The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic could have been prevented | Hacker News Reader

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic could have been prevented

virology.ws

62 pointsaberoham105 comments

I’m not sure why this was flagged Vincent Racaniello is a pretty well known immunologist he is the one behind the discovery of PVR (the discovery of the polio receptor allowed his team to develop a technique for animal models for viruses that only infect humans such as polio which is still used today to study diseases that do not have other natural hosts) and the mechanisms for interferon immunity in viruses.

I really hope that this is the lesson we get from the Covid-19 pandemic. To develop a series of easily manufacturable antivirals against all potentially pandemic causing viruses. It will cost a couple of billions but Covid-19 alone has cost us trillions already.

I hope that, as a result of this, those in power realize that we need to invest more in biotech. It seems to me that government pour too much money into things like deep learning research (which will serve to eliminate jobs and enable a surveillance state), and not enough in research that could save lives and eliminate illnesses.

We really should have the capability to develop and mass-manufacture antivirals much faster, ideally in the span of a few weeks. We understand the basic physics involved, we can do protein folding and I assume we can simulate how well synthetic molecules bind to proteins. Why don't we have this technological capability? It seems it really should be within the realm of what we're capable of achieving.

This is exactly the goal of DARPA's Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program.

https://www.darpa.mil/program/pandemic-prevention-platform

I am constantly surprised how often the answer to why aren't we funding this really ambitious but also really impactful project? is yup, DARPA is funding it, but nobody else is, and we probably should increase DARPA funding by 10x.

Check out this 2005 statement from George W. Bush with some very similar ideas: https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/20...

Some notable passages:

> At this moment, there is no pandemic influenza in the United States or the world. But if history is our guide, there is reason to be concerned. In the last century, our country and the world have been hit by three influenza pandemics -- and viruses from birds contributed to all of them. The first, which struck in 1918, killed over half-a-million Americans and more than 20 million people across the globe. One-third of the U.S. population was infected, and life expectancy in our country was reduced by 13 years. The 1918 pandemic was followed by pandemics in 1957 and 1968 which killed tens of thousands of Americans, and millions across the world.

> Three years ago, the world had a preview of the disruption an influenza pandemic can cause, when a previously unknown virus called SARS appeared in rural China.

...

> The second part of our strategy is to protect the American people by stockpiling vaccines and antiviral drugs, and accelerating development of new vaccine technologies. One of the challenges presented by a pandemic is that scientists need a sample of the new strain before they can produce a vaccine against it. This means it is difficult to produce a pandemic vaccine before the pandemic actually appears -- and so there may not be a vaccine capable of fully immunizing our citizens from the new influenza virus during the first several months of a pandemic.

...

> To protect the greatest possible number of Americans during a pandemic, the cornerstone of our strategy is to develop new technologies that will allow us to produce new vaccines rapidly. If a pandemic strikes our country -- if a pandemic strikes, our country must have a surge capacity in place that will allow us to bring a new vaccine online quickly and manufacture enough to immunize every American against the pandemic strain.

...

> Since American lives depend on rapid advances in vaccine production technology, we must fund a crash program to help our best scientists bring the next generation of technology online rapidly. I'm asking Congress for $2.8 billion to accelerate development of cell-culture technology. By bringing cell-culture technology from the research laboratory into the production line, we should be able to produce enough vaccine for every American within six months of the start of a pandemic.

So that kind of reminds me of this comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-11-21

I really don't get how people assume that the US (or anyone else for that matter) was just sitting on its hands this entire time not doing anything at all about fatal, potentially-epidemic viruses. As a matter of fact, we have been developing antivirals.

The new hotness in COVID antivirals is remdesivir, which was originally developed in 2015 or so to treat Ebola and Marburg viruses. Marburg and, to an even greater extent, Ebola viruses have caused deadly outbreaks and epidemics in recent years.

Tamiflu was also developed in the late 1990's as an antiviral targeted against influenza. We also have influenza vaccines that we update on an annual basis. Influenza is a massive area of research and public health work, largely inspired by the legacy of the 1918 "Spanish" flu pandemic as well as intermittent scares and smaller pandemics since then, including the H5N1 "bird" and H1N1 "swine" flu scares of the 00's--the latter of which did formally reach pandemic status.

HIV is one of the fundamentally scariest viruses out there, and enormous resources have been invested in it for decades to develop effective antiviral drugs and provide them at large scale. Starting in 2003, the US government deployed massive amounts of humanitarian aid under the PEPFAR program to curb the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa, saving 18 million human lives.

Tens of billions of dollars were invested in these efforts. We got kicked in the nuts with a fucking coronavirus anyway. The fact of the matter is that Mother Nature is just a real bitch sometimes.

>Tens of billions of dollars were invested in these efforts. We got kicked in the nuts with a fucking coronavirus anyway. The fact of the matter is that Mother Nature is just a real bitch sometimes

Almost none of those billions were spent on sars-like coronaviruses though, despite the risk being well established after the last time mother nature was a bitch. Antivirals are only being developed if they can immediately turn a profit.

> Almost none of those billions were spent on sars-like coronaviruses though

That’s just not true. And at any rate, you’re only saying that with perfect hindsight, ignoring the other pandemic threats and actual, not potential epidemics that were addressed.

There’s an equally likely scenario as the one we find ourselves in now where research prioritizes coronaviruses and, as a result, there’s an Ebola or influenza pandemic instead. Or maybe we manage to avert first-world pandemics altogether at the expense of simply letting millions of people in the Global South die from HIV/AIDS.

