Now U.S. has closed two embassies in Mideast & told Americans in 14 countries to leave. But most airspace is shut down, there are no flights. Reading about people from around the world stranded.
Why are they only now telling Americans to leave? No planning, they weren’t expecting it to spiral.
I’m a broken record on this but Trump’s entire plan was clearly “kick them in the face, collect praise from Twitter, walk away.” From his perspective it’s always worked before. It seemingly never occurred to them that they may not be able to walk away.
If only there was some sort of precedent for a Special Military Operation encountering an enemy willing to shoot back.
But if it lasts 4 years+, it will see Trump out...
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
You didn't kill 20 million people, did you? Byronic, Fitz, LadyG, Eadric only comes to five.
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
No, its ok, I've been assured on PB that she is definitely guilty and that a jury looked at the evidence and everything...
I will be amazed if there isn't some kind of appeal allowed. Too much has come out since.
Its an awful situation. If she killed no babies then you have an innocent woman in prison for crimes that never happened. And you have grieving parents who believe that their children were killed when the reality was that they died from poor care on a ward that should not have been looking after them.
OR
She is the devil incarnate, an evil murderer who has wrecked hundreds of lives.
And at the moment I don't believe anyone knows for sure which it is.
I don’t either. It could well be a mix - she is guilty, but the ward was shit as well. See the GK Chesterton short story where a murder hides his crime by causing a battle to happen there.
I just know that the idea, floated here, that “we shouldn’t prosecute her for further crimes, because they might fail to get a conviction, and that might cause the original conviction to fail. Which would really upset the parents” is simply wrong.
Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.
I’m increasingly unsure that the sub judice rules do not serve the interests of justice well: People deserve to have their day in court & not be pilloried by the press, but this case is a classic example of where the sub judice rules made it impossible for those with qualms about the case to be heard.
The state spent about £10million prosecuting Letby & gave her £1.5million to defend herself, most of which was spent on barrrister prep & court time. How much of that was available to spend on finding & paying expert witnesses to counter the CPS narrative? Not much, one suspects, given the ruinous expense of good lawyers! Defence solicitors only have so much resource to spend finding expert witnesses in fields that they are (inevitably) not themselves experts in.
A justice system where those who are convinced that the defendant is guilty can rock up to the police making all kinds of claims with no basis in science whatsoever & are enthusiastically co-opted as prosecution expert witnesses but those who take the other view are silenced & not permitted to speak will inevitably lead to miscarriages of justice.
There are significant flaws in this post. Which I should think is fairly apparent to anyone. In particular the thought that just any random enthusiast is allowed to be an expert witness is just wrong.
(That the defence called no expert evidence in either trial is interesting. The obvious conclusion is the most likely, but the information is privileged to Letby, not her lawyers, and SFAICS she has not waived it.)
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Now U.S. has closed two embassies in Mideast & told Americans in 14 countries to leave. But most airspace is shut down, there are no flights. Reading about people from around the world stranded.
Why are they only now telling Americans to leave? No planning, they weren’t expecting it to spiral.
I’m a broken record on this but Trump’s entire plan was clearly “kick them in the face, collect praise from Twitter, walk away.” From his perspective it’s always worked before. It seemingly never occurred to them that they may not be able to walk away.
If only there was some sort of precedent for a Special Military Operation encountering an enemy willing to shoot back.
But if it lasts 4 years+, it will see Trump out...
Maybe its meant to last that long to allow for the cancellation of US elections....
No, its ok, I've been assured on PB that she is definitely guilty and that a jury looked at the evidence and everything...
I will be amazed if there isn't some kind of appeal allowed. Too much has come out since.
Its an awful situation. If she killed no babies then you have an innocent woman in prison for crimes that never happened. And you have grieving parents who believe that their children were killed when the reality was that they died from poor care on a ward that should not have been looking after them.
OR
She is the devil incarnate, an evil murderer who has wrecked hundreds of lives.
And at the moment I don't believe anyone knows for sure which it is.
I don’t either. It could well be a mix - she is guilty, but the ward was shit as well. See the GK Chesterton short story where a murder hides his crime by causing a battle to happen there.
I just know that the idea, floated here, that “we shouldn’t prosecute her for further crimes, because they might fail to get a conviction, and that might cause the original conviction to fail. Which would really upset the parents” is simply wrong.
Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.
I’m increasingly unsure that the sub judice rules do not serve the interests of justice well: People deserve to have their day in court & not be pilloried by the press, but this case is a classic example of where the sub judice rules made it impossible for those with qualms about the case to be heard.
The state spent about £10million prosecuting Letby & gave her £1.5million to defend herself, most of which was spent on barrrister prep & court time. How much of that was available to spend on finding & paying expert witnesses to counter the CPS narrative? Not much, one suspects, given the ruinous expense of good lawyers! Defence solicitors only have so much resource to spend finding expert witnesses in fields that they are (inevitably) not themselves experts in.
A justice system where those who are convinced that the defendant is guilty can rock up to the police making all kinds of claims with no basis in science whatsoever & are enthusiastically co-opted as prosecution expert witnesses but those who take the other view are silenced & not permitted to speak will inevitably lead to miscarriages of justice.
Her court case lasted for 10 months, which I think was a record for the charge. When I did jury service, it was a murder trial. I think the case ran for a week. Letby had massively more time to defend herself than most people. If there's a problem there, it's all the other murder defendants, not Letby, you should be feeling bad for.
Prosecutions generally cost more. I don't recall Letby's defence ever complaining that they were not sufficiently funded.
Of all the reasons to cast aspersions on the judgement, this is not one of them.
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
No. You’re wrong and I’m right. And we know this because I’ve actually fucking been there. And you haven’t
Motorists are urged to buy fuel normally after sales rise
All we need now is the BBC to find one petrol station in London running short and then broadcast it.....like last time.
Then weeks of its Brexit, Brexit, Brexit, driver shortage, Brexit....when it was changing over to new fuel due to updated regs followed by shouting fire in a crowded room.
No, its ok, I've been assured on PB that she is definitely guilty and that a jury looked at the evidence and everything...
I will be amazed if there isn't some kind of appeal allowed. Too much has come out since.
Its an awful situation. If she killed no babies then you have an innocent woman in prison for crimes that never happened. And you have grieving parents who believe that their children were killed when the reality was that they died from poor care on a ward that should not have been looking after them.
OR
She is the devil incarnate, an evil murderer who has wrecked hundreds of lives.
And at the moment I don't believe anyone knows for sure which it is.
You say, "Too much has come out since." However, while what's being reported here is news to us, the reporting says it was considered at the time. It appears the lawyers argued it out, presumably before the judge, just not in open court. So, this isn't new.
An appeal requires new evidence or to show that there was a significant problem with how the case was conducted. If this was known about at the time to prosecution and defence lawyers, then I don't see how it leads to a grounds for appeal...?
Soaring gas prices are not going to be good for businesses that are not covered by the price cap. Schools will be feeling the strain very acutely. In particular, watch out for private schools closing unexpectedly if that stays high for long,
Indeed.
But worry it’s nearly summer seems to Be the view.
I’ve 4 more months on my fix
Well, the fact it *is* nearly summer will undoubtedly help. We use three times as much gas in the winter as in the summer - can't think why. Solar power is also kicking into gear if the output from my panels is anything to go by.
But life would be rather easier if we were not so highly dependent on gas for heating and power generation.
Won’t really help business that much
it will, as they're not going to be using the central heating so much.
You reckon ?
Fine for offices but not great for high energy users like my old company
Oh I see. I would tend to refer to that as industry, rather than business, hence why I was getting confused. Sorry.
NP
I probably presume too much business is what I’m familiar with
My old company did alot of hot plate welding. Very energy intensive
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
No. You’re wrong and I’m right. And we know this because I’ve actually fucking been there. And you haven’t
That's possibly the weakest argument I've ever heard.
No, its ok, I've been assured on PB that she is definitely guilty and that a jury looked at the evidence and everything...
I will be amazed if there isn't some kind of appeal allowed. Too much has come out since.
Its an awful situation. If she killed no babies then you have an innocent woman in prison for crimes that never happened. And you have grieving parents who believe that their children were killed when the reality was that they died from poor care on a ward that should not have been looking after them.
OR
She is the devil incarnate, an evil murderer who has wrecked hundreds of lives.
And at the moment I don't believe anyone knows for sure which it is.
I don’t either. It could well be a mix - she is guilty, but the ward was shit as well. See the GK Chesterton short story where a murder hides his crime by causing a battle to happen there.
I just know that the idea, floated here, that “we shouldn’t prosecute her for further crimes, because they might fail to get a conviction, and that might cause the original conviction to fail. Which would really upset the parents” is simply wrong.
Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.
I’m increasingly unsure that the sub judice rules do not serve the interests of justice well: People deserve to have their day in court & not be pilloried by the press, but this case is a classic example of where the sub judice rules made it impossible for those with qualms about the case to be heard.
The state spent about £10million prosecuting Letby & gave her £1.5million to defend herself, most of which was spent on barrrister prep & court time. How much of that was available to spend on finding & paying expert witnesses to counter the CPS narrative? Not much, one suspects, given the ruinous expense of good lawyers! Defence solicitors only have so much resource to spend finding expert witnesses in fields that they are (inevitably) not themselves experts in.
A justice system where those who are convinced that the defendant is guilty can rock up to the police making all kinds of claims with no basis in science whatsoever & are enthusiastically co-opted as prosecution expert witnesses but those who take the other view are silenced & not permitted to speak will inevitably lead to miscarriages of justice.
There are significant flaws in this post. Which I should think is fairly apparent to anyone. In particular the thought that just any random enthusiast is allowed to be an expert witness is just wrong.
(That the defence called no expert evidence in either trial is interesting. The obvious conclusion is the most likely, but the information is privileged to Letby, not her lawyers, and SFAICS she has not waived it.)
