Well I hope that at least the next lab-made pandemic will insert some beneficial mutations to humanity.
In a way, the lab-leak hypothesis is comforting, because it means that nature with its own means did not manage to manufacture such a highly-transmissive disease, despite the facts of modern life, record human population and rates of travel. If it is not lab-made, then nature may do this again soon with another virus.
> Well I hope that at least the next [..] pandemic will insert some beneficial mutations to humanity.
Sometimes this is indirect; there is some debate on why some Europeans have immunity to HIV, the current hypothesis is that it’s a result of us surviving the Black Plague.
Also why Africans did not suffer such large number of fatalities per population.
A younger population but we are one of the few regions in the world still giving the TB/Polio vaccine at birth.
"epigenetic modifications, activate cells of the innate immune system, such as monocytes, macrophages and natural killer cells"
> (...) it means that nature with its own means did not manage to manufacture such a highly-transmissive disease (...)
I think I'm less optimistic than you in this matter. There's at least one counter-example to that statement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu that has the same order of magnitude of deaths as COVID-19, but in a world where population was ~4x smaller and I'd expect less mobile / interconnected.
Nobody actually knows how many people died of Spanish flu. Look at the range of estimates provided and where they come from - you'll discover that the distribution is enormous, partly because the high estimates come from epidemic models. But such models always seem to overshoot by large amounts, so their estimates aren't credible.
Putting that to one side, Spanish flu happened in the context of:
- A society that didn't know viruses existed at all, only bacteria.
- The very recent discovery of aspirin, which was believed to be a wonder drug that could cure anything. Doctors didn't know what doses were safe and had a habit of prescribing lethal overdoses to people suffering from the flu.
- Widespread censorship by the authorities due to WW1. It became known as "Spanish Flu" mostly because the censorship was just less aggressive there, so that's where reports emerged from first.
For tech firm employees systematically censoring reports of bad reactions to vaccines, there are lessons here that still apply to the modern day. Spanish Flu would probably have been less deadly in a society with less censorship, and which was less likely to mass prescribe brand new miracle pharma products.
I do think this is an appropriate counter-example, but I’m curious how much modern medicine would change the impact (and preserve the case for optimism).
> the lab-leak hypothesis is comforting, because it means that nature with its own means did not manage to manufacture such a highly-transmissive disease
We are well past the point where nature is our greatest enemy.
A lab leak of such consequences has the attention of every hostile organization out there. Imagine the scale of hurt you could achieve, yourself remaining pretty much immune to detection and prosecution, by doing the same thing but intentionally. Bye-bye unrestricted travel.
Isn’t the lab leak hypothesis saying nature did this make this, but scientists who were studying (and allowing) the natural processes accidentally leaked it?
Which is the main argument against this kind of function research - there’s little gain compared to the risk.
Wuhan scientist working with EcoHealth alliance specifically wrote a grant proposal with intent to:
“We will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in [a type of mammalian cell commonly used in microbiology] and HAE cultures,”
They were denied over Gain of Function concerns, and bam a year later the only Sars virus to be ever observed with those exact human-specific cleavage sites at the S1 S2 junction ravages the planet starting 500m from WIV.
The term "lab leak" is ambiguous (deliberately I guess) as to whether the virus was modified in the lab before it leaked, or if the lab leaked an unmodified virus.
But the preponderance of evidence is that the leaked virus was modified before it was leaked. The critical spike protein in SARS_CoV2 is coded uses a sequence of amino acids that has never been seen before in any other coronavirus. I forget the names, but there are certain common amino acids that can be coded using several different functionally-identical DNA (RNA) sequences, and the SARS-CoV2 one looks like the sequences used in labs and humans, and never seen before in natural viruses. One nobel laureate in biology described this as a "smoking gun" that this was a lab leak when they first heard about it.
I disagree, I hope that lableak confirmation will push for a reassessment on the risk reward ratios for research. It may slow down scientific process, but we can now see that the dangers, if catastrophic enough, even if minimal, may not warrant it.
I can’t believe anyone would seriously say ‘it doesn’t matter how it happened.’ That’s like the NTSB holding a press conference and saying it doesn’t matter why the 747 crashed and killed 500 people.
