All things political. Coronavirus Edition. (16 Viewers)

[Maxp]

I fear we are really going to be in a bad place due to the obvious cuts to the federal agencies that deal with infectious disease, but also the negative effect the Affordable Care act has had on non urban hospitals. Our front line defenses are ineffectual and our ability to treat the populous is probably at an all time low. Factor in the cost of healthcare and I can see our system crashing. What do you think about the politics of this virus?

 

[SaintForLife]

 

[RobF]

SFL: there were 18 authors for the article that you disregarded because one of the authors. Were all 18 involved in a conspiracy? Do you know how many people would be involved in 18 different labs? Probably over 100. My brother runs a research lab and I worked in one in college. There are at least 10 people for every lab involved in producing the research for that article. Post-docs, student employees, and such. Are they all in on it? Do you know how ridiculous this all is?

He should, because we already did that one.

But since every single one of those tweet dumps consists of people failing reading comprehension and basic critical thinking, for an audience of people similarly lacking the skills to realise it, perhaps it's inevitable we'll get repeats.

 

[MT15]

He should, because we already did that one.

But since every single one of those tweet dumps consists of people falling reading comprehension and basic critical thinking, for an audience of people similarly lacking the skills to realise it, perhaps it's inevitable we'll get repeats.

Yeah, and then whining that “well, show me where you refuted that”. Or “I don’t know what to search for”. Welcome back, hope you’re doing well!

 

[SaintForLife]

He should, because we already did that one.

But since every single one of those tweet dumps consists of people failing reading comprehension and basic critical thinking, for an audience of people similarly lacking the skills to realise it, perhaps it's inevitable we'll get repeats.

Why don't you point out what they are saying is incorrect?

 

[MT15]

Why don't you point out what they are saying is incorrect?

Why don’t you re-read the previous posts? Or read them, rather, because it’s evident you never read any of them in the first place. Searching is easy, honest.

 

[RobF]

Why don’t you re-read the previous posts? Or read them, rather, because it’s evident you never read any of them in the first place. Searching is easy, honest.

He'll inevitably claim that it isn't, or demand that you do it for him, with the implication that if you don't, that means it doesn't exist.

Which is also the same approach he took first time round.

So, for the purpose of illustrating how baseless that approach is, I (easily) found the previous posts. SFL dumped the usual junk tweets, Dragon linked to a thread showing that the referenced discussions actually "showed in real time how their thinking evolved with new evidence", SFL spent several posts pointlessly dumping more tweets and going, "Data? What data?" while MT15 repeatedly pointed out that reading "the actual slack conversations, not someone tweeting about them" would help, SFL spent some more posts claiming to have read it and insisting that he couldn't see any data being referenced, and then after I explicitly pointed out that the data was literally referenced in the tweet Dragon quoted:

'Simple' is one word for it, sure. 'Wrong' is a better one.

I mean, there's an example literally in the tweet @Dragon originally posted. The one that states the discussion "showed in real time how their thinking evolved with new evidence" (although you changed that phrasing to the simpler, and more inaccurate, 'changed their minds', because of course you did).

But the example in the tweet literally starts with the data: "A bit more: (i) sequence confirmed by Sanger; (ii) bats collected May-July 2019, so ~6 months prior; (iii) in most of the virus genome it is the closest to SARS-CoV-2 although not in S; (iv) some very wide ranging recombination events", and then goes on to show them discussing what this data shows and whether they should wait for it to come out before updating their commentary.

So if you read that, and then come here, and say, "Data? But what data? I see no data!" we can only conclude that you haven't read it, or that you're just incapable of comprehending anything being discussed here.

SFL then ignored that, to the point of not posting in the thread again for over six weeks (at which point he just dumped yet more tweets).

And now he's posted the same garbage again, asking for us to point out, again, why the garbage is garbage.

But it's always the same reasons why it's garbage. Lack of comprehension, misrepresenting fact or, frequently, literally just ignoring it (as above), making wild leaps of the, "this theoretically could have happened... so it definitely did happen!" nature, etc., etc., all of which is easily refuted by just reading and comprehending the original source material (if that's even necessary; often the tweets themselves don't stand up for anyone with even a basic understanding of events, and the articles linked to by the tweets frequently contain the information necessary to refute the misrepresentations of the information).

