I’m not the one who introduced the term “cold” to the conversation.
Sigh. Alright, man, onto the next conversation, where maybe you'll decide to be a productive participant, or maybe you'll do this sort of sh*t. See you there.
Aha, straw-manning, another common conspiracy-theorist tactic.
No, I'm not saying COVID is just a bad cold. I'm saying its symptoms heavily overlap with other respiratory viruses, including the flu and the various types of viruses that get classified under the common cold. And the majority of people who get COVID, especially healthy people like, say, athletes in the military, experience only the cold-like symptoms. However, COVID is not just a bad cold, because in its more severe form, it is much worse than either the cold or the flu (or at least was worse than the flu, before widespread immunity and vaccination; I haven't seen the latest mortality rate numbers for COVID, but I suspect they've dropped down closer to the flu). And that's before we start talking about long COVID and its various manifestations.
My point is all we know is that 7 Americans who participated in the World Military Games in 2019 had COVID-like symptoms, and that this 7 is not an unusual number for that time in the military, even compared to units that sent no one to the World Military Games. So those 7 people tell us nothing, for better or worse. You'll have to look elsewhere for clues, I'm afraid.
Oh man, by all means, keep talking about alternatives. The problem isn't that you're talking about alternatives on a podunk website in 2025: it's that scientists keep saying there's a very real impact on research because people in power keep insisting that they, the scientists, focus on the alternatives.
I mean, I know in your mind, the conspiracy is more than likely, it's almost certain, and therefore what's actually being suppressed is the conspiracy, but seriously, scientists have been saying for years now that the pressure they're getting is very much from the opposite direction.
Syllogism 1:
If a report is required by law to be released, it is important.
This report was required by law to be released.
Therefore, this report was important.
Syllogism 2:
If a report was not required to be released, but is important, it should be released.
This report was not required to be released, but isimportant (per syllogism 1).
Therefore this report should have been released even though it was not required by law to be so.
If you read the report, or even just the sections I quoted above, you'll see that it says nothing that could possibly lead anyone to conclude that U.S. military personnel contracted COVID at the World Military Games in Wuhan in 2019 without a great deal more evidence. It mostly just looks like about the number of people you'd expect got colds. It just so happens that they got colds a couple months before a worldwide pandemic with cold-like symptoms originated in the place they were. It's weak even as circumstantial evidence goes, if you take 2 seconds to think about it. But you're thinking like a conspiracy theorist, so 2 seconds is more than you have to spare.
So in addition to reconfirming the laziness of conspiracy theory thinking, we have another common feature: draw a conclusion from false information, and when the information is shown to be false, continue to the maintain the conclusion as though it had been proven anyway.
I realize that, post-February 2020, we're all virologists and epidemiologists now, but man, I really suggest reading some of the actual research by virologists and epidemiologists. I even linked a Nature write-up of a recent (published in February) study on the origins of the virus above. It's a good place to start.
The article you posted, by a yellow rag, says they were required by law to release the report, but it references a law that says no such thing (the quote in the article is "publicly available on an internet website in a searchable format," but their link to the law actually takes you to the same report, and the part of the law that has that quote is actually about other reports related to Wuhan and the DOD (I've included the entire section of the law below). In other words, you don't know that they were required by law to publish it, and the yellow rag you linked to doesn't seem to know either.
It seems more than likely that the report came out, it was a big ol' nothing burger (because that's what it is), and they just sent it on the Congress along with a bunch of other stuff without thinking about it further.
The other feature of the conspiracy theorist is laziness: he or she is willing to accept, without question, the mere conjecture and outright misinformation of any publication that says anything that confirms their conspiratorial suspicions, but he or she is unwilling to do even basic checking of the facts and assumptions presented in said publications, despite the fact that it takes mere minutes to do such fact checking most of the time.
The committee directs the Secretary of Defense to submit a report to the Armed Services Committee of the House of Representatives not later than January 1, 2022 describing:
(1) All contracts the Department of Defense signed with the
EcoHealth Alliance or its affiliates by year from 2012-2021 in
spreadsheet format, to include purpose, location where contract was performed, cost, metrics, contract number, contract oversight organization, and whether any funds were provided ultimately to the Wuhan Institute of Virology;
(2) Whether any DoD-funded research projects involving
EcoHealth Alliance or its affiliates were performed in China or
in support of research performed in China, and if so, a
description of the projects, the work performed, and the risk
assessments DoD used to evaluate the project;
(3) Whether DoD issued any awards to the EcoHealth Alliance or its affiliates that are not available on USASpending.gov;
(4) Whether the Department sponsored any classified
research involving EcoHealth Alliance or its affiliates; and
(5) Copies of the agreements, initial research reports, and
all progress and final reports from the EcoHealth Alliance or
its affiliates.
This report shall be submitted in unclassified form and
made publicly available on an internet website in a searchable
format, but may contain a classified annex.
Keep what hidden? And did they try? Have you ever seen a report like this before for any sort of event?
You've made a bunch of assumptions about what happened with the report, what the report secretly means, etc., and drawn your conclusion from those assumptions. It's like the Ontological Argument of Conspiracies: if you can conceive it, then it happened.
Relatedly, man, conspiracy theorizers are so keen on finding evidence of a conspiracy that they'll latch onto literally anything. Though Slade already said that better than I.
I read the report. It would be difficult to conclude from it that COVID existed pre-December from it, given these quotes and the reports own conclusion:
Data surveillance reports from military treatment facilities indicate no statistically significant difference in COVID-19-like symptoms cases at installations with participating athletes when compared to installations without them. In addition, no significant increase in COVID-19-like signs and/or symptoms was documented for the dates of October 2019 through March 2020 as a result of U.S. Army separate surveillance testing.
and
Data surveillance reports from military treatment facilities indicate no statistically significant difference in COVID-19-like symptoms cases at installations with participating athletes when compared to installations without them. In addition, no significant increase in COVID-19-like signs and/or symptoms was documented for the dates of October 2019 through March 2020 as a result of U.S. Army separate surveillance testing.
It sounds like 7 members of the U.S. military who attended the games in Wuhan had COVID-like symptoms, which are, as we all know now, very consistent with other respiratory viruses, including the flu and the common cold (which would include various other coronaviruses and rhinoviruses). These 7 wouldn't have stood out, given that a bunch other servicemembers all over the world also had colds, if there hadn't been a global pandemic that originated in Wuhan (likely from racoon dogs, the cute little buggers, the latest research suggests).
Buncha people in their 50s and 60s, a few years from what would have been a decent pension after decades of work, deciding, you know what, why not work doing repetitive, body-destroying labor for a fraction of what they were previously paid, getting their pay docked if they screw up one piece of a widget out of many thousands in a day, with no paid time off and no real ability to form a union because labor laws have been gutted. Seems likely.
2 weeks ago
This is a month old, but I just stumbled upon it this morning:
Relevant for the sizeable OT contingent clinging to the "If white people had been able to express their race-realist views in the classroom/workplace, none of this would have happened" theory of the (re-)rise of Trump.
The commenter archive features may be temporarily disabled at times.
I’m not the one who introduced the term “cold” to the conversation.
Sigh. Alright, man, onto the next conversation, where maybe you'll decide to be a productive participant, or maybe you'll do this sort of sh*t. See you there.
Aha, straw-manning, another common conspiracy-theorist tactic.
No, I'm not saying COVID is just a bad cold. I'm saying its symptoms heavily overlap with other respiratory viruses, including the flu and the various types of viruses that get classified under the common cold. And the majority of people who get COVID, especially healthy people like, say, athletes in the military, experience only the cold-like symptoms. However, COVID is not just a bad cold, because in its more severe form, it is much worse than either the cold or the flu (or at least was worse than the flu, before widespread immunity and vaccination; I haven't seen the latest mortality rate numbers for COVID, but I suspect they've dropped down closer to the flu). And that's before we start talking about long COVID and its various manifestations.
My point is all we know is that 7 Americans who participated in the World Military Games in 2019 had COVID-like symptoms, and that this 7 is not an unusual number for that time in the military, even compared to units that sent no one to the World Military Games. So those 7 people tell us nothing, for better or worse. You'll have to look elsewhere for clues, I'm afraid.
