Wing nuts, conspiracy theorists and ammosexuals are jumping all over the Coronavirus crisis and making hay. Even though all the BS and conspiracy theories have been debunked social media is full of them and of course Facebook and Twitter allow anyone to lie about anything.
I know wingnuts that have been hoping for societal collapse since Y2K. They all think they will then be the alpha male of a new society. Idiots. They won't last a week.
OK lets put the conspiracy theories to rest so we can actually prepare and so that actual work can be done on a vaccine.
Facts not propaganda.
Coronaviruses are a group of viruses that tend to cause respiratory illnesses in humans and a variety of other illnesses in animals, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explains on its website. The name comes from the crown, or corona-like appearance of infective viruses when seen under a microscope.
One patent is for a genetic sequence of the virus that causes SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, a disease that spread to dozens of countries in 2003, sickening more than 8,000 people and killing 774.
“The sequencing was done at the CDC during the SARS outbreak and they were the ones that filed the patent,” Matthew Frieman, a coronavirus researcher at the University of Maryland, explained in an email.
The CDC told the Associated Press in 2003 that the agency was claiming ownership to ensure access, and to prevent others from controlling the technology. In a phone interview, Columbia law professor Harold Edgar told us that following a U.S. Supreme Court case decided in 2013, U.S. patent law no longer allows for patents on viral sequences as they exist in nature.
The other supposedly related patent is for a mutated form of avian infectious bronchitis virus, or IBV, which infects poultry, but not people. The patent was filed by the Pirbright Institute, a research institute in the U.K. whose mission is to prevent and control “viral diseases of livestock.” The mutations were created to attenuate, or weaken, the virus, so that it could be used as a vaccine to protect chickens from the disease.
As with all conspiracy theories, it is important to fight back with facts. You will not change the mind of those spreading them, but you might influence the lurkers and listeners to do their own research. Finding the facts takes works, lies are easy.
My mantras when I am on the internet.
Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts.
"God did it" is not an argument. It is an excuse for intellectual laziness.
If your viewpoint has merits and facts to back it up why would you have to lie?