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Statesman
 
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Post 06 Jun 2021, 10:54 am

rayjay
Ricky, that's precisely the point. What they publicly published is different than what their gut was telling them

Maybe you want to check the date of the email versus the date of the published paper.
The email was conjecture at the beginning before she have seriously investigated.
The published paper is after weeks of research. And she's putting her name on the line by publishing.
She obviously learned something over 8 weeks.


rayjay
Shame on you for not picking the side of a democratic government vis-à-vis a totalitarian one who wants to consume them. Do you really want Taiwan to suffer the fate of Hong Kong
?

I'm not picking sides. If Taiwan wants to continue purporting to be the legitimate government of all China, they aren't going to garner much support. And its a a major barrier to recognition of Taiwan as a nation as a result.
If China wants to keep claiming that Taiwan is a state of China - they will find this continues to make their participation in world affairs more difficult.
That is just fact Ray.
It would be sensible for Taiwan to renounce its claims on the rest of China, and begin to demand recognition as an independent nation.
It would be sensible for China to recognize Taiwan as a separate nation if it renounces claims to rule China.
I don't expect either to be sensible.
Hong Kong is a whole different matter.

YOu guys still seem to think an authoritarian regime behaves like an elected government?
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Post 06 Jun 2021, 10:59 am

freeman3
Wow. A researcher says he thinks the virus is bioengineered then says the opposite in published results. That's either group think...or something worse. Power distorts truth. And I think China has been using its power to deflect blame with regard to t


Or maybe he learned something between January and March? You know, by doing research?

You are very conspiratorial. Delusion distorts truth too.
feel they
There is no question that China wants to deflect blame over Covid. The problem is that they have to behave one way for their domestic audience...
And therefore they don't behave like an open nation.
Why is this so surprising?
The point is, just because they are behaving as they always do, doesn't mean that scientific evidence should be discounted based on idle conjecture and poor journalism.
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Post 06 Jun 2021, 12:51 pm

It's not poor journalism when they obtain an email contradicting what the researcher later publishes! It's not for them to explain it. You have a pre-determined bias and you just sift through whatever evidence supports your bias. And then when you dont like how things are going you start throwing around insults like "youre conspiratorial" or "poor journalism". I dont know how a researcher would explain how he saw evidence of bioengineering and later he totally changes his opinion. Let the researcher explain it. And see if it makes any sense. But there is nothing wrong with the journalism.

I like the way you make these total guesses that the researcher changed his mind after further investigation..there is no evidence of that. How do we know why the researcher did a 180 on their opinion? We dont know. Youre just guessing. It's now up to the researcher to explain.

There is no conspiracy being alleged. See, a conspiracy is something, I dont know, like China alleging that Covid came from the US. That's ludicrous. China uses money to create influence. You say things negative to China...you lose access to that money. Pretty simple stuff. Researchers know that. Theyre not dumb. It doesnt even have to be that self-interested. People tend to feel almost an obligation towards a benefactor. Gratitude. And of course I'm sure they even think they are not being influenced, that they would think that way regardless of the agenda China is pushing here...

I'm not sure what happened with this particular researcher. Hopefully, we will get an explanation.
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Post 06 Jun 2021, 1:30 pm

Ricky:
If Taiwan wants to continue purporting to be the legitimate government of all China, they aren't going to garner much support. And its a a major barrier to recognition of Taiwan as a nation as a result.


Now I understand. You get your news from the People's Daily. If you can get past The Great Firewall, check out Wikipedia. You will learn that Taiwan risks war with China if it were to declare its territory as not including mainland China.

In 1991, President Lee Teng-hui unofficially claimed that the government would no longer challenge the rule of the Communists in mainland China, the ROC government under Kuomintang (KMT) rule actively maintained that it was the sole legitimate government of China. The Courts in Taiwan have never accepted President Lee's statement, primarily due to the reason that the (now defunct) National Assembly never officially changed the acclaimed national borders. Notably, the People's Republic of China claims that changing the national borders would be "a precursor to Taiwan independence". The task of changing the national borders now requires a constitutional amendment passed by the Legislative Yuan and ratified by a majority of all eligible ROC voters, which the PRC has implied would constitute grounds for military attack. ...


The Additional Articles of the Constitution of the Republic of China have mentioned "Taiwan Province," and the now defunct National Assembly passed constitutional amendments that give the people of the "Free Area of the Republic of China", comprising the territories under its current jurisdiction, the sole right, until reunification, to exercise the sovereignty of the Republic through elections of the President and the entire Legislature as well as through elections to ratify amendments to the ROC constitution. Also, Chapter I, Article 2 of the ROC constitution states that "The sovereignty of the Republic of China shall reside in the whole body of citizens." This suggests that the constitution implicitly admits that the sovereignty of the ROC is limited to the areas that it controls even if there is no constitutional amendment that explicitly spells out the ROC's borders.

