If the lab leak turns out to be true I could see people demanding that the gallows be dusted off.
That's extreme. I work with transgenic, not viruses, but mistakes happen and the death penalty for researchers is crazy.
We weren't at war this time, but pandemics are inextricable from international politics for the same reason everything else that has massive impact on people's health and safety across national borders is inextricable from international politics.
I agree with you on the desire for depoliticization of the topic, but I lack a mechanism to get there; it's not like an independent agency run by, say, the UN would be free of politics on this topic.
And it has been years; if some one did it deliberately then they failed to capitalize on it.
First if it was a leak, we'd have to cut off all funding and shared resources just to be safe, which we have already done.
Next there would have to be some investigation that China would naturally be adversarial to. If it was natural they would want to collaborate (they are refusing to collaborate for the most part).
At its core, no. But there were a lot of people caught in the crossfire of information who simply got scared. For many of them, seeing SARS-CoV-2 as man-made could have counteracted that anxiety.
It was clear very early on that for the vast majority of the population (over 99%) there was no tangible threat from Covid. And yet the theater of Covid was carried on. I still remember the footage out of Wuhan in early 2020 that scared the bejeezus out of me, of people just falling over in the middle of the streets and people with hazmat suits showing up and carting people off. Only in retrospect can we see that was all a production. People don't literally fall over in the middle of the street from Covid infection, fine one minute and near dead the next.
So from that background, why would you trust anything the government tells you, when the government showed no good faith effort to seek truth or be reasonable? Many who pitched the lab leak theory were dismissed, shut down, censored, and ridiculed. From the same conformists that sought to manipulate healthy young people into taking an unnecessary vaccine and to give up a portion of their youth to terror and tyranny.
Inoculation means to prevent disease. The mRNA vaccines were extraordinary at preventing Covid, the disease. Sterilisation is a nice to have, but far from mandatory--modern polio vaccines aren't sterilising.
> didn't have to propagandize and gaslight people to take the smallpox vaccine: it was self evident how deadly the disease was
A meaningful fraction of Americans, Brits and Canadians are generally against inoculation [1].
He said was. The disease was deadly, now it's threat to you is extremely low. If you weren't aware, we stopped vaccinating for small pox in 1972, as soon as it was no longer a threat in the United States. It would not be globally eradicated until 1979.
And I think that's largely the problem many people have. Forcing vaccinations for diseases that pose little risk is illogical. In looking up information on this topic I somehow stumbled onto this [1] page. For instance now the seasonal flu vaccine is required for immigrants, and even in some schools!?
The flu poses an extremely negligible risk to both of these groups. It's hard not to see the motivation behind this as being simply directing ever more $$$ to big-pharma interests, which the people making these rules are often directly invested in. It doesn't feel like rational public health guidance, and that destroys trust.
[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/immigrantrefugeehealth/laws-regs/vaccina...
When there were local smallpox outbreaks in the West in the 20th century there were drastic containment measures.
But right on, I feel exactly the same. I do plant transformation and we call these experiments, mRNA "transient-expression" assays, as in, transiently transgenic. It was so weird from my perspective that we were going to start using the common lab technique to test genes on people.
The only two facts I needed were that over 80% of people that have had COVID never even knew they had it, it's that mild. And of the people that even show symptoms it have over a 99% recovery rate.
This depended strongly on which variant you got. Early on, it was inefficiently deadly. (In its current form, I don't think Covid is a problem.)
> over a 99% recovery rate
Fewer than 1% of Americans died from Covid [1]. On a case fatality basis, about 99% survived. Lack of mortality != recovery.
COVID now is far more mild because of vaccination and how the virus has evolved (Omnicron being far more mild than the earlier variants).
And obviously there were no vaccines for the Spanish Flu.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Patterns_of_fatali...
Like what you've done there is a fallacy a lot of people commit, that they conflate seasonal viruses, colds, allergies etc with the flu. But when you actually get the flu, you know it.
Age Range : Deaths : Group Population as Percent of total US Population
55-64 : 159k : 12.9%
65-74 : 256k : 10.1%
75-84 : 300k : 4.9%
85+ : 311k : 1.8%
COVID was only especially dangerous to the extremely elderly, and particularly those with severe preexisting conditions. So for instance that 65-74 age group, you have about 34 million people, and only 256k deaths. Think about the numbers in that 34 million with cancer, severe diabetes, heart failure, etc. But then you go the 85+ group and with 1/6th as many people, ended up with about 20% more total deaths.
[1] - https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta... (for the % of population data)
To state different: Was the unknown/disputed origins the catalyst for some not getting vaccinated?