Blame China so they take no responsibility themselves.

Plus, then they get to feel superior.

Thanks @JLeslie that is the picture I am getting as well.

And they’re racist.

The Orange Jackass and his followers pushed the “China virus!” narrative (without evidence) to deflect from his disastrous suppression of efforts to counter the spread of Covid-19.

As you say, we all know it started in China. But the dullards can be easily whipped into anger by framing that as a deliberate attack from China on the US (as if everyone on Earth were not affected).

Just imagine if the virus had started here. Do you think Trump would have taken measures to halt it in country or to alert the rest of the world?

And the right trying to put the blame on China, anyone want to guess where the 1918 pandemic started?

@SQUEEKY2…Ft Riley,Kansas

Exactly @Dutchess_III The USA!

It is so stupid.

That I do agree.

The totally insatiable desire to blame SOMEBODY! It’s like it’s inherent. Go figure!

Perhaps its because the Wuhan lab was funded by the U.S. to create lethal virus and find vaccines and cures. Perhaps its because there was no transparency and mo one was allowed in. And perhaps it was because scientists who were forthcoming disappeared without a trace under the iron fist of the Communist regime? Just sayin’

Before you start labeling everything a conspiracy theory, at least know what the people you are accusing are actually saying.

Maybe a better question would be, now that evidence is undeniable about the Wuhan virus’ origin, why are some still pretending its last year and we do not know? Why was there so much blame against the one who was saying all along what Fauci is now saying on Brianna Keilar’s CNN broadcast a couple of days ago?

Your question presumes that the truth revealed, coming out even on CNN, is somehow a blame game, and the one you blamed was a liar and conspiracy theorist.

The finger must be pointed somewhere, when nearly all involved mishandled the plague. It’s “Don’t blame me”!

If you mean America is blaming China, no, I blame America—we funded the Wuhan Virology lab—irregardless as to whether they created it or accidentally released it, we do know that they hid and destroyed evidence, made people disappear, and lied about it.

Just check it out at least. No more censorship and lies about those who say it came from China and may have been produced in a lab that was funded specifically to do these things.

More investigation needs to be done, as per Fauch & Don

I know the correct answer to this question, but since it was written in flame bait fashion, forget you.

@Yellowdog I fully support an investigation of the origins of the virus. That doesn’t change how the US mishandled it. We had weeks advanced notice to do more than we did.

In the Middle Ages people blamed witches for sickness. Most of us have got beyond that and are dealing with the virus rationally (and successfully) through science.

I did some serious hunting to find some of the better videos explaining the consequences and responsibilities involved with something so serious.
This is expert commentary, and if you honestly want an answer to the question, you will take the time to hear them.
India has lots to say on the subject, but I wanted a wider view to post, so this is a variety of sources, some within the past week, some longer ago. You might choose to keep an eye on the dates.

https://youtu.be/06NNyBkA5sM

https://youtu.be/ErniFN5lFSc

https://youtu.be/ma05Nsd4YTU
.
https://youtu.be/k59_H-gKZ88

https://youtu.be/zgTeNFIY-b0

https://youtu.be/xfQjUwBpDks

I find the number three interesting. Let’s see if anyone catches the reason why.

China or no China, any country who is the source of a virus that could kill millions globally must be blamed and put to task in preventing deadly pandemics from happening.

Any of you who want to blame China, do you think they released the virus on purpose?

It’s best to investigate to find out exactly what happened before assigning blame.

OMG, this hurts my brain.

Viruses mutate all the time without human intervention
The conservatives are a bubbling brew of paranoid schizophrenia.

We, and by ‘we’ I mean the academic community that deals with labs and safety issues, need to hold every lab accountable. Absolutely. When the public or media become involved, the entire issue is so muddied as to make no sense at all and it will actually HINDER progress. We don’t need these issues to become political footballs. Political points are scored at the sacrifice of truth, more often than not.

@Dutchess_III Wanting a full investigation NOT by Communist China or the World Health Organization, who lied about the virus six times before January 9, is hardly a bubbling brew of paranoid schizophrenia.”

In fact, the reason this has become a big story now, and no longer getting people banned from Twitter and Facebook, is because the Left has finally come on board. Eighteen months and millions of lives too late, but at least they are with us now.

If Yellowdog is found to be a vector of a horrific communicable disease, but he himself is ignorant of carrying the disease, are we under obligation to recognise his autonomous agency or do we have the right to take samples and run tests without his permission? And keep him captive without his consent. Do we create lab rats of EVERYONE? and put them in a plastic tent without their consent?

