COVID vaccine works - we're saved!

Oh how I would love for the name Trump Virus, spoken with a hard edge of derision, to become the name used, but, the world has already anointed a name, covid or covid-19. The covid pandemic of 2020It's already in world-wide use to describe not just the disease but the broad impact on world societies. Humans are rather stubborn when it comes to changing names, and right now this one is so embedded in world culture I don't see this changing anytime soon.Unfortunately, only buried deep in the details of its history will the story be of the incompetence, the ego, the sheer stupidity, that allowed covid to run rampant over the world. But will not be recognized as genocide in the same league with the Armenian or the Rwandan actions.The only legacy will be "just friggin' stupid".Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

Also I'm not sure it's fair to label any part the Trump Virus beyond the US. The stupidity was near universal and while all governments were equally stupid in this case the US under Trump was more equal.

i am still on some kind of fence wondering if the winds of fortune put the virus, COVID-19, into the end of Trump's only term. imagining the horrors of a 2nd Trump term versus some 578,000 dead? hmmm...still thinking in my best Jack Benny voice.For certain, if he had come out for masks, and set up a logical plan to deal with it - perhaps used the playbook he was given, then he would have been re-elected. As it was, 74 million STILL voted for him!!!hmmmmm...still thinking....

I agree that we're stuck with the name. In my opinion Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis and a number of other republican governors should all be tried for premeditated aggravated mass murder. They should all be fed human shit until they die.

Trump's (in)actions didn't create the virus, but they did cause the virus to produce the pandemic, so the proper name would be the Trumpandemic.

our own AIG suggests:

the Trumpandemic

love it. rolls off the tongue.

Keeping it as two words might work, too, because then it could be combined with other things to his credit like the Trump Insurrection and so forth.--Percy

Was SARS-CoV-2 engineered in a Wuhan lab and then escaped? I believed the experts who last year said that the virus lacked the characteristics of engineered viruses. I was having trouble understanding why this possibility is suddenly receiving serious attention.The article The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan? - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists explains all this. Those who claimed lab engineering unlikely or lab escape unlikely had conflicts of interests. There is so much information in that article that I won't attempt to summarize it here except to make two damning points:

• SARS-CoV-2 is excellent at infecting humans but not bats, making it extremely unlikely that it evolved in bats and then jumped to humans, even in a lab.
• No SARS-CoV-2 antecedents have been found in the wild.

The article describes the possibility that gain-of-function experiments along with well established knowledge of what mutations increase infectivity created SARS-CoV-2 in a Wuhan lab, and then it escaped. If this proves true then another question is how well the Wuhan researchers understood the lethality of the pathogen they'd created.--Percy

The choice of journal should be a bit of a red flag. It’s not the usual venue for this subject. From my own reading around it seems that the lab leak hypothesis is still unlikely even if it can’t be definitively ruled out.Orac gives the lab leak hypothesis some Respectful InsolenceWade’s article is not the first mentioned, but it’s there: More on site

I thought that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had been confirmed ( a year ago) as being similar to bat viri.Is it possible that the virus did escape from the lab but was zoonotic and being examined in the lab? So the answer is sort of "both".ABE: Now that I've read the article it does appear that what I say up there is redundant. (blush)Edited by NosyNed, : No reason given.

How is it a red flag to appear in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which has branched out in recent years from its doomsday clock focus to all things of concern to humanity's future. By your criteria, isn't the appearance of the article you cite in RESPECTFUL INSOLENCE - "A statement of fact cannot be insolent." The miscellaneous ramblings of a surgeon/scientist on medicine, quackery, science, and pseudoscience (and anything else that interests him)., a widely respected doctor's blog but still just a blog, much more a red flag?Nicholas Wade is a respected science writer with stints at Nature, Science and The New York Times. He did write a controversial book a few years ago. It wasn't the lab leak hypothesis that received the lion's share of public attention. It was the engineered and leaked hypothesis. The possibility of its being engineered received the strongest rebuttals, the core objection being that SARS-CoV-2 possessed none of the characteristic signposts of having been engineered.While it was also argued last year that a lab leak was extremely unlikely, perfectly following detailed protocols day after day for months and years on end without error or accident or equipment failure or unlikely sequence of events while constantly bringing newbies on board never seemed likely to me. Managers of such labs will of course argue strongly against the possibility of leaks, but I think the reality is that leaks are not an uncommon occurrence. Most viruses under study are not virulent human pathogens, so most leaks have few if any consequences. Furin cleavage sites might be common in a wide variety of viruses, but while they do appear in coronaviruses, their frequency cannot accurately be characterized as common. The possibility that the 12-nucleotide insertion appeared naturally cannot be excluded (and Wade says this) but neither can it be considered more likely than engineering, particularly since all attempts to track down natural origins for SARS-CoV-2 have hit dead ends.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typo.

