I’m not a scientist, so obviously do correct me if I’m wrong. (Heck, this is twitter, I don’t need to ask that do I?)

BUT a virus doesn’t mutate in *nothing*, does it, it doesn’t mutate when it’s on the handle of the supermarket door or even in the air you’ve just breathed out.

It mutates *in a host*. And the most sure fire way for a virus to find a wide variety of hosts in which to mutate is to do precious little to control the spread of the virus. To have policies which amount to “take it on the chin”. To have an ‘acceptable’ death level.
To allow the virus to run absolutely rampant through one section of the population (children) because stopping it doing so would mean making a politically unpopular decision (closing the schools).
Seen some people (scientists, I mean, not your uncle Jim) saying this virus is now more transmissible in children and like... what did they THINK would happen if you allow the virus unfettered access to kids?
It adapts! It adapts to its fucking hosts! It becomes better at infecting them! Like, the whole fucking point for a virus is to be able to make copies of itself. It’s actually not that arsed about killing or harming you.
In fact in viruses that kill people very quickly, sometimes the virus mutates to become *less* deadly, because it’s not in the virus’ interest to kill people quickly as it means it can’t spread for as long or as much.
I’ve read people (not scientists) suggesting this will happen with the coronavirus. “Viruses usually become less deadly over time,” and like, yeaaaaaah, that *can* happen with viruses that are *too deadly to be able to spread much*.
That’s my understanding anyway, and I’m sure twitter will be quick enough to correct me if I’m not right. But viruses also do sometimes become even more infectious over time because, well, it’s in a virus’ interest to be infectious.
A virus just wants to make copies of itself. The more the better. It’s mutating all the time, of course, that’s how scientists can track where it comes from. Hats off to those scientists doing all that hard work, btw. <3
And most of the time those mutations won’t be particularly meaningful. But a mutation that *gives the virus an advantage*, that helps it (yep you guessed) make more copies of itself, that mutation will become dominant.
So, at the beginning, it looked as if the virus wasn’t actually *that* great at making copies of itself in children, at least, not as efficient as it was at making copies of itself in adults.

But what did we do?
Oops! We gave the virus easy access to a pool of the very hosts it needed to get better at infecting.

And you’ll never guess what’s happened now!

IT FUCKING ADAPTED.
And the government, aided and abetted by *some*, choice, scientists, has allowed this to happen.

And if a fool like me, whose weakest science was biology, who didn’t take it any further than GCSE, could see this, why couldn’t they?
What an absolute fucking mess. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it didn’t have to be like this.
@threadreaderapp could you compile this please so I can share on Facebook with people who don’t understand threads?

More from Twitter

This is why I'm not a critic of "cancel culture." It's crucial to impose social costs for the breech of key social norms. The lesson of overreaction is that we need to recalibrate judgment to get it right next time, not that we need a lot more bad judgment in the other direction.


Obviously, people will disagree about which norms are important, about how bad it is to violate them, and thus about how severe the social cost ought to be. That's just pluralism, man, and it's good.

It's important to openly talk through these substantive differences, which is why derailing these conversations with hand-waving moral panic about "cancel culture" is obnoxious and illiberal.

Screaming "cancel culture!" when somebody pays a social costs other people have been fighting hard to get others to see as necessary is often just a way to declare, with no argument, that the sanction in question was not only unnecessary but in breach of a more important norm.

It's impossible to uphold social norms without social sanctions, so obviously anti-cancelers are going to want to impose a social cost on people they see as imposing unjustly steep social costs on others.

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The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.


In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.

In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.

This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.

In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.