Right, and this article is titled "There is one, and only one strain" which is an affirmative statement, and calls for a burden of proof.
What this piece should be titled is "We don't have any evidence yet of multiple strains."
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Except the claim was that there are more than one strain and the author is responding to that. The burden of proof lies in the one making the claim that there are multiple strains. The author has no burden of proof.
This would be akin to one person making the claim: "Unicorns are not only real, but are causing a global pandemic" and then someone writing an article titled "Unicorns aren't real, STFU". The second title doesn't have the burden of proof and we wouldn't be having this conversation if these were the titles of the respective articles.
Why is the unicorns title an accurate analogy? Because the science doesn't expect there to be multiple strains in the same way the science doesn't expect unicorns to exist. I'm using the same vernacular here that we use in science. I didn't say "unicorns don't exist" but "we don't expect unicorns to exist". This is how we say things.
That's the thing. Science is a bit of a different language from English. And they get conflated all the time. The strain doesn't exist until it does, and then everybody gets mad and thinks the scientist was lying.
It's speaking different languages that have a high overlap, but key words may have completely different meanings.
And, when you're talking to a regular person, being able to speak English will help you convey your point.
This is exactly right. As I said in another post
> Well we're chimps that can barely communicate with one another even when we speak the same language.
My point is, this post was supposed to be written in English, but its headline only makes sense in science, and actually means something misleading in English
>> Except the claim was that there are more than one strain and the author is responding to that.
Doesn't matter, the author still made an unsubstantiated claim, and hence is unscientific. He should change the title.
Except the author didn't make a claim.
I'd even be happy with "We don't have any evidence yet of multiple strains, and we probably never will"