Of course. But it will likely be years before it really reaches its full effect.
There is herd immunity for a lot of vaccines. It might be decades before we have to break out an iron lung. Once we do we'll have to get a whole bunch because polio is extremely transmissible, but until then it will be easily deniable.
Similarly, without tracking a lot of diseases, it'll just be anecdotal. We already hear about E. coli and salmonella outbreaks. Will anyone really notice the difference if there are twice as many? (Especially if it's only reported in the much-reviled "mainstream media".)
The danger is obvious to anyone who knows anything at all about how disease processes work. But as Kennedy said, "We, you know, people, we need to stop trusting the experts." Anybody who knows anything is ipso facto untrustworthy, and you should believe the opposite of what they say. So it will be quite a long time before people have sufficiently "done their own research" (by dying).
Also many vaccines are given in childhood, the vaccine schedule is frontloaded to the first 18 months of life, and many parents are trying to push to get the rest of their kids' vaccines early if possible for fear of losing access to them. So kids up through roughly 2024 births will have largely gotten their vaccines before the CDC can substantively change anything. We're looking at decades before the health effects become apparent, enough time for kids to be born after the unavailability of vaccines and yet grow old enough to get into school settings where diseases can easily spread.
Also likely to be extremely socioeconomically divided, as wealthy parents will likely be able to secure vaccines for their kids through vaccine tourism or the black market, while diseases run rampant through the lower classes.
>So it will be quite a long time before people have sufficiently "done their own research" (by dying).
And even then, it may not be enough. Antivaccine is as old as vaccines, with the same arguments forever, and I would argue that the mass adoption of vaccination in the 20th century has as much to do with social and cultural forces such as post-war optimism, fascination with science and trust in modernity, as with hard data like "efficacy" and having your kids escape illness.
The time frame of elections doesn't afford enough time for that. He'll likely be gone in four years regardless of what happens. His successor may or may not have any interest in repairing the damage done, but you'd basically have to restart the clock.
The voters, like markets, can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent/uninfected.
A) The lab leak hypothesis is still unproven. There is no hard scientific data to support it, and many supposed proofs ("Chinese scientists fell ill first") are circular references without proof.
B) Pseudoscientific grifters such as RFJ jr are far far less credible than the CDC, and yet here we are. He specifically said COVID-19 was a genetically engineered bioweapon that targets Black and white people but spared Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.
C) Do your own research and look at "The relativity of Wrong" recently submitted on this website.
The lab leak theory is plausible. That's enough to not label it a conspiracy theory. It also meant there was never broader discourse on if gain of function research is a good idea.
The problem was that it mostly started being brought up for the purpose of political propaganda. Trump's only use for the pandemic was as fuel to rail against China in support of his predetermined agenda. So "lab leak" was used to focus attention on the external enemy to fight, instead of taking care of our own country or asking why Trump was so dead set against that.
The whole time, it was obviously wrong to reject the lab leak theory out of hand. Yet people are stupid herd animals, and instead of tri-state "it is irrelevant in the current context" they argued that the theory was definitely wrong. That same fallibility applies to people working for institutions (see also the early CDC lie implying that masks weren't effective, based on wanting to keep the supply for the healthcare industry).
Then after the dust settles, people stay dug in and the politically-colored battle lines never go away. I'd say this kind of establishment-clearly-wrong but dissent-with-nothing-productive underlies most of the energy fueling the destructionists.
I've been seeing a lot of articles asking about AI on news sources like the NYT, but even during 2020-2021, I didn't see that level of articles of GoF. Maybe biotech is having these debates internally.
The CDC did not 'brand the lab-leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory'. The CDC stated the scientific truth, which was that we didn't have enough to go on at the time to make a judgement one way or another. The initial lab-leak hypothesis was primarily created by Trump & the MAGA folks to try to deflect blame onto China. It could still be valid and correct, but it was definitely not motivated from facts at first, and to my understanding we still don't have enough facts to assert it confidently one way or the other.
If the two options are a) coming from a wet market vs b) coming from a coronavirus gain of function laboratory in Wuhan that's funded by the CDC, you have to start thinking about this more than just MAGA conspiracy theories.
It's the most bloody obvious explanation, and in a sane world where "MAGA" didn't just turn off everyone's brain cells and cause them to blindly repeat what they're told, any alternative would need some serious heft to be convincing.
'coronavirus gain of function laboratory in Wuhan that's funded by the CDC' is misleading.
The particular lab (Wuhan Institute of Virology) is not a 'coronavirus gain of function laboratory', but an institute studying viruses, including the coronavirus, and including gain of function research. And, critically, "the viruses used in these experiments were not physically present but rather consisted of synthesized genetic sequences, meaning they were not complete, nor infectious viral particles capable of replication, and the pseudo-virus experiments conducted to test human cell entry lacked the ability to replicate." (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12040609/).
