I came across this is little story today, it's not breaking news. I suspect that a member of the housekeeping staff knows something about the bomb threat that required the sweep for weapons.
According to police in Secaucus, the bomb threat — which later was determined to be bogus — was called in to Hudson Regional Hospital on July 18. During a search, bomb detection dogs led investigators to an unlocked office closet containing dozens of firearms.
Among the weapons were 11 handguns and 27 rifles or shotguns, according to police. The closet also contained a .45 caliber semi-automatic rifle with a high-capacity magazine that was determined to be an assault rifle, and a 14-round high-capacity handgun magazine.
The arrested the guy the next day.
What the heck do you think this guy was doing? It sounds very ominous that he was keeping those weapons there.
The Department of Energy's low-confidence assessment that Covid-19 most likely originated from a laboratory leak in China is still a minority view within the intelligence community, three sources familiar with the intelligence community's findings tell CNN.
While the FBI has also assessed – with moderate confidence – the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 likely leaked from a lab, 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...
..A 2021 report issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence revealed that the National Intelligence Council, along with four other unidentified agencies, assessed with low confidence that the initial Covid-19 infection "was most likely caused by natural exposure to an animal infected with it or a close progenitor virus.”
Three other intelligence community agencies were "unable to coalesce around either explanation without additional information, with some analysts favoring natural origin, others a laboratory origin, and some seeing the hypotheses as equally likely.” One of those undecided agencies, as CNN has reported, is the CIA, which remains on the fence on the issue.
The only significant shift from the 2021 report was the Department of Energy analysis, sources said. The intelligence community provided an update to that report to lawmakers in recent weeks, which included the new DoE assessment.
Do I really need to paste the other dozen articles. You know darn good and well it was called a conspiracy theory and people who claimed called xenophobes.
Who called the possibility of a lab leak a conspiracy theory? Who used that language?
It's right in the article I posted if you bothered to read it.
I read the article and I can't see that anyone called it a conspiracy theory. A lot of people tried to prove it. One person referred to himself as a crackpot for looking into the theory, seemingly as a joke.
Can you point out who called it a conspiracy theory, rather than just posting a lengthy article?
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MaybeeRN said:
It's right in the article I posted if you bothered to read it.
From the NY Times article above, I bolded what I thought were critical parts of article:
Quote
On a recent Zoom call, Andersen sat at his desk, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. He told me that his initial suspicions reflected the fact that he hadn't known enough about coronaviruses. His use of the term "crackpot theories,” he said, was a reference, in part, to an article that was circulating at the time, which claimed that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered with genetic inserts from H.I.V.He also had referred to himself as a crackpot in earlier discussions, he said, since his suspicions about viral engineering were not widely shared. "I think there were people that thought I was an idiot for even suggesting it came from a lab.”...
...One member of the W.H.O. team was Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, which is dedicated to mitigating the emergence of infectious diseases. Since the first SARS outbreak, he has been one of the W.I.V.’s closest partners, facilitating the N.I.H. subcontracts and working extensively with Shi and her team in the field. He has unwaveringly vouched for Shi, and led the charge to call any suggestion of a lab accident a conspiracy theory."The problem with this lab-release hypothesis,” he told me, "is that it depends on a critical thing: that the virus was in the lab before it got out. But I know that that virus was not in the lab.”...
...Daszak, a widely published disease ecologist, also knows that the diversity of viruses in nature is nearly limitless. Most recently, he and other EcoHealth scientists built a model analyzing how frequently coronaviruses might spill over from bats to people across southern China and southeast Asia. They overlaid the habitats of all twenty-three bat species known to harbor SARS-related coronaviruses with maps of human populations. Based on bat-human contact and antibody data, they estimated that roughly four hundred thousand people could be infected with SARS-related coronaviruses annually. "People are getting exposed to them every year,” Daszak told me. "They may not know it. They may even get sick and die.”...
Since then, close relatives of SARS-CoV-2 have been identified in China, Thailand, Cambodia, and Japan. But the most significant finding supporting a natural origin was announced in September. Scientists in Laos—just south of the border from Yunnan—found a horseshoe-bat coronavirus that is genetically closer to SARS-CoV-2 than the virus from the Tongguan mine. It might have split from a common ancestor with SARS-CoV-2 sometime in the last decade or so. Alarmingly, their spikes are identical and bind with equal efficiency to human ACE2 receptors. The discovery "completely blows away many of the main lab-leak arguments about Yunnan being special,” Andersen said. "These types of viruses are much more widespread than we initially realized.”...
WASHINGTON, June 4 (Xinhua) -- Director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health Francis Collins appeared to have dismissed the Wuhan lab leak theory of COVID-19 as a "conspiracy" in an email last year, according to recent media reports.
Citing a newly released email in April 2020 from Collins to Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, U.S. magazine Newsweek reported Wednesday that the subject line of Collins' email to Fauci was titled "conspiracy gains momentum."
WASHINGTON, June 4 (Xinhua) -- Director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health Francis Collins appeared to have dismissed the Wuhan lab leak theory of COVID-19 as a "conspiracy" in an email last year, according to recent media reports.
Citing a newly released email in April 2020 from Collins to Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, U.S. magazine Newsweek reported Wednesday that the subject line of Collins' email to Fauci was titled "conspiracy gains momentum."
Do you think that Dr's Collins or Fauci led the public to believe that it was a conspiracy theory? Do you think that they were concerned about misinformation around that lab leak theory?
What they're saying: "The same people who shamed us, canceled us, & wanted to put us in jail for saying covid came from the Wuhan Lab ... are starting to say what we said all along," tweeted Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-Ga.).
"Being proven right doesn't matter. What matters is holding the Chinese Communist Party accountable so this doesn't happen again," wrote Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who first raised the lab leak theory in 2020.
"So the government caught up to what Real America knew all along," Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) wrote on Twitter.
"When an agency comes out and says they're leaning this way but with 'low confidence?' I mean, how do you interpret that?" Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, told Axios. "The question is: 'Why did you even put it out there?'" he said.
"As I said before, I am willing to reconsider my hypothesis if presented with verifiable, affirmative evidence," tweeted Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization. "For now, I see no evidence that suggests the current scientific evidence base is incorrect. And that evidence base continues to suggest the pandemic originated via zoonotic spillover at the Huanan market."
The big picture: The most tangible outcome may be that Republicans will use the Energy Department findings to demand answers from NIH about its oversight of risky research, and tie those to any funding increase for fiscal 2024, said Chris Meekins, a health care analyst at Raymond James.
An HHS inspector general's audit in January found NIH didn't effectively monitor or take timely action to address problems with grants to EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that directed some of the money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to study bat coronaviruses.
I think it's irresponsible of media to elevate things because agitation is good for their bottom line.
The hearing on Tuesday will be interesting since some of the Republicans seem to think there's new evidence which proves them right about a lab leak or something.
Two commanders and four subordinate leaders at Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, have been relieved of command, according to a terse news release from 8th Air Force....
...The command, which oversees the Air Force's nuclear bombers and missiles, is not releasing the names of the four subordinate leaders, who were relieved by other commanders assigned to Minot, the spokesperson said.
"To protect the privacy of the individuals, further details will not be released,” the news release says.
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MSN post of CNN article today
Assessment Covid-19 leaked from Chinese lab is a minority view within US intel community, sources say
US News today reported similar info: U.S. Agencies Divided Over COVID-19 'Lab Leak' Origin Theory
Heard Brit Hume report on Brett Baier show tonight: " Another US agency assesses COVID-19 origin likely a Chinese 'lab leak' " BUT didn't state "Low Confidence" comment which Fox online news article posts.