>Speculation is starting again that the virus might have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, because it's such an intriguing coincidence, but reasonable people do not currently believe it was a deliberate Chinese conspiracy.
The weight of the evidence is that it's very unlikely that it came from anywhere else. Given that one of the specific purposes of the institute was to intentionally mutate bat virus coronaviruses into a form that can infect humans to study, and there have been plenty of witness suggesting the lab followed the practice of throwing away used lab equipment without first washing it and locals would regularly search through their bins to collect glass to recycle.

In other coronavirus news, massive protests in Brazil against Bolsanaro or however it's spelt.

>>33825
I support this idea. Big threads are big.

>>33825
I suspect that even if Cummings does come back with hard evidence it won't matter much. I know this is what the Tory party wants me to feel, but their policy of stonewalling everything and admitting to nothing does appear very effective and enough of the country have entered a hybrid serf-bourgeoisie mode of thought in which they really think the thin blue line of conservatism, and the World King himself more specifically, is the only thing between them and horde of students and swarthy types forcing the country to join the Euro and eat whatever the lads in the food review thread keep posting. If there is a ministerial casuality it'll probably be Hancock, or maybe Cummings revealing that was the plan all along has scuppered that idea. The Labour Party might do some needling, but they appear to be run by a gender a swapped Nichola Murray and Peter Mandelson, a man so nostalgic for 1997 to 2005 I don't know if he's even been lucid for following sixteen years. Not to mention having hardly made a peep during the more severe stages of the pandemic the party doesn't have a leg to stand on in the eyes of many.

Sorry about the photo, I attached it by mistake and I don't know how to remove it.

>>33834
If you click on 'choose file' again but click cancel it should get rid of the image selected.

>>33834
>Sorry about the photo, I attached it by mistake and I don't know how to remove it.

Apologies are too late. Expect to find yourself hanging in a police cell by morning and the videotape of your cell later being found to have accidentally been taped over by the entire series of Boohbah.

>>33828

>one of the specific purposes of the institute was to intentionally mutate bat virus coronaviruses into a form that can infect humans

It's important to be pedantic enough to note, here, that this doesn't constitute "man made" any more than a golden retriever is man made.

Even if it is a deadly bioweapon, the leak was more likely some prick forgetting to wash their hands than deliberate conspiracy. It's hard to see what China has really acheived if this was some master stroke of villainy on their part.

>>33838

I think the general scientific consensus is that dogs having sex with dogs isn't man made.

>>33839

A lot of it is though.

>>33839
Lad wtf. What do you think breeding is?

>>33839

Different kind of Lab m8

>>33838

Saying it escaped from a lab due to carelessness is v. different from saying it's a bioweapon

>>33838
Arguing whether a virus produced via gain of function experimentation is man-made or not is the last response I expected, but I guess this is .gs after all.

A virus made this way is the intended result of direct human actions. It is not genetically engineered or manufactured. That's the distinction.

It's worth pointing out too that this type of research has been going on in the west for decades too, but there had been increasing amounts of pushback against it as the huge risks of an accidental release far outweigh the small benefits of doing the research. These Chinese labs were set up directly on the back of American experience and funding.

>>33843
>>33844

I never implied anyone was saying that, you carpet-baggers. I was just making the statement for posterity, since a lot of conspiracy loons will leap directly from one to the other; and they will definitely conflate what amounts to selective breeding for research purposes with outright Umbrella Corp genetic manufacturing.

>>33845
>I never implied anyone was saying that, you carpet-baggers.
Maybe you didn't imply it but you set the rest of us off.

So if China did create a more virulent strain of bat-itis and through their carelessness created a global pandemic, if we have solid evidence of this, how much compo are we owed?

>>33847
China would simply deny it. They're committing genocide at the moment and most countries are happy to accept their denial of this. I'd imagine the world is also too reliant on Chinese investment and manufacturing for there to be any form of real sanctions against them.

>>33847

It's about time someone dropped a load of plague fleas on them again.

