Yes, I confused you with rich_sasha, that's right. My aplogies.
As you say 700k people over two years is an impossibly high number so we can disregard this number and any other number that someone makes up just because they want to make a point. That's not the way to make a point with numbers.
>> So after all this, do you at least agree that (a) many people died, (b) the research accident caused those deaths, and (c) that's bad?
Not at all. Note that my initial point, quoting from my initial comment, was that "every single pandemic and disease that has ever infected humans did not leak from a lab and instead evolved in nature, usually in animals".
The 1977 flu did not start in a lab but instead jumped from animals to humans, just like any other disease that has ever bothered us. This happened in the 1950's. In the 1970's an earlier strain of the virus re-emerged but we don't know where it came from and it did not cause a pandemic.
The Covid-19 virus instead is said to have first come from a lab, and some people even think it was a human-made virus, possibly as a result of gain-of-function research. Nothing to do with the 1977 flu.
Have you looked for the Udacity course I recommended, on probabilities? It is really good and it will help you a lot.
> As you say 700k people over two years is an impossibly high number so we can disregard this number
I agree it wasn't over two years. I never said it was over two years, though, and neither did Burke. Michaelis might imply that, and I criticized them for that.
Do you not think it's plausible that all the deaths tracing back to that reintroduction sum to 700k? It's a big chunk of global flu mortality over almost fifty years now. If you think 700k is too high, what's a better estimate? I asked before if you could agree that it was greater than zero, and you didn't answer. If you're still unwilling to, can you at least explain why not?
Perhaps it's misleading to attribute the deaths to the "1977 flu" when our count isn't limited to that one year. I don't think it's that unusual, though. We often say ~7M people died from COVID-19, even though very few of those were in 2019. In any case, I believe the period in question should be clear now.
> The 1977 flu did not start in a lab but instead jumped from animals to humans, just like any other disease that has ever bothered us.
You've changed your terminology here, from "leaked" to "started". There's no question that the 1977 flu, SARS-CoV-2, or any other virus traces back to nature--the technology doesn't yet exist to create a functioning viral genome de novo. All laboratory viruses are derived from natural viruses, whether in simple ways (like freezing for twenty years) or complex ones (like the genetic engineering proposed in DEFUSE).
All viruses trace back to natural evolution. The question is whether their path to humans involved a trip through a lab, and for the 1977 flu the answer seems to be yes. Do you disagree? Even the paper you linked yourself--written by a longtime proponent of high-risk virological research--opens with "The 1977-1978 influenza epidemic was probably not a natural event".
> and it did not cause a pandemic.
Can you explain why you don't think it was a pandemic? Even if you're (bizarrely) unwilling to admit that anyone died, pandemics are defined in terms of cases or infections, not deaths. There's no question that the 1977 flu spread unusually quickly to infect a large fraction of the world. It's widely referred to as a pandemic. What do you know that all these professors don't?
> Have you looked for the Udacity course I recommended, on probabilities? It is really good and it will help you a lot.
It sounds like a good course and I might take a look. My own professors did give me passing grades, though? I don't think introductory statistics is the major point of disagreement here.
is incorrect, since it falsely implies the 700k was just from one season. The 1977-78 season did show excess mortality in some estimates, though it's not clear whether that was from the H1N1 or the co-circulating H3N2 (which was probably a minority of the infections, but a majority of the infections in older people at highest risk of death, due to their prior immunity from 1957 and earlier). Mortality in the <19 age group reached its all-time high, around 2.4x average; that's a tiny share of the total (just 234 deaths), but perhaps an interesting gauge of the H1N1 spread.
Unless I'm missing something, I do believe the 700k has travelled remarkably far with remarkably weak provenance, and I appreciate the push to investigate that. Perhaps there's just no one with any incentive to correct it--for authors opposing high-risk virological research it's impressively large enough, while authors supporting such research don't wish to draw attention to this mortality at all. I don't think the exact number changes much practically, but I'd still rather not perpetuate that carelessness.
As you say 700k people over two years is an impossibly high number so we can disregard this number and any other number that someone makes up just because they want to make a point. That's not the way to make a point with numbers.
>> So after all this, do you at least agree that (a) many people died, (b) the research accident caused those deaths, and (c) that's bad?
Not at all. Note that my initial point, quoting from my initial comment, was that "every single pandemic and disease that has ever infected humans did not leak from a lab and instead evolved in nature, usually in animals".
The 1977 flu did not start in a lab but instead jumped from animals to humans, just like any other disease that has ever bothered us. This happened in the 1950's. In the 1970's an earlier strain of the virus re-emerged but we don't know where it came from and it did not cause a pandemic.
The Covid-19 virus instead is said to have first come from a lab, and some people even think it was a human-made virus, possibly as a result of gain-of-function research. Nothing to do with the 1977 flu.
Have you looked for the Udacity course I recommended, on probabilities? It is really good and it will help you a lot.