by Judith Curry
The concerning saga of the creation, enforcement and collapse of a ‘consensus’ on Covid-19 origins.
The Covid-19 virus first appeared in Wuhan, China, where there is a laboratory that conducts research on bat coronaviruses. However from the beginning, the possibility that this virus accidentally escaped from the lab was dismissed quite forcefully by prominent virologists.
The ‘consensus’ that Covid-19 had an entirely natural origin was established by two op-eds in early 2020 – The Lancet in February and Nature Medicine in March. The Lancet op-ed stated, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.”
In May 2021, science reporter Nicholas Wade published a lengthy article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists stating that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the Covid-19 virus had escaped from research that he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. Daszak had corralled other scientists with similar professional interests into making a declaration to the effect that anyone who mentions the obvious possibility that the pandemic might have a connection to the research in the Wuhan Lab could only be doing so with bad intentions.
The enormous gap between the actual state of knowledge in early 2020 and the confidence displayed in the two op-eds should have been obvious to anyone in the field of virology, or for that matter anyone with critical faculties. There were scientists from adjacent fields who said as much.
However, the pronouncements in these op-eds effectively shut down inquiry. The pre-emptive declaration of scientific consensus was highly successful in garnering media enforcement of public opinion. The so-called ‘fact checkers’ of PolitiFact used these op-eds to shut down any discussion of the lab leak hypothesis. Articles in the mainstream press repeatedly stated that a consensus of experts had ruled lab escape out of the question or extremely unlikely.
Invocation of ‘conspiracy theory’ has become a reflex for arresting criticism. Analysis by Matthew Crawford shows how the political environment caused the magic words ‘conspiracy theory’ to trigger a wider epistemic immune reaction in high-prestige opinion. Crawford provides the following political frame for these events. Since Donald Trump publicly floated the idea that Covid-19 may have had its origin in a Chinese lab, it became a point of conviction for all those who believe in science that such a hypothesis could only be a conspiracy theory, probably rooted in ‘Sinophobia’. The ‘conspiracy theory’ of the lab leak hypothesis has been juxtaposed with reporting on anti-Asian hate crimes, thereby subsuming an urgent scientific question to a Trump-era morality play.
Publication of Nicholas Wade’s story on May 2 triggered a cascade of defections. Crawford describes the defections as “not simply from a consensus that no longer holds, but from a fake consensus that is no longer enforceable.” On 14 May, 18 scientists signed a letter in the journal Science with the title “Investigate the origins of COVID-19”. In an interview with the New York Times, an organizer of the letter stated, “Anybody who’s making statements with a high level of certainty about this is just outstripping what’s possible to do with the available evidence.”
Politifact has just withdrawn its Wuhan-Lab theory ‘fact check.’ [link]
What is concerning about this episode is not so much that a consensus has been overturned, but that a fake consensus was so easily enforced for year. This occurred during a key period when understanding the origins of the virus had implications for how it could best be fought. Scientists who understood that there was a great deal of uncertainty surrounding the origins of the virus did not speak up. Probity came from knowledgeable individuals that were outside of the field of virology.
Matthew Crawford states, ” Regardless of how the question of the virus’s origins is ultimately decided, we need to understand how the political drama surrounding the science played out if we are to learn anything from this pandemic and reduce the likelihood of future ones.”
Research cartels and consensus enforcement
Crawford argues that the scientists who were signatories to the two letters may have been acting as a classic research cartel.
In 2004, Henry Bauer formulated the idea of research cartels and knowledge monopolies, in context of the institutionalization of science that becomes subordinate to corporate or government values.
A key element of knowledge monopolies and research cartels is stifling of skepticism, premature canonization of preferred hypotheses and consensus enforcement, in the interests of financial or political objectives. With the help of uncritical mass media, this effectively results in near censorship of minority views. Since corporate and government scientific organizations also control the funding of research, by denying funds for unorthodox work they function as research cartels as well as knowledge monopolies.
Wade notes that in today’s universities, challenging the consensus can be very costly. Careers can be destroyed for stepping out of line. Any virologist who challenges the community’s declared view risks having his next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency.
The IPCC and the ‘climate-industrial-government complex’ is a clear example of a knowledge monopoly and research cartel.
However, I don’t think that the fake consensus surrounding the Covid-19 origins reflects a research cartel. What I see is a group of scientists appealing to their own authority in protecting their personal interests. The question is why The Lancet and Nature Medicine published these op-eds. It is noted that Daszak had an obvious conflict of interest re the op-ed, but this conflict was not stated. Apparently there are no adverse consequences for not accurately stating your conflicts of interest in journal publications.
Daszak et al. presumably have some influence over which research gets funded, and this may have prevented other virologists with less influence from speaking out. However, the fact that these op-eds successfully defined a ‘consensus’ for a year has more to do with Trump derangement syndrome and the desire not to appear Sinophobic. The media is arguably the most culpable for a complete absence of vigorously investigative science journalism, prior to Wade’s article. Note that Wade’s article was published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and as far as I can tell has not been picked up by major media outlets.
What does all this mean for institutionalized climate science? Well the IPCC, along with supporting governments and industries, is much more entrenched as a knowledge monopoly and research cartel. But the Covid origins example illuminates the social, political and careerist motivations that are in play in attempts to prematurely canonize and enforce a scientific consensus.
In closing, a recent essay by Mike Hulme is insightful.
<begin quote>
Climategate was a controversy because it appeared that climate scientists were undermining the idea of a ‘well-ordered science’, or what Naomi Oreskes has written about as ‘the conditions necessary to reach a fair and open consensus’. We can discuss the extent to which this ‘appearance’ was real or manufactured, but my point is this: Climategate became a crisis because so much was being staked – by both ends of the political spectrum – on science providing the direction and justification for political action (or inaction). It was a crisis because of the undermining of the probity of the science upon which, it was believed or at least claimed, all sensible climate policy depended. Most notably, this included the prominent environmental commentator George Monbiot.
Climate skepticism has broader roots than this. Mistrust in science is always bound up with other things – politics, culture, ethics, the law. Skepticism often arises from observing how science and expert judgement is being mobilized in debates that are essential political – in other words, climate sceptics are suspicious about how the different interests and values of public actors concerning climate change are being resolved.
Skepticism therefore points to the problem of legitimation; it is the problem of how science – how experts – relate, or are perceived to relate, to democracy. The problem is one of when and how to “open up” public debate and when and how to “close it down”, to use Andy Stirling’s metaphor. And this requires us to recognize that how one ‘closes down’ depends on political culture: Russia, China, USA and Germany all do it very differently.
To stand in here, I use the case of climate scientist Michael Mann and his militarist vocabulary. The German theorist Carl von Clausewitz characterized war as “an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will.” This is not a good way to think about climate politics in a democracy. In wars there are winners and losers. Sides are taken and the solution is conquering and defeating the enemy.
As John Besley at Michigan State University asks, “Do we want people to see scientists as angry, embattled, frustrated people … or rather people who are doing [their] best to solve problems to make the world better?” The danger with the combative climate militancy espoused by Mann is that it ends up being a destructive form of advocacy.
<end quote>
Contrarians have espoused crap science and conspiracy theories. Including the Chinese government origins of COVID. Or at least a cover up. It’s not a great base to build on.
There are plenty of good reasons to suspect a Chinese cover up. I don’t have time to look it up now, but I seem to recall that there was misleading information put out in January 2020, for example that there was no evidence of human to human transmission. The head of WHO also has a conflict of interest regarding China as I recall.
The Director-General of WHO is one calling for a deeper investigation of the potential for lab releases. In principle – with the broad availability of powerful biotechnology – this is a problem for the broader society that will not go away. But in particular the available evidence favours a natural spillover of what evolved into the COVID-19 virus.
Your position strikes me as a variation on the Bart Simpson
argument “You can’t prove a thing because nobody saw me do it”. In this case, the Chinese government, aided and abetted by their supporters, have done their best to cover up the mess they created in their laboratory. Trotting out the Director-General of WHO is ridiculous, as he knows full well that his pious words mean absolutely nothing. This is the cold hard and painfully obvious truth. There is a conspiracy involved, but it emanates from the Chinese government and their supporters who turn a blind eye to the evil they have unleashed on the planet.
We should contrast the terms consensus with scientific paradigms – and evidence free conspiracy ideation with scientific scepticism. This may go some way to rescuing science from the morass of opinions of self appointed arbiters. Conspiracy ideation leaps to unsupported conclusions – scientific scepticism suspends judgement until the evidence is in. The evidence thus far favours – according to leading edge experts – an animal spillover.
‘Bats have been identified as the hosts of a series of important zoonotic viruses (for example, Nipah virus, Hendra virus and SARS-CoV), including coronaviruses with considerable genetic diversity.(3, 4) Of particular relevance with regard to COVID-19 are those coronaviruses that were found to be associated with the outbreaks in humans of SARS in 2002 and the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in 2013.(5) The causative virus of COVID-19 was rapidly isolated from patients and sequenced, with the results from China subsequently being shared and published in January 2020.(6) The findings showed that it was a positive-stranded RNA virus belonging to the Coronaviridae family (a subgroup B betacoronavirus) and was new to humans. In the early work, analysis of the genomic sequence of the new virus (SARS-CoV-2) showed high homology with that of the coronavirus that caused SARS in 2002-2004, namely SARS-CoV (another subgroup B betacoronavirus).(5) Over the next year extensive work globally on sequences and phylogeny followed and the results have been shared internationally and stored through the GISAID platform.’
David it was WHO itself that first made that statement: https://www.businessinsider.com/who-no-transmission-coronavirus-tweet-was-to-appease-china-guardian-2020-4
Dr. Tony and the CDC might have repeated it as they were following WHO’s lead.
dpy6629 posted: “….for example that there was no evidence of human to human transmission.”
So, where is the published evidence to confirm human to human transmission, contradicting the WHO’s early info?
The tweet from WHO on 14 Jan 2020:
https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152?s=20
Taiwan had officially notified the WHO of suspected human-to-human spread being reported on Dec 31, 2019. Taiwan saw it from online sources they monitored within China. The WHO ignored this.
https://www.cdc.gov.tw/En/Bulletin/Detail/PAD-lbwDHeN_bLa-viBOuw?typeid=158
Ron Graf: Taiwan had officially notified the WHO of suspected human-to-human spread being reported on Dec 31, 2019. Taiwan saw it from online sources they monitored within China.
Thank you for the link.
Dismissal an argument is not refutation. Covid-19 apparently came from bats. Coronavirus from bat feces was transported from caves 1000 miles distant from Wuhan to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Scientists in 2013 sent frozen samples to the Wuhan lab from a bat-infested former copper mine in southwest China; Shi, nicknamed “bat woman” for her expeditions in bat caves, described Covid-19 in a February 2020 paper, saying it was 96.2% similar to a coronavirus sample named RaTG13 obtained in Yunnan in 2013.
The virus was brought to the Wuhan lab for research purposes, the virus first appeared in humans in Wuhan province; research on the bat coronavirus in the U.S. (funded by NIH) was discontinued because of the perceived danger that it could too easily escape from the lab. That is not proof of origin but the principle of Occam’s Razor suggests the Wuhan lab as the most likely source. The bats did not fly 1000 miles to Wuhan. In early 2020, Dr. Fauci (whose agency funded coronavirus research in the U.S. and in China), laughed off the possibility that COVID-19 escaped from the Wuhan lab when science editor Nsikan Akpan asked, “Do you believe or is there evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was made in the lab in China or accidentally released from a lab in China?” Fauci laughed as he claimed not to understand why the possibility that COVID-19 had escaped from a lab was being raised. On May 11, 2021, when asked whether he was still confident that COVID-19 emerged naturally, he replied “No, actually. … No, I’m not convinced about that. I think that we should continue to investigate what went on in China.
I assume this is a quote. And I do not dismiss the potential for lab releases – but have regard for the probabilities assessed by actual experts.
‘China’s bat woman felt she was fighting a battle in her worst nightmare, even though it was one she had been preparing for over the past 16 years. Using a technique called polymerase chain reaction, which can detect a virus by amplifying its genetic material, the team found that samples from five of seven patients had genetic sequences present in all coronaviruses.
Shi instructed her group to repeat the tests and, at the same time, sent the samples to another facility to sequence the full viral genomes. Meanwhile she frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”
By January 7 the Wuhan team had determined that the new virus had indeed caused the disease those patients suffered—a conclusion based on results from analyses using polymerase chain reaction, full genome sequencing, antibody tests of blood samples and the virus’s ability to infect human lung cells in a petri dish. The genomic sequence of the virus, eventually named SARS-CoV-2, was 96 percent identical to that of a coronavirus the researchers had identified in horseshoe bats in Yunnan. Their results appeared in a paper published online on February 3 in Nature.’ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/
Shi’s story about RatG13 has come under scrutiny on many points. But first one should consider that we know now for a fact that Shi was not just collecting bat viruses to observe and catalog them. Shi was working on creating a SARS2 like virus in her lab and neglected to mention this part in her story. The scary thing is that all the US and French virologists that were working with her to make bat SARS viruses attack humans were silent about the work as well. As pointed out Peter Daszak apparently actively approached them to circle the wagons and keep the world away looking at the lab, sitting in the middle of Wuhan. This is very analogues to the Phil Jones – Michael Mann hockey team emailing each other advising to delete embarrassing emails that could be subject to public disclosure requests.
The virologists and their funders have gotten away with this for the most part to this point even though their years of gain of function research have been sitting online in plain sight all along. Even within the Baric-Shi 2015 paper they conclude their experiments are so dangerous that it might be better to stop.
In the end of their 2015 paper they have the boilerplate ethics statement that no animals were mistreated and after that a statement on biosafety and their exemption given from the GOF research ban.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985
Here is a list of virus gain of function research by Dr. Ralph Baric of Univ of NC and Dr. Shi of the WIV. http://www.themenacherylab.com/p/blog-page.html
Baric remained silent until recently when he joined a group of virologists in signing a letter asking that the lab origin possibility be investigated. I think this is what forced Fauci to change his position from laughing it off.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1
The second signer, Dr. Alina Chan, is a good name to search on Twitter and Google as she has been conducting her own investigation.
As a liberal progressive, I get annoyed when I have to credit Trump with anything. But I have had to do so on four or five occasions. This may turn out to be one.
At a meta level, our government does not want another issue to complicate our relationship with China.
At an academic level, conflicts of interest are unseemly enough to cause a conscious will to ignorance (something that permeates every level of the climate conversation.)
At an individual level, the dismal science repeatedly advises us that incentives matter. A lot.
But to all of those ‘skeptics’ who may be proven right about the origins of Covid–this is what it looks like when the process works. A year and a half of digging, getting past authoritative dismissal, etc., etc. If it turns out that you were right all along, this is how the process plays out.
Perhaps those of us who have invested so much in the climate conversation can learn from this, rather than imposing our frustrations with the scientific establishment as an overlay on Wuhan.
Thomas,
I see no reason to credit Trump with anything. Donald Trump rarely employs a thoughtful and reasoned approach to available evidence IMO. The unforgivable mistake was the country’s scientists, politicians, and journalists disregarding evidence and engaging in fallacious reasoning in large part because they needed to discredit Trump. Trump’s opinion on this matter should have been, and still is, irrelevant.
Is that your response to Dr. Curry’s column about the collapse of the supposed consensus over Covid-19’s origins? Nothing about the conflicts of interest? Nothing about the politics driving the consensus in the western media? Nothing about whether it’s wise to trust what the Chinese Communist Party says about, well, anything?
The bottom line is that we won’t be able to rule out an accidental release from the Wuhan lab without a full forensic audit of the Wuhan lab, and the Party will never permit that. You can draw your own conclusions about why the Party won’t permit a full, independent investigation.
The WHO reported – a number of voices have called for a more detailed consideration of the lab release scenario. You – like Judith – have no evidence that anything untoward happened. Your conjectures are purely that.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1
Robert,
You seem to have completely missed the point of this post and the change in the Overton window regarding the source of SARS-COV2. The issue is not that we now know that it came from a lab. The issue is that the reasoning that it could not have come from a lab was always fallacious, and was enforced by a culture that did not allow debate.
No – I reject outright the point of the post. Drawing a long bow between a consensus that never existed and a consensus that was politically motivated in the public arena and has no place in science – and calling it a failure of science merely feeds the contrarian meme factory that CE has become. The idea that eminent and respected scientists were silenced by the peanut gallery on the novel coronavirus is absurd beyond belief.
My point was crap contrarian science and conspiracy ideation that leads them to imagine that they are later day Galileo Galilei or else voices in the wilderness. Not a lick of sense between them. I have been told for instance that ‘believing’ in general relativity is a religious genuflection. We see much of crap science and conspiracy ideation in the comments – and indeed in the greyish of grey literature cited in the post. Science is self correcting – the rest leads to the tower of babel.
The whole point of this article is scientists behaving badly, and a failure of the journals, media and politicians to investigate a very important issue. The scientists involved had vested interests in this particular story line, including full blown conflicts of interest. In context of the climate debate, the attempts at declaring a consensus are interesting, at least to me.
We have opinions in the Lancet and Science – neither of which are evidence of scientific misbehaviour. I saw an allegation that Peter Daszak had an undeclared conflict of interest – but nothing more substantive.
Trump as usual covered himself with ordure in this – along with the usual denizens.
I think what is disturbing about this incident is that the letters were expressing great certainty about some thing where there was no justifiable certainty. And now that the fake consensus has collapsed everyone seems to have been aware of that fact. Were they too cowardly to speak up or were they in the grip of Trump derangement syndrome? It’s a systemic failure of The SCIENCE establishment.
What Trump has exposed is the corruption of our most powerful institutions. Trump won’t be around forever, but the consequences of the collapse of institutional authority will last longer. The media in particularly has suffered a total collapse of confidence.
Crawford’s analysis is convincing to me. The reason the establishment and their institutions (including SCIENCE) are embracing the insanity of critical race theory (which really echos 19th Century progressive racism) is to try to recover their authority by covering themselves with the virtue of the victim. The pandemic exposed how primitive viral epidemiology is and also the need of the public health establishment to seem certain about the SCIENCE when they really knew almost nothing. Not since the 1850’s (and James Buchanan’s disastrous tenure) has confidence in governmental competence been lower.
Douglas, you have hit on another piece of the puzzle and it has to do with the growing popularity of the social totalitarianism of China coupled as it is with a dose of free markets. That’s a model many of our elites and indeed many Tech Titans embrace. Crawford also points this out and also another reason Trump caused deep derangement. He challenged this sometimes secret, sometimes open admiration for China’s social credit model.
We have seen this movie before in the 1930’s. Both Fascists and Communists were growing in popularity. Elites embraced one or the other. The New York Times consciously covered up Stalins genocides and tyrrany. Charles Lindberg was a not so secret admirer of Nazi Germany. It took a global catastrophe to bring a return to common sense. Destroying the Soviet Union took another 40 years and another president named Reagan who also we quite unpopular with the Soviet friendly media.
Or it is overwhelmingly likely that the virus spilled over from an animal source, that
anyone with expertise knew it and that you have an ideological axe to grind. The science is broken meme allows you to reject science you disagree with. Climate science is not broken it is just misunderstood.
Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/
Robert: “The science is broken meme allows you to reject science you disagree with. Climate science is not broken it is just misunderstood.”
Good scientists need to stand up to keep it from getting broken as well as science reporters. I think Wade recognized that he an others need to report facts and analysis rather than worry what people might conclude. He is to be commended.
Here, the Sydney Morning Herald is explaining that the consensus is changing before our eyes, even among a NYT reporter who wrote early on that the lab theory was “crazy town.”
https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/fringe-feasible-or-false-the-covid-19-wuhan-lab-leak-theory-gets-a-second-look-20210521-p57tts.html
Further down the thread you write: “The evidence thus far favors – according to leading edge experts – an animal spillover.” Really? “leading edge experts”?
https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus/origins-of-the-virus
From Robert Ellison’s link:
“As far as WHO is concerned, all hypotheses remain on the table. This report is a very important beginning, but it is not the end. We have not yet found the source of the virus, and we must continue to follow the science and leave no stone unturned as we do,” said Dr Tedros.
The “report” notes that the WHO investigators were ordered “to find the animal source,” rather than the origin of COVID. And, as you see above, they couldn’t find the animal source and they didn’t investigate the obvious potential source of the origin of the virus.
Why? Over a year into a pandemic that shut down the globe, why not study the origin?
From actual science:
“A joint China-World Health Organization (WHO) study into the origins of Covid-19 has provided no credible answers about how the pandemic began, and more rigorous investigations are required, a group of international scientists and researchers have said.
In an open letter, 24 scientists and researchers from Europe, the United States, Australia and Japan said the WHO study, published last week, was “tainted” by politics.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/researchers-call-new-inquiry-covid-origins-study-tainted-politics/
How about a little bit of math. The bats that carry the virus are located a thousand miles from Wuhan. If the origin was natural, Covid was most likely to emerge close to the caves. But let us allow that the transport was via wild animals and random people doing ordinary things, in which case the virus likely had a pretty equal probability of appearing in any settled part of China. Based on the amount of arable land in China, the odds of it appearing within a 9 mile radius of Wuhan and not somewhere else are about 2000 to 1 against. Just based on that, I would give a 99.95% probability that it came from the lab.
The idea that blaming the lab is some kind of conspiracy theory that has no evidence is akin to blaming a small pox outbreak that occurs within blocks of a CDC smallpox lab in Atlanta on a Kentucky Fried Chicken two blocks away, and insisting that somehow the smallpox must have came from a chicken ranch. A CDC director might come out and say that, insisting that his lab couldn’t have had an accident, but nobody would believe him.
Re: origin
I sat in on a discussion panel on CRISPR – including 2 scientists who were using CRISPR to try and correct sickle cell anemia. The mutation responsible for sickle cell is a single codon.
It took them 3 years to get that right.
COVID is using a novel infection path which – even in March 2020 – scientists were saying that nobody had ever seen.
To me – the creation of a novel infection path bespeaks several likelihoods:
1) If you are working on an actual bio-weapon, what’s the likelihood of people being careless? As opposed to general bat research.
2) How difficult is it to discover a novel infection path?
3) How difficult is it to test a novel infection path?
4) How likely is it that a novel infection path is effective? Much less more effective than standard paths?
To me – the answers to the above questions are cumulatively: extremely unlikely.
It would require a brilliant but careless scientist or research group who was also extremely lucky: brilliant to find the path, careless to let it loose, lucky that it actually works so well.
It also requires human test subjects. If you’re testing a human infection agent that is novel – how do you know whether it actually works at all? Works better than the standard path? You can only do this by testing on people. Monkeys do not have the same disease reactivity as humans.
Note what I am saying above does not guarantee COVID is not man-made. What it does is look at major issues which a human created COVID would have had to overcome or create, and how likely.
What you say is that’s it’s extremely unlikely covid19 has been designed, but afaik gain of function is far from genetic design, it’s just a boosted evolution. You increase mutation rate, mix radiated viruses in the same host to promote recombination, and setup an environment that select the mutants more adapted to the new hosts. Which is basically a lab accelerated version of what could happen in the wild when a virus jump from an animal host to humans…
Forced evolution is one of several methods for GOF. Another is the insertion of restriction sites, which allow the RNA to be cut a particular point. This allows the insertion of new strands, simulating a natural (but rare) recombination event where the RNA mistakenly takes up a segment of a different virus’s RNA. Whistleblower Li-meng Yan claims there are restriction sites on either side of the spike’s RNA segment.
When Robert I Ellison speaks of what “contrarians” have espoused, he is deliberately discrediting and disparaging them. These are people whom I would designate by the honorable title “dissenters.” They would be happy to present their case and sources and give their opponents an equal opportunity to do likewise. Then both can be weighed and fairly judged but not when people want dissenters censored and silenced.
“critic” is the appropriate word here, IMO
By all means make your case.
I was replying to Michael. Neutron star matter forcing climate change, the rotisserie planetary warming theory, the irrigation forced warming, the CO2 saturation meme… This is not criticism – these are just a few of the crude and eccentric theories aired ad nauseum on CE that are vying to disprove fundamental physical realities.
Human emitted greenhouse gases bias a chaotic system to a warmer state. There is implicit in chaos the risk of dramatic and rapid change in the Earth system – atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere. That much should be accepted as truth in line with Isaac Newton’s 4th rule of natural philosophy. There are of course those who don’t and never will.
Hint: The media are whitewashing the identity of the perpetrators. Its the same group that accounts for half of all serious crimes in the US. And its part of a general dramatic increase in crime since the BLM riots. That is caused by “reforms” like shrinking police departments, demotivating police from being proactive, and effectively decriminalizing broad categories of crime. The media lie on this is that its caused by Trump, which is manifestly not true.
The other whitewash by the media is covering up the spate of anti-Semitic hate crimes.
Our media are just garbage and their narratives have grown more uniform and they will misrepresent anything to promote these narratives.
Robert
Contrarians have espoused crap science and conspiracy theories. Including the Chinese government origins of COVID.
It’s linked to a new “Yellow Peril” anti-China narrative which swings dangerously close to racism.
Phil Salmon: It’s linked to a new “Yellow Peril” anti-China narrative which swings dangerously close to racism.
Particular Chinese, the Chinese Communist Party, and Chinese institutions are not beyond criticism just because some critics may be racists. There is evidence here of serious sloppiness and dishonesty.
There is nothing likeable about the Chinese government but neither is beating up Chinese people in the streets.
While acknowledging that isn’t what you meant, I’d like to point out that the Chinese government quite literally does beat up Chinese people in the streets. I’d also like to suggest you do some research on the demographics of anti-Asian violence in the US, especially compared to the population.
There are reports from all over.
e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56218684
Yes there are. Like the article that you linked, most don’t mention the demographics of the perpetrators of such attacks (which are available if you look for them). The demographics of the victims, while a defining element, are the least interesting part of research into anti-Asian violence in the US. This is consistent with the state of research for various other hate crimes.
????
I’m saying that there are the same problems in the narrative on the subject as are found in the other subjects being discussed, for some of the same reasons. There is no value in researching the victims, and apparently there is no will to research the perpetrators.
I’ve lost interest in trying to decipher what you mean.
Of course you have.
The problem is: who defines what is crap science?
If anything is clear from the climate wars and now COVID origin – it is that scientists are people, and people have political affiliations.
So once again – the problem is the process. The actual outcome should be irrelevant but this isn’t how it works in the real world.
Science is a dictatorship of the evidence – because only the facts decide what is crap science.
Robert I Ellison: Contrarians have espoused crap science and conspiracy theories. Including the Chinese government origins of COVID. Or at least a cover up.
There may be contrarians who have espoused crap science and conspiracy theories, but you have not named or quoted any. Nicholas Wade and others have summarized the evidence and highlighted questions that have so far not been answered. Judith Curry has provided a nice introduction.
There was only a low probability that this virus could have originated naturally. There was only a low probability that this virus could have been created in a lab and then escaped. Yet it originated and spread. Of the unlikely routes to its origination, the accumulated evidence supports the lab origin more than the natural origin; dismissals of the lab origin were premature and superficial; support of the lab origin isn’t (for most readers so far) conclusive.
Thanks to Judith Curry for this essay, and to Nicholas Wade and others for their thoughtful reviews of the evidence.
And thanks to many scientists for their ongoing research.
How a lab release morphs from being a remote possibility to being mathematically probable. Without the need for any actual evidence at all.
Robert I Ellison: How a lab release morphs from being a remote possibility to being mathematically probable. Without the need for any actual evidence at all.
Are you agreeing that there is no “actual evidence at all” that SARS CoV-2 exists (c.f. quotes from Kauffman)? Conditional on the emergence of SARS CoV-2, what are the relative likelihoods of the two (so far) origin stories — each with a low probability of occurrence?
Surely you have learned about conditional probabilities?
No.
Robert Ellison wrote: “I am not a virologist and I defer in this to authoritative scientific sources.” There are no authoritative scientific sources. Science does not listen to authority, science remains open to free inquiry and open discussion. Those who would anoint someone – anyone – as a scientific authority are attempting to suppress dissenting voices with one of the oldest logical fallacies – the argument from authority. And who chooses the correct authority? Those with the power, of course, and that is why the Chinese Communist Party cannot be trusted. Neither, by the way, can the CDC or Dr. Fauci and NIH and NIAID. It is just human nature for those with the power to attempt to protect and enhance their power by silencing or discrediting any dissent. Let free and open discussion continue.
Honestly Judith – your moderation is arbitrary nonsense and always has been.
But this needs responding to. Seeking reputable and authoritative sources and comparing and contrasting is not the fallacy of an appeal to authority. No one can be on top of the language, math, methods and have the background depth to make sense of all sciences. It is obvious nonsense to believe otherwise.
I see this comment out of context, no idea what you are referring to. If I deleted one of your comments, it was presumably a relatively low content comment that insulted someone personally.
Robert I Ellison: Honestly Judith – your moderation is arbitrary nonsense and always has been.
Judith’s moderation gets no quarrel from me. When my posts seem to have been lost in moderation, I usually see problems — I rewrite them and resubmit them.
What a load of arrogant old codswallop. I am trained to evaluate sources and to compare and contrast. I have been doing it for decades. But even now I know little more than a smattering of a few disciplines needed for my work. For most of science the language, maths, methods and deep background needed to make sense of it all are lacking. Relying on reputable and authoritative sources is not the fallacy of an appeal to authority. Relying on your authority would be.
I suggest you leave well enough alone Matthew.
Robert — there has been plenty of evidence since May 2020 for instance https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.073262v1
SARS-CoV-2 is well adapted for humans? If it were not – there wouldn’t be a problem.
Surely you have learned about conditional probabilities?
Robert I. Ellison | May 24, 2021 at 5:47 pm |
No.
In discussions of COVID-19, the most commonly mentioned conditional probabilities have been sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value of diagnostic tests.
Admittedly, RIE did not identify the proposition to which he responded “No”, but I don’t see another likely candidate.
Robert I Ellison: “What a load of arrogant old codswallop. I am trained to evaluate sources and to compare and contrast. I have been doing it for decades. But even now I know little more than a smattering of a few disciplines needed for my work. For most of science the language, maths, methods and deep background needed to make sense of it all are lacking. Relying on reputable and authoritative sources is not the fallacy of an appeal to authority. Relying on your authority would be.”
I suggest you leave well enough alone Matthew.
I added the quote marks. Whatever does that have to do with me?
Something about moderation. This time it isn’t . Arbitrary as I said. Sententious on your part.
Ah – no – I don’t think SARA-CoV-2 doesn’t exist.
Mr. Eillison: Thank you for responding to my earlier comment. I’m a law professor, not a scientist, so I look at these matters a little differently. You say that there is no “direct evidence” that Covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan lab. I say that any direct evidence bearing on that question is under the control of the Chinese authorities, and they have refused to allow independent inspection of that evidence. If we were litigating this issue in a US court, the judge would instruct the jury that they could infer from that refusal that the virus did in fact escape from the Wuhan lab. I agree this is not the scientific method, but it is one legitimate way we establish facts in the public sphere.
I am not a virologist and I defer in this to authoritative scientific sources. This is building on the rock of science and not the sand of legal opinion.
Robert E – you and I must disagree.
The incredible mismanagement of the false Covid-19 pandemic since January 2020 cannot be simply ascribed to gross incompetence by government and health authorities.
I knew about the Dr Fauci involvement about one year ago – he originated the gain-of-function virus research and offshored it to Wuhan when it was declared illegal in the USA. But the lockdown scam is global-scale – much bigger than just Dr Fauci.
A year ago I concluded that the Covid-19 virus originated from the Wuhan lab and not at the wet market. The only question then was “did the virus jump from the Wuhan lab, or was it pushed?”
Based on all the dystopian events since then, the rational conclusion is that the virus did not escape, but was pushed out of the lab – deliberately released for political and financial gain.
There was never any justification for the lockdown of under-65’s – all we needed to do was over-protect the very elderly and infirm. I published that conclusion with confidence on 21March2020 and that was correct.
There was no increase in total deaths in Alberta or Canada up to 30June2020 – no increase in total deaths means no deadly pandemic. Repeating, the lockdowns etc were never justified – so who pulled the strings?
The lockdowns have cost society ~100 times more harm than the Covid-19 illness – it was never a close call.
A case is being prepared in Canada to pursue our government leaders for criminal negligence. Other western democracies should do the same.
Yeah – like I said – speculation and conspiracies.
My March2020 assessment has been proved correct by subsequent events. Sweden’s success with no lockdowns. No 2020 “death bump” in Alberta or Canada. Massive fraud in USA Covid-19 death stats. False vilification of effective treatments like Ivermectin, etc. Forced imposition of deadly, ineffective injections – that are NOT vaccines.
Robert E – you write like a typical troll. You are on ignore.
You’re welcome I am sure.
The moral of the story is the Faceless Cultural Elite have the power to control the narrative. Even if ultimately they are found out by that time the majority of the great unwashed have moved on and without the major news outlets (aka the Propaganda Ministry for the Faceless Cultural Elite) reporting loudly and resoundingly of the criminal nature of the transgression it dissipates into a willow wisp of yesterdays news that becomes drowned out by nonsense. For example who could fail to notice that the (once detested by the Primary Medial outlets for being the) spawn of Dick Cheney was recently voted off the Republican Leadership Committee. informal polls would discover that 7 in 10 were aware but only 1 in 10,000 could tell you what the committee existed t accomplish.
Matt Crawford has another essay on the crisis of confidence in our institutions and how much of the recent insanity surrounding critical race theory is a desperate attempt by these institutions to regain their authority in the face of growing skepticism.
https://unherd.com/2021/05/how-science-has-been-corrupted/
This subject came up on the previous comment section and you can see there an example of how consensus enforcement is attempted.
It is interesting, if not amazing; to have witnessed how Judith’s positions regarding climate change have evolved since 2007.
Have no idea what that means.
Judith once was much more supportive of the “climate consensus” and the IPCC than she is today. She defendeď the IPCC strongly back in the early days while some readers of the blog were more skeptical of the unproven models and seemingly unsubstantiated conclusions.
Judith has had the experience of working closely with the key players in climate science over the last 15 years and is now far more skeptical that CO2 is leading humanity to a disaster. She now seems skeptical of much of the published “climate science” as being biased and unreliable.
The fact that she, as a scientist in the middle of the issue has altered her perspective so much over that time means something to those of us who study from the periphery.
“The fact that she, as a scientist in the middle of the issue has altered her perspective so much over that time means something to those of us who study from the periphery.”
When the known facts change, a competent (and honest) scientist modifies their opinion. What do you do?
> The fact that she, as a scientist in the middle of the issue has altered her perspective so much over that time means something to those of us who study from the periphery.
What does it mean to you when people like Richard Muller or Jerry Taylor change their views?
I think Rob this is a normal progression. It’s happened with me too. As people get more senior, they gain enough experience to step back a little bit from the process of doing science to critically evaluate their own work and their own assumptions and culture narratives about science.
Older successful scientists are often free from financial insecurity and job insecurity and so are more willing to speak out.
The last 20 years have seen a flood of information about the growing corruption of science that can no longer be ignored easily.
Dpy
IMO, you are mistaken.
Judith grew to disagree with consensus climate science around the time she started this blog. That seems to have occured while she was in her 50’s and in her prime earning years of academica. That entailed considerable personal and professional risk.
Robert, have you considered the possibility the reason for Dr. Curry’s progression was an ethical determination to remain true to her commitment to science and made determinations at difficult cross-roads not to go the path that these virologists signers felt politically required to travel?
Judith is an actual scientist and her understanding of climate science agrees with the dominant scientific paradigm. I asked her recently. But nor do I think these virologists acted unethically.
In the public arena there is all sorts of nonsense from both fringe activist groupings.
Has Judith progressed from the uncertainty monster to the purely oppositional?
Circa 2007, i supported the consensus. Uncertain T. Monster was birthed in 2010
I don’t think she is purely oppositional. What is true is that there is a lot more serious problem in science now than 25 years ago.
Consensus was always an odd way of thinking about science. Although it may have become a thing with Cook et al (2013). Far better to think in terms of scientific paradigms. The dominant climate science paradigm being that human emitted greenhouse gases bias a chaotic system to a warmer state. And there is implicit in chaos the risk of dramatic and rapid change in the Earth system. It implies that the future is hard to predict.
Here you cite a bevy of odd contrarians without any mention of the far more authoritative WHO report on the origins of the virus.
Can’t believe you’ve blatantly lifted that moniker.
Uh oh. Mr. Google says this was the first udagr he could find:
https://judithcurry.com/2013/09/19/quote-of-the-week-2/
My bad.
I can’t say that I remember exactly where that came from or whether someone else used it first. Doesn’t matter; I like it and use it.
Rob Starkey: It is interesting, if not amazing; to have witnessed how Judith’s positions regarding climate change have evolved since 2007.
Exact quotes might clarify your meaning.
Got to love Henry Bauer:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252797131_Science_in_the_21st_Century_Knowledge_Monopolies_and_Research_Cartels/link/57d8204108ae601b39af986f/download
Note 34 reads:
Rob:
What does it mean when you stated: “something to those of us who study from the periphery”…such an ambiguous statement appears to have no real substantive value… Likewise, “what does “so much over time” mean — what are your facts which can solidly referenced – back your statement up with sound and germane rationale and reasoning — not with a superfluous – nebulous answer.
Bruce
Could you elaborate Rob? Her positions may well have evolved but since I’ve started following her over the last couple years most appear reasonable to me.
Apologies Rob. You had responded adequately to my query before I posted it.
A big problem in this country isn’t that China lies about everything, it’s at so many in this country want to be lied to about everything. Amazingly, Leftists don’t even make good atheists.
The fake news MSM ignores Leftist’s reverence for commie dictators, Mao, Castro, Chavez and use our hard-earned savings to jack-up inflation and invest in more hypocrisy, superstition and government flimflam like their global warming alarmist doomsday religion.
I’ve been reading this blog for many years but I think I now have to offer my resignation because I no longer meet the requirements to make entries on this blog. Here is the check list of requirements:
Do I think the 2nd amendment allows anyone to own a gun? No. check me off
Do I think every single thing that governments do is bad? No. check me off.
Do I think the observed runaway climate change evidence is a hoax? No. check me off.
Do I think that because climate models are not very good, there is no need to worry about climate change? No. Check me off.
Do I believe that CO2 has a major impact on climate? Yes. Check me off.
Do I believe that masks, social distancing and some shut downs had no effect in preventing a worse crisis in the pandemic? No. Check me off.
Do I think the many claims on Covis on this website regarding herd immunity, Sweden, government intervention, and the pandemic in general were bogus? Yes. Check me off.
Do I think Mr. Trump was the worst American president, ever? Yes. Check me off.
Do I think the Republican Party has degenerated into an amalgamation dominated by misfits and religious bigots? Yes. Check me off.
Do many of the people who post on this blog seem unable to to reason logically, and mainly make up their minds in advance based on their persuasions, and then try to adapt the data to their preconceived notions? Yes. Check me off.
Well, I got every question wrong on the check list, so I am not qualified to read this blog any further. I have not passed the entry exam.
I leave it to Joshua and a few occasional stalwarts such as Tall Guy, to keep doing battle with those who do fit the check list.
This blog is a forum for people to discuss scientific and policy/political issues, mostly related to climate change. I don’t agree with the perspectives or comments of many (or even most) of the participants, but provided that they present arguments or evidence to support their statements, they are welcome to participate here.
I also want this blog to be readable/interesting to the majority who don’t actually comment here, and this means no bickering, no insults, and no ad hominem attacks on other commenters.
Thank you, Dr. Curry.
Pretty much every single dpy comment has insults and ad hominems included.
You leave those, and delete responses.
That is, of course your prerogative as blog owner.
I don’t spend very much time moderating the blog (I am way too busy), so i don’t catch everything. If someone makes a substantive point, i tend to leave it up unless it associated with egregious insults or ad homs. I definitely delete responses that are destined to start food fights.
Another issue is that for moderation, i don’t see the same stream that you see, i see the comments in reverse time order (most recent at top). Hence i miss the threading of the comments that is seen by you. So when i catch an insulting response i delete it, and it is not easy for me to reference the comment to which the response is made.
Moderating a blog that isn’t simply an echo chamber is not simple or straightforward
Virtually all of VTG’s comments contain cherry picked out of context proof texting. Often they contain outright distortions of what others say. Given this context, I doubt his expressed concern with civility is genuine.
dpy,
Thank you for confirming my post.
So then what I said is true. Thank You for confirming that.
I’ve had comments that didn’t pass muster too and usually in retrospect Judith was correct about them. Judith does an excellent job of moderation. It’s a very difficult task and it is unpaid in this case too.
People who complain about blog moderation usually know deep down that they might have been out of line. It’s mostly anonymous commenters who are the most out of line.
Donald
You have a very interesting cv so I sincerely hope you stick around and continue to contribute.
You make three comments on climate in your comment above which seems at variance with your book ‘ the climate debate’
‘Most published books are one-sided in the climate debate between alarmists and skeptics. My book on the climate debate presents both sides of the debate with considerable technical detail and weighs the supporting evidence. It is found that in general, the data in climatology are very sparse and noisy. Yet climatologists seem willing to draw a dollar’s worth of conclusions from a penny’s worth of data. The sad truth is that we don’t really have good answers to the questions raised in the climate debate. My book shows why this is so. This new edition includes hundreds of references not included in the original version, and the book is expanded by more than 100 pages.’
So you sound sceptical in the book but much less so in your comment above.
what gives?
Tonyb
You have created a caricature to represent people who disagree with you.
Mr. Rapp,
Out of 10 boxes, three concern CC. Just because SOME bloggers here are expressing differing views on these three topics should be no reason for you to quit, especially with your impressive resume. Personally I agree with your points and I salute you for using “I think” rather than “I believe”. I also agree with your two topics on Covid 19. The two political statements on how terrible Mr. T and the R’s are, simply don’t belong here, I haven’t seen any glorification of the two here and rightly so.
Yes Donald, that’s quite a list of biases. It amounts to a stereotypical characterization. There is no check list for this blog.
Donald, I am sad to read your comment after enjoying your guest posts regarding ice ages and other items through the years. I hope your strong feelings that have been set on this topic will not keep you from having an open mind on SARS2 origin. I think you and others would be very surprised at what has been coming up as far as circumstantial as well as genomic evidence pointing to lab origin.
Also, if one is thinking that this topic is not of concern to climate scientists and others working in similar dynamics is missing an important point. The top virologists were all banded together to kill the notion of lab origin before they had a shred of evidence of natural origin, and we now know this was orchestrated by the grant holder for gain of function research in the WIV to make a SARS2-like virus. This was a earth-shaking fr@ud and it’s still battling to surface after a year.
Mr. Rapp
A rap on your comment is that it is like asking the unanswerable question in court: when was the last time you beat your wife? It is illogical, let alone unscientific, to make pre-conclusions. Ergo: everyone on this website believes that anyone should be permitted to own a gun. But this is a non sequitur that has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Same with all the other twisted statements. But is your list racist? Oh no, that would be conclusionary.
Donald Rapp: “Do I think Mr. Trump was the worst American president, ever? Yes. Check me off.”
The history of the COVID-19 pandemic is now being rewritten to eliminate Donald Trump’s central role in speeding up delivery of the SARS vaccines through his efforts at speeding up the government’s regulatory review process.
The true story of what actually happened is being progressively replaced with the narrative that Donald Trump did little or nothing to fight the pandemic; that he played little or no role in speeding up delivery of the vaccines; and that real progress in fighting the pandemic was made only after Joe Biden was inaugurated as president.
Mr. Rapp, I’m curious. Do you agree or disagree with the almost universal opinion now held among those who voted for Joe Biden that his ascension to the White House was the true turning point in our battle with COVID-19?
Biden was only able to speed up because Trump orderd as early as possible. the vaccines.
Without these orders, Biden would have empty hands
Dr. Fauci, early during the pandemic, stated that the earliest a vaccine could be developed would be 12-18 months in ideal circumstances. Others quoted the Johns Hopkins typical timeline for vaccine development, 5 to 10 years. Many underestimated Trump’s resolve; Operation Warp Speed facilitated the development of a vaccine in the 9 month range that Trump originally described as doable when everyone else in the MSM said it was impossible. Of course the MSM went into its typical hysterics, calling Trump a liar among the kinder comments. https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/31/us/coronavirus-vaccine-timetable-concerns-experts-invs/index.html
For those Fauci acolytes; it should be noted that Dr. Fauci himself hasn’t ruled out that COVID-19 originated from the Wuhan lab.
Donald Rapp: Do I think the many claims on Covis on this website regarding herd immunity, Sweden, government intervention, and the pandemic in general were bogus? Yes.
My regular reading of this blog suggest to me that you have a lot of company here. Stick around.
“Donald Rapp: Do I think the many claims on Covis on this website regarding herd immunity, Sweden, government intervention, and the pandemic in general were bogus? Yes.”
Sigh. “Settled science,” again. No reason to look for the source of Covid, no reason to seriously examine what did and didn’t work, and certainly no reason to ever take a look at the cost/benefit of any action. It’s not like 3.5 million people died globally or there are any governments that might have an interest in learning any lessons for the next pandemic.
The trouble here isn’t just politicization, it’s the fact that our global politics have become so hyper-partisan that neither side can admit when it’s wrong and the other guy is right.
This inability to apply thought to your own side is how you get Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump.
The reason you have articles like this one we’re commenting on is because science is supposed to be the one place that is always asking “why?” Why did Sweden fare better than France and Belgium, why did Florida and Texas fare better than New York and Michigan? But no.. in our hyper-political world team blue hates Sweden and Florida ergo they simply must have done everything – literally everything – incorrectly. Otherwise.. gasp! … someone on MSNBC might have to admit they were wrong and, FFS, Fox News will brag about it that very night. Can’t have that, so the issue is settled. Sweden, Texas, all wrong. France, Belgium, New York- perfection personified. China? Could not possibly have made any mistakes, anywhere, at any time, because racism and Trump, period, end of discussion. Tha new science(y).
This blog has the commenters it deserves.
Actually, it’s pretty much an iron law of blogs.
To be more specific, if you publish obviously nonsensical analysis of “herd immunity” mid pandemic, you’ll attract cranks. There are many other examples.
The site seems to allow articles whether Judith agrees with the premise or not. It is up to the author to defend what they wrote.
Judith’s deletion of comments seems inconsistent.
Joshua was frequently correct in his criticism of Nic’s conclusions.
You don’t know which comments I delete. I don’t allow piling on, or insults to guest posters, or irrelevant topics on a guest post. What I delete has nothing to do with what I personally agree with.
I think this is called playing the ref. Something might be technically correct but meaningless and irrelevant. Best take on Joshua’s mostly tangential criticisms of Nic is this:
jeffnsails850 | April 22, 2021 at 10:22 am |
To recap for any lurkers: Nic attempted to figure out when herd immunity would happen, using Sweden. His forecasts for reaching herd immunity were wrong- just like every other scientists forecasts for anything COVID related. This was probably due mostly to the discovery that “immunity” is time limited (the reason people are telling you that annual booster vaccine shots will be necessary) as well as controlled by viral load (and amount of antibodies- some who caught the virus are less immune than others). Because Nic’s examination of a real and interesting topic – herd immunity – produced an inaccurate but interesting thought experiment, Joshua et al declared all work by Nic to be utterly useless and politically motivated (just like all the thousands of inaccurate forecasts by climate scientists- ha, just kidding, their errors are pure!).
Joe – the non epidemiologist | April 23, 2021 at 5:40 pm | Reply
Josh – big picture – not minutia
1) Still havent learned about the hope-Simpson curve
2) India total cases is less than 1,200 per 100k vs a range of 8k to 10k for other industrialized countries which is substantially less than most all other industrialized countries
Try not to get lost in the detail with your obsession trying to prove Nic wrong.
Joshua, You didn’t respond to what I said but instead pivoted to shift focus to me. That’s not a way to have a dialogue. I’ll just post one more comment of yours where you admit you are acting in bad faith and out of childish spite. It’s really a miracle that more of your repetitious and off topic comments are not deleted.
Joshua | April 23, 2021 at 2:38 pm |
> I assume they are important to you, but I just don’t see how they answer the big picture.
Not really. In the end, the fact that as an individual he makes statements that are obviously totally wrong is completely meaningless w/r/t the big picture. I just like tweaking David Young, because he’s so easily tweakable, and because it serves as a good example for how some “skeptics” get so far ahead of their skis when integrating uncertainty into their reasoning.
And your imagined “errors” are usually not errors at all as this comment shows.
atandb | April 22, 2021 at 12:44 pm | Reply
I have for a long time contended myself with reading rather than commenting. However, your use of statistics in the preceding comment is so egregious that I decided to comment. First of all you quote two numbers of an entire bicameral plot to prove your point, which is cherry picking in the extreme. A look at the entire plot without using any other information would lead to the conclusion that, at present that the death rate is a low for the graph.
David Young –
I assume that when you say tbings that are obviously wrong, it’s not because of some malign intent on your part – but perhaps because, for example, you’ve gotten out over your skis when accounting for uncertainties.
The example with deaths in Sweden, where you said they declined throughout March when that clearly isn’t the case, is a perfect example of that.
Your constant assertion that I’m responsible for your decisions about what you do with your time is another problem entirely, as is your contradictory behaviors when you say you’re going to stop reading and responding to my comments (how many times have you done that, David Young?) only to continue to do both.
dpy,
oh dear, another sideswipe.
Let’s note, as usual, you’re simply factually wrong.
I did not say Nic was a crank as you falsely write. I said his analysis was nonsensical. Something obvious at the time and readily verified by the fact that cases promptly doubled after his declaration of herd immunity.
What I wrote about cranks was that publishing such nonsense attracts them.
Again, many thanks for reinforcing my point. Many more examples under the comments on Nic’s.
And Nic’s analysis was not nonsensical. In summertime it did appear the the pandemic was strongly receding. Of course winter came … What I’ve noticed is that you make these quite untrue pronouncements with an air of certainty that belies the fact that you are utterly unqualified to make them. You just disagree with Nic’s sensible positions on mitigation methods and you allow your political biases to dictate your “scientific” opinions.
It takes a heroic, nay, delusional feat of mind bending to describe Swedish deaths as in “strong decline” through March.
A period which, lest we forget, we *entered* in “herd immunity”, *and* vaccinated large numbers of people, *and* still saw deaths *increase* afterwards!
My “intellectual betters” can explain this, I’m sure.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2021-03-02..latest&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=~SWE
“…It takes a heroic, nay, delusional feat of mind bending to describe Swedish deaths as in “strong decline” through March…”
According to the Swedish government, total (all-causes) deaths have been declining steadily from January through April 2021.
https://ibb.co/SB3LJft
verytallguy | May 24, 2021 at 5:28 pm |
It takes a heroic, nay, delusional feat of mind bending to describe Swedish deaths as in “strong decline” through March.
I dunno about that – 1+ deaths per 100k in Dec/January down to .20 to .15 per 100k is close to 80%-85% decline.
Maybe thats not considered a strong decline is some parts of the blogosphere
“My “intellectual betters” can explain this, I’m sure.”
Sweden ranks 33rd in deaths. Well below the following tightly locked down EU states that also experienced recurring waves (that the narrative claims couldn’t have been possible because they were locked down and masked, unlike Sweden.)
Belgium
France
Poland
Spain
Portugal
Italy
UK
The discovery that immunity is short lived and not always complete happened months ago. The zeal to pretend, for political reasons, that Sweden was uniquely damaged by Covid suppresses the actual questions- which policies were most effective, how do you identify and address immunity limitations, what would we do differently next time?
Intellectual “betters” worth listening to care about those questions. The ones who apply their intellect to dodging those questions are fascinating. God save us from the intellectually “fascinating.”
For those who still just don’t get it- nobody is saying Sweden did everything right or that Nic Stokes accurately predicted herd immunity there. We’re addressing the mythologies that a. there’s no such thing as herd immunity and only a crank would try to predict it and b. the avoidance of absolute governmental lockdown was horrific because Norway, and no other examples need be examined.
Clever people would be able to actually think about this-
The issue with lockdowns isn’t virology, it’s sociology. New York fared worse than Florida while locked down permanently because you can’t, actually, make people sit indoors alone for over a year. You can’t even make the governor of Michigan or California do it even while they’re signing the orders to force the rest of their state to lock down. The mayor of Austin TX recorded a video telling people not to travel internationally or in groups while traveling internationally with a group. How much credence did he really give the “intellectual betters” he was citing in the video?
They couldn’t even get the British scientist who demanded absolute lockdowns to follow them. The Neil Ferguson scandal wasn’t just silly politics- if our top “intellectual better” in the field of virology could easily and happily ignore his own commands, what chance did we ever really have to get the average 25-year-olds to sit at home for 18 months with a face cloth?
But… Norway!
Don: It is a bad thing that the world is self-sorting into two major echo chambers. Since I agree with much of what you wrote and don’t want another echo chamber, I regret your departure. As scientists, we have a professional obligation to resist our natural tendency to self-sort and listen to all the evidence. Over the past year, listening to climate change skeptics here making dubious remarks about the non-climate issues you raise has decreased my confidence in the climate skeptic position (though not in our host).
Donald, several of your points are quite valid. Others are straw men. To take just one, the unfortunate Donald Trump, there’s this:
One of the 18 scientists who recently published a letter acknowledging the plausibility of the coronavirus lab-leak theory said she and her colleges didn’t speak out sooner because President Trump promoted that possibility for the origin of the pandemic.
“At the time, it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn’t want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins,”said Alina Chan in an interview with NBC News.
Chan said there had been trepidation among some scientists about publicly discussing the lab leak hypothesis for fear that their words could be misconstrued or used to support racist rhetoric about how the coronavirus emerged. Trump fueled accusations that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research lab in the city where the first Covid-19 cases were reported, was connected to the outbreak, and on numerous occasions he called the pathogen the “Wuhan virus” or “kung flu.”
HOW TO INTERPRET THIS?
1. “Scientists” who modify their opinions based on political currents are unworthy of the name.
2. Trump really does have the fecal touch, and should be kept from associating with anything you value.
3. What is important is the message, not the messenger.
4. Fear of loss of credibility because of the ignorance of the public is shameful.
5. All of the above…
Since the start I’ve been saying that RNA labelled “SARS-CoV-2” is a mere new entry on a database built using software and other lab techniques. That’s why no “isolation” is possible. And this even the authors of all papers confirmed as well as the CDC and other countries state agencies. In short OPERATION COVIDIUS is not a lab accident. It’s just a well planned operation to start the transformation of the global civilization. Chinese officials were present in the last meeting to fine tune the deployment of the operation back in October 2019 and it appears that success was achieved. They were even able to made-up an experimental jab and test/kill thousands and thousands of people worldwide. All this while still making huge profits. What’s not to like?!
Sorry sir, but this strikes me as many bridges too far. This virus will likely just become another circulating human CoV. Resulting in what we commonly refer to as a cold after the adaptive immune system has been trained by an initial exposure.
I can’t connect your premises to your conclusions. Would a paper documentation instead of a database change an “isolation”, whatever it means?
Dr. Andrew Kaufman refutes “isolation” of SARS-Cov-2; he does step-by-step analysis of a typical claim of isolation; there is no proof that the virus exists.
by Jon Rappoport
April 21, 2021
The global medical community has been asserting that “a pandemic is being caused by a virus, SARS-Cov-2.”
But what if the virus doesn’t exist?
People have been asking me for a step-by-step analysis of a mainstream claim of virus-isolation. Well, here it is.
“Isolation” should mean the virus has been separated out from all surrounding material, so researchers can say, “Look, we have it. Therefore, it exists.”
I took a typical passage from a published study, a “methods” section, in which researchers describe how they “isolated the virus.” I sent it to Dr. Andrew Kaufman [1], and he provided his analysis in detail.
I found several studies that used very similar language in explaining how “SARS-CoV-2 was isolated.” For example, “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 from Patient with Coronavirus Disease, United States, (Emerging Infectious Diseases, Vol. 26, No. 6 — June 2020)” [3].
First, I want to provide a bit of background that will help the reader understand what is going on in the study.
The researchers are creating a soup in the lab. This soup contains a number of compounds. The researchers assume, without evidence, that “the virus” is in this soup. At no time do they separate the purported virus from the surrounding material in the soup. Isolation of the virus is not occurring.
They set about showing that the monkey (and/or human cells) they put in the soup are dying. THAT’S THEIR KEY “EVIDENCE.” This cell-death, they claim, is being caused by “the virus.” However, as you’ll see, Dr. Kaufman dismantles this claim.
There is no reason to infer that SARS-CoV-2 is in the soup at all, or that it is killing cells.
Finally, the researchers assert, with no proof or rational explanation, that they were able to discover the genetic sequence of “the virus” they never isolated. “We didn’t find it, we don’t know anything about it, but we sequenced it.”
Here are the study’s statements claiming isolation, alternated with Dr. Kaufman’s analysis:
STUDY: “We used Vero CCL-81 cells for isolation and initial passage [in the soup in the lab]…”
KAUFMAN: “Vero cells are foreign cells from the kidneys of monkeys and a source of contamination. Virus particles should be purified directly from clinical samples in order to prove the virus actually exists. Isolation means separation from everything else. So how can you separate/isolate a virus when you add it to something else?”
STUDY: “…We cultured Vero E6, Vero CCL-81, HUH 7.0, 293T, A549, and EFKB3 cells in Dulbecco minimal essential medium (DMEM) supplemented with heat-inactivated fetal bovine serum (5% or 10%)…”
KAUFMAN: “Why use minimal essential media, which provides incomplete nutrition [to the cells]? Fetal bovine serum is a source of foreign genetic material and extracellular vesicles, which are indistinguishable from viruses.”
STUDY: “…We used both NP and OP swab specimens for virus isolation. For isolation, limiting dilution, and passage 1 of the virus, we pipetted 50 μL of serum-free DMEM into columns 2–12 of a 96-well tissue culture plate, then pipetted 100 μL of clinical specimens into column 1 and serially diluted 2-fold across the plate…”
KAUFMAN: “Once again, misuse of the word isolation.”
STUDY: “…We then trypsinized and resuspended Vero cells in DMEM containing 10% fetal bovine serum, 2× penicillin/streptomycin, 2× antibiotics/antimycotics, and 2× amphotericin B at a concentration of 2.5 × 105 cells/mL…”
KAUFMAN: “Trypsin is a pancreatic enzyme that digests proteins. Wouldn’t that cause damage to the cells and particles in the culture which have proteins on their surfaces, including the so called spike protein?”
KAUFMAN: “Why are antibiotics added? Sterile technique is used for the culture. Bacteria may be easily filtered out of the clinical sample by commercially available filters (GIBCO) [4]. Finally, bacteria may be easily seen under the microscope and would be readily identified if they were contaminating the sample. The specific antibiotics used, streptomycin and amphotericin (aka ‘ampho-terrible’), are toxic to the kidneys and we are using kidney cells in this experiment! Also note they are used at ‘2X’ concentration, which appears to be twice the normal amount. These will certainly cause damage to the Vero cells.”
STUDY: “…We added [not isolated] 100 μL of cell suspension directly to the clinical specimen dilutions and mixed gently by pipetting. We then grew the inoculated cultures in a humidified 37°C incubator in an atmosphere of 5% CO2 and observed for cytopathic effects (CPEs) daily. We used standard plaque assays for SARS-CoV-2, which were based on SARS-CoV and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) protocols…”
STUDY: “When CPEs were observed, we scraped cell monolayers with the back of a pipette tip…”
KAUFMAN: “There was no negative control experiment described. Control experiments are required for a valid interpretation of the results. Without that, how can we know if it was the toxic soup of antibiotics, minimal nutrition, and dying tissue from a sick person which caused the cellular damage or a phantom virus? A proper control would consist of the same exact experiment except that the clinical specimen should come from a person with illness unrelated to covid, such as cancer, since that would not contain a virus.”
STUDY: “…We used 50 μL of viral lysate for total nucleic acid extraction for confirmatory testing and sequencing We also used 50 μL of virus lysate to inoculate a well of a 90% confluent 24-well plate.”
KAUFMAN: “How do you confirm something that was never previously shown to exist? What did you compare the genetic sequences to? How do you know the origin of the genetic material since it came from a cell culture containing material from humans and all their microflora, fetal cows, and monkeys?”
—end of study quotes and Kaufman analysis—
My comments: Dr. Kaufman does several things here. He shows that isolation, in any meaningful sense of the word, is not occurring.
Dr. Kaufman also shows that the researchers want to use damage to the cells and cell-death as proof that “the virus” is in the soup they are creating. In other words, the researchers are assuming that if the cells are dying, it must be the virus that is doing the killing. But Dr. Kaufman shows there are obvious other reasons for cell damage and death that have nothing to do with a virus. Therefore, no proof exists that “the virus” is in the soup or exists at all.
And finally, Dr. Kaufman explains that the claim of genetic sequencing of “the virus” is absurd, because there is no proof that the virus is present. How do you sequence something when you haven’t shown it exists?
Readers who are unfamiliar with my work (over 300 articles on the subject of the “pandemic” during the past year [5]) will ask: Then why are people dying? What about the huge number of cases and deaths? I have answered these and other questions in great detail. The subject of this article is: have researchers proved SARS-CoV-2 exists?
The answer is no.
ptor: The subject of this article is: have researchers proved SARS-CoV-2 exists?
The answer is no.
Intriguing. What is the “sequence” that has been published the “sequence” of? Are all positive test results false positives? (How) Do the vaccines work?
@mathieurmarler
I’m just an engineer able to analyze systems and your questions have already been answered by Dr Andrew Kaufman, Dr Tom Cowan, Dr. Stephan Lanka and the likes…but basically this all brings back to the forefront the very important discussion about “settled” or “crony” science which is rightfully and consistently brought to attention by Judith. We see the unquestionable paradigm theories of Darwinism https://dissentfromdarwin.org/ and “Big Bang” https://hiup.org/astrophysics-gets-turned-head-black-holes-come-first/ are now falling apart. As far I’m concerned, this is very much the case with molecular biology as the rift between ‘germ’ theory and ‘terrain’ theory stemming from its origins between Pasteur and Bechamp https://www.biologicalmedicineinstitute.com/antoine-bechamp still exists today. In my awareness so far there is no clear distinction between exosomes and ‘viruses’.
Furthermore the aspect of electro-molecular biology is generally ignored in the mainstream and little understood despite all of biology having been created/evolved in the earth’s natural emf and Schumann resonance … protein synthesis occurs only because of electron transfer, something that is provably very sensitive. I highly recommend reading the Invisible Rainbow by Arthur Firstenberg. Besides the plethora of obvious detrimental biological effects of emfs https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5521226/ …when one considers how far from the status quo scientists like Piotr Garyaev https://wavegenetics.org/en/ and William Brown of the Resonance Foundation https://www.resonancescience.org/william-brown entertaining the third possiblity in this debate, that ‘THE virus’ (which actually means one of the words for poison in Latin) doesn’t actually ‘exist’, and that deep withing the techocratic infrastructure they understand the electromagnetic underpinnings of biology, it makes quite alot of sense…making the two other options of natural or laboratory origins good red-herrings to not go down the road of discussing ‘cleaning the fish tank’. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(18)30221-3/fulltext
There is too much correlation between the environmental ‘terrain’ factors (metals, emf’s etc.) in all the corona hotspots http://www.tomeulamo.com/fitxers/264_CORONA-5G-d.pdf and yet again in India (the discourse of which is highly censored by gainsaying factcheckers sponsored by tech itself) Why was this paper really ‘retracted’ ?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32746604/
So…
i) if “the virus” is a bioweapon, it is a really bad one…that’s needed the assistance of the debilitating protocols of technocratic scientism/fascism (bad computer modelling, masks , lockdowns, toxic hand gels, psychological warfare, improper medical treatments and suppression of effective medicines) who are also destroying the microbiome (the bacterias needed to sustain life) with antibiotics and toxic agriculture in an already sugar and gmo soaked population…to create even the tiny chance of dying.
ii) if ‘the virus’ is natural…the very same technocratic collution of big-ag/pharm/big-ag scientism has thus eroded natural immunity with it’s arrogance is blackmailing and cleverly marketing their solution of ‘vaccines’ (and the covid jab is not a vaccine by definition, it’s an injection with a molecular device(gene therapy))… a direct anathema to natural immunity and thus are completely unnecessary. So regarding the effectiveness of the ‘injections’…I would ask what is the real purpose, where is the independent analysis of it’s content and is Luc Montagner a redherring too?…
https://planetes360.fr/pr-luc-montagnier-les-variants-viennent-des-vaccinations/
ptor: your questions have already been answered by Dr Andrew Kaufman, Dr Tom Cowan, Dr. Stephan Lanka and the likes…
Could you quote us the answers or provide links to the articles that have the answers?
And then there is those totally safe vaccines that everyone should take. Do you part for society and get the jab. More arms better for the good of us all.
Thank you. I enjoyed the opening paragraphs and skimmed the rest, so far, and will return to this. The conspiracist in me of course wants to scream and shout that a Czech media outlet published an interview which predates the specifics of the Wuhan hypothesis, with a Kazak researcher mentioning work on a bat-born virus at the former Soviet bioweapons lab in Altimy, a lab which after the disintegration of the Soviet Union was supported with US DOD funding. The Czech outlets which I had been reading daily became almost impossible to access, and hits on this report became impossible to find immediately after a NATO / Atlantic Council response which called this story Russian propaganda intended to undermine Western morale and Covid response , a theory which I immediately questioned because of Czech-Russian animosity.
There were thoughtful articles that posited the lab origin of this virus nearly a year ago. It`s pretty easy to quickly discern whether an article is worth reading on this subject. If they regard people who disagree with them as conspiracy theorists or if the entirety of their argument is that China is evil, then they are typically not worth reading. Months ago when I discovered that the bat reservoir that was the host of the most closely related CoV was not native to Wuhan, that caught my attention.
Kenneth – are you sure you spelled “Altimy” correctly?
Altima
It is not just the cartel, but also the bystanders not intervening. The craziest thing about climate science is the fact that GHGs do not even warm planet Earth. It is something no one ever realized, especially not those denying the GHE altogether. It is not about denial, but about taking on the science and being precise. If you do not tolerate simplified assumptions and go after the details, it is perfectly enough to annihilate the GHG induced GHE.
Since no one else seems capable of doing it, I made it my mission. A decent part is already up, but big things are yet to come. Enjoy..
https://www.greenhousedefect.com/
Don
I don’t think you have to resign when you were never hired.
I realized you received your Ph.d long long ago, so I’ll let you know that today, people can post on blogs without permission.
In his farewell address in January 1961, President Eisenhower did not only speak about the “military-industrial complex” that became a kind of stereotype.
He also said : “We must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” (Farewell address of President Eisenhower, January 17, 1961)
How far-sighted was he!
Thank you for the piece Dr. Judith.
There’s also the possibility that Covid-19 was used as a preemptive biological weapon. As mentioned by Sir Winston Churchill, it’s inevitable that Chinese communism will rub against western democracy. It’s unfortunately a very real possibility:
….
More athletes have revealed that they fell ill during the Military World Games in October when the Chinese city of Wuhan hosted the event months before the COVID-19 outbreak.
Taking place in October, the allegations came two months before the first identification of COVID-19 by China.
Close to 10,000 competitors competed at the Games from over 100 countries during the nine-day event.
….
https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1094347/world-military-games-illness-covid-19
Reblogged this on Climate Collections.
There didn’t even need to be a real virus for the world-wide pandemonium to have occurred.
Dr. Claus Kohnlein, MD, in his book Virus Mania and in an interview (link below) explained that researchers at Wuhan University wrote a paper on the proper protocol for treatment of the C-19 virus that was published in the prestigious journal Lancet at the onset of the spread of the virus. The Lancet is funded by the Bill Gates Foundation. Dr. Kohnlein demonstrates how this accepted standard of care for C-19, that doctors must use to avoid liability, is malpractice and criminal and resulted in avoidable deaths.
So, it could be said that the C-19 standard of care was weaponized or at minimum negligence. If so, there didn’t even need to be a virus that spread, just social contagion, fear and panic. This was exacerbated by lockdowns, social isolation and lack of sunlight, vitamin D and zinc for the immune system.
Moreover, influenza deaths curiously dropped to negligible or minimal concurrently with the C-19 pandemic. Health officials said this was because people were at home and not spreading the virus. But one of the aspects of C-19 is that neither a virus or flue would likely infect other healthier members of a family. Moreover, how could a mask screen out influenza but not virus when both can be spread through the human eye or nasal passages. I
Interview link here
There did not even need to be a virus for pandemonium to happen. Dr. Claus Kohnlein, MD, in his book Virus Mania, and in an interview at https://Vimeo.com/404203138 , explains how Wuhan University researchers wrote a paper on proper protocol for treatment of the C-19 virus that was published in The Lancet at outset of virus spread. Lancet is funded by Bill Gates. Dr. Kohnlein demonstrates how this accepted standard of care for C-19 is malpractice and criminal. So, it could be said that the standard was weaponized it at minimum incompetence or negligence. If so, there did not need to be a virus to spread, only social contagion, fear and panic coupled with lockdowns and social isolation.
Covid first came to our attention because of cases in Wuhan in December 2019. But there is at least one well-attested case in France, also Dec 2019, in someone with no relevant travel history.
Although the patient had no travel history his infected wife, whom had a milder case, was a worker at a supermarket next to Charles DE Galle Airport. She said international travelers frequented her store.
Ron: Thanks for the reply. I’ve commented extensively about some of your evidence elsewhere in this post. Until this evidence is debated publicly, it is premature for me (at least) to reach any conclusions. My objective writing above was to express the opinion that Wuhan was the site of the first super-spreader event, but did not need to be the site where Patient Zero was infected. If you want to believe the virus escaped from a Chinese lab, there are probably at least a dozen major Chinese cities where research is being done on coronaviruses.
As best I can tell, WIV identified RaGT13 by sequencing amplicons, but never claimed to have isolated intact virus from bat feces. If I were performing gain of function studies by introducing a furin cleavage site into a SARS1-related coronavirus, I probably wouldn’t choose RaGT13, whose existence wasn’t important enough to disclose for seven years after samples were collected.
Frank, thanks for your thoughts. The more the better. I am wanting to think it was not a lab leak or a bioweapon. Like you, I am hoping it was a natural disaster that we almost stopped but just missed.
But even if that proves to be the case nobody can deny now that it just as well could have been a lab leak, whether engineered to test vaccines to get a technological edge, or to engineer a bioweapon to gain an economic edge — or both (the civil-military fusion directive). That being the case, policy considerations should follow this reality.
“…I probably wouldn’t choose RaGT13…”
RaTG13, in fact, was exactly what Fauci, Baric and the international virologist community were looking for, a SARS-like virus that caused a documented incident of SARS-like illness and death in humans. There is no way to explain Shi’s lack of disclosure of this other than the PLA told her not to. That she didn’t ever get a whole virus sample is to believe her when even the most naïve person can see she was being deceptive for years, particularly when the world was counting on her honesty.
For what it’s worth my better half and I were flat on our backs in bed between Xmas and New Year 2019 with the classic Covid-19 symptoms.
Neither of us had been anywhere near Wuhan, but lots of other people had been a few months earlier. See Alan’s “World Military Games” story.
Nick, Ron, Jim: Most discussions of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 ignore our inability to track the spread of the virus around the world:
Nick brings up the two cases in France (with transmission from one person to another in France).
In Washington state, the first case was identified on 1/19/20 in Everett (a Seattle suburb) in a man who had recently returned from visiting family in Wuhan. Despite doctors being on the alert and knowing exactly what to look for, a closely related strain next popped up on 2/19/20 in a nursing home 30 miles away.
The story was similar in CA. COVID was first identified in travelers from Wuhan beginning on 1/26/20, but the first American to die of COVID (on 2/6/20) wasn’t diagnosed until April and was never connected with any early case or traveler from China. FWIW, my sister and her husband in Central California were very ill in January of 2020; one lost their sense of smell and the other needed inhaled steroids.
Furthermore, more than half of people with COVID don’t pass the disease on to anyone. Super-spreading events are essential to the high transmission of COVID, but that means many lines die out.
Bat-infested Southern China is the place where a novel bat coronavirus was most likely to cross over to man (possibly via another mammalian species). Based on our failure to track SARS-CoV-2 AFTER it was discovered and doctors were on the alert, there is every reason to believe that COVID COULD HAVE BEEN CARRIED FROM SOUTHERN CHINA IN AN INFECTED PERSON WITHOUT HAVING BEEN DETECTED. (It obviously also could have been carried in a live animal, but the virus hasn’t been found in the live animals trade as SARS-CoV-1 was.)
Consequently, I think that WUHAN WAS THE SITE OF THE FIRST SUPER-SPREADING EVENT(S), but not necessarily the site where Patient Zero was first infected. With at least 50 identified cases in December and allegedly several hundred possible cases, that super-spreading event could have occurred in late November. All of the branches of the evolutionary tree that died out without causing a super-spreading event can’t be detected by genetic analysis.
Hi Frank,
I agree that if the virus was natural your scenario is the most likely right now. However, that is a vanishingly small chance if you read all the evidence in this post. There is a ton of circumstantial evidence pointing to the WIV and now forensic evidence is flowing out as the flood gates have been opened by Baric’s signature on the May letter of Nature.
Afternoon Frank,
It seems my previous reply is stuck in Judith’s moderation queue for some reason.
Hopefully it will reappear in due course.
I have been scanning for articles on SARS2 origin since the outbreak. The first news we all heard. It came from the Wuhan wet market. But that faded as the Wuhan health department dismissed this due to finding no animals in the market that were infected. And, significantly, no Horse Shoe bats. Then they found more and more earlier cases that had no connection to the market.
The next lead was the pangolin cov papers. Chinese virologists found that its spike RNA coding was a 97% match to SARS2’s spike. Remember that the precursor bat virus collected in 2013 by Dr. Zhengli Shi, RatG13, was only 96% similar and the spike was far lower than that. But non-China virologists rejected the pangolin cov because the non-spike RNA was less of a match than RatG13. In other words pangolin cov had to be a more distant ancestor than the bat cov so it couldn’t be the father to SARS2.
The big leap in evidence came in September from Dr. Li-meng Yan. She published a non-peer reviewed article claiming genomic evidence proved SARS2 was from a lab. She went further and claimed that RatG13’s RNA code was fudged by Dr. Shi to cover up that the Chinese military released it intentionally as an “unrestricted bioweapon.” I felt she went too far then.
People should read her papers and digest her evidence themselves but my opinion is that she make a strong case for lab origin the at least. Her strongest point is that a segment of the RNA in SARS2 called the E-protein is 100% genetically identical to bat covs collected by the Chinese military in 2017 called ZC45 and ZXC21. In her second paper she points out that this is no longer the case since the E-protein has evolved through mutation. But that proves there was nothing so critical about the RNA that it shouldn’t have ever been 100% identical unless the first SARS2 virus samples were very recently connected to the ZC45 and ZXC21. RatG13 also had the identical E-protein but Yan’s paper makes a good case as to why RatG13 was a hasty fabrication.
Yan paper 1 https://zenodo.org/record/4073131
Yan paper 2 https://zenodo.org/record/4073131/files/The%202nd%20Yan%20Report.pdf
Another paper claiming lab origin was published by Dr. Steven Quay in January here.
He lays out lots of the evidence, including a unique claim that several of the RNA codes published from viruses from early samples from Wuhan included code for an adenovirus which is used to make a vaccine. He offers the possibilities that either patients were given a vaccine as a hail Mary or that these patients were part of a challenge study (voluntarily or not) on SARS2 vaccine program, pre-pandemic .
I just found that Dr. Quay will testify before the US congress on lab origin for SARS2 from 2:00 to 3:30 pm EDT, Monday, May 24, 2021.
The link for Quay’s paper is https://zenodo.org/record/4642956
Yan paper 3 2021
Yan, L.M., Kang, S., Guan, J. and Hu, S., 2021. The Wuhan Laboratory Origin of SARS-CoV-2 and the Validity of the Yan Reports Are Further Proved by the Failure of Two Uninvited “Peer Reviews”. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Limeng-Yan/publication/350523980_The_Wuhan_Laboratory_Origin_of_SARS-CoV-2_and_the_Validity_of_the_Yan_Reports_Are_Further_Proved_by_the_Failure_of_Two_Uninvited_Peer_Reviews_Opening_Statement/links/6064861f458515e83485d1b8/The-Wuhan-Laboratory-Origin-of-SARS-CoV-2-and-the-Validity-of-the-Yan-Reports-Are-Further-Proved-by-the-Failure-of-Two-Uninvited-Peer-Reviews-Opening-Statement.pdf
Dr. Li-Meng Yan provides the earliest specialist researcher evidence closest to the source that I have seen. She had to flee for her life. I highly recommend reviewing all three of her papers.
The Lancet op-ed commits a fundamental error of logic when it speaks in its opening sentence of: “.. conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.” The theory that the virus escaped from the Wuhan laboratory would only be a conspiracy theory if it was claimed that the escape was deliberately engineered – something that no-one has ever suggested. The editorial is therefore tainted from the outset.
The Lancet is simply indulging in the weaponised use of the term “conspiracy theory,” a process begun by Lewandowsky in his 2013 paper in which he falsely claimed to have demonstrated that climate sceptics are more likely to believe in absurd theories about faked moon landings, etc. (Lewandowsky and his co-author John Cook have since moved on to investigating conspiracy theories surrounding Covid-19, while playing down their long-debunked research on climate scepticism.)
This weaponised use of research into belief in conspiracy theories to attack and belittle political opponents is now prevalent in social science. A recent major research project at Cambridge University was altered in mid-course in order to identify supporters of Trump and Brexit as conspiracy theorists. The European Union is supporting a number of studies which do the same for supporters of “populist” (i.e. critical of the European Union) political parties. Any mention of “conspiracy theory” in the social sciences should therefore be treated with suspicion.
https://judithcurry.com/2021/05/23/collapse-of-the-fake-consensus-on-covid-19-origins/#comment-950547
Robert, after it is established to be of lab origin we can look at the evidence of premeditation. You have a lot of my respect for you superb command of climate science and alternative energies. You should do a deep dive into the links I have started providing with an open mind.
“However, the fact that these op-eds successfully defined a ‘consensus’ for a year has more to do with Trump derangement syndrome and the desire not to appear Sinophobic. ”
Perhaps, but to think all kinds of viruses naturally springing out of China, also appears, Sinophobic.
Or if virus are naturally occurring so often in China, is good reason wall off China, until “this nature” can be controlled.
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“They” got Trump out of re-election to office via all the media onslaughts of half-truths and outright lies, which was their only concern in 2020. They now have the bully pulpit via Puppet Joe to continue the gas-lighting of the American public and most of the Western world.
Given the millions of places that a new virus could emerge, what are the odds that it ‘spontaneously’ emerged in the shadow of one of the very few labs in the world that work on virus manipulation, and which has a track record of poor safety performance? On that basis alone, the Wuhan lab is the first suspect and should have been the focus of efforts to understand the origin from day one. The fact that the Chinese government and several connected officials in the West diverted our attention from the lab simply adds to the skepticism around their story. Anyone who believed the bat/pangolin route was simply being lazy.
And why is it OK to call the variants “S African” “Indian” “British” etc while calling the Wuhan virus Covid? Manipulating language is a propaganda tool, used all to frequently today.
“What are the odds that it ‘spontaneously’ emerged in the shadow of one of the very few labs in the world that work on virus manipulation”
Exactly: 1) Wuhan lab works on gain of function for viruses 2) The Chinese government is a corrupt government 3) China covered up key facts in the early stages of the outbreak, which included censoring media coverage. 4) WHO is in the back pocket of China (China essentially put Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in charge of the WHO). 5) WHO’s director-general praised China’s “transparency.” 6) In the initial days of the outbreak, the WHO repeated the false claim from the Chinese government that there is “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” associated with COVID-19. 7) As the number of cases and the death toll soared, the WHO took months to declare the COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic.
We have people here who implicitly defend China; and directly hold WHO in high regard, as unreproachable. Why?
Reblogged this on ClimateTheTruth.com and commented:
“What is concerning about this episode is not so much that a consensus has been overturned, but that a fake consensus was so easily enforced for year. This occurred during a key period when understanding the origins of the virus had implications for how it could best be fought. Scientists who understood that there was a great deal of uncertainty surrounding the origins of the virus did not speak up. Probity came from knowledgeable individuals that were outside of the field of virology.”
Is our approach to science really that much different from medieval science, apart from the superb tricks and tools we have acquired since that time?
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China’s Officials now have shown us their true nature by pushing fervently back on the Coronavirus Pandemic outbreak.
CHINA HAS SHOWN IT CANNOT BE TRUSTED WORLD LEADER:
(CHINA DOES NOT RESPECT THE BASIC INDIVIDUAL DIGNITY AND RIGHTS OF ITS OWN PEOPLE, LET ALONE THE DIGNITY & RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE AROUND OF THE WORLD)
Over the last thirty years, the Chinese Officials have shown us our many great National Security weaknesses and frailties. We not only failed to heed the many warnings that lay at our doorstep, but we continued to allow the Chinese Officials and government leaders to unduly take advantage of our goodwill and good graces. We now see how wrong we had been in trusting the Chinese Officials and Wuhan Laboratory Directors to do proper and fitting communicable disease surveillance and response, enhance training for public health professionals, and establish timely local and international critical emergency COVID-19 disaster rapid response collaboration.
CHINA HAS SHOWN IT CANNOT BE A GOOD CUSTODIAN OF THE WORLD
— CHINA HUMAN DEPRAVITY TOLL: IMMEASURABLE —
The self-interested Chinese ‘survival of the fittest’ leaders have now put the world on the road to perdition [economic chaos/destruction, ill-health/death and stifling starvation/poverty]. The PRC Officials keep choosing to try to disgustingly connive their way out of being grossly negligent. These single-minded draconian monolithic dystopian CCP leaders, even today, do not have any feelings of compunction into the greater COVID-19 Pandemic Outbreak which had gone awry [completely got out-of-hand]— tossing aside their key world leader role of being responsible and accountable to the world body. Even at this writing, the Chinese Military international propaganda misinformation machine is in full bloom* countering [at every turn]** the stark realities of the Chinese wilful wrongdoings by not containing the Coronavirus in Wuhan, Hubie Province.*** Many important unanswered questions still remain.
***https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/us-intel-officials-believe-45500-corpses-were-incinerated-one-fortnight-wuhan
Virologists Say Genetic “Fingerprints” Prove COVID-19 Man-Made, ‘No Credible Natural Ancestor’, TYLER DURDEN ZeroHedge
“British professor Angus Dalgleish – best known for creating the world’s first ‘HIV vaccine’, and Norwegian virologist Dr. Birger Sørensen – chair of pharmaceutical company, Immunor, who has published 31 peer-reviewed papers and holds several patents, wrote that while analyzing virus samples last year, the pair discovered “unique fingerprints” in the form of “six inserts” created through gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. They also conclude that “SARS-Coronavirus-2 has “no credible natural ancestor” and that it is “beyond reasonable doubt” that the virus was created via “laboratory manipulation.””
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/virologists-claim-fingerprints-manipulation-prove-covid-19-man-made-no-credible-natural
Thanks for this very very good article. Here is a pdf of the paper described by the article. I blasts Kristian Anderson’s work and I am anxious to see if he has a reply. The authors outline 6 sites that are unusual for a naturally evolved virus to acquire that make it particularly well adapted to attack humans.
1The Evidence which Suggests that This Is No Naturally Evolved Virus A Reconstructed Historical Aetiology of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike
Birger Sørensen, Angus Dalgleish& Andres Susrud
Immunor & St Georges University of London
Abstract: “To discover exactly how to attack SARS-CoV-2 safely and efficiently, our vaccine candidate Biovacc-19 was designed by first carefully analysing the biochemistry of the Spike. We ascertained that it is highly unusual in several respects, unlike any other CoV in its clade. The SARS-CoV-2 general mode of action is as a co-receptor dependent phagocyte. But data shows that simultaneously it is capable of binding to ACE2 receptors in its receptor binding domain. In short, SARS-CoV-2 is possessed of dual action capability. In this paper we argue that the likelihood of this being the result of natural processes is very small. The spike has six inserts which are unique fingerprints with five salient features indicative of purposive manipulation. We then add to the bio-chemistry a diachronic dimension by analysing a sequence of four linked published research projects which, we suggest, show by deduction how, where, when and by whom the SARS-CoV-2 Spike acquired its special characteristics. This reconstructed historical aetiology meets the criteria of means, timing, agent and place to produce sufficient confidence to reverse the burden of proof. Henceforth, those who would maintain that the Covid-19 pandemic arose from zoonotic transfer need to explain precisely why this more parsimonious account is wrong before asserting that their evidence is persuasive, most especially when, as we also show, there are puzzling errors in their use of evidence”
https://thevirus.wtf/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/TheEvidenceNoNaturalEvol.pdf
See a working link to pdf in Ron Graf’s post above (same as I gave.)
Just to make sure I understand…
The Lancet and Nature and many virologists have been colluding together to hide the truth from the public about the genisis of a deadly disease, where the resulting ignorance about the true genisis might well lead to increased morbidity and mortality going forward.
And the truth should be obvious to any virologist, yet none have any sense of ethics, and thus none have come forward to blow the whistle – or if they have, they have been squelched media that has no one who isn’t deluded because Trump.
So basically, a vast conspiracy.
But don’t call it a conspiracy theory, ’cause some snowflakes might get their feelings hurt and that wouldn’t be politically correct.
Look, conspiracies happen. If you believe in a conspiracy theory, feeakin’ own it. Don’t okay the victim card.
The problem with conspiracy theories is usually the plausibility issue. How plausible is it that X number of people could be directly or indirectly (but knowingly) involved in perpetrating or tacitly supporting a fraud, at the potential expense of significant suffering and death? The biggie the X, usually the less plausible is your conspiracy theory.
Since you’re the easiest person for you to fool, ask yourself if the alignment of your conspiracy theory with your ideology or advocacy (say, oh I don’t know, your advocacy against the consensus view among climate scientists about the risks from ACO2 emissions…)
Avoid motive-impugning, and employ some cognitive empathy to see if maybe you can find alternative explanations for what other people do rather than malign intent or indifference to suffering.
And then if you still think there’s a conspiracy afoot, freakin’ own it – and take on the plausibility issue.
Avoid playing the victim card.
The problem is what happened to the people who said a lab leak was plausible. They were Trump lovers. This happening was not science. We heard over and over, because Science!! It was a PR approach. A political one. It happens all the time. It would be nice if the people not doing science but calling people Trump lovers whould own up to what they did. But because it’s not science, I doubt they will.
So the truth should be obvious to any virologist, yet none have any sense of ethics, and thus none have come forward to blow the whistle – or if they have, they have been squelched media that has no one who isn’t deluded because Trump.
So basically, a vast conspiracy.
But don’t call it a conspiracy theory, ’cause some snowflakes might get their feelings hurt and that wouldn’t be politically correct.
Look, conspiracies happen. If you believe in a conspiracy theory, feeakin’ own it. Don’t okay the victim card.
The problem with conspiracy theories is usually the plausibility issue. How plausible is it that X number of people could be directly or indirectly (but knowingly) involved in perpetrating or tacitly supporting a fraud, at the potential expense of significant suffering and death? The biggie the X, usually the less plausible is your conspiracy theory.
Since you’re the easiest person for you to fool, ask yourself if the alignment of your conspiracy theory with your ideology or advocacy (say, oh I don’t know, your advocacy against the consensus view among climate scientists about the risks from ACO2 emissions…)
Avoid motive-impugning, and employ some cognitive empathy to see if maybe you can find alternative explanations for what other people do rather than malign intent or indifference to suffering.
And then if you still think there’s a conspiracy afoot, freakin’ own it – and take on the plausibility issue
Why?
We have a theory of collusion (direct or indirect but knowingly) among the Lancet and Nature and many virologists to hide the truth a out a deadly disease.
And people promoting that conspiracy theory whine about people saying they’re promoting a conspiracy theory.
Conspiracies happen. If you believe a conspiracy’s afoot, own it. Don be such a victim.
Joshua comment – “And then if you still think there’s a conspiracy afoot, freakin’ own it – and take on the plausibility issue”
The only conspiracy was the speed in which the possibility that covid originated in the Wuhan lab was labeled a conspiracy. It was labeled a conspiracy long before there was any where near enough sufficient information to assess the validity of possibility of originating from the Wuhan lab.
to this day, there remains insufficient information to ascertain the validity of the origin or to rule out many possible origins. (at least publicly available information)
Responding to Joshua June 17 at 11:17 p.m. “Look, here’s a chance for you to break the pattern. I’ll post a quote of Horowitz responding on the question of evidence of political bias or improper motivation in his findings.
See if you can respond without insulting me. As an experiment.
“Your report states you didn’t find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation played a role,” Feinstein said.
“That’s correct,” Horowitz responded.”
Horowitz used lawyerly language to evade the obvious conclusion. His report said there was no “direct” evidence of bias — meaning something like an email stating we are out to get Trump. Said nothing about circumstantial evidence which is admissible in court and often times of very high quality (like DNA evidence) He said many stupid things were done but he had no explanation why. (duh — bias) The way he worded his report was simply a bone given to Dems to take the heat off of himself for his other damning conclusions.
Also, he was stating that there was no direct evidence of bias in initial opening of investigation, however, when questioned more closely about continuing investigation, he stated: “We found no evidence that the initiation of the investigation was motivated by political bias. It gets murkier — the question gets more challenging, senator — when you get to the FISA,”
Geoff Chambers above addressed this very well. The term conspiracy theory has become a weapon to discredit and avoid considering ideas on their merits.
‘The Lancet op-ed commits a fundamental error of logic when it speaks in its opening sentence of: “.. conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.” The theory that the virus escaped from the Wuhan laboratory would only be a conspiracy theory if it was claimed that the escape was deliberately engineered – something that no-one has ever suggested. The editorial is therefore tainted from the outset.
The Lancet is simply indulging in the weaponised use of the term “conspiracy theory,” a process begun by Lewandowsky in his 2013 paper in which he falsely claimed to have demonstrated that climate sceptics are more likely to believe in absurd theories about faked moon landings, etc. (Lewandowsky and his co-author John Cook have since moved on to investigating conspiracy theories surrounding Covid-19, while playing down their long-debunked research on climate scepticism.)
This weaponised use of research into belief in conspiracy theories to attack and belittle political opponents is now prevalent in social science. A recent major research project at Cambridge University was altered in mid-course in order to identify supporters of Trump and Brexit as conspiracy theorists. The European Union is supporting a number of studies which do the same for supporters of “populist” (i.e. critical of the European Union) political parties. Any mention of “conspiracy theory” in the social sciences should therefore be treated with suspicion.”
dpy6629: When our nation’s leader advanced dozens (if not hundreds) of conspiracy theories for his political advantage, his allegations that the virus leaked from WIV were rightfully dismissed. When you highly publicize a hypothesis without any substantial evidence, you make the path more difficult for responsible investigators who follow. Don’t blame the left or the liberal press for responding normally to Trump’s irresponsible claims. In response to the libel lawsuit filed against her, Sidney Powell has asserted that no reasonable person should have believed the conspiracy theories she repeated about Dominion Voting machines. The same thing should applies to all hypotheses advanced without evidence.
When this lab theory re-appeared, President Biden’s first public response was to ask for a report. There is a good chance I won’t like what Biden chooses to do with the information he receives, but at least I know some evidence will back what he says.
With respect Frank, you have no way to know what information Trump had access to at the time. There were whistle blowers almost from the beginning in China many of whom were disappeared. Even if it was a guess based on past behavior, the media response was pure propaganda and a lie. The scientists who wrote the Lancet letter were lying. Of course intelligence agencies were looking into this from the beginning.
Your hatred of Trump I fear has distorted your view of reality and seems to make you unable to evaluate evidence or fairly represent anything about the last 5 years.
At the same time the press was trotting out the “conspiracy theory” tripe, they themselves had engaged in the largest and most consequential real conspiracy in American history to try to remove a duely elected president. That was the Russian collusion theory, which was purely disinformation bought and paid for by Clinton’s campaign. This was basically an attempted soft coup such as we are used to seeing in Banana Republics. The media and the deep state are culpable and I think worse than the Russians at spreading disinformation. This is why Trump was elected in the first place. Our elites are corrupt and shameful liars.
Although I agree with David’s assessment that the Russia collusion operation was the most consequential abuse of power by an outgoing administration in American history, I don’t think most who participated in government and media were witting, but they were negligent. They hated Trump so much it clouded their judgment to see BS. This is the same with Trump’s handling of Covid and China. If Trump had been briefed about the WIV going silent for two weeks in October and three employees being hospitalized with SARS-like symptoms in November and he did nothing but praise China and the WHO, and then we had the scientific consensus shift we are seeing now, what would be the MSM analysis of Trump?
a) He did the right thing in keeping quiet to preserve the China relationship and keep them from losing face.
b) Trump ignored his own intelligence agencies and allowed China to get off the hook for the worst pandemic of the century.
As you see the TDS game is heads I win tales you lose.
David Young –
> … they themselves had engaged in the largest and most consequential real conspiracy in American history
You shouldn’t speak of our ex-president in that way…
> The article was also promoted by the president. Disgraceful. We laugh about institutions such as Cornell and the University of California being complicit in junk science, but when it’s the U.S. government . . . this is Stalinesque. I guess that from their perspective, we’re in a war, and so this is all legitimate disinformation tactics. But that’s what the Stalinists said too, basically: everything is us vs. them and so any tactics are acceptable.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/05/30/your-tax-dollars-at-work-junk-social-science-edition/#comments
… they themselves had engaged in the largest and most consequential real conspiracy in American history
“You shouldn’t speak of our ex-president in that way…”
Because Obama and the Obama adminstration was involved, some of whom were quite active in the conspiracy, we should speak of an ex-president that way? Why not
Obama and members of his administration were part of the effort to make suckers out of a large majority of Republicans, by convincing them the election was stolen from Trump?
I didn’t realize that.
With respect David, your love or my hated for Trump has certainly distorted at least one of our views about Trump. Sadly, it has weakened the faith I’ve placed in your opinions about CFD in AOGCMs.
You are correct: didn’t know what information Trump had access to when he first claimed the pandemic began in a Chinese laboratory. Experience has taught me that Trump says whatever he wants, whether he has any evidence to support his claims. His administration began with the false claim that his inauguration crowd was bigger than Obama’s, though he had been lying and distorting for decades. His administration ended with lies that: the election had been stolen, Dominion Voting machines were rigged, and VP Harris can choose which state’s Electoral Votes should be presented to Congress for approval, just like VP Pence could in 2020. By the time the pandemic began, most of those with integrity were gone and the administration was filled with yes men whose loyalty was to Trump, not to evidence or the truth.
The evidence I saw in early 2020 was completely consistent with the hypothesis that both SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 crossed over to man from bats in bat-infested Southern China, probably via an intermediary host. Experience has shown that the latter traveled around the world (and even to France in December 2019!) without being detected by doctors who were alert and knew what they were looking for. The fact that the first super-spreader events occurred in Wuhan didn’t mean Patient Zero was infected there. The attempts to silence doctors warning peers of the danger, their delay in admitting that human-to-human transmission was occurring and their destroying evidence at the live animal market appeared to be business as usual for the Chinese Communist Party (and similar to the way the Trump administration behaved – no bipartisan investigation of Jan 6).
You failed to cite anyone who accused the authors of the Lancet editorial of lying, deception, or even conflict of interest last spring. Those responsible for intelligence in the Bio-warfare community weren’t asked to provide a statement in support of Trump’s accusations. A grossly-out-of-context sentence about safety from the State Department’s report on their visit to WIV was leaked.
I think that the increasing number of conspiracy theories and outright cults we are experiencing are a result of the echo chambers too many of us live in. The problem is particularly acute for Trump supporters, because Trump can destroy the career of any conservative news host, network or internet news site if they challenge his credibility on any subject. Remember Megan Kelly, top rated anchor on Fox News in 2016? Trump’s threats to take his audience from Fox to OAN? With an average of 35 tweets a day from Trump in the second half of 2020 and a right wing echo chamber of media and social media, did you ever find time to be exposed to addition facts and perspectives? (FWIW, I can’t stand the WaPo and NYT and have always though those liberal elite journalist’s biases and spin would get Trump re-elected even if there were more facts in their articles. For the most part, I research thing I want to know about (like the origin of COVID) and don’t trust news articles to be free of spin.) I think there is a cult of Bernie (1960’s Scandinavia socialism was a failure), BLM (the police have serious problems, but aren’t systematically killing Blacks), the 1619 Project and other attacks on American exceptionalism (we are exceptional, but imperfect) and pride (what volunteer army is going to defend a nation without pride?).
Frank, You should look at some of the links in this post and in the comments. For me this is not about Trump. For you it obviously is about Trump and you have carefully laid out the minute details of your obsession. Trump is the coroner and not the murderer of civility. Trump rose because of the growing separation between the elites in our society and working class people and the collapse of credibility of our institutions. Is Trump more dishonest than most politicians? I don’t know the answer.
Matt Crawford has several very perceptive pieces over the last months about the crisis we are facing in the West. I believe almost all our institutions are in crisis especially the media who have become frankly partisan and regularly lie about the most consequential issues such as policing and race. Academia has been captured by a racist Marxist theory that is dangerous and can’t exist in a diversity of ideas environment. Science is also in a dangerous situation and is in danger of being captured by this ideology. The pandemic brought this crisis out in the open for everyone to see.
With regard to the Lancet letter, please read the comments by Ron Graf and others. Given the evidence at the time, I think its clear the authors lied. In my opinion, no honest person could have arrived with such absolute certainty at their conclusion.
Ron and David: Here is the key passage from the Lancet Letter:
“The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2),1 and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 as have so many other emerging pathogens.11, 12 This is further supported by a letter from the presidents of the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine13 and by the scientific communities they represent. Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus. We support the call from the Director-General of WHO to promote scientific evidence and unity over misinformation and conjecture.14 We want you, the science and health professionals of China, to know that we stand with you in your fight against this virus.”
With 20/20 hindsight, this passage is ambiguous and misleading, but not necessarily a lie. If SAR2 originated by genetically engineering a furin cleavage site into a bat coronavirus, then SARS2 still “originated in wildlife” – a bat. References 2-10 (I haven’t read all of them) apparently suggests that recombination and mutation of existing genetic sequences in known coronaviruses could have produced SARS2. What the article doesn’t say is that references X and Y PROVE that SARS2 couldn’t be produced by genetic engineering a known beta-coronavirus. Nor does the letter specify what kind of conspiracy theories have been ruled out. (I couldn’t locate the NAS article (Ref 13).
Trump could have promoted the claims of an expert asserting that several research groups doing “gain-of-function” studies have genetically engineered furin cleavage sites into viruses to see if that allows cross-over to new species. If so, it was possible that such studies were being done at WIV and that a genetically engineered virus escaped. Then a critical Lancet article would have been forced address a credible hypothesis that couldn’t be vaguely dismissed as a conspiracy theory. The WHO investigation could have demanded an answer to the question: “Was WIV genetically engineering furin cleaved sites into beta-coronaviruses? If so, what coronavirus backbone was used? Unfortunately, Trump does not care about the opinions of experts or whether it was plausible that WIV was doing such gain-of-function studies. He simply wanted to look tough by trying to embarrass China, whether they deserved it or not.
The problem with both the natural evolution and genetic engineering hypotheses is that the closest coronavirus to SARS2, RaTG13, is only 96% homologous to SARS2, and something like 50 years of evolution apart. There isn’t a “coronavirus backbone” for genetic manipulation or a collection of other beta-coronaviruses similar enough to make a path to SARS2 appear obvious.
My fundamental problem is that Trump makes ludicrous accusations and somehow gets his supporters to believe them, no matter how absurd. For example:
1) If an FBI conspiracy began the Crossfire Hurricane investigation to prevent Trump from being elected, why didn’t they leak the existence of the investigation and the Dossier BEFORE THE ELECTION? Simple conclusion: No leak; no conspiracy. There was an investigation because: a) The Russians hacked the DNC. b) Manfort consulted for the pro-Russian Ukainian Party of Regions for a decade, his business partner (Kilimnik) was known to be connected to Russian intelligence, and Deripasha was suing him for $20M. c) Flynn and Page were being cultivated by Russia, Page associated with known Russian intelligence officers in the US, who were overheard planning to compromise Page. d) The Mifsud dangle of Clinton email to Papadopoulos – which even Barr eventually admitted wasn’t a Western operation. e) Roger Stone contacted the Internet persona Guccifer 2 (a Russian intelligence officer) and received advanced copies of WikiLeaks October releases. Since the FBI doesn’t discuss investigations until they are ready to indict or give up, for more than two years, Trump was able to convince his naive supporters that the “Russia collusion investigation” was nothing more than the unconfirmable raw intelligence or possibly DNC-inspired and-funded fantasies produced by Steele. The collusion section of the Mueller Report doesn’t even mention Steele’s unconfirmable allegations. It dealt with REAL AMERICANS who posed a REAL POTENTIAL THREAT to national security. It wasn’t until 2020 that we learned that the FBI had interviewed Danchenko, that all of Steele’s alleged sub-sources were real people, and that Danchenko and several of these sub-sources confirmed the basic outline of the allegations in the Dossier. Even the Dossier wasn’t a hoax!
2) At a videoed talk, Biden bragged to the Council of Foreign Relations that he had demanded the firing of Chief Ukrainian Prosecutor Shokin within 24 hours or $1B of US aid would be withheld. If Shokin were attempting to prosecute Hunter, why Biden have been publicly bragging about what he had done? Biden may be not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but even he isn’t that stupid! Everyone in the room knew that the US wanted Shokin fired because he had failed to attempt to prosecute the corrupt oligarch Zlochevsky, who had built Burisma into the biggest private Ukrainian oil and gas company worth $10B from almost nothing in a decade – partly while he was the government Minister under Yanukowych in charge of oil and gas leases! Corruption was the main reason for the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, and the new Ukrainian government desperately needed to convict some of the corrupt officials who had served under Yanukowych to gain credibility with the people. Fearing imprisonment, Zlochevsky spent 5 years mostly hiding out in Cyprus and meanwhile paid top dollar to put some influential Westerners on his BoD: The former President of Poland, the former head of the CIA Counter-Terrorism and Hunter Biden; and hired a lobbyist in Washington who had been chief of staff for SoS Kerry. (Kerry’s son-in-law turned down a board seat. He was already wealthy from the Heinz fortune, while Hunter’s Dad was not.) The issue was always Zlochevsky’s illegal billions, not Hunter’s sleezy, but legal, millions. I’m perpetually insulted by such repeated ignorance.
Frank, I don’t know where you are getting your information about Crossfire Hurricane or the Hunter Biden story but you repeat above a long list of disproven misinformation.
1. There was never any evidence that Carter Paige posed any kind of security risk. He was around that time actually a CIA confidential informant. The smear of him was always a lie with ZERO supporting evidence. A defensive briefing of Paige would have been the only legal response from the FBI.
2. Similarly with Flynn there was ZERO evidence. In fact Flynn had a good track record and his call with the Russian ambassador was entirely appropriate yet it became a set up for a perjury trap. Flynn’s only mistake was saying that our intelligence establishment needed serious reform and daring to work with Trump. I’m sure you and all the Trump haters determined long ago that orange man bad and worse all those who enabled him.
3. Crosfire Hurricane was almost totally predicated on the Steele Dossier which Steele himself admitted in testimony in a UK court was unverified and perhaps totally wrong. It was an “insurance policy” in case Trump won to drive him from office. (Strokz said this to Lisa Page in a text message). You ignore the fact that there were many many leaks from those involved before the election.
4. Roger Stone found out about the WikiLeaks dump when everyone else did. There were numerous fake news reports lying about this and the date on an email. Later totally disproven, but the lies were not retracted. That’s the pattern in this sad tale of political disinformation, lies are told. After they are disproven, perhaps a sentence is added saying additional information has come to light when a retraction is called for.
5. Even lefties such as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi have published on the sham Crossfire Hurricane and how its a terrible deep state and intelligence community abuse of power.
In short, you are being mislead by the mass disinformation campaign by the media and the deep state to spread lies and distortions. And you could only fail to see this unless your personal hatred for Donald Trump is very deep. I’m not going to go into the Hunter Biden pay for play criminal conspiracy but you are also misrepresenting that one.
For most of us out here this is not about Trump. It’s about a corrupt elite and a corrupt Intelligence deep state that needs deep reform or perhaps mass firings. If you think Biden will do any of that, you are sadly misinformed. Trump is not the murderer but the coroner. Western elites are broken and going insane.
With regard to the Steele dossier there is now an in depth book showing it to be disinformation. Thus, Crossfire Hurricane had no legitimate predication.
https://jasonfoster.substack.com/p/new-book-private-spies-infected-journalism
dpy6629 wrote: “I don’t know where you are getting your information about Crossfire Hurricane or the Hunter Biden story but you repeat above a long list of disproven misinformation.”
I get my information about the Crossfire Hurricane from reading the DoJ IG’s reports, the Mueller Report, and the Republican-controlled Senate investigation. The DoJ IG was no friend of the FBI, unnecessarily releasing the irresponsible texts of Strzok and Page. Your ignorance of the facts established by these investigations is bad and your over-confidence in your knowledge is appalling, When I tell someone they are wrong, I usually double-check my facts.
You can find a timeline of the CH investigation compiled by Senate investigators here:
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/CFH%20Timeline%20w%20Updates%2020201203%20%28FINAL%29.pdf
The DoJ IG found that all aspects of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation were properly predicated and that every top official in the FBI expressed the opinion that the investigation was essential (even when offered the opportunity to comment anonymously).
dpy6629 writes: “There was never any evidence that Carter Paige posed any kind of security risk. He was around that time actually a CIA confidential informant. The smear of him was always a lie with ZERO supporting evidence. A defensive briefing of Paige would have been the only legal response from the FBI.”
Upon hearing that Page had informed Russian officials about his role in the FBI’s indictment of three Russian spies (who had been overheard planning his recruitment), the FBI opened a counter-intelligence investigation into Carter Page on APRIL 6, 2016. That investigation later was incorporated into Crossfire Hurricane. Page was never a “source” for the CIA (someone who is given instructions and tries to find out information the CIA needs and the CIA generally can’t carry out any operation inside the US); he was an “operational contact” (someone the CIA occasionally contacts for information or expertise, probably about the Russian oil and gas industry). Page was last contacted by the CIA in 2011. Clinesmith would later break the law by altering a document used in the FISA application that described Page as a “source” when the CIA had told Clinesmith Page was only an “operational contact”. Page knowingly had many contacts with Russian intelligence operatives working under diplomatic cover in the US and probably in Russia. In other words, he was an “operational contact” for both the CIA and the Russians. Deciding which sources and contacts can be trusted is the most challenging part of the intelligence business. For example, who did Danchenko work for?
There had already been one earlier counter-intelligence investigation of Page and a FISA warrant. Page is the sole employee of private investment fund trying to invest in oil and gas projects in Russia and has bragged that he had offers of Russian funding to set up a pro-Russian think-tank in the US. Unlike most Americans, Page doesn’t view Russia as a dangerous adversary after Crimea. There is no proof that Page was knowingly or unknowingly working as an agent of the Russian government, but investigations are opened upon the basis of reasonable SUSPICION. Such investigations are normally kept secret by the FBI so that the subject’s reputation isn’t damaged if suspicions prove wrong, but Steele’s dubious allegations have led to highly publicized claims that Page has been persecuted. After intense scrutiny, the first two FISA surveillance warrants for Page were found valid, but the last two were withdrawn. The DoJ IG found that the FBI’s supporting documentation for the Page FISA contained numerous mistakes and omissions, and so did 10 other FISA applications he surveyed.
Yes, Comey could have advised Trump of the security threat posed by Manafort, Page and Flynn. However, we both know Trump wouldn’t have listened. It was Comey’s choice whether to investigate or warn. In this case, discretion might have be better than valor. Comey, however, is self-righteous, has a large ego, and LONG history of never backing down from powerful people (HRC email re-opening and candid testimony to Congress on her mistakes, Plame/Libby, the Bush/Cheney WH over illegal surveillance, Martha Stewart, Kobar Towers, and Mafia bosses.) He treated the Trump campaign the same way he treated others, at least until Trump fired him, claimed to have taped their conversations, bragged that the Russia investigation was the reason for the firing (obstructing justice) and invited Kislyak over to celebrate. Those mistakes resulted in a Special Counsel. When offered the opportunity to speak anonymously for IG report, ALL top FBI officials asserted an investigation had been essential.
dpy6629 wrote: “Similarly with Flynn there was ZERO evidence. In fact Flynn had a good track record and his call with the Russian ambassador was entirely appropriate yet it became a set up for a perjury trap. Flynn’s only mistake was saying that our intelligence establishment needed serious reform and daring to work with Trump. I’m sure you and all the Trump haters determined long ago that orange man bad and worse all those who enabled him.”
There is compelling evidence Flynn was being cultivated by Russia and he certainly was working as an unregistered foreign agent for Turkey before and during the Trump campaign. President Obama was outraged about Russian hacking of the DNC and other interference in the 2016 election. In December, he imposed serious penalties and asked the intelligence community why there was no public response from Russia. He worried his penalties were too weak and his message hadn’t gotten through. Obama was told Flynn had called Kislyak and requested that Russia make no more than a reciprocal response, meaning that Flynn had agreed to negating Obama’s sanctions. Some have called offering to negate the penalty for interfering with our election traitorous, but you aren’t required to agree. After the Kislyak calls leaked, but were publicly denied by Pence and others, concern grew that Flynn had been free-lancing and was now compromised. Comey took advantage of the disorganization in the new WH and sent two agents to interview Flynn, who lied about two different aspects of his conversations with Kislyak. Flynn twice pleaded guilty to lying and agreed that he had not been trapped trapped or deceived (though many asserted the interview was improper). Was Flynn following Trump’s instructions? Did he exceed them? No one knows, but Flynn was dismissed after Trump received a transcript of what Flynn actually said. You would never tolerate such lies from Susan Rice, and she merely distributed dubious and misleading intelligence about the origin of the attack in Benghazi on Sunday news shows.
dpy6629 wrote; “Crossfire Hurricane was almost totally predicated on the Steele Dossier which Steele himself admitted in testimony in a UK court was unverified and perhaps totally wrong. It was an “insurance policy” in case Trump won to drive him from office. (Strokz said this to Lisa Page in a text message). You ignore the fact that there were many many leaks from those involved before the election.”
The DoJ IG confirmed that the properly predicated Crossfire Hurricane investigation was officially opened on 7/31/16, and that six reports from Steele first reached the investigators almost two months later on 9/19/16. Steele first approached his former FBI handler in Rome in early August of 2016, but the CH investigation was so secret that no one knew what to do with such politically sensitive information. (I suspect Trump supporters were responsible for the delay, but there is no evidence that is what happened.) Since Steele had approached his former handler, the FBI assumed that he had returned to working as a Confidential Human Source, and they correctly dropped all contact with Steele when they realized he was talking to the press – something CHS’s are not allowed to do, However, Steele continued to send information through Bruce Ohr, John McCain (who gave the FBI its first complete copy of the Dossier on 12/9/16) and others. The intermediary between Steele and McCain, a Republican, would later leak the Dossier to Buzzfeed
dpy6629 wrote: “Roger Stone found out about the WikiLeaks dump when everyone else did. There were numerous fake news reports lying about this and the date on an email. Later totally disproven, but the lies were not retracted. That’s the pattern in this sad tale of political disinformation, lies are told. After they are disproven, perhaps a sentence is added saying additional information has come to light when a retraction is called for.”
Nevertheless, Bannon, Gates and other Trump campaign officials testified about Stone’s back-channel to WikiLeaks at Stone’s trial. A jury found Stone guilty of lying to Congress and law enforcement officials about Wikileaks, as well as witness tampering.
You have omitted the biggest villain, Manafort. The FBI opened and investigation into his money laundering in JANUARY 2016. That investigation later became part of Crossfire Hurricane. Gates reported that Manafort like to joke that his business partner in Ukraine (Kilimnik) was part of Russian intelligence and the US intelligence community agreed with that assessment. Manafort sent polling data from the Trump campaign to Kilimnik and asked him to share it with “friends”, information which could have been used to target the campaign ads Russia bought to the decisive states of PA and MI. Manafort broke his cooperation agreement with investigations by continuing to lie about his ongoing relationship with Kilimnik.
Worst of all, you fail to realize that the main objective was the CH investigation was Russian interference with our election: Hacking the DNC, purchases of ads supporting Trump and sowing dissension, organizing Trump rallies. None of this is a fantasy; Mueller indicted more than 30 Russians by name for these activities.
It is only with 20/20 hindsight that I could see that the CH investigation had almost nothing to do with Steele’s dubious allegations. Gullible Trump supporters like you heard mostly Trump propaganda about Steele’s allegations – which were unconfirmed raw intelligence that was not suitable for public consumption. The FBI wasn’t responsible for its release. In short, YOU have been seriously misled by a mass disinformation campaign run while the FBI and Special Counsel were investigating and not allowed to respond publicly.
As for Biden, he’s certainly not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he’s not stupid enough to publicly brag at a Council of Foreign Relations meeting about getting Ukrainian Prosecutor Shokin fired if Shokin were investigating his son. Since I know that corruption was the main cause of the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity, Biden obviously demanded that Shokin be fired because he had failed to indict any corrupt oligarchs. Nor do I have much confidence in reports that Hunter Biden left three? damaged laptops at a repair shop in Dover, DE when he lives in LA and his father lives an hour’s drive from Dover. Is Hunter making lots of money off of his family connections? Presumably. Unfortunately it isn’t illegal for a Ukrainian oligarch to pay enormous sums to board members who have been President of Poland, head of the CIA Counter-terrorism Center, and a son of the US VP; and to a lobbyist close to SoS Kerry. Carter Page’s investment fund is trying to make money off his connections with Russia and Hunter Biden is doing the same in China.
Just one more thing Frank because the actual sworn predication documents are the 4 warrant applications. Sally Yates, a Trump hater said under oath before Congress that she would have never signed the warrant renewal application if she had known what she knows now. That’s exceptionally strong evidence that the warrants were pseudo fraudulence or at the least badly wrong or perhaps deliberately deceptive. Those who signed them probably committed perjury even though it is hard to prove. They were largely predicated on opposition research paid for by Hillary from foreign operatives and Russians whose reliability has been admitted by Steele himself under oath to be unknown.
There never was any collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. All the rest is relatively small stuff. That the media kept this big lie alive for 3 years is a disinformation campaign vastly bigger than anything the Russians did.
Frank ‘
I knew the rough outlines of much of that, but some was new information and the level of detail was informative. So thanks for taking the time to write that up.
And thanks again for contributing here. It’s people like you who lend some credibility to arguments of “skeptics” about climate change.
There are a few people that I can use as a touchstone for evaluating technical arguments – because they display a consistently thorough and well-reasoned approach on issues where I can more easily get a sense of whether someone is just reflexively filtering everything through an ideological bias or really drilling down to the evidence stripped from biasing spin.
Pekka used to be one such contributor, but unfortunately is no longer available to contribute (except in spirit). Your comments on the pandemic helped me see that you’re that kind of contributor. That we fairly often have different political takes gives me an opportunity to check my own political takes against a reliable touchstone that can help me see my own biases.
Frank, That’s a giant mass of unsourced assertions and vague insinuations. The fact is that the FISA warrants cited for the bulk of their information the Steele dossier. If there was anything else surely they would include it. These warrants were deceptive and the court later said as much. Peter Strokz called CH an insurance policy in case Trump won. What you have here is lots of vague circumstantial evidence and little else.
You ignored my reference on the Steele dossier as if when you ignore something it doesn’t exist.
Manafort was indicted fro things that he did long before 2016. They had nothing to do with Russian interference in 2016. There has always been foreign interference in US elections. The scope of this in 2016 was no larger than Obama’s interference in Israeli elections.
You tip you hand with your description of the Hunter Biden laptop. It is authentic and everyone admits it or refuses to talk about it.
Its you who selectively ignore the main facts here about the actual formal warrant applications which are the official record of predication and select other vague information. You are the one ignoring the big facts and focusing on vague suspicions about mostly legal activities.
I’m busy right now with more important things but I have a lot of source information which you can easily find yourself. Mollie Hemingway has scores of in depth fact articles on this. She started off with your attitude Frank and has spent vastly more time digging than any of us here.
> Manafort was indicted fro things that he did long before 2016.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trials_of_Paul_Manafort
dpy6629 wrote: “Frank, That’s a giant mass of unsourced assertions and vague insinuations. The fact is that the FISA warrants cited for the bulk of their information the Steele dossier.”
AREN’T YOU WORRIED about the many lies you have been fed and repeated about the origin and timing of the CH investigation? I linked a timeline from the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, which was controlled by Republicans. The CH investigations did not start with Steele’s allegations – that is clearly another one of Trump’s Big Lies!
Due to Page’s many contacts with Russian intelligence agents in the US, the FBI had discussed, but rejected, the possibility of applying for a FISA surveillance warrant for Page before Steele’s reports arrived, and only went ahead after. The DoJ IG and the DoJ under Trump appointees decided the first two FISA warrants were valid, but the last two were not (because they failed to tell the judges that no significant new evidence had been uncovered from surveillance during the first two warrants.)
I was tremendously disappointed when the Mueller Report said nothing about Steele’s allegation, but that was when I finally understood that the CH investigation wasn’t about Steele’s allegations. It was about the reliable evidence collected by the FBI here in the US, not rumors and bar talk which makes up most raw intelligence. However, I was shocked to learn in 2020, that the FBI had identified and interviewed Steele’s primary source and knew that his sub-sources were real people. Danchecko confirmed that the allegations in the Dossier came from his sub-sources through him to Steele. Steele was running a real, though limited, intelligence network in Russia even before he was approached by Fusion GPS! The Dems who hired Steele clearly didn’t tell Steele and Danchenko what to put in their reports. Blaming the Dems for the content of the Dossier is another Big Lie.
Frank, You ignored the elephant in the room. The only sworn predication documents were the warrant applications. They relied heavily on the Steele dossier. The timeline just shows that the conspiracy to get Trump started before the dossier appeared to justify it. This omission of the most critical data shows that you like Comey and Strozk are motivated by political bias.
The warrants are tissues of lies and omissions of exculpatory information. They are the sole official and sworn predication documents. They prove that the Dossier provided the bulk of the predication.
There is an awful lot of word salad here to distract from the outcome of these multiple, lengthy investigations:
1. The claims about Trump or his campaign working with the Russians were found to be not true. The FBI was aware the claims were untrue in 2016, but did not reveal this until after the midterm elections in 2018,
2. FBI and DOJ officials falsified supporting documentation in order to secure warrants to wire tap a presidential political campaign.
3. The DOJ (for now) has declared the falsification was not politically motivated but was the result of extraordinary incompetence and lack of leadership. Those who displayed this extraordinary incompetence and lack of leadership are, curiously, considered by the Democratic Party to be “heroes.”
4. Hillary Clinton and the DNC employed a British foreign agent who disseminated misinformation from Russian intel in order to affect the American presidential election and enhance the chances of the election of Ms. Clinton.
5. At the time he was a vice president and personally tasked with rooting out corruption in Ukraine, Joe Biden’s son was given a “board” position on a corrupt and politically connected Ukrainian gas company that paid him seven figures for “work” he had no qualifications to perform. State Department personnel, who testified that it was outrageous for President Trump to consider that improper, were found to have sent memos noting that this was, indeed, improper. The New York Times and Washington Post along with social media declared it was out of bounds for anyone in the US to discuss Hunter Biden until after the 2020 election. This process was also implemented to quash the accurate concerns about lab leak at Wuhan, the myth that Trump “tear gassed protestors for a photo op,” and the publication of amazing information from Hunter Biden’s laptop.
dpy6629 wrote: “You ignored the elephant in the room. The only sworn predication documents were the warrant applications. They relied heavily on the Steele dossier. The timeline just shows that the conspiracy to get Trump started before the dossier appeared to justify it. This omission of the most critical data shows that you like Comey and Strozk are motivated by political bias. The warrants are tissues of lies and omissions of exculpatory information. They are the sole official and sworn predication documents. They prove that the Dossier provided the bulk of the predication.”
I personally hope that I’m biased by evidence. FWIW, I was distressed to be presented with a choice between the corrupt Clintons/Clinton Foundaation and Trump. If a conspiracy against Trump started in the FBI well before the Dossier arrived, then why didn’t the FBI conspirators leak the existence of their investigation and the Dossier before the election. Except for Yahoo News and Mother Jones, the MSM did not print the unconfirmable opposition research Steele was spreading. The vast majority of Americans voted in 2016 without ever having heard of Steele, his Dossier or an FBI investigation. One leak from any of those alleged Trump-hating conspirators at the top of the FBI would have filled the October 2016 newspapers with the same stories and worse that appeared in January 2017. In fact, many of those running the CH investigation probably suspected their careers at the FBI would be over if Trump won the election and Trump appointees had to be informed of CH – and still these [patriots?] didn’t leak. Without the FBI’s integrity. Trump would have lost the election. Your suggestion of an early conspiracy to keep Trump from being elected makes no sense at all.
You can read the Page FISA warrant application at the link below. Large blocks are still blacked out as confidential information, meaning that they are not from the Steele Dossier. The could be surveillance reports on Russian spies working under diplomatic cover.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4614732-D1Release
The DoJ IGs report is more readable and covers many other subjects. The opening of the Page investigation is discussed beginning on page 61.
