Don't fall for it. "The C-19 virus came from a Chinese Lab" meme is a planned distraction.

[Botany]

My bullshit meter is screaming about this planned distraction as to the "virus is from a Chinese Lab"
meme that Fox is now pushing in order to pull attention away from the Dominion Voting Systems
defamation case against News Corp aka Fox News. And they have been successful in that strategy
because much of the rest of the media has picked it up and run with it.

We know from evolutionary biologists' work on the history of genetic material (mRNA) in the C-19
virus that it goes back to the Wet Markets in Wuhan. I have read here (w/out sourcing) that the first
C-19 deaths were very close to Wuhan's Wet Markets although we now know that virus and the disease
was out much earlier then the timeline which has been spread. Now, China early on did have the virus
in their labs so as to study it and they mapped out its genome which they gave to the WHO and the
WHO gave that information to scientists in Germany who produced the 1st test for the disease. Trump
rejected that test and tried to produce his own and the Trump backed test did not work and that helped
in spreading the disease.

Fox News is in court right now for lying about the election and Dominion Voting System and is pushing
another big lie about the origins of the C-19 virus to try to cover things up.

Botany =

Disclaimer this all might be wrong but I don't think so.

[Johnny2X2X]

1. It is possible

That's all the new information says, that it's "feasible" it was from an infected animal that escaped from a lab.

We'll never know for sure where it came from, but you can't rule out lab leak at this point, although you can rule out that it was genetically engineered.

And nothing about this means that back in 2020 and 2021 we were still right to stop conspiracy theories that it came from a lab.

[getagrip_already]

31. Correct! It may or may not be lab related, but...

That doesn't really matter wrt how we responded.

How a fire started is a different discussion than how to put it out.

Fox would say farts caused the spread if they thought it would distract and confuse people.

[Sympthsical]

2. So the Biden administration is trying to distract us from Fox?

Because that is where the new information is coming from, on the President's orders to investigate and assess.

Covering for Fox would be a very, very weird move for a Democratic administration.

Sounds kind of like . . . a conspiracy theory?

(Dun dun dun!)

[Celerity]

5. +1

[Dorian Gray]

41. We need to be very careful

about digging into our beliefs so hard that we can't be objective. That's what happened with covid. It became so politicized that we have negative reactions to news that doesn't confirm our prior beliefs.

Lab Leak/Natural infection.... in the end it doesn't matter in how we addressed it. Vaccines/Masking/etc. We were in an emergency situation and trying to save lives. Some mistakes were made, some weren't.

Many Republicans are grasping on this news saying that that it proves something. Many Democrats are holding their ears and refusing to hear it. It doesn't bode well for our ability to come to collective agreements about what is best societally.

[Sympthsical]

42. The one thing that irks me about "Believe Science"

Is that it kind of became more of a religious sentiment - almost a devotional - than a scientific one. It was more, "Believe this thing, period. Do not question it."

Which isn't Science.

Science is a process, a search for things that are true, a method where we ask questions, present evidence, allow others to see the evidence, question it, test it, see if the same result is repeatable.

We really weren't getting that in the panic at the time, and we saw a lot of efforts to shut that process down once everything became tribal. It's one thing to question something like, "Is the earth round?" or "Is climate change real?" We have years of evidence, experiments, observation, and empirical data that has been examined and retested. We still don't have that for Covid. It's a process that should be allowed in the marketplace of ideas and discussion.

I mean, look at these masking studies coming out. I've been reading them and watching the panic to discount them, "Yeah, this is what happens when you're afraid to hear data." Others have been gripping hard on what they want to be true either based on personal anxieties or a simple desire to hold onto a narrative side. But I care about the science, proof, data, what seems likely. That's all that should matter when it comes to this stuff. I saw more than once, "Oh no, now people on the Right will . . ." which should be a complete non-concern. We should only ever worry about what is true. Covid should remain the scientific and medical realm - not the political one.

At the end of the day, I don't know if Covid came from a lab. We're missing pieces in all this. But there are a lot of scientists out there who certainly think it could have. People I respect - scientists and doctors - both online and in my personal life have asked questions and had thoughts that could have or did put their professional status under threat if voiced on social media.

That's just not how science should work in any of this. That's politics - not science.

[Dorian Gray]

45. I think that people

have confirmation bias and don't want to hear anything that negates their biases. And that becomes a problem with science. So many twitter scientists had their camp and didn't want to hear otherwise. And the debates became "right wing" vs. "left wing" and not about harm reduction.

