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  • Wuhan Institute of Virology Can Ask Federally-Funded Biosecurity Lab to Destroy Records



    U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit investigative research group focusing on public health transparency, recently retrieved documents such as a memorandum of understanding via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealing that the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan China is granted the right to request partnering American lab Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch to literally destroy all records of their collaborative work. Actually, either one of the labs can request the other lab to destroy documents or “secret files” or, for that matter, any other communications, documents, associated data, or equipment arising out of the collaboration, including a demand that the partner destroys all copies. The Wuhan lab is affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This is quite a strange clause, given the Texas-based lab is supported by federal funds that are associated with record retention requirements.


    Why would a Chinese lab have the right to ask that a prominent lab with national security relevance destroy any secret files? This right persists even after the five-year term of the agreement terminates in October 2022, reports the nonprofit organization.


    Sensitive Biocontainment Labs

    Both Wuhan and the Texas Medical Branch Labs are classified as biocontainment labs that both inked a collaborative deal in 2018. Both of them are part of an elite and select group of facilities involved in cutting-edge research, including investigations into novel coronaviruses, reports Right to Know.


    NIH Funds Collaboration

    The National Institutes of Health funded a joint collaborative partnership between the Texas and Chinese-based labs as part of a biosafety training program. Under the agreement, the Sino-American cooperation also pursued novel research and the sharing of resources and knowledge.


    Do the Chinese Have the Right to Demand Destruction of Data?

    According to this agreement, they do. The Wuhan lab affiliated with the Chinese government is empowered in this agreement “to call for the destruction of data on U.S. servers funded by U.S. taxpayers.” This, of course, seems odd that a U.S.-based lab would agree to such terms.


    After all, the Texas Medical Branch lab includes a Biosafety Level 4 research laboratory storing highly infectious materials.


    What are Some Other Red Flags?

    According to Right to Know, other legal experts raise concerns, including a comment from Reuben Guttman, partner at Guttman, Buschner & Brooks PLLC, a consulting firm specializing in government program integrity, who declared, “The clause is quite frankly explosive.” They continued, “Anytime I see a public entity, I would be very concerned about destroying records.”


    In fact, records retention and destruction policies are governed by legal concerns such as records management schemes and are necessary across federal, state as well as academic, and even private corporate legal mandates. As mentioned in the recent Right to Know piece, relevant laws associated with the Texas lab include the Texas Public Information Act and the federal False Claims Act. The Galveston National Laboratory, a part of the University of Texas System—which receives federal funding—most definitely has record retention accountability.


    WIV: We don’t delete records—really?

    WIV claims they would never delete records, yet U.S. Right to Know reports a WIV virus database disappeared in 2019 and continues to represent “…a source of intrigue for reporters, scientists, and U.S. intelligence agencies pursuing the origins of SARS-CoV-2.”


    Meanwhile, Zhengli Shi, a senior scientist known as Bat Woman with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, shared with MIT Technology Review that suggestions that her lab would destroy records associated with SARS-CoV-2 are “baseless and appalling


    US Right To Know - Pursuing truth and transparency for public health
    U.S. Right to Know is a nonprofit organization pursuing truth and transparency in America's food system.
    usrtk.org

  • Once in a while the maestro has to praise himself a little bit.

    And those darn citations won't keep up with the ever rising clickbot reads.

  • So posting an article by another scientist with a different viewpoint from yours, or the mainstream science "narrative", is being arrogant? If so, then I guess we can shut LF down then

    I intervened here because of the principle: I've mostly lots the will to live on this thread, as you may have realised, and it no longer has much new of interest.


    So - yes - the principle is that by posting a random blog entry from an isolated scientist (not sure in this case, but normally the are opining outside their field of expertise) and preferring that over the well-researched coherent scientific consensus from those who have looked at all of the data and present a carefully argued well-researched view - you are essentially preferring your gut over a best-effort well-informed guess.


    Since ALL science is guessing - just some so well validated it is effectively fact - to be more than story-tellers scientist need a lot of discipline and to consider objectively all of the evidence.


    No scientists is objective, but most try to do this, and understand the work needed to reduce their own biases. You can judge research papers by whether a scientist has looked carefully and considered all the previous work (both for and against their idea) when putting forward an idea. It is sort of the opposite of politics where arguments are all about pushing one side and ignoring the other.


    That process can be judged objectively. If a scientist has done their homework and fitted in a new idea into all the previous knowledge it is there to see in a well-written article. And anyone in the field will know if there are big bits missing. Regardless what is their subjective bias. And it is the basis for (good) peer review. Like everything it is an imperfect process - and can be corrupted when you have peer reviewers who do not do their job. Still, it works.


