>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.

>>34026
Wikipedia gives an upper estimate of 350,000 Allied soldiers killed on the Western Front.

Does this not prove your tendency to exaggerate how deadly things are?

>>34026

That was an actual war. We were still homogeneous with a sense of collective unity then. This is the fucking flu. Grow up.

Happy Pride! But please stop talking about WW2 none of you silly bastards know a howizter from an Operation Husky.

Anyone who makes an argument that revolves around how things were better in the good old days is an idiot.

>>34030

No we weren't, what an ostentatiously stupid thing to say.

>>34030

Yeah, the shotgun cartridge in the gut compared to the gunshot in a kneecap version of the Flu. Fuck off Lawrence, maybe you can get a slot on Infowars for your next gig.

>>34029

>Does this not prove your tendency to exaggerate how deadly things are?

That doesn't meaningfully detract from my argument though.


>>34032

>Anyone who makes an argument that revolves around how things were better in the good old days is an idiot.

Some things were indeed though. Just look at job security or the welfare state. Or the environment.

>>34035

Yeah and children respected their elders. The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers. It's just not like how it was.

>>34035
>the welfare state
Wasn't this an Attlee thing, in other words, post-Blitz? I understand this question has the potential to devolve into a fact-free bad-faith shitstorm, but it can't be any worse than the shite currently being flung here.

>>34039

>in other words, post-Blitz?

It was meant more as a general retort to the "good old days" argument by >>34032 lad, not specifically in relation to WWII.

The Attlee government founded the NHS in 1946, that much is true. Attlee was also instrumental in creating the post-war consensus. Which then pretty much directly led to the malaise years of 1970s Britain. Although it's unfair to paint the 1970s as just a British problem, as they were shit in many Western countries. Which was owed to things like a downturn in long-term economic cycles and the inability of left-wing Big Governments to offset the effects.

You lot didn't used to be this easily riled, I should leave room for bad faith more often. All I said is that I want to put it off, maybe an extra day, maybe an extra few, but I intend on taking a vaccine.

I only leave the house once a week (though that will increase once I'm vaccinated), I live alone. Do you mongoloids understand my lack of urgency between this week and next week now? Or did none of you make unnecessary extra trips to the market or take extra walks, or see an extra person, or leave less than 2m gap in the queue?

The absolute blindness of some of you, marvellous.

>>34017
I'm not reading any anti-vax stuff, I'm just saying why shouldn't I wait an extra few days if I've decided I'm going to take it anyway?

>>34026
I suppose people just have different ideas about the common good. I imagine some anti-vaxxers volunteer their time and contribute to charity. They're still making personal sacrifice for the common good, just not the one you want them to, or that you value more. I'm not an anti vaxxer, I just figure that every day that goes past is another day I can feel more comfortable with taking it. And since I only leave the house once a week, I highly doubt a delay of one or two weeks is going to result in any sort of tragedy at all.

>And nobody ever really complained.
Pull the other one.

>>34025
I think it's the rudgwicksteamshow.co.uklad influence, the insults aren't even imaginative.

>>34023
I think I'd pass away rather peacefully, content in the knowledge that I'd pissed you off.

>>34041
> I'm not reading any anti-vax stuff, I'm just saying why shouldn't I wait an extra few days if I've decided I'm going to take it anyway?
How many extra grannies will you kill in those extra few days!

>>34042
I will not stop until my bloodlust is sated.

For what it's worth, >>34015 had the best response, thanks mate. I'm still interested in more information but that was appreciated.

>>34040
>Which then pretty much directly led to the malaise years of 1970s Britain.
Although you're better than most for conceding that everyone had a bad 1970s, this isn't particularly true. The reason Britain had a particularly bad 1970s was almost entirely down to a mixture of Heath government policies and typically British bad luck. In short succession, the government slashed controls on bank lending (leading to a credit boom) and hiked spending/cut taxes (in the hopes of expanding the economy prior to entry to the EEC), neither of which were strictly necessary in the framework of the postwar consensus. By themselves both of these actions would be inflationary, but because this is Britain they both had to land right in the prelude to the 1973 oil crisis, which killed any hopes of growth while sending inflation sky high.
Labour's strategy to deal with all of this gets a bad reputation in Britain (just ask the unions to be responsible in their wage claims in exchange for better public services? ha ha ha), but the exact same strategy was used by Australian Labor with great success in the 1980s, since they actually kept up their end of the deal.

(Lest anyone think I'm a Labour partisan for putting the blame at Heath's door: If you take my view, Callaghan's the one who actually killed the postwar consensus. He just gets off with it because he's a more sympathetic oh-dear-i've-broken-it sort of character than Thatcher, who actually wanted to kill it.)

>>34041

> And since I only leave the house once a week, I highly doubt a delay of one or two weeks is going to result in any sort of tragedy at all.

Yes, but it's still a good idea to get the vaccine as early as possible, because who knows, you might pass something on to somebody without knowing it, which you wouldn't have if you'd gone two weeks earler. And that person might then become seriously ill.

What I have kind of grown to despise though is the certain kind of smugcuntery that some people now have about having had the jabs. It's probably the same kind of people who will rub it in any chance they get that they are doing this, that, and the other to save the environment, and who look down on you for not being the same kind of zealot.

>>34031
We can't stop talking about The War now. Not when we're in the middle of Operation Market Garden: A Lifted-Restriction Too Far.

