121–130 of 253 posts
Perhaps I am one of a small group but it still irritates me how politicized the origins of COVID were. It should never have been that way and it should never happen again. Lab leak, deliberate act, accident, or a mutation in the wild, the origins should have been rigorously challenged and pursued no matter the consequence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You realize early on into the pandemic our hospital systems were struggling with the amount of patients that had to come in and see urgent care, right? As in, other people with more treatable conditions were dying because hospitals were filled up and there were no staff or beds available. Like this is just an objective fact. COVID now is far more mild because of vaccination and how the virus has evolved (Omnicron bei…
Vaccines have no effect on whether a virus mutates to become milder or more virulent. Effective vaccines, which prevent spread, can eliminate a disease, but clearly the COVID vaccines failed on that front. So for instance the Spanish Flu was an unimaginably brutal disease that primarily killed people in the 20-40 year old range! [1] Just terrifying stuff. But it never disappeared. It's still with us today as a varian…
Like what you've done there is a fallacy a lot of people commit, that they conflate seasonal viruses, colds, allergies etc with the flu. But when you actually get the flu, you know it.
Another lesson we should learn from the pandemic, aside from the risks of GoF research, is that searching for novel viruses in animals can be extremely dangerous. WIV collected samples from bat populations to find novel coronaviruses. Processing those samples was not done in a BSL-4 facility, but instead in BSL-2 labs. Some of those samples, like RaTG13, were as close as 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2. Even if COVID didn'…
>96% similar what does this mean
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This entire topic has gotten harebrained, so I’ll add to the fire: the part of our population that had a problem getting vaccinated would have responded much better to a perceived threat from a tangible adversary.
The purpose of a vaccine is to inoculate against a disease. The vaccine failed miserably at that. If the disease were actually deadly enough, more people would have chanced an experimental mRNA injection into their bloodstream vs taking the disease on via natural immunity. You didn't have to propagandize and gaslight people to take the smallpox vaccine: it was self evident how deadly the disease was. And yet, the wor…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone can cherrypick what they believe - it just doesn't mean much in the real world. With respect to the lab leak hypothesis largely a US phenomenon, though.
Uh? It's basically what everyone believes almost everywhere I went. In North Africa for sure, in Canada it's a bit less common but still extremely widespread. So I'm not sure you meant by it being a US only phenomenon? If anything it's actually a pretty divisive debate in the US,.
One thing the pandemic certainly has shown is just how dangerous an otherwise unremarkable animal virus can be if it gains the ability to infect humans. Simply because nobody has a pre-existing immunity it gains enormous advantages in its ability to spread compared to similar viruses that are already endemic. I think previous candidates for new pandemic viruses did mislead us as those never got far enough to become a…
> Simply because nobody has a pre-existing immunity There is good evidence that those who had SARS-CoV-1 had immunity that covered SARS-CoV-2. This immunity lasted for more than a decade. > What I found scary about SARS-CoV2 is just how much it improved between variants. Perhaps a leaky spike only vaccine was a particularly bad choice and the extent to which it drove these variants is not clear. There is additional d…
That is a tiny tiny number of people, measured in thousands at most.
One thing the pandemic certainly has shown is just how dangerous an otherwise unremarkable animal virus can be if it gains the ability to infect humans. Simply because nobody has a pre-existing immunity it gains enormous advantages in its ability to spread compared to similar viruses that are already endemic. I think previous candidates for new pandemic viruses did mislead us as those never got far enough to become a…
That gives me hope regarding H1N1, if it happens, we might be able to keep it under control.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This entire topic has gotten harebrained, so I’ll add to the fire: the part of our population that had a problem getting vaccinated would have responded much better to a perceived threat from a tangible adversary.
The purpose of a vaccine is to inoculate against a disease. The vaccine failed miserably at that. If the disease were actually deadly enough, more people would have chanced an experimental mRNA injection into their bloodstream vs taking the disease on via natural immunity. You didn't have to propagandize and gaslight people to take the smallpox vaccine: it was self evident how deadly the disease was. And yet, the wor…
I get that there are a lot of arm-chair experts who think this was a lab-leak. But we're making many large jumps here from: Was this created in a lab? Was this leaked from a lab? Is there something inherently dangerous about studying viruses in labs? Full NIMBY. The positive externalities of this are good jobs around virology study to try and prevent the next pandemic. But we're just leaning super hard into fear-mong…