Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

1) The inferences in that piece are certainly supported. They didn't just pull shit out of their sphincters. Everything in that piece is true. It doesn't prove the virus came out of the lab, it just points out a number of factors that are very consistent with it having come out of the lab. It's looking at evidence. *gasp* 2) Which is why the word "probably" is in the headline. They are looking at the evidence and can't prove definitively that the virus came out of the lab, just that it "probably" did in their opinion, given all of the factors they painstakingly pointed out in that piece. 3) Hotez has been about as bad as those scientists who signed their names to that Lancet letter, except that unlike most of them, he has dug in his heels and is incapable of being objective. He expects people to defer to him because he's Peter Hotez. Appeals to authority never prove anything, but in the case of Peter Hotez it proves less than anything. He'd sooner tell someone they were not worthy of his time than address what they have to say. Of course scientific journals aren't filled with papers about pandemics that were started by viruses that were manipulated in labs and got out into the public. If that is what happened, it was a first, and it's not provable for the purposes of a scientific journal. That doesn't mean that it COULDN'T have happened or that all the zoonatic leaps he can point to make it so that THIS had to have been a zoonatic leap. If you serial passage a virus you found in the wild in a lab and create something novel and then the virus leaks from the lab. ... you'd get what happened in 2020.

 

There is a ton of evidence. New evidence, maybe not, although I am not certain nothing in that piece is new. I have seen most of it before.

They did present the evidence in a very compelling way.

Peter Hotez doesn't have a "smoking gun" proving that this virus was a zoonatic leap. Are you just as quick to point out that there is no smoking gun with regard to what he suggests?

There isn't going to be a smoking gun. The only ones who know for certain if the virus came out of the lab or if it mysteriously showed up in humans are in China, and they have not been forthright. And in fact, it lends to the theory that it did come out of the lab, because there are several significant things that we know now, but which they tried to hide, which point to the possibility that it came from that virology lab.

Yup. Hotez is in the business of developing vaccines. Vaccinology is the one thing he's probably worth listening to about.

 

It's a ridiculous point. This isn't want scientific journals do. If there was a lab leak that was proveable. ... it would take someone who knows telling everyone there was a lab leak to know for CERTAIN. In the absence of that, all you can do is look at the evidence in this case that suggests it could have been a lab leak and weigh how likely it is based on that evidence.

It is not something anyone could study scientifically (this is not what the Journal of Virology does), beyond looking at the genetic code to try to determine IF it COULD BE a virus that was serial passaed through cell cultures in a lab (which can mimic a natural zoonatic jump) as opposed to it being something that came from nature. That has certainly been done, and this virus definitely COULD HAVE come out of a culture in a lab.