It's fascinating to see how knowledge evolves over time. So far most of the emphasis has been on the spike protein and its cleavage mechanisms. Now we start to see that may even be a relatively minor factor compared to the nucleocapsid.
It is quite important to understand all these things if we are seeing new variants arise and need to assess how dangerous they are likely to be. Most especially since vaccines are based on the spike protein on the premise that it is essential to the infectiousness. But what if a variant can arise with a highly compromised spike protein yet compensate enough to still be highly infectious due to other factors?
The most interesting thing is to think about where the other empty spaces in our knowledge are that are yet to be filled in - what will we know this time next year that will have us saying "previously we thought ...."
The nucleocapsid is inside the live virus - it's not accessible from the outside. So we don't currently know of a way to train the human immune system to bind to it to kill live virus particles. So while it's important to understand the role of the nucleocapsid in infectivity, it's not actionable for vaccine technology.
Conversely, there is currently no evidence that the spike can be "highly compromised" without reducing infectivity. The spike has to bind specifically to ACE2 in order to enter the cell. As long as that's true, vaccines can continue to target live virus using the ACE2 receptor binding domain in the spike protein.
I lived through the entire HIV cycle (from first announcements in the press to the current situation).
There weren't really any credible origin stories for HIV for years after the discovery of the virus and the syndrome it causes (AIDS). Eventually (more than a decade later), a reasonably good origin narrative evolved, but not until there were plenty of now-discredited origin theories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discredited_HIV/AIDS_origins_t...
It's a pretty sobering thought that HIV took 40 years to get to 37 million people confirmed dead, and that COVID-19 took only two years to get to 5 million confirmed dead.
> It's a pretty sobering thought that HIV took 40 years to get to 37 million people confirmed dead, and that COVID-19 took only two years to get to 5 million confirmed dead.
The transmission mechanism for one of them is "being in the same room with the other person", and the transmission mechanism for the other is "having gay sex with the other person". [1] Almost everyone had pre-existing behavioral immunity.
If you can only infect a tiny portion of the population, you can only cause a tiny number of deaths.
[1] This is not the primary transmission mechanism in Africa, but it's pretty much the exclusive mechanism as far as the Western history of AIDS goes, with the runner-up being "receive a blood transfusion from the other person".
Hi, as a scientist who worked at UCSF during the HIV crises and saw the direct impact of HIV/AIDS, I can tell you that your understanding of HIV science aand transmission is very limited. It's not completely and totally incorrect, but it looks like you're trying to push a personal agenda on top of some shaky beliefs.
Not relevant to Western transmission of AIDS. It is the primary transmission mechanism in Africa.
The difference is that Westerners generally form small, closed sexual networks, while Africans participate in a gigantic sexual network including most of the local sexually active population.
The term of art here is the fairly awkward "multiple simultaneous sexual partners", but that concept isn't quite enough - a typical Westerner with multiple simultaneous sexual partners might be a man with a wife and a mistress, but when neither of them is cheating on him, that's still just a tiny, closed three-person network. But in Africa, the typical case is that most people have multiple simultaneous sexual partners, so even with the low transmission rate from heterosexual intercourse, the paths still exist for the virus to flow from one person in the society to (almost) anyone else.
(I don't think mettamage deserved to be downvoted. I specified gay sex for a reason, but the followup question "why not heterosexual sex?" is pretty obvious. It has a lower transmission rate, but that's a minor issue compared to the behavioral difference.)
FWIW, this is just one paper, but it argues that the important factor for HIV transmission in their rural Africa sample is having many lifetime sexual partners, and less so whether they're simultaneous (although that certainly makes it much easier to rack up the count): https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(11)60779-4
Simultaneity is theoretically valuable to the virus in another way.
If the average number of sexual partners in a community is 5, then a lot of links exist for the virus to flow through. But the links are of much "higher quality" if the partners are simultaneous, because in the serial case, a lot of paths through the graph are, when you look at them closer, made impossible by the chronology. If Marie sleeps with Jim, and then Jim sleeps with Agnes, and Agnes carries HIV, the virus can't flow from Agnes to Marie (along what appears to be a valid path in the sexual network) unless Jim goes back and sleeps with Marie again.
So it's not just about lifetime sexual partners, though it's certainly true that high average lifetime sexual partners contributes to spread.
Note that one-night stands can never, by definition, be simultaneous with each other, though a succession of one-night stands can each be simultaneous with a long-term girlfriend.
They're using terrible, imprecise terms. Homosexual vs heterosexual sex is irrelevant here.
What matters is the orifice/method (and whether giving or receiving). The CDC has data here [1]. Anal sex has a much, much higher rate of transmission (especially receptive), regardless of the gender of the participants. Oral sex has almost no transmission, regardless of the gender of the participants.
Just as a counterpoint to the "gay AIDS" narrative, AIDS is extremely low in the lesbian community because I don't think there are even any high-risk sexual activities available.
It's kind of humorous to me that lesbians are above the straight community on the "STDs as a judgement of moral purity" scale. Somebody tell the TV pastors that they're going to have to rework it.
> Homosexual vs heterosexual sex is irrelevant here.
> What matters is the orifice/method (and whether giving or receiving).
No, this isn't what matters. Anal sex has a higher rate of transmission. Receptive sex (of any variety) has a higher rate of transmission. But that isn't what matters.
What matters is the sexual behavior of the community as a whole. The higher transmission rate of anal sex is not enough to explain why heterosexual sex was so insignificant as a vector for AIDS -- heterosexual sex is safer, but there's much, much more of it!
But the only way to participate in the gay sexual culture of the period, which is what caused the problem, was by having gay sex.
COVID appears very impactful but I also suspect if you integrate over biological time (IE 1+M years) the integral of retroviruses is probably larger than rhino/coronaviruses. I mean COVID killed a lot of people but then several years later, a large fraction of the world is at least partly immunized (by their own immune system). We can't say for sure but it may be that the total sum of COVID after 40 years will be smaller than HIV.
I've been waiting to point it out until most of the people who ran around say "ohh, COVID, it's terrible, look how many people died". Nothing in public health seems that bad when viewed from the lens of biological history.
It's the 'we can't say for sure' bit that has my full attention, the problem is that these kind of relatively rare events seem extremely improbably until they happen and given that we haven't had a pandemic of this kind of virulent pathogen with the world as closely connected and as populated as we have today that it may be that circumstances have changed enough to invalidate our past experience.
Don't panic, nothing significant has changed. The previous coronavirus pandemic in 1889 spread quickly around the world even though it wasn't as closely connected.
let's just say I've worked in science long enough to watch many exponential graphs turn to sigmoids over time and that makes perfect sense.
