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Comment by robhu | Hacker News Reader

Ewan Birney (deputy directory of EMBL European Molecular Biology Laboratory)'s Twitter is a really good source of first class scientific information on this.

You need to scroll back about 2 days to get the latest info (and he refers to the Twitter accounts of others in the field who can give more information).

His Twitter profile is @ https://twitter.com/ewanbirney/

(Ewan is awesome - he is also (co)director of EMBL-EBI European Bioinformatics Institute, and I had the honour (as a Computer Scientist) of working there for nine years)

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In the latest episode of This Week in Virology[1] five virologists discuss this issue.

Some points they made:

"It's a variant. It's not a strain. A strain is a virus with a new biological property. There have been no new properties ascribed to this isolate other than sequence differences, which is not enough to make a strain.. nor have we seen any other new strains of SARS-CoV-2 that anybody's demonstrated to be biologically different. None. It hasn't happened yet. I'm not saying it couldn't but it hasn't."

"Nobody's done any experiments to determine the effects of these changes on any property of the virus. Yet when a journalist calls up a scientist and say "What do you think?" and the scientist says "These could have an effect on virulence or transmission or antibody neutralization," somehow that gets translated in to "It's making the virus more virulent" and that's what's circulated and a dozen people this week said to me "What do you think about these mutations in the UK that make the virus more virulent, more transmissible, more resistant to neutralization by antibodies?" None of that has been shown, folks! It's speculation. There's no paper on any of this."

[1] - Starting at about 54 minutes in to episode 696: https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-696/

I hope we look back critically at mainstream media role in all aspects of covid analyse and reactions.

Commercial news media is so far from critical analysis that it's dangerous that we allow it anywhere near our decision making processes.

>Yet when a journalist calls up a scientist and say "What do you think?" and the scientist says "These could have an effect on virulence or transmission or antibody neutralization," somehow that gets translated in to "It's making the virus more virulent"

This has been an incredibly large issue for almost a year now and it's ridiculous. Journalists not understanding the way scientists speak was vaguely understandable ten months ago, but after a year straight of science being the number one news maker in the world it's obvious that the media is just use it as an excuse to scare-monger and increase their clicks.

Literally every day in the last few weeks I've had to explain to someone that vaccines will almost certainly have a profound impact on if people can transmit the virus because the news articles keep taking the "We don't have data yet on how it impacts transmission" and reporting that as the worst case scenario, when in all likelihood it will profoundly diminish people's ability to transmit the virus.

They go on to say that in this case it's probably the opposite, scientists calling up journalists. Which seems relevant given the OP in this thread linking to a scientist making a number of statements based on unproven hypotheses.

Seems as though it would go both ways.

Scientists have career-advancing reasons to have their opinions and research--whether confirmed by evidence and peer reviewed or not--distributed by the media. And the media has incentive to amplify concerning or controversial information.

What's tragic is that these hypotheses or conjectures are being used to make public policy decisions that affect millions or billions of people. And it seems that public servants and officials lack the scientific aptitude or inclination to truly understand how solid the data and conclusions are before acting on them. Or, perhaps more cynically, the officials know the conjecture is unverified but--being accountable to a public who will likely not read beyond the headlines and who will believe any article that starts with "Scientists find ..."--are forced to take action purely to hold the appearance of doing something.

Regardless of the directionality, I agree with the parent that 2020 is demonstrating serious flaws in the relationships between the scientific community, journalism, public policy makers, and the public.

Yes I agree completely. The recent TWiV has some great discussion on this between this new variant and that ridiculous "sars-cov-2 is reverse transcribing into the human genome" preprint. The scientific publication process and science journalism has always been somewhat broken it just rarely had serious consequences, now it's another broken system the pandemic is shining a light on.

I think the media has a real problem with reporting uncertainty. What's interesting is that there was a collective effort not to jump to conclusions and be careful when reporting on the presidential election. They showed they're capable of restraint when they think it's warranted, but with the pandemic they can't help but reach for the "Because of [unproven report] [consequence] is very likely" formula.

>Scientists have career-advancing reasons to have their opinions and research--whether confirmed by evidence and peer reviewed or not--distributed by the media.

Couldn't agree with this more. The number of ill-conceived pre-print "studies" I've seen get released this year is disappointing. Tons of studies with either a tiny sample size and questionable methods (medicines given very late in the progression of the disease, control groups whose demographics don't remotely match the test group, etc.). And of course those studies get reported on with no indication they were poorly done.

Well we’re about 10 months into this and most news outlets won’t even admit that there’s natural immunity, even though with 10s of millions of cases we have maybe a dozen of cases worldwide of reinfection.

I think the fundamental issue is that the public health measures break down once everyone doesn’t have to follow them. So either you refuse to admit that there’s no reason for a recovered COVID patient to wear a mask, or quarantine after close contact with a new case, etc.

