Left doesn’t believe lab leak because ….

[Valcazar]

The Lab-Leak Hypothesis Made It Harder for Scientists to Seek the Truth
Virus origin stories have always been prone to conspiracy theories. COVID disinformation has threatened research—and lives

The Lab-Leak Hypothesis Made It Harder for Scientists to Seek the Truth

Virus origin stories have always been prone to conspiracy theories. COVID disinformation has threatened research—and lives

www.scientificamerican.com

Good article.

 

[basketcase]

...

Too bad the left decided ...

Who exactly is making it political?
I don't represent anyone other than myself but my condemnations of Trump's statements has always been him promoting a theory with absolutely zero evidence purely for political gain.

And China has never been open about anything. Even if they had 100% incontrovertible proof it was a natural zoonotic incident, they wouldn't bother releasing it unless doing so provided them significant gain.

 

[Czar]

Who exactly is making it political?
I don't represent anyone other than myself but my condemnations of Trump's statements has always been him promoting a theory with absolutely zero evidence purely for political gain.

And China has never been open about anything. Even if they had 100% incontrovertible proof it was a natural zoonotic incident, they wouldn't bother releasing it unless doing so provided them significant gain.

Ending any suspicion/accusation that they accidentally unleashed covid from a lab would be huge political gain. They could say that Trump is a fraud. Instead, the lefties are more interested in making accusations against trump than finding out the truth. Pathetic actually..

As for me, I don't say it was a lab leak. But it sure wouldn't surprise me. There is precedent.

 

[basketcase]

Ending any suspicion/accusation that they accidentally unleashed covid from a lab would be huge political gain. They could say that Trump is a fraud. Instead, the lefties are more interested in making accusations against trump than finding out the truth. Pathetic actually..

As for me, I don't say it was a lab leak. But it sure wouldn't surprise me. There is precedent.

You and the Trump disciples would simply claim China was lying because .. they're China.

I'll stick with what the evidence says. The lab leak is a possibility but is far from the leading conclusion.

 

[Valcazar]

Instead, the lefties are more interested in making accusations against trump than finding out the truth. Pathetic actually..

Only that's not remotely true.
Or do you think the only people actually looking into the origins are all right wingers?

Like basketcase said - stick to the evidence.
The lab escape hypothesis remains a possibility, but not the most likely one.

 

[Czar]

Like basketcase said - stick to the evidence.
The lab escape hypothesis remains a possibility, but not the most likely one.

My own opinion is that I don't have the knowledge to determine which p

You and the Trump disciples would simply claim China was lying because .. they're China.

I'll stick with what the evidence says. The lab leak is a possibility but is far from the leading conclusion.

The Enemy of the People(also known as the mainstream media infested with unprofessional partisan lefties) dismissed the lab leak theory(and therefore were willing to harm society) because Trump said it might be true. Their political interests are much more important than your health. Do not trust the media. Now the frauds on this site pretend that they are open-minded on the subject when they no doubt joined the fruad bandwagon a couple of years ago.

Why It Matters: Tracking The Media's Dismissal Of The Wuhan Lab Theory

The whole point of journalism is to seek truth and report it. We failed to do that in this instance.

www.wgbh.org

Why It Matters: Tracking The Media's Dismissal Of The Wuhan Lab Theory

This illustration

By Dan Kennedy

Howard Kurtz was in high dudgeon. The Fox News media critic opened his Sunday program, “Media Buzz,” this past weekend by blasting the press for dismissing the possibility that COVID-19 had its origins in a leak from a lab in Wuhan, China. That possibility is suddenly very much on the table, and President Joe Biden has ordered an investigation.

“It was a whack-job theory, right? It was Looney Tunes. It was trashy Trump talk, surely not worthy of serious journalistic attention,” Kurtz said. He added: “If President Trump said it, the media dismissed it. If conservatives embraced it, liberal pundits mocked it. This just speaks volumes about our media establishment. Now, nothing’s been proven, but the circumstantial evidence is growing. Will there be any soul-searching about what amounted to media malpractice? Don’t hold your breath.”

