Hacker News Reader

Comment by mensetmanusman | Hacker News Reader

Part of me thinks that we should almost not waste the time to find out. Spend the effort on preparing for the next one, by improving air filtration etc.

Politics is too deeply entrenched, it will be an impossibility to uncover the truth.

View on HN

That viewpoint basically amounts to head in the sand. There is a plausible pathway to determine the origin. The lab could be openly investigated and the natural environment could be combed for an ancestor. If this was an unintentional release, it would vastly change the public perception and oversight protocols around pathogen research. Think what Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima did to nuclear energy.

If we don't get open cooperation from China, it's also extremely useful information and helps all other nations recalibrate their levels of trust and ties.

Because if a future lab release happens, it could be so, so much worse. If it seems impossible, disease was a contributing factor in 31 species' extinctions that we know of, and those diseases were of natural origin.[1] The Plague of Justinian, also of natural origin, is estimated to have killed up to half the world's population at the time. After the last year, can we really afford to take these risks lightly anymore?

[1] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

This is actually a good point. I think you changed my mind :)

Thanks for the thoughtful post

I think that may be a first for me in 25 years on the internet. Thanks for being so open minded!

How do we know the next one will involve air filtration at all? Perhaps it will thrive on surfaces for long periods and will react negatively to air. How should we prepare for this or any other etiology that might be significantly different than this one? If we're constantly preparing for the last pandemic, and the next one is surprisingly different, wouldn't that be bad as well, as those resources could have been used better in the intervening time?

But, also, wouldn't it be better to determine the cause of this one so we know not to do whatever it was that caused this? For example, try to discourage exotic meats that might be host to the virus and/or eliminate or strictly control gain of function research, depending on the actual cause (or some other cause that isn't actually either of these)?

If a containment breach of a relatively harmless virus can lead to worldwide catastrophic consequences, you may want to know what procedures were breached and what institutional incentives are required to make sure the risks are constrained.

In software terms, if you have a bug that breaks the production and the response is messy and slow, you absolutely need to spend time and effort to change your response process. But you also need to know how this type of a bug became possible in the first place.

The current plan is to 6x the funding for gain-of-function research, from $200 million to $1.2 billion, in the name of pandemic prevention. That's one serious reason for wanting to investigate whether gain-of-function research may have caused the current one.

The risks of such research have been in open debate for years, and the Obama administration even banned it for a while. It's not a far-fetched possibility, and it's a shame that the discussion about it became such a political casualty for the first year or so. The fact that heads are cooling a little now is clearly the precondition for scientists to be able to start writing letters like the OP.

> The current plan is to 6x the funding for gain-of-function research, from $200 million to $1.2 billion, in the name of pandemic prevention.

Do you have a source for this? Because if true this would be extremely frightening, even if Covid is natural the research is just too risky. GoF research should be banned, I mean it's entire justification for conducting this research in the first place is that it "helps predict new emergent diseases and develop vaccines" but it failed to predict this pandemic and did nothing towards vaccine development.

"Also, current plans are to expand worldwide collaboration on risky virus research sixfold, through the $1.2 billion Global Virome Project. Shouldn’t we figure out if this research sparked the pandemic before drastically expanding it?"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/cong...

That's a pretty weak reference because it's part of an opinion piece with no references.

However there's an article in Nature which makes it clearer that the 1.2B figure is just an amount requested by those who suggested the project. A far cry from "current plans" to fund that amount.

> even if Covid is natural the research is just too risky. GoF research should be banned

This was actually the reason we stopped the research in the US in 2014: Risky with no clear benefit. It was restarted in 2017 after investigations and new guidelines for the research to hopefully improve safety measures.

What is sad is that these ideas were dismissed as crackpotish or racist until now.

Was the idea that we should inquire about the virus’ origin dismissed as such, or just the idea that there is already strong evidence of any particular origin story?

Most of what I recalling at the time doesn't match that description. It was more disparaged as pointless speculation mostly being used to fuel political finger pointing when people had far more important things to figure out.

Sampling bias acknowledged.

It reminds of how hostile people became when you merely questioned the effectiveness or need of the lockdowns last year.

I think many academics and scientists are so emotionally invested in the side they took they will defend it no matter of the evidence.

Preparation for the next event _requires_ understanding the origin of this one to the greatest extent possible.

I think it's very wrong to shy away from inquiry of the truth out of fear of politics.

Besides, forgoing any investigation is a political statement and indeed the preferred outcome by one major political player.

I'm sympathetic to this view, but the flip side of it is we don't do much about currently identified pandemic vector risks such as swine CAFO operations; why would we expect new information (if any) affect our behavior any more than that?

If it's expensive to mitigate and hard to quantify, it's always going to be an uphill battle.

Yes. By that logic, why start punishing people for vehicular manslaughter? Just spend the effort on educating perpretrators so that they don't kill someone next time.

Why is it an either/or? It seems like it would be possible to improve air filtration and have an inquiry.

Sort of agree. But if it was from a lab, that might make people and governments more careful in the future

Also, what do you mean by "improving air filtration"?

We need to make the penalty for this so insanely high that nobody, absolutely nobody ever even thinks of doing research that might lead to this ever again.

No this needs more investigation. Even if the Chinese side might be hard to crack, the American angle needs to be fully evaluated. Which American scientists were at least aware if not complicit (including Fauci) in this entire misguided attempt at proactively finding the next virus? Did they actively try to suppress their involvement once everything hit the fan?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com