Personally I believe that were the flu or cold to arise anew todya, we'd have seen something very similar (a pandemic), but presumably, due to the lower rate of connectedness, local populations evolved (both in the DNA sense, and in the immune learning sense) responses that dull the scale (and even then, some bad flu years are Really Bad, although nobody really freaked out about it). The plague killed what, 1 in 10 people in Europe?
The other important thing to realize is that COVID was and isn't and won't ever be a truly existential risk, medically speaking, and the existential risks came more from economic collapse.
The official statistics start the clock in the 1980s when HIV became widespread enough to get noticed, but it probably infected humans quite a lot earlier.
(which I think that period is probably relevant in the comparison to COVID)
Especially sobering when those 5 million dead preempted death by other causes! Meaning that people weren't surviving long enough to die by influenza or motorcycle accident.
Amazing work, and it would be gratifying to see Doudna bag another Nobel prize, to be awarded in a year when the celebrations aren't markedly subdued by rampant disease.
As important as the posted story demonstrates the N protein to be, it's probably not a good idea to direct a vaccine towards it without a much deeper understanding of the consequences.
Derek Lowe's wonderful column in the same magazine touched that point earlier this year, in
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/antibody-dependent...
See the last paragraph under the subheading "ADE and Coronaviruses" for a very brief account of candidate vaccines (against the closely related SARS-CoV) which included the N protein tending to make the disease worse.
For those who have already read that story, but not recently, you may want to check back on it, because I see now that Derek has added an update and more references:
"There was trouble after immunization with a nucleoprotein-directed vaccine, but ADE could also be seen with some of the Spike-directed vaccine candidates as well - see reviews here, here, and here."
Not sure exactly what you, zmmmmm, mean by a "compromised" spike protein, but if it's something like one that is not well neutralized by antibodies raised against epitopes from the early generations of SARS-CoV-2, this post recently would be relevant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29004006
...plus the 'Matrix-M1' adjuvant - saponin from tree bark.
And, if you wish, polysorbate 80 to assemble the spike proteins into nanoparticle "parcels". In fact, I think the Novavax particles should be radial bunches of spike proteins tied at their "tail" - see e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/health/novavax-covi...
>So far most of the emphasis has been on the spike protein and its cleavage mechanisms.
This is something that bothers me about science, why has most of the emphasis been on the spike protein? Has that prevented many researchers from looking for other mechanisms that increase infectiousness? Maybe not in this case, but it seems really difficult to tell what science believes are facts and what are assumptions. I think that if you could identify all the assumptions in science and test them you would find rich material for groundbreaking research. One assumption that seems to be universal is that old science is correct, that it has "stood the test of time", except that often nobody tested it and a lot of it is turning out to be wrong. Those old folk had a tendency to make things up and no one at the time checked them on it because they were an authority unto themselves. I'd like to see any statements that are assumptions specifically highlighted in research papers. There is a little of this in security research papers but not in other research as far as I can tell. How might it be possible to tell how much of "what is true" is actually based on assumptions? Maybe a semantic mining of research papers using an AI could identify assumptions and list them as interesting areas for further testing and research? To start with any statement that doesn't have a citation is a candidate for being an assumption. Also statements like "it is well known" without a citation. Maybe a dependency of logic upon an unsupported statement could be used to find assumptions.
Let’s try in a (safe) lab to make it more infectious, you know for science !
Hey, while we are doing this why not try on MERS, immagine the number of citation I could get for this !
Let’s think for one second the cost of a leak to the world population.
It seems to me that we are doomed to self destruction if we don’t get wiser fast.
Yes, virus research does indeed come with trade offs that we have to balance. But it’s not like not researching these things don’t come with trade offs too; after all the worst viral outbreak in human history probably started in Kansas on a farm, not in a lab.
This is an argument for good regulation of safety protocols, not an outright ban.
but not all virus research is "gain of function" right?
what is the advantage of "gain of function" specifically, aside from biowarfare? are we trying to anticipate nature? are there any successful examples?
I’m a bit out over my skis here, but given that we’ve just seen an active pandemic mutate to become more infectious, it does make some sense to try and anticipate what else might happen next. This kind of research has obvious biowarfare implications, so it should obviously be carefully monitored and regulated internationally.
As far as successful examples, I’m not really sure. But I’m not convinced that I’d take a lack of examples as proof of unsuitability; we’re clearly in a new era of viral and immunology research. Given that researchers can literally sequence proteins for mRNA vaccine use, a ludicrous concept even a decade ago to most of us, I suspect that attempting to anticipate future mutations via gain of function research might yield more medicinal rewards than it would have in decades past.
So the story goes, before the first nuclear detonation, it was not fully agreed upon if the nuclear reaction ignite the whole of the atmosphere and destroy all life on Earth. The final say before giving it a go:
> "It is shown that, whatever the temperature to which a section of the atmosphere may be heated, no self-propagating chain of nuclear reactions is likely to be started. The energy losses to radiation always overcompensate the gains due to the reactions."
Really, really big boom. Nitrogen is in the air. I'm not sure you could make a reasonable counterfactual though, because it's not how the physics works.
In this particular case, the mutation being added to the original SARS-CoV-2 is one that was already present in Delta. So if someone were to replicate this with real virus (as opposed to the non-infectious particles the existing experiment used), and the virus were to escape, it seems like the new variant's infectiousness would likely be somewhere between the original and Delta. Which means it would get outcompeted by Delta and the effect on the population would be nil.
There's no guarantee of that, so biosafety is still critical, but as biosafety worst-case scenarios go it seems relatively ho-hum.
Viruses will always mutate. We can either let nature beat us to the punch or we can attempt to race nature. Also there’s a lot of literature on BSL 4 labs with crazy safety lapses (e.g. labs using duct tape to seal leaks and what not). If we wanted to treat BSL 4 with the same safety culture of modern nuclear technology we could. This is ultimately a policy problem, not a technical problem (e.g. shutting down dangerous labs and defunding the researchers running offending labs).
Viruses will not always successfully replicate, and failing that, have a hard time mutating. I'm not saying all gain of function research should automatically be precluded, but considering that a severe disease phenotype is (almost?) never directly selected for, deliberately bringing pathogens directly into danger zone is bound to often be go fetching trouble which would never have manifested on it's own.
I'm not convinced I'd feel much more comfortable with biosafety labs being handled according to the same safety culture as modern nuclear technology either, and that's by the argument that they both suffer from the circumstance that policy problems, and policy enforcement problems, do not rank anywhere near the top of a list, good to poor, of how humankind handles things.
The virus-like things they are making don't have any genetic material. If they get out nothing interesting happens.
To use an analogy with computer viruses, they have the part that given a target system exploits an unpatched vulnerability to load a payload onto the target, but their payload doesn't have the code to scan for other systems to infect.
