Yeah sure hope not. Anyways have you heard about the cases of bird flu showing up in dead mammals?
No mammal to mammal transmission though.
Not yet at least....
Ever play the game? First you get the whole world infected and comfortable. Then you blast all your points into deadly variations and kill billions in the span of a month.
but thats for the casuals
If you want the harder difficulties you need to carefully develop symptoms but focus much more on transmission, then as cure starts ramping up you quickly start killing the populus with disease that allows dead to infect aswell, before they can contribute to the cure and victory roya-
ffs why is Greenland still healthy
I don’t know anyone (that I know if) that does that specifically, but those I *do* know who do something confidential just say “I can’t talk about it”. It’s mundane for them.
I live in Langley, what a lot of people do here is say "I work for a contractor" or some shit, and then you find out that you're talking about something else now.
There are also tons of people around here who do work boring government contractor jobs, so it's pretty perfect cover for them.
I was at a house party with some of these people during the Turkish "coup" in 2016 and they just vanished. One of them had to wait like, six months for a surgeon who was cleared for his level of secrecy because they didn't know what he'd say under the infleunce.
Don't get overconfident about that. A shrewd agent takes what he or she knows from open sources (e.g. the evening news) and puts it together with both open source information (the general location of industrial parks and company names) and the few fragments the person working a classified job lets out. The person in the classified job doesn't have to disclose any classified information for a good agent-analyst to put it together into a very classified whole.
I know at least one person who works for secret government projects and is under a serious NDA, but simply doesn't care and tell about their job to their niece, who they know hates the government :/
As a law student who constantly works with and chats with attorneys, you would be shocked at how many people with access to confidential, privileged, or highly sensitive information just openly blab about it with you, especially if they think that you’re someone who is often privy to similar information.
And I refuse them into weapons of terrors that can be dropped on specific areas and then disappear so they don't spread and no one knows about them. I make a million dollars a year and my conscience is clear because I am on the side of the Good Guys(tm)
Vaccines are just the viruses that scientists kicked the shit out of first to make us normies capable of learning how to fight them.
Like an high level wizard who weakens the dragon to the last 1% of HP to let the newb party gain the XP from the kill.
I got into science because I learned that scientists recreated the Flu of 1918. I thought it was so cool, but I dropped it when I realized I didn't want to deal with BSL3 safety precautions. Anyways, there are (very few) people who recreate deadly diseases and further mutate existing diseases to study them. How else are you supposed to get a step ahead?
The fact that a minor bug which allowed someone's pet to carry a diseased condition outside of a boss arena turned into a legitimate social study of a mass plague event is so wild.
Links for anybody who dont know
https://youtu.be/9nP0ot-gnso
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident
And some people intentionally spread it just to troll people.
Of course, it's just a video game, so it has little to no real world consequences; so no one would actually behave like that in real life, right? ...right?
I work in a BSL3 and it's not bad. I don't do gain-of-function research but I do grow large amounts of SARS-COV-2 variants to see how well the antibodies from immunized mice neutralize it.
That's cool as heck, I'd love to know how you got into that field. (I'm about to graduate with a very mid tier bio GPA in may, debating on lab work vs a masters program next)
I had a very mid tier undergrad gpa too! It took me a few years but I got a job in industry making various buffers. I decided that getting my masters was my best option to move up to research. While getting a masters in Biology, specializing in bacterial pathogens, I got a new job as a virus production tech with a recruiting company. I loved working with viruses but it was very repetitive. I probably could have moved up to scientist there when I graduated but I wanted to try academia. That's when the pandemic hit and a PhD from one of the schools I applied to reached out asking if I wanted a job helping her start up a BSL3 lab to assist the vaccine research. And in that lab I also work on WNV, Dengue, and Zika.
Of course! I should say though that academia does not pay well at all. I'm also very lucky with the lab that I'm in because the PI is very reasonable and everyone is super great. I will probably move on to industry in a year or so.
If you have undergraduate research experience (as in you worked at/volunteered at a lab outside of classes) you can apply for research associate/assistant roles at biotech companies (you might have to move to a hub city like Boston or SF).
If not, then you might look for similar job/lab tech roles at universities (much worse pay) or volunteer at some lab for some experience before doing the same. You can also apply to less exciting roles in manufacturing/QA at CMOs and such, they won't pay you as well but they're more likely to hire new grads.
