This is a perfect example of mixing science and opinion, and we should be scolding "scientists" who do this without clarifying which is which, not lionizing them.
The only definitively factual statement he makes is in the first tweet:
"One of the key questions about the new variant (B.1.1.7) is whether there is conclusive evidence that it is more transmissible. I don't think we are absolutely certain yet"
Everything else is speculation. He says that founder effect is not likely because the virus is spreading widely, nationwide: this is a hypothesis, not a statement of fact. He says that there are reasons to believe that the mutations are associated with structural regions known to be important to transmission: this is a hypothesis, not a statement of fact.
He then says that because of these two unproven hypotheses (which he implicitly believes), one should "change your priors" on how likely it is that this strain is selectively advantaged. Certainly, one can "change their priors" based on personal opinion, but that doesn't mean that other informed scientists don't have different opinions.
What this guy is doing is citing the (limited, non-definitive) evidence that we know, and then saying he has an opinion about what it all means. That doesn't make it factual.
Without well-controlled cell-culture or animal studies that show that this strain is out-competing other strains in vivo, we don't have solid evidence either way. Trying to predict the organism-level impact of point mutations is a fun parlor game, but no more or less definitive than asking a sports fan which team is going to win on Sunday.
I don't wish to veer into ad hominem arguments, but it is worth noting that the UK government must be very relieved to be able to associate the new lockdown rules with the new strain of the virus.
By pointing to an unpredictable external factor they can justify the apparent U-turn in their policy, while also not having to point the finger at any potential voters who may not have been following the rules well enough.
Whether the government's political needs have an effect on how scientists interpret or represent their findings is something I only have a hypothesis about.
You could spend ten minutes debating whether the growing bright light and rising Doppler sound exactly matches the expected profile of an oncoming train.. or you could just get off the tracks. Here absolute fact is only clear when the effect is so strong it's too late.
> Here absolute fact is only clear when the effect is so strong it's too late.
This! I strongly agree that one should not mix up scientific hard knowledge with hypotheses, statements of likelihood, educated guesses and so on.
However, I do not agree at all with the demand that you always need to be 100% sure to act decisively on something important. That is just not how life works!
It does not work like that in the small. If you are a parent and you smell smoke, and your children are playing upstairs, there is no requirement that you know with certainty there is a fire before you get your kids out of the house. You get them out.
If you are a bus driver packed full with people chopping a long a foggy motorway in the morning, and three hundred meters ahead appears something which looks like an overthrown heavy truck, you do not need to be 100& certain to hit the brakes. You brake.
If you are captain of a frigate in heavy weather and with serious navigation difficulties, and ahead appears something which looks damn likely like a rock or a VLCC, you do not need absolute certainty to change course. You just change.
And in fact we demand the same from industrial and military leaders all the time. It is even one defining element of leadership to act both wisely and decidedly under uncertain conditions.
And now, we go and demand that the evidence we get from scientists has 100% certainty before we act. That's wrong. It is not intelligent behaviour because a lot of things will have irreversible consequences before we have certainty about the situation.
(And interestingly, we have seen exactly the same pattern on the topic of climate change.)
The problem is, there is always someone willing to make extreme arguments to convince people that this is the exceptional circumstance where evidence doesn't matter, and that we all need to do something urgent and panicky, now.
> Without well-controlled cell-culture or animal studies that show that this strain is out-competing other strains in vivo, we don't have solid evidence either way.
Just a question:
If two weeks from now, it becomes evident that more than 90 % of all infections in the UK are with the new variant, would you change your opinion?
I did see him mention on twitter the other day that he was going to be on a BBC segment talking about this, so there could be video archives on that front
> "14) “In the lab, Gupta’s group found that virus carrying the two mutations was less susceptible to convalescent plasma from several donors than the wildtype (common strain) virus. That suggests it can evade antibodies targeting the wildtype virus”!!"
Could that mean that the "herd immunity strategy" by letting relatively healthy people being infected by the virus might fail utterly because the immunity they acquire does not help very much against the new variant?
Visiting Hacker News with a text-mode browser (Links2, in this case) is so liberating! Twitter says that my browser is not supported (unsurprisingly enough).
Well, I think I'll have to adapt to ditch a website that needs a shit-ton of JS to serve me a few KibiBytes of content.
The only definitively factual statement he makes is in the first tweet:
"One of the key questions about the new variant (B.1.1.7) is whether there is conclusive evidence that it is more transmissible. I don't think we are absolutely certain yet"
Everything else is speculation. He says that founder effect is not likely because the virus is spreading widely, nationwide: this is a hypothesis, not a statement of fact. He says that there are reasons to believe that the mutations are associated with structural regions known to be important to transmission: this is a hypothesis, not a statement of fact.
He then says that because of these two unproven hypotheses (which he implicitly believes), one should "change your priors" on how likely it is that this strain is selectively advantaged. Certainly, one can "change their priors" based on personal opinion, but that doesn't mean that other informed scientists don't have different opinions.
What this guy is doing is citing the (limited, non-definitive) evidence that we know, and then saying he has an opinion about what it all means. That doesn't make it factual.
Without well-controlled cell-culture or animal studies that show that this strain is out-competing other strains in vivo, we don't have solid evidence either way. Trying to predict the organism-level impact of point mutations is a fun parlor game, but no more or less definitive than asking a sports fan which team is going to win on Sunday.