201–210 of 250 posts
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They did share it with scientists. Here’s Francois Balloux saying he replicated the results, tried to find holes, couldn’t https://mobile.twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1583165259...
Here's another blue check immunologist on twitter with a substantially different take: https://twitter.com/K_G_Andersen/status/1583252866394771456
I'm sure this kind of talk might have been squashed, suppressed, and some people might even people got banned for saying such things?
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Absolutely incredible to think that the national institute of allergy and infectious disease might fund research into infectious disease.
I think you’re committing a motte-and-bailey here. We are talking about research deemed so dangerous Obama banned it, not infectious disease research in general.
The opening line: "To prevent future pandemics, it is important that we understand whether SARS-CoV-2 spilled over directly from animals to people, or indirectly in a laboratory accident." Is that true? I mean I understand why people would be curious, but does it really matter, in terms of what we need to do? We know that viruses _can_ spillover from animals to people, and we know that viruses in a laboratory setting…
> I don't know that I believe that the answer to which one happened in the case of covid-19, is all that important It is when literally this week a version with an 80% kill rate but with the spread of the most transmissible was made in a lab for no good reason. How many would die if that leaked out and the only reason it’s been made is just so some academic can get their name in a paper and earn some grant presumably…
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> It's important to know whether or not the authors picked BsaI & BmBI blind, before looking at the genome. You could never convince me that these restriction enzymes were picked blindly, no bioinformatician I have ever met does science this way. There is a preliminary period of exploratory data analysis which is done before any hypothesis is put forward, and data dredging and leakage are rampant in the literature. T…
> To your point however, could someone comment on the suitability of BsaI/BsmBI for the in vitro assembly of synthetic coronaviruses? These are very commmon enzymes. Perhaps the most common today. The GP comment is sort of misleading...you wouldn't just pick enzymes at random to do this analysis. You'd pick the enzymes in common use. These count. > Is it all just about finding sites in the genome at the right locatio…
I said pick blind, not at random. I recommend reading https://info.umkc.edu/drbanderson/p-hacking-and-the-problem-...
Wasn't this a conspiracy theory at the start if this? I'm sure this kind of talk might have been squashed, suppressed, and some people might even people got banned for saying such things?
"To avoid losing power with multiple comparisons, we focus our analysis on the BsaI/BsmBI sites in SARS-CoV-2 and compare the BsaI/BsmBI map in SARS-CoV-2 to all other restriction maps of all other CoVs used in our analysis." It's important to know whether or not the authors picked BsaI & BmBI blind, before looking at the genome. If they picked BsaI & BmBI with knowledge of the SARS-CoV-2 genome, that doesn't dodge t…
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Wasn't the lab working with coronaviruses? So maybe some of it escaped. I really don't see how that's an unnecessary multiplication of entities. Is the objection simply that, pandemics have emerged from markets, but not labs? But we know that an escape of a coronavirus could lead to a pandemic. I see nothing needlessly complex here, and certainly not extraordinary.
I don’t believe anyone is saying it’s needlessly complex, but Occam’s Razor isn’t “the second simplest explanation is usually the correct one.” On one hand you have the market which housed animals that throughout its history some have had and spread different coronaviruses naturally. Every prior pandemic has been believed to have been from animal to human transmission, it’s seemingly the simplest explanation. The lab…
The likelihood a lab accident is independent of "all other prior pandemics", because it is not adjusted by whether there have been two natural pandemics, or two million of them. Rather, it's adjusted by the safety practices at the lab.
It's still not obvious that the wet market explanation is simpler than the lab leak. I don't see Occam's Razor making a selection here.
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You're talking about the field of above-board academic research. Academics didn't create SARS-CoV-2 and cover up their own role in it.
It is not possible to be certain of this. You can't state that as an incontrovertible fact. Is it beyond reasonable doubt that a virus created as part of a gain-of-function research programme escaped? We simply don't know definitively one way or the other, and it's rather unscientific to make blanket statements about these things one way or the other in the absence of evidence to validate the claim. (I'm an immunolog…
The more pressing matter is the conspiracies between some top level specialists and some governments that seem to have effectively pushed public opinion away from the lab leak hypothesis (where they both can take a lot of blame) to the zoonotic hypothesis (less blame) - even though actual specialist opinion was (and still is) pretty split... (Not so much if you remove the specialists with a conflict of interest and the pressure they and the governments might have been able to exert ?)
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> which I wont link Why not? HN promotes logical evidence-backed discussion. The least you can do is link the forum.
He's talking about virological and making up threads that never existed. There was a lot of discussion in the early days about how it seemed possible it was synthetic based on the binding site affinity but as scientists do, they researched the literature, conferred with their colleagues and almost all came around to the virus arising via natural origin. The early threads are super interesting in an anthropological se…