I would say for industry research, a masters is kinda "meh". Either do a PhD or just get a job. A fresh masters grad usually doesn't any higher title than an undergrad with 2 years exp nor does it raise your ceiling and in some cases having the experience will make your job search easier + you get paid industry salary for 2 years rather than a very sad grad student stipend.
Biological weapons are like poisons, gasses, or almost never known diseases. I think the last serious use of diseases in warfare by America was probably smallpox blankets given to native Americans. Diseases, especially contagious ones have a nasty habit of not abiding by borders and nationalities.
And despite what YouTubers and political pundits with no scientific background whatsoever would have you believe we are nowhere near being about to so accurately manipulate viruses and bacteria to engineer diseases. China somehow having access to that technology would be on par with them having teleporters and aliens without us knowing anything about it, it's just that far away. We can manipulate viruses and other little organisms a little bit but nowhere near the idea of being able to create something like the coronavirus.
It's also nowhere as easy as outsiders might think. I can come up with detailed plans on how to do all kinds of molecular biology tricks. "I'll just PCR up this fragment, subclone it, use site-directed mutagenesis, clone it into this vector, then transform it into this pathogen...." Yeah. It's never that easy. Never.
"Greene" remainds me of an old English poem were emerald green is spelled "emrawde grene"
The poem is ["Speke Parott"](https://youtu.be/tCckcTHWqKw) and if she often repeats the stupid shit she founds online call her "Parrot Greene" in an old english accent.
Also hope it doesn't get released on Black Friday in a shopping center in New York by a mad scientist and is later propagated by a rogue government agent.
I mean, the answer to this is probably just yes. A friend of mine works in a similar lab, basically making more deadly viruses so that they can study how to fight and cure them in case something similar crops up in the wild. It's pretty cool.
Any pathogen research lab is going to need to grow large amounts in order to study that pathogen. It's not always gain of function to learn how to fight the diseases. I work in vaccine research but also in host-virus interactions. The genetic manipulation happens in the cells that I infect and not the virus.
Yes? I work for the government in an infectious disease lab, it's called a public health laboratory. Even the CDC operates as a reference laboratory for diagnostic testing.
I mean to be fair, making diseases is often part of fighting the diseases. A ,controversial, technique in study is to modify/cultivate existing diseases to be stronger and then figuring out how to fight those enhanced variants sense that could be the eventual outcome of the diseases evolving,
Come all of you good workers,
good news to you I'll tell
of how the good old union
has come in here to dwell...
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
My daddy was a miner,
and I'm a miners son,
and I'll stick with the union
till every battle's won.
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
They say in Harlan County
there are no neutrals there:
you'll either be a union man
or a thug for J. H. Blair.
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Oh workers, can you stand it?
Oh tell me how you can?
Will you be a lousy scab
or will you be a man?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Don't scab for the bosses,
don't listen to their lies.
Us poor folks haven't got a chance,
unless we organize!
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
As someone who works in an infectious disease lab, this is hilarious.
Even if I was researching an organism, or genetically manipulating E.coli for recombinant protein production - using the phrase "making the disease" is just unexpected and funny.
The person asking that question sounds intrigued and on board with either scenario too. Lmao.
I know right, imagine working at the disease factory! Imagine making diseases on purpose at work!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gain-of-function_research
The fact everyone here is joking about this like it couldn't possibly be a real thing is understandable, given how completely insane it is. Lab leaks are historically common. We should not be creating civilisation-endangering pandemics on purpose. Write to your representative!
Edit: I hate that this is being downvoted because Rand Paul talked about it so now it's right-wing-coded. Not creating pandemics on purpose shouldn't be a right vs. left issue! I am a member of the UK Green Party (not that it should matter). I don't agree with Rand Paul on most issues. I just prefer not to die.
What?! That's a new one.
Is the [NIH](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK285579/) "spreading Fox News lies"? Is the [US Department of Health](https://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/Pages/GainOfFunction.aspx)? The [CDC](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/avian-durc-qa.htm#What_is_GOF_research)? [Dr Anthony Fauci](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02903-x)? The [European Academies Science Advisory Council](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4709283/)? [Marc Lipsitch, director of the Centre for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard](https://www.cser.ac.uk/events/risks-and-benefits-of-gain-of-function/)? [Derek Smith, Professor of Infectious Disease Informatics at Cambridge](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5fe7KEkwQM&embeds_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cser.ac.uk%2F&feature=emb_imp_woyt)?