They have to determine what happened so they can do root cause analysis and institute procedures to make this less likely to occur again.
Nature does not 'manage to manufacture'. Genomic changes occur by random chance.
For example, nature did not intend to manufacture smallpox, when that became a thing 4-5000 years ago. Instead, some random pox virus (like monkey pox) infected some people and random changes happened to produce smallpox, which became endemic in the human population. Then, another mutation happened that caused hemmorhagic smallpox to become a thing and to start killing people (the vast majority of smallpox strains do not have high death rates, although they can cause bad disability, although no one knows if they would with modern medicine).
So nature can produce anything a human can. But certainly, human intervention to make a disease worse can also make terrible diseases.
In nature, it makes no sense for a virus to be both highly transmissible and highly deadly. Any such virus would cease to exist after having run amok in such a way in its hosts. Therefore, any extremely deadly virus should be looked at with similarly extreme criticism, especially if / when it adapts and becomes a better behaving parasite.
Nature, and evolution, don't follow motive based logic. Random mutations that are temporarily beneficial but are detrimental to the long term do happen.
To put it another way, a cell mutates based off of random chance. It doesn't have desires. We only have to go back as far as 1918 to see an example of a virus that could not have been engineered and was highly transmissible and highly deadly. As you say, in the long term that doesn't work out- the virus in that case mutated to be much more mild- which is why you won't see viruses like that surviving for long. But it still doesn't make sense to assume viruses evolve according to a motivation based logic.
You're assuming that viruses don't have natural reservoirs. For example, viral hemorrhagic fevers, particularly filovirus VHFs, are both highly transmissible and highly deadly -- accounting for their history of rapid, fast-growing, and quickly-diminishing epidemics amongst humans -- but have stable zoonotic reservoirs that allow them to circulate freely across those populations. (Bats' unique immune system, like camelids, makes them a particularly good evolutionary proving ground for viral evolution, so they serve as a reservoir and a source of ongoing viral mutations.)
The main deterrent here is that it's too easy for the leaders of the evil government to end up being infected too. Even if you target a virus at specific genetics or make a secret vaccine, it's impossible to predict how it might evolve once it's out in the wild. At least given current technology, viruses can't be controlled well enough to make good weapons.
Nature certainly manufactured HCoV-OC43, another betacoronavirus very similar to SARS-CoV-2. It is the leading suspect for causing a worldwide pandemic which killed a lot of people starting in 1889.
I don’t go looking for covid discussions but they arrive in my feeds so i’m conscious i’m seeing a feed that someone(s) else curated for me and wanted me to view. That said…
Is there any popular discussion or action regarding mitigation of both lab and natural origins for future?
It seems that both avenues are possible. If we know both are possible, that seems like enough knowledge to move forward with exploring possible mitigations for future.
I realise there may be hard reasons why no mitigation is possible, but i just never encounter popular discussion of what to do next.
There’s a natural fork in the road here which is why this is so contentious. The best argument gain of function proponents have for their research (besides weaponization of course) is to create the next big thing in a lab first so that we can figure out how to neutralize it. The argument the anti-GoF advocates have is that creating the next big thing in a lab leads eventually/inevitably to at least one of them getting out.
The responses are effectively inherently opposite hence strong disagreement.
> The best argument gain of function proponents have for their research (besides weaponization of course) is to create the next big thing in a lab first so that we can figure out how to neutralize it
Did that actually help in this case? Or are gain-of-function advocates the science equivalent of employees who want to rewrite your webapp in the language du jour? They say it's for the benefit of the company (humanity) but really what they want is to play with cool toys and get promotions.
The first obvious corrective action would be to prohibit gain of function research in level-2 labs.
The second would be to prohibit gain of function research in general, especially with funds emerging from a country that has implemented such restrictions as the United States did.
"A ban publicly endorsed by Xi Jinping was instituted on the consumption of almost all wild animals. … There are risks, however, that the economic pressures these actions place on wildlife farmers and traders will drive the lucrative business farther underground, or induce local officials, eager to spur economic recovery or susceptible to bribery, to tolerate it, as occurred in the wake of SARS. … Outside experts, however, question how well the bans are being enforced, and believe they do not go far enough, as demand is still fuelling a transboundary wildlife supply chain in neighbouring countries."