AIUI from the Guardian article, it was disclosed to the Defence that he was under investigation for professional misconduct but the Defence counsel did not make an application for that information to be disclosed to the Jury.
Also noted that he resigned from the GMC rather than have the case adjudicated.
"Hindmarsh told the court that these tests and the medical records of babies F and L showed they suffered from hypoglycaemia – low blood sugar – because they had been poisoned with insulin most likely inserted into intravenous bags of fluids. The prosecution alleged that Letby had injected insulin into the bags, although there was no direct or forensic evidence that she or anybody else had done so."
I didn't follow the case at the time, too upsetting, but it does appear that there are serious questions about the verdicts
One of the funniest things to come out of this are the brits who won’t leave Dubai even as it’s being bombed. One influencer adjacent guy went on a live stream on his balcony and said he’d rather be killed by Iran than go back to Wigan
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
No. You’re wrong and I’m right. And we know this because I’ve actually fucking been there. And you haven’t
That's possibly the weakest argument I've ever heard.
Coming from a regular on pb like yourself that is a strong statement. On balance though I think you might be right.
One of the funniest things to come out of this are the brits who won’t leave Dubai even as it’s being bombed. One influencer adjacent guy went on a live stream on his balcony and said he’d rather be killed by Iran than go back to Wigan
Jeremy Clarkson being given a choice between death and Doncaster has said he would always choose death.
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
No. You’re wrong and I’m right. And we know this because I’ve actually fucking been there. And you haven’t
That's possibly the weakest argument I've ever heard.
Some professional tourist pre-programmed to scribble down any old thought-free pap for couples who can’t be bothered to have a shag of a Sunday morning to read, really isn’t going to shed any new light on anything of any significance.
No, its ok, I've been assured on PB that she is definitely guilty and that a jury looked at the evidence and everything...
I will be amazed if there isn't some kind of appeal allowed. Too much has come out since.
Its an awful situation. If she killed no babies then you have an innocent woman in prison for crimes that never happened. And you have grieving parents who believe that their children were killed when the reality was that they died from poor care on a ward that should not have been looking after them.
OR
She is the devil incarnate, an evil murderer who has wrecked hundreds of lives.
And at the moment I don't believe anyone knows for sure which it is.
I don’t either. It could well be a mix - she is guilty, but the ward was shit as well. See the GK Chesterton short story where a murder hides his crime by causing a battle to happen there.
I just know that the idea, floated here, that “we shouldn’t prosecute her for further crimes, because they might fail to get a conviction, and that might cause the original conviction to fail. Which would really upset the parents” is simply wrong.
Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.
I’m increasingly unsure that the sub judice rules do not serve the interests of justice well: People deserve to have their day in court & not be pilloried by the press, but this case is a classic example of where the sub judice rules made it impossible for those with qualms about the case to be heard.
The state spent about £10million prosecuting Letby & gave her £1.5million to defend herself, most of which was spent on barrrister prep & court time. How much of that was available to spend on finding & paying expert witnesses to counter the CPS narrative? Not much, one suspects, given the ruinous expense of good lawyers! Defence solicitors only have so much resource to spend finding expert witnesses in fields that they are (inevitably) not themselves experts in.
A justice system where those who are convinced that the defendant is guilty can rock up to the police making all kinds of claims with no basis in science whatsoever & are enthusiastically co-opted as prosecution expert witnesses but those who take the other view are silenced & not permitted to speak will inevitably lead to miscarriages of justice.
Her court case lasted for 10 months, which I think was a record for the charge. When I did jury service, it was a murder trial. I think the case ran for a week. Letby had massively more time to defend herself than most people. If there's a problem there, it's all the other murder defendants, not Letby, you should be feeling bad for.
Prosecutions generally cost more. I don't recall Letby's defence ever complaining that they were not sufficiently funded.
Of all the reasons to cast aspersions on the judgement, this is not one of them.
Her defence failed to find any of the domain experts who have since been willing to give their own time up to question the prosecution case. That’s a system failure.
It might be money, or time, or just that the current expert witness system is not fit for purpose. I’m willing to entertain all or any of those possibilities, but I think the system did fail - Letby’s conviction is unsound (independently of whether she is factually guilty or not).
No, its ok, I've been assured on PB that she is definitely guilty and that a jury looked at the evidence and everything...
I will be amazed if there isn't some kind of appeal allowed. Too much has come out since.
Its an awful situation. If she killed no babies then you have an innocent woman in prison for crimes that never happened. And you have grieving parents who believe that their children were killed when the reality was that they died from poor care on a ward that should not have been looking after them.
OR
She is the devil incarnate, an evil murderer who has wrecked hundreds of lives.
And at the moment I don't believe anyone knows for sure which it is.
You say, "Too much has come out since." However, while what's being reported here is news to us, the reporting says it was considered at the time. It appears the lawyers argued it out, presumably before the judge, just not in open court. So, this isn't new.
An appeal requires new evidence or to show that there was a significant problem with how the case was conducted. If this was known about at the time to prosecution and defence lawyers, then I don't see how it leads to a grounds for appeal...?
I have followed Private Eye's reporting on the case (I know - caveat etcs). However there was a report on how it came about that the defence didn't contest the insulin data. This, to me, is crucial, because the prosecution case was that insulin had been administered, causing death and the defence accepted that this had happened. This evidence has been challenged by others since then (not in a court of law). But for the defence to accept it meant that they accepted that murders had happened and their case was that Letby wasn't the one responsible. The reasons for the defence accepting this are lost to my memory now, but were convincing enough to me at the time to think that it was a huge miss-step.
Most who think Letby may be innocent believe that no babies were deliberately harmed or killed. Their case is that the unit should never have been looking after the babies that it was and that other babies died that were not thought to be murder. Indeed the list of those murdered changed over time.
By "too much has come out" I am referring to the totality of things reported since her conviction, not today's Guardian splash.
One of the funniest things to come out of this are the brits who won’t leave Dubai even as it’s being bombed. One influencer adjacent guy went on a live stream on his balcony and said he’d rather be killed by Iran than go back to Wigan
Scottish Energy is doing 5.7p/kwH for gas fixed for a year. Just switched from Octopus' tracker - which did average me 4.8p over the previous year but obviously that's ancient history for the forseeable future.
My 12 month Octopus tracker is doing 5.42p per kWhm, with a 33.46p daily standing charge for gas.
I think I'm tied in there because they are the best payers for export of solar. I'm not sure if I can disaggregate further.
One of the funniest things to come out of this are the brits who won’t leave Dubai even as it’s being bombed. One influencer adjacent guy went on a live stream on his balcony and said he’d rather be killed by Iran than go back to Wigan
Jeremy Clarkson being given a choice between death and Doncaster has said he would always choose death.
He has never been given this choice yet AFAIK.
Humph. He didn't even come from the shabby part of Donny.
That spring statement, written before but read out after World War Three got underway, was a whole load of nothing. The only point of note was Reeves’s remarkably Freudian slip of having said “the promise that we have changed” when she meant to say “the change that we have promised”….
No, its ok, I've been assured on PB that she is definitely guilty and that a jury looked at the evidence and everything...
I will be amazed if there isn't some kind of appeal allowed. Too much has come out since.
Its an awful situation. If she killed no babies then you have an innocent woman in prison for crimes that never happened. And you have grieving parents who believe that their children were killed when the reality was that they died from poor care on a ward that should not have been looking after them.
OR
She is the devil incarnate, an evil murderer who has wrecked hundreds of lives.
And at the moment I don't believe anyone knows for sure which it is.
You say, "Too much has come out since." However, while what's being reported here is news to us, the reporting says it was considered at the time. It appears the lawyers argued it out, presumably before the judge, just not in open court. So, this isn't new.
An appeal requires new evidence or to show that there was a significant problem with how the case was conducted. If this was known about at the time to prosecution and defence lawyers, then I don't see how it leads to a grounds for appeal...?
I have followed Private Eye's reporting on the case (I know - caveat etcs). However there was a report on how it came about that the defence didn't contest the insulin data. This, to me, is crucial, because the prosecution case was that insulin had been administered, causing death and the defence accepted that this had happened. This evidence has been challenged by others since then (not in a court of law). But for the defence to accept it meant that they accepted that murders had happened and their case was that Letby wasn't the one responsible. The reasons for the defence accepting this are lost to my memory now, but were convincing enough to me at the time to think that it was a huge miss-step.
Most who think Letby may be innocent believe that no babies were deliberately harmed or killed. Their case is that the unit should never have been looking after the babies that it was and that other babies died that were not thought to be murder. Indeed the list of those murdered changed over time.
By "too much has come out" I am referring to the totality of things reported since her conviction, not today's Guardian splash.
And this is where it would be incredibly helpful if Letby waived privilege, so we could understand what was going on. Without it, we have no idea why the defence did not contest it.
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
No. You’re wrong and I’m right. And we know this because I’ve actually fucking been there. And you haven’t
That's possibly the weakest argument I've ever heard.
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
That's the problem the lab leak theorists have. The theories were all constructed around the WIV, including all the nutty conspiracy theory stuff about it being Fauci's fault. But the evidence is too strong that the infections came from the market, the other side of a city to the WIV, so there's this big hole in the theory. How do you get a leak from a lab on one side of the city popping up in a wet market on the other side of the city?
So, some conspiracy theorists have jumped on the CDC, an institute that's close to the market. But that opens up a different big hole in the theory, because it's a different institute that's not doing the same coronavirus research. There's no link to Fauci. There's no link to the bat virus work.
If only there was some other explanation for how the virus first appeared in the wet market. Like, maybe we could look at all the warnings for years before that said that a very likely place for a novel pandemic to start is a wet market, because nearly all novel pandemics come from zoonoses? Instead of coming up with more and more convoluted explanations for how a lab leak someone got to a wet market, we could just accept that it came directly from the wet market!!!
No, its ok, I've been assured on PB that she is definitely guilty and that a jury looked at the evidence and everything...