>>33848
>I'd imagine the world is also too reliant on Chinese investment and manufacturing for there to be any form of real sanctions against them.

Probably, but it would be fun if we did an audit on the CCP members overseas assets anyway. Or at least that is until we find out that Xi Jinping owns half of London and is now the real Mr Kipling who can buy for our silence with an exceedingly good bribe.

You'd think that now China is a hardworking business corporate environment, at least there would be plenty of opium going spare for the rest of us. But I haven't had even a sniff. This is absolutely scandalous.

The WHO has renamed all the variants with Greek letters, to stop India being offended when people are more afraid of their variant than ours. I think we're now the Alpha variant, and they have the Delta variant. The WHO says these names are easier to say, but also that the official scientific names (so, like, B1.64.3 or whatever) won't be changing, so it really is just to stop people calling them the South African variant and the Brazilian variant and so on, since those are perfectly easy to say already and we didn't need to rename them.

Maybe, just maybe, the WHO have no clue what they're doing?

>>33852
Or maybe they don't want leaders acting like cunts in the way that Seppo with the second-order combover did.

>>33852
Welcome to 2015.

https://www.who.int/news/item/08-05-2015-who-issues-best-practices-for-naming-new-human-infectious-diseases

>>33852
It's a shame they didn't use the NATO phonetic. We could've had a press announcement that Gove is carrying Charlie.

>>33853
Did anyone* really give a fuck about this; we might've had people (mostly continentals) talking about the English variant as a joke but I think we all understood that Indians don't emit covid. I don't think even back in the days of Spanish flu that Spaniards ended up targeted.

*aside from faceless morons on the internet

>>33852

It's sensible advice. It's not just about avoiding hurt feelings, but preventing the illusion that the "Indian variant" or "South African variant" will be contained within those borders. Nepal is also suffering from the "Indian variant", for example, making it an unhelpful misnomer.

>>33855
>talking about the English variant as a joke

Mate, you've seen the pictures of Singaporean, Japanese, and other-non Chinese peoples being beaten for their association with the virus.

The regional specifications do nothing apart from foster blame or negative sentiments towards the connected demographic. There is no advantage. Yeah, we're smart enough to know x, but is the next lad? Why is the location where a virus ended up mutating important information?

>>33856

Also they don't want to stigmatise countries for discovering variants. We don't actually know where these variants came from, we just know where they were first detected.

The UK, India and Brazil have high infection rates, but they also have big biotech industries with plenty of genome sequencing capacity. Countries that don't have that capacity are actively dis-incentivised from building it up by the fact that they'll get blamed for whatever variants they happen to find first.

>>33857
>Mate, you've seen the pictures of Singaporean, Japanese, and other-non Chinese peoples being beaten for their association with the virus.

No, I've heard of specific incidents involving Asian people getting abuse but that's just standard yellow-peril stuff fed by the virus specifically originating in China no matter how you name it. America specifically has a long tension with its Asian community.

The kind of asks you get around policing language are bullshit infantilization designed around the idea that racists won't just be racist and the false premise that we're language zombies.

>>33855
>Did anyone* really give a fuck about this
The East Asians who suffered harassment and violence for vaguely looking like they came from the same part of the world as first discovered the virus certainly gave rather a lot of fucks.

>>33859
>No, I've heard of specific incidents involving Asian people getting abuse but that's just standard yellow-peril stuff fed by the virus specifically originating in China no matter how you name it.
Jolly good, first step is acknowledging your ignorance.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-54048546

>The kind of asks you get around policing language are bullshit infantilization designed around the idea that racists won't just be racist and the false premise that we're language zombies.

What's your argument for using it? Why is it useful information to know where a variant was first documented, as opposed to the specifics of how that variant operates? What possible benefit is there?

If your grasp on language is so tenuous that you would lose all comprehension as a result of refraining from calling something an inflammatory name, then you really have more things to worry about.

