355 replies to this topic

[Dorian Grey]

I could forgive the old guy for sticking to pharmaceutical protocol, if it was not for the fact he'd been through this before with AIDS.  Front line doctors were saying Bactrim prophylaxis in high risk AIDS patients was very helpful in preventing PPC pneumonia.  Fauci said no one should be using this until it had been scientifically proven, while at the same time talking up his highly toxic and ineffective AZT therapeutic.  Sound familiar?  

 

https://www.huffpost...story_b_4762295

 

Whitewashing AIDS History

 

"Dr. Anthony Fauci is rewriting history. He is doing so to disguise his shameful role in delaying promotion of an AIDS treatment that would have prevented tens of thousands of deaths in the first years of the epidemic."

 

"In 1987, pioneering AIDS activist Michael Callen begged Fauci for help in promoting the use of Bactrim as PCP prophylaxis and issuing interim guidelines urging physicians to prophylax those patients deemed at high risk for PCP."

 

"Whether Fauci personally had this authority or not isn't the point. His excuse would be laughable if it wasn't so tragic; he was constantly traveling and speaking to the media and opining about everything related to AIDS research and treatment"

 

"Had Fauci listened to people with AIDS and the clinicians treating them, and responded accordingly, he would have saved thousands of lives. In the two years between 1987, when Callen met with Fauci and 1989, when the guidelines were ultimately issued, nearly 17,000 people with AIDS suffocated from PCP. Most of these people might have lived had Fauci responded appropriately."

 

"Fauci refused to acknowledge the evidence and, according to one account, even encouraged people with AIDS to stop taking treatments, like Bactrim, that weren't specifically approved for use in people with AIDS."

 

"Fauci's close colleague, Dr. Samuel Broder, who was head of the National Cancer Institute, even suggested -- in the absence of any evidence at all -- that the newly introduced antiretroviral, AZT, would make prophylaxis against PCP redundant!"

[Mind]

Fauci also pushed the idea of an AIDS vaccine over any other type of treatment.

 

https://pubmed.ncbi....h.gov/11363792/

 

Sound familiar?

 

Who knows how many AIDS patients died while treatments were being shunned by Fauci. Is the same thing happening now?

[bladedmind]

Nice.

 

Comer, Scalise, Jordan Call on Scientists Who Privately Supported Lab Leak Theory to Provide Answers Under Oath

 

To:

 

     Dr. Kristian Andersen, Professor, Department of Immunology and Microbiology, Scripps Research

    Dr. Jeremy Farrar, Director, Wellcome

    Dr. Michael Farzan, Professor, Department of Immunology and Microbiology, Scripps Research

    Dr. Robert Garry, Professor, School of Medicine, Tulane University

    Dr. Edward Holmes, Professor, Sydney Medical School, University of Sydney

    Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, Director, Center for Infection and Immunity, Columbia University

    Dr. Andrew Rambaut, Professor, School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh

 

“We are conducting oversight of the U.S. government’s response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and specifically apparent conflicts of interest, suppression of scientific discourse, and abuse of official government resources. Documents in the custody of the National Institutes of Health reveal how a group of scientists—including you—initially believed COVID-19 to be man-made before reversing course and claiming otherwise following discussions with senior government health officials. This sequence of events suggests a possible coordinated effort to conceal evidence pointing to a lab leak in Wuhan, China, and make your cooperation vital to our investigation. To restore public confidence in the scientific process regarding the origins of COVID-19, it is imperative you provide answers under oath about what, if any, underlying science changed in a matter of days after meeting with top government health officials."

 

 

 

[Mind]

People are keeping track of all of the people who claimed the lab-leak theory was a whack-job conspiracy.

[Daniel Cooper]

The video in your link above would be absolutely hilarious if it did not represent a organized squashing of real scientific debate on a critical issue of world wide importance.

 

https://youtu.be/zl-X-Lgrlf0

 

The way that people who suggested that the virus might have been man made were silenced and scrubbed from social media was an absolutely shameful episode by societies that once welcomed free and open debate.