It's possible that WIV did screw up and create, intentionally or otherwise, the virus responsible for the pandemic. And, WIV has been linked with military research programs. But, it's not a slam dunk, and the best/widest scientific consensus is still, in 2025, that the origin was natural/biological and came as a result of human/wild-animal contact.
I don't know how you could read this story as anything other than complete vindication of the people who turn off their brains and refuse to listen to anything "MAGA" has to say. I wasn't in their camp, I thought Kennedy was going to be fine, and now he's working full time to make sure Americans get more diseases and fewer treatments.
Given precisely that amount of information, sure. But people dig in further and it complicates things. We don't just go "ugh jeez isn't it obvious" and turn our brains off.
The most bloody obvious explanation is a natural origin, exactly like the first SARS. Did you forget about that was also a coronavirus outbreak, a close cousin of the COVID-19 (whose real name is SARS-cov-2) that was more lethal (but less contagious, and contained thanks to the heroic efforts of Hong Kong and south Korea)?
The clique downvoting my post can suck it: SARS-CoV-1 as well as MERS are more lethal than SARS-CoV-2 (aka COVID-19), and nobody doubts they are perfectly natural - that is until RFK jr and the crazies around him on day begin to lie they are bioengineered, the same way they lie about Lyme disease, vaccines, autism, antidepressants and their FUD-du-jour.
Who, SPECIFICALLY PLEASE, at the CDC "branded the lab-leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory and quickly dismissed it"?
Not the press, not some rando on twitter, not some anonymous and probably made up "source", not "people are saying"-- which actual CDC employee or appointee did this?
I keep asking, and people keep making up bullshit.
Fauci was relatively quick to dismiss the idea of the virus being human-modified, in a press briefing on April 17, 2020 [0]:
> Q Mr. President, I wanted to ask Dr. Fauci: Could you address these suggestions or concerns that this virus was somehow manmade, possibly came out of a laboratory in China?
> THE PRESIDENT: Want to go?
> Q You studied this virus. What are the prospects of that?
> DR. FAUCI: There was a study recently that we can make available to you, where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve. And the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.
(The study he refers to is "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" [1], published March 17.) It seems that much was made of this particular remark. It doesn't rule out the idea of an unmodified virus leaked from the lab, but the widespread theories have always been aimed at the gain-of-function research occuring there.
The original commenter got flagged for his response, so I'd like to ask you more politely. Dr. Fauci did not in fact work for the CDC, and as you acknowledge this statement does not even say that the lab leak hypothesis is untrue. Are you trying to argue in favor of the original commenter's assertion that "they branded the lab-leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory", or just trying to explain what comments people are interpreting in bad faith to support that assertion?
My apologies, I was actually under the belief that Fauci was affiliated with the CDC at the time, given how often they appeared together in headlines (e.g., [0]; most of those are clumping them together in critisism, but I also saw them clumped together in praise). I'll keep that in mind.
In any case, the assertion made me curious about what was actually said by government officials and affiliates regarding lab-leak theories, and drilling down into some of the blog posts led to that particular statement and the paper associated with it.
People do often specifically mean a human-modified virus when they talk about "the lab-leak hypothesis", especially given the GoF research conducted there, so I'd say it's true that Fauci wanted to cast water on that particular version of the hypothesis. (If there's anything that annoys me, it's when people equivocate over what is and isn't a lab leak. But if you must know, I personally find the stronger forms uncompelling.)
Of course, many have put far stronger language into the mouths of politicians and officials (most of whom in 2020 were quite careful with their words), and the tales can easily grow in the retelling, but it doesn't mean it's not worthwhile to focus on the kernel of truth about what actually occurred. "It wasn't the CDC, it was Fauci/others, and they were only talking about a manmade virus, against which the evidence is still strong" would have been much clearer than "it's all BS".
How is this quickly dismissing the idea that it was a lab leak as a conspiracy? The research showed (and still shows) that it's extremely plausible for the virus to have gone from animal -> human. I think currently there is a "missing" jump where the animal which was involved in transmission still isn't know but to say that Fauci citing the current research is "dismissal of lab leak as a conspiracy theory" is a bit absurd.
I don't think you'd easily catch him put it in precisely the terms of a "conspiracy theory". He wouldn't have had such a long career if he weren't careful with his words on air.
But he did consider that research to adequately "address" the concerns of a "manmade" virus, and I don't think it would be uncharitable to interpret that as a dismissal of those concerns. After all, he always could have ended his statement with a noncommittal "but this is just one study, and we need more evidence to really know for sure".
