The Reemergent 1977 H1N1 Strain and the Gain-of-Function Debate (2015)
journals.asm.org
journals.asm.org
All of this focus on the point of origin is misplaced. We know that there will be new viruses. What matters is how we respond to them. In this case the US response was completely botched. This is in part because the team that had been in place to deal with emerging virus threats was disbanded and also in part because the CDC was forced to focus on making the president look good instead of dealing with the virus. What is ultimately being argued here is that instead of being prepared and responding reasonably all we have to do is control research and nothing like this will happen. Unfortunately, this is obviously false.
e.g. if one ignores the GoF research and it therefore increases the likelihood of continued research, does that also increase risk of periodic outbreaks akin to this pandemic and a higher frequency than natural outbreaks from animal>human?
We need to have a better plan for dealing with future viruses but we should also look to make what changes we can to reduce the number of new viruses that jump to humans in the first place.
Ebola - not as contagious. Perhaps AIDS was the closest.
still giving out medical advice I see! ;)
We are fortunate that most children are at minimal risk from COVID-19 death. The CDC estimated the infection fatality rate for the 0-17 age group at about 0.001%. Most of those who died had a serious underlying condition such as obesity, diabetes, asthma, cancer, or congenital heart disease.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
This is what 50 years of postmodernism and cultural relativism broughts us. "Why" doesn't matter, don't search beyond what the consensus is telling you.
As for dismissing "why for the sake of why" being the fault of cultural relativism... shrug to me it has the same smell.
"Why" ultimately doesn't matter because viruses can just spontaneously evolve in carrier animals, in a lab or by whatever other means causes a mutation where it is now infectious to us. People searching for the "why" are ultimately looking for blame when we should be looking ahead on how to stop the next one (and the current one).
People are going to die in traffic accidents whether i drive home drunk tonight or not, so it probably doesn't matter what I do, right?
Understanding why something happened is also a pretty important step in trying to prevent it from happening again. If you're having production incidents every day, "just get better at incident response" is probably not a very thorough solution.
We've instituted safeguards against car accidents (seatbelts, speed limits, harsh penalties for driving drunk, etc). What have we done for wide-spread, novel disease response?
Preventing pandemics _is_ the best way of responding to them. If we're going to have 10 big epidemies next century, doing whatever we can to make sure 3 don't happen at all is by far the best response to those 3.
So researching the sh*t out of the causes of this particular pandemic is likely to get us extremely good return of investment.
You're suggesting we put barriers in our minds as to what questions should be asked. No more open ended inquiry, no more search for truth. Truth should be a tool in the service of a goal, nothing more. Searching for it without a good reason is to be discouraged as a waste of effort.
This is not harmless. Beside being wrong, this kind of logic is one step away from the problem of who's deciding what are the worthy questions. Next step you have maufacturing consen... hey, wasn't a book with this name?
Yeah.
You might, in a different universe, argue that there are too many resources spent on investigating the origin on the pandemic. This is definitely not the case in our universe, where the investigation is laughably small. There are murder or missing person cases where there is more information available to the public than what we have now, and they affected 1 (one) victim. As for China's cooperation... I understand they have a different way of doing things, but it's kinda a global problem, so maybe we shouldn't be ok with doing the investigation their way, aka without any public involvement at all.
In both the US and the UK those plans were either ignored, or the teams disbanded.
Proper N95s age well.
Whos government? This is a global issue. It doesn't care about governments.
Only so much, and New Zealand is clearly an outlier.
Has their response to this been an A+? Without a doubt.
But I'd need some hard evidence this stance works across the globe. Everywhere from India to Brazil is going through this.
Which is why these pandemics are so dangerous. If this was slightly worse, New Zealand would succumb to it too, despite best efforts.
I'm seeing this in real time across the Internet as anyone who questions the FDA's (split) Friday decision against recommending boosters broadly is being shot down as "not following the science".
We won't be around to respond to them when the next engineered one is potentially much worse.
This is an enormously dangerous global issue, we need to address origins.
If the origin story implies that the vendor is dishonest, then don’t trust that same vendor to solve the problem.