“An FBI counterintelligence agent in NYFO (NYFO CI Agent) with extensive experience in Russian matters told the OIG that Carter Page had been on NYFO’s radar since 2009, when he had contact with a known Russian intelligence officer (Intelligence Officer 1)… NYFO CI agents believed that Carter Page was “passed” from Intelligence Officer 1 to a successor Russian intelligence officer (Intelligence Officer 2) in 2013 and that Page would continue to be introduced to other Russian intelligence officers” … The FBI’s NYFO CI squad supervisor (NYFO CI Supervisor) told us she believed she should have opened a counterintelligence case on Carter Page prior to March 2, 2016 based on his continued contacts with Russian intelligence officers; however, she said the squad was preparing for a big trial, and they did not focus on Page until he was interviewed again on March 2. ”
https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2019/o20012.pdf
So, Manafort was under investigation for several months before he began working for the Trump campaign (and had been the subject of an earlier investigation), the FBI was already in the process of opening an investigation on Page (who had also been investigated earlier), within weeks of joining, Papadopoulos would receive a dangle of dirt on HRC from someone he believed was connected to the Russian Foreign Service (and who Barr now admits wasn’t part of a “sting” by a Western agent). And all of this occurred almost half a year before Steele’s info reached the FBI, before Fusion GPS was hired by the DNC and hired Steele. Flynn was merely being cultivated by RT, Putin and a female Russian national in Britain with connections to Russian intelligence and being paid to lobby for Turkey without registering as a foreign agent. For reasons no one understands, Flynn lied to the FBI about his conversations with Kislyak and the transcript of his 12/22 call has never been released (when both Flynn and Trump were at Mar-a-Lago trying to block a UN vote on Israel that Obama would abstain and allow to pass.) Since Flynn has joined Qanon and recommended that Trump declare martial law, we probably should be glad the CH investigation ended his term as NSA.
Frank, I think you should be concerned about the misrepresentations you are spreading here. Regardless of how it started, CH rapidly morphed into an illegal conspiracy to wiretap and infiltrate the Trump campaign and find the nonexistent Russian collusion. it was called an “insurance policy” by the principles at the FBI.
The official sworn documents are the warrant applications and they rely largely on the Steele dossier. Ron’s comments later in this thread are really excellent.
Your statement about predication is patently false about everything after roughly July or so. There was no valid predication and the warrant applications prove that.
Frank –
> The vast majority of Americans voted in 2016 without ever having heard of Steele, his Dossier or an FBI investigation. One leak from any of those alleged Trump-hating conspirators at the top of the FBI would have filled the October 2016 newspapers with the same stories and worse that appeared in January 2017. In fact, many of those running the CH investigation probably suspected their careers at the FBI would be over if Trump won the election and Trump appointees had to be informed of CH – and still these [patriots?] didn’t leak. Without the FBI’s integrity. Trump would have lost the election. Your suggestion of an early conspiracy to keep Trump from being elected makes no sense at all.
Simple, obvious, and unassailable logic. If the “deep state” was motivated by a desire to keep Trump from getting elected, by a desire to destroy his campaign, they would have then this conspiracy theory makes zero sense. And of course, also, the conspiracy theory needs to be viewed against the backdrop of years of promises from the right wing that Barr et al., would peidice the goods and hold the crooks accountable and yet all their investigations amounted to next to nothing.
Wrong on a number of counts. They viewed Hillary ascertain to win. Crossfire Hurricane was an insurance policy in case the impossible happened.
There was already massive oppo research on Trump including the Clinton campaign with its Steele dossier. Here’s an example of the press making the Russian connection.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/donald-trump-s-plea-russian-hackers-roils-campaign-n618061
Also you carefully selected your talking points to ignore the fact that patriots don’t submit sworn warrant applications that are mostly based on unverified gossip from unknown Russian sources. The FBI knew at the latest in Jan 2017 that the dossier was a lie but continued to lie to the court for another year.
Read Ron’s comments summarizing the main facts.
https://judithcurry.com/2021/05/23/collapse-of-the-fake-consensus-on-covid-19-origins/#comment-952561
It to mention, the “deep state” actions actually severely harmed the campaign of Trump’s opponent.
And somehow they did that to harm Trump?
Bizarre logic indeed, Seth Rich conspiracy quality thinking.
If a “deep state” were out to get Trump, where would be a million things they might have done, and saying what they did was motivated by a desire to get Trump makes zero sense.
And if they were motivated by a desire to hurt Trump, they wouldn’t have done what they did that significantly helped Clinton.
So much we have heard, for years, that Trump administration officials and DOJ officials under Trump would demonstrate criminal liability and criminal malfeasance and clear violations of the rules of law….and bupkis.
It’s like the Seth Rich nonsense stuck in replay.
And it never stops. More nonsense continuously added, still always leading nowhere.
This conspiracy suffers from the same problems as all conspiracy theories. Conspiracies do happen, but to make a viable case you have to address the basic plausibility problem.
It’s like the Seth Rich nonsense stuck in replay.
And it never stops. More nonsense continuously added, still always leading nowhere.
This conspiracy suffers from the same problems as all conspiracy theories. Conspiracies do happen, but to make a viable case you have to address the basic plausibility problem.
Here, the plausibility problem lies in that the supposed it’s simply not plausible that given the array of options available, if the motivation were to get Trump, that the actions taken would have been the result.
Meanwhile, it becomes clear that the Trump administration used the DOJ to pursue political goals. And nary a peep from the outraged who are so deeply concerned about how unfairly poorittle Donnie was treated.
Lol. It’s so perfect that so many “skeptics” sign on to such obvious nonsense.
“Skeptics” should thank their lucky stars that people like Frank and meso (on covid) are around to lend their brand some measure of credibility.
Lol. It’s so perfect that so many “skeptics” sign on to such obvious nonsense.
“Skeptics” should thank their lucky stars that people like Frank and meso (on covid) are around to lend their brand some measure of credibility.
Weird –
Comments just disappearing – not even going into moderation.
A few paragraphs just wouldn’t post.
Joshua provides nothing but his vague silly false analogy opinions. Evidence matters to most of us Josh, even though to you it obviously doesn’t matter much.
If you wanted to be taken seriously, read Ron’s comments I referenced above and then try to disprove any of his points.
We’ll add to your long record of hundreds of fuzzy logic errors this one about the deep state.
There were two investigations, one of Hillary’s emails that was justified and Crossfire Hurricane that Ron and I have proven was not justified. Comey probably did harm Hillary with his letter to Congress, but Crossfire Hurricane did not harm her. It was specifically designed around Clinton talking points to try to find evidence to support them. Nellie Orr worked for the Fusion on digging up this dirt. Her husband worked for the FBI on the same thing.
David Young –
Your conspiracy theory makes no sense because it doesn’t pass a simple plausibility test.
I cite a mass of evidence with Ron citing an avalanche of information and you have looked at none of it. But my theory doesn’t pass a simple minded and meaningless “plausibility” test. Your opinion is of little value as is most often the case.
For years now, the right wing has been promising compelling evidence to prove this conspiracy.
How many times have we been told how many people would wind up on jail?
Trump even had hacks working for him (along side competent investigators) in the DOJ to prove the conspiracy.
Bupkis and nothing else besides conspiracy tweets on Twitter and blog comments.
It’s the same quality as the supposed theft of the election, the Seth Rich murder plot. There’s actually an endless list. It never ends. The same people are involved in pushing the lame conspiracy. These people just move from one wild-eyed conspiracy theory to the next and never stop to think about the longisr of times they’ve come up empty handed.
You have looked at nothing and cited nothing except your valueless opinion.
Daocd Young –
> I cite a mass of evidence
Your standard of “evidence” is lacking.
These same people claimed “evidence” of a massive voter crimes to steal the election.
Partisan (and non-partisan) expert investigators have poured over your supposed evidence. You’ve claimed the biggest crime in American history and Trump’s DOJ came up with nothing.
Not only do you claim a massive scheme among people that weren’t Trump cronies, now you’re saying that Trump loyalists must have been on on the c*nspiracy also – because the cr>minal actions were so obvious that Google jockeys can sniff them out and yet people like Barr and Horowitz couldn’t find it.
Read Ron’s comments and search for the evidence. Your childish assertions are just that.
It’s just like the claims of passive election fr*ud. Google jockeys post on Twitter and blogs about the “mass of evidence” there also. They’ve fully convinced themselves of their mad slueth skillz just like you have convinced yourself.
David (Sherlock Holmes) Young,
Joshua,
You have to admit you are commenting on something you have not investigated and have no knowledge of except what leakers told your favorite outlets to tell you. These leakers include McCabe, Comey and Brennan, the very people that we charge with confidentiality of investigations and prosecution of leakers. This is not just a theory. Obama appointed inspector general Horowitz uncovered massive wrongdoing. All the department heads when called before Lyndsey Graham’s committee admitted there was massive wrongdoing, including the signing of all four Page FISAs. But that was the tip of the iceberg. These were not accidental wrongdoings that went on by a rogue underlings. As Lisa Page texted Peter Strzok, “Potus wants to know everything we are doing.”
Your only point besides your limited belief system, Joshua, is that if there was too much wrongdoing for the outlets that you trust not to have told you about it. Your assumption appears to be that those media outlets would be upset and would want to correct the record, that these outlets view their consumers as truth-seekers.
Try reading some of my facts I have connected and see if you can poke a hole in one. The Horowitz report is easy to find. The Mueller report missed finding out where the dossier came from despite Danchenko’s interview being less than a week after the inauguration. How do you explain that in your world? Why didn’t your media find it out or bother to report it’s implications when found. The NYT was outraged that meddling kids on Twitter exposed an intelligence source, a Brookings dropout who was referred to Steele by a key witness in the Ukraine hoax. Instead, very evil men at the reins of the DoJ, shielding their wrongdoing under the name and reputation of a former official, (whom was in some stage of dementia), framed the innocent and shielded the guilty. Sergei Millian turned out to have nothing to do with the dossier, yet even Horowitz was not free to clear his name from the Mueller mucker’s libels. Instead, it was Twitter jockeys, lea by Steve Mc, who were there to remove at least one spear thrust through Lady Justice.
David Young –
These issues have been thoroughly investigated by Trump’s DOJ by heavily financed partisan prosecutors with partisan interests.
They found bupkis.
And you want to go with Ron’s “evidence” posted on a blog?
You’re like the Qanon conspiracy theorists who claim a “mass of evidence” that the election was stolen. Or the Fox News talking heads that told their gullible viewers that Barr was going to uncover the “deep state” conspiracy.
Ron thought he found evidence related to Seth Rich’s murder also, justkke all these other conspiracy theorists:
https://climateaudit.org/2018/03/21/dnc-hack-due-to-gmail-phishing/#comment-780567
Ron –
Sometimes conspiracy theories can be rejected because of their imausibility;
> Horowitz uncovered massive wrongdoing.
Massive wrongdoing? And no prosecutions? Where are all those prosecutions promised?
> Your only point besides your limited belief system, Joshua, is that if there was too much wrongdoing for the outlets that you trust not to have told you about it. Your assumption appears to be that those media outlets would be upset and would want to correct the record, that these outlets view their consumers as truth-seekers.
The problem with thinking you have mind – reading powers, Ron, is that it often leads you to form incorrect opinions. I never said anything about “trusted” news sources. That was all generated from your imagination. I have made no “assumptions” about news outlets.
You’ve just imagined all of that. And burdening me with your fantasies about what I believe is the very definition of bad faith dialog. You should try to confirm what I do and don’t think and certainly shouldn’t conclude I think things that I’ve never said I think.
These matters were investigated. Massive cri. I al activity was claimed yet prosecutions never materialized. You’re convinced of the compelling nature of you’re own investigation just like people the who were convinced about Seth Rich’s murder or massive election fraud.
Ron –
> You have to admit you are commenting on something you have not investigated and have no knowledge of…
That is true. But people with the requisite knowledge and skills have investigated. They didn’t find criminal activity. Of course, those investigators could have been wrong, but I see no reason to take your word for it over theirs.
> As Lisa Page texted Peter Strzok, “Potus wants to know everything we are doing.”
Here’s a perfect example of the problem with your reasoning. You think you know exactly what Page meant by that statement, but you can’t mind-read, Ron, and you fail to account for the ambiguities and the different potential interpretations.
When you make srgrnts like that, sbd mistakenly argue that you’ve read my mind, you don’t inspire confidence – certainly not more than our legal system does. Send Horowitz your theories and maybe you can get him to get the DOJ to reopen the investigations based on your detective work.
Ron –
> You have to admit you are commenting on something you have not investigated and have no knowledge of…
That is tr*e. But people with the requ*site kn*wledge and sk*lls have inv*stigated. They didn’t find crim*nal activity. Of course, those investigators could have been wrong, but I see no reason to take your word for it over theirs.
Ron –
> As Lisa Page texted Peter Strzok, “Potus wants to know everything we are doing.”
Here’s a perfect example of what I see as a problem with your reasoning. You think you know exactly what Page meant by that statement, but you can’t mind-read, Ron, and you fail to account for the ambiguities and the different potential interpretations.
When you make statements like that, snd mistakenly argue that you’ve read my mind, you don’t inspire confidence – certainly not more than our legal system does. Send Horowitz your theories and maybe you can get him to get the DOJ to reopen the investigations based on your detective work.
“Joshua,
You have to admit you are commenting on something you have not investigated and have no knowledge of…”
That’s sort of the definition of Joshua. Investigation or knowledge would interfere with the narrative.
Anyone who still thinks Page and Strozk weren’t politically motivated isn’t worth talking to.
‘Where’s the prosecutions?”
A whole lot of people lost their jobs and pensions and are still under investigation. How many people were prosecuted for “collusion” with the Russians? How many are in jail for daring to ask questions about Hunter Biden. How many are being prosecuted for “armed insurrection” or murdering a police officer with a fire extinguisher? The grand “insurrection” is resulting in charges like this one actually filed by the DOJ “Parading, Demonstrating or Picketing in a Capitol Building.”
Do you get the death penalty for that in blue states? Or does it depend on party affiliation just like the “expert” science-based determination that Biden supporter riots were covid okay, but peaceful Trump supporter protests were not?
Progressives – the gang who promoted riots all through 2020 and told us they want to defund the police – want people to go to jail for “parading” and “picketing.”
This sort of thing, on top of the intentional destruction of middle class schools in 2020, should make mid-terms epic. I think that’s why the myth-making is turning up to 11.
> How many are in jail for daring to ask questions about Hunter Biden.
Is that something you investigated, Jeff?
Something tells me you’re just peddling Freedom Fighters talking point.
And that is something I investigated, BTW.
Your peddling, that is.
There’s nothing remotely new about the FBI and other law enforcement being over-zealous and gong past red lines to investigate matters.
If the wild-eyed conspiracy theorists would stop there I’d be in agreement. There are things that happened in the investigations into the 2016 election that shouldn’t have happened. Sure – people should lose their job if they don’t perform it as prescribed – especially in law enforcement. Fire cops also, for being over-zwois in doing their jobs. Dismantle systemic CYA mechansms for corrupt performance as we see with so many police departments or with the FBI – have at it.
But Horowitz thoroughly investigated the 2016 election investigations. He found poor performance and rules violations, but nothing like these wild-eyed conspiracy theories that we’ve seen promoted for years, like Ron’s mind-reading of Lisa Page or the nut job theories all over the right-wingosphere about Seth Rich.
It’s quite amusing that I can pick out names from Climate Etc. threads and Google them along with “Seth Rich” and so easily find links in past threads on the Interwebs.
And for anyone who thinks that the outrageabout “deep state” overreach isn’t ideologically biased, just look for whether it’s found both with the 2016 investigation and Trump’s push to use the DOJ to investigate non-existent “massive voter fraud” in 2020.
BTW –
We’ve long seen promises that indictments and convictions will arise from the Durham investigation. Apparently he diageed with Horowitz’a finding that the rule violations and incompetence in the 2016 election investigation were not motivated by political animus.
Let’s see what happens when his report comes out. If indictments and convictions for politically motivated inpropoieties are a result, I will be more than happy to revisit my assessment.
“You’re like the Qanon conspiracy theorists…”
Joshua, you seem to be saying that the logical conclusion one should make when someone proposes claims one finds implausible is that they are crazy. And, of course, this is exactly what 27 scientist said about anyone who might propose a lab leak as a possible origin of covid. They used the term “conspiracy theorists.” The only problem is that we know now that the idea of a lab leak was not implausible then. Worse, no other group of virologist came forward to challenge their false claim. There were a few brave whistleblowers but they were swiftly dismissed by the MSM (leftists). The journalist investigators for the MSM failed miserably on this issue. Do you agree?
And, this is not the first time. We see a continued pattern. I won’t list the dozen major stories that the MSM got wrong or missed. The question is how many more major stories do they need to get wrong before you can no longer rely on them?
This is why we need a free and open discourse. Censorship and consensus enforcement are corruptions to the free flow of ideas and thus are ill-liberal and anti-progressive. Do you agree?
The 27 scientists clearly were abusing the fact of the presence of mental illness in society in order to smear the truth. If an uncontested scientific consensus can do that is it possible that a blogger might also?
It does not further trust of help the sufferers of paranoia to be told they are paranoid even if they are. Thus, this practice is particularly condemnable. I hope you agree.
“Ron thought he found evidence related to Seth Rich’s murder also, justkke all these other conspiracy theorists…”
I am glad you agree he was murdered. The case is still open. But if he was shot on the street randomly or in an aborted robbery why did the FBI just reveal this year they have Seth Rich’s laptop. What would be the reason for keeping it? They should just dispel the conspiracy theories by giving it back to his family after making the files accessible to reporters and researchers. Julian Assange is specifically named Seth Rich as an example of the type of danger his sources face. But I await more evidence.
Joshua, I welcome you to keep a more open mind and feel free from fear of ridicule. Tell us what you think about current events and if you have good facts and analysis we will be respectful even if they are contrary to our own.
BTW, I strongly contest your assertion that Barr did not find any wrongdoing by the Obama USIC, most of which carried into the Trump administration, insulated by the false attack on Sessions to force his recusal, and likewise, the attack on Gen. Flynn.
Ron: “Horowitz uncovered massive wrongdoing. All the department heads when called before Lyndsey Graham’s committee admitted there was massive wrongdoing, including the signing of all four Page FISAs. But that was the tip of the iceberg. These were not accidental wrongdoings that went on by a rogue underlings.”
I think the problem here is that Joshie as usual cites a report that he hasn’t actually read.
David Young –
Your “investigation” as reported in blog comments, or testimony under oath from an experienced professional investigator with decades of experience and huge resources at his disposal.
Not a particilsrly tough choice. You could be right. But the chances are slim.
You are omitting the text messages of strokz, Paige and others that show clear political bias in fact they show hatred. In public, all the main colluders showed extreme bias and hatred of Trump. That’s very convincing evidence.
That’s another classical fuzzy logic error Josh. You make them regularly.
David Young –
> That’s another classical fuzzy logic error Josh.
I get that you think you’re right, just as you thought you were right when you got it wrong on the testing and cases in Florida relative to NY, just as you were wrong when you thought that the spike in cases wouldn’t be paralleled by a spike in morbidity and mortality, just as you were wrong about the trend in ICU admissions in Sweden and the trend in deaths there.
Each time I explained your errors to you and in response you insulted me.
I get you have great faith in your own ability to “investigate” the investigations into the 2016 campaign. Just as you had great faith in your own thinking many other times you were just flat out wrong.
Horowritz didn’t forget about any texts. He investigated the issues far more extensively than you have. He has much superior skills, knowledge, and experience relevant to conducting such an investigation. He has vastly resources at his disposal for conducting such an investigation than you have for your “investigation.”
I get you think your abilities to investigate this are greater than Horowitz’s.
I have to disageee. Given your lousy track record and vastly inferior qualifications, I’m thinking the chances are that you’re wrong and he’s right.
Joshie, This is another classic of cherry picking.
1. Horowitz found scores of significant errors.
2. He I recall recommended the firing of Andrew McCabe for lying.
3. Comey, Strokz, Paige are all acknowledged liars. As is Klinesmith. It wouldn’t be unusual for them to lie to an internal investigator to keep their job.
4. You didn’t respond to the massive paper trail showing extreme political bias.
I won’t go through the list of other commenters who point that you are a biased eggregious cherry picker. You pick out of context one fact and ignore the other facts that are more important.
Your mind is like a course seive. The sand of truth passes through because it requires analytical skills. A few coarse pieces of detetritus are trapped to be regurgitated without any context.
Read the first 2 paragraphs from a leftie journalist who has intensively looked into Russiagate. Summary: It was a fraud.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-do-big-media-outlets-so-often
David Young –
Here is Horowitz characterizing his findings w/r/t the influence of political bias:
And obviously, he didn’t “omit” the texts.
Now you may think that you can chattering his findings better than he can characterize his findings. Given your overconfidence in the past in your own analysis even when it was proven wrong it doesn’t exactly surprise me that you think you understand Horowitz’s findings better than he does.
But I think that’s highly implausible.
And Greenwald’s political orientation doesn’t make him right any more than yours makes you wrong.
Here – read this again:
He testified under oath.
David Young –
I have to say, it’s very interesting that your response when I quote Horowitz is to insult me.
It’s such an odd behavior, imo, yet you repeat it over and over. I wonder why you do it.
Look, here’s a chance for you to break the pattern. I’ll post a quote of Horowitz responding on the question of evidence of political bias or improper motivation in his findings.
See if you can respond without insulting me. As an experiment.
Joshua, you might consider that characterizations of the executive summary of a report might be vastly different than the body of the report. This allows CYA on the political side in the news release while protecting from liability for falsification in the details. So the body of the IPCC AR can supply details that are in complete conflict with the summary which are in even more conflict with the characterization of the summary by the political heads. Same with the IG report. Also, that report is just one piece of the puzzle. The omissions and falsifications in the Mueller report give another piece and the text messages between Strzok and Page give yet another, etc…
For example, Horowitz does not make a point about the person granting immunity to Danchenko is the same guy who gave it to all of Hillary’s staff. One has to notice that oneself by reading both the IG’s FISA abuse investigation and also the IG’s earlier investigation into the whitewashing of Clinton’s mishandling of top secret docs and obstruction of justice in wiping the evidence while under a congressional evidence protection order.
DPY wrote: “Read the first 2 paragraphs from a leftie journalist who has intensively looked into Russiagate. Summary: It was a fraud.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-do-big-media-outlets-so-often
This is an great article and raises an interesting subject best illustrated by his linked article, “The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story.” However, nothing in this article contradicts the information I have provided and proves the investigation was a fraud. In general, I rely on primary sources such as the DoJ IGs Report. It does show that hatred of Trump likely biased those reporting these stories and possibly encouraged their organizations to publish a dubious story.
HOW DID GREENWALD LEARN THAT THESE MSM STORIES WERE FALSE? According to Greenwald himself:
1) Other MSM reporters found information contradicting these stories or they reported that they were unable to confirm a story about the Trump-Russia conspiracy.
2) In at least one case, the Special Counsel’s Office issued press release denying a story about the evidence in their possession – despite the normal policy of not commenting on an ongoing investigation.
To a reasonable extent, the BIASED MSM is self-correcting on important stories. Some of the reporters of these stories were even fired. To put it in scientific terms, these liberal hypotheses were tested by the MSM and the Right and rejected.
RIght-wing news operates by a different set of rules. ANYTHING published by the MSM is automatically considered to be untrustworthy Fake News. Rush Limbaugh denounced the “Four Corners of Deceit”: government, academia, SCIENCE and media. The conservative media is the only source of truth – you can’t trust anything else (including any assertions supported by links from me.) To put it in scientific terms, right-wing hypotheses don’t get tested, because all testers are corrupt and there is no trustworthy information to test them with. The truth is revealed to us by the Right-Wing media.
Unfortunately, unlike the MSM, conservative media is not even remotely self-correcting. Breitbart and OAN don’t challenge stories by FOX News. The most popular news anchor on FOX, Megyn Kelly, was exiled simply for asking challenging questions of Trump. And Trump can severely damage or ruin any of these organizations if they betray him.
For example, the Podesta email dump led to a false story about Democrat child sex ring at the Cosmic Ping Pong Pizzeria. That story was investigated and dismissed by the MSM, but not by the right. Today that story has morphed and grown enormously into the Qanon conspiracy theory, which is supported by several members of Congress.
In 2017, it was he logical assumption that the Democrat-funded Steele Dossier was the reason for the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and the Special Counsel investigation. Some of the Dossier was found to be false and most was unconfirmable. However, that storyline has been proven false by the DoJ IG and Special Counsel’s reports, but right-wing media doesn’t publish stories contradicting hoax and conspiracy theories. Today we know that the sources of the allegations in the Steele Dossier were unwitting friends of Danchenko.
Seventy percent of Republicans apparently still believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
There is no story titled: “The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing Right-Wing Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story”. If one were published by the MSM, you wouldn’t believe it.
Frank, You are just showing your strong bias against “Right wing media” as if that were a thing with a meaningful definition. It’s a lie to say that mainstream media is self-correcting. They still are actively covering up the Hunter Biden story to this day. I actually get a lot of information from Ben Shapiro and Andrew Klaven who are conservative but usually present both sides of an argument. You are obviously very emotional about recent political events and have fallen victim to prejudice and bias. My condolences to you on having to live through a time of growing and deserved distrust in all our main institutions.
I’ll repeat my point which all your massive document dumping has not contradicted. The official and sworn predication documents for CH were the warrant applications which relied for the bulk of their information the Steele Dossier which was and is almost totally unverified, sourced from foreign operative, and mostly gossip and rumors. Comey and Yates lied when they signed these warrant applications and swore that the information was verified. It’s a debaters trick to conflate the Trump Russia investigation with the earlier DNC hack investigation. They should have remained separate.
Partly as a teaching exercise in how brevity is always better, I am reproducing Frank’s long winded comment with some much shorter responses in bold.
DPY wrote: “I’m a little surprised that you responded in such a vitriolic and political way to an issue that is really about how herd immunity is defined.
The definition of herd immunity used by some epidemiologists and by you is not meaningful because there is no such thing as “normal conditions.” Thus the only meaningful metric is if R <1, when there is effective herd immunity for existing conditions. But that varies all over the place." This was discussed on another post."
For vaccination, the traditional threshold for herd immunity is 1-(1/R_0) where R_0 refers to the reproduction number in the early stages of spread before behavior has changed. The target in a vaccination campaign is to get appreciably over this threshold so that R during any outbreak will still be less than 1 and the outbreak will spontaneously die out. In this situation, there IS such a thing as "normal conditions – that is why they put the nought after R. Although there are multiple definitions, when talking to the public in the WSJ, "herd immunity" means we can go back to doing what we were doing in 2019 and have spontaneous outbreaks die out. Are you using a different definition?
I pointed out several times that this definition is not useful and virtually meaningless because you can’t define normal conditions before behavior has changed. Winter or summer? China or Russian culture? Did you not read what I wrote?
By my definition, the pandemic was not ended by herd immunity at the end of February. Miami-Dade county had 17% cumulative infections and about 20% full vaccination at the end of March and the local pandemic was still raging with 50 confirmed infections/day/100,000. In the US as a whole, cumulative infections were only 8.5%. One this basis, I personally find it absurd to insist that the pandemic was ended by herd immunity in February. We were about halfway to herd immunity by the end of February.
Furthermore, at the end of February, the number of new infections was just as high as it was a the PEAK of the summer surge (about 20/day/100,000) and TWICE the peak in the initial spring surge (about 10/day/100,000, before correcting for limited testing.) If you wish to measure in terms of deaths, it took until April 1, 2021 for the death rate to reach the PEAK in the summer of 2020. The pandemic did NOT end in late February.
Finally, the number of new infections in the US rose 25% from early March to a peak in mid-April! When you are talking to WSJ readers, that can’t happen where herd immunity exists. In Michigan, there were just as many new cases (75/day/100,000) and hospitalizations in mid-April as there were during the late fall surge! (Only about half as many deaths, thanks to vaccination.)
(The Delta variant is able to infect some of the vaccinated and those with immunity derived from previous infection, but rarely kills those people. So we may have “effective herd immunity” against death, but not against infection. That seems to be the case in the UK today.)
You presented zero evidence for your theory about behavior causing cases to decline a factor of 5 in 60 days. You cite Miami-Dade but that’s irrelevant to the US as a whole. You use infection numbers that are of low quality and have to make vague assumptions about undetected cases when no one really knows. You compare cases to last spring and summer, but its largely meaningless because of lack of testing last spring. You have presented a long winded list of “facts” virtually all of which are not very meaningful. The only real indicator is whether R is below 1. When its strongly below 1, that indicates that herd immunity exists for those conditions. That doesn’t mean it can’t change. Your dogmatic insistence on a meaningless and inflexible definition leads you into a host of errors supported by nothing more than your personal opinion.
DPY wrote: “I am also surprised that you ignored my well documented point that your favored tyrannical responses to the pandemic did not seem to cause better outcomes among US states.”
My preferred “tyrannical response” would have been to reduce new cases in late spring 10-fold as Europe did and institute aggressive contact tracing, paid ($1,000/day) quarantine supervised by cell phone GPS, and mandatory masks indoors in public. Taiwan, South Korea and China made this work. With a negative PCR test after about a week of quarantine, the chances of developing COVID would be low and quarantine could be shortened. Deliver high quality masks for free to everyone. Encourage voluntary work from home. Probably close or limit capacity in high-risk businesses such as bars, gyms, theaters, and restaurants without medical/airline quality air filtration and circulation. Publicly beg churches to at least triple the number of services so they can safely tend to the increased needs of their congregation. Emphasize danger of singing.
. So then US governors like Cuomo and Witcher are incompetent and only the all knowing Frank knows what will work. The measures taken in the US simply did not work.
DPY wrote: “Basically, you have no explanation of the strong decline starting in mid January aside from an evidence free assertion that people let down their guard over the holidays.”
No, you have been ignoring my explanation. Actually, I said people became much more careful after the holidays BECAUSE of the high death rates and overflowing hospitals. My state and probably others tightened restrictions as the hospitals filled in November. We have reasonably good precedent from the 1918-1920 Spanish flu that fear and NPIs brought a pandemic to a near halt several times without the aid of approaching herd immunity. If you look at individual states, you can see many local surges that rose over a little more than a month and fell over the next month+. Arizona and Florida peaked in this manner in July and August. Those surges weren’t ended by heard immunity! North Dakota’s surge in October and November also lasted a more than two months, but the winter surge in most other states had several peaks and lasted longer, possible due to holidays. France had a huge surge in Oct/Nov and another in March proving the first wasn’t ended by herd immunity. Europe has other similar cases, including the UK’s surge in Dec/Jan. (With 2/3rds as many cumulative injections as the US, the UK surge wasn’t ended by herd immunity either.) Since the course of the pandemic and vaccination in March-May shows we were far from herd immunity, approaching herd immunity couldn’t have been the major cause of our Jan/Feb decline. You seem to think that FEAR + NPIs can’t cause a rapid decline in a pandemic. If you open your eyes, you will find plenty of surges followed by steep declines with no other obvious explanation besides FEAR+NPIs. However, the whole US pandemic is heterogeneous, so you need to look at individual states and European countries.
Endless repetition does not add anything. Herd immunity is a virtually useless concept as you use it. No Frank, you have no evidence on behavior changes at all. Weather also changes, contagiousness changes, vitamin D levels change. You really seem to have a prejudice that things can be controlled by behavior that is mostly false. You are going to die and nothing you do will change that fact. You will not be able to reverse your arteriosclerosis with dietary changes.
DPY wrote: As to your apparent disgust with people utilizing their right of free speech in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, get used to it. There are at least a hundred million of us who are intent on preserving our God given rights. There are many other countries for you to choose where people have much less freedom.
Members and carefully selected friends of the elites that run the WSJ editorial page are the only ones with the right to speak on the WSJ editorial pager (and without fact-checking). Dr. Markey is surgeon, not an epidemiologist. My letter to the editor pointing out that it was impossible for there to be 6.7 total cases for every confirmed case wasn’t printed, nor were others. Yes, people are entitled to their opinions, but when their opinions are based on facts that are highly like to be wrong, the opinion is grossly misleading. If the WSJ isn’t going to fact-check there opinions (like most respectable news organizations, Facebook and Twitter have every right to censor them when fact-checkers point out the errors. With all of the conspiracy theories on the left and right, the fraction of our nation that is – as one commentator puts it – “in touch with reality” is shrinking. (The Dems just got a big dose of reality about defunding the police in the NYC mayor’s race.)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmid/33399860/
I don’t see any evidence that 6.7 can’t be right. It is a US number. Pointing to localities where it can’t be right is totally beside the point. No wonder your letter wasn’t printed. I see you are repeating the lie that “private” entities can do what they like. There are thousands of statutes that place severe limitations on what private entities can do. There should be more dealing with censoring people on essentially public utility platforms.
I can’t understand why so many people signed the Great Barrington Declaration. We had no better way to protect the vulnerable at that time (and according to my research nursing home residents were 6X more likely to have a confirmed infection than the average American). We couldn’t reach herd immunity in a few months without exceeding the capacity of most hospitals – and the resulting fear that would quickly cause a decline in new cases. The GBD seemed like a bad joke. The saintly Ioannidis was invested in the incorrect idea that COVID wasn’t much more deadly than seasonal influenza, so his support wasn’t a surprise. As best I can tell, the motivation was mostly political, because their campaign didn’t continue after the election and after we had a vaccine. In many locations, a huge number of “essential workers” were idiotically vaccinated before or alongside the vulnerable. I look at the GBD signers as being similar to those advocating raising the minimum wage to $15/hr without asking how many minimum wage workers will lose their jobs or have their hours cut. . (When I’m told a dramatically higher minimum wage won’t cost jobs or hours, I say: If so, why be so stingy? Go for $30/hr.) If an idea is superficially attractive, many will sign without thinking or being in touch with reality.
. Once again, a long winded evidence free diatribe reading people’s minds. Ioannidis had the final word on the IFR in a recent meta-analysis that seems to have resulted in the peanut gallery being quite.
We had evidence that masks work against seasonal influenza in a community setting, but only for the small number of volunteers who reported wearing them consistently. They weren’t recommended by health authorities for preventing seasonal influenza pandemics because too few volunteers wore them often enough to show a statistically significant benefit for all volunteers. The problem was compliance not efficacy, there was every reason to expect compliance to improve when people are trying to protect themselves from COVID instead of flu. I personally don’t need ANY studies to know that masks work: they block sprayed droplets and the right masks can block aerosols whatever fraction the air that passes through them. Cloth masks that don’t block aerosols still provide protection against sprayed droplets. Their inability to block aerosols or their leakiness around the edges ARE NOT reasons to abandon masks; they are reasons to get BETTER masks. Singapore has been distributing high-quality washable masks for free. https://sg.news.yahoo.com/fourth-round-free-face-mask-distribution-start-1-march-033840942.html
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.seminolecountyfl.gov%2Fcore%2Ffileparse.php%2F4529%2Furlt%2FUniversal-Masking-is-Urgent-in-the-COVID-19-Pandemic-ADA.pdf&psig=AOvVaw3jM5tXOZlJCOykANt6T98e&ust=1625628044701000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=2ahUKEwj8mrPCvs3xAhVDFFkFHSobCVcQr4kDegQIARAR
. You haven’t responded to the literature on masks showing no evidence they work in a community setting. There are many papers on this. You’re just repeating crude mechanistic narratives that lack quantification. Swiss policy research site has an article on this giving many papers on the subject.
BTW, I do not endorse everything on that site by any stretch.
As for NY vs Fl vs MI, I found some additional NY data at Wikipedia. About 1/3 (900/million) of New York’s deaths occurred before 5/1/20. Deaths peaked about April 15 and were already declining within a month of starting lockdown. Given that death often takes about 3 weeks after infection, it is hard to see to how the state could have done much to prevent these April deaths. Another 1/9 of NY deaths occurred in May. By June, the death toll was down to only 42/million. This huge drop was partially attributable to New York’s severe lockdown and the death toll would have been much higher without it. The spring NY death toll was also inflated by inexperience treating COVID (steroids weren’t being used then). In the meantime, DeSantis began losing control over the Florida pandemic in June, For the rest of the pandemic, NY state did significantly better than Florida. Finally, when DeSantis ended the mask mandate at a time when Florida had one of the highest infection rates in the country.
Like NY, Mi had a lot of deaths in the spring that were unavoidable. Michigan had as many infections in mid-April 2021 as at the peak in Nov/Dec and even a significant number of associated deaths. This suggests a gross failure in late February, but I don’t know much about Michigan’s changing policies or her governor. Nor do I claim any special insight about the cost-benefit balance between restrictions and deaths/risk. If a state official wants to reduce restrictions because the costs outweigh the benefits, fine. Just don’t expect me to swallow the excuse that restrictions can be lifted because herd immunity has been reached or because we can protect the vulnerable while the pandemic burns out in a few months.
I love this silly idea that a lot of the early deaths were unavoidable. If masks and lockdowns worked so well that would be untrue. You can’t have it all ways Frank. You need to pick the tripe you are going with and stick with it. The bottom line is as I stated before. California, Florida, and Texas all came in reasonable close with Texas the worst of the 3. New York was quite bad and Michigan quite a bit worse than Florida. California also didn’t really have a bad spring surge just like Florida.
DPY wrote: “I really am sorry Frank to see you descend into such political emotion and become an unreliable source of information.”
Emotional? I’m not the one bringing up “Killer Cuomo” and “Lord Fauci”. I’d be thrilled if DeSantis or almost any strong, sane Republican took Trump’s place as the leader of the Republican Party, so I don’t faced a third unattractive choice in 2024. Unfortunately, DeSantis has been advised by the “WSJ epidemiologists” that I have scientifically criticized for their over-optimism about herd immunity and the GBD. (Yes, I will confess to being emotional about Trump – his conspiracy theories are unnecessarily tearing down faith in elections, the FBI, and experts (such as you and I); and combined with the left wing conspiracy theories (BLM, 1619, Stacy Abrams) are undermining the foundations of American government. As for “Killer Cuomo”, any elderly COVID patient well enough to leave the hospital for a nursing home almost certainly was no longer infectious whether or not they were PCR negative. When a lawsuit provides DNA sequence data proving that Cuomo-discharged Patient X brought the pandemic into nursing home Y, I will gladly change my mind. In the absence of such conclusion information, every state in the nation has seen its nursing homes invaded by COVID carried by asymptomatic or careless staff, and I assume NY was just the first. Hospitals aren’t allowed to discharge elderly patients too weak to take care of themselves at home until they identify a rehab facility for them. Either the governor had to order nursing homes to take recovered elderly COVID patients or desperately ill patients would be denied hospital admission for lack of beds.
. Then why did Cuomo cover up his policy? You have no way of knowing if those sent back were still contagious. In any case, there was massive excess capacity and sending them back was totally unnecessary and a sign of incompetence.
DPY wrote: “I don’t think there is any implied right of state governments to suspend fundamental Constitutional provisions for up to 16 months due to any eventuality, including war. What tyrants like Cuomo, Newsome, Witchmer, and Inslee did is unprecedented. Even during the Civil War, the Bill of Rights stayed in force outside active war zones. I do hope that the Supreme Court eventually weighs in on this issue.”
The Supreme Court has ruled on this subject about a dozen times already, mostly in the form of emergency decrees. You could inform yourself about this issue by listening to expert attorneys from opposing sides having civil discussions at the non-partisan National Constitutional Center. Sometimes you get to hear from attorneys that submitted amicus briefs and occasionally one who argued the case before the Court. (Instead, you and too many other Americans get their information in the form of a dally addicting and profitable injection of anger, outrage, disinformation from biased media and social media.) For centuries, the Supreme Court (and earlier English Common law) has recognized that each state’s police power allows them to protect their citizens from pandemic disease within the limits set by state constitutions. The intrusions on liberty must be the minimum needed and for the shortest period possible, so regulations that are arguably tougher on churches than some similar secular activity have been found unconstitutional, as have regulations without a clear endpoint. Everyone is deeply concerned about the length of time stringent regulations/tyranny have remained in force, but courts can’t arbitrarily pick a time limit; that is a job for legislatures. Some countries have had great success in limiting the pandemic through emergency measures (Taiwan, South Korea, China, Norway, Finland, Australia, NZ and Vietnam, as well as many European countries last spring), so it doesn’t make sense for the Supreme Court to substitute their cost-benefit analysis for that of the state’s experts. I’ll remind you that Tyrant Lincoln famously used emergency war powers to suspend habeus corpus during the Civil War (5 days after Sumter and three months BEFORE Bull Run) and to claim/seize vast amount of private property (slaves) in the South. 600,000 Americans died in both the Civil War and the war against the COVID pandemic. On the other hand, Tyrant Roosevelt interned 120,000 Americans citizens of Japanese descent during WWII by lying about the danger they posed. This isn’t a simple subject and mistakes have been made.
I suspect some state constitutions will be modified to limit future “tyranny”, some by referendum. Governor Newsome is facing a recall vote. Our system for protecting liberty isn’t perfect, but it can be refined based on experiences such as this one, hopefully after long and thoughtful discussion. Madison famously remarked that if all Athenians had been Socrates, [passionate populist direct democracy] would still have made Athens a mob. Therefore, we have a system that promotes constructive disagreement and sometimes compromise before reaching a decision. If anyone wants to convict alleged-tyrant Inslee (or tax-cheat Trump), a jury will hear evidence from both sides and the jury will be locked away to talk until they reach a decision. On the other hand, you appear to be only listening to the evidence from the prosecutors from the Right.
Well, You didn’t respond to the point. I challenge you to show me any time in American history when there has been such a prolonged and widespread suspension of the Bill of Rights. Emergency decrees are usually for short periods such as the Mt St. Helens eruption and for very limited geographical regions. What just happened is a frightening prospect.
And to top it off you cite absolute statistics about the Civil War vs. Covid that are blatantly misleading. The population of the US during the Civil War was I recall about 30 million. So per capita there were 10 times as many casualties as with covid19. Also that 600,000 number is a very significant undercount and omits civilian casualties where were a very large number especially in the South.
Frank, I tried to keep my responses short and to the point. I would suggest you would find more people willing to read your long winded comments if you did the same. Also actually responding to what other people say is the only way to actually resolve any issue. Obfuscating the point with a blizzard of often irrelevant or misleading detail is not helpful.
DPY wrote: “You are just showing your strong bias against “Right wing media” as if that were a thing with a meaningful definition. It’s a lie to say that mainstream media is self-correcting. They still are actively covering up the Hunter Biden story to this day.”
Actually, I got the idea that the competitive MSM is reasonably self-correcting, but right-wing media is not, from a book I’m reading, “The Constitution of Truth”, written by a moderate conservative who is deeply concerned about what he calls the increasing fraction of Americans who are losing their connection with he calls “the reality-based community”. I was looking for a way to test this assertion when you raised suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
There are some strong parallels between the allegations that were circulating about what latter became known as the Steele Dossier and the Hunter Biden laptop story. Although they were aware of Steele’s allegation and some reporters had even met Steele, the NYT, WaPo, and most of the MSM chose not to print unconfirmed stories provided by paid operatives of the Democrat party.before the 2016 election.
In mid-October 2020, we have President Trump’s Personal Attorney providing what he says is is an electronic copy for Hunter Biden’s laptop. How did anyone know in October 2020 that the copy actually came from Hunter Biden’s laptop? If it were Hunter Biden’s laptop at one point, were we sure that someone else hadn’t put fake material on the laptop? (The repair shop owner doesn’t claim that he identified Hunter Biden as the person who dropped it off.) IIRC, the FBI subpoenaed the laptop in December of 2019, so this “evidence” has been kicking around for more than a year. Why has it taken so long to become public. We know Giuliani had it in September and possibly much earlier. If he believed this was the “real deal”, why didn’t he make its existence public much earlier, so the press and possibly law enforcement could confirm the information. By waiting until the last minute to release the story, Giuliani is telling me that he didn’t really believe the laptop would survive scrutiny. Guiliani admitted he gave the material to the NY Post, because more reputable journalists would have scrutinized the information more closely. So the MSM might have evaluated Hunter Biden’s laptop as unconfirmed opposition research and may not have published the story for exactly the same reason as they failed to publish Steele’s allegations four years earlier.
However, the NY Post didn’t bother the address the dubious background of the laptop and presented all of the information without caveats; much like Buzzfeed did three months AFTER the 2016 election. Twitter used its Hacked Materials Policy to block the NYP story, but quickly changed its mind. Facebook didn’t interfere with the story. The NYT published four stories on the allegations before the election, including one opinion piece by Douthat that recommended taking the allegations seriously. The WaPo published three stories. Neither paper was given access to the electronic material, so they had no way to confirm the authenticity of the information. (The NY Post gave its electronic information to specialists after the election and reported in March 2021 (IIRC) that these experts judged the material authentic. By traditional journalism standards, the NY Post shouldn’t have published until such an evaluation was complete. ABC, CBS, and NBC covered the story, but NPR infamously did not.
So, did the MSM really fail to cover the Hunter laptop story, or is this simply more FAKE NEWS from Fox that DPY is repeating without first bothering to check for himself?
And if the MSM coverage was exceptionally skeptical, there were excellent reasons for that skepticism, most importantly the fact that other newspapers weren’t given access to the raw electronic material.
As for me, I was disgusted with the absurd story that Joe fired Shokin to protect Hunter and then bragged about it publicly at a meeting of the Council of Foreign Relations. Giuliani’s antics in Ukraine were disgusting. I dismissed the laptop story as Russian disinformation. Joe’s tax returns and financial disclosure statements have proven that he was too poor to have engaged in influence peddling (though I believed Hunter is capable of ANYTHING). Obama reportedly offered to loan Joe money when Beau was dying so Joe wouldn’t have to sell his house. Documents on the laptop suggest that Hunter was actually paying some of Joe’s expenses – the first aspect of this story that made ANY sense to me. However, one document says Hunter was complaining about keeping the family financially float recently, which is nonsense as Joe reported earning about $20M the first two years after he left VP. My confidence that the laptop was Russian disinformation dropped after the NY Post claimed its experts believed it was authentic, but I’d still take a even bet the FBI will pronounce parts of it are fraudulent (if it ever announces anything). Never fear; following Trump’s precedent Joe can pardon Hunter and fire anyone who attempts to investigate him.
So, the author of my book appears to have it right; the MSM is generally self-correcting. However, DPY never learned from the right-wing media that: Manafort and Page were under investigation in early 2016, the DoJ IG found the CH investigation properly precedented, the CH investigation was opened 7 weeks before some of Steele’s reports first arrived, the Trump DoJ found the first two Page FISA warrants valid, huge sections of the Page FISA warrant not related to Steele’s information remain redacted by the Trump DoJ so no one can see the OTHER EVIDENCE the FBI used to obtain a warrant, that Page bragged to FBI Confidential Sources that the Russians offered to fund a think tank to be organized by him, that the head of the NES who invited Page to speak allegedly believed Page had visited Sechin, that Page was still acting as if he were a Trump advisor on his Dec 2016 trip to Moscow, etc.
Part III
5. I see you return to your deceptive narrative about Crossfire Hurricane. The DNC hack investigation may have been justified even it was total incompetence from day one. The server was never examined by the FBI and so they had to rely on a paid consultant of the DNC. The Russian collusion conspiracy theory and the resulting investigation was a fraud from day 1. The most important facts that you continue to fail to acknowledge are.
a. The warrant applications are the only SWORN and OFFICIAL predication documents. They rely for the bulk of their information on the dossier which everyone knew was salacious and unverified as Comey said under oath. Signing this document which was certifying that the information contained is verified was perjury.
b. That the dossier was a fraud was rather evident at the time (as Comey essentially admitted) but by Jan. 2017 it was a proven fact that it was a fraud. Yet more warrants were submitted to the court. How could that happen if there was not a deep state informal conspiracy to keep the investigation going at any cost?
6. The subject of this post. The media/scientist fake concensus is a prime example of an informal conspiracy to control what people get to read. And one of the peddlers of this fake news was Frank your revered MSM.
7. Finally your buddies Frank in the media are now colluding with government and tech monopolies to censor what people get to read and say. This could be the tipping point into a soft (or very hard if you are a dissident) totalitarian state such as China or even Venezuela. Gen. Milley has openly talked of a coup and implied half his fellow citizens are Nazi’s. His defense of critical race theory is deeply dishonest. This new war on “domestic terrorism” is unprecedented in American history. Even during the Civil War, this kind of threat to the Republic didn’t take place. The Constitution was never suspended except for brief periods in areas in open rebellion.
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/563520-shadow-state-embracing-corporate-governance-to-escape-constitutional-limits
Finally Frank, I’m tired of this pseudo-conversation where you continue to stonewall and ignore the most important facts in these matters while insisting on largely irrelevant or minor matters carefully skewed by you to give an unbalanced picture. And please drop your “right wing” media smear. Next thing we know you will be signing up for Milley’s critical race theory training and his strike team to take out Nazis.
Part II:
4. I do think the MSM’s articles quoting the spurious letter from former deep staters about Russian disinformation was covered in “right wing” media.
5. Frank:”I dismissed the laptop story as Russian disinformation.” This shows how biased and politically motivated your judgment has become.
6. The Steele dossier was a fraud and its was pretty evident that that was true. Yet it was used for the bulk of the information on 4 warrant applications to a FISA court. Come admitted this under oath. Comey said the dossier was salacious and unverified yet he perjured himself by signing a warrant application that states that the signer is certifying that the information is verified. The dossier was used by deep state actors and former Obama flaks to lie for years about the evidence on Trump Russia collusion. The media breathlessly reported thousands of stories based on nothing but anonymous leaks, many of which turned out to be lies.
https://sharylattkisson.com/2021/06/50-media-mistakes-in-the-trump-era-the-definitive-list/
To summarize, MSM used an obviously fraudulent dossier and deep state leaks in a relentless campaign to put pressure on Trump and his team to resign and/or to create momentum for impeachment. They put on the back burner and in most cases censored a true story about Hunter Biden and his laptop. Instead of honest reporting, they went with the letter by former officials saying this looked like Russian misinformation, which turned out to be a transparent lie. There is no comparison between the credible and true Biden laptop story and the fraudulent Steele Dossier story. Why do you spuriously misrepresent the most important facts?
5. I see you return to your deceptive narrative about Crossfire Hurricane. The DNC hack investigation may have been justified even it was total incompetence from day one. The server was never examined by the FBI and so they had to rely on a paid consultant of the DNC. The Russian collusion conspiracy theory and the resulting investigation was a fraud from day 1. The most important facts that you continue to fail to acknowledge are.
a. The warrant applications are the only SWORN and OFFICIAL predication documents. They rely for the bulk of their information on the dossier which everyone knew was salacious and unverified as Comey said under oath. Signing this document which was certifying that the information contained is verified was perjury.
b. That the dossier was a fraud was rather evident at the time (as Comey essentially admitted) but by Jan. 2017 it was a proven fact that it was a fraud. Yet more warrants were submitted to the court. How could that happen if there was not a deep state informal conspiracy to keep the investigation going at any cost?
6. The subject of this post. The media/scientist fake concensus is a prime example of an informal conspiracy to control what people get to read. And one of the peddlers of this fake news was Frank your revered MSM.
7. Finally your buddies Frank in the media are now colluding with government and tech monopolies to censor what people get to read and say. This could be the tipping point into a soft (or very hard if you are a dissident) totalitarian state such as China or even Venezuela. Gen. Milley has openly talked of a coup and implied half his fellow citizens are Nazi’s. His defense of critical race theory is deeply dishonest. This new war on “domestic terrorism” is unprecedented in American history. Even during the Civil War, this kind of threat to the Republic didn’t take place. The Constitution was never suspended except for brief periods in areas in open rebellion.
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/563520-shadow-state-embracing-corporate-governance-to-escape-constitutional-limits
Finally Frank, I’m tired of this pseudo-conversation where you continue to stonewall and ignore the most important facts in these matters while insisting on largely irrelevant or minor matters carefully skewed by you to give an unbalanced picture. And please drop your “right wing” media smear. Next thing we know you will be signing up for Milley’s critical race theory training and his strike team to take out Nazis.
Franktoo, I assume you are referring to firing Comey as being fired for investigating Trump. Comey is a liar and a perjurer. At the Senate hearing Comey stated under oath that Trump whispered to him in the blue room “I really look forward to working with you”. This was clearly an attempt to fortify the narrative that he was fired for the investigation. The only problem is that it is impossible for Trump to have said that. Watch the video and try saying it yourself. Comey not only perjured himself but he did it by making up a quote from Trump. How many other things did he make up?
stevenreincarnated wrote: “Franktoo, I assume you are referring to firing Comey as being fired for investigating Trump. Comey is a liar and a perjurer. At the Senate hearing Comey stated under oath that Trump whispered to him in the blue room “I really look forward to working with you”. This was clearly an attempt to fortify the narrative that he was fired for the investigation. The only problem is that it is impossible for Trump to have said that. Watch the video and try saying it yourself. Comey not only perjured himself but he did it by making up a quote from Trump. How many other things did he make up?
Steven: This isn’t the right place for believers in the Qanon. If you want to rejoin the reality-baserd community, ask yourself these questions: If Comey clearly committed perjury at some point, why didn’t the Trump DoJ, especially under AG Barr not even attempt to bring charges against him? And why would Comey lie under oath about what Trump said when they shook hands that day?
Franktoo, unless I am QANON it didn’t come from QANON since I am the only one I am aware of that ever pointed it out. You could prove it for yourself but obviously you decided not to or did and can’t accept it.
stevenreincarnated | July 18, 2021 at 2:51 pm | Franktoo, unless I am QANON it didn’t come from QANON since I am the only one I am aware of that ever pointed it out. You could prove it for yourself but obviously you decided not to or did and can’t accept it.
It’s too bad you are incapable of running a google search and discovering that you weren’t the first to accuse Comey of committing perjury when telling Congress that Trump whispered to him in the blue room “I really look forward to working with you”. You can’t explain why Comey would lie about something so trivial nor why the Trump DoJ wouldn’t indict Comey for perjury if there were proof he had lied.
If Comey were willing to risk lying under oath to Congress, he certainly could have made more damaging allegations about Trump than this statement.
So Frank, you are admitting he lied, correct? I don’t really care if someone else has pointed it out so I didn’t search it, duh. Who else did, Qanon? I gave a motivation to you already. Too bad you copied what I said without reading it. There’s a lot of things I can’t explain why he wasn’t prosecuted over. This one is just such an open and shut case that I don’t expect an argument about it when I point it out. If you don’t like the motivation I gave you then come up with one of your own you think is more probable. The evidence indicates it was a purposeful lie since he sped up his pace of speech considerably as he presented the quote in his testimony knowing that time was a factor so it was premeditated perjury. In fact that change in speech pattern was what led me to think something wasn’t right about it in the first place. Like I said, liar and perjurer.
DPY ignorantly wrote: “Well, You didn’t respond to the point. I challenge you to show me any time in American history when there has been such a prolonged and widespread suspension of the Bill of Rights. Emergency decrees are usually for short periods such as the Mt St. Helens eruption and for very limited geographical regions. What just happened is a frightening prospect.
Parts of the South were under military occupation after the Civil War until 1877, FOR MORE THAN A DECADE. If the military wanted to detain you without charges, no state court could insist upon your release. Then Jim Crow denied former slaves and their descendants their Rights under the Civil War amendments for another century.
During WWII, 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry were detained FOR 3.5 YEARS by the federal government as an emergency wartime measure. The Supreme Court approved detention, but we later discovered that the evidence that FDR presented to the court that they posed a national security threat was a lie.
The restrictions that were imposed on American liberty during this pandemic were part of the police power granted to each state by the people of the state in their state constitutions. When those constitutions were writtenb, pandemic disease killed more people than war or crime, so state constitutions granted their officials wide latitude in fighting pandemic disease. The present generation has been spoiled – until now – by advances in vaccination sanitation and drugs that have eliminated the threat of pandemic disease.
If government measures had halted the US pandemic in the spring of 2020, like they did in South Korea, Taiwan, China and elsewhere, and allowed life to return to normal (say with just face masks, contact tracing and compensated voluntary quarantine), would you have approved of the severe spring lockdowns that sent unemployment to 15%? Or should we have skipped those lockdowns and stood by and let one million MORE Americans die. What if those measures had succeeded after the surge in the early summer and the number of lives at risk hadn’t changed much? What if SARS2 were as lethal as SARS1 or evolved to become much more lethal? Today, now that you have survived to be protected by vaccination, you have decided that your rights were suspended for an emergency for far too long, but you have 20/20 hindsight. The worst choice is to fight a war – against a military enemy or a pandemic – to a long drawn out stalemate – rather than fighting to WIN – but in this case we did save about a half million lives through vaccination.
A detour: This is America and everyone is entitled to their own opinion about these questions, though it obviously would be far better if highly capable elite scientists like you and me arrived at our opinions by dispassionate reasoning and discussion rather than inflammatory, biased, populist rhetoric from those with political and monetary agendas. Populists on the right believe that NOTHING can be trusted if it comes from scientists like you and me or from the MSM or from government experts (like the FBI, DoJ, intelligence community) or from academics who aren’t social justice warriors. The only source of truth is the Holy Trinity of Sean, Tucker and formerly Rush and their accolytes. It is worth remembering that there are those in Russia and China spending lots of money creating and promoting conspiracy theories and fanning our flames (possibly even on this website?). You are (or were) an elite scientist capable of researching and understanding scientific literature and making informed decisions without the help of these con men – who do occasionally expose real problems. Unfortunately, you seem have abandoned your innate skepticism as a scientist and delegated the job of looking at critical primary sources (the DoJ IG’s report and the CDC’s estimates of seropositivity, for example) to people with an agenda who can’t be trusted. Like those who brought you weeks of fake news about Dominion voting machines that Sidney Powell now tells us NO ONE should have taken serious. And weeks of stories about election fraud that no judge found was supported by evidence.
Once you have an informed opinion about how much power you want to delegate to your state health officials (remembering that pandemic diseases more deadly than COVID are possible), you can work to change your state constitution and recall your governor for the bad decisions he made. However, the courts were forced to make decisions without knowing that the state’s interventions would fail and the pandemic would get MUCH worse in the fall of 2020. Judges aren’t medical experts, and the medical experts with the power to make decisions work for the executive branch.
I’m afraid it is you Frank who are ignorant of American history. After the Civil War, Southern states continued to hold elections and normal government happened. Freedom of religion and the other rights in the Bill of Rights continued. Democrats were able to run for office and most won. The troops largely were there to ensure that Blacks were able to vote and to enforce Federal law. Political debate remained open and often libelous and nasty with the waving of the bloody shirt a common campaign tactic.
What you cite from WWII was a special circumstance affecting a very small number of people. The Bill of Rights remained in full force.
My statement is quite true. Your ignorant citation of much milder restrictions is just bias. Is there any topic Frank on which you are not terribly biased?
You really really need Frank to own your extreme bias in favor of state emergency measures. Is it the good German in you?
Government overreach is of course a legitimate concern. But all this hand-wringing about loss of freedom comes in a context: Specifically that a majority of Americans have wanted their government to take actions to protect health, and what we’re left with is significantly the political expediency of highly partisan activists, with a ridiculously over-developed sense of entitlement who think just because they’re used to controlling the levers of society they are therefore justified in fear-mongering about relatively minor inconveniences like having to wear a freakin’ mask for a few minutes while in a public space where they could potentially set of a compounding chain of infections of a deadly disease.
W/o such opportunism, we might have had a chance to save hundreds of thousands of lives had we implemented fairly simple measures such as they did in countries like South Korea. What a strange world where people think there’s some inherent zero sum relationship between sacrifice for our community and induvidual freedom.
‘
Unquantified rhetorical posturing from Joshie.
1. There is no definitive scientific evidence that most NPI’s worked. I already gave the population fatality data above by state. There is no correlation between severity of lockdowns and those statistics.
2. So, as implemented draconic counter-measures didn’t work in practice. Whining that they weren’t implemented “right” means nothing.
3. The evidence on masks is that there is no quantified evidence they work in community settings. Cloth masks simply don’t work as most particles get through. Surgical masks redirect the air flow up and down which means in enclosed spaces, the air will rapidly become satured with particles due to diffusion and turbulence. N95 masks are a benefit. They have significant side effects, some life threatening and even medical personnel are simply not going to comply very well with continuously wearing one.
4. We have been over and over again and again the competing studies on NPI’s in this epidemic. The Flaxman was really badly flawed and its results worthless. Ioannidis et al have a competing paper, but the evidence is mixed and inconclusive.
So, Josh are you then anti-science or just not very good at reading and digesting quantified science?
Just wanted to provide some debunking of the Flaxman et al study that found lockdown had a large effect. It turns out this was almost certainly an artifact of a flawed model. This critique also provides strong circumstantial evidence that lockdown was not beneficial.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2020.580361/full?&utm_source=Email_to_authors_&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=T1_11.5e1_author&utm_campaign=Email_publication&field=&journalName=Frontiers_in_Medicine&id=580361
> You have to admit you are commenting on something you have not investigated…
This is what I love here.
I have not “investigated” this I look at Ron’s “investigation” and Horowitz’s investigation and I see one that is heavily funded and conducted by professional law enforcement with decades of experiencd and huge resources to being to bear.
I look at Ron’s “investigation” and I see one that, well, isn’t that.
Oh, just to be sure people understand.
Just because Ron’s “investigation” lacks many of the important attributes of Horowitz’s doesn’t mean I think that Ron’s conclusions are necessarily wrong and Horowitz’s are necessarily right.
I have no blind “trust” in Horowitz’s investigation.
But I do think that the different broad characteristics of the two “investigations” are relevant for assessing the probabilities one them being correct relative to the other. And show me where Horowitz thought probable theories like the Seth Rich political assassination theories, and I’d have to revisit how I assess the probability of correctness of the two “investigations,” respectively.
Here’s a good summary from a leftie journalist. Joshie level of knowledge of this is basically zero. Even the DOJ IG found scores of errors and misrepresentations, may of them seriousl
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-do-big-media-outlets-so-often
“There were so many false reports circulated by the dominant corporate wing of the U.S. media as part of the five-year-long Russiagate hysteria that in January, 2019, I compiled what I called “The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story.” The only difficult part of that article was choosing which among the many dozens of retractions, corrections and still-uncorrected factual falsehoods merited inclusion in the worst-ten list. So stiff was the competition that I was forced to omit many huge media Russiagate humiliations, and thus, to be fair to those who missed the cut, had to append a large “Dishonorable Mention” category at the end.
That the entire Russiagate storyline itself was a fraud and a farce is conclusively demonstrated by one decisive fact that can never be memory-holed: namely, the impetus for the scandal and subsequent investigation was the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign had secretly and criminally conspired with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election, primarily hacking into the email inboxes of the DNC and Clinton campaign chief John Podesta. And a grand total of zero Americans were accused (let alone convicted) of participating in that animating conspiracy.”
This is a good article
https://trialsitenews.com/origin-of-covid-19/
Great article? By a prominent physician and researcher who won’t put his name on the article.
I guess I could argue, your team has forced them underground and then complains they are underground. That’s kind of rich. What’s your opinion of the WWII French Resistance?
The anonymous virologist in the article goes out of his way to support the valid motives for GOF research and not cast accusations but his questions clearly imply his suspicions. More on the Yunnan 2013 virus:
1) Dr. Shi’s mission was to find Sars-like viruses in the wild yet she downplayed the 2013 Yunnan bat cave virus find in publications before 2020. For example, the only paper describing the incident named the virus “4991,” cataloged only a segment of its RNA called RDRP (RNA-dependent RNA polymerase) and said the sample came from swabs of bat cave guano. Yet, in her 2020 publication announcing RatG13 and the story of the sick miners she neglected to cite the 2014 reference paper or that she changed the name of the virus or that she had sequenced the entire genome in 2018 or why she had chosen to do that. The fact that RatG13and 4991 were one in the same only came out after citizen investigators started digging and Dr. Shi admitted she had changed the name “for convenience.” After that is was found that the DNA surrounding the RatG13 RNA was not of that found in fecal samples but seemed to come from human respiratory fluid. Was it from the sick miner’s? When asked for actual samples of RatG13 Dr. Shi said the 2018 analysis exhausted the last bit of sample.
2) The article asks the question if the the TRS leader sequence explored in a 2018 publication was identical to RatG13’s why was this not mentioned in the publication? It seems there is a pattern of non-disclosures of important information.
3) The Chinese military was running its own research program into SARS-like bat covs. In fact, the closest viruses to SARS2 after RatG13 were collected by the Chinese military in 2017. On RNA segment called the E-protein was 100% homologous to that of both sequence published by Shi in 2020 for RatG13, the military virus and also the earliest SARS2. The E-protein now has mutated some showing that this is a near impossible coincidence. This needs more attention.
4) The the most important evidence of lab versus natural origin that has been circulating among virologists in the background is a SARS2 feature called a furin cleavage site. This segment of four amino acid codons uses the human hosts furin protein to cleave the two parts of the spike, assisting its entry into human ACE2 receptor cells. This feature has been well known on other viruses to increase pathogenicity but it is unnecessary for the infection of bats and thus is not found in any other beta coronavirus. So how did it get there? Nature provide two possibilities and each have a problem. The first is random mutation but there is no evidence of any earlier versions of SARS2 in bats or humans and it statistically calculates to implausibility by experts. The second is recombination by SARS2 stealing the segment from another virus. This would be plausible except the particular coding that is used is extremely rare in bat viruses and also as said before there are no known bat viruses in the family that it could have stolen it from.
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210217/The-origin-of-SARS-CoV-2-furin-cleavage-site-remains-a-mystery.aspx
e
> The origin of the virus is extremely important in helping us determine what is going to happen going forward in the pandemic
Not really:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2021/06/16/how-to-reason-by-analogy/
The risk is greater with engineered viruses. We can prepare for natural jumps. And engineered jumps. What am I fighting? Bruce Lee would ask that question. What do you call the inability to perceive what’s in front of you? Death. There are limited resources. We can figure out what’s in the world to use. We do not figure out we can do all things, all the time. And while we are saving our own butts with our resources, the poor are dying. What is this mindset we are have?
Pingback: Collapse of the fake consensus on Covid-19 origins – Watts Up With That? | Blue Anon News
Thank you, Judith for posting this. Well done.
Regards,
Bob
A year ago Cambridge University (UK) and Munster and Kiel (Germany) researchers did the genetics on covid-19 and found that it mutated from a bat virus in Yunnan in Southern China. What scientists already on the case suspected before the pandemic based on their specialist knowledge, was confirmed:
https://ptolemy2.wordpress.com/2020/04/29/the-genetic-web-of-coronavirus-origin-in-yunnan-not-wuhan/
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/17/9241
What is wrong with this straightforward, robust, parsimonious and well established answer?
Why has this research been forgotten – and every month we return to the subject of covid-19 origins like the script of “Fifty Blind Dates”?
It’s a mutated Yunnan bat coronavirus.
End of story.
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/17/9241/tab-figures-data
Phil Salmon: It’s a mutated Yunnan bat coronavirus.
Yet to be elucidated: Where did the mutation occur, and how did the resultant virus first infect humans?
Elliot Sobel, in his book “From a Biological Point of View”, addressing random variation and natural selection (and artificial selection), referred to “parsimony” as “Occam’s Lobotomy”. It isn’t a trustworthy guide to “truth”, just a preference for a constraint on human thinking. There is seldom agreement on when “necessity” has been satisfied.
Yunnan was where the Wuhan lab was getting the bats to study, because the prior SARS virus traced to a bat population in Yunnan. They were looking for novel corona viruses in Yunnan bats, found 800 miles away, and then conducting gain-of-function research on them.
Matthew
Yet to be elucidated:
No, Forster et al. in PNAS illucidated it thoroughly.
50 blind dates again.
It’s a mutated Yunnan bat coronavirus.
End of story.
—————–
We have proclaimed Science is finished, it’s done. Thank you.
“The following quote, or some variation thereof, has often been attributed to Lord Kelvin
“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.””
The point is not whether he said it or not.
It is, it’s never done. Rust never sleeps.
The title of the thread is Collapse of the fake consensus on Covid-19 origins.
That consensus was orchestrated by professional institutions. Whether or not it was ‘true/false’ or done in smoke filled room or not, is interesting, but secondary. Bureaucratic control of information is endemic to its basic function, particularly if that information has the potential to undermine its authority/survival. The fact is that ‘the consensus’ has deteriorated, as shown by the public statements of questioning professionals, and the present shifting of the bureaucratic official position.
By necessity we live in a society dominated by bureaucracies. If we ignore their basic structure as social mechanisms we can easily overlook their inherent coercive function which necessitates that they are, primarily, the arbiters of information. Not necessarily truth, as shown by the fact their official positions evolve. In this case with covid, one can definitely make the argument that the bureaucratic coercive function got ahead of its mandate to advocate for public health. It was far from prudent that a position regarding covid origins should have been decided so early.
Another interesting article
https://editions.mydigitalpublication.com/publication/?m=58909&i=704791&p=18
Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone columnist and author, has an interesting take as well:
“From the start, the press mostly mishandled Covid-19 reporting. Part of this was because nearly all of the critical issues — mask use, lockdowns, viability of vaccine programs, and so on — were marketed by news companies as culture-war narratives. A related problem had to do with news companies using the misguided notion that the news is an exact science to promote the worse misconception that science is an exact science. This led to absurd spectacles like news agencies trying to cover up or denounce as falsehood the natural reality that officials had evolving views on things like the efficacy of ventilators or mask use.
When CNN did a fact-check on the question, “Did Fauci change his mind on the effectiveness of masks?” they seemed worried about the glee Trump followers would feel if they simply wrote yes, so the answer instead became, “Yes, but Trump is also an (bad word)” (because he implied the need to wear masks is still up for debate). By labeling whatever the current scientific consensus happened to be an immutable “fact,” media outlets made the normal evolution of scientific debates look dishonest, and pointlessly heightened mistrust of both scientists and media.”
This follows along Koonin’s point that climate science has been blown out of any semblance of accuracy by a desperately partisan press.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/fact-checking-takes-another-beating?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxMjMwNDk4NCwicG9zdF9pZCI6MzY3NzU0NTIsIl8iOiJTYkNzViIsImlhdCI6MTYyMTg5NTI1OCwiZXhwIjoxNjIxODk4ODU4LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMTA0MiIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.za-MfB2_o5eBCEkvS1GEkkaKP2PcntXux2WX5sEFeAs
An animal intermediate was a highly probable and valid hypothesis a year ago. But no animal intermediate has been found, unlike SARS and MERS. Then there’s the coding of the furin cleavage site on the spike and the hospitalization of three WIV employees with respiratory infections in November 2019. The preponderance of the evidence is now for a lab leak, not an animal spillover. The lab leak hypothesis is probably not at the ‘beyond a reasonable doubt level’, but it’s getting close.
Well, upthread I left a comment that put 1 in 2000 odds of a zoonotic outbreak emerging within a nine mile radius of Wuhan, based on China’s overall arable land area. Taking a population approach, the odds of a zoonotic outbreak coincidentally occurring in Wuhan, a city of 11 million in a country of 1.4 billion, is 1 in 125.
If the reports of three WIV employees getting Covid in November are true, we could make a rough stab at calculating the odds of that. As a guess, lets say WIV has 1000 employees (I couldn’t find employment figures). Even if there was some particular reason for a zoonotic outbreak in Wuhan, the odds that a WIV employee would be the first to get it in a city of 11 million is 11,000 to one. I’d allow that one might’ve infected the other two coworkers, so as not to cube those odds into a trillion to one chance.
So the people lecturing us that a lab leak is an unsupportable conspiracy theory should perhaps explain why these three rough, back-of-the-envelop stabs are completely invalid, as they show a 99.95%, 99.2%, and 99.99% chance it was a leak.
And of course the actions of the Chinese government clearly show that they thought it came from the lab, or they wouldn’t have been desperately covering everything up.
The amazing part of all this is that the NYT and WaPo could not do that math.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronavirus-tom-cotton-china.html
The zoonotic outbreak didn’t have to occur in Wuhan for Wuhan to be the first large outbreak of the disease. It could have been brought there from somewhere else.
The problem with the three WIV employees getting Covid in November argument is that there is evidence that COVID was already in Europe by then. Even if the three employees had COVID (which isn’t proved), they could as easily have gotten it from outside the lab since the infection was widespread in Wuhan at that time.
The presence of COVID in Europe and possibly even the West Coast of US in late 2019 suggests an origin much earlier than November, 2019.
“The zoonotic outbreak didn’t have to occur in Wuhan for Wuhan to be the first large outbreak of the disease.”
Yes clearly it’s not direct evidence. But independent circumstantial evidence can be multiplied into the probabilities until it surpasses the beyond reasonable doubt threshold. The list of evidence is very long now and the experts who claimed there was no evidence or strong evidence of the opposite have now been found to be concealing huge professional conflicts. The 27 Lancet virologist signers knew, for example, that lab leaks were common, that the 2003 SARS1 virus had caused outbreaks from lab leaks no less than 6 times, 4 of them in China. They knew that the WIV was engaging in GOF research making chimera SARS viruses designed to infect humans. They knew the US had ordered a halt on funding of GOF research due to lab leaks and the need to revamp the safety protocols.
Fauci and Daszak knew all of this better than any others and never disclosed it. Instead, together they corralled the virologists community, over which they controlled funding, to sign a letter claiming with certainty a zoonotic origin and also labeling dissenters conspiracy theorists.
It took people like the retired NYT science writer Nicholas Wade to point out that the lab leak origin theory explains the facts better than the zoonotic origin. The direct evidence that would eliminate the lab origin has been withheld by China while the world experts remained silent.
Ron
>Fauci and Daszak knew all of this better than any others and never disclosed it. Instead, together they corralled the virologists community, over which they controlled funding, to sign a letter claiming with certainty a zoonotic origin and also labeling dissenters conspiracy theorists.
It took people like the retired NYT science writer Nicholas Wade to point out that the lab leak origin theory explains the facts better than the zoonotic origin. The direct evidence that would eliminate the lab origin has been withheld by China while the world experts remained silent. <
I agree with what you said. But another possible twist to the plot could have been that Dasak's mad dash to the lab could have been nothing more than CYA. Controlling the situation to preserve one's derrierre is one of the first things one learns in any bureaucratic environment, particularly as there have been stories of containment issues and the lab employees becoming ill. There was much at stake to avoid an investigation that could have exonerated the lab for transmission but nonetheless exposed practices that, given the dangerous nature of the experiments, recommended closure. Another words, he didn't want to be a sacrificial lamb for the greater bureaucratic good.
And if this scenario is true, make no mistake that there were many in positions of power who realized this and knowingly set Dasak in motion. Fauci certainly included.
This possible scenario would support the basis of this thread of the 'consensus uber alles narrative', which is nothing but scientists, and bureaucracies, behaving badly.
Bill,
I think everyone gave themselves a perfectly good rationalization of why they gave no curiosity as to the checking the lab. Imagine that in 2015 Shi had trained students on what Baric taught her in 2014. Let’s say in 2016 the military takes control of part of the WIV and puts that student in charge. The area is restricted to those with top secret clearance. They run experiments to give viruses GOF to stay ahead of Fort Dietrich where they assume the US is making viruses (or that is their cover story to the workers.) We know in 2017 the military did their own bat guano expeditions and obtained ZC45/ ZXC2, which is 90% similar to SARS2. After a year of serial passage in humanized mice they get the virus to lets say 96.2%. Shi published in November 2020 that she ran the full RNA sequence of 96.2% similar RaTG13 for the first time in 2018 (since she got some new equipment) and exhausted the last sample. But it is just as plausible that was given the RNA sequence by the military after the SARS2 outbreak along with a cover story that she dutifully followed.
Shi could honestly tell Daszak and Baric that the virus was not from her lab and only tell the small lie about where she got the RatG13 sequence. This leaves Daszak, Baric and Fauci relieved and only needing to make the small oversight of informing the public about their GOF projects and training of WIV staff.
It’s all very plausible without a large conspiracy. You just count on people’s relationships and situational biases. Fauci, Baric and Daszak’s behavior was predictable. All this said my scenario can be half blown up by the Chinese allowing an international expedition to go into the bat cave in Yunnan and find RatG13 or it’s kin in near identical form to the 2018 sequence. But so far they have kept a fence and around the cave opening guarded by sentries.
Ron … Thanks for your reply. It is amazing at how many ways this can go. Oh what a tangled web we weave …
But no animal intermediate has been found,
What happened to the pangolin?
50 blind dates again.
https://judithcurry.com/2021/05/23/collapse-of-the-fake-consensus-on-covid-19-origins/#comment-950564
For the pangolin spike to be 97% similar to SARS2 by co-evolution is very small. So why is the pangolin cov spike so similar? Peter Daszak’s Eco Health Alliance is in business to answer that question. They have collected tens of thousands of wildlife samples over the last 20 years looking for viruses. They went back to their pangolin samples for the past 10 years for multiple locations and could not find ANY coronaviruses. They thus conclude that pangolin cov must have originated in captive pangolins, perhaps the smuggling trade.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10393-020-01503-x#Tab4
This still leaves one expecting that pangolin cov and SARS2 have a common ancestor in the smuggling trade. One would think they would have found it by now. Another mystery appeared in the two pangolin cov papers in that it was uncovered last fall that the second one plagiarized or was falsified using the RNA samples from the first while changing the labeling to make if appear to be independent samples. The first pangolin paper was published in March 2019 and the second in June, just a couple months before the October outbreak. Is this all coincidence?
What we have actually seen the past 17 months where Covid19/SARS-CoV2 is concerned is that ‘skepticism’ has migrated to independent websites, based on the suppression at the MSM.Although at this time point that means that only a small minority of the world get to hear the skeptical viewpoint, it does mean that viral transmission methods are still capable of taking place.In the UK, a variety of ‘independent media sites’ have been prepared to engage on the subject of Covid-skepticism. These include:
www. off-guardian.org (set up by a variety of people banned from commenting at the now Neoliberal Guardian Newspaper website (originally the Guardian was the foremost national daily newspaper for the intellectual left of centre reader));
http://www.conservativewoman.co.uk – a website espousing traditional conservative views, set up by two women (but contributed to- and read by just as many men as women);
http://www.therealslog.com – a website set up by John Ward, a former senior market researcher in the private sector whose clients demanded sociological analyses concerning a wide variety of topics – the site really represents a political outlet for a free-thinking individual with 50 years of adult experience;
http://www.ukcolumn.org – an alt-media site which openly states that it is in effect ‘anti-establishment’ (based on the fact that the Establishment now seems to be dedicated to continual lying);
Whilst not everything that is written there is accurate and whilst you do get some rather crazy viewpoints expressed BTL (almost always with scant disregard for empirical evidence), the effect on engaging at those sites for several months or years is that your knowledge tends to iterate rather than stall, simply because the sites base their offering on seeking out the truth (which is always an ongoing affair).
Another valuable aspect to such sites is that comments BTL can have links to really excellent alternative articles on the subject which may lead quite quickly to rapid dissemination of such facts, evidence, views etc to much wider audiences.
There is of course a danger of cognitive bias coming from limiting oneself to such sources. However, it is in fact necessary to completely disengage from the MSM for a sufficient time period to lose ones brainwashing from such sources and hence become aware of how the MSM is in fact brainwashing the public.
Once freedom from brainwashing has been achieved, it is possible to revisit such sites in the knowledge that they will be seen for what they are, rather than naively seeing them as places where you may find some truth on a regular basis.
For those looking for the MSM current stance here is the latest from Forbes.com. It concludes:
“Conspiracy theories like the lab leak hypothesis might sound compelling and inviting to us. After all, how much more comforting would it be to know that just a handful of evil people — not the politicians who sacrificed their constituents, but rather some imaginary “mad scientists” laughing maniacally in their lair — were ultimately responsible for the tragedies of the past 18 months? Fortunately, as scientists, we are not guided by comfort, but rather by the pursuit of truth and accuracy, based on the best knowledge we can obtain. Despite what many prominent voices would have you believe, the virology is open-and-shut: there is no compelling reason to believe that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab.” – Ethan Siegel
I would that agree with this conclusion to borrow any points from the article for debate. I couldn’t find that a single point that I agreed with.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/05/20/no-science-clearly-shows-that-covid-19-wasnt-leaked-from-a-wuhan-lab/?sh=25fa1d925585
I meant to say I would ask anyone who agrees with this conclusion to borrow any points from it for debate. And, BTW, that would include Peter Daszak who tweeted out the article.
https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/1395455248404258821?s=20
Ron Graf: there is no compelling reason to believe that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab
There is no compelling reason, imo, to believe any of the origin stories. What is present, for example in Nicholas Wade’s review, is evidence that is hard to reconcile with each origin story.
Ron Graf: “Most recently, disgraced journalist Nicholas Wade has penned an error-filled, misleading piece promoting this nonsense, but the science tells a different story.”
Is there, yet, a published point-by-point rebuttal of Wade’s article? If so, could you please link it? Also link to a substantiation of the claim that Wade is “disgraced”?
I was quoting a article I strongly disagree with. Just providing both sides.
Classic –
> There is of course a danger of cognitive bias coming from limiting oneself to such sources….
Followed by:
>However, it is in fact necessary to completely disengage from the MSM for a sufficient time period to lose ones brainwashing from such sources and hence become aware of how the MSM is in fact brainwashing the public.
My guess… zero realization of the irony.
From Pielke Jr
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/scientific-leadership-on-covid-19
I don’t have to point out that the same political party that attacked critics of the COVID origin is also the party that attacks climate skeptics. Bullies are simply bullies, that is how they “win” debates. Anyway, the list of stations that show no warming is growing…rapidly. No amount of attacking will change this data.
https://imgur.com/a/CDasqHH
Despite spending over 17% of it’s GDP on healthcare the poor response to the virus exposed the US as a house of cards.
I think 2020 was the tipping point for the US. It will take years to make up for the losses in education, average life expectancy, birth rate, debt to GDP and that’s only if we restore trust in our institutions. With 70% of republicans refusing to acknowledge the results of the last election I’m not holding my breath.
I knew the end was near when China took over world leadership in international patents in 2018. Their response to control the pandemic is clear evidence they have the social cohesion and leadership to become the the most powerful nation on the planet.
The cause of this sad state of affairs Jack is the failure of most of the important institutions in Western culture, emphatically including academia, the media, and big business. The insane response to Covid that resulted in these dramatic setbacks was unprecedented and driven by fanatical hatred of Trump and Trump supporters.
Every election since 2000 has generated widespread claims that the result was not fair or the result of cheating. That’s not a new thing
I’m not assigning blame to either party. I think the country is in the early stages of the “Behavioral Sink Syndrome”. Since BSS is a multi-generation
phenomenon there is still time to invent the technology* to reverse it.
*genetically engineering better citizens who are smarter, emotionally stable and live longer and healthier lives.
“Every election since 2000 has generated widespread claims that the result was not fair or the result of cheating”
Jack has forgotten that Trump stole the election from Hillary.
But if Hillary had won in 2016 we would still be a year or more out from having a vaccine, at best. Trump’s innovation was putting the most promising vaccines into production while they were still being tested, this enabled early ramping of vaccinations. Biden hasn’t done much but watch and claim victory between naps.
jungletrunks,
Let’s just dispense with the notion the the US is a democratic nation. The R’s have won the popular vote only once since 2000. If I had to put a label on it I would lean towards calling it a oligarchy.
The last time we had so many citizens voting was 120 years ago. Over the next few decades from around the beginning of the 1900’s through the late 1920’s numerous changes to voter eligibility, limits to the House of Representatives and federal control over the voting process managed to slice that from around 70% of eligible voters down to a cycle low of 48% in 1996. If history is any guide I expect voter participation to drop significantly.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?511363-1/the-age-acrimony
“The last time we had so many citizens voting was 120 years ago”
We never have seen so many vote, ever before, as we did in the 2020 federal election.
We’re a democratic republic, Jack. The founders knew the certain tyranny that a pure democracy would bring, it enables mob rule. That’s why we have an electoral college; minority populations in states with less density have a say in the governance of our country. Otherwise only a few regions would determine their own federal spoils at the expense of the rest of the nation paying the taxes for those spoils. The structure is all about mitigating tyranny.
I was unclear about the most voters comment;
“The last time we had so many citizens voting was 120 years ago”
should be: “The last time we had such a high percentage of citizens voting was 120 years ago”.
None of this deflects from my central point; China will be the most powerful country on the planet in the next 5-10 years because they have committed themselves to be the world’s leaders in the technology that will decide the fate of humanity. United we stand, divided we fall and if all else fails blow up everyone with nukes.
If you have any doubts just do a search on “global approval rating by country”.
… genetically engineering better citizens who are smarter, emotionally stable and live longer and healthier lives…. Jack
Perhaps we should learn how to reliably engineer virus’ first.
Well Robert I think we are doing pretty good at genetic engineering with viruses considering CRISPR/cas9 was literally derived from how a virus is able to infiltrate and modify DNA.
But CRISPR/cas9 is ancient history now.
https://singularityhub.com/2021/05/11/a-new-gene-editing-tool-rivals-crispr-and-can-make-millions-of-edits-at-once/
We will always be divided when comparing ourselves to totalitarian regimes, jack. Having divisions of ideas is a good thing. Creative destruction is good for both capitalism, and politics, the arts, many things; provided that corruption can be kept in check; but centralized government and massive corruption are inseparable because power always finds ways ways to insulate itself, that’s the nature of it.
Higher education should be a place where individuals are kept off balance from an influx of ideas. CE is a good source for diversity of opinions, Dr. Curry allows a great deal of freedom and should be commended for it. But upstream in this blog we have someone leaving because they can’t stand the heat of alternative views; the views here are much more varied than he suggested. Society has gotten to the point where having certain political views means you stand to be canceled in some capacity. The Left has no use for competition, that’s a bad thing.
Jack, I agree with you about CRISPR.
But I wouldn’t be so sure that COVID-19 isn’t someones idea of perfection, everything is relative.
Well Jack – we may crudely edit genes – as your cite says – but what emerges is a surprise.
Robert, CRISPR gene editing is not all surprises; I don’t know about the content of Jack’s post, but there are diseases that are treatable today specifically because of advances in CRISPR technology.
As far as I know – CRISPR has not been used to treat conditions in people.
“As far as I know – CRISPR has not been used to treat conditions in people.”
I encourage you to study it more:
https://innovativegenomics.org/news/crispr-clinical-trials-2021/
https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2020/crispr-cancer-research-treatment
Although technically those are trails and not ‘genetically engineering better citizens who are smarter, emotionally stable and live longer and healthier lives.’
Robert on CRISPR: “…we may crudely edit genes … but what emerges is a surprise….As far as I know – CRISPR has not been used to treat conditions in people.”
I presented the science that contradicts your assumptions.
CRISPR trials are in process to treat myriad conditions in people, with very promising early results.
For those interested, there’s also interesting research info in the link about COVID-19: https://innovativegenomics.org/covid-19-research-projects/
‘The current trials using CRISPR-based treatments are still in early stages. That means that even if the treatments are safe and effective, they’re likely still a few years away from FDA approval and being broadly available to patients.’ https://innovativegenomics.org/news/crispr-clinical-trials-2021/
‘While the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing system has become the poster child for innovation in synthetic biology, it has some major limitations. CRISPR-Cas9 can be programmed to find and cut specific pieces of DNA, but editing the DNA to create desired mutations requires tricking the cell into using a new piece of DNA to repair the break. This bait-and-switch can be complicated to orchestrate, and can even be toxic to cells because Cas9 often cuts unintended, off-target sites as well.’ https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/04/210430120411.htm
Jack & dpy …
I wouldn’t worry … too much. The bureaucratic/institutional structural weaknesses combined with human frailty happens often. When hasn’t the MSM been lockstep with institutions? Or, the self-possessed of academia? This too shall pass, and from the efforts of individuals who refuse to be cowed by the dictates of bureaucratic/institutional depredations.
I may sound a bit blase … but my advice is to stay angry, stay loud and give no quarter.
Poor response compared to who? The USA response, and mortality, is similar to many other industrialized nations. Most of the impacts you cite were based on government interventions not the effectiveness of our medical infrastructure. Our vaccination rates have been consistently in the top 5 globally.
Only about 25% of the USA identify as either D or R, both historic lows. Your 70% of Rs statistic becomes about 18% of the US population. This is far higher than I would like it to be but I suspect not unlike many other cultural beliefs that have thin or no evidence, and hardly the end of the world as we know it.
The Yunnan bat virus – with 96.2% of the genetics of the SARS-2 virus – was transported to the Wuhan lab where it was weaponised using US DoD funds and either accidentally or deliberately released – something that the lab and the Chinese government then covered up? 🤣
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/117/17/9241/F1.medium.gif
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/17/9241
A more likely scenario is that the SARS-2 virus originated in Yunnan Province – where there were cases as early as September 2019 – after a long sequence of mutations from the bat virus – and then appeared in Wuhan as well as Canada and East Asia. The length of the lines represent the number of mutations between variants.
The bigger issue with the conspiracy theory is that it obscures graver issues. Six of the eighteen signatories of the recent letter in Science are members of the Cambridge Working Group.
‘Recent incidents involving smallpox, anthrax and bird flu in some of the top US laboratories remind us of the fallibility of even the most secure laboratories, reinforcing the urgent need for a thorough reassessment of biosafety. Such incidents have been accelerating and have been occurring on average over twice a week with regulated pathogens in academic and government labs across the country. An accidental infection with any pathogen is concerning. But accident risks with newly created “potential pandemic pathogens” raise grave new concerns. Laboratory creation of highly transmissible, novel strains of dangerous viruses, especially but not limited to influenza, poses substantially increased risks. An accidental infection in such a setting could trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible to control. Historically, new strains of influenza, once they establish transmission in the human population, have infected a quarter or more of the world’s population within two years.’ http://www.cambridgeworkinggroup.org/
Here is an excellent 2015 podcast by Baric and his lead US collaborator explaining the specific gain of function experiments carried out in the WIV in 2014 they designed and why. They even get into “the pause” on GOF and their new rules they had to follow to continue. He says they operated in BSL3 conditions but that is disputed by their grant according to Wade.
One also can see how Fauci can claim NIAID did not fund GOF research at the WIV to Sen Rand Paul. Baric told the moderator that they had to report whenever they got an experimental result that showed a gain of function so that the anonymous committee (“the black box at NIAID”) could tell them if they could continue. He said their 2014 experiments making a SARS chimera virus to infect human ACE2 modified mice did not show a gain of function so they didn’t need to notify the committee. This means that Fauci was technically correct in that they did not fund GOF as it turned out because they didn’t achieve GOF.
Also it’s interesting that Baric does not believe that SARS1 came from a civet cat, the animal that Peter Daszak was credited for finding that is the official source of SARS in 2003.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985
He also proposes a third paradigm that eliminates the need for any intermediary virus host and just explains the civet cat as a concidential co-infection, In fact, one of the goals of his 2014 chimera experiment was to prove that nature did not need an intermediary.
This explains perhaps some of Baric’s silent wait and see stance until now and underscores his change joining with the other virologist signers in wanting to see the lab origin investigated.
Am I simply imagining that the 4 WHO pathways disappeared? An animal spillover is the null hypothesis. ‘
‘The joint team’s assessment of likelihood of each possible pathway was as follows:
• direct zoonotic spillover is considered to be a possible-to-likely pathway;
• introduction through an intermediate host is considered to be a likely to very likely pathway;
• introduction through cold/ food chain products is considered a possible pathway;
• introduction through a laboratory incident was considered to be an extremely unlikely pathway.’ https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/who-convened-global-study-of-origins-of-sars-cov-2-china-part
Well it would seem the joint team’s mission was to cover up the US sponsored gain-of-function research and sloppy procedures and protocols that led to the outbreak, based on who they selected for it. Or look at their findings:
No, it’s not. Almost the entire world has been through this pandemic for over a year, and not once has the food chain been implicated in a single instance, out of 167 million known cases. That includes restaurant drive-throughs. The CDC has said repeatedly that food isn’t a pathway for infection. So even eating an infected bat shouldn’t result in transmission.
So far as I can tell, there has not been a single reported instance of animal to human transmission of Covid-19, except perhaps among the Wuhan lab workers, out of 167 million known cases. In over a year of searching, no intermediate host has been identified. No animals in Wuhan has been found to contain the virus, and the Chinese looked up and down for one.
Most bats have almost no interactions with other mammals. They hang upside down in caves, fly out, and eat nothing but insects. They have very few predators, which is one reason many species live so long for such a small animal. About the only way to catch a disease from a bat is to spend a lot of time in caves with them, or from shoveling bat guano. If there was a natural breakout, it wouldn’t have been near Wuhan, it would’ve been near the caves where they were finding bats infected with SARS-COV-2, which is the natural reservoir of the virus.
In contrast, at the beginning of the outbreak one of the lab workers said one of his coworkers got bloodied up in a fight with a research bat in the lab, where they were studying bat SARS viruses.
George is correct about zero documented covid infections from eating contaminated food. Even transmission from contaminated surface contact (fomites) is extremely low. And NEVER has there been a documented virus emergence emanating from frozen food. That bit of ridiculousness likely was meant to corrupt further the virologists already staked to the consensus — sort of punking them. But Tedros was not a weak and compromised as they calculated him to be and didn’t give it his stamp of approval to it, at least not unequivocally. Kudos to him.
It has been amazing to see the establishment consensus transform on this story with no different information than last year except with Donald Trump no longer needing to be contradicted.
Nonetheless – WHO recommends thorough cooking of meat and not eating diseased animals. It was recognised as a possible pathway in the 3000 page WHO report. They surely cannot be criticised for covering the bases.
Cats and minks have been identified as hosts with animal to human transmission. These were infected by people and are not the source of the spillover.
The Hendra virus spread from fruit bats to horses grazing beneath fruit trees and then to humans. A pattern of spillover that has repeated throughout human history.
And no – there was a bat corona virus identified as a close genetic match to SARS-COV-2. However – a long sequence of mutations was needed before it became the covid19 virus. It has been shown that emerged in Yunnan Province as early as September 2019. And then was carried to Wuhan as well as to Canada and the East Asia.
The ‘chimera’ virus in 2014 was engineered under Biohazard Level 3 protocols – according to the American researchers who commissioned the work – and was less infective than the source virus’. So no gain of function it was argued.
Expert opinion – and unlike these guys I am no virologist – is that by far the most likely origin is from bats via other species. But we may easily argue that away and accuse WHO and everyone else of covering their arses.
Yet there are no known cases of the virus being transmitted by food, and we’ve studied it for over a year and seen at least 167 million cases. Fast food workers, some obviously with Covid, have been using their hands to assemble hamburgers, give the bun a final little pat, and handing them to someone who almost immediately put it in their mouth, and yet there are no documented cases of that having transmitted the virus.
Yet the WHO was seriously considering this, and discounting the mountains of evidence implicated the lab, such as three lab workers getting sick in mid-November.
Again, this is like having a small pox outbreak next to a CDC smallpox lab and arguing that the null hypothesis is that it came from an infected chicken breast from the KFC down the street.
Fruit bats are really really big and hang out in trees all day, pooping on the horses and pooping on the horses’ food. In contrast, there aren’t millions of horseshoe bats hanging upside down over hotel lobbies in Wuhan. In fact, there are probably almost no bats there at all. The infected bats are in cave regions 800 miles away, and down in Vietnam, Laos, and other areas, where the outbreak did not originate, even though all those people have lived there for thousands of years next to infected bats without causing a pandemic.
Again, no intermediate host has been found. No trace of the virus was found in the Wuhan seafood market. China didn’t conduct some massive sweep of wildlife, or cull any farm animals, they instead shut down the Wuhan lab, deleted all the data, destroyed the virus samples, silenced all the lab workers, and blamed the outbreak on the American military. Now why would they do that?
The virus appeared months earlier that the Wuhan outbreak. In Wuhan they had the expertise to identify the outbreak as something new. It may have originated Guangdong Province – the source of the original SARS spillover. .
e.g. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/17/9241
The sources of your other seemingly wild speculation are of course absent.
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The whole paragraph of the Lancet letter seems well worth reading:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2820%2930418-9/fulltext
Due diligence needs to be paid to the evidence basis (1-13) before crying foul. In any event, toning down conspiracies might indeed help data sharing. And if Denizens really want to entertain a theory that can easily be turned into News Corp red meat, it is their personal responsibility to distance themselves from such ideation. Which means that the WHO’s point still stands.
Willard, there is nothing in the Lancet letter that was valid then or now.
The very heart of their argument is a lie. They claimed to have knowledge based on their expertise that they did not have. They abused their authority to the detriment of all good scientists, both in their field and outside it.
Then making matters worse, they believed somehow that they had some authority to tell others, non-experts and collogues alike, what they were allowed to say or report.
Your proof by many assertions are duly noted, Ron.
All the points I made stand.
Here is a new article in the WSJ with a few new items.
Of the 27 original signers of the “conspiracy theory” denunciation letter 3 have now recanted. One said:
They also contacted Baric for comment and he stuck to the natural crossover hypothesis. So he, like Fauci, is just moving reluctantly with the consensus.
Due diligence needs to be paid to the evidence basis (1-13) before crying foul. In any event, toning down conspiracies might indeed help data sharing. And if Denizens really want to entertain a theory that can easily be turned into News Corp red meat, it is their personal responsibility to distance themselves from such ideation. Which means that the WHO’s point still stands.
https://judithcurry.com/2021/05/23/collapse-of-the-fake-consensus-on-covid-19-origins/#comment-950564
Looks to me that Ron has a lot more knowledge about this issue than I do or than you do Willard. I have yet to check out his evidence, but it looks interesting.
I checked a couple of the Lancet letter references and some do say the virus did not originate in a lab, but the evidence is not conclusive to me and relies on many assumptions about what exact editing technology might or might not have been used. Another says the virus “might” have originated in wildlife. Of course all the viruses at the Wuhan lab “originated” in wildlife. Another says that no definite originating animal virus has been identified but bat viruses are quite undersampled and studied. That was very early in the pandemic, so perhaps it was too early to draw such strong conclusions. That point I think is undeniable especially given how much of the early science turned to be junk. The initial WHO IFR of 3.7% was very wrong. Many of the important questions are quite uncertain even now.
Looks to me … the evidence is not conclusive to me …
Addressing the points I made might have saved you a comment, David.
The “point about the evidence” is that due diligence needs to be paid to the evidence basis (1-13) before crying foul, David.
Do you agree with it, yes or no?
Yes pay due diligence. I think Ron has done that quite well. I explained the reason that early “evidence” about this virus has mostly proven to be wrong. Also pay due diligence to more up to date evidence.
You rather explained how you can’t really judge the evidence, David, and due diligence does not amount to scan articles like Ron did. It’s unclear if he looked at the evidence at all. If you agree with my point, then you agree with the main point made by the authors in the paragrap.
Also, what the WHO said on this matter also applies to something like this:
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/china-pushes-fringe-theories-on-pandemic-origins-virus-1.5280530
Institutions that stand against spreading fear, rumours, and prejudice should be welcome. Private individuals like you, me, Ron, and Judy can do as we please.
Another good article
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/fact-checking-takes-another-beating?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoyMjU0OTc4LCJwb3N0X2lkIjozNjc3NTQ1MiwiXyI6InQ2dHBZIiwiaWF0IjoxNjIxOTA5ODU3LCJleHAiOjE2MjE5MTM0NTcsImlzcyI6InB1Yi0xMDQyIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.ug1bUlAotOORzcKrZaooNyHziim7nwwclhsK948CSi8
FYI,
You might like the new book from sone of my favorite authors:
Daniel Kahneman & Olivier Sibony & Cass R. Sunstein – Noise- A Flaw in Human Judgment.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55339408-noise
A paragraph follows. Indeed confidence in the media has collapsed and that is amply deserved. Taibbi is part of a new independent journalism that I find a lot more trustworthy.
Unfortunately, over the course of the last five years in particular, as the commercial media has experienced a precipitous drop in the public trust levels, many organizations have chosen to trumpet fact-checking programs as a way of advertising a dedication to “truth.” Fact-checking has furthermore become part of the “moral clarity” argument, which claims a phony objectivity standard once forced news companies to always include gestures to a perpetually wrong other side, making “truth” a casualty to false “fairness.”
“ The news business just can’t stop clowning itself”
It’s even more delicious when watching from the cheap seats in the circus.
Fact checking by the media has become a joke in one specific area, Individual Income Taxes, only because I’ve read and analyzed all the IRS Annual Reports back to 1916. So, when a politician or a talking head purports to have checked the so called facts, I at least have a reference to judge their statements by. Some get it right. But most use carefully constructed weasel words or omit what should be said or just outright lie. Very seldom do they put anything into context or try to educate about the US Tax system or its history.
I can fact check on only a very small slice of what we as news consumers get each day. Much of it is BS. I can only imagine how much BS there is in the other 99.9% of information that I know very little about.
(Imagine how I feel after having eaten genuine birds nest soup and inspected a source cave in S-W Yunnan province while visiting mines.)
Judith, it takes bravery to write what you wrote. Again, thank you for advancing the discussion of the state of science.
It is predictable but disappointing that many of the bloggers here have quickly expressed their beliefs, with little to say about science. (There are exceptions, Ron Graf has presented some science).
It is almost as if many bloggers here put their beliefs ahead of the Scientific Method. Where are the data in this Covid-19 issue? Has any blogger seen actual data, sought it from papers on GOF research and elsewhere? I have not. I lack much interest in the Covid science topic because it is far from my scientific experience (though as a chemist, I have doubts about some uses of the polymerase chain reaction.) That disqualifies me from discussing the science data, but I remain qualified to discuss factors affecting the paths of science in coming years. As an Australian, I can do this without referencing politics, though I admire what Donald Trump has done and can do for a slightly ill USA.
Corruption of traditional hard science was evidenced in many places from climate research, particularly with the Climategate release of emails. I had been critical of Phil Jones years before then, for cherry picking and being devious when asked for simple answers to simple questions. It was then my feeling that other sectors of science would jump on these poor but public climate researchers in a self-healing way. That has not happened. For motives that continue to evade my understanding, other science sectors joined in with decay of basic principles of their own. It is tragic. The old science, controlled by the scientists, has now been weakened by advertising agencies and academic schools of journalism, while at much the same time society as reported has been calling for less punishment in all walks of society for those who are knowingly breaking the law.
This is a moral collapse in the eyes of some of us old enough to have known golden times. There is no way that I like it or condone it.
People should have a better understanding of truth and proof and uncertainty and similar factors. I cannot influence this, but it is sad. Geoff S.
I admire what Donald Trump has done and can do for a slightly ill USA.
What did he do?
Want to define “slightly?”
He lowered the Black unemployment rate from 8.7% to 5.6% before the virus struck.
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/trump-administration-accomplishments/
And median Family income increased by $13.500 in first 3 years compared to $11,000 previous 8 years.
slightly ill?
Pingback: Collapse of the fake consensus on Covid-19 origins
dpy
You just disagree with Nic’s sensible positions on mitigation methods and you allow your political biases to dictate your “scientific” opinions.
As I have literally no idea what Nic Lewis’ positions on mitigation are, I would struggle to disagree with them. If you’re interested in my view on them, drop in a link to them and I’ll be happy to help.
You would do so much better if you responded to what is in front of you, rather than trying to fit the facts to your ideology.
I am trained to evaluate sources and to compare and contrast. I have been doing it for decades. But even now I know little more than a smattering of a few disciplines needed for my work. For most of science the language, maths, methods and deep background needed to make sense of it all are lacking. All of you are in the same ignorant boat. But there is little evidence here of the discrimination needed to evaluate claims about science. Politicians marshal competing experts. Activists crusade against it – apparently we have forgotten how to do science like they did it in the old days. Internet pundits wave it about like talismans and dress it up with specious argumentation. What is lacking is the reserved and balanced judgement that is scientific scepticism. Replaced with blog unscience and conspiracy theories. That seems to me to be the clear and present danger to the scientific enlightenment. Not the climategate emails, the tropical hotspot, model verisimilitude or the hockey stick.
Climate science has moved on. The dominant climate paradigm is that human emitted greenhouse gases bias a chaotic system to a warmer state. There is implicit in chaos and a changing climate the risk of dramatic and rapid change in the Earth system. Ask Judith for a post on the real fundamentals as she sees them.
It is enough to be pragmatically getting on with. Practical responses involve ‘the raising up of human dignity via three overarching objectives: ensuring energy access for all; ensuring that we develop in a manner that does not undermine the essential functioning of the Earth system; ensuring that our societies are adequately equipped to withstand the risks and dangers that come from all the vagaries of climate, whatever their cause may be.’
Hopefully it includes a better response to the next viral spillover – and the avoidance of lab accidents with pandemic pathogens. Despite a natural viral spillover seemingly still the dominant SARS-2 origin paradigm – the latter is something the world must get right.
“The dominant climate paradigm is that human emitted greenhouse gases bias a chaotic system to a warmer state.”
Unfortunately, the dominant climate paradigm is nonstop lies.
That much should be accepted as truth in line with Isaac Newton’s 4th rule of natural philosophy. There are of course those who don’t and never will. And if you think contrarians aren’t arseholes about it I guess it is all rainbows, Leonard Cohen and unicorns for you. The best one can expect is to be told that ‘believing’ in general relativity is a religious cult.
“Daszak had corralled other scientists with similar professional interests into making a declaration to the effect that anyone who mentions the obvious possibility that the pandemic might have a connection to the research in the Wuhan Lab could only be doing so with bad intentions.”
Many may claim with justification that everything about SARS-CoV-2 has been about bad intentions, from the fear mongering, the mask controversies, variant anxiety, vaccine efficacies and side effects, asymptomatic infection noise, etc., through to the initial failure of public health functions almost everywhere except for the few who still had some common sense left intact from before the ‘woke’ started to get their money for nothing routine working and immediately noticed the benefits of a Covid New Deal. How many times have you heard the phrase ‘game changer’ only to find the game didn’t change at all?
It obviously matters where the virus came from if it was not engineered by nature. But who stands to get the most out of keeping the subject as a live potential ‘Gain of Function’ issue if it isn’t the fear mongers who have made such a dog’s dinner out of it? These are the very politicians who nonsensically hold onto an ability to forever limit our freedoms as long as this or similar viruses remain in circulation.
We really need stronger leadership than this and to stop voting for those who get anxious about things we should be capable of taking in our stride without so much as missing a heartbeat.
“We really need stronger leadership than this and to stop voting for those who get anxious about things we should be capable of taking in our stride without so much as missing a heartbeat.”
the trouble is that they are all as bad as each other, as those promoting the precautionary principle have taken it to the extremes and have got into bed with both the health and safety brigade and the Nanny knows best mongers.
tonyb
It’s worse than that. Neil Ferguson told the government to take it to extremes, then went to see his mistress (ie took the thing in stride without missing a heartbeat.)
They weren’t just anxious, they were deceptive.
“These are the very politicians who nonsensically hold onto an ability to forever limit our freedoms as long as this or similar viruses remain in circulation.”
I really worry about the next garden variety strain of flu that presents itself; I suspect there will be attempts by certain politicians to ride on the coattails of COVID’s political bounty.
This article is a revelation. Not about the substance as much as about myself and how jaded I’ve become about the media and science. Decades ago I would have reacted to the material with disbelief or at a minimum strong skepticism. That was when, in my eyes, the media and science were above reproach. Both institutions were sacrosanct. No more.
The degradation of the media began about 40 years ago. My reevaluation of science began about a decade ago coinciding with reading Judith’s outstanding. Now, when she provides an article about questionable practices by the media and in science, my reaction is “sounds plausible” given everything else that I’ve learned about behavior in those fields.
I was going use some venom on the media. But they indict themselves before our eyes every day. So, science gets center stage. This article below encapsulates the sorry state of science and the self absorbed state of the cancel culture in one fell swoop.
https://blog.ucsusa.org/science-blogger/climate-denialism-no-place-at-lawrence-livermore-laboratory
Interesting article, although I was rather hoping for more insight on the origin. The parallels between covid alarmism and climate alarmism are obvious … but still worth stating. The big difference is that whereas climate was a money spinner only for those with an alarmist point of view, with covid many people worldwide now have a stake in getting to the truth – not least all the businesses who have lost so much for a lockup that we now know to be totally useless (e.g. see cv19 DOT uk)
I am still hoping for a definite disproval of a lab leak theory along the lines:
“I can state categorically that it was not a lab leak. I was there on the same day that no leak occurred.”
WHO IS CHECKING THE WHO’S INVESTIGATORY FINDINGS:
MANY COVID -19 UNANSWERED QUESTIONS REMAIN:
WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION WUHAN LABORATORIES COVID-19 UNANSWERED QUESTIONS By BJM:
• How many Wuhan public officials or Wuhan lab directors, scientists, or researchers have been silenced and / or fired?
• Did the Beijing Central Government leaders replace certain Wuhan public officials, Wuhan lab directors, scientists or researchers — during the outbreak — who did not follow the Communist Central Party line — to mask a coverup?
• How was the Wuhan Laboratory [BSL3/4] work safely conducted? Testing In Vitro? Testing on animals? How had the tested contagious material and animals been properly & securely disposed? Any testing done on humans? Did Airborne COVID-19 and/or any other diseases make their way out of the secure Wuhan Lab areas? Did Airborne COVID-19 travel through the HVAC Wuhan Lab system? Did the WHO check, cross-check and counter-check the Airborne COVID-19 escape capability in the Biosafety Space, The Surrounding Safety Offices, General Office Space, Receiving room/dock? When was the last time the HVAC/air filtering system was updated — HEPA FILTERS ADEQUATE ? HVAC/air filtering replaced? How was the Biosafety Wuhan Lab area designed to contain the new Airborne COVID-19 whose [unseen] micron particles stay in the air for 3 or more hours? Prefiltered air exhaust safe [regularly tested (dates)]? Filtered Air exhaust safe [regularly tested (dates)]? Did any COVID-19 or any other disease ever escape from the Wuhan Labs? How many times [dates]? What safety measures went into place to clean it up? These same questions would apply to the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute Of China – Academy Of Agricultural Science [Large animal research center].
• Were virus testing tubes, computer cache, equipment, and supplies safely/securely transferred back and forth between the two Wuhan Laboratories and/or Harbin Vet Research Institute? Did a Wuhan Lab worker’s flash drive transport the COVID-19 around infecting people?
• How many different types of Coronavirus were under secured research study [certain number (evidence) destroyed?] in the 2 Wuhan Laboratories — any at Harbin? Of these various types of coronavirus, what are their various COVID-19 virulency [high viral load] capacity?
• How many individuals [part-time, temporary (substitute), full-time, student researchers (including security, delivery drivers, hired drivers [personal transport], etc.] worked at or for the two Wuhan laboratories?
• How many individuals [part-time, temporary (substitute), full-time, student researchers] tested COVID-19 positive [date]? How many died [date]? Did any such individuals travel outside Wuhan City and/or Hubie Province [community spread] to visit family, relatives and friends?
• Did any Wuhan Laboratory workers’ or employees’ [security, delivery drivers, etc] family members, neighbors, or friends test COVID-19 positive [date]? How many died [date]? In simple terms, how many people directly or indirectly affiliated with the two Wuhan laboratories tested COVID-19 positive [date]? How many such individuals directly or indirectly affiliated with the two Wuhan laboratories died [date]?
NETWORKING OF WUHAN LAB EMPLOYEES by BJM
• Particularly [Asymptomatic – Community Spread]: Did any Wuhan Lab doctors, professors or researchers teach [full-time/part time], guest lecture, give seminars [or do any other collaborations] at/with any China Universities, Harbin Vet Research Center, Police/Military/Intelligence Institutions [or give private independent instruction (not university/government sanctioned)] private laboratories [dates]? If so, how many university students tested COVID-19 positive [date]? How many university students died [date]? If so, did any Harbin Vet Research Center personnel test positive COVID-19 [date]? How man Harbin Center personnel died [date]? If so, any police/military/intelligence personnel test Covid-19 positive [date]? How many police/military/intelligence personnel died [date]? Had any flash drives/computers been taken out of the Wuhan Labs to teach, give lectures, seminars, etc? Had all food, snack and/or beverage drinks at the two Wuhan Labs been properly disposed – any food, snack and/or beverages taken out into the public domain? [Questions remain about Fudan University, Wuhan University, Wuhan Institute Of Biological Products, Wuhan Institute Of Bio-engineering, et al]
UNIVERSITY RESEARCHERS AT WUHAN LABORATORIES by BJM
• Did University Students work as assistants/researchers at the two Wuhan Laboratories? If so, did any university student assistants/researchers test positive COVID-19? When [date]? Any deaths [date]? If so, did such students take adequate precautions so as not to take the COVID-19 back to the university dormitories/housing quarters – community spread? If so, did those university dormitories have any international students who returned home? Did such international students test positive COVID-19 [date]? Any deaths [date]; or any international student family members, friends or neighbors test positive COVID-19 [date]? Any deaths [date]?
HUANAN WET MARKET VISITS AND RETURN VISITS by BJM
• How often did the Wuhan Lab workers, family members, friends or neighbors go to the Huanan Wet Markets to purchase items? Any exotic or wild animal purchases, bartering, influence peddling or underground/black market distribution? Any current WHO or former WHO [Dr. Margaret Chan] connected to Wuhan Lab workers, family members, friends or neighbors involved directly or indirectly in such activities?
TRAVEL: WUHAN LAB WORKERS, FAMILY, FRIENDS, NEIGHBORS ET AL by BJM
• Did any individuals from the two Wuhan Laboratories travel outside the Hubie Province? Other Laboratories? Any other travel to Japan, Korea, Europe, Middle East, India or the United States?
• Did any Wuhan Lab workers’ family members, friends, or neighbors travel outside the Hubie Province? Other Laboratories visits? Any other travel to Japan, Korea, Europe, Middle East, India or the United States?
• Did any Wuhan Lab Worker’s family, neighbors, or friends study abroad? Where? Did they travel back and forth to Wuhan City?
• Who visited the 2 Wuhan Laboratories during October 2019 – January 2020? Where were they from? What was their itinerary? Did any person who visited the 2 Wuhan Labs test COVID-19 positive? Die?
• Where did the Wuhan Laboratories secure their bat, pengolin et al purchases for experimentation purposes? Were such Exotic & Wild animals purchases secured at the Huanan Wet Market? If so, from whom was the purchase made in the Huanan Wet Market? Did such person(s) test COVID-19 positive? Did such individual(s) die [Date]? Did more than one person test positive COVID-19 in the Huanan market place from subsequent purchases (a series of purchases November 2019 – March 2020)? If so, who were the Wuhan Laboratory workers who secured the various purchases?
https://www.news18.com/news/world/there-are-2-labs-in-wuhan-wet-markets-us-nsa-says-china-should-give-real-proof-about-covid-19-2587855.html
‘There Are 2 Labs in Wuhan, Wet Markets’: US NSA Says China Should Give ‘Real Proof’ About Covid-19
A worker in a protective suit is seen at the closed seafood market in Wuhan, Hubei province, China. The seafood market is linked to the outbreak of the pneumonia caused by the new strain of coronavirus, but some patients diagnosed with the new coronavirus deny exposure to this market.
http://www.news18.com
As a scientist myself, not in climate, but in medicine and public health, i am often confronted by individuals including university faculty that lacking scientific knowledge on the issue of climate, blindly believe and further this narrative, indoctrinating young people.
Concerning the reasons Donald Rapp gives for abandoning Climate Etc., let’s explore one facet of his ringing denunciation of Judith Curry’s blog in somewhat greater detail; i.e., those points of his comment which concern the Trump presidency.
In contrast with Trump’s America First foreign policy, a key element of Joe Biden’s foreign policy is that the United States must present itself as the role model to be followed in pursuing environmental stewardship. As Biden’s argument goes, China, India and the other developing nations will not agree to reduce their carbon emissions unless America demonstrates its firm resolve to show the way.
Foreign governments know full well that if Biden’s climate action plan doesn’t hold water; and that if he can’t deliver on his announced goal of a 50% reduction in American’s carbon emissions by 2030, they are off the hook for reducing their own emissions. So we must ask this question:
Why don’t climate activists hold Joe Biden to account for not doing everything in his power as president to quickly reduce America’s carbon emissions?
Using the Clean Air Act to its fullest possible effectiveness in quickly reducing America’s GHG emissions has been a topic of discussion in the environmental law community for more than a decade. One of the reasons offered by those who promote aggressive use of the Clean Air Act is that America’s leadership is crucial for bringing the developing nations on board in limiting their future carbon emissions.
If Biden were to go a step further beyond the Clean Air Act and combine the authorities already granted to the president in the CAA with those authorities already granted in national security law — then the Executive Branch could, by formally declaring a carbon pollution emergency, unilaterally dictate that America must reduce its GHG emissions 50% by 2030.
The details of how this might be done are described in a comment I posted on May 3rd, 2021, on WUWT describing the Supply Side Carbon Emission Control Plan (SSCECP).
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/05/03/climate-is-everything/#comment-3238630
It is impossible to build enough wind, solar, and nuclear by 2030 to reach Biden’s 50% goal. That goal can be fully achieved only by imposing strictly enforced energy conservation measures on the American economy.
The SSCECP is a highly effective but also highly coercive means of reaching 50% by 2030. The plan imposes an artificial shortage of carbon fuels on the American people while also increasing the price of all forms of energy for all of America’s energy consumers, thus encouraging energy conservation as the primary means of achieving Biden’s 2030 GHG reduction target.
So far, Joe Biden has shown no sign that he will use the full authority of the Chief Executive to reach his announced 2030 target. One can draw one’s own conclusions if President Biden never uses the full authority of his office in pushing GHG reductions as far and as fast as current law authorizes him to do.
Which brings us back to Donald Rapp’s reasons for denouncing this blog.
Will you, Mr. Donald Rapp — someone who was, and is, a vocal opponent of Trump’s America First foreign policy — are you yourself willing to call Joe Biden to account for not doing everything in his power as president to quickly reduce America’s carbon emissions, with the ultimate effect of handing China and India and all the other developing nations a convenient excuse for not reducing their GHG emissions as well?
This article was published in early January of 2021. It was the first article I read that argued the virus could have been a lab leak. Published in New York Magazine..
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html
The Nicholson Baker’s articlewas the first investigative article in a major publication. He and Wade should share a Pulitzer.
-Nicholson Baker
The last line reminds me of a Climategate email.
Baker exposed and explained the gain of function research at the WIV and about the “pause” due to past virus leaks. He also gives a good explanation of the furin cleavage site, as does Wade.
Re: “Crawford argues that the scientists who were signatories to the two letters may have been acting as a classic research cartel.
In 2004, Henry Bauer formulated the idea of research cartels and knowledge monopolies, in context of the institutionalization of science that becomes subordinate to corporate or government values.”
Henry Bauer is an HIV/AIDS denialist who did not accept that well-evidenced fact that HIV causes AIDS, leading to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Sad to see his garbage being cited to misrepresent another pandemic:
“Evidence-based medicine: No HIV/AIDS epidemic”
https://www.webcitation.org/6IwUMlkyk
His idea on ‘research cartels’ is basically a conspiracy theory invented to explain away why informed experts disagree with his HIV/AIDS denialism. And yes, it’s a conspiracy theory. It posits people conspiring together, when that is a less plausible explanation than the fact that HIV causes AIDS, the experts know this, and so disagree with him:
“A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful groups, often political in motivation,[2][3] when other explanations are more probable.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory
This is a standard trope of paranoid conspiracy theorists. Since experts know enough to disagree them, the conspiracists try to turn their expertise from a strength into a sign they are part of a conspiracy. That way the conspiracist can brush off virologists who disagree with them on HIV as just being part of the conspiracy. That’s again what’s happening on SARS-CoV-2. And it’s telling who fell for Bauer doing this, since it fit their biases.
“Conspiracy Theories and Selective Distrust of Scientific Authority
That HIV is the primary cause of AIDS is the strongly held consensus opinion of the scientific community, based upon over two decades of robust research. Deniers must therefore reject this consensus, either by denigrating the notion of scientific authority in general, or by arguing that the mainstream HIV community is intellectually compromised. It is therefore not surprising that much of the newer denial literature reflects a basic distrust of authority and of the institutions of science and medicine.”
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0040256#s3
As I and others have been saying for over a decade, contrarians resort to many of the same tactics, regardless of whether its on SARS-CoV-2, HIV/AIDS, AGW, etc. No surprise Nicholas Wade resorts to the same conspiracist tripe as well.
Re: “In May 2021, science reporter Nicholas Wade published a lengthy article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists stating that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York.”
Wade’s article is nonsense, and I view it as a litmus test: if someone fails to spot one of the many reasons why it’s nonsense, then they don’t have enough knowledge to evaluate this subject. For example, Wade goes on and on about the furin cleavage site (FCS). But it’s been apparent for at least a year that the site arose via copy-choice error between an ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 and an ancestor of HKU9, leading to an out-of-frame sequence transfer to SARS-CoV-2’s ancestor. That would account for the codon usage Wade whines about, since out-of-frame transfers can produce codons that are otherwise uncommon. It also addresses Wade whining about the sequence not being found in other coronaviruses, since an out-of-frame transfer would not produce the same sequence of amino acids, even though the sequence of nucleic acids is similar. This is virology and genetics 101. A an immunologist I’m required to know this type of stuff, so I didn’t fall for Wade’s nonsense. Maybe epistemic trespassers, climate contrarians, etc. lack the requisite knowledge of biology?
Again, this has been known since at least May 2020, yet Wade is willfully ignorant of it. There are many other such distortions in Wade’s ridiculous article. This is one of the fundamental problems with the ‘lab leak’ idea: the vast majority of people attracted to it come not due to actual knowledge or understanding of evidence, but because the idea appeals to their motivations / biases (ex: dislike of China’s government, tendency towards paranoia, liking to be a contrarian from the mainstream consensus, etc.). They’re just ideologically-motivated non-experts who like an anti-mainstream story without real evidence, which Wade happily feeds them. This is not the first time Wade has misrepresented a scientific field when even experts who know more than him explain why he’s wrong. It likely won’t be the last.