A lot of the tweet mirrors what is described in more detail, and better sources, by Alina Chan in Viral, Search for the Origin of Covid-19. In my opinion a book worth reading, as it doesn't try too hard to point a finger but raises enough circumstantial arguments to support _anything other than a natural origin_ for Covid-19. Either way, CCP has caused enough damage (in my opinion, again) to never be trustworthy again.
Somewhere else in this thread, her medium is linked, and indeed she also writes clear and rational reviews of more recent literature.
After reading it, it seems most likely to me that patient 0 was a person who collected bats for the lab with insufficient safety equipment, but the article itself doesn't really present a strong conclusion.
Other than the second tweet in the thread (which source is questionable, see edit below), no sources are provided. Does anyone have a list of sources for the claims in the remaining eight tweets?
It's a compelling list of "facts" but without sources and an understanding of the science it's difficult to ascertain whether this is a genuinely strong argument by a "blue check mark" academic.
Edit:
This is the Nature editors note on the only sources provided:
"Editors’ note, March 2020 We are aware that this story is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus."
>There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.
Well, 2 things:
1. An animal could be the source of the virus which could be leaked from a lab. Even with the lab leak hypothesis an animal is part of the chain, just not the last step.
2. There is also no evidence that the epidemic had no lab involvement. COVID was never found in any animal from the Huanan market.
> … no evidence that the epidemic had no lab involvement…
"So you simply cannot prove general claims that are negative claims -- one cannot prove that ghosts do not exist; one cannot prove that leprechauns too do not exist. One simply cannot prove a negative and general claim."
You mean it makes the lab leak hypothesis less trustworthy through appeal to authority, or it makes Nature less trustworthy because they made the comment instead of letting the reader make up their own minds based on the paper only?
I recommend reading the Office of the Director of National Intelligence unclassified summary of the assessment on COVID-19 origins. It's over a year old but the analysis hasn't changed much and they do explain how they reached their conclusions. Some sort of lab origin is possible but unproven (and I doubt we'll ever know for sure).
If you ever take something intelligence says seriously that isn't independently verifiable, you're getting your crank yanked. They are professional liars and manipulators.
The main point that no scientists seems to want to mention is the clear cut and well defined conflict of interest in determining the origins.
How would the scientists of the future ask for funding if it turns out they themselves directly caused an epidemic? It is a black eye for science, it provides ammunition to the "anti-science" crowd.
In contrast scientists are in the drivers position if the cause was all natural. Then they can propose to be the "defendenders" of the humanity against the next danger.
No wonder that there is strong headwind against any other narrative. Remember all it takes a single dissenter to bury a paper.
It is the in the vital (short term) interest of every scientist to say that the origin is all natural!
If you read the papers that claim natural origin, these turn out to be extremely weakly argued. A heat-map plot here and there, some evasive language when it comes to evidence. But the quotable conclusion is always formulated much more strongly.
Scientists aren't a monolith though. There few better career boosts than proving everyone else wrong, and the satisfaction of poaching work off a competitor who messed up isn't restricted to any one industry. Research into dangerous viruses isn't going to stop, no matter what happened in Wuhan, and it's far from the only risky work going on in labs around the world anyway.
Whatever about the strength of the natural origin theory, the idea that there's a conspiracy of silence from all the scientists in the world (including ones who would love to give the Chinese authorities a black eye) just doesn't seem plausible. You said it yourself - all it takes is a single dissenter to bury a paper.
Scientists who aren't part of the monolith find themselves pushed out as wacko conspiracy theorists. This happened over and over and over and over and over and over and over again in the past thirty or so months. Even HN took part in this, supporting the depersoning of anyone who dared question the natural origin narrative. Scientists aren't a monolith as long as you include those who have been threatened with dire consequences for not toeing the line. Even now there are still some who want anyone who suggests the possibility of a lab leak origin to be silenced.
Science funding is dominated by industry and academic sources. Academic research departments are funded by industry or by NGOs funded by industry and government. As with any culture, successful people generally know where the third rails are, and where to focus their energies if they just want to have a career. Controversial science is relegated to the fringe by the internal logic of the system. It doesn't require a conspiracy, just an Overton window. Within any large organization there may be malfeasance, corruption, etc, that is widely known or suspected. Yet there are few "whistleblowers". Who wants that fight? Who wants their reputation blemished? Very few.
Even so, if the system isn't hiring people who don't need to be told what to investigate and what to leave alone then the system is doing it wrong. Ideological guardrails and discourse policing take care of the bulk of compliance. The few kooks who insist on honest debate, well, people like Fauci and Francis know what do do about them. The sociopaths at the top have no compunction about ruining careers and make sure that is widely understood. Occasionally they'll kill a chicken while the monkeys watch to remind everyone.
If someone doesn't know this about Science and Scientists now, after cigarettes and cancer, the replication crisis, and now 2+ years of pandemic evidence smacking us in the face, then they don't want to know.
> How would the scientists of the future ask for funding if it turns out they themselves directly caused an epidemic? It is a black eye for science, it provides ammunition to the "anti-science" crowd.
The real black eye for science is the refusal to consider a line of inquiry because the answer might be unacceptable.
> The real black eye for science is the refusal to consider a line of inquiry because the answer might be unacceptable.
Yes, but this is what happens when science and politics occupy the same bed, as they did for COVID. Politics is what made certain answers unacceptable.
This doesn’t convince me because we have a recent covid-related example of scientists making a significant mistake and admitting it: namely, the primary means of transmission. At the beginning of the pandemic, the scientific community argued that transmission was surface-based. As more data came in, it became evident that transmission was aerosol-related. This was a huge mistake with significant implications, but nobody tried to cover it up.
I conclude that scientists are more truth-motivated than you assert.
Admitting scientists were wrong in their claims on science does not hurt societal standing of science or funding. The cost is very low, everybody expects scientists to be wrong on science from time to time.
Admitting scientists may have caused the pandemic is on a whole another level. Societal status and funding may be pulled. The cost is so huge it makes relevant scientists unlikely to admit any of the sort.
They aren't a monolith but there is a pretty large overlap between the set of scientists that would be negatively impacted by major policy changes in virus research and those who's opinion is considered useful in the discussion of possible origins of SARS-CoV-2.
I suspect you are mostly right in that many are more concerned about funding - and publication - at the micro (personal) level, and this might discourage many from going against the establishment armed only with speculation.
As for the scientific establishment (eg the NIH in the USA), it is very politically aware and was apparently determined to speak with a single voice. Somewhat ironically, this may have made it impossible for them to put an end to lab-origin hypotheses, even if they are false.
But scientists aren't in a single domain, they're cut up into biology and physics and etc... And they're further divided into specializations, and then specialties...
And if we don't discount that they're human, they have families, careers, friends, and nations. And at this point we're talking about a pretty narrow cross section of the population, even narrower when you take into account the few that publish, and minute when you finally arrive at who among them can be counted as prime drivers.
And what would the geopolitical consequences be if an objective finger driven by unanimous assent pointed itself at some culprits? All the deaths implicated in the disease, all the destruction, the damage wrought economically - they're culpable for it all. Would it be war or sanctions? Could it be handwaved away?
There's a lot of reasons, at scale, that such data is better kept quiet, and long lists of lots of individuals in many high places which immediately evince one of conflicts of interest if we do take it for granted that it was a fuckup.
You mean the polytomy argument? As I said earlier, it's incredibly weak. They're assuming they can capture the spread of the first human cases in an SIR-type model well enough to recreate the shape of that early phylogenetic tree. During this pandemic, such models haven't shown particularly good accuracy in forecasting case count at a country level, certainly no better than less physical curve-fitting approaches like Youyang Gu's. I see no reason to believe such a model would be accurate on the more difficult problem of SARS-CoV-2's early spread, in an unknown group of people with unknown behaviors, and perhaps different biology for those earliest variants too.
Essentially Pekar's argument is a "two introductions of the gaps"--that if their model of a single introduction doesn't conform to reality, then it must have been two introductions. But the other possibility is simply that their model is wrong. I see no reason to exclude that. Here are some Twitter threads expressing the same concerns in more detail:
Even if the lab leak theory was true and some irresponsible handlers were responsible for it, so what? Science moves and lives on. If we had to throw out every concept that committed some catastrophic failure we'd have nothing - no governments, no religions, etc.
