The article notes that a lab leak or gain of function research or both are suspected because research with cultivated influenza strains was common at that time. In contrast, attempts by researchers at Wuhan to consistently cultivate coronavirus were unsuccessful. That is why they decided to work with chimeras instead of pursuing gain of function research.
All of this focus on the point of origin is misplaced. We know that there will be new viruses. What matters is how we respond to them. In this case the US response was completely botched. This is in part because the team that had been in place to deal with emerging virus threats was disbanded and also in part because the CDC was forced to focus on making the president look good instead of dealing with the virus. What is ultimately being argued here is that instead of being prepared and responding reasonably all we have to do is control research and nothing like this will happen. Unfortunately, this is obviously false.
Whatever one thinks the optimal response to a pandemic should be, the fact that several nations of western Europe (e.g. France) with much different policies, have per capita mortality the same or higher, suggests that the policies used were not a major determinant of the outcome.
If you plot per capita mortality for France and Sweden, they are almost identical, swapping places five times so far. Currently Sweden is slightly lower, but really they're about the same. France and Sweden have policies at the opposite ends of the spectrum. If the differences between those two countries are not enough to make a measurable difference in mortality, then none of the policies used in western countries are making a significant difference one way or the other.
I’d like a per capita chart but I can’t find one. Norway has about half the population of Sweden and has 18x less Covid deaths though. Maybe France and Sweden are too different to compare directly?
The way countries measure covid deaths is also relevant.
Unless it has changed you were counted as a covid death in Sweden if you died in a car accident and happened to have covid. Norway would count you as a car accident death in their statistics.
It's the same thing with a gunshot, you have been shot in the heart, but you died due to lack of oxygen in your brain, and thus you did not die of a gunshot wound
It’s a good point, but it is also more complex. For example the severity of policy response tends to be proportional to local severity of the disease.
You can imagine a situation where all countries have a different, fixed propensity to Covid, and adjust their policy until they hit some universal level of containment. You’ll then see a world with very different policies but identical outcomes.
I think it is hard to disentangle those two in general.
If instead of studying the winners you obsess on justifying why you are a loser then it seems unlikely you will find success in tech or any other endeavor. Are they now offering a degree in excuses and rationalizations?
I'm long past the point of believing anti-vaxxers who insist on loudly cosplaying this like it's the Holocaust should be welded into their homes if only because it's a lot cheaper than building camps for them to really enhance that cosplay they themselves opted into.
And you don't even have to actually weld them in there all you need to do is put ankle monitors on them.
Because it's going to be very hard to move France or Germany into the Pacific. Hell just moving them a few hundred miles into the Atlantic will be difficult .
Are there good patterns here? Last I looked, it seemed more that there were nations that just hadn't been hit, yet.
Especially as more of the heavy hit nations get it under control with vaccines, unless full isolation is the plan for the other nations, I'm not seeing an end game.
Pattern #1: Don't politicize the pandemic.
Pattern #2: Enforce mask mandates
Pattern #3: terminate public officials who won't enforce immediately
I'd say something about vaccines as well but I don't want to trigger the engineer epidemiologist demographic they are very fragile. But, you know, Israel (not an island nation even).
While I agree with those points, my understanding is that the evidence is actually rather thin right now.
About the only pattern that has consistently played out, is nations getting cocky and then getting smashed.
And this doesn't address the end game. Vaccines are about the only route that makes sense. The rest seems to be akin to thinking condoms alone could solve STDs. They definitely help. They aren't getting is to the end, though.
I mean... Maybe? I don't think I ever saw evidence that they moved that needle. And to your previous point, a ton of damage came from politicizing the issue.
I'm not sure what you are getting at with posting that. Of course condoms work when used properly. Problem is that there is a high rate of not getting used properly, such that I'm not clear on how effective that is as a policy. The very first key takeaway is "Laboratory testing shows that condoms are impermeable to viruses, but protection rates are lower in real-world studies." Seeming to support my "maybe?"
That is, I did not intend my "maybe" to cover the question of if condoms can do what they are designed to do. I meant that I wasn't aware of any studies showing how effective they are as a policy.
And again, to your point, there are plenty of places where these are taken off the table as a policy, out of some misguided sense of propriety for the population. Please do not take my point as one that is against the use.
If one cannot figure out how condoms work, I'm hoping they can't figure out the rest either lest they reproduce, but that's probably unrealistically optimistic.
Other confounders will be that other contact can also spread some diseases. Such that they didn't get things from sex, but still spread.
Though, again, my question is of how much it helps. I cede and expect that it helps. Some or a lot, though? And, in either case, what gets it to contained?
And I fully acknowledge that my opening "maybe" wasn't as clear on that as it could have been. My intent was to push back on forgone conclusions without hard data.
France had more death that it could because the governement refused to rely on private hospitals, to maintain the narrative than the budget cuts on public health didn't prevent them from doing their work.
Disagree that it's misplaced. If it was caused by a lab leak it's easier to address before it happens next time via a simple change in protocols for this type of research e.g. all GoF work is done in an isolated environment not in the middle of major population hub.
The means by which a virus appears is much less relevant than the response to the virus. We need a robust plan on dealing with viruses regardless of their origin. All this talk on trying to find the origin is missing the forest for the trees.
This depends on the priors you assume for future events,
e.g. if one ignores the GoF research and it therefore increases the likelihood of continued research, does that also increase risk of periodic outbreaks akin to this pandemic and a higher frequency than natural outbreaks from animal>human?
We need to have a better plan for dealing with future viruses but we should also look to make what changes we can to reduce the number of new viruses that jump to humans in the first place.
Just because this one was a lab leak doesn't mean the next one has to be. I think origin would be worth knowing just for the historical record, but ultimately it doesn't matter in the slightest.
