The number of people testing positive for coronavirus in England has risen by 22%, reaching the highest level in six weeks.
A total of 17,162 people tested positive for Covid-19 in the country at least once in the week to 26 May according to the latest test and trace figures.
That is a rise of more than a fifth on the previous week and the highest number of people to test positive since the week to 14 April, PA Media reports.
Meanwhile the number of rapid Covid-19 tests carried out in England has fallen to its lowest level in six weeks.
As many of those rapid test will be on school children and Y11 and Y13 are probably on study leave/had finished school in that week I'm not really surprised the number has gone down. It will plummet this week (half-term).
But if the tests are then deployed to Covid hot-spots, hardly a surprise the numbers go up when they are finding the asymptomatic...
I said months ago the government should have just said vaccinating going great, but no summer holidays abroad this year, lets just get this covid lark cracked, keep arrival of new variants to a minimum and see where we are in the autumn.
That way Oz/NZ lies. Going on holiday is part of normal life and the government seems keen to return to normal life.
They could close the borders but then you have a fully vaccinated nation not allowed to leave the country.
It isn't bonkers, would you really want to go to a foreign country where you get trapped in with a overwhelmed health system and where you might need urgent non Covid-19 related healthcare.
That's the risk I've decided I don't want.
More likely to die in the taxi ride from the airport to your hotel if you're fully vaxxed.
You, meanwhile, are taking a huge risk in Blackpool. Odds on surviving? 50:50 at best.
It's also the financial aspect.
Having to quarantine a hotel for ten days.
For someone such as yourself? I don't believe it. And in any case most UK holidays are far more spenny than ones abroad right now.
Well ok, I'm honest, I worry I'll have to quarantine for ten days in a ghastly Premier Inn or a Britannia hotel.
I said months ago the government should have just said vaccinating going great, but no summer holidays abroad this year, lets just get this covid lark cracked, keep arrival of new variants to a minimum and see where we are in the autumn.
That way Oz/NZ lies. Going on holiday is part of normal life and the government seems keen to return to normal life.
They could close the borders but then you have a fully vaccinated nation not allowed to leave the country.
It isn't bonkers, would you really want to go to a foreign country where you get trapped in with a overwhelmed health system and where you might need urgent non Covid-19 related healthcare.
That's the risk I've decided I don't want.
More likely to die in the taxi ride from the airport to your hotel if you're fully vaxxed.
You, meanwhile, are taking a huge risk in Blackpool. Odds on surviving? 50:50 at best.
It's also the financial aspect.
Having to quarantine a hotel for ten days.
For someone such as yourself? I don't believe it. And in any case most UK holidays are far more spenny than ones abroad right now.
Well ok, I'm honest, I worry I'll have to quarantine for ten days in a ghastly Premier Inn or a Britannia hotel.
The horror...
Could be worse, it could be one of those old school service station Travelodge's....
I'm not going abroad on holiday this year - I suggest you don't either.
Yup, as someone who likes travelling overseas for a long time I've accepted I will not be going overseas until 2022 at the earliest.
Chez Urquhart garden will be getting plenty of use again this summer....although I would appreciate it if the neighbours kids didn't ruin the grass quite so much when they come round.
I'm actually going to Blackpool this month for a long weekend, for the LOLZ mostly.
What have you done to deserve that?
I'm backing Britain and showing off my working class credentials with a trip to Blackpool.
The reality is my other half wants me to have a proper Blackpool experience again, normally we visit Blackpool in November time because I get tickets to the Strictly Live Show in Blackpool but that's in the winter and a proper time in Blackpool is in the summer.
COULD the bug be a bio-weapon, that escaped? Is it even possible it was deliberately released?
I severely doubt the latter, and I am skeptical of the former, but these are potent paragraphs from the Vanity Fair article
"Though {Wuhan lab chef] Shi has portrayed the WIV as a transparent hub of international research beset by false allegations, the State Department’s January fact sheet painted a different picture: of a facility conducting classified military research, and hiding it, which Shi adamantly denies. But a former national security official who reviewed U.S. classified materials told Vanity Fair that inside the WIV, military and civilian researchers are “doing animal research in the same fricking space.”
"As officials at the NSC tracked collaborations between the WIV and military scientists—which stretch back 20 years, with 51 coauthored papers—they also took note of a book flagged by a college student in Hong Kong. Written by a team of 18 authors and editors, 11 of whom worked at China’s Air Force Medical University, the book, Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons, explores issues surrounding the development of bioweapons capabilities."
"Claiming that terrorists using gene editing had created SARS-CoV-1 as a bioweapon, the book contained some alarming practical trade craft: “Bioweapon aerosol attacks are best conducted during dawn, dusk, night or cloudy weather because ultraviolet rays can damage the pathogens.” And it cited collateral benefits, noting that a sudden surge of hospitalizations could cause a healthcare system to collapse. One of the book’s editors has collaborated on 12 scientific papers with researchers at the WIV....
"The inflammatory idea of SARS-CoV-2-as-bioweapon has gained traction as an alt-right conspiracy theory, but civilian research under Shi’s supervision that has yet to be made public raises more realistic concerns. Shi’s own comments to a science journal, and grant information available on a Chinese government database, suggest that in the past three years her team has tested two novel but undisclosed bat coronaviruses on humanized mice, to gauge their infectiousness."
Cockup rather than conspiracy is usually a good explanation for things like this.
Yes, I agree. Cock-up at the BSL2 lab near Wuhan city centre. A virus escaped, probably via an infected (asymptomatic?) lab worker who went to the market, which became THE super-spreading locus
My only caveat is whenever the narrative of this hideous crisis shifts, it shifts closer to China Doing Something Terrible
We've gone from
Definitely A Natural Source at The Market to
Not The Market But Some Natural Source Nearby? to
OK It Is Just Possible It Might Have Been An Accident At The Lab to
OK It's Very Possible It Was An Accident At The Lab And They Covered It Up
at the moment the story is again shifting, this time to
It Probably Came From The Lab And It's Possible The Virus Was Altered To Be More Virulent
just down the line we have
It Accidentally Definitely Came From The Lab And It was Engineered To Be Nastier
then
OK It Was A Bioweapon, The PLA Fucked Up In The Lab
it ends with
THEY DELIBERATELY RELEASED A BIOWEAPON ON THE WORLD
Sorry to disappoint, but 10 points of lead is roughly where I would expect any party of government that was managing the current vaccine programme.
Like in Germany?
As in our vaccination programme, which I would put more down to our expertise in pharma and the expert advice it gives to government than our Classics educated ex-polemicist PM.
Besides, the reality is that government ministers are on TV and radio constantly. For the last 6 months the press briefings have been party political broadcasts. Whether one believes the vaccine programme in the UK was a result of Boris Johnson, Brexit or extra terrestrial intervention from the planet Zog, the reality is that the government has had massive publicity. I don't have the ability to compare with Germany because I don't live there.
So "inside your head" then is the quality of your evidence?
Sorry to disappoint, but 10 points of lead is roughly where I would expect any party of government that was managing the current vaccine programme.
Like in Germany?
As in our vaccination programme, which I would put more down to our expertise in pharma and the expert advice it gives to government than our Classics educated ex-polemicist PM.
Besides, the reality is that government ministers are on TV and radio constantly. For the last 6 months the press briefings have been party political broadcasts. Whether one believes the vaccine programme in the UK was a result of Boris Johnson, Brexit or extra terrestrial intervention from the planet Zog, the reality is that the government has had massive publicity. I don't have the ability to compare with Germany because I don't live there.
Delighted to assist you with the comparison:
Vaccines doses per 100 administered in Britain under Boris Johnson (B.A. Literae Humaniores): 96.72
Vaccines does per 100 administered in Germany under Angela Merkel (Doctor of Quantum Chemistry): 61.57
This is why I love Test Cricket (and politics) - the twists and turns.
Start of the day England would have been thrilled with what they've managed, but now a number 11 throwing the bat and it takes some of the shine off their day.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
The problem is that pretty much everyone who I've seen pushing this theory has appeared to be a seeker-after-dramatic-story rather than an obRNA that would make the mRNA vaccines we've since developed in the West look like sixth-form projects against whatever China would have been able to roll out at far shorter timescales and more effectively (and gain the plaudits for saving the world). Not only haven't they done so, there are no hints that they have the technology to do so.
(1/2)
Because, though, that all makes for a really great story, it's all glossed over. Either ignored, or diminished, or insulted. While any anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in favour of the story is cherry-picked and highlighted and emphasised. (Stuff like the zoonotic origin being described as only supported by 'precedent' with the word precedent in scare quotes - when by that it is meant that it's only supported by the fact that literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires).
It does make one take these earnest and breathless links with an entire chip-shop-worth of salt. Which can be a shame if there's something in it.
Personally, I could easily accept "they were studying bat coronaviruses because they were worried about another SARS or MERS and had an accident." It would need genuine evidence to back it up (a God of the Gaps argument that we can't trace it all the way back to Bartok the Bat in Cave 16 in Yunnan province and what he did doesn't cut the mustard, because it's far more common to be unable to trace a zoonotic jump all the way back than otherwise. But this doesn't mean that there was a secret virus lab in the 1800s run by a Victorian Dr Moreau that designed the most recent of the four cold coronaviruses, either). However, this always gets swept into a "they were designing it and it was a mad scientist experiment run amuck!" theme as well, which runs into multiple implausibilities that have been highlighted.
It's an Achilles heel of storylovers - to push the more dramatic ones too far. (2/2)
And yet you completely miss the most obvious evidence of all. Which is all around you, the circumstantial stuff
"literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires)."
So basically it's almost impossible. It can never happen! This is the entirety of YOUR evidence (I wait for any more)
And yet, here is the reaction of the director of the Wuhan lab, when she first heard about this weird new respiratory coronavirus disease, at a conference in Shanghai
""Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.
"Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”"
COULD THEY HAVE COME FROM OUR LAB
That was her first, urgent reaction. A leak from the lab. She rushed back to Wuhan to check.
Now, you're pretty good on maths and data, but compared to the actual women who has done fifteen years of research on novel bat coronaviruses, I suggest you know the cube root of fuck all, on this particular topic. You just waffle on.
She's the expert, and she thought it might have come from her lab, because the coincidence was otherwise too great
"All your evidence relies on is that every single time it's ever happened before, millions of times, it happened that way, and you're ignoring that someone got worried, so this first time ever in history MUST have happened and you're a poopy-head."
And I emphasised that I'm quite happy to believe that they were researching coronaviruses and one of the ones they were looking at had been part of a lab leak. If there's evidence for it. And "We don't know the exact route - like with most other zoonotic viruses" and "She was worried about a lab leak therefore it must have happened and they were making it worse" isn't evidence.
What’s he highest score by a New Zealander on debut? I want to say 214 by Matthew Sinclair?
Not the happiest of precedents for Conway because after that and another double Sinclair ended up being like a poor man’s Chris Martin, but still the target to go for.
Yes, that's the 7th highest score on debut by any test batsman.
I’ve just found a history professor with a lively sense of humour.
We are delighted to host Professor Robert Frost FBA, FRSE (University of Aberdeen) for the RHS Prothero Lecture 2021
The Roads Not Taken Liberty, Sovereignty and the Idea of the Republic in Poland-Lithuania and the British Isles, 1550-1660
Now there is a title of pure genius.
It might actually be very interesting - there were some strong links. I've just been coincidentally reading about the Scottish merchants who set up shop in Lithuania at that time and whose houses are still surviving - for instance the ones in this tweet
Russian general Barclay de Tolly from the Napoleonic wars was from Courland (now Lithuania), of Scottish descent. If I recall correctly, there's a statue of him in Tallinn as he was brought up in Livonia, now Estonia
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
The problem is that pretty much everyone who I've seen pushing this theory has appeared to be a seeker-after-dramatic-story rather than an obRNA that would make the mRNA vaccines we've since developed in the West look like sixth-form projects against whatever China would have been able to roll out at far shorter timescales and more effectively (and gain the plaudits for saving the world). Not only haven't they done so, there are no hints that they have the technology to do so.
