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Fauci is clearly dismissing the notion that it was engineered. He says pretty clearly that if a natural virus escaped the lab it would still be a natural virus
by tootie 5y ago
Fauci is clearly dismissing the notion that it was engineered. He says pretty clearly that if a natural virus escaped the lab it would still be a natural virus and hence not a useful topic when it comes to treating it. I don't think he ever said it wasn't possible just that there's no reason to believe it. And it's understandably not his primary concern to figure out.
- um_ya 5y agoI think this whole thing is a great example of why you don't ban alternative viewpoints, even if considered "conspiracy theories". Zerohedge was reporting this early on, and Twitter banned them for "misinformation".
- JesseMReeves 5y agoThat newspaper scene from Men in Black. I’ve relived it a number of times over the past year particularly. Local mainstream “fact checkers” have even called Covid-19 a “right-wing conspiracy theory” in early 2020.
- loopz 5y agoPeople were dying of covid in hospital beds, still believing the virus is fake narrative.
- Workaccount2 5y agoI just want to point out that there is no real evidence of this. Statistically, I'm sure it happened at least once, you can find one example of anything, but this phrase originates with a single anecdotal story from a single nurse. There was no trend or array of stories. Just one lady who said she had someone denying it on their deathbed with zero corroboration, and then she got 2 days of news cycle.
- loopz 5y agoThere were random interviews in the capitol saying all these weird stuff from the internet, and people in US often know someone who'd be convinced this way. So its not like this crazy stuff is hard to prove is prevalent (pun intended) among certain groups. What is hard is actually putting figures on it when worldviews get so warped due to circular logic. This is bad, because there are real reasons people are upset. Underlying reasons that need to be properly addressed.
- mrguyorama 5y agoTalk to the team of nurses in your local hospital. Hell, if you're rural, it's pretty likely to have a nurse who doesn't really believe the current understanding of COVID
- croon 5y ago> Local mainstream “fact checkers” have even called Covid-19 a “right-wing conspiracy theory” in early 2020. Would love a citation or two. I remember the right-wing administration saying it would disappear as if by magic and Fox News saying "0 deaths" and that playing up covid was a left wing invention at least up to april or so.
- ttt0 5y agoI don't know about this particular wording, but from my point of view here is what happened: At first the loosely defined right-wing were panicking about the virus. Myself included, although I wasn't really panicking, just getting myself mentally prepared that this might possibly be the second black plague that could wipe out a similar percentage of the population. Meanwhile the loosely defined left-wing was ridiculing it, laughing about it, saying that there is no evidence that the virus is dangerous and calling people fearmongers and racists (?). And then everything switched. As it turned out, the virus wasn't as nearly dangerous as I initially though it'd be and the left-wing suddenly started acting like we're all going to die.
- croon 5y agoFascinating how your PoV is so fundamentally different from mine, even when archive browsing the web a bit now. Regarding: > calling people fearmongers and racists (?) I remember asian (or of asian descent) acquaintances being spit on and yelled at in the vein of "you're killing us!" on the subway for ostensibly looking Chinese (I'm guessing), at a time when the virus was already likelier to spread from other countries, and I'd say the more left leaning were pointing this out. People doing that don't reach that stage of racebased profiling independently without someone drumming up "chinavirus" as soon as it was no longer feasible to shrug it off. Is that maybe what you're referring to?
- ttt0 5y agoYes, it really is fascinating how there are basically two entirely different worlds out there. But we're not in disagreement that the positions switched at some point, right? I've seen people talking about the rise in anti-asian hate crimes and it being incorrectly blamed on white supremacy, but that happened somewhat recently. At the point in time we're talking about I haven't really heard about anything too much, although it's not hard to imagine it being the case. I think it's to be expected, what are you supposed to do about it? Should you ignore the actions of Israel, because it's associated with Jews? Or actions of Russian government, because someone could discriminate a Russian person over that? Or what happens in some Islamic country? And we're fine with talking about about "systemic white supremacy", so I find these concerns to be hypocritical frankly. I also don't believe that pretending like the virus didn't originate in China would help anything. People might be stupid, but they're smart enough to figure out that this is just BS.
- s5300 5y ago>>I've relived it a number of times over the past year particularly. Perhaps you should consider checking in to a psychiatric care facility, that's definitely not normal.
- JesseMReeves 5y agoLooking at your comment history you seem to be projecting. Get back to Reddit.
- noduerme 5y agoBut Zerohedge in turn is a great example of a stopped clock being right twice a day.
- dosman33 5y agoSeparate from the article, the damming thing in his email release is the strong suggestion that he knew it was engineered early on and may have participated in hiding this fact.
- bigfudge 5y agoCan you provide citations for this because it just seems like FUD to me
- bananapub 5y agoer, who has shown any evidence at all that covid-19 was "engineered"? this whole discussion is about the unproven possibility that it leaked from a lab.
- calsy 5y agoThat emails he received early 2020 from fellow scientists stating covid-19 had identifiable traits of being engineered.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wkearney99 5y agoWHICH messages, from which 'fellow scientists'. The mails are out there now, cite them. Not just parrot assumptions.
- eutropia 5y agoThe article mentions the state department had Steven Quay present an analysis of the origin of the virus: https://zenodo.org/record/4642956#.YIa66ehKhPY https://zenodo.org/record/4642956#.YIa66ehKhPY The “engineered” component is about the Furin cleavage site on the sars-cov-2 spike protein. The virus shares 92% genetic similarity to bat coronaviruses, except the spike protein, which is nearly identical to a pangolin coronavirus(which is otherwise only ~38% similar) with one key exception: The Furin cleavage site using “lab standard” sequences. The gene sequence for the amino acids in the furin site in CoV-2 uses a very rare set of two codons, three letter words so six letters in a row, that are rarely used individually and have never been seen together in tandem in any coronaviruses in nature. But these same ‘rare in nature’ codons turn out to be the very ones that are always used by scientists in the laboratory when researchers want to add the amino acid arginine, the ones that are found in the furin site. When scientists add a dimer of arginine codons to a coronavirus, they invariably use the word, CGG-CGG, but coronaviruses in nature rarely (<1%) use this codon pair. For example, in the 580,000 codons of 58 Sarbecoviruses the only CGG pair is CoV-2; none of the other 57 sarbecoviruses have such a pair.