Sincerity [comrade/them]

Those Italian studies are complete dogshit. Unreviewed preprints from nobodies.

Completely and utterly contrary to the actual genomic data.

:bruh-moment:

I get what you’re saying.

But from my own country’s public health organisation - with PCR testing criteria having no mention of GBMSM at all and is only based on symptomatic presentation there is a clear demographic bias in positivity rates to the interconnected communities of GBMSM. It’s not because they’re gay - and ofc public health practitioners understand this because we see community specific clusters, or transmission chains restricted to within specific communities all the time.

But its also incredibly frustrating to know how easily things can be twisted and “rhetoricised”, and it’s hard to witness the fear people have over it. Where a single misstep in public coms from public health agencies can endanger peoples’ lives.

Not meaning to um akshually, but the problem with vaccination availability is legitimately an issue of supply - like globally

I can understand a reflexive belief that things feel off.

But we’ve known for a long time that SE/E Asia generally is an absolute hotspot for zoonotic diseases; mostly fairly inconsequential- but it’s a numbers game; SARS-CoV-2 happened to he extremely effective at what it does; infact passing into and out of various different hosts with apparent ease (eg. human-cat, human-mink-human). But it’s not a unique event, only very, very unlucky.

Ultimately the failure of COVID lies not on China for being a point of origin of an incredibly unlucky event, but rather the utter hubris with which Europe and “the west” reacted with in response. Whilst China did the most effective public health action I have ever seen, Europe was focused on denying it was even a problem.

Because even doing that in bad faith perpetuates complete falsehoods. Basically it’s tainting the well.

It’s pretty well characterised that people who go for some conspiracy, either choose to consume much more or are at least primed to engage with and be less skeptical of further conspiratorial ideas.

From a purely pragmatic point of view, a base of conspiratorially minded comrades who aren't able to critically assess information are probably a lot more susceptible to ops and targeted disinfo.

You’ve hit the nail on the head. Destroying our planets remaining intact and vibrant ecosystems is increasing the chances that something else will cross the species barrier again.

This is why we have epidemiologists; we look for reasons for these things all the time.

If you want a good recent example - the clusters of hepatitis in children, some of whom required liver transplants. Multiple extremely experienced public health agencies and academic colleagues looking at sequencing data, PCR data, biopsies, good biological tissue samples. And it's still not fully clear exactly what caused them; after months of hard scrutiny. There was a paper this week which has posited that the commonality between them all was a rare adeno-associated virus. But we're still not entirely sure on the mechanisms at play.

Sometimes clusters happen, and they're not always easily explicable. However - it's certain that the most parsimonious explanation for those incidents you listed above is not that all the genomic and phylogenetic information we have amassed on COVID is incorrect and there is some kind of mass cover up by international evolutionary virologists.

You don't need passaging when you have millions upon millions of interactions with wildlife reservoirs to allow for that ridiculously small chance that a novel zoonotic disease with the ability to transmit human to human to emerge.

What we're not seeing is the possibly billions of failed interactions humans are having with wildlife reservoirs of various viruses which do not result in any successful transmission or infection of humans at all. This is happening all around the world (particularly where people are engaged directly with and often in conflict with remaining healthy wild ecosystems) every single day. COVID (SARS-CoV-2) was just a horrifically unlucky event; especially given its efficacy of human to human transmission even when it had barely diverged/evolved from the initial lineage that jumped the species barrier.

Really worrying amount of conspiracy in here about COVID; y'all even made me stop lurking and actually log in.

Without breaking some opsec, I've a PhD in genomics and direct contacts to foundational researchers in viral evolution - the science on this is incredibly clear. SARS-CoV-2 originated somewhere in/or linked to Huanan. The genomic evidence that we have is what shows us this. Genomic evidence that we only have because Chinese epidemiologists worked incredibly rapidly and effectively to trace and sequence a novel zoonotic disease within days/weeks of it's emergence. It was truly incredible work that they did and awe-inspiring to an epidemiologist in a crumbling post-imperial nation.

But what these scientists are saying is completely in line with what the data are telling us. The papers which claimed genomic evidence in Italian sewage in mid-2019 were absolute dogshit un-reviewed preprints.

There is a paper that says this - I work in the field (PhD) and the paper is complete dogshit. Very bad interpretation with evidently no knowledge of bioinformatics or metagenomics which has caused a river of shit ever since.

Edit: It's actually been so long since I had to read the original COVID in Italy sewage that I think it might even just have been a single PCR positive in a lab where they were already testing positive samples - which was clearly contam./bad lab practice - at best.

Thankyou

This is unproductive, you can quote my posts piece by piece and add your irony poisoned retorts if it makes you feel better about your day.

But I don’t see this going any further than that, and since this is a shared left space rather than reddit we should leave it at that.

😌

Nice misquote bro.

You’re fighting with an enemy that doesn’t exist.

I’m literally not from the US, and have no support for Russiagate conspiracies. But your boy up there is failing to take a stance beyond

West = US = Imperialism = bad

:. Anything not the West = not the US = not imperialism = good and to be trusted

Lmao

Moralistic virtue signalling “woke”

Is this Cha Cha or 2013 Atheist YouTube?

This is as simple as accepting that critical thought ought to be levelled at media and it’s not doing an imperialism to do so. You don’t need to do a screed to justify every point of contention.

Yes, criticism of modern Russia under a literal autocrat is big time “moralistic virtue signalling”.

Get outta here. The motherland is dead and gone and any leftist ought rightfully to criticise the current apparatus of power and corruption in Russia.

Even mentioning Russia in the same breath as China and Bolivia is completely asinine.

Read theory

This is insufferable

Please, just one more red flag :angery: