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Leaked documents: Ugandan government expects explosion in Ebola cases

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: Leaked documents: Ugandan government expects explosion in Ebola cases

#51

Post by nonameiguess »

benreesman wrote: post #25
throwaway920102 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean it could evolve to be airborne in the wild or in a research lab doing intentional gain of function research (a practice for which funding was temporarily halted by Obama) and hybridization much like has been done at BSL-4 facilities worldwide unchecked including by EcoHealth alliance with bat coronaviruses via US funding at the WIV prior to the Covid outbreak in Wuhan. https://www.science.org/content/article/n…

Why is parent getting downvoted? The lab leak theory is pretty mainstream these days. And gain of function research is 1: real 2: fucking insane and 3: a plausible way we would have a true captain trips style pandemic.

It's a hell of a leap to go from gain of function research has ever happened at all to gain of function specifically on Ebola is a near-term serious risk. Is there any evidence that gain of function has ever been conducted on Ebola? I've never heard of it, and don't know where to look other than a search engine, and conducting a search there returns exactly two sources making that claim, one called "scamdemic" and one called "goldismoney." Neither seems like a particularly reputable source.

Re: Leaked documents: Ugandan government expects explosion in Ebola cases

#52

Post by mikeyouse »

benreesman wrote: post #43
mikeyouse wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not mainstream amongst virologists.. as has been demonstrated by repeatedly debunking the latest gish gallop papers, there's literally zero evidence for lab manipulation of the sars cov2 virus. It's vaguely plausible that the virus could have been captured in the wild and then leaked, but even that seems extremely unlikely given the two separate market lineages and timeline of the earliest cases. Stricter…

I think there is a lot more controversy than you’re implying, even among serious scientists, but an HN comment thread is probably not the right place to litigate a complex issue that is also a partisan political football. I’ll leave it at this: I would encourage everyone to do their own research on this and try to look past the elephant in the room of the politics angle.

I've got a busy day so don't want to get into it again -- but I cannot express how incapable the average (even educated!) person is to "do their own research" on something as complex and nuanced as molecular engineering and the probabilities of covid genetic engineering.

Even some expert 'pre-reviewers' that received the advance of the most recent bombshell paper that supposedly proved an unnatural virus with lab origin missed obvious tells that completely invalidated the authors' claims. E.g. this thread; https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/15870905072887767...

If people do want to make up their own minds on this - I'd encourage you to track down people making falsifiable claims and then changing their priors based on the results of that research instead of people jumping from one conspiracy theory to the next to avoid changing their views.

As one data point, several prominent "lab leakers" on Twitter are now insisting that prior strains are fake and were invented by virologists since those strains disprove recent papers instead of considering that maybe those recent papers were flawed. It's bizarre to watch. (One of the authors of the most recent 'bombshell' LL paper claiming that two related field-collected coronaviruses are fake / manipulated: https://twitter.com/VBruttel/status/1584920770605621248)

Re: Leaked documents: Ugandan government expects explosion in Ebola cases

#53

Post by VancouverMan »

mschuster91 wrote: post #10
_djo_ wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was handled well by global public health authorities, with education campaigns, targeted vaccinations, early warning, treatment, and growing immunity in the most at-risk populations.

Additionally, most of the most-at-risk population has lived through the AIDS horror. A good gay friend of mine roughly summarized it as "we gays know how bad diseases can get, and fuck it my dating life even after 2 years of pandemic is not as important as is my life". Once it was clear that MSM were (once again) a high-risk group, they all went back to either reducing contacts or at least wearing condoms. In contras…

Masking was never inherently a political issue, even if some people tried to make it one.

From a purely scientific perspective, and regardless of one's political leanings or preferences, it was obvious from the start that widespread everyday masking simply isn't effective, nor is it practical.

If such masking was even just somewhat effective, the entire situation would have been over by mid-2020 at the latest. That clearly wasn't the case.

Even in large regions with strictly-enforced masking (even outdoors, in some cases!), combined with numerous other onerous restrictions, we still saw massive case number spikes. Those would not have happened if masking worked.