It matters. Zoonotic viruses that jump to humans naturally tend to be less well adapted to human biology, and thus less contagious. That potentially gives us more time to respond before they evolve really dangerous human adapted variants. Whereas GoF research using human tissue or transgenic animals can produce viruses that are perfectly adapted to humans right out of the gate.
That’s true. I don’t remember any other viruses being this contagious for a long time. Avian flu, swine flu, not nearly as contagious as Delta and spreading asymptomatically.
Ebola - not as contagious. Perhaps AIDS was the closest.
Measles, Chickenpox, Rubella, Mumps, Polio, Pertussis, Smallpox, HIV as you mentioned, SARS, Diphteria and the common cold all have basic reproduction numbers >= original Covid, per wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number
Right. I didn’t really mean the speed but the infectiousness, because people were asymptomatic when infecting each other during the incubation period. It was just really long with AIDS
hey, aren't you the "kids without comorbid conditions are not at serious risk from covid" guy? how's it going with that? And sheesh, to think you were the one calling others ignorant…
What a bizarre, off-topic comment. Why would you think that a discussion about the risks of GoF research constitutes medical advice?
We are fortunate that most children are at minimal risk from COVID-19 death. The CDC estimated the infection fatality rate for the 0-17 age group at about 0.001%. Most of those who died had a serious underlying condition such as obesity, diabetes, asthma, cancer, or congenital heart disease.
Yes absolutely it's incredibly relevant if world-crippling viruses are being engineered in labs, and should be a topic for public policy discussion.
COVID has been many times more damaging to the world than the bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If we're at the point where science is capable of creating such pathogens, then we have to also consider the fact that this technology can make its way into the hands of bad actors.
That's a very different state of affairs than saying we need to be ready for a pandemic of natural origin which may occur every 100 years or so.
> Yes absolutely it's incredibly relevant if world-crippling viruses are being engineered in labs, and should be a topic for public policy discussion.
The problem here is that countries can wrap this research under the banner of "natsec" and then there can be no further discussion. I see no way around that outside of crossing our collective fingers.
> COVID has been many times more damaging to the world than the bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Precisely. And this can be considered the "easy" version compared to what could potentially be created.
It's a nightmare scenario, and it's far more dangerous than nuclear weapons (unless that resulted in the end of civilization / "mutually assured destruction").
It could literally wipe out the planet before we have time to respond to it. Similar in that regard I suppose.
> we have to also consider the fact that this technology can make its way into the hands of bad actors
Those would have to be some really, really bad actors if they are willing to take out the entire planet, crossing all ideological and political boundaries.
I'm sure smarter minds than me are keeping an eye on this.
I'm reminded of the king of the Swamp Castle from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who."
It should not need saying that if millions of deaths are the result of a simple, easily avoidable mistake (or gross negligence) then that is kind of a big deal. The Titanic led to better lifeboat regulations. We need to understand our role in the origin of this disease even if only so that we can learn our lesson, whatever that may be.
How on earth is wanting to know why I was locked in my house for months with men with guns patrolling the streets.... "misplaced"?
This is what 50 years of postmodernism and cultural relativism broughts us. "Why" doesn't matter, don't search beyond what the consensus is telling you.
It is valid to disagree with the parent comment about wanting to know why this all happened. But you carry a lot of ideological baggage along with it. "men with guns patrolling the streets" is the police and was routine before the pandemic. "50 years of postmodernism and cultural relativism" has nothing to do with what caused the pandemic and no one is saying that it does.
Because if we had a competent strategy for dealing with the virus, you wouldn't have been locked in your house for months. This is entirely a failure of government. The origin is for all intents and purposes irrelevant.
"Why" ultimately doesn't matter because viruses can just spontaneously evolve in carrier animals, in a lab or by whatever other means causes a mutation where it is now infectious to us. People searching for the "why" are ultimately looking for blame when we should be looking ahead on how to stop the next one (and the current one).
Yes, the sad thing is that we could have redirected one tank worth of funding 10 years ago for an entire years supply of N95s for every American just waiting in local warehouses to be distributed.
> "Why" ultimately doesn't matter because viruses can just spontaneously evolve in carrier animals, in a lab or by whatever other means causes a mutation where it is now infectious to us.
People are going to die in traffic accidents whether i drive home drunk tonight or not, so it probably doesn't matter what I do, right?
Understanding why something happened is also a pretty important step in trying to prevent it from happening again. If you're having production incidents every day, "just get better at incident response" is probably not a very thorough solution.
I understand the need to understand why but if we can't mount a response to any virus, it again, ultimately doesn't matter.
We've instituted safeguards against car accidents (seatbelts, speed limits, harsh penalties for driving drunk, etc). What have we done for wide-spread, novel disease response?
This line of thought supports my connection to postmodernism. Or at least, to today's culture of... I don't even know what to call it.
You're suggesting we put barriers in our minds as to what questions should be asked. No more open ended inquiry, no more search for truth. Truth should be a tool in the service of a goal, nothing more. Searching for it without a good reason is to be discouraged as a waste of effort.
This is not harmless. Beside being wrong, this kind of logic is one step away from the problem of who's deciding what are the worthy questions. Next step you have maufacturing consen... hey, wasn't a book with this name?
I'm not saying we never answer the question, I'm saying there's more important things to focus on right now. Many people are more concerned with the specific question of "where did it come from", I'm more concerned with the specific question "how do we prevent or mitigate this in the future." People are using the former question to reenforce biases against other countries or place blame where, to be frank, is a complete waste of time in my opinion. Specifically, because this will happen again and next time (regardless of origin), it might not be this (relatively) easy (compared to things like Ebola).