Or else, if you admit that exemption, you either basically can’t enforce the rules anymore, or you need to track everyone who was infected and provide verifiable “passports” which is a step toward a dystopian future we should not allow.

I think in the end it’s easier to deny that there is true natural or vaccinated immunity than to deal with this conundrum head-on. However, at some point the admission must come, I can only hope in the April/May timeframe once vaccination is more widespread.

This does not appear to be true at all.

Newspapers are very willing to admit natural immunity. But scientists point out they don't know how effective it is, and/or how long lasting it is.

It's very clear newspapers have been way to casual with admitting natural immunity.

If you want some fairly clear evidence of this, if you were gonna ask a 1000 people whether they were immune if they got the virus and recovered from it, I suspect 999 of them would say yes. And you wouldnt get those numbers if newspapers were stating the opposite.

What the rest of your comment ignores is that we actually don't know whether people who are immune, can nevertheless transmit the disease. Furthermore, false positives do exist.

In fact, even people who are vaccinated will be advised to wear masks, because we do not know whether the vaccine prevents spread, or if it only protects the vaccinated. The Pfizer and Moderna trials did not factor this in their testing at all. I am not sure about the AstraZeneca one, but their trials have had a lot of issues anyways. And no other vaccine's trials have been completed yet.

E.g: A NYTimes article comparing natural immunity vs a vaccine from 2 weeks ago. Note the concept of natural immunity is considered a given, and is not even questioned (and it includes the statement, for example, "Natural immunity from the coronavirus is fortunately quite strong"):

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/05/health/covid-natural-immu...

> If you want some fairly clear evidence of this, if you were gonna ask a 1000 people whether they were immune if they got the virus and recovered from it, I suspect 999 of them would say yes.

I don't think this is close to true. For example when Rand Paul claimed he had immunity after recovering from Covid, liberals I'm in casual contact with were jumping up and down screaming "he's not immune! he's not immune!" Of the maybe 10 people I know of who've had Covid and recovered, 2 are still actively worried and living in terror that they will get it again.

My anecdotal evidence is that most people I talk to believe that reinfection is possible or even likely, as "shown by the news"

> Journalists not understanding

Journalists don't understand anything about the topics on which they write, but they regard themselves as paragons of virtue and arbiters of Truth with a capital T.

Trump is a garbage president but the one thing he got right was identifying the fourth estate as the enemy of the people. They were Enemies in March when they told everyone it was just the Flu, and NOT to wear masks, and they are are Enemies now when they whip the public into hysterics.

Nor is this anything new with Fox News, or CNN, or even with William Randolph Hearst, as some may claim. They have been the Enemy since time immemorial and they always will be.

Rosebud, indeed.

> Journalists don't understand anything about the topics on which they write, but they regard themselves as paragons of virtue and arbiters of Truth with a capital T.

This assertion makes no sense at all. Journalists aren't expected to create their content from thin air. They are expected to talk with primary sources, ask them questions, gather the answers and information, and report on that to the public.

> Trump is a garbage president but the one thing he got right was identifying the fourth estate as the enemy of the people.

Oh give me a break. The only thing Trump did was come up with a populist angle to sell it to gullible idiots in the form of conspiracy theories. It makes absolutely no difference whether anything resembling Trump's conspiracy theories have a bearing in reality or not because as his term demonstrated he did rigorously zero to address, let alone fix, any of his pet conspiracy theories. He used them as a mariachi's guitar, just popping it out of the case whenever he felt he needed to prop up support from his base and back in the box it went when he felt things went his way.

I mean, just look at the way he boasted about voting by mail and afterwards he proceeded to fabricate all sorts of bullshit to discredit mail-id votes.

I swear to gid during the Bush era all the 'liberal' newspapers and people on reddit claimed the voting machines are rigged. Now it's the opposite. It's a never ending bullshit from you.

I'm sorry to burst your childish "but he started it" bubble, but I am not a US citizen nor have I ever set foot in the US. So please direct your childish ad hominem attacks and general finger wagging elsewhere, and meanwhile do some introspection.

>This has been an incredibly large issue for almost a year now and it's ridiculous. Journalists not understanding the way scientists speak was vaguely understandable ten months ago, but after a year straight of science being the number one news maker in the world it's obvious that the media is just use it as an excuse to scare-monger and increase their clicks.

Not understanding or not wanting to understand? It's become fully mainstream to interpret the most scary or salacious or intriguing angle. I used to love the BBC and NYT but they are right up there with some of the worst, when it comes to the narratives and forced angles.

“It is hard for a person to understand something when their income depends on not understanding it”(upton Sinclair) explains too much of the modern world, unfortunately.

I realize that this is probably an unpopular opinion among techies but I really wish people would post information on a website and then link to it from Twitter. At the very least, double post it. I don't use Twitter and actively block it and Facebook's various websites from my router and VPN. Additionally, reading long threads on Twitter or back and forth replies for a non-regular Twitter user is taxing.

https://threadreaderapp.com/ is a popular choice that allows you to combine a tweet thread into a single page.

