outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Luckily runny noses aren’t that common in hay fever season

yeah I fuckin' get those on the regular, as does my mother. yay for having to worry whether it's allergies or COVID!

"Does Nicotine protect against Covid symptoms?" researchers were paid by... (guess!)

https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1303

surely people with covid could also have hayfever. and then a runny nose looks like a “symptom”.

Terrific piece on the lab conspiracy

https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/lab-leak-theory-doesnt-hold-up-covid-china/

Love #resistance types, libs, democrats pushing this Trump type conspiracy because China.

Right now: Jon Stewart on the Covid Lab Leak “theory” is solid laughs pic.twitter.com/WlRX35p9WK

— siskin.eth (@mns) June 15, 2021

it is definitely cool that jon stewart got dennis miller'd by covid

I was waiting for Jon to reveal he was just messing around but apparently not? wtf

I'm not as confident as Jon, but the lab leak thing has always been totally plausible.

I mean, no.

The only people who have been confident about the lab leak theory or the jumped-from-animals theory had obvious agendas, or are very credulous of people with agendas. I'm not saying the lab leak theory is true, just that it is plausible.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/lab-leak-theory-doesnt-hold-up-covid-china/

So possible, but very unlikely? That sounds about right, I guess.

Sorry, I couldn't read that article until switching to Chrome.

possible does not = plausible

also note that if the lab leak story is true the jumped-from-animals story is quite possibly also true

the idea that this virus was "designed" as a bioweapon is clearly false and it's funny to see the same people who spent a year insisting that it was basically harmless now spout that line

it did seem plausible that this virus was discovered and then was studied in a lab and may have escaped from there, idk if there's any proof of that though. that article is paywalled for me.

idk if there's any proof of that though. that article is paywalled for me.

lol

possible does not = plausible

― cancel culture club (Neanderthal), Wednesday, June 16, 2021 6:24 PM (twenty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah that's why I wrote possible the second time. I changed my mind after reading more information.

Love you Neanderthal, but sometimes this fucking place is so lame.

The author of that FP piece, Justin Ling, was writing articles dismissing the lab leak theory as early as January 2020, so he may not be the most unbiased observer.

Read the full Foreign Policy article and while I felt like not all of the author's arguments are bulletproof, the main takeaway that it's much more likely to have come from animals/nature than a lab is pretty convincing.

After reading it and bearing that point in mind, it sucks extra hard to see Stewart doing that familiar "Has the world gone insane? How am I the only person seeing how obvious this is?" routine about it. Dennis Miller comment otm. We're truly in The Upside-down.

I agree it's more likely it didn't come via the lab in some shape or form, but rather took another pathway to Wuhan, just because that's one very specific pathway which has gotten a lot of attention, and there are many other less visible pathways. Most likely we will never know exactly where or how it started. However, I didn't find his arguments all that convincing. He seems to think that Wuhan Institute of Virology wouldn't have had any virus specimens that the international scientific community didn't know about. That seems unlikely to me.

Love too call a place 'lame' when my efforts to be clever with words fall flat.

there’s an unstated implication that it’s this huge coincidence that wuhan has a virology lab because well, wtf is wuhan, but it’s as big as new york, of course there’s a virology lab there

Well as of 2017 it was the only lab of its type in China, rated to study the most dangerous pathogens.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.21487

it also literally doesn't matter

Not trying to be clever. Just accurate. But keep piling on. You are clearly very confident in your take!

right o nate, just that there’s a kind of “of all places” appended to the conspiracy theories and it’s like.. wuhan is a major world metropolis. plus it’s close to where a bunch of viruses appear to have propagated earlier, so it kinda makes sense it would be there as opposed to somewhere else

Sure, I agree. There's lots of ways the virus could have gotten to Wuhan. I can also understand why some people see it as a coincidence though. If you just read that 2017 Nature article, highlighting the fact that a new lab was opening in Wuhan to study the most dangerous viruses and some scientists were worried about the possibility of lab leaks, and fast-forwarded to today, you might say, "Huh, that's a coincidence."

Take Long Covid seriously. Searing BBC documentary making the case for essential workers to be treated like soldiers damaged in the line of duty. Europe is moving forward with this, sounds like we should toohttps://t.co/4URTjriWCE

— Giles Wilkes (@Gilesyb) June 18, 2021

The idea that covid was designed as a bioweapon seems ludicrous. Weapons of war need to be aimed in some way. Covid is indiscriminate and uncontrollable and there was no way to ensure the safety of your own population or that of your allies through inoculation against it.

we are post-thinking now. pre-now, however, some would say that the idea would be to secretly innoculate your own population and then give secret covid to everyone else and watch them die. that's why bill gates is involved. he knows how to do all of it. however, now we are post-now, so no need to think

Totally agree bioweapon theory is ludicrous. However, gain of function research in which scientists genetically manipulate animal viruses to make them transmissible to humans is very real.

Cuba is a good example of how resource poor/small states can leverage intensive investment in high value add sectors (healthcare) to avoid the imported inflation/resource dependency trap. Now they're gonna generate a crap ton of hard currency selling this cheaply https://t.co/GOaC84Rx37

— Praxis Thoughts Haver (@praxisprocess) June 22, 2021

3-dose? 3 thumbs down

3 Thumbs Down has already been booked for the 2024 Trump campaign.

3 Dose Mafia

alt:

3 dose? no, 3 tres.

Or:
3, dose, uno, blastoff!

Interesting bit of Internet sleuthery:

Scientist Finds Early Virus Sequences That Had Been Mysteriously Deleted

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/science/coronavirus-sequences.html

someone did "c:\>del *.dir" on the virus

i did prefer their early stuff, before they started infecting whole countries

from my window last spring, i watched corpses wheeled from buildings on my block. & although i understand whence suspicion of the business/state nexus arises, the lies & individualistic yahooism & sheer idiocy of the anti-vax contingent fill me with absolute merciless hatred

— michael röbbins (@alienvsrobbins) June 24, 2021

highest daily new case total in two weeks

for who?

oh globally?

yeah. btw I think Bolsonaro is gonna get the entire globe killed.

highest new case count in the US in 2 weeks

?? Not from the data I saw

out of curiosity, where did you see it?

Our World in Data has 13,365 cases so far, which is a total we've exceeded multiple times in the past few weeks (we've had a few 16,000+ days), and I dont see NYT's data yet for the night.

(unless they released Florida's once a week dump a day early - lolz, that'd be so Desantis)