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Ron DeSantis claimed today that Covid came from a lab.

What does that mean?  Does that mean that the Chinese government created it and released it into the population?

It means it was artificial and not arising from a natural occurrence between animal and man.

Now I know Ronnie is talking about the DoE report but I would
Implore you to look up “low confidence” and what that means.

The Chinese will say if pressed that it escaped from the breach at Fort Detrick.

We will likely never know, and what’s more comforting, that this was a man made horror or that it was anti-body from the earth?

Could it have been?

Is that what people who work in labs do?

Create deadly viruses

Here are the points of Covid pushed by the GOP right now

1) Covid came from a lab leak
2) Masks were not effective
3) Masks cause health hazards to children
4) Covid counts are inflated
5) Vaccines cause heart problems
6) Vaccines do not provide more protection than previous infection
7) Ivermectin is effective

We don't really know.

It is a leading theory from the DoE, but as Denver said, with low confidence.   ...so it's not really a slam dunk case of evidence and they're basing it on likelihood, I guess.

I also don't know that if it did come from a lab, that it was necessarily malicious.  It could've been scientists studying strains and ended up mutating this somehow and one of them got infected.

We just don't know.  We also may never know, because even if it were true, it's not like China is going to hand over all of the info, necessarily.



I'm also not sure how this matters very much in the grand scheme, other than making certain groups financially liable.

Ron Desantis is really hyping it up like a "gotcha" moment.

I mean yes it’s possible.

As Dave mentioned it may not mean it was weaponized. Both the US and China have been doing research on these viruses since the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s. It’s possible someone got infected doing the research and spread it to the public.

I know the US is a signatory to a treaty not to create bio-weapons, not sure about China. But even that doesn’t guarantee everyone will follow it.

Look up Fort Detrick breach, some people believe it came from there.

Truth is there is evidence supporting natural theory and lab theory. Different US agencies have different opinions and no one has a conclusive firm opinion.

As far as your rest, the GOP politicizes everything and they will try and use some new information to hammer to the democrats, nothing new there.

It's common sense. As the liberal Jon Stewart said:


Ah yes, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Over the past 18 years the Wuhan Institute of Virology has lead coronavirus research, it was the first facility to isolate the virus, and the first to sequence its genome.

In other news, water is wet and the sky is blue. LMFAO..........

Why would you want to create a virus in the first place?

And how is this a gotcha moment for the GOP?

Just a couple of points on this:

- The Wuhan Institute of Virology is about half an hour by car from the "wet market" where the first cases were clustered. There is a lab really close to the market and news media have conflated that lab (which doesn't do anything related to viruses) with the Wuhan Institute of Virology labs.
- The WHO team that was sent into China to had unrestricted access to people working at those labs, questioned them extensively, and were provided data on where those individuals were at any given time. The workers could obviously have lied and the data falsified, but there have been claims in the media that the investigators were not even authorized to look into any of this and could only investigate the "animal origin" aspect. That is obviously false.
- The WHO team was *not* authorized (nor did they have the expertise required) to conduct a review of the lab, procedures etc.

I was listening to an interview with one of the investigators yesterday and, other than making the points above, she emphasized that an "animal origin" was far more likely given the data available to them and further backed by the data that has since been released. She did point out that could not conclude anything with absolute certainty, but that the spread and pattern suggested at least two distinct introductions of the virus to the area in and immediately surrounding the wet market, consistent with a pool of infected animals somewhere that were brought to the market on separate occasions. Some of this data could theoretically have been falsified by China, but it did appear that a "lab leak" would have had to occur in multiple instances.

The DoE has not revealed any of the sources for their (self-labeled "low confidence") belief that it was a lab leak, so it's certainly possible that there is some intelligence indicating that where they are just not comfortable revealing those sources.

Maybe someone would try to create a biological weapon.  But that's probably not what we're dealing with.

If a lab is studying coronavirus, they may have accidentally released a mutated version of the virus.

There are probably some people who got out over their skis on Twitter in terms of calling out the lab leak theory as crazy conspiracy.  But it's pretty much been "we don't know" the whole time.  There are lots of theories.  And the lab leak theory is still not the prevailing theory of the government.  There is more support for natural transmission from other agencies, but we just don't know.  It's just that the most recent DoE report gives credence to those that say it came from a lab.

I can't rule out a lab leak but what does the DoE have to do with this? How are they qualified?

The "lab leak" theories were originally referring to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which does participate in some genetic engineering; the premise was that COVID is a man-made biological weapon that escaped containment (intentionally or unintentionally).

The recent "lab leak" theory associated with the Department of Energy (a conclusion DoE issued with, ahem, "low confidence") is completely different.  It is that the virus was escaped containment from the Chinese CDC in Wuhan, which does no genetic engineering at all.  If leaked from the Chinese CDC, that means they had it from someone who was infected naturally by an animal... which is what the scientific community has been saying all along.  There is no "there" there.

So like many conspiracies, the fact that the fundamental underlying premise (that COVID was a biological weapon) has completely changed is a minor detail to be dismissed.  You're supposed to hear the words "lab leak" and just infer that everyone who said that COVID was a Chinese bioweapon has just been proven right.

I can't remember, Phish, but I listened to a podcast that explained why the DoE had some insight.  It's something to do with them having spy information or something for protection of nuclear facilities and they extrapolated from that.


I can see why "The Chinese were creating a bio-weapon to release" is a sexy headline.  But that doesn't sound like what we're dealing with.
So, sure -- find out what you can, just so you know -- but realistically, what's the difference?  Would we try to hold them accountable or something?