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Will we ever get the truth about the origins of Covid?
Venture investor Bill Gurley recently appeared at the All-In Summit to give a talk about how journalists and investigators uncovered the truth about various disasters like the Challenger Space Shuttle and the Boeing 737 Max. He talks about searchers, who look for the truth, and blockers, who try to keep people from finding it.
Then he talks about the origins of Covid.
While admitting he does not personally have a definitive explanation for the origins of Covid, he talks about how people who questioned the zoonosis hypothesis were repeatedly sidelined and ridiculed.
He gives one intriguing example of something which is not exactly a smoking gun, but still a giant blinking arrow pointing at the problem.
In 2018, there was a proposal made to DARPA called DEFUSE, in which bat coronaviruses would be studied. Human-specific cleavage sites would be added. Transmissability would be increased via gain-of-function. And this would happen in the United States in collaboration with, you guessed it, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. DARPA ultimately rejected the $14 million proposal.
In the word of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, please explain this to Fat Tony and tell him that Covid-19 wasn't a lab leak. Tell him that a bat (living in Laos) spread it to an animal (possibly a Pangolin!) and then from there to a wet market in Wuhan, the exact city where they (definitely weren't) doing the exact research that would allow Covid-19 to be created.
"But Fat Tony, I only had the exact idea for how to create Covid-19 in a lab. I didn't actually do it. It was the pangolins. Tony, no, please, not the blowtorch.... "
I'm also aware of the Root Claim debate which I've encountered as a wall of text and like 30 hours of videos. I'd love an explanation of why this debate matters, but my tendency is to dismiss it as a gish gallop.
In any case, I recommend giving the Bill Gurley talk a listen. He's got a nice drawl.
I typically hesitate to say that people aren't seriously believing their claims but Lab leak theorists have a major missing mood problem going on.
If one very seriously believes that the world was attacked by an artificial bioweapon (even if unintentionally leaked) so dangerous that it was killing more than a 9/11 worth of Americans daily and that the evidence for it is overwhelming, then the reaction should be way different than what it is now! This is a matter of major national security now, and the most anyone wants to do is shitpost about it?
Where are the plans to counteract their next, possibly even more dangerous, bioweapon? Where's the plans to convince Americans to be ready for future lockdowns and masking? If you think "those are ineffective" then why aren't you trying to find effective countermeasures then? It should have you more worried if you don't think lockdowns/masking/etc work then you would believe we don't have an effective response to even more dangerous ones! It should be mass panic trying to find something.
And even more glaring where is the war? Lab leak theory proposes China killed almost 2 million people in the first year alone. Even if you don't think the option is full blown war from every country on Earth against China, why are they so content with the status quo? You would expect something in response, but seemingly no one gives a shit.
This isn't a bunch of rhetorical questions. If I truly believed that China had released a nearly holocaust amount of deaths onto the Earth I would be calling for flattening the country's leaders. You don't have to go that far but that no one takes it even a fraction as serious as a genuine belief makes it very hard to take the belief as genuine. It seems to just be shitpost based ritual circle jerking. If the cost benefit analysis says "war isn't worth it in response to a literal bioweapon" then fine, but there is literally nothing done in response by anyone.
The response to shrug and do literally nothing in response to nature makes sense because nature has been doing this since forever and we already have the response to natural viruses. The response to a lab bioweapon apparently also being nothing just boggles my mind, why do people not give a shit about the implications? People say they believe in lab leak, but they act like they believe in zoonosis instead.
There is no missing mood, plenty of people were this level of mad.
I am still pretty mad. But I'm not gonna blow up my life for ineffective revenge. And the worst thing about COVID wasn't the disease it was the insane response to it, which is not something that can be blamed exclusively on China. The wuhan lab also wasn't exclusively run by the Chinese.
I'd still be very happy to see Fauci or other American scientists prosecuted. Short of that, him being dragged through the mud and multiple senate hearings by Rand Paul is kinda nice.
In another thread someone mentions anthropic giving their AI access to a wetlab. I consider this equal levels of stupid and insane. I can't wait to discover what novel viruses they create while stress testing the security and bio hacking capabilities of their latest AI.
What exactly am I supposed to do?
The world is pretty fucked up and people do things that I think are incredibly stupid/evil all the time. I try not to run up the numbers on my blood pressure by feeling mad about all these things.
Shitposting is stress relief. At least if I can't do anything to the people that have done measureable harm to my life I'll make sure to keep bringing it up online.
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