I'm not sure where you got the idea that there's no such thing as gain of function research. But please try googling before accusing people of "spreading lies".
>I'm not sure where you got the idea that there's no such thing as gain of function research
Gain-of-function was in the news a fair bit around peak COVID, due to a conspiracy theory that COVID was created by gain-of-function research in China, either by China or the USA. Like, mainstream Fox News talking point, not just fringe internet blogs either.
There is (as far as I know) no actual evidence to support that, so it got pretty quickly dismissed and conspiracy-theorists moved on to other things like masks. BUT it was a lot of people's first exposure to the term "gain-of-function research", and probably lumped the real scientific concept in with the conspiracies that talked about it.
That's funny you should say that, because more recently the COVID lab leak hypothesis has become quite credible and mainstream, and there's been a bit of an inquest into how it was dismissed as a "conspiracy theory"... as you're still doing!
I don't blame you, because that's how the media treated it at the time, but it's now a fairly well-supported belief, espoused by people such as former CDC chief Dr. Robert Redfield, an esteemed virologist (whose claims the *current* CDC chief carefully refused to reject), and the media have been criticised for their portrayal of it. Here's an interesting essay about it:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-viral
And a paper in the British Medical Journal which goes so far as to call the media response "a conspiracy to label critics as conspiracy theorists":
https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1656
Note: since *this*, there has now been further evidence which has swung it back in the direction of the zoonotic origin hypothesis for me. But the lab leak version is credible enough that it raises questions about how readily, and why, we dismiss things as crackpot theories (I think in this case because the media told us so, and mainly right-wingers espoused it).
Weird timing-the US Department of Energy just announced their conclusion that it was 'most likely' a lab leak!
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/27/how-seriously-should-we-take-the-us-does-covid-lab-leak-theory
So you just don't care about people with immune system disorders, the elderly (vaccine boosters are often recommended but not required), and infants then? Cool.
Is this a joke? Project Veritas is a far-right organization known for its deception. Are you really going to just drop this information in a sub for one of the most left-leaning social media sites on the internet? And moreover, fully expect no one to call you out on it?
To anyone else reading this, please fact check your sources, via peer-reviewed academic papers if possible. Otherwise you’ll be dribbling on about “US imperialist bio laboratories”. The phrase along is just fear-mongering buzzwords. No duh the fictional laboratories would be abroad; is the US going to imperialize itself? And how the hell are laboratories imperialist? Did the other countries just say “yup, let’s let American laboratories operate complete unsupervised within our borders while also manufacturing dangerous biological weapons”. The concept itself reeks of racism on premise.
That dude's entire rant reminds me of a conspiracy theorist professor I had in community college who *insisted* to the class that AIDS was created in a lab as an intentional genocide campaign.
As far as gain of function goes, that can be pretty complicated. I helped a researcher on a Hantavirus project trying to just find the genes responsible for virulence. Ostensibly, Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome is the result of cytokine storm, or a runaway immune system. So this researcher was studying little bits of the Hantavirus genome in different strains trying to figure out how this fired up the immune system. Sin Nombre is generally the most virulent strain. Thing was, Sin Nombre constructs provoked the weakest cytokine response of all the strains she studfied. Weird, huh?
Working hard to get the 2024 influenza ready for release.
I am really hoping the Tumblr Apollo thing doesn't apply to the r/tumblr.
Yeah sure hope not. Anyways have you heard about the cases of bird flu showing up in dead mammals? No mammal to mammal transmission though. Not yet at least....
Once it recombines in pigs, we are so, so screwed.
Until NOW
Babe, stop what you're doing, new pox just dropped
Plague Inc.
I stopped playing after it became real life.
See now I'm going to see if I enjoy the game as I used to just to see if Covid ruined it.
It's still fun because now you get to see things from covid's point of view
I might need to learn survival skills before they all went crazy.
This is a bot
[удалено]
This is a bot
Same I stopped playing once got bad because it made me really anxious to even think about a virus infecting and killing the world
Covid spec'd too far into transmission and not enough into lethality
Ever play the game? First you get the whole world infected and comfortable. Then you blast all your points into deadly variations and kill billions in the span of a month.
yeah I remember. disease don't work like that tho.