And a lot of people do specifically mean a virus that was genetically modified or otherwise selected for human transmissibility when they talk about a "lab leak", so at least he was trying to talk down that version of a lab leak theory.
(Personally, I do think a lot of the theories of an genetically-modified virus are overblown, both then and now, I just wanted to give some perspective for what he actually said.)
Please don't attack other users like this, no matter how wrong anyone is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
That's a good point about the word harangue! I've replaced it with a different verb above.
Could you please stop breaking the site guidelines, and also please stop creating accounts to do that with? You're welcome here as long as you respect the same rules that apply to all commenters.
NIH officials involved in writing a paper in 2020 about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 actively suppressed consideration of a lab leak hypothesis and exaggerated the evidence for a natural origin. Some of their communications have been released and others involved have testified to that under oath.
But your second link contradicts this story entirely! It's about a claim from the CDC director that other officials in other agencies froze him out because he wanted to consider the lab leak hypothesis.
Sorry I should have been more clear. From a US federal government perspective, the fault for the sloppy science in the 2020 paper lies with the NIH and not the CDC. Will edit my comment above.
With these rabid haters, COVID-19 is at the same time "just a flu that doesn't hurt kids nor adults and can be cured with a cheap widely available medicine" and “a genetically engineered bioweapon that targets Black and white people but spared Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people” (as explained by RFK jr, now in charge of the CDC).
You’re blaming the medical establishment for Western disease? Maybe blame a car centric, carbohydrate rich ultra processed food incentivized system? Read the risk factors on the page you cited. It’s smoking, alcohol consumption, poor diet, and lack of exercise. Everyone gets cancer when we live longer and improve detection.
Prescribe and subsidize exercise and GLP-1s, ban cigarettes, and you solve a lot of this. The medical establishment did not make the system humans exist in the US in, they simply try to treat it.
You can't really do that, but life expectancy in the US is a fair bit lower than comparably wealthy countries. I'm not sure you can blame the CDC but something is not ideal.
I think it's 84 years in Italy, 79.3 in the US. I'm sure a lot of that is due to healthier diets and less obesity, but isn't that the sort of thing RFK is trying to encourage?
With demagoguery you start with there needing to be a party that's "corrupt and incompetent fools" and then apply that to the party you don't like. What are you doing, earnestly trying to understand the problem or something?
What task have they failed in? And, more importantly, what is the better approach?
You've asserted 60% of Americans having at least one chronic condition is a failure and begged the question that it is a failure (instead of a reasonable expectation of the health of mortals, especially mortals in a population that starts to skew older as our birth rates fall relative to the baby boom... Or the consequence of accurate tracking and reporting on an ever-widening set of understood or recognized conditions). Start by convincing the room there is a problem to solve before asserting leadership has failed at it.
And even if there is a problem to solve: entropy being what it is, there are infinitely more worse ways to do things than there are better. Even if the CDC's approach has room for improvement, from whence comes the confidence that putting a debunked conspiracy believer (https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2024/11/15/rfk-jrs-con...) and anti-vaccination activist at its helm leads to improvement?
The fact that you mentioned butter and not synthetic dyes, glyphosate, seed oils, or literally anything else is part of the problem (ie corporate capture).
Dyes, glyphosate, seed oils... Yeah. I like olive oil, and don't want to eat glyphosate, but you're fixating on the tenuous unfalsifiable presumed linkage of their toxicity to population level health problems.
I would still put my money on a person eating a commodity, non-organic, seed oil rich diet that is sanely balanced and appropriate for their activity level being healthier on average than an overeating gluten free organic-everything only touched by hemp fiber vegan who never exercises.
I completely agree. On any other issue this would be considered a catastrophic failure beyond failure. This is an op-ed from a series of old army generals who lost the war because they were in bed with the enemy every step of the way. The CDC, FDA, and other regulators have a revolving door open to the same industries that profit from the demise of public health.
Take, for example, myopia in children (which has grown from zero to nearly half of children today) or vitamin D deficiency (34.5% of Americans _sufficient_!) The cost is colossal - both myopia and vitamin D deficiency have huge knock-on effects. The intervention in this case is easy and free. And yet, because there is no profit to be made, approximately nothing was done. This is a completely insane state of affairs.
I think you've identified the symptom but misidentified the cause. The CDC can identify issues and provide recommendation and guidance.
Implementation and enforcement are federal and state legislative responsibilities. The CDC has known vitamin D deficiency is an issue for awhile; why aren't we handing out vitamin D tablets at school? Hint: it would cost money and at least one party has no new taxes as a pretty consistent plank.
>why aren't we handing out vitamin D tablets at school?
The current US administration, the one with Trump and RFK jr, is currently cutting free meal at school. The food was coming from local farms, not Big Ag.