From the description it seems like the nucleocapsid protein mutation is something that would make the virus more effective in any given host. Whereas a spike protein mutation would be specific to the host since that is a part of the virus that interfaces with the host cell. In that case I would expect such a protein to already be very optimized (even in a lab leak scenario). Am I missing something here?
The virus evolved in bats, which have a much faster metabolism (to support the metabolic requirements of flight) and a constitutive (always on) immune response. This means in bats, the virus is always "on the run" from the host immune system and the host may never actually completely extinguish the infection, allowing it to continue at a low level while reducing inflammation.
The trade-offs and selective pressures are different in the bat host compared to human. Packaging more copies of the mRNA per particle implies slowing down particle production so more mRNA can be made, but in bat that may slow down the generation time so much that the virus gets extinguished by the always-on host immunity. That's just one plausible mechanism of many, including simply that the protein structure was just not as "optimized" as you expect prior to the spillover event.
There is no "the vaccine". There are several existing vaccines, and so far no one prevents infection, nor prevents spread. The only thing current vaccines do is making the illness softer. Yet the governments everywhere pushing the mandate which would have made sense only if the vaccines prevented infection and spread.
Whole stuff of an emergency department in a Russian town resign refusing to get vaccinated. In addition to their main job they also work in the local covid hospital, and so far nobody of them has gotten ill. They are being forced to either get vaccinated or resign:
> but it sure feels like they’re tinkering with humanity on the edge of a knife. I can’t help but worry something could go wrong.
well the current Covid is a result of such experiments - the original gain-of-function NIH grant channeled through the Dvorjac's EcoAlliance to the Wuhan lab even had the "Human Subjects Involved" checked. Gain-of-function in human model with human specific genetic modification of the virus (check the EcoAlliance's DARPA proposal) - what can go wrong... Well, now we know at least one such scenario for real.
No, they aren't effective in reducing spread. Singapore, Israel, UK, Wisconsin studies or even just public data on US infections all tell the same picture.
See, you quoted a couple of sentences of an article literally titled "COVID vaccines cut the risk of transmitting Delta — but not for long" and subtitled "People who receive two COVID-19 jabs and later contract the Delta variant are less likely to infect their close contacts than are unvaccinated people with Delta." and then used it to imply that COVID vaccines don't cut the risk of transmitting the delta variant. That's a classic denier move.
Yes, vaccine-induced protection against transmitting the delta variant may be limited; no, that doesn't mean it's nonexistent.
There are other studies too, like [1].
Finally, the site guidelines explicitly ask you not to say things like "looks like you didn't read the article you submitted".
I see your point but a well practiced mechanic in the right subset of the field (i.e not automotive) is going to have picked up a lot of knowledge to the point where only the most arcane gotchas are likely to get them.
Why would someone with a medical degree be able to verify the works of research biologists?
This comes from a team led by a woman whose credentials in this field are very nearly impeccable.
Not to mention, this article is pretty much information that we have no ability to act on. This is more like something you read and go "Huh, that's interesting" and then move on. It's an indicator that we're learning more. It doesn't need approval from your General Practitioner.
> But because it is stripped of the virus’ RNA genome, it can’t hijack a cell’s machinery to replicate and burst out of the host cell to infect more cells. “It’s a one-way ticket. It doesn’t spread,” says Charles Rice, a molecular virologist at Rockefeller University.
Did these people not take Jurrasic Park seriously? Life finds a way!
Probably best not to extrapolate too much from some fun but inaccurate science fiction when actual human lives are on the line.
The odds of creating a super-virus researching Delta with this method are far, far lower than the odds of Delta continuing to stack up a body-count if we can't understand it better.
Although they have a BSL-4 facility, the WIV lab was also doing bat coronavirus research in their BSL-2 and BSL-3 facilities through 2019 [0]. The odds of leaks from those facilities are not as low.
What did? Viruses escaping a lab, or a gene-free virus infecting a cell and causing it to make more of that virus?
I don't think the latter has happened. If I really stretch, maybe something could trigger a reactivation of a virus that's burned into your DNA? But that can't give you a new virus, and such a reactivation could happen on its own without help.
Or if you were implying something about the origin of viruses, I disagree and don't think the mechanism we're talking about was part of that story.
> Only a small fraction of scientists actually believe the lab leak hypothesis
Got a source for that?
And, let's not forget that wholly insubstantial Daszak / Lancet piece, used to justify massive censorship of the lab leak theory. Millions of posts discussing the lab leak hypothesis were scrubbed from FB and Twitter - even posts by legit scientists with highly valid and relevant points and questions.
Having trouble finding my original source but I remember an NYT article that interviewed a bunch of virologists, and the consensus was that the vast majority of the community were unsure because the evidence so far was so limited. Only a tiny, vocal minority is going definitively one way or the other, putting forth arguments that are much flimsier than they sound.
Believe me or no, that's what I remember in good faith. And I think it's supported by the fact that extremely few people with the relevant domain knowledge are coming public with a strong opinion either way.
And don't believe stuff just because FB and Twitter censored it. They're not trying to hide the Truth, they just hate anti-establishment opinions regardless of whether those opinions are true. And things are not true just because they're anti-establishment. That's just the opposite end of conformity.
> And don't believe stuff just because FB and Twitter censored it. They're not trying to hide the Truth, they just hate anti-establishment opinions regardless of whether those opinions are true. And things are not true just because they're anti-establishment. That's just the opposite end of conformity.
There are two reasons people censor things.
One is that they're authoritarians who don't want something true to be disseminated. In these cases the thing being censored is true.
The other is that they're authoritarians too incompetent to convincingly demonstrate that something they believe to be false actually is false using evidence or reasoning, since otherwise they could do that in place of censorship. This level of incompetence is correlated with being factually incorrect, so the thing being censored in these cases is also true more often than not.
That isn't to say that 100% of things being censored are true, or even 99%, because that would be too easy. But it's not a bad heuristic to expect that it's decently in excess of 50%.
You missed a third reason: they are trying to cultivate a userbase that is turned away by open debate on some topics.
For example, I'm familiar with a site called Hacker News that will castigate, constrain, and in some cases out and out ban users for political flame war. They don't do this because they're trying to hide a truth... They do this because it's not what that website is for. The site owners and operators seek a particular signal on the site, and political flame war just fuzzes up the signal to noise ratio from their point of view.
Is it authoritarian? Indubitably. But simply because some things are off topic.
But then this is not really any different from the second reason, because the chance of any given proscribed topic being true would average to 50%. Necessarily so because to ban the debate in that context is to ban both sides of it and averaging both sides of the same issue together will always yield 50%.
Meanwhile you still have the non-zero (even if small) probability that they could censor something they want to suppress because they know it's true.
