Morales plane was searched. If Snowden was on it, he would have been detained.
It's not that Belarus' actions are admissable. It's that the West is acting in a hypocritical way.
If Belarus had as much power as the US, they surely would have followed the same route and forced all the surrounding nations to close their airspace. The end result would be the same.
It was searched according to the local law where it landed. Nobody forced them to land in Austria - could have just as easily returned to Moscow.
The stark difference between the way the West does it is that you have a choice whenever to comply or pick an alternative, whereas Belarus left no choice.
EU, as a matter of routine, forbids certain persons from entering their airspace, has refused entry countless times to planes (some of them airborne) based on passenger manifests. Nobody would have batted an eye if Belarus would have done the same.
Pointing a gun (armed MiG fighter) at a civilian airplane based on who is a passenger using a deceptive pretext, outside laws and regulations, is several orders of magnitudes worse than lawful application of rules. If you fail to see why, read about habeas corpus.
The same end result achieved by legal or illegal means is more than enough difference. One is performed by the consent of many, the other by thuggery of few.
But that's a local station of a Serbian broadcaster, and I think the GP's point relates to AP being American. RTS seems to have broadcast outright propaganda from the building which I doubt AP did. Though Al Jazeera also used the same building, and while Al Jazeera English tries to seem neutral its Arabic version is little more than a qatari state mouthpiece. But that's still not a reason for Israel to bomb it.
Obviously the event you linked to is pretty abhorrent nonetheless. & the wiki page has a pretty interesting quote especially in light of what happened today:
>The American news agency, the Associated Press, wrote:
>The station blatantly spread Milosevic's nationalist propaganda, portraying Serbs as the victims of ethnic attacks in the former Yugoslavia, thus whipping up nationalism that led to wars. At the same time, the television accused the Serbian opposition of being foreign mercenaries and traitors who were working against the country's interests. The propaganda was so intense that it led to anti-government protests in March 1991 in the capital, during which two people were killed in what was the first popular uprising against Milosevic's rule. It also prompted Nato in 1999 to declare the state TV a legitimate target. The RTS building was bombed during the air war that the alliance launched to stop Milosevic's onslaught against Kosovo Albanian separatists. Sixteen RTS employees died in the bombing.[19]
I wouldn't say it's ironic, but it's still... weird to see the AP's tone here.
A reminder that "U.S. officials pushed Brazil to reject Russia’s coronavirus vaccine" [0] for political reasons.
> Under a section titled “Combating malign influences in the Americas,” the HHS report states that countries including Russia “are working to increase their influence in the region to the detriment of US safety and security.” The global affairs office coordinated with other U.S. government agencies “to dissuade countries in the region from accepting aid from these ill-intentioned states,” it says.
The concerted effort to smear the Russian vaccine is clearly the Western version of the anti-vaccine misinformation Russia has been accused of spreading. Textbook projection.
Brazilian here, but just a regular guy, I didn't dug deep into this. Anvisa (our health regulatory agency) is well stablished before current president, supposedly independant and more often considered in opposition to current government. I find it unlikely that they are fabricating a rejection and more likely they are being cientific about it.
Same here. If what they say is true, that there was viral reproduction in the vacine, theres no way is gonna pass. They schedule a session in congress with Anvisa to defend their position, and decided to not show up to the meeting. The resistance in allowing European heath agencies entering and inspecting it's labs is also a bad sign.
I talked with a friend with ties in Anvisa. After all the bullshit the current president make they go through, with all the hydroxychloroquine thing, they kind of done a no interference pact over there among the staff, to not allow political pressure to dictate the result of their work. That say, nothing is immune to politics. But I don't think this was the case.
It is not that Anvisa is taking a political stance, but they operate under requirements of the government. The government is making it difficult for Anvisa to gather the data they need to make a decision.
This is not mutually exclusive with the findings of the Brazilian investigators. More than likely this will spur other investigations which should find the same thing if the Brazilian investigators were correct.
