elites infected the plebes to make more money.
When 1 conspiracy is chopped off, 2 take its place.
To you, a theory is invalid if your political enemies embrace that theory.
And back in October 2020, this was published: https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/item/2... . Is this right, or wrong?
This whole pandemic could have been handled as "We are following the medical and scientific establishment on best handling of the pandemic", but that wasn't the case. Instead, we have US states that have 'declared' Covid done, or worse yet have states that forbid companies providing proof of vaccination. The simple requirement of wearing masks, was rarely enforced. Quite a lot of assaults happened because workers at stores said something.
The politicians could have moved out of the way for science. They didnt, and they doubled down. And that got more people killed.
Your decision to turn it into a political question is a dead-end that prevents you from thinking.
https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/item/2...
-------------------------
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
ODNI News Release No. 11-20
April 30, 2020 Intelligence Community Statement on Origins of COVID-19
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Office of the Director of National Intelligence today issued the following Intelligence Community (IC) statement:
“The entire Intelligence Community has been consistently providing critical support to U.S. policymakers and those responding to the COVID-19 virus, which originated in China. The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.
“As we do in all crises, the Community’s experts respond by surging resources and producing critical intelligence on issues vital to U.S. national security. The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”
-------------------------
Stress on the quote: "The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified."
So, is it for scientific or political reasons you are ignoring this?
Sure, Trump seems prone to accepting conspiracy theories (or at least acts like it) - but why "white nationalist"? Seems like people like to sprinkle in these accusations when they thing their audience won't question it - but the evidence is a weak string of unsubstantiated guilt-by-associations.
The idea was good (hit mark audience that needed respite from all the "great globalization"), but the execution was about treason ("Trump First").
Also, I don't really consider a "white nationalist" to be a "nationalist" by the usual sense of the word (applying to nation), but rather a rarer, more abstract sense of the word (applying abstractly to "groups" such as race). White nationalism isn't necessarily compatible with race-defined nationalism e.g. if you would prioritise foreign whites over domestic non-whites.
Part of the solution would be to say something along the lines of "Right now we don't have enough evidence to make a statement about the origin of the virus, so we'll refrain from talking about it until further evidence is brought to light.".
Though, media will report what various individuals and agencies report, and they will contradict eachother.
Geraghty:
> And none of the above is definitive proof that COVID-19 originated from a bat at either the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention or the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Definitive proof would require much broader access to information about what happened in those facilities in the time period before the epidemic in the city.
> But it is a remarkable coincidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was researching Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses in bats before the pandemic outbreak, and that in the month when Wuhan doctors were treating the first patients of COVID-19, the institute announced in a hiring notice that “a large number of new bat and rodent new viruses have been discovered and identified.” And the fact that the Chinese government spent six weeks insisting that COVID-19 could not be spread from person to person means that its denials about Wuhan laboratories cannot be accepted without independent verification.
Engber:
> Arguments in favor of the “lab-leak hypothesis” remain grounded, as they ever were, in the mere and highly suspicious fact that a coronavirus likely borne by bats, likely from a cave in southwest China, emerged 18 months ago, quite suddenly, in a city very far from southwest China—where researchers had assembled an archive of cave-bat-borne coronaviruses.
As Geraghty recounts yesterday (https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/even-xavier-...), many in the media, rather than assessing the facts themselves, just resulted to name calling against a conservative-leaning but measured writer. I also haven't seen Geraghty (and again, other more measured writers) claim to have definitive proof of the lab-leak theory (as some conspiracy theorists might claim), only that it is a possibility that shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. It is illogical, irresponsible and unscientific to say "well, this theory was picked up by racists, therefore we should dismiss it" rather than evaluating a possibility on it's own merits.
It's not even considered by the people who are aware of the history of mass anti-Sino biological warfare that took place around WW2 and the decades after.
So I ask you: what evidence, even circumstantial, do you have for making the claim you do?
