I suppose the internet has some positive features

Posted by: Peltast | Feb 13 2021 17:29 utc | 1

Good on the researchers! China's response was praised in many online covid video discussions, and the comparison to what didn't happen other places should make the NYT writers blush with shame. Thanks,b! Like Lavrov, you are calling it how you see it, and so are the research teams who make the hard effort to find out the facts, then see them blatantly distorted.

Time for everyone to take a hard line - this must not be allowed! Better no truth than lies!!

Posted by: juliania | Feb 13 2021 17:35 utc | 2

These NYT people are the ones you trust with the "covid" narrative.

Posted by: Norwegian | Feb 13 2021 17:41 utc | 3

Posted by: Norwegian | Feb 13 2021 17:41 utc | 3

Let's frame it another way: Can you trust Western MSMs on anything?

Posted by: J W | Feb 13 2021 17:45 utc | 4

"While the Times claims that the Chinese have more data than they provided (they don't) and insinuates that they have something to hide, the researchers quoted in its piece reject both as nonsense."

China should just say that those data was lost during the Fort Detrick leaks, or was bombed together with Iraqi WMD, or Syria's uses of chemical weapons, or destroyed by the treatments of Navalnyi....

However, those data should be recoverable after US remedies the above problems.

Posted by: d dan | Feb 13 2021 17:51 utc | 5

It is nice to read that more are standing up to the ongoing lies and misrepresentations.

Will these call outs see the same number of eyeballs as the original lies?
unlikely
Will the Empire News (NYT) correct its reporting of the WHO?
doubtful
Will this dissuade the Empire News from further lies and misrepresentations?
no

same shit show, different day

Posted by: psychohistorian | Feb 13 2021 17:54 utc | 6

@J W | Feb 13 2021 17:45 utc | 4

Let's frame it another way: Can you trust Western MSMs on anything?

Posted by: Norwegian | Feb 13 2021 17:59 utc | 7

Now if only the NYT will focus on NY and write about its own "exemplary" covid 19 response and totally "transparent" handling of nursing home covid 19 deaths figures...

Shame? they might have heard of it...

Posted by: A.L. | Feb 13 2021 18:04 utc | 8

And the same is true w/how the WSJ mishandles information from the IAEA about Iran. The latest dumpster fire about 'Uranium Metal'. Anti-war does a reasonable job of untangling that mess. In short, the 'uranium metal' is uranium oxide plates used in Iran's one research reactor for medical research. They were forced to produce it because of Trump's sanctions. France, and the U.K. (the FUK in FUKUS) lied when they said it has no civilian applications.

https://news.antiwar.com/2021/02/10/iaea-confirms-iran-produces-uranium-metal-despite-western-warnings/

Posted by: Christian Chuba | Feb 13 2021 18:11 utc | 9

I'm pleasantly surprised Twitter allowed those tweets, but then I suppose it wasn't expecting such pushback from that quarter. But what media will further inform the public of the NY Times's ongoing lies? Sure there's FAIR and kin; but what I seek is a break in the ranks of BigLie Media. Until that happens, the lies and distortions will continue.

Posted by: karlof1 | Feb 13 2021 18:15 utc | 10

All these stories- Wuhan, Navalny, Uighurs etc- come down to the same basic fact; the Empire, latest iteration of the Iberian-Dutch-British maritime empire, is fighting to survive.
And its survival means its domination over all and any possible rivals.
It is a long story and an old one- going back more than five centuries- but in essence this is about the struggle of the old Euro-creole Empire to maintain its supremacy over the first real challenge it has ever faced from a Eurasia which is emerging from, firstly the brutalised victims of the Empire abroad, in the form of China, south east Asia and Iran and secondly, the Soviet Union in which the previous great challenge to empire, the socialist projects of the exploited working classes, still retains, in the form of Russian state power, some of the strength that gave it the ability to defeat the Empire in its fascistic form.

Posted by: bevin | Feb 13 2021 18:21 utc | 11

kudos to those 2 scientists...... i think twitter better do its work and ban them right away!! they are not going along with the agenda!! and whoever they are working for - ""the guardian"" equivalent can do a nathan robinson on them, just like they did on nathan robinson.. they better watch their back...

Posted by: james | Feb 13 2021 18:27 utc | 12

Logically, if the BBC says it was so, it was so only because the BBC said it was. Which is MSM "Standard practice".

"China refused to hand over key data to the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of Covid-19, one of its members has said.
Microbiologist Dominic Dwyer told Reuters, the Wall St Journal and the New York Times the team requested raw patient data from early cases, what he called "standard practice"

Now from the same authors, details about "raw patients"..... and other strange customs.

- Just about anything goes in the MSM these days.

Posted by: Stonebird | Feb 13 2021 18:28 utc | 13

Dear New York Times,

Please stop pretending to be a newspaper.

Thanks,
Everyone

Posted by: Josh | Feb 13 2021 18:32 utc | 14

There is no excuse for talking to the NYT.

Posted by: Johny Conspiranoid | Feb 13 2021 18:59 utc | 15

Hey NYT, isn't New York the place where numbers of COVID deaths were misreported last year?

Posted by: Helen | Feb 13 2021 18:59 utc | 16

And right on cue: the Times has another one of it's daily anti-Russia psyops propaganda pieces appropriately titled:

"A Life in Opposition: Navalny’s Path From Gadfly to Heroic Symbol" .

"his daring return to Russia after surviving a Kremlin-sanctioned assassination attempt last summer — and with a lengthy prison sentence all but certain — he has been transformed. No longer the gadfly, Mr. Navalny is now an international symbol of resistance to Mr. Putin and the Kremlin elite, the leader of a growing opposition movement."

And in one of last few paragraphs of this State Department/CIA promoted Navalny 'puff' piece, the authentic agenda is revealed:

"“The strategy is this: This is a personalized regime rooted in Putin’s popularity,” Mr. Guriev, the economist close to Mr. Navalny, said of that approach. “That is why Putin’s rating needs to be destroyed.”

The NYT's is only doing what is in it's designated nature and proforma function to do, and that is: to continually pump out continuous daily propaganda in the service of our "Grand Imperial/Corporate Empire". Nothing more.

Posted by: time2wakeupnow | Feb 13 2021 19:01 utc | 17

so we've had an ISIS LARPer handing them bullshit, lies about the cop "killed at" the capital hootenany, proof that their newroom is basically a day care center for shitty millennial yuppies and now this. maybe when the NYT goes under bezos can buy them and own another ossified and anachronistic tabloid.

Posted by: the pair | Feb 13 2021 19:15 utc | 18

It's clear the angle for viewing the whole visit is to look for things which support distrust. This would include stories of China not cooperating or putting pressure on the experts. In this case the experts objected publicly. WSJ also has an article , this time the expert is one Dominic Dwyer. Maybe distorted, maybe selective. As long as it supports the narrative.

Posted by: Tuyzentfloot | Feb 13 2021 19:22 utc | 19

@James
James could you go into more detail about your "nathan robinson" line? My wife reads the Guardian religiously and I often ask her how a particular topic is being covered there. I asked her about this one and she said her interpretation is that the Guardian was more balanced on the WHO trip and collaboration with Chinese colleagues.
As with many partners/relatives/neighbors/friends my wife and I are not in total agreement on this and trying to disagree, step back, accept differences and continue our own dance together is... is a dance. respect, humility, self introspection are all qualities that I am trying to grow but not always successful!

Posted by: migueljose | Feb 13 2021 19:22 utc | 20

Look, ban me - I'm just a floater on this site (as much as I value the non partisan takes from both you, b, and the (mostly) very intelligent commenters).. but:

https://hcqtw.com/

Please, grow some balls - either address the studies (and admit error), or show the other side and explain why HCQ is a dead end.

Peace!

Posted by: Ilya G Poimandres | Feb 13 2021 19:23 utc | 21

Of course The New Pork-Pies Times will also insist that the WHO should be allowed to carry out an investigation of the Fort Detrick biolab in Maryland and the reasons for its shutdown in August 2019. Of course the newspaper will also investigate the mystery pneumonia that killed at least 2 people and sickened nearly 60 patients at Greensprings nursing home in northern Virginia (about 70 km downstream from Fort Detrick) in July 2019. Of course The NYT will interview the doctors who saw the patients' lung X-rays and were flabbergasted by what they saw.

I'm not holding my breath.

Posted by: Jen | Feb 13 2021 19:28 utc | 22

What a convenient distraction from an investigation into Fort Detrick. Or even just a brief summary of the reason for its closure and its sorry tale of gross mismanagement. Gee look over there...

Posted by: uncle tungsten | Feb 13 2021 19:43 utc | 23

The heroic symbol is busy making fool of himself in the courtroom. For example, as it seems his trademark, he and his team spent time ridiculing a live-in caretaker of the defamed veteran, that she could not possibly write her deposition that the veteran felt insulted and depressed, or "was she abroad during the last year" (probably was, foreign workers are obliged to go back every 6 months, I am not sure how is it during COVID, irrelevant anyway), doubting that the authorities could understand her Tadjikistan passport (??? it is like doubting if American authorities could understand a Mexican passport) etc. Navalny also said that the judge should be called Strumfuerer, that Putin is a traitor because he is raising the retirement age, etc. And he insults people non-stop.