> and averaging both sides of the same issue together will always yield 50%.
This is a strong assertion you keep making that doesn't hold water. The flat earth hypothesis, for example, doesn't become true simply because someone has banned discussion of it.
Your assertion, unless I'm misunderstanding it, implies that any topic dang steps in to say "please stop posting about this" is true. And since he steps in to stop people discussing both sides of flamewar topics, your assertion implies that the positions held by both sides must be true, even when they are factually opposed, which is obviously impossible.
There's definitely a flaw in your reasoning, sorry. :(
This analysis misses that most of what people spread is bullshit: things they intuitively feel or want to be true, but which are difficult or impossible to prove or disprove.
When bullshit spreads that authorities don't want spread, they censor.
Neither party to the dynamic knows or cares if the bullshit is actually true or if there are compelling arguments either way. That would be too much work.
Some day FB is going to censor some urban legend about zombies because it motivated some kid to kill another kid. Will you believe in zombies then?
Suppose the incompetent authorities aren't worse than random. They're just censoring whatever ambiguous things they don't like independent of their veracity. Then the expected chance that it's true is 50%. Coin flip. You add to that any amount of things censored intentionally because they know for sure that they're true and you're above 50%.
No it is not. Randomly generated ideas are much less likely than 50% to be true.
For example, I could make two claims: COVID was a leaked research project, and COVID is a leaked research bioweapon. These claims cannot both be 50% probable, because the second claim is more specific version of the first and therefore must be less likely.
Randomly generated ideas are gibberish. They don't even parse as a coherent sentence.
For an idea to spread, it has to at least sound plausibly true. For it to spread to a large number of people in a forum open to public debate, it has to survive all of their attempts to convincingly refute it.
The ideas that remain in contention are the ones that can neither be proved to be highly likely nor highly unlikely. In other words, the ones whose average probability is a coin flip.
> These claims cannot both be 50% probable, because the second claim is more specific version of the first and therefore must be less likely.
We're talking about average probabilities, not individual probabilities. Suppose the probability based on available information is 75% for the first and 25% for the second. Then the average is still 50%. When you put them in a box with a thousand other ideas with probabilities centered around 50% and pull one out at random, you're still at 50%.
The things that didn't have a probability around 50%, i.e. the things that can be proved highly likely or highly unlikely, weren't in contention.
> For an idea to spread, it has to at least sound plausibly true
Given that just this week, QAnon believers showed up in Dealy plaza apparently expecting John F. Kennedy Jr would appear and re-appoint Donald Trump president, I think that assertion might call for a big [citation needed] sign hung from it.
I haven't seen a lot of evidence as of late that refraining from segregating them is having any positive impact. And some ideas are simply too profoundly foolish to exhaust time debating them. What sort of reasoned debate should we expect to have with people who think a man who died 22 years ago in a plane crash isn't dead?
> I haven't seen a lot of evidence as of late that refraining from segregating them is having any positive impact.
Have we been refraining from that? They got mass banned from the biggest social media platforms and dumped into Gab and such like.
> What sort of reasoned debate should we expect to have with people who think a man who died 22 years ago in a plane crash isn't dead?
Encourage them to go to the place where he's alleged to show up. Have them commit in advance to admitting that if he doesn't, they were wrong. Then he won't, because he died 22 years ago in a plane crash.
You'll have convinced some of them. Now recruit those to help you convince the others. They'll be more believable because of the shared experience and because they understand the language of that subculture.
The whole thing has the hallmarks of a scam. If somebody is making money off of this somehow, figure out who it is. Expose them.
Figure out what else they believe. Identify the things that can be falsified. Falsify them.
"You're wrong, you're banned" doesn't do any of that, and then the only place they're accepted with their broken ideas is in a place full of other people who believe the same things and reinforce their nonsense.
What debate do you want exactly? Two scientists at podiums yelling at each other? Nobody's stopping anyone from making the lab leak case and several people have published their best cases for it.
It could be, but censorship doesn't increase its probability. All it shows is the authorities don't like it. Your argument that they'd use facts if it were false is not relevant here because nobody knows which way the facts point.
Now suppose there is any non-zero percent chance that they did know and the reason it was censored is that they didn't want to inculpate themselves. Then knowing that it was censored puts the percentage above 50%, right? It's a sliver of evidence in favor of the possibility that it could have been censored to hide the truth, in which case there was a truth to hide.
Say that before there is any censorship, we start with a probability of 50%. People disagree, we don't know, it's plausible but not proven, that's our best guess.
Then censorship occurs. This is new information. Evidence.
If the censorship occurred because they don't like the speculation but they don't know any better than you, this doesn't affect the probability, because it's not dependent on whether the idea is true.
If the censorship occurred because it was true and they wanted to suppress it, it was true. If there is any non-zero probability that this is what happened, the censorship is some evidence that it did, so the existence of the censorship increases the probability that it was true from 50% to some higher amount.
If censorship only happened for the second reason then the calculation would be easy. If censorship happened, the probability that it was true would be 100%. It can happen for both reasons, so depending on how likely each reason is, the probability given censorship increases proportional to how likely that was to be the cause of the censorship. But unless the probability of the second alternative is zero, it increases by some.
> If the censorship occurred because it was true and they wanted to suppress it, it was true.
I get what you're saying with this analysis, I just don't think it's relevant in this case. The inconsistent and weak suppression by random social media websites isn't what you'd expect if some actually powerful authorities with an actual interest in concealing the lab leak truth were involved in suppressing it.
Your analysis applies best to Peter Daszak, who may have insider info about what WIV was doing and who has clearly been trying to cover his ass from the beginning. But his behavior is equally consistent with a generalized anxiety about what may be uncovered if there is an investigation, because he knows (like we all do) that lab leaks have a long history.
China's behavior is also consistent with generalized anxiety without regard for truth. China zealously suppresses uncontrolled information spread out of fear of what might become widely believed, but they are not at all precise or rational about it. For example, they footgunned themselves by suppressing a doctor's report that SARS had resurfaced in Wuhan. As it turned out, this was false, but it was not far off from the truth. It was not in their interest to suppress this information -- they should have reacted with aggressive investigation and containment measures, as they did several weeks later. But their instinct to censor uncontrolled information of any kind, without regard to truth, is too powerful and too reflexive.
The fact that China suppressed an incorrect but informative report should give you an idea of the weakness of the connection between suppression and truth. They would have also suppressed the report if it had been both untrue and completely uninformative.
> The inconsistent and weak suppression by random social media websites
Um, millions of posts on Facebook and Twitter were removed. Not very inconsistent, weak, or random - and certainly not warranted by scientific evidence or Daszak's analysis.