Ignoring your efficacy claims, the linked article indicates that the vaccine being distributed now is likely not the same as the one that was used in clinical trials.
In particular,
> Anvisa, the Brazilian drug agency, said that every single lot of the Ad5 Gamaleya shot that they have data on appears to still have replication-competent adenovirus in it.
This is a serious issue because none of the virus vector is supposed to be competent to replicate. Something is very clearly wrong with the vaccine that's being distributed.
Hmm, not necessarily no. This can be a simple imperfection in the manufacturing process, it happens. There is not necessarily anything very wrong, just deficient QA.
The vaccine is going to work essentially identically to if it wasn't able to replicate. The difference is that you might get an adenovirus infection, which is basically a cold. Still far from perfect, but it is incredibly unlikely to effect efficiency.
Yes, it's entirely possible that this is a manufacturing fuckup, but as Lowe points out in the linked article:
> The response from the Sputnik V camp has not been good. The official Twitter account has accused Anvisa of having “invented fake news” about the vaccine, when what you’d hope to see is more of the good ol’ “We stand by our manufacturing process, but take these concerns seriously and are working with the authorities to resolve this question” sort of thing. But no, it’s all for “political reasons”. Their official statement is no more conciliatory. A tip for the vaccine’s manufacturers: don’t immediately start accusing your critics of bad faith, especially when they are the regulatory authorities. Step up and act like responsible drug developers: address the issues directly, with transparency, and work to find a solution. Throwing fits on Twitter is not the answer.
Update: Here's Gamaleya's official response, which immediately smears the decision as "political" and basically dismisses Anvisa's findings as impossible.
Certainly, but I don't see what this has to do with the vaccine. From the very same article, this Twitter account is not ran by the Gamelaya institute but by a separate government institute.
EDIT: The link you send is not from Gamelaya either. Gamelaya's webiste is https://www.gamaleya.org/en/. The link you sent is by the same non-scientific governmental marketing agency.
If they claim that this indeed did not happen then I guess we will have to see some hard data.
The "Sputnik V team" is the not the Gamelaya research institue, again the article you cited says they are affiliated with the Russian sovereign wealth fund.
"Powered by" is weasel word 101. When you see a website where it's written "Powered by NodeJS" does that mean the website literally is from NodeJS?
I'm not sure what you're even trying to say here. Whoever wrote that response is quite clearly authorized speak on behalf of Gamaleya and the Sputnik V vaccine team, and while I'm sure there are plenty of conscientious scientists at Gamaleya, as Derek says this really is the worst possible public response.
Tackle the problem seriously, sort out the manufacturing process, and the world will have one more weapon in the fight against COVID. But if the response to every piece of bad news is "hurr hurr political fake news", then nobody will trust Sputnik-V, and quite rightly so.
It's the post-Soviet Russian way of doing things, comrade. First claim fake news, then quietly fix the vaccine and deny accountability. Some vaccine scientists are due to accidentally fall off their apratment windows while doing Easter cleaning, with a helping hand from the FSB.
> Hmm, not necessarily no. This can be a simple imperfection in the manufacturing process, it happens. There is not necessarily anything very wrong, just deficient QA.
You don't sell medicines to people which don't meet the specs you made public about them.
> The vaccine is going to work essentially identically to if it wasn't able to replicate. The difference is that you might get an adenovirus infection, which is basically a cold.
They've made the vaccine demonstrably less safe, either through carelessness or because they don't care. Don't minimize that, or assume it's the only place where the reality of sputnik doesn't match up to the phase 3 data.
> This should be a pretty easy fix, actually.
The fix is Gamaleya taking their current production facilities offline figure out where the problem is and fix it. Unless you're suggesting that regulators should just go full YOLO on this and let it slide, which is a stupid idea.
>You don't sell medicines to people which don't meet the specs you made public about them.
Sure, and I never said otherwise. But all things considered this is pretty minor.
