China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs Now Spreading Conspiracy Theory that Moderna Created Covid 177
China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs now spreading the conspiracy theory that Moderna created Covid. New York Times reporter Paul Mozur: Hard to believe they don't see the credibility they lose amplifying this stuff. Takeaway is still no sign the wolf warrior approach has been reconsidered. [...] It underscores how the CAC quashes rumors it doesn't like, but let's those of political expediency flourish within China.
Conspiracy theory is not about convincing 100% of (Score:5, Insightful)
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Mod parent up.
Something I myself forget, those promulgating this kind of propaganda are not emotionally invested in truth or in my reaction or my persuausion. They are focused on their own end goals, and the population these days is primed for susceptibility.
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11% of Americans either "strongly" or "somewhat " believe that the moon landings were faked. [statista.com] And this post will probably be replied to by some of them.
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Well, count in anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers, and those that believe in "an invisible man in the sky" and you get a measure of how bad the problem with irrationality really is.
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80% believe in angels, 90% supported Bush's WMD claims, 74% use Windows. A 10% level shouldn't be hard to achieve.
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.. of the people. As shown in the 2016 US election and subsequent events, the spread of conspiracy theories is not about convincing the 100% or 50%, it is just about convincing the 10 to15% and that is enough to change the course of history.
Indeed. The appalling fact is that you can only reach about 20% of all people with rational argument. Hence just shifting 10% or 15% of the mindless masses can give you a decisive victory. Democracy is unfortunately broken and can be exploited because the overwhelming majority of the human population is not rational.
It isn't about international credibility (Score:2)
It is about local credibility.
If you haven't been there it is hard to understand the culture. I have been there twice and was inundated with pro-China propaganda. For example on their high speed trains. The trains are literally a blatant copy of the trains in Germany. It is clear that they stole the designs. However, when you are on that train they have a video play over and over that says that the train was independently developed, designed and manufactured by glorious China.
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It is about local credibility.
Uh, then why was this message not broadcast by The Leader himself directly to and internally to China, and instead broadcast via a message from the office of foreign affairs?
We've screwed with a lot of definitions in recent times, but I'm pretty sure foreign still means what I think it means. Not doubting your claim one bit regarding the trains, but the method of delivery here, speaks to the world, not merely to China.
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saw this in the wild yesterda (Score:2)
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It is. The link is in the summary.
What's sauce for the goose.... (Score:2)
I look forward to this new era of official government fiction. Perhaps the US and China will even have a number to which you can text your vote for which of their narratives is more truthy.
CCP living up to their name /s (Score:2)
Communist /s
Censorship
Propaganda
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Lol. This story just gets more hilarious. American conspiracy theorists: "hurr durr, the furrin cleavage site is different by TWELVE nucelotides! That is unpossible! Clearly communist china party has manufactured COVID!"
Chinese conspiracy theorists: "well, akshually, capitalist American research shows that NINETEEN nucleotides are in fact patented by evil capitalist American biotech company!"
Personally, I think there's some great fan fic potential in a plot involving the US Army wanting to do some San Diego
Allegedly (Score:2)
They should have used "allegedly". I noticed a trend in US media, they use this word in the title for everything unconfirmed.
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This one is confirmed false.
Ever hear of the Streisand effect? (Score:2)
https://dailyexpose.uk/2022/03... [dailyexpose.uk]
https://dailyexpose.uk/2022/03... [dailyexpose.uk]
These guys are good! lots of scientific notations and supporting evidence down to searching the BLAST database.
Fake news has upped their game!
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That's not the original source. The original source was a scientific paper (linked to in the summary). The article you linked is just a distortion of the original paper, trying to say things not supported by the evidence.
Missing link (Score:2)
That's not the original source. The original source was a scientific paper (linked to in the summary). The article you linked is just a distortion of the original paper, trying to say things not supported by the evidence.
Sorry, but I don't see the link to the paper in the summary. Is it in the Twitter link perhaps? Or maybe the summary was rewritten?
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Yeah I didn't drink coffee today. Here is the paper [frontiersin.org].
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The correlation between this SARS-CoV-2 sequence and the reverse complement of a proprietary mRNA sequence is of uncertain origin. Conventional biostatistical analysis indicates that the probability of this sequence randomly being present in a 30,000-nucleotide viral genome is 3.21 ×10^-11.
This claim is recapitulated in a less technical form at the end of the paper:
The presence in SARS-CoV-2 of a 19-nucleotide RNA sequence encoding an FCS at amino acid 681 of its spike protein with 100% identity to the reverse complement of a proprietary MSH3 mRNA sequence is highly unusual. Potential explanations for this correlation should be further investigated.