Whatever the posters above are claming the CDC did wrong (when in fact it was undercut at every step by the Republican Party and the right wing of the Democrats), the cuzrrent administration is doing worse. Much worse.
Agreed. The crazy thing is that the Silicon Valley ethos has always been about disruption, challenging the status quo.
Yet when it comes to the utterly abysmal state of public here they all are reflexively rushing to defend the indefensible.
Michele Obama tried to encourage physical activity, and was met with frothing-a-the-mouth backlash from the whole right-wing media personalities and Republicans who vehemently criticized related regulation as government overreach.
Weird comment? Why am I the corrupt one?
I think there is a deep institutional corruption that exists across the food and health bureacracies. and it persists regardless of who is in power. And no doubt there are many Democrats too who benefit from the status quo. I dont think Michelle Obama absolves them of their sins.
It was the Republicans who kneecapped Michelle Obama's initiative. Not the Democrats. Stop trying to bothside this.
And "who is in power" is decided by your vote. You could vote anytime against those Republicans who voted again and again against health because it was too "socialist". Now you have a health secretary who is happy that the sugar in Coca-Cola is another type of sugar.
Yes, this is the cost of "freedom". Do you want the nanny state to come and tell you smoking is bad, eat less meat, walk more, drink less sugar, don't sell guns and put "This product contains a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer" labels everywhere?
You red-blooded Americans hate all of these things and then you discover you have chronic disease? Take responsibility for you own footgunning for once, instead of blaming the Deep State, a corrupt CDC, or immigrants or anyone but you.
When people live longer they develop more chronic conditions. And our view of health widens, so stuff that was previously just “Bob has bad knees” becomes a chronic condition.
I assure you that banning vaccines isn’t going to fix people’s back pain.
Many chronic conditions are also "chronic" now but just two or three generations ago were either a swift or slow and painful death sentence. We see more adults with <insert major health problem here> because now they actually survive into adulthood and can reasonably participate in society rather than being confined to their homes (or to a home).
You can’t pick your parents. ~40% of pregnancies every year in the US are unintended [1], and a similar percentage of births are paid for by Medicaid [2] (~50% in rural communities). Lots of kids born into some combination of poverty and parents who aren’t providing the nutrition and exercise kids need to not be pre-diabetic (poverty rates are highest for rural children). The only solution to that is to help everyone who doesn’t want kids to not have them (robustly accessible contraceptives) if we’re not going to provide robust social support to parents who need it to raise healthy children (all evidence points to “we are not going to do this” for the foreseeable future). Are you expecting the government to do something different? Because they were providing food assistance (SNAP) and child healthcare (Medicaid) which is getting reduced or removed (depending on state or circumstance) by this administration.
Like “Who pays the tariffs?” in this context the question is, “Who do you think has the primary responsibility of raising healthy children? And why aren’t they able to?” [3] [4] [5] I think it’s highly unlikely changing vaccination requirements is going to improve the outcomes you’re stating are the problems in this thread.
https://archive.is/FdsDo
Of course. But it will likely be years before it really reaches its full effect.
There is herd immunity for a lot of vaccines. It might be decades before we have to break out an iron lung. Once we do we'll have to get a whole bunch because polio is extremely transmissible, but until then it will be easily deniable.
Similarly, without tracking a lot of diseases, it'll just be anecdotal. We already hear about E. coli and salmonella outbreaks. Will anyone really notice the difference if there are twice as many? (Especially if it's only reported in the much-reviled "mainstream media".)
The danger is obvious to anyone who knows anything at all about how disease processes work. But as Kennedy said, "We, you know, people, we need to stop trusting the experts." Anybody who knows anything is ipso facto untrustworthy, and you should believe the opposite of what they say. So it will be quite a long time before people have sufficiently "done their own research" (by dying).
Also many vaccines are given in childhood, the vaccine schedule is frontloaded to the first 18 months of life, and many parents are trying to push to get the rest of their kids' vaccines early if possible for fear of losing access to them. So kids up through roughly 2024 births will have largely gotten their vaccines before the CDC can substantively change anything. We're looking at decades before the health effects become apparent, enough time for kids to be born after the unavailability of vaccines and yet grow old enough to get into school settings where diseases can easily spread.
Also likely to be extremely socioeconomically divided, as wealthy parents will likely be able to secure vaccines for their kids through vaccine tourism or the black market, while diseases run rampant through the lower classes.
>So it will be quite a long time before people have sufficiently "done their own research" (by dying).
And even then, it may not be enough. Antivaccine is as old as vaccines, with the same arguments forever, and I would argue that the mass adoption of vaccination in the 20th century has as much to do with social and cultural forces such as post-war optimism, fascination with science and trust in modernity, as with hard data like "efficacy" and having your kids escape illness.
It looks like US will not be at the fore front of vaccine development and production.