That's verbal sophistry. People shouldn't have a fixed set of priorities and take them in order, aka the "but there are starving people in Africa argument". You can wonder how the pandemic started without taking anything from the importance of fighting it.
You might, in a different universe, argue that there are too many resources spent on investigating the origin on the pandemic. This is definitely not the case in our universe, where the investigation is laughably small. There are murder or missing person cases where there is more information available to the public than what we have now, and they affected 1 (one) victim. As for China's cooperation... I understand they have a different way of doing things, but it's kinda a global problem, so maybe we shouldn't be ok with doing the investigation their way, aka without any public involvement at all.
The point being made is that even if you stop all pandemics with a lab leak origin, pandemics will still happen. So at the end of the day if you prove covid was lab leak and put in safeguards that will, with 100% certainty stop pandemics with a lab leak origin, you’re nonetheless going to encourage yet pandemics because they are a fact of nature. Therefore it’s more important to respond pandemics rather than prevent them (because you can’t).
It feels a bit of an overkill, given that your comment is already negative, but I kinda want to point out the fallacy.
Preventing pandemics _is_ the best way of responding to them. If we're going to have 10 big epidemies next century, doing whatever we can to make sure 3 don't happen at all is by far the best response to those 3.
So researching the sh*t out of the causes of this particular pandemic is likely to get us extremely good return of investment.
Governments have the ability to isolate, mitigate and mobilize a response. Unless we have a global government to do all that, I don't get your response. Look at New Zealand for an example of how to do it right (read: better).
>don't search beyond what the consensus is telling you
I'm seeing this in real time across the Internet as anyone who questions the FDA's (split) Friday decision against recommending boosters broadly is being shot down as "not following the science".
At the outset, I agreed that research into the origin is misplaced.
However as time went on, a scenario emerged that made the origin story important - it’s about the ethics and integrity of the system.
If the people and institutions at the origin lack integrity, and they are the same things we depend on for the solutions brought forward - then the origin story matters a lot.
If you have a vendor that is good, and they make a mistake - you can trust them to fix it.
If you have a dishonest vendor, then the last thing you should do is trust them to fix a problem they created.
<this isn’t about the specifics - it’s about a scenario where the origin of a problem is directly relevant to solving a problem>
especially when the same people are:
1) responsible for funding very dangerous and questionable research
2) investigate their own failings
3) give advice on how every else ought to behave?!?
> That is why they decided to work with chimeras instead of pursuing gain of function research.
The distinction between gain of function research, and creating lab made chimeric viruses is purely semantic. If you were doing gain of function research, you'd spend most of your time creating chimeric viruses. The argument is that "not all chimeric virus experiments are gain of function research, because you might be conducting those experiments for reasons other than making the virus more harmful".
It's just a big semantic contrivance, and the only reason this distinction was every made in the first place is because a certain public figure claimed numerous times that the NIH had never funded gain of function research in Wuhan, only for that later to turn out to be a lie, with the excuse being "oh yeah, but that wasn't _real_ gain of function research".
Isn't a chimera akin to putting part of one organism with another? I think this would make the astrazeneca vaccine a chimera (Adenovirus with SARS-COV2 spike protein). Obviously the AZ vaccine has not causes a pandemic so maybe the distinction is very important here.
The vaccine isn't a chimera virus, and the controversial research isn't similar to processes used to make the vaccines.
The research in Wuhan involved sequencing genomes from cornoaviruses found in bat guano, blood and saliva, mixing different sequences together, and using that to create brand new chimera viruses that could be cultured in a lab. Then testing the new viruses they'd created to see if they could infect human tissue, and perform other experiments that were motivated ultimately by a goal of creating a broad spectrum coronavirus vaccine.
If you were attempting to create a viral bioweapon, this is exactly the sort of research you'd do. Mixing parts of different viruses together, and seeing what the new viruses did. The distinction here entirely comes down to the motives of the research. The reason the NIH funded this research to take place in China, is because those research practices had been prohibited in the US as the risks involved were seen as poorly understood. The argument that "that's not gain of function research because..." is just a contrivance of a poorly defined piece of jargon.
In the US’ defense, the response of many countries - including and perhaps foremost China - were botched. They were actively suppressing information about the virus early on when it could have significantly helped other countries prepare for what was coming.
America has a history of responding poorly to pandemics. They let HIV rip through their population before getting serious about it. Regan famously denied it was even happening. It is interesting to contrast this with Australia's quick public health response that saved a lot of lives. It is easy to see similarities with COVID responses, but two timepoints and n=2 do not make for quality statistics. Hopefully the USA does better with whatever pandemics come for us all in the next decades.
That's a good point. Australia has a similar federalist structure as the USA, although we have less than 10 states/territories of any consequence. The COVID response has a been fix of both state and commonwealth (federal). The commonwealth closed the borders, but because health is delegated to states/territories it was up to each state to manage the testing, contact tracing, and lockdown rules. The main issue in Australian politics right now is border closures which have been used by every state to greater or lesser degrees. The commonwealth hates the border closures, but the states, pandering to their state based support, mostly love it (except NSW).
Different societies will have different strengths and weaknesses. The US' priority on individual liberty will generally run counter to solutions which require collective action. But the US system has been fairly good at fostering innovation for instance.
I don't think that is historically accurate. The US had many large epidemics of diseases such cholera, typhus, yellow fever, and bubonic plague, not to mention influenza in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The priority on individual liberty didn't get in the way then. Quarantines and lockdowns and mask requirements were imposed and enforced. They even had vaccine or inoculation mandates for some of them.
Heck, arguably an inoculation mandate played an important role in the successful creation of the US. 90% of the loses among the Continental regulars were due to disease with small pox being the most serious.
