Americans have learned all the wrong lessons from the pandemic
Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20231030144616/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/covid-lockdowns-big-fail-joe-nocera-bethany-mclean-book-excerpt.html
not a single study had ever been undertaken to measure their efficacy in stopping a pandemic. When you got right down to it, lockdowns were little more than a giant experiment.
The "there is no evidence" => "this is not true" is rapidly becoming one of my most rage-inducing things science writers use to mislead the public, and it is everywhere
In addition, he felt that the worst thing officials could do was overreact, which could create a panic.
lol, not even close. The worst thing they could do is lie about the virus' non-existence, convince people to take dewormers instead of vaccines, and demonize masks so severely people won't even wear them to filter smoke from forest fires.
That's as far as I could get. We don't have enough
emotes (which is saying a lot) to carry onThe worst thing officials in the CDC could have done was tell people not to buy masks so they could keep masks available for healthcare workers.
To repeat, the government told its citizens not to buy masks because it would disrupt the supply… despite it being a government… with the ability and means to buy, produce, and sell masks… to prevent a disruption in supplies… and then backtracked…
And they expect their uneducated public to trust them after that?
I vaguely remember something about the CDC suggesting it wasn't a fucking airborne virus lmao
I remember a delegate to the WHO (maybe Taiwan’s delegate?) getting their microphone muted for saying it was airborne, despite pretty obvious signs that it was transmitted through the air.
I also remember hearing lots of denials about a lab leak being the source of the contagion, even though it was the most logical source. But even suggesting that was outright mocked in much of the mainstream media, despite there being, you know, a bio-lab working on that exact kind of virus in the center of the city where the outbreak started. I’m not saying it’s been proven to beyond a shadow of a doubt, but I believe it because Occam’s Razor says the simplest solution is right.
It felt like an alternate reality where somehow the lab in Raccoon City couldn’t be the source of the plague in Resident Evil because…reasons? I mean, sure, the lab in Raccoon City was working on the T-Virus and yes, the T-Virus is what spread worldwide, but somehow the lab didn’t have a leak, and how dare you for even suggesting it‽
I don't hold much stock in the lab leak there - here is a pretty objective assessment in the evidence - https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/jvi.00365-23
Occam's razor isn't a great tool because it relies on a subjective assessment of what "simple" is. I'd suggest given the number of novel coronaviruses that can infect humans that have emerged in the last two decades, it's really not surprising to more zoonotic diseases emerging.
You can also look at the spread and evolution of the wildtype virus, which has variously evolved to new species (minks) and with significantly higher virulence and/or lethality. The omicron variant, for example, spread from South Africa and rapidly became the most prevalent variant around the world in a matter of weeks (despite many being already being exposed to the wildtype, alpha and delta variants).
Without doxxing myself, I can’t provide a copy of my passport to prove it, but I was in China during the SARS epidemic of 2003. I was doing tourist things, so I was visiting a different city every two or three days, and I saw how hard the Chinese government worked to cover it up as I would leave a city right before infections were reported (in international media, no Chinese). My tour guide, in fact, had a very suspicious viral illness that eventually landed her in the hospital where they prescribed her antibiotics (ineffective naturally) and TCM. Needless to say, her condition didn’t improve until a nurse in our tour group told her what she needed, and she listened. The Chinese media had almost no coverage of SARS, despite it being the epicenter.
All that to say, I don’t trust the Chinese government to be honest about the lab leak, and the fact that they shut down all outside laboratory audits stinks like week old rotting fish. Again, I don’t think they did it on propose, I think the cultural attitude of “good enough” or chabuduo meant somebody cut a corner, either on disposal of laboratory specimens or on the following of SOPs to ensure novel viruses don’t escape. It’s not like it would be the first time, lab leaks are more common than anybody is probably comfortable with.
I’m not saying it’s 100% rock solid, but when outside auditors are net given u restricted access to data, there’s no way of knowing for sure. Given my personal experience with SARS in China, I feel very comfortable saying the highest likelihood is a lab leak.
There’s no such thing as “lab leak” theory
There are multiple “lab leak” theories, many of which are mutually exclusive, that the people pushing these theories don’t even agree on. Of course it’s been presented in the media as a unified theory as part of our new Cold War with China, but when you actually get into the weeds you get conflicting theories, “lab leak” theories that have since been proven false, and theories that don’t even make much sense to begin with.
