Dr. Fauci “not convinced” coronavirus developed naturally

Generals

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Well, since you completely deliberately misunderstand what I said, how about I say it this way:

China thinks its the HERO of this situation. It thinks it saved so many lives. It thinks it was responsible. Even the Chinese people who acknowledge that they mishandled the initial outbreak think that China stepped up and TOOK responsibility and showed the world how to deal with COVID. They dont want to apologise. They want thanks for a world that should be gracious to the Chinese leadership
So, the Fascists want to be thanked for causing the death of 3 million people? What was the point of your reply if not to show how cartoonishly fucked up China has become?
 

Generals

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Getting a bit off-topic, but that's not how it works. Countries that are apologising for stuff in the long past aren't doing so because they've apologised for everything that matters and gone the extra step, they are doing so because it doesn't cost them anything. Apologising for something big and going on now is another different matter.

Can't speak for Belgium, but a few years ago, the UK retroactively pardoned Turing for being gay, some generations after he was driven to suicide and some years after everyone involved was dead. They did not, however, think it important to much mention the UK's response (or lack of) to the AIDS crisis amongst the gay community, the government washing their hands of it and blaming gay people. Because some of the people who were responsible for that are still alive, and some still in office, generally pretending to be supporters of LGBT rights.

Now, you can say that (if guilty), China should apologise, that, politics aside, it would be the right thing to do. Which, ok, fair enough. But this is not a thing countries do, and you are holding China to a standard that the US, UK, Australia et al don't get held to. Again, though, you can argue they should.
Well I don't think countries will ever apologise for everything that matters because we all know that if you'd go around and ask people what truly matters you would get different answers and in the end you would have to apologise about everything. But it's about the whole way a country deals with criticism. And I do believe that anno 2021 we should expect world leaders to be able to admit they fucked up big time when they are at the origin of a pandemic which killed more than 3 million people. Is China alone in their total lack of introspection? No. But China is probably among the worst students on that aspect.
 

Satinavian

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Being the origin of a pandemic is not the same as being responsible for it. Alone for population you would expect a significant portion of new deseases to originate in China without any fault of their own.

And while they sure could have handled it better, they sure did handle it far better than most other industrialized countries. They actually managed to suppress it.
 

Generals

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Being the origin of a pandemic is not the same as being responsible for it. Alone for population you would expect a significant portion of new deseases to originate in China without any fault of their own.

And while they sure could have handled it better, they sure did handle it far better than most other industrialized countries. They actually managed to suppress it.
We have been over this plenty of times. The way they inititially dealt with it is the reason why the epidemic became a pandemic to begin with. They tried to hide it away, both internally and externally. And even when it couldn't be hidden anymore it was heavily minimised by China. Off course afterwards it managed to handle it better. It's a Fascist dictatorship which has gone crazy on surveillance and has a docile populace. It's easy to lock people down under those circumstances. It's much harder for liberal democracies where people are allowed to contest their governments and their decisions, especially when these countries do not have the repressive tools to deploy in order to enforce extremely harsh rules on its entire population.
 
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Gordon_4

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We have been over this plenty of times. The way they inititially dealt with it is the reason why the epidemic became a pandemic to begin with. They tried to hide it away, both internally and externally. And even when it couldn't be hidden anymore it was heavily minimised by China. Off course afterwards it managed to handle it better. It's a Fascist dictatorship which has gone crazy on surveillance and has a docile populace. It's easy to lock people down under those circumstances. It's much harder for liberal democracies where people are allowed to contest their governments and their decisions, especially when these countries do not have the repressive tools to deploy in order to enforce extremely harsh rules on its entire population.
Those countries do have the tools to enforce those rules. They’re called the police and the army. Both have been deployed in Australia at different times to enforce lockdown rules.
 
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Dwarvenhobble

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Those countries do have the tools to enforce those rules. They’re called the police and the army. Both have been deployed in Australia at different times to enforce lockdown rules.
That only generally applies to the non rich non friends of ranking party members
 

Trunkage

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So, the Fascists want to be thanked for causing the death of 3 million people? What was the point of your reply if not to show how cartoonishly fucked up China has become?
Wait... did you think I was ever defending China?
 

Generals

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Wait... did you think I was ever defending China?
At some point it felt like it. My apologies if it wasn't your intention.

