When did people start conflating people disagreeing vehemently with them and censorship/suppression?
I've been called a moron for saying that I don't think the evidence is fully there yet for lab leak, does that make me a victim of a counter-censorship?
I can't speak for "people", but I can speak for myself as the grandparent comment, and I take no issue with disagreement. It's how the disagreement is expressed. Using words like "conspiracy theory" and "disinformation" are the keywords to justify censorship/suppression (see Hunter Biden laptop. See lab-leak theory).
No excuse for the Hunter Biden thing, but lab-leak theory has been covered quite extensively in the media & discussed all over the place since the start and hard for me to really see ivermectin stuff in any light other than conspiracy theory, you are theorizing that there is some very effective drug against Covid that others are 'conspiring' to prevent you from having.
No, that right there is how I remind you that if you want your hypothesis to be taken seriously you need proofs or at least a very compelling argument. There was neither.
Nonsense. There were plenty of arguments from the very beginning for the lab leak theory. The alternative "bat cave" hypothesis had plenty of implausiblies (e.g. huge distance) and was far from being "proven".
There is, however, quite a bit of precedent for bat coronaviruses eventually infecting humans, most likely through zoonotic spillover via an intermediate species (e.g. HCoV-NL63, HCoV-229E, SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV, SADS-CoV), and thanks to humans shipping animals all over the globe, huge distances aren't necessarily a deal breaker.
The difference between previous spillovers like SARS1 and MERS was these viruses rapidly mutated as they adapted towards humans allowing for the identification of the intermediate species within months. SARS2 on the other hand was already pre-adapted towards humans, had almost no adaptive mutations and no intermediate host has been found. And guess what when a virus crosses into humans the virus does not suddenly go extinct in the intermediate species, it continues to circulate, for example we still to this day find camels infected with MERS. But SARS2 we just can't seem to find this progenitor virus circulating.. . . very strange isn't it?
As far as I'm aware, we still do not know the first intermediate species of SARS-1 (cf Wikipedia: "Infected palm civets at the market were traced to farms where no infected animals were found. It is unknown whether the virus was originally introduced to the market by civets, humans, or another animal." and "Phylogenetic analysis of these viruses indicated a high probability that SARS coronavirus originated in bats and spread to humans either directly or through animals held in Chinese markets.") So no, it hasn't been months, but 20 years...
The palm civet found infected in the market was infected with a virus 99.9% similar but unique to palm civets. The issue here is they have found animals infected with an ancestral strain at a market that's a 29-nucleotide difference. SARS2 none of this has been found, which stands in stark contrast to all previous coronavirus spillovers.
And the fact the virus not only was extremely well adapted towards humans, but also is more adapted towards human's than other species. Nothing about SARS-2 is typical.
I mean I get it, lots of people's careers/reputations are on the line so it's hard to accept, but it is vital we do.
The same kind of arguments as for the bat cave theory.
Anyway, your argument here seems circular: Academics must not take the lab leak theory seriously, because only non-academics discuss it, because academics don't take the lab leak theory seriously.
I didn't say non-academic, I explicitly said "crazy people".
The lab theory will be taken seriously when there will be serious evidences. If they exist they will come out. Believing in conspiracies because enough people believe in them without any actual, tangible, verifiable evidence is worrying.
The option "intensive farming+poverty+open market full of crap+random bats, all in extremely unsanitary conditions" seems a way better theory, needing way less evidence (also hard to acquire in this case), if you compare it to the random lab doing experiments full of incompetent researchers.
Well it's not my hypothesis, it's a hypothesis of which the Director of National Intelligence in the United States during the pandemic, the executive head of our intelligence community, stated to congress under oath:
"My informed assessment, as a person with as much or more access than anyone to our government’s intelligence during the initial year of the virus outbreak and pandemic onset, has been and continues to be that a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science and by common sense."
Say what you will about politics and intentions, my statement holds that joining the group that calls people "crazy" and "conspiracy losers" is not a form of healthy discussion, in fact, is a form of propaganda itself.