 

We should all remember this the next time we're told to trust some scientific authority purely on their lofty credentials.

 

 

Edited by Daniel Cooper, 07 February 2022 - 02:02 PM.

[bladedmind]

Daniel Cooper, I'm old and jaded, but watching that video left me feeling cold and miserable.  The intellectual, moral, and probably material corruption that enabled that propaganda campaign is disgusting and shameful.  I recommend the video to everyone, even if you already know its theme, as a stern and necessary lesson.   There is plainly a risk of a soft-authoritarian crackdown. 

 

It's distressing to see I guess young people who think that if the government or news media says something, it's true.  More often than not it is true, and more often than not people you meet are trustworthy, but there are many huge exceptions when power and money are involved!     I rarely look at "fact checks," but when I do they often read like they were written by a high school student.   Latest example, a fact check of the claim that the Defense Department medical data base shows a  high level of adverse vaccine effects.  False!   The Defense Department (without even an  explanation) said that the 2016-2020 baseline was (grossly) under-reported while the 2021 comparison year somehow was not.   For the fact-checker, the Defense Department saying something MAKES it true.  If the fact-checker had reported that the Defense Department claimed that their data base was mistaken, his reporting would have been correct but inconclusive.

 

Maybe people aren't taught history like they used to be?  I could list from memory a 100 instances of major corruption.  In the mid-1930s the Nye Committee In the Senate investigated war profiteers who helped start WWI and corruptly enriched themselves.  In the mid-1970s the Church Committee exposed hundreds of lies, murders, and outrages perpetrated by the CIA.   And today defense contractors and CIA are accepted as credible and progressive.  I'm glad that there is an anti-authoritarian tradition in this country even if, like any broad movement, it can contain some people with simplistic views. 

[Daniel Cooper]

Yes, it is very disappointing to see where the West has gone in recent decades.

 

I've noticed an unusually high deference to authority in the last 20 years or so. You even see it here on this forum. Fauci or Daszek says that the virus didn't come from a lab, and we're supposed to believe them because these guys have the right degrees and the government only employs the "best and brightest" (honestly that has been argued right here in the covid forums).

 

Those guys never made a scientific argument as as to why this virus could not have come out of a lab. They only labeled the suggestion as "xenophobic" (what a fun word!) and a "conspiracy theory" only held by "kooks". That's not how you're supposed to work your way towards the truth on an issue of science.

 

And of course, the idea that the "best and brightest" routinely end up in the employ of government is laughable to anyone that has dealt with the bureaucrats that populate nearly all governments (and make no mistake - Anthony Fauci is far more of a bureaucrat than he is a scientist).

 

Since the advent of social media the US and the West in general has become far more conformist than at any moment in my lifetime. Which makes sense since one of the main things that social media does is punish non-conformity. That's what the cancel culture is.

 

 

Edited by Daniel Cooper, 07 February 2022 - 07:12 PM.

[Mind]

What is amazing about the video is how most US news organizations (NPR was probably the worst), went on the offensive to not only say "the lab leak is a false theory" but to denigrate anyone who asked questions about it.

 

I work in media. True story hear about how slavish devotion to authority is ruining the media and the nation.

 

We had a meeting once about accuracy in reporting. It was emphasized to use official sources at all times, like the police, the FDA, the DNR, etc... I jumped into the discussion and asked about the times when the police lie to us.

 

......

 

crickets

 

.......

 

None of the news people in the room said anything. It was a weird silence for a long time.

 

I had to jump in and say that yes, "official sources" do lie sometimes and we should have methods for getting to the truth.

[Mind]

Another review of the lab-leak claim. It looks increasingly likely that it was a lab leak, contrary to what Dr. Fauci and the fact-checkers claimed.

[Daniel Cooper]

The thing that really started to change my feelings on the lab leak theory is the fact that Fauci obviously fears that it escaped from WIV.