Those countries do have the tools to enforce those rules. They’re called the police and the army. Both have been deployed in Australia at different times to enforce lockdown rules.
Good for Australia. But over here Police forces have been pushed into passiveness after decades of demonization of any kind of repression by the (hard) left. Deploying the army is even less of an option. The army was only deployed to help out hospitals.
But even than, police forces are already being said to be underfunded, most liberal democracies don't have very large armies and are reluctant to deploy it against its own population (for good reasons) and we don't have the same mass surveillance as China. You can't expect states which have gradually moved away from violent repression to put more focus on prevention to be able to deploy as many ressources as Police States for which nation-wide repression is business as usual. Off course this doesn't mean things couldn't have been handled better. But unlike in China democratic governments have to take into account public opinion. And in many countries it is not very favorable towards lockdowns.
 

Agema

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We have been over this plenty of times. The way they inititially dealt with it is the reason why the epidemic became a pandemic to begin with.
No.

If the likes of higher development countries such as Germany and the USA couldn't control covid-19 despite months of forewarning and potential preparation time, a decent idea of what the disease was and how it spread, and knowing how serious it was, then there is no particular reason think China could have prevented the pandemic either.

This is not an excuse for China being deeply unhelpful in numerous ways. It's just the simple fact that it's deeply hypocritical to blame China for failing to achieve what (almost) none of ours managed either.
 

Generals

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This is not an excuse for China being deeply unhelpful in numerous ways. It's just the simple fact that it's deeply hypocritical to blame China for failing to achieve what (almost) none of ours managed either.
Nonsense, there is nothing hypocritical because they are incomparable. China knowingly and deliberately lied to everyone and went as far as investing ressources into hiding the truth. I don't think Angela Merkel sent people to prison because they were spreading alarming messages about Covid 19. And that's the difference, China ACTIVELY took actions which put us where we are now. At most nations like Germany can be blamed for being too passive and being too eager to accept China's lies. But I doubt European leaders would have reacted just as poorly if China raised the alarm bells and clearly communicated how bad this was. This would have been political suicide. On the other hand being passive while most people still believed it was a "flu like" epidemic is very very easy.

I am not even going to get into Trump because he also totally failed and acted like an idiot. But at the very least in contrast to Xi he paid for it by losing the elections.
 
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Agema

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I don’t think it being from a real life Umbrella Corp lab in Wuhan is impossible, but I do think that anyone betting on that evidence coming from a foreign inspection and not from the CIA or SIS sweating the shit out of every Chinese based asset they have and it subsequently seeing the light of day is kidding themselves. Assuming of course it’s release was malicious and not preceded by words to the effect of “Hold my beer and watch this”.

I’m personally putting five bucks on the wet markets and the invisible, often fickle fingers of fate giving us a timely reminder to not get to big for our boots.
Well, there's malice in terms of a disgruntled employee, and malice in terms of intent at high governmental level. But seriously, no nation releases an infectious bioweapon like covid-19 on its own populace. Your average nation doesn't release infectious bioweapons period, because as covid-19 demonstrates, they've got a nasty tendency to spread and therefore bite the hand that makes it just as hard as anyone else.

I can't help but point out that we have had two definitely natural zoonotic coronavirus outbreaks in the last 20 years. I'm inclined to think that's telling us something, and that a third is not a particularly unlikely event.
 

Thaluikhain

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Your average nation doesn't release infectious bioweapons period, because as covid-19 demonstrates, they've got a nasty tendency to spread and therefore bite the hand that makes it just as hard as anyone else.
A quibble, but you don't have to have bioweapons that affect people. Not every nation has the same agriculture, Ireland's experience with the potato blight wouldn't have happened if the British were on the ball, but also wouldn't have happaned if they were one of the nations that didn't rely on potatos.
 

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At some point it felt like it. My apologies if it wasn't your intention.
Great. Just wanted to check

As you said, they have twisted fact to make them saviour. How are you going make them apologize when this was their response?
 

Phoenixmgs

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Your ability to wildly overrate media-friendly doctors ahead of genuine experts is truly depressing.
The CDC director is just a media-friendly doctor when they get more intelligence about it than probably anyone else? How is Fauci not a media-friendly doctor?

It's a totally meaningless email. A scientist emailed Fauci saying he was glad Fauci disagreed with the lab leak hypothesis, and Fauci replied to say thanks.
The email said myth not just mere disagreement of a hypothesis.