“As discussed by Dobbs and many others, Wade juxtaposes an incomplete and inaccurate account of our research on human genetic differences with speculation that recent natural selection has led to worldwide differences in I.Q. test results, political institutions and economic development. We reject Wade’s implication that our findings substantiate his guesswork. They do not.”
https://cehg.stanford.edu/letter-from-population-geneticists
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/08/geneticists-decry-book-race-and-evolution
“A palindromic RNA sequence as a common breakpoint contributor to copy-choice recombination in SARS-COV-2”
“Indels in SARS-CoV-2 occur at template-switching hotspots”
Not yet peer-reviewed: “Insertions in SARS-CoV-2 genome caused by template switch and duplications give rise to new variants of potential concern”
https://virological.org/t/the-sarbecovirus-origin-of-sars-cov-2-s-furin-cleavage-site/536/1
https://virological.org/t/tackling-rumors-of-a-suspicious-origin-of-ncov2019/384/4
https://twitter.com/K_G_Andersen/status/1391507230848032772
Re: “The ‘consensus’ that Covid-19 had an entirely natural origin was established by two op-eds in early 2020 – The Lancet in February and Nature Medicine in March. The Lancet op-ed stated, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.””
A correspondence in Nature Medicine in not an op-ed. But I guess messing up on something basic like that is understandable when one lacks experience with this field. It’s not going to work on those of us who regularly read peer-reviewed research in this field, though.
“Correspondences may be peer-reviewed at editorial discretion.”
https://www.nature.com/nm/about/content#correspondence
And their point was made before either of those two articles were published. This is just a repeat of the usual conspiracy theories those of us in this field heard about on the origin of HIV, SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV, etc. The moment I heard of SARS-CoV-2, I knew there would be people claiming it was man-made or came from a lab, regardless of what the evidence showed on its origins.
February 14, 2020:
“Discovery of the origin of a newly human pathogen is a sophisticated process that requires extensive and vigorous scientific validations and generally takes many years, such as the cases for HIV-1 [1], SARS [2] and MERS [3]. Unfortunately, before the natural sources of new pathogens are clearly defined, conspiracy theories that the new pathogens are man-made often surface as the source. However, in all cases, such theories have been debunked in history.”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22221751.2020.1727299
February 26, 2020:
“Currently, there are speculations, rumours and conspiracy theories that SARS-CoV-2 is of laboratory origin.”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22221751.2020.1733440
“Disinformation, misinformation and inequality‑driven mistrust in the time of COVID‑19: Lessons unlearned from AIDS denialism
[…]
This manifestation of HIV-related mistrust can include the beliefs that the U.S. federal government was involved in creating or disseminating HIV as a form of genocide against people of color […]”
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10461-020-02925-y.pdf
“The public health crisis emerging due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) is also now beginning to feel the effects of misinformation.
[…]
Similarly, misinformation was widespread during the early years of the HIV epidemic. It too was plagued by conspiracy theories, rumours, and misinformation for many years, with the effects still visible in regions to this day.”
https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-020-01556-3
“Protein structure and sequence re-analysis of 2019-nCoV genome does not indicate snakes as its intermediate host or the unique similarity between its spike protein insertions and HIV-1”
“Bioinformatic analysis indicates that SARS-CoV-2 is unrelated to known artificial coronaviruses”
“Is SARS-CoV-2 originated from laboratory? A rebuttal to the claim of formation via laboratory recombination”
Re: “Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the Covid-19 virus had escaped from research that he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. Daszak had corralled other scientists with similar professional interests into making a declaration to the effect that anyone who mentions the obvious possibility that the pandemic might have a connection to the research in the Wuhan Lab could only be doing so with bad intentions.
[…]
In 2004, Henry Bauer formulated the idea of research cartels and knowledge monopolies, in context of the institutionalization of science that becomes subordinate to corporate or government values.
Again, no. For example, as shown above, other people were already independently thinking the same thing, including me. The evidence was there; we knew how this song-and-dance goes, given what happened with HIV’s origins and on whether it caused AIDS. Some of those HIV conspiracy theories even re-appeared in relation to SARS-CoV-2:
“There are also rumours that the SARS-CoV-2 was artificially, or intentionally, made by humans in the lab, and this is highlighted in one manuscript submitted to BioRxiv (a manuscript sharing site prior to any peer review), claiming that SARS-CoV-2 has HIV sequence in it and was thus likely generated in the laboratory. In a rebuttal paper led by an HIV-1 virologist Dr. Feng Gao, they used careful bioinformatics analyses to demonstrate that the original claim of multiple HIV insertions into the SARS-CoV-2 is not HIV-1 specific but random [15]. Because of the many concerns raised by the international community, the authors who made the initial claim have already withdrawn this report.”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22221751.2020.1733440
“HIV-1 did not contribute to the 2019-nCoV genome”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22221751.2020.1727299
Daszak didn’t have to “corral[l]” people, anymore than Robert Gallo had to “corral[l]” people into accepting that HIV causes AIDS in the Durban Declaration. That’s a conspiracy theory, when the more plausible explanation is that people reached a similar conclusion based on evidence, and then got together to voice their shared conclusion. But, of course, Curry’s source Henry Bauer would likely disagree with that (HIV/AIDS denialist that he was), just like Curry disagrees on what Daszak did. Interestingly, this is not the first time Curry cited an HIV/AIDS denialist supporting her position on science. For example: Kary Mullis.
“The Durban Declaration
[…]
HIV causes AIDS. Curbing the spread of this virus must remain the first step towards eliminating this devastating disease.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/35017662
“Robert Gallo MD 1, Nathan Geffen 2, Gregg Gonsalves 3, Richard Jefferys 4, Daniel R. Kuritzkes, MD 5, Bruce Mirken 6, John P. Moore PhD 7, Jeffrey T. Safrit PhD 8”
https://www.natap.org/2006/HIV/ErrorsInFarberArticle.pdf
Re: “Wade notes that in today’s universities, challenging the consensus can be very costly. Careers can be destroyed for stepping out of line. Any virologist who challenges the community’s declared view risks having his next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency.”
Again, taken straight out of the HIV/AIDS denialists’ playbook:
August 2007:
“Deniers argue that because scientists receive grant money, fame, and prestige as a result of their research, it is in their best interest to maintain the status quo [15]. This type of thinking is convenient for deniers as it allows them to choose which authorities to believe and which ones to dismiss as part of a grand conspiracy. In addition to being selective, their logic is also internally inconsistent. For example, they dismiss studies that support the HIV hypothesis as being biased by “drug money,” while they accept uncritically the testimony of HIV deniers who have a heavy financial stake in their alternative treatment modalities.”
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0040256
Re: “What does all this mean for institutionalized climate science? Well the IPCC, along with supporting governments and industries, is much more entrenched as a knowledge monopoly and research cartel. But the Covid origins example illuminates the social, political and careerist motivations that are in play in attempts to prematurely canonize and enforce a scientific consensus.”
For years I’ve been drawing the parallels between the position people like you take on climate science, and how HIV/AIDS denialists treat virology, immunology, etc. Thanks for accidentally using COVID-19 to again make that point for me.
https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1226305075557076993
What is an “aids denialist”? Mullis certainly did not claim the disease does not exist. He simply believed that the pathogen that causes it has been misidentified. I have no idea if that’s true or not but the use of the term “aids denialist” here is just a thought terminating cliche. Designed to end debate not further debate.
atomsk’s sanakan: “The ‘consensus’ that Covid-19 had an entirely natural origin was established by two op-eds in early 2020 – The Lancet in February and Nature Medicine in March. The Lancet op-ed stated, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.””
It isn’t a conspiracy theory, and calling such does not make it either false or even a conspiracy theory. The lab was conducting gain-of-function research using bat samples brought from hundreds of miles away. The research was begun in the US and partially funded by the US, in circumvention of US law. The only claim is that an enhanced antigen may have escaped from the lab.
I had reservations about the reliability of the ‘grayest of grey literature’ – as I describe it above – cited in this post. I resisted bringing in HIV and racial genetics. Atomski is – however – the model of a consensus enforcer. Try to follow the typically convoluted style. He starts with a sociology of HIV denial and then lumps that with SARS-nCoV and AGW – allowing him to dismiss anything he disagrees with as contrarian noise. He avoids the problem of a lab release – when the Director-General of WHO, many nations and more recently a bevy of virologists demand that it be further investigated. Some of the bevy are members of the Cambridge Working Group.
http://www.cambridgeworkinggroup.org/
I may not be a virologist but I guarantee that there is no useful consensus on climate change. There may be a dominant scientific paradigm. Human emitted greenhouse gases bias a chaotic system to a warmer state. There is implicit in chaotic dynamical systems the risk of small changes triggering dramatic and rapid change in the Earth system.
Pragmatic responses involve the ‘the raising up of human dignity via three overarching objectives: ensuring energy access for all; ensuring that we develop in a manner that does not undermine the essential functioning of the Earth system; ensuring that our societies are adequately equipped to withstand the risks and dangers that come from all the vagaries of climate, whatever their cause may be.’
He may dismiss both the paradigm and the responses – but only on the basis of his consensus enforcement.
I forgot another reference that I wanted to include
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.160384
It’s vastly worse than that Robert. This is all a campaign to claim that critics of THE SCIENCE are all bad people and often wrong. He’s deployed the Meyerowitz-Katz badly flawed study to attack John Ioannidis. Ioannidis now has a paper destroying that study. Ioannidis has hinted that Sanakan is really the online troll version of M-K himself. I found an earlier comment on an earlier post about science and its problems. It is entirely apropos of this latest screed which is mostly ad hominem attacks and smears. I also document what is a very real crisis within THE SCIENCE that virtually everyone who is honest will acknowledge is a very real crisis.
“Except that this is to ignore the main post and its correct point about science generally. In particular climate science has been very politicized and so we are justified in doubting anything it produces. It’s also a primitive science that is trying to measure a very small change in energy fluxes of a few percent at most. That means that the numerical truncation error in models is much larger than the signal they want to detect. In this regard, it shares a lot with viral epidemiology. As CMIP6 is showing that models are now even further from reality with large disagreements even over the historical period for those with larger cloud and aerosol feedbacks, that is becoming plain.
In the argument over the pause, there were scores of papers blaming the fact that models had higher ECS than historically constrained balance methods indicated on an incorrect SST pattern of change in the models. But its not just SST patterns, its cloud patterns, regional climate, etc.
Over the last year, I’ve given a host of references here. The usual pattern is that anonymous activists try to discredit those references often with lies about them or what was said previously.
Generally, most of what epidemiologists say is based on crude mechanistic explanations that lack quantification in any rigorous way. Same for climate science. The greenhouse gas mechanism is correct, but everything else particularly about feedbacks is merely mechanistic explanations that lack real quantification, often because the data is simply too noisy to detect the very small changes in energy fluxes we want.
What this leaves us with is activists like Sanakan who just parrot the unquantified claims of some climate scientists and epidemiologists. He is part of an online attack on John Ioannidis and the lionization of Meyerowitz-Katz’s paper that has just been demolished as badly biased. Here’s a very selective set of references on the crisis in Science. There are many many more. The first link has 78 references.”
https://www.significancemagazine.com/2-uncategorised/593-cargo-cult-statistics-and-scientific-crisis
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0132382
https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1743-422X-5-29?fbclid=IwAR1HNtleAb0eEF-NG-d4UW8qhMkitIvH4VdIro7Mc6Ph6UggxjVoopLL8dM
https://thefederalist.com/2019/01/30/federal-agencies-nutrition-obesity-recommendations-junk-science/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/eci.13554
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)60696-1/fulltext
Re: “It’s vastly worse than that Robert. This is all a campaign to claim that critics of THE SCIENCE are all bad people and often wrong. He’s deployed the Meyerowitz-Katz badly flawed study to attack John Ioannidis. Ioannidis now has a paper destroying that study. Ioannidis has hinted that Sanakan is really the online troll version of M-K himself. I found an earlier comment on an earlier post about science and its problems.”
Ioannidis was so embarrassed by what he said and by numerous scientists calling him out on it, that he removed that part of the appendix from the paper. Maybe you should learn from his example?:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13554
My favorite example was the shade from Johns Hopkins University Genetics threw when Ioannidis criticized GidMK for being a graduate student in his since-deleted appendix:
https://twitter.com/jhugeneticepi/status/1376564441286840325
Re: “Generally, most of what epidemiologists say is based on crude mechanistic explanations that lack quantification in any rigorous way. Same for climate science.”
Time for your regular reminder of Ioannidis actually says on matters like this (note that he hasn’t retracted the statements below, unlike his statements about GidMK and I):
“Many fields lack the high reproducibility standards that are already used in fields such as air pollution and climate change.
[…]
It is a scandal that the response of governments to climate change and pollution has not been more decisive.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5933781/
“The anti-vaccine movement and climate emergency deniers are already drawing ammunition from the reversals of opinion and policy during the pandemic.”
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4048.full
Anthropogenic climate change is on same level of certainty as smoking killing people.
17:17 – 18:22 :
http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-174-john-ioannidis-on-what-happened-to-evidence-based-med.html
dpy,
Ioannidis has hinted that Sanakan is really the online troll version of M-K himself.
Hard to know where to go with this level of paranoia. Read Atmosk and GidMK. Their style could hardly be more different. This is seriously conspiratorial thinking.
Ioannidis has been serially wrong. I’ve given you references before.
He’s resorted to unprecedented personal attacks in scientific papers.
Asserting a “demolition” does not make it so.
So you guys continue the smear of the most cited scientist of the last 20 years. It’s word salads all the way down.
There are several lies out there about Ioannidis. The most prominent is the lie about 10000 deaths. That statement was conditional on how many infections there might be and was and is true. That this lie is still spread by anonymous activists shows them to be acting in bad faith.
In fact his March interview in which he gave a mid range estimate of the IFR of 0.3% based on the Diamond Princess data turned out to be prescient. At the time Fauci was saying 1 to 2% and Ferguson was saying the same thing. WHO’s initial 3.7% was badly wrong.
The second lie is to use a paragraph from the preprint about Sanakan and M-K pointing out their lack of credibility that was dropped from the final version as evidence the whole paper was flawed. The usual rhetorical distortion. Sanakan does this little deception just above.
Meyerowitz-Katz and Imperial college were outlier studies with Draconian and inconsistently applied exclusion criteria. There has been no response from anyone to Ioannidis’latest paper either. Anonymous internet activists wiith no visible qualifications carry zero weight.
And then the brilliant quotes from Ioannidis that actual don’t contradict anything anyone here has said. It’s a smear technique to try to associate people who question science with anti-vaxxer or radiative physics doubters. Propaganda all the way down.
The smear of the most cited scientist of the last 20 years continues here. Anonymous activists carry no weight for most people.
There are at least two prominent lies about Ioannidis.
The first concerns his March 2020 interview and the 10000 deaths. That was a conditional statement based on how many infections there might’ve. It was true at the time and true now. The interview was prescient in pointing to a mid range IFR of 0.3% at a time when Fauci and Imperial were saying 1-2%.
The second one concerns the paragraph about M-K and Sanakan pointing out their lack of qualifications. It’s omission from the final version is cited to cast doubt on the whole paper. Transparently fallacious.
The smear of the most cited scientist of the last 20 years continues here.
There are at least two prominent lies about Ioannidis.
The first concerns his March 2020 interview and the 10000 deaths. That was a conditional statement based on how many infections there might’ve. It was true at the time and true now. The interview was prescient in pointing to a mid range IFR of 0.3% at a time when Fauci and Imperial were saying 1-2%.
The second one concerns the paragraph about M-K and Sanakan pointing out their lack of qualifications. It’s omission from the final version is cited to cast doubt on the whole paper. Transparently fallacious.
You will also notice the classic hallmarks of the smear here. You try to associate someone with conspiracy theories or anti vax ideas when there is no evidence of this.
What is going on here is more repetition of the Oreskes Lewandowski version of demonization of people they disagree with. The key elements deployed here are:
1. Claim that ideas you don’t like are conspiracy theories.
2. Deny that the “industry funded climate denial” meme is a conspiracy theory.
3. Associate the target with fringe ideas such as anti-vax ideas, that the moon landing didn’t happen, or that radiative physics is wrong.
4. Use irrelevancies to cast doubt on a massive body of work. In Ioannidis’ case, Sanakan focuses on a paragraph in Ioannidis’ paper’s preprint about the lack of qualifications of Sanakan and M-K that was dropped in the final paper. This fact is totally irrelevant to the science in the paper.
5. Distort what people say or quote mine it. An example is Ioannidis’ March 2020 interview where he said that if there were X infections, there might be 10000 deaths. It’s a conditional statement and was true then and is true now. That interview was prescient in that he give an IFR value of 03% as being a mid range estimate from the Diamond Princess data. That is exactly the overall estimate in his latest paper, a year later. Fauci and Ferguson were saying 1-2%.
6. Promote the “science has no serious problems” meme and refuse to read or respond to the literal avalanche of top notch scientists and journals that have acknowledged that there are serious and growing problems.
7. Quote mine a vast body of work that is generally excellent for any stray statements that can be quoted out of context and claimed to be wrong.
dpy6629: Without meaning any disrespect to Ioannidis many other accomplishments, it should be obvious today that the IFR for COVID is not 0.3%. With 33 million cumulative detected cases and nearly 600,000 deaths in US, the case fatality rate (CFR) is 1.8% (and other developed countries have converged on similar values since last summer.) A CRF of 1.8% and an IFR of 0.3% implies that there have been 6 infections for every infection that was confirmed by PCR. If that were true, then the 9% confirmed infections in the US in January would have been enough to reach herd immunity without vaccination! In the hardest hit counties in the US with more than 100,000 people, cumulative detected cases reached 17% before a significant number of people were vaccinated. Five undecteded cases for every detected case would mean 100% of the population had been infected in areas with the highest percentage of cumulative cases! That’s absurd. In the US, the pandemic began its final decline on April 15, when the one-dose vaccination rate began to approach 50%. We were clearly far from herd immunity when cases fell dramatically from 250,000/day in early January 70,000/day in mid-Feb – where it remained until mid-April. Most vaccinations occurred during this plateau, and “herd immunity” was likely reached about mid-April. Without vaccination, another half million or more Americans would likely have died before the pandemic burned out.
IT SHOULD NOW BE OBVIOUS TO EVERYONE THAT EARLY ANTIBODY SURVEYS AND THE RESULTING LOW IFR WERE MISLEADING. The above data is most consistent with 1-2 undetected infections for every infection confirmed by PCR. That makes the IFR 0.6-0.9%. If you look at the data in Ioannidis first paper, a wide range of IFRs had been reported and he used his expert judgment to selected 0.3%. Politics has prevented many from recognizing that early antibody surveys were misleading and Ioannidis estimate has proven to be wrong.
MY HYPOTHESIS IS THAT SARS2 HAS EVOLVED DURING THE PANDEMIC SO THAT A LARGER FRACTION OF THOSE INFECTED GET SICK ENOUGH TO GET TESTED. We know that newer variants are “more transmissible” and deadly. IMO, this means that the virus is replicating more efficiently and negating the innate immune system more efficiently, producing higher viral loads in patients. Higher viral loads would explain why a larger fraction of infected patients get tested, transmit more efficiently, and suffer more serious illnesses. There may have been 10 undetected cases for every detected case last spring and the IFR could have been low – but that hasn’t been true since the fall surge began. (FWIW, 1918-1920 Spanish flu apparently evolved to become much more deadly between the first and second waves.)
There is another way to recognize that the IFR for COVID must be much higher than the IFR for seasonal influenza. In an average year, 30 million Americans get seasonal influenza (60 million during swine flu), but only about 37,000 die. About 30 million Americans have tested positive for COVID – about the same number as get seasonal influenza, but 15-times are many Americans (more than 0.5 million) have died of COVID! And this death toll has occurred despite lockdowns, social distancing and face masks – measures that have totally eliminated seasonal influenza this past winter. In other words, these NPI’s are extremely effective against seasonal influenza, but haven’t been adequate to contain the more transmissible and deadly COVID. Claims that the IFR for COVID is 0.3% have caused many conservatives to grossly under-estimate how much more serious COVID is than seasonal influenza.
Frank, I disagree that its obvious. In fact Ioannidis has a recent paper eviscerating the Mereyowitz-Katz and Imperial Collage papers as being hugely biased because of very strict exclusion criteria that were not applied correctly. That study finds IFR’s vary a lot from 0.02% in some tropical countries to 0.6% in some countries with older populations. (those are form memory and may be a little off).
The IFR is highly variable with this virus since the age structure of the population is critical. People who insist on single numbers are providing disinformation. Your evidence is not real science either.
I likewise can do BOE calculations. In the US, PFR rates range from roughly 0.1% to 0.2% excluding the top and lowest 10 states. If we assume that perhaps 30%-50% have been infected or are essentially immune (everyone under 30 or so) and double that PFR we get 0.2% to 0.4%. In many states that reallly did nothing to limit freedom such as North and South Dakota PFR’s are about 0.2%. In Sweden the PFR is 0.14% and the epidemic seems to be in strong decline.
Covid is an ink blot test for the “good German” in all of us and the tendency to believe official dogma and comply. I knew pretty well a PhD statistician who grew up in Germany. He was quite comfortable with regulating speech and was very polite himself and expected others to be polite. We now have unaccountable monopolies doing this function for us. That’s why you may have been misinformed about the events of the last 5 years. Probably the German media is little better.
In addition Covid showed very conclusively how bankrupt THE SCIENCE is at the moment. There were some very very bad papers published. I recall a couple where the takedown was devestating and left little conclusion that these scientists were acting out their political activist views and using just terrible methods. Same for Meyerowitz-Katz and our occassional doofus Sanakan who were completely discredited by Ioannidis. That happens when a house cat attacks a lion. And papers are all over the place on all the important issues. Ioannidis has a recent paper showing that Imperial College’s models of NPI effectiveness is highly sensitive to model details, i.e., its scientifically meaningless. Viral epidemiology is a primitive field dominated by crude mechanistic narratives with no rigorous quantification. Yet we were told to “follow the ‘SCIENCE.” What tripe and rubbish.
The latest scandal about the Lancet editorial and Danzig’s [sp?] connection to our health Saint Fauci. There was I believe by Danzig an attempt to cover up the fact that he was laundering NIH money to WIV. Fauci and he were thanking each other last spring for being zealous in discrediting any man made origin theory.
It has also brought out into the open how dysfunctional the media has become. In the US and UK, they promote nakedly partisan narratives lifted right from politicians and lie frequently or use a single anonymous source and they never retract anything. They are as bad as media in the old USSR. I recommend Glen Greenwald or Matt Tiabbi for a left of center perspective.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/without-mass-testing-were-flying-blind-through-this-crisis/2020/04/09/bf61e178-7a9b-11ea-a130-df573469f094_story.html
Ioannidis – quoted here:
https://tinyurl.com/2ujxhj8u
Dear D,
As I was explaining to someone from UNC this very afternoon, and I quote:
Ioannidis seems to have “gone emeritus” with his recent “motivated reasoning”
The response came back across the Atlantic, and I quote once again:
I don’t know who GidMK is, but I was amused by point 2: If I were to commission a review on the small number of SR/MAs on the COVID-19 IFR, I’d probably want it to be written by someone who hadn’t authored one of the 6…..
You’re welcome.
Well Jim, This is a silly criticism. This new standard you seem to advocate would mean Gavin Schmidt couldn’t participate in a CMIP review article. It’s unscientific and another form of attempted silencing. Address the science on its merits if you can.
The Imperial College paper and the MK paper used very aggressive exclusion criteria that excluded most of the data and on top of that the criteria were not applied at all in a couple of cases.
I’ll also note that Josh’s contribution here is the usual partisan hack cherry picking of single sentences. This is how politicians smear their opponents.
It’s the ultimate bias especially when Josh has no way to evaluate the science and hasn’t read it.
Here’s a good summary of how vile our media have become on the issue of the possible lab leak and how dangerous Fakebook is to freedom of speech.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/06/04/facebooks_speech_suppression_argues_for_repeal_of_section_230_and_a_facebook_stock_price_of_zero_145871.html
David Young –
I fail to understand why a renowned scientist such a yourself, when I quote ionannidis saying something that was completely wrong about the pandemic, attack me in respomse.
It’s far from the only completely wrong thing thst he said about the pandemic. Why does it make you angry and bitter when I quote something that ionannidis said that was completely wrong?
Ioannidis’ obviously underestimated the deadlines of the virus as well as its infectiousness.
There was a lot of uncertainty. Errors are to be expected. As a renowned scientist you must surely know that. It’s odd that you seem to want to believe that somehow Ioannidis is above making errors or shouldn’t be accountable for the errors he made.
Franktoo: dpy6629: Without meaning any disrespect to Ioannidis many other accomplishments, it should be obvious today that the IFR for COVID is not 0.3%. With 33 million cumulative detected cases and nearly 600,000 deaths in US, the case fatality rate (CFR) is 1.8% (and other developed countries have converged on similar values since last summer.) A CRF of 1.8% and an IFR of 0.3% implies that there have been 6 infections for every infection that was confirmed by PCR. If that were true, then the 9% confirmed infections in the US in January would have been enough to reach herd immunity without vaccination!
I don’t think that is obviously true. There have been 33M confirmed cases in the us; if there are 6 infected for every 1 positive diagnosis, that is close to 200M infected by now, about 60%. “Herd immunity” estimates are extremely dependent on models and other parameter values, and without a known really accurate model and solidly estimated parameters, we have no reason to think that 60% infected “achieves” [quoting someone else] “herd immunity”.
Right now, about 168M Americans have received at least 1 dose of vaccine, and we do not know how many of those were previously infected. Maybe 80% of Americans have been either infected or vaccinated? We do not know. I don’t think it is beyond the realm of the possible.
My problem here Joshie is that when you cherry pick single sentences its deceptive and childish as virtually every other commenter here has pointed out. It’s partisan hack behavior that is schoolyard bully stuff. Just stop it and you might gain a little self-respect.
David Young –
Ioannidis was quoted in the Washington Post making a statement about the pandemic that was completely wrong – vastly underestimating the magnitude of the impact.
That’s a significant event – when an expert such as he makes such a huge error in such a public forum.
For Ioannidis to estimate only 40,000 deaths COVID makes it obvious that he vastly underestimated the IFR. Of course, then there’s the interesting aspect of the incompatibility of Ioannidis’ low IFR estimate and the obviously wrong predictions of a low “herd immunity threshold” – from people such as Nic Lewis (of course assuming you don’t believe that more than 100% of the population has been infected with COVID 😁).
You refer to one estimate he made that was arguably wrong. Showing how we can know it was wrong gets a bit complicated, but Frank does a good job of doing so.
I refer to an projection he made that was unargusbly wrong, and you get nasty and call me names and attack me.
It seems that for some reason it makes you angry and hostile when I point his errors out, just as you have a track record of calling me names when I point out Nic Lewis’ errors snd your errors – such as when you said the following:
Deaths didn’t decline throughout March. I told you when you said that you were wrong, that you didn’t appropriately consider the lag in reporting deaths. And in response you insulted me then just as you have done in this thread.
Joshie, You keep repeating the same word salads and cherry picked sentences over and over again. Everyone else here knows your pattern and how biased it is. You really should try to do better.
atandb | April 22, 2021 at 12:44 pm | Reply
I have for a long time contended myself with reading rather than commenting. However, your use of statistics in the preceding comment is so egregious that I decided to comment. First of all you quote two numbers of an entire bicameral plot to prove your point, which is cherry picking in the extreme. A look at the entire plot without using any other information would lead to the conclusion that, at present that the death rate is a low for the graph.
atandb | April 22, 2021 at 1:24 pm |
As long as the graph is in the asymptotic decline, which it is, it is a decline. Does not matter what the average is, how much of the graph you want to select, etc. What you did was cherry picking. David Young’s assertion of “strongly declining” is correct, but not what I would have used. The asymptotic curve is still strongly declining according to statistics. I would not have used that description, but your objection to it is fallacious.
David Young –
It’s not like the CDC is above making mistakes, of course, but I seem to recall you citing the CDC IFR estimate back when their estimate was relatively lower. I haven’t noticed where you referenced their more recent IFR estimate. Is that because their more recent estimate is considerably higher than Ioannidis’?
At any rate, I will readily agree that an aggregative IFR estimate is of limited value anyway. If we went with an IFR or 0.3%, that would imply that in Peru, not only has everyone been infected but that some 80% of the population in Peru has been infected twice! Of course, the death rate in Peru is highest in the world – but clearly there are many countries (such as the US) where an aggregated estimate of an IFR of 0.3% is too low, and thus the aggregated number is of little value.
Denmark is an interesting situation at the other end of the spectrum with respect to the applicability of an aggregated IFR of 0.3%. If 15% of their population were infected, that would mean that they’ve caught about 1 in 3 of every infection. Given that they’ve got the highest per capita testing in the world, maybe that’s a reasonable figure. If, in fact, 15% of their population were infected, that would mean an IFR of 0.3% would be plausible.
Anyway, despite that there seems good reason to believe that Ioannidis aggregated IFR estimate is too low, what’s more disturbing are his statements that COVID is comparable to the seasonal flu.
Not only is that obviously wrong in an aggregated framework, it is particularly inapt given that COVID is much, much more dangerous than the seasonal flu to certain particularly vulnerable populations. COVID is not remotely comparable to the seasonal flu in large segments of the public.
While aggregating an IFR is uninformative, aggregating the overall impact of COVID to compare it to the seasonal flu is disturbingly misleading.
To see someone like Ioannidis make such a misleading comparison is quite surprising, and certainly more problematic than his making a more technical mistake in estimating the IFR – which was arguably in line with the range of uncertainty. Likening COVID to the seasonal flu isn’t in line with the range of uncertainty given the very significant dissimilarities.
And once again Josh you are ripping single sentences out of context. It’s biased and not really honest. And that is your way of gaining attention because you can’t get it by saying things that are interesting and worthy considering.
Ioannidis has been saying from the start that the mid range IFR based on the Diamond Princess data might be 0.3%. That’s higher than the flu but comparable to several severe flu epidemics of the 20th Century such as 1969. Taken as a whole, his statements have been much more accurate than most other epidemiologists most especially Imperial College and the graduate student Meyerowitz-Katz.
In fact if one looks at overall mortality adjusted for age and population, in Sweden that number in 2020 is about the same as 2013 and every other previous year on the 21st Century. In the US, its comparable to 2003 and every other previous year back to the 1960’s at least. So by the measure most used by professionals to monitor public health, 2020 was a bad year but better than 2000.
The overall message of fear spread by the media using lies about cases and deaths was disastrously wrong. This was done mostly to discredit Trump. And people like yourself who are too unfocused to critically evaluate science serve as echoers of the narrative. And then there were the lies about the lab leak theory and the very real conspiracy to discredit it and delay any investigation.
David Young –
Why is it so difficult (apparently) for you to acknowledge that you were wrong:
Here’s what I said:
> Deaths also aren’t falling significantly over the past few weeks. They fell for a while but seem to have stabilized and with allowing time for the lag, given the rise in ICU admissions, may very well turn out to be rising over this period – as would be suggested by the significant rise in ICU admissions.
And in response you said;
dpy6629 | April 5, 2021 at 8:48 pm |
ICU admissions are rising. You cherry picked that fact to hide the fact that deaths are strongly declining and have been for quite a while.
You were wrong David, and it was clear at the time that you were wrong. Here’s more:
Joshua | April 5, 2021 at 9:22 pm |
[…]
I pointed out that actually, the rate of deaths has flattened out after a significant drop, and that once you consider the lag (in conjunction with the significant increase in ICU admissions) they may actually be rising.
You responded:
dpy6629 | April 5, 2021 at 9:55 pm |
You are wrong on the death data.
and you also responded:
dpy6629 | April 5, 2021 at 10:36 pm |
[…]
You were wrong to claim that deaths were leveling off and you cover that with more very repetitious word salads, another sign of an unfocused intellect.
You were wrong. That atandb didn’t know the full back and forth of how you were wrong doesn’t change the single fact that you were wrong and got nasty when it was pointed out.
Strange behavior for a renowned scientistz I must say.
Repeating falsehoods doesn’t change the fact that several other commenters say that I am right and you are cherry picking. You are not an honest person I’m afraid.
DPY6629, Ron and others: Thanks for the replies. I re-read Ioannidis first paper on IFR and his newer one. To avoid confusion, here are the links:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7947934/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/eci.13554
We are approaching this issue from two different perspectives. For Ioannidis, IFR is technically the ratio of deaths to infections detected by the presence of antibodies (seroprevalence). I am interested in herd immunity, not IFR. IFR is mostly interesting to me in the sense that IFR/CFR is the ratio of total infections to detected infections, the Case Detection Rate (CDR). However, the only infections that really count towards herd immunity are those that produce immunity that lasts a year or more – immunity that has the ability to bring this pandemic to an end.
My thesis: Low IFR values promoted by Ioannidis are misleading about herd immunity in the US and have been used to misrepresent seriousness of the COVID pandemic.
Let’s review some basics: 1) We have followed those who received Pfizer and Moderna vaccines long enough to know that 90% are protected for more than half a year against INFECTIONS SERIOUS ENOUGH TO SEND PATIENTS FOR A PCR TEST. J&J and AZ provide less protection. 2) We also know that those sick enough to be tested for SARS2 by PCR (and found positive) rarely get a second positive test (after they recover). We also know they usually test positive for “antibodies”, but the level of these antibodies is falling significantly with time. These antibodies are not found in older blood samples, so the antibody tests appear to be highly specific for SARS2 (or at least something new). 3) Unlike vaccines, no one has ever taken a large group of people who have tested positive for antibodies to SARS2 (and an appropriate control group) and shown how much protection they have received from those antibodies and for how long. The antibodies detected by serology are generally not neutralizing antibodies to the RBD of the spike protein. Serology usually detects antibodies that are produced in much higher amounts to other viral proteins. These antibodies help T-cells kill infected human cells, but don’t directly protect cells from infection. 4) Moderna, Pfizer, and AZ all found that single doses of their vaccines (targeting the spike protein) didn’t produce levels of antibodies as high as natural infection, so they all began developing two-dose vaccines, (but AZ fell behind exploring the optimum time between doses and hadn’t been approved in the US as of May 1).
In other diseases, like influenza, antibody tests are used to demonstrate the presence of an infection. Those antibodies persist, allowing surveys to determine that an average 30 million Americans get seasonal influenza every year. (Apparently 2/3rd of them see a doctor, and may receive an antibody test.) COVID is very different. 33 million Americans have tested positive by PCR. The presence of virus is transient so we can’t do population surveys by PCR. The early antibody surveys suggested that PCR testing was missing about 10 SARS2 infections for every “confirmed” infection, a Case Detection Ratio (CDR) of 10. Later surveys suggest that only one out of four infections were being confirmed by PCR (CDR 5). Today’s 33 million infections detected by PCR extrapolate to 167 million or 330 million total infections with CDRs of 5 or 10. The latter unreasonable total is one reason why we no longer believe we are missing ten infections for every one we detect. However, when you look at the cumulative 18.5% of the population in Miami-Dade, and 17% in Bismarck, Souix City, and Yuma, even a CDR of 5 appears unreasonable. A CDR of 5 means 90% of Miami has been infected. (You can find small counties with more that 20% detected infections, but some have state prisons or military bases. If the county doesn’t have at least 100,000 people, I don’t trust that the number are representative of this pandemic.)
We now know – beyond any doubt – that the number of Americans who have acquired “immunity relevant to herd immunity” must be much smaller than 33 million times a CDR of 5 or 10. FWIW, I personally believe Nic and others were right in suggesting that heterogeneity reduces the threshold for effective herd immunity below 1-1/R0, but perhaps only to 50% or 60%. (Gregarious people and those who work with large numbers of people must become immune faster than hermits and those who work at home.) So my personal estimate is that only 2-3 people are becoming immune for every 1 who tests positive by PCR. Let’s call this a Immunity Detection Rate (ImDR) of 2-3. So 33 million positive PCR tests would only translate into 66-100 million people made immune by infection. This is why we had to vaccinate almost half the population to permanently slow this pandemic.
Ioannidis papers review the published literature on IFR’s ranging from 0 to 1.6%. His second publication reported a composite “global” value of 0.15%. His first publication reported a median corrected IFR of 0.23%, 0.09% in countries with below average death rates and 0.57% in countries with above average death rates. Footnote b in Table 4 of the published version indicated IFR is 0.3% – a value that the preprint of his work made popular, but which didn’t survive peer-review.
In reality, no single value of IFR is broadly relevant to this pandemic. Countries with more elderly are going to have a higher IFR. As treatment improves, the IFR should go down. As more transmissible and deadly variants evolve, IFR should go up and the fraction of cases causing illnesses serious enough to be detected (CDR) should also go up. As the elderly become more cautious and the young more reckless, IFR is going to go down. When a small fraction of the population has been infected, seroprevalence estimates are easily distorted by false positives (which can easily be more common in the field than lab). The Santa Clara survey found an unadjusted 1.5% testing positive of antibodies. In the early stages of the pandemic, PCR testing capacity was limited and the CDR was lower than it would be later.
I’m personally not particularly interested in whether Ioannidis’s IFR of 0.3% was appropriate for its time or whether his critics are right. That was a year ago and things are much clear. What is clear today is that his IFR has been grossly misleading about the approach of herd immunity and the seriousness of the COVID pandemic (compared with influenza).
Based on Ioannidis, many assumed that the ImDR = CDR = IFR/CFR = 1.8%/0.3% = 6. This is partly because Ioannidis only considered data BEFORE SEPTEMBER 2020. This is back in the day when many believed that the Case Detection Rate was 10. For example, if you were to take an IFR of 0.3% and today’s 0.6 million fatalities in the US, you would conclude that there have been 200 million infections and the US pandemic was ended by herd immunity. This supported the position that we should protect the vulnerable and let the pandemic burn out. In truth, we didn’t have the ability to protect the vulnerable without a vaccine and we needed to vaccinate about 50% of the country to get close enough to herd immunity to bring the number of new cases below the peak last spring.
The 6,472 deaths in Miami-Dade county would translated into 2.16 million infections, 80% of a county with 2.72 million people. Given his advisors, it is no wonder DeSantis assumed herd immunity was near, eliminated all restriction, and then watched Miami-Dade surge past other large counties in ND, SD and AZ to lead the nation’s populous counties in terms of cumulative percentage of their population testing positive by PCR.
Worst of all, publicizing the fact in seasonal influenza and COVID have similarly low IFRs has created the illusion that they are equally serious. The number of Americans who have tested positive for SARS2 (33 million) is comparable to the average number who acquire seasonal influenza every year, but the number that have died from COVID is about 15-fold higher. And these deaths have occurred despite lockdowns, social distancing and masks that totally eliminated seasonal influenza last winter. In truth, since it took about 50% vaccination to bring this pandemic under control, these measures reduced the toll from COVID by about 50%.
I did my own study of C-19 death rates using online Los Angeles County data. I found the same as what county county was reporting: low income Latino zip codes and city neighborhoods had highest death rates. But this is not science. So I compared death rates in unincorporated zip codes and LA City neighborhoods that were adjacent and also were high low income and Latino asa control. Result was much lower death rates, so C-19 can’t be explained by poverty or necessarily ethnicity as the health officials concluded. Delving deeper into the data the only variable that explained high death rates was the percentage of Foreign Born. The only plausible explanation was that the areas with high death rates and foreign born may have had high incidence of dormant tuberculosis, a respiratory disease similar to C-19. I also found that those with TB had many more times likelihood of contracting C-19. So was TB a co-morbidity? We know many migrants come to US unscreened for TB. This pattern also played out in City if Glendale, which has high % of Armenians. The one area in Glendale that had high C-19 death rate also had high Foreign Born. If corroborated, this would invalidate or call into question the conclusion that C-19 had 15x higher deaths than flu. We already know that C-19 is a co-morbidity disease.
Frank, Thanks for rereading the papers. I will read more carefully when time permits. I think that Covid19 generated an emotional response and that it’s hard for people to think objectively in this case. Generally, viral epidemiology is a primitive science and data on intervention effectiveness is all over the place, largely because its very hard to quantify human behavior.
While I agree with some of your technical points Frank, your comment still appears to me to be laced with bias against DeSantis in Florida and anti-lockdown scientists. Florida is in fact in the middle of the pack among US states in PFR rate. It is only a little worse than California where severe restrictions were continuously imposed. There is it seems to me virtually no evidence that strong measures have better outcomes. Another point is that your statement that it is “impossible” to protect the elderly is I think wrong. There are measures that could have worked such as paying care facility workers to live on site for a couple of weeks at a time and getting tested at the beginning of a tour or duty. Florida did a pretty good job. Given their large elderly population, they would be expected to have one of the worst PFR of any state. They are in the middle of the pack.
I actually think that it is possible that in places like the Dakotas herd immunity was indeed reached early in 2021 when the sharp decline in cases started and before a huge number were vaccinated. But we may never know.
I still return to the basic fact that mortality adjusted for age and population has not been dramatically worse than the historical trend. In the US 2020 was about the same as 2003. In Sweden, 2020 was about the same as 2013. The overwhelming fact about this epidemic was the media scare campaign motivated by a desire to ensure Trump was not re-elected. Everything else got sucked into this sewer of pseudo-science, lies and distortions, and bias.
I don’t see how you can say that Ioannidis’ IFR estimates were misleading. They look in retrospect to be the best ones in March of 2020.
Frank,
Do you agree that the CDC and NIAID did a terrible job in gaining understanding of this virus in a timely fashion and communicating it to policy makers and public? If so, I would think it logical that produced dissent and expert second guessing. And dissent is almost always exaggerated to the opposite pole rather than dead on accurate.
1) First the paid experts propagated the China lie that there was little to fear; no evidence of community spread; we have NYC and SF under surveillance (with a handful of working test kits in the country).
2) They fought Trump’s China travel ban when they should have done it even earlier and included a quarantine period on all international travel, the same a China did in April.
3) They should have gotten contact tracing teams organized in January.
4) The test launch = FUBAR
5) The lateness to look for PPE was addressed by lying to the public that masks were useless when they thought they weren’t.
6) They didn’t recognize that a particle shaped like a dandelion seed bloom would be airborne.
7) If they had read the 2015 Chinese SARS virus manual they would have known that daylight kills the virus. And thus, outdoors also having infinite dilution to airborne particles, makes outdoors the safest place.
8) Baric and Menachery found that SARS is lethal only to elderly mice in 2014. One would think that Fauci would have talked to them about the virus’s pathology while discussing the coverup. Why did DeSantis have to figure out to ignore the CDC’s advice to protect the hospitals and instead focus on protecting elderly? Apparently DeSantis was more observant of the Washington state early nursing home deaths than Fauci.
9) Why were schools closed? Why was outdoor dining closed?
10) Vaccine hesitancy is a symptom of distrust of the response.
11) Why was the vaccine rollout so uncoordinated at the beginning? Didn’t they know it was coming?
12) Why didn’t they publicize that a vaccine is unnecessary to those with the antibodies from a previous infection? They could have saved on vaccine and at the same time collected more data on antibody prevalence.
I don’t think the answer is to hire more government workers or make a new department. The answer is to reform civil service rules and dissolve public worker unions, (including teacher’s unions).
Absolutely right on all counts Ron. This response was quite similar to what happens in warfare. The WWII internment of Japanese Americans is a good comparison. It had some vague justification since Japanese spies had given all the Pearl Harbor information to the Imperial Navy but was not justified in the American mainland.
Upon rereading this its clear to me that Matt is more likely to be right than Frank. Since the pandemic started strongly declining in Mid January of this year long before a significant number were vaccinated, we were probably close to herd immunity at that point. That might ball park mean that perhaps 50% or more were immune which is a lot closer to Matt’s ball park numbers.
“Henry Bauer is an HIV/AIDS denialist…” “…Nicholas Wade resorts to the same conspiracist tripe as well.”
I hope I’m not just as bad a person because I would like to disagree with you on Wade. He did not smear anyone in his article. He calls Baric “the top scientist in his field.” He does not claim the lab origin hypothesis is proven or completely dismiss zoonotic spill-over. He presents evidence that point one way or the other and feels they mostly point to lab origin.
I think the toughest thing for Baric and Daszak is to believe that their longtime friend and collogue, Zhengli Shi, could be lying. But Wade points out to a recent interviewer that Shi is not free to say whatever she wants if it implicates China. For example, there are reports that many Chinese scientists have been disappeared for speaking out. It is well documented that nobody is allowed to publish on the SARS2 subject in China without submission through the CCP. (I bet they don’t get a lot of those.) The medical doctor who first told others about a new illness was arrested. Later he soon after died of covid at a young age.
Li-meng Yan sounded the alarm of non-natural genomic features from from her University of Hong Kong research position on SARS2. She was told by her superiors to shut up for fear of her getting “disappeared.” She fled to the US but made the mistake of accepting help from Steve Bannon. She has been banned by social media but able to publish on the CERN website Zenodo. The medical establishment have mounted an attack on her, recruiting the prominent Robert Gallo to lead the debunkers of her paper. She recently effectively rebutted their reviews, rightly pointing out that they were heavily plagiarizing each other, using the exact same sentences.
Reading Yan’s papers she clearly has no problem believing Shi is completely of bad faith, a villain. I adopt Wade’s POV that Shi and others in China have no choice. I hope the USA and other free countries do not become more like China than they already have become or I couldn’t wright this. My Twitter was permanently suspended last year after I didn’t bother appealing the temporary ban for unspecified reasons. I suspect now in hindsight it may have been due to my tweets on lab origin theory.
Establishment debunking review on Yan paper
Yan’s reply to the reviews.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVVE6MD7tRw&ab_channel=UnHerd
Yan paper 1. Sept. 14, 2019.
Yan paper 2. Oct. 12, 2020.
Ron, The Yan reply link seems to not work for me.
dpy, Zenodo’s server seems to be down. Check back later.
Her replies were not super informative. She met their incredible pompous slanders with meticulous replies, carrying as much earnestness that one could muster to a group of shills that were seemingly reading from a single script.
It does seem that the viscousness of public life has been getting worse and worse. A lot of it is due to the internet but the media are the real source of the problem. It used to be limited more or less to politics but now science is like this too.
I missed the smear of Judith at the end of Sanakan’s second screed. It’s really a distortion and like a classic smear does not address any substantive point. I do wonder where this turkey finds the time to quote mine Twitter and a carefully selected set of papers and assemble them in preprepared diatribes.
I deleted Sanakan’s comment with really big smears
The selective interpretations of “smear” is quite a sight.
J
What part of it’s her sight and her rules don’t you understand?
Site
“For years I’ve been drawing the parallels between the position people like you [Judith] take on climate science, and how HIV/AIDS denialists treat virology, immunology, etc.”.
You know what a smear is Josh. It’s use of guilt by association and lying about someone’s positions and statements. Here Sanakan admits that he’s a smear merchant with a long track record.
It’s exactly like the classic McCarthy communist smear. You claim that someone’s friend attended a communist rally in college, therefore he is a fellow traveler.
Unethical, immoral, and possibly actionable if there was actual malice.
atomskssanakan wrote: “For example, Wade goes on and on about the furin cleavage site (FCS). But it’s been apparent for at least a year that the site arose via copy-choice error between an ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 and an ancestor of HKU9, leading to an out-of-frame sequence transfer to SARS-CoV-2’s ancestor. That would account for the codon usage Wade whines about, since out-of-frame transfers can produce codons that are otherwise uncommon.”
Unfortunately, an out-of-frame recombination event means that all of the codons 3′ of the insertion in the S protein gene are out of frame and can’t produce a functional protein without a second frame shift mutation. While waiting for a second compensating frameshift mutation to occur, the virus with the insert would be incapable of infecting cells. Possibly for this reason, neither Gallaher (the originator of the hypothesis that the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleave site comes from HKU9) nor proposer of a second hypothesis for origin of the furin cleavage site (RmYN02) discuss frameshifting during recombination as an explanation for the unusual codon usage near the furin cleavage site. It is worth remembering that these are simply hypotheses that explain what we observe, but which so far can’t be experimentally tested.
In addition to these precedented recombination hypotheses for the natural origin of the furin cleavage site, there are many precedents for introducing a furin cleavage site into the junction between the S1 and S2 regions of the spike protein. Scientists are very interested in understanding the role such sites play in receptor binding and fusion/viral entry. And those studies have been done using the CGG-CGG codons for inserting the Arg-Arg furin cleavage site that are rarely found in coronaviruses. A hypothesis for how this insertion could have been made with RaTG13 without detectable signs of genetic engineering has been proposed.
My limited understanding is that we have two viable competing hypotheses for how SARS-CoV-2 acquired a furin cleavage site not previously observed in other betacoronaviruses (but now also found in RnYN02?). And two competing hypotheses for its origin. Since every previous viral pandemic has begun with transfer between species (zoonosis) and since research on potential pandemic viruses is likely going on in many large Chinese cities like Wuhan with hospitals capable of identifying a novel pathogenic virus, I originally saw no need to hypothesize an unprecedented lab origin. IMO, the Chinese government would be obstructing investigation of the origin of the pandemic whether it came from a Chinese lab or Chinese failure to limit the wild animal trade after SARS-CoV-1 and they would seek to avoid blame for the delay in reporting and responding to human-to-human transmission. Now, however, scientists have failed for more than a year to identify the presumed intermediate host between bats and humans (civets for SARS-CoV-1, camels for MERS) or a more closely related virus in bats. The zoonosis hypothesis is therefore getting more scrutiny, partially from autonomous group called the DRASTIC Collaboration that rightly doesn’t want to be associated with Trump’s politically motivated accusations and whose Asian members fear the wrath of the Chinese government. Are these people scientific skeptics or conspiracy theorists? I’m not making up my mind until the issues they raise have been openly debated, Duesberg’s skepticism about the HIV hypothesis for the origin of AIDS eventually deteriorated into a conspiracy theory, but his questions prompted the development of an overwhelming scientific case for this hypothesis. When adopted by others, that conspiracy theory did did damage health and AIDS policy. As best I can tell, a thorough scientific debate about the origin of the pandemic is appropriate, even though I fear it could degenerate into a conspiracy theory. Experience may cause me to regret this judgment.
https://zenodo.org/record/4477081/files/SQuay_Bayesian%20Analysis%20of%20SARS-CoV-2%20FINAL%20V.2.pdf?download=1
I’m approaching this unusual and long document with extreme skepticism.
‘Good checkers are there to help perpetuate the illusion of competence. They’re professional ass-coverers, whose job is to keep it from being obvious that Wolf Blitzer or Matt Taibbi or whoever else you’re following on the critical story of the day only just learned the term hanging chad or spike protein or herd immunity. In my experience they’re usually pretty great at it, but their jobs are less about determining fact than about preventing the vast seas of ignorance underlying most professional news operations from seeping into public view.’ https://taibbi.substack.com/p/fact-checking-takes-another-beating?
Socratic wisdom entails the admission of one’s ignorance. Ignorance can only be dispelled by in this case a science I barely understand. Not blogs and articles scanned through the lens of confirmation bias.
‘Since the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) 18 years ago, a large number of SARS-related coronaviruses (SARSr-CoVs) have been discovered in their natural reservoir host, bats1,2,3,4. Previous studies have shown that some bat SARSr-CoVs have the potential to infect humans5,6,7. Here we report the identification and characterization of a new coronavirus (2019-nCoV), which caused an epidemic of acute respiratory syndrome in humans in Wuhan, China.’ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7
Although SARS-nCoV may have emerged as an infective agent in humans months earlier in Guangdong Province. In Wuhan there was the scientific expertise to recognise it as a new agent.
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/17/9241
Consensus in science doesn’t exist. Although there are ideas – right or wrong – endorsed by a broader cross section of scientists in any field. Getting to those fundamentals and acting on them is the hope of humanity.
From the Nature article:
Except that a month before that, three lab workers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were apparently hospitalized for acute respiratory infections. For some reason, the Chinese government hid that, along with suppressing most of the other information about the outbreak, and deleted all the data from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and clamping down on all the researchers there. An optometrist, who soon died of Covid, had to use social media to get the word out.
Please explain how Covid-19 could’ve gone from Guandong, which has twice the population of Hubei (where Wuhan is located), 800 or more miles to Wuhan, over a period of two months, without anybody noticing that a pandemic was in full swing.
It took two weeks from mid-December until WHO was conducting investigations and having emergency meetings. By the second week of January cases were showing up outside China. By the third week in January Wuhan was locked down, the Chinese were madly building giant field hospitals for all the victims, and WHO was declaring a global pandemic. That’s about five weeks from the first public report of cases to full-blown global crisis.
So the claim that Covid-19 had already been appearing two months earlier in Guandong has no merit whatsoever. None. If people in Guandong had been getting hospitalized in October, the disease would’ve already shown up in Los Angeles, Paris, and New York by mid December. You might as well say the virus was smuggled into Wuhan by the US military.
And that’s the problem with many of these early scientific articles from researchers with connections to China and the Wuhan institute. Most seemed aimed at providing deniability.
If the US had a sudden outbreak of a novel strain of Ebola, and then we heard that the outbreak was located in Frederick Maryland, most of us would immediately think “It escaped from a lab at Fort Detrick”. If all the scientists banded together and said the outbreak must’ve come from some illegal pet store selling exotic African pets, while nobody can find any signs of such a pet, or such a store, and the scientists stick to it, then it’s not our fault if we think the scientists are covering up something.
If the outbreak was due to exotic pets, then almost any US city would have had an equal likelihood of being the start of the outbreak. But Frederick isn’t some random city, it is one of a couple of cities in the entire nation where scientists study Ebola. And then the public learns that the US Army destroyed all the documents in the Ebola lab, reassigned all their Ebola researchers to a remote Arctic base, and arrested any lab worker who talked to the press.
If it later turns out that the first three Ebola patients in Frederick worked with Ebola at Fort Detrick, then the scientists who stubbornly continue to deride and disparage those who doubt the pet-store theory are only bringing disrepute to all of science and destroying the public’s trust that took centuries to create.
When you keep citing the early articles that are false and misleading, it just reinforces the impression that there was a massive cover-up going on. As they said about Watergate, it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up that does all the damage. Human behavior is also a science, and we know that when there’s highly-motivated personal and organizational behavior that evinces a guilty mind, when there’s massive destruction of evidence, suppression of testimony, hiding of witnesses, and flat refusal to provide requested materials, a court will take that behavior, in itself, as evidence of what must have happened, because humans share some very predictable behaviors.
Scientists can stick with “The flash of light you saw in the sky was not a UFO. Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus. It’s science!”, but their red blinky thing isn’t working and the public isn’t buying it.
The Nature article described the SATS-CoV-2 genome sequenced at the Wuhan Institute of Virology – and linked to viral loads in bat populations. After it was recognised that something new had emerged. From the PNAS article.
‘There are two subclusters of A which are distinguished by the synonymous mutation T29095C. In the T-allele subcluster, four Chinese individuals (from the southern coastal Chinese province of Guangdong) carry the ancestral genome, while three Japanese and two American patients differ from it by a number of mutations. These American patients are reported to have had a history of residence in the presumed source of the outbreak in Wuhan.’
This suggests that the site of the viral spillover was in Guangdong province. Samples from patients with an acute respiratory disease were later sequenced and found to contain the foundational SARS-CoV-2 genotype. It was not recognised as a new disease at the time. The virus may have become more infective as it mutated in human hosts.
You still do not supply any sources for your wild speculations about massive destruction of evidence. Anywhere. Or any science at all. I suspect you get it all from conspiracy theorist blogs.
“Please explain how Covid-19 could’ve gone from Guandong, which has twice the population of Hubei (where Wuhan is located), 800 or more miles to Wuhan, over a period of two months, without anybody noticing that a pandemic was in full swing”.
Is it really that hard to imagine?
There is evidence that the virus was in the United States and France by late 2019 too. How did that happen if the leak occurred in November in the lab in Wuhan?
The virus probably originated months earlier and gradually spread at a low level of infection for months. People who got ill were thought to have the ordinary flu. Even some deaths could be written off as the ordinary flu. Once the infection rate reached a high level, people became aware they were dealing with something different than the flu. Keep in mind that there wasn’t any ability to test for COVID in these early months.
It’s true that the outbreak could have gone for a couple of months before being detected because it did so in the USA even though we were supposedly monitoring for it. But the evidence was still available in retrospective analysis using hospital records and kept samples. The retrospective studies done on SARS1 and MERS gave clear explanations of the timing and geographic spread. There was also a phylogenic tree that could follow the mutation branches back to the root of the zoonotic crossover period. In addition to this hospital blood samples in the locations would show antibodies in a percentage of the population for the zoonotic version per-crossover to epidemic spread.
The strongest evidence for lab leak is the absence of evidence one should expect to find for zoonotic origin. The next strongest is China’s lock-out of international investigators to work with them to find it. Why don’t they invite the WHO expedition to take samples from the bat cave to find the RatG13 and its homologs. If the possibility of a pandemic warranted visiting the cave many times by Zhengli Shi why doesn’t the realization of their fears warrant another visit?
It’s just out that Beijing Biden stopped the State Departments investigation of the origins of the COVID, he turned the effort over to WHO.
https://www.the-sun.com/news/2958332/biden-shut-probe-china-lab-leak-covid/
No sense waiting for WHO’s findings; one should be able to surmise what those findings will be now.
I have listened to some of the UK PM’s former adviser, Dominic Cummings, giving evidence about the government’s response to the pandemic, and he constantly keeps mentioning ‘lack of preparedness’. Yet at the turn of 2019/20 we had academia, medical science, public health structures, expert virologists and epidemiologists and the WHO to advise us on all health matters. With all that power up front what went wrong with the structure, the joined up and shared thinking, the welcome collaborations, united human fronts for a regular, if not highly always dangerous or contagious, visitor to the public health arena, the novel virus?
Does this not parallel the difficulties in climate science that despite all the knowledge and effort we have over decades of data unravelling and research that we have not already implemented workable solutions that were available to us years, if not decades, ago? It is all about energy and how best and efficiently we can make it available to every human being who wants and needs it.
Why this lack of preparedness on these two important fronts? Are there just too many egos at work and not enough responsible people in responsible jobs who have the integrity and honesty needed to lead others who would gladly follow them? Has the bloated media world poisoned our ability to have and hold on to integrity because it has demonstrated that lies, slogans and fast answers get a better, larger and faster monetary gain than hard work?
What bothers me most is the complete lack of unity because a consensus of fools has never been a very good place to go to find answers and yet here we are faced with charlatans who just cannot be trusted because no one appears to know who is really telling the truth..
You may already know of this article from Unherd. I found it interesting regarding this matter: https://unherd.com/2021/05/what-if-there-was-a-lab-leak/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups%5B0%5D=18743&tl_period_type=3&mc_cid=d5cf56c50e&mc_eid=8cadb1e8e2
Interesting article. It does appear that expert opinion is starting to abandon the fake consensus on this. Perhaps Willard will pay due diligence and read it. The Lancet piece is after all out of date by now with over a year of research since then.
‘
“Even though strong opinions abound, none of these scenarios can be confidently ruled in or ruled out with currently available facts. Just because there are no public reports of more immediate, proximal ancestors in natural hosts, doesn’t mean that these ancestors don’t exist in natural hosts or that COVID-19 didn’t began as a spillover event. Nor does it mean that they have not been recovered and studied, or deliberately recombined in a laboratory.”
Here’s where I stopped:
Not a paper. An op-ed.
Willard of course can find an out of context phrase to dismiss anything hat disagrees with his narrative.
I can, David, but I won’t. First, because I’m not your monkey. Second, because that it’s your itch to scratch. So pay due diligence to it yourself. That is, if you can.
In other words, don’t try to bait me. More generally, don’t try to bait people. That’s unsportsmanlike.
Willard: Not a paper. An op-ed.
Was it a good op-ed? Let’s not forget that the dismissals of the Wuhan Lab origin theory were op-eds.
> Was it a good op-ed?
It was fine. As I say about a related Q&A elsewhere:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2021/05/23/the-bingo-core/#comment-192704
So I don’t buy the “we should investigate even if we probly never get to the bottom of it” stance.
Furthermore, David’s policy sounds a lot like Sam Harris argument for airport profiling. And it’s not a good one:
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2012/05/to_profile_or_not_to.html
In security matters, simplicity is key. Every layer adds exponents.
Notice the tactics here. The editorial was good and made good points that Willard agrees with but he feels the need to cast shade on it because someone who he doesn’t like might use it in ways he doesn’t like.
Notice how David Young conflates three different products while still trying to burden me with a task he himself does not accomplish and after being told that it was unsportsmanlike.
And failing once again to address the points I raise. So let’s recap them:
Could contrarians and Freedom Fighters exploit his efforts? Indeed they do. Check.
Could we just invest in both risk-mitigation efforts offer less downsides and more upsides? That’s debatable. Hence why I offer the following question as argument:
Could David Relman’s policy increase security risks? You bet.
***
David Young brought me here. These are my terms. Unless he wants to debate them, I wash my hands over this exchange.
“Could we just invest in both risk-mitigation efforts offer less downsides and more upsides? That’s debatable. Hence why I offer the following question as argument:
Could David Relman’s policy increase security risks? You bet.”
Interesting. How? To my mind, if you signal to labs that you won’t even allow an investigation into leaks, you remove any incentive to prevent them. But to be fair, I see where you’re coming from. In our hyper-politicized world it becomes almost impossible to admit a mistake because any admission is accompanied by cancellation. In such a world, it almost becomes reasonable to pull the old Soviet trick of investigating secretly so you can deny, while silently fixing. IMO that’s always going to leak out and the damage will be worse. That’s why the following was a Russian joke, not a western joke: “there’s no news in Izvestia or truth in Pravda”
> How?
You can lose time and resources. Even if you find something conclusive, that does not eliminate the other risks related to the options you exclude with your policy.
You get stolen. This time the thief went through your window. Does that mean you need to leave the door open until you spot him with your cameras? No. That’d be silly.
While audits never end, not every auditing stories get interesting with time.
Willard: “So I don’t buy the “we should investigate even if we probly never get to the bottom of it” stance.”
I am assuming this is an dispute of Relman: “Such prevention efforts would look very different depending on which of these scenarios proves to be the most likely.”
I agree with Willard on this point more than Relman. Prevention efforts will not look different based the answer of origin. I think everyone now, including Daszak and Baric and Fauci, know now that GOF on human pathogens is a bad idea even without proof of the lab leak. Just the admission now by Baric and Fauci that it’s plausibly the origin of covid, and the fact that their position moved, eliminates any firm ground to continue GOF.
My prediction is that the face saving international consensus will be that we can’t know if it was a lab leak but we all agree on an international treaty banning GOF.
Question for Willard: Do you think that nuclear power plant accident
danger outweighs CO2 emissions danger? I anticipate your answer would be that we don’t need nuclear or fossil fuel because wind and solar will do the job. banning nuclear energy. My analogous answer to GOF is that vaccine research on the pathogens that currently already exist will do the job without making human pathogens.
Your prediction has nothing to do with the security point, Ron.
What you and other Freedom Fighters present as consensus enforcement is based on two letters from individual scientists. This is far from the statements on AGW with most if not all the scientific organizations in the world.
If you read the letters properly you should realize that the main target was conspiracy ideation. Even the main researcher who pursued the lab hypothesis admits that At the time, conspiracy theorists were spinning bioweapon fantasies, and Chan was loath to give them any ammunition.
This is still going on. Tune in on Alex Jones. Go on Twitter.
If the hat does not fit you, stop wearing it. But please, very please, stop pretending that what you’re doing right now won’t get used by conspiracy theorists. It is, and it will. And THAT is a very big problem, for you and for every Freedom Fighter, including Wade and that other Unherd guy who can’t quote Kuhn properly.
More that that, this is your problem. Own it.
> More that that, this is your problem. Own it.
Not strong enough. Let’s rewrite the fall:
This not only your problem. This is my problem too. It is everyone’s problem now. This is where COVID and AGW meet. We’re all in it together.
I can own what I’m doing here. Can you?
> Do you think that nuclear
“But nukes” is a fringe move in my Bingo, Ron. Nevertheless:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2017/11/29/going-nuclear/
this should answer your leading question.
> Should virologists lie or stay silent in order not to inflame “conspiracy thinking.”
I simply don’t think scientists stay silent because of some Omertà, Ron. Alina simply crushed Peter on Twitter. So much the worse for the browbeating theory and for the idea that he’s the megaphone of the community.
Take Poker. Good players try to play their hands without paying too much attention to the result of individual games. They know that if they play well, in the long run it’ll reward them. They know that both luck and skill is involved in the game. They also know that being prosocial helps.
But here’s the twist: there are many ways to be prosocial. Some players become the life of the party. Others play a more self-effacing role. Same with scientists. Should we really penalize scientists if they decide to remain silent? I don’t think so. Most of whom I know find social media a time sink. They prefer to do what they love best, which is to do science.
***
Sure, as long as what they say is supported by the evidence they best can judge, scientists should be able to say whatever they please. That idea is so vague as to be compatible with the paragraph I quoted from the letter. It’s also not very realistic. We’re social animals. While we can’t be responsible for our friends, but we are still judged by the company we keep.
That’s just the way it is.
But again, reality is more complex. When Glenn goes on Tucker’s, it does not look good on him. When Bernie goes on Tucker’s, it looks good on him. What would explain the difference? My interpretation: one keeps speaking truth to power, the other looks like an opportunistic dolt who cares about his self-image more than anything.
People notice when you dance like they’re not watching.
Social media is young. It’s far from being perfect. Manners have to be instilled. I myself need to ignore troglodytes and to improve how to pitch properly. And if there’s one thing I learned on how to change behavior, it’s that people pay attention to what you do things and how you do them, not what you say. Manners maketh people. Nobody likes cops, not even cops.
That’s all I got for you right now.
Thank you for your comment.
Ron Graf
“Prevention efforts will not look different based the answer of origin. I think everyone now, including Daszak and Baric and Fauci, know now that GOF on human pathogens is a bad idea even without proof of the lab leak. Just the admission now by Baric and Fauci that it’s plausibly the origin of covid, and the fact that their position moved, eliminates any firm ground to continue GOF.”
What evidence is there that any of those people listed really believe GOF is a bad idea? There may actually be a good reason to do GOF research with better safety protocols – they obviously seemed to think so for a long time despite a series of problems at Wuhan.
This is why prevention efforts will absolutely look different based on the origin- again, if nobody cares about accidents at labs there will be more accidents at labs.
And to Willard’s point about wasting resources- how is it useful to have all of virology trying to discover the species jump if it didn’t happen? How is it not a waste of resources that all of the extensive investigations (all of which were prohibited from examining lab leak possibilities) have turned up no answers.
To steal his analogy, the thief went through the window and the WHO declared windows impenetrable, anyone who looks at them to be nutters, and demanded we add more locks to the doors. In the face of that, which staffer at WHO will be brave enough to say- excuse me, but shall we shut the windows too?
Also Ron, Willard brings his bingo cards out anytime someone does something silly, like proposing a reduction in CO2 emissions. Remember, It’s an “existential threat,” but it’s not THAT bad. Anti-nuke activists have feelings ya know.
> It’s an “existential threat,”
CAGW is the central square, Jeff, and you’re reading the risks backassward. Relman’s argument isn’t that we should not follow up on the lab theory because there are too much risks. He’s saying that there are risks in not following it up. And I’m saying that if the risks are worth be tackled, better tackle them without having to wait for what could be a fool’s errand.
“CAGW is the central square, Jeff”
You can call it the smallbluemike square, ’cause he’s obviously a figment of Exxon’s imagination.
“And I’m saying…”
we should stop playing games and do a genuine search for the origin because it’s important. Which is relevant to this post because saying that caused the type of person who makes bingo cards to put me in the center square for a year. Because bingo cards are designed to avoid questions by insulting those who ask them.
> because it’s important.
That’s a great argument you got there, Jeff. Next you’re gonna tell me it’s important because it’s important.
Bingo squares are designed to recognize contrarian talking points. You and Ron went from risks to nukes. That you chimed in is to be expected because we all know you love that square. That you went for “but CAGW” is just par for the contrarian course.
Bingo squares don’t protect against physical play, however. For that I need a manual.
Good talk.
Willard, thanks for your robust reply.
Addressing your thoughts in reverse order, nukes are an important part of the energy policy debate. I don’t understand how you write off an entire technological area as a ploy by deniers to obfuscate, as embodied by your Bingo game squares creation (which I have no problem with if just for humor and not taken seriously.)
“If the hat does not fit you, stop wearing it. But please, very please, stop pretending that what you’re doing right now won’t get used by conspiracy theorists. ”
You have underscored the most profound aspect of this entire blog post and also the theme of an article published today and tweeted by Daszak. We should not be talking about lab leak because we are going to make the Chinese defensive and break down trust and then they won’t share and cooperate.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01383-3
My last thought is to bully and I appreciate your acknowledgement of my good faith “freedom fighter” motive. So the question becomes are there times when honesty is not the best policy, when the greater good is served by knowingly repeating untruths or remaining silent? Can promoting deception be a good thing? Sure, if you are at war. US historians to not have an ounce of guilt for US deception of the Japanese at Midway or Germany about D-Day.
Then stepping back from that the questions gets murkier.
Is it OK for expert witnesses to lie in order to convict a heinous murderer who might otherwise get off due to a legal technicality? See Lindbergh Crime.
Should virologists lie or stay silent in order not to inflame “conspiracy thinking.”
Should climate scientists lie or stay silent to promote a cause of social importance?
I misplaced my too long response:
https://judithcurry.com/2021/05/23/collapse-of-the-fake-consensus-on-covid-19-origins/#comment-950910
It should be the basis of an incoming post.
Yes Ron. This thread of comments is mostly squirrel, i.e., a distraction. The issue here is that a large group of scientists lied in high profile scientific journals. This post and the additional sources introduced by Judith in the comments are very conclusive. There never was conclusive scientific evidence for a species crossover event and the early theories on that proved to be false. But Conspiracy Theories has become the default left wing talking point and narrative about almost everything. And many real conspiracies are lied about or denied. (Russian collusion theory).
If anyone thinks that if we treat the Chinese dictatorship nicely they will cooperate in the investigation, they are a little divorced from reality. It’s far more likely that the Lancet letter authors had a corrupt motive. Some were directly connected to Chinese virus research. Further, one must note that this was at a time when all right thinking people were required to contradict anything Trump said even if it might be true. That’s a corrupt political motive. In fact, despite the suppression of the lab origin theory for over a year, the Chinese have not cooperated in any investigation but have stonewalled and tried to blame other countries. So this possible motive to help the Chinese cooperate was a miserable failure and makes one question if the letter writers are deluded.
In any case, the net effect of the letter was to suppress any effective investigation. There have been whistle blowers out there for a while whose claims could have been investigated. Calling them names and accusing them of being “conspiracy theorists” is corrupt.
And this all goes to the question the crisis in science and many of our other institutions. They are losing credibility and this little incident only intensifies the institutional crisis of confidence.
> The issue here is
Identified by the “it” in “Perhaps Willard will pay due diligence to it.”
And it’s not what David says “it” is.
Willard, I realize that nuclear power is a sensitive topic and invited a “look, squirrel” (sorry David). As a clear thinking too though it is important to compare how principles are applied in analogous problems. I thought that issue since intimately dissected by the CE community might give clarity on risk management.
Willard, being the coiner of “climateball,” inventor of your climate matrices and Bingo cards, it seems you have a keen appreciation of the sociology behind the debate. As I pointed out to you on a different post I think that the root of the sociological conflicts behind issues like AGW or pandemic debate may be the deeper existential threat to solve.
I had trouble understanding the answer to my questions regarding the where one should morally draw a tipping point line when the honesty-is-the-best-policy conflicts with the cause, whether it be social justice or international relations. -Ron
Ron Graff:
“Willard, I realize that nuclear power is a sensitive topic and invited a “look, squirrel”…
Nuclear is not a sensitive topic, nor is it a squirrel.
Let me try an analogy: You’re informed you need to go to Paris from New York tomorrow. So you naturally pull up airline booking websites and start looking for flights. That’s when Willard say’s you’re just distracting from the travel question, your efforts prove your lack of interest in travel to Paris, and then the bingo cards come out: “ha, ha, contrarian who denies that sailboats are cheaper than airliners thinks people still fly across the Atlantic! Ha!”
It’s at that point that you realize you aren’t conversing with a person who sees any need for you to go to Paris. Tomorrow or anytime in the future.
No need for any analogy here, JeffN.
The first topic here is an Unherd article. In it, there is a reference to an op-ed. In that op-ed there is an argument according to which we should investigate the lab leak hypothesis for security issues.
I offered an argument against it. Ron agreed with it. He then switched to “what about nukes?”
See? That’s a squirrel.
I know that there’s always a good reason for you to talk about nukes. But that’s not relevant to the point I made. You and Ron are therefore burdening me with a commitment I do not have.
But I still gave you my answer: a post entitled Going Nuclear. Ron’s response and yours show me that you have not read it. In fact you commented in the post, lying twice in the span of four years along the way.
It’s funny that our in-house troglodyte mentioned philosophy of language, for topicality, relevance, and commitment (in dialogues) are basic concepts in argumentation theory.
My simple point was that GOF research has risk of accident just like nuclear power. It might be interesting to compare why I think nuclear is some settings is worth the hazard but GOF is not. In GOF it is just too hard to separate it’s sloppy or nefarious use from it’s benevolent use.
Compare and contrast, Ron:
[1] If we do not do X, there are risks.
[2] If we do X, there are risks.
So not only your point is irrelevant, but it’s not logically well-formed.
I honestly don’t understand your point. Mine is that one needs to weigh risks versus benefits of these dangerous technologies in the most robust and forward thinking analysis we can muster. Try to leave politics aside.
Willard: [1] If we do not do X, there are risks.
[2] If we do X, there are risks.
For some people, that’s too complicated — one set of risks drives the other set of risks out of consideration, for no good reason.
I made many points, Ron:
You used “but Nukes.” This is irrelevant to the topic at hand. It burdens me with commitments I do not have. I still replied to it, and your feedback shows me you have not read it. And the simile you make is not of the proper form. Allow me to help. If you really wanted to compare COVID with AGW, you’d say something like this:
[AGW Problem] If we do not investigate the source of the AGW problem and get to the bottom of it, we risk wasting resources.
My response would have been the same. The argument posits a false dichotomy. (Some call that dichotomy the linear model for all kinds of wrong reasons, but who cares.) We sure can do things before being 100% sure on everything regarding climate science!
There are low hanging fruits. We can do things for national security reasons, as it’s an energy problem. Public health reasons compel us to reduce tackle pollution. Financial reasons to manage risks properly. Plain common sense suffices to make everyone see that trying to get a better world is a Good Thing. The list goes on an on.
Same for our energy portfolio. AGW is a Very Big problem. We need all the tools to fight it. Why waste time on wondering which technology is best?
Bashing hippies and renewables is silly.
But it’s not just silly: it also reinforces tribalism. You asked elsewhere how to reduce tribalism. Drop the hippie punching. That’ll make you look better, and you will promote less News Corp crap.
Do you notice how my message is the same whether it’s Covid or AGW? That’s how we see that the analogy fits. That’s also how I can see that the principles I defend cohere.
Try it.
Willard: Bashing hippies and renewables is silly.
Do you notice how my message is the same whether it’s Covid or AGW? That’s how we see that the analogy fits. That’s also how I can see that the principles I defend cohere.
If you wrote a message, you camouflaged it among your other verbiage, such as your mockery of the idea of competing risks. So, what is your message?
“Hippies” requires some clarification by people who write the term, but bashing renewables is an important counterpoint to bashing fossil fuels. Substituting large batteries (mines, pollution, manufacturing costs, etc) for fuel tanks has large trade-offs, that should be examined comprehensively and in detail. Likewise the environmental and social costs of mining rare earths and other resources, versus the environmental and social costs of fossil fuels.
> “Hippies” requires some clarification
No it does not, Matt Stat, and why should I waste my time with what you’ll call more verbiage?
Be seeing you.
WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION HUANAN WET MARKET – COVID-19 QUESTIONS by BJM:
[Bat Virus (Wildlife) Jumps To Pengolin (Exotic Animal – Anteater) Jumps To (Transmission To) To Human?
• How many workers [percentage/total] in the Huanan Wet market tested positive for COVID 19? When did Huanan Wet market workers test positive [date]? How many died [date]?
• How many workers in the Huanan Wet markets had family members, friends and neighbors test positive for COVID-19 [date]? How many died [date]?
• How many distributors, truck drivers, et al in the Huanan Wet markets test positive for COVID-19 [date]? How many died [date]? Where were the distributors and truck drivers from? Did those purveyor area [good & services] market hubs, the distributors [middlemen] and truck drivers came from, have COVID-19 [community spread]? How many individuals died from COVID-19 in these local, rural and remote areas? Dates of death? Did Wuhan Wet Markets distribute (community spread) products to City wholesalers, Factory kitchens, University Campus Kitchens, Restaurants, Food Co-ops, Food prep and/or catering businesses, etc.
• Were there any air/rail transports of wildlife and exotic animals to the Huanan Wet markets? If so, Air/rail transports: Inside and/or Outside of China: where were such air/rail transports from? Community Spread? Simple question: If not from China, where do the wildlife and exotic animals [live & dead] shipments come from — which are sold in the wet markets throughout China – what countries? Are any China Wet Markets affiliated with any underground /black market operations to secure exotic and wild animals?
• Did any workers from the Huanan Wet markets travel outside Wuhan City? Outside Hubie Province? Any travel to Japan, Korea, Europe, Middle East, India or the United States?
• Did any Huanan Wet market workers’ family, friends or neighbors travel outside Wuhan City? Outside Hubie Province? Any travel to Japan, Korea, Europe, Middle East, India or the United States?
• Did any Huanan Wet market Worker’s family, neighbors, or friends study abroad? Where? Did such students travel back and forth to Wuhan City? When?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPpoJGYlW54
How wildlife trade is linked to coronavirus — And why the disease first appeared in China. NOTE: As our expert Peter Li points out in the video, “The majority of the people in China do not eat wildlife animals. Those people who consume these wildlife animals are the rich and the powerful –a small minority.” This video explains how the people of China are themselves victims of the …
http://www.youtube.com
WUHAN WET MARKET & CHINA PORTS RODENT SOURCE (CARRIERS) Of DISEASE? by BJM
WET MARKETS RODENTS – PORTS RODENTS SOURCE (CARRIERS) OF COVID-19?
DO RODENT TRANSMISSIONS COMPOUND THE EFFECTS OF COVID-19?
Did the World Health Organization [WHO] and CDC do a thorough investigation as to the direct or indirect COVID-19 disease transmission by the rodent population [disease carriers] in China’s wet markets, ports and major cities, including U.S. cities? Do not rodents run [scavenge] around the China wet markets/waterfront markets at night vis-a-vis through, around, under & near the cages of live and dead animals [pus, blood, excrement, etc]?
• Rodents directly transmit (CDC Source Below): Hanatvirus Pulmonary Syndrome, Plague, Tularemia, South American Arenaviruses:(hemorrhage fevers: Argentine, Bolivian, Sabia-associated & Venezuelan) et al. https://www.cdc.gov/rodents/diseases/direct.html
• Rodents indirectly transmit (CDC Source Below): Powassan Virus, Omsk Hemorrhagic Fever, West Nile Virus et al. https://www.cdc.gov/rodents/diseases/indirect.html
• https://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/hygiene/ships/gssanitation8.pdf
• 8 Disease Vectors – World Health Organization 74
8 Disease Vectors 8.1 Health concerns The control of disease vectors such as insects and rodents is necessary for the maintenance of health and healthful conditions aboard ships. www.who.int
• https://globalnews.ca/news/6577779/japan-coronavirus-cruise-ship-concerns/
https://tuoitrenews.vn/news/society/20210504/182-quarantined-on-board-luxury-cruise-ship-in-vietnam-s-ha-long-bay-over-covid19-fear/60720.html
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/23-sailors-us-navy-aircraft-carrier-test-positive/story?id=69818040
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23378666/
• A comparison of bats and rodents as reservoirs of zoonotic viruses: are bats special? — Twice The Number Of Rodent Species Than There Are Bat Species.
Giant New York rats overtaking Central Park and the UWS
https://nypost.com/2020/11/21/new-yorkers-take-charge-against-citys-surging-rat-population/
Nov 21, 2020 Rats as big as bunnies are roaming the streets in broad daylight, nesting in trees and chewing through car engine wires that can cost thousands to fix.
WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION HUANAN WET MARKET – COVID-19 QUESTIONS by BJM:
[Bat Virus (Wildlife) Jumps To Pengolin (Exotic Animal – Anteater) Jumps To (Transmission To) To Human?
• How many workers [percentage/total] in the Huanan Wet market tested positive for COVID 19? When did Huanan Wet market workers test positive [date]? How many died [date]?
• How many workers in the Huanan Wet markets had family members, friends and neighbors test positive for COVID-19 [date]? How many died [date]?
• How many distributors, truck drivers, et al in the Huanan Wet markets test positive for COVID-19 [date]? How many died [date]? Where were the distributors and truck drivers from? Did those purveyor area [good & services] market hubs, the distributors [middlemen] and truck drivers came from, have COVID-19 [community spread]? How many individuals died from COVID-19 in these local, rural and remote areas? Dates of death? Did Wuhan Wet Markets distribute (community spread) products to City wholesalers, Factory kitchens, University Campus Kitchens, Restaurants, Food Co-ops, Food prep and/or catering businesses, etc.
• Were there any air/rail transports of wildlife and exotic animals to the Huanan Wet markets? If so, Air/rail transports: Inside and/or Outside of China: where were such air/rail transports from? Community Spread? Simple question: If not from China, where do the wildlife and exotic animals [live & dead] shipments come from — which are sold in the wet markets throughout China – what countries? Are any China Wet Markets affiliated with any underground /black market operations to secure exotic and wild animals?
• Did any workers from the Huanan Wet markets travel outside Wuhan City? Outside Hubie Province? Any travel to Japan, Korea, Europe, Middle East, India or the United States?
• Did any Huanan Wet market workers’ family, friends or neighbors travel outside Wuhan City? Outside Hubie Province? Any travel to Japan, Korea, Europe, Middle East, India or the United States?
• Did any Huanan Wet market Worker’s family, neighbors, or friends study abroad? Where? Did such students travel back and forth to Wuhan City? When?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPpoJGYlW54
How wildlife trade is linked to coronavirus And why the disease first appeared in China. NOTE: As our expert Peter Li points out in the video, “The majority of the people in China do not eat wildlife animals. Those people who consume these wildlife animals are the rich and the powerful –a small minority.” This video explains how the people of China are themselves victims of the …
http://www.youtube.com
WUHAN WET MARKET & CHINA PORTS RODENT SOURCE (CARRIERS) Of DISEASE? by BJM
WET MARKETS RODENTS – PORTS RODENTS SOURCE (CARRIERS) OF COVID-19?
DO RODENT TRANSMISSIONS COMPOUND THE EFFECTS OF COVID-19?
Did the World Health Organization [WHO] and CDC do a thorough investigation as to the direct or indirect COVID-19 disease transmission by the rodent population [disease carriers] in China’s wet markets, ports and major cities, including U.S. cities? Do not rodents run [scavenge] around the China wet markets/waterfront markets at night vis-a-vis through, around, under & near the cages of live and dead animals [pus, blood, excrement, etc]?
• Rodents directly transmit (CDC Source Below): Hanatvirus Pulmonary Syndrome, Plague, Tularemia, South American Arenaviruses:(hemorrhage fevers: Argentine, Bolivian, Sabia-associated & Venezuelan) et al.
https://www.cdc.gov/rodents/diseases/direct.html
• Rodents indirectly transmit (CDC Source Below): Powassan Virus, Omsk Hemorrhagic Fever, West Nile Virus et al.
https://www.cdc.gov/rodents/diseases/indirect.html
• https://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/hygiene/ships/gssanitation8.pdf
• 8 Disease Vectors – World Health Organization 74
8 Disease Vectors 8.1 Health concerns The control of disease vectors such as insects and rodents is necessary for the maintenance of health and healthful conditions aboard ships. www.who.int
• https://globalnews.ca/news/6577779/japan-coronavirus-cruise-ship-concerns/
https://tuoitrenews.vn/news/society/20210504/182-quarantined-on-board-luxury-cruise-ship-in-vietnam-s-ha-long-bay-over-covid19-fear/60720.html
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/23-sailors-us-navy-aircraft-carrier-test-positive/story?id=69818040
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23378666/
• A comparison of bats and rodents as reservoirs of zoonotic viruses: are bats special? — Twice The Number Of Rodent Species Than There Are Bat Species.
Giant New York rats overtaking Central Park and the UWS
https://nypost.com/2020/11/21/new-yorkers-take-charge-against-citys-surging-rat-population/
Nov 21, 2020 Rats as big as bunnies are roaming the streets in broad daylight, nesting in trees and chewing through car engine wires that can cost thousands to fix.
Must read
https://unherd.com/2021/05/what-if-there-was-a-lab-leak/?=frbottom
Yet more evidence Judith that the fake concensus is collapsing rapidly. The Hill podcast today mentioning the growing evidence supporting the lab leak hypothesis. Even the New York Times and the Washington (com)Post mention it recently too.
So who has the authority to regulate bioengineering? The technology is spreading almost as fast as a pandemic.
https://singularityhub.com/2021/05/26/one-crispr-treatment-lowered-cholesterol-in-monkeys-by-60-percent/
All of this is simply more circumstantial evidence for a leak with nothing concrete. Here’s a balanced perspective.
https://www.businessinsider.com/wuhan-lab-leak-animal-spillover-coronavirus-origin-questions-2021-5
I just came across something this morning where a scientist was interviewed who said that the covid19 virus cannot infect bats. If it came from a bat virus, it must have jumped to a different species first and mutated there or been manipulated in a lab. I also saw that no animal from the wet market has been found to be carrying this virus.
One thing is certain and that is that the Chinese Communist party is very efficient at suppressing information that puts it in an unfavorable light, so the lack of definitive evidence at this point is not meaningful. What is disastrous is that we may never know because people in China regularly disappear never to be heard from again.
It is quite certain however that Judith’s characterization of this as a fake concensus that it didn’t come from a lab is absolutely on target. It’s just another example of scientists behaving very badly.
Viral epidemiology is a primitive field that relies on crude mechanistic narratives that mostly lack rigorous quantification.
It could have jumped to humans and mutated there. That is very much consistent with the idea that it was present in humans months prior to the outbreak in Wuhan.
Powerful indeed:
But what would it mean if the lab leak hypotheses proved correct? The result would be uncomfortable not just for the Chinese Communist Party, which would be guilty of overseeing arguably the biggest cover-up in history of an event that caused economic chaos, millions of deaths and misery around the world. It would shake science to its foundations for carrying out risky research despite clear warnings of the dangers, and then collaborating in an epic whitewash. And it would challenge a media that meekly accepted the establishment view rather than doing its job of asking difficult questions — a failure even more serious than the Iraq War intelligence debacle. Indeed, much of science and the media already look sadly tainted by their failures on this front, regardless of the outcome.
“But what would it mean if the lab leak hypotheses proved correct?”
Liability law, with monetary damages, is a real thing. What would it mean if the trial lawyers (major Democratic Party donors and media darlings) began insisting on assigning blame in order to collect damages? The flip-flop on this issue could be faster and more laughable than the 180 pivot on “defund the police.”
These events highlight three significant scientific issues exposed by the pandemic that need tackling regardless of the origins: a dismal WHO leadership and structure not up to the task of protecting public safety; the collusion of a scientific establishment that sought to shut down debate rather than follow evidence; and the shredding of the reputations of some key journals that failed to promote free debate based on facts.
Good article on implications for GOF field, science in general and the media. And apparently he was thinking there was no problem with these before now, (being he is an award winning liberal). BTW, this great writer says Shi Zhengli rather than Zhengli Shi. The later is the way I see it in all the scientific journal articles. I just checked again; It’s definitely Zhengli Shi. I then checked Wikipedia and had an “Ahh ha!” And now I know half the journalists use Wikipedia for their scientific research. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi_Zhengli
GOF research must be banned now. There is no way to discern constructing bio-monsters for curiosity versus for WMD. Even if there was it would be too dangerous due to accidental leak being impossible to prevent for certain. As one virologist put it GOF is like searching for gas leaks with a lit match.
‘Greater clarity about the origins will help guide efforts to prevent a next pandemic. Such prevention efforts would look very different depending on which of these scenarios proves to be the most likely.’
The next zoonotic spillover will likely not be anticipated. And if the Cambridge Working Group is right – laboratory biohazard protocols need urgent revisiting.
‘Recent incidents involving smallpox, anthrax and bird flu in some of the top US laboratories remind us of the fallibility of even the most secure laboratories, reinforcing the urgent need for a thorough reassessment of biosafety. Such incidents have been accelerating and have been occurring on average over twice a week with regulated pathogens in academic and government labs across the country. An accidental infection with any pathogen is concerning. But accident risks with newly created “potential pandemic pathogens” raise grave new concerns.’ http://www.cambridgeworkinggroup.org/
The encouraging element is the speed with which multiple vaccines were produced around the world. It still seems – btw – that a zoonotic spillover is the dominant paradigm within the narrow speciality of virology. The debate outside of that I would still characterize as junk science and conspiracy theories. I would now add thought policing to my very short list. Poor wee willie has been polishing this turd for a very long time.
https://climateball.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/climateball-bingo-v-1-1.png
Freedom was endowed on us by our Creator – and freedom fighting is a long and honorable tradition. It should not be sacrificed on the altar of poor wee willies AI economic overlord. The freedom fighter response is to pursue economic freedom in a context ofhigh economic growth.
For that we need much more and cheaper energy this century. The encouraging fact is that advanced nuclear reactors – safe, proliferation resistant, manageable waste streams and cheap – around which robust systems can be built – will start to come on line this decade. In the interim there is a need for gas and high efficiency/low emission coal generation.
It’s part of a dated 20th century trend in philosophy to do textual analysis of language and discourse. Mostly a distraction that helps tenured professors pass the time. You see, that way you don’t have to make a constructive contribution and can still be a highly paid member of the elite. And you can show up on blogs and cast vague doubts without actually saying anything substantive.
“Research cartel, knowledge monopoly”
Hmm – I wonder in what other scientific field sometimes discussed on this site – those entities might also play a role?
Since this issue has been beat pretty good, although not quite a dead horse, at least until until new nuggets emerge … I thought it might be fun to toss out an old article.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/real-war-science-14782.html
Willard …
Absolutely loved The Bingo Core!!! The not so subtle characterizations were funny and clever. You had me LOL.
But dude, a block diagram? That’s soooo beneath you. Let me suggest a medium where we can have full blown Willardness humor. If you can’t draw, get a good caricaturist/cartoonist. The scene: a mosh pit with a band playing above. Imagine the characters? More than a few could be posed with a raised finger, a book/research paper in the other in mid-pontification. And about to be hit with a round house kick. Several characters shown pummeling people while they’re down. A few scrambling to get out of the pit, only to be pulled back. A few succeeding escape are nonetheless drawn to stay and expound on the chaos itself, ducking objects thrown their way. And, of course, we put Dr. Curry playing lead or rhythm guitar, belting out her lyrics.
Humor has become vastly underrated. Comedy has been destroyed. If we can take a moment and laugh at ourselves, maybe, just maybe, we could bring a more open mind to what others have to say. Well … I don’t want to get too carried away. But you get the point. If anybody can do it, you can.
Thanks, Bill.
The characters will be in the Manual. If you like cartoons:
https://www.flamewarriorsguide.com/
LOL! Love it.
Thanks.
This Twitter thread by a blue check NYC talk radio science editor is a really interesting lefty establishment enforcing dogma. https://twitter.com/MoNscience/status/1396240581651742724
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change first met in 1990, where it predicted that GHGs could fuel global warming.
Even as more evidence accumulated, efforts to sow doubt delayed action.
The “natural origins” vs “lab leak” debate around COVID-19 has entered this realm…”
So anyone who believes in lab leak also let us keep burning fossil fuel which is bad. Despite beginning with infantile logic this person actually repeats some good points I haven’t read elsewhere.
Point 1) Wade said serial passage may have been used as a GOF technique while science has proven this is impossible. There was a scientific study done that if you grow a pathogen in a petri dish it will actually become less pathogenic.
Counter) I don’t know why they did the study because that is what I would expect. A hand fed virus would become fat and lazy and slowly accumulate baggage RNA in exchange for it’s critical motifs. But the WIV was given humanized mice. They might have also bought from smugglers an exotic variety of mammals to train the virus to be less selective. SARS2 can infect cats, rabbits and many other mammals but not bats.
Point 2) Leak theorists point to the lack of finding the natural host animal source of the virus. But we still don’t know the natural origin of Ebola.
Counter) We don’t know exactly when Ebola first originated because the first outbreak that came to the attention of the WHO was in 1976. like Aids it originated in sparsely populated areas in Africa and may have been simmering for years or decades. They think it comes from eating uncooked bats or monkeys or other “bush meat.”
Asides: It’s named for the river it was found near.
I hope we don’t give the Chinese money to do GOF on Ebola.
Point 3) If and when the natural host animal is identified the lab leak believers will deny it or say the animal was connected with the lab.
Counter) Although this is the best point, I think forensic details could tell us whether the animal virus was perfectly natural. We have already seen this with the Chinese presenting the pangolin as the host yet being rejected by even the natural proponents (even Dr. Christian Anderson) due to a phylogenic misstep. Also, as I mentioned in another thread, a study overseen by none other than Peter Daszak proved that pangolins have no coronaviruses in the wild. This means the sick pangolins found in 2019 got first infected in captivity, either from other animals, from the smugglers, (or from a lab).
“Point 1) Wade said serial passage may have been used as a GOF technique while science has proven this is impossible. There was a scientific study done that if you grow a pathogen in a petri dish it will actually become less pathogenic.”
If that’s the entirety of what was said that is badly misleading. That serial passage is used in GOF research is not in dispute.
An interesting insight recorded 26 May 2021.
Peter Daszak, Thea Kølsen Fischer, and Marion Koopmans, members of the WHO team investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2 join TWiV to explain the work done by the committee during phase one, their conclusions, and the extent of work that remains to be done in phase two.
I think investigations about the Wuhan lab will lead to unreasonable dead ends. China’s People’s Liberation Army was also involved in the research, this angle is little discussed. I imagine it will be a black hole to truly getting to the bottom of what was going on in the Wuhan lab; but hopefully at least there will be a resolution that there was an attempt to weaponize SARS. In a report published in June 2020, Beijing researchers affiliated with the Academy of Military Medical Science “published a new model for studying SARS-CoV-2, one that uses the CRISPR gene editing tool to alter mice lung cells. The scientists equipped the mice with the ACE2 receptor from human lung cells. This is the same receptor that they learned how to exploit with modified coronaviruses, using enhanced gain-of-function properties.”
https://sciencedeception.com/2021-03-14-new-book-chinese-militarys-coronavirus-research.html
While there’s no formal tie-in specifically to the Wuhan lab yet, the Chinese recently completed human trials in China for a type of lung cancer using CRISPR therapy. So there’s a potential path in this that could tie into PLA research at the Wuhan lab.
“In 2016, a lung cancer patient became the first person in the world to be treated with a CRISPR therapy: this patient was injected with PD-1 edited T cells in a Chinese clinical trial. This and an American clinical trial using CRISPR-based immunotherapies for cancer have been completed”
https://innovativegenomics.org/news/crispr-clinical-trials-2021/
As the threesome agree in the course of the discussion they have been told ‘there is intelligence’ but when they ask for evidence or more detail there is nothing forthcoming … As they comment during the video nothing in the three visits to labs and the questionning of staff by themselves and others during the investigation led to any unease about the answers.
My problem with the video is that the panel approaches origins of the virus mostly from natural causations. They attempt to reverse engineer natural progressions. They also elaborately discuss: samples that need to be sampled for mutation, the history of COVID strains, the food market, etc. So their approach to the investigation is mostly centered on variations of natural causations. The last part of the discussion dealt with what they called the elephant in the room (they laughed) dismissing any malevolent intent, “deliberate creation”, and diving right into laboratory escape possibilities of the virus as unlikely. They interviewed some of the scientists, they took the information given them at face value. They made no mention of interviewing PLA affiliations (I doubt they would ever be allowed to do that unless from the context of a scripted interview). They used the statement “they had no leads” for the escape scenario. Bottom line, this part of the inquiry was superficial from a forensic perspective. As they stated, it wasn’t designed as a lab audit, they simple asked questions, and they accepted the answers at face value. “Answers were consistent with everything else that’s out there”, was one of the comments. Their intent was to only come up with an “initial conclusion”.
The WHO’s inquiry to this point is far from a investigative deep dive, it’s many shades too pale from one. They believe there’s not enough information to call for a deep audit. Important here is their predetermined collective “attitude”, motivated reasoning and confirmation biases. These are very evident in this discussion; in fact they’re uncomfortably giddy in their dismissiveness at any escape scenario.
Early in the video they touch on a key, but they don’t elaborate; who shared in “custody of samples” from the Wuhan lab? There’s understandably no answer, yet there’s much to answer to. There was no discussion of the PLA’s involvement in the research, when the panel laughed at the question of “deliberate creation”, it represents investigative malpractice IMO. One must assume the PLA would have custody of their portion of gain-of-function research, wouldn’t they? So why is that funny? I can’t imagine the WHO will make the tiniest dent diving into where “possible” weaponized strains of the virus traveled, inside or outside China. Academy of Military Medical Science research will be a dead end. The WHO will dismiss these considerations and not insist on a deeper audit.
Thank you for the video, Lass. Very informative.
What stood out to me, like jungletrunks, was their belief that a lab audit wasn’t needed based solely on interviews. And it seemed those interviews, unless I’m mistaken, were not with the military who were also utilizing the lab. Koopman mentioned following the science. Interviews aren’t science. And they seem strangely satisfied with that.
‘My problem with the video is that the panel approaches origins of the virus mostly from natural causations.’
That is the ‘age old way’ that public health has dealt with nasty diseases as I briefly experienced early in my working life. You work back as far as you can to (hopefully) find the source of the spread. It would seem places like Iceland still have an interest in maintaining such detailed systems but the UK not so much. Perhaps we will (all) do a lot better next time.
I am really agnostic about the source of SARS-CoV-2 and have seen strong papers on either side. I suspect we may never know.
As it relates to natural causations: “That is the ‘age old way’ that public health has dealt with nasty diseases as I briefly experienced early in my working life.”
I appreciate your sensibility, UK-Weather Lass. And I thank you for the video too, BTW. The video however was informative in a way the WHO wouldn’t hope it would be for me, I’m sure.
I would normally take the same position that you take, but not in context of the period we’re in. This is a period of hyper technological growth, of global technological theft; of global expansionist ambitions, and of Eastern globally malevolent collectivist visions (simpatico within Western internal collectivist visions). There’s the rub. This is a period where the East has made significant inroads into Western sensibilities through coercion and corruption of Western institutions. There’s much maneuvering afoot.
Mother Nature can no longer be humanities innocent fall gal. IMO. If there wasn’t significant anecdotal evidence, with equal motivations, then I wouldn’t hold the strong suspicions that I do.
One other observation. They said their questioning during the interview was aggressive and somewhat rude. And, that when asked about the ‘conspiracy’ theory of a lab leak, the Chinese responded that they don’t address such things so as not to give them any weight. After almost 170M cases and 3,500,000 deaths I can’t see how any serious questions could be considered rude. The framing of a lab leak theory as conspiracy, which the three smirked at, along with the hosts, is about as rude as one could get to the families of the 3,500,000. As health advocacy scientists/professionals it is their duty to investigate any and all possibilities.
“We may never know.”
There is a 96.2% similar virus reported in the wild. We either start calling to visit the cave where that sample was allegedly collected or resign that the tyranny under corrupt politics is humanity’s ultimate destiny.
Bill: “The framing of a lab leak theory as conspiracy, which the three smirked at, along with the hosts, is about as rude as one could get to the families of the 3,500,000. As health advocacy scientists/professionals it is their duty to investigate any and all possibilities.”
Well said.
It’s demonstrable how the Left embarrassingly tiptoes around Chinese sensitivities; Biden called the brutality towards Chinese Uyghurs “a different cultural norm”. He’s walked that exclamation back a bit; yet there’s not much outcry among the elitist Left about Uyghur concentration camps. And please; let’s not call COVID-19 the Wuhan virus.
Meant to say: I think investigations about the Wuhan lab will lead to “unresolvable” dead ends; not unreasonable, but maybe that too.
1) China is a totalitarian authoritarian fascist system that literally rounds up people that are deemed enemies of the state.
2) No one in their right mind would trust a single thing China says
3) The Wuhan Lab is the only Level 4 Lab in China, they do experiments on the Corona Virus
4) People at the lab got sick in late 2019
5) China persecuted whistleblowers
6) Cell Tower data shows a lock down around the Lab
7) China didn’t shut down the “Wet Market.” it is open today
8) China is obstructing the investigation of the lab
9) Most of the early cases had no exposure to the Wet Market
10) Horseshoe Bats aren’t sold at the Wet Market
11) The Horshshoe Bat’s habitat is 800km from the Wuhan Lab
12) The same media that “debunked” the Hunter Biden Laptop, promoted the “Russian Collusian” and Steale Doscier, 50 Intel Officers claiming Hunter Biden’s Labtop was Russian “disinformation,” claimed Russia was paying bounties for US Troups have worked hard to “debunk” Trump’s claim that it was in fact the China Virus. He should have called it the CCP VIrus .
13) China did nothing to stop the COVID from leaving the Country, but shut down travel internally.
14) The Bidens have close ties to China, and benefitted by not blaming China to defeat Trump.
Facts are the Liberal Media, Academia and the Democrats politicized science, as they have Climate Change, to push a counterproductive political agenda.
Oh, BTW, Democrats claim a surge in Asian Hate Crimes. Simply look at where those crimes occur (deep blue cities) and who is committing them. The FBI keeps stats and they refule the narrative the Progressives are pushing.
Lastly, the media and Democrats are demanding irrefutable evidence that China is the source, yet they never demanded any evidence supporting the charges against Trump. They even worked to cover up the Hunter Laptop. Also, Biden blocks pipelines in the US, allows the Russian NORDSTREAM 2 Pipeline and works to funnel Billions to Irarn as well as helping them get nuclear Power/Weapons.
Democrats/Media/China/Iran are all working against the best interests of America, and COVID is just the most recent example of the dangers they pose to America.
Matt Ridley writes today in the Spectator:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-covid-lab-leak-theory-is-looking-increasingly-plausible
Nobody told Ridley that the consensus is changing on UFOs in USA thanks to the military pilots, Tucker and now CBS 60 Minutes. Nessie, not so much.
How could anyone in their right minds not have thought the Wuhan Lab was the source? There is only 1 lab in China dealing with those kinds of viruses. Efforts should have first been directed at ruling out the lab instead of simply saying Trump says it is from the lab so it must not be. The Trump derangement syndrome has cost millions of lives and countless dollars all for politics. BTW, Biden’s party is literally fighting Nuclear Power in the US all while supporting Nuclear Power in Iran. He and Obama helped fund Iran who is using that money to supply missiles to Hamas today. Biden blocks the US Pipelines and aids the Russian Pipeline. His fiscal policy insanity is driving Energy prices higher which benefits Russian and Iran and hurts the US.
BTW, the UFO stuff is really really really cool if you haven’t seen it.
The silvery tetrahedral UFO’s are tetroons from the Univ of Hawaii and launched off NOAA ships to monitor oceanic air circulation patterns. Dark colored ones were made in New Mexico as an attempt at altitude stabilization via solar heating, but those didn’t perform all that well.
Balloons don’t:
1) Travel 80,000 ft/47 Miles in a second
2) Accelerate against the wind, change direction at will and submerge underwater
3) Outrun fighter jets
4) Travel is well-defined patterns and incoordination
5) Follow aircraft and ships
6) Travel both up and down and even underwater
7) Require high tech radar and FLIR to see
8) San Diego is no where near Hawaii, and the UFOs were near the surface of the ocean when discovered
9) Have been seen for years, long before the balloons were created
1, 2, and 3) Someone ran the numbers from the HUD in some of the encounter videos, and while it looks like the UFO’s were traveling at tremendous speeds, and the pilots are all excited about it, the math from the targeting data said the targets were drifting at a bit over 10 knots and at a stable altitude the whole time.
4, 8) The tetroons were made at the University of Hawaii, the NOAA ships were releasing them off the coast of San Diego, sometimes in coordinated patterns to get wind data. Check papers with something like “Smart Balloons for Lagrangian Air Mass Tracking”. They’ve been launching these for years at all kinds of locations off the coasts of Australia, Tasmania, Africa, and California and writing up the results.
9) The tetroons are new in UFOs, or at least from the 1990’s onwards, when they started making tetrahedral balloons. Prior to that UFO’s were always disks, saucers, and cigars. Now frankly, a poofy tetrahedron is a pretty stupid shape for any flying object, even a space object. It’s a tell, like seeing a cigar shaped UFO with “Goodyear” painted on the side. Just filter those sightings out and see what’s left.
I’m not saying that climatologists are behind all UFOs, just some of them, and the tetrahedral ones in particular.
George, have you seen the videos and the interviews? The object disappears and reappears 47 miles away in a second. They send out a second team to locate it as the second location. The jet in the “Go Fast” video is having trouble tracking it because it is going so fast. The “Gimble” Video shows the speed as 238 Knots AGAINST the wind and it rotates.
https://www.history.com/videos/uss-roosevelt-gimbal-ufo-declassified-video
The latest video shows the UFO diving into the ocean.
From your comments, I get the feeling you haven’t seen the evidence.
George,
The US military has been investigating UFOs since WWII, whether they admit it or not. They have taken many approaches in levels of compartmentalization and public stances but have never stopped because the UFOs never stopped. Finally, in 2007 Sen. Harry Reid stepped in because he had enough power and curiosity to fund a secret program that could more effectively study the phenomenon (and I guess report to him). The new department is called AATIP. The original head of AATIP, Lou Elizondo, resigned a few years ago and went public with some leaked video which the military acknowledged was real two years ago (I think). A directive to report on the subject to the public was slipped into the covid relief bill last year and we should be seeing something next month.
Two good books on the subject I have read, one very very old and one more recent.
Coslife, some of the targets are definitely weather balloons, complete with the instrument package dangling visibly underneath. One of them is even described as “an upside down pyramid”. That’s a tetroon, just as a “giant snoopy” would be an escapee from the Macy’s parade. If the Navy isn’t filtering out those, then they’re obviously not competent at rationally judging UFO encounters.
Over on an aerospace blog I discussed why the UFO’s only seem interested in F-18’s that use the AN/ASQ-228 FLIR pod. They also only seem interested in Navy aircraft, which I’m sure the Air Force takes as kind of an insult. The Roosevelt video looks a bit like they’re tracking their own laser designator, which is sort of a PID loop problem in control systems, which also occurs if you try to look at an after-image that’s just off-center in your retina, when the act of trying to center the target moves the image of the target because the target isn’t real. If you treat such an image as a real object, that object will easily defy the laws of physics, such as making supersonic impacts with the water without even making a ripple.
Other videos show objects that seem to have no surface shape, just a 2-D outline. Such objects are extremely common in optics and plague some cinematic lenses, especially zoom lenses, which is why photographers hang big barn-door size shades over their cameras. You can’t do that with a FLIR pod, so any bright light source can send light bouncing all around inside the optical train.
And it’s doubtful that UFO’s are flying supersonic all over off the coast of San Diego without a thousand fishing boats noticing them every year.
George, I hope you will take the time to read a book on the subject sometime. I happened to find a copy of Report on UFOs (1960) by Captain Edward Rupelt, the head the air intelligence’s third attempt to explain the phenomena, which was the 1st version of Project Blue Book. That was 1951 to 1953. Rupelt described many unexplained cases, the most typical being unidentified targets seen on ground radar that would cause jets to scramble and play cat and mouse chase until the planes ran low on fuel. The UFO would then vanish from radar at incredible speeds. Rupelt had resigned from the Air Force after they convened the top secret Robertson Panel which determined the UFOs were not a military threat and thus Blue Book’s mission would change to one of public relations, explaining UFOs. This was at the height of the “UFO flap” where the national news was alight with sightings, especially after a major incident over DC visible to thousands, dubbed the Washington Merry-go-round.
Rupelt’s Blue Book determined that 90% of cases had natural or terrestrial explanations, including a ton of weather balloons, blimps and fireballs. The Air Force tried to block him from publishing but then he did so in England in ’56. He published in the USA in ’60 but never got to promote his book, dying that same year at the age of 37 of a heart attack. I found his book in about 1970 in my town library by accident while researching a school report. I bought my own copy on Ebay about 15 years ago for a couple of dollars to read again. I just saw it’s worth quite a bit more now.
Ohio State astronomer J Allen Hynek, the father of modern Ufology, worked with Rupelt and stayed on to debunk UFOs for the public relation Blue Book through the ’60s until a congressman named Gerald R. Ford saw a UFO along with thousands of Michiganders, which Hynek infamously called swamp gas. Ford called a hearing on UFOs. The two experts called were Hynek and Carl Sagan. The esteemed NASA scientist said UFOs were impossible due to the speed of light and planetary distances, the consensus view. Swamp gas Hynek though was sweating a bit and under oath shocked everyone, saying he honestly couldn’t explain 10% of the cases he had investigated. He went further and suggested the government set up a scientific program to study UFOs.
The US government instead closed Blue Book and declared they had no more interest the subject. Hynek, after unsuccessfully floating the idea to Ohio State, resigned and formed the Center for UFO study in Arizona. Hynek has a cameo in Close Encounters of the Third Kind as the old lab coated scientist staring at the landing ship at the end.
George, from your comments, I’m not sure you have seen the videos. There is no chance these are balloons. As far as AIr Force vs. Navy, just because the AIr Force hasn’t released any information, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Anyway, here are the official videos released by the Navy. These aren’t balloons.
Watch the Pentagon’s three declassified UFO videos taken by U.S. Navy pilots
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO_M0hLlJ-Q
Navy pilots describe encounters with UFOs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtMbBPzqHY
UFO: Pentagon releases three leaked videos – is the truth finally out there?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a0xIzp-fbs
Pentagon declassifies Navy ‘UFO’ videos (VIDEO 1/3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TumprpOwHY
Pentagon declassifies Navy ‘UFO’ videos (VIDEO 2/3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TumprpOwHY
New footage shows UFOs swarming US Navy ship
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWt-f07Gm0w
New Video Raises More UFO Questions Ahead of Pentagon Report Release
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rh4QngYJG4I
Balloons don’t do what is captured in those videos.
CO2 is life.
Check Youtube for everyone’s home-made tetroon videos. What are the odds that, after probably hundreds of thousands of years, the space aliens started making silvery tetrahedral space ships right at the same time that Youtubers started launching big silvery DIY tetrahedron shaped balloons and turning them loose?
Why tetrahedrons all of the sudden? Because plastic companies don’t sell spherical plastic bags. A tetrahedron is the easiest volume to make out of flat sheets.
The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence just released its report on UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena).
As expected it says almost nothing. Here is a sample paragraph:
On the other hand, this is a huge step for the USIC, to be able to admit there are vehicles in the restricted military airspace that defy conventional explanation, and that there has been over 113 unexplainable incidents in just the las two-year cross section of the continuous events dating back to WWII, and likely earlier. They bravely predicted that the actual explanation when found will likely fall into one of five categories, including, “airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, USG or U.S. industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and a catchall ‘other’ bin.”
Extraterrestrial technology is not mentioned but I think that is the “other.”
Much like the lab origin theory for covid one can almost feel the discomfort of the ensconced, effete technocrats.
Accelerate viral mutations through cell cultures is possible. It’s a bit hit and miss apparently. So is the mutation of virus’ in host animals – but there the opportunities are endless are the ‘contingent probability’ approaches unity. Junk science – btw – can be recognized by narrative without strong evidence. Conspiracy theories by the reliance on hearsay and conjecture as evidence. As they say in the video posted just above – show us the evidence. As I have here on a couple of occasions.
‘Although SARS‐CoV‐2’s efficient solution for ACE2 binding has been accurately described as something that could not be intentionally engineered nucleotide‐by‐nucleotide,[ 2 ] it could well be selected for after serial passage through ferrets or cell cultures in a lab. The only origin for the SARS‐CoV‐2 spike‐protein RBD that the sequence data excludes is the deliberate manufacturing and introduction of the entire SARS‐CoV spike‐protein RBD sequence to create SARS‐CoV‐2. Otherwise, there are no genetic data to distinguish among natural and engineered possibilities at the present time.’ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7435492/
Robert …
The three scientists in the video gave hearsay and conjecture on the possibility of a lab leak. And just because they are ‘experts’ doesn’t disqualify what they say as conspiracy.
For the purpose of this thread and having confidence in science, an actual audit of the lab, by those without any conflict of interest, needs to take place. It doesn’t matter whether the virus was naturally evolved and naturally distributed, or naturally evolved and accidentally leaked from the lab, or genetically altered and leaked from the lab. 3,500,000 people died, as of yesterday. If there is ever such a time to ‘follow the science’ this is it. There’s no room for hand waving.
The ‘three scientists’ interviewed lab workers directly. Akin to a legal deposition? This is not hearsay. And the investigation is ongoing. This post, the yellow journalism it is based on and most of the comments are nothing but hand waving.
Robert …
I didn’t know you had such respect for the legal profession, considering you pooh-poohed the attorney who responded to you a short while ago.
Don’t get cute.
I am not opposed to evidence – just haven’t seen any.
‘I am not a virologist and I defer in this to authoritative scientific sources. This is building on the rock of science and not the sand of legal opinion.’
And neither of us will see any evidence until we have an actual investigation. We owe it to the 3,500,000.
A qualitative risk assessment is hardly dispositive – but a laboratory leak remains unlikely on the best evidence. Other conspiracy theories are even wilder.
‘The closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2 from bats and pangolin are evolutionarily distant from SARSCoV-2. There has been speculation regarding the presence of human ACE2 receptor binding and a furin-cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2, but both have been found in animal viruses as well, and elements of the furin-cleavage site are present in RmYN02 and the new Thailand bat SARSr-CoV. There is no record of viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 in any laboratory before December 2019, or genomes that in combination could provide a SARS-CoV-2 genome. Regarding accidental culture, prior to December 2019, there is no evidence of circulation of SARS-CoV-2 among people globally and the surveillance programme in place was limited regarding the number of samples processed and therefore the risk of accidental culturing SARS-CoV-2 in the laboratory is extremely low. The three laboratories in Wuhan working with either CoVs diagnostics and/or CoVs isolation and vaccine development all had high quality biosafety level (BSL3 or 4) facilities that were well-managed, with a staff health monitoring programme with no reporting of COVID-19 compatible respiratory illness during the weeks/months prior to December 2019, and no serological evidence of infection in workers through SARS-CoV-2-specific serology-screening. The Wuhan CDC lab which moved on 2nd December 2019 reported no disruptions or incidents caused by the move. They also reported no storage nor laboratory activities on CoVs or other bat viruses preceding the outbreak.
Assessment of likelihood
In view of the above, a laboratory origin of the pandemic was considered to be extremely unlikely.
What would be needed to increase knowledge?
Regular administrative and internal review of high-level biosafety laboratories worldwide. Follow-up of new evidence supplied around possible laboratory leaks.’ https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus/origins-of-the-virus
see also – https://www.who.int/news/item/30-03-2021-who-calls-for-further-studies-data-on-origin-of-sars-cov-2-virus-reiterates-that-all-hypotheses-remain-open
The left, and liberalism, have always claimed the moral high ground, berating conservatives for lack of compassion towards their fellow citizens. So I ask, where is the outrage for the facile attempt at eliminating the investigation of a possible lab leak? 3,500,000 deaths and we just say ‘that’s nature for you’, ignoring the probability of human error. Is it money? An investigation would be expensive. But money has never stopped the left/liberal movement. Is it absurdity? Well, that seems to be what we were told, that it is absurd to think that a human error could occur. My, my how we have evolved to the point of errorless behavior. I must have been asleep. When did all this happen?
https://www.city-journal.org/lionel-trillings-warning
Bill –
> liberalism, have always claimed the moral high ground…
As opposed to….? Conservatives?
Hey Joshua … Yes, in reference to … ‘lack of compassion towards their fellow citizens’. It’s an easy criticism to lob at advocates of personal responsibility from those who endorse government social intervention. This requires victim and abuser claims. Conservatives are cast as cold, unfeeling, without empathy. In short, not woke.
Of course conservatives have their own political rhetoric where they cast the left/liberals in unflattering terms. I’m sure you could list them. My post was to point out the apparent contradiction in the liberal/left narrative as being woke yet not particularly interested enough in 3,500,000 deaths to leave no stone unturned.
Bill –
> Yes, in reference to … ‘lack of compassion towards their fellow citizens’.
Libz are constantly being portrayed as indifferent to human suffering as advocates for totalitarianism, as depriving poor children access to cheap energy, as only expressing compassion to virtue signal, etc.
The “moral high ground” is fully a feature of the religious tught’s rhetoric.
I find it hard you’d argue that “the right” doesn’t consider itself morally superior to, and more (truly) compassionate, than “the left.”
> This requires victim and abuser claims.
Victimhood is a constant theme in rightwing rhetoric.
> Conservatives are cast as cold, unfeeling, without empathy.
If course they are. That’s what other ism is about. But the “casting” isn’t distributed disproportionately across the political divide.
> In short, not woke.
But “wokism” is portrayed as phony, totalitarianism dressed up in disguise, a firm of oppression and merely a power grab, etc. So, the rejection of “wokism” is a reflection of moral superiority and true compassion.
> My post was to point out the apparent contradiction in the liberal/left narrative as being woke yet not particularly interested enough in 3,500,000 deaths to leave no stone unturned.
See – that tight there.
“If they REALLY cared sboiut millions of deaths, they’d act differently. So they don’t REALLY care. Actually, they’re indifferent to the deaths. They lack true compassion. Their caring is just a pretense. They’re morally inferior.”
Joshua
You may be right that … “Libz are constantly being portrayed as indifferent to human suffering as advocates for totalitarianism, as depriving poor children access to cheap energy, as only expressing compassion to virtue signal, etc.”
My post was not to say that. I was wondering where are the liberals who claim to be advocates to those who have suffered? If you say you’re an advocate, then advocate. Who is going to advocate for the 3.5M? I expected the liberals to be among the first to demand a full investigation of where/how the virus arose. Am I wrong to expect that from liberals?
As for the right, they have many characters that can be criticized, severely. A few on this blog claim to be conservative and don’t seem to care either. Start your run of criticism and you may find that I’ll join you.
But don’t say I’m being unfair by singling out the liberal/left in this post. They dominate the media, academia and the health/science bureaucracies. This issue of the origins of the virus is in their backyard and they controlled the narrative. And from the beginning they sought to limit the discussion to a natural source and distribution. And, they were quite vicious about it. Why? Was that proper advocacy?
As I’ve said earlier, it doesn’t matter how the virus arose or how it spread for the point of this thread. It actually is about something Ron Graf just said … integrity. Which to me means how one conducts themselves. Limiting an investigation from the get go isn’t justifiable, not only because the information in the beginning is limited and continually expanding over time, but it’s not good advocacy.
Bill –
> I was wondering where are the liberals who claim to be advocates to those who have suffered?
If you’re seeking answers for why people believe and act as they do, I think there are a couple of good foundational principles.
The first is to not group people and treat them as monolithic. There’s a lot of diversity among libruls just as there is among “conservatives.” The second – assume that most people are pretty much similar in motivational and psychological mechanisms as you are (and more than likely the diversity in motivational and psychological mechanisms within groups like libruls and “conservatives” is much greater than the comparative difference in the means of the two groups). The third – related to the 2nd – don’t decide that if people that disagree with you don’t act in the ways you think they should act, it’s attributable to malignant intent, or moral depravity, or a lack of compassion, or fraudulent posturing and virtue signaling, etc.
Try a little “cognitive empathy” or “perspective taking” to figure out why people different from you act as they do.
> My post was not to say that. I was wondering where are the liberals who claim to be advocates to those who have suffered?
So if you put on your “perspective taking” thinking cap, and you have to look at “libruls” as a group, consider that they actually do care about those who have suffered, there’s prolly some difference in perspective that explains why they aren’t acting in a way that you think would be consistent with that caring – other than that they’re posturing hypocrites who don’t actually care.
Move beyond point scoring. Challenge yourself to think more deeply about what libruls must be thinking.
> I expected the liberals to be among the first to demand a full investigation of where/how the virus arose. Am I wrong to expect that from liberals?
Try it as an intellectual exercise. What might explain their actions as opposed to sheer hypocrisy, or moral depravity?
> But don’t say I’m being unfair by singling out the liberal/left in this post. They dominate the media, academia and the health/science bureaucracies.
What’s “unfair” got to do with it? I don’t think “fairness” plays into this. I”m questioning your logic that libruls are more inclined to claim moral superiority and to denigrate the compassion of their political opponents. And I’m wondering why you’d be leveraging the question of COVID’s origin to reach conclusions to confirm the ethical inferiority of libruls.
Not that libruls aren’t inclined to claim superiority and denigrate the compassion of conservatives, but that there’s no particular reason I can think of why they’d be more inclined to take a major page out of the identity-warfare playbook than conservatives. And I’d point to the nature of the arguments that you’re making – which indeed are like crib notes from that page – as relevant evidence.
> It actually is about something Ron Graf just said … integrity. Which to me means how one conducts themselves. Limiting an investigation from the get go isn’t justifiable, not only because the information in the beginning is limited and continually expanding over time, but it’s not good advocacy.
More of the same. Now you’ve added “integrity” to the differential deficiencies of libruls.
I’m surprised to see this stuff from you.
“The first is to not group people and treat them as monolithic. There’s a lot of diversity among libruls just as there is among “conservatives.” The second – assume that most people are pretty much similar in motivational and psychological mechanisms as you are (and more than likely the diversity in motivational and psychological mechanisms within groups like libruls and “conservatives” is much greater than the comparative difference in the means of the two groups). The third – related to the 2nd – don’t decide that if people that disagree with you don’t act in the ways you think they should act, it’s attributable to malignant intent, or moral depravity, or a lack of compassion, or fraudulent posturing and virtue signaling, etc.”
I agree. The conundrum is how we can limit political tribalism, which I think follows the same dynamic as racism and xenophobia. I think along with civics it needs to be taught in school that humans are animals that have instincts and this one must be kept always in mind and countered with a welcoming predisposition to build trust.