We are in a place now where we can try to open up the dialog.

Personally, I don't think it ULTIMATELY matters if covid was from natural sources or a lab leak. The sickness/death/need for interventions all still exist. But it does matter in terms of regulations for labs and who we choose to work with/support in the future. And by shutting down the discussion, we are alienating half of our population.

That's not a good thing.

[Sympthsical]

47. That's where my concern rests, too

I think, if it did come from a Lab, we need to know. Because then people really need to take a hard look at what goes on in these labs and what safety features are implemented. If it is lab-based, we need to make policies to ensure millions don't die again.

6 million people died in the Holocaust. We have been doing our damnedest to make sure that sort of thing never comes close to happening again.

Nearly 7 million (and counting) have died from Covid, and suddenly we're not curious to know if there are things we can or should be doing to prevent a repeat? "Hey, stuff happens! Anyway, moving on . . ."

Like, what? How did the people who want to know so it can be prevented if that's what happened considered the crazy ones in all this?

[brooklynite]

3. WAPO: "Little-known scientific team behind new assessment on covid-19 origins"

The theory that covid-19 started with a lab accident in central China received a modest boost in the latest U.S. intelligence assessment after the work of a little-known scientific team that conducts some of the federal government’s most secretive and technically challenging investigations of emerging security threats, current and former U.S. officials said Monday.
Are you on Telegram? Subscribe to our channel for the latest updates on Russia’s war in Ukraine.

An analysis by experts from the U.S. national laboratory complex — including members of a storied team known as Z-Division — prompted the Energy Department to change its view earlier this year about the likely cause of the 2019 coronavirus outbreak, the officials said. Though initially undecided about covid-19’s origins, Energy officials concluded as part of a new government-wide intelligence assessment that a lab accident was most likely the triggering event for the world’s worst pandemic in a century.

But other intelligence agencies involved in the classified update — completed in the past few weeks and kept under wraps — were divided on the question of covid-19’s origins, with most still maintaining that a natural, evolutionary “spillover” from animals was the most likely explanation. Even the Energy Department’s analysis was carefully hedged, as the officials expressed only “low confidence” in their conclusion, according to U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a classified report.

The overall view — that there is as yet no definitive conclusion on the virus’s origin — has not changed since the release of an earlier version of the report by the Biden administration in 2021, according to the officials.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/02/27/little-known-scientific-team-behind-new-assessment-covid-19-origins/

The evidence may not be strong, but it is NOT a "planned distraction"

[mgardener]

20. ELISE stefanik is

Stating that the virus came from the lab.
Most other Republicans politicians are too.
Their base are calling for Fauci to be jailed and Biden to be impeached.

They are fomenting violence against " Communist China"

[brooklynite]

24. Which has nothing to do with the truthfulness of the media reporting a DOE analysis.

[Dorian Gray]

46. They're assholes acting like assholes

that doesn't mean that the information is wrong.

[Celerity]

4. from 19 months ago: Senior Biden officials finding that Covid lab leak theory as credible as natural

origins explanation

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/16/politics/biden-intel-review-covid-origins/index.html

Washington
CNN
Published 6:18 PM EDT, Fri July 16, 2021

Senior Biden administration officials overseeing an intelligence review into the origins of the coronavirus now believe the theory that the virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan is at least as credible as the possibility that it emerged naturally in the wild – a dramatic shift from a year ago, when Democrats publicly downplayed the so-called lab leak theory. Still, more than halfway into President Joe Biden’s renewed 90-day push to find answers, the intelligence community remains firmly divided over whether the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab or jumped naturally from animals to humans in the wild, multiple sources familiar with the probe told CNN.

Little new evidence has emerged to move the needle in one direction or another, these people said. But the fact that the lab leak theory is being seriously considered by top Biden officials is noteworthy and comes amid a growing openness to the idea even though most scientists who study coronaviruses and who have investigated the origins of the pandemic say the evidence strongly supports a natural origin.

Current intelligence reinforces the belief that the virus most likely originated naturally, from animal-human contact and was not deliberately engineered, the sources said. But that does not preclude the possibility that the virus was the result of an accidental leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where coronavirus research was being conducted on bats – although many scientists familiar with the research say such a leak is unlikely.