But if someone is unable or unwilling to comprehend that, it's not our job to jump through hoops for them on the clearly false premise that if we do, they'll admit they're wrong. They won't. They'll just go away for a bit and then do it again. That doesn't mean they aren't wrong - they clearly and provably are - it just means there's a point where the lack of credibility has been so clearly established, it's sufficient in itself to dismiss it.

To put it another way, if someone's checks keeps bouncing, it's completely reasonable to start just rejecting them, and demand cash, up front (which in this context would mean instead of someone repeatedly dumping garbage tweets and demanding other people do the work of refuting them, that someone doing the work to post their argument in their own words referencing original source material in the first place).

 

[MT15]

The pattern described above is devastatingly accurate. Like we just witnessed a murder.

 

[Taurus]

He'll inevitably claim that it isn't, or demand that you do it for him, with the implication that if you don't, that means it doesn't exist.

Which is also the same approach he took first time round.

So, for the purpose of illustrating how baseless that approach is, I (easily) found the previous posts. SFL dumped the usual junk tweets, Dragon linked to a thread showing that the referenced discussions actually "showed in real time how their thinking evolved with new evidence", SFL spent several posts pointlessly dumping more tweets and going, "Data? What data?" while MT15 repeatedly pointed out that reading "the actual slack conversations, not someone tweeting about them" would help, SFL spent some more posts claiming to have read it and insisting that he couldn't see any data being referenced, and then after I explicitly pointed out that the data was literally referenced in the tweet Dragon quoted:



SFL then ignored that, to the point of not posting in the thread again for over six weeks (at which point he just dumped yet more tweets).

And now he's posted the same garbage again, asking for us to point out, again, why the garbage is garbage.

But it's always the same reasons why it's garbage. Lack of comprehension, misrepresenting fact or, frequently, literally just ignoring it (as above), making wild leaps of the, "this theoretically could have happened... so it definitely did happen!" nature, etc., etc., all of which is easily refuted by just reading and comprehending the original source material (if that's even necessary; often the tweets themselves don't stand up for anyone with even a basic understanding of events, and the articles linked to by the tweets frequently contain the information necessary to refute the misrepresentations of the information).

But if someone is unable or unwilling to comprehend that, it's not our job to jump through hoops for them on the clearly false premise that if we do, they'll admit they're wrong. They won't. They'll just go away for a bit and then do it again. That doesn't mean they aren't wrong - they clearly and provably are - it just means there's a point where the lack of credibility has been so clearly established, it's sufficient in itself to dismiss it.

To put it another way, if someone's checks keeps bouncing, it's completely reasonable to start just rejecting them, and demand cash, up front (which in this context would mean instead of someone repeatedly dumping garbage tweets and demanding other people do the work of refuting them, that someone doing the work to post their argument in their own words referencing original source material in the first place).

It's like Trump is a 6,000 year old Earth.

 

[SaintForLife]

He'll inevitably claim that it isn't, or demand that you do it for him, with the implication that if you don't, that means it doesn't exist.

Which is also the same approach he took first time round.

So, for the purpose of illustrating how baseless that approach is, I (easily) found the previous posts. SFL dumped the usual junk tweets, Dragon linked to a thread showing that the referenced discussions actually "showed in real time how their thinking evolved with new evidence", SFL spent several posts pointlessly dumping more tweets and going, "Data? What data?" while MT15 repeatedly pointed out that reading "the actual slack conversations, not someone tweeting about them" would help, SFL spent some more posts claiming to have read it and insisting that he couldn't see any data being referenced, and then after I explicitly pointed out that the data was literally referenced in the tweet Dragon quoted:



SFL then ignored that, to the point of not posting in the thread again for over six weeks (at which point he just dumped yet more tweets).

And now he's posted the same garbage again, asking for us to point out, again, why the garbage is garbage.

