Coronavirus COVID-19 Thread

[Shadow Reaper]

I am not sure about the distinction you're offering. You're not suggesting it would be okay to tell 330 million people to go back to wearing masks because a few people had a fever?

My point is we can no longer trust CDC. Fauci has been lying from the start. We now know he was told at the end of January 2020 that the virus is certainly man made since it cannot be explained by evolutionary biology, and he went out and started lying about that, whether we should wear masks, and a host of other things, all out of political expediency. He belongs in prison for his perjury, but the truly terrible outcome of all the lying and politicizing is people no longer trust the "science", because it is not science. It is politics. Half the country has adopted a tragic anti-science attitude about taking the vaccine, and this is entirely the fault of Fauci. Generally, anti-vaxers are a MUCH smaller group. Here in the USA, anti-vax parents deciding about early childhood deseases are about 6%, and anti-flu are about 25%. We're only at 50% vaccination because people have stopped believing what they've been told the last 18 months, and for good reasons.

Lying has consequences.

 

[Aramsolari]

Yeah lol.

One of you other guys handle this one.

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

I'm a little confused, was the US strategy not herd immunity through immunisation?

If not, no problem, but I'm sure I remember seeing that was the plan?

 

[Vavrik]

I am not sure about the distinction you're offering. You're not suggesting it would be okay to tell 330 million people to go back to wearing masks because a few people had a fever?

I'm not making a distinction, and I didn't mention masks. What I said was a the event was the wakeup call for the CDC.

My point is we can no longer trust CDC. Fauci has been lying from the start. We now know he was told at the end of January 2020 that the virus is certainly man made since it cannot be explained by evolutionary biology, and he went out and started lying about that, whether we should wear masks, and a host of other things, all out of political expediency. He belongs in prison for his perjury, but the truly terrible outcome of all the lying and politicizing is people no longer trust the "science", because it is not science. It is politics. Half the country has adopted a tragic anti-science attitude about taking the vaccine, and this is entirely the fault of Fauci. Generally, anti-vaxers are a MUCH smaller group. Here in the USA, anti-vax parents deciding about early childhood deseases are about 6%, and anti-flu are about 25%. We're only at 50% vaccination because people have stopped believing what they've been told the last 18 months, and for good reasons.

Lying has consequences.

You're putting an awful lot of responsibility on Dr. Fauci and the CDC that isn't theirs to bear. The CDC has nothing to do with the vaccines. They didn't develop them, the pharmaceutical industry did. The Government department that governs the people who did develop the vaccines is also not the CDC, it is the FDA. The responsibility for health policy and delivery does not rest with the CDC, it rests with each state. And the responsibility to be vaccinated or not for adults and their children in the US rests with the family adults.

 

[Radegast74]

OMG, Dr. Fauci has consistently been the one voice of reason.

I'm not going to say the CDC hasn't had some huge mis-steps. But overall, as a scientist and as a spokesperson for his department, he has consistently been the voice of reason.

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

COVID Catharsis Corner - Reports from around the world from today, Sunday 1st of August:

- World: 198,143,172 confirmed cases and 4,221,996 confirmed deaths.

- Australia: YouTube suspends Sky News from uploading new content to the platform for a week following misinformation breaches.

- Italy: Hackers bring down the COVID vaccination booking system of the area surrounding capital city of Rome. "It is a very powerful hacker attack, very serious... everything is out. The whole regional CED is under attack."

- EU: Pfizer and Moderna increase the price of Vaccines to the Bloc.

- Germany: Lockdown protestors in Berlin defy ban on gatherings and clash with Police: “They tried to break through the police chain and pull out our colleagues. This led to the use of irritants, batons and physical violence,”

- US: Fauci says he does not see a return to lockdowns. Not enough of the country has been vaccinated to control the situation, however enough has to consider Lockdowns no longer a certainty: “I think we have enough of the percentage of people in the country – not enough to crush the outbreak – but I believe enough to not allow us to get into the situation we were in last winter.”

- Israel: Having got the number of new cases to zero not many months ago, new daily cases have risen to 2,435 amidst protests as restrictions have had to be reinstated.