However, a pseudonymous comment below the article gives a non-technical explanation for the anomaly. Basically, both the virus and the vaccine maker are/were targeting, in a manner of speaking, the same parts of the human genome. Another reader gives a more detailed explanation that sadly got eaten by site's comment formatting system.
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Yeah, this is the furin cleavage site.
If someone doing research on coronaviruses wanted to add furin cleavege site in order to make it easier for the virus to fuse with a cell going through the cell wall (that's my understanding), then they might do a search through the database to find this RNA sequence and insert it into the coronavirus genome. Alternately, they might have already been familiar with it (since some AIDS research has focused on it).
Alternately, it might have evolved naturally. However, ther
China? Obvious much? (Score:2)
Okay, who was so asleep at the wheel they didn't see this BS coming?
Pure Alinsky tactic.
It's one thing for them to steal our tech... (Score:3)
Must they also steal our conspiracy theories?
Years ago at lunch we would play this game, "Conspiracy theory of the day..." in which the goal was to take two unrelated headlines and invent a conspiracy to link them together. The player with the most plausible explanation won.
Had I known then that this game would soon become the de facto sport of the ruling class, I suppose I would have kept my mouth shut.
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If you'd patented it, you'd be rich.
"Credibility" was an idea when truth mattered (Score:2)
Today everything is "flood the zone with shit". Liars used to be shamed, now they get clicks and interviews.
They have to do this (Score:2)
If you dig into it you'll find decades of epidemiologists warning us this was going to happen. It's why when Obama handed off the presidency to Trump and it was time to do a "disaster drill" the disaster they used was "a pandemic".
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the overwhelming scientific consensus is that the virus got it's start in the wet markets
It's easy to have a consensus when those exposing contrary evidence can't get published [dailymail.co.uk] and those connected to the accused pretend not to be so to discredit accusers. [archive.is]
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A quick search on PubMed shows tons of articles discussing the lab leak possibilities, so clearly if there is a systematic campaign to block scientists from talking about this possibility, they are doing a very bad job at it.
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China needs the wet markets and they need to slash and burn those forests.
I don't understand your claim that China needs those. Particularly in the case of wet markets, there's no reason why they couldnt open more grocery stores. A lot of their wet markets have already moved indoors anyways https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] .
This is pretty funny. (Score:2)
The weird part on this is that this sequence was in the wild already, whereas the sequence that others claim was found in Sar-covid proving china's complicity, was NEVER in the wild. IOW, there is more logic in the supposed non-wild sequence, than the wild one
Personally, I have argued that finding a single sma
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I think the Trump theory is more believable.
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Might as well argue that Trump is Hitler re-incarnated.
Highly improbable. Trump was bourne in 1946. Hitler died in 1945. A gap of little over a year. It would take quite a few turns of the wheel of rebirth to work off a karma as bad as Hitler's and still end up a Trump.
How silly, when reality is... (Score:2)
Everyone knows that the virus was created by a Putin-sponsored team in a Grupo Modelo laboratory. That is why it is called the Corona virus.
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I admire your theory and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Conspiracy theory vs conspiracy theory... (Score:2)
Back in the early days of the pandemic, the prevailing PRC official response to how Covid came about was all about bats in a food market. For some reason, that didn't seem to convince people... so around the same timeframe, a conspiracy theory started floating around which was very quickly quashed by Chinese officials: that whole thing about a local Chinese scientist apparently saying (and I'm paraphrasing here), "Oh, crap! I recognize this virus! Didn't this come from our lab?!?"
Think what you will about t
Twitter agrees this is true (Score:2)
Don't forget Twitter has an official policy [twitter.com] of disallowing COVID misinformation. Particularly applicable, "False claims about COVID-19 that invoke a deliberate conspiracy by malicious and/or powerful forces." The fact they allow such CCP posts to remain up and with no disclaimer must mean that Twitter as a company affirms their validity - or what else should we infer?
Just when you think it cannot get more stupid (Score:2)
Something like this happens.
Everything that comes from China is Bullshit (Score:2)
A tweet as the only source? (Score:2)
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The evidence has long been heard and evaluated. It's disingenuous to suggest otherwise. This conspiracy theory is just the same old Big Lie with a fresh coat of paint.
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Your mistake is to equate claims with evidence. Listening to every crazy, half-baked self-serving claim and pretending it should get equal consideration with what is already known is not a good way to do science. If they do have evidence they will present it and the conversation will change.
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That isn't really how proof works, which is something conspiracy theories exploit.