> Antivirals are only being developed if they can immediately turn a profit.

Again this is ludicrous. Developing and producing antiviral drugs to treat Ebola and HIV in sub-Saharan Africa wasn’t done for profit. There’s no profit to be made there anyway, certainly not compared to wealthier markets like Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, or South Korea that faced coronavirus outbreaks in the past. Though, as it turns out, one of the more promising COVID antivirals, remdesivir, was originally intended to treat Ebola in the first place.

>That’s just not true. And at any rate, you’re only saying that with perfect hindsight, ignoring the other pandemic threats and actual, not potential epidemics that were addressed

This has been known as one of the major pandemic threats for quite some time now. Additional resources should have been spent preparing for it, but that doesn't require diverting resources from other threats.

>Or maybe we manage to avert first-world pandemics altogether at the expense of simply letting millions of people in the Global South die from HIV/AIDS

HIV/AIDS has killed around 800,000 people so far. If you're viewing this from a utilitarian view that is clearly the right choice. This pandemic already has the potential of killing more people in the Southern Hemisphere than HIV/AIDS has so far. And again, developing medicine for other diseases is still possible.

>Developing and producing antiviral drugs to treat Ebola and HIV in sub-Saharan Africa wasn’t done for profit.

Providing some relief for those in impoverished areas does not stop drug companies from making huge profits elsewhere. The US has already spent billions stockpiling for Ebola, and HIV spreads in wealthy countries as well.

> HIV/AIDS has killed around 800,000 people so far.

That’s in a single year, actually. And the annual death rate was significantly higher before PEPFAR.

I triple checked my source for that, I don't know how I still fucked that up. I blame tiredness, but my mistake.

Even if it could have been prevented, there is significant probability that another novel virus could arise from bat or other reservoirs in the future. Similar to how H1N1 better prepared certain countries who experienced it, this could be the wake-up call that was needed to help future generations survive a much worse virus by getting them more used to a life where being in a crowd is not normal. There are very few people alive who lived through the previous 1918 pandemic. This is our 1918 or, at least, a strong warning.

Are you implying that the 1918 pandemic resulted in some sort of lesson learned or a fundamental shift in culture?

If anything, it actually seems to have resulted in a decade of partying.

We are all living through this in real-time. A few of us even know people who have died from COVID-19 [1]. For the first time in a long time, on a large scale, many people are experiencing the effects of normalcy bias, even if they don't it is called that particular term. [2] Good or bad, we are all seeing the results of having a global supply chain. For the first time in a long time, most of us know people who are unemployed for reasons that are beyond their control. We are seeing acutely the benefits of a social safety net. [3] For the first time in a very long time, with few exceptions, people are not experiencing FOMO as it relates to the innocent but probing "what are you doing this weekend?" or "what did you do this weekend?", as people simply cannot "go out on a Friday" like they did just a couple months ago. The whole casual Tinder hookup culture is undergoing a sea change in the temporary era of social distancing, as kissing is a known probable vector for virus transmission. Let alone, having a date in a restaurant is a vaguer memory every passing day.

The Internet, broadly speaking, is fueling a return to creativity not seen widely since the days of MySpace. Creativity almost always thrives under constraint. For example, Russian isolation art [4].

Finally, for those who are saying we'll forget about this in two years... (normalcy bias) what if there is ultimately no successful vaccine and just a set of treatments that are fairly to moderately successful once you are infected?

[1] > The CDC's Pandemic Flu Storybook provides readers with a look at the impact pandemic flu events have had on both survivors and the families and friends of non-survivors. These stories are not folklore, but personal recollections.

https://www.cdc.gov/publications/panflu/stories/survived.htm...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/business/europe-coronavir...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/25/world/europe/russia-Faceb...

There was no vaccine for the Spanish Flu either. We didn't even know what caused the flu at the time, had no particular reason other than the course of past pandemics to believe it would recede, and in many places got hit with 3 waves of it. But once it did recede (and in some places even before it receded!) people were chomping at the bit to go out.

It just seems unrealistic to propose that, after humanity survived plague and smallpox and tuberculosis, a disease less deadly than all of them will be what ends our general willingness to physically interact with each other.

> our general willingness to physically interact with each other

In the best outcome, there is a successful vaccine. Even Introverts Gone Wild. The Roaring Twenties all over again, as another commenter mentioned.

In the worst outcome, we learn to live with COVID-19 or its offshoots, forcing each person to take into a risk calculation and mitigation measures for meeting others, especially in crowds.

In all outcomes, humanity will survive. Even if the Contagion virus, which was modeled after the Nipah virus with 80%+ mortality rates in certain break outs, becomes a reality in the future, there will always be survivors.

The Roaring Twenties happened in the absence of a vaccine or even pharmaceutical treatment. Every person was forced to take a risk calculation, and for most people the result of that calculation was "idk epidemics happen sometimes let's go dancing". Unless the average person has become radically more risk averse in the past century, we'll be prepared to ignore the virus in the medium to long term, no matter how good our response is now.

I don’t think this question came out right. I was not downplaying the severity of the current situation in any way, shape, or form.

I was genuinely asking if there were actual tangible effects post-1918 pandemic.

My cynical view is that no matter how long the current crisis lasts – 6 months or 6 years, or more, civilization has a notoriously bad long term memory and the ruling class has major incentives to help them forget.

