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Origins of Covid
When you have to sue the government to get them to share legally available information, it almost always means they know more than they want you to know. Whatever the origins of Covid, policymakers have behaved from the outset of the pandemic in ways that can only be described as curious. Their frequently irrational behavior, and contradictory pronouncements, have spawned any number of theories as to why they have flailed the way they have.
One thought I have had is that the folks at the CDC have behaved in ways someone would if they were afraid that this virus might not act like a naturally occurring virus. It isn’t as if we haven’t had coronaviruses in the world before. And we generally know the course a viral outbreak takes through a population. Sure, maybe this one has a marginally higher mortality rate for certain segments of the population. But some of the behavior of policymakers has suggested their behavior is born out of a concern, not just for mortality, but for the possibility that the entire pandemic course with this one could somehow be…different.
Such puzzling behavior has prompted all manner of attempts to explain their inconsistent, and often ridiculous, policy prescriptions. Hanlon’s razor is always – always – the most likely explanation: Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. Or perhaps the popular explanation on the right, that the bureaucrats are power-mad, is correct. Perhaps some combination of stupidity and a lust for power offers the magic decoder ring. Embrace the healing power of and.
The delusional view on the left, that the government is a benevolent caretaker of the citizenry and only wants what’s best for us, should have died as the last planes left Afghanistan, abandoning the remaining American citizens to their fate. But they’ll be telling us again that we should trust our well-being to the government before the week is out. They’re incapable of learning from experience. (The determination of the poobahs of social media to decorate the posts of their users with ubiquitous assurances of the probity of the government’s pronouncements on Covid is a case in point.)
The fact that the federal government routinely demonstrates its indifference to the welfare of American citizens doesn’t, however, really explain the epidemic of bureaucratic bumbling and burbling.
I’ve been long haunted by the thought that we should at least consider whether the wacky behavior of the bureaucrats might suggest that some of them suspect something, and have been haphazardly reacting out of fear that the virus could behave in ways for which there is no natural precedent.
Just wondering.
Published in General
I’ll go you one better: My wife works at a tribal clinic and for several months helped run a vaccine clinic. They vaccinated thousands of people. Many of them friends and family. Of them all, one, just one had an issue. A good friend of mine who’d had a serious bout with COVID early on, who also has allergies. He got one shot of one of the mRNA vaccines and had an extreme allergic reaction. But he didn’t die. He knew he might have the reaction and consulted with his doctor.
Anecdotal, yes. But so is Hoffe’s nonsense.
“There are no solutions – only tradeoffs.” – Thomas Sowell
The pandemic is the world’s largest ever experiment in decision making in the face of uncertainty. People will have to decide which of the available tradeoffs they can tolerate. I’m vaccinated, but I understand some people’s reluctance, and I come down firmly on the side of liberty – ESPECIALLY when there’s uncertainty.
We don’t know the long term risks of the vaccines, but the good new is that the people who most need the vaccines tend not to have a long term horizon to worry too much about. So there’s that.
I listened to Zdog for one video, and with all respect, he didn’t impress me at all.
My “doctor” (a PA) has not been vaccinated, and I know he doesn’t trust them. Another “doctor” (another PA) got the vaccine and came to worked and stretched his arms up in victory and proclaimed “Now I am invincible!!!” but he’s the biggest fearfulest Gladys Kravitz, telling everyone to pull their mask closer over their noses. And complaining to HR if you don’t.
Another doctor I know (a real doctor) thinks what he’s told to think. In the early months of 2020 he laughed off the virus saying, “It’s only the flu!” but by March he was wearing a two-filter respirator even when sitting at his desk.
And besides what doctor is going to fill out any survey and admit that they haven’t gotten vaccinated even if it’s true. Not many, I don’t think.
I think you and Spin have the right of it. Fauci deliberately went around the Gain-of-Function research oversight process. People should be asking for the approval documents and oversight for this proposal. He was very clearly negligent, and practiced a deceptive coverup including lying repeatedly to Congress. You don’t need to make him into a supervillain to show he is despicable. I wrote an entire post unloading on the guy.
Add in China’s known record of blatant safety and environmental violations, and you have the biosafety equivalent to a Chernobyl-style RBMK reactor.
@CarolJoy the Marburg Virus is a viral hemorrhagic fever (VHF) caused by a filovirus like Ebola. It is extremely lethal, which limits its ability to spread, as does the fact it has a contact and droplet based transmission. Marburg VHF can be contained with strict hygiene and use of lots of bleach in African field hospitals. It’s dangerous in the context of a terror attack, but not pandemic material. Quarantine the people bleeding everywhere and you are good.
