Especially because the @WhiteHouse & @POTUS could scale hygienic infrastructure federally, incentivize it at states, kill Covid, and create a booming post-WWII-level economy.
A true #CovidZero effort would unleash ENORMOUS economic activity, if done correctly, like so:
🧵 1/ We MUST start a conversation about "data bros / broettes."
These are people who subscribe to a kind of idiot-version of Humean empiricism. They have zero grasp of deduction/abduction, and they genuinely believe it is impossible to predict real outcomes without "The Data."
2/ For those don't know, here's a quick summary of deduction, induction, and abduction before we get into the weeds.
It's important to understand HOW we generally think and reason before we discuss WHAT we think and reason. merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/…
3/ Next, here's a great overview of Hume (who was a genius), if you don't know what I mean by "idiot-version of Humean empiricism": plato.stanford.edu/entries/induct…
Here's their TL;dr premise: Viruses that are "pre-adapted" to human ACE2 receptors would by definition stop mutating.
You don't need a virology background to know how silly this is from an evolutionary standpoint.
E.g.
"If SARS-CoV-2 resulted from attempts to adapt a SARSr-CoV for study in animal models, it would likely have acquired mutations like N501Y for efficient replication in that model"
LOL. Why would it "likely" have acquired these? They don't say.
"Recurring mutations...including N501Y...E484K/Q... similarly enhance viral infectivity and ACE2 binding, refuting claims that the SARS-CoV-2...was optimized for binding to human ACE2 upon...emergence"
Literal nonsense unless your premise is that viruses stop mutating.
Denying lab leak outright, however, WAS an actual conspiracy.
The next day after you looped Andersen in this🧵to help dunk on Cotton's comments, he wrote to Fauci: "genome [was] inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory."