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Wait the article says there's 200k cases in the U.K everyday now? Why is google reporting way lower? [1] [1] https://i.imgur.com/u6KABa5.png
I will just say this: Interest in developing and deploying nuclear power dramatically declined after Three Mile Island and the Chernobyl incidents. This lead to an increased reliance on carbon-based energy sources like Coal and Natural Gas, likely killing hundreds of thousands over the years. I think skittish virologists rightly concluded that a lab-leak mea culpa would have a similar effect on virology and perhaps b…
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.
When the first sentence is factually incorrect, it's tough to read on. The UK doesn't have 200k cases a day, it's less than a tenth of that.
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…
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 the lack of a sequence match bothered me. If you want to get meta-meta-scientific I would not be surprised if there was at least a blog post by someone out there saying "if it was a lab leak, where's the sequence match?" Out there that preceded the sleuth who found it hidden in plain site (behind an NCBI search option)
Edit: I have not read the ridley/chen book, I know most of the stuff from when they were emergent reports by reading this site and applying my intuition as a former biochemist (and some of my actively working biochemist friends) ti judge relative merits of hypotheses.
Even if this one wasn’t a lab leak, the next one very well could be. The risk/reward profile of that sort of research is insanely unfavorable.
If I don’t see health authorities taking lab safety seriously by thoroughly and publicly investigating, why should I believe they take vaccine safety seriously? The framing damages credibility.
I think understanding the origin is important, but I also understand why it wasn't a media fixation during the pandemic itself. 1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic 2) Unlike the nuclear analogy in the article, pandemic virus outbreaks happen naturally, and fairly frequently. Combined with the huge increase in global travel, when one does happen it can be around the…
Came or not from a lab, SynBio and gain of functions experiments have the potential of re-doing this of way worse.
So basically the only truly important response that is not damage containment is to prevent this from happening (or happen again).
Honestly beside fringe groups I don’t see any initiatives happening, if it was up to me I’d kick gain of function experiments into the same realm as chemical weapons.
This is why free speech is important, it is impossible to rely on “fact checkers”.
I think the important point is not whether this outbreak was in fact a lab leak, but that it is entirely plausible due to gain-of-function research. Even if this one wasn’t a lab leak, the next one very well could be. The risk/reward profile of that sort of research is insanely unfavorable.
It’s because there was a series of scientific papers that pointed very strongly to a zoonotic origin: https://mobile.twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1499406148...
So strangely, the grossly unscientific propaganda effort that was the Proximal Origins paper may have had the reverse effects, at least, it had on me.
Anyone contributing to this virology conspiracy (why they were put in charge to lead the investigation and theory building, and not the way more qualified biosecurity experts?), including voluntarily, like Angie Rasmussen, has Chinese propaganda tainted blood on their hands.