>>34032
Britain was united behind a collective project, I don't know how you can not see that. The blitz spirit was not an uncommon reaction to attack by outsiders in uniting those under attack - although I suppose it's only natural that shysters in our culture would attack it.

>Look at Mosley!

The BUF was finished after the Knight of the Long Knives and he was imprisoned in 1940. What a stupid image to post.

>>34039
The welfare state extends way before Atlee or even the war but events during 40s had the obvious cause in accelerating it. The Beveridge Report in particular was 1942 but you can see a timeline stretching back to at least the Liberals at the turn of the last century and arguably we would've seen a quasi-NHS emerge in the 1920s had Labour not displaced them.

>>34047
>The BUF was finished after the Knight of the Long Knives and he was imprisoned in 1940

So what? You think the rest of his supporters just vanished along with their sentiments?
Anyway here are nearly half a dozen websites explaining at length that you're wrong.
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Blitz-Spirit/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/britain_wwtwo/blitz_01.shtml
https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/30535/01-04-2020/all-in-this-together-the-blitz-spirit-myth
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11213968

>it's only natural that shysters in our culture would attack it
Piss off with this ridiculous faux-patriotic rhetoric. "Anyone who isn't with us is a coward!" You sound like a politician.

>nearly have a dozen
Sorry, got distracted in the middle of copy-pasting. Anyway there are plenty more, I only opened a few.

All I'll say is the lad complaining we aren't "homogeneous" enough and calling people "shysters" is definitely a racist.

>>34047

>The welfare state extends way before Atlee or even the war

Quite. If you go back even further, you could say that it has its roots in the worker's rights movement of the 19th century. It's easy to forget that for much of the early Industrial Age, most common labourers simply couldn't afford a doctor's visit. Most factories employed medical staff of some description, but their aim was to keep a factory floor worker capable of doing their job. You were expected to function, but if you wanted to live well, that was your own problem during your sparse time off the job.

The great peculiarity of the Attlee government and the postwar Consensus was that while the West tried to distance itself increasingly from communist Eastern Europe and its political system on a geopolitical level, Britain's system of big government, union pandering and nationalisation almost made us a socialist country in its own right.

I've always hated Thatcher milk snatcher, and continue to do so with passion, but it's worth remembering that Britain had hit a wall when she came to power, and the only way out was denationalisation and liberalisation. It's ironic that Blair then later took the concept and ran with it and pushed back the welfare state beyond anything Thatcher had done, but that was New Labour for you. Much in the same way that only Nixon could have gone to China, only a Labour government could dissolve the welfare state the way Blair did.

>>34036

As someone still on the right side of young, most of my elders seem to be cunts and therefore very difficult to respect.

I've been reading a lot of people's responses to the delay of "Freedom Day", and it's funny how all the old cunts who've had their jabs are the ones most critical of more restrictions. Young people have given up more than a year of their life and their freedom, often being the most at risk key workers, in order to protect the elderly and vulnerable. But now the shoe is on the other foot our older generation doesn't want to return the favour.

I mean you'd never have seen that coming would you.

>>34051

I've been wondering if the current government's break from austerity will shift the window back and (if Labour or whoever get their act together) enable a return to a more social-democratic kind of era.

The post-war consensus was named as such for a reason, because broadly all the parties shared the same view and largely supported the existence of the welfare state right up until the Thatcher years. One can hope we are currently living through a social shift which sees neoliberalism fall out of fashion in a similar way.

What's clear is that the left right divide in politics has ceased to meaningfully matter, and it's been that way for quite some time.

>>34053

>What's clear is that the left right divide in politics has ceased to meaningfully matter, and it's been that way for quite some time.

True; mainly because voters often just aren't as loyal to their respective party as they used to be, no political party at Westminster nowadays can afford to be fully entrenched in distinct traditional left- or right wing platforms. At least Labour and the Conservatives are now far more centrist than they have ever been. Still each with their own bent and tonality on things in order not to alienate their more traditional voters, but the overlap is pretty significant.

>>34051
>and the only way out was denationalisation and liberalisation.
This seems like post purchase rationalisation. If you look to New Zealand (always a good idea, they speak English and more people should know how a pandemic response is supposed to go) they've hardly suffered a bit for Labour spending the 2000s renationalising the things it sold off in the 1980s, increasing trade union rights, etc. Both major parties wound up largely disavowing their role in the economic reforms of the 1980s-90s because of the massive social harm they caused, with the finance ministers responsible winding up in a new party entirely. Only in Britain do we persist with the idea that it was all deeply necessary and very successful, rather than being 13 or so years of economic masochism which happened to include one or two passable ideas like a free floating exchange rate. (introduced at the worst possible time, naturally.)
Perhaps because Thatcher was more politically astute than the kiwis: They sold nationalised industries to foreign companies to get the best price, she sold to the UK public to buy the Conservatives a new class of voters... Politicians have never been good at economics, but election results, they understand those.

>>34048
>So what?

The organisation become irrelevant. This wasn't a division in mainstream society, it's a bogeyman.

>Anyway here are nearly half a dozen websites explaining at length that you're wrong.

Try forming an argument. It's not hard.

>>34056

Either way, 1970s Britain was deeply dysfunctional, there were strikes everywhere, nobody really got any work done, people were laid off, inflation was rampant, and the rubbish was piling up in the streets.

I did say that I hate Thatcher as a person and a politician, and I do, but there simply was no way you could've carried the 1970s way of doing things into the 80s.

