Red Mosquito

I’ve been to a walmart a couple of times

My office is officially “get vax, no mask” as of today.

Honor system?

verb_to_trust wrote:Honor system?

are people who do not want to wear a mask going to be honorable about this? I’ve watched people walk into stores with their mask only to pocket them once inside

I don’t think the honor system is going to work here especsince the dummies are convinced HIPAA laws assuredly protect them from having to answer this question. News flash it doesn’t

verb_to_trust wrote:Honor system?

Yes.

I can’t, in good conscience, abandon mine til after my second shot.

Bammer wrote:

verb_to_trust wrote:Honor system?

Yes.

I can’t, in good conscience, abandon mine til after my second shot.

My office is still dooming but I was promoted recently so maybe I can help get it squashed.

Good ol' Matty Y

Everything must be funnelled through the political narrative!

Good to see Mississippi in last again.

Monkey_Driven wrote:Good to see Mississippi in last again.

What if they’re actually in first

https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligen ... 1621796228

Intelligence on Sick Staff at Wuhan Lab Fuels Debate On Covid-19 Origin
Report says researchers went to hospital in November 2019, shortly before confirmed outbreak; adds to calls for probe of whether virus escaped lab

And….

Fauci is a clown

PLANDEMIC!

Bammer wrote:PLANDEMIC!

Eh, fuck the journo's calling the lab leak a "debunked conspiracy theory" last year. Debunked based on what? Individuals with conflicts of interest that really do not want Congress and the NIH to revisit how grants are written for research with questionable risk/ reward value?

good read b

B wrote:https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswith ... wuhan-lab/

Awful read B. Easy take down of this multi-page strawman and I only have an undergrad in biochem.

Most recently, disgraced journalist Nicholas Wade has penned an error-filled, misleading piece promoting this nonsense, but the science tells a different story.

His evidence? None. He simple links to unrelated things: A paper the Wade wrote tying genetic inheritablilty to 'race' and some random blog. So in the second paragraph he already goes to 'youre a racist if you believe this'. After this lame Ad Hominem, solid science must surely come next.

Depending on which particular incarnation of this conspiracy you listen to, it can involve:

-Dr. Fauci was behind it all, using NIAID to fund EcoHealth Alliance, which then funded Wuhan, which then created SARS-CoV-2,
-that secret documents from the Chinese government dating back to 2015 indicate a plan to engineer a virus that could launch a global pandemic,
-that Dr. Zhengli Shi, the chief scientist for emerging disease at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, engineered this virus with a furin-like cleavage site, in order to be specifically infectious to human ACE2 receptors,
-or that the specific mutations that encode arginine (instead of the more typical tyrosine in this instance) in coronaviruses are a "smoking gun" for the engineered hypothesis.

I'm pretty up on this particular 'conspiracy' and I've never heard of items two and four, but items one and three are partially true. What the author does here is mix truth in with falsehoods in order to discredit the pieces he doesnt want to confront. NIH did fund research at the Wuhan Lab via EcoHealth Alliance. The funding document is available at NIH's website here. In case you are unwilling to read it, here's the goal of the research:

Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.

This is a fact.

Dr. Shi was doing research on ACE2 receptors.

https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/defaul ... 0Q%26A.pdf

Q: Has your lab done any animal experiments with SARS-related viruses recently? If so, can you provide any details?

A: We performed in vivo experiments in transgenic (human ACE2 expressing) mice and civets in 2018 and 2019 in the Institute’s biosafety laboratory. The viruses we used were bat SARSr-CoV close to SARS-CoV. Operation of this work was undertaken strictly following the regulations on biosafety management of pathogenic microbes in laboratories in China. The results suggested that bat SARSr-CoV can directly infect civets and can also infect mice with human ACE2 receptors. Yet it showed low pathogenicity in mice and no pathogenicity in civets. These data are being sorted and will be published soon

This is a fact, straight from her lips.