@sorry All that about a virus we supposedly knew very little about, except for the body bag count for a virus we were told was not communicable.

And yet, you STILL blame Trump—after admitting very little was known about it at the time.

Even now, Trump is being blamed for something he was far ahead of everyone else. He had plenty of briefings and intelligence on the matter, yet the left was having a field day with this, calling him a xenophobe and anti-China racist, judges blocking every move.

Why not just admit that your side has been the one putting politics before the pandemic? Think what we could have accomplished with the team Trump assembled if the Left hadn’t been obstructing every step,

It is no secret it came from China, weather it was a super lab,or a wet market.
And if proven it was the lab, I don’t think anyone one on earth could prove they released it on purpose .
What is the point, wanting to make China liable for the lives this virus has taken?
Maybe they did hold back information at first,maybe being cautious .
Tell me what country hasn’t lied to it’s citizens?
The USA has never been truthful about agent orange.

@SQUEEKY2 No one on the Right is claiming it was released on purpose—if that is the narrative you are trying to fabricate

@Yellowdog Trump is partly to blame by his rhetoric by saying things like it will just go away when the warm weather comes, by refusing the test kits offered by the W.H.O .
and talking about how people should just work through it if they have mild symptoms.
You do have to face one thing the USA has the worst death toll in the world due to this virus,while your hero was at the controls.

Well, I see I wasted my time here.
Nobody here even knows the history of the WHO, or the very reason it was started.
Also, intentional spread or not, China is definitely guilty of delaying information sharing, which is a requirement for obvious reasons. Those facts and more are supported in my posted links above. It is a cross section of sources and dates, including more than three countries, half a dozen different dates, NBC in the states. There are professionals and experts of a variety of areas, law, science, medicine, economy, etc.

I sorted through hours of reporting to collect a full blanket of coverage.

Nobody cares to know. Everybody wants only to argue.
People crying they are blind, but won’t give the light switch on the wall a try.

China is too good to get caught if they released a virus intentionally. Right now I think it’s impossible to find out what really happened. Personally I wouldn’t initiate any conspiracy theory myself. It’s for people who don’t have anything else better to do or have agendas political in nature.

@Patty_Melt China did delay, but the US delay was even longer. I think there is culpability all around. The whole thing could have been done better.

Unfortunately, the way Trump handled it promoted the lunatics in our country to actually hate our Chinese-Americans citizens. They boycotted Chinese restaurants and there has been an increase in Asian hate crimes. I don’t even think Trump hates Chinese people, I think he just loves the adoration from his fringe base.

Because of all of what I mentioned, the Democrats are reacting to blaming China without confirmation. Both groups are being extreme. Who was first?

The governments of the world should assess what happened and also assess how to improve response, and let’s hope the American people will mask up right away and quarantine if it applies.

^^trump has blood on his hands. And an insult to that notion of competent American leadership. We had an aberration, a dangerous clown in the WH playing leader instead of a normal human being as President before and during a catastrophic pandemic.

It just occurred to me….if China engineered the virus and set it loose on the world they obviously thought they had something to gain. Nary a whisper as to what the gain might be.

@Yellowdog Is that your take away? Great. You don’t deserve my decades of experience and education. Go lick some door handles.

@Patty_Melt One more thing, our government is investigating it. Ignore MSNBC and Fox and people who are hysterical.

Are we all really very far apart? We all want to know how to prevent this from happening again. Most Americans don’t hate Chinese people, they don’t want them to be harmed. Let’s not let the fringe take over the dialogue. It’s a distraction meant simply to divide us.

@SQUEEKY2

“The USA has never been truthful about agent orange.”

And Agent Orange has rarely been truthful about Covid 19. ;-)

Nice answer @JLeslie .

@JLeslie Some 60% of emerging infectious diseases that are reported globally are zoonoses. Over 30 new human pathogens have been detected in the last three decades, 75% of which have originated in animals. The new viruses and other pathogens (bacteria, etc) are going to happen. The press reporting and folks general knowledge of science has been tested this time around and they totally failed. The press want to make money and they will print ANYTHING to those ends. How do we prevent this from happening again? If the ‘Fourth Estate’ could self govern and rein in their behaviour, that would be great. And you are so right, we just need to ignore them when they are being salacious and sensationalist and stop clicking and buying. But I don’t have much faith in human nature, I’m afraid. This past year brought out the best and worst in us. (I think I like this place and might stick around, though.) *gives JLeslie a shoulder hug

@Yellowdog SHOW me where I mentioned your Orange Leader anywhere in my posts.

