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On Mon, 17 Mar 2025 13:01:31 -0700,  Alan says...  

> On 2025-03-17 06:43, AlleyCat wrote:
> > 
> > It Wasn't A Conspiracy Theory.
> > 
> > It Was A Conspiracy.

> It wasn't a conspiracy to create and release a pathogen, Phil.

THAT wasn't the gist of the article, and you know it.

You're just fabricating another one of your bullshit fantasies, JUST so you 
have SOMETHING to argue about.

The story is about those who lied to protect the guilty, for whatever reason 
for the release of the virus.

THIS is the conspiracy, and THEY were proven wrong.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might 
have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated 
like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists 
dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had 
emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China.

So, take your bullshit "it wasn't a conspiracy to create and release a 
pathogen" excuse to argue over to your boyfriend's house and have him shove 
it up your ass, along with the gerbils he has in cages in his bedroom.

Stay away from the Fusilli!

https://i.imgur.com/1yQ3P1z.mp4

> That's what you're implying,

Again, with the faggot thinks he's a mind-reader.

I'm implying that you're a faggot for putting words in where they never 
existed.

If you don't think it's a conspiracy when people lied about where the virus 
came from, for WHATEVER reason they lied, you're a hopeless fucking faggot 
rich boy, and will be treated as such.

Since YOU brought it up... PROVE to us you KNOW the origin of Covid-19.  

You think The New York Times is going to allow a story like this in their 
"paper", even an opinion, if the author is wrong.

PLONK!

=====

We Were Badly Misled About The Event That Changed Our Lives

By Zeynep Tufekci

March 16, 2025

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in 
laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on 
how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly 
sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the 
odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept 
mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might 
have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated 
like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists 
dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had 
emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a 
nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to 
conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology 
- research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted 
in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world - no fewer than 77 Nobel 
laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely 
caused by natural transmission - it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, 
some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at 
least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices 
and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to 
keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan 
laboratory's research, the details that have since emerged show that safety 
precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Five years after the onset of the Covid pandemic, it's tempting to think of 
all that as ancient history. We learned our lesson about lab safety - and 
about the need to be straight with the public - and now we can move on to new 
crises, like measles and the evolving bird flu, right?

Wrong. If anyone needs convincing that the next pandemic is only an accident 
away, check out a recent paper in Cell, a prestigious scientific journal. 
Researchers, many of whom work or have worked at the Wuhan Institute of 
Virology (yes, the same institution), describe taking samples of viruses 
found in bats (yes, the same animal) and experimenting to see if they could 
infect human cells and pose a pandemic risk.

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Sounds like the kind of research that should be conducted - if at all - with 
the very highest safety protocols, as W. Ian Lipkin and Ralph Baric discussed 
in a recent guest essay. But if you scroll all the way down to Page 19 of the 
journal article and squint, you learn that the scientists did all this under 
what they call "BSL-2 plus" conditions, a designation that isn't standardized 
and that Baric and Lipkin say is "insufficient for work with potentially 
dangerous respiratory viruses." If just one lab worker unwittingly inhaled 
the virus and got infected, there's no telling what the impact could be on 
Wuhan, a city of millions, or the world.

You'd think that by now we'd have learned it's not a good idea to test 
possible gas leaks by lighting a match. And you'd hope that prestigious 
scientific journals would have learned not to reward such risky research.

Why haven't we learned our lesson? Maybe because it's hard to admit that this 
research is risky now and to take the requisite steps to keep us safe without 
also admitting it was always risky. And that perhaps we were misled on 
purpose.

Take the case of EcoHealth, that nonprofit organization that many of the 
scientists leaped to defend. When Wuhan experienced an outbreak of a novel 
coronavirus related to ones found in bats and researchers soon noticed the 
pathogen had the same rare genetic feature that the EcoHealth Alliance and 
the Wuhan researchers had proposed inserting into bat coronaviruses, you 
would think EcoHealth would sound the alarm far and wide. It did not. Were it 
not for public records requests, leaks and subpoenas, the world might never 
have learned about the troubling similarities between what could easily have 
been going on inside the lab and what was spreading through the city.

Or take the real story behind two very influential publications that quite 
early in the pandemic cast the lab leak theory as baseless.

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The first was a March 2020 paper in the journal Nature Medicine, which was 
written by five prominent scientists and declared that no "laboratory-based 
scenario" for the pandemic virus was plausible. But we later learned through 
congressional subpoenas of their Slack conversations that while the 
scientists publicly said the scenario was implausible, privately many of its 
authors considered the scenario to be not just plausible but likely. One of 
the authors of that paper, the evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, 
wrote in the Slack messages, "The lab escape version of this is so friggin" 
likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and 
the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario."

