outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Well as of 2017 it was the only lab of its type in China, rated to study the most dangerous pathogens.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.21487

it also literally doesn't matter

Not trying to be clever. Just accurate. But keep piling on. You are clearly very confident in your take!

right o nate, just that there’s a kind of “of all places” appended to the conspiracy theories and it’s like.. wuhan is a major world metropolis. plus it’s close to where a bunch of viruses appear to have propagated earlier, so it kinda makes sense it would be there as opposed to somewhere else

Sure, I agree. There's lots of ways the virus could have gotten to Wuhan. I can also understand why some people see it as a coincidence though. If you just read that 2017 Nature article, highlighting the fact that a new lab was opening in Wuhan to study the most dangerous viruses and some scientists were worried about the possibility of lab leaks, and fast-forwarded to today, you might say, "Huh, that's a coincidence."

Take Long Covid seriously. Searing BBC documentary making the case for essential workers to be treated like soldiers damaged in the line of duty. Europe is moving forward with this, sounds like we should toohttps://t.co/4URTjriWCE

— Giles Wilkes (@Gilesyb) June 18, 2021

The idea that covid was designed as a bioweapon seems ludicrous. Weapons of war need to be aimed in some way. Covid is indiscriminate and uncontrollable and there was no way to ensure the safety of your own population or that of your allies through inoculation against it.

we are post-thinking now. pre-now, however, some would say that the idea would be to secretly innoculate your own population and then give secret covid to everyone else and watch them die. that's why bill gates is involved. he knows how to do all of it. however, now we are post-now, so no need to think

Totally agree bioweapon theory is ludicrous. However, gain of function research in which scientists genetically manipulate animal viruses to make them transmissible to humans is very real.

Cuba is a good example of how resource poor/small states can leverage intensive investment in high value add sectors (healthcare) to avoid the imported inflation/resource dependency trap. Now they're gonna generate a crap ton of hard currency selling this cheaply https://t.co/GOaC84Rx37

— Praxis Thoughts Haver (@praxisprocess) June 22, 2021

3-dose? 3 thumbs down

3 Thumbs Down has already been booked for the 2024 Trump campaign.

3 Dose Mafia

alt:

3 dose? no, 3 tres.

Or:
3, dose, uno, blastoff!

Interesting bit of Internet sleuthery:

Scientist Finds Early Virus Sequences That Had Been Mysteriously Deleted

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/science/coronavirus-sequences.html

someone did "c:\>del *.dir" on the virus

i did prefer their early stuff, before they started infecting whole countries

from my window last spring, i watched corpses wheeled from buildings on my block. & although i understand whence suspicion of the business/state nexus arises, the lies & individualistic yahooism & sheer idiocy of the anti-vax contingent fill me with absolute merciless hatred

— michael röbbins (@alienvsrobbins) June 24, 2021

highest daily new case total in two weeks

for who?

oh globally?

yeah. btw I think Bolsonaro is gonna get the entire globe killed.

highest new case count in the US in 2 weeks

?? Not from the data I saw

out of curiosity, where did you see it?

Our World in Data has 13,365 cases so far, which is a total we've exceeded multiple times in the past few weeks (we've had a few 16,000+ days), and I dont see NYT's data yet for the night.

(unless they released Florida's once a week dump a day early - lolz, that'd be so Desantis)

Washington Post

ahh thanks. i see that.

drives me nuts how differing the counts are across all sites now.

true, it's very confusing, but I imagine this will show up elsewhere soon enough

I stared at the daily data and realized Florida's weekly dump is fucking every stat

IL started doing one-a-week press releases on case counts a couple weeks back, which is naturally fucking the numbers (NYT's tracker showed zero new cases a couple of days in the past week). I guess the numbers are still being logged daily somewhere on the IL dept. of health website, but it's so labyrinthine and such a resource hog that I haven't been able to find them. At least the cases are down significantly here. For the moment.

federalism is maybe kind of stupid sometimes, like for example when each state is dealing with ("dealing with") an identical simultaneous public health emergency. someone should probably do something about that someday, i guess.

We can’t, because if there were a national plan for coronavirus testing last year, for example, that would have made this one really racist guy with a confederate flag draped over his front porch in the Ozarks angry

States rights. Right to know, right to not know. Right to be wrong all over you.

Good piece on the lab leak hypothesis:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/opinion/coronavirus-lab.html

^^

Ron Johnson is holding a press conference to publicize adverse reactions to the vaccine, it's like he's angry that Wisconsin is actually doing OK relative to other states

https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/ron-johnson-plans-news-conference-to-highlight-rare-covid-19-vaccine-side-effects/article_dcfd5a46-b4b1-5547-afc3-b621b8258e5d.html

It seems bit odd that they are publishing all that information as an Op-Ed. I guess they still fact-check everything? But it would seem more natural to have their own reporters do some reporting and investigation rather than out-source the whole thing to an independent investigator. But maybe the political will is not there for the Times to invest too much investigative firepower into this hypothesis at this time.

Don't think NYT opinion pieces are fact-checked.

This says they do fact-check Op-eds:

We also need all of the material that supports the facts in your story. That’s the biggest surprise to some people. Yes, we do fact check. Do we do it perfectly? Of course not. Everyone makes mistakes, and when we do we correct them. But the facts in a piece must be supported and validated. You can have any opinion you would like, but you can’t say that a certain battle began on a certain day if it did not.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/opinion/op-ed-and-you.html

The Tom Cotton NYT op-ed about how the military should be deployed in cities against leftists didn’t seem to have much fact checking, as it cited facts related to “cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa”, etc. I guess at least the editors issued a “we fucked up” after that, at least

Do we do it perfectly? Of course not

do we do it at all? yes, if by "it" you mean "assign the job to an overwhelmed intern"

The WHO is now advising people to mask up even if vaccinated

I'm still masking indoors in public spaces, but never outdoors. Oregon is about to 'lift all restrictions' on July 1. I think I'll still be masking on an ad hoc basis for a while, yet. It isn't clear to me how our daughter's group home will be affected in terms of masking and other precautions.

There's been a steep drop in mask usage here and that includes me. I was basing it off CDC guidance that masks are not needed if you are vaccinated. So I guess that isn't true anymore?

WHO is global. CDC is USA only. Add political considerations to that and they can disagree on recommendations for both sound and unsound reasons. Uncertainty is the ocean we all swim in.

ok, but this seems to indicate a very large disparity in the belief that vaccines are effective. If they are indeed not effective, that would apply just as much to the US.

Vaccines reduce your risk of passing on the virus, they don’t eliminate it. Masking also reduces your risk of passing in the virus.

The who’s advice might be good in this case (we’ll see) but I don’t think there’s much evidence for it, and generally speaking, as an individual, I would ignore anything they say. They’ve been wrong/late on pretty much everything.