@SQUEEKY2 It IS true that Trump said Covid would go away when the weather got warmer. But the advice to go to work or about your normal routine, even go on cruises, with mild symptoms—THAT was from the CDC.

Parts of left seemed to think all covid risk had to go away before scientists would give the all clear. They have been wanting to be like Taiwan and New Zealand all along, and just aren’t on board with what actually is happening in the US. I wanted to be like Taiwan, and I hope the next pandemic we are, but for covid it did not happen, and won’t happen.

If the vaccines are working (they seem to be) and we get deaths down below 50,000 a year, I think the powers at be in America will typically allow those deaths to happen without much intervention, we see it with flu every year. It would be great if covid could be squashed down to near nothing like measles and polio in the US, I’m hoping for it.

By the way, I think over 50,000 flu deaths is appalling, and I think in years when the trajectory looks to be well over 20,000 we should take some minor measures to prevent the spread.

@sorry When will Americans stop wanting to be in separate corners? You’re right about the money machine in parts of the media and the lack of science knowledge (this is true across the political spectrum). People need to just slow down and think and observe.

@Yellowdog will simply ignore you @sorry.

I think everyone would be better off ignoring @sorry

Bur hey, its your song and dance.

hahahahha, @Yellowdog. You and your sockpuppet are called out so much on this site, you are the most obvious masochist I’ve ever met.

I find it odd that you are pretending to be smarter than the rest of us, even telling @Patty_Melt to stop watching Fox and MSNBC for information, when she provided an extremely thorough list for you. You are the one following the politics and the media moguls.

It doesn’t take much real research to find out that the virus had no preceding forms in animals, and was manufactured to target humans.

Here is something I found since you last posted a couple of minutes ago, from The Cambridge Journal reports that COVID-19 virus has properties that have never been found in nature before

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/DBBC0FA6E3763B0067CAAD8F3363E527/S2633289220000083a.pdf/biovacc19_a_candidate_vaccine_for_covid19_sarscov2_developed_from_analysis_of_its_general_method_of_action_for_infectivity.pdf

Fluther has plenty of users who regularly insult people, but at least they don’t pretend to have “years and years of education and experience.” We can evaluate the obvious for ourselves.

@Yellowdog It has new properties because it is a new virus.

@Yellowdog You go get your PhD in epidemiology or virology and get back to me. EVERY new virus has qualities that have never before been observed. Also, QRB is not a recognised publisher of peer reviewed work. Also, I already explained that this and its authors have been exposed. Catch up, will you. https://fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-claims/

She isn’t pretending to be smarter than you, @Yellowdog

Well, I still say Cambridge Medical School has a more informed opinion and does better research than someone on Fluther who claims high credentials and goes against what is currently being revealed.

Remember the whole discussion started because of what Anthony Fauci has said on CNN in an interview. Brianna Keiler kept putting words in his mouth blaming Trump, but all we really heard was that Fauci now is wanting more research into the origins of the virus, and is no longer saying it couldn’t come from a lab,

@Yellowdog wrong that wasn’t from the CDC it was from a Trump interview with his pal Sean Hannity.

HEY!! We are getting very far from the question, why the need to blame China we all know it started there,what is the difference if it came from a wet market or a Bio lab?
And yeah they thought they could keep it quiet and handle it themselves.
You don’t think other countries are guilty of that as well?

There is a difference. We should investigate it. If wet markets are creating a lot of diseases in humans the country or world needs to do something about it. We already know it is a problem, but this would be just more evidence of the problem.

If a virus escaped from a lab we need to feel sure the precautions are in place to make sure that is less likely to happen.

^^This.

Take away all the politics, apply common sense and the simple correct answer to the OP’s question shows up.

Since the people sitting in the back have attempted to pretend they viewed my links, their comments clearly prove that, I have not one word to say to them. I made my points by posting multiple links to multiple sources where the talking points cover multiple aspects of the issue.
@JLeslie obviously doesn’t understand the issue well enough to participate any deeper than to bring pom poms, yeah, go team!

@Yellowdog, they will argue to the death because they think it is the Trump hater thing to do. CNN covered that very thing today, that people were so intent on hating Trump, they would not listen to reason, or hard evidence presented by him, even when others were saying the very same thing.
Both Twitter and Facebook have dialed back on denying the actual possibilities.
Trump never blamed the people of China, nor Americans of Asian ancestry. He focused blame directly on the leadership, and stated that the Wuhsn lab was the place to start looking.
We could post links all day proving that Trump acted quickly, and as decisively as possible with the information available, but they would not even bother to observe anything because it doesn’t line up with their rhetoric. They don’t care about truth. They don’t care about facts. They don’t care about the science, laws, or justice. They just want to cry.