 

How so? Well, look at the way he keeps sequentially narrowing the definition of "gain of function". The definition is obvious - if you add a function to a virus that enhances it's ability to infect (in this case human) cells, the virus has "gained a function" and you are doing "gain of function" research.  But Fauci keeps trimming away at what is an otherwise pretty obvious definition. Suddenly it's only gain of function if one or both of the viruses are notably lethal. Never mind that you can clearly construct a lethal virus from the components of two or more non-lethal viruses. And what does the stipulation of lethality have to do with whether you are adding functions to increase the infectiousness of a virus? In fact, sometimes you can not anticipate how a new function might enhance a virus's lethality. Biological systems are complex and the ramifications of some changes are not always obvious.

 

Why would Dr. Fauci do this? Because he was for years an outspoken advocate of gain of function research even with the stipulation that he supported it even if it resulted in a pandemic. And he was also clearly funding gain of function research at the WIV through Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance, in violation of then existent law.

 

Almost all of Fauci's advisers were telling him that parts of the virus looked engineered - at which point he says "let's stop this discussion through email and discuss on a call". What was said during that call we do not know. We only know that mere days later all of his advisers that were saying that covid-19 looked engineered suddenly published an article in Nature saying that the virus evolved naturally. Perhaps the millions upon millions of research dollars controlled by Dr. Fauci and the NIAID has some sway in that change of heart.

 

One conclusion from all of this is clear - not only do we suspect that covid-19 might have escaped from the WIV, clearly Dr. Anthony Fauci does as well. His behavior betrays him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Daniel Cooper]

Another review of the lab-leak claim. It looks increasingly likely that it was a lab leak, contrary to what Dr. Fauci and the fact-checkers claimed.

 

That is a very high quality article and worth a read by everyone.

[bladedmind]

Almost all of Fauci's advisers were telling him that parts of the virus looked engineered - at which point he says "let's stop this discussion through email and discuss on a call". What was said during that call we do not know. We only know that mere days later all of his advisers that were saying that covid-19 looked engineered suddenly published an article in Nature saying that the virus evolved naturally. Perhaps the millions upon millions of research dollars controlled by Dr. Fauci and the NIAID has some sway in that change of heart.

 

Here are my guesses about what Tony said in that meeting. 

• NIH says, billions in virology research would be stigmatized and defunded.
• Defense says, Americans would call for war on China. 
• State says, we need China’s cooperation on mitigating the virus and on other issues. 
• CIA says, we can’t let domestic or international audiences find out that EHA was spying on WIV.
• Tony says, you know where your grants came from and will come from.
• Tony adds, call them racists and conspiracy theorists, that always works. 

Farrar at Wellcome Trust in UK, Fauci’s co-conspirator, wrote:

 

In those weeks, I became exhausted and scared. I felt as if I was living a different person’s life. During that period, I would do things I had never done before: acquire a burner phone, hold clandestine meetings, keep difficult secrets. I would have surreal conversations with my wife, Christiane, who persuaded me we should let the people closest to us know what was going on. I phoned my brother and best friend to give them my temporary number. In hushed conversations, I sketched out the possibility of a looming global health crisis that had the potential to be read as bioterrorism.

[Mind]

Just more evidence that it was a lab leak, which was the solid consensus from the beginning, until Fauci, Collins, and the Facebook/Google "fact checkers" started deceiving the world.

[sensei]

How do you explain documented infections (antibodies in dated samples) in ITALY in SEPTEMBER 2019.

https://www.google.c...p/idUSKBN27W1J2

[Daniel Cooper]

How do you explain documented infections (antibodies in dated samples) in ITALY in SEPTEMBER 2019.

https://www.google.c...p/idUSKBN27W1J2

 

That article is from back in the fall of 2020.  I remember it when it was published.

 

I don't know whether it has been refuted or confirmed. I do know that it didn't appear to get any traction which tends to make me think it was not widely accepted.

