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)....and now, in an effort to debunk the XMRV-CFS connection, researchers have argued that XMRV itself was created in the lab during the process of passing cells through mice...and then somehow escaped and spread all round the world as 'contamination' (without infecting any humans or causing any harmful effects, of course
Yes, all of this is what goes on; those are the observable facts, and everything from then onwards is theorising as to the why. From my reading about the history of the UK's Science Media Centre, about 'The Lobby', etc etc, the whole philosophy of those groups is fairly clearly laid out. It's a clear but rather mundane 'conspiracy' (if one insists on using that word): the philosophy is simply to defend scientific and industrial progress from any kind of public scare about the harmful effects of technology. The powers that be act on the assumption that it's their responsibility to manage these problems, that they act in the greater good, that there will inevitably be problems and casualties, and that it's not possible for an uninformed and illogical general population to engage with those kind of complex moral dilemmas.
I think that's only half-true. Gammaretroviruses are by definition much smaller; an order of magnitude smaller than retroviruses like HIV, for example. XMRV was only discovered in 2006. The sheer scale of the search for new viruses is unimaginable on a human level; it's perfectly plausible that there are still retroviruses that haven't been spotted yet. We're dealing with an absolutely vast search space here.
That doesn't follow at all. This logical leap is a good example of the failure of imagination that leads to an illogical conclusion. It's perfectly feasible that - as now - a whole lot of people in authority just didn't believe Defreitas' theory was a realistic possibility, had a few quick looks for the virus, didn't find it, and gave up on what seemed like a fruitless search. That's a far, far more likely explanation than the idea that all these people - and we're talking about a lot of people here - were involved in a deliberate coverup that has spanned decades and decades. At the very least, if we're being realistic, we have to realise that the vast majority of people involved in the search for DeFreitas' virus can't possibly have been part of some deliberate conspiracy. It's just not plausible that so many people, so many leading scientists, could have such incredibly dark knowledge and it didn't leak out in any form. And if the majority of people were simply innocently doing what they thought was right, then why not everyone?
Nonsense. They are definitely not the smartest people in the world, they are just the most ambitious in their field. They definitely do not have an unlimited budget, they just have a lot of money. They have millions of lives in their hands, and huge responsibility - which means in practice that they are balancing all kinds of impossible equations. At the time in question, they were also trying to deal with the beginnings of the AIDS crisis, at a time when all budgets were under pressure with the first gulf war...there's no infinite pot of money, these things had to be balanced.
This is also illogical, because if they are all-powerful and all-knowing and knew that what has happened would happen, then they would also know that people would notice sooner or later. Conversely, if they are incompetent enough to make the mistake of underestimating the people's ability to start putting two and two together, then they are incompetent enough to have failed to follow up Defreitas' work purely because of that incompetence. At this point, you're trying to have it both ways with regards to the omnipotence of the alleged conspirators...
There's no dispute from me that the stupidity of the system and the whole tale of woe is an epic one, and no dispute that anti-XMRV articles are rushed out frantically and illogically and plastered across the media. We know and understand a lot more now about how and why that sort of thing happens - and it's all about systematic bias and modern scientific practices, not about sinister organised conspiracies.
Ditto, and Amen.