COVID has been many times more damaging to the world than the bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If we're at the point where science is capable of creating such pathogens, then we have to also consider the fact that this technology can make its way into the hands of bad actors.
That's a very different state of affairs than saying we need to be ready for a pandemic of natural origin which may occur every 100 years or so.
The problem here is that countries can wrap this research under the banner of "natsec" and then there can be no further discussion. I see no way around that outside of crossing our collective fingers.
> COVID has been many times more damaging to the world than the bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Precisely. And this can be considered the "easy" version compared to what could potentially be created.
It's a nightmare scenario, and it's far more dangerous than nuclear weapons (unless that resulted in the end of civilization / "mutually assured destruction").
It could literally wipe out the planet before we have time to respond to it. Similar in that regard I suppose.
> we have to also consider the fact that this technology can make its way into the hands of bad actors
Those would have to be some really, really bad actors if they are willing to take out the entire planet, crossing all ideological and political boundaries.
I'm sure smarter minds than me are keeping an eye on this.
It should not need saying that if millions of deaths are the result of a simple, easily avoidable mistake (or gross negligence) then that is kind of a big deal. The Titanic led to better lifeboat regulations. We need to understand our role in the origin of this disease even if only so that we can learn our lesson, whatever that may be.
The distinction between gain of function research, and creating lab made chimeric viruses is purely semantic. If you were doing gain of function research, you'd spend most of your time creating chimeric viruses. The argument is that "not all chimeric virus experiments are gain of function research, because you might be conducting those experiments for reasons other than making the virus more harmful".
It's just a big semantic contrivance, and the only reason this distinction was every made in the first place is because a certain public figure claimed numerous times that the NIH had never funded gain of function research in Wuhan, only for that later to turn out to be a lie, with the excuse being "oh yeah, but that wasn't _real_ gain of function research".
The research in Wuhan involved sequencing genomes from cornoaviruses found in bat guano, blood and saliva, mixing different sequences together, and using that to create brand new chimera viruses that could be cultured in a lab. Then testing the new viruses they'd created to see if they could infect human tissue, and perform other experiments that were motivated ultimately by a goal of creating a broad spectrum coronavirus vaccine.
None of this is part of a disputed conspiracy theory, you can read about it here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...
If you were attempting to create a viral bioweapon, this is exactly the sort of research you'd do. Mixing parts of different viruses together, and seeing what the new viruses did. The distinction here entirely comes down to the motives of the research. The reason the NIH funded this research to take place in China, is because those research practices had been prohibited in the US as the risks involved were seen as poorly understood. The argument that "that's not gain of function research because..." is just a contrivance of a poorly defined piece of jargon.
That being said, Fauci lead the charge on the AIDS pandemic and this one ...
That is unconstitutional in the US and therefore never even considered.
The priority on individual liberty didn't get in the way then. Quarantines and lockdowns and mask requirements were imposed and enforced. They even had vaccine or inoculation mandates for some of them.
Heck, arguably an inoculation mandate played an important role in the successful creation of the US. 90% of the loses among the Continental regulars were due to disease with small pox being the most serious.
Inoculation was widespread in Europe and most of the British army was immune, giving them a large advantage. People were still afraid of the risks of inoculation in the colonies and in 1776 the Continental Congress issues a proclamation prohibiting army surgeons from inoculating.
In early 1777 George Washington informed the Continental Congress that he was going to mandate inoculation and told his commanding officers to do so. They inoculated the ~3/4 of the army that had not already had smallpox and all new recruits.
Smallpox continued to rage throughout the war, but no longer in the Continental army. From that point on not a single Continental regiment was incapacitated by smallpox.
On the British side the actual British soldiers were also immune to smallpox, but not so the slaves who had chosen to fight for the British in exchange for freedom or the Native Americans who sided with the British. Those groups were devastated by smallpox.
I saw this claim when the border was closed. But perhaps I missed other incidence? Can you cite a few?
It’s worth talking about better versus worse covid response, but that’s missing the forest for the trees. Most of the G7 didn’t do that much better: from Germany to Italy, and including the US, they’re all in the 1,200 to 2,200 deaths per million people range. Countries like Australia that did a little better, down at 700, are still having to have military-enforced lockdowns 18 months into the pandemic.
