Nesslig20
Active Member
Something different for a change. I was just messing around Youtube to pass the boredom of lockdown, and then I saw a short clip from Real Time with Bill Maher. While I often like a lot of the stuff from his show, mostly from the comedy, I am still very wary since Bill Maher has a record of fucking up the science, particularly on pathology and vaccines. Then I looked at the title of the video more closely...then sighed...face palmed...and prepared for the worst before watching the video.
He brought on guests to entertain the idea that the coronavirus [the specific name is SARS-CoV-2, but writing that every time is bodersome] responsible for the pandemic that began almost a year ago came from a lab. This isn't a new idea that has been floating around the internet. Potholer54 did a great video on that subject, which I highly recommend.
1. The people
Before I go into the stuff they say, I want to cover the background the guests. The people that Bill Maher brought on are Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary theorist and biologist, and his wife Heather Heying, an evolutionary biologist. Although I extensively study evolutionary biology (both from my education and just curious to keeping tabs on the literature) I have never heard of these people before. Perhaps I just didn't came across their work by my own fault, but it turns out they are really obscure. Only Weinstein has a wikipedia page, and most of the "career section" doesn't mention much about his career as a scientist. It's mostly about some political controversy he got into. Perhaps that is the fault of wikipedia for only focusing on the spicy stories, not on the boring scientific work, but even then...Weinstein has only 4 publications and Heying has 5 publications. Not to imply that their work is bad, however none of their work is related to viruses, let alone the coronavirus...let alone ones that support the claims they espouse about it being made in a lab. How did Bill Maher find these guys to talk about the coronavirus? I started to think it wasn't their scientific background that Bill found attractive. Or perhaps it was the other way around, they contacted Bill Maher. I don't know.
Then I started to dig deeper and it got even weirder. I found out that Weinstein and Heying have their own personal websites, named after themselves. What it says on these sites is really bizarre. I know this is often a creationist talking point, but it is almost like they view evolution as like a religion (of, to put it more softly, a life style).
Before I found all that out, I made some commentary on twitter about what was said in the video. I also hoped that more knowledgeable individuals could comment on this, like Potholer54. It turns out, look in the comments on the his video, other people have also asked him about this. Potholer's responses is pretty spot on.
2. The claims
Alright..now on what was said during that talk with Bill Maher. Bill begins by saying:
Weinstein begins to answer the question by saying that since you have history with the family of adenoviruses, but not with the family of betacoronaviruses from which SARS-CoV-2 comes from, hence the the unexpected consequences of vaccines against adenovirus vaccines is much less likely to be dramatic compared to vaccines with lipid nanoparticles (that's in the coronavirus vaccine).
I am lost. The family of the virus doesn't really matter to the unexpected consequences of the lipid nanoparticles. Also, I looked up about betacoronaviruses, and it turns out he is just wrong. They aren't even a family, its a genus. But even so, we do have extensive contact with them, OC43 and HKU1 causing a good fraction of the common cold. But then Weinstein pulls a 180. He explains that the vaccine is equivalent, since it gives you the same protein as it would with a traditional vaccine. He could have skipped the first part and got right to this. This was a really weird roller coaster.
After some speculation by Maher about how the virus "got out", the guests start to talk about the controversy of studying viruses in a lab with "gain-of-function" research, where viruses are studied in a lab to see how they evolve to become more transmissible or virulent. Then Weinstein says
Does she think those were lab made as well?
Then finally Weinstein lists the reasons why he thinks it is lab made:
1. First, things that were intentional like infectivity of human cells...like the fact it infects humans is evidence that it was made in the lab. That is just question begging.
2. Second, extra capacities like the furin cleavage site that is unique to the new virus. The new cleavage site is interesting, you can see about that here and here. But there isn't any reason to think that this novelty can only occur in the lab. And there reasons to think it occurred naturally. But even if this site was "unexplained", unexplained doesn't mean explained by lab-work (or aliens, or God).
He mentions other characteristics of the virus as evidence for the lab origin hypothesis like
3. how it's unnatural that it infects so many different tissues in the body. This is otherwise known as high viral tropism, which isn't unique to the SARS-CoV-2, like The zika virus as high tropism. And even if it was, I don't see how this would indicate a lab origin.