If you want to read this more than once, I advise a screenshot, because it won’t be here long.

@Yellowdog You found ONE study paper (not a peer reviewed one, mind you, and one that has already been discredited, but you’re ignoring the follow up data I’m providing
READ THIS: https://fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-claims/ You are cherry picking information that you don’t even understand that you think confirms your bias opinion. Here’s one that says it comes from animals from scientists at Los Alamos and published by Oxford: https://academic.oup.com/mbe/issue/37/9 Now, I’m done trying to discuss this with someone who doesn’t know phylogenetic analysis from their asshole.

@sorry Thanks for posting those links. This site needs people like you.

@Patty_Melt What good does it do to criticize or make fun of one of the few Democrats who actually sometimes defends Trump’s actions or agrees with Republicans?

Trump did take some action, but not nearly enough. My guess is he followed advice from the CDC or NIAID at least partly. Fauci has said Trump initially listened and did what the science team recommended. People have said it was good Trump stopped flights from China.

What I don’t get is you say Trump haters won’t listen, I completely agree that is true most of the time, but Trump supporters also have the same blinders on. We have to hope the scientists are apolitical.

Italy was exploding with virus and we had flights coming in for weeks and nothing was done. Flights came here, cruise ships came here, no quarantine imposed, no testing, that was the beginning of the thousands of deaths in NYC, Miami, and other cities. I blame the CDC, Trump, NIAID, WHO, all of them.

Trump held people on a cruise ships for more than 4 weeks off of our west coast, but what? They thought that was the only ship with covid? That was ridiculous. They allowed and caused people to get sick and die in a nursing home in Washington state by basically locking them in while they let thousands of people from international travel come into the country. The government didn’t ramp up PPE production in January or February or early March. I hope to God we can do better next time.

They didn’t say much of anything to the American people, or even advise churches to stop with the handshake in January, February in March, which most churches willingly did when H1N1 first arrived, and in early 2020 H1N1 was exploding again here in the US. They could have done something just for flu reasons.

Next time could simply be a bad flu year and taking minor precautions to cut illness and death in half. We should have done more in 2017–2018. That was under Trump also, and I blame scientists in charge at that time and Trump, I blame both. Some school systems did act to close schools a few days to stop the spread on a local level.

The investigation into all of it, from how the virus started to the reactions to handle it should be investigated, thought through, and acted upon for the future. If anyone specifically committed a crime, that should be addressed too.

If you think a virus can never start in America like we are so much better, that is naive. I would hope we wouldn’t try to hide the information from the world.

If you think it’s ok to think about these viruses as “just a virus” that’s a problem too. Do we care about life or not? Everyone seems to think it’s all or none. Total shut down or do nothing. That’s completely false.

I watched part of a couple of your videos. I watched the third one all the way through. That information has been known for over a year. It was reported even on what you would consider liberal media. China should have released the sequence earlier, but when the sequence was released the US was still basically observing and not doing much acting for weeks. One video from India I watched for a minute, which could be the Fox News of India, I would have to Google. Why can’t the case be both China and US could have and should have done better?

People (Democrats and Republicans) seem to not understand that the FDA, CDC, WHO watch viruses move across regions and the world all day every day, and try to gauge if the illness and death rates are worth pulling an alarm. They watch people die and let it happen. 40,000 deaths a year in America seems to be acceptable, but over a million they feel isn’t from what I can tell, so they pull the alarm. If nothing had been done we would have easily had over one million deaths here. Although, if the government had done nothing, our citizens would have done something on their own eventually, but it would have been probably April or May when the majority of people really reacted rather than March.

Again, the truth is people are not far apart on this issue. Not the people who matter. The scientists, the health organizations, the governments matter. The division is politics. Americans being manipulated to hate each other. You and the OP are both getting sucked into that machine that is terrorizing the United States of America.

^^ TLDNR

@Dutchess_III I really don’t care if you read it. The summary is why are Republicans mean to Democrats who actually agree with them sometimes, and why are Democrats and Republicans so fucking sucked in by propaganda that divides us. We are on in agreement a lot of time and people still want to make it into a fight.

I’m just offering objective perspective on why people think this: I don’t have the time in my life to care about where or why it came.
One example is being Joe rogan has become really popular and he’s had journalists and a couple virologists come on the show and they’re all basically saying:
Not just in china, but some countries have labs where they keep dangerous virus’ to test and make solutions to fight these viruses.