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How is it a red flag to appear in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which has branched out in recent years from its doomsday clock focus to all things of concern to humanity's future. By your criteria, isn't the appearance of the article you cite in RESPECTFUL INSOLENCE - "A statement of fact cannot be insolent." The miscellaneous ramblings of a surgeon/scientist on medicine, quackery, science, and pseudoscience (and anything else that interests him)., a widely respected doctor's blog but still just a blog, much more a red flag?

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Because it’s not a journal with a great deal of expertise in this area.

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By your criteria, isn't the appearance of the article you cite in RESPECTFUL INSOLENCE - "A statement of fact cannot be insolent." The miscellaneous ramblings of a surgeon/scientist on medicine, quackery, science, and pseudoscience (and anything else that interests him)., a widely respected doctor's blog but still just a blog, much more a red flag?

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No. Why on earth would it be?

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Nicholas Wade is a respected science writer with stints at Nature, Science and The New York Times. He did write a controversial book a few years ago.

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And that makes him an expert on the genetics ? And I note that the controversial book you refer to was noted for getting the science wrong.

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It wasn't the lab leak hypothesis that received the lion's share of public attention. It was the engineered and leaked hypothesis. The possibility of its being engineered received the strongest rebuttals, the core objection being that SARS-CoV-2 possessed none of the characteristic signposts of having been engineered.

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Wade does claim that it was engineered.

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Furin cleavage sites might be common in a wide variety of viruses, but while they do appear in coronaviruses, their frequency cannot accurately be characterized as common. The possibility that the 12-nucleotide insertion appeared naturally cannot be excluded (and Wade says this) but neither can it be considered more likely than engineering, particularly since all attempts to track down natural origins for SARS-CoV-2 have hit dead ends.

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Even if it’s unusual in coronaviruses that makes it less than good evidence for engineering. I’d also like to know why you feel that engineering is at least as likely as a natural origin, given the weakness of the evidence. Orac points out that tracking down natural sources is not easy, so the failure to do so is not especially strong as an argument either.

To further add, this paper published in Nature states that - although these viruses were not known,This rather emphasises the point that tracking down a natural source is difficult - there are so many viruses in circulation and we only know of a fraction of them.

I was just puzzled by your "judge a book by its cover" criteria, which you still haven't justified or explained. It's far more nuanced than that, plus you're engaging in the poisoning the well fallacy: "He was wrong about this, so therefore we can conclude he's also wrong about that without considering it on the merits."The reality is that he was criticized for speculating beyond what the science would support. Wade acknowledges this himself, saying "evidence for his thesis is 'nearly nonexistent.'" (A Troublesome Inheritance - Wikipedia) Attempts to connect I.Q. to race are a lightning rod for criticism, as Charles Murray discovered years ago with The Bell Curve. I think most critics within the scientific community experienced moral repugnance first and tried to find things to criticize second.It is also speculating beyond what the science supports to claim there is no connection between I.Q. and race. Most attempts to settle the issue either way founder upon cultural, social, educational, geographic and environmental differences. The idea feels racist to me and so I reject it, but I have to concede the issue is not a settled one scientifically. His claim is more nuanced than that. He feels it more likely it was engineered and escaped than that it evolved in the wild and either migrated to humans from there or was gathered from bat caves by researchers and then escaped by infecting one or more researchers. How do you reach that conclusion? I haven't reached any conclusions myself, but why do you think the evidence weak? The longer we go without finding the natural origin the more likely some other origin becomes. And this is just one of many arguments. I only mentioned two in my post.--Percy

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I was just puzzled by your "judge a book by its cover" criteria, which you still haven't justified or explained.

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It’s not about judging a book by it’s cover it’s simply a concern that the choice of venue indicates that the article might not have had sufficient review.

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It's far more nuanced than that, plus you're engaging in the poisoning the well fallacy: "He was wrong about this, so therefore we can conclude he's also wrong about that without considering it on the merits."

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Wrong again. It’s that we can’t consider him a reliable authority.

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The reality is that he was criticized for speculating beyond what the science would support. Wade acknowledges this himself, saying "evidence for his thesis is 'nearly nonexistent.'

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Really? This is what the scientists said: Presenting an “incomplete and inaccurate account” is more than simply speculating beyond the evidence. 139 scientists signed that letter and another 4 added their names after publication.

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How do you reach that conclusion?

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The only thing that makes the furin cleavage special is that it increases infectivity in humans - but we’re only looking that this virus because it is highly infectious in humans. So an unusual but known feature - with a plausible natural origin - isn’t exactly strong evidence. Surely we’d expect something of the sort.

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I haven't reached any conclusions myself, but why do you think the evidence weak?

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I’ve explained about the furin cleavage above, and I’ve pointed out that we don’t have a strong expectation of finding the natural source. But apparently you won’t explain why you think that the evidence makes a lab release as likely as a natural origin.