Spooked, the authors reached out for advice to Jeremy Farrar, now the chief 
scientist at the World Health Organization. In his book, Farrar reveals he 
acquired a burner phone and arranged meetings for them with high-ranking 
officials, including Francis Collins, then the director of the National 
Institutes of Health, and Dr. Anthony Fauci. Documents obtained through 
public records requests by the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know show that the 
scientists ultimately decided to move ahead with a paper on the topic.

Operating behind the scenes, Farrar reviewed their draft and suggested to the 
authors that they rule out the lab leak even more directly. They complied. 
Andersen later testified to Congress that he had simply become convinced that 
a lab leak, while theoretically possible, was not plausible. Later chat logs 
obtained by Congress show the paper's lead authors discussing how to mislead 
Donald G. McNeil Jr., who was reporting on the pandemic's origin for The 
Times, so as to throw him off track about the plausibility of a lab leak.

The second influential publication to dismiss the possibility of a lab leak 
was a letter published in early 2020 in The Lancet. The letter, which 
described the idea as a conspiracy theory, appeared to be the work of a group 
of independent scientists. It was anything but. Thanks to public document 
requests by U.S. Right to Know, the public later learned that behind the 
scenes, Peter Daszak, EcoHealth's president, had drafted and circulated the 
letter while strategizing on how to hide his tracks and telling the 
signatories that it "will not be identifiable as coming from any one 
organization or person." The Lancet later published an addendum disclosing 
Daszak's conflict of interest as a collaborator of the Wuhan lab, but the 
journal did not retract the letter.

And they had assistance. Thanks to more public records requests and 
congressional subpoenas, the public learned that David Morens, a senior 
scientific adviser to Fauci at the National Institutes of Health, wrote to 
Daszak that he had learned how to make "emails disappear," especially emails 
about pandemic origins. "We're all smart enough to know to never have smoking 
guns, and if we did we wouldn't put them in emails and if we found them we'd 
delete them," he wrote.

It's not hard to imagine how the attempt to squelch legitimate debate might 
have started. Some of the loudest proponents of the lab leak theory weren't 
just earnestly making inquiries; they were acting in terrible faith, using 
the debate over pandemic origins to attack legitimate, beneficial science, to 
inflame public opinion, to get attention. For scientists and public health 
officials, circling the wagons and vilifying anyone who dared to dissent 
might have seemed like a reasonable defense strategy.

That's also why it might be tempting for those officials or the organizations 
they represent to avoid looking too closely at mistakes they made, at the 
ways that, while trying to do such a hard job, they might have withheld 
relevant information and even misled the public. Such self-scrutiny is 
especially uncomfortable now, as an unvaccinated child has died of measles 
and anti-vaccine nonsense is being pumped out by the top of the federal 
government. But a clumsy, misguided effort like this didn't just fail; it 
backfired. These half-truths and strategic deceptions made it easier for 
people with the worst motives to appear trustworthy while discrediting 
important institutions where many earnestly labor in the public interest.

After a few dogged journalists, a small nonprofit pursuing Freedom of 
Information requests and an independent group of researchers brought these 
issues to light, followed by a congressional investigation, the Biden 
administration finally barred EcoHealth from receiving federal grants for 
five years.

That's a start. The C.I.A. recently updated its assessment of how the Covid 
pandemic began, judging a lab leak to be the likely origin, albeit with low 
confidence. The Department of Energy, which runs sophisticated labs, and the 
F.B.I. came to that conclusion in 2023. But there are certainly more 
questions for governments and researchers across the world to answer. Why did 
it take until now for the German public to learn that way back in 2020, their 
Federal Intelligence Service endorsed a lab leak origin with 80 to 95 percent 
probability? What else is still being kept from us about the pandemic that 
half a decade ago changed all of our lives?

To this day, there is no strong scientific evidence ruling out a lab leak or 
proving that the virus arose from human-animal contact in that seafood 
market. The few papers cited for market origin were written by a small, 
overlapping group of authors, including those who didn't tell the public how 
serious their doubts had been.

Only an honest conversation will lead us forward. Like any field with the 
potential to inflict harm on a global scale, research with dangerous, 
potentially supertransmissible pathogens cannot be left to self-regulation or 
lax and easily dodged rules, as is the case now. The goal should be an 
international treaty guiding biosafety, but we don't have to be frozen in 
place until one appears. Leading journals could refuse to publish research 
that doesn't conform to safety standards, the way they reject research that 
doesn't conform to ethical standards. Funders - whether universities or 
private corporations or public agencies - can favor studies that use research 
methods like harmless pseudoviruses and computer simulations. These steps 
alone would help disincentivize such dangerous research, here or in China. If 
some risky research is truly irreplaceable, it should be held to the highest 
safety conditions and conducted far from cities.

We may not know exactly how the Covid pandemic started, but if research 
activities were involved, that would mean two out of the last four or five 
pandemics were caused by our own scientific mishaps. Let's not make a third.

=====

Trump still winning after WINNING Presidency!

Donald Trump is STILL the 47th U.S. president.

A Second Trump Administration is STILL going!