Former Biden White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha this weekend became the latest denier of the lab theory to do a 180-degree turn. During the interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Jha admitted that he now believes that the most likely explanation is a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. As pundits and politicians quietly admit that the natural mutation theory is not as credible, the courageous scientists who were blacklisted for years remain persona non grata in higher education.
Jha stated:
“This is going to surprise some people. You know, when I went into the White House, my view was, ‘This was almost surely a natural outbreak, maybe a lab leak.’ Based on information I learned and based on information I‘ve seen, I have come to conclude that it is more likely to have been a lab leak.”
I commend Jha for publicly addressing his change. Indeed, everyone in academia, myself included, has had their views evolve.
What should not evolve is the willingness of the scientists and academics to accept dissenting viewpoints. One of my long-standing complaints against figures like Anthony Fauci is that they held prominent positions during the pandemic, but said nothing about the cancel campaigns directed against those experts who disagreed with their views on issues like the origins of COVID-19.
As I discuss in my new book, “The Indispensable Right,” the result is that we never really had a national debate on many of these issues and the massive social and economic costs that resulted.
I spoke at the University of Chicago with Bhattacharya and other dissenting scientists in the front row a couple of years ago. After the event, I asked them how many had been welcomed back to their faculties or associations since the recognition of some of their positions.
They all said that they were still treated as pariahs for challenging the groupthink culture.
For years, figures like Bhattacharya (who was recently awarded the prestigious Intellectual Freedom Award by the American Academy of Sciences and Letters) were hounded and marginalized.
Others opposed Bhattacharya’s right to offer his scientific views, even under oath. For example, in one hearing, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) expressed disgust that Bhattacharya was even allowed to testify as “a purveyor of COVID-19 misinformation.”
Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik decried an event associated with Bhattacharya, writing that “we’re living in an upside-down world” because Stanford University allowed dissenting scientists to speak at a scientific forum. Hiltzik also wrote a column titled “The COVID lab leak claim isn’t just an attack on science, but a threat to public health.”
As recently as last year, Hiltzik continued to attack the lab theory.
Bhattacharya’s experience is not unique. When scientists argued that the virus’s origin was likely the Chinese research lab in Wuhan, they were mobbed by the media. That position was denounced by the Washington Post as a “debunked” coronavirus “conspiracy theory.”
The Washington Post denounced Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark) when he raised the theory for “repeat[ing] a fringe theory suggesting that the ongoing spread of a coronavirus is connected to research in the disease-ravaged epicenter of Wuhan, China.”
After Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) mentioned the lab theory, Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler mocked him: “I fear @tedcruz missed the scientific animation in the video that shows how it is virtually impossible for this virus to jump from the lab. Or the many interviews with actual scientists. We deal in facts, and viewers can judge for themselves.”
The New York Times Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli called any mention of the lab theory “racist.”
At NPR, an endless stream of segments ran dismissing the lab leak notion, painting it as a debunked conspiracy theory of the far right, including one story titled “Scientists Debunk Lab Accident Theory of Pandemic Emergence.”
I consider it valuable to have voices like Hultzik’s that still challenge the lab theory — just as I thought it was valuable to have lab theorists voice their views. The difference is that critics of the lab theory are not being canceled, but continue to be celebrated for their prior work. To the contrary, figures like Scott Atlas have shown how those educators who helped lead the mob against dissenters still hold positions of power. These figures should not be canceled for holding opposing views, but their conduct in silencing others should be reviewed.
Despite the vindication of scientists on their opposition to policies on the use of surgical masks, the closure of schools, and other issues, there have not been any repercussions for those who enforced the orthodoxy and intolerance during the pandemic in higher education.
The fact is that most are now willing to admit that the lab theory is probably correct, but they are unwilling to forgive those who forced them into that admission.
As a comedian (I forget which one) said, if a deadly virus started killing people that ate chocolate and the first victims were in Hershey, PA I think we would suspect the origin of the disease was the CHOCOLATE FACTORY, and not a wild animal.
This was all an attack on Trump. The economy was doing well and he looked strong going into the election. Funny how the guy with the most ties to China got 81 million votes??
Jon Stewart said it on Colbert
THE GREATEST CRIMINAL IN HUMAN HISTORY
Let’s get to the bottom line that has been there since 2019.
China is the liable and responsible party for an accident, or wilful and deliberate act, that caused approximately $200 trillion in damages to 200 countries globally.
America never needed to ask who killed O.J. Simpson’s wife, did it?
This must be the finding of the UN, if it has ever done anything of consequence in its entire history, and it must definitively compel China to distribute compensation forthwith.
China is a fugitive criminal that must pay now.
What should happen is that all debt held by China is forgiven, no more. That would go a long way and do alot for America.
Here is the list of pseudo-scientists who dictated that SARS-CoV-2 (covid19) did not and could not have originated in a laboratory. They degraded and canceled any scientist of dissenting opinion on the origin of the virus which disagreed with their dictate that it originated in nature. They wrote this in a fraudulent letter published in the fraudulent journals “Nature” and “The Lancet”. These individuals and journals should be remembered for their deliberate fraud of the public if they are ever cited again in scientific literature. Their reputation now precedes them – they don’t qualify as “scientists”. Here are their names: Charles Calisher (Colorado State University, Fort Collins), Dennis Carroll (Texas A&M), Rita Colwell (U MD), Ronald B Corley (NEIDL Institute, Boston), Peter Daszak (EcoHealth Alliance, New York), Christian Drosten (Charité – Universitatsmedizin Berlin), Luis Enjuanes (National Center of Biotechnology, Madrid, Spain), Jeremy Farrar (The Wellcome Trust, London), Hume Field (University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia), Josie Golding (The Wellcome Trust, London), Alexander Gorbalenya (Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, Netherlands), Bart Haagmans (Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, Netherlands), James M Hughes (Emory), William B Karesh (World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) Working Group on Wildlife, New York), Gerald T Keusch (Boston University), Sai Kit Lam (University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), Juan Lubroth (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome, Italy), John S Mackenzie (Curtin University, Perth, WA, Australia), Larry Madoff (Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA), Jonna Mazet, (UC Davis), Peter Palese (Icahn School of Medicine, Mt Sinai Hospital, New York), Stanley Perlman (University of Iowa), Leo Poon (University of Hong Kong), Bernard Roizman (U Chicago), Linda Saif (Ohio St, Columbus), Kanta Subbarao (The University of Melbourne, Melboune, VIC, Australia), Mike Turner (The Wellcome Trust, London), Kristian Andersen (Scripps), Robert F. Garry (Tulane), Edward Holmes(University of Sydney), Andrew Rambaut (University of Edinburgh), W. Ian Lipkin (Columbia University)
According to the World Health Organization, the likeliest source was a natural mutation of a strain of the existing coronavirus. The genetics of the virus were extensively studied, and there is NO evidence of manipulation that would have occurred if gain of function manipulation had been employed. The scientists from your list are CORRECT, based on scientific studies. Why do you MAGAs insist otherwise? I know why–because Trump is trying to use Dr. Fauci as a scapegoat for his own failues of leadership during the pandemic, just like he keeps trying to re-write the facts when it comes to his loss in 2020.
From “Nature”, 2/24/2026: “COVID’s Origins-What We Do and Don’t Know:
“We are 23 of the 27 original members of the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO) for the World Health Organization (WHO). After nearly 3.5 years of deliberations, we concluded our independent assessment of the origin of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, and provided our report1 in June 2025 to the WHO director-general.
In the 78-page document, we determined that most of the peer-reviewed scientific evidence supports the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 has a zoonotic origin, meaning that it came from an animal. But until requests for additional information are met or more data become available, there can be no certainty about when, where and how SARS-CoV-2 entered the human population.”
They found COVID in animals at the Wuhan market–but they don’t know who Patient Zero was–i.e., the first victim, or what animal he/she came in contact with. Early victims of the respiratory illness later determined to be COVID all had ties to the Wuhan wet market.
The bigger question is about the brittle, defensive closed-mindedness that almost instantly drove the Covid-origin question into a highly polarized trap. What this means is that scientifically well-educated adults made up their minds prematurely, and simply refused any further inquisitiveness that could resolve the question. This neurotic response was something new and unexpected.
Prof. Turley thinks the root of the problem is a highly conformist leftist culture that has swallowed up academia. But, what caused that? Those same professors self-identify as paragons of open-mindedness, and yet their behavior toward dissenting viewpoints says otherwise.
I’d point to borderless social media which took hold a dozen years before Covid broke out. Twitter especially was reckless in allowing anybody anonymously to claim anything, including falsely accusing without proof and deceiving with impunity (for political effect). The CCP took full advantage of the borderless internet (which Americans invented) during the outbreak of Covid to cover-up the covert PLA gain-of-function bioweapons R&D at Wuhan Institute of Virology. These are seasoned experts in PsyOps and deceptive infowarfare. Our social media platforms remain naive and reckless in amplifying propaganda campaigns camouflaged as “opinions” of fellow Americans. The ChiComs were highly effective in using our own information infrastructure to build up the wet market cover-up.
Prof. Turley still clings to anonymous, ad-hominem, inauthentic, false-accusation public utterances as “free speech”.
What baffles me is how blind he remains to giving our nation’s mortal enemies that kind of power over opinion-shaping. And because of this wildly expansive conception of free speech — that knows no international borders or sovereign loyalties — it’s impossible to investigate the full expanse of foreign influence over the US mindshare.
If Turley were to go over to Langley or Quantico and sit through training on sophisticated PsyOps-opinion-shaping, he would begin to doubt Brandeis’ early 1900s mantra “the antidote to bad information is good information”. He would begin to realize that the forces at play in 21st century geopolitics, the near-instantaneous communication timeframes, the anonymity permitted, and the borderless global tentacles form a perfect storm wrecking havoc on dispassionate, meritocratic truth-seeking. That explains why the US policy during Covid was irrational.
These distortions of normal politics won’t subside until we repeal Section 230 — and subject social media to the same liabilities for harm as other publishers. When forced to more closely curate who is behind content and their motivations, we can enjoy free speech among Americans of character and goodwill without the distortions introduced by enemies.
It wasn’t a leak. It was intentional and the Chinese were just the fall guys. Let’s see how many years it takes for the actual truth to be accepted. To pretend that it just magically leaked from the lab is just as ridiculous as pretending it came from bat soup.
I tend to see the Chicoms as complicit, I recall reading they had a virus outbreak inside China several years prior that killed 5M Chinese people. In China, human life is a commodity and not of the same concern as it is here. There’s plenty of them to go around!
Chicoms again, lol. Just the CPC is a complicated creature let alone the official state bodies it controls. I do agree however, its possible some CPC actors were complicit for sure and also possible some were not, but we will never know. Unlike Fauci who kept his diary on a government server and goofs like that, we will never know. From credible sources, I can say this much: they were blaming it on Americans very early, and not without any evidenhce. From what we have learned from Fauci’s papers, he certainly helped move the GOF experiments to Wuhan. So I am reluctant to blame See See Pee for what we know was a Fauci scheme if not also a CIA one. At this point I think CIA needs to be completely reorganized after a new Church style hearings exposing their never do well mischief.