My optimistic view of the current situation, is that it shifts some leverage to the working class similar to what happened during and shortly after the plague.

Thanks for the clarification. I do not have an answer since I have not researched it or yet read the John Barry book about 1918. However, the epidemic will be forgotten, assuming a safe, effective vaccine is found. In a few years time after worldwide vaccine deployment and ongoing international joint efforts to proactively fight emerging and unknown viruses, there might be an annual flashback on International COVID-19 Remembrance Day. There will be moments of silence and then normalcy straight thereafter. Adults who grew up during the era as kids might talk about it as a way to bond during in-person or VR (not for safety, the Metaverse will not be denied) dates. And then the next threat will arise and the cycle will repeat.

"the ruling class has major incentives to help them forget"

> Until then, get ready, my friends. What is about to be unleashed on American society will be the greatest campaign ever created to get you to feel normal again. It will come from brands, it will come from government, it will even come from each other, and it will come from the left and from the right. We will do anything, spend anything, believe anything, just so we can take away how horribly uncomfortable all of this feels. There will be an all-out blitz to make you believe you never saw what you saw.

https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2020/04/14/gaslighting-coro...

It did. About a decade afterwards, the first flu vaccines were invented, and the legacy of the "Spanish flu" frightened people for decades, leading to strong, proactive measures, albeit mostly against influenza viruses.

This is by by Vincent Racaniello, a professor of Microbiology & Immunology at Columbia University.

I highly recommend his podcast, This Week in Virology, aka TWiV.

Anybody have transcripts of the best TWiV episodes?

> Anybody have transcripts of the best TWiV episodes?

Youtube STT is pretty good. You can open the autogenerated transcripts on youtube page, select all and copy them to a file.

https://ccm.net/faq/40644-how-to-get-the-transcript-of-a-you...

Second the recommendation. I've been watching his virology lectures. Teaches you a lot about viruses, although it sometimes contains organic chemistry that I don't know about, but outside of that it's great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3NhPgOoX4&list=PLGhmZX2NKi...

I wish this was included in the post. Among the first things I do when I read these articles were to search for author credentials, and I couldn't find one in that article.

This posts says in passing without further explanation that the NIH is "under-funded". I looked up their budget, they get roughly 40 Billion dollars a year. I'm not sure what rational one uses to call that underfunded but that doesn't seem like they are some small agency starved for money.

> This posts says in passing without further explanation that the NIH is "under-funded". I looked up their budget, they get roughly 40 Billion dollars a year. I'm not sure what rational one uses to call that underfunded but that doesn't seem like they are some small agency starved for money.

Compare the cost of this kind of pandemic, which was generally agreed as likely to happen at some point.

Or consider it in a per capita context -- about US$100 per citizen of the USA.

Given this, and given what the USA spends most of its money on, I agree with TFA - the NIH is woefully underfunded.

Guys, this is a natural disaster. The blame game about causality is fucking stupid. Mitigation and response is all that matters because it’s all that’s actually under our (humanity’s) control.

> this is a natural disaster

True, but it’s been frustratingly exacerbated and perpetuated by corrupt private interests and fundamentally unqualified leadership. I agree that our focus should be on mitigation and response, but the genesis of this debacle is fair game, particularly in an election year.

The Official US death toll just surpassed the Vietnam War count, and that figure is widely speculated to be underreported. Not to mention that health experts are warning of a second wave in the winter, when Americans travel the most.

People have every right to know exactly how the US got its butt kicked by the worst public health crisis in a century.

Even to the degree that's the case, "failing to accurately guess the taxonomic category of the next virus to cause a pandemic" is a really dumb criticism. Based on the evidence prior to 2019--hell, even prior to about February of this year--coronaviruses didn't really seem like that much more of a potential threat than influenza or maybe Ebola.

If you want to criticize the US government, criticize them for depleting the Strategic National Stockpile (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_National_Stockpile), maintaining pointless and counterproductive regulatory barriers against meaningful testing until it was too late, not listening to early warning signs from China and Taiwan, not effectively coordinating between local, state, and federal agencies, allowing the CDC to lose focus by wasting resources on merely metaphorical "epidemics" like obesity and gun violence, or having a political culture more focused on partisan bickering and gainsaying than on competent governance. But please, don't criticize them for not being clairvoyant enough to proactively cure coronaviruses.

>Vietnam War count

What count? The number of American death? It's the least of concerns if think about the total civilian death.

There is next time, you know. Something has to change, and that means admitting that you might have to change.

Indeed. But should we not even discuss, instead, about something like this?

One of the treating physicians, Dr. Li Wenliang, warned some colleagues about the new illness on December 31. Instead of spreading the word about the new pathogen and dispatching the country’s top infectious disease detectives to Wuhan, the police arrested Dr. Li and accused him of “spreading rumors.” He died on February 7 from the coronavirus that he contracted while treating patients. It took China’s president Xi Jinping until January 7 to order his top medical officials to investigate the outbreak. They publicly denied it was communicable person-to-person. That allowed Chinese lunar New Year celebrations and holiday breaks to go ahead as planned, sending infected people from Wuhan around the country and across the planet.

https://lithub.com/on-the-near-impossibility-of-planning-for...

China notified the WHO on the same day, December 31.

The WHO did not deny person-to-person transmission. They said there was no direct evidence yet.

After China locked down on January 23, some countries took months before acting.

At least they had the excuse of being the first who this happened to.