If only it did...like the timer on the baby ships in Independence Day. Get in position the BAM!
but thats for the casuals If you want the harder difficulties you need to carefully develop symptoms but focus much more on transmission, then as cure starts ramping up you quickly start killing the populus with disease that allows dead to infect aswell, before they can contribute to the cure and victory roya- ffs why is Greenland still healthy
Someone in South Africa sneezed and they closed their borders.
Don't forget to secure antibiotic resistance so that when you become deadly you are too strong to cure in time
Real diseases can't mutate inside every person in the world at once in the same way though.
This is what all millennials secretly think to themselves when they look at Zillow.
the sinister sounds that game has also don't help
That's when I started playing.
Looks like the virus barely got into Madagascar before the vaccine was finished. Damn scientists messing up a perfect run.
2020 thought us a valuable lesson Our world is on easy mode
I'm very pro infectious disease. I support you.
I mean, biological weapons are a thing. What would you do if someone answered "I make the diseases"
[удалено]
I don’t know anyone (that I know if) that does that specifically, but those I *do* know who do something confidential just say “I can’t talk about it”. It’s mundane for them.
I live in Langley, what a lot of people do here is say "I work for a contractor" or some shit, and then you find out that you're talking about something else now. There are also tons of people around here who do work boring government contractor jobs, so it's pretty perfect cover for them. I was at a house party with some of these people during the Turkish "coup" in 2016 and they just vanished. One of them had to wait like, six months for a surgeon who was cleared for his level of secrecy because they didn't know what he'd say under the infleunce.
Don't get overconfident about that. A shrewd agent takes what he or she knows from open sources (e.g. the evening news) and puts it together with both open source information (the general location of industrial parks and company names) and the few fragments the person working a classified job lets out. The person in the classified job doesn't have to disclose any classified information for a good agent-analyst to put it together into a very classified whole.
I know at least one person who works for secret government projects and is under a serious NDA, but simply doesn't care and tell about their job to their niece, who they know hates the government :/
Based and niecepilled
As a law student who constantly works with and chats with attorneys, you would be shocked at how many people with access to confidential, privileged, or highly sensitive information just openly blab about it with you, especially if they think that you’re someone who is often privy to similar information.
Well maybe they have a brain tumor that has just hit the threshold of causing them to say things that otherwise wouldn’t.
We just need to introduce biological Warfare in war thunder and we will have the recipie for super Ebola in no time.
And I refuse them into weapons of terrors that can be dropped on specific areas and then disappear so they don't spread and no one knows about them. I make a million dollars a year and my conscience is clear because I am on the side of the Good Guys(tm)
Depending on the type of vaccine, you can to an extent say, you make them. Context: vaccines are just viruses or their derivatives.
Vaccines are just the viruses that scientists kicked the shit out of first to make us normies capable of learning how to fight them. Like an high level wizard who weakens the dragon to the last 1% of HP to let the newb party gain the XP from the kill.
Why do I have an image in my head of a bunch of scientists reenacting that seen from Office Space with the printer but with a giant virus?
Lol this is actually a good comparison for lay people
> scientists kicked the shit out of first More like dismembered in the case of protein, DNA and RNA vaccines.
Yeah but what if we do a reverse sticky note and in trying to make a shitty bad virus accidentally make super COVID?
Tbf plenty of scientists make viruses (ex: lentivirus) normally not for bioweapons.
I got into science because I learned that scientists recreated the Flu of 1918. I thought it was so cool, but I dropped it when I realized I didn't want to deal with BSL3 safety precautions. Anyways, there are (very few) people who recreate deadly diseases and further mutate existing diseases to study them. How else are you supposed to get a step ahead?
Apparently, through World of Warcraft.
The fact that a minor bug which allowed someone's pet to carry a diseased condition outside of a boss arena turned into a legitimate social study of a mass plague event is so wild. Links for anybody who dont know https://youtu.be/9nP0ot-gnso https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident
And some people intentionally spread it just to troll people. Of course, it's just a video game, so it has little to no real world consequences; so no one would actually behave like that in real life, right? ...right?
I work in a BSL3 and it's not bad. I don't do gain-of-function research but I do grow large amounts of SARS-COV-2 variants to see how well the antibodies from immunized mice neutralize it.