Sal Sar
The source was NOT the lab— it was the market.
Turley–
“As recently as last year, Hiltzik continued to attack the lab theory.”
Odd that so many in the media who are obsessed with The Credentials ignore that Hiltzik has no scientific credentials whatsoever. He is a graduate of the Columbia journalism school where promising minds are turned into idiots and propagandists. A journalism degree from Columbia is a negative credential.
Yet he has the hubris to attack actual scientists like Dr. Battacharyra and others who have done actual research with viruses.
It would be good if Dr. Battacharya taught Hiltzik how to do honest reporting; but I doubt he would bother to stoop so low. Hiltzik’s opinion is worthless.
Not all media writers are useless. John Derbyshire wrote a long, thoughtful analysis of the then limited evidence on Covid origin and concluded it was likely escaped from the Wuhan lab. Since then his conclusion has become the accepted idea. Derbyshire has some intellectual weight in mathematics and computer programming. He can think and has actually thought about Covid and put his train of thought into a convincing presentation. I doubt Hiltzik thinks at all.
Young: Thanks for pointing that out.
Lin, thank you, but please note my later comment above where I correctly attributed the article to Nicholas Wade who is also a very good science writer. Sorry for the error.
I understand the situation when there is a paucity of direct evidence, thank you very much to the Chinese government cleanup and obfuscation program, strong opinions can range on either side (natural mutation or lab leak). I happen to fall squarely on the lab leak side primarily because for a zoonotic virus to jump to humans and have evolved to be highly human-to-human transmissible, such as Smallpox, would take thousands of years but then I am not the expert.
The major political science error was in the COVID-19 taskforces not organizing COVID origin and COVID public health policy debates by a variety of inside and outside experts with the goal of brainstorming and assessing options. A small group of smart, dedicated but insular and unquestioned scientists (giving Dr Fauci and Dr Birx all the benefit of doubt) was not adequate for the job. VP Mike Pence was the head of Trump’s COVID task force. He, despite the urging of Dr Scott Atlas, failed in this important aspect of his duty. In the Biden administration, Dr Kessler and Dr Murthy also failed in this regards. One could call this a second opinion, red/blue team exercise, non-advocate review, etc. but it should be standard practice for trillion dollar policies.
Years ago, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert “debated” the COVID origin. Jon has an amusing way of arguing. Colbert is clearly on the defensive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSfejgwbDQ8&pp=ygUlam9uIHN0ZXdhcnQgd3VoYW4gbGFiIHN0ZXBoZW4gY29sYmVydA%3D%3D
The greatest sin in politics is to be right too early.
When MAGA commands that Trump be vindicated, MAGA pundits like Turley just can’t let it go. From “World Health Organization Scientific Advisory Group Issues Report on Origins of COVID-19”, dated 6/27/2025:
““I thank each of the 27 members of SAGO for dedicating their time and expertise to this very important scientific undertaking over more than three years,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. “As things stand, all hypotheses must remain on the table, including zoonotic spillover and lab leak. We continue to appeal to China and any other country that has information about the origins of COVID-19 to share that information openly, in the interests of protecting the world from future pandemics.”
In its report, SAGO considered available evidence for the main hypotheses for the origins of COVID-19 and concluded that “the weight of available evidence…suggests zoonotic spillover…either directly from bats or through an intermediate host.””
This is a multi national group of 27 scientist s who studied ALL of the available evidence, and who considered ALL potential sources. They are from all over the world–they know what they’re talking about—they’ve seen ALL of the evidence and they say that the likeliest cause was zoonotic spillover. Can any of the “dissenting scientists” make the same claim–that they have seen ALL of the available evidence? WHY ARE MAGA MEDIA HARPING ABOUT THIS INSTEAD OF THE IRAN WAR? Just a diversion, and part of the Trump vengeance campaign–the current object of which is Dr. Fauci. The more Turley and other MAGA media talk about COVID, they’re not talking about the Iran war, the economy and all of Trump’s other failures. All MAGA media is doing is sowing seeds of doubt, which will cause gullible people not to trust scientists, which means that at the next pandemic there will be unnecessary deaths and infections.
It’s just like the Trump lie about the Lincoln Reflecting Pool being the result of un-named vandals cutting a 350-ft gash with box cutters–even though there is absolutely NO proof of this–where is the surveillance camera footage? Pirro dismissed the case against David Hearn, the Olympic canoeist based on evidence that a botched installation was the cause. Trump cannot be wrong–so he accused Pirro of “choking” and “folding like an umbrella”, and criticized the Judge for failing to go after “vandals” instead of requiring Pirro to account for the evidence she claimed, in a news conference, would prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the pool liner was damaged by vandals. Of course, it is incumbent upon the government, when it files a criminal charge against someone to put up or shut up when it comes to evidence. There used to be, before Trump, a presumption of good faith on the part of the Department of Justice. That presumption is gone now.
Pirro got called into the White House and lied about some junior attorney in her office dismissing the case without her knowledge or consent–that does not happen. This is just another embarrassment in a long line of embarrassments for the DC Attorney’s Office, because she is not practicing according to the standards of the legal profession–she is doing the bidding of a malignant narcissist who demands a conviction for vandalism even though the evidence proves that Trump’s campaign donor botched installation of the liner. Trump’s need for vengeance is not going to sway courts—only evidence will. Trump said it was vandalism–the facts say that is a lie. We all look for Pirro to get fired soon because Trump cannot be wrong. That’s how Trump has perverted the justice system.
Where is the host animal? .. the pangolins were innocent.
*note. as always, criticism of zoonotic spillover is not the same thing as support for Trump/Maga mob zombies.
Why was a random wet market in the home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology Importing bats from 600 to 900 mikes away?
When 1100 local bats were tested, none had anything like SARS-CoV-2.
try to stay focused on today’s topic. The redundancy of your anti-Trump diatribes is truly indicative of some other pathological predilection, it so appears.
If the good professor can dedicate his time to providing us with a topic/issue to discuss/debate, it would be respectful on your part to try to honor that. This is not your blog.
Thank you in advance. yours truly, lin.
lin: You have a myopic view of “today’s topic”–which is: Donald Trump cannot be wrong and he will do everything possible to re-litigate his past mistakes and failures of leadership, all with the help of MAGA media. That is what I wrote about, plus the fact that MAGA media harping about COVID’s origins diverts attention away from the disasters of Trump’s current “presidency”, like the war he started and the damage he has done to our economy and relations with other countries. Trump did a terrible job of handling COVID–the US had a much-higher rate of deaths and infections than comparable industrialized countries while Trump was lying about how serious COVID was and pushing quack cures like ingesting bleach and taking Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine. Revisionists now claim that distance learning for kids and shutting down businesses was unnecessary–something that there is not universal agreement on because in other countries that shut down sooner, they had a lower rate of deaths and infections. Decisions and recommendations made at the time were based on the best-available evidence and scientific consensus, coupled with the virulence of COVID and rapid spread of infections, overwhelmed hospitals, plus a shortage of ventilators. Hospitals were literally begging people to stay home because they couldn’t take care of more acutely-ill people. Doctors, nurses and respiratory therapists were overwhelmed and forced to work long hours. So someone has to be blamed–that someone is Dr. Fauci. But, blamed for WHAT, exactly? MAGA media have gone overboard trying to defend Trump (which is really what all of his hullabaloo is about), outright accusing Dr. Fauci of personally engineering the virus at the Wuhan lab via gain-of-function manipulation, thereby being a modern-day Dr. Josef Mengele and lying about the source–all without any evidence, because when Trump commands that Dr. Fauci is at fault, that’s what they report. MAGA media are NOT journalists–they are pundits. Genetic testing of the virus points to a natural mutation. No gain-of-function manipulation was done at Wuhan. Who cares what people not directly involved in the scientific studies think?
Just like Trump decreed that vandals, not his campaign donor, were to blame for the failure of the painting of the Lincoln Reflecting Pool. Never mind that all evidence points to a botched installation and that there is NO evidence of vandalism. The point is Trump use of the office he lied to get to recreate the facts–the Big Lie is another example. It’s all about the ego.
*gigi’s opening sentences to lin: “You have a myopic view of ‘today’s topic’–which is: Donald Trump cannot be wrong and he will do everything possible to re-litigate his past mistakes and failures of leadership, all with the help of MAGA media.That is what I wrote about” [repeat, “…That is what I wrote about”]
lin’s response: Gigi: Trump was mentioned not once, not twice, but ZERO times in Turley;s piece today. For that matter, neither was MAGA.*
Furthermore, quite a flat misunderstanding of the word myopic, n’est ce pas?.
No cigar today, gigi.
‘
Back with the “Gigi” crap again. Don’t you realize how much that says about you and your limited ability to respond on the merits to inconvenient facts?
The issue isn’t how many times Trump was mentioned in Turley’s piece—it’s the motivation behind attacking Dr. Fauci now, in 2026, years after the pandemic, and before the midterms, after which Republicans will likely not have the power to go after Trump’s perceived enemies.
Trump needs a scapegoat and Dr. Fauci is it. His Republican enablers are happy to accommodate, because, as an added bonus, it’s a distraction away from the current crises Trump has created— the war, the economy, and the corruption scandals.
Trump is using the power of the presidency to try to change the facts from his first disastrous “presidency”, which includes seizing ballots, voting machines and voter rolls to try to prove he didn’t lose, and now, attacking Dr. Fauci to try to blame him for his lack of leadership and mismanagement of COVID.
gigi: you are known by others on this blog site as gigi. I conform to that conclusion/expectation. Sorry for the “crap,” but it is apparently coming from you.
Gigi, you jumped as easily as the COVID virus might have jumped from zoonotic to human embedded.
YOU miraculously jumped from the title, “Leading Biden COVID-19 Figure Embraces the Lab Leak Theory” to
“today’s topic”–which is: Donald Trump cannot be wrong and he will do everything possible to re-litigate his past mistakes and failures of leadership, all with the help of MAGA media.”
Quite a jump? Oh dearie, I am so sorry that you got on the wrong train.
thanks anyway
You embarrass yourself every time you take up the MAGA mantle—only you don’t seem to realize it. When confronted with inconvenient facts, you go ad hominem, just like Trump and MAGA media do.
naw, she embarrassed you. typical answer from you. “inconvenient facts???????”
were those inconvenient facts related to Turley’s article? aren’t you the one who mentioned talking to your doctor about your weight? is that tummy keeping you from seeing what is right in front of your nose?
Lin,
Nice try, you get a A for effort, but Gigi’s terminal 4 TDS has really warped her mind into that crazy cat lady. You can just imagine her sitting in her Lazy-Boy, surrounded by cats, hanging on every word Rachel Maddow says. Or watching Fox news and screaming at the TV.