Good morning, Joshua. I’m having my coffee while taking in another beautiful Arizona sunrise.
>If you’re seeking answers for why people believe and act as they do, I think there are a couple of good foundational principles.
The first is to not group people and treat them as monolithic.
Ahh, after reading that I knew I was in for the bigot club. Am I a charter member now? How did this perspective come upon you? Was it through a developed sense of empathy? I was certainly impressed with your step-by-step guide, your foundational principles, to being … a better, more understanding human being. Thank you for taking the time to show me the errors in my character. I promise I’ll do better. And how can I not with such a guiding light to show my way!!! We are truly so fortunate here on Climate Etc to have such a paragon of virtue in our midst!
Still breathing? I didn’t suffocate you with that sticky mess, did I? Good. Don’t worry, yours had no affect on me, either.
How about we get back to the discussion at hand? The thread is about scientists and bureaucracies behaving badly. In this instance, medical scientists and bureaucracies that advocate for health. My question was why take a stance at the beginning of the pandemic on the origins of the virus that excludes a lab leak? And why was that stance contrasted with those who suggested a lab leak be included in any investigation as somehow more scientific and the latter as conspiratorial? The media then supported this with some nasty commentary. One might say politics was then introduced, but as we are political animals, it was always there in some form from the beginning.
We can trade barbs back and forth all day, but there is little doubt that the liberal/left ideologies have more representation in the sciences, academia and the media than conservatives. It’s been documented enough, but go ahead, knock yourself out.
But when you’re done ask yourself if the dominant ideology amongst the scientists and bureaucrats whose task is to advocate for public health was true to its core principles, such as the ones reflected in The City Journal piece I posted where: ‘… Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who believed, in the cumbersome words of one scholar, that “the desires, habits, feelings and customs of the common people and of the most marginal social groups do count.” ‘ Marginal social groups … maybe we can say the downtrodden? Joshua, what’s more downtrodden … than DEAD.
3.5M dead and there’s a push to limit the investigation of the origins.
I actually don’t expect much soul searching from the left, after all they don’t believe in souls. But the liberals are another matter. Shame on them. And if that’s you, sorry bro, shame on you.
Bill –
> Thank you for taking the time to show me the errors in my character. I promise I’ll do better.
I said nothing about your character. First. I don’t know you. Second, from what I’ve seen (and judging from blog comments is a very flimsy practice) I haven’t seen anything that would make me question your character. In fact the opposite. Sorry it came across that way – it wasn’t intended. I certainly haven’t seen anything to make me think you’re a bigot, and certainly wasn’t calling you one.
I thought your broad-sroke characterization of libruls was illogical and in contrast to the evidence I’ve seen about characteralogical and/or reasoning differences in association with ideological orientation. I don’t think the “If they REALLY cared about what they CLAIM” to care about is usually a very sound form of logics and reaoning. Sometimes it might work, but i
IMO, it’s generally a function of poor perspective taking. And I think that’s true in this case in particular.
That was my point, nothing more. Your character and whether you’re a bigot wasn’t even close to my point
Bill –
> I actually don’t expect much soul searching from the left, after all they don’t believe in souls.
OK. With that, I see there’s not much room for discussion.
Ron –
> I agree. The conundrum is how we can limit political tribalism, which I think follows the same dynamic as racism and xenophobia. I think along with civics it needs to be taught in school that humans are animals that have instincts and this one must be kept always in mind and countered with a welcoming predisposition to build trust.
We’ve do cussed something very similar elsewhere.
Again, there’s lots of overlap there with my view. I oeova lg lean more towards the sreixiral elements. For example, in some ways our society is becoming more segregated experientially, and not just among racial or ethnic lines. Economically, and in terms of where we live (largely broken down into urban vs. rural), which in term has a mediator/moderator relationship with educational attainment….
Expecting edfericely segregated schools to overcome the impact of thst segregation seems unrealistic to me – and I think the negative impact of that segregation on building trust is foundational. Imo, as I mentioned elsewhere, the impact of various lifestyle changes is significant there.
Joshua …
I think you should read the City Journal article again. It might show you that what you seemed to be characterizing in me, lack of perspective, empathy, etc you also seemed to exhibit.
And being very serious here, it’s a bit concerning to see so many spelling mistakes from you. Are you alright? I’m not being sarcastic.
Bill –
I’m on my phone and don’t bother to edit because the words are generally decipherable.
Cognitive empathy and empathy aren’t the same – so there’s only one person here that has characterized the other person’s empathy,and it ain’t me.
Pretty ironic, considering – along with you being the person who’s characterizing morality in association with political viewpoint.
One might think you’re a librul.
And I haven’t characterized YOU as lacking perspective.
I’ve said thst your arguments reflect a lack of perspective. Because they’re flawed as mind-peobimg often is.
We all lack perspective at times.
My point is that if your broad-scale and blanket explanation for the behavior of some 1/3? of the American citizenry boils down to you judging them of inferior morality, lacking compassion, lacking “soul-searching,” being phony in what they “claim” they believe (especially regarding millions of deaths) etc., it may well be that you don’t understand what their actual reaoning is and stretching yourself to understand their oerspective better might pay off.
And with that, I’m done. There’s nothing for me productive to be had with you on this topic.
Good. Glad to see you’re alright.
I your acknowledgment its important to try to understand the sources of the differing points of view. There are many foundational beliefs or core assumptions that we take for granted that we share or wrongly assume we do not. We need more dialogue generally to explore the core differences. That is like showing the enemy a tour of your fort’s keep to some. But I am an open book because I am committed to being persuaded through education to evolve my POV at any moment.
If the Chinese present an RNA sequence readout of a SARS2 progenitor from a hospital case in Mahjong from summer 2019 I will take it but it will also need to fit and explain evidence that we already have.
I am not a hippie basher. This reminds me of when I was a teen when Rambo came on TV for the first time. In the opening the small town deputy picks up scraggly looking Rambo and drives him to the city limit and tells him to get out of the care and then says, “Get a hair cut.” My aunt piped in with a dead earnest, “Getting a hair cut when you’re traveling is always a good idea.”
My aunt was worked for the city of NY and was diehard liberal until the day she died.
Ron –
> There are many foundational beliefs or core assumptions that we take for granted that we share or wrongly assume we do not.
My own views is thst most Americans, at least, share a large % of foundational beliefs: they believe in the importance of family, in helping the needy, in limiting government intrusion in daily life but thst government has a role to play in ensuring safety, in equality, providing a safety net, crafting policies to provide maximum benefit to as many people as possible, in taking good care of children and being kind. There are few places I’ve lived (and I’ve lived in quite a variety) where those sorts of values didn’t predominate among most people I encountered. The greatest variance I’ve experienced was mostly when I moved in other countries where even if those same values were prevalent on the whole, how they were prioritized might have been somewhat different.
What I think is that although those values are largely shared, it’s easy to think that they aren’t. People translate those shared values into different forms, often as a way to fit within a oaero ulad identity orientation. For example, people who agree that government should be invasive but should provide a basic safety net might reach very different conclusions about which policies strike the best balance.
That dynamic is put under “tribal” pressure because of the tendency to not see those differences as non-zero points on an overall spectrum from anarchy to totalitarianism, but instead as zero sum differences of “values” or “morality” that confirm biases that “we” are superior and “they” are creeps. Once that tendency is in play, then every difference can be folded into that structure very smoothly.
This goes back to something I mentioned to you before – the difference between positions and interests. We often get locked into what seem like mutually exclusive “positions” which block us from seeing the shared “interests” (say thst we find out the truth abothr the origins of COVID) – which are, imo, skin to shared values
As for beliefs and assumptions – yes we often are unable to find those shared interests because we’re operating from different beliefs and assumptions and lack the skills to find them, or the interest in doing so (it feels better to just tell ourselves stories about how my how better “we” obviously are than they).
…believe government SHOULDN’T be invasive…
Joshua,
Very good comment. Thank you. I would only add that the split on policies most times comes from the beliefs about their unintended consequences. This always more speculative and complicated and thus easy to ignore by one side or the other. This leaves differing sets of assumptions that rarely get hashed out.
On Woke:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2021/06/23/general-mark-milley-critical-race-theory-matt-gaetz-vpx.cnn
Excellent article, Bill. But I would not put down liberalism only but any radical ideology per se that is group based. One cannot eradicate racist or zelophobic groups by punishment. That only creates backlash and more redicalism, which is what I perceive “ultra nationalists” and anarchists to be. Rev. Martin Luther King’s spoken dream of a colorblind society is reached by simply reminding people that need reminding of the Golden Rule. That’s it. No need for group punishments or reparations.
A movement that wants to rule by consensus enforcement to stamp out dissenting ideas will never succeed. Even if it does temporarily seize power it will inevitably be overthrown by an internal group of dissenters at some point or be conquered by and exterior group that is threatened by their presence. For such a movement is ultimately accountable to no one it cannot be trusted within or without. The result is perpetual conflict.
The American ideal of spreading out an unimposing government in Federal, State and local tiers builds trust from within by providing mechanism for flexibility and innovation while providing local accountability to individuals. And it garners trust from without precisely by the weakness to strike without the broad popular support.
Building institutions that hold their highest priority in maintaining their trustworthiness will succeed, whether a person, business or nation. A CDC or NIH that is not completely transparent with their rational behind their directives will fail in any mission. Same with a political party or sub-group. All legitimacy flows through integrity and all influence flows from legitimacy.
Fake news can be conquered by an educated, critical thinking, public.
Hey Ron … Thanks for responding. I agree with most of what you said. I could rant on certain groups of conservatives, as well. However, this particular issue has exposed many contradictions in the liberal/left position, not the least of which is globalism and its heavy bureaucratic structure. It’s interesting you bring up legitimacy and integrity. Over time I’d like to think you are correct. However, bureaucracies acquire their legitimacy through legislation. Aside from those who populate them, bureaucracies are social mechanisms whose purpose is social control. All social control is accomplished through coercion. Coercion has many forms. As individuals we have no immediate control over them. We sacrifice this control, or freedom, to bureaucracies (government) ostensibly because we believe they will make our lives better; that they are in our best interests. This is where the integrity of the individuals in positions of power in the bureaucracies enters. Without integrity how do we hold bureaucracies accountable for mistakes? For decisions that are not considered by some to be in their interests but are difficult to be shown as ‘mistakes’? The media? Government? As I keep repeating, who speaks for the 3,500,000? Obviously not the group that claims the mantle of a collective, ‘we are all in this together’ philosophy. Yes, I’m cynical, tired of the dog and pony show and annoyed. :-)
Thanks for taking the time.
Bill: “We sacrifice this control, or freedom, to bureaucracies (government) ostensibly because we believe they will make our lives better; that they are in our best interests. This is where the integrity of the individuals in positions of power in the bureaucracies enters. Without integrity how do we hold bureaucracies accountable for mistakes?”
The thoughts in this paragraph should get a chapter in every civics class. It’s attempt at solution if the driving thought that crafted our constitutional republic.
The answers that were come up with:
1) Surrender no more power that is absolutely necessary for the security of the nation.
2) Ultimate control is held by the electorate through representatives and informed by a free media.
3) A legislative system with many checks to allow gradual and incremental reforms carrying wide consensus, all while hoping to keep the inevitable creep of corruption held at bay.
Ron …. Shhhhhh!!! There are no more civics classes. What are you trying to do? Next thing you’ll mention are The Federalist Papers. In a few years you might get locked up for that kind of talk. Don’t worry, I’ll visit you. You like lasagna? I’ll bring you some.
Pielke Jr’s article today, “Please shut up,” is excellent.
Coercion is not persuasion. How can any group think that trying to silence people is a behavior justified by a “virtuous” cause?
List of rationalizations of why scientists lied about their certainty of covid’s zoonotic origin:
1) Would hurt global biological lab research.
2) Would hurt Chinese cooperation sharing information.
3) Would hurt trust in science generally by the public.
4) Would support something Donald Trump suggested.
5) Would take focus off the important work of debunking Hydroxychlorquine and Ivermectin.
6) All the above
During April 2020 NPR ran a series of stories over the course of 3-4 days with each segment lasting 30+ minutes each day on why a viral escape from the Wuhan lab was physically impossible due to all the safety protocols in place. What struck me in the stories was the level of anti-trump sentiment in the explanations (being pure conspiracy) and that the safety protocols in place were ironclad (not withstanding other prior accidental leaks from other viral labs).
And don’t forget the obligatory reference to the racist elements of calling it the China virus. I don’t remember anyone becoming unhinged when everyone, including the NYT, calling the 1957 and 1968 pandemics the Asian and Hong Kong flu.
CONCLUSION
The great magnitude of COVID-19 (SARS-Cov-2) Global National Security untold issues, concerns and problems have not been addressed by the World Health Organization (WHO) in an exhaustive investigative report to the world body. Herein, such questions provided in the Part II & Part III COVID-19 breakdown assists investigators in moving forward in assessing the epidemic origins in the City of Wuhan, China. Thus far, what we have seen is that there are a great many inherent problems in delineating the COVID-19 transmissions (community spreading) stages that moved into the epidemic phase (which should be a cause for alarm).
CONTAINING & ISOLATING THE VIRUS BEFORE IT BECAME A PANDEMIC: The first major Global National Security responsibility of the Chinese Leaders and health officials was to CONTAIN & ISOLATE the COVID-19 virus in the City of Wuhan (at all costs). Herein, the COVID-19 transmissions (community spreading) and death surges continued to rise to significant levels (the epidemic writing was on the wall to immediately act). This monumental moral and ethical Breach Of Duty is quite apparent. The CCP leaders and health officials had been grossly negligent by not instituting effective measures to stop the coronavirus spreading to its various provinces then beyond China’s borders. The Chinese leaders and health officials must now be held accountable and responsible for their actions.
CHINA CAUSED A GLOBAL HEALTH CRISIS: The Chinese government was unfit and ill-prepared (grossly negligent) in handling the on-going community spread of the COVID-19 virus. The People’s Republic Of China Officials and the CPP leaders did not practice Due Diligence by immediately enlisting (willing & able) international medical experts and resources to help Control and Isolate the virus in Wuhan City. In other words, the Chinese government did not have proper and fitting communicable disease surveillance and response (in place), critical enhanced training for public health officials nor establish timely local, national and international key emergency COVID-19 disaster rapid response collaboration at the onset of the COVID-19 Epidemic in Wuhan City, Hubei Province.
CHINA DESTROYED IT’S GOOD STANDING AS A WORLD CUSTODIAN LEADER ON THE UNITED NATIONS SECURITY COUNCIL (UNSC): China caused untold harm, insecurity and instability to the indigenous peoples and governments in already beleaugered Failed (Fragile) States, Third World Nations and Developing Countries by not Containing & Isolating COVID-19 in the epidemic stage in Wuhan City, Hubei Province. China put vulnerable countries around the world on the Road To Perdition [Economic chaos/destruction, ill-health/death, stifling starvation/poverty and escalated lawlessness.
The United Nations (U.N.) and the UNSC have not taken any decisive actions (sanctions-mandates-binding resolutions) (2020-2021) against the People’s Republic Of China and the CCP Leaders. The will of the United Nations and the United Nations Security Council organs is now suffering the internal ‘ravaging’ bureaucratic/political demise which beset the inept League Of Nations. The growing humanitarian suffering caused by China around the world has gone unanswered — i.e. has fallen on the deaf ears of the U.N. and UNSC.
https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/later-g20-fears-nations-will-fail-under-virus-strain-20200324-p54d9e
https://www.usip.org/publications/2020/03/dont-leave-fragile-states-behind-fight-against-coronavirus#
https://abcnews.go.com/International/indigenous-peoples-south-america-face-genocide-coronavirus-pandemic/story?id=71256909
A great many thanks goes out to Professor Judith Curry for sheperding an open constructive dialogue on the Collapse Of The Fake Consensus On COVID-19 Origins. The indepth comments by the contributors have been thoughtful, educational and insightful.
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I listen to NPR in the car. I find educational from an anthropological prospective.
I agree that the one should first look at the natural hypothesis because it’s easier to rule out if it doesn’t work. Nature doesn’t lie. The natural scenario that Robert outlined is that the cross over from bats occurred in Yunnan providence from a horseshoe bat but went unnoticed due to less population density and monitoring. It then traveled to Wuhan, which is larger than NYC, where after 2-3 months it got detected.
If this was true China should have been able to trace a retrospective path from both hospital records and reanalysis. They would have gone back to the Yunnan and other places and done serological studies looking for SARS2-like antigens in the population as done with SARS1. This did not occur. Instead, China presented in April pangolin cov that was found in March 2019, just months before the outbreak, that had a 97% similar spike to SARS2’s.
The problem is that one cannot throw out the evidence presented by China earlier of RatG13 RNA sequence, which is more similar overall than pangolin cov and thus making this bat virus a closer match to SARS2. But is still is possible that SARS2 and pangolin cov had a common ancestor that was the crossover from RatG13.
Peter Daszak’s study of ten pangolin samples collected from 10 locations over 10 years showed pangolins in the wild carry no coronaviruses. Pangolin cov was found in a confiscated one from a smuggler. Thus Daszak’s study concluded this points to the exotic animal trade, (which also points to the wet market in Wuhan). The problem is that SARS2 did not come from the pangolin, as noted above. And, China’s own CDC has cleared the wet market as the source.
I would think it is still possible that the smuggling trade could still be the common source for both the Wuhan wet market and the earlier found cases, the zoonotic cross-over for SARS2 being from another animal. But it has been a year and a half now and no animal has been found. One would think that China could know how to put the screws to previously arrested smugglers.
On the other side of the coin we have a furin cleavage site that is unique to the virus genus that includes RatG13, Pangolin cov, SARS1 and SARS2. This furin cleavage site is responsible for making the pandemic unstoppable. Not only did the virus need to stay undetected while having this unique mutation, the phylogenic analysis done early on showed that SARS2 was already well adapted to humans from its first sample, unlike SARS1 when it was detected.
On top of this the furin cleavage site has codons that are extremely rare in nature but common in a lab. These codons allow it to be selectively analyzed and RNA features through serial passage (forced evolution). Here is Dr Steven Quay’s description:
“But it gets worse still for the zoonosis theory. The gene sequence for the amino acids in the furin site in CoV-2 uses a very rare set of two codons, three letter words so six letters in a row, that are rarely used individually and have never been seen together in tandem in any coronaviruses in nature. But these same ‘rare in nature’ codons turn out to be the very ones that are always used by scientists in the laboratory when researchers want to add the amino acid arginine, the ones that are found in the furin site. When scientists add a dimer of arginine codons to a coronavirus, they invariably use the word, CGG-CGG, but coronaviruses in nature rarely (<1%) use this codon pair. For example, in the 580,000 codons of 58 Sarbecoviruses the only CGG pair is CoV-2; none of the other 57 sarbecoviruses have such a pair."
Actually Quay’s claims are incorrect:
“First of all, this unique sequence is not specific to SARS-CoV-2. By aligning several coronaviruses discovered from natural sources, our result showed that this “unique” sequence (1378 bp) from SARS-CoV-2 was also found in other coronavirus (Figure 1), with a high sequence identity. This indicated that this particular fragment in SARS-CoV-2 spike gene was widely spread in naturally existing coronaviruses and was not from laboratory”.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22221751.2020.1738279
Collapse of lab origin theory?
I don’t think you are reading Quad correctly. He is not talking about 1378 base pairs or the entire spike. He is referring to a sequence of 6 base pairs that are in the middle of the spike RNA, separating S1 and S2. These 6 base pairs make a furin cleavage site that allows the host (human) protease, furin, to attach and cleave S1 and S2 which greatly facilitates the virus entry into the cell. The 6 base pairs can code for furin in more than one way since some coding is synonymous. For the mutation placing 6bp there naturally, where they are absent in this precise location in SARS2’s close cousin, pangolin cov, it would by rare to occur at all but even 100X rarer to be CCG-CCG coding.
From another great article here:
“As we hope for a full and honest account of COVID-19’s origins, we must recognize that it is not just the story of a virus, but of the cancer that is metastasizing in our fundamental institutions. We now have clear evidence that the people who largely run our country — the mainstream media, the lords of Silicon Valley, the leaders of the Democrat party – grossly misled the country on the two biggest stories of the last five years: Trump/Russia and COVID-19.
Theirs were not honest mistakes, but willful efforts to deceive. They were not interested in finding the truth but in delegitimizing their political enemies. Exposure of their failures has not led to humbling self-examination. Instead they are sticking to playbook – brooking no dissent while they smear and punish those brave enough to challenge them – as they insist upon the absolute truth of other bogus claims: that America is riddled with systemic racism and white supremacy, that the Jan. 6 protest at the Capitol was an insurrection aimed at toppling the government, that climate change is an existential threat to life on the planet.
These misleaders have lost their claim to moral authority. But, for the time being at least, they still have power.”
“The Jan. 6 protest at the Capitol was an insurrection aimed at toppling the government”. It was not a protest. It was a carefully orchestrated deadly insurrection, which killed nobody, and it was armed with a fire extinguisher. Let’s ban sales of fire extinguishers.
This is a really good comment. However, it somewhat contradicts Joshie’s views here that. most people really want pretty much the same thing and that our troubles are due to tribalism and biases. Just not true. The problem here is a theology trope from the 1950’s, that we are all equally committed, and therefore biased. This is an intellectually lazy for justifying bad ideas. A perhaps better idea is that elite ideologies are usually wrong. True today with woke ideology and true in the 19th Century with social Darwinism and racism. It’s a good argument for the balance of powers in the Constitution. There is no equivalent balance today in the media, academia, or indeed in science. When all three line up behind an insane idea, we have the reason for populism.
“ Theirs were not honest mistakes, but willful efforts to deceive”
Flip Wilson used to say “The devil made me do it.” I guess the left can say “Trump made me do it “
What powers Trump has.
“Instead, models are claimed to be reliable thanks to their sound physical basis, which is not supported by the present analysis, whereas recourse is also made to the subjective notion of consensus to assert their validity. Whether Or Not Such A Consensus Prevails Here Does Not Need To Be Discussed At Length Because This Notion Is Epistemologically Irrelevant. As already alluded to, the history of science is nothing more than a long stroll through the cemetery where ideas that were overwhelmingly accepted are now resting in peace.”
https://hgss.copernicus.org/articles/12/97/2021/?fbclid=IwAR2qrmUi2kxkCm9pvTByLR3NBj2AlZkqcrusfoGZVimQzwTu84tdSJQ67mM
This article I think was tweeted by our host. Often the lead is some form of the consensus.
‘WHO calls for further studies, data on origin of SARS-CoV-2 virus, reiterates that all hypotheses remain open’ https://www.who.int/news/item/30-03-2021-who-calls-for-further-studies-data-on-origin-of-sars-cov-2-virus-reiterates-that-all-hypotheses-remain-open
What seems more obvious is the fake consensus on the collapse of the fake consensus. The narrative allows all sorts of issues to be conflated – from Trump to climate change – to be nullified by a global reference to a stereotypical other. Opposition is a faith based, Trump deranged, China loving useful fool consensus enforcer.
I don’t begin to understand virology. Except perhaps that there is no way to tell the difference between a naturally evolved SARS-CoV-2 virus and one forced to evolve from the same progenitor in a lab. A potential progenitor was found in bat guano from a mine in Guangdong Province – 96.2% the same as the SARS-CoV-2 virus across the entire genome – and taken to the Wuhan lab. But either the lab or the natural route requires a long sequence of mutations.
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/117/17/9241/F1.medium.gif
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/17/9241
The length of the lines indicates the genomic distance between variants and the branching the evolution of a new variant. Whether lab or natural – the progenitor bat virus was found years earlier than the Wuhan outbreak. When it apparently killed three miners – who may have been made more susceptible to viral lung infection by mould growing on bat guano. It suggests to me the possibly of viral evolution in a human host – but then I am just an amateur virologist.
Aren’t you and me 95% chimpanzees?
It’s confusing. There are base pairs (bp), codons and genes. Three bp make a codon. A codon codes for one of about 20 amino acids. These amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. A protein can have many thousand amino acids. One protein = one gene. The proteins in a Chimp are 95% similar to a humans but not at the bp level. This is because mutations can change the order of bp without changing the amino acid that it codes for. This is called a synonymous mutation. There is only a 1 in 6 chance that a random mutation will be non-synonymous and change the amino acid.
This provides the bio-detectives a tool to see if mutations appear random, by recombination or by lab editing.
Dr. Yan and her co-authors in their 2nd paper claim that the RatG13 is fake (or engineered) because its bps do not follow the pattern one would expect of 1 in 6 mutations being non-synonymous when comparing it to its phylogenic cousins like ZC45/ ZXC21.
The recruited high profile virologists debunkers that reviewed Yan et al did not address this claim because they did not review the 2nd paper, also they offered no substantive rejections of claims, only smears.
‘Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.’ There is no difference between in vivo and in vitro serial passage viral evolution.
“There is no difference between in vivo and in vitro serial passage viral evolution.”
I’ll take your word for it, even though I don’t believe that the evolution is a deterministic process.
RIE made a point just shortly ago …
> The narrative allows all sorts of issues to be conflated …
Agreed. Narratives, like social movements, always seem to overshoot. This happens on all sides of the political landscape. Yet, today it seems qualitatively different than when I was young. Then differing narratives coexisted and individuals could navigate amongst them and their adherents. There are always those who can’t seem to escape their own biases, and within that group there’s even a wide range of reaction to differing views. And there has always been a militant few who have had zero tolerance.
Today it seems the percentage of those with militant (zero tolerance) views has gone up exponentially. When kept to a low percentage there isn’t much of a ripple effect, if you will, in the greater society. When those numbers of militant views grow it does seem to have a ripple effect, and it results in narratives that allow all sorts of issues to be conflated. Where once people/groups were not threatened by differences of opinion, political or otherwise, we now have a situation where threats are having real effects.
I would say the issue isn’t so much the ‘conflating’ but the organized attacks on those who don’t share particular beliefs. Narratives are like currents in the sea, many times carrying unsuspecting passengers to lands they never suspected they would inhabit but suddenly find themselves. This applies to all narratives.
This article below is an easy and extreme example of the militant breakdown in Western culture. One might think it doesn’t apply to this thread on scientists (and institutional groups) behaving badly. But I think it does, as our narratives have adapted to the rising militancy. These are not tolerant times. The question is have we reached a point of complete polarization where as individuals we don’t even realize where the currents have taken us and just react instead of engage? If so, it doesn’t bode well.
https://quillette.com/2021/05/23/the-petulant-campaign-against-eric-kaufmann/
Bill, There is an easy explanation for this. Having a common culture and education is a necessary condition for a non-toxic political environment.
During the 19th Century, the US was accepting tens of millions of immigrants from all over the world. Big Business was corrupt and run by oligarchs who had as much power as governnent. Politicians were often bribed captives of special interests. The result was dysfunction and extremism in politics and violence. The trusts were broken up and the worst abuses of the financial system reigned in. By the 1920’s immigration largely ceased and we gradually developed a common language and with the dawn of universal public education, a common cultural set of Western values. Also the middle class became dominant in politics. Around the 1990’s though this post WWII common culture started to disintegrate due to mass immigration and the growing monopolist nature of business. Oligarchs now exercise massive influence once again and have corrupt politicians in their pockets. Once again the middle class is shrinking and the gap between rich and poor is huge. Working people see real wages falling just as in the 19th century.
That’s recipe for social and political unrest.
The usual whipping boys of tribalism, racism, zenophobia, etc. have little to do with it.
Hey Dave …
>The usual whipping boys of tribalism, racism, zenophobia, etc. have little to do with it.
Yes, I see them as ‘conflated issues’ referred to above.
And I absolutely agree with your common culture thesis. My Italian grandparents would say non parlo Italiano, parli Inglese. Don’t speak Italian, speak English. They weren’t going back to the village with the chickens and the goats, and even though they would always be immigrants they wanted their children to be American. That’s not saying they gave up their culture, by no means. It’s just that they made the decision to embrace the new culture and to commit to being a part of it, demonstrated by giving their children over to it, their most precious possession.
The transition was so complete, in just one generation, my mother’s brother when with Patton’s 3rd Army actually shelled villages in Italy. There are many similar stories of German Americans, as well. The most decorated outfit in WWII was an all Japanese unit serving in Europe. The Navajo code talkers and Tuskegee Airmen are interesting stories, too. Today many Hispanic immigrants choose to serve. Many fantastic stories there.
And while those examples are military, I chose them specifically as they are one of the few means for immigrants to establish their bona fides as Americans. And not an easy one either.
When my dad and uncles came home from WWII they took advantage of the new GI Bill, many of whom went to college and became doctors, accountants and engineers. They used it to buy homes, moving out of the Italian neighborhoods and started families. My aunt even married an Irishman, :-) If you know anything about how the Irish treated Italian immigrants in the early 20th C that was quite the deal. LOL! The house my father bought was in a ‘mixed’ neighborhood. It was a row home, much like what you see in England. On one side was a Greek family. Their son, George, and I used to gorge ourselves on almonds that his parents kept in sacks stored in the garage. The other side was a Jewish family. Lillian and Nathan with their son Steve. Nathan dreamed of owning a hotdog stand. He drove a cab to support his family. Not an easy job. I’ll never forget his think Yiddish accent, and the number tattooed on his arm. Always a smile, never saw him angry. Absolutely generous people when you consider where they came from and what they had. They used to leave pots of chicken soup with matzo balls on our stoop, when times got a little tough. Poles, Irish, German, Hungarian … Considering the era, it was an evolved neighborhood. Mostly immigrant and first generation. Today it’s denigratingly called white. But if you lived through those times you saw the changes from segregated ghettos and how they all knew their common link was the American culture. And my oh my how they embraced it. That’s not to say everything was Kumbaya. But respect was given if you worked hard and did the best you could for your family … and neighbors. You thus earned the title American.
For those who see some sort of racism, I’d continue with how my generation continued the evolution with similar examples of inclusion … but I’ll not speak of that as it was lived as a normal thing, not meant to be worn as a badge. That’s for the next generation to speak of.
But that brings us to what has happened in the culture, as the current generation doesn’t speak well of us. There is a break, so to speak. While I agree with you that oligarchs, the wealthy elite, have much to do with cultural norms, I think the embrace of the left by the liberal establishment has been devastating. It may come as a shock to many here that I was raised a Democrat and educated as a Marxist. LOL!!! After today, Joshua thinks I’m a religious conservative. :-) Actually he’s partly right as I have a genuine interest in all persuasions. And with my sarcasm it’s sometimes hard for people to tell where the hell I’m at. I’ve witnessed the affects of liberal academia’s welcoming of the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm and the boys post WWII. And it has born much fruit … for those who see American culture, actually Western Civilization, as the ultimate threat.
The Eric Kaufmann story I posted above would be quite hilarious if not for the sheer horror of what was done to him. Jewish, Asian and Hispanic … he should be what every multi-culturalist dreams. But, oy vey!, it’s not enough as he embraces an American culture that is considered anathema and must be destroyed. And all of this is being done subtly and not so subtly by narrative … as you intimate, getting us to attack each other based on distinctions we really don’t think much about but react to quite viscerally.
I’m sorry for the long post. But you gave me a chance to flesh-out a bit more where I was going with the prior post, which wasn’t very clear. :-) Thank you.
I’m going to go and get some rack. Enjoy!
Bill –
> After today, Joshua thinks I’m a religious conservative. :-)
More perspective taking might help you to not draw such erroneous conclusions about what other people think.
Good morning, Joshua!
You missed the self-deprecating humor.
He sometimes does. Not always.
Here is the paper that shows SARS2 does not infect bats well and RaTG13 does not infect humans barely and bats almost not at all.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/10NHvdcCcSuOVm13JeKGx74Zx0u0FkhJn/view?usp=sharing
The protein spike adaptation in SARS-CoV-2 was noted very early. The RaTG13 coronavirus was found in horseshoe bats. The path of adaptation to human ACE2 receptors is obscured but it is not surprising that life found a way to enhance reproduction.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.581569/full
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.073262v1
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/372/6541/466/F1.medium.gif
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6541/466
The collapse of the expert consensus is the modern societies version of The Emperor’s New Clothes where a powerful agency heads is the emperor, the government funded experts are the court and the skeptical scientist on the periphery is the child that says, “Look!” But a science reporter of equal bravery must broadcast the cry for the public to hear.
I readily admit that SARS2 could be from a yet unidentified natural bat virus, but let’s look a few things. Zhengli Shi’s mission was to explore bat viruses to help prevent SARS outbreaks. So naturally one would expect she would be keenly interested in any new SARS outbreaks. In 2012 six miners get sick after clearing bat guano and three die. They all had the same SARS-like symptoms. She does mount an expedition to the mineshaft in 2013 but does not ever publish anything about the miners and waits to 2016 to publish data from that expedition but only in regard to the variety of bat viruses coexisting in an abandoned mine shaft.
How could she not hear of the 6 miners from the cave sick with SARS? Is it just coincidence that she visited the site just after their illness? Surely it would have been worth mentioning. We only know now about the story because of a master’s thesis recently translated from Chinese.
Fast forward to 2020. Shi’s highly cited paper after the outbreak introducing RaTG13, says only that it was “previously collected from Yunnan province.” Not only is there no mention about the sick miners, she doesn’t even reference the 2016 paper that published the collection under a totally different name, RaBtCoV/4991. This is against the rules. It’s essentially self-plagiarism. It took thousands of hours of investigation of months following for researcher to make the connection that RaTG13 and RaBtCoV/4991 were the same virus, which Shi finally admitted in a November 2020 letter.
In Shi’s 2020 RaTG13 paper she says:
The reader get’s the understanding that after comparing the previously cataloged RDRP segment she had the full RNA sequence decoded to compare with SARS2 and found a 96.2% bp match. But that was not correct. And if one wanted to know when she actually did the sequencing they would have to wait until May 2020 when she finally released her raw reads to see they were dated 2018, which naturally brought the question of why. In Shi’s letter in November she claims in 2018 they got a new piece of equipment that allowed the full sequencing. But if she had the full sequence from the start why does Shi even waste mention of the RDRP segment line in the important RaTG13 paper? To add more suspicion Shi says in her letter that she exhausted the sample in 2018, which might be plausible if the WIV was not closed down to outsiders in Dec 2019. Shi attributes the shutting down of the internationally shared virus online database in Sept 2019 due to “cyber security concerns.”
If RaTG13 were not sequenced the next closest published virus match to SARS2 are two near identical strains ZC45 and ZXC21. Shi calls them ZC45 together for simplicity. The paper introducing ZC45 in Sept 2018 doesn’t mention RaTG13 or RaBtCoV/4991, though they are more similar to each other than any other viruses. Remember, RatG13 was sequenced practically this same time. The ZC45 paper was funded in part by “Army Logistics Scientific Research Projects (BWS14C051).”
So the PLA was doing piggybacking on SARS research in the open along with the US’s NIH in the WIV on the same viruses. Nothing to see here.
Ron,
Thank you for your excellent contribution to this thread.
Something puzzles me however. In a post up above, you wrote:-
“After that is was found that the DNA surrounding the RatG13 RNA was not of that found in fecal samples but seemed to come from human respiratory fluid. Was it from the sick miner’s? When asked for actual samples of RatG13 Dr. Shi said the 2018 analysis exhausted the last bit of sample. ”
Who found this if no samples were made available?
The most detailed analysis of RaTG13’s evidence of falsification is given in Yan’s 2nd paper. I just re-read it and must apologize profusely that she did not mention the raw reads were consistent with respiratory fluid, only that it was not consistent with a fecal swab. I can’t find where I read reparatory fluid or be sure I did not conflate reading about the analysis of the miner’s respiratory fluid or Quay’s analysis of the raw reads for Wuhan military hospital patient’s reparatory fluid. Here is a snip from Yan 2:
“The raw sequencing reads of RaTG13 have multiple abnormal features. Despite the sample being described as a fecal swab, only 0.7% of the raw sequencing reads are bacterial reads while the bacterial abundance is typically 70~90% when other fecal swab samples were sequenced. In addition, in the identifiable region of certain sequencing reads, a vast majority of reads are eukaryotic sequences, which is also highly unusual in the sequencing of fecal swap-derived samples. Within these eukaryotic reads, 30% of the sequences are of non-bat origin and instead shown to be from many different types of animals including fox, flying fox, squirrels, etc. These abnormal features are significant and indicate that the raw
sequencing reads should have been obtained via a route that is different from the normal one (Figure 1). No independent verification of the RaTG13 sequence seems possible because, according to Dr. Zhengli Shi, the raw sample has been exhausted and no live virus was ever isolated or recovered. Notably, this information was known to a core circle of virologists early on and apparently accepted by them. It was then made public, months later, by Dr. Yanyi Wang, director general of the WIV, in an TV interview on May 23rd, 202023. Dr. Shi also confirmed this publicly in her email interview with Science in July 202024. However, judging from Shi’s published protocol25, exhaustion of the fecal swap sample is highly
unlikely. According to this protocol, the fecal swab sample would be mixed with 1 ml of viral transport medium and the supernatant collected. Every 140 ul of the supernatant would then yield 60 ul of extracted
RNA25. For the subsequent step, RT-PCR, 5 ul of this RNA-containing solution is required per reaction25. Therefore, from one fecal swab sample, at least 80 RT-PCR reactions could be carried out ([1000/140] x
60/5=86). Such an amount is sufficient to support both the initial round of sequencing and the subsequent gap filling PCR. It would be sufficient to also allow reasonable attempts to isolate live viruses, although
Dr. Shi claimed that no virus isolation was attempted.”
Yan’s 1st paper accuses Shi of fudging the RaTG13’s sequence to enter in GenBank. Yan’s 2nd paper speculates that the raw reads were then later fabricated by a lab process using lab made DNA, which she diagrams in the paper. I disagree with Yan’s point that since Shi’s lack of publishing a thorough investigation of RaTG13 or RaBtCoV/4991 earlier was evidence that it was not a SARS virus and not the sequence later put forth.
I think the much more plausible explanation is that Shi was doing work both for the international community and PLA simultaneously. And, the PLA had the right to censor her publishing, including the best candidate for a SARS2 progenitor. Shi’s 2016 publishing of RaBtCoV/4991 makes no mention of it being a SARS-like virus just another RDRP segment of many unique bat viruses found in the same mineshaft. The published paper was just an obligatory reporting on her expedition’s results, not the revelation of the key finding, a SARS virus capable of killing 3 out of 6 unprotected exposed miners.
Thank you, Ron. Curiouser and curiouser.
dpy
“By the 1920’s immigration largely ceased”
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-population-over-time
Never let the facts get in the way of a string opinion.
vtg … I don’t think he meant it literally. There was a large cycle prior to that time, and then it abated.
By the way, just curious, how tall?
“By the way, just curious, how tall”
4’3″
4’3″ Cool.
You know vtg, I’m 5’9″. But … actually about 5’8 7/8″, as age and work have beat me down, just a bit. For conversation purposes, I’m 5’9″. What’s your real number?
Your own source shows a decline in immigrants as a percentage of the population (the important number) from 15% in 1910 to 5% in 1960. My point is entirely correct even though strongly declined would be a better wording than largely ceased. Why do you try to distract and deflect from the truth?
It took 5 seconds to find the real numbers on annual immigration to the us and they support what I said. Immigration did almost vanish in roughly 1920. Another in the long list of VTG’s misrepresentations and cherry pickings.
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/Annual-Number-of-US-Legal-Permanent-Residents
“It took 5 seconds to find the real numbers on annual immigration to the us and they support what I said. ”
They don’t.
I posted the data above.
“Immigration did almost vanish in roughly 1920. ”
No, it didn’t.
“Another in the long list of VTG’s misrepresentations and cherry pickings.”
You made an incorrect assertion, as usual. I posted the data, as usual.
The numbers you posted VTG are not dispositive of much because its a very lagging indicator. The actual immigrants per year shows that from 1910 to 1930 the decline was sharp and almost hits zero. I do note for the record that you posted misleading numbers. It’s becoming a habit with you.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cost-of-covid-19-treatment-has-left-families-destitute-around-the-world-11622280600?st=nd4ct91q85nl8ug&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
The Yan article disturbingly bought and paid for political propaganda. Something quite obvious in the unscientific tone of the work. Is Sørensen et al more credible. That relies of the unlikelihood of protein spike insertions at the S1/S2 boundary – making manufacture of the virus the more likely route. It is the idea that the virus is too well adapted to humans and sprung fully formed on the world in Wuhan – where after all there was a sophisticated virology lab working on gain-of-function in a bat coronavirus – like Athena from the head of Zeus. And who on Earth would deliberately weaponize an infectious and deadly plague but the Chinese military.
‘The laboratory origin stories have taken on a new life as political propaganda, with wide-ranging, deeply harmful implications. In February, US senator Tom Cotton appeared on Fox News to share his fervent belief that the virus was a biological weapon. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also heavily implied that SARS-CoV-2 has anthropogenic origins. US president Donald Trump himself has given the theory further credence. In addition, the Rule of Law Society, an institution with no clear scientific mandate that was directed by former Trump White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon until his recent indictment for fraud, has sponsored two preprints claiming that SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately engineered as a bioweapon and alleging an international cover-up by the global scientific community. The lead author of those preprints, Yan Li-Meng, has personally attacked scientists engaged in combating this misinformation with evidence, including me. As a result, I’ve been threatened with violence and sexual assault, an occupational hazard of misinformation debunking that I’ve unfortunately come to expect. Although this is deeply unpleasant, I am more concerned about the long-term effects of this type of misinformation for scientists around the world and our ability to conduct impactful scientific research on emerging viruses with pandemic potential.’ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01205-5
I have no opinion either way – I don’t have the expertise and I doubt that any of you do either – I am going with the flow. Overwhelmingly informed opinion remains with the zoonotic spillover route. As uncomfortable as holding that scientific opinion is at this time of bellicose Trump vindication. This seems the true parallel with climate. Contrarians are again peddling junk science and conspiracy theories.
Robert: “I have no opinion either way – I don’t have the expertise and I doubt that any of you do either – I am going with the flow.”
My claim is slightly different. I have developed opinions based on my reading but I will change my conclusions if there is new evidence that either explains a particular prior item of evidence in a different light or proves it false.
I would like to differ with you respectfully on several items:
“The Yan article disturbingly bought and paid for political propaganda.”
I don’t have any hard evidence of Yan’s motives other than she published papers on infectious disease for Hong Kong University and now she is in hiding somewhere in the USA. Banned from social media and peer reviewed journal publishing, her team uses the Swiss open research site zenodo.
The only claim of Yan et al that I have seen refuted is their assertion that no other virus in SARS2’s genus has a furin cleavage site. MERS is in the same genus and does have a furin cleavage site. The correct claim would be limited to SARS2’s subgenus not have such sites. But no other SARS-like virus besides MERS has the site or is outside the subgenus of Sarbecovirus.
“And who on Earth would deliberately weaponize an infectious and deadly plague but the Chinese military.”
That the PLA was funding GOF SARS research would not be surprising. That the NIH was co-funding it should start a conversation though. BTW, secretly making a bioweapon and releasing it intentionally are two very different things. Here is an article published four months before covid detailing China’s military interest in bioweapons. The article was sparked by a military pronouncement that their military-civil fusion program (dual use technology) included bioweapons. https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2019/08/chinas-military-pursuing-biotech/159167/
SARS2 origin scenarios include:
1) Natural zoonotic crossover directly from bat or through intermediary host.
2) Lab escape from secret GOF research (for Chinese vaccine and anti-viral pharmacology testing, for ex.)
3) Lab escape from secret GOF research for bioweapons. This would be almost indistinguishable from #2, and why both NIH and PLA could fund the same project.
4) Intentionally authorized release as unrestricted bioweapon as allegedly strategized in a 2015 PLA textbook, i.e. knock down global economies to help China climb ahead.
5) Unauthorized release by a “Dr. Strangelove” type scenario in order to force the textbook plan into motion.
Evidence from #2-5 are extremely hard to discern from evidence without a inside whistleblower but they should be separable from #1.
Neither Cotton nor Trump nor Pompeo made any allegation about intentional release or bioweapon. This is echoing a false media narrative. I just posted a link and quote from an article that used explored this lie as a case study of our media problem.
It takes some 10,000 hours to develop expertise. Real evidence of 2 to 5 seem entirely lacking.
If Zhengli Shi herself defects to the USA and confesses that she did a horrific thing for the Chinese military against her will would you believe her? Or, would you suspect that Bannon (who was recently under fraud indictment for being on the board that allowed the Build the Wall exec director to take compensation when it was advertised that 100% of funds would go to the wall) must have bought her off? Because you are darned if you are going to believe in a alt-right conspiracy theory, especially if Bannon’s name is mentioned.
Regardless of the SARS2 origin are you in favor of the continuation of GOF research at the WIV to be funding by the US, France or Australia tax dollars? Why not? If SARS2 was natural surely we need to redouble our efforts to head off SARS3. Right?
So no I am part of the conspiracy?
Just exercising hypotheticals, Robert. But I was also genuinely hoping you might give me more of an answer. My questions are genuine.
BTW, thank you for your contributions to the post and to CE in general. I read a lot of your CS comments and appreciate the depth of research behind them.
The collapse of the fake scientific consensus is accompanied by a collapse of the fake media consensus. The following is from an excellent article focusing on the implications regarding our media’s failure.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-medias-covid-failure
‘Cotton’s comments were nuanced: He wasn’t certain that the virus that causes COVID-19 had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but he considered it to be a possibility, and he was troubled that the Chinese government was failing to offer the transparency necessary to prove it one way or another.
But the response to Cotton’s theory and nuanced line of questioning was brutal. The New York Times dismissed him as repeating a “Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins,” as the headline put it. The Washington Post insisted that Cotton “keeps repeating a conspiracy theory that was already debunked.” And the rest of the mainstream media wasn’t much kinder.
But how could the theory possibly have been debunked? There is no official consensus on where the new coronavirus first emerged and, as Cotton pointed out, China’s government made it basically impossible for outside observers to investigate the origins of the virus.
Yet for most of the past year, the mainstream media’s consensus was that the lab-leak hypothesis was just a fringe theory promoted by hawkish parts of the right. Facebook, which has increasingly appointed itself the arbiter of global speech, had a policy of taking down posts claiming that the virus was man-made or manufactured.
In recent weeks, that has slowly started to change. Top scientists are calling for a more serious probe into the origins of the virus, including the lab-leak theory. President Biden is ordering our intelligence agencies to do a 90-day investigation into the question of where the virus came from. And Facebook recently lifted its ban on posts that claim that the virus that causes COVID-19 was manufactured.
What should we make of all this?
It appears that for the past year, our media seemed to lock arms in shielding the Chinese government from the scrutiny it deserved for failing to control the virus. Whether or not the lab-leak hypothesis bears out, it is clear that our nation’s journalists did not approach this question with an open mind.
In a tweet that she later deleted, Apoorva Mandavilli, a New York Times science reporter who has been on the coronavirus beat, offered a window into the mindset of much of the media: “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here.”
Is it really supposed to be “racist” to consider the possibility that the Chinese government failed to prevent the virus that causes COVID-19 from escaping from a government lab? The other leading origin theory—that the virus emerged from China’s lightly regulated wet markets—would place more of the blame on local culture than the lab-leak hypothesis, which directly implicates the government (and only the government).
Perhaps Mandavilli’s revealing tweet is emblematic of a wider mindset among American journalists, many of whom saw their mission as simply opposing any stance taken by the Trump administration—former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has long suspected that the virus leaked from the lab in Wuhan—while also burnishing their anti-racist and anti-imperialist credentials by refusing to blame a foreign government for the pandemic.
But the goal of journalism shouldn’t be to craft the most culturally sensitive or partisan narrative. The goal of journalism is to seek the truth. The consequences of telling the truth should be secondary to getting the truth out there in the first place, even if it makes the Trump administration or Republican Senators look good or the Chinese government look bad.
To be clear, there have always been partisan or ideological journalists who openly take sides in social or political disputes. But until very recently, we could at least expect that the mainstream media would make a legitimate effort to seek the facts and report fairly, rather than dismissing stories that could make their favored political faction look unfavorable or boost the prospects of their political opponents.
Increasingly, the space for nonpartisan journalism that aggressively seeks the truth is shrinking.
It should hardly be a surprise that Americans are rapidly losing faith in the media. As the story of the lab-leak hypothesis shows, too many in our current news media environment are quick to politicize their coverage and seek the truth only when it’s convenient for their faction. Ultimately, this will only continue to degrade the credibility of the American press, which may benefit forces like the Chinese Communist Party in more ways than one.’
For comparison here is CNN’s article today explaining what all the lab origin current fuss is about. Skeptics of the lab escape theory should read it and decide if CNN’s scientific staff is being clinical and balanced by leaving out that the WIV is known to have been carrying out experiments making SARS Frankensteins, that no scientists have found any new clues. Does CNN really believe there is no evidence on either theory to report, or do they have only 1/100 the knowledge that you and I do? You decide. https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/29/world/covid-19-theories-intl-cmd/index.html
Ron, I wanted to personally thank you for your sterling contributions to this post. Really excellent research.
Dave, thank you for your kind comment. I thank you and all the CE denizens who educated me on climate science when I looked around in 2014 to hear both sides of the climate debate on such a high level. And Josh and Willard too.
A huge thanks to Dr. Curry for the post and patiently getting me out of moderation my probably too long, too frequent comments.
Yes Ron, the American media are more corrupt than at any time in our history. In the past there was a partisan media but all sides had plenty of media on their side. There was diversity. That has vanished and its a troubling step in the direction of the Chinese social credit system. I don’t give clicks to the mainstream media anymore but when I perchance see what they write, I instantly suspect deception or narrative promotion.
As I mentioned I listen to NPR for anthological evaluation of what indoctrinated people are believing this month. It’s amazing how they found a way to blame Trump for the establishment’s coverup of the possibility of lab origin. But that was the only avenue left for them to find a way back and not have any culpability. I keep hoping that being chronically wrong will wake up people out of wokeness. But I am amazed at the endless ways found to blame Trump. He is the Orwell predicted Emanuel Goldstein whom all ills can be spun around and pointed at, Trump and his insurrectionist terrorist followers.
Ron Graf’s comment – “As I mentioned I listen to NPR for anthological evaluation of what indoctrinated people are believing this month. It’s amazing how they found a way to blame Trump for the establishment’s coverup of the possibility of lab origin.”
As a follow up comment to Ron – I was in Estes Park in Nov 2019 during the Trump impeachment. NPR was the only radio station with reception in area. NPR ran stories 24/7 during the impeachment discussing all the corruption from trump with the demands for investigation of a “political opponent”.
But nary a mention of the biden family corruption associated with bursima or urkraine as if the biden family committed no sin.
“American media are more corrupt”
They have become the Democratic party’s public relations team.
I’ve analyzed the Bidens 2022 budget. Does anyone think the media will point out the following:
The $6 trillion budget for 2022 includes $4.4 Trillion for social programs which is quadruple the amount in 2000. Spending on Defense during that time went up from $300 Billion to $760 Billion.
The increase in the top marginal rate will generate only $35 billion per year. After Trump cut taxes in 2018 individual tax revenue went up by $100 billion.
Debt held by the public will be $26 trillion by the end of 2022. Biden’s budget includes only $340 billion for debt service. In fiscal year 2000 the debt held by the public was $3.4 trillion and that debt service was $220 billion. It’s obvious the budget does not include the entire debt service cost for $26 trillion. An honest press would ask the question why aren’t all debt service costs included in the budget. Just a very small increase in interest rates will wipe out the benefit of the increase in the top marginal tax rate.
I am reading this thread on Microsoft Edge. They have flagged it as “Unsafe content”.
This security warning is likely due to my linking to a graphic that I have on my Google Drive in this comment. https://judithcurry.com/2021/05/23/collapse-of-the-fake-consensus-on-covid-19-origins/#comment-951036
I found the unsafe link. It wasn’t me.
It’s the pdf in this comment that is being flagged: https://judithcurry.com/2021/05/23/collapse-of-the-fake-consensus-on-covid-19-origins/#comment-951112
The China flu of 1957 is fascinating when compared with the Asian Covid-19 pandemic:
https://youtu.be/U-OI8x8C36A
My memories of the 1957 flu correspond with the speaker. That was the sickest that I’ve been and I recall many of my classmates being out of school at the same time I was. No one else in my family was sick.
At the time we considered the pandemic as just another sickness. After a few days at home we went back to school. There was not the national obsession with the pandemic and I don’t recall any discussion about wearing masks.
In the late 1950s we only had access to two networks. The local news was on at 6:30 PM each night and the national news lasted only 15 minutes and began at 6:45. That was the extent of national news on TV. There simply wasn’t enough time to focus on the daily death and case statistics to the extent it dominates the news today.
I imagine for a lot of parents who had just lived with the fear of having their children contract polio this threat was just another sickness to be dealt with.
The Australia Broadcasting Service covered up the possibility of lab leak just like the US mainstream media, and for the same reason: TDS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vXdBDP8uQ8
New York times science reporter tweeted this week that the lab leak theory is “racist” then took it down after likely getting the word Media Matters is in process of changing the consensus to blaming Trump for supporting the lab theory and thus forcing MSM to nuke the idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmfdGjRf4Zc
“Yesterdays conspiracy theory is now probable or highly likely.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOLJEUt_aPU
Australia’s version of 60 Minutes, “Under Investigation,” did a show on lab leak a month ago, (Youtube link below). It’s very fair and points out that most scientists [in April] still currently believe that the Wuhan wet market is the source of the virus. But then they debunk the wet market theory showing the first two cases had no connection as well as half the early cases overall. They do have a left-leaning slant in that they blame Trump’s odiousness for the lab theory not being investigated.
They report that the miners that got sick and died in 2012 would have been diagnosed with covid had they been taken to a hospital today. They also report as fact that fluids from the infected miners were sent to the WIV in 2012. Amazingly, they make it sound like this was known and long ago disclosed by Zhengli Shi. In fact it came from the masters thesis that was only translated out of Chinese and independently reported last summer. So even the best journalists are having trouble with putting together the timeline and the implications that come from that as evidence.
Near the end of the video they show undercover video with Chinese doctors, unknowingly recorded, saying that there was early knowledge of the virus and human to human contagion and were forced to be quiet by authorities.
The NYT science reporter needs to watch this Australia video from last month to catch up.
> Australia’s version of 60 Minutes, “Under Investigation,”
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/9-news-australia/
Ron Graf, thank you for your posts on this topic.
No one seems to be concerned with the NPI effectiveness issue but here’s a new paper showing that the effect is uncertain and model dependent.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0895435621000871
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More are beginning to loosen their grip on the conspiracy of natural causation. But if one can close the loop of this theory by providing conclusive evidence, then by all means do it. Having an open mind is the only pragmatic approach:
British Intelligence Believes Covid Lab Leak Theory “Feasible”: Report
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/british-intelligence-believes-covid-19-lab-leak-theory-feasible-report-2452604
“There might be pockets of evidence that take us one way, and evidence that takes us another way. The Chinese will lie either way. I don”t think we will ever know,” said a western intelligence source familiar with UK involvement in the investigation.”
“Agencies are believed to have few human intelligence sources in China. Gathering data there has focused on trying to recruit on the dark web, where Chinese employees can share secrets anonymously without fear of being caught, the paper said.”
About the WHO’s recent report: “The WHO study was co-authored by 17 Chinese scientists, several of them from state-run institutions.
Are we supposed to believe the 17 Chinese scientists co-authoring the WHO’s study weren’t feeling any heat?
Thank you, Matthew Marler. It is my honor to be able what I find. And I just found something big.
The media has been telling us for a year the lab leak theory is “implausible.” Then they changed it to a plausible theory but that “the evidence is likely gone.” Both these positions are untrue. I have found the paper that got the 2012 Chinese PhD thesis from a twitter helper last summer. Before I berate journalists for not finding it or realizing its significance I confess I read this months ago and did not get its importance either. It took the discussion in this post and the question from Kribaez: If the WIV had samples from the miners how could they not have the live virus? So it went and found that paper again.
Since the 2003 SARS outbreak the world virology community has been looking to Dr. Zhengli Shi, the WIV “bat woman,” to be on the lookout for any outbreak. BTW, the lab in Hong Kong University where Dr. Yan worked was also charged to be on the lookout as was many major cities. The PhD thesis details the specific blood samples that were taken from the sick miners in 2012 and sent to the WIV and results came back positive for SARS-like corona virus. The proper protocol should have been for the WIV to alert the WHO and bring in international investigators. Instead, China shut down the mine and sent the WIV (and perhaps military?) to the mine shaft to collect samples multiple times from 2012-2014, according to the paper.
2014 — Dr. Shi get’s trained by Dr. Ralph Baric in the latest GOF techniques so that the WIV can take over the Univ. NC coronavirus research that if “not GOF” during the just issued USA “pause” on GOF research due to a recent lab leak.
2016 — Dr. Shi publishes a paper documenting the variety of bat species and coronaviruses in co-existing in the mine shaft and makes no mention of the outbreak or a SARS-like virus. She only runs the RDRP segment of 4991 and catalogs it.
2017-2018 — The full RNA sequence for RatG13 (4991), the virus she knows caused a SARS outbreak, is mapped. Shi, in 2020 does not share the virus. The important RNA sample is exhausted carelessly, not published into GenBank and only processed due to the arrival of new equipment. Also, Yan 2 et al claim RaTG13’s raw reads content profile includes squirrel and fox RNA, contradicting Shi’s claim that it was bat feces from underground.
March 2019 — Among an exotic animal smuggling bust a sick pangolin is found that tested to find a novel coronavirus. A paper is published. Later Daszak’s research confirms pangolins in the wild do not have any covs.
June 2019 — A second pangolin is reported found having the same cov. Later analysis of the raw reads show they are identical samples from the March paper with different labels.
November 2019 — Three WIV lab workers are hospitalized among the first cases of SARS2.
January 2020 — Shi gives 1st interview with Scientific American here. There is no mention of the origin of RaTG13 (4991).
June 2020 — Shi gives 3nd interview with SA here. In this article Shi tells the story of the now infamous mine shaft.
Oct 2020 — This paper reveals the found PhD thesis documenting the 2012 mine shaft incident. Translating it into English, they pose the following polite questions to the famous esteemed scientist that is now found to be obviously lying through her teeth every time she opens her mouth.
There is documentary evidence that Zhegli Shi concealed a 2012 SARS mini outbreak that sickened six and killed three. She instead did an intense study with many trips over several consecutive years and only published a paper about the variety of viruses found living together in 2016.
In the same WIV lab the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army ramp up their research on SARS coronaviruses, launching their own expeditions in 2015 finding ZXC22 and 2017, recovering ZC45, which they publish full genomes for into GenBank in 2018 (likely with the new France supplied equipment used to run RaTG13, which is not published).
A pangolin is found in 2019 that has a coronavirus when pangolins do not get coronavirus in nature. This virus when sequenced has a spike RNA that is >97% similar to SARS2, where RaT13’s spike is only 90% similar.
Later in 2019 SARS2 shows up hospitalizing three WIV lab personnel, having a furin cleavage site that is not found in any other coronavirus of its sub genus, and a feature more adapted to human pathogeneses than to any other animal. The furin site has six base pairs arranged in a fashion that is as rare in nature as being struck by lighting — but routinely used for lab modification of RNA.
There is enough evidence right now for a law suit.
Regardless if this bioweapon was spilled accidentally or intentionally, it was used as a weapon when the Chinese authorities suppressed the knowledge of its release and of its nature, slowing the world’s response until it was too late (except for New Zealand and Australia).
Ron,
I think it is better to avoid the use of the word “bioweapon” in any sensible conversation about origins. It is out of place. There is a huge difference between ass-covering behaviour and psychopathy. There is credible evidence of cover-up and incompetence. Yes, but no more than that.
China would not be the first country to be shy about publicising an accidental release of pathogens.
In the congressional discussions leading up to the moratorium on GOF research, the US CDC acknowledged some 1200 extramural releases over a 9 year period up to 2014.
In early 2015, USA TODAY sent a FOI request to the (US) CDC seeking copies of lab incident reports on serious releases for the previous two years (during which at least four high profile releases had occurred). The CDC took a further 2 years before responding in 2017 with a heavily redacted report of events involving pathogen release. It was edited sufficiently for it to be meaningless, according to USA Today. The CDC cited a 2002 bioterrorism law as a justification for the redactions. The CDC might have been somewhat distracted at the time of the FOI request, since in June 2015, just a few months after the submission of the USA Today request, some 84 scientists in the CDC were exposed to a live and potentially deadly strain of anthrax.
In 2016, Gryphon Scientific carried out an analysis of incidents in US biocontainment security level 3&4 labs, using inter alia the incident data from the Federal Select Agent Program (FSAP) yearly summary reports to Congress for seven years, 2009 through 2015. During that period there were a total of 749 incidents reported to FSAP from select-agent research laboratories. (For objective reasons, incidents from BSL4 labs are under- reported in this number. )
I suspect that a number of people working in BSL4 labs internationally look at China and think “there but for the grace of god…”
Personally, I would like to see a complete ban on GOF research worldwide.
Paul, Thanks. I didn’t know the detailed story behind the 2014 pause. If people have the time after reading your comment they should listen to this 2015 podcast of Dr. Ralph Baric and his lead biologist, Vineet Menachery discussing the now infamous collaboration with Zhengli Shi to make a SARS chimera virus. They go into far more detail than is in their paper here.
They scoff at “the pause” in GOF and the interferences in their important work. Baric explains to the interviewer that they did not violate the moratorium because the SARS spike enhanced mouse virus was less parthenogenic than the mouse virus they used. Although they could not know this until after the testing on humanized mice of various age groups over months of study, Baric said that if they hadachieved GOF they would have needed to halt (somehow) and report to the NIH and wait for a “black box” committee to give then a green light to continue or red light (I guess to clean up the lab and go home.)
Fauci to the US Senate last month clearly was following Baric’s reasoning voiced on the 2015 podcast that they hadn’t violated the moratorium. It did not make Fauci look like he was telling the truth. He simply repeated twice, “You are incorrect. The NIH did not fund GOF research in the WIV,” while not denying Baric’s work.
The podcast interviewer found all the regulatory nonsense ridiculous. Baric explained that their aim was to see how easily it was to expand the species of attack by SARS and also to test vaccines and antivirals, all very laudable goals.
The second half of the interview is with Menachery, the lead author on the paper. He said that Baric had bet wrongly that the chimera wouldn’t be parthenogenic to the mice. That part was a surprising success. The failure was that none of their antivirals and expensive monoclonal antibodies worked. Menachery smiled that he lost that side of the bet with Baric. He thought at least one would work. I read in a separate post somewhere that Univ NC were working with big pharma in testing their candidates, including Remdesivir. It’s interesting that Menachery did not test any of the less expensive SARS1 treatments. It’s also interesting that all those same big pharma experimental came off the shelf for covid. Remdesivir was approved though not effective while HCQ was resisted and panned by a fraudulent Lancet study (now retracted).
Also, interestingly, experiment showed the virus to be very mild to young mice but deadly to the older ones.
‘ Ron,
I think it is better to avoid the use of the word “bioweapon” ‘
I agree it’s important not to over-reach on claims, particularly that one. But I balance that with not continuing to cover up truth. So here’s the support so far for the bioweapon claim.
1) The PLA (Chinese military) were working in the WIV and funding SARS research along with civilian groups.
2) The Chinese military specially announced in August 2019 that they had a program of civilian-military “fusion” in biological research.
3) Two of the top four most similar catalogued viruses to SARS2 were collected on projects partly funded by the PLA.
4) Zhengli Shi and the WIV failed to report the 2012 Mojiang miners deaths as a SARS incident and they still have not acknowledged it despite our knowledge since last summer that they were keenly aware and made at least three expeditions to the mineshaft collecting samples from 2012-2014. Shi admitted last summer they closed the mine but that the miners died of fungal exposure. Although this may be partly true it is a material omission not to point out that they were sickened by SARS even if succumbing to a lethal secondary fungal infection.
5) Shi’s concealing of the RaTG13 virus’s known lethal SARS origin from 2012 to present considering her standing and renown mission of revealing SARS dangers can only show a nefarious ulterior motive of her superiors and of the highest authority. I found last night that I’m not the first to realize this. Here is a paper from last summer:
6) In the very least Shi concealed research into making a lethal SARS virus. If the research was for benevolent use there would be no reason not to publish results at some point before the lab leak, even if they are now concealing due to the leak. This points strongly to military weapons research.
7) The Chinese military took over control of the WIV in the wake of the SARS2 outbreak. The local doctors complained on an undercover video of an Australian investigative magazine that they were silenced during the outbreak from warning anyone. This dovetails with the arrest of the ophthalmologist bell ringer, now posthumous hero, and also with Li-meng Yan’s story of hearing of the suppression through her professional contacts in Wuhan.
8) They misinformed the WHO and world on the human to human pathogenicity until they learned it on their own.
9) If the virus was of a lab leak that means the pangolin cov was either planned or an amazing coincidence that just months earlier they discovered what they later put forward as the intermediary animal infection. There is a credible claim by Alina Chan that the two pangolin cov cases were actually using the same raw reads and relabeling them, falsifying the appearance of more than a single animal infection.
10) If the virus was a lab leak that means the Wuhan wet market supercluster was an amazing coincidence to be a repeat of the SARS1 wet market outbreak pinpointed as the crossover origin. Or, it was an intentional infection to make a false evidence trail, which is extended back in time and premeditation by the pangolin false evidence.
I absolutely condemn any ill will to China or Asia or anyone. The only ones that would be accountable are the Chinese military heads and Xi Jinping. But if this was planned it should be revealed and let the chips fall where they may. Covering up is a bad ethic and slippery slope.
-Ron
> I agree it’s important not to over-reach on claims, particularly that one. But
A work of art and a thing of beauty.
Let’s immortalize it:
https://i.imgflip.com/5bwb9v.jpg
Ron,
I am no fan of the Chinese government, but I think you are being naive with your list here. Nearly all western governments have continued “biomedical” research for “defence purposes”. This includes the USA. The US military maintains its own links with BSL4 labs. And when pathogens are released from those facilities, the government does not immediately notify the public with a mea culpa. On the contrary, they do their best to cover-up such leaks for “national security reasons”, until the narrative is broken and they have no choice but to come clean. Fort Detrick was closed down last year because (or so we are told) of system problems in dealing with contaminated waste. As in every such leak, this is always followed by a routine “no risk to the public” message. Who knows? It was known, for example, in 2001 that the 2001 anthrax attack matched spores kept in Fort Detrick, and Fort Detrick subsequently turned out to be the source of the attack. When did the US public find out that information? I believe that it was some time in 2008 buried among the baseball scores?
Your list offers evidence of cover-up and incompetence, but lacks any evidence of wilful intent. The use of the word “bioweapon” actually diminishes the validity of various arguments which you have presented to support the lab-release theory. Numerous other genuine experts in bioweapons have put forward cogent and highly credible arguments to explain why this virus has the wrong suite of characteristics to be developed or used as a bioweapon, not least of which is that its future trajectory is completely unpredictable. It could, for example, at any time mutate into a form that preferentially devastates the south-east Asian population. The Chinese government may be authoritarian but it is neither stupid nor suicidal. Equally, you might ask yourself about the motivation of the virologists working on the development in the USA of the chimera coronavirus reported in 2015 – which terrified many in the world of medicine. Did those virologists believe that their GOF research was targeted on developing a bioweapon? Or were they trying to develop pharmaceutical defence against the next viral attack?
kribaez, you’re correct: the U.S. indeed has worked, and presumably continues to work on weapons grade biological weaponry. But it’s reckless to believe China thinks about such, much less do this type of research; more importantly, where’s the evidence? Be sensible, or be chased by a light saber wielding dreamer.
However, I draw the line here: “The Chinese government may be authoritarian, but it is neither stupid nor suicidal.” One doesn’t need to worry about being stupid, or suicidal [inviting attack] when holding the power of cancel, meaning death in this example of executive authority, towards anyone who distributes unwanted smarts. Or alternatively, truly artistic lying [messaging control] means never appearing stupid, the latter produces the same result geopolitically; either way, erasing unwanted smarts is effective tactical methodology in the totalitarian tradition. The U.S. hard Left has been studious to these traditions.
Paul,
I agree that the US and others have biodefense labs. I think most would agree that the bioengineering of potential weapons in order to create countermeasures is done. We all agree that there is a tendency to cover up mistakes if possible, especially with the examples you point out.
Do I think that Zengli Shi was wittingly working on bioweapons? No. It’s much more plausible she was told that China wanted to get ahead on vaccine research and would gladly share the technology with others once they had the lead. Remember, China had a vaccine for SARS2 ready before anyone. And, if not for Op Warp Speed they may have had the world market mostly to themselves. We can see that Shi complied with censorship of full disclosure regarding discovery of a new SARS virus and its connection to deaths. In doing so, remember, she was then compromised to later coercion and groomed to be compliant.
Your claim that SARS2 does not match our weapons expert’s expectation of a bioweapon is true. But warfare is messy and that’s why Russia and the US invented the Cold War. Perhaps China thinks they are even more cunning. Everyone must agree that covid put Trump out of office and raised China economically in the global markets (absent blowback). Then the question becomes whether that was predictable. I would say probably yes. Would they get the WIV to go along? Probably no. But even without coercion they could get the WIV to cover up an accident that they would assume they created. Since the US was funding GOF research on SARS chimeras in the WIV the potential nefarious actors might even have played out the war game that Fauci and others would cover up the possibility of WIV causing the pandemic. They could predict the natural CYA denial in the face of disgrace by their experts and US experts. Clearly, that had the WHO compromised. Could they predict a fake consensus would be manufactured and that experts would destroy the evidence of the crime for them? Maybe.
I see that Occam’s razor would slice off the intentional part of the lab leak theory as unnecessary. But then I have to stop the razor mid cut when thinking about the chances that the Wuhan wet market would become an early cluster. One would think a coverup would include trying to quietly stop the spread, not fan the spread in a directed way. Then I add to this the attempt to introduce the pangolin cov to supply the consensus with the intermediary host, a piece of evidence that came to be in March 2019 and then confirmed by an inexplicably falsified paper in June.
We have three possible theories.
1) That there is a yet unknown natural origin.
2) There was an accidental lab leak.
3) There was an intentional lab leak that would be covered up by everyone under the belief it was the feared accident that would ruin the name of virology (and science).
If the WIV believed in theory #1 why haven’t they invited the WHO to mount an expedition to the Mojiang mine and perhaps find RaTG13 in the wild or SARS2’s intermediary? Zhengli Shi published in 2016 that she mounted four expedition to the mine over two years, each time finding more coronavirus species. One would assume there were more yet to be discovered viruses there and perhaps a natural SARS2’s progenitor, the missing link.
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12250-016-3713-9.pdf
Tucker Carlson broke the news from Fauci’s emails just released by BuzzFeed FOIA show the head of our pandemic response’s first act was to take steps to shoot down the lab leak theory.
On Jan 31, 2020, virologist Kristian Anderson emailed Fauci at midnight that the SARS2 virus had evidence of potential engineering. Remember that Anderson wrote the paper days later pointing to a natural origin looking virus and remains to present fighting the “conspiracy theory.” In panic mode Fauci emails his deputy to clear his day for important tasks under a subject heading of “IMPORTANT.” Attached to this email was a document entitled: “Baric, Shi et al, Nature Medicine SARS Gain of Function.pdf.
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6257135727001#sp=show-clips
If I were the FBI director I would have Fauci, Anderson and Fauci’s deputy brought in for questioning in separate rooms until a story came out that meshed.
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I find it amusing how the recognition that COVID could have originated from a lab leak has been morphed into:
1- The lab leak is most likely origin for COVID (it isn’t).
2- The burden of proof is on everyone who says it didn’t leak from a lab (you can’t prove a negative)
3- The consensus on origin has collapsed (it hasn’t)
I urge you to read the comment above this and let me know the flaw in the proof that Dr. Zhengli Shi concealed the 2012 min SARS outbreak, the one producing the precursor to SARS2, RaTG13.
James Cross: 1- The lab leak is most likely origin for COVID (it isn’t).
2- The burden of proof is on everyone who says it didn’t leak from a lab (you can’t prove a negative)
3- The consensus on origin has collapsed (it hasn’t)
1. I think the evidence to date does not support a confident opinion.
2. The burdens[ sic ] of proof lie on all people who are making claims.
3. A new consensus has not yet emerged, but the old consensus has collapsed. c.f. Dr Fauci’s latest revised opinions.
It’s a discussion of not trusting the government or the MSM. Or relying on crushing authority to make truth.
Regarding the burden of proof. What’s productive is to try to rule out either source. Is science going to have an answer? Perhaps not. The authority of government may provide an answer. What we may end up calling truth may result from a legal process. Assume China has laws, those laws are applied, and it is found that something illegal happened in the lab. And that something was a cover-up. Then we could say this person was convicted, therefore the truth is X. However, since it’s China, would we be confident in that truth?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn_b4NRTB6k
Ivermectin. A good take. A good discussion of science.
When I posted it to Facebook, they noted I should get the vaccine. Thank you Facebook.
Did you?
Willard:
No. I am working on getting Ivermectin now.
Do you feel like sharing with us if you did?
I did.
Willard:
The old make your own decision trick. I am on to that one. Next thing you know, you’ll be a libertarian.
Covidball is the last thing in the world you can invoke to cheerlead for libertarianism, Ragnaar.
Willard
“Covidball is the last thing in the world you can invoke to cheerlead for libertarianism, Ragnaar.”
I apologize for my delay in replying. Sometimes I just walk away from the discussion and do my real work. With Covidball, we saw Red States and Red countries. Red people too. What an odd universe that the normies would need Trump voters to get vaccinated. That is bleeping Bruce Lee in its beauty. Like some apocalyptic movie. That one video where someone outside sitting in some bleachers is tazed for not wearing a mask. There was no one but the police within 25 yards of them. This is a freedom fighters dream. You made Trump a martyr.
judith
are you aware that when i come to this site it is flagged up in red as ‘unsafe content.’
tonyb
I think that is correct. Anyone who is threatened by independent thinking would feel in danger. 😀
Afternoon Tony,
That’s intriguing news! Which hardware/browser combo are you using, because I certainly don’t see that message at the moment.
Jim
Jim
I use microsoft edge and live mail but it seems to happen on others.
Are you managing to hide from the grockles/emmetts? They are out in force today
tonyb
Afternoon Tony,
I’m on Opera by default. I’ll rush off and try MS Edge forthwith!
I had a pre-arranged appointment to deliver a large painting to Camelford Gallery this morning, so I had to endure the formic hordes on the A39:
http://www.thecamelfordgallery.co.uk
We followed assorted caravans, camper vans and a bright red Ferrari in the queues through the town centre. Having spotted a parking spot opposite the gallery, we were then delayed by a long queue of traffic coming at us against the priority in one of the single lane sections. By the time we’d finally negotiated the one way system a camper van was attempting a 27 point turn into “our” parking space. Fortunately by the time they’d finally got in there somebody else wanted to reverse out of an adjacent spot.
The return journey was much less fraught!
That did the trick.
Chrome seems to be OK, but Edge definitely deems this page to be “unsafe”.
Microsoft are easily offended it seems.
jim
fortunately we were going against the flow of traffic in the morning on our way through dawlish and we reckoned-fortunately correctly-that everyone would still be on the beach when we needed to head back at 3. Wish that spain and france would open up so they could clear off there!.
However we will now have to contend with those not now going to Portugal.
i will send everyone down your way!
tonyb
Cornwall is full to overflowing already Tony! There’s a “no camping” sign by the cattle grid at the entry on to Davidstow Moor, but nevertheless:
https://twitter.com/DavidstowInfo/status/1399988336450752516
Are you sure you don’t want a few hundred thousand grockles back on your side of the River Tamar? Allegedly they spend lots of money.
Jim
My opinion of the tourist industry as it is practised on both sides of the Tamar is unprintable. There is an unbreakable rule of business that the industry seems never to have heard of;
“turnover is vanity profit is sanity.”
We see that evidenced by the poor wages and prospects and that so many tourist businesses regularly go bust.
We are heading down to Looe for a couple of days next week, booked months ago on the basis that it was before the school hols and in the expectation that many of our tourists would be heading to the continent.
Personally I favour a tourist tax that could be used to repair our fraying infrastructure
tonyb
Afternoon Tony,
Don’t forget about all the 2nd and 3rd home owners occasionally in these parts. Tax them to within an inch of their opulent lives!
Sadly it seems you’re heading for the wrong Cornish coast. Pop up and see us sometime on the rugged shores of the North Atlantic:
https://twitter.com/jim_hunt/status/1366111529255501825
Hi jim
the advantage of Looe is that it is normally only a max of 90 minutes away so provides an easy contrast and also has a train (but not at the moment!)
I would introduce a substantial tourist tax and yes I would tax second home owners more or severely restrict the houses they can buy. Certainly no new houses and probably restrict them to certain zones.
Just got back from Dartmoor as the bluebells are spectacular due to the late spring. Fortunately tourists tend to stay close to the car parks in the honey spots but they were much in evidence coming back along the coast.
the coast path is becoming too popular and the sea seems to be covered in people doing a variety of things
tonyb
If one clicks on the warning it points to the link on this comment as causing the page to be unsafe: https://judithcurry.com/2021/05/23/collapse-of-the-fake-consensus-on-covid-19-origins/#comment-951112
RG, thanks for the link. Somehow I missed that post.
Ron
I went to that link and under Davids comment it reads within a big red block;;
“Microsoft Defender SmartScreen has blocked this unsafe content”
tonyb
They put warnings on cigarettes. On my motorcycle. The impact over time fades.
This is one of the best things you’ve written:
“A key element of knowledge monopolies and research cartels is stifling of skepticism, premature canonization of preferred hypotheses and consensus enforcement, in the interests of financial or political objectives. With the help of uncritical mass media, this effectively results in near censorship of minority views. Since corporate and government scientific organizations also control the funding of research, by denying funds for unorthodox work they function as research cartels as well as knowledge monopolies.”
Bret Weinstein I imagine awaits hearing from you.
Vanity fair jumps on board the covid origin story with some investigative reporting. After the obligatory excusal of the media for ignoring the story due to Trump odiousness and smearing Li-Meng Yan as a right-wing tool, they get down to the really important stuff they uncovered (by asking).
It seems they uncovered that the government experts had an unrevealed conflict of interest in investigating the covid origin. They may have intentionally misdirected the public, (and the credible media, of course).
Was Park’s conflict of interest corrupting the investigation? No, no. He was protecting the investigation from ridicule and irresponsibility.
The last paragraph is not part of the quote. It’s me again.
The VF article points out a couple key facts. In a paper published in April 2020 by the WIV on SARS2 they used humanized mice that were cultivated months before the outbreak. Also that shared bat virus database was taken offline in September. The intelligence about the 3 sick WIV lab workers in November was sitting hidden in US intelligence reports that got dusted off after Trump’s loss.
It’s interesting that the Chinese military had a theory that SARS1 had been a US bioweapon attack. And, as we all know, they accused the US of having had released SARS2 on China during an October 2019 Wuhan sporting event.
But the article can’t conclude without coming back to the Orange man and his racist, deplorable supporters as also to blame for covid.
Ron, Thank you for the work you’ve done here relating to the various possibilities for COVID-19 origins. You’ve added a good deal of context to the subject overall. Of interest to me, only now touched on in this post (as far as I’ve discerned), is the man-made genetic angle. You reference a book: “Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons”; and reference a claim “…that terrorists using gene editing had created SARS-CoV-1 as a bioweapon”. The terrorist angle I must say is a planted idea, an attempt to misdirect; counter intelligence, if you will. No “terrorist” is going to understand cutting-edge genetic technology that is barely understood today by leading-edge first world scientists. The genetics referred to here is CRISPR technology (I’m sure this must be what the reference is about). However, this genetic angle does dove-tail to work done earlier by Washington Post journalist Josh Rogin. China is at the epicenter of what he uncovered. If one wants to call them terrorists…
“In his brave pursuit for the truth, Rogin reveals in-depth insight from top U.S government officials who have evidence of dangerous Chinese gain of function research on coronaviruses that went above and beyond the gain-of-function research that was openly discussed with US universities and institutions. Rogin revels that Chinese researchers were taking more risks in the lab, risks that governments did not understand at the time. The Chinese scientists ultimately found a way to engineer coronavirus spike proteins to exploit the ACE2 receptor in human lung cells. (Related: China rewrites COVID history, purges 300 studies linking virus to Wuhan lab.)
Chinese military classified some of their most dangerous gain-of-function research
One of the more suspicious studies came from Beijing researchers affiliated with the Academy of Military Medical Science. In June 2020, the researchers published a new model for studying SARS-CoV-2, one that uses the CRISPR gene editing tool to alter mice lung cells. The scientists equipped the mice with the ACE2 receptor from human lung cells. This is the same receptor that they learned how to exploit with modified coronaviruses, using enhanced gain-of-function properties.”
https://sciencedeception.com/2021-03-14-new-book-chinese-militarys-coronavirus-research.html
The new realm of virual manipulation utilizing CRISPR is terrifying. If certain bad actor scientists can envision viral customization, while believing they can protect from repercussions of blowback, whether such ideas are sensible or not is irrelevant; just having any such belief is the operative concern here.
I’d be interested in anything that digs into viral manipulation utilizing CRISPR technology. We know the Chinese introduced a therapy for lung cancer utilizing CRISPR technology in 2016; which means they were studying the technology years earlier.
JT >> You reference a book: “Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons”; and reference a claim “…that terrorists using gene editing had created SARS-CoV-1 as a bioweapon.
The book was mentioned in the VF article I was quoting but they did not theorize if was terrorists but the US military as the perps. It is difficult to tell who believed that theory or whether they wanted to spread a suspicion or justification to cover their own program to counter it by researching to duplicate it. Their knowledge about UV light harming the coronavirus is something we experimented and found true with covid last year. China’s military apparently conducted the same experiment 6 years ago.
The SARS2 lab origin fraudulently manufactured consensus is still the biggest story running in the US. It seems like every publication is wanting to weigh in. The right is blasting Fauci while the left blasts Trump for being so xenophobic as to make the technocratic deep state cover for China to avoid the unspeakable. What’s that you ask? WWIII? — No; souring the public on GOF research funding.
I hope Judith does post on a new covid origin consensus as that forms. It will be interesting to see who joins it and what persuaded them.
I appreciate the reply, Ron.
In your earlier post: ““We needed to create a space where all of the hypotheses could be considered,” Metzl said. I embrace this idea wholeheartedly.
As you know there are serious minded people, think tanks, etc., concerned about what the Chinese, and others, are doing with gene editing technology. I don’t know if CRISPR technology was used in the SARS research done at Wuhan, but it must be investigated, and not by the WHO.
A widely distributed January Reuters article touched on a dark age risk coming from gene editing. No revelation here, but doors are opening for the creation of Frankenstein strains of viruses that don’t even have to kill to be a threat.
“China has moved to integrate private technology companies into military-related research under President Xi Jinping…The U.S. government has recently been warned by an expert panel that adversary countries and non-state actors might find and target genetic weaknesses in the U.S. population and a competitor such as China could use genetics to augment the strength of its own military personnel…Elsa Kania, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security think tank, who has provided testimony to U.S. Congressional committees, told Reuters that China’s military has pushed research on brain science, gene editing and the creation of artificial genomes that could have an application in future bioweapons. She added that such weapons are not currently technically feasible
One patent was granted in 2015 to BGI and the Academy of Military Medical Science for a low-cost test kit to detect respiratory pathogens, including SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and coronaviruses. BGI’s current chief infectious disease scientist, Chen Weijun, is listed as an inventor on the patent documents. Chen was among the first scientists to sequence COVID-19, taking samples from a military hospital in Wuhan, according to sequence data later shared internationally. Chen is listed as affiliated with the Academy of Military Medical Science in three science papers reviewed by Reuters. In response to Reuters’ questions, BGI said in a statement that Chen has not been affiliated with the PLA’s Academy of Military Medical Science since 2012. Chen did not respond to a request for comment.
Four BGI researchers have also been jointly affiliated with another military institution, the National University of Defence Technology (NUDT), according to publicly available science and conference papers reviewed by Reuters. Hunan-based NUDT is under the direct leadership of China’s Central Military Commission, the top-level body that steers the Chinese military and is headed by Xi.”
The article goes on:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-genomics-military-exclusive-idUSKBN29Z0HA
JT,
I suppose if there is an overall conclusion to make is that we are heading into more dangerous times. Fixing CO2 emissions seems like one of the more easily managed ones in comparison.
One thing that would help with all these big dangers is the advancement of culture to emphasis the importance of openness and the societal benefits of a trustworthy world.
Ron,
I would strongly urge you, if you have not done so, to read the paper by Latham and Wilson from last year. A preprint is available here:- https://jonathanlatham.net/a-proposed-origin-for-sars-cov-2-and-the-covid-19-pandemic/
It establishes some important incontrovertible facts, notably that
A. The disease which hit the 6 miners from the Mojiang mine (and killed 3 of them) was a coronavirus, described as similar to SARS (COV 1). It was not a fungal infection as claimed.
B. Whatever this virus was, it was already sufficiently adapted to humans to infect the miners. Yet, there is no reason to doubt that this was a naturally occurring zoonotic virus with a predominant bat ancestry.
C. The symptoms described are indistinguishable from present day SARS COV 2 infection.
D. RATG13 is a very close match to SARS COV 2.
D. Tissue and blood samples from these patients were sent to WIV.
E. The WIV has been guilty of obfuscation and lies over a number of important facts which relate to the origins of the virus.
Although Latham and Wilson believe that the virus escaped from WIV, probably as a result of workers becoming infected by loose handling of the samples taken from the sick miners, they develop a theory which suggests that the SARS COV 2 affinity for human ACE2 receptors and human lung cells did NOT have to be engineered. The theory proposes the virus entered the miner’s bodies as an ill-adapted virus and later became adapted. The adapted virus could have arisen from accelerated convergent evolution in one or more of the miners’ lungs. As support for this theory, they also point to Andersen et al 2020, who, in their critique of a possible engineered origin for SARS-CoV-2, stressed the need for passaging in whole humans:
“Finally, the generation of the predicted O-linked glycans is also unlikely to have occurred during cell-culture passage, as such features suggest the involvement of an immune system” (Andersen et al., 2020).
Although the Latham and Wilson narrative is coherent, it still leaves a major unanswered question. Wrobel et al (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41594-020-0468-7) concluded that the RATG13 virus “would not be able to bind effectively to human ACE2 receptor and would be unlikely to infect humans directly.” The RATG13 virus clearly is not the adapted virus – among other problems, it lacks the furin site; on the other hand, if Wrobel et al are correct, then the RATG13 sample cannot be the initial ill-adapted virus either. It should not have infected the miners in this form. This suggests then that the sample did not come from the sick miners. But if the reports on, and conclusions from, the absence of bacterial DNA are valid, then it did not come from a fecal sample either. The sequence seems highly relevant, so where did it really come from?
Paul,
We have documentary evidence with the release of Fauci’s emails that Anderson wrote Fauci at midnight on Jan 31, 2020, that he saw “the unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered."
We then see Fauci going into panic mode on closing down the lab origin theory and being thanked by Daszak specifically for doing so. It is not a huge leap to believe that Anderson was instructed as what he was to conclude in his findings.
The next week will be an interesting test on how scientific consensus is truly formed in the 21st century in light of the Fauci-Anderson email.
We also have documentary evidence that Zhengli Shi lied to conceal relevant facts connected with origin of SARS2 in her possession. In her Feb 3, 2020, Nature publishing of RaTG13 she omits mention of the miners becoming ill with SARS as the reason for the expeditions that recovered RaTG13. Why?
We can deduce several theories as to what she is covering up but a natural origin of SARS2 would not be one of them. Adding to this that RaTG13 does not appear to be able to be a bat virus or a human virus, (it's best host determined to be a horse,) that supports Yan's claim that RaTG13's sequence was fudged.
Back to the Mojiang bat cave, Shi covered up 8 other unique SARS viruses found there between 2012-2014, most of which were in 2014. This information came out after the masters thesis and was confirmed by Shi in her November '20 addendum to the Feb '20 Nature article.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2951-z
The significance of the miner’s becoming ill from a SARS-like bat virus cannot the understated. It was about this same timeframe that Daszak’s researchers conclusively determined that civet cats do not carry corona virus in the wild, the same story as pangolins. This information undermined Daszak’s famous 2003 find of the civet as being the source of SARS. At a minimum it brought up new questions. How did a virus jump from bats to smuggled civets to people? One jump is rare even when there is a natural reservoir of infected animals. This is because the virus must mutate within the new host in a way that makes it more transmissible to the new host species, forming a new reservoir, before it can make a new jump.
Evolution is slow. But this new finding about the lack of a natural civets reservoir got a lot of people thinking a new theory about the origin of SARS1. Ralph Baric, on the 2015 podcast explaining the reasoning behind his now infamous collaboration with the WIV to make a SARS chimera, says that one reason is to explore his theory that SARS did not come from a civet cat. Baric believed SARS made a direct jump from a bat and was going to show how easy it was for SARS to cross directly into multiple host species.
Coincidently, 2015 is also when the Chinese military had developed their own new theory about SARS1 origin, that it was the result of the US military’s bio-engineering experiments, according to the new book coming out by Sharri Markson this fall about the 2015 Chinese PLA book and other evidence surrounding SARS2 origin.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1399934149666934784.html
I meant to say the significance of the miners direct infection by bat SARS cannot be overstated.
While Shi is taking lessons on gene splicing techniques from Baric and millions from US research funding to find if bat SARS can directly infect people without a intermediary host Shi already had the answer. If the miners were infected with a SARS bat virus that would have changed the theory on SARS1 and accelerated funding by US. The only way Shi would conceal this is if China told her to.
The concealment of the 2012 miners illness would be a sufficient motive for her to conceal the details around the origin of RaTG13 in 2020. But why does she bring it up at all if she knows where the investigation would lead? Why not present a another virus like ZC45 or others that would be just a little further distant? The answer is two-fold. ZC45 was connected to military funding but the bigger one is the RDRP of 4991 was published. It would be a matter of time for someone to see the similarity of 4991’s to SARS2’s RDRP. All Shi could do is slow down the investigation. By submitting a faked RaTG13 she could buy time misdirecting the bio-detectives.
The only problem was that ZC45 was published so the RaTG13 had to be more similar to SARS2. This led it also be more similar that pangolin cov, which was supposed to be the intermediary host for the theorized crossover. All these little conflicts though could be smoothed over if she could count on the US virologist community to not want to look too close.
Without the handful of whistleblowers at the periphery of the SARS research community we may have never got to the revelations we have now.
Ron: I agree 100% that the February Lancet letter was a grossly misleading political statement. It characterized alternative hypothesis on the origin of COVID as conspiracies and didn’t deal with them as scientific hypotheses. However, Andersen’s March 2020 Nature Medicine article is often mention together with the Lancet letter. This publication deals with alternative hypothesis scientifically and appears to be reasonably sound given what we know today.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9?fbclid=IwAR3w65RgILi01mVjIMQ2LKeZS4xUkLz5LRBinImTKRPOWSnCqIQWw_hDzR0
In particular, Andersen discuss (reference 14) the fact that a furin cleavage site had been added to SARS1 as early as 2006(!) and found to potentiate membrane fusion without reducing affinity for ACE2. If I were interfered in germ warfare, this construct would be my starting spot. Section 3 (Selection During Passage) says:
“Basic research involving passage of bat SARS-CoV-like coronaviruses in cell culture and/or animal models has been ongoing for many years in biosafety level 2 laboratories across the world27, and there are documented instances of laboratory escapes of SARS-CoV28. We must therefore examine the possibility of an inadvertent laboratory release of SARS-CoV-2.
In theory, it is possible that SARS-CoV-2 acquired RBD mutations (Fig. 1a) during adaptation to passage in cell culture, as has been observed in studies of SARS-CoV11. The finding of SARS-CoV-like coronaviruses from pangolins with nearly identical RBDs, however, provides a much stronger and more parsimonious explanation of how SARS-CoV-2 acquired these via recombination or mutation19.
The acquisition of both the polybasic cleavage site and predicted O-linked glycans also argues against culture-based scenarios. New polybasic cleavage sites have been observed only after prolonged passage of low-pathogenicity avian influenza virus in vitro or in vivo17. Furthermore, a hypothetical generation of SARS-CoV-2 by cell culture or animal passage would have required prior isolation of a progenitor virus with very high genetic similarity, which has not been described. Subsequent generation of a polybasic cleavage site would have then required repeated passage in cell culture or animals with ACE2 receptors similar to those of humans, but such work has also not previously been described. Finally, the generation of the predicted O-linked glycans is also unlikely to have occurred due to cell-culture passage, as such features suggest the involvement of an immune system18.”
Even if a furin-cleavage site had been genetically engineered into a known coronavirus before extensive passage in cell culture, Andersen is telling us that OTHER features of SARS2 would be unlikely to have developed. And there was no coronavirus known to Andersen that would provide a suitable “backbone” for engineering in a furin cleavage site and producing SARS2 – even RaTG13 is too distant. As best I can tell, the need for a “backbone” from a known coronavirus which is much more similar to SARS2 is still the biggest weakness of any genetic engineering hypothesis. Today is seems much more likely the the Chinese may have possessed other “backbones” that they haven’t disclosed. RaTG13 was undisclosed until the sequence of SARS2 was disclosed and could have distracted our attention from other possible starting places as Yan suggests. If the Chinese military were trying to engineer a pandemic coronavirus, you’d want: 1) a furin cleavage site for efficient replication, 2) genes that allow the virus to counter the innate immune system, 3) possibly glycosylation sites to protect antigenic sites, but 4) serious illness to illness to develop only slowly, so that victims aren’t quickly immobilized (the reason SARS2 is highly transmissible and Ebola is not). It isn’t obvious to me how those traits were engineered to SARS2 without a long and sophisticated program.
For March 2020, Andersen’s arguments appear fairly good. The concluding sentence of the abstract, “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus” is arguably stated somewhat over-confidently, but zoonosis certainly was the best hypothesis at the time.
I’ve always assumed that the Chinese would prevent any real investigation into origin of the pandemic, whether it began with negligence over wild animal markets or laboratory escape or even a bioweapons program. So I mistakenly refused to draw any conclusions from their behavior.
I greatly appreciate your posting useful information and especially links and am disturbed to learn you have been banned on some social media (another problem I have underestimated).
Forgot this Andersen’s reference14: Furin cleavage of the SARS coronavirus spike glycoprotein enhances cell–cell fusion but does not affect virion entry.
“The fusogenic potential of Class I viral envelope glycoproteins is activated by proteloytic cleavage of the precursor glycoprotein to generate the mature receptor-binding and transmembrane fusion subunits. Although the coronavirus (CoV) S glycoproteins share membership in this class of envelope glycoproteins, cleavage to generate the respective S1 and S2 subunits appears absent in a subset of CoV species, including that responsible for the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). To determine whether proteolytic cleavage of the S glycoprotein might be important for the newly emerged SARS-CoV, we introduced a furin recognition site at single basic residues within the putative S1–S2 junctional region. We show that furin cleavage at the modified R667 position generates discrete S1 and S2 subunits and potentiates membrane fusion activity. This effect on the cell–cell fusion activity by the S glycoprotein is not, however, reflected in the infectivity of pseudotyped lentiviruses bearing the cleaved glycoprotein. The lack of effect of furin cleavage on virion infectivity mirrors that observed in the normally cleaved S glycoprotein of the murine coronavirus and highlights an additional level of complexity in coronavirus entry.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682206000900
Frank,
Thanks for the comment. I appreciate your reading about my Twitter ban. They probably did me a favor in helping my time management, which is why I didn’t fight.
I am a bit slow to understand all your points. Do you see the Anderson paper as being untouched by bias and simply reflecting the information he had at the time for his analysis? Of course, we can’t challenge his expert opinion. I have only a rough idea of what he is saying but murine is mouse. What is the similarity to mouse viruses supposed to mean if anything? Anderson seems unaware that the WIV were working with humanized mice and would become apparent after his paper when the WIV published a paper relying on using H-ACE2 modified mice.
We know that the WIV was not sharing nearly all the samples or experimental results from what they were doing. We can surmise, however, that if there was an outside chance they thought the virus was natural they would have used it to bring all hands on deck from the international community to maintain their long cultivated standing.
Do you agree that we are down to the WIV origin options?
Hi again Ron,
You wrote:- “We can surmise, however, that if there was an outside chance they thought the virus was natural they would have used it to bring all hands on deck from the international community to maintain their long cultivated standing.”
I don’t believe we can reach this conclusion on the evidence available. For China, the first objective would be to ensure that there was no dispositive evidence of a lab escape, whether it was a naturally evolved virus or an engineered one. The furthest one can go is to say that the obfuscatory actions of China are compatble with the inference that the Chinese government BELIEVED that this was a lab release rather than a natural outbreak. Even if they could have demonstrated that the virus evolved naturally, they would still be held responsible for the pandemic if the virus was negligently released from the lab, and hence would take action to cover up any negligent release whatever the origin of the virus.
Paul
Paul,
I have to agree that your point is logical. China, after all, is not monolithic; individuals can lie or be deluded. Shi or a PLA general could have had SARS2 in their stock of pathogens and kept it from the authorities without worrying. China is not a brutal dictatorship.
I agreed with Paul that the motives behind Chinese actions are hard to discern. I suspect that Chinese Communist Party would also suffer harm if this pandemic pandemic had begun in a live animal market, a business that the Chinese had been negligent in leaving unregulated or in place. However, I personally criticize myself to not being more aware of the biological warfare aspects of a lab release and gave the Chinese too much credit to announcing releases of SARS1 in the mid-2000’s.
Yes, Ron, I think Andersen’s March 2020 paper was reasonable for its time. I could complain about over-confidence in the concluding statement of his abstract, and failing to consider the possibility that bio-warfare could have motivated some laboratory experiments.
“The rules say you can’t grant this unusual authorization (to deploy these vaccines) because of the hazard that it (the vaccines) carries with it if there is a safe and effective treatment available.” – Paraphrase of Bret Weinstein
I am suggesting the reason they are trying to suppress Ivermectic is that it is a safe and effective treatment. And if it is, and if they follow their own rules that have been in place for many decades I suppose, no vaccines deployment. No return on their investment for the vaccine makers. Ivermectin is ready to do the job and it’s safe. Many lines of evidence point to this conclusion. In zero universes are these two guys in the video conspiracy theorists. I think they are closer to unimpeachable on the subject than 99.99% of people. Video with the paraphrase: COVID, Ivermectin, and the Crime of the Century: DarkHorse Podcast with Pierre Kory & Bret Weinstein At about 1:13:00. Emergency use authorization.
If Ivermectin is accepted as even partially effective it will mean thousands, possibly millions, died unnecessarily. It would sound yet another alarm that government funded establishments have a fundamental vulnerability. We all have hoped that science and medicine would be immune. The Oxycontin scandal says they are not.
If similar forces affected HCQ it resulted in the same kind of harm as Ivermectin since it would have been a treatment earlier in the pandemic, even if it was less effective. There should be an FBI investigation on the faked Lancet study on HCQ that resulted in the WHO’s halting clinical trials on it. There should be more consequences than just a retraction. BTW, I saw the uncovering of the fraud exposed by a Twitter personality (yet another citizens arrest) that just did some digging on Surgisphere to find out it was an empty shell. https://www.the-scientist.com/features/the-surgisphere-scandal-what-went-wrong–67955
> If Ivermectin is accepted as even partially effective it will mean thousands, possibly millions, died unnecessarily.
If social measures are found to be even partially effective it will mean thousands, possibly millions, died unnecessarily.
And we knew about them before Ivermectin.
Willard,
Good point. However, HCQ and Ivermectin are among the safest drugs, both with long and bountiful track records. They are also cheap and available. Lockdowns, OTOH, had huge costs including deaths from lack of treatment for other conditions, economic hardships and suicides.
Interestingly, we have a controlled experiment consisting of the “red” states and “blue” states in the USA to compare. The same with differing national policies. I think the jury is out but leaning in favor of the less draconian social measures.
In the Scientists article on the Surgisphere scandal I was surprised to learn that they also made a fraudulent study on Ivermectin. But in a positive direction. It’s maddening that science is getting such a black eye in so many important areas.
The article concludes by quoting a trial investigator formerly with the ministry of health from Peru.
Ron –
> Lockdowns, OTOH, had huge costs including deaths from lack of treatment for other conditions, economic hardships and suicides.
Why so cavalier in these assumptions? I’ve seen little evidence that “lockdowns” (a uselessly vague term, but for the sake of argument…) differentially cause those sorts of harms in ways that wouldn’t have happened with a raging (or even possibly MORE raging) pandemic otherwise. There’s of course the possibility those outcomes might have been far worse absent interventions. In particular interventions like stimulus payments and extended unemployment benefits. Yet you make this attribution/causal assertion with zero attempt to make an actual causal case by distinguishing correlation and cauation.
Not entirely dissimilar to the way you select certain miracle cures and neglect others. What if Oleander turned out to be a miracle cure,or injecting bleach?
Not to say that there isn’t more evidence recommending Ivermectin than those other miracle cures. It seems that there is. It you treat Oy mic health policy decisions as if they’re. Black and white, with no trade-offs or need to juggle complicated balances assessments in the face of uncertainty about low probability, high damage function risk.
..
but you treat public health policy.
Willard:
Ending the pandemic can have many positive contributors. If you mean social distancing, that may have helped. Say the goal is to end the pandemic. Can you think of ways Ivermectin works against that goal? I see it as working towards it by having something vaccine hesitant people can take that is helpful. That reduces transmission. I know 10 years ago leftists were skeptical of big pharma and companies in league with our government. I wonder if that’s still true, but wonder even more if it’s true for you?
J:
To call something a ‘miracle cure’ suggests you wish to concede the battle. That you checked with our government agencies, heard what they said, and accepted it. That you are surrendering not to reality, but to the authorities. You will now be given work release, if you further their message.
Can you give me one specific challenge to any of the claims Weinstein or Kory have made? Source the claim. We might end up having a discussion.
Ragnaar –
> Can you give me one specific challenge to any of the claims Weinstein or Kory have made?
I assume you mean re Ivermectin? Weinstein is over the top and has made tons o’ nutty claims in all sorts of topics.
Kory seems credible and i don’t know of any erroneous claims he’s made about Ivermectin. But public health policy is hard and I’m not going to second guess experts either way on Ivermectin, especially since there’s basically only observational/retrospective data at this point. Given the large effect size of that observational data, I personally would be inclined to use Ivermectin in clinical settings as a supplement to promoting vaccines, but I obviously lack the sufficient expertise to draw a firm opinion. On the other hand, pitting Ivermectin against vaccines in some kind of zero sum framing seems to me to be highly, highly irresponsible and the epitome of crankery – which is why I’m not surprised to see it coming from Brett “they robbed me of my Nobel prize, I’m basically Gallileo, modern medicine kills more people than it saves” Weinstein.
He could be right on Ivermectin, though. Stopped clocks and blind squirrels and all that.
Why did you never show accountability on the Covid infection and death rates in Sweden, Ragnaar?
I expect a lack of accountability from some folks but I’m kind of surprised in your case.
J:
You’re not being helpful as far Weinstein goes. He’s a nut job. He did however make the argument that the vaccines combined with preventive Ivermectin and prior exposure equals likely herd immunity. In some cases we are pitting them against each as we should as Ivermectin is known to be safer by an order of magnitude. If the vaccine are safe is not yet known for the medium and long terms. But they work together if given a chance. You used crankery similar to when you used miracle cure. That’s not a discussion but a tactic.
It looks to me that you’re refraining from criticizing Ivermectin. Which is progress. Thank you.
I saw Bret’s brother urge him to tell is lab rat telomeres story. I hadn’t thought about it much since then and hadn’t heard Bret speak about it since. It’s not the right way to characterize him. Your life is too short for that.
“Ivermectin has been used in humans for 35 years and over 4 billion doses have been administered. Merck, the original patent holder, donated 3.7 billion doses to developing countries. 2015 the two individuals who developed Ivermectin were awarded a Nobel Prize for medicine.” Merck has bizarrely issued a statement saying words to the effect of, It’s not safe.
Ragnaar –
He says ALL medicine is based on invalid research and he’s the only one who knows why. That he’s brave enough to stand up for what’s morally right, while no one else is, because he knows his wife will hold him accountable. He nods in agreement when his brother says the three siblings should all have won Nobels, then adds on how his genius ideas were stolen by people who actually produce Nobel-winning research. I could go on, but here, this will do…
It’s stunning that I can even say the moon is made of green cheese….
https://youtu.be/HttqgJQOuTw
Ragnaar –
> Merck has bizarrely issued a statement saying words to the effect of, It’s not safe.
I could be wrong, but my guess is that they’re concerned about widespread, off-label use without clinical supervision. I’d guess that’s a valid concern. If my guesses are right, then conflating that with them saying “it’s not safe” is crankery.
J:
Direct from Merck:
No scientific basis for a potential therapeutic effect against COVID-19 from pre-clinical studies;
No meaningful evidence for clinical activity or clinical efficacy in patients with COVID-19 disease, and;
A concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies.
I took a little license, but not much. I am concerned about safety. That has no meaning. You’re not concerned about all the people who died and poor people living in bleephole countries? This is Merck, a monster in size, using its authority. Of all the quacks that work there. They ought to be ashamed.
J:
Source something specific Weinstein said. You’re just hurling muck at vague things. It’s similar to you reciting what you think you heard from someone you don’t like.
Ragnaar –
> You’re just hurling muck at vague things.
Listen to his pod with his brother where he describes the putative theft committed by Nobel-winner against him (convenient excuse for producing virtually zero published research in his field?) , as well as the claims that two other siblings also deserve Nobel. Imagine that, three in one family!
Then listen to the recent pod with his wife, you’ll hear the Galileo self-referencing. The pod with Jordan has the goodies about how he knows he’s not wrong about stuff ’cause he checks in with his wife. It’s all in there. It’s not in written do and I’m not going to go back and listen to that crap again so I can give you time stamps. Especially since you declined the accountability offering.
If you’re interested, you’ll listen. Up to you. I don’t particularly care whether you do or not.
You do have the hilarious clip where Jordan promotes vapid speculation about an incorrect and absurd claim that could be easily checked, and Brett’s intellectual rigor produces a “its stunning that’s plausible.” If that isn’t enough. To show you he’s basically running a con, I doubt anything would be.
J:
Your Jordan Peterson Bret Weinstein combo. Hospitals kill more people than they save. Superbugs are a valid concern. Hospital stays are becoming shorter. He said it’s a guess that could wrong or not be wrong. What’s the headline? Of course, lacking his qualification and context. Clickbait. Yes please dismiss someone because of a 60 second video. That is our fate.
Ragnaar –
> Yes please dismiss someone because of a 60 second video. That is our fate.
Jordan makes a completely absurd claim without even bothering to research to support his overrexhi rhetoric. He does it all the time. And Brett sits there, doesn’t challenge it, and says it’s “stunning” that it’s plausible, when it isn’t plausible.
That’s a total lack of rigor on both of their parts. It’s not just a one-off, it’s their whole schtick that they repeat constantly. They’re always making this grand, se weping claims with no evidence., in field after field. And then pat each other on the back for having such keen and unique insight and moral courage. They’re saving the world don’t you know. Those woke people be out to get us. Brett tells us Nazism was a walk in the park by comparison. We’re evolutionary unprepared for what’s about to come doncha know.
But I get it. Accountability isn’t a big deal for you. So nothing to see here. There never is. They can say anything and there’s nothing to see.
> Yes please dismiss someone because of a 60 second video. That is our fate.
Jordan makes a completely absurd claim without even bothering to research to support his overrexhi rhetoric. He does it all the time. And Brett sits there, doesn’t challenge it, and says it’s “stunning” that it’s plausible, when it isn’t plausible.
That’s a total lack of rigor on both of their parts. It’s not just a one-off, it’s their whole schtick that they repeat constantly. They’re always making this grand, se weping claims with no evidence., in field after field. And then pat each other on the back for having such keen and unique insight and moral courage. They’re saving the world don’t you know. Those woke people be out to get us. Brett tells us Naz*sm was a walk in the park by comparison. We’re evolutionary unprepared for what’s about to come doncha know.
But I get it. Accountability isn’t a big deal for you. So nothing to see here. There never is. They can say anything and there’s nothing to see.
“You know, medical error is the third leading cause of death.”
“Yep.”
Stated as a fact. Not as a guess. A statement of fact. No reference to the controversy, or to the range of the estimates, or the difficulties of estimating the uncertainty. Stated as a fact.
“Yep.” “That it’s even plausible [WHEN IT ISN’T PLAUSIBLE!] is stunning.”
Make a dramatic claim with no idea what you’re talking about. Say it’s only a guess (I’m just asking questions). It could be wrong and it could not be wrong. Yes it could. What couldn’t be wrong and also not possibly be wrong? Anything?
Tie it into conspiracy ideation and grand victimization narratives. Then pile on with overblown statements of fact with no reference to uncertainties.
Find a couple of enemies to tie it to also. Bad people. If you can make them worse than commies and Naz*s so much the better. Add in some evolution hocus pocus and some evolution Just-So stories. Call yourself Galileo.
There’s nothing to hold them back because their fans don’t care about accountability. What they say sounds good. It’s emotionally gratifying. It’s dramatic. Sweeping. That’s what counts.
“It’s stunning.”.That’s what counts. Makes for great podcasts.
Judith Curry:
Thank you for putting up with us. I hope you’d be able to write a piece on Ivermectin. I know you’ve gone through a lot all ready, doing what you think is right. On Ivermectin, we need the help. The similiarity between climate change and the vaccines/other options is there. In some ways climate change was the model. They practiced going after skeptics. They are getting good at it.
This hasn’t been peer reviewed yet but could be a real game changer in the discussion. The paper reports detection of COVID genomes in Barcelona in March, 2019, and suggests that COVID (a less infectious variant maybe?) may have been circulating in the world months or maybe years before the outbreak in Wuhan.
“Most COVID-19 cases show mild influenza-like symptoms (14) and it has been suggested that some uncharacterized influenza cases may have masked COVID-19 cases in the 2019-2020 season (11). This possibility prompted us to analyze some archival WWTP samples from January 2018 to December 2019 (Figure 2). All samples came out to be negative for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 genomes with the exception of March 12, 2019, in which both IP2 and IP4 target assays were positive. This striking finding indicates circulation of the virus in Barcelona long before the report of any COVID-19 case worldwide. Barcelona is a business and commerce hub, as well as a popular venue for massive events, gathering visitors from many parts of the world. It is nevertheless likely that similar situations may have occurred in several other parts of the world, with circulation of unnoticed COVID-19 cases in the community”.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v1.full
Why do you suppose that paper is still a mere preprint, given that it dates from June 2020?
James,
Thanks for the paper. I would think one needs to treat the March 2019 positive sample result like a UFO; extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. From the paper we see the techniques has a limited sensitivity, meaning that there needs to be hundreds or thousands of sick people contributing their sewage waste to get a positive hit. But April-December 2019 samples are all negative. This means there had to be an outbreak that fizzled out. This is plausible if it was a precursor virus. If they could get an entire sequence from their sample or enough to show it was a phylogenic predecessor of the highly contagious December strain then we have real evidence. Otherwise, one must suspect the March sample got contaminated in the lab.
If the March 2019 hit was real one must incorporate that evidence without throwing out any other evidence we have and look at the probabilities of each alternative theory using Bayesian analysis. How does one connect the Mojiang mine SARS virus, pangolin cov and the Wuhan wet market outbreak to earlier infections in Spain, maybe Italy and other places earlier in 2019?
Are there Chinese wet markets in Spain selling pangolins?
What are the chances that the epicenter of the pandemic is a 10km radius around Wuhan transit line #2, which includes the WIV?
There is good evidence apart from this paper that COVID’s origins go back much further than late 2019. The first confirmed case, I think, has been traced to November 17 in the same province as Wuhan but outside of Wuhan in someone with no contact with the market or the lab. There is also evidence of COVID presence on West Coast of the US and in Europe in late 2019. All of these suggests that COVID, possibly in a less infectious form, had probably been in human populations for a fairly long time. That would mean the zoonotic jump may have occurred years ago and that there could have been a low level of infection in human populations, easily mistaken for regular flu, for months or years. The outbreak in late 2019 was actually just a mutation in human populations to a more virulent and infectious variety.
James, I am interested to see your good evidence apart from the paper on the sewage analysis. Here is the November 2020 preprint of an April 2021 article looking at the phylogenic pattern of the most recent common ancestor and concluding the initial critical mutation or cross-over occurred in Hubei province in October or November of 2019.
There are reports that the cell phone activity in a high security area of the WIV went silent for a several week period in October and a cluster of at least three WIV lab workers were hospitalized in November.
They discount international claims of virus found in 2019 sewage due to the low number of cases there would have had to have been to go extinct being to low to be detected in sewage.
So think about the likelihood of a Yunnan bat SARS virus crossing into humans, going around the world undetected, and then coming back to Wuhan to spur the first cluster in a wet market near the WIV just months after a smuggler’s pangolin is found with a cousin to SARS2. We need to weigh all the chances.
Ron –
A detailed article including a view at some supporting evidence. You won’t like the anti-Trump parts, but may find the rest interesting:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins
Joshua,
Thanks for the research for the link. I commented on the story a few days ago starting here: https://judithcurry.com/2021/05/23/collapse-of-the-fake-consensus-on-covid-19-origins/#comment-951701
This link is safe. It’s from the FLCCC with help from the DarkHorse podcast:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/28oa0byp3k0j9g2/GRAPHS%20OF%20IVERMECTIN%20COUNTRY%20USAGE%20-%20DHP%20ep83.pdf?dl=0
The argument is, this is what happens when you roll out Ivermectin.
Make something better. You can do it.
Ragnaar –
> The argument is, this is what happens when you roll out Ivermectin.
Yeah, that’s the argument. But how good an argument is it?
My understanding (I could well be wrong) is that Ivermectin was widely in use in India before it became official protocol.
As such, those data may be uninformative at best and highly misleading at worst. What you really need are the data on prevalence of doses taken in association with trends in infections and deaths. Do you have that? You need data on trends on testing and other potential confounds. There are many countries with a similar pandemic trajectory and virtually zero Ivermectin usage. Are you pointing to Ivermectin as causal w/o data on actual usage rates? If not, can you provide that data and why didn’t you do so earlier? Does the prevalence of usage in India track with the official policy, given the high level of usage off-label and outside of clinical supervision?
That is, unless your interest is in confirming a bias.
Is that your interest?
J:
You have high standards for Ivermectin and low standards for the vaccine. Weinstein covered that one. Do you think there’s some conspiracy going on with the date plots I linked to above? They are sourced. You can ask questions all day about Ivermectin. You do not do the same for the vaccines.
Joshua,
I think the point that left and right can agree on is that there should have been a Warp Speed on trials of all the on-the-shelf therapeutics that showed promise in vitro, prioritizing the ones that are have already been prescribed for decades with a clean track record. This did not happen. Ivermectin was published to be highly effective in vitro in April 2020. Corticosteroids were used to treat the 2012 Mojiang miners. Yet the trials for each lagged badly in the west in 2020. The most prominent doctor behind the Corticosteroids breakthrough, BTW, was Cory I believe.
Ragnaar, This is Joshie’s pattern of childish behavior. He throws questions against the wall and then accuses others of bias when in fact he is totally biased and unfocused in his thinking. Josh is a bias machine and an arrogant one at that.
Ragnaar –
Looks like after initially not getting the memo to fall in line on the conspiracy, the Health Ministry in India is back on board.
https://www.news18.com/news/india/revised-health-ministry-guidelines-drop-use-of-ivermectin-doxycycline-from-covid-19-treatment-3817415.html
Ron –
> I think the point that left and right can agree on is that there should have been a Warp Speed on trials of all the on-the-shelf therapeutics that showed promise in vitro, prioritizing the ones that are have already been prescribed for decades with a clean track record.
I’ve heard about a few projects that are doing that, explicitly – such as the one described here:
https://www.npr.org/2020/05/13/855229776/doctor-with-rare-disease-and-no-answers-decides-to-find-his-own-cure
Should there be more support from public health agencies for these kinds of investigations? Maybe. I don’t think I have enough information to judge. A lot of this is shot in the dark with a very low rate of return. Are resources better spent on that than supporting existing approaches like vaccinations? Maybe. I would assume it’s a complicated cost/benefit analysis.
Ragnaar –
> Do you think there’s some conspiracy going on with the date plots I linked to above?
Conspiracy? No. Inadequate analysis? Yes.
Notice that you address zero of the points I raised – all of which relate to basic epidemiological science.
So you have answers to those questions? As this article points out, post hoc ergo propter hoc
Basic logic, basic science:
https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/no-data-available-to-suggest-a-link-between-indias-reduction-of-covid-19-cases-and-the-use-of-ivermectin-jim-hoft-gateway-pundit/
Once again, there is observational, retrospective evidence that it works – with a very large effect size. That’s not insignificant. It might merit more usage under clinical supervision.
Using that evidence to justify widespread, off-label usage is problematic. It may turn out that in the end, it could save many lives. That’s a worthwhile cost/benefit analysis to conduct.
But concluding it’s a slam dunk, based only on that sort of evidence, without acknowledging the complicated nature of the analysis, and without holding the evidence to basic epidemiological standards, and resorting to conspiracy ideation, and motivation impugning of a huge number of people who have dedicated their lives to public heath, doesn’t strike me as good science.
Ragnaar –
> You have high standards for Ivermectin and low standards for the vaccine. Weinstein covered that one.
Lol. Vaccines went through massive levels of analysis. Huge trials investigated by teams of people, including clinicians, who have worked for years to understand how to conduct these sorts of evaluations.
Now if you are inclined towards conspiracy ideation and thinking that you can do the same level of analysis over Google despite lacking the relevant experience and expertise, you’re entitled.
Meantime, I’m not inclined to just dismiss the observational level analysis conducted by clinicians in the ground. It’s important information. But it is what it is. It’s reasonable to ask how to balance the different kinds of evidence. It’s worthwhile to consider the impact of institutional inertia and institutional biases.
But sloppy, slap dash, facile conflation of correlation with causation doesn’t help in that analysis.
I asked you if you had information on the actual trends IN USAGE of Ivermectin in India to go along with those graphs of trends of morbidity and mortality – because those data are critical to interpreting the significance of those trends to understanding cauality.
In response, you don’t answer the question and certainly don’t provide data, but criticize me fir asking if you have the data.
If anything, such an approach only worsens the case for Ivermectin.
Except on podcasts and with podcasters running cons.
I will note from the article I liked above..
> Furthermore, ivermectin is included in the guidelines as a treatment, meaning that it would be used on people who already developed COVID-19, and are therefore considered as COVID-19 cases. Even if ivermectin worked as a treatment, its effects would be to reduce the number of severe COVID-19 cases and deaths. But it wouldn’t cause the number of new COVID-19 cases to fall, since a treatment wouldn’t prevent new cases from occurring. Therefore, the reduction in the number of COVID-19 cases cannot be attributed to the purported effectiveness of ivermectin.
Since the claim had been made that Ivermectin works prophylactically, this paragraph is partially not applicable.
Joshua
I think a lot of people are hung up on the speed with which a vaccine was developed then approved, equating that to being experimental and unsafe.
In the case of the UK we were the European centre for medicine so were stuffed full of high quality medical researchers. Many of these did not want to go to Amsterdam where the EU decided to locate the New EU medical centre once we left.
As a result there was plenty of talent here, (and lots of Govt money) and I understand the rapidity of developing a vaccine and approval of others was due to this medical strength in depth, which was the equivalent say of editing a book where 50 people could look at 1 page each, instead of one person looking at 50 pages.
The former is obviously quicker.
Mind you I do think there are some existing medicines around that will treat covid (perhaps milder versions not a heavy duty dose) assuming it is used in a timely fashion.
I think there was a reluctance to do that initially, not helped by Trumps endorsement of a variety of cures
tonyb
tony –
> I think a lot of people are hung up on the speed with which a vaccine was developed then approved, equating that to being experimental and unsafe.
It’s an understandable concern – as is the amount of time it’s taking for final approval.
On the other hand, there’s a slew of bad hot takes around this issue that exploit those understandable concerns. I was reading Alex Berenson’s Twitter feed for a while. He’s a favored guest on Fox News. His fear-mongering on vaccines is textbook material on argumentative fallacies. And he gets widespread play.
I have no problem with “asking questions” in general, but doing so can often be inextricably linked to fallacious reasoning. Seeing the extent to which this is happening related to the vaccines, and the associated ideological signal in “vaccine hesistency” is disturbing. It feeds into an unfortunate zero sum framing of public health policies versus “freedoms” which, IMO, has significantly dileterious impact.
Not to dismiss the importance of regulating governmental overreach, but when there’s a widespread cohort of people who dismiss any societal responsibility element to getting vaccinated or accepting the minor inconvenience of mask-wearing when in public indoor spaces, then there’s a material impact on the general health of a society. If this is part of a growing trend (I’m not sure it is, there were violent protests to mask-wearing in 1918-1919) it doesn’t bode well.
J:
There is no substitute for time. So we don’t know of the medium and long term effects of the vaccines. It is perfectly accurate to say that the vaccines are not safe if you need data to be able to say that. And we do not have data on the medium and long terms.
CPAs learn there is theory and practice. Our exam in the 1980s had 2 sections named those two things.
All your data is theory. Done not in the field. Kory does practice and has a good record developing protocols. That’s practice. He can see. He has vision. You can argue data until the cows home. Medicine is practiced and the hangers on who are the regulators are the back seat drivers.
It’s the hangers on who are the problem getting Ivermectin into circulation where it can do good.
What would you guess Weinstein and Heying have done? Field work. Bret has a story about capturing bats in mist nets. Fauci? Who knows.
Ragnaar –
> CPAs learn there is theory and practice. Our exam in the 1980s had 2 sections named those two things.