If you go to the Wikipedia page for the Lab Leak Theory, there are absolutely nutty conspiracy theories, but like I pointed out, the idea of somebody cutting corners on either specimen disposal or safety precautions isn’t exactly crazy, as both have happened before.
For instance, in 1972 in the UK, there was a leak of smallpox. From the Wikipedia page I cited, “A 23 year old laboratory assistant at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was infected with smallpox after observing the harvesting of live smallpox virus from eggs without isolation cabinets at that time. The assistant was hospitalised and before being isolated, she infected two visitors to a patient in an adjacent bed, both of whom died. They in turn infected a nurse, who survived.”
In 1978, Foot and Mouth disease was accidentally released from Plum Island Animal Disease Center in the US.
1979 saw a lab leak of Anthrax in the USSR. “Spores of anthrax were accidentally released from a Soviet military research facility near the city of Sverdlovsk, Russia (now Yekaterinburg), resulting in approximately 100 deaths, although the exact number of victims remains unknown. The cause of the outbreak was denied by the Soviet authorities, and all medical records of the victims were removed to hide serious violations of the Biological Weapons Convention that had come in effect in 1975. Scientists from the United States ultimately proved the incident was the result of an aerosolized plume of anthrax spores which were genetically identical to the strain studied in a nearby laboratory, not from environmentally contaminated meat, which was the official Soviet explanation. The accident is sometimes referred to as "biological Chernobyl".” I emphasized two passages in particular because they sound very familiar.
Ask yourself this, do you believe the Chinese government specifically is telling the truth about the death toll in Wuhan? If so, what’s up with all the crematoria? In case you don’t like Vice, here’s a Time article on the same. And just in case those two were somehow not trustworthy enough, which I get, check your sources and all that, NBC.
What does any of this have to do with Covid lab leak? I’m not denying that lab leaks can occur and have occurred, I’m saying that Covid is not a case of that happening. I also do not understand what Covid case numbers have to do with lab leak. For the record, I do believe Chinese numbers, but even if I didn’t, what would that prove about lab leak theory?
Wuhan was where the virus was first identified, that doesn't mean it's where the outbreak started. I remember a news report about a hospital in Italy looked at some lung cancer samples they had on ice and found covid 19 antibodies dating to september 2019. There was also that "vape related illness" that had sprung up in the United States in the summer of 2019.
could create a panic
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9NMt42il4Q
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Not a mention of Vietnam’s successes. Ok well, how about New Zealand who had comparatively aggressive lockdowns despite having an entire goddamn ocean to help prevent COVID’s spread. But not a peep about them either.
Not a mention of Vietnam's successes.
That's been US policy since 1973.
A bunch of Australian states did pretty well too (and two did very poorly), including using restrictions to stop a couple delta or omicron outbreaks
I mean, is anyone claiming that they don't know someone who caught COVID in the US and didn't report it?
The Lancet published a study comparing the COVID infection rate and death rate in the 50 states. It concluded that “SARS-CoV-2 infections and COVID-19 deaths disproportionately clustered in U.S. states with lower mean years of education, higher poverty rates, limited access to quality health care, and less interpersonal trust — the trust that people report having in one another.” These sociological factors appear to have made a bigger difference than lockdowns (which were “associated with a statistically significant and meaningfully large reduction in the cumulative infection rate, but not the cumulative death rate”).
The states with less education and higher poverty rates, etc. were more likely to be red states that opened up sooner, so lockdowns likewise corresponded to fewer infections and fewer deaths.
Look at Alabama and Oregon. Similar population sizes. Alabama opened up earlier and had about three times as many infections and deaths (or more).
I had to stop reading after a paragraph because I could feel an aneurysm coming on
:principle-skinner: Could it be that the united states has little-to-no capacity to coordinate efforts outside the context of war-fever? No, it must be the lockdowns that are ineffective.
It seems I was on my one free article
Here: https://web.archive.org/web/20231030144616/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/covid-lockdowns-big-fail-joe-nocera-bethany-mclean-book-excerpt.html
Seriously. Everyone needs to stop having learned helplessness about soft paywalls, and either:
- Install Bypass Paywalls Clean or similar browser plugin.
- Learn to use Archive.today and/or the Wayback Machine and/or 12ft.io.
we could have avoided lockdowns if everyone wore n95 masks.
But they told us it wasn't airborne and masks wouldn't help at the start. Mainly because they were worried about liability issues.
They simply couldn't imagine a world where covid was contained.
Sheltered from news of the outside world? What are we, North Korea???
But have you considered China is lying about their numbers