Hold on there a minute, the Kayaker was caught ripping out sections of the liner. Whether the liner was separated and falling or intentionally cut, he did that according to Park Police. Those are irrefutable facts, he was vandalizing a National monument by doing so. Pirro probably discovered that the liner was faulty in that area and weighed whether this person needed some punishment or forgiveness as it would require removal and repair anyway. President Trump sees it as another attack on the clean up and refurbishment of OUR Parks and monuments. An unabashed attack on what the American people paid for with their tax dollars.
Now give me 20 and go stand in the corner yet again. Take some pride in your nation you little pustule on a rats ass.
America for Americans!
Olympic canoeist David Hearn didn’t “rip” anything. He saw a piece of the liner flapping around on the surface of the pool and bent down to examine it — he touched it . Nothing Hearn did caused the liner to separate — the cause was defective installation, which Trump cannot admit because the installer was a campaign donor that he praised.
Shocking news as Democrat tells the truth, Gives media anxiety attacks.
“Fauci said nothing about the cancel campaigns directed against those experts”?
He’s the one that started those cancel campaigns! Does anyone have a count of the times Fauci said “wet market” in interviews?
I think Fauci just can’t deep state very well while addled with that massive ego.
So it was a lab leak, what was it doing in that lab in China? We need a few more in front of congress starting with Francis Collins.
So now that we finally have these slow-to-come-to-their-senses-but-should-have-known-better onboard, can we start getting some admissions to the whole ‘it wasn’t gain-of function research’? That’s the one that provides the proper historical context for Fauci et al.
Yeah. Seems rather important to know if SARS/COV2 was a GOF lab-made virus. Imagine the release of a manufactured virus with a 50% kill rate.
As the nation’s chief medical officer, Dr. Fauci should be compelled – in no uncertain terms – to testify before any investigation into the origins of SARS/COV2. Asap.
*for all we know, Fauci/USbiotech created the virus.
Listen up MAGA morons.
With regard to COVID and your obsession with Dr. Fauci, and Turley’s obsession with attacking him.
The MAGA doctrine can be described as follows:
1. COVID was designed and released by the Chinese as a lethal bioweapon.
2. COVID infection is no more serious than the common cold or flu, and therefore required no special precautions to prevent spread, and certainly did not need a vaccine to mitigate spread.
So which is it?
You can’t have it both ways.
Annony, no one is a bigger moron than you.
1. It was a GOF experiments by the Chinese that got released by accident. We will never know the whole truth of it as the Chinese are not just going to let us conduct an investigation. And it appears all the data from the lab was deleted.
2. Yes, it was and is no more serious than the common cold or flu.
We can and do have it both ways.
Fake Farmer
If COVID-19 is no more serious than the common cold, then it didn’t gain much function did it ???
There are over 200 viruses that cause the common cold. That is why we get them so frequently. Immunity to one of them does not protect against the others.
There are many, many rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, parainfluenza viruses, and coronaviruses that cause the common cold.
COVID is a coronavirus. There are already several well known coronaviruses that cause the common cold. If Covid is no more serious than the common cold, then it is no different than the other known coronaviruses and therefore any experiments in China did not result in any significant gain of function.
You MAGA morons tie yourselves up in knots with ridiculous self-contradictory beliefs that make absolutely no sense.
You claim that the Chinese were involved in gain of function experiments, then turn around and claim that COVID is no more serious than the common cold caused by other coronaviruses, so obviously there can’t have been any significant gain in function.
You can’t have it both ways.
You are an idiot.
1. Fauci was the sorcerer’s apprentice who couldn’t resist becoming the Creator of the GOFrankenvirus even though better minds had such research banned in the U.S. The PLA had their own inscrutable motivations.
2. It was a bad flu. The 1957 Asian flu was another bad flu.
After the first Covid shot , I went back to the VA for the 2nd one. My doctor asked me if I had heard that Quinine had been taken off the market. When I said yes , he asked me if I knew that quinine was the best natural cure for fevers and virus diseases. When I said yes , he told me to look for Tonic water because it was still being sold although it contained small amounts of quinine. So I didn’t take the shot and started drinking Tonic water every day. Since then I have not taken any Covid shots and never contracted Covid or ANY other fever for that matter. Fauci and the rats who continued lying to us for years and who helped cause death world wide need to be put in prison with the keys thrown away.
The above is Estovir with another first person account. But anyone who think drinking tonic water will ward off covid is a blithering idiot.
That is NOT Estovir you moron.
You have a very odd opinion of this person, even when they don’t post.
Dustoff is clearly Estovir in disguise.
Annony is clearly a Gen Z, 30-something failure to launch.
Your mom is calling for you to earn your allowance and take out the trash.
I did the same except I added the Queen’s gin.
What if the lab leak was not an accident but a purposeful act? If one thinks back to 2019, the U.S. economy was smoking and it seemed that Donald Trump, Xi Jinping’s frenemy, was headed to reelection in 2020. The re-election of Trump would have been a likely economic, political, and military disaster for Xi and China. The Chinese likely knew the potential devastating effect of a worldwide COVID epidemic and were likely able to model the social chaos that would result in the U.S. and in the U.S. economy during the run up to a presidential election. The Chinese were likely adept at modeling the predictable political and emotional response of Trump that would likely result in the chance of his reelection self-imploding. What if the Chinese were able to model how the predicable response to the COVID epidemic in the U.S. would devastate elementary, secondary, and college education in the U.S. and allow the Chinese to further advance their desired intellectual superiority over the U.S. and further accelerate their stated desire for worldwide dominance? I don’t bring this up as a conspiracy theory but it was what I actually thought as the COVID scenario unfolded in 2020. It may not be correct or even provable, but it should not be summarily dismissed as “misinformation” as were so many other “facts” about COVID during the epidemic.
Maybe it was a deliberate lab leak alright and the Christians in Action engineered it. CIA for the spelling challenged readers here. Yes even from a bsl 4 lab in China. After all– their man Fauci is the one who moved the gain of function research there in the first place. Ron Unz believes this, look it up
Vincente, and what if the deep state cabal over here aided, abetted or even maserminded it with Fauci as conduit? What if?
Mass hysteria is always good to the ill willed.
The COVID virus did not affect 99.9% of people. Most of the people affected were above 60 years old and the death rate was very low. As the age got younger there was no affect. In past pandemic in the late 60s the US had 1M people affected yet the country did not close anything or push vaccines on the country, which had 177M at the time.
Initial reports by various Doctors in all parts of the USA was that a combination of HQC+Ivermectin+Z-pack would stop the COVID virus quickly. This was reported via the internet but was quickly blocked on the internet. The question is why was that blocked and who got the various internet providers to block it? This caused me and my wife not to take any COVID vaccines that later came out and we never got COVID. I told my sons who are in the late 30s not to take any COVID vaccines and why.
The COVID vaccines, which are actually “Emergency Drugs” were put out by multiple Big Pharma companies. The release of these goes against “The Nuremburg Code” and the US Laws we have for that. The COVID virus was created in China as is Big Pharma vaccines. Fauci and others in the US government have been part of the work to build COVID and the vaccines.
Normally to do a proper vaccine it takes a very small sample of the virus and then about five years of testing and putting it out to the public without over 100 people have side effects or deaths. This was not done as the “Emergency Drugs” were listed as vaccines to all ages, pushed heavily, pushed by corporations and government or you would lose your job, and in many times people got sent to Hospitals. Once in a Hospital they died.
The government gave Hospitals money for COVID activity so if anyone was in the Hospital for any work it somehow became COVID. If they had an accident and died it became COVID. This through off the actual information on what was the activity happening such as Cancer and so on.
The Emergency Drugs since they were put out quickly does not fully have a listing of what affect they will have on people. The government gave the Big Pharma companies freedom from being sued. The issues that are being seen are people are having Heart Attacks, Massive Blood Clots, and other issues. The open question is: Was this planned to kill off people and control the government?
Everything in this comment is completely false.
Covid infected 77.5% of Americans at least once.
Covid infected 87.1% of children under the age of 18.
Only 56.5% of seniors were infected.
https://www.vaccineadvisor.com/news/cdc-more-than-three-quarters-of-americans-16-and-older-have-been-infected-with-covid-19/
The US death rate was one of the highest in the world. Only 15 countries had a death rate higher than the US and they were mostly third world countries with very poor medical resources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_by_country
The comments about treatments and vaccines are nothing more than fantasy, completely disconnected from reality.
what you forgot to mention was that your statistics showing “Covid-infected” were measured by antibodies found in blood samples (which are produced following exposure to pathogen) AND INCLUDED THOSE (large members of population) WHOSE ANTIBODIES WERE INTENTIONALLY TRIGGERED by VACCINATION.
Children do get COVID and some of them are hospitalized and some die from it–FROM Georgia Public Broadcasting–dated 8/22/2025:
“While people over 65, those with high-risk medical conditions like chronic lung or heart disease, people who are immune compromised, and women who are pregnant are in the highest risk situations.
Nationwide, 152 children died of COVID last year, half of whom were previously healthy, Offit said.
Thousands of children were hospitalized with COVID last year, most of whom were unvaccinated, and about one-fifth or 20% of those hospitalized were admitted to the intensive care unit, according to the CDC’s data.
“The American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that children who have not been vaccinated and have not been naturally infected, receive a vaccine,” Offit said. “That comports with the data.”
Where do these MAGAs get their information?
Ashish Jha, at this late date, admits he thinks lab leak more probable. He does not say when he changed his mind nor what evidence persuaded him. The change appears to have occurred while he was in government as Covid czar yet he said nothing then. The public deserves an explanation.
Yes, Hashish Jaw
The magnitude of the after-issue debate is the telling point. The Lab Leak versus Natural Origin argument has taken on a level of hilarity rarely seen with such a deadly subject. In the beginning, people rushed to their chosen corners (opinions) without even a modicum of knowledge or understanding. They invested themselves in a scenario which had, at that time, zero validity. Then, as things advanced, Confirmation Bias reared its ugly head and prognosticators, themselves without any factual basis, fed the narrative for microphone and TV time, for audience share and internet clicks. Politicians, doing what they do best, took to the podium expressing themselves based on optics, voter opinion and a desire to be shown as protectors of the nation’s welfare. That morphed into political party turf war and the lines were drawn. Fear Porn dominated everything. And the American People were left with nothing reliable to use as the basis for life-critical decisions about the safety of themselves, their children and their loved ones. The issue of the Origin then took backseat to The Vaccine! We were told that salvation was at hand. People were assured that The Vaccine was the miracle we were waiting for. Then the question of choice became the debate and the sides divided once again. In response The People were encouraged, intimidated and ultimately threatened to gain their cooperation in making society safe. Coercion for The Greater Good. To the point of a violation of the most basic civil liberties. So, forget The Origin debate. Shelve The Vaccine argument. What has been the result? Evidence is overwhelming that Covid originated from a lab leak in Wuhan. Experience has shown that the mega-billion dollar Vaccine was virtually worthless. Confidence in science has been horribly damaged and The People have lost even more confidence in the credibility of the media, politicians and even medicine itself. And the precedent of subversion of Civil Liberties “for the greater good” may never be undone.
