Summary
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s HHS nominee, expressed belief in the “plandemic” conspiracy, suggesting the COVID pandemic was planned by the government.
He also compared COVID efforts to Nazi experiments and accused the government of using bioterrorism to implement social controls.
Kennedy’s statements raise concerns about his understanding of infectious diseases and his potential impact on pandemic response.
There’s strong evidence it was in the USA well before the first cases were reported in China.
That’s not to say that anything RFK says makes any damn sense. But it’s also not clear that it started in China.
For people asking for evidence, check the statistics for respiratory-related illnesses and pneumonia in late 2019.
https://nchsdata.cdc.gov/DQS/#nchs-home_by-primary-diagnosis/diseases-of-the-respiratory-system/age-group/all-time-periods/1
There was an unexplained spike in respiratory illness across all age groups, and a spike in pneumonia deaths starting in September. Google also tracked a spike in searches related to pneumonia. We didn’t even have COVID tests until January of 2020, which is when the first diagnoses started coming in. None of the deaths in 2019 attributed to pneumonia were tested for COVID.
That doesn’t mean it was definitely COVID, but it is enough to make me doubt the Trump narrative that China started it.
You’ll also notice the incidence of scented candle complaints began in the latter quarter of 2019.
https://www.reviewpartydotcom.com/blog/reviews-as-data-points-yankee-candle-covid-cases
The problem is that China absolutely lied, obfuscated data, and generally did whatever it took to make it look like their COVID response was better than reality.
It is very, very, very likely that the COVID-19 virus originated in China, and it is also quite likely that Americans were infected with coronavirus before January 2020. Both of these things can be true without needing to resort to conspiracy.
No, there isn’t. Anyone who was paying attention to news out of China saw that illnesses started being reported there in November 2019. By late December, it was obvious that something was going on.
There has been zero evidence that the same was true in the States.
Don’t spread misinformation.
The earliest tests done on residual samples from the Red Cross date back to December 13th and they show a small but significant positive caseload at that time. To my knowledge no other testing was done on earlier samples so in theory it could have been present before that in the US.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7799215/
Even with researchers testing samples that were taken before Covid was known about, the earliest US cases seem to be mid-December.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Serologic testing of U.S. blood donations to identify SARS-CoV-2-reactive antibodies%3A December 2019-January 2020&author=SV Basavaraju&author=ME Patton&author=K Grimm&publication_year=2020&journal=Clin Infect Dis&volume=72
In fact there is strong evidence against this conclusion. Here is a graph showing reported instances for China and the rest of the world (ROW) starting in January 2020:
In which you can see that Global Cases match China Cases until the end of February 2020.
And here is a graph showing cases in Hubei province, the rest of China, and the rest of the world starting in January 2020:
And here is an animated map showing confirmed cased starting January 2020.
source
It is very, very clear that the COVID-19 pandemic started in China, specifically in Hubei province, and that anyone who says otherwise is a liar.
What you’ve got there is a graph of testing. The slopes are all the same, because that’s when each country received tests, and that’s how quickly they ramped up testing. Covid 19 wasn’t even sequenced until 40 people were extremely ill from the virus. We know now that it is spread through the air, and carriers of the virus can be contagious without being symptomatic. Zero countries were wasting precious tests on deceased people who died in the previous weeks.
China made for a convenient target for xenophobes and racists to blame. It spread quickly through dense populations, and their government was using (ineffective) draconian methods to contain the spread. Westerners spread the image of indigent communists eating bats and civets, ignoring the growing number of anomalous respiratory illnesses at home.
Maybe it started in China. Maybe it didn’t. We cannot know for sure, because we deliberately did not collect the data. And anyone trying to convince you differently has an agenda.
If you have some contradictory evidence from a reliable source to present to substantiate your claims, please present it now. If not, then your
is a super weak and transparent attempt to spread doubt of the actual research. Your claims, made without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
We can tell the difference between SARS-CoV-2 and other sources of viral respiratory illness because we can test that shit, so again your attempt to spread doubt is super weak and transparent. There is research, there is data, there is corroboration from multiple sources. You haven’t presented any sources.
Science works. Denialism is stupid. Nobody with any brain cells is buying your garbage. Go home.
The only agenda we’re seeing here is you pushing misinformation
No, they aren’t. Because it’s a semilog graph.
Strong evidence.
Tankie and MAGA views align on this stance.
Can you give a citation for this strong evidence?
Trust me, bro, my sino-ruskie special sources beamed them directly to the remaining parts of my brain.
The Trump narrative was that China purposefully started it. Not that it was the origin. That is the “narrative” of the science. That you claimed “strong evidence” and then cite something you say may not definitely mean COVID but seems suspicious…that’s not very strong. That’s literal “trust me, I feel it’s true”.