- UK: Announces cut price taxi rides and fast-food takeaways to incentivise younger people to take up vaccination. It has already been dubbed "Kebabs for Jabs" by the populous.

- Tunisia: Receives 1.5 million vaccine doses from Italy.

 

[Radegast74]

Gov. Ron DeSantis sells ‘Don’t Fauci My Florida’ merch

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has released a new line of T-shirts and beer koozies in the leadup to the 2022 gubernatorial race taking aim at Dr. Anthony Fauci.

nypost.com

People in Florida probably wish there was MOAR Dr. Fauci in Florida right about now:

Florida has more new Covid cases than ever before

The state has become the new national epicenter for the virus, accounting for around a fifth of all new cases in the U.S.

www.nbcnews.com

 

[Shadow Reaper]

You're putting an awful lot of responsibility on Dr. Fauci and the CDC that isn't theirs to bear. The CDC has nothing to do with the vaccines.

I'm not saying anything about this. I'm referring to last week's CDC recommendation that 330 million people go back to wearing masks because 5 people were hospitalized. That is not good science.

Bear in mind that CDC officials don't get in trouble for all the depression and suicide these kinds of recommendations cause. They don't own businesses that are being forced out of business. They're not suffering. They don't feel any consequences of their recommendations, so they don't think about them. So when they have a knee-jerk reaction scaring 330 million people, they don't care. All it does it make them feel powerful.

My second point is and remains that Fauci has time and again proven he is willing to lie to the people who pay him for entirely self-interested reasons. Anyone thinks he is good guy is not paying attention. January 31 2020 he had mail from his epidemiology advisor telling him that the virus was probably not natural--it looked to be man made because it defies evolutionary biology. That's what Fauci was told from his chief advisor on viral evolution.

"Kristian Andersen, a virologist at California’s Scripps Research Institute who emailed Dr. Anthony Fauci in January 2020 to raise the possibility that the coronavirus may have been engineered, has deactivated his Twitter account.​

​

Andersen's email to Fauci appeared in a trove of documents obtained last week following a Freedom of Information Act request. The email in question, sent on Jan. 31, 2020, pointed to a report in Science magazine about the global race to share "full sequences of the virus from patients" in order to understand the origins of the virus and learn how it "fits on the family tree of related viruses found in bats and other species."​

​

Andersen was quoted in the article, in which he talked about the difficulties scientists face in trying to determine natural hosts.​

​

​

Andersen wrote to Fauci about the new virus.​

​

"The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered," he wrote.​

​

He wrote that his team was in the early stages of looking critically at the data but found "the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. But we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those options could still change."​

Scientist who emailed Fauci about coronavirus possibly being engineered deactivates Twitter account

Thousands of pages of email correspondence sent from Dr. Anthony Fauci during the coronavirus outbreak have been released and shed new light on early speculation about the origin of the virus.

www.foxnews.com

In the middle of the following night he sent urgent mail to someone telling them to review the gain of function work they had funded in Wuhan, and after that they started their narrative saying the OPPOSITE of what they knew was true. Later, they told people masks would not help so first responders would have them, which was again the OPPOSITE of what he knew was true.

If these lies had never come to light they would have done less damage than they have. People have had enough of the lies. There is a reason that an unusually high percent of people are not getting vaccinated and it is reasonable to posit this is the reason. Lying has consequences.

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

I'm not saying anything about this. I'm referring to last week's CDC recommendation that 330 million people go back to wearing masks because 5 people were hospitalized. That is not good science.

Thanks for continuing to discuss this with us, I can only imagine my continued questioning is frustrating, so thank you. I'm not trying to convince you otherwise, I'm just trying to understand your viewpoint:

Again - it's not the sickness rate, it's not the the hospitalisation rate, it's not the mortality rate, it is the transmission rate - the fact that 75% of vaccinated people at an event caught COVID and were infectious is a huge problem. With vaccination, to get herd immunity, the number of people in the population being capable of passing it on is thought to need to be bought down to 30% or lower to make the situation safe again - that's vaccinated and unvaccinated persons.

