Viewing profile — kaitaincps

Well, that's an interesting question. If the public health dept wants to inspect a restaurant to make sure its hygiene standards are adequate, and the restaurant goes out of its wa…

Precisely so.

This seems probable to me as well: they don’t know that a lab leak occurred, but believe it’s a plausible explanation, and one whose investigation needs to be suppressed because of…

Okay, but cui bono?

The WIV was not set up in Wuhan to study bat-borne coronaviruses in the surrounding area. This is a widespread myth, one popularized by Maggie Koerth on Twitter.

You’d need to clarify what specifically is entailed by zoonotic origin (and what would count as not-zoonotic-origin) in order for your claim to be evaluated.

Not really. The poster is saying they used to believe X but was persuaded subsequently that ~X was more likely. This seems to indicate at least a recent pattern of avoiding confirm…

Certainly there is a culture within China of taking dangerous short cuts to save money. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/26/opinion/beware-of-chinas-...

Hmm, but have there been any other pandemics that started close to a lab researching the kind of pathogen involved in the pandemic? Funny you should ask. There was this one: https:…

Rubbish. The response would not be to increase surveillance near labs. It would be to float a moratorium on GoF research and to increase biosafety at labs. Much of the work being d…

Not really.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12250-018-0012-7 “In October 2015, we collected serum samples from 218 residents in four villages in Jinning County, Yunnan province, Chi…

Also: Even the founders of Moderna would have had their lives made worse overall by SARS-COV-2. Money and utility are different things. They and their families now live in a shitti…

They seem to me to be a totally separate group. They’re more fellow travellers with the “Bill Gates’s Plandemic” crowd.

She’s a scientist and a bat virus expert. One would expect her mind to gravitate towards what she saw as being the most plausible explanation. If a zoonotic jump had been overwhelm…

If I could Snopes-whack just one persistent myth in this debate, it would be that one. It’s completely untrue. And the WIV used the human population of Wuhan as a control in their …

The main reason to suspect that gain of function research on bat-borne sarbecoviruses was taking place at the WIV is that we know that gain of function research on bat-borne sarbec…

No, we don’t know there were two separate crossover events. The two lineages are more likely to be the result of a minor mutation having occurred during human-human transmission, i…

A standard serology chain through animal populations showing a plausible path to Wuhan would make the lab leak hypothesis unlikely, or at the very least redundant. We do know that …

Excellent satire. Please post more.

Correct.

In the first few months the focus was heavily on spread via fomites. The value of masks was dismissed.

No it doesn't. There is a single leak, which mutates into a second strain through community transmission over a period of a few months. That's it.

There of no known lineage B sarbecoviruses that have a furin cleavage site, at least not prior to SARS-COV-2. This polybasic furin cleavage site is found in various proteins from m…