Inoculation was widespread in Europe and most of the British army was immune, giving them a large advantage. People were still afraid of the risks of inoculation in the colonies and in 1776 the Continental Congress issues a proclamation prohibiting army surgeons from inoculating.
In early 1777 George Washington informed the Continental Congress that he was going to mandate inoculation and told his commanding officers to do so. They inoculated the ~3/4 of the army that had not already had smallpox and all new recruits.
Smallpox continued to rage throughout the war, but no longer in the Continental army. From that point on not a single Continental regiment was incapacitated by smallpox.
On the British side the actual British soldiers were also immune to smallpox, but not so the slaves who had chosen to fight for the British in exchange for freedom or the Native Americans who sided with the British. Those groups were devastated by smallpox.
> All of this focus on the point of origin is misplaced. We know that there will be new viruses. What matters is how we respond to them. In this case the US response was completely botched.
It’s worth talking about better versus worse covid response, but that’s missing the forest for the trees. Most of the G7 didn’t do that much better: from Germany to Italy, and including the US, they’re all in the 1,200 to 2,200 deaths per million people range. Countries like Australia that did a little better, down at 700, are still having to have military-enforced lockdowns 18 months into the pandemic.
Is it really possible that none of these advanced economies were adequately prepared? The next time this hits, are we really going to try this massively expensive lockdown approach again? That seems like madness to me.
Cuba isn't comparable because the age structure of it's population will be different. 90% of covid deaths happen in the 65 and over cohort so mortality will be drastically lower.
I’m not sure what you can get out of comparing small Scandinavian countries.
Out of the big ones, Germany is at 1,200 and the US is at 2,000. What’s the effect of response type when you account for the scale of obesity in the US versus Germany?
Sweden has the same numbers as Germany. Sweden and Germany are very similar with respect to culture, clustering of people in cities, percentage of people with a migration background. Norway and Sweden are not.
Turns out that Sweden and Germany have similar results:
Yeah, right. Let’s compare Sweden with 10M people and a very low population density with Germany with 83M people and 10 times the population density instead of Norway that has comparable population and density and 10 times less deaths just because it helps your narrative.
Such comments spreading misinformation should not be allowed at all here in my opinion.
Empty land doesn't get sick. The people in Sweden are concentrated in one fairly dense area, Stockholm.
I don't think the overall #people/surface area of the country is something meaningful to compare.
I hypothesize that comparing Sweden and Germany is about the same as comparing Stockholm to an average of German cities. I don't have the German and Swedish skills to find and compare the data though
That’s exactly the point.
In Norway and Sweden, unlike Germany, there is a huge amount of empty land.
For this reason it doesn’t make sense at all to compare Sweden with Germany when you have a far, far better comparison in the nearby country.
If you have a hypothetical country with a huge swath of empty land, and a single city with the population density of Hong Kong, the population density of that country will appear to be low, but in fact all the people living in the country live in a highly dense city. Perhaps a better measure than population/land area would be the average of the population density in the square kilometer surrounding each inhabitant (or something like that).
As it happens, we don't live happily ever after unless the evil covid kills us. There are plenty of other death causes, some directly caused by lockdowns like delayed health care, suicide, OD, increased poverty. What we really want to look at is excess mortality, and possibly excess 'quality years lived' for some definition thereof. Some Canadian researchers looked at excess mortality in Canada and found it 3x than 'deaths with covid'.
Covid is a long term issue. It is fairly pointless to compare response outcome for the first year and a half of an extremely contagious mutating endemic virus. Look at a 10 year horizon, possibly longer. Sweden is middle of the pack within Europe if we don't cherrypick, and that outcome could possibly be driven by chance more than anything else.
Speaking of other costs, it is really pathetic what we do to children. At my kid elementary school they detected two kids with covid. No word of severity of symptoms, if any symptoms whatsoever. As a result, the entire grade was sent home packing for weeks, after a whole two weeks of in-person instruction. This when kids have about the same risk for severe covid as for severe flu, and teachers have one of the lowest covid risk of all occupations (!).
Delayed healthcare doesn't fit in there. That's directly related to covid, whether there's lockdowns or not. No lockdowns means you can't get healthcare because the doctors and nurses are busy with covid patients
Delayed healthcare is also people scared out of their minds missing cancer screenings or even mundane teeth cleanings because 'what if I get covid from the doctor's office'?
While the difference between the first two is significant, one of these is really not like the others, and I'm still glad to live in a country that values human life. Also getting pretty sick of ignorant muppets talking about "military-enforced lockdown" here - had a good laugh about that with mates this afternoon over beers in the park this afternoon.
I'll simply add to what other comments have said similarly, every aspect of this virus has its place, and the virus's origin is absolutely essential. We'll probably never know, and that's a horrifying thought. How do you learn from a mistake if it's never disclosed?
Frankly, I find the attitude that we should not pay considerable attention to the possibility that we created and lost control of this virus to be worse than the event itself, as it primes us for further catastrophes of the same sort.
The response to this virus having been manufactured and released should be as severe as our response to a nuclear weapon, or perhaps even more so.
I think we can focus on both our response to widespread viruses and also making sure we aren’t shooting ourselves in the face by releasing novel viruses into the wild.
>What is ultimately being argued here is that instead of being prepared and responding reasonably all we have to do is control research and nothing like this will happen.
I don't think that is being argued at all. The article ends "it remains likely that to this date, there has been no real-world example of a laboratory accident that has led to a global epidemic" which suggests the opposite.
> All of this focus on the point of origin is misplaced. We know that there will be new viruses. What matters is how we respond to them. In this case the US response was completely botched.