(1/2)
Because, though, that all makes for a really great story, it's all glossed over. Either ignored, or diminished, or insulted. While any anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in favour of the story is cherry-picked and highlighted and emphasised. (Stuff like the zoonotic origin being described as only supported by 'precedent' with the word precedent in scare quotes - when by that it is meant that it's only supported by the fact that literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires).
It does make one take these earnest and breathless links with an entire chip-shop-worth of salt. Which can be a shame if there's something in it.
Personally, I could easily accept "they were studying bat coronaviruses because they were worried about another SARS or MERS and had an accident." It would need genuine evidence to back it up (a God of the Gaps argument that we can't trace it all the way back to Bartok the Bat in Cave 16 in Yunnan province and what he did doesn't cut the mustard, because it's far more common to be unable to trace a zoonotic jump all the way back than otherwise. But this doesn't mean that there was a secret virus lab in the 1800s run by a Victorian Dr Moreau that designed the most recent of the four cold coronaviruses, either). However, this always gets swept into a "they were designing it and it was a mad scientist experiment run amuck!" theme as well, which runs into multiple implausibilities that have been highlighted.
It's an Achilles heel of storylovers - to push the more dramatic ones too far. (2/2)
And yet you completely miss the most obvious evidence of all. Which is all around you, the circumstantial stuff
"literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires)."
So basically it's almost impossible. It can never happen! This is the entirety of YOUR evidence (I wait for any more)
And yet, here is the reaction of the director of the Wuhan lab, when she first heard about this weird new respiratory coronavirus disease, at a conference in Shanghai
""Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.
"Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”"
COULD THEY HAVE COME FROM OUR LAB
That was her first, urgent reaction. A leak from the lab. She rushed back to Wuhan to check....
And concluded NO.
...Meanwhile she frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”...
I note you omitted the other bit of the article which very clearly demonstrates the occurrence of bat-human transfer of coronaviruses in the wild.
...In October 2015 Shi’s team collected blood samples from more than 200 residents in four of those villages. It found that six people, or nearly 3 percent, carried antibodies against SARS-like coronaviruses from bats—even though none of them had handled wildlife or reported SARS-like or other pneumonia like symptoms…. …Three years earlier Shi’s team had been called in to investigate the virus profile of a mine shaft in Yunnan’s mountainous Mojiang County—famous for its fermented Pu’er tea—where six miners suffered from pneumonialike diseases and two died. After sampling the cave for a year, the researchers discovered a diverse group of coronaviruses in six bat species. In many cases, multiple viral strains had infected a single animal, turning it into a flying factory for new viruses...
Thank you for the sensible and balanced response.
It is my experience, across the Internet, that there are people (who seem to be represented on this forum too) who are only too willing to believe the worst, will only cherry pick the evidence that suits their approach and then run with it as though only they were the holders and purveyors of the 'true truth'.
My instinct is that the belief in and acceptance of the various conspiracy fantasies on this subject require too much work for them to have taken place. The path of evolution and the path of contemporary events is normally along the line of least resistance and least effort. Viruses mutate and become more widespread because they become easier to contract. Of the type that the Coronavirus is, being single strand RNA, they are also prone to error during their replication phase. Some errors cause the newly replicated virus to become useless, therefore that mutation dies out, some make it less dangerous and some make it more easy to transmit. Given how many billions of billions of viral particles there are out there, it's not in the least bit surprising or abnormal that, once they get to infect a human that they should then, by random chance, mutate into the perfect transmission machine. And, over time, mutate out of it again once we all have antibodies, of course.
This whole thing about finding someone to blame for these sorts of things is psychologically understandable - having something to point at and judge makes the afflicted (in all sorts of circumstances) feel better, but it does nothing whatsoever to change the situation that the afflicted are in.
Are we blaming the people of Kent for for the 'Alpha Variant'? Shall we carpet-bomb Kent as an act of revenge? Cut them off from the rest of society? Forever ostracise the leaders of Kent County Council for having the misfortune to be in roughly the part of the world where someone unknown caught Covid, replicated the virus and in doing so, it mutated into a better virus - i.e. the gain of function caused by random chance?
To do that would be ridiculous. And that ridiculousness goes all the way back through the chain of transmission to China where, all the relevant evidence shows that Coronaviruses transmit to humans naturally and this one almost certainly did that exactly the same way as all the others - like SARS (from Civet Cats) and MERS (from camels in the Middle East) before it.
Not everything is a conspiracy or a cover up. It might be a calamity, but its cause almost certainly isn't deliberate. And, to go back to my original point, it makes no difference to you or me now anyway.
This is why I love Test Cricket (and politics) - the twists and turns.
Start of the day England would have been thrilled with what they've managed, but now a number 11 throwing the bat and it takes some of the shine off their day.
It's also the reason 20/20 is crap. There isn't enough time for anything unexpected to happen.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
The problem is that pretty much everyone who I've seen pushing this theory has appeared to be a seeker-after-dramatic-story rather than an obRNA that would make the mRNA vaccines we've since developed in the West look like sixth-form projects against whatever China would have been able to roll out at far shorter timescales and more effectively (and gain the plaudits for saving the world). Not only haven't they done so, there are no hints that they have the technology to do so.
(1/2)
Because, though, that all makes for a really great story, it's all glossed over. Either ignored, or diminished, or insulted. While any anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in favour of the story is cherry-picked and highlighted and emphasised. (Stuff like the zoonotic origin being described as only supported by 'precedent' with the word precedent in scare quotes - when by that it is meant that it's only supported by the fact that literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires).
It does make one take these earnest and breathless links with an entire chip-shop-worth of salt. Which can be a shame if there's something in it.
Personally, I could easily accept "they were studying bat coronaviruses because they were worried about another SARS or MERS and had an accident." It would need genuine evidence to back it up (a God of the Gaps argument that we can't trace it all the way back to Bartok the Bat in Cave 16 in Yunnan province and what he did doesn't cut the mustard, because it's far more common to be unable to trace a zoonotic jump all the way back than otherwise. But this doesn't mean that there was a secret virus lab in the 1800s run by a Victorian Dr Moreau that designed the most recent of the four cold coronaviruses, either). However, this always gets swept into a "they were designing it and it was a mad scientist experiment run amuck!" theme as well, which runs into multiple implausibilities that have been highlighted.
It's an Achilles heel of storylovers - to push the more dramatic ones too far. (2/2)
And yet you completely miss the most obvious evidence of all. Which is all around you, the circumstantial stuff
"literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires)."
So basically it's almost impossible. It can never happen! This is the entirety of YOUR evidence (I wait for any more)
And yet, here is the reaction of the director of the Wuhan lab, when she first heard about this weird new respiratory coronavirus disease, at a conference in Shanghai
""Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.
"Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”"
COULD THEY HAVE COME FROM OUR LAB
That was her first, urgent reaction. A leak from the lab. She rushed back to Wuhan to check....
And concluded NO.
...Meanwhile she frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”...
I note you omitted the other bit of the article which very clearly demonstrates the occurrence of bat-human transfer of coronaviruses in the wild.
...In October 2015 Shi’s team collected blood samples from more than 200 residents in four of those villages. It found that six people, or nearly 3 percent, carried antibodies against SARS-like coronaviruses from bats—even though none of them had handled wildlife or reported SARS-like or other pneumonia like symptoms…. …Three years earlier Shi’s team had been called in to investigate the virus profile of a mine shaft in Yunnan’s mountainous Mojiang County—famous for its fermented Pu’er tea—where six miners suffered from pneumonialike diseases and two died. After sampling the cave for a year, the researchers discovered a diverse group of coronaviruses in six bat species. In many cases, multiple viral strains had infected a single animal, turning it into a flying factory for new viruses...
Thank you for the sensible and balanced response.
It is my experience, across the Internet, that there are people (who seem to be represented on this forum too) who are only too willing to believe the worst, will only cherry pick the evidence that suits their approach and then run with it as though only they were the holders and purveyors of the 'true truth'.
My instinct is that the belief in and acceptance of the various conspiracy fantasies on this subject require too much work for them to have taken place. The path of evolution and the path of contemporary events is normally along the line of least resistance and least effort. Viruses mutate and become more widespread because they become easier to contract. Of the type that the Coronavirus is, being single strand RNA, they are also prone to error during their replication phase. Some errors cause the newly replicated virus to become useless, therefore that mutation dies out, some make it less dangerous and some make it more easy to transmit. Given how many billions of billions of viral particles there are out there, it's not in the least bit surprising or abnormal that, once they get to infect a human that they should then, by random chance, mutate into the perfect transmission machine. And, over time, mutate out of it again once we all have antibodies, of course.
This whole thing about finding someone to blame for these sorts of things is psychologically understandable - having something to point at and judge makes the afflicted (in all sorts of circumstances) feel better, but it does nothing whatsoever to change the situation that the afflicted are in.
Are we blaming the people of Kent for for the 'Alpha Variant'? Shall we carpet-bomb Kent as an act of revenge? Cut them off from the rest of society? Forever ostracise the leaders of Kent County Council for having the misfortune to be in roughly the part of the world where someone unknown caught Covid, replicated the virus and in doing so, it mutated into a better virus - i.e. the gain of function caused by random chance?
To do that would be ridiculous. And that ridiculousness goes all the way back through the chain of transmission to China where, all the relevant evidence shows that Coronaviruses transmit to humans naturally and this one almost certainly did that exactly the same way as all the others - like SARS (from Civet Cats) and MERS (from camels in the Middle East) before it.
Not everything is a conspiracy or a cover up. It might be a calamity, but its cause almost certainly isn't deliberate. And, to go back to my original point, it makes no difference to you or me now anyway.
The Chinese deliberately spread Covid around the world by allowing - even encouraging - flights in and out of the country, even as they shut down their own country domestically, to contain the pandemic
You want us to just forget that, because "it makes no difference now anyway"
Sorry to disappoint, but 10 points of lead is roughly where I would expect any party of government that was managing the current vaccine programme.
Like in Germany?
As in our vaccination programme, which I would put more down to our expertise in pharma and the expert advice it gives to government than our Classics educated ex-polemicist PM.
Besides, the reality is that government ministers are on TV and radio constantly. For the last 6 months the press briefings have been party political broadcasts. Whether one believes the vaccine programme in the UK was a result of Boris Johnson, Brexit or extra terrestrial intervention from the planet Zog, the reality is that the government has had massive publicity. I don't have the ability to compare with Germany because I don't live there.
So "inside your head" then is the quality of your evidence?
??! No I was giving an opinion on the basis of having worked in the healthcare industries for over 30 years, and simultaneously have an interest in politics. My opinion, if I have to make it clearer is that given the current amount of publicity given to the party of government it is little surprising that they are 10 points ahead. As I am neither a Labour supporter (was once a Tory activist) , nor a fanbois of Boris Johnson it makes my opinion , whilst accepting it is but that, reasonably balanced.
I'm not going abroad on holiday this year - I suggest you don't either.
Yup, as someone who likes travelling overseas for a long time I've accepted I will not be going overseas until 2022 at the earliest.
Chez Urquhart garden will be getting plenty of use again this summer....although I would appreciate it if the neighbours kids didn't ruin the grass quite so much when they come round.
I'm actually going to Blackpool this month for a long weekend, for the LOLZ mostly.
What have you done to deserve that?
I'm backing Britain and showing off my working class credentials with a trip to Blackpool.
The reality is my other half wants me to have a proper Blackpool experience again, normally we visit Blackpool in November time because I get tickets to the Strictly Live Show in Blackpool but that's in the winter and a proper time in Blackpool is in the summer.
Have you had all your jabs, no not the COVID ones....your TB one etc.
I would say that the number of people who boo sportsmen taking the knee because the founders of the BLM movement are marxist-leninist is very small.