Clarke Penley,
Great comment.
In the beginning, I knew what I did not know. Pretty sure the experts didnt either. Not without on the ground investigation in China, but not like China was going to allow that. Another reason why I doubt the wet market theory.
My wife was forced to take the vaccine or lose her job.
How can you “doubt” the wet market theory when Fauci’s diary and emails show him concocting it in January 2000 to divert attention from the level 2 lab doing his GOFrankenvirus research?
A leak from the only lab that studied bat viruses collected 600 to 900 miles away was far more likely than from some random wet market in the same town, even if the virus was unchanged.
There are lots of reasons from the startt to strongly suspect a lab leak over all other possibilities.
But when a crossover host was not found in nature in 6 weeks the direct from nature thesis was highly unlikely.
In 6 months it was astronomically unlikely.
In 2 years it was a near zero possibility.
In Feb 2020 a scientist could prefer the wet market source. By July any scientist still espousing a direct from nature source was a quack.
What is MOST evident is NOT the relative merits of various ideas.
But the Jump to conclusions for POLITICAL not scientific reasons and the dogmatic unwillingness to tolerate alternative views and to change your view when the evidence no longer supported it.
Science rarely gets it right the first time. Nor is science determined by consensus. It is determined by reproduce-able evidence.
This rush to judgement drivern by politics and ideology not evidence and the dogmatic refusable to tolerate other views, and the supression of other views and the unwillingness to change your view as the evidence changes – is the consequence of the en$hitification of science by the left.
I am not a scientist. Neither is the vast majority of the general public. But we can smell the stench of control freaks peddling panic and terror. We smelled that stench early on.
For many of us, it was Fauci-fueled insanity such as this:
Force a medical procedure on children. (A vaccine is a medical procedure.) If you don’t agree, you’re responsible for mass murder.
Who alerted us, early on, to that particular insanity? Private family physicians, most specifically private pediatricians. They told us, early on, that there was no scientific evidence for that insane fear mongering.
Then the evidence emerged — which proved the exact opposite of what the “experts” claimed. For children without comorbidities, the Covid mortality rate is about the same as the mortality rate for seasonal flu.
What really pisses of the Left is this: How dare you use your own independent judgment to question our Philosopher King experts. Don’t you know that Fauci is science.
Watch out Sam
george/X will come back and call you a liar. He’s good at that.
Right.
Then you provide the documentation, and wonder-of-wonders — they disappear.
Typical Leftist intellectual dishonesty: Make an arbitrary claim. It gets shot down. They drop it, and move on to the next arbitrary claim.
What documentation? Just posting links is not enough. You’ve got to be able to explain why such documentation matters.
“You’ve got to . . .”
You’re not human. You’re a baby bird.
Mommy chews and digests your food. Then regurgitates it into your open mouth.
So you just can’t defend or support an argument. So you choose to mock instead.
Sam was just giving you the response you deserve.
And Sam was spot on.
Sam has no idea what he’s trying to defend. Like you could do any better.
^nonny, why do your replies always parrot the criticism lodged at you?
You’re not a scientist. That’s the problem. Those “control freaks” know more about what has been going on than you. They follow data, you follow your gut. Which do you think is a better approach?
The real scientists and virologists were silenced. I had enough biology, organic chemistry and study of pathogens in my course studies. I do understand how it works and what polished bonding sites are. I have also been around Communist propaganda and gaslighting to see through this entire fraud.
Given how badly scientists have performed on issue after issue over the past 2 decades – I have far greatger trust for an ordinary persona capable of critical thinking.
Regardless I would note as has Turley – there was plenty of dissent by extremely well respected and credentialed scientists.
Baktarya has far better credentials than Fauxi.
BTW this is also the norm for left wing politicized science.
Chose sides based on political implications – not data or science or logic,.
Paint all those often more capable than you who disagree as Quacks.
Silence dissent.
That is NOT science.
Those who practice it are not scientists.
They are the high priests of a religion.
Real science tolerates dissent, proves things with data and logic not false claims of consensus
welcomes challenges,
and does not silence anyone.
John Say,
“ Baktarya has far better credentials than Fauxi.”.
And yet you don’t post his credentials and objectively compare them.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a highly respected professor at Stanford University, but his primary training is as a health economist (holding an MD and a PhD in economics). His research focuses on the economics of healthcare systems, health policy, and the outcomes of medical treatments—not laboratory immunology, virology, or the development of vaccines.
Dr. Anthony Fauci is an immunologist who spent nearly 40 years as the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). He is one of the most cited scientists in history across all medical fields, having pioneered critical research in HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and Zika. He has been at the forefront of global infectious disease research for decades.
While Dr. Bhattacharya has excellent credentials in health economics, he was stepping far outside his core area of expertise when proposing the Great Barrington Declaration. Mainstream epidemiologists, virologists, and immunologists worldwide—the actual specialists in virus transmission—overwhelmingly rejected his proposals because his theories lacked foundational understanding of how respiratory viruses mutate and spread.
Dr. Fauci had an extraordinary difficult job at the time. As a scientist he had to re-evaluate evidence every day and make changes that to the scientifically illiterate was suspect. Of course MAGA idiots who suddenly “got good at reading complex scientific papers” were more knowledgable than an expert with 40 years of experience in the field.
Trump is a moron, everyone knows it. Fauci was an intellectual giant compared to Trump. Fauci could only advise Trump, a moron, and hope he understood what he was being told. Of course we all know Trump had no idea what he was being told….because he’s a moron.
X: Your post mixes some good points (accurate resumes) with stupid ones (Trump’s a moron) and misses the real issue which whether Fauci lied to the public by condemning those who said lab leak when, in fact, he knew it was a real possibility.
Trump IS a moron. That’s just an objective fact.
Fauci didn’t lie. Fauci never “condemned” people for merely considering a lab leak; he pushed back against politicians who were claiming—without a shred of genomic evidence—that the virus was an engineered Chinese bioweapon. When scientists privately brought the possibility of a lab accident to Fauci in early 2020, he told them to investigate it and follow the data. They did, and they concluded a natural origin was far more likely. Acknowledging that one theory has a lot of evolutionary data behind it while the other relies on circumstantial politics isn’t a cover-up—it’s just basic science.
It’s just the sad reality that most people in this country are scientifically illiterate. That’s the problem.
Like Obama, Trump transferred from a decent school (Fordham vs. Oxy) to an Ivy (Penn vs. Columbia), I guess that means Obama is also a moron.
Fauci graduated from the same Jesuit school he was admitted to (Fellow alumnus: Clarence Thomas).
X, I regret that you don’t seem to understand either the issues or the gist of Professor Turley’s post.
Your attempt earlier today to take down Bhattacharya, or compare his credentials to that of Fauci, is terribly naive.
All three co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) were either epidemiologists or accomplished voices in epidemiology (see Bhattacharya’s recent major publishing in the area of COVID epidemiology).
Fauci is an internist and investigatory immunologist. Do you even understand the difference between immunology and epidemiology? Do you understand Bhattacharya’s specialty as it relates to health economy in epidemiological crises? Your reference to Bhattacharya as a mere “economist” is grossly comical.
Secondly, GBD was literally signed by Thousands of researchers and scientists, many of whom are internists, immunologists, infectious disease specialists and epidemiologists-(Bhattacharya grossly exceeds Fauci in research publications). https://gbdeclaration.org/
Thirdly and importantly, Turley’s post today focuses on the suppression of countervailing research and opinion.
Did you get that?
Fauci indeed appears to have been dishonest/duplicitous. https://dailydeclaration.org.au/2026/08/04/anthony-fauci-diary/
Try to stay focused, OK? Thanking you in advance,
yours truly, lin.
Lin,
Let’s actually look at the training and the data instead of hiding behind condenscention.
The Credentials: Calling Dr. Fauci a “mere internist” completely erases his actual title as a clinical immunologist and his status as one of the most cited scientists in human history across all medical fields. While Dr. Bhattacharya has an MD, his PhD is in economics. His specialty is health economics—the financial modeling and policy outcomes of healthcare systems. He does not run a laboratory, map viral genomes, or study the biological mechanics of vaccine immunology. Pointing out this distinction isn’t naive; it is defining their actual jobs.
The Signatories: Citing the thousands of signatures on the Great Barrington Declaration is a major logical fallacy. Multiple independent investigations, including reports by The Guardian, discovered that the declaration’s unvetted open-signup system was flooded with fake names like “Dr. Johnny Bananas,” “Professor Cominic Dummings,” homeopaths, and therapist aliases. It was an open internet petition, not a peer-reviewed consensus.
The Diaries: The article you linked from The Daily Declaration completely misinterprets the 2026 declassified diary tranche. The actual text released by Congress shows that Fauci’s private notes completely align with the timeline of a fluid, real-time investigation: he explicitly logged on February 1, 2020, that scientists were deeply divided between a lab leak and natural spillover and that they “could not let this go” without investigating. Expressing uncertainty during the first month of a novel outbreak is the literal definition of the scientific method—not “duplicity.”
X, Good Lord, you sure jumped on this when you saw my name, didn’t you? To do all that research and compose your response within a half hour is amazing, isn’t it?
But you still don’t get it do you?
For starters, please don’t represent what I said. NOwhere did I refer to Fauci as a “mere internist.” Try to read more carefully and with a little more comprehension.
Secondly, X, look up the differences and overlaps of immunological and epidemiological specialties. The argument is NOT over the characteristics or makeup of pathogens here. I don’t think you are grasping the issue at all. Bhattacharya’s role had to do with “focused protections” and remediation.
While you have every right to discount theories and research on the origin, you fail to understand that your focus on Bhattacharya is my beef.
Third, and finally, I’m going to help you understand what is the POINT OF FOCUS in today;s post..
e.g., https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/the-lockdown-dissidents-wsj-opinion-film-covid-censorship-jay-bhattacharya/
https://www.independent.org/article/2025/10/06/great-barrington-5-years-on/
read it, sleep on it, and check in with us tomorrow. thanks anyway.
Lin,
Dropping a link from an anti-vaccine advocacy group like Children’s Health Defense isn’t the mic-drop moment you think it is. Let’s address your actual point of focus: “focused protection” and remediation.
The core reason the global scientific community rejected Dr. Bhattacharya’s “focused protection” model is that it was a mathematical and logistical impossibility. In a modern society, the vulnerable do not live in an airtight bubble. They rely on working-age family members, healthcare staff, and essential workers—the exact mobile populations the Great Barrington Declaration wanted to infect to build natural herd immunity.