As far as I can tell, there are no grounds for claiming that the response to covid was botched. Botched compared to what? Also, when people talk like this, they always end up saying that we should respond to novel viruses by locking everything down right away, imposing quarantines, stopping flights, and so on.
I see two problems with that. First, covid was already spreading globally when we became aware of it. And second, we are unable to tell if a novel virus will turn into a pandemic (scientists disagreed about SARS, MERS, and covid on this count). Adopting a policy that minimizes risks will be incredibly costly and often wasteful.
To the extent that we can prepare for novel viruses, it seems to me that we should focus on developing fast and efficient machinery for creating and mass-producing vaccines. We did quite well at this (and so I don't think our response to covid was botched) but we could clearly do better. Imagine if, after isolating a virus in a lab, it took 3 months to create a vaccine and begin mass production. That's what we should aim for.
Indeed SARS-CoV-2 had already spread to multiple countries at least by December 2019, and possibly earlier. That was way before anyone seriously proposed quarantines and travel bans.
>All of this focus on the point of origin is misplaced.
I think it matters quite a lot, but not for scientific reasons.
If the point of origin is sloppy lab practice (maybe it's impossible to not be sloppy) and everyone lied about it, I want to know everything. Trust is a hard thing to re-gain but I really want to know where we all stand. Realistic calibration of your position vs. power centers is always a good thing.
Personally I don't think responses were particularly botched, although it's tempting to think so for other political reasons. It's likely more a lack of real knowledge by anyone on what really makes for good public policy and the inability to do what it takes in any case.
> …I want to know everything. Trust is a hard thing to re-gain but I really want to know where we all stand. Realistic calibration of your position vs. power centers is always a good thing.
I agree but that trust was never there. It has always been the case that the public cannot be trusted with information or full information that might cause any panic not because of the panic behavior itself but due to panic behaviors destabilizing markets. The former president had explicit selfish reasons for the direction but he also used it as a political tool attempting to use the panic in his favor and limit its influence:
But both types of behavior are inappropriate and counterproductive to fighting a pandemic or any public emergency
It largely was but misplaced. Walter Cronkite was never truthful, the Joint Chiefs of Staff rarely had your interest in mind. Public policy has always been people scrabbling for status while feigning morality.
Your point of opposition to OP is noted, but your analogy misses on almost every point of comparison but that they are two things among many that contribute to untimely deaths. Live fire isn't exactly contagious, and people who interact with live fire with any frequency do wear vests. You might do better comparing firearms (begun with gunpowder in China a thousand years ago) to measles which also began[1] a thousand years ago.
>What matters is how we respond to them. In this case the US response was completely botched. This is in part because the team that had been in place to deal with emerging virus threats was disbanded and also in part because the CDC was forced to focus on making the president look good instead of dealing with the virus.
Your confrontational attitude and make believe reasons, dismisses you from any and all future discussions on this matter. You have demonstrated that your are unfit to comment. Please refrain from posting.
Why the hell would you put a virology lab in the middle of a huge city with millions of people? I am not a virologist, but to me it seems like if covid was a lab-leak then it could have been avoided very easily just by having the lab in the middle of nowhere, like in the desert or the artic. Instead of the whole world having to go into lock down, with millions dying, just put the lab in a remote location, and make it so that before anyone leaves they have to quarantine for 2 weeks. This seems obvious, why isn't it standard protocol?
> This seems obvious, why isn't it standard protocol?
Would you take a job that had that requirement? Want a few days off? 2 week quarantine. Would investors be ok with this? Want to pay expensive PHD for vacation plus quarantine time (which could be days off x 10 working days every time). The problem is that the workers in the lab are just as human, have the same needs for relationships and contact, and some have enterprises outside of their day job. Want to speak at a conference? 2 week quarantine...
Sure that makes sense, but you could crank their pay way up to compensate, build places for their family to stay if they desired like the families of the scientist working on the Manhattan project, present at conferences through teleconferencing. There are scientist who stay in Antarctica for months and the international space station. Yes it would be inconvenient, but look at what (maybe) happens if you don't.
> I'm not going to take a job that makes it impossible to see my family
Literally addressed in the very next part of that same sentence you quoted:
> build places for their family to stay if they desired
Cool for you though if you aren’t for sale. There are many people in this world with quite varied interests and motivations. I wouldn’t do it either in my current position in life, but might have considered it when I was younger.
Even if the price is the lives of millions and the whole world in lockdown? We might be better off if you don't take the job then. Also you ignored the rest of the sentence you are quoting and my examples of highly skilled scientist who are willing to make that sacrifice in Antartica and the ISS.
> Even if the price is the lives of millions and the whole world in lockdown?
I don't have to research gain of functionality in virus. I can chose to research something else. Yes, some people are willing to do extreme things in pursuit of their careers, but most people, even highly educated people have things they value more than their job.
These questions, while valid, should not matter. People who had to work in Los Alamos would perhaps have preferred a location in Manhattan, too.
There is an oversupply of scientists who would do anything to work in their fields. One could also question if this sort of research has ever produced anything valuable (I'm not in the field, genuine question).
> There is an oversupply of scientists who would do anything to work in their fields.
I'm pretty sure that's not true, and assumes that people will rationally accept a bad deal. Personal experience is that the better educated a worker is, the higher their expectations are for how they are treated. Example: tenured faculty at a college.
OP's link is fascinating. It is interesting to see that there is strong evidence for a lab leak leading to a pandemic at least once in the past. I think it is striking how clear cut the evidence for this is: a strain absent for 30 years suddenly reappears. Lab leak isn't the only possibility, but at least it makes the most sense here. I don't think we have the same evidence for COVID.
