COVID.gov now redirects to site promoting unproven “lab leak”

The site previously hosted links to resources on Long COVID, vaccines, and testing.

See full article...

 

[Bernardo Verda]

Depressingly high, a good 40% just absolutely love him and another few percent above that are ok with him and think he’s doing a fine job

It’s very divided by both state and urban/suburb/rural though, so depending on where you are it’s “MAGA Trump Train” central or “MAGA GTFO” and not much in between

Remember when we used to laugh at the Italians reelecting Silvio Berlusconi?
I miss those days.

 

[Bernardo Verda]

Why would they do that? And who would buy it?

It's dollyllama, so the reason is simply because the argument, no matter how stupid it may be, complements dollyllama's prejudices and biases.

 

[Sajuuk]

Why would they do that? And who would buy it?

You know, just a thing those stupid, corrupt, backwards, Chinese, lab techs do.

 

[uid1]

BBC has a great podcast about Covid's origin:

Fever: The Hunt for Covid's Origin​

Politicised, polarised, and caught up in a chaos of cover-ups, coincidences, and conspiracy theories, it's one of the biggest questions of our time: where did Covid come from?

It's from July 2023, so memory is a bit hazy, but episodes 3 & 5 are about lab leak theory.

I'm unsure which episode they discuss an "incident" occurring at WIV in November 2019 that seemed to cause quite a stir, bringing in officials from Beijing for ... some reason.

Listening through the whole thing, I went from "plausible but without evidence" to "they what now? That is not a good sign" and back to "I doubt we'll ever know".


Certainly worthwhile to give it a listen.

 

[mpfaff]

It’s weird, because I know people even older and none of them died.

I'm glad for you. But with over a million Americans dead from COVID, there are a great many who didn't have your good fortune.

The posted "information" is highly inappropriate, but note the animal market and lab leak aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, as a lab worker might have sold a lab animal at the market that should've been euthanized and incinerated.

That is definitely not how that works. They work in a well funded government lab, it's unlikely they even shop at a wet market.

Trump is only doing this because he needs a distraction from the fact that he was the world leader that gave what amounts to the worst possible leadership during a pandemic. Literally every single President who came before him and every other potential President in 2016 would have done a better job and killed less Americans. But he saw the pandemic not as a thing that was a problem for the United States and public health, he saw it as this thing that was personally screwing with him and his upcoming election. An election he would have easily strolled through if he'd been a better crisis leader and not a moron who spent briefings bickering with lady reporters and calling them nasty.

 

[mundivagrant]

Who gives a rat’s ass? What, are you going to ask the Chinese to close their biological labs? If it was a wet market problem, are you gonna ask them to close their market? Because they will do neither.

It came from China, OK? Isn’t that enough for you xenophobes? What possible difference does it make whether it was from a lab or the markets? The real scandal is and always has been the Trump administration‘s reaction to the virus not where it came from.

I don’t think anybody was actually worried initially about a virus that didn’t exist because it was a hoax. There’s your scandal. And yes, we were badly misled about that fact

Looking in to the future, how will the US respond when H5N1 escapes from dairy cows into humans, creating a far more exiting pandemic than covid, and the rest of the world blames US lack of action to control it.

As I understand the strain of H5N1 affecting cows across multiple states is identical, so the transmission is already potentially within the livestock industry, and therefore should be controllable with appropriate biosecurity practices.

 

[MedicalGeek]

The NRA has always been about exactly two things:

1. Opposing any and all gun legislation, of any kind, anywhere;
2. Pushing the narrative that crime is out of control and getting worse, damn the facts and statistics, you need more guns.

Anything else is just gaslighting bullshit -- including giving a single fuck about the REASON for the 2nd Amendment. All they care about is "moar guns".

This is why it was such a shock to me when I found out they are mostly funded by... (checks notes)... gun manufacturers.

Actually you’d be wrong. The modern NRA is all that you claim but from the 1860s to the 1960s it was more focused on raising skill and interest in shooting for hunting and competition. Originally founded to raise the skill level of shooters after taking a look at the Civil War.

The upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s flipped some kind of switch and it turned into the reich wing organization it is today.

 

[babedenny]

It's the aesthetic of fascism, y'all. Dear leader is on top. Dear leader is strong. Dear leader is everywhere.

I love Big Brother.

 

[MedicalGeek]

Sadly this is absolutely true. And is exactly the world I live in locally. Totally cult members.

