You believe you make decisions based on facts, evidence, and common sense. This does not guarantee that your decisions are always correct.
Have you ever considered that two things can be true at the same time? In this case, that the COVID virus could have accidentally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology but also because of natural zoonotic transmission?
I previously mentioned consensus generally favors a natural zoonotic origin. You asked what consensus. One would hope that to conclude that the COVID pandemic is the result of the Wuhan lab leak you would have investigated other possibilities and therefore known that the leading consensus among major health organizations, including the World Health Organization is that COVID is of zoonotic origin. Zoonotic spillover is also the consensus of the scientific community at large.
COVID is a virus like SARS, MERS, and Ebola, and the vast majority of emerging infectious diseases in human history are zoonotic. The virus "Monkeypox" or Mpox was first identified in captive monkeys used for research in 1958. But there are also many viruses resulting from accidental laboratory escapes, such as the Russian Flu and the Marburg virus, and many other viruses.
I don't "believe" that I make decisions based facts, evidence, and common sense. That's literally what I do. I follow the facts wherever they lead. And I've said things on this board that probably everyone at some point has disagreed with.
I've never said I'm always correct. I'm not. That is a straw man. I've been wrong about a lot of things. I change my mind all the time. Like about Trump. I devoted an entire thread to tracking how badly I thought he would lose in 2016, using the fact that the majority of primary votes went to other candidates. And we see how that prediction turned out.
Regarding Covid, why would you place any stock in the "consensus" when they were so incredibly dishonest and so wrong about the pandemic? I knew nothing about pandemics before Covid. When I started listening to the unbiased experts, I learned so much. And a lot of what I learned conflicted with the "consensus."
A refresher:
- Fauci treated Covid the same way he treated HIV and AIDS when it first developed. Do you remember how he and the "consensus" tried to tell us it was not a gay disease and that everyone had the same risk? That was a lie. Just like with Covid, there was a discreet group of people at risk: people having gay/anal sex, intravenous drug users, people getting blood transfusions, and people with third world health immune systems.
- They did the same thing with Covid. Covid (as a deadly virus) targeted discreet groups: the elderly with comorbidites, the obese, and immuno-comprmised people. It was lethal for those groups. For everyone else, it was largely like the cold or flu. My first clue that we were overstating the risk was when the study first came out in Italy (?) where the average age of people dying was over 80. Then the people dying here early on were in nursing homes.
- The "consensus" cooked the books regarding the death toll, where people who died "with" Covid were listed as dying "from" Covid.
- I learned that kids are not effective transmitters of the virus and do not get seriously ill or die from it. Minuscule numbers. So we should have never shut down the schools.
- I learned that when a virus is out in the community, lockdowns are ineffective. So we should not have shut down the country, even though the "consensus" said we should. Remember 14 days to slow the spread?
- I learned that natural immunity was as or more effective than the vaccines, despite what the "consensus" said.
- I learned that the lockdowns interfered with herd immunity, which actually made the pandemic last longer.
- I listened while people from the CDC, to talking heads, to the POTUS lied to us and said the vaccines would stop the spread of the virus.
- I heard Facui and the "consensus" tell us that masks would stop the spread of the virus. Wrong.
- I watched while they tried to force essentially the entire country to take an experimental vaccine, when that vaccine neither stopped you from catching nor spreading the virus.
- I heard the "consensus" tell us that six feet of social distancing was required and based on science, only to later learn that they pulled six feet out of their rear end, that effective social distancing was more like about 30 feet, and they picked 6 because it would be easier to sell to the public.
- I saw how Fauci and his gangsters tried to censor anything that contradicted their narrative. And now we see exactly why he wanted a pardon.
There is more, but given this, why in God's name would I give any credence to the "consensus"?
I don't think there is anything wrong with looking at the consensus, but you still have to think for yourself and see if what they are saying makes sennse. For example, a friend of mine who actually recently passed away was mad at me during the pandemic because she said that we had a crisis in Hawaii with Covid patients being quarantined, taking up hospital space, and that we only had about 500 ventilators in the entire state. (Her husband is a doctor.). When I asked how many Covid patients are actually using ventilators, she lost her mind, started telling me "you're not a doctor," etc. I said: "yeah, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night." That didn't go over too well.
. The point was: how could the limited number of ventilators be a crisis unless they were actually being monopolized by Covid patients.
But I digress. If you actually look at the evidence and think about this logically it's hard to come any other reasonable conclusion.
