Leaked documents: Ugandan government expects explosion in Ebola cases

> Will you accept that graphs predicting more than 6 months of results were in common circulation?

I accept that they exist. I don't accept that we were "bombarded" with them. This is, of course, a US perspective, so perhaps your mileage may vary.

I’m aware that “do your own research” is a common phrase among people who want to believe that “9/11 was an inside job” or whatever (also Hi Mom).

I meant it in the more nuanced sense of trying to actually do research. A layperson who wants to be informed has to start somewhere, and when the stakes are as high as with global public health, I think it behooves the person in the street to try to at least read the abstracts of some papers, try to identify experts on both sides of a controversy, and be aware that credentials are no guarantee of reasonability.

Shockley played a big role in the transistor, IIRC got the Nobel, and later spent years advocating for racist eugenicist horseshit: credentials are a good guideline, but they can’t be blindly trusted.

I really wish the medical community just agreed about all this stuff: then my job would be easy, do what they say.

Unfortunately you seem to get one group of MD/PhD people saying those other MD/PhD people are cranks, we’re the “real” scientific consensus. This does not make it easy for the well-intentioned layperson.

Neither the GP nor myself said that SARS-COV-2 escaped from the Wuhan lab, let alone that it was the result of GoF research.

I called it a theory, as in, neither conclusively proven nor conclusively disproven. It’s a theory about which there has been significant controversy. I didn’t even say there was significant evidence for it.

Acknowledging the existence of a controversy is not the same thing as promoting a conspiracy theory, and as you yourself point out, basically everyone, from word-renowned virologists down to the man in the street, has skin in the game on this one.

The world’s medical community had a COVID response that was a fucking disaster: inconsistent and constantly changing guidance, conflicts of interest, geopolitical 4th dimensional warfare, rushed and sloppy-looking vaccine approvals.

It’s no wonder the public believes a bunch of crazy shit: the experts dropped the ball. Trying to blame that on the ignorance and gullibility of the layperson and flip the script like that set back the public’s willingness to take vaccines and listen to the authorities by 50-100 years.

Don’t try to blame that on us plebs.

> [2] - https://twitter.com/janeqiuchina/status/1589098167051911169

Since you put the Twitter handle as an evidence for your argument. This particular Chinese jounalist is using Twitter and publishing articles in Western journals *while living in China*. What makes you think she is more trustworthy than Steve Bannon? Even if she is an honest and trustworthy person why would CCP let her publish anything that goes against their narrative?

> just that the actual physical evidence we have today about this virus and this pandemic overwhelmingly points to a natural origin

actual physical evidence *provided by China* FTFY. You don't think China will readily handover the data to you if it came from lab, do you? And what physical evidence? The evidences are just some early patient data and virus gene sequences. By that logic HIV spillover happened in US, not in Africa. Because early HIV cases have been detected in USA.

> overwhelmingly points to a natural origin

according to whom? The virologists who also have a history of covering up lab leaks. The virologists who will have the most to lose if lab leak is true. [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/20/world/europe/coronavirus-...

Why are you so insistent that there shouldn’t be a discussion on this?

For you to say, e.g. “My bona fides are such and such, I find this theory highly implausible for $REASONS” would be eminently useful and helpful and very much in the spirit of the site.

In case the multiple people saying this aren’t saying it clearly enough: you sound more like “Serious people all agree about this, only cranks disagree with us, and you plebs wouldn’t understand even if I explained it”.

Love #1. Fuck #2 in fucking particular.

I'm not going to engage with the 'me vs you' narrative you have going here, because you are forcing this into the polarization tactics that social media uses: I presented not just sources to those claims but I also followed up with ACTUAL incidents that took place that you could research yourself that make it impossible to arrive to that conclusion that it's overwhelmingly of natural origin which has been at the core of the CCP's discourse (despite conflicting claims of it being a US bioweapon) which absolves everyone involved and will ultimately be the highly contentious but acceptable narrative if you want any funding in the future and don't want to rock the boat, or if you're a mainlander released from indefinite lockdown.

I'd rather question your claims than your position, because I know where you stand anyway, which is the crux of my response: so, where was it revealed that Dr. Yan lied about her credentials and her experience at the Wuhan lab? To date that has never been proven despite constant criticism, what has been proven is that she was scrubbed from the Internet when she went public and that the CCP targeted her family (she is a Chinese National) while she was still in HK. She continues to publish her work in peer-reviewed journals [0] and her work stands alongside her colleagues who continue to publish their work on other journals. I'm willing to review these sources that discredit her in order to contrast with my currently held position and arrive to a better informed position, which is something I'm not sure you are willing to do.

I will agree that those who ran with the story first have a clear and unscrupulous bias, but that is the very definition of shooting the messenger which never result in her claims being thoroughly vetted--she released her scientific papers after having arrived to the US and fleeing from China then HK and finally to the US. That takes resources she likely didn't have after the ordeal.

This has to be seen as dire as the exodus of Jewish scientists fleeing Nazi Germany for it to be seen in proper context, as that is what has happened in Hong Kong since the Summer of 2019 and ultimately what set the NSL doctrine in HK, but since so many dismiss things based on association then you're making my point for me that is continues even in the upper echelons of Academia as I presume you are given what you have said and how you have expressed yourself thus far.

> Admitting that Covid19 was very likely a spillover of a natural virus doesn't mean that you trust China, that you think their labs are run well or are incapable of accidents, that they've been transparent or helpful with the investigations, or that the possibility of new evidence pointing to a lab origin is foreclosed -- just that the actual physical evidence we have today about this virus and this pandemic overwhelmingly points to a natural origin.

