The Wuhan virus—how are we doing? - Page 110 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15182382
@B0ycey

People have a human right to life and to be protected by their government from a dangerous pandemic that can kill them. Moreover, the economy is going to keep being damaged until people start vaccinating. This damage can be limitless.
#15182383
Politics_Observer wrote:@B0ycey

People have a human right to life and to be protected by their government from a dangerous pandemic that can kill them. Moreover, the economy is going to keep being damaged until people start vaccinating. This damage can be limitless.


The economy is damaged today because of the lockdowns initially. I remember actually saying that inflation would happen back in March 2020 when I was about the only person on here saying about the economic damage of lockdowns due to mass borrowing and supply issues with keeping everyone at home. So if you want an economic recovery now you open up given that is the only way to build up supply.

As for the right of life, you give people the option to be vaccinated and that is it. Those who can't take the vaccine for whatever reason should take precautions the same as people with a weak immune system did prior to Covid19. We didn't close the economy to protect them as it was just accepted they had a personal responsibility to themselves. And now we seem to think that is immaterial for some reason?
#15182384
@B0ycey

Unfortunately, your argument is an epic fail. During a pandemic, rights just aren't only for individuals. The economic damage wasn't caused by lock downs, it was caused by cornavirus which necessitated the lock downs.
#15182387
Politics_Observer wrote:The only way to ultimately get out of this pandemic is through vaccination...

The oligarchs won't stop imprisonning you until you let them put a drug into you.

It is because of the guillotine-hesitancy of the lower classes that they are going through a manufactured hell right now.

We've known since 2008 that our elite is bankrupt and corrupt, and it is clear that they have hollowed out our countries and destroyed the near future for a few generations. But we did nothing to remove them, so now they will kill us.
#15182388
Politics_Observer wrote:@B0ycey

Unfortunately, your argument is an epic fail. During a pandemic, rights just aren't only for individuals. The economic damage wasn't caused by lock downs, it was caused by cornavirus which necessitated the lock downs.


If that was true explain Chinas growth figures last year?

The reality is lockdown did indeed cause the economic damage. Those who were most at risk were in retirement age who could have easily self isolated. Also the whole point of lockdowns weren't even about saving lives initially anyway but to underwhelm the health service by flattening the curve. Then goal posts kept moving and today we have people like yourself trying to convince yourself that lockdowns prevent economic damage when there is no logical reason to think that.
#15182390
QatzelOk wrote:Rightwing-sounding soundbites don't prove that our oligarchs are telling the truth.

You are fooling yourself with internalized propaganda strategies.


I'm awaiting my instructions from tower command before I respond to you.
#15182411
Politics_Observer wrote::lol: We'll see about that. If people aren't willing to support fines and penalties for those who refuse to vaccinate, ...

The ones that refuse to be vaccinated are adults. They've made their choice, let them live (or not) with the consequences. To paraphrase Justice Scalia, you have a right to be stupid. You also have a right to gamble with your life.
... we'll see how much economic damage the country takes before they start changing their tune when that economic damage starts affecting them and their families personally.

I suspect that a lot of states are going to look at the data, see that the only ones at serious risk are the unvaccinated, and refuse to shut down their economies again just to protect them.
#15182413
@Doug64

Doug64 wrote:To paraphrase Justice Scalia, you have a right to be stupid. You also have a right to gamble with your life.


But you don't have the right to scream fire in a movie theater when there is no fire and endanger others un-necessarily in the process. A man is not an island or a law unto himself.
#15182414
Politics_Observer wrote:@Doug64

But you don't have the right to scream fire in a movie theater when there is no fire and endanger others un-necessarily in the process. A man is not an island or a law unto himself.

I agree, it's a crying shame that much of the Wuhan virus fearmongerers are being lauded instead of condemned for their efforts.
#15182421
I agree, it's a crying shame that much of the Wuhan virus fearmongerers are being lauded instead of condemned for their efforts.


Do you include the widows and children of all of the 500,000 Americans who have died in the category "fear mongers"? How about the over three million permanently disabled Americans due to this disease? Are they "fear mongers"?

Right wing = left side of the bell curve.
#15182428
Drlee wrote:Do you include the widows and children of all of the 500,000 Americans who have died in the category "fear mongers"? How about the over three million permanently disabled Americans due to this disease? Are they "fear mongers"?

Right wing = left side of the bell curve.


I looked and at first I thought you said ''Bell End'' :lol:

Fake ''Left'' and Fake ''Right''; Bell End and Bag End...
#15182445
I don't see how you could justify coercive measures when the vaccines have only received emergency approval.

"Is there a risk of death?"
"Yes but don't worry, we've waived liability for the manufacturers."
#15182449
@AFAIK :roll: Another person who has no fucking clue what "Emergency approval"means. FFS, do some homework!

The Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) authority allows FDA to help strengthen the nation’s public health protections against chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) threats including infectious diseases, by facilitating the availability and use of medical countermeasures (MCMs) needed during public health emergencies.


Also, there has been MORE than adequate testing and just because FDA, an American bureaucratic organization, doesn't approve something, doesn't mean it isn't good. The FDA is American. Canada doesn't use it. UK doesn't use it. Australia doesn't use it. Only USA uses it!

AFAIK wrote:"Is there a risk of death?"
"Yes but don't worry, we've waived liability for the manufacturers."
No. That is simply stupid. Fuck, what happened to your brain? Did you slam it in a car door? :?:
#15182476
AFAIK wrote:It's called the PREP act and has been widely reported on for several months.

This is your brain on vax;

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-v ... wsuit.html


FYI. We waive the right to sue on defective products all the time in our lives. It's not unique to this.

That said, what is the rate of death from severe side effects, versus the rate of death (coupled with probability of an infection to be more fair) from not getting vaccinated?

At the end of the day, all of these decisions should be made based on data (there's alot of data now), and not feelings, or fear, or whatever.
Last edited by Rancid on 25 Jul 2021 16:30, edited 1 time in total.
#15182501
Image

Rancid wrote:LET THE VIRUS RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIP!!

Seriously, why not just let her rip?

Deaths are mostly among the non-vaccinated now. That's their call.

We agree on something! You were being serious and not satirical, right? :eh:

Rancid wrote:That said, what is the rate of death from severe side effects, versus the rate of death (coupled with probability of an infection to be more fair) from not getting vaccinated?

You were right the first time--it's the rate of death, not infection, that's important. You have an excellent chance of getting the flu every year, and every year it kills people. But we don't shut down the country every flu season.

And for the latest weekly numbers:

Image
Image

Also, a look at the background behind the latest Paul/Fauci kerfluffle:

Experts weigh in on risky Wuhan study that Fauci, Paul debated
Several experts say Anthony Fauci was correct this week when he described an experiment funded by the National Institutes of Health in Wuhan, the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, as not being “gain of function” research. But the reason is unlikely to reassure Americans concerned about the lab’s risky work.

The virus under study in 2017 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology didn’t “gain the function” of becoming more deadly and contagious to humans through experimentation. That’s because that virus, known as WIV1, already posed a danger to humans before any of the Wuhan lab’s engineering.

The virus in question is not believed to be tied to the COVID-19 pandemic but was highlighted in a tense exchange between Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Fauci in a July 20 hearing. Paul pointed to the WIV1 experiment as an example of U.S.-funded research that could harm humans if not overseen correctly.

Some public health experts say that whether or not the WIV1 virus was made even more dangerous in the Chinese lab, questions about biosecurity and the necessity of tinkering with perilous pathogens are appropriate.

“It’s the kind of work we as a scientific society need to think more critically about,” said Stanford University microbiologist David Relman, an adviser to the U.S. intelligence community, in testimony before a House panel last week.

Paul, a proponent of a theory that the coronavirus that caused the COVID-19 crisis escaped from the Wuhan lab, accused Fauci of failing to properly oversee U.S. support for the lab, which allegedly performed risky research on coronaviruses and may have sickened researchers. The senator challenged Fauci’s assertion that the work on the WIV1 bat virus was not gain-of-function research that manipulates pathogens to make them more transmissible or harmful.

“You do not know what you’re talking about,” Fauci told Paul before the Senate, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, holding up the 2017 study and later suggesting Paul was lying.

Paul fired back.

“You take an animal virus and you increase its transmissibility to humans, you’re saying that’s not gain-of-function?” he asked.

But George Mason University’s Gregory Koblentz, an expert in biodefense and dual use research, pointed out that WIV1 wasn’t an animal virus enhanced to infect humans through gain-of-function research, because it was already shown to pose a danger to humans.

“Sen. Paul is wrong when he says that the coronaviruses that were the subject of this research only infect animals and not humans and that this research was ‘gain-of-function’ because it enabled an animal virus to infect humans,” Koblentz said. "The WIV1 strain was already known to be able to infect humans."

Even before the virus was edited in the lab, researchers found WIV1 was “poised for human emergence,” writing it could infect human airway cells “with no significant adaptation required.”

Fauci said the grant proposal “was judged by qualified people up and down the chain” in the federal government not to comprise gain-of-function research.

Experiments in synthetic biology that create engineered, or “chimeric,” viruses that are “reasonably anticipated” to gain properties that make them more dangerous are supposed to get extra scrutiny by the government. At the time of the 2017 study, the government had implemented a pause on these experiments altogether.