Mostly cult members here. And I work in healthcare and most of my patients are also cult members. When they start vomiting Faux Noise bullshit I tell them “my employer does not allow me to discuss politics so please stop to protect my job.” Usually that shuts them down. But if I want to keep my job, buy groceries or anything else, I cannot cut them off completely. And I can’t afford to spend thousands of dollars and give up a good job to move to a bluer more expensive area of the state right now.

 

[Bernardo Verda]

I have an open mind about it--and no money on the line. Do you, though?

I'm sorry to hear you're not even getting paid... my sympathies.
But if your mind were open, it would be so open that your brains fell out -- and you didn't even notice.

In any case, you've been posting here long enough, that no one is going to give you that much benefit of the doubt.

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

^ Hey look, authentic frontier gibberish!

 

[Socially Inept]

Holding all that dumb in for eighteen years sure is an accomplishment.

 

[forkspoon]

HHS Director of Communications Andrew Nixon downplayed the disease, saying in a statement: "The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago."

Bro thinks it’s like a breakup and you just have to set boundaries, move on and the virus will take the hint.

 

[Sajuuk]

Holding all that dumb in for eighteen years sure is an accomplishment.

Got activated from the motherland like a DOGE user account.

 

[kuil0]

My wife and I just had our Covid booster shots Friday, paid for by Medicare Advantage. I wonder if there will be another one in the fall?

 

[Senti]

My MAGA friends who are ALL IN on this conspiracy theory are going to love this.

No doubt a link they will share all over the place, relentlessly.

It even has dear leader popping out of the letters ...

Almost like HE is the actual thing that leaked out of a lab.

MAGA choose to ignore Musk when he told them US funded covid as bioweapon because it doesn't fit their blame china agenda. In the end, current US reflect a gov that is full of lies, biased media and people that easily manipulated so truth will no longer matter here.

 

[Shazster]

This non-sense only seems crazy if you ignore the context:

A China that has taken Drumpf's tarriffs, doubled down, and said "Fuck You".

So out rolls the BlameChina.gov propaganda website right on cue.
Covid was only fake news bullshit in the MAGA universe...until it becomes useful agitprop.

 

[mpfaff]

It was Lab made. Had a single human cross over (unheard of in natural spillover), clear indications of genetic modification including spliced sequences from other organisms. The CIA had this Fauci buried it and fabricated the cross over paper. The UK also KNEW it was lab made and buried it in order to "not offend china" - good to see all the brain dead covid freaks are still at it.

Alterations of the S1-2 junction of coronavirus, including mutations, insertions and deletions, demonstrates that the generation of polybasic cleavage sites is achieved through a natural evolutionary process [14].


In conclusion, all these specific features observed in SARS-COV-2 helps scientists to rule out the idea that this pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus is the result of a man-made action that could be either engineered in the laboratory or further created as a bioweapon out of conspiracy. Recent discoveries revealed evidence of the presence of the virus around the world before it emerged in Asia. There is growing evidence of its true origin as a global organism that was waiting for favorable conditions to emerge instead of originating in China. Recent testing of sewage in Barcelona had suggested that the virus may have been present in the Spanish city in March 2019, many months before China identified the pathogen in the city of Wuhan in December 2019. Based on the results available, it is most probably that this is a natural-born virus that emerged from an animal host, most likely a bat, without any direct pieces of evidence about its intermediate host.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7982270/

All credible studies done on this point to a natural origin for COVID-19. But I guess those were conducted by a CIA/Deep State/Fauci/CocaCola Corporation conspiracy. The real people to get to the bottom of it are a senile hotel owner and a trust funder kookoo crazy pants who did a lot of drugs and drove a wife to suicide.

Again, Trump needs someone else to blame because he's probably been told history will remember him as the world leader who didn't care when it came time to care.

He could have gotten his yokel followers to take it seriously and be productive members of this country in helping to slow the spread. But he wanted to pretend it was fine and the experts were wrong. So people died, a lot of people died, and he's ruined any public health disaster response with his stupidity and incompetence for generations. Travel to any country in SE Asia, they take health screenings for international arrivals very seriously, then return to this one, we don't give a single fuck.

 

[FuzzyTheBear]

Trump is a moron. I pity the Americans having that as a President for 4 more years. He's just trying to blame China for anything he can without a shred ( as usual ) of evidence.