4. Finally, the last thing he says is pretty mind boggling
3. Like a moth to a light
Naturally, by putting this all on twitter, I attracted some attention. One guy started to talk about the russian collusion and trump 2016 election fraud, but I just ignored him. Another guy really was like going into defence on behalf of Weinstein. His arguments were bad because he had little time to explain them fully. And he linked a podcast he had with a guy named Yuri Deigin who has (co)authored 2 pieces to claim that the virus comes from the lab, or "the lab origins cannot be disproven at the very least". This guy is interesting. Under the podcast there is a link to his blog post that takes 1 hour to read. For the publications, he has corroborated with Rosanna Segreto, who also has published her own solo papers. Again, this is very weird. Yuri Deigin is apparently fixated on the biological process of ageing or "gerontology", focusing mainly on the epigenetics of it. But he is more of a blogger on that rather than an active researcher on that topic. Looking at his credentials, he has a BSc in computer science and math, and whent to University Business School. He is a CEO of "Youtherium" that aims to "cure ageing" and Gero Discovery (with a similar goal). Ambitious, but what does he have knowledge on the coronavirus. Nothing much. Even in the podcast, he admits that he isn't a biologists by any stretch, just someone who can look at genetic patterns and blast ssequences. I have learned genomics and bioinformatics professionally in college and university. This doesn't sound very impressive. Well, what about his corroberator, Rosanna Segreto. She is a mycologist.
This is so weird. A bunch of obscure people whose scientific credentials have little do to with each other, nor with the subject of the coronavirus, are all making these claims in public. Only Deigin and Segreto put out some extensive work, but I don't have yet the time to really dig into this. Maybe some time later (or may be someone else here on the forum can take a look at it).
I have had an extensive twitter conversation with the one person who notified me about the podcast, and he slowly but surely went down the conspiracy thinking rabbit hole. When I showed that his own source contradicted his own claims, he says that his won sources were lying. Another trait of conspiratorial thinking "overriding suspicion". When I challenged him to back up this claim that they were lying, he shifted to (not verbatim)
He also points out that the closest virus to SARS-CoV-2 was studied in that lab, that being RaTG13, discovered in 2013 that is 96.2% identical regarding to the whole genome. And again, his own source said that this virus wasn't even isolated and cultured in the lab. He then began speculating about why they didn't culture the virus. "Why is that" he asked. Then I pointed out that the explained is in his own source. They used all the samples to sequence the genome so any living virus was just gone. And the sequence they obtained wasn't very similar to the previous epidemic SARS virus so they weren't motivted to isolate it either for further research. After I explained this, he went in full denial. This is the part that he dismissed from his own source, that they were lying. And then he started a diatribe about how suspicious it was that the researcher explained that they didn't culture or isolate the RaTG13 virus, even though the question wasn't even about whether it was cultivated. (not verbatim)
Lastly, he cited the fact that since this virus is only 4% different, it is evidence for it being an ancestor. But anyone familiar with genetic similarities measured in percentages does not entail any ancestral/descendend relatedness. It is way more likely that it is a cousin-cousin relationship and that's what the scientists also conclude, as other research shows this isn't an ancestor looking at the sequence alone. The sequences are publically availalbe, so he has no little grounds to say that this sequence is a lie as well.
This conversation eventually went nowhere. Eventually he backed off and changed his position to essentially this:
So, that's all I wanted to share.
Again, perhaps I will go deeper into the stuff from Deigin and Segreto if I have the time.
And maybe one of you can also comment about it and other stuff on Bill Maher's show.
He brought on guests to entertain the idea that the coronavirus [the specific name is SARS-CoV-2, but writing that every time is bodersome] responsible for the pandemic that began almost a year ago came from a lab. This isn't a new idea that has been floating around the internet. Potholer54 did a great video on that subject, which I highly recommend.
