Subtitle:
Revised award to EcoHealth Alliance will no longer involve studies of hybrid coronaviruses
FWIW. I don't know if that will make anyone feel any better about it.
NIH restarts bat virus grant
51–60 of 208 posts
Re: NIH restarts bat virus grant
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Conspiracy and fact are orthogonal descriptors.
I don't understand this concept. I see it all over the internet. But I don't get it. At what point did we stop believing it was possible for people to conspire to commit crimes? Nobody disputes, for example, that the convictions of the Watergate conspirators - for the charge of conspiracy - was based in fact. So how is it that we can now say that fact and conspiracy can't be part of the same pattern? It's true that a…
That's not what orthogonal means. Your counter-examples are exactly what orthogonal means; they are independent attributes.
Re: NIH restarts bat virus grant
#53What would it even mean if we created covid 19 in a lab and it was accidentally released? Would it change anything? Would anyone be held responsible?
>> What would it even mean if we created covid 19 in a lab and it was accidentally released? Would it change anything? Would anyone be held responsible?
Nothing. No. and No. "Scientists" were proposing research that would create essentially the Covid19 virus. I'm not sure if they ever got funded, but maybe that was being carried out at the Wuhan lab. The facts are: people wanted to create Covid19 (or something nearly like it). We found out what can happen if that type of thing gets out (whether it occurred naturally or in a lab). Those same people want to carry on with exactly the kind of "research" they were doing before, as if we've learned nothing from a global pandemic caused by a virus just like the ones they want to play with.
The fact we can't prove Covid19 came from a lab is beside the point. Given what people are working on, it may as well have been a lab leak since the result would be essentially identical to what happened, and they refuse to understand that - quite intentionally it seems.
Re: NIH restarts bat virus grant
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whatever happens, I don't think people will tolerate another lockdown ever again for at least two generations. I know in florida there could be literally airborn aids and people will still go out and live life, myself included. COVID lockdowns were a test of how much the government could push without backlash. I feel so badly for the kids that lost their last two years of high school for what?
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hey so im really curious
do you actually believe Trudeau is a communist? i was speaking to a Canadian guy I work with and he seems to actually believe that
Re: NIH restarts bat virus grant
#55EcoHealth should not be allowed to participate in Federal grants. If there is a reason we don't have confidence as a society where Covid came from, it's because of efforts taken by Ecohealth to short-circuit reasonable scientific inquiry. EcoHealth doesn't do science and should be banned.
Re: NIH restarts bat virus grant
#56I love the appeal to the "independence" of science from politics, after what may have been the single most materially and socially destructive scientific disaster since the invention of the atom bomb. We'll just act like none of that ever happened and continue with impunity.
Whatever happens, I don't think people will tolerate another lockdown ever again for at least two generations. I know in florida there could be literally airborn aids and people will still go out and live life, myself included. COVID lockdowns were a test of how much the government could push without backlash. I feel so badly for the kids that lost their last two years of high school for what?
For what?
I dunno, to prevent overflowing hospitals from having to turn people away because everyone who ‘did their research’ conveniently start trusting doctors again when they get a bad case.
Re: NIH restarts bat virus grant
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not really the case here. Gain of function research can not be justified using this argument. There are so many potential mutations that putting specific evolutionary pressure on a virus in order to "prevent" only those specific effects has such low efficacy considering the size of the problem space. GOF research has provided very little in terms of benefits, and many argue it's simply been a way to disguise b…
The NIH, the scientists doing the research, and most other experts in the field disagree. Partisan politicians are the ones yelling about how dangerous it is. I think I'll listen to the experts.
Are you referring to "experts" in the field such as Peter Daszak?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_letter_%28COVID-19%29?w...
Re: NIH restarts bat virus grant
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Conspiracy and fact are orthogonal descriptors.
I don't understand this concept. I see it all over the internet. But I don't get it. At what point did we stop believing it was possible for people to conspire to commit crimes? Nobody disputes, for example, that the convictions of the Watergate conspirators - for the charge of conspiracy - was based in fact. So how is it that we can now say that fact and conspiracy can't be part of the same pattern? It's true that a…
I took the go to mean whether something is a conspiracy and whether something is a fact aren't tied. You can have any of the permutations. I think very often you get what looks like conspiracy when there is actually no communication between parties, rather it is swarm behavior, each ant acting based on its observations and motives. But sometimes the ants have to chat, then it is a conspiracy.
Re: NIH restarts bat virus grant
#59I love the appeal to the "independence" of science from politics, after what may have been the single most materially and socially destructive scientific disaster since the invention of the atom bomb. We'll just act like none of that ever happened and continue with impunity.
Whatever happens, I don't think people will tolerate another lockdown ever again for at least two generations. I know in florida there could be literally airborn aids and people will still go out and live life, myself included. COVID lockdowns were a test of how much the government could push without backlash. I feel so badly for the kids that lost their last two years of high school for what?
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Re: NIH restarts bat virus grant
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because of all the conspiracy theories, it is not going to be pretty if there's a lockdown in the future for any reason whatsoever. Indeed, I think governments will be very reluctant to order a lockdown even if it's the right thing to do. This has nothing to do with facts about virus research though.
It feels like (at least in my country) all the lockdowns were part of an experiment; try something else, see if it works. At some point they tried a curfew for a few weeks, it had an effect but people didn't like it and enforcement was a huge issue (naturally). The other thing is that every time a measure was effective, they would stop doing it so that the cases would go back up again. That said, as China proved, a t…
> China got back to productivity faster though, and gave their population time for a vaccine to be developed and distributed.
Wasn't China famously locked down long past the point where the rest of the world was back up and getting on with life? By the time we got to Omicron the vaccine appeared to be doing next to nothing and China was still locked down.