Vincent Racaniello is a professor of virology.
Yeah, that's a virology point of view all right. That something has to have a proven biological mechanism before it can be taken as fact, or even considered as a risk. That's bad public policy though. With his reasoning there would have been no reason to increase restrictions in the UK in Dec/Jan, but in fact the restrictions were extremely necessary and the variant caused tens of thousands of extra deaths.
Also the claims about variants being "more infectious" are - when you dig in - hopelessly confounded by seasonal effects that many epidemiological papers were at that time still ignoring.
For your seasonal effect explanation to make any sense, the effect would have to have only applied to Alpha but not to baseline Covid at the same time. And then it's not a seasonal effect, is it? It's an actual difference in the behavior of the two variants. The same goes for any other similar confounder that you try to manufacture.
Is there any evidence besides an appeal to authority?
My mother at 14 after a car accident was considered as lost cause and by opinion of expert she should be dead, but survived only because her relative with much less medical expertise believed in second opinion and got her in different hospital. Sometimes, these stupid parroted ideas about expert opinions can only be proven wrong by personal experience only. But quite many people do not learn from their own mistakes, so, meh - there is no cure for stupid people, who can't think by themselves.
PS Every covid mutation so far has put scientists on alert...
Is that the case here?
There’s an overlap with hard left and a few other niche political views as well. Though with less victimhood and more consistency at times.
Personally, I care very little for appeal to authority myself. The bias among experts based on their political views is generally going to be very high.
To which you replied: "Vincent Racaniello is a professor of virology.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Racaniello"
This is an appeal to the authority of Vincent's position as a professor
When asked for evidence, the ONLY evidence that you provided, was that he IS an expert. Full stop.
GP
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Comment. My 2nd reply with link.
/I assign higher priors to subject matter experts until I have reason to believe otherwise.
I mean, it is a logical fallacy. An expert isn't right only because he's an expert, he's right only when the evidence supports his position. Do all experts only make conclusions based on evidence, or do other beliefs factor in? I think the answer is clear, hence the fallacy.
For any given scientific question, select two populations. One populaton is enriched in subject matter experts, while the other is selected at random. Have them make blind predictions about scientific facts. It is not fallacious to sdtate that the first group's predictions will have a higher posterior probability.
Source: Myself, an authority
Joking aside, you are just misrepresenting what the "appeal to authority" logical fallacy is. An "appeal to authority" is when one argues that "X is correct because <insert some expert> said it was". In really, X is either correct or incorrect, regardless of what any authority has said about it.
So yes, appeal to authority is absolutely a logical fallacy. Changing the definition of those words and then arguing that your definition isn't a fallacy is called a fallacy of equivocation. And yes, a fallacy of equivocation is also a logical fallacy.
That's not the only kind of argument that exists though, and we're pretty unlikely to be in that kind of argument on the internet talking about current events. When trying to tell from incomplete facts what's more likely to be true, listening to what an expert says is a pretty good start.
But yeah, I like the way you put this; we're just arguing on the internet about things which are too messy to have a true false dichotomy.
Logic is part of math, and logic is where logical fallacies come from.