It may be possible there was a leak at one of these facilities, and one leak may happen to be at the wuhan virology institute.

Supposedly, virus have to work up to mutating to humans, but covid appears to already have “been ready” to jump to humans…..so when I heard this….I thought “great, they just gave people fuel to say the virus was crafted intentionally to infect humans easier.”
But apparently virologists do this to discover ways to protect humans from potential outbreaks.

There’s a lot of information floating out there about how virology centers operate and basically people are just saying we need to investigate how virologists work and make sure better protections are in place.

Then they bring up chinas unwillingness to be investigated, doctors or scientists refusing to speak out, some even going missing etc….so you can see how people take all this information and run with it.

@Blackberry The former director of the CDC, Robert Redfield, said in a CNN interview a few months ago that it looks most likely covid19 was a virus that escaped from a lab. He is a virologist. Democrats dismissed this as one of Trump’s hacks being a liar. He didn’t imply anything about it being on purpose or some sort of germ warfare. He said the virus was so efficient so quickly at human to human spread it seemed unlikely that it jumped from an animal to a human on its own. He felt the virus had probably started infection people September 2019.

I wouldn’t hold Redfield up as an example, personally. He’s presented ‘data’ at conferences he later was forced to admit he made up. Plus, there are the ways he treated the AIDS epidemic. He’s not the best example if you’re looking to hold someone up to support any argument. His credibility was shot before he was even made head of the CDC.

@sorry I said people see him as a hack. Are you saying I am holding him up as a shining example of integrity? I just mentioned the interview because @Blackberry mentioned Joe Rogan.

So, do you think we shouldn’t investigate what happened just because it happened while Trump wasn’t president and Trump used China to dog whistle and to make himself look blameless for the deaths that happened here? That’s not how scientists function. Not the scientists with integrity anyway.

@JLeslie You said Democrats regard him as a Trump Hack.. and I’m adding that he’s considered as someone with tainted credibility by the scientific community, regardless of where you vote. If you read the recent WHO report.. which I’m guessing most people haven’t, but they outline a great deal of what has happened and what is GOING to happen and further investigation is PART of the consensus. So, the press can earn money by exploiting the situation, like they always do, and attention whores like Rogan and his ilk will keep blabbling on about things they don’t know that much about and invite people on his show to confirm his audience bias, because challenging bias doesn’t earn you ratings. There IS continuing investigation going on in regards to the virus and its trail. And it will be done by people who know what Phylogenetic Analysis is and how to do it. Not by TV and Radio pundits that sell protein supplements and Viagra type pills.

It is very telling who is yelling loudly for more investigation, because what they are doing is trying to infer there IS NOT any already going on, which is false. Seems you feel for their tactic yourself.

And, I’m half expecting, sort of joking with colleagues, that what will come to light is that HUMANS are the ones who have been hosting this virus and allowing it to mutate, mostly unwittingly. There are samples of sewage from Spain in March of 2019, and in samples of frozen cod imported to China that might be showing early versions of the virus. Miners in China have tested positive for a Corona virus like SARS CoV-2 after digging guano in bat caves. Humans might be the host animal it mutated in and that might be why we can’t find the animal it jumped from. It might have been us all along. But that’s just my wild idea right now. Of course, if it was us, that may mean that lab workers my have unwittingly contracted it from samples they were working with, or they caught versions of it in the wild and they carried it, helping it to mutate along. If that’s the case, they’ll be correct in saying, ‘Its man made’.. but not how they expected. Pure conjecture on my part right now, but I think just as valid an idea as any currently out there. BUT, this is why we have to keep an open mind. It doesn’t have the markers of a lab engineered virus, so perpetuating the bioterrorism angle is harmful. They can see that when they look at the genetic sequencing and detect rates of mutation. Investigations will carry on. Research will continue.

And… sorry, I don’t mean to keep going on about this, but it’s been my bug-bear for the last year and a half…. Corona viruses have been known to go from rodents to cows and then people, like the Corona virus that causes a common cold (OC43). The first SARS from 2002 that infected humans was traced to masked palm civets and racoon dogs from live markets. So, Occam’s razer… there have been animal hosts it jumped from that was just enough to take good hold in the Human Reparatory system and we did the rest ourselves. And it isn’t just Corona Viruses that do this. The Nipah Virus is a nasty Henipavirus that went from bats to pigs to humans and has a very handy 50% success rate in killing its human host. No secret evil laboratory needed to make that one, just the expansion of pig farms into the jungle where fruit bats lived, shat and died. And, I hate to be the first to tell you, but they have found corona viruses in bats in the US. They differ from their Asian counterparts, but they are there, none the less, with the ability of any virus to mutate.

