It's begging the question to claim they were proven right. Sure, they were proven right in some respect, but if the research itself caused it (and let's be real, it did) then they were proven right in a manner that doesn't really speak well of their record. And yes, they were influential in arguing for continued grant money to study coronaviruses. They were also influential in arguing against the Obama administrations restrictions on gain of function research and seem to have sought ways around the restrictions (we know from comments on the DEFUSE paper). They didn't publicly disclose the DEFUSE paper, a whistleblower in the DoD had to leak it. It is relevant because it suggested adding a FCS to natural coronaviruses to make it more virulent to humans. It seems like as soon as a virus with FCS appeared on the scene, their first reaction should have been "oh no, did someone do that research we proposed somewhere? We have to tell someone!" -- but, alas, no. Let's keep crying that they're being demonized, though.
The scientific evidence that the outbreak began at the market is overwhelming at this point, and there's never been a shred of evidence for the lab leak.
If you think otherwise, then you have not been following the scientific publications on the subject for the last 5 years.
So yes, EHA has been proven right, and you're hounding the very people who dedicated themselves to warning the world about the threat of a pandemic.
This is a fascinating exhibit. To effectively summarize favorite take on Covid, “the peasants will go to their graves before they admit they were fools”.
It's pretty wild to me that a good portion of commenters here seem to think that only one side can politicize Covid's origins when the cited article itself says that the conclusion predates the new administration.
The natural origin bitter-clingers are still citing papers that claim to lean towards natural origin with the thinnest possible evidence. I admit I'm not a virologist, but I am a bit skeptical that this community would be completely forthright with us.
I can't shake the feeling like there might be fire where there's smoke: the Chinese government has not provided access to the WIV's data, for instance. The Chinese government deleted the virus's genome sequence from GenBank before later releasing it publicly. The closest relative to Covid-19 in known databases is RatG13, a virus from bats that was discovered in caves thousands of miles away, a complex that the researchers at WIV had used to collect samples. Peter Dasnak of EcoHealth alliance had previously submitted a plan to the DoD to introduce furin cleavage sites to existing coronaviruses to do gain-of-function research (or some euphemism for GOF to evade restrictions), a proposal that was declined, but within which there are still comments extant where they discuss outsourcing the riskiest research to China. Peter Dasnak led the delegation from WHO to China but never publicly disclosed that he had, only several years earlier, been interested in research that would have produced a virus that very specifically resembled Covid. A small group of influential scientists and bureaucrats were discussing via email that it certainly appeared to be a lab leak to them until they met in person to speak with Dr. Fauci in February 2020, after which they abruptly stopped discussing the possibility of lab-leak and worked to submit the Proximal Origin letter to Nature that claimed a consensus among scientists that it must be natural origin -- based on the airtight logic that if a lab wanted to make a coronavirus it probably would have done it differently. Those authors did not disclose the influence of Peter Dasnak and Dr Fauci in drafting the letter. Subsequently, the US government used the existence of the letter as authoritative evidence of a natural origin in order to lean on social media companies to censor speech about the potential of a lab leak. Meanwhile, the fact remains that in order for Covid to have made a jump from an animal species, it would have to be extant in the population of an animal species -- or a variant clearly one mutation away would need to be. It's been 5 years and we haven't found an animal with Covid.
Of course we'll never get the smoking gun because the data you'd need -- the experimental data from WIV -- is likely gone forever. Why would that be? Why wouldn't a leading research center on coronavirus virology -- perhaps the foremost in the world -- hide its records when the big event that represents its entire reason for existence -- a coronovirus pandemic -- has shown up in the world, conveniently on its doorstep? Shouldn't that be their time to shine? Are you going to blame that on Trump's rhetoric? Why hasn't all of Baric's data from UNC been released to the public yet, then?
It is really pretty amazing to me that many people will likely go to their grave thinking "oh, no, no scientists released a paper that says the natural origin is still a live theory, I don't have to listen to any of this conspiracy nonsense" simply because they can't live in a world where Trump was right.
> oh, no, no scientists released a paper that says the natural origin is still a live theory
Not to mention that the main paper cited for this was written by ... Daszak, yet again. And it was endorsed by 26 other people who all had conflicts of interest, under a Lancet editor who since admitted that he knew Daszak had a massive conflict of interest, which wasn't admitted publicly for a year.
Ain't it odd that media never really ran with that story? That neither Dems or Republicans had much to say about Daszak? It didn't too viral on social media, there were never any TV interviews where they showed people reacting to being told that, no documentaries about the flaws of the Lancet paper and how it was pushed; it was never part of any drive to change policies, etc. Seemed odd to me anyway.