The path to truth, is often easier when you hear out the lies.
Besides, it tends to make sense that you at least respond with "The FUCK did you do that for?!?" when you're a vaccine company slapped that hard against the corporate face.
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The path to truth, is often easier when you hear out the lies.
This is generally a dumb approach unless you can figure out what the lies are supposed to distract you from. For most people it would be a waste of time. If you're Columbo, it works out great. If you're Ginny Thomas, you wind up living in an alternate universe.
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The path to truth, is often easier when you hear out the lies.
This is generally a dumb approach unless you can figure out what the lies are supposed to distract you from.
I know it's quite fashionable with the events of the day, but I'm not going to automatically assume every liar is a disinformation campaign specialist sent in behind enemy lines to execute a 3-day psyop every time they answer a question.
Sometimes a stupid lie, is just a stupid lie. In fact, almost all the time.
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Sometimes a stupid lie, is just a stupid lie. In fact, almost all the time.
Given the available evidence, the cases where a stupid lie is not just a stupid lie are very rare indeed. Sure, there are some "superspreaders" of stupid lies (like Trump), but even their lies are not competently done misdirection, they usually just managed to identify a part of the population so abysmally stupid that they will even believe badly done stupid lies when they come from the mouth of their surrogate messiah. But even that does not work reliably. Not many were willing to inject disinfectant, for
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Fact checkers = agenda based liars no matter what they claim in their mission statements. For every scientific paper there is one saying the opposite. For every report of a death or a side effect, there is a story saying it's fake, falsified, or twice as bad as actually reported. Who the fuck knows when there is this much emotion and this many liars on every "side" trying to manipulate reality? At this point, at least in person, I'm just allergic to the whole discussion. [slashdot.org]
You claim to be too confused by all the available information to tell facts from fiction. Meanwhile, by dismissing lies and bad arguments, I have enough free mental energy to judge Ginni Thomas' sanity, your information strategy, and the latest effluence from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the same afternoon without breaking a sweat.
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You don't prove a negative, you can only prove a positive and there has been zero credible evidence of this being true.
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You don't prove a negative, you can only prove a positive and there has been zero credible evidence of this being true.
As that fundamental truth invalidates all kinds of conspiracy theories well-loved by countless morons, said morons start by ignoring this simple fact. "It _could_ be true" is the battle cry of willful ignorance.
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There is a conspiracy theory that hot alien chicks inhabit the moon Europa. Prove me wrong.
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They are only considered "hot", if you have really low standards. And technically, Europa is only their summer vacation spot, so the word "inhabited" is a tad disingenuous.
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You must be thinking of southern Europa. The real da[nm]es are in northern Europa. :-D
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The summary gives a link to the origination of the theory, including the evidence (which is slight and just a misinterpretation of facts imo)
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Nobody claims this conspiracy theory is entirely false. The claim is that it has no credible supporting evidence. That means this conspiracy theory is about as likely to be true as "Santa Claus" did it (which definitely should be looked into, BTW!) or other crackpot theories.
The thing is that there is always a basically infinite number of alternate theories that have no supporting evidence even if they are very remotely plausible. Hence the way this works in Science is that you have to bring _supporting_ ev
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There is zero evidence that Moderna created covid. Even if covid was created in a lab, the evidence all points to Wuhan. Some evidence points to the US government funding. But none of it points to Moderna.
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I am not arguing that point?
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What point are you arguing?
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I'm ok with China. The CCP is seriously problematic.
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Nah, that's definitely not true. The legitimate government of China is the Republic of China, currently in exile.
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It doesn't really matter, you can make up whatever theory you want to support any conclusion you want.
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No it doesn't point to U.S. government funding in the sense you meant it. The U.S. funded some labs in China in order to investigate viral diseases there since China seems to export a fair share of them due to their feral animal markets and the poor hygiene on their farms. This is precisely what we want the U.S. government to fund, i.e., catch it there before it can get here. Stop spreading nonsense.
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lol no one wanted covid to escape a lab. But the US government was funding experiments to create viruses just like covid.
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The problem with your hypothesis is that anyone could do a search for "furin cleavage" and come up with the same sequence. It was public info. By way of analogy, just because the Apache error page comes up when a website is down, that doesn't mean Apache brought your website down.
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>because the Apache error page comes up when a website is down, that doesn't mean Apache brought your website down.
That's what they want you to think.
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"Apache: the spreading scourge?"
Are your children safe?
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I don't have an hypothesis, I just stated a fact.