Germany has had (mostly contained) Covid cases since Jan 27, and there's been community spread in Europe since February. Where China (supossedly) had lunar New Year celebrations, we had carnival celebrations with hundreds of thousands. And Germans along with half of Europe went skiing in the Alps, right next to what was at the time the epicenter of the disease.

An earthquake or volcanic eruption is a natural disaster - there is nothing that can be done to stop them from happening and they are largely unpredictable.

The Covid virus started naturally but that it was allowed to turn into a pandemic was caused by negligence and corruption. Those are the things that we must address. Calling it a pure act of force majeure will result in lessons not being learned and this problem happening again unnecessarily.

We, in Asia learned a lot during the SARS and many countries on this side of the world are already well on their way to eradicating the virus within our communities. Unfortunately China covered up and suppressed their knowledge of this virus which delayed other country's responses. Additionally, the WHO dragging their feet and doing engage in pointless politics, such as refusing to acknowledge Taiwan's existence, resulted in wasted knowledge.

There's thousand such threats to humanity that need to be prevented even right now. The real problem is determining which threat is real and prioritising. Think of it like you are a celebrity. You recieve thousands of threats daily, most of these are just threats which will never realise. The problem is identifying which ones will and acting on those to prevent them.

I suppose if you already have a grudge against the US you can pick and choose which facts you focus on to try to piece together a narrative that blames the US for this... But of course that narrative is extremely flimsy.

Assigning blame to any one country for a pandemic which is affecting literally the entire world is petty and disingenuous.

All countries on Earth could have done more to prevent this.

I don't think preexisting grudges against the USA are necessary for thinking the USA has really dropped the ball here. Home to some of the most advanced medical research, self-appointed world protector, vast financial resources.

TFA wasn't assigning blame for the pandemic per se, from my reading, but was pointing out the effects could have been mitigated had earlier (2003+, 2012+) research not been abandoned -- noting that it was abandoned not because anyone in the field didn't think it would be useful one day (experts were sure we'd have more of these types of viruses, with pandemic risks) but because it wasn't financially attractive to for-profit pharma.

> All countries on Earth could have done more to prevent this.

For most of the 190+ countries on the planet, that would be true for very small values of 'more'.

> I don't think preexisting grudges against the USA are necessary for thinking the USA has really dropped the ball here. Home to some of the most advanced medical research, self-appointed world protector, vast financial resources.

Sure.

> the effects could have been mitigated had earlier (2003+, 2012+) research not been abandoned -- noting that it was abandoned not because anyone in the field didn't think it would be useful one day (experts were sure we'd have more of these types of viruses, with pandemic risks) but because it wasn't financially attractive to for-profit pharma.

I don't think it's just profit motive that caused those lines of research to be dropped. SARS was effectively eradicated and MERS was mostly contained. Sure there was a pandemic risk, but there were also pandemic risks with influenza and ebola, both of which saw lots of research and active countermeasures. Meanwhile, HIV/AIDS was spreading to the tune of over a million cases per year. If you're a rational, altruistic person trying to make a decision about where to focus investment in antiviral research at this point in time, you had a lot of reasons to invest in HIV, a lot of reasons to invest in influenza, and maybe only a few long-shot reasons to invest in Ebola or coronaviruses. At its peak HIV was an immediate death sentence that over a million people on Earth got every year. I think it would have been a hard sell at the time to try and divert funds away from addressing that problem just in case there was a sequel to SARS that couldn't be stopped the same way SARS was.

You're right - it wasn't entirely profit motive, but that was a non-trivial component of many of the decisions. Trying to generalise the actions of the medical & pharmaceutical research and industry components as a whole is necessarily fraught.

There's news, though how much I trust I am not sure, coming out of the USA since COVID19 started, that various pandemic response teams, earlier research, etc - had been abandoned only very recently.

Ebola etc - well, we're going off at a tangent, but practically that kind of very fast acting, very high mortality rate pathogen is relatively easy to stop, if for no other reason than most people are going to be sufficiently petrified of their organs dissolving, brutal pain, and almost certain death. It's been noted before that ebola is too effective to cause a pandemic.

HIV - treatments are available now, and you're right, it was (up until 2019) a bigger risk than COVID, but I'm sure there's some political and social resistance to funding a disease that still has various stigmas associated with it. I guess part of that social mindset is a feeling by most people that they can't possibly get HIV.

But, yes, rational and altruistic - I know we're not either of those things by and large. But if you asked your average USA citizen now if they wish NIH had been funded at something > $100 per person, I reckon you'd get a resounding affirmative.

> It's been noted before that ebola is too effective to cause a pandemic.

Something we can all be thankful for. It should be noted that SARS didn’t cause a pandemic, either.

Without the benefit of hindsight, TFA’s argument that “there should have been work into vaccines and cures for SARS-type viruses just in case one of them ends up being a pandemic threat” could have just as easily been applied to Ebola. Ebola and SARS were never pandemic viruses, but the notion of a less deadly but more easily transmitted form of Ebola is a lot scarier than what we ended up with: a less deadly but more easily transmitted form of SARS.

> But, yes, rational and altruistic - I know we're not either of those things by and large. But if you asked your average USA citizen now if they wish NIH had been funded at something > $100 per person, I reckon you'd get a resounding affirmative.

And I think that’s something we can stand to learn from this. I think my overall point is that we can learn from our mistakes without playing the blame game over how they happened in the first place.

> Something we can all be thankful for. It should be noted that SARS didn’t cause a pandemic, either.

