Comments by "Theodore Shulman" (@ColonelFredPuntridge) on "Lab leak information redacted" video.

  1. First of all, no, it's still an hypothesis, not "a bit more". Secondly, Dr. Campbell is speaking as if it went without saying that the only possible reason to redact information about the virus were something embarrassing in it. But there might well be something dangerous in it. Everyone is quite sure that this virus SARS-CoV-2 was not purposely engineered or released as a bio-weapon, but the next one, or the one after that, could well be. It's getting easier and easier to engineer new variants (if anyone wanted to do that) and there could be some information which the Brits don't want to release, for very good reason. The fact that the virus stores its genetic information in the form of viral RNA rather than DNA, and the unusually large size of the RNA (30 kilobases), were obstacles for a while, but we seem to have overcome them (see the work of Volker Thiel in Switzerland) and it is getting uncomfortably easy to mess with the viral genome. We can make, for instance, variants of the virus which cause infected cells to glow in the dark (by cloning in a gene for a jellyfish protein which glows, called Green Fluorescent Protein, "GFP"). That means we can likely also make variants which would do other, less harmless things. If we release all the information, quite soon some apocalypse-minded guy with a bit of knowledge and too much of money (think Osama bin Laden if he had taken a PhD in virology and worked in biotech for a few years) could produce something very nasty indeed (imagine a variant virus which made 20% of patients go permanently blind). So don't be so quick that every redaction is for the sake of avoiding embarrassment! It could be something to protect you. Go review Isaac Asimov's short story "The Dead Past". Money quote: "Nobody knew anything," said Araman bitterly, "but you all just took it for granted that the government was stupidly bureaucratic, vicious, tyrannical, given to suppressing research for the hell of it. It never occurred to any of you that we were trying to protect mankind as best we could."
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