[seabass-labrax]

> I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing.

I think the cause might have been the polar opposite of a conspiracy: isolated, but similar, examples of opportunistic fraud. Soon after COVID-19 vaccines were developed, I saw lots of advertisements for pseudo-scientific remedies for COVID-19 - these were clearly intended to make some profit out of the public's justified concerns about mRNA technology.

However, once mRNA vaccines proved themselves to be not especially different in efficacy or danger from traditional vaccines, it makes sense that the vendors of pseudo-scientific remedies would seek to maintain the anxiety about vaccines somehow. Hundreds of self-serving quacks trying to keep their customers (and compensate for the shrinking size of their market!) would naturally result in self-sustaining movements of anti-vaxers. The persistent conflation of COVID-19 conspiracy theorists with civil liberties campaigners in some parts of the media would have benefited the quacks further, by making anti-vaxing seem more of a legitimate social movement than it actually was.

[EnigmaFlare]

Ironically, this is how popular beliefs are supported, but I don't think anti-vax is one of them. The news tells people what they want to hear to keep them engaged to make money from advertising to them. That's why news organizations are split into partisan groups, they have to do that to serve their own markets. Anyone being neutral would alienate most of their audience by making them uncomfortable.

Remember when the correct belief about the origin of Covid was naturally occurring in an animal then spreading to people in a market? Turned out to be a big conspiracy and false. But the news kept telling people that because people had already formed political attachment to that belief.

[defrost]

> Turned out to be a big conspiracy and false.

Did it now?

Lableak truther loses $100,000 in his own debate https://www.protagonist-science.com/p/lableak-truther-loses-...

Even with money on the line and an arsenal of medical expertise and documents that's not a case that can be conclusively made.

[EnigmaFlare]

I agree it's not conclusive, so I shouldn't have said "false", but the FBI says it was most likely a lab leak [1].

Your article starts by calling it a "false myth" so they're clearly still in the political partisanship trap whatever the outcome of some bet. Anybody who's certain it was of natural origin is just being fooled by the news and some prominent scientists who made some intentionally misleading statements.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/28/politics/wray-fbi-covid-o...

[defrost]

From your link:

     underscoring a divide in the US government as the majority of the intelligence community still believes that Covid either emerged naturally in the wild, or that there is still too little evidence to make a judgment one way or another.

"My article" isn't mine, it's an article discussing a lengthy technical debate recently held on the merits of zoonotic origin Vs Lab leak origin cases with a great many qualified onlookers, experienced judges, and $100K USD at stake on the outcome.

You may feel the article is biased as the (qualified) author clearly thinks lab leak is an improbable origin, you can go to the actual debate record being discussed and judge whether that was a fair pitting of one viewpoint against another - great lengths were taken to ensure a fair playing field in a debate for a cash prize.

Nobody is certain .. that's your ongoing strawman in in all your comments here so far, but the probabilities with all things considered very heavily fall on the natural origin side.

The best arguments put forward for a lab leak being more likely failed to carry the day.

It's still possible just very unlikely and certainly not certain.

[EnigmaFlare]

It's not a strawman, it's your real man. It's the first sentence in the article you cited.

The conspiracy I'm talking about is the one described here: https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1656

"For most of 2020, the notion that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, was treated as a thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory."

which identifies the misinformation's origin here:

"Shortly after the pandemic began, Daszak effectively silenced debate over the possibility of a lab leak with a February 2020 statement in the Lancet.2 “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” "

[aredox]

The FBI doesn't know ("likely" isn't a proof, it is not even a certainty). When Trump was in power, why hasn't any conclusive proof published?

[shiroiushi]

Maybe I'm a little behind on this stuff, but I thought that it hasn't been conclusively proven either way (lab leak or naturally occurring). The lab-leak hypothesis was shouted down in mainstream media early on because they didn't want to offend China, but I don't think it's ever been conclusively proven that it wasn't a lab leak. However, there hasn't been sufficient evidence to back that hypothesis either.