>>33861
>What's your argument for using it? Why is it useful information to know where a variant was first documented, as opposed to the specifics of how that variant operates? What possible benefit is there?

What's the argument for not. As I've said, people are going to be racist to Asians no matter what you call it and I can think of no historical precedent from Spanish Flu to assume the name carried a stigma despite being in a supposedly less enlightened age.

You're just struggling to understand this because rewriting language is the most textbook example of a groupthink activity that achieves nothing and avoids the actual issue.

>>33862
Those who were hit by the spanish flu may well have lived in a less enlightened age, but they also lived in an age where you could go your entire life without actually encountering a Spaniard. The convenient point in our history after the Spanish armada, but before globalisation. It does not seem to require too great a leap of logic to think that although altering language is usually pointless busywork that achieves very little, in a modern interconnected society where everyone's spending 16 hours a day online and where people move between countries with trivial ease, the incredibly marginal effect changing language around is multiplied a thousandfold by social media exposure and the proximity of stupid nutters to a diverse selection of potential targets now that they're actually pretty likely indeed to pass a chinaman in the street.

>>33862
>As I've said, people are going to be racist to Asians no matter what you call it
Yes but if you call it something like that then more people are going to be racist to Asians. And they're going to take it further. This is demonstrably true. Something like this obviously isn't going to stop all racists being racist but it encourages them less, which is the point.

>>33862

We had a US president who referred to COVID-19 as "the China virus" and "kung-flu". Words matter, which is why I would be insta-banned for using a variety of words to describe certain ethnic minorities.

This isn't political correctness gone mad, it's a well-reasoned decision by the World Health Organisation that is in accordance with their existing policies on naming infectious diseases. The actual issue is that many countries don't want to test for new variants because they don't want to be blamed for it; changing the naming convention to neutral rather than location-based names is quite obviously a sensible response to this problem.

>>33862

Listen m8 I would very much fight to the death for your right to use the gamer word, I believe freedom of speech is paramount to a free society.

But this is really nothing worth getting up in arms about.

ZERO DEATHS, BITCHES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57320320

Told you it was just the sniffles.

>>33865

>"kung-flu"

Even for a shit pun, that is pretty shit.

>changing the naming convention to neutral rather than location-based names is quite obviously a sensible response to this problem

True, and not least because giving a variant a name of origin can be misleading. What if the variant itself originated in country X, but was only first described in country Y.


Fun fact: The Spanish Flu got its name not because it may have originated in Spain, which it didn't (the most likely origin was a chicken farm in Kansas), but because Spanish newspapers at the time were among the few that weren't censored due to the war, as Spain was a neutral party in WWI. So they reported freely on the effects the pandemic was having on their population, which led people in other countries to believe that it had originated in Spain altogether.

>>33863
>they also lived in an age where you could go your entire life without actually encountering a Spaniard

I think you're wrong to assume that the world didn't have globalisation in the early 20th century. For example there's an observation Tommy made in the trenches that many Germans spoke English because many had actually worked in the Britain as shopkeepers along with a fair amount of evidence in literature from the period of upper class travels.

Then there's obviously the US which was still a magnet for immigration during the period and the press being, well, about the same as today but with wider circulation.

>>33864
>if you call it something like that then more people are going to be racist to Asians

Are they really, or is this just an assumption like we're throwing fucking slurs around and making crude drawings. No, I do not hold the bureaucratic mechanisations of an international organisation with a public image problems in high-esteem. We instead seem to be in a moral panic that believes we're having pogroms in Middlesbrough.

>>33871

There's a clear correlation between "Chinese virus" and anti-Asian sentiment.

https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306154

>>33870
>>"kung-flu"
>Even for a shit pun, that is pretty shit.
I remember I chortled when I first heard it.

>>33871
>Are they really, or is this just an assumption like we're throwing fucking slurs around and making crude drawings.

Yes. Turns out feeding anti-x sentiment has an impact on x people.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-48692863

You can bury your head in the sand if you like, and claim that because you can't see a direct link that...whatever, but there's clearly a relationship.

