It's a bummer to be a scientist whose work is stymied by these concerns.
Nevertheless, pumping the brakes here is sensible.
I get the sense that researchers feel a certain injustice that geopolitics is affecting scientific decisions by their funding bodies. Funding should be decided on the scientific merit of their proposals. In a vacuum, that makes sense.
Seen more widely, though, the decisions of the NIH and similar funding bodies are shot through with political considerations. For example, it would be hard for a physician scientist to attend a conference in the last few years where considerable resources were not devoted to equity issues.
My point here is that we already contextualize what work we fund by political decisions, for better or worse. In this circumstances, we continue to do so, but we in particular pause funding on research that may, in some form, be responsible for the deaths of millions of people and the disruption of lives of billions. That's a sensible choice.
There's the completely reasonable compromise of continuing to conduct this research at an isolated Antarctic station, at a quarantined oil platform etc.
Instead these labs are all near major population centers, with researchers freely mixing with the general population.
This is what I don't get, why is this all happenning in cities?
Like I live in a place where one of the major employers is a government research facility and every day people go to the designated meeting point and a bus takes them the rest of the way, or they spend 45 minutes driving on a dirt road to the middle of nowhere to keep anything from work (in this case nuclear related stuff) from coming home with them.
Why the hell are we putting biological virology institutes in the middle of the major population centers instead of the middle of nowhere?
Like there's plenty of unused land in the west, hell WY has like 2 dozen people living there, it seems that would be safe.
They already kind of do this (look up Michael Army Airfield near Tooele, UT where they store(d) VX nerve gas and destroyed it over a multi-year period). How are you going to persuade civilian scientists to move there? If one of them gets sick, how are you going to keep them from going to the hospital? Are they physically confined if they have a fever? (the base was in fact locked down several years back because an accounting error made it look like VX gas was missing). What if they get a normal flu, are they under arrest? Not many will agree to those conditions, so research would be greatly slowed.
That's a completely reasonable compromise. I think the reason it doesn't get mentioned is that nobody would bother doing it under those constraints. Scientists would not choose to work on it at such great personal cost, and the financial cost would mean that other kinds of research would be better uses of money.
There are plenty of people who work in remote locations like Antarctica, and few if any of them make such grandiose claims as these virologists who think their work will save millions of lives.
If they can't be bothered to work in a safely remote location then they don't actually believe in their work and are blind to the risks and history of lab leaks.
In the article they talk about four researchers that may have trouble getting a grant due to the changed political environment. Seven million people are confirmed to have died from COVID, and the excess worldwide mortality since the beginning of the pandemic is 27 million. Both of these numbers are larger than the number of Jews that died in the Holocaust.
These are stakes as high as any single event in human history. Given the danger we're talking about, whether or not a few professors get a grant and have a good career is simply not even worth discussing. The fact that it is even discussed shows that the priorities of the virology community are wildly misplaced.
Rather than modifying viruses and seeing what happens in the hope that that will inform us for the next pandemic, it seems smarter to start making more vaccines with different techniques where mistakes are lower-stakes and the benefit is more clear.
What exactly do you think gain of function research is for? In order to determine how viruses behave in a safe and reasonable manner, gain of function is one of the ways we do so. For example, modifying a virus that normally only infects humans to infect an animal, so we can examine how it works in a lab and in turn design better vaccines or treatments.
Some of these fears and comments reminds me a lot of comments around the nuclear accident in Japan. The actual issues stemmed from poor safety measures and protocols, not nuclear itself. That's assuming that the lab leak theory is even true and not just a convenient tool for politicians to use as a wedge.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
Sun Tzu.
How do you think you can devise a vaccine if you don't know the virus? They experiment to find out what are the weaknesses of the enemy (i.e. proteins and other markers), so that they can target it. If the next pandemy is caused by a similar strain: ta-dam you have the vaccine already (or at least you know what to target).
One huge problem is the "safe and reasonable" part. Gain of function has killed millions in a recent lab leak you may have heard of (high likelihood). That doesn't seem safe to me.
No, actually. COVID originated at the location of a lab doing gain of function research on coronaviruses and the lab had a sketchy safety record. If you need someone to tell you the most likely origin of COVID given these circumstances you have a fundamental inability to reason and a citation wouldn't help you because you lack the ability to comprehend.
Sure, remember how useful GoF was during the pandemic? Oh wait, no, that was mRNA vaccines. In fact, if there was ever a time GoF could have been helpful, it would have been a global pandemic. So maybe it's a crappy technique that should be banned by all countries everywhere because it is all costs and no benefits. :-/
They certainly can come up with plenty of reasons its valuable for them. Cigarette smokers can come up with a lot of justification of why cigarettes shouldn't be banned.
It seems like the GoF research shows a lot of "oh look we made a super virus. It would be very bad if a virus did this in nature." Perhaps we can get some data on specifically _how bad_ that particular function would be. What do we get beyond that? Like you said, are there any other benefits that outweigh the risks?
Maybe we're all just really bad at understanding risks. I see a lot of comparisons between nuclear power. We know exactly how much dangerous material is in a nuclear reactor. Those physics don't evolve. Nuclear material doesn't reproduce and reinfect endlessly. A nuclear power plant needs a chain of failure to be harmful. A virus only needs one particle to infect.
I'm glad that things are slowing down here. Virology research is one of those things no one ever thought about, but the fact that a single careless lab was able to release a virus that killed tens of millions around the world should be a wake up call that the researchers were outpacing the regulations. The entire industry around the world has to be heavily regulated at this point to prevent this from happening again.
I haven't read much in the last year that didn't consider it extremely likely. The lab was receiving funding from other nations including the US, so I don't think hatred specifically and only for China is rational, but being rational is so cliche. What is 100% accepted and documented is that the lab in question had a history of repeated leaks and failures to follow protocol. When a Chinese nuke plant doesn't follow protocols other nations use, that is one thing, but given global ramifications, it seems like even otherwise adversarial nations could agree on a set of safeguards for such labs and enforce them. That is assuming the aluminium fedora crowd are wrong and it wasn't like that scene in goonies where they hand Chunk a picture frame they want broken knowing he isn't very coordinated.
Sorry, where is this documented that this lab is known for leaks?
To my knowledge, as of 3 months ago, the only “tangible” evidence for a lab leak was that china cleaned up before the WHO arrived and could better investigate.
You are the first person I have ever seen, after hundreds of articles, claim that the lab is known for leaks.
That is where I thought I got it from, but I don't see it just scanning through. Either it came from somewhere else, or I got it confused in the section where they were talking about a Beijing lab. If so they have my apologies.
> Two State Department cables show that American embassy officials in Beijing made several visits to the research facility and sent two official warnings back to Washington in early 2018 about the lab’s inadequate safety measures. This was at a time when researchers were conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats, The Washington Post reported, citing intelligence sources.
The thing that China does which deserves the most hatred, however, is not the accident: It is the coverup. It's one thing to fuck up; it's another thing to hinder investigation of the fuckup, while trying in vain to "save face," which ends up just resulting in more deaths. A sincere person or organization would say "OK, one of us screwed up, now please help us fix it". It's literally the most basic ethics/honesty lesson we teach kids (at least in the West)- "if you screwed up, 'fess up, and the punishment will be less":
> While the U.S. investigates, officials say the Chinese government’s continuing lack of transparency, including with respect to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, raises questions over how the outbreak began. Officials also accuse Beijing of still not sharing all of their data with the international community.
> Instead, there is Chinese evidence that the lab had safety problems. VOA has located state media reports showing that there were security incidents flagged by national inspections as well as reported accidents that occurred when workers were trying to catch bats for study.
All evidence points to zoonotic spillover, aggravated by our encroachment on previously undisturbed natural areas and global warming.
Sadly, it was both political useful ('the Chinese did it!'), and ideologically useful ('a few faulty humans did this, like in the movies'), to blame the lab in Wuhan. By doing so, we can absolve ourselves of blame, and of need to take action - action both to mitigate the effects of this pandemic, and to prepare for the next. The next being an inevitability, just a question of when (within 10 years is my uneducated guess)
> All evidence points to zoonotic spillover, aggravated by our encroachment on previously undisturbed natural areas and global warming.
what evidence?
in any case, thats fancy language for: "Donald Trump was a proponent of the lab leak hypothesis so we had to come up with an alternate theory lest we appear to be in agreement with Donald Trump...so we've decided that it was people eating Pangolin Soup"
Nobody who has any sense is even remotely interested in agreeing or disagreeing with Trump - he could not be part of any meaningful debate, anymore than a 5 year old, we are just disappointed he became POTUS.
It's not absolving anyone from blame. The lab leak theory blames all parties-- it points out that the US NIH funded the research being done in Wuhan, which is public record.
That's leaving aside the specious claim that there's no evidence of lab leak. The evidence of first outbreaks being near the lab are evidence of it being a lab leak, just as the first outbreaks going through a wet market are evidence of natural evolution. We have evidence for both theories.
It's absolving 'us' of blame - meaning our activities in causing the spillover event in the first place, and our failure to contain the outbreak - or even make it real for many in our population.
Much easier to identify a few bad actors (which can then be 'punished' so this 'never happens again') instead of the crapness of people in general (which crapness ensures that this will happen again, with bodybags and lockdowns, and probably quite soon)
There is ZERO evidence that it's zoonotic spillover. In almost 4 years they haven't found the source. There's actual hard evidence that it came from the Wuhan lab.
I know, it's crazy right? There are people here that just blindly assume that because the NIH lied about 1-degree indirectly funding gain of function research on coronaviruses at China's only level4 bio lab, where workers were just happened to be some of the first that got sick, where security protocols were admitted to being flawed, and the Chinese government came in and deleted data... that any of this means it came from there!?
When in reality we all know China said it maybe came from a wet market in the same city (as the only Level4 biolab), because someone ate a bat.
You and I have higher burdens of proof than these "conspiracy theory" pushers.
Anyone can cherrypick what they believe - it just doesn't mean much in the real world. With respect to the lab leak hypothesis largely a US phenomenon, though.
Uh? It's basically what everyone believes almost everywhere I went. In North Africa for sure, in Canada it's a bit less common but still extremely widespread. So I'm not sure you meant by it being a US only phenomenon? If anything it's actually a pretty divisive debate in the US,.
Who are you talking to? No-one I speak to in Europe cares but some US media do, though. Some niche circles might in Europe, but then there are hobbyist for everything.
There you go, France, the UK, Italy and Spain all have a higher proportion (or even a majority) of people believing in the lab leak theory than in the US. Germany is very close too.
No. I am saying I don't know what it means to ask people about something in a survey that isn't a topic of discussion, i.e., asking about things that people don't care about.
There will be an opinion but that doesn't mean anyone cares about it or there is discussion about it.
I live in Europe. People do absolutely care, why would they not. Had lots of discussions about it here. What a weird argument this is anyway, proof by European? What is this?
Like on almost any topic, the majority of people doesn't care (and looking at media coverage, less so in the EU than in the US). If you force people via a survey to have a view on something like that the answers are not meaningful.
Some hobbyists caring and going down rabbit holes just doesn't mean much as far as what actually happened is concerned.
Long before Covid there was pushback against these projects, particularly near population centers. Boston University built its National Emerging Infectious Diseases center right in the middle of the city, which was approved by local regulators (https://www.bu.edu/articles/2017/neidl-bsl-4-lab-approved) but strongly criticized by neighbors when they learned that Ebola and Marburg were studied there. Covid research at the center has not followed bureaucratic protocols, either:
But it has become apparent that the research team did not clear the work with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which was one of the funders of the project. The agency indicated it is going to be looking for some answers as to why it first learned of the work through media reports.
Emily Erbelding, director of NIAID’s division of microbiology and infectious diseases, said the BU team’s original grant applications did not specify that the scientists wanted to do this precise work. Nor did the group make clear that it was doing experiments that might involve enhancing a pathogen of pandemic potential in the progress reports it provided to NIAID.
NIMBYism != People being concerned about their neighbors possessing weapons of mass destruction/super viruses capable of killing them and millions/billions of other people.
>while completely ignoring the effects of NOT making a change
The completely hypothetical effects of not making a change in just one area of virology research which is highly criticized by many in the scientific community.
It's hilariously absurd to compare people who don't want a dual use bioweapons research facility in their neighborhood to NIMBYism.
Describing NIMBYism as "narcissistic assholes" is a gross oversimplification, and misses the point I'm getting at.
In the US, you'll reliably get a lot more NIMBY response from "set up a nuclear power plant in the neighbourhood" vs. "set up a gas power plant in the neighbourhood". However, if you look at the risk assessment, the gas power plant is far more lethal to the neighbourhood.
> you'll reliably get a lot more NIMBY response from "set up a nuclear power plant in the neighbourhood" vs. "set up a gas power plant in the neighbourhood"
I don't associate the term "NIMBY" with either scenarios, just housing. I don't think there's much value to overloading it. It's not like anyone's trying to put a nuclear power plant in the middle of Boston to begin with.
> I don't associate the term "NIMBY" with either scenarios, just housing.
You might not, but the broader population associates NIMBY with any scenario where a neighbourhood pushes back against some kind of change in that neighbourhood (adding a prison, a power plant, a half-way house, a school, a bar, trains, airports, etc.). There are NIMBY responses to pretty much any change, and the magnitude of that response tends to have little bearing on the relative merits of the change.
> It's not like anyone's trying to put a nuclear power plant in the middle of Boston to begin with.
No. For the most part no one is putting nuclear power plants anywhere in the US. However, there are other power plants in Boston (and for good reason). This is a direct byproduct of the NIMBYism I'm talking about.
One thing the pandemic certainly has shown is just how dangerous an otherwise unremarkable animal virus can be if it gains the ability to infect humans. Simply because nobody has a pre-existing immunity it gains enormous advantages in its ability to spread compared to similar viruses that are already endemic.
I think previous candidates for new pandemic viruses did mislead us as those never got far enough to become a true pandemic. Those were scarier than SARS-CoV2 by lethality, but were manageable by the usual epidemiological tools. Now we've also seen how a virus can spread that is far more contagious, and how we are unable to stop such a virus.
What I found scary about SARS-CoV2 is just how much it improved between variants. It didn't have any special features like influenza to increase its potential there. It simply had the numbers, enormous amounts of hosts to evolve in. So potentially any virus that is able to spread as far initially could be able to evolve in a similar manner.
I think avoiding many if not most gain-of-function experiments is a reasonable lesson to learn from this pandemic.
Certain gain of function experiments, e.g. modifying an animal virus to be able to infect humans could create viruses that might behave very similar to SARS-CoV2 if leaked. We now know more about the potential consequences of such a leak, we have a full-blown pandemic as a benchmark.
If those experiments have a chance to repeat a similar pandemic, I don't think any of them are worth that risk.
