Does anyone still believe Covid came from a wet market?

[Aerialis]

Even the sainted New York Times has now confirmed, 5 years too late, that those dangerous 'conspiracy theorists' were right all along, and that Covid did not come from a bat crossed with a pangolin at a wet market in Wuhan, but unbelievably from a lab leak at the Wuhan institute of virology next door, who had been conducting gain of function research on coronaviruses. Surprise, surprise and who would have thought!

thespectator.com/topic/new-york-times-comes-clean-about-covid-zeynep-tufekci-apoorva-mandavilli/

Makes you think what else the 'conspiracy theorists' got right, and what else our governments and media are still lying to us about.

But anyone actually still actually think it came from a wet market rather than a lab leak?

Because so many outlets have presented "TW are women" as 100% true fact, and the Ministry of Truth BBC presented lots of things about Covid as 100% true fact. Can nobody see the parallel?

The closest the BBC got to reporting on anti-lockdown marches was "a couple of hundred conspiracy theorists on Speaker's Corner". I know that it was in the order of hundreds of thousands, and not "conspiracy theorists", but ordinary people concerned for their future of their children. How do I know the numbers were like this? I was there!!!!! The march was about 40 people wide, and literally miles long.

As for "vaccines are entirely optional": only if you were brave enough to stand up to the pure vitriol thrown at you, including on Mumsnet. The public was bullied and coerced into taking them. Anyone who hesitated was a "refusenik", a "granny murderer", a "consipiracy theorist", along with many other insults. The government did not actually legislate to make it compulsory, but they were ONE STEP away from doing so. The infrastructure was there. The extremely expensive app was up and running. The public had been told that it "might" happen. Posters of children in superhero costumes ("I got the vaccine!") were drafted, although not actually printed. Tesco were in on the act with that advert of Santa showing his vaxpass. All it needed was a forced nod from Boris Johnson, with his handlers moving his head to make it happen. I think the only reason that it wasn't made compulsory in law was so that the government could cling on to being able to say "we never forced anybody to take the vaccine"; they held out on this for as long as they could, but they damn well made sure that "divide and conquer" would make people take it.

There were points for and flaws in both theories at the time.

WTF?! Read about history of pandemics. It was a mutation of an existing virus, that no one (naturally) had immunity to, like Spanish flu was a mutation of flu.

Quite.
Legitimate PPE manufacturers were frozen out and people like Michelle Mone were given £60m to source PPE and managed to acquire a £60m yacht instead. It is hard not to sympathise with conspiracy theorists when one considers the corruption and lining of pockets while people were dying.

I've always thought it was a lab leak. It just makes sense.

Lab leaks have happened before. Not regularly, but they have. We famously had our own one back in 1978 when smallpox leaked from a lab in Birmingham and Janet Parker (a medical photographer) died. I was 11 at the time and at a school not far from Birmingham. We were in the outer limits of the bio-hazard area (whatever it is called).

I don't believe it was ever established exactly how the Birmingham leak happened, but if it can happen in Birmingham then why not in Wuhan?

I find the wet market theory very hard to believe. In fact, I'd call it bollocks.

And the witch-hunts launched against any scientists who dared to speak up against the official 'narrative' were utterly brutal and often career-ending (de-platforming, smearing, firing, censorship, loss of funding, etc

Yes - I wonder if any of these people ever got an apology or if the people responsible for deplatforming, sacking etc. faced any consequences.
One of the oddest aspects was the accusation of a lab leak was racist. Why?
Maybe the Chinese government started that knowing that it would immediately shut down discussion in the West.

there was a big push that indeed people would be made to have the injections
Have you forgotten about the threat to the NHS workers and the care workeres?

"The vaccines didn't prevent infection" hmmm ok then

@Topseyt123 I used to work at the University of Birmingham. I knew staff who had worked there during that awful incident. As far as I’m aware a fume cupboard was faulty and that is how the virus escaped in to the venting system, a service duct. Her office was above the lab. The professor in charge committed suicide as was so distraught at such a major mess up safety wise.