>pogroms in Middlesborough

I know you're joking, but this type of joke makes you seem a bit obtuse. No, it's not pogroms in MIddlesborough, it's people getting beaten up or harassed all over.

Cineworld are trying to lure people back into the cinema with private screenings and gaming sessions; from £119 for up to 20 people. I'm tempted to book one to see if my girlfriend fancies a shag in a cinema, bringing back memories from our teenage days.

https://www.cineworld.co.uk/static/en/uk/venue-hire-events/film-screenings

>>33877
At last, Dwarf Fortress the way it was meant to be played. On a big public screening with 20 friends.

>>33878

Nobody who plays Dwarf Fortress has 20 friends.

>>33878
No no, this is for games like Artemis Bridge Simulator.

>>33825
The top left window is a cubist Hitler portrait.

You can see the gentlemen's heads are each one lens of Hitler's eyeglass. The nose is present in the crease under the lower chaps left arm, and obviously his tie is a vertical moustache. And then you have that little peek of combover/parting at the top left, where the artist has cleverly disguised the hair as shading.

>>33881

Hitler didn't wear glasses.

>>33882

He wore readers, but it was a state secret. They were always airbrushed out in official photos, because they implied weakness or some such twaddle.

There's debate over whether he had one ball, but there's good evidence to show that he was wounded in the groin in 1916. Records do not support the idea that the Albert Hall was used to store human tissue; the notion that Klara Pölzl was a dirty bugger is pure conjecture.

>>33882
They could conceivably be eyes aside a furrowed brow. Though maybe it's Roosevelt instead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzgmBorqqNs

>>33888
OK so we can look forward to China releasing their medical records with the part where they caught Covid deleted.

>>33889

Haha. Yes.

Except no, because releasing the records would mean complying with the authority of a foreign government and that would be very very loss of face.

Getting ready to go to a vaccine walk-in and I get the Dreaded Notification.

Fuck my life.

>>33891
If it's the 'may have had contact' one then I wouldn't read too much into it. I had one last year and nothing come of it, they don't even give you a follow up text.

>>33892
It's this one.

>>33893
Oh fair enough then, RIP.

>>33891
There's a place near me that has hundreds of signs pointing to it, and a huge banner proclaiming "COVID-19 VACCINATION CENTRE". I went there yesterday, because being vaccinated on a Saturday is obviously the best and the standard methods keep offering me Tuesdays and Wednesdays which are much less convenient, and the bloody place was shut. All these stories of people just rocking up and asking, and when I try it they lock all the doors and hide like I'm a bloody Jehovah's Witness. Twats.

I got my jab in lads!

>>33906
First or second? And did they offer you a Saturday? I've been getting hounded for weeks to go for my second one, but they just wouldn't give me a Saturday whatever I did. Now I have to wake up an hour earlier than usual on Wednesday. And if I get horrible side effects, I'll get them at work instead of at home on a comfy Sunday.

>>33907

First. I was aiming for midweek because I had to go to another city for mine.

>>33906
Nice one, did she come?

>>33891
You're not alone, looks like I caught the dreaded lurgy for real. PCR test is on the way to confirm, fingers crossed it won't be too bad since I already had my first jab.

>>33958
I've been testing myself every day and it's now 6 days since I was 'exposed', and I'm still feeling fine and negative, so hopefully I'm in the clear.

Don't worry Covid sufferers, soon Grace™ will be paying you a visit.

I'm unsure on talk therapy feature.

>>33958

Fortunately those things are about as accurate as sticking your finger in the air, so you've got a good chance it's a false positive.

>>33960
Hmm, starting to slowly clamber out of uncanny valley, aren't we?
Shame about the whirring noise and the tics, but the skin is on another level from five years ago. Give it another decade or two.
When I'm old(er) and demented, I can see myself rambling away to this thing's successor, telling stories of cuntoffs I have seen, the likes of which you just don't get any more, kids of today all polite and shit.