To put this in perspective:
50% of the US population has been fully vaccinated meaning 50% is presumed un-immunised - that's well over that needed 30% already. By the findings of that 4th July event saying 75% caught and were incubating it, 37.5% of that 50% vaccinated are still able to catch and pass it on, most likely asymptomatically in the main... They may be safe but 50% not/not fully vaccinated and the 37.5% mentioned makes 87.5% of the population of the USA presumed still capable of catching and passing on the virus. That would not be a problem if every time it is passed on there wasn't the risk of a mutation which could go on to evade the vaccines which have already been administered taking that number to 100% and basically putting everything back to square one, but that is a risk and one we should not discount - Delta evolved in someone somewhere.

If the 75% figure is correct and I haven't misunderstood it, the US is nowhere near the 70% of no-transmission citizens needed for herd immunity.

I can't see how seeing the above numbers and saying some small additional precautions will have to return, even for the fully vaccinated, is lying to anyone? If vaccination alone can't stop people catching and passing it on, other measures must be taken. Masking and distancing are the only other measures available as far as I am aware.

Vaccines which can train the immune system to detect and kill the virus and stop transmission, and therapeutic drugs and treatments to 'cure' an infection stopping transmission in its tracks will be the things to end the pandemic if they can be distributed and made available to everyone around the world. As far as I am ware, before Delta evolved, the vaccines were found to cut transmission by a whole hell of a lot. It wasn't total, but it was a high number. But Delta did evolve and it has been shown, in this example at least, to still be transmissible in the majority of vaccinated persons. The vaccines will be updated and therapeutic treatments will also be devised but until that point civilisation needs the citizens of earth to do one thing: Buy it time to get that work done.

Masks and staying a meter away from each other while otherwise getting on with your life isn't that much of a cross to bear if it means in the long run we get out of this mess. Someone in the past, somewhere, didn't wear a mask and didn't keep their distance and contracted COVID-19. It mutated inside them and they then spread it by not wearing their mask and keeping their distance. Now we have Delta becoming the dominant variant globally and causing this issue with 75% of the vaccinated who attended that event being able to catch and pass the virus on. If whoever that was in the past had kept their mask on and had kept their distance, there is a chance we wouldn't be having this conversation right now because the variant with a hyper high viral load and ability to incubate in vaccinated persons would not exist.

That's my angle on it. I'd be interested in your thoughts on that.

 

[Vavrik]

I'm not saying anything about this. I'm referring to last week's CDC recommendation that 330 million people go back to wearing masks because 5 people were hospitalized. That is not good science.

Bear in mind that CDC officials don't get in trouble for all the depression and suicide these kinds of recommendations cause. They don't own businesses that are being forced out of business. They're not suffering. They don't feel any consequences of their recommendations, so they don't think about them. So when they have a knee-jerk reaction scaring 330 million people, they don't care. All it does it make them feel powerful.

My second point is and remains that Fauci has time and again proven he is willing to lie to the people who pay him for entirely self-interested reasons. Anyone thinks he is good guy is not paying attention. January 31 2020 he had mail from his epidemiology advisor telling him that the virus was probably not natural--it looked to be man made because it defies evolutionary biology. That's what Fauci was told from his chief advisor on viral evolution.

"Kristian Andersen, a virologist at California’s Scripps Research Institute who emailed Dr. Anthony Fauci in January 2020 to raise the possibility that the coronavirus may have been engineered, has deactivated his Twitter account.​

​

Andersen's email to Fauci appeared in a trove of documents obtained last week following a Freedom of Information Act request. The email in question, sent on Jan. 31, 2020, pointed to a report in Science magazine about the global race to share "full sequences of the virus from patients" in order to understand the origins of the virus and learn how it "fits on the family tree of related viruses found in bats and other species."​

​

Andersen was quoted in the article, in which he talked about the difficulties scientists face in trying to determine natural hosts.​

​

​

Andersen wrote to Fauci about the new virus.​

​

"The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered," he wrote.​

​

He wrote that his team was in the early stages of looking critically at the data but found "the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. But we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those options could still change."​

Scientist who emailed Fauci about coronavirus possibly being engineered deactivates Twitter account

Thousands of pages of email correspondence sent from Dr. Anthony Fauci during the coronavirus outbreak have been released and shed new light on early speculation about the origin of the virus.

www.foxnews.com

In the middle of the following night he sent urgent mail to someone telling them to review the gain of function work they had funded in Wuhan, and after that they started their narrative saying the OPPOSITE of what they knew was true. Later, they told people masks would not help so first responders would have them, which was again the OPPOSITE of what he knew was true.

