3 ms·

There's no need to resort to straw man arguments. It's very likely that the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic was the result of reckless gain-of-function research combined w

There's no need to resort to straw man arguments. It's very likely that the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic was the result of reckless gain-of-function research combined with sloppy biohazard standards. It's also clear that better public communication about the efficacy of the vaccines and in particular the high likelihood that vaccinated people would still contract Covid (but would suffer less severe symptoms) would have done a lot towards maintaining public trust in government proclamations.

notahacker 2y ago
On the contrary it's extremely clear that there was very little the government could have done to maintain trust in their proclamations from the existence of people prepared to blindly distrust health authorities on the basis of things they didn't say about sterilizing immunity and prepared to blindly trust gain-of-function origin theories despite the initial basis for them being a series of arguments that were either trivially wrong like furin cleavage sites not being found in coronaviruses, or fairly quickly discredited like the argument that it was clearly derived from RaTG13. Even being outspokenly critical of the Wuhan lab and favourably disposed towards the leak hypothesis doesn't seem to have spared Barin from being woven into its web of conspiracy. And let's not forget, you started off with every antivaxxers' favourite canard that the only criteria for a successful vaccine is sterilizing immunity (which is brilliant, because it lets them declare most vaccines don't work, which is sorta true if you consider stuff like increasing chances of survival and reducing chances of transmission to be irrelevant) and an insinuation that stats on transmission efficacy from Phase III trials that drug companies were so keen to share they put them in press releases were somehow not studied or withheld from the public. If you don't want to get compared to Alex Jones, maybe don't adopt his style of argument.
- photochemsyn 2y ago
  The Baric lab developed 'no-see-um' technology for cutting and pasting sequences into bat coronaviruses, and the Wuhan lab scientists had been collaborating with them since about 2012 or so. There are a dozen or so papers detailing all this. Their gain-of-function research involved introducing sequences that would be targeted by the human version of the furin enzyme. This would have allowed wild-type bat coronaviruses to gain access to the interior of human cells, where the DNA-RNA machinery is more indistinguishable. The larger issue we need to think about is that there are hundreds of mammalian viruses out in natural systems that don't infect humans but which could all be altered to become human pathogens by this kind of technological approach. That's why so many people who have detailed knowledge of these systems (but who are not affiliated with the guilty parties in the Chinese and American virology funding system) want to see global agreements to ban this kind of research and institute significant penalties for those who pursue it.
  - notahacker 2y ago
    You'll forgive me for sticking with my view that if the actual experts who had campaigned against certain types of gain of function research including SARS research for years generally don't attach any credibility to "COV-SARS-2 was obviously the product of gain of function research" arguments, so that domain was left to people unaware that furin cleavage sites were present in other coronaviruses and random politicos, people who raise it as established fact after making a series of largely unrelated antivax talking points might be considerably closer to Alex Jones than to people who have detailed knowledge of these systems....
    - photochemsyn 2y ago
      Appeal to authority isn't a very good argument when so many of the experts who've gone on the record promoting the natural origin theory are weighed down with conflicts of interest due to the fact that the funding agencies they rely on have a lot to lose if it turns out the gain-of-function / lab-accident theory is correct (e.g. the authors and architects of the infamous 'Proximal Origin' paper). There are also many experts who are convinced the gain-of-function accident is the only plausible scenario at this point. Hopefully we'll have some comprehensive public hearings into the question in the coming year, at least in the United States, which I look forward to.

notahacker 2y ago

On the contrary it's extremely clear that there was very little the government could have done to maintain trust in their proclamations from the existence of people prepared to blindly distrust health authorities on the basis of things they didn't say about sterilizing immunity and prepared to blindly trust gain-of-function origin theories despite the initial basis for them being a series of arguments that were either trivially wrong like furin cleavage sites not being found in coronaviruses, or fairly quickly discredited like the argument that it was clearly derived from RaTG13. Even being outspokenly critical of the Wuhan lab and favourably disposed towards the leak hypothesis doesn't seem to have spared Barin from being woven into its web of conspiracy. And let's not forget, you started off with every antivaxxers' favourite canard that the only criteria for a successful vaccine is sterilizing immunity (which is brilliant, because it lets them declare most vaccines don't work, which is sorta true if you consider stuff like increasing chances of survival and reducing chances of transmission to be irrelevant) and an insinuation that stats on transmission efficacy from Phase III trials that drug companies were so keen to share they put them in press releases were somehow not studied or withheld from the public. If you don't want to get compared to Alex Jones, maybe don't adopt his style of argument.

photochemsyn 2y ago
The Baric lab developed 'no-see-um' technology for cutting and pasting sequences into bat coronaviruses, and the Wuhan lab scientists had been collaborating with them since about 2012 or so. There are a dozen or so papers detailing all this. Their gain-of-function research involved introducing sequences that would be targeted by the human version of the furin enzyme. This would have allowed wild-type bat coronaviruses to gain access to the interior of human cells, where the DNA-RNA machinery is more indistinguishable. The larger issue we need to think about is that there are hundreds of mammalian viruses out in natural systems that don't infect humans but which could all be altered to become human pathogens by this kind of technological approach. That's why so many people who have detailed knowledge of these systems (but who are not affiliated with the guilty parties in the Chinese and American virology funding system) want to see global agreements to ban this kind of research and institute significant penalties for those who pursue it.
- notahacker 2y ago
  You'll forgive me for sticking with my view that if the actual experts who had campaigned against certain types of gain of function research including SARS research for years generally don't attach any credibility to "COV-SARS-2 was obviously the product of gain of function research" arguments, so that domain was left to people unaware that furin cleavage sites were present in other coronaviruses and random politicos, people who raise it as established fact after making a series of largely unrelated antivax talking points might be considerably closer to Alex Jones than to people who have detailed knowledge of these systems....
  - photochemsyn 2y ago
    Appeal to authority isn't a very good argument when so many of the experts who've gone on the record promoting the natural origin theory are weighed down with conflicts of interest due to the fact that the funding agencies they rely on have a lot to lose if it turns out the gain-of-function / lab-accident theory is correct (e.g. the authors and architects of the infamous 'Proximal Origin' paper). There are also many experts who are convinced the gain-of-function accident is the only plausible scenario at this point. Hopefully we'll have some comprehensive public hearings into the question in the coming year, at least in the United States, which I look forward to.