[HN Gopher] Scientists who signed Lancet letter about origins of...
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Scientists who signed Lancet letter about origins of Covid-19, have
2nd thoughts
Author : Flatcircle
Score : 32 points
Date : 2021-06-25 14:55 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| dzonga wrote:
| Once you've a few people in control of who can be heard, you're
| back to serfdom days. The internet was supposed to bring a voice
| to everyone, now there's massive gatekeepers at a scale never
| known to man. Anyone can be cancelled, only FB, Twitter n Google
| know what the 'truth' is. End of day it's the equivalent of CCP,
| which people in the west dread so much. Orwell, would be having
| nightmares right now.
| jjeaff wrote:
| A lot of people have tried to ascribe the reluctance of many
| scientists to admit the possibility of a lab leak to some
| conspiracy from the top or even political leanings. But it seems
| more likely to me that many scientists in the field, especially
| those that work specifically with gain of function, are going to
| be reluctant to blame a lab leak because they know that if it is
| found that covid was from a lab, then their funding is at risk.
| Not to mention those that may not have funding at risk but
| believe that gain of function research is important regardless of
| the risk.
| passivate wrote:
| >more likely to me that many scientists in the field,
| especially those that work specifically with gain of function,
| are going to be reluctant to blame a lab leak because they know
| that if it is found that covid was from a lab, then their
| funding is at risk.
|
| This would be easy to find out given that their names are
| public and so are the projects/papers/publications. What does
| the data indicate?
| mesozoic wrote:
| So they all signed a letter stating they were political actors
| and jokes of scientists and now have second thoughts. Too bad.
| somethingwhere wrote:
| This is exactly how science is supposed to work. People learn
| some new things and they update their opinions based on that
| new data. That's a good thing.
|
| The idea that people aren't allowed 'second thoughts' is
| probably the worst thing to happen to general discourse.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| These scientists didn't believe X, and later change their
| minds to believe Y based on new evidence--they believed X,
| _vocally smeared everyone who dared to believe Y as liars and
| cranks_ , and later changed their minds to believe Y based on
| new evidence.
|
| Updating opinions based on evidence is good. Insulting and
| slandering people because they have different opinions is
| bad.
| peytn wrote:
| What new things were learned here?
| FuckButtons wrote:
| The lab leak theory is nonsense and a distraction. If you compare
| where the mutations of sars-cov-2 are, relative to a wild type
| bat coronavirus, they are distributed randomly across the genome.
| If you were to genetically engineer a virus, those mutations
| would not be random, there would be a discrete chunk of edited
| base pairs that had been spliced in from somewhere else but that
| isn't present. It seems unlikely that in this day and age a
| virology lab would be doing gain of function experiments without
| crispr since it's far easier than the alternative.
| passivate wrote:
| > If you compare where the mutations of sars-cov-2 are,
| relative to a wild type bat coronavirus,
|
| How many distinct samples do we have of the wild-type variants
| from that region?
| tyleo wrote:
| Genetic engineering is not the only way there could have been a
| lab leak. Did you read the whole post? It makes a different
| claim.
| wrycoder wrote:
| They are not. They are predominately in the part of the
| sequence that codes for the spike proteins.
|
| There are other evolutionary mutations spread across the
| genome, but they are minor by comparison.
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(page generated 2021-06-25 23:02 UTC)