This is not recorded, but the notes are published.

Posted by: Piotr Berman | Feb 13 2021 19:43 utc | 24

The charges laid against China by NYT were "...refused to share raw data... disagreements over patient records and other issues were so tense that they sometimes erupted into shouts..." These allegations were explicitly said to have been made by independent researchers. At this point, quotation of the charges are to be expected as illustration as well as attribution and documentation of the allegations.

“If you are data focused, and if you are a professional,” said Thea Kølsen Fischer, a Danish epidemiologist on the team, then obtaining data is “like for a clinical doctor looking at the patient and seeing them by your own eyes.” This quote is a general statement about how important seeing the data is, with *no bearing* on whether the Chinese withheld data until shouted at, or whatever.

“The world doesn’t realize, you know, that they were the first to get this thing,” Dr. Daszak said, “and they didn’t know how bad it was.” *Nor does this quote have any bearing* on whether the Chinese withheld data until shouted at, or whatever.

Anyone doing a close reading would expect to see quotes that are actually relevant to the allegations. *Not* producing relevant quotes is failure to support the charges.

"Peter Daszak, a member of the W.H.O. team and the president of EcoHealth Alliance in New York, said the trip was emotionally draining, as he and the team came to terms with the trauma of the early days of the pandemic. The team interviewed some of the first people to fall ill with Covid-19 in Wuhan, as well as medical workers." This indirect quote doesn't support the NYT reading either.

Pedantry alert! These are none of them misquotations, not even selective ones. The wording wasn't changed to support the allegations, obviously, since they don't. They are not even selective quotes that seemingly support the allegations because they are taken out of context. Neither the direct quotes nor the indirect quotes say *anything* about the behavior of the Chinese scientists. They don't even refer to the behavior of the independent WHO scientists, as in shouting. The indirect quote about the feelings of the WHO researchers can even be read as hinting at empathy with the Chinese. But it does not complain the obstruction from the Chinese scientists drained them. So, speaking strictly (pedantically) the NYT did not selectively misquote, it *mischaracterized* the observations from the WHO researchers. Unable to support the NYT version, vaguely negative remarks or general observations were substituted in lieu of documentation of the claim.

The OP is correct I think is calling this a lie, but it is not the lie direct. The mainstream media rarely directly falsify quotations. In this example, the NYT didn't even *directly* say that the remark about the importance of data was the explanation for why the Chinese scientists' behavior was so obstructive and frustrating. They merely hoped proximity would allow the inference.

The reputable mainstream media do even more "lying" by omission than they do by such devices as this. Their most effective lies are conventional wisdom and unspoken assumptions, like an (unconscious?) assumption that American exceptionalism really is a thing.

The thing for the general readership of the mainstream media is that close reading is not only tiring, it's effectiveness depends on knowing a lot of background information. The remark about the importance of data, for instance, loses all of its seeming relevance to the charges, when you realize from prior knowledge, it's background, not a direct statement against the Chinese scientists. The lie is about whipping up anger and fear.

Unfortunately for the Trumpers, the QAnon, the cryptofascists etc. their charges against the mainstream media is exactly the wrong one, that the MSM is directly lying, openly falsifying, simply faking news. But the respectable mainstream media don't do that as a rule. They do what the OP shows us, making charges and inciting emotion but *not* by simply falsifying the facts. Indeed, they even put in quotes that they hope might pass for actual evidence, but as far as just making stuff up...generally. Really, the mainstream media most likely to simply make stuff up are still Fox News, Breitbart, the tabloids (you know, like the Murdochs' Star.)

Posted by: steven t johnson | Feb 13 2021 19:57 utc | 25

Sorry for posting the above in a wrong thread.

By now, several aspects of COVID beginnings should be clear. COVID-like symptoms belong to the spectrum of coronavirus symptoms, they were reported in many places, leading to wrong assessments and predictions. In December 2018, one could guess that the initial cases could lead to a major epidemic, nobody could be sure.

Proper action to stop an epidemic with possibly asymptomatic carriers are drastic and no country takes them lightly. Thus a delay -- or refraining from them -- is unavoidable when the situation is not certain.

In January 2020, Americans knew enough to start the necessary drastic actions (especially after 23rd, when the province with a population of UK was quarantined). And as one article reminds, at this time the entire top of American political hierarchy was preoccupied with impeachment (one more argument that pointless brouhahas may cost lives). And all countries in Far East undertook such actions -- Japan being somewhat sloppy in that regard. North American and European countries manifestly did not.

Basically, all people coming into a country should be quarantined for at least two weeks, and so all contacts of symptomatic cases. In a country like Italy or USA that would meant hundreds of thousands, requiring huge mobilization of resources. Industry should be mobilized to provide masks and disinfectants -- something that every country can do, but they were needed fast. Political authorities were not ready to do it, in USA it was definitely not possible when the authority is divided among various federal levels, these steps cost money, the jurisdictions are controlled by political parties that so happened to have very acrimonious spat with huge interest in making the other side look bad and so on.

Then medical cases should be analyzed, and wide range of therapeutic options should be considered. This is something that medical establishment was not prepared to do.

Posted by: Piotr Berman | Feb 13 2021 20:05 utc | 26

The point is that it is high time to stop considering outlets like NYT as 'news resources'.
These people do not make news and are not journalists. These people are doing pure propaganda. They lie, manipulate facts, invent non-existent events, censor/adjust statements in the "right way", ignore and suppress real data (statistics, statements, reports, testimonies, etc.) - they do everything to artificially create the narrative required by the customer (whether it be about China, be it something about Russia, etc.) and promote it under the guise of a 'news agenda'.

Daszak is very much mistaken in stating that

It's disappointing to spend time w/ journalists explaining key findings of our exhausting month-long work in China

Posted by: alaff | Feb 13 2021 20:14 utc | 27

the nyt is quite willing to lie more directly. see iraqi wmd's, or any number of articles on russiagate, or the faked gas attacks on douma. does anybody really believe they only lie by omission?

they nyt lies regularly, and covid is in itself not a hoax. it's not a narrative. it's a real disease, and it kills people, and rich people use the crisis to advance their agenda, including by manipulating the response and making sure the social safety net is insufficient. all these things can be true, and are.

Posted by: pretzelattack | Feb 13 2021 20:16 utc | 28

The New York Times told blatant lies there including quoting Dominic Dywer whom they claimed was part of the WHO team.

Here Dwyer admits he was never on the team but part of a group of "independent experts".

"We go there as an international group and we're not part of the WHO, we're just independent experts."

https://amp.abc.net.au/article/13140456?__twitter_impression=true

Thea Fischer who was actually on the WHO covid origins team said the quoting of her out of context to convey a message exactly opposite to her experience was intentional (also known as lying).

NYT usually are subtle and crafty with their lies. With some countries like China they are bald faced liars.

Posted by: Doryphore | Feb 13 2021 20:20 utc | 29

Here is Reuters taking the don't trust China narrative farther:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-china/china-refused-to-provide-who-team-with-raw-data-on-early-covid-cases-team-member-says-idUSKBN2AD090

So now we will be endlessly debating "raw data".

This type of psychological terror (deliberate sowing of confusion and distrust) inflicted on the general public constantly is, in my view, criminal.

Posted by: JB | Feb 13 2021 20:36 utc | 30

Peter Daszak ?

He not only knows about the Bat corona virus research in Wuhan ,he funded it!......he knows what kind of gain of function research they were doing becasue he was part of it.
He was the first to come out and call anyone who had questions about the Wuhan lab and possible leak a "conspiracy theorist".

Posted by: jean | Feb 13 2021 20:37 utc | 31

Miguel Jose @ 20:

I heard about Nathan Robinson's sacking from Guardian USA. Robinson once claimed that "cancel culture" didn't exist at his workplace. He later went on Twitter and queried the current rise on US military and financial support for Israel. He was reprimanded for the tweet and was then sacked for it.

Posted by: Jen | Feb 13 2021 20:45 utc | 32

Miguel Jose @ 20:

Further to my comment @ 32, Robinson had a column at Guardian US (not USA). His contract to write the column was scrapped over his tweet. Of course Guardian US claims it didn't fire him because he was never a full-time employee in the first place and he has other sources of income, but I should think in some ways writing a regular column for a newspaper is not very different from being a "self-employed" Uber driver in terms of the time and effort invested into the work, and the demands placed on the person doing it.

Posted by: Jen | Feb 13 2021 20:57 utc | 33

@ 20 migueljose and @ 32 jen.... hey miguel! get her to read this and see what she thinks... article from nathan himself on why he was fired from the guardian.

How the Media Cracks Down on Critics of Israel

Posted by: james | Feb 13 2021 21:05 utc | 34

hey, wasn't the nyt the paper of prestige that pushed for war on iraq??? indeed - that bad guy saddam had wmds and look how amazing america has solved it all!