@sorry There are thousands of coronaviruses in bats, of course I realize we have them here in the US, and I am the one who keeps questioning Republicans, what do they think Trump would have done if the virus had started here, and do people even really believe a pandemic could not start in the US? So, your argument is not with me.

I completely agree about the media making things worse, all parts of media with all political biases, and I completely agree the virus could have simply jumped from an animal to a human in nature. Or, maybe we should not even call it in nature because often that sort of thing happens, because humans are caging wild animals or interacting with them when it is disruptive to the wild animals’ habitat.

Redford never framed it as secret or evil by the way. That would be some sort of Republican spin that now maybe you are turning into Democrat spin.

@JLeslie The former director of the CDC, Robert Redfield

Redfield was a Trump appointee, hired because he would support whatever Trump wanted instead of what evidence supported.

Citing him as an authority is as good as citing Sidney Powell or Rudy Guliani on election integrity.

Ok, I am just identifying him so people know who he is. It’s not like I am his cheerleader. Geez. @Blackberry cited where some of this is coming from, and I just added that Redford said the same on a CNN interview recently.

AGAIN, it is ridiculous for the average American to be angry and hate each other over this sort of thing. Let the experts investigate. Redford said his opinion, and he said he knows other scientists have other opinions. His word is not the gospel, and he did not condemn other scientists. The Republicans might want to spin what he said into it was definitely a China lab just like Trump said, and Democrats might want to spin it into Redford will say anything to support Trump, none of it is that extreme. People just making it political when it should not be.

Exhausting.

^^It’s exhausting because you had a guy in the White House who was and still is an asshole. Pick any other Republican President and things would have been different.

@mazingerz88 I agree Trump made things even worse than ever before, but the division was already there and getting worse. Both sides want to keep up the division.

Democrats keep saying the pandemic should not be political, but they continue to make it political just like the Republicans. Why are you against an investigation of how the virus likely evolved?

@JLeslie You’re not getting that I’m not mixed up in your bullshit American politics. There is the science, and then there is the misinformation from propaganda. I’m on the side of facts and science.

@sorry So am I. I think it most likely did not escape from a lab. What don’t you get?

@JLeslie You use a great deal of pointed political words for not being political.

@sorry So, I am the political one? Sure, right. I am the one aware of the politics and the potential for a backfire effect.

I just googled. Here is Gottlieb on the topic. I have liked him throughout the pandemic, see the video in the article.

@JLeslie Go back to your posts and count how many times you have used the terms ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican’ and used them in some accusatory tone/context. (your video doesn’t work because it doesn’t have permissions in my country due to copyright law, but again… another talking head, getting paid to talk on TV. Not a researcher at the coal face.)

@sorry YOUR articles says the scientists continue to look for answers. We basically agree. You are fighting over nothing.

^^Not against it. Check out my initial post.

China is to blame simply because the virus came from there. Intentional or not I blame them.

But I blame trump even more. It was in his incompetence, his self-serving obsessions, his overall stupid nature, not to mention being a sociopath that guaranteed failure in gaining any chance of preventing more than half a million American deaths.

What pisses me off more than trump are his defenders. Imagine if Hillary won and did all the deplorable things trump did in office.

@mazingerz88 I don’t blame China just because the virus happened to come from there. We don’t know if there was specific negligence regarding how the virus jumped to humans.

I do agree Trump is to blame for many of the deaths in the US, but how can you not also blame health officials here? I haven’t heard or read anything that said the team suggested to ramp up PPE production in January and Trump refused. We started making a vaccine but not making PPE.

Hillary is small potatoes, just imagine if it had happened under Obama and was handled like Trump handled it. Terrifying to think about it. Of course there would be total hypocrisy.

Hillary would have handled it like Pelosi.

Hiding in a bunker, showing her gourmet ice cream treasure trove in a $60,000 freezer.

Like SARS under Obama, it wouldn’t receive much media coverage.

But we wouldn’t have had nationwide obstructionalist far-left judges undermining every move, every travel ban, every prevention of its spread, as we had under Trump.

@mazingerz88 I don’t particularly blame China—as @Backberry mentioned, some countries, including China, have labs where they keep dangerous virus’ (and fabricate them) to test and make solutions to fight these viruses. Wuhan is where this originated, and nobody was allowed in. The Wuhan lab had only a type 2 security clearance, and several people died.

The U.S. was funding the Wuhan lab.