If these lies had never come to light they would have done less damage than they have. People have had enough of the lies. There is a reason that an unusually high percent of people are not getting vaccinated and it is reasonable to posit this is the reason. Lying has consequences.

Read this, before you read anything from Fox or CNN (my advice). This describes what scientists mean when using the term gain-of-function research. Pay special attention to the last two paragraphs - but read the whole thing.

What is Gain-of-Function Research?

Gain-of-function research is the serial passaging of microorganisms to increase transmissibility, virulence, immunogenicity, and host tropism.

www.news-medical.net

Now, the problem with the Fox News article you pointed me to is that it makes unsubstantiated claims. In fact, there are open questions about the work being conducted by the Wuhan lab just prior to the outbreak. These were investigated by a team from the WHO, but was inconclusive at best because China blocked open investigation. The US has not investigated this except speculatively. Unless China suddenly becomes honest and open, we will never know what happened there. But if it was gain of function research, it does not explain this pandemic. The virus that first infected humans is not one of the strains that we know of in bats. There was at least one intermediary - and it does look like it was an animal, and not human enhancement of the virus. Whether or not this is something that escaped from Wuhan, who knows. Certainly not Fox News.

But China, and not any members of the US civil service, is who owes the world an explanation.

 

[Shadow Reaper]

I agree with that in general, but with a few provisos.

We don't know how many people have immunity because we don't have a good idea how many have had the disease. 50% have been immunized, but they can still carry and transmit covid in any variant. Those who have had the disease can carry and transmit it as well. There are no figures as to what percent fit these categories. Everyone who has had the disease or the vaccination can carry the disease but we don't know how virulent they're likley to be (how MUCH virus in them) which is squarely on the shoulders of CDC. We need that answer and haven't got it.

Do I think this is bad news? Yeah. Seems serious to me. However, we need to keep in mind that extreme measures were pitched to the country based upon the need to "flatten the curve" so hospitals won't be overwhelmed, and that appears long ago accomplished. Swapping the discussion from keeping hospital beds available to holding back raw numbers we don't have good analysis on is slight of hand.

I know too many people who have had their busineses destroyed, decades of work all washed away; because we chose to isolate everyone instead of just those at greatest risk. I dunno if you're from The States, but we actually had moron Governors force nursing homes to admit covid positive people, and thus killed thousands of our elderly, all while dropping draconian meaures on the average person who was never at serious risk. Recall, this disease almost never kills healthy people, kids, etc. So before we again look to lock down (which is now the next step and sources inside the White House say they want a manditory lockdown by Novermber), we really need to look carefully at the cost.

My sister in law is a clinician who works with the elderly population, people with depression, etc., and she says the numbers have been through the roof for over a year now. What good is destroying Mom and Pop busineses if we lose more people to suicide? Sure, if you own Walmart or Amazon stocks may seem great, but most people in the US are employed by small businesses, and knee jerk reactions are killing those businessses.

I am thus not going to be for a new lockdown no matter the numbers. Sweden did fine without a lockdown.

 

[Aramsolari]

Alright....there's so much misinformation and misinterpretation I don't even know where to begin. Why don't we start by peeling away obfuscation that Fox News subjects us to and go straight to the source. How about an interview from Dr. Kristian Andersen, the supposed whistleblower that Fox and Friends have been citing?

In the interest of clarity, I've linked the whole article. I'll recommend one read the whole thing instead of just picking and choosing excerpts.
Having linked that I'll like to point out this exchange between the interviewer and Dr. Andersen. The interviewer's passages are in bold.

Interviewer: You also said you found the virus’s genome to be “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”

Andersen: This was a reference to the features of SARS-CoV-2 that we identified based on early analyses that didn’t appear to have an obvious immediate evolutionary precursor. We hadn’t yet performed more in-depth analyses to reach a conclusion, rather were sharing our preliminary observations.