Britain saw an increase in prosperity for the average middle-class person that had been unheard of for decades on the back of Thatcher privatisation. It all then crumbled around the time of the 1987 stock market crash and thereafter, but a five- or six-year boom cycle since the beginning of Tory rule was not a bad track record.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyeWRd7ZEBs

(hats off to the Pet Shop Boys for delivering by far the wittiest satirisation of that era)

>>34057

"It's a bogeyman" he says while claiming something to exist despite being given multiple credible sources that say otherwise.

>>34050

I am. What's your point?

(A good day to you Sir!)

>>34060
The problem with this sort of analysis is that it misunderstands what "The 1970s way of doing things" was and why it wasn't working. It's like imagining that the reason Churchill was turfed out and the pre-postwar-consensus ended was because there were bombs falling everywhere and half of the men in the country were off shooting Germans.
It's not like everyone just decided to have a bunch of strikes for a laugh one day because they realised they could be workshy, people went on strike to preserve their pay and conditions because they were being eroded by inflation. The inflation wasn't the unpredictable result of the inefficiencies of nationalisation or the inflationary pressures of giving people £10 at Christmas time, it was the result of an energy crisis, international instabilities, policy miscalculations, and some incredibly bad monetary policy. Those aren't mandated internal components of a coherent way of doing things, they're external shocks and system-neutral errors.
Of course we couldn't have carried on like that - not because it would've ended in tears, but because it was physically impossible. You could no more preserve the social conditions of the 1970s into the 1980s than you could preserve the social conditions of Roman Britain into the present day. North Sea oil was about to come online, global inflation rates were tracking downwards, markets were stabilising, old MPs were dying and new ones being elected, and so on and so on. If you define the 1970s way of doing things as the postwar consensus, it didn't even last until the late 1970s: It died in 1976 when Callaghan went out and told Labour conference that Keynesianism had never worked. By the time of the winter of discontent and the binmen's strike the country already had a chancellor who was ignoring mass unemployment while being praised by Milton Friedman for bringing in monetarism. It was all over. The only thing that survived the 1970s is the gross incompetence that defined British economic policymaking. (Well, it got a bit better after Black Wednesday.)

Which I suppose is what my point is: Bringing the postwar consensus back would be difficult if not impossible, so I'm not making the case for that. But I really do wish we'd learn from our mistakes and our successes separately instead of embracing our failures and confabulating our successes into them.
As for the chart: I couldn't find a way to work in the fact that unemployment under Thatcher and Major was never lower than it had been under Callaghan without looking like a pedant, but considering the state of the economy under Callaghan and his utter inaction on unemployment, that's a remarkable achievement in bungled if not outright malicious policymaking.

>I’M A Celebrity queen Giovanna Fletcher claimed thousands of pounds from the furlough scheme weeks after her TV win. The mum of three and her pop star husband Tom, worth an estimated £8million, have received up to £30,000 of government cash.

>An HMRC register of claims shows the pair received support shortly after Giovanna triumphed on the jungle series in December. Files released by HMRC last week listed more than 600,000 companies and individuals who received taxpayers’ support between January and March this year.

>It was not clear if Giovanna or Tom were claiming the money for themselves or for an employee. Companies House records state Giovanna Fletcher Ltd in 2019 had one employee and £300,000-plus in the bank. A spokeswoman for Giovanna has declined to comment.

https://www. Please ban me/tvandshowbiz/15254557/giovanna-fletcher-claimed-thousands-furlough-scheme/

Hang on, lads. There's a public register somewhere where you can see who's claiming furlough?

>>34063
I'm never wrong. If it weren't for my deeply unstable mental state and barely concealed lust for power I'd have have made moderator years ago.

>>34085

Probably someone had to put in an FoI request for it.

Shouldn't be surprising at all that people who are already more than comfortable financially will have been abusing it though.

>>34085

>There's a public register somewhere where you can see who's claiming furlough?

Yes, although you can ask HMRC not to publish your details if you have a good reason.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/employers-who-have-claimed-through-the-coronavirus-job-retention-scheme

>>34088

>Yes, although you can ask HMRC not to publish your details if you have a good reason.

I cant think of one good reason for this information not to be published, I can think of a few bad ones though

I'm really feeling my second Biontech jab today. I would say the symptoms aren't dramatically worse than after the first one, but I do feel pretty lethargic, and I've got a headache and some muscle pain. Very similar to a common cold, without the runny nose. And I've got just under 37.5 degrees body temperature, if my £5 digital thermometer from Boots can be trusted.

Still worth it. I'm glad I can put the whole thing behind me now. I was a little worried that something would somehow keep me from getting the second dose, from a sudden catastrophic vaccine shortage to me just forgetting my appointment.

I've now started looking at offers for holidays around the Med. I've got everything from Corfu to Sardinia and Tenerife on my shortlist. Can't bring myself to consider Majorca. I have bad memories of a lads holiday there with two hours of sleep a night and being off my tits all day long in the blazing sun.

>>34092
It is great that you're fully vaccinated but unfortunately all this isn't over just yet and I certainly wouldn't be travelling abroad any time this year. Keep wearing a mask and distancing at least, so far a handful of people who have had both doses of vaccine have still ended up in hospital with the delta variant that's spreading.

>>34093

I've read that the Biontech vaccine isn't as effective against the Delta variant as some others, but I think it's really just statistical margins. With both jabs, your likelihood of getting sick from the delta variant is still tolerably low.