Well no, but we didn't know it wouldn't at the time, of course. Which isn't really the point.

TFA's argument only makes objective sense in hindsight - after many missed opportunities, bungling, false starts, etc have manifested. That TFA only points this out after all these mistakes are made and the costs are being borne is a truism, not an astute observation.

> ... the notion of a less deadly but more easily transmitted form of Ebola is a lot scarier than what we ended up with ...

I totally disagree.

Ebola, as mentioned earlier, is sufficiently brutal, and known to be so, that it takes itself out of circulation relatively quickly and scares the living shinola out of the candidate carriers, so it dies out really quickly.

COVID19 OTOH has yet to be really experienced by most people, directly or indirectly, so the 20+ day incubation, and weird claims of mild flu-like and other misdirections are in its favour. (Excuse implicit anthropomorphism.)

And if we want to talk about something less deadly than Ebola, it's a very crowded field.

AFAICT Ebola's officially taken < 20,000 people (I may be wildly wrong here - it's hard to find good numbers). SARS-CoV-2 has (as of 2020-05-05) already taken an order of magnitude more than that - 252,000, and that's likely an under-estimate.

It certainly sounds like you have a pre-existing grudge, so I suppose this supports what I'm saying.

Why didn't the EU pour more resources into treatments and vaccines? I think I'm going to blame them.

See how that works?

Hey, can you please not post/argue in the flamewar style on HN? It's not what this site is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.

I fear that this pandemic eventually passes and we learn nothing from it.

In fairness, over the long run, we don't really "learn" anything from any major world events. Human nature is human nature, and we'll always prioritize the immediate threats over something vague and in the future. It's why climate change is virtually inevitable.

The most likely outcome, i'm afraid

No it couldn't have been prevented under the current system of global capitalism. No market forces means no research done by private companies. This kind of forward thinking project requires billions of dollars of funding by the government into large-scale public programs - something the US public has been allergic to since the 80s.

Preventing another pandemic means rethinking how the incentives in this current system are structured.

I agree that it's a matter of changing the incentives. It seems possible though. Governments are pulling trillions of dollars out of thin air for relief measures. They have the ability to print money and have been expanding the money supply since there has been money. It's a matter of allocating said money to the right things. Maybe instead of keeping zombie companies alive through zero-interest debt, we should be letting badly managed companies die, and fund critical research instead, as well as infrastructure projects. That would create jobs and help us build a better future.

There's an easier way to prevent animal nexus illnesses. This includes SARS, COVID, MERS, Ebola, E Coli, and many others. This change would have a byproduct of massively reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving the life expectancy of billions of people.

Unfortunately there is no sign people will do this.

It requires a switch to a plant based diet.

It's really a shame that so few people will consider a change that would personally benefit them and everyone around them.

EDIT: Instead of downvoting, why not respond? I'm happy to hear your alternate opinion.

It’s been horrifying to read about the slaughter of thousands upon thousands of pigs by allowing them to cook alive in their pens, simply because of a “drop in demand.”

If people want to understand the nihilistic impulses behind some of those pushing to “reopen the economy,” they’d do well to observe how livestock are being treated in this moment of crisis. The belief in their entitlement to impose misery and death on life that’s “beneath them” isn’t limited to animals.

> switch to a plant based diet

It amazes how incendiary this is. People even on HN will frequently respond to such a thing by boasting with adolescent glee how much meat they eat.

It's easy to feel like we live in an advanced era with our internet and gadgets, but I often think about how far we still have to go as a species.

To our credit, it was only yesteryear that our tools were stone and fur and tribes. Not easy to evolve past that.

You imply that people dismiss vegan diets out of habits and not because of the shoddy science, bad health outcomes, and all of the lies coming from this cult.

Cult! Ha!

I believe you need to have some sort of privilege to switch to a plant based diet. It's not cheap, especially in america where fast food is so accessible, cheap, and satisfying. Fresh produce is expensive and calories per dollar doesnt make any sense. Sure beans and grain sounds great, but in practice gets boring very quickly.

I agree with you that switching to a plant based diet is better for the environment and would prevent 99% of these diseases, but most people simply dont have the resources to do so, and the cultural dependence on meat will be near impossible to change.

> Sure beans and grain sounds great, but in practice gets boring very quickly.

That is basically what Indian food is, and I assure you it's far from boring. Almost too exciting sometimes, IMO.

There's no way it's more expensive in a free (with externalities priced-in) market. Meat eats plants in a very lossy fashion. The main problem for your average Joe is that it's quite hard to get started cooking tasty meals this way. I've tried many times and I can kinda manage with these frozen "patties" and such but it's just hard to flip thousands of years of cooking tradition. You can tell when you have some Ethiopian or Indian veggie food that it's been honed to perfection over centuries. Where I'm from all the dishes include meat or animal fat/broth which is honestly even harder to replace than the protein.

When you go from chicken broth or bacon fat to a vegetable broth or coconut butter, it's just a jump too far to make the dish still make any sense and that's the kind of moments where most people give up.

Most historical foodways across the world involve plant-centered diets providing most sustenance for the majority of the population. We've lost these foodways in the USA, but they're not resource intensive and are, if anything, better suited to mass production and distribution than meats.

The issue is that people don't like how they taste compared to meat.

Given that consumption isn't the only way that disease spreads from animals to humans, you're missing the step two of "exterminate all non-human animals".

Or think about just ending domestication of animals full stop. Maybe it's having grown up without pets but I don't understand the need.