I cautioned in that same email that we would need to look at the question much more closely and that our opinions could change within a few days based on new data and analyses — which they did.

Interviewer: In March, you and other scientists published the Nature Medicine paper saying that “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” Can you explain how the research changed your view?

Andersen:The features in SARS-CoV-2 that initially suggested possible engineering were identified in related coronaviruses, meaning that features that initially looked unusual to us weren’t.
Many of these analyses were completed in a matter of days, while we worked around the clock, which allowed us to reject our preliminary hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 might have been engineered, while other “lab”-based scenarios were still on the table.

Yet more extensive analyses, significant additional data and thorough investigations to compare genomic diversity more broadly across coronaviruses led to the peer-reviewed study published in Nature Medicine. For example, we looked at data from coronaviruses found in other species, such as bats and pangolins, which demonstrated that the features that first appeared unique to SARS-CoV-2 were in fact found in other, related viruses.

Overall, this is a textbook example of the scientific method where a preliminary hypothesis is rejected in favor of a competing hypothesis after more data become available and analyses are completed.

There you have it. This supposed EXPLOSIVE email exchange between Andersen and Fauci where Andersen was supposedly suppressed by Fauci is a farce and manufactured outrage by our friends in Right Wing Media. What is supposed to be a scientific exchange between experts in their field was misinterpreted and hijacked by talking head LAYMEN with political and economic agendas. Standard selective reading in order to support an agenda I suppose.

Here's another Tidbit on what I'm talking about.....

Tucker Carlson falsely claims Anthony Fauci 'created' Covid19

Outrageous statement? Of course it is. Tucker doesn't believe in this nonsense but he thinks his viewers might. He'll quietly roll this statement back in a few days with a hasty apology....hope people forget, and perhaps in a few weeks reiterate it during one of his tiring monologue rants.

And here's more goodness by our friends over at Fox. They really can't keep their story straight.

NO Fauci hasn't sowed disinformation, obfuscated data, and indirectly caused people to fear vaccines.

Fox News, Tucker Carlson, Epoch Times, Brietbart, etc, etc ARE the ones responsible. We've been subjected to MONTHS of disinformation, discrediting of vaccines in general, and overall medical quackery (Hydroxychloroquine? BLEACH?!!). Meanwhile your mom or your aunt (bless them) catch a glimpse of a Covid Vaccine article on Facebook from their Friday Bingo night friends and poof....off they go down the rabbit hole of Qanon-wackfuckery. The bullshit comes so fast and in such volume that there's no way to fact check everything.

My partner's mother refuses to get her jab because bless her heart, "We believe in herd immunity, honey"

Herd immunity? Women you're in your mid 60s, overweight, and have all sorts of health issues. YOU'RE the one who's going to be culled in that herd.

If you go to her place, Fox News is on all the time. She's also an EXPERT of what's going on because she spends most of her waking time on the internet going down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories (She loves the Epoch Times). The irony is that her daughter is a registered nurse at a major hospital.

So there you have it. Fear and misinformation about Covid attributed to Fauci? Vaccine hesitation rampant with him to blame? No man, I respectfully Disagree. All that NOISE has been going on since the beginning.

 

[Aramsolari]

My sister in law is a clinician who works with the elderly population, people with depression, etc., and she says the numbers have been through the roof for over a year now. What good is destroying Mom and Pop busineses if we lose more people to suicide? Sure, if you own Walmart or Amazon stocks may seem great, but most people in the US are employed by small businesses, and knee jerk reactions are killing those businessses.

My partner is the CNE (Clinical Nurse Instructor) of the Covid ward at her hospital. She's in charge of over a hundred medical staff...including their mental and physical well being.

Her answer is that of course it's not good that people's mental health have plummeted and small businesses are suffering. She'll also say that it's not great that hospitals everywhere were at the brink of collapse due to rampant outbreaks. You should have seen her in those dark months of March and April last year. She came home crying almost every day for those two months

I'll like to think that we can have a happy compromise. I've been part of this godawfully long thread for awhile now and I've said this since last year....I'm NOT in favour of restrictive lockdowns. That being said...it's a give and take thing. No lockdowns? Fine....that means people need to wear masks, social distance when possible, and take their goddamn shots.