But I find the ultimate hypocrisy in those who were blaming Trump for his statement that we needed to investigate the origins of Covid-19 and not just take the word of Communist China and the WHO—and who said Trump was just deflecting from the political circus of the impeachment farce.

Now, the media and the politicians are having to walk it back—and they’re STILL blaming Trump ! All the while engaging in the same behavior or activity for which they criticize Trump, and the glaring practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which their practice and behavior does not conform.

The vaccines were delivered in spite of this, by Trump’s deregulates for which he was harshly criticized. Not until Trump was out of office did any of the Democrats encourage their constituents to even get the vaccine,

While cities burned, and rioting and looting occurred across the nation, the TRUE progressives were focusing on a cure for Covid.

@Yellowdog Give it up, mate. You sound like you don’t know what you’re talking about. ‘type 2 security clearance’? You don’t even know how bio security is classified. Wuhan has had up to BSL-3 and is building BSL-4. Taiwan has TWO BSL-4 labs. The Super H1N1 developed in Madison Wisconsin in 2013/14 by Yoshihiro Kawaoka was in a BSL-2-vetrinary lab. Studying the pathogen that causes SARS doesn’t require a BSL-4. Things in the nature of Ebola type pathogens do. Stop making this a political football and just TRY to understand the science.

Your political unrest in the US didn’t stop the rest of us from working and focusing. Trump had less to do with the vaccine than he’d lead you to believe. The effort was GLOBAL. AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKlien are in the UK. Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci were based in the German city of Mainz with Pfizer. (Turkish immigrants, mind you). The work in Oxford was agreed upon that it would be all for free until the pandemic was over. No profit could be made on the vaccine they were working on.

I wasn’t going to call you out on it before, but perhaps it will be a learning opportunity. You claim the paper you were referring to about the UK oncologist and the Norwegian Virologist was a paper put out by Cambridge University, but that isn’t how that works. Universities like Cambridge and Oxford create data bases with links to publications of all sorts. They are varying degrees of respected publications and written by doctors and scientists from around the globe that may have nothing to do with Cambridge or Oxford. Some of those publications aren’t peer reviewed, but are ‘study papers’ where scientists can get their ideas out and start a conversation. They aren’t all published studies that have been audited and peer reviewed. The best of the papers come out in Nature or Nature Medicine. The paper you touted as ‘coming from Cambridge’ was from a NEW publication that has just been founded in 2016 and it’s published and edited out of Sweden. It was submitted to Nature Medicine and rejected.

There are two sides to this issue, one side is the virus and the other is all of us. Bearing that in mind it makes sense to establish how the virus originated and spread and it makes no sense to try to blame others. Even more important is for wealthy countries to support the vaccination of the Third World. This is required urgently to reduce human suffering and to make it less likely that a more dangerous mutation might emerge whether it be from Bhutan, Bangladesh or the Congo.

Interview posted by a Facebook friend. I thought jellies here would be interested. The following is all copied pasted:

Interesting points re actual reasons to look into lab-escapee theory re COVID19 virus. (Copied from Mercury-News/Bayareanewsgroup.

NewsHealthNews
COVID lab leak theory: Why Berkeley scientist wants answers
Scientists call for further investigation of virus origins

By John Woolfolk | jwoolfolk@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: June 6, 2021 at 7:00 a.m. | UPDATED: June 7, 2021 at 7:39 a.m.

Throughout much of the COVID-19 pandemic, health experts widely assumed the new coronavirus that has killed at least 3.7 million people worldwide got passed from an infected animal to humans, either in the animal’s natural environment or at a wildlife market.

Now they’re revisiting whether the virus known as SARS-CoV-2 that emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan might have leaked instead from a lab where researchers were studying such viruses, and potentially altering them in ways that could make them more contagious. China and many leading U.S. health experts have long dismissed that possibility — which was pushed early on by then-President Donald Trump — but there has been a shift among some researchers. Just last week the White House called for an independent investigation.

Rasmus Nielsen, a professor of integrative biology at the UC Berkeley, was among 18 researchers from respected universities around the world who in a May 14 article in Science called for the scientific community to explore the lab-leak theory. We asked him why this is suddenly gaining interest. His responses, which have been edited for length and clarity, reflect his personal opinions.

Q: A year ago, everyone said the virus surely came from wildlife, perhaps through a Chinese “wet market” selling fresh produce, seafood and meat near where the first cases originated. What has changed since?
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A: In some sense, not much has changed. I don’t think you’ll find many people who will say it’s impossible that it could have come from a lab. That was always on the radar screen. We don’t really know.

