China should pay reparations for creating Covid-19!

[Jack D]

13 hours ago, hk blues said:

Also, Mike, some just don't give a F*** about the politics! Or see things differently.  

[Jack D]

17 hours ago, scott h said:

Jack, do you really think (in our case) the American public will have the resolve to pay double for their Air Jordans at Walmart or their favorite football stars jersey at the stadium gift shop? Me thinks not 

"... [But] the American public [already seems to be paying double... or even much more than that] for their Air Jordans at Walmart..." 

https://www.walmart.com/search/?query=air jordans&cat_id=5438

[Mike J]

@Shady - I removed the political comment from your last post.  Future violations will result in the entire post being removed or hidden.

[robert k]

On 6/7/2021 at 10:31 PM, hk blues said:

It doesn't just happen in China though...

Right, some places used precautions to stop a virus from escaping. China used 2nd and third tier labs to do the Wuhan Flu research. But there have been releases in Britain and other places.

[Snowy79]

The man/woman or the other 57 genders will be the only one paying any reparations. If acountry puts tarrifs on anything the cost will be added to the consumer, if the price exceeds what a consumer will pay then no sales are made and no tax goes back to the treasury. Once the tax stops coming in the treasury will print money to cover their outgoings and inflation will increase hitting everyone but the wealthy. 

[Tommy T.]

2 hours ago, robert k said:

Right, some places used precautions to stop a virus from escaping. China used 2nd and third tier labs to do the Wuhan Flu research. But there have been releases in Britain and other places.

Just curious and not attacking you. But could could you please share your sources of information for those, like me, who are ignorant about them?

[hk blues]

2 hours ago, robert k said:

But there have been releases in Britain and other places.

Indeed...the "other places" include America, 

[Mike J]

1 hour ago, Tommy T. said:

Just curious and not attacking you. But could could you please share your sources of information for those, like me, who are ignorant about them?

I know that you responded to Robert, but here is some info you may find a bit scary.  While in the military (long time back) I attended special training in CBR (Chemical Biological Radiological) warfare.   Not how to do it, but rather how to recognize and deal with it.   It was spooky as hell even then and I am sure that is worse stuff out there now. 

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/05/28/biolabs-pathogens-location-incidents/26587505/

Vials of bioterror bacteria have gone missing. Lab mice infected with deadly viruses have escaped, and wild rodents have been found making nests with research waste. Cattle infected in a university's vaccine experiments were repeatedly sent to slaughter and their meat sold for human consumption. Gear meant to protect lab workers from lethal viruses such as Ebola and bird flu has failed, repeatedly.

A USA TODAY Network investigation reveals that hundreds of lab mistakes, safety violations and near-miss incidents have occurred in biological laboratories coast to coast in recent years, putting scientists, their colleagues and sometimes even the public at risk.

Oversight of biological research labs is fragmented, often secretive and largely self-policing, the investigation found. And even when research facilities commit the most egregious safety or security breaches — as more than 100 labs have — federal regulators keep their names secret.

Of particular concern are mishaps occurring at institutions working with the world's most dangerous pathogens in biosafety level 3 and 4 labs — the two highest levels of containment that have proliferated since the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001. Yet there is no publicly available list of these labs, and the scope of their research and safety records are largely unknown to most state health departments charged with responding to disease outbreaks. Even the federal government doesn't know where they all are, the Government Accountability Office has warned for years.

A team of reporters who work for the USA TODAY Network of Gannett newspapers and TV stations identified more than 200 of these high-containment lab facilities in all 50 states and the District of Columbia operated by government agencies, universities and private companies. They're scattered across the country from the heart of New York City to a valley in Montana; from an area near Seattle's Space Needle to just a few blocks from Kansas City's Country Club Plaza restaurant and shopping district.

High-profile lab accidents last year with anthrax, Ebola and bird flu at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the discovery of forgotten vials of deadly smallpox virus at the National Institutes of Health raised widespread concerns about lab safety and security nationwide and whether current oversight is adequate to protect workers and the public. Wednesday the Department of Defense disclosed one of its labs in Utah mistakenly sent samples of live anthrax -- instead of killed specimens – to labs across the USA plus a military base in South Korea where 22 people are now being treated with antibiotics because of their potential exposure to the bioterror pathogen. As many as 18 labs in nine states received the samples, the CDC said Thursday.

"What the CDC incidents showed us ... is that the very best labs are not perfectly safe," says Marc Lipsitch, a Harvard University professor of epidemiology. "If it can happen there, it certainly can happen anywhere."

Some people find little reassurance that nobody was sickened in the CDC accidents or in the historically low numbers of serious infections among lab workers generally, or that infections spreading into communities surrounding labs have been rarer still.

"Many of us think that's really a matter of good fortune," said Beth Willis, who chairs a citizen lab advisory panel in Frederick, Md., home to one of the nation's largest high-containment research campuses at the Army's Fort Detrick.

The country's best labs have robust safety programs, said Kenneth Berns, co-chair of a panel of outside lab safety advisers currently examining biosafety at CDC and other federal labs. Yet the systemic safety problems identified at the CDC's prestigious labs have raised questions about what's happening elsewhere. "It's a matter of some concern," said Berns, a distinguished professor emeritus of molecular genetics and microbiology at the University of Florida.

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The consequences could be devastating if accidents were to occur with lab-created strains of deadly influenza viruses that are purposely engineered to be easier to spread than what's found in nature, said David Relman, a microbiology professor at Stanford University who is a federal adviser on lab safety and a past president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

"You're talking about something that has the ability to take off, and we could not be confident of being able to contain it," he said.

Relman said that not enough is known about the state of safety at labs that perform infectious disease research but emphasized that the kinds of labs drawing concern are the same ones the public needs to discover important new treatments and vaccines. "We have to find some happy blend of minimized risk and enhanced benefit," he said.

At the high-containment labs identified by USA TODAY, experiments are underway involving drug-resistant tuberculosis, exotic strains of flu, the SARS and MERS viruses, plague, anthrax, botulism, ricin and the Ebola and Marburg hemorrhagic fever viruses, according to interviews and more than 20,000 pages of internal lab safety records and incident reports obtained from labs across the country.

Studies are also being done on a wide range of bioterrorism pathogens that are less known to the public, such as the agents that cause exotic diseases like tularemia, Q fever and melioidosis. Still others are focused on pathogens that pose serious economic risks to agriculture, such as foot-and-mouth disease, brucellosis and "mad cow" disease.

At a few labs, experiments have been done with strains of flu and other viruses purposely made to be more dangerous in studies that seek to understand how they might mutate naturally. White House science advisers called for a temporary halt of that kind of "gain of function" research last fall while expert scientific panels spend the next year studying its risks and benefits.

[Tommy T.]

2 hours ago, Mike J said:

I know that you responded to Robert, but here is some info you may find a bit scary.  While in the military (long time back) I attended special training in CBR (Chemical Biological Radiological) warfare.   Not how to do it, but rather how to recognize and deal with it.   It was spooky as hell even then and I am sure that is worse stuff out there now. 

Thanks for the info, Mike... scary as hell as the content says...