This is only an attack on science if you are already anti-science.
I think a lot of people in the lab leak community are looking for someone to blame, purely out of retribution, which is ultimately pointless.
Ignoring that contingent, it's still important to do a full postmortem after a catastrophe. If a bridge collapses, people don't say "oh well, life moves on". They figured out why it collapsed, and then design the next generation of bridges to not fail in that way. If you don't do the analysis, you can't do the mitigation.
There is no chance, that this is just a call for reform, for working oversight, for not outsourcing to the cheapest bidder, for a outside inquisition to have visits and quality control. For reproduceability? For a limiting of potentially exponetially dangerous research, like we are perfectly willing to push it with nuclear weapons? No, every one opposing my oppinion is a absolute enemy, there is only black and white and the institutions we have are perfect, right now, at this very moment.
All those yells, just from touching the pots.
Sorry, but this absolutist, finalist stating of facts, is verz unscientific in itself. Were does that sentiment, that yelling the loudest and ascribing every oppossition evil motives come from?
Its not very democratic. Not very scientific either.
The early cases were very heavily concentrated around the Huanan wet market, but not around the lab, which is on the other side of the Wuhan, a pretty massive city.[0]
If the virus had come from the lab, you'd expect the early cases to cluster around the lab. Instead, they were centered around a wet market, just like the early cases of the original SARS were back in 2002.
This is completely aside from the other reasons that make a lab leak extremely unlikely. It's public knowledge which viruses the lab in Wuhan works with. The lab regularly publishes its work, lab members go to conferences to present their work, there are international researchers at the institute in Wuhan. There would have been no reason at all for them to hide SARS-CoV-2 prior to the pandemic, and there is simply no shred of evidence that they had SARS-CoV-2.
Finally, I would just encourage anyone who's wondering how much stock to put in Ebright's claims to scroll through his Twitter account. The online persona he cultivates is, to put it very politely, that of a troll.
>If the virus had come from the lab, you'd expect the early cases to cluster around the lab.
No, because it's not proposed that the virus leaked out of the lab building into the nearby air. I presume it's more like a person who worked at the lab getting infected, and then moving around the city as normal, needing only to infect one other person, anywhere in the city.
And that person just happened to go all the way across the city to a wet market that sells the same sorts of animals that caused the original SARS outbreak in 2002?
The earliest known cases are people who worked at the market or lived right next to it. That's exactly what you'd expect for an outbreak caused by animals at the market.
"A news report from Virginia says that two people are dead and 18 have been hospitalized following an outbreak of an unknown respiratory infection at a retirement community. What could it possibly be?"
" The closest known CoV RaTG13 strain (96.2%) to SARS-CoV-2 detected in bat anal swabs have been sequenced at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Wuhan CDC laboratory moved on 2nd December 2019 to a new location near the Huanan market. Such moves can be disruptive for the operations of any laboratory." [0] (page 119)
The Wuhan Institute of Virology, which studied RaTG13, is not the same thing as the Wuhan CDC.
Two points about RaTG13:
1. RaTG13 is not the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2. It's not even the closest known relative any more. A closer relative has since been found in the wild, in bats in Laos.
2. RaTG13 doesn't even exist in live form in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It only exists there as data on a hard drive, obtained by sequencing traces of RNA in a swab taken from a bat in the wild. A replicating form of the virus has never actually obtained. It's much more difficult to isolate a replicating virus than it is to sequence RNA in a sample. In fact, the WIV has only ever isolated three SARS-like viruses, all of which are publicly known and have been heavily publicized by the WIV (because it's a big deal, scientifically, and reflects well on them).
I ask myself whether the Chinese government knows more about the risks of a COVID infection and is therefore trying everything it can to stop it from spreading. Maybe the virus actually leaked and the chemists know something about the long term effects that they do not publicly disclose.
Readit News
In a way, the lab-leak hypothesis is comforting, because it means that nature with its own means did not manage to manufacture such a highly-transmissive disease, despite the facts of modern life, record human population and rates of travel. If it is not lab-made, then nature may do this again soon with another virus.
Sometimes this is indirect; there is some debate on why some Europeans have immunity to HIV, the current hypothesis is that it’s a result of us surviving the Black Plague.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050325234239.h...
"epigenetic modifications, activate cells of the innate immune system, such as monocytes, macrophages and natural killer cells"
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34983348/
I think I'm less optimistic than you in this matter. There's at least one counter-example to that statement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu that has the same order of magnitude of deaths as COVID-19, but in a world where population was ~4x smaller and I'd expect less mobile / interconnected.
Putting that to one side, Spanish flu happened in the context of:
- A society that didn't know viruses existed at all, only bacteria.
- The very recent discovery of aspirin, which was believed to be a wonder drug that could cure anything. Doctors didn't know what doses were safe and had a habit of prescribing lethal overdoses to people suffering from the flu.
- Widespread censorship by the authorities due to WW1. It became known as "Spanish Flu" mostly because the censorship was just less aggressive there, so that's where reports emerged from first.
For tech firm employees systematically censoring reports of bad reactions to vaccines, there are lessons here that still apply to the modern day. Spanish Flu would probably have been less deadly in a society with less censorship, and which was less likely to mass prescribe brand new miracle pharma products.
We are well past the point where nature is our greatest enemy.
A lab leak of such consequences has the attention of every hostile organization out there. Imagine the scale of hurt you could achieve, yourself remaining pretty much immune to detection and prosecution, by doing the same thing but intentionally. Bye-bye unrestricted travel.
Deleted Comment
Lab-leak != Lab-made
Which is the main argument against this kind of function research - there’s little gain compared to the risk.
“We will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in [a type of mammalian cell commonly used in microbiology] and HAE cultures,”
They were denied over Gain of Function concerns, and bam a year later the only Sars virus to be ever observed with those exact human-specific cleavage sites at the S1 S2 junction ravages the planet starting 500m from WIV.
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
But the preponderance of evidence is that the leaked virus was modified before it was leaked. The critical spike protein in SARS_CoV2 is coded uses a sequence of amino acids that has never been seen before in any other coronavirus. I forget the names, but there are certain common amino acids that can be coded using several different functionally-identical DNA (RNA) sequences, and the SARS-CoV2 one looks like the sequences used in labs and humans, and never seen before in natural viruses. One nobel laureate in biology described this as a "smoking gun" that this was a lab leak when they first heard about it.
They have to determine what happened so they can do root cause analysis and institute procedures to make this less likely to occur again.
https://news.yahoo.com/china-locks-down-65-million-095328796...
> It said that outbreaks have been reported in 103 cities, the highest since the early days of the pandemic in early 2020.
Crazy, it's like the rest of the world moved on but China is still in 2020.
For example, nature did not intend to manufacture smallpox, when that became a thing 4-5000 years ago. Instead, some random pox virus (like monkey pox) infected some people and random changes happened to produce smallpox, which became endemic in the human population. Then, another mutation happened that caused hemmorhagic smallpox to become a thing and to start killing people (the vast majority of smallpox strains do not have high death rates, although they can cause bad disability, although no one knows if they would with modern medicine).
So nature can produce anything a human can. But certainly, human intervention to make a disease worse can also make terrible diseases.
"In May [2021], researchers reported that two coronaviruses in dogs recombined in Malaysia. The result was a hybrid that infected eight children."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/science/bat-coronaviruses...
To put it another way, a cell mutates based off of random chance. It doesn't have desires. We only have to go back as far as 1918 to see an example of a virus that could not have been engineered and was highly transmissible and highly deadly. As you say, in the long term that doesn't work out- the virus in that case mutated to be much more mild- which is why you won't see viruses like that surviving for long. But it still doesn't make sense to assume viruses evolve according to a motivation based logic.
I understand that most of the major viral pathogens have emerged in the last 10,000 years, since urban society replaced hunter-gatherer culture.
It has not been difficult to bring what naturally evolved under control in developed countries.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecuri...
Is there any popular discussion or action regarding mitigation of both lab and natural origins for future?
It seems that both avenues are possible. If we know both are possible, that seems like enough knowledge to move forward with exploring possible mitigations for future.
I realise there may be hard reasons why no mitigation is possible, but i just never encounter popular discussion of what to do next.
The responses are effectively inherently opposite hence strong disagreement.