Imagine we did have evidence one way or the other, half of people would believe it and the other half wouldn’t due to the stonewalling by various relevant institutions.
It's true it's pretty clear the 1977 virus had human involvement though I'd lean towards the vaccine trial explanation. Yeah the origins of covid seem up in the air at the moment.
Meta: I was curious to see a dead comment by user redis_mlc here, and also seeing their history about 80% of their comments had the same status. The contents however seemed fine. What's going on here?
Typically in those cases I think it is someone who just won't stop posting inflammatory comments on certain topics even though they are otherwise interesting.
If someone is willing to stop doing that they can email the mods and often get another chance. Dang even use to point it out while banning someone.
I noticed that user too, and was "impressed" how most of their comments are downvoted to death. Some of them might have deserved it, but others seem totally normal. I guess they're expressing strong and unpopular opinions..?
Just like in the real world, there certainly are ideological groups. While some are adhoc others are highly organized.
So once you are on target or even a mild comment that challenges their ideology gets heavily down voted.
We see the long terms effects of this behavior in the real world, not just individuals but institutions stay away from questioning certain ideologies as a norm.
Yeah the comments are all political and some are less than friendly in their tone.
I've found that going too partisan on HN ends in down votes.
I'd probably agree with some of the politics they're pushing but I'd avoid bringing that discussion here. It doesn't fit with the rules here and I think the rules here are responsible for one of the friendliest environments online.
Even the friendliest forums a liable to politicization during times of political upheaval. 2020-2021 should qualify, imho. Should we ensure HN is a safe place to talk about Rust, compilers, space, css, etc, even as the world is under strict pandemic politics and dissension is raging? Or should we use this niche community try to gather and influence each other's political thinking before it becomes illegal? All the hot topics are technical -- we are living through a technocratic revolution.
HN has improved at hosting discussions on the intersection of tech and politics over the years, but it has a long way to go. Most threads on it still turn into slap fights within an hour.
Plus, it is likely untrue as well. I am a kid from behind the Iron Curtain and I met quite a bit of Marxist thinking in the real world, including former Communist ideologues (I mean, people who were paid by the Central Committee to develop and spread the ideology full time, not just amateurs). But HN does not seem to be "mostly Marxist", though there are a few "eat the rich" commenters, as everywhere; but definitely a minority.
American Reddit seems, on average, quite a lot more left leaning than HN. I guess programmers are too individualist to be attracted to Marxism en masse. Also, highly paid employees tend to feel the brunt of the current Western taxation policy, because they have fewer loopholes to use and they tend to live in high CoL areas at the same time.
Marxist can mean many things. It is clear in the former soviet states or in the western world.
However, Marxism is a global project. In India for instance Marxists are mercenaries for hire. The network built by the soviets and later coopted by the Americans have their tentacles deep in the English press and universities.
So they do control school textbooks and the minds of the English educated urban kids.
But sooner or later kids figure out this propaganda. And anyway social "sciences" is not what the bright kids aspire to learn.
If you ever wonder about this, you can mail the moderators using the link in the footer, they’ll look into it. Typically there is a reason for it but you can still vouch for individual comments.
You can debate whether that counts as gain of function research - the virus definitely gained as a result of the experiment but you can argue the experimenters didn't know that was going to happen. It still remains risky research whether the researchers deliberately made a more infectious virus or said oops we've accidentally made a more infectious virus.
Goes into detail about all of the Soviet bioweapons programmes, from someone who was quite near the top (I think he was deputy director). It's scary as hell.
In addition to not making new viruses, we should consider a moratorium on further digging up of old viruses, e.g. securing Arctic graves of Spanish Flu victims, or ancient viruses in the sea bed or icebergs, https://www.nature.com/articles/437794a (2005)
> It is thought to have killed 50 million people, and yet scientists have brought it back to life. In this issue of Nature, scientists publish an analysis of the full genome sequence of the 1918 human influenza virus … Some scientists have already hailed the work as giving unprecedented insight into the virus. Working out how it arose and why it was so deadly could help experts to spot the next pandemic strain and to design appropriate drugs and vaccines in time, they say. But others have raised concerns that the dangers of resurrecting the virus are just too great. One biosecurity expert told Nature that the risk that the recreated strain might escape is so high, it is almost a certainty.
> "We know that the virus itself is different, and we know that the host response is different," said Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin who headed the international research team. "The virus is really a bad actor," said Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The virulence of the 1918 virus has always been a mystery.
> ..The experiment was done in a Canadian biosafety Level 4 lab, where researchers work in the equivalent of space suits. Kawaoka's team does not have permission to experiment with the virus in the United States. In the new experiment, Darwyn Kobasa, a scientist in a Canadian government microbiology lab in Winnipeg, Manitoba, synthesized the 1918 virus from scratch and infected seven macaque monkeys with it.
> ..The monkeys infected with the 1918 virus were so sick within eight days that they had to be euthanized. "Profuse watery and bloody liquid" filled 60 to 90 percent of the their lung tissue, "greatly reducing lung function," the researchers reported ... The animals infected with the 1918 virus produced less interferon, a type of cytokine that suppresses virus growth by limiting the microbe's ability to infect new cells. The virus continued to replicate and spread, reaching in one case 5,000 times the levels seen in the tissue of the monkeys infected with the modern virus. The ability to selectively limit interferon production is seen in other microbes, including respiratory syncytial virus, Ebola virus and parainfluenza virus, Fauci said.
> In response to the virus's unchecked growth, the monkeys' immune systems produced large amounts of inflammatory substances aimed at killing it and the cells already infected. That ultimately did lethal damage to the lungs of the animals.