Posted by: james | Feb 13 2021 21:07 utc | 35

Oh my - respected WHO scientists questioning credible information sources? The Sino-Russian fake news machine goes deeper than we thought. Maybe they need to be fact checked with their own botched interviews,

Posted by: Cesare | Feb 13 2021 21:08 utc | 36

Meanwhile, the Biased Broadcasting of China (BBC) is also working overtime to show that Wuhan is still in serious problem, and WHO is colluding with China about the Wuhan "coverup".

Look like some sort of coordinated attacks by multiple media.

Posted by: d dan | Feb 13 2021 21:31 utc | 37

Lmbao
New York times is gonna New York times

Posted by: Dogon Priest | Feb 13 2021 21:35 utc | 38

US Gov statement today:

Calling for transparency, Sullivan said “China must make available its data from the earliest days of the outbreak.”

Read more here: https://www.macon.com/news/politics-government/national-politics/article249239565.html#storylink=cpy

https://www.macon.com/news/politics-government/national-politics/article249239565.html

Posted by: JB | Feb 13 2021 21:51 utc | 39

What else would or could we expect from a gutter publication like "The New York Times"? I've been to New York at several "Times" -- at ages six, eight, sixteen and fifty-six -- and have observed the continued desaccitation and delapitation of the times there. As "for instance" the renevenation of such other places I've lived in like Tehran, Shànghâi, Bêijing, Hángzhou or (stragely enough) even Oslo and Hälsingfors/Helsinki.

Posted by: Tollef Ås اس طلف | Feb 13 2021 22:03 utc | 40

I find it astonishing that WHO denies that Covid originated in the Wuhan outbreak. It was there that Fauci's NIAID did bat coronavirus enhancement research without doing vaccine research. They did that there because they were not allowed to do such dangerous research in any lab in the US! Did WHO investigate that?

Posted by: jason | Feb 13 2021 22:17 utc | 42

Correction of formatting of the first comment:

I find it astonishing that WHO denies that Covid originated in the Wuhan outbreak. It was there that Fauci's NIAID did bat coronavirus enhancement research without doing vaccine research. They did that there because they were not allowed to do such dangerous research in any lab in the US! Did WHO investigate that?

From Newsweek April 28, 2020:
https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan-lab-millions-us-dollars-risky-coronavirus-research-1500741

National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the organization led by Dr. Fauci, funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions for work on gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.

In 2019, with the backing of NIAID, the National Institutes of Health committed $3.7 million over six years for research that included some gain-of-function work. The program followed another $3.7 million, 5-year project for collecting and studying bat coronaviruses, which ended in 2019, bringing the total to $7.4 million.

Many scientists have criticized gain of function research, which involves manipulating viruses in the lab to explore their potential for infecting humans, because it creates a risk of starting a pandemic from accidental release.

SARS-CoV-2 , the virus now causing a global pandemic, is believed to have originated in bats. U.S. intelligence, after originally asserting that the coronavirus had occurred naturally, conceded last month that the pandemic may have originated in a leak from the Wuhan lab. (At this point most scientists say it's possible—but not likely—that the pandemic virus was engineered or manipulated.)

I have heard that the virus originated first in bats in a district not far from Wuhan. But it certainly seems likely that even that resulted from the Wuhan lab work. If not, one would need some strong reason that they just happened to be doing bat coronavirus enhancement research there and nowhere else in the world!

Posted by: Sam F | Feb 13 2021 22:20 utc | 43

@ Posted by: Sam F | Feb 13 2021 22:20 utc | 43

The Wuhan lab has a relation of viruses it is keeping. The genome of the SARS-CoV-2 was made available in 30 January 2020. If it matched some virus it kept, it would've already discovered it.

The only way the virus could've originated from the Wuhan lab is if it was contained in still unprocessed samples. The probability for that is merely theoretical.

Besides, scientists from at least three independent and non-related countries (Brazil, Scotland and one more I don't remember of) all analyzed the genome of the virus and detected, with the help of their specialized stuff, many imperfect and useless mutations that can only come from natural selection: no human manufacturing process can replicate those.

Therefore, it is a certainty the virus didn't come out of the Wuhan lab - or any lab, for that matter. The SARS-CoV-2 is not a bioweapon.

Posted by: vk | Feb 13 2021 22:29 utc | 44

steven t johnson | Feb 13 2021 19:57 utc | 25

but as far as just making stuff up...generally. Really, the mainstream media most likely to simply make stuff up are still Fox News, Breitbart, the tabloids (you know, like the Murdochs' Star.)

They all repeat lies such as that "The Russians poisoned Skripal and his daughter", that "Russia shot down MH17", that "Russia invaded Georgia", that "Russia fixed the 2016 election for Trump" and I am sure there are many other statements which are repeated over and over again, in the MSM, as though they were established facts, though most of them are merely barely arguable assertions.

Posted by: foolisholdman | Feb 13 2021 22:34 utc | 45

@Sam f,

The newsweek article provided no sources for the claim GoF research was funded and done at WIV.

The claim is rejected here. They did seem to fund one study using GoF but it's unclear where that study was done.

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/2021/02/09/covid-dr-anthony-fauci-did-not-fund-research-tied-creation/4450338001/

Posted by: Doryphore | Feb 13 2021 22:35 utc | 46

I read the article in the Japan Times (which echoed it). There are a lot of outright lies there, and the quotes from the scientists - specially the Danish one - are clearly heavily edited and put out of context.

For example, when the Danish scientist told the "journalist" about "heated debates", which they make it look like a bar fight for access to information right the next door.

For those who are not from the academic world, a "heated debate" merely means the scientists discussed with different theories or approaches over the evidence and/or the methodology. It is purely scientific and has nothing to do with your political circus we see in the Congress.

The headline of the article also makes it look like that there is definitive evidence the virus originated from China and that China torched three months trying to contain it through repression and censorship. But even the heavily edited quotes from the scientists don't even give a hint of that, and their own theory that the pandemic started in China in October 2019 comes from... official Chinese data!

There are other outright lies. China never claimed the virus originated from another country that sent it through cold stored products. China literally detected the virus on cold stored products from Brazil (frozen chicken), Ukraine (an ice cream) and another country I don't remember of, and asked those countries to clean them with disinfectant before exporting to China. Brazil initially refused to do so or simply ignored, and China had to ban its chicken imports for some months so it could learn a lesson or two about good business relations. China also recommended its local businesses to disinfect their cold stored products before putting them to sale. But it never stated the SARS-CoV-2 originated from freezers from the outside.

The strategy is clear: the West wants to create a narrative where China is blamed for worldwide genocide. It pretends use it to not only to try to create an anti-China alliance and automatically clean the governments who botched their lockdowns, but also to sue China for the equivalent of war reparations. Those "reparations" will be of an astronomic value - probably the equivalent to China's whole GDP - which they pretend to use to, at the same time, rebuild their own economies and throw China back to the Stone Age. This is the West's concept of "win-win": I win, and then I win again by you losing (vampirism).

I don't think this strategy will work, mainly for two reasons (I'm not discarding other more superstructural reasons):

1) the pandemic was a natural phenomenon and therefore not really China's fault, so it will be difficult for the United States to galvanize an alliance with sincerely neutral or at least pragmatic countries; and

2) it would open a massive Pandora Box in the West, where its peoples would be forever drowned in an environment where pseudo-science will be the rule of the land. It would be a new Dark Age, where the West, even if winning in the short term, would kiss goodbye to any prospect of ever holding the Forth Industrial Revolution thanks to the decline of its intellectual power (imbecilization).

Posted by: vk | Feb 13 2021 22:47 utc | 47

[email protected] disagrees presumably, writing "...there are many other statements which are repeated over and over again, in the MSM, as though they were established facts, though most of them are merely barely arguable assertions."

These things are regarded as conventional wisdom, which is what I explicitly cited. Most of them are ultimately due to government information and the media act as stenographers. It is however not just the mainstream media that relies on conventional wisdom. And it is most certainly not just the liberal but also the conservative mainstream media that relies on conventional wisdom. The belief that the US (and maybe England) defeated the Nazis in WWII or the certainty that both Stalin and Mao killed more people than Hitler and Communism is worse than fascism and that "democracy" is something entirely different from the Communism and Fascism which are some sort of conjoined twins are prime examples of conventional wisdom beloved of conservative mainstream media. The second main source of conventional wisdom is business propaganda extolling the virtues of free enterprise, a task businesses have lavished money and skill on for children for all ages for decades. The third main source of conventional wisdom is from the churches.

Any effort at piercing the fog of unspoken assumptions, blandly repeated government talking points, blind acceptance of businessmen's notions of economic science, religious prejudices tricked out in secular wording has to start with one principle: The intensity of feeling, feaor or outrage or whatever, guarantees no truth whatsoever. This eliminates simple reliance on most media, liberal or conservative, mainstream or fringe. Thinking critically, if it means indignantly rejecting everything as simples lies and trickery, doesn't work. That kind of critical thinking, is the kind that turns an open mind into a gullible mind. Hence, things like covid-hoaxing, QAnon, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, greys at Roswell, the stolen election, the list is endless.

Critical thinking as a gut feeling of skepticism is useless. Critical thinking in the sense of effective thinking is what is needed. That requires, unfortunately, knowing a lot of facts. And even more difficult to accept, a grasp of how the very simplest parts of the world actually work.

