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Media misdirection on COVID-19 — 56 Comments

  1. A sardonic, scathing—and absolutely brilliant—article that describes the developing catastrophe in Europe against the backdrop of European fantasies and delusions.

    I mention it because the author, a Spaniard and former government advisor, refers to Germany’s “talent” with numbers; but rest assured he gives almost every deserving country and pan-national organization its due turn.
    https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-europe-wasnt-ready-it-may-never-fully-recover/#slide-1

  2. I hope one outcome of this mess will be mitigation of the FDA and CDC stranglehold on medical innovation. I see that we don’t want people buying snake oil and being deceived. We have laws on fraud and deception to deal with that kind of thing. Centralized tests that don’t work and refusal to approve things that do work aren’t helpful at all.

  3. That’s a good post on the misdirection by statistics.
    There’s a blogger, WILLIAM M. BRIGGS, who is a statistician and his analysis goes over my head sometimes as I’m not trained that way.
    But he looks at stuff like that and calls it out.
    The misdirection is there.
    The terms, the language we use, can impact how we think about these things (as if you didn’t know).

  4. I was just reading that in France the numbers have been off because the deaths in nursing homes are not counted in the totals. They are suppose to be working on fixing that. I wonder if something like that is happening in Germany?

  5. And there’s no mention in the article as to Germany’s method of counting covid-19 deaths. Will a heart attack or pneumonia death following a serious covid-19 illness be counted as a covid-19 death or not?

  6. “…no mention in the article…”

    If you’re referring to the article I linked to above, there’s this (four paragraphs from the end):
    “…However, the truth is that lying does not solve the problem: We now know that neither Germany nor France is counting the deaths from coronavirus that occur outside of hospitals, and that the Germans don’t call it “death from coronavirus” if the patient had a previous illness.”

  7. What is the history of the Coronavirus tests being initially restricted to the CDC?…I don’t think this has been the case with any other tests? Are there such?

    CDC is supposed to be a research organization, not an operations function.

  8. Sorry Barry M. I was referring to Neo’s NPR article. Now I must read yours, which I hadn’t read.

  9. David Foster:

    My understanding is that for previous pandemics the CDC has indeed been in charge of testing. Supposedly they want to control the testing and make it standard (I’m doing this from memory; can’t find the article right now). The trouble this time is that their test was botched and then the red tape caused more delay (see this). I cannot think of another virus for which we’ve needed to do such widespread testing, so I think COVID was somewhat of a unique situation for which they were unprepared.

  10. I think initial test kits had some of the quality control specimens yielding spurious results.

  11. Dnaxy,
    So the specimens were spurious, and not the reagents? Whatever the heck they specifically mean by reagent.

  12. Watt on March 31, 2020 at 8:55 pm said:

    Yes, it’s maddening that news articles, blogposts, and so on use the wrong term so much of the time.
    * * *
    It’s enough to make you want to go out and buy an AR-14 assault rifle or two.
    https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2020/03/Screen-Shot-2020-03-12-at-3.22.18-PM.png?w=996&ssl=1

    Fairness caveat: there really IS an Ar-14, but I doubt Mr. Biden was referencing it.
    https://www.quora.com/What-is-an-AR-14?share=1

  13. BTW, we have been misdirected on a lot of things without any input from the MSM at all.

    Got this today from one of AesopSpouse’s co-workers (working at home, the bunch of them!); no link was attached, but it all sounded reasonable to me,
    except for a few odd phrases and wrongly used words, but I thought that might have been from someone summarizing points from various articles.

    However, Snopes (still good for some things) says JHU denies all responsibility, and some of the advice is flat out wrong.
    https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/johns-hopkins-covid-summary/

    This is how it starts:

    The following is from Johns Hopkins University…
    * The virus is not a living organism, but a protein molecule (DNA) covered by a protective layer of lipid (fat), which, when absorbed by the cells of the ocular, nasal or buccal mucosa, changes their genetic code. (mutation) and convert them into aggressor and multiplier cells.
    * Since the virus is not a living organism but a protein molecule, it is not killed, but decays on its own. The disintegration time depends on the temperature, humidity and type of material where it lies.
    * The virus is very fragile; the only thing that protects it is a thin outer layer of fat. That is why any soap or detergent is the best remedy, because the foam CUTS the FAT (that is why you have to rub so much: for 20 seconds or more, to make a lot of foam).

    It’s a curious mixture of things that are true (wash your hands), things that aren’t (viruses are RNA, not DNA), things we wish were true (Listerine will kill corona “germs”!), and things it legitimately claims won’t work (vodka as hand sanitizer – sorry, guys).

  14. There’s misdirection, and then there’s lying.
    https://dailycaller.com/2020/03/31/chinese-government-underreporting-coronavirus/

    A top Chinese health official said Wednesday that the government will begin counting coronavirus patients without symptoms in its official tally of cases of the virus, in what is a tacit acknowledgement that Beijing has underreported data on the pandemic.

    China’s National Health Commission disclosed that the government is monitoring 1,541 people who have tested positive for coronavirus but have no symptoms.

  15. My daughter, who has lived in Germany for 15 years, points out that German hospitals generally do not bother to determine the cause of death in elderly people. Autopsies are quite rare, and are generally performed only if some crime is suspected. So, it is probably there is substantial underreporting of the coronavirus deaths.

    PS. Daughter thinks that the German medical system is excellent, a mix of mandatory public and optional private plans. It is also expensive. Her total tax bill for retirement and medical care is 30% of her gross income.

  16. Morning update: not much change from yesterday. Active US cases still fit perfectly by a sigmoid function. Active cases listed as 177,000. If still following an exponential curve, should have been 300,000.

    Yesterday’s pronouncement by Trump is very troubling. I’m not sure whether he is a fool, or being played by Fauci and Birx. To reach over 100,000 deaths in two weeks would require the death toll to rise by a factor of 7 overnight, and continue every day. Yesterday there were 912 deaths, but there would need to be close to 7,000 for this prediction to come true. OK, that’s assuming a linear growth. The “serious cases” data is growing somewhere between linear and a power function. Further, all those serious cases would have to end up dying for this prediction to hold, and there aren’t even “enough” serious cases at 4500 to uphold this prediction. Art will probably have much better take on these numbers.

    I can’t think of single good reason Trump would say this. It’s already sent the market down this morning, and all it does is sow more fear into the public. What is going with the CDC? What are they telling Trump? Why are they telling him these things? Why is he believing them? Do they know something they don’t want the public to know? It’s time to start being extremely skeptical of anything they are saying; and that includes Trump. On the basis of the data we know, his statement is almost as absurd as Newsome’s was regarding California a week ago.

  17. physicsguy, my husband watched the press conference, and he doesn’t think Trump said we’d reach 100,000 “in two weeks.” They do expect it to plateau in New York in two weeks. My own impression, dropping in and out of the press conference, was that 100,000 was the figure we might reach perhaps later in the year, and we hope not to.

  18. This is why, every day or two, I post a graph of either total deaths per million or deaths per day by million on fb. I have rabidly liberal friends, and I want them to see that the US is, so far, actually doing quite well. Take NYC out of the numbers and we are actually very close to Germany. I doubt they have any way of knowing that from the sources they are likely paying attention to. So I show it to them.

    The countries I display are: US, UK, France, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden, South Korea, and Japan. I pull the graph from ourworldindata.org, which on some of their graphs allows you to select what you want to see.

  19. Art will probably have much better take on these numbers.

    you did great… my point on them is just that its kind of like a rocket, to get to a certain point by a certain time, you need a certain amount. the linear progression is actually the easier one to get to a point (though you and i both know that curve can get to it too). but each day that the linear amount isnt reached, the curved amount has to increase on the end…

    lets say you have a current number of 5000, and they predict 50,000 in 10 days and currently you have 200 a day dying… well… if it stays at 200 a day, its only going to reach 7000 by the 10 day deadline (forgive the term). if deaths go up 100 more a day, your only going to hit 12,500

    the numbers above would need 4,500 a day linearly…
    but lets say you get
    (9)200, need 4977 a day
    (8)400, need 5550 a day
    (7)600, need 6257 a day
    (6)1000, need 7133 a day
    (5)2000, need 8160 a day
    (4)3500, need 9325 a day
    (3)5000, need 10766 a day
    (2)10000, need 11150 a day
    (1)20000, need only 2300 to hit the mark the next day

    i dont know if its clear, but each day that it ISN’T over
    4,500 adds that amount to the total to reach in a day less…

    if we go back in neo’s blog to the date and time of gavin newsome prediction
    how much would things have to increase since they havent increased fast enough?