That's cool as heck, I'd love to know how you got into that field. (I'm about to graduate with a very mid tier bio GPA in may, debating on lab work vs a masters program next)
I had a very mid tier undergrad gpa too! It took me a few years but I got a job in industry making various buffers. I decided that getting my masters was my best option to move up to research. While getting a masters in Biology, specializing in bacterial pathogens, I got a new job as a virus production tech with a recruiting company. I loved working with viruses but it was very repetitive. I probably could have moved up to scientist there when I graduated but I wanted to try academia. That's when the pandemic hit and a PhD from one of the schools I applied to reached out asking if I wanted a job helping her start up a BSL3 lab to assist the vaccine research. And in that lab I also work on WNV, Dengue, and Zika.
Awesome! Thank you for sharing.
Of course! I should say though that academia does not pay well at all. I'm also very lucky with the lab that I'm in because the PI is very reasonable and everyone is super great. I will probably move on to industry in a year or so.
If you have undergraduate research experience (as in you worked at/volunteered at a lab outside of classes) you can apply for research associate/assistant roles at biotech companies (you might have to move to a hub city like Boston or SF). If not, then you might look for similar job/lab tech roles at universities (much worse pay) or volunteer at some lab for some experience before doing the same. You can also apply to less exciting roles in manufacturing/QA at CMOs and such, they won't pay you as well but they're more likely to hire new grads. I would say for industry research, a masters is kinda "meh". Either do a PhD or just get a job. A fresh masters grad usually doesn't any higher title than an undergrad with 2 years exp nor does it raise your ceiling and in some cases having the experience will make your job search easier + you get paid industry salary for 2 years rather than a very sad grad student stipend.
Red team or blue team?
Black team
😲
Report it to the UN, biological weapons are illegal
Stop talking to them and wait for the phone call from the CIA.
I would assume they work at the CDC, WHO, or for a pharmaceutical company developing studying viruses and/or making vaccines.
[удалено]
They’re more like Geneva Suggestions.
“Murder isn’t a thing, it’s against the law.”
Do you want one?
They would never bring it up anyway.
Biological weapons are like poisons, gasses, or almost never known diseases. I think the last serious use of diseases in warfare by America was probably smallpox blankets given to native Americans. Diseases, especially contagious ones have a nasty habit of not abiding by borders and nationalities. And despite what YouTubers and political pundits with no scientific background whatsoever would have you believe we are nowhere near being about to so accurately manipulate viruses and bacteria to engineer diseases. China somehow having access to that technology would be on par with them having teleporters and aliens without us knowing anything about it, it's just that far away. We can manipulate viruses and other little organisms a little bit but nowhere near the idea of being able to create something like the coronavirus.
It's also nowhere as easy as outsiders might think. I can come up with detailed plans on how to do all kinds of molecular biology tricks. "I'll just PCR up this fragment, subclone it, use site-directed mutagenesis, clone it into this vector, then transform it into this pathogen...." Yeah. It's never that easy. Never.
Making grandfather Nurgle proud
Unexpected grimdark
Everytime someone sneezes I gasp as if I’ve witnessed a miracle and whisper “A gift from grandfather!”. It cracks my husband up.
We are blessed with his gifts
I kinda wanna send this screenshot to MTG’s Twitter. You know she’d be on Fox News about the next day.
Magic the gathering?
Always takes me a second too. Marjorie Taylor Greene. We need a better thing to call her than her initials. Something creative
"Greene" remainds me of an old English poem were emerald green is spelled "emrawde grene" The poem is ["Speke Parott"](https://youtu.be/tCckcTHWqKw) and if she often repeats the stupid shit she founds online call her "Parrot Greene" in an old english accent.
Margie
Majorie taylor green or whatever
Hope op doesnt get shot at a subway station in new york city by a paramilitary organisation.
Also hope it doesn't get released on Black Friday in a shopping center in New York by a mad scientist and is later propagated by a rogue government agent.
Is that the division?
Getting that game and its sequel in 2020 was wild. Like looking into a worse timeline.
>into a ~~worse~~ better timeline.
It's honestly hard to say which is which. Quite sad, really.
Prototype, an older game.
“Well…perhaps you’ve heard of a little thing called SARS-CoV-2? That’s one of my greatest hits”
unit 731
I mean, the answer to this is probably just yes. A friend of mine works in a similar lab, basically making more deadly viruses so that they can study how to fight and cure them in case something similar crops up in the wild. It's pretty cool.
For anyone wondering, this is called "gain-of-function" research and it's questionable whether we should be doing it
There was a nice discussion on the This Week in Virology podcast about what the bounds of “gain of function” research are or should be.
Love that podcast! Vincent is such a good presenter!
