Please be positive and upbeat in your interactions, and avoid making negative or pessimistic comments. Instead, focus on the potential opportunities.
- Manlobbi
Halls of Shrewd'm / US Policy
No. of Recommendations: 3
TL;DR:
-CIA scientists knew it was a lab leak from the start
-Fauci had been playing with the definition of "gain of function" for years and "inserted himself" into the process
-Fauci pressured CIA managers to soften the lab leak theory
Wow.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/cia-whistl...James Erdman, a career CIA operations officer who spent much of the last year on joint assignment for the Director of National Intelligence Director Initiatives Group (DNI DIG), testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on Wednesday, telling committee members Fauci “influenced the analytical process and findings by leveraging his position to ensure the [intelligence community] consulted with a conflicted list of curated subject matter experts, public health officials, and scientists.”
He further said the CIA and DNI analytic managers responsible for examining the origin of Covid “made decisions inconsistent with the conclusions of subject matter experts and analytical tradecraft, consistently favoring the theory of zoonosis or natural origin.”
And when the CIA conducted a Covid relook in 2022 and 2023, the CIA “retaliated against analysts supporting the lab-leak hypothesis,” Erdman says, particularly against those who refused to agree with “management’s middle of the night anonymous rewrite of the analysis, which changed the assessment to a non-call judgment.”And the CIA is still stonewaling:
The CIA then failed to comply with the DNI DIG’s oversight investigation, refusing to provide necessary information for investigators to understand why analytical standards at the CIA were violated. The CIA also illegally spied on the computer and phones belonging to DIG personnel, along with their investigations and contact with whistleblowers, Erdman alleges.The CIA is pushing back on the process parts of all this, grumbling that all this testimony was being done under subpoena.
No. of Recommendations: 10
Back into Covid, I see.
So how about those Epstein files? Are they coming out soon???
—Peter
No. of Recommendations: 14
The whistleblower was one of those who accepted and promoted the Republican party line about vaccines and self quarantining during COVID
There’s nothing like the darkening clouds of another possible though unlikely pandemic- to bring out the crazies who continue to promote the nonsense they promoted during COVID.
Hell, some of them are even promoting Ivermectin again, this time as a cure for hantavirus.
Faucci is a target because Trump failed miserably during COVID, and everyone knows that no blame can ever fall on God-man Trump.
No. of Recommendations: 3
The whistleblower was one of those who accepted and promoted th
I knew the shoot the messenger tactic would show up and the substance would get ignored.
No. of Recommendations: 4
It's inevitable that we will get another pandemic. COVID, as it turned out in hindsight, wasn't as bad as it could have been. As I recall, it had about a 4% mortality. The deniers will say "see, I told you!", but they had no way to know. They were just following misinformation and ideology. As it is, I've seen estimates of up to 1M people dying needlessly because they listened to the misinformation, including that from the Felon.
Spanish Flu had a mortality of about 20%, give or take. One in five who contracted it, died. Some form of flu is the most likely pandemic candidate, and it is inevitable. If we don't have the resources and protocols in place to handle it, literally hundreds of millions could die. We have at least 4x the global population that existed during Spanish Flu, and that killed ~100M people. So, next time we could be looking at half a billion or more.
Frankly, it will serve us right when it happens. We listen to demagogues and liars who have no clue, instead of the experts that actually know. And then we don't take the necessary steps to minimize the catastrophe. Could happen next year, or in ten years, or in fifty years. Dunno. But it will happen. We need to get our act together before it does.
No. of Recommendations: 2
Frankly, it will serve us right when it happens. We listen to demagogues and liars who have no clue, instead of the experts that actually know. And then we don't take the necessary steps to minimize the catastrophe. Could happen next year, or in ten years, or in fifty years. Dunno. But it will happen. We need to get our act together before it does.
What "experts" didn't we listen to? Fauci and company got their lockdowns, their school closures and their mask mandates.
Ask yourself. Honestly. How much did they accomplish?
No. of Recommendations: 10
Ask yourself. Honestly. How much did they accomplish?
A lot. As bad as it was, a lot of people are still alive because of those measures. Compare and contrast to -I think- Sweden that didn't make a point of protecting their elder population, and had grievous losses in that demographic.
Hindsight is 20/20. At the time, with a killer contagion that was overwhelming hospitals and morgues, the obvious thing was to get people to isolate. Were the measures too much? Probably. But we didn't know that at the time, and couldn't know it. We didn't even know what was killing people for several months.
1poorlady had to do her cancer surgery on an outpatient basis because a) the hospital had no space whatsoever, and b) they didn't want her to get sick and die after the surgery. So, still groggy from anesthesia, we had to bring her home and care for her here. Non-emergent surgeries were outright canceled because of the lack of facilities to cope with the sick and dead. 1poorlady's was emergent, so they performed it.
Meanwhile, a few of my coworkers (all of them younger than me) died from COVID. My group manager spent a week on a ventilator (but survived). From what I learned, none of them took the isolation or mandates seriously prior to getting infected. The one coworker I knew personally had a wife and two kids, and was 15-20 years younger than me. Not even in the high risk group.
No. of Recommendations: 4
As bad as it was, a lot of people are still alive because of those measures.
Only those still alive are around to debate whether or not preventative measures were too harsh.
