At what point did you / will you take the coronavirus epidemic seriously?

[UVACoug]

Governor Little was not amused by the Lt. Governor's executive order while he was away:

https://idahonews.com/news/local/governor-brad-little-reverses-lieutenant-governor-janice-mcgeachins-executive-order-banning-mask-mandates-by-the-state-irresponsible-abuse-of-power

So I take it the Governor and Lt Governor of Idaho don't have a good working relationship. Damn!

[Moliere]

If the crowds at Universal Orlando are any indication, 95% of America is now fully vaccinated.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Bo Diddley]

If the crowds at Universal Orlando are any indication, 95% of America is now fully vaccinated.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Uncle Ted]

The Science Suggests a Wuhan Lab Leak
The Covid-19 pathogen has a genetic footprint that has never been observed in a natural coronavirus.

The possibility that the pandemic began with an escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology is attracting fresh attention. President Biden has asked the national intelligence community to redouble efforts to investigate.

Much of the public discussion has focused on circumstantial evidence: mysterious illnesses in late 2019; the lab’s work intentionally supercharging viruses to increase lethality (known as “gain of function” research). The Chinese Communist Party has been reluctant to release relevant information. Reports based on U.S. intelligence have suggested the lab collaborated on projects with the Chinese military.

But the most compelling reason to favor the lab leak hypothesis is firmly based in science. In particular, consider the genetic fingerprint of CoV-2, the novel coronavirus responsible for the disease Covid-19.

In gain-of-function research, a microbiologist can increase the lethality of a coronavirus enormously by splicing a special sequence into its genome at a prime location. Doing this leaves no trace of manipulation. But it alters the virus spike protein, rendering it easier for the virus to inject genetic material into the victim cell. Since 1992 there have been at least 11 separate experiments adding a special sequence to the same location. The end result has always been supercharged viruses.
[...]
Now the damning fact. It was this exact sequence that appears in CoV-2. Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?

Yes, it could have happened randomly, through mutations. But do you believe that? At the minimum, this fact—that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural combination used by human researchers—implies that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape.
[...]
The presence of the double CGG sequence is strong evidence of gene splicing, and the absence of diversity in the public outbreak suggests gain-of-function acceleration. The scientific evidence points to the conclusion that the virus was developed in a laboratory.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-science-suggests-a-wuhan-lab-leak-11622995184

Everyone knows that the virus came from bat soup and not the Wuhan lab:

The researchers went on to dismiss the lab accident theory as “extremely unlikely,” saying they had agreed not to pursue it any further. Their reasoning was fairly simple: Chinese scientists at several Wuhan labs told them they had never seen the virus before and hadn’t worked on it. “There could be a leak of a virus, but it should be a known or existing virus,” Liang reasoned, according to a translator. “If it doesn't exist, there will be no way that this virus would be leaked.”

If it doesn't exist then no way it can be leaked. They is nothing to see in the Wuhan lab so move along.

[YOhio]

Israel provided shots from Pfizer and has the second-highest vaccination rate in the world, after the Seychelles. The number of new daily confirmed Covid-19 cases per million in Israel is now around 4.95.

In the Seychelles, which relied mostly on Sinopharm, that number is more than 716 cases per million.

Disparities such as these could create a world in which three types of countries emerge from the pandemic — the wealthy nations that used their resources to secure Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna shots, the poorer countries that are far away from immunizing a majority of citizens, and then those that are fully inoculated but only partly protected.

China, as well as the more than 90 nations that have received the Chinese shots, may end up in the third group, contending with rolling lockdowns, testing and limits on day-to-day life for months or years to come. Economies could remain held back. And as more citizens question the efficacy of Chinese doses, persuading unvaccinated people to line up for shots may also become more difficult.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/b...-outbreak.html

[old_gregg]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/b...-outbreak.html

good, fuck china

[Moliere]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/b...-outbreak.html

China has been trying to use the pandemic to get more and more footholds into countries in an effort to unseat the west as the ones that rule the world. Vaccines have been their biggest tool to do this. I’m kind of glad it’s backfiring on them. It’s a good thing that people will see just how bad China can be (they obviously fudged their vaccine testing numbers) yet the countries that relied on them are hurting more than they should. Hopefully a lesson is learned through all this.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Clark Addison]

My son received the Sinovac vaccine! Hope it doesn't mutate him or turn him into a commie.