>They've made the vaccine demonstrably less safe, either through carelessness or because they don't care. Don't minimize that, or assume it's the only place where the reality of sputnik doesn't match up to the phase 3 data.
Yes, this does make the vaccine marginally less safe. Not by much. Empirically, after millions of doses administered, the safety profile of the vaccine is more than acceptable as is.
>The fix is Gamaleya taking their current production facilities offline figure out where the problem is and fix it. Unless you're suggesting that regulators should just go full YOLO on this and let it slide, which is a stupid idea.
I literally say the exact same thing. In any case, Gamelaya right now is trying to get other people to produce the vaccines, but sure they should fix this issue. It will not be complicated.
Why is there any reason to think it wasn't? Replicant viruses are very easily explained by a QA failure, and Brazil doesn't claim that non-replicant viruses aren't there anymore.
That QA failure means the vaccine injected is different: they tested without reproduction competent in the trials. What else could they have missed along with this?
The problem if the vacine was not the efficiency. It was rejected based on poor documentation, and quality control. Both serious problems that need to be solved before approval in any serous regulatory agency.
The author is irresponsibility propagating a conspiracy theory and elevating its status in the public’s mind.
I’m a bioscientist. It’s frustrating to respond with evidence and in good faith, and be downvoted by those who simply disagree. But sadly it appears that the loudest voice prevails over reason.
Could you explain why evidence that the virus evolved naturally contradicts the lab-leak theory? I'm all ears and waiting to hear the reasoning. As others have pointed out, lab-leak does not imply artificially developed.
> I’m a bioscientist.
And I'm a Bayesian analyst. Surely your position is that it is a coincidence that:
- the virus appeared to originate in Wuhan
- genome sequences from patients were 96% or 89% identical to the Bat CoV ZC45 coronavirus originally found in Rhinolophus affinis
- The bats carrying CoV ZC45 were originally found in Yunnan or Zhejiang province, both of which are more than 900 kilometers away Wuhan
- According to municipal reports and the testimonies of 31 residents and 28 visitors, the bat was never a food source in the city, and no bat was traded in the market
- Wuhan is home to two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus
- Within ~280 meters from the market, there was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention
(WHCDC). WHCDC hosted animals in laboratories for research purposes. In one of their studies, 155 bats including Rhinolophus affinis were captured in Hubei province, and other 450 bats were captured in Zhejiang province
- one of the researchers described that he was once by attacked by bats and the blood of a bat shot on his skin. In another accident, bats peed on him. He was once thrilled for capturing a bat carrying a live tick
Not conclusive by any means, but I have yet to hear reasoning by which we should exclude the lab-leak theory, besides that the virus evolved naturally, which does not contradict the lab-leak theory whatsoever.
Also, from your article:
> As a team of researchers from the WHO
This WHO? [0][1] Doesn't instill much confidence in me, to be sure.
There are a lot of bats in Wuhan. There are a lot of bats carrying coronaviruses. Coronaviruses have triggered past epidemics. Ergo, there’s an institute for virology in Wuhan.
Listen starting at 6:30 in the podcast I posted from Nature. There is indeed strong correlation but no causal relationship established.
Except everything I've read indicates the bats carrying the most closely related virus are not in Wuhan, not even close:
> The SARS-CoV-2 virus is most closely related to coronaviruses found in certain populations of horseshoe bats that live about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away in Yunnan province, China. [0]
So why would the virus so strongly appear to originate in Wuhan, and not in another city, closer to the bats' native regions? Appears quite statistically unlikely.
What you’re saying is all possible. But there’s no evidence to support leak from a lab, and there is a lot of evidence supporting the natural spillover hypothesis. As such, the latter interpretation is more likely to be correct.
For example, there were cases as early as December 2019 that did not come from Wuhan. Wuhan was no doubt a key early hotspot.
I read the article, but it only states that the first case from December was not linked to the seafood market ("wet market"), but not that it occurred outside of Wuhan. Did I misread something?