    And it is the recognition that process is valuable that is the heart of modern science. It means that not all stuff written buy scientists is equally worthy. While there is no guarantee a well-researched paper that considers pros and cons of a hypothesis is not biassed (in fact everything is biassed) it will be less biassed than one which does not do this. Also, scientists value innovation, and one way to use that creative ability (well known) is to storm into some filed you do not normally work with and find something new. That is fine - and valuable. But in evaluating the worth of that new thing, you need to do the hard work - read and appraise a large literature, spending the effort to work out how it fits together, what is more and less significant, and see where your new thing fits into that. Good scientists know that. Bad ones (who are typically arrogant, believe their own ideas vastly superior to others, scorn other work, think themselves brilliant - maybe you recognise this syndrome?) do not know that and construct fair-tale castles in the air.


    So what is your arrogance? You see the tough scientific attempt at rigor that many great modern scientists devote their lives to as being irrelevant when compared with the tenacity of your gut (which seems to be featuring quite a lot in this post).


    It is like if you claimed you were a doctor without 7 years of hard graft at med school, and started rubbishing medical treatments you did not understand. Now, some of those medical treatments are wrong - and in the US (where medicine is more financially corrupted than elsewhere) there are terrible stories of doctors over-treating patients. The point is that you need to critique that fairly, understanding the merits of medicine, and that requires a lot of expertise, or a lot of reliance on information from medical experts. The 7 years hard work means something.


    THH

  • After reading a bunch of Lou's posts just now I appreciate more than ever that he was a guy after the truth, the mainstream be damned.

    And, since I am POP for a few posts here.


    Mark shows his true colours here - and many will agree, but I not.


    If you are after the truth for real you need to be humble, but not slavish. You need to understand and sympathetically but critically get to the bottom of the mainstream stuff. Then you can be bold, and change things.


    The mainstream be damned is an attitude that leads to uninformed arrogant and inevitably poor arguments - because you are ignoring all the previous work. Much of that work will have merit, and where it is wrong, the way it is wrong will be illuminating.


    It is difficult to understand a whole load of stuff that makes sense (but may be wrong) and then critique it, coming up with something new. Much easier to make bold hypotheses in absence of any prior knowledge. If you have a bit of scientific education most people will be unable to critique what you say, and believe it.


    Equally, progress is highly unlikely to be made by those with no prior knowledge (or, worse - who deliberately and arrogantly refuse to consider prior work).


    I think many here see the difficulty (and can't imagine anyone having enough gumption to overcome it) while they underestimate the dangers of isolated locked in a tower thinking that ignores contrary views.


    Good scientists can do that. There are not so many of them. But many can aspire to be good.


    THH

  • Not meaning to be arrogant, but I trained with the best scientists at the once famous Biophysics Department at University College London, having accomplished a 2.1 degree there too in the also famous Physiology Department. Incidentally, Sir Andrew Huxley, your namesake, was one of my tutors as an undergraduate. Are you related to the Huxley's? Or Aldous Huxley with his controversial views on the subjective views on mescaline, LSD and other hallucinogenics? I fear that Professor Nutt at imperial college (which to us at UCL is a second-rate tech college) is now proposing the use of psychodelic drugs (psilocybin) for the treatment of depression. He is unreservedly a nut-case.

  • A puzzling phenomenon: Patients report a rebound of COVID-19 symptoms after taking the antiviral Paxlovid


    A puzzling phenomenon: Patients report a rebound of COVID-19 symptoms after taking the antiviral Paxlovid - The Boston Globe
    The issue has captured the attention of at least two teams of Boston-area scientists, who are trying to understand what might be fueling the problem.
    www.bostonglobe.com


    When it first hit the market in December, the COVID-19 antiviral treatment, Paxlovid, was hailed as a game-changer, an effective medicine that kept at-risk people out of the hospital. But now some patients are reporting on social media an unusual and unnerving phenomenon: their COVID symptoms appear to rebound after taking the medication.


    And it’s not just their symptoms that reappear. Many report that after finishing their five-day course of treatment, feeling better, and testing negative on an at-home rapid test, they then test positive again a few days later.


    The issue has captured the attention of at least two teams of Boston-area scientists, who are trying to understand what might be fueling the problem. Resistance to the drug? Patients being quickly reinfected? Or maybe some people just need to take the medicine longer to mount a more effective immune response.

  • As far as I am concerned your attitude is good, but do you THHuxleynew have the expertise in the medical field to decide which articles published today are 'good' and which are 'bad'? I do, because I have a biophysics PhD.

