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.

  • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
    4·
    19 hours ago

    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.

      • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
        2·
        10 hours ago

        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.

        • qevlarr@lemmy.world
          2·
          9 hours ago

          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

          “It’s like finding an iPhone in a pharaoh’s tomb,” says Worobey—you either have to rewrite history, or you have to consider the possibility that one of the archaeologists dropped their phone.

    • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
      1·
      14 hours ago

      Neither does wet markets and bat soup by the way - that was just good old racism.

      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.

      • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
        3·
        10 hours ago

        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.

        • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
          1·
          6 hours ago

          And why do you think that’s MY interpretation of a “wet market” or what my “demands” are?

          I knew what these things are from before covid. The problem isn’t that they’re called “wet markets”. The problem is that the much lower food sanitation standards in China. Something that I will be complaining about very soon in the US. We already RFK Jr.(or his brain worm) doesn’t seem to have any problems with the consumption of wild caught meat.