Comments by "Flook D" (@flookd5516) on "Debunking COVID-19 Conspiracies (Coronavirus Update #2)" video.

  1. Most people will; it doesn’t mean everybody will.
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  2.  @DemigodoftheSea  Developed and leaked are two different things.
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  3.  @Hubin12  Immune response is not an automatic or instant cure.
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  4.  @hymeringfamily9711  “Every real virologist” All of whom are Scotsmen?
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  5. Xenobiology is looking at compounds that don’t occur in nature but which could support life. The compounds exist.
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  6.  @vitzuja5943  Pointing out what they work on is irrelevant to a claim saying they don’t work on anything?
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  7.  @duanefromjustice316  There is a significant difference between isolated and engineered.
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  8.  @duanefromjustice316  There was no gain of function, simply a change in one of the constituent genes. That does occur in nature and there is no indication it is artificial.
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  9. ​ @DemigodoftheSea  If you;re wishing to prove something then technically correct is the only correct.
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  10.  @DemigodoftheSea  A wild-type virus can be leaked; a virus can be developed without leaking it. The distinction is very relevant if you want to know what the truth is, rather than jumping to the conclusion you would like to hear.
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  11. Vaccines are not magic shields; they enable your body to fight the next infection effectively, not repulse viruses that approach you. It is possible for you to be infected but the ability of the virus to propagate is severely compromised; with Covid you may show symptoms and you may (briefly) be able to infect other people. Not being infected relies on herd immunity; if the majority of the people around you are vaccinated then the chances of you being infected plummets.
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  12.  @emsuojaus573  You think scientists who find nothing significant amiss just gotta be biased & industry-sponsored while the ones who claim definitive conclusions without supporting evidence just gotta be unbiased 'cos they're different? You refer to a National Toxicology which is a government programme via the NIEHS; do you considered them unbiased? There results came down to a possible association. "Settings - legal - about- rf exposure" Precautionary since it can't be ruled out. That does not mean there is clear evidence that it can cause problems.
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  13.  @hymeringfamily9711  "You do realize that the virus came from the Wuhan lab, and is clearly man made, right? No theory anymore, proven fact" Neither are proven fact; you're reading in what you want to believe.
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  14. Gain of function in that context is simply culturing virus strains in cells they wouldn't normally infect to make the lab work easier, rather than referring to some extra characteristics being added to a virus. The Wuhan lab was collecting viruses; an accidental release could include wild-type viruses. There were no infected bats found in the local wet market but the virus samples had been collected remotely. Initially at least it was less likely to have come from a controlled lab when there were abundant and uncontrolled sources of such viruses in the market. I don't think I've heard anything about sloppy procedures at the lab but the Chinese government is not exactly open on details.
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  15.  @jaredtandle2596  The RNA vaccines are approved; they’ve been in development for years and were adapted to work with Covid. No system for controlling the spread of a virus will be perfect; if it reduces the infection rate then it is effective.
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  16. mRNA vaccines have been in development for years and were already being tested; the existing trial vaccine was adapted to carry a Covid sequence. It's not going to create any new variants;
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  17. He wasn’t speaking of trust but a government acting beyond its abilities.
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  18.  @vitzuja5943  Yes, you think existing compounds don’t exist. You don’t find that contradictory?
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  19.  @vitzuja5943  Abundant papers on PubMed.
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  20.  @vitzuja5943  Abundant papers on PubMed for astrobiology too.
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  21. edwardponder66 Money is assigned to scientific bodies as a block; what projects are actually funded is decided through scientists reviewing grant applications. We don’t publish our work in the mass media.
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  22. It is also infectious; you don’t need to have direct exposure to the markets to catch it. Picking up a gene from another virus is not accelerated evolution, just one step. While the possibility exists the purified virus escaped the Wuhan lab they’d us no evidence of gene manipulation.
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  23.  @DemigodoftheSea  And viruses develop naturally; development does not mean it was in a lab.
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  24. The nuclear plants would contribute less to global warming but do create the problem of nuclear waste. We've been breeding plants & animals since prehistoric times to have a greater impact than any GMO. Asbestos comes in three forms, one of which causes asbestosis. People are spreading incomplete and hence misleading information.
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  25.  @GZar5K  So what do you think is in the vaccine shots?
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  26.  @GZar5K  <eyeroll> Either you think there is a secret ingredient not listed or you think one or more of the ingredients have properties we don’t know about. You need to be explicit in your claims if you think nobody knows what you know. Which ingredients do you consider to be part of a conspiracy and why?
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  27.  @jn0125  There are different definitions of gain of function; nobody’s altering anything.
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  28. To add to Marco's comprehensive reply: "80% never knew they had it." If nobody knows they had it then how do you know they had it? "it was made in a lab in Wuhan, China" It has been sequenced by numerous labs and there is no indication that it is anything other than wildtype. "How else did a bat that is not native to the local market be the vector for the human to human transmission?" Via an animal that was native to the local market, e.g., pangolins. "they were never close to being overwhelmed" etc Why is so much spent on fire prevention when there aren't that many fires? Same reasoning.