I will be amazed if there isn't some kind of appeal allowed. Too much has come out since.
Its an awful situation. If she killed no babies then you have an innocent woman in prison for crimes that never happened. And you have grieving parents who believe that their children were killed when the reality was that they died from poor care on a ward that should not have been looking after them.
OR
She is the devil incarnate, an evil murderer who has wrecked hundreds of lives.
And at the moment I don't believe anyone knows for sure which it is.
I don’t either. It could well be a mix - she is guilty, but the ward was shit as well. See the GK Chesterton short story where a murder hides his crime by causing a battle to happen there.
I just know that the idea, floated here, that “we shouldn’t prosecute her for further crimes, because they might fail to get a conviction, and that might cause the original conviction to fail. Which would really upset the parents” is simply wrong.
Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.
I’m increasingly unsure that the sub judice rules do not serve the interests of justice well: People deserve to have their day in court & not be pilloried by the press, but this case is a classic example of where the sub judice rules made it impossible for those with qualms about the case to be heard.
The state spent about £10million prosecuting Letby & gave her £1.5million to defend herself, most of which was spent on barrrister prep & court time. How much of that was available to spend on finding & paying expert witnesses to counter the CPS narrative? Not much, one suspects, given the ruinous expense of good lawyers! Defence solicitors only have so much resource to spend finding expert witnesses in fields that they are (inevitably) not themselves experts in.
A justice system where those who are convinced that the defendant is guilty can rock up to the police making all kinds of claims with no basis in science whatsoever & are enthusiastically co-opted as prosecution expert witnesses but those who take the other view are silenced & not permitted to speak will inevitably lead to miscarriages of justice.
There are significant flaws in this post. Which I should think is fairly apparent to anyone. In particular the thought that just any random enthusiast is allowed to be an expert witness is just wrong.
(That the defence called no expert evidence in either trial is interesting. The obvious conclusion is the most likely, but the information is privileged to Letby, not her lawyers, and SFAICS she has not waived it.)
Private Eye’s coverage has including an explanation of how it came to be that the defence called no expert witnesses. I don’t know whether they’re explanation is correct, but it seems plausible.
It is a lovely spring day here with the sound of a lawn mower in a nearby garden whilst I look over a tranquil Irish sea and it is just so difficult to believe that the world is effectively at war.
For those of us safe we should just be grateful for our blessings and say a wee prayer for those less fortunate
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
That's the problem the lab leak theorists have. The theories were all constructed around the WIV, including all the nutty conspiracy theory stuff about it being Fauci's fault. But the evidence is too strong that the infections came from the market, the other side of a city to the WIV, so there's this big hole in the theory. How do you get a leak from a lab on one side of the city popping up in a wet market on the other side of the city?
So, some conspiracy theorists have jumped on the CDC, an institute that's close to the market. But that opens up a different big hole in the theory, because it's a different institute that's not doing the same coronavirus research. There's no link to Fauci. There's no link to the bat virus work.
If only there was some other explanation for how the virus first appeared in the wet market. Like, maybe we could look at all the warnings for years before that said that a very likely place for a novel pandemic to start is a wet market, because nearly all novel pandemics come from zoonoses? Instead of coming up with more and more convoluted explanations for how a lab leak someone got to a wet market, we could just accept that it came directly from the wet market!!!
There is no evidence that it 'first appeared at the wet market'
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
No. You’re wrong and I’m right. And we know this because I’ve actually fucking been there. And you haven’t
That's possibly the weakest argument I've ever heard.
You've missed his case for UFOs, then ?
I heard the institute was going to be demolished, but that's still being held up by the requirement for a bat survey.
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
That's the problem the lab leak theorists have. The theories were all constructed around the WIV, including all the nutty conspiracy theory stuff about it being Fauci's fault. But the evidence is too strong that the infections came from the market, the other side of a city to the WIV, so there's this big hole in the theory. How do you get a leak from a lab on one side of the city popping up in a wet market on the other side of the city?
So, some conspiracy theorists have jumped on the CDC, an institute that's close to the market. But that opens up a different big hole in the theory, because it's a different institute that's not doing the same coronavirus research. There's no link to Fauci. There's no link to the bat virus work.
If only there was some other explanation for how the virus first appeared in the wet market. Like, maybe we could look at all the warnings for years before that said that a very likely place for a novel pandemic to start is a wet market, because nearly all novel pandemics come from zoonoses? Instead of coming up with more and more convoluted explanations for how a lab leak someone got to a wet market, we could just accept that it came directly from the wet market!!!
Thing is, the lab leak theories are reassuring in a way. Horrible thing happened, either because of a mad scientist tinkering with forces they can't control, or an unfortunate lapse by an individual. Both of those are aberrations, and can be managed by better control and punishment.
If the plague just sort of happened, because nature throws things at us from time to time, because that's what randomness does, that's much scarier.
Basically, it's the old "did that earthquake happen because the sinful city needed to be destroyed, or because of the release of tectonic forces?" argument, updated for the 21st century.
One of the funniest things to come out of this are the brits who won’t leave Dubai even as it’s being bombed. One influencer adjacent guy went on a live stream on his balcony and said he’d rather be killed by Iran than go back to Wigan
Jeremy Clarkson being given a choice between death and Doncaster has said he would always choose death.
He has never been given this choice yet AFAIK.
Humph. He didn't even come from the shabby part of Donny.
Very much from the City of Doncaster, not the middle of Doncaster
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
That's the problem the lab leak theorists have. The theories were all constructed around the WIV, including all the nutty conspiracy theory stuff about it being Fauci's fault. But the evidence is too strong that the infections came from the market, the other side of a city to the WIV, so there's this big hole in the theory. How do you get a leak from a lab on one side of the city popping up in a wet market on the other side of the city?
So, some conspiracy theorists have jumped on the CDC, an institute that's close to the market. But that opens up a different big hole in the theory, because it's a different institute that's not doing the same coronavirus research. There's no link to Fauci. There's no link to the bat virus work.
If only there was some other explanation for how the virus first appeared in the wet market. Like, maybe we could look at all the warnings for years before that said that a very likely place for a novel pandemic to start is a wet market, because nearly all novel pandemics come from zoonoses? Instead of coming up with more and more convoluted explanations for how a lab leak someone got to a wet market, we could just accept that it came directly from the wet market!!!
It’s been alleged that employees from the WIV would take research animals and sell them at the market. I have no idea whether that’s true, though it would combine the best (worst?) of both explanations: Why not mix research viruses with whatever happened to be around in the wet market & see what emerged from the resultant melange!
In reality both of the two are plausible origin stories, with Occam’s Razor preferring the wet market alone as being sufficient in the absence of hard evidence to the contrary. Regardless of whether it was actually the proximal cause of the pandemic though, the researchers at the WIV appears to have been horrendously cavalier about the risks they were taking by attempting to engineer coronaviruses capable of infecting human cells from extant animal strains.
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
No. You’re wrong and I’m right. And we know this because I’ve actually fucking been there. And you haven’t
That's possibly the weakest argument I've ever heard.
No, its ok, I've been assured on PB that she is definitely guilty and that a jury looked at the evidence and everything...
I will be amazed if there isn't some kind of appeal allowed. Too much has come out since.
Its an awful situation. If she killed no babies then you have an innocent woman in prison for crimes that never happened. And you have grieving parents who believe that their children were killed when the reality was that they died from poor care on a ward that should not have been looking after them.
OR
She is the devil incarnate, an evil murderer who has wrecked hundreds of lives.
And at the moment I don't believe anyone knows for sure which it is.
I don’t either. It could well be a mix - she is guilty, but the ward was shit as well. See the GK Chesterton short story where a murder hides his crime by causing a battle to happen there.
I just know that the idea, floated here, that “we shouldn’t prosecute her for further crimes, because they might fail to get a conviction, and that might cause the original conviction to fail. Which would really upset the parents” is simply wrong.
Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.
I’m increasingly unsure that the sub judice rules do not serve the interests of justice well: People deserve to have their day in court & not be pilloried by the press, but this case is a classic example of where the sub judice rules made it impossible for those with qualms about the case to be heard.
The state spent about £10million prosecuting Letby & gave her £1.5million to defend herself, most of which was spent on barrrister prep & court time. How much of that was available to spend on finding & paying expert witnesses to counter the CPS narrative? Not much, one suspects, given the ruinous expense of good lawyers! Defence solicitors only have so much resource to spend finding expert witnesses in fields that they are (inevitably) not themselves experts in.
A justice system where those who are convinced that the defendant is guilty can rock up to the police making all kinds of claims with no basis in science whatsoever & are enthusiastically co-opted as prosecution expert witnesses but those who take the other view are silenced & not permitted to speak will inevitably lead to miscarriages of justice.
There are significant flaws in this post. Which I should think is fairly apparent to anyone. In particular the thought that just any random enthusiast is allowed to be an expert witness is just wrong.
(That the defence called no expert evidence in either trial is interesting. The obvious conclusion is the most likely, but the information is privileged to Letby, not her lawyers, and SFAICS she has not waived it.)
Private Eye’s coverage has including an explanation of how it came to be that the defence called no expert witnesses. I don’t know whether they’re explanation is correct, but it seems plausible.
Noted with thanks re waiver WRT the CCRC on 11 December 2025.
I have not followed recent PE coverage but their early attempts to explain the failure to call defence expert evidence (basically that the defence thought their case so strong they need not bother to call it) was not credible. Have they advanced on that?
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
No. You’re wrong and I’m right. And we know this because I’ve actually fucking been there. And you haven’t
That's possibly the weakest argument I've ever heard.
Good article, but weirdly they have omitted really strong feelz from travel journalists from the knowledge base. On that basis I just can't take the rest of it seriously.
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
That's the problem the lab leak theorists have. The theories were all constructed around the WIV, including all the nutty conspiracy theory stuff about it being Fauci's fault. But the evidence is too strong that the infections came from the market, the other side of a city to the WIV, so there's this big hole in the theory. How do you get a leak from a lab on one side of the city popping up in a wet market on the other side of the city?
