101–110 of 792 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excuse me, but scientists are not public policy makers. Their job is to follow the evidence, not publish based on what they think will happen if they do.
Scientists are members of society too. They are not automatons.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you link some sources here? Call me skeptical, but if the evidence is as convincing as you make it sound, then it implies a pretty widespread conspiracy among experts (of many countries and affiliations) who would understand the implications yet are deliberately mis-communicating via their podcasts, news appearances, papers in famous journals, etc. Are there any papers published on this or is it just in the book…
A loose conspiracy of a bunch of social media scientists/journalists? Wouldn't the overall size and diversity of the field mean that there would be at least a few dissenters presenting more factual alternatives? You should just read the book. It's not very convincing. The most likely explanation for the lack of interest in identifying the origins is primarly a lack of data. Speculating about conspiracies does not hel…
The lab-leak hypothesis is meta-scientific. When it was first tossed around, the lab leak hypothesis generated two predictions: 1. We would find evidence that someone was doing experiments on furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses. 2. We would find that the furin cleavage site matched a known sequence. We did not find 2, which should have been easy to find. Eventually, we found 1, since a rejected DARPA grant proposal…
I haven’t been fixated on this by any means but I remember reading an article months back that looked at the timeline and locations of the early cases and compared them against the locations of the market and the research facility. I came away thinking that the animal market hypothesis seemed much more likely than the lab leak.
I linked it above, but aside from the fact that every other pandemic we've seen came about the same way, there's a ton of specific evidence from this pandemic:
https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-g...
Including the timeline/locations of the earliest cases:
https://zenodo.org/record/6299600#.YjSWqDUxmUk
One thing the lab leak crew haven't been able to answer is how there could possibly be two different lineages at the market -- which you'd 100% expect from multiple spillover but is essentially impossible if your working theory is that an infected lab worker brought it to the market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can find the primary source for the DARPA leak on hn; if you care to verify that the sequence comes from a patent yourself directly from primary sources, you can find instructions on how to do that on hn too. I've done the search myself, it's real. I can't provide direct sources for the fact that these predictions preceded the discoveries, but I can tell you they ran through my head, and others I talked to, and t…
I assume the DARPA leak is this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28644428 ~700pts, ~450 comments, with the source published 23. September 2021.
It's not that the origin story is not important, it's not that people don't care, it's that it is a distraction. It doesn't help solve the crisis. The article makes the comparison with a nuclear bomb. This is a bad comparison. If we were attacked by a sentient creature, we could reason with it and mitigate further damage or escalation. In the case of a virus, it's good to know to prevent future pandemics maybe, and t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would be, ironically, moderna. Will the patent court award them negative damages? On a more serious note, to stave off conspiratorial thinking, it should be "not crazy" that a moderna furin sequence appear. If I told a biochemist to go and insert a furin cleavage site into a virus, that grad student would do an NCBI blast search and get a list of all sequences. Maybe they are more knowledgeable than me and did k…
> On a more serious note, to stave off conspiratorial thinking, it should be "not crazy" that a moderna furin sequence appear. If I told a biochemist to go and insert a furin cleavage site into a virus, that grad student would do an NCBI blast search and get a list of all sequences. The weird part is, prior to 2020, a BLAST search only results in Moderna patents. There wasn't anything there for them to copy from. htt…
The lab-leak hypothesis is meta-scientific. When it was first tossed around, the lab leak hypothesis generated two predictions: 1. We would find evidence that someone was doing experiments on furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses. 2. We would find that the furin cleavage site matched a known sequence. We did not find 2, which should have been easy to find. Eventually, we found 1, since a rejected DARPA grant proposal…
Can you link some sources here? Call me skeptical, but if the evidence is as convincing as you make it sound, then it implies a pretty widespread conspiracy among experts (of many countries and affiliations) who would understand the implications yet are deliberately mis-communicating via their podcasts, news appearances, papers in famous journals, etc. Are there any papers published on this or is it just in the book…
Few scientist are the learned aristocrats of before who did not depend on grant money to live comfortable lives.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Proximal paper was used by Chinese disinformation bots to skelch any debate about a lab leak. I take that as a Streisand effect. Same when Fauci strongly and publically rebuked the Indian bioinformatics pre-print paper talking of the GP-120 HIV inserts. That is how I came to know about those inserts and their interesting history. So strangely, the grossly unscientific propaganda effort that was the Proximal Origi…
What’s your scientific criticism of the paper?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scientists are members of society too. They are not automatons.
If scientists do not publish their unbiased results and instead bend their results to fit personal or public expectation, their credentials should be revoked in the name of science itself. There is no greater crime against humanity that to conceal or compromise scientific truth.
I initially dismissed the lab leak hypothesis because surely nobody would be stupid enough to make new SARS virus strains on purpose. They’re worthless as biological weapons, and the risks are insane. Then it turns out that that is precisely the type of research the Wuhan lab does regularly. And then when our prime minister merely suggested an investigation, China put punitive tariffs on billions of dollars of our ex…