Covid-19 is a biological weapon invented by the Chinese military to mass murders American citizens but also a complete hoax made up by pharmaceutical companies to siphon a bunch of money from American taxpayers, BUT ALSO a nefarious plot by Bill Gates to install a nanobot swarm into every man, woman, and child, so that one day they will combine into a giant Metal Gear and fight Solid Snake for the fate of our nation. Nanomachines, son.
Republicans have got to be the dumbest fucking people on planet Earth.
So this was released to help show transparency? Other than knowing to prevent future outbreaks I’m trying to understand why people may care. I assume it would be to push some narrative but I’m not real clear on what that might be other than something that sounds like it came from a movie script.
I mean, when has Republican screeching not been to push a disingenuous narrative?
I can imagine the disingenuous narrative. I was trying to see or understand if there was a realistic or genuine one.
Honestly, if the root is discovered to be a lab leak the likihood it was due to a conspiracy to create and release a bio weapon is almost zilch. More likely people not following safty procedures through laziness and hubris while they conducted typical viral research.
Also I could be wrong but a $600K contribution to a research lab doesn’t sound like it would go very far.
I can imagine the disingenuous narrative. I was trying to see or understand if there was a realistic or genuine one.
Honestly, I don’t even think it goes that far and looking any deeper is probably giving them way too much credit. Their only goal is to make their opponents look bad and/or fan the flames of a conspiracy theory their base is rabid about (not that those two things are mutually exclusive, mind you).
Either way, it’s manufactured outrage: nothing more, nothing less. They have no policies (or principles, shame, or integrity for that matter, but I digress) so they engage in this pointless garbage to keep their base afraid and angry.
Some of them are just plain stupid, yes, but the rest know exactly what they’re doing.
Also I could be wrong but a $600K contribution to a research lab doesn’t sound like it would go very far.
But that’s $600K in Freedom Dollars™, so after conversion, it’s like 200 billion, trillion dollars /s.
The purpose is to make people distrust science.
"“Republicans in Congress have increasingly pushed the lab leak theory, and accused the Biden administration of trying to cover it up because the U.S. funded research at the Wuhan lab.”
Can anyone confirm that the NIH did fund research at the Wuhan lab? I’ve heard this before but wanted to make sure this was coming from credible sources and it’s not just some conspiracy bs
https://www.factcheck.org/2021/05/the-wuhan-lab-and-the-gain-of-function-disagreement/
Above is a good summary. Here’s my personal take if interested:
Short story is an nih grant was awarded to a US based non profit research coalition, and the grant involved collaboration among multiple institutes. NIH funds are generally given to US based researchers primarily, but it’s also common if you have a good reason for the project to have international collaboraters on the grant as well. In this case they were collaborating with the Wuhan virology institute, who are obviously going to be very helpful in any collaboration to study corona viruses, since multiple novel corona viruses have been found or made the jump to humans in China before. So yes, a small portion of a much larger grant was sent to Wuhan, who helped provided corona virus samples for US researchers to study.
As an aside it’s also mentioned there was another corona virus 96% similar in genome to covid was previously isolated by that lab from bats. But saying that’s proof they artifically made covid from that virus is pretty ridiculous, altering genomes to that extent and still having a functioning virus is basically science fiction, would take an absurd amount of technology and resources that just do not exist currently. For comparison, humans and chimpanzees have 98.8% similar genomes, so 96% is really not that close. To get from 96% similar to covid even in the much smaller viral genome would still involve at least 1200 changes to different nucleotides across every gene and structural non coding regions and still have all the proteins it encodes not only somehow still work and be expressed correctly but do this even better than before. We’re struggling along with just slight changes to one gene at a time in genetic engineering currently.
Another point that keeps coming up, is research that was done in North Carolina (not China) that some people argue as gain of function research but by other definitions is not (if nih considered it gain of function research it would not have been funded due to a funding pause with that). This keeps being conflated with US funding gain of function research in China, which is not the case.
All in all, the NIH was absolutely interested in funding research into corona viruses because of the fear that something like this would happen after multiple novel corona viruses that started pandemics. I’m still very skeptical of the lab leak theory personally, when we already have multiple instances of novel corona viruses causing epidemics lately, like obviously it could happen again and still can. I suppose it’s possible this virus was found somewhere else, then brought to the lab, then leaked from the lab, but then it would have already been circulating and could have caused a pandemic anyways even without a lab leak. I think people just want to have an easy answer or someone to clearly blame, when the whole world is actually to blame for some extent with out terrible responses to potential pandemics and actually chronic underfunding to this problem that should be a high priority for the whole world. And probably will be happening with only greater frequency as we encroach further on habitats and become more and more densely populated and interconnected. Saying oh we just need to lock down viral labs even more (which hey I’m not even saying is a bad idea, keep that stuff locked up tight), is a much simpler problem to tackle so people would rather go after that than the true larger issues we’re facing with our poor abilities to surveil for and respond to potential pandemics.
Hope some found that interesting at least, sorry for the novel.
You answered my question perfectly! Thank you for the novel.
The novel is okay, great read and I definitely learned something!
Yes. EcoHealth received $3.7m from the NIH, $600,000 of which was given to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/57932699 Full grant document: https://theintercept.com/document/2021/09/08/understanding-the-risk-of-bat-coronavirus-emergence/
Thanks for posting that! The grant was interesting. Specific aims page is down on page 107 to save others who want to read it some time.
One of their main hypotheses they wanted to test was that covid viruses they found in animals in the Wuhan market would have greater fitness than those found in wild animals due to spillover between multiple species and other differences in the environment, which in light of current events seems a reasonable hypothesis.
And republicans won’t accept a word of it.