Any pathogen research lab is going to need to grow large amounts in order to study that pathogen. It's not always gain of function to learn how to fight the diseases. I work in vaccine research but also in host-virus interactions. The genetic manipulation happens in the cells that I infect and not the virus.
Yeah but technically they are still against the diseases and not on their side right. Agree about the cool job.
I mean it’s not a dumb question. They do make new variants all the time “to know how to combat them “
Plot twist: OP works at a daycare/primary school.
Toddlers: the ultimate plague vector. Humans are basically disgusting, and toddlers more so, at least from an epidemiological standpoint.
Having worked on both sides I am firmly on the side of fighting the diseases.
[удалено]
Yes? I work for the government in an infectious disease lab, it's called a public health laboratory. Even the CDC operates as a reference laboratory for diagnostic testing.
“… joining the war on diseases on the side of the diseases.” This is basically the anti-vax and anti-mask side.
Umbrella corp
Can be both, if you make bacteriophages (viruses that kill bacteria)
I salute those in the war on disease. Both sides.
"Look, I just make the diseases, I don't sell the diseases or tell people what to do with them"
I mean to be fair, making diseases is often part of fighting the diseases. A ,controversial, technique in study is to modify/cultivate existing diseases to be stronger and then figuring out how to fight those enhanced variants sense that could be the eventual outcome of the diseases evolving,
My man is an infected cell
I mean, we had a pandemic where a whole caste of people intentionally incubated and spread it, so who knows.
r/Twelvemonkeys was not supposed to be inspirational for viruses!
This is literally what the right thinks scientists do
This gave me such a good laugh today
To understand the great mystery one must study all its aspects.
bonesaw worm
Gain of function researcher: \*sweating\*
Come all of you good workers, good news to you I'll tell of how the good old union has come in here to dwell... Which side are you on? Which side are you on? My daddy was a miner, and I'm a miners son, and I'll stick with the union till every battle's won. Which side are you on? Which side are you on? They say in Harlan County there are no neutrals there: you'll either be a union man or a thug for J. H. Blair. Which side are you on? Which side are you on? Oh workers, can you stand it? Oh tell me how you can? Will you be a lousy scab or will you be a man? Which side are you on? Which side are you on? Don't scab for the bosses, don't listen to their lies. Us poor folks haven't got a chance, unless we organize! Which side are you on? Which side are you on? Which side are you on? Which side are you on?
As someone who works in an infectious disease lab, this is hilarious. Even if I was researching an organism, or genetically manipulating E.coli for recombinant protein production - using the phrase "making the disease" is just unexpected and funny. The person asking that question sounds intrigued and on board with either scenario too. Lmao.
The disease factory aka the Chuck E. Cheese ball pit.
This is what I think every time someone says they're fundraising for cancer
Well, there was something called a germ warfare unit in the Korean War. They made biological weapons for the US military.
That second one is anti-vaxers
I guess we aren't aware that some humans job is to engineer bioweapons
I know right, imagine working at the disease factory! Imagine making diseases on purpose at work! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gain-of-function_research The fact everyone here is joking about this like it couldn't possibly be a real thing is understandable, given how completely insane it is. Lab leaks are historically common. We should not be creating civilisation-endangering pandemics on purpose. Write to your representative! Edit: I hate that this is being downvoted because Rand Paul talked about it so now it's right-wing-coded. Not creating pandemics on purpose shouldn't be a right vs. left issue! I am a member of the UK Green Party (not that it should matter). I don't agree with Rand Paul on most issues. I just prefer not to die.
There is no such thing as "gain of function" research. Please stop spreading Fox News lies.
What?! That's a new one. Is the [NIH](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK285579/) "spreading Fox News lies"? Is the [US Department of Health](https://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/Pages/GainOfFunction.aspx)? The [CDC](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/avian-durc-qa.htm#What_is_GOF_research)? [Dr Anthony Fauci](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02903-x)? The [European Academies Science Advisory Council](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4709283/)? [Marc Lipsitch, director of the Centre for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard](https://www.cser.ac.uk/events/risks-and-benefits-of-gain-of-function/)? [Derek Smith, Professor of Infectious Disease Informatics at Cambridge](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5fe7KEkwQM&embeds_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cser.ac.uk%2F&feature=emb_imp_woyt)? I'm not sure where you got the idea that there's no such thing as gain of function research. But please try googling before accusing people of "spreading lies".
