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Comment by ajna91 | Hacker News Reader

A thread by an epidemiologist on the new results:

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1223305946723704832

This has been pointed out in previous threads, but this Twitter is full of alarmist unscientific BS and it appears to be spammed with some regularity on HN recently.

This particular person doesn't seem to be an example of that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Ding

He's also calling for confirmation before everyone goes nuts:

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1223325141364592640

That largely depends on the credibility of the source of the Twitter posts. The author in the referenced thread does seem to be a legitimate commentator on the subject.

The Twitter user seems legit. The Internet in general is full of BS yet we don't guilt-by-association the entire Internet.

We should question the veracity of the information presented. The nature of this fluid topic is a good example. I read the first part, a few days ago, and most of the information presented tallied with what was presented elsewhere. However, since then Dr. Eric Ding's profile has risen in prominence and the Twitter feed is commingling speculation with credentials, so it is entirely justified to question the validity of your source.

It would seem that there were doubts around the content in the Wikipedia entry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

From 2K followers to 64K+ followers in less than 7 days! https://socialblade.com/twitter/user/drericding

Alarmist, yes. Unscientific BS, not really. He’s got the background to make comments from a position of legitimacy. If we can’t trust this guy, even with some healthy skepticism, who should we trust?

https://scholar.harvard.edu/ericding/home

Edit: by trust, I don’t mean blindly believe, but mean one should consider his comments seriously.

From that link, it seems like he is commenting far outside of his expertise in "behavioral interventions" to improve things like "medicare cost."

Don't trust anyone, just weigh their claims and their background. In this case, I have yet to see people with serious credentials in genomics make this claim (outside of the original scientists who published the paper relating it to HIV - IIT is impressive, but I don't really know how to assess their credentials writ large)

How is this outside his area of expertise? He has a doctorate in epidemiology.

He graduated from The Johns Hopkins University with Honors in Public Health and Phi Beta Kappa. He then completed his dual doctorate in epidemiology and doctorate in nutrition, as the youngest graduate to complete his dual program at age 23 from Harvard SPH. Teaching at Harvard for over 15 years, he has advised and mentored 2 dozen students, and lectured in more than a dozen graduate and undergraduate courses, for which he received the Derek Bok Distinction in Teaching Award from Harvard College.

What are the geopolitical ramifications if this is indeed a bioweapon?

Perhaps the US and EU will put aside squabbles caused by the trade war to have a united front against China?

I don't think it will be talked about in that way. Especially if this is a bioweapon created in China which accidentally escaped. No one wants the dirty laundry spilled of all the countries who are doing bioweapon research. China is too powerful economically and surely has too much dirt on everyone else to go down alone. So I believe the official position will be that it's either not engineered at all ("inconclusive"), or just an unfortunate accident related to legitimate non-weapon research. Worst case scenario is US, EU, etc. do a little finger wagging that China needs to "stop eating bats" and then it will be let go. Of course, that's just the official/public position.

China is a signatory to the Biological Weapons Convention [1]. The US State Department regularly issues a compliance report about it (and other international agreements). Here [2] is how it summarized China's compliance in August 2019:

"Information indicates that the People’s Republic of China (China) engaged during the reporting period in biological activities with potential dual-use applications, which raises concerns regarding its compliance with the BWC. In addition, the United States does not have sufficient information to determine whether China eliminated its assessed biological warfare (BW) program, as required under Article II of the Convention."

(That's followed by some more details, which you can read about in [2].)

Given this ongoing scrutiny, it would be very surprising if a smoking gun that the PRC has in fact been developing bioweapons were just swept under the rug.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Convention

[2] https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Compliance-...

One of the issues in treaty monitoring for bioweapons is that so much research is inherently dual-use. The CDC synthesized Spanish flu and infected primates to study why it was so lethal.. they've even tweaked regular strains of flu to make them more lethal, in order to study what genetic factors influence virulence and mortality. There are legitimate, compelling reasons to make even genetically engineered pathogens. Even straight-up engineered bioweapons can be used to study defenses.

Just do not leak and not under communist rule.

Even if this is not, you just cannot trust them. They leak sars in their Beijing lab

“ In fact, the SARS virus had ‘escaped’ multiple times from a lab in Beijing, according to the Nature article.”

I'm making the assumption that there's a MAD situation here with regards to revealing bioweapon programs. I am assuming every major economy has clandestine bioweapon programs and that every major economy has the dirt on everyone else's bioweapons programs, regardless of treaties. So if the US, or someone else, comes out hard against China for an alleged bioweapon program, then China will release information about US programs. That is why, in my opinion, the media headlines and public positions of the major players will be a polite fiction. The truth may wind up buried in some report somewhere, but it won't make the same kinds of headlines that "kooky bat eating" makes.

Maybe this is naive, but I would assume if it was a bio-weapon it would be a lot more deadly.

Viruses which kill too quickly don't spread widely enough to kill a lot of people.

Good viruses kill after a few days of showing few (if any) symptoms so that they can maximise their spread.

This is the difference between epidemic and pandemic viral contagions.

This virus spreads quickly (check) but has a mortality rate of 2%, mostly the old and already immunocompromised. If that's a bioweapon it's a pretty ineffective one.

2% so far, it's very early in the lifecycle of this epidemic and most people go days without showing any symptoms.

The mortality rate will rapidly increase as it spreads to areas where it can overwhelm the local infrastructure. Not every country is capable of creating hospitals in 6 days like China, and China has a lot of experience responding to these crises since the Sars days.

We are only a month in, it's too early to really count mortality.

It might not be a bioweapon. It might be an economic weapon.

If you want to extinct homo sapiens you should probably make a virus that infects everybody and has as little symptoms as possible and then kills them a year later.

We don't know yet if this virus has any long-term consequences. HIV would seem harmless if we estimated its effects after 1 month.

But I don't think bioweapons need to be deadly. If you can make a virus that kills 2% of people but shuts down global trade with your main economic competitor for example - that's quite useful (if you don't care for morality of course).

I'm not persuaded it's human-created, but it's a possibility.

But the point of a bio weapon is not to kill everyone,just your enemy. So i guess you would want it to be very deadly and not spread to far. And i imagine you would want to primarily take out young healthy people (soldiers) not the eldery and sickly. (I assume)

Funny, I would have assumed the opposite. Nobody wins a war by releasing a doomsday virus that indiscriminately kills 5% of the world. But they can win battles by temporarily incapacitating an army, with no fear of loss of their own life if the winds blow in the opposite direction.

Well, it's a Made in China bio Weapon..

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