I know someone fully double vaccinated with the Pfizer one and still managed to catch it. It almost completely crushes your chances of getting seriously ill, but doesn't completely stop you catching it.

When is this going to die out like in 1918? Do we have to reach a point where the whole world is vaccinated, so the virus mutates into a less deadly seasonal flu, and then we just tolerate it?

>>34095

It's a game of probabilities, in the end. With two doses of any of the government-approved covid-19 vaccines, your chances of becoming seriously ill are drastically reduced.

There are stories of people who have recovered from an actual infection and who got it again, so there's always that possibility that you'll just have some incredibly bad luck. It doesn't detract from the fact that getting vaccinated is for all intents and purposes an all-around good idea.

This is some fucking bullshit. Everyone else is already getting their second jabs and I've even been told there's now long queues because of the under-30s getting their first. As for me, I'm only getting my first next week and the second is in bloody September. Which I have to travel half-way across London for as there was nothing else left.

Sure I could perhaps try turning up and going "whoops, I thought it was September" but I'm not one to jump to a queue, I won't do it. Broken Britain if you ask me.

>>34098

The Dark Web has you covered.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/16/fake-covid-vaccine-and-test-certificate-market-is-growing-researchers-say

>>34099
That's all well and good if I wanted to go to France but I want to escape up north on the train without the risk of my Covid mashing my testicles up.

>>34096

If we'd let it run rampant in the first place it probably would have by now. The catch is that would have come with a much higher death toll.

We have asked lives, but in fighting the virus we have exerted selective pressure that has allowed the rise of more infective variants. We're in it for the long game now like it or not.

I've completely checked out of everything in the past few months and I no longer have any real idea of what I'm not allowed to do. Not least because it seems like we can do anything, but with a mask on or at least near enough to be quickly put on.

>>34102

Pretty much the only thing that's still not allowed is nightclubs and gigs. Everything else is allowed to happen just fine with the pretend counter-measures we're using like fucking 14th century plague doctors stuffing their masks with incense.

It's all a bit bollocks. Most people have been acting as though it's over for at least the last couple of months. I feel like a bit of a mug for being one of the people still playing ball. I suspect my so-called mates have used the opportunity to just quietly drop me from the group and this is it for me, now.

I just want to go for a fucking pint with someone other than my fucking missus, it can't be that much to ask can it, surely. I am tired.

Delta strain looks like it's vaccine resistant.

>>34101

It'll probably always be there in some form or another. The really interesting question is going to be how long immunity lasts. There isn't sufficient data yet, science's best guess at the moment is that you're probably protected after a vaccination or after you've had the virus for anything between five months and a year.

It could be that we'll all need yearly top ups. Or it could be that once you've had it as a child, you'll be immunised for life, like some other diseases.

The lesson humankind should probably learn is that you really shouldn't eat bats.

>>34104
>Delta strain looks like it's vaccine resistant.
*to some extent more resistant to vaccines than the other variants.

Vaccines aren't an all-or-nothing thing. Even with newer variants the immune system has a head start, meaning the infection will be far less severe.

>>34105

>The lesson humankind should probably learn is that you really shouldn't eat bats.

Is this a new word filter for 'do gain of function research'?

>>34107
It is now.

>>34107

Indeed, it'd be a good idea to do gain of function research to help us understand the virus better.

That, and banning the eating of wildlife that could carry pathogens like the coronavirus. That's where it started, even if the tinfoil hat crowd still claim that it escaped from a lab.

>>34109

Now now lad, it's not crazy conspiracy talk any more. That was only when prototype Nexus 7 Hitler droid Donald Trump was saying it. Saint Biden said it might be China now, so it must have been China, the commie bastards.

>>34110

I just wonder how people can seriously maintain the idea. Look around you. Evolution is perfectly capable of creating astonishing life forms on its own that leave even the most seasoned biologists dumbfounded. Even if there is debate whether a virus actually constitutes a life form, the argument is the same. Nature has shown in abundance what it can do, and that it doesn't need some scheming scientists in a commie lab to bring about a pathogen that's capable of disrupting human life on the entire planet.

As attractive and intellectually stimulating as many conspiracy theories often are, it doesn't change the fact that the majority of them are verifiably false.

That a Murrikin President decided to make conspiracy theories a vital part of his presidential platform is a whole different story, and in his case, it was really about even further dumbing down the dumb vote.

>>34111
> it doesn't change the fact that the majority of them are verifiably false.
That's not a refutation of this particular one though is it.

I don't see how it matters either way. Zoonotic viruses happen and so do lab leaks. The next major pandemic won't be a re-run of this one, just as this one isn't a re-run of the 1918 flu pandemic. If the Wuhan Institute of Virology were negligent, then the Yanks are complicit in that negligence because they were partly funding their work.

If this virus was of zoonotic origin, we should still be reviewing biosecurity measures in research labs; if it was a lab leak, we should still be working to reduce opportunities for human-to-animal viral transmission. Maybe people will feel better if they have someone to blame, but the exact origin of this pandemic won't be relevant to the next pandemic.

>>34112

No, it doesn't. And I was arguing mainly from the view point of probability/plausibility. It's not entirely impossible that this virus was bioengineered in a lab in China. I assume the technology exists. If we can pretty much print mRNA as we please, which is also the basis of all the mRNA covid-19 vaccines now, then it could be that somebody crafted a cronavirus with certain desired properties and released it into the environment.

