Remember how you would get banned from Facebook for suggesting that the lab leak theory was a possibility?
Then major social networks and the medias reversed their positions. What changed in the meantime, other than the president?
The previous administration was completely nuts and would do and say all kinds of random things. The problems with communication and trust were too many to know where to start. Besides that, the context was totally different. A president trying to "wage a trade war" on China, stir up nationalist sentiment, distract from his responsibility to respond to the pandemic, constantly regurgitating conspiracy theories and other misinformation, constantly trying to distract from scandals, etc.
> Remember how you would get banned from Facebook for suggesting that the lab leak theory was a possibility?
The amount of misinformation about COVID was and is extreme. Yeah, they moderated their platform, which is under intense congressional scrutiny, in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic. Even so, I think you're conflating the bio-weapon theory with the lab-leak theory.
> Then major social networks and the medias reversed their positions. What changed in the meantime, other than the president?
Major social networks and medias didn't "reverse their positions"...we learned more, we're still learning more. What changed in the meantime is so, so many things lmao.
1. Vaccines would be available by the election (they were off by two days, likely because of optics of releasing a vaccine right before). 2. The lab leak theory being worthy of investigation 3. School lockdowns are damaging (now broad agreement) 4. New York did not need 40k ventilators and Andrew Cuomo covered up nursing home deaths (later an aide admitted to it) 5. Shutting down travel was wrong before it was right. If you recall, after trump's state of the union, in which he mentioned covid, Nancy Pelosi went into the streets of china town and insisted people ignore his fear mongering.
Shall I go on?
> A president trying to "wage a trade war" on China
A trade war which he campaigned on, was voted into office for, and for which he has the legal authority. You are complaining that trump doesn't agree with you, not that he did something legally wrong.
> we learned more, we're still learning more
Yes, they learned that they were wrong on many things and trump was right.
Fact check - the first COVID vaccine given in the US outside of a clinical trial was December 14, over a month after the election, not two days.
> If you recall, after trump's state of the union, in which he mentioned covid, Nancy Pelosi went into the streets of china town and insisted people ignore his fear mongering.
Are you aware that residents of Chinatowns are US citizens/residents, and not “travel”? I’d suggest you search news sources again and review Trump’s comments - he never warned Americans in the state of the union to stay away from downtown areas. He didn’t call for Americans to stay home and avoid coronavirus until March 2020. In February 2020 Trump’s message was that US residents had nothing to fear from the coronavirus, and that Democrats were trying to panic people - Pelosi et al were actually backing the administration line when they went to downtown areas and said people should continue their normal lives. Here’s one reminder article for you to review https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/485245-trump-hits-demo... ‘Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney earlier Friday claimed the press was seeking to use the virus to harm Trump, while Donald Trump Jr. claimed on Fox News that Democrats are hoping coronavirus "kills millions of people" so it ends the president's "streak of winning."’ This was 4 days after Pelosi visited Chinatown in SF.
Remember when the head of the previous administration thought injecting disinfectants or UV light was a possible solution to Covid?
The problem with trust and credibility is that once it’s lost, it’s very hard to gain back. Even if the broken clock is right twice a day, it’s still broken.
Maybe UV could help in some way, but was this ever going to be a real solution? I highly doubt Aytu BioPharma was in a position to deliver anything meaningful at the volume and time-scale required.
Trump simply had no clue what a workable solution looked like. He broadcast to the world as the American President the ideas of the most recent crazy to have his ear (or one that he read on Twitter), and then got a bruised ego and doubled down when shown his ideas were worthless.
No propaganda there.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/health/malaria-drug-trump...
[2] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Now if all you do is read the title of articles or videos from left leaning news site, you may walk away with the belief that he's telling people to inject it. But he's not. He says they're going to look into it. Watch the video for yourself (and take note at the video title): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zicGxU5MfwE.
I want to add--I'm in no way indicating the right leaning news sites don't do the same. They've both screwed the country up by failing to report news without some bias slapped all over everything.