As for China's behaviour, it has been very consistent about keeping independent investigations well the fuck away from Wuhan; and I don't really give a shit what their reason for that is.
> Um, millions of posts on Facebook and Twitter were removed. Not very inconsistent, weak, or random - and certainly not warranted by scientific evidence or Daszak's analysis.
I am against censorship of FB and Twitter, but realistically, FB and Twitter posts have essentially no informational value so it doesn't really matter if they were suppressed.
> As for China's behaviour, it has been very consistent about keeping independent investigations well the fuck away from Wuhan; and I don't really give a shit what their reason for that is.
If you don't care what their reason is, then you're not in a position to make a rational argument about what it says about the lab leak hypothesis.
>The other is that they're authoritarians too incompetent to convincingly demonstrate that something they believe to be false actually is false using evidence or reasoning, since otherwise it wouldn't have to be censored.
There aren't enough hours in the day to waste answering every single instance of bullshit posted to the internet with a thoroughly researched, evidence-based point for point rebuttal that would only be buried under another layer of bullshit.
There are always enough hours in the day to waste answering every single instance of bullshit posted to the internet with a thoroughly researched, evidence-based point for point rebuttal that would only be buried under another layer of bullshit.
This is the internet. It's full of pedants who do it all day long and then do it again tomorrow. It's the method by which we determine whether the thing is actually bullshit.
Nobody is requiring you to read or participate in the arguments. If you only want to know the end result, get off Twitter and find someone you trust to summarize them and read their summary. But that's no reason to shut down the debate.
>There are always enough hours in the day to waste answering every single instance of bullshit posted to the internet with a thoroughly researched, evidence-based point for point rebuttal that would only be buried under another layer of bullshit.
Maybe for some, but most of us have actual lives to live.
>It's the method by which we determine whether the thing is actually bullshit.
No it isn't. Science and critical thinking is the way we determine whether a thing is bullshit. Pedants on the internet are its second biggest source of entropy after Bitcoin, but at least Bitcoin eventually finds a consensus.
>But that's no reason to shut down the debate.
Once it's clear the other side has no interest in debate, only in aggressively spreading misinformation, shutting down the discourse is the only reasonable course of action.
> Maybe for some, but most of us have actual lives to live.
You're here, aren't you?
But also, it doesn't have to be everyone in order to work.
> No it isn't. Science and critical thinking is the way we determine whether a thing is bullshit.
I tried doing all forms of science in the entire world personally but it turns out I didn't have time, so some of it had to be handed off to quite a large number of other people and now we have to have a debate and evaluate each others hypotheses.
> Pedants on the internet are its second biggest source of entropy after Bitcoin, but at least Bitcoin eventually finds a consensus.
Science is a process, not a result.
> Once it's clear the other side has no interest in debate, only in aggressively spreading misinformation, shutting down the discourse is the only reasonable course of action.
Who decides this? What happens when they get it wrong?
As are you, and you've got way more more failure points than I do. And neither of us is accomplishing a thing here.
The same exact arguments have been had here before, the same exact arguments will be had again tomorrow.
>But also, it doesn't have to be everyone in order to work.
Great. You go right ahead, then, let us know how you do.
>I tried doing all forms of science in the entire world personally but it turns out I didn't have time, so some of it had to be handed off to quite a large number of other people and now we have to have a debate and evaluate each others hypotheses.
But you just said you believed censored information is more likely true than not, simply by virtue of being censored. What's the point in referring to science if you're not going to trust it as authoritative? On what basis are you evaluating hypotheses? Moh's scale of edginess?
>Science is a process, not a result.
Arguing on the internet is not science, at best it's politics. The scientists are already doing the science. The internet has rejected the science and is drinking horse piss and bleach instead because a Facebook meme told them to.
And science does reach results. Relativity is a result. The earth being more round than flat is a result. Germ theory winning out over miasma theory is a result. Science as a process moves in a direction that validates some claims and invalidates others. It doesn't move in an endless circle.
>Who decides this? What happens when they get it wrong?
This is one of the most insufferable thought terminating cliches I've ever seen on this site. It gets applied to everything but it doesn't mean anything. Must there always be a singular, authoritative and objective source of truth for anything to be decidable? The universe is fundamentally uncertain.
I decide. You decide. The owner of the venue decides. Society decides. The law decides. Whomever wants to decide decides because opinions are like assholes, everybody has one, and most are full of shit. And what if they get it wrong? What if they do? People get things wrong all the time, but eventually the truth will out, we move on.
I didn't care about that letter to begin with. Peter Daszak is obviously a creep trying to cover his ass. That doesn't change the fact that the origins of COVID are a hard scientific question that no one has figured out yet.
If you're keeping up with the news, do you just read partisan polemics or do you actually keep up with the scientific developments? Here is an article on an exceptionally close bat coronavirus relative to the COVID coronavirus, which can bind to ACE2. The lab leak peanut gallery said such a thing didn't exist anywhere. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2
Almost all the references from point to articles written by Chinese scientists in the last year. Color me skeptical.
Who among the proponents of the lab leak theory claim that the virus doesn't occur in nature? Nobody I am aware of. Perhaps the kooks who claim covid was completely manmade as a bioweapon or something.
There is no transparency on this issue with China. There's a reason why there is a dearth of evidence- it's all been suppressed or destroyed.
> Almost all the references from point to articles written by Chinese scientists in the last year. Color me skeptical.
Except the first reference, which is the entire point of the article: French scientists found bat coronaviruses very similar to SARS-CoV-2 in Laos.
No more partisan posturing please. You are straining to defend preconceived notions by ignoring new information, rather than paying curious attention to the world around you. Turn politics brain off, turn science brain on.
What's the point of responding to something I posted in a way that completely ignores the main point? The main finding in that Science paper was from a team with a French leader and zero Chinese co-authors, as far as I can tell from the surnames. Your level of trust in Chinese scientists is completely irrelevant to the point that was made.
What are you trying to do here? If you're not trying to learn, are you trying to play political debate and beat me? There's no audience to impress. You either learn something from our conversation or you don't. That's all that can come of this.
Are you under the impression that the lab leak is proven unless I myself disprove it in these comments? I'm just telling you a reason you should doubt that it has been proven. Is this confusing or something?
Fair counterpoint, but in my defense there really are animals that switch sex when their population is lacking one or the other, so there's not much fictional about it: the scientists were confident in their plan because they didn't know one of nature's tricks.
What I find most shocking about all of this is that we can't even publicly or openly discuss things anymore because even if it is no longer done, there is surely still a latent deterrent effect from all the censorship and public persecution of anyone who was not willing to tow the regime message.
When a culture of fear and intimidation sets it, it is extremely dangerous and usually in my experience even terminal for things like organizations and companies.
You find it shocking that, even thought it's no longer done, discussing things openly will open up someone to censorship and public persecution?