Changing the virus

The researchers in Wuhan spliced the WIV1 virus with other novel coronaviruses expressing spike proteins and grew them in the lab. The scientists tested whether the new engineered viruses could infect human-like cells with the ACE2 receptors that spike proteins bind to. They could.

Among the coauthors credited are Shi Zhengli, a Wuhan Institute virologist, and Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth, a nonprofit that served as a private intermediary between Wuhan and the NIH. The research received funding from NIH and USAID.

A key question is whether adding different spike proteins to a virus already known to infect human cells made that virus even more infectious or virulent.

Richard Ebright, a Rutgers microbiologist and biosecurity expert whom Paul cited at the hearing, says yes.

“The research was, unequivocally, gain-of-function research,” he said. “There can be no serious doubt that Fauci knows this.”

Others dispute whether it was, or say it’s hard to know, but that the experiment was potentially dangerous. Not a lot is known about the novel coronaviruses that the Wuhan researchers edited into WIV1.

“A certain set of experiments that have been published by the Wuhan Institute … I view as particularly risky,” said Relman of Stanford, calling attention to the WIV1 research.

“I’m not saying they led to this outbreak or pandemic by any means,” he said, referring to COVID-19.

University of North Carolina researcher and Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborator Ralph Baric had already studied the WIV1 bat coronavirus and found it "to be a virus ‘poised for human emergence,’” Relman said.

Relman described the experiment: The spike proteins of other novel coronaviruses found in samples taken from bats, whose virulence and transmissibility were unknown, were added to the WIV1 virus. Then those new viruses were grown in the lab.

Virologists argue this sort of research is important to learn about how viruses evolve in nature and where new outbreaks could emerge, while critics like Relman are not convinced.

“Their approach for studying novel sequences that they found in other samples was to take a piece of the genome, a piece of that sequence, and swap it into this WIV1 virus. They then resurrected this virus and grew them in the laboratory,” Relman continued. “Now we’re talking about a chimeric virus with properties we don’t know and can’t predict well.”

Defense of the research

Virologists are less concerned about the WIV1 study.

Stephen Goldstein, a researcher of dangerous pathogens at a high-security lab in Utah and skeptic of the so-called “lab leak” theory, noted the paper showed some of the edited viruses were less infectious than the original WIV1.

Georgetown University virologist Angela Rasmussen, another critic of the lab leak theory, acknowledged that the viruses were infectious to human-like cells, but said studying a cell line in a lab, as the Wuhan researchers did, isn’t a good predictor of the virus’ ability to infect real people.

“The definition [of gain-of-function research] refers to increased transmissibility and pathogenicity in humans, and you can't determine either of those things in a cell line,” she said in an email. “That can test infectivity in an artificial system but is not remotely analogous to showing the virus is ‘transmissible,’ because there’s a lot more to transmission in the real world than just receptor binding and entry.”

Rasmussen said attempts by Paul to link WIV1 to the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 are a “politically motivated smear,” echoing Fauci’s argument that it’s “molecularly impossible” they are related. Fauci was “right to call Sen. Paul a liar,” she said.

The assurances of virologists have not alleviated the concerns of other researchers.

“What I would apply here is a little common sense. And if what you are doing is creating recombinants of a dangerous human virus that you know to have potential to be more infectious or more lethal, then I think that by any reasonable understanding of the term, you are engaged in gain-of-function,” said Edward Hammond, a biosafety researcher and activist.

The rationale behind the NIH’s approval of the grant is mysterious, because its reviews of gain-of-function research are confidential and there is relatively little public information about NIH’s process.

Rasmussen acknowledged more discussion is needed about how the government reviews this sort of work.

Koblentz said the disagreement between Fauci and Paul shows how little is known about what the government views as gain-of-function research and what it doesn’t.

“How ‘enhanced’ would a virus have to be to count as an enhanced potential pandemic pathogen?” said Koblentz. “It would be really useful for NIH to document these reviews and explain their reasoning and assessment.”
#15182503
Doug64 wrote:You were right the first time--it's the rate of death, not infection, that's important. You have an excellent chance of getting the flu every year, and every year it kills people. But we don't shut down the country every flu season.
:roll: You're really not getting it.

They estimate that 2018(the worst flu season on record in the USA) 35 million people in the USA got the flu. 34,200 Americans died of it.

They estimate that around 34 million Americans have gotten Covid-19. Over 610,000 Americans have died. That means that it is about 18 times deadlier than the flu, and there is evidence of long-term problems among Covid-19 patients.

The only thing the current pandemic can match up with, is the number of deaths from the Spanish Flu in 1918, in USA, where a similar amount of people died... sans modern medicine, of course.

You don't sound as smart when you consider the reality.
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