    give me a bit… its time physics guy and myself came up with a guestimate killer… a formula that you can put the current numbers in that shows how ridiculous or cogent an estimate is…

    🙂

  20. I Just downloaded the numbers (again as they are updated every day), and whats interesting is that the totals online APPEAR to be wrong.. that is, they now have the US broken down by each death… and the state data is buried inside all the other break down data… IF you did not fix your program to separate state totals from local totals, from county totals, your number would not be right..

    AFTER copying out just the state totals (deaths)…
    moving that to a new spreadsheet with 51 lines… (Wash DC is 51)
    then total up all the columns into one row, then totaling up the row, i am short a whole bunch of deaths!!!!!!!!!

    1,739 was the total…

    what? i will now investigate where MY mistake is…
    or……..

  21. So the category Unassigned is 1,739…
    there is also an Out of category… but that has nothing but zeroes in it
    if you take the break down data, you get 12,640

    so far I have NOT been able to match or get near the US total in anyway…
    so either its three times larger or one third smaller depending on how they report

    IF anyone wants to look at the data i am using..
    https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/blob/master/csse_covid_19_data/csse_covid_19_time_series/time_series_covid19_deaths_US.csv

    you have to change the csv to html..
    then copy the data out and into a text file
    rename the text file to .csv
    and you can open it up in excel no problem…

    good luck

  22. Its interesting though to plot the numbers even with the very high 12k mark…
    ie. you subtract from the current number the prior days number..
    that gives you the death for that day..
    the first death is still 2/29/2020 with the last day being yesterday

    what makes it interesting? the death numbers are plummeting..

    when you plot the cumulatives… each day being a total including the day before
    its still rising fast… if you plot the total deaths by day, it peaked and is now plummeting

    i am assuming though that i am looking at the wrong data given the fact i cant get the data to match the current reported number no matter how i play with it

  23. Source of the Coronavirus?

    Take a look at this apparently little noticed paper from two Chinese medical researchers that was highlighted on Tucker Carlson’s show last night–

    (P.S. Surprised that this paper is still up on the Web, best to take a look at it now before it “disappears.”)

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/tucker-carlson-chinese-researchers-confirm-coronavirus-linked-to-horseshoe-bat-studies-at-one-of-two-wuhan-research-institutes-video/

  24. Note: some records may look incomplete or inconsistent with previous days due to the modification from the data source.

    —DEPRICATED WARNING—
    The files below will no longer be updated. With the release of the new data structure, we are updating our time series tables to reflect these changes. Please reference time_series_covid19_confirmed_global.csv and time_series_covid19_deaths_global.csv for the latest time series data.

    time_series_19-covid-Confirmed.csv
    time_series_19-covid-Deaths.csv
    time_series_19-covid-Recovered.csv

    which i did and that puts the deaths up to 12k instantly..
    or puts them down to under 2000 if you look at state totals…

    wtf? physics guy… any ideas?

  25. This is a video chat for medical personell given by a doctor at NY’s Cornell-Weill hospital – basically a mask is effective because it reminds you not to touch your face. So even a funky coffee-filter contraption will do the job for non-medical situations.

    There has been minimal airborne infection, it’s almost all traceable to touching eyes, nose, mouth with contaminated hands.

    Watch the whole thing – or at least the first 25 minutes until the questions:

    https://vimeo.com/399733860

  26. I watched Dan Bongino yesterday, and saw a clip of Nancy Pelosi celebrating lunar new year among close-packed crowds in San Francisco’s Chinatown district. This was on about Febuary 10, if memory serves. Dan’s point was that she was advocating very non-social-distancing behaviors.

