Wet Markets

[Hards Alumni]

Wet markets are some people’s livelihood. Easy for us to say stop. Not so easy for them.

Too bad.  They're horrible places.  Watch a video of them on the internet.  I challenge you to be able to sit through more than a minute or two without tossing your cookies.  They're straight up animal abuse.

[forgetful]

Forgetful,

Have you read The Premonition by Michael Lewis? With your knowledge base, it seems like it would be right in your wheelhouse.

I have not read it, but was just looking for some books to read, as I'll finally have some time to read for me. Will definitely pick it up. Looks very interesting.

Thank you.

[rocket surgeon]

very well written article on "wet market" vs manipulated.  nicholas wade does a tremendous job trying to explain these theories on the origin of COVID-19 bringing down to a level most could understand.  mixing politics, money and china should always make one skeptical.  wuhan, having a level 4 BSL should draw the attention of anyone with the slightest modicum of a bs detector.  dr peter daszak also needs to come clean.  if we had any MSM, this would have been discussed long ago.  why not?  refer to sentence #2.  sad.  many people may have unnecessarily died.  if we do not correct this serious frailty,  this will happen again in some form or another.  this should not be a partisan issue as we have seen time after time, death has no preference for political stances. 

if one has the attention span to follow nicholas wade discussion, he lays out a very plausible map.  you don't have to have a deep bio science background to follow his logic

https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038

"These are the two arguments made by the Andersen group in support of their declaration that the SARS2 virus was clearly not manipulated. And this conclusion, grounded in nothing but two inconclusive speculations, convinced the world’s press that SARS2 could not have escaped from a lab. A technical critique of the Andersen letter takes it down in harsher words."


"The Daszak and Andersen letters were really political, not scientific statements, yet were amazingly effective. Articles in the mainstream press repeatedly stated that a consensus of experts had ruled lab escape out of the question or extremely unlikely. Their authors relied for the most part on the Daszak and Andersen letters, failing to understand the yawning gaps in their arguments. Mainstream newspapers all have science journalists on their staff, as do the major networks, and these specialist reporters are supposed to be able to question scientists and check their assertions. But the Daszak and Andersen assertions went largely unchallenged."

[Skatastrophy]

very well written article on "wet market" vs manipulated.  nicholas wade does a tremendous job trying to explain these theories on the origin of COVID-19 bringing down to a level most could understand.  mixing politics, money and china should always make one skeptical.  wuhan, having a level 4 BSL should draw the attention of anyone with the slightest modicum of a bs detector.  dr peter daszak also needs to come clean.  if we had any MSM, this would have been discussed long ago.  why not?  refer to sentence #2.  sad.  many people may have unnecessarily died.  if we do not correct this serious frailty,  this will happen again in some form or another.  this should not be a partisan issue as we have seen time after time, death has no preference for political stances. 

if one has the attention span to follow nicholas wade discussion, he lays out a very plausible map.  you don't have to have a deep bio science background to follow his logic

https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038

"These are the two arguments made by the Andersen group in support of their declaration that the SARS2 virus was clearly not manipulated. And this conclusion, grounded in nothing but two inconclusive speculations, convinced the world’s press that SARS2 could not have escaped from a lab. A technical critique of the Andersen letter takes it down in harsher words."


"The Daszak and Andersen letters were really political, not scientific statements, yet were amazingly effective. Articles in the mainstream press repeatedly stated that a consensus of experts had ruled lab escape out of the question or extremely unlikely. Their authors relied for the most part on the Daszak and Andersen letters, failing to understand the yawning gaps in their arguments. Mainstream newspapers all have science journalists on their staff, as do the major networks, and these specialist reporters are supposed to be able to question scientists and check their assertions. But the Daszak and Andersen assertions went largely unchallenged."

Someone that recently wrote a book promoting eugenics is not a reliable source.

https://www.americanscientist.org/article/a-troubling-tome

[ATL MU Warrior]

Someone that recently wrote a book promoting eugenics is not a reliable source.

https://www.americanscientist.org/article/a-troubling-tome

that's a perfect source for people like rocket

[The Hippie Satan of Hyperbole]

Rocket just gets mad when "the media" says things he doesn't like, while simultaneously ignoring the fact that half of the media says things he likes.

Anyway, from the source he posted above:

"Neither the natural emergence nor the lab escape hypothesis can yet be ruled out. There is still no direct evidence for either. So no definitive conclusion can be reached."

Just like forgetful said...

[MUBurrow]

Too bad.  They're horrible places.  Watch a video of them on the internet.  I challenge you to be able to sit through more than a minute or two without tossing your cookies.  They're straight up animal abuse.

I agree that they are awful, and Wags makes a good comparison with poaching, which is also often directly related to the markets themselves.  And any concerns about cultural mores starts fading pretty quickly when compared against the risks of virus transmission.  Whether or not a wet market is responsible for covid species jumping, its happened before and will happen again.

