Unethical science does more to damage democracy and liberty than 'misinformation' ever could.
Who's going to stop them? With the way pharma has infiltrated all aspects and levels of academia and public health, it holds powerful sway over our medical existence.
It's going to take some very brave people to reverse this.
"Misinformation" has never been a threat to democracy or liberty. Those who claim otherwise are simply ignorant and illiterate on the history of democratic thought.
By definition, "misinformation" necessitates the primacy of narrative over facts, data, and evidence--and thus contains the seeds of its own downfall. "Misinformation" is either an effort to dismiss a certain narrative framework as propaganda, despite its objective factual and evidentiary support, or is itself propaganda. Because it necessarily entails a denial of reality, it must invariably collapse under its own weight.
Right now, the greatest purveyors of "misinformation" outside of government are the Big Pharma companies. Whether the average American citizen, through the good offices of the jury box and the ballot box, can bring Big Pharma to heel, is an open question. If this cannot be done, we will need to rely on the cartridge box.
Good article hadn't heard of this particular research where a hybrid was created, just have heard the fact that the two viruses could cause a coinfection. Curious as to how you found out about the GOF research?
Your paragraph towards the end perhaps explains the answer to your own question of What Was The Point: "The mechanics of an hybridization that is unlikely to occur naturally, given that it is an apparently rare pairing of viruses in a coinfection is an amazingly small benefit for a research project which could quite easily have created the next pathogen to escape from the lab to torment the world with yet more disease."
This one was a case of simply keeping up with the facts. First I saw the news article about an Influenza/RSV hybrid, and then when I read more about it, it was clear this had taken place in a lab context.
After that I just had to read the original study plus the follow its own citations to get a sense of the background.
It would be a mistake to treat this in the same light as the molecular manipulations of Boston University and Imperial College London. This was not that sort of deliberate effort to create a more dangerous pathogen. Still, when you read the study itself, it is clear this was an effort to see if IAV and RSV would create a hybrid, and then to ascertain how that hybrid would behave. Given that prior research has already established that coinfections with RSV tend to be more severe, it doesn't take too much extrapolation to realize there is a potential here for a dangerous pathogen to emerge.
Was the point to see if such a pathogen could be crafted in such fashion? Certainly the study does not offer that as the focal point of the research. Still, there is no denying that, even if such was not the motive for the research initially, the research now shows that such is at least possible.
My constant motto in developing articles for All Facts Matter: follow the data.
Unethical science does more to damage democracy and liberty than 'misinformation' ever could.
Who's going to stop them? With the way pharma has infiltrated all aspects and levels of academia and public health, it holds powerful sway over our medical existence.
It's going to take some very brave people to reverse this.
"Misinformation" has never been a threat to democracy or liberty. Those who claim otherwise are simply ignorant and illiterate on the history of democratic thought.
By definition, "misinformation" necessitates the primacy of narrative over facts, data, and evidence--and thus contains the seeds of its own downfall. "Misinformation" is either an effort to dismiss a certain narrative framework as propaganda, despite its objective factual and evidentiary support, or is itself propaganda. Because it necessarily entails a denial of reality, it must invariably collapse under its own weight.
Right now, the greatest purveyors of "misinformation" outside of government are the Big Pharma companies. Whether the average American citizen, through the good offices of the jury box and the ballot box, can bring Big Pharma to heel, is an open question. If this cannot be done, we will need to rely on the cartridge box.
Good article hadn't heard of this particular research where a hybrid was created, just have heard the fact that the two viruses could cause a coinfection. Curious as to how you found out about the GOF research?
Your paragraph towards the end perhaps explains the answer to your own question of What Was The Point: "The mechanics of an hybridization that is unlikely to occur naturally, given that it is an apparently rare pairing of viruses in a coinfection is an amazingly small benefit for a research project which could quite easily have created the next pathogen to escape from the lab to torment the world with yet more disease."
Creating the next pathogen to torment the world may have been the intent!!! Linking tomorrow @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/
This one was a case of simply keeping up with the facts. First I saw the news article about an Influenza/RSV hybrid, and then when I read more about it, it was clear this had taken place in a lab context.
After that I just had to read the original study plus the follow its own citations to get a sense of the background.
It would be a mistake to treat this in the same light as the molecular manipulations of Boston University and Imperial College London. This was not that sort of deliberate effort to create a more dangerous pathogen. Still, when you read the study itself, it is clear this was an effort to see if IAV and RSV would create a hybrid, and then to ascertain how that hybrid would behave. Given that prior research has already established that coinfections with RSV tend to be more severe, it doesn't take too much extrapolation to realize there is a potential here for a dangerous pathogen to emerge.
Was the point to see if such a pathogen could be crafted in such fashion? Certainly the study does not offer that as the focal point of the research. Still, there is no denying that, even if such was not the motive for the research initially, the research now shows that such is at least possible.
My constant motto in developing articles for All Facts Matter: follow the data.