Is it really possible that none of these advanced economies were adequately prepared? The next time this hits, are we really going to try this massively expensive lockdown approach again? That seems like madness to me.
Australia has had less than 1,200 deaths in total. That's 48 per million.
Edit: NZ has only had 27 deaths in total. Only 5.4 per million.
Norway, Finland, Denmark, even Cuba, a poor country with 3x the population density of the US is significantly below 700.
Australia stands at 45, not 700, BTW.
Turns out that Sweden and Germany have similar results:
https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/why-does-no-one-ever-talk-abou...
I don't think the overall #people/surface area of the country is something meaningful to compare.
I hypothesize that comparing Sweden and Germany is about the same as comparing Stockholm to an average of German cities. I don't have the German and Swedish skills to find and compare the data though
That’s exactly the point. In Norway and Sweden, unlike Germany, there is a huge amount of empty land. For this reason it doesn’t make sense at all to compare Sweden with Germany when you have a far, far better comparison in the nearby country.
So exactly like Norway, were almost all people live around Oslo/Bergen
Covid is a long term issue. It is fairly pointless to compare response outcome for the first year and a half of an extremely contagious mutating endemic virus. Look at a 10 year horizon, possibly longer. Sweden is middle of the pack within Europe if we don't cherrypick, and that outcome could possibly be driven by chance more than anything else.
Speaking of other costs, it is really pathetic what we do to children. At my kid elementary school they detected two kids with covid. No word of severity of symptoms, if any symptoms whatsoever. As a result, the entire grade was sent home packing for weeks, after a whole two weeks of in-person instruction. This when kids have about the same risk for severe covid as for severe flu, and teachers have one of the lowest covid risk of all occupations (!).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/388539/age-structure-in-...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/270000/age-distribution-...
Out of the big ones, Germany is at 1,200 and the US is at 2,000. What’s the effect of response type when you account for the scale of obesity in the US versus Germany?
US: 41,587,821 Cases; 666,702 Deaths; 328.2M people. ~2,000 deaths per million.
Germany: 4,127,158 Cases; 92,906 Deaths; 83.13M people. ~1,100 deaths per million.
Australia: 85,629 Cases; 1,162 Deaths; 25.36M people. ~45 deaths per million.
While the difference between the first two is significant, one of these is really not like the others, and I'm still glad to live in a country that values human life. Also getting pretty sick of ignorant muppets talking about "military-enforced lockdown" here - had a good laugh about that with mates this afternoon over beers in the park this afternoon.
I don't think that is being argued at all. The article ends "it remains likely that to this date, there has been no real-world example of a laboratory accident that has led to a global epidemic" which suggests the opposite.
If you plot per capita mortality for France and Sweden, they are almost identical, swapping places five times so far. Currently Sweden is slightly lower, but really they're about the same. France and Sweden have policies at the opposite ends of the spectrum. If the differences between those two countries are not enough to make a measurable difference in mortality, then none of the policies used in western countries are making a significant difference one way or the other.
South Korea is essentially an Island, since it has been completely shut off from NK for decades.
Especially as more of the heavy hit nations get it under control with vaccines, unless full isolation is the plan for the other nations, I'm not seeing an end game.
I'd say something about vaccines as well but I don't want to trigger the engineer epidemiologist demographic they are very fragile. But, you know, Israel (not an island nation even).
About the only pattern that has consistently played out, is nations getting cocky and then getting smashed.
And this doesn't address the end game. Vaccines are about the only route that makes sense. The rest seems to be akin to thinking condoms alone could solve STDs. They definitely help. They aren't getting is to the end, though.
That is, I did not intend my "maybe" to cover the question of if condoms can do what they are designed to do. I meant that I wasn't aware of any studies showing how effective they are as a policy.
And again, to your point, there are plenty of places where these are taken off the table as a policy, out of some misguided sense of propriety for the population. Please do not take my point as one that is against the use.
Though, again, my question is of how much it helps. I cede and expect that it helps. Some or a lot, though? And, in either case, what gets it to contained?
And I fully acknowledge that my opening "maybe" wasn't as clear on that as it could have been. My intent was to push back on forgone conclusions without hard data.
