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Comment by thih9 | Hacker News Reader

Could you elaborate? In what way? How would you proceed?

Use slightly more expensive other source of the same substance? It's like killing whales for oil just to burn it instead of using olive oil, or that stuff pumped from the ground and refined, or whatever. (as was done at various points in history)

Kinda annoying how many people take this issue to mean "kill sharks or humans will die" when it's just about money.

Would that make it too expensive for some? So inoculate just those that can afford it?

There isn't a way out to this mess that doesn't involve rethinking wealth redistribution.

Animal expoitation vs the poor... I imagine some "intellectual" will come up with a new sort intersectionalism for this... or is this just one of those externalities we keep hearing about, but of the animal rights movement instead?

Well, we all suffer if a segment of the population isn't innoculated. Suffering, disease spread, cost. And putting "intellectual" in quotes is what, and attempt to make resorting-to-science look wrong?

There's also the concern of immediate availability, i.e. if shark-derived squalene is available today and the plant-derived version takes time to scale, we can't just start using that if we want to mass-produce a vaccine very quickly.

Possibly. It's hard to know without having a detailed insight into how this works. Presumably, there's some process involved in extracting it from both animals and plant sources. (You don't just put shark liver into a vaccine.)

Someone in the know would have to provide a comparison.

> Use slightly more expensive other source of the same substance?

You're assuming money is the only issue here. If we throw money at the problem, will we be able to produce a similar solution on a similar schedule?

Well, my understanding is that the virus jumped from some species, which was sold under absolutely miserable conditions in a wet market in Wuhan, to humans. I find it almost comical that someone would be completely fine with more animal exploitation given that this was the reason humans were infected in the first place.

Just like other theories, the wet market one has no evidence.

It's more of a matter of human population expanding to cover the entire surface of the earth than anything else. There's no evidence the last SARS outbreaks in China was from wet markets. Much like there's no evidence it was from wet markets this time.

Fish are very stupid animals without much brain. It is definitely worth it to kill 500k of them to help save a bunch of human lives.

Strange, all of that seems to be wrong. It was wet markets; people are not growing populations any more; it's worth it to kill ~2 million of them for cosmetics so certainly half a million to save lives is reasonable.

Excuse the ad hominem, but did you miss the food chain class in elementary school? “Very stupid” has exactly “fuck all” to do with how important they are to the ecology of the oceans. If the ocean food chain collapses, there’s no coming back from that for millennia. Like, what?

This compound is found in wheat! Wheat!

This is not an amount that will collapse any food chains.

500K fish used for human purposes is not going to deplete the ocean. Alternatives are good but right now there is reasonable justification for expediting things. We should use fish and all the other sources as well.

This is clearly rhetorical, not substantial argument. Using the same label for vaccine production, and wet markets ('exploitation' in your case) doesn't make it the same thing. From epidemiological perspective it's not even similar.

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