Furthermore, your argument that the debate isn’t over the “makeup of pathogens” is flat-out wrong. You cannot design a public health remediation plan without understanding the biology of the pathogen. Because SARS-CoV-2 spreads rapidly via asymptomatic transmission and mutates continuously, letting it run wild simply created an ideal breeding ground for deadlier variants. Rejecting his plan wasn’t censorship; it was a refusal to adopt a policy that would have completely vaporized our healthcare infrastructure.
P.S. you responded to my post. Naturally I responded back. I would think you would consider that to be an obvious response.
lin
Unfortunately you do not understand what epidemiology is.
Epidemiology is a retrospective science that looks back at infectious disease outbreaks to analyze how they spread. When confronted with a novel infectious agent epidemiology tends to not of much value in predicting how it will spread. An epidemiologist can make some guesses as to what may happen based on studies of prior epidemics, but when the infectious agent is completely novel there is no way to accurately predict what will happen.
An epidemiologist can make certain guesses, based on assumptions that the novel virus will behave like other viruses, but there can be absolutely no certainty that those guesses and assumptions are correct.
Bhattacharya and his co-authors are not clinicians. They made the fatal error of assuming that COVID would behave like other viruses. They made assumptions that turned out to be invalid. COVID was a novel virus that did not behave as other viruses. They assumed that the appropriate response should be guided by past experience with other unrelated viruses. Unfortunately as non-clinicians they did not know what they did not know.
On the other hand, Fauci and the other clinicians with experience treating infectious disease, immediately recognized that COVID was a novel virus, and that no assumptions could be made about how it would behave. Therefore, they took the safest possible route and recommended normal preventative measures such as masks, social distancing, closure of schools and businesses where people congregate in close contact.
You can look back as a Monday morning quarterback and second guess what Fauci recommended, but given that in the beginning there was no way to predict how the virus would behave, then Fauci made the correct decisions.
If any of his decisions later proved to be wrong, that does not mean that he lied. It simply means that he was unable to predict what would happen. In contrast Bhattacharya et. al. assumed that they could accurately predict what would happen, and they were wrong.
I don’t understand why you are defending Bhattachrya by saying that he is an expert in “health economy in epidemiological crises”. Are you saying that it is more important to protect the economy than to protect people’s lives?
And I fully understand the difference between an immunologist and an epidemiologist. I explained what an epidemiologist does above.
By the way, I am a physician, retired after 45 years of practice, and before I went to medical school I had a Ph.D. in immunology. My research work was to examine the immune responses to different influenza vaccines.
Hello. No, I’m sorry. I clearly understand the difference AS WELL AS the “overlaps” that I expressly stated.
respectfully, you’re stepping on your own foot here.
also respectfully, you misrepresent what the issue was, and wholly gloss over what MY beef was, i.e., the misrepresentation of Bhattacharya’s role–and what his position was. Moreover, as I mentioned, there were LOTS of epidemiologists AND immunologists who agreed with Bhattacharya, so your opinion has no more value than any of them, for as little as you represent here.
Second, you say, “I don’t understand why you are defending Bhattachrya by saying that he is an expert in “health economy in epidemiological crises”. Are you saying that it is more important to protect the economy than to protect people’s lives?”
If you do not understand what I said OR what Bhattacharya stood for, then I’m not convinced with your own stated qualification to opine c.v. Please rate yourself against the two epidemiologist co-authors as well as the other epidemiologists and immunologists listed : https://gbdeclaration.org/
Third, you seem to join the pundits who dismiss GBD as an appeal for “herd immunity.” That is clearly the view of the common man/Media journalist, and those whose objections were speciously hidden under pecuniary interest.
While there is clearly an appreciation for herd immunity, Bhattacharya and his two VERY-CREDENTIALED co-authors (both epidemiologists and IVY graduates and instructors) merely advocated a plan that emphasized protecting the vulnerable rather than compulsory lockdowns for all. THAT WAS THE FOCUS.
Finally, and BTW, I note that you speak of “preventative” medicine. I’ve interviewed literally hundreds of scientists, researchers, and physicians as potential “expert witnesses” over the years. I do not recall any of them using the word “preventative.” If you received a Ph.D in immunology, surely you must know that “The American Medical Association (AMA) Manual of Style — the gold standard for medical publishing — uses the word ‘preventive’ EXCLUSIVELY. and you sure do appear on this blog in various roles of “expertise,” (notwithstanding your anonymity) don’t you?
https://freemarkethealthcareblog.com/preventive-vs-preventative/
thanks anyway,
p.s. metadata analysis/analyses:
https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/comprehensive-research-finds-that-lockdowns-dont-work
You state that the GBD simply wanted to protect the vulnerable. But neither you, Bhattacharya, nor the declaration ever provided a concrete, actionable plan for how millions of high-risk, multi-generational, and working-class Americans were supposed to survive completely insulated from a raging, hyper-contagious airborne virus.
When real-world countries tried to implement lighter-touch restrictions under the guise of “focused protection,” the results were disastrous. Sweden’s early experiment resulted in an unmanageable spike in elderly mortality, forcing them to pivot back to traditional public health measures. Appealing to the Ivy League credentials of the authors doesn’t erase the baseline biological reality: allowing a novel, mutating pathogen to run rampant through the population is a failed strategy. Academic credentials don’t protect an idea from bad math.
your response to LIn is even funnier, you’re sinking deeper, sounding more like georgie. When I saw your sentence, “the results were disastrous. Sweden’s early experiment resulted in an unmanageable spike in elderly mortality.,” I burst out laughing. What did the Barrington plan say about protecting the vulnerable, clown?
“Trump IS a moron. That’s just an objective fact.”
It is an objective fact that you are a moron.
I mkay not agree with everything Trump does but he OBVIOUSLY has a higher IQ than you – and Fauxi.
“Fauci didn’t lie. Fauci never “condemned” people for merely considering a lab leak; he pushed back against politicians who were claiming—without a shred of genomic evidence—that the virus was an engineered Chinese bioweapon. ”
Spinin wheels got to go round
Fauxi actively supressed the lab leak theory BECAUSE he bore alot of responsibility for the GOF research in Wuhan that lead to the lab leak.
Fauxi did everything possible to kill the lab leak hypothesis – because it leads to HIM PERSONALLY.
“When scientists privately brought the possibility of a lab accident to Fauci in early 2020, he told them to investigate it and follow the data.”
No he chased them away from it and quietly threatened their funding.
” They did, and they concluded a natural origin was far more likely.”
False – the virus had been genetically sequenced by mid janaury 2020.
In emails to Fauxi multiple people in his circle told him that it looked man-made, that Several things – the Spike protein and other attributes were just not going to happen as a result of normal genetic mutation. Regardless, When ANY virus comes from nature – ESPECIALY in china where we monitor the progress of flu viruses from animals to humans constantly, There is a clear genetic trail back to the animal source. Usually that is found in days, rarely in weeks, it never takes 6 months much less 6 years. The absence of a animal host for Covid in Jan 2020 – 5 months after the likely patient zero, means the odds were astronomical it was not zoonotic. It is more than 6 years later – nothing even close in nature has been found. Thje RATG13 virus found in bats while near certainly the closest genetic ancestor – is hundreds of thousands of permustions away from Covid.
“Acknowledging that one theory has a lot of evolutionary data behind it while the other relies on circumstantial politics isn’t a cover-up—it’s just basic science.”
And if that is what had happened it would be true – but the gentics were ALWAYS point at human bioenginerring, not nature.
As noted the RATG13 bat virus is hundreds of thousands of mutations away. You prove a zoonotic source with something ZERO or 1 generation way – not hundreds of thousands.
You claim there is evidence – what is that evidence ? No one has ever produced any actual evidence.
The zoonotic source of the 2004 SARS outbreak in China was found quickly.
Further china responded quickly and approrpirately and it never got out of china.
MERS-CoV, was connected to camels quickly.
Every flu that ever was is zoonotic – and we always KNOW how it went from birds to pigs to humans.
And we are terified of one jumping directly from birds to humans.
Regardless we KNOW – we find the virus in nature.
“It’s just the sad reality that most people in this country are scientifically illiterate. That’s the problem.”
People demanding roof from scientists who have none is sad – but it is scientists who are the problem – not people in this country.
Scientists are supposed to follow the scientific method to provide actual evidence.
Trust me I am the expert is not good enough – especially when we are talking about OUR LIVES.
John Say,
Screaming about IQ scores doesn’t make your made-up virology numbers any less embarrassing.
Claiming a 96.2% genetic match between COVID-19 and the RaTG13 bat virus equals “hundreds of thousands of permutations” proves you don’t know how to read genetic data. In evolutionary biology, that is a close cousin. Furthermore, the myth that scientists always find natural virus reservoirs in a few days is completely made up. It took 14 years to find the bat source for SARS-1.
Finally, your “extortion” narrative completely collapses under the weight of the recently declassified Fauci journals. His private logs from February 2020 show him explicitly writing that a lab leak was possible and needed to be thoroughly vetted. He didn’t threaten anyone; independent scientists looked at the actual genomic sequences, saw zero markers of human engineering, and followed the data. Moving from a temporary hypothesis to an evidence-based conclusion isn’t a cover-up—it’s just actual science.
You’re like Sen. Paul. Really upset because Fauci did what he thought was best at the time and you didn’t like the lock downs and mask mandates. It offended your little libertarian sensibilities.
X; You lose credibility when you spew name calling nonsense. You also failed to note that Fauci actively pushed back against the lab leak theory in public; while in private, he held serious reservations. Had he shared his private reservations, many credible scientists would not have been vilified. While many people may not be scientifically literate, I dare say, many have common sense. And, connecting the dots of the source of the virus to a lab that performs gain of function on viruses in Wuhan where an outbreak occurred should not have been a radical thought. But, in this age of rage, too many woke politicians and “scientists” didn’t want to be labelled “racist.” Your attempt to defend Fauci maybe well-intended, but misguided.
Actually X’s resume fixation is stupid. He is claiming that Fauxi is a globally recognized expert in residential plumbing and therefore the right person to trust when a dam breaks flooding a country.
Bhattacharya has alot of the actual expertise relevant to the problem.
Further, the major issues with respect to government policy on Covid is actually “systems engineering” – Which fauxi has absolutely no experience with, and Bhattacharya atleast has some ecomonics background.
It was not fauxi’s job in 2020 to go into the lab and develop the vaccine. My understanding is that he had almost nothing to do with project warp speed,
Fauxi’s job was to determine the correct public response to an epidemic of an airborne and deadly virus that exponentially targeted the old and unhealthy more so than any previous significant virus.
Nearly everything you need to do that job has little to do with medicine or viruses, and most of that can be learned in a night.
Further all the specialized knowledge is available form hundreds of domain experts.
The need is not for a domain expert, but someone with board knowledge.
The lockdowsn as an example had numerous effects besides on Covid.
They reduced traffic and highway fatalities, they increases suicides and drug overdoses, they initially decreased crime but ultimately spiked it.
They tanked the economy. They resulted in people avoiding hospitals and medical care.