I’m a big believer in walking the line between theory and practice. In education the practitioners think the theoroticians lack practical grounding and the theoriticians think the practitioners lack sophistication. And to some degree both are right. I think the way to go is to constantly keep the dialog between practice and theory ongoing.
There are tons o’ clinicians who support vsccines. The vaccines weren’t developed and approved without in envolvement of clinicians. You’re hurrying your insight behind a false dichotomy.
> All your data is theory. Done not in the field.
All “my” data about what? Vaccines? Again, that’s just wrong. There’s tons o” field-derived data in the dwxwlownr of vaccines.
> Kory does practice and has a good record developing protocols. That’s practice.
Practitioners have their biases as well. Ignoring that, and focusing only on biases of theoriticians is only done to confosl a bias.
And once again you fail to address the weaknesses of your arguments. And instead talk platitudes and sound bites.
Disappointing.
Here you go, Ragnaar. Let’s follow what the clinicians say – those theoriticians just aren’t to be trusted:
Go to 13:45 in…
https://odysee.com/@Potholer54:9/Potholer54:2
Ron wrote: “I think the point that left and right can agree on is that there should have been a Warp Speed on trials of all the on-the-shelf therapeutics that showed promise in vitro, prioritizing the ones that are have already been prescribed for decades with a clean track record. This did not happen.”
Every approved drug was immediately screened in multiple places for their ability to inhibit the growth of SARS2 in cell culture. (So were many development candidates that have passed safety studies, but never became approved drugs.) Such screens are automated, cheap and fast; drug companies screen hundreds of thousands of compounds. I’ve worked as a medicinal chemist looking for anti-infective drugs. A compound with an IC50 for inhibiting viral replication in cell culture greater than 1 uM is NOT a “promising candidate” for development as a drug. Long-shot candidates start around 0.1 uM. (Anti-bacterial drugs can have MIC’s in the range of 1-4 ug/mL (1 uM), but an MIC is where no bacterial growth can be detected and is roughly 20 times higher an IC50.) All useful antivirals have IC50’s below 0.1 uM. Remdesivir (and some other anti-virals) are complicated because they are prodrugs that are converted to the active nucleotide triphosphates in vivo, but not necessarily in cell culture. The active form of resdesivir inhibits the RNA polymerase of SARS2 with an IC50 of 0.07 uM. Candidly, remdesivir is a lousy drug that – at best – gets some patients out of the hospital a few days sooner. Really effective anti-virals quickly cause several orders of magnitude reductions in the concentration of viruses in the blood, SARS2 isn’t present in blood and nasal swabs can be variable and are semi-quantitative at best. (Gilead got approved without showing reduction in viral load in vivo.) When a better drug comes along, I predict you will hear about how effective it is in reducing viral load.
Furthermore, neither ivermectin nor HCQ have “clean track records”. The prescribing information for HCQ warns doctors of cardiomyopathy and QT prolongation which is associated with life-threatening arrhythmia (problems that have only been recognized in the past few decades). If you want to continuously give HCQ to millions of Americans to prevent infection knowing that only 0.01-0.1% of them are likely to be infected in any one day (10-100/100,000/day), these are serious drawbacks. If you want to treat patients who have been exposed to those diagnosed with COVID for a few days, the risks are lower. If your doctors can come to your office several times a day to listen to your heart – as was the case with President Trump – the risk is minimal. The same is true for hospitalized patients, but most were given an ECG before starting HCQ or didn’t get it if they had a history of heart disease. A drug that is considered safe and effective for one indication might not be considered safe and effective for another. The patients most in danger from COVID – elderly with heart conditions – are precisely those most in danger from cardiac effects of HCQ.
https://www.drugs.com/pro/hydroxychloroquine-tablets.html
Ivermectin is an extremely useful drug against the worms that cause river-blindness, but it does have significant safety liabilities. It acts like a nerve gas and irreversibly inactivates a receptor used for transmission of nerve signals. This is why a single dose can safely eliminate the river-blindness. People and worms both have this receptor, but ivermectin is about 100-fold more potent at inactivating the worm receptor. What happens if you want to raise the dose and/or give multiple doses to treat COVID, something that is likely to be useful given its low potency in cell culture? Ivermectin has long been known to be active against the parasites that cause malaria, and there is a desperate need for new anti-malarial agents. Nevertheless, no one has developed a safe and effective protocol for treating malaria with ivermectin – possibly because of these liabilities. Preliminary safety studies with higher and multiple doses of ivermectin were performed in an attempt to develop it as an anti-malarial and those studies have guided some treatment regimes for COVID in the third world.
I’ve very cynical about all of the ivermectin clinical trials that have been run in the third world – where doctors need to show positive results to keep money coming in. If they really believed in the results they have been reporting, they’d run a proper random-assignment, placebo-controlled clinical trial and collect their Nobel Prize if the results were great. As I said, I’m cynical and could be wrong.
Correction: Ivermectin is equally potent binding to the human receptor and the same receptor in the worms that cause river blindness. However, Ivermectin doesn’t “cross the blood brain barrier’ very well, so Ivermectin doesn’t kill us. Today, we known that drugs do cross the blood brain barrier, but many are actively transported out of the brain as fast as they get in – as long as nothing interferes with that pump.
Frank,
Thanks for your information packed comment. You make very persuasive points. I believe your points could all be true and it could still also be true that medical science did not do their best to find a use for HCQ and Ivermectin in a time where they had little else. There are a slew of other medications that are safe and can have a slight antiviral effect, including famotidine (Pepsid), melatonin, vitamins D, B12, K2 and zinc. There is no good reason that everyone who came down with flu-like symptoms couldn’t immediately take these or even take them preventatively. If they reduced the infection even by 10% many lives would have been saved.
All of our primary care doctors had no business stepping out of practice.
New study on HCQ says it saved lives even for people on vents.
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210602/HydroxychloroquineAzithromycin-therapy-at-a-higher-dose-improved-survival-by-nearly-20025-in-ventilated-COVID-patients.aspx
Franktoo | June 9, 2021 at 2:30 pm, and correction.
Good comment. Thank you.
Ron Graf: New study on HCQ says it saved lives even for people on vents.
That is the result of a long series of post-hoc analyses. Even if an agent is ineffective (i.e. the “null hypothesis” is true) you can after a while find an analysis that apparently shows the agent to have been effective. Quantitatively, the “p-value” is close to 1.0 [sic], no matter what p-value is reported by the authors.
Ron –
> New study on HCQ says it saved lives even for people on vents.
So how do we integrate this information with all the admonishments from HCQ proponents that we shouldn’t judge its) HCQ’s efficacy when used late in the course of the disease with very sick patients?
One of the problems with this kind of advocacy by cherry-picking observational studies over the Google is that it creates an ever-morphing standard of unfalsifiability.
Today’s Washington Times tells story of Rich Drug, Poor Drug, the difference of $3500/treatment Remdeivir and $10/course HCQ, $2.34MM in lobbying NIH versus zero dollars. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jun/9/follow-the-money-big-pharma-dr-fauci-and-the-death/
Ron: A glanced at the “HCQ helps people on ventilators” paper. First, this isn’t a definitive random-assignment trial where two otherwise similar groups of patients receive or don’t receive the test drug. This is the cumulative experience of a working hospital (observational study) where dozens of different doctors are doing whatever they think is best for their patients at the time. There is a natural tendency for some doctors to administer or not administer experimental treatments to their sickest patients. Those will the worst heart disease might not be as likely to get HCQ, for example.
There are 10 risk factors and four different classes of drug involved (See Table 5). One of the drugs, anti-inflammatory steroids, is now recognized as the biggest advance in treatment, but timing is critical. To learn anything from this uncontrolled experience, one needs a regression model which predicts the risks and benefits of these 14 different variables. Note that the confidence intervals for the odds ratio (OR) for these parameters are very wide. Note that this model is completely unable to determine if steroids are helpful or harmful. Note that there is a purely arbitrary cutoff that defines whether the patient received HCQ+AZ. There are probably dozens, if not hundreds, of equally valid models that could be constructed to fit this data. The purpose of this kind of observational study is to collect suggestive evidence for what kind of definitive random assignment clinical trials should be run. And we have done random-assignment clinical trials for HCQ and found no benefit. Now those trials probably didn’t test the doses recommended by this work for the particular subset of ventilated patients analyzed in this study. What are the chances that HCQ helped these patients, but not the patients in a well-controlled random-assignment clinical trial? Maybe someone with the time and resources will think this is a decent bet?
Long experience has taught the FDA to only trust efficacy data from random assignment (double-blind) placebo-controlled clinical trials on a predefined patient population that are analyzed by a statistical methods defined before the trial begins. Otherwise there are too many ways for rapacious drug companies to analyze different sub-populations using different end-points and discover statistically significant efficacy where none really exists.
Frank,
I agree with everything except you seem to be missing the point that there was so much foot-dragging, incompetence and even fraud flowing against HCQ and Ivermectin that practicing doctors around the world are still split about whether they are effective. It’s a real problem. There is no split on the fact that Remdesivir does not work despite its getting the red carpet treatment and approval for use in the US.
Ron Graf’s comment – ” There is no split on the fact that Remdesivir does not work despite its getting the red carpet treatment and approval for use in the US.”
I recall the initial studies for Remdesivir only showed 8%-12% better results at best which seemed to be very weak improvement based on the data I saw in the study. Yet Remdesivir was highly touted as a substantial improvement.
My take on those studies was that Remdesivir was very ineffective or at best a placebo. I have several left of center clients in my business and several commented that remdesivir was a very promising cure- its as if, the TDS had turned off any critical thinking skills
Matt Taibbi, recently awakened from his wokism is sounding the alarm at scientific censorship since it may be costing thousands (or millions) of lives. Ivermectin is a dangerous word.Fauci and big pharma are not fans for some reason. And therefore, since Fauci contradicted Trump enough to become a left hero, the left also hates Ivermectin. Even though Trump didn’t disqualify it by praise, it’s close enough HCQ, being cheap and safe, to be dangerous for the left.
Ragnaar: Vaccines were tested in random-assignment, double-bind clinical trials with 40,000 patients divided between treatment and control groups and followed for two months after vaccination. Within about 5 weeks, more than 100 patients had tested positive, enough to ensure that efficacy would be properly assessed, but the additional 3 weeks were specified by the approved protocol for safety. For the Pfizer and Moderna RNA vaccines, the injected RNA is degraded within days and the subunit of the spike protein the RNA codes for is also degraded. The safety and degradation of the lipids vesicles used to induced cells to take up RNA had been explored in the past studies. Within about a month, here is nothing left in the vaccinated patient’s body – except antibodies – to cause problems.
Your immune system creates antibodies to antigens hundreds or probably thousands of times in your lifetime. Yes, those antibodies occasionally cause serious auto-immune diseases. For example, Type I diabetes is due to your immune system attacking the cells in your pancreas that make insulin. In general, these attacks occur when the antibodies are first created and present at the highest concentration. Based on long experience with vaccines and their side effects, the FDA felt that a 2 month period was adequate for emergency approval of a vaccine, but those 20,000 patients are still being followed to see if new problems appear. Smaller groups from preliminary studies had been followed for much longer before emergency approval. This is similar or greater scrutiny that Ivermectin received before its approval and today patients may be getting higher doses and more doses of Ivermectin than were used in those safety studies.
The clotting problems seen with the J&J and AZ vaccines are extremely rare and too infrequent to have been detected in a trial with only 20,000 patients. COVID infections apparently cause many more dangerous clots than the vaccine. When the problems was first detected in the US, administration was halted for a few days so that doctors could be properly instructed about what side effect symptoms to look for and how to treat them in the unlikely event they were observed. Many criticized this halt for creating doubts about vaccination, but the FDA wasn’t going to let vaccinations proceed and unnecessarily put new people at risk without instructing doctors how to deal with a rare, KNOWN side effect
The development of vaccines for COVID was sped up a number of ways. 1) Some vaccines you expect to administer only one or twice in a lifetime. So developers work very hard to optimize the antigen that creates the immune response. In this case, little or no optimization was done, except in computers. If the vaccine provided protection for one year, that would be good enough. If two doses were needed to get protection for one year, that would be good enough. (It turns out that AZ wasted a lot of time optimizing the period between doses of its vaccine, dealing completion of the studies needed for approval in the US. The British took a big gamble by giving single doses of vaccine and expecting to give a second dose three months later.) 2) In the last few years, cryo-EM has tremendously sped up structural studies on spike proteins. Research on the SARS1 spike protein gave everyone a head start on SARS2. 3) Some vaccine clinical trials require years to vaccinate enough patients and years to determine whether or not they were protected against a rare disease. People lined up ahead of time to volunteer for trials of COVID vaccines and it only took weeks in the middle of this pandemic for enough to get sick to determine efficacy. 4) Government funding allows developers to line up manufacturing capacity and produce vaccine long before the need for this capacity was proven by clinical trials. 5) The FDA gave top priority to these vaccines. It can take months to get the protocol for a clinical trial approved and a year or more for the FDA to review everything about a new drug. Trump demanded approval before election day, but the FDA knew that approval was only the first step in a 6+ month process of using a vaccine to bring this pandemic under control. Conspiracy theorists and anti-vaccers were certain to try to create doubts about any vaccine. Mistakes the FDA could be fairly criticized for making would be deadly to success.
Looks like the fake consensus is dead.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-science-suggests-a-wuhan-lab-leak-11622995184?mod=opinion_lead_pos5
If the consensus in question was the decision to deny and hide the truth about the origins, that has weakened but is still alive unfortunately. Unless there are some repercussions for scientists and media personnel who failed to do their jobs, there’s no reason to believe this or any future “consensus” to deceive will ever die. There have not been any repercussions yet.
In fact it looks like too many are simply using this as lessons on how to destroy science and news without getting caught.
David,
Thanks for the that WSJ link. Did you see the article was written by Steven Quay and Richard Muller (of Berkeley Earth.) That is symbolically huge. Muller also was practically the only liberal who had the ca-hungas to denounce Mann and his hockey stick.
Quay does a great job of explaining in plain English how incredibly strong the evidence is of engineering, and that it could plainly be seen by any expert. It seems likely this was what Anderson was seeing on Jan 31, 2020 when he wrote Fauci. This rare codon pair evidence was in Yan’s first paper that Gallo and other medical science big shot tried to shoot down.
There has to be a special place for those who use their authority to wittingly silence honest whistleblowers risking their life and career.
Frank –
You might find this of interest:
https://twitter.com/Marco_Piani/status/1408584677032710146?s=19
I’d prefer to learn about the origin of COVID from experts in virology; not an entrepreneurial doctor who greatest experience is with medical imaging agents and a physics professor with influential connections at the WSJ. (Nor from Latham and Wilson, who appear to be opportunists making a living at a foundation they set up opposing genetically engineered crops.)
FWIW, the consensus furin cleavage site is RXXR/ (where X can be any base and / is the cleavage site and the sequence needs to be in a region flexible enough to fit into the furin active site). In SARS2, the sequence is RRAR, where the first two Rs are encoded by the infamous CGG-CGG, but the critical R in the fourth position coded for by CGT. R is found in the fourth position of many coronaviruses, so a furin cleavage site be introduced by mutations at the first position. One apparently doesn’t need to insert four amino acids by genetic engineering.
See Figure 1B and Table 1 in: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/am/pii/S016635422030052
Quay and Mueller write: “In gain-of-function research, a microbiologist can increase the lethality of a coronavirus enormously by splicing a special sequence into its genome at a prime location [a furin cleavage site at the junction between the S1 and S2 subunits of the spike protein]… The end result has always been SUPERCHARGED viruses.”
MERS has a furin cleavage site but replicates so poorly that it hasn’t caused a pandemic. (See above reference) The furin cleavage site has been removed from SARS-CoV-2 and it replicates about five fold slower in cell culture. A furin cleavage site has been added to SARS-CoV-1, speeding up replication in some assays, but not others. A second cleavage using a the host enzyme TMPSS is also critical and there may be others. Many viral proteins prevent the innate immune system (interferon etc) from suppressing viral infections until antibodies can be produced. Creating a pandemic virus isn’t as simply as adding a furin cleavage site
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03237-4
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682206000900
Different organisms make different amounts of tRNAs that recognize redundant codons, such as the six t-RNAs that recognize the six triplets that code for arginine (R). (Actually multiple tRNAs apparently also recognize the same triplet.) If you want to produce a human protein drug in yeast, it often pays to replace many of the coding triplets in the human gene with the codons that are used most frequently in yeast. In the case of a bat virus that is crossing over into humans, one might expect that virus to mostly use the codons preferred in bats and gradually switch to human-preferred codons, unless there is an intermediate host with different preferences. However, as best I can tell, the preferred codons for R in humans are CGG (21%), AGA and AGG (20%), CGC (19%), CGA (11%) and CGT (8%) and I couldn’t find any information on preferred codons in bats. Quay and Mueller correctly suggest that the CGG-CGG is unlikely to have been introduced by recombination, but it is not necessarily a hallmark of genetic engineering. If you intend to do gain of function experiments in existing mice with a human ACE2 receptor, would you want to use codons optimized for mice? GC-rich synthetic oligonucelotides assemble double helices more readily than AT-rich sequences, but GC-rich single-stranded RNA can fold into more stable secondary structures which slow translation and replication. SARS-C0V-2 actually has a general bias against redundant codons with C or G that may have nothing to do with host cell tRNAs
https://www.genscript.com/tools/codon-frequency-table
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12985-020-01395-x
Quay and Mueller claim: “Both [SARS1 and MERS] were confirmed to have a natural origin; the viruses evolved rapidly as they spread through the human population, until the most contagious forms dominated. Covid-19 didn’t work that way. It appeared in humans already adapted into an extremely contagious version. No serious viral “improvement” took place until a minor variation occurred many months later in England.” Are these scientists experts on the evolutionary improvements of viruses? The initial outbreak of COVID sickened many people, but antibody surveys showeed that 10 or more people acquired antibodies for every 1 person who got sick enough to be tested by PCR. 10% of the people in the US have tested positive by PCR and 18% the hardest hit areas, so the virus has obviously improved its ability to make a much larger fraction of humans it infects ill enough to get tested. That improvement is why early estimates of IFR have grossly underestimated how many people would die compared with seasonal influenza. Today we say variants have become more “transmissible” and probably more deadly. I’m no expert in judging whether “serious improvements” in SARS2 were much slower than in SARS1, MERS, HIV, Zika, etc – and neither are Quay and Mueller.
I want to hear from virologists who are actually manipulating the genomes of viruses, performing gain of function studies and possibly know something about engineering viruses for bio-warfare. After the last five years, I’m personally sick of the biases elites who run the WSJ Editorial page deciding who gets to criticize the expert consensus (especially on COVID) without even having their work fact checked. We’d all be better off if real experts from multiple positions DEBATED on the editorial page and READERS get to decide who is right. (I do want experts candid enough to admit that the Lancet letter was a political abomination that never should have been published.) No one is interested in developing a consensus about what is known and what important questions need to be answered. You get more glory and eyeballs attracting advertising revenue from sensation opinions.
I don’t think we will be able to determine the origin of this pandemic until we identify the starting “backbone” or genome for genetic engineering experiments, gain of function experiments or natural evolution. RaTG13 is too distant for natural evolution and doesn’t appear to have any special features that would make it a good starting spot for laboratory experiments. Sure, you can add a furin cleavage site, but there are another hundred mutations to go before you get to SARS2. What was the objective of these experiments and how was that goal reached?
We would all prefer to trust the experts. That is why they were corralled together to stake themselves in a political letter to the Lancet. That’s a problem.
The only solution is for the jury of independent scientists at the periphery to do an audit. Yan’s 1st paper marks the furin cleavage site as PRRA. I think they may have been mistaken and the true functionality lies more shifted one amino acid to the RRAR, using an existing consensus R at the end. Still, there is no other sars-like virus out of the 50+ known that have this PRRA segment inserted. So, we have both a rare insertion and a lightning strike rare in nature coding for a pair of arginines.
Yan’s 1st paper shows this. https://zenodo.org/record/4028830
Ron, The solution is for leaders in science to reform the culture. They need to stamp out attempts at consensus enforcement and politicization. People like Roger Pielke should be admired instead of being vilified. The problem is that consensus enforcement has become deeply entrenched in our current very intolerant public discourse. Editorials need to be published in pairs with opposite positions being argued.
I’m not holding my breath. There are strong cultural biases in most science that cause most people to self censor their public statements. Some days, I wake up believing we need to simply start over and defund academia and rebuild it from scratch. Only a large group of billionaires could fund such a thing though. I don’t trust government to do it.
Ron –
> We would all prefer to trust the experts.
For me, it’s not a mater of “trust.” it’s a matter of weighing probabilities.
I ask which is more probable: that a group of heavily ideologically oriented Google jockeys can conduct a thorough analysis by serving the web for articles that confirm their preexisting biases, or thst Pelle who have spent decades doing the relevant research reach a broad and valid consensus on a particular viewpoint?
Neither choice merits trust, imo. And there have been instances in the past when outlier expert opinion has won out over broadly held concensus opinions. Institutional biases exist just as do “motivated” biases of ideological influence.
But anyone who equates trust with an assessment of probabilities, or dismisses the valuable contribution of expertise and experience, is operating from a fundamental misconception, imo.
“I’m no expert in judging whether “serious improvements” in SARS2 were much slower than in SARS1, MERS, HIV, Zika, etc…”
Here is the paper that started Alina Chan on her personal investigation on the origin. It’s a peer reviewed comparison of the differences in human adaptation pattern of SAR1 and SARS2 in their evolution. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2020/05/02/2020.05.01.073262.full.pdf
Joshua,
Would you rather live in a society where reporters trust anything an expert tells them or where news consumers trust whatever their chosen reporters tell them? Sincere question. I think the answer is that you are glad to be a “Google jockey” and glad there are other ones too.
It’s not hard to find examples where you don’t trust expert opinions. I am pretty sure you would be totally skeptical of anything our host claimed about climate change regardless of how expert she was on that particular point. At the same time I think you might well trust her sincerity and candidness. That leaves bias. Therefore, I would think you might agree that bias is powerful enough to override expertise in getting the right answer on an expert opinion. This is proven in court every day where expert opinion for opposing parties can have equal expertise and sincerity with opposite opinions.
So what’s the solution? IMO there should be open debate among experts. Then people can do their own checking on the argument assumptions. Authorities want to shut down debate and apply duress to experts to tow the line. Fauci emails show this. Fauci starts every sentence off with: “Experts who I know say — …”
Ron, The problem for someone like Joshua is that he has demonstrated a lack of critical thinking skills and an extreme tendency to cherry picking what suits his narrative. That leaves bias or pure reactionary personal spite as the motivation for actions. He tends to pick up on minor or irrelevant “inconsistencies” that largely exist in his own mind. It’s not an enviable position to be in. There would be ways to remedy that such as doing some self training or practicing the Socratic method with colleagues to sharpen skills. Joshie at one point years ago spent months of his precious life energy trying to tell Judith how biased she was. It was condescending and dispicable. Judith got tired of the largely meaningless rhetorical posing (Josh can’t dispute science except by cherry picking sentences from papers) and put him in moderation.
David, Joshua,
To David’s comment that was upthread, apparently just released from moderation, we are of like mind except I am skeptical that tearing anything down is necessary in order to reform it. My hope that lasting progress is made by persuasion through dialogue. Building trust is critical. I realize that seems hopeless at times. But paradigms can shift with the change of view of very few influencers. Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Aaron Mate, Bari Weiss, Jonathan Turley, maybe Tulsi Gabbard, are examples of previously committed left-leaning thinkers that have recently had a life-changing realization that no long-term cause is above truth or is worthy of lying for.
In the electorate, Reagan was famous for gaining support of centrist Democrats. He did that by building trust. This is Trumps main weak point. I realize the center is very thin now but it would only take the flipping of one of the major networks or newspapers to create a dam break of change in opinion, which is currently based on an ever growing list of MSM mis-informed stories. Think now how many times one would have been embarrassed by repeating a major media story, like that Officer Sicknick was bludgeoned on the head with a fire extinguisher. Yesterday an Obama appointed IG blew away the Lafayette Park Trump Nazzi narrative. It’s hard for people to wake up to the realization that woke means the opposite of what it sounds like, just like equity. Who knows, 1984, which used to be required reading for English class, might be dusted off to start being assigned in social studies, (where it belonged all along).
Ron –
There’s not much that I disagree with there in your June 10, 4:11 post:
> Would you rather live in a society where reporters trust anything an expert tells them or where news consumers trust whatever their chosen reporters tell them? Sincere question. I think the answer is that you are glad to be a “Google jockey” and glad there are other ones too.
Of course. But I also (1) recognize the limits of my Google jockeying, and (2) I think that it’s easy to mislead ourselves as to which “experts” or journalists are trustworthy – because of what has been well established in how we filter evidence so as to reinforce existing beliefs.
At any rate – non of that deals directly with what I was saying about the importance of assessing probabilities – with an assumption of “trust” either one way or the other.
> It’s not hard to find examples where you don’t trust expert opinions.
I don’t particular “trust” ANY expert opinions. That was my point. There may be some occasions where it do, but as a rule I don’t without a strong evidence basis for doing so.
> I am pretty sure you would be totally skeptical of anything our host claimed about climate change regardless of how expert she was on that particular point.
Hmmm. Not really. At the ground level, I assume that what she says about the technical matters of climate science are valid, and in the very least that I don’t have the ability or skills to assess their veracity. So then I look to ground her technical assessments within a wider range of technical assessments. Then I look for signals of bias at the level where I may have the ability to skills to detect them – in non-technical aspects – and I feed them back into the loop. In so doing I try to account for my own potential biases in that process, as well as to remain aware that just because she’s displayed some biased reasoning in non-technical aspects does’t necessarily imply a bias in her technical assessments.
> At the same time I think you might well trust her sincerity and candidness. That leaves bias. Therefore, I would think you might agree that bias is powerful enough to override expertise in getting the right answer on an expert opinion.
Well, I would be sure to caveat that enough to make sure it’s viewed conditionally.
> This is proven in court every day where expert opinion for opposing parties can have equal expertise and sincerity with opposite opinions.
I don’t fully agree. True to some extent, sure. But sometimes experts can be correct in contradictory conclusions for any variety of reasons, not the least of which are different operational assumptions or technical definitions, or simply because what’s being focused on is only a subset of a much larger phenomenon what contains a great deal of uncertainty.
> So what’s the solution? IMO there should be open debate among experts. Then people can do their own checking on the argument assumptions.
I agree.
> Authorities want to shut down debate and apply duress to experts to tow the line. Fauci emails show this. Fauci starts every sentence off with: “Experts who I know say — …”
There is a dual problem in effect. On the one hand, sometimes “experts” want to shut down further exploration out of a resistance to accepting the possibility of being wrong. But sometimes there’s a legitimate concern, especially for someone like public health official, about promoting harmful concepts that lie far beyond a reasonable range of probabilities. And sometimes, “experts” are wrongly accused of trying to shut conversations down – because making that accusation has become a politically convenient narrative.
Here’s a good conversation regarding a false accusation that an “expert” was trying to “cancel” Darwin….(I listen to these as pods when I”m working outside – just search from your pod player to do that) that serves as a good example of when that politically convenient narrative was absurd…
https://meaningoflife.tv/videos/43515
Joshua, The overwhelming problem today is not too much debate and too many viewpoints. The problem is a vast array of institutional forces ranging from academia, the mainstream media, and now tech titan monopolies that are censoring correct viewpoints. The origins of COVID19 is the perfect example where a lie was perpetrated by scientists and government official scientists that has later turned out to be a fake consensus.
I notice that now that the consensus in in full avalanche collapse mode, no one is defending that fake consensus even here.
> They need to stamp out attempts at consensus enforcement and politicization.
Millions of years of evolution for this.
I say it’s worth it.
“They need to stamp out attempts at consensus enforcement and politicization.”
Kinda sounds like: “On Domestic violence, we need to just keep punching and punching and punching away at it.”
:)
Oops. Should be here:
https://twitter.com/Marco_Piani/status/1408584677032710146?s=19
The rest of that thread echoes much if what you’ve said.
Copy of the original paper by Quay. https://zenodo.org/record/4477081#.YMC1tsR8Jdg
Compelling.
kribaez: https://zenodo.org/record/4477081#.YMC1tsR8Jdg
Thank you for the link.
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dpy6629 wrote in an awkwardly long thread above: “Thanks for rereading the [Ioannidis] papers. I will read more carefully when time permits. I think that Covid19 generated an emotional response and that it’s hard for people to think objectively in this case. Generally, viral epidemiology is a primitive science and data on intervention effectiveness is all over the place, largely because its very hard to quantify human behavior.
And I think you grossly under-estimate the value of epidemiology models. Ferguson infamously predicted UP TO 2.2 million deaths in America if nothing were done. We imposed NPI’s (non-pharmaceutical interventions) that totally eliminated seasonal influenza, developed a vaccine in 9 months and still suffered 0.6 million deaths.
What epidemiology models can’t do is account for changes in human behavior. The 1918-20 Spanish influenza came in three major waves in most locations. With a lower R_0 than COVID and causing greater fear than COVID by killing many in the prime of life, NPI’s and fear likely brought that pandemic to a halt twice and probably a third without reaching herd immunity. The situation was much like the dramatic reduction in the pandemic in Europe seen in the summer of 2020. Then FEAR diminished, people’s behavior changed, perhaps more transmissible variants made containment more difficult and the pandemic surged dramatically. (Lockdowns in the less-disciplined US ended the initial exponential surge by early April, but failed to cause a dramatic reduction except in hard hit areas like NYC and Massachusetts. Republican run states had big surges over the early summer. And then things really went to he11 in November and December. The dramatic fall in cases in late January and early February wasn’t caused by approaching herd immunity of vaccination (which had barely gotten underway, so I suspect it was caused by FEAR and recognition that lack of discipline over the holiday season had created enormous problems.
I suspect that the fear of getting sick and finding no room at the hospital was the biggest source of FEAR. When the rate of new cases stays above 50-100 new cases per 100,000 per day, I think hospital reach capacity. They infamously did in NYC. I know some elderly patients were sent home to die from some South Texas hospitals so there would be space for patients who could be saved. I read patients were being flown out of the Dakotas to other states. However, for the most part these were local stories that didn’t make the national news (to the best of my knowledge).
Overflowing hospitals and FEAR are the reason it wasn’t practical to let this pandemic burn out in a few months (which may be the economically sensible approach). Politicians want voters seeing avoid overflowing hospitals and people become vastly more cautious when hospital beds are in short supply.
Epidemiological models can do a decent job predicting the course of the pandemic for the next few weeks and smart political leaders used models to impose restrictions before hospital capacity was reached. (Even Texas governor Abbott closed the bars when hospital capacity was threatened and exceeded in June.) What epidemiologists probably can’t do is handle significant changes in FEAR and behavior. Once fear subsidies, the pandemic will return to the course towards herd immunity it was on. And that leads to roughly the number of deaths Ferguson predicted, but not following a course he could predict.
Feel free to dismiss all of the above as after-the-fact rationalization. Perhaps it is. However, remember that pandemics are rather simple phenomena to model: a certain number of dangerous contacts are going to result in a certain amount of transmission. Simple. You can reduce contacts through lockdowns and social distancing, and make them safer with masks. With experience, modelers probably learned roughly how much these NPI’s help. It’s people’s behavior that is not simple. Unfortunately we don’t have Asimov’s psycho-history to guide us.
Frank,
Behaviour is certainly one of the controls, but I am not certain that it is the dominant control. I think it is dangerous to underestimate the effect of mutation. You mentioned the three waves of the Spanish Flu. The statistical evidence shows that the virus in the second wave was not only more transmissible, but had a far higher IFR than the first wave. So much so that some researchers have suggested that the first wave was actually caused by a different flu virus rather than by a precursor to the second wave. The other more dominant theory is that the first wave was a precursor, but the second wave mutation was sufficiently different to be “antigenically distinct”. Apparently, there were many recorded instances of individuals who contracted the Spanish flu in both the first and second wave.
I suspect that we are seeing something similar happening with COVID-19. A lot of the bumps in country profiles of COVID-19 cases and deaths seem to be explicable by the timing of the appearance of certain variants and their rise to dominance. If you look at SE Asian nations like Malaysia and South Korea, for example, they were performing exceptionally well until the arrival and increasing frequency of the more transmissible GR and GU variants in mid to late 2020. This was followed at the end of the year by the arrival of the English variant (B117). Malaysia has now identified the Indian variant, and deaths are sky-rocketing. It was confirmed in 3Q last year that an individual who had antibodies from an earlier infection could be reinfected by some of the later GR and GU variants.
Equally, you can examine various European profiles and see the rise to dominance of B117 (plus some South African and Brazilian) between December 20 and March 21, even when behavioural controls were held in place and vaccination programmes should have been offsetting the effect of the new variants.
It is not obvious to me that behaviour is the major controlling factor on these profiles, although it should certainly be a contributor.
Paul: I agree with you – I over-simplified. The additional factors you suggest could be very important. Unlike the US, most of Europe reduced most new cases by more than an order of magnitude in late spring, Did more transmissible variants cause the same measures to fail the following fall? Or we people tired of pandemic restrictions and less careful?
I like the hypothesis that aerosol transmission is more effective when indoor air is much drier. This could be another factor. Due to their high surface area to volume, aerosol droplets immediately evaporate until they reach equilibrium with indoor humidity. That could modify their infectivity and persistence. That could explain the seasonality of the annual influenza and the many surges seen last fall and winter. In the US, the fall surge began in the Dakotas where it is colder and drier sooner. The pandemic in those states peaked in November and had fallen dramatically by Christmas when much of the country was at its worst. However, the same pattern wasn’t seen in Europe, possibly because of variants. The French were first to surge (soon after their famous for August vacations). Air conditioning could have dried the air in FL, TX and AZ causing their June surge.
Another favorite personal hypothesis is that the virus may be as “transmissible” as it used to be, but that a larger fraction of those being infected are getting ill enough to be tested and therefore detected. That would be the case if the virus evolved to replicate more rapidly or better counteract the innate immune system. Last spring, we thought there were 10 undetected infections for every one confirmed by PCR. If that remained true, the cumulative 10% of the US that has tested positive would have resulted in herd immunity without vaccination. My estimate is that we have been detecting 1 in 2-3 infections beginning with the fall surge.
I hoped to convey the idea that pandemics are simple enough to be modeled over the next four to six weeks – as long as behavior/fear doesn’t change. On that time frame, fewer contacts and more masks should have a semi-predictable effect. And I suspect overflowing hospitals are the major cause of changes in behavior/fear. Hospital capacity can drive public policy, too. However, it is hopeless to model an entire pandemic from exponential growth to a plateau and decline when herd immunity is reached. The crash in the US and UK pandemics (5X? and 10X?) from mid-January to mid-February probably wasn’t predictable on January 1, (because it occurred well before vaccination had an impact and well before approaching herd immunity began to become apparent in April). However, the total cases and deaths would be semi-predictable even if some major surges and retreats are not.
franktoo – “Air conditioning could have dried the air in FL, TX and AZ causing their June surge.”
Edgar hopes simpson documented influenza summer surges in regions of the world south of the 30th N and north of the 30th S in the 1980’s. This covered periods going back to the mid 1880’s which was long before those southern states had air conditioning.
Likewise Hopes Simpson documented waves (80+% of infections) in regions north of the 30th N occurring in the Oct/nov/Dec/Jan/Feb time frame.
I cant attribute any particular reason, but the pattern for influenza waves by location has been fairly consistent over the last 150+ /200+ years.
Franktoo: Republican run states had big surges over the early summer.
Has it ever been shown that Republican run states had bigger surges than Democrat run states? CA, TX, and FL ran basically neck-and-neck, and far lower than MA, NYC and Northern NJ.
The effects of voluntary behavior changes can hardly be assessed, but the lockdown orders (“stay-at-home” etc) had no demonstrable effects on case and death rates (though perhaps effects in economic activity and economic well-being.)
However, remember that pandemics are rather simple phenomena to model:
But not so simple to get accurate enough models for planning purposes. Few if any of the parameters can be accurately estimated before the pandemic is over.
“Has it ever been shown that Republican run states had bigger surges than Democrat run states?”
No. Nor has it been shown that the US was “less disciplined” than Europe. The “death rate” in the US ranks in the middle of the pack and is only that high because of the massive, early, rate of infection in New York City, then later Detroit, Boston and New Orleans. Then the major mistake of simultaneously “locking down” while also giving New York City residents carte blanche to flee to any local they wanted. Even the Washington Post conceded last year that they could trace most infections in the US back to either fleeing New Yorkers or those who traveled pre-lockdown.
Ironically, we’re not supposed to remember that NY Gov. Cuomo threatened to sue Rhode Island for stopping New Yorkers from visiting there in the middle of the pandemic. Then, later, issued orders preventing anyone from visiting New York from out of state. This is the guy they reward for solid, consistent “leadership” during Covid.
Cuomo says it’s wrong to prevent the infected from visiting your state:
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/490019-cuomo-threatens-to-sue-ri-over-new-coronavirus-policy-targeting-ny
Cuomo does the same thing he said was illegal and immoral:
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/30/eight-states-added-to-new-york-governors-quarantine-order.html
In my state of 8 million people – four under the age of 19 died of Covid in the last 16-month period and they’re still requiring kids to wear a mask, outdoors, in 90-degree weather. Because that’s the definition of “discipline” and we allegedly don’t have it. Probably because our IQs are high enough to grasp we’re being fed bovine output.
And if anyone is wondering, poor tiny Rhode Island suffered one of the highest death rates in the world. Higher than Belgium (the worst of EU + US) Italy, and the UK.
Because Andrew Cuomo, D-NY, sent the virus there and forced them to take it.
But… the media tell us Republicans were bad, mostly because they didn’t have the “discipline” of Cuomo and Europe.
Jeff and Matthew: Well, one can look at possibly random COVID data and see all kinds of patterns because of confirmation bias. However, the patterns and rationals I see are:
The pandemic arrived mostly from Europe and mostly in big coastal Democrat urban cities. They had no idea how dangerous asymptomatic transmission would be in nursing homes and no time to prepare. The nationwide lockdowns resulted in a nationwide plateau in April, but cases were falling in the NYC area and rising where restrictions were not as severe.
Next in June, there were big – and to me inexplicable – surges in FL, TX and AZ, at a time when the rest of the US doing better and Europe was cutting cases 10-fold. Rightly or wrongly, I interpreted that as lack of discipline in red states. However, the death rate per infection was much better as nursing homes and hospital were better prepared and more experienced dealing with COVID.
The big fall surge in the US started first in the Dakotas and spread to neighboring states. Those states lead the nation in cumulative cases by far. Such rural states didn’t seem like the logical spot for renewed outbreak and fit my less-discipline red state perspective.
Today, the large locality with the highest percentage of cumulative cases is Miami, another red state. Some areas in AZ and TX have counties with high cumulative cases. However, Rhode Island, a density populated state, which is mostly the city of Providence, has pulled even with ND and SD. As spring arrived and things improved dramatically everywhere, Michigan and the NYC area surged. Did policymakers and people’s optimism cause a lose of discipline in these blue areas at the last minute?
At ourworldindata.com you can see how national ranking in per capita cumulative cases or deaths changed over time. First Italy led, then Spain, then the rest of Europe pulled even, with the US (with a great diversity of areas) running behind until our inexplicable summer surges. Europe did great over the summer, except Sweden which rose from a great start to poor (as one might expect from their policies). If you include neighboring Norway and Finland as comparisons, Sweden looks like a disaster in the summer.
Then the fall surge (and more transmissible variants?) arrives and some European nations temporarily surge past the US. Even Germany hits a rough patch, but the disciplined Germans suffer about half the cumulative death rate of other large nations. If you put Taiwan and South Korea on the graph, you can see that an effective contact tracing and quarantine program works great.
What I conclude from this is that persistently out-performing your neighbors is difficult. If 50% of the people in a neighboring area are immune and only 25% are immune in your area, you need to work harder to stay ahead. For all the differences in US states I watched, nationwide cumulative detected cases average 10% and the leading states are only 14% and the worst urban countries only 18% (Miami-Dade). WV is the 42nd best state in terms of cumulative cases at 7.2%. There is not a lot of dispersion in the data. The blue states of WA, OR, ME and VT stand out as the best at 5.9%, 4.8%, 5.1% and 3.9%. (HI is best, but it is an island.) Approaching herd immunity is a great leveler.
So it is hard to reach useful conclusions about what policies work and what don’t. However, they unambiguously do work. Masks, social distancing, and lockdowns have totally eliminated seasonal influenza this year, but they aren’t completely effective at controlling the more dangerous COVID. The serious measures imposed in late March unambiguously ended the the exponential growth phase of the pandemic (a doubling of cases every 2.5 days) in the first week of April and caused 10-fold reductions in Europe.
This analysis is, of course, entirely anecdotal. However, statisticians say NPIs work. Unfortunately, their multi-factorial analysis are too dense and obscure for me to understand at a more intuitive level
Yes Frank, your purely narrative analysis is not very meaningful. There is mixed evidence on NPI’s with some papers supporting them (one early one of which was just almost fraudulent because of the bins the data was selected in) and some say they don’t do much. Certainly masks have very limited evidence except for health care workers who wear the N95 masks continuously. It is just not credible that a surgical mask (which merely redirects air up instead of out) helps. In a room, the particles will be well mixed by convection pretty quickly.
Your bias against DeSantis has been obvious for a while. We do have a pretty good idea about the PFR numbers. There is no obvious correlation between strict measures and lower numbers. Florida actually did very well considering how many elderly live there.
matthewrmarler: Has it ever been shown that Republican run states had bigger surges than Democrat run states?
Franktoo. | June 12, 2021 at 5:27 pm
Not a bad post, but, … ,
I think your answer is “no”.
Jeff and Matthew continued: Fortunately, I not a governor who needs to balance lives save by NPI’s vs. small businesses permanently closed and interrupted schooling. That is above my pay grade as a scientist. If I were governor, the only thing I might be sure of is that the vast majority of my citizens would prefer that I intervene before hospitals run out of space to treat those who get seriously ill and that it would be best to end the pandemic in a few months of really severe lockdowns or other measures rather than let it drag out over one or two years or more until a vaccine is available. Trump’s insistence on re-opening in early May before a significant drop in cases was a strategy guaranteed to lost. I though much of Europe had “won” with greater than 10-fold reductions in cases by early summer, but the dramatic surge in cases in the fall (beginning with France in early September) proved me wrong. That may have been due to variants.
dpy6629 writes: “There is mixed evidence on NPI’s with some papers supporting them (one early one of which was just almost fraudulent because of the bins the data was selected in) and some say they don’t do much. Certainly masks have very limited evidence except for health care workers who wear the N95 masks continuously. It is just not credible that a surgical mask (which merely redirects air up instead of out) helps. In a room, the particles will be well mixed by convection pretty quickly.”
By citing the evidence that N95 masks work, you are acknowledging that masks in general work. Surgical masks have the same efficacy in filtering out aerosols as N95 masks, but if they are worn so that all of the incoming and outgoing air goes around the mask, they obviously do no good. However, if you have ever worn a surgical mask, you know that all the air doesn’t go around the mask. To a first approximation, the mask protects you from sprayed droplets and aerosols in whatever fraction of air passes through the mask. (Aerosol exposure is cumulative, a single virus does cause illness.) I wore a cloth mask over my surgical mask with elastic straps that went over my head (like they use on N95s) to make a snugger fit. Yes, most cloth masks only protected against sprayed droplets and not aerosols and the medical establishment probably underestimated the importance of aerosols in 2020. There is a big difference implying that “masks don’t work” and the truth: masks can provide very significant, but not complete, protection when most of the air passes through the mask and especially through material that filters out aerosols.
As I said, pandemics are relatively simple phenomena: To the extent that an NPI reduces the number personal contacts and/or the risk of transmission during contacts, logically that NPI must work. If it doesn’t, the NPI has been implemented ineffectively, is being ignored, or really doesn’t do actually reduce contacts or they damage. Ordinary cloth masks probably don’t reduce aerosol transmission by much. The quality and implementation of the NPI makes a huge differences. When statisticians lump a bunch of NPI’s into some type of poorly controlled multi-factorial analysis, it is not surprising that statistically significant benefits can’t be found.
What skeptics of NPI’s miss is that modest changes are important. If the average infected person is infecting one new person (a stable pandemic like last spring) and we can reduce that to an average of 0.8 new infections, the number of new cases should drop exponentially 20% per week. When this appeared most possible last spring and early summer, idiots like DeSantis inspired by the idiot in the WH were presiding of surges that that weren’t being experienced anywhere else in the developed world (and potentially breeding more dangerous variants).
dpy6629 write: “Florida actually did very well considering how many elderly live there.”
According to what metrics. If the early summer surge in Florida (which wasn’t experience by most of the nation and most developed countries and predated more dangerous variants) was caused by lax precautions, Florida’s record is atrocious. The early huge death toll in NYC and elsewhere is understandable because these unlucky locations were caught by surprise and unprepared to deal with the crisis in nursing homes – that happened everywhere. FWIW, Miami-Dade county leads all large metropolitan counties with more than 18% of the population having tested positive. It took the lead in 2021 when DeSantis relaxed restrictions before a significant number of people were vaccinated.
FWIW, if you look at the states with the lowest percentage of confirmed infects, they are almost all blue states.
Frank, I am starting to lose patience here. You didn’t really respond to the literature which is admittedly sparse, but which showed when I checked it that only continuous wearing of an N95 mask was significant in health care workers, who presumably are vastly more compliant than the public. Even then compliance in the N95 mask arm was only about 67%. They are uncomfortable and have side effects some of which are non trivial such as hypoxia. I don’t have the papers in front of me as I did my reading last year, but you can find them yourself I’m sure. Your faith in masks has a pseudo-religious quality to it and a totally unquantified mechanistic explanation that simple fluid dynamics shows is a half truth. Your vague assertion that NPI’s work is just your opinion and has no scientific merit. There are lots of papers either way including one by Ioannidis’ and colleagues analyzing European data. Indeed one of the early UK papers on NPI’s from Imperial College claiming they worked was just almost fraudulent because of the way the data was processed and binned. The paper demolishing it was devastating. Once again, I don’t have the time to go back over ground I already covered.
Your silly statements about Florida are just excuses for the criminals in charge of New York and Michigan as if their worse performance was somehow inevitable. Michigan didn’t have the massive first wave seen in New York but a milder one so your shabby excuses don’t apply. Their second surge was much larger. Why didn’t Witchmer’s draconian dictates prevent that second wave?
Just to present some data and leave your vague meandering into surges that we will never know fully the causes of: Population fatality ratios and percentage over 65 years of age:
New York. 0.277%. 16.4%
Florida. 0.174%. 20.5%
Texas 0.180%. 12.6%
California. 0.160%. 14.3%
Michigan. 0.208%. 17.2%
Florida has a higher percentage of elderly and so their population fatality rate would expected to be worse than other states, probably a lot worse. That it was not worse proves that DeSantis did an exceptionally good job.
Your assertions that epidemics are simple is just pseudo-science. The modeling problem is ill-posed. Nic’s posts here show that subtle changes in the susceptibility ratios make huge changes in the value of herd immunity. You are quite wrong about this and its mathematically not open to question. It really surprises me your comments on this and it can only be explained by your having been frightened and made desperate by media lies. In fairness you are one of perhaps 100 million who have been taken in.
And your comments are very long and repetetive. They meander just like your comments on Crossfire Hurricane are incredibly obfuscatory and ignore the most important documents and evidence.
And to top it off, your throw away observation about confirmed infections is totally meaningless. In the early surge which hit blue states very hard, testing was very sparse. Later when red states had the fall surge, testing was much more widespread. This totally explains the statistic you cite.
Confirmed cases for this epidemic is not meaningful to compare states. Population Fatality Ratio is meaningful because not a lot of covid 19 deaths were missed even in spring of 2020.
Frank writes: “If the early summer surge in Florida (which wasn’t experience by most of the nation and most developed countries and predated more dangerous variants)..”
The summer surge certainly happened in California. And then the fall/winter surges were nationwide and certainly massive in New York and New York City- all “safely” locked down at the time.
What you can see is “people go inside for Air Conditioning/Heating = surge”
What you can’t see literally anywhere is “Governor orders people to go bankrupt, halts Covid.” There were secondary waves – very big ones – in every blue and red state in the US.
My estimate of “why” is that lockdowns “worked” in the same sense that bans on criticism of Fidel Castro in Cuba worked. In other words, they didn’t work at all, but they gave some people an opportunity to cherry-pick anecdotes and stats to make political arguments. Therefore California and Michigan “successfully locked down” even though their respective governors were caught ignoring the lockdown (just as most of their supporters did). And Florida (which was just as locked down as blue Virginia) must have had it “worse” despite the evidence because.. it simply must.
You can pull the charts any way you wish right here: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailytrendscases
jeffnsails850 | June 14, 2021 at 12:39 pm |
Frank writes: “If the early summer surge in Florida (which wasn’t experience by most of the nation and most developed countries and predated more dangerous variants)..”
18 months into the covid epidemic and frank is not familiar with Hopes-Simpson curve?
most all of florida is south of the 30thN along with the gulf coast, and houston and the parts of texas , the valley which is where the summer surge occurred. No parts of europe are south of the 30thN
kribbaez wrote:
” You mentioned the three waves of the Spanish Flu. The statistical evidence shows that the virus in the second wave was not only more transmissible, but had a far higher IFR than the first wave..”
” . . . statistical evidence shows . . . ”
” . . . statistical evidence shows . . . ”
Interesting how the “far higher IFR” is produced, and the assumption of “more transmissible”. Might be some lessons here for 2021.
A more likely hypothesis for cause of the Spanish Flu “second wave” is medical error, which was giving toxic doses of aspirin as treatment. The aspirin overdose led to lung congestion and subsequent bacterial lung infection which killed many young adults. The aspirin hypothesis was explained in publications by Dr. Karen Starko, a retired pediatrician who had previously in the 1970s seen children with Reyes syndrome (aspirin poisoning) and had noted the similarity of their symptoms to the unusual symptoms reported for the 1918 Spanish Flu victims, particularly the many young adults who composed much of the spike of the “second wave”. So, Dr. Starko began her independent research to include locating documentation of medical protocols for 1918, which turned out to recommend a massive dose of aspirin for flu, at a dose level we now know to be toxic.
It would be interesting to calculate how many of the Spanish Flu deaths were due to medical error — aspirin poisoning. I would guess well over 50% and that nearly all of the young adult deaths (uncommon for usual flu seasons) were due to poisoning.
My comment: Medical research will never find the solutions to many medical problems because of refusal to look in the mirror.
Thank you. Your comment prompted me to read Karen Starko’s 2009 paper. The overuse of aspirin may indeed have been a large enough effect to make it impossible to draw any safe inference from the far higher IFR in the second wave.
Meanwhile our Cornish air has failed to improve matters. The G7 gathering declared it will stop the next viral pandemic in 100 days which would be, at least based on present ongoing failure, an infinite improvement..
I have stopped believing the hype, the madness and even badness of our current crop of politicians and it is sad to see our Cornish air unable to improve matters. This is another example of their inability to grasp the damage caused by their errors just as we have seen in climate science.
Our politicians were simply not prepared for an epidemic. Our politicians had been warned by experts that that was the case. Our leaders ignored the warnings and recruited the wrong people in all the panic to cover their mistakes. It is the clueless G7 who need to be stopped in 100 days if the people of the planet know what is good for them,
The UK has reported recently that the Delta variant (Indian variant) has become super-dominant. It probably explains the creeping increase in cases in the UK. It seems at least for now that death rates are not following the trend in cases. All of this seems compatible with the assertion that the vaccination program in the UK is less effective against the Delta variant in terms of protecting against infection but is still effective at reducing severity of illness.
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Here is a piece of evidence that demands some very careful consideration.
Unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the prepandemic period in Italy
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0300891620974755
There are some important questions to be raised here about specificity. However, it appears to conform with the evidence of SARS COV 2 in waste water samples from Italian sewage. It is also worth noting the reference to the early patient in Paris.
If any of these early European samples yield a full genome sequence, it would be good to see some attempt at phylogenetic comparison with the early Wuhan genome sequence which was reported.
The area of Italy were the outbreak first become notice is also an area with lots of Chinese workers. Chinese apparel firms moved there in droves so they could put a “Made in Italy” label on their products, and so flights back and forth to China were very heavily traveled.
kribaez: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0300891620974755
Thank you for the link.
Paul,
Thanks for the link. The paper is a much more compelling than I had expected. I heard it referenced in January and dismissed just like the Spanish sewer samples paper. But this one had several independent serological tests, as well as sewer samples, overlapping into the pandemic period and geography. It all is very in depth and independently confirming evidence that SARS2 was in Italy at least by September and possibly earlier.
This changes things a bit. Although there is poor likelihood of northern Italians interacting with horseshoe bats, it is just plausible that Wuhan was not the epicenter of the pandemic but simple the first to identify it. Having the WIV, and native awareness of the 2002-2003 SARS could have produced the proverbial street lamp under which the discovery got located. The rest of the guilty behavior by China could have been due to guilty mindset. Remember, that China people likely have the least trust in what authorities might have done. The Chinese virologists likely knew of the military interest in SARS. They knew the doctors were being silenced about the cases. Zhengli Shi certainly knew she withheld critical information back in 2012 regarding the sick miners. She had to be defensive not only about that but her own suspicion of what she didn’t know but could imagine.
On the other had, the evidence for the Chinese suspicions of their own authorities is justified.
For me, the paper raises more questions. The first two victims were two Chinese tourists who tested positive on Jan 31st, 2020. The third case was a week later, an Italian victim who’d flown back from Wuhan, and subsequent cases showed up on Feb 21st, 2020.
If the blood samples from a lung cancer screening are taken as a random sampling of the population, it would mean that 14% of Italians in the area had already been infect back in September, with a 30%+ cluster of infections.
Currently, only 7% of Italians have tested positive for Covid and 126,924 have died from it. But if 14% of a sample of Italians had in September, they should have seen up to 250,000 deaths (scaled down to the regions tests) before the first known case showed up in January. But the first known death was in late February, so clearly the two sets of data just don’t mesh.
The paper also mentions that the virus detected in the first three patients in Lombardy suggests their common shared ancestor was several weeks earlier, several weeks prior to the first reported cases in China. But the first reported cases in China were late December. That would put the common ancestor to the initial Lombardy outbreak in early to mid December. But if the virus was already highly prevalent in Lombardy three months earlier that that, the common ancestor of three unrelated Lombardy patients should have been three or four months, not just several weeks.
Given that the Chinese government has desperately tried to establish that the virus originated outside of China, and that back-dating the first major outbreak outside of China would accomplish that critical political goal, could the Italian scientists be looking at the results of some sloppy hijinks with their samples?
George,
Obviously, if the paper has falsified or contaminated samples then we can only add it to a heap. It does beg to be independently supported. I wish the sewage samples were analyzed by another investigator.
They speculate on the lack of deaths and hospitalizations in the fall due to a less lethal precursor.
This less parthenogenic aspect may be born out in the US data where May 2020 serological surveillance in NY and SF showed positives 10X of illnesses. But later that ratio did not hold as Franktoo pointed out.
It seems that more countries could do the same study and support or refute the finding because the case and fatality timing followed similar initiation patterns in Italy, France, Spain and elsewhere.
Ron: I like to think of Wuhan as the site of the first super-spreader event(s), but not necessarily the home of Patient Zero. Now I might have to qualify that thought: the site of the first super-spreader event with a variant pathogenic enough to send patientS to the hospital.
Frank, I have to admit that the Italian study does give some weight to the less harmful precursor theory. Tonight I learned reading Alina Chan’s tweet thread that humans naturally carry thousands of viruses, most innocuous, some even beneficial. BTW, she is teaming up with Matt Ridley on a book following the investigative timeline on the progress of the lab origin theory. Surprisingly, she does not think the FCS is the most important clue.
Frank, I would love it if you could read this paper on the analysis of SARS2 evolution of insertions. They conclude there are two forces at play driving the insertions, one for the short 3 and 6 bases (1 and 2 codons), and another for the 9 and longer base segments. The short ones are mostly random from RdRP “slippage” but the longer ones are adding functionality. They point out the FCS arginine CGG is the most optimal for humans but least for corona viruses. But since they have not mutated there must not be pressure on them to do so.
My question is how did a 4 base insertion take place to create the FCS without putting the rest of the S2 bases out of frame? The paper says:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.23.441209v1.full.pdf
Frank, I admit the Italian study does give some weight to the less harmful precursor theory. Tonight I learned reading Alina Chan’s tweet thread that humans naturally carry thousands of viruses, most innocuous, some even beneficial. BTW, she is teaming up with Matt Ridley on a book following the investigative timeline on the progress of the lab origin theory. Surprisingly, she does not think the FCS is the most important clue.
Frank, I would love it if you could read this paper on the analysis of SARS2 evolution of insertions. They conclude there are two forces at play driving the insertions, one for the short 3 and 6 bases (1 and 2 codons), and another for the 9 and longer base segments. The short ones are mostly random from RdRP “slippage” but the longer ones are adding functionality. They point out the FCS arginine CGG is the most optimal for humans but least for corona viruses. But since they have not mutated there must not be pressure on them to do so.
My question is how did a 4 base insertion take place to create the FCS without putting the rest of the S2 bases out of frame? The paper says:
Frank,
I have two comments in moderation. Please ignore the question about PRRA creating an out of frame insertion. They don’t, of course. I was thinking in terms of bases instead of amino acids. I wonder if you can explain why Gallaher hypothesized that PRRA was an out of frame insertion. As you pointed out that would mess up the whole S2 gene and make the virus non-functional unless the insertion was simultaneous with another close by insertion or deletion that set the sequence back in frame.
I understand that CCG is the most common codon for arginine in humans but very rare for corona viruses, as well as CCG. But as you point out in another comment that CCG is the standard codon used for bio-engineering.
Quay points this out as well as that non-optimal bases are often engineered into viruses to attenuate them. And, I think I have read that viruses when they jump species want to adapt quickly. I am reading that gaining optimal codons for the new host is be part of that. Do you know if there would be any difference of expected adaptation from a virus crossing from another host versus from a lab? Chan et al found that SARS2 was already pre-adapted to humans at the first hospitalizations versus SARS1, which saw a rapid evolution for many months after its outbreak. Is it possible the FCS had started with coronavirus optimized codons but did not create illness until they adapted to human preferred CGG CGG? If they could isolate a sequence from the pre-outbreak virus in Italy and it was figure out if CGG CGG is optimal for humans that at least might give an explanation for the lack of illness in Sept-Nov.
From Quay:
I meant CGG is the most common for humans and for use in bioengineering.
Paul_K and Ron: Citation search turns up several more papers. (The first of these says that Apolone et al (the study cited above) was using a “home-made” antibody test that had not been validated by others.) A second discusses experience with false positives in such surveys. It isn’t clear to me what conclusions to draw from this evidence.
https://www.europeanreview.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/3342-3349.pdf
SARS-CoV-2 was already circulating in Italy, in early December 2019
Abstract.– RESULTS : Via rapid tests, we found 10/234 (4.3%) IgG-positive and 1/234 (0.4%) IgM-positive cases in the Hep-patient group. Two/56 (3.6%) IgG-positive and 2/56 (3.6%) IgM-positive cases were detected in BD group. Chemolumi-nescence confirmed IgG-positivity in 3 Hep-patients and 1 BD and IgM-positivity in 1 Hep-pa-tient. RNAemia was not detected in any of the subjects, rendering the risk of transfusion trans-mission negligible. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest an early circulation of SARS-CoV-2 in Italy, before the first COVID-19 cases were described in China. Rapid tests have multiple benefits; however, a confirmation assay is required to avoid false positive results.
_______________________________
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0300891621992430
Comments on: “Unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the prepandemic period in Italy”
Discusses potential causes for false positive results in Apolone et al.
__________________________
https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(21)00124-9/fulltext
Retrospective serosurveillance for anti-SARS-CoV-2 immunoglobulin during a time of low prevalence: A cautionary tale
Summary: We performed a retrospective screening of 428 serum samples for anti-SARS-CoV-2 immunoglobulin during a period of low prevalence. Employing two different serological tests yielded discrepant results for 10 samples; highlighting an increased risk of potential false positive results and the need for further confirmatory testing before publication of data.
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https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00716-2
Evidence of early circulation of SARS-CoV-2 in France: findings from the population-based “CONSTANCES” cohort.
Using serum samples routinely collected in 9144 adults from a French general population-based cohort, we identified 353 participants with a positive anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG test, among whom 13 were sampled between November 2019 and January 2020 and were confirmed by neutralizing antibodies testing. Investigations in 11 of these participants revealed experience of symptoms possibly related to a SARS-CoV-2 infection or situations at risk of potential SARS-CoV-2 exposure. This suggests early circulation of SARS-CoV-2 in Europe.
____________________________________
However, another survey of swabs from patients hospitalized with severe respiratory infections in Lombardi found NO evidence SARS2 by PCR with two sets of primer. However, if only 1 of 10 people with antibodies in Santa Clara (in April 2020?) had been sick enough to have been tested by PCR and found positive and fewer had been hospitalized, it isn’t obvious to me that samples from desperately ill hospital patients is the only relevant place to look for SARS2 in 2019.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7988398/
Thanks for the paper. They acknowledge the other Italian study but conclude they might be false positives, as they had experienced a 2/3 false positive rate. However, they double confirmed at least one case sampled in late November of a woman that traveled from the Philippines in September but had no known contacts with anyone from China. She remembers having a mild cough.
If even 1 in 234 random blood samples in Italy in late November were seropositive for SARS2 that sets the clock back months for the origin. It takes at 2-4 weeks after exposure to become seropositive for the antibody test. If a virus spreads geometrically the introduction to Italy seems to go back to the summer. I wonder what other countries are finding. I thought serology screening was standard practice after they investigated SARS1. People need to ask for China’s results.
Now thinking again about pangolin cov, which was not natural but found only in a single captive pangolin, what if the lab leak was in early 2019 or late 2018? What if the leak was from lab animals not properly being disposed of but instead being sold to the exotic animal trade for a month’s wage for a lab janitor? This would be enough for China to have covered up the origin. Remember, they were trying to silence doctors in Wuhan. Perhaps they were hoping the virus would break out somewhere else first. And, it seems odd that if the virus was circulating around China and the world would mutate to the lethal form in the same place it escaped 6-12 months earlier. Any thoughts? Anyone?
I wonder if a virus freshly becoming human to human transmissible after crossed over virus from zoonosis behaves identically to a virus that was engineered throw GOF to be human transmissible. In one or both cases one can imagine that the spread with international travel would distribute it throughout the world within a month or two. For it to undergo the critical mutation for lethality and presumably higher contagion at the place of origin would indicate a pre-destined evolution, a genetic time bomb that went off in China and Italy in succession with timing synced according to when it was seeded. This might explain the European strain hitting the NYC while the China strain hit the US west coast.
Here is a good international paper from February that tested 100 bats in a Thailand cave and found a new SARS-like virus, showing that there is many more to be discovered even outside of China.
Interestingly, they found confiscated smuggled pangolins with pangolin cov and also some with antibodies to SARS1, showing that pangolins are carriers of SARS viruses. So the WIV found pangolin cov in March 2019 was likely not from a lab discarded animal or a fore-planted piece of evidence.
The other interesting this is that pangolin cov binds to ACE2 even better than SARS2. The paper predicts the natural precursor of SARS2 should be found it is out there. Another thing is that RaTG13 did not bind to ACE2 at all. And remember from the other study it was predicted from bio-mechanics that RaTG13 could not infect bats or humans, only horses. So another key to natural origin is ground proofing RaTG13 in the wild.
From the paper:
Here is a new paper on serology testing of 24,000 blood donors in the USA from Jan 9 to March 18, 2020. Nine were positive after double testing for false positives. It takes at ~2 weeks to become seropositive after infection. Seven of the nine positive samples were taken prior to the first known case in their respective states. So this was a random sampling showing that about 1 in 3000 were SARS2 infected before the first known cases in the US. This would mean 100,000 infections by March 1. The bottom line is the CDC and WHO need to have a much better surveillance system.
DR. MIKE YEADON EXPOSES POSSIBLE COVID FRAUD
Former Chief Scientific Officer of Pfizer
Video: https://thehighwire.com/videos/episode-219-in-harms-way/ Recorded June 10, 2021
Dr Mike Yeadon starts at 1hour:30:00minutes = 1:30:00
CONTRARY TO GOVERNMENT AND MASS MEDIA PROPAGANDA:
Covid-19 is not significantly more dangerous than a typical seasonal flu.
Covid-19 is typically dangerous only to the very elderly.
The lockdowns were not justified and were harmful.
There are effective treatments for Covid-19, including early treatment with hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.
These treatments were vilified, and the failure to use these early treatments cost lives.
PCR test not a good test for diagnosing Covid-19, and gives many false positives since it is being used with too many amplification cycles.
People with no symptoms were not carriers, asymptomatic transmission was another big lie.
The wearing of masks was not necessary or effective.
Transmission of Covid-19 occurred care homes, hospitals and other places where the elderly are confined – not outdoors, etc.
Natural immunity to Covid-19 from those who had the illness is very strong and long-lived.
People who were infected with the Sars-Cov-1 virus seventeen years ago are still immune to Sars-Cov-2 (Covid-19).
The variants are not significantly different from the original Sars-Cov-2 virus – those who had the original Covid-19 illness are immune to the variants.
The Covid-19 “vaccines” were known to cause blood clots, based on previous research.
It is reckless to give the Covid-19 injections to pregnant women.
Polyethylene glycol, which is included in the “vaccines”, causes dangerous anaphylactic shock in some people.
Lying about these facts is widespread in government and the media.
__________
My comments:
There was no significant deadly Covid-19 “epidemic” in the USA, Alberta or Canada to mid-2020, and no justification for the panic, the lockdowns of the workforce and students, and the destruction of our economies – just as I correctly published more than one year ago, on 21&22 March 2020:
21March2020 – Allan MacRae
LET’S CONSIDER AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH: Isolate people over sixty-five and those with poor immune systems and return to business-as-usual for people under sixty-five. This will allow “herd immunity” to develop much sooner and older people will thus be more protected AND THE ECONOMY WON’T CRASH.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/03/21/to-save-our-economy-roll-out-antibody-testing-alongside-the-active-virus-testing/#comment-2943724
22March2020 – Allan MacRae
This full-lockdown scenario is especially hurting service sector businesses and their minimum-wage employees – young people are telling me they are “financially under the bus”. The young are being destroyed to protect us over-65’s. A far better solution is to get them back to work and let us oldies keep our distance, and get “herd immunity” established ASAP – in months not years. Then we will all be safe again.…
https://rosebyanyothernameblog.wordpress.com/2020/03/21/end-the-american-lockdown/comment-page-1/#comment-12253
All we really needed to do was over-protect the very elderly and infirm – the high-risk population – which we failed to adequately do. What a debacle! The evidence of serious criminal activity is overwhelming.
_______________________
Aside from the fact that you’re wrong about almost everything, isn’t the battle over? There are no lockdowns. Mask wearing is almost gone. Treatments are mostly only needed for the idiots who didn’t get vaccinated. The economy is roaring back.
Aside from the fact that you’re wrong about almost everything, isn’t the battle over? There are no lockdowns. Mask wearing is almost gone. Treatments are mostly only needed for those who didn’t get vaccinated. The economy is roaring back.
The G-7 meeting concludes by calling for a deep dive WHO investigation on COVID origins, this is a charade.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3zakua9ymmj4v2k/10Jun2021_Stanford_Classical_Liberalism_COVID_16x9-rdu.pdf?dl=0
Here’s an interesting analysis of civid19 excess deaths. Not nearly as bad as we have been led to believe
“Classical Liberalism, Stanford”
How interesting.
James Cross comment – “James Cross | June 14, 2021 at 2:25 pm |
Joe,
That’s when people started getting vaccinated. The first were the most vulnerable – the ones over 65. So it would be perfectly expected for excess deaths to fall once the Biden vaccine program started to take effect.”
J Cross – you are showing extreme political bias with your comment
A) the vaccine program was started under Trump. The biden vaccine program was only a continuation of the Trump program.
B) 18 months into covid and basic knowledge of influenza trends are being ignored in the science of political beliefs. The infection curves are following the hopes simpson curves with little deviation from past pandemics. Further, the typical wave of covid have followed the typical gomhertz curve which have been documented in the medical literature for the last 100+ years.
In summary, the vaccine programs, while successful, are being attributed with greater success than is merited by historical trends.
JCross comment – That’s when people started getting vaccinated. The first were the most vulnerable – the ones over 65. So it would be perfectly expected for excess deaths to fall once the Biden vaccine program started to take effect.
J Cross – A little trump derangement syndrome perhaps
the vaccine program was started under Trump. The biden vaccine program was only a continuation of the Trump program.
18 months into covid and basic knowledge of influenza trends are being ignored in the science of political beliefs. The infection curves are following the hopes simpson curves with little deviation from past pandemics. Further, the covid waves have followed the typical gomhertz curve which have been documented in the medical literature for the last 100+ years.
In summary, the vaccine programs, while successful, are being credited much greater success than is merited by historical trends.
oops posted in the wrong spot – in response to J Cross praising the biden vaccine program
When I look at the US excess deaths, it adds up to over 500K or almost exactly to the reported COVID deaths, which doesn’t seem all that good to me.
look at excess death post feb 2021. Most likely excess deaths for the next 6-12 months will be in the negative 300k- 600k range
Joe,
That’s when people started getting vaccinated. The first were the most vulnerable – the ones over 65. So it would be perfectly expected for excess deaths to fall once the Biden vaccine program started to take effect.
James Cross: Biden vaccine program started to take effect.
That’s a good one.
David Young –
> Not nearly as bad as we have been led to believe
Perhaps people who were involved and risking their health in the care of sick and dying people might disagree, as well as those whose loved-ones suffered and died, those who will have long-term sequelae, those living in communities particularly hard hit, etc.
Just a thought. It my guess is that from a place of privilege and relative safety that might all seem rather abstract.
Dang librulz just won’t quit with their attempts to destroy the American economy to go after Trump because they’re deranged.
It would seem untruthful for someone to claim that covid variants have delayed the vaccine rollout. Bureaucratic inefficiencies delay rollout. Variants reduce effectiveness potentially.
The wording was ambiguous. I can see where you got that meaning but it was meant in another way – that the variants blunted the benefits of the roll out
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/06/14/uk/boris-johnson-lockdown-extended-intl-gbr-analysis-cmd/index.html
> London(CNN)England’s plan to lift all Covid-19 restrictions on June 21 has been scuppered by the Delta variant of the virus, Boris Johnson said Monday.
Despite the UK’s successful vaccine rollout, which has given two doses to more than half of the adult population, the prevalence of the Delta variant — first identified in India — has convinced the Prime Minister and his government that “freedom day” for English citizens, as some have called it, must be delayed by four weeks to July 19.
Frank,
I think you are missing a few key facts that is skewing your view on the Trump-Russia collusion investigation.
1) The pretext for opening Crossfire Hurricane was contrived by people connected to Hillary including Alexander Downer, Crowdstrike and Peter Strzok et al.
2) If it had not been contrived the standard procedure of providing a defensive briefing to the presidential nominee, Trump, would have been followed. In fact, just two months prior Hillary got a defensive briefing when it was found through Dutch intelligence that the Russians had intercepted an DNC email that her campaign aid, Amanda Rentaria, had gotten assurances from AG Loretta Lynch that Hillary would have her email investigation white washed.
3) At almost the same time Strzok opened CH the USIC had intercepted Russian intelligence candidly reporting that Hillary was running a Trump-Russia op to divert from her email problem and use it instead a weapon. This intelligence went directly to the WH and then trashed, only to be uncovered years later, (not by Muller).
4) All of the Steele dossier allegations were made up and the FBI had many clues that this was the case early on and throughout their investigation, yet they covered this up. They even covered up the identity of the Steele’s primary source, who admitted that he was simply trying to gain a paycheck by making up anything he thought Steele wanted. He chatted with childhood friends from Russia in “brainstorming sessions” while heavily drinking.
5) Despite the FBI interview where Danchenko confesses all of this (under an agreement of unconditional immunity and permanent anonymity), in his first interview and the FBI keeps it a secret for years.
6) The date of that interview was just six days after Trump took office. There was no reason for Comey to be investigating Trump, Flynn, Manafort or Papadopoulos. In fact the later was interviewed the next day after Danchenko and treated much differently.
7) Despite the dossier being the only evidence against Carter Page, and the indisputable fact that after January 26, 2017, they knew it was a complete and malicious fabrication, the FBI applied for two more FISA renewals in order to spy on Trump and his administration for six more months. They forced the recusal of Trump’s Attorney General Session and set up the fake Muller investigation for two years as a dual witch hunt in order to find dirt, destroy Trump associates and create an obstruction of justice trap should Trump try to shut it down.
More excellent points Ron. Frank, you could restore a small part of your credibility by responding to 7 and 8 above.
Ron: Sorry I haven’t replied. Answering dpy’s complete fantasies is much easier than addressing your issues, which start with a reasonable basis in reality.
1) Barr admits that he no longer believes that CH was started by some sort of anti-Trump conspiracy. I assume this means he doesn’t believe Downer was involved in any anti-Trump shenanigans. Since Mueller reported that there is no evidence that Papa reported the dangle to anyone else in the Trump campaign, I doubt he was the target of a sting. The first thing you want to know in a sting is whether the target took the bait and who he reported to.
“The current [Durham] investigation, a criminal probe, had begun very broadly but has since “narrowed considerably” and now “really is focused on the activities of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation within the FBI, ”https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-donald-trump-robert-mueller-statutes-elections-ae0275b4eb23981c1e6fbf9fc49c3239?amp;amp
DNC security and the response by CrowdStrike appeared abysmal and suspicious, but I don’t understand anything about hacking or identifying hackers. It seems to me that if you are cleaver enough, you can cover your tracks or implicate others. Crowdsource had a successful IPO in 2018 and did some work for the Republicans in 2018. With everything else Russia did to interfere with the 2016 election (for good reasons, Trump has seriously damaged our relationship with allies), I see no compelling reason to entertain conspiracy theories about who hacked the DNC, some of which originate with the IRA. Perhaps I’m just not smart enough to unravel some conspiracies.
I’ve been at a few websites that I suspect the IRA set up, including more than 50 identically titled news stories and four videos reporting that the FBI raided the Clinton home in Chapaqua and found her server and many Blackberries. I suspect the IRA stoked suspicions that the Syrian rebels gassed their own people. Which brings us to CA. I don’t use Twitter, but occasionally stop by out of respect to see what I should pay more attention to. I read about his hypothesis that Shivets was the primary source, but missed Steve’s involvement outing Danchenko. A link would be appreciated.
2) Of course, Comey could have provided a defensive briefing about Manafort, Page and Papadopoulos, but we both know Trump wouldn’t have listened. (He usually blows off his PDB and gets his intelligence briefing from Hannity and Alex Jones.) And we both know that the over-confident, self-righteous Comey never backed down from the politically powerful. According to the IG, Strzok and McCabe opened the CH investigation and fully briefed Comey later. Same for the email investigation. The IG reported that every top manager in the FBI agreed that CH was essential, even when offered the opportunity to express reservations anonymously. (One repeated his reservations about the Page FISA: Since Page had been alerted by the Yahoo News story and written Comey a letter, surveillance would be unlikely to be fruitful and wasn’t worth the political price the FBI would likely pay someday.)
3) Ron wrote: “At almost the same time Strzok opened CH the USIC had intercepted Russian intelligence candidly reporting that Hillary was running a Trump-Russia op to divert from her email problem”.
The intelligence doesn’t refer to an “op”, merely to a 7/26/16 “plan” to distract attention from the still ongoing investigation into her email server by linking Donald Trump to criminal hackers (probably Russian) who were trying to help him win the US election. However, Brennan wouldn’t brief Obama about what the Russians knew about ordinary campaign strategy. The date of Obama’s briefing appears unknown, but the CIA referral of this intelligence (and two other findings) to the FBI was dated 9/7/16, well after Danchenko’s first trip to gather intelligence on Trump, CH was launched and Steele approached the FBI, but weeks before Steele’s first reports reached the CH team. Conspiracy theorists believe this plan referred to Steele, but the investigative referral discusses GUCCIFER 2.0, who had claimed on 7/15 to have been the lone hacker of the DNC. Perhaps HRC wanted Crowdstrike to expose Guccifer 2.0 as a Russian agent and perhaps create a false trail (which is unlikely since that would constitute obstruction of justice). By 8/2 Stone had been in contact with Guccifer and WikiLeaks and knew there was more hacked material (from Podesta) that would be released in October. The Russians would certainly be aware of Stone’s interactions with Guccifer that that would interest Obama. You can see Ratcliffe’s misleading letter to Graham and the actual documents at the links below. The redactions and the possibility the report was based on Russian disinformation make it difficult for me to understand its significance. The full report has long been available to Mueller, Congressional intelligence committees and probably the IG. If earthshaking, we would know.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.191592/gov.uscourts.dcd.191592.261.4.pdf
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.191592/gov.uscourts.dcd.191592.261.5_2.pdf
Frank, You keep doubling down on your selection biased narrative. My main point is not about the “origins” of the investigation. It is about the FISA warrants and their reliance on the Dossier and other unverified and unverifiable information. That makes those who signed them liars because they were swearing that the information was verified. The only possible reason they would do that is that they had a political motive.
You also never respond to the fact that all the higher ups in the FBI involved were fired for lying. Why was that? Perhaps the investigation was poorly predicated?
I’m afraid you are the one involved in fantasies and self-deception.
I also believe we will never know who hacked the DNC server or even if it was a hack for sure. More FBI incompetence. Why didn’t the FBI confiscate and examine the server themselves? Another example of bias?
It’s similar to your phony pseudo-scientific Covid narratives about NPI’s, masks, and DeSantis. You do seem to have toned down the obvious falsehoods on this so perhaps there is hope. Can we start with an admission that Comey, McCabe, Storkz, and Paige were all fired for lying or other ethical lapses involving Crossfire Hurricane? I think Ohr also either resigned or was terinated although my memory is fuzzy. If you can’t even acknowledge that, you are really driven by hatred and emotion and not a fair examination of evidence.
Ron wrote: “8) Having failed after three years to find the presumed dirt on Trump that would have justified the investigation, despite jailing or threatening to jail a half dozen of his lieutenants on process crimes or dirt in their past, the Democrats had to pause with a half-hearted accusation that Trump mouthed the word “fired” privately to his counsel regarding Muller. They tried to prosecute a thought crime, but they were just filling time as the schemed for the next phase. With their Muller assisted Democratic House majority, now they could impeach, no more 25th amendment stuff. They just needed a new pretext.”
Sorry I’m so slow to reply. So much incorrect information; so little time.
Trump was not a target of the CH investigation for a year until he obstructed justice by firing Comey and bragged on TV that he did so because of the CH investigation. Yes, I know there are some idiots who believe a President can never commit a crime while exercising his Article 2 constitutional duties. Trump hired one such idiot to be AG because he advertised such views. However, several counts in the impeachment resolution passed by the House Judiciary Committee charged Nixon with obstruction of justice: firing Cox, having the CIA tell the FBI to back off because the burglars were part of a national security operation, paying hush money to the burglar’s families. In our system of justice, no man is above the law and therefore is not allowed to make judgments about cases that involve him personally. Nixon demonstrated why presidents can’t be trusted to make decisions in cases involving themselves by calling the hush money “compassionate aid to the burglar’s families”. Absurd! However, even Nixon recognized it would have been wrong to pardon the burglars in return for their silence, but Trump has dangled pardons in front of many in a position to incriminate him. More obstruction IMO. I made the mistake of believing Nixon when the declared “I’m not a crook”, but I learned my lesson. Nixon would have easily survived Watergate if he’d made use of pardons as Trump has. Furthermore, Nixon never tried to prevent his aides from testifying in front of the Watergate committee either.
Trump has left our democracy defenseless. The DoJ can investigate Biden, but won’t indict him. Congress can’t compel Biden’s aides to testify about what they observe. Joe can pardon Hunter and others to keep them silent. And in 2024, VP Harris gets to decide which state’s Electoral Votes are reliable enough to be presented to Congress for approval.
There are many other reasons it took three years to complete the CH investigation: 1) First you need to remember, THIS WAS NOT AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE ALLEGATIONS OF THE STEELE DOSSIER (though Trump has convinced many of the opposite). Even if Danchenko had told the FBI tin January 2017 that everything in the Dossier was made up or false (which he did not!), the rationals for opening and continuing investigations into Manafort, Page, Papadopoulos and Flynn that predated the Dossier were still perfectly valid. 2) The FBI wasn’t satisfied they understood what they needed to know after one meeting with Danchenko. They met twice more with him in the spring of 2017 and later with Steele. As far as I can tell, the Dossier was exactly what it was advertised to be: stories Danchenko heard from his connected friends in Russia and others. 3) When the Steele Dossier was published, the FBI began interviewing the targets of the investigation. THEY ALL LIED. If you want to get an investigation over quickly because you are innocent, don’t lie to investigators. 4) Then Trump fired Comey and publicly bragged that he did so to stop the CH investigation. He celebrated in private with Ambassador Kislyak the next morning. He was rewarded for this stupidity with a special prosecutor and became the target of an obstruction of justice investigation, doubling the Special Counsel’s work. Volume II (obstruction) of the Mueller report is longer than Volume 1 (Russian interference and possible collusion)! 5.) Meanwhile, Kushner had problems trying to get a security clearance, because he kept failing to disclose all of the meetings he had been having with foreigners. This led to the disclosure of the Veselnitskaya meeting. The advertised dirt on HRC arguably was delivered in October 2016 with the release of Podesta’s hacked email. Had Trump promised something in return? Were they working together to exploit it? 6) Then we had Stone and Cohen lying to Congress about their role interacting with a Russian officer (Guccifer 2) and WikiLeaks and about Trump Tower Moscow. In early 2017, CIA Director Pompeo called WikiLeaks a “Russian-aided,non-state hostile intelligence service”. Guccifer 2. Later Cohen decides to cooperate, opening up new avenues of investigation. 7) Finally, Trump’s attorneys wasted an enormous amount of time debating and negotiating whether and how Trump answer questions from the Special Council in person.
Ron claims: “Trump mouthed the word “fired” privately to his counsel regarding Mueller. They tried to prosecute a thought crime,”
According to the testimony of White House Counsel McGahn (a government official, not Trump’s private attorney), Trump twice called White House counsel McGahn (a government official, not his private attorney) at home on a weekend from Camp David to tell him to get Rosenstein to remove Muller for conflict of interest. (Trump’s private attorneys had already raised the issue of these alleged conflicts and McGahn though they were insignificant.) McGahn told his chief of staff and his personal attorney he would be resigning because he didn’t want to participate in another Saturday Night Massacre. Later Trump ordered McGahn to lie to the press about what transpired. You are living in a fantasyland. Why would you ever trust any except source but the Special Counsel’s report. McGahn was and remained a loyal Trump supporter. If Mueller’s report lied about McGahn’s testimony, then McGahn would have shredded him.
Frank, It’s another long compendium of falsehoods and misrepresentations motivated by your hatred of Trump.
Even if Trump wasn’t an “official” target early on, he was a target and everyone except you as a blinkered partisan knew it. The Steele dossier was all about Trump and baseless accusations against him. You lie about firing Comey. Comey was fired for lying to Trump multiple times. That is not obstruction of justice. It’s a baseless lie to say otherwise.
You are just gaslighting about who lied. It was the investigators who all lied and most were fired or indicted for doing so.
The only official and sworn predication documents were the warrant applications which relied on the dossier for most of their information. Those who signed the applications lied when they certified that the information had been verified. It was all based on gossip from foreigners all paid for by political hacks in the US.
But the bottom line here is that the “collusion” was a lie from the beginning. It was a lie cooked up by Hillary operatives the day after the election and constantly propegated by liars in the media, Congress, and former Obama hacks who lied deliberately.
I find it hard to believe that you are so hateful that you simply raise mostly minor points and gaslight the most important facts.
The crossfire hurricane investigation became corrupt the moment it became about the dossier and collusion. Most of the principles are proven liars.
The Special Council’s report is the work of proven Trump haters and corrupt prosecutors like Weissman. In appears that Mueller himself knew almost nothing about the report personally (adding another amazing twist to a tale of lies and prosecutorial misconduct). Only a partisan hack would believe the details. The only significant fact is that there was no evidence found of Russian collusion, the main lie on which the investigation was predicated.
Your BS about McGahn is irrelevant. The Mueller investigation was always faudulent from day one as it was based on paid opposition research that its author said in sworn testimony was of unknown validity. Most of it was a lie and the principle investigators knew it was unverified as Comey swore before Congress. Only partisan hacks use such selection bias to select mostly secondary facts and ignore the important facts.
It is true that Manafort was not an honest individual. But he is no worse than Comey, Strokz, Paige, McCabe, and Clinesmith. The point here is that police officials have a much higher standard of truth and honesty than ordinary citizens. It is also true that there was a ferocious witch hunt against Trump associates that was a deliberate scheme to harm Trump’s administration and its political effectiveness. I believe that people like Flynn were really done a grave injustice. For example Flynn was bankrupted by the witchhunt and his son threatened with malicious prosecution. Clinesmith is still doing fine. Why was that outcome so different? Because of partisan hacks such as yourself who agree with liars in law enforcement and simply deny their lies because of partisan hatred.
For half the country this issue is not going away. We have witnessed the worst abuse of power in American history that is right out of 3rd world banana republics or the Communist world.
That’s a good summary Ron. It’s hard to keep all the facts at one’s fingertips when this matter is complex.
David, I actually have much more but it won’t post. No. 5-7 are in moderation and #8 failed four times to even post. I this subject forbidden? Do you have troubles on it too? Is this blog at its length limits?
5) Danchenko’s confession (under an agreement of unconditional immunity and permanent anonymity), was kept secret even from congress intel committees as well as IG for years until he (Horowitz) uncovered it, and then only on the condition that he would preserve the anonymity and only summarize the interview. Sen. Lyndsey Graham released it after Rick Grenell walked it to him. Stephen McIntyre was central to a group of Twitterites that went to work to crack the redactions to determine the PSS’s identity. Once successful Igor D deleted his social media within 3 hours but not before they scraped it to gain the data to find his 5 Russian childhood friend drinking buddies who were his unwitting sub-sources. Igor D’s lawyer confirmed his ID to the NYT 4 days later in this article in which they trash Graham and those darn meddling kids on Twitter for endangering intelligence assets. I kid you not. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/us/politics/igor-danchenko-steele-dossier.html
I would love to say I was on of McIntyre’s code breakers but I was only a spectator, jaw a-gap, cheering them on. This was July 2019, 7 months after the Horowitz report came out clearly labeling the description of Steele’s PSS as a different character that Person #1, Sergei Millian, whom Steele had set up.
6) The date of Igor D’s interview was just six days after Trump took office. This means the FBI had no reason to be investigating Trump, Flynn or Manafort that point. In fact, Papadopoulos was interviewed the next day and pressured to make an immaterial lie so that he could be prosecuted.
7) Despite the Danchenko brainstormed, Steele, Simpson, Perkins Coie, Clinton dossier being the only evidence against Carter Page, and it being indisputable after January 26, 2017, the FBI knew it was a malicious fabrication, they applied for two more FISA renewals in order to spy on Trump administration illegally for six more months. They also forced the recusal of Trump’s Attorney General Session and set up the fake Muller investigation for two years as a dual witch hunt in order to find dirt, destroy Trump associates and create an obstruction of justice trap should Trump try to stop it. And nobody is touchable since practically every federal agency and congressional Democrat supported it.
A perfect crime.
8) Having failed after three years to find the presumed dirt on Trump that would have justified the investigation, despite jailing or threatening to jail a half dozen of his lieutenants on process crimes or dirt in their past, the Democrats had to pause with a half-hearted accusation that Trump mouthed the word “fired” privately to his counsel regarding Muller. They tried to prosecute a thought crime, but they were just filling time as the schemed for the next phase. With their Muller assisted Democratic House majority, now they could impeach, no more 25th amendment stuff. They just needed a new pretext.
dpy6629 wrote: “Wrong on a number of counts. They viewed Hillary ascertain to win. Crossfire Hurricane was an insurance policy in case the impossible happened.”
FWIW, Page and Strzok say that they had been discussing strategy with McCabe the day of the insurance policy text. Did they have years to cautiously investigate collusion with Russia without arousing public attention or did they need to move fast to get answers to provide insurance against Trump winning the election and appointing the targets of their investigation to sensitive positions.
The MSM wanted the public to believe that the election of someone like Trump was inconceivable, and hoped that their propaganda would make his loss a reality. However, if you look at the polls, the race was within the 3% margin of error for nearly a month at the end of September and the beginning of October. Hypothetical desperate FBI conspirators couldn’t count on HRC winning during this period and would have leaked then. Waiting until the last minute to leak would create more suspicion. Yes, HRC had a bigger lead after mid-October, but that lead had receded to 4% on the day email investigation was re-opened and was at or below the 3% margin of error until Election Day. The national polls weren’t wrong; HRC won the popular vote by 2%.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_clinton_vs_johnson_vs_stein-5952.html#!
Furthermore, there were an usually large number of undecided voters late in the 2016 election. 11-15 % of the voters in PA, FL, Mi and WI reportedly made up their minds in the last week. And the presence of minor party candidates Johnson and Stein provided in more uncertainty. They received 6% of the national popular vote and were polling higher.
https://www.aapor.org/Education-Resources/Reports/An-Evaluation-of-2016-Election-Polls-in-the-U-S.aspx
Of course, the Electoral College decides the presidency. Polls in October showed FL, PA, NH, MI, ME, and VA as toss up states. In mid- to late-October, HRC was one big state away from 270 EVs. However, the last polls had Clinton with only 203 EV and 171 EVs were in the toss up category.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/2016_elections_electoral_college_map_race_changes.html#previous_changes
You may also recall in 1980, Reagan and Carter were dead even with a week to go. The undecided broke for Reagan who won by almost 10% in the national popular vote.
If I had been one of the FBI leaders who was likely to lose my job, reputation – and possibly my freedom – after illegally conspiring against the Trump campaign for six months, I certainly would have been following the polls carefully. As a conspirator, I would have leaked CH & the Dossier in early October and never re-opened the email investigation. The whole goal was to STOP Trump from becoming President, not make his presidency – and the conspirators own lives! – miserable. It is insane to suggest that the goal of any conspiracy was to make a misery of the first two years of the Trump presidency are nuts. The logical goal of any conspiracy was to prevent him from winning!
Finally, in the unlikely event I had engaged in a conspiracy against Trump and had done nothing while he won the election, I would have leaked the Dossier and CH investigation before the Electoral College met. If Trump won the election due to Russian assistance and was presumed to be under Putin’s control, faithless electors and/or the PA or MI legislatures might have prevented Trump from winning in the Electoral College. There would have been a vastly better case than the one Trump made in 2020. There was no guarantee Trump could have been beaten, but the conspirators were guaranteed to lose if they didn’t act in November.
There were idiotic rumors circulated that Comey was forced to announce the re-opening of the email investigation because he feared the news that the FBI had requested a search warrant for Weiner’s laptop would leak. However, Comey could have postponed requesting that search warrant until after the election, so that the FBI’s actions couldn’t influence the election (standard practice). Or he could have claimed that those records weren’t critical or that he wasn’t allowed to take action that close to the election. The FBI hadn’t subpoenaed every possible source of HRC’s email – they didn’t ask for Jake Sullivan’s email, for example. Only a handful of people knew why the email on Weiner’s laptop was critical – it came from HRC’s first months as SoS – the period when the security staff was most likely to have warned the new SoS about her insecure practices, and from a period when the FBI had found few email records. If Comey were part of a conspiracy, the email investigation wouldn’t have been re-opened.
I’ve heard these highly publicized conspiracy theories you and Ron are pushing. I have books on “The Hoax” from Strassel and Jarrett, but don’t find them convincing.
dpy6629 wrote: “Also you carefully selected your talking points to ignore the fact that patriots don’t submit sworn warrant applications that are mostly based on unverified gossip from unknown Russian sources. The FBI knew at the latest in Jan 2017 that the dossier was a lie but continued to lie to the court for another year.”
Another Big Lie. In January 2017 and the following months, the FBI learned that all but one of the allegations made by Steele originated with Danchenko, not Steele’s imagination or the Democrat Party. They learned that Subsources A, B, C etc, were real people and friends Danchenko had been paid to visit or contact for Steele’s business EVEN BEFORE being retained by Fusion GPS. The FBI was able to identify all of them and interview at least two. Yes, much of the information Danchenko delivered was rumor and bar talk, but valid investigations are begun on the basis of such suspicions, Your local police department uses rumors from compromised drug abusers to get search warrants too. Under normal circumstances, surveillance on probably would have quietly allowed the FBI to clear Page of the potential threat he currently posed to national security, especially if he wanted to join the Trump administration. Unfortunately, the story that Yahoo News got from Steele made everyone suspicious of Page and forced him to leave the campaign (before the surveillance warrant was granted).
Put the shoe on the other foot, and consider the infamous Fang Fang. Her contact with another Chinese agent alerted the FBI to her existence and they became concerned about her network of contacts with Democrat politicians. The FBI almost certainly began their investigation of Fang Fang on the basis of suspicions and eventually accumulated enough information to get a FISA warrant. That would allow them to determine who was actively assisting her gathering intelligence and who was an unwitting source of information. Only then did the FBI offer defensive briefings to those she had infiltrated. Same for Maria Butina.
In the case of CH, the FBI started with a tip from Australia that the Russians had offered Papdopoulos dirt on HRC – dirt that may have been recently hacked from the DNC. If the Russians were reaching out to one member of the Trump campaign, perhaps they were reaching out to others. The FBI was already running a counter-intelligence investigation about Page’s (who had just visited Moscow) interactions with Russian spies, and a money-laundering investigation into Manafort, whose relationships with Kilminik and Deripasha were very concerning. Kilminik was a member of Russian Intelligence and Manafort was being sued for $17M by Deripasha. Those investigations were moved in the highly secret CH investigation. Then they added Flynn to the investigation, without citing any additional evidence. The information from Steele was not used to open any of these four investigations; the first six reports from Steele didn’t arrive until 9/19. The FBI knew or would soon find out about Flynn’s dinner with Putin and $45,000 speaker’s fee, two other paid speeches at Russian companies, his close relationship with the head of the GRU (which hacked the DNC). All of these made Flynn and ideal candidate IF the Russians were reaching out to anyone in the Trump campaign. If Flynn’s attorney’s account can be trusted, the FBI would also learn Flynn properly briefed the US Intelligence Community about these activities. However, the FBI didn’t dig deeply into Flynn’s lobbying work for Turkey with payments laundered through a Dutch company and didn’t realize he had failed to register as a foreign agent before and during his work for the Trump campaign. Having not found anything suspicious about Flynn’s activities, the FBI was about to close his sub-investigation when he made calls to Kislyak that Trump officials denied.
You don’t identify spies like Fang Fang, Maria Butina, the ten Russians arrested in 2010, etc if you wait until you have a solid case to begin any investigation. You quietly follow up suspicious or potentially risky situations and quietly close those investigations when they don’t lead anywhere. The Flynn investigation didn’t lead anywhere and was about to be closed until he made suspicious calls to Kislyak – suspicious because those around Trump denied that the calls took place. When questioned, Flynn lied about his conversations. When Papadopulos was questioned, he lied, allowing Mifsud to escape. Manafort lied. Stone lied. Cohen lied. Kushner fails to provide complete information for his security clearance. We learn about the Veselniskaya meeting. (Was the Podesta email delivered in October the “dirt” she was offering?) Then Trump obstructs the investigation and ends up with a Special Counsel, who now even more reason to be suspicious.
Sorry Frank but it’s you who are promoting the big lie. Sally Yates sworn testimony before Congress proves the warrants were mostly fraudulent. Ron above provided evidence that by early Jan 2017 the FBI knew the Dossier was garbage. Steele himself swore before a UK court that he had no way to know if any of it was true. Your carefully selected less relevant ‘facts’ show that you are biased by a hatred of Trump just as the FBI principles were.
BTW, Comey, Strokz, Paige, and McCabe were all fired for lying. Why would they do that? The most convincing idea is that they did it to cover up their biased and poorly predicated investigation. Klinesmith also lied but kept his job. Why do you focus on Trump’s associates who mostly fell victim to entrapment? There is an email trail of Strokz et al discussing how to entrap Flynn. That’s abuse by law enforcement. In short, your comments here are carefully selected ‘facts’ to support your bias that Trump and associates deserved to undergo a witch hunt and making the spurious case that the investigation was justified. There was no Russian collusion and that was quite obvious early on. The media campaign of disinformation hid that fact for a couple of years before it collapsed.
For me this is not about Trump.
Sorry Frank but it’s you who are I think cherry picking a few facts and ignoring the larger fact pattern. Sally Yates sworn testimony before Congress proves the FISA warrants were mostly fraudulent. Ron above provided evidence that by early Jan 2017 the FBI knew the Dossier was garbage. Steele himself swore before a UK court that he had no way to know if any of it was true. Your carefully selected ‘facts’ show that you are biased just as the FBI principles were.
BTW, Comey, Strokz, Paige, and McCabe were all fired for lying. Why would they do that? The most convincing idea is that they did it to cover up their biased and poorly predicated investigation. Klinesmith also lied but kept his job. Why do you focus on Trump’s associates who mostly fell victim to entrapment? There is an email trail of Strokz et al discussing how to entrap Flynn. That’s abuse by law enforcement. In short, your comments here are carefully selected ‘facts’ to support your bias that Trump and associates deserved to undergo a witch hunt and making the spurious case that the investigation was justified. There was no Russian collusion and that was quite obvious early on. The media campaign of disinformation hid that fact for a couple of years before it collapsed.
Another thing that shows me your bias is that its vastly more serious when the top brass at the FBI and DOJ lie in the course of an investigation and in sworn court documents. That’s really really dangerous. If Page lied about a minor detail (perhaps inadvertently) that’s a minor matter really. This fact pattern is most often not charged except in a few cases such as Martha Stewart, another victim of law enforcement overreach.
You are also carefully mining for facts that seem to cast suspicion on Trump associates while omitting any exculpatory evidence and also being very gullible with regard to known liars like McCabe and Strokz and what they told Horowitz. The Russian collusion “investigation” used fabrications to justify itself and to wiretap a candidate for President’s phones. It coincided with Clinton talking points about the DNC hack that was designed to deflect from her email scandal. I don’t think anyone will ever know who hacked the DNC because the FBI never looked at the server. If that was the early predicate, then the FBI hopelessly botched the investigation. They had bigger fish to fry, i.e., Trump’s campaign. We have to take the word of Clinton’s hired “expert.” All of this is hopelessly political and aided by a corrupt media.
dpy6629 wrote: “I think you just admitted the fact that makes most of your previous comments on CH not really relevant to the overall fact pattern and indicative of a biased selection of facts to support a narrative. Once it morphed from the DNC hack to Trump it became corrupt and the Warrant applications were tissues of lies and disinformation. Sally Yates sworn testimony to Congress is proof of this.”
Nevertheless, DPY can’t be bothered to quote anything I wrote that supports his points.
DPY may want to believe that the FISA warrant applications “were tissues of lies and disinformation”, but the first two FISA warrants were upheld by the Trump DoJ and IG as valid. (The other two were withdrawn ONLY because they failed to including new information investigators obtained that weakened the evidence against Page.) I’ve provided a link to full text (with some redaction) of the warrant, but you’ve never bothered to read it and to the IG’s report. You are ignorant of the facts because you don’t want to read anything that challenges you deeply held beliefs. (Confirmation bias.) Sally Yates testified to Congress: “If I had known that it contained incorrect information, I certainly wouldn’t have signed it,” Meaningless. Yates and Comey were not personally responsible for checking all of the facts in the warrant, their signatures were attached to the part of the document asserting that the warrant was being sought to address important national security concerns. The appendix to the IG report lists four clear mistakes in the first application several statements for which supporting information was not found and (absurdly) correct statements that were not properly documented.
Trump only became an official target of the CH investigation after he obstructed justice by firing Comey, at which point a Special Counsel was appointed. If any of the campaign team implicated Trump, he would have become a target of the collusion investigation, but no one ever did.
dpy6629 wrote: “And just to mention another irrelevancy you mentioned previously. Mueller’s indictment of some Russians who he knew would never be brought to trial is not very meaningful. Grand Juries and ham sandwiches and all that.”
Another meaningless platitude. 90% of those indicted in federal court plead guilty, 2% go to trial and 0.02% are found innocent. 8% of cases are dismissed. Federal prosecutors are good at obtaining indictments from grand juries, precisely because they bring good cases.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-federal-criminal-defendants-go-to-trial-and-most-who-do-are-found-guilty/
The attorneys on Mueller’s team were some of the best in the country and national prestige was at stake. The Russians would love to embarrass us if Mueller indicted the wrong people for the hacking. If you casually dismiss these indictments as meaningless, you’ve been drinking to much of that Kool-Aid being distributed by the Internet Research Agency. Read the indictment here:
https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download
dpy wrote: “There has always been and always will be foreign “interference” in US elections.”
Grossly misleading. The bipartisan report from the Republican controlled Senate Select Committee on Intelligence called the interference ion 2016 “unprecedented”. 1) Never before have foreign actors hacked the documents from one party’s computers and released them at strategic moments (just before the Democrat convention and in October beginning one hour after the Access Hollywood tape was released.) 2) Voting systems in all 50 states were attacked. 3) Russians purchased millions of dollars worth of pro-Trump advertising. 4) Russians even organized pro-Trump rallies in the US from overseas.
dpy wrote: “That this was used as an excuse for the worst law enforcement abuse in American history is not disputed by anyone really.
Your ilk in the press have just gone silent. But like you they have never corrected their manifold disinformation and wrong deep state leaks that were used to hobble a legitimately elected President and affect the 2018 election. The overall picture here is one of alarming corruption and misuse of law enforcement powers to pursue and entrap people who did nothing wrong except associate with Trump.”
The worst law enforcement abuse was the pardoning of Trump’s lying campaign officials. Even Nixon didn’t do that. On one side, we have one low-level attorney convicted of improperly correcting a supporting document for the FISA warrant. On the other hand, we have: Manafort, Stone, Flynn, Bannon, Gates, Cohen, and Papadopoulos (although P is hardly worth mentioning). Page is the only one who was not indicted, most likely because he knows he has been under scrutiny for year.
dpy wrote: “Even you must admit that journalism as practiced in the 1970’s is dead. Watergate reporters wouldn’t report something unless there were 3 corroborating sources. Over the last 4 years, single leaks are reported without any corroboration or the simplest credibility checks.”
It was my understanding that Woodward and Bernstein needed only two sources to publish during Watergate. And one source – Steele – wasn’t enough to get the MSM to publish the allegations in the Dossier before the election in 2020! The MSM refused to follow up the limited stories in Mother Jones and Yahoo News, despite the fact that Steele had personally briefed the NYT, WaPo, New Yorker and CNN. Majority Leader Reid publicly begged the FBI to share what it knew. Nevertheless, almost no Americans went to the polls in November 2020 having heard of Steele or his allegations. IRONICALLY, TRUMP WOULDN’T HAVE WON THE 2020 ELECTION WITHOUT THE INTEGRITY OF THE MSM AND THE FBI. Both knew about the allegation and the public never found out. The public learned of Steele and his Dossier four months after Steele first began to spread his unconfirmed raw intelligence – after DNI Clapper (a military officer by training, not law enforcement) leaked the existence of a briefing for Trump to CNN and Buzzfeed responded by published a copy of the Dossier provided by a Republican staffer. I could add that the Trump Organization is apparently on the verge of being indicted under RICO and Trump faces many other legal cases.
Frank, I have valuable things to do with my time that involve real science and I don’t have time to wade through your carefully selected points. BTW, how many hours did you spend on this last one? I just noticed a really glaring error that shows that you are motivated by hatred of Trump. Trump fired Comey for lying. That’s the same reason McCabe, Strokz, Paige and others were fired. To characterize that as “obstruction of justice” is just a giant falsehood and indicates to me that you are simply not capable of telling the whole truth about this matter.
You of course in all your long winded citations have never said why all those people were fired if CH was such a sterling example of police work. They were fired because they were lying to cover up their bad work.
dpy6629 wrote: “Sorry Frank but it’s you who are promoting the big lie. Sally Yates sworn testimony before Congress proves the warrants were mostly fraudulent.”
No one can determine if the applications for FISA warrants were fraudulent unless they studied the information available to the FBI at the time the applications were filed. That supporting information is contained in a document called a Wood’s file. Then you need to interview the agents involved to understand why mistakes were made. Unintentional mistakes are not fraud. The DoJ IG conducted such a study; Sally Yates did not. Once she left office, she no longer even had access to the application, and parts are still redacted today. If we are lucky, she read more the executive summary of the IG’s report before appearing in front of Congress. You can hear her testimony at the link below. Her statement is meaningless: Who would knowingly sign a document they knew contained mistakes? Senator Graham talks about fraud; Yates talks about “duty of candor” to the FISA court and “errors and omissions”. Her information comes from the IG’s report – which you refuse to read. The DoJ under Trump relied on the IG’s report to withdraw the last two FISA warrants (since they hadn’t been properly undated with new information). THEY LEFT IN FORCE THE FIRST TWO WARRANTS! Do you really think the DoJ under Trump left in force two fraudulent FISA warrants when they were willing to abandon two others? Use your head! The fundamental problem is that your only sources of information misrepresented Yates’s statement as an admission of fraud and have repeated that lie dozens of times. I don’t rely on the NYT or WaPo to tell me what to think – I read key parts of the original definitive document, like any skeptical scientist should.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/08/05/sally_yates_knowing_then_what_i_know_now_i_would_not_sign_fisa_warrant_based_on_steele_dossier.html#!
DPY wrote: Ron above provided evidence that by early Jan 2017 the FBI knew the Dossier was garbage. Steele himself swore before a UK court that he had no way to know if any of it was true. Your carefully selected less relevant ‘facts’ show that you are biased by a hatred of Trump just as the FBI principles were.”
The January interview with Danshenko didn’t prove the Dossier was garbage. If it had, the FBI wouldn’t have followed up with Danchenko in March and May and then met with Steele in September in an attempt to resolve disagreements. After a year of investigation, the FBI still hadn’t determined that the Dossier was garbage, but had also failed to confirm large parts of it. They became aware of MODEST areas where Danchenko and Steele disagreed, but Steele’s reports (written immediately after debriefing Danchenk) were the best evidence.
Of course, Steele had no way of knowing if any of it was true! He heard from Danchenko, who heard from his sub-sources, who heard directly or indirectly (probably mostly the latter) from those who were likely to know. That is called hearsay and is inadmissible in court, but not in investigations preceding trials. When the police hear from a drug addict about his dealer getting drugs from Source X, the police likely have probable cause to get a search warrant for Source X, but they don’t know if the allegation is true. If the search doesn’t turn up any drugs, the drugs could have been moved. In the case of FBI Counter-intelligence investigations – which are essential to national security, but much more intrusive – the FBI is required to candidly inform the court of everything bad and good they know about the target and about the reliability of their sources of information. I certainly don’t know what is true about the many allegations reported by Danchenko and neither do you (as scientist).
DPY wrote; “BTW, Comey, Strokz, Paige, and McCabe were all fired for lying. Why would they do that? The most convincing idea is that they did it to cover up their biased and poorly predicated investigation. Klinesmith also lied but kept his job. Why do you focus on Trump’s associates who mostly fell victim to entrapment? There is an email trail of Strokz et al discussing how to entrap Flynn. That’s abuse by law enforcement. In short, your comments here are carefully selected ‘facts’ to support your bias that Trump and associates deserved to undergo a witch hunt and making the spurious case that the investigation was justified. There was no Russian collusion and that was quite obvious early on. The media campaign of disinformation hid that fact for a couple of years before it collapsed.”
More lies – or they would be lies if you knew what you were talking about. Papadopoulos, Flynn, Manafort, Gates, and Cohen plead guilty to lying and Stone was convicted of lying by a jury. No one in the FBI has been convicted of lying or properly fired for lying.
The official reason the WH gave for firing Comey was a memo written by Rosenstein correctly asserting that Comey hadn’t followed established policies during the email investigation (though Rosenstein personally admired Comey and allegedly thought those deviations didn’t warrant firing). His memo is here.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39866767
Later Trump told us that he fired Comey because of the Russia investigation and his unwillingness to tell the public that Trump himself was NOT a target of that investigation. That would have been against the policies cited by Rosenstein’s memo! Later,Trump warned Comey not to lie about their conversations, warning that he had taped them (a lie), and Comey released the memos he had written immediately after those conversations documenting potential obstruction of justice claiming he was hoping to have those tapes preserved for the record.
The IG recommended that McCabe be prosecuted for “lack of candor” with Comey and with those investigating McCabe’s “leak” to the WSJ about the unacknowledged, but widely rumored, investigation into the Clinton Foundation. The IG’s findings led to McCabe’s Trump-inspired rushed firing days before McCabe was expected to retire with pension. Further investigation showed that the IG’s report was inaccurate and a grand jury refused to indict McCabe. Embarrassed at their failure to indict this particular “ham sandwich” and Trump’s fury, it took another year and a FOI request before the DoJ to admitted they had failed with a grand jury. McCabe has sued for wrongful termination, and many expect him to win. (As Deputy Director, McCabe was allowed to talk to the press when it was important to correct stories damaging to the FBI. McCabe told the WSJ FBI management believed there wasn’t yet a substantial case against the CF, because individual agents were complaining the Obama DoJ was stonewalling.)
Clinesmith WAS fired and conservatives are trying to get him disbarred. Page (and Baker) resigned (the latter after becoming pension-eligible); but Strzok was fired. According to The Atlantic, he was fired for: unprofessional off-the-job conduct in texting Page, delay in reporting Weiner’s laptop (something I long suspected!), and forwarding sensitive documents to his personal email account. Not for lying about his work. The FBI Office of Professional Responsibility recommended only suspension and demotion, not firing, and Strzok is suing. I personally disagree with the FBI OPR. If Strozok couldn’t shut up about his strong personal feelings about Trump, he shouldn’t have been playing a key role in this investigation. (This appears to be the most plausible of many stories about Strzok’s firing, but I couldn’t a story I’d call definitive.)
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/why-the-fbi-fired-an-agent-who-wrote-anti-trump-texts/567763/
There is no email about Strzok planning to entrap Flynn. IIRC, there was n ambiguous notes McCabe wrote when considering options for the Flynn investigation: Was the goal of the interview to see if Flynn would lie? In practice, the agents who interviewed did everything possible to refresh Flynn’s memory, by asking “Is it possible you said something like ….” and then paraphrasing what Flynn actually said to Kislyak. The agents did not warn Flynn that his words could be used against him, they weren’t asking about a prosecutable crime. (Every conversation with an FBI agent isn’t required to start with a Miranda warning.) When pleading guilty (twice under oath), Flynn said he was fully aware of the potential consequences of lying and wasn’t trapped.
For me, the Hoax is about the unnecessary destruction of public confidence in a critical government institution solely for political gain. BLM is tearing down faith in our police, the NYT’s 1619 project is portraying our country as irredeemably racist (despite the success of Asians), everyone is portraying the Supreme Court and judges are puppets of the president who appointed them. Trump is destroying faith in elections. (Congress and the press have destroyed faith in themselves.) When citizens no longer trust in critical institutions, they turn to totalitarian strongmen to protect them. Flynn advised Trump to declare martial law and hold new elections. About 150 Republican Congressmen rejected the legally certified Electoral Votes from PA and AZ. This problem isn’t unique to the US; for some reason, democracy is in retreat around the world.
DPY: You complain bitterly about the biased news coverage of the liberal press, yet almost everything you know about the most controversial event in the Trump presidency is DEMONSTRABLY wrong. Furthermore, more than half of Republicans think the 2020 election was stolen… Biden was dumb enough to publicly brag about firing Ukrainian prosecutor Shokin to protect his son… Antifa stormed the Capitol on Jan 6 – no wait, it was a peaceful demonstration – and this week Carlson tells us the attack was organized by the FBI! I don’t want to debate these latter events with you, but I presume you recognize that the conservative press has misled many Americans about at least some of these subjects. So how can you be sure they didn’t fill your head with incorrect information about the CH Hoax. Why aren’t you appropriately skeptical about what the conservative media is telling you? I’m not saying that there aren’t enormous problems with what the liberal press has told us for 50 years. I recently tried to learn how the nationwide damage from the George Floyd riots compared with 1968 and other events. What has happened to the damaged areas of all those cities where Democrat mayors failed to protect businesses and homes for political reasons? There were record numbers of gun purchases in the last year, especially by black women. Ron and at least one other apparently sane commenter here have been banned by social media. I KNOW the liberal press has big problems. But that doesn’t make the CH investigation a hoax, even though the left mercilessly exploited the Steele Dossier. As best I can tell, the biggest lies have come from the right.
Frank, You obviously hate Trump and are just as biased as the fired and/or disgraced people who led Crossfire Hurricane. I won’t get down in your weed bed of redacted documents.
Just two things I think you are misrepresenting. Comey’s repeated statements to Trump that he was not under investigation and his refusal to publicly say that I think would lead any reasonable person to suspect he was lying. I think Trump was smart enough to see that. Do you deny that Comey repeatedly lied to his boss?
The bulk of information in the warrants was from the Dossier. Comey essentially admitted that under oath. Comey also admitted that the Dossier was unverified. Hell if its authors say its unverified, no honest FBI person would swear it was verified. That itself shows the Warrants were bad. No need to get into the ofuscatory weeds of who knew what when. The investigation was shot through with political bias from the beginning.
I also love your convoluted statement that the 3 and 4 warrants didn’t contain “updated” information. You said they were almost identical to the 1 and 2. Therefore, 1 and 2 contained unverified information that turned out to be false and easily seen to be false before it was definitely known.
You have destroyed your credibility with me here. First your covid pseudo-science and actual denial of science (indicated by your refusal to cite any at all) and your hatred of DeSantis and your crude mechanistic unquantified nonsense about masks. It’s obvious that your hatred of Trump has led you down a dark path.
For me this is not about Trump. I voted for Cruz myself and was fearful Trump was not conservative. I was wrong about that even though Trump’s personality is an issue that hurt him. But Trump hatred is a real disease and you are full out biased and full of misrepresentations and outright denial.
Ron: The Crossfire Hurricane investigation was obviously precipitated by the Russians hacking the DNC and interfering in the 2016 campaign with paid ads other nefarious activity at the IRA. The Dutch apparently caught Russians in the act of hacking. Mueller indicted more than 30 Russian nationals by name. The investigation of Russian interference was expanded to include the possibility that Trump campaign officials were colluding with the Russian effort. The ongoing investigations of Page and Manafort were folded into CH, along with Downers report of a dangle to Papadopoulos and concerns about Flynn. I’ve offered links above to a timeline of the investigation and the DoJ’s IG report. The decision to open CH was by those above Strzok.
From what I understand, Papadopoulos has never denied receiving a dangle of dirt on HRC from Mifsud, but has told multiple stories about whether he told Downer and whether he believed Mifsud was working for the Russians. He isn’t very reliable. Former AG Barr has admitted publicly that he had given up hope of finding that Papadopoulos was approached by a Westerner intelligence officer to entrap the Trump campaign. If Papadopoulos were being entrapped, I presume he would be under surveillance overseas by a friendly intelligence service so the operation would know if he took the bait and which campaign superiors were informed of the dangle. The Mueller investigation was unable to identify anyone in the Trump campaign Papa informed, so I presumed this wasn’t a Western sting against the Trump campaign. However, I don’t have high confidence that I understand the other complexities of Papa.
Yes, I’ve heard about the intelligence report about a Hillary operation to divert attention to the email scandal onto the relationship between Trump and Russia. It would have been a great strategy too, and could have been in public, not covert. Fusion GPS had an enormous amount of public material on Trump’s numerous trips to Russia and business connections with Russian, some of which had been complied by Nellie Ohr. So far, to my knowledge, no contacts between the HRC campaign and Steele have identified except the one running through Attorney Elias and Fusion GPS. Elias allegedly knew nothing about opposition research on Trump and no one else has admitted or been shown to have directed or supervised Fusion GPS or Steele.
My understanding was that Denchenko confirmed that all of the information in what we now know of as the Steele Dossier except one small part originated from his reporting to Steele. The FBI interviewed Danchenko three times and learned who Sub-Sources A, B … were and spoke with some of them. Steele and Danchenko agreed on the big picture, but not every detail. Danchenko was very candid about admitting that most of what his sub-sources learned was rumor and bar talk. Unless you have a high-level source or someone photographing documents, a lot of raw intelligence is rumor and bar talk that may or may not ever add up to something useful. I suspect Steele and the FBI knew this, but not the public reading the Dossier. They never should have been exposed to this raw intelligence. Most of the MSM correctly didn’t print it before Buzzfeed acted grossly irresponsibly. According to Danchenko, he had four independent sources for the incident during the Beauty Pageant. Most official reports were vague about what the FBI learned about Danchenko and certainly didn’t mention him by name, so I’m relying on news stories about Danchenko and not official reports.
Lynch’s problems went far deeper than the dubious intelligence about her possible communications with Schultz. She was compromised by her mentorship by the Clintons and her visit to Bill’s plane. And for both of these reasons she should have recused herself. Perhaps worst of all from Comey’s perspective, she showed no signs of wanting to explain to the American public exactly what mistakes HRC had made with her email, which news stories were true and which were misleading and why prosecution wasn’t practical despite obvious wrongdoing. Normally, the FBI and DoJ say nothing about the mistakes made by ordinary citizens who aren’t indicted. Clinton was a public figure who had lied to the public about her actions. Comey believed the American people deserved candor and did want all of the blame for letting her escape justice: “Based on the information provided to the DoJ by the FBI, we see no grounds for indicting HRC. This press conference is over.” The prosecutor of the policeman who killed Michael Brown violated tradition and released the entire grand jury transcript so people could (if they were open-minded) understand why the officer wasn’t indicted. IMO, the Americans deserved the same candor about HRC. The DoS had no desire to enforce security rules for the “President-in-Waiting”, her Mafia certainly weren’t going to let Her Highness be inconvenienced by security rules or make it easy for department attorneys to locate their communications.
OK Frank, I think you just admitted the fact that makes most of your previous comments on CH not really relevant to the overall fact pattern and indicative of a biased selection of facts to support a narrative. Once it morphed from the DNC hack to Trump it became corrupt and the Warrant applications were tissues of lies and disinformation. Sally Yates sworn testimony to Congress is proof of this.
And just to mention another irrelevancy you mentioned previously. Mueller’s indictment of some Russians who he knew would never be brought to trial is not very meaningful. Grand Juries and ham sandwiches and all that.
There has always been and always will be foreign “interference” in US elections. That this was used as an excuse for the worst law enforcement abuse in American history is not disputed by anyone really. Your ilk in the press have just gone silent. But like you they have never corrected their manifold disinformation and wrong deep state leaks that were used to hobble a legitimately elected President and affect the 2018 election. The overall picture here is one of alarming corruption and misuse of law enforcement powers to pursue and entrap people who did nothing wrong except associate with Trump.
Even you must admit that journalism as practiced in the 1970’s is dead. Watergate reporters wouldn’t report something unless there were 3 corroborating sources. Over the last 4 years, single leaks are reported without any corroboration or the simplest credibility checks.
Frank
I enjoyed our conversations back in 2017 at Climateaudit.org on Guccifer 2.0. Steve Mc has continued on the path since then and could write a great book on the details of all the lies and illegalities (no, not by Trump). Steve was the heart of the Twitter clan that outted Danchenko. Before that Steve, made use of the Wayback machine to create a national story by discovering the ICIG whistleblower online form had been altered just days prior to the Ukraine hoax. The old form required firsthand information and had the WB expressly sign away his right to anonymity.
IIRC, you predicted in 2017 that G2 was a Russian agent and would be identified by the USIC. I think they made a claim so, the same USIC that used the Steele dossier for voicing “high confidence” of Russia meddling just after Trump’s win.
Steve attempted to crowd source the cracking of G2 as being a non-Russian. He smelled a rat because none of G2’s actions followed the behavior of a hacker, leaker or anyone that would have given Wikileaks the DNC emails. It was instead the actions of trying to make the leak look like a nefarious Russian covert op. That was familiar to Steve as he witnessed the Climategate emails be branded a nefarious international crime by the climate community, rather than be about the embarrassing contents of a whistleblowing release.
If G2 was the Wikileaks source why does he come out as a hacker the day after the DNC announced the Russians hacked them? WL specifically relies on its credibility of never having published a false document or making a false statement. Yet their source is trying to discredit them as unethical even before they publish. It makes no sense. Then G2 proves his bone fides and bypasses WL by publishing the DNC’s oppo research on Trump of all things, complete with sloppy Russian meta data fingerprints.
What sealed the deal for me was when I saw G2 contacting Roger Stone. This was the same time when we were learning of the Papadop dangle of Russia-Hillary dirt, the Henry Greenberg [Russian FBI-CIA contractor] dangle of “Hillary emails” to a Trump campaign chief, the Trump Towers dangle of “Hillary emails.” So, G2 had followed the exact same MO. I foresaw Stone’s framing for prosecution then and there, reading up on G2 in 8-2017, months before Stone’s indictment and sham trial.
If G2 was not a Russian GRU agent then who did he work for? Who hated Roger Stone? Who needed to cover up an embarrassing email investigation? Who wanted to be portrayed as a victim of Trump-Russia bullying?
I know what you’re thinking; the Dutch had caught Cozy Bear inside the DNC way back before they informed the FBI in the summer of 2015. That proves Russians hacked the DNC. to be continued…
Frank,
I went back to CA and found my comment on Stone and G2 back in 9/2017. You had 86 comments on the page to my 32.