For me, what I don't like about it is that it's quasi-religious. And I don't particularly like poppies on football shirts, though at least that's once a year and money is raised for a good cause when they're auctioned off.
Quasi-religious? It's saying racism is bad. I really think that before a footie game that is all it means. And if you think about the constituency it is aimed at then the more the merrier, message-wise, frankly.
Football have had the perfectly serviceable “Kick It Out” campaign for years, and it’s been effective at stopping the racist chanting that was sadly commonplace in the stands.
I'm not going abroad on holiday this year - I suggest you don't either.
Yup, as someone who likes travelling overseas for a long time I've accepted I will not be going overseas until 2022 at the earliest.
Chez Urquhart garden will be getting plenty of use again this summer....although I would appreciate it if the neighbours kids didn't ruin the grass quite so much when they come round.
I'm actually going to Blackpool this month for a long weekend, for the LOLZ mostly.
What have you done to deserve that?
I'm backing Britain and showing off my working class credentials with a trip to Blackpool.
The reality is my other half wants me to have a proper Blackpool experience again, normally we visit Blackpool in November time because I get tickets to the Strictly Live Show in Blackpool but that's in the winter and a proper time in Blackpool is in the summer.
Ha! Well, I hope you enjoy it.
Do report back!
I remember the first time I visited Blackpool in 1987 for the Conservative conference. There was a keen wind carrying water off the irish Sea, and it was raining. In the street my hotel was located in, there was a dog rolling in horseshit. My bed was quite damp, and when I complained to the landlady she explained it was because "we had the mongoloids here last week and they wet themselves.".
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
The problem is that pretty much everyone who I've seen pushing this theory has appeared to be a seeker-after-dramatic-story rather than an obRNA that would make the mRNA vaccines we've since developed in the West look like sixth-form projects against whatever China would have been able to roll out at far shorter timescales and more effectively (and gain the plaudits for saving the world). Not only haven't they done so, there are no hints that they have the technology to do so.
(1/2)
Because, though, that all makes for a really great story, it's all glossed over. Either ignored, or diminished, or insulted. While any anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in favour of the story is cherry-picked and highlighted and emphasised. (Stuff like the zoonotic origin being described as only supported by 'precedent' with the word precedent in scare quotes - when by that it is meant that it's only supported by the fact that literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires).
It does make one take these earnest and breathless links with an entire chip-shop-worth of salt. Which can be a shame if there's something in it.
Personally, I could easily accept "they were studying bat coronaviruses because they were worried about another SARS or MERS and had an accident." It would need genuine evidence to back it up (a God of the Gaps argument that we can't trace it all the way back to Bartok the Bat in Cave 16 in Yunnan province and what he did doesn't cut the mustard, because it's far more common to be unable to trace a zoonotic jump all the way back than otherwise. But this doesn't mean that there was a secret virus lab in the 1800s run by a Victorian Dr Moreau that designed the most recent of the four cold coronaviruses, either). However, this always gets swept into a "they were designing it and it was a mad scientist experiment run amuck!" theme as well, which runs into multiple implausibilities that have been highlighted.
It's an Achilles heel of storylovers - to push the more dramatic ones too far. (2/2)
And yet you completely miss the most obvious evidence of all. Which is all around you, the circumstantial stuff
"literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires)."
So basically it's almost impossible. It can never happen! This is the entirety of YOUR evidence (I wait for any more)
And yet, here is the reaction of the director of the Wuhan lab, when she first heard about this weird new respiratory coronavirus disease, at a conference in Shanghai
""Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.
"Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”"
COULD THEY HAVE COME FROM OUR LAB
That was her first, urgent reaction. A leak from the lab. She rushed back to Wuhan to check....
And concluded NO.
...Meanwhile she frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”...
I note you omitted the other bit of the article which very clearly demonstrates the occurrence of bat-human transfer of coronaviruses in the wild.
...In October 2015 Shi’s team collected blood samples from more than 200 residents in four of those villages. It found that six people, or nearly 3 percent, carried antibodies against SARS-like coronaviruses from bats—even though none of them had handled wildlife or reported SARS-like or other pneumonia like symptoms…. …Three years earlier Shi’s team had been called in to investigate the virus profile of a mine shaft in Yunnan’s mountainous Mojiang County—famous for its fermented Pu’er tea—where six miners suffered from pneumonialike diseases and two died. After sampling the cave for a year, the researchers discovered a diverse group of coronaviruses in six bat species. In many cases, multiple viral strains had infected a single animal, turning it into a flying factory for new viruses...
Thank you for the sensible and balanced response.
It is my experience, across the Internet, that there are people (who seem to be represented on this forum too) who are only too willing to believe the worst, will only cherry pick the evidence that suits their approach and then run with it as though only they were the holders and purveyors of the 'true truth'.
My instinct is that the belief in and acceptance of the various conspiracy fantasies on this subject require too much work for them to have taken place. The path of evolution and the path of contemporary events is normally along the line of least resistance and least effort. Viruses mutate and become more widespread because they become easier to contract. Of the type that the Coronavirus is, being single strand RNA, they are also prone to error during their replication phase. Some errors cause the newly replicated virus to become useless, therefore that mutation dies out, some make it less dangerous and some make it more easy to transmit. Given how many billions of billions of viral particles there are out there, it's not in the least bit surprising or abnormal that, once they get to infect a human that they should then, by random chance, mutate into the perfect transmission machine. And, over time, mutate out of it again once we all have antibodies, of course.
This whole thing about finding someone to blame for these sorts of things is psychologically understandable - having something to point at and judge makes the afflicted (in all sorts of circumstances) feel better, but it does nothing whatsoever to change the situation that the afflicted are in.
Are we blaming the people of Kent for for the 'Alpha Variant'? Shall we carpet-bomb Kent as an act of revenge? Cut them off from the rest of society? Forever ostracise the leaders of Kent County Council for having the misfortune to be in roughly the part of the world where someone unknown caught Covid, replicated the virus and in doing so, it mutated into a better virus - i.e. the gain of function caused by random chance?
To do that would be ridiculous. And that ridiculousness goes all the way back through the chain of transmission to China where, all the relevant evidence shows that Coronaviruses transmit to humans naturally and this one almost certainly did that exactly the same way as all the others - like SARS (from Civet Cats) and MERS (from camels in the Middle East) before it.
Not everything is a conspiracy or a cover up. It might be a calamity, but its cause almost certainly isn't deliberate. And, to go back to my original point, it makes no difference to you or me now anyway.
Maybe a lab in Kent (or London, which is next to Kent) was doing research on the spreading coronavirus. We know lots of people were doing research on it, for vaccines, for sequencing genomes, and for other treatments.
Maybe they were doing Gain of Function research to work out what mutations were possible and accidentally released that into the wild. Lab leaks have occurred before, so that's practically proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.
And the variant seen in India probably came from an Indian lab doing the same thing. We know they produce vaccines there, so they might have the skillset.
Anyone know if Brazil and South Africa have virus labs?
I'm not going abroad on holiday this year - I suggest you don't either.
Yup, as someone who likes travelling overseas for a long time I've accepted I will not be going overseas until 2022 at the earliest.
Chez Urquhart garden will be getting plenty of use again this summer....although I would appreciate it if the neighbours kids didn't ruin the grass quite so much when they come round.
I'm actually going to Blackpool this month for a long weekend, for the LOLZ mostly.
What have you done to deserve that?
I'm backing Britain and showing off my working class credentials with a trip to Blackpool.
The reality is my other half wants me to have a proper Blackpool experience again, normally we visit Blackpool in November time because I get tickets to the Strictly Live Show in Blackpool but that's in the winter and a proper time in Blackpool is in the summer.
Sorry to disappoint, but 10 points of lead is roughly where I would expect any party of government that was managing the current vaccine programme.
Like in Germany?
As in our vaccination programme, which I would put more down to our expertise in pharma and the expert advice it gives to government than our Classics educated ex-polemicist PM.
Besides, the reality is that government ministers are on TV and radio constantly. For the last 6 months the press briefings have been party political broadcasts. Whether one believes the vaccine programme in the UK was a result of Boris Johnson, Brexit or extra terrestrial intervention from the planet Zog, the reality is that the government has had massive publicity. I don't have the ability to compare with Germany because I don't live there.
Delighted to assist you with the comparison:
Vaccines doses per 100 administered in Britain under Boris Johnson (B.A. Literae Humaniores): 96.72
Vaccines does per 100 administered in Germany under Angela Merkel (Doctor of Quantum Chemistry): 61.57
Average Conservative polling lead: 11%
Average CDU/CSU polling lead: 2%
Oh it must be nice to be such an unthinking loyalist. Life must be so simple, a bit like being a gold fish. Boris Johnson may be popular with the gullible, but he is still UNFIT FOR OFFICE.
As I said to his one of his other fanbois, I can't judge Germany as I don't live there. Your nationalistic gloating about vaccines just makes you look silly and uneducated, and despite your blind loyalty I doubt you are either. You might want to try and grow up politically.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
The problem is that pretty much everyone who I've seen pushing this theory has appeared to be a seeker-after-dramatic-story rather than an obRNA that would make the mRNA vaccines we've since developed in the West look like sixth-form projects against whatever China would have been able to roll out at far shorter timescales and more effectively (and gain the plaudits for saving the world). Not only haven't they done so, there are no hints that they have the technology to do so.
(1/2)
Because, though, that all makes for a really great story, it's all glossed over. Either ignored, or diminished, or insulted. While any anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in favour of the story is cherry-picked and highlighted and emphasised. (Stuff like the zoonotic origin being described as only supported by 'precedent' with the word precedent in scare quotes - when by that it is meant that it's only supported by the fact that literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires).
It does make one take these earnest and breathless links with an entire chip-shop-worth of salt. Which can be a shame if there's something in it.
Personally, I could easily accept "they were studying bat coronaviruses because they were worried about another SARS or MERS and had an accident." It would need genuine evidence to back it up (a God of the Gaps argument that we can't trace it all the way back to Bartok the Bat in Cave 16 in Yunnan province and what he did doesn't cut the mustard, because it's far more common to be unable to trace a zoonotic jump all the way back than otherwise. But this doesn't mean that there was a secret virus lab in the 1800s run by a Victorian Dr Moreau that designed the most recent of the four cold coronaviruses, either). However, this always gets swept into a "they were designing it and it was a mad scientist experiment run amuck!" theme as well, which runs into multiple implausibilities that have been highlighted.
It's an Achilles heel of storylovers - to push the more dramatic ones too far. (2/2)
And yet you completely miss the most obvious evidence of all. Which is all around you, the circumstantial stuff
"literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires)."
So basically it's almost impossible. It can never happen! This is the entirety of YOUR evidence (I wait for any more)
And yet, here is the reaction of the director of the Wuhan lab, when she first heard about this weird new respiratory coronavirus disease, at a conference in Shanghai
""Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.
"Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”"
COULD THEY HAVE COME FROM OUR LAB
That was her first, urgent reaction. A leak from the lab. She rushed back to Wuhan to check....
And concluded NO.
...Meanwhile she frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”...
I note you omitted the other bit of the article which very clearly demonstrates the occurrence of bat-human transfer of coronaviruses in the wild.
...In October 2015 Shi’s team collected blood samples from more than 200 residents in four of those villages. It found that six people, or nearly 3 percent, carried antibodies against SARS-like coronaviruses from bats—even though none of them had handled wildlife or reported SARS-like or other pneumonia like symptoms…. …Three years earlier Shi’s team had been called in to investigate the virus profile of a mine shaft in Yunnan’s mountainous Mojiang County—famous for its fermented Pu’er tea—where six miners suffered from pneumonialike diseases and two died. After sampling the cave for a year, the researchers discovered a diverse group of coronaviruses in six bat species. In many cases, multiple viral strains had infected a single animal, turning it into a flying factory for new viruses...
Thank you for the sensible and balanced response.
