On Friday evening, the Biden administration published a previously classified intelligence report acknowledging that three years of investigations have produced no evidence that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was created in a laboratory by scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China.

This admission demolishes years of false claims, uncritically promoted by the entire spectrum of the US media and political establishment, that China deliberately created the virus that has infected the world and killed more than 20 million people.

The report reveals that three leading US newspapers the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal lied when they claimed that the United States had evidence that researchers at the institute were hospitalized with COVID-19 symptoms before the start of the pandemic, and were thus the proverbial “patient zero.”

  • roseh@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    Funny that after the report was released, all my lib friends seem more convinced than ever that there really was a lab leak. The media really doesn’t care at all about the facts on this one

    • toomanyjoints69@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      A lot of homeless people I know are convinced of it just because it sounds cool. Since its not for political reasons, I just go along with it and tell them I agree.

  • Ergifruit [he/they]@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    in other news, the sky is blue, grass is green, and racist shitheads will still believe whatever they want. but how kind of them, to concede they were making shit up after years of COVID-related racist hate crimes and harassment. good for them.

  • stewie3128@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    I used to believe that the presence of the furin cleavage site on the spike protein was basically concrete evidence that it was a natural virus that was modified in a lab somewhere. I still think it’s theoretically possible, but the evidence that we now have points to that being less likely.

    There definitely is an injection if 12 nucleotides into the spike gene, but the injection is out of frame (meaning that the round peg didn’t totally make it into the round hole). If it were engineered that way, that would amount to it being done the hard way just for the sake of making it difficult.

    I’m not an evolutionary biologist, biochemist, or anything like that (just a bachelor’s in bio now working in the film industry), so I really don’t know if it’s within the realm of possibility that this out-of-frame nucleotide injection could just be the result of sloppy copying over the course of many infections, or not.