ROC President Lee Teng-hui proposed a two-state theory ... in which both the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China would acknowledge that they are two separate countries with a special diplomatic, cultural and historic relationship. This however drew an angry reaction from the PRC who believed that Lee was covertly supporting Taiwan independence.
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Post 07 Jun 2021, 8:25 am

freeman3
It's not poor journalism when they obtain an email contradicting what the researcher later publishes!


It is if they don't point out that after two months of research the scientist was persuaded by evidence to publish a different conclusion.

freeman3
You have a pre-determined bias and you just sift through whatever evidence supports your bias

I don't have a predetermined bias. All I'm telling you is that
1) there is no evidence, other than rumored circumstantial evidence, that there was a lab leak.
2) china's reluctance to cooperate is also not evidence that there was a lab leak. Its how they behave on every issue.

freeman3
I like the way you make these total guesses that the researcher changed his mind after further investigation. There is no evidence of that

Please explain why she published the paper then?

freeman3
It's now up to the researcher to explain.

The published paper is her explanation. She provides accompanying evidence .
That you discount this, and hold to one line of conjecture in an email that she wrote at the beginning of the pandemic is rather strange. They are in no way equivalent.

rayjay
You will learn that Taiwan risks war with China if it were to declare its territory as not including mainland China.


Sure. That's their position. Quite a pickle.
What's that got to do with a rumored lab leak?
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Post 07 Jun 2021, 8:38 am

So to the extent that the nuts are coming out of the wood work,
famous nut Richard Muller is now contending that the virus had to be engineered. And he's being lead out to testify to Congress.
Richard Muller is a physicist from Berkley who has a number of crack pot theories that deny climate and propose a hidden planet in our solar system. So no particular expertise in virology but that hasn't stopped him in anything else regarding climate or evolution...

His partner is a fellow named Steven Quay who has a company called Antossa Thereupeutics. - a "clinical stage" biopharmeceutical company which has never brought a product to market but manages to drive its stock up and down with news releases about "early stage" trials. All the markings of a pump and dump company.

yet these two gentlemen are now being paraded by the WSJ and republican congressmen as knowing more that what actual virologists know. They have insight that real expertise hasn't delivered...
Anything's possible. But not probable.
The nature of the political climate in the US and the Chinese government's authoritarianism ensure that this is going to taint genuine investigation. And will further poison the conspiracy driven American reaction to vaccines and science...
This just isn't healthy.
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Post 07 Jun 2021, 8:43 am

This is what Dr. Steven Quay and Richard Muller wrote in today's WSJ. I find it very compelling.

In the case of the gain-of-function supercharge, other sequences could have been spliced into this same site. Instead of a CGG-CGG (known as “double CGG”) that tells the protein factory to make two arginine amino acids in a row, you’ll obtain equal lethality by splicing any one of 35 of the other two-word combinations for double arginine. If the insertion takes place naturally, say through recombination, then one of those 35 other sequences is far more likely to appear; CGG is rarely used in the class of coronaviruses that can recombine with CoV-2.

In fact, in the entire class of coronaviruses that includes CoV-2, the CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally. That means the common method of viruses picking up new skills, called recombination, cannot operate here. A virus simply cannot pick up a sequence from another virus if that sequence isn’t present in any other virus.

Although the double CGG is suppressed naturally, the opposite is true in laboratory work. The insertion sequence of choice is the double CGG. That’s because it is readily available and convenient, and scientists have a great deal of experience inserting it. An additional advantage of the double CGG sequence compared with the other 35 possible choices: It creates a useful beacon that permits the scientists to track the insertion in the laboratory.

Now the damning fact. It was this exact sequence that appears in CoV-2. Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?

Yes, it could have happened randomly, through mutations. But do you believe that? At the minimum, this fact—that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural combination used by human researchers—implies that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape.

When the lab’s Shi Zhengli and colleagues published a paper in February 2020 with the virus’s partial genome, they omitted any mention of the special sequence that supercharges the virus or the rare double CGG section. Yet the fingerprint is easily identified in the data that accompanied the paper. Was it omitted in the hope that nobody would notice this evidence of the gain-of-function origin?

But in a matter of weeks virologists Bruno Coutard and colleagues published their discovery of the sequence in CoV-2 and its novel supercharged site. Double CGG is there; you only have to look. They comment in their paper that the protein that held it “may provide a gain-of-function” capability to the virus, “for efficient spreading” to humans.