 

[sir_trackmenot]

But it's been clear for years that MAGA folks are not logical.

s/logical/even a little bit intelligent/

 

[keddaw]

My MAGA friends who are ALL IN on this conspiracy theory are going to love this.

No doubt a link they will share all over the place, relentlessly.

It even has dear leader popping out of the letters ...

Almost like HE is the actual thing that leaked out of a lab.

The real conspiracy theorists have long moved on from this and think that there was no novel virus and that it was simply a rebranded flu season which was used to impose medical tyranny and destroy free speech and other basic freedoms.

 

[AdrianS]

It was Lab made. Had a single human cross over (unheard of in natural spillover), clear indications of genetic modification including spliced sequences from other organisms. The CIA had this Fauci buried it and fabricated the cross over paper. The UK also KNEW it was lab made and buried it in order to "not offend china" - good to see all the brain dead covid freaks are still at it.

Why are you lying, liar?

 

[BasicBrunel]

I know we're not supposed to suggest violence as a solution to the myriad problems facing us, but legitimately curious at the point it becomes self defense. They're trying to kill as many people as they can.

Isn’t this what the NRA were arming themselves against? So they could rise up and defend the liberty of the republic against internal tyranny?

 

[bri2000]

We are ruled by the stupidest fascists in history.

I think that’s yet to be conclusively proved.

The Nazis were pretty fucking stupid. Among many examples there’s the entire history of the Luftwaffe‘s procurement programs (in particular their obsession with building a heavy bomber that was also capable of dive bombing and their complete lack of any strategic concept for how they might win the Battle of Britain, instead just sending planes over to see what would happen in the vague hope this would somehow destroy the RAF), the refusal to supply Winter equipment to the Eastern Front, the use of starved slave labour to do precision engineering (jet manufacturing), Hitler‘s tendency to reallocate production resources every couple of weeks depending on which wunderwaffen had most recently been presented to him (just one of the reasons - along with the fact that it’s not even clear that they had figured out the significance of enriched Uranium never mind how to build Plutonium breeder reactors - they were never going to get a nuclear weapon), their bizarre Mendelian theory of how ‘Jewishness’ is inherited and all the backstabbing, infighting and jockeying for position among the various factions as they worked towards the Führer. That’s not intended to be a fully comprehensive list.

Unfortunately overwhelming stupidity does not necessarily prevent a group from causing massive amounts of harm.

 

[excognita]

My MAGA friends who are ALL IN on this conspiracy theory are going to love this.

No doubt a link they will share all over the place, relentlessly.

It even has dear leader popping out of the letters ...

Almost like HE is the actual thing that leaked out of a lab.

"My NAZI friends"

 

[DarthSlack]

Isn’t this what the NRA were arming themselves against? So they could rise up and defend the liberty of the republic against internal tyranny?

The NRA took the cowards way out and decided that since it didn't start in the Tyranee region, it's just sparkling fascism.

 

[captobie]

Why is Donald Trump on the logo? Will he be the protagonist in the Lab Leak movie?

To me, it looks like it’s suggesting that Donald Trump is the “true origin of COVID-19.”

 

[PsychoArs]

The first Trump administration surprised everyone and they were not prepared.

But this time they've been preparing Project 2025 for years. They've excommunicted all the Republican "adults" who kept the worst shit in check from 2016-2019, and now he's purely surrounded by religious zealots, conspiracy freaks, white nationalists, and more. It's going to take a long time to fix what they're doing now.

I visited my mom and step-dad yesterday.

He's a US citizen who has recently acquired Canadian citizenship and she's a Canadian citizen who's working on acquiring US citizen ship.

They announced they've finally managed to buy a cottage and property in a "nice little community" with water and stuff and things. And no crime because "they have police that don't tolerate that stuff".

Then he explained. "It's like 98.5 percent Caucasians there, with a couple Hawaiians."

Because skin colour and crime are causally linked in his mind. Crime isn't a social problem. It's a genetic problem.

It breaks my heart but there's a part of me that's like "okay, well, fuck off to your cottage in Whiteyville, hang out with your MAGA buddies and leave my country the fuck alone." But no. They both get to vote in this Thursday's election, and will be supporting Trumpollievre. Because everything bad that has ever happened is because Liberals exist.

 

[RecursiveNonsense]

At 39 years old, I experienced something most people do not experience until old age - Every man, woman, boy, and girl I knew died (except for family, thankfully). It did not matter if they were in good health, poor health, younger, older, white, black, asian, wealthy, middle class, poor, or what "god" they believed in or not, as COVID killed indiscriminately.