So, some conspiracy theorists have jumped on the CDC, an institute that's close to the market. But that opens up a different big hole in the theory, because it's a different institute that's not doing the same coronavirus research. There's no link to Fauci. There's no link to the bat virus work.
If only there was some other explanation for how the virus first appeared in the wet market. Like, maybe we could look at all the warnings for years before that said that a very likely place for a novel pandemic to start is a wet market, because nearly all novel pandemics come from zoonoses? Instead of coming up with more and more convoluted explanations for how a lab leak someone got to a wet market, we could just accept that it came directly from the wet market!!!
There is no evidence that it 'first appeared at the wet market'
There is, however, significant evidence that it spread /from/ the wet market IIRC. Doesn’t mean it started there, but it looks like that was the source of the early mass infection.
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
No. You’re wrong and I’m right. And we know this because I’ve actually fucking been there. And you haven’t
That's possibly the weakest argument I've ever heard.
No, its ok, I've been assured on PB that she is definitely guilty and that a jury looked at the evidence and everything...
I will be amazed if there isn't some kind of appeal allowed. Too much has come out since.
Its an awful situation. If she killed no babies then you have an innocent woman in prison for crimes that never happened. And you have grieving parents who believe that their children were killed when the reality was that they died from poor care on a ward that should not have been looking after them.
OR
She is the devil incarnate, an evil murderer who has wrecked hundreds of lives.
And at the moment I don't believe anyone knows for sure which it is.
I don’t either. It could well be a mix - she is guilty, but the ward was shit as well. See the GK Chesterton short story where a murder hides his crime by causing a battle to happen there.
I just know that the idea, floated here, that “we shouldn’t prosecute her for further crimes, because they might fail to get a conviction, and that might cause the original conviction to fail. Which would really upset the parents” is simply wrong.
Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.
I’m increasingly unsure that the sub judice rules do not serve the interests of justice well: People deserve to have their day in court & not be pilloried by the press, but this case is a classic example of where the sub judice rules made it impossible for those with qualms about the case to be heard.
The state spent about £10million prosecuting Letby & gave her £1.5million to defend herself, most of which was spent on barrrister prep & court time. How much of that was available to spend on finding & paying expert witnesses to counter the CPS narrative? Not much, one suspects, given the ruinous expense of good lawyers! Defence solicitors only have so much resource to spend finding expert witnesses in fields that they are (inevitably) not themselves experts in.
A justice system where those who are convinced that the defendant is guilty can rock up to the police making all kinds of claims with no basis in science whatsoever & are enthusiastically co-opted as prosecution expert witnesses but those who take the other view are silenced & not permitted to speak will inevitably lead to miscarriages of justice.
There are significant flaws in this post. Which I should think is fairly apparent to anyone. In particular the thought that just any random enthusiast is allowed to be an expert witness is just wrong.
(That the defence called no expert evidence in either trial is interesting. The obvious conclusion is the most likely, but the information is privileged to Letby, not her lawyers, and SFAICS she has not waived it.)
Private Eye’s coverage has including an explanation of how it came to be that the defence called no expert witnesses. I don’t know whether they’re explanation is correct, but it seems plausible.
Noted with thanks re waiver WRT the CCRC on 11 December 2025.
I have not followed recent PE coverage but their early attempts to explain the failure to call defence expert evidence (basically that the defence thought their case so strong they need not bother to call it) was not credible. Have they advanced on that?
No, its ok, I've been assured on PB that she is definitely guilty and that a jury looked at the evidence and everything...
I will be amazed if there isn't some kind of appeal allowed. Too much has come out since.
Its an awful situation. If she killed no babies then you have an innocent woman in prison for crimes that never happened. And you have grieving parents who believe that their children were killed when the reality was that they died from poor care on a ward that should not have been looking after them.
OR
She is the devil incarnate, an evil murderer who has wrecked hundreds of lives.
And at the moment I don't believe anyone knows for sure which it is.
You say, "Too much has come out since." However, while what's being reported here is news to us, the reporting says it was considered at the time. It appears the lawyers argued it out, presumably before the judge, just not in open court. So, this isn't new.
An appeal requires new evidence or to show that there was a significant problem with how the case was conducted. If this was known about at the time to prosecution and defence lawyers, then I don't see how it leads to a grounds for appeal...?
I have followed Private Eye's reporting on the case (I know - caveat etcs). However there was a report on how it came about that the defence didn't contest the insulin data. This, to me, is crucial, because the prosecution case was that insulin had been administered, causing death and the defence accepted that this had happened. This evidence has been challenged by others since then (not in a court of law). But for the defence to accept it meant that they accepted that murders had happened and their case was that Letby wasn't the one responsible. The reasons for the defence accepting this are lost to my memory now, but were convincing enough to me at the time to think that it was a huge miss-step.
Most who think Letby may be innocent believe that no babies were deliberately harmed or killed. Their case is that the unit should never have been looking after the babies that it was and that other babies died that were not thought to be murder. Indeed the list of those murdered changed over time.
By "too much has come out" I am referring to the totality of things reported since her conviction, not today's Guardian splash.
And this is where it would be incredibly helpful if Letby waived privilege, so we could understand what was going on. Without it, we have no idea why the defence did not contest it.
Presumably because whenever they approached an expert witnesses with the actual details from the case, the expert witness didn't give them the answers they wanted? People since the trial may say they would have provided expert testimony challenging the prosecution's conclusions, but I don't think we know that any of them has actually seen the same material as the expert witnesses did.
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
That's the problem the lab leak theorists have. The theories were all constructed around the WIV, including all the nutty conspiracy theory stuff about it being Fauci's fault. But the evidence is too strong that the infections came from the market, the other side of a city to the WIV, so there's this big hole in the theory. How do you get a leak from a lab on one side of the city popping up in a wet market on the other side of the city?
So, some conspiracy theorists have jumped on the CDC, an institute that's close to the market. But that opens up a different big hole in the theory, because it's a different institute that's not doing the same coronavirus research. There's no link to Fauci. There's no link to the bat virus work.
If only there was some other explanation for how the virus first appeared in the wet market. Like, maybe we could look at all the warnings for years before that said that a very likely place for a novel pandemic to start is a wet market, because nearly all novel pandemics come from zoonoses? Instead of coming up with more and more convoluted explanations for how a lab leak someone got to a wet market, we could just accept that it came directly from the wet market!!!
There is no evidence that it 'first appeared at the wet market'
There is, however, significant evidence that it spread /from/ the wet market IIRC. Doesn’t mean it started there, but it looks like that was the source of the early mass infection.
No, i disagree. Some of the official early hospitalisation cases had connections to the wet market but several others did not and there is some evidence it was circulating before this in any case
One of the funniest things to come out of this are the brits who won’t leave Dubai even as it’s being bombed. One influencer adjacent guy went on a live stream on his balcony and said he’d rather be killed by Iran than go back to Wigan
Jeremy Clarkson being given a choice between death and Doncaster has said he would always choose death.
He has never been given this choice yet AFAIK.
Humph. He didn't even come from the shabby part of Donny.
Very much from the City of Doncaster, not the middle of Doncaster
Well, indeed. I took this within the City of Doncaster on St David's Day:
No, its ok, I've been assured on PB that she is definitely guilty and that a jury looked at the evidence and everything...
I will be amazed if there isn't some kind of appeal allowed. Too much has come out since.
Its an awful situation. If she killed no babies then you have an innocent woman in prison for crimes that never happened. And you have grieving parents who believe that their children were killed when the reality was that they died from poor care on a ward that should not have been looking after them.
OR
She is the devil incarnate, an evil murderer who has wrecked hundreds of lives.
And at the moment I don't believe anyone knows for sure which it is.
I don’t either. It could well be a mix - she is guilty, but the ward was shit as well. See the GK Chesterton short story where a murder hides his crime by causing a battle to happen there.
I just know that the idea, floated here, that “we shouldn’t prosecute her for further crimes, because they might fail to get a conviction, and that might cause the original conviction to fail. Which would really upset the parents” is simply wrong.
Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.
I’m increasingly unsure that the sub judice rules do not serve the interests of justice well: People deserve to have their day in court & not be pilloried by the press, but this case is a classic example of where the sub judice rules made it impossible for those with qualms about the case to be heard.
The state spent about £10million prosecuting Letby & gave her £1.5million to defend herself, most of which was spent on barrrister prep & court time. How much of that was available to spend on finding & paying expert witnesses to counter the CPS narrative? Not much, one suspects, given the ruinous expense of good lawyers! Defence solicitors only have so much resource to spend finding expert witnesses in fields that they are (inevitably) not themselves experts in.
A justice system where those who are convinced that the defendant is guilty can rock up to the police making all kinds of claims with no basis in science whatsoever & are enthusiastically co-opted as prosecution expert witnesses but those who take the other view are silenced & not permitted to speak will inevitably lead to miscarriages of justice.
There are significant flaws in this post. Which I should think is fairly apparent to anyone. In particular the thought that just any random enthusiast is allowed to be an expert witness is just wrong.
(That the defence called no expert evidence in either trial is interesting. The obvious conclusion is the most likely, but the information is privileged to Letby, not her lawyers, and SFAICS she has not waived it.)
Private Eye’s coverage has including an explanation of how it came to be that the defence called no expert witnesses. I don’t know whether they’re explanation is correct, but it seems plausible.
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
That's the problem the lab leak theorists have. The theories were all constructed around the WIV, including all the nutty conspiracy theory stuff about it being Fauci's fault. But the evidence is too strong that the infections came from the market, the other side of a city to the WIV, so there's this big hole in the theory. How do you get a leak from a lab on one side of the city popping up in a wet market on the other side of the city?