 

Parts of it don't make a lot of sense. If 12% of healthy volunteers in lung cancer screens were infected with covid-19 - why weren't they seeing lots of severe illness and deaths? By the time you saw 12% of the general population infected with covid in the rest of the world, they were seeing a major and unmistakable impact in their hospitals. Keep in mind that the positivity rates for covid tests early in the pandemic for people showing symptoms was normally around 5%. 

 

So, was the testing in Italy accurate? That is the question. It possibly was not since it was done some time prior to November 2020 when that paper was published, which was still relatively early days in covid testing. If it was accurate it seems like there are two possibilities:

 

1.) Genomic regression puts the epicenter of the infection in Wuhan. If it actually originated in Italy, then you have to suppose that some early seed cases escaped Italy and landed in Wuhan, but no other infections from Italy propagated to the rest of the world. That is to say the least unlikely.

 

2.) The other possibility is that Wuhan had cases earlier than China has reported, and the earliest escapes from Wuhan landed in Italy, and then further cases escaped from Wuhan to the wider world a few months later.

 

It is certainly the case that China lied about when they saw the first covid cases in Wuhan (first week in December), but frankly I don't find either of the above possibilities all that compelling. 

[sensei]

I don't know the answers to your questions why don't you research it.

But what I do know is that there are lots of coronavirus strains and it is highly mutating as evidenced by the covid strains that have been identified since 2020.


There are literally over 100 variants identified since 2020.


https://cov-lineages...neage_list.html

It makes much more sense that it was a natural mutation that ended up being more communicable.

We have evidence that a very quick mutation can code for an even more communicable disease as seen by the difference between the initial strain Delta and Omicron.

We also see vastly different severity across variants. Out of the over 100 IDENTIFIED VARIANTS, only SEVEN are deemed of concern or of interest.

Edited by sensei, 14 February 2022 - 04:04 PM.

[sensei]

Here is a paper that identifies mutations occurring LOCALLY INSIDE QATAR.

https://www.frontier...021.768883/full

It shows the emergence of lineages seen elsewhere that the study authors identify as ALSO OCCURRING LOCALLY INSIDE QUATAR.

Geographically separate simultaneous viral mutations are well documented in other viruses, specifically HIV.

In fact, researchers can predict the mutations that will happen to the HIV virus based on what anti-virals are used.

Like I said, Occam's Razor.

Edited by sensei, 14 February 2022 - 04:15 PM.

[sensei]

SARS was a novel emergence, MERS was a novel emergence.

So, we have TWO PRECEDENTS of ZOONOTIC novel viral emergence of CORONAVIRUSES, yet COVID is manmade.

Pull the other one.

[Daniel Cooper]

Here is a paper that identifies mutations occurring LOCALLY INSIDE QATAR.

https://www.frontier...021.768883/full

It shows the emergence of lineages seen elsewhere that the study authors identify as ALSO OCCURRING LOCALLY INSIDE QUATAR.

Geographically separate simultaneous viral mutations are well documented in other viruses, specifically HIV.

In fact, researchers can predict the mutations that will happen to the HIV virus based on what anti-virals are used.

Like I said, Occam's Razor.

 

Ok, but what does that have to do with the Italian paper?

 

They said that 12% of a random sample had covid antibodies. Yet, they didn't see any notable increase in hospitalizations (certainly nothing anyone noticed at the time). They did say they went back and looked and saw a bump in pneumonia cases, but they only found that retrospectively, and it seems like it was minor.  I would think if 12% of your population had covid .... you'd know about it - not have to look back retrospectively.

 

And yes, if you use a vaccine that targets one specific viral site (like the covid vaccines and spike protein) or some anti-viral that exploits some specific mechanism of the virus you can predict you will have mutation in those areas (actually you have mutations all the time everywhere - it's just that vaccines and anti-virals put specific selection pressures for certain mutations into play).

 

You're going to have to spell it out for me - what do you think Occam's Razor is telling you, because it's not obvious to me.