1. The people
Before I go into the stuff they say, I want to cover the background the guests. The people that Bill Maher brought on are Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary theorist and biologist, and his wife Heather Heying, an evolutionary biologist. Although I extensively study evolutionary biology (both from my education and just curious to keeping tabs on the literature) I have never heard of these people before. Perhaps I just didn't came across their work by my own fault, but it turns out they are really obscure. Only Weinstein has a wikipedia page, and most of the "career section" doesn't mention much about his career as a scientist. It's mostly about some political controversy he got into. Perhaps that is the fault of wikipedia for only focusing on the spicy stories, not on the boring scientific work, but even then...Weinstein has only 4 publications and Heying has 5 publications. Not to imply that their work is bad, however none of their work is related to viruses, let alone the coronavirus...let alone ones that support the claims they espouse about it being made in a lab. How did Bill Maher find these guys to talk about the coronavirus? I started to think it wasn't their scientific background that Bill found attractive. Or perhaps it was the other way around, they contacted Bill Maher. I don't know.
Then I started to dig deeper and it got even weirder. I found out that Weinstein and Heying have their own personal websites, named after themselves. What it says on these sites is really bizarre. I know this is often a creationist talking point, but it is almost like they view evolution as like a religion (of, to put it more softly, a life style).
Weinstein: If humanity continues down our current path, we will not survive. There are too many of us consuming too much, our technology is too powerful, and we are all hooked together in one global system. Our fates are now linked and we will thrive or perish together. We got into this predicament through an evolutionary process--All of the problems that we face are actually symptoms of a process that has no name. [...] The enemy that has no name is not a nation, an organization or a religion. It is not a corporation or an industry. It is not an economic system or an ideology. It is a way of living on the earth that evolved, and if we are to change it, we must take evolution from autopilot and into our own hands. We must come together to create the future we wish to inhabit.
Heying: I am an evolutionary biologist. I apply the tool kit of evolutionary theory to problems large and small, some seemingly intractable, some possibly trivial—what to eat, how to teach and parent and be an upstanding citizen, what to avoid, and what to seek.
Before I found all that out, I made some commentary on twitter about what was said in the video. I also hoped that more knowledgeable individuals could comment on this, like Potholer54. It turns out, look in the comments on the his video, other people have also asked him about this. Potholer's responses is pretty spot on.
Potholer54: I don't get my science from TV chat shows. It all seems very vague. If and when they decide to show their evidence in the form of a scientific paper, which will then get properly reviewed by qualified scientists rather than a TV chat show host, I'll be very interested to read it.
I wonder why he hasn't submitted his evidence for publication, where it would get critiqued and responded to by experts, instead of giving his opinion to an amateur on a podcast.
anyone can opine about the origin of viruses. Even you or I, with no knowledge of the subject, are free to go on a chat show and give our opinions about where SARS-Cov-2 came from. But that is not the same as giving correct information and having that information fact-checked. That's why we have the scientific literature. It ensures that evidence and research are the basis for scientific conclusions rather than personal beliefs and opinions. I am sure Bret Weinstein is a very intelligent man, and he has a lot of firm opinions, but if he wants to show that SARS-Cov-2 has been engineered then he needs to find the evidence for that and present it to a scientific journal where it can be peer-reviewed, rather than give his opinion on a chat show where nothing is fact-checked.
you don't need to be a 'crank' to shape your opinions according to your ideological or religious beliefs. The story of the first woman coming from a rib and having a conversation with a snake is certainly interesting, and many scientists believe it and are far from being 'cranks,' but their beliefs wouldn't stand up to much scrutiny if submitted to a peer-reviewed scientific journal. From what I've seen of Bret Weinstein's Twitter page, his main interest seems to be politics and his libertarian beliefs, so it's not surprising he wants people to believe that governments are capable of infringing on our personal liberty and engineering viruses. That doesn't make him a crank, it just makes him very human. In my experience, most people will shape their opinions to put their beliefs in a favourable light.
2. The claims
Alright..now on what was said during that talk with Bill Maher. Bill begins by saying:
Wow...Bill...that's a solid "No U" right there. Then Weinstein begins by stating that he was 90% certain the virus came from a lab and then starts complaining about the term "conspiracy theory". How it is used against his claims of the virus being man made in a lab to "make it go away". And now he is able to talk about it out loud without being stigmatized. Ironically, this is a common talking point among conspiracy theorist. The conspiracy theory conspiracy. And it aligns with one of the seven traits of conspiratorial thinking is the "persecuted victim"."it would almost be a conspiracy theory to think it didn't start in a lab"
Then Heying says she wants to consider "all possibilities", but before we could dive into the evidence, Bill Maher pulls the conversation away from the origin of the virus to the vaccine in a really bizarre and incoherent string of statements that. He says he first wanted the mRNA vaccine since it's new, then he heard that one of the guests wants the old way of receiving a piece of the virus, and then Bill asks:"Conspiracy theorists perceive and present themselves as the victim of organized persecution. At the same time, they see themselves as brave antagonists taking on the villainous conspirators. Conspiratorial thinking involves a self-perception of simultaneously being a victim and a hero."