Oh man, by all means, keep talking about alternatives. The problem isn't that you're talking about alternatives on a podunk website in 2025: it's that scientists keep saying there's a very real impact on research because people in power keep insisting that they, the scientists, focus on the alternatives.
I mean, I know in your mind, the conspiracy is more than likely, it's almost certain, and therefore what's actually being suppressed is the conspiracy, but seriously, scientists have been saying for years now that the pressure they're getting is very much from the opposite direction.
What's great here is your logic:
Syllogism 1:
If a report is required by law to be released, it is important.
This report was required by law to be released.
Therefore, this report was important.
Syllogism 2:
If a report was not required to be released, but is important, it should be released.
This report was not required to be released, but isimportant (per syllogism 1).
Therefore this report should have been released even though it was not required by law to be so.
If you read the report, or even just the sections I quoted above, you'll see that it says nothing that could possibly lead anyone to conclude that U.S. military personnel contracted COVID at the World Military Games in Wuhan in 2019 without a great deal more evidence. It mostly just looks like about the number of people you'd expect got colds. It just so happens that they got colds a couple months before a worldwide pandemic with cold-like symptoms originated in the place they were. It's weak even as circumstantial evidence goes, if you take 2 seconds to think about it. But you're thinking like a conspiracy theorist, so 2 seconds is more than you have to spare.
So in addition to reconfirming the laziness of conspiracy theory thinking, we have another common feature: draw a conclusion from false information, and when the information is shown to be false, continue to the maintain the conclusion as though it had been proven anyway.
I realize that, post-February 2020, we're all virologists and epidemiologists now, but man, I really suggest reading some of the actual research by virologists and epidemiologists. I even linked a Nature write-up of a recent (published in February) study on the origins of the virus above. It's a good place to start.
The article you posted, by a yellow rag, says they were required by law to release the report, but it references a law that says no such thing (the quote in the article is "publicly available on an internet website in a searchable format," but their link to the law actually takes you to the same report, and the part of the law that has that quote is actually about other reports related to Wuhan and the DOD (I've included the entire section of the law below). In other words, you don't know that they were required by law to publish it, and the yellow rag you linked to doesn't seem to know either.
It seems more than likely that the report came out, it was a big ol' nothing burger (because that's what it is), and they just sent it on the Congress along with a bunch of other stuff without thinking about it further.
The other feature of the conspiracy theorist is laziness: he or she is willing to accept, without question, the mere conjecture and outright misinformation of any publication that says anything that confirms their conspiratorial suspicions, but he or she is unwilling to do even basic checking of the facts and assumptions presented in said publications, despite the fact that it takes mere minutes to do such fact checking most of the time.
Keep what hidden? And did they try? Have you ever seen a report like this before for any sort of event?
You've made a bunch of assumptions about what happened with the report, what the report secretly means, etc., and drawn your conclusion from those assumptions. It's like the Ontological Argument of Conspiracies: if you can conceive it, then it happened.
Relatedly, man, conspiracy theorizers are so keen on finding evidence of a conspiracy that they'll latch onto literally anything. Though Slade already said that better than I.
I read the report. It would be difficult to conclude from it that COVID existed pre-December from it, given these quotes and the reports own conclusion:
and
It sounds like 7 members of the U.S. military who attended the games in Wuhan had COVID-like symptoms, which are, as we all know now, very consistent with other respiratory viruses, including the flu and the common cold (which would include various other coronaviruses and rhinoviruses). These 7 wouldn't have stood out, given that a bunch other servicemembers all over the world also had colds, if there hadn't been a global pandemic that originated in Wuhan (likely from racoon dogs, the cute little buggers, the latest research suggests).
Buncha people in their 50s and 60s, a few years from what would have been a decent pension after decades of work, deciding, you know what, why not work doing repetitive, body-destroying labor for a fraction of what they were previously paid, getting their pay docked if they screw up one piece of a widget out of many thousands in a day, with no paid time off and no real ability to form a union because labor laws have been gutted. Seems likely.
This is a month old, but I just stumbled upon it this morning:
https://sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2025/03/the-agents-of-history.html
Relevant for the sizeable OT contingent clinging to the "If white people had been able to express their race-realist views in the classroom/workplace, none of this would have happened" theory of the (re-)rise of Trump.