Dear Graham,

That was a thoughtful piece. How do we put the scientific genie back in the bottle if it can have catastrophic consequences once it has been released? In 1945 I thought it would just be a matter of time before the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be repeated in other great cities in the world? The impetus for the Manhattan Project which produced the atomic bomb was the fear of the consequences if Hitler got nuclear weapon capacity. I am still alive 65 years later, and there hasn't been another such device dropped on a city. The threat still exists. Possibly, if Ukraine hadn't given up its nuclear capability Russia wouldn't have invaded. However, the nuclear powers, India and Pakistan, fought several wars without using those powers. Israel, a nuclear power, has fought several wars without using those powers. The threat of a nuclear exchange remains. How long can we continue avoiding it?

Bad arithmetic. 2023-1945=78. I am alive 78 years later.

Population decimation proved in the end, re Black Death plagues, to be an advantage to the march for equality.

The pandemic of COVID proved the point in opposite directions; a lot of people became very wealthy from the shift in priorities of the property market, and too many lost the little they had from the same shift.

But a common outcome to both was a rise in racial vilification directed towards Asians and Jews: a more notable observation in the US as opposed to Australia, where such bad news is suppressed and difficult to find.

Irrespective of those facts, over population and strains on health and housing infrastructure, are the commonality of negative outcomes from COVID for those on the bottom end of society that take the brunt of negative outcomes. The rest can chatter on with academic disconnection.

"The precautionary principle says that if the consequences of an event happening are possibly catastrophic, you are justified in taking all actions to stop that event before you have fully assessed either the risk or the probable size of the consequences."
A pity we didn`t do that before embarking upon this ridiculous population explosion occurring now.

Off hand, I think there are 2 aspects we should focus on.

Firstly, we should question all this gain of function research.

Medicine should focus on reducing infections and the severity of infections, whereas we have all these biolabs across the planet, that are working on making viruses more dangerous and more transmissible to people.

I think this approach needs a rethink.

Secondly, there are poor standards in virus adverse event reporting and quarantine in these biolabs.

This also needs a rethink.

We shouldn't be messing around trying to make diseases more dangerous and spreadable in the first instance, and we need completely foolproof containment protocols for situations where people are working with dangerous pathogens.

- And logic suggests that if we can't develop completely foolproof containment protocols for adverse events, then we most certainly shouldn't be messing around with gain of function research.

Why bother preparing for the next pandemic, if we can simply prevent it from happening in the first place?

Yes, AC and on the money. If we want a healthy economy, we need a healthy workforce. And because this thing needs new hosts to survive, it should be denied that facility by installing quarantine that works.

For mine that is island quarantining, and for all infected and contagious. Folk would not comply with health orders, because they were not badly infected and because that was so and due to economic circumstances could not afford time off.

And because this is still the case, the next pandemic will be just as bad if not worse. I'm predicting far worse.
Alan B.

"Peer review is the independent assessment of your research paper by experts in your field. The purpose of peer review is to evaluate the paper’s quality and suitability for publication. As well as peer review acting as a form of quality control for academic journals, it is a very useful source of feedback for you. The feedback can be used to improve your paper before it is published."

Thus sayeth one scientific journal publisher to its authors or potential authors about the purpose of review. Quality and suitability for publication. Not "whether or not a paper's results and/or conclusions are correct."

I must have reviewed hundreds of papers in my research career. I can't recall ever saying a paper was "wrong". Nor did any reviewer ever say any of mine were wrong. Reviewers might claim the experimental methods were inadequately described or the analysis faulty or the results did not support the conclusions or the English was poor (very common), but not that the authors were "wrong".

Scientific papers and journals are proliferating. If reviewers could exclude incorrect work from publication there might be fewer. They can't and they generally don't try, in my experience.

So don't hope for higher exclusion rates of false findings. Anyway, what really caused COVID policy failure was simple blind panic. And this resulted from huge recent increases in journalistic hyperbole and speed of global transmission of bad news. This is a fatal combination. And by definition rational efforts to keep it in check cannot succeed because irrationality beats them hands down

Hi TomBie,
Your comment has reminded me of a movie I watched the other night.

The Man Who Knew Infinity
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0787524/

It was on on SBS and anyone can watch it here on demand.
http://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/movie/the-man-who-knew-infinity/1482206787555
I recommend it, it was an enjoyable movie.


Your comment above was well demonstrated in this movie.
The fellows were not so much interested that he was right, but in him providing proofs that showed how he'd come up with the mathematical answers that he did.

It seems his mind was a machine, and he could figure things out; or that the answers would just come to him, without him knowing what the exact method was that his mind used to come up with those answers.

So true Graham, but good luck with getting any of the reasoning being used by academia or governments.

Thanks for the well thought out article GY. Kudos.

Classic non science, but a socio-political response, with fossil fuels Koch Network via think tanks and faux experts dismissing Covid science like climate science, joined at the hip:

'How the UK's Climate Science Deniers Turned Their Attention to COVID-19. The coronavirus crisis quickly divided the population between those putting their trust in public health experts and others quick to question the science...

A close look at commentary on both COVID-19 and climate change reveals significant crossover between unqualified voices casting doubt on experts recommending action.

Why?

“There’s nothing mysterious about this,” says Stephan Lewandowsky, a professor of cognitive science, who studies the persistence of misinformation in society at the University of Bristol.

“I think COVID is just climate change on steroids in a particle accelerator,” he says. “The same forces are happening: you have the inevitability of a virus which is the same as the inevitability of the physics. And opposing that you have politics which motivates some people to deny the inevitables and instead resort to bizarre claims.”

https://www.desmog.com/2020/08/10/how-uk-climate-science-deniers-turned-their-attention-coronavirus-covid-19/