Do you think corporate media is giving the recent information the weight it deserves, given the fact that 4.3 million people died so far, and untold damage was done to the global economy and mental health?
If that's the case, then the previous administration's opponents ought to look in the mirror, because they were the first anti-vaxxers, the first covid deniers (pelosi's statements that people should not be afraid of covid in late jan/early feb in chinatown, despite having access to the same intelligence as trump), and Dr Fauci lying to the US congress about gain of function research.
Honestly, given what's happened in the last two years on both sides, it should come as no surprise that no one trusts the federal government.
>The findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Advances in Therapy, were based on five days of 20-minute treatments with ultraviolet A (UVA) light using a catheter inserted into the patients' tracheas. Patients were followed for 30 days. The findings were based on four patients; the fifth patient had no detectable levels of SARS-CoV-2 at the study outset.
https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/reduced-viral-loads-se...
>The problem with trust and credibility is that once it’s lost, it’s very hard to gain back.
Are you talking about corporate media? They seem to break trust constantly, and a large % of the population continues to trust them.
So far I've seen no retractions.
The issue is not that people wanted to investigate a lab leak, the issue was that people presented their lab leak theory as a fact. Believing in a theory without any evidence to support it falls pretty squarely in the conspiracy theory bucket.
Honestly, I haven't seen anything change in substance in the meantime. It still is a suspicious coincidence, but we don't have any clear indication of what actually happened. What has changed in the reporting is that people are expressing concerns about the lab (clearly theories, not fact), which is completely natural. We should investigate it so we can better prevent, detect, and respond to future outbreaks. But let's not make premature judgements from a coincidence.
We have e-mail evidence of lab employees explicitly asking reporters not to report on the potential.
And we have a novel virus that appeared centered around a biomedical research lab doing gain of function research on closely related viruses.
Simply due to the level of accusation and its implications, the claim deserved investigation from day one not out of hand dismissal.
Imagine if someone is found with a gun right next to a shooting scene, and everyone around you insisted that he certainly could not be the one who did any wrong because... racism or something. And then later on, you find that that guys friends spoke privately with the police and asked them not to conduct an investigation. Shouldn't that arouse suspicion in normal people?
We live at the peak of the information age but our natures have not changed. Both left and right need to focus on being unified, not strong-arming the other side.
I don't want unity. People obsessed with politics think they just need consensus to solve any problem, despite the atrocious track record of political solutions. Just leave the rest of us alone.
And this sentiment is problematic, because other countries have unity and are not afraid to use it.
It actually wasn't downvoted too much - plenty of people here found it plausible - but the amount of people saying I was stupid and gullible has really stuck with me.
I was told I had no idea how viruses work (this is true enough - I don't have a degree in biology) but still felt extremely gaslit.
You don't need a degree to understand how a virus works.
The amount of people saying something about you on a mostly anonymous internet message board has really stuck with you?
This is, probably for your own good, a decent indicator that you should stop visiting said website.
I like this website. I feel like I learn a lot - mostly on discussions about fields I only have outside knowledge of.
Its not like I was personally offended but had the realization that it is possible for large groups of smart people to convince themselves of something even when it is not true (or at the very least, have no actual data to know if its true)
Similarly, on New Year's Eve 2015 I saw mention of the Cologne mass attacks on women by refugees as they were occurring on, yes, 4chan/pol/, and checked /r/worldnews and /r/europe to find out more. I didn't see anything, and assumed that it was another /pol/ "it's happening" dank maymayism. I only later realized that German media and those subreddits' mods had all worked to suppress news of the attacks until they could no longer be ignored.
(Cue "/pol/ was right" couplet)
Was it confirmed these men were legitimate refugees?
> I only later realized that German media and those subreddits' mods had all worked to suppress news of the attacks until they could no longer be ignored.
Why would they do that?
Could you remind us who was that person who went to SF’s Chinatown to hug random people and was urging others to “come and visit and enjoy Chinatown” during the first critical months of unknown risk?
Further, the above (reasonably) implies that, had the president not changed, the reversing of positions would not have occurred.