It is my experience, across the Internet, that there are people (who seem to be represented on this forum too) who are only too willing to believe the worst, will only cherry pick the evidence that suits their approach and then run with it as though only they were the holders and purveyors of the 'true truth'.
My instinct is that the belief in and acceptance of the various conspiracy fantasies on this subject require too much work for them to have taken place. The path of evolution and the path of contemporary events is normally along the line of least resistance and least effort. Viruses mutate and become more widespread because they become easier to contract. Of the type that the Coronavirus is, being single strand RNA, they are also prone to error during their replication phase. Some errors cause the newly replicated virus to become useless, therefore that mutation dies out, some make it less dangerous and some make it more easy to transmit. Given how many billions of billions of viral particles there are out there, it's not in the least bit surprising or abnormal that, once they get to infect a human that they should then, by random chance, mutate into the perfect transmission machine. And, over time, mutate out of it again once we all have antibodies, of course.
This whole thing about finding someone to blame for these sorts of things is psychologically understandable - having something to point at and judge makes the afflicted (in all sorts of circumstances) feel better, but it does nothing whatsoever to change the situation that the afflicted are in.
Are we blaming the people of Kent for for the 'Alpha Variant'? Shall we carpet-bomb Kent as an act of revenge? Cut them off from the rest of society? Forever ostracise the leaders of Kent County Council for having the misfortune to be in roughly the part of the world where someone unknown caught Covid, replicated the virus and in doing so, it mutated into a better virus - i.e. the gain of function caused by random chance?
To do that would be ridiculous. And that ridiculousness goes all the way back through the chain of transmission to China where, all the relevant evidence shows that Coronaviruses transmit to humans naturally and this one almost certainly did that exactly the same way as all the others - like SARS (from Civet Cats) and MERS (from camels in the Middle East) before it.
Not everything is a conspiracy or a cover up. It might be a calamity, but its cause almost certainly isn't deliberate. And, to go back to my original point, it makes no difference to you or me now anyway.
Maybe a lab in Kent (or London, which is next to Kent) was doing research on the spreading coronavirus. We know lots of people were doing research on it, for vaccines, for sequencing genomes, and for other treatments.
Maybe they were doing Gain of Function research to work out what mutations were possible and accidentally released that into the wild. Lab leaks have occurred before, so that's practically proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.
And the variant seen in India probably came from an Indian lab doing the same thing. We know they produce vaccines there, so they might have the skillset.
Anyone know if Brazil and South Africa have virus labs?
Bit like HMY Britannia 2.0 - is there an age divide over whether it should be launched or not?
The first render of HMY Flaggy McFlagface has appeared and it looks like Cammell Laird are designing it in Roblox.
The fact that estimated cost has doubled since Johnson started going on about it will, of course, be of no concern to the tories.
For someone whose personally funded travel choice was between a £300 Toyota Previa or a £100 (Y reg) Ford Focus, his travel tastes have become more sophisticated since he got his grubby paws on our tax pounds.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
The problem is that pretty much everyone who I've seen pushing this theory has appeared to be a seeker-after-dramatic-story rather than an obRNA that would make the mRNA vaccines we've since developed in the West look like sixth-form projects against whatever China would have been able to roll out at far shorter timescales and more effectively (and gain the plaudits for saving the world). Not only haven't they done so, there are no hints that they have the technology to do so.
(1/2)
Because, though, that all makes for a really great story, it's all glossed over. Either ignored, or diminished, or insulted. While any anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in favour of the story is cherry-picked and highlighted and emphasised. (Stuff like the zoonotic origin being described as only supported by 'precedent' with the word precedent in scare quotes - when by that it is meant that it's only supported by the fact that literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires).
It does make one take these earnest and breathless links with an entire chip-shop-worth of salt. Which can be a shame if there's something in it.
Personally, I could easily accept "they were studying bat coronaviruses because they were worried about another SARS or MERS and had an accident." It would need genuine evidence to back it up (a God of the Gaps argument that we can't trace it all the way back to Bartok the Bat in Cave 16 in Yunnan province and what he did doesn't cut the mustard, because it's far more common to be unable to trace a zoonotic jump all the way back than otherwise. But this doesn't mean that there was a secret virus lab in the 1800s run by a Victorian Dr Moreau that designed the most recent of the four cold coronaviruses, either). However, this always gets swept into a "they were designing it and it was a mad scientist experiment run amuck!" theme as well, which runs into multiple implausibilities that have been highlighted.
It's an Achilles heel of storylovers - to push the more dramatic ones too far. (2/2)
And yet you completely miss the most obvious evidence of all. Which is all around you, the circumstantial stuff
"literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires)."
So basically it's almost impossible. It can never happen! This is the entirety of YOUR evidence (I wait for any more)
And yet, here is the reaction of the director of the Wuhan lab, when she first heard about this weird new respiratory coronavirus disease, at a conference in Shanghai
""Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.
"Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”"
COULD THEY HAVE COME FROM OUR LAB
That was her first, urgent reaction. A leak from the lab. She rushed back to Wuhan to check....
And concluded NO.
...Meanwhile she frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”...
I note you omitted the other bit of the article which very clearly demonstrates the occurrence of bat-human transfer of coronaviruses in the wild.
...In October 2015 Shi’s team collected blood samples from more than 200 residents in four of those villages. It found that six people, or nearly 3 percent, carried antibodies against SARS-like coronaviruses from bats—even though none of them had handled wildlife or reported SARS-like or other pneumonia like symptoms…. …Three years earlier Shi’s team had been called in to investigate the virus profile of a mine shaft in Yunnan’s mountainous Mojiang County—famous for its fermented Pu’er tea—where six miners suffered from pneumonialike diseases and two died. After sampling the cave for a year, the researchers discovered a diverse group of coronaviruses in six bat species. In many cases, multiple viral strains had infected a single animal, turning it into a flying factory for new viruses...
Thank you for the sensible and balanced response.
It is my experience, across the Internet, that there are people (who seem to be represented on this forum too) who are only too willing to believe the worst, will only cherry pick the evidence that suits their approach and then run with it as though only they were the holders and purveyors of the 'true truth'.
My instinct is that the belief in and acceptance of the various conspiracy fantasies on this subject require too much work for them to have taken place. The path of evolution and the path of contemporary events is normally along the line of least resistance and least effort. Viruses mutate and become more widespread because they become easier to contract. Of the type that the Coronavirus is, being single strand RNA, they are also prone to error during their replication phase. Some errors cause the newly replicated virus to become useless, therefore that mutation dies out, some make it less dangerous and some make it more easy to transmit. Given how many billions of billions of viral particles there are out there, it's not in the least bit surprising or abnormal that, once they get to infect a human that they should then, by random chance, mutate into the perfect transmission machine. And, over time, mutate out of it again once we all have antibodies, of course.
This whole thing about finding someone to blame for these sorts of things is psychologically understandable - having something to point at and judge makes the afflicted (in all sorts of circumstances) feel better, but it does nothing whatsoever to change the situation that the afflicted are in.
Are we blaming the people of Kent for for the 'Alpha Variant'? Shall we carpet-bomb Kent as an act of revenge? Cut them off from the rest of society? Forever ostracise the leaders of Kent County Council for having the misfortune to be in roughly the part of the world where someone unknown caught Covid, replicated the virus and in doing so, it mutated into a better virus - i.e. the gain of function caused by random chance?
To do that would be ridiculous. And that ridiculousness goes all the way back through the chain of transmission to China where, all the relevant evidence shows that Coronaviruses transmit to humans naturally and this one almost certainly did that exactly the same way as all the others - like SARS (from Civet Cats) and MERS (from camels in the Middle East) before it.
Not everything is a conspiracy or a cover up. It might be a calamity, but its cause almost certainly isn't deliberate. And, to go back to my original point, it makes no difference to you or me now anyway.
Maybe a lab in Kent (or London, which is next to Kent) was doing research on the spreading coronavirus. We know lots of people were doing research on it, for vaccines, for sequencing genomes, and for other treatments.
Maybe they were doing Gain of Function research to work out what mutations were possible and accidentally released that into the wild. Lab leaks have occurred before, so that's practically proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.
And the variant seen in India probably came from an Indian lab doing the same thing. We know they produce vaccines there, so they might have the skillset.
Anyone know if Brazil and South Africa have virus labs?
Desperate stuff, keep at it
Ironically, exactly what we were thinking about your "proofs"
I said months ago the government should have just said vaccinating going great, but no summer holidays abroad this year, lets just get this covid lark cracked, keep arrival of new variants to a minimum and see where we are in the autumn.
That way Oz/NZ lies. Going on holiday is part of normal life and the government seems keen to return to normal life.
They could close the borders but then you have a fully vaccinated nation not allowed to leave the country.
It isn't bonkers, would you really want to go to a foreign country where you get trapped in with a overwhelmed health system and where you might need urgent non Covid-19 related healthcare.
That's the risk I've decided I don't want.
More likely to die in the taxi ride from the airport to your hotel if you're fully vaxxed.
You, meanwhile, are taking a huge risk in Blackpool. Odds on surviving? 50:50 at best.
It's also the financial aspect.
Having to quarantine a hotel for ten days.
For someone such as yourself? I don't believe it. And in any case most UK holidays are far more spenny than ones abroad right now.
Well ok, I'm honest, I worry I'll have to quarantine for ten days in a ghastly Premier Inn or a Britannia hotel.
The horror...
Could be worse, it could be one of those old school service station Travelodge's....
I've stayed in one of those.
Probably twenty years ago I was driving late at night on the M62/M1 and suddenly there was this quick and very thick fog from nowhere.
With visibility down to zero I really didn't fancy driving, pulled over to the nearest service station. The fog was here to stay the night, so I had the option of staying in my car or in a hotel room, being young and innocent I stayed in the hotel.
I'm still traumatised by that room, I felt like Terry Waite when he was kidnapped and held hostage by Hezbollah.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
The problem is that pretty much everyone who I've seen pushing this theory has appeared to be a seeker-after-dramatic-story rather than an obRNA that would make the mRNA vaccines we've since developed in the West look like sixth-form projects against whatever China would have been able to roll out at far shorter timescales and more effectively (and gain the plaudits for saving the world). Not only haven't they done so, there are no hints that they have the technology to do so.
(1/2)
Because, though, that all makes for a really great story, it's all glossed over. Either ignored, or diminished, or insulted. While any anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in favour of the story is cherry-picked and highlighted and emphasised. (Stuff like the zoonotic origin being described as only supported by 'precedent' with the word precedent in scare quotes - when by that it is meant that it's only supported by the fact that literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires).
It does make one take these earnest and breathless links with an entire chip-shop-worth of salt. Which can be a shame if there's something in it.
Personally, I could easily accept "they were studying bat coronaviruses because they were worried about another SARS or MERS and had an accident." It would need genuine evidence to back it up (a God of the Gaps argument that we can't trace it all the way back to Bartok the Bat in Cave 16 in Yunnan province and what he did doesn't cut the mustard, because it's far more common to be unable to trace a zoonotic jump all the way back than otherwise. But this doesn't mean that there was a secret virus lab in the 1800s run by a Victorian Dr Moreau that designed the most recent of the four cold coronaviruses, either). However, this always gets swept into a "they were designing it and it was a mad scientist experiment run amuck!" theme as well, which runs into multiple implausibilities that have been highlighted.
It's an Achilles heel of storylovers - to push the more dramatic ones too far. (2/2)
And yet you completely miss the most obvious evidence of all. Which is all around you, the circumstantial stuff
"literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires)."
So basically it's almost impossible. It can never happen! This is the entirety of YOUR evidence (I wait for any more)
And yet, here is the reaction of the director of the Wuhan lab, when she first heard about this weird new respiratory coronavirus disease, at a conference in Shanghai
""Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.
"Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”"
COULD THEY HAVE COME FROM OUR LAB
That was her first, urgent reaction. A leak from the lab. She rushed back to Wuhan to check....
