4chan figured this out as early as March 2020: google "site:4plebs.org shi zhengli"
- 4chan saw the pandemic coming in January 2020, and predicted it would be big
- 4chan knew it wasn't 'just another flu' in March 2020, when the media was downplaying it
- 4chan figured out the virus is transmitted via areosol, not just particulate
- 4chan worked out that Vitamin D can help (even Fauci admitted he takes it)
- Wuhan Lab hypothesis
That's just off the top of my head. Sure, 4chan got a lot wrong: but better to get all the (possible) facts, and sift through them. That's science. What are you going to do otherwise? Trust Fauci?
4chan isn't know for enormous deference to anyone, so the fact that "they" (collectivizing 4chan always irriates me, but whatever) got things right given the head-in-sand public attitude (*) of the administration isn't really surprising.
(*) Trump of course privately told Woodward that it was really bad.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/31/8016865...
Months after this came out, the media was proclaiming that the virus was no worse than the flu.
Retrospectively, most analyses that I've read have said that travel bans had essentially no effect, something most epidemiologists at the time were saying too. Was that covered? No. The administration said that a ban on travel from China was a good idea (it likely wasn't a bad one), and that was the end of the story, more or less.
Months after that announcement, Trump was proclaiming that the virus was no worse than the flu.
March 24th, 2020:
"We lose thousands and thousands of people a year to the flu. We don't turn the country off," Trump said from the Rose Garden. "And actually, this year we're having a bad flu season. But we lose thousands of people a year to the flu. We never turn the country off. We lose much more than that to automobile accidents… I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter."
It's pretty well known that trump was subsequently labeled racist for attempting that ban.
Where are you getting this idea that the media was deferential? It sounds...very far fetched, to put it nicely.
Hoping to have the country roaring back by easter 2020 didn't and doesn't strike me as evidence of someone taking COVID19 seriously.
Was it incorrect that part of Trump's motivation for the travel ban was racism (his own, or institutional)? I don't think we can really answer that question definitively at the moment, and we may never be able to. But again, this is another example of "the boy who cried wolf" syndrome. Maybe this time, his nationalistic, xenophobic language was rooted in a sincere, scientifically rooted belief about how best to protect the country. But when you've used the same kind of language throughout your administration to belittle, insult and denigrate, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that people interpret the same sort of behavior as more of the same.
The US media is almost always deferential. They lob softball questions at politicans, allow them to lie to the cameras without challenge, give outsize credibility to administration statements, and so much more. I grew up in the UK in the 60s, 70s and 80s. No US politician would survive the media climate in the UK back then.
Probably you're thinking of media actually calling Trump out on his lies, and yes, when they eventually got around to that, that was a little different. But then, he was a different sort of president, so hardly surprising.
I never read 4chan or many opinions in genral, but I knew all of those points (minus the vitamin D) on my own.
The quote of 'knew a picosecond after he heard' resonated with me, because my intuition - as a laymen - was exactly the same. The moment I heard of the wuhan institute, I basically was pretty sure what had happened. All that followed was disbelief and mild shock about my surroundings not coming to the same conclusions, or lets say suspicions and not hearing the sound of alarm bells.
I lost a lot of faith in the common sense of people through the pandemic.
what's what the internet used to be like. These days, only a few places are left that have this sort of level of community and capability.