There is additional scientific evidence that points to CoV-2’s gain-of-function origin. The most compelling is the dramatic differences in the genetic diversity of CoV-2, compared with the coronaviruses responsible for SARS and MERS.

Both of those were confirmed to have a natural origin; the viruses evolved rapidly as they spread through the human population, until the most contagious forms dominated. Covid-19 didn’t work that way. It appeared in humans already adapted into an extremely contagious version. No serious viral “improvement” took place until a minor variation occurred many months later in England.

Such early optimization is unprecedented, and it suggests a long period of adaptation that predated its public spread. Science knows of only one way that could be achieved: simulated natural evolution, growing the virus on human cells until the optimum is achieved. That is precisely what is done in gain-of-function research. Mice that are genetically modified to have the same coronavirus receptor as humans, called “humanized mice,” are repeatedly exposed to the virus to encourage adaptation.

The presence of the double CGG sequence is strong evidence of gene splicing, and the absence of diversity in the public outbreak suggests gain-of-function acceleration. The scientific evidence points to the conclusion that the virus was developed in a laboratory.
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Post 07 Jun 2021, 2:02 pm

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Statesman
 
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Post 07 Jun 2021, 5:52 pm

rayjay
I find it very compelling.

Sure you do. But you don't actually know what they are saying or if they actually have the evidence to back up their claims.
Lets see what happens when peers review what they've got...

this is Richard Muller, a physicist turned conspiracy theorist

https://ep.probeinternational.org/2011/ ... he-public/

Steven Quay is committed these days to pump and dump stock schemes based upon "preliminary research " into various therapeutics.

Neither are a good bet to have actual insight into the topic at hand.
But they are saying what you and the WSJ would like to hear... so.
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Post 07 Jun 2021, 5:59 pm

by the way, the first "study that proposed that covid 19 was "engineered" made very similar claims to these.

Here's what scientists said then:
First, the authors say the virus’s genes look “suspiciously similar to that of a bat coronavirus discovered by military laboratories” elsewhere in China. That seems bad, but Rasmussen notes that it makes sense this disease would have similar-looking genes to other coronaviruses because it is a coronavirus. “They are similar because they are related,” she said.

Second, Yan’s team says part of the spike protein the current coronavirus uses to infect cells looks like the 2003 SARS spike protein “in a suspicious manner.” In other words, they’re implying the virus isn’t natural — someone changed it. But that’s not the case, Rasmussen says: Those “are found in other coronaviruses. They arose naturally and coincidentally.”

Third, the paper states the SARS-CoV-2 virus has a “unique” furin cleavage site — a section of the spike protein — asserting that such a feature isn’t found in the natural world. But Rasmussen said many coronaviruses have these sites, including the 2012 MERS coronavirus first found in the Middle East. “This proves exactly nothing,” she told me.

Altogether, there’s just little Yan’s team offered to convince their peers they found what they say they found. There’s always fierce debate in academic and scientific literature, of course, but the easily refuted assertions make it hard to take much of what they wrote seriously.


https://www.vox.com/2020/9/18/21439865/ ... udy-bannon

So I suggest you wait till someone with expertise has a run at Muller and Quay. And don't buy any stock in Quays company.
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Post 08 Jun 2021, 12:31 am

Ok let me take each argument in turn..


It is if they don't point out that after two months of research the scientist was persuaded by evidence to publish a different conclusion.


You dont know that she was persuaded by other evidence. You are guessing as to the reasons her published work changed from her original findimgs. She could have been pressured to change, she could have been influenced by groupthink to change her mind. Until she explains why she changed her original position, we dont know.

I don't have a predetermined bias. All I'm telling you is that there is no evidence, other than rumored circumstantial evidence, that there was a lab leak. 
2) china's reluctance to cooperate is also not evidence that there was a lab leak. Its how they behave on every issue. 


(1) There is circumstantial evidence and unlikely coincidences pointing towards the lab. And a complete lack of evidence in support of alternative theories.
(2) Totalitarian governments do not get to normalize not cooperating in an investigation as just "China being China". If they fail to cooperate that is evidence they are hiding something.

Please explain why she published the paper then? 


What does that have to do with the tea in China? Her credibility is in question when she flips her conclusion 180 degrees, notably without any discussion in her paper of her preliminary conclusion. Researchers publish papers...that doesnt mean there is a sound basis for them.

The published paper is her explanation. She provides accompanying evidence .
That you discount this, and hold to one line of conjecture in an email that she wrote at the beginning of the pandemic is rather strange. They are in no way equivalent.