By the way, early on I believed that the virus jumped to humans at the seafood market, which was the prevailing theory at the time, it seemed. But as evidence like the above article came out - noting that many early cases had no link to the seafood market, while still being in Wuhan - it raised suspicions, and lent credence to the lab-leak theory.
> There has been rigorous scholarship done on this question. I recommend reading it given your interest in the subject.
I do, but I'm not convinced. A lot of reporting either relies on appeal to authority ("I'm a PhD, and this couldn't possibly happen, so don't question it"), or is purposely obtuse, confusing lab-leak with lab-synthesized, and by dodging the point, hardly alleviates suspicion.
You must understandably excuse me for being a sceptic. I started wearing masks back in February or March, against the advice of the CDC who was telling me masks increase the rate of spread. At the same time I believed that borders should be closed to limit the rate of spread, while the WHO was telling me that closing borders would do no such thing.
So I am not going to believe something just because an expert tells me to, nor do I find it at all scientific to dismiss politically inconvenient possibilities.
No you didn’t misread, I did, my apologies. And I appreciate your skepticism! While responding to you I did a lot more reading, and I’m more sympathetic to the possibility of “lab leak” than when we started discussing. Ultimately this needs a transparent investigation to resolve, but as it stands the data best supports a natural spillover hypothesis. But I regret the extent to which I characterized this as a foregone conclusion.
> For example, there were cases as early as December 2019 that did not come from Wuhan.
No.
This isn't deducible from the article YOU linked!
Not having a link to the seafood marketplace in Wuhan != originating from outside Wuhan.
> The paper, written by a large group of Chinese researchers
> Their data also show that, in total, 13 of the 41 cases had no link to the marketplace.
> the virus possibly spread silently between people in Wuhan—and perhaps elsewhere—before the cluster of cases from the city’s now-infamous Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was discovered in late December.
The article that you linked, if anything, offers more support for a lab leak.
Chiefly, it says that there is evidence that not only did the virus NOT originate from an animal source in the seafood market, but they suggest that Chinese officials knew that it did NOT originate in the Market, yet they issued statements saying that it did anyway.
> And I'm a Bayesian analyst. Surely your position is that it is a coincidence that...
Then you ought to know that seeing more circumstantial evidence for A than B does not imply that A is more likely. What would imply that A is more likely is if you find more circumstantial evidence for A than whatever amount you would expect to find if A didn't happen.
That's why good Bayesians place so little weight on circumstantial evidence: because it's difficult or impossible to predict the expected amount of circumstantial evidence for something that didn't happen. It would involve answering questions like, "When a novel coronavirus moves from the animal population to humans without a lab accident, what are the odds that it will happen within X miles of a lab studying such viruses?" That's pretty difficult to answer, given that we don't know a lot about how or why that happens yet.
And it shouldn't even need to be said that this all goes double when the thing being argued over is political (because, even if you personally are unbiased, the people gathering and publishing the evidence you rely on may not be) and treble when the evidence is technical and outside your area of expertise.
Viruses behave very differently in different species. For example, I think ebola can be airborne in pigs because it binds to receptors in pig lung cells and is more of a respiratory disease for them. It doesn't have a great affinity to human lung cells however so it's NOT airborne in humans.
I'm not suggesting that either fluid was the pathway by which the virus jumped to humans, nor do I know how it happened, only that evidence suggests researchers interact closely with the animals.
And I am not ready to dismiss the theory but I am always open to hearing evidence to exclude the theory.
Can you explain why you are calling a plausible theory a "conspiracy theory" when it is something that indeed has happened in world history more than once?