And on and on and on. One of the common problems with domain experts is they are unable to think outside the very narrow confines of their domain.
X cites Fauxi’s experience with Aids/Zika and Ebola. – it is my understanding that he botched Aids.
Regardless, those three diseases are different from Covid in every way that is relevant to the job of thwarting Covid.
The right person for the job would be the CEO of a large diverse business. Someone who knows how to consult ALOT of domain experts, and to examine the impact on ALOT of domains. While Fauxi botched the even the disease part of all this. He was completely clueless about the effects beyond the disease.
Worse still – beyond the fact that his experience is in the wrong diseases, hje litterally dusted off a decade old science fair project that is not only completely inapplicable but dangerous and contra X untried.
We have centuries of experience with airborne viral epidemics.
Fauxi ignored that experience.
Saying a global pandemic response can be learned in a night, and that a corporate CEO should have run it, is a peak internet-expert comment.
A pandemic isn’t a marketing campaign. You can’t delegate basic biology. If you don’t understand how a respiratory virus spreads or how an ICU operates, you can’t build a “systems engineering” solution. Your defense of Dr. Bhattacharya as an economist proves the point: he looked at economic spreadsheets and proposed letting a mutating virus tear through the young to get natural immunity—a strategy that mainstream epidemiologists proved would have completely vaporized our healthcare system. Also, stop repeating the debunked talking point about suicides; they went down in 2020. Fauci didn’t “dust off a science fair project”—he used established, layered public health mitigation tools to keep hospitals from collapsing until vaccines were ready.
It is abundantly clear you don’t know what you are talking about. Your obsession with Fauci is only because you can’t grasp basic science and how it works. You’re playing to the best of you ignorance. Not knowledge.
Fauci was an arsonist who enjoyed the kudos he received for pontificating on the conflagration he used our tax dollars to start.
Fauci produced no cures, no palliative measures, and no vaccines.
John Say,
“ Baktarya has far better credentials than Fauxi.”.
You cited some of his credentials – those are far better than Fauxi’s
The issue we are addressing is the spread and treatment of communicable diseases.
We had no antiviral until 2022. Regardless, Fauxi did not develop it Pfizer did.
We still have no vaccine that works. Regardless, Fauxi did not develop the vaccines – he had almost no role in project warp speed, private pharmaceutical companies developed the vaccines.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has exactly the credentials you would want for managing an epidemic.
The plan in the GB declaration unlike What Fauxi did – would actually reduce total deaths.
I lost my response to your absolute idiocy.
The mortality rate under 24 is 0.1 The mortality rate 85 and over it 4000 times greater
less than 100 people under 24 died of Covid – not 10,’s of thousands.
90% of all deaths were people 55 and older,
75% were 70 and older.
Nearly all deaths were in people with comorbidities.
The US healthcare system was never overwhelmed – we almost never hit 50% of total capacity even regionally.
Worse still Hospitals NEVER should have taken in Covid patients.
China and most of the undeveloped world did the same thing as EVERYONE did in an epidemic in the 20th century and set up separate “fever hospitals.”
The last thing you want is covid patients int he same fascility as people who have exactly the comorbidities that Covid likes to kill.
Worse still youi claim hospitals would be overwhelmend and unable to deal with people with other problems.
But the FACT is that throughout 2020 and into 2021 people did not go to the hospital if they could possibly avoid it – Because of covid.
We officially and stupidly shut down most non-critical medical care – stopping cancer screenings. colonoscopies and all kinds of other preventive care.
And again until 2022 there was no treatment for Covid.
Regardless, you make lots of stupid claims – Google is your friend.
Actually look up ANYTHING you are posting – it is pretty much ALL WRONG.
You claim it is hard to protect the 10M people over 85 with the 1 in 3 chance of dying if they get covid.
And in the same breath push nonsense that we shoudl try to protect all of 350M people – as if that is somehow easier.
You claim that the vulnerable are all smeared through society – while for the most part THEY ARE NOT.
It is farily easy to separate the most culnerable – ALL THE NORDIC COUNTRIES DID THAT.
“Dr. Anthony Fauci is an immunologist who spent nearly 40 years as the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). He is one of the most cited scientists in history across all medical fields, having pioneered critical research in HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and Zika. He has been at the forefront of global infectious disease research for decades.”
Absolutely none of which was actuyally relevant. HIV/AIDS – which he actually botched, Ebola, and Zika are all NOT AIRBORNE.
Every single one of those Can be stopped by an assortment of effective measures.
Airborne viruses can not. The entirety of his background is in all the wrong things to deal with Covid.
He is massively cited – because he blackmails people – READ HIS DAMN DIARY. He is likely a sociopath.
What separates Bhattacharya and Fauxi is that Bhattacharya has been closer to in the real world rather than Government.
The GBD has over a million signatures, 17,000 public health and medical scientists – that is the people like Fauxi, and 50,000 doctors – the people UNLIKE Fauxi who have to make these things work in the real world/.
Absolutely the orgiantizatrions that Fauxi has been instrumental in supporting lied and claimed the GBD was bogus
But the FACT is that it is how we have dealt with infectuous diseases and epidemics for CENTURIES.
There is nothing controversial in it. Nother that has ever been proven ineffective.
Conversely Fauxi pulled the 11th grade science fair project of a student in 2008 out of his ass and turned it into a never before tested public policy that has predictably failed miserably.
The entire Flatten the curve approach is complete and total nonsense. As noted repeatedly before – For centuries during an epidemic we do NOT bring those suffering from the epidemic into our normal health care facilities. That is OBVIOUSLY total stupidity.
Never bring a highly infectuous disease – especially on that kills people who are already compromised into contact with those it is most likely to kill.
Again prior to 2022 there was no effective treatment for Covid. Treating Covid patients was BASIC CARE – not advanced, we rapidly found ventalators were ineffective. So there was pretty much nothing medicine could do to care for a covid patients except make them comfortable – something even a candy stripper can do. This is not surprising it has ALWAYS been true of epidemics. Which is why we have ALWAYS had separate makeshift “fever hospitals” with lots of people quickly trained in the basics of what little care can be provided for COVID patients.
To the extent possible you want them quarantined – separated from everyone else. You also want those caring for them quarantined – separated from everyone else.
Regardless my core point is that it is not the GBD that is a load of Crap – it is the total nonsense that Fauxi and his cronies foist on the world.
A new untested idea that rejected centuries of experience.
But then look at Fauxi’s background. You CAN put HIV patients in a hospital with other patients – unless they are having anal sex with other patients, you are not going to spread HIV in a hospital – though OTHER patients might give HIV patients something that kills them.
The same is true of Zika – it is spread by mosquitos – maybe that is an issue in hospitals in the congo – it better not be in NYC.
Ebola is highloy contagious – but it is spread by bodily fluids. With care you can put ebola patients into a hospital.
You can not mic Covid patients and you should not mix any other highly contagious airborne disease in a hospital.
If you are in the same room with someone with Covid for 15 minutes – you have greater than a 50% chance you now have covid.
You do not put covid patients into regular hospitals. We have NEVER done that for epidemics before.
You can not overwhelm the “healthcare system” if you quickly separate the healthcare system from Covid.
It is ONE disease, there is no treatment, training people to care for Covid patients is trivial. Setting up a completely independent system for dealing with Covid is trivial.
The healthcare system overall can not be overwhelmed because you do not allow Covid patients into the regular healthcare system.
Whether you take 1/3 of hospitals clinics, urgent cares, and make them exclusively Covid, or setup tents or use warehouses or ….
What you do NOT do is put covid patients in the same place as people who will die if they get covid.
There were deserved attacks on Rachel levine and other Stat Fauxi clones who sent covid patients to senior living fascilities.
But no pushback at putting them in hospitals which was FAR STUPIDER.
Regardless the effect was – people who did not have covid did not go to the hospital.
And that increased the number of non-covid deaths.
“While Dr. Bhattacharya has excellent credentials in health economics, he was stepping far outside his core area of expertise when proposing the Great Barrington Declaration. Mainstream epidemiologists, virologists, and immunologists worldwide—the actual specialists in virus transmission—overwhelmingly rejected his proposals because his theories lacked foundational understanding of how respiratory viruses mutate and spread.”
False. As noted above you are clueless about the differences between Fauxi and Bhattacharya, you are also clueless about reality
“Dr. Fauci had an extraordinary difficult job at the time. As a scientist he had to re-evaluate evidence every day and make changes that to the scientifically illiterate was suspect.”
Absolutely false – his job was Trivial – Prior to some idiotic science fair paper about flattening the curve the treatment of airborne epidemics was well established.
We have been working on if for CENTURIES. It is not the GBD that is proposing something new and untested – it is the Nonsense that Fauxi and his Cronies in Public heatlh tried.
We would have been better off had Fauxi and his ilk said NOTHING.
” Of course MAGA idiots who suddenly “got good at reading complex scientific papers” were more knowledgable than an expert with 40 years of experience in the field.”
Absolutely – there were 11 RCT papers on Masks int he 21st century – NONE ever found them effective against an airborne virus ZERO.
There 3 more RCT papers conducted over the next several years NONE ever found them effective.
Regardless, any “scientist” who can not defend what they claim with trustworthy data and properly conducted studies – should not be called a scientist.
Fauxi and his cronies pulled an untested approach that was so flawed it would OBVIOUSLY fail – from a decade old teenagers science fair project that “experts” like Fauxi rejected decades ago – and imposed it on us all by FORCE.
Yes, that causes people to read scientific papers.
Regardless the left pollution of education that Turley writes about daily has infected science and yes as a result an awful lot of crap gets sold, that does not work.
It should not surprise you that people who live in the real world – not ivory towers have lost their trust in so called “experts” like fauxi.
There is no amount of credentials that will make up for getting caught repeatedly lying.
Trust is earned – something you do not graps.
“Trump is a moron, everyone knows it. ”
Obviously not. IQ is the greatest predictor of scuccess – the converse is also true. Success is the greatest predictor of IQ.
If you succeed ONCE – you likely have an IQ over 130. If you succeed in multiple endeavors – as people like Trump, and Musk have your IQ is astronomical.
Trump does not talk like someone with a high IQ – but he succeeds like someone with an astronomical IQ.
I would be shocked if he does not have 15pts on Fauxi.
Further with Trump he has succeeded is very diverse domains. Real estate, Golf, Entertainment, politics, Social Media, Crypto. Diplomacy.
Please find a single left wing nut with half as many domains as Trump.
Contra your claim – Fauxi’s area of expertise is very narrow. He MIGHT be someone to trust to deal with lyme disease, alpha-gal syndrome.
No one should ever trust him with an airborne epidemic.
“Fauci was an intellectual giant compared to Trump.”
Fauxi has failed at most everything he has done. His track record on AIDS was poor.
He has completely blew Covid, He engaged in funding risky scientific research in places without adequate precautions and the result was predictable disaster.