>>33961

I'm sure at least some of you lads will already know this, but first-line tests value sensitivity over specificity by design (meaning they'll give a greater number of false positives). The results of those possible positives are then narrowed down in the more (usually more expensive or labour intensive) specific tests like PCR, culture, or what have you.

It's massively more efficient to catch all possible positives with a highly sensitive test and then hone in on them. Likewise, a first-line test that gave a load of false negatives would be useless and let more infected people wander around than is necessary.

>>33960

Would.

>>33964
Bear in mind she's only pink from the neck up. That thermal camera is attached to what looks like a steel chassis using M6 bolts. There's car batteries and hoverboard wheels at the bottom.
Enjoy your meat grinder.

>>33963

That's great, but they give a shitload of false negatives too. We were given a load of lateral flow kit (care of Hancock's mates I'm sure) early on in the pandemic, but they failed pretty much every aspect of our internal QC audits.

They're better than nothing, and they have probably improved over the last year, but just worth bearing in mind. If I was at all concerned I'd go get myself a proper PCR test.

t. lablad

>>33965

If a man can shag a postbox, he can shag a pile of scaffolding with a rubber face.

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/man-sex-with-postbox-wigan-8459224

I have not had covid, not had the vaccine, not had any covid test, not had any symptoms, not had any notifications on that cursed app.

It may as well have all been made up.

>>33968
How do you know you haven't had Covid?

>>33965
Got a mouth though. I bet those eggheads in Hong Kong have thought about it.

>>33968
Don't worry, soon you'll feel the economic damage and yearn for the halcyon days of Cameron's austerity.

>>33963
From what I've been reading on most news sites and government releases I was under the impression that the lateral flow tests being used in the UK were specifically chosen to have a very low false positive rate at the expense of a high false negative rate, with the sole aim of catching people with high viral loads rather than trying to catch as many cases as possible whilst upsetting and confusing people who get false negatives.

>>33971

That sounds retarded enough to be true yeah.

I don't work for the WHO or anything but I can't really see why such a strategy would be anything but unhelpful. Any ideas?

>>33973

If you're doing large-scale testing of people who probably don't have COVID, false positives can be a much bigger problem than false negatives.

At the moment, less than 0.1% of the population are estimated to have an active COVID-19 infection. A hypothetical false positive rate of 1% might seem perfectly acceptable, but right now that would mean that 90% of positive test results were false positives.

We use highly sensitive PCR tests (high false positive, low false negative) for people with symptoms and highly specific lateral flow tests (low false positive, high false negative) for people without symptoms. That's not totally daft, it's certainly the most sensible way of augmenting our PCR testing capacity with lateral flow, it doesn't undermine trust by asking loads of COVID-negative people to self-isolate, but it's not clear if the lateral flow tests are actually doing anything useful.

>>33971
>whilst upsetting and confusing people who get false negatives.
I meant false positives.

>>33974

A false negative is an undetected COVID case whichever way you look at it. A high false positive rate on lateral flows which are then confirmed by highly accurate and specific PCR is the only sensible approach, and I suspect anything else is just retroactive justification for the fact the kits are shite.

Even positive PCRs are sent away to The Big Lab (PHE) for typing. The only way this conceivably helps is in keeping the lab testing infrastructure from being overwhelmed; but the lab testing infrastructure exists for a much higher workload than it is currently handling, because we built it that way during the peak.

Doing it according to whether people have symptoms or not seems completely arbitrary given that we know asymptomatic carriers are just as capable of spreading.

>>33978

>Doing it according to whether people have symptoms or not seems completely arbitrary given that we know asymptomatic carriers are just as capable of spreading.

Asymptomatic people are much less likely to have COVID, so the acceptable false positive rate is correspondingly lower. I'm not a massive fan of lateral flow, I think Hancock was mainly keen on them to push the testing numbers higher, but they can definitely do some good if used sensibly.

https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/20/even-imperfect-covid-19-tests-can-help-control-the-pandemic/

Had my second jab of Biontech today.