Unfortunately, that sort of GOF research is at the top of the list of GOF utility. Because animal virii making the jump to humans is the risk factor the international epidemiology community tries to protect against, for the very reasons you've highlighted: the harm when it occurs and the frequency with which it occurs (rare, but often enough to create a once-a-century firestorm, at least).
Spanish Flu was likely an animal-jump, baed on research done on corpses retrieved from the arctic circle. H1N1 was an animal jump. HIV was a multi-virus infection followed by an animal jump. If COVID was human-made and not an animal-jump, that's still three deadly natural pandemics that we want this research to be able to prevent in the future.
Do you actually need GoF research to prevent animal spillovers? Did GoF research help us develop the COVID vaccines? Or does GoF research mostly demonstrate the risks of spillover? Because I think we're now well aware of the risks, and ought to avoid poking the bear any further.
I literally can't think of a more dangerous kind of research that we could be doing as a species than messing around and making viruses more dangerous.
If we really have to do it, then we can do it in the middle of a desert with quarantine procedures instead of near/in population centers.
> I literally can't think of a more dangerous kind of research that we could be doing as a species than messing around and making viruses more dangerous.
You have a very limited imagination. ;-) I assure you that extensive research into biological (not involving viruses), chemical, and nuclear weapons... and really a wide variety of weapons research is easily more dangerous. There's plenty of opportunity in other areas like materials science, genetics, etc., as well.
> If we really have to do it, then we can do it in the middle of a desert with quarantine procedures instead of near/in population centers.
Now you'll want to have an ultra-secure means of transporting highly dangerous biological samples, not to mention research teams & observers, at very high speeds to the middle of a desert. Are you sure you've improved the risk profile?
I assume the biological samples need to get transported at some point anyway. The researchers would need to live on-site. Yes this would dramatically increase the cost.
Personally, I think we just shouldn't do this at all.
> I assume the biological samples need to get transported at some point anyway. The researchers would need to live on-site. Yes this would dramatically increase the cost.
If you're worried about lab contamination, the risk is from the researchers moving amongst the population. I agree that you'd rather not, but I don't agree that regularly putting them on planes to and from major population centers really reduces the risk.
> Personally, I think we just shouldn't do this at all.
> I don't agree that regularly putting [gain of function researchers] on planes to and from major population centers really reduces the risk.
This would have to not happen regularly. The researchers would need to stay for many months at a time, and undergo a separate quarantine before they re-enter society.
> This would have to not happen regularly. The researchers would need to stay for many months at a time, and undergo a separate quarantine before they re-enter society.
So you would add months of delay, significantly impaired observability, and far less agility to our response to emerging threats. Congratulations, you've just increased risk.
Are researchers acting as result couriers? Your responses come across as very daft and fighting for status quo of everything as it relates to virology research.. why?
> I assure you that extensive research into biological (not involving viruses), chemical, and nuclear weapons... and really a wide variety of weapons research is easily more dangerous.
They very much are not.
Viruses and bacteria are unique in the fact that they can harm the whole globe as opposed to chemical and other disasters that will likely only harm the immediate area.
And harming the whole globe is all the more certain for infectious diseases if you put them in the middle of a large city with lots of air travel.
> Now you'll want to have an ultra-secure means of transporting highly dangerous biological samples, not to mention research teams & observers, at very high speeds to the middle of a desert. Are you sure you've improved the risk profile?
Why would you need to transport things at high speed for speculative research involving newly generated viruses/bacteria?
I never said anything about analysing things involving people who are actively infected, but there the disease is already out in the public, so the risk profile is completely different.
> Viruses and bacteria are unique in the fact that they can harm the whole globe as opposed to chemical and other disasters that will likely only harm the immediate area.
First of all, you added in bacteria, which are not viruses.
However, this statement isn't a useful statement "X is unique because it can harm the whole world, as opposed to Y that will likely only harm the immediate area".
The implication is that X will almost always harm the whole world, and Y will almost always impact the immediate area, but that's not necessarily true.
(I would remind you the "1% chance we'll ignite the entire atmosphere" of the Manhattan Project. Fortunately, any future nuclear weapons we might develop will almost certainly be less powerful... oh wait.)
It also implies that the risk of X and the risk of Y doing harm are equivalent, and that's undoubtedly not true. It's ignoring the reality that nature is already doing X all the time, and primarily in high population centers.
> And harming the whole globe is all the more certain for infectious diseases if you put them in the middle of a large city with lots of air travel.
I would think it'd be all the more certain if you're regularly putting the researchers working in the lab, along with any biological samples they might have, on flights to and from such large cities.
Pandemic risk is a systemic problem and has to be evaluated as such. Controls/mitigations you have in place generally have way more impact than where the experiments are run, and it's really not as simple as "well if the lab is away from people that reduces the risk".
> Why would you need to transport things at high speed for speculative research involving newly generated viruses/bacteria?
Because this research is not isolated from reality. Much of what they do is take samples from the real world, observe virology in the real world (both human and non-human populations), and work with front line healthcare workers who are usually the first to see new viral threats. Without that you pretty much eliminate the value of the research entirely.
> I never said anything about analysing things involving people who are actively infected, but there the disease is already out in the public, so the risk profile is completely different.
The threat doesn't come directly from a virus that is already out in the public. It comes from how a virus that is already out there might evolve. You appear to believe that nature is conducting fewer and less significant experiments in evolving viruses than people in labs. I don't think that is supported by the evidence.
The pandemic risk profile with a virus that is already out in the public is that it might evolve into something that has never been out in public before. Nature is conducting these experiments every day, all day. I'd be more worried about the outcomes of those experiments than anything going on in a lab.
> Nature has a more limited tool kit and has limited ability to bring together virus genes that would otherwise not occur in the same nucleus.
Would that that were true. I'm curious how you explain how your perception aligns with the reality that no lab, anywhere, at anytime since the outbreak, has been able to produce COVID-19 variants as fast as occurred naturally.
Nature is experimenting all the time, with the overwhelming majority of viruses out there, with absolutely no interest in controls, mitigations or protections for the human population... and nature is far trickier to observe. We've gotten pretty good at reducing the risk from nature, but make no mistake, even with all the GoF research we could possibly hope for, it far outpaces our capacity to experiment. The only advantage GoF labs have is that they can direct their research in specific areas where there is greatest risk. That's the whole challenge.
This paper at least [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8490979] argues that GoF research (in particular done in 2015 regarding transplantation of spike proteins into SARS-CoV-1) was instrumental in prediction of the rate of mutation of the spike protein, which factors into models of virulence, reinfection, immunity, whether the spike is a viable target for creation of a vaccine at all, etc. It also therefore informs research spending; the hard data on being able to say "Hey, if this bat virus gene mixes with this human virus we're gonna have a bad time" can inform the kind of virology research we focus on, and the hard data on "We cultured a virus like this years before COVID-19 happened; here's how it behaved in the lab" informs what vaccination and detection approaches might be viable.
I hate to say it (because I agree the risks are significant), but I suspect the need to use this as a tool to model both probable futures and not-yet-understood behaviors of viral mutation may be arguments in favor of continued GoF research, despite the risk. I concur with other commenters that maybe we should be putting this stuff in the wilderness behind service providers that must undergo quarantine procedure before returning to densely-populated areas.
> instrumental in prediction of the rate of mutation of the spike protein
The research must have been pretty misleading then, because all the experts appeared to be taken by surprise by the fact that it mutated at all, given their original plan was "two shots and done". Something that has now become promoting infinity boosters to a world that has stopped listening (uptake of the current round is extremely low).
But again, why should we listen to claims about virology? People who have been living in ivory caves may not realize this, but it's been proven beyond all doubt that the entire profession engaged in a conspiracy against the public to mislead people about the likelihood of a lab experiment gone wrong. Not just the many authors of the proximal origins paper, but so the other scientists who saw this coverup happening in public and said nothing.
Arguing over the origins was completely orthogonal discussion to figuring out how to mitigate spread and severity, and I think most virologists made the wise decision to stay out of a fundamentally political argument. It doesn't matter if the virus came from the moon as long as we can quarantine and vaccinate against it.
And I'm sorry you feel misinformed, but nothing I read ever suggested anyone was taken by surprise by its mutagenic rate. To the extent experts thought it might be a "two shots and done" virus, they were overly optimistic about policy and vaccination uptake; were the vaccine manufactured and rolled out quickly enough and deployed globally, it could have been cut off from human reservoirs and died out, but a combination of logistics and public distrust meant we missed that window and now it's endemic. Its mutation rate pretty much guarantees it'll be with us indefinitely as long as the public has the stomach to tolerate that.
An injected vaccine was never going to cut a respiratory virus off from human reservoirs. The mucosal immune compartment has a nearly independent immune response, including antibody production. Mild and asymptomatic cases were never going to be prevented, and therefore neither was person-to-person spread. This is textbook immunology knowledge, so clearly the experts would have known this.
That's why the vaccine protects against serious illness and death, because at that point the virus has spread beyond the mucous membranes.
> Arguing over the origins was completely orthogonal discussion
If you know it came from a lab then there's a chance that the lab workers have knowledge that can help fight it. If you lie and claim it couldn't have come from a lab, that whole line of investigation gets closed off.
> they were overly optimistic about policy and vaccination uptake
They were overly pessimistic and were making those claims back when they thought they'd only get 60-70% uptake. This is the famous Fauci admission that his claims about herd immunity were made up in response to opinion polls. Uptake was higher than expected and effectiveness was drastically lower.
This business whereby scientists are always innocent, it's only politicians and the media that misrepresent them, is crap. Scientists lied and manipulated a naive and plastic public deliberately in order to protect and advance their own careers, they did it at scale and nobody in that community seems to care. Smart people now understand that scientists are both less honest and less wise than both politicians and journalists as a group. At least the latter groups have strong internal competition and different factions trying to establish what's true. Scientists seem to behave as a bloc regardless of what's right or wrong.
I don’t research viruses, so I can’t tell you if GoF is the right tool to fight a future pandemic or not. What I do know is that if a deadly virus with a 30% CFR is spreading rapidly, I want the experts fighting it to have every tool at their disposal. I don’t want them artificially handcuffed in finding a cure/vaccine by the feelings of some Hacker News posters like me and you. Happy to stipulate that this should be an emergency capability, but frankly I don’t know enough about the value of preemptive GoF research to determine whether that’s a good balance.
Yes because despite the known risks we need to understand these viruses and what causes across species transmission so that we can prepare for future pandemics (even those caused by spillover mistakes) and what we learn may also prove useful in other applications.
Otherwise we are in the dark with unknown unknowns which is not a good place. So the risk here of doing research is manageable.
> that sort of GOF research is at the top of the list of GOF utility
According to the virologists who do it, not anyone else. Virologists conspicuously had no role in fighting COVID and didn't seem to contribute any particular knowledge to the NPIs or vaccines.
> According to the virologists who do it, not anyone else.
That's not true.
> Virologists conspicuously had no role in fighting COVID and didn't seem to contribute any particular knowledge to the NPIs or vaccines.
I can't imagine your basis for saying this. Virologists isolated the signature genetic sequences for COVID-19. That was the basis for the development of testing & vaccines for COVID-19 (...and if you think they aren't involved in development of tests and vaccines beyond that...).
Sequencing is something done by many types of biologist, there's nothing special about virologists there.
No, this is a profession that really should not exist at all. GoF was banned in the past without consequence beyond causing them to engage in coverups of their own psychotic experimentations, it can be banned again with no loss to humanity. COVID simply wouldn't have happened if these experiments were banned.
> Sequencing is something done by many types of biologist, there's nothing special about virologists there.
Sequencing can be done by a high school student in a lab. Of course, to obtain a sequence for a novel virus, you have to do a lot more than that, but let's pretend that's all you have to do; the fact remains that the sequencing wasn't done by a high school student in a lab, but by virologists.
I agree that everything virologists do could be done by non-virologists. That doesn't mean that it's what happened, nor that it'd be a good idea.
Of course it was sequenced by virologists, they're the ones who were there at the start when they let it escape, they're the ones who were splicing cleavage sites into it and developing vaccines against what they'd developed. It's all in the grant application to read about there. Then they provided the sequences to allies via back channels early on.
So they don't get points for being first, when they're the ones who created the problem in the first place.
Part of me wishes the international virology community was as coordinated as you imagine. It would be nice if we could place the blame on a shadow cabal who sickened the world on purpose for grant money. It would be convenient.
The real world is not nearly that tidy. Most of the Wuhan lab researchers' counterparts don't even speak Chinese, and you're imagining some kind of international conspiracy to drum up a disease and the cure for it.
Oh, to have the naive optimism of the conspiracy theorist. A lot of my projects would be so much more easy if people worked that way.
You're a virologist then? That would make sense given your other replies.
> Part of me wishes the international virology community was as coordinated as you imagine
It's pretty damn coordinated and we have the receipts to prove it. Sorry for you if you're not in the loop, but when you read chat transcripts, meeting notes, and emails where they literally organize a conspiracy to shut down all public discussion, and no virologists stand up to say, "this stance is not accurate", then we may as well consider virology to be globally coordinated.
By the way, cut the condescending tone about conspiracy theorists. They utterly won this round, beyond all possible doubt. The people who blithely dismiss any possibility of academic conspiracy turned out to be the naive ones. The people who posited a conspiracy to suppress discussion of lab leaks can now point to reams of hard evidence where scientists literally say they're going to publish statements they don't believe for political reasons, where they say they're going to engineer a SARS-CoV-2 like virus, where they say they're going to do it in order to develop a vaccine against it. Basically every conspiracy theory turned out to be true. You should respect that a lot more!
These are not the only two options. An animal virus could be enhanced in a lab, then jump to humans, and then the “animal-jump” terminology is just a misdirection away from the lab work. “Human-made” as a term is a similar misdirection in this scenario, trying to make the human involvement claims sound overstated, again trying to point away from the lab.
I’m not saying you are doing misdirection, but I think some people framing it that way are.
I think it’s important to recognize the full nuance of what is likely in the middle, instead of just looking at highly unlikely and opposed extreme scenarios.
What risk could possibly be worse than a global pandemic? That seems to be what gain of function research purports to be studying to prevent- and in this case it appears that the research virus caused the very thing it was supposed to (indirectly) prevent.
> Simply because nobody has a pre-existing immunity
There is good evidence that those who had SARS-CoV-1 had immunity that covered SARS-CoV-2. This immunity lasted for more than a decade.
> What I found scary about SARS-CoV2 is just how much it improved between variants.
Perhaps a leaky spike only vaccine was a particularly bad choice and the extent to which it drove these variants is not clear. There is additional debate amont the "virologist" community about this specific outcome.
> most gain-of-function experiments
I simply do not trust for profit drug companies to do this work. I certainly don't trust governments to do it either. Further, the idea that we can correctly estimate how nature is going to perform and then front run those outcomes in the laboratory is entirely insane and is explicitly anti-science.