Posted by: steven t johnson | Feb 13 2021 23:07 utc | 48

Omnipotent Insane Clown POSse

The outrage grinders stir the pot
with lies and obfuscation
the purpose of this psyop
is to manipulate the nation.

The manufacture of consent
for plunders foreign and domestic
the cattle serve the one percent
keep in line or be arrested.

they enrage so you'll engage
pick a side, it's good for hating
god forbid you disengage
this dissent is good for ratings.

don't you want to say your piece
tell them what you think at least
your clever words will prove them wrong
your takedown is a masterpiece.

Posted by: ld | Feb 13 2021 23:07 utc | 49

@ vk | Feb 13 2021 22:29 utc | 44
@ Doryphore | Feb 13 2021 22:35 utc | 46

Thank you both for those clarifications. The coincidence still seems very improbable, but perhaps they did the research there to access the nearby bat population. Perhaps they thought that they could do enhancement research with little risk, and work on vaccines if that appeared necessary.

Posted by: Sam F | Feb 13 2021 23:37 utc | 50

@ Posted by: migueljose | Feb 13 2021 19:22 utc | 20

My condolences! My otherwise sensible wife is in thrall to the Guardian as well. She doesn't share their upper middle class Blairite view on much of anything, yet readily absorbs their framing of every issue, and they pretty much exclusively determine which "issues" she's talking and thinking about each day. Please do let us know if you ever find a way to break her away -- the way my wife constantly checks in for her hourly dose of mind-poison hurts my heart.

Posted by: Observer | Feb 13 2021 23:51 utc | 51

@steven t johnson:

'[email protected] disagrees presumably, writing "...there are many other statements which are repeated over and over again, in the MSM, as though they were established facts, though most of them are merely barely arguable assertions."

These things are regarded as conventional wisdom, which is what I explicitly cited. Most of them are ultimately due to government information and the media act as stenographers. It is however not just the mainstream media that relies on conventional wisdom."

And "foolisholdman is spot on that disinformational organs such as the NYT's do tell 'outright lies' - like many of the ones he sited and more.

To clarify: "convention wisdom" is basically formulated and/or maintained by these very propagandist themselves: either on behalf of the powerful, behind the curtain forces using these propaganda organs for dissemination (NYT's, WashPo, Fox, CNN..etc), or also can be, and many times are initiated by these propaganda industry themselves for their elite corporate owner's and their associated interests - often in an attempt to further apply 'public' pressure on the deeper state powers into taking a more assertive posture on what has now become "convention wisdom" - to which they themselves have personally manufactured, and have had endlessly echoed throughout their well established chains of disinformational distribution - ad nauseum.

Posted by: time2wakeupnow | Feb 14 2021 0:09 utc | 52

The protocol, as expected:

Biden admin has ‘deep concerns’ about Covid-19 China data from WHO, wants report on its origins ‘free from alteration’ by Beijing

At this point, the USG and the NYT-WaPo have basically formed a binary system, where one feeds the other: when the USG wants something to base their policy, they have the NYT-WaPo; when the NYT-WaPo publish something that needs some official backup in order to keep their credibility at a sustainable level, they can count on the USG.

--//--

@ Posted by: Sam F | Feb 13 2021 23:37 utc | 50

Yes, the strongest theory being considered by the WHO is that the SARS-CoV-2 came from a population of bats outside Wuhan.

Posted by: vk | Feb 14 2021 0:16 utc | 53

Related: mini-NYT The Independent forced to apologize, pay Roman Abramovich's legal fees after republishing piece of fake news:

The Independent apologizes to Roman Abramovich, pays Chelsea owner’s legal fees after parroting claim of ‘Putin’s bag carrier’

Like Carole Cadwalladr, The Independent had the bad luck to cross the wrong kind of guy (a billionaire), in the wrong place (the UK), at the wrong time (when he's already a honorary British citizen).

Posted by: vk | Feb 14 2021 0:19 utc | 54

Posted by: Ilya G Poimandres | Feb 13 2021 19:23 utc | 21

Interesting, but it's obviously not a peer-reviewed study and the authors have all chosen to remain anonymous. Caveat lector.

Posted by: farm ecologist | Feb 14 2021 1:24 utc | 55

The MSM lies and serves as the main vector for imperial propaganda and misinformation. It's also the main medium for preparing populations to accept narratives in the event of conflicts. Given that WE all know that, would not our time be better spent analysing current contexts rather than frittered away trying hold these media to some truth-in-reporting accountancy long ago abandoned? My response when told the NYT is full of shit, is... and? The more on the 'left' (rofl) these media claim to be (e.g. The Guardian) the worse their mendacity because they masquerade as progressive outlets and soften up readers to accept lashings of BS.

That said, my favourite posts by b, and comments by the community here, are analytical, like the Russia-EU situation. Who cares what misinformation is circulated by commercial purveyors of hype? On the subject of China, for example, what's happening in Taiwan? Are they going ahead with their ultra-provocative 'independence' referendum?

Posted by: Patroklos | Feb 14 2021 1:44 utc | 56

Where's Judith "Niger Yellowcake Uranium" Miller and Jayson Blair when you need them?

These intrepid former New York Times reporters are urgently needed to return and restore integrity to the New York Times!

God knows they would be an improvement for the Times--the Newspaper of Record ... Lies.

Posted by: ak74 | Feb 14 2021 2:25 utc | 57

Another trash rag caught inciting sinophobia while innocently asking "Why are there so much anti-Asian hate crimes?"

Posted by: J W | Feb 14 2021 2:36 utc | 58

Besides, scientists from at least three independent and non-related countries (Brazil, Scotland and one more I don't remember of) all analyzed the genome of the virus and detected, with the help of their specialized stuff, many imperfect and useless mutations that can only come from natural selection: no human manufacturing process can replicate those.

Therefore, it is a certainty the virus didn't come out of the Wuhan lab - or any lab, for that matter. The SARS-CoV-2 is not a bioweapon.

Posted by: vk | Feb 13 2021 22:29 utc | 44

I agree that lab origin is not particularly probable BUT I am less certain. The experiment that is suspect does not use gene editing that would indeed be recognizable, but "accelerates the evolution" by infecting cells in cell cultures, selecting batches with most "dangerous" infection results and repeating. Thus the mutations would look natural.

That said, in vitro models are not necessarily close to in vivo, what actually happens in an organism. Actually, I think that there are pretty far from it, so the chance of getting a virus producing a dangerous epidemic seem remote. Outside the labs, viruses cross from one species to another and exists in much larger numbers. But in either case, COVID-19 seems a freak accident.

About the difference between in vivo and in vitro. We can try to breed intelligent politicians by letting them compete in elections, those that show promise get more resources in the next round etc. Alas, the ultimate winners will surely be well suited to attracting voters, but may still be total morons when it comes to actual governmental activities. Like fitness for elections vs fitness for governing, in vitro differs from in vivi.

Posted by: Piotr Berman | Feb 14 2021 3:47 utc | 59

Alternative take:

So scientists talk openly to NYT reporter. Story is published. Scientists get call from CCP operatives, i.e. "colleagues", berating them and mentioning future contracts to their institutions. Scientists go on Twitter to CYA...

Posted by: Albert | Feb 14 2021 3:48 utc | 60

@ albert... making they are hiring at the nyt? give them your resume... hopefully it is chalk full of fiction writing..

Posted by: james | Feb 14 2021 4:12 utc | 61

@ Posted by: Albert | Feb 14 2021 3:48 utc | 60

There are many reasons to believe that's not the case:

1) the WHO has a reputation of being neutral. It's weird the USA has begun to distrust it right now, in a case that would precisely tarnish (what a coincidence!) its main enemy;

2) if you read the article itself, you can see known and verifiable lies when there isn't any quotes from the scientists. This is evidence of a propaganda piece, therefore strong indication the quotes themselves were taken out of context;

3) behavior by non-Western countries in relation to the investigation indicate China was not responsible for the pandemic;

4) China's modus operandi against Western propaganda is to use its own newspapers, not social media, let alone Twitter - which the Chinese people mostly doesn't use anyway;

5) Heavy use of Twitter and Facebook indicate those articles are produced for a Western public. This is not the behavior of a news outlet that wants to liberate/enlighten the Chinese people, but of an institution that seeks to mobilize the Western peoples to a war against China (e.g. WWII's demonization and dehumanization campaigns). Yes, the NYT translates some of its anti-China editorials and op-eds, but those are a sporadic occurence;

6) scientific evidence and theories indicate the pandemic was a natural occurence and that China did the best it could, so it's more likely the WHO's scientists are telling the truth on the Twitter than in the NYT article.

Posted by: vk | Feb 14 2021 4:22 utc | 62

julian @ 1 says: make the writers of the article published by the NYT
blush with shame; the link to the article suggest the writers accused
of "selective misquotation" are identified
by https://www.nytimes.com/by/javier-c-hernandez and James Gorman
<= but I do not see any evidence the writers were in attendance at
the W.H.O. meeting in China?

exactly what question did _WHO__ ask of China _____? and exactly what was the exact
response of the China person to whom the question was addressed?