In that sense, a coronavirus conspiracy theory is more difficult to refute and falsify than things like the Moon Hoax, where a mountain of irrefutable solid evidence exists that people did go to the Moon.

But the question is still how likely it is that somebody did create SARS-CoV-2 in a lab. Given all the above arguments for nature being quite capable of creating it on its own. And even if China actually set out to cause global turmoil and disruption on the back of a bioengineered virus, we've seen that China itself experienced very drastic effects on public life and its economy, even if they were only temporary. Once you release a pathogen or even a toxin into the environment, it's very difficult to predict and control the dynamics that will ensue.

>A headache, sore throat and runny nose are now the most commonly reported symptoms linked to Covid infection in the UK, researchers say. Prof Tim Spector, who runs the Zoe Covid Symptom study, says catching the Delta variant can feel "more like a bad cold" for younger people.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-57467051

Just in time for hay fever season.

>>34113
>>34114
Go to bed, Xi.

If I wanted to build the world's foremost research facility into bat coronaviruses, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that I would choose to build it in a place where people eat bats, to make the research easier. That's more or less the only way I'd be able to accept the incredible coincidences that seem to have happened up to this point.

Finally escaped isolation, and got me a Puh Fizzer. I can feel the 5G coarsing through my veins.

>>34117
You can't feel the 5G. It'll be the nanobots that you can feel, probably as they are becoming activated by the 5G.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/09/washington-state-joints-for-jabs-boost-vaccination-rates

>To boost vaccination rates, Washington state is offering free marijuana joints to any adults that receive a Covid-19 vaccine.

>On Monday, the Washington state liquor and cannabis board announced the promotion, aptly called “Joints for Jabs”, that will run until 12 July. During the initiative’s run, state-licensed dispensaries can give age-appropriate customers, 21 and older, a pre-rolled joint when they receive their first or second dose.


That seems only reasonable.

>>34119
We really missed a trick by freely getting the jab didn't we. It was a moment where we realistically could've demanded anything we want and the powerful would have to agree to it.

>>34119

>That seems only reasonable.

Depends on who's licking all those rizlas, I suppose.

>>34114

The lab leak hypothesis is not that the lab was 'bioengineering' the virus, but that it was simply trying to mutate it to understand how viruses would evolve to affect humans. Nature can do this on its own, you're right. However, we can game the system. It's easy for us to create the conditions where this is highly more likely.

Generally it seems like the lab was mutating the virus backed by global money and negligence is what got the virus out by mistake. That is a risk of gain of function research. I don't understand why you leapt into conspiracy territory, but you should try to fight a strong opponent.

>>34120

It's not the best idea to get high right after your jab. I really felt the effects of the first and second dose, and am still feeling a bit shit from Friday's second injection. Taking drugs really has been the last thing on my mind.


>>34125

I still don't think it's likely that it came from a lab. Normally, viruses don't just get out by mistake. There'd have to be a pretty serious breach of safety protocols for a test tube or petri dish full of a pathogen to get out into the environment.

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level

It still doesn't mean the lab hypothesis can be falsified. That is true. But not every hypothesis is correct just because you can't disprove it.

>>34126
>There'd have to be a pretty serious breach of safety protocols for a test tube or petri dish full of a pathogen to get out into the environment.

Well the Wuhan lab workers are on film getting bitten and splattered with blood without protection. Although we're not going to know until end of July at the earliest and China has plenty to cover up even if it was natural.

>>34127

>Although we're not going to know until end of July at the earliest and China has plenty to cover up even if it was natural.

I don't know, still has a big ring of Trumpist retaliationism to me. Somebody has to be responsible, and that somebody has to be brought to justice, just like tham turrists what done 9/11.

Nobody blamed the U.S. or asked compensation of them when a Kansas chicken farmer's son became patient zero of the Spanish Flu and brought the virus with him to Europe in WWI. If you know what I mean.

>>34130

>Nobody blamed the U.S. or asked compensation of them when a Kansas chicken farmer's son became patient zero of the Spanish Flu and brought the virus with him to Europe in WWI. If you know what I mean.

Maybe if that Kansas chicken farm was also a poorly run virology lab they would have.

>>34132
A poorly run virology lab by any other name would still unfairly malign the nation of Spain.

>>34127

Please bear in mind we live in an era where entire war scenes are staged for the purpose of propaganda and influencing global politics.

This is a really strong claim, not just that the lab was so unsafe, but that China (and also who in China, what authority?) covered things up.

I bet you all think British labs are a much higher standard. On paper sure, but in reality? We Brits are renowned for our capability to half arse things.

It always comes down to people, and there's always some cunt who's having a bad day, woke up late that morning, can't be arsed, etc. That's all it takes. A system can be as robust as you like, the regulations can be as stringent as you want. It always comes down to people, and people are unreliable.

>>34136

Not in BSL-4 labs mate, there is no fucking about with those. If your having a shit day, you can stay home.

Anyway:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/world/asia/china-covid-wuhan-lab-leak.html

>Some scientists say Dr. Shi conducted risky experiments with bat coronaviruses in labs that were not safe enough. Others want clarity on reports, citing American intelligence, suggesting that there were early infections of Covid-19 among several employees of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

>Dr. Shi has denied these accusations, and now finds herself defending the reputation of her lab and, by extension, that of her country. Reached on her cellphone two weeks ago, Dr. Shi said at first that she preferred not to speak directly with reporters, citing her institute’s policies. Yet she could barely contain her frustration.