> I simply do not trust for profit drug companies to do this work. I certainly don't trust governments to do it either.
But you trust nature to do this work? ;-)
> Further, the idea that we can correctly estimate how nature is going to perform and then front run those outcomes in the laboratory is entirely insane and is explicitly anti-science.
Well, this eliminates a great deal of research areas completely outside virology. Climatologists aren't needed. Seismologists aren't needed. Meteorologists become largely irrelevant. Much of cancer research, forestry, etc. isn't needed. Certainly no need to take measures for forecasted hurricanes or tsunamis.
We do just fine estimating how nature is going to perform and identifying what to do in anticipation of it. There's a lot of variables involved, so we don't always get it exactly right, but we sure do a lot better making forecasts and reacting to them than when we don't.
What work is that? Unnaturally bringing bats and pangolins together in a meat market? The only "real world" excuse ever offered.
> Climatologists aren't needed.
I've read their reports and their annual revisions. I'm not convinced they're needed, and since the "science" here is purely a wild guess using models projected backwards in time to fit existing data, the results aren't particularly meaningful either.
> Seismologists aren't needed. Meteorologists become largely irrelevant. Much of cancer research, forestry, etc. isn't needed. Certainly no need to take measures for forecasted hurricanes or tsunamis.
Do any of these require you to invent novel phenomenon to "study?" If not, then your comparison is purely the making of a strawman.
> but we sure do a lot better making forecasts and reacting to them than when we don't.
Interestingly.. was any "forecast" of the virus they created in a lab provided to anyone? Even if we did have it, would it have made a difference in timelines? You clearly see the exact problem.
> What work is that? Unnaturally bringing bats and pangolins together in a meat market? The only "real world" excuse ever offered.
GoF research in virology is specifically to replicate what happens in nature in hopes of forecasting outcomes and giving us more time to respond to them. If it isn't doing what happens in nature, it is, by definition, a failure.
> I've read their reports and their annual revisions. I'm not convinced they're needed, and since the "science" here is purely a wild guess using models projected backwards in time to fit existing data, the results aren't particularly meaningful either.
Those "guesses" have proven to amazingly insightful. You may not find them useful, but even energy companies have found these forecasts useful for their business.
> Do any of these require you to invent novel phenomenon to "study?" If not, then your comparison is purely the making of a strawman.
Yes, they do. More precisely, I would say they involve artificially controlled experiments that are used to forecast outcomes in nature.
...and I wasn't making a comparison or a strawman. I was taking your statement as an assertion, and identifying that in fact many scientific fields employ methods that you describe as "anti-science".
> Interestingly.. was any "forecast" of the virus they created in a lab provided to anyone?
No. One might almost think that perhaps "the virus" wasn't created in a lab. It's unlikely, given the large number of virologists who've said it wasn't created in a lab, but maybe?
> Even if we did have it, would it have made a difference in timelines?
Yes. Hugely, particularly for testing. Most of the vaccine development cycle is tied up in testing for safety and such, so the impact there is smaller, but it's not zero.
> You clearly see the exact problem.
I do. I don't think it's the same problem that you are seeing.
How exactly do seismologists or meteorologists do artificial experiments that replicate the phenomena they study?
> GoF research in virology is specifically to replicate what happens in nature
And yet in both the leaked chats and third party analysis, they talk extensively about how the RNA sequence doesn't match what they'd expect from natural evolution. Not only was it highly adapted to humans right from the get go, but there was the furin cleavage site too. The strange and artificial looking nature of it created suspicion immediately which is why they engaged in a conspiracy to shut down and censor discussion of it.
So that doesn't seem like they're just replicating nature.
Exactly, there doesn't seem to be any restraint to creating viruses that would match a naturally occurring pathway. Viruses are simple enough that you can do statistical analysis and determine how many years it would take for such an occurrence to take place in nature. Humans have the tools to create viruses that wouldn't occur in the wild before the heat death of the universe.
During SARS-Cov2 the flu basically disappeared because of all the masks and hand sanitizer, given that the flu is much less contagious and harder to spread.
That gives me hope regarding H1N1, if it happens, we might be able to keep it under control.
We'd also be able to develop a vaccine much more quickly. We're very good at making flu vaccines because we do it every year. That's why we had a 2009 "swine flu" vaccine within a few months.
I get that there are a lot of arm-chair experts who think this was a lab-leak. But we're making many large jumps here from:
Was this created in a lab?
Was this leaked from a lab?
Is there something inherently dangerous about studying viruses in labs?
Full NIMBY.
The positive externalities of this are good jobs around virology study to try and prevent the next pandemic. But we're just leaning super hard into fear-mongering here. How many people in the comments of this article really describe the processes used at each of these labs to prevent the viruses from getting out? How many can say how effective those practices are? We've still not proven that COVID was a lab-leak, so we're attempting to say that something that otherwise has a very safe record is dangerous based on what might have happened.
I have certainly not heard of any new evidence that would change my view that it was not caused by a lab-leak yet. My impression is that the market animal to human jump was still the prevailing theory.
There has been little or no new physical evidence. We have seen new evidence of coverup, though, where scientists privately said there was high likelihood of lab leak in slack messages before publicly signing publications claiming there was no likelihood of lab leak. The leaked slack messages are damning.
That’s a complete mischaracterization of that situation.
The conversation DID ask if it was a leak. Then they studied the evidence and only after studying the evidence did they publicly sign that it was probably of natural origin.
They had already studied the evidence on February 2 when they had the slack conversations. No new evidence appeared.
Then they said out loud that they were changing the paper's conclusions away from their actual beliefs because of the political consequences:
> “Given the shit show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possible distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content to with ascribing it to natural processes.”
> “Yup, I totally agree that’s a very reasonable conclusion,” Andersen responded. Although I hate when politics is injected into science – but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstance. We should be sensitive to that.”
There's really none. The biggest evidence is the fact that an animal reservoir was never found and it was found relatively quickly during the first SARS and MERS outbreaks. There's no evidence from the lab itself and no evidence the virus that reached the public was subject to GoF. And just general distrust of China.
I don't think we'll ever find out. There's no incentive for the Chinese government to investigate this issue, and plenty of incentives to keep it hidden.
Your argument here boils down to 'we shouldn't care if it's created in a lab, because even if it were, the benefits of studying viruses outweigh the risk'. It's funny that you accuse others of being 'armchair experts', when you yourself are being an armchair expert on the topic of the risk/benefit analysis of gain-of-function research. Moreover, your idea is even more dangerous because it necessitates that there will never be any expertise in this area. If no one investigates whether this was a lab leak, we'll never be able to put together proper research and data to answer the question of whether the benefits outweigh the risks of gain-of-function research.
The main purpose behind determining if it's a lab leak is not to 'make jumps'. It's so that we know. It's important we know because it's how science and policy get done. Putting our fingers in our ears and covering our eyes and pretending it doesn't matter is irresponsible.
> We've still not proven that COVID was a lab-leak, so we're attempting to say that something that otherwise has a very safe record is dangerous based on what might have happened.
How is anyone supposed to prove or even provide evidence of such a thing if China doesn't cooperate? And that's really the reason this has exploded. China is not cooperating. No one knows, and that's suspicious.
Even if, as you say, all indicators point to gain-of-function research being useful, I think we should all be able to agree that labs that are not open to being investigated by international, neutral bodies should not be involved in conducting them. The possibility of cover ups is too great.
My argument here is "We don't know that this was created in a lab, and it's unreasonable to assume it was when we have evidence that it wasn't created in a lab." It's even more unreasonable to create policy based on this wild speculation.
> How is anyone supposed to prove or even provide evidence of such a thing if China doesn't cooperate? And that's really the reason this has exploded. China is not cooperating. No one knows, and that's suspicious.
Difficulty in obtaining evidence doesn't change the burden of proof from "proving a positive" to "disproving a negative".
"Suspicious" is not "damning evidence." But also my understanding is that scientists have studied the virus and determined it doesn't have any of the hallmarks they would expect from a human-altered virus.
> My argument here is "We don't know that this was created in a lab, and it's unreasonable to assume it was when we have evidence that it wasn't created in a lab."
Unless something major has changed, I don't believe we have firm evidence either way.
> Difficulty in obtaining evidence doesn't change the burden of proof from "proving a positive" to "disproving a negative".
When difficulty obtaining evidence has to do with geopolitics, rather than science, then yes it becomes very diferent. Because geopolitics, and people, you can convince, investigate, and hold accountable. Science and nature less so. That's why this is important.
Anyway, your entire purpose making your argument is to question the need for any investigation it seems. That is why it seemingly excuses the fact that we have not actually investigated the lab in any meaningful way. I don't believe this is acceptable.
Crazy virus comes from where said crazy viruses are literally made and studied.
Occams Razor suggests a lot, but more importantly, smart risk management dictates that you treat the lab as if it is the source; absent some sort of clear risk-related reason that these experiments are likely to do more good than harm.
So I suppose the correct question is -- what are we getting from these labs that's worth the risk of leaks?
This is the wet market theory, yes? I presume these wet markets exist in places other than Wuhan.
Yeah, nah, that one is only "more believable" propped up by e.g. xenophobia and racism. Falls way too neatly into "look at the weird Chinese people they eat bats" or whatever.
Pretty flimsy compared to "lab that literally does this kind of virus all day."
It's also a more convenient theory for the Chinese government. Its much less embarrassing to say "The virus came from rednecks eating weird things" than it is to say "The virus came from a government funded lab".
I think if there's even a 49% chance that a certain kind of research caused the pandemic, it should be banned, because that's too high. Hell, even a 1% chance of another pandemic is too high, but I don't think any honest evaluator can put the odds of it having been a lab leak that low. It's not 100%, but I think anyone being honest with themselves about the evidence has to put it over at least 20%, and I think as high as 80%.
Burden of proof is a tragically misapplied concept. The question is what position should be the default given some uncertainty? This isn't decided in a vacuum. The default should be decided based on the facts and utility estimates of various outcomes where relevant. In the case where the issue is of purely academic interest, the burden of proof is on those making the claim. When the issue has real world consequences, then utility estimates of various outcomes are relevant.
Who has the burden to demonstrate that GoF research is safe given our uncertainty of whether COVID was lab created and subsequently leaked? This issue isn't of purely academic interest. We must consider the costs to society of a leak vs the benefits of that research. From where I'm sitting, the benefits are non-existent relative to the costs. Given the massive negative utility of a leak compared to benefits of the research, the burden of proof is on those who want to continue doing GoF research to demonstrate safety and value.
GP is totally right to point to you that it hasn't been proven it wasn't a lab leak either.
Your burden of proof would make some sense if, of all the places in the world, the outbreak didn't happen near a "leading" lab in GoF research on bat viruses.
I mean: if people were to die due to irradiation near some uranium-enrichment facility but there was no proof that any radioactive material leaked, the reasonable stance would still be that some fuck up happened in that uranium-enrichment facility.
People would have to proof it was a lab-leak if the outbreak happened in some city where there weren't any research done on viruses.
But as it is an undisputable fact that the biggest pandemic in modern history happened due to a virus outbreak beginning in a place exceptionally close to a lab doing research on similar viruses, the burden of proof is on those claiming it's not a lab leak.
Moreover it's a known fact communism uses propaganda as one of its most powerful tool so nothing coming out of chinese officials can be trusted.
You want to point out it wasn't proven it was a lab leak, which is true. But people can point out it wasn't proven it wasn't a lab leak either. And that is totally on-topic.
I'm not generally opposed to virology research - I do think that it's totally reasonable a lab leak could have lead to this.
Coronaviruses (SARS specifically) have leaked from Chinese labs twice in the last 20 years. These aren't really even controversial incidents, the PRC admitted it. [2]
Lab leaks of pathogens aren't really that uncommon, to the extent Wikipedia has a huge list including labs from all over the world. [1]
tl;dr: viruses escape from labs, so it was never a far-fetched scenario.
You might expect they'd have contributed a lot, what with the being shut down and everyone and everything involved being subject to endless accusations and calls for investigations.
Now tell me, how did all of those accusations and investigations help in the pandemic?
Any benefit from research of gain of function research is clearly outweighed by risk of lab leak. I.e if the estimated incremental realized benefit of better planning, better mitigation from a single gain of function research equaled X; the cost of a lab leak seems to be 100X~10,000X.
Here's [1] a reasonable one. That list should be considered far from comprehensive, as it's extremely safe to assume that many events end up buried, especially given all of the grey-tier legality bio research happening in far off shores, researching who knows what.
But looking at the reported events (that have made their way onto Wiki), since 2000 we've had lab leaks and "incidents" in the US (repeatedly.. to say the least), Japan, Taiwan, China, Russia, UK, Australia, France, the Netherlands, and many more places. That includes incidents at BSL-4 labs, the highest biosecurity rating. And the leaks/incidents involve some pretty crazy stuff: polio - lab worker was infected without anyone's knowledge, ebola - lab worker infected at a BSL-4 lab, smallpox - vials of active smallpox found casually laying around in cold storage at a rando facility, anthrax - 75 exposed, and more.
It seems completely obvious from the absurd volume of reported incidents that we're bee-lining to a global biosecurity accident, almost certainly far more serious than COVID, completely of our own making, again.
Gain of function research is the kind of experiment that could develop a disease that kills billions. It isn't a game we should be playing lightly if at all. The argument is that eventually biology could make the same mutation. The thing is, it is extremely unlikely that Ebola becomes air born naturally, for example. But that is the kind of thing that gain of function seeks to develop, you know, just in case.
Naturally, there's an adversarial game playing out, and we accelerate it massively. If the results of our small games enter the larger playspace, we're damned, so I get your concern.
Is there some scifi solution to step outside of the game? Are the problems involved in understanding the systems involved (to the extent that you can predict realistic risk and mitigate) solvable?
I don't know the level of realistic risk for a devastating virus naturally occurring, nor the potential for us to address it without this kind of research, so I don't know what is within reason here. It would be cool to see any studies that attempt to address these two questions.
Edit: And a systematic review of past and considered lab leak scenarios probably wouldn't hurt either. If we still have to do this work, and just decide it must be done by isolated monks/robots in space, for humanity ending risks I guess that's worth discussing
> Is there some scifi solution to step outside of the game?
Of course there is, of course they already use it, and of course the people who think banning research is the peak of enlightenment aren't remotely interested in making this kind of distinction.
> I don't know the level of realistic risk for a devastating virus naturally occurring
If we assume it is directly proportional to the number of people (more people to encounter animals, more people to incubate potential pandemics), there were roughly 450 billion people-years lived between the Black Plague and the Spanish Flu and the Spanish Flu and COVID-19.
That would put the next zoonotic spillover around 2065.
With earthquakes you at least have stress accumulating over time, even if the stress is not necessarily accumulating or being released at a constant rate.
