Quote Originally Posted by donkdowndonedied View Post
Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
I don't care why Trump said the lab leak thing at first. Even if he just took a wild guess and turned out to be right, it doesn't matter.

What does matter is that very quickly we learned about the Wuhan lab, the gain-of-function research there, and of course we already knew China's propensity to lie and cover things up.

At the very least, the lab leak theory should have been an ongoing, serious discussion. You don't have to believe it's 100% certain in order to warrant discussion of it.

But nope! Not allowed! Discussion was shut down on Twitter. The media relegated it to conspiracy territory. The "experts" all agreed that it was impossible, and that anyone who thought otherwise was a racist moron.

This defied common sense, but we were all told to believe it, because the "experts" said so, and since the rest of us aren't virology experts, we need to shut our mouths and ignore the obvious. And if we don't, Twitter will ban us.

You don't see a problem with all this?
I see a problem with many parts of it. I'd like to see where respected media was saying it was impossible that it came from a lab. You quote "experts" saying it was impossible. Well, can you show me any links where they were that strong in their conviction using words like "impossible"? I suspect your memory of this is largely manufactured.

The problem here is that there is a nexus of many issues. A lot of nationalism bullshit that will prevent a lot of serious discussion and the "discussion" would be largely relegated to a few data points shared by everyone.

Twitter made a mistake, yes. It is one private company.

You love to take one example and extrapolate it. It is unfortunate that twitter wields so much power, but they're not "the media".

I agree that the media buried discussion of the subject early on, but I really don't think there was that much to discuss. You pretty much laid out all the data points we had at that point in your post. There is not going to be a serious dialogue arising from that. So you're right in that it was wrong that it was censored, but meh it isn't like some lifelong conspiracy to keep people in the dark. All the discussions would have been more or less meaningless at the time except to froth up Trump's supporters. That is still true.
He's misremembering a study about how it was very unlikely/impossibly that Covid-19 was engineered from the natural sample that was closest out of all the samples we knew China/Wuhan had.

And that's what happens when people know very little about the subject. The above is a very simple "fact" as science knows facts. Well above 99% true. Literally nothing has happened to that fact. It's still just as unlikely. There's no statement in it about leaks or how many unknown samples of viruses China has.

The "experts" are aware of leaks. Those happen all the time in pretty much any country that does any major research work. And they have fairly good idea how shoddy recordkeeping still is for all kinds of reasons.