Fear and Loathing, a Rat Flu Odyssey

[bennymac]

there is a fair amount of jerking off in this thread (and some poliass threads) by certain maggots yelling "I knew it all along 100% and I said it and no one listened and I was right!" - the irony is that it's being done by posters who are wrong about 99% of the time.

They decided to push all-in on the lab theory for some redemption - let's see if that gamble pays off. For me the jury is still out.

[powdrhound]

Isn’t there someone around W-2 who can get this lady some bananas?

[LongShortLong]

Didn't invest 90 minutes, but were they specifically addressing it as no evidence of a lab "developed" virus?

No evidence a lab was involved. All the evidence to date is uninformed speculation. Including Wade's article. Including WSJ. Including US State Department Pompeo / unnamed intel. That's not to say it wasn't a lab release (or creation), only the current evidence doesn't support it, and it's a distraction from our best chances to discover the origin. Also they find China's response/actions appropriate, though perhaps not as forthcoming as we'd like. Also - it's hard to prove a negative.

There's a shorter TWiV from 2020 that goes through some of the lab theories. Vincent says the current publicity is a rehash of unsupported ideas in that earlier episode.

These scientists are basically saying "We're doing work here, go away kids." Though Vincent has a soft spot for informing the public.

[jono]

Wade says there was gain of function research going on with level 2 protection and I thought he claimed some of that was a matter of public record. Seems like that could be verified. Do they address that?

[pureantigravity]

https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-ma...h-f96dd7413748

Hurts my brain. Ouch. This could start WWIII.

[riser4]

Furry cleavage.

[Percy Rideout]

No evidence a lab was involved. All the evidence to date is uninformed speculation. Including Wade's article. Including WSJ. Including US State Department Pompeo / unnamed intel. That's not to say it wasn't a lab release (or creation), only the current evidence doesn't support it, and it's a distraction from our best chances to discover the origin. Also they find China's response/actions appropriate, though perhaps not as forthcoming as we'd like. Also - it's hard to prove a negative.

There's a shorter TWiV from 2020 that goes through some of the lab theories. Vincent says the current publicity is a rehash of unsupported ideas in that earlier episode.

These scientists are basically saying "We're doing work here, go away kids." Though Vincent has a soft spot for informing the public.

The Chinese military still controls the lab in question with an iron fist and no access while the world wants in. Again to a facility with multinational funding and multinational scientists and research. Systemic failure by the WHO here. Why should we fund the WHO after this?

[AEV]

It’s been a year. If/when something is of natural origin, isn’t the source usually discovered extremely quickly and easily?

not saying thats proof, I’m wondering

[frorider]

SWA flight attendant gets teeth knocked out by nose-out mask wearer. Warning: side boob and mild obesity.

[The AD]

^^^ this ^^^
I got diagnosed with the flu back in 2005. After that experience (felt like I got run over by a truck), I knew the difference.

... Thom

Seconded. When you have the flu it's pretty obvious. I've never had a cold that rendered me bedridden.

[summit]

It’s been a year. If/when something is of natural origin, isn’t the source usually discovered extremely quickly and easily?

not saying thats proof, I’m wondering

How would you tell the difference in a virus of natural origin that was acquired from an unknown intermediary species (pangolin) by some person and spread from there... versus if that virus was acquired, studied, and accidently infected a lab worker and spread from there?

Contact tracing is an imperfect craft that yields fuzzy information even if you aren't trying to get it third hand from an obfuscating reputation obsessed bunch of secretive liars that constitute the Communist Chinese Party.

There aren't going to be any smoking guns unless the truth is known to the CCP (they might not know) and someone leaks it. All there will be is clues that are inconclusive.

There could have been a contained index case/outbreak that allowed study at the lab, a resulting sick lab worker/outbreak, and more animal-to-human transmission outbreaks going on in the wild simultaneously.

I'm not sure any of it matters except if it focuses folks on the other actually-culpable wrongs that China has done. Perhaps this sideshow keeps some people from going right back into their Cheap-Chicom-Consumer-Goods heroin trip and focuses them on the threat that CCP is to Western Liberal Democracy.

[jono]

https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-ma...h-f96dd7413748

Hurts my brain. Ouch. This could start WWIII.

From Deigin: "Furin cuts proteins in strictly defined places, namely after an RxxR sequence (that is, Arg-X-X-Arg, where X can be any amino acid). Moreover, if arginine is also in the second or third place (that is, RRxR or RxRR), then the cleavage efficiency is significantly increased."

From Mofro261:

As a mad scientist who has waffled between making vaccines to improve humanity and dreaming up the Sar-bola like viruses to wipe out humanity, I'm a little jealous if someone else beat me to it on the latter one. But if Sars2 was lab derived, why use a poor furin cleavage site like RRAR with only one previous occurance in the database, over other more well established sites for furin? Codon optimized but not amino acid optimized seems like poor planning if it was by plan.

Trying to make sense of these two statements, I understand the notation to mean that RRAR is a form of RRxR, which has "significantly" higher cleavage efficiency per Deigin. Is Deigin incorrect or is that true but not as efficient as RxRR? Or is A just a suboptimal amino acid?

