Re: Covid pandemic came from a lab leak?

On 12/6/24 10:01 AM, jillery wrote:

On Wed, 4 Dec 2024 11:35:09 -0600, RonO <rokimoto557@gmail.com> wrote:
 

https://www.science.org/content/article/house-panel-concludes-covid-19-pandemic-came-lab-leak
>
A partisan report (Republicans) concludes that the Covid 19 pandemic was
caused by a lab leak.  This conclusion likely is not true, mainly
because the Wuhan lab was not working with corona virus closely related
to Covid-19.  The sequence would not have been available to recombine
the virus that has parts most closely related to virus that has
subsequently been isolated from bats, but it does have sequences from
other sources.  It is some type of recombinant virus, but the mixing
likely occurred in some coinfected animals.
>
QUOTE:
The World Health Organization “caved” to the Chinese Communist Party and
allowed it to conceal the severity of the pandemic.
>
Masking and vaccine mandates, school closures, and lockdowns were of
questionable value, and U.S. public health officials put forth
conflicting, opaque messaging on those issues and more.
>
Operation Warp Speed, launched by then-President Donald Trump to develop
COVID-19 vaccines in record time, was a success and a model for future
pandemics. But the report also criticized the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration for pressuring its senior scientists to accelerate full
approval of one of the vaccines.
END QUOTE:

  The above are examples of alternate facts asserted by Trump and his
toadies:
 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed>
 IIRC, other than signing the enabling bill into law, Trump had little
to do with the organizing of the project or its development of
vaccines.  Giving Trump credit for it is like giving Queen Isabella
credit for discovering the New World.
 

There was a lot of denial about the severity of the pandemic.  The
Chinese responded as everyone else should have, and contained the
infection in China.  China's main problem was that everyone else did not
do the right thing and China kept getting reinfected resulting in their
current Covid issue that seems to be about the same as everyone else at
this time.
>
It looks like the report doesn't contain much about Trump's denial and
lies about the covid pandemic, and the lack of a national policy to deal
with the pandemic.  Masking, school closures, and lockdowns were of
questionable value in most cases because there wasn't a national policy,
and they were haphazardly implemented.  It didn't matter what your state
implemented if a neighboring state didn't do it so the infected just
kept increasing in both states.
>
They note that the vaccine was a success, but they don't mention Trumps
stupid denial and lies about the pandemic that interfered with the
implementation of things like masking and school closures, and even
resulted in the antivaccination issues that resulted in thousands of
unnecessary deaths.  At one time the unvaccinated were dying of covid at
10 times the rate of the vaccinated, and the unvaccinated were likely
the cause of many of the infections that the vaccinated suffered.  There
has never been a highly protective corona virus vaccine created.  Corona
virus evade our immune system pretty effectively.  It is one of the
viruses associated with the common cold, and it just keeps infecting
people over and over.  We do not seem to mount an effective immune
response against the virus.  What the vaccine did was only decrease your
chance of infection it attenuated the symptoms if you did get infected,
so you were less likely to die of the disease.  Trump screwed that all
up, and the unvaccinated kept the virus at a high concentration in the
environment, so that everyone was more likely to get infected.
>
Masking was not effectively sold to the population.  The greatest
benefit of masking was that it decreased the amount of airborne virus in
the environment.  The homemade cloth masks and paper surgical masks were
nearly worthless for keeping you from being infected, but they did
decrease the virus in the environment if the infected wore them.  The
sick and the asymptomatic shedders that did not wear a mask were most
likely to be those that infected others.  It was still true of KN95
masks that became popular.  They were most effective in reducing virus
in the environment.  If you were in an enclosed room with someone
shedding virus for more than 40 minutes, you would still be likely
infected by that person even if you were wearing a KN95 mask.  Those
masks did not have a tight seal.
>
They needed to make it clear that the infected should wear a mask, and
since you had asymptomatic shedders, everyone needed to wear a mask.
>
Ron Okimoto
>

 

Regarding the "lab leak" theory of covid origin, we'll likely never know, given China's policy of concealing what they know.