I hope at least this US admin will not ban importing vaccines developed by other countries… they may tariff them, but not ban.
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The time frame of elections doesn't afford enough time for that. He'll likely be gone in four years regardless of what happens. His successor may or may not have any interest in repairing the damage done, but you'd basically have to restart the clock.
The voters, like markets, can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent/uninfected.
This is terrifying. We can’t handle these generational tantrums.
The destruction of the educational system, a lifetime ago, guarantees that tantrums are the only thing on the menu from here on out.
What are you referring to, No Child Left Behind? And why is legitimate conversation so grayed out on this site?
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A) The lab leak hypothesis is still unproven. There is no hard scientific data to support it, and many supposed proofs ("Chinese scientists fell ill first") are circular references without proof.
B) Pseudoscientific grifters such as RFJ jr are far far less credible than the CDC, and yet here we are. He specifically said COVID-19 was a genetically engineered bioweapon that targets Black and white people but spared Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.
C) Do your own research and look at "The relativity of Wrong" recently submitted on this website.
The lab leak theory is plausible. That's enough to not label it a conspiracy theory. It also meant there was never broader discourse on if gain of function research is a good idea.
The problem was that it mostly started being brought up for the purpose of political propaganda. Trump's only use for the pandemic was as fuel to rail against China in support of his predetermined agenda. So "lab leak" was used to focus attention on the external enemy to fight, instead of taking care of our own country or asking why Trump was so dead set against that.
The whole time, it was obviously wrong to reject the lab leak theory out of hand. Yet people are stupid herd animals, and instead of tri-state "it is irrelevant in the current context" they argued that the theory was definitely wrong. That same fallibility applies to people working for institutions (see also the early CDC lie implying that masks weren't effective, based on wanting to keep the supply for the healthcare industry).
Then after the dust settles, people stay dug in and the politically-colored battle lines never go away. I'd say this kind of establishment-clearly-wrong but dissent-with-nothing-productive underlies most of the energy fueling the destructionists.
>there was never broader discourse on if gain of function research is a good idea.
There has always been tons of discussions if GoF is a good idea, for years. You don't know anything about the topic you are commenting about, do you?
I've been seeing a lot of articles asking about AI on news sources like the NYT, but even during 2020-2021, I didn't see that level of articles of GoF. Maybe biotech is having these debates internally.
The CDC did not 'brand the lab-leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory'. The CDC stated the scientific truth, which was that we didn't have enough to go on at the time to make a judgement one way or another. The initial lab-leak hypothesis was primarily created by Trump & the MAGA folks to try to deflect blame onto China. It could still be valid and correct, but it was definitely not motivated from facts at first, and to my understanding we still don't have enough facts to assert it confidently one way or the other.
If the two options are a) coming from a wet market vs b) coming from a coronavirus gain of function laboratory in Wuhan that's funded by the CDC, you have to start thinking about this more than just MAGA conspiracy theories.
It's the most bloody obvious explanation, and in a sane world where "MAGA" didn't just turn off everyone's brain cells and cause them to blindly repeat what they're told, any alternative would need some serious heft to be convincing.
'coronavirus gain of function laboratory in Wuhan that's funded by the CDC' is misleading.
The particular lab (Wuhan Institute of Virology) is not a 'coronavirus gain of function laboratory', but an institute studying viruses, including the coronavirus, and including gain of function research. And, critically, "the viruses used in these experiments were not physically present but rather consisted of synthesized genetic sequences, meaning they were not complete, nor infectious viral particles capable of replication, and the pseudo-virus experiments conducted to test human cell entry lacked the ability to replicate." (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12040609/).
It's possible that WIV did screw up and create, intentionally or otherwise, the virus responsible for the pandemic. And, WIV has been linked with military research programs. But, it's not a slam dunk, and the best/widest scientific consensus is still, in 2025, that the origin was natural/biological and came as a result of human/wild-animal contact.
I don't know how you could read this story as anything other than complete vindication of the people who turn off their brains and refuse to listen to anything "MAGA" has to say. I wasn't in their camp, I thought Kennedy was going to be fine, and now he's working full time to make sure Americans get more diseases and fewer treatments.
Given precisely that amount of information, sure. But people dig in further and it complicates things. We don't just go "ugh jeez isn't it obvious" and turn our brains off.
So much this. It was hard to watch.
The most bloody obvious explanation is a natural origin, exactly like the first SARS. Did you forget about that was also a coronavirus outbreak, a close cousin of the COVID-19 (whose real name is SARS-cov-2) that was more lethal (but less contagious, and contained thanks to the heroic efforts of Hong Kong and south Korea)?