But it's always the same reasons why it's garbage. Lack of comprehension, misrepresenting fact or, frequently, literally just ignoring it (as above), making wild leaps of the, "this theoretically could have happened... so it definitely did happen!" nature, etc., etc., all of which is easily refuted by just reading and comprehending the original source material (if that's even necessary; often the tweets themselves don't stand up for anyone with even a basic understanding of events, and the articles linked to by the tweets frequently contain the information necessary to refute the misrepresentations of the information).

But if someone is unable or unwilling to comprehend that, it's not our job to jump through hoops for them on the clearly false premise that if we do, they'll admit they're wrong. They won't. They'll just go away for a bit and then do it again. That doesn't mean they aren't wrong - they clearly and provably are - it just means there's a point where the lack of credibility has been so clearly established, it's sufficient in itself to dismiss it.

To put it another way, if someone's checks keeps bouncing, it's completely reasonable to start just rejecting them, and demand cash, up front (which in this context would mean instead of someone repeatedly dumping garbage tweets and demanding other people do the work of refuting them, that someone doing the work to post their argument in their own words referencing original source material in the first place).

Oh please. You or anyone else here couldn't show why those scientists changed their minds. They claimed it was based on new data, but there wasn't any new data. That thread that Dragon linked to didn't show any new data that had supposedly caused them to change their minds. What changed their minds was Fauci holding the grant they were waiting on approval for. And they received the grant after they published the fraudulent Proximal Origins paper.

Here is the thread that Dragon posted:




From the article he posted that had the Slack messages

...But his emails and Slack messages show that there was nothing theoretical about his conspiracy to discredit the lab leak hypothesis. Andersen makes clear in his messages that the purpose of the “Proximal Origin” paper was to “disprove,” in his words, the lab leak hypothesis. It was a propaganda exercise, not a scientific one.

The documents that Public and Racket were the first to report on show Andersen and his co-authors, Andrew Rambaut, Edward C. Holmes, and Robert F. Garry, conspiring — by which we mean they made secret plans to engage in deceptive and unethical behavior and — to spread disinformation. Their conspiracy included coordinating with their “higher-ups” in the US and UK governments to deceive journalists, including a New York Times reporter.

Our reporting led several people sympathetic to the lab leak hypothesis to demand the release of all the emails and Slack messages. “This calls for more transparency,” tweeted Zeynep Tufecki, a professor at Columbia University and a contributor to the New York Times, “rather than selective, partial releases —especially since the messages imply coordinated efforts for manipulating journalists etc…”

We agree and are thus happy today to release the full cache of Slack messages and emails covering the discussions between Andersen et al. as they wrote their influential “Proximal Origin,” paper, which Anthony Fauci and others in the US government used to dismiss the lab leak hypothesis.

The messages vindicated researchers like the Broad Center’s Alina Chan, who coauthored a major book, Viral: The Search For Covid’s Origin, with British science journalist Matt Ridley, who Public interviewed for a podcast last month.

“It's ironic,” Chan told Public, “that these scientists who wanted to shut down conspiracy theories ended up starting their own conspiracy to prematurely dismiss a lab origin of Covid-19. Whether intentionally or not, their actions have steered a large portion of journalists and other scientists away from asking reasonable questions about how the pandemic started.”

Jamie Metzl, Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council, another long-time supporter of the lab leak hypothesis, tweeted, “While the @nytimes was blindly and unquestioningly following the lead of the Proximal Origin authors [Andersen et al.] re #COVID19 origins, those scientists were scheming to manipulate NYT coverage. It’s time for the NYT to review its disastrous coverage of the pandemic origins issue.”

The authors blamed pangolins in “Proximal Origin” even though they said, privately, that they were not convinced pangolins were a likely intermediate host between bats and humans.

Here’s what Andersen et al. wrote in “Proximal Origin”: “The presence in pangolins of an RBD [receptor binding domain] very similar to that of SARS-CoV-2 means that we can infer this was also probably in the virus that jumped to humans.”

