Even without spending time my heuristics is that I find biases in the claim and find out how referenced it is. This one had plenty red flags, including dismissing the RaTG13 results claiming that they were just put into the database after people started questioning, the adversarial tone, presumptions and so on. Conspiracy theorists use recognizable heuristics, but their motivation is to seek attention, for which there is large competition. They want to be relevant, but who doesn't. Conspiracy theorists are not really into publishing a paper either, a blog post, video or tweet is all you get, it's not about the truth and it is easier to avoid being found out this way, though social media these days have fact checkers, so they have to fly under the radar or keep to the social circles that are not bothered by fact checkers.
Knowing about biases and how to recognize them is a vital skill, should be taught in schools. Everyone needs a working bullshit meter.
To be fair, that sequence came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology
It is in the Moderna 2015 patent. 19 nucleotide match.
This is pretty common. The reason I take it as obligation is that if there aren't people fighting disinformationn, the disinformation will win, because it tends to be full of simple, seductive, but. wrong ideas that naive people fall for.
I'm not sure which particular thing public health people said that you're complaining about in the last part of the section- but I don't really think that public health leaders who communicate things which aren't 100% correct are dissemination disinformation. That's sort of a pedantic and uninteresting argument to have about the philosophical nature of information.
> It’s easy enough to change a single nucleotide (a single point mutation or SNP) or even insert or delete nucleotides (less common) but to insert 20 or 30 nucleotides with a code that works? Nope, that has to come from another virus or else it’s been done in a lab.
The original preprint which noted similarity of the HIV-1 sequences and those in the COVID spike protein, and on which this blog author's claims rest, was voluntarily withdrawn by its authors. [1]
Moreover, the assertions of uniqueness have been thoroughly addressed in the published article, "HIV-1 did not contribute to the 2019-nCoV genome" [2] :
> For any virus to obtain additional insert sequences from other organisms, it requires that it has direct interactions with other organisms, most likely through homologous or non-homologous recombination. [...] On the contrary, these motifs are widely present in various mammalian cells and so it will be more likely for bat CoV viruses to gain those motifs from the genomes of their infected cells if recombination indeed occurs.
That rebuttal article clearly suggests several feasible sources of the gene in Nature. That surely is more plausible than suggesting that Moderna or some other group nefariously created the COVID genome _in vitro_ before unleashing it upon humanity.
I deeply enjoy Hacker News for its ability to surface different ideas and sources of information that I would otherwise never find, but this article is simply ridiculous.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer
[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v2
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC7033698/