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  29.  @littlerock8926  An NIH research grant can include a foreign research group where the expertise that lab provides can't be readily obtained within the US and their contribution would be of benefit to the US. I was part of a US group that was looking to develop vaccines that could recognise all known strains of several viruses that could lead to a single vaccine for each with worldwide efficacy; the grant covered two labs in South America and the Far East as well as the American ones. All grants require annual reports to the NIH from all parties; if there was no data coming from a lab or the money was apparently being misspent then the grant could be cancelled.
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  30. Do you mind saying which city that is?
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  31. Coronavirus is not the one and only virus and the ability of the Coronavirus to infect humans is recent.
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  32. The evidence is minimal, mixed and does not constitute “rock solid proof”
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  33.  @emsuojaus573  You realise the research is not limited to telecom companies? That most will be covered by grants from research institutes. Research grants are a gamble and research institutes know it; the results may well be negative or indeterminate. Anything of interest will be reproduced and expanded upon by other people; it might turn out to be something & nothing, it might expand. Faked data will be noticed and faking it can end someone’s career. Without an identified health risk from transmission tower there is no reason to deny permission on health grounds.
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  34.  @emsuojaus573  You quoted the the NIEHS ongoing project.
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  35.  @emsuojaus573  The NCI has a long term internal project that has been running about 10 years (1ZIACP010135-25).
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  36.  @emsuojaus573  Thd NTP concluded there was evidence of an association (not cause & effect) in particular male rats exposed and possible association in others. You’re over interpreting their conclusions.
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  37.  @emsuojaus573  “IARC has concluded that...” And so? Why would a project not pay attention to what has been said elsewhere? It doesn’t mean they are automatically agreeing or disagreeing with that party, just taking note of what has been done and by what method. MRI is very different from a cell phone. Have you ever had one?
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  38.  @emsuojaus573  That crap...
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  39. The virus was isolated & the genome sequenced, not manufactured. There is evidence that EcoHealth used the NIH grant for chimeric viruses but that was not the purpose of the grant.
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  40. Richard Rodriguez They aren’t producing proof, just making conspiracy claims.
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  41.  @Wolverine985  Something which is true of any government: it consist of each country's citizens. Portraying them as a race apart whose raison d'etre is malevolence and who work rigidly in-step with a unified purpose of total domination (or extermination) is simply invoking a bogeyman rather than addressing the issue of accountability. Cock-ups occur, over-reach occurs - it doesn't follow that anything & everything should be automatically distrusted; that way lies paranoia, not accountability.
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  42.  @vitzuja5943  There was a time when plastics didn’t exist; were the people who created them studying nothing? Something preceded the current relationship of DNA, RNA & proteins, most probably a replicating molecule part RNA, part peptide. That’s xenobiology.
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  43. Libres Penseurs Where did he say anything of “a few wealthy people”?
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  44. What would you have suggested as a treatment?
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  45.  @Shocked6302  After all hassle Dan-Bak's deleted his OP. Maddening when they do that.
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  46.  @iamtobler  There’s a difference between possible and just gotta be, which is where the distinction lies. There were people talking about genetically engineered bioweapons at the time.
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  47.  @GZar5K  How do you fit a microchip down a 22G needle? What sizes do you think the bore and chip are?
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  48. 2:10 Not in science.
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  49. "microchips in vaccines" Vaccine needles having too narrow a gauge for microchips would be an obvious consideration.
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  50. They didn’t want the bad publicity.
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  51.  @angel_withaflamethrower  YT has been playing up in recent months; which comments different people can see varies.
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  52. There is serious competition between academics and we don't receive mysterious instructions on what we should do or what results we should arrive at. Faking data is one of the biggest no-nos in academia; being caught usually ends your career. Given that I could earn substantially more if I hadn't gone into science I wouldn't say I was top of the food chain.
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  53. The question is whether or not it originated from a lab leak, not whether it was “man-made”. Labs do use isolated viruses.
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  54.  @AK-yb4zn  It can take 20+ years of work to determine something for certain; it isn’t done overnight.
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  55.  @AK-yb4zn  In academia almost all funding comes from governments and charities, not corporations. Results are not dictated by the funder. You’re assuming that a few scientists being pliable means all of us are.
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  56.  @AK-yb4zn  You are arguing that there is reasonable probability conclusions are incorrect despite having been verified by multiple competing parties. That would require most if not all scientists to be corrupted.
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  57.  @AK-yb4zn  No, I’m talking about multiple competing parties taking different approaches, independently arriving at the same conclusion with various people waving their hands and talking about corruption.
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  58. Only the in vitro effect on spermatazoa. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7727890/
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  59.  @hymeringfamily9711  That’s a long line if ifs.
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  60.  @joshkar24  Gain of function has several meanings; in this context it refers to culturing viruses in cells they wouldn’t normally infect. It doesn’t alter the virulence. Nobody has said that the Chinese authorities were open & timely; they obviously weren’t. It has been said that their (final) implementation of a lockdown was rapid & thorough as would be expected from an authoritarian system. Virus escapes are rare.
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  61. China is as authoritarian as western folks think their governments are.