This is just nonsensical. All vaccines are lab made, and whether or not the virus in question is made in a lab or natural is irrelevant to the vaccine. To me, Bill Maher is asking leading questions, which don't make any sense, just to cast doubt on the safety of the vaccine. Clearly stemming from his anti-vaccine bias that he has frequently shown in the past, like I mentioned at the beginning.Wait...if it came from a lab, do I really want a piece in me? Is there something different in a lab made virus then the natural one that would make a vaccine different than the ones we had for decades against viruses that occur in nature?
Weinstein begins to answer the question by saying that since you have history with the family of adenoviruses, but not with the family of betacoronaviruses from which SARS-CoV-2 comes from, hence the the unexpected consequences of vaccines against adenovirus vaccines is much less likely to be dramatic compared to vaccines with lipid nanoparticles (that's in the coronavirus vaccine).
I am lost. The family of the virus doesn't really matter to the unexpected consequences of the lipid nanoparticles. Also, I looked up about betacoronaviruses, and it turns out he is just wrong. They aren't even a family, its a genus. But even so, we do have extensive contact with them, OC43 and HKU1 causing a good fraction of the common cold. But then Weinstein pulls a 180. He explains that the vaccine is equivalent, since it gives you the same protein as it would with a traditional vaccine. He could have skipped the first part and got right to this. This was a really weird roller coaster.
After some speculation by Maher about how the virus "got out", the guests start to talk about the controversy of studying viruses in a lab with "gain-of-function" research, where viruses are studied in a lab to see how they evolve to become more transmissible or virulent. Then Weinstein says
First, how does he know that this was right from the get go? The virus could have had one trick and gained the other before we detected it. And even if it did had both tricks, that doesn't mean it is lab made. And Heying says"what is really conspicuous about this virus is that it had both tricks, infect and spread in humans right from the get go with no explanation"
I tried to look up whether the new variants are more virulent (more lethal), but they don't seem to be. They are more infectious, they spread more easily which could end up causing more overall deaths. However, there are many, natural viruses that are way more virulent. Ebola, small pox, and the Spanish Flu (within range).that the virus does exactly what you expect a lab made virus to do, but not natural viruses, become more virulent and pathogenic.
Does she think those were lab made as well?
Then finally Weinstein lists the reasons why he thinks it is lab made:
1. First, things that were intentional like infectivity of human cells...like the fact it infects humans is evidence that it was made in the lab. That is just question begging.
2. Second, extra capacities like the furin cleavage site that is unique to the new virus. The new cleavage site is interesting, you can see about that here and here. But there isn't any reason to think that this novelty can only occur in the lab. And there reasons to think it occurred naturally. But even if this site was "unexplained", unexplained doesn't mean explained by lab-work (or aliens, or God).
He mentions other characteristics of the virus as evidence for the lab origin hypothesis like
3. how it's unnatural that it infects so many different tissues in the body. This is otherwise known as high viral tropism, which isn't unique to the SARS-CoV-2, like The zika virus as high tropism. And even if it was, I don't see how this would indicate a lab origin.
4. Finally, the last thing he says is pretty mind boggling
Think for a moment. Bats are the likely suspect as the natural resevoir of the virus. Where do bats often live in close contact to each other in high numbers? In caves. I rest my case."It does not seem to transmit outdoors nearly at all. Most animals live outdoors, so to see a virus adapted to indoor transmission is conspicuous."