On Thursday, the director-general of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it had been “premature” to dismiss the possibility that a lab leak had spawned the pandemic and urged China to provide “direct information on what the situation of these labs was before and at the start of the pandemic.”

from 20 months ago:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/rumors-of-us-secretly-harboring-top-china-official-dong-jingwei-swirl

Updated Jun. 17, 2021 7:17PM ET / Published Jun. 17, 2021 3:25PM ET

Chinese-language anti-communist media and Twitter are abuzz this week with rumors that a vice minister of State Security, Dong Jingwei defected in mid-February, flying from Hong Kong to the United States with his daughter, Dong Yang.

Dong Jingwei supposedly gave the U.S. information about the Wuhan Institute of Virology that changed the stance of the Biden administration concerning the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dong is, or was, a longtime official in China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), also known as the Guoanbu. His publicly available background indicates that he was responsible for the Ministry’s counterintelligence efforts in China, i.e., spy-catching, since being promoted to vice minister in April 2018. If the stories are true, Dong would be the highest-level defector in the history of the People’s Republic of China.

Dong’s defection was raised by Chinese officials last March at the Sino-American summit in Alaska, according to Dr. Han Lianchao, a former Chinese foreign ministry official before defecting after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. In a Wednesday tweet, Han, citing an unnamed source, alleged that China’s foreign minister Wang Yi and Communist Party foreign affairs boss Yang Jiechi demanded that the Americans return Dong, and U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken refused.

and from now:

Covid Likely Originated From Lab Leak, Energy Department Reportedly Finds—But Biden Aide Says There’s No ‘Definitive Answer’

https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisadellatto/2023/02/26/covid-likely-originated-from-lab-leak-energy-department-reportedly-finds-but-biden-aide-says-theres-no-definitive-answer/

snip

KEY FACTS

The Energy Department’s new conclusions are found in an updated classified report from the office of Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence, which was recently provided to the White House and some members of Congress, according to the Journal.

The Energy Department, which oversees many U.S. laboratories, came to its conclusion based on new intelligence, but deemed its level of confidence in its judgment as “low,” people who read the report told the Journal.

The FBI also determined in 2021 with “moderate confidence” the virus came from a lab leak, but the agency came to its conclusion for different reasons than the Energy Department, U.S. officials told the Journal.

Other federal agencies disagree: Four agencies have reportedly determined with “low confidence” the virus was transmitted naturally through animals, and two others, including the CIA, remain undecided between the two origin theories.

CRUCIAL QUOTE

“Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other, a number of them have said they just don't have enough information to be sure…President Biden has directed, repeatedly, every element of our intelligence community to put effort and resources behind getting to the bottom of this question,” Sullivan said on CNN on Sunday when asked about the Journal’s reporting. “But right now, there is not a definitive answer that has emerged from the intelligence community on this question.”

snip

[keithbvadu2]

7. It was Trump, not a Chinese lab, who killed over 800,000 Americans by ignoring it and letting it spr

It was Trump, not a Chinese lab, who killed over 800,000 Americans by ignoring it and letting it spread across America..

It was Trump, not a Chinese lab, who sent over 18 tons of PPE to his pals in China.

[central scrutinizer]

10. Yes, key point

Trump was trying to blame the Chinese. At that point (early 2020), it was beside the point who or where. His active downplaying for months allowed the US to become the hottest spot on the planet. The irony is that if he had acted promptly, he probably would have been re-elected.

[panader0]

16. When TFG was elected, the CDC had 44 workers in China, several in Wuhan.

By 2018, there were none. TFG severely cut the budget for the CDC.

[Celerity]

38. Trump administration budget cuts could become a major problem as coronavirus spreads

https://www.google.com/amp/s/fortune.com/2020/02/26/coronavirus-covid-19-cdc-budget-cuts-us-trump/amp/


and, from 5 full years ago in February 2018:


How will CDC cuts affect health programs abroad and at home?

Health Feb 11, 2018

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/how-will-cdc-cuts-affect-health-programs-abroad-and-at-home

[roamer65]

18. +1000

[uponit7771]

34. THIS !!!! ☝🏾☝🏾☝🏾

[fightforfreedom]

8. Nobody knows where it came from for certain.

We are not the only country investigating where covid started. I have read articles about other investigations. From everything I have read I would guess it started in the market. Because the market happened to be a mile or so from the lab that made it easy for all kinds of theories to get started.

This may end up like the Kennedy investigation. Which has led to countless conspiracy theories that will never end.

[fescuerescue]

12. Good comparison to the Kennedy investigation

There are so many answers, that investigations are spawned to investigate the plethora of answers.