“Whoever G2 is the most obvious purpose of G2 attention getting is to divert attention from the DNC hack and onto the attacker. Declaring the hack and bringing attention to the crime and perpetrator, rather than the content of the emails, feeds into the desired focus of the victim target. The perpetrator must then be assumed to be too blind to see that he is accomplishing the opposite his goals by making himself the story.
If G2 is Russia trying to plant the individual hacker false flag they did a worse than amateur job.
G2 is an admitted criminal with a false identity therefore G2’s overt claims will naturally be taken very skeptically, if not a reverse barometer.
G2 claims that he is a Romanian practically with a Russian accent. The documents are that G2 supplies are not embarrassing to his target and in some cases not part of the WL dump. The documents have clumsily created Russian fingerprints, changing the metadata author name to Felix Dzerzhinsky , the first head of the Soviet secret police.
G2 comes out at just the time we know that the DNC would be bracing for the email publication and must have spent days planning how to counter the narrative.
Roger Stone, a high profile conservative and favorite butt of Democrat’s scorn, is chosen by G2 to be elevated to the headlines by being contacted by G2.
All the forensics of the G2 twitter, email and other accounts have similarities to Fancy Bear/APT28. So either G2 is a Russia, which stupidly provided a trail to their own door or it is Crowdstrike making a false flag for the DNC. Which makes more sense?” -Ron Graf 9-17-2017
https://climateaudit.org/2017/09/02/email-dates-in-the-wikileaks-dnc-archive/#comment-774679
Although the Dutch have hacked a SVR security camera in 2014 and were literally reading from the computer screen of one of their agents as they hacked the DNC in the summer of 2015, and the Dutch shared this with the FBI secretly at that time, this information supposedly never makes it to the DNC until January 2016. The story is that the agent assigned to inform the DNC called them in Oct, Nov and Dec but the DNC’s IT chief tech kept on thinking they were scammers pretending to be the FBI. Then in Jan the agent makes the walk from the JE Hoover building over to the DNC and tells them in person, “Your server has Russian malware in it.” Still, there is no action taken. The same tiny IT company from Chicago, MIS Inc., that followed Obama into DC in 2008 with his campaign, were now also the default contractor for “Hillary For America.” The same squad that did nothing about the Russian malware are also the ones that told John Podesta that the phishing email that told him to change his password was “legitimate” when they meant to type illegitimate (oops!), causing the breach that would supposedly be the source for WL six months later. It was also the supposed source for gaining the password to the DCCC and thus spurring the DC Leaks hack of March 2016.
All at the same time this is going on the Dutch are still intercepting Russian exfiltration of DNC docs that are then fed back to Hillary Clinton. This is before HRC was the DNC nominee but it was “by the book” since the emails had to do with dirt on her and she thus deserved a defensive briefing. Remember, Amanda Renteria, from her campaign had assurances from DWS that Lorretta Lynch had given assurances to Soros that the fix was in on the HRC homebrew email server investigation. As an aside, Peter Strzok, the lead on that investigation too, had drafted HRC’s exoneration memo weeks before interviewing HRC or any of her staff. Another aside, the same DoJ supervisor that granted unconditional immunity to all of HRC’s staff and their contractor that wiped her private email server in exchange for taking back their laptops and remaining silent, is the same person who gave Danchenko the same deal with anonymity added to sweeten it, David Laufman, then Chief of the National Security Division’s (NSD) Counterintelligence and Export Control Section.
How do we know Hillary was getting defensive briefings in March 2016? It’s in James Comey’s 2018 book. It’s listed as one of the reasons he did not want Loretta Lynch to have to clear Hillary, even besides the publicized tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton. He did not want rightwing conspiracy nuts to think that the AG was in the tank. He speculated to himself what would happen if the Renteria matter ever got out to the press.
So if Hillary was getting defensive briefings in March of 2017 why wouldn’t she have gotten a heads up personally about Cozy Bear at least at the same time the DNC was getting their first calls in October 2015? In Donna Brazile’s tell all book she claims that Hillary controlled the DNC finances and the choosing of all their vendors, which were mostly the same ones as hers, including Perkins Coie. Why would Hillary allow the Russians to stay in the DNC server? It was not until late April when MIS Inc detected “unusual activity.” Perkins Coie was called, who called Crowdstrike, who immediately “found Russians” in the system. A cyber security expert at Climate Audit, named Jaap Titular, pointed out that the malware was years old and would have been caught by any off the shelf antivirus scanner. The bulk of the emails that made it to WL ran from late April to the end of May, weeks after Crowdstrike had entered the DNC.
Now remember that Donald Trump had been campaigning that he wanted to find common ground with Putin in fighting ISIS, for example, since he entered the race in early 2015.
From released emails we see that Fusion GPS had assigned Nellie Ohr, a Russian speaking expert researcher, to investigate any Russian crossing Trump’s path by the spring of 2016. This is the same time that Danchenko said he was first assigned to investigate Paul Manafort.
Paul Manafort was not called by Trump and paid to be campaign chair. On the contrary, he volunteered without pay, something he had never done working for Bob Dole, John McCain or anyone. Manafort lived like he was independently wealthy but he was deeply in debt. He owed a Russian aluminum oligarch named Oleg Deripaska 20 million dollars from a deal gone bad years earlier. The money Deripaska loaned Manafort was the same that he was prosecuted in 2017 for not paying taxes on. How did Deripaska feel about this? We know from Isikoff and Corn’s Russian Roulette that Deripaska hired Christopher Steele in early 2016 to investigate Manafort. This explains the statement from Danchenko of Steele assignment to him. But Steele also hired Fusion GPS to investigate on behalf of Deripaska. Remember, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS always led investigators to believe he initiated the contact with Steele.
TBC….
Oleg Deripaska is a name that pops up again and again. We discovered from the notes of Bruce Ohr, the head of the DoJ’s international investigations, was engaged with, among other things, a project to recruit Russian oligarchs away from Putin. This might seem like trying to recruit Bill Gates away from the Democrat Party. But Ohr and the Obama administration had something Deripaska desperately wanted, a US visa and free ability to do business in the US. He had in fact hired a couple of high powered DC lawyers to lobby for him for over ten years. Then in late January of 2016 Ohr approached OD through his latest lobbyists, the perhaps most powerful deal broker in DC, Adam Waldman and a Waldman client named Christopher Steele.
Now one might remember that Nellie Ohr, Bruce’s wife, worked for Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS, whom just two months later was working with Steele to investigate Manafort for OD. In late March, as Manafort joined the Trump campaign and quickly rose to the top he reported back to OD through a Russian/Ukrainian named Konstantin Kilimnik.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/emails-suggest-manafort-sought-approval-from-putin-ally-deripaska/541677/
So clearly Manafort is hoping to clear himself from the immense debt and legal pressures OD initiated on him. That is clearly a major motivation for Manafort to trade his services for Trump’s good graces.
TBC…
One last word on this from Glenn Greenwald.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-do-big-media-outlets-so-often
“There were so many false reports circulated by the dominant corporate wing of the U.S. media as part of the five-year-long Russiagate hysteria that in January, 2019, I compiled what I called “The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story.” The only difficult part of that article was choosing which among the many dozens of retractions, corrections and still-uncorrected factual falsehoods merited inclusion in the worst-ten list. So stiff was the competition that I was forced to omit many huge media Russiagate humiliations, and thus, to be fair to those who missed the cut, had to append a large “Dishonorable Mention” category at the end.
That the entire Russiagate storyline itself was a fraud and a farce is conclusively demonstrated by one decisive fact that can never be memory-holed: namely, the impetus for the scandal and subsequent investigation was the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign had secretly and criminally conspired with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election, primarily hacking into the email inboxes of the DNC and Clinton campaign chief John Podesta. And a grand total of zero Americans were accused (let alone convicted) of participating in that animating conspiracy.”
Ron,
We can hope that with an independent DOJ Donald Trump can finally get the justice he is due.
James Cross comment – “James Cross | June 14, 2021 at 2:25 pm |
Joe,
That’s when people started getting vaccinated. The first were the most vulnerable – the ones over 65. So it would be perfectly expected for excess deaths to fall once the Biden vaccine program started to take effect.”
J Cross – you are showing extreme political bias with your comment
A) the vaccine program was started under Trump. The biden vaccine program was only a continuation of the Trump program.
B) 18 months into covid and basic knowledge of influenza trends are being ignored in the science of political beliefs. The infection curves are following the hopes simpson curves with little deviation from past pandemics. Further, the typical wave of covid have followed the typical gomhertz curve which have been documented in the medical literature for the last 100+ years.
In summary, the vaccine programs, while successful, are being attributed with greater success than is merited by historical trends.
Credit where credit is due. Trump gave a bunch to money to Big Pharma and left Biden with no plan whatsoever for distributing the vaccine. Trump gets credit for doling out money. Biden gets credit for effective governmental management of a complex logistical effort.
Of course, it is complete coincidence that cases and death begin to fall dramatically as vaccination rates rise. Complete coincidence.
1) The Biden plan is just a continuation of the Trump plan. Biden only deserves credit for not screwing it up.
2) infections rates world wide and in the US began falling in early January – which was in the early stages of the vaccine rollout – long before any vaccine could have a statistically significant effect on the data. This was a world wide, not just in the US. Those infection rate drops have been consistent with both the hopes simpson curve and the gompertz curve which has been extremely well documented in the medical literature for the last 60-70+ years.
Following historical trends is not a coincidence.
Blaming trump & praising biden or visaversa – shows a strong political bias, that greatly impedes rational critical thinking skills
“The Biden plan is just a continuation of the Trump plan”.
Nonsense. There was no Trump plan. Or you could say the Trump plan was to let the states distribute. What’s more when Biden took office there wasn’t even vaccine in the supply chain.
quote
Newly sworn in President Joe Biden and his advisers are inheriting no coronavirus vaccine distribution plan to speak of from the Trump administration, sources tell CNN, posing a significant challenge for the new White House.
The Biden administration has promised to try to turn the Covid-19 pandemic around and drastically speed up the pace of vaccinating Americans against the virus. But in the immediate hours following Biden being sworn into office on Wednesday, sources with direct knowledge of the new administration’s Covid-related work told CNN one of the biggest shocks that the Biden team had to digest during the transition period was what they saw as a complete lack of a vaccine distribution strategy under former President Donald Trump, even weeks after multiple vaccines were approved for use in the United States.
“There is nothing for us to rework. We are going to have to build everything from scratch,” one source said.
Another source described the moment that it became clear the Biden administration would have to essentially start from “square one” because there simply was no plan as: “Wow, just further affirmation of complete incompetence.”
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/21/politics/biden-covid-vaccination-trump/index.html
James Cross | June 15, 2021 at 9:32 am |
“The Biden plan is just a continuation of the Trump plan”.
Nonsense. There was no Trump plan. Or you could say the Trump plan was to let the states distribute. What’s more when Biden took office there wasn’t even vaccine in the supply chain.
quote
Newly sworn in President Joe Biden and his advisers are inheriting no coronavirus vaccine distribution plan to speak of from the Trump administration, sources tell CNN, posing a significant challenge for the new White House.
your trump derangement syndrome has destroyed any basic critical thinking skills you may have had.
In the UK we have seen how specious the two sides of the SARS-CoV-2 divide themselves with each and every announcement our politicians make, and so it does not surprise me to find the origins of the virus follow the same very different paths. I am convinced that G-o-F was, for some reason, either collaboration or battle between the US and China, but it is hard to determine who was at fault unless we are honestly told what the collaboration/battle was all about when it begun.
What bothers me is that people in general are rapidly losing patience with ‘experts’ who seldom get anything right be it forecast or explanation of what is happening NOW. The misinformation continues to flow when we see the G7 folk behave as if SARS-CoV-2 didn’t exist in Carbis Bay, ignoring all that stuff like asymptomatic infection, mask wearing, social distancing, etc., when they had their knees up at the end of the public theatrical show. What’s sauce for them is sauce for all of us, I say.
” I am convinced that G-o-F was, for some reason, either collaboration or battle between the US and China, but it is hard to determine who was at fault unless we are honestly told what the collaboration/battle was all about when it begun.”
Assuming the lab origin is 90% likely, I’d put 95% of that responsibility to China for running a dual use vaccine-bioweapons research lab. I put 3% of the guilt on Fauci and US GOF community that somehow were blind to the innate risks for benevolent purpose, let alone for weapons use. I put 1% on the French and whoever else donated to lab equipment and research to the WIV cause, buying into the US accrediting of the China’s trustworthiness. The WHO get’s 1% responsibility for being totally corrupt.
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An article today tells of a secret meeting between Fauci, Anderson and others on Feb 1, 2020, the day after Anderson’s midnight email to Fauci warning of what looked like potential lab engineering in SARS2’s genome.
The article refreshes us on the contents of the midnight email:
The contents of the next day’s email about the discussions of the meeting were redacted by the NIH (sources and methods) but Fauci said in a recent interview about that email that the lab origin was considered the meeting concluded to do further study. In a separate FOIA it is found that just 3 days after that meeting Anderson told another group of scientists to strongly debunk the lab theory due to public perception concerns.
After the initial Fauci email release exposing Anderson’s voiced concerns of engineering, Anderson had posted on Twitter that is “the scientific process in action.” After the latest email releases Anderson deleted his entire Twitter account and has not been taking calls.
“The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered,” Andersen said in an email to Fauci on Jan. 31, 2020. Andersen added that he and University of Sydney virologist and evolutionary biologist Edward Holmes, plus a handful of other top scientists with whom Fauci was on a first-name basis, “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
Looks like someone “persuaded” Andersen. I wonder how.
Or maybe a observation that looked conclusive on January 31 and was the subject of a conference call on with Fauci and others on February 1, didn’t seems so attractive after several days of scientific analysis.
Given the moral panics of scientists at the time and how political they all were, I think it quite likely that he received some feedback from his bosses or fellow more senior scientists that the fake consensus was going to be fully enforced.
Ron: Adding a furin cleavage site to RaGT19 still leaves you more than 1000 nucleotide changes away from SARS2, and much further from other known viruses. Yes, you can repeatedly passage a virus through human cell culture or in a mouse with human ACE2 receptors, but how fast do changes occur?
RaGT19 presumably was only identified in 2019. What would have caused scientists to stop what they were working on and start doing gain of function experiments on RaGT19? Or bio-warfare scientists to pick this starting spot. Did RaGT19 sicken the six mine workers in 2019?
Whether or not SARS2 evolved naturally or in the lab, I presume we still need a starting SARS-related virus much more closely related SARS2 than we have right now. For laboratory origin, we also need a reason why that virus would have been chosen for experiments.
Respectfully, Frank
Ron –
Don’t know if you’ll see this comment but since I know you like to consider different viewpoints…
https://castbox.fm/vb/392827358
I imagine we share concerns about fear-mongering from Demz about Russia. This podcast touches on concerns I have about fear-mongering about China – in particular with respect to handling pandemics and viruses in the future.
Thank you, Joshua, for finding this. One could write a school paper on critical thinking from analyzing that podcast. Everyone should listen to it as a comparison of how bankrupt groupthink is propagated.
Just the opening from editor and founder of SupChina, Kaiser Cuo, is a study in propaganda. He begins with the use of stereotyping.
“People in April that wouldn’t know a prion from a Prius are suddenly banging on about Furin Cleavage sites and debating the ethics of GOF research, and holding forth views on safety protocol difference between a BSL2 and BSL4 labs.”
Here Kuo disqualifies anyone, even if they have a strong base in science, from doing a deep dive into the subject, basically calling them a Google jockey. Next he specifically includes reporters in this class and disqualifies them as well while simultaneously using false framing.
“Certain members are self-flagellating or flagellating other members of the media for allegedly dismissing the possibility that SARS2 leaked from a lab at the WIV because they found the politics of those who champion that hypothesis a year ago to be distasteful.”
Here Kua uses pre-framing to place as fact that the debate is about whether or not a presumably vacant rightwing accusation is true, that the MSM bias was behind the dismissal of the lab leak theory. This also presents false dichotomy by oversimplifying the controversy and eliminating the larger question of corruption of the experts (and technocrats that fund them).
“And Pres. Biden has even ordered the intelligence community to launch an investigation to determine whether Covid 19 resulted from a zoonotic transmission or from a lab leak.”
Here, the improper pre-framing now allows the ordering of an investigation by the Dem president not to be a sign of validity, but an unfair nuisance caused by right-wingers. As a result expert energy needs to be expended to quell a rightwing conspiracy theory for which there is no evidence.
“This sea change strikes me at least as having happened despite there being, well, little by way of new information or evidence, but quite a bit of new animus toward China [Aaahh, it always comes down to racist, xenophobic rightwingers].”
Now that Cuo has signaled to his audience the virtuous side and that there is nothing to the lab leak hypothesis, he introduces his guest, a former US ambassador to China that will basically confirm all of Cuo’s pre-framed POV while skillfully omitting any technical details and simply calling anyone who disagrees with her a racist.
Joshua, you are a lot smarter than this, especially after you have been armed with the knowledge from reading this blog page for three weeks.
Is there any point in the podcast you would like to defend? If not, isn’t that a reason that you might reflect on some other questions? Why do you believe the things you do? Do you consider propaganda justified in some cases? Real questions.
Ron Graf: One could write a school paper on critical thinking from analyzing that podcast.
Good post.
Thanks, Ron –
For demonstrating how shallowly some people can respond to the points raised in the podcast:
> Here Kuo disqualifies anyone, even if they have a strong base in science, from doing a deep dive into the subject, basically calling them a Google jockey.
Of course he doesn’t. He’s responding to people who do a little Google jockeying and then consider themselves able to simply discount the importance of expertise developed over years of experience. Not anyone from doing a deep dive. You should expand beyond such a binary framing and you should consider being less sensitive.
> Here Kua uses pre-framing to place as fact that the debate is about whether or not a presumably vacant rightwing accusation is true, that the MSM bias was behind the dismissal of the lab leak theory. This also presents false dichotomy by oversimplifying the controversy and eliminating the larger question of corruption of the experts (and technocrats that fund them).
Actually, he was exactly arguing AGAINST an artificial dichotomy. Strange that you would miss that..
> Here, the improper pre-framing now allows the ordering of an investigation by the Dem president not to be a sign of validity, but an unfair nuisance caused by right-wingers.
They discussed that in some depth – mentioning the benefits of further investigation.
As a result expert energy needs to be expended to quell a rightwing conspiracy theory for which there is no evidence.
> “This sea change strikes me at least as having happened despite there being, well, little by way of new information or evidence, but quite a bit of new animus toward China [Aaahh, it always comes down to racist, xenophobic rightwingers].”
How odd that you would simply hand-wave away the influence of anti-china animus, not only to the developments related to the idea of a lab leak and the related political developments therein, but also with respect to their discussion about how Anti-China animus will affect the important cooperation of China as the world moves forward to dealing with future pandemics developing in a part of the world where a great deal of human interaction takes place.
> Now that Cuo has signaled to his audience the virtuous side and that there is nothing to the lab leak hypothesis, he introduces his guest, a former US ambassador to China that will basically confirm all of Cuo’s pre-framed POV while skillfully omitting any technical details and simply calling anyone who disagrees with her a racist.
Fascinating how active your imagination is, Ron, and how you project onto that woman your fantasies.
> Joshua, you are a lot smarter than this, especially after you have been armed with the knowledge from reading this blog page for three weeks.
My main point id interest is with respect to the aspects which I pointed you to, Ron, which you totally ignored. Unfortunate, but C’est la vie.
> Is there any point in the podcast you would like to defend?
Defend?
Ron, you completely misunderstand how I look at material like that. The notion of “defending” something in the pod completely misses the point. I listen to a pod like that to hear a perspective.
> If not, isn’t that a reason that you might reflect on some other questions? Why do you believe the things you do?
Again, this totally misses the point. You have made similar statements in the past about your fantasies about what I “believe” that likewise were based on near compete ignorance on your part, and projections of your fantasies. I tried pointing that out to you, but apparently it didn’t register.
> Do you consider propaganda justified in some cases? Real questions.
Perhaps a real question, but not only a ridiculous one, it’a also totally irrelevant. Nonetheless, it’s interesting that you’d focus on “propaganda” in reference to that podcast. Is it your contention thst he podcast was come kind of Chinese propaganda? Or do you think it’s propoganda on the past of some other political entity?
Joshua: you completely misunderstand how I look at material like that. The notion of “defending” something in the pod completely misses the point.
There is more than one point, isn’t there? An important “point” is to arrive at the most accurate and informative accounts possible.
Matthew –
> There is more than one point, isn’t there?
Of course usually when one person’s describing “the point” in blog comments, they’re wrongly and subjectively arguing that there’s only one point when there could be many.
But if Ron is asking me to “defend” the podcast he totally misses the point of why I linked it…
I think I get it now Ron and Matt. Joshua seems to be admitting that he is an eclectic consumer of nonsense but he likes it to be diverse nonsense and propaganda. He doesn’t care about quality or correctness, you know little stuff like that. This shows why talking to him always results in the spread of misinformation.
Ron –
But really, you’re smarter than that, than to just get stuck in such a tribal and falsely dichotomous reaction to that podcast.
It’s not only the head infectious disease scientists leaving the left holding the bag on the fake covid origin consensus, comedians are too. If you haven’t seen Jon Stewart’s on Colbert’s show you must. It’s worth it.
Idea for Joshua to try to be constructive. If you post something and say it echos your concerns, that looks like an endorsement. If you understand that its shallow and biased, you should qualify your mention of it.
Well, there’s a big difference between Russian fear mongering and concerns about China.
The Russian narrative was a purely political weapon invented by Hillary, her campaign and seized on by a complicit media and deep state to smear Trump and conservatives. It was mostly a lie.
Those concerned about China do so often at their peril. If they are Chinese, they could disappear or get kidnapped. Americans are crossing the Tech Titans and many of our elites who in this era can cancel people for doing nothing but expressing themselves. The NBA for example winks at Chinese abuses of human rights because of their economic clout.
That’s why I give vastly more credance to the China concerned than the political tools and fools who bring up Russia. It’s a little cowardly to be concerned that China might “punish” us in the future in some vaguely defined way.
> The Russian narrative was a purely political weapon invented by H–
See for yourself:
https://www.foxnews.com/world/russia-attacks-media-breaking-point-independent-journalist
There are 13 “Biden” on this page.
There are 30 “Russia.”
Anyone who pretends that the News Corp isn’t weaponizing Russia is a fool.
This looks irrelevant to the point I was making. Obfuscation perhaps.
C’mon, David.
The Russian narrative.
Was a purely political weapon.
Invented by H.
Red baiting was here before you were born:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-baiting
Xenophobia is an old tradition in conservative circles.
Use your brain Willard. What I was referring to was the modern non-communist Russian interference narrative. I suspect you knew that but wanted to challenge with a misdirection.
https://judithcurry.com/2021/05/23/collapse-of-the-fake-consensus-on-covid-19-origins/#comment-953013
Ragnaar –
> Don’t forget Sam Harris. Who I’d say is also a moral man.
Harris says he’s not tribal because he meditates. In my experience, the vast majority of people who meditate say that meditation is what enables them to accept how aburd that statement is.
I would look at any of Harris’ assessments of morality from a similar orientation.
> Don’t use force is substantially a moral statement.
In the abstract framing, or in your preferred contextual construction, it’s a moral lever you can apply and you do so continuously. It real world context its usually a pragmatic statement mixed with political outlook.
>So you want to talk morality? We always did care about children.
“We” still do.
I say it’s morally ambiguous to leverage “But think about the children! ” to push your ideological agenda.
Ragnaar –
> Don’t forget Sam Harris. Who I’d say is also a moral man.
Sam Harris says he’s not tribal because he meditates. Everyone who I know who meditates laughs at that because, they say, meditation helps them see how tribalism is unavoidable.
I look at Harris’ assessment of morality in the same way.
>Don’t use force is substantially a moral statement.
The morality of the use of force changes with context, and people just love them some pushing their agendas through their view of the context of the use of force. “Morality” over use of force is a cheap elixer for those looking to elevate their own morality over an “other.”
> We always did care about children.
Ah yes, “Think about the children!”another favored cheap elixer.
“We” still do care about the children.
Stop holding science hostage in your attempt to politicize “morality.”
Just to put the final nail in the coffin of Willard’s obfuscatory defense of journalism, here’s another article on the embrace of post-journalism. No doubt Willard will continue his denial.
https://www.city-journal.org/journalism-advocacy-over-reporting
> continue his denial
Denial of what, David? Let me remind you of what you just said:
Try to read what I write instead:
That’s the third time now you’re dodging that point.
You got caught portraying pundits as journalists. It’s no big deal. Get a grip.
Now you are just lying Willie.
You said: “I know you were peddling “but the media,” David. Not only it’s false, it’s ahistorical nonsense.”
I have provided ample evidence that my take is accurate. You have provided nothing as always.
Good grief, David, Can’t you read?
Your anhistorical nonsense is when you attribute anti-Russian sentiments to the part of the media you dislike. Anti-Russian sentiments have been pervasive in the American media since at least the Cold War.
Worse is that with Bari or Andrew’s dismissal you’re using to portray the NYT or the Atlantic as woke or something. It’s not even clear they’re publications that lean progressive, for Noam’s sake!
Red-baiting has a long tradition among troglodytes, e.g.:
https://twitter.com/NRO/status/1406832539512315911
Deal with it.
You are lying and deflecting again Willard. The New York Times has officially come out as a narrative promoting outlet for woke ideology. Bari Weiss accuses them of condoning harrassment. You didn’t even read the City Journal piece did you? And you return to your original lie about what I said. The context was the recent past starting in 2016.
You are failing basic reading comprehension, David.
A Chomskian standpoint does not lack poxes to throw in all the mediatic houses. How many times should I say that the main role of the media is to generate controversy? In contradistinction to Mir’s thesis, there’s nothing new about that.
Post-journalism starts by portraying pundits as journalists. So clean your own room. And give yourself a chance: you’re only discovering teh Discourse.
I bet you don’t even know what I mean by that.
You know, Tom Friedman wrote op-eds waaaaaaaaaaayyyyyy before teh Donald. We even have a bot now:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jsvine/the-tom-friedman-sentence-generator
That bot is older than teh Donald’s political stint.
Once again, this is all your personal theories and fantasies Willie, with no supporting evidence. You don’t even respond to contrary information indicating you are not acting in good faith. I’ve provided a mountain of evidence. You are focusing on a triviality of whether a media critic is a journalist or a columnist, a minor distinction in many cases as the roles often overlap. Just plain obfuscation from you, an ordinary artifice of those who seek not the truth but their own advantage.
C’mon, David. You’re not the Dude here. I am.
Your own theory can’t account for the fact that the media ran with H’s emails. Mine can account for both: anti-Russian sentiment.
Anti-Russian sentiment sells.
I know you were peddling “but the media,” David. Not only it’s false, it’s ahistorical nonsense.
Here’s an idea to be constructive. If you post something and say it echos your concerns, that looks like an endorsement. If you understand that its shallow and biased, you should qualify your mention of it.
Willard, Denial does not suite you well. Ron and I have pasted scores of comments with documentation (especially for me Glenn Greenwald) on this Russian interference narrative and the media’s complicity. Glenn is particularly strong at documenting this. In my link he named the top 10 hall of shame media errors but apologized for failing to award all the other ones something. You should like Greenwald as he’s a leftie but an honest one.
From Greenwald.
“There were so many false reports circulated by the dominant corporate wing of the U.S. media as part of the five-year-long Russiagate hysteria that in January, 2019, I compiled what I called “The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story.” The only difficult part of that article was choosing which among the many dozens of retractions, corrections and still-uncorrected factual falsehoods merited inclusion in the worst-ten list. So stiff was the competition that I was forced to omit many huge media Russiagate humiliations, and thus, to be fair to those who missed the cut, had to append a large “Dishonorable Mention” category at the end.
That the entire Russiagate storyline itself was a fraud and a farce is conclusively demonstrated by one decisive fact that can never be memory-holed: namely, the impetus for the scandal and subsequent investigation was the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign had secretly and criminally conspired with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election, primarily hacking into the email inboxes of the DNC and Clinton campaign chief John Podesta. And a grand total of zero Americans were accused (let alone convicted) of participating in that animating conspiracy.”
David,
You and Ron have jumped the shark a long time ago, and the day you’ll document anything will be a good day.
Glenn is first and foremost on Glenn’s side. Whatever boosts his brand is good for Glenn, including catering to troglodytes like you.
The long and the short of it is the media fuels on controversy. You’re talking about the same media that made teh Donald win with the canard H’s emails. Your conspiracy ideation knows no bound.
Seek help.
“Glenn is first and foremost on Glenn’s side.”
Speaking one’s mind truly and fearlessly about power abuses used to be called journalistic independence. Now it’s “catering to troglodytes.”
I hear you saying that Greenwald left the news organization he cofounded to post stories independently out of greed to cater to an audience. The mental gymnastics to come up with that should give anyone pause.
My take on Greenwald is that he switched from practicing law to journalism out of a concern about the intelligence state. He took Eisenhower’s farewell warning to heart (as all should have.) From Nixon to the Bush administrations Greenwald saw the USIC as being in the conservative camp. After Obama’s administration, (which seems to have successfully corrupted most every federal agency), Trump was seen (by the right and center) as an outsider and reformer of that corruption. Greenwald is alarmed by the marriage of the USIC to the MSM newsroom. The Russiagate was not news reporting by the MSM in Greenwald’s eyes, it was collusion, accomplishing the CIA’s predilections going back to the 1960s with the now declassified Operation Mockingbird. Greenwald will tell anyone this who asks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
> Speaking one’s mind truly and fearlessly about power abuses used to be called journalistic independence. Now it’s “catering to troglodytes.”
Being a regular on Tucker’s is catering to troglodytes, Ron.
And there is a distinction between journalist and editorialist:
https://newrepublic.com/article/160012/glenn-greenwald-throws-fit
Whatever his shining medals as a past Freedom Fighter, Glenn is an egoistical dolt who, among other episodes in which he threw fits (there are many to recall this morning), demanded full editorial control over his rants about Hunter’s laptop.
That’s not journalism.
Willard has returned to trogoloditism. No substance, proof by assertion, and guilt by association. Ordinary tools of the political consensus enforcer and overall obfuscation. Perhaps being in the moderation doghouse had only a temporary effect. The ankle biter doesn’t change its bark.
Have you found Hunter’s laptop yet, David?
Somce Ron and David Young have so much faith in Greenwald’s journalism, I wonder if Glenn things that David and Ron are socialists.
Only if it includes a strong dose of nationalism, Joshua:
https://judithcurry.com/2021/05/23/collapse-of-the-fake-consensus-on-covid-19-origins/#comment-951032
I think this takes the cake for ad hominem fallacies and complete failure to address any substance. Sneering and posturing all the way down.
Greenwald is not the only one. Over half the public says Mueller probe was a witch-hunt. And here’s a good analysis of the media’s corrupt actio nature.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagate-is-wmd-times-a-million
While David tries to start a food fight, in the same article I cited earlier we can read about how Freedom Fighters would assemble:
https://archive.ph/5JDGs
Say what you will about David’s tenets, at least he got an ethos.
This is all irrelevant to the issue of the Crossfire Hurricane and the media total failure and corruption with regard to it. It’s called obfuscation Willard and Joshua. When you can’t respond to the point, you divert attention to distract from the point.
Willard –
What I find most interesting here are the revealed attitudes towards authority.
I linked a podcast for Ron, thinking that he might find the discussion of the implications and impact of anti-China animus with respect to the fight into the future against pandemic outbreaks. Included in the podcast are discussions of the Chinese government suppression of news about the pandemic and resistance among people with financial interests in China, against open communication about outbreaks. And the discussion also goes into how these problems aren’t only limited to China…
But Ron can’t get beyond some expressions of opinion with which he disagrees, and gets triggered to the point of waaaaay exaggerating what was said and calling it propaganda despite elements that are critical of the Biden government as well as the Chinese government. In so doing, he misses that there was disagreement among the duscussants regarding the motivation and value of the Biden administration investigation of the origin of the virus, mischaracterizes the role of one of the discussants, etc. It’s almost as if he was so triggered he didn’t even get past the introduction.
But where it gets interesting is the assumption that I can only look at the podcast as some kind of authority from which I should follow in forming an opinion. Thus, because I linked the pod with a reference to one particular aspect, it must be that I am a mindless sheep who assumes that all opinions expressed in the podcast are correct (and thus have some obligation to “defend” them). And in response, he and David Young link to Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi on unrelated topics with an apparent assumption that my fealty to authority will somehow be roiled – because people who self-identify as leftists must be sources I should consider as authorities.
But also not to be missed is the label of “propaganda.” Is there any cheaper trick in the book than labeling the views that one disagrees with as “propaganda?” Particularly when it involves a place like China? Ron and David Young were so prepped to throw that label around, they didn’t even stop to think that people that they were calling propagandists regularly promote the views of activists fighting against state authorities.
And this despite Ron’s deep concern about people shutting down reasoned discussions among those who disagree.
I suggest that was transpired reveals a kind of approach to authority, that runs so strongly in Ron and David Young (despite their self-identification as brave anti-authority heroes) that they can’t help but project their own attitudes onto others despite obvious signs of the inapplicability.
Or, it could just be run of the mill fundamental attribution error, of the sort which is so ubiquitous in this kind of exchange setting.
https://www.simplypsychology.org/fundamental-attribution.html
Joshua, This is a prime example of why others here don’t respect you. It is unethical to try to read people’s minds. You have been told over and over again that your comments are very long, repetetive, contain logical and scientific errors such as extreme cherry picking. Have you ever thought that you might be the cause of the reaction to you by everyone else.
Another totally speculative and irrelevant comment Joshie. A couple more pro tips for honest interactions.
1. Don’t misrepresent what other people say. When corrected, do not double down and repeat the lie scores of times.
2. Try to invest as much time in looking up source material as you do in commenting.
3. Do not endlessly repeat substanceless cavilling and sarcastic rhetoric that adds absolutely nothing.
What I hope people will do when I post primary sources is to NOT take it as an authority but to read it and go to the multitude of primary sources for the assertions. Only you could convert this into some BS about attitudes toward authority.
It’s all about puck control, J.
Just take how David treated Frank.
Joshua
The latest Covid figures in the UK newspapers today show that since 2020 Sweden has actually done very well as regards excess deaths and cases and are one of the least affected of the 28 European countries surveyed. I don’t think i can link to the article so do you want me to extract a few figures?
tonyb
Willard –
> It’s all about puck control,
I had hoped for more from Ron, with all the talk of trust and all the upset about people attacking to avoid discussion.
But apparently for Ron too, it’s aggression above all.
tony –
I’ve no reason to doubt that you say – so don’t bother getting the figures.
All the metrics have their downsides. For example excess deaths has less value in some ways than p- or Z-scores. But nonetheless, while having relatively low excess deaths compared to other European countries is certainly not a bad thing. Sweden had way more per capita infections (despite less testing) and deaths from COVID than the most like countries in the Nordics. If one wants to assess the efficacy of interventions across countries then you have to control for confounding variables and comparing to the most similar countries in key aspects (like age profile, or SES, or access to healthcare, or baseline health, or ability to work from home, or average household size, or number of multi-generational household, etc.) that are generally predictive of health outcomes is a kind of natural way to have some level of control for confounds. Most of those metrics would predict better outcomes for Sweden although some don’t – like % of the population that live in international communities.
But all of that aside – as I don’t think that comparing COVID outcomes across countries yields much value for assessing the efficacy of interventions, not the least because of myriad confounds -my main point of interest HERE w/r/t the outcomes in Sweden were the viability of Nic’s projections.. As such, excess deaths are mostly irrelevant while the trend of infections and covid desths, because that’s how Nic quantified his projections, are; those were his outcomes of interest. And that’s how we can see just how wrong his modeling turned out to be.
Joshua: “What I find most interesting here are the revealed attitudes towards authority.”
Joshua, no need to analyze my thoughts on authority. I will gladly share them if asked. Authority is neither good nor bad per se, it’s in how it’s exercised. Good leadership has many qualities that transfer naturally to the responsible wielding of authority, first among them being trustworthiness. Following close behind are empathy, respect, resoluteness, decisiveness, humility and optimistic spirit.
But these are far from natural traits. They must be learned. If you have ever experienced someone who is not used to wielding authority dealing a restriction or penalty upon you then you understand the “Hitler Youth syndrome.” This is why we should be careful how authority is come to be assigned. Everyone would like to have authority over others while enjoying carte blanch themselves. The pinnacle of this is a national dictator. Hugo Chavez, for example, persuaded enough of the electorate in a democratic nation to elect him president.
The populace knew full well he promised he would use presidential authority to take from others, and that he promised his voters they would get a share. It was easy for them to believe they were entitled to it (sort of). The problem was that giving someone authority because they promise to give you something you did not earn is a universal con. So if you give a con man the keys to your country you cannot blame outsiders for you troubles. The con man knows this. It also helps make the steal successful. Victims don’t complain much when they realize they got what they paid for (and deserved).
America’s founders were not only excellent students of history, they were ingenious in devising a system that would be self-checking against corruption. Unfortunately, no system is fool proof and Marxism seems to have found a way into our universities and poisoned our schools, news media and many other institutions, including scientific ones. The teaching that power naturally corrupts and needs to be kept in check has been replaced with other tribalistic noise.
The examples that were given of early industrial oligarchs corruption being placed in check is a great example of the success of the American founder’s vision. But it was much easier when the federal government was limited like the founder’s designed. We have broken that design so we are in grave danger of the grand failure that we can’t even imagine. It was interesting to watch liberal constitutional scholar, professor Jonathan Turley, all of the sudden awaken to the danger during the Obama presidency.
Hey, its Father’s Day in the USA. Happy Father’s Day!
Bye now for today.
Jonathan Turley, that name rings a bell:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Turley#Politics
> This is all irrelevant to the issue of the Crossfire Hurricane and the media total failure and corruption with regard to it
Here was the half-move before that:
And the half-move before that was:
David is shadowboxing from one topic to the next like a crank uncle in a party. Except that we’re on a blog. Everything is written for the only eternity humans may know.
It’s as if David wanted to enforce something. But what?
What a tripe ad hominem. Crossfire Hurricane has been a prime subject here by several commenters. I posted these references primarily for other people, not you who I know would not have a substantive response.
J:
Nic was wrong. I was wrong. Most the United States was more wrong with 1854 deaths per million while Sweden has 1431 per million. You live in the United States so were not wrong even though the country was wrong.
The list of people who were wrong I guess will go on for another six months. At that time that list will no longer be useful so we will need a new list. And I know you will have it.
“Sweden never closed schools for those under 16 and public health authorities in neighboring Norway and Denmark now acknowledge that Sweden made the correct decision. Globally, according to a research review published recently in The Lancet, a leading medical journal, the number of Covid-19 deaths prevented by school closings has been vanishingly small. The same can’t be said about the closings’ educational effects, which have been devastating.”
Sweden lost the Covid death Olympics, but finished in front of us, while avoiding the long term effects of the devastation wrote upon our young people’s education. They did not sacrifice children. Nic’s work supported them not sacrificing children. Which aint bad.
Ron –
> Joshua, no need to analyze my thoughts on authority. I will gladly share them if asked.
I wasn’t “analyzing” it and there’s not need to ask as you made it quite clear as I explained.
(1) you have (repeatedly) wrongly projected onto me some kind of weird impression about me assuming various sources are authorities. The latest example was that you expected me to “defend” a source, as if I considered it an authority, simply because I pointed to some parts of what it said with some interest.
(2) you point to an article by Taibbi, indicating that I should consider it authoritative, simply because Taibbi (presumably) self-identifies as a lefty based on his subjective scale or because you’ve deemed him as a leftie based on your subjective scale.
Both of those developmwnts are based on nothing other than a projection on your part. I’ve ever given ANY indication that I’d be looking for an authority or thst I’d consider either source as an authority.
In fact, you’ve ignored what I’ve told you about how I approach sources in rhsmknds of matters but it makes no difference to you.
Thus, no explanation required. You’ve made your attitude plainly obvious by projecting your attitude into me despite thst it doesn’t come close to fitting.
Ragnaar –
>… I was wrong….
Thanks. I was waiting for that. It doesn’t really matter that people are wrong – particularly in a fast moving situation with so much uncertainty. What matters is how people respond when they’re wrong. I was perplexed that you persisted being wrong when it was obvious thst you were wrong. I was disappointed that it took you so long to acknowledge your error.
Most the United States was more wrong with 1854 deaths per million while Sweden has 1431 per million. You live in the United States so were not wrong even though the country was wrong.
The list of people who were wrong I guess will go on for another six months. At that time that list will no longer be useful so we will need a new list. And I know you will have it.
>Sweden lost the Covid death Olympics,
I think it’s strange to refer to “covid death Olympics.” It wasn’t a competition. People made choices in the face of high uncertainty. No one knew how things would turn out. The mistake thst people made was thinking they knew more than they did and turning it into a proxy political battle. Imo, that was disgusting.
Sweden made choices thinking that their path would be more sustainable there was a logic to it. There were trade-offs. I don’t 2nd judge their decisions. They did what they thought right. It’s uonto them to decide of what they did was right.
> They did not sacrifice children. Nic’s work supported them not sacrificing children. Which aint bad.
This, of course, repeats the problems. It ignores the uncertainties about what might have happened had things been different. You project forward as if you know the counterfactual scenarios. You don’t.
Don’t be afraid of uncertainties. Don’t forget to caveat with conditionals. We aren’t Sweden. You can’t just extrapolate from what happens there to know what would had happened here. Life is more complicated than that.
J:
“…turning it into a proxy political battle.”
That’s what it was. I know you can see. You framed it yourself between Sweden and its neighbors. Political decisions were made there, here and everywhere. This is called policy which is not scientific.
What we know about Sweden is their young people are not at minus 1 year of education. And we know most of ours, with an emphasis on ones that most need it, are at minus 1 year of education. I don’t care what anyone says, that’s bad.
We learned about decisions at that business school I went to. It’s valid to avoid the worst outcome though there are other ways as well. We did not avoid the worst outcome. Politically, we let it happen. Minus 1 year. And it was science that was waived over us like a sword urging us towards that.
> Crossfire Hurricane has been a prime subject here by several commenters
Only to bolster Glenn’s reputation.
David’s topic here is China, see his originale red-baiting:
https://judithcurry.com/2021/05/23/collapse-of-the-fake-consensus-on-covid-19-origins/#comment-952984
He claimed that Russia was less of a threat. He then invoked Russiagate and went on to say “but the press.” Then it switched to Glenn, then Matt.
The main problem with David’s story is that Fox News is using Russia to get back at Joe as we speak. So David’s main problem is how he deals with his inaccurate portrayal of the press, and more generally, his double standard regarding it. Any outlet that supports him is glorified, and any outlet that does not his vilified.
Hence why David challenges other commenters with squirrels.
While it would be tempting to fall for them (he can’t even keep a simple timeline of the Manafort events), I’d rather let him throw food.
Vacuous and irrelevant analysis. Capped off by reading my mind and lying about the press. Willard never tires of distraction and obfuscation. Care to respond to Greenwald’s and Taibbi’s detailed and careful laying out of the brief against the press? I thought not.
Ragnaar –
> What we know about Sweden is their young people are not at minus 1 year of education.
You just can’t give it up, can you? What would you do if you didn’t have your moral posturing? I blame Jordan Peterson (with an assist from Brett Weinstein)
You could have been a contender.
> Capped off by reading my mind
A quote might be nice. Here are a few:
– “Denial does not suite you well”
– “You should like Greenwald”
– “It is unethical to try to read people’s minds”
J:
What would you do if you didn’t have your moral posturing?
————————————————–
Don’t forget Sam Harris. Who I’d say is also a moral man. Don’t use force is substantially a moral statement.
Take the Right. Religious/Moral. Then the Left Other/Moral.
The game used to be, don’t give me your religious morality. The Left won that one.
The new game may turn out to be, We learned from before. Change or die right? It’s expected. So you want to talk morality? We always did care about children.
What you’d find interesting is Peterson’s Biblical series. Have I got you confused enough?
The main problem with David’s story is that Fox News is using Russia to get back at Joe as we speak.
———————————————–
I am not going to invest a lot into this one. Yes, Willard’s above is true. Russia was not a threat when the Left made up all that stuff about Willard’s favorite President and Russia. Now Russia is eating President Biden’s lunch.
I don’t know if your dissing Greenwald? He’s a braver man than 99% of journalists. A hero. Is he perfect? No. Can you find some issues? Yes.
On Tucker Carlson recently he laid into our intelligence agencies. Like the ideal the Democrats used to champion. Now the Democrats are most of the wrong things they used to be against. No honest person can get civil liberties and Democrats into the same coherent sentence.
Ragnaar,
Would you say that Michael Moore is a journalist? I would not. Why the hell would you say that Glenn is a journalist? He has stopped being one years if not decades ago. He’s first and foremost a grifter.
It’s as if Denizens just discovered what is usually called The Discourse.
In fairness, it’s also as if Glenn discovered the “but CAGW” trick too:
https://www.manystories.com/story/due-process-and-matt-gaetz-a-response-to-glenn-greenwald–u-6074ee6a07c8d4001f23647e
Since it’s easy to find a sensationalist newsie somewhere in the universe (just take David Rose), it’s trivial to raise concerns about how the media behaves. Which returns me to the point everybody forgot to address:
The long and the short of it is the media fuels on controversy. That’s how it always rolled. For a short time, the Internet worked without it. Then ads came, and everyone who’s not from the Internet. Including cranky uncles.
We lost the Internet.
Glenn Greenwald wrote for the Guardian and Salon. Apparently their staff are “journalists” until they disagree with Willard and become not journalists.
And Greenwald peddles in the weird theory that AGW is an existential threat – the “C” in CAGW – an extremist position only held by people like President Biden.
The “we lost the internet” actually is an interesting topic. There is a good argument for the case that internet ads created an emphasis on division and fake news. The internet ad industry shifted to digital data- which means Brand X doesn’t buy an ad on a website, they buy your cookie data so their ad will appear to you no matter what site you visit and the publisher of that site will get paid for it. That means any site adept at creating “click bait” drawing your attention however briefly can make a lot of money. This doesn’t just impact fringe sites or writers, but mainstream as well. The Washington Post got a whole lot of clicks and money for example for their fake story about Kentucky teenagers attacking a native American. Rolling Stone made a bunch on their fake story about an entirely made up frat boy. The New York Times is cashing in on their mythology around the 1619 project. And all of them kept the bogus collusion fairy tale going for long, long after they knew it was wrong because any story – however inaccurate – was guaranteed to draw eyeballs.
It’s a fair question to ask if the media is grossly biased, or has made the financial conclusion that liberals are better marks for fake click-bait.
> Glenn Greenwald wrote for the Guardian and Salon.
See for yourself:
https://www.theguardian.com/profile/glenn-greenwald
Cranky uncles have a tougher time during parties nowadays: every kid has a phone.
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-books-are-already-burning?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxMDk5ODQ2OSwicG9zdF9pZCI6Mzc4MzI3OTgsIl8iOiJIa2Q5VyIsImlhdCI6MTYyNDI5NDc0MywiZXhwIjoxNjI0Mjk4MzQzLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMjYwMzQ3Iiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.moAidZQjBKwzABNvFA1WF5GZWphH6bfL1sgjfr3qiiU
Another journalist (a moderate) who has documented the corruption of the New York Times. Go to her resignation letter.
I forgot, for Willard any journalist who has a message he doesn’t like is no longer a journalist. I posit that Willard is just strongly ideologically biased and a content free practitioner of online meaningless games. He carries as a badge of honor.
“every kid has a phone.”
and the only way to get them to look at your dry history lesson about the year 1619, the frat scene at UVA, or the bus pickup at the Right to Life March is make up wild fictional stories and get marketing to tweet them out.
Your other example was Michael Moore- who made millions of dollars and spent years being celebrated by CNN as a “documentarian” by peddling fairy tales to Progressives. Until he made the mistake of challenging their climate narrative.
That’s the point- the way to make money on the internet is to attract eyeballs and the more outrageous the claim the more eyeballs you get.
I’ll put it another way- the internet rewards “journalists” willing to say Gaetz is definitely guilty AND rewards those who say he’s definitely not. It does not reward careful consideration or doubt- one or the other only. So your link has the bizarre situation that Gaetz is a totally busted pedo and human trafficker that, for reasons unknown, nobody is interested in arresting or requesting his resignation from Congress.
Which leads to the downside: nobody believes either story. At all. Trust in media is at low.
Gallup’s chart is funny. Only half (51%) of even Democrats trusted the media right up to the moment when they went all in on the fake collusion narrative and then “trust” in disproven stories shot up to 73% among Democrats.
I think this is one of the reasons the media has stopped being self-policing. The NYT for example won’t admit the inaccuracies and correct their 1619 project because they know their audience wants to believe it and won’t pay any attention to critics. The incentive is to keep the fairy tale alive- Lord knows they don’t want to admit to leftists that their narrative is wrong. Independents and Republicans, meanwhile, assume the story is wrong until you do something weird, like practice journalism, so their faith in journalism keeps ticking down, down, down.
By the way- that 51% lowest of low for Democrats in 2016? That was when the NYT, Washington Post and CNN were “reporting” that Hillary only used her email server for yoga and wedding plans and that she “believed all women” who reported harassment… except, you know, those. You could barely get half of Dems to believe those whoppers but they kept peddling them. In fact, it was so bad that year that Democrats almost gave their nomination to someone who wasn’t a Democrat just to avoid Hillary.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/321116/americans-remain-distrustful-mass-media.aspx
Willard:
Thank you for your reply. Okay, I am in some kind of trap again that I can’t see or figure out. I said, Greenwald – Hero.
The world is bleeping complicated. I can’t keep track of it all. So I invest in Greenwald after hearing some of what he has to say. A lot of what he’s said recently, aligns with some part of my past enduring thoughts.
I like a former Lefty. Is that one in your Matrix? It seems an obvious one to be there. I like Weiss and Rubin as well.
Why Heroes? I have been trying to teach one of my young relatives this. Because we’ve had heroes for 3000 years or longer. Because we’ve had hero stories for that long too. We want to make Curry, Lewis and Wyatt a hero. Spencer. Anyone who writes a paper going against the mainstream. And we want to be heroes. In our own small way.
More dry lesson, uncle Jeff:
https://www.theguardian.com/gnm-press-office/7
> Another journalist (a moderate)
I mean, c’mon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bari_Weiss
Has the line between being a journalist and a pundit been so blurred in the Murican media that uncles can’t see any difference anymore?
Ragnaar –
Oops. I couldn’t find my earlier comment. Because I posted it on the wrong place. So I reposted.
In the wrong place again.
Here it is:
https://judithcurry.com/2021/05/23/collapse-of-the-fake-consensus-on-covid-19-origins/#comment-953156
Another piece of evidence.
https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/media/new-york-magazine-columnist-slams-company-in-brutal-resignation-letter/news-story/e5b409293ec76e05795121addc2315d2
Willie’s denial of the truth is starting to look obvious.
Returning from Willard’s obfuscation to the main point. The corporate media has become a captive of an ideology that is disconnected from reality and that is very intolerant of diversity of thought. I’ve cited 4 veterans of the media who say so quite strongly. Perhaps Willard deep down likes the idea of intellectual intolerance. Wouldn’t surprise me.
“I mean, c’mon:”
I’m sure your hand just slipped when you forgot to copy/paste the part where she was a reporter from 2008-2013 before the WSJ picked her up and put her on books and op-ed.
But now, Columbia educated journalists with 13 years of experience working for the biggest names in news are absolutely not “journalists” in the politically approved sense of the word- which is to say “not leftist, not journalist.”
Now do Donald G. McNeil Jr.
Was Andy Revkin a “journalist” or does it depend on whether you liked the story he wrote?
Yes Jeff, The only question is whether Willie is too rushed to cite correct facts in context or if he is deliberately twisting the truth with carefully cherry picked excerpts. I think the latter is obviously correct as the track record is long with literally hundreds of obfuscations to his credit.
> Another piece of evidence.
Of another “well-known, high-profile columnist.”
I already cited Andrew earlier:
https://archive.ph/5JDGs
Fishes are barrels are tougher.
Welcome to Teh Discourse, Denizens!
Andrew Sullivan is not Andy Revkin.
Sullivan was one of the first to discover that there is money to be made in being solo as long as you’re controversial and you don’t irritate your “followers.”
Nothing sets up a worse fourth estate than inducing them to abandon editors, seek division, and build and audience of ideological followers. It was fine as long as it was just Sully, but then the Washington Post decided to follow that model.
Revkin was one of the first to discover that climate change deserved high profile coverage as long as W was president. Then Obama came along, hired Podesta- the boss of Joe “Indipensible” Romm – who backed hydraulic fracturing and the natural gas revolution and suddenly Dot Earth and Climate Progress were no longer useful to the party.
Nothing sets up a worse movement than chaining it to a political party that will spin a 180 on any issue if there is a vote in it. If you’re wondering how Biden is going to reverse the success of the Obama/Biden administration in fossil fuels, well…. he probably is wondering that too, but not too worried given the lack of journalists.
https://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/john-podesta-natural-gas-environment-energy-104836
> Andrew Sullivan is not Andy Revkin.
I can play squirrels too, Jeff:
What about Winston Churchill, teh Boris, Michael Gove, Nigel Lawson, or Benito Mussolini?
J:
I can’t remember what this argument is about, however you said:
> Don’t use force is substantially a moral statement.
In the abstract framing, or in your preferred contextual construction, it’s a moral lever you can apply and you do so continuously. It real world context its usually a pragmatic statement mixed with political outlook.
We have a hierarchy of values. Don’t use force exists high in mine. When do I sacrifice it for a lower value? I don’t fight the income tax because of some lower value I hold has been placed by me above the value of not using force. At that point, one could argue I have no values. That my hierarchy of values is a sham. If we jump to the end of the story. We have our values and our hierarchy of values is not corrupt. Failing that, we can improve our hierarchy and make it better than it was. I hope you are enjoying this and I bet Willard can guess where the idea for this came from.
He’s (Greenwald) first and foremost a grifter.
The long and the short of it is the media fuels on controversy.
We lost the Internet.
————————————–
Politics is downstream from culture. The internet is culture. Regarding his work on our intelligence agencies, I think he helps my idea of politics.
I’ve used the term myself.
1. a person who operates a sideshow at a circus, fair, etc., esp. a gambling attraction.
2. a swindler, dishonest gambler, or the like.
He offers something that isn’t what it seems to be. Maybe.
The MSM lost the Internet. We complain about it, but they are drifting down. It’s as if the Ghost of Trump is working in the background. In some grand not dead yet guy conspiracy.
> He offers something that isn’t what it seems to be.
What Glenn offers is first and foremost incoherent. You might like this old debate:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/19/lesser-of-two-evils-chomsky-vs-greenwald-and-the-ignored-factor/
Bothsidesism is silly, but Glenn succeeded in going to 11 with it by abstracting away the proto-fascists that he courts.
That he’s getting paid lip service here was only too predictable.
Thanks a lot because an individual have been willing to be able to have information with you. we will generally value all you have done the following because I understand you are incredibly anxious with our
Above Ragnaar admitted he, Nic and others were wrong about some aspects of the pandemic. However, Nic and many others weren’t completely wrong. Nic and other scientists correctly pointed out that heterogeneity in susceptibility means herd immunity can be reached before the traditional value of 1-(1/R0). The caveat is that no one knew how much lower. There was misleading data from Sweden that suggested herd immunity could be a lot lower. However, other explanations were also possible.
The biggest problem was that early antibody surveys showed that about 10-fold more people had acquired antibodies from COVID infection than were testing positive by PCR. After reports from Manaus and the fall surge in the US (where greater than 13% of the people in some Dakota cities cumulatively had tested positive by PCR), it became clear that a 10:1 detection rate no longer applied.) Today Miami-Dade county leads large US counties with more than 18% cumulative infection and they required about 50% vaccination before the pandemic subsided. However, we didn’t know this last summer.
My personal HYPOTHESIS is that SARS2 has evolved to sicken a much greater fraction of those it infects: that 10:1 may have been correct last spring and 2:1 may be correct with today’s variants. In other words, “more transmissible” may simply mean the same number of infections that are more serious and therefore more likely to be detected.
We have discussed several papers showing showing the presence of antibodies in Italy and France in 2019. It is possible that SARS2 crossed over to humans (most likely in Southern China) as a somewhat less transmissible virus that was barely able make humans sick and sent only an occasional patient to the hospital. (For example, cowpox is a virus that doesn’t cause serious illness.) Within a month or two, a new variant evolved that was more effective at sickening humans, and that variant was seriouslly sickened enough people to be discovered in Wuhan and sequenced. By the time it got to the US in spring, it was sickening only about 1 in 10 humans it infected and fewer than 10% of those needed hospitalization. With new variants, today perhaps 1 out 2 of those infected are getting sick enough to get tested by PCR.
Finally, the R_0 value from early in the pandemic (3) presumably changed as new variants became 50% and then another 60% more transmissible. That could make R_0 = 7.5 and raise the threshold for heard immunity to about 85% (and be lowered from there somewhat by Nic’s heterogeneity argument.)
The people who should be admitting their mistakes are those who let their political beliefs bias their judgment about the scientific evidence- a enormous problem on both sides of the climate science debate. Given the surprisingly low transmission from children and the mildness of their illness, the costs of closing schools may not be worth the epidemiological benefits. However, we didn’t know that last spring, and high school age students apparently transmit more like adults. IRCC, there was a huge outbreak in Israeli high schools when they re-opened. Sweden closed high schools.
It personally thought those advocating that we “protect the vulnerable” and re-open everything before we had a vaccine were grossly irresponsible. We had been failing for six months to protect the vulnerable, and if all restrictions had been lifted our hospitals would soon be overflowing. Many were this past winter, though poorly staffed “surge capacity” disguised that problem. And once the hospital were overflowing, the vast majority of people would be staying home, negating most of the benefit from re-opening.
Then we had the idiocy about masks. Any mask will block some transmission by sprayed droplets, but only tight-fitting (electrostatically-charged?) non-woven polypropylene provides good protection against aerosols.
Frank, That’s a nice theory but I thought the concensus was that the newer strains were not more deadly but merely more transmissible. At least I’ve seen several reports to that effect. Evolutionary selection would explain the more transmissible. More deadly is harder for me to see.
What I see though is that you have no room to lecture people about politicization of the science. The politicization was actually coming from the scientific community and the media which wanted desperately to make things seem as bad as possible to make Trump look as bad as possible and to scare people into accepting the longest suspension of the Constitution in American history (counting the Civil War) and the first steps toward increased Federal spending and monetary transfers to individuals. They largely succeeded especially in your case. The early IFR estimates based on CFR’s of 10% or even more were way off.
The real bottom line here is that PFR’s don’t lie. I posted them up thread and you didn’t respond, perhaps because they are convincing proof that Florida and Texas didn’t do any worse than New York and California. Especially given Florida’s much larger elderly population, that is contrary to the largely unsupported pseudo-science that NPI’s and mask mandates “work.” I mentioned this before about the literature being inconclusive, especially about masks. You responded with a crude mechanistic narrative that is totally unquantified pseudo-science.
In summary, there is no real evidence that your pseudo-scientific pronouncements about who is irresponsible are correct. They are emotional responses.
Further, age and population adjusted mortality in 2020 was only up a little and in the US matched 2003. In Sweden it matched 2013. This is the number public health experts use as a figure of merit for public health.
I can’t find it right now but there is a great blog on swedish mortality but here’s another analysis that agrees with it and also debunks some of the worse lies of the media and scientists.
https://anti-empire.com/swedens-age-adjusted-excess-deaths-for-2020-are-just-1900/
You bring up the fact that we have weak data. That’s also the case with climate change. Now what? We don’t say, I believe the data and the science. We experiment. What we see is both top down and bottom up approaches. Which do we trust? Huge corrupt bureaucracies or frontline doctor heros? There I am again with my heroes. That makes a good story.
DPY: Some sources say variants are both more transmissible (for example, the CDC) and some say more transmissible and more deadly.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/coronavirus/a-new-strain-of-coronavirus-what-you-should-know
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/09/dr-scott-gottlieb-covid-delta-variant-not-immediate-threat-to-us.html
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/uk-coronavirus-variant-appears-to-be-more-deadly-study-suggests-but-more-research-is-needed/ar-BB1erY0H
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/video/adolescents-getting-sicker-from-covid-variants-johns-hopkins/vi-AAKNx2b
It is easy to detect a more transmissible strain by the fact that it begins to dominate over less transmissible strains. It is harder to determine if a strain is more deadly (or causes more hospitalizations) because these outcomes are also effected by the changing age and co-morbidities of those getting infected. For the first few months of this year, vaccination of older Americans first was lowering the age of average person being infected and should have reduced deaths faster than it reduced new causes. My crude analysis shows this isn’t true.
I looked at the period from 1/31 to 4/11 as the period when the US was mostly vaccinating the elderly (remembering it takes 1-2 weeks for vaccination to produce immunity). From 1/31 to 4/11, the number of new cases dropped 53%. The number of hospitalizations at week later (2/7 to 4/18) dropped only 48%. And the number of deaths a week after that (2/14 to 4/25), dropped only 71%. By June, the number of new cases has dropped 88%, hospitalization 79% and deaths only 85%. This suggests to me that the viruses circulating this year have become more deadly. Obviously, this is a crude analysis.
Furthermore, “more transmissible” means more detected transmission. If variant A makes one in three people sick enough to get tested and Variant B makes one in two sick enough to get tested, B would superficially appear 50% more transmissible than A. This might be the case because B was better at suppressing the innate immune response than A and making people sick enough to get tested. The same phenomena might result in B sending more patients to the hospital and the morgue. Someday I suspect we will hear more about what the phrase “more transmissible” really implies.
As always in a primitive field like viral epidemiology, there are lots of contradicting opinions, lots of noisy data, and lots of “experts” whose opinions are not enlightening.
DPY wrote: “It goes to Frank’s careful selection of US data in defense of Ferguson which is flawed by untrue assumptions about early vaccination rates. In fact COVID-19 was much worse in the US than in Europe. I think that’s due to the US having a much less healthy population than Sweden for example.”
I’m not aware that I made any untrue assumptions about early vaccination rates. I simply said the we had to vaccinate about 50% of Americans before the pandemic began it’s final decline. That final decline began in mid-April when roughly 40% of the US population had been vaccinated. That final decline was assisted by large, but declining, numbers of people wearing masks, social distancing, and working from home (but most business lockdowns had ended). Since conditions hadn’t returned to normal, I made a ballpark estimate that 50% vaccination might be enough (when combined with immunity acquired by infection) to reach herd immunity. On that basis, I estimated that the final death toll would have been roughly double 600,000 without the vaccine. Respectfully, I don’t see what is so unreasonable about this estimate.
In the first six months of the pandemic, Ferguson’s estimate of 2 million US deaths was ridiculed as a gross exaggeration by those who conveniently forget that estimate was based on no changes in policy or behavior. It was a simple estimate of the potential danger we faced. Looking back, it was a useful estimate of the danger we faced, half of which was eliminated by vaccination.
The high incidence of co-morbidities may have put the US at a disadvantage when comparing with healthier countries such as Sweden. When judging the effectiveness of government policies (and the personal risk I was running living in the middle of a pandemic), I prefer to look at the total number of confirmed cases rather than deaths. On that basis, Sweden performed poorly, with a cumulative 10.8% of Swedes having tested positive by PCR, compared with 7.3% in the EU, 10.2% in the US, 4.5% in Germany, and in Sweden’s closest neighbors and comparators, 2.4% and 1.7% in Norway and Finland. The availability of testing may bias cumulative confirmed cases as a measure of effective control of the pandemic. However, Sweden has often had one of the highest percentages of positive tests (25% in January) and is likely to have missed more infections than other countries. Your hypothesis that the Swedes might have fewer co-morbidities is probably correct since they look better on the basis of confirmed deaths per million: 1,448 (Sweden), 1,658 (EU), 1,824 (US), 1,083 (Germany), and 175 and 146 in the best comparators, Finland and Norway. So, you are probably correct when you say that Sweden did better because its people are relatively healthy (and I’ll add they did much worse at stopping the spread of the disease.)
Thank you for the link to Levitt’s material; I hadn’t paid much attention to excess mortality. It is always interesting to look at other metrics. However, excess mortality is a lousy measure of the impact of COVID, because it ignores the fact that anti-COVID interventions have totally eliminated deaths from seasonal influenza and likely other respiratory illnesses. There has been -6% excess mortality in Norway because anti-COVID measures eliminated many deaths from other respiratory illnesses while minimizing the spread of COVID in that country. When one measures the impact of COVID on the basis of excess mortality, you are missing the non-COVID deaths that would have occurred without anti-COVID measures. I think it would be far more accurate to report confirm COVID deaths as a fraction of all deaths. Thus the usual death rate in the US is about 8,700 /million/yr compared with 1822 /million so far during this pandemic (modestly more than a year). So that is about 20% more deaths from COVID than expected in a normal year, much higher then the figure cited by Levitt.
The definitive word is not in on whether new variants are more deadly or dangerous than than earlier variants, but I’ve provided you several good reasons for believing that they are more dead. The simplest reason is that new cases and deaths are declining at similar rates, even though the most vulnerable have received the most vaccinations. To me, that is a clear sign that the virus has become more deadly as we have been protecting the most vulnerable.
Frank –
> However, Nic and many others weren’t completely wrong. Nic and other scientists correctly pointed out that heterogeneity in susceptibility means herd immunity can be reached before the traditional value of 1-(1/R0). The caveat is that no one knew how much lower. There was misleading data from Sweden that suggested herd immunity could be a lot lower. However, other explanations were also possible.
I don’t know how much credit Nic deserves for focusing interest in the impact of heterogeneity – certainly there’s literature out there that touched on the issue before Nic started his posts on the issue on a climate website. But I wouldn’t begrudge him any credit that he does deserve. There’s nothing AT ALL wrong with his interest in trying to develop a more comprehensive model.
But that doesn’t absolve him from being totally wrong in his overconfidence in thinking he was able to reduce the uncertainties to the point that he could correctly model the pandemic. His estimate of a “herd immunity threshold” at some 15% population infection wasn’t even close. And in the end, it’s ironic that yes, heterogeneity is important but modelers who didn’t address heterogeneity as Nic advocated were far closer in being able to estimate the pandemic’s trajectory correctly.
Another lie from Joshie. Nic was a lot less wrong than Ferguson who predicted that Sweden would have 94,000 deaths by May of 2020. In reality Sweden had only 98,000 deaths for the entire calendar year of 2020 with only about 12,000 or so Covid deaths. You can’t name a single expert whose modeling was skillful. Ioannidis was perhaps the only one whose early guesses on IFR ended up being close to right.
I posted above for Frank a very detailed analysis of Swedish mortality in 2020.
David Young –
Intersting that you’d make such an obvious mistake.
I specifically and explicitly and clearly referenced Nic’s estimates of the % of the population at which a herd immunity threshold would be reached.
Why do you so frequently make such obvious errors?
David Young –
Why so you mix in the childish “Joshie” diminution in along with your constant insults?
Do you think that, along with your constant insults, somehow makes your arguments more compelling?
If so, i think that’s strange logic for a renowned scientist such as yourself. I don’t think that insults or nicknames meant to be demeaninf strengthen your arguments one iota.
Perhaps instead you might focus your efforts in logic and accuracy?
Yes Joshie, you used weasel words to distract from the fact that herd immunity threshold is vastly less important than deaths. Nic was off by a factor of 2. Ferguson was off by an order of magmitude.
In any case, there is no proof that Nic’s analysis was wrong for conditions in summer 2020. You certainly have produced anything of any substance on the subject but vast word salads and meaningless cavilings.
David Young –
> Yes Joshie, you used weasel words to distract from the fact that herd immunity threshold is vastly less important than deaths. Nic was off by a factor of 2. Ferguson was off by an order of magmitude.
Franks comment that I was responding to was bout Nic’s modeling related to “herd immunity,” which as I said was way off compared to those who didn’t account for heterogeneity as he did – because his accounting for heterogeneity was way off. That doesn’t mean that heterogeneity has no impact, it seems thst it does. It’s logical to try to account for it. It nismeams that he did a bad job of accounting for uncertainty. It happens.
You then conflated thst with Nic’s estimates if deaths which was way off, repeatedly, even well into the pandemic. Well into the pandemic he made a prediction of deaths in the pandemic in Sweden that was off by a mutiple of arouns 7 X or 8 X (I don’t rember the exact amount).
Anyway, carry on with your insults and inaccuracies and keep covering up your errors and insults with more insults and inaccuracies.
It’s strange behavior for a renown scientist and I notice that you have yet to explain the bizarre logic of you spending your time doing that after constantly claiming you don’t read and won’t respond to my comments because it’s a waste of your time only to continue to read and respond.
It’s a great case study for how even renown scientists can make a public display of contradicting themselves and acting illogically even when they get triggered.
Another word salad. You have no way of knowing what herd immunity was in the summer of 2020 when Nic did his calculations. Your assertion is thus not based in fact, science, or math but your own deluded idea that your assertions (which often turn out to be false) are valuable.
So I guess you agree then that on the big issue of deaths most other modelers were much worse in predicting outcomes.
And I think you are lying about Nic’s Swedish death estimates or else you are letting your personal bias cloud your memory. In the summer of 2020 Nic said something like 6-7 thousand. It turned out to be about 14 thousand.
David Young.
At one point, well into the pandemic, and after repeated wrong claims about “herd immunity,” Nic predicted something like 1,000 or 1,500 or so more deaths when in fact there were 7,000 or 8,000 more deaths.
And David, can you please explain why, after so many times claiming you aren’t going to read or respond to my comments (because it’s a waste of your time doing so) YOU REPEATEDLY read and respond to many of my comments?
In fact, you frequently inject yourself into discussions between me and other people – as you just did in response to my comment to Frank, only to make an obvious error when doing so and just like in more insults..
Please explain this illogical behavior where you repeatedly contradict what you say you’re going to do, and repeatedly engage in behavior that you have frequently described as a waste of your time.
I’m going to need a link to the specific death prediction. In any case, Ferguson was way off as well.
I did not make an error. You have nothing to show Nic was wrong about herd immunity in summer 2020. Classic smear. Since deaths were steady at a very low level, that indicates that some kind of herd immunity threshold had been crossed. You just assert your authority as an anonymous blog commenter with a strong track record of misrepresentation and cherry picking.
Joshie, You have a very long track record of misdiagnosing other people’s errors and bias. It goes back to Judith putting you in moderation. As a non-scientist and someone with no obvious math skills of any kind, it takes a lot of arrogance for you to interject yourself and repeat lies and errors about other people. You clutter up comment threads and do the blog a disservice.
> Ferguson was way off as well.
Look, squirrel!
Another lie Willie. Joshua asserted that Nic was say off compared to other modelers. That’s a gross falsehood. Pointing that out is not a squirrel.
> I’m going to need a link to the specific death prediction.
Lol. You’re going to need. David, you don’t get to make any calls. Put your money where your mouth is. Let’s set up a bet. I’ll bet you 100k that he his prediction about deaths going forward was off by more than 6 X. Otherwisez I won’t bother because you’ll just deny being wrong or I’m some such nonsense. As below.
> I did not make an error.
Of course you did. Because you made an elementary mistake of conflating estimates about herd immunity and predictions of deaths.
Your repeated claims that you weren’t wrong when you were obviously wrong are very strange for a renown scientist such as yourself.
David – please explain why you have many times said that reading my comments and responding is a waste of your time, and that you wouldn’t do it any more, only to turn around and repeatedly read my comments and respond as you are doing here.
I’m trying to figure out why such a renown scientist would make such a pubkic display of such illogical and self-contradictory behavior. I’ve asked you this question many times but you won’t give me an answer. Why?
Are you ashamed of your behavior?
David Young –
> Another lie Willie. Joshua asserted that Nic was say off compared to other modelers. That’s a gross falsehood. Pointing that out is not a squirrel.
Other modelers of herd immunity, David.
Nic was obviously way off on that as his wildly incorrect modeling of herd immunity led him to be way off in his estimates of deaths. It led him to assert that Sweden had reached “herd immunity” and on that basis project forward a number of deaths that was low by many multiples.
You conflated that with modeling of deaths and responded in that topic, and you continue to do so.
David – please explain why you have many times said that reading my comments and responding is a waste of your time, and that you wouldn’t do it any more, only to turn around and repeatedly read my comments and respond as you are doing here.
I’m trying to figure out why such a renown scientist would make such a pubkic display of such illogical and self-contradictory behavior. I’ve asked you this question many times but you won’t give me an answer. Why?
Are you ashamed of your behavior?
Joshie it is you who should be ashamed of a weak mind that can’t even remember what you just said. Here’s what you said:
His estimate of a “herd immunity threshold” at some 15% population infection wasn’t even close. And in the end, it’s ironic that yes, heterogeneity is important but modelers who didn’t address heterogeneity as Nic advocated were far closer in being able to estimate the pandemic’s trajectory correctly.
Trajectory of the pandemic would seem to include the most important such statistic, i.e., fatalities. And you are totally wrong on that.
But on herd immunity, you are also very wrong. You have no evidence, no math, no science, just baseless assertion by an anonymous doofus on the internet, yourself.
You then waste vast amounts of valueless time generating repetitious comments that are all based on your inability to recall what you just said. It’s hard to see how you can have any self-respect.
> Joshua asserted that Nic was say off compared to other modelers
Where? Here’s what J said in the comment to which you responded:
https://judithcurry.com/2021/05/23/collapse-of-the-fake-consensus-on-covid-19-origins/#comment-953356
In that quote, he’s comparing what Nic said with what happened in reality.
Do you have a specific quote in mind?
“His estimate of a “herd immunity threshold” at some 15% population infection wasn’t even close. And in the end, it’s ironic that yes, heterogeneity is important but modelers who didn’t address heterogeneity as Nic advocated were far closer in being able to estimate the pandemic’s trajectory correctly.”
He compared Nic’s estimate with other modelers.
I’ll just note that this gives the lie to Joshie’s own characterization of his own comment. He mentions the trajectory of the pandemic, which to me would mean the fatality trajectory. He is so weak minded he can’t even remember what he just said.
David – please explain why you have many times said that reading my comments and responding is a waste of your time, and that you wouldn’t do it any more, only to turn around and repeatedly read my comments and respond as you are doing here.
I’m trying to figure out why such a renown scientist would make such a pubkic display of such illogical and self-contradictory behavior. I’ve asked you this question many times but you won’t give me an answer. Why?
Do you fail to explain because you’re ashamed of your behavior?
David Young –
I specifically and explicitly and clearly referenced Nic’s estimates of the % of the population at which a herd immunity threshold would be reached.
David Young –
Please explain why you have many times said that reading my comments and responding is a waste of your time, and that you wouldn’t do it any more, only to turn around and repeatedly read my comments and respond as you are doing here.
I’m trying to figure out why such a renown scientist would make such a pubkic display of such illogical and self-contradictory behavior. I’ve asked you this question many times but you won’t give me an answer. Why?
Do you fail to explain because you’re ashamed of your behavior?
David –
David Young –
I specifically and explicitly and clearly referenced Nic’s estimates of the % of the population at which a herd immunity threshold would be reached.
David Young.
At one point, well into the pandemic, and after repeated wrong claims about “herd immunity,” Nic predicted something like 1,000 or 1,500 or so more deaths when in fact there were 7,000 or 8,000 more deaths.
David – please explain why you have many times said that reading my comments and responding is a waste of your time, and that you wouldn’t do it any more, only to turn around and repeatedly read my comments and respond as you are doing here.
I can’t figure out why such a renown scientist would make such a pubkic display of such illogical and self-contradictory behavior. I’ve asked you this question many times but you won’t give me an answer. Why?
Do you fail to explain because you’re ashamed of your behavior?
David Young –
Please explain why you have many times said that reading my comments and responding is a waste of your time, and that you wouldn’t do it any more, only to turn around and repeatedly read my comments and respond as you are doing here.
I can’t figure out why such a renown scientist would make such a public display of such illogical and self-contradictory behavior. I’ve asked you this question many times but you won’t give me an answer. Why?
Do you fail to explain because you’re ashamed of your behavior?
David
Please explain why you have many times said that reading my comments and responding is a waste of your time, and that you wouldn’t do it any more, only to turn around and repeatedly read my comments and respond as you are doing here.
I can’t figure out why such a renown scientist would make such a public display of such illogical and self-contradictory behavior. I’ve asked you this question many times but you won’t give me an answer. Why?
Do you fail to explain because you’re ashamed of your behavior?
David – please explain why you have many times said that reading my comments and responding is a waste of your time, and that you wouldn’t do it any more, only to turn around and repeatedly read my comments and respond as you are doing here.
I can’t figure out why such a renown scientist would make such a public display of such illogical and self-contradictory behavior. I’ve asked you this question many times but you won’t give me an answer. Why?
Do you fail to explain because you’re ashamed of your behavior?
David Young –
I specifically and explicitly and clearly referenced Nic’s estimates of the % of the population at which a herd immunity threshold would be reached.
Joshie, Are you drunk?
I quoted your plain words in full. You are either too weak minded to recall what you said only a few hours ago or else you lied about it.
Of course you referenced herd immunity. You also referenced the pandemic trajectory. You are wrong on both counts and will never provide any evidence for either of your wrong statements. That’s because you are an anonymous internet doofus with no qualifications and a diffuse mind prone to vague and non specific thinking.
David Young –
More insult filled comments.
I specifically referenced his modeling with respect to heterogeneity compared to modelers who didn’t account for heterogeneity, and that is all specifically in reference to his estimates regarding the population infection rate and “herd immunity” – where his estimates are clearly way off and not even close compared to other modelers.
You made an error and conflated that with modeling deaths. I already explained this to you.
Most renown scientists graciously accept when their errors are pointed out. It’s curious thst instead, you get nasty and double down in toyr errors.
And speaking of your strange behavior:
please explain why you have many times said that reading my comments and responding is a waste of your time, and that you wouldn’t do it any more, only to turn around and repeatedly read my comments and respond as you are doing here.
I’m trying to figure out why such a renown scientist would make such a pubkic display of such illogical and self-contradictory behavior. I’ve asked you this question many times but you won’t give me an answer. Why?
Are you ashamed of your behavior?
His estimate of a “herd immunity threshold” at some 15% population infection wasn’t even close. And in the end, it’s ironic that yes, heterogeneity is important but modelers who didn’t address heterogeneity as Nic advocated were far closer in being able to estimate the pandemic’s trajectory correctly
Joshie, I know you regard truth telling as insulting but I really think you need to face the truth. I quoted your original statement in full context.
You have zero evidence or math to show that Nic was wrong about herd immunity in summer of 2020. You have only your totally unqualified assertion from your own personal authority.
You likewise have produced no evidence Nic did worse than other modelers in predicting the trajectory of the pandemic. It would be very hard to be worse than Ferguson and the Imperial group.
My honest suggestion to you is to read more carefully and try to evaluate statements on the basis of evidence, not your emotional responses. You respond to commenters here with sarcasm, rhetorical posturing, and meaningless caviling, and endless repetition. I know you can do better.
David Young –
> I know you regard truth telling as insulting
Lol. Your comments we invariably filled with insults. Merely because I Pont out thst Nic was obviously wrong about herd immunity and his esitmsts are much further off then many other modelers in estimating the population infection level at which a “herd immunity threshold” would occur.
Now David, I’m still curious why:
1) you constantly fill your comments with insults. What do you hope to achieve through nastiness and ad homs?
2) given that you’ve often said that reading my comments and responding to them is a waste of your time, why so you continue to read my comments and respond to them – in fact often interjectinf your responses into the middle of eczchangesnik having with other people? Why do you so frequently engage in an activity that you have often said is a waste of your time? Is it some kind of obsession or addiction?
3) given that you’ve often declared that you were going to stop reading and responding to my comments, why do you continue to do both so frequently – even running around so many threads following my exchanges with other people so you can interject your resoonses. Why do you fail to live up to those declarations? Why have you so frequently said you’re going to stop reading and rspnsknf to my comments. See you ashamed of what you decide to do with your time?
I have to say, your behavior is very difficult for me to understand. It seems highly illogical and irrational. Why would someone do publicly contradict the declarations he makes about what he’s going to do? Why would he engage so much in behaviors he’s said is a waste of his time?
I’ve asked you these questions many times, but you haven’t answered. Why? Are you ashamed to answer th questions and think I’ll stop asking if you simply don’t answer?
Josh and DPY: Nic cited a published estimate for the heterogeneity parameter. Unfortunately, that estimate depended on knowing the ratio of detected cases to undetected cases, which we now know was wrong or has changed. And that estimate assumed that all of the slowing during the period used to derive the parameter was due to approaching herd immunity and not changing behavior and policy.
What impressed me about Nic’s posts is that I was reading about heterogeneity here at Climate Etc, before reading about this cutting edge new concept in Science magazine. Nic had quicly mastered consequences of mathematics that was beyond my capabilities. This reminds me of how quickly Nic recognized the consequences for ECS of less negative estimates for the aerosol indirect effect. So I’m not eager to criticize someone for a hypothesis that didn’t work out because it was based on incorrect data. (FWIW, I’ve compared the data AR6 is using to challenge Nic’s low estimates for ECS to the data Nic used and find their higher estimates a a bunch of statistical smoke and mirrors.)
I tried to focus what the heterogeneity parameter meant at the individual level: How much more or less susceptible or transmissible does one person need to be than average to produce a given heterogeneity parameter. Were these difference reasonable? I thought (and still think) it was a good idea, but I FAILED to get through the math. So I’m not eager to criticize someone who worked on a good idea but was misled by two types of bad information.
Now when DPY says Nic’s estimate was “better” than Ferguson’s, I’ll cry foul. Ferguson’s estimate was BASED ON THE ASSUMPTION that policymakers would do nothing and that people wouldn’t change their behavior. The estimate was intended to inform policymakers about the size of the threat facing our governments if they did nothing. Ferguson had published a paper that modeled the interventions made in the 1918-1920 Spanish influenza, and knew very well that governments would be forced to intervene and that people’s behavior would change in unpredictable ways. The most important part of his projections presumably was that an uncontrolled pandemic would exceed the capacity of our hospital system to deal with the patient load. That happened in Wuhan, Northern Italy and NYC in spring, and later in the Rio Grande valley in early summer and the Dakota’s in fall. In these latter cases, hospital had prepared “surge capacity” with extra beds (doubled capacity where I live), but lacked the trained personnel to sustain normal care for all those beds.
Ferguson projected that 2 million American would die if the pandemic continued until her immunity was reached. In reality, 0.6 million Americans died before roughly 50% vaccination brought us near herd immunity. Extrapolating, 1.2 million Americans would have died without the vaccine and probably more without improving medical care. With 20/20 hindsight, 2 million was a remarkably accurate estimate!
And if Nic had more reliable information about the heterogeneity parameter and the number of cases that weren’t being detected by PCR, his estimates probably would have been much better too.
PERSONALLY, I’M SICK OF EVERYONE BASHING OUR EXPERTS BECAUSE THEIR ANALYSIS DISFAVORS THEIR PERSONAL POLITICAL POSITION. Let’s consider what they really did wrong scientifically and whether those mistakes were justifiable or caused by allowing their political biases to corrupt their scientific analysis. DPY’s misrepresentation of Ferguson’s work is unacceptable. I’m an expert too! Both the left and right are unnecessarily destroying confidence in our experts and professions. If I were ever lucky enough to do something really important, people like you are destroying my ability to have a positive impact. I deeply resent it. If my political biases and confirmation bias cloud my judgment, criticize all you want – AFTER READING THE SOURCES I CITE.
Well I still think that in the case of Sweden, Ferguson was quite badly wrong. Especially as there were few policy NPI’s implemented before December 2021. 96,000 fatalities by May 2020 was off by an order of magnitude or more. Excusing his failure by appealing to unforseen changes in behavior is not cutting it for me. Ferguson has come in for some very severe criticism from other scientists, a lot of it justified.
The modeling problem is ill-posed and thus accurate predictions are virtually impossible. There are a huge number of unknowables concerning evolution of the virus, human behavior, etc. This is why its so childish for Joshie to highlight Nic’s alleged failures (unsupported by anything but Joshie’s worthless authority).
There is convincing evidence that Ferguson’s IFR was off by a factor of 3 as well. That also comports with Frank’s US data. But bear in mind the US is a very unhealthy country compared to Sweden and thus our IFR would be a lot higher than Sweden. I also think Frank that you are misrepresenting US data. Cases have been declining since Jan 11 and deaths started declining a few weeks later. That was months before we had 50% vaccinated.
I AM SICK AND TIRED OF PEOPLE WHO EXCUSE AND DEFEND WHAT IS VIRTUAL PSEUDO-SCIENCE. Viral epidemiology is a crude and primitive field dominated by primitive narratives that have no quantification. Your long narrative of totally unquantified musing Frank are really of little value. Science was virtually useless in predicting the course of the pandemic or of telling us what would work.
Experts still strongly disagree about masks and NPI’s. Your faith in them Frank is a hallmark of emotion and bias. And your attacks on DeSantis are literally insane and totally contrary to data.
The problem here is that science is deeply flawed especially in areas like epidemiology and climate science. The uncertainties are huge and scientists are actively obfuscating and denying that.
If your authority Frank is undermined by telling truth, I am not sympathetic. I am continuing to have a very big impact because I rely on facts and data and do not hide negative results. Many people in my field are honest at heart but are cowed by the establishment false narratives. They are easily persuadable by clear mathematics and actual data. You are only steeling my resolve to continue until the record is fully corrected. Quite frankly, you can go to hell.
Frank, you sound a little like JP Morgan bemoaning the fact that Teddy Roosevelt was destroying his ability to have an impact. I would suggest you grow up and try to clean up your politically motivated diatribes. It’s still a free country even though perhaps you don’t like that fact very much and long for the speech laws of Germany. And the 2nd amendment is still the law of the land.
As a final point, Frank you make an obvious error about hospital capacity in New York City. There was massive excess capacity provided by the US military. The amoral and incompetent Cuomo didn’t use it because just like you Frank, he hated Trump. Other states could have asked for similar assistance or could have called out the national guard medical units. That’s on them.
Frank –
Nothing I disagee with in your June 25, 7:12 comment.
In 5 seconds I found the US vaccination data Frank. On January 20, 4.35% had received 1 dose and < 1% had been fully vaccinated. What that means to me is that the US was already close to herd immunity before vaccination was a significant contributor.
Joshua, You say there is nothing you disagree with in Fank’s comment that included a praise of Nic’s work on understanding the effect of heterogeneity in pandemic modeling as well as his work on ECS estimates over that of the AR6.
I applaud both you and Frank for your acknowledgments to Nic.
“What impressed me about Nic’s posts is that I was reading about heterogeneity here at Climate Etc, before reading about this cutting edge new concept in Science magazine. Nic had quicly mastered consequences of mathematics that was beyond my capabilities. This reminds me of how quickly Nic recognized the consequences for ECS of less negative estimates for the aerosol indirect effect. So I’m not eager to criticize someone for a hypothesis that didn’t work out because it was based on incorrect data. (FWIW, I’ve compared the data AR6 is using to challenge Nic’s low estimates for ECS to the data Nic used and find their higher estimates a a bunch of statistical smoke and mirrors.)”
David, I agree with you politically but I also respect Frank’s views and well thought out comments. I see Frank as having a bias against Trump but one that could be modified with evidence. I believe he has moved slightly from his position of completely discounting the lab leak theory, for example. BTW, I’m more open to the idea of undetected natural infection circulating asymptomatically prior to the outbreak. Yet, it’s still highly coincidental that the outbreak was in Wuhan near the WIV and that initially the origin was attempted to be shown as the Wuhan wet market, the pangolins, the FCS and all the rest of the circumstantial evidence.
Ron, Expecting consistency from Joshie is going to be disappointed. He only does this because it’s all he can do, i.e, do the house cat attacking a lion thing.
Frank’s comments often contain worthwhile content on other subjects, even though its hard to find the nuggets in the vast volume of theories and assertions. He would benefit from sitting and writing down the main points in a single sentence.
I really do believe though that on Covid19 he is exceptionally biased and always shades any evidence to support his pseudo-scientific narratives. Further, his comments are more psuedo-scientific than usual and seem to actually deny what little science there is for example on masks. His theory about cases vs. deaths late in the epidemic is unsupported by anything else I’ve seen. On the positive side he seems to have dropped the most blatantly pseudo-scientific assertions in his more recent comments. The stuff about DeSantis and Florida is really just disinformation and denial of obvious facts and data. You see its all about Trump and his allies being evil.
With regard to Crossfile Hurricane, the same pattern emerges. He focuses on what supports his hatred of Trump and ignores the main issue which is the warrants, the Steele dossier, and its obvious unverified nature. He also is quite adept at cherry picking from the IG report while ignoring its long list of errors and lies. And the quibbling is just amazing. Claiming Comey was fired because he refused to make a public statement is a blatant half truth. Trump almost certainly knew he was being lied to and that was why he fired Saint James the righteous. He seems to me to have an unusual reverence for authority especially governmental authority.
Just stumbled across this again and it is quite comprehensive.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3zakua9ymmj4v2k/10Jun2021_Stanford_Classical_Liberalism_COVID_16x9-rdu.pdf?dl=0
It goes to Frank’s careful selection of US data in defense of Ferguson which is flawed by untrue assumptions about early vaccination rates. In fact COVID-19 was much worse in the US than in Europe. I think that’s due to the US having a much less healthy population than Sweden for example.
US obesity is up to over 42% which is a shocking number. Obesity is a prime cause of diabetes, heart disease, and early death. I recall that in Sweden, it’s in the low teens. For Covid that largely kills the elderly and those already ill, these differences can I think explain why Ferguson was really badly wrong about Sweden but a weak case can be made that he was not terribly wrong about the US. Does anyone know if Ferguson took into account prevalence of co-morbidities. My memory is he did not. That’s a rather serious oversight if true.
The WHO have revised their advice on vaccination to say that children under 18 should not get the Covid vaccine.
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/covid-19-vaccines/advice
This comes as blue states mandate covid vaccines for children under 18 because they “follow the science.”
Meanwhile, in my state, over the last 16 months fewer people age 29 and under have died of covid than the average yearly mortality from “accidents-other (not gun related or traffic related).”
> The WHO have revised their advice on vaccination to say that children under 18 should not get the Covid vaccine.
Do you have another source? Because that would be a misleading characterization based on the source you provided.
> Meanwhile, in my state, over the last 16 months fewer people age 29 and under have died of covid…
Over one year in, and you still don’t understand the arguments for vaccination.
Hard to understand why could explain that lack of understanding.
From the link:
“Children should not be vaccinated for the moment.
There is not yet enough evidence on the use of vaccines against COVID-19 in children to make recommendations for children to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Children and adolescents tend to have milder disease compared to adults. However, children should continue to have the recommended childhood vaccines.”
The CDC says the heart inflammation issue is “rare,” but so was the blood clot issue when they shut down vaccinations. And, of course, vaccination of children is still rare and incidences of serious illness from Covid in children is rare as well. Tell me again why that means you think it should be mandated?
Seems pretty clear to me Jeff. You must bear in mind that Joshie has a reading comprehension problem.
Jeffsnails comment -” Meanwhile, in my state, over the last 16 months fewer people age 29 and under have died of covid…”
Joushua’s comment -“Over one year in, and you still don’t understand the arguments for vaccination.” “Hard to understand why could explain that lack of understanding.”
Josh – perhaps the risk of death or serious illness for the young doesnt reach the level warranting the benefits of vaccination based on a rational assessment of the risks. the link below shows the relative risks for the young to be exceedingly small. Consider also that asystomptomatic transmission provides immunity, So why would the young need vaccination when the survival rate is 99.999+% (+or- .005%)
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#SexAndAge
Rational assessment of the risk is the operative phrase !
Joe,
In 18 months, 32 people under the age of 30 have died of Covid in Virginia- a state with over 8 million population. That age group accounted for 35% of the cases.
Four, as in less than five, people under age 20 died of Covid over that 18 months. That’s fewer than last weekend in Chicago gangland violence. In my city they were still making kids wear masks while playing outside as late as last week when school let out.
The clever argument would be…well, you don’t want the kids to give it to their parents or grandparents. Of course, you’d have to ignore the science that children are less likely to spread it AND the science that says if the parents or grandparents are vaccinated the kids can’t give it to them- an unlikely scenario becomes even more unlikely.
For the record, I don’t mind saying, I’m fully vaccinated and have been for a while. I would hesitate with any child under 20 and the WHO agrees.
Joe –
> So why would the young need vaccination when the survival rate is 99.999+% (+or- .005%)
Consider the following:
Death is not the only important outcome for children.
Given the evidence regarding the impact of vaccinations on infection rates, there is a clear associated impact on community transmission rates.
Thus far, the evidence is that the risks to children from vaccination are extremely low, it would be important to consider the relative risk from COVID vs. vaccination, respectively, and not ONLY look at the risk of either in isolation from the other.
I think it’s rather remarkable that wde this far in and so many people fail to consider these issues in full context.
It’s similar to seeing people say “But people still got infected even where masks were being worn.”
Conditional probability is hard for people to hang onto, especially then their identity orientation has been triggered.
Another vacuous comment. There are all kinds of dangers in life and the truly marginal impact of possible (with little scientific support and some negative evidence) transmission from someone under 20 to an adult is significant to only a few frightened people, or people who like to meaninglessly cavil at other people’s comments.
Oh, and BTW – even the very phrasing of “need vaccination” suggests a fundamental misunderstanding.
Jeff – for the most part I concur with your assessment.
as you mentioned 32 people under the age of 30 died from covid in virginia.
The CDC shows 2800 under age 30 died of covid in the US out of approx 120m total under age 30. which translates into 99.9976% survival rate. with a corresponding rare incidence of serious illness in individuals under age 30. Given the rarity of both death and serious illness coupled with the easily obtained immunity via infection, most of which is asystomptomatic, there is a very rational basis to forgo vaccination, especially when considering everything in full context.
“Given the evidence regarding the impact of vaccinations on infection rates, there is a clear associated impact on community transmission rates.”
The number of new cases is in the low double digits a day statewide even without vaccinating children and still dropping like a stone.
Most people would accept that it is perfectly reasonable to avoid giving a child a vaccine that has no benefit to either the child or the community at this point. Safety? I don’t even give my kids an aspirin unless it’s really necessary. This is about virtue signaling and we don’t give kids medicine they don’t need just to score political points.
If I were you, I’d start looking at pain avoidance at this point from.a political standpoint. Parents are already angry about the disaster that was “school” over the last 18 months (your fave – Norway – only closed schools for a month). And the completely unscientific school mask mandates for outdoor sports in 90-degree temps. Is now the best time to mandate unnecessary shots for kids who don’t need them?
> The number of new cases is in the low double digits a day statewide even without vaccinating children and still dropping like a stone.
Most people would accept that it is perfectly reasonable to avoid giving a child a vaccine that has no benefit to either the child or the community at this point.
Right. So you’ve determined it has no value to the community at this point, I assume like you determined that the spike in cases last summer was nothing to be concerned about because it was only a function of more testing oriee younger peope getting infected?
Got it. Prolly ’cause you got out your keyboard and Google. How silly for me not to see that. Why wait for the studies or give time to assess what happens with possible variants? Who needs the CDC or research conducted by people who study these issues? Just do some Googling and figure it all out!
> Safety? I don’t even give my kids an aspirin unless it’s really necessary.
Yeah. Good point. Cause it’s just like the situation when your kid gets a headache or an earache. Excellent point. Not many people know about the infectious disease dangers of headaches or earaches
> This is about virtue signaling and we don’t give kids medicine they don’t need just to score political points.
Yes. No doubt. Anytime people who identity differently politically than you, when there’s disagreement over issues, it’s because they’re phonies, lack integrity, are morally inferior, etc. All you have to do is discover which specific defect is applicable, although “virtue signaling” is a good catchall. ‘Cause something like making a big public statement about REFUSING to wear a mask or get vaccinated couldn’t possibly be “virtue signaling.” Only lefties “virtue signal” just like only lefties employ “identity politics” or try to “cancel” people or act “politically correct” or denigrate people just because they disagree.
> If I were you, I’d start looking at pain avoidance at this point from.a political standpoint.
Ah. There we go. Thanks. As if it weren’t totally obvious anyway, at least now you’re directly acknowledging that this is all a out politics for you, about hating lefties, and not really about the issues (which explains your inane arguments – the logic is only a secondary consideration). And I love the macho chest pounding – just like we saw before Republicans lost the House, Senate, and presidency under Trump. But of course those losses under Trump despite the bragadocio about all that “winning” wouldn’t temper your lockstep attributions of cause and effect. Why should they. It just feels good to claim you’re winning even if you’re not.
Funny thing is, like with Ragnaar, I can remember when you at least tried to pretend that you were interested in talking about issues rather than just looking to get your political rocks off.
Another totally content free comment from Joshie the teenager. It’s just sneering and sarcasm and contributes absolutely nothing. It clutters up threads and makes them unreadable.
“Anytime people who identity differently politically than you, when there’s disagreement over issues,…”
Let’s recap, shall we:
First Democrats accuse Republicans of experiments in mass homicide by daring to reopen. That proves to be the right call, so they pivot next to:
Democrats accuse Republicans of “prioritizing” GOP voters for vaccines- 60-Minutes does a widely panned hit piece on Florida Governor DeSantis claiming that vaccination centers in areas with old people were intended to give Republicans first dibs on the jab. That fell apart because any fool can see the necessity in prioritizing old people. And Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) drives the final nail in that narrative when he literally got caught prioritizing political friends and family for the jab.
So…. then the pivot to the next political gamesmanship over vaccines- Democrats and left-leaning pundits spending weeks making the false claim, based on poll data, that Republicans are endangering the community by refusing the vaccine on political grounds. You see… all that stuff about corruptly prioritizing Republican voters for the vaccine is no longer operative because last week’s story had to be inaccurate because no Republican wants the vaccine. That goes nowhere because data shows deep blue cities and Democrats core- people in their 20s – have the lowest vaccination rates and people who actually care about herd immunity start building cash incentives for… wait for it… core Democratic Party voters. Washington (state) even offers free weed for vaccines!
Then the little autocrats decide, overnight, that masks that were absolutely necessary on Monday are unnecessary on Tuesday but justify the flip flop thanks to the pivot to vaccine politics. Now you can’t merely GET vaccinated- you must announce it publicly, get a passport and you must petition any authority at hand to mandate it – even for kids! – if you want to be a good person unlike those icky Rethuglicans! Universities side with the angels and mandate away!
WHO says, mandates for college freshmen is a bad idea.
Unable to come up with a new pivot, Joshua says right wingers politicized the vaccine, the last 18 months don’t count. Today is day one of year zero.
> WHO says, mandates for college freshmen is a bad idea.
That’s not what the WHO says, Jeff.
W stands for “World.”
Jeff –
“Democrats,” “Republicans,” “Democrats, ” “Republicans,” blah, blah, blah. “Democrats” “Republicans,” blah, blah.
I could write any comment at all about the issues and your response would be the same – because that’s your only point of interest.
Which just illustrates my point.
https://judithcurry.com/2021/05/23/collapse-of-the-fake-consensus-on-covid-19-origins/#comment-953241
Fundamental attribution error.
https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/the-fundamental-attribution-error
And of course:
> Joshua says right wingers politicized the vaccine…
You continue to misrepresent what I said, although this time you didn’t use a truncated quotation in order to do so.
“…at least now you’re directly acknowledging that this is all a out politics for you, about hating lefties…”
No. I’m saying your “point” was invalid. Pushing back on fake political narratives is not “hating on lefties.” It’s saying stop with the fake political narratives.
It was reasonable to reopen, it was reasonable to prioritize the elderly, it was reasonable to question whether it was true that GOP reluctance slowed herd immunity (where do you put your “get vaccinated” efforts) and it’s reasonable to think about it before getting under-18s vaccinated.
Prompting CNN and MSNBC + the entire Democratic Party to say the opposite 24/7 on television was counterproductive to the vaccine effort, not to mention the political effort given how obviously false it was.
It’s actually not even a left-right thing entirely. The sudden flip-flop on masks was entirely due to the fact that the mask virtue-signalers couldn’t even maintain a coalition of moderate and left, much less right-wing, people willing to deny that vaccination works and removing the face diaper was clearly an incentive that would get more people vaccinated. That was obviously true but we all had to delay saying it because someone thought the obvious was “hating on lefties.” Great job.
Jeff –
Every single comment you write on here is rooted in your contempt for those who disagree with you ideologically.
You’re certainly not alone here. We’ve had people telling us that we’re in a state equal to North Korea because lefties, or it’s worse here than Maoist China because libruls. I’m not being hyperbolic. Although of course MSNBC, CNN, and the NYTimes, and the “mainstream media” and “academics” are constantly thrown in for good measure to extend the target a bit. There are many, many, many such comments here.
It’s entirely understandable that people who feel that way about libruls or “the left” would write such comments and turn each and every political issue into a form of confirming those views.
If you feel that some 1/2 of the American public is so worthy of contempt, as obviously you do, it’s hard to imagine a situation where you wouldn’t systematically parse each and every societal development and reverse engineer causality behind everything negative to your perceived enemies and everything positive to your tribe.
Oh, and don’t forget, the librul notion of the GHE has been disproven.
https://judithcurry.com/2021/06/09/death-spiral-of-american-academia/#comment-953264
Thanks god the “denizens” are around to fight back against all this tyranny.
There’s a reason people don’t respond to your comments in detail Joshie. It’s because your comments are vague content-free rhetorical caviling that don’t mean anything. You are a purely negative person who can’t contribute anything constructive.
“…we’re in a state equal to North Korea because lefties…”
Monmouth University is mandating vaccination by August 1, a negative Covid test taken with few days of arrival on campus, and is still mandating masks “at all times” indoors this fall on campus.
I’m saying that’s nuts no matter what the political affiliation of the school administrators. You say I can’t call it nuts because that would be an attack on “lefties.”
Who’s the ideologue here?
https://www.monmouth.edu/covid-19/fall-2021-healthcare-protocols/
Good point, Jeff. Monmouth College and Pyongyang = same, same but different.
And lest we forget, mask requirements are exactly identical to Jews being required to where yellow stars in N*zi Germany (except it’s worse, of course)
David just cited the Anti Empire website:
https://anti-empire.com/
Here’s what we can read on its first page:
– Moscow Decrees Vaccine Passports
– How Stalin’s Blunders and Communist Megalomania Combined to Leave the Soviet Union Exposed and Vulnerable to the Reich
– Spain Quietly Drops Probe Into “Russian Meddling” in Catalan Referendum
– Rogue State USA “Seizes” Website of Iran’s Press TV
– Here Is the Case That China Is Quietly Soaking Up New Dollars Again, Effectively Paying the Bill of US ‘Stimulus’
– Alleged Belgian Anti-Lockdown Rebel Found Dead
– Why Has “Ivermectin” Become a Dirty Word?
– China Considers Lifting All Childbirth Restrictions by 2025, Shift to Promotion of Childbearing
– The Junior Empire Plots More Sanctions Warfare vs Belarus, Hopes to Hurt Russia by Extension
– The Hungarian Uprising Against the Woke West
These are just the first 10 newsies.
Its editor ran the Crappy Town blog on the Balkans, Eastern Europe, Western interventionism and history, contributed to The Voluntaryist Reader libertarian anarchist group blog, contributed to The Libertarian Liquidationist libertarian anarchist group blog, and was editor for Russia Insider.
Another smear by Willard in an ongoing obfuscation campaign. The article was from Systems Perestroika website. Smear: attacking the source of information (in this case second hand) and totally failing to deal with the substance. Further proof Willard is playing a childish game and wasting everyone’s time.
Do you actually dispute that mortality in Sweden adjusted for age and population was not much worse that recent values and about the same as 2013? Of course not because its true.
David Young –
> There’s a reason people don’t respond to your comments in detail Joshie.
You frequently say things like that, mixed in with your constant insults. Yet strangely, you also often respond to the details of my comments.
It’s similar to the many, many times you’ve said that you weren’t going to read my comments anymore, or respond to my comments anymore, only to subsequently follow me around in conversations I’m having with other people to interject with comments filled with insults.
You frequently have said that reading and responding to my comments is a waste of your time yet you continue to both read and respomd.
What explains this behavior that obvosuly stands in contrast to what you intend?
Is someone forcing you against your will to read my comments and respond? Or are you just acting extemely illogically, driven by some unexplained force to go against your intent and to engage in behaviors you consider a waste of your time.
I’ve asked you before to explain what seems like such illogical and irrational behavior. But you haven’t offered an explanation. I’m hoping you might provide one this time. Obviously as such a renown scientist you wouldn’t constantly engage in illogical behavior, but I can’t for the life of me figure out an explanation where your behavior would be logical.
> What explains this behavior that obvosuly stands in contrast to what you intend?
Signalling:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory
A subgenre is enforcement.
David Young –
In this very thread alone, there are references to “Joshie” some 19 times. It’s possible that 1 or 2 are from someone else, but it’s likely that all 19 or close to that number are all from you, and that most of them are from when you interjected your comments into discussions I was having with other people.
Since you find my comments so vacuous and such a waste of your time to read, why do you spend so much time reading them and responding – even when I’m not even directing my comments to you?
That behavior seems very illogical to me.
Can you explain it?
Do you think that it somehow makes me feel bad or bothers me, and that’s why you do it?
Are you trying to help me to understand things better and think that chasing me around and insulting me and intejecting insults I to my comments with other people will help to educate me or give me more insight?
Perhaps you think you’re performing some kind of a public service by telling me my comments are vacuous and a waste of time to read, and insulting me? But I dont understand that logic either since you think alll of that is so obvious. Do you think other readers aren’t smart enough to understand something that’s so obvious, and so you’re willing to donate your precious time, wasting your time, as a public service?
yes, yes. I see. We must not question mask mandates for vaccinated 17 and 18 year olds because Joshua says any questioning is akin to comparing it to North Korea.
Therefore, Monmouth must be allowed to do the ridiculous – that which would be just as ridiculous at Liberty University – without question. If you call the ridiculous “ridiculous” then you are an ideologue. If you support the ridiculous, because you perceive it to have come from your own ideological tribe, then you are not an ideologue.
This is the sort of “thinking” that leads national news organizations to report both that Republicans are refusing to get vaccinated -1 and states are giving out free pot in order to increase vaccination rates -2.
And they do it with a straight face. Because it’s unacceptable to point out the contradiction. Good luck with that. I recommend keeping those mask mandates for 18-year old vaccinated college students at least until next year’s midterm elections. Go ahead, show Fox News who’s boss!
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/03/07/republicans-covid-vaccine/
2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/06/08/washington-state-joints-for-jabs-vaccine/
Willard –
> Signalling
That could be, but it wouldn’t be logical since it’s obviously so ineffectual to call something a waste of your time and then make a very public display of often engaging in that very behavior.
Why would a renown scientist make a public display of illogical behavior if it is so ineffectual towards achieving a goal? He could just constantly respond to my comments and insult me, often intejecting into conversations I’m having with other people, without also publicly saying that reading and responding to my comments is a waste of time.
> a very public display of often engaging in that very behavior
Perhaps, but notice the difference. You’re J, and D’s a renowned scientist. If D’s audience buys all the Very Bad things he signals about you, it does not matter if he’s projecting or whatnot. D’s still a renowned scientist. Whereas you’re J, with all the attributions he signaled, some of which are mental.
He can even claim that mental attributions are Very Bad while indulging in them. Who cares?
Willard –
On the “enforcement” point – also illogical. Obviously, his constant insults and constantly telling me that he’s wasting his time with his constant interjection of responses to convos I”m having with other people won’t keep me from commenting.
Although….he also constantly appeals to Judith’s moderation, and there’s a good chance that he thinks that he can get me back into moderation by constantly posting about what an ignorant person I am and how my comments are so harmful to the community. So maybe he thinks that works as an enforcement strategy.
> If D’s audience buys all the Very Bad things he signals about you, it does not matter if he’s projecting or whatnot. D’s still a renowned scientist. Whereas you’re J, with all the attributions he signaled, some of which are mental.
Yes. Ok. That’s a good point.
I still go with projection, however. He’s not unique in that. Projection is a big part of all of this, IMO.
Jeff –
> Joshua says any questioning is akin to comparing it to North Korea.
Notice no quote. Not even a deceptively truncated one.
No, I’m talking about comparing our current state to North Korea, or comparing Monmouth College’s policy to North Korea. I’m not talking about comparing “any questioning” to North Korea. Can you even respond without mis-characterizing what I’ve said?
Of course, I’m also talking about the constant catastrophizing that we see in these threads, and from people like Majorie Taylor Green when she compares mask requirements to N*zi oppression of Jews.
Anyway, we should stop now – essentially piling on, best to be avoided.
This series of comments proves that what I say about your comments Joshie is true.
These contain no real subject matter content. They are all about phony “form” analysis and mind reading. Based on past interactions, everyone else who reads this already sees this. That you don’t shows something disturbing about anonymous doofuses on the internet.
Since you say nothing of substance, there is no “enforcement” needed. I’m just helping out the other rational commenters here so your comments don’t disrupt the thread.
> constantly posting about what an ignorant person I am and how my comments are so harmful to the community
That’s an important part of D’s signaling. In fact it’s playing the ref. That should tell you how toxic playing the ref is.
Which reminds me:
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/506/secret-identity/act-one-27
At some point the only way to deal with people who can’t let go of their delusions is to appeal to the interest. They can entertain all the conspiracy theories they want, but to keep them to themselves should help them socially.
The Internet makes that therapeutic approach harder and harder.
One more…
I will note that Chief has a long history of doing something very similar (repeatedly claiming to not read my comments only to repeatedly prove that wasn’t true, constantly claiming he would stop responding only to subsequently frequently respond).
Interesting overlap, as Chief isn’t appealing to the audience in the same way. Although for a long time he was appealing to Judith’s moderation, he’s given up on that.
“Of course, I’m also talking about the constant catastrophizing that we see in these threads, and from people like Majorie Taylor Green when she compares mask requirements to N*zi oppression of Jews.”
I didn’t bring up either North Korea or N*zis. You did. I pointed out a ridiculous mandate is ridiculous and you took umbrage and started babbling Godwin award stuff. Which is a nifty little tactic to prevent anyone from criticizing Monmouth’s policy. Which you still haven’t said is good or bad, just that it’s illegitimate “catastrophism” to question.
No doubt right-wing pundits and politicians will have a field day with this one. Fish in a barrel.
There’s also no doubt in my mind a majority of Democrats and even “leftists” think Monmouth’s policy is nuts and are calling them now to ask them to knock it off.
Posting this in the correct location.
This series of comments proves that what I say about your comments Joshie is true. And Willie is even worse about critiques of “form” and ignoring substance.
These contain no real subject matter content. They are all about phony “form” analysis and mind reading. Based on past interactions, everyone else who reads this already sees this. That you don’t shows something disturbing about anonymous doofuses on the internet.
Since you say nothing of substance, there is no “enforcement” needed. I’m just helping out the other rational commenters here so your comments don’t disrupt the thread.
> Smear
Let me remind you of the first quote I excerpted from this episode:
See?
That is a smear!
All I did was to read the landing page of your source and the bio sketch of the curator.
Try as you might, you won’t be able to turn this into a food fight.
Obfuscation again. You smeared the post contents which look correct and tried to raise doubts about a secondary echoer. It is a classical squirrel and obfuscation.
You being a non-scientist and someone with little evident math background probably are totally unqualified to discuss the actual mortality statistics. To pass the time of day in your probably uninteresting life, you divert and clutter up others comment threads.
Oh and the Russian collusion and interference narrative was a Hillary Clinton campaign talking point. You have likewise not laid a glove on that fact either.
> I’m just helping out the other rational commenters here so your comments don’t disrupt the thread.
See, David?
That is signalling!
Now, either what you do has no content, or your accusation that I’m only after form is a smear.
Which is it?
> You smeared the post contents which look correct
I only listed titles, David. They suffice to undermine the main premise of your rant:
Russian fear mongering is real. It has very little to do with how you distort “the Russian narrative” with your conspiracy ideation.
I don’t care about your conspiracy ideation for now. I care about Russian fear mongering. That is the point I made all along.
Are engineers supposed to be able to read?
Well we finally agree that Russian fear mongering is real and it is mostly coming Democrats and the deep state. That in no way contradicts my point.
> Russian fear mongering is real and it is mostly coming Democrats and the deep state.
Wait, David. That’s even stronger than what you earlier suggested: now you’re claiming that the “Russian narrative” should be equaled to Russian fear mongering.
Considering all the evidence I laid out to the contrary, don’t you think that’s a bit impudent?
Willie, I didn’t see much evidence aside from one National Review link. The link to Greenwald and Taibbi talks about the Russian collusion narrative and is very well sourced, despite your groundless smears of them.
That you didn’t see much evidence is par for your oblivious course, D boy.
Let’s start with the last ones: the titles you falsely claim were smears.
I don’t think you can view these stories as orchestrated by a liberal cabal.
Yet they exploit an anti-Russian sentiment.
See?
That’s how analysis works outside your area of expertise.
Well then, we do agree even with your attempts to obfuscate that. Fear of Russia is common.
But an obscure web site doesn’t prove anything. That you bothered to cite it shows you have too much time on your hands and perhaps a boring life.
It’s mostly the Hillary Campaign and the media over the last 5 years as part of a collusion to discredit Trump.
The obfuscation is all yours, David.
You baited with “Russian fear mongering,” David. Then you switched with the “Russian narrative.” You got called on it. After some huffing and puffing, here we are.
Now what: you’re going to repeat that China fear mongering is more justified?
It’s not smart to vaccinate children under 18 in most cases. The unknown risks of the vaccines outweighs their risk of sustaining damage from the virus. This cost versus benefits approach has been used for many years. I guess they felt should they throw that old school knowledge out. What parents can do is have a look at repurposed drugs that may prevent their children from contracting the virus. Drugs that have about a 40 year track record.
Ragnaar –
> What parents can do is have a look at repurposed drugs that may prevent their children from contracting the virus. Drugs that have about a 40 year track record.
Rather remarkable.
Dr. Ragnaar, our local internet pediatrician, is recommending that parents go with off-label use of medications rather than getting their children vaccinated – ’cause in his extensive research he has established that for children under 18 the risk of vaccination outweighs the risk of a COVID infection (regardless of comorbidities, potential king term sequelae from infections that don’t result in death, etc.)
Thanks for that tittle. I have an opinion as some people have the opinion children should get the vaccine. It’s rather obvious when you have an experimental vaccine versus one with a long track record and considering the extremely low risk of the virus to children under 18. Let the government experiment on someone else’s kids. We are still allowed to have opinions. Maybe not on youtube if it is about Ivermectin.
Oxford Univ. started a 5000+ randomized study on Ivermectin and other therapeutics.
I see this as an act of bravery even though many countries have Ivermectin as part of the front line health policy now. If it’s proven to be effective by an irrefutable study then western health agencies will have to answer why they were incurious for a cheap, safe and effective treatment that could have saved countless souls. The fact that we don’t know for certain about Ivermectin and HCQ at this point in itself is a major problem but I haven’t see that point made by the MSM or any medical newsletters. I agree that getting rid of Trump is not a reasonable analysis as to why but there must be something.
Question for those who call HCQ and Ivermectin a scam or rightwing motivated: What range of effectiveness do you predict the Oxford U study will come up with for Ivermectin?
I predict it will be found to cut death rate by 20-40% if given before hospitalization is necessary. And it will speed recoveries by and average of 5+ days. As you see, I am less optimistic than Dr. Kory but I still think these numbers (if found) would and should be a world scandal on the order of the manufactured origin consensus.
https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/featured/whats-the-deal-with-ivermectin-and-covid/
https://www.livemint.com/news/india/govt-removes-ivermectin-other-popular-drugs-from-covid-19-treatment-list-check-revised-guidelines-11623074154396.html
Ron Graf: Oxford Univ. started a 5000+ randomized study on Ivermectin and other therapeutics.
Thank you for the link. I am glad to see that. I wrote my opinion more than a year ago that RCTs were the fastest way to acquire the truth, and that everything else retards effective intervention. At the time I was writing of RCTs for hydroxychloroquine.
Thanks for the link, Joshua. Why not state your thoughts?
The Halifax Examiner article dovetails my sense, that Ivermectin will be found effective in some dose at some point of intervention for some people. That would still have a hundreds of thousands of lives if true and likely more good that mask wearing. If it turns out that both Ivermectin and HCQ had no value to anyone in any dose, with any cocktail, at any time, it will be instructive to just how easily bias can take even today an honest clinician into a fantasy.
Jeffnsails850 writes: Monmouth University is mandating vaccination by August 1, a negative Covid test taken with few days of arrival on campus, and is still mandating masks “at all times” indoors this fall on campus.
I’m saying that’s nuts no matter what the political affiliation of the school administrators. You say I can’t call it nuts because that would be an attack on “lefties.”
Clinical trials with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines showed that they reduced COVID infections SERIOUS ENOUGH TO PROMPT PEOPLE TO BE TESTED by 95% in the first few months and about 90% after the first six months. This didn’t prove that a vaccinated person can’t get infected, have mild disease and then transmit COVID to another person in the college community who has a significant risk of dying from COVID. This is why the CDC is still warning vaccinated Americans to stay away from large indoor gatherings, such as large college lectures with one or two hundred students. Colleges have traditionally been hot spots for seasonal influenza and other infectious diseases. Furthermore, there are plenty of news stories saying that new variants are sending more younger people to the hospital.
Finally, there is a good chance there be a rebound in COVID this coming fall and winter. At the moment, there is every reason to assume that immunity acquired by earlier infection or vaccination will moderate the severity and transmission of the illness, however that protection is expected to wane over time. However, new variants appear to be causing more serious illnesses, at least in those who have no immunity. The Asian flu that caused the 1918-20 pandemic has returned every winter since as part of the usual seasonal pandemic and COVID is expected to do the same. The big question is how deadly will it be.
These presumably are the reasons for Monmouth University’s policies. The problem with masks is that studies show that compliance is low unless people perceive that a real threat exist. In addition to a shortage of masks, this is the reason masks were not initially recommended last spring.
While Monmouth University’s plans may be overly cautious and subject to poor compliance, they are based on the CDC’s current recommendations which are based on science – not politics. However, our policies shouldn’t be geared ONLY towards reducing the threat from COVID. The trade-offs and costs of various policies are a subject for intelligent political debate, but that requires one to assimilate the rationals for and against various policies, not merely salivate in response to Trump’s uniformed propaganda about masks.
I believe viral history and standard epidemiology predict that as viruses mutate they in fact become less lethal and more transmissible.
Seems more myth than reality.
https://theconversation.com/will-coronavirus-really-evolve-to-become-less-deadly-153817
No, you focus on the exception vs the general trend.
Thomas: In the really long run, viruses and their hosts should co-evolve so that neither harms the other. For example, bats appear to be unharmed by infection with a variety of coronaviruses. In some cases, the host can even benefit from being infected. Our GI tracts are loaded with a great variety of bacteria, some of which are helpful. Gut bacteria make vitamin B12 and several other vitamins.
On the other hand, in a shorter time frame, really deadly viruses such as Ebola are expected to become less deadly over time. The biggest limiting factor in the spread of Ebola is that it quickly sickens and immobilizes the people it infects. If a mutant form of Ebola allows the people it infects to be mobile for three days rather than one day, it will spread about three times faster. When syphilis was first encountered about 500 years ago, it was much more deadly debilitating than it is today.
In the case of SARS2, we probably have a third situation. The typical SARS2 patient whose illness is detected by PCR usually does doesn’t get sick enough to be hospitalized for about a week and only a fraction of those infected get sick enough to need hospitalization. In the early days of the pandemic, antibody surveys showed that roughly only 1 out of every 10 infected people got sick enough to go in for testing. So SARS2 isn’t likely to gain any advantage in transmission by causing milder illness.
In fact SARS2 seems to be evolving into a more transmissible, and probably more deadly, pathogen. If SARS2 replicates faster, then higher concentrations of virus will be found in the aerosols and droplets, making it more likely to infect someone else. (In the case of influenza, it takes about 1,000 viruses to infect a person. Our innate immune system usually can easily handle a few influenza viruses.) So new variants may have become more transmissible by replicating faster (higher viral titer) or by doing a better job of suppressing the innate immune system. In theory, we can detect increases in viral load by PCR, but swabbing isn’t highly reproducible and increases in fluid can dilute the virus and make it look like the virus is replicating more slowly. Higher levels of virus in an infected person could make the infection more deadly. And if evolution has produced variant that make 1 our of every 2 people sick enough to get tested by PCR – instead of the 1 in 10 last spring, the variant will appear to be more transmissible simply because we are detecting a larger fraction of the infections.
Survival of the fittest means that the most “fit” virus – most transmissible – will eventually dominate..Sometimes a more “fit” viruses will be more deadly and sometime less deadly.
Thank you, Franktoo, for such an interesting post. I am fascinated by the scattering of studies of the so called Kent variant in the UK which are now suggesting the transmission rates and severity were no different to the original virus. These studies suggest the way the virus spreads is, as Mr Lewis suggested a long time ago now, largely dependent upon human behaviours, how and where we live, work, and socialise, and these are not easy to replicate in modelling scenarios. It’s quite possible we will see similar study results on the Indian variant before the year is out.
There are still huge question marks about testing efficacy and whether it should be absolutely restricted to symptomatic cases because asymptomatic transmission is far from being proven. We can also begin to surmise that our treatment protocols at the beginning of the epidemic were not what we would do if we were to replay the event again. And, on top of all this, is the clear need to keep populations reasonably fit and healthy, something to chew over for our overly rich and protected food industries whose profit motives need to be much better controlled by the average person in the street who can stop buying their junk right now.
But, and right at the top of my agenda, is the simple fact that lockdowns demonstrably do not change outcomes by anything close to the cost of locking people down and splashing cash out in the hopes that you can have a zero-virus result, because that is simply not going to happen. The vaccination programme has at least given people some peace-of-mind but really, from the outset, decent leadership worldwide would have never have made people so fearful in the first place.