[Mind]

NIH continues to stonewall the release of documents regarding the funding of the creation of SARS-Cov2. Sure looks like they are still trying to hide the origins.

[sensei]

Ok, but what does that have to do with the Italian paper?

They said that 12% of a random sample had covid antibodies. Yet, they didn't see any notable increase in hospitalizations (certainly nothing anyone noticed at the time). They did say they went back and looked and saw a bump in pneumonia cases, but they only found that retrospectively, and it seems like it was minor. I would think if 12% of your population had covid .... you'd know about it - not have to look back retrospectively.

And yes, if you use a vaccine that targets one specific viral site (like the covid vaccines and spike protein) or some anti-viral that exploits some specific mechanism of the virus you can predict you will have mutation in those areas (actually you have mutations all the time everywhere - it's just that vaccines and anti-virals put specific selection pressures for certain mutations into play).

You're going to have to spell it out for me - what do you think Occam's Razor is telling you, because it's not obvious to me.

That has to do with the likelihood that it was a common emergence across the world. What caused it? who knows, maybe the pyeongchang 2018 Olympics.

As far as Occam's razor is concerned, you have multiple natural emergences, and the paper from Qatar identifies multiple mutations and lineages that happened inside Qatar but are also identified as happening other places around the world during the pandemic.


Occam's razor implies that if it happened before naturally, and it continues to happen naturally it is more likely then not that covid-19 was a natural occurrence and could easily have naturally occurred in multiple places.

Edited by sensei, 14 February 2022 - 07:25 PM.

[Daniel Cooper]

Are you suggesting that covid-19 emerged de novo at multiple locations separated by thousands of miles more or less simultaneously?

 

 

 

 

[aribadabar]

SARS was a novel emergence, MERS was a novel emergence.

So, we have TWO PRECEDENTS of ZOONOTIC novel viral emergence of CORONAVIRUSES, yet COVID is manmade.

Pull the other one.

 

Of course it is manmade. Explain furin cleavage site otherwise.

Edited by aribadabar, 15 February 2022 - 03:40 AM.

[sensei]

Are you suggesting that covid-19 emerged de novo at multiple locations separated by thousands of miles more or less simultaneously?

That's EXACTLY WHAT IM STATING, NOT IMPLYING.

It happened with HIV, a de novo mutation of SIV that apparently happened in geographically separate areas of Africa more or less around the dame time but with 2 different tropes. One is cxcr4 tropic and one is cxcr5 tropic.

If it happened once it's likely to happen again

[sensei]

Of course it is manmade. Explain furin cleavage site otherwise.

" Furin cleavage sites naturally occur in coronaviruses"

https://www.scienced...873506120304165

That was easy.

[aribadabar]

" Furin cleavage sites naturally occur in coronaviruses"

https://www.scienced...873506120304165

That was easy.

 

And to paraphrase Galileo: And yet it is manmade.

[Daniel Cooper]

That's EXACTLY WHAT IM STATING, NOT IMPLYING.

It happened with HIV, a de novo mutation of SIV that apparently happened in geographically separate areas of Africa more or less around the dame time but with 2 different tropes. One is cxcr4 tropic and one is cxcr5 tropic.

If it happened once it's likely to happen again

 

If you're saying that a bat coronavirus which which only exists in certain limited geographic locations suddenly acquired the same mutations at the same time at multiple points across the global (most of which don't even have the specific progenitor coronavirus) you are stacking multiple very unlikely coincidences in terms of both time and space. Whatever one would call the opposite of Occam's razor ... this is it.