That's a lie. I will quote your hypothesis, from your previous comment:
" this does not confirm Moderna created it. It certainly suggests the possibility"
Don't be a coward. If you have a hypothesis, don't be afraid to admit it. Everyone will know anyway.
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What exactly do you want people to investigate then if you haven't proposed a hypothesis?
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Yeah, your words are slippery. You need to decide what you think before you write. When you say "the possibility should be looked into" then that definitely implies you want it to be investigated.
Be firm in your words. They can't be pinned to you anyway as an AC.
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Then say what you mean. "The possibility should be looked into" clearly shows that you want it to be looked into. If you don't think so, learn English because you're wrong.
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And while it might be patented by Moderna, the fact that it is in HUMAN DNA would mean nothing.
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It's in the name - "China Virus".
How could Moderna possibly have invented that?
China Virus. China Virus. China Virus.
Re: Could be true (Score:2)
A few idiots call it "China virus", that doesn't prove anything. If other idiots start calling it "moderna virus", will that be proof that moderna created it ?
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There is a 19 nucleotide sequence in the original COVID strain that was patented by Moderna. the sequence itself appears elsewhere naturally, but not in a flu virus.
Why would it appear in a flu virus? COVID isn't related to influenza.
The sequence in the COVID strain is part of the human version of the MutS-1 protein gene — a sequence of genetic code that occurs naturally in pretty much every mammal out there, plus various bacteria, etc., presumably with slight variations. Saying that this sequence occurs "elsewhere naturally" and then assuming that it can only be in the virus because of human manipulation is roughly like saying that oxygen exists elsewhere natur
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Technically you cannot explicitly patent [medlineplus.gov] a natural gene sequence.
Unfortunately, you probably can get a patent on uses of the gene.
And, you can patent it if you tweak it a little.
YMMV, IANAL, etc.
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Technically you cannot explicitly patent [medlineplus.gov] a natural gene sequence. Unfortunately, you probably can get a patent on uses of the gene. And, you can patent it if you tweak it a little. YMMV, IANAL, etc.
Fair enough. I somehow missed the SCOTUS decision in 2013 that banned patents based solely on isolation. This makes me wonder how this sequence got patented... except that if it's anything like software patents, there are probably a hundred invalid patents issued for every valid one, thanks to everybody throwing crap against the wall, seeing what sticks, and hoping that the examiners don't notice that it's all crap....
Re: Could be true (Score:2)
Mod up people with points and who can think
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That's your evidence it might have been made by Moderna? Really?
"It occurs elsewhere naturally" So, not invented by anybody.
"but not in a flu virus" So, what? SARS-CoV19 is not a flu virus, either.
"a 19 nucleotide sequence in the original COVID strain" Out of 29,903 base pairs. [nih.gov]
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They both give me the sniffles so they must be the same thing.
The OP shouldn't be too chastened though. That was basically the default assumption of medicine until the 2050s or so.
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The wuhan money mostly went through one private company and the man heading it had previously submitted (and been rejected for) a funding proposal to perform gain-of-function research
This man needs to be investigated much more deeply. What was he doing exactly in Wuhan?
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A year ago you would have be ostracized for even hinting at that as a possibility.
Not really. A year ago the most commonly accepted hypothesis was that covid started in the wet markets in Wuhan. That has been the primary hypothesis since COVID was first found in Wuhan.
I don't think Moderna has any research labs in Wuhan.
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Clearly Modern is a front for the CIA's bioweapons program. I bet if you find pictures from Wuhan in the last few months of 2019 you will find a man in a dark suit and sunglasses with a briefcase. Classic spook.
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I can tell that is false, because given the competence of the American CIA, if they tried to release COVID, we would find out about it because a room was found in Wuhan with a bunch of dead US-looking spooks, having died of a mysterious virus.
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So you're saying it must have been Mossad then?
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LOL in terms of competence, it is certainly more likely. I blame the lizard people.
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Citation of _CREDIBLE_ evidence is required for this please.
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Actually there is a lot of pretty hard evidence this cannot be true. There are some theoretical ideas with no basis in reality that ignore the hard evidence that say it could be true.
So first of all, Covid was not "created" unless the ones creating it are a few decades ahead of everybody else in medical research and managed to keep that secret. So research that would involve a lot of highly qualified people would have to be kept absolutely secret. There is no chance of that happening. The thing is all known
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Believe all the conspiracy theories you like, but it isn't the path to enlightenment. Go get a science education, much better for you.
Re: Sad (Score:2)
Not that I put any stock in this virus story of course, it's obvious political bullshit to stir up anti-US sentiment in case China gets into a "fight" about the Russia-Ukraine situa