I believe we need some decent leaders across the board but our politics don’t seem to produce them any longer, or, when they do, they get shoved out of office PDQ by a group of selfish people who have, apparently, never had life so good under the woke-yoke. I’d rather take my chances with SARS-CoV-2 than with the woke-yoke any day of the week. At least the virus is doing what comes naturally.
Lass –
> But, and right at the top of my agenda, is the simple fact that lockdowns demonstrably do not change outcomes by anything close to the cost of locking people down
Take a look at Brazil, and see whether they have avoided the costs of intervention.
When you read a post and digest it thoroughly, Joshua, I will let you know. My post is about the UK which, I hope you already know, is not in Brazil …
Lass –
> lockdowns demonstrably do not change outcomes by anything close to the cost of locking people down
Oh, I’m sorry. I guess I missed where you said “lockdowns IN THE UK do not change outcomes….
My bad.
Now perhaps you can elaborate on your insight as to why Brazil had huge costs by despite eschewing interventions whereas the UK wouldn’t have?
The government should not have been shutting down businesses and gatherings for one simple reason: authorities are people, and people have favorites. We saw small businesses closed while large box stores stayed open, selling the same goods. Restaurants, bars and hair salons were open for the authorities and their friends but shut down for the common folk. Protests against the lockdown were not allowed but street riots and burning of buildings by large crowds were applauded by the leftwing leaders. The few that were arrested were quickly bailed out by people like Kamala Harris.
I’m sure in China and Cuba the authorities are not biased toward themselves. But in the countries not mature enough to handle socialism and authoritarianism the best policy is to simply supply the best information to the public and allow individuals to navigate protecting themselves.
Of course, the accuracy of the information and it’s perceived trustworthiness by the populations are key, (whether or not the leaders impose lockdowns). The USA had a problem there.
https://twitter.com/BristOliver/status/1408693788906754050
> The USA had a problem there.
Which is not unrelated to the kind of spin you’ve been serving Denizens for the last months, Ron.
Manufacturing dissent has a cost.
Lass, best to ignore Joshie’s random and irrelevant questions. He roams this blog interjecting himself trying to get someone to engage his unfocused ideas. Then he whines about being called on it.
“Which is not unrelated to the kind of spin you’ve been serving Denizens for the last months, Ron.”
The last thing I want to be is a spin doctor.
Do we both agree that everything being equal truth and freedom are universal virtues and thus perpetual goals for humanity?
If you think I am trying to trick you please feel free not to answer.
Ukweather lass
I don’t know if you saw this graph regarding lockdowns not changing outcomes as cases were in decline before each of the three Uk lockdowns which Boris admitted to in a press conference
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-imperial-graph-that-shows-infections-declined-before-lockdown-and-increased-under-it/
https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/92057
Looks like most things in viral epidemiology, the work on lethality of the B.1.1.7 variant is mixed and shows a wide range of suggested results.
David Young –
> Lass, best to ignore Joshie’s…
What’s with your weird obsession with chasing me around these threads to interject ad homs and insults?
It’s all that much weirder because you’ve promised multiple times that you would stop reading and responding to my comments.
I’ve asked you to explain this werid behavior but as of you not explanation has been forthcoming.
Why are you having so immaturely, illogically, and so irrationally?
Joshie, I already explained this at least once but I forgot your mind can’t retain what people actually say. I have faith that with proper reflection and education you might make a useful positive contribution beyond your purely negative and derivative rhetorical caviling, sarcasm, and childish obsession with first Judith and then Nic. What you are doing is stealing others life energy that is valuable.
I also want to make sure disinformation is balanced with more truthful information.
“Manufacturing dissent…”
The biggest lockdowns in decades and the dissent is manufactured. There was no need to manufacture it. People were bought off for fear of dissent. The governments in a number cases, yielded to dissent. People are moving. It that manufactured?
David Young –
I asked you for a logical answer. Again you failed at that
Chasing me around these threads and interjecting with insult-filled comments will obvosuly accomplish nothing positive. That should be obvious just from basic principles. But it’s also obvious because you’ve been doing that obsessively for quite a while and it has had no beneficial effect.
It’s also obvious that your answer is totally illogical because you have said many times that reading my comments and responding is a waste of your time. Now you’re saying that you’re doing it to achieve a positive outcome. So you’re contradicting yourself and being totally illogical.
Honestly, David, it’s kind of creepy. I’m startng to get the impression that you’re following me around obsessively because you’re trying to somehow to some kind of revenge because so many times I’ve pointed out your obvious errors.
And now once again, you add to your problem by offering a lame, obviously inane.smd tislly illogical explanation for your odd behavior.
Try again to give a logical explanation.
It is you Joshie who has a long track record of following people around online and harrassing them. Now you whine. It’s very illogical and hypocritical. Get lost if you think I care what you think. You are illogical anyway and usually quite wrong even about obvious facts.
UK-Weather Lass: Thanks for the kind remarks. You wrote: “I am fascinated by the scattering of studies of the so called Kent variant in the UK which are now suggesting the transmission rates and severity were no different to the original virus.”
When a new variant B displaces the old variant A as the dominant virus in a pandemic, as best I can tell, that is proof that B is being transmitted more than A. Deadliness as measure by deaths or hospitalization rates can be difficult to assess as vaccination programs have changed the average age of those getting infected. There are anecdotal stories reporting that hospitals are now seeing many in the thirties with severe illnesses, I expected new hospitalizations and deaths to drop much faster than new cases in the US as older people were vaccinated first, but my personal ad hoc analysis didn’t show a big difference. In the absence of definitive studies, I’m fairly confident that evolution is producing a more deadly virus.
Asymptomatic transmission is an established fact, but the relative transmissibility of symptomatic, pre-symptomatic, and symptomatic patients isn’t known. Viral load tends to be highest a day before symptoms appear.
You wrote: “But, and right at the top of my agenda, is the simple fact that lockdowns demonstrably do not change outcomes by anything close to the cost of locking people down and splashing cash out in the hopes that you can have a zero-virus result, because that is simply not going to happen.
Cost-benefit analysis is a tricky subject. I suspect that most Chinese think their severe lockdowns were worthwhile. Taiwan and South Korea are thrill with the efficacy of their programs, Australia? New Zealand? Obviously, the worst possible outcome is that lockdowns and other measures slow the pandemic, but in the end roughly the same number of people die before herd immunity is reached. In a sense, lockdowns are a BET that your government can completely stamp out a pandemic (as China and South Korea have done, and Europe came close to doing last summer) or developed a vaccine before herd immunity is reached. In a sense, the US has won its bet on lockdowns, because it took about 50% vaccination to start bringing this pandemic under control. So a rough estimate is that another 600,000 Americans would have died before herd immunity would be reached in the US.
The cost side of the cost-benefit analysis is also tricky. If you try to let a pandemic burn out without restraints, your hospitals quickly get filled and there are no beds for new patients. At that point, your economy begins to shut down because everyone is scared and staying home. To some extent, the losses from government imposed lockdowns of “non-essential” businesses need to be balanced against the unknown costs of voluntary shut-downs, possibly of the collapse of the entire economy.
However, in the end, cost-benefits analysis may have little to do with why all governments intervened. I personally don’t think any political leader can avoid intervening once hospitals are overflowing and supply disruptions create real shortages. However, if the pandemic can be controlled by having many voluntarily work from home, wearing masks and social distancing, Republicans are happy to campaign against Democrats who impose more severe measure – even though they would impose exactly those same measures if things got bad enough. Even Texas Governor Abbott closed the bars in Texas a year ago.
Frank, You keep repeating many things that are seem to lack scientific evidence and in some cases seem wrong.
The pandemic started waning in the US about early January. At that point about 4.8% had gotten 1 job and less than 1% had two. The decline was quite rapid through Jan. and Feb. Your 50% vaccinated number seems obviously wrong. Herd immunity must have been reached long before we got to 50%. On March 1, about 15% had gotten 1 jab and only about 7.7% were fully vaccinated.
Even if asymptotic transmission is possible, I have seen no evidence it is significant and you present none. I have seen reports its rare. This trope seems to be another tactic designed to scare people and accept draconian measures.
In fact virtually all your confident statements don’t seem to have very good support. There are mixed studies on whether the new variants are more deadly. Likewise for NPI’s and masks which I see you steered clear of in this latest perhaps because even you know the evidence is weak to nonexistent.
Projecting an air of confidence in things for which there is weak or nonexistent evidence means you are overconfident and also have trouble with a situation like this where the science is mostly inconclusive. There is a natural tendency to fall back on emotion and political prejudice.
I also note you have not returned to your emotional DeSantis bashing. Perhaps you should acknowledge that Florida had a pretty good outcome.
David Young –
> Now you whine.
I’m not whining. I think it’s kind of funny that you act so illogically and irrationally and say things that obviously don’t add up – such as when you first say that reading and responding to my comments is a waste of your time, but keep chasing me around this comment section to do both, and then say you’re reading and responding to my comments to serve some higher purpose – which is laughably inane.
> It is you Joshie who has a long track record of following people around online and harrassing them.
Again, illogical.
You interject with foolish, insult-filled comments into exchanges I’m having with other people.
It’s an odd behavior. It directly contradicts your statements that reading and responding to my comments is a waste of your time. You even seek out my comments to other people in order to read and respond. And you do it despite declaring you would stop doing it multiple times. Why do you act do irrationally?
You misunderstand. Apparently you think I don’t like it that you constantly chase me around to write insult-filled responses to my comments, ebrm my comments directed at other people, in total contradiction to what you say about my comments and what you say you’re going to do.
But actually, it’s amusing to watch you act so illogically and irrationally. Its an interesting curiosity. Why would a renown scientist do something so foolish, so publicly, so often?
It’s a mystery.
But keep it up if you wish. Be my guest.
And maybe at some point you can even offer an explanation for your behavior that isn’t just lame and that obviously fails to add up.
You are such a hypocrite Joshie. You are perhaps the worst stalker in the climate blogosphere. What are your reasons for doing it? I have a couple. 1. You have nothing better to do as you don’t have a life.
2. The only way you can get attention and fill your time is to be the flea attacking the lion. The lion scratches the flea.
Willard: Which is not unrelated to the kind of spin you’ve been serving Denizens for the last months, Ron.
Care to quote any examples of what you consider “spin”?
David Young –
> Get lost if you think I care what you think.
Also obviously illogical.
You chase me around, reading my comments, and writing responses, and then act as if you don’t care what I think. You even interject into exchanges I’m having Ruth other people to respond to my comments.
Obviously, if you didn’t care what I think, you wouldn’t chase me around, reading and responding to my comments.
That would be as illogical and irrational as saying that reading and responding to my comments would be a waste of your time and ghen chafing me around this comments section to read and respond to my comments.
Oh wait, you do that also. Lol.
So you’re keeping your record intact of acting illogically and irrationally and then offering laughably illogical and irrational follow up comments to explain your off behavior.
Thanks for the amusement. Keep it up!
Ah. Another insult-filled comment when I point out how illogical and irrational your comments are.
You chase me around in these threads to write insult filled responses to my comments, even to the point of frequently interjecting them into exchanges I’m having with other people, and then call me a stalker when I point out how that stalking behavior contradicts your explanation for why you chase me around writing insult-filled comments.
That just supports my theory that your so hostile and nasty because you’re embarrassed because I’ve pointed out your obvious errors so often.
But my theory could be wrong. I’ve asked you to explain your behavior other than that. But unfortunately thus far you’ve only given illogical, irrational, and inane explanations. Like you’re going it got a higher purpose, or for my benefit. Lol.
Well, maybe tomorrow you’ll have some insight and come up with an explanation that makes sense?
You are also lying here. You don’t know what is logical or not logical.
And you deflect from the fact that you for years have been a very bad anonymous internet stalker of your intellectual betters and waste other people’s valuable time. That’s called deflection from your own obvious guilt. You also are really silly if you think everyone here doesn’t know it.
Thank you for your reply Franktoo. I respect your views on how best to deal with a novel virus but I do not believe the world, in general, dealt with SARS-CoV-2 at all sensibly. The actual facts of the epidemic and the effects of policy will take a long, long time to decipher and I do not believe our eventual conclusions will be happy ones, at all. As one former UK public health official suggested we seem to have forgotten what public health actually means because we threw away a very strong system and replaced it with an inadequate but dictatorial service that told us what not to do, advice which continually changed just as it has done with Covid19. Our health services are supposed to be there to protect us. It turns out that the UK’s NHS was never in danger of being overrun at any stage and yet that was what lockdown one was all about. Were we lied to by politicians? You bet we were.
On the subject of asymptomatic infection If most people are regularly exposed to a minor viral load (SARS-CoV-2 included) which their immune system immediately recognises, it heightens defences and bats the virus away without any infection happening and that is how we reach herd immunity naturally with our common colds and ‘flu. None of the papers I have read concerning asymptomatic infection convince me that it has happened in this epidemic or is even possible. What is possible is that people with symptoms say they have no symptoms to avoid getting into trouble by losing their job and/or not being able to pay your bills, and that is most certainly human nature at work.
Yes, Lass, You make a really good point about bias in symptom reporting. I too believe that symptoms should be a good correlate of viral load and thus probability of being able to infect others.
But the whole covid19 issue is very very bad in terms of the biased pseudo-science being produced about it. Frank’s ideas are worth considering but generally he is quite biased in favor of alarmist narratives and hatred of red state responses, which may be a spillover effect of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
A prominent example of this is the continuing narrative that the new strains are more deadly. The evidence is mixed on this issue, but that doesn’t keep people from making confident statements about it. I have noticed some evidence that this might be a phony narrative looking at cases/hospitalizations/deaths data for Sweden and Washington State this spring. In Sweden cases/hospitalizations nearly doubled February 1 to about April 15. Deaths were declining in that period. In Washington the same thing happened about March 1. Something similar happened in Florida as well around mid March even though it was not as pronounced. I would not call this conclusive but would tend to point to declining lethality or perhaps the same lethality accounting for the fact that many older people got vaccinated this spring.
But the pattern is the same. There are strong voices in the media and among scientists that shamelessly distort any facts they can to keep people alarmed and frightened. It’s really just shameful and deeply political.
I personally have never been frightened of covid19. Me and many of my relatives (who are MD’s) and friends have traveled a lot by air during the height of the pandemic. I have always refused to wear a mask outdoors and continue to socialize with people at close range. I also think the pseudo-scientific and shameful fearmongering game is over and that most people are beginning to realize that covid19 is essentially over as a serious public health threat. I notice that refusing to wear a mask in stores has become a trend and that no one bothers to try to get you to put one on. I got vaccinated and at that point starting actively resisting the nanny state and its Karen enforcers. I’ve pushed back against them commenting on my lack of a mask while out hiking several times. As more people start to resist, we will reach critical mass and everyone will give up trying to pretend its not over. In our area, many businesses are just ignoring the remaining mandates. In reality, they were always unenforcible and were mostly political theatre.
Lass –
> … that is how we reach herd immunity naturally with our common colds and ‘flu.
Could you explain that a bit more. I wasn’t aware of people reaching “herd immunity” to the common cold or the flu and I’m hoping you could link to some scientific material that describes when that has happened.
David Young –
You’ve been following me around these threads, interjecting insult-filled responses that have absolutely nothing to do with the topic being discussed into in exchanges with other people. It’s a very strange behavior and it the only explanation i can come up with is that you have some kind of hurt feelings about me and thus feel some kind of compulsion to try to get back at me.
Of course that’s on top of the background rate of your constantly responding to me with insults and nastiness as we can see in this very thread (in fact we can see both behaviors here as our exchange only started after you interjected into an exchange I had with someone else).
Now it’s very odd behavior in itself – but your explanation for that behavior is downright hilarious.
First you say it’s a waste of your time to do those things but then continue don’t them. A lot.
Then you say that you’re doing it to serve a higher purpose – which contradicts your many
statements that reading and responding to my comments is a waste of your time. Why would you continuously do something that you’ve said is a waste of your time? How would serving some higher purpose be a waste of your time? Your statements are obviously contradictory – and thus illogical.
And how would writing insult-filled responses to my comments serve a purpose in educating me or enlightening me? Obviously the goal is to somehow make me feel bad, or intimidate me, or get me to be quiet. Not only is that explanation illogical, it’s also weird because obviously I simply think your insult-filled comments are nothing other than someone acting illogically and irrationally.
But it’s fine with me if you keep it up. It’s a fascinating study of human behavior.
Lass –
I should have said…
…reached “herd immunity” with the common cold, or the flu through the process you described.
You’ve repeated your word salad at least 10 times. I know you regard truth telling as insulting. You are also essentially admitting that you are a serial internet stalker by refusing to address your behavior while deflecting to others. I and everyone elsewhere will rake that as an admission of guilt.
David Young –
> I know you regard truth telling as insulting.
I regard insult-filled comments as insult-filled comments.
Your explanation for why you chase me around these threads reading my comments and responding with insult-filled comments is entirely illogical.
It’s obviously not to increse my insight as you claimedz and you’re obviously not doing it to fulfill some higher purpose as you claim because you’ve previously, repeatedly said its a waste of your time.
That you’d spend so much time doing something that you’ve said is a waste of your time is also odd.
Again, I don’t know that you do it because your feelings have been hurt when I’ve pointed out many of your errors, but you have yet to offer an alternative explanation that holds any water.
I’m open to considering one if you can come up with one.
Joshie, You have a tract record of very biased cherry picking and then lying about what other people say. That’s a rather sick online profile. Why do you continue to persist in this? An ethical person would change. Just a couple of examples from a much longer list showing that no one else here takes you seriously.
Robert I. Ellison | April 22, 2021 at 3:55 pm |
I have retired as Chief Hydrologist – people like Joshua couldn’t cope with it. I was apparently claiming to be authoritative. Joshua is of course a person with a habit of latching onto some point or other he imagines is telling and repeating it endlessly. I have on occasion replied without reading his comments. It makes no difference. Too funny.
atandb | April 22, 2021 at 1:24 pm |
As long as the graph is in the asymptotic decline, which it is, it is a decline. Does not matter what the average is, how much of the graph you want to select, etc. What you did was cherry picking. David Young’s assertion of “strongly declining” is correct, but not what I would have used. The asymptotic curve is still strongly declining according to statistics. I would not have used that description, but your objection to it is fallacious.
Joe – the non epidemiologist | April 23, 2021 at 9:54 am |
Context in the overall data (not the minutia) is far better to develop an understanding of the infection rate curves. As you stated, Sweden, in spite of much looser mitigation protocols, fared better than most other western countries, Josh on the other hand became so obsessed with proving nic wrong, that he lost sight of the broader picture. Classic case of cant see the forest for the trees.
David Young –
That you clip comments of others criticizing me in no way makes your explanations for your odd and illogical and irrational behavior and more logical or ratonal.
It just looks like more classic use of ad homs to avoid confronting dealing with your behavior.
Of course I could spearch for clips of people criticizing you, but there’s a reason that argument ad populum is considered a fallacy and me appealing to the views of peope who ager with me is no more valid than you appealing to people who agree with you.
It’s just another form of ad hominem argument.
Once again, the more you can offer no reasonable explanation for your behavior, the more you reinforce my theory that you chase me around on these threads to read my comments and write insult-filled responses (and even interject those comments into threads where I wasn’t even addressing my comments to you) merely because you’re feelings have been hurt because a non-scientist has such an easy time finding cavernous logical holes in your arguments.
I’m still wondering if you can actually provide a logical alternative explanation, but the longer it goes when all you have to offer is self-contradictory and obviously illogical explanations the slimmer the chances become that you can offer a reasonable explanation.
This comment thread is the worst unethical deceptive behavior I’ve seen online. Joshie routinely stalks vastly more competent people online, misrepresents their comments and then repeatedly lies about it. He’s a relentless cherry picker. When this is pointed out, he repeats endlessly a rhetorical question that simply doesn’t matter to anyone.
David Young –
> This comment thread is the worst unethical deceptive behavior I’ve seen online
Wow. That’s very dramatic. Seems that you’re really getting emotionally triggered here.
And why?
Because I keep pointing to your illogical and irrational behavior and your laughably inane explanations for that behavior?
That seems like the explantion to me – especially since you’re so emotional about it.
Seems the more I point to how illogical your behavior is and the more I point out how illogical your explanations for your behavior are, the more emotional you get.
Of course, you might be able to provide a reasonable explanation for your behavior. I’m still waiting. But thus far you haven’t been up to the task.
David Young –
Another question for you. Why do you write so many comments ABOUT me, whether directed towards a general audience or specific commenters?
Why is it so important to you to talk about me? Why is it so important for you to express your feelings about me? Why is it so important for you to tell other people how you feel about me or to tell them how they should feel about me?
It all seems kind of strange to me and I have a theory – that this is all so important to you because you feel embarrassed that a non-scientist has so easily pointed to gaping holes in your reasoning. So you’re very triggered and emotional toward me, leading to you chasing me around these threads to write insult-filled comments about me. It seems to me that you’re real target when writing all these comments is ME, that your comments are actually intended for me to read (and perhaps feel bad or something?) but for some reason you have to address an audience under some pretense that I’m not the real target of your comments. Is it a kind of “Who’s your daddy? I’m your daddy” kind of thing?
I’m open to reasonable alternative explantions but as of yet none have been forthcoming.
Well, Joshie, as I said above this is a deflection to distract from your long track record of misrepresentions, endless repetition, and stalking people with vastly more to contribute. I certainly don’t need to explain anything.
In answer to the comments about my observations concerning viral loads, potential infection ‘types’ (e.g. symptomatic, asymptomatic, pre-symptomatic etc.), and herd immunity, let me say that perhaps my eyes and brain work in a different manner to those who read scientific papers ‘for a living’. Just three further points for people to mull over.
1) Children normally have much reduced lung capacity compared to adults, and therefore would be unlikely to pass on (or receive) as strong a viral load, meaning they are more likely to attain effective immunity when mixing with other children AND adults via milder viral loading. In the detailed Icelandic track and trace study they found no evidence of children infecting their parents but the reverse was largely true.
In one epidemiology video I watched right at the start of the worries about SARS-CoV-2 it was suggested that this is how herd immunity is usually attained for common infections and was a reason why schools should always remain open during outbreaks. Primary teachers infect kids but the reverse is seldom likely. That balance steadily changes as schoolkids get older.
N.B. I commented about this ‘knowledge’ very early in the epidemic.
2) Dr David Price, a doctor in a New York hospital frontline very early in the epidemic, posted an emotional video about managing his fears of transmitting the virus to his wife and their children when he realised that as long as he wore proper PPE and spent no longer than twenty minutes in the close presence of a known infected patient he would not contract the virus. His conclusion satisfied the rule that viral load = seriousness of infection multiplied by time in proximity to the load.
3) Vaccination protects by waking up our immune systems and the older we get the more sluggish that immunity may become – and we all get older by the millisecond. Hence the more you are exposed to infection when your immune system is able to cope then the better it will be at dealing with an infection ruthlessly and quickly when you really need it to. A cold or ‘flu virus may inconvenience someone temporarily, but they may be the better protected from re-infection later in their life until, of.course, we become too vulnerable.
We have yet to find out what mass vaccination for a coronavirus may lead to, especially for children and younger people who I may, arguably, be better off without it. Hopefully no serious harm will be done but perhaps we should be sure of that before we do it.
dpy: “Even if asymptotic transmission is possible, I have seen no evidence it is significant and you present none…”
I think Frank was speaking of pre-symptomatic transmission, which I believe there is clinical evidence of high viral load just prior to symptoms. There was one early case study of contact tracing that I recall, and I’m sure there were many like it, that the person passed on the virus the day or two prior to their symptoms. This is not to be confused with asymptomatic spreading, which I believe has been debunked. The CDC held for a long time that under 10% of infections were asymptomatic spreaders. They got hammered when it was found they were just being conservative in not revealing the actual number was less than 0.1%.
Pre-symptomatic transmission may be possible. But I have seen nothing to indicate it is a significant source of transmission and Frank cited none, just relying on his air of authority. Like most things about this virus, there really seems little quantified science on most of these questions. If you know of some, I’d like to see it.
David,
Here is a link to the first study I found on Google Scholar. They conclude that in the aware and mostly self-isolating infected population about half of transmission is presymptomatic by an average of 2.5 days, with the highest concentration being on the day before symptoms.
Thanks Ron. That does make sense I suppose. It’s however, just a small shapshot of a small population. And as Lass points out elsewhere there may be a denial effect in people of their symptoms until they become very ill.
Ron’s article is about pre-symptomatic transmission by infected people who will soon show symptoms. This is because it was discovered very early in the pandemic that viral titer often peaks a day or two before patients show symptoms. (The same is true for influenza.) It has also been shown that large numbers of infected people have high levels of virus, develop antibodies and never show symptoms.
HOWEVER, I was talking about asymptomatic transmission FROM vaccinated people who never show symptoms. We know that the number of people who show symptoms dropped 95% with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, but those studies never assessed how many people acquired asymptomatic infections and whether a vaccinated person with an asymptomatic infection could infect another. I don’t know what has been done with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, but Astra-Zenaca has looked into this problem. If I understand correctly, the AZ vaccine caused only a 4% reduction in the number of asymptomatic infections, while reducing the number of symptomatic infections by about 75%. In other words, the AZ vaccine doesn’t prevent you from getting infected, it merely prevents 75% of those vaccinated from getting sick enough to want to be tested by PCR. Those symptomatic infections are milder, the number of hospitalizations is down by 90%? (vs unvaccinated controls) and the number of deaths is even lower, but too low to be accurately quantified.
Below is from: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/early/2021/01/20/2021.01.16.21249946.full.pdf
“6. Quoted efficacies of vaccines are for symptomatic infection and do not exclude the possibility of asymptomatic infection which could still pose a risk of disease transmission. The Oxford AstraZeneca trials included routine swab collection. From this an estimate of the efficacy of the standard dose of the vaccine against asymptomatic infection (and therefore presumably all risk of transmission) was estimated to be just 3·8% (95%CI −72·4 to 46·3) rising to 27.3% (-17.2 to 54.9) for data pooled across both dose regimes (Voysey et al. 2020). Asymptomatics make up 36% of infections in the control group. That the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine may not prevent asymptomatic infection and therefore stop all transmission was suggested even in early non-human primate studies which found “there was no difference in nasal shedding between vaccinated and control SARS-CoV-2-infected macaques (van Doremalen et al., 2020). We were not able to find similar human data for efficacy of the mRNA vaccines in preventing asymptomatic infection. However, animal studies for both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines did suggest that these vaccines could stop viral shedding after the 1st d ay from inoculation and so presumably substantially limit transmission (Corbett, Flynn, et al., 2020; Vogel et al., 2020).
7. In addition, a number of those who received the Oxford vaccine had a positive test for infection with the virus without displaying any of the five most characteristic symptoms offever≥ 37.8°C, cough, shortness of breath, anosmia or ageusia. Efficacy stated by Voysey et al (2021) is 36.4% for non-primary symptomatics. If we combine these three groups, the overall efficacy of the SD/SD regime against infection is 39.5% (the figure of 55.7% given by Voysey et al., 2021 for any positive swab includes data for the unlicenced LD/SD regime).
8. Using the figures from Voysey et al, (see table 2), the SD/SD vaccine regime leads to symptomatic cases reducing to 37.9% of that in the control and the combination of asymptomatics and other non-primary is reduced only slightly to 91.3% of the number in the control. The corresponding figures for data pooled across the two testing regimes are 29.6% and 71.3%.
9. It is now accepted that asymptomatic but infected individuals can transmit COVID-19 (Buitrago-Garcia et al 2020). But the probability of transmission from someone who is asymptomatic is somewhat less than from someone with symptoms. In the systematic review by Buitrago-Garcia et al (2020) it was estimated that relative risk of transmitting the infection if asymptomatic was 0.35 (95%CI 0.10–1.27) compared to a symptomatic individual. Consequently, any vaccine that reduces the risk of developing symptomatic disease will reduce the transmission even if it does not totally prevent it.
10. There are substantial methodological challenges in characterising the proportion of infections that are truly asymptomatic (Meyerowitz, Richterman, Bogoch, Low, & Cevik, 2020) and estimates vary quite considerably from one study to another.”
The take home lesson is that vaccination protects you from serious illness and death, but it may not protect you from transmitting an asymptomatic infection to others. Strange, but true.
From early March to mid-April there had been a plateau (actually a slight rise) in new confirmed infections despite the rapidly increase in numbers of vaccinated Americans. The CDC told vaccinated Americans to continue to wear masks and social distance until it was clear that the pandemic was retreating in mid-May as more Americans were vaccinated. President Biden was criticized by the ignorant right-wing media for continuing to wear a mask even though he was vaccinated.
I’ll just note again Frank that the confidence interval is huge. I don’t have the time to do a literature search and I am not confident in your ability to represent the range of opinion.
Even if you are right, it shows the insanity of some people’s religious faith in things like taking people’s temperature and asking them about symptoms to enter facilities. If true, it really means it was impossible all along to “stop” the virus or even exercise much control over its spread.
And of course you couldn’t control your political biases again. There is to my mind no evidence that masks help outside at all. That’s my sister and brother-in-law’s opinion too. Even the CDC more or less says so. Therefore the criticism of Biden is correct. It is pseudo-science and virtue signaling to wear a mask outdoors and 6 feet from anyone else. That’s especially true for a cloth mask. There is no convincing evidence that surgical masks help in a community setting. N95 masks can work if worn continuously but most people won’t do that because of unpleasant side effects that can be serious or even fatal.
Why can’t you get it through your skull that the US pandemic began to retreat rapidly around mid January long before vaccination was significant. Also you might want to take a look at the data for Sweden and Washington state this spring. Both show a strong surge of cases while deaths were flat. That’s not exactly consistent with the virus becoming more deadly. Of course many older people had been vaccinated by then so its nor possible to prove this definitively.
In any case you and your ilk have lost the war. Most places I visit now allow vaccinated people to dispense with a mask. Given that we are certainly way past herd immunity, this makes sense from a scientific standpoint. Only those who are fascinated with preventing every possible illness worry about this. There are vastly more serious public health issues at the moment, perhaps the most serious being the obesity epidemic, which everyone ignores. I would suggest that if you are one of these people, by all means stay in your house and have food and essentials dropped off on your porch. When you go insane, you will have the comfort of knowing you didn’t die from a communicable disease.
dpy6629 | June 27, 2021 at 1:33 am | Reply
“Pre-symptomatic transmission may be possible. But I have seen nothing to indicate it is a significant source of transmission”
Ron Graff’s comment “This is not to be confused with asymptomatic spreading, which I believe has been debunked. The CDC held for a long time that under 10% of infections were asymptomatic spreaders. They got hammered when it was found they were just being conservative in not revealing the actual number was less than 0.1%.”
Much of well known medical science and history has been disregarded with Covid. As both DPY & ron Graff note, Asysmptomatic transmission was minimal, yet advertised/promoted as a high source of spread, especially from the young. Presymptomatic transmission 1-2 days prior to symptoms was a source, yet presymptomatic transmission 3-5 days prior to symptoms was advertised as significant source of transmission, even though viral loads necessary for high rates of transmission were generally to low to be a significant source of transmission.
Rare cases of potentially permanent damage to children from covid were advertised as highly likely among all children, even though permanent damage from any prior flu virus was rare.
Yes Joe, couldn’t agree more wholeheartedly. Covid is a very bad episode for science generally.
“Ron Graf | June 27, 2021 at 9:41 am |
David,
Here is a link to the first study I found on Google Scholar. They conclude that in the aware and mostly self-isolating infected population about half of transmission is presymptomatic by an average of 2.5 days, with the highest concentration being on the day before symptoms.”
FWIW – I would be a little dubious of that study. The study is a survey of multiple studies, most of which are from the March, April & May 2020 time frame. At the time of those early studies, there was a huge bias to attributing significant spread from all sources.
Meta-analysis of Asymtomatic, Pre-symptomatic and Symptomatic Transmission in 50,000 COVID cases.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jingjing-He-10/publication/343105462_Proportion_of_asymptomatic_coronavirus_disease_2019_COVID-19_a_systematic_review_and_meta-analysis/links/607418ee4585150fe99f9b50/Proportion-of-asymptomatic-coronavirus-disease-2019-COVID-19-a-systematic-review-and-meta-analysis.pdf
Proportion of asymptomatic coronavirus disease 2019: Asystematic review and meta‐analysis. Abstract: PubMed and EMBASE were electronically searched to identify original studies containing the rate of asymptomatic infection in COVID‐19 patients before 20 May 2020. Then mate‐analysis was conducted using R version 3.6.2. A total of 50,155 patients from 41 studies with confirmed COVID‐19 were included. The pooled percentage of asymptomatic in-fection is 15.6% (95% CI, 10.1%‐23.0%). Ten included studies contain the numberof presymptomatic patients, who were asymptomatic at screening point and de-veloped symptoms during follow‐up. The pooled percentage of presymptomaticinfection among 180 initially asymptomatic patients is 48.9% (95% CI, 31.6%‐66.2%). The pooled proportion of asymptomatic infection among 1152 COVID‐19children from 11 studies is 27.7% (95% CI, 16.4%‐42.7%), which is much higher than patients from all aged groups.Abnormal CT features are common in asymptomatic COVID‐19 infection. For 36 patients from 4 studies that CT results were available, 15 (41.7%) patients had bilateral involvement and 14 (38.9%) had unilateral involvement in CT results. Reduced white blood cell count, increase dlactate dehydrogenase, and increased C‐reactive protein were also recorded. About 15.6% of confirmed COVID‐19 patients are asymptomatic. Nearly half of the patients with no symptoms at detection time will develop symptoms later.Children are likely to have a higher proportion of asymptomatic infection than adults. Asymptomatic COVID‐19 patients could have abnormal laboratory and radiational manifestations, which can be used as screening strategies to identify asymptomatic infection.
Hopefully, I only sound authoritative when I am authoritative.
Frank –
8 haven’t looked in detail to assess the veracity, but fwiw:
https://twitter.com/greg_travis/status/1410220921684697094?s=20
https://twitter.com/greg_travis/status/1410219741789237253?s=20
https://twitter.com/greg_travis/status/1410218848809373700?s=20
This guy Travis looks like a classic cherry picker. He’s committing the classic error of extrapolating without considering other factors. In a county with 50% of its population over 60 years old, the PFR would be much higher and also meaningless with regard to the general population. Is 99.8% that different from 99.6%? It depends on your perspective. I wouldn’t trust anything this guy posts on Twitter of all places.
Not to mention, Florida has lower per capita testing and higher per capita infection than Cali. The gaps aren’t huge and I don’t know how age gradient factors in, but comparing FL and CA as undifferentiated blocks and saying “Lockdown deaths, they stole our freedoms for nuttin!” is just facile.
David Young –
> Is 99.8% that different from 99.6%
Freakin’ hilarious. You’ve many, many obvious and laughable errors in these threads, but this may just be the most obvious and laughable yet.
Here, I’ll repost the remark you’re referring to, and I’ll even add bold to help you out and we’ll see if you still can’t spot your obvious error.
I was wondering how long you could remain an adult and remain sober Joshie. You of course misquoted the remark. You can’t even copy and paste. It was 0.4%, not 0.4 you doofus. Grow up and put down the Budweiser bottle.
This illustrates why you are so worthless. You constantly cherry pick data, grossly misrepresent what others say, and nip at the heels of your betters. Grow up
David Young –
I cut the % sign when I put in the bold tags.
It’s totally irrelevant.
You made an obvious and laughable error.
It doesn’t change your error. Youe error remains.
Here, look:
> Is 99.8% that different from 99.6%
Freakin’ hilarious. You’ve many, many obvious and laughable errors in these threads, but this may just be the most obvious and laughable yet.
Here, I’ll repost the remark you’re referring to, and I’ll even add bold to help you out and we’ll see if you still can’t spot your obvious error.
“COVID has a 99.8% survival rate”
Remind them that in 20% of US counties, 0.40% of the entire population has died from COVID
David Young –
Is it possible you don’t understand your error?
I mean it’s so obvious.
And laughable.
It’s not possible you don’t see it, right?
David Young –
Do I really need to explain it to you?
100% – 0.4% = 99.6% assuming most were infected. In some counties with high fatalities that’s not too much of a stretch. I mean only children will quibble with even 99.2% assuming only half had been infected. But I forgot Joshie, you are a child.
David Young –
Wow.
Survivor rate means people who were infected and died.
% of the population who died /= survivor rate.
Do you understand now?
Sorry,
David Young –
Wow.
Survivor rate means people who were infected and DIDN’T die.
% of the population who died /= survivor rate.
Do you understand now?
David Young –
> 100% – 0.4% = 99.6% assuming most were infected.
No. Your math would mean that 100% were infected. That’s obviously not the case.
Unreal.
You make an obvious error and then then flail away to try to cover your tracks instead of just acknowledging your error. What’s up with that?
Are you ashamed because I can see an obvious error that you missed?
It’s OK. David Young. You’ll be Ok even if you make an obvious error. It just makes it worse if you make a a lame attempt to hide it. And it’s not what renown scientists such as yourself should do.
Just acknowledge your error and move on.
OK perhaps it should have been 99.2% but its irrelevant and a throw away number anyway. Only a child like you would waste time on this but I forgot your time is worthless.
David Young –
Let me remind you what you said:
> Is 99.8% that different from 99.6%?
Your math was wrong. Even with your lame attempt to cover up for your error, you were off by 300%. And it was simple math. You were confused. It’s not that big a deal.
But it’s a problem when you ger confused and make such an obvious error and then try to hide your error, and then when you can’t hide it, try to diminish your error.
Renown scientists shouldn’t make obvious errors that someone like me can see so easily. But if it happens, renown scientists should be appreciative that their error was pointed out and just move on.
dpy, Joshua,
have you considered getting a room?
I’m sure you could thrash this out.
>>Next time someone says “But Florida vs. California”
If CA is doing such a great job why are people leaving?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/40-san-francisco-residents-plan-200200119.html
If Democrats are so good at central planning why doesn’t the big picture ever work out? Maybe because they are not looking at larger complexities on issues. Strong ideologs make weak managers.
BTW, Joshua, do you remember when Steve Mosher used to accuse anyone who complained about the strict moderation practiced at ATTP of not respecting a visit in someone else’s house. We are all visitors in this blog. Posting something that you and Willard would snip or delete if it was done by dpy at ATTP is not following a age old ethic that still applies.
Well now, there’s a disturbing thought.
COVID-19 lockdowns caused more deaths instead of reducing them, study finds.
>>Next time someone says “But Florida vs. California”
If CA is doing such a great job why are people leaving?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/40-san-francisco-residents-plan-200200119.html
Ron –
> If CA is doing such a great job why are people leaving?
Are you seriously making the argument that the polling results re San Francisco are a function of Cali state COVID policies relative to FL COVID policies?
The CDC’s official survival rate is 98.2%, but the CDC officially says the case counts used to come up with that are wrong, low, because of the dearth of testing in early days. So the CDC officially says the survival rate was much better than the reported rate.
For example, the CDC official numbers says you had only a 65% chance of surviving Covid in New York City vs a 98.3% chance of surviving covid in Texas. But we don’t say this because it’s one of those times when the truth almost matches the media narrative- Greg Abbott didn’t really personally save more people than killer Cuomo, they just had better testing in Texas by the time Covid arrived there (from New York City according to the New York Times).
And, of course, survival rate is relative to the demographics.
In Virginia, a blue state whose first real wave happened after testing became more available and accurate, the survival rate for those under 30 years old was 99.9% (and that’s lower than actual given that the highest number of asymptomatic and never discovered cases were among the young.)
Survival rate for those over 70 was 86.3% which is probably closer to accurate given that those over 70 were hit hard and more likely to notice it and get tested.
Is my argument: “…polling results re San Francisco are a function of Cali state COVID policies?”
A year-plus of the largest state government intervention into personal lives might have something to do with people wanting to move to states where there was more respect for individual liberty. Are you saying that’s an outrageous correlation/causation?
Although most of the survey captured the rise in homelessness and crime, covid was also mentioned. This was before yesterday’s study that CA residents can read and find out that “shelter in place” interventions made overall life outcomes worse. That was my second link in that comment. Here from the link about the survey:
`Stevens added: “I honestly think in the last three years, we’ve seen a massive decline in the quality of life, and that was only enhanced over COVID. `
Centralized authority is always unwieldy claw and invariably produces unintended consequences. USA’s founders, realizing this was true since the beginning of civilization, said things like: “That government is best which governs least.”
Ron –
> A year-plus of the largest state government intervention into personal lives might have something to do with people wanting to move to states where there was more respect for individual liberty. Are you saying that’s an outrageous correlation/causation?
The trend captured in that polling reflects a convergence of many developments over a period of years and decades, including long-standing zoning policies, the enormous economic surge and income inequality in that areas due to the explosion in tech in the region, the opioid crisis, other areas shipping their homeless to that area on greyhounds, the ways in which specifics of that region attract homeless people, redlining, racial dynamics, development and gentrification in surrounding areas, etc.
I get that it’s tempting to seek out simplistic casual explanations, particularly when they satisfy political biases, but yeah, I do think that while not “outrageous,” it is pretty facile and something that people should work hard to avoid.
> A year-plus of the largest state government intervention into personal lives might have something to do with people wanting to move to states where there was more respect for individual liberty. Are you saying that’s an outrageous correlation/causation?
The trend captured in that polling reflects a convergence of many developments over a period of years and decades, including long-standing zoning policies, the enormous economic surge and income inequality in that areas due to the explosion in tech in the region, the opioid crisis, other areas shipping their homeless to that area on greyhounds, the ways in which specifics of that region attract homeless people, redlining, racial dynamics, development and gentrification in surrounding areas, etc.
> A year-plus of the largest state government intervention into personal lives might have something to do with people wanting to move to states where there was more respect for individual liberty. Are you saying that’s an outrageous correlation/causation?
The tr*nd c*ptured in th*t p*lling r*flects a c*nvergence of m*ny d*velopments over a p*riod of years and d*cades, incl*ding l*ng-standing z*ning p*licies, the en*rmous ec*nomic s*rge and inc*me inequ*lity in that area due to the expl*sion in tech in the r*gion, the op*oid cris*s, other are*s shipp*ng their hom*less to that area on gr*yhounds, the ways in which sp*cifics of that r*gion attr*ct hom*less people, r*dlining, raci*l dyn*mics, dev*lopment and g*ntrification in surr*unding ar*as, etc.
I get that it’s tempting to seek out simplistic casual explanations, particularly when they satisfy political biases, but yeah, I do think that while not “outrageous,” it is pretty facile and something that people should work hard to avoid.
Particularly since SF has had relative success with COVID, with a high rate of compliance. My guess is that if you polled the people in the area about their satisfaction with the regional COVID policies in particular, you’d find a fairly high level of positive ratings.
Ron –
Here.
I guess this is because of San Francisco’s COVID policies also?
-snip-
West Virginia has highest population exodus in the country
-snip-
Yah, I think you should strengthen your approach to assessing cauality.
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/554900-west-virginia-has-highest-population-exodus-in-the-country
Your caution to me on causation of CA state exodus is a link to West Virginia population decline. What do you believe that is from? Could it possibly be something to do with Obama policy on coal combined with cheap natural gas from hydraulic fracking? Or is that too facile?
CA governor is facing a recall due to mainly to Covid policy. Right of wrong?
Ron –
You linked at an article with a description of polling in San Francisco, and from that attributed cauality to the shown trend of more people wantjng to leave the area to COVID policies, with ZERO evidence for why that association would be a causal one as opposed to a spurious one.
I explained that the tend is a long-standing one that far predates COVID, that it’s associated with MANY other factors, and that likely, in fact, the COVID policies in the Bay Area would generally viewed positively among the residents there.
I linked to the arcike about the exodus in West Virginia to underscore the point that there are a variety of reasons that people leave areas and that when you project your own political views onto other people to explain their behaviors, you might want to think things through a bit.
But in response, you amusingly then move on to attributing a long-standing trend in West Virginia, with an obviously multi-factorial cauality, to another politician you don’t like.
Ron, just because there are politicians you don’t like, and just ’cause you don’t like libruls, you really should consider whether your propensity to blame every development over the entire planet to them is well-grounded. You may well find, if you think things through, that sometimes your strong dislike for some 1/2 of your fellow Americans can lead your thinking astray and into being overly confident about simplistic and facile notions of cauality.
Obviously, the cauality behind the trend of people wanting to leave San Francisco is a multi-factorial mechanism. I have no doubt that some of the factors may well be a result of the policies and views of people you don’t like, but I would suggest that the cauality you suggested above is facile and doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. If you don’t agree, you’re certainly entitled to your view.
Joshua, you wrote: “You linked at an article with a description of polling in San Francisco, and from that attributed cauality to the shown trend of more people wantjng to leave the area to COVID policies, with ZERO evidence for why that association would be a causal one as opposed to a spurious one.”
That you see zero evidence of causality is your privilege. That is not the same as there being zero evidence. Not every piece of information is a reproducible fact resulting from a perfectly controlled experiment. For example, only 1.1 C in climate sensitivity that is derived from lab science, which is arguably a beneficial amount of warming. The 2-5C ECS in models are not based on controlled experimental science nor have demonstrated any predictive skill. Yet you base your life’s aspirations on that faith.
I pointed out that CA just completed a successful petition with over 2 million verified signatures calling for its governor to be removed. And you believe this has zero to do with his Covid policies?
This is the second time I am asking.
BTW, I said nothing about disliking Obama or liberals. I don’t even dislike you. Perhaps your false assumption of my dislikes is based on your personal tendency to dislike someone you disagree with. If that is the case it is quite common. In the wider perspective It might part of the collapse of trust I have commented about. I believe in a personal ethic to make a point not to dislike people I disagree with. I have arrived at this not from religious indoctrination but from observing that such an ethic leads to a happier life. Perhaps the sharing of this ethic has some causation for the correlation of my reasoning to be in line with the Judeo-Christian POV even though I do not practice a religion. I respect people that go to church to be reminded of forgiveness. It leads to happiness and societal order without coercions (I think).
Ron –
My initial response is at this link:
https://judithcurry.com/2021/05/23/collapse-of-the-fake-consensus-on-covid-19-origins/#comment-954168
But this discussion is quite intersting. As near as I can tell, you think that bacially any associations you can find between (even non-longitidonal) phenomena – such as people expressing the desire to move out of the Bay Area, and a recall campaign against Newsome – is evidence of causality. The evidence of the association could be just observational, subjectively determined, unquantified, etc., but it still suffices for you to determine cauality just ’cause you think it’s causal?
Now I’m thinking that can’t be right – you can’t really think that’s sufficient to be considered evidence of cauality – but I’m not sure becauae it does seem to me be what you’re arguing. As long as you think the relationship is causal, no standard of evidence is required – is that right?
Thus, a preexisting trend of people expressing the desire to move out of the Bay Area, that existed before COVID, despite that it’s preexisting and in association with a shortage of affordable housing and an increase in the homeless population and an increase in crime, etc., can be caused by Newsome’s COVID policies because there’s a recall campaign and because you think his policies were an unprecedented infringement of freedom.
Now if I have that wrong, I’m hoping you could explain what conditions you think are needed to establish cauality and how you apply those standards in this situation of people expressing the desire to move out of the Bay Area.
Joshua, Sorry to have dropped the thread. I got very busy. Let’s leave it at what we mutually agree upon.
1) People are leaving CA despite having perhaps the best climate in the USA and being the home to vibrant industries. Though people when polled will say they are leaving due to poor state government policies we will agree that there is no ironclad proof of why people truly want to leave.
2) We agree that although a petition to recall the governor of CA, which got over 2 million verified signatures, initiated just after the winter lockdowns, that is not ironclad proof that it had anything to do with the his Covid lockdowns.
Ron –
> Though people when polled will say they are leaving due to poor state government policies…
I’m not sure what you’re talking about. The article you linked quoted people talking about increased crime and homelessness as a causal factor in SF for people’s thoughts about moving out of the area – in fact, there isn’t even mention of their intent to move OUT OF THE STATE. There was no mention of state-level policies. The article refers to polling on people expressing the desire to move out of the city.
Of course, one could possibly argue that the increased homelessness and crime are the result of state-level policies but you haven’t laid out such an argument.
And once again, the trend in those problems predates the COVID era, and thus the COVID state-level policies to which you attributed the trend talked about in the article.
> we will agree that there is no ironclad proof of why people truly want to leave.
This is an absurdism/absolutism spin. I’m not just saying that your putative causal mechanism isn’t “iron clad,” I’m saying there are solid reasons to consider it basically implausible except to a very minor extent – given that there are other factors which are specific to the Bay Area that would likely explain the Bay Area trend described in the article, and given that the trend predates the COVID-era state policies that you’re saying are causal to the more recent trend in one specific area.
> We agree that although a petition to recall the governor of CA, which got over 2 million verified signatures, initiated just after the winter lockdowns, that is not ironclad proof that it had anything to do with the his Covid lockdowns.
This of course, is a non-sequitur. I haven’t said anything about whether Newsome’s handling of COVID might be explanatory, to any particular extent, for the recall effort. In fact, what I’ve been saying is that your conflating of that issue with the Bay Area-specific trend highlighted in the article is what makes your statements of attribution poorly supported.
It’s hard for us to reach agreement about what we do and don’t agree about when you have linked to an article that discusses one issue and you use it as evidence to attribute causality on a completely different issue.
Perhaps as a start we should try to reach agreement on what we’re talking about?
Ron Graf: Here is a link to the first study I found on Google Scholar.
Thank you for the link.
“Joshua | July 1, 2021 at 6:44 am |
Frank –
8 haven’t looked in detail to assess the veracity, but fwiw:”
Josh – you obviously did not assess the validity of data presented by Greg travis
Every chart Greg Travis presents is inconsistent with the data from john hopkins
The delta between california and florida is approx 10% for both death rates and infection rates (on a per capita basis) . Yet Greg travis charts show a delta of more than 50%-60% per capita delta.
See 91-divoc (using john hopkins data)
Joe –
> Yet Greg travis charts show a delta of more than 50%-60% per capita delta.
Where, in the tweets I reposted, are you talking about where he compared Florida to Cali?
And he sourced John [sic] Hopkins data.
Josh comment – Where, in the tweets I reposted, are you talking about where he compared Florida to Cali?
“Joshua | July 1, 2021 at 6:50 am |
Not to mention, Florida has lower per capita testing and higher per capita infection than Cali. The gaps aren’t huge and I don’t know how age gradient factors in, but comparing FL and CA”
Josh ‘s comment – “And he sourced John [sic] Hopkins data.”
Josh – look at the Cali v Fl county comparison – compare the inconsistency with 91-divoc.
You should be able to spot the discrepancy , its pretty obvious. The math error renders the rest of Greg Travis analysis dubious.
Personally, I think that aggregating data at the state level isn’t very informative at all. Too much diversity and too many confounding variables, both within and across states, to make that much of anything other than an exercise in confirmation bias.
It’s uninformative, imo, in much the same way that aggregating IFR across all ages a isn’t informative.
But that said, FL currently has higher per capita infections and mortality than Cali, despite both states being mostly open.
Cumulatively, Florida has a higher infection rate and a lower testing rate, which obviously suggests that the infection rate differential is even higher than what shows in the infection rate stats.
Without having the data on how the age gradient interacts with the higher infection rate in Florida, it’s hard to assess what any of that means.
And it would be too early to assess factors like economic advantages in Florida from being more open, or reduced impact on children due to schools being more open.
Joe –
Where in the tweets I posted did he compare FL to Cali?
> Josh – look at the Cali v Fl county comparison – compare the inconsistency with 91-divoc.
Wait. Now you’re taking about the COUNTY LEVEL data? Before you referenced numbers for the states on the whole.
Which county level stats did he get wrong?
Joe –
Wait – I was the one who said the following:
“Joshua | July 1, 2021 at 6:50 am |
Not to mention, Florida has lower per capita testing and higher per capita infection than Cali. The gaps aren’t huge and I don’t know how age gradient factors in, but comparing FL and CA”
Did you think that was him?
“Joshua | July 1, 2021 at 9:50 am |
> Josh – look at the Cali v Fl county comparison – compare the inconsistency with 91-divoc.
Wait. Now you’re taking about the COUNTY LEVEL data? Before you referenced numbers for the states on the whole.
Which county level stats did he get wrong?”
Josh – the discrepancy is obvious – but I didnt expect you to catch it
Joe –
I’m confused.
You said his charts comparing at the state level are off and showed a 50%-60% discrepancy when the actual discrepancy is @10%.
I don’t see where he compared at the state levek in the tweets I posted.
I compared at the state level and offered no charts and mentioned no specific figures.
You say his citations of John [Hopkins] data are obviously erroneous. I’ve asked you to point to which of his citations are off and you hand wave to some vague comparison without being specific.
> Josh – the discrepancy is obvious – but I didnt expect you to catch it
Now come the insults.
Where did he reference state-level data?
Where did he reference state-level data in error?
Help. Me out here. I’m obviously not very smart. Please explain with some level of specific what his errors were.
Should have been,
Where did he reference state-level data?
Or
Where did he reference state-level data in error?
Or
Where did he reference county-lecel data in error?
Next time someone says something incoherent about red states, remind them that New York City was the primary source of all cases and deaths in the nation (including the primary source in red states). That is because New York didn’t actually lock down and their residents fled blue states to red ones. Because New Yorkers knew the BS about blue states being “safer” was… BS.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/us/new-york-city-coronavirus-outbreak.html
In other words, Cuomo and DeBlasio sent infected New Yorkers to Florida and Joshua wants to blame DeSantis for it. And he really wants you to know that Florida did “worse” with the virus than New York, despite the fact that New York had 50% more deaths per capita.
Me? I never thought it was possible or reasonable to expect to be able to “lock down” New York City or Boston or Detroit. The best you could do was
1. limit the exodus from those cities, their state and municipal leaders did the opposite of that.
2. mitigate the impact. State and municipal leaders did the opposite of that, they left the hospital ship and Javit’s Center treatment centers empty and ordered old people to return to nursing homes.
3. Seek treatment for those with the disease. Trump suggested that so it was illegitimate for anyone to attempt to do this.
4. Fast track a vaccine. The federal government did this in 2020, the new administration in 2021 says they did it.
5. Be consistent, honest and informative with your medical advice. “Health experts” did the opposite of this- masks don’t work/work, gatherings to protest lockdowns are dangerous and must stop, but to protest police departments are safe and should continue; HCQ doesn’t work, see this retracted “study” with fake data; it’s safe to ditch the mask when you’re vaccinated unless this conflicts with your mandate narrative; etc etc etc.
Jeff –
> Next time someone says something incoherent about red states…
I’m betting you simply won’t write a comment w/o deliberately mischaracterizing what someone that you disagree with says, or deliberately constructing a strawman.
I used to give you the benefit of the doubt in that regard, but you’ve demonstrated that it’s not something that matters to you.
You’d have a point if you hadn’t literally just posted a series of tweets beginning with a cherry pick attempting to argue that Florida and rural red counties suffered comparably high to California.
“Next time someone says but California vs Florida…”
And I just demonstrated that the scientific evidence was that it was easier to drive to Florida than California from New York. 82% of the cases in the south were courtesy of Gov Cuomo’s “locked down” New Yorkers, 43% out west.
But, again, my point is that this insistence on a failed narrative is more than just bad politics, it’s harmful to health policy. How do you evaluate the success of policies if you look at that NYT map and say: “look how effective it was to order people in New York to stay home!”
If you read what I wrote, you’d see that Cuomo should get a pass (for a lot of this anyway). I don’t think he or anyone else could have stopped the exodus of New Yorkers, so we need to think about ways to minimize the impact of that which you cannot prevent. We can’t, of course, because the narrative requires we all assume New Yorkers stayed home even as science shows Interstate 95, north and south from NYC was the Covid highway.
One way to minimize the impact could be “contact tracing” but we learned that has two flaws.
First: 40% of those New Yorkers with Covid still, to this day, have no idea they had it, rendering contact tracers moot.
Second: Lockdowns orders (and the narrative around them) prevent contact tracing. To be effective, contact tracers would have to get New Yorkers to voluntarily confess all instances where they violated local quarantines as well as those in New York. So the tracer can document all links between them personally and hospitalizations and deaths in a state where they weren’t supposed to be. Nobody with an IQ would do that.
Second flaw: 40% of those New Yorkers with Covid still, to this day, have no idea they had it, rendering contact tracers moot.
But we can’t look at facts, the narrative won’t permit it. We’re not allowed to say Georgia and Florida had problems because I-95 runs from NYC to Key West. Even when the data shows us this. We’re not allowed to say this because some newspapers and TV shows had too much fun making up stories about Republican governors.
And what’s the outcome of this? When the next pandemic hits, we’ll watch NY “lock down” and we’ll watch NYC residents ignore it and rush south down I-95 and north- poor little Rhode Island had an obscenely high death rate because NYC residents took I-95 to vacation homes there. But… Rhode Island is blue, so even though the death rate there is 46% higher than Florida and is higher today than in Florida, no policy or politician could possibly be worth reviewing there. Which means there is obviously nothing to do differently next time.
And we won’t. CNN will tell us Florida is “bad,” Rhode Island is “good” and the death toll will go up and up and up. Because we can’t evaluate policy.
Jeff’s point is relevant and correct of course. As usual Joshie’s comments are vague and cherry picked items from that leading scientific journal Twitter. The real evidence on masks is that they don’t work well in a community setting, particularly cloth masks.
Interesting, not to mention amusing, that none of you have any sort of refutation of what Greg said. Well, except for Joe’s vague claim for which he can’t be specific despite numerous requests, that he was wrong on the data he used in a comparison type he never even mentioned.
Then again, Joe used the technical term “delta” so I guess he must have been right. Lol.
“not to mention amusing, that none of you have any sort of refutation of what Greg said. ”
Well except for the specific rebuttal of his comparison of California to Florida, using actual data, and analysis vetted and reported by the New York Times and then augmented by CDC state-by-state reporting.
But.. other than that, yah, nada. Meanwhile you’ve confirmed everything Greg said by noting that it’s Twitter. So there.
> Well except for the specific rebuttal of his comparison of California to Florida, using actual data, and analysis vetted and reported by the New York Times and then augmented by CDC state-by-state reporting.
Lol.
Please point to the data where he compared Cali to FL (at least in the tweets I posted).
You boys be hilarious.
A new epidemic has broken out here at Climate Etc.
A handwaving epsidemic, where denizens claim that Greg’s comparison of infection rates Florida to infection rates in Cali (at the state level) are not consistent with John[sic] Hopkins’ data (which he cites).
Only two problems. The first is that despite the handwaving and arguments by assertion, none of my much beloved friends have actually pointed to any EVIDENCE showing inaccuracies in the data he charted, despite numerous requests that they do so.
The second, which is much more amusing, is that they can’t even point to where he charted data comparing infection rates in Florida to infection rates in Cali (at the state level). It seems that Greg is just moving in their heads?
This is why I love me some Climate Etc.
Now I don’t know that his data are accurate, and if his data are in error, I would appreciate it if someone could actually show where that’s the case.
Not to say I don’t appreciate the frantic handwaving also, as it’s quite amusing.
Just to add, further, as I’ve stated before – I’m certainly no expert but it seems to me that comparing state-level data are if limited utility anyway – given the heterogeneity within and between states.
What seems more intersting to me would be comparisons if country level data, as through such comparisons it might be easier to identify those variables that help explain differences in infection rates and the like.
I realize that kind of comparison doesn’t fit as well with the cheap thrill of exploiting death and illness to serve a partisan political agenda, if course. So don’t let anything get in the way of your enjoyment of filtering the state-level data so as to fulfill your urges in that regard. I get that hatin’ on some libruls feels satisfying for you.
Joshie wastes hours on Twitter tweets of unknown accuracy from someone with no qualifications. I guess if your time has no value, you don’t care if you waste it. I suggest you try harder to not abuse the fact that you are still allowed to comment here and find something that might be convincing.
Your twattle about county data is totally unsupported speculation. I thought you were against comparing disparate places. Counties even with a given state have widely varying demographics, living patterns, etc. Whole states are more uniform in these terms.
Sorry – thar should have been county level data, not country level data.
I look forward to the opportunity of thanking my much beloved friends here at Climate Etc. for showing me the evidence proving Greg’s charts to be inaccurate, so I can inform him of his errors.
Thanks in advance, boyz.
I’ll let the others explain Johns Hopkins disparity, but one of your stats from Twitter – one that you apparently love – is a delightful example of how you can abuse statistics to try to score political points.
“Next time someone says.
“COVID has a 99.8% survival rate”
Remind them that in 20% of US counties, 0.40% of the entire population has died from COVID”
Greg Twitter gone out to find himself some sparsely populated counties that he can use dishonestly in order to cast doubt on an entirely true statement- the official survival rate is 99.8% (in fact the survival is higher.)
There are counties in this country where you can reach “.4 of the entire population” if 10 people die of covid. If the regional nursing home for a rural state is in one county you can easily get Greg’s scary number of the day.
Greg knows this even if Joshua doesn’t. Which is why Joshua is Greg’s audience.
We said the lab leak hypothesis was a right wing conspiracy.
We didn’t do what we should’ve done because Trump was in the story.
We thought Trump was a liar.
You may think therefore what he says has no content.
But what that really means, the truth is the opposite of what he says.
Science!
These are what your heroes are saying. Unaccountable heroes. It seems obvious that you need new heroes.
@drdrew
Drew is back, and pissed. It’s about the “I” word, which makes @TeamYouTube yank our content off the their pristine platform. Have no fear @PierreKory coming here for you on Twitter, Facebook & Twitch TV!
——————————
The I word. It’s great. So here comes a new variant. Will Ivermectin work against that? It’s an anti-viral and anti-inflammatory. And it’s ready to roll. Will you have to get vaccinated again with something new?
But I guess what’s important is big Pharma having some way to make more money. Could the establishment burn its house down any miore than it all ready has?
10 Worst US States on the Basis of Cumulative Infections. (Cumulative infections is the good measure of the risk you have running by living in the state independent of other factors.)
ND 14.5%
RI 14.4%
SD 14.1%
UT 13,9%
TN 12.5%
AZ 12.3%
IO 11.9%
WI 11.6%
NB 11.6%
SC 11.6%
US Mean: 10.1% 35 States are within +/- 2% of this mean. IMO, relatively homogeneous in the end given regional heterogeneity during the pandemic. (As we approach herd immunity, the states that have done the best have a harder time staying ahead, due to less fear and more susceptible people. Michigan had been doing well )
10 Best US states on the Basis of Cumulative Infections
HI 2.6%
VT 3.9%
OR 5.0%
ME 5.1%
WA 6.0%
DC 7.0%
NH 7.3%
MA 7,7%
VA 8.0%
WV 9.2%
Obviously, there is some connection with red states and blue states. I once thought RI did worse simple because 2/3rds of the population live in the county of Providence and therefore was highly urban. However the city of Providence is less than 1/5 the population. Washington DC is essential all urban and had half as many cases. If you look at counties in hard hit ND and SD, more densely and less densely populated counties had similar percentages of (and scatter in) cumulative cases.
Some states are very heterogeneous. Miami-Dade may the the hardest-hit large county in the country with 18.5% cumulative infections, but with only 14% of the population, the state looks relatively normal with 10.8% of the population having tested positive. It is worth remembering that Miami-Dade is the bluest part of the state.
Frank –
> Obviously, there is some connection with red states and blue states.
There’s an association, but I”m skeptical about whether, or at least how much, it’s a spurious association.
There are so many related and likely predictive influences, interaction and mediatory/moderator effects: the timing of when the pandemic hit, factors like SES or population density, or baseline health status, heterogeneity within the States, etc., that I think teasing out the influence of state-level policy is extremely difficult, let alone teasing out the influence of more local-level policy.
And of course, on top of trying to tease out the impact of State-level policies, then you have to tease out the interaction behavioral signals of blue/red orientation, when then interacts with the potential (and likely) confounding variable of who is an essential worker who had to go to a high density workplace, particularly early-on in the pandemic.
I dunno. I’m certainly no expert, but my non-expert view is that this is waaaaay to complicated, with waaaaay to many potential confounds, to meaningfully assign causality to red/blue associations. Especially when you weigh that against the “motivating” bias to filter information related to the associations so as to reinforce preexisting ideological views, and put all that on top of the problems with the data collection, the necessarily limiting constraint of having only observational and retrospective data available (and the relative lack of long-term longitudinal data)….
Seems to me that the first step in any analysis about COVID should be to caveat everything with strong conditionality, and humility.
Tony –
> Please rise above any perceived insults,…
From my side, consider it done.
Frank, I really don’t know why you persist in using this biased metric of cumulative “infections.” The reason is obvious. Early in the pandemic there was a severe shortage of tests so vastly more infections were missed. This metric makes states with early surges like New York look vastly better and states like Florida worse because their surge was after testing became readily available. The following data is strong evidence of this well known fact.
State. Cases/million. Deaths/million
NY 110,465 2776
Florida 103,457 1762
Michigan 100,134 2103
Is that an accident or just another example of your selection bias Frank?
Population fatality rates are not nearly as biased. Throughout the pandemic most people who were hospitalized with flu like symptoms got priority for testing and so not too many covid deaths were missed.
I gave those statistics above. You can easily find the data on Worldometer and can verify that there appears to be little correlation between these numbers and severity of state mandates. Here’s another source:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covid19-death-rates-us-by-state/
This is quite strong evidence that red states did not do worse than blue states at all. In fact, given its high elderly population, Florida did at least as well as other big blue states. That arguably includes California. The propagandistic attempts to tarnish DeSantis while whitewashing Cuomo’s political hack performance is stunning and by itself enough to show that our corporate media are completely corrupt and will lie about anything.
Further, population fatality rates of all states (neglecting the top and bottom 10) range from 0.1% to 0.2% roughly by early February. The epidemic started declining dramatically starting about January 10 long before vaccination could have had much effect. If we assume the herd immunity threshold was roughly 50% at that time, that implies an IFR of 0.2% to 0.4%. This is admittedly not determinative but it does agree with Ioannidis’ recent meta-analysis as well as his March of 2020 guess.
DPY: I offered both state cumulative infection and death data, but comments have now separated them. I cited the cumulative infection data first because IMO it better reflects the effectiveness of state policies.
As I said before, the number of people testing positive where you live is a useful measure of the RISK you are running of getting COVID by living in your area. Cumulative infections measure cumulative risk. If you’ve got 100 new cases/day/100,000 and each person is infectious for 5 days, then 0.5% of the people around you are infectious. (Some asymptomatic infections aren’t being detected by PCR and there is a lower risk of those being transmitted to you. Pre-symptomatic infections get detected in a day or two.) You’d be 10-fold safer where there are 10 new confirmed infections/day/100,000, and 100-fold safer where there is only 1 (as there was in much of Europe in the summer of 2020 and in South Korea throughout the pandemic). Government policies such as masks, social distancing, closing or restricting risky, non-essential businesses like gyms and bars can all reduce the number of infections and therefore risk. Quick test turnaround time and contact tracing can also help.
The government can do nothing to minimize additional risk of dying associated with the age of my 93-year-mother in law (who needs daily help and occasional doctor’s visits). Or the addition risk to someone who is overweight or has diabetes or heart disease. These factors determine what fraction of infections will lead to deaths. I’m not aware of what the government can do to prevent someone from dying once they have been infected. If you are worried that Florida’s large retirement population put it at a disadvantage when the pandemic is measured by cumulative deaths, look at the cumulative infection data I provided.
Better treatment has improved the chances that an infected person will survive, but government policy isn’t responsible for improving treatment. Today, more deadly variants are probably causing more deaths per infection, but government policy isn’t to blame. The latest Nature says infection with the Delta variant is hospitalizing twice as many per infection than the Alpha. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01696-3?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20210701&utm_source=nature_etoc&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20210701&sap-outbound-id=EC9B40F3410825B5D28EE6EC9E006FB5C6E9B676
The vast majority of the pandemic occurred when access to testing was not a problem. 11% of American deaths occurred before May 1, 2020, but only 3.3% of confirmed infection. Since death occurs 2-4 weeks after infection, so THERE WAS LITTLE GOVERNMENT POLICY COULD DO to to prevent deaths before May 1. Another 7% of deaths occurred in May (many from infections detected in April), but only 2% of positive tests. 12% of deaths and 12% of infections occurred from 6/1 to 9/1. Test positivity was below 10% by May 1 and 5% by June 1 (and 14% in Jan21). I think the period where limited testing seriously distorted our measures of the pandemic ended in early May, soon after government policy began to have an impact on the pandemic.
(Finally, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at county cumulative infection data hoping to detect the influence of approaching herd immunity. At the county level, the death data is really noisy.)
By focusing on cumulative infections rather than cumulative deaths, I’m under weighting the first month or so of the pandemic when government policy could do little to prevent death. And I’m eliminating the influence of factors (such as age) that the government can’t control, including Florida’s large retirement population. So I showed this data first and then provided death data for those who didn’t agree with my rational. If I had easy access to state death data after May 1 or May 15 – the period during which government policy could have had an impact – I would have cited it.
State. Cases/million. Deaths/million
NY 110,465 2776
Florida 103,457 1762
Michigan 100,134 2103
If you believe the IFR is similar in Florida and New York and that many fewer cases were missed in Florida, New York cases were too low by about 35% or so. Taking into account that the IFR should be higher in Florida, that number could be higher. That’s not a rounding error and would lead to incorrect conclusions.
The course of the pandemic was similar in Florida and Michigan and indeed their cases/million are very close. Since Michigan had 20% more deaths /million and Florida has a much older population, that seems rather strong circumstantial evidence that Florida did better and Witchmer’s draconian measures didn’t work. It’s not really relevant why they didn’t work since she tried very hard to get compliance. One can also add California which had asimilar pattern for the epidemic. Either Newsome is totally incompetant (which I don’t discount as a possibility) or the strict measures didn’t really work.
It remains a mystery to me as to why Washington state for example did so well. Washingtonians tend to be sheep who are easily manipulated by leftist ideology but I doubt that compliance was better than in most other parts of the country based on my observations particularly in rural and semi-rural parts of the state. Most people were using totally ineffective cloth masks with distinctive or personalized markings. It is also true that enforcement of the dictates was nearly impossible and many county sherifs declared their counties to be sanctuary counties for covid mandates. Maybe its the climate:-)
It appears to me that by January 20 the epidemic was in strong decline in most parts of the country. I believe that can only be due to herd immunity as weather was not changing for another 6 weeks and mitigations were all mostly in place and didn’t change much either.
The bottom line here I think is that in a free society, compliance with restrictions on constitutionally protected rights will most often be weak. That’s the way it should be even if it doesn’t minimize mortality or maximize life expectancy. I do fear that in our age of mass communication and a lying propagandistic media that perhaps half the population might actually be fooled for a while. But polls show that number to have declined to roughly 30% or even lower over the last few years.
> Washingtonians tend to be sheep who are easily manipulated by leftist ideology
C’mon, David.
David Young –
> The bottom line here I think is that in a free society, compliance with restrictions on constitutionally protected rights will most often be weak. That’s the way it should be even if it doesn’t minimize mortality or maximize life expectancy. I do fear that in our age of mass communication and a lying propagandistic media that perhaps half the population might actually be fooled for a while.
Indeed, the citizens of South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Finland, Denmark, Norway, New Zealand, Australia, etc., are clearly much worse off by having saved lives and protecting against illness, including among the healthcare workers who sacrificed and put their own health on the mine
And you Joshie are just a sarcastic teenager. You have no way of knowing if what they did really worked or if they were just lucky. Health care workers have a job to do and they did it. They are from time to time called on for overtime and the like. It’s their professional responsibility and knew when they signed up that there might be dangers. Unlike you Joshie, they are adults.
… on the line so folks like you could sit back and write blog comments.
> I do fear that in our age of mass communication and a lying propagandistic media that perhaps half the population might actually be fooled for a while.
Have you built your bunker yet? Alternatively, you could get a dog.
What a teenager response Joshie. Have you nothing substantial to say? I guess not.
A dog would indeed be a good idea, David.
I am not aware of the exsistence of bunker dogs, however:
“In the spring of 1943, a detachment of six scout dogs and two messenger dogs was sent to the Pacific in a test of their usefulness in combat situations. An observer was sent along, and after following the dogs around New Guinea from July to December of that year, he reported back that the animals had performed “consistently excellent.””
So dogs may be useful in the apocalypse. Remember Terminator? One may call their underground refuge a bunker. When robots dressed as us, come to get us, we will need bunker dogs. In what ways will dogs help us survive climate change?
Sorry teenagers, but we have owned dogs for decades. Right now I’m working on firearms markmanship and tactics and my wine cellar. A wine cellar might improve Joshie’s attitude, but I doubt he could get a firearms permit in NewYork given his challenges. Actually changing things is a better goal than a bunker.
Let me get this straight, David:
You’re trying to change things by improving your shooting and wining game?
David Young –
> What a teenager response…
That incapsulates so well what like about your comments. Amidst a constant stream of insults and diminutives, you take the time to call out “teenage responses.”
Can’t make that up.
Next, amidst a constant stream of insults and diminutives (and appealing to self authority), you’ll complain about ad hominems.
Oh, wait…
https://judithcurry.com/2021/05/23/collapse-of-the-fake-consensus-on-covid-19-origins/#comment-953043
Oh, wait…
https://judithcurry.com/2021/05/23/collapse-of-the-fake-consensus-on-covid-19-origins/#comment-953114
Oh, wait…
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/05/08/so-the-real-scandal-is-why-did-anyone-ever-listen-to-this-guy/#comment-1334980
I’ll just point out that your responses to both Ron and I here are content free. No data, no evidence, just rhetorical posturing and whining about truth telling. I’ll also point out that your constant repetition is also a childish pattern of behavior.
Your total pseudo-substantive points here in hundreds of comments is exactly 1 and that was a Twitter excerpt from someone with no qualifications. You made no effort to verify it and then whined when we didn’t do the work and prove him wrong. That’s lazy. You would rather gratify your schoolyard instincts. Sad, really.
Do better. BTW, It also explains why other commenters have lost patience with you.
> No data, no evidence
That’s actually false, David. For instance:
But even when you are confronted with what you perceive is real data and evidence, like Frank keeps offering you on a plate, you keep dismissing it, e.g.:
You’re just acting like a cranky uncle. No wonder you see adolescents around you.
Relax. Have a glass of wine. Go take a walk. Shoot some rounds.
Get back when you’ll feel better.
Willard you are not playing with a full deck. The argument was with Ron, not with me.
What Frank presented was a flawed metric. It’s flawed data and I don’t consider it evidence. I gave very conclusive proof that infections was a flawed metric. He later essentially admitted this fact by dealing with the fatality data.
Getting a life and actually trying to be honest beats sitting at home acting as if you are impaired.
David Young –
> . I’ll also point out that your constant repetition is also a childish pattern of behavior.
Sometimes self-parody is the only explanation for your comments, methinks. Just from what’s on this page (some quote you from @ 3 months ago – imagine how many times you repeated the same insult in between).
dpy6629 | June 26, 2021 at 1:02 pm |
… his unfocused ideas
dpy6629 | June 7, 2021 at 2:20 am |
… unfocused in his thinking.
dpy6629 | April 5, 2021 at 10:36 pm |
… an unfocused intellect.
dpy6629 | June 6, 2021 at 1:36 pm |
… people like yourself who are too unfocused
What a fascinating study you are for what a renown scientist can do when he gets triggered enough.
I at least repeat the truth but only responding to your repeated rhetorical devices. You mostly repeat falsehoods about what other people say.
> I don’t consider it evidence.
Of course you don’t, David. Which is my point.
So perhaps I wasn’t clear enough: if you were paying more attention to what Frank says, perhaps you’d have a leg to stand on when you pontificate on fact and evidence. Perhaps if you weren’t spicing your comments with troglodyte monologues it’d look better too.
You got dogs. You drink wine. that’s cool. Try to go organic. You’re learning tactical? As a ninja trained in gorilla warfare, that’s cool with me.
I’m not that interested in your food fights. Too much time. You’re not worth it.
But let me ask you this: why are you turning Judy’s into a cess pool?
No Willard, you lied about the California article. That was Ron and not me. My comment was in reference to Joshie, not Frank. I never said Frank showed no evidence.
Both of your examples are lies and misrepresentations. Then you call me names.
David Young –
How typical. I show how you exactly fit your descriptor for being juvenile, then you move the goalposts. Iys as if you’re incapable of applying your standards evenly. Strange behavior for a renown scientist.
> You mostly repeat falsehoods about what other people say.
Another one of your favorite tricks is to call me a liar WHEN I QUOTE YOU.
David Young –
How typical. I show how you exactly fit your descriptor for being juvenile, then you move the goalposts. Iys as if you’re incapable of applying your standards evenly. Strange behavior for a renown scientist.
> You mostly repeat falsehoods about what other people say.
Another one of your favorite tricks is to call me a liar WHEN I QUOTE YOU. David
Typical convo with David Young…
David Young: “Repeating yourself is a childish pattern of behavior.”
Me: David, “Here is just one of the many examples of you repeating yourself.”
David Young; “Look Squirrel. Insult.”
Ragnaar –
Here Brett and Heather promote retracted study:
https://twitter.com/uberfeminist/status/1411447438481756162?s=19
Read about the retraction:
https://factcheck.org/2021/07/scicheck-flawed-paper-on-covid-19-vaccines-deaths-spreads-widely-before-retraction/
This is reason why Brett shouldn’t act like an expert on sh*t he knows nothing about.
> you lied about the California article
You’re just saying stuff once again, David.
If that rocks your boat, so be it.
I tried to help, Judy. You’re on your own now.
Joshua and David
Please give it a rest, your conversations have become beyond tedious and long winded, and in trading continual insults with each other you are also insulting Judith, her blog, and other commentators.
You can both do much better than this. Please rise above any perceived insults, stop this tedious quarreling and instead provide some informed comment on other topics.
tonyb
Yes Tony, sorry about that. Joshie does clutter up threads and make them unreadable. I personally don’t know why Judith doesn’t moderate more of his comments.
Joshie has a decades long track record as an internet stalker. He’s done it to Judith (and was put in moderation jail), Nic Lewis, and me. Which places me in very good company. He latches onto minor inconsistencies, errors that are not errors, or alleged “bias” and then generates thousands of comments endlessly repeating these vague and largely imaginary issues. Because of moderation, he has had to clean up his most obvious and personal tripe but what remains is still rank.
It’s a close call as to whether to ignore him (and allow his tripe to stand unchallenged) or to respond. Most commenters here agree that he is full of obvious errors and emotional rubbish. I’ve reproduced a long series of others comments that prove this. I suspect everyone else just skips his comments.
You can see his long winded essentially content free musings elsewhere on the blogosphere as well. My only conclusion is that he doesn’t have a life worth living with real people. It’s quite sad actually.
No Willard, you accussed me of ignoring evidence and lied twice in the process.
The issue of Californians leaving the state was Ron’s conversation not mine. I said nothing about it.
When I said there was no evidence, I was responding to Joshie’s tripe, not Frank. I never said that Frank had shown no evidence, merely that there was much better evidence which I provided.
> you accussed [sic] me of ignoring evidence
Here’s what I said, David:
Which you readily confirmed:
Please, for Judy’s sake. Stahp.
DPY: It appears to me that by January 20 the epidemic was in strong decline in most parts of the country. I believe that can only be due to herd immunity as weather was not changing for another 6 weeks and mitigations were all mostly in place and didn’t change much either.
This is grossly wrong. After declining rapidly from the peak in early January, confirmed infections (nationally) reached a plateau at the end of February and rose modestly through mid-April (despite vaccination). Only then did new infections decline steadily everywhere in the country, suggesting that “herd immunity” required about 40% vaccination in addition to immunity acquired by infection. The pandemic was about halfway to herd immunity when this decline began.
Actually behavior hadn’t returned to normal when this decline occurred. Many were still working from home, wearing masks and perhaps social distancing. When these unusual practices end, and metro cars are standing-room only with unmasked passengers at rush hour, even higher levels of immunity will be required to prevent outbreaks from spreading.
If you look at that decline in January, it occurred in most states about the same time regardless of whether they were among the worst or best in terms of cumulative infection. I was following the hardest hit areas of the country carefully, hoping to detect approaching herd immunity. When some large counties in ND, SD, and AZ had 15% of their population with confirmed infections and the nation as a whole was below 10%, the decline after the January peak was not caused by approaching herd immunity. Then Miami-Dade took the lead after DeSantis announced the end of mask mandates in February with 17% of the population having confirmed infections and 20% vaccination – with the pandemic still raging at 50 new cases/100,000/day. The decline in January and February was NOT caused by approaching herd immunity.
Perhaps you were fooled by a late February WSJ editorial by a prestigious doctor, Markey, who claimed that herd immunity had caused the decline and the pandemic would be over by the end of March. He cited his personal estimate that 6.7 Americans had become immune for every infection that had been confirmed by PCR. That meant that more than 50% of Americans were already immune and that vaccinations in March would quickly end the pandemic. IMO, his personal estimate was absurd given that several large counties in ND, SD and AZ had more than 15% cumulative infections at the time. Facebook banned this editorial because fact-checkers reported that the consensus estimate was that (at most) 4 Americans had become immune for every infection confirmed by PCR. Ironically, a plateau in new infections began immediately after this editorial was published surged modestly in April! Instead of issuing a correction, the WSJ complained about censorship by Facebook.
The Right, with its bias in favor of limited government, has consistently allowed its bias to promote misleading information about the pandemic. Gross failures included the politicization of masks (the least intrusive was to reduce spread), the Great Barrington Declaration (there was no way to protect the vulnerable before vaccines and ending restrictions during the fall surge would resulted in overflowing hospitals), and the misleading information about approaching herd immunity are all gross failures. FWIW, I generally share its bias for limited government. In general, it is hubris for the left to believe that their brilliance can radically and successfully reshape the government and society that has evolved over more than two and a half centuries. Slavery and Jim Crow are two obvious exceptions to this generalization. That makes me a conservative on many issues. However, even two and a half centuries ago, English common law and our Supreme Court gave the government wide, but not unlimited, power to protect citizens from pandemics. Unfortunately, Trump is a radical, not a conservative – challenging accumulated wisdom about race and not stereotyping minorities, free trade, defensive alliances, and limitations on executive authority. And he’s a conspiracy theorist who has been operating with at least as much ignorance of reality and excess authoritarianism as the radicals on the left.
So, what was the cause of the January decline? Americans tired of social distancing may have been careless over the Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years holidays, and then seen cases rising (and local hospitals at capacity?). Perhaps they decided to be more cautious in the new year, especially with vaccination proceeding at a slow pace. We do know that the 1918-20 Spanish flu came in three waves very distinct waves in most locations, with at least two of those waves and probably the third ending short of herd immunity, presumably because of changes in behavior and policy. (The avian flu became seasonal after 1920.) So behavior certainly could have caused the decline in January and February.
The Dakotas and Michigan are interesting cases, because they behaved differently from the rest of the country. The fall surge started first in the Dakotas and gradually expanded into the neighboring states and then the nation as a whole. In the Dakotas, the peak was in mid-November (not January) and by Christmas the surge was over and cases were down by about a factor of about ten. (There was a modest surge in March, showing that they hadn’t reached herd immunity.) On the other hand, Michigan’s fall surge was much weaker than its neighbors and the state was doing much better than average in terms of cumulative cases. Then something changed in the new year and Michigan surged to average cumulative infections while almost everywhere else was doing much better. The same thing happened in New Jersey and NYC suburbs. Did all the optimistic news about vaccination and re-opening the economy finally cause these locations to relax and become less disciplined?
Sorry Willard, you can’t stop lying and selectively ignoring what is written.
I have responded to Frank’s evidence which I said was flawed initially. I did not dismiss it. But you can quibble about exact wording which is all you seem to be able to do.
You have not acknowledged your lie about the CA flight discussion. And your carefully selected out of context quote mining is a shameless tactic of propagandists trying to discredit and not enlighten.
Frank, I’m a little surprised that you responded in such a vitriolic and political way to an issue that is really about how herd immunity is defined. I am also surprised that you ignored my well documented point that your favored tyrannical responses to the pandemic did not seem to cause better outcomes among US states.
The definition of herd immunity used by some epidemiologists and by you is not meaningful because there is no such thing as “normal conditions.” Thus the only meaningful metric is if R <1, when there is effective herd immunity for existing conditions. But that varies all over the place. This was discussed on another post. In case you have forgotten, an epidemiologist in Nature calculated herd immunity threshold for many countries last year and got between 7% and 78% (very roughly from memory). In other words it's not a universal constant. In fact it's highly variable. Yet you claim that if R is ever greater than 1 during a strong decline that herd immunity has not been reached. That is just pseudo-science based on fundamental logical errors.
You say:So, what was the cause of the January decline? Americans tired of social distancing may have been careless over the Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years holidays, and then seen cases rising (and local hospitals at capacity?). Perhaps they decided to be more cautious in the new year, especially with vaccination proceeding at a slow pace.
Basically, you have no explanation of the strong decline starting in mid January aside from an evidence free assertion that people let down their guard over the holidays. The fall rise started about November 1 long before the holidays and was quite strong right up until mid January. The same pattern is observable in virtually every European country including Sweden. I seriously doubt that across so many cultures the same behavior pattern took place. I think this is another instance of a strong need to feel that people can control outcomes with appropriate behaviors. Most things that happen are simply not controllable with behavior changes even though those with a strong need to control outcomes often lie to themselves and adopt dysfunctional behaviors particularly surrounding their diet. And you keep citing cumulative infections as if it’s a meaningful number. I showed you above that a rough calculation shows that it is in error by 35% or more in New York.
Also the decline was very strong and essentially monotonic, i.e., R never got much over 1.0. The number of daily cases declined a factor of 5 over the coarse of 2 months!!!! Deaths declined similarly and stayed monotone. Cases are currently almost flat but deaths continue their strong decline. The epidemic is really really over. You should celebrate instead of pouting that your analysis missed the strong decline and that many people didn’t do what you personally wanted them to do. Grow up Frank. You can’t and will never be able to control what other people do especially based on pseudo-science.
As to your apparent disgust with people utilizing their right of free speech in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, get used to it. There are at least a hundred million of us who are intent on preserving our God given rights. There are many other countries for you to choose where people have much less freedom.
Oh and you are lying about the “political right” indicating a highly emotional response to the pandemic. The great Barrington declaration was sighed by thousands of scientists and professionals. Many were not of the political right such as John Ioannidis. And you just can’t help lying about Trump. Trump so far as we can determine believes in racial equality of opportunity just like 99.9% of conservatives. Blaming the “right” for politicizing masks use is just blatantly biased. If anything it was Lord Fauci and left wingers who politicized them. What DeSantis did was supported by what limited science there was. You are I am guessing lying to yourself about this science. Masks in a community setting simply have no evidence especially cloth masks which are useless.
I really am sorry Frank to see you descend into such political emotion and become an unreliable source of information. The bottom line which you ignored in your long winded rant is that there is no correlation of the severity of the tyranny imposed by governors and the death rate from this virus. You didn’t respond to what I said about Florida vs. Michigan perhaps because there is no rational response. Florida came out a lot better. My theory is that DeSantos did a much better job on nursing homes and senior communities in his state. The demonization of DeSantos and the beatification of killer Cuomo and Lord Fauci is the most disgusting example of propaganda perhaps in all American history. That was not done by your bogeyman, the political right, either. And you fell for it apparently.
I don’t think there is any implied right of state governments to suspend fundamental Constitutional provisions for up to 16 months due to any eventuality, including war. What tyrants like Cuomo, Newsome, Witchmer, and Inslee did is unprecedented. Even during the Civil War, the Bill of Rights stayed in force outside active war zones. I do hope that the Supreme Court eventually weighs in on this issue.
Frank, I am sorry but I made an overstatement in my response. In looking at European countries, it is really only Sweden and the UK where the winter surge and retreat is similar to the US. Most countries do show a strong winter peak but many also have a strong spring surge as well.
Ragnaar –
-snip-
Dr. Weinstein: Well, again, I think the only way to evaluate these things properly is using scientific tools. And that is my home turf as it were. I would say we have to think in terms of hypothesis. And the problem for me is that the only hypothesis that I have heard of or thought of that explains our seeming biases is that what is driving is a desire to vaccinate as many people as possible. And the only reason to vaccinate as many people as possible seems to be that there is profit in it.
-snip-
So the only hypothesis he can think of for why people might want to vaccinate as many people as possible is the profit motive?
Lol
Tony –
Let me try to get this in the right place:
> Please rise above any perceived insults,…
From my side, consider it done.
DPY wrote: “I’m a little surprised that you responded in such a vitriolic and political way to an issue that is really about how herd immunity is defined.
The definition of herd immunity used by some epidemiologists and by you is not meaningful because there is no such thing as “normal conditions.” Thus the only meaningful metric is if R <1, when there is effective herd immunity for existing conditions. But that varies all over the place." This was discussed on another post."
For vaccination, the traditional threshold for herd immunity is 1-(1/R_0) where R_0 refers to the reproduction number in the early stages of spread before behavior has changed. The target in a vaccination campaign is to get appreciably over this threshold so that R during any outbreak will still be less than 1 and the outbreak will spontaneously die out. In this situation, there IS such a thing as "normal conditions – that is why they put the nought after R. Although there are multiple definitions, when talking to the public in the WSJ, "herd immunity" means we can go back to doing what we were doing in 2019 and have spontaneous outbreaks die out. Are you using a different definition?
By my definition, the pandemic was not ended by herd immunity at the end of February. Miami-Dade county had 17% cumulative infections and about 20% full vaccination at the end of March and the local pandemic was still raging with 50 confirmed infections/day/100,000. In the US as a whole, cumulative infections were only 8.5%. One this basis, I personally find it absurd to insist that the pandemic was ended by herd immunity in February. We were about halfway to herd immunity by the end of February.
Furthermore, at the end of February, the number of new infections was just as high as it was a the PEAK of the summer surge (about 20/day/100,000) and TWICE the peak in the initial spring surge (about 10/day/100,000, before correcting for limited testing.) If you wish to measure in terms of deaths, it took until April 1, 2021 for the death rate to reach the PEAK in the summer of 2020. The pandemic did NOT end in late February.
Finally, the number of new infections in the US rose 25% from early March to a peak in mid-April! When you are talking to WSJ readers, that can't happen where herd immunity exists. In Michigan, there were just as many new cases (75/day/100,000) and hospitalizations in mid-April as there were during the late fall surge! (Only about half as many deaths, thanks to vaccination.)
(The Delta variant is able to infect some of the vaccinated and those with immunity derived from previous infection, but rarely kills those people. So we may have "effective herd immunity" against death, but not against infection. That seems to be the case in the UK today.)
DPY wrote: "I am also surprised that you ignored my well documented point that your favored tyrannical responses to the pandemic did not seem to cause better outcomes among US states."
My preferred "tyrannical response" would have been to reduce new cases in late spring 10-fold as Europe did and institute aggressive contact tracing, paid ($1,000/day) quarantine supervised by cell phone GPS, and mandatory masks indoors in public. Taiwan, South Korea and China made this work. With a negative PCR test after about a week of quarantine, the chances of developing COVID would be low and quarantine could be shortened. Deliver high quality masks for free to everyone. Encourage voluntary work from home. Probably close or limit capacity in high-risk businesses such as bars, gyms, theaters, and restaurants without medical/airline quality air filtration and circulation. Publicly beg churches to at least triple the number of services so they can safely tend to the increased needs of their congregation. Emphasize danger of singing.
DPY wrote: "Basically, you have no explanation of the strong decline starting in mid January aside from an evidence free assertion that people let down their guard over the holidays."
No, you have been ignoring my explanation. Actually, I said people became much more careful after the holidays BECAUSE of the high death rates and overflowing hospitals. My state and probably others tightened restrictions as the hospitals filled in November. We have reasonably good precedent from the 1918-1920 Spanish flu that fear and NPIs brought a pandemic to a near halt several times without the aid of approaching herd immunity. If you look at individual states, you can see many local surges that rose over a little more than a month and fell over the next month+. Arizona and Florida peaked in this manner in July and August. Those surges weren't ended by heard immunity! North Dakota's surge in October and November also lasted a more than two months, but the winter surge in most other states had several peaks and lasted longer, possible due to holidays. France had a huge surge in Oct/Nov and another in March proving the first wasn't ended by herd immunity. Europe has other similar cases, including the UK's surge in Dec/Jan. (With 2/3rds as many cumulative injections as the US, the UK surge wasn't ended by herd immunity either.) Since the course of the pandemic and vaccination in March-May shows we were far from herd immunity, approaching herd immunity couldn't have been the major cause of our Jan/Feb decline. You seem to think that FEAR + NPIs can't cause a rapid decline in a pandemic. If you open your eyes, you will find plenty of surges followed by steep declines with no other obvious explanation besides FEAR+NPIs. However, the whole US pandemic is heterogeneous, so you need to look at individual states and European countries.
DPY wrote: As to your apparent disgust with people utilizing their right of free speech in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, get used to it. There are at least a hundred million of us who are intent on preserving our God given rights. There are many other countries for you to choose where people have much less freedom.
Members and carefully selected friends of the elites that run the WSJ editorial page are the only ones with the right to speak on the WSJ editorial pager (and without fact-checking). Dr. Markey is surgeon, not an epidemiologist. My letter to the editor pointing out that it was impossible for there to be 6.7 total cases for every confirmed case wasn't printed, nor were others. Yes, people are entitled to their opinions, but when their opinions are based on facts that are highly like to be wrong, the opinion is grossly misleading. If the WSJ isn't going to fact-check there opinions (like most respectable news organizations, Facebook and Twitter have every right to censor them when fact-checkers point out the errors. With all of the conspiracy theories on the left and right, the fraction of our nation that is – as one commentator puts it – "in touch with reality" is shrinking. (The Dems just got a big dose of reality about defunding the police in the NYC mayor's race.)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmid/33399860/
I can't understand why so many people signed the Great Barrington Declaration. We had no better way to protect the vulnerable at that time (and according to my research nursing home residents were 6X more likely to have a confirmed infection than the average American). We couldn't reach herd immunity in a few months without exceeding the capacity of most hospitals – and the resulting fear that would quickly cause a decline in new cases. The GBD seemed like a bad joke. The saintly Ioannidis was invested in the incorrect idea that COVID wasn't much more deadly than seasonal influenza, so his support wasn't a surprise. As best I can tell, the motivation was mostly political, because their campaign didn't continue after the election and after we had a vaccine. In many locations, a huge number of "essential workers" were idiotically vaccinated before or alongside the vulnerable. I look at the GBD signers as being similar to those advocating raising the minimum wage to $15/hr without asking how many minimum wage workers will lose their jobs or have their hours cut. . (When I'm told a dramatically higher minimum wage won't cost jobs or hours, I say: If so, why be so stingy? Go for $30/hr.) If an idea is superficially attractive, many will sign without thinking or being in touch with reality.
We had evidence that masks work against seasonal influenza in a community setting, but only for the small number of volunteers who reported wearing them consistently. They weren't recommended by health authorities for preventing seasonal influenza pandemics because too few volunteers wore them often enough to show a statistically significant benefit for all volunteers. The problem was compliance not efficacy, there was every reason to expect compliance to improve when people are trying to protect themselves from COVID instead of flu. I personally don't need ANY studies to know that masks work: they block sprayed droplets and the right masks can block aerosols whatever fraction the air that passes through them. Cloth masks that don't block aerosols still provide protection against sprayed droplets. Their inability to block aerosols or their leakiness around the edges ARE NOT reasons to abandon masks; they are reasons to get BETTER masks. Singapore has been distributing high-quality washable masks for free. https://sg.news.yahoo.com/fourth-round-free-face-mask-distribution-start-1-march-033840942.html
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.seminolecountyfl.gov%2Fcore%2Ffileparse.php%2F4529%2Furlt%2FUniversal-Masking-is-Urgent-in-the-COVID-19-Pandemic-ADA.pdf&psig=AOvVaw3jM5tXOZlJCOykANt6T98e&ust=1625628044701000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=2ahUKEwj8mrPCvs3xAhVDFFkFHSobCVcQr4kDegQIARAR
As for NY vs Fl vs MI, I found some additional NY data at Wikipedia. About 1/3 (900/million) of New York's deaths occurred before 5/1/20. Deaths peaked about April 15 and were already declining within a month of starting lockdown. Given that death often takes about 3 weeks after infection, it is hard to see to how the state could have done much to prevent these April deaths. Another 1/9 of NY deaths occurred in May. By June, the death toll was down to only 42/million. This huge drop was partially attributable to New York's severe lockdown and the death toll would have been much higher without it. The spring NY death toll was also inflated by inexperience treating COVID (steroids weren't being used then). In the meantime, DeSantis began losing control over the Florida pandemic in June, For the rest of the pandemic, NY state did significantly better than Florida. Finally, when DeSantis ended the mask mandate at a time when Florida had one of the highest infection rates in the country.
Like NY, Mi had a lot of deaths in the spring that were unavoidable. Michigan had as many infections in mid-April 2021 as at the peak in Nov/Dec and even a significant number of associated deaths. This suggests a gross failure in late February, but I don't know much about Michigan's changing policies or her governor. Nor do I claim any special insight about the cost-benefit balance between restrictions and deaths/risk. If a state official wants to reduce restrictions because the costs outweigh the benefits, fine. Just don't expect me to swallow the excuse that restrictions can be lifted because herd immunity has been reached or because we can protect the vulnerable while the pandemic burns out in a few months.
DPY wrote: "I really am sorry Frank to see you descend into such political emotion and become an unreliable source of information."
Emotional? I'm not the one bringing up "Killer Cuomo" and "Lord Fauci". I'd be thrilled if DeSantis or almost any strong, sane Republican took Trump's place as the leader of the Republican Party, so I don't faced a third unattractive choice in 2024. Unfortunately, DeSantis has been advised by the "WSJ epidemiologists" that I have scientifically criticized for their over-optimism about herd immunity and the GBD. (Yes, I will confess to being emotional about Trump – his conspiracy theories are unnecessarily tearing down faith in elections, the FBI, and experts (such as you and I); and combined with the left wing conspiracy theories (BLM, 1619, Stacy Abrams) are undermining the foundations of American government. As for "Killer Cuomo", any elderly COVID patient well enough to leave the hospital for a nursing home almost certainly was no longer infectious whether or not they were PCR negative. When a lawsuit provides DNA sequence data proving that Cuomo-discharged Patient X brought the pandemic into nursing home Y, I will gladly change my mind. In the absence of such conclusion information, every state in the nation has seen its nursing homes invaded by COVID carried by asymptomatic or careless staff, and I assume NY was just the first. Hospitals aren't allowed to discharge elderly patients too weak to take care of themselves at home until they identify a rehab facility for them. Either the governor had to order nursing homes to take recovered elderly COVID patients or desperately ill patients would be denied hospital admission for lack of beds.
DPY wrote: "I don’t think there is any implied right of state governments to suspend fundamental Constitutional provisions for up to 16 months due to any eventuality, including war. What tyrants like Cuomo, Newsome, Witchmer, and Inslee did is unprecedented. Even during the Civil War, the Bill of Rights stayed in force outside active war zones. I do hope that the Supreme Court eventually weighs in on this issue."
The Supreme Court has ruled on this subject about a dozen times already, mostly in the form of emergency decrees. You could inform yourself about this issue by listening to expert attorneys from opposing sides having civil discussions at the non-partisan National Constitutional Center. Sometimes you get to hear from attorneys that submitted amicus briefs and occasionally one who argued the case before the Court. (Instead, you and too many other Americans get their information in the form of a dally addicting and profitable injection of anger, outrage, disinformation from biased media and social media.) For centuries, the Supreme Court (and earlier English Common law) has recognized that each state's police power allows them to protect their citizens from pandemic disease within the limits set by state constitutions. The intrusions on liberty must be the minimum needed and for the shortest period possible, so regulations that are arguably tougher on churches than some similar secular activity have been found unconstitutional, as have regulations without a clear endpoint. Everyone is deeply concerned about the length of time stringent regulations/tyranny have remained in force, but courts can't arbitrarily pick a time limit; that is a job for legislatures. Some countries have had great success in limiting the pandemic through emergency measures (Taiwan, South Korea, China, Norway, Finland, Australia, NZ and Vietnam, as well as many European countries last spring), so it doesn't make sense for the Supreme Court to substitute their cost-benefit analysis for that of the state's experts. I'll remind you that Tyrant Lincoln famously used emergency war powers to suspend habeus corpus during the Civil War (5 days after Sumter and three months BEFORE Bull Run) and to claim/seize vast amount of private property (slaves) in the South. 600,000 Americans died in both the Civil War and the war against the COVID pandemic. On the other hand, Tyrant Roosevelt interned 120,000 Americans citizens of Japanese descent during WWII by lying about the danger they posed. This isn't a simple subject and mistakes have been made.
I suspect some state constitutions will be modified to limit future "tyranny", some by referendum. Governor Newsome is facing a recall vote. Our system for protecting liberty isn't perfect, but it can be refined based on experiences such as this one, hopefully after long and thoughtful discussion. Madison famously remarked that if all Athenians had been Socrates, [passionate populist direct democracy] would still have made Athens a mob. Therefore, we have a system that promotes constructive disagreement and sometimes compromise before reaching a decision. If anyone wants to convict alleged-tyrant Inslee (or tax-cheat Trump), a jury will hear evidence from both sides and the jury will be locked away to talk until they reach a decision. On the other hand, you appear to be only listening to the evidence from the prosecutors from the Right.
Franktoo commented on Collapse of the fake consensus on Covid-19 origins.
in response to dpy6629:
Frank, I really don’t know why you persist in using this biased metric of cumulative “infections.” The reason is obvious. Early in the pandemic there was a severe shortage of tests so vastly more infections were missed. This metric makes states with early surges like New York look vastly better and states like Florida worse …
Continue reading “Collapse of the fake consensus on Covid-19 origins”
DPY wrote: “I’m a little surprised that you responded in such a vitriolic and political way to an issue that is really about how herd immunity is defined.
The definition of herd immunity used by some epidemiologists and by you is not meaningful because there is no such thing as “normal conditions.” Thus the only meaningful metric is if R <1, when there is effective herd immunity for existing conditions. But that varies all over the place." This was discussed on another post."
For vaccination, the traditional threshold for herd immunity is 1-(1/R_0) where R_0 refers to the reproduction number in the early stages of spread before behavior has changed. The target in a vaccination campaign is to get appreciably over this threshold so that R during any outbreak will still be less than 1 and the outbreak will spontaneously die out. In this situation, there IS such a thing as "normal conditions – that is why they put the nought after R. Although there are multiple definitions, when talking to the public in the WSJ, "herd immunity" means we can go back to doing what we were doing in 2019 and have spontaneous outbreaks die out. Are you using a different definition?
I pointed out several times that this definition is not useful and virtually meaningless because you can’t define normal conditions before behavior has changed. Winter or summer? China or Russian culture? Did you not read what I wrote?
By my definition, the pandemic was not ended by herd immunity at the end of February. Miami-Dade county had 17% cumulative infections and about 20% full vaccination at the end of March and the local pandemic was still raging with 50 confirmed infections/day/100,000. In the US as a whole, cumulative infections were only 8.5%. One this basis, I personally find it absurd to insist that the pandemic was ended by herd immunity in February. We were about halfway to herd immunity by the end of February.
Furthermore, at the end of February, the number of new infections was just as high as it was a the PEAK of the summer surge (about 20/day/100,000) and TWICE the peak in the initial spring surge (about 10/day/100,000, before correcting for limited testing.) If you wish to measure in terms of deaths, it took until April 1, 2021 for the death rate to reach the PEAK in the summer of 2020. The pandemic did NOT end in late February.
Finally, the number of new infections in the US rose 25% from early March to a peak in mid-April! When you are talking to WSJ readers, that can’t happen where herd immunity exists. In Michigan, there were just as many new cases (75/day/100,000) and hospitalizations in mid-April as there were during the late fall surge! (Only about half as many deaths, thanks to vaccination.)
(The Delta variant is able to infect some of the vaccinated and those with immunity derived from previous infection, but rarely kills those people. So we may have “effective herd immunity” against death, but not against infection. That seems to be the case in the UK today.)
You presented zero evidence for your theory about behavior causing cases to decline a factor of 5 in 60 days. You cite Miami-Dade but that’s irrelevant to the US. You use infection numbers that are of low quality and have to make vague assumptions about undetected cases when no one really knows. You compare cases to last spring and summer, but its largely meaningless because of lack of testing last spring. You have presented a long winded list of “facts” virtually all of which are not very meaningful. The only real indicator is whether R is below 1. When its strongly below 1, that indicates that herd immunity exists for those conditions. That doesn’t mean it can’t change. It will change. Your dogmatic insistence on a meaningless and inflexible definition leads you into a host of errors supported by nothing more than your personal opinion.
DPY wrote: “I am also surprised that you ignored my well documented point that your favored tyrannical responses to the pandemic did not seem to cause better outcomes among US states.”
My preferred “tyrannical response” would have been to reduce new cases in late spring 10-fold as Europe did and institute aggressive contact tracing, paid ($1,000/day) quarantine supervised by cell phone GPS, and mandatory masks indoors in public. Taiwan, South Korea and China made this work. With a negative PCR test after about a week of quarantine, the chances of developing COVID would be low and quarantine could be shortened. Deliver high quality masks for free to everyone. Encourage voluntary work from home. Probably close or limit capacity in high-risk businesses such as bars, gyms, theaters, and restaurants without medical/airline quality air filtration and circulation. Publicly beg churches to at least triple the number of services so they can safely tend to the increased needs of their congregation. Emphasize danger of singing.
. So then US governors like Cuomo and Witcher are incompetent and only the all knowing Frank knows what will work. The measures taken in the US simply did not work. You are a master of evasion.
DPY wrote: “Basically, you have no explanation of the strong decline starting in mid January aside from an evidence free assertion that people let down their guard over the holidays.”
No, you have been ignoring my explanation. Actually, I said people became much more careful after the holidays BECAUSE of the high death rates and overflowing hospitals. My state and probably others tightened restrictions as the hospitals filled in November. We have reasonably good precedent from the 1918-1920 Spanish flu that fear and NPIs brought a pandemic to a near halt several times without the aid of approaching herd immunity. If you look at individual states, you can see many local surges that rose over a little more than a month and fell over the next month+. Arizona and Florida peaked in this manner in July and August. Those surges weren’t ended by heard immunity! North Dakota’s surge in October and November also lasted a more than two months, but the winter surge in most other states had several peaks and lasted longer, possible due to holidays. France had a huge surge in Oct/Nov and another in March proving the first wasn’t ended by herd immunity. Europe has other similar cases, including the UK’s surge in Dec/Jan. (With 2/3rds as many cumulative injections as the US, the UK surge wasn’t ended by herd immunity either.) Since the course of the pandemic and vaccination in March-May shows we were far from herd immunity, approaching herd immunity couldn’t have been the major cause of our Jan/Feb decline. You seem to think that FEAR + NPIs can’t cause a rapid decline in a pandemic. If you open your eyes, you will find plenty of surges followed by steep declines with no other obvious explanation besides FEAR+NPIs. However, the whole US pandemic is heterogeneous, so you need to look at individual states and European countries.
Endless repetition does not add anything. Herd immunity is a virtually useless concept as you use it. No Frank, you have no evidence on behavior changes at all. Weather also changes, contagiousness changes, vitamin D levels change. You really seem to have a prejudice that things can be controlled by behavior that is mostly false. You are going to die and nothing you do will change that fact.
DPY wrote: As to your apparent disgust with people utilizing their right of free speech in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, get used to it. There are at least a hundred million of us who are intent on preserving our God given rights. There are many other countries for you to choose where people have much less freedom.
Members and carefully selected friends of the elites that run the WSJ editorial page are the only ones with the right to speak on the WSJ editorial pager (and without fact-checking). Dr. Markey is surgeon, not an epidemiologist. My letter to the editor pointing out that it was impossible for there to be 6.7 total cases for every confirmed case wasn’t printed, nor were others. Yes, people are entitled to their opinions, but when their opinions are based on facts that are highly like to be wrong, the opinion is grossly misleading. If the WSJ isn’t going to fact-check there opinions (like most respectable news organizations, Facebook and Twitter have every right to censor them when fact-checkers point out the errors. With all of the conspiracy theories on the left and right, the fraction of our nation that is – as one commentator puts it – “in touch with reality” is shrinking. (The Dems just got a big dose of reality about defunding the police in the NYC mayor’s race.)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmid/33399860/
I don’t see any evidence that 6.7 can’t be right. It is a US number. Pointing to localities where it can’t be right is totally beside the point. No wonder your letter wasn’t printed. I see you are repeating the lie that “private” entities can do what they like. There are thousands of statutes that place severe limitations on what private entities can do. There should be more dealing with censoring people on essentially public utility platforms.
I can’t understand why so many people signed the Great Barrington Declaration. We had no better way to protect the vulnerable at that time (and according to my research nursing home residents were 6X more likely to have a confirmed infection than the average American). We couldn’t reach herd immunity in a few months without exceeding the capacity of most hospitals – and the resulting fear that would quickly cause a decline in new cases. The GBD seemed like a bad joke. The saintly Ioannidis was invested in the incorrect idea that COVID wasn’t much more deadly than seasonal influenza, so his support wasn’t a surprise. As best I can tell, the motivation was mostly political, because their campaign didn’t continue after the election and after we had a vaccine. In many locations, a huge number of “essential workers” were idiotically vaccinated before or alongside the vulnerable. I look at the GBD signers as being similar to those advocating raising the minimum wage to $15/hr without asking how many minimum wage workers will lose their jobs or have their hours cut. . (When I’m told a dramatically higher minimum wage won’t cost jobs or hours, I say: If so, why be so stingy? Go for $30/hr.) If an idea is superficially attractive, many will sign without thinking or being in touch with reality.
. Once again, a long winded evidence free diatribe reading people’s minds. Ioannidis had the final word on the IFR in a recent meta-analysis that seems to have resulted in the peanut gallery being quite.
Continuation of Frank’s comment and my responses.
We had evidence that masks work against seasonal influenza in a community setting, but only for the small number of volunteers who reported wearing them consistently. They weren’t recommended by health authorities for preventing seasonal influenza pandemics because too few volunteers wore them often enough to show a statistically significant benefit for all volunteers. The problem was compliance not efficacy, there was every reason to expect compliance to improve when people are trying to protect themselves from COVID instead of flu. I personally don’t need ANY studies to know that masks work: they block sprayed droplets and the right masks can block aerosols whatever fraction the air that passes through them. Cloth masks that don’t block aerosols still provide protection against sprayed droplets. Their inability to block aerosols or their leakiness around the edges ARE NOT reasons to abandon masks; they are reasons to get BETTER masks. Singapore has been distributing high-quality washable masks for free. https://sg.news.yahoo.com/fourth-round-free-face-mask-distribution-start-1-march-033840942.html
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.seminolecountyfl.gov%2Fcore%2Ffileparse.php%2F4529%2Furlt%2FUniversal-Masking-is-Urgent-in-the-COVID-19-Pandemic-ADA.pdf&psig=AOvVaw3jM5tXOZlJCOykANt6T98e&ust=1625628044701000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=2ahUKEwj8mrPCvs3xAhVDFFkFHSobCVcQr4kDegQIARAR
. You haven’t responded to the literature on masks showing no evidence they work in a community setting. There are many papers on this. You’re just repeating crude mechanistic narratives that lack quantification.
As for NY vs Fl vs MI, I found some additional NY data at Wikipedia. About 1/3 (900/million) of New York’s deaths occurred before 5/1/20. Deaths peaked about April 15 and were already declining within a month of starting lockdown. Given that death often takes about 3 weeks after infection, it is hard to see to how the state could have done much to prevent these April deaths. Another 1/9 of NY deaths occurred in May. By June, the death toll was down to only 42/million. This huge drop was partially attributable to New York’s severe lockdown and the death toll would have been much higher without it. The spring NY death toll was also inflated by inexperience treating COVID (steroids weren’t being used then). In the meantime, DeSantis began losing control over the Florida pandemic in June, For the rest of the pandemic, NY state did significantly better than Florida. Finally, when DeSantis ended the mask mandate at a time when Florida had one of the highest infection rates in the country.
Like NY, Mi had a lot of deaths in the spring that were unavoidable. Michigan had as many infections in mid-April 2021 as at the peak in Nov/Dec and even a significant number of associated deaths. This suggests a gross failure in late February, but I don’t know much about Michigan’s changing policies or her governor. Nor do I claim any special insight about the cost-benefit balance between restrictions and deaths/risk. If a state official wants to reduce restrictions because the costs outweigh the benefits, fine. Just don’t expect me to swallow the excuse that restrictions can be lifted because herd immunity has been reached or because we can protect the vulnerable while the pandemic burns out in a few months.
I love this silly idea that a lot of the early deaths were unavoidable. If masks worked so well that would be untrue. You can’t have it all ways Frank. You need to pick the tripe you are going with and stick with it. Your long winded response doesn’t change the bottom line. California, Florida, and Texas all came in reasonable close with Texas the worst of the 3. New York was quite bad and Michigan quite a bit worse than Florida. California also didn’t really have a bad spring surge just like Florida.
DPY wrote: “I really am sorry Frank to see you descend into such political emotion and become an unreliable source of information.”
Emotional? I’m not the one bringing up “Killer Cuomo” and “Lord Fauci”. I’d be thrilled if DeSantis or almost any strong, sane Republican took Trump’s place as the leader of the Republican Party, so I don’t faced a third unattractive choice in 2024. Unfortunately, DeSantis has been advised by the “WSJ epidemiologists” that I have scientifically criticized for their over-optimism about herd immunity and the GBD. (Yes, I will confess to being emotional about Trump – his conspiracy theories are unnecessarily tearing down faith in elections, the FBI, and experts (such as you and I); and combined with the left wing conspiracy theories (BLM, 1619, Stacy Abrams) are undermining the foundations of American government. As for “Killer Cuomo”, any elderly COVID patient well enough to leave the hospital for a nursing home almost certainly was no longer infectious whether or not they were PCR negative. When a lawsuit provides DNA sequence data proving that Cuomo-discharged Patient X brought the pandemic into nursing home Y, I will gladly change my mind. In the absence of such conclusion information, every state in the nation has seen its nursing homes invaded by COVID carried by asymptomatic or careless staff, and I assume NY was just the first. Hospitals aren’t allowed to discharge elderly patients too weak to take care of themselves at home until they identify a rehab facility for them. Either the governor had to order nursing homes to take recovered elderly COVID patients or desperately ill patients would be denied hospital admission for lack of beds.
. Then why did Cuomo cover up his policy? You have no way of knowing if those sent back were still contagious. In any case, there was massive excess capacity and sending them back was totally unnecissary.
DPY wrote: “I don’t think there is any implied right of state governments to suspend fundamental Constitutional provisions for up to 16 months due to any eventuality, including war. What tyrants like Cuomo, Newsome, Witchmer, and Inslee did is unprecedented. Even during the Civil War, the Bill of Rights stayed in force outside active war zones. I do hope that the Supreme Court eventually weighs in on this issue.”
The Supreme Court has ruled on this subject about a dozen times already, mostly in the form of emergency decrees. You could inform yourself about this issue by listening to expert attorneys from opposing sides having civil discussions at the non-partisan National Constitutional Center. Sometimes you get to hear from attorneys that submitted amicus briefs and occasionally one who argued the case before the Court. (Instead, you and too many other Americans get their information in the form of a dally addicting and profitable injection of anger, outrage, disinformation from biased media and social media.) For centuries, the Supreme Court (and earlier English Common law) has recognized that each state’s police power allows them to protect their citizens from pandemic disease within the limits set by state constitutions. The intrusions on liberty must be the minimum needed and for the shortest period possible, so regulations that are arguably tougher on churches than some similar secular activity have been found unconstitutional, as have regulations without a clear endpoint. Everyone is deeply concerned about the length of time stringent regulations/tyranny have remained in force, but courts can’t arbitrarily pick a time limit; that is a job for legislatures. Some countries have had great success in limiting the pandemic through emergency measures (Taiwan, South Korea, China, Norway, Finland, Australia, NZ and Vietnam, as well as many European countries last spring), so it doesn’t make sense for the Supreme Court to substitute their cost-benefit analysis for that of the state’s experts. I’ll remind you that Tyrant Lincoln famously used emergency war powers to suspend habeus corpus during the Civil War (5 days after Sumter and three months BEFORE Bull Run) and to claim/seize vast amount of private property (slaves) in the South. 600,000 Americans died in both the Civil War and the war against the COVID pandemic. On the other hand, Tyrant Roosevelt interned 120,000 Americans citizens of Japanese descent during WWII by lying about the danger they posed. This isn’t a simple subject and mistakes have been made.
I suspect some state constitutions will be modified to limit future “tyranny”, some by referendum. Governor Newsome is facing a recall vote. Our system for protecting liberty isn’t perfect, but it can be refined based on experiences such as this one, hopefully after long and thoughtful discussion. Madison famously remarked that if all Athenians had been Socrates, [passionate populist direct democracy] would still have made Athens a mob. Therefore, we have a system that promotes constructive disagreement and sometimes compromise before reaching a decision. If anyone wants to convict alleged-tyrant Inslee (or tax-cheat Trump), a jury will hear evidence from both sides and the jury will be locked away to talk until they reach a decision. On the other hand, you appear to be only listening to the evidence from the prosecutors from the Right.
Well, You didn’t respond to the point. I challenge you to show me any time in American history when there has been such a prolonged and widespread suspension of the Bill of Rights. Emergency decrees are usually for short periods such as the Mt St. Helens eruption and for very limited geographical regions. It is a frightening prospect.
And to top it off you cite absolute statistics about the Civil War vs. Covid that are blatantly misleading. The population of the US during the Civil War was I recall about 30 million. So per capita there were 10 times as many casualties as with covid19. Also that 600,000 number is a very significant undercount and omits civilian casualties where were a very large number especially in the South.
Frank, I tried to keep my responses short and to the point. I would suggest you would find more people willing to read your long winded comments if you did the same. Also actually responding to what other people say is the only way to actually resolve any issue. Obfuscating the point with a blizzard of often irrelevant or misleading detail is not helpful.
Tony –
Here you go, my friend:
dpy6629 | July 10, 2021 at 9:24 pm |
Rob, Joshie is a classic troll. He exists solely to unethically smear other people and use rhetorical devices to sneer at them.
DPY wrongly believes that the pandemic was halted by approaching herd immunity after the peak in detected infections in Jan 2021 – possibly because the right wing media has been misinforming him (about this and many other subjects). For example, after a 77% decline in new cases, the elite conservatives that run the WSJ editorial page, carried an editorial on Feb 18 by a highly respected SURGEON Marty Markey: “We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April”. Events proved this prediction to be grossly wrong: The rapid decline in new cases stopped immediately after his editorial was published and then new cases rose modestly to reach a new peak in mid-April of 2020 – despite the enormous number of Americans who were vaccinated during this period. It wasn’t until May (40% vaccination) that the increasing number of Americans with immunity acquired from both vaccination or infection sent pandemic into a steady unambiguous nationwide decline.. Even that decline was assisted by Americans who were wearing masks, social distancing and working from home, and didn’t guarantee that another rebound couldn’t occur once behavior returned to normal – which is what the public understands “herd immunity” to mean. (The Delta variant is now complicating the concept of herd immunity.)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-have-herd-immunity-by-april-11613669731
Dr Markey’s erroneous prediction was based on his personal estimate that there were 6.5 Americans who had acquired immunity from mild or asymptomatic infection for every one who had tested positive by PCR. From that he estimated that 55% of Americans had acquired immunity naturally through infection by mid-Feb. However, at that time, 13% of the population in the entire states of North and South Dakota had tested positive, and some large counties had 15-17% positive. That would be 85% infected in the Dakotas and 100% in some large counties and some of these location
DPY replied: “I don’t see any evidence that 6.7 can’t be right. It is a US number. Pointing to localities where it can’t be right is totally beside the point.”
Classic confirmation bias! Why doesn’t DPY research the question for himself BEFORE challenging a commenter who regularly provides extensive documentation of his claims. The CDC has been conducting surveys of the ratio of immunity detected by antibody surveys to cases detected by PCR. Their work shows that the ratio antibody positive to PCR positive (the “underreporting factor”) DROPPED as the pandemic evolved from about 10 early in the spring to 3.2 in surveys between August and November! See Table 3 in the link below and a summary of more than 50 US seropositivity studies
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/articlepdf/2774584/angulo_2021_oi_201025_1608585423.06959.pdf
The CDC has also been monitoring the presence of antibodies in donated blood. Blood donors are not representative of the population as a whole, but the CDC constructed a model for estimating immunity in the population as a whole from this data and they have relied on this data and model since fall began.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#nationwide-blood-donor-seroprevalence
For example, in Feb 2021 when Dr. Markey was publishing erroneous information about herd immunity, the CDC calculated that 43+/-3% of the population of North Dakota (the hardest hit state in the country) was immune at a time when 12.9% had tested positive by PCR: An underreporting factor of 3.3. About 9% of the entire US population had tested positive by mid Feb21; about 30% seropositive.
I personally am of the opinion that the underreporting factor has continued to drop as new variants have evolved to become more “transmissible”, which likely means that the virus is replicating to higher levels in vivo, increasing the severity of mild illnesses and the likelihood the patient while get tested. However, the CDC’s model, which was calibrated almost a year ago.
Hopefully DPY will finally admit that the US was far from herd immunity (roughly halfway) when new cases were falling in Jan2021.
Frank, Do you not read what others write? Your claims about herd immunity are based on using a largely meaningless definition. Herd immunity varies all over the map depending on things like heterogeneity, season of the year, cultural norms, new virus strains, etc. You have no idea whether the strong decline in cases starting in early January was due to a threshold being crossed or not.
And you’re just wrong to assert that your CDC seroprevalence data proves you right. It does no such thing. It looks to me as if seroprevalence started skyrocketing about the same time frame as the epidemic began sharply declined. One might speculate that perhaps Nic was right after all and the herd immunity can be effectively as low as 20% in some circumstances.