While everyone including Dr. Jha is coming arround tot he lab leak – the FACT is that even if Covid did not come from a lab – something like it was inevitable eventually. And Fauxi was far too stupid top grasp that.
Lets be clear – Fauxi is going to be remembered as a modern Mengele. That is of his own doing. Millions of people are dead because He was stupid and reckless.
And you are stupid enough to argue he was an intellectual giant.
I do not think that Obama was a genius – but Obama was smart enough to ban this type of research. Fauxi arranged to have the US fund it and arranged to have it conducted in places like China and Ukraine were the odds of disaster were large.
That is hubris, arrogance and stupidity.
” Fauci could only advise Trump, a moron, and hope he understood what he was being told. Of course we all know Trump had no idea what he was being told….because he’s a moron.”
Calling Trump a moron does not change the fact that it was Fauxi’s policies that were followed – and they did not work.
It also does not change the fact that But for Fauxi there never would have been a covid epidemic in the first place.
We are fighting over Fauxi taking the fifth in the senate.
Biden’s pardon only covers Federal crimes. There are 50 states and 400+ nations that can prosecute him.
He is guilty of “crimes against humanity”
This is your idea of a hero ? A brilliant person.
Trump should not have taken Fauxi’s advice – but he did. There were plenty of others telling Trump Fauxi was very wrong and dangerous.
John Say, that’s a LOT of words to say nothing new. You keep repeating hilarious circular logic in everything.
It’s hilarious that you tell me to use Google when your entire argument relies on a fictional history of medicine.
First, respiratory pandemics have been treated in modern, specialized isolation wards inside general hospitals for over a century—no one invented a “science fair project” in 2020. Second, your fantasy that a global pandemic can be managed in tents by uneducated volunteers completely ignores that severe COVID-19 required specialized respiratory therapies and acute organ-failure management. Finally, stop rewriting the history of the Nordic countries. Sweden tried your exact “isolate the old, let the young rip” strategy, and it failed so miserably to protect their elderly that their own King publicly called it a disaster. Dr. Bhattacharya looks at financial models; Dr. Fauci looks at biological realities. You can’t spreadsheet your way out of a collapsing ICU network.
It’s obvious Dr Bhattaracharya is no real scientists. He’s an economist. Belittling Dr Fauci’s expertise because you cannot how he is truly an expert is your biggest problem. Throwing a million-word diatribe only shows you cannot make a concise argument. You keep going in circles or just start rambling on a tangent. It’s more of an exasperation about your inability to successfully make a rational argument.
John Say.
Fauci is a clinician and a scientist.
Bhattacharya is neither a clinician, nor a scientist.
Bhattacharya is an economist. Some may consider economics to be a science, but it is generally described as the dismal science, for good reasons.
Jay Bhattacharya falsely holds himself out as a physician. However, he is an economist who just happens to have graduated from medical school in 1997. He went straight from medical school to a Ph.D. program in economics, and has held academic positions as an economist. He never did an internship, never did a residency and has never held a license to practice medicine. He has had no postgraduate clinical training of any kind and therefore cannot be considered to be a physician. His medical knowledge is that of a 4th year medical student from 1997.
“Fauci is a . . . a scientist.”
Correction:
Fauci is science. Just ask him.
And the most famous person in the world. Just ask him.
And Joan Baez, Babs, Julia Roberts all want to sleep with him. Probably at the same time.
Physicians are not scientists. They are practitioners. The MD is the entry-level degree.
“Fauci is a clinician and a scientist.”
Once a long time ago – today he is a bureacrat – not at all the same thing.
Regardless, as I noted earlier – dealing with the pandemic is not a job for either a clinician or scientist or bureacrat.
It is a systems engineering problem. Scientists from MULTIPLE domains are advisors in that task, they do not have any of the education expertise or skills to solve systems problesm across multiple domains.
“Bhattacharya is neither a clinician, nor a scientist.” arguably he is both. But that is non-critical. He is unarguably far more familiar with Health as a SYSTEM which is the issue.
“Bhattacharya is an economist. Some may consider economics to be a science, but it is generally described as the dismal science, for good reasons.”
Economics is without a doubt a science., it is one of the hardest of the soft sciences.
There is science that can be conducted by direct experiment. That is the most solid of all sciences.
Then there is science where hypothesis are validated by data analysis from the real world.
In between we have some things where controlled experiments can be conducted but where there are some many variables and you can not control them all.
Most of the direct science using the scientific method that can be done has been done.
What is left and the leading edge of most science for almost a century has been mathematical modeling, computer simulations. data analysis and where possible randomized control trials.
And we have had very significant problems because the overwhelming majority of people in the sciences are not very skilled mathematically and they are statistically illiterate.
Regardless dealing with Covid has always been more math than fundimental science.
You can easily do laboratory tests to find the effectivesness of masks. An N954 mask under optimal conditions is 77% effective.
Sounds good. But to stop a virus with a 2.5-3.5 Transmission rate you need a NET sustained effectiveness of 98.5%
Not only can’t you get that from a really good mask – but over a number of exposures the effectivenss goes rapidly to zero.
This is not politics, aside from the initial value it is not science – it is MATH.
One of the earliest computer programs that most everyone who has taken a programming course has had to do it “the game of life”.
This is just a simple model of disease propagation. You could tweak a life program a bit and it will model Covid – far better than Fauxi.
Early on Los Almost and the Imperial college in the UK modeled Covid and that is what panicked governments. Los Almost and the Imperial college were producing figures of over 4M deaths in the US. They were off by a factor of 4. Still that is not overall that bad. Though simple models actually do better.
The IC model is incredibly complex, does not even finish most of the time is a non-determinative model – it does not produce the same results from the same input. It is just garbage. But the concept of mdeling diseases is not only valid – but we rely on it.
I do not know that his series was done because of Covid – but 3blue1brown on Youtube has created a bunch of videos about general disease propagation.
These were enlightening to me in early 2020. The huge deal is the transmission rate. The higher the transmission rate the more effective measures to stop the spread must be. QWuarantie is the most effecitve IF and only if you can detect infection before the person can spread the disease – if not and covid can be spread before it can be detected,, then quarantie does not work.
Regardless for a given transmission rate you need an exponential reciprical sustained effectivenest to stop it.
If you can not exceed that threshold which reduces the spread rate below 1.0 you WILL NOT reduce the number of people infected, you MAY increase the total number, and you MAY end up causing the disease to become endemic – not an epidemic that comes and goes but something that is with us forever like the cold.
It is actually a BAD idea to try to stop the spread of a virus collectively as opposed to individually, if you can not absolutely succeed.
Falling short makes things WORSE not better. Even if you reduce the transmission rate below 1.0 – a transmission rate of 0.9 is still going to infect/kill lots of people – just fewer than if you left the virus alone. But again that is only if you can get to .9.
To have a meaningful effect you need to get below 0.5. With covid that would halve the number of infected people every 14 days until there were none.
Regardless, my point is that Covid can be modeled far easier and more accurately than say Climate or the economy, and the results tell us that defeating a virus with a high transmission rate is very hard. And it is easier to make things worse than to make things better.
And with certainty we made things worse. Covid is endemic, left alone it would not have become endemic.
While I would expect a virologist to know this – none of the above is virology – it is all math.
it is something I would expect an economist to be adept at, and a virologist not so much.
“Jay Bhattacharya falsely holds himself out as a physician.”
He is – you do not get a degree in medicine without practicing.
“However, he is an economist who just happens to have graduated from medical school in 1997. He went straight from medical school to a Ph.D. program in economics, and has held academic positions as an economist. ”
And he teached medicine. You keep skipping things.
“He never did an internship, never did a residency and has never held a license to practice medicine.”
To get a degree you must perform clinical work, you must pass clinical exams – alteast prior to 2020.
Whether you like it or not Bhattacharya has clinical expereience he is also permitted to do clinical research.
You can spin his experience all you want – but it does not change the fact that for the actual task of addressing how to deal with Covid as a matter of public policy he is 10,000 times more qualified than Fauxi.
If you want your apendix out – get a surgeon.
If you want to diagnose apendicitis see your GP.
If you want to determine whether we should just remove everyone’s apendix preemptively you need an economist – not an MD, not a surgeon.
Treating a person is radically different than fighting an epidemic. Among other things advice that might be good individually – but only if FEW follow it, may be bad nationally.
I have repeatedly noted the poor effectiveness of masks. But if everyone who had atleast one risk factor for dying from Covid wore masks AND studiously tried to avoid getting out AND we deliberately infected everyone else AND burned through the disease rapidly – we would same massive numbers of lives with masks.
But that only works if in addition to using masks we can burn through the disease rapidly and avoid contact with others.
While I have suggested modeling this – computer modeling it. If you are good enough with math intuitively – you do not need a model. All you need is to understand how exponential curves work and that changing the variable can make the curve bend up or down.
Absolutely none of this is part of an internship, residency, or Fauxi’s experience. Though it would all be familiar to any mathematician of economist.
Wrong.
We were following the data. The data they said was bunk. The data MSM would not report on and then when it was too big, they tried to downplay it or call it misinformation. THAT data turned out to be right.
What data was bunk? MSM was reporting even the bad data. What are you talking about?
No the MSM was not.
We see that here right now.
Bhattacharya has been proven right about most everything – Fauxi has not only been proven wrong – but is both criminally recklessly and negligently complicit in the deaths of millions.
And yet STILL we have left wing nuts praising Saint Anthony and pretending that Bhattacharya is unqualified.
And as is typical of the left – your approach to argument is ad hominem.
You have long ago completely lost the argument – and STILL you will not let go.
STILL you pi$$ all over the people who were right and deify the people who were wrong.
In the real world
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion… Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them…he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
YOU did not listen to those who disagreed with you – you silenced them.
As a result you F$%Ked u – and that was predictable.
This is not the first time you have made than mistake.
Sam,
“How dare you use your own independent judgment to question our Philosopher King experts.”
That right there. Look with our own eyes and we can see it was not the mass life ending event they were spinning. According to his own diary, Fauci thought the mortality rate was 0.02-0.03. IIRC, the mortality rate for the flu is 0.01.
If you are going to challenge the experts, you should at least get the math right.
The mortality rate for seasonal influenza is around 0.1%, not 0.01%. Conversely, the overall infection fatality rate (IFR) for COVID-19—even with modern medical treatments and vaccines—settled between 0.3% and 0.5% globally. In the early waves before vaccines existed, it was closer to 1% or higher for older demographics. That means COVID-19 was roughly 3 to 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu. Over 1.1 million Americans died from it. Ignoring a literal million-person body count by mangling basic decimals isn’t “using independent judgment”—it is just rejecting basic arithmetic.
Thanks for reporting COVID 19 did exactly what it was designed in a laboratory to do. A quick run of a very virulent strain tapering off to a much lesser strain equating to that of the common cold. Thinking of the design, it took out the elderly and also the very fit, younger athletic types. What better way to attack a population, remove the wisdom of age and the brawn of the military aged group.