My arm is starting to hurt a bit, just like last time. They told me that because I had symptoms after the first shot, they are going to be even worse after the second one.

But oh well, I'll just spend the weekend in bed. Small price to pay.

>>34000

Have some Chicken Soup, Lucozade, and the latest edition of 2000AD. Will have you right as rain lad.

>>34000

I was expecting a bad reaction to my second one, but I felt fucking fantastic instead.

I'm a bit worried, over 30 and recently got the text. If I'm not intending on going back to the office and am happy wearing a mask, is there any point putting off the vaccine until I have to take it?

>>34003
Just fucking get the jab.

>>34003
Given the choice between catching a bad flu now or at some unspecified future time, I choose delay.

>>34007

How the fuck are people like you still calling it a "bad flu"

>>34008
It's asymptomatic in significant amount of people. Bad flu doesn't really do it justice, it's more like nothing.

But of course I'm just saying that. It could just flat kill you, it's a bad idea to risk contracting it, but arguments like >>34005 just don't quite have the necessary weight behind them. Why shouldn't I wait an extra day?

>>34013

>Why shouldn't I wait an extra day?

Nobody asked that.

>>34013

>Why shouldn't I wait an extra day?

Because the Delta variant is running rampant and we're headed for another full lockdown. The infectivity of Delta seems to match the anticipated worst case scenario. We're not sure about how those cases will translate into hospitalisations and deaths, but the reasonable range is between "hospitals suspending routine treatment again" and "people dying in hospital car parks". The easing of lockdown and the rollout of the vaccine has given people the impression that the pandemic is all over bar the shouting, but this is the most dangerous point we've been at since last March.

The faster we vaccinate everyone, the better chance we have of being out of the next lockdown by Christmas. I wish that was scaremongering, but the data has taken a sudden and severe turn for the worse over the past few weeks and the medium-term situation is looking grim.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/986709/S1237_SPI-M-O_Consensus_Statement.pdf

>>34015
Does this mean we're not properly going back into the office anytime soon?

I'm still regretting spending all this time in London when I could've been renting somewhere with a much lower cost of living.

>>34013
Not taking the jab is being a selfish cunt to all others in your family and community. Go ahead and keep reading whatever fucking bullshit you're reading on antivax, but people like you are literally the problem now.

>>34017
As far as I'm concerned, if people don't want to take the Oxford or Pfizer vaccine, they should be forcibly given the Mozabique vaccine instead.

>>34017
I'm sure you've convinced him now.

>>34013
It's a shame the virus doesn't discriminate by severity of being a selfish cunt because you'd definitely be dying a horrible death.

>>34022

Bullying and aggressively shaming people into agreeing with you is a fine tactic, works every time.

>>34017

I think people have forgotten what it means to make a personal sacrifice for a common good.

Just look at WWII, when our entire economy and public life switched into collective wartime mode in order to end the war. Food was rationed, consumer goods were almost unavailable, and millions of men in their prime gave their lives on the Western front to defeat Hitler. And nobody ever really complained.

And now you're telling me that you can't be arsed to fucking have a vaccine jab because you're worried it could put you in bed for a couple of days? The sacrifice you're making is infinitely smaller than the above, and you could be protecting your own health and that of countless others around you by getting the vaccine.

That said, I am really feeling yesterday's second jab. They weren't lying when they said that I had to expect a more severe reaction if the first shot already gave me symptoms.

>>34026
>Just look at WWII, when our entire economy and public life switched into collective wartime mode in order to end the war. Food was rationed, consumer goods were almost unavailable, and millions of men in their prime gave their lives on the Western front to defeat Hitler. And nobody ever really complained.

Isn't this and the whole Blitz spirit thing a myth? Crime was rife during the war.

>>34027

>Crime was rife during the war.

As is scepticism about the vaccine nowadays. But I think by and large, public opinion was about as united behind the war effort as it is now in the fight against covid.