3. Like a moth to a light
Naturally, by putting this all on twitter, I attracted some attention. One guy started to talk about the russian collusion and trump 2016 election fraud, but I just ignored him. Another guy really was like going into defence on behalf of Weinstein. His arguments were bad because he had little time to explain them fully. And he linked a podcast he had with a guy named Yuri Deigin who has (co)authored 2 pieces to claim that the virus comes from the lab, or "the lab origins cannot be disproven at the very least". This guy is interesting. Under the podcast there is a link to his blog post that takes 1 hour to read. For the publications, he has corroborated with Rosanna Segreto, who also has published her own solo papers. Again, this is very weird. Yuri Deigin is apparently fixated on the biological process of ageing or "gerontology", focusing mainly on the epigenetics of it. But he is more of a blogger on that rather than an active researcher on that topic. Looking at his credentials, he has a BSc in computer science and math, and whent to University Business School. He is a CEO of "Youtherium" that aims to "cure ageing" and Gero Discovery (with a similar goal). Ambitious, but what does he have knowledge on the coronavirus. Nothing much. Even in the podcast, he admits that he isn't a biologists by any stretch, just someone who can look at genetic patterns and blast ssequences. I have learned genomics and bioinformatics professionally in college and university. This doesn't sound very impressive. Well, what about his corroberator, Rosanna Segreto. She is a mycologist.
This is so weird. A bunch of obscure people whose scientific credentials have little do to with each other, nor with the subject of the coronavirus, are all making these claims in public. Only Deigin and Segreto put out some extensive work, but I don't have yet the time to really dig into this. Maybe some time later (or may be someone else here on the forum can take a look at it).
I have had an extensive twitter conversation with the one person who notified me about the podcast, and he slowly but surely went down the conspiracy thinking rabbit hole. When I showed that his own source contradicted his own claims, he says that his won sources were lying. Another trait of conspiratorial thinking "overriding suspicion". When I challenged him to back up this claim that they were lying, he shifted to (not verbatim)
Yeah, I didn't put up with that BS. And when I asked him to show evidence for the claim that the coronavirus is a lab leak, he cited the fact that there is a lab researching coronaviruses close to the area where the pandemic coronavirus was first detected. Yet another trait of conspiratorial thinking "Re-interpreting Randomness". And it isn't really random that a reserach lab studying the type of viruses (related to the previous SARS epidemic) sampled from the surrounding area, would be studying the viruses related to the current pandemic coronavirus that came from the same area."well, I am not saying they are Lying. they could be lying. Where is YOUR claim they are not lying...do you always trust the Chinese government then?"
He also points out that the closest virus to SARS-CoV-2 was studied in that lab, that being RaTG13, discovered in 2013 that is 96.2% identical regarding to the whole genome. And again, his own source said that this virus wasn't even isolated and cultured in the lab. He then began speculating about why they didn't culture the virus. "Why is that" he asked. Then I pointed out that the explained is in his own source. They used all the samples to sequence the genome so any living virus was just gone. And the sequence they obtained wasn't very similar to the previous epidemic SARS virus so they weren't motivted to isolate it either for further research. After I explained this, he went in full denial. This is the part that he dismissed from his own source, that they were lying. And then he started a diatribe about how suspicious it was that the researcher explained that they didn't culture or isolate the RaTG13 virus, even though the question wasn't even about whether it was cultivated. (not verbatim)
But even if they didn't ask, they could have just mentioned that they didn't culture it as a side not for whatever reason. He is just being extremely paranoid. Although, it turns out that they were asked whether they isolated this virus (which requires cultivation). So, he was wrong about that too.So why would the researcher clarify that they didn't culture the virus when they weren't asked about whether they did or didn't?? mmmmh...(strokes chin)
Lastly, he cited the fact that since this virus is only 4% different, it is evidence for it being an ancestor. But anyone familiar with genetic similarities measured in percentages does not entail any ancestral/descendend relatedness. It is way more likely that it is a cousin-cousin relationship and that's what the scientists also conclude, as other research shows this isn't an ancestor looking at the sequence alone. The sequences are publically availalbe, so he has no little grounds to say that this sequence is a lie as well.
This conversation eventually went nowhere. Eventually he backed off and changed his position to essentially this:
Yeah, same old same old. JAQing-off and burden shifting."well, It is not conclusive. of course. All I am saying that they COULD be lying and that it COULD be from the lab? Do you have any evidence against it? Can you name any better theories"
So, that's all I wanted to share.
Again, perhaps I will go deeper into the stuff from Deigin and Segreto if I have the time.
And maybe one of you can also comment about it and other stuff on Bill Maher's show.
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