 

[Shadow Reaper]

Now, the problem with the Fox News article you pointed me to is that it makes unsubstantiated claims.

I only looked up the article I posted to provide a source. That is incontestable. Fact is, the actual grants that sent the money overseas list the research as "gain of function". The scientific papers published call the work gain of function. If you watch the CSPAN interview with Fauci before the US Senate, you'll find the precise references to those papers.

Senator Rand Paul Accuses Dr. Fauci of Lying About Gain-of-Function Research at Wuhan Lab

Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul reminds Dr. Anthony Fauci that it is a crime to lie to Congress and asks him if he would like to retract testimony he gave on May 11 where he said that the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. Fauci says he didn't lie in his previous...

www.c-span.org

Fauci had been warned we should not do this kind of research because it is so dangerous, and so he funded it in China instead of in the US. Fauci thus belongs in prison for perjury, as he has been lying to Congress about this for more than a year.

Again keep in mind that Fauci was completely cognizant of the paper by Chinese defector Yin Li-Meng showing that the virus shows signs of creation in the lab, and that she believes it was not only created in Wuhan, but released deliberately by the Chinese military.

Unusual Features of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of Its Probable Synthetic Route

The COVID-19 pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has led to over 910,000 deaths worldwide and unprecedented decimation of the global economy. Despite its tremendous impact, the origin of SARS-CoV-2 has remained mysterious and controversial. The natural origin theory, although...

zenodo.org

Despite Fauci knew this, he claimed the precise opposite on many ocassions and with no contrary evidence in support.

No matter where you come down on these issues, it's not a stretch to say this is one reason so many are not getting vaccinated. Add on that the vaccines do not have FDA approval, have not met the standard tests, and vax manufacterers have all recieved indemnification; and it's not hard to sympathize with the anti-vax folks. I'm not one of them. I'm just trying to understand what seems a rise in anti-science, and this seems to fit as an explanation. Fauci is a lying piece of shit, and people have known this since he admitted he lied about mask effectiveness well over a year ago.

 

[Aramsolari]

I only looked up the article I posted to provide a source. That is incontestable. Fact is, the actual grants that sent the money overseas list the research as "gain of function". The scientific papers published call the work gain of function. If you watch the CSPAN interview with Fauci before the US Senate, you'll find the precise references to those papers.

Senator Rand Paul Accuses Dr. Fauci of Lying About Gain-of-Function Research at Wuhan Lab

Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul reminds Dr. Anthony Fauci that it is a crime to lie to Congress and asks him if he would like to retract testimony he gave on May 11 where he said that the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. Fauci says he didn't lie in his previous...

www.c-span.org

Fauci had been warned we should not do this kind of research because it is so dangerous, and so he funded it in China instead of in the US. Fauci thus belongs in prison for perjury, as he has been lying to Congress about this for more than a year.

Ah yes. That infamous exchange between Fauci and Paul, an exchange in which Fauci flat out called Paul a liar. He did it in front of Congress with no hesitation.

I too would like to see the outcome of this. Paul apparently started a criminal case against Fauci. Bold move, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for him.

 

[Shadow Reaper]

My guess is, as compromised as the DoJ is, it will come to nothing.

 

[Aramsolari]

My guess is, as compromised as the DoJ is, it will come to nothing.

Nevertheless I’ll like to see this taken to the highest courts in the land.

If the DoJ is compromised (which I don’t think is, even when Trump was around), the truth will eventually emerge.

I’m not political in the sense that I don’t identify with any one political spectrum. I’ve voted for political parties of all shapes and stripes. I think one of greatest dangers to democracies is when we treat politics like sports teams. We shouldn’t support our parties/leaders no matter.

If someone accuses of Fauci of something, let there be due process.

I believe Fauci. I believe he has nothing to hide. This is an apolitical man in his 80s with decades of public service.

If he’s in the wrong, let it be known. I seriously suspect though this is just more cynical politics from politicians with agendas.