This is important because of this nonsense right here:

The science of what can be done in virology, with modern techniques, is quite impressive. But what the conspiracy attests must have happened reaches far beyond the capabilities of even the most advanced research teams in the world.

The first red flag that should leap out at you, but perhaps only if you have some knowledge of virology to begin with, is the very idea that you could "know" what certain mutations would do — i.e., that you'd know what you'd create and what effect it would have on humans — without extensive testing in humans themselves.

followed by this:

This means, right off the bat, that if SARS-CoV-2 were engineered for the purpose of infecting and severely harming humans, it would have had to have been tested in at least hundreds of human subjects in order for scientists to know how effective it was.

The answer to why this is bunk is exactly what Dr. Shi said, transgenic mice cells. For nearly a decade scientists have been using genetically modified mice cells to test how infectious a virus is. This is literally how gain of function work is done. Dr Shi published papers on this topic.


Ugh, it gets worse.

Imagine that you have the tools, technology, and capability to change which amino acids are encoded by a genetic sequence. <snip> ou can't make a virus more deadly — or, at the very least, you have no way of knowing what that switch would do to the virus — by switching out one amino acid for another. No virologist living today has that knowledge; that's not how this scientific field works. Without intensive and extensive studies of the virus in human beings, which we know we need because of the inherent genetic variabilities in human populations, we cannot predict what the resultant effects in humans will be.

There are many, many ways of doing this. Including methods pioneered by Dr. Ralph Baric at UNC, who taught them to Dr. Shi at the Wuhan lab. Transgenic mice for example. Exactly like she said.


Now it gets even worse:

Genetically, there are many reasons to think that SARS-CoV-2 occurred naturally.

The Wuhan Institute for Virology was studying bat viruses: RaTG13, to be specific. This bat virus is not a direct ancestor of SARS-CoV-2.
The first cases of COVID-19 in humans occurred in two places: linked to a wet market near the Wuhan Institute, and in more distant, rural areas where contact between humans and wild animals are common.
None of the staff at the Wuhan Institute were infected with SARS-CoV-2; they were PCR/antibody negative, which should be disqualifying for the lab leak hypothesis.
And, perhaps most importantly, the idea that SARS-CoV-2 was "perfectly adapted to humans" on first emergence is untrue; this variant appears to be a "generalist" virus.

RaT13 was completely unknown to the world until January of 2020 (several months after the outbreak) when the lab 'found' they had it in their freezers, and they were not doing research on it, or at least they claimed they were not. It's well documented that there were cases of COVID-19 prior to the Wet Market. Even the WHO report admits that claim is false, so I am not sure why Siegel would repeat the falsehood here. This is the first I am hearing of documented 'rural areas' contacts. Hopefully... nope. No evidence is given for this claim by Dr Siegel. 'No one at the lab was infected' is only possible if you believe what the Chinese government claims, and contradicted by intel reports cited earlier on this page. And this: "perhaps most importantly, the idea that SARS-CoV-2 was "perfectly adapted to humans" on first emergence is untrue" no one is claiming this other than Q-Anon level clowns. Not even hiding the strawman here.


The final gasp here is when the author states it's wrong to even seek the truth:

It might seem like there’s no harm to claim, as some scientists have done, that we ought to be more fully investigating SARS-CoV-2 to determine its origin, and that means not ruling out the possibility that it was created in a lab and leaked out. But the downside to performing that sort of investigation is twofold.

.....

But the second reason is truly chilling: the reason so many people have died is because of a global political failure to respond appropriately. Attempting to shift the blame onto the very scientists who have been instrumental in understanding and combating the virus is a tactic straight out of Operation Himmler, and must be opposed by the entire scientific community in full force.

So you're literally a Nazi if you question what the Chinese government origin story. Fuck you Dr. Siegel.

lol “right off the bat”

E.H. Ruddock wrote:lol “right off the bat”

It's probably mean to force Bi do all that work and then just ignore it and laugh at your joke, but ...