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

[upthemaggies]

see, there's your problem! Sent you a DM. Mud out.

Well, that works both ways doesn't it.

I'm getting the impression that this discussion has made you feel uncomfortable having initially been intrigued by it, and I get that. Nobody wants to think they've been lied to and moreover potentially been tricked into damaging their health. FWIW I've seen a study today claiming 30% of the shots given in Denmark were a placebo, based on batch numbers and the reporting of side effects, which if true would of course significantly skew the safety data as well as creating a control group for a live experiment. Repeated worldwide that would mean roughly 1 in 3 were given saline.

[Newish Pie]

Anybody who goes against the official narrative gets "fact checked" and smeared, but that's not to say he's right of course. As I said, I don't really know much about that side of things because it does tend to attract the extreme end of the spectrum, the equivalent on the other side being those who believe in masking alone at home and washing down all of their shopping with disinfectant in the garage before bringing it into the house, living their lives in total fear.

What he says in the video - which I didn't post originally - isn't particularly controversial, for example he's giving dates of when Pfizer patented x and then pointed out what happened the following year. He makes it obvious that he thinks it's more than just a coincidence, but there's clearly more to this story than it just popping out of nowhere in 2019.

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.

[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.

[Magpies1959]

Perhaps if both of you, Newish Pie and magpie_mania, actually watched GB News you would actually know what you were talking about. Just the same old same old dis anything that does not lean to the left. All the programmes I watch on GB News have guests from the left and the right putting their arguments forward, with viewers asked to give their views. Probably wouldn't sit right with the modern mainstream media's way of presenting news topics. Stick to your echo chambers guys.

[Newish Pie]

Perhaps if both of you, Newish Pie and magpie_mania, actually watched GB News you would actually know what you were talking about. Just the same old same old dis anything that does not lean to the left. All the programmes I watch on GB News have guests from the left and the right putting their arguments forward, with viewers asked to give their views. Probably wouldn't sit right with the modern mainstream media's way of presenting news topics. Stick to your echo chambers guys.

Out of interest, I went and looked at tomorrow's schedule.

6pm-7pm Michelle Dewberry. Former Brexit Party candidate
7pm - 8pm Nigel Farage. Enough said.
8pm- 9 pm Jacob Rees-Mogg. Tory MP
9pm -11 Dan Wooton. Former Mail journalist.

If that's not an echo chamber, I don't know what is. That leans so hard to the right, I'm amazed it doesn't topple over.

And that's before the litany of broadcasting code violations, breaches of impartiality rules, inaccuracies, and misinformation.

[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.

[Elite_Pie]

Perhaps if both of you, Newish Pie and magpie_mania, actually watched GB News you would actually know what you were talking about. Just the same old same old dis anything that does not lean to the left. All the programmes I watch on GB News have guests from the left and the right putting their arguments forward, with viewers asked to give their views. Probably wouldn't sit right with the modern mainstream media's way of presenting news topics. Stick to your echo chambers guys.

What a load of bollox.

It mostly says what you want to hear, simple as that.

[Mud Pie]

Well, that works both ways doesn't it.

I'm getting the impression that this discussion has made you feel uncomfortable having initially been intrigued by it, and I get that. Nobody wants to think they've been lied to and moreover potentially been tricked into damaging their health. FWIW I've seen a study today claiming 30% of the shots given in Denmark were a placebo, based on batch numbers and the reporting of side effects, which if true would of course significantly skew the safety data as well as creating a control group for a live experiment. Repeated worldwide that would mean roughly 1 in 3 were given saline.

It doesn't really work both ways when it comes to things we can personally attest to. If you'd been on the moon or in the Wuhan lab/pfizer boardroom, you could maybe say for sure. As you weren't, everything else is on one level of speculation or another.

Not uncomfortable with the discussion, nor with being patronized! Neither do I choose to put as many hours into researching it as you do, or work in the field as other posters here do.

I smoked fags for years, why would I suddenly think that big corp/govt wouldn't trick me into damaging my health? As NewishPie points out to you, that doesn't mean they manufactured the covid pandemic, or that they didn't.

I totally agree with NewishPie that a manufactured pandemic for profit would take a high number of morally crippled people suffering from weapons grade psychopathy to pull off. That doesn't make it fake either, just highly unlikely.

[Magpies1959]

More expected crap replies from the lefties. If you won't watch it how can you form an opinion. The presenters may have their hearts to the right but they have guests on to give the other side of the argument. I would be better off talking to a brick wall I guess.

[SwalePie]

More expected crap replies from the lefties. If you won't watch it how can you form an opinion. The presenters may have their hearts to the right but they have guests on to give the other side of the argument. I would be better off talking to a brick wall I guess.

I watched it and formed my own opinion which is that it is a right-wing echo chamber. At least I watched to find out.