 

[Shadow Reaper]

There you have it. This supposed EXPLOSIVE email exchange between Andersen and Fauci where Andersen was supposedly suppressed by Fauci is a farce and manufactured outrage by our friends in Right Wing Media.

I think you missed my point. We don't know what happened in Andersen's research afterward. We're not virologists. We're not in a position to accept or deny Andersen's about face. Maybe it is legit and maybe it is merely political.

What we do know is that before Andersen reversed course, Fauci was out lying about the input he had received, assuring everyone that there was unanimous consensus that the virus was natural, when he had been told it was likely not. Whether Andersen's later position changed based upon science, politics or expedience is not the issue. The word Fauci had been given from Andersen, and Yin Li-Meng was that it appears man made, and Fauci promptly LIED about those opinions.

And let me say, this should not ever be a Left v Right issue. Science is science. Mix it with politics and it is no longer science, but rather scientism and propaganda.

 

[Shadow Reaper]

If the DoJ is compromised (which I don’t think is, even when Trump was around), the truth will eventually emerge.

If you don't believe DoJ is compromised, you have obviously never read the Nunes Memo nor understood it. 17 separate lies fabricated by the FBI and handed to the FISA courts with the express purpose to decieve the court and spy on a presidential campaign for their opponents--certainly the greatest tragedy in American political history. Makes Watergate look like someone broke a double pinkie swear.

With that we ought to skip back on subject or get censored.

 

[Aramsolari]

I think you missed my point. We don't know what happened in Andersen's research afterward. We're not virologists. We're not in a position to accept or deny Andersen's about face. Maybe it is legit and maybe it is merely political.

Bingo. You said it here yourself. We're not VIROLOGISTS, we're not scientists either (maybe you are, I don't know). What we are are a bunch of random dudes shooting the shit on a GAMING website about a subject we don't really understand. 'We're not in a position to accept or deny Andersen's about face' but we're ARE in a position to hear him out. His position (which has remained unchanged for awhile) is that there is not enough evidence to claim that the virus was engineered in a lab. You've taken a position of not believing him.

As for Fauci, his entire stance has been that his communications words, and actions have been misinterpreted and twisted into pretzels by political media operatives with an agenda to discredit his work, vaccines, and the country's Covid response....to what end? I really don't know.

And what about Yan Li-Meng? Dr Yan is a political hack. A Steve Bannon acolyte and associate of Guo Wengui (A dissident Chinese billionaire with an axe to grind towards Beijing).

Here's some articles about Dr Yan:

Yan Li-Meng fact checked.
Conspiracy theorist Yan Li-Meng may be Beijing's best friend.
Scientists said claims about China creating the coronavirus were misleading. They went viral anyway.
Weird science: How a 'shoddy' Bannon-backed paper on coronavirus origins made its way to an audience of millions
Why misinformation about COVID-19’s origins keeps going viral
How Steve Bannon and a Chinese Billionaire Created a Right-Wing Coronavirus Media Sensation
Did Chinese Virologist Dr. Li-Meng Yan Say COVID-19 Was Made in a Wuhan Lab?

Here's what her Hong Kong University has to say about her:

Dr Yan Limeng was a post-doctoral fellow at HKU. She has left the University.

While HKU respects freedom of expression, Dr Yan’s past or present opinions and views do not represent those of the University.

HKU notes that the content of the said news report does not accord with the key facts as we understand them. Specifically, Dr Yan never conducted any research on human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus at HKU during December 2019 and January 2020, her central assertion of the said interview.

We further observe that what she might have emphasised in the reported interview has no scientific basis but resembles hearsay.

HKU does not act on hearsay and we will not further comment on this matter.

HKU is a terrific University by the way. They're essentially an Asian version of one of the Big Ivy league schools. I trust their academic independence despite the political pressures Beijing has been exerted on Hong Kong lately.

Anyway, those are just some of the articles I can find of Dr Yan in English. I can find some in Chinese (Which I can read to a lesser degree) as well but what's the point? Put it simply, the woman is a hack. She never conducted any Covid research while at HKU and most certainly wasn't part of the Wuhan lab in any serious capacity. What she is however, is that she's an associate of Steve Bannon who in my opinion is one of the slimiest individuals connected to the Trump administration (along with Steve Miller).