That is just not reasonable. If she explained why she changed her mind...then we would have her explanation. But she didnt. What do you mean conjecture? That was her expert opinion that it looked bioengineered. Thats not conjecture. She didnt need to investigate further. She examined the virus and it appeared bioengineered. She needs to explain why that initial conclusion changed. She could have thought about it further...listened to other scientists and was convinced that she was wrong. Or she could have been pressured or influenced to change her mind. But we do need to know. She needs to explain herself because her email undermines her credibility. Again, for her to send an email to Fauci discussing her preliminary findings..you just dont do that without a certain amount of confidence. And for her not to even discuss that in her paper is suspicious. But maybe she has a good explanation. Lets hear it.
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Post 11 Jun 2021, 7:29 am

freeman3
That is just not reasonable. If she explained why she changed her mind...then we would have her explanation. But she didnt.


He did. He published an extensive paper, with supporting evidence and documentation...
You can read it here, and criticize it all you want... But please be specific about what evidence or methods you find are questionable. Conspiratorial blathering like this " She could have been pressured to change, she could have been influenced by groupthink to change her mind." is meaningless when you have a published scientific paper .
Therein lie all your answers .

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

This is Tucker Carlson like. Ask all kinds of questions that there are answers for in plain sight...
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Post 11 Jun 2021, 2:26 pm

Are you being serious? That's not a serious argument. Researchers dont get anointed with the golden aura of pure research. Researchers have cooked data. Researchers did research for tobacco companies. Researchers are subject to the same human foibles as anyone. So just because he published that doesnt mean it is assumed that he his views had evolved for good scientific reasons. Evidence has surfaced that undermines the credibility of his research. He needs to explain why his research findings were directly contrary to opinions he had conveyed a short time before. His research does not answer that question. The only way for him to answer that is for the researcher to answer it himself.

Which by the way he has...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newswe ... 27%3famp=1

By the way, it took him...4 days to change his mind! Newsweek: Andersen called the ideas that the virus was engineered “crackpot theories,” writing, “engineering can mean many things and could be done for basic research or nefarious reasons, but the data conclusively show that neither was done.” In four days he went from saying some of the features of the virus (potentially) look engineered...to saying it was a "crackpot theory".

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnew ... cna1269650

Who was blathering again...
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Post 12 Jun 2021, 7:52 am

And by the way...WHY did he change his mind in only 4 days? We dont know. But it is certainly suspicious for the influence of power. I doubt that anyone told Mr Anderson dont go forward with his theory. It's more likely that the theory...became unpopular. That there were a lot of headwinds against that theory. China was putting pressure on the WHO, Chinese scientists arguing against it, American and European scientists with connections to China saying it was a crackpot theory. Four days...
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Post 13 Jun 2021, 5:13 am

From Sat.'s WSJ interview

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-scientis ... _lead_pos5

Ms. Lentzos, who places her own politics on the Swiss “center left,” thought that conclusion premature and said so publicly. In May 2020, she published an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists weighing whether “safety lapses in the course of basic scientific research” caused the pandemic. While acknowledging there was, “as of yet, little concrete evidence,” she noted “several indications that collectively suggest this is a serious possibility that needs following up by the international community.”

She was suggesting an accident, not a deliberate release: “If you’re culturing a virus that is readily able to infect humans, particularly via the respiratory tract, then any droplet caused by a simple splash or aerosolization of liquid can be inhaled without you realizing it,” she wrote. “Could an unknowingly infected researcher showing no symptoms unwittingly have infected family, friends, and anyone else he or she was in contact with? Or was there perhaps an unnoticed leak of a coronavirus from the lab, from improperly incinerated waste material or animal carcasses that found their way to rubbish bins that rats or cats could have accessed?” ...

The most significant problem came from the scientific community. “Some of the scientists in this area very quickly closed ranks,” she says, and partisanship wasn’t their only motive: “Like most things in life, there are power plays. There are agendas that are part of the scientific community. Just like any other community, there are strong vested interests. There were people that did not talk about this, because they feared for their careers. They feared for their grants.”

Ms. Lentzos counsels against idealizing scientists and in favor of “seeing science and scientific activity, and how the community works, not as this inner sacred sanctum that’s devoid of any conflicts of interests, or agendas, or any of that stuff, but seeing it as also a social activity, where there are good players and bad players.”

Take Peter Daszak, the zoologist who organized the Lancet letter condemning lab-leak “conspiracy theories.” He had directed millions of dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology through his nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance. A lab mistake that killed millions would be bad for his reputation. Other researchers have taken part in gain-of-function research, which can make viruses deadlier or easier to transmit. Who would permit, much less fund, such research if it proved so catastrophic? Yet researchers like Marion Koopmans, who oversees an institution that has conducted gain-of-function research, had an outsize voice in media. Both she and Mr. Daszak served on the World Health Organization’s origin investigation team.