How can one say data is important if one does not know the content of
the data that one is talking about?

How can one know that data is important if one does not know in advance the details of
the data, or even that the data actually exist, if one cannot describe in detail the exact
nature of requested data.. then how can a person respond to the request??

Before anyone can rationally make valid statements about the importance of data,
it is first necessary
1. to exactly describe the data in question?
2. to have prior certain knowledge such data actually exist.
3. to be sure the person in charge of the described data had actual access to all of the
requested data at the time the request was made?
4. to be sure all persons to receive or give the data had proper levels of security clearances.
5. maybe the fuss over the subject data rises from suspicions that the subject data
represents the basis for a lawsuit to be filed by China against another; and China
does not want the data to be made public until the suit is filed?

Apparently the subject matter in the article written by Hernandez and Gorman published by the NYT
was derived from 2nd hand reports about the Global Study of Origins of SARS-CoV-2 being conducted
by W.H.O. in China ? Has WHO confirmed China refuses to turn over data defined in detail
and known to exist?

Apparently, Dwyer was not part of the WHo team but a member of a group of "independent experts".
who hired and paid these independent experts? Where did they come from and why were they
there? This is like the rifle team that stood in Donabass and shot into the crowd.. so
the media and the government it controls could say lockdown was necessary because
there were snipers.

Jean @ 31 says about Peter Daszak ? "He not only knows about the Bat corona virus research in Wuhan ,he funded it!......he knows what kind of gain of function research they were doing becasue he was part of it.
He was the first to come out and call anyone who had questions about the Wuhan lab and possible leak a "conspiracy theorist".

If the data in question incriminates someone other than China,
then maybe China is justified in holding on to the data that proves that point?

Demanding the production of data that does not exist, and accusing the person asked of refusing is an old trick.. how can one prove they don't have data which does not exist or has not yet been collected?

I love juliana's remedy.. make those responsible blush with Shame;?
Maybe Plaintiff China will produce that blush with a lawsuit?

I think uncle Tungsten @ 23, fitted the reason for selective misquotation in a convenient framework designed to help avoid investigation into Fort Detrick. Or even just a brief summary of the reason for its closure and its sorry tale of gross mismanagement. Gee look over there... <=but not at Ft. Detrick. Maybe the mismanagement was part of the cover <=plausible denial?

Steven Johnson @ 25 says "So, speaking strictly (pedantically) the NYT did not selectively misquote, it *mis-characterized* the observations from the WHO researchers. vaguely negative remarks or
general observations were substituted in lieu of documentation of the claim." .. this is why
we need truth (human rights) courts.. every word published by a content provider on MSM
has a mind control intention.. unless the readers can challenge and recover damages for
substitutions in liew of.. documentation.. in published materials the readers are nothing
but sheep in the NYT pasture.

Piotr Berman @ 26 suggest Draconian lock-down is the answer to pandemic suppression.. I say no democratic culture is going to allow a nation state to enforce lock-down against the population no matter the promoted benefits of lock down.

Death from the flu is preferable to submission and is far more valid than joining the army
to invade and war on a a nation state to save its population from tyranny. What's the
difference in a nation state that inflict tyranny on its subjects, and being locked up
by tyranny in your own nation state because of a flu..

Posted by: snake | Feb 14 2021 4:39 utc | 63

Another example of media malfeasance;

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/02/12/the-guardian-revealed-itself-in-sacking-columnist-for-criticizing-us-military-aid-to-israel/

Posted by: vetinLA | Feb 14 2021 5:02 utc | 64

FLG propaganda by NY Post debunks itself:

After the Totally Ghoul SOS made headlines in 2012, Sears Holding — which owns Kmart — said they found “no evidence that production was subcontracted to a (Chinese) labor camp during a recent audit of the factory that produced the Halloween decoration.”

Yet, Pang said, “no evidence” often just means that the production records no longer exist. “

So anybody here wants their very own FLG-made Russell Teapot?

Posted by: J W | Feb 14 2021 5:35 utc | 65

I keep looking through ZH to see if they cover this story and so far...no

I think it says there is a suppression effort about the scientist's twitter response to the NYT story.

Any others seeing this story reported on?

Posted by: psychohistorian | Feb 14 2021 6:05 utc | 66

In the land of oz .. or ukraine 2.0 - self destruct, self destruct, our official propaganda organ - the ABC - has been pumping out the same crap. OZ five-eyes clown on the so called covid investigation crapping on. Who knows, perhaps yankistan will give us javelin missiles and inflatable rubber duckies so we can attack the chinks.

Posted by: Peter AU1 | Feb 14 2021 6:21 utc | 67

Piotr Berman

The most likely source at the moment for the jump from bats to humans appears to be mink. Farmed mink.

Posted by: Peter AU1 | Feb 14 2021 6:38 utc | 68

The Globaltimes.cn today (2/14) has this same story up. They also have a good article up yesterday on the general conclusions being considered by the WHO team. To say the least, the NYTimes and BBC's coverage has been abysmal.

Posted by: ToivoS | Feb 14 2021 8:58 utc | 69

Viruses are thoroughly studied all around the world – among other things for creating new vaccines (see Sputnik V). They are efficient vectors and their capability to bypass human immune system is rather useful.

Wuhan lab got its P4 security level some years ago in cooperation with Institute Pasteur and French state. It is worthwhile to know that IP has patented coronaviruses in attempt to create malaria vaccine (*).

At one moment “gain of function” research was banned in United States by Barack Obama. It continued, but was moved overseas to China. Anthony Fauci and Peter Daszak from Ecohealth Alliance (and WHO) were both involved.

So blaming China is really a two-edged sword – once they through caution to the wind the whole cardhouse could be crumbling down.

Lab leak is a real possibility – Alina Chan (@Ayjchan) with colleagues has written extensively on this subject. It cannot be outruled.

(*) Robin Monotti https://twitter.com/robinmonotti/status/1338456894537691139

FRANCE: Accomplished pharma prof thrown in psychiatric hospital after questioning official COVID narrative: Professor #Fourtillan was taken to the Uzès psychiatric hospital of Le Mas Careiron, where he has been held since. https://lifesitenews.com/news/accomplished-pharma-prof-thrown-in-psych-hospital-after-questioning-official-covid-narrative

Fourtillan gained widespread publicity when a recent film by Pierre Barnérias, giving a voice to critics of the official narrative, became viral in France.

In Hold-Up, Professor #Fourtillan spoke of his concern that the COVID-19 crisis was fabricated and is being used to impose a dangerous vaccine on the world population: CLIP:
Extrait Holdup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z1-O-vsoU8&feature=youtu.be

Among the public documents Fourtillan has analyzed and made public are patents for SARS-COV-1, which contains parts of the malaria virus, dating back to 2003. The patents were used by various labs to develop vaccines.

2011 saw the Institut Pasteur filing a further patent application for “SARS-COV-2,” identical to the previous one, according to Fourtillan, who says this was done because commercial exploitation of the first patent started in 2003 and would expire 20 years later, in 2023

The Wuhan P4 lab. was built following an agreement between France and China signed in 2004..in 2017, France’s then–Interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, joined the official opening ceremony of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s P4 lab

together with Yves Lévy, co-president of the steering committee. Lévy is the husband of Agnès Buzyn, who was France’s health minister when the COVID-19 crisis erupted. She was responsible for signing the decree that banned over-the-counter sales of #hydroxychloroquine in France

Posted by: js | Feb 14 2021 10:09 utc | 70

We have a couple pathetic apologists for the #FakeNews Mockingbird mass media offering up defenses for their lies. I wonder if back in the real world they are fake journalists who are paid by the big business oligarchy to deliberately disinform the population and who are trying to defend their scumbaggery?

"B-b-but no individual sentence that the New York Langley Times published can be called a lie! Some sentences that are not related to one another just happened to end up close together in such a way that it is possible to misinterpret them to mean something else! It is just a little sloppy editing, and it is the readers' faults for jumping to conclusions!"

Wrong! Moreover, trying to argue that the New York Langley Times is not being deliberately deceitful is itself deliberately deceitful. It is a lie. The mass media apologists in this thread know that their argument is bogus, and that makes it a lie. The individual sentences are irrelevant. Nobody remembers a particular sentence five seconds after reading it unless it is one of those key phrases that is being hammered by multiple outlets into the public consciousness like "Capitol riots!", which happens to be a full blown lie in that case. What people remember is the narrative, and if the narrative that the servants of empire in the Mockingbird mass media are manufacturing is false then it is a lie, and those fake "journalists" producing that lie of a narrative are liars.

"Those Trumpers" are perhaps not "sophisticated" enough to fool themselves into believing that the New York Langley Times is truthful by parsing the individual sentences and realizing that none of those sentences on their own are false. Unlike the sophisticated morons (sophomores?) who do manage that feat of self-deceit, "those Trumpers" only look at the narratives being pushed by that filthy shit-stained rag of a journal and recognize those narratives for what they are: LIES. In this regard "those Trumpers" are far wiser than the empire's disgusting #FakeNews fake "journalists" and their sophisticated moron apologists.

Posted by: William Gruff | Feb 14 2021 10:18 utc | 71

Peter AU1 @68: "The most likely source at the moment for the jump from bats to humans appears to be mink. Farmed mink."

Yes. Farmed mink living in cages at Fort Detrick. You cannot get rapid generational mutations in the virus in a homogeneous population as that population gets infected with the same strain all at once. The population must be isolated into small groups that are sequentially infected from one group to the next in order to force rapid adaptation of the virus.

We are still talking several hundreds of years of mutation in the virus that somehow occurred in just a couple years. Obviously the virus was edited from its natural state and then cycled through dozens of generations of infection in caged mink. The intention of those dozens of virus generations in mink was partially to obfuscate the genetic code and hide the edits.

Posted by: William Gruff | Feb 14 2021 10:36 utc | 72

Posted by: J W | Feb 13 2021 17:45 utc | 4 -- "Let's frame it another way: Can you trust Western MSMs on anything?"

Beautifully formed question!!!

The West's MSM, just like their political "leadership", is beyond derision, beyond shaming. Both mundanely illustrate the banality of evil these days.

But then again, their audience is not us, but Mr American Idiot and his ilk.

Posted by: kiwiklown | Feb 14 2021 10:46 utc | 73

Posted by: A.L. | Feb 13 2021 18:04 utc | 8 -- "Now if only the NYT will focus on NY and write about its own "exemplary" covid 19 response and totally "transparent" handling of nursing home covid 19 deaths figures..."

Good riposte.

However, I have noticed that whenever the MSM chooses to call out a misdemeanour, they would castigate a single individual (eg. they might report that Cuomo or Newsom has been asked to go fly a kite), but they NEVER blame the entire US government.

On the other hand, they pin ALL wrongdoing in China on "the evil CCP regime", and not the individual Chinese governor or bureaucrat at fault.

Western values, anybody?

Posted by: kiwiklown | Feb 14 2021 11:04 utc | 74

all in all, i think the question is what is the proper question to ask the responsible parties of each and every nation state and who shall be given the authority to demand those nation states answer truthfully the questions?

Developing on B's MoA is a set of rules that can assist in developing landmarks that expose false, misleading or made up propaganda from unintentional mistake or alligations made by well meaning, but uninformed sources or sources paid to give false, misleading or made up testimony.

long standing rule: look for "often repeats" of the same narrative in the competing media.
Stephen Johnson's rule: sort "mis-characterization" from "mis-quotation"
Gruff's law: only the narrative is remembered.

Keep up the good work, maybe a set of rules can be developed that the mass audience can be trained to use, that will tame the mind control impact of false and misleading propaganda

Posted by: snake | Feb 14 2021 11:40 utc | 75

Posted by: bevin | Feb 13 2021 18:21 utc | 11 -- "It is a long story and an old one- going back more than five centuries- but in essence this is about the struggle of the old Euro-creole Empire to maintain its supremacy...."

It can be posited, eg. by the study of food anthropology (the quality and diversity of food items; the fecundity / productivity of cultivated / domesticated crops; the food-as-medicine principles; etc), that Europe, and with that, "the West", had been laggards behind Eurasia when human existence is viewed on a timescale of millenia.

Andre Gunder Frank wrote "ReOrient" to explain that the present Western "predominance" in the world economy is fairly new, beginning when Europe stole the New World's natural resources, silver, gold, agricultural DNA, and the vast tracts of New World land, and then and used it to buy a ticket on the Eurasian train, enslaving India, then drugging China.

But the West, in absolute banal hubris, has been writing tomes to "explain" that this recent dominance is due to their civilisational superiority, social organisation, intelligence, diligence, military excellence, and even that God asked them to go subdue, rape, rob, and then teach the rest of the world how to become "normal nations" just like them !!!

Along the way, they forgot that we remember that they got their original lucky break by killing, raping, robbing, enslaving those amazingly creative brown people of the New World (floating market gardens; potatoes; maize; tomatoes; vanilla; chocolate; chilli peppers; quinoa; etc).

Posted by: kiwiklown | Feb 14 2021 11:41 utc | 76

i forgot to add at 75..

Juliana's rule @ 1: identify and sort content provider of the article or piece from the big name media
that gave the content its access to a mass audience.

Define mass media by the types of audiences they serve their contents to.

Classify content providers according to the types of false, misleading or made up (FMM) propaganda they generally write about

Match the mass media that often publish FMM propaganda to the content providers they often publish.

There is also a question of timing.. Often when a false narrative generally appears. there is a succession of media and content providers which can be identified as the driving forces behind the mind control narrative.

Posted by: snake | Feb 14 2021 12:08 utc | 77

William Gruff @ 71 -- Thoroughly enjoyable rant. Spot on!

J W @ 58 -- Another astute catch. Looks like a twofer from you!

Posted by: kiwiklown | Feb 14 2021 12:19 utc | 78

@kiwiklown | Feb 14 2021 10:46 utc | 73

Posted by: J W | Feb 13 2021 17:45 utc | 4 -- "Let's frame it another way: Can you trust Western MSMs on anything?"

Beautifully formed question!!!

Can you trust anyone on anything?

The answer is clearly no, as public trust in establishment figures has been thoroughly abused and exploited by so called journalists, scientists, NGOs, politicians, MSM, think tanks and what have you. Anyone trusting such figures without being able to directly verify their claims via access to hard data and first hand information sources are either extremely naive or abusing trust themselves.

Trust should be removed from the vocabulary of politics, science and journalism and be reserved for use in connection with close family and friends only.

Posted by: Norwegian | Feb 14 2021 12:22 utc | 79

Posted by: Norwegian | Feb 14 2021 12:22 utc | 79

Yes! Exploiting trust is the basic business plan, it's what the Internet is all about now. Provide free services or information, attract a large audience and gain their trust, and then exploit the heck out of it as long as they keep coming. Everybody still trusts Wikipedia, right? Then start all over again. You can do it many times. American enterpreneurs have hundreds of years of experience with exploiting trusting, naive people. Where do you think our State Dept. learned all of it's clever tricks? Even our politics works the same way. Everything is a grift. Everything is empty talk. After a while you get used to it, nothing really means anything.

Posted by: Bemildred | Feb 14 2021 12:48 utc | 80

Chinese State media has published something about the NYT article:

U.S.' continued deception, deflection, politicization

--//--

@ Posted by: js | Feb 14 2021 10:09 utc | 70

It was a possibility until the WHO investigation team visited the Wuhan lab and ruled it out. The SARS-CoV-2 is not in the lab's "catalogue" (I don't know how you call that in English) and there was no signs of any leaks of unprocessed samples.

The links you posted are from December 2020, when the speculation was still somewhat valid (even if a long shot).

--//--

@ Posted by: jean | Feb 13 2021 20:37 utc | 31

Which makes him the ideal investigator. He knows which variations of the coronavirus are from labs and which aren't.

It would be weird if he wasn't in the team.

Posted by: vk | Feb 14 2021 12:52 utc | 81

@ Posted by: Norwegian | Feb 14 2021 12:22 utc | 79; @ Posted by: Bemildred | Feb 14 2021 12:48 utc | 80

But there's a dialectics in the concept of trust: in order to preserve your trust, your "family and friends" will have to lie to someone else in the "public sphere" (i.e. the "world out there"). This is the mafia logic, where absolute trust (within your own circle) generates absolute mistrust (on the other circles).

That's why we have science, and that's why nothing will ever substitute critical thinking. You can still use the MSM as a source - if you know how to interpret it.

Posted by: vk | Feb 14 2021 12:55 utc | 82

Posted by: vk | Feb 14 2021 12:55 utc | 82

There you go, trying to build up trust again. I've got my eye on you Buddy./sarc

Posted by: Bemildred | Feb 14 2021 13:03 utc | 83

@vk | Feb 14 2021 12:55 utc | 82

Trust does not belong at all anywhere near science. Critical thinking in relation to science is important in evaluating an existing hypothesis and the data that goes along to support it, but critical thinking alone is not sufficient, if the data is missing it is not science, because there is no way to falsify the often outrageous claims (That is where we are with "global warming" and "covid").

Also required is imagination, without imagination you cannot formulate new laws from the information available and then you will never progress.

It boils down to being able to verify and replicate a scientific hypothesis through data and experiments, trust has no place in it. This also why "peer review" is fundamentally unscientific since it mostly functions as a gate-keeping mechanism defending mainstream views.

The Essence Of Science In 60 Seconds (Richard Feynman)
If it disagrees with experiment, its wrong. It doesn't matter how beautiful your guess is, it doesn't matter how smart who made the guess is, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, its wrong.

Transferred to journalism, a similar rule must apply. If a claim is made that cannot be verified independently, it is not journalism.

Posted by: Norwegian | Feb 14 2021 13:35 utc | 84

The virus didn't emerge in bats in Wuhan. The virus did indeed emerge in Wuhan (most probably) and it's closest related virus lives in bats. However, those bats live hundreds of kilometers away from Wuhan in South China. (China is very big.) So far there isn't a conclusive explanation of how the bat virus could mutate into a human virus and get to Wuhan without infecting anybody on it's way.

