351–360 of 494 posts
Look, when most virologists/epidemiogists look at this "evidence" and consider it too flimsy and flawed, then I wonder why people here are so eager to jump on it as "I'm not a biologist, covid19 is so unusual, it's obviously man-made". HN is embarrassing right now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, sorry. The US was prepared, we just have an administration that failed us and an entire political party that cares more about short-term politics than protecting its citizens. We have to reform our system because it should not be possible that someone like Trump is head of the executive or Mitch McConnell is head of the Senate. Arguing counter factuals is hard, but I entirely believe we could have whipped this th…
Yeah we've been tracking it and preparing for it since 1918. There's a whole industry built up over the years around preparing for this, but it still requires leadership involvement to put it into action. The leadership we have now believes in ideologies, conspiracy theories and blame. All they had to do was stand on the shoulders of science and let it work, as many previous administrations have done to prevent pande…
The chances of both countries doing this just before a global pandemic seem similar to the chances that there's a virus lab in a Chinese mega-city that saw some of the first cases.
So, it's proven Trump and Johnson are secretly Chinese operatives working as part of a covert group hellbent on destroying Capitalism with engineered viruses!!1one /s
Look, when most virologists/epidemiogists look at this "evidence" and consider it too flimsy and flawed, then I wonder why people here are so eager to jump on it as "I'm not a biologist, covid19 is so unusual, it's obviously man-made". HN is embarrassing right now.
Its not just non-biologists opinion. Its the opinion of nobel laurates https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23877141 . It is embarrassing for chinas ccp.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do the background checking? Why not just consider the arguments on their merits alone? That's what science is.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Doubly so when there is motivated reasoning behind the argument. If a pharma company came out with a paper saying “we’re almost done developing a cure for cancer!”, people would be rightly skeptical. Lethal manmade viruses are less ridiculous than that, but I’d still classify them as very surprising. Motivated reasoning for those with political ends should be unsur…
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…
Depends on how you define pandemic. Just in my lifetime I've seen the rise of HIV, SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, H1N1, SARS-CoV-2, and perhaps others that I've forgotten, that meet the dictionary definition of pandemic. That is more than one pandemic per decade, on average, which seems like a lot.
But you can also avoid calling them pandemics. HIV, for example, is officially a "worldwide epidemic". As per the dictionary definition of pandemic, I cannot find any difference between pandemic and worldwide epidemic, but I suppose to an epidemiologist there is a difference.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good summary, thanks! Related to the origin hypotheses, the hypothesis of zoonotic outbreak from a wet market in mid-Dec no longer seems as relevant. It was first laid out in a widely disseminated paper in The Lancet [1, see Figure 1B], but since then retrospective wastewater analyses from Italy[2], Spain[3], Brazil and others[4] have found it was circulating much earlier. "The Italian National Institute of Health lo…
I think the “hypothesis of zoonotic outbreak from a wet market in mid-Dec” is still very relevant, and the few papers claiming to have evidence of SARS-CoV-2 prior to Dec 2019 outside China are still very questionable. It’s not like they tested old samples in a few places and the virus promptly showed up. Rather, lots of old samples were tested all over the place, and the virus almost never showed up, except in a ver…
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…
Gunnveig Grødeland, vaccine researcher at the University of Oslo, is one of the scientists voicing their disagreement with Sørensen. She explains that what Sørensen referred to as "inserted sequences" can enable the development of a more serious disease, but this is not unusual in nature: "Examples can be found in other viruses including subtypes of influenza (including "bird flu"), HIV, and several human coronaviruses (MERS, OC43, HKU1)."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidnikel/2020/06/07/controver...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Related to the origin hypotheses, the hypothesis of zoonotic outbreak from a wet market in mid-Dec no longer seems as relevant Perhaps in your mind, but this is not at all a fair representation of the general scientific consensus - most still hold the weight of the evidence leans towards a November '19 origin in Wuhan
Please don't spew falsehoods and add 'general concesus' to it. There are reports that the French team that traveled in October in Wuhan for mil. sports games, got infected by it. So, that it was at circulating in Wuhan at least since October, even most probably: early september. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/08/covid-19-pandemi...
I haven't crunched these numbers, but a start in early September seems unlikely to me - call it a hunch, based on looking at the initial growth curves.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't speak for the OP, but for myself: I am not qualified to evaluate the evidence in this case; I just don't have the biology background. But sometimes when you get some out-there questionable sounding stuff research, and you spend a minute googling, you quickly find out that the journal the thing is published in is chaired by the author and itself has no credibility, the author is selling some form of snake oil di…
> I am not qualified to evaluate the evidence in this case; I just don't have the biology background. A "background check" does not change this fact, nor does your point actually negate the comment you are responding too. No one here is arguing that you must listen and believe everything that someone has written in a paper, but things must be proven and disproven. "Background checking" in any form is not science. It…
Also, swamping people with already settled arguments that they have to continue to prove or disprove is a disinformation tactic. A background check helps avoid giving those situations any air.