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Mike Pemberton's avatar

"So scary it ought to be ill-eagle". Odd thing about puns is that the worse they are, the better they are. That one's dreadful, good work.

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Brian's avatar

"Is this the one that was published in Science? ... what they had done to make the H5N1 more transmissible... they only modified five amino acids on this hemagglutinin protein. and they made it by doing so able to spread easily via airborne droplets "

Great episode but I am freaked out that scientists are allowed to do this research. The chances of a lab leak are not zero. Making viruses more virulent is too much risk and should be completely banned.

Since your COVID episode the report from the DIA was released (https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/dia-analysis-covid-may-have-come-from-wuhan-lab/.) I'd say that now every person and their donkey suspects COVID was an accidental lab leak of a gain-of-function experiment.

I realize the hosts are friends with Jeremy Farrar, but it is pretty clear he was part of a group who tried (conspired? lol) very hard to suppress the lab leak hypothesis. The author of the H5N1 research sent emails to Farrar and were a part of a call where they organized a response to promote zoonotic origins. https://www.lemonde.fr/en/science/article/2022/12/19/the-e-mails-that-helped-shape-a-major-scientific-paper-on-the-origin-of-sars-cov-2_6008365_10.html Seems like they all had a massive conflict of interest.

I'm not sure i trust these guys. It is all rather scary.

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Pam Param's avatar

This DIA report says nothing that Stuart and Tom didn’t in their podcast, i.e. that there is a substantial possibility that the virus originated from a lab leak but the evidence is nowhere near conclusive enough to dismiss the alternative, extremely plausible possibility that it was a zoonosis just like the two other zoonotic coronavirus outbreaks in the preceding 20 years. I wish lab leak truthers would accept ‘substantial likelihood’ as a win rather than trying to make out that only sheeple could still believe in zoonosis.

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Mark L's avatar

Is someone who "believes" the zoonosis hypothesis a "zoonosis truther"? I don't think it's possible to know for sure, but I want people to continue having the debate. I think Tom over weighted past pandemics' origins when describing his priors in the COVID episode. It took me just a very quick search to find a journal article from 2004 about how SARS leaked from a lab in Beijing... twice--from the same lab. It looks like SARS actually escaped at least 3 times in 3 different countries: China, Taiwan, and Singapore. Not all lab leaks cause worldwide pandemics, but they are relatively common. I'm not an expert, but I understand that "Gain of function" research is relatively new, so novel viruses would inherently have come from a natural origin until quite recent history.

We don't have to know for sure how SARS-CoV-2 came about to guard against the creation and leak of dangerous viruses in the future. Tom and Stuart seemed to dismiss the idea that knowing it came from a lab would change anyone's sense of urgency, but I'm not so sure. Dr.s Ian Lipkin and Ralph Baric wrote a guest essay warning that researchers at the Wuhan are still doing research on potentially dangerous viruses without sufficient safety protocols. Seems bad to me.

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Pam Param's avatar

SARS leaking from labs after it had become infectious in humans and was being studied has literally nothing, *nothing* to do with its zoonotic origins and Tom was correct to weight zoonosis highly in his priors. It has always been and will always be the most likely origin for novel infectious diseases, and the evidence available can only establish the lab leak hypothesis as a plausible alternative. Deal with it, and make your arguments for better biosecurity based on risk management rather than false certainty.

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Mark L's avatar

You're the one who seems to have false certainty. 🤷

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Pam Param's avatar

My certainty is that it’s uncertain.

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Mark Kerr's avatar

Nothing to do with bird flu, but the Body and Soul section on the Saturday Times , reliably a source of pseudo scientific nonsense, has a corker this week on the benefits of spending time outdoors. Who knew that tracing fractal patterns in tree branches helps increase alpha waves in the brain, promoting relaxation? There is more in this vein.

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Make Antarctica Green Again's avatar

Bird flu?

Episode 65 surely?

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Spencer's avatar

“Mink are a bugger” is a great T-shirt.

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Pam Param's avatar

The swine flu and bird flu ‘panics’ of the past were indeed used by Simon Jenkins, the Grauniad’s inverse Renaissance Man, who has managed to be wrong about almost every field of human endeavour, to argue that this whole Covid thing was just another storm in a teacup kicked up by those drama queen scientists for attention: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/06/coronavirus-hype-crisis-predictions-sars-swine-flu-panics

Simon is my favourite character in the British press, if you can’t tell. You can set your watch by him.

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