Dr. Daniel Reardon, an astrophysicist, is being a good sport in telling his story showing that modern scientists are not the applied physics geniuses like The Professor on "Gilligan's Island." 

He read a paper saying people touch their face too much and that could lead to getting SARS-CoV-2 into the body where it might cause COVID-19, and since magnets repel and he was bored he tried his hand at invention.

Do you think the 2019 flavor of coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, originated in a lab as part of bioweaponry?

That's crazy talk, mostly because it requires believing that scientists are (a) in a vast Corporate and/or Government Conspiracy so cleverly crafted that only a few cranks can find it but (b) also so stupid as to think a virus in the same family as the common cold would cause California, which would be the fifth largest economy in the world if it were its own country, to commit economic suicide over a few dozen deaths.

After Robert Koch first separated Mycobacterium bovis from Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and with the success of vaccination in preventing smallpox well-known, scientists believed that infection with bovine tuberculosis might protect against human tuberculosis. 

It wasn't a linear path but after a lot of trial and error, and some fitful starts (including deaths) microbiologists Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin  introduced the Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccine and it has been administered routinely to protect babies against tuberculosis since 1921.  

FDA is streamlining labs to allow independent coronavirus testing after CDC showed they were just as cumbersome and incompetent as I'd worried for years, they're cutting red tape for hand sanitizer "approval", getting treatments to market without 90-day comment periods where activists can insist science is a vast corporate conspiracy.

It's no surprise that Twitter is a hotbed of misinformation and disnformation about science. They have no barrier to entry whereas a journal article must survive peer review and if you want to promote your clients in The Guardian you at least have to cut them a check.

What is interesting is how these deniers for hire are using the public's newfound resolve to mitigate risk for people with preexisting conditions from coronavirus to advance their agenda against normal agriculture. This, they argue, is the "precautionary principle" in action and if it's right for infectious disease, why not use it against food sold by competitors to their clients and spiritual leaders? 

In 2017 a group of colleagues and I began editing a short book called "The Next Plague, And How Science Will Stop It".

It was published in early 2018 and became quite popular. Shortly after that, articles began appearing in The Atlantic and other places wondering what the next pandemic would be.

When a mass outbreak of the coronavirus occurred on a Princess Cruise ship, it quickly became international news. There was a rush to panic and Diamond Princess was quarantined for over two weeks, and the infection rate onboard was about four times higher than what can be seen on land in the worst infected areas of China. But, they said, it would have been worse if they had not isolated everyone.

While the U.S. CDC continues to show that concerns about it being more Klondike Kops than serious disease prevention experts are valid, China is making progress in containing 2019-nCoV - coronavirus. Which means the job should be relatively easy elsewhere.

All you need to know about distrust in science and medicine is that Facebook is littered with claims of chronic lyme disease, along with bizarre advice such as 'keep looking for a doctor' until you find one willing to diagnose you, and bizarre self-experimentation and remedies.

It turns out all you might need is to mistake LSD for cocaine, take 55,000 percent of what you would take of cocaine, trip for 34 hours, and you may find your chronic lyme disease is cured.