The problem is that various countries' (USA in particular) political institutions are in crises and facing collapse.
So instead, the pattern instead, is embrace authoritarian politics and do what's dictated to you unquestioningly.
What worked in China was welding people into their houses, but that's not going to work of most people don't have metal doors
And you don't even have to actually weld them in there all you need to do is put ankle monitors on them.
You can imagine a situation where all countries have a different, fixed propensity to Covid, and adjust their policy until they hit some universal level of containment. You’ll then see a world with very different policies but identical outcomes.
I think it is hard to disentangle those two in general.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1113834/cumulative-coron...
I’d like a per capita chart but I can’t find one. Norway has about half the population of Sweden and has 18x less Covid deaths though. Maybe France and Sweden are too different to compare directly?
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...
Norway and Sweden seem a much better comparison and they had pretty much opposite responses to Covid.
“Norway closed educational institutions, and banned sports and cultural activities; Sweden kept most institutions and training facilities open.”
To me this implies Covid lockdowns etc may have caused a ~ten-fold reduction in per capita death rate.
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths?country=USA~GBR~CAN~...
Unless it has changed you were counted as a covid death in Sweden if you died in a car accident and happened to have covid. Norway would count you as a car accident death in their statistics.
As far as I can tell, there are no grounds for claiming that the response to covid was botched. Botched compared to what? Also, when people talk like this, they always end up saying that we should respond to novel viruses by locking everything down right away, imposing quarantines, stopping flights, and so on.
I see two problems with that. First, covid was already spreading globally when we became aware of it. And second, we are unable to tell if a novel virus will turn into a pandemic (scientists disagreed about SARS, MERS, and covid on this count). Adopting a policy that minimizes risks will be incredibly costly and often wasteful.
To the extent that we can prepare for novel viruses, it seems to me that we should focus on developing fast and efficient machinery for creating and mass-producing vaccines. We did quite well at this (and so I don't think our response to covid was botched) but we could clearly do better. Imagine if, after isolating a virus in a lab, it took 3 months to create a vaccine and begin mass production. That's what we should aim for.
https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...
However as time went on, a scenario emerged that made the origin story important - it’s about the ethics and integrity of the system.
If the people and institutions at the origin lack integrity, and they are the same things we depend on for the solutions brought forward - then the origin story matters a lot.
If you have a vendor that is good, and they make a mistake - you can trust them to fix it.
If you have a dishonest vendor, then the last thing you should do is trust them to fix a problem they created.
<this isn’t about the specifics - it’s about a scenario where the origin of a problem is directly relevant to solving a problem>
It also explains how a lot of the guidance looks like projection - things they wish they’d been doing themselves ahead of the virus.
I think it matters quite a lot, but not for scientific reasons.
If the point of origin is sloppy lab practice (maybe it's impossible to not be sloppy) and everyone lied about it, I want to know everything. Trust is a hard thing to re-gain but I really want to know where we all stand. Realistic calibration of your position vs. power centers is always a good thing.
Personally I don't think responses were particularly botched, although it's tempting to think so for other political reasons. It's likely more a lack of real knowledge by anyone on what really makes for good public policy and the inability to do what it takes in any case.
I agree but that trust was never there. It has always been the case that the public cannot be trusted with information or full information that might cause any panic not because of the panic behavior itself but due to panic behaviors destabilizing markets. The former president had explicit selfish reasons for the direction but he also used it as a political tool attempting to use the panic in his favor and limit its influence: But both types of behavior are inappropriate and counterproductive to fighting a pandemic or any public emergency
It largely was but misplaced. Walter Cronkite was never truthful, the Joint Chiefs of Staff rarely had your interest in mind. Public policy has always been people scrabbling for status while feigning morality.
Your confrontational attitude and make believe reasons, dismisses you from any and all future discussions on this matter. You have demonstrated that your are unfit to comment. Please refrain from posting.
Frankly, I find the attitude that we should not pay considerable attention to the possibility that we created and lost control of this virus to be worse than the event itself, as it primes us for further catastrophes of the same sort.
The response to this virus having been manufactured and released should be as severe as our response to a nuclear weapon, or perhaps even more so.