Of course, there are also the numerous harmful effects of masking that must be considered. It causes many accessibility problems, it causes childhood development problems, it causes social strife (including discrimination), it enables abusive policing, and so forth.

Hopefully, society as a whole has been reminded how masking just doesn't work, and that's exactly why we didn't bother with it until this recent debacle.

Re: Leaked documents: Ugandan government expects explosion in Ebola cases

#54

Post by Blahah »

photochemsyn wrote: post #46

Comprehensive accessible review here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4495366/ The virus apparently just wrecks the immune system right off the bat, allowing it to rampage throughout the body unchecked. Hence immune-system-support therapies are being worked on: > "EBOV is able to evade innate and adaptive (both humoral and cellular) responses by encoding for multiple viral proteins that inhibit both type…

"right off the bat" is unfortunately apt for ebola!

Re: Leaked documents: Ugandan government expects explosion in Ebola cases

#55

Post by MichaelCollins »

georgeburdell wrote: post #39
_jal wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contact tracing in the Covid context has worked horribly everywhere in the US, as far as I know, outside of more or less defined communities where penalties could attach. And even there is mostly failed when they didn't. Did I miss an instance where it worked well enough to be worth the effort? Add in the fact that the gay community has reasons to be less than thrilled with medical disclosure of this sort and I'm not…

The CDC is still recommending contact tracing (for Covid), so I imagine they have data to back up its employment.

Or they simply don't want to relinquish whatever funding they may have been allocated for contact tracing, or may receive in the future.

Don't trust government agencies to tell you what they need, they'll always ask for a Moon mission.

Re: Leaked documents: Ugandan government expects explosion in Ebola cases

#56

Post by wkearney99 »

kramerger wrote: post #16
pelorat wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the only reason it spreads is due to lack of education.

Is there a particular program or degree that makes me immune? Because multiple members of Doctors Without Borders died in the previous outbreak.

That's entirely disingenuous, and you know it. There's a huge difference between the uneducated public in the developing world (or, clearly, everywhere really) and those that choose to enter into those challenging conditions to try and help people.

Re: Leaked documents: Ugandan government expects explosion in Ebola cases

#57

Post by jcelerier »

mwint wrote: post #49
spywaregorilla wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds... wrong? What if the 6+ month forecast assuming no interventions is useful to compel an intervention, and the 2-3 week one is not?

If “useful to compel” is a criteria, we can jump straight to flat-out lying and dispose with the statistics part.

No post body was provided.

Re: Leaked documents: Ugandan government expects explosion in Ebola cases

#58

Post by MichaelCollins »

justapassenger wrote: post #50
benreesman wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is parent getting downvoted? The lab leak theory is pretty mainstream these days. And gain of function research is 1: real 2: fucking insane and 3: a plausible way we would have a true captain trips style pandemic.

Gain function is only way to research pathogens.

No it isn't.

Re: Leaked documents: Ugandan government expects explosion in Ebola cases

#59

Post by bergenty »

exhilaration wrote: post #4

The headline is scary but #1 Ebola isn't airborne and #2 it's super deadly which means it kills before it really has a chance to spread widely.

I mean it’s not all that hard for it to become airborne. If that happens it’s doesn’t kill fast enough to not spread like crazy.

Re: Leaked documents: Ugandan government expects explosion in Ebola cases

#60

Post by giantg2 »

exhilaration wrote: post #4

The headline is scary but #1 Ebola isn't airborne and #2 it's super deadly which means it kills before it really has a chance to spread widely.

" it's super deadly which means it kills before it really has a chance to spread widely."

I generally agree. I believe there is some lag time before dropping dead. Fast air travel seems like a good way for this to spread over a wide range. If I remember correctly, CDC was involved in some Ebola cases about 10 years or so ago due to travellers. The manpower required for the precautions to prevent US spread for just 2-4 infected people was massive. I would guess we would be overwhelmed and it would start spreading here if the numbers were in the dozens.

I'm not saying that would be likely this time, but the likelihood would go up if there was a less deadly mutation. Operating on previously true beliefs is likely to cause the most damage.

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