Kurtz’s monologue oversimplified what we know, but he was largely correct. In fact, the media sloppily mashed together two different stories about Wuhan — a legitimate line of inquiry that the virus had accidentally escaped from the lab and a conspiracy theory that Chinese scientists at the lab were developing COVID-19 as a bioweapon.

As a result, with just a few lonely exceptions, the mainstream press over the course of the past 15 months has dismissed any suggestion that COVID-19 came from the lab as so ludicrous that it was unworthy of coverage. The media’s credibility is taking yet another hit — this one entirely legitimate — at a moment when it is already at an all-time low. And their “shameful dereliction of duty,” as conservative Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen put it, may make it that much harder to persuade Trump supporters to get over their skepticism about vaccinations.

The media’s dismissive attitude toward the lab-leak theory was grounded in their distrust — often warranted — of anything that came out of President Donald Trump’s mouth. After all, during the course of the pandemic Trump dismissed the seriousness of COVID-19 repeatedly, pushed unproven, potentially dangerous remedies like hydroxychloroquine, and even suggested at one memorable press briefing that injecting bleach might help.

So when Trump would use racist terms like the “China virus” in referring to COVID-19, the media were already primed to accept the consensus view touted by Dr. Anthony Fauci and the World Health Organization that the disease had, in fact, jumped from bats to humans in China and from there spread throughout the world.
Indeed, the possibility that COVID-19 had its origins in a Wuhan lab came to be seen as so thoroughly discredited that Facebook began taking down posts about it on the grounds that it was misinformation. The social-media giant reversed itself recently.

A few journalists, including Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin, kept the lab-leak theory alive. Rogin exploded on Saturday with a bitter tweet complaining that most mainstream reporters “actively crapped all over it for over a year while pretending to be objective.”

The tide finally started to turn when a pair of former New York Times reporters, first Nicholas Wade and then Don McNeil, wrote several weeks ago that they had come to regard the possibility of a lab leak as being as plausible as the bats-to-humans theory.

“I now agree with Nick’s central conclusion: We still do not know the source of this awful pandemic. We may never know,” McNeil wrote. “But the argument that it could have leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology or a sister lab in Wuhan has become considerably stronger than it was a year ago, when the screaming was so loud that it drowned out serious discussion.”

Matthew Yglesias, a prominent member of the Substackerati, has offered what I think is the most useful and detailed analysis of what went wrong from a journalistic point of view. He traces much of it to inept reporting about U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, who made some provocative statements early on about the possibility of a lab leak. Cotton is well-known as a China hawk, and pretty soon the media were falsely claiming that Cotton had touted the bioweapons fantasy, starting with a sensationalized account in Business Insider and then spreading from Politico and into the mainstream.

“At this point,” Yglesias wrote, “Cotton had achieved what’s really the greatest achievement possible for a Republican Party politician — he was unfairly maligned by the MSM.”

Also getting at an important part of what went wrong is Jonathan Chait of New York magazine, who points to Twitter as the place where mainstream journalists reinforced their views, making it that much harder to re-examine the lab-leak theory.

“Media coverage of the lab-leak hypothesis was a debacle, and a major source of that failure was groupthink cultivated on Twitter,” Chait said, calling the platform “a petri dish of tribalism and confirmation bias.”

So where does all this leave us? I’ll end where I began — with Howard Kurtz. Yes, he’s a conservative, and yes, he’s on Fox News. But he’s also a serious observer of the media who spent years at The Washington Post and CNN. His analysis can’t be easily dismissed. And I think he’s correct that animus toward Trump played a huge role in the media’s consensus that the lab-leak explanation for COVID was propaganda put out by the Trumpist right to deflect attention away from Trump’s numerous failures.

There’s a context that can’t be ignored, of course. Trump lied constantly. His horrendous mismanagement of the pandemic might go down as the greatest failure of any American president — unless you want to count his failure to abide by the results of a democratic election. It’s not difficult to see why journalists decided to accept Fauci’s word on the origins of the pandemic.

But they were wrong. The reality is that we don’t know where COVID-19 came from. The bats-to-humans explanation might be right. The lab possibility might be right. There’s a good chance that we’ll never know.