>“How on earth can I offer up evidence for something where there is no evidence?” she said, her voice rising in anger during the brief, unscheduled conversation. “I don’t know how the world has come to this, constantly pouring filth on an innocent scientist,” she wrote in a text message.

>In a rare interview over email, she denounced the suspicions as baseless, including the allegations that several of her colleagues may have been ill before the outbreak emerged.

There you go, settled. Nothing to see here.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z95PiVUIRzw

>>34137

you're*
please don't ban me

>>34136
Being a half drunk moron who used to work in a virology lab, they lock you in. You're not allowed to leave for your entire shift, you take lunch in a separate room, and you're not the one responsible for your own decontamination protocol between rooms and upon leaving.

They get audited by both the FDA and the EMA 4 times a year and everything is recorded and monitored. It's almost impossible for a well run lab to breach protocol due to the actions of even 2 or 3 people in the chain having a bad day.

When accidents happen, the entire lab shuts down to deal with it. So, much like the silent majority of biology STEM professionals who believe the pandemic was Wuhan's fault due to them failing inspections and getting roasted over protocol by the FDA in the past, but wont speak about it publicly for fear of being fired, I'm also pretty certain it was their fault.

Never mind the fact that we still don't have a lineage or origin species for the strain to confirm a wild event, meaning it almost certainly came from a lab anyway. DNA doesn't lie and it's telling us that it's recombinant. We should listen and stop hand wringing about if China might not like us or not.

>>34137
>>34139

Sure, but they always said the same thing about those deep sea oil rig diving bell things, until one day someone fucked up and several people had their intestines sucked out their arseholes by explosive decompression.

There's always failure points. I'm not defending Chinese labs or anything, they probably could have done with better protocol, but accidents happen and that's a fact of life. That's why we stopped fucking around with smallpox entirely, it was deemed not to be worth the risk.

>>34136

I can't speak for the biotech industry, but China have no great difficulty in running semiconductor cleanrooms. The sensitive parts of a high-end semiconductor cleanroom are 3-4 orders of magnitude cleaner than a GMP A cleanroom, although obviously that doesn't directly translate to BSL standards.

>>34141
There's a lab in Beijing from which SARS escaped four separate times.

>>34140
This, fuck-ups still happen and Dangerous pathogens do occasionally escape from secure labs despite safety precautions. This article has a good summary of some of the more serious incidents:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-27/covid-19-and-lab-leak-history-smallpox-h1n1-sars

IIRC one of the foot & mouth outbreaks in the 2000s was also caused by a leak from a BSL4 facility.

Fuck lads, if it turns out it really did escape from a lab, all the experts telling us it's highly unlikely for it to have done so are really going to do wonders for the conspiracy theorist anti-democracy alt-right nutter movement.

>>34143

I'm not saying that the Chinese are infallible, but they're at least as competent as us. It's worth bearing in mind that China is absolutely fucking massive, so it's statistically inevitable that weird things will happen on a regular basis. If you're truly one-in-a-million, then there are 1400 of you in China.

>>34145
Money talks, but people also get afraid of putting their head above the parapet if they think they'll be shouted down for it. Just like Rotherham.

Am I too cynical for wondering if it really matters whether the virus came from a Chinese lab or not?
If you're a yank playing geostrategic games, it's convenient to say it did even if it didn't. If you're Chinese playing geostrategic games, it's convenient to say it didn't even though it did. If you're a conspiracy nutter then obviously the Americans got the Chinese to leak it because Agenda 21 was behind schedule. But nowhere in all of this is "what really happened" all that important. What difference does it make to me whether 2020 was ruined by accident or by the random fluctuations of biology?
I'm not being an idiot here, obviously if there was a lab leak then you've got to tighten up the lab and all that, but you'd think they'd do that even if the virus didn't come from there just because the scale of the damage from an error has now been made very clear indeed. But that's an internal matter for virus researchers and the Chinese government, a relatively small number of people - what's the difference to us in the general population?

More to the point: Unless China itself comes out and says "Actually we fucked up" or America comes out and says "Actually you didn't fuck up" it's hard to imagine there ever really being a definitive conclusion. One or both of them will just keep sniping at one another until it fades away because people born during the pandemic are now at the age where they're learning to self-drive their hovercars.

>>34148

>Am I too cynical for wondering if it really matters whether the virus came from a Chinese lab or not?

I don't see how that's cynical, it's just rational if you ask me. The thing isn't even over and we're worrying about the blame game? I think it just says a lot about people's priorities, but it shouldn't be surprising. It's just a large scale manifestation of what you see all the time on a lower level.

How many times have we all had to roll our eyes and bite our tongue when watching an incompetent manager find someone to bollock, instead of taking action to solve the problem? I have always imagined that to be a pretty relatable experience.

>>34135
>Please bear in mind we live in an era where entire war scenes are staged for the purpose of propaganda and influencing global politics.

We also live in a world where governments, especially authoritarian regimes, regularly fuck-up and try to hide the evidence no matter it's impact on the situation and history. Remember last year when there was a frantic search to work out where COVID-19 came from as that would directly assist the development of vaccines.

I get that you don't think crippling the international communities ability to fight pandemics (as Taiwan already understood from the lesson of SARS) isn't important because someone might not order a Chinese one night but come the fuck on. Was Chernobyl also unimportant?

