Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

Of course it's the United States' fault.

I've never bought into the upside American exceptionalism...nor is America uniquely culpable for, I dunno, failing to pin China to the wall on this in May 2020.

 

A zombie theory is exactly what it is.

It can be neither proved nor disproved.

It is thus at once alive and dead.

A zombie.

 

Yeah the LAT columnist didn’t mean it that way:

Perhaps that explains why a claim about the pandemic that has been consistently debunked by scientific experts and should have been buried long ago still walks among us. That’s the claim that the COVID virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory — specifically, a Chinese virology lab.

The columnist believes we shouldn’t even be discussing it.

 

The saddest part to me is the damage done to public health in general in this country. Not only did tens of thousands of people die who might have been saved had prevention and treatment not been turned into a political football, but the push back against routine immunizations that has accompanied it will have inevitable consequences. Add that if there is ever another such pandemic in our lifetimes, particularly a very serious one of the black plague/Spanish flu variety, the most valuable and necessary methods of fighting them are going to face guerilla warfare and massive disobedience.

The sort of massive lockdowns in place that China used after an outbreak are the best defense against the spread of a deadly contagious disease. This country is going to be full of people that say "to hell with that" and Muh Freedom onto the interstate to spread it all over unless they are shot trying to leave their quarantine area. SMH.

 

Maybe we shouldn't - until we actually have some evidence.

It has been consistently debunked by a number of scientists. And until we get a whistleblower from inside the Wuhan lab or Chinese intelligence or American intelligence - and the relevant documentation to make the case - all we're doing is expressing our cultural fears and political preferences.

Because there's almost no way shoe-leather reporting - no matter how rigorous - advances this story. We need a Snowden or Assange or Ellsberg to produce the proof and the paperwork. I hope we get one.

But in the meantime it's worth remembering the press doesn't have subpoena power to compel testimony under oath.

You know who does?

US Senator Tom Fucking Cotton.

 

I'm honestly sick of much of this discussion. I don't care where it came from right now. More than 1 million Americans are dead. Gun rights activists always say it's "too soon" to discuss gun control after a mass shooting. Perhaps it's "too soon" to be discussing the origins, even three years later.

 

Hey Libs, The DOE Has "Low Confidence" in a COVID Lab Leak, So Our Racism is Justified

 

The origins are important so we can know how to avoid another pandemic of the same ilk or at least mitigate it in the future.

If it was a market place that caused it, that's important for researchers to know to focus on similar things and possible pressure governments (as good as it will do) to keep those kinds of places clean.

If it was a lab leak, we definitely need to know because there are worse things than the Coronavirus lurking in labs. Knowing how it might have gotten out will be important to adjust procedures.

My issue with the lab leak is it falls under two premises 1) there is a lab in Wuhan and 2) China is shady. All of the evidence, starting with the article Ragu cited, is centered around "it could have happened, but we don't know." IIRC, the author of that article was more pimping his book and talked to people without specific knowledge of this outbreak and it was more speculative.

The other issue is people from the right really, really want China to be the bad guy and a market origin doesn't allow them to have that.

I love all this "moderate confidence" and "low confidence" and the like because it reiterates we don't know and it will be difficult to know. Because as one "I'm just asking questions" poster pointed out, China scrubbed the Wuhan market. You know what that proves? China knows how to clean something. That give zero evidence that it came from the lab. What does them cleaning a market have to do with whether it got out of a lab? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zero. It doesn't disprove the lab theory. It doesn't enhance the lab theory.

Probably why that poster never bothered to get a substitute job when he was clamoring for teachers to risk their health to return to schools. They ask you to think on those tests.

 

"The racism and xenophobia was justified." That's all you need from this dingbat. But thanks for not posting another Hat Guy tweet. At least we've reached that level.

 

The origins are important. But the main focus needs to be preventing illness, even if the illness is less debilitating than it was. Every time I hear randos arguing about whether the genesis was from a lab release or people eating bats in a market and whether the libz are going overboard “protecting” China, I wanna scream.

 

I figured it'd be a Republican's fault one way or another.

The national narrative has been pretty nimble in recent days. First, well, it's a Murdoch paper. Then, well, it's just the energy department. Next, it's been discussed all along to the unknowable nature of this thing to, until Tom Cotton compels evidence...

 

He's the one who raised the issue early on. February 2020.

Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins (Published 2020)

Seems not to have done much about it since then.