Quite a fast reader, aren’t you?

Please cite the spot in those documents that “prove gain of function research was being performed on SARS in the area the pandemic first started”

Funny, you haven’t “questioned” anything. You’ve just regurgitated your same tired disproven talking points. Then you act like your viewpoint deserves respect. It doesn’t. No sources, no evidence, no respect.

If you’d like my sources, here you go. Let me know when you find the spot that says “I, Fauci, personally oversaw the development of a virus that looks absurdly natural in origin.”

The original grant proposal for EcoHealth Alliance: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9819304

Every relevant follow up study produced under that grant proposal:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6171170/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7094983/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7148670/

The original grant was to the EcoHealth Alliance, which then subcontracted the Wuhan institute to collect wild samples from bats. In other words, the whole point of the research was to try and catalogue viruses that existed in the wild with pandemic potential.

It’s not coincidence that lab samples there or in other facilities exist that are close in sequence to viruses later identified in humans. That was, in fact, the goddamn point of surveying bat coronaviruses: to identify those with spillover potential. And it’s absolutely possible one of these collected samples was mishandled and leaked from the lab. After all, lab leaked viral outbreaks happen almost every other year, and there were already safety concerns at this particular site published long before the pandemic.

But what you and every other mouthbreathing idiot is trying to say is that Fauci, a director of the NIAID at the time, personally directed gain of function research to engineer new viruses to infect humans and then that virus escaped. Which, speaking as a molecular biologist myself, is laughably backwards.

No self-respecting scientist concluded that either a natural origin or a lab leak were the definitive cause of the pandemic. This is clear if you actually read scientific literature. It’s why phrases akin to “the most supported hypothesis is X” or “the Y theory is unlikely without more supporting evidence” are used. Both hypotheses were and are still possible explanations.

It’s people who get their scientific info from sources like the Telegraph that keep jumping to conclusions. Or people who don’t understand what a section leader at the NIH does, how research grants work, or what gain of function research is. You know, like yourself.

It’s a red flag when I’m making new friends too.

It just screams “I don’t read up on any viewpoints presented to me”

God I would kill for 2 real friends

I know two things. I really like to be right about stuff and if we’re going by the usual tests a majority of people are going to be near average intelligence.

So I’m most likely average and real smug about it.

I’m going door to door trying to gather pledges from all technology subscribers.

Will YOU downvote all Musk posts in this community until people post them in their proper place (c/enoughmuskspam)?

The “old idea” is actually baked into one of the parameters of the new model. It’s why I said the old hypothesis “was not in line with observation” rather than being “wrong”. It predicted some trends correctly, but failed to predict many others. Like all science, it needed to update as we gathered more info.

The “new” hypothesis also isn’t perfectly predictive of viral evolution, but it’s more accurate with the observed spread of other diseases. Like all models, it’ll get replaced eventually by something more powerful. Likely sooner rather than later specifically because COVID put a spotlight on a lot of holes in the idea.

Just a very small correction- as with all biology, natural selection will drive a virus to replicate more effectively, that’s it. This does NOT mean a virus will automatically become less lethal over time. That’s an older hypothesis that scientists found was not in line with observation.

The newer hypothesis is known as “virulence-transmission trade-off”. The oversimplification of the idea is that if a mutation increases both transmission and virulence, it will also tend to be selected for. COVID is inconsistent with both hypotheses in certain ways though, so really predicting its virulence in the short or long term has proven difficult. Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10066022/

Republican leadership is a festering pile of shit across the country, and yet somehow Texas Senate Republicans manage to stand out as an even more vile faction

Me freezing my glove in leftover LN2

I was kinda hoping the enoughmuskspam community would be focused on talking about innovative tech/engineering work happening at other companies. I guess that’s more the point of “futurology”, but still…

But, enoughmuskspam is just… Musk spam

I long so desperately for the days when I didn’t know who Elon Musk was

The entire MM3 soundtrack slaps

Funny…. But I don’t see this as a good use of advertising.

You’re not swaying anyone visiting the site, and may instead be invigorating R voters.

Oh no thanks, with the release of Ahsoka I’m filled up on fantasy for a while

Is every vaguely prominent leader in Russia dumb as rocks? How did he think he’d get away with an attempted coup while leaving the dictator in power?

Did he expect to get points for being bad at a coup?

What’s the over-under on Musk proposing everyone mint their IDs as an NFT access token before using his shitty platform?

Oh hey, I just completed a couple play throughs of this a few weeks ago!

Necromancers are horribly busted.