Personally, I fully admit I do not have beyond an undergrads understanding of genetics/virology; my career was spent in the field of oncological diagnostics (specifically Leukemia and Lymphoma), so it's hardly the same field and I do not claim expertise. But, unlike most, I have a very clear and documented history laying out the violent hypocrisy of the CCP's held beliefs on COVID and it's actions in HK that coincided with the protests in 2019-2021.

But, it stands to reason that anyone who remains so adamant of the claims (Natural origin) and is coaxing it as much as you are the likely cause requires much more compelling evidence and is otherwise ignoring the simple fact that we will never know what happened due to the refusal of the CCP to allow investigators into the country in the onset while having cases in HK and still forcing the borders open to the mainland when it was in lockdown and that the subsequent floods removed any real evidence that could identify the origin (on either side) in order to create a consensus is done in order to get back to business as usual while simultaneously trying to absolve anyone guilt of this as something that needs to be accepted--which is ironic since this naturaly caused illness is still forcing people in China to be locked-down due to China's zero-covid policy.

These are the (many) mental gymnastics I underscored in my first post, and why I think it's deserving of such ire. You make claims, you cannot support and instead will play identity politics (entirely useless since I'm an anarchist and I have no political affiliation) rather than rebuttal with actual evidence and facts to support your claim. Which thus far include:

- COVID is of Natural Origin due the evidence (that's not conclusive)

- Dr. Yan is not a real scientist and lied about her experience and is puppet of the MAGA crowd

- Lab Leak is absurd and should be dismissed because reasons(?)

Again, I remain that any person with any shred of credibility would question all positions and realize we simply do not have, and will likely never have, enough information to conclusively arrive to either.

But it's this forced narrative and consensus MO (and the arrogance that follows with it) that is strikingly consistent in my experience--not to mention this need for a 'COVID amnesty' and the blanket immunity of pharmaceutical corps got early on.

Do I know it definitely leaked from a lab? Absolutely not, I felt it was rather convenient and compelling evidence to quell the HK revolts against the extradition bill (given who bird flu went down) and I saw to what length the CCP was willing to go to do so, and has continued on a belligerent war-path to achieve it's end thorough out it's bloody history and will disspaear, kill and enslave people who question it's position and supremacy clause on the one china policy.

And this is why I think it's not beyond reason that they used the pre-tense of a wet-lab based disease in order to achieve their end(s), which ironically was supported by the US via NIH grants to study GoF at the Wuhan lab until 2017 and had a documented lengthy history of safety violations and had reported cases of similar symptoms in the Fall of 2019 which was critical in suppressing the HK protests.

0: https://www.scirp.org/(S(lz5mqp453edsnp55rrgjct55))/referenc...

let's leave it up to the word definitions instead :

mainstream : the ideas, attitudes, or activities that are regarded as normal or conventional; the dominant trend in opinion, fashion, or the arts.

So, no, 6% is not mainstream. Moon landing conspiracies are by no means a dominant trend anywhere aside from joke books and parody.

> Josh, I recommend that you do even just some basic research into this topic. It's quite complex, and I can't do it justice here.

I have.

> For example, people with mobility and other issues involving their fingers, hands, arms, shoulders, neck, and ears can find it quite difficult, or even impossible, to put on, to wear, or to remove a mask.

This is minimal and solvable. If someone needs assistance putting on a mask, they need assistance with other daily activities and so can get that assistance as well.

> Masking can cause problems for those with hearing-related issues, as it can make it difficult to hear the muffled voices of others, as well as making lip-reading impossible.

This is also solvable, with for example clear masks that are used in speech therapy contexts.

> Masking can also aggravate respiratory and cardiovascular-related medical issues.

This is not true, there's no support for this in the literature. While full-face respirators can reduce airflow, facemasks like those commonly worn and recommended don't decrease airflow or O2 intake significantly enough to matter. As a rule of thumb, if you cannot breath through a mask either the issue is psychosomatic or you should be wearing a plastic face mask that provides you supplementary oxygen, because you are not sufficiently able to breathe on your own.

> In jurisdictions where accessibility is considered important, the forced masking bylaws or legislation typically had accessibility-related exemptions, because masking does cause severe accessibility problems for many people.

Please cite them.

> Among the most egregious were when exempt individuals were denied service, reasonable accommodation, and in some cases employment.

Please cite them. What is a reasonable exemption from mask wearing if a building requires all present to wear masks?

> A less-visible aspect to this very real threat of harassment was how some people just stopped participating in society as much as possible, even at the cost of financial, psychological, and social harm to themselves.

Lots of people do this for many reasons, for example the large swaths of people who (rightly or wrongly) still feel unsafe going out and about because of the dangers of Covid and the fact that most areas in society don't mask. Personally, I feel those people, even most with immunicompromisations, are overstating the risks associated with involvement in society. By the same token, I think the people you describe are overstating the risks of masking. I cannot conclusively say whether one faces a greater real issue than the other. What I can say is that masks to provide conclusive benefits, so the imagined risks of people who fear them are less of an issue to me than the imagined risks of people who overestimate the dangers of covid and other airborne infectious diseases.

> Perhaps you were spared the worst of this based on where you happen to live, and luckily didn't have to experience the costs of masking yourself.

Given where I live and my social circles, I and those around me masked far more aggressively and for far longer than the majority of the united states. I'll reiterate that there have been few to know real negative impacts from these policies.

> What about people who have difficulty breathing, and have to have their breathing hindered for hours by the mask?

That is why vaccinating and wearing masks is so important: you're not just protecting yourself, but also those who legitimately cannot get vaccines (e.g. due to allergies), where the vaccines are ineffective (people with autoimmune disorders, on immunosuppressants or with a generally non-respondent immune system), or who cannot wear masks at all or for prolonged amounts of time (e.g. people with claustrophobia or weakened lungs).