Q: After former President Donald Trump said as early as April 2020 that he believed the virus leaked from a Chinese lab, why did so many scientists argue otherwise?

A: When Trump came out and said it came from a lab and there was no publicly available evidence, that politicized it. It became much more difficult for scientists to come out and talk about it.

Q: After a World Health Organization research team put out a report in March deeming a lab leak unlikely but not ruling it out, why were scientists unsatisfied?

A: The WHO report did not include an investigation of the lab leak hypothesis — it was not part of the mandate and the report dismissed this hypothesis without any real data. Also, it did not do many of the standard analyses you would do to find the source of a new epidemic, including detailed contact tracing of the first individuals infected.
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Q: Has anything new been learned this year that raises the possibility of a laboratory accident?

A: We know much more about what was going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They were growing viruses on human cells, adding in elements of another virus, training viruses on human cells to see which ones are most infectious. When you’re doing that, you risk making viruses that are more infectious.

Q: Is there evidence the COVID-19 virus was manipulated in a laboratory rather than simply a naturally evolved pathogen?

A: There’s not the scientific evidence one way or another. There’s nothing in the DNA sequence that’s a smoking gun. The sequence of SARS-CoV-2 is consistent with evolution in the natural world.

Q: What about conflicting reports of the Wuhan lab manipulating coronaviruses with “gain-of-function” methods, in essence intentionally making the viruses more virulent, which they deny?

A: In some sense, it’s a matter of semantics. Technically there’s no evidence of gain-of-function research, but there is evidence of genetic manipulation of coronaviruses in labs. They have published papers that showed they are working on chimeric (man-made) viruses.

Creating a chimeric virus may not be a gain-of-function experiment. You don’t necessarily purposefully insert something into virus that you know will make it more efficient or infectious. You might simply mimic the natural way natural viruses recombine with each other.

Q Would it be hard to tell from the virus’s genetic sequence whether it was a chimera?

A Yes, that is right. Some ways of doing this work would leave no clear traces in the DNA (RNA) sequence.

Q: Why do that kind of work?

A: The reason you do this kind of research is you want to know what viruses are out there that can cause an epidemic. To answer that, you need to grow them on human cells. So when this research is being done, it’s not just by crazy scientists doing mad experiments. It’s to be prepared for the next epidemic. That’s going on all over the place. But it should be done under conditions that are safe.

Q: Was the Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory, a biosecurity level 2 out of 4, safe for that work?

A: I personally think that safety level is too low for that kind of research. It should be done in a BSL-3 or BSL-4 lab. The fact that it was being done in a BSL-2 is a worry.

Q: The COVID-19 virus hasn’t been found in animals. Does that suggest a lab leak?

A: We haven’t found such a thing for SARS-CoV-2, that’s right. But that in itself doesn’t prove anything. There are viruses we still don’t know where they came from. We never figured out where Ebola came from. There have been many lab leaks through time. SARS-1 escaped from a lab five times. But what’s never happened before is a new virus from a lab leaking.

Q: Does the speed at which COVID-19 vaccines were developed change the view of the benefit of this virus research?

A: The wonderful, fantastic thing is we have RNA vaccines. All you need is the genome of the virus. That’s also an argument that you don’t need research on these viruses. You can make a vaccine really, really fast without having that research in advance.
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Q: Would the world and the scientific community have handled the virus differently if we knew from the start that it was manipulated and leaked out of a laboratory?

A: I think that would all be the same.

Q: Why is it important to find the answer to its origins?

A: The reason we need to know is to prevent COVID-23 and COVID-26 and COVID-29. In order to do that, we need to know how does it start. We want to know exactly how this transmission happened.

Because China was working on the virus in the first place.

A couple of liberals discussing the science.

Yeah, Jon Stewart is a satirist, not a virologist…. Maybe that’s over your head? THIS was a bit.

@sorry It could be why trump fans thought he should be President. He was entertaining therefore had the makings of a glorious leader!

@mazingerz88 perhaps you have it in one: Folks who are totally incapable of recognising they’re being taken for a ride.

Also,... PLEASE, read all of my replies here.

I didn’t say anything about those men being specialists. I just thought somebody besides me would find it amusing.
Not everything has to have combatant force.

@sorry I never knew Jon Stewart was a Satanist!

Okay, here is my non satirical answer… $10T restitution.

@Yellowdog I guess you don’t know the difference between a satirist and a Satanist?

@sorry You wouldn’t know the difference either if you had bad eyesight and a small screen to work with, as I do : )