231–240 of 494 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why give a government with modern day concentration camps, forced organ harvesting, and military occupation of free countries like Hong Kong the benefit of the doubt on biological weapons research gone awry?
Even taking the worst possible view of the Chinese government, they have strong economic reasons to have been preparing for a new SARS type epidemic over the past twenty years. They don't need the benefit of the doubt.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the same stuff that causes conspiracy theories around airplane crashes. The conspiracists go “It must be a conspiracy because there are like these 6 redundant safety mechanisms and the odds of them all failing at the same time are extremely low”. But the answer is obvious. If the 6 redundant mechanisms hadn’t failed, the plane wouldn’t crash. So as long as the odds of failure of each redundant system is not 0…
This is not the same thing IMO. Imagine Russia announced last week they had a airplane hacking tool that could crash any 747 by using sonic waves to rattle some bolts loose making the wings fall off the plane. If tomorrow, 3 different 747s crash all because their wings fell off, would that be suspicious? You could say "well it was a plane crash, something had to go wrong". But things went wrong in a very specific and…
This is the immunology equivalent of "jet fuel can't melt steel beams". It's embarrassing to see it here, especially in a community with pretensions of bringing "disruption" to biotech. It would take a long time to catalog all the nonsense here but I'll just say that short subsequence (6aa) BLAST is meaningless and this subsequent claim is just word salad: "Such high human similarity also implies a high risk for the…
Here is an overview: http://s3.amazonaws.com/nasathermalimages/public/video/prete...
Here's the Cliff Notes version of the argument in this paper: 1. SARS-CoV-2 has a number of unique and unusual genetic features, when compared to close relatives, many of which explain its high virulence and infectivity among humans. 2. A series of research papers published by a group of virologists, dating back a little over a decade, demonstrate (1) a progressively increasing understanding of viral features which m…
Thank you for this summary. A slightly tangential question I'd love to get more perspective on is the impact of the virus being "man made" on our current predicament. Even assuming that the virus was not naturally evolved, and its characteristics are partly caused due to human interventions we're still stuck finding a vaccine, medication and ways of reducing transmission. Is there still a thread here that this virus…
That evidence looks weak IMO, but it's frustrating that the current culture in science isn't "present the best argument for your position no matter how crazy it is" but rather "your arguments better agree with the established consensus unless you have overwhelming evidence that you are right."
"You better agree with consensus" has always been the current culture in science. It's nothing to do with science itself -- just human emotionality. We don't change unless we have to, unless there's overwhelming evidence that we need to.
To take the spectrum of shades of grey: - white would be math - first hint of grey with physics - greyer all they way down to biology where every different field has their own bar graphs
You're a lunatic if you say 2+2=5, to return to the cases in point, it's been done, it's been dusted (mostly), and there's going to be a lot more work to do in the future to clear it up but people will always want to see the 'missing link' or proof that there was no leakage (deliberate or otherwise) from the lab.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
Here's the Cliff Notes version of the argument in this paper: 1. SARS-CoV-2 has a number of unique and unusual genetic features, when compared to close relatives, many of which explain its high virulence and infectivity among humans. 2. A series of research papers published by a group of virologists, dating back a little over a decade, demonstrate (1) a progressively increasing understanding of viral features which m…
Or, and this is a really crazy theory, they were studying it in China because it was a local virus that they were worried might one day infect humans. Maybe they were studying which changes would make it most dangerous because they wanted to be ready if those changes happened naturally. Honest hard work can sometimes look like evil plans, and not every coincidence is the result of conspiracy.
Regardless of the source of this one, it is only getting _easier_ to engineer these extraordinarily valuable weapons. The 24x7 induced fear response is the real threat, not the virus.
Excess deaths are the only real measure: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm
This is the immunology equivalent of "jet fuel can't melt steel beams". It's embarrassing to see it here, especially in a community with pretensions of bringing "disruption" to biotech. It would take a long time to catalog all the nonsense here but I'll just say that short subsequence (6aa) BLAST is meaningless and this subsequent claim is just word salad: "Such high human similarity also implies a high risk for the…
Epidemiologist Ellie Murray said it better than I could, so I’ll just quote her: “Yes, the chance of a virus like SARS-CoV-2 suddenly arising is fairly low. That’s why we have so few pandemics!! But conditional on being in a pandemic the chance that the virus that arises to cause it is like SARS-CoV-2 is super high!! There’s no conspiracy, just statistics”[0] That said, the fact that the outbreak started so close to…
There are virus labs all over the place so this could be a birthday paradox. There's one here in rural Montana (the data we quote often about sars-cov-2 survival times on surfaces was generated there).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
is there evidence that it's not?
Every single pandemic in history was naturally occurring, so I think it makes sense for our priors to be weighted towards COVID-19 being a natural occurrence like all others. Substantial evidence and compelling arguments can overcome these priors. But it’s a big claim with huge implications so I think caution is warranted.