Off Topic Politics Thread

I knew people would try and rewrite history about it

 

Also, just be aware that this is a political finding that conveniently states that everything the Republicans did during Covid was right. It somehow suggests that masks did not help spread the virus, but I wonder how many of the report’s authors would be happy if their surgeon operated on them without one?

 

This is a complete revision of what actually happened, as I remember it. The most common assumption was that it started in a lab in China.

 

Indeed you have.

 

. On 31 December 2019, the World Health Organization ( WHO ) was informed of a cluster of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China. A novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) was subsequently identified from patient samples.

It is now being considered that it was a mutation of an existing virus, nobody knows the truth.

 

It's the benefit scroungers that have brought the country to it's knees according to the propaganda. The reality is some what different.
Re the dispatches program.
"Softening up British public opinion prior to the governments health and disability benefits Green Paper in the Spring appears to have begun, with a shamefully inaccurate and prejudicial Channel 4 Dispatches episode entitled "Britain’s Benefits Scandal" screened last night.
The programme was researched, and is presented by, Fraser Nelson the former editor of the right-wing Spectator magazine. The opening lines set the tone for what follows:
“Across the UK a crisis is building that affects us all. More than 3 million people are now on long-term sickness benefits, up by about a million in just five years. And these figures are set to get far worse.”
https://www.benefitsandwork.co.uk/news/britain’s-benefits-scandal

 

From what I remember, the lab leak was a conspiracy theory to begin with.

It was rammed down our throats, by most media outlets, that it was from bats/ pangolins in the wet markets for a long while despite people saying there's literally a laboratory around Wuhan that works with Corona virus strains, for example, Russell Brand would talk about it on his channel (before more recent allegations came out about him). I remember believing in the lab leak theory and mentioning it on here and getting shot down by some people.

Not all conspiracy theorists said it was fake either, some said it was a test for the future to see if the can control the masses with fear.

The biggest argument came from debate about vacations; the term "anti vax" blew up because people didn't want to get jabbed by medication when it cut through all the red tape so quickly and in the legislation it stated there would be no repercussions on the pharmaceutical companies. To me, and many others, it seemed more about profit than care of life or anything else.

However, there were people who believed that 5G masts was giving people covid... Let's not tar every conspiracy theory with the same brush

I never understood those shield masks either where there was a massive gap for spreading germs. They were pointless!

We were told we could only go out once a day to exercise, we couldn't see our loved ones but we had "eat out to help out" which went tits up and then they introduced tier systems which all quickly went to tier 3 (I think it was) meaning that there was nowhere open to eat out anyway. Meanwhile the government had secret parties and made us clap and bang saucepans for the NHS that was crippling.

Oh and they gave multi million pound contracts to their mates for unusable PPE.

What a joke.

Unexpected rant over.

 

Pretty much everyone I know thought that it was likely a lab leak, and that the Chinese were trying to cover that by the wet market excuse. It was certainly never dismissed as a possibility, and nor was it put in the ‘conspiracy theory’ bracket, which was, as you say reserved for the likes of the 5G crew, and those that claimed the whole thing was fake.

 

I wish I could find it, but I remember watching an in-depth exposé of a Chinese virologist in Wuhan and the work she was doing, and various theories on how the leak might have happened.

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-65067264

Not in the news it wasn't, you conspiracy theorist

 

If you read the piece, it consistently says that it’s not definitive proof, and that the hunt for the truth is politicised and messy, so that’s hardly the media telling us that it was definitely from the wet market (or suppressing the lab leak theory). Quite the opposite.

 

One thing it cartainly doesn’t say either, is that the lab leak is a ‘conspiracy theory’, which is kind of the point.

 

Just want to say again, we still don’t know where the virus came from. This is not a report from expert scientists but some politicians in a room - who have explicitly denied Fauci’s evidence despite him being the US’s foremost expert.

So, yeah, maybe it came from a lab. Maybe it came from wet markets. I am not taking a politicised report as proof either way.

 

I suspect, as I always have done, that it was lab made. But yeah, we’ll likely never know definitively.

 

Nothing a good old injection of bleach wouldn't sort out

 

Yep, maybe I am too trusting, but I think it was lab made (not for sinister reasons, just as research) and then it accidentally leaked out of the lab. The sheer scale of what happened after caused a lot of lying and covering up etc.

The ensuing lockdowns etc with hindsight look over the top, but at the time it was unprecedented and everyone was feeling their way. Yep, maybe a few took liberties, but without the initial lockdowns we wouldn't have come out of it as quickly as we did IMO.

 

This was a republican lead investigation which, much to my surprise, was disputed in some respects by a similar democrat lead panel. This sums it up for me and I won't be wasting any more time on the subject as it seems to be a statement the vast majority of investigations concur with.
"Different federal agencies have drawn different conclusions about the most likely origin of the virus, but it remains a mystery."

 

"Inaccurate comparison of benefit fraud and tax losses recirculates on social media
The amount of money lost to tax evasion is 360 times higher than the amount lost to benefit fraud."

https://fullfact.org/online/benefit-fraud-vs-tax-evasion/

 

Not just the lockdowns. As inquires have found most of the mitigations had a greater or lessor effect. Most also agree travel bans and rigorous test and trace campaigns (UK failure) helped prevent the spread along with the vaccine program which saved millions of lives by lessening the effects and cutting transmission rates.

 

This wasn’t the piece I remember, but it’s a good overview of what was known about the work of Shi Zhengli:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/09/1044985/shi-zhengli-covid-lab-leak-wuhan/amp/