[PaloAltoCougar]

I hope a strong team of disinterested scientists can settle the question of whether the pandemic started with a lab leak. I think part of the reason people have been so dismissive of the idea is because Trump promoted it (ergo, bad!). And although some of the pro-leak advocates are too extreme (see, e.g, Jon Stewart's funny but illogical bit on Colbert), I'm leaning in the direction of the leak hypothesis. If you're interested in the issue (and I get why most won't be, Covid-fatigue and all), this video provides a pretty balanced view of the issue, including why the original no-leak conclusion was deeply flawed by the biases of the investigators.

[Northwestcoug]

I hope a strong team of disinterested scientists can settle the question of whether the pandemic started with a lab leak. I think part of the reason people have been so dismissive of the idea is because Trump promoted it (ergo, bad!). And although some of the pro-leak advocates are too extreme (see, e.g, Jon Stewart's funny but illogical bit on Colbert), I'm leaning in the direction of the leak hypothesis. If you're interested in the issue (and I get why most won't be, Covid-fatigue and all), this video provides a pretty balanced view of the issue, including why the original no-leak conclusion was deeply flawed by the biases of the investigators.

Hot off the not-yet-peer-reviewed press is a paper discussing the evidence for and against both theories:

https://zenodo.org/record/5075888#.YOYU-DOSmUl

I'm on record favoring a zoonotic source, so this paper confirms my bias. Here's a part that I think gives a good perspective:

Although no bat reservoir nor intermediate animal host for SARS-CoV-2 has been identified to date, initial cross-species transmission events are very likely to go undetected. Most SARS-CoV2 index case infections are unlikely to have resulted in sustained onward transmission and only a very small subset of spillover events from animals to humans result in major outbreaks. Indeed, the animal origins of many well-known human pathogens, including Ebola virus, Hepatitis C virus, poliovirus, and the coronaviruses HCoV-HKU1 and HCoV-NL63, are yet to be identified, while it took over a decade to discover bat viruses with >95% similarity to SARS-CoV and able to use hACE-2 as a receptor

[PaloAltoCougar]

Hot off the not-yet-peer-reviewed press is a paper discussing the evidence for and against both theories:

https://zenodo.org/record/5075888#.YOYU-DOSmUl

I'm on record favoring a zoonotic source, so this paper confirms my bias. Here's a part that I think gives a good perspective:

That was interesting; thanks for that. Still not convinced it was zoonotic, but I remain very open to the idea and hope a final determination can be made (although as the article suggests, that may not happen soon, if ever).

[Bo Diddley]

That was interesting; thanks for that. Still not convinced it was zoonotic, but I remain very open to the idea and hope a final determination can be made (although as the article suggests, that may not happen soon, if ever).

I'm skeptical a final determination can be made, in part because of a lack of transparency in China. That said, this is perhaps more an indictment of my ignorance on the subject.

[Commando]

Trump obviously pimped the lab leak theory early on since he loves to harness xenophobia to bolster his own ego and assign blame elsewhere with his fat irresponsible ass. "China Virus".

Wow- weird-- a new epidemic of random acts of violence against Asians in the U.S. you say? Who could have predicted that?

[Bo Diddley]

This thing is going to be here a while. You can't force people to get vaccines. I was hoping for more incentives from the government and private sector by now. Sounds like the Military will require the vaccine this fall when one or more of the vaccines receive full FDA approval.

Latest casualty: spectators at Tokyo Olympics.

[Flystripper]

the stupidity of mankind will never cease to amaze me.