O/T:- ⚠️Impressed with the leadership [The UK Party Politics Thread]

[upthemaggies]

I'm glad we agree that getting fact checked isn't evidence of actually being correct. I have spoken to people who do believe this. I guess a question I'd ask is... is the fact-checker smearing this speaker, or is this speaker smearing Pfizer?

I think (and again, OchPie will hopefully correct me) is that it's generally accepted that if the pandemic had occurred a few years earlier, we wouldn't have had a key technology which would have made vaccine development a lot slower. This may be related to the Spike Protein as a target, but I'm not sure. I don't know whether Pfizer developed it, but I think it much more likely that it was broader than that, probably involving publicly funded university researchers.

If all that's true, then I can understand why the timing seems suspicious. But that doesn't mean it is. Sometimes we get lucky, sometimes we get unlucky. Could be that we're only seeing our luck - what was developed a few years before - and not our bad luck - what would have been developed in the years following. We'll never know for sure now, because research has been so supercharged. But likely there was a whole pipeline of innovation and development... some we had access to when the pandemic broke out, some we didn't yet.

It's nowhere near enough to just point at one thing happening before another and claiming that it can't be coincidence. That's nowhere near proof. It's just telling a story that's internally consistent.

And more generally... in spite of all the bad stuff that pharma companies do and have done... it just doesn't make any sense for Pfizer or anyone else to engineer a pandemic for profit. Let's say for the sake of argument that there are huge profits... but there are also huge risks… getting caught for one. If you get caught, you're done... you, your company, everything.

And quite how you arrange something like that in a competent, secure, reliable way without news leaking or someone messing up... I just don't think it's possible. A really small team couldn't do it, a really large team couldn't keep it quiet.

Even if you're a psychopath... it doesn't make sense to gamble the riches and power you already have as a pharma exec against the possibility of even more power and money when you probably already have more money than you can ever spend. Even a massive pile more money isn't going to make that much difference. And the risks for getting it wrong, getting caught... the loss of everything.... your position, your power, your liberty, your money, your reputation, your name.

Even if I don't care how many people I kill (even my own elderly relatives), there's not a chance I'm taking that risk. And that's where conspiracy theories tend to fall apart. As a plan, it doesn't make sense for the conspirators to do it, even if they could.

The position the people I tend to take the most notice of believe it escaped from a lab (based on the sequence of the thing and low probability of something jumping in one hop from animal to human and being able to then spread so easily) but that there's no conclusive evidence for how it came to escape, so they tend to avoid those discussions. In asking the question - How many people going rogue would it actually take? I wouldn't rule out that it was released deliberately. You could - in theory (as a mad example) - have one person able to bypass lab security on trust credentials whose wife has just left him and is then in the same mindset as that pilot who deliberately crashed a passenger jet into a mountain. That would be deliberate, but not for the reason everybody claims it's deliberate.

His conclusion aside, the evidence presented in the video shows that the conditions were optimal for something careless to happen, so I think he's broadly correct in what he says and presents as facts but we'd need a lot more evidence to believe the pandemic was released for the purpose of rolling out a vaccine.

I'd say some big players in tech and security have been waiting for something like this to seize on the opportunity, the evidence is apparently out there that they were talking about this kind of thing before Covid happened, but exponential advance in bio-technology (ability to download and reproduce a virus sequences in relatively cheap labs in rogue states) was always likely to throw something like this up eventually and a bio-terrorist attack or bio-warfare can't be ruled out in future, though you'd now have the "Cry Wolf" problem because they pushed it way too far with Covid-19.

[Newish Pie]

The position the people I tend to take the most notice of believe it escaped from a lab (based on the sequence of the thing and low probability of something jumping in one hop from animal to human and being able to then spread so easily) but that there's no conclusive evidence for how it came to escape, so they tend to avoid those discussions. In asking the question - How many people going rogue would it actually take? I wouldn't rule out that it was released deliberately. You could - in theory (as a mad example) - have one person able to bypass lab security on trust credentials whose wife has just left him and is then in the same mindset as that pilot who deliberately crashed a passenger jet into a mountain. That would be deliberate, but not for the reason everybody claims it's deliberate.

His conclusion aside, the evidence presented in the video shows that the conditions were optimal for something careless to happen, so I think he's broadly correct in what he says and presents as facts but we'd need a lot more evidence to believe the pandemic was released for the purpose of rolling out a vaccine.

I'd say some big players in tech and security have been waiting for something like this to seize on the opportunity, the evidence is apparently out there that they were talking about this kind of thing before Covid happened, but exponential advance in bio-technology (ability to download and reproduce a virus sequences in relatively cheap labs in rogue states) was always likely to throw something like this up eventually and a bio-terrorist attack or bio-warfare can't be ruled out in future, though you'd now have the "Cry Wolf" problem because they pushed it way too far with Covid-19.

Well, my understanding that it's at least possible that the virus escaped from a lab but as you say, there's no evidence for that. And there's plenty of evidence for viruses crossing the species barrier (zoonotic diseases). It's happened before and will happen again. It's happening (and nearly happening) all the time... the lottery balls are being drawn and re-drawn constantly, and we only notice when our numbers are drawn.

It's true that a lot of people were talking about the possibility of a pandemic before it happened. There's even a boardgame called 'Pandemic'. But that's because it was thought to be a very high risk, and a case of when, not if. We were well overdue a pandemic, and pandemics are far more likely given the interconnectedness of the modern world and the way we've treated nature. I think it was thought that an influenza virus was more likely than coronavirus to be the cause, but a potential pandemic has been really high on risk registers and the agendas of people who think about these things for some time. And it's not like we've not had warnings... SARS, bird flu, others... potential pandemics that fortunately didn't gain critical mass.

So, yes, people were ready. The tragedy is that not everyone was, and not every government was ready enough. I don't see that readiness (government or corporate) constitutes evidence of a plan or conspiracy.

[upthemaggies]

Well, my understanding that it's at least possible that the virus escaped from a lab but as you say, there's no evidence for that.

I think it's widely accepted now that it did come out of a lab, aside from the New York Times running a story earlier this year based on a garbage paper that's been thoroughly debunked as totally unscientific.
To have a virus of this type occur in nature and move from animal to human and then immediately spread like wildfire with no evolutionary process involved is apparently ridiculously low, that's why they've been doing the gain of function research, to speed that process up, in the area of China that hardly anybody disagrees this virus arose from, naturally or otherwise. I've listened to discussions on this and I'm quite satisfied that the nature theory was an attempt at a cover up. It's now a question of how it got out the lab, not if.

[Newish Pie]

I think it's widely accepted now that it did come out of a lab, aside from the New York Times running a story earlier this year based on a garbage paper that's been thoroughly debunked as totally unscientific.
To have a virus of this type occur in nature and move from animal to human and then immediately spread like wildfire with no evolutionary process involved is apparently ridiculously low, that's why they've been doing the gain of function research, to speed that process up, in the area of China that hardly anybody disagrees this virus arose from, naturally or otherwise. I've listened to discussions on this and I'm quite satisfied that the nature theory was an attempt at a cover up. It's now a question of how it got out the lab, not if.

No, it's not widely accepted among reputable scientists that the virus came from a lab. That's absolutely not the scientific consensus.