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@stevegoldca.bsky.social

Retired medical writer. Studied microbiology. Mostly read advance reader copies and write book reviews. No DMs.

566 Posts435 Follower771 Folgt
Philipp Markolin@philippmarkolin.eurosky.social ยท 3d ago

I try not to comment on Alina Chan anymore, because I do not know how many times her self-serving commentary needs to be exposed for what it is for people to not fall for it anymore, but alas it seems she is planning her comeback tour so let me just explain what she tries to do here ๐Ÿ”ฝ 1/

The virologists who brought us & the media the "overwhelming evidence" for a natural origin of Covid have been exposed. Their private messages refute their own key arguments for a natural origin & they were fearful that Covid-19 had been genetically engineered in an Wuhan lab. Jul 28 The card-carrying virologists who published just about every influential paper claiming a natural origin of Covid reacted to the Defuse put-furin-cleavage-sites-in-SARS-like-viruses proposal as so: What made me ๐Ÿ’ข while reading their messages is they had the same suspicions & reactions to damning evidence of a lab origin of Covid - as one would expect from intelligent scientists - and they wasted years of our lives, pushing nonsensical double spillover raccoon dog theory. It's one thing to have a genuine disagreement with another scientist. It's another to have to waste years of your energy arguing with scientists who are smart enough to know you're right but choose to attack you as an unqualified conspiracy theorist. How many more years of our time and energy are these virologists going to waste when we could be creating better guardrails and oversight for catastrophic pathogen research that's proliferating around the world? Alina Chan Anyone, if you see journalists or scientists or people online citing the double spillover raccoon dog papers, please show them the above slack messages from the senior authors of those papers. Most people should be able to grasp the situation.Bild
Edward Nirenberg@enirenberg.bsky.social ยท 2mo ago

One of the things that so frustrates me about the government's decision to divest from mRNA vaccine work is that we have still barely scratched the surface of how much better it can be, e.g., one of the big limitations of mRNA vaccines is their tendency towards causing systemic symptoms.

Edward Nirenberg@enirenberg.bsky.social ยท 2mo ago

Okay, so it seems like IFN-ฮฒ and IL-21 are really key for making our flu vaccines work way better, which means future vaccine designs can emphasize means to promote the production of these cytokines and enhance our protection. It is notable that this is particularly easy to do with mRNA vaccines.

David Fisman.@dfisman.bsky.social ยท 3mo ago

The key to person to person hanta is that it has a highly overdispersed R. That means that while individual cases can generate large numbers of secondary cases, most cases are dead ends.