And concluded NO.
...Meanwhile she frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”...
I note you omitted the other bit of the article which very clearly demonstrates the occurrence of bat-human transfer of coronaviruses in the wild.
...In October 2015 Shi’s team collected blood samples from more than 200 residents in four of those villages. It found that six people, or nearly 3 percent, carried antibodies against SARS-like coronaviruses from bats—even though none of them had handled wildlife or reported SARS-like or other pneumonia like symptoms…. …Three years earlier Shi’s team had been called in to investigate the virus profile of a mine shaft in Yunnan’s mountainous Mojiang County—famous for its fermented Pu’er tea—where six miners suffered from pneumonialike diseases and two died. After sampling the cave for a year, the researchers discovered a diverse group of coronaviruses in six bat species. In many cases, multiple viral strains had infected a single animal, turning it into a flying factory for new viruses...
Thank you for the sensible and balanced response.
It is my experience, across the Internet, that there are people (who seem to be represented on this forum too) who are only too willing to believe the worst, will only cherry pick the evidence that suits their approach and then run with it as though only they were the holders and purveyors of the 'true truth'.
My instinct is that the belief in and acceptance of the various conspiracy fantasies on this subject require too much work for them to have taken place. The path of evolution and the path of contemporary events is normally along the line of least resistance and least effort. Viruses mutate and become more widespread because they become easier to contract. Of the type that the Coronavirus is, being single strand RNA, they are also prone to error during their replication phase. Some errors cause the newly replicated virus to become useless, therefore that mutation dies out, some make it less dangerous and some make it more easy to transmit. Given how many billions of billions of viral particles there are out there, it's not in the least bit surprising or abnormal that, once they get to infect a human that they should then, by random chance, mutate into the perfect transmission machine. And, over time, mutate out of it again once we all have antibodies, of course.
This whole thing about finding someone to blame for these sorts of things is psychologically understandable - having something to point at and judge makes the afflicted (in all sorts of circumstances) feel better, but it does nothing whatsoever to change the situation that the afflicted are in.
Are we blaming the people of Kent for for the 'Alpha Variant'? Shall we carpet-bomb Kent as an act of revenge? Cut them off from the rest of society? Forever ostracise the leaders of Kent County Council for having the misfortune to be in roughly the part of the world where someone unknown caught Covid, replicated the virus and in doing so, it mutated into a better virus - i.e. the gain of function caused by random chance?
To do that would be ridiculous. And that ridiculousness goes all the way back through the chain of transmission to China where, all the relevant evidence shows that Coronaviruses transmit to humans naturally and this one almost certainly did that exactly the same way as all the others - like SARS (from Civet Cats) and MERS (from camels in the Middle East) before it.
Not everything is a conspiracy or a cover up. It might be a calamity, but its cause almost certainly isn't deliberate. And, to go back to my original point, it makes no difference to you or me now anyway.
Maybe a lab in Kent (or London, which is next to Kent) was doing research on the spreading coronavirus. We know lots of people were doing research on it, for vaccines, for sequencing genomes, and for other treatments.
Maybe they were doing Gain of Function research to work out what mutations were possible and accidentally released that into the wild. Lab leaks have occurred before, so that's practically proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.
And the variant seen in India probably came from an Indian lab doing the same thing. We know they produce vaccines there, so they might have the skillset.
Anyone know if Brazil and South Africa have virus labs?
Desperate stuff, keep at it
Ironically, exactly what we were thinking about your "proofs"
There is no proof. Neither of us knows, certainly not you.
Evidentially you have precedence, I have mighty circumstantial evidence, and the evidence keeps pointing my way
At the very least, we now have proof that both China and America were engaged in a cover-up, about gain-of-function, and possibly about lab leak
I said months ago the government should have just said vaccinating going great, but no summer holidays abroad this year, lets just get this covid lark cracked, keep arrival of new variants to a minimum and see where we are in the autumn.
That way Oz/NZ lies. Going on holiday is part of normal life and the government seems keen to return to normal life.
They could close the borders but then you have a fully vaccinated nation not allowed to leave the country.
It isn't bonkers, would you really want to go to a foreign country where you get trapped in with a overwhelmed health system and where you might need urgent non Covid-19 related healthcare.
That's the risk I've decided I don't want.
More likely to die in the taxi ride from the airport to your hotel if you're fully vaxxed.
You, meanwhile, are taking a huge risk in Blackpool. Odds on surviving? 50:50 at best.
It's also the financial aspect.
Having to quarantine a hotel for ten days.
For someone such as yourself? I don't believe it. And in any case most UK holidays are far more spenny than ones abroad right now.
Well ok, I'm honest, I worry I'll have to quarantine for ten days in a ghastly Premier Inn or a Britannia hotel.
The horror...
Could be worse, it could be one of those old school service station Travelodge's....
I've stayed in one of those.
Probably twenty years ago I was driving late at night on the M62/M1 and suddenly there was this quick and very thick fog from nowhere.
With visibility down to zero I really didn't fancy driving, pulled over to the nearest service station. The fog was here to stay the night, so I had the option of staying in my car or in a hotel room, being young and innocent I stayed in the hotel.
I'm still traumatised by that room, I felt like Terry Waite when he was kidnapped and held hostage by Hezbollah.
I once stayed in the room of a hotel in China which still had the blood stain on the floor from the investment banker who had been killed the previous month. Bed/wardrobe went up against the door that night and a close watch was kept on the window.
I said months ago the government should have just said vaccinating going great, but no summer holidays abroad this year, lets just get this covid lark cracked, keep arrival of new variants to a minimum and see where we are in the autumn.
That way Oz/NZ lies. Going on holiday is part of normal life and the government seems keen to return to normal life.
They could close the borders but then you have a fully vaccinated nation not allowed to leave the country.
It isn't bonkers, would you really want to go to a foreign country where you get trapped in with a overwhelmed health system and where you might need urgent non Covid-19 related healthcare.
That's the risk I've decided I don't want.
More likely to die in the taxi ride from the airport to your hotel if you're fully vaxxed.
You, meanwhile, are taking a huge risk in Blackpool. Odds on surviving? 50:50 at best.
It's also the financial aspect.
Having to quarantine a hotel for ten days.
For someone such as yourself? I don't believe it. And in any case most UK holidays are far more spenny than ones abroad right now.
Well ok, I'm honest, I worry I'll have to quarantine for ten days in a ghastly Premier Inn or a Britannia hotel.
The horror...
Could be worse, it could be one of those old school service station Travelodge's....
I've stayed in one of those.
Probably twenty years ago I was driving late at night on the M62/M1 and suddenly there was this quick and very thick fog from nowhere.
With visibility down to zero I really didn't fancy driving, pulled over to the nearest service station. The fog was here to stay the night, so I had the option of staying in my car or in a hotel room, being young and innocent I stayed in the hotel.
I'm still traumatised by that room, I felt like Terry Waite when he was kidnapped and held hostage by Hezbollah.
I once stayed in the room of a hotel in China which still had the blood stain on the floor from the investment banker who had been killed the previous month. Bed/wardrobe went up against the door that night and a close watch was kept on the window.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
The problem is that pretty much everyone who I've seen pushing this theory has appeared to be a seeker-after-dramatic-story rather than an obRNA that would make the mRNA vaccines we've since developed in the West look like sixth-form projects against whatever China would have been able to roll out at far shorter timescales and more effectively (and gain the plaudits for saving the world). Not only haven't they done so, there are no hints that they have the technology to do so.
(1/2)
Because, though, that all makes for a really great story, it's all glossed over. Either ignored, or diminished, or insulted. While any anecdotal or circumstantial evidence in favour of the story is cherry-picked and highlighted and emphasised. (Stuff like the zoonotic origin being described as only supported by 'precedent' with the word precedent in scare quotes - when by that it is meant that it's only supported by the fact that literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires).
It does make one take these earnest and breathless links with an entire chip-shop-worth of salt. Which can be a shame if there's something in it.
Personally, I could easily accept "they were studying bat coronaviruses because they were worried about another SARS or MERS and had an accident." It would need genuine evidence to back it up (a God of the Gaps argument that we can't trace it all the way back to Bartok the Bat in Cave 16 in Yunnan province and what he did doesn't cut the mustard, because it's far more common to be unable to trace a zoonotic jump all the way back than otherwise. But this doesn't mean that there was a secret virus lab in the 1800s run by a Victorian Dr Moreau that designed the most recent of the four cold coronaviruses, either). However, this always gets swept into a "they were designing it and it was a mad scientist experiment run amuck!" theme as well, which runs into multiple implausibilities that have been highlighted.
It's an Achilles heel of storylovers - to push the more dramatic ones too far. (2/2)
And yet you completely miss the most obvious evidence of all. Which is all around you, the circumstantial stuff
"literally every previous virus to make the jump, all the millions since the dawn of time, did it just that way and no virus has ever done it before in the way that the story requires)."
So basically it's almost impossible. It can never happen! This is the entirety of YOUR evidence (I wait for any more)
And yet, here is the reaction of the director of the Wuhan lab, when she first heard about this weird new respiratory coronavirus disease, at a conference in Shanghai
""Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.
"Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”"
COULD THEY HAVE COME FROM OUR LAB
That was her first, urgent reaction. A leak from the lab. She rushed back to Wuhan to check....
And concluded NO.
...Meanwhile she frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”...
I note you omitted the other bit of the article which very clearly demonstrates the occurrence of bat-human transfer of coronaviruses in the wild.
...In October 2015 Shi’s team collected blood samples from more than 200 residents in four of those villages. It found that six people, or nearly 3 percent, carried antibodies against SARS-like coronaviruses from bats—even though none of them had handled wildlife or reported SARS-like or other pneumonia like symptoms…. …Three years earlier Shi’s team had been called in to investigate the virus profile of a mine shaft in Yunnan’s mountainous Mojiang County—famous for its fermented Pu’er tea—where six miners suffered from pneumonialike diseases and two died. After sampling the cave for a year, the researchers discovered a diverse group of coronaviruses in six bat species. In many cases, multiple viral strains had infected a single animal, turning it into a flying factory for new viruses...
Thank you for the sensible and balanced response.
It is my experience, across the Internet, that there are people (who seem to be represented on this forum too) who are only too willing to believe the worst, will only cherry pick the evidence that suits their approach and then run with it as though only they were the holders and purveyors of the 'true truth'.
My instinct is that the belief in and acceptance of the various conspiracy fantasies on this subject require too much work for them to have taken place. The path of evolution and the path of contemporary events is normally along the line of least resistance and least effort. Viruses mutate and become more widespread because they become easier to contract. Of the type that the Coronavirus is, being single strand RNA, they are also prone to error during their replication phase. Some errors cause the newly replicated virus to become useless, therefore that mutation dies out, some make it less dangerous and some make it more easy to transmit. Given how many billions of billions of viral particles there are out there, it's not in the least bit surprising or abnormal that, once they get to infect a human that they should then, by random chance, mutate into the perfect transmission machine. And, over time, mutate out of it again once we all have antibodies, of course.
This whole thing about finding someone to blame for these sorts of things is psychologically understandable - having something to point at and judge makes the afflicted (in all sorts of circumstances) feel better, but it does nothing whatsoever to change the situation that the afflicted are in.
Are we blaming the people of Kent for for the 'Alpha Variant'? Shall we carpet-bomb Kent as an act of revenge? Cut them off from the rest of society? Forever ostracise the leaders of Kent County Council for having the misfortune to be in roughly the part of the world where someone unknown caught Covid, replicated the virus and in doing so, it mutated into a better virus - i.e. the gain of function caused by random chance?
To do that would be ridiculous. And that ridiculousness goes all the way back through the chain of transmission to China where, all the relevant evidence shows that Coronaviruses transmit to humans naturally and this one almost certainly did that exactly the same way as all the others - like SARS (from Civet Cats) and MERS (from camels in the Middle East) before it.
Not everything is a conspiracy or a cover up. It might be a calamity, but its cause almost certainly isn't deliberate. And, to go back to my original point, it makes no difference to you or me now anyway.
The Chinese deliberately spread Covid around the world by allowing - even encouraging - flights in and out of the country, even as they shut down their own country domestically, to contain the pandemic
You want us to just forget that, because "it makes no difference now anyway"
I guess this must also be part of the plot for your latest novel (co-Authored with that other literary genius, Dan Brown)?
A Chinese government official in Wuhan(who is in fact a decedent of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdelene), deliberately releases Coronavirus to soften the world up for World Government, that can in turn be taken over by alien life forms from the Planet Zog? They are stopped by an Anglo-saxon trio of super heroes in the form of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and expert in uber-bullshit, Superhero SeanT?
The two relatively new pavilions on either side of the Media Centre at Lords look awful don't they. They've also messed up the view of the Media Centre itself which looked pretty good when it was by itself so-to-speak. It looks very boxed in now.
Sorry to disappoint, but 10 points of lead is roughly where I would expect any party of government that was managing the current vaccine programme.
Like in Germany?
As in our vaccination programme, which I would put more down to our expertise in pharma and the expert advice it gives to government than our Classics educated ex-polemicist PM.
Besides, the reality is that government ministers are on TV and radio constantly. For the last 6 months the press briefings have been party political broadcasts. Whether one believes the vaccine programme in the UK was a result of Boris Johnson, Brexit or extra terrestrial intervention from the planet Zog, the reality is that the government has had massive publicity. I don't have the ability to compare with Germany because I don't live there.
So "inside your head" then is the quality of your evidence?
given the current amount of publicity given to the party of government it is little surprising that they are 10 points ahead.
Yes, a good vaccine roll out does appear capable of giving governing parties a boost - but this is far from uniform - see other European countries, or the SNP's recent performance, for examples. This suggests that there is more to it than "vaccine boost", and airily waving away a 10 point lead for a government in office for 11 years, does seem a touch simplistic. There is more afoot.
Sorry to disappoint, but 10 points of lead is roughly where I would expect any party of government that was managing the current vaccine programme.
Like in Germany?
As in our vaccination programme, which I would put more down to our expertise in pharma and the expert advice it gives to government than our Classics educated ex-polemicist PM.
Besides, the reality is that government ministers are on TV and radio constantly. For the last 6 months the press briefings have been party political broadcasts. Whether one believes the vaccine programme in the UK was a result of Boris Johnson, Brexit or extra terrestrial intervention from the planet Zog, the reality is that the government has had massive publicity. I don't have the ability to compare with Germany because I don't live there.
Delighted to assist you with the comparison:
Vaccines doses per 100 administered in Britain under Boris Johnson (B.A. Literae Humaniores): 96.72
Vaccines does per 100 administered in Germany under Angela Merkel (Doctor of Quantum Chemistry): 61.57
Average Conservative polling lead: 11%
Average CDU/CSU polling lead: 2%
Oh it must be nice to be such an unthinking loyalist. Life must be so simple, a bit like being a gold fish. Boris Johnson may be popular with the gullible, but he is still UNFIT FOR OFFICE.
As I said to his one of his other fanbois, I can't judge Germany as I don't live there. Your nationalistic gloating about vaccines just makes you look silly and uneducated, and despite your blind loyalty I doubt you are either. You might want to try and grow up politically.
And yet somehow under the man allegedly 'unfit for office' Britain has been vaccinated faster than any other major country in the world. Surely dear Angela's rather less impressive achievement - and she a quantum chemist, not a mere Greats man, let's recall - would have seen her rusticated from the Nigel Foremain School of Political Leadership?
This is why I love Test Cricket (and politics) - the twists and turns.
Start of the day England would have been thrilled with what they've managed, but now a number 11 throwing the bat and it takes some of the shine off their day.
Do they call it "Test Cricket" because it "tests" your patience?
This is why I love Test Cricket (and politics) - the twists and turns.
Start of the day England would have been thrilled with what they've managed, but now a number 11 throwing the bat and it takes some of the shine off their day.
Do they call it "Test Cricket" because it "tests" your patience?
This is why I love Test Cricket (and politics) - the twists and turns.
Start of the day England would have been thrilled with what they've managed, but now a number 11 throwing the bat and it takes some of the shine off their day.
Do they call it "Test Cricket" because it "tests" your patience?
Test cricket is like chess but on a playing field instead of a chess board.
And the variant seen in Delta probably came from a Deltan lab doing the same thing. We know they produce vaccines there, so they might have the skillset.
Probably twenty years ago I was driving late at night on the M62/M1 and suddenly there was this quick and very thick fog from nowhere.
With visibility down to zero I really didn't fancy driving, pulled over to the nearest service station. The fog was here to stay the night, so I had the option of staying in my car or in a hotel room, being young and innocent I stayed in the hotel.
I'm still traumatised by that room, I felt like Terry Waite when he was kidnapped and held hostage by Hezbollah.
The worst hotel I know is local to my office and we sometimes have put people up there. Our Dutch CEO reported that he'd drawn attention to the fact that water was trickling through the ceiling and splashing into the handbasin. The manager came up to look and said "Ah, well, at least it's not on the bed, but we'll have a look upstairs", then disappeared. Next morning, the trickle was still going. Our Dutch colleague is very amiable and also fond of the British, so he decided this was charming rather than ridiculous... but we did put him up somewhere else next time.
Political aficionados will be delighted to know that I'm staying at The Imperial Hotel during my sojourn to Blackpool.
Venue of so many party political conferences of yesteryear.
Aren't the Conservatives returning to Blackpool, or is that an ambition to be announced rather than carried out? Anyway, Peter Kay's not touring so enjoy Chubby Brown.
Sorry to disappoint, but 10 points of lead is roughly where I would expect any party of government that was managing the current vaccine programme.
Like in Germany?
As in our vaccination programme, which I would put more down to our expertise in pharma and the expert advice it gives to government than our Classics educated ex-polemicist PM.
Besides, the reality is that government ministers are on TV and radio constantly. For the last 6 months the press briefings have been party political broadcasts. Whether one believes the vaccine programme in the UK was a result of Boris Johnson, Brexit or extra terrestrial intervention from the planet Zog, the reality is that the government has had massive publicity. I don't have the ability to compare with Germany because I don't live there.
Delighted to assist you with the comparison:
Vaccines doses per 100 administered in Britain under Boris Johnson (B.A. Literae Humaniores): 96.72
Vaccines does per 100 administered in Germany under Angela Merkel (Doctor of Quantum Chemistry): 61.57
Average Conservative polling lead: 11%
Average CDU/CSU polling lead: 2%
Oh it must be nice to be such an unthinking loyalist. Life must be so simple, a bit like being a gold fish. Boris Johnson may be popular with the gullible, but he is still UNFIT FOR OFFICE.
As I said to his one of his other fanbois, I can't judge Germany as I don't live there. Your nationalistic gloating about vaccines just makes you look silly and uneducated, and despite your blind loyalty I doubt you are either. You might want to try and grow up politically.
And yet somehow under the man allegedly 'unfit for office' Britain has been vaccinated faster than any other major country in the world. Surely dear Angela's rather less impressive achievement - and she a quantum chemist, not a mere Greats man, let's recall - would have seen her rusticated from the Nigel Foremain School of Political Leadership?
It might be a surprise to you, but we do not live in Maoist China. Not everything that is good is a result of the Great Leader, anymore than everything that is bad is either. You are just so naïve. Kind of sad really, or hilarious. You are obviously not stupid, like some of the fanbois on here, but completely love blind. When he eventually is toppled, will you go into weeks of mourning?
All politicians are flawed. The object of your unquestioning love is hopelessly flawed. The only thing he is actually good at is gulling the supremely gullible. Perhaps it is repressed homosexual feelings that loyal Tories have for him? Those puppydog eyes? He is definitely able to fool some of the people all of the time. Fascinating really.
"Man City fans on Ryanair flights are ordered to self-isolate after three planeloads of Chelsea supporters coming back from Porto were ordered into quarantine after testing positive - as country is axed from UK's Green list
Three planes full of Chelsea fans returning from Champions League final in Portugal told to self-isolate"
"Man City fans on Ryanair flights are ordered to self-isolate after three planeloads of Chelsea supporters coming back from Porto were ordered into quarantine after testing positive - as country is axed from UK's Green list
Three planes full of Chelsea fans returning from Champions League final in Portugal told to self-isolate"
Sorry to disappoint, but 10 points of lead is roughly where I would expect any party of government that was managing the current vaccine programme.
Like in Germany?
As in our vaccination programme, which I would put more down to our expertise in pharma and the expert advice it gives to government than our Classics educated ex-polemicist PM.
Besides, the reality is that government ministers are on TV and radio constantly. For the last 6 months the press briefings have been party political broadcasts. Whether one believes the vaccine programme in the UK was a result of Boris Johnson, Brexit or extra terrestrial intervention from the planet Zog, the reality is that the government has had massive publicity. I don't have the ability to compare with Germany because I don't live there.
So "inside your head" then is the quality of your evidence?
given the current amount of publicity given to the party of government it is little surprising that they are 10 points ahead.
Yes, a good vaccine roll out does appear capable of giving governing parties a boost - but this is far from uniform - see other European countries, or the SNP's recent performance, for examples. This suggests that there is more to it than "vaccine boost", and airily waving away a 10 point lead for a government in office for 11 years, does seem a touch simplistic. There is more afoot.
Possibly, but I think it is silly for loyal Tories to get carried away when the current circumstances are so odd. I would think the polls were unreliable if Labour had a massive lead also.
Probably twenty years ago I was driving late at night on the M62/M1 and suddenly there was this quick and very thick fog from nowhere.
With visibility down to zero I really didn't fancy driving, pulled over to the nearest service station. The fog was here to stay the night, so I had the option of staying in my car or in a hotel room, being young and innocent I stayed in the hotel.
I'm still traumatised by that room, I felt like Terry Waite when he was kidnapped and held hostage by Hezbollah.
The worst hotel I know is local to my office and we sometimes have put people up there. Our Dutch CEO reported that he'd drawn attention to the fact that water was trickling through the ceiling and splashing into the handbasin. The manager came up to look and said "Ah, well, at least it's not on the bed, but we'll have a look upstairs", then disappeared. Next morning, the trickle was still going. Our Dutch colleague is very amiable and also fond of the British, so he decided this was charming rather than ridiculous... but we did put him up somewhere else next time.
The worst experience I can think of is staying in a small town on the Hungarian plain (where my grandfather was born) for a relative's wedding. Apparently it was the town's accommodation for visiting dignitaries.
The general standard was in line with lower end student accommodation - crappy single beds with breeze block walls. No big deal, although I'd be a bit upset if I was a dignitary. However, the number of insects everywhere, mould covering everything in the bathroom etc. Shudder. My grandfather was covered in flea? bed bug? bites afterwards. Also no air conditioning in the height of summer (it pushes 40 there).
Thankfully my parents decided we were going to go and be tourists in Szeged after a couple of nights, which was a nice face saving way of escaping.
I said months ago the government should have just said vaccinating going great, but no summer holidays abroad this year, lets just get this covid lark cracked, keep arrival of new variants to a minimum and see where we are in the autumn.
That way Oz/NZ lies. Going on holiday is part of normal life and the government seems keen to return to normal life.
They could close the borders but then you have a fully vaccinated nation not allowed to leave the country.
It isn't bonkers, would you really want to go to a foreign country where you get trapped in with a overwhelmed health system and where you might need urgent non Covid-19 related healthcare.
That's the risk I've decided I don't want.
More likely to die in the taxi ride from the airport to your hotel if you're fully vaxxed.
You, meanwhile, are taking a huge risk in Blackpool. Odds on surviving? 50:50 at best.
It's also the financial aspect.
Having to quarantine a hotel for ten days.
For someone such as yourself? I don't believe it. And in any case most UK holidays are far more spenny than ones abroad right now.
Well ok, I'm honest, I worry I'll have to quarantine for ten days in a ghastly Premier Inn or a Britannia hotel.
The horror...
Could be worse, it could be one of those old school service station Travelodge's....
It depends whether they're relatively new or not. The new ones are okay. The ones built in the 70s are dreadful.
As they have significantly less pox than we do, why can't I go see my clients in Romania? I really do need to go on a business trip, its safe, let me go.
It is worth remembering that between mid-March and mid-April, daily US Covid cases went from 35,000 to 70,000. But hospitalisations and deaths didn't budge, because the most vulnerable had already been vaccinated.
Sorry to disappoint, but 10 points of lead is roughly where I would expect any party of government that was managing the current vaccine programme.
Like in Germany?
As in our vaccination programme, which I would put more down to our expertise in pharma and the expert advice it gives to government than our Classics educated ex-polemicist PM.
Besides, the reality is that government ministers are on TV and radio constantly. For the last 6 months the press briefings have been party political broadcasts. Whether one believes the vaccine programme in the UK was a result of Boris Johnson, Brexit or extra terrestrial intervention from the planet Zog, the reality is that the government has had massive publicity. I don't have the ability to compare with Germany because I don't live there.
Delighted to assist you with the comparison:
Vaccines doses per 100 administered in Britain under Boris Johnson (B.A. Literae Humaniores): 96.72
Vaccines does per 100 administered in Germany under Angela Merkel (Doctor of Quantum Chemistry): 61.57
Average Conservative polling lead: 11%
Average CDU/CSU polling lead: 2%
Oh it must be nice to be such an unthinking loyalist. Life must be so simple, a bit like being a gold fish. Boris Johnson may be popular with the gullible, but he is still UNFIT FOR OFFICE.
As I said to his one of his other fanbois, I can't judge Germany as I don't live there. Your nationalistic gloating about vaccines just makes you look silly and uneducated, and despite your blind loyalty I doubt you are either. You might want to try and grow up politically.
And yet somehow under the man allegedly 'unfit for office' Britain has been vaccinated faster than any other major country in the world. Surely dear Angela's rather less impressive achievement - and she a quantum chemist, not a mere Greats man, let's recall - would have seen her rusticated from the Nigel Foremain School of Political Leadership?
It might be a surprise to you, but we do not live in Maoist China. Not everything that is good is a result of the Great Leader, anymore than everything that is bad is either. You are just so naïve. Kind of sad really, or hilarious. You are obviously not stupid, like some of the fanbois on here, but completely love blind. When he eventually is toppled, will you go into weeks of mourning?
All politicians are flawed. The object of your unquestioning love is hopelessly flawed. The only thing he is actually good at is gulling the supremely gullible. Perhaps it is repressed homosexual feelings that loyal Tories have for him? Those puppydog eyes? He is definitely able to fool some of the people all of the time. Fascinating really.
Er, Nigel, you're the only one on this site who's ever brought up the topic of barely suppressed homoerotic lust for Boris [and his] Johnson. Perhaps the subject has been occupying your own subconscious recently, given the news of his happy nuptials, and the disappointment has only heightened your ire against him? Odi et amo, as Catullus said. But there's really no need to take the rejection so personally.
It is worth remembering that between mid-March and mid-April, daily US Covid cases went from 35,000 to 70,000. But hospitalisations and deaths didn't budge, because the most vulnerable had already been vaccinated.
This seems to be the absolute crux of the shrill voices. Because in wave 1 and 2 there was a direct path of increase cases leads to increased hospitalization leads to deaths. But now the pathway should have been broken by the vaccination of the most vulnerable. Yet all you see on the zero covid and iSAGE twitter feeds is "cases are rising and this will lead to more deaths, why are the government being so stupid? They are making the same mistake again!"
I don’t think there’s any dispute labour are the party of working age people, it is the working class they are not really the party of or that is the claim.
As they have significantly less pox than we do, why can't I go see my clients in Romania? I really do need to go on a business trip, its safe, let me go.
That chart is a little misleading.
Back in early January, the 14 day case count in the US was 3.5 million. That means 1% of the United States had been diagnosed with Covid over the course of the previous two weeks.
Countries in the "black" on this map are those where the case rate is 0.12%. I.e. one tenth of the incidence it was in the US in January.
If 0.12% of your country is diagnosed with Covid over two weeks, that's not great. But it is very far from out of control.
Plus, I would note, that this chart doesn't look at hospitalisations. I looked up Denmark as they're (a) currently in the "black" on this chart, and (b) removed pretty much all their Covid restrictions two weeks ago.
They have - across the whole country - 143 people in hospital with Covid, which is actually down 13 on yesterday.
It is worth remembering that between mid-March and mid-April, daily US Covid cases went from 35,000 to 70,000. But hospitalisations and deaths didn't budge, because the most vulnerable had already been vaccinated.
This seems to be the absolute crux of the shrill voices. Because in wave 1 and 2 there was a direct path of increase cases leads to increased hospitalization leads to deaths. But now the pathway should have been broken by the vaccination of the most vulnerable. Yet all you see on the zero covid and iSAGE twitter feeds is "cases are rising and this will lead to more deaths, why are the government being so stupid? They are making the same mistake again!"
It's reassuring to read posts like this and realise not all academic scientists* are complete idiots.
*Or at least, so I deduce from your posts. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Sorry to disappoint, but 10 points of lead is roughly where I would expect any party of government that was managing the current vaccine programme.
Like in Germany?
As in our vaccination programme, which I would put more down to our expertise in pharma and the expert advice it gives to government than our Classics educated ex-polemicist PM.
Besides, the reality is that government ministers are on TV and radio constantly. For the last 6 months the press briefings have been party political broadcasts. Whether one believes the vaccine programme in the UK was a result of Boris Johnson, Brexit or extra terrestrial intervention from the planet Zog, the reality is that the government has had massive publicity. I don't have the ability to compare with Germany because I don't live there.
Delighted to assist you with the comparison:
Vaccines doses per 100 administered in Britain under Boris Johnson (B.A. Literae Humaniores): 96.72
Vaccines does per 100 administered in Germany under Angela Merkel (Doctor of Quantum Chemistry): 61.57
Average Conservative polling lead: 11%
Average CDU/CSU polling lead: 2%
Oh it must be nice to be such an unthinking loyalist. Life must be so simple, a bit like being a gold fish. Boris Johnson may be popular with the gullible, but he is still UNFIT FOR OFFICE.
As I said to his one of his other fanbois, I can't judge Germany as I don't live there. Your nationalistic gloating about vaccines just makes you look silly and uneducated, and despite your blind loyalty I doubt you are either. You might want to try and grow up politically.
And yet somehow under the man allegedly 'unfit for office' Britain has been vaccinated faster than any other major country in the world. Surely dear Angela's rather less impressive achievement - and she a quantum chemist, not a mere Greats man, let's recall - would have seen her rusticated from the Nigel Foremain School of Political Leadership?
It might be a surprise to you, but we do not live in Maoist China. Not everything that is good is a result of the Great Leader, anymore than everything that is bad is either. You are just so naïve. Kind of sad really, or hilarious. You are obviously not stupid, like some of the fanbois on here, but completely love blind. When he eventually is toppled, will you go into weeks of mourning?
All politicians are flawed. The object of your unquestioning love is hopelessly flawed. The only thing he is actually good at is gulling the supremely gullible. Perhaps it is repressed homosexual feelings that loyal Tories have for him? Those puppydog eyes? He is definitely able to fool some of the people all of the time. Fascinating really.
Er, Nigel, you're the only one on this site who's ever brought up the topic of barely suppressed homoerotic lust for Boris [and his] Johnson. Perhaps the subject has been occupying your own subconscious recently, given the news of his happy nuptials, and the disappointment has only heightened your ire against him? Odi et amo, as Catullus said. But there's really no need to take the rejection so personally.
Touche, old bean. I thought you weren't stupid! Makes the undying love thing even more fascinating. What part of the human brain creates loyalty in some in spite of overwhelming evidence of the object of their desire's disloyalty to everything? Perhaps it is the unsuitability that makes them even more attractive. And idiotic appearance? I guess that did not stop people swooning over a certain 1930 dictator for example. It would be interesting how strong the evidence of him being unfit for office would need to be before you changed your mind? How about if it were suggested he was a bully and sex pest such as Mr. Salmond? I guess you would still make allowance.
It is worth remembering that the MERS coronavirus outbreak was in 2012, but it was only in 2016 that camels were identified as the intermediate species (between bats and humans). We have also never found the zoonotic origin of HIV/Aids nor of Ebola (and the search for Ebola's host has been a *very* long one.)
This doesn't (obviously) mean that it is definitely natural. But is also means that those pointing to the lack of known zoonotic origin need acknowledge that this is hardly unusual.
It is worth remembering that between mid-March and mid-April, daily US Covid cases went from 35,000 to 70,000. But hospitalisations and deaths didn't budge, because the most vulnerable had already been vaccinated.
This seems to be the absolute crux of the shrill voices. Because in wave 1 and 2 there was a direct path of increase cases leads to increased hospitalization leads to deaths. But now the pathway should have been broken by the vaccination of the most vulnerable. Yet all you see on the zero covid and iSAGE twitter feeds is "cases are rising and this will lead to more deaths, why are the government being so stupid? They are making the same mistake again!"
It's reassuring to read posts like this and realise not all academic scientists* are complete idiots.
*Or at least, so I deduce from your posts. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Complete idiot on many things, but hopefully not where science is concerned...
It is worth remembering that between mid-March and mid-April, daily US Covid cases went from 35,000 to 70,000. But hospitalisations and deaths didn't budge, because the most vulnerable had already been vaccinated.
This seems to be the absolute crux of the shrill voices. Because in wave 1 and 2 there was a direct path of increase cases leads to increased hospitalization leads to deaths. But now the pathway should have been broken by the vaccination of the most vulnerable. Yet all you see on the zero covid and iSAGE twitter feeds is "cases are rising and this will lead to more deaths, why are the government being so stupid? They are making the same mistake again!"
It's reassuring to read posts like this and realise not all academic scientists* are complete idiots.
*Or at least, so I deduce from your posts. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Complete idiot on many things, but hopefully not where science is concerned...
That's what I love about science, there's no one right answer.
As they have significantly less pox than we do, why can't I go see my clients in Romania? I really do need to go on a business trip, its safe, let me go.
Their vaccination rate is less than half the UK's and their testing rate who knows.
Increasingly I think we'll look to vaccination rates - since testing rates vary so widely, are low case numbers a function of low cases or low testing? And is the absence of "variants of concern" down to their absence, or the absence of sequencing....
It is worth remembering that between mid-March and mid-April, daily US Covid cases went from 35,000 to 70,000. But hospitalisations and deaths didn't budge, because the most vulnerable had already been vaccinated.
This seems to be the absolute crux of the shrill voices. Because in wave 1 and 2 there was a direct path of increase cases leads to increased hospitalization leads to deaths. But now the pathway should have been broken by the vaccination of the most vulnerable. Yet all you see on the zero covid and iSAGE twitter feeds is "cases are rising and this will lead to more deaths, why are the government being so stupid? They are making the same mistake again!"
It's reassuring to read posts like this and realise not all academic scientists* are complete idiots.
*Or at least, so I deduce from your posts. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Complete idiot on many things, but hopefully not where science is concerned...
Mr Tubbs, I think you're selling yourself short.
What is worrying though, speaking as a layman, is the realisation as to just how far many scientists are willing to ride their personal hobby horses rather than look objectively at the data and draw logical conclusions. I don't think it's doing the reputation of science any favours, frankly.
Another government insider said that it was a rise in variants that prompted ministers to decide to take it off the green list. “They’re victim of their own pretty decent genomic capabilities. They’ve picked up increases in both the Indian and Nepalese variants so there was little choice.”