Empirically, HN collectively gets things like this right much more often than not. It’s been right about the coming pandemic as early as beginning of Feb, it’s been right about masks when it was dismissed by CDC, and lab leak hypothesis has been dismissed as crank the whole time while building more and more of an implausible case that it wasn’t lab-leaked. HN has been coming around to that too. Of course, nothing is conclusive yet but you’re actually furthering the damages caused by misinformation by grouping this into it. If lab leak comes to fruition, there’s just going to be further outrage against traditional authority sources of info that gets things wrong, railing against people like you who called their correct hypothesis misinformation.
ive been here for a decade... its my opinion that HN very much does NOT get things like this right more often than not. its very hard to even guage what the hn opinion is to begin with
> "its very hard to even guage what the hn opinion is to begin with"
Not sure how to square this with the fact you're saying HN collectively gets it wrong. Either you can't even determine what it is they're getting wrong or you're exceptionally good at gauging what the HN opinion is. Because of your quote, I'll assume you're not accurately gauging what HN's majority opinion is on issues, because it's "very hard." I spend a lot of time here and don't think it's difficult at all. While there's a lot of debate and disagreement, most issues have fairly clear >2/3 majorities.
Classically liberal, anti-trumpism, climate change urgently needs addressing, anti-BigTech, static typing, Rust/Go > Java/C#, anti-CCP, anti-surveillance, pro-encryption / pro-privacy, pro-fasting, pro-lifting, decriminalize drug use, pro-rationalist, crypto mostly snake oil, more Twitter use/discussion than IG/Snap/TikTok though it's less popular, etc.
You keep reposting this Nature article but it is vacuous. There are many "guilt by association to Trump", "false equivalency to outrageous conspiracy theories", etc. and other non-good-faith argumentation that the author relies upon. This does not give confidence in her motives.
There are a few much more substantive sites with analysis into the genetics and circumstances around the virus, which emerged since the April 2020 which your Nature article cites as its primary source.
We really need to do better with scientific communication. As scientists we are evaluated too much on our communication with other scientists (ie paper publishing), while communication with the public is not weighed much for career advancement. I wish this structural problem would be discussed more so it can be addressed.
But not all of this is on the scientists. The public must do better. We can’t just blindly trust what a senator says on Fox News for political expedience, or “trust our gut”.
There are other results, too. For instance ...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jmv.26478 "However, the SARS‐CoV‐2 host tropism/adaptation pattern has significant discrepancies compared with other CoVs, raising questions concerning the proximal origin of SARS‐CoV‐2. The flat and nonsunken surface of the sialic acid‐binding domain of SARS‐CoV‐2 spike protein (S protein) conflicts with the general adaptation and survival pattern observed for all other CoV" . https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca... : “There are indeed many unexplained features of this virus that are hard if not impossible to explain based on a completely natural origin.” Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, wrote that he’d been concerned for some years about the Wuhan laboratory and about the work being done there to create “chimeric” (i.e., hybrid) SARS-related bat coronaviruses “with enhanced human infectivity.” Ebright said, “In this context, the news of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan *screamed* lab release.”
Are you familiar with calls "Mozhem povtorit'"? They date at least to 2014.
To curious, this means "(we) can repeat" and refers to the end of WWII, when Soviet armies went West and stormed Berlin - tanks, infantry, aviation, everything. Those using such calls conveniently forget the price which was paid during those years - the price they certainly aren't eager to repay.
last May Russian authorities could not resist allowing widespread displays of "patriotic" bumper stickers reading "We can repeat it!" ("Mozhem povtorit!"), the undisguised hint for a new military campaign to come again to the heart of Europe. If those are not the threatening statement of possible intentions—what are those?
I'm not sure, it sounds like the government usually is against such displays, but in the fervent of the Victory Day, they simply allowed the displays to stand without interference?
Well I'm Russian and I can certify there's no such thing as bumper sticker regulation in Russia :)
People sometimes slap truly tasteless stickers on their cars. There are many variations of the "Mozhem povtorit" sticker, including obscene ones like a Soviet Union stick figure fucking the bent over Nazi Germany stick figure from behind.
No one asks for permission to put a sticker like that on their car. The only requirement is lack of taste.
It's not that Belarus' actions are admissable. It's that the West is acting in a hypocritical way.
If Belarus had as much power as the US, they surely would have followed the same route and forced all the surrounding nations to close their airspace. The end result would be the same.