What did we do 25 years ago to discuss things? It sure the hell wasn't Twitter or Facebook. It was sitting down with the people around us and having a reasonable conversation that didn't include snippets from stupid corners of some webby thing.
It required thought and a reasonable search of the information at hand, which was slower back then. We were more methodical in forming our opinions and what we put our attention on.
I’m all for having a chat with people in real life but all the internet has shown us is here is that we weren’t and are not very methodical in forming our opinions, the speed of incoming information or ability to communicate quicker over distance hasn’t worsened it, it’s just shown up how poor it is. There were plenty of conspiracy theories before Twitter and Facebook.
Regardless, the best method for improving knowledge is making it available to criticism, which is why I favour free speech and openness over this silly culture of “fact checking”, algorithmic censorship and “hate” speech. If it means someone does or doesn’t do something someone else dislikes or thinks is wrong but is legal, like not taking a vaccine, then so be it, they’re adults.
Or was just clumsy and communicationally ineffective while attempting to note some trends and events which are not negligible at all: yes, we are discussing matters in a cool civilized manner (in general and sufficiently) here, while elsewhere moderators banned users who objected that vaccines should be a topic at all in sections dealing with the cutesy of small cats with big eyes (Reddit), or platforms decided that no discussion can be made about vaccine toxicity (YouTube), etc.
It is refreshing that relative visibility and a better median allow us a proper environment. It's not granted.
Where is it that you’re not able to publicly or openly discuss things? There has never BEEN such a wealth of opinions and discussion freely accessible to everyone.
Correct, which is why there is a such a strong push to get Facebook to increase censorship. All of this communication freedom is absolutely freaking elites out, as their ability to control the discourse has slipped substantially.
OK, so by many standards I'm "elite" (in terms of net worth, education etc.). But I don't think I'm part of the "elite" you're referring to, and I'm still concerned about the information flows enabled by the internet. Does that make me a member of said elite, or is there something else going on?
I'm not going to try to diagnose you, but in general, the outrage that people have that someone is saying the wrong thing online is exactly what I'm talking about.
The definition of "elite" is of course murky, but that does not mean that it's not real. There is a very real process of preference cascades among the discourse of those who hold power in society together with the professional classes that identify with them (even if they themselves do not hold much power). The ability to control the public discourse has collapsed as centralized media has been converted into decentralized social media, which has led to panic and calls to bring social media back to heel.
Part of this is the (correct) belief that Trump and other populist phenomena - for example Democratic Socialists and the rise of Bernie Sanders -- are made possible by people being able to communicate with each other directly, bypassing whatever Overton window the major media outlets try to set, and even forming their own tribal Overton windows with no regard to what respectable people at the Heritage Foundation or the New York Times or members of the Davos-set think about this. These outsiders can then win elections or at least threaten to win elections. That creates a moral panic about wrongthink, "misinformation", fact-checker discourse, and general terror that ordinary people are able to communicate freely, form their own opinions, and coordinate without the supervision of elite consensus.
The point is surely that many people without much power take issue with the discourse that the internet has enabled, and that therefore it is incorrect to hear such opinions and conclude that they can only be about the retention of some kind of power.
If you'd like, you could accuse them of "false consciousness" (long a favorite derisive put down from Leninists and their friends), or of simply being patsies for the powerful (more typical of the current US right).
So I'm wondering what your explanation of this concern among non-elites?
> The point is surely that many people without much power take issue with the discourse that the internet has enabled
Well sure, but that's always been the case. E.g. in the past, people who were outside the overton window had no choice but to get mad at views they disagreed with as they had great difficulty in getting their own voices heard.
Now they can have their own voices heard. They can make their own overton window and completely ignore someone else's.
Point being, there is a democratization at work, but whereas those on the outside always had to put up with disagreeable voices, now elites must also put up with it, which is something they are not used to, indeed they are offended by needing to - it's a real shock to them - and this is where the calls for censorship of social media are coming from.
The Overton window isn't individually defined. It might not be false to say that there's more than one, but there isn't one per person.
Most of the outrage isn't about democratization. It's about the gutter-level quality of the voices. I don't think many people at the time had much of a problem with someone like William Buckley being the mouthpiece for the views he expressed on national media, even if they strongly disagreed with those views. He may have been a racist bigot, but he was a thoughtful, literate, articulate racist bigot. Likewise, even the far right tends to have a little grudging respect for the ability of someone like Noam Chomsky to articulate a view of the world with which they fundamentally disagree.
But democratization hasn't resulted in lots more voices cleverly or playfully or insightfully or creatively expressing new (or existing) points of view.
It has resulted in a culture filled with endlessly repeating garbage, where the dumbest, most simplistic, least nuanced crap dominates by volume. Oh, and of course, endless snark, because people don't actually have the courage to say what they really mean, but instead just use snark to try to make other people seem less funny, less clued in and therefore "obviously" wrong.
You seem to be claiming an awfully deep level of insight into the psychology of "elites"
> "which is something they are not used to, indeed they are offended by needing to - it's a real shock to them"
are you a part of this elite, or perhaps study them? They don't seem to actually write a lot - that would be mostly middle class pundits - or appear on TV or other visual media - that would be said pundits and/or party officials or elected representatives. I'm not sure where this level of insight can come from?
I sense an inner authoritarian coming out of their pupa here.
> even the far right tends to have a little grudging respect for the ability of someone like Noam Chomsky
The "far right" has about as much respect for Noam Chomsky as the "far left" has for John Birch.
Which is to say, they view him as a peddler of hateful conspiracy theories that his low information followers unquestioningly believe. A dangerous person that should be silenced. If you think otherwise, you are fooling yourself about any supposed admiration there is for Chomsky.
> It's about the gutter-level quality of the voices.
Now are you talking about Chomsky again? Because you still think that the right is objectively worse than the left and that's just not the case. Some people are just natural authoritarians and any opposing views are "gutter discourse" whereas their own enlightened views have to be grudgingly admired. That's not how it works. And I would not recommend that anyone read Chomsky because the value of his political commentary really is the same as that of John Birch, IMO. There are some important nuggets of insight, but you have to be immunized against all the conspiracy theories and hate, and most readers don't have the appropriate background to handle it. They will come away with a feeling of faux-insight that is just a bubble of misinformation. And they tend to be very angry and militant. We need less of that.
> but instead just use snark to try to make other people seem less funny
There's no need to bring John Oliver into the discussion. There is lots of snark, but I agree it's not helpful to focus on it.
> I'm not sure where this level of insight can come from?