The decision to take Portugal off the green list was also influenced by the Johnson government’s eagerness to lift all lockdown restrictions on June 21. “There’s no way we can meet the step four easing if we’re importing more variants of concern,” an official said. https://www.ft.com/content/be70d339-37c7-46c9-98e8-4f8878c7392f
It is worth remembering that between mid-March and mid-April, daily US Covid cases went from 35,000 to 70,000. But hospitalisations and deaths didn't budge, because the most vulnerable had already been vaccinated.
This seems to be the absolute crux of the shrill voices. Because in wave 1 and 2 there was a direct path of increase cases leads to increased hospitalization leads to deaths. But now the pathway should have been broken by the vaccination of the most vulnerable. Yet all you see on the zero covid and iSAGE twitter feeds is "cases are rising and this will lead to more deaths, why are the government being so stupid? They are making the same mistake again!"
It's reassuring to read posts like this and realise not all academic scientists* are complete idiots.
*Or at least, so I deduce from your posts. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Complete idiot on many things, but hopefully not where science is concerned...
Mr Tubbs, I think you're selling yourself short.
What is worrying though, speaking as a layman, is the realisation as to just how far many scientists are willing to ride their personal hobby horses rather than look objectively at the data and draw logical conclusions. I don't think it's doing the reputation of science any favours, frankly.
I had a trawl of various iSAGE and zero Covidians the other night on twitter. I think it is a bit like a drug. The sheer love and praise for these single minded heroes from their hordes of followers must be contributing. It seems a bit like the Andrew Wakefield affair in some ways. I am not suggesting that anyone who thinks we should be opening up slower, or is worried about the increase in cases is anything like as bad as Wakefield, but there is clearly a lot of adoration coming from the gallery, and that must be intoxicating. Its a bit like getting a 'like' on here - I can imagine some actively seek 'likes' and are dissappointed when nothing is forthcoming. I blame the media too. They are hunting a story, a narrative, and 'just wait a couple of weeks to look at more data' is no good to them, they thrive on disaster. They are never prepared, or indeed capable, of exposing where genuine questions and doubt becomes wildly implausible. The 'herd immunity' lady (Gupta) was rightly mocked as her figures for IFR were obviously and immediately disproved by data in the real world. Yet the iSAGE and zero covid crowd are not getting the same scrutiny for their 'positions', and they really should be.
Comments
Do report back!
My only caveat is whenever the narrative of this hideous crisis shifts, it shifts closer to China Doing Something Terrible
We've gone from
Definitely A Natural Source at The Market to
Not The Market But Some Natural Source Nearby? to
OK It Is Just Possible It Might Have Been An Accident At The Lab to
OK It's Very Possible It Was An Accident At The Lab And They Covered It Up
at the moment the story is again shifting, this time to
It Probably Came From The Lab And It's Possible The Virus Was Altered To Be More Virulent
just down the line we have
It Accidentally Definitely Came From The Lab And It was Engineered To Be Nastier
then
OK It Was A Bioweapon, The PLA Fucked Up In The Lab
it ends with
THEY DELIBERATELY RELEASED A BIOWEAPON ON THE WORLD
Clearly, I hope we never arrive at that terminus
Vaccines doses per 100 administered in Britain under Boris Johnson (B.A. Literae Humaniores): 96.72
Vaccines does per 100 administered in Germany under Angela Merkel (Doctor of Quantum Chemistry): 61.57
Average Conservative polling lead: 11%
Average CDU/CSU polling lead: 2%
Start of the day England would have been thrilled with what they've managed, but now a number 11 throwing the bat and it takes some of the shine off their day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents
26 different lab leaks of dangerous pathogens, from laboratories, since the year 2000
https://stats.espncricinfo.com/ci/content/records/284185.html
It is my experience, across the Internet, that there are people (who seem to be represented on this forum too) who are only too willing to believe the worst, will only cherry pick the evidence that suits their approach and then run with it as though only they were the holders and purveyors of the 'true truth'.
My instinct is that the belief in and acceptance of the various conspiracy fantasies on this subject require too much work for them to have taken place. The path of evolution and the path of contemporary events is normally along the line of least resistance and least effort. Viruses mutate and become more widespread because they become easier to contract. Of the type that the Coronavirus is, being single strand RNA, they are also prone to error during their replication phase. Some errors cause the newly replicated virus to become useless, therefore that mutation dies out, some make it less dangerous and some make it more easy to transmit. Given how many billions of billions of viral particles there are out there, it's not in the least bit surprising or abnormal that, once they get to infect a human that they should then, by random chance, mutate into the perfect transmission machine. And, over time, mutate out of it again once we all have antibodies, of course.
This whole thing about finding someone to blame for these sorts of things is psychologically understandable - having something to point at and judge makes the afflicted (in all sorts of circumstances) feel better, but it does nothing whatsoever to change the situation that the afflicted are in.
Are we blaming the people of Kent for for the 'Alpha Variant'? Shall we carpet-bomb Kent as an act of revenge? Cut them off from the rest of society? Forever ostracise the leaders of Kent County Council for having the misfortune to be in roughly the part of the world where someone unknown caught Covid, replicated the virus and in doing so, it mutated into a better virus - i.e. the gain of function caused by random chance?
To do that would be ridiculous. And that ridiculousness goes all the way back through the chain of transmission to China where, all the relevant evidence shows that Coronaviruses transmit to humans naturally and this one almost certainly did that exactly the same way as all the others - like SARS (from Civet Cats) and MERS (from camels in the Middle East) before it.
Not everything is a conspiracy or a cover up. It might be a calamity, but its cause almost certainly isn't deliberate. And, to go back to my original point, it makes no difference to you or me now anyway.
Anti Lib Dem alliance - 91%
You want us to just forget that, because "it makes no difference now anyway"
Maybe they were doing Gain of Function research to work out what mutations were possible and accidentally released that into the wild. Lab leaks have occurred before, so that's practically proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.
And the variant seen in India probably came from an Indian lab doing the same thing. We know they produce vaccines there, so they might have the skillset.
Anyone know if Brazil and South Africa have virus labs?
As I said to his one of his other fanbois, I can't judge Germany as I don't live there. Your nationalistic gloating about vaccines just makes you look silly and uneducated, and despite your blind loyalty I doubt you are either. You might want to try and grow up politically.
Anti Lib DemProper Democrats alliance - 91%Probably twenty years ago I was driving late at night on the M62/M1 and suddenly there was this quick and very thick fog from nowhere.
With visibility down to zero I really didn't fancy driving, pulled over to the nearest service station. The fog was here to stay the night, so I had the option of staying in my car or in a hotel room, being young and innocent I stayed in the hotel.
I'm still traumatised by that room, I felt like Terry Waite when he was kidnapped and held hostage by Hezbollah.
Evidentially you have precedence, I have mighty circumstantial evidence, and the evidence keeps pointing my way
At the very least, we now have proof that both China and America were engaged in a cover-up, about gain-of-function, and possibly about lab leak
We shall see. Now I must return to my flints
Venue of so many party political conferences of yesteryear.
A Chinese government official in Wuhan(who is in fact a decedent of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdelene), deliberately releases Coronavirus to soften the world up for World Government, that can in turn be taken over by alien life forms from the Planet Zog? They are stopped by an Anglo-saxon trio of super heroes in the form of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and expert in uber-bullshit, Superhero SeanT?
Gloucestershire can't buy a wicket.
New Zealand can't do wrong.
Ackerman and Harris look set to bat all week.
Somerset are falling in a heap when we desperately need them to beat Hampshire.
I tell you what, today is a miserable day to be a cricket fan from Gloucestershire.
PM overruled Appointments Commission to put Peter Cruddas in Lords after he failed vetting.
Now it has emerged he gave largest ever cash contribution just days later
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/billionaire-donates-500000-tories-days-24241434
All politicians are flawed. The object of your unquestioning love is hopelessly flawed. The only thing he is actually good at is gulling the supremely gullible. Perhaps it is repressed homosexual feelings that loyal Tories have for him? Those puppydog eyes? He is definitely able to fool some of the people all of the time. Fascinating really.
https://twitter.com/ShaunLintern/status/1400425963024965635
CON: 42% (-1)
LAB: 32% (-2)
LDEM: 9% (-)
GRN: 5% (+1)
via @SavantaComRes, 28 - 30 May
Chgs. w/ 23 May
Three planes full of Chelsea fans returning from Champions League final in Portugal told to self-isolate"
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9647361/Disaster-British-holidaymakers-EU-refuses-UK-white-list.html
The general standard was in line with lower end student accommodation - crappy single beds with breeze block walls. No big deal, although I'd be a bit upset if I was a dignitary. However, the number of insects everywhere, mould covering everything in the bathroom etc. Shudder. My grandfather was covered in flea? bed bug? bites afterwards. Also no air conditioning in the height of summer (it pushes 40 there).
Thankfully my parents decided we were going to go and be tourists in Szeged after a couple of nights, which was a nice face saving way of escaping.
Having the match played in Porto was the best of a bad set of options.
Independent SAGE called it....All done in 3.5 days.
All I need to do is open Youtube and put on that nuclear flask test and I can have three train crashes on at once.
Back in early January, the 14 day case count in the US was 3.5 million. That means 1% of the United States had been diagnosed with Covid over the course of the previous two weeks.
Countries in the "black" on this map are those where the case rate is 0.12%. I.e. one tenth of the incidence it was in the US in January.
If 0.12% of your country is diagnosed with Covid over two weeks, that's not great. But it is very far from out of control.
Plus, I would note, that this chart doesn't look at hospitalisations. I looked up Denmark as they're (a) currently in the "black" on this chart, and (b) removed pretty much all their Covid restrictions two weeks ago.
They have - across the whole country - 143 people in hospital with Covid, which is actually down 13 on yesterday.
Some past govts were even worse.
https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/cash-for-honours-labour-deliberately-tried-to-conceal-secret-loans-6634523.html
This is one that Boris had no say in, it is UEFA's competition
Not that I disagree, it was idiotic to play it in Portugal
*Or at least, so I deduce from your posts. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
It is worth remembering that the MERS coronavirus outbreak was in 2012, but it was only in 2016 that camels were identified as the intermediate species (between bats and humans). We have also never found the zoonotic origin of HIV/Aids nor of Ebola (and the search for Ebola's host has been a *very* long one.)
This doesn't (obviously) mean that it is definitely natural. But is also means that those pointing to the lack of known zoonotic origin need acknowledge that this is hardly unusual.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK-b1CtIATw
Increasingly I think we'll look to vaccination rates - since testing rates vary so widely, are low case numbers a function of low cases or low testing? And is the absence of "variants of concern" down to their absence, or the absence of sequencing....
What is worrying though, speaking as a layman, is the realisation as to just how far many scientists are willing to ride their personal hobby horses rather than look objectively at the data and draw logical conclusions. I don't think it's doing the reputation of science any favours, frankly.
Another government insider said that it was a rise in variants that prompted ministers to decide to take it off the green list. “They’re victim of their own pretty decent genomic capabilities. They’ve picked up increases in both the Indian and Nepalese variants so there was little choice.”
The decision to take Portugal off the green list was also influenced by the Johnson government’s eagerness to lift all lockdown restrictions on June 21. “There’s no way we can meet the step four easing if we’re importing more variants of concern,” an official said.
https://www.ft.com/content/be70d339-37c7-46c9-98e8-4f8878c7392f
Its a bit like getting a 'like' on here - I can imagine some actively seek 'likes' and are dissappointed when nothing is forthcoming.
I blame the media too. They are hunting a story, a narrative, and 'just wait a couple of weeks to look at more data' is no good to them, they thrive on disaster. They are never prepared, or indeed capable, of exposing where genuine questions and doubt becomes wildly implausible. The 'herd immunity' lady (Gupta) was rightly mocked as her figures for IFR were obviously and immediately disproved by data in the real world. Yet the iSAGE and zero covid crowd are not getting the same scrutiny for their 'positions', and they really should be.