>>34145
I mean the US government has performed experiments on its own population including deliberately infecting people with syphilis. It's not like conspiracy theorists have nothing to go on or that we probably won't find out in 20 years time that MI5 have been doing something outlandish like sneaking into our homes to replace our clothes with copies that are slightly tighter on the stomach.

>>34150

>I mean the US government has performed experiments on its own population including deliberately infecting people with syphilis

They've done a whole bunch of unethical experiments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States

They never quite went as far as the Nazis with their human experiments, but they still did some pretty depraved shit. Like administering radiactive isotopes to pregnant women and then studying the aborted fetuses to learn about the effects of radiation on unborn babies.

>>34151
When are we going to accept that we can prevent an unquantifiable amount of human suffering by throwing ethics out of the window for a few years?

>>34150
>We also live in a world where governments, especially authoritarian regimes, regularly fuck-up and try to hide the evidence no matter it's impact on the situation and history.

I agree, both things are true. In that case, then, what do you think we should rely on in order to determine the truth of the situation? I would still stand by evidence, preferably verified by a politically independent body (or as independent as any can be). I would want to see the video you're talking about, and if it does have any basis, for it to be investigated. Beyond that I'd be extremely skeptical.

>I get that you don't think crippling the international communities ability to fight pandemics (as Taiwan already understood from the lesson of SARS) isn't important because someone might not order a Chinese one night but come the fuck on.

This is a total non-sequitor. Requesting evidence for a strong claim does not mean I don't care.

>>34152

Some of the most unethical studies produced little to no medical benefit. One of the most famous examples from that list, the Tuskegee syphilis trials, were just depriving people of effective treatment in order to observe the natural course of the disease with minimally effective treatments. Unsurprisingly, subjects got sick and died.

You're also assuming that those who would throw out ethics would be doing so in order to improve medical care. It seems very likely that this approach would lead to greatly increased research into biological weapons.

A final trite-but-true counterpoint to what you're saying would be: if you truly believe this, why not give your live body to medical science? Or do you only want ethics thrown out the window when it comes to experimentation on other people?

>>34152

Covid-19 vaccine research did bend the previously accepted standards of ethics, because normally it takes years from your first ground-level research to clinical trial studies and then finally the approval of a governing body before a vaccine or a drug becomes more or less widely available.

Although there is no reason to believe that the covid vaccines that are in existence now will cause long-term harm to a significant number of people, there was no time to make any kind of adequate long-term assessment about them, beyond the few months of the duration of the clinical trials. It was just assumed that the urgency of the global situation outweighed all other considerations like that.

That's about as far as we should ever push ethics. We've seen so far that the vast majority of patients have no serious adverse reaction to the vaccines, but it might be that we were just lucky. At least in theory, disasters like the Thalidomide scandal could happen again anytime if we don't thoroughly test drugs.

>>34152
I think Fallout style shelters would be pretty interesting, and some of the more notable ones almost actually resemble compelling experiments.

Obviously testing 'everything' on a bevvy of clones would surely produce some interesting results. Could find a few more natural remedies maybe, that kind of thing. Test all the distillates of all the flora etc.

What kind of direction would you take?

>>34154
Why are you trying to 'win' rather than entertain the topic?

>Some of the most unethical studies produced little to no medical benefit.
Yeah, but that's not integral to it. You obviously have a higher/broader ceiling for what can be discerned if the range of experiments is wider.

>You're also assuming that those who would throw out ethics would be doing so in order to improve medical care.
I don't think he is, I think that's integral to their premise of what they said, otherwise this would have been the obvious answer and it wouldn't be interesting to talk about.

>A final trite-but-true
It's not true though, is it. It's all trite.

>Or do you only want ethics thrown out the window when it comes to experimentation on other people?
Speaking for myself, yes. That's why this would be unethical. Keep up. To be slightly more serious, I'm assuming these tests would be done on people who were born specifically for this purpose, and who wouldn't have any knowledge of what they were missing out on. They'd just exist simply to suffer, and by doing so ease the suffering of others.

Your pedantry would be interesting if you applied it better.

>>34150

>Remember last year when there was a frantic search to work out where COVID-19 came from as that would directly assist the development of vaccines.

I don't actually remember that. The SARS-CoV-2 genome was published by China on the 11th of January and four candidate vaccines had entered human trials before the end of March.

The CCP doesn't believe in a right to free speech and exercises substantial control over the dissemination of information, but I have seen no credible evidence that they hid anything of real substance.

The argument that a Chinese cover-up hindered the ability of other countries to respond effectively to the pandemic is starkly contradicted by just how slowly many governments (including our own) responded to information that was fully in the public domain. China was publicly saying "we have identified a novel coronavirus, it is highly dangerous and it is spreading from human to human" and started a WHO working group in the second week of January, but we didn't even start ordering PPE until mid-March.

Maybe the Chinese knew more than they were letting on in late November or early December of 2019, but I don't see how that would have in any way affected our response. We were complacent, we were arrogant and we find it convenient to blame someone else.

>>34151

The US never went as far as the Nazis, they were pretty fucking keen to get their hands on the information from concentration camp experiments and things like the Japanese Unit 731 atrocities. Foreign war crimes have proven very valuable to American science over the years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvDQft9enw4

>>34159

Police just standing watching?

>>34160
Better than that. Saw it happening, shook their heads and went "nope" before turning around to pretend it wasn't happening.

>>34161

He must have said something unflattering about Patel.

