Why has the lab leak theory come back now?
That’s complicated. The overt hostility of the Trump administration to China, and the way it pushed the lab leak claims, including a dodgy dossier that was doing the rounds last year, made it a pretty tainted source.The advent of a Biden administration, which is less hostile to China, combined with the limitations in the WHO investigation, created an environment where some have felt able to ask questions about Covid-19’s origins without appearing to buy into Trump-era conspiracies.
Jeez people…..
Just the sort of bullshit you’d expect from The Guardian.
If they didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards at all.
Well… it’s the Guardian..
Read it carefully, guys.
The Grauniad admits there’s no new evidence (publishing an old story in WSJ is not new evidence) and all that has changed is the name of POTUS – which allows lefty papers to actually think whether the CIA could be right for once. They are tacitly admitting that it was only their bigotry that led them to reject the lab-escape theory previously. Anything reported by the Trump administration was “tainted” which gave lefties an excuse to ignore facts staring them in the face, let alone a theory which needs a scientist to explain it to them.
Tax revenues are up as global multinationals can’t park money offshore any more…
But!! Orange Man Bad!!!!
The next stage will be to blame Trump for lifting the gain of function pause in 2017
https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statements/nih-lifts-funding-pause-gain-function-research
3,2,1..”It was Trump’s fault, he signed off on the research”
@Ken. Except that nothing in that document, and the quoted underlying policy decisions gives the impression that research would be done anywhere else but the in US, and possibly with US-friendly partners.
If you put “we do this in China” ( or Russia, Iran, North Korea…) into “other considerations” and run it past the departments who should have been evaluating the proposals as a new project, you should have gotten a big, fat “are you mental?!!” back in 2017.
Note that the DoD and 3-letters needed to review any proposal as well…
If Trump literally signed off on the go-ahead, it would have been on a list of Approved Projects with all green checkmarks/stamps by departments that should have noticed the location of the research. Especially the ones who are supposed to be Professionally Paranoid…
Last time I checked, the Brits don’t blame the Queen for signing off on anything done that way. She’s supposed to. As is basically any other head of state/chief CEO anywhere.
Trump is no different, and while I’m definitely not one of his fans, no-one can pin this on him in this way.
Not that it will stop the Orange Man Bad crowd from trying…
But honestly.. The sheer amount of Fail ( or deliberate misdirection. Pick Your Poison..) at the base of the whole decision chain is… staggering..
Which, at least to me, is more worrying than the possibility that a Nasty escaped some lab and is doing a Grand Tour of the World.
“Tax revenues are up as global multinationals can’t park money offshore any more…”
Its more that they don’t want to, rather than can’t……..its still perfectly possible for them to do it but why bother when the tax rate at home is as low as (or close to) the one abroad?
It is amazing, utterly amazing, that a question of such immense importance can be credible or a conspiracy theory simply because of personal animus towards the president of one country.
We are truly fucked with such spiteful children in charge.
When do they get around to ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and the propaganda used to suppress them? To the utter useless of the PCR test used as an adjustable rheostat to ramp up or down the number of”cases” not ill people? To the fortunes made out of patents held by the NIH and vaccine manufacturers? To the adverse events underreported and underinvestigated , caused by those experimental drugs? We need a Nuremberg Trial, not just for the complicit medical fraternity, the power grabbing politicians, but also for their propagandistshappy to manufacture any smear that could be used against Trump or anyone asking questions.
What Ljh said.
Plus, to repeat an earlier comment, If a lab is known to be working on viruses obtained from bats living a thousand miles away and there is an outbreak of disease caused by similar viruses outside the lab only an insane conspiracy theorist could have suspected a connection. It obviously moved from infecting bats to infecting humans naturally, and then made its way the thousand miles to the lab without affecting anyone on the way.
So the media are finally admitting that they lied about stuff that was quite important to the American people simply to avoid making President Trump look good? Ok, they really are the ‘Enemies of the People’ that he said they were.
Actually, I’m not surprised at this at all, given that Pfizer delayed announcing the effectiveness of their covid vaccine until the week after the November 2020 election for, probably, the same reason:
I’m not easily shockable, but I found it eyebrow-raising to discover that the November Surprise, Monday’s announcement by the Pfizer-BioNTech team that their new vaccine was spectacularly effective (over 90 percent), likely could have been made a week earlier, which would have given Trump a late October Surprise.
https://www.takimag.com/article/the-new-normal-by-any-means-necessary/
@ Jonathan
The responsibility of the directors of Pfizer is to their shareholders, not to an uber-narcissist who was notorious for screwing the banks when any of his over-geared investments went phut!
In view of the observed vindictiveness of the left-wing press/media in the USA, I do not find the behaviour of Pfizer at all eyebrow-raising. If early publication *did* make any difference to the election result (which I doubt) the impact on Pfizer would dwarf the anti-AstraZeneca campaign launched by the EU-philes. If it didn’t they would still suffer some of the opprobrium for helping Trump with no benefit whatsoever.
Wasn’t it more the case of the American establishment delaying the release of information than Pfizer directly.
The extent to which the bureaucracy worked against the elected President is the scary bit.
Just look at the voting record for Washington DC in the last election, overwhelmingly Biden
@BniC
DC is majority black and divided between the very poor and the very rich. Most Federal employees live in the surrounding states and commute in.
The demographics of DC explain why they re-elected Marion Barry – despite his criminality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Barry#1990_arrest_and_drug_conviction
And this is not fake news based on a political agenda…how?
BniC said:
“Just look at the voting record for Washington DC in the last election, overwhelmingly Biden”
The Federal government workers tend to live in Virginia; DC is mostly poor blacks. But your point still holds because Virginia voting patterns basically get more Democrat the further you get into the DC commuter belt.
Colour me unsurprised. People paid by the gummint vote for parties that propose moah gummint. How many UK public sector employees voted Conservative, do you reckon?
It’s like they’re saying, “Can you really blame us for getting it wrong?”
Yes, yes we can.
It’s also about the fetishization of “scientific opinion”. Seen in the great “climate consensus” and the bizarre way in which a letter and a single article were used to give the imprimatur of certainty to something that is difficult to assess in this case. And ignoring the potential conflict of interest of one of the organizers of the letter. (A problem common to the wretched climate panic.)