    But he failed to note what I saw as a Freudian slip on her part: she said this celebration was to show that the people of her district were not afraid of “what’s coming… – what’s elsewhere.” She said this in a manner clearly intended to “correct” the “what’s coming” and replace it with the “what’s elsewhere”, which was apparently a reference to the Chinese locales then reporting outbreaks. The inference is obvious: she had an awareness that CV 19 would be “coming” to America, but was deliberately obfuscating that reality and promoting risky behavior as part of her attack on Trump’s travel bans! This is a very damning little slip of the tongue if you ask me!!

    Ps. So why am I saying this here? I know Dan relies on tips like this, but I’ll be damned if I can find an email address for tips to him! Can anyone help?

  27. PBS must be defunded. If the libs want their own TV and radio network, they can pay for it.

  28. Cornhead – you are so right. Firing Big Bird may have been the most correct plank in Romney’s platform. Trump won’t bother with it — too low level — but I wish someone would.

  29. Ed Bonderenka on March 31, 2020 at 6:32 pm said:
    That’s a good post on the misdirection by statistics.
    There’s a blogger, WILLIAM M. BRIGGS, who is a statistician and his analysis goes over my head sometimes as I’m not trained that way.

    * * *
    I located the blog (looks like the right one!), and found these posts along the lines you mentioned.
    Not sure I agree with all of his assertions, but lots to think about.
    And fun to read.
    Definitely not PC.

    https://wmbriggs.com/post/30062/
    Coronavirus Update VII — We’ve Got Models (Update)
    BY BRIGGS POSTED ON MARCH 31, 2020

    https://wmbriggs.com/post/30013/
    Perspective On The Coronavirus: Sanity Check
    BY BRIGGSPOSTED ON MARCH 27, 2020

    https://wmbriggs.com/post/29993/
    Curse of The MINIMAX!
    BY BRIGGS POSTED ON MARCH 26, 2020

    https://wmbriggs.com/post/29542/
    I Was Wrong: An Official Apology
    BY BRIGGS POSTED ON APRIL 1, 2020
    (not quite what the title implies)

  30. This is the same William M. Briggs, in a different hat, and still interesting.
    Old, but specific discussions with general foundations never grow stale.

    https://onepeterfive.com/politics-trumps-theology-filial-correction-response/
    Politics Trumps Theology in Filial Correction Response
    William M. Briggs William M. Briggs September 25, 2017

    What if a man, a man of eminence and of great and well-credentialed education, a man of authority, a priest, even, a man who has the ear of the Pope, told you that sometimes 2 + 2 = 5? Would this man by virtue of his lofty position be correct?

    What if a small child, a wretch with no virtue of schooling, a unkempt waif, told the great man, “No, sir. 2 + 2 always equals 4, even for God, who cannot change Truth”?

    Hold on! What’s this untutored child doing? Doesn’t she realize her error? She has no authority to offer a correction! Why should we listen to a kid?

    Here comes Massimo Faggioli, a professor at Villanova University’s Department of Theology and Religious Studies, to help us. He says the child represents a “tiny, extreme fringe of the opposition to” to our great man. The child “is clearly not a cardinal or bishop with formal standing in the Catholic Church.”

    David Gibson, who is director of Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture, agrees. He says the child’s attempt at a correction is “akin to an online petition”. He also says, “It’s a great headline anytime a priest is accused of error. But these kids are really, kind of, the usual suspects of really far right types who have been upset with not only this priest, but other priests in recent years.”

    Even the New York Times—the New York Times!—reminds us the child is not a cardinal. And therefore her criticism is of no consequence.

    We can only conclude that because our child is not an authority, and has no right to offer a correction, she is wrong. 2 + 2 does not always equal 4. It sometimes, as the priest Antonio Spadaro (for that is his name) said, can be 5, or 3, or any number he likes. The actual figure doesn’t count as long as, presumably, the solution is merciful.

    Right?

    If that argument makes sense to you, as it does to folks like Faggioli and Gibson and the others who are carping from the sidelines about qualifications of those who offered the Filial Correction, then you have succumbed to the idea that the Church is really about politics. That all battles are power plays, in which the side with the superior numbers or shiftier political abilities will, and should, win.

