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There’s going to be a ton of comments on the lab security aspects, but there are two other big takeaways from this article: 1) Researchers easily found multiple naturally occurring coronaviruses that seemed likely to be able to jump into humans. In fact that is why they were so eager to conduct that lab research: the natural threat seemed imminent. 2) The sequence of COVID-19 does not yet resemble any of the sequence…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Platform/publisher isn't a thing. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201017/13051145526/secti...
There's no legally spelled out condition, but one editorializes content and the other is content agnostic. The justification of 230's existence is that the host shouldn't be liable, because it's not their speech. That's no longer true if they're picking and choosing what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned. They may not be typing the post, but they're determining what actually gets said. And that means…
> That's no longer true if they're picking and choosing what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned.
No, its not. That's approximately the traditional justification for distributors having more limited liability than publishers.
Section 230 was expressly adopted to allow platforms to act like publishers in a limited way without publisher liability, specifically to pick and choose what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned.
The justification you invented is basically the opposite of the explicit purpose of 230.
There’s going to be a ton of comments on the lab security aspects, but there are two other big takeaways from this article: 1) Researchers easily found multiple naturally occurring coronaviruses that seemed likely to be able to jump into humans. In fact that is why they were so eager to conduct that lab research: the natural threat seemed imminent. 2) The sequence of COVID-19 does not yet resemble any of the sequence…
This type of comment is what I come to HN for. Thank you.
https://newrepublic.com/article/162689/bats-covid-19-lab-lea...
The problem with this whole article is that we know of no suitable backbone virus to use, and we know of no suitable spike-protein sequence to form a chimera which results in SARS-CoV-2. The experiments done on the SARS-CoV-1 or WIV1 backbone don't remotely get you close to SARS-CoV-2 and you're dealing with centuries of evolutionary difference there. The RaTG13 virus backbone is also several decades of evolution awa…
"The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory":
https://newrepublic.com/article/162689/bats-covid-19-lab-lea...
The problem with this whole article is that we know of no suitable backbone virus to use, and we know of no suitable spike-protein sequence to form a chimera which results in SARS-CoV-2. The experiments done on the SARS-CoV-1 or WIV1 backbone don't remotely get you close to SARS-CoV-2 and you're dealing with centuries of evolutionary difference there. The RaTG13 virus backbone is also several decades of evolution awa…
Yet almost a year later and still no smoking gun showing a clear zoonotic link. I suppose we’ll never find one because China has no interest in getting to the truth. Cooperation means disclosing things which have the potential to make them look bad so why risk it?
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/ncezid/stories-features/global-stories/e...
"The Last And Only Foreign Scientist in the Wuhan Lab Speaks Out" [1] [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-06-27/did-covid...
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Oh I see. I didn't follow your links, rather I thought your second para was the quote. "I think it's possible to split out the question of bioresearch risks from Covid origins. If it was a lab leak, obviously we should regulate those risks better, but we should also do more to mitigate zoonotic spillover, because we have tons of evidence that happens and causes damage. If it wasn't lab leak, we should do more to miti…
Nope, apologies if there is any confusion. That's just my opinion. I'm basically trying to make the point that this overfocus on origins is more of a political question than one with direct public health impact.
The over focus on origin is clearly a proxy for something else.
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Much of this reminds me of how we went to war against Iraq The lead author of the WSJ piece on the "sick lab workers" is the same author that helped get us into Iraq with a NYT article on Hussein's nuclear WMD program in 2002.
It’s almost like those two pieces are completely unrelated to one another. If you’re looking for someone with a clean record commenting on the viability of the lab leak theory for months, take a look at Bret Weinstein.
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I don't think you need to make conspiratorial allegations about the info being judged "dangerous" to explain it. It simply got politicized just as masks got politicized. The more one side advocates it the more the other side discredits it.
Except in this case, the left tried to discredit it. If Trump kept his mouth shut, it may have gone down differently (that is, less politicized).
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It’s almost like those two pieces are completely unrelated to one another. If you’re looking for someone with a clean record commenting on the viability of the lab leak theory for months, take a look at Bret Weinstein.
I took a look at Bret Weinstein, and it wasn’t good. Not good at all. He seemed to be making every effort he could to blame the mRNA vaccines for problems that —if true— could have any number of mundane explanations. But hey, maybe he’s right about the lab leak theory.