    I wonder.


    My point about judgement is that if you are familiar with the prior work you will know which papers are missing (or completely misrepresenting) strands of argument. And that can be objectively established.


    PhDs are very narrow. To take the topic most debated here, while you might have some background in data science as part of your doctoral work and so be able to critique the vaccine effectiveness arguments after a bit of appraisal, have you that background, or done that appraisal? I guess you'd be much comfortable with the mask stuff, except that the evidence mostly comes from poor experimental data, which again is all that data science stuff?


    While I don't claim I have expertise - my whole point is that cherry-picking articles is not right, and ignoring mainstream means you are ignoring the people who do have correct background to critique new work in a specialist area. Because I don't have expertise I do not go against mainstream scientific opinion: I am willing and able to call out politicians who misrepresent or slant things.


    More generally: if you have a PhD you will have been trained (but it might not have stuck, and some training is better than others) in how to critically appraise and apply to a new problem an area of the literature. In which case you will side with me and know it takes a long time and is difficult - not something that can easily be done on a blog without serious reading and then doing something based on what you have read (even if doing is just writing a decent literature review rather than running calculations).


    So - not me - but I await your answer as to whether you have put the needed work in for it to be you!

  • I may be wrong here, but it does not seem too puzzling to me? Just wrongly argued. And "puzzling" or "unnerving" seems to be used for journalistic effect.


    Paxlovid is an antiviral. As we know with antibiotics - antivirals do not help the immune system (well - some do, but most don't). They kill the virus while you take them. That will maybe give your immune system more time to respond, but equally if taken early there may be not much virus around for your immune system to have responded to. The same would be true for ivermectin were it an effective antiviral (which it is not).


    If the virus stays in you, or if you get reinfected from the same source - quite likely in home situations with household transmission - the antiviral will not suppress further symptoms. Even so it will probably still reduce serious disease because 2nd time around your immune system has at least some preparation, and can do a bit better than it would without the antiviral.


    It is a general problem with antivirals, and antibiotics, where the external source of the infection is not removed, or where the course of drugs is not long enough to completely knock out the infection. I guess either could apply to Paxlovid as used here. And I agree that it is a phenomenon that needs careful investigation if Paxlovid is to be used to maximum effect.


    THH

  • Yes, the world is a sad place.


    And on topic here I guess, especially for those more conspiracy minded here, we should not rule out the possibility that any information coming from Russia about LENR is in fact disinformation designed to distract or mislead people in the West. Though, personally, I don't think that would be high on anyone's list of important disinformation, so I doubt it.

  • Yes, the world is a sad place.


    And on topic here I guess, especially for those more conspiracy minded here, we should not rule out the possibility that any information coming from Russia about LENR is in fact disinformation designed to distract or mislead people in the West. Though, personally, I don't think that would be high on anyone's list of important disinformation, so I doubt it.

    Soviet disinformation began around 1923. Didn't work out as planned I imagine and now Russian disinformation. Seeing how poorly they are performing in Ukraine, hasn't helped much. It became a catch phrase during the Obama administration as a distraction to how poorly the administration policies were. In politics, Now ,you are a Russian asset instead of a racist or both depending on how vile a candidate gets. If you don't believe mainstream you are part of a conspiracy. If you seek alternate theories you are an anti vaxer The whole fucking thing is just insane! 50 some odd former intelligence officers claimed Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. Doesn't say much for our intelligence services and they should have their security clearance removed . The Democratic party uses the guise of Russian misinformation to hide all their misdeeds!

  • Not meaning to be arrogant, but I trained with the best scientists at the once famous Biophysics Department at University College London, having accomplished a 2.1 degree there too in the also famous Physiology Department. Incidentally, Sir Andrew Huxley, your namesake, was one of my tutors as an undergraduate. Are you related to the Huxley's? Or Aldous Huxley with his controversial views on the subjective views on mescaline, LSD and other hallucinogenics? I fear that Professor Nutt at imperial college (which to us at UCL is a second-rate tech college) is now proposing the use of psychodelic drugs (psilocybin) for the treatment of depression. He is unreservedly a nut-case.

    I named myself after Thomas Henry, not Andrew. Though they were a prolific and scientific family! Aldous Huxley, you will remember, was a writer of some fame. They are allowed to be nutcases. As for halucinogenics for depression it is not a stupid idea and I believe has some concrete science behind it. Not sure if it will work though.

  • So what is your arrogance? You see the tough scientific attempt at rigor that many great modern scientists devote their lives to as being irrelevant when compared with the tenacity of your gut (which seems to be featuring quite a lot in this post).