[Botany]

13. The right wing has been pushing "it came from a Chinese Lab" for sometime now. With some ...

.... on the right such as Rand Paul trying to link that lab to Dr. Fauci. Although I don't see the Chinese
government being very helpful in investigating where the virus/disease came from. Too bad Trump got
us out of the Global Pandemic Response Task Force and fired the C.D.C.'s epidemiologist who was on the
ground in Wuhan looking for possible problematic microbes prior to the C-19 outbreak.

[Nevilledog]

14. My response to these asshats:

Okay, it came from a lab. That makes it even worse for Trump because he totally praised China.


15 times Trump praised China as coronavirus was spreading across the globe

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/15/trump-china-coronavirus-188736

[greymattermom]

9. Were they doing passaging experiments at the Wuhan lab?

That could result in a more virulent virus that might have been contacted by a lab worker.

[Ray Bruns]

23. My point all along has been we don't know. All this speculation is a waste of time.

It’s all noise. It might have come from a lab. It might have been aliens if you have aver watched the history channel. We will never know because the Chinese will never let an outside entity conduct a open investigation.

[DENVERPOPS]

27. I distinctly recall

the very first news reports about the virus being broadcast, stated that it leaked from a lab in China, they showed the two story lab building being closed up and barricaded, and said everyone working in the building were taken away, to an unknown future.......

Like every news story, the first news is some of the most truthful, before everyone gets to write a version for whatever political reasons.

I believe that they also said it was a bat from a local market that the scientists obtained and were studying it. They also said that the U.S. and several other countries were trying to help that lab, and countless others in other nations, tighten up their security and handling techniques to help make sure nothing leaked out.......

[Celerity]

39. Yes, they were doing passaging experiments at the Wuhan lab

In Major Shift, NIH Admits Funding Risky Virus Research in Wuhan

A spokesman for Dr. Fauci says he has been “entirely truthful,” but a new letter belatedly acknowledging the National Institutes of Health’s support for virus-enhancing research adds more heat to the ongoing debate over whether a lab leak could have sparked the pandemic.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-risky-virus-research-in-wuhan

snip

On Wednesday, the NIH sent a letter to members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce that acknowledged two facts. One was that EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City–based nonprofit that partners with far-flung laboratories to research and prevent the outbreak of emerging diseases, did indeed enhance a bat coronavirus to become potentially more infectious to humans, which the NIH letter described as an “unexpected result” of the research it funded that was carried out in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The second was that EcoHealth Alliance violated the terms of its grant conditions stipulating that it had to report if its research increased the viral growth of a pathogen by tenfold.

The NIH based these disclosures on a research progress report that EcoHealth Alliance sent to the agency in August, roughly two years after it was supposed to. An NIH spokesperson told Vanity Fair that Dr. Fauci was “entirely truthful in his statements to Congress,” and that he did not have the progress report that detailed the controversial research at the time he testified in July. But EcoHealth Alliance appeared to contradict that claim, and said in a statement: “These data were reported as soon as we were made aware, in our year four report in April 2018.”

snip

Early last month, The Intercept published more than 900 pages of documents it obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the NIH, relating to EcoHealth Alliance’s grant research. But there was one document missing, a fifth and final progress report that EcoHealth Alliance had been required to submit at the end of its grant period in 2019.

In its letter Wednesday, NIH included that missing progress report, which was dated August 2021. That report described a “limited experiment,” as the NIH letter phrased it, in which laboratory mice infected with an altered virus became “sicker than those infected with” a naturally occurring one.

snip

[fescuerescue]

11. I don't think it's about Fox news

Frankly if we knew for sure it came from a lab, that info would probably not be released to the public.

This isn't the sort of info that a government would release UNLESS it desired war with another government.

[niyad]

15. ProPublica published a lengthy, informative article about this last Oct. DU'er

Shrek posted about it yesterday in another thread on this topic. Sorry I cannot link to it.
If one googkes "propublica covid 19 origins or lab leak", should get you to the article.

[Celerity]

36. COVID-19 Origins: Investigating a "Complex and Grave Situation" Inside a Wuhan Lab

The Wuhan lab at the center of suspicions about the pandemic’s onset was far more troubled than known, documents unearthed by a Senate team reveal. Tracing the evidence, Vanity Fair and ProPublica give the clearest view yet of a biocomplex in crisis.

https://www.propublica.org/article/senate-report-covid-19-origin-wuhan-lab

“A Secret Language of Chinese Officialdom”

Toy Reid has always had a gift for languages — one that would carry him far from what he calls his “very blue-collar” roots in Greenville, South Carolina. In high school, Spanish came easily. At nearby Furman University, where he became the first person in his family to attend college, he studied Japanese. Then, “clueless but curious,” as he puts it, he channeled his fascination with the Dalai Lama into a master’s degree in East Asian philosophy and religion at Harvard. Along the way, he picked up Khmer, the national language of Cambodia, and achieved fluency in Chinese.

