“
In the beginning, there was a lot of pressure against speaking up, because it was tied to conspiracies and Trump supporters,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University. “There was very little rational discussion going on in the beginning.”
Many scientists welcomed President Biden’s call for a more rigorous investigation of a virus lab in Wuhan, China, though they said the so-called lab leak theory was still unlikely.
www.nytimes.com
What you're complaining about here is that scientists weren't joining the clusterfuck writing into national newspapers and appearing on TV shows expounding grandiose claims on which they had no evidence. And all the better for it: what Iwasaki is telling us is that debate was political and toxic, and it was wise to not get embroiled in it. But in the scientific literature the origins of SARS-CoV-2 were under discussion and the lab leak hypothesis was in play, and that's what matters. No-one shut scientists up.
I get that, but how easy is that to do? If it is pretty easy, why haven't they done that?
Finding the precise link is very, very hard indeed. It's not like China has only a few animals to test. But if SARS-CoV-2 was a natural virus that leaked from the lab, China would merely need to show the evidence it was natural and that protects them from a metric shit-ton of criticism that they brewed it up experimentally.
Checking the place they found it is then the task of trying to impress on people it came from that natural reservoir rather than their lab.
Not really, there were studies tracing back thousands of infections and only 1 transmission was found outside
Fuck - do you remember nothing? Nothing at all? How do you remember to tie your own laces? We've already done this, and that is really NOT the correct interpretation of that paper.
And where's the consistency when you say vaccinated people still need to abide by restrictions, how is that encouraging vaccination? Not only is the messaging inconsistent but it's also just plain wrong quite often, that's why no one listens to it now. It was quite funny to see people saying "listen to the CDC for a year" then saying "don't listen to the CDC" when the CDC finally said something they didn't agree with.
The CDC has been "wrong" mostly in the opinions of know-nothings and dilettantes who don't properly understand what the CDC is there to do. It is consistent in trying to encourage a "safety first" approach to infection control. Because, obviously, the highest priority of the CDC is preventing the spread of disease and deaths of people.
The CDC however does not make policy, that's up to politicians. The CDC says "we recommend this" (as best evidence-based practice infection control), and then state governors decide whether they want to comply, or whether they would accept higher risk for other benefits. All as it should be.
And there's that bit where you hopelessly misguidedly accuse the CDC of being late to describe the virus as "airborne", which we established a few months ago was one part you not understanding what airborne meant in the technical context of viral transmission, and the other part you not understanding that the CDC needs to establish reasonable evidential grounds before it says something is officially the case. Like all the other times you have walked into a matter with an opinion and colossal ignorance, when corrected, you have simply repeated your lies ad nauseam instead.
Many of them are experts, far more than the "experts" that say stupid shit like we need 70-80% vaccinated for herd immunity when you need 70-80% IMMUNE for herd immunity.
And here again, you amply demonstrate that you have no understanding whatsoever of public health practicalities.
In your model, we need to find who is immune. We can't simply take an assumption of immunity from having the disease, as some people (particularly those with lesser symptoms) develop weak immune responses. Many people don't even know if they caught covid because they were asymptomatic, or they erroneously think they did because they mixed it up with some other respiratory infection which they assumed was covid but wasn't, etc. The only way to check whether someone is immune is do a series of tests - an antibody test might work, but antibodies can get low very quickly, despite some level of immunity potentially still existing via T/B cells. Can we rely on them to do it themselves? Let's remember, there's been a bustling trade in fake test certificates. So checking immunity with this sort of test is not only expensive and complex, but the laboratory capacity doesn't exist to do it on the scale of the whole country, so there's also the months of delay and cost to get it set up, and then try to make everyone come in have a test, at which point a load of them will need be vaccinated anyway.
So this a really fucking dumb idea on a national scale when we want to end the impact of a pandemic. But you know what we can do that is incredibly cheap, simple, straightforward and can be done now?
Vaccinate everyone.
So whilst you and a bunch of twats chuck stupid ideas around (which basically come down to whiny anti-vaxxer sentiment) divorced from the real world, people like Fauci are thinking about what practical things get the job done, and what they say to encourage that to happen and in simple terms the public can readily grasp.
Why do you keep making ad hominem attacks vs attacking the actual argument? Kinda funny how most of my "experts" are right far more often than not.
They are not so much as right as saying what you want to hear, and in your world as you keep amply demonstrating, what you want to hear is the primary determinent of what you believe is true.
