October 19, 2022
Oh.
One of the Brickmuppet's Crack Team of Science Babes brings us news from the world of epidemiology.
"I have thoughts on this matter. Let me spell them out for you:
Pound sign, lightning emote, question mark, star, treble clef icon, poop emote, "at"symbol, exclamation point."
"I...uh...concur with your analysis"
Well... it seems that Boston University has taken the highly vaccine-resistant and super-contagious Omicron variant of Coronachan/The Pinko Pox/ Winnie the Flu/The Commie Cough/Kung-Flu-of-Dying/The 2020 Gain-Of-Function-Award-Winner/...better known as COVID-19 and crossed it via gain of function techniques with the original Wuhan variant and developed a strain of Xi's Disease that kills 80% of it's victims (at least in mice).
For further thoughts on the matter, let's go to one of our crack team of science bobcats...
Thank you Busby.
According to the Live Science article, Boston claims that this was not "gain of function research" and that they made the original Wuhan strain slightly less lethal by giving it the higher transmissibility of the Omicron variant, and that they successfully discovered that Omicron's spike protein did not cause a lack of lethality.
This seems to be quite the semantic argument, at least from a layman's perspective. While the original, hyper-deadly variant was indeed made slightly less lethal by this research, the much less dangerous but far more transmissible variant was made vastly more so.
An argument can be made that there is a need for this kind of research, but the place for that research is not in the middle of Boston (or Wuhan) it's in a secure facility in a dry valley in Antarctica, or preferably, in a crater on the moon.
I can't imagine, after the disaster we have been through the last three years, what combination of addle-mindedness, arrogance and autism compelled some of the smartest (albeit obviously not wisest) minds in the country to perpetrate this act of asininity.
There is a hubris and lack of self awareness that seems to permeate our expert class, one that may well be our downfall if we don't reign in these over-credentialed ding-a-lings.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
01:21 PM
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1
Don't hold back, tell us what you really think... so I can agree wholeheartedly.
Posted by: Mauser at Wed Oct 19 23:06:12 2022 (BzEjn)
2
Yeah, I've been salty as all on this for at least a year, when I figured this out.
Mostly, at a local to me university. "Okay, you have to endorse all of this stuff, and force employees, for 'public safety' and 'public health'. But, for some reason your medical school employees have decided that teaching a bunch of humanities and social sciences to kids is an essential economic activity. That looks like fucking the rest of the country over, and only caring for your own business activities. If we /need/ such extreme measures because of one pathogen, there are legitimate questions to reconsider about whether university medical schools, and hospitals in general, are trustworthy to handle the pathogen samples that they currently do."
The fundamental issue is, blindly enforcing whims tied to federal funding is a bit totalitarian. Totalitarianism is really really bad for industrial safety. For real quality of industrial safety, you need the workers with hands on, who have the most information about what they are doing, to have the initiative and intelligence not to do stupid stuff. This does not hold where totalitarians have squashed the initiative and thought out of the work force.
The public should not be trusting the credentialed 'experts' to do any handling of pathogens, so long as those 'experts' are enthusiastically ruining any possible industrial safety at the work places of those 'experts'.
If we had any thoughtful decisive people any where in formal power, we should have had some very pointed public questions about whether the medical professionals should be prevented from collecting blood, stool, or urine samples, for fear of compromised industrial safety practices.
And, the tertiary schools are a pretty concerning area of activity. International graduate students very often come from much more totalitarian nations than the US, and combined with the wild overconfidence of professoral and administrative tyrants, do not have a good feel for not pissing off the American public.
Mostly, at a local to me university. "Okay, you have to endorse all of this stuff, and force employees, for 'public safety' and 'public health'. But, for some reason your medical school employees have decided that teaching a bunch of humanities and social sciences to kids is an essential economic activity. That looks like fucking the rest of the country over, and only caring for your own business activities. If we /need/ such extreme measures because of one pathogen, there are legitimate questions to reconsider about whether university medical schools, and hospitals in general, are trustworthy to handle the pathogen samples that they currently do."
The fundamental issue is, blindly enforcing whims tied to federal funding is a bit totalitarian. Totalitarianism is really really bad for industrial safety. For real quality of industrial safety, you need the workers with hands on, who have the most information about what they are doing, to have the initiative and intelligence not to do stupid stuff. This does not hold where totalitarians have squashed the initiative and thought out of the work force.
The public should not be trusting the credentialed 'experts' to do any handling of pathogens, so long as those 'experts' are enthusiastically ruining any possible industrial safety at the work places of those 'experts'.
If we had any thoughtful decisive people any where in formal power, we should have had some very pointed public questions about whether the medical professionals should be prevented from collecting blood, stool, or urine samples, for fear of compromised industrial safety practices.
And, the tertiary schools are a pretty concerning area of activity. International graduate students very often come from much more totalitarian nations than the US, and combined with the wild overconfidence of professoral and administrative tyrants, do not have a good feel for not pissing off the American public.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Thu Oct 20 12:13:42 2022 (r9O5h)
3
...so, work proceeds well on project "Captain Trips" ?
Posted by: Doug O at Thu Oct 20 12:18:39 2022 (T6enK)
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