Did that actually help in this case? Or are gain-of-function advocates the science equivalent of employees who want to rewrite your webapp in the language du jour? They say it's for the benefit of the company (humanity) but really what they want is to play with cool toys and get promotions.
The second would be to prohibit gain of function research in general, especially with funds emerging from a country that has implemented such restrictions as the United States did.
"The Contested Origin of SARS-CoV-2" 26 Nov 2021
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2021.2...
Dead Comment
Somewhere else in this thread, her medium is linked, and indeed she also writes clear and rational reviews of more recent literature.
https://ayjchan.medium.com/
https://project-evidence.github.io/
After reading it, it seems most likely to me that patient 0 was a person who collected bats for the lab with insufficient safety equipment, but the article itself doesn't really present a strong conclusion.
"We believe in holding the Chinese government accountable for changes in regulations and poplicies that can prevent another laboratory accident. "
why not focus on international standards?
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2021.2...
Dead Comment
It's a compelling list of "facts" but without sources and an understanding of the science it's difficult to ascertain whether this is a genuinely strong argument by a "blue check mark" academic.
Edit:
This is the Nature editors note on the only sources provided:
"Editors’ note, March 2020 We are aware that this story is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus."
Well, 2 things:
1. An animal could be the source of the virus which could be leaked from a lab. Even with the lab leak hypothesis an animal is part of the chain, just not the last step.
2. There is also no evidence that the epidemic had no lab involvement. COVID was never found in any animal from the Huanan market.
The timing of the A and B lineages spreading at the same time strongly indicates multiple spillover events.
"So you simply cannot prove general claims that are negative claims -- one cannot prove that ghosts do not exist; one cannot prove that leprechauns too do not exist. One simply cannot prove a negative and general claim."
https://www.qcc.cuny.edu/socialsciences/ppecorino/phil_of_re....
What would you accept as evidence of "no lab involvement"?
If I understand correctly, for some reason you find "no lab involvement" for that "last step" implausible.
Why?
"In May, researchers reported that two coronaviruses in dogs recombined in Malaysia. The result was a hybrid that infected eight children."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/science/bat-coronaviruses...
https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/reports-publications/...
Dead Comment
How would the scientists of the future ask for funding if it turns out they themselves directly caused an epidemic? It is a black eye for science, it provides ammunition to the "anti-science" crowd.
In contrast scientists are in the drivers position if the cause was all natural. Then they can propose to be the "defendenders" of the humanity against the next danger.
No wonder that there is strong headwind against any other narrative. Remember all it takes a single dissenter to bury a paper.
It is the in the vital (short term) interest of every scientist to say that the origin is all natural!
If you read the papers that claim natural origin, these turn out to be extremely weakly argued. A heat-map plot here and there, some evasive language when it comes to evidence. But the quotable conclusion is always formulated much more strongly.
Whatever about the strength of the natural origin theory, the idea that there's a conspiracy of silence from all the scientists in the world (including ones who would love to give the Chinese authorities a black eye) just doesn't seem plausible. You said it yourself - all it takes is a single dissenter to bury a paper.
Even so, if the system isn't hiring people who don't need to be told what to investigate and what to leave alone then the system is doing it wrong. Ideological guardrails and discourse policing take care of the bulk of compliance. The few kooks who insist on honest debate, well, people like Fauci and Francis know what do do about them. The sociopaths at the top have no compunction about ruining careers and make sure that is widely understood. Occasionally they'll kill a chicken while the monkeys watch to remind everyone.
If someone doesn't know this about Science and Scientists now, after cigarettes and cancer, the replication crisis, and now 2+ years of pandemic evidence smacking us in the face, then they don't want to know.
what else could you bring up?
The real black eye for science is the refusal to consider a line of inquiry because the answer might be unacceptable.
Yes, but this is what happens when science and politics occupy the same bed, as they did for COVID. Politics is what made certain answers unacceptable.
I conclude that scientists are more truth-motivated than you assert.
Admitting scientists may have caused the pandemic is on a whole another level. Societal status and funding may be pulled. The cost is so huge it makes relevant scientists unlikely to admit any of the sort.
As for the scientific establishment (eg the NIH in the USA), it is very politically aware and was apparently determined to speak with a single voice. Somewhat ironically, this may have made it impossible for them to put an end to lab-origin hypotheses, even if they are false.