“Ignoring a literal million-person body count by mangling basic decimals isn’t “using independent judgment”—it is just rejecting basic arithmetic.”
X, why did you start copycatting the “It’s not this. It’s that” style in your recent posts? From AI or from Olly?
Was it wrong? If you think to was wrong why don’t you provide the correct data and prove what I posted is wrong. It should be pretty easy.
“It’s important to know that deaths due to COVID-19 and the flu are not counted in the same way. This means comparing the numbers isn’t as straightforward as we would like.”
You might recall that supposed “COVID deaths” included comorbidities that greatly tainted the statistics.
“If you are going to challenge the experts, you should at least get the math right.”
The mortality rate of the flu is about 10:100000 or 1:10000 or .1:1000 or 0.01:100
0.01 is correct. According to CDC
“The mortality rate for seasonal influenza is around 0.1%, not 0.01%.”
Nope, the mortality rate is approx 10:100000 – that is not the same as 1:1000. your off by a factor of 10.
“Conversely, the overall infection fatality rate (IFR) for COVID-19—even with modern medical treatments and vaccines—settled between 0.3% and 0.5% globally. ”
JHU and other sources are listing the Covid CFR in the US and globally as 0.1 not 0.3-0.5. That is about 10 times more lethal than the flu.
However the CFR is lower than the flu for people under 24 and as high as 1 in 3 for people over 85 or with commodities.
Claims regarding the CFR of Covid have to be age and health adjusted – which that is also true of other diseases like the Flu we have NEVER experiences anything before that targets the old and unhealthy so disproportionately. 90% of all deaths were in people 55 and over, 0.1% of all deaths were in people under 25, 75% of all deaths were in people 65 and older. There were very very very few deaths in people who were healthy. nearly everyone who died had a serious health problem.
A recent study from Micigan found the long term fatality rate in Michigan from Covid for all ages was 14.9/100000 that is the same as the Flu.
The vaccine is NOT a factor. Pretty much every claim for it has been rebutted. While there is a very short term benefit from the vaccine – there is also a very real short term risk of death from the vaccine – data from Japan and other places is finding that there are 3-5 times as many deaths in people who get the vcaccine over the following 6 months No vaccine has ever been approved before with this high a mortality rate. Worse still as the rsik of death from the vaccine declines the protection from Covid also declines. Though there is growing evidence of long term damage to your immune system AND the risk of death from the vaccine increases every time you get a booster.
Thjere is small evidence that getting vaccinated decreases your sik of dying from Covid – but a prior case of covid has more than double the benefit and the immunity lasts longer – though it is still short.
“In the early waves before vaccines existed, it was closer to 1% or higher for older demographics.”
NOPE In the early wave and then Delta which was the most fatal the death rate for those in their 80’s was 1:3.
” That means COVID-19 was roughly 3 to 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu. ”
That is correct – for ONE age group. Again all diseases hit the unhealthy harder – but none so hard as Covid
Thje difference from under 25 to over 84 is more than a factor of 3000.
“Over 1.1 million Americans died from it.”
The flu has a transmission rate of on average about 1.4 – each person who gets the flu infects 1.4 others under optimal conditions.
For early covid that was 2.5-3.5, for Delta that was 3.5-5.0 For Omicron it is way over 10.
Thjere is no flue that has ever infected such a large portion of the people. or even close.
The huge problem with Covid is not its lethality, but its infection rate.
That is what makes all public polices to stop it spitting in the wind.
We can not stop the Flu.
While it would be nice if you got your numbers right – you are not even aligned with CDC on pretty much anything.
Regardless, the numbers do not matter, the fatality rate does not matter.
What matters is that we are dealing with a highly contagious disease that is exponentially more contagious then other other disease we can not stop.
Worse still this disease is highly fatal for people already in poor health.
We can predict mortality accurately solely from demographics.
What we did obviously did not work.
In Feb. 2020 – while the scientific communitiy should have been leaning towards a lab leak – and would have but for pressure by Fauxi to hide his on culpability, it was still reasonable for scientists and other to disagree.
It was NEVER reasonable to silence those who disagreed.
Bu July 2020 – the direct from nature theory should have been dead.
It has never taken more than 6 weeks to find the direct natural source of a crossover from nature. It often only takes a few days.
If there is a natural source it is IMPERATIVE that it is isolated IMMEDIATELY. Anything that can Cross once , can cross again and again and again.
We have in the past stopped viruses as bad or worse than Covid. We do so by identifying them immediately. By establishing RIGID quarantines Instantly when there are only a handful of patients. And by finding an killing the natural source IMMEDIATELY.
It is likely the initial outbreak was in Sept 2019. If it was a lab leak then the lab KNEW the moment the first person showed symptoms.
Sufficient a quarantine right then and there would have stopped Covid.
We stopped a more lethal virus in the mideast that came from Camels before more than 2000 people were infected.
Once several thousand people are infected you can not stop an airborne virus.
Everything here said by John Say is false. It is pure fantasy, magical thinking.
Viruses as bad or worse than Covid have NEVER been stopped.. It is simply not possible to kill the natural source IMMEDIATELY. That would require the complete elimination of an entire species.
If this is true , then give an example.
The reference to to stopping a “more lethal virus” from camels is completely false.
The MERS virus is endemic in camels, where it causes at most very mild respiratory symptoms like a common cold, but most camels are completely asymptomatic.
The virus has not been “stopped”. There was never a quarantine. The virus still circulates in camels and continues to jump to humans.
John Say is wrong, as usual,
Your entire timeline of how animal viruses are traced is complete historical BS.
The claim that it “never takes more than 6 weeks to find the direct natural source” is factually false. It took over 14 years for scientists to finally track down the exact cave and bat population responsible for the original 2002 SARS outbreak. For many devastating viruses, including Ebola and Hepatitis C, it took decades to identify the precise natural reservoir. Expecting a definitive natural match in just a few days or weeks ignores how complex zoonotic spillover tracking actually is. Furthermore, your comparison to MERS (the Middle East respiratory virus) proves the exact opposite point: MERS spread for nearly a year before camels were identified as the source, and it was contained not by “killing the source,” but through rigorous hospital infection controls.
But of course X, you do not support Fauci, you believe it WAS a lab leak, not zoonotic transfer and it was covered up by Fauci, right X?
Let’s hear you say it. Also China DID NOT have a aging population problem of “eaters”, as they call em, before the lab ‘leak’.
What the heck are you babbling about? Clearly you have no argument or rationale. You’re just spewing nonsense.
Shameless moving of the goalposts:
The first SARS cases were identified in November, 2002.
Masked palm civet cats were identified as an intermediate animal host for the SARS coronavirus in May 2003 by researchers from the University of Hong Kong and announcements from the World Health Organization. Six months later.
Even 60 months after the first COVID outbreak, no intermediate animal host has been found.
Your summary of the first SARS outbreak leaves out a massive, highly inconvenient detail: finding infected civet cats in 2003 didn’t solve the case. It took scientists over 14 years of intensive field research to finally locate the actual, natural viral source in a remote bat cave in Yunnan.
Furthermore, claiming “no intermediate host evidence has been found” ignores extensive peer-reviewed data. A major international study published in the journal Cell mapped the genetic data recovered directly from the cages and stalls of the Huanan market. The data showed a direct, localized overlap between the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the DNA of illegal, live mammals known to be highly susceptible to the virus—specifically raccoon dogs and masked palm civets. The geographic mapping is so tight that it forms a literal statistical bull’s-eye on the exact wildlife stalls. Rejecting peer-reviewed genetic mapping just because it contradicts your political timeline is the real goalpost-moving.
No X
We knew the sources before we found the specific reservoir.
Are you really this much of an idiot ?
First the most significant zoonotic virus class in existence – The Flu – we usually know the specific source – often down to the specific Pig before the Flu shows up in the US. We are very very good at tracking zoonotic viruses and getting better all the time.
One of the reasons we are getting better is because the better we are at tracking the fewer animals we have to exterminate to eliminate the disease.
US cattle farmers have an incredible system of tracking cattle now – so that if ONE cow gets mad cow disease that they can kill off ALL possibly infected cattle without having to kill off millions. We did this because the market demanded it – because the Europeans and Japanaese quit buying US Beef.
It will likely take a few more years but we are doing similar things for chickens – because killing off half the chickens int he country to stop Bird flu is not an economically viable model.
Hepatitis C is not only not zoonotic – but humans have not been able to infect any other animal except Chimpanzees with it.
While we were aware that SOMETHING contaminated the blood supply in the 70’s HCV has only been actually identified int he 21st century.
We have known that Ebola came from chimps my entire life.
The First case of MERS was in 2012. But it was known to be in Camels in 2010. So NO it did not take decades to find.
Yes it can take a long time to identify the ROOT source. But it does not take long to find the disease in nature.
We are not looking for a SINGLE CAVE. We are looking for evidence of ANY virus that is significantly closer to Covid than RATG13 found in bats, in any animal population.
THERE IS NOTHING – in FACT MERS ius closer to Covid than it is to RATG13.
Regardless as usual you miss the trees for the forest.
You prove something is likely zoonotic by finding ‘ANYTHING close to it in Nature. Prefereably an EXACT match – in which case you likely have found the transfer point.
But even something Close is evidence that the disease came from nature.
6 years and NOTHING.
It is still possible that hidden somewhere near wuhan there is an animal that transmitted covid to humans – but given how hard we have searched the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Covid did not come directly from nature to humans.
From “Respiratory Therapy”, June 2, 2022–“COVID 19 is More Lethal to Children Than the Flu::
“About six times more kids in the United States died from Covid in one year than from the flu, according to a new analysis of pediatric mortality data.
Millions of kids get sick with the seasonal flu each year. But although it can be dangerous — especially for those who are unvaccinated — it’s much less lethal than Covid. According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, childhood flu deaths during the regular season have ranged from 39 to 199 since 2004. Meanwhile, in 2021 alone, more than 600 children died from Covid-19, according to the analysis done by Jeremy Faust, a professor at Harvard University Medical School and physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Faust used death data from the CDC to compare Covid deaths during the pandemic to flu deaths over the last decade, to highlight the differences in severity between the viruses in kids.
Widespread vaccination efforts have helped lower the flu’s death toll, but children remain largely unvaccinated against Covid despite the shots’ safety. Less than a third of kids ages 5 to 11 have received two doses of the Covid vaccine, according to the CDC. And kids under 5 are still ineligible to get the shots, though Pfizer asked regulators on Wednesday to clear its vaccine for young children under an emergency use authorization.
Throughout the pandemic, some have argued that Covid poses little health risk to kids aside from a few days of sniffles — much like the flu. But Faust’s analysis shows just how wrong that is. Though kids sometimes experience less-severe symptoms than adults, Covid is still a very real risk. An estimated half a million kids have long Covid, a number that experts say is likely an undercount because the condition is tricky to diagnose.”
He and everyone inside knew it was a lab leak. I give him no credit for waiting this long to admit what was known since day one.