You are aware that Lukashenko is a wannabe Stalin, right? He’s a legit dictator, not someone with a slightly more authoritarian style of leadership like Orban. Read up on the guy a little before you go trumpeting him. Also, the protests in the Ukraine were driven by Yanukovich playing games with elections. Given our recent experience, I’d figure you could understand why the average Ukrainian wanted a change in government. (I have no doubt people were throwing money around to influence things, just that I don’t want to write off the legit reasons for the people of Ukraine to rise up)
I was just thinking about that this morning. Apparently fauci funded two separate labs in Wuhan to conduct gain of function research; both I believe while the moratorium was on in the US. He really must have wanted a chimera that could infect the human body, and now he’s got what he wanted.
No, believe what you’re told to believe. Government would never lie about any of this.
I personally know of two young men who got cardiac inflammation, hospitalization two days after getting their second vaccine, and a boat load of medicines to go home with. And I’m not even in the business. Anecdotal, too.
This is true unless they’ve modified it to be more transmissible. Sort of like they’ve done to SARS.
I have to admit I have no idea where the Quantas pilot got the idea that Marburg would be released soon. I know that on the Australian continent, truckers staged a vast nation wide highway shutdown, during the end of August, and a lot of people have had it.
Would the PTB in Australia raise the ante to go the Marburg route? In order to quell the possible uprising of the populace? Would they ensure it was modified it to make more transmissable and less deadly? It has been said for quite a while that the COV vaxxes contain both HIV and ebola. Gates himself has bragged about the capacity of “new vaccines containing newer technologies” allowing for a switch to be turned on or off. (I confess I don’t remember if that was a statement he made as a general overview, like back in 2015, or something he said in one of his televised interviews in Spring 2020.)
Here are just two.
WHO warns population: Highly dangerous Marburg virus detected in a new region in Africa
8/10/2021, 9:06:40 AM
Marburg Virus Threatens to Spread from Guinea, WHO Warns the Ebola-Like Virus Could Be Contagious
BY RENZ SOLIMAN AUG 10, 2021 10:15 PM EDT
That “fact-check” is laughable. He didn’t say 62% of patients who get the shot get blood clots. He said 62% of his patients did, and the “fact-check” doesn’t make that distinction or interview him to follow up on the claim. I could post a hundred testimonies from doctors and nurses singing the same tune by the way. Including some very good friends of mine, one a doctor who resigned last month. From a nurse friend who texted me the other day:
This whole discussion illustrates that many (most?) people don’t trust a lot of the information being put out because everything Covid-19 has been completely politicized. I would argue most of the initial politicization was by the people who sought to paint the disease as severe and high risk. In the process of painting a severe and high risk disease, those people conveyed an impression that they might be doing so as cover to control the lives of others, and they did little to counter that impression. The other people who were suspicious of the people painting a severe and high risk image looked for information to counter that image. And the result is that almost all the information available to the general public is generated and presented first as part of a political campaign, so that none of it is to be believed.
True, but I would take it a step farther and make it more general. The government has been telling things other than the truth for at least five years, and going back to “If you like you doctor.” There’s not much credibility left even before don’t-wear/wear/don’t-wear/wear-two-masks, and before fauci wagged his finger in the air in wonderful Bill Clinton style and said, “I did not directly fund that virus, Covid-19!”
Added: And let me take it a step further. When people died with covid, they counted it as died from covid.
Now when someone dies with the vaccine, they died from something other than the vaccine.
This level of hypocrisy and lies is phenomenal. It undercuts any truth that they may be inadvertently telling. Any statistics that they may be presenting. Any instruction that they may be giving. And any mandates that they may be dictating.
Agree. We don’t know the long term effects of either the disease or of the vaccines.
For the elderly, the short term negative effects of the disease are severe enough, and the short term negative effects of the vaccine small enough that many elderly and near-elderly will rationally choose to take the vaccine and thus take on the risks of the unknown long-term effects. That was my thinking. I am 65 years old. My “long term” maxes out at 25 – 30 years.
But for younger people who don’t have other significant health issues, the uncertainty of the unknown long term effects of both the disease and of the vaccine loom larger. The short term negative effects of the disease are relatively low risk. So are the risks of short term negative effects of the vaccines. But neither risk is zero, so it is not irrational for a younger person to choose either the uncertainty of the short term and long term risks of the disease, or the short term and long term risks of the vaccine. And for women currently of childbearing age, or girls not yet of childbearing age, the uncertainty of the long term unknown looms even larger.
This Covid-19 stuff is all too new for there to be enough certainty about what the “right” level of risk-taking to dictate that everybody MUST take a particular course of action.
As a part of the 65+ cohort, I got vaxxed because my wife (a retired teacher) was completely wigged out about the virus. I fugured the long-term/short-term odds favored me getting it. I have firmly told my mid-30s kids not to get vaxxed until the consequences are better understood. They have between them 7 kids they will have to care for. No reason for them to take an experimental drug.
Are you offering a guarantee to me that my vaccination cannot possibly be something I regret having done — say 10 years from now?
Long term safety isn’t known yet.