That's when the speculation starts with some intermediate host, frozen food (maybe contaminated with bat feces for instance), etc.

The problem is this bat virus specifically had been worked with at the Wuhan Institute of Virology which just a few hundred meters away from the "wet market" where the virus had been detected first.

Posted by: m | Feb 14 2021 13:46 utc | 85

The virus is likely synthetically modified. A natural evolution does not look plausible given the insert of the sequence for the cleavage site and that mutations are not distributed evenly over the sequence.

Whether the was a leak from the level 2 work in Wuhan or elsewhere is still an open question. That cases were first identified in Wuhan doesn't mean the virus necessarily came from there. There are other potential sites e.g. similar work on bat coronaviruses was carried out by Daszak's EcoHealth alliance as contractor for DoD in Georgia as reavealed by:
http://dilyana.bg/project-g-2101-pentagon-biolab-discovered-mers-and-sars-like-coronaviruses-in-bats/

Nevertheless it is hard to over state the conflict of interest in Daszak's heading of the WHO investigation.
https://www.gmwatch.org/en/news/latest-news/19691-who-investigation-descends-into-farce-in-rush-to-rule-out-a-lab-leak

Posted by: WastedTime | Feb 14 2021 14:51 utc | 86

@ Posted by: m | Feb 14 2021 13:46 utc | 87

So far there isn't a conclusive explanation of how the bat virus could mutate into a human virus and get to Wuhan without infecting anybody on it's way.

This is a false premise. Epidemics and pandemics can - and do - originate in a distant place. A recent case of this is MERS, which broke out in South Korea but was originated from bats, which mutated to infect camels, which then infected the populations of the Arabian Peninsula, where it had initially few cases before South Korea.

It is perfectly possible for a epidemic/pandemic virus to originate in a remote area only to fulfill its potential in a more densely populated area.

The WHO's investigative team itself has claimed the strongest hypothesis they're considering is that the SARS-CoV-2 originated in a population of bats outside Wuhan. This population X may or may not be from China, but they almost certainly isn't from Wuhan (as already stated here many times, the Chinese don't eat bat, and bat is not sold in Wuhan's wet market).

It's also very likely that there were intermediate animals between this original bat population and humans (the evolutionary distance between the SARS-CoV-2 and its earliest known ancestor is at least 75 years). The pangolin is one strong candidate, but there may have been even more intermediate animals.

Most importantly, the WHO has already discarded the possibility that the virus emerged from Wuhan's wet market. Yes, they stated the wet market is far from ideal, but nothing extraordinary by world standards (i.e. they've seen worse in other nations). Wuhan's wet market, therefore, was the spark of the epidemic because it was the earliest high human density place the SARS-CoV-2 found, but not the origin of the virus.

We also must consider that there is evidence of SARS-CoV-2 as early as October and November in Italy and the USA, respectively. The WHO's investigative team was only dedicated to Wuhan, so they didn't talk about that, but it is inevitable the hypothesis the virus originated in Italy will be considered. Indeed, the WHO's preemptive warning that the origin of the virus "may never be discovered" may be preparation to hide any potential scandal that could hurt a Western nation.

The problem is this bat virus specifically had been worked with at the Wuhan Institute of Virology which just a few hundred meters away from the "wet market" where the virus had been detected first.

No, because the SARS-CoV-2 wasn't registered in the lab's "catalogue" (which the WHO confirmed in the visit). Labs have a very precise and schematic database of what they have and what they don't have. You can't have it both ways: a lab that is competent enough to engineer a precise and devastating bioweapon but sloppy enough to let a rogue virus to proliferate and leak from its facilities.

Besides, you may have a survivor bias here: Wuhan is a big city with a good infrastructure by world standards. This is a place where the virus could both become an epidemic and where it could be first detected and mapped. If it broke out in, say, Lagos (Nigeria), most likely scenario would be it would simply wreck havoc, killing millions of people, and nobody would notice until it was completely out of control - say, when it would have reached the next big Western city with a competent medical facility to detect it.

Posted by: vk | Feb 14 2021 14:56 utc | 87

@ Posted by: WastedTime | Feb 14 2021 14:51 utc | 88

There are two problems with your theory:

1) it would imply dr. Daszak has not only the entire staff of the Wuhan lab (which are mainly Chinese), but also the entire Chinese government's backing. That would make him one of the most powerful men in the world;

2) the article of the NYT mainly quotes dr. Fischer (the Danish one) and uses her "heated discussion" line to vertebrate their narrative, not dr. Daszak's. And nowhere in the NYT's article it is even suggested he has links and conflicts of interests in relation to the Wuhan lab activities. Well, the narrative that the virus came out of a Wuhan lab is the best possible scenario for the West, so it is difficult to understand why the NYT would let such an opportunity to be missed.

Posted by: vk | Feb 14 2021 15:03 utc | 88

William [email protected] writes "We have a couple pathetic apologists for the #FakeNews Mockingbird mass media offering up defenses for their lies. I wonder if back in the real world they are fake journalists who are paid by the big business oligarchy to deliberately disinform the population and who are trying to defend their scumbaggery?"

The first sentence is a combination of personal abuse and misrepresentation, mixed with too much cowardice to name names. The second sentence is an ad hominem fallacy applied to the imaginary idea of journalists posting at MoA to defend their profession, a truly stupid ploy in rhetoric.

"B-b-but no individual sentence that the New York Langley Times published can be called a lie! Some sentences that are not related to one another just happened to end up close together in such a way that it is possible to misinterpret them to mean something else! It is just a little sloppy editing, and it is the readers' faults for jumping to conclusions!"

Like the imaginary journalists, this is imaginary. Being in quotes it is literally a falsification, that is to say, a lie. It is not an accident Gruff pretends to indignation over lies then lies. Basically everything Gruff says is a lie and any accidental grains of truth are there mostly by accident.

"Wrong! Moreover, trying to argue that the New York Langley Times is not being deliberately deceitful is itself deliberately deceitful. It is a lie. The mass media apologists in this thread know that their argument is bogus, and that makes it a lie. The individual sentences are irrelevant. Nobody remembers a particular sentence five seconds after reading it unless it is one of those key phrases that is being hammered by multiple outlets into the public consciousness like 'Capitol riots!', which happens to be a full blown lie in that case. What people remember is the narrative, and if the narrative that the servants of empire in the Mockingbird mass media are manufacturing is false then it is a lie, and those fake
'journalists' producing that lie of a narrative are liars."

Gruff's narrative here is that somebody said the NYT wasn't lying in this story, except of course Gruff can't quote anyone saying that---I explicitly said I thought it was a lie---which is why Gruff made up the imaginary quote above. False narratives are I still think lies, which shows it is Gruff who is lying here. In particular, Gruff is repeating the conventional wisdom of conservative media, and the cryptofascist clique in the commentariat (the majority?) There were riots at the Capital, they were by Trump supporters trying to overturn the the election despite Trump's loss. Gruff's narrative is worse than the NYT article because it does rely on the lie direct. The insistence that there is no difference between direct lying, total falsification like Gruff's made-up quotes and the rhetorical trickery in the NYT article is partly about a bare-faced liar trying to accuse the target first, as a distraction. But the real need I think is for an uncritical rejection of all facts, including well-known and well-supported facts, by the simple expedient of an ad hominem fallacy. The NYT is the CIA (not true, you know, Gruff lies all the time,) therefore no facts ever be acknowledged. The NYT article doesn't support it's own allegations and should be rejected out of hand. But NYT articles where the quotes do support the articles? Oh, that's a different matter altogether...but that's the truth that the Gruffs of this world hate.

"'Those Trumpers' are perhaps not 'sophisticated' enough to fool themselves into believing that the New York Langley Times is truthful by parsing the individual sentences and realizing that none of those sentences on their own are false. Unlike the sophisticated morons (sophomores?) who do manage that feat of self-deceit, 'those Trumpers' only look at the narratives being pushed by that filthy shit-stained rag of a journal and recognize those narratives
for what they are: LIES. In this regard 'those Trumpers' are far wiser than the empire's disgusting #FakeNews fake 'journalists' and their sophisticated moron apologists."

You don't have to be terribly sophisticated to realize there is a difference between just plain making stuff up (like Gruff's imagined quotations) and rhetorical trickery. The notion of a direct lie, as opposed to other kinds of lies, is not some newfangled hoity-toity word game, it's a simple and useful idea, easily grasped by those willing to make any effort at all. Only political swindlers like Gruff need the uncritical rejection of facts, only manipulators like Gruff need to dismiss inconvenient facts with an ad hominem fallacy of liar. The ocean of self-pity at being looked down on I suspect is neurotic projection, an uneasy fear that the contempt the Gruffs feel for their targets may be returned in kind.