Would you take a job that had that requirement? Want a few days off? 2 week quarantine. Would investors be ok with this? Want to pay expensive PHD for vacation plus quarantine time (which could be days off x 10 working days every time). The problem is that the workers in the lab are just as human, have the same needs for relationships and contact, and some have enterprises outside of their day job. Want to speak at a conference? 2 week quarantine...
Some things aren't for sale. I'm not going to take a job that makes it impossible to see my family on short notice at any price.
I don't have to research gain of functionality in virus. I can chose to research something else. Yes, some people are willing to do extreme things in pursuit of their careers, but most people, even highly educated people have things they value more than their job.
Literally addressed in the very next part of that same sentence you quoted:
> build places for their family to stay if they desired
Cool for you though if you aren’t for sale. There are many people in this world with quite varied interests and motivations. I wouldn’t do it either in my current position in life, but might have considered it when I was younger.
There is an oversupply of scientists who would do anything to work in their fields. One could also question if this sort of research has ever produced anything valuable (I'm not in the field, genuine question).
I'm pretty sure that's not true, and assumes that people will rationally accept a bad deal. Personal experience is that the better educated a worker is, the higher their expectations are for how they are treated. Example: tenured faculty at a college.
Researchers are going to want a city with libraries, hospitals, manufacturing, restaurants, etc.
I've found that going too partisan on HN ends in down votes.
I'd probably agree with some of the politics they're pushing but I'd avoid bringing that discussion here. It doesn't fit with the rules here and I think the rules here are responsible for one of the friendliest environments online.
American Reddit seems, on average, quite a lot more left leaning than HN. I guess programmers are too individualist to be attracted to Marxism en masse. Also, highly paid employees tend to feel the brunt of the current Western taxation policy, because they have fewer loopholes to use and they tend to live in high CoL areas at the same time.
However, Marxism is a global project. In India for instance Marxists are mercenaries for hire. The network built by the soviets and later coopted by the Americans have their tentacles deep in the English press and universities.
So they do control school textbooks and the minds of the English educated urban kids.
But sooner or later kids figure out this propaganda. And anyway social "sciences" is not what the bright kids aspire to learn.
So once you are on target or even a mild comment that challenges their ideology gets heavily down voted.
We see the long terms effects of this behavior in the real world, not just individuals but institutions stay away from questioning certain ideologies as a norm.
If someone is willing to stop doing that they can email the mods and often get another chance. Dang even use to point it out while banning someone.
>new viruses increased viral load in lung tissues up to 10,000 fold
https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1436301383163129871
You can debate whether that counts as gain of function research - the virus definitely gained as a result of the experiment but you can argue the experimenters didn't know that was going to happen. It still remains risky research whether the researchers deliberately made a more infectious virus or said oops we've accidentally made a more infectious virus.
> It is thought to have killed 50 million people, and yet scientists have brought it back to life. In this issue of Nature, scientists publish an analysis of the full genome sequence of the 1918 human influenza virus … Some scientists have already hailed the work as giving unprecedented insight into the virus. Working out how it arose and why it was so deadly could help experts to spot the next pandemic strain and to design appropriate drugs and vaccines in time, they say. But others have raised concerns that the dangers of resurrecting the virus are just too great. One biosecurity expert told Nature that the risk that the recreated strain might escape is so high, it is almost a certainty.
Photos: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/reconstruction-19...
Only two years later, a version was created in a lab, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/0...
> "We know that the virus itself is different, and we know that the host response is different," said Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin who headed the international research team. "The virus is really a bad actor," said Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The virulence of the 1918 virus has always been a mystery.
> ..The experiment was done in a Canadian biosafety Level 4 lab, where researchers work in the equivalent of space suits. Kawaoka's team does not have permission to experiment with the virus in the United States. In the new experiment, Darwyn Kobasa, a scientist in a Canadian government microbiology lab in Winnipeg, Manitoba, synthesized the 1918 virus from scratch and infected seven macaque monkeys with it.