A zoonotic spillover is pure repeated throws of the dice, no accumulated pressure.
Are most zoonotic crossovers more than one step or are most misadventures NONHUMAN => HUMAN? Either way if market activity doesn't change year on year then rate of dice rolls don't change on that front.
However there is no reason to believe that such misadventures take place in a single generation and immediately produce a viable and successful agent.
Producing something that spreads to humans but not will will none the less produce many orders of magnitude more useful and numerous dice rolls. Such actions may not be immediately obvious even if they were fatal. People after all get sick and die all the time.
I doubt we have enough data to meaningfully forecast risk.
I mean, we, a random assortment of software engineers on HN, almost certainly lack the data and expertise to forecast the risk of a pandemic.
My own self-critique above was more that, even if you could accurately deduce that there is a 1.54e-12 chance per person-year of a person encountering a novel disease that can spread as a global pandemic, you can't then schedule the next one for 450 billion people-years later, when the probability exceeds 50%, because it's a random occurrence and there's nothing stopping it from happening after ten or a trillion throws of the dice.
But I'll still stand by the logic of my original back of the envelope number; insomuch as the risk is proportional to the population, we should expect the next global pandemic twice as fast as the last one, and I think there's a good chance many of us will be alive to see it (as opposed to the gap between the Spanish Flu and COVID-19, where the survivors of the first were infants for the last and centenarians for this one).
Eventually medical science is going to arrive at methods that have potential to cure/create disease, novel organisms, synthetic organisms, etc. I don't think we want these methods pursued in a geopolitical vacuum either - like an arms race. It is inevitable and the only way to improve our collective chances of survival will be to co develop building codes, quarantine strategy, and agile attitudes to respond in time.
I'm not sure you establish the 100X-10,000X measure. How did you calculate the realized benefit? How do you quantify the relative impact of extinction?
The approximate loss of life for major outbreaks in the past 25 years (excluding Covid) was around 500K. In a best case scenario GoF could have mitigated maybe 20% of that or 100k. Let' say one research initiative as r, the chance of that research being successful as s, the chance of that research being on the exact virus causing the outbreak as v, the type of mutation research being the actual mutation the virus had as m, the chance that the government leveraged the research and took action to prepare accordingly to take advantage of that research as g, we get s * v * m * g = P probability of r mitigating outbreaks by 20%. P of r is probably around 1/100 or less. So you would probably want around at least 100 GOF research initiatives to save ~100K lives.
On the surface that might sound ok. However if we undergo a similar exercise of chances of Lab leak causing an outbreak we'll probably end up with a similar figure of 1/100. In a lab leak we'll have to contend with a more powerful variant of a pathogen that has caused a prior outbreak which may kill an order more people than the average outbreak. So perhaps a million deaths alone, or if we entertain that Covid was caused by a lab lead ~10m deaths, or 100x of 100k.
Ultimately it seems GoF research is playing with fire without knowing if the effort actually will reduces total deaths on net.
A much more effective route seems to simply invest in rapid sequencing, rapid wastewater monitoring, PPE stocking/distribution policies, more effective local lockdown procedures/policies.
You mention rapid sequencing, rapid wastewater monitoring, PPE stocking/distribution policies, and more effective local lockdown procedures/policies. Those would all be factors that would reduce the value of "X" (as in, the consequences of bad outcomes in either scenario), rather than any coefficients in front of X.
I don't necessarily agree that the past 25 years, particularly if you are excluding COVID, is a meaningful representative sample... unless you want to compare it to the loss of life from GoF over the past 25 years excluding COVID. In that case, I'd challenge you to demonstrate a loss of life from GoF research that is over 10K. Given the ~100K lives estimate, that puts it at 10x greater benefit than not doing GoF research.
> However if we undergo a similar exercise of chances of Lab leak causing an outbreak we'll probably end up with a similar figure of 1/100. In a lab leak we'll have to contend with a more powerful variant of a pathogen that has caused a prior outbreak which may kill an order more people than the average outbreak.
There's a number of false assumptions here. Your threat assessment seems more rooted in works of fiction than reality. That the probability is equivalent is highly debatable, particularly since it is far easier (and cheaper) to apply risk mitigations to a virology lab than to society as a whole. It's also not a given that a lab leak means we'll have to contend with a more powerful variant of a pathogen. Even if it were a more powerful variant of a pathogen, that does not necessarily relate to a higher death toll. In fact, SARS-COV-2 was far less virulent than SARS-COV-1, and that's a significant contributor to why it had so much more impact.
Even if we ignore ALL of that, in the even that there was an outbreak from a virology lab doing GoF research, that would mean we would be much further ahead on research to combat the virus than if said virus were to occur in the wild. We'd have shorter times to have disease profiles, tests, epidemiological models, and vaccines, and the impact of shorter times is exponential. While it is conceivable that a leak from a lab leads to a higher death count, it is far more conceivable that a virus that didn't come from a lab would end more lives.
> if we entertain that Covid was caused by a lab lead ~10m deaths, or 100x of 100k.
Spanish flu, which existed before anyone knew how to do GoF research, killed far more people than COVID-19. At the lowest estimate, it's about 17 million people, and at the high end closer to 100 million people. The population of the world at the time was ~1/4 the population when COVID-19 hit the scene, so on a per capita basis COVID-19 isn't in the same league. AIDS, which we've been able to track back to its natural origin, has killed 42 million people. The Bubonic Plague killed... 75+ million, or about a third of the European population.
Nature is way better at killing us than any lab.
> Ultimately it seems GoF research is playing with fire without knowing if the effort actually will reduces total deaths on net.
Another way to think of it is that international trade & travel is playing with fire without knowing if the effort actually will reduce total deaths or not. We could therefore return to the days of the horse and buggy, or we could continue with the practice and put in place mitigations, like GoF research, to mitigate the risks it entails.
Perhaps I am one of a small group but it still irritates me how politicized the origins of COVID were. It should never have been that way and it should never happen again. Lab leak, deliberate act, accident, or a mutation in the wild, the origins should have been rigorously challenged and pursued no matter the consequence.
This entire topic has gotten harebrained, so I’ll add to the fire: the part of our population that had a problem getting vaccinated would have responded much better to a perceived threat from a tangible adversary.
> Are you under the impression that a large number of people who refused the COVID shots didn't also already believe that the virus came from a lab?
At its core, no. But there were a lot of people caught in the crossfire of information who simply got scared. For many of them, seeing SARS-CoV-2 as man-made could have counteracted that anxiety.
The purpose of a vaccine is to inoculate against a disease. The vaccine failed miserably at that. If the disease were actually deadly enough, more people would have chanced an experimental mRNA injection into their bloodstream vs taking the disease on via natural immunity. You didn't have to propagandize and gaslight people to take the smallpox vaccine: it was self evident how deadly the disease was. And yet, the world was never shut down for small pox.
It was clear very early on that for the vast majority of the population (over 99%) there was no tangible threat from Covid. And yet the theater of Covid was carried on. I still remember the footage out of Wuhan in early 2020 that scared the bejeezus out of me, of people just falling over in the middle of the streets and people with hazmat suits showing up and carting people off. Only in retrospect can we see that was all a production. People don't literally fall over in the middle of the street from Covid infection, fine one minute and near dead the next.
So from that background, why would you trust anything the government tells you, when the government showed no good faith effort to seek truth or be reasonable? Many who pitched the lab leak theory were dismissed, shut down, censored, and ridiculed. From the same conformists that sought to manipulate healthy young people into taking an unnecessary vaccine and to give up a portion of their youth to terror and tyranny.
> purpose of a vaccine is to inoculate against a disease. The vaccine failed miserably at that.
Inoculation means to prevent disease. The mRNA vaccines were extraordinary at preventing Covid, the disease. Sterilisation is a nice to have, but far from mandatory--modern polio vaccines aren't sterilising.
> didn't have to propagandize and gaslight people to take the smallpox vaccine: it was self evident how deadly the disease was
A meaningful fraction of Americans, Brits and Canadians are generally against inoculation [1].
"> A meaningful fraction of Americans, Brits and Canadians are generally against inoculation [1]."
He said was. The disease was deadly, now it's threat to you is extremely low. If you weren't aware, we stopped vaccinating for small pox in 1972, as soon as it was no longer a threat in the United States. It would not be globally eradicated until 1979.
And I think that's largely the problem many people have. Forcing vaccinations for diseases that pose little risk is illogical. In looking up information on this topic I somehow stumbled onto this [1] page. For instance now the seasonal flu vaccine is required for immigrants, and even in some schools!?
The flu poses an extremely negligible risk to both of these groups. It's hard not to see the motivation behind this as being simply directing ever more $$$ to big-pharma interests, which the people making these rules are often directly invested in. It doesn't feel like rational public health guidance, and that destroys trust.
Wow, I did a double take in your second paragraph thinking I was reading a comment I had left earlier, lol.
But right on, I feel exactly the same. I do plant transformation and we call these experiments, mRNA "transient-expression" assays, as in, transiently transgenic. It was so weird from my perspective that we were going to start using the common lab technique to test genes on people.
The only two facts I needed were that over 80% of people that have had COVID never even knew they had it, it's that mild. And of the people that even show symptoms it have over a 99% recovery rate.
You realize early on into the pandemic our hospital systems were struggling with the amount of patients that had to come in and see urgent care, right? As in, other people with more treatable conditions were dying because hospitals were filled up and there were no staff or beds available. Like this is just an objective fact.
COVID now is far more mild because of vaccination and how the virus has evolved (Omnicron being far more mild than the earlier variants).
Vaccines have no effect on whether a virus mutates to become milder or more virulent. Effective vaccines, which prevent spread, can eliminate a disease, but clearly the COVID vaccines failed on that front. So for instance the Spanish Flu was an unimaginably brutal disease that primarily killed people in the 20-40 year old range! [1] Just terrifying stuff. But it never disappeared. It's still with us today as a variant of the common seasonal flu. The next time you've a winter fever and some congestion, you might well have the Spanish Flu, or what it's become at least.
And obviously there were no vaccines for the Spanish Flu.
Yes, and the flu is milder both because of vaccination and the way it's evolved. But even the seasonal flu kills quite a few people every year, the reason why we think it to be milder is because we've gotten used to how it primarily affects vaccinated people.
Like what you've done there is a fallacy a lot of people commit, that they conflate seasonal viruses, colds, allergies etc with the flu. But when you actually get the flu, you know it.
COVID was a serious threat for anyone over 60 for example, that is already far more than 1% of the population. Without the vaccines many more people would have died.
You can [finally] find data on COVID death by age here. [1] Of the total 1.1 million US deaths:
Age Range : Deaths : Group Population as Percent of total US Population
55-64 : 159k : 12.9%
65-74 : 256k : 10.1%
75-84 : 300k : 4.9%
85+ : 311k : 1.8%
COVID was only especially dangerous to the extremely elderly, and particularly those with severe preexisting conditions. So for instance that 65-74 age group, you have about 34 million people, and only 256k deaths. Think about the numbers in that 34 million with cancer, severe diabetes, heart failure, etc. But then you go the 85+ group and with 1/6th as many people, ended up with about 20% more total deaths.
Math question for you: What's 1% of the world's population? Go ahead and say you don't care about 80M dying because it's not that many. Also, you're ignoring the morbidity rate. Unvaccinated people were hospitalized at an alarming rate even if most of them were saved via intensive treatment.
Could you please expand on that? To be sure I understand correctly: Those who resisted taking the vaccine would have been more inclined to do so had a specific country been identified as the source, or that it may have been a leak from a laboratory?
To state different: Was the unknown/disputed origins the catalyst for some not getting vaccinated?
People are selfish. COVID may have started in China as a lab leak but the US likely funded it. Plenty of selfish reasons for people in government to squash the idea that COVID was a lab leak.
If the lab leak turns out to be true I could see people demanding that the gallows be dusted off.
We fund this research in a few countries around the world where their procedures are more lax so leaks are even more likely than they are in US based labs Plum island, fort Dietrick, etc). Still if US officials are responsible for lax oversight or funding poorly run labs they should be held responsible.
Yes, for the coverup. If it was a lab leak, we had the director of NIAID covering it up on national news. That is the kind of thing the people demand blood for.
There was a specific legal ban on this type of research, yet, the researchers continued anyways. It may have been "an accident," but that really doesn't afford them any excuse.
The death penalty is a merciful punishment for going out of one's way to circumvent research bans that would have completely prevented a leak in the first place.
Should we tolerate a culture of accidents and face preserving around nukes, grey goo (which this falls under?) there are things you only get to fail once..
If China did leak COVID, as is looking more and more likely, by accident or on purpose, that is a POLITICAL issues.
First if it was a leak, we'd have to cut off all funding and shared resources just to be safe, which we have already done.
Next there would have to be some investigation that China would naturally be adversarial to. If it was natural they would want to collaborate (they are refusing to collaborate for the most part).
Spanish flu is called Spanish flu because Spain was one of the few countries not directly embroiled in World War I at the time, so when the flu was identified in their cities, their media reported on it. The US and other European nations' military chains of command were aware of the illness ripping through trenches, bases, and hospitals but had a media blackout on public reports of it to avoid disruption of morale during wartime.
We weren't at war this time, but pandemics are inextricable from international politics for the same reason everything else that has massive impact on people's health and safety across national borders is inextricable from international politics.
I agree with you on the desire for depoliticization of the topic, but I lack a mechanism to get there; it's not like an independent agency run by, say, the UN would be free of politics on this topic.
Still no motive for a deliberate action. I'm having a hard time believing that releasing COVID-19 was a competing plan for accomplishing anyones goals.
I mean, are we supposed to feel bad for a handful of scientists and not the millions of people who died and the billions whose lives were disrupted? Seriously?
Everyone in this thread seems awfully convinced. There is as of yet no proof that's the case. Nor that GoF created the strain. Both are just conjecture. Seems pretty foolish to end valuable research to appease people who fear things they don't understand.
We don't know if the virus came from a market either, so why would that be the default position? Especially since that position requires accepting a hell of a coincidence that the virus just happened to emerge near a lab working on gain of function research for that type of virus. China's lack of openness to investigating this should also skew us against giving them the benefit of the doubt, rather than the opposite.
Given that lab escapes have happened multiple times and might have caused a global pandemic, the burden of proof should be on showing that the research is worth the significant risk it carries.
Defaulting to assuming that the risks are negligible and everyone concerned is scared for no reason is an absurd and dangerous take.
It's not a court case. There's not a burden of proof.
What there is, is a risk analysis, which means you have to consider the risks of any particular action as well as in NOT taking the action. I've seen literally no discussion about the risks of NOT taking the action.
I'm reminded of self-driving cars, because we're worried they might lead to the deaths of thousands of people each year. Meanwhile, over a million people die each year in car accidents. Conclusion: best to let those million people die each year.