The whole point of journalism is to seek truth and report it. We failed to do that in this instance. And it ought to remind us of why we need to go about our jobs with humility and an open mind.

 

[squeezer]

Now the frauds on this site pretend that they are open-minded on the subject when they no doubt joined the fruad bandwagon a couple of years ago.

You do realize calling members names can lead to time off ? Now. don't get me wrong, I would love to unleash a verbal beatdown but I keep my name calling in check and it hurts, it really does.

Just know what I post in a friendly manner is not what is in my mind at the time of posting.

PS....Fraud <-----correct spelling

 

[basketcase]

...


The Enemy of the People(also known as the mainstream media infested with unprofessional partisan lefties)...

Reading this makes me think that you are either a troll or need some serious help.

There is no evidence of a lab leak. Any rational person understands it is a possibility but based on the evidence available, it is a far less likely one. if you took the time to look at the studies I posted a while back, one of them analyses the locations of the outbreak cases which are centred on the market. Sure, it's possible that a lab worker got infected then infected others around the market area without infecting any colleagues but that is speculation, not evidence.

 

[Czar]

Reading this makes me think that you are either a troll or need some serious help.

There is no evidence of a lab leak. Any rational person understands it is a possibility but based on the evidence available, it is a far less likely one. if you took the time to look at the studies I posted a while back, one of them analyses the locations of the outbreak cases which are centred on the market. Sure, it's possible that a lab worker got infected then infected others around the market area without infecting any colleagues but that is speculation, not evidence.

The sign of a fraud. I say the media refused to cover that it could have been a leak and the frauds making it sound as if I am saying it was a lab leak. I already said more than once that I don't know what the cause is it could be the cause.

Note for the basketcases. It had to get to the market somehow and people are one of the many types of animals that go to the market. A good starting point might be to investigate if it could have gotten there from the lab. We could ask the Chinese government for help but they refuse. Suspicious yet? Yes. Evidence? No. Media are frauds? Yes.

The WHO? Too busy looking for a new name for Monkey pox because apparently it is racist. Not sure how but it must be important. Frauds.

 

[basketcase]

The sign of a fraud. ...

Amazing how quickly this troll handle has jumped off the deep end.

But sure, call evidence a fraud if it contradicts with your admittedly uninformed opinion.

 

[Valcazar]

Reading this makes me think that you are either a troll or need some serious help.

He's so wildly biased that his ability to engage with facts and reasoning is limited.
The "fraud" thing just seems to be some sort of troll attempt. Calling people names will get them to react and then he proves he is cool by getting them to react?
Who knows.

It may well be his biases are so profound that he literally can't perceive reality well and therefore everything that disagrees with the narrative in his head makes someone a "fraud".
Think of it like Holden Caufield and "phony".

There is no evidence of a lab leak. Any rational person understands it is a possibility but based on the evidence available, it is a far less likely one. if you took the time to look at the studies I posted a while back, one of them analyses the locations of the outbreak cases which are centred on the market. Sure, it's possible that a lab worker got infected then infected others around the market area without infecting any colleagues but that is speculation, not evidence.

All true, but there is an argument to be made about the media not handling the nuances involved well.
The problem is how to deal with nuanced discussion when one side is actively working in bad faith.
There is a tendency to not even give them an inch in that case, because they will actively exploit that to derail the argument.
The problem is that then having to go back and acknowledge that inch results in them getting to argue (in bad faith) that they were being suppressed or not treated fairly.

It's not an easy thing to resolve.

 

[basketcase]

Explain how my opinion is uniformed when...

Ummm

My own opinion is that I don't have the knowledge to determine which p
...

 

[basketcase]

It is pretty hard to get any evidence about the location when you are blocked from investigating it. Not too hard to figure that out is it?,

So you admit that when Trump started promoting the claim, he had no evidence. Thanks.

 

[Czar]

So you admit that when Trump started promoting the claim, he had no evidence. Thanks.

Trump's opinion is irrelevant. What matters is how the lefties automatically come to a conclusion about investigating the origins of covid because of Trump's opinion.

That is why they are frauds.