What the Trump administration has done here is absolutely disgusting. This weapons-grade balognaum from you doesn't have quite the same punch, but it's still pretty gross.

Every man, woman, boy and girl? That's literally everyone you knew (except family, thank goodness!) before the age of 40 - every classmate you ever had, every colleague, every neighbor... Literally every human you knew before the age of 40 that you weren't related to died of Covid?

What you say is so farcical I can't even bring myself to feign sympathy.

And this comment has 98% upvotes? Come on, Ars. Patently dumb shit shouldn't get an upvote just because it includes some Trump hating...

 

[trannic]

It is a bit like a 'secret society'. You are inducted into the society and told the lesser truths with the promise that greater truths will be revealed 'later' when you have proved your worth. The later truths will be revealed after you have paid a lot of money to the society. Then, one of your mentors will point to the old man in silly robes dribbling in the corner. He, you will be told, is the keeper of the 'ultimate truth'. Pay more and he may reveal it to you!

Why does this remind me of the Republican (Maga wing) of the party?

Ed, Spelling.

 

[georges]

I know we're not supposed to suggest violence as a solution to the myriad problems facing us, but legitimately curious at the point it becomes self defense. They're trying to kill as many people as they can.

The Founding Fathers did consider violence against an unjust government a legitimate and defensible act.

Just saying, it is indeed one of the tools in the toolbox of American democracy.

 

[mpfaff]

Isn’t this what the NRA were arming themselves against? So they could rise up and defend the liberty of the republic against internal tyranny?

NRA members were the ones who thought the true tyranny were the signs to mask up at the grocery store.

 

[ColdWetDog]

Correction: you do not, under any circumstances, “gotta hand it to ‘em”.

This world is getting too fucking weird. I'm going for a walk.

 

[flipside]

Apart from all Covid related and all other misdeeds by Trump and the disgusting propaganda in this case, there are signs that the scientific community is not ruling out the lab hypothesis anymore.

Take this interview with Christian Drosten for example (sorry, autotranslate only). We should not make the mistake automatically picking the opposite side on issues just because how horrible those people are.

Edit: What I found especially worrying in the interview above is the number of high risk study proposals out of China.

 

[Sajuuk]

I visited my mom and step-dad yesterday.

He's a US citizen who has recently acquired Canadian citizenship and she's a Canadian citizen who's working on acquiring US citizen ship.

They announced they've finally managed to buy a cottage and property in a "nice little community" with water and stuff and things. And no crime because "they have police that don't tolerate that stuff".

Then he explained. "It's like 98.5 percent Caucasians there, with a couple Hawaiians."

Because skin colour and crime are causally linked in his mind. Crime isn't a social problem. It's a genetic problem.

It breaks my heart but there's a part of me that's like "okay, well, fuck off to your cottage in Whiteyville, hang out with your MAGA buddies and leave my country the fuck alone." But no. They both get to vote in this Thursday's election, and will be supporting Trumpollievre. Because everything bad that has ever happened is because Liberals exist.

Yup, it's all western chauvinism and revanchism rooted in white supremacy. That's why you see Trump support cut right across nationalities; it's white grievance politics on a global scale. I just have to laugh anytime someone brings up economic populism as if that's the product people were really buying while Republicans intentionally and literally plunge us into a global depression.

 

[Mechjaz]

How can so many Americans be so mentally ill?

Hey, some of us take our meds. And despite the recent wave of celebrities and the powerful deflecting terrible behavior as some kind of mental illness, even when we don't take our meds, we don't turn into fascists/racists/rapists.

The real answer... I'm sure I've probably been ninjad by now, the real answer is that America is a deeply sick country where the only true health is profitability.

 

[artvandelayIIII]

They've been preparing for ages. The first "Mandate for Leadership" was published by the Heritage Foundation in 1981. In 2016 they learned that they really did not want another Reagan but rather that an ignorant buffoon who lacked any meaningful intelligence or ounce of shame was far more useful. And, while I applaud your optimism that the damage currently being done can be fixed, ever, I wallow in a depressing level of skepticism.

I think that to take their attempted destruction of the country as a fait accompli is to let them win by default.

Fuck these fuckers. It's our country too. And I'm going to work to elect people who will mercilessly beat them back by any means necessary. These ghouls do NOT have a majority of the country behind them, so they're moving fast to get away with everything they can as fast as possible. It's a smash-and-grab robbery.