Well we spent over a decade and millions of dollars studying SARS coronaviruses and yet none of that work was of any help in fighting the pandemic. For example Ecohealth which was publicly funded with our tax dollars has still to this day refused to share it's research/samples/data despite being legally obligated to. The most charitable interpretation for refusing to share this information while millions of people are dying is that it is simply useless.
So why continue to fund such dangerous research if the research will be hidden when we actually need it?
> Well we spent over a decade and millions of dollars studying SARS coronaviruses and yet none of that work was of any help in fighting the pandemic.
Wow. Just wow.
It's statements like this that make me think we should indeed halt all virology research, and really all medical research and development entirely. We deserve what we get.
All government funded work maybe, yeah? It wouldn't make much difference. The consumers of that sort of research are ultimately just pharma companies and they don't use it much because so little replicates to begin with.
Beyond them creating it in the first place you mean?
I spent a long time investigating the effectiveness of everything governments did during COVID. None of it worked and a lot of it backfired badly, lockdowns being only one of the most prominent examples. Even the vaccine programme was a disaster: the data claiming otherwise turns out to have all been juked in various ways. We'd have been better off without governments doing anything at all.
Every pandemic ever has been caused by a natural source. Most pandemics happened before virology was a field. The default assumption from the start was animal source until there's proof it was something else.
>Every pandemic ever has been caused by a natural source.
That's an awfully bold claim, unless you have proof that covid-19 occurred naturally. Defaulting to your preferred reality and ignoring the potential risks is not a responsible way to guide research policy.
When we can do this work in a satellite with robots, and ensure that in case of launch failure or de-orbitting the samples are incinerated, then we can discuss doing this research. Otherwise we are just playing with fire and doing our best to ensure somebody doesn't bring something smoldering to the outside.
Another lesson we should learn from the pandemic, aside from the risks of GoF research, is that searching for novel viruses in animals can be extremely dangerous.
WIV collected samples from bat populations to find novel coronaviruses. Processing those samples was not done in a BSL-4 facility, but instead in BSL-2 labs. Some of those samples, like RaTG13, were as close as 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2. Even if COVID didn't require GoF research to spill over into humans, and was a purely natural spillover, actively collecting novel viruses and processing them in a low-BSL lab is a recipe for disaster.
BSL-4 is reserved for pathogens known to be dangerous to humans. This policy effectively translates to treating novel viruses as safe until proven otherwise, which is reckless.
the SARS-CoV-2 genome is ~29.8K nucleotides long. 96% of that sequence is identical to the genome of RaTG13, i.e. all but ~1200 match. for reference, SARS-CoV-1 is only 82% similar to SARS-CoV-2. at a mutation rate of 8*10^-4, this means the current strains of COVID are ~97% identical to the original 2019 sequence.
so, darned close honestly. to be clear, I'm not saying RaTG13 is the source of the lab leak - it's just too different - but I am saying that it's much closer than the original SARS, and thus had no business being analyzed in a BSL-2 lab.
Sophisticated evolutionary models are needed to accurately estimated expected mean and variance in genetic distances. For example, rare events of large effect (e.g. recombination) also introduces variation beyond within-strain mutation.
I don't see how then % number means anything. Humans and apes have 4% difference. It depends on thebkind of difference, not the number of different genes
But a human and chimp's have over 3 billion nucleotides in our genome. SARS2 only has 30 thousand, so the genetic distance between the two are at most decades, but with recombinants the timeline is much shorter
That means they were several decades of evolution in the wild away from each other.
It would take passage through billions of organisms to turn RaTG13 into SARS-CoV-2.
Which is probably what happened naturally through many, many millions of bats (and whatever intermediate animal) being infected and passing it on. Something that is well outside the scale of serial passage experiments in a lab.
How far away would it be? Would it still take millions and millions of bats or is it now within the realm of possibility to infect humanized mice and get SARS-CoV-2 out the other end?
Yes, you're still a thousand mutations away from each other. The FCS is tiny. The mutations are spread all over the entire genome--although the main areas are in spike RBD (which suggests that RaTG13 may not be able to use ACE2 at all). The PRRAR FCS that SARS-CoV-2 uses is also a previously-unknown-to-humans FCS and not one a human scientist would have naively guessed would work.
How do you arrive at several decades and billions of organisms? You can't extrapolate the current mutation rate to the spillover event; SARS-CoV-2 was already quite fit at infecting humans and didn't need to change much. In contrast, during spillover events there's heavy selection pressure to adapt to the new host.
There's also the possibility of recombination events, which can instantly cause significant drift. Now consider the case of the Mojiang miners, who contracted and slowly succumbed to viral pneumonia in 2012 after inhaling bat guano. WIV found, like, a dozen beta-coronaviruses in that cave alone (including RaTG13.) The miners could have been exposed to several at once, which recombined and adapted quickly to their new home in human lungs. Again, unlikely to have been SARS-CoV-2, since the pandemic almost certainly would have happened already, but whatever they had was virulent enough to kill half of them.
The genetic clock was estimated from bat coronavirus mutation rates in the wild, not from SARS-CoV-2 mutation in humans.
And virulence != transmissible. They got sick by inhaling everything that was floating around in that mine. To get more people sick you'd need to take them all to that mine.
Recombination to produce a viable and more successful virus is also very rare, that is unlikely to have happened to any of those miners, much less several of them (over populations it becomes likely but there we're talking many millions of infections as well).
Don't they still collect wild bats for food in China?
If so, it seems a bit misguided to be taking issue with BSL-this-vs-that handling wild bats when BSL-fuck-all members of the public are still using them as a food source.
Pre-COVID it was already well understood that bats are viral reservoirs. It didn't prevent wet markets from selling wild bats. The labs are of focus due to GoF, in lieu of GoF there's already that level of exposure happening in the Chinese food supply.
Include building a completely hermetically sealed underground facility.
Sign away the ability to interact with the world at large for the duration of the experiment.
All samples and potentially contaminated equipment is to be incinerated/vitrified upon conclusion of the experiment.
If you think you are good enough to play God with manufacturing new pandemic pathogens, okay. Fine. I sure hope you're really willing to sacrifice it all for your work. Because otherwise, the answer should be no by default.
The National Intelligence Council of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found:
> The IC assesses that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, probably emerged and infected humans through an initial small-scale exposure that occurred no later than November 2019 with the first known cluster of COVID-19 cases arising in Wuhan, China in December 2019.
And that:
> As of August 2021, we still have not observed genetic signatures in SARS-CoV-2 that would be diagnostic of genetic engineering, according to the IC’s understanding of the virus. Similarly, we have not identified any existing coronavirus strains that could have plausibly served as a backbone if SARS-CoV-2 had been genetically engineered.
Also:
> The WIV previously created chimeras, or combinations, of SARS-like coronaviruses, but this information does not provide insight into whether SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered by the WIV.
And:
> Early in the pandemic, the WIV identified that a new virus was responsible for the outbreak in Wuhan. It is therefore assessed that WIV researchers pivoted to COVID-19-related work to address the outbreak and characterize the virus. These activities suggest that WIV personnel were unaware of the existence of SARS-CoV-2 until the outbreak was underway.
And as far as spillover from collected samples in the lab goes:
> They also see the potential that a laboratory worker inadvertently was infected while collecting unknown animal specimens to be less likely than an infection occurring through numerous hunters, farmers, merchants, and others who have frequent, natural contact with animals
> Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.
No idea why DOE continues to think it was a lab leak, other than we can't definitively prove it wasn't and since ChinaBad(tm) we have to assume it was.
I am assuming the 1 IC element in the link I reference below is the DOE. It claims
"One IC element assesses with moderate confidence that the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was the result of a laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. These analysts give weight to the inherently risky nature of work on coronaviruses."
Based on the quote (if the one IC element is in fact the DOE) is seem they are basing it on the "inherently risky nature of the work on coronaviruses.
I do find it interesting this was given with moderate confidence but the natural occurring is only given low confidence. Any idea how the whole confidence level is determined?
The DOE seems to have assigned "moderate" confidence to the idea of a lab leak on the basis of zero concrete evidence. Taking the assessment on the whole it seems obvious to me that the argument from them is weak, but the assessment can't come out and just state that in plain English.
The thing here that confuses me is that the DoE is definitely the gov't agency I most associate with Health. \s
Why are we giving so much wait to the organization that says "Energy" in the name over one that says "Health" in the name? And is there a convincing reason that's not: "It's the department I agree with the most on this issue."
The fundamental problem with GoF research is that the virology community has shown that it's not trustworthy enough to be working with things that are this dangerous.
In China, there has been almost a complete information blackout after COVID. Most of what we know that points to a leak that actually comes from China has been accidentally disclosed or was published before the pandemic.
In the U.S. and Europe, it's sadly largely the same story. We now know through FOIA requests that the authors of the pivotal Proximal Origin thought privately that there was a significant likelihood that SARS2 was lab derived, but what they published was that "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible." They also sought to conceal some of the true authors of the paper in order for it to appear more independent and credible. They, and their colleagues then relentlessly smeared and called conspiracy theorists, anyone who publicly said the very same things that they said privately to each other.
EcoHealth and DARPA refused to provide a copy of the DEFUSE grant proposal. It ultimately had to be leaked by an anonymous source in the government. When it finally came out it ended up being more or less a direct blueprint for how you'd create SARS2 from existing bat viruses, and it was submitted just a year before the outbreak started in Wuhan. One of the collaborators on that project was to have been the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Throughout, (and there is much more), not a single person who has brought any of this to light has been a virologist. Some have been biologists in other fields, some have been outside the scientific establishment entirely.
Being responsible for an animal that harbors a virus that could kill 10,000,000 people or more if you make a mistake is an awesome responsibility, and only people of the utmost integrity can be trusted with something that dangerous. What we've seen is that sadly, nowhere near this level of integrity exists in the virology community.
> We now know through FOIA requests that the authors of the pivotal Proximal Origin thought privately that there was a significant likelihood that SARS2 was lab derived
What we learned from the FOIA requests is that some authors initially privately believed a lab leak was more likely and some believed that a natural origin was more likely, but after they discussed the evidence, they all agreed that it supported the latter. https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/15951210808005386...
Why are we so focused on understanding the biology of viruses, while making almost no effort to block them physically or install any more filters in public?
See how paid actors and shills quickly jump in push the "it was not a lab leak" concerning a virus that was deliberately engineered with the additional benefit of creating profit from patented cures.
Very early on after the virus genome was released a group of Indian researchers quickly noted that the virus had been deliberately engineered and they were quickly shut down,
then one Peter Daszak who was financing GoF research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology got a group of scientists to publish a paper saying it was not engineered and the Chinese were not involved in any such thing.
Here is the BBC featuring Peter Daszak given Wuhan a clean bill of health while forgetting to tell viewers about his relationship with the Wuhan institute - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-56002216
We now have leaked Slack conversations from a group of scientists who jumped in to say the virus was a naturally evolved was admitting privately in the conversations that the evidence pointed to deliberate engineering.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 274 ms ] threadhttps://ghostarchive.org/archive/XbLza
Nevertheless, pumping the brakes here is sensible.
I get the sense that researchers feel a certain injustice that geopolitics is affecting scientific decisions by their funding bodies. Funding should be decided on the scientific merit of their proposals. In a vacuum, that makes sense.
Seen more widely, though, the decisions of the NIH and similar funding bodies are shot through with political considerations. For example, it would be hard for a physician scientist to attend a conference in the last few years where considerable resources were not devoted to equity issues.
My point here is that we already contextualize what work we fund by political decisions, for better or worse. In this circumstances, we continue to do so, but we in particular pause funding on research that may, in some form, be responsible for the deaths of millions of people and the disruption of lives of billions. That's a sensible choice.
Instead these labs are all near major population centers, with researchers freely mixing with the general population.
Like I live in a place where one of the major employers is a government research facility and every day people go to the designated meeting point and a bus takes them the rest of the way, or they spend 45 minutes driving on a dirt road to the middle of nowhere to keep anything from work (in this case nuclear related stuff) from coming home with them.
Why the hell are we putting biological virology institutes in the middle of the major population centers instead of the middle of nowhere?
Like there's plenty of unused land in the west, hell WY has like 2 dozen people living there, it seems that would be safe.
If this field is their career and their passion, they will do it.
Have you looked at the answers to these questions?
If they can't be bothered to work in a safely remote location then they don't actually believe in their work and are blind to the risks and history of lab leaks.
These are stakes as high as any single event in human history. Given the danger we're talking about, whether or not a few professors get a grant and have a good career is simply not even worth discussing. The fact that it is even discussed shows that the priorities of the virology community are wildly misplaced.
Some of these fears and comments reminds me a lot of comments around the nuclear accident in Japan. The actual issues stemmed from poor safety measures and protocols, not nuclear itself. That's assuming that the lab leak theory is even true and not just a convenient tool for politicians to use as a wedge.
This is where I see a gap. How does it actually inform vaccine design? Are there not enough wild viruses to play with?
Sun Tzu.
How do you think you can devise a vaccine if you don't know the virus? They experiment to find out what are the weaknesses of the enemy (i.e. proteins and other markers), so that they can target it. If the next pandemy is caused by a similar strain: ta-dam you have the vaccine already (or at least you know what to target).
It seems like the GoF research shows a lot of "oh look we made a super virus. It would be very bad if a virus did this in nature." Perhaps we can get some data on specifically _how bad_ that particular function would be. What do we get beyond that? Like you said, are there any other benefits that outweigh the risks?
Maybe we're all just really bad at understanding risks. I see a lot of comparisons between nuclear power. We know exactly how much dangerous material is in a nuclear reactor. Those physics don't evolve. Nuclear material doesn't reproduce and reinfect endlessly. A nuclear power plant needs a chain of failure to be harmful. A virus only needs one particle to infect.
Wait, is this canon now? If so, how is China going to not garner the hatred of the entire world?
To my knowledge, as of 3 months ago, the only “tangible” evidence for a lab leak was that china cleaned up before the WHO arrived and could better investigate.
You are the first person I have ever seen, after hundreds of articles, claim that the lab is known for leaks.
That is where I thought I got it from, but I don't see it just scanning through. Either it came from somewhere else, or I got it confused in the section where they were talking about a Beijing lab. If so they have my apologies.
Edit:https://www.voanews.com/a/covid-19-pandemic_chinese-lab-chec...
> Two State Department cables show that American embassy officials in Beijing made several visits to the research facility and sent two official warnings back to Washington in early 2018 about the lab’s inadequate safety measures. This was at a time when researchers were conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats, The Washington Post reported, citing intelligence sources.