> ..The monkeys infected with the 1918 virus were so sick within eight days that they had to be euthanized. "Profuse watery and bloody liquid" filled 60 to 90 percent of the their lung tissue, "greatly reducing lung function," the researchers reported ... The animals infected with the 1918 virus produced less interferon, a type of cytokine that suppresses virus growth by limiting the microbe's ability to infect new cells. The virus continued to replicate and spread, reaching in one case 5,000 times the levels seen in the tissue of the monkeys infected with the modern virus. The ability to selectively limit interferon production is seen in other microbes, including respiratory syncytial virus, Ebola virus and parainfluenza virus, Fauci said.
> In response to the virus's unchecked growth, the monkeys' immune systems produced large amounts of inflammatory substances aimed at killing it and the cells already infected. That ultimately did lethal damage to the lungs of the animals.
That lethality was before Gain-of-Function research, which followed a few years thereafter :(
Another worrying thing is the incentives for the individual scientists are different for those to the world. If they discover something interesting about the 1918 virus, maybe a paper in nature, tenure. If there's a 1/100000 of screwing up and killing millions then 99,999 times out of 100,000 they are on to a winner. But for humanity as a whole it's an iffy bet. (Article on that stuff https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/562003-an-economists-...)
[0] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-chinese-pla...
Edit: changed wording to say "infiltrated by" instead of "had most research taken by" as per discussion below
The linked article does not support your assertion that “most” research was shared/taken.
The issue, of course, is whether this is also cover for development of nation-state biological warfare programs, as this was a tactic used in the past to collect deadly viruses and bacteria by the Soviet, American, British and Japanese biological weapons programs, at least. Secrecy only encourages this kind of insanity, too.
The extent of this leak also appears to be under a "Public Health Gag Order", presumably to hide the ineptitude of Canadian security procedures and to avoid public panic at how extensive this leak is. [0]
I only heard about this story after the public health official responsible for the whole thing refused to appear before the Canadian government and give details on what happened. [1]
[0] https://www.visiontimes.com/2021/09/17/canada-bsl4-virology-...
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-president-o...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-lifts-morator...
You can read about alternative hypotheses on the talk page here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:1977_Russian_flu
To me this points out that every study on a pandemic-possible virus should have an extremely high bar to meet in terms of both safety and reason for performing the study in the first place. Effectively the only reason that is needed now to perform such research is that you want to publish a paper. The linked paper points out one possible source of the flu pandemic: vaccine development. This may have been a worthy enough cause but greater safeguards are needed. We should take the money we spend on GoF research and spend it on ensuring better safeguards for existing research.
GoF research has an explicit goal is to make a virus more human transmissible: if it is too successful, you end up with the possibility of a pandemic. We now have a COVID pandemic that might have been caused by GoF research. On the flip side we can't show much benefit from this kind of research.
In many ways GoF seems to bee like a site reliability team's "dynamite monkey Friday" where they try to break things in staging in unpredictable ways... hoping whatever they do to our staging environment doesn't leak to production. Fortunately, our app is not likey to cause bodily harm to anyone and not likely to cause a pandemic.
However, there's a huge risk - concentrating all these viruses in one place means accidents can result in infection of lab workers or other releases. There are many examples, such as the 1978 smallpox case in Birmingham:
"It turned out that the building that Parker worked in also contained a research laboratory, one of a handful where smallpox was studied by scientists who were trying to contribute to the eradication effort. Some papers reported that the lab was badly mismanaged, with important precautions ignored because of haste. (The doctor who ran the lab died by suicide shortly after Parker was diagnosed.) Somehow, smallpox escaped the lab to infect an employee elsewhere in the building. Through sheer luck and a rapid response from health authorities, including a quarantine of more than 300 people, the deadly error didn’t turn into an outright pandemic." Vox Mar 2019 (pre-pandemic)
As fas as Sars-CoV-2, it's very plausible that it accidentally escaped from the Wuhan lab, which housed bats and mice infected with a whole variety of bat coronaviruses and which had a very active coronavirus research program. The lack of governmental transparency in the early days also helped the virus spread, i.e. an early quarantine was possible but was not implemented.
Probably the only real long-term fix will involve a lot more spending on public health infrastructure and vaccination globally. At present the virus is circulating in poorer communities around the world and new variants are likely to continue to be spawned as a result.
