CV and mad panic behaviour

[LP]

Where do the vaccine naysayers go with this little gem, the foundations of their opposition to vaccines just crumbled!

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/...udy-finds/

Let me summarise, this beautifully simple scientific measure!

Unvaccinated COVID patients more likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke after the infection than someone who is vaccinated!

"Nah, twas da vacsine dat dun it!", werz mi lawya?

[ElwoodBlues1]

https://au.yahoo.com/news/covid-19-likel...04757.html

[kruddler]

https://au.yahoo.com/news/covid-19-likel...04757.html

10 countries say its impossible.
USA say its highly likely.

Even with some 'chinese influence', that is a huge turnaround that makes me think its more propaganda from the US.

[LP]

10 countries say its impossible.
USA say its highly likely.

Even with some 'chinese influence', that is a huge turnaround that makes me think its more propaganda from the US.

Agreed, why would you ask the Department of Energy to secretly review the Sars-CoV-2 outbreak?

Probably as a political tool, because they can do it without reputations being tarnished in their own field of expertise, energy!

People in Australia should accept the reports from the Australia Scientist who was on the ground in Wuhan and is now back here working at our own Secure Virology Lab in Geelong, Danielle Anderson. Paraphrasing she said it was a joke to claim it was a Wuhan lab outbreak.

Personally, I think the lab leak hypothesis will let China off the hook for the real crime. The real crime now appears to be that Chinese health officials knew of a viral outbreak months before the deadly virus mutated to become more virulent, and covered it up. With the roots of the outbreak occurring in the southern region nearly a thousand kilometres from Wuhan. But if they had gone public they might have suffered economic damage to the economies engine room in GuangXi and GuangDong province. I also read late last year that there is now a high confidence traceable link to wild animal farming / hunting near China's southern border and the Wuhan wet market. In that regard the outbreak was a consequence of human actions, but not from actions in a virology lab.

[PaulP]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/f...department

A few quotes from that article :

The conclusion from the energy department – which oversees a network of 17 US laboratories, including areas of advanced biology – is considered significant despite the fact that, as the report said, the agency made its updated judgment with “low confidence”.

The energy department’s updated findings run counter to reports by four other US intelligence agencies that concluded the epidemic started as the result of natural transmission from an infected animal. Two agencies remain undecided.

[Mav]

I don’t get the fascination with COVID’s origin story. Whatever the truth, it was a diabolical screw up. It either originated in the wet market which is like a Petri dish for zoonotic transfer or leaked from a lab which would be a major screw up. But the latter seems to be a mere jumping off point for the idea that the Chinese deliberately unleashed a bio weapon on the world. Yet the way the Covid story unfolded suggests the Chinese were totally unprepared for the pandemic.

You’d think that a country that was about to release an infectious disease would do a little bit of prep work. Maybe isolating a vaccine or treatment before doing so would be nice. Having some sort of plan to ensure the pandemic won’t disrupt your own economy would be fine and dandy too. But the Chinese were caught with their pants down on both accounts. The vaccine they pushed, Sinovac, was second rate and pride prevented them from accepting vaccines from the West. Presumably, other countries that the Chinese “helped” by providing Sinovac for free wouldn’t be as grateful as the Chinese had hoped. They then tried to limit the damage at home by pretending it didn’t exist. They also relied on lockdowns well after effective mRNA vaccines were available and it was clear that Omicron was too infectious to be contained in that fashion. That has created an economic slowdown. If the Chinese had released Covid deliberately, it was one of the biggest own goals in history. Baldrick would have been happy to claim it as his own cunning plan.

No doubt there would be value in determining the origin of Covid from a scientific point of view. Maybe the US could benefit politically by establishing that the Chinese screwed up although the way the US handled the pandemic was hardly a study in good governance. But the Chinese won’t pay any compensation or accept any blame. What’s the point?

[LP]

I don’t get the fascination with COVID’s origin story.

I suppose the media want someone to blame, it's human nature.

The driver for finding the origins of Sars-CoV-2 is of course making sure we get early warning of the next outbreak, and there is very high confidence there will be one, it's a when not an if debate.

For me the big question, the one the media tends to gloss over, is why they are not asking the hard question of western politicians who had been warned about this event almost 15 years earlier and did nothing to prepare for it?

[PaulP]

I recall hearing Michael Osterholm (American epidemiologist) in the early days of the pandemic saying that infectious disease experts have for decades been warning governments that an outbreak like this was simply a matter of when, not if, and that governments needed to be prepared. These were global warnings, not just about China.

[LP]

There is a bizarre aspect to the pandemic, it made some people very very rich, because they were ready to act in the absence of actions by states. They had known about and heeded the warnings, reaping huge sums of money from sovereign states for the solution in the process.

One of the very early "canaries" that politicians ignored has become a Moderna billionaire!

Then politicians managed the pandemic based on economic costs, sacrificing lives to limit economic damage.

Yet if politicians had heeded the warning, and the issue was addressed by funding basic science, it would have been the sovereign states reaping the financial reward rather than managing the cost!

Who should we be jailing, some poor science schmuck who alerted the world of the virus, or the politicians who knew a pandemic was coming and did nothing costing us all billions of dollars and millions of lives?

[Thryleon]

If COVID originated in a LAB it wasn't bad enough to warrant being developed there which instantly dismisses that argument unless we are all ticking time bombs waiting to go off (evidence points to this not being the case but that could change).

I've had it finally.  Sure it knocks you around a bit, but at worst it was nothing too untoward.  Certainly not worth the shutdowns we faced, but I recognise that those decisions were made with limited information and incorrect assumptions (every covid case would end up in hospital).  If you hadn't told me about a pandemic floating around and the requisite symptoms, I might have just thought I was run down and suffering from the flu or something a bit like it.  The symptoms did hang around for about 4-8 weeks, and there was an element of weirdness to the symptoms as they were highly variable but realistically they all passed easily enough from what I can tell.  I can appreciate how people who were already halfway to deaths door would have likely succumbed to it, but I don't believe that applies to the majority.  If you were unlucky enough to have had a stroke, Pneumonia, heart failure (manageable with treatment but still a deaths door scenario) those people would likely have died from it.  Thing is COVID was a tip someone over the edge scenario, not a killer itself.  We couldnt have known that originally but why is it that people can put their hand up and say this now?

We all know it, everyone who has any cognitive ability understands it, but for political reasons, no one will ever admit it.  Particularly with the impending economic doom our society is facing.