I’m going to put my money on there actually being no signs of genetic engineering, and that the people who did this paper either misunderstood things, or are actively dishonest.
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Yup. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but reality is utterly mundane.
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Why didn’t I know the leader of Illuminati is called Pindar (shortened term for “Pinnacle of the Draco” AKA Dragon’s Penis)?
I need to go see H. Celine about this.
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Well, it does say the paper comes from an outsider to the field and hasn’t even been peer reviewed…but surely a respected scientific publication like The Economist knows viral genomes well enough that we can trust them that it deserves consideration.
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It was The Invisible Hand all along!
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Remember that time they published a review saying “slavery wasn’t all bad you know. It brought culture to the enslaved”? They were really in early in the current British slavery apologism . Also early adopters of fake climate scientists to boost climate denialism under the guise of classical liberal sceptical events.
The Economist is what it is.
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And a free sea cruise! How’s that for altruism?
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I haven’t heard of most of those…and I was already worried about people going down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. Basically, this is telling me to never sleep again.
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Exactly. Damn, I wish more folks would know what to shitcan.
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Please don’t forget your sarcasm tags.
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I don’t know. On that one, there was enough info to read “dripping with excessive sarcasm” from the get go.
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… just the magazine, or the whole discipline 
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I’m still looking for links to the studies themselves rather than just the news stories about them, but if they’re correct then there may have been no advantage to changing the booster formula:
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What I need to know is, are the bivalent vaccines less effective? If they are equally effective, we are good. What I have seen so far are indications, not evidence yet, of lack of superiority. For me, this matters little if true. Although I already see it being spun as “See, it doesn’t work! I told you it was all a hoax!”
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Possibly. I think I found one of the papers:
Depends on how significant the ID50 titers are in dictating health outcomes, I guess.
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Other than the original SARS, are any of these significant human pathogens? Yeah, like most, I had hopes for the bivalent vaccine in helping to control the immune evasion abilities of the omicron lineage, but I will be content with continuing to minimize severe disease and viral load. This thing continues to spit out new variants that each seem to improve on evading immune response, which is not at all surprising. That is the biggest threat to their ongoing survival. Lots of evolutionary pressure, and as fast as these things reproduce, and as error prone as they are, a “generation time” can be incredibly brief.
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