How would you preferred that I put it? I have no idea of your relationship to the putative elites that you're describing; I see no way that a random HN commenter can possibly have the kind of insight that you're claiming in describing how "they" "feel" about the "voices of the masses". So I tried to ask as neutrally as I could, without doubting that you might in fact really have some authoritative knowledge of this, so that you could let us know whether this was just you pontificating about people you don't actually have any real knowledge of, or actually real information.
> Some people are just natural authoritarians and any opposing views are "gutter discourse" whereas their own enlightened views have to be grudgingly admired.
Oh FFS. I am sure that you read at least some social media. I limit myself to Twitter and don't follow many people, but even there, my exposure to stuff that is "gutter discourse" is still more than I'd like, and it comes from every direction and ideology. I'm not talking about right/left stuff, I'm talking about people who really don't know what they're talking about but still insist on talking.
> It might not be false to say that there's more than one,
There is one for any group of people definable as a meaningful political context, down to and including individuals.
> but there isn't one per person.
Because each person is a coherent political unit and there are also coherent political units with more than one person, there is strictly greater than one Overton window per person.
> The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse.
> The term is named after American policy analyst Joseph P. Overton, who stated that an idea's political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range, rather than on politicians' individual preferences. According to Overton, the window frames the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office given the climate of public opinion at that time.
This definition does not really allow for the notion of an individual's "own" Overton Window, which would be something without any statistical properties, given it corresponds precisely with "what one person currently believes".
> This definition does not really allow for the notion an individual's "own" Overton Window, which would something without any statistical properties, given it corresponds precisely with "what one person currently believes".
Sure, an individuals Overton window is “the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme” to a voter; in any context the Overton window is per dimension; an idea within the window on an individual sense is one which does not, on its own, rule the candidate out of consideration by that voter, its not the same as the single point the individal voter prefers; this is just exactly the usual sense of an Overton window where the polity has one viewpoint, not just of preferred policies but of which non-preferred ones are and are not deal breakers.
The concept behind the overton window is fundamentally rooted in the statistical properties of large numbers of people. It's not about what might or might not appeal to a voter, it's about what might or might not appeal to a large number of voters, where the effects of statistics mask the noise inherent in their individual foibles, and things coalesce to give you a sort-of clear answer.
> The concept behind the overton window is fundamentally rooted in the statistical properties of large numbers of people.
No, its fundamentally rooted by the fact that the relationship between distance from an individuals preferred policy in any dimension and a candidates actual policy on that dimension and the effect on the individuals willing to vote for the candidate is nonlinear.
The thresholding effect in groups is only because of (and is a function of) the thresholding effect in individuals.
> What you're describing is real, but it's not called the overton window.
Its usually not something worth discussing on its own, but I don't know why you wouldn't call the exact same thing that is called “the Overton window” for any other size set of people “the Overton window” for an individual.
Because the Overton Window isn't really about voting patterns or explicit support for specific policies. It's about a cultural phenomenon that constrains the cultural response to possible policies.
If someone running for POTUS was to have suggested UBI in 1992 (say), they would have been instantly dismissed (probably as a communist). No voting. Not even much in the way of individual reactions, other than a few high profile op-eds here and there and sunday morning talkshow outrage.
When Yang was talking about UBI in 2020, while he was not successful even in the primaries, the idea did not trigger the same sort of cultural reactions at all.
Inside the top 10% for net worth would be my criteria for this, and I think many other Americans too. No self-aggrandisement here, I just wouldn't want to pretend to be "an ordinary guy on the street" (whatever that actually means).
> "OK, so by many standards I'm "elite" (in terms of net worth, education etc.). But I don't think I'm part of the "elite" you're referring to"
explicitly acknowledging different (simultaneous, potentially overlapping) versions of what "elite" could mean. Yet here you are dickering about one definition versus another.
I surely have never heard any one cast the top 10% of some thing as the "elite" of said domain, so I hoped to enlighten you. I must say though, your emotional control - specifically lack thereof - belies just how not-elite you are. Angry at what a commoner wrote at you on a public forum and trying to cast oneself into the highest tiers of society at the same time... Incredible
You can rationally be concerned without being one of the "elite". But if your solution involves trusting the real "elites" to censor information, then you would have to be one of them because you trust them to act in your interests.
In South Korea, major study found mandatory wearing of masks reduced COVID-19 rates by 93.5% and practicing both social distancing with masks on public transport during peak hours reduced infection rates by 98.1%.
Proper mask wearing and replacement, understanding how masks work—all the things I observe in every study concerning masks as prevention for COVID and yet almost never in real life.
(FWIW I wear a mask, except when I only have a used cheap surgical one and almost nobody around is wearing a mask correctly. I’m not doing society any good by getting sick from breathing in whatever badness has stuck in the mask during use, and I can't save the situation by being the one person properly wearing a mask.)
Many mask studies are based upon the real world in the field, such as the Bangladesh one, as well as the Korean subway study elsewhere linked to. So it's simply not true that all of these are somehow in lab only.
I have no idea what mask behavior is like where you are, but it's known that masks are asymmetric -- they prevent transmission better than they prevent catching COVID (unless N95). But that doesn't mean you wearing one is 0% effective.. it's still a diminished amount. It also gives an example for behavior for others for them to emulate. Certain regions (like SF for the most part) have very good adherence on average. You also do the most important duty -- significantly reduce transmission from you to others! What better thing could you do to 'save the situation' than prevent covid?
If you're concerned that your mask previously had covid on it, then you should use a different mask next time and either throw the previous one away, wait for the virus to die, or otherwise disinfect it depending on the mask type.
Rest assured, I believe if 90%+ of people consistently wore masks properly when among other people we’d have no problem getting rid of COVID. However, it’s unrealistic. People will skip masks at home (even though they risk getting infected by asymptomatic members of the family), people won’t wear masks properly, etc.
> Many mask studies are based upon the real world in the field, such as the Bangladesh one
In Bangladesh study:
> For roughly half the 600 villages, we intervened by promoting mask usage: We gave every family in each village at least three masks — one per adult, cloth or surgical — and distributed masks in public spaces, including markets. We enlisted eminent local figures to explain why wearing masks can help slow viral transmission — providing imams with scripts to be read during religious services, for instance. Local leaders also modeled proper mask-wearing. We then sent observers into public spaces to note any changes in behavior.
> We cross-randomized mask type (cloth vs. surgical) and promotion strategies at the village and household level. Proper mask-wearing increased from 13.3% in the control group to 42.3% in the intervention arm (adjusted percentage point difference = 0.29 [0.26, 0.31]).
> After piloting, we settled on a core intervention package that combined household mask distribution with communication about the value of mask-wearing, mask promotion and in-person reminders at mosques, markets, and other public places, and role-modeling by public officials and community leaders. We also tested several other strategies in sub-samples, such as asking people to make a verbal commitment, creating opportunities for social signaling, text messages, and providing village-level incentives to increase mask-wearing. <…> We tested many different strategies because it was difficult to predict in advance which ones would lead to persistent increases in mask-wearing.
