The protests were linked to concerns over personal freedoms and government overreach. Mainly related to COVID-19 mandates and stay at home recommendations.
Supporters saw the movement as a grassroots stand for liberty against government overreach.
*edit the freedom convoy organised 3 years ago in 2022 as pointed out by commenter’s.
A lot of things were wrong during covid. For example, I’m now convinced of the lab leak theory, having thought of it as a right wing conspiracy for too long. Polarized politics clouds our judgement on both sides. Yes, there were and are a lot of right wing loons, but that doesn’t mean they were wrong about everything.
The lab leak theory was dismissed because there was a lot of powerful people that didn’t want any serious investigation into it. China was 100% against the lab leak theory. Fauci and the CDC were also against the lab leak theory as he was directly responsible for funding gain of function research in the most likely lab, which had been widely criticised as extremely risky research.
It also makes an incredible conspiracy theory because it’s essentially impossible to prove either way at this point.
If it helps, the (main) lab leak theory was conclusively disproven back in 2020 when waste water samples from Italy in September 2019 to December 2019 showed the presence of natural precursors to Covid-19, with signatures indistinguishable from “the” Covid. Lots of people were reporting a strong ‘flu-like’ bout of illness at Christmas 2019. The idea that it leaked from a lab in Wuham in December 2019 makes no sense. Neither does wet markets and bat soup by the way - that was just good old racism.
A troublesome but mundane coronavirus of the sort that millions every year dismissed as a cold had a slight mutation and turned deadly and prolific. I think the knowledge that this can happen at any time scares people far more than the lovely little idea of it coming out of a test tube so we can blame a person or a race or a government for it, direct anger at a tangible foe rather than the fragility of biological life.
No, the wet markets are definitely an issue. There’s a lot of objectively unsanitary issues with these things.
Also, “lab leak” is intentionally vague. At the very least, there’s no signs in the genome that it was engineered. It’s statistically unlikely for a natural virus to have been discover, isolated in a lab, only for it to be leaked, but it’s possible, but unless the Chinese government comes forward, any claims that it escaped from a lab should be met with skepticism.
Wet market is weirdly interpreted by most in the west as meaning literally wet and inheritently unsanitary. One guy I talked to thought it meant the floating markets like the tourist trap in Bangkok.
A wet market is just the opposite of a dry market - food, drink, fresh goods. A “dry market” is clothes, furniture, devices.
There are unsanitary wet markets, but there are unsanitary Walmarts and Tescos. The western response to demand all wet markets be shut was just pure ignorance and prejudice.
Yeah, I think ‘conclusively’ disproven or proven anything is not realistic here. Lab leak has a lot of things going for it too. Here’s just a recent example
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz7vypq31z7o
Are you referring to these studies btw? https://www.wired.com/story/flawed-covid-19-origin-theory-italy/
I’m locked out of the Wired article, but if it’s the discourse I remember, then it’s arguing against Italy as the source rather than arguing for Wuhan specifically as the source.
Finding waste water samples from Italy doesn’t prove it came from there. It does disprove the idea that it originated from someone dropping a beaker or eating a bat on a particular street in Wuhan 3 months later.
The argument here is actually that they didn’t find Sars-CoV-2, but that their controls to test against got mixed up with their samples. It doesn’t matter, really. My point is that this got political very fast and that now we may never know