5 ms·

I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I always found it it little odd that the guy who became the de facto pandemic era “leader” in the U.S. was also the s

I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I always found it it little odd that the guy who became the de facto pandemic era “leader” in the U.S. was also the same guy that personally approved funding for the lab in Wuhan.

puffoflogic 4y ago
The state religion reveres experts, who are by definition the people with conflicts of interest. It's normal.
ethanbond 4y ago
You think it’s weird that one of the top virologists in the world was responsible for finding virus research and for planning virus outbreak response?
- carlivar 4y ago
  How is "top" virologist measured? If it's simply by years of power, this is accurate I suppose. However I think "most powerful" is a better term than "top".
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    Like it or not this is how scientific output is usually measured. He is a prolific scientist in his field and has been for decades, well before COVID happened. > In a 2022 analysis of Google Scholar citations, Dr. Fauci ranked as the 44th most-cited living researcher. According to the Web of Science, Dr. Fauci ranked 9th out of 3.3 million authors in the field of immunology by total citation count between 1980 and April 2022. During the same period, he ranked 22th out of 3.3 million authors in the field of research & experimental medicine, and 715th out of 1.4 million authors in the field of general & internal medicine. 2019 and prior Google Scholar shows him cited about 8,000 times per year. In 2020+ that only jumped to 10,000, so his ridiculous statistics here are not entirely (or even mostly) due to COVID related stardom.
- aquarium87 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    1) That’s a big assumption you’re making, even if it was a lab leak (which is itself a big leap from what’s known today) 2) It also wouldn’t be “weird” at all. That’s like saying you find it weird that a firefighter got burned or a nuclear safety researcher caused a nuclear safety incident.
    - aquarium87 4y ago
      No it's not. Not at all. Everything risk is increasing exponentially. BSL-4 labs are expanding 1 per year, or around 2% extra risk. CRISPr and CRISPr cas9 are only 10 and 20 years old. How much added risk is that per year? 10,000%? Then to send money to actively seek out bat viruses in the place thought to harbor the worse or most diverse viruses? And to do all that in partnership with a hostile enemy who most certainly isn't going to tell you all the extras they have planned above and beyond the controllable. No, I think you are dead wrong. The default assumption from now on is lab leak unless proven otherwise, because that's the risky world we live in. Period. No getting around it. And the risk gets higher every year. There are literally tens of thousands of BSL-3 labs in the world. They aren't sitting empty doing nothing. They are busy trying to "save us".
      - ethanbond 4y ago
        I can't really tell what position you're arguing against here. I personally find the risk of GoF research to probably net out to "not worth it," but that's an entirely different conversation than "did Fauci cause this." And no, it's nowhere near acceptable to just assume that every new virus is a lab leak. Especially when the subtext of this line of inquiry is usually that we're going to "hold 'them' accountable" somehow. Combine those two thoughts and you get something like, "anywhere that a novel virus appears in suddenly gets smacked by the international community," and I'm not sure you could create a stronger disincentive to early pathogen detection and alerting if you tried. P.S. There's almost certainly not anywhere close to "tens of thousands" of BSL-3 labs. Probably in the few hundreds to maybe thousand or two, but that'd be a stretch, and "tens of thousands" is not supported by any data I can find: https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/mapping-biosafety-level-3-laboratories-by-publications/ https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/mapping-biosafety-le...

puffoflogic 4y ago

The state religion reveres experts, who are by definition the people with conflicts of interest. It's normal.

ethanbond 4y ago

You think it’s weird that one of the top virologists in the world was responsible for finding virus research and for planning virus outbreak response?

carlivar 4y ago
How is "top" virologist measured? If it's simply by years of power, this is accurate I suppose. However I think "most powerful" is a better term than "top".
- ethanbond 4y ago
  Like it or not this is how scientific output is usually measured. He is a prolific scientist in his field and has been for decades, well before COVID happened. > In a 2022 analysis of Google Scholar citations, Dr. Fauci ranked as the 44th most-cited living researcher. According to the Web of Science, Dr. Fauci ranked 9th out of 3.3 million authors in the field of immunology by total citation count between 1980 and April 2022. During the same period, he ranked 22th out of 3.3 million authors in the field of research & experimental medicine, and 715th out of 1.4 million authors in the field of general & internal medicine. 2019 and prior Google Scholar shows him cited about 8,000 times per year. In 2020+ that only jumped to 10,000, so his ridiculous statistics here are not entirely (or even mostly) due to COVID related stardom.
aquarium87 4y ago
[flagged]
- ethanbond 4y ago
  1) That’s a big assumption you’re making, even if it was a lab leak (which is itself a big leap from what’s known today) 2) It also wouldn’t be “weird” at all. That’s like saying you find it weird that a firefighter got burned or a nuclear safety researcher caused a nuclear safety incident.
  - aquarium87 4y ago
    No it's not. Not at all. Everything risk is increasing exponentially. BSL-4 labs are expanding 1 per year, or around 2% extra risk. CRISPr and CRISPr cas9 are only 10 and 20 years old. How much added risk is that per year? 10,000%? Then to send money to actively seek out bat viruses in the place thought to harbor the worse or most diverse viruses? And to do all that in partnership with a hostile enemy who most certainly isn't going to tell you all the extras they have planned above and beyond the controllable. No, I think you are dead wrong. The default assumption from now on is lab leak unless proven otherwise, because that's the risky world we live in. Period. No getting around it. And the risk gets higher every year. There are literally tens of thousands of BSL-3 labs in the world. They aren't sitting empty doing nothing. They are busy trying to "save us".
    - ethanbond 4y ago
      I can't really tell what position you're arguing against here. I personally find the risk of GoF research to probably net out to "not worth it," but that's an entirely different conversation than "did Fauci cause this." And no, it's nowhere near acceptable to just assume that every new virus is a lab leak. Especially when the subtext of this line of inquiry is usually that we're going to "hold 'them' accountable" somehow. Combine those two thoughts and you get something like, "anywhere that a novel virus appears in suddenly gets smacked by the international community," and I'm not sure you could create a stronger disincentive to early pathogen detection and alerting if you tried. P.S. There's almost certainly not anywhere close to "tens of thousands" of BSL-3 labs. Probably in the few hundreds to maybe thousand or two, but that'd be a stretch, and "tens of thousands" is not supported by any data I can find: https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/mapping-biosafety-level-3-laboratories-by-publications/ https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/mapping-biosafety-le...