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Yeah, the social media and the internet is full of these claims and I see how these are pretty easy to believe when told with enough confidence. Which was an in
by atleta 5y ago
Yeah, the social media and the internet is full of these claims and I see how these are pretty easy to believe when told with enough confidence. Which was an interesting revelation for me.
Since the average person doesn't know much about the background (me included!) and since a similar claim takes a lot of knowledge to disprove it just sounds plausible by default. Because if someone makes a more specific claim, like "this is how sars-cov-2 enters the cells" or "this drug works" (or doesn't work) that's easy to check and then, if not true, disprove with published papers. The "we don't know this" is harder. Even if you pull up a paper, the goal post indeed will be moved ever so slightly and if the claim is more broad then you need to be a knowledgable expert to be able to say where the gaps are in the knowledge and how likely, when discovered/understood that new knowledge would change the field substantially.
Since I became interested, I started learning a bit of virology online. Vincent Racaniello, a professor of virology at Columbia has an online course on youtube. This semester he teaches it directly with a focus on the average layperson [1]. Each session is 2 hours long and you can ask questions which he answers. It's not about covid, it's about virology in general but he does include the relevant pieces of information abour sars-cov-2 into every lesson/topic. He actually has his previous courses taught to undergrad (or graduate?) students online as well. Those seem to be just 1 hour long each, but based on a quick look at the slides the content is identical.
Now what it teaches to everyone interested is that they know a lot. They have astonishingly detailed knowledge about how viruses work in general and they have learned a lot about sars-cov-2 very quickly. But given the general virology knowledge, you won't be surprised at the things they looked at first.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGhmZX2NKiNnVlm_lAvk50Qy_wWh_7tPL https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGhmZX2NKiNnVlm_lAvk5...
- nickthemagicman 5y agoMy undergrad is in biology and I got it many years ago. I can only imagine how much has changed since then. Does anyone think that in the infinite complexity of the human body and the immune system that we think we have 'figured covid out' by discovering a single spike protein? There's such an endless possibility of how Covid can interact with the body. We are just touching the surface of how the body works. They just discovered a new organelle in cells this year. So for any single group to claim a monopoly on truth and censor other views, especially with only a year and a half of study... is a major problem.
- atleta 5y agoYet again, a strawman. Or a few: 1., nobody said "we figured covid out". I said we learned a lot about it pretty quickly. (BTW, coronaviruses and SARS in particular have been researched pretty intensively since 2003, the first SARS pandemic.) 2., they didn't just discover a "single spike protein" > There's such an endless possibility of how Covid can interact with the body. Actually, no. There are indeed very definitive ways SARS-CoV2 (or any virus, for that matter) can interact with the body. It's not a living thing. It needs to get into specific type of cells and it can only do it through the spike protein which will only bind to the ACE2 receptor. As long as/if it doesn't happen, the virus is an inert particle. E.g. it won't proliferate in mice (without genetically making them susceptible) or in most other animals. Also, we have a lot of virus particles in us that can't interact with the human cells, so we'll never know about them. One interesting comment from the above curse was that prof. Racaniello said that you can learn bout your "virome" by sequencing your stool and some experiment found that the most frequent virus in there is some plant virus (which don't even have the capability to enter even plant cells by themselves).
- nickthemagicman 5y ago>>>There are indeed very definitive ways SARS-CoV2 (or any virus, for that matter) can interact with the body. >>>the virus is an inert particle. Couldn't the same thing be said about the thinking about Thalidomide though?