NYT: We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

[ataraxia]

Because Biden wanted to punish them?

He certainly refused to send aid to states that didn't vote for him.

Or maybe because they lived in New York and Gov. Cuomo fed them hydroxycholoquine fish tank cleaner?

Or maybe they just trusted that Biden had things under control and "the worst days were behind us." Or whatever.

Hard to tell with those people, isn't it?

No. Actually the reasons were looked into carefully. They found that the reasons were their paranoid conspiracy mindedness, rampant misinformation, and skepticism of recommendations from doctors. WHO woulda thought?

"We discuss several mechanisms explaining why, to some extent universally, conservatives (the right-wing oriented public) were less likely to follow public health recommendations, were more COVID-19 vaccine-hesitant, and had increased infection rates, poorer health outcomes, and increased mortality compared to left-wing oriented public. The mechanisms explaining the links include the media, trust, cognitions, and values. We conclude the chapter with lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic and future research directions on the pandemics' politicization."

Politicization of COVID-19 health-protective behaviors in the United States: Longitudinal and cross-national evidence - PMC

During the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. conservative politicians and the media downplayed the risk of both contracting COVID-19 and the effectiveness of recommended health behaviors. Health behavior theories suggest perceived ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9115435/

 

[Lursa]

The author adds, in the comments section of the article:

"The fact that such risky research is still being incentivized via prestigious publications is exactly why we can’t just ignore all this, however difficult it may be to have this conversation. The price for a mishap — so easily possible under such lax biosafety standards — would be paid for by the entire planet.

Nuclear scientists had to grapple with the horrific, destructive potential of the growing power of their discipline. The same applies to risky virology research — which is but a tiny part of the field."

Accidental lab leaks arent new and are preventable...there are effective standardized methods for handling different levels of dangerous microbes.

But human error never goes away. Nor do malicious acts. Same reason I dont support nuclear power. I do however support disease research, properly overseen and regulated.

 

[Hari Seldon]

Most of the deaths happened during Biden's leadership.

In fact, just Biden's first year killed more people than Trump's entire term.

But Trump could have, and should have, done better. For sure.

Yea it's all Bidens fault. DEI and LBGTQ as well.

 

[lynnwinslow]

You can't even lie good. I rarely have posted any Fox News links and I don't watch or read Fox News.

I just did a quick search, you reference FOX quite often in your comments.
So, who's posting lies?

That being said, I may have you confused with another conservative poster, the one who uses this "------" as his user name.

 

[j brown's body]

The fact is people were shunned, ridiculed, speech was outright banned for many things that have been proved to be factual.

And it appears that nothing is being done to assure this doesn't happen again.

 

[Lursa]

And it appears that nothing is being done to assure this doesn't happen again.

They might try to take things into their own hands to try and stop it.

I'm watching the local news and the footage of the way these deportees are being handled, harsh, humiliated, etc...and are basically being "disappeared." It's pretty inflammatory.​

​

Mango MAGAt magnet thinks he's pretty slick calling them terrorists in the US...there are still thousands of them S of the border and they arent laborers jumping the border, they can get in and out without a problem.​

​

Gangs and cartels are well known for getting revenge and "sending a message." MMM may be creating a whole new terrorist threat and one with a different agenda...not basic crime and drug/human trafficking for profit...but terrorism to avenge their compadres. "Because they can."​

 

[j brown's body]

They might try to take things into their own hands to try and stop it.

I'm watching the local news and the footage of the way these deportees are being handled, harsh, humiliated, etc...and are basically being "disappeared." It's pretty inflammatory.​

​

Mango MAGAt magnet thinks he's pretty slick calling them terrorists in the US...there are still thousands of them S of the border and they arent laborers jumping the border, they can get in and out without a problem.​

​

Gangs and cartels are well known for getting revenge and "sending a message." MMM may be creating a whole new terrorist threat and one with a different agenda...not basic crime and drug/human trafficking for profit...but terrorism to avenge their compadres. "Because they can."​

Are you suggesting that we might be better off if Trump focused on research reform instead of deporting people who cause us no harm whatsoever?

 

[Lursa]

Are you suggesting that we might be better off if Trump focused on research reform instead of deporting people who cause us no harm whatsoever?

 

[Threegoofs]

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world — no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission — it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

https://archive.ph/Ma183

Now they tell us, but most of us knew pretty quickly they were lying to us. People in power who lied to us need to be held responsible.