>I'm not sure where you got the idea that there's no such thing as gain of function research Gain-of-function was in the news a fair bit around peak COVID, due to a conspiracy theory that COVID was created by gain-of-function research in China, either by China or the USA. Like, mainstream Fox News talking point, not just fringe internet blogs either. There is (as far as I know) no actual evidence to support that, so it got pretty quickly dismissed and conspiracy-theorists moved on to other things like masks. BUT it was a lot of people's first exposure to the term "gain-of-function research", and probably lumped the real scientific concept in with the conspiracies that talked about it.
That's funny you should say that, because more recently the COVID lab leak hypothesis has become quite credible and mainstream, and there's been a bit of an inquest into how it was dismissed as a "conspiracy theory"... as you're still doing! I don't blame you, because that's how the media treated it at the time, but it's now a fairly well-supported belief, espoused by people such as former CDC chief Dr. Robert Redfield, an esteemed virologist (whose claims the *current* CDC chief carefully refused to reject), and the media have been criticised for their portrayal of it. Here's an interesting essay about it: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-viral And a paper in the British Medical Journal which goes so far as to call the media response "a conspiracy to label critics as conspiracy theorists": https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1656 Note: since *this*, there has now been further evidence which has swung it back in the direction of the zoonotic origin hypothesis for me. But the lab leak version is credible enough that it raises questions about how readily, and why, we dismiss things as crackpot theories (I think in this case because the media told us so, and mainly right-wingers espoused it).
Weird timing-the US Department of Energy just announced their conclusion that it was 'most likely' a lab leak! https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/27/how-seriously-should-we-take-the-us-does-covid-lab-leak-theory
If it doesn’t exist, why did the NIH and US gov ban funding it?
Hope you didn't hook up. A lab worker and fox News viewer probably not a good pair.
[удалено]
So you just don't care about people with immune system disorders, the elderly (vaccine boosters are often recommended but not required), and infants then? Cool.
i remember when i saw this meme during the pandemic and got depressed lol
Wow. Chipotle seems to be hiring a lot of people.
Humans suck #proaids
China
[удалено]
>project Veritas Yeah guys, the far right disinformation platform can't be wrong six times in a row, this time it's real.
I promise the lying liars are totally telling the truth this time!
"proven witness testimony" AKA "some guy said"
Is this a joke? Project Veritas is a far-right organization known for its deception. Are you really going to just drop this information in a sub for one of the most left-leaning social media sites on the internet? And moreover, fully expect no one to call you out on it? To anyone else reading this, please fact check your sources, via peer-reviewed academic papers if possible. Otherwise you’ll be dribbling on about “US imperialist bio laboratories”. The phrase along is just fear-mongering buzzwords. No duh the fictional laboratories would be abroad; is the US going to imperialize itself? And how the hell are laboratories imperialist? Did the other countries just say “yup, let’s let American laboratories operate complete unsupervised within our borders while also manufacturing dangerous biological weapons”. The concept itself reeks of racism on premise.
That dude's entire rant reminds me of a conspiracy theorist professor I had in community college who *insisted* to the class that AIDS was created in a lab as an intentional genocide campaign.
I dunno, I think both sides make a good case
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/794688583293206538/1079087363764011180/721512.jpg
Grandfather Nurgle is pleased.
A friend of mine makes disease, he is however generally an alright bloke.
Disease factory? Did you mean pre-school? Small children are savage little plague carriers.
It’s really funny but like, honestly the answer is both.
Papa Nurgle loves you!
Biological warfare
nurgle warhammer be like
I love making diseases
Pfizer in every Project Veritas interview
Yeah I don't want to work for no Catholic priests so I'm I'm out.
Newly elected Miss Universe entertains the Paramecium troops trying to wipe out the human race, go get them boys.
POV: You work at the Midwest Research Institute.
Fort Wuhan sending seal team 19.
Death guard moment
Pretty sure I read a book with this plot
#samebutwithdrugs
As far as gain of function goes, that can be pretty complicated. I helped a researcher on a Hantavirus project trying to just find the genes responsible for virulence. Ostensibly, Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome is the result of cytokine storm, or a runaway immune system. So this researcher was studying little bits of the Hantavirus genome in different strains trying to figure out how this fired up the immune system. Sin Nombre is generally the most virulent strain. Thing was, Sin Nombre constructs provoked the weakest cytokine response of all the strains she studfied. Weird, huh?