So, some conspiracy theorists have jumped on the CDC, an institute that's close to the market. But that opens up a different big hole in the theory, because it's a different institute that's not doing the same coronavirus research. There's no link to Fauci. There's no link to the bat virus work.
If only there was some other explanation for how the virus first appeared in the wet market. Like, maybe we could look at all the warnings for years before that said that a very likely place for a novel pandemic to start is a wet market, because nearly all novel pandemics come from zoonoses? Instead of coming up with more and more convoluted explanations for how a lab leak someone got to a wet market, we could just accept that it came directly from the wet market!!!
Thing is, the lab leak theories are reassuring in a way. Horrible thing happened, either because of a mad scientist tinkering with forces they can't control, or an unfortunate lapse by an individual. Both of those are aberrations, and can be managed by better control and punishment.
If the plague just sort of happened, because nature throws things at us from time to time, because that's what randomness does, that's much scarier.
Basically, it's the old "did that earthquake happen because the sinful city needed to be destroyed, or because of the release of tectonic forces?" argument, updated for the 21st century.
One of my students is presenting work on MERS later this semester. Fatality rate of 35%. Pray to god that never gets to spread assymptomatically and as easily as Covid did and does.
No, its ok, I've been assured on PB that she is definitely guilty and that a jury looked at the evidence and everything...
I will be amazed if there isn't some kind of appeal allowed. Too much has come out since.
Its an awful situation. If she killed no babies then you have an innocent woman in prison for crimes that never happened. And you have grieving parents who believe that their children were killed when the reality was that they died from poor care on a ward that should not have been looking after them.
OR
She is the devil incarnate, an evil murderer who has wrecked hundreds of lives.
And at the moment I don't believe anyone knows for sure which it is.
I don’t either. It could well be a mix - she is guilty, but the ward was shit as well. See the GK Chesterton short story where a murder hides his crime by causing a battle to happen there.
I just know that the idea, floated here, that “we shouldn’t prosecute her for further crimes, because they might fail to get a conviction, and that might cause the original conviction to fail. Which would really upset the parents” is simply wrong.
Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.
I’m increasingly unsure that the sub judice rules do not serve the interests of justice well: People deserve to have their day in court & not be pilloried by the press, but this case is a classic example of where the sub judice rules made it impossible for those with qualms about the case to be heard.
The state spent about £10million prosecuting Letby & gave her £1.5million to defend herself, most of which was spent on barrrister prep & court time. How much of that was available to spend on finding & paying expert witnesses to counter the CPS narrative? Not much, one suspects, given the ruinous expense of good lawyers! Defence solicitors only have so much resource to spend finding expert witnesses in fields that they are (inevitably) not themselves experts in.
A justice system where those who are convinced that the defendant is guilty can rock up to the police making all kinds of claims with no basis in science whatsoever & are enthusiastically co-opted as prosecution expert witnesses but those who take the other view are silenced & not permitted to speak will inevitably lead to miscarriages of justice.
There are significant flaws in this post. Which I should think is fairly apparent to anyone. In particular the thought that just any random enthusiast is allowed to be an expert witness is just wrong.
(That the defence called no expert evidence in either trial is interesting. The obvious conclusion is the most likely, but the information is privileged to Letby, not her lawyers, and SFAICS she has not waived it.)
Private Eye’s coverage has including an explanation of how it came to be that the defence called no expert witnesses. I don’t know whether they’re explanation is correct, but it seems plausible.
Now U.S. has closed two embassies in Mideast & told Americans in 14 countries to leave. But most airspace is shut down, there are no flights. Reading about people from around the world stranded.
Why are they only now telling Americans to leave? No planning, they weren’t expecting it to spiral.
I’m a broken record on this but Trump’s entire plan was clearly “kick them in the face, collect praise from Twitter, walk away.” From his perspective it’s always worked before. It seemingly never occurred to them that they may not be able to walk away.
If only there was some sort of precedent for a Special Military Operation encountering an enemy willing to shoot back.
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
That's the problem the lab leak theorists have. The theories were all constructed around the WIV, including all the nutty conspiracy theory stuff about it being Fauci's fault. But the evidence is too strong that the infections came from the market, the other side of a city to the WIV, so there's this big hole in the theory. How do you get a leak from a lab on one side of the city popping up in a wet market on the other side of the city?
So, some conspiracy theorists have jumped on the CDC, an institute that's close to the market. But that opens up a different big hole in the theory, because it's a different institute that's not doing the same coronavirus research. There's no link to Fauci. There's no link to the bat virus work.
If only there was some other explanation for how the virus first appeared in the wet market. Like, maybe we could look at all the warnings for years before that said that a very likely place for a novel pandemic to start is a wet market, because nearly all novel pandemics come from zoonoses? Instead of coming up with more and more convoluted explanations for how a lab leak someone got to a wet market, we could just accept that it came directly from the wet market!!!
Thing is, the lab leak theories are reassuring in a way. Horrible thing happened, either because of a mad scientist tinkering with forces they can't control, or an unfortunate lapse by an individual. Both of those are aberrations, and can be managed by better control and punishment.
If the plague just sort of happened, because nature throws things at us from time to time, because that's what randomness does, that's much scarier.
Basically, it's the old "did that earthquake happen because the sinful city needed to be destroyed, or because of the release of tectonic forces?" argument, updated for the 21st century.
One of my students is presenting work on MERS later this semester. Fatality rate of 35%. Pray to god that never gets to spread assymptomatically and as easily as Covid did and does.
Is that the one where the first symptom is losing the ability to pronounce the names of every foreign footballer?
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
That's the problem the lab leak theorists have. The theories were all constructed around the WIV, including all the nutty conspiracy theory stuff about it being Fauci's fault. But the evidence is too strong that the infections came from the market, the other side of a city to the WIV, so there's this big hole in the theory. How do you get a leak from a lab on one side of the city popping up in a wet market on the other side of the city?
So, some conspiracy theorists have jumped on the CDC, an institute that's close to the market. But that opens up a different big hole in the theory, because it's a different institute that's not doing the same coronavirus research. There's no link to Fauci. There's no link to the bat virus work.
If only there was some other explanation for how the virus first appeared in the wet market. Like, maybe we could look at all the warnings for years before that said that a very likely place for a novel pandemic to start is a wet market, because nearly all novel pandemics come from zoonoses? Instead of coming up with more and more convoluted explanations for how a lab leak someone got to a wet market, we could just accept that it came directly from the wet market!!!
There is no evidence that it 'first appeared at the wet market'
Yes, there is. Oodles of it. The early human cases were clustered around the wet market and people working at the wet market. Environmental samples from the wet market show that SARS-CoV-2 was there early on.
The early genomic variation in the virus in humans strongly implies that there were two events when it entered humans. That is consistent with there being a pool of animals infected with the virus in the market, during which time the virus could mutate, and then jump to humans on two different occasions. It is very hard to make it consistent with a lab leak.
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
That's the problem the lab leak theorists have. The theories were all constructed around the WIV, including all the nutty conspiracy theory stuff about it being Fauci's fault. But the evidence is too strong that the infections came from the market, the other side of a city to the WIV, so there's this big hole in the theory. How do you get a leak from a lab on one side of the city popping up in a wet market on the other side of the city?
So, some conspiracy theorists have jumped on the CDC, an institute that's close to the market. But that opens up a different big hole in the theory, because it's a different institute that's not doing the same coronavirus research. There's no link to Fauci. There's no link to the bat virus work.
If only there was some other explanation for how the virus first appeared in the wet market. Like, maybe we could look at all the warnings for years before that said that a very likely place for a novel pandemic to start is a wet market, because nearly all novel pandemics come from zoonoses? Instead of coming up with more and more convoluted explanations for how a lab leak someone got to a wet market, we could just accept that it came directly from the wet market!!!
Thing is, the lab leak theories are reassuring in a way. Horrible thing happened, either because of a mad scientist tinkering with forces they can't control, or an unfortunate lapse by an individual. Both of those are aberrations, and can be managed by better control and punishment.
If the plague just sort of happened, because nature throws things at us from time to time, because that's what randomness does, that's much scarier.
Basically, it's the old "did that earthquake happen because the sinful city needed to be destroyed, or because of the release of tectonic forces?" argument, updated for the 21st century.
Yeah, I think that's true, but it's also wrong. That is, we can do something about wet markets. China should have done something about wet markets. Yes, pandemics generally come from zoonoses and zoonoses seem random, but actually they're not random, they are a result of human activity that we can do something about.
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
That's the problem the lab leak theorists have. The theories were all constructed around the WIV, including all the nutty conspiracy theory stuff about it being Fauci's fault. But the evidence is too strong that the infections came from the market, the other side of a city to the WIV, so there's this big hole in the theory. How do you get a leak from a lab on one side of the city popping up in a wet market on the other side of the city?
So, some conspiracy theorists have jumped on the CDC, an institute that's close to the market. But that opens up a different big hole in the theory, because it's a different institute that's not doing the same coronavirus research. There's no link to Fauci. There's no link to the bat virus work.
If only there was some other explanation for how the virus first appeared in the wet market. Like, maybe we could look at all the warnings for years before that said that a very likely place for a novel pandemic to start is a wet market, because nearly all novel pandemics come from zoonoses? Instead of coming up with more and more convoluted explanations for how a lab leak someone got to a wet market, we could just accept that it came directly from the wet market!!!
There is no evidence that it 'first appeared at the wet market'
Yes, there is. Oodles of it. The early human cases were clustered around the wet market and people working at the wet market. Environmental samples from the wet market show that SARS-CoV-2 was there early on.
The early genomic variation in the virus in humans strongly implies that there were two events when it entered humans. That is consistent with there being a pool of animals infected with the virus in the market, during which time the virus could mutate, and then jump to humans on two different occasions. It is very hard to make it consistent with a lab leak.
Were environmental samples collected from other places in the city?