Dairy-eating vegetarian here, but I disagree.

1) The vast majority of consumed meat comes from animals that have so closely co-evolved with humans that any pathogens that can plausibly jump from one to the other already has (with sometimes devastating effect). If we simply limited meat consumption to cows, pigs, and chicken, it'd satisfy most people and strictly limit the risk of novel zoonetic pathogens.

2) Those diseases you list in particular are mostly unconvincing: SARS and COVID likely come from bats via civets, MERS from bats via camels, Ebola from bats via primates. None of these species make up most meat consumption.

3) E. coli is the best example, but plenty of people do get it from lettuce and spinach. That said, E. coli is never going to shut down the world in a mass pandemic.

Thanks, I appreciate the dialog.

What do you think about H5N1 (Avian Flu)? This is an example of a disease carried by birds, passed to domesticated birds, and then on to humans. What about H1N1 (Swine Flu)? Both of these diseases required culling millions of livestock due to the very real crossover to human populations globally.

Are you aware that there are intermediate hosts in many coronavirus epidemics? Many of those involve domesticated livestock such as chickens, pigs, and cows[1].

E. coli isn't naturally found on greens since it requires an animal host. How does it keep getting there? Interaction with domestic livestock[2].

If we are going to continue our interaction with livestock in the way we are now, we should at least all be aware that this is a conscious choice which will result in pandemics on a somewhat regular basis.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Animal_origins_of_human_c... [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/08/29/642646707/in...

As I understand the animals that infected humans in the case of SARS and MERS where respectively civet cats and camels. Neither of those are generally bred for food consumption.

>A pan-CoV antiviral drug could have been developed through human phase I trials, and stockpiled for the next pandemic.

Would it make sense to test this drug on 80 year old people who are also ill? Usually young healthy people get the drugs in these trials AFAIK.

Developing protection medicine against all potential bad pandemic viri in animals, it even just the ones we know of which at just a small party is only possible in theory.

In practice even a union of all first world countries can't afford it as far as I know.

There is also the problem about constant mutations.

E.g. after the SARS-Cov outbreak medicine against it was development. But it couldn't be used efficiently against SARS-Cov-2 . Through it likely did reduce the amount of time so need until we get a vaccine.

So putting money into developing vaccines for all kind of latent viruses makes sense for gaining knowledge. But it's not cable is preventing pandemies.

Alright so the most absurd leap in reasoning is probably here:

> In one scenario, we have stockpiles of a pan-CoV antiviral drug, enough to treat millions of people. When SARS-CoV-2 is first identified in Wuhan, the drug is immediately given a large phase II efficacy trial....

> It’s easy to blame bats for unwittingly giving humanity SARS-CoV-2. But I also blame both big Pharma and the US government for failing to come up with a pan-CoV antiviral or vaccine.

Why single out the US government in particular with the responsibility to come up with a "pan-CoV antiviral or vaccine" that should have been on hand to treat an outbreak in Wuhan? I'm not saying the NIH shouldn't have worked on it, but there were other countries with the ability and incentive to do so. There was nothing stopping China, Taiwan, or Canada from doing something after SARS, or South Korea from doing something after MERS, so why aren't any of those countries equally to blame?

There's the further speculation that SARS-CoV-2 was originally released due to some lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If that's true, it only further undermines this Monday morning quarterbacking, because it would mean that one of the countries with the most vested interest in preventing this pandemic, and one of the best equipped to do something about it, was actually trying to do that only to be undone by some procedural blunder.

There's also a huge degree of hindsight here. Pandemics tend to occur from time to time, and we're barely on the verge of having the tech level necessary to prevent them. Up to and including 2019, we had a couple of near-misses with coronaviruses, but we also had near-misses with influenza and Ebola among others. If the US or anyone else somehow managed to come up with some "pan-CoV antiviral or vaccine" only to fall victim to an influenza or Ebola pandemic, I'm sure some wise guy would be going around telling us how stupid they were for not being better prepared. In reality, the world has collectively gone to heroic measures to try and snuff out these outbreaks when and where they initially occur before they turn into pandemics.

Speaking of which, there's an elephant in the room. Maybe the US government didn't sufficiently invest in speculative countermeasures against a potential epidemic. But, starting in 2003, they did invest in countermeasures against the actual epidemic of HIV/AIDS, and managed to save over 17 million lives. In fact, Drs. Fauci and Birx have both been personally involved with that program for many years.

I'm not saying the US did everything right, but in some sense the world got a really bad break with COVID-19 if you look at where virology efforts were focused. And our shortcomings in terms of public health policy would have been the same for any pandemic.

His facts might be right but his tone is unreasonable. This epidemic started in China, neighbor to India. Those two countries are home to something like 20-25% of the worlds human resources and are basically on the doorstep of being advanced world-striding superpowers. China in particular is becoming a technological colossus and India is already a major player when it comes to actually producing these drugs.

Assigning the blame on the NIH or US funding would be fine in the 1980s; but this is really an issue for the Asians to take leadership on. China was in a much better position to study all these viruses. The US failed on disease screening for incoming travelers.

Sorry, but the US has (had?) the world strongest economy and owns right to being the home of the dollar , the currency all others are measured against.

It’s crazy to me to cry poor now, especially like the author said, trillions have been spent now, not billions on economic remedies which are likely to fail.

This was just ignorance and a lack of foresight from administrations who had issues “trusting the science”.