Here’s what Andersen said shortly before the “Proximal Origin” pre-print was published: “For all I know, people could have infected the pangolin, not the other way.” Said Andersen the day after the pre-print: “Clearly none of these pangolin sequences was the source though.”

The messages reveal that Andersen still suspected that a lab leak was possible in mid-April, a full month after Nature Medicine officially published “Proximal Origin,” and two months after the authors published a preprint. “I’m still not fully convinced that no culture was involved,” Andersen wrote to his co-authors on April 16. “We also can't fully rule out engineering (for basic research).” As we noted on Tuesday, if Andersen wasn’t convinced that no culturing was possible, why did he rule out “any type of laboratory-based scenario” in his paper?

The scientists attempted to deliberately misdirect a New York Times veteran science journalist, Donald McNeil. When approached by McNeil with questions about a possible lab leak, members of the Slack channel coordinated with each other to lead him away from the theory. “It would be prudent to continue to pre-think responses” to McNeil, Garry suggested. Andersen told his fellow authors that one of his replies to McNeil “includes humor to deflect from the fact that I’m dismissing him.”

The scientists were specifically discussing experiments being performed in the lab of Shi Zhengli, the infamous “bat lady of China,” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That’s the same lab where three researchers became sick with Covid-like symptoms in 2019. Andersen discussed some of her papers in early February, and noted his concerns about gain-of-function experiments on MERS and SARS viruses. in mid-April he noted that Shi’s work was “the main reason I have been so concerned about the ‘culture’ scenario.” Cell culturing is a method through which viruses can be passed multiple times through cells in order to render them more infectious, and is exactly the kind of “laboratory-based scenario” the authors ruled out in their paper.

Covid Origins Scientist Denounces Reporting On His Messages As A “Conspiracy Theory”

We release full cache of messages :: Plus, why Public and Racket keep scooping the mainstream media

public.substack.com

Let's look closer at what they said.

"This virus is actually the closest to Sars-Cov2 in some parts of the genome, although not hugely close."

"My alignment above was just a mock up. I don't know what the nucleotides were"


The screenshot from the tweet you posted was after they had published the Proximal Orgins paper.

Also it said: "I don't think this data necessarily argues against accidental/infection release"

There wasn't new data. They were comparing possibilities and what they said wasn't definitive.

How could they say they don't believe any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible eventhough they said all these things?

 

[SaintForLife]

The rest of the thread:

"Kristian Andersen..in his opening statement [said]..'Based on the actual timeline of this grant, it is not possible that the..federal grant awarding process was influenced by a call in February, 2020.'"

"Under..questioning, Andersen reiterated that the grant application could not possibly have influenced his willingness to publicly entertain the chance that risky research at the Wuhan lab may have led to the pandemic."

"'s there any way..the grant could have been used as a bribe during the February 1, 2020 conference call?' Dingell asked..Excluding the possibility that somebody is a time traveler, no, that is just not possible given the timeline,' Andersen insisted. Garry added: 'I agree.'"

"Both knew that was false."

"The records [Dingell]..pointed to in her questioning undermine Andersen’s claim. It is true that by November, the grant had cleared the independent review process, but it was still pending final approval from the director, in this case Fauci."

"The grant wasn’t finalized until May 21, 2020. In other words, it was on Fauci’s desk at the time of the conference call."

"The NIH is clear about its process. 'Council recommends an application for funding. NIAID makes the final decision..The main NIAID advisory Council must recommend an application for funding before we can award a grant, although the Institute makes the final funding decision'"

Ebright: "The post-Council administrative review stage plays an especially large role in proposals for multi-investigator center grants and program project grants, for which programmatic fit and programmatic balance are deemed as important as scientific impact"

Ebright: "Andersen and Garry had a proposal for a center grant in the post-Council administrative-review stage in January-May 2020, making them maximally susceptible to pressure from Fauci and Collins."

Ebright: "This would have been known to, and clear to, both the potential grantees (Andersen and Garry) and the potential grantors (Fauci and Collins) on the February 1, 2020 telecon, and would not need to be mentioned to be motivational"

 

[RobF]

Oh please. You or anyone else here couldn't show why those scientists changed their minds. They claimed it was based on new data, but there wasn't any new data. That thread that Dragon linked to didn't show any new data that had supposedly caused them to change their minds.