 

This is not the way zooniotic viruses make the jump from animal to man. They don't just acquire the needed mutation to infect humans due to random chance. Normally some zoonotic virus will have some extremely limited ability to infect man. They might successfully infect a human cell every thousand or million attempts. The way the jump normally happens in nature is that someone receives a massively large initial infectious dose. In this case, think of a human that falls into a pit of bat guano.  That poor person gets an overwhelming exposure to the virus and it starts to multiply (but slowly because it's not very good at infecting humans - that's why you normally need a large initial dose) and of course mutating while doing so. Now it is in an environment where there are selective pressures where those mutations which increase the ability of the virus to infect human cells are preferred because the virus is actually in a human host. In a rare instance, a highly advantageous mutation will occur in this patient zero which significantly enhances the ability to infect humans and this virus will then jump from that host into another human host. At this point we now have a virus that is capable of human to human transmission. 

 

This doesn't happen very often, otherwise we'd be acquiring new viruses all the time. Think of your own examples - you brought up three or four viruses that made the jump in a couple of decades.  What you are suggesting is that this would occur at multiple locations widely spread around the globe at the same time.  This would be like winning the lottery while getting struck by lighting while watching a room full of monkey's randomly typing out the text of Hamlet.

 

There simply is no way to synchronize these events across time and space as you propose. If you know the environment and selective pressures on a virus you might make an educated guess as to what mutations might occur, but these are random processes. You can't say - "I project that this virus will acquire a furin cleavage site at 2:00 pm next Tuesday". You can't even make these predictions to month, year, or decade. There's just no way that you'll get the same mutation of the same virus at different points across the globe at what amounts to the same time (say within a month or two). Not going to happen.

 

The simplest answer (you know that Occam thing) is that the virus made the jump from beast to man once and then got spread around the globe. There is no explanation simpler than that. The only issue is whether it was a natural jump or was it a jump that was the result of gene editing or did someone take a bat virus and run it through a few generations of humanized mice (either of which can result in a new virus capable of infecting man).

 

Occam's Razor argues in favor of that explanation, not yours.

[sensei]

Spontaneous Coronavirus mutations have arisen worldwide that are extremely similar in humans.

Identical Geographically separated (isolated from eachother) mutations in the COVID virus have occurred during the pandemic.

Coronaviridae are endemic in BATS WORLDWIDE.

It is reasonable to assume the repetition of previously observed viral processes.

It is more reasonable to assume natural processes are responsible than to assume human action.

I see you ignore the FACT to that your "cleavage boogeyman" is actually a common natural occurrence in coronaviruses.

[Advocatus Diaboli]

Re post #175

 

"That was easy."

 

The authors of the study Yiran Wu ( iHuman Institute, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai 201210, China) and Suwen Zhao (School of Life Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai 201210, China).

 

Make an important point in their conclusion:

 

"4. Conclusion

Furin cleavage sites in spike proteins naturally occurred independently for multiple times in coronaviruses. Such feature of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is not necessarily a product of manual intervention, though our observation does not rule out the lab-engineered scenario." (my emphasis)

 

 

 

Edited by Advocatus Diaboli, 15 February 2022 - 10:11 PM.

[Daniel Cooper]

Spontaneous Coronavirus mutations have arisen worldwide that are extremely similar in humans.

Identical Geographically separated (isolated from eachother) mutations in the COVID virus have occurred during the pandemic.

Coronaviridae are endemic in BATS WORLDWIDE.

It is reasonable to assume the repetition of previously observed viral processes.

It is more reasonable to assume natural processes are responsible than to assume human action.

I see you ignore the FACT to that your "cleavage boogeyman" is actually a common natural occurrence in coronaviruses.

 

And you don't seem to appreciate that you're asking that a very rare 1 in a million event happens not one, not twice, but multiple times near simultaneously.  

 

And yes, coronaviruses are endemic in bats worldwide. But your theory requires that you start with the same virus (meaning the same coronavirus - there are many different bat coronaviruses - and the same variant) in all these geographically disperse locations otherwise you don't end up with the same end virus. And you're not going to find the same virus to be a progenitor in all those different regions.

 

You're stacking events which are themselves unlikely which makes your theory even more unlikely.

 

I mean, that's a theory ... but it has absolutely nothing to do with Occam's Razor.

 

 

Edited by Daniel Cooper, 16 February 2022 - 04:42 PM.