How is the virus coming from a Chinese lab gonna spark more anti-China sentiment than it coming from a Chinese wet market? Most people already think wet markets are pretty disgusting and China has them (and most developed nations don't), wouldn't that cause more anti-China sentiment than a lab accident that could've happened in basically any lab (Chinese or not)? Can't you keep politics out of it? I don't give 2 shits about of the politics. Something is either a possibility or it's not. And even if it's not a possibility, censoring discussion is not good. The official public messaging did more to hurt vaccines and masks than the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers could've possibly done on their own. The fact that we were told the lab leak was impossible is the bullshit of it all because it was never true. And when you get bullshitted by people you're supposed to trust, why would you trust them the next time? You can see the majority (or at least a very large chunk) don't trust the CDC anymore by just going to Youtube and looking at just about any covid video from a major news network and see that it has more dislikes than likes. And then the minority of the population that was actually following the CDC guidelines the whole time called bullshit on not needing masks anymore. It was actually quite funny how they kept saying "listen to the CDC" for a year and then they themselves couldn't listen to the CDC anymore when it didn't agree with their beliefs. So who's actually following the CDC guidelines anymore? Or will actually listen to them the next time?

Here's why you can't censor information and why scientific "consensus" isn't really a consensus (video all queued up)


...unless its your job to collate them for said jurisdictions.
And why wouldn't the jurisdictions still have the real data and they could simply just work together and show the official numbers are wrong?

Also...
 

Trunkage

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A quibble, but you don't have to have bioweapons that affect people. Not every nation has the same agriculture, Ireland's experience with the potato blight wouldn't have happened if the British were on the ball, but also wouldn't have happaned if they were one of the nations that didn't rely on potatos.
If I remember correctly Ireland was dominated by a very specific variety of potato A monoculture... that was imposed by the British. If you know anything about bananas at the moment, we're are in a 50 years losing battle with a disease that could wipe out bananas, like it almost did to apples a century ago.

That being said, there were a huge variety of agricultural missteps made by government at that time. eg. Italy, just after its formed, did things like got rid of trees... which created a Dust Bowl... leading to millions of Italians leaving and going to Ameica. British not understanding monoculture as bad, particularly when Capitalism forces that option on you, is more ignorance than wilfully harm
 

Silvanus

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And why wouldn't the jurisdictions still have the real data and they could simply just work together and show the official numbers are wrong?
It's not that I believe what Jones is spouting-- she's not given a reason to-- but this isn't proof. I could come up with a dozen reasons.
 

Agema

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The CDC director is just a media-friendly doctor when they get more intelligence about it than probably anyone else? How is Fauci not a media-friendly doctor?
I mean Marty Makary. Fuck Marty Makary, he's just a media rent-a-mouth with a medical degree.

The email said myth not just mere disagreement of a hypothesis.
And...?

How is the virus coming from a Chinese lab gonna spark more anti-China sentiment than it coming from a Chinese wet market?
Gee, let me think... a virus naturally evolves and passes to humans, or a Chinese lab both makes one evolve to infect humans and also flubs its lab safety. I wonder which is worst for China's reputation?

Can't you keep politics out of it?
No. Virtually no-one can keep politics out of it. The sad, useless, pointless flapping of mouths of people to "keep politics out of it" are delusional and/or self-aggrandising posturing to pretend they aren't politicised themselves. But they are.

The CDC is an arm of government and politicised. The government is politicised (obviously). And all these people spouting their little opinions, from Joe Bloggs on the street through to doctors who do books, interviews and YouTube vids and so on, are themselves consciously or subconsciously politicised. They have political ideologies, they speak with and pick up ideas from people with political ideologies, they get their news and opinions from politicised media, etc.

You can see the majority (or at least a very large chunk) don't trust the CDC anymore...
... because the CDC has been attacked by anyone and everyone. And that is because the CDC has recommended things that people don't want to do, and every time it has done so, people don't like it and scrape around the internet for opinions that justify hating on the CDC and considering it incompetent. In many cases, this is politicised. One can consider the people attacking state capitol buildings for imposing mask mandates and closing shops. These guys aren't informed by science. They're informed by political ideology and a willingness for other people to die so they can continue to sell shit. So when the CDC says something they don't want, they call the CDC crap, irrespective of whether it is or not.

Everyone's a critic, eh? Talk is incredibly cheap when it's not your fucking job. It's like all those wankers who watch a pro sports game and think they know who to pick and what tactics to run better than the team coach/manager. Of course they don't. You can experience this sort of thing by getting a promotion. You might often wonder why the manager didn't just do this, or that. And then when you get the job and bring your idea forwards, quite a lot of the time you find out exactly why they hadn't done it: because you were actually just ignorant of something that made it impractical. Your predecessor, with experience and knowledge of doing the job you didn't have, was not.