From the NYT article that I'm sure you didnt read -

It’s not hard to imagine how the attempt to squelch legitimate debate might have started. Some of the loudest proponents of the lab leak theory weren’t just earnestly making inquiries; they were acting in terrible faith, using the debate over pandemic origins to attack legitimate, beneficial science, to inflame public opinion, to get attention. For scientists and public health officials, circling the wagons and vilifying anyone who dared to dissent might have seemed like a reasonable defense strategy.

And from all your previous posts, we can see a person who, if not acting in terrible faith, is all to willing to fawn over and parrot those that are acting in bad faith.

 

[BirdinHand]

US
China
Russia
UK
France
Australia
Germany
Canada

All conduct or fund Gain of function research.

I’ve yet to see conclusive proof that is how COVID happened.

Is it a possibility? Yep.

Does that mean we stop doing GOF research? No.

 

[NOLA Dude]

Are you suggesting that we might be better off if Trump focused on research reform instead of deporting people who cause us no harm whatsoever?

Violent gangs like tren de aragua do us no harm whatsoever?

 

[NOLA Dude]

 

[NOLA Dude]

 

[NOLA Dude]

 

[ElChupacabra]

You seem more concerned with those people than the people in power that lied to us.

You seem more concerned with some of the people who supposedly lied though. Remember the person who thanked China for their transparency, who said everything was under control and cases would soon go down to zero, and who said the pandemic would disappear in April because of "warm weather"? Odd you never mention any of that.

 

[NOLA Dude]

You seem more concerned with some of the people who supposedly lied though. Remember the person who thanked China for their transparency, who said everything was under control and cases would soon go down to zero, and who said the pandemic would disappear in April because of "warm weather"? Odd you never mention any of that.

Supposedly lied? Do you know what thread you are in?

 

[multivita-man]

An opinion piece from the NYT. Not factual.

She's had her "opinions" called out by real scientists before and didn't have much to say about it in response. She's one of the reasons I stopped reading the Times.

 

[ElChupacabra]

The author points out that those who speculated that the virus came from lab leaks were considered to be "kooks and cranks," but goes on to affirm that some, in fact, were. And now they have a dangerous legitimacy that is apt to make things worse, not better.

"It’s not hard to imagine how the attempt to squelch legitimate debate might have started. Some of the loudest proponents of the lab leak theory weren’t just earnestly making inquiries; they were acting in terrible faith, using the debate over pandemic origins to attack legitimate, beneficial science, to inflame public opinion, to get attention. For scientists and public health officials, circling the wagons and vilifying anyone who dared to dissent might have seemed like a reasonable defense strategy.

That’s also why it might be tempting for those officials or the organizations they represent to avoid looking too closely at mistakes they made, at the ways that, while trying to do such a hard job, they might have withheld relevant information and even misled the public. Such self-scrutiny is especially uncomfortable now, as an unvaccinated child has died of measles and anti-vaccine nonsense is being pumped out by the top of the federal government. But a clumsy, misguided effort like this didn’t just fail; it backfired. These half-truths and strategic deceptions made it easier for people with the worst motives to appear trustworthy while discrediting important institutions where many earnestly labor in the public interest."

The problem when you have the "kooks and cranks" leading the charge is whatever theory they're pushing suffers a credibility problem from the start. The possibility of it being a lab leak was always present, as was it being zoonotic and spread between species. I think the mistake that was made in the media was completely dismissing it as if it wasn't possible due to concerns about backlash against Chinese here. Of course you had the US president calling it the "China virus" to make that even worse, so one can understand how the sentiment to keep pressure off Chinese here made sense.

 

[ElChupacabra]

Violent gangs like tren de aragua do us no harm whatsoever?

I'll bet MS-13 feels pretty bad no longer being the focus of everything wrong about immigration....

 

[NOLA Dude]

I'm surprised he hasn't deleted the post

 

[NOLA Dude]

Ding, ding, ding. We have a winner

 

[j brown's body]

Violent gangs like tren de aragua do us no harm whatsoever?

Covid killed 7 million people. How many deaths have gangs caused?

 

[NOLA Dude]

 

[Slartibartfast]

So there is conclusive proof that it was caused by a lab leak somewhere or is just people trying to spread misinformation about science again?

 

[NOLA Dude]