kaitaincps

6 ms·

1.
by kaitaincps 4y ago
Well, that's an interesting question. If the public health dept wants to inspect a restaurant to make sure its hygiene standards are adequate, and the restaurant goes out of its way to try to delay or block such an inspection, should w
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
Precisely so.
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
This seems probable to me as well: they don’t know that a lab leak occurred, but believe it’s a plausible explanation, and one whose investigation needs to be suppressed because of the potential for embarrassment and retaliation. They might
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
Okay, but cui bono?
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
The WIV was not set up in Wuhan to study bat-borne coronaviruses in the surrounding area. This is a widespread myth, one popularized by Maggie Koerth on Twitter.
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
You’d need to clarify what specifically is entailed by zoonotic origin (and what would count as not-zoonotic-origin) in order for your claim to be evaluated.
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
Not really. The poster is saying they used to believe X but was persuaded subsequently that ~X was more likely. This seems to indicate at least a recent pattern of avoiding confirmation bias.
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
Certainly there is a culture within China of taking dangerous short cuts to save money. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/26/opinion/beware-of-chinas-...
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
Hmm, but have there been any other pandemics that started close to a lab researching the kind of pathogen involved in the pandemic? Funny you should ask. There was this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_fl
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
Rubbish. The response would not be to increase surveillance near labs. It would be to float a moratorium on GoF research and to increase biosafety at labs. Much of the work being done at the WIV was carried out at BSL-2, which is absolutely
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
Not really.
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12250-018-0012-7 “In October 2015, we collected serum samples from 218 residents in four villages in Jinning County, Yunnan province, China (Fig. 1A), located 1.1–6.0 km
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
Also: Even the founders of Moderna would have had their lives made worse overall by SARS-COV-2. Money and utility are different things. They and their families now live in a shittier world. Even a (rational) psychopath would not gain overal
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
They seem to me to be a totally separate group. They’re more fellow travellers with the “Bill Gates’s Plandemic” crowd.
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
She’s a scientist and a bat virus expert. One would expect her mind to gravitate towards what she saw as being the most plausible explanation. If a zoonotic jump had been overwhelmingly probable, why would the news have triggered the kind o
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
If I could Snopes-whack just one persistent myth in this debate, it would be that one. It’s completely untrue. And the WIV used the human population of Wuhan as a control in their experiments because there was so little exposure to zoonotic
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
The main reason to suspect that gain of function research on bat-borne sarbecoviruses was taking place at the WIV is that we know that gain of function research on bat-borne sarbecoviruses was taking place at the WIV.
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
No, we don’t know there were two separate crossover events. The two lineages are more likely to be the result of a minor mutation having occurred during human-human transmission, i.e. subsequent to the initial (single) crossover event.
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
A standard serology chain through animal populations showing a plausible path to Wuhan would make the lab leak hypothesis unlikely, or at the very least redundant. We do know that the pandemic started in Wuhan, or certainly that that’s the
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
Excellent satire. Please post more.
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
Correct.
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
In the first few months the focus was heavily on spread via fomites. The value of masks was dismissed.
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
No it doesn't. There is a single leak, which mutates into a second strain through community transmission over a period of a few months. That's it.
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
There of no known lineage B sarbecoviruses that have a furin cleavage site, at least not prior to SARS-COV-2. This polybasic furin cleavage site is found in various proteins from many viruses, including Betacoronavirus Embecoviruses, and th
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
Ditto for zoonosis. The problem is that people treat the zoonotic transfer hypothesis as some kind of default, the incumbent to which we must defer in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary. This is a mistake, given the proximit
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
The WIV was not set up in Wuhan to study bats in Hubei. That is a total misconception. It was set up in 1956 with no connection whatsoever to bat-borne sarbecoviruses. That specialization arose later, but studies were made principally in Yu
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
It was not. This is a widespread misconception. The local bat populations in Wuhan were negligible and their viruses were not being studied. Indeed, the local human population in Wuhan was used as a control in the WIV's studies because
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
Wait, wait...does this whole debate hinge around the idea that you think the WIV staff are reliable, honest agents ? The very idea is hilarious. They operate within an authoritarian regime that restricts their freedom of speech and makes t
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
> has to somehow make it into a lab undetected Undetected? The lab was specifically searching for and storing pandemic-capable viruses, and had applied for grant money to insert furin cleavage sites into them!
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by kaitaincps 4y ago
> You still need to explain how there are two distinct lineages at the market among the first cases! Actually, YOU do. You need to explain how a virus made two separate rare hops to humans in the same place, at the same time, in two diff

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