The 18-hour video debate
The Rootclaim debate was structured over 3 days with 3 thematic blocks;
* the first block was about the geographic location and the evidence for the Huanan market versus the Wuhan Institute of virology being where the virus came from
* the second block was about the SARS-CoV-2 genome and whether its genetic features more likely arose in nature versus gain-of-function research
* the third block was about probability; how can the evidence be grouped and what probabilistic assumptions should be taken to accurate reflect odds of the evidence occurring
Each side first got 90 minutes to lay out their cases, then another 90 minutes together to respond to questions.
No matter how you slice it, this is a serious effort and time investment, as the preparation alone of materials and research into it probably consumed hundreds of hours from speakers and judges alike.
I don't think so, because the sweeping motion of minute hand is effectively continuous rather than discrete, so there's no truncation. At 4:53:30 the minute hand will be correctly in between 4:53 and 4:54, if one (like the author) cares about such precision.
One town over from my own hometown is Westfield, NJ where Charles Addams is from, and there's a house on Elm Street that looks a lot like the Addams Family house -- especially the one he drew in New Yorker cartoons. The town has a festival in his honor every year around Halloween and the house in particular features proudly as _the_ Addams Family house.
I agree with the idea that there's something dramatic about evil things happening in an old house where one might find a mysterious aristocrat behaving badly, but I think the theme goes back to Regency era Britain an, when the industrial revolution was upending society and old aristocrats were going broke while new industrialists were getting rich -- causing the old manor house in disrepair trope to be something you might find in England. One person who inherited such a manor house, but not the wealth to maintain it, was Lord Byron. His manor, Newstead Abbey, is out of haunted-house central casting and, as a romantic, he plays to all those tropes. He had also visited the Balkans and was aware of Vampire myths, so when it's time to participate in the famous scary-story-contest in 1816 (where Mary Shelley submitted _Frankenstein_), Byron tells a story of a vampire who seems a lot like himself. This story is ripped off by Byron's physician who published his own story (The Vampyre) where the main character is absolutely Byronic. Bram Stoker's Dracula ends up with a similarly Byronic idea of Dracula, and now we have a deeply embedded cultural heritage of creepy stuff happening in run-down manor houses -- maybe just because Lord Byron himself haunted such a setting.
It is incorrect, but widespread among left-leaning pundits, that this ruling will force Congress to micromanage everything that would normally be left to the agencies. Agencies can still make rules. If Congress would like to be out of the details business, they can even write statutes that explicitly delegate rule making to the agencies. What this does is prevent agencies from acting in ways that are easily interpreted as _not_ conforming with law. The Chevron test told judges that they have to defer to the agencies _even when_ they conclude that the agencies are misreading the laws, as long as the agencies aren't being manifestly unreasonable. This has led to agencies very savilly expanding their power without any new statutory authority simply because they have good lawyers who know how to craft it in a way that survives a Chevron test. The SC just said something I find completely reasonable: from now on, judges have to interpret the law as its written and decide cases based on whether or not the agency is complying with the law. They cannot abrogate their duties to be the experts on legal analysis simply out of a desire to defer to the agency's interpretation. I think it's correctly decided because Chevron is an illogical mess -- why is it that in one situation and one situation only, our legal system treated one of the parties in a suit as inherently having more authority to intepret the law than a court itself? It is not persuasive to me that we should say "well, because the courts can't be experts," as this is not an argument that works in any other situation where a court must make legal rulings in the face of experts -- such as bankruptcy proceedings, antitrust cases, etc.
Simply because you're not a fan of the outcomes doesn't mean that the appointments of justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett were illegitimate. Chevron deference started under the Stevens court and the deference it entailed related to the Reagan administration. That this has become a conservative hobby horse since then has nothing to do with policy preferences that only cut one way in a partisan way, and has everything to do with a deeper disagreement over the separation of powers and the role of the judiciary. Chevron deference isn't "the system" it's simply one precedent that has been faltering for years. There's no reason for any "side" to see this as the sky falling unless you really, really want to preserve some federal regulation that is TOO IMPORTANT to allow statutes to clarify.
>Simply because you're not a fan of the outcomes doesn't mean that the appointments of justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett were illegitimate.
I agree; just because I don't like their made-up and pre-determined justifications doesn't make their appointments illegitimate; that would be Mitch McConnell's blatant disregard for the timely execution of his responsibilities basically without recent precedent and certainly inconsistent between the times he did actually fulfill his duties.
One of Gorsuch or Barrett must be illegitimate if you want to be consistent.
Scalia should have been replaced by Obama, or Ginsburg shouldn't have been replaced by Trump. All of the arguments that the Republicans made about Scalia's replacement were equally applicable to Ginsburg's.
The only misconduct _alleged_ is that he had extramarital affairs and led women on:
"Those sources said DFJ’s external investigators at the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett discovered from at least two women — who confirmed their accounts to Recode — that Jurvetson had allegedly carried out affairs with multiple women simultaneously. Some of the women also said they felt led on by the married man and were unaware of the other relationships." https://www.vox.com/2017/11/18/16647078/steve-jurvetson-dfj-...