What’s gain of function research?

It is mucking about with genetics to 'gain function' and most of us are now injected with genetically modified cells as a result of this.

It's a conspiracy thread. Don't bother trying to be rational.

I got an email from MNHQ asking me not to question vaccine safety and efficacy.

It is still a mystery to me why you can’t have a conversation about vaccines, any vaccines. Why is it so emotional for some people? If it’s a free choice, then you need informed consent which involves knowing all possible information about them, not just bits some ‘expert’ from the drug company decides you can see.

It’s pretty obvious to anyone now that the vaccines weren’t all they claimed to be, and would anyone still say that young healthy children and adults really needed them?!! I just can’t see how anyone could still think that.

Wet market is very likely too.
Also vaccines were particularly life saving for the older/vulnerable.

Masks are worn in theatre mainly to protect the surgeons/scrub nurses from flying body fluids eg sudden spurts of blood. Some also wear eye protection for the same reason.

Masks do little for infection control after the first 30 seconds or so of use. This has been known since I worked in theatre decades ago.

This was the 500 page report that the USA congressional committee released in Dec 2024. The main reason that they concluded that it was designed in the Lab was that the biological characteristics found on the virus could not have been mutated in nature, according to biologists. These are their top five resasons:

COVID-19 ORIGIN: COVID-19 most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. The FIVE strongest arguments in favor of the “lab leak” theory include:

1. The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.
2. Data shows that all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans. This runs contrary to previous pandemics where there were multiple spillover events.
3. Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research at inadequate biosafety levels.
4. Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with a COVID-like virus in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.
5. By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced.

The vaccines don't prevent you catching the infection, they just make it less likely you'll become seriously unwell. I thought that was the issue lots of people had with them?

If masks are so crap why do surgeons still wear them? They might get on better without.

I'm not sure the average surgeon is wearing them in quite the same way that the general public used face coverings during covid. At least, I hope they're not doing operations in the same one they had on the train into work, that's been in their pocket for a week beforehand, and donning them once again for Tesco on the way home.

(More that it’s de rigeur and applause worthy on Mumsnet to get a transphobic dig in by the 4th post 🤷🏼‍♀️ )

We have that aneasthesist to thank for that.
Good on him

Not proven as far as I know, just one of the theories floating around.

I was a youngish mother, all mine are autistic. Mine are all inherited autism, I’m autistic, my husband is, both of our families have traits going back generations.

Someone mentioned John Campbell as a conspiracy theorist, but he started by immersing himself in Covid news and translating the info from medical/science jargon to human and explaining what was going on in easy to understand terms.

His regular research and reports started to show up weird things which he looked into.

He was the darling of MN until he started talking about the odd things that were happening, and after that point he was relegated as a conspiracy theorist who had always been a conspiracy theorist - rather Orwellian - Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

It is also worth thinking about the diagnosis happening more now. Same with dyslexia, in my day, children were just labelled as stupid and pushed out. It is so good that this happens so much less now.

Re the age thing, I had read some of these:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7396152/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/autism-maternal-age/

https://academic.oup.com/ije/article-abstract/43/1/107/736982

So whether this counts as proven or not is still a discussion point, but the evidence is quite strong.

I still think that understanding of such things has improved greatly which can only be a good thing.

Not true, lots of people have said he started out doing good things. I used to watch all his videos until they gradually started to make less sense.

I think what possibly happened is that he started to enjoy the increased responses, feeling of importance, and probably also the views that he got when he posted things that seemed to be more questioning/exposing.

I suspect he found that more rewarding in every way (including financially) than the simple explanations he used to post so well, and so he just gradually drifted into giving that section of his audience more and more of what they seemed to want, even though it meant straying further and further from any kind of solid scientific basis (and his own areas of expertise).

Susan Oliver who was a regular guest of his early on ended up making videos debunking some of the things he now says - it must have been very disappointing for her when he went in that direction.

I guess he realised the general public were being lied to and he was genuinely worried about the effects the injections were having on people ( and with good reason)