It's a bit weird to reply to a post that contains a quote of the post that originally explicitly pointed out the references to the data, with verbatim quotes ('the example in the tweet literally starts with the data: "A bit more: (i) sequence confirmed by Sanger; (ii) bats collected May-July 2019, so ~6 months prior; (iii) in most of the virus genome it is the closest to SARS-CoV-2 although not in S; (iv) some very wide ranging recombination events"'), to claim that there "wasn't any new data."

The fact that you've just done that also renders the entire rest of your gish-gallop of drivel redundant. That entire tower of nonsense is built on a glaringly false premise.

And while you can figuratively cover up your eyes and pretend that if you say you can't see the data that means it doesn't exist, the thing about that is, it only works for you. Everyone else can see it. And see what you're doing.

Why you'd do something so daft remains a mystery, but hey, you do you. Just don't expect anyone else to play such a stupid game.

 

[MT15]

Not to mention, but all the quotes from legitimate scientists who are speculating or being concerned about the possibility of a lab leak are from years ago. They were being vigilant and considering all the possibilities, which they would naturally do. None of them would say those things today, because it has been pretty much settled. Or as settled as it can be at this time.

Then there‘s just a bunch of idle speculation about a vast conspiracy. Which would never work, because these scientists don’t operate in a vacuum. There is accountability built into the scientific method. SFL would know this if he knew anything about scientific study.

Obviously he doesn’t.

 

[SaintForLife]

It's a bit weird to reply to a post that contains a quote of the post that originally explicitly pointed out the references to the data, with verbatim quotes ('the example in the tweet literally starts with the data: "A bit more: (i) sequence confirmed by Sanger; (ii) bats collected May-July 2019, so ~6 months prior; (iii) in most of the virus genome it is the closest to SARS-CoV-2 although not in S; (iv) some very wide ranging recombination events"'), to claim that there "wasn't any new data."

The fact that you've just done that also renders the entire rest of your gish-gallop of drivel redundant. That entire tower of nonsense is built on a glaringly false premise.

And while you can figuratively cover up your eyes and pretend that if you say you can't see the data that means it doesn't exist, the thing about that is, it only works for you. Everyone else can see it. And see what you're doing.

Why you'd do something so daft remains a mystery, but hey, you do you. Just don't expect anyone else to play such a stupid game.

Do you think just because they said the word data means they found new definitive data that proved it was of natural origin?

This virus is actually the closest to Sars-Cov2 in some parts of the genome, although not hugely close."

"My alignment above was just a mock up. I don't know what the nucleotides were"

Also it said: "I don't think this data necessarily argues against accidental/infection release"

Does that sound definitive to you? Wouldn't it need to be definitive for them to do a 180 from initially saying it was mostly likely a lab leak to no type of lab leak is plausible?

It also convenient how they changed their opinions so drastically right after the conference call with Fauci.

It's also convenient that Fauci approved their multimillion grant the day after that conference call.

I'm sure those are just coincidences right?

 

[MT15]

Do you think just because they said the word data means they found new definitive data that proved it was of natural origin?

This virus is actually the closest to Sars-Cov2 in some parts of the genome, although not hugely close."

"My alignment above was just a mock up. I don't know what the nucleotides were"

Also it said: "I don't think this data necessarily argues against accidental/infection release"

Does that sound definitive to you? Wouldn't it need to be definitive for them to do a 180 from initially saying it was mostly likely a lab leak to no type of lab leak is plausible?

It also convenient how they changed their opinions so drastically right after the conference call with Fauci.

It's also convenient that Fauci approved their multimillion grant the day after that conference call.

I'm sure those are just coincidences right?

How old are those quotes?

Also, none of those coincidences matter, because data confirms the origin was animal. There is actual data which is referenced and talked about it interviews and articles. You just refuse to see it.

You don’t know what you’re talking about.

 

[RobF]

Do you think just because they said the word data means they found new definitive data that proved it was of natural origin?