What was tested was not just mask-wearing, what was tested is a complex, holistic approach to educating residents that resulted in proper mask-wearing among large percentage of even symptomless people.
> as well as the Korean subway study elsewhere linked to. So it's simply not true that all of these are somehow in lab only.
Mask-wearing culture in Korea, Japan, Hong Kong is different. Attention is paid to proper mask wearing, for example, and most people wear masks.
The WaPo article was interesting - it seems that telling villagers in 3rd world countries how to act, "for their own good", is back in fashion. It's an article, not a paper, and the methodology is poorly described (particularly how and when they measured the incidences of symptomatic Covid cases), and the results are highly simplified.
Unfortunately, I cannot read the "49 studies", as I am in the EU.
a) There are cited references within the paper that are based on real-world analysis. The onus is on you to refute the paper on its merits as well as those cited instead of dismissing anything based on modelling.
b) Don't move the goalposts. You said that masks provide no net public health benefit. They clearly do. Some masks are obviously more effective than others but that doesn't change the fact that they are effective.
In Australia at least you do see N95 masks being used. And K80/K94 ones are very popular especially amongst Asian communities.
But the type of mask is irrelevant to the discussion. It's about whether they are effective in preventing transmission. And on that point the answer is unequivocally yes.
It absolutely is relevant. Rated masks (N95, etc) are designed and tested to achieve a particular level of particle filtration. If you want to avoid viral particles, find one that meets the specification you need and wear it.
There was a great w5 episode that tested the two and others. If you don't move look straight ahead they are about the same if you bend your head down or move forward the air gets in. There is a reason why they are plentiful and much cheaper.
Real-world test of both cloth masks and surgical masks, demonstrating a decreased prevalence in towns randomly selected for mask distribution and education (not mandates, which is important; nowhere near 100% compliance, with 13% vs 42% masking) across 350,000 subjects.
> The distribution of surgical masks resulted in a striking 35% reduction in confirmed symptomatic cases among people aged 60 or older.
Again, that's without a masking mandate or even 50% mask compliance.
Taking the results at face value, then we need about 40% of over 50s to wear masks, and no-one else needs to.
Saying that, it's very unclear if they are measuring "Covid cases by age group of people wearing masks" or "Covid cases by age group, with a certain percentage of overall people wearing masks".
>The outcome measure– the proportion of individuals who reported symptoms and who tested positive for antibodies– is a poor proxy for actual SARS-CoV-2 infections during the study period. Moreover, only 40% of those reporting SARS-CoV-2 symptoms consented to providing a blood sample for antibody testing. If there were systematic differences between intervention and control villages in the proportion of antibody-positive individuals among the >60% of symptomatic individuals who were not tested, the results would be biased.
>It is unclear whether the serological assay used to assess the primary outcome was validated in the population under study, or when serological measurements were taken relative to symptom onset. Furthermore, using symptomatic seroprevalence as an outcome means that authors could not distinguish between effects on infections and on symptom severity. Another key limitation is that the persons recording the behavior data could not be blinded to whether the village was a control or intervention arm, leaving open the possibility that data recorders could have been influenced by knowledge of the study arm.
Ooof, I think you over-skimmed. Did you read the "Our take" summary up top of that page?
> However, the study provides evidence that interventions promoting mask use can reduce community SARS-CoV-2 transmission even when fewer than half of community members wear masks. If the results are valid, they imply that near-universal mask wearing would be associated with much larger reductions in transmission.
and the conclusion:
> This study is the largest and best-designed randomized controlled trial to date of a realistic non-pharmaceutical intervention on SARS-CoV-2 transmission.
You created your account one day ago and it's name is even an anti-mask anti-government slogan.
This site had just been overwhelmed with people who don't want discourse or even to change minds. They want to make their fringe views seem more popular than they really.
The worst part is all the effort people have to do finding studies to disprove you while all you do is spout unverified conclusions.
I know it's against the rules to attack a poster but I'll risk it.
You understand what ad hominem means, right? Don't worry, I've been around for many years. I just go through periods of not having an account, to control the time I waste online.
I've seen most of those studies before. Many of them are not even peer-reviewed papers, they all contain big caveats like "these results were not very conclusive and more research is needed", and many use very simple methodologies (eg, like assuming that some reduction in aerosol particles of a certain size will certainly result in a useful reduction in emitted viral particles). Research labs have access to viral samples (it doesn't have to be Covid). I am sure that no-one has measured how many aerosol-bourne viral particles are stopped by cloth masks, because the results would be quite damning.
That's a great example of the type of topic I could see people shutting down arguments/conversations over.
In a very general sense, it doesn't make a lot of sense for laypeople to argue among themselves over the findings and guidance of experts. At best you see an extremely-localized effect (e.g. you convince someone it's okay to not wear a mask and they happen to not catch COVID) and at worst you add to the pile of disinformation and confusion around the whole thing (e.g. you convince someone that masks aren't effective at viral load reductions).
In another sense, presenting one side of an evolving, actively-researched subject and painting it as fact (e.g. "masks aren't effective") doesn't help either. What we know about the virus and its transmission lifecycle changes as we learn more about it and it's often prudent to err on the side of caution in the context of potential deaths, especially when there are arguments actively being made for the effectiveness of those tactics (e.g. masks are not completely ineffective).
For your courtesy, I'll conclude with this and excuse myself from the thread, as I'm not here to argue: I wish more people got their news, guidance, and expertise from vocal experts in the field and those experts' interpretations, rather than forming their own personal interpretations bourne from individual studies, which vary wildly per study for innumerable reasons rarely obvious to a layperson. I say this to mean: don't bother taking the time to find individual studies that say masks aren't effective -- there are plenty of studies I could also dig up saying the opposite, and neither one of us should be forming conclusions based on strangers throwing links at each other on the internet.
>Where is it that you’re not able to publicly or openly discuss things? There has never BEEN such a wealth of opinions and discussion freely accessible to everyone.
reply
In a roundabout way, I'm agreeing with you here. Not because I think I'm right or you're wrong, but because there's really no point in either of us arguing over it here if neither of us are actually publishing papers, providing guidance, etc.
It is quite important to understand all these things if we are seeing new variants arise and need to assess how dangerous they are likely to be. Most especially since vaccines are based on the spike protein on the premise that it is essential to the infectiousness. But what if a variant can arise with a highly compromised spike protein yet compensate enough to still be highly infectious due to other factors?
The most interesting thing is to think about where the other empty spaces in our knowledge are that are yet to be filled in - what will we know this time next year that will have us saying "previously we thought ...."