It’s going to be the same scenario in the US with regards to climate change, all the economic ability to tackle the issue head on early, existed, so little has been done.

Also remember, the author is talking about the past, you can’t really blame China or India from 15 years ago not to have taken more appropriate action, they weren’t the economic powers they are today. Besides, why t try pass the blame?

I agree with your sentiments. The USA still leads the world in research and were the best positioned to respond to this threat. So much of the rest of the world's biology/medical research relies on tools that are supplied by the NHS/NCBI/CDC in the USA. It is scary to me what will happen to those essential tools as the USA continues to deteriorate.

Also, China was prepared for this epidemic. They experienced SARS. They knew there would be a SARS-2 sooner or later. They had lockdown plans ready to go for this. They had a huge research facility specialising in this threat where they thought it might occur.

Do you think they might just not yet to have the technical and intellectual facilities to do what is described in the article though?

China is an advancing country but America does have some pretty insanely good tech and researchers.

China probably lacks the decades of institutional knowledge that the USA has. As much as us young ones complain (in anglo-saxon developed countries), there is something to be said for the old men who chair the committees and head the labs. They have a lot of experience.

> I agree with your sentiments. The USA still leads the world in research and were the best positioned to respond to this threat. So much of the rest of the world's biology/medical research relies on tools that are supplied by the NHS/NCBI/CDC in the USA.

It's not like that reputation and research has all gone to waste. The US has developed a lot of antiviral drugs. Some notable examples include many of the antiretrovirals that have been used to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the influenza antiviral drug Tamiflu which multiple countries have proactively stockpiled in case of an influenza pandemic, and remdesivir, which was originally invented as an Ebola antiviral but might actually be effective against SARS-CoV-2.

I don’t understand why are you dragging India into this

Start at Wuhan. Draw a big circle around it; 2 Chinas large. Anyone in that circle with the ability to develop general antivirals and vaccines were the ones who could be assigned a notional responsibility. I picked on India because I'd heard it produces a lot of medicine and they have enough smart people to accomplish anything. As I stare at Google maps, Japan and Korea probably have the capability as well.

If Europe and the US can have ready-to-go antivirals for every possible disease ever then they are encouraged to do that; but realistically for a virus from an Asian reserve it is reasonable to expect the antivirals will be researched and produced in Asia. Can't be ready for everything; and the US should probably be focusing on possible pandemics from Africa where the locals don't have the sort of technical mastery found in Asia.

We are literally not talking about a wildfire in a neighbouring country. It's a human to human transmissible pandemic in "2020". And then factor in geopolitics: Indo-China border movement, compared with Chinese people travelling to countries in the west (or other countries around China). Actually you could have said this for India-Nepal, even India-Bhutan, and maybe India-Bangladesh as well; but not China and India.

If it is impossible for India to preemptively develop an antiviral then it is crazy to think the US could. India and China are 2/3 of the world's top 3 economies (after purchasing power adjustments). Arguably China is now the US's superior. And as mentioned something like a quarter of the world's population They don't need the States to step in to fund vaccine development.

It isn't reasonable to blame the US government/big pharma for not preemptively curing all possible diseases. It isn't a sensible standard. If they can then they should, but they probably can't. If they can they should be starting in Africa rather than Asia.

If I converted the currencies correctly, India's annual government spending is about 10% of the US's.

Pandemics are a global problem, and can start anywhere. Everybody should be working on this. It's not like the US doesn't have bats or birds or pigs, all sources of previous pandemics. The US has long been a medical research leader, and now especially doesn't seem like a great time to say, "Ah, whatever, let somebody else deal with it."

Sure, that’s a fair point. And it’s the perfect argument for where the US did end up focusing a lot of research and aid, namely on Ebola. Another SARS or MERS outbreak would likely originate in a developed country with a track record of successfully eradicating that type of coronavirus, whereas Ebola is a problem for a part of the world that is much less developed and ill-equipped to handle such a crisis.

It’s obvious now that we should have invested more into all pandemic risks including coronaviruses, but it’s an exaggeration to imply that the US wasn’t doing anything at all or that the priorities of US-funded research and aid were poorly chosen based on what was known at the time.

China and Asia can take leadership for sure, but it doesn’t mean that the US / the west shouldn’t.

Viruses do not care about passports as long as the world is connected it’s everyone’s problem.

The US and the west had good candidates for SARS and MERS vaccines overall only a single team continued to work on them the Oxford one and that’s mostly because Saudi Arabia was still interested in funding it.

SARS should’ve been a wake up call and if it wasn’t enough then MERS less then a decade later should’ve been an indication that SARS wasn’t a black swan event.

We had two examples within an extremely short time frame of how coronaviruses can mutate to become as deadly or even more deadly than pandemic causing influenza strains and for the most part the western world decided it’s not a priority.

{C,Sh,W}oulda

> The viral outbreak could have been stopped in December in Wuhan had we had the foresight and financial support to develop antiviral drugs or vaccines.

It’s quite possible the pandemic started with a virology lab in Wuhan doing exactly that.

Unfortunately to say, the President of the United States is not a reliable source. US intelligence agencies said Trump is wrong, and without any further evidence, it should be placed in the conspiracy theory category.

What's the conspiracy here? We know that WIV studies coronavirus. It could have been inadvertently leaked.

He also said it's "possible". Notice the lack of certainty. From what i know, the wet market theory also lacks evidence. All we know is that this evolved naturally and was not designed in a lab. It could still evolve in a lab, or evolve elsewhere and studied in the lab.