The clique downvoting my post can suck it: SARS-CoV-1 as well as MERS are more lethal than SARS-CoV-2 (aka COVID-19), and nobody doubts they are perfectly natural - that is until RFK jr and the crazies around him on day begin to lie they are bioengineered, the same way they lie about Lyme disease, vaccines, autism, antidepressants and their FUD-du-jour.
Who, SPECIFICALLY PLEASE, at the CDC "branded the lab-leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory and quickly dismissed it"?
Not the press, not some rando on twitter, not some anonymous and probably made up "source", not "people are saying"-- which actual CDC employee or appointee did this?
I keep asking, and people keep making up bullshit.
Fauci was relatively quick to dismiss the idea of the virus being human-modified, in a press briefing on April 17, 2020 [0]:
> Q Mr. President, I wanted to ask Dr. Fauci: Could you address these suggestions or concerns that this virus was somehow manmade, possibly came out of a laboratory in China?
> THE PRESIDENT: Want to go?
> Q You studied this virus. What are the prospects of that?
> DR. FAUCI: There was a study recently that we can make available to you, where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve. And the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.
(The study he refers to is "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" [1], published March 17.) It seems that much was made of this particular remark. It doesn't rule out the idea of an unmodified virus leaked from the lab, but the widespread theories have always been aimed at the gain-of-function research occuring there.
[0] https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/re...
[1] https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-0820-9
The original commenter got flagged for his response, so I'd like to ask you more politely. Dr. Fauci did not in fact work for the CDC, and as you acknowledge this statement does not even say that the lab leak hypothesis is untrue. Are you trying to argue in favor of the original commenter's assertion that "they branded the lab-leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory", or just trying to explain what comments people are interpreting in bad faith to support that assertion?
My apologies, I was actually under the belief that Fauci was affiliated with the CDC at the time, given how often they appeared together in headlines (e.g., [0]; most of those are clumping them together in critisism, but I also saw them clumped together in praise). I'll keep that in mind.
In any case, the assertion made me curious about what was actually said by government officials and affiliates regarding lab-leak theories, and drilling down into some of the blog posts led to that particular statement and the paper associated with it.
People do often specifically mean a human-modified virus when they talk about "the lab-leak hypothesis", especially given the GoF research conducted there, so I'd say it's true that Fauci wanted to cast water on that particular version of the hypothesis. (If there's anything that annoys me, it's when people equivocate over what is and isn't a lab leak. But if you must know, I personally find the stronger forms uncompelling.)
Of course, many have put far stronger language into the mouths of politicians and officials (most of whom in 2020 were quite careful with their words), and the tales can easily grow in the retelling, but it doesn't mean it's not worthwhile to focus on the kernel of truth about what actually occurred. "It wasn't the CDC, it was Fauci/others, and they were only talking about a manmade virus, against which the evidence is still strong" would have been much clearer than "it's all BS".
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cdc+fauci&df=2019-08-31..2020-09-0...
How is this quickly dismissing the idea that it was a lab leak as a conspiracy? The research showed (and still shows) that it's extremely plausible for the virus to have gone from animal -> human. I think currently there is a "missing" jump where the animal which was involved in transmission still isn't know but to say that Fauci citing the current research is "dismissal of lab leak as a conspiracy theory" is a bit absurd.
I don't think you'd easily catch him put it in precisely the terms of a "conspiracy theory". He wouldn't have had such a long career if he weren't careful with his words on air.
But he did consider that research to adequately "address" the concerns of a "manmade" virus, and I don't think it would be uncharitable to interpret that as a dismissal of those concerns. After all, he always could have ended his statement with a noncommittal "but this is just one study, and we need more evidence to really know for sure".
And a lot of people do specifically mean a virus that was genetically modified or otherwise selected for human transmissibility when they talk about a "lab leak", so at least he was trying to talk down that version of a lab leak theory.
(Personally, I do think a lot of the theories of an genetically-modified virus are overblown, both then and now, I just wanted to give some perspective for what he actually said.)
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Please don't attack other users like this, no matter how wrong anyone is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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That's a good point about the word harangue! I've replaced it with a different verb above.
Could you please stop breaking the site guidelines, and also please stop creating accounts to do that with? You're welcome here as long as you respect the same rules that apply to all commenters.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
NIH officials involved in writing a paper in 2020 about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 actively suppressed consideration of a lab leak hypothesis and exaggerated the evidence for a natural origin. Some of their communications have been released and others involved have testified to that under oath.
https://theintercept.com/2023/01/19/covid-origin-nih-emails/
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/08/trumps-cdc-director...
But your second link contradicts this story entirely! It's about a claim from the CDC director that other officials in other agencies froze him out because he wanted to consider the lab leak hypothesis.