Direct link to the thread where he explains why the evidence, although not conclusive, strongly supports a higher infectivity of the new variant: https://mobile.twitter.com/jcbarret/status/13407169016101724...

Are there any non-twitter sources available? I can't access that website.

Also, I doubt twitter is the place where that information should live long-term anyway.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1340716901610172416.html

I did see him mention on twitter the other day that he was going to be on a BBC segment talking about this, so there could be video archives on that front

Try nitter, it's a fast alternative to reading Twitter content on Twitter itself. I modified the link above for you:

https://nitter.net/jcbarret/status/1340716901610172416

Visiting Hacker News with a text-mode browser (Links2, in this case) is so liberating! Twitter says that my browser is not supported (unsurprisingly enough).

Well, I think I'll have to adapt to ditch a website that needs a shit-ton of JS to serve me a few KibiBytes of content.

This is a perfect example of mixing science and opinion, and we should be scolding "scientists" who do this without clarifying which is which, not lionizing them.

The only definitively factual statement he makes is in the first tweet:

"One of the key questions about the new variant (B.1.1.7) is whether there is conclusive evidence that it is more transmissible. I don't think we are absolutely certain yet"

Everything else is speculation. He says that founder effect is not likely because the virus is spreading widely, nationwide: this is a hypothesis, not a statement of fact. He says that there are reasons to believe that the mutations are associated with structural regions known to be important to transmission: this is a hypothesis, not a statement of fact.

He then says that because of these two unproven hypotheses (which he implicitly believes), one should "change your priors" on how likely it is that this strain is selectively advantaged. Certainly, one can "change their priors" based on personal opinion, but that doesn't mean that other informed scientists don't have different opinions.

What this guy is doing is citing the (limited, non-definitive) evidence that we know, and then saying he has an opinion about what it all means. That doesn't make it factual.

Without well-controlled cell-culture or animal studies that show that this strain is out-competing other strains in vivo, we don't have solid evidence either way. Trying to predict the organism-level impact of point mutations is a fun parlor game, but no more or less definitive than asking a sports fan which team is going to win on Sunday.

I don't wish to veer into ad hominem arguments, but it is worth noting that the UK government must be very relieved to be able to associate the new lockdown rules with the new strain of the virus.

By pointing to an unpredictable external factor they can justify the apparent U-turn in their policy, while also not having to point the finger at any potential voters who may not have been following the rules well enough.

Whether the government's political needs have an effect on how scientists interpret or represent their findings is something I only have a hypothesis about.

On TWiV they call it a SWAG, scientific wild ass guess

You could spend ten minutes debating whether the growing bright light and rising Doppler sound exactly matches the expected profile of an oncoming train.. or you could just get off the tracks. Here absolute fact is only clear when the effect is so strong it's too late.

> Here absolute fact is only clear when the effect is so strong it's too late.

This! I strongly agree that one should not mix up scientific hard knowledge with hypotheses, statements of likelihood, educated guesses and so on.

However, I do not agree at all with the demand that you always need to be 100% sure to act decisively on something important. That is just not how life works!

It does not work like that in the small. If you are a parent and you smell smoke, and your children are playing upstairs, there is no requirement that you know with certainty there is a fire before you get your kids out of the house. You get them out.

If you are a bus driver packed full with people chopping a long a foggy motorway in the morning, and three hundred meters ahead appears something which looks like an overthrown heavy truck, you do not need to be 100& certain to hit the brakes. You brake.

If you are captain of a frigate in heavy weather and with serious navigation difficulties, and ahead appears something which looks damn likely like a rock or a VLCC, you do not need absolute certainty to change course. You just change.

And in fact we demand the same from industrial and military leaders all the time. It is even one defining element of leadership to act both wisely and decidedly under uncertain conditions.

And now, we go and demand that the evidence we get from scientists has 100% certainty before we act. That's wrong. It is not intelligent behaviour because a lot of things will have irreversible consequences before we have certainty about the situation.

(And interestingly, we have seen exactly the same pattern on the topic of climate change.)

The problem is, there is always someone willing to make extreme arguments to convince people that this is the exceptional circumstance where evidence doesn't matter, and that we all need to do something urgent and panicky, now.

Usually, those people are wrong.

> Without well-controlled cell-culture or animal studies that show that this strain is out-competing other strains in vivo, we don't have solid evidence either way.

Just a question:

If two weeks from now, it becomes evident that more than 90 % of all infections in the UK are with the new variant, would you change your opinion?

There is also this comment by Eric Feigl-Ding:

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1340913688992165888

> "14) “In the lab, Gupta’s group found that virus carrying the two mutations was less susceptible to convalescent plasma from several donors than the wildtype (common strain) virus. That suggests it can evade antibodies targeting the wildtype virus”!!"

Could that mean that the "herd immunity strategy" by letting relatively healthy people being infected by the virus might fail utterly because the immunity they acquire does not help very much against the new variant?

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