Simply dismissing inconvenient facts because of an uncritical insistence that the people you don't like are liars, liars, liars without troubling to draw even the simplest distinction between direct lies, simple fabulation and cheap, commonplace rhetoric only helps political swindlers like Gruff. Again, it is the conservative media that are the most prone to simple straightforward fiction, like Gruff's quotations. Like Gruff, they don't even give others the implicit respect of *pretending* to support their claims by adding even irrelevant quotes! And, again, conservative media are just as prone to repeating conventional wisdom, or official ideology (which comes in variants, for the same reason cars come in different models, namely, marketing to different tastes.) These bare-faced lies are not felt to be lies but are deemed obvious truths. The cure for this is *not* just shrieking liar, liar, liar but knowing more. Knowing things is the key to effective critical thinking. A gut reaction of skepticism isn't critical thinking, it's a gut reaction, period. Ignorance is the true shield of ideology/conventional wisdom. Simple suppression of the news is a powerfully effective form of lying, though still not the lie direct. But contra the Gruffs this is not the sole province of the so-called MSM (always implied to be liberal or Jewish for the more advanced cryptofascists.) Conservative mainstream media are even more apt to suppress news for national security reasons.

To cut to the nitty gritty, to address what is probably the real issue, Gruff can't prove Trump won the election or that the attempted autogolpe of January 6 didn't happen by merely screaming "Liar!" at the TV set. That ploy is a shameless lie itself.

Posted by: steven t johnson | Feb 14 2021 15:26 utc | 89

Does a skinny person indignantly cry "Ad hominem!" if one claims they are fat? What a telling response! Perhaps they only pretend to be skinny in online fora.

Posted by: William Gruff | Feb 14 2021 16:15 utc | 90

Of course is SARS-CoV-2 not registered under that name at Wuhan in the records of 2019. The designation "SARS-CoV-2" stems from the WHO and has been introduced only in Feb. 2020. The Wuhan Institute of Virology did however work with RaTG13 - the bat virus from south China - which is the closests known relative to SARS-CoV-2. In fact, it was Shi Zhengli from the Wuhan Institute of Virology who had discovered RaTG13 in 2013.

I have never claimed that SARS-CoV-2 is a bioweapon. Gain-of-function research isn`t about creating bioweapons. It is about modifying viruses that accure naturally in such a manner that they mimic hypothetical viruses that could emerge naturally in the future and might pose a serious epidemic threat. The rationale behind this is that by doing research with such viruses before they emerge provides mankind with the knowledge to fight them when a similar virus eventually does emerge naturally.

I have also never claimed that SARS-CoV-2 -emerged- at the wet market in Wuhan. I wrote that it had been -detected- there first.

Posted by: m | Feb 14 2021 16:57 utc | 91

Everyone just chill, wait for the report. It'll be public. The journos know exactly as much as we do, which is jack diddly squat.

The usual suspects being hostile to WHO means the WHO isn't as infiltrated as the OPCW so there may be some hope for truth yet.

The more they fight the WHO, the more it exposes that they do not control it. And my friends, that, is a good thing.

Posted by: A.L. | Feb 14 2021 17:39 utc | 92

Quoting myself @25 "The OP is correct I think is calling this a lie, but it is not the lie direct." William Gruff lied about that and spun a huge fake quotation, satirical fiction to back it up because Gruff never tells the truth about anything. At least, not on purpose, so far as I can tell.

But yes, if someone claims that a fat person is lying and that this is proven by the fact they are fat, then yes, they most certainly do say, ad hominem fallacy. Similarly, if the mainstream media (all flavors) generally refrain from direct lies---other than the conventional wisdom/official ideology/civic religion/common illusions and delusions---you cannot refute facts found in the mainstream media by the false claim that no facts can be accepted because ad hominem, everything they say is lies. It's not. The article in the OP was deceptive (aka lying) but it did not directly lie. It is an example demonstrating Gruff and other Trumpers who deny reality are relying on a fallacy. Not everything in the media is a lie. Saying it is, is a lie.

Posted by: steven t johnson | Feb 14 2021 17:40 utc | 93

Global Times Editorial today proves conclusively that Jake Sullivan is merely continuing Pompeo's policy of lies and distortions while misusing science in a failing attempt to politicize the pandemic and concludes:

"While the new US administration claims that it is different from its predecessor, it has hardly kept its distance from the previous policies on major issues involving China and COVID-19. Such self-contradictive moves will only cripple the current administration's abilities to make clear and resolute policies. The dominant authority of science and rationality is fading in American society, and desire often goes ahead of facts. This is the most significant sign that the US is declining."

How's that for a swift kick to the groin--BidenCo is no different from TrumpCo. Or maybe this was the blow:

"The only goal of the US to attack China with COVID-19 is to cover its own ineptitude. But the world will not always be fooled by the US."

Yes! China is now enjoying the Lunar New Year and welcoming the Year of the Ox with extremely few pandemic issues while the Outlaw US Empire continues to record 100,000+ new cases daily and a death toll that's not abating. In other words, its policy remains a failure--one that it can't hide.

It has yet to dawn on the Neoliberalcons that every time they open their mouths to smear Russia or China all they accomplish is digging the hole they're mired inside deeper, nor have they figured out that it's a Credibility Hole that lies and such only serve to deepen while Truth is what fills it in. But Truth is something they cannot abide since their entire gambit is based on lies and falsehoods.

Posted by: karlof1 | Feb 14 2021 18:08 utc | 94

@vk | Feb 14 2021 14:56 utc | 89

You can't have it both ways: a lab that is competent enough to engineer a precise and devastating bioweapon but sloppy enough to let a rogue virus to proliferate and leak from its facilities.

COVID is EVALI

Posted by: Lurk | Feb 14 2021 18:38 utc | 95

vk | Feb 14 2021 12:55 utc | 82

Ah, science plus marxism = utopia!...
Now let's all pronounce our material dialects correctly - OR ELSE!...

Posted by: tucenz | Feb 14 2021 19:00 utc | 96

vk @89: "You can't have it both ways: a lab that is competent enough to engineer a precise and devastating bioweapon but sloppy enough to let a rogue virus to proliferate and leak from its facilities."

SARS Mk.II was neither precise nor intended to be very devastating, at least where death toll is concerned. It was just the closest that the CIA could find off the shelf to a "Goldilocks virus": Not so virulent that the Chinese wouldn't be able to stop it within their own borders like they did with SARS Mk.I but sufficiently more virulent that it shuts China's economy down and lets America take the lead in the Trade War. The virus didn't leak either. It was deliberately seeded in China's national transportation hub just in time for China's biggest travel week of the year.

Posted by: William Gruff | Feb 14 2021 21:53 utc | 97

vk @89: "You can't have it both ways...."

Typically simplistic American "mindset". To them, it is always either-or, black-white, good guys-bad guys. False choices. False logic. I do not read vk's bombast, but this phrase jumped out. Neither do I read those who "challenge" Gruffy. It is all about so little time to read so much. And about sense and sensibility.

Posted by: William Gruff | Feb 14 2021 21:53 utc | 99 -- "SARS Mk.II was neither precise nor intended to be very devastating.... just the closest that the CIA could find off the shelf to a "Goldilocks virus".....

Highly plausible fit to the events as played out on the ground. We can also suggest that Wuhan was a field test for a virus product undergoing continuing "improvement". I note that China mounted a war-response, continue to maintain a war-footing (medically speaking), and now counter-strike with suggestions for the US leadership to invite the WHO to inspect their bio-labs.

Posted by: kiwiklown | Feb 15 2021 0:29 utc | 98

Posted by: karlof1 | Feb 14 2021 18:08 utc | 96 -- "It has yet to dawn on the Neoliberalcons that every time they open their mouths to smear Russia or China all they accomplish is digging the hole they're mired inside deeper, nor have they figured out that it's a Credibility Hole that lies and such only serve to deepen while Truth is what fills it in. But Truth is something they cannot abide since their entire gambit is based on lies and falsehoods."

That is what the banality of evil looks like.

I call it swirling down the toilet bowl.

Pity those Americans and their ilk who follow US 'leadership' down into the sewer.

If I am a youngish American, I would look at options to live elsewhere for the next 2 or 3 decades to let Amedika be great again.

Posted by: kiwiklown | Feb 15 2021 0:37 utc | 99

From bats in Yunnan to Wuhan. 1300 km, by train it is 1500 km, "6.5 to 8 hours" by high speed train. Yunnan has plenty of bats (mountains, hence caves, and warm climate, a lot of insects for bats to eat), and it had a COVID-like epidemic in a mining city. In entire Eurasia there are weasel-like animals, and according to Wikipedia, some species thrive near rice fields (I guess because of rodents and other small mammals that become weasel food).

I thought that weasels were a natural vector, but the speed of transmission over larger distances may be lacking. And I do not know about Chinese efforts to gauge infections among weasels. The fastest traveling species are birds and humans, and China sports a vast fast-speed train network and a lot of internal air connections. I am still thinking that raising animals for furs is done in colder climates than south and central China, as dense and long fur is an adaptation to cold, and the best fur is harvested in winter.

The transmission through weasel-like animals in the history of COVID-19 virus may explains why it infects minks so effectively. Most confusingly, these viruses mutate quickly, and some strains are highly infectious and asymptomatic. This is the winning combination for the virus, but it may start killing hosts, however detrimental it is to its spread. So the public question is: how and where the Wuhan virus emerged? One can theorize a number of scenarios...

Posted by: Piotr Berman | Feb 15 2021 0:51 utc | 100