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More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

nytimes.com

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Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#321

Post by XorNot »

rogers18445 wrote: post #311

Gain of function research is not engineering, they are often conflated for some reason. Gain of function is essentially artificial selection with bells and whistles. Such manipulation would leak some information into the virus. Already it seems like the virus has great difficulty spreading outdoors while great success spreading indoors. It may be a coincidence but evolution does encode environmental assumptions into…

Humans are susceptible to being damaged by sunlight but it doesn't imply we evolved indoors in a lab.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#322

Post by brippalcharrid »

mistermann wrote: post #281
temp8964 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the word "debunk" has been frequently used by one political side to label any idea they disagree with. This is a very strange word. When I read history of science books, this word was almost never used. Change of scientific consensus is not uncommon in the history of science. Scientists disagree with each other, debate with each other, but they don't claim they debunk each other. I don't believe people use thi…

Misinformation is another word that has become extremely popular in the last year or two. I don't think very many people think very deeply about the meaning of words, and how subtle changes in the ones that are chosen can influence the collective consciousness. A lot of people even seem to strongly dislike the topic being mentioned.

I think that practitioners of Postmodernism have spent a lot of time thinking about the meanings of words that they can cause people to perceive, and that they have had a very successful track record of using this to shift cultural parameters and achieve their political objectives.

They'd probably prefer that you didn't notice they were doing this.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#323

Post by mistermann »

brippalcharrid wrote: post #322
mistermann wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Misinformation is another word that has become extremely popular in the last year or two. I don't think very many people think very deeply about the meaning of words, and how subtle changes in the ones that are chosen can influence the collective consciousness. A lot of people even seem to strongly dislike the topic being mentioned.

I think that practitioners of Postmodernism have spent a lot of time thinking about the meanings of words that they can cause people to perceive, and that they have had a very successful track record of using this to shift cultural parameters and achieve their political objectives. They'd probably prefer that you didn't notice they were doing this.

Politicians and journalists are probably a bit choked that others are stealing their bit!

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#324

Post by rogers18445 »

XorNot wrote: post #321
rogers18445 wrote: post #311

Gain of function research is not engineering, they are often conflated for some reason. Gain of function is essentially artificial selection with bells and whistles. Such manipulation would leak some information into the virus. Already it seems like the virus has great difficulty spreading outdoors while great success spreading indoors. It may be a coincidence but evolution does encode environmental assumptions into…

Humans are susceptible to being damaged by sunlight but it doesn't imply we evolved indoors in a lab.

Humans evolved melanin to resist UV while also needing UV for vitamin D synthesis. Your point is what exactly?

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#325

Post by tshaddox »

kodah wrote: post #314
tshaddox wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t that tweet pretty clearly aimed at people who were already concluding that it was engineered in a lab? That’s a lot different than saying we should investigate the origins of the virus.

If a scientist is telling people to unfollow them because those people believe it's a possibility that they don't want ruled out without evidence; that is the very definition of being a child. In fact, maybe they shouldn't have credentials at that point. If someone is telling people who already only believe that conclusion then that makes sense. It's important to ask people that do this stuff to be very specific abou…

The statement is very explicitly not aimed at people who believe it’s a possibility.

The childishness of telling people to unfollow you on Twitter is undeniable, but isn’t really related, and is just what you get when you’re reading Twitter.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#326

Post by bagacrap »

fumbly wrote: post #181
baja_blast wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The current plan is to 6x the funding for gain-of-function research, from $200 million to $1.2 billion, in the name of pandemic prevention. Do you have a source for this? Because if true this would be extremely frightening, even if Covid is natural the research is just too risky. GoF research should be banned, I mean it's entire justification for conducting this research in the first place is that it "helps predict…

"Also, current plans are to expand worldwide collaboration on risky virus research sixfold, through the $1.2 billion Global Virome Project. Shouldn’t we figure out if this research sparked the pandemic before drastically expanding it?" https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/cong...

That's a pretty weak reference because it's part of an opinion piece with no references.

However there's an article in Nature which makes it clearer that the 1.2B figure is just an amount requested by those who suggested the project. A far cry from "current plans" to fund that amount.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#327

Post by strken »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #167

What does it matter, beyond natural curiosity, whether it was released from a lab or not? It is of no real consequence because: (1) if it *was* released from a lab, its highly suspect that it was intentional due to it infecting China's own citizens; if it was some kind of "attack" you would think they would plant it somewhere else. (2) this is somewhat of the price we (as a society) pay for experimentation on disease…

It matters because I don't want this to happen again in 2025, and neither does anyone else. If COVID-19 was released from a BSL-2 lab, or even if it would have been studied in one under current biosafety practices, then perhaps such research should be conducted in BSL-3 facilities or above. Above all else we need to avoid shutting down the entire globe for another two years.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#328

Post by swader999 »

mike00632 wrote: post #293
swader999 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article does a thorough examination of the origination, covers your points on Daszak well. https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...

The author of that article makes some claims that you should give some critical thought to: Some are pretty obviously wrong: - they say the virus hasn't mutated to become more suitable or transmissible in humans - they imply the first cases of COVID-19 were hospitalizations and imply that asymptomatic spread of the disease is not possible Then also the article claims that science hasn't tracked gene mutations of the…

You seriously miss read a lot of what was said in that article to post those claims. Re read slower and pay mind to the nuances.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#329

Post by Auracle »

xxpor wrote: post #188
arrozconcosas wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was by accident, then it calls into question the quality controls over labs. It isn't "equally likely to happen anywhere" if the quality and safety standards vary by location. Operating a lab with poor safety standards is not "bad luck".

The problem is: what is anyone going to do about it? China will never admit it, even if it is true (I have no position one way or the other).

Other countries could insist on oversight of China’s labs, and if they aren’t given that they could put economic screws to them.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#330

Post by divbzero »

smallnamespace wrote: post #297
trompetenaccoun wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a 3rd option. I'm going to repost a comment I made a few days ago regarding the labs in Wuhan: The "Wuhan Institute of Virology" is named in a couple of news articles and scientific publications. However what is rarely discussed is that the Wuhan CDC (武汉市疾病预防控制中心), which also has a virus lab and was also researching coronaviruses is in walking distance from that wet market! I took a screenshot of it, in the…

> It's absurd that this is almost never talked about anywhere FYI, this really doesn't match my experience. I got curious and Googled about the lab's location myself about a year ago, not long after the outbreak, and found the hypothesis tantalizing, even in the absence of hard evidence. I've seen ongoing discussion about this since then on various blogs and on Twitter. As a more meta-comment, we're all in tiny, pers…

To add one more data point, for the past year I’ve been following this story passively — reading articles I’ve come across but never searching actively — and this is the first I’ve heard of the coincident location of the Wuhan CDC.
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