I'm glad to see none of this seems to point to WWIII. Despite the attempted thoroughness, the incredible length of the Deigin article just goes to show that we don't know and probably won't know (unless lab records show us, and those have surely been destroyed if they existed). Otherwise, we'll never be sure that there isn't an as-yet unknown (and maybe obscure/never to be known) virus whose recombination with, say, RatG13 in some perfectly logical place explains the whole thing.

[summit]

Seconded. When you have the flu it's pretty obvious. I've never had a cold that rendered me bedridden.

Flu comes in a full spectrum of acuity from asymptomatic to mild to bedridden to hospitalized with secondary bacterial pneumonia sepsis to ARDS/ECMO/lung transplant to dead. It trends towards the lower acuity when compared to COVID. If you get infected with a similar strain to a prior infection you've had or been vaccinated against, you are more likely to experience asymptomatic or mild flu. Note that because flu has such a short incubation (as short as 18 hours), complete prevention of infection by acquired immunity is much harder to achieve than with diseases with longer incubation times like COVID, mumps, or measles.

[MultiVerse]

The Chinese military still controls the lab in question with an iron fist and no access while the world wants in. Again to a facility with multinational funding and multinational scientists and research. Systemic failure by the WHO here. Why should we fund the WHO after this?

The WHO primarily exists to deal with health issues, including dealing with epidemics like Ebola, in developing countries. That remains an important mission.

China has the world's second largest economy, the largest military in terms of manpower, and nuclear weapons. Suggesting the WHO has any power over China other than what the CCP allows is like a Monty Python sketch: we demand... access to all your labs!!!!

Everyone not associated with China agrees scientists and health experts should be allowed complete access to the labs but China can't allow that even if it wanted to. Because all of the large military powers, including the United States, have biowarfare programs so even if there's no SARS2 evidence, nothing COVID related to hide, they still have lots of other national security things to hide.


Beside Occam’s Razor: Aliens created the virus (and killed Epstein) and are now trying to pit humanity against each other so they can steal our fossil fuels to mine bitcoin.

[Flounder]

It’s been a year. If/when something is of natural origin, isn’t the source usually discovered extremely quickly and easily?

not saying thats proof, I’m wondering

Saw Fauci respond to congress about this exact question. He pointed out we still don’t know how Ebola jumps species. So no, it isn’t always discovered extremely quickly and easily.

[The AD]

Flu comes in a full spectrum of acuity from asymptomatic to mild to bedridden to hospitalized with secondary bacterial pneumonia sepsis to ARDS/ECMO/lung transplant to dead. It trends towards the lower acuity when compared to COVID. If you get infected with a similar strain to a prior infection you've had or been vaccinated against, you are more likely to experience asymptomatic or mild flu. Note that because flu has such a short incubation (as short as 18 hours), complete prevention of infection by acquired immunity is much harder to achieve than with diseases with longer incubation times like COVID, mumps, or measles.

Sorry, I forgot where I was. I should have said FULL BLOWN FLU!

[jono]

Beside Occam’s Razor: Aliens created the virus (and killed Epstein) and are now trying to pit humanity against each other so they can steal our fossil fuels to mine bitcoin.

For at least 10 seconds I thought the best answer was for the Chinese to open the books and be as transparent as possible, unless there's something to hide. Then I remembered it was 2021 and even with their influence over at Qanon there's no amount of transparency that could quell the speculation. It's a no-win situation for them.

[pureantigravity]

The books are invisible. How much more transparent can they be?

[The AD]

After a nice, nearly linear decrease in new cases since about mid-April it appears that the curve is starting to flatten out. To my eyes it looks like we're heading to a level that's comparable to early last summer: about 20,000 new cases per day. Is that really the best we can hope for even with vaccinations?

Here's the graph from the New York Times.

[AEV]

Saw Fauci respond to congress about this exact question. He pointed out we still don’t know how Ebola jumps species. So no, it isn’t always discovered extremely quickly and easily.

Good to know. I’d like to do some reading up on different virus origins when I get a chance.

I’ve had that question forgotten in my brain for 6 months, after hearing it last year. I did hear it brought up recently, and was genuinely curious.

I see now my framing of that question looks bad. I should have said “is”, instead of “isn’t”

[jono]

The books are invisible. How much more transparent can they be?

So...exactly?

[funkendrenchman]

After a nice, nearly linear decrease in new cases since about mid-April it appears that the curve is starting to flatten out. To my eyes it looks like we're heading to a level that's comparable to early last summer: about 20,000 new cases per day. Is that really the best we can hope for even with vaccinations?

Here's the graph from the New York Times.

Most models show it flattening around early July. That end number will likely end up being 5,000-15,000 cases/day based on what I've seen.

[skaredshtles]

Most models show it flattening around early July. That end number will likely end up being 5,000-15,000 cases/day based on what I've seen.

Which seems pretty reasonable, given the contagiousness of this bug and the number of dum dums in this country.

[funkendrenchman]

Which seems pretty reasonable, given the contagiousness of this bug and the number of dum dums in this country.

And 0-11 year olds not getting vaccinated yet. Over the past month, I believe 1/4 of our county's cases (still a small number) have been in kids.

[The AD]

Most models show it flattening around early July. That end number will likely end up being 5,000-15,000 cases/day based on what I've seen.

Yikes, that's still 1.8-5.5 million new cases per year! Of course if those cases are predominantly minor maybe it's an acceptable number.