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Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

> Changes in the environment are driving displaced species of animals into new habitats, allowing them to mix with other species or potential hosts.

Outside of reactionary comments about banning eating bats and banning "wet markets", I wish there was more serious discussion about how intensive animal farming in general could lead to another pandemic and what we're going to do about it. We're just going to continue as normal until a pandemic kicks off from cows, pigs or chickens?

On top of just the number of animals treated with antibiotics being kept in close proximity to help a virus mutate, there's also the animal waste produced, the land required and the contributions to climate change that are destroying the environment and displacing species.

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You clearly don't know much about modern farming, but do not a lot about the tropes that the anti-animal agriculture movement have brought out.

Antibiotics are not functional against viruses. They don't make any difference. Where antibiotics are used it must be under qualified medical care, farmers can't just go buy them at the corner store, any more than you can. (15 years ago they could buy them, I don't remember exactly when the laws changed) Even when they are used (never in chickens), there can be not detectable antibiotics in food, and we can detect very tiny amounts.

Animals in close proximity are very isolated. Farmers have strict bio security rules before you can enter the barns.

Yep, I muddled words there but antibiotic resistance is a related concern:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock#An...

  "This is a growing matter of concern as antibiotic resistance is considered to be a serious future threat to human welfare.[10] Infectious diseases are the third leading cause of death in Europe and a future without effective antibiotics would fundamentally change the way modern medicine is practised.[10][12]"

> Animals in close proximity are very isolated. Farmers have strict bio security rules before you can enter the barns.

How does this explain the number of outbreaks of swine flu in multiple countries? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H1N1

I don’t know where you’ve been, but bird flu and swine flu were already epidemics. Do we really have to wait for a cow-related disease to become an epidemic and finish up the trifecta before we’ll consider changing our behavior?

Sorry, what is reactionary about banning wet markets? Not trying to be confrontational, I'm honestly asking. They're banned pretty much everywhere in the west with the exception of fish. There is plenty to object to about Western animal agriculture, but it hasn't created any new diseases on the scale of covid since it industrialised...

So true. A lot of our virus come from birds. Viruses are like most invasive species. If you take them out of their normal habitat, they can thrive in a way that is unexpected and uncontrollable.

There is considerable suspicion that SARS-CoV-2 was enhanced by the Wuhan lab. The simple fact that the species carrying the closest relative of this epidemic was a thousand miles away from Wuhan and was not present at the wet markets in any capacity is sufficient to doubt the narrative.

If we want to safeguard our species from zoonotic pandemics, instead of weaponizing them, then a vaccination effort would be better directed at the source.

Perhaps an international effort to identify dangerous zoonotic pathogens and address them within their natural hosts is preferable to what COVID-19 has forced us to endure.

"Considerable suspicion" is over-selling it in my opinion. The arguments I've heard go along the lines of 'the virus is surprisingly well adapted to humans'. This reasoning, however, is text-book survivor bias:

Given we observe a pandemic, the probability for the virus to be well adapted is very high.

What we do know is:

* There is a highest safety level virus lab in Wuhan.

* Lab escapes do and did happen.

As far as I know we simply do not have evidence if or if not gain of function research played a role.

\edit: formatting. Can somebody please explain the downvotes?

It might be that people are taking issue with the survivorship-bias argument.

The important question here is: Given a virus that is as well adapted to humans as SARS-CoV-2, how likely is it that it emerged spontaneously (without a trace of any intermediate states, afaik) vs. how likely is it that it leaked from a lab that has high safety standards, but was probably producing viruses just like it.

It is indeed not surprising that the virus is well adapted to humans, seeing as we are experiencing a pandemic, but that is disconnected from wondering how it got to be so.

> (without a trace of any intermediate states, afaik)

It's pretty clear that SARS-CoV-2 shares an ancestor with RaTG13 [0]. Their S-proteins, the main factor in human adaptation, are a 97.8% match, which can be explained with about a decade of divergence, putting the common ancestor somewhere in late 2000s.

Why RaTG13 (then called RaBtCoV/4991) research was shelved by China, when it's been one of the suspects of the death of 3 miners with SARS-like symptoms in 2012[1], is the concerning part of it all. The chances of it being lab made/grown/modified are just way too slim.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41594-020-0468-7

[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/03/new-killer-virus-chi...

> As far as I know we simply do not have evidence if or if not gain of function research played a role.

You can examine phylogenetic distance -- the degree of evolutionary drift that the initial virus had from others which are subject to natural (in-the-wild) evolution. COVID is way out there. And even then the closest "natural" virus had its genome published by the Wuhan lab long after the initial outbreak.

The lack of any close relatives suggests that gain-of-function very well may have taken place, as does the heightened vulnerability of typical lab-animals. What there isn't much evidence of is zoonotic transfer.

That's a reasonable argument. But it requires a very high level of understanding of (bat) corona-viruses in general with a majority of corona-viruses that exist having been sequenced etc.

From my (limited) understanding we only know about a fraction of corona-viruses out there, and hence there is great uncertainty in the phylogenetic modelling.

I haven't seen a credible write-up, if you can point me in the right direction, that would be appreciated.

RaTG13 geonome was published January 23, 2020 by Wuhan Institute of Virology.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.22.914952v1....

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/MN996532

Actually part of the genome of RaTG13 was published as RaBtCoV/4991 back in 2016.

Some people suspected it [0] and eventually Dr. Shi confirmed it [1] after.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341547726_Understan...

[1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6503/487.full

Thank you for the reference. [1] particularly interesting.

You've got to be joking. No one is going to vaccinate millions of wild bats and pangolins.

Why not?

For starters, there are 1.5mm bats under one bridge in Austin with 750k new babies there each year[1]. That alone would be quite the task!

[1] https://tpwd.texas.gov/huntwild/wild/species/bats/bat-watchi...

Unless you find a way to give them cow pox (so to speak).

They vaccinate wild foxes against rabies, so this idea is not that implausible as it might appear at first.

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