    Exclusively political reactions to the Filial Correction belie another attitude. It is as if these naysayers do not believe seriously, or at all, in the supernatural elements of the Catholic faith. The authors of the correction certainly do.

    If the naysayers thought the supernatural element the most important, and not politics, there would have been immediate and lively discussion of the seven points of the Correction. Are they really heresies? All of them? Why? Why not? “Let’s dig into this most important matter,” they would have said. “The salvation of souls is paramount, and heresy cannot be countenanced. Here is where we agree, and here where we disagree on the theological points.”

    Only after we figure out, really investigate, and agree on each the points are the motives of the writers and signers of the Correction up for grabs. To focus on personalities first is an inversion—and very telling.

  31. I’ve been wondering for a while now what’s happening with Covid and the homeless.

    It would seem the homeless would be Ground Zero for massive outbreaks, yet I never read any statistics to that effect. Instead I see one article after another about how vulnerable the homeless are followed by the usual handwringing.

    I ran across one article in which a journalist found an old homeless guy whose daughter had Covid-like symptoms, but the journalist never found her to get the facts.

    I’m not pressing any particular point here. I continue to wonder why Covid affects different groups so differently and what we might learn from that.

    It does seem, though, if the homeless were becoming infected at high rates, a fair number would find their way to hospitals and we would hear about it.

  32. Snow on Pine: I’ve been following the Chinese lab angle for a while too.

    At one point I took the addresses of the infamous Wuhan Seafood Market, reputed to be the origin of Covid, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology — the only Bio-Safety Level 4 lab in all of China — and pored over Google Maps across all those Chinese streets to determine that the BSL-4 lab was less than ten miles from the Seafood Market.

    That’s a tough coincidence to ignore. I wouldn’t expect the Chinese to launch a biowarfare attack on their soil without an antidote, but it wouldn’t be the first time a serious biological agent escaped from a lab.

  33. Ray Van Dune on April 1, 2020 at 12:52 pm said:

    She said this in a manner clearly intended to “correct” the “what’s coming” and replace it with the “what’s elsewhere”, which was apparently a reference to the Chinese locales then reporting outbreaks.
    * * *
    A lot of people call Joe Biden’s obviously senile statements “gaffes” but they are just mistakes, or just lies. He deals in both.
    What Nancy did is a classic gaffe – telling a truth that you did not intend to tell.
    She covered it well enough, but Ray made a good catch.

  34. huxley – one of the quotes from the report that Tucker was reading was a recommendation that biohazard labs like those “not be located in densely populated areas.”
    Wow – ya think!?!

    PS – here are some photos of bat soup, in case you thought, as I did, that they skinned the animal like a squirrel or rabbit and cooked the meat in broth.
    Nope.
    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/01/gross-scientists-blame-coronavirus-on-bats-in-chinese-province-where-bat-soup-is-served-in-restaurants/#comment-4768245926

  35. Media misdirection by not waiting to get the actual facts.
    If it’s on the news, it must be true!

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/remember-the-young-woman-who-died-while-waiting-for-a-coronavirus-test-in-new-orleans-yeah-that-was-a-media-lie-too/

    GP made this claim, but I don’t see it supported on any of the internal links.
    “Furthermore, it was not revealed that she was in fact suffering for the last TWO years from an undiagnosed intestinal condition but her boyfriend lied and said she was perfectly healthy.”

    However, the sourced reports do indicate that several tests did come back negative for the virus.

  36. The PJM post has a partial transcript of Tucker’s show, which contains some essential warnings about our esteemed authorities — take your pick — and relates to the Wm Briggs essay I posted at 4:44 above: who ya gonna believe?

    https://pjmedia.com/trending/did-covid-19-originate-in-a-chinese-lab-and-why-is-it-crazy-to-ask/
    Tucker Carlson said:

    That paper has been online for nearly two months [since February 6]. So far, it’s been virtually [sic – literally is the correct word, but, since pixels are not print, maybe virtual is excusable] ignored. Almost nobody in American journalism has dared to write about it. The few who have, were immediately attacked as dangerous conspiracy theorists. Instead of assessing what seemed like rational conclusions in the Chinese paper, there was a spate of American news stories and academic research designed to show that the Coronvirus absolutely could not have been engineered in a Chinese lab as a bioweapon. They sounded supremely confident of that. But do they really know it? No, they don’t. As a factual matter, it is impossible for western scientists to settle the question either way. So they amped up the rhetoric, hoping you wouldn’t notice. A post on the National Institutes of Health website, written by NIH director Francis Collins, dismisses any such speculation as quote “outrageous.” Keep in mind, NIH is supposed to be keeping you safe from disease, not running political interference for hostile foreign governments. This is how they’re spending their time, as Americans die in the middle of a global pandemic.

    And still, no one addressed the substance of the claims. The South China University paper concludes that the virus probably escaped accidentally from a lab in Wuhan. It says nothing about bioweapons. Yet the NIH, and USA Today and countless others, have devoted many thousands of words to scolding you for thinking the virus may have been a form of biological warfare. That’s a totally different claim. And it’s not accidental. One of the surest signs that people are lying to you is when they answer questions you didn’t ask. That’s exactly what the professional class is doing now, and they’re doing it on many fronts: They’re lying to you. They’re claiming to know things they don’t. They’re dismissing the obvious as impossible. They’re blaming you for their failures. The media are helping them do it. The stakes are too high to let them do this. So no matter what, stay skeptical. Remain rational. Gather your own evidence. Come to your own conclusions. At this point, you have no choice.

    Hard to gather definitive evidence when we have to depend on randomly encountering a news programs with heterodox viewpoints.

    PS – thanks to Artfldgr for crunching numbers and making sense out of them.

  37. From the Cruz post:

    But an analysis of SARS-CoV-2 says otherwise, a group of researchers said last month. They compared the genome of the new coronavirus with the seven other coronaviruses known to infect humans and drew a clear conclusion: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” they wrote in the journal Nature Medicine.

    How can we “gather our own evidence” when so many reputable experts disagree?
    Coming to our own conclusions, however, is much easier.
    This is mine:
    How can we trust any experts or authorities anymore, when just about all of them have demonstrably lied to the public at some time in the past, sometimes very recently?

  38. One of the surest signs that people are lying to you is when they answer questions you didn’t ask. –Tucker Carlson

    AesopFan: I know the feeling and I wish I had said that.

  39. Huxley-If the things cited in this paper are true, the fact pattern in this paper is suggestive as hell.

    If you read the summary of that Chinese paper,* you will see that one of the two laboratories in Wuhan researching bat Coronaviruses, ironically named the “Wuhan Center for Disease Prevention and Control,” is located less than a thousand feet from the “wetmarket” in Wuhan and, moreover, that, according to this paper, the first Chinese doctors to become infected by the Coronavirus worked at the Union Hospital, which is adjacent to that laboratory.

    * Given its content, I’m wondering if the co-authors of this paper are still around, if they have been “disappeared,” or suffered some sort of “unfortunate accident.”

  40. Snow on Pine: I assumed those two labs were one and the same, and were the Wuhan Institute of Virology. I had heard there was a lab close to the Seafood Market, but when I checked WIV on the map it wasn’t that close.

    Really, if there was also a lab within a thousand feet of the Market — in addition to a BSL-4 not many miles away — I say that’s a bit much to write off to coincidence.

    Some authorities say Covid doesn’t show evidence of manipulation, but even assuming that can be definitively determined, it hardly absolves the Chinese labs.

    Covid could have been a natural-in-the-wild virus they were studying and as I recall from one paper I looked at a month ago, a few Chinese scientists were studying coronaviruses at one of those labs.

    A biolab accident would explain why the Chinese authorities would not allow Western scientists into the country to help with Covid early on.

  41. Snow – not an unreasonable supposition, given the fate of the whistle-blowing doctor.
    Why did the CCP even allow the study to be made, much less the report be published?
    Did they really think it wouldn’t leak to the world?

    I hope it’s not some kind of elaborate “sting” – a distraction with wet markets and bad lab oversight that puts attention on low-tech disasters — while they do something even more nefarious, like an EMP attack or something.

    I have to keep reminding myself this is not a disaster movie, and no one knows what’s in the script or how it ends.