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  62. Antibodies don’t last long; a baby is protected by the mother’s antibodies for only about six months. The original vaccine for small pox (Edward Jenner) was achieved by collecting serum, which is what you are thinking about. All later vaccines (including small pox) worked by injecting weakened or “dead” viruses into people so their bodies would raise their own antibodies and thus would retain the ability to make more if they were later infected with that virus. Their immunity could last years and thus gave better coverage. Later vaccines used only parts of the target virus; there would be no danger of a weakened virus becoming virulent again. mRNA vaccines by briefly enabling the body to produce little bits of a virus in sufficient quantities to trigger an immune reaction. mRNA cant enter the nucleus to affect the DNA and is short -lived within the cell.
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  63. The conspiracy theory was that the virus has been deliberately created then accidentally or deliberately released. In the absence of an locatable animal source then accidental release of a collected virus becomes plausible. SARS-CoV-2 would not be in the published paperwork because it didn't yet exist. In this context gain of function means the ability to jump species. It can be done in a lab by selecting strains that are more likely to interact with a cell-type or animal that is considerably easier to maintain, e.g., mice. You wouldn't want to create one that was transmissible to humans. The aim was to determine how jumping species happens in the wild.
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  64. Religious teachings can be studied regardless of where they came from 😊
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  65. Recombination with another virus.
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  66. No ready means to localise the effect.
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  67.  @Wolverine985  The government isn't made of the people? Who are they?
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  68.  @Wolverine985  I don’t think you’ve fully thought through your original assertion.
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  69.  @Wolverine985  Rand Paul has his own axe to grind and is a member of The Government - why do you find him trustworthy? As with all criticism of science, I see a lot of armchair experts with bugger all knowledge and understanding expounding on how things really are and how they should really be done. In the last two years I've had to listen to claims that viruses don't exist, all viruses are created in labs, mutations don't occur naturally, that you wouldn't find wild-type virus in a lab studying wild-type viruses, all virology related grants are for bioweapons and the foreign collaborations can only be nefarious purposes. The last does at least acknowledge there is a world outside the US though that doesn't many from expounding Covid is just a hoax by the US Government, presumably on the assumption that all international Zoom connections are real-time CGI run by black ops people. I've had to explain countless times how masks work and why <100% does not to equal 0%, a concept that people who understand a "20% off" sign seem to have great difficulty grasping. Oddly enough when a politician expounds any of this We The People suddenly find politicians trustworthy rather than malevolent. Have you never wondered why the US has to import so many foreign scientists?
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  70.  @jaygio  It's amazing the amount of power that a handful of people can wield, apparently micro-managing all aspects of life. 🙄 Yes, some people do have an inordinate amount of power but essentially accusations like yours come down to portraying them as bogeymen, ie., clear simple scapegoats for complex situations that are far more chaotic than you would like to believe. Think about confirmation basis before engaging in research.
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  71.  @pikleman5880  You said gain of function research means it must be deliberately manufactured; it does not.
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  72.  @pikleman5880  A: "The virus was deliberately manufactured, as it was being used in gain of function research" B: The purpose is usually studying how a virus works and it can be achieved by either selection or gene manipulation.
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  73. The 1% death rate is when there is sufficient medical facilities for this hospitalised. If it had been to run through the population like wildfire then numbers would have exceeded hospital capacity and the death rate could be 10% plus.
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  74. There’s an assumption that if a shortage of a particular nutrient has a negative effect on the immune system then an excess amount will give you a super-charged immune system but that is not how biology works. The body will simply eliminate or destroy the excess.
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  75. I don’t know what gets entered on an Indian death certificate but is probable contributory factors are included; since people with heart & respiratory diseases are more likely to die from Covid then both would appear on the certificate.
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  76. https://www.jstor.org/stable/106988
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  77. Constructive criticism is reasonable; simply waving your hands and declaring it to be exaggerated or made-up is conspiracy theorist.
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  78.  @vitzuja5943  If people are publishing their work then they are not working in nothing. Explicit enough?
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  79.  @Tocinos  You shouldn’t just believe what your calculator says - everything’s rigged to fool you 😊
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  80. nelk pary The postulates date from 1890; the first virus was isolated 1892. Why do you think Koch didn’t specifically allow for viruses?
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  81.  @abbysaurus_rex  They ought to have informed WHO but were very reticent to say anything at the time. Some bats possessing it would not necessarily mean that it was common in bats and the bat populations cover a very wide area; there's no guarantee it would show up if more bats were checked.
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  82. Marco Hmmm....what? You realise you get local variations due to multiple complicating factors?
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  83. It’s a log scale. The aim is to show the change in rate rather than numbers infected. A constant rate should produce a straight line; the curve indicates the rate of spread is declining.
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  84. Iosefa Andrews https://www.biorxiv.org
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  85. Everybody sneezes and coughs, dealing with minor irritants we continuously encounter. Breathing alone expels moisture.
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  86. Gain of function in this context would be selectively “breeding” a virus so it can infect a new species for the simple reason that rodents are easier to house & breed. It’s a matter of convenience, not malevolence.
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