Sorry I should have been more clear. From a US federal government perspective, the fault for the sloppy science in the 2020 paper lies with the NIH and not the CDC. Will edit my comment above.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-0820-9
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> Remember how they branded the lab-leak hypothesis a conspiracy
Who gives a shit if they did? (and from looking at the comments below it seems like they actually didn't)
Does knowing it came from a lab help you not get Covid? It's called the Centers for Disease Control, not the Pandemic Origin Investigation Bureau.
With these rabid haters, COVID-19 is at the same time "just a flu that doesn't hurt kids nor adults and can be cured with a cheap widely available medicine" and “a genetically engineered bioweapon that targets Black and white people but spared Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people” (as explained by RFK jr, now in charge of the CDC).
These actions helped diminish the trust people had in CDC. So it made it a lot easier to fire these CDC executives.
Again, the other comments indicate they didn't do anything of the sort. People have their own agenda for diminishing trust in the CDC.
It was Lancet that called it a conspiracy theory.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7159294/
Ironically the one major player to come out and say it probably was a lab leak was the head of the CDC at the time, Robert Redfield.
It was Fauci's lot who tried to do a cover up.
Redfield's telling of the tale is quite interesting if you are in to that sort of thing https://youtu.be/oMlhvnMpRU0?t=119
60% of the US population has at least one chronic disease. 60 PERCENT!
40% has 2 or more. In any other sector would this be an acceptable outcome?
https://www.cdc.gov/chronic-disease/about/index.html
The old establishment health bureacracy should not be taken seriously. By any measure they are corrupt and incompetent fools.
You’re blaming the medical establishment for Western disease? Maybe blame a car centric, carbohydrate rich ultra processed food incentivized system? Read the risk factors on the page you cited. It’s smoking, alcohol consumption, poor diet, and lack of exercise. Everyone gets cancer when we live longer and improve detection.
Prescribe and subsidize exercise and GLP-1s, ban cigarettes, and you solve a lot of this. The medical establishment did not make the system humans exist in the US in, they simply try to treat it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_of_affluence
You can't really do that, but life expectancy in the US is a fair bit lower than comparably wealthy countries. I'm not sure you can blame the CDC but something is not ideal.
I think it's 84 years in Italy, 79.3 in the US. I'm sure a lot of that is due to healthier diets and less obesity, but isn't that the sort of thing RFK is trying to encourage?
https://www.brown.edu/news/2025-04-02/wealth-mortality-gap
With demagoguery you start with there needing to be a party that's "corrupt and incompetent fools" and then apply that to the party you don't like. What are you doing, earnestly trying to understand the problem or something?
Yes this would be their primary challenge at which they have comprehensively failed.
What task have they failed in? And, more importantly, what is the better approach?
You've asserted 60% of Americans having at least one chronic condition is a failure and begged the question that it is a failure (instead of a reasonable expectation of the health of mortals, especially mortals in a population that starts to skew older as our birth rates fall relative to the baby boom... Or the consequence of accurate tracking and reporting on an ever-widening set of understood or recognized conditions). Start by convincing the room there is a problem to solve before asserting leadership has failed at it.
And even if there is a problem to solve: entropy being what it is, there are infinitely more worse ways to do things than there are better. Even if the CDC's approach has room for improvement, from whence comes the confidence that putting a debunked conspiracy believer (https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2024/11/15/rfk-jrs-con...) and anti-vaccination activist at its helm leads to improvement?
To paraphrase Dwight Schrute, did the CDC force people to not exercise and eat butter and sugar for 30 years?
What about the role of companies that develop and manufacture and market all this delicious, poisonous food?
The fact that you mentioned butter and not synthetic dyes, glyphosate, seed oils, or literally anything else is part of the problem (ie corporate capture).
Dyes, glyphosate, seed oils... Yeah. I like olive oil, and don't want to eat glyphosate, but you're fixating on the tenuous unfalsifiable presumed linkage of their toxicity to population level health problems.
I would still put my money on a person eating a commodity, non-organic, seed oil rich diet that is sanely balanced and appropriate for their activity level being healthier on average than an overeating gluten free organic-everything only touched by hemp fiber vegan who never exercises.
"Butter" is in the quote I was referencing.
I covered corporate capture in the second half of my comment.
These aren't mentioned because Kennedy is against all of them.
But he is perfectly happy with people drinking liters of Coca-Cola (with still the same amount of sugar, but "natural", now).
I completely agree. On any other issue this would be considered a catastrophic failure beyond failure. This is an op-ed from a series of old army generals who lost the war because they were in bed with the enemy every step of the way. The CDC, FDA, and other regulators have a revolving door open to the same industries that profit from the demise of public health.
Take, for example, myopia in children (which has grown from zero to nearly half of children today) or vitamin D deficiency (34.5% of Americans _sufficient_!) The cost is colossal - both myopia and vitamin D deficiency have huge knock-on effects. The intervention in this case is easy and free. And yet, because there is no profit to be made, approximately nothing was done. This is a completely insane state of affairs.
