How do you go about deciding which overseas drug mail-order business to trust?
Eliezer's post has one paragraph on RaDVaC. It's a good paragraph but I wouldn't expect anyone that didn't hear about RaDVaC before and doesn't take Eliezer as an important authority to be convinced by that paragraph that RaDVaC is worth funding. A longer post would likely have included a more clear case of why RaDVaC is worth funding. Writing that case down wouldn't have been just for the sake of length.
that first sentence is 100% false unless "proved themselves" means something like "proved that they are smart people" or "proved that they are acting in good faith" rather than "proved that they have something that works", which means that the second is waaaay premature.
RaDVaC is not only about the particular technology but also about the way the organization runs differently. The approach of being public about the technology and regularly iterating it is very different than the way vaccines are traditionally produced.
RaDVaC is for example right now both looking into the small peptide version they started out with as well as looking at subunit vaccines.
The problem with that is that the Nitrogen does not go back into the atmosphere. It goes into the oceans and the resulting problems have been called a stronger violation of planetary boundaries then CO2 pollution.
I remember from early in the pandemic studies suggesting that there's measurable long-term heart inflammation in many cases. That seems to be one plausible mechanism for long-COVID that's less subjective. Does anyone read the literature to have a more recent idea of this?
Psychosomatic is a word that's gets often used as if that would mean that illnesses aren't real.
If you tell someone with an allergy to cats to imagine that they are stocking a cat, that can be enough to trigger the allergy symptoms. The fact that an imagined cat is good enough to trigger the allergy shows quite clearly that the allergy is partly psychosomatic as it can be triggered psychologically.
The underlying mechanisms of such an immune response are however deep. One model of long COVID is, that it's partly about autoimmune issues. Those might be as psychosomatic as the above example of cat allergy. There's a neuronal pattern that gets the body to trigger defenses in a misaligned way.
What's your threat scenario where you would believe a bio-bunker to be helpful?
Have you had covid?
Generally, it makes sense to both ask "do you think you had COVID-19" and "did you have a positive test". I remember that there was some study that claimed that subjective sense might be more predictive for long COVID symptoms than the positive test.
The Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED) is one of the recipients of donations for the Survival and Flourishing Fund.
The New York Post article sounds to me overall positive but the journalist wasn't allowed to write a one-sided article so they had to bring up some bullshit argument given that the argument has been made by other people.
One of the key questions here is how you would actually go about making this a reality. I imagine that if you make it a completely public project there's a good chance that the whole thing fails and becomes a political liability for the major that approved the project. It takes likely a decade to build and has the potential to produce political trouble in between.
There's no Robert Moses around to run the project. In the absence, it's worth thinking about how you would actually structure such a project and make it good politics.