Maybe I responded too strongly, based on other things I've read on other sites. "Currently unfounded" might have been a better way to phrase it.

I don't think Wuhan labs started the virus, but I'd point out that the job of spy agencies is to lie and manipulate the public. Trump's a liar but so are the spooks. Trump is transparently attempting to pin the blame on a foreign power so that way he isn't blamed for the epidemic in the US. Essentially, who is blamed will determine the 2020 election. One read no further than that to understand his motivations.

Person A has motivation A and says thing A, person B has motivation B and says thing B, and the truth sits off in the corner like a kid at the prom with no date.

"I'd point out that the job of spy agencies is to lie and manipulate the public."

The spy agencies have a number of jobs. The obvious one is to spy (not just on foreign powers, but on everybody, as we now know without a doubt). Lying to and manipulating the public is another big job. And they have other more heinous jobs (torture, assassinations, etc). To do their jobs requires constant obfuscation. So why on earth does anyone ever give any credence to anything a spook says?

Here's the best collection of evidence that accidental release from WIV should be viewed as a plausible vector: https://project-evidence.github.io/ Nothing in here can reasonably be classified as a conspiracy theory.

The US intelligence agencies haven't said anything to my knowledge about accidental release. They said it didn't appear to be an engineered virus (true) and that there was no evidence that it did come from the lab (true).

But what that misses, is that there's a ton of circumstantial evidence that exactly this class of disease was being studied (bat coronaviruses, research on animal to human transmission, including forced mutation to encourage this) a few hundred yards from the wet market in question, and this lab had explicitly been called out for sloppy handling of dangerous biological materials.

(and to be clear, this isn't some dark secret research -- it's public albeit controversial research on preventing pandemics, funded by the NIH.)

To be clear I do not believe it was engineered or designed or otherwise was part of biological weapons research. I think that it’s possible that it was a tragic accident, though. In terms of culpability, I don’t see how it’s any worse for China than the wet market theory. Either way, it’s a lapse in public health safety protocols.

You can tell from the way the Chinese authorities reacted in the beginning that they did not know what they were dealing with. Had it been a lab accident their reaction would have been quite different.

Also as I understand it. Bats acts as a repository for corona virus but the virus has to mutate in order to infect a human, so it infects another animal, where the mutated strain grow, before it reaches a human.

Exactly, and it seems that the intermediate host is the palm civet as far as I remember.

It’s possible this virus might have escaped before they got around to studying it. Given how contagious it is, it might have gone straight from a bat they collected to a technician to the city.

That is not evidence if it has been debunked in several scientific papers. This is one of them with the analysis of the virus genoma: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22221751.2020.1...

You have not even slightly tried to read or understand what I posted.

This is (weak) evidence that the virus was not engineered. It says absolutely nothing about the possibility -- which I outlined clearly, and which is outlined clearly in the linked doc -- that this is a natural virus accidentally released from a lab.

I read it. There are a bunch of papers that are presented as proof of how it was engineered spreading bullshit, plus some fact narrated in the typical conspiracy theorist modus operandi to convince people of something that is very, very unlikely.

I'm sorry, but it's simply not possible to square your comments with the content as presented. Let me quote it directly, in case you missed it:

> Studies proving the virus was not "engineered" do not prove the spillover event occured outside of a laboratory. We are not claiming the virus was engineered. They also do not prove that the spillover event did not involve an animal or organism sourced from one of these labs.

> To start with, we will once again state that we are not claiming SARS-CoV-2 has been engineered.

> 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.

I'd like to engage on this, but it's pretty clear you aren't discussing this in good faith, or even reading the content you're talking about, so I'm going to have to step out.

Did you even read it?

Project evidence hasn't claimed the thing was engineered; only that a lab was involved in it in some shape or form.

They also address the articles you've linked if I recall. It's not a bunch of conspiracy theories. It is a vast collection of circumstances that make it very difficult to discount a lab origin out of hand.

Where is the paper that I posted on that page? I don’t see it. What I can see is the typical modus operandi of all the conspiracy theories with unproven or factually wrong claims and several “coincidences”.

They have not in fact said that. And fwiw, I think Trump is a monster and an idiot. I do think it’s plausible that they were researching corona viruses for perfectly good reasons and accidentally released it, though.

Even if not, there are risks associated with continuing to research new viruses. I live five minutes away from where the lab was that nearly released Ebola into the us 30 years ago.

Correlation is not causation. There is plenty of reason to believe that novel viruses would emerge in a place like Wuhan. I would suspect that the reverse is true: The coronavirus lab is in Wuhan because it a likely hot spot for emerging infectious diseases. Basically, the lab exists for exactly the reasons Vincent Racinnello is arguing for in his blog post.

There's bat colonies and wet markets all over China. The odds that SARS-CoV-2 naturally began in one of the very few places with labs that study it seems exceedingly remote.

Of course it is possible.

Labs in the USA and elsewhere have had problems. Not hard to believe it happened in China too.

Interesting fact - so called "gain-of-function" studies were banned in the US in 2014 and then the ban lifted in 2017.

October 2014 - https://www.the-scientist.com/the-nutshell/moratorium-on-gai...

February 2018 - Ban ends. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

So also on HN you can find plenty of conspiracy theories it seems. On what is based your claim? This is a pretty good evidence against all the recent conspiracy theories with analysis of the virus genoma studied in the labs. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22221751.2020.1...

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