The thing that China does which deserves the most hatred, however, is not the accident: It is the coverup. It's one thing to fuck up; it's another thing to hinder investigation of the fuckup, while trying in vain to "save face," which ends up just resulting in more deaths. A sincere person or organization would say "OK, one of us screwed up, now please help us fix it". It's literally the most basic ethics/honesty lesson we teach kids (at least in the West)- "if you screwed up, 'fess up, and the punishment will be less":
> While the U.S. investigates, officials say the Chinese government’s continuing lack of transparency, including with respect to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, raises questions over how the outbreak began. Officials also accuse Beijing of still not sharing all of their data with the international community.
> Instead, there is Chinese evidence that the lab had safety problems. VOA has located state media reports showing that there were security incidents flagged by national inspections as well as reported accidents that occurred when workers were trying to catch bats for study.
All evidence points to zoonotic spillover, aggravated by our encroachment on previously undisturbed natural areas and global warming.
Sadly, it was both political useful ('the Chinese did it!'), and ideologically useful ('a few faulty humans did this, like in the movies'), to blame the lab in Wuhan. By doing so, we can absolve ourselves of blame, and of need to take action - action both to mitigate the effects of this pandemic, and to prepare for the next. The next being an inevitability, just a question of when (within 10 years is my uneducated guess)
what evidence?
in any case, thats fancy language for: "Donald Trump was a proponent of the lab leak hypothesis so we had to come up with an alternate theory lest we appear to be in agreement with Donald Trump...so we've decided that it was people eating Pangolin Soup"
The folks claiming that there is evidence only for their theory are incorrect.
That's leaving aside the specious claim that there's no evidence of lab leak. The evidence of first outbreaks being near the lab are evidence of it being a lab leak, just as the first outbreaks going through a wet market are evidence of natural evolution. We have evidence for both theories.
Much easier to identify a few bad actors (which can then be 'punished' so this 'never happens again') instead of the crapness of people in general (which crapness ensures that this will happen again, with bodybags and lockdowns, and probably quite soon)
When in reality we all know China said it maybe came from a wet market in the same city (as the only Level4 biolab), because someone ate a bat.
You and I have higher burdens of proof than these "conspiracy theory" pushers.
There you go, France, the UK, Italy and Spain all have a higher proportion (or even a majority) of people believing in the lab leak theory than in the US. Germany is very close too.
But I’ll bite. You are saying that people in Europe over the last six month think that a lab leak is less likely now than they had? Hmm, hot take.
There will be an opinion but that doesn't mean anyone cares about it or there is discussion about it.
Some hobbyists caring and going down rabbit holes just doesn't mean much as far as what actually happened is concerned.
But it has become apparent that the research team did not clear the work with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which was one of the funders of the project. The agency indicated it is going to be looking for some answers as to why it first learned of the work through media reports.
Emily Erbelding, director of NIAID’s division of microbiology and infectious diseases, said the BU team’s original grant applications did not specify that the scientists wanted to do this precise work. Nor did the group make clear that it was doing experiments that might involve enhancing a pathogen of pandemic potential in the progress reports it provided to NIAID.
https://www.statnews.com/2022/10/17/boston-university-resear...
The completely hypothetical effects of not making a change in just one area of virology research which is highly criticized by many in the scientific community.
It's hilariously absurd to compare people who don't want a dual use bioweapons research facility in their neighborhood to NIMBYism.
In the US, you'll reliably get a lot more NIMBY response from "set up a nuclear power plant in the neighbourhood" vs. "set up a gas power plant in the neighbourhood". However, if you look at the risk assessment, the gas power plant is far more lethal to the neighbourhood.
I don't associate the term "NIMBY" with either scenarios, just housing. I don't think there's much value to overloading it. It's not like anyone's trying to put a nuclear power plant in the middle of Boston to begin with.
You might not, but the broader population associates NIMBY with any scenario where a neighbourhood pushes back against some kind of change in that neighbourhood (adding a prison, a power plant, a half-way house, a school, a bar, trains, airports, etc.). There are NIMBY responses to pretty much any change, and the magnitude of that response tends to have little bearing on the relative merits of the change.
> It's not like anyone's trying to put a nuclear power plant in the middle of Boston to begin with.
No. For the most part no one is putting nuclear power plants anywhere in the US. However, there are other power plants in Boston (and for good reason). This is a direct byproduct of the NIMBYism I'm talking about.
I think previous candidates for new pandemic viruses did mislead us as those never got far enough to become a true pandemic. Those were scarier than SARS-CoV2 by lethality, but were manageable by the usual epidemiological tools. Now we've also seen how a virus can spread that is far more contagious, and how we are unable to stop such a virus.
What I found scary about SARS-CoV2 is just how much it improved between variants. It didn't have any special features like influenza to increase its potential there. It simply had the numbers, enormous amounts of hosts to evolve in. So potentially any virus that is able to spread as far initially could be able to evolve in a similar manner.
I think avoiding many if not most gain-of-function experiments is a reasonable lesson to learn from this pandemic.
Help me out, I don't see the thread of logic from your previous points...
If those experiments have a chance to repeat a similar pandemic, I don't think any of them are worth that risk.
Spanish Flu was likely an animal-jump, baed on research done on corpses retrieved from the arctic circle. H1N1 was an animal jump. HIV was a multi-virus infection followed by an animal jump. If COVID was human-made and not an animal-jump, that's still three deadly natural pandemics that we want this research to be able to prevent in the future.
I am not a vegan.
If we really have to do it, then we can do it in the middle of a desert with quarantine procedures instead of near/in population centers.
You have a very limited imagination. ;-) I assure you that extensive research into biological (not involving viruses), chemical, and nuclear weapons... and really a wide variety of weapons research is easily more dangerous. There's plenty of opportunity in other areas like materials science, genetics, etc., as well.
> If we really have to do it, then we can do it in the middle of a desert with quarantine procedures instead of near/in population centers.
Now you'll want to have an ultra-secure means of transporting highly dangerous biological samples, not to mention research teams & observers, at very high speeds to the middle of a desert. Are you sure you've improved the risk profile?
Personally, I think we just shouldn't do this at all.
If you're worried about lab contamination, the risk is from the researchers moving amongst the population. I agree that you'd rather not, but I don't agree that regularly putting them on planes to and from major population centers really reduces the risk.
> Personally, I think we just shouldn't do this at all.
[Shrugs]. Some people are pro-pandemic.
This would have to not happen regularly. The researchers would need to stay for many months at a time, and undergo a separate quarantine before they re-enter society.
So you would add months of delay, significantly impaired observability, and far less agility to our response to emerging threats. Congratulations, you've just increased risk.
They very much are not.
Viruses and bacteria are unique in the fact that they can harm the whole globe as opposed to chemical and other disasters that will likely only harm the immediate area.
And harming the whole globe is all the more certain for infectious diseases if you put them in the middle of a large city with lots of air travel.
> Now you'll want to have an ultra-secure means of transporting highly dangerous biological samples, not to mention research teams & observers, at very high speeds to the middle of a desert. Are you sure you've improved the risk profile?
Why would you need to transport things at high speed for speculative research involving newly generated viruses/bacteria?
I never said anything about analysing things involving people who are actively infected, but there the disease is already out in the public, so the risk profile is completely different.
First of all, you added in bacteria, which are not viruses.
However, this statement isn't a useful statement "X is unique because it can harm the whole world, as opposed to Y that will likely only harm the immediate area".
The implication is that X will almost always harm the whole world, and Y will almost always impact the immediate area, but that's not necessarily true.
(I would remind you the "1% chance we'll ignite the entire atmosphere" of the Manhattan Project. Fortunately, any future nuclear weapons we might develop will almost certainly be less powerful... oh wait.)
It also implies that the risk of X and the risk of Y doing harm are equivalent, and that's undoubtedly not true. It's ignoring the reality that nature is already doing X all the time, and primarily in high population centers.
> And harming the whole globe is all the more certain for infectious diseases if you put them in the middle of a large city with lots of air travel.
I would think it'd be all the more certain if you're regularly putting the researchers working in the lab, along with any biological samples they might have, on flights to and from such large cities.
Pandemic risk is a systemic problem and has to be evaluated as such. Controls/mitigations you have in place generally have way more impact than where the experiments are run, and it's really not as simple as "well if the lab is away from people that reduces the risk".
> Why would you need to transport things at high speed for speculative research involving newly generated viruses/bacteria?
Because this research is not isolated from reality. Much of what they do is take samples from the real world, observe virology in the real world (both human and non-human populations), and work with front line healthcare workers who are usually the first to see new viral threats. Without that you pretty much eliminate the value of the research entirely.
> I never said anything about analysing things involving people who are actively infected, but there the disease is already out in the public, so the risk profile is completely different.
The threat doesn't come directly from a virus that is already out in the public. It comes from how a virus that is already out there might evolve. You appear to believe that nature is conducting fewer and less significant experiments in evolving viruses than people in labs. I don't think that is supported by the evidence.
The pandemic risk profile with a virus that is already out in the public is that it might evolve into something that has never been out in public before. Nature is conducting these experiments every day, all day. I'd be more worried about the outcomes of those experiments than anything going on in a lab.
Would that that were true. I'm curious how you explain how your perception aligns with the reality that no lab, anywhere, at anytime since the outbreak, has been able to produce COVID-19 variants as fast as occurred naturally.
Nature is experimenting all the time, with the overwhelming majority of viruses out there, with absolutely no interest in controls, mitigations or protections for the human population... and nature is far trickier to observe. We've gotten pretty good at reducing the risk from nature, but make no mistake, even with all the GoF research we could possibly hope for, it far outpaces our capacity to experiment. The only advantage GoF labs have is that they can direct their research in specific areas where there is greatest risk. That's the whole challenge.
I hate to say it (because I agree the risks are significant), but I suspect the need to use this as a tool to model both probable futures and not-yet-understood behaviors of viral mutation may be arguments in favor of continued GoF research, despite the risk. I concur with other commenters that maybe we should be putting this stuff in the wilderness behind service providers that must undergo quarantine procedure before returning to densely-populated areas.
The research must have been pretty misleading then, because all the experts appeared to be taken by surprise by the fact that it mutated at all, given their original plan was "two shots and done". Something that has now become promoting infinity boosters to a world that has stopped listening (uptake of the current round is extremely low).
But again, why should we listen to claims about virology? People who have been living in ivory caves may not realize this, but it's been proven beyond all doubt that the entire profession engaged in a conspiracy against the public to mislead people about the likelihood of a lab experiment gone wrong. Not just the many authors of the proximal origins paper, but so the other scientists who saw this coverup happening in public and said nothing.
And I'm sorry you feel misinformed, but nothing I read ever suggested anyone was taken by surprise by its mutagenic rate. To the extent experts thought it might be a "two shots and done" virus, they were overly optimistic about policy and vaccination uptake; were the vaccine manufactured and rolled out quickly enough and deployed globally, it could have been cut off from human reservoirs and died out, but a combination of logistics and public distrust meant we missed that window and now it's endemic. Its mutation rate pretty much guarantees it'll be with us indefinitely as long as the public has the stomach to tolerate that.
That's why the vaccine protects against serious illness and death, because at that point the virus has spread beyond the mucous membranes.
It's more likely that people misinterpreted "after two shots quarantine is no longer necessary" as "the disease is eradicated after two shots."
If you know it came from a lab then there's a chance that the lab workers have knowledge that can help fight it. If you lie and claim it couldn't have come from a lab, that whole line of investigation gets closed off.
> they were overly optimistic about policy and vaccination uptake
They were overly pessimistic and were making those claims back when they thought they'd only get 60-70% uptake. This is the famous Fauci admission that his claims about herd immunity were made up in response to opinion polls. Uptake was higher than expected and effectiveness was drastically lower.
This business whereby scientists are always innocent, it's only politicians and the media that misrepresent them, is crap. Scientists lied and manipulated a naive and plastic public deliberately in order to protect and advance their own careers, they did it at scale and nobody in that community seems to care. Smart people now understand that scientists are both less honest and less wise than both politicians and journalists as a group. At least the latter groups have strong internal competition and different factions trying to establish what's true. Scientists seem to behave as a bloc regardless of what's right or wrong.
How do they protect and advance their careers by being wrong?
Otherwise we are in the dark with unknown unknowns which is not a good place. So the risk here of doing research is manageable.
According to the virologists who do it, not anyone else. Virologists conspicuously had no role in fighting COVID and didn't seem to contribute any particular knowledge to the NPIs or vaccines.
That's not true.
> Virologists conspicuously had no role in fighting COVID and didn't seem to contribute any particular knowledge to the NPIs or vaccines.
I can't imagine your basis for saying this. Virologists isolated the signature genetic sequences for COVID-19. That was the basis for the development of testing & vaccines for COVID-19 (...and if you think they aren't involved in development of tests and vaccines beyond that...).
No, this is a profession that really should not exist at all. GoF was banned in the past without consequence beyond causing them to engage in coverups of their own psychotic experimentations, it can be banned again with no loss to humanity. COVID simply wouldn't have happened if these experiments were banned.
Sequencing can be done by a high school student in a lab. Of course, to obtain a sequence for a novel virus, you have to do a lot more than that, but let's pretend that's all you have to do; the fact remains that the sequencing wasn't done by a high school student in a lab, but by virologists.
I agree that everything virologists do could be done by non-virologists. That doesn't mean that it's what happened, nor that it'd be a good idea.
So they don't get points for being first, when they're the ones who created the problem in the first place.
The real world is not nearly that tidy. Most of the Wuhan lab researchers' counterparts don't even speak Chinese, and you're imagining some kind of international conspiracy to drum up a disease and the cure for it.
Oh, to have the naive optimism of the conspiracy theorist. A lot of my projects would be so much more easy if people worked that way.
> Part of me wishes the international virology community was as coordinated as you imagine
It's pretty damn coordinated and we have the receipts to prove it. Sorry for you if you're not in the loop, but when you read chat transcripts, meeting notes, and emails where they literally organize a conspiracy to shut down all public discussion, and no virologists stand up to say, "this stance is not accurate", then we may as well consider virology to be globally coordinated.
By the way, cut the condescending tone about conspiracy theorists. They utterly won this round, beyond all possible doubt. The people who blithely dismiss any possibility of academic conspiracy turned out to be the naive ones. The people who posited a conspiracy to suppress discussion of lab leaks can now point to reams of hard evidence where scientists literally say they're going to publish statements they don't believe for political reasons, where they say they're going to engineer a SARS-CoV-2 like virus, where they say they're going to do it in order to develop a vaccine against it. Basically every conspiracy theory turned out to be true. You should respect that a lot more!
Can you expand on the multi-virus infection thing?
These are not the only two options. An animal virus could be enhanced in a lab, then jump to humans, and then the “animal-jump” terminology is just a misdirection away from the lab work. “Human-made” as a term is a similar misdirection in this scenario, trying to make the human involvement claims sound overstated, again trying to point away from the lab.
I’m not saying you are doing misdirection, but I think some people framing it that way are.
I think it’s important to recognize the full nuance of what is likely in the middle, instead of just looking at highly unlikely and opposed extreme scenarios.