Perhaps Frank you should use your purely unquantified narrative style to speculate on why there was a pause in recession of the epidemic in the spring while seroprevalence continued to strongly increase. I doubt anyone will ever know for sure, but I’m sure you will know for sure. Why are we currently seeing an uptick in cases when we have perhaps 50% vaccinated and probably at least 35-40% already infected?
I’ll compare your attitude here Frank to a novice fluid dynamicist who mistakenly comes to believe that Reynolds’ number is fixed for a given airframe. It’s just totally wrong. altitude, temperature, speed, etc. all play a big role too. In short Reynolds’ number is not a universal constant. Herd immunity likewise can vary over an order of magnitude depending on lots of things. The only sure indicator is if R is substantially less than 1 for a sustained period of time.
Will Frank finally admit that he has no idea whether herd immunity was reached or not? Will Frank admit that he has no idea what the herd immunity threshold is to within a factor of 4? Of course not, Frank likes pseudo-scientific very simple ideas that belie a much more complex reality.
And one other thing Frank that calls into question your certainty on this issue. Antibodies decline over time and at some point people who had covid last March may no longer test positive. I’ve not seen data on this but it seems that this would lead to less accuracy in seroprevalence data in 2021 than early in the epidemic. All long term immunity is T cell immunity or so I have read.
DPY wrote: “I love this silly idea that a lot of the early deaths [in New York] were unavoidable. If masks worked so well that would be untrue. You can’t have it all ways Frank. You need to pick the tripe you are going with and stick with it.
Unfortunately, the CDC was worried about the supply of surgical masks and DISCOURAGED the use of face masks until April 3. 2020. It would take some time for New Yorkers to acquire face masks there weren’t enough surgical face masks capable of blocking aerosols for months. For a well documented review, see.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/05/22/mask-wearing_guidance_a_timeline_of_slow-to-shift_messaging_143264.html#!
On March 1, a woman returning from Iran was NY’s first confirmed case, but many others were being missed due to limited testing (not Cuomo’s fault). On March 10, Cuomo banned all public gatherings within 1 mile of a super-spreader event at a synagogue. On March 14, 2020, New York reported its first two deaths from COVID and on 3/18 identified cases totaled 950. From March 16-20, Cuomo shutdown the NY economy, with the “all non-essential businesses” shutdown coming on March 20, one day after the earliest states.
Deaths in New York peaked at nearly 1000/day about 4/13, 23 days after the shutdown. Therefore most of those dying at the peak then had been infected about the time the governor shut down the state. The decline from the peak was the result of Cuomo’s lockdown order. The governor couldn’t do much about the fact that others would be infected after the lockdown by members of their household and die later in April, as would large numbers of essential workers and those they came in contact with.
On April 16, Cuomo MANDATED that face masks be worn everywhere that social distancing was impossible.
What would you have done differently, DPY, to make avoid deaths in New York in April? Remember, the average death a little more than three weeks after the average infection.
FWIW, cases and deaths were doubling every 2.5 days in most locations early in the pandemic. The experience in NY was nothing unusual.
DPY wrote: “And one other thing Frank that calls into question your certainty on this issue. Antibodies decline over time and at some point people who had covid last March may no longer test positive. I’ve not seen data on this but it seems that this would lead to less accuracy in seroprevalence data in 2021 than early in the epidemic. All long-term immunity is T cell immunity or so I have read.”
Excellent points, which had not escaped me. 80% of US PCR positives were reported after 9/15 and only 5% before 6/1, when testing was limited. (Positivity reached a minimum in early June and then rose.) The bulk of US infections occurred within five months of the 77% decline in new cases in January and February of 2021. BTW, 2/3rds of US deaths occurred after the Great Barrington Declaration recommended advised that all we needed to do was protect the vulnerable. More than one million would have died before herd immunity was reached, and many more hospitals would be overflowing and/or understaffed.
IIRC, CDC surveys of blood donors showed seroprevalency rising everywhere except NY where it fell slightly before the fall surge (which came late to NY). I remember something about long-lived T-cell activation by SARS1 epitopes, but this phenomena was not proven to provide protection against re-infection. Coronaviruses release proteins that suppress T-cells.
The SIREN study of British nurses (who were tested regularly by PCR and for antibodies) found 93% protection against re-infection from earlier confirmed infections with classic COVID symptoms, 78% protection against re-infection from earlier infection with symptoms not typical of COVID, and only 50% protection from earlier asymptomatic infection. Overall, there was 84% protection. The dominant strain at the time (second half of 2020) was the alpha variant. The average time between infection and re-infection was 200 days. Note that these nurses were tested on the job and didn’t need to meet the requirements for testing and visit a testing center. Under these circumstances, 66% of PCR positive nurses report classic COVID symptoms, 14% atypical symptoms and only 17% reported no symptoms. This is very different from the US where 2-10 people seroconvert for every one who tests positive.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00675-9/fulltext?utm_content=buffer96546&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Whether immunity is mostly mediated by antibodies or by T-cells, SOME infections haven’t produced long-lasting immunity. Protection seems to be falling on the same time frame as antibodies. We don’t know whether antibodies can disappear and still leave highly effective, long-lived T-cell mediated immunity behind in 80% or even 50% of those with reported or underreported infections. Dr. Markey ignored this problem when he incorrectly predicted herd immunity by April 2021. The Delta variant has probably made it impossible to answer this question.
The other meaningful metric is. of course, deaths. However, age, co-morbidities, and a host of other factors outside the control of the state government determine who dies, especially in April of 2020 when there was little the government could do. Four of the worst states NJ, NY, MA, and CT (but not RI) experienced more than half of their deaths in the spring of 2020 while the rest of the country suffered worst in the fall of 2020 and winter of 2021.
Ten Worst States by Deaths/100,000
NJ* 298
NY* 273
MA* 261
RI 258
MS 249
AZ 246
CT* 232
AL 232
LA 231
SD 230
US average 182
Ten Best States by Deaths/100,000
HI 36
VT 41
AK 49
ME 64
OR 66
UT 74
WA 79
NH 101
ID 121
CO 121
Obviously Hawaii and Alaska are somewhat unique. UT made the worst ten in terms of cumulative infections and the best ten in terms of deaths. ND, the worst in terms of infections (14.5%) had only slight above average deaths (205, 15th highest). Miami-Dade had 238.
Some will, of course, want to focus only on the states that did worst in terms of deaths and ignore whether any government could have reduced this initial onslaught. And the cumulative number of cases in these states is modestly under-estimated because of the shortage of tests early in the pandemic. The data is real. The only unbiased way to analyze it would be to decide how it should be analyzed before you look at it and your biases can influence your choice of metrics. It it too late for that.
Frank’s comment – “The data is real. The only unbiased way to analyze it would be to decide how it should be analyzed before you look at it and your biases can influence your choice of metric.”
to a large degree I concur. My observation is that covid progressed in the manner in which most every other influenza type virus progressed. The primary reason that Covid was more deadly and infectious is that it was so new that there was very little natural immunity built up in the human population prior to its emergence.
The second observation is that the infection rates & death rates across the various states, Europe , etc for the most part regressed to the mean, irrespective of any mitigation protocols – ie mother nature is more powerful than man.
Everyone can argue about who did a better job, commorbities, and a host of other factors, but bottom line, mother nature controlled.
NBC News is reporting that Zhengli Shi and other WIV researchers had many ties to the China military, contrary to Shi’s denials.
https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/wuhan-lab-researcher-linked-to-military-scientists-nbc-news-finds-115706437674
Ron –
> That you see zero evidence of causality is your privilege.
You didn’t show evidence of cauality. You pointed to an association, and assumed cauality.
As I said, more than once, there are multiple associated factors that are independent of covid, as is the trend that the article discusses.
> That is not the same as there being zero evidence.
You have provided no evidence of cauality of a trend in SAN FRANCISCO, you’ve merely pointed to an association between COVID and a recall campaign in the entire state of CA.
> I pointed out that CA just completed a successful petition with over 2 million verified signatures calling for its governor to be removed. And you believe this has zero to do with his Covid policies?
Ron, please pay attention. The article pointed to a trend IN SAN FRANCISCO of people wanting to move out of THE BAY AREA that was well in place way before the pandemic. An well-established factor in that trend as a shortage of affordable housing IN SAN FRANCISCO, and and associated problems with homelessness and crime. Those are significant problems that PREDATED THE PANDEMIC. There are other factors for the tend in dam Francisco as well, and in fact, in San Francisco there’s good reason to believe that there’s general satisfaction with the COVID policies because there was a high level of compliance and because the impact of the pandemic was relatively light in the Bay Area.
You want to assign cauality to people wanting to move out of THE BAY AREA to the governor’s unpopularity among people who have long not liked him before the pandemic, because of his COVID policies which worked quite well in THE BAY Area, and despite numerous other factors that have contributed to A PREEXISTING trend of people moving out of the area, and that’s your right to do so.
You also have the right to believe that the moon is made out of green cheese and the reason that no one lives on the moon is because green cheese smells bas and peope don’t like Newsome’s COVID policies.
David Young –
> What a teenager response…
That incapsulates so well what like about your comments. Amidst a constant stream of insults and diminutives, you take the time to call out “teenage responses.”
Can’t make that up.
Next, amidst a constant stream of insults and diminutives (and appealing to self authority), you’ll complain about ad hominems.
Oh, wait…
https://judithcurry.com/2021/05/23/collapse-of-the-fake-consensus-on-covid-19-origins/#comment-953043
Oh, wait…
Or complain about name calling…
Oh, wait…
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/05/08/so-the-real-scandal-is-why-did-anyone-ever-listen-to-this-guy/#comment-1334129
Oh, wait…
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/05/08/so-the-real-scandal-is-why-did-anyone-ever-listen-to-this-guy/#comment-1334842
Or complain about ad hominems:
-snip-
dpy6629 | April 19, 2020 at 11:29 pm |
Josh, This Gelman is a nothingburger.
And you can’t even place comments in the appropriate place.
Wow. Deep
@tonyb
>Joshua and David
>Please give it a rest, your conversations have become beyond tedious and >long winded, and in trading continual insults with each other you are also >insulting Judith, her blog, and other commentators.
>You can both do much better than this. Please rise above any perceived >insults, stop this tedious quarreling and instead provide some informed >comment on other topics.
>tonyb
Well said. There’s more bickering in this thread than actual content.
Yes that is true. The reason for it is that Willard and especially Joshie have a very heavy footprint here. You would find that this correlation is a long term and strong one. Every post on covid, particularly the ones by Nic have drawn the ankle biting Joshie out to accuse Nic of making errors and failing to acknowledge them. I wouldn’t be surprised if 10% or more of the comments on this post are Joshie’s.
> a very heavy footprint here
You have almost 200 comments on this page alone, David.
Many with many, many words.
Nobody makes you write them but you.
You are not Judy’s Hall Monitor.
Please own your schtick.
Speaking of owning your Schtick, Wee Willie, pot kettle and all that. I’ll just note that essentially all of your comments here are quibbles about allegedly inconsistencies in what others say. That’s the definition of nit picking.
Daryl is asking you to stop bickering, David.
Look at you now.
Chill.
David –
> It’s an unquantified statement about a “substantial risk”. That’s irrelevant to the main issue and that is lack of resolution.
It’s a statement that summarizes their views of the value of models, despite their limitations.
Like I said, you don’t have to agree with them.
You don’t have to agree that the “systematic errors do not invalidate the use of such climate models in providing scientific input into mitigation policy.”
You don’t have to ager with them that the models are “quite unequivocal in showing that there is a substantial risk of dangerous, even calamitous, climatic impacts arising from increased levels of atmospheric CO2.”
You don’t have to agree with them that “It is a statement of scientific fact that to reduce this risk will require a reduction of our carbon emissions.”
You don’t have to agree with any of that. But your lack of agreement doesn’t mean that isn’t what they believe, and of course it would be ridiculous to argue that their beliefs aren’t grounded in their science.
So you should stop trying to pretend that they don’t believe what I quoted, or that their belief in what I quoted isn’t grounded in their science.
And it isn’t “cherry-picking” to quote summary statements about what they believe that clearly reflect what they believe based on their science. You should look up what cherry-pick means if you don’t understand that.
dpy,
repeatedly calling someone a liar is insulting.
My position is clear, accurate, and in the original thread, although Willard helpfully extracted the key points again for you here.
Your endless attempts to engage in a slanging match demean only you, and show your pretensions to scientific discourse to be just that.
@Willard
The post I replied to wasn’t directed only at David. Joshua posted exactly the same thing numerous times, acting like a child. Joshua is a troll by any definition.
I know that you targeted a specific duo, Daryl. Whereas Joshua acknowledged and responded positively to Tony’s request, David went full THEY STARTED IT mode.
He also mentioned my name. Every time he does I am cautioned to respond. He needs to stop using my name.
Socrates may have been the first troll. To say that someone is a troll means little to me.
Daryl –
> Joshua is a troll by any definition.
Just out of curiosity, given your taxonomy, is there a definition by which David is not a troll? If so, could you elaborate?
Daryl, If you are new to these parts, you may not know that Willard is a professional troll who has invented a formal and meaningless game called ClimateBall which focuses purely on formal textual and logical analysis. Since Willie has no scientific expertise, he is reduced to shadowing those who do and trying to cast vague doubt often by lying about what people say or quote mining lengthy threads. Willie started out with Steve McIntyre, but there was a problem in that Steve had a strict moderation policy. So I am in good company.
You are amusing dpy.
No matter how many people point out your childish insults and ask you to stop, you keep at it.
And bizarrely keep on talking up your own “scientific expertise”, demonstrated on this thread with scientific comments of yours like:
“Washingtonians tend to be sheep who are easily manipulated by leftist ideology”
I’m looking forward to your link to the journal article on that!
How about just give the childish insults a rest? It’s like a compulsion.
Well I know you regard truth telling as an insult. It is you who shamelessly lies scores of times about what other people say. Here is the evidence.
Here’s an example from a previous post of your misrepresenting what I say. BTW, You essentially agreed that what I said was true just previously.
dpy6629 | April 29, 2021 at 5:39 pm |
Reading comprehension or something worse VTG?
Again what I actually said: “Any skill in outputs not used in tuning is accidental and caused by cancellation of numerical errors.” ,I usually phrase it as “outputs not directly related to those used in tuning.”
You invented this ”You asserted that models have no skill” which is a misrepresentation.
You repeated this misrepresentation scores of times before agreeing with what I actually said. No apology or shame for VRG.
And there you go again.
> there was a problem in that [the Auditor] had a strict moderation policy
My experience at the Auditor’s rather suggests the opposite to what you’re trying to intimate, David. There was no problem there for me at all. For every comment I posted there two ankle biters such as you were censored.
My bad experience at the Auditor’s were caused by blacklisted words, login hiccups, and MrPete’s mishandling of the WP framework.
Your indirections to play the ref are not going unnoticed, btw.
There is a very simple basic decency rule VTG that you might want to try. To be treated with respect, stop misrepresenting and quote mining what others say and then repeatedly lying about it.
David,
One reason I could comment at the Auditor’s is that I could support my claims, and I could stick to the topic. Here’s what you claimed:
https://judithcurry.com/2021/04/25/how-we-fool-ourselves-part-iii-social-biases/#comment-948306
Your two sources do not support that. And in fact if you think about it Tim would not be asking for more computational power if that were the case. Hence why you threw spaghetti on the walls, and picked a claim Very Tall said afterwards.
You don’t do climate modelling. You work(ed) for a military company. And for some reason the simulation turn does not seem to appeal to you.
Is that supposed to impress me?
Any skill in outputs not used in tuning is accidental and caused by cancellation of numerical errors. . is 100% true. You judgment that it is not is noted but wrong.
The reason is really elementary numerical analysis. Grid sizes in climate models are very large and numerical truncation scales like the square of that grid spacing. Most of the scales of the flow are unresolved. Then there is turbulence modeling and the ill-posed nature of convection.
“And in fact if you think about it Tim would not be asking for more computational power if that were the case.” is typically illogical Willie. They are asking for more computing to resolve more of the flow features which they well are required to improve currently lacking skill.
Since you put in an ad hominem that is a lie, I’ll just note that I’m imminently more qualified than you are to judge this issue.
You snippet from past interactions with is also cherry picked. The bolded statement above is one that ultimately VTG agreed with while claiming it was not particularly profound. That was after he repeated a score of times a misrepresentation of that statement.
Willie, Can you not be balanced and accurate about anything?
Oh, and let me preempt the incoming food fight by quoting a comment that shows how we left that episode in violent agreement:
https://judithcurry.com/2021/04/25/how-we-fool-ourselves-part-iii-social-biases/#comment-948534
Even Very Tall could agree with that technically correct claim.
Heck, even J could.
And again
> The bolded statement above is one that ultimately VTG agreed with while claiming it was not particularly profound.
Here’s what Very Tall said, David from the B Company:
https://judithcurry.com/2021/04/25/how-we-fool-ourselves-part-iii-social-biases/#comment-948448
So what you just said is false. Very Tall disagrees with your Motte. He agrees with your Bailey.
Why would you turn your “Judith is absolutely correct about GCM’s and their heavy usage in climate science” squirrel into a truism out of a sudden?
For you realize that it was a squirrel, right?
Willard, Once again you distorted and cherry picked your way to doofushood. He clearly agrees with my assertion that skill is due to cancellation of errors.
Just a little later there was this:
dpy6629 | April 28, 2021 at 10:00 pm |
I’ll just add a note here on how easy the cancellation of large errors issue is to understand.
It’s really very simple math to see how if the patterns are wrong, the global average can be right only by cancellation of errors.
Consider a series of numbers that represents reality. The sum is 9
0,1,-2,-1,3,1,4,-3,2,3,0,-1,-2
No suppose the pattern is not matched by a model and generates the following series. The sum is still 9. The “amplitude” of the series is also the same roughly.
1,2,3,4,2,0,-2,0,4,1,-2,-2,-2
Thus, the skill is due to cancellation of large local errors.
GCM’s get the pattern of SST changes pretty wrong. There are at least a score of papers out there saying that this mismatch explains why their ECS is inconsistent with the historical period. Bear in mind that its the patterns that we really need to know to ascertain even how to adapt.
Robert I. Ellison | April 29, 2021 at 12:19 am |
Just to note that there is a pdf on the Max Planck Institute web site as I said. Linked obviously with the title as link text. Not sure why this is a point but I’m certain that the internet will be the poorer. 🥱
verytallguy | April 29, 2021 at 2:22 am |
dpy
“Consider a series of numbers that represents reality. The sum is 9
0,1,-2,-1,3,1,4,-3,2,3,0,-1,-2
No suppose the pattern is not matched by a model and generates the following series. The sum is still 9. The “amplitude” of the series is also the same roughly.
1,2,3,4,2,0,-2,0,4,1,-2,-2,-2
Thus, the skill is due to cancellation of large local errors”
Ah, but this is an entirely different point to your original claim.
And it’s trivially true; *any* model of *any* system which conserves *any* quantity (mass, heat, momentum) will have errors and they must cancel.
It’s hardly profound.
And then when you introduced a long quotation from a paper you did not understand there was this. Chief points out that VTG got it wrong about this paper too.
dpy6629 | April 29, 2021 at 9:10 pm |
I must respond to this long quote because it shows something quite telling about climate modeling as a field. It also shows that Willard is a consensus enforcement 10 minute internet expert.
One of the first principles of model construction and tuning is that you need to control numerical error for it to be meaningful. If your model all of a sudden gives poorer answers on a much finer grid, that is a fatal flaw.
The same is true of more or less arbitrary methodological choices about ordering such as whether to relax first in X, Y, or Z in an ADI method. The standard practice would be to iterate the 3 methods until convergence is achieved. That costs a lot more.
CFD is perhaps 50 years ahead of climate modeling in terms of methods and reproducibility. RANS codes are finely tuned machines that do a good job for thin boundary layers and shear layers in the absence of separation. Unfortunately separated flows seem to be ill-conditioned and a different story.
1. It is settled science that for second order methods, 30-50 grid points in the boundary layer are needed to reasonably control numerical errors. Climate models use perhaps 1 or 2.
2. RANS codes solve 2 systems of nonlinear equations. The NS equations and the turbulence modeling PDE’s. These sets of equations must be iterated to convergence. If you do just a single iteration of solving first the NS equations and then the turbulence model, your answer will be really badly wrong.
3. All of these best practices have been found to be needed to achieve what limited success CFD has had.
In climate models, numerical errors are quite large because the grids are coarse. Not only that but things like tropical convection (a classical ill-posed problem) are represented by crude models that fail for example to account for aggregation. Much of climate model tuning is just compensating for these large errors and violates best practices.
Willard | April 29, 2021 at 9:28 pm |
> Tim Palmer is truly authoritative on the subject.
An editorial remains an editorial, not “science.”
If David is to flex his “science” muscles while punching hippies, he ought to learn the difference.
I bet he does not even realize which paper I’m citing, and why.
Robert I. Ellison | April 29, 2021 at 10:08 pm |
The paper is the one dealing with structural instability introduced by DPY – the one that VTG decided wasn’t about structural instability. Scientific synthesis is science that is given gravitas by the authority – a real and profound authority in the case of Tim Palmer – by authors. It was why I introduced the article on hydrology and uberty. It is about connecting the dots.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2016WR020078
What is this adamant ignorance? Is it poor wee willies heart of darkness. I hope he get’s some comfort from his AI economic overlord.
> He clearly agrees with my assertion that skill is due to cancellation of errors.
Here’s what you yourself quoted, David:
Which part of “this is an entirely different point to your original claim” you do not get?
So once again, you’re wrong. Very Tall agrees with your Bailey. He disagrees with your Motte.
Willard, You are just quote mining again and misrepresenting. That was where he forgot what I originally said or else lied about what I had said and made something up.
dpy6629 | April 28, 2021 at 10:00 pm |
It’s really very simple math to see how if the patterns are wrong, the global average can be right only by cancellation of errors.
Thus, the skill is due to cancellation of large local errors.
VTG agreed with that. However, next he manufactures a falsehood.
verytallguy | April 29, 2021 at 3:32 pm |
You asserted that models have no skill; we now agree that was false, and indeed that a single definition of skill is not meaningful.
dpy6629 | April 29, 2021 at 5:39 pm | Reading comprehension or something worse VTG? Again what I actually said: “Any skill in outputs not used in tuning is accidental and caused by cancellation of numerical errors.” I usually phrase it as “outputs not directly related to those used in tuning.” Your invention is “You asserted that models have no skill” and that’s quite different. The global average temperature is related to top of atmosphere radiation balance and so is more skillful than the patterns. But any quantity not so related will have skill only by accident. That’s because the local numerical truncation errors are quite large.
> And then when you introduced a long quotation from a paper you did not understand there was this
Not sure what you mean by this agrammatical sentence, David, but I’m quite sure that the “long quote” I introduced was Very Tall’s. Let me shorten it for you:
This provides a KO argument to your claim that he agrees with you about the first claim you made. He does not, at least not until you reduce it to a truism.
***
Once it becomes a truism, however, it fails to support your claim. And here’s why it was a squirrel:
[SIMON] Authors should first consider their own personal motivational and confirmation biases before accusing others.
[ROB] In Judith’s case, it has been interesting to observe the change in her perspective over the years.
[BIG] Judith Curry is a hero of science. A rare gem.
[ROB] Judith’s perspective seems to have evolved as more evidence came to light regarding the poor performance of GCM’S in marching observed conditions.
[JOSHUA] I love it when people display cognitive biases as they talk about climate biases.
[ROB] Show use the plenty of people who can defend the relative inaccuracy of gcm […] Those people are being unscientific
[JOSHUA] Thanks for doubling down on showing cognitive bias in a discussion of cognitive bias.
[DAVID] Judith is absolutely correct about GCM’s and their heavy usage in climate science. I’ve explained this many times. Any skill in outputs not used in tuning is accidental and caused by cancellation of numerical errors.
That’s when Very Tall intervened.
Here we are.
That Judy changed her mind exactly because of your favorite pet topic is too good to be true. So I’d like to know what evidence you have to that effect. In return, I’ll give you evidence that it was because of CG I and II.
So as I see it, you fell line and sinker for Rob’s “but modulz” bait.
That should be enough to show you why I had little problem commenting at the Auditor’s.
Another misrepresentation from the champion of the genre.
My two statements are indeed quite similar.
“Any skill in outputs not used in tuning is accidental and caused by cancellation of numerical errors.”
“It’s really very simple math to see how if the patterns are wrong, the global average can be right only by cancellation of errors.
Thus, the skill is due to cancellation of large local errors.”
Indeed the patterns are wrong in GCM’s and thus any skill is due to tuning causing cancellation of errors.
You still have not addressed the fundamental issue that the patterns are wrong. I showed you a paper on structural instability that you didn’t understand and misrepresented. Chief at least corrected you.
> You still have not addressed the fundamental issue that the patterns are wrong.
The central issue here, dear David, is your claim that The bolded statement above is one that ultimately VTG agreed with while claiming it was not particularly profound. I already showed you two quotes that establish that this was not the claim with which Very Tall agreed. Let’s add a third:
https://judithcurry.com/2021/04/25/how-we-fool-ourselves-part-iii-social-biases/#comment-948525
Whether or not your two claims are “similar” is immaterial with the fact that Very Tall agrees with one (he in fact finds it trivial) and disagrees with the others (he in fact quotes from your own sources as to why).
Let’s accept that your claim is rather trivial. My turn now to underline what you’re not addressing: the idea that a trivial claim would explain why Judy went rogue. It certainly did not have that effect on Tim Palmer. As Joshua emphasized a few times already:
Armwave all you want, you can’t deny that this testimony undermines your whole line of argument. And that’s notwithstanding that it’s historically tenuous. Judy’s started with CG I. Should I recall how she describes her Damascus moment?
The fact that I started at the Auditor’s should make you ponder, not lulz.
dpy,
I’m not reentering the models discussion.
But once again.
The childish insults. They’re like a compulsion. You’re embarrassing yourself.
Quoting them, repeating them, emboldening them. All of these, far from proving them right merely embarrasses you all over again.
The central issue is that VTG misrepresented what I said literally scores of times Willie still can’t address the central issue that the patterns are wrong. He misrepresented the paper on sub grid model ordering. He and VTG must focus on word games because they can’t read and understand the science. I know the truth is challenging.
> The central issue is
The central issue is that you backtracked to a trivial interpretation of your claim to justify Judy’s contrarianism, David.
Think about how silly this is.
And you have yet to acknowledge that this had nothing to do with what was under discussion. You exploited Rob’s squirrel to harp about your pet topic.
The topic of that thread was not teh stoopid modulz. You can fool yourself into thinking that this was relevant. Heck, you can fool yourself that your explanation is credible. It is not:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/07/the-montford-delusion/comment-page-4/#comment-181895
Earlier in that comment thread (#139) Judy is being asked to start her own blog.
I’m tired of your errors and unethical practices Willie.
1. You read people’s minds.
2. You never address the underlying technical point because you can’t. All you did was quote from a paper on structural instability and misinterpreted it. I recall VTG likewise came up with a couple of stray out of context quotes.
3. You just lie about what papers say by saying they don’t say what I say they do. You do not know about this. You are not a scientist and cannot synthesize an informed view based on many sources of information. All you can do is cherry pick and play word games.
4. Your analysis is stiltingly formal and deployed with constant attempts to refocus the discussion away from the fundamentally correct nature of what I said.
5. Your analysis of my two very similar statements is BS and you I think know it.
6. It was VTG who charitably got confused and misinterpreted my original statement. Given his track record, it may not have been an innocent error.
7. You deliberately distort what Palmer and Stevens say. Most sane people would not propose a multi-billion dollar effort to dramatically decrease numerical errors by using finer grids if they didn’t feel it was a very big problem.
8. I essentially proved to you that climate models have numerical error levels at least 100 times greater than weather models. Did you not understand? I guess even elementary math can be challenging. Their numerical errors are orders of magnitude greater than in virtually all engineering simulations
9. CMIP6 has if anything provided more evidence for my point. Many of them can’t even reproduce the historical record of GMST because of unrealistic aerosol cloud models.
10. You have admitted that what you are doing here is done in bad faith. You are trying to discredit me by throwing up enough disinformation and obfuscation. You are really unethical in this.
11. You cast doubt on my qualifications by saying I’m not a climate modeler. Another cheap rhetorical trick. Nic Stokes is correct in saying that weather and climate modeling is really just garden variety CFD. And it mostly uses the best methods of the 1960’s.
No amount of deflection and obfuscation by anonymous non-scientists can cover up the fact that GCM’s get the patterns wrong because the numerical errors are quite large. I’ve given evidence from the literature to this obvious fact.
Grid sizes in climate models are usually about 50 km. In weather models they are about 1 km. Given second order numerical methods, truncation errors in climate models are at last 100 times larger.
Palmer acknowledges these problems. That’s why they are proposing a multi-billion dollar effort to dramatically increase the resolution of the models. That would be unneccesary if the models were adequate as they are currently used.
I provided a paper on structural instability of these models. Willie responded by misrepresenting that paper. Since he can’t read it and understand it, he can’t be expected to do better. The dishonesty is pretty breathtaking.
It’s really an open and shut case.
David,
Nothing in your laundry list addresses the following points I made:
Your attribution of VTG’s beliefs was false.
You Motte and Bailey makes your whole line of argument preposterous regarding Judy’s Damascus moment.
Your muscle flexing was as irrelevant to the topic at hand as is your current chest beating.
Were you at the Auditor’s, your laundry list would get snipped.
You won’t get a food fight. Cut it out.
Willie, You are just lying about that. Both of my statements were essentially the same. “Skill is due to concellation of large numerical errors.”
In any case, what you say is really obfuscation because both statements are quite true at least to anyone but anonymous non-scientists playing a meaningless game on the internet.
It was VTG who got confused and misrepresented my initial statement by saying I had said that “models have no skill.” That was the main error.
> both statements are quite true
I don’t need to dispute them, David. In fact all I need is to remind you how you explained one with the other in a way that trivialized your clam. Once we realize that we’re discussing a trivial claim, Very Tall’s agreement isn’t as triumphant as you portrayed it at first.
You need to accept that a trivial statement carries no weight. It can’t drive Judy’s epiphany. It was only meant to peddle your pet topic.
I could dispute your more substantial claim, but you’re not worth it. Look how you just played yourself.
Is that clearer, this time?
dpy,
If you wish to be regarded as an expert scientist, start behaving as one.
Drop the childish insults and casual denigration of me and anyone else.
I will not be dragged into your attempts to restart the previous model discussion by making repeated personal attacks on me.
I am very happy for my words to speak for themselves. They were and remain accurate, in my view.
You are of course perfectly entitled to disagree, but your continued, tedious and repetitious attacks on my supposed motivations just embarrasses you, and exposes the weaknesses of your argument.
Well what I. Said is true and rather obviously true. Numerical errors in climate models are perhaps 100 times larger than in weather models. Why did you misrepresent ( or misremember) what I said scores of times? You might try admitting that what I said was correct to demonstrate that you act in good faith seeing as how you claim to be a model of good citizenship.
> Well what I. Said is true and rather obviously true.
Then obviously what you said can’t support your claim that Judy saw the light because of that, David.
But it’s rather what you were trying to imply with your first claim that could be, shall we say, more contentious?
Here’s your chance. Spell it out. And try to keep Tim on your side while you do.
dpy,
I misrepresented nothing. I simply disagree agree with you, and have no wish to elaborate more on my previous posts which are very clear.
The more you repetitive your claims to know my motivation the less credible your claim to be an “expert scientist” becomes.
Well you first disagreed vehemently with an obviously true statement about numerical errors. You repeated that scores of times. Then when I explained further you agreed with the point (phrased in a slightly different way) and said it was obvious.
Numerical errors in climate models are at least 100 times bigger than in weather models and most other credible CFD simulations. Palmer and Stevens propose a massive and costly program of research to increase that resolution dramatically. I believe them to be honest enough to not do that if this lack of resolution was not a huge problem.
That’s not a pattern of someone acting in good faith. Perhaps if I persuaded you you can clear the record by acknowledging that. What is laughable about this is that you are an anonymous and scientifically unqualified internet persona and yet expect to be treated with respect.
dpy,
Repeating your insults once more shows how weak your arguments are.
I disagree with you, my posts are very clear as to why.
I have no interest in reopening the discussion, or in descending to your level of discourse.
> Well you first disagreed vehemently
See for yourself:
(1) And yet you remain entirely unable to cite a reputable source for this tediously repeated assertion of yours.
(2) Palmer and Stevens does not remotely support your assertion.
(3) none of that remotely supports your assertion.
(4) I’ve cited only one thing – your ridiculous assertion that for GCMs “Any skill in outputs not used in tuning is accidental and caused by cancellation of numerical errors.”
(5) Interesting that may be, [Chief,] but none of it is relevant to dpy’s claim.
(6) your points 1-4 amount to an argument that models are useful but imperfect.
(7) Ah, but this is an entirely different point to your original claim.
(8) I think what we’re back to dpy, is your use of bombast and assertion rather than technical language. You are then unable to justify your position when challenged.
That’s it.
Now, compare with David’s rants, which supports Very Tall’s last point.
> (6) your points 1-4 amount to an argument that models are useful but imperfect.
Is David quoting Palmer and Stevens again?
Hard to tell, J. Since David has difficulties in keeping track of topics and making explicit claims, let alone supporting them, it’s always a pain to audit. He’s mostly winging it.
Don’t forget that it’s theater for the sake of signalling at best, and at worse to play the ref. This has nothing to do with creating a meeting of minds. As long as you stay away from his food fights, all should be well.
David should not have brought my Neverending Audit past in this discussion. He was fooling himself if he thought that this jab would land.
And don’t worry: I’m just riffing on the “How We Are Fooling Ourselves” theme of the post from which this exchange is taken. I could not care less about his mental states.
This is just vast obfuscation by Willie and VTG. Willard, yours is pure sophistry. None of what you list is evidence. It’s evidence free assertion used to obscure the obvious truth that he later agreed with. That’s pretty blatantly dishonorable and disingenuous. I know obfuscation is difficult to do credibly from a position of abject ignorance. My condolences.
1. Stevens and Palmer does support my point. They would not be so dishonest as to suggest spending billions on dramatically increasing resolution if it was not a big problem. Everyone knows its a big problem.
2. I’ve cited several papers supporting my point. There was the one on module order which Willard didn’t understand and misrepresented.
3. Another one is on the fact that reasonable parameters in the could microphysics module can be used to engineer ECS over a broad range.
4. There is another one on model validation from about 4 years ago.
5. Do you deny that climate models numerical errors are 100 times larger than weather models or most credible CFD simulation? Oh, I forgot, you have no idea because you are ignorance of math.
6. There are a host of papers saying that the failure of models to reproduce the pattern of SST change accounted for their ECS being higher than observations indicated.
7. The patterns is the only useful information models add to energy balance methods. Most of them are wrong.
8. Just think about mountains. At 50 km grid spacing these features are almost ignored. Yet they make a huge difference in climatic patterns.
9. Rigorous and tested CFD uses the rule of thumb that you need 30-50 points normal to the wall inside the boundary layer to get credible results. GCM’s are lucky to have a handful. Once again, I know you can’t verify this from a position of ignorance. It is very obvious to anyone who can use
Google Scholar and knows anything about RANS simulations.
10. There are lots of papers on convective aggregation and how GCM’s miss this important phenomenon.
VTG still has an honorable exit point. He can admit he didn’t understand my statement (which is obviously true) but out of personal animus wanted to throw up as much doubt as he could, making various false statements along the way. But then he finally understood once an example was given but was too dishonorable to admit it.
Truth telling is not an insult. This is just more gaslighting to cover your very poor understanding.
Don’t make me dig out the links. There are at least a score of them by “mainstream” climate scientists. I haven’t done that because I know you wouldn’t understand them or worse would cherry pick them.
This is just vast obfuscation by Willie and VTG. Willard, yours is pure sophistry. None of what you list is evidence. It’s evidence free assertion used to obscure the obvious truth that he later agreed with. That’s pretty blatantly evidence of bad faith. I know obfuscation is difficult to do credibly from a position of total lack of knowledge. My condolences.
1. Stevens and Palmer does support my point. They would not suggest spending billions on dramatically increasing resolution if it was not a big problem. Everyone knows its a big problem.
2. I’ve cited several papers supporting my point. There was the one on module order which Willard didn’t understand and misrepresented.
3. Another one is on the fact that reasonable parameters in the could microphysics module can be used to engineer ECS over a broad range.
4. There is another one on model validation from about 4 years ago.
5. Do you deny that climate models numerical errors are 100 times larger than weather models or most credible CFD simulation? Oh, I forgot, you have no idea because you don’t do math.
6. There are a host of papers saying that the failure of models to reproduce the pattern of SST change accounted for their ECS being higher than observations indicated.
7. The patterns is the only useful information models add to energy balance methods. Most of them are wrong.
8. Just think about mountains. At 50 km grid spacing these features are almost ignored. Yet they make a huge difference in climatic patterns.
9. Rigorous and tested CFD uses the rule of thumb that you need 30-50 points normal to the wall inside the boundary layer to get credible results. GCM’s are lucky to have a handful. Once again, I know you can’t verify this from a position of lack of knowledge. It is very obvious to anyone who can use Google Scholar and knows anything about RANS simulations.
10. There are lots of papers on convective aggregation and how GCM’s miss this important phenomenon.
VTG still has an honorable exit point. He can admit he didn’t understand my statement (which is obviously true) but out of personal animus wanted to throw up as much doubt as he could, making various false statements along the way. But then he finally understood once an example was given but was too dishonorable to admit it.
Truth telling is not an insult. This is just more gaslighting to cover your very poor understanding.
Don’t make me dig out the links. There are at least a score of them by “mainstream” climate scientists. I haven’t done that because I know you wouldn’t understand them or worse would cherry pick them.
Models may indeed by useful as experiments used to understand what physical effects are important and how to get them right.
In their current form, they miss almost all the patterns that are their only value added to energy balance methods.
GCM’s resolution is at least an order of magnitude worse in all 3 dimensions than credible CFD simulations. At these resolutions, CFD would be way off, perhaps by as much as 20-50%. You can verify that yourself in the literature. Oh I forgot, you don’t have the knowledge to understand any of the literature.
> None of what you list is evidence.
I listed all of Very Tall’s contributions to the exchange, David. This list sufficed to prove that your “disagreed vehemently” was misleading at best. This list also suffices to prove that your “none of what you list is evidence” is false.
Were you in my shoes at the time, David, you would not have lasted a day at the Auditor’s.
World champion gaslighting by Willie. VTG called my statement ridiculous. That qualifies as vehement disagreement except in Willie’s twisted world of BS.
> Don’t make me dig out the links.
You must be joking, David. Are you threatening to provide more evidence that you were only stating a truism?
You are more than welcome to do so!
Sooner or later, you’ll have to face the facts that (1) this does not support your story about Judy’s red pilling and (2) it’s mostly irrelevant flexing on your part.
> VTG called my statement ridiculous
No, David. Here’s the first thing that Very Tall said:
https://judithcurry.com/2021/04/25/how-we-fool-ourselves-part-iii-social-biases/#comment-948308
Your claim that Very Tall “first disagreed” is false. And he said it was tedious. Not “ridiculous.”
First, Very Tall asked you to source your damn claim. Which you still haven’t done. Even better: that you might be threatening to do!
Rational argumentation should be easy. You make your claims explicit. You support them. For some reason, you can’t do that, David.
You would not have lasted a day at the Auditor’s in my shoes.
You are lying Willard. VTG said several things among one that you yourself just quoted:
(4) I’ve cited only one thing – your ridiculous assertion that for GCMs “Any skill in outputs not used in tuning is accidental and caused by cancellation of numerical errors.”
Even for a sophist such as yourself, this is a world record shattering event in terms of the brazenness of the gaslighting.
I gave you a bunch of easy to find papers. If you are too lazy or unqualified to verify them yourself, then you can go to hell. My statement is true and you have said absolutely nothing at all to the contrary.
And you are lying about sourcing my claim. I did source it. You are too lazy or too unqualified to find or understand the sources.
Here’s a simple refutation of your contention, David:
Is four the first number in the list I showed you? No, it’s not. You want to see vehement? Look at your responses:
(1) You are not acting in good faith as always. Can you not read and understand real science? Perhaps your role is that of anonymous internet nonscientist merchant of doubt?
(2) Your memory is bad I fear. […] The alternative is that so many memory lapses may indicate that someone is not acting in good faith.
(3) Something for every political crusader with a superficial understanding and a cultural bias to dislike.
(4) You have cited nothing and repeatedly denied the evidence others present, which you probably have not read. Nothing here is political rhetoric except your consensus enforcement attempts, which are actually I fear completely ineffective.
(5) What we see here […] is classic simple minded denial.
(6) You revert to very simple minded formulations that hide the truth.
Only afterwards did you offer an explanation of your point, which made it trivial.
You tried to start a food fight with Very Tall. It did not work.
You try to start a food fight with me. It does not work.
Please, do continue. And thank you for your 9:48 comment. You just played yourself once again.
Gaslighting again. I made an obviously true statement that VTG denied and tried to discredit. I then elaborated on it and he realized that he was wrong and tried to cover his error with obfuscation.
David Young –
> Stevens and Palmer does support my point.
I’m glad that you’re FINALLY willing to admit that after dissembling for so long:
-snip-
These systematic errors do not invalidate the use of such climate models in providing scientific input into mitigation policy. These models, our best attempts to solve the laws of physics applied to climate, are quite unequivocal in showing that there is a substantial risk of dangerous, even calamitous, climatic impacts arising from increased levels of atmospheric CO2. It is a statement of scientific fact that to reduce this risk will require a reduction of our carbon emissions.
-snip-
We have been over this many times before Joshie. That’s a cherry picked quote you have posted many times. It proves nothing because its an opinion. The technical point they make is that model resolution is a huge problem which we should spend billions to remedy. There are a host of papers documenting that the patterns of change in GCM’s are mostly wrong. That’s essentially in the settled science category by now.
> That’s a cherry picked quote
Lol. “cherry picked.”
Totally self-sealing assessment by you. David Young.
I quote you saying something that’s totally wrong, and you say I lied. Or that I cherry picked. I quote Nic saying something wrong, or Ioannidis, and you say I lied, or I cherry picked.
You should look up cherry pick, David. Because you don’t seem to understand what it means. Whiting someone isn’t “cherry-picking.”
There’s nothing misleading about quoting thst excerpt. It’s their opinion based on their science.
I get that you don’t like that they have thst opinion. That’s OK. You’re entitled to your opinion also.
But you really ought to stop dissembling
It’s clear that they disagee with you about the value of models.
You should stop trying to portray it as if they agree with you. That quote (among others) makes it quite clear that they don’t.
It’s fundamentally wrong for you to claim otherwise.
Here David –
Read it again. You don’t have to ager with their opinion but it is their opinion (bawd in their science). Stop trying to pretend otherwise.
-snip-
These systematic errors do not invalidate the use of such climate models in providing scientific input into mitigation policy. These models, our best attempts to solve the laws of physics applied to climate, are quite unequivocal in showing that there is a substantial risk of dangerous, even calamitous, climatic impacts arising from increased levels of atmospheric CO2. It is a statement of scientific fact that to reduce this risk will require a reduction of our carbon emissions.
-snip-
You are reverting to being a troll Joshie. You have been called out by at least half a dozen other commenters. You are childishly repeating largely meaningless quote mining.
It’s an unquantified statement about a “substantial risk”. That’s irrelevant to the main issue and that is lack of resolution.
Daryl M | July 5, 2021 at 12:44 pm | Reply
@Willard
The post I replied to wasn’t directed only at David. Joshua posted exactly the same thing numerous times, acting like a child. Joshua is a troll by any definition.
David –
> It’s an unquantified statement about a “substantial risk”. That’s irrelevant to the main issue and that is lack of resolution.
It’s a statement that summarizes their views of the value of models, despite their limitations.
Like I said, you don’t have to agree with them.
You don’t have to agree that the “systematic errors do not invalidate the use of such climate models in providing scientific input into mitigation policy.”
You don’t have to agree with them that the models are “quite unequivocal in showing that there is a substantial risk of dangerous, even calamitous, climatic impacts arising from increased levels of atmospheric CO2.”
You don’t have to agree with them that “It is a statement of scientific fact that to reduce this risk will require a reduction of our carbon emissions.”
You don’t have to agree with any of that. But your lack of agreement doesn’t mean that isn’t what they believe, and of course it would be ridiculous to argue that their beliefs aren’t grounded in their science.
So you should stop trying to pretend that they don’t believe what I quoted, or that their belief in what I quoted isn’t grounded in their science.
And it isn’t “cherry-picking” to quote summary statements about what they believe that clearly reflect what they believe based on their science. You should look up what cherry-pick means if you don’t understand that.
And David, I know that it’s hard for you to do soz but try to leave off the insults and the ad homs and all that jazz.
It doesntnbither me, in fact I find it amusing, but it clearly bothers some other readers and I’m the least you’re being inconsiderate of them by continuing with that nonsense.
Give it a try. I promise it won’t hurt a bit.
Joshie, You are gaslighting again. It’s their opinion but has nothing to do with my quantifiable point about resolution and numerical errors which are true. So why did you quote something that is irrelevant?
Daryl M | July 5, 2021 at 12:44 pm | Reply
@Willard
The post I replied to wasn’t directed only at David. Joshua posted exactly the same thing numerous times, acting like a child. Joshua is a troll by any definition.
David Young –
These are all really, really solid gold comedy:
dpy6629 | June 28, 2020 at 2:55 pm |
…That number [deaths before “herd immunity” is reached] will likely not be dramatically different between Sweden and its neighbors…. If Nic is correct that the ultimate population fatality rate will be 0.06%, that’s much much less than expected annual mortality,…
dpy6629 | June 29, 2020 at 12:42 am |
IFR for people under 70 is lower than the flu and even Sweden will probably have a PFR of 0.06%.
dpy6629 | June 28, 2020 at 4:48 pm |
…You should know that fully effective virus vaccines are usually not possible. For most viruses there is no vaccine at all. The flu vaccine is only partially effective. Counting on that for covid19 is grasping at straws.
dpy6629 | June 30, 2020 at 9:59 pm |
On this post Josh does a classic rendition. Refusing to accept the good news that Sweden hospitalizations and deaths are way way down from the peak and that fatality rates will end up under 0.1%, he wants to focus on how much “better” neighboring countries did (while ignoring that they will do worse in the future while Sweden has herd immunity) and then whines that comparisons between countries don’t mean much.
Note the date here:
dpy6629 | July 4, 2020 at 11:06 pm |
Don is right of course. This is why cases are rising strongly in the US but deaths are on a downtrend. Similarly in Sweden where the trend is much more striking. Cases doubled over the last 3 weeks where new hospitalizations are down under 10 per day from a high of around 40.
dpy6629 | July 4, 2020 at 1:11 pm |
frank, “Cases” are surging but I’m not worried by that….
[…]
If you look at the Wikipaeda page for the Swedish epidemic you will see that cases have surged in the last 3 weeks too, while new hospitalizations continue to decline and are now in single digits and deaths also continue to decline. Surging cases is in my view a phony statistic because its an strongly related to how extensive testing is.
py6629 | July 5, 2020 at 10:53 pm |
…My own hypothesis is that the vulnerable population has already mostly been exposed, leading to an early high IFR which will decline as time goes on.
dpy6629 | July 10, 2020 at 12:08 am |
Frank, Check the Sweden covid19 wikipedia page. While cases have surged from about 4 weeks ago, deaths and hospitalizations have continued to decline.
[…]
If indeed a lot of younger people are getting infected, that’s not a bad thing because very few will die and they will recover and help us ultimately get to herd immunity.
David Young –
But given the context, this is probably even better:
dpy6629 | April 11, 2021 at 9:58 am |
Quote mining is a classic propagandists tool. What does that say about you?
David Young –
> . It’s their opinion but has nothing to do with my quantifiable point about resolution and numerical errors which are true
It’s their opinion regarding the value of climate models. It’s consistent with other statements they’ve made, and its consistent with their science
Ponder that.
Report back once you’ve done that.
Well, I’ve given you plenty of papers to track down saying that these systematic errors can be used to engineer ECS over a broad range. What I said was true despite your squirrel. BTW you are gaslighting when you say their statement is consistent with their science. You are completely clueless in that matter of the science so it’s an argument from ignorance;
David,
I’m glad that you finally dropped your “first disagreed.” Very Tall did not. He asked you to source your claim. You handwaved to a bunch of stuff that can wait for now.
If your claim was “obviously true,” how does it support your theory that it’s what made Judy see the man behind the curtain?
You’ve been dodging that point for two days now. Since it’s the sole reason for you to peddle your pet topic into an exchange about how we are fooling ourselves, you should address it.
Please address it.
World class quibbling and gaslighting. VTG did disagree with my obvious point only to later agree when I elaborated with an example. It is at the very least an example of him being wrong scores of times. And Willie, you deployed thousands of words having nothing to do with with this. A classic sophists’s move. You also misrepresented my two essentially identical statements.
I understand why VTG won’t discuss the original CFD issue. The only honorable way to do that would be an admission of error. This shows his ‘concern’ for civility is not genuine. When you can’t argue science you argue rhetorical form over substance.
dpy,
You were asked by two other posters to quit the insults and thread bombing.
Still you continue:
VTG still has an honorable exit point. He can admit he didn’t understand my statement (which is obviously true) but out of personal animus wanted to throw up as much doubt as he could, making various false statements along the way. But then he finally understood once an example was given but was too dishonorable to admit it.
I disagree with you.
Why you cannot cope with that without throwing insults and mindreading of my motivations is your issue.
Why you are obsessed with the earlier thread when you also behaved in such a way is your issue.
Regardless of how long you continue embarrassing yourself, I will not join your mudslinging. I am am entirely uninterested in reopening the modelling discussion: my posts were very clear and I stand by them.
David,
You keep dodging the issue I raised many times now:
Why would you turn your “Judith is absolutely correct about GCM’s and their heavy usage in climate science” squirrel into a truism out of a sudden?
A trivial claim does not support your story about Judy’s red pilling. That Judy changed her mind exactly because of your favorite pet topic is too good to be true. The idea that a trivial claim would explain why Judy went rogue is silly. The central issue is that you backtracked to a trivial interpretation of your claim to justify Judy’s contrarianism. Your Motte and Bailey makes your whole line of argument preposterous regarding Judy’s Damascus moment.
So let me repeat once more:
If your claim was “obviously true,” how does it support your theory that it’s what made Judy see the man behind the curtain
You’re not artful enough to become a dodger, David.
Please answer the question.
It does appear that VTG’s final position is “I admitted I was wrong after repeating my error scores of times but I refuse to reenter the discussion because you have proven my culpability. Further, I will lie about the truth being told and interpret it as insulting.”
it appears that David has no answer to a very simple question that has been reiterated many times.
dpy,
It does appear that VTG’s final position is “I admitted I was wrong after repeating my error scores of times but I refuse to reenter the discussion because you have proven my culpability. Further, I will lie about the truth being told and interpret it as insulting.”
My position is very clear.
Your every post is peppered with childish insults. Several others have asked you to stop. You continue regardless. You are embarrassing yourself once more.
Despite you continuing endlessly to attempt drag me into an entirely off topic discussion through your repeated personal slurs, I feel no need to do so.
I stand by my previous posts on the subject of modelling. The weakness of your arguments clearly shows in your need to resort to invective filled rants.
Classic gaslighting by VTG. You simply repeat your position while refusing to say what that position is which is classic denial. Climate models have large numerical errors. Skill is due to tuning that causes those errors to cancel for the quantities used in tuning. You denied this a score of times before admitting it was true. That is not the behavior of someone acting in good faith.
It is a lie to say that statements of truth are insults. Only liars can repeat this scores of times. It is a lie to blame others for your constant repetition of irrelevant and meaningless statements.
dpy,
More personal insults. Continuing to embarrass yourself.
as to
Classic gaslighting by VTG. You simply repeat your position while refusing to say what that position is which is classic denial.
My position on the models discussion is set out, very clearly, in the original thread.
It is off topic here, and regardless of endless repetitive invective laden rants from you I am entirely uninterested in reopening it.
That you cannot cope with disagreement without throwing insults around is your issue to deal with, not mine. I am not your therapist.
VTG, Your entire opus on this post is off topic. It’s purely personal and had no content with regard to Frank and my discussion of Covid19. Same for Joshie. And then you hypocritically accuse me of doing what you are doing.
DPY: Any skill in outputs [of climate models] not used in tuning is accidental and caused by cancellation of numerical errors.
VTG: I won’t discuss it. I want to focus on my personal attacks against you. In any case, I was strongly against this truth scores of times before I admitted it was true.
DPY: That’s obfuscation and denial and just personal attacks.
VTG: Pointing out my evasions and denial is insulting. As an anonymous non-scientist with a decades long track record of trying to obscure the science with rhetorical games and personal attacks, I resent it. I am trying my best to repeat a personal attack so many times it will obscure the important truth about climate models.
> It is a lie to say that statements of truth are insults.
That’s not quite true, old man.
You never address the question I reiterated many times because you can’t.
Need I go on to prove my point?
Your silly question Willie is irrelevant to everyone except your poor deluded self. Name calling only obscures the truth of what I am saying. You haven’t really even bothered to say anything about the substance on either climate models or covid19. You are purely rhetorical posturing and childish verbal analysis. My condolences.
dpy,
Your insults and personal attacks, continue.
Please, carry on embarrassing yourself.
1. We’ve established that you regard truth telling about what you write as insulting.
2. We’ve established that on at least one important issue you repeated scores of times a falsehood, then admitted you were wrong, and now refuse to discuss it.
3. We’ve established that you are hypocritical about off-topic comments. Every comment for you here is off topic.
You are in Joshie’s league of endless repetition of off topic and purely personal complaining. But your decades long track record is of poor technical content of your comments and their personal nature. You try to stir up enough mud to obscure the truth of what I say. Same pattern here.
dpy,
We disagree.
You can cope with that without the insults and slurs.
Really. You can.
We are now celebrating a full week of you not answering my question, David.
It does appear that VTG’s final position is “I admitted I was wrong after repeating my error scores of times but I refuse to reenter the discussion because you have proven my culpability. Further, I will lie about the truth being told and interpret it as insulting.”
It appears that David can’t justify how a truism would explain Judy’s change of heart.
Who could anyway?
Wee Lard, No one cares. You don’t really care either.
dpy,
repeatedly calling someone a liar is insulting.
My position is clear, accurate, and in the original thread, although Willard helpfully extracted the key points again for you here.
Your endless attempts to engage in a slanging match demean only you, and show your pretensions to scientific discourse to be just that.
It is amazing to me that you can stick with the position that truthfully pointing out that you are gaslighting about what you said is insulting. Your whole propagandistic line here is insulting to anyone foolish enough to read your comments. The honorable thing for you to do is to admit that you either misunderstood what I wrote or else deliberately tried to discredit it knowing it was true.
This is a child’s game you are playing here.
Your position is contradictory as you well know. You tried to discredit my true statement about the models scores of times before agreeing with it and saying it was a simple observation.
dpu,
more insults.
Please, continue to embarrass yourself.
I cannot stop you.
I’ll must point out one other biased narrative you have promoted here numerous times regarding Covid19’s IFR. You ridiculed Ioannidis’ work on the subject and linked the Imperial College paper calling it an example of mainstream science. This very paper was demolished earlier this year by Ioannidis who pointed out that it used a draconian exclusion criteria that excluded most of the data and selected hot spots.
You almost always carefully select the science you call mainstream and include only what supports your political narratives.
I even doubt you are truthful about disagreeing with me about climate models. You have been all over the spectrum from trying to discredit my statement to agreeing with it and saying it is trivial.
> Your position is contradictory as you well know.
Were that the case, dear David, you’d be able to tell how a truism can explain Judy’s about-face. You’ve been tasked to do so for a week now. So far you have yet to acknowledge that task.
Until you do, the most plausible explanation of this episode is that you trapped yourself into an inconsistent Motte-and-Bailey.
I quoted my exact statements.
VTG, You have repeated at least 20 times the fact that you find truth telling insulting. In the mean time, what Daryl said that started your current line of tripe was this:
Joshua posted exactly the same thing numerous times, acting like a child. Joshua is a troll by any definition.
I think he just asserted that you are childish and a troll by any definition.
> You have repeated at least 20 times the fact that you find truth telling insulting.
That’s a barefaced lie, David. Here’s a sample of what Very Tall said:
– No matter how many people point out your childish insults and ask you to stop, you keep at it.
– The childish insults. They’re like a compulsion. You’re embarrassing yourself.
– Drop the childish insults and casual denigration of me and anyone else.
– I will not be dragged into your attempts to restart the previous model discussion by making repeated personal attacks on me.
– Repeating your insults once more shows how weak your arguments are.
Please own your Motte-and-Bailey.
Come on Willard, you are the one who is transparently lying. Everything I have said is true. You can’t show me one thing that is untrue.
Anyone else foolish enough to read your comments will easily see that too. So then why are you doing this? Some kind of obsession with your silly game. You only got out of moderation jail by promising to be better. You are not doing better. If anything you are just as bad as before.
C’mon, David. Don’t be ridiculous.
Very Tall never said that he finds truth telling insulting. That’s your silly misinterpretation. By that logic, I could infer from your “nobody cares” that you don’t care about your Motte-and-Bailey.
Speaking of which, how about you revisit it and tell everyone how a truism can explain Judy’s transfiguration?
Wee Lard, You have just proven for me that VTG fits Dayrl’s definition of a troll by echoing his scores of repetitions of off topic and incorrect comments.
What I say is true. VTG is insulted. Therefore VTG finds truth telling insulting. Even a game playing endlessly old man whose time is valueless like yourself can see this.
Caution, everyone else who wastes time reading your comments can also see it.
You pulled a silly Motte-and-Bailey on Very Tall, David. I called it out.
Try as hard as you might, David, you won’t get a food fight.
Please stop playing the ref.
You are lying about that Wee Lard. I quoted my exact statements. They are essentially the same. Repetition of a falsehood is what Daryl was referring to. Making you a semi-professional troll.
Not only you quoted your statements, dear David, you also interpreted them as truistic.
Which is why I asked many times: how does that truism explain Judy’s reformation?
You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place right now. You can play the ref. You can try to insult me. I won’t let go.
May this be a lesson as to how I could comment at the Auditor’s.
You lie again Willard. It was VTG who admitted that my observation about models was trivial and obvious (after vehemently denying it a score of times). I don’t waste time on irrelevancies such as you and your silly questions.
> It was Very Tall
Very Tall washed his hands over that exchange a long time ago, David, so that deflection won’t float. But let me put the denial it contains to rest:
What you said was a truism.
You can’t support your story of Judy’s contrarian rebirth with a truism.
In a saner world, that’d be checkmate.
dpy,
OK, so this is getting beyond tedious now, as even you may agree. So rather than just repeating the observations on your continued behaviour, I’ll offer you some advice as to how you can stop embarrassing yourself.
Firstly, you need to decide your persona. Are you an “expert scientist”, as you repeatedly claim, or a conservative culture warrior as you repeatedly behave – “Washingtonians tend to be sheep who are easily manipulated by leftist ideology”. It’s quite impossible for you to behave like the latter whilst claiming to be the former. It does, I fear, make you appear ridiculous. Make a choice.
Second, and this may seem obvious, you need to be less wrong. Loudly proclaiming that Sweden is in herd immunity whilst cases are rising for weeks continuously destroys any credibility you might wish for. Also apply this to climate, where in the thread you link here, you made an assertion, referenced a paper that directly (as Joshua so gleefully repeatedly points out) contradicts your claim and then doubled down on it. Michael Tobis has an excellent piece on this, which I commend to you. https://medium.com/@mtobis/who-decides-what-is-true-b6d9057489cd
Note that, following Tobis’ advice, I cited AR6 which also directly contradicts you. Do you really think your unreferenced assertions will influence anyone over the views of the whole scientific community? Seriously?
Third. You behaviour, which is what brought me in here on this thread. Two other commenters asked you to stop – one even despite agreeing with you on Joshua and his behaviour. Your response to that poster: “Willard is a professional tr0ll” and the ensuing endless list of insults you have set forth. Ask yourself – how does this utter lack of common courtesy come across to others? The thread was started by someone asking you specifically *not* to do this!
So, to summarise.
1. Decide your persona.
2. Be less wrong.
3. Behave with courtesy.
I am sure you will be grateful for this advice, which I commend to you.
It is my final word on this thread.
VTG here shows the height of arrogance. I don’t have to “pick a persona.” Because doing so would not be honest, something with which it appears VTG has a more than passing familiarity.
VTG is just gaslighting about the paper I cited and what it says. The paper is an admission that the lack of numerical resolution is a serious flaw in climate models and justifies spending billions to attempt to fix it. Joshie’s out of context quote means little.
My assertion about Willard being a professional troll is obviously true. He is proud of it and has a whole massive site devoted to the finer points.
The incredible hypocracy of chiding me for repetition when it is he who has filled this thread with endless repetition of vague unsupported assertions with no content. At least I’ve gone back to the record and offered proof of what I’ve said.
My advice to you VTG is to stop misrepresenting what you and others have said. Stop selecting out of context snippets from long papers that prove nothing. Stop referencing badly biased papers and denigrating top flight scientists just because they don’t fit your narratives.
And finally, learn some science so you will not appear to be an anonymous activist on the internet trying to throw mud on actual science. Finally you would benefit if you read more broadly beyond the Guardian and the New York Times.
I will also note that the posturing by VTG about civility is not genuine. He’s adopted it now because on the substance he knows he is wrong. This enables him to throw mud without returning to the substance. This is called a ploy.
David,
You still haven’t got the memo.
Suppose I tell you that Judy’s conversion (I’ve run out of synonyms) can be explained with the following facts:
[BAILEY] I’ve explained this many times. Snow is white and 2+2=4.
That’s what you’re trying to sell to Very Tall.
Do you understand why nobody should take your Bailey seriously?
Now, suppose I would say instead:
[MOTTE] In their current form, stoopid modulz miss almost all the patterns that are their only value added to energy balance methods.
Do you think Tim Palmer would agree with that?
I don’t think so, for here’s what he says:
Don’t you think that your Motte-and-Bailey has lasted long enough?
Willard is here cherry picking from material he doesn’t understand. It is really such obvious tripe. If what I said was a truism, it is true.
1. Climate models use grids that are 25 times coarser than weather models. Therefore the truncation errors are at least 100 times larger.
2. The literature is chock full of papers pointing out that many of the important patterns in AOGCM’s are incorrect and that it affects the ECS of the models.
3. Virtually all credible CFD simulations have numerical errors smaller than weather models.
Willard’s quote mining is so pointless. Asserting that climate models have not been invalidated as input into mitigation strategies is a very very tepid endorsement and a double negative that is virtually meaningless. Of course it fits Willard’s largely meaningless opus here.
You keep using the word “cherry-picking,” David. It may not mean what you make it mean.
Either you try to explain Judy’s conversion with something more substantial than a truism, or your anti-modulz rant was not quite relevant.
Only after you owned what you did will we look over every single paragraph where the word “skill” appears in the two papers you cited.
Sooner or later you will run out of spit.
Hi Daryl,
While you are correct, I think we need to cut the poor boyz a little slack.
The topic of the thread is the “collapse of the fake consensus on Covid 19” and we just finished an epic weekend of collapse of consensus. First, hundreds of millions of people gathered in massive crowds for the holiday weekend without masks. They all ignored the somber warning that if 70%+ were vaccinated we could, maybe, have very small outdoor barbecues over the Fourth. Even Joe Biden, who issued that warning, ignored it. Remember, our posters here believe firmly that vaccinated 18-year-olds are planning to be masked up all the time three months from now.
Then the media ran stories right before the weekend of local efforts to use African American barber shops to help get vaccine reluctant out to the injection sites- collapsing the fake consensus that southern white Republicans are the ones refusing the jab.
Then came the news that airlines were booked and gas stations were swamped, just as Democrats were still giving CPR to the fake consensus that people really, really want Congress to take dramatic action right now to stop fossil fuel use.
Finally, newspapers and television news were filled with photos and video of of those Fourth of July parties and they featured people waving American flags and celebrating the United States, collapsing the year-long media “consensus” that all of us believe AmeriKKKa is a systemically awful mistake that we are all ashamed of and where only a handful of irredeemable supremacists would dream of gathering, sans-masks, to wave (shudders in horror) a flag!
It’s not often that a three-day weekend tramples someone’s entire world view, but it happened.
The Lancet editorial dismissed allegations of a leak from the lab in Wuhan as a conspiracy theory, not as a scientific hypothesis that must be countered with evidence. However, President Trump IS a CONSPIRACY THEORIST: bitherism, vaccines cause autism, corrupt Dominion Voting machine software from Venezuela, etc. He frequently fails to consult experts or take their evidence into account before speculating. An intriguing hypothesis isn’t rejected simply because there is evidence that contradicts it. Perhaps it was correct for the authors of the Lancet article to dismiss the lab leak HYPOTHESIS as a “conspiracy theory” because it came from a conspiracy theorist.
After the Lancet letter, Senator Cotton has discussed the possibility of a lab leak as a hypothesis with some evidence/arguments to support it. See the WSJ editorial linked below. If someone who apparently does not have a long record of acting as a conspiracy theorist adds some evidence to a conspiracy theory, he doesn’t automatically become a conspiracy theorist. The Lancet letter didn’t deal appropriately with Cotton’s allegations.
https://www.cotton.senate.gov/news/press-releases/-cotton-op-ed-in-the-wall-street-journal-and-145coronavirus-and-the-laboratories-in-wuhan-and-146
And another Covid claim collapses.
Remember how only the conspiracy-minded would believe the Covid death toll was exaggerated? Two California counties did an audit of all “Covid deaths.” Almost a fourth of the deaths weren’t Covid. Surprise!
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/07/02/santa-clara-county-revises-covid-death-toll-down/
A lot of people have made this point including Dr. Birx last spring. It does show however how panic and fear combined to cause inflated numbers which then led to more fear and panic.
> an audit of all covid deaths….
Interesting that independently of whether the downward revision likewise applies to other regions (and it may well do so), you neglect to take into account that there is likely uncertainty, and perhaps a greater range of uncertainty, running in the other direction for a variety of reasons.
That has been, all along, why people who actually study how deaths are reported have suggested that the official toll may well be an undercount.
It’s almost a fair point. I actually know someone who got sick at home, was afraid to go to the hospital (and doctors’ offices were closed) and he was found dead at home. Officially they didn’t do a covid test, unofficially nobody knows if he was listed as “probable” in the covid stats. Everyone was told to assume it was Covid for cleaning and quarantine purposes.
But I do doubt that there is much “uncertainty” in the usual sense- deaths are not hidden and there are many studying “excess death” rates to help understand Covid. And you still have the same problem the audit discovered- did someone die “of Covid” or “with Covid?”
> But I do doubt that there is much “uncertainty”
Then you obviously haven’t done even a modicum of investigation, as there are numerous studies that support the uncertainty.
I really doubt if many covid deaths were missed except perhaps in March in New York City. What they did was create the “due to covid but not tested” category to try to cover for their incompetence. There is now a growing body of evidence of overcounting. Colorado last fall did something similar after auditing their numbers. I’ve not seen any instances of upward revisions even though I haven’t looked. My brother I think made the point to me about higher reimbursement rates for covid patients to hospitals. Since cause of death is almost always ambiguous, actual corruption is not required here, just suggesting to doctors that maybe they are underattributing.
David Young –
> I really doubt if many covid deaths were missed…
Duly noted that you doubt it and so does Jeff.
Also noted is that people who actually have the requisite skills and relevant experience and who have conducted extensive studies of the issue have published research that suggests undercounting.
Evidence? Show it. And not from spring of last year either.
“Then you obviously haven’t done even a modicum of investigation, as there are numerous studies that support the uncertainty.”
Everyone here has seen excess death “studies.” They know there were deaths (no uncertainty). They know there were excess deaths (no uncertainty). They don’t know the causes of all the excess deaths happened (uncertainty). And now they know that the count of excess deaths attributed to Covid was wrong (high).
For instances where medical professionals examined and tested the patient and then assigned a specific cause of death, they significantly incorrectly attributed death to Covid.
That shouldn’t give extra confidence to the “studies” by those who want to assign Covid as the cause to every death above the annual average.
Meanwhile, even though the “casedemic” is all a big hoax, life expectancy in the US dropped significantly contemporaneously with the fake pandemic created by “the mainstream media” just to keep people from voting for Donald Trump.
During a period where deaths from the flu dropped precipitously. Drop was something like 8 times many comparable countries, apparently the biggest drop since WWII?
Well, of course “lockdown deaths” and “just a bunch of old people” and “we all die anyway” and besides, it was mostly ’cause of minorities dying so we don’t really need to care that much anyway.
“…life expectancy in the US dropped significantly…”
I challenge you to put some thought into that. According to the CDC, covid rarely killed young people, it mostly killed old people. In other words, if it was Covid, “life expectancy” would be largely unchanged. If life expectancy changed (young people died) it wasn’t Covid according to the CDC.
According to this stupid article, “The county reported that it had reviewed each COVID-19 fatality and was only counting those whose cause of death was from the virus and not those who tested positive for COVID-19 at the time of death but did not necessarily die from the virus. The new approach meant that the death toll dropped by 22%, specifically from 2,201 to 1,696 death”
How does the SARS2 virus kill patients? The list includes: Sepsis, Respiratory failure, acute respiratory distress syndrome (cytokine storm), heart failure, septic shock, blood coagulation issues, acute cardiac injury, acute kidney failure, secondary infections (pneumonia), low protein levels in blood, and acidosis. Other problems can produce these same causes of death. The right question isn’t what killed the patient; the right question is whether the patient would have survived if he hadn’t been infected by SARS2.
Pick any person in the US. What are the chances that person will die in the next 20 days? About 650,000 will die each year of heart disease, or about 35,000 in the next 20 days. Now, let’s say the person has some form of heart disease and received a positive PCR test for COVID 5 days ago? About 600,000 died of COVID within 25 days of getting a positive PCR test. If the person died, the odds are about 20:1 it would NOT have happened without COVID.
Pick someone who is 90. Though they likely have some health problems, their average life expectancy is 4.5 years, about 1600 days. The odds of their dying in any 20 day period are roughly 1:100. Now add a positive PCR test for COVID. What killed the patient?
How many people died without being tested for SARS2? About 6 times as many as died with a diagnosed COVID infection. How often was SARS2 an undiagnosed factor in their deaths. Oh, the authorities aren’t looking into these mistakes?
Now, who is it that is re-writing the cause of death for 20% people who died infected with SARS2? Answer: The county health officials who were supposed to be protecting us from pandemics. The same county officials who failed to recognize the first death in the US from COVID for two months despite knowing exactly what to look for. Color me skeptical.
I know Frank you hate this analysis because it tends to reduce the sense of panic and doom. Let me explain this to you.
There are always multiple causes of death. We simply don’t know how many covid19 victims were already on death’s door. Average life expectancy in nursing homes is 1-3 years if memory is correct. If someone is already using supplemental oxygen and has advanced COPD or lung cancer and subsequently dies of lung failure and had other covid symptoms, what caused the death? It’s possible to argue it either way. They would have died in short order regardless of covid19.
DPY’s comment – ” Average life expectancy in nursing homes is 1-3 years if memory is correct.”
The median life expectancy for males entering nursing homes is approx 4-6 months. For females, the median life expectancy is approx 8-10 months. The average life expectancy is much higher because a few entering nursing homes have long term illnesses that are not terminal. One point is that people enter nursing homes to die.
The better metric is median life expectancy instead average life expectancy and whether the median life expectancy changed to any degree.
Shorter version of Frank- it makes sense to Frank to force third graders to wear masks outdoors in 90-degree heat and force the bankruptcy of restaurants and barber shops because somewhere a dying 90-year-old might possibly (if we make several assumptions) have died a half hour earlier than expected from a highly contagious virus. Just like they do every year for every contagious disease.
The other fake consensus this audit exposed was the myth that deaths from injuries or other conditions were “lower than expected” due to lockdowns. If you expected five highway deaths and you get five highway deaths that you incorrectly attribute to Covid because of a positive test, then highway deaths were not “down” and Covid was less fatal than reported.
Joe,
Before Covid, we used to accept the science that
stress kills.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mood-microbe/201910/stress-can-kill-you-how-cope
isolation kills
https://journals.lww.com/psychosomaticmedicine/Citation/2001/03000/Social_Isolation_Kills,_But_How_and_Why_.11.aspx
depression kills
https://www.healthline.com/health/can-depression-kill-you
We just conducted a national experiment of stressing out, isolating, and depressing everyone in the nation 24/7 for 16 months. And some folks want to say it was awesome and assign all the excess deaths to a virus.
Joe, Thanks for that data. I agree that median stay is a better metric for how ill most residents are. It further adds to the point that many of the covid fatalities were already very ill and near death which further shows how dishonest all the hype about 620,000 fatalities is. A better measure is mortality adjusted for age and population. Those numbers show 2020 to be higher than most recent years but at the same level as 2003 for the US and as 2013 for Sweden.
For future reference, do you have a source I could bookmark? Thanks
jeffnsails850 | July 7, 2021 at 10:07 am | creates an enormous strawman:
“it makes sense to Frank to force third graders to wear masks outdoors in 90-degree heat and force the bankruptcy of restaurants and barber shops because somewhere a dying 90-year-old might possibly (if we make several assumptions) have died a half hour earlier than expected from a highly contagious virus. Just like they do every year for every contagious disease.”
Jeff’s ignorance is appalling: That 90-year who died of COVID a “half-hour early” actually had a 5-year life expectancy. At 85, a 7-year life expectancy. At 80; 9 years. At 75; 12.3. At 70; 16 years. Only 32% of Americans who have died of COVID are over 85. 28% of are 75-84. 22% are 65-74. 12% are 55-64. Wait until your grandchildren come to visit you during the next pandemic and say; “Wearing a mask in the 90 degree heat is hassle, Gramps. Your idol, Trump refused to wear a mask in Wuhan Pandemic before a coup made him Emperor in August 2021, just as he and Q predicted.” DPY probably could use a refresher on these numbers too. (Yes, I realize that co-morbidities complicates the analysis. However, with my limited experience, when family members were in seriously “declining” health, I didn’t have the slightest idea whether they would live another 2-3 months or 2-3 years. However, COVID would kill them within 2-3 weeks.
Jeff is right that an extra 20,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2020 compared with 2019, many due to isolation during the pandemic and others due to the ongoing switch towards the more dangerous fentanyl. And 30,000 didn’t die because “ineffective NPI’s” totally eliminated seasonal influenza.
Only naive conspiracy theorists believe that the public health authorities who failed to protect the public from COVID are likely to be counting deaths in highway accidents as COVID deaths. The opposite is far more likely.
As for those restaurants and beauty parlors, many of those businesses have been hurt more by their customers staying away out of FEAR rather than government imposed full or partial shutdown. Restaurant owners, like all good entrepreneurs, need to re-orient their businesses to meet the shifting demands of their customers, in this case for takeout and delivery meals that can brighten up isolation or for outdoor dining. More sophisticated restaurants need vastly improved ventilation, HEPA air filtration and an enlightened government capable of recognizing that such establishments are safe enough. The Paycheck Protection Program is helping many small businesses survive.
It was probably impossible to keep school systems open or re-open them in the spring of 2020. The loss of in-person elementary school and perhaps middle school in the fall of 2020 and spring of 2021 was probably an unnecessary tragedy from any epidemiology perspective, but one that was difficult to solve in practice given the concerns of parents and teachers unions.
What you idiots forget, however, is that a pandemic in the fall of 2020 was not inevitable. Numerous Asian countries kept their business and schools fully open. They beat this pandemic. My aspiration for the greatest nation on the planet was to beat this pandemic as these other countries have PROVED IS POSSIBLE; not surrender to overflowing hospitals and 1.2 million deaths. (Vaccines cut the death toll in half.) We didn’t even come close to succeeding. Today, China looks like the greatest nation on the planet, because they stopped this pandemic AND grew their economy in 2020.
jeffnsails850: And another Covid claim collapses.
Thank you for the link.
DPY wrote: “As a final point, Frank you make an obvious error about hospital capacity in New York City. There was massive excess capacity provided by the US military. The amoral and incompetent Cuomo didn’t use it because just like you Frank, he hated Trump. Other states could have asked for similar assistance or could have called out the national guard medical units. That’s on them.”
Really? the amoral and incompetent Cuomo didn’t use the hospital ship because he hated Trump?
Read a more complete account of the Navy hospital ship at the link below. Initially, the hospital ship wouldn’t take COVID patients. A ship is absolutely the worst place to treat patients with a highly infectious disease. See the USS Theodore Roosevelt and Diamond Princess. Fortunately, only four of the crew came down with COVID. Elderly patients recovering from COVID don’t need a hospital or a hospital ship, they need a facility used to handling and rehabilitating elderly patients who aren’t strong enough to go home. By the time an elderly COVID patient was well enough to leave the hospital, they were almost certainly not infectious. With CDC approval, hospitals were being staffed nurses and doctors whose symptoms were gone, but who tested positive of residual viral RNA.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/new-yorks-nursing-homes-ship-empty/
Frank –
I’d be curious to read your take on this re Ivermectin:
https://t.co/b5g3HZjJab?amp=1
;The review/opinion piece at your link is reasonable, but far too optimistic for a pessimist like me. The authors starts by admitting the obvious:
“Very early enthusiasm for the use of ivermectin for COVID-19, derived from in vitro data, was tempered by subsequent pharmacokinetic data suggesting effective doses to achieve IC50 against the virus were not readily achievable in humans (refs 13–15). More recently, some have proposed alternate mechanisms of action for ivermectin in the treatment of COVID-19 [Ref 16].
Reference 16 is https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2020/11/22/2020.11.21.392639.full.pdf The Figures in this paper are horrible. I don’t want to compare males and female; I want to compare infected males with and wlthout ivermectin. And infected females with and without ivermection. Lost patience.
How good is this evidence that ivermectin works by some other mechanism like nicotinic receptors as suggested by:
https://comptes-rendus.academie-sciences.fr/biologies/articles/10.5802/crbiol.8/
Attractive hypothesis, but I think we would have heard long ago that SARS2 uses another receptor in addition to ACE to enter cells. Unlikely. (HIV uses two receptors.)
IL6/IL10 mechanism? IL6 antagonists have been tried in the clinic. WHO thinks they have modest efficacy, but not the FDA? Probably only important when you get to cytokine-storm in advanced illnesses.
Concluding remarks seem appropriate:
Where does this leave us? There are arguments to be made both in support and against a potential benefit of ivermectin for COVID-19 treatment. In borrowing from Sir Bradford Hill’s causal criteria framework 21, there are clear elements of strength of association (the pooled estimate of reduction in mortality was over 50%), there is consistency across studies (and meta-analyses) with relatively little heterogeneity in effect sizes, and there is evidence of temporality, which is provided by the prospective randomized study designs. Counterbalancing these arguments are the general lack of biologic plausibility and coherence for the use of ivermectin in the treatment of a viral infection. Since it does not appear to be active in standard doses as a direct-acting anti-viral, we are forced to speculate about anti-inflammatory or indirect antiviral effects. Perhaps most puzzling is the degree and extent of benefit identified – across disease stages, dosing regimens, and viral and clinical outcomes – WHICH STRAINS BELIEF, particularly for a disease that has been characterized by narrow therapeutic windows for most other interventions. [I’m skeptical of data from third-world countries where “success” is essential to funding.]
“As of this writing, there at least five large, placebo-controlled clinical trials on the use of ivermectin for COVID-19 underway that should be powered to allay residual concerns about the available data. Until those data are released, ivermectin might be best considered as an extremely promising therapy, but one not quite ready for public use. Otherwise, there is a real risk that the scientific community will once again be bitten by over-enthusiasm and forced to answer to a public that will not be shy about holding us to account.
Nothing said here relieves Cuomo of responsibility for his incompetence. They could have sent non-covid patients to the hospital ship. They also had the Javitz center. Cuomo had a massive oversupply of hospital beds and personnel. He didn’t use it and instead relieved his hospital problem by sending covid positive seniors back to their care facilities. He covered it up and lied about it.
DPY: Elderly patients who have recovered from COVID but aren’t strong enough to care for themselves wouldn’t profit from the hospital ship or the Javitz Center. They need physical therapy to get back on their feet and be able to return to something resembling normality. It typically takes about one week of rehab for every day spend in a hospital bed for an elderly to return to pre-illness normal (if that is possible). You certainly don’t want to tie up your regular and overflow hospital space with these elderly patients – unless they are still infectious.
A positive PCR test at some time in the past doesn’t prove that a patient was still infectious when discharged. A positive PCR test at discharge doesn’t prove that a patient is still infectious. Some patients test positive for weeks after they are well and presumed non-infectious. The standard PCR assay is run for many rounds of amplification so they can detect a SARS2 infection before the patient is infectious.
If you check the guidelines at the CDC, you’ll see that medical professionals are allowed to return to work with a positive PCR test as long as symptoms (fever, cough, etc) have been absent for only 24 h. An elderly patient being discharged with such symptoms.
There is an average of one staff member for every resident in a nursing home (24 hour coverage). There are one hundred or more staff members at the typical nursing home living in the community (often dependent on public transportation in the NYC area) who can bring in SARS2 into the facility with a pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic infection. This is the route by which COVID invaded hundreds of nursing homes across the country that were not forced to accept elderly patients after they had recovered from a COVID infection. Therefore, we don’t need to postulate that NY deliberately sent patients they knew were potentially infectious to nursing homes. However, if they did, this is a very litigious country. Contact tracing and sequencing can unambiguously establish how someone became infected. Someone has/will bring a lawsuit and could provide compelling evidence of this mistake. A sympathetic jury will decide whether a preponderance of the evidence shows such a mistake). They won’t need to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. I’m not sure why you are so certain of Cuomo’s guilt in this case. Real doctors and administrators, not just politicians, needed to sign the discharge papers of the infectious elderly patients who were sent to nursing homes. If Cuomo was guilty, so were these doctors! I’ll wait for the jury verdict before deciding what happened.
(FWIW, there is no doubt Cuomo is guilty of hiding the number of deaths in NY nursing homes and has been accused of sexual harassment or unprofessional conduct with his female staff. Why not stick with things you know are true?)
A not entirely unreasonable but highly insufficient overview of the “Did NPI’s save lives” issue.
Biggest problem, IMO, is that like most takes I’ve seen it doesn’t discuss the question of how to disaggregate the severity of the precipitating from evaluating NPI effects, and neither does it actually interrogate the question of counterfactual assumptions – i.e., what would have happened in the absence of NPIs is critical for actually evaluating what the differential effect of NIPs actually were:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness-much-more?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo1NjcxNTAyLCJwb3N0X2lkIjozNzk2NDkzMiwiXyI6Ik1CUExvIiwiaWF0IjoxNjI1NjY0MjM2LCJleHAiOjE2MjU2Njc4MzYsImlzcyI6InB1Yi04OTEyMCIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.mKe3tW-LNf2ro1wnJmqnVcfFx-OZ_SJkeufBjq2kdYo
Ron –
Maybe you’ll see this:
https://zenodo.org/record/5075888#.YOZKSWkpAzZ
Ho hum, a parsimonious explanation; refined, selective, anecdotal reasoning.
Josh was impressed, it had the desired effect.
Trunks –
> Josh was impressed, it had the desired effect
You should rethink your paradigm for how you think about me, and then think about how the mistaken ways you think about me might generalize.
I didn’t actually read the article, because I haven’t followed the details of the issue carefully – because I’m not capable of understanding the technical discussion.
I was neither impressed nor unimpressed.
At this point I’m content to think that there might have been a lab leak, or there might not have been. I’m content to realize that some people were too quick to dismiss the possibility of a lab leak and thar some people want to exploit that quick dismissal. Motivations or causal mechanisms on both sides of the dynamic are likewise easily exploited for a variety of reasons.
IMO, what’s best here is to think of how motivated reasoning and other cognitive biases work, how pervasive they are and how one reasonably accessable partial antidote to those biases is a serious commitment to cognirive empathy (look it up), and avoiding fundamental attribution error (look it up), and realization that profess comes with focusing on non-zero sum engagement.
I suggest that fantasizing about what I do and don’t think is sub-optimal. If you’re curious about what I do and don’t think, instead try asking me.
Thanks for channeling your inner Tibetan monk, Josh; though it’s not stated enough, we really do appreciate your virtue.
Let’s take your last post directed towards me at your word: from it we recognize that your exploitation of Ron turned into a win/win for you; that is, laziness rewarded by Ron’s analysis at no personal cost of your own time. If it were a junk essay (as it obviously was) it would be no sweat off your back to have someone else fill you in on it. I’m sure Ron appreciates you exploiting his time with something you couldn’t bother to read yourself, to save him wading through nonsense. If you had read it yourself you could have juxtaposed its content with Ron’s very exemplary and studied analysis that he shared with denizens throughout this thread, but you didn’t.
But at least now your apparently open-minded with Ron’s studied “both sides of the fence” critical analysis about the genesis of COVID-19, since you’ve reached out to him. Upthread you weren’t so generous in consideration of him. Generally for someone who self-professes to know so little about the science, and as one who says they haven’t studied the COVID genesis issue carefully, you provide denizens an awful lot of anal-retentive screeds that read at length like the rabbit hole equivalent of War and Peace. Please give it a rest, meditate with some monks for awhile; and please spare us your tortured ideological sociology lessons.
Trunks –
>… laziness rewarded by Ron’s analysis.
Let’s try this again.
I didn’t read Ron’s analysis on any detail either. Accordingly, I’m neither impressed nor unimpressed either. So I take no measure of reward from Ron’s analysis. I know that he considers his analysis superior to the analyses of the people he disagrees with. I’ll take that under advisement.
You can think it’s laziness if you’d like. I don’t particularly care. If you lookes up fundamental attribution error, you will see I’m in surprised that you’ve reached such a conclusion. Why care one way or the other when your conclusion was inevitable.
Anyway, I consider my stance as an honest appraisal of my ability to understand an issue where technical skills and brains beyond my reach would be required.
As such, I look at the larger outlines of the back and forth. People with clearly heavy partisan interests line up exactly as I could predict. That doesn’t give me confidence in an interpretation of the science, but it does help me to gain some measure of inroads into probabilities.
> But at least now your apparently open-minded with Ron’s studied “both sides of the fence” critical analysis about the genesis of COVID-19, since you’ve reached out to him.
If you think that forming no opinion one way or the other with respect to Ron’s take, then I guess I’m openinded.
> Upthread you weren’t so generous in consideration of him.
My more generous take was related to other issues where I feel much more confident as to grasping details.
Many typos..I think what I was saying is obvious…but obviously I meant my LESS generous take..
And btw, any time you don’t want to read one of my comments, feel free not to.
It’s entirely right.
Joshua,
Thanks for the link. This paper looks like the establishment’s best arguments. One should critically read it as well as listen to the this congressional testimony in which the lab origin theory was laid out on June 29. https://www.c-span.org/video/?513038-1/house-republicans-examine-covid-19-origins
Each of the arguments in the paper have been refuted in this blog post and dozens of scientific points were omitted, including the proof that Zhengli Shi lied several times about RatG13 and its origin. Yet the paper relies on Shi’s word and her lab’s publishing as being completely inclusive and transparent. The military connections and CCP are not even in the realm of the establishment virologist’s thought even though they took over the lab and shut down the sharing of their database in Sept 2019.
At the beginning of his congressional testimony Dr. Richard Muller explained that when he called all his virologists friends for help in understanding the issues on the Covid origin they refused to help and told him that no virologist (or even their assistants) would help him. They all were sensitive to having their name associated with any comment that might offend China and thus interfere with their financial ties. At the end of the hearing Muller added to this by saying that he is from Berkeley. Nobody he knows was in favor of his investigation or of him speaking out because it’s perceived to be helping Republicans. Muller proudly pointed out that he is not a Republican but that science cannot be political or it fails to remain science.
Many existing drugs that are weakly active against SARS2 in vitro appear to exert their activity through a toxic mechanism: phopholipidosis, HCQ is in this group, but ivermectin is not. My logical assumption is that the concentration of HCQ experienced in vivo after dosing is not high enough to produced either anti-viral activity or phospholipidosis.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/06/22/science.abi4708
Drug-induced phospholipidosis confounds drug repurposing for SARS-CoV-2
Abstract: Repurposing drugs as treatments for COVID-19 has drawn much attention. Beginning with sigma receptor ligands, and expanding to other drugs from screening in the field, we became concerned that phospholipidosis was a shared mechanism underlying the antiviral activity of many repurposed drugs. For all of the 23 cationic amphiphilic drugs tested, including hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, amiodarone, and four others already in clinical trials, phospholipidosis was monotonically correlated with antiviral efficacy. Conversely, drugs active against the same targets that did not induce phospholipidosis were not antiviral. Phospholipidosis depends on the physicochemical properties of drugs, and does not reflect specific target-based activities, rather it may be considered a toxic confound in early drug discovery. Early detection of phospholipidosis could eliminate these artifacts, enabling a focus on molecules with therapeutic potential.
“[Phospholipidosis] is characterized by the formation of vesicle-like structures and “foamy” or “whorled” membranes, and is thought to arise by CAD disruption of lipid homeostasis. [Cationic amphiphilic drugs or CADs] accumulate in intracellular compartments such as endosomes and lysosomes where they can directly or indirectly inhibit lipid processing. Modulation of these same lipid processing pathways is critical for viral replication, and inhibiting phospholipid production has previously been associated with inhibition of coronavirus replication. CADs have in vitro activity against multiple viruses including Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, Ebola, Zika, Dengue, and filoviruses, though CAD-induction of phospholipidosis has only been proposed as an antiviral mechanism for Marburg virus.”
Frank, Thanks for your research. I think all agree that in vitro efficacy is only a first screening toward in vivo efficacy. In regards to finding Covid treatments I think the bigger question than whether a particular treatment is safe and effective is how can we know this if we can’t trust the health establishment? I am absolutely serious.
Not one, but two highly respected medical journals published fraudulent studies based on an unvetted, unaccredited and likely non-existent database in the Surgisphere scandal. The Who trials on HCQ were halted on the Lancet publishing. Although they were later restarted once the Twittersphere caught on to the Surgisphere, but not before dozens of articles were blasted out on medical newsletters and blogs declaring the epitaph to Trump’s crazy treatment. The FDA effectively banned HCQ’s use in the USA for Covid and never reconsidered. The result is that many US doctors turned renegade, not believing the FDA or CDC. The world became split on the question and to this day I don’t think either side trusts a study that does not confirm their prior belief. Does this sound familiar? The late Michael Crichton argued that climate science should be more like medical science. It turned out he got his wish.
Do you think Ivermectin and HCQ with zinc and vit C are worthless for those at day one of covid symptoms? Which studies would you trust if they are contradictory in results? If we don’t know then Crichton’s red and blue team division on every such controversial trial seems like a great idea to me.
Franktoo: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/06/22/science.abi4708
thank you for the link
Tedros says today it was premature to have ruled out a lab leak as the origin of Covid-19.
“I was a lab technician myself. I’m an immunologist, and I have worked in the lab, and lab accidents happen,” Mr. Tedros said. “It’s common.”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-16/who-urges-china-to-share-more-information-about-covid-source/100297904
Tedros says today it was premature to have ruled out a lab leak as the origin of Covid-19.
“I was a lab technician myself. I’m an immunologist, and I have worked in the lab, and lab accidents happen,” Mr. Tedros said. “It’s common.”
Ron Graf
As I previously noted – NPR ran a week long expose in April 2020 explaining how it was nearly impossible for the virus to escape from the lab due to all the safety protocols in place. Failing to note that lab leaks do happen.
The week long expose – was very anti trump.
Back in June, 2020, the American People had the % that tested positive down to 20,000 per day and could not see why. The % positive grew until they found out why and the contact tracers used the six day rule to find the asystematic in September. They began using the rule and the % positive began coming down. By January, 2021, the % was down to 40,000 per day. It got down to 1%. The last few days the % positive has been staidly climbing. Yesterday it was 32,899 positives. That was 5%.
180,000 individuals per month are entering the country. If we believe 50% have antibodies then 90,000 individuals, unvaccinated, 10% are probably caring the live virus, are being spread out all over the country.
IT IS NOT THE DELTA VIRUS CAUSING THE RISE. IT IS OUR STUPIDITY CAUSUNG THE RISE.
How many illegals in the country will fallout the paperwork to get the vaccine???
date Positive increase % total tests % Pos/Total
7/1/2021 16,192 3,740 30 549,109 3
7/2/2021 16,777 585 3.6 825,994 2
7/3/2021 7,392 -385 -56 258,317 3
7/4/2021 3,985 -3,407 -44 161,132 3
7/5/2021 4,351 366 9 209,004 2
7/6/2021 8,578 4,227 97 1,117,989 1
7/7/2021 13,873 5,295 62 608,803 2
7/8/2021 18,854 4,981 36 764,316 3
7/9/2021 24,614 5,760 30 840,067 3
7/10/2021 14,535 -10,079 -41 409,551 4
7/11/2021 6,642 -7,893 -54 134,862 5
7/12/2021 11,837 5,195 78 1,116,175 1
7/13/2021 24,172 12,335 104 1,852,531 1
7/14/2021 33,611 9,439 39 876,846 4
7/15/2021 32,899 -712 -2 627,261 5
7/16/2021 36,127 3,228 8 870,541 4
Robert- there is no doubt that a whole lot of covid is coming over the border, but the main reason for the increase in cases is: it’s July, it’s hot people are back inside in the air conditioning.
Those coming across the border are probably moving in to areas with the same ethnicity. Of those admitted to the hospitals, how many have health insurance? How many have a driver’s license?
These percentages will never be known because the government already knows the answers!
Maybe Tucker Carlson should be given a Special Achievement Darwin Award.
“Maybe Tucker Carlson….”
Still peddling those lies when they’ve been debunked already?
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/09/politics/vaccine-hesitant-analysis/index.html
“A look at the data reveals that the vaccine hesitant group, however, are not big Trump lovers. They’re actually likely not to be Republican. Instead, many of them are people who are detached from the political process and didn’t vote for either major candidate in 2020.
The most recent Kaiser poll helps illustrate that the vaccine hesitant group doesn’t really lean Republican. Just 20% of the group called themselves Republican with an additional 19% being independents who leaned Republican. The clear majority (61%) were not Republicans (41% said they were Democrats or Democratic leaning independents and 20% were either pure independents or undesignated).”
This political fetish is killing Democrats- what locality is going to design programs or incentives to get vaccines into the actually reluctant – Democrats – when the entire MSM is devoted to fairy tales about Tucker Carlson and the GOP?
But, then again, judging by Progressive’s defund the police and bail “reform” efforts, the left appears to wish for a high body count among it’s putative supporters.
” The unvaccinated group are younger, more likely to identify as Republicans or be Republican-leaning, and more likely to have lower levels of education and lower incomes than the vaccinated population”.
https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/kff-covid-19-vaccine-monitor-profile-of-the-unvaccinated/
https://files.kff.org/attachment/Topline-KFF-COVID-19-Vaccine-Monitor-April-2021.pdf
CNN, which really really didn’t want to burst its own narrative, read the polls accurately.
And of course, if you’ve ever looked at actual vaccination statistics by demographics instead of just polling you know that the young and African Americans in cities have the lowest vaccination rates. Which is why the CDC is ignoring your narrative and enlisting Black barber shops https://www.wsj.com/articles/barbershops-and-hair-salons-are-enlisted-in-covid-19-vaccine-push-11625410802
and places like Seattle are offering free pot.
Or you can keep believing Tucker Carlson’s audience is at the GOP stronghold of black barber shops and hair salons in Washington DC or among the 19-year-old stoner antifa types in the Pacific northwest.
I’m just saying we should call Tucker’s special contribution to the infection and death rates among the unvaccinated.
And I’m asking why.
Tucker Carlson bangs on and on against mandates, not vaccines.
Did you know there is no law or health department mandate against eating fried chicken for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day? Not even in blue states or cities. Yet somehow or another people heard the advice against it and took action all on their own. Not everyone, of course, but just like a skinny person standing next to a guy with a bucket of KFC, if you’re vaccinated what someone is doing next to you won’t hurt you. Is there a tiny chance you’ll get covid and die? Sure. There’s a tiny chance the vaccine will kill you. And a bigger chance the travel for your next holiday will kill you. Welcome to planet earth.
Jeff,
Why are you minimizing his great accomplishments?
Ivermectin COVID-19 Scandal Shows How Vulnerable Science Is to Fraud
“A few days ago, the study was retracted amid accusations of fraud and plagiarism. A masters student who had been assigned to read the paper as part of his degree noticed that the entire introduction appeared to be copied from earlier scientific papers, and further analysis revealed that the study’s datasheet posted online by the authors contained obvious irregularities.”
https://www.sciencealert.com/ivermectin-study-controversy-is-a-huge-wake-up-call-for-fraud-in-covid-19-science
James, thanks for your link. The Ivermectin side of the story seems to be unconnected with the article’s broader conclusion: that science should not be trusted until validated by rigorous skepticism.
What came to my mind reading the article is how establishment science behaved when lay person Stephen McIntyre decided to audit the data and code of Mann, Brown and Hughes (1998,99). Wikipedia still has “Mike’s Nature Trick” explained as a clever solution to a hard math problem.
There needs to be a complete overhaul of all grant driven science. Every study should have two lead investigators with competing hypotheses conducting an identical protocol while independently collecting and/or analyzing data. This was Michael Crichton’s solution to ground truth climate science’s hockey team.
Most of us have been skeptical of Ivermectin. It has been the credulous right that was ready to believe in another miracle cure.
A preprint, quite notable for its use by a bunch of activists who were campaigning for a “miracle drug” in contravention to the opinions of the majority of people with relevant experience and expertise, gets retracted as likely fraud was exposed.
And that justifies a complete overhaul of grant-driven science.
And what do we have to replace it? Google jockey researchers (who rely on grant-driven science to Invent their pet theories)?
A capital idea.
Milk is even cheaper than Ivermectin. And no doubt safer. And you can put it in coffee and dunk your oreos in it too:
-snip-
Several videos showing Indonesians rushing to buy up Nestle’s Bear Brand milk have gone viral.
This happened after claims emerged on social media and WhatsApp groups that drinking this brand of milk could produce Covid antibodies
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-57838033
Ron: I’ve dreamed of running the Gates Foundation and carrying out a version your to “two principal investigators” suggestion. Suppose somebody approaches the Foundation to fund a transformative new program, say a new curriculum or a new type of school. Suppose reviews of the grant proposal look great. Then I find three highly respected critics of this type of program or perhaps skeptical peer reviewers of the program. I tell the originator of the program that we’d like to fund it, but – when the money is spent – the foundation wants the world to know whether the program really worked or not. So the Foundation insists the proposer to pick one of these three respected skeptics of your program, and the two of you need to reach a detailed agreement about how the success of the project/intervention will be assessed. That assessment will be shared with the world, ideally in a joint publication. If not, the Foundation publish the evaluation using the metrics and procedures the two of you will defined.
Congress could, but is unlikely to, include similar provisions when funding certain programs: What do we expect to gain from spend the taxpayers money and did we obtain the results we expected? Long ago, such a provision was attached to funding for Head Start and the random assignment study commissioned by the DOE found that students who attended such programs showed no lasting benefit from having attended. (Before becoming a nationwide program, pilot programs did show substantial benefits for those who attended, but something has changed since then.)
This is somewhat analogous to what happens between sponsors of clinical trials of a new drug and the FDA. The two sides sit down together BEFORE any clinical trials have been started and agree what data will be collected, how it will be analyzed, and what endpoints will be used to define efficacy. For remdesivir, the chosen endpoint was the amount of time patients receiving drug or placebo take to get well enough to be discharged. (The FDA has an advisory committee on infectious disease whose specialists that have discussed the value of alternative endpoints. Remdesivir is a fairly ineffective drug and the FDA’s advisors may now want new drugs for COVID to be evaluated by a tougher standard, say evidence of a reduction in viral load in vivo. Sponsors may feel nasal swabs are too irreproducible to be a useful endpoint.) Both also discuss what data will be collected from each patient, especially for side effects. The sponsor of the new drug isn’t forced to follow the FDA’s “orders” about how the clinical trial will be carried out, but they are given a clear idea of what the FDA is looking for and the FDA has heard a clear rational why data they might want to see isn’t practical to obtain.
These days anyone planning a clinical trial that might be used for drug approval or requesting funding is required to register their trial with a database and specify what they intend to do, what data they will collect, and when results are expected. If ivermectin is used to treat COVID and the results turn out poorly, they are still expected to enter the results in the fields that have already been generated. If the researchers choose to hide their poor results, their failure to enter their results at the expected time will still be on record.
Frank –
How familiar are you with the full literature on Head Start? I think there’s quite a bit of heterogeneity in the literature on the long term effects. It’s a very complicated and multifactorial subject of study.
Here’s an article that discusses changes in findings over time and what might help to explain those changes:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/202002/head-start-s-value-lies-in-care-not-academic-training
“Ron: I’ve dreamed of running the Gates Foundation and carrying out a version your to “two principal investigators” suggestion…”
Frank, thanks for your comment. If I am reading it correctly you are saying it would be nice if we could afford such an extravagance. But I think you would agree, (and I hope James would too), that having a confirmation of your predilections a stamp labeled science so we can call those who remain skeptical of the results mean names is not what we truly want.
The medical establishment seems to have come to a consensus that randomized controlled trials are worth the expense over cheaper retrospective studies or post hock analysis. This would seem to fall in line with that same degree of rigor being acknowledged as necessary in order for all parties to trust the results, meaning air-tightness against of a scandal (whether of good or bad intention).
Yes James, The last couple of years have been a really huge black mark on the science establishment. What really does work is pre-registration of trials requiring the scientists to lay out in advance exactly their protocols and their out come measures. Over the last 20 years after a major funder of medical research required it, positive outcomes plummeted (from memory) from 60% to 8% indicating that more than half of research may be wrong in providing false positive outcomes, just as Ioannidis has claimed.
“Most of us have been skeptical of Ivermectin.”
Again, your article’s point, which I agree with, James, is that we need to be skeptical of peer reviewed as well and pre-published papers across the board. Science’s brand gets routinely abused by hucksters and political activists, and we need to protect with better protocols. Relying on “establishments” in which we think we agree politically is not a good rule for our trusting of results. The same Surgisphere that produced retracted papers in the Lancet and the NEJM panning HCQ to the applause of the leftwing and Big Pharma establishments was also the one’s who created a retracted paper using fake data promoting Ivermectin. By the way, I hope there are some actual journalists that are looking into the motivations that were in common with those two deceptions.
This reply to Frank won’t post in the correct place, but its important.
Part I:
This is another long winded evidence free rant from Frank dominated by falsehoods about the MSM and a phony comparison between the Biden laptop and the Steele Dossier. And then you return to your truly indefensible line on Crossfire Hurricane.
1. You don’t know where I get my information. There is no “right wing” media, that’s a fabrication in your own biased mind. Below you will find many non-“right wing” sources that show that the MSM is corrupt. I tend to believe lefties when they criticize the media because the media is a bunch of lefties. Look at Greenwald, Taibbi, and Weiss (a centrist) on substack. That is still a place where there is no censorship of criticism of the elites. But the MSM have a terrible track record and its getting worse.
https://sharylattkisson.com/2021/06/50-media-mistakes-in-the-trump-era-the-definitive-list/
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/jounalists-against-free-speech?fbclid=IwAR2G12CfGxCB2HAy8-4SN2wcavulzDkJnQtGkw3wejkBeLq1Q8n6DuEslos
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-do-big-media-outlets-so-often
Part II:
This is another long winded evidence free rant Frank dominated by falsehoods about the MSM and a phony comparison between the Biden laptop and the Steele Dossier. And then you return to your truly indefensible line on Crossfire Hurricane.
1. You don’t know where I get my information. There is no “right wing” media, that’s a fabrication in your own biased mind. Below you will find many non-“right wing” sources that show that the MSM is corrupt. I tend to believe lefties when they criticize the media because the media is a bunch of lefties. Look at Greenwald, Taibbi, and Weiss (a centrist) on substack. That is still a place where there is no censorship of criticism of the elites. But the MSM have a terrible track record and its getting worse.
https://sharylattkisson.com/2021/06/50-media-mistakes-in-the-trump-era-the-definitive-list/
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/jounalists-against-free-speech?fbclid=IwAR2G12CfGxCB2HAy8-4SN2wcavulzDkJnQtGkw3wejkBeLq1Q8n6DuEslos
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-do-big-media-outlets-so-often
2. The public in America knows that the media are a flaming grease dumpster fire.
https://thehill.com/opinion/international/560480-us-finishes-dead-last-in-media-trust-among-46-countries-heres-why
3. Like most of your narratives, your comparison between the Biden laptop story and the Steele dossier story is essentially meritless. The laptop is almost certainly authentic which I think you essentially admitted. A lot of it is confirmed by Biden’s former business partner Bobolinski, whose revelations were mostly ignored by the MSM even though very credible. Note that totally incredible accusations against Kavanaugh are broadcast 24/7 but the very credible Bobolinski is mostly ignored. The media may have published a few stories but they were a blip in the constant lying about Trump, covid19, and the massive BLM riots and Antifa insurrections. I ‘m thinking those stories mostly used the Russian disinformation line to discredit rather than objectively reporting. The NYT has openly admitted they have abandoned journalism in favor of narratives. They allow a hostile work environment and harassment of employees based on skin color and political views.
https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter
Part III:
4. I do think the MSM’s articles quoting the spurious letter from former deep staters about Russian disinformation was covered in “right wing” media.
5. Frank:”I dismissed the laptop story as Russian disinformation.” This shows how biased and politically motivated your judgment has become.
6. The Steele dossier was a fraud and its was pretty evident that that was true. Yet it was used for the bulk of the information on 4 warrant applications to a FISA court. Come admitted this under oath. Comey said the dossier was salacious and unverified yet he perjured himself by signing a warrant application that states that the signer is certifying that the information is verified. The dossier was used by deep state actors and former Obama flaks to lie for years about the evidence on Trump Russia collusion. The media breathlessly reported thousands of stories based on nothing but anonymous leaks, many of which turned out to be lies.
https://sharylattkisson.com/2021/06/50-media-mistakes-in-the-trump-era-the-definitive-list/
To summarize, MSM used an obviously fraudulent dossier and deep state leaks in a relentless campaign to put pressure on Trump and his team to resign and/or to create momentum for impeachment. They put on the back burner and in most cases censored a true story about Hunter Biden and his laptop. Instead of honest reporting, they went with the letter by former officials saying this looked like Russian misinformation, which turned out to be a transparent lie. There is no comparison between the credible and true Biden laptop story and the fraudulent Steele Dossier story. Why do you spuriously misrepresent the most important facts?
5. I see you return to your deceptive narrative about Crossfire Hurricane. The DNC hack investigation may have been justified even it was total incompetence from day one. The server was never examined by the FBI and so they had to rely on a paid consultant of the DNC. The Russian collusion conspiracy theory and the resulting investigation was a fraud from day 1. The most important facts that you continue to fail to acknowledge are.
a. The warrant applications are the only SWORN and OFFICIAL predication documents. They rely for the bulk of their information on the dossier which everyone knew was salacious and unverified as Comey said under oath. Signing this document which was certifying that the information contained is verified was perjury.
b. That the dossier was a fraud was rather evident at the time (as Comey essentially admitted) but by Jan. 2017 it was a proven fact that it was a fraud. Yet more warrants were submitted to the court. How could that happen if there was not a deep state informal conspiracy to keep the investigation going at any cost?
6. The subject of this post. The media/scientist fake concensus is a prime example of an informal conspiracy to control what people get to read. And one of the peddlers of this fake news was Frank your revered MSM.
I see DPY has returned citing Trump tweets without bothering to check if they are factual. Doesn’t he know that at least 50% of what he tweets is a lie or misleading, and his echo chamber isn’t going to correct him. .
The standards for beginning an FBI investigation are extremely lax. There were last revised in 2008 by AG Mukasey. The liberals hate them. Any agent currently can follow up leads for up to a month (while carrying out his assigned duties) without requesting authorization. The reason for this is obvious: If an agent hears a rumor from a source that there are several Arabs in a flight school training to fly passenger jets, the agent can call up flight schools and request the pictures of Arabs being trained there. With some evidence in hand, the agent can go to his superiors and request that an investigation be opened. There doesn’t need to be evidence a crime has been committed; national security and terrorism are major concerns of the FBI that can be investigated without evidence of a crime. There are preliminary investigations and full investigations, and more intrusive practices are not permitted in the former. Agents are supposed to use less intrusive techniques first, but if an agent immediately gets a directional mike recording the conversations of those Arab pilots at lunch, the agent isn’t going to be fired.
a) Only then do we come to the evidence/procedures you wrongly think were needed to open the Page investigation: The 100 page application (and many supporting documents the IG found lacking). Large sections of the FISA applications for Carter Page are still classified, probably because the Trump DoJ didn’t want the public to know how much evidence the FBI had accumulated against Page. We know from the Mueller Report that Page told two confidential informants that the Russians pledged millions to help him create a pro-Russia think tank and that he advising officials in Moscowin December about the coming Trump administration (even though he had been dismissed from the campaign two months earlier. Rumor has it that a least one non-Steele source in Russia (the head of the NES who invited Page to speak) understood that Page met with Sechin. And there were the Russian intelligence officers he knowingly met with, that launched his investigation even before he joined the Trump campaign. Immediately after the Mueller Report decline to recommend indictment of Page, Manafort, and Flynn for conspiracy with Russia, there is a redacted passage about Page and a footnote explaining that there was sufficient evidence for the FISA warrant, but not indictment.
b) There is NO evidence that the Steele Dossier was a fraud: “a misrepresentation of fact”. DANCHENKO CONFIRMED THAT ALL OF THE RAW INTELLIGENCE STEELE REPORTED ORIGINATED FROM CONVERSATIONS WITH HIS FRIENDS IN RUSSIA WHO KNEW SOME ACCESS TO THE INNER WORKINGS OF THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT. The fact that some of it was rumor or bar-talk is does NOT make the intelligence fraudulent. The FBI deduced the names of all of the secondary sub-sources and interviewed some of them. The FBI’s interview of Danshenko in Jan 2017 did NOT convince the FBI the Dossier was fraudulent; they interviewed Danshenko again in March and May and then Steele in the summer trying to understand its credibility. The fact that the DNC funded Steele’s research does not make the Dossier a fraud – there is ZERO evidence that any HRC campaign official ever told Steele what to say in the Dossier. The fact that many allegations in the Dossier remain uncorroborated does not make the Dossier a fraud. If Danscheko worked to the Russians, the Dossier would be disinformation (a familiar possibility), not fraud by Steele. However, given Russia’s other efforts to help Trump, it is unlikely they provided disinformation that would hurt him. After his agent was murdered by Putin, we can be sure Steele didn’t knowingly help spread Russian disinformation.
I don’t revere the MSM. Every time I encountered a paper copy of the WaPo packed with biased anti-Trump stories, I complained that these elite liberals were making it more likely that Trump would be re-elected. Trump used this “persecution” to united the Republican party under his leadership. Every time I turn on Fox News for a few minutes, however, I see people who are disconnected from reality (except Trey Gowdy).
It seems as if links no longer are postable by me for some reason. This makes it impossible to effectively respond to Frank. My 5 part comment contained 6 links to non “right-wing” media sources showing the media is a flaming grease dumpster fire and the American people overwhelming know it.
I’ll try to post them again in a second.
1. You don’t know where I get my information. There is no “right wing” media, that’s a fabrication in your own biased mind. Below you will find many non-“right wing” sources that show that the MSM is corrupt. I tend to believe lefties when they criticize the media because the media is a bunch of lefties. Look at Greenwald, Taibbi, and Weiss (a centrist) on substack. That is still a place where there is no censorship of criticism of the elites. But the MSM have a terrible track record and its getting worse.
https://sharylattkisson.com/2021/06/50-media-mistakes-in-the-trump-era-the-definitive-list/
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/jounalists-against-free-speech?fbclid=IwAR2G12CfGxCB2HAy8-4SN2wcavulzDkJnQtGkw3wejkBeLq1Q8n6DuEslos
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-do-big-media-outlets-so-often
Well, I will post enough information to find them.
1. Sheryl Atkinson. //sharylattkisson.com/2021/06/50-media-mistakes-in-the-trump-era-the-definitive-list/
2. http://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/jounalists-against-free-speech?fbclid=IwAR2G12CfGxCB2HAy8-4SN2wcavulzDkJnQtGkw3wejkBeLq1Q8n6DuEslos
1. Sheryl Atkinson, The definitive list of mistakes the media made in the Trump era.
2. Tablet magazine. Journalists against free speech?
3. Glen Greenwald, substack. How big media outlets so often get it wrong.
4. The Hill. US finishes dead last in media trust among 46 countries heres why
5. Berri Weiss’ resignation letter from the New York Times.
6. Jonathan Turley, The Hill. shadow state embracing corporate governance to escape constitutional limits
The last one is an issue more and more are seeing as the biggest threat to our Republic since the Civil War.
This is another long winded evidence free rant Frank dominated by falsehoods about the MSM and a phony comparison between the Biden laptop and the Steele Dossier. And then you return to your truly indefensible line on Crossfire Hurricane.
1. You don’t know where I get my information. There is no “right wing” media, that’s a fabrication in your own biased mind. Below you will find many non-“right wing” sources that show that the MSM is corrupt. I tend to believe lefties when they criticize the media because the media is a bunch of lefties. Look at Greenwald, Taibbi, and Weiss (a centrist) on substack. That is still a place where there is no censorship of criticism of the elites. But the MSM have a terrible track record and its getting worse. (Sheryl Atkinson, Glenn Greenwald, and Tablet magazine).
2. The public in America knows that the media are a flaming grease dumpster fire. (The Hill, Concha)
3. Like most of your narratives, your comparison between the Biden laptop story and the Steele dossier story is essentially meritless. The laptop is almost certainly authentic which I think you essentially admitted. A lot of it is confirmed by Biden’s former business partner Bobolinski, whose revelations were mostly ignored by the MSM even though very credible. Note that totally incredible accusations against Kavanaugh are broadcast 24/7 but the very credible Bobolinski is mostly ignored. The media may have published a few stories but they were a blip in the constant lying about Trump, covid19, and the massive BLM riots and Antifa insurrections. I ‘m thinking those stories mostly used the Russian disinformation line to discredit rather than objectively reporting. The NYT has openly admitted they have abandoned journalism in favor of narratives. They allow a hostile work environment and harassment of employees based on skin color and political views. (Berri Weiss resignation letter where she says the NYT has officially abandoned journalism in favor of narrative promotion).
4. I do think the MSM’s articles quoting the spurious letter from former deep staters about Russian disinformation was covered in “right wing” media.
5. Frank:”I dismissed the laptop story as Russian disinformation.” This shows how biased and politically motivated your judgment has become.
6. The Steele dossier was a fraud and its was pretty evident that that was true. Yet it was used for the bulk of the information on 4 warrant applications to a FISA court. Come admitted this under oath. Comey said the dossier was salacious and unverified yet he perjured himself by signing a warrant application that states that the signer is certifying that the information is verified. The dossier was used by deep state actors and former Obama flaks to lie for years about the evidence on Trump Russia collusion. The media breathlessly reported thousands of stories based on nothing but anonymous leaks, many of which turned out to be lies.
To summarize, MSM used an obviously fraudulent dossier and deep state leaks in a relentless campaign to put pressure on Trump and his team to resign and/or to create momentum for impeachment. They put on the back burner and in most cases censored a true story about Hunter Biden and his laptop. Instead of honest reporting, they went with the letter by former officials saying this looked like Russian misinformation, which turned out to be a transparent lie. There is no comparison between the credible and true Biden laptop story and the fraudulent Steele Dossier story. Why do you spuriously misrepresent the most important facts?
5. I see you return to your deceptive narrative about Crossfire Hurricane. The DNC hack investigation may have been justified even it was total incompetence from day one. The server was never examined by the FBI and so they had to rely on a paid consultant of the DNC. The Russian collusion conspiracy theory and the resulting investigation was a fraud from day 1. The most important facts that you continue to fail to acknowledge are.
a. The warrant applications are the only SWORN and OFFICIAL predication documents. They rely for the bulk of their information on the dossier which everyone knew was salacious and unverified as Comey said under oath. Signing this document which was certifying that the information contained is verified was perjury.
b. That the dossier was a fraud was rather evident at the time (as Comey essentially admitted) but by Jan. 2017 it was a proven fact that it was a fraud. Yet more warrants were submitted to the court. How could that happen if there was not a deep state informal conspiracy to keep the investigation going at any cost?
There are a couple of points left to go, but will post those tomorrow.
dpy,
It’s too much to read everything you post. It makes my head hurt. Could you just sum it up in 50 words or less?
The summary is that the MSM are a dumpster fire and the American people by a large margin know it. The media for four years was essentially a propaganda arm of the Democrat party and the woke left. They openly admit it and brag about it. Critical Race Theory is really an open return to 19th Century racist. They allow hostile work environments where gross harrassment is allowed. The best leftie journalists such as Greenwald and Taibbi have been exiled to substack which still allows freedom of speech.
Oh, that’s all. Why didn’t you say so?
To all the Trump-Russian conspiracy theorists: If Russia wanted to get Trump elected then why were they giving so much money to Democrats? Search Podesta Sberbank. They know how to get money to our politicians. They don’t need to buy stupid ads on Facebook.
That was the brilliance of the conspiracy, duh.
Yes, we are all nuts. At the same time we design the buildings you work in, practice medicine on your loved ones, judge you in court and teach your children. It’s too bad we have thrown out all of our means of finding the truth. James, you link to an article that goes into detail about the collapse of the integrity of our scientific establishment and your take away is that Ivermectin has no efficacy, just like you thought. Amazing.
Didn’t we find the “truth”?
The worm pill doesn’t work for COVID as most people suspected.
Of course. How incredibly cunning of them.
“The worm pill doesn’t work for COVID as most people suspected.”
Why would most people suspect one way or the other? In April of 2020 a highly respected Australian virologist found that Ivermectin stopped SARS2 from replicating in vitro. The question in my mind is why Ivermectin was not immediately tried in human trials since it has a long established safety record.
How did the establishment know it wouldn’t work?
How do we know now that it doesn’t work?
How do we know that HCQ does not work when we have some studies indicating that it does, like the Henry Ford Institute and NYU ones?
How do we know that a combination cocktail of antivirals are not the answer? That turned out to be a very effective approach for AIDS.
I am against pre-judging anything. My question is how does one assume the worst about Ivermectin or HCQ investigators while at the same time assuming the best about the People’s Liberation Army?
Yesterday 24 of the 27 Lancet letter signers signed a new letter affirming their confidence in their communist Chinese counterparts. here.
Speaking of Russia….
Vladimir Putin has been funding pretend “climate change” activists for years because the goal was always to get the EU to burn more Russian gas. They funded the opposition to fracking in Europe, the support for direct pipelines of gas to Europe from Russia, and the switch to natural gas for EU industrial areas.
It’s working:
https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2018/03/the-volkswagen-group-leads-the-way-in-phasing-out-coal.html
And, of course, there are many working hard to hide the pea. Here’s how CNN “reported” the story that Putin will control Germany’s biggest auto factory- note there is not a single mention of the fact that the factory and city will now be powered by Russian gas:
https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/08/news/volkswagen-coal-wolfsburg-factory/index.html
The “climate chancellor” of Germany substantially paid for the Russian pipeline, which will also power the rest of the country as Germany is committed to replacing emissions-free nuclear power with the natural gas that supplies cash to the Russian Army.
Meanwhile the Biden administration has waived all sanctions – making Nord Stream 2 the only gas pipeline the new US government supports.
But, hey, James wants you to care deeply about the Steele “dossier”- the Russian intel misinformation project paid for by Hillary Clinton.
Jeff,
Never mentioned the dossier. You must be thinking of somebody else.
“You must be thinking of somebody else.”
Or commenting, as you are, under a post about Russian interference in the US elections.
This is typical fuzzy thinking. Because I comment on Russian interference, that automatically implies all sorts of things in your mind that I never mention. And ll I said:
“That was the brilliance of the conspiracy, duh.”
In regard to comment about Putin contributing to Democratic candidates.
7. Finally your buddies Frank in the media are now colluding with government and tech monopolies to censor what people get to read and say. This could be the tipping point into a soft (or very hard if you are a dissident) totalitarian state such as China. Gen. Milley has openly talked of a coup and implied half his fellow citizens are fascists. His defense of critical race theory is insane and not honest.
Finally Frank, I’m tired of this pseudo-conversation where you continue to stonewall and ignore the most important facts in these matters while insisting on largely irrelevant or minor matters carefully skewed by you to give an unbalanced picture. And please drop your “right wing” media smear. Next thing we know you will be signing up for Milley’s critical race theory training and his strike team to take out political opponents.
Jonathan Turley in the Hill does a very good job of summarizing the outlines of this state collusion with big tech and the media to control the information we are allowed to see.
Another good but alarming take on our current media insanity and totalitarian instincts.
https://nypost.com/2021/07/17/the-media-only-tries-to-cancel-joe-rogan-because-he-terrifies-them/
Speaking of the media, Frank, Taibbi is fantastic on the recent NPR take on Ben Shapiro. What is really true Frank is that the MSM is growing more rabidly woke and divorced from reality. When they are not lying, they are looking hilarious.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/nprs-brilliant-self-own
I must apologize to the AMERICAN PEOPLE.!
YOU FOUND THE ANSWER, THE TESTERS , CONTACT TRACERS, AND VACCINE ARE STILL DOING THEIR JOBS.
IT IS NOT THE DELTA VIRUS. THE LYING MEDIA IS THE ONE KILLING PROPLE!!!!!