So every time you watch a ZDogg MD or Marty Makary blowing hot air, hold that thought in your head: these guys don't actually know a huge amount of the stuff that it takes to run a successful public health campaign. If they were in that ball-clenchingly difficult position of having the lives and deaths of so many people hanging on their decisions, having to weigh up a huge number of factors that they are unaware of as a media gobshite, don't for a minute think they would necessarily come out with the same thing as they do on their social media posts.

The CDC and Fauci are by no means perfect. In many respects they "play safe", because that is their function. Fauci particularly has a sort of split loyalty: he must on the one hand advance good health policy, and on another retain the confidence of the executive. Hence Fauci's reply to a journalist who asked him why he put up with Trump's bullshit: because he's got a job to do, and he can't do it if he resigns / gets fired, at which point the President potentially gets another 100,000 Americans killed. This is the stuff of the real world, which ZDogg MD and Marty Makary don't have to worry about and don't think about, safe in their little media bubble where theories don't have to meet practicalities.

When we were talking about vaccines, and I said go get your vaccine, one of the things I'm aware of is the public health element that we want immunity, and the more immunised the better. I'm inclined to hold a tough line, to encourage people to get vaccinated. The more people have loopholes, the less people think vaccination is important, the lower the vaccine uptake, and the lower the community protection. The more people swan round saying "I'm not getting vaccinated because..." the more other people decide not to get vaccinated too. Thus in that sense, "following the science" doesn't necessarily achieve public health outcomes, because these sorts of public health outcomes are really about managing public opinions and the attitudes and activities of millions of people, many of whom can be perverse and obstructive. In much the same way, all the understanding in the world of how angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors reduce blood pressure doesn't convince the public to get more exercise and eat less. "Follow the science" is misunderstanding the task.

Thus whilst I do not have uncritical trust in Fauci and the CDC, I have a great deal of skepticism about the legion of twats criticising them.

Here's why you can't censor information and why scientific "consensus" isn't really a consensus (video all queued up)
Fuck those preening, self-publicising, social media, gobshite rent-a-mouths whose content is driven by a psychological need for attention and wanting more clicks and subscribers ($$$).
 

Silvanus

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I mean Marty Makary. Fuck Marty Makary, he's just a media rent-a-mouth with a medical degree.
(Not to mention that Phoenix is happy to contradict Makary on vaccinating children. As soon as the topic is something on which he disagrees, suddenly Makary's supposed authority doesn't count for much).
 

TheMysteriousGX

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I'm still stuck on "why does it matter?"

What is the practical difference in "this virus was accidentally manifested though bad wet market sanitation" vs "this virus manifested through accidental animal transfer" vs "this virus manifested through accidental laboratory contamination"?

"They lied about it"? Of course they did, who gives a shit, what does that actually change?

Would knowing that this virus escaped from a lab instead of a wet market changed *any* of our response to Covid? Is it *now* suddenly a very serious disease we have to handle extremely seriously or are we getting super mad at a country for not disclosing exactly where the next strain of Basically The Flu came from?

Because I gotta say, it's pissing me off to see the people who were downplaying how dangerous covid is over the past year all of a sudden treating covid as a major foreign attack of a dangerous bio-weapon. It's the same fucking virus, you fuckwits. Nothing practical has changed.
 

Phoenixmgs

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It's not that I believe what Jones is spouting-- she's not given a reason to-- but this isn't proof. I could come up with a dozen reasons.
And there's no 100% definitive proof that the election results aren't legit either. The likelihood of the election results or Florida covid numbers being fudged are both very very very very unlikely. Everything that is coming out about the Jones' story is pointing very very very strongly in the direction that 1) she's lying and 2) the numbers weren't fudged nor have any reason to have been fudged. Have you given your password to Houseman and they are posting under your name? The accuser is supposed to supply the proof that something is wrong.

(Not to mention that Phoenix is happy to contradict Makary on vaccinating children. As soon as the topic is something on which he disagrees, suddenly Makary's supposed authority doesn't count for much).
He said PROBABLY but you can't decide to vaccinate kids based on a PROBABLY, which I'll show in the other thread (as your worst enemy will win if you're wrong). He also says you don't need kids vaccinated for herd immunity, but I guess you forget the things that someone says that don't agree with your beliefs.