But studies have shown that when wet markets just get closed, the risks associated with them can actually get worse due to the black market filling the void.  So the answer here is probably a gradual shift away from the highest risk activities - like keeping the markets open but a more strict policing of the animals permitted to sold there.  The real answer is increased standards of living to make these a thing of the past, but I'm not holding my breath there.

[Jockey]

Too bad.  They're horrible places.  Watch a video of them on the internet.  I challenge you to be able to sit through more than a minute or two without tossing your cookies.  They're straight up animal abuse.

I agree, Hards. I certainly wasn’t defending them. I was just giving a reason why they exist.

[Jockey]

Itchy, thanks for the tip, it looks very interesting. On reserve at my local library.

You read? 

[Hards Alumni]

that's a perfect source for people like rocket

Exactly.  He finds awful sources and tries to talk them up in posts... but then it's very clear he hasn't read the article or done any due diligence.

I wonder if he thinks anyone around here takes him seriously.

[MU82]

Good summation (IMHO) by the NYT's David Leonhardt:

Suddenly, talk of the Wuhan lab-leak theory seems to be everywhere.

President Biden yesterday called on U.S. intelligence officials to “redouble their efforts” to determine the origin of Covid-19 and figure out whether the virus that causes it accidentally leaked from a Chinese laboratory. Major publications and social media have recently been filled with discussion of the subject.

Today, we offer an explainer.

What are the basics?

The origin of the virus remains unclear. Many scientists have long believed that the most likely explanation is that it jumped from an animal to a person, possibly at a food market in Wuhan, China, in late 2019. Animal-to human transmission — known as zoonotic spillover — is a common origin story for viruses, including Ebola and some bird flus.

But some scientists have pointed to another possibility: that it escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. As in other laboratories, researchers there sometimes modify viruses, to understand and treat them.

“It is most likely that this is a virus that arose naturally, but we cannot exclude the possibility of some kind of a lab accident,” Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, told senators yesterday.

Why now?

The subject is getting more attention because some scientists who were once skeptical of the laboratory theory have expressed new openness to it.

Two weeks ago, 18 scientists wrote a letter to the journal Science calling for a new investigation and describing both the animal-to-human theory and the lab-leak theory as “viable.” And three scientists who last year dismissed the lab-leak explanation as a conspiracy theory have told The Wall Street Journal that they now consider it plausible.

Among the reasons: Chinese officials have refused to allow an independent investigation into the lab and have failed to explain some inconsistencies in the animal-to-human hypothesis. Most of the first confirmed cases had no evident link to the food market.

What changed?

In some ways, not much has not changed. From the beginning, the virus’s origin has been unclear. All along, some scientists, politicians and journalists have argued that the lab-leak theory deserves consideration.

Almost 15 months ago, two Chinese researchers wrote a paper concluding that the virus “probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.” Alina Chan, a molecular biologist affiliated with Harvard and M.I.T., made similar arguments. David Ignatius and Josh Rogin, both Washington Post columnists, wrote about the possibility more than a year ago. Joe Biden, then a presidential candidate, didn’t mention the lab-leak theory in early 2020 but he did argue that the U.S. should “not be taking China’s word” for how the outbreak started.

But these voices were in the minority. The World Health Organization initially dismissed the lab-leak theory as implausible.

Why all the dismissals?

It appears to be a classic example of groupthink, exacerbated by partisan polarization.

Global health officials seemed unwilling to confront Chinese officials, who insist the virus jumped from an animal to a person.

In the U.S., one of the theory’s earliest advocates was Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas who often criticizes China — and who has a history of promoting falsehoods (like election fraud that didn’t happen). In this case, though, Cotton was making an argument with plausible supporting evidence.

The media’s coverage of his argument was flawed, Substack’s Matthew Yglesias has written. Some coverage exaggerated Cotton’s comments to suggest he was claiming that China had deliberately released the virus as a biological weapon. (Cotton called that “very unlikely.”) And some scientists and others also seem to have decided that if Cotton believed something — and Fox News and Donald Trump echoed it — the idea had to be wrong.

The result, as Yglesias called it, was a bubble of fake consensus. Scientists who thought a lab leak was plausible, like Chan, received little attention. Scientists who thought the theory was wacky received widespread attention. It’s a good reminder: The world is a complicated place, where almost nobody is always right or always wrong.

Why does it matter?

The virus’s origin does not affect many parts of the fight against Covid. The best mitigation strategies — travel restrictions, testing, contact tracing, social distancing, ventilation and masking — are still the best mitigation strategies.

But there are at least three concrete ways, in addition to the inherent value of truth, in which the origin matters.

First, if the virus really did come from a lab, an immediate airing of the details might have led to even faster vaccine development and more effective treatments. Second, a leak that caused millions of deaths could lead to widespread change in laboratories’ safety precautions. Third, confirmation of a leak would affect the world’s view of China — and would put pressure on China to bear the burden of vaccinating the world as quickly as possible.