That lethality was before Gain-of-Function research, which followed a few years thereafter :(
I would like to point out that the same Winnipeg lab discussed above, seems to have been infiltrated by the Chinese military [0]. If this doesn't concern you, I'd like to bring to mind that our current pandemic is suspected to have been leaked from a lab in China. That's without discussing any of the bioweapon fears or fear of war between the West and China...
Also just to illustrate that military labs can screw up a worker at Porton Down, the UK one got bit by a ferret with coronavirus last year, amongst over 100 safety breaches https://archive.ph/IRrgT#selection-867.72-867.83
Very fair point. More and more it seems very dangerous to do work like this, even with all the safety measures. At the same time, I suspect it's a race to the bottom with bioweapons research - no other explanation makes sense to me on why these labs exist.
“I would like to point out that most of the research, at the same Winnipeg lab discussed above, seems to have been shared with/taken by the Chinese military“
The linked article does not support your assertion that “most” research was shared/taken.
You're right. It only provides evidence that a top member of the Chinese military was working with the lab (specifically with Ebola variants), that this was only discovered after he had access to the lab and that the RCMP are not releasing details on their investigation on the extent that "intellectual property" has been passed on. So, you're right, maybe I should have left it at "infiltrated by the Chinese military".
I don't think the person made any attempt to hide their affiliation, did they? This kind of international cooperation on infectious disease is pretty normal, i.e. that's how smallpox was eradicated, and it's also normal for military branches to have their medical services work on this as well.
The issue, of course, is whether this is also cover for development of nation-state biological warfare programs, as this was a tactic used in the past to collect deadly viruses and bacteria by the Soviet, American, British and Japanese biological weapons programs, at least. Secrecy only encourages this kind of insanity, too.
Well, it does appear that the Canadian government only discovered that scientist was actually a Major-General in the Chinese army after he sent something like 15 vials of biomatter to the (one and only) Wuhan Institute of Virology without authorization.
The extent of this leak also appears to be under a "Public Health Gag Order", presumably to hide the ineptitude of Canadian security procedures and to avoid public panic at how extensive this leak is. [0]
I only heard about this story after the public health official responsible for the whole thing refused to appear before the Canadian government and give details on what happened. [1]
One of the worries is that as the technology becomes cheaper easier and more widespread, more scientists in less good labs will think I'll have a go at that.
Another worrying thing is the incentives for the individual scientists are different for those to the world. If they discover something interesting about the 1918 virus, maybe a paper in nature, tenure. If there's a 1/100000 of screwing up and killing millions then 99,999 times out of 100,000 they are on to a winner. But for humanity as a whole it's an iffy bet. (Article on that stuff https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/562003-an-economists-...)
TLDR for the paper: GoF is not necessarily the strongest candidate for this flu outbreak. However, all the candidates are man-made due to research efforts.
To me this points out that every study on a pandemic-possible virus should have an extremely high bar to meet in terms of both safety and reason for performing the study in the first place. Effectively the only reason that is needed now to perform such research is that you want to publish a paper. The linked paper points out one possible source of the flu pandemic: vaccine development. This may have been a worthy enough cause but greater safeguards are needed. We should take the money we spend on GoF research and spend it on ensuring better safeguards for existing research.
GoF research has an explicit goal is to make a virus more human transmissible: if it is too successful, you end up with the possibility of a pandemic. We now have a COVID pandemic that might have been caused by GoF research. On the flip side we can't show much benefit from this kind of research.
> On the flip side we can't show much benefit from this kind of research.
In many ways GoF seems to bee like a site reliability team's "dynamite monkey Friday" where they try to break things in staging in unpredictable ways... hoping whatever they do to our staging environment doesn't leak to production. Fortunately, our app is not likey to cause bodily harm to anyone and not likely to cause a pandemic.
Virology labs can play important roles in the eradication of infectious disease around the world, but they must be stringently and transparently regulated. They are needed because if we have a natural outbreak of an infectious novel virus, labs need to be able to rapidly isolate, identify and characterize (sequence) the virus. From there vaccines can be made, mode of transmission can be analyzed, etc.
However, there's a huge risk - concentrating all these viruses in one place means accidents can result in infection of lab workers or other releases. There are many examples, such as the 1978 smallpox case in Birmingham:
"It turned out that the building that Parker worked in also contained a research laboratory, one of a handful where smallpox was studied by scientists who were trying to contribute to the eradication effort. Some papers reported that the lab was badly mismanaged, with important precautions ignored because of haste. (The doctor who ran the lab died by suicide shortly after Parker was diagnosed.) Somehow, smallpox escaped the lab to infect an employee elsewhere in the building. Through sheer luck and a rapid response from health authorities, including a quarantine of more than 300 people, the deadly error didn’t turn into an outright pandemic." Vox Mar 2019 (pre-pandemic)
As fas as Sars-CoV-2, it's very plausible that it accidentally escaped from the Wuhan lab, which housed bats and mice infected with a whole variety of bat coronaviruses and which had a very active coronavirus research program. The lack of governmental transparency in the early days also helped the virus spread, i.e. an early quarantine was possible but was not implemented.
Probably the only real long-term fix will involve a lot more spending on public health infrastructure and vaccination globally. At present the virus is circulating in poorer communities around the world and new variants are likely to continue to be spawned as a result.
Markson is also the reason that SkyNews was temporarily banned on YouTube [0], for repeatedly delivering information that was more grounded in the imagination, than in anything with actual evidence backing it.
She helped promote and mislead around claims to do with hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, mis-identifying chemical differences between human formulations and animal formulations, leading to hospital admissions. [1]
There's no conspiracy here - she's actively dangerous to people's health. More interested in promoting an alternative viewpoint than whether that viewpoint actually has merit.