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
That's the problem the lab leak theorists have. The theories were all constructed around the WIV, including all the nutty conspiracy theory stuff about it being Fauci's fault. But the evidence is too strong that the infections came from the market, the other side of a city to the WIV, so there's this big hole in the theory. How do you get a leak from a lab on one side of the city popping up in a wet market on the other side of the city?
So, some conspiracy theorists have jumped on the CDC, an institute that's close to the market. But that opens up a different big hole in the theory, because it's a different institute that's not doing the same coronavirus research. There's no link to Fauci. There's no link to the bat virus work.
If only there was some other explanation for how the virus first appeared in the wet market. Like, maybe we could look at all the warnings for years before that said that a very likely place for a novel pandemic to start is a wet market, because nearly all novel pandemics come from zoonoses? Instead of coming up with more and more convoluted explanations for how a lab leak someone got to a wet market, we could just accept that it came directly from the wet market!!!
Thing is, the lab leak theories are reassuring in a way. Horrible thing happened, either because of a mad scientist tinkering with forces they can't control, or an unfortunate lapse by an individual. Both of those are aberrations, and can be managed by better control and punishment.
If the plague just sort of happened, because nature throws things at us from time to time, because that's what randomness does, that's much scarier.
Basically, it's the old "did that earthquake happen because the sinful city needed to be destroyed, or because of the release of tectonic forces?" argument, updated for the 21st century.
One of my students is presenting work on MERS later this semester. Fatality rate of 35%. Pray to god that never gets to spread assymptomatically and as easily as Covid did and does.
Indeed: you don't *need* a lab leak for new and horrible viruses to emerge and spread.
With that said, that it was a bat virus, and came from the same city as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had a well known bat virus expert, Shi Zhengli is an awful big coincidence.
(The evidence for bat viruses being studied at the CDC in the period immediately preceding the Covid outbreak is pretty weak, I thought. But I might be wrong.)
Mel Stride was v good at giving both barrels to Rachel from Accts
Quite the opposite.
Mel the economics novice was gratefully thankful to Donald and Bibi, no wonder Tories so desperate for war, to give him some ammunition, as without that a very decent picture emerging with the exception of unemployed, made up of the Boris wave of meets, the impact of AI and the minimun wage issue that does need urgently addressing in the Autumn
If the statement had been last week poor old Mel would have been speechless.
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
You didn't kill 20 million people, did you? Byronic, Fitz, LadyG, Eadric only comes to five.
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
That's the problem the lab leak theorists have. The theories were all constructed around the WIV, including all the nutty conspiracy theory stuff about it being Fauci's fault. But the evidence is too strong that the infections came from the market, the other side of a city to the WIV, so there's this big hole in the theory. How do you get a leak from a lab on one side of the city popping up in a wet market on the other side of the city?
So, some conspiracy theorists have jumped on the CDC, an institute that's close to the market. But that opens up a different big hole in the theory, because it's a different institute that's not doing the same coronavirus research. There's no link to Fauci. There's no link to the bat virus work.
If only there was some other explanation for how the virus first appeared in the wet market. Like, maybe we could look at all the warnings for years before that said that a very likely place for a novel pandemic to start is a wet market, because nearly all novel pandemics come from zoonoses? Instead of coming up with more and more convoluted explanations for how a lab leak someone got to a wet market, we could just accept that it came directly from the wet market!!!
It’s been alleged that employees from the WIV would take research animals and sell them at the market. I have no idea whether that’s true, though it would combine the best (worst?) of both explanations: Why not mix research viruses with whatever happened to be around in the wet market & see what emerged from the resultant melange!
In reality both of the two are plausible origin stories, with Occam’s Razor preferring the wet market alone as being sufficient in the absence of hard evidence to the contrary. Regardless of whether it was actually the proximal cause of the pandemic though, the researchers at the WIV appears to have been horrendously cavalier about the risks they were taking by attempting to engineer coronaviruses capable of infecting human cells from extant animal strains.
I am not aware of any evidence that employees from the WIV would take research animals and sell them at the market. That would be very difficult to do. Any employee would know that was incredibly stupid.
Now U.S. has closed two embassies in Mideast & told Americans in 14 countries to leave. But most airspace is shut down, there are no flights. Reading about people from around the world stranded.
Why are they only now telling Americans to leave? No planning, they weren’t expecting it to spiral.
I’m a broken record on this but Trump’s entire plan was clearly “kick them in the face, collect praise from Twitter, walk away.” From his perspective it’s always worked before. It seemingly never occurred to them that they may not be able to walk away.
If only there was some sort of precedent for a Special Military Operation encountering an enemy willing to shoot back.
But if it lasts 4 years+, it will see Trump out...
Watching the YouTube channels I watch with hosts highlighting his neck rash, bruised hands and evidence of a catheter, if the war lasts four months might be more accurate timeline for his survival.
OT In January I got a tip that AB had got a seat and was going to stand.......It turned out to be correct. Well today i have had a second tip saying the same thing is going to happen this May. The source is reliable. I don't know if there could be a bet on it but having been given this information I wouldn't use it for a bet anyway. I'll give better and further particulars in May
Reeves was stronger on responding to the Tories, who pushed back with the strongest challenge, than she was on dealing with the LibDems who zeroed in on the critical things the government ought to be doing, were it not for all their myriad political no-go areas.
Sally Lockwood of Sky reporting from Dubai has asked the government officials if the gulf states are asking Trump to back off, and their response was absolutely not and they support the US
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
That's the problem the lab leak theorists have. The theories were all constructed around the WIV, including all the nutty conspiracy theory stuff about it being Fauci's fault. But the evidence is too strong that the infections came from the market, the other side of a city to the WIV, so there's this big hole in the theory. How do you get a leak from a lab on one side of the city popping up in a wet market on the other side of the city?
So, some conspiracy theorists have jumped on the CDC, an institute that's close to the market. But that opens up a different big hole in the theory, because it's a different institute that's not doing the same coronavirus research. There's no link to Fauci. There's no link to the bat virus work.
If only there was some other explanation for how the virus first appeared in the wet market. Like, maybe we could look at all the warnings for years before that said that a very likely place for a novel pandemic to start is a wet market, because nearly all novel pandemics come from zoonoses? Instead of coming up with more and more convoluted explanations for how a lab leak someone got to a wet market, we could just accept that it came directly from the wet market!!!
It’s been alleged that employees from the WIV would take research animals and sell them at the market. I have no idea whether that’s true, though it would combine the best (worst?) of both explanations: Why not mix research viruses with whatever happened to be around in the wet market & see what emerged from the resultant melange!
In reality both of the two are plausible origin stories, with Occam’s Razor preferring the wet market alone as being sufficient in the absence of hard evidence to the contrary. Regardless of whether it was actually the proximal cause of the pandemic though, the researchers at the WIV appears to have been horrendously cavalier about the risks they were taking by attempting to engineer coronaviruses capable of infecting human cells from extant animal strains.
I am not aware of any evidence that employees from the WIV would take research animals and sell them at the market. That would be very difficult to do. Any employee would know that was incredibly stupid.
I find this very strange...
"How do you get a leak from a lab on one side of the city popping up in a wet market on the other side of the city?"
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
You didn't kill 20 million people, did you? Byronic, Fitz, LadyG, Eadric only comes to five.
Is that all? It felt like a lot more.
You could reasonably add in the various PB’ers whose spirit died, and who subsequently left the site, many of them female, before the Mods realised the toxic impact he was having on our site and at least started to try and reign it in.
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
That's the problem the lab leak theorists have. The theories were all constructed around the WIV, including all the nutty conspiracy theory stuff about it being Fauci's fault. But the evidence is too strong that the infections came from the market, the other side of a city to the WIV, so there's this big hole in the theory. How do you get a leak from a lab on one side of the city popping up in a wet market on the other side of the city?
So, some conspiracy theorists have jumped on the CDC, an institute that's close to the market. But that opens up a different big hole in the theory, because it's a different institute that's not doing the same coronavirus research. There's no link to Fauci. There's no link to the bat virus work.
If only there was some other explanation for how the virus first appeared in the wet market. Like, maybe we could look at all the warnings for years before that said that a very likely place for a novel pandemic to start is a wet market, because nearly all novel pandemics come from zoonoses? Instead of coming up with more and more convoluted explanations for how a lab leak someone got to a wet market, we could just accept that it came directly from the wet market!!!
There is no evidence that it 'first appeared at the wet market'
There is, however, significant evidence that it spread /from/ the wet market IIRC. Doesn’t mean it started there, but it looks like that was the source of the early mass infection.
No, i disagree. Some of the official early hospitalisation cases had connections to the wet market but several others did not and there is some evidence it was circulating before this in any case
Not every hospitalisation case has connections to the wet market. Most of them do. (None of them have any connection to the WIV lab.) We wouldn't necessarily expect contact tracing to be able to determine how every individual was infected. That the early cases cluster around the wet market is bog standard evidence for where the infection started.
There have been some claims that COVID-19 was circulating earlier, but they haven't withstood much scrutiny.
OT In January I got a tip that AB had got a seat and was going to stand.......It turned out to be correct. Well today i have had a second tip saying the same thing is going to happen this May. The source is reliable. I don't know if there could be a bet on it but having been given this information I wouldn't use it for a bet anyway. I'll give better and further particulars in May
I rather think that what your are hinting at is already at large on the internet?
Now U.S. has closed two embassies in Mideast & told Americans in 14 countries to leave. But most airspace is shut down, there are no flights. Reading about people from around the world stranded.
Why are they only now telling Americans to leave? No planning, they weren’t expecting it to spiral.
I’m a broken record on this but Trump’s entire plan was clearly “kick them in the face, collect praise from Twitter, walk away.” From his perspective it’s always worked before. It seemingly never occurred to them that they may not be able to walk away.
If only there was some sort of precedent for a Special Military Operation encountering an enemy willing to shoot back.
But if it lasts 4 years+, it will see Trump out...
Watching the YouTube channels I watch with hosts highlighting his neck rash, bruised hands and evidence of a catheter, if the war lasts four months might be more accurate timeline for his survival.