I think you've identified the symptom but misidentified the cause. The CDC can identify issues and provide recommendation and guidance.
Implementation and enforcement are federal and state legislative responsibilities. The CDC has known vitamin D deficiency is an issue for awhile; why aren't we handing out vitamin D tablets at school? Hint: it would cost money and at least one party has no new taxes as a pretty consistent plank.
>why aren't we handing out vitamin D tablets at school?
The current US administration, the one with Trump and RFK jr, is currently cutting free meal at school. The food was coming from local farms, not Big Ag.
Whatever the posters above are claming the CDC did wrong (when in fact it was undercut at every step by the Republican Party and the right wing of the Democrats), the cuzrrent administration is doing worse. Much worse.
https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/trump-admin-cuts-prog...
You want the nanny state to tell you what to do?
How many of you American are following the CDC's guidelines? Can you follow them without the nanny state enforcing them on you?
Look at Trump congratulating himself for the return of gas cooking - a known cause of inside air pollution. Freedom!
Agreed. The crazy thing is that the Silicon Valley ethos has always been about disruption, challenging the status quo. Yet when it comes to the utterly abysmal state of public here they all are reflexively rushing to defend the indefensible.
Michele Obama tried to encourage physical activity, and was met with frothing-a-the-mouth backlash from the whole right-wing media personalities and Republicans who vehemently criticized related regulation as government overreach.
https://edition.cnn.com/2014/05/29/politics/michelle-obama-n...
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/06/14/michelle-o...
https://authorityhealth.org/irony-abounds-on-the-anniversary...
Do you have any long-term memory?
Look in the mirror: you are the corrupt one.
Weird comment? Why am I the corrupt one? I think there is a deep institutional corruption that exists across the food and health bureacracies. and it persists regardless of who is in power. And no doubt there are many Democrats too who benefit from the status quo. I dont think Michelle Obama absolves them of their sins.
It was the Republicans who kneecapped Michelle Obama's initiative. Not the Democrats. Stop trying to bothside this.
And "who is in power" is decided by your vote. You could vote anytime against those Republicans who voted again and again against health because it was too "socialist". Now you have a health secretary who is happy that the sugar in Coca-Cola is another type of sugar.
Yes, this is the cost of "freedom". Do you want the nanny state to come and tell you smoking is bad, eat less meat, walk more, drink less sugar, don't sell guns and put "This product contains a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer" labels everywhere?
You red-blooded Americans hate all of these things and then you discover you have chronic disease? Take responsibility for you own footgunning for once, instead of blaming the Deep State, a corrupt CDC, or immigrants or anyone but you.
When people live longer they develop more chronic conditions. And our view of health widens, so stuff that was previously just “Bob has bad knees” becomes a chronic condition.
I assure you that banning vaccines isn’t going to fix people’s back pain.
Many chronic conditions are also "chronic" now but just two or three generations ago were either a swift or slow and painful death sentence. We see more adults with <insert major health problem here> because now they actually survive into adulthood and can reasonably participate in society rather than being confined to their homes (or to a home).
1 in 3 adolescents has pre-diabetes.
https://diabetes.org/about-diabetes/prediabetes/adolescents-...
It's mystery to me why people rush to defend such extreme levels of failure.
Have you read the list of remedial actions at the bottom of your source? What can the medical establishment do to enforce these actions?
And how will banning vaccines will help with any of the problems you pointed out?
You can’t pick your parents. ~40% of pregnancies every year in the US are unintended [1], and a similar percentage of births are paid for by Medicaid [2] (~50% in rural communities). Lots of kids born into some combination of poverty and parents who aren’t providing the nutrition and exercise kids need to not be pre-diabetic (poverty rates are highest for rural children). The only solution to that is to help everyone who doesn’t want kids to not have them (robustly accessible contraceptives) if we’re not going to provide robust social support to parents who need it to raise healthy children (all evidence points to “we are not going to do this” for the foreseeable future). Are you expecting the government to do something different? Because they were providing food assistance (SNAP) and child healthcare (Medicaid) which is getting reduced or removed (depending on state or circumstance) by this administration.
Like “Who pays the tariffs?” in this context the question is, “Who do you think has the primary responsibility of raising healthy children? And why aren’t they able to?” [3] [4] [5] I think it’s highly unlikely changing vaccination requirements is going to improve the outcomes you’re stating are the problems in this thread.
[1] https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/unintended-pregnancy-u...
[2] https://www.aha.org/fact-sheets/2025-02-07-fact-sheet-medica...
[3] https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu...
[4] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/12/poverty-rate-...
[5] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-...