>> Markson is also the reason that SkyNews was temporarily banned on YouTube [0], for repeatedly delivering information that was more grounded in the imagination, than in anything with actual evidence backing it.
Let's be clear about the fact that in 0% of any cases where speech was not directly illegal was censorship the right choice.
>> There's no conspiracy here - she's actively dangerous to people's health.
So is McDonald's every time they advertise and sell any of their garbage product. And yet we recognize that it is important that people make up their own minds than do 'what is right', because it is not our place to determine what is right for them.
> Let's be clear about the fact that in 0% of any cases where speech was not directly illegal was censorship the right choice.
In a debate about scientific facts, when you stop defending the content of a position and instead fall back to saying that it is not illegal to express that position, you've lost the debate.
That's literally the opposite of the scientific method. A healthy scientific community rejects "scientific consensus" because the scientific method is about testing hypothesis including previous work (see the replication crisis).
As an example, the study proving that hydrocholoroquinine was useless for treating COVID was retracted by The Lancet. Turns out that the data was faked, and yet the paper still gets cited.
A good scientist doesn't hold any "scientific facts" as sacrosanct. Only hypothesis, theories, and evidence.
The debate wasn't about scientific fact. It was about whether a journalist was spreading misinformation and according to whom. The debate is about the Orwellian term "misinformation" and has less to do with science than with Scientism.
Can I express something that has been whirling in my head for some time already?
So, all you folks shrouding their polemic tripe under the mantle of Freedom and Liberty of Speech, please stop.
You claim Liberty to express whatever crosses you mind, but I want to claim my own right to “Passive” Freedom of Speech: the freedom to form my own ideas, settle into an opinion, build my own ethical compass, free from the manipulation, the doublespeak, the deceit of fake news, astroturf and pure induced mental fatigue on subjects that are important and demand careful and good faith reflection.
Get out of my mind, it’s my own rightful and exclusive property!
> So is McDonald's every time they advertise and sell any of their garbage product. And yet we recognize that it is important that people make up their own minds than do 'what is right', because it is not our place to determine what is right for them.
Pelman v. McDonald's [0] covered that in considerable detail.
Markson, has promoted information that is detrimental to health, as positive for health, and so is not afforded certain protections.
Part of the reason that the tort against McDonald's failed, is that McDonald's was not shown that they had a duty to warn the plaintiff.
However, it is established precedent, that someone in Markson's positions _does_ have a duty to warn their audience.
Aside for YouTube "tut tut" what has Markson said that disqualifies her? I ask in full faith, as I don't know who she is.
But why does YT get to tut tut anyone? The only basic reason for it is that you fundamentally agree with YT's worldview and are OK with their dominance.
I'd ask for you to turn the tables around, YT censoring PoV you agree with. But we both know that is a ridiculous question; introspection by the hegemon usually is.
because it is a platform they own. I'm not arguing whether that is good or bad but if you run a site you are free to moderate it however you wish. Until YT, FB etc. are classified as public utilities or similar, you have no rights whatsoever to say what you want on someone else's platform.
I don't give a damn if she's selling me the literal oil of processed snakes and telling me it will cure my cancer. It is not the purview of the government to be my daddy.
Information you get from an advertising based channel is filtered by the advertisers who provide the money to make the thing run. Shitstorms are bad for sales.
Regardless of the supposed merits or demerits of hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, the articles you cite don't support your claim very well. The piece on hospitalization only tangentially connects those two medications to toxicity in hospital. It specifically says those drugs were taken among unnamed others and that the source of influence was unnamed online sources. The quoted doctor is very hand-wavy about connecting those drugs to the hospitalization, and it's unclear from the quote whether the primary reason the patient was admitted to hospital wasn't Covid: "The patient didn’t get severe toxicity from taking the ivermectin cocktail, “but it didn’t help their Covid either”, he said."
I would be very skeptical of any claims around Ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine in The Guardian, which is a very biased news source. Especially after the recent Rolling Stone mendacity regarding claims of toxicity in Oklahoma, which was a complete fabrication nonetheless amplified on the left media.
The other article you cite disapprovingly mentions the author was claiming "lab leak" back in May 2020. That would seem a mark in favor of her reporting, no?
> The other article you cite disapprovingly mentions the author was claiming "lab leak" back in May 2020. That would seem a mark in favor of her reporting, no?
Not unless said reporting at the time actually had evidence to support the claim. A reporter has a duty to report based on actual evidence.
She has repeated misinformation, without that evidence, an argument you just used to dismiss the entirety of the Guardian, for all time, on one subject matter. Should that not equally apply to this reporter, then?
What is your evidence that she didn't have evidence? Lots of credible people were saying lab leak in 2020. I was there and following it closely. It wasn't hard to come by if you employed basic skepticism of the mainstream narrative.
I didn't dismiss the entirety of The Guardian for all time (straw-man, anyone?), I said I would be skeptical of anything they publish related to a contested narrative because they have shown repeated bias. What's wrong with that? I'm not telling you not to be skeptical of this journalist. It seems like you're really projecting your own beliefs here.
If someone makes a claim that many credible scientists are making publicly, the burden to present your evidence on a cable news segment is lessened. Regardless, the fact is she published a book and I assume it's got citations. The commenter merely asserted their claim as true and I wondered if they had good reasons to believe it.
All of this focus on the point of origin is misplaced. We know that there will be new viruses. What matters is how we respond to them. In this case the US response was completely botched. This is in part because the team that had been in place to deal with emerging virus threats was disbanded and also in part because the CDC was forced to focus on making the president look good instead of dealing with the virus. What is ultimately being argued here is that instead of being prepared and responding reasonably all we have to do is control research and nothing like this will happen. Unfortunately, this is obviously false.