What explanation are they putting forward for the neck rash?
Reeves was stronger on responding to the Tories, who pushed back with the strongest challenge, than she was on dealing with the LibDems who zeroed in on the critical things the government ought to be doing, were it not for all their myriad political no-go areas.
That is a fair reflection. Stride's tacit critique is one of "you have been far too slow in clearing up the mess we created over 14 years".
And for those who need reminding; austerity, Brexit, COVID corruption, defence spending dereliction and Elizabeth Truss.
OT In January I got a tip that AB had got a seat and was going to stand.......It turned out to be correct. Well today i have had a second tip saying the same thing is going to happen this May. The source is reliable. I don't know if there could be a bet on it but having been given this information I wouldn't use it for a bet anyway. I'll give better and further particulars in May
If you are referring to Andy Burnham, labour had their chance last week and I am not sure they have any safe seats left even for AB
No, its ok, I've been assured on PB that she is definitely guilty and that a jury looked at the evidence and everything...
I will be amazed if there isn't some kind of appeal allowed. Too much has come out since.
Its an awful situation. If she killed no babies then you have an innocent woman in prison for crimes that never happened. And you have grieving parents who believe that their children were killed when the reality was that they died from poor care on a ward that should not have been looking after them.
OR
She is the devil incarnate, an evil murderer who has wrecked hundreds of lives.
And at the moment I don't believe anyone knows for sure which it is.
I don’t either. It could well be a mix - she is guilty, but the ward was shit as well. See the GK Chesterton short story where a murder hides his crime by causing a battle to happen there.
I just know that the idea, floated here, that “we shouldn’t prosecute her for further crimes, because they might fail to get a conviction, and that might cause the original conviction to fail. Which would really upset the parents” is simply wrong.
Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.
If she is guilty, the mere fact she got away with so many crimes for so long suggests there was something very wrong on the ward.
If she isn't, there was something very wrong on the ward.
I cannot see how any scenario does not involve dreadful management and poor safeguarding processes.
Which I think is the presumption behind the Thirlwell Inquiry. AFAICT Letby definitely should have been sacked based on her behaviour. But that doesn't necessarily make her a murderess. I have an open mind on whether she is innocent but like everyone here I agree both Letby and victims (of hospital incompetence, if not murder) deserve the truth to be properly established.
I should also say Letby has a high bar to clear. She needs to establish an innocent explanation for each and every one of her 15 convictions. If only one remains, she will stay behind bars. Making it doubly difficult her defence on the original trial failed to put forward any evidence of her innocence. Any overturning of the judgment requires new evidence that wasn't aired at the time.
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
That's the problem the lab leak theorists have. The theories were all constructed around the WIV, including all the nutty conspiracy theory stuff about it being Fauci's fault. But the evidence is too strong that the infections came from the market, the other side of a city to the WIV, so there's this big hole in the theory. How do you get a leak from a lab on one side of the city popping up in a wet market on the other side of the city?
So, some conspiracy theorists have jumped on the CDC, an institute that's close to the market. But that opens up a different big hole in the theory, because it's a different institute that's not doing the same coronavirus research. There's no link to Fauci. There's no link to the bat virus work.
If only there was some other explanation for how the virus first appeared in the wet market. Like, maybe we could look at all the warnings for years before that said that a very likely place for a novel pandemic to start is a wet market, because nearly all novel pandemics come from zoonoses? Instead of coming up with more and more convoluted explanations for how a lab leak someone got to a wet market, we could just accept that it came directly from the wet market!!!
There is no evidence that it 'first appeared at the wet market'
There is, however, significant evidence that it spread /from/ the wet market IIRC. Doesn’t mean it started there, but it looks like that was the source of the early mass infection.
No, i disagree. Some of the official early hospitalisation cases had connections to the wet market but several others did not and there is some evidence it was circulating before this in any case
Not every hospitalisation case has connections to the wet market. Most of them do. (None of them have any connection to the WIV lab.) We wouldn't necessarily expect contact tracing to be able to determine how every individual was infected. That the early cases cluster around the wet market is bog standard evidence for where the infection started.
There have been some claims that COVID-19 was circulating earlier, but they haven't withstood much scrutiny.
Indeed there was a story about an aging rocker who had been in China in the autumn of 2019 and later died of an unknown respiratory disease. His widow was claiming it was covid, but there is no evidence of this.
At the height of covid testing, most of those with symptoms didn't test positive for covid. We are surrounded by respiratory viruses. I've probably had three different ones since December and my wife is on to her fourth, the lucky woman.
There are some complexities. But not many. And they're not that big. It's right that we're building it. The North cannot be the place that's ignored while we find out why things like this cost so much now and fix them. But FFS. Seventy MILLION QUID for a station on existing line? https://x.com/thomasforth/status/2028750303370088850
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
No. You’re wrong and I’m right. And we know this because I’ve actually fucking been there. And you haven’t
That's possibly the weakest argument I've ever heard.
Sally Lockwood of Sky reporting from Dubai has asked the government officials if the gulf states are asking Trump to back off, and their response was absolutely not and they support the US
Iran has made enemies of its friends
The Gulf States -with the possibly exception of Oman- have never been Iran (or Persia's) friends.
OT In January I got a tip that AB had got a seat and was going to stand.......It turned out to be correct. Well today i have had a second tip saying the same thing is going to happen this May. The source is reliable. I don't know if there could be a bet on it but having been given this information I wouldn't use it for a bet anyway. I'll give better and further particulars in May
God help us. The ghosts of those who died during the N. Staffs Health Trust scandal are waving frantically.
Burnham seems far more interested in Burnham than he does in either the Labour Party or the GM Mayoralty.
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
That's the problem the lab leak theorists have. The theories were all constructed around the WIV, including all the nutty conspiracy theory stuff about it being Fauci's fault. But the evidence is too strong that the infections came from the market, the other side of a city to the WIV, so there's this big hole in the theory. How do you get a leak from a lab on one side of the city popping up in a wet market on the other side of the city?
So, some conspiracy theorists have jumped on the CDC, an institute that's close to the market. But that opens up a different big hole in the theory, because it's a different institute that's not doing the same coronavirus research. There's no link to Fauci. There's no link to the bat virus work.
If only there was some other explanation for how the virus first appeared in the wet market. Like, maybe we could look at all the warnings for years before that said that a very likely place for a novel pandemic to start is a wet market, because nearly all novel pandemics come from zoonoses? Instead of coming up with more and more convoluted explanations for how a lab leak someone got to a wet market, we could just accept that it came directly from the wet market!!!
It’s been alleged that employees from the WIV would take research animals and sell them at the market. I have no idea whether that’s true, though it would combine the best (worst?) of both explanations: Why not mix research viruses with whatever happened to be around in the wet market & see what emerged from the resultant melange!
In reality both of the two are plausible origin stories, with Occam’s Razor preferring the wet market alone as being sufficient in the absence of hard evidence to the contrary. Regardless of whether it was actually the proximal cause of the pandemic though, the researchers at the WIV appears to have been horrendously cavalier about the risks they were taking by attempting to engineer coronaviruses capable of infecting human cells from extant animal strains.
I am not aware of any evidence that employees from the WIV would take research animals and sell them at the market. That would be very difficult to do. Any employee would know that was incredibly stupid.
I find this very strange...
"How do you get a leak from a lab on one side of the city popping up in a wet market on the other side of the city?"
Do WIV employees not go shopping?
Or travel on public transport. Or live with other people.
Now U.S. has closed two embassies in Mideast & told Americans in 14 countries to leave. But most airspace is shut down, there are no flights. Reading about people from around the world stranded.
Why are they only now telling Americans to leave? No planning, they weren’t expecting it to spiral.
I’m a broken record on this but Trump’s entire plan was clearly “kick them in the face, collect praise from Twitter, walk away.” From his perspective it’s always worked before. It seemingly never occurred to them that they may not be able to walk away.
If only there was some sort of precedent for a Special Military Operation encountering an enemy willing to shoot back.
But if it lasts 4 years+, it will see Trump out...
Watching the YouTube channels I watch with hosts highlighting his neck rash, bruised hands and evidence of a catheter, if the war lasts four months might be more accurate timeline for his survival.
What explanation are they putting forward for the neck rash?
Topical preventive treatment for a precancerous lesion, I think ?
"In Milton Keynes, people will be able to vote in the city's main shopping centre, and in the three other areas, voters will have the option of casting their ballot in person ahead of the election, including on the weekend."
OT In January I got a tip that AB had got a seat and was going to stand.......It turned out to be correct. Well today i have had a second tip saying the same thing is going to happen this May. The source is reliable. I don't know if there could be a bet on it but having been given this information I wouldn't use it for a bet anyway. I'll give better and further particulars in May
If you are referring to Andy Burnham, labour had their chance last week and I am not sure they have any safe seats left even for AB
I suspect Burnham has a better opportunity this time around (in the right seat) because Burnham gives the special relationship traitor Starmer a bloody nose more so than the Greens.
Now U.S. has closed two embassies in Mideast & told Americans in 14 countries to leave. But most airspace is shut down, there are no flights. Reading about people from around the world stranded.
Why are they only now telling Americans to leave? No planning, they weren’t expecting it to spiral.
I’m a broken record on this but Trump’s entire plan was clearly “kick them in the face, collect praise from Twitter, walk away.” From his perspective it’s always worked before. It seemingly never occurred to them that they may not be able to walk away.
If only there was some sort of precedent for a Special Military Operation encountering an enemy willing to shoot back.
But if it lasts 4 years+, it will see Trump out...
Watching the YouTube channels I watch with hosts highlighting his neck rash, bruised hands and evidence of a catheter, if the war lasts four months might be more accurate timeline for his survival.
What explanation are they putting forward for the neck rash?
Topical preventive treatment for a precancerous lesion, I think ?