Motives... the Chinese have no incentive to maliciously release a virus in their own country during an event that is tied to national pride and acts as a showcase of Chinese domestic development in Wuhan. The western warhawks on the other hand have a tremendous interest in obstructing any Chinese military cooperation with its peers. The potential motives seem quite clear...with the nice side effect of disrupting Chinese trade as the world recoils from a new downside risk of globalization.
The US and its allies have a long history of biological warfare against economic competitors. Even the Japanese bio-warfare campaign in WW2 China was supported, partially funded, and fully pardoned by the US/UK...people and history books tend to forget/omit that Imperial Japan received all of its oil and much of its supplies from the US. These supplies being cutoff (aka treaty violation) without FDR's/Churchill's knowledge are what resulted in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
During periods of uncertainty, it's good to remember that America's left hand doesn't always know what its right hand is doing... and vice versa.
I tend to think history is in the process of rhyming again.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_Ei_1644
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaimingjie_germ_weapon_attac...
This lead to predictable debacles on mask usage, airborne spread, everyone's pet theories of innate population immunity, seasonality of the virus, virus origins, etc.
And yet - there are zero calls for introspection, blameless post-mortems. Nobody seems to care.
i view the last decade (perhaps two) as a complete shattering of nearly all epistemology and social trust
we are all now wandering in a forest of mirrors
or perhaps, rather, this is not a new condition, and we merely understand it
Under a: say whatever gets you clicks. Period.
Under b: hypotheses and theories cannot be reported as truths. Hard evidence is needed. There are two ways a virus evolves- naturally or guided/engineered. Without proof of the latter it is safe to assume former. No humility needed. If/when we have evidence of latter we can now report that.
Most of what can reasonably called the mainstream media was misrepresenting lab leak theories as racist QAnon ramblings for a year before it entered the "it's okay to believe this" realm. This kind of dismissal ends up being the default mode for any idea which doesn't fall within a very narrow approved view of reality.
What happens is, people discuss something plausible for which there exists circumstantial evidence (e.g. lab leak theory). Then, the media, left and right, pretends it has defininitve answers and uses "q anon" as an excuse to claim the plausible theory is wrong.
The left wants to pretend that there are all these loony q anon believers just like the right wants to pretend all left-wingers are antifa anarchists. In reality, these are tiny groups that most Americans find utterly repulsive. And, perversely, the media's breathless coverage of these groups is boosting their membership.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/study-finds-...
People don't like getting vaccines for rational reasons like: they don't like getting shots (much less 2), they're worried about side effects (which are real), they don't trust new technology (like mrna vaccines), and so on.
I think people should get vaccinated. But I understand why someone wouldn't and it has nothing to do with believing in q anon. It's like paying your taxes: I don't like paying my taxes but I do it because 1. I drive on the roads and 2. it's illegal not to. If not paying taxes was legal, I hope I'd still pay (because I drive on the roads) but a lot of people wouldn't (even though they should) for reasons that have nothing to do with being a conspiracy theorist.
it's perverted interests and motivations.
Most didn't stop at "maybe this escaped from the lab in Wuhan", but went down the real rabbit hole accusing the Chinese government of manufacturing and releasing a bioweapon.
In any case there won't be any proof ever for any origin theory, the Chinese government has made certain of that.
As an anecdote, someone recently asked me if we could tell if the COVID genome had come via animals/natural origin or engineered in some way. I said that most likely, yes that should be possible. Their immediate reaction was that this meant I didn’t believe in lab leak. That’s not at all what I had said
How?
Current facts on the ground:
- 1st response to CoVID occurrence was certainly in Wuhan.
- The closest wild strain of CoVID happens in bats living thousand kilometres from Wuhan
- Wuhan had two institutes which, on record, did gain of function experiments on bat coronaviruses
- SARS had a record of lab escapes past the previous pandemic even without live animal hosts.
I don't think it's fair to say that "most" of these people thought it was deliberately released, whether or not they believed it was a bioweapon.