So what’s the truth?

We don’t know. Both animal-to-human transmission and the lab leak appear plausible. And the obfuscation by Chinese officials means we may never know the truth.

[rocket surgeon]

Exactly.  He finds awful sources and tries to talk them up in posts... but then it's very clear he hasn't read the article or done any due diligence.

I wonder if he thinks anyone around here takes him seriously.

  so you believe the nyt to be a reliable source?   

"I wonder if he thinks anyone around here takes him seriously"

  this is how you guys roll.   demean, minimize and bully those you don't agree with in any number of ways-nice

[The Hippie Satan of Hyperbole]

No we just have higher expectations for you then you do for yourself.

[Billy Hoyle]

Another good article, Jonathan Chiat, well known liberal pundit, calling out his own side for the media’s failure to pursue the lab leak possibility.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/05/lab-leak-liberal-media-theory-china-wuhan-lab-cotton-trump.html

[MU82]

  so you believe the nyt to be a reliable source?   

Thank goodness for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters and other legitimate news outlets these last 5-6 years.

[rocket surgeon]

Thank goodness for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters and other legitimate news outlets these last 5-6 years.

maybe the wall street journal, but the others on your list "and other legitimate news outlets these last 5-6 years" made me laugh-good one

[tower912]

An investigation is being started.  It can only go so far if the Chinese don't cooperate.    As we learned when the WHO conducted an investigation.   Truth and honesty would be the ideal so that all the necessary lessons can be learned and shared.   I am not optimistic.

[4everwarriors]

Thank goodness for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters and other legitimate news outlets these last 5-6 years.

Ewe actually reed da WSJ orr just look at da pictures and cartoon, hey?

[MU82]

Ewe actually reed da WSJ orr just look at da pictures and cartoon, hey?

I subscribe to the WSJ and read it daily. Thanks for asking.

Ewe actually reed any legitimate publications orr just "official statements from the 45th president," nu?

[rocket surgeon]

An investigation is being started.  It can only go so far if the Chinese don't cooperate.    As we learned when the WHO conducted an investigation.   Truth and honesty would be the ideal so that all the necessary lessons can be learned and shared.   I am not optimistic.

  completely agree tower, but WHO and china are hooked at the wallet.  unless we get full transparency(don't hold our breath)we will never learn from this and it will happen again.  the world needs to unite against china and make them pay.  china has #46 by the short hairs and can't even come clean on his biness dealings with hunter inc.  speakin of impeachable offenses

    maybe le'bron and the NBA can help? 

[pacearrow02]

https://mobile.twitter.com/SharriMarkson/status/1398252182609154056

You want to charge someone with reckless homicide?!?!?  Start with this guy and his other scientist buddies who knew all along they were playing with fire.

[cheebs09]

https://mobile.twitter.com/SharriMarkson/status/1398252182609154056

You want to charge someone with reckless homicide?!?!?  Start with this guy and his other scientist buddies who knew all along they were playing with fire.

Seems extreme. Basically there’s a small risk that comes with a large potential benefit. We aren’t even sure that this is due to a mistake in the lab.

I’m not well-read on gain of function testing, but this seems a little like saying we shouldn’t take someone with an emergency to the hospital because the ambulance might get into an accident. There’s a risk, but when weighed against the positives, it is worth it. Plus, with lab protocols, if this leaked from a lab, I have to imagine a lot of steps were missed.

[MU82]

  completely agree tower, but WHO and china are hooked at the wallet.  unless we get full transparency(don't hold our breath)we will never learn from this and it will happen again.  the world needs to unite against china and make them pay.  china has #46 by the short hairs and can't even come clean on his biness dealings with hunter inc.  speakin of impeachable offenses

    maybe le'bron and the NBA can help? 

Glad you're all about investigations and transparency. You must be livid that your "law and order" party isn't helping pass bipartisan legislation calling for an independent investigation into the cop-killing, seditionist coup attempt at the Capitol on 1/6/21. I can only assume that you already have contacted your U.S. senators and representatives to urge them to be patriots -- rather than traitors who aid, abet and/or condone domestic terrorism on behalf of the deranged leader of what used to be the Republican Party.

[ZiggysFryBoy]

Glad you're all about investigations and transparency. You must be livid that your "law and order" party isn't helping pass bipartisan legislation calling for an independent investigation into the cop-killing, seditionist coup attempt at the Capitol on 1/6/21. I can only assume that you already have contacted your U.S. senators and representatives to urge them to be patriots -- rather than traitors who aid, abet and/or condone domestic terrorism on behalf of the deranged leader of what used to be the Republican Party.

WTF does this have to do with wet markets?  Stay focused.

[MUBurrow]

https://mobile.twitter.com/SharriMarkson/status/1398252182609154056

You want to charge someone with reckless homicide?!?!?  Start with this guy and his other scientist buddies who knew all along they were playing with fire.

What?