You're saying that without regard to the measure of risk, or what risks exist if we don't do those experiments.
There is good evidence that those who had SARS-CoV-1 had immunity that covered SARS-CoV-2. This immunity lasted for more than a decade.
> What I found scary about SARS-CoV2 is just how much it improved between variants.
Perhaps a leaky spike only vaccine was a particularly bad choice and the extent to which it drove these variants is not clear. There is additional debate amont the "virologist" community about this specific outcome.
> most gain-of-function experiments
I simply do not trust for profit drug companies to do this work. I certainly don't trust governments to do it either. Further, the idea that we can correctly estimate how nature is going to perform and then front run those outcomes in the laboratory is entirely insane and is explicitly anti-science.
That is a tiny tiny number of people, measured in thousands at most.
Does that somehow prevent you from getting them to express those antibodies and then cloning them?
But you trust nature to do this work? ;-)
> Further, the idea that we can correctly estimate how nature is going to perform and then front run those outcomes in the laboratory is entirely insane and is explicitly anti-science.
Well, this eliminates a great deal of research areas completely outside virology. Climatologists aren't needed. Seismologists aren't needed. Meteorologists become largely irrelevant. Much of cancer research, forestry, etc. isn't needed. Certainly no need to take measures for forecasted hurricanes or tsunamis.
We do just fine estimating how nature is going to perform and identifying what to do in anticipation of it. There's a lot of variables involved, so we don't always get it exactly right, but we sure do a lot better making forecasts and reacting to them than when we don't.
What work is that? Unnaturally bringing bats and pangolins together in a meat market? The only "real world" excuse ever offered.
> Climatologists aren't needed.
I've read their reports and their annual revisions. I'm not convinced they're needed, and since the "science" here is purely a wild guess using models projected backwards in time to fit existing data, the results aren't particularly meaningful either.
> Seismologists aren't needed. Meteorologists become largely irrelevant. Much of cancer research, forestry, etc. isn't needed. Certainly no need to take measures for forecasted hurricanes or tsunamis.
Do any of these require you to invent novel phenomenon to "study?" If not, then your comparison is purely the making of a strawman.
> but we sure do a lot better making forecasts and reacting to them than when we don't.
Interestingly.. was any "forecast" of the virus they created in a lab provided to anyone? Even if we did have it, would it have made a difference in timelines? You clearly see the exact problem.
GoF research in virology is specifically to replicate what happens in nature in hopes of forecasting outcomes and giving us more time to respond to them. If it isn't doing what happens in nature, it is, by definition, a failure.
> I've read their reports and their annual revisions. I'm not convinced they're needed, and since the "science" here is purely a wild guess using models projected backwards in time to fit existing data, the results aren't particularly meaningful either.
Those "guesses" have proven to amazingly insightful. You may not find them useful, but even energy companies have found these forecasts useful for their business.
> Do any of these require you to invent novel phenomenon to "study?" If not, then your comparison is purely the making of a strawman.
Yes, they do. More precisely, I would say they involve artificially controlled experiments that are used to forecast outcomes in nature.
...and I wasn't making a comparison or a strawman. I was taking your statement as an assertion, and identifying that in fact many scientific fields employ methods that you describe as "anti-science".
> Interestingly.. was any "forecast" of the virus they created in a lab provided to anyone?
No. One might almost think that perhaps "the virus" wasn't created in a lab. It's unlikely, given the large number of virologists who've said it wasn't created in a lab, but maybe?
> Even if we did have it, would it have made a difference in timelines?
Yes. Hugely, particularly for testing. Most of the vaccine development cycle is tied up in testing for safety and such, so the impact there is smaller, but it's not zero.
> You clearly see the exact problem.
I do. I don't think it's the same problem that you are seeing.
> GoF research in virology is specifically to replicate what happens in nature
And yet in both the leaked chats and third party analysis, they talk extensively about how the RNA sequence doesn't match what they'd expect from natural evolution. Not only was it highly adapted to humans right from the get go, but there was the furin cleavage site too. The strange and artificial looking nature of it created suspicion immediately which is why they engaged in a conspiracy to shut down and censor discussion of it.
So that doesn't seem like they're just replicating nature.
That gives me hope regarding H1N1, if it happens, we might be able to keep it under control.
Was this created in a lab? Was this leaked from a lab? Is there something inherently dangerous about studying viruses in labs? Full NIMBY.
The positive externalities of this are good jobs around virology study to try and prevent the next pandemic. But we're just leaning super hard into fear-mongering here. How many people in the comments of this article really describe the processes used at each of these labs to prevent the viruses from getting out? How many can say how effective those practices are? We've still not proven that COVID was a lab-leak, so we're attempting to say that something that otherwise has a very safe record is dangerous based on what might have happened.
What does the evidence point to?
Has any new evidence surfaced in the past year?
The conversation DID ask if it was a leak. Then they studied the evidence and only after studying the evidence did they publicly sign that it was probably of natural origin.
They had already studied the evidence on February 2 when they had the slack conversations. No new evidence appeared.
Then they said out loud that they were changing the paper's conclusions away from their actual beliefs because of the political consequences:
> “Given the shit show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possible distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content to with ascribing it to natural processes.”
> “Yup, I totally agree that’s a very reasonable conclusion,” Andersen responded. Although I hate when politics is injected into science – but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstance. We should be sensitive to that.”
https://theintercept.com/2023/07/21/covid-origin-nih-lab-lea...
The main purpose behind determining if it's a lab leak is not to 'make jumps'. It's so that we know. It's important we know because it's how science and policy get done. Putting our fingers in our ears and covering our eyes and pretending it doesn't matter is irresponsible.
> We've still not proven that COVID was a lab-leak, so we're attempting to say that something that otherwise has a very safe record is dangerous based on what might have happened.
How is anyone supposed to prove or even provide evidence of such a thing if China doesn't cooperate? And that's really the reason this has exploded. China is not cooperating. No one knows, and that's suspicious.
Even if, as you say, all indicators point to gain-of-function research being useful, I think we should all be able to agree that labs that are not open to being investigated by international, neutral bodies should not be involved in conducting them. The possibility of cover ups is too great.
My argument here is "We don't know that this was created in a lab, and it's unreasonable to assume it was when we have evidence that it wasn't created in a lab." It's even more unreasonable to create policy based on this wild speculation.
> How is anyone supposed to prove or even provide evidence of such a thing if China doesn't cooperate? And that's really the reason this has exploded. China is not cooperating. No one knows, and that's suspicious.
Difficulty in obtaining evidence doesn't change the burden of proof from "proving a positive" to "disproving a negative".
"Suspicious" is not "damning evidence." But also my understanding is that scientists have studied the virus and determined it doesn't have any of the hallmarks they would expect from a human-altered virus.
Unless something major has changed, I don't believe we have firm evidence either way.
> Difficulty in obtaining evidence doesn't change the burden of proof from "proving a positive" to "disproving a negative".
When difficulty obtaining evidence has to do with geopolitics, rather than science, then yes it becomes very diferent. Because geopolitics, and people, you can convince, investigate, and hold accountable. Science and nature less so. That's why this is important.
Anyway, your entire purpose making your argument is to question the need for any investigation it seems. That is why it seemingly excuses the fact that we have not actually investigated the lab in any meaningful way. I don't believe this is acceptable.
Crazy virus comes from where said crazy viruses are literally made and studied.
Occams Razor suggests a lot, but more importantly, smart risk management dictates that you treat the lab as if it is the source; absent some sort of clear risk-related reason that these experiments are likely to do more good than harm.
So I suppose the correct question is -- what are we getting from these labs that's worth the risk of leaks?
Yeah, nah, that one is only "more believable" propped up by e.g. xenophobia and racism. Falls way too neatly into "look at the weird Chinese people they eat bats" or whatever.
Pretty flimsy compared to "lab that literally does this kind of virus all day."
"Crazy" is an odd characterization, but let's go with it. Where are "crazy viruses literally made"? Well, more often than not, in nature. So...
We also haven't proven it wasn't a lab leak.
> so we're attempting to say that something that otherwise has a very safe record is dangerous based on what might have happened.
I'm not sure how good the record really is[0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)#P...
Your second point is better taken.
Who has the burden to demonstrate that GoF research is safe given our uncertainty of whether COVID was lab created and subsequently leaked? This issue isn't of purely academic interest. We must consider the costs to society of a leak vs the benefits of that research. From where I'm sitting, the benefits are non-existent relative to the costs. Given the massive negative utility of a leak compared to benefits of the research, the burden of proof is on those who want to continue doing GoF research to demonstrate safety and value.
Your burden of proof would make some sense if, of all the places in the world, the outbreak didn't happen near a "leading" lab in GoF research on bat viruses.
I mean: if people were to die due to irradiation near some uranium-enrichment facility but there was no proof that any radioactive material leaked, the reasonable stance would still be that some fuck up happened in that uranium-enrichment facility.
People would have to proof it was a lab-leak if the outbreak happened in some city where there weren't any research done on viruses.
But as it is an undisputable fact that the biggest pandemic in modern history happened due to a virus outbreak beginning in a place exceptionally close to a lab doing research on similar viruses, the burden of proof is on those claiming it's not a lab leak.
Moreover it's a known fact communism uses propaganda as one of its most powerful tool so nothing coming out of chinese officials can be trusted.
You want to point out it wasn't proven it was a lab leak, which is true. But people can point out it wasn't proven it wasn't a lab leak either. And that is totally on-topic.
Coronaviruses (SARS specifically) have leaked from Chinese labs twice in the last 20 years. These aren't really even controversial incidents, the PRC admitted it. [2]
Lab leaks of pathogens aren't really that uncommon, to the extent Wikipedia has a huge list including labs from all over the world. [1]
tl;dr: viruses escape from labs, so it was never a far-fetched scenario.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7096887/
Your opinion has been shaped by a massive disinformation campaign.
Now tell me, how did all of those accusations and investigations help in the pandemic?
But looking at the reported events (that have made their way onto Wiki), since 2000 we've had lab leaks and "incidents" in the US (repeatedly.. to say the least), Japan, Taiwan, China, Russia, UK, Australia, France, the Netherlands, and many more places. That includes incidents at BSL-4 labs, the highest biosecurity rating. And the leaks/incidents involve some pretty crazy stuff: polio - lab worker was infected without anyone's knowledge, ebola - lab worker infected at a BSL-4 lab, smallpox - vials of active smallpox found casually laying around in cold storage at a rando facility, anthrax - 75 exposed, and more.
It seems completely obvious from the absurd volume of reported incidents that we're bee-lining to a global biosecurity accident, almost certainly far more serious than COVID, completely of our own making, again.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
Is there some scifi solution to step outside of the game? Are the problems involved in understanding the systems involved (to the extent that you can predict realistic risk and mitigate) solvable?
I don't know the level of realistic risk for a devastating virus naturally occurring, nor the potential for us to address it without this kind of research, so I don't know what is within reason here. It would be cool to see any studies that attempt to address these two questions.
Edit: And a systematic review of past and considered lab leak scenarios probably wouldn't hurt either. If we still have to do this work, and just decide it must be done by isolated monks/robots in space, for humanity ending risks I guess that's worth discussing
Of course there is, of course they already use it, and of course the people who think banning research is the peak of enlightenment aren't remotely interested in making this kind of distinction.
If we assume it is directly proportional to the number of people (more people to encounter animals, more people to incubate potential pandemics), there were roughly 450 billion people-years lived between the Black Plague and the Spanish Flu and the Spanish Flu and COVID-19.
That would put the next zoonotic spillover around 2065.
It discounts all factors we are ignoring and pretends we can establish an accurate duration between rare events with a few occurrences
With earthquakes you at least have stress accumulating over time, even if the stress is not necessarily accumulating or being released at a constant rate.
A zoonotic spillover is pure repeated throws of the dice, no accumulated pressure.
Large-scale wet markets or bushmeat markets increase the chances because there are more rolls of the dice.
However there is no reason to believe that such misadventures take place in a single generation and immediately produce a viable and successful agent.
Producing something that spreads to humans but not will will none the less produce many orders of magnitude more useful and numerous dice rolls. Such actions may not be immediately obvious even if they were fatal. People after all get sick and die all the time.
I doubt we have enough data to meaningfully forecast risk.
My own self-critique above was more that, even if you could accurately deduce that there is a 1.54e-12 chance per person-year of a person encountering a novel disease that can spread as a global pandemic, you can't then schedule the next one for 450 billion people-years later, when the probability exceeds 50%, because it's a random occurrence and there's nothing stopping it from happening after ten or a trillion throws of the dice.
But I'll still stand by the logic of my original back of the envelope number; insomuch as the risk is proportional to the population, we should expect the next global pandemic twice as fast as the last one, and I think there's a good chance many of us will be alive to see it (as opposed to the gap between the Spanish Flu and COVID-19, where the survivors of the first were infants for the last and centenarians for this one).
That would either save the planet, or go a long way in that direction.
https://youtu.be/7W33HRc1A6c?si=-EGHs1UFrx3s3io5
On the surface that might sound ok. However if we undergo a similar exercise of chances of Lab leak causing an outbreak we'll probably end up with a similar figure of 1/100. In a lab leak we'll have to contend with a more powerful variant of a pathogen that has caused a prior outbreak which may kill an order more people than the average outbreak. So perhaps a million deaths alone, or if we entertain that Covid was caused by a lab lead ~10m deaths, or 100x of 100k.
Ultimately it seems GoF research is playing with fire without knowing if the effort actually will reduces total deaths on net.
A much more effective route seems to simply invest in rapid sequencing, rapid wastewater monitoring, PPE stocking/distribution policies, more effective local lockdown procedures/policies.
You mention rapid sequencing, rapid wastewater monitoring, PPE stocking/distribution policies, and more effective local lockdown procedures/policies. Those would all be factors that would reduce the value of "X" (as in, the consequences of bad outcomes in either scenario), rather than any coefficients in front of X.
I don't necessarily agree that the past 25 years, particularly if you are excluding COVID, is a meaningful representative sample... unless you want to compare it to the loss of life from GoF over the past 25 years excluding COVID. In that case, I'd challenge you to demonstrate a loss of life from GoF research that is over 10K. Given the ~100K lives estimate, that puts it at 10x greater benefit than not doing GoF research.
> However if we undergo a similar exercise of chances of Lab leak causing an outbreak we'll probably end up with a similar figure of 1/100. In a lab leak we'll have to contend with a more powerful variant of a pathogen that has caused a prior outbreak which may kill an order more people than the average outbreak.
There's a number of false assumptions here. Your threat assessment seems more rooted in works of fiction than reality. That the probability is equivalent is highly debatable, particularly since it is far easier (and cheaper) to apply risk mitigations to a virology lab than to society as a whole. It's also not a given that a lab leak means we'll have to contend with a more powerful variant of a pathogen. Even if it were a more powerful variant of a pathogen, that does not necessarily relate to a higher death toll. In fact, SARS-COV-2 was far less virulent than SARS-COV-1, and that's a significant contributor to why it had so much more impact.
