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
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
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?