>>34159
Can we make being an anti-vax/anti-lockdown/contrarian cunt a capital crime already?

>>34163

The anti-lockdown people are generally supportive of the Tories. There's the same septic conspiracy mindedness of a corrupt left-wing deep state forcing their hand as other than that, Johnson's shit obviously doesn't stink.

>>34158

>The US never went as far as the Nazis, they were pretty fucking keen to get their hands on the information from concentration camp experiments

The human experiment data from Nazi concentration camps is still seen as a noteworthy body of work. While racist, cruel, and unethical beyond words, they did quite remarkable research on many things. Although it's impossible to consider it an achievement of science, because they really cared squat if a test subject died from hypothermia or suffocated during high-altitude experiments. In terms of regard for human life, their subjects were little more than crash test dummies to Nazi doctors.

There was substantial debate after the war if Nazi findings should be permitted to enter medicine as a whole, but it was felt that in all the horror, this was a way of honouring the victims who died or suffered lifelong effects from these experiments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation

>>34156
>Why are you trying to 'win' rather than entertain the topic?

Disagreement doesn't mean I'm trying to "win", it just means I disagree. Lifting all ethical boundaries off medical research would have real world consequences, and as far as I know we have no evidence that it would improve medical care in any way. In fact, we have more historical evidence that being lax with medical ethics leads to the opposite; not just a lack of concern for human life to begin with, but also generally ineffective studies. I mentioned Tuskegee for a reason.

If you're going to make the argument for something that is certainly going to harm human life in the present for some tradeoff in the future, you should really make a decent case that "unquantifiable human suffering" would be prevented. The poster didn't do that, and neither did you.

>It's not true though, is it. It's all trite.

What's not true about what I said? If all medical ethics were hypothetically erased tomorrow, what's to prevent you or anyone you care about from becoming a test subject? Breeding people especially for the purpose is something you just pulled out of thin air, so it's not something I could have mentioned in the original post.

It's a really silly throwaway post that I've clearly treated too seriously. Still, pointing out the flaws in a half-baked idea in three or four sentences isn't pedantry unless you have an extremely short attention span. I'm just applying a bit of reasoning.

If you really want me to play devil's advocate to try and at least make this an interesting question, in an environment with absolutely no ethical boundaries, you could potentially do some invasive anatomical experiments for areas of the body we still lack knowledge about. Our understanding of neuroscience would stand to jump forward this way, but there's no way of knowing whether such knowledge would translate to the development of, say, effective therapies for neurological conditions -- that's a related but distinct area of research. You could also draw some tenuous parallels to stem cell research or the lifting of religious taboos on studying corpses in the Renaissance, but clusters of cells and cadavers are quite different from living human beings.

I got my first jab today and, being a wacky comedian with a penchant for tomfoolery, I made a silly little joke about installing 5G. I don't think I've ever seen someone groan quite like that before as he revealed he's heard it almost every 15 minutes for weeks on end.

Don't do it, lads. It's not just the shame of it but the fact that I'm liable to remember this for the rest of my life.

Also you can't just turn up anymore, they were checking and asking people without an appointment to piss off.

>>34157
Nope. If you'd even spent 5 minutes on google you would know that China fucked up and its neighbours suffered the effects of covid in reverse proportion to the time they stop listening to China's bullshit.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-52573137

>The argument that a Chinese cover-up hindered the ability of other countries to respond effectively to the pandemic is starkly contradicted by just how slowly many governments (including our own) responded to information that was fully in the public domain.

Whataboutism.

I didn't get given a sticker with my jab.
Who do I complain to?

>>34169
Complain to me. They offered me a sticker when I went for my second one, and I refused quite aggressively. I have personal reasons for not liking the stickers they give out. Then I thought, "Maybe she's just trying to be nice", and I asked to look at the sticker I had refused. It was one of the evil stickers that spreads ignorance and laziness and panders to the imbeciles of society, ruining my own quality of life by proxy, as I had expected, so I recoiled once again and left. I can only assume my revulsion was so visible that they threw all the remaining stickers away.

You must meet all sorts of people being a vaccination volunteer. I bet they'll have some stories once everyone has been vaccinated.

>>34169

1st or 2nd jab? If it was your 2nd, then you should write a strongly-worded email to the Smuggery Ombudsman.

(I slapped my sticker in the big space on my Care Identity Service Smartcard, before anyone accuses me of anything incorrect)

>>34168

>you would know that China fucked up

This is pretty much the gist of everything you read on any respectable news site.

China's government is like a big black box. Being that democracy and checks and balances are very profoundly absent in the country, the Chinese government has a habit of bending reality and suppressing the truth any way they fucking please. So they covered it up in the hope that it was going to be a non-issue that would somehow resolve itself, maybe kill a few people along the way here and there, but who's counting when you've got a population of close to 1.4 billion. And you had those public festivities coming up, I can't remember what they were called, so some stray virus did not fit in with state propaganda.

And so, precious time was wasted during which the outbreak probably could have been contained regionally, or at least kept from spreading around the globe. It was only when the situation was gravely out of control that they decided to lock down entire cities, which was evidently too little, too late.

>>34172

>the outbreak probably could have been contained regionally, or at least kept from spreading around the globe

There's absolutely no chance of that with a virus as infectious as SARS-CoV-2 and a country as connected as China. Wuhan has a bigger population than London, a national railway hub and an international airport. The cat was out of the bag before anyone could have figured out what was going on.