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
That's the problem the lab leak theorists have. The theories were all constructed around the WIV, including all the nutty conspiracy theory stuff about it being Fauci's fault. But the evidence is too strong that the infections came from the market, the other side of a city to the WIV, so there's this big hole in the theory. How do you get a leak from a lab on one side of the city popping up in a wet market on the other side of the city?
So, some conspiracy theorists have jumped on the CDC, an institute that's close to the market. But that opens up a different big hole in the theory, because it's a different institute that's not doing the same coronavirus research. There's no link to Fauci. There's no link to the bat virus work.
If only there was some other explanation for how the virus first appeared in the wet market. Like, maybe we could look at all the warnings for years before that said that a very likely place for a novel pandemic to start is a wet market, because nearly all novel pandemics come from zoonoses? Instead of coming up with more and more convoluted explanations for how a lab leak someone got to a wet market, we could just accept that it came directly from the wet market!!!
Thing is, the lab leak theories are reassuring in a way. Horrible thing happened, either because of a mad scientist tinkering with forces they can't control, or an unfortunate lapse by an individual. Both of those are aberrations, and can be managed by better control and punishment.
If the plague just sort of happened, because nature throws things at us from time to time, because that's what randomness does, that's much scarier.
Basically, it's the old "did that earthquake happen because the sinful city needed to be destroyed, or because of the release of tectonic forces?" argument, updated for the 21st century.
Yeah, I think that's true, but it's also wrong. That is, we can do something about wet markets. China should have done something about wet markets. Yes, pandemics generally come from zoonoses and zoonoses seem random, but actually they're not random, they are a result of human activity that we can do something about.
I like 'zoonoses' - while I know how it should be said (and understood) I can't help thinking of dejected looking bats - and other animals - stuck in a zoo with runny noses, passing viruses on to humans...
Reeves was stronger on responding to the Tories, who pushed back with the strongest challenge, than she was on dealing with the LibDems who zeroed in on the critical things the government ought to be doing, were it not for all their myriad political no-go areas.
That is a fair reflection. Stride's tacit critique is one of "you have been far too slow in clearing up the mess we created over 14 years".
That's a very fair critique. Though perhaps the Tories aren't best placed to be voicing it.
Comments
(That the defence called no expert evidence in either trial is interesting. The obvious conclusion is the most likely, but the information is privileged to Letby, not her lawyers, and SFAICS she has not waived it.)
Until the Israelis find him.
https://youtu.be/lJNPL8v-DfQ?t=321&si=EQHBJryG2TSf1yBH
Prosecutions generally cost more. I don't recall Letby's defence ever complaining that they were not sufficiently funded.
Of all the reasons to cast aspersions on the judgement, this is not one of them.
So no big change
How to create a fuel shortage !!!!
Petrol retailers
Motorists are urged to buy fuel normally after sales rise
Then weeks of its Brexit, Brexit, Brexit, driver shortage, Brexit....when it was changing over to new fuel due to updated regs followed by shouting fire in a crowded room.
An appeal requires new evidence or to show that there was a significant problem with how the case was conducted. If this was known about at the time to prosecution and defence lawyers, then I don't see how it leads to a grounds for appeal...?
I probably presume too much business is what I’m familiar with
My old company did alot of hot plate welding. Very energy intensive
Also noted that he resigned from the GMC rather than have the case adjudicated.
"Hindmarsh told the court that these tests and the medical records of babies F and L showed they suffered from hypoglycaemia – low blood sugar – because they had been poisoned with insulin most likely inserted into intravenous bags of fluids. The prosecution alleged that Letby had injected insulin into the bags, although there was no direct or forensic evidence that she or anybody else had done so."
I didn't follow the case at the time, too upsetting, but it does appear that there are serious questions about the verdicts
One of the funniest things to come out of this are the brits who won’t leave Dubai even as it’s being bombed. One influencer adjacent guy went on a live stream on his balcony and said he’d rather be killed by Iran than go back to Wigan
On balance though I think you might be right.
He has never been given this choice yet AFAIK.
It might be money, or time, or just that the current expert witness system is not fit for purpose. I’m willing to entertain all or any of those possibilities, but I think the system did fail - Letby’s conviction is unsound (independently of whether she is factually guilty or not).
Most who think Letby may be innocent believe that no babies were deliberately harmed or killed. Their case is that the unit should never have been looking after the babies that it was and that other babies died that were not thought to be murder. Indeed the list of those murdered changed over time.
By "too much has come out" I am referring to the totality of things reported since her conviction, not today's Guardian splash.
I think I'm tied in there because they are the best payers for export of solar. I'm not sure if I can disaggregate further.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00530-y
@uticaeric.bsky.social
Trump’s going to wait until there’s a 3-4% slide, then call a ceasefire, and the markets will pop.
(All the admin’s friends will know it’s coming)
So, some conspiracy theorists have jumped on the CDC, an institute that's close to the market. But that opens up a different big hole in the theory, because it's a different institute that's not doing the same coronavirus research. There's no link to Fauci. There's no link to the bat virus work.
If only there was some other explanation for how the virus first appeared in the wet market. Like, maybe we could look at all the warnings for years before that said that a very likely place for a novel pandemic to start is a wet market, because nearly all novel pandemics come from zoonoses? Instead of coming up with more and more convoluted explanations for how a lab leak someone got to a wet market, we could just accept that it came directly from the wet market!!!
Private Eye’s coverage has including an explanation of how it came to be that the defence called no expert witnesses. I don’t know whether they’re explanation is correct, but it seems plausible.
For those of us safe we should just be grateful for our blessings and say a wee prayer for those less fortunate
I heard the institute was going to be demolished, but that's still being held up by the requirement for a bat survey.
If the plague just sort of happened, because nature throws things at us from time to time, because that's what randomness does, that's much scarier.
Basically, it's the old "did that earthquake happen because the sinful city needed to be destroyed, or because of the release of tectonic forces?" argument, updated for the 21st century.
In reality both of the two are plausible origin stories, with Occam’s Razor preferring the wet market alone as being sufficient in the absence of hard evidence to the contrary. Regardless of whether it was actually the proximal cause of the pandemic though, the researchers at the WIV appears to have been horrendously cavalier about the risks they were taking by attempting to engineer coronaviruses capable of infecting human cells from extant animal strains.
Hypothesis one: animals infected with SARS-CoV-2 passed the virus to humans
Most of the peer-reviewed scientific evidence supports this hypothesis.
Although they go on to criticise the Chinese for not providing enough evidence to allow them be more confident about ruling out a lab leak.
I am now getting an image of the election of the next Supreme Leader descending into Handforth Parish Council levels of bickering….
I have not followed recent PE coverage but their early attempts to explain the failure to call defence expert evidence (basically that the defence thought their case so strong they need not bother to call it) was not credible. Have they advanced on that?
Supaporn Wacharapluesadee
Narcissus pseudonarcissus subsp. pseudonarcissus (Native daffodil)
There is a current application to become a UNESCO biosphere reserve, mostly based around two the National Nature Reserves.
All very well but the council aren't terribly sustainable in other ways, particularly when it comes to bunging money at airports.
If only there was an actual green party...
More evidence why Reform will not perform as well this May
Oh now I get it. Dubai is Golgafrinchan Ark B.
https://bsky.app/profile/roberthutton.co.uk/post/3mg5zvhwt7s2f
The early genomic variation in the virus in humans strongly implies that there were two events when it entered humans. That is consistent with there being a pool of animals infected with the virus in the market, during which time the virus could mutate, and then jump to humans on two different occasions. It is very hard to make it consistent with a lab leak.
With that said, that it was a bat virus, and came from the same city as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had a well known bat virus expert, Shi Zhengli is an awful big coincidence.
(The evidence for bat viruses being studied at the CDC in the period immediately preceding the Covid outbreak is pretty weak, I thought. But I might be wrong.)
Mel the economics novice was gratefully thankful to Donald and Bibi, no wonder Tories so desperate for war, to give him some ammunition, as without that a very decent picture emerging with the exception of unemployed, made up of the Boris wave of meets, the impact of AI and the minimun wage issue that does need urgently addressing in the Autumn
If the statement had been last week poor old Mel would have been speechless.
Israeli intelligence would then eliminate him, and Iran could pick a new leader to replace him once his little war had stopped.
Iran has made enemies of its friends
"How do you get a leak from a lab on one side of the city popping up in a wet market on the other side of the city?"
Do WIV employees not go shopping?
There have been some claims that COVID-19 was circulating earlier, but they haven't withstood much scrutiny.
And for those who need reminding; austerity, Brexit, COVID corruption, defence spending dereliction and Elizabeth Truss.
I should also say Letby has a high bar to clear. She needs to establish an innocent explanation for each and every one of her 15 convictions. If only one remains, she will stay behind bars. Making it doubly difficult her defence on the original trial failed to put forward any evidence of her innocence. Any overturning of the judgment requires new evidence that wasn't aired at the time.
At the height of covid testing, most of those with symptoms didn't test positive for covid. We are surrounded by respiratory viruses. I've probably had three different ones since December and my wife is on to her fourth, the lucky woman.
There are some complexities. But not many. And they're not that big. It's right that we're building it. The North cannot be the place that's ignored while we find out why things like this cost so much now and fix them. But FFS. Seventy MILLION QUID for a station on existing line?
https://x.com/thomasforth/status/2028750303370088850
For a town of about 10k people.
Burnham seems far more interested in Burnham than he does in either the Labour Party or the GM Mayoralty.
"In Milton Keynes, people will be able to vote in the city's main shopping centre, and in the three other areas, voters will have the option of casting their ballot in person ahead of the election, including on the weekend."
https://www.itv.com/news/2026-03-03/voters-to-cast-ballots-before-polling-day-for-first-time-under-new-trial
Though perhaps the Tories aren't best placed to be voicing it.
NEW THREAD
Another projection site for the locals.
Tories hold Bexley is bold (as is only 3 wards between Norfolk and Suffolk)