She's been the leading journalist since early 2020 on corona.
NTD Media also ignored the global embargo coordinated by the CCP/Peter Daszak/Fauci.
She helped promote and mislead around claims to do with hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, mis-identifying chemical differences between human formulations and animal formulations, leading to hospital admissions. [1]
There's no conspiracy here - she's actively dangerous to people's health. More interested in promoting an alternative viewpoint than whether that viewpoint actually has merit.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/aug/04/sharri-markson...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/02/sydne...
Let's be clear about the fact that in 0% of any cases where speech was not directly illegal was censorship the right choice.
>> There's no conspiracy here - she's actively dangerous to people's health.
So is McDonald's every time they advertise and sell any of their garbage product. And yet we recognize that it is important that people make up their own minds than do 'what is right', because it is not our place to determine what is right for them.
In a debate about scientific facts, when you stop defending the content of a position and instead fall back to saying that it is not illegal to express that position, you've lost the debate.
As an example, the study proving that hydrocholoroquinine was useless for treating COVID was retracted by The Lancet. Turns out that the data was faked, and yet the paper still gets cited.
A good scientist doesn't hold any "scientific facts" as sacrosanct. Only hypothesis, theories, and evidence.
So, all you folks shrouding their polemic tripe under the mantle of Freedom and Liberty of Speech, please stop.
You claim Liberty to express whatever crosses you mind, but I want to claim my own right to “Passive” Freedom of Speech: the freedom to form my own ideas, settle into an opinion, build my own ethical compass, free from the manipulation, the doublespeak, the deceit of fake news, astroturf and pure induced mental fatigue on subjects that are important and demand careful and good faith reflection.
Get out of my mind, it’s my own rightful and exclusive property!
Pelman v. McDonald's [0] covered that in considerable detail.
Markson, has promoted information that is detrimental to health, as positive for health, and so is not afforded certain protections.
Part of the reason that the tort against McDonald's failed, is that McDonald's was not shown that they had a duty to warn the plaintiff.
However, it is established precedent, that someone in Markson's positions _does_ have a duty to warn their audience.
[0] https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/8852143/Benloulo...
But why does YT get to tut tut anyone? The only basic reason for it is that you fundamentally agree with YT's worldview and are OK with their dominance.
I'd ask for you to turn the tables around, YT censoring PoV you agree with. But we both know that is a ridiculous question; introspection by the hegemon usually is.
because it is a platform they own. I'm not arguing whether that is good or bad but if you run a site you are free to moderate it however you wish. Until YT, FB etc. are classified as public utilities or similar, you have no rights whatsoever to say what you want on someone else's platform.
It's a pickle to to balance all the higher order principles involved.
I would be very skeptical of any claims around Ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine in The Guardian, which is a very biased news source. Especially after the recent Rolling Stone mendacity regarding claims of toxicity in Oklahoma, which was a complete fabrication nonetheless amplified on the left media.
The other article you cite disapprovingly mentions the author was claiming "lab leak" back in May 2020. That would seem a mark in favor of her reporting, no?
Not unless said reporting at the time actually had evidence to support the claim. A reporter has a duty to report based on actual evidence.
She has repeated misinformation, without that evidence, an argument you just used to dismiss the entirety of the Guardian, for all time, on one subject matter. Should that not equally apply to this reporter, then?
I didn't dismiss the entirety of The Guardian for all time (straw-man, anyone?), I said I would be skeptical of anything they publish related to a contested narrative because they have shown repeated bias. What's wrong with that? I'm not telling you not to be skeptical of this journalist. It seems like you're really projecting your own beliefs here.
That is extremely easy to answer: She never presented any. Which is the entire point of everything I have said.
> I would be skeptical of anything they publish related to a contested narrative because they have shown repeated bias. What's wrong with that?
Nothing. It's the exact reason to not believe this journalist. As I have repeatedly pointed out.
I'm no scientist but I'm pretty sure that's not how that works.
Given the spread of risky research:
> At least 59 facilities, like Wuhan Institute, are planned or in operation across world https://www.ft.com/content/a0badd5d-4d88-4a3b-b019-61c6d8275...
I hope they regulate this stuff better.