You're just doing the same thing over and over again. Misrepresenting what happened and what was said, and simply ignoring things that don't support your fantasy. Specifically, here:

1) You're misrepresenting the paper, which actually stated, "Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."

And 2), ignoring the fact that the transcripts show they thought that "on the basis that both cleavage site insertions and the full RBD exist in nature" as shown by that data. Because that's how that works.

 

[Taurus]

It's a bit weird to reply to a post that contains a quote of the post that originally explicitly pointed out the references to the data, with verbatim quotes ('the example in the tweet literally starts with the data: "A bit more: (i) sequence confirmed by Sanger; (ii) bats collected May-July 2019, so ~6 months prior; (iii) in most of the virus genome it is the closest to SARS-CoV-2 although not in S; (iv) some very wide ranging recombination events"'), to claim that there "wasn't any new data."

The fact that you've just done that also renders the entire rest of your gish-gallop of drivel redundant. That entire tower of nonsense is built on a glaringly false premise.

And while you can figuratively cover up your eyes and pretend that if you say you can't see the data that means it doesn't exist, the thing about that is, it only works for you. Everyone else can see it. And see what you're doing.

Why you'd do something so daft remains a mystery, but hey, you do you. Just don't expect anyone else to play such a stupid game.

The Venn diagram of YECs and MAGAts looks like the Target logo.

 

[MT15]

Here is a paper that is about 8 months old, and although it would like more study, which is a normal thing to say, it shows that the early data points to the Wuhan Market and not the lab.

‘Of the first nineteen cases, there was a clear epidemiological relationship to the Huanan market in twelve.’

There were no early cases with any relationship to the lab.

“ In his research,15 Worobey indicates that the majority of the cases were grouped in the center of Wuhan, close to the westerns shore of the Yangtze river, with a high density of homes near and around the Huanan market. They used a Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) to reconstruct an underlying probability density function from which the locations of the houses for each case were extracted. This group of cases resided significantly closer to the market than those who worked in it, which seems to indicate that they had been exposed to the virus in the market or close to it. In the case of market workers, the risk of exposure arose from their workplace and not their place of residence, which were significantly farther away than cases not formally linked to the market.”

What do we know about the origin of COVID-19 three years later?

More than three years have passed since the first case of a new coronavirus infection (SARS-CoV-2) in the city of Wuhan (Hubei, China). The Wuhan Institute of Virology was founded in that city in 1956 and the country’s first biosafety level 4 ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

 

[SaintForLife]

You're just doing the same thing over and over again. Misrepresenting what happened and what was said, and simply ignoring things that don't support your fantasy. Specifically, here:

1) You're misrepresenting the paper, which actually stated, "Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."

And 2), ignoring the fact that the transcripts show they thought that "on the basis that both cleavage site insertions and the full RBD exist in nature" as shown by that data. Because that's how that works.

Okay. I should have stated what I said differently.

The supposed new data they discovered was convincing enough for them to claim that any type of lab leak wasn't plausible despite them all saying in private that the lab leak was very likely?

I found this interesting nugget. Their private messages were released in July and their response was the Natural Orgins Paper is an opinion instead of a research study. Wow



Dozens of scientists have now signed an open letter to Nature Medicine calling for the paper to be retracted.

One of the signatories, Prof Neil Harrison, professor of anaesthesiology, molecular pharmacology and therapeutics at Columbia University, said: “Virologists and their allies have produced a number of papers that purport to show that the virus was of natural origin and that the pandemic began at the Huanan seafood market.

“In fact there is no evidence for either of these conclusions, and the email and Slack messages among the authors show that they knew at the time that this was the case.

“Scientists in the clinical and contiguous sciences have argued against these papers almost from the beginning, and have been subjected to volleys of abuse. This is the first retraction call but it won’t be the last.”

Prominent scientist ‘downplayed Covid lab leak theory to avoid upsetting China’

Private messages show Prof Andrew Rambaut helped stifle debate into virus’s origins because he feared ‘s---show’ for accusing Beijing

www.telegraph.co.uk