Even if we ignore ALL of that, in the even that there was an outbreak from a virology lab doing GoF research, that would mean we would be much further ahead on research to combat the virus than if said virus were to occur in the wild. We'd have shorter times to have disease profiles, tests, epidemiological models, and vaccines, and the impact of shorter times is exponential. While it is conceivable that a leak from a lab leads to a higher death count, it is far more conceivable that a virus that didn't come from a lab would end more lives.
> if we entertain that Covid was caused by a lab lead ~10m deaths, or 100x of 100k.
Spanish flu, which existed before anyone knew how to do GoF research, killed far more people than COVID-19. At the lowest estimate, it's about 17 million people, and at the high end closer to 100 million people. The population of the world at the time was ~1/4 the population when COVID-19 hit the scene, so on a per capita basis COVID-19 isn't in the same league. AIDS, which we've been able to track back to its natural origin, has killed 42 million people. The Bubonic Plague killed... 75+ million, or about a third of the European population.
Nature is way better at killing us than any lab.
> Ultimately it seems GoF research is playing with fire without knowing if the effort actually will reduces total deaths on net.
Another way to think of it is that international trade & travel is playing with fire without knowing if the effort actually will reduce total deaths or not. We could therefore return to the days of the horse and buggy, or we could continue with the practice and put in place mitigations, like GoF research, to mitigate the risks it entails.
At its core, no. But there were a lot of people caught in the crossfire of information who simply got scared. For many of them, seeing SARS-CoV-2 as man-made could have counteracted that anxiety.
It was clear very early on that for the vast majority of the population (over 99%) there was no tangible threat from Covid. And yet the theater of Covid was carried on. I still remember the footage out of Wuhan in early 2020 that scared the bejeezus out of me, of people just falling over in the middle of the streets and people with hazmat suits showing up and carting people off. Only in retrospect can we see that was all a production. People don't literally fall over in the middle of the street from Covid infection, fine one minute and near dead the next.
So from that background, why would you trust anything the government tells you, when the government showed no good faith effort to seek truth or be reasonable? Many who pitched the lab leak theory were dismissed, shut down, censored, and ridiculed. From the same conformists that sought to manipulate healthy young people into taking an unnecessary vaccine and to give up a portion of their youth to terror and tyranny.
Inoculation means to prevent disease. The mRNA vaccines were extraordinary at preventing Covid, the disease. Sterilisation is a nice to have, but far from mandatory--modern polio vaccines aren't sterilising.
> didn't have to propagandize and gaslight people to take the smallpox vaccine: it was self evident how deadly the disease was
A meaningful fraction of Americans, Brits and Canadians are generally against inoculation [1].
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9009899/
He said was. The disease was deadly, now it's threat to you is extremely low. If you weren't aware, we stopped vaccinating for small pox in 1972, as soon as it was no longer a threat in the United States. It would not be globally eradicated until 1979.
And I think that's largely the problem many people have. Forcing vaccinations for diseases that pose little risk is illogical. In looking up information on this topic I somehow stumbled onto this [1] page. For instance now the seasonal flu vaccine is required for immigrants, and even in some schools!?
The flu poses an extremely negligible risk to both of these groups. It's hard not to see the motivation behind this as being simply directing ever more $$$ to big-pharma interests, which the people making these rules are often directly invested in. It doesn't feel like rational public health guidance, and that destroys trust.
[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/immigrantrefugeehealth/laws-regs/vaccina...
When there were local smallpox outbreaks in the West in the 20th century there were drastic containment measures.
But right on, I feel exactly the same. I do plant transformation and we call these experiments, mRNA "transient-expression" assays, as in, transiently transgenic. It was so weird from my perspective that we were going to start using the common lab technique to test genes on people.
The only two facts I needed were that over 80% of people that have had COVID never even knew they had it, it's that mild. And of the people that even show symptoms it have over a 99% recovery rate.
This depended strongly on which variant you got. Early on, it was inefficiently deadly. (In its current form, I don't think Covid is a problem.)
> over a 99% recovery rate
Fewer than 1% of Americans died from Covid [1]. On a case fatality basis, about 99% survived. Lack of mortality != recovery.
[1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
COVID now is far more mild because of vaccination and how the virus has evolved (Omnicron being far more mild than the earlier variants).
And obviously there were no vaccines for the Spanish Flu.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Patterns_of_fatali...
Like what you've done there is a fallacy a lot of people commit, that they conflate seasonal viruses, colds, allergies etc with the flu. But when you actually get the flu, you know it.
Age Range : Deaths : Group Population as Percent of total US Population
55-64 : 159k : 12.9%
65-74 : 256k : 10.1%
75-84 : 300k : 4.9%
85+ : 311k : 1.8%
COVID was only especially dangerous to the extremely elderly, and particularly those with severe preexisting conditions. So for instance that 65-74 age group, you have about 34 million people, and only 256k deaths. Think about the numbers in that 34 million with cancer, severe diabetes, heart failure, etc. But then you go the 85+ group and with 1/6th as many people, ended up with about 20% more total deaths.
[1] - https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta... (for the % of population data)
To state different: Was the unknown/disputed origins the catalyst for some not getting vaccinated?
If the lab leak turns out to be true I could see people demanding that the gallows be dusted off.
That's extreme. I work with transgenic, not viruses, but mistakes happen and the death penalty for researchers is crazy.
First if it was a leak, we'd have to cut off all funding and shared resources just to be safe, which we have already done.
Next there would have to be some investigation that China would naturally be adversarial to. If it was natural they would want to collaborate (they are refusing to collaborate for the most part).
We weren't at war this time, but pandemics are inextricable from international politics for the same reason everything else that has massive impact on people's health and safety across national borders is inextricable from international politics.
I agree with you on the desire for depoliticization of the topic, but I lack a mechanism to get there; it's not like an independent agency run by, say, the UN would be free of politics on this topic.
And it has been years; if some one did it deliberately then they failed to capitalize on it.
Given that lab escapes have happened multiple times and might have caused a global pandemic, the burden of proof should be on showing that the research is worth the significant risk it carries.
Defaulting to assuming that the risks are negligible and everyone concerned is scared for no reason is an absurd and dangerous take.
What there is, is a risk analysis, which means you have to consider the risks of any particular action as well as in NOT taking the action. I've seen literally no discussion about the risks of NOT taking the action.
I'm reminded of self-driving cars, because we're worried they might lead to the deaths of thousands of people each year. Meanwhile, over a million people die each year in car accidents. Conclusion: best to let those million people die each year.
So why continue to fund such dangerous research if the research will be hidden when we actually need it?
Wow. Just wow.
It's statements like this that make me think we should indeed halt all virology research, and really all medical research and development entirely. We deserve what we get.
I spent a long time investigating the effectiveness of everything governments did during COVID. None of it worked and a lot of it backfired badly, lockdowns being only one of the most prominent examples. Even the vaccine programme was a disaster: the data claiming otherwise turns out to have all been juked in various ways. We'd have been better off without governments doing anything at all.
That's an awfully bold claim, unless you have proof that covid-19 occurred naturally. Defaulting to your preferred reality and ignoring the potential risks is not a responsible way to guide research policy.
or initiate
>the next pandemic virus.
WIV collected samples from bat populations to find novel coronaviruses. Processing those samples was not done in a BSL-4 facility, but instead in BSL-2 labs. Some of those samples, like RaTG13, were as close as 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2. Even if COVID didn't require GoF research to spill over into humans, and was a purely natural spillover, actively collecting novel viruses and processing them in a low-BSL lab is a recipe for disaster.
BSL-4 is reserved for pathogens known to be dangerous to humans. This policy effectively translates to treating novel viruses as safe until proven otherwise, which is reckless.
what does this mean
so, darned close honestly. to be clear, I'm not saying RaTG13 is the source of the lab leak - it's just too different - but I am saying that it's much closer than the original SARS, and thus had no business being analyzed in a BSL-2 lab.
It would take passage through billions of organisms to turn RaTG13 into SARS-CoV-2.
Which is probably what happened naturally through many, many millions of bats (and whatever intermediate animal) being infected and passing it on. Something that is well outside the scale of serial passage experiments in a lab.
There's also the possibility of recombination events, which can instantly cause significant drift. Now consider the case of the Mojiang miners, who contracted and slowly succumbed to viral pneumonia in 2012 after inhaling bat guano. WIV found, like, a dozen beta-coronaviruses in that cave alone (including RaTG13.) The miners could have been exposed to several at once, which recombined and adapted quickly to their new home in human lungs. Again, unlikely to have been SARS-CoV-2, since the pandemic almost certainly would have happened already, but whatever they had was virulent enough to kill half of them.
And virulence != transmissible. They got sick by inhaling everything that was floating around in that mine. To get more people sick you'd need to take them all to that mine.
Recombination to produce a viable and more successful virus is also very rare, that is unlikely to have happened to any of those miners, much less several of them (over populations it becomes likely but there we're talking many millions of infections as well).
If so, it seems a bit misguided to be taking issue with BSL-this-vs-that handling wild bats when BSL-fuck-all members of the public are still using them as a food source.
Pre-COVID it was already well understood that bats are viral reservoirs. It didn't prevent wet markets from selling wild bats. The labs are of focus due to GoF, in lieu of GoF there's already that level of exposure happening in the Chinese food supply.
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Vault_81
Get in line.
Include building a completely hermetically sealed underground facility.
Sign away the ability to interact with the world at large for the duration of the experiment.
All samples and potentially contaminated equipment is to be incinerated/vitrified upon conclusion of the experiment.
If you think you are good enough to play God with manufacturing new pandemic pathogens, okay. Fine. I sure hope you're really willing to sacrifice it all for your work. Because otherwise, the answer should be no by default.
I know it's not definitive it was a lab leak, but many US agencies including, notably, the Department of Energy, say it's likely it was.
And when you change the headline to reflect that, it sure does change the message.
> The IC assesses that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, probably emerged and infected humans through an initial small-scale exposure that occurred no later than November 2019 with the first known cluster of COVID-19 cases arising in Wuhan, China in December 2019.
And that:
> As of August 2021, we still have not observed genetic signatures in SARS-CoV-2 that would be diagnostic of genetic engineering, according to the IC’s understanding of the virus. Similarly, we have not identified any existing coronavirus strains that could have plausibly served as a backbone if SARS-CoV-2 had been genetically engineered.
Also:
> The WIV previously created chimeras, or combinations, of SARS-like coronaviruses, but this information does not provide insight into whether SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered by the WIV.
And:
> Early in the pandemic, the WIV identified that a new virus was responsible for the outbreak in Wuhan. It is therefore assessed that WIV researchers pivoted to COVID-19-related work to address the outbreak and characterize the virus. These activities suggest that WIV personnel were unaware of the existence of SARS-CoV-2 until the outbreak was underway.
And as far as spillover from collected samples in the lab goes:
> They also see the potential that a laboratory worker inadvertently was infected while collecting unknown animal specimens to be less likely than an infection occurring through numerous hunters, farmers, merchants, and others who have frequent, natural contact with animals
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Declass...
A prior declassified report found:
> Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Report-...
No idea why DOE continues to think it was a lab leak, other than we can't definitively prove it wasn't and since ChinaBad(tm) we have to assume it was.
"One IC element assesses with moderate confidence that the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was the result of a laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. These analysts give weight to the inherently risky nature of work on coronaviruses."
Based on the quote (if the one IC element is in fact the DOE) is seem they are basing it on the "inherently risky nature of the work on coronaviruses.
I do find it interesting this was given with moderate confidence but the natural occurring is only given low confidence. Any idea how the whole confidence level is determined?
See the second bullet point on key takeaways.
https://www.intelligence.gov/assets/documents/702%20Document...
The DOE seems to have assigned "moderate" confidence to the idea of a lab leak on the basis of zero concrete evidence. Taking the assessment on the whole it seems obvious to me that the argument from them is weak, but the assessment can't come out and just state that in plain English.
Why are we giving so much wait to the organization that says "Energy" in the name over one that says "Health" in the name? And is there a convincing reason that's not: "It's the department I agree with the most on this issue."
In China, there has been almost a complete information blackout after COVID. Most of what we know that points to a leak that actually comes from China has been accidentally disclosed or was published before the pandemic.
In the U.S. and Europe, it's sadly largely the same story. We now know through FOIA requests that the authors of the pivotal Proximal Origin thought privately that there was a significant likelihood that SARS2 was lab derived, but what they published was that "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible." They also sought to conceal some of the true authors of the paper in order for it to appear more independent and credible. They, and their colleagues then relentlessly smeared and called conspiracy theorists, anyone who publicly said the very same things that they said privately to each other.
EcoHealth and DARPA refused to provide a copy of the DEFUSE grant proposal. It ultimately had to be leaked by an anonymous source in the government. When it finally came out it ended up being more or less a direct blueprint for how you'd create SARS2 from existing bat viruses, and it was submitted just a year before the outbreak started in Wuhan. One of the collaborators on that project was to have been the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Throughout, (and there is much more), not a single person who has brought any of this to light has been a virologist. Some have been biologists in other fields, some have been outside the scientific establishment entirely.
Being responsible for an animal that harbors a virus that could kill 10,000,000 people or more if you make a mistake is an awesome responsibility, and only people of the utmost integrity can be trusted with something that dangerous. What we've seen is that sadly, nowhere near this level of integrity exists in the virology community.
What we learned from the FOIA requests is that some authors initially privately believed a lab leak was more likely and some believed that a natural origin was more likely, but after they discussed the evidence, they all agreed that it supported the latter. https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/15951210808005386...
Very early on after the virus genome was released a group of Indian researchers quickly noted that the virus had been deliberately engineered and they were quickly shut down,
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v2....
then one Peter Daszak who was financing GoF research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology got a group of scientists to publish a paper saying it was not engineered and the Chinese were not involved in any such thing.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Here is the BBC featuring Peter Daszak given Wuhan a clean bill of health while forgetting to tell viewers about his relationship with the Wuhan institute - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-56002216
Peter Daszak's Ecohealth Alliance passing on NIH funding to WIV - with receipts - https://www.foxnews.com/video/6227902415001
We now have leaked Slack conversations from a group of scientists who jumped in to say the virus was a naturally evolved was admitting privately in the conversations that the evidence pointed to deliberate engineering.
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2023/07/19/so-friggin-likely-an...
Isn't that the same Kristian Andersen who received a huge load of money from Tony Fauci after backtracking on the lableak/artificial origins theory?
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/03/scicheck-no-evidence-scien...
Now here are some researchers who maintain that the new variants did not evolve naturally.
https://zenodo.org/records/8361577