51–60 of 319 posts
Curious why this was flagged?
A blog post full of wild speculation, whose main sources appear to be a bunch of Twitter threads. Have we not learned anything in the past two years?
Asking valid questions, though. Is that better to bury one's head in the sand?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This discussion instantly garned upvotes, not one substantial argument against the article, and was flagged off the front page. At least this person has a reasoning and stands behind it, that's heads and shoulders above the tactics of those who want to bury this.
This post had 40 points within 20 minutes, which is the reading time of the article at 200 WPM plus a minute or two for figures. How many of those upvotes were from people who didn't read or who skimmed the article?
And I wasn't surprised.
That's a wild state of affairs.
.. And it looks like I wasn't the only one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a lot of implications if this is a lab leak, including: - Are labs involved in this research sufficiently secure? Do we need to raise the standard of security? - Is the cost-benefit of gain of research worth it? - Should China be forced to pay reparations/ sanctioned for hiding the source? All of these conversations depend on whether its a lab leak.
I would add to that: "is it an intentional means of destabilizing the West?" To be clear: I see no evidence that Omicron is even a second lab-leak, much less that it's part of a sinister plot. My point is that there are immediate geopolitical implications, in addition to the scientific and public-health implications you have highlighted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This discussion instantly garned upvotes, not one substantial argument against the article, and was flagged off the front page. At least this person has a reasoning and stands behind it, that's heads and shoulders above the tactics of those who want to bury this.
This post had 40 points within 20 minutes, which is the reading time of the article at 200 WPM plus a minute or two for figures. How many of those upvotes were from people who didn't read or who skimmed the article?
In this case I took my time fully reading it before posting it, but not being a biotech person I posted this here also because I was interested in criticism of flaws I would have no chance of not overlooking. But just flagging it isn't that. It doesn't tell me this article is bad, it tells me too many people aren't acting in good faith, so that raises the question why that is.
Trying to turn it around on others by speculating on what they might have done (i.e. why they upvoted it, if they read it), doesn't change what was definitely done (i.e. flagging it without any substantial criticism).
I don't like certain aspects of publishing with peer review, but if one is so confident with their lab leak theory, try go publish in journals or put it up in one of the preprint servers instead of substack. The key is to demonstrate not that your claims are based, but that you have tried various ways to invalid the conclusions but could not success.
This discussion instantly garned upvotes, not one substantial argument against the article, and was flagged off the front page. At least this person has a reasoning and stands behind it, that's heads and shoulders above the tactics of those who want to bury this.
The author argued in section "weirdness 1" that the phylogentic tree implies the omicron strain is directly related to an ancestor genome from Spring 2020. I have the following concerns:
the tree is based on https://nextstrain.org/ , a database initially introduced in 2018 [1]. This is a great data source. However, for COVID, nextstrain naturally bias towards the more viable biosamples. In other words, COVID strains in wild animals such are going to be underrepresented, if represented at all. And if so, the large sequence divergence is surprising but not a direct indication of lab leak. The author can supply with a rough overview of sequencing sources of nextstrain to counter this. Or better, it would be good if the author can compare with, or cite existing literatures, phylogenetic trees of other epidemics and demonstrate that the sequence divergence is much larger than what we would expect from wild animal reservoir.
"weirdness 2" has a stand, but it should be accompanied by silent/functional mutation ratios in other COVID strains since synonomous mutation could be not entirely silent if translation efficiency is affected (correct me if I'm wrong).
Briefly on one other point, "weirdly it's exactly mice, not other animals": we use mice as lab animals for a reason. They are somewhat similar to human in terms of physiology. Therefore we can expect that they could be more prone to COVID infection, aren't we?
editted to add one more sentence: from a peer review aspect, this blog is beyond terrible and I'd probably have 10 major conerns listed if it comes in as a PR.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/34/23/4121/5...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would add to that: "is it an intentional means of destabilizing the West?" To be clear: I see no evidence that Omicron is even a second lab-leak, much less that it's part of a sinister plot. My point is that there are immediate geopolitical implications, in addition to the scientific and public-health implications you have highlighted.
I'm confused. Is Dr. Ferguson and Dr. Vonagen's observations about s/sn ratio not decent evidence towards this? It seems quite good statistically to me.
Definitely intrigued, now!
Curious why this was flagged?
A blog post full of wild speculation, whose main sources appear to be a bunch of Twitter threads. Have we not learned anything in the past two years?
But more importantly, it's well reasoned. It's not "wild speculation". It's learned speculation based on history, opinions of experts, and independent sources, synthesized with deduction.
I understand the reflex to push back on claims of conspiracy. I find the mainstream meme conspiracy theories (flat earth, 9/11 was an inside job, etc) to be somewhere between laughable and terrifying. But this is a unicorn among conspiracy theories: both the initial conditions are plausible (that this was an accident, of a kind that has happened before, not a nefarious pre-planned event with dubious benefit), and the conditions of the conspiracy are plausible (the set of people with positive knowledge of a given leak would be quite small, and their incentives to keep it secret would be strongly aligned).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Friend, I think you maybe clicked the wrong reply link? I didn't say anything about GoF research at all. Assuming that we ever get the honest and open public debate about COVID-19's origins, and if it was a lab leak from WIV and was related to GoF research, then certainly the potential benefits of GoF research would be weighed against the potential dangers. I don't take a position one way or another in that conversat…
Perhaps I read into your comment more than was warranted. However, "follow the evidence" applies to science. You are describing an ethical question, which means you are doing philosophy.
I don't like certain aspects of publishing with peer review, but if one is so confident with their lab leak theory, try go publish in journals or put it up in one of the preprint servers instead of substack. The key is to demonstrate not that your claims are based, but that you have tried various ways to invalid the conclusions but could not success.
Journals are very unlikely to publish this kind of things, because of massive conflicts of interests. Look at the Lancet.