Anthony Fauci is ‘not convinced’ COVID-19 developed naturall

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Andrew Bolt
China is ‘feeling the heat’ as experts begin to favour Wuhan lab leak theory


China’s official Global Times newspaper says I am a bloodthirsty anti-China hawk.

And my Sky News colleague Sharri Markson it calls a backstage manipulator spreading lies about this virus actually coming from a Chinese lab.

Now China, as you can tell, is very sensitive about that claim.

It has punished Australia for calling a year ago for an independent inquiry into how this virus started – a call we made again last week, with a lot of support, at a meeting of the World Health Organisation.

You see, we still don’t know how exactly this pandemic started.

We don’t know why 3.5 million people have since been killed.

How did we suddenly get a coronavirus with unusual features, well adapted to killing humans, right outside the door of a Chinese lab in Wuhan that was working on exactly this kind of thing.

Last year we had so many people saying that’s just a conspiracy theory, it’s impossible.

The ABC, China apologists, Trump haters, businesspeople with business links to China not wanting anyone to blame China.

A lot experts are now saying, well actually, it does look like this virus maybe did escape from that Chinese lab, and China is feeling the heat.

The head of that lab in Wuhan, known as the bat woman, last week helped put out a report insisting that this virus is probably natural.

It has features of a bat virus, it says, but actually is closer to what you’d expect if it had then jumped to infect an animal known as the pangolin.

But this study admits it’s still not clear how the virus then jumped again from pangolins to humans.

One has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potenitally) look engineered.

I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome to be inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.

f*****g stoopid hoomans and their f*****g stoopid politics.

I mean really, it is more important to play politics rather than establish what has happened so it can be prevented in the future.

Humanity disgusts me.

So, let's try and translate:
This sounds like you have interpreted her words to mean that she sees the emphasis on being factually correct, at the expence of being "morally correct" as being a bad thing, given this would be the only way the "greater, moral point" coud be missed...

Again, this appears to be claiming she acknowledges that being factually correct is "important" - But it is noteworthy that neither she nor you clarify whether she sees the "factual" as being as valuable as (or more, or less than) the "moral", leaving us with the impression from her initial remark - Just because A is more important than B doesn't mean B is not important...

You seem to be the only person here asserting that she doesn't care about facts... Nothing was said about not caring about facts: Just that in order of importance, she appeared to be valuing "moral" correctness over "factual" correctness.

So, unless my translation of what you have claimed here is mistaken

Nothing in there states that being "factually correct" is a bad thing, or that it is not important, merely that being "morally right" is of higher importance\value to her ("more important").

Anderson Cooper: One of the criticisms of you is that— that your math is fuzzy. The Washington Post recently awarded you four Pinocchios—

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Oh my goodness—

Anderson Cooper: —for misstating some statistics about Pentagon spending?

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: If people want to really blow up one figure here or one word there, I would argue that they're missing the forest for the trees. I think that there's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.

Anderson Cooper: But being factually correct is important—

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: It's absolutely important. And whenever I make a mistake. I say, "Okay, this was clumsy." and then I restate what my point was. But it's— it's not the same thing as— as the president lying about immigrants. It's not the same thing, at all.

All very interesting, but off-topic.

Why do so many people refuse to engage with critical thinking and simply unquestioningly adopt hyperpartisan rhetoric?
It is damn well embarrassing.

Politics - from "Poly" + "Ticks", meaning "many parasites"

Again, nope - simply that someone "being precisely, factually, and semantically correct" can mean the greater, moral point is missed. You're the one extrapolating this into an implied good vs. bad issue, rather like the misleading meme does with that text implying it's something she said - a fake quote.

Perhaps it will be clearer for you if I summarized it even further by saying "can't see the forest for the trees" - that situation where focussing on one point can mean that the bigger picture gets missed. Which is to say, if you stare intently at one tree you won't get any sense of the forest.
It's a it's a simple, cautionary statement, and one utterly devoid of any implied importance of one thing over another.

So, she was saying that "moral rightness" is dependant on "factual correctness", or that you cannot be "morally right" unless you are already "factually correct".

Thank you for the clarification.

As mentioned many times on Viva Frei's videos: "Politics ruins everything".

Of course, there's always the etymology of "politics" which may help explain the reason it causes problems:
Politics - from "Poly" + "Ticks", meaning "many parasites"

In the spring of 2020, when the United States was coping with the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, some journalists began asking whether the initial outbreak in China could have originated in the biomedical research laboratory in Wuhan through the accidental release of a virus (perhaps altered for the purpose of studying disease). The Washington Post’s Global Opinions columnist Josh Rogin wrote about this scenario; I noted it in an April 2020 column that argued that assigning major responsibility for the pandemic to China’s leadership made sense.

Yet, most of the media dismissed the "lab leak" hypothesis as fringe conspiracy theory — particularly after it was endorsed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a politician with a reputation for far-right and arguably xenophobic views. The rebuttals often conflated the "research accident" scenario with a far less plausible one of biowarfare. The theory was also seen as a ploy by President Donald Trump and his supporters — such as Cotton — to use China-blaming to deflect from his own poor handling of the crisis.

For many on the right, this is a moment to gloat. The mainstream media, conservatives say, dropped the ball on the lab-leak hypothesis for ideological reasons — because they wanted Trump to be wrong, or even because they wanted to give China a pass.

The animus against Trump and Trumpism, however justified, probably did lead to some knee-jerk dismissals of the lab-release scenario, which was prematurely described as "discredited" or "debunked" despite the fact that some respected scientists and journalists took it seriously. And while I don’t think the media have been particularly easy on China in the past couple of years, some progressive journalists have embraced the bizarre idea that talking about the possible lab leak or the Chinese government’s cover-up is racist.

Yes, "China virus" rhetoric can be used to stoke hostility toward Asian Americans. But as some have pointed out, the conventional view that the virus spread to humans from China’s "wet markets" in which live wild animals are sold for food, has far more racist overtones than the lab-leak hypothesis: The "wet market" scenario easily lends itself to nasty caricatures of poor hygiene and unusual eating habits.

Conservative claims about the media’s alleged silencing of the lab-leak hypothesis are drastically exaggerated. But the media bias on the subject was very real. That’s especially unfortunate because, when serious journalism loses credibility, actual fringe views and conspiracy theories are far more difficult to discredit.

It's interesting to look at how prevalent (and among which portions of the population) the "conspiracy theory" of it coming from a lab were 12 months ago, and how this has changed to now...

From an economist\yougov poll last year, compared with the same poll this year:

Source: https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/06/02/most-americans-now-believe-coronavirus-originated-

Looking at this, it seems there was only a small section of the population which had a higher belief that it couldn't have been from a lab, compared it could have been (and so seen it as a "conspiracy theory"), and even this section has altered its view.

Behind a paywall
Return of the COVID lab-leak theory - Cathy Young for Newsday

Young's claims that media silencing of the lab leak is exaggerated are premature. In 2020 the ongoing attitude was to get Trump to lose by any means we can get away with. Nobody is 100 percent wrong not even Trump. Because Trump is Trump he does not get credit for fast track. IMHO his lies and conspiracy theories about COVID did more damage than fast track helped.

Young's is spot on to point out then the "wet market" theory has more racist overtones than the lab leak theory(and the biowarfare theory also). Speaking of racism and things being swept under the rug the damage done by progressive politicians who during the key earliest stages of the pandemic urged people to go to restaurants because there was nothing to see there but racism combined with Trump's blabbermouth was incalculable.

Speaking of wanting to see nothing, that is going on all over the place including this column about the biowarfare theory. Proving it came from the Wuhan lab if that is what happens will do nothing to prove or disprove the reason for why it got out of the lab.

The ramifications of COVID leaving that lab are so severe that there is nothing to be happy or gloat about.