    No insult intended, but you are a dinosaur every bit as much as your namesake. There is a whole new internet centric world developing that is upending the scientific status quo. Challenging everything from the science itself, to the politics, money, greed that may, or may not have influenced, and corrupted it.


    No longer does the University based mainstream have the last say. It is increasingly becoming a healthy competition between the old way, and new, that IMO will result in a better outcome for humanity. This is especially so in the health care sciences. It most of all created this need to question everything, trust nothing, as has been proven time after time again during this pandemic.


    Representing this new challenge are a new breed of cyber experts who do not accept a narrative as is. They question everything, and offer up their own theories backed by solid science. Some are classically trained and educated, others self educated in the relative discipline, but equally as adept.


    Either evolve with the times, or risk becoming irrelevant. I choose the former. And you?

  • https://www.instantcheckmate.com › ...

    Albert Momenthy Phone, Address, & Email Records ...

    Albert Mohring Momenthy has lived in Renton, WA 98057; Kent, WA 98042; Cantonment, FL 32533 ... Click Here For Albert Mohring Momenthy's Current Address

    ttps://www.google.com › patents

    EP0461690A3 - Cold nuclear fusion thermal generator https://patents.google.compatent EP0461690A2 - Cold nuclear fusion thermal generator https://patents.google.com › patent

    More results from patents.google.com lenr-forum.com/attachment/20793/https://www.lenr-forum.com › thread Boeing LENR Patent - Players

    19 hours ago · 2 posts · 1 author EP0461690A2. Inventor - Albert Mohring Momenthy. Current Assignee - Boeing Co. THIS Patent has recently been cited by a number of other patents. ttps://clustrmaps.com... 1500 Kings Rd, Cantonment, FL

    Jul 29, 2021 — Known Residents. Albert Mohring Momenthy · Details. Age 86. (850) 937-8803. Bonnie Momenthy · Details. (850) 937-8803. Sharon L Momenthy. ttps://clustrmaps.co

    11 results — Associated persons: Albert Mohring Momenthy, Bonnie Momenthy, Sharon L Momenthy, Jeffery John Spencer

    Results 1 - 11 of 11 — Albert Mohring Momenthy, Bonnie Momenthy, and three other persons are also associated with this address. Kimberlee's previous addresses

    Albert Mohring Momenthy Sharon Lynn Momenthy Arthur Pilant Juanita C Beal · Rodney A Hatfield. Previous Address, 10413 174th, Renton, WA 98055

  • And, to continue the one strand of this I find worthwhile:


    Who said anything about universities?


    I pointed out that:

    (1) all scientists have biases - working out science is tough - you need to try hard to counter biases which is why writing good papers helps everyone

    (2) those who ignore what others are doing instead of understanding it and using it as context are not scientists - and highly unlikely to advance anything. Imagine a mathematician who ignored prior work and tried to do complex work in algebraic geometry without a knowledge of the existing work in group and ring theory and topology. You understand the existing stuff and if there are mistakes you find them, if not you build on it.

    (3) scientists can easily be arrogant and ignore other work, thinking their pet ideas are so much better that is safe. Usually those are the ones who get it wrong.

    (4) Your gut does not do any of the hard work needed to see what is what. Nor do cyber experts (who may be great at cyber warfare, but have not taken the time to do science).

    (5) Politics and the health care system is not the point here. Science is. The two intersect. You can assert the need for new politics, tearing down old institutions, all you like. I don't care. None of that touches the process needed to advance science - which has nothing to do with universities, and everything to do with hard work from individuals who communicate and so are able to put together a whole picture from many different fragments.


    I probably disagree with you on the politics - but that is OK. My point is that you are arrogant (and wrong) in applying political views that ignore the hard work of creating new understanding about science. And it is absurd to take the advice of an internet 3.0 expert over that of somone who has spent months studying all of the scientific evidence and putting it together.


    That you think it is possible to reach good guesses on science without that hard work shows only that you have not a clue what science is.


    That by the way is OK - why should everyone know everything? I mind only that from your position of not having looked at it you get on your soapbox and assure us all that internet experts can answer science questions better than scientists.


    I define scientist here as somone who does the long and hard work - reading and struggling to understand and put into context (much of it is wrong) all of that past work.


    TANSTAAFL

  • you are a dinosaur every bit as much as your namesake


    LOL. I am honoured indeed to be compared with THH. Although I note that Imperial College (which he founded) is trying to dethrone him because of his erroneous and very hurtful to many scientific views on black cultures - which were indeed dinosaur-like.


    THH

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