  42. The way they can tell its not from a lab is from the changes that happen over time as its spreads and the base… labs put in sudden changes that show up differently statistically… but thats only if the question is whether its engineered in some way, not if its natural and just being studied..

    but there is no reason to bring up a lab as it happens naturally and from that area
    the wet markets are a source not just because of the methods used there
    but of the fact that many chinese eat things live… uncooked… the bat dish that is cooked would kill virus… but the animal eaten alive unprepared or baby bird found in a nest and just eaten, is a whole other vector story…

  43. but there is no reason to bring up a lab as it happens naturally and from that area

    Artfldgr: Disagree. China is a very big place — 3.7 million square miles. To discover that their only Bio-Safety Level 4 lab is within a mile or several of the Covid epicenter at least raises the question that the virus was from a lab.

    Furthermore, according to Snow on Pine’s Gateway link:

    The study concluded the deadly virus came out of local laboratories in Hubei Province. The smoking gun in the study is the link to horseshoe bats which are not sold in local markets and not native to Wuhan. In fact the closest colony is 900 kilometers away. There is no evidence horseshoe bats were sold in the Wuhan wet markets. The local labs used this bat specimen and the virus came from a lab in Wuhan.

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/tucker-carlson-chinese-researchers-confirm-coronavirus-linked-to-horseshoe-bat-studies-at-one-of-two-wuhan-research-institutes-video/

  44. Given a circle with, say, a 10-mile radius, which would include the farther Wuhan Lab and the Wuhan Seafood Market, that would be an area of ~314 sq. miles.

    Divide that by the area of China, ~3.7 million sq. miles, then approximate to a power of ten and the odds of the virus outbreak and Chinese bio lab being that close together by coincidence are about 1 out of 10,000.

    Certainly not proof, but as a friend of mine used to say, “damned interesting.”

  45. Huxley–

    Watch how the UK’s Sun tabloid simultaneously reports (with pictures) on a Chinese researcher who catches the particular species of bat that was likely the source of the Coronavirus for use by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab in Wuhan where they are researching bat Coronaviruses—a lab which is located just 900 feet away from the Wuhan “wetmarket”–while, at the same time, arguing that to think that the Coronavirus might have escaped from one of these labs in Wuhan (there are reportedly two labs doing such research on bat Coronaviruses, and the other lab is 7 miles away) is a “wild conspiracy theory.”

    To quote this article, “…claims of a lab leak and subsequent cover-up are pure speculation and lay in the realm of conspiracy theories.”

    See https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11307835/coronavirus-conspiracy-theory-expert-catching-bats/

  46. Mr Tian works at the centre, which is not far from the animal market where officially the virus began.

    Labs here were known to have studied bats and Mr Tian himself was said to have gathered samples from numerous flying mammals.

    One anonymous US State Department official told the Washington Times the reports about Mr Tian and his role in working with bat viruses were concerning.

    They said: “He lives and works at Wuhan’s CDC, a few hundred yards away from the Huanan wet market.

    “He is among the small team in Wuhan that has contributed to China’s obsession in recent years with virus hunting and research.” –The Sun

    Snow on Pine: I’m an excitable fellow. To me that’s like finding a murder weapon in someone’s backyard and then being told, “Nothing to see here. Move along.”

  47. Huxley–so to echo the question that AesopFan raised at 10:17 above, given how apparently incriminating this paper we are all mining is, and the information in it, how come it hasn’t been taken down, how come it is still out there, floating around?

    True to form, though, we see members of the MSM trying to ignore, to minimize, or to declare as a “conspiracy theory,” and to “debunk” this highly suggestive information.

  48. Snow on Pine on April 2, 2020 at 3:44 pm said:

    True to form, though, we see members of the MSM trying to ignore, to minimize, or to declare as a “conspiracy theory,” and to “debunk” this highly suggestive information.
    * * *
    I think you may have the answer.
    The standard media playbook, when running interference for Democrats, is to acknowledge that some news item exists (because it’s already known or in imminent danger of being outed); downplay it’s importance or “debunk” it by their resident partisan experts; refer to it thereafter as a “debunked conspiracy theory,” and if it stays in circulation or resurfaces later, call it “old news” — as if facts are somehow discredited by their age.

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