But it was his career as a China specialist for the Rand Corporation and as a political officer in East Asia for the U.S. State Department that taught him how to interpret a notoriously opaque language: the “party speak” practiced by Chinese Communist officials. Party speak is “its own lexicon,” explains Reid, now 44 years old. Even a native Mandarin speaker “can’t really follow it,” he says. “It’s not meant to be easily understood. It’s almost like a secret language of Chinese officialdom. When they’re talking about anything potentially embarrassing, they speak of it in innuendo and hushed tones, and there’s a certain acceptable way to allude to something.”

For 15 months, Reid loaned this unusual skill to a nine-person team dedicated to investigating the mystery of COVID-19’s origins. Commissioned by Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., the team examined voluminous evidence, most of it open source but some classified, and weighed the major credible theories for how the novel coronavirus first made the leap to humans. An interim report, released on Thursday by the minority oversight staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP), concludes that the COVID-19 pandemic was “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident.”

As part of his investigation, Reid took an approach that was artful in its simplicity. Working out of the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington and a family home in Florida, he used a virtual private network, or VPN, to access dispatches archived on the website of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). These dispatches remain on the internet, but their meaning can’t be unlocked by just anyone. Using his hard-earned expertise, Reid believes he unearthed secrets that were hiding in plain sight.



snip

[ancianita]

17. High level biosafety labs do study microbe jumping across species. They also do synthesize

or recombine DNA. It's not a stretch to think that a BSL 4 or 5 might have leaked, imo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level

[Bev54]

19. Can somebody explain to me why the "Energy Dept" is putting out a report

on a Medical virus?

[CaptainTruth]

21. Because they manage some government research labs.

I've seen it reported that the Energy Dept manages a lab that was studying the virus.

Just the other day I was thinking, can you imagine what a complete organizational chart of our government would look like?

[Bev54]

22. An organizational chart would be interesting for sure, I can see them having management

over labs on perhaps oil and gas etc but to me viruses would not or should not be under their purview.

[ancianita]

29. Here's one. Add to this all the other organizational charts and we've got at scale big government.

But then we are the 3rd largest nation on Earth. So there's that.

[brooklynite]

25. Question: did anyone here question why CDC issued a report on sexual abuse?

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-sexual-attacks-teen-girls-increased-lockdown-rcna70782

[Bev54]

26. Well the CDC is a health department and sexual attacks result in all sorts of

health matters from physical to emotional so I would say that is far more related than energy to virus.

[brooklynite]

28. Sexual assault is a Disease?

[Bev54]

30. What I am saying is the department is related to healthcare of which sexual assault

is not just a crime but a healthcare issue as well, far more related than energy to virus labs.

[Caliman73]

33. No. Likely because the CDC found that information while conducting a survey on the effects of ...

the COVID-19 Pandemic and the shelter in place orders which were used to combat the spread, which is very much their direct purview.

The increase in sexual abuse was directly affected by people being confined during the response to the pandemic. That is the link.

I am sure that there is a link as to why the Department of Energy is related to the investigation on COVID-19's origins. Other posters actually addressed the problem showing organizational maps and stating the the DOE runs some of the research labs.

[womanofthehills]

32. I don't think so - this info was sent to Congress & White House

The Republican House is requesting all this info for their upcoming look into the lab & it’s funding.

We know there were 3 sick lab workers. Anyone of them could have walked across the street to the market to buy lunch. Stuff is not black & white.

[applegrove]

35. We know for sure there is no smoking gun. We are split.

[Kaleva]

37. Thankfully, only about 3% of the adult population watches Fox

I suspect the vast majority of adults don't care about the Dominion lawsuit or the actual origin of the Covid virus.

[themaguffin]

43. Fox is NOT going to report on the case. Period & will literally discuss anything else. The lab is

story is irrelevant. There would be another story to replace it.

[tinrobot]

44. Who cares where it started. I'm more concerned with those who helped spread it.

The anti-masker/anti-vaxxer idiots who made this a lot worse than it ever needed to be.