Do you see the problem with your reasoning here?
If you say scientists are not a monolith, then you don’t get to make sweeping generalizations about them.
But science isnt a country, most scientists arent politicians and most would prefer the truth to out.
But scientists aren't in a single domain, they're cut up into biology and physics and etc... And they're further divided into specializations, and then specialties...
And if we don't discount that they're human, they have families, careers, friends, and nations. And at this point we're talking about a pretty narrow cross section of the population, even narrower when you take into account the few that publish, and minute when you finally arrive at who among them can be counted as prime drivers.
And what would the geopolitical consequences be if an objective finger driven by unanimous assent pointed itself at some culprits? All the deaths implicated in the disease, all the destruction, the damage wrought economically - they're culpable for it all. Would it be war or sanctions? Could it be handwaved away?
There's a lot of reasons, at scale, that such data is better kept quiet, and long lists of lots of individuals in many high places which immediately evince one of conflicts of interest if we do take it for granted that it was a fuckup.
What didn't you like about Pekar 2022?
Essentially Pekar's argument is a "two introductions of the gaps"--that if their model of a single introduction doesn't conform to reality, then it must have been two introductions. But the other possibility is simply that their model is wrong. I see no reason to exclude that. Here are some Twitter threads expressing the same concerns in more detail:
https://twitter.com/NimwegenLab/status/1563490916006264833
https://twitter.com/nizzaneela/status/1509431997713764352
This is only an attack on science if you are already anti-science.
Ignoring that contingent, it's still important to do a full postmortem after a catastrophe. If a bridge collapses, people don't say "oh well, life moves on". They figured out why it collapsed, and then design the next generation of bridges to not fail in that way. If you don't do the analysis, you can't do the mitigation.
All those yells, just from touching the pots.
Sorry, but this absolutist, finalist stating of facts, is verz unscientific in itself. Were does that sentiment, that yelling the loudest and ascribing every oppossition evil motives come from?
Its not very democratic. Not very scientific either.
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If the virus had come from the lab, you'd expect the early cases to cluster around the lab. Instead, they were centered around a wet market, just like the early cases of the original SARS were back in 2002.
This is completely aside from the other reasons that make a lab leak extremely unlikely. It's public knowledge which viruses the lab in Wuhan works with. The lab regularly publishes its work, lab members go to conferences to present their work, there are international researchers at the institute in Wuhan. There would have been no reason at all for them to hide SARS-CoV-2 prior to the pandemic, and there is simply no shred of evidence that they had SARS-CoV-2.
Finally, I would just encourage anyone who's wondering how much stock to put in Ebright's claims to scroll through his Twitter account. The online persona he cultivates is, to put it very politely, that of a troll.
0. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abp8715
No, because it's not proposed that the virus leaked out of the lab building into the nearby air. I presume it's more like a person who worked at the lab getting infected, and then moving around the city as normal, needing only to infect one other person, anywhere in the city.
The earliest known cases are people who worked at the market or lived right next to it. That's exactly what you'd expect for an outbreak caused by animals at the market.
There appears to be consensus on the latter: the wet market (although some do wonder about the mystery illness in Summer of 2019, in US).
https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/07/11/2-dead-unknown-respirat...
"A news report from Virginia says that two people are dead and 18 have been hospitalized following an outbreak of an unknown respiratory infection at a retirement community. What could it possibly be?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Detrick#2019_closure_and_...
So, were these "mystery illnesses" caused by vaccinated US military personnel who work in F.D. cranking around Washington DC metro area?
[0] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/final-j...
Two points about RaTG13:
1. RaTG13 is not the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2. It's not even the closest known relative any more. A closer relative has since been found in the wild, in bats in Laos.
2. RaTG13 doesn't even exist in live form in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It only exists there as data on a hard drive, obtained by sequencing traces of RNA in a swab taken from a bat in the wild. A replicating form of the virus has never actually obtained. It's much more difficult to isolate a replicating virus than it is to sequence RNA in a sample. In fact, the WIV has only ever isolated three SARS-like viruses, all of which are publicly known and have been heavily publicized by the WIV (because it's a big deal, scientifically, and reflects well on them).
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...
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