PolitiFact Quietly Retracts ‘Pants On Fire’ Lab Leak Fact Check - Kotaku In Action 2

PolitiFact Quietly Retracts ‘Pants On Fire’ Lab Leak Fact Check (dailycaller.com)

posted 3 years ago by NotFBI1 3 years ago by NotFBI1 +75 / -0

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– Grumman 23 points 3 years ago +23 / -0

PolitiFact’s fact check had linked to a statement published in the journal Nature Medicine in March 2020 by a group of five virologists who argued that the virus that causes COVID-19 exhibited no signs of purposeful laboratory manipulation.

Longtime New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade wrote in May that despite the Nature Medicine statement being “full of absurdly large holes” and “grounded in nothing but two inconclusive speculations,” it successfully “convinced the world’s press that SARS2 could not have escaped from a lab.”

Even if the first claim was true, the second does not follow from the first. "This virus was not modified in a lab" does not mean "this virus was not in a lab."

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– donaldthrow 25 points 3 years ago +25 / -0

Strawman arguments are a staple of all the "fact-checking" sites.

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– cartoonericroberts 7 points 3 years ago +7 / -0

One of the arguments was even weaker (the suboptimal protein binding site argument) which just supports that it either wasn't designed as a weapon, or if a weapon it was a weapon made to not obviously look like a weapon.

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