Hacker News Reader

Comment by p1necone | Hacker News Reader

Working out the initial cause of this Covid outbreak is far far far less important/actionable than working out what we should do differently when (not if) another virus starts spreading.

This concept should be familiar to those in tech already: https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/

View on HN

Well I mean never letting Covid out (if that is the source) would have prevented 7-13 million extra deaths this year so it is worth thinking about how we don’t let another one out if it is possible.

I disagree that it is less actionable. I am a former scientist. Proper handling of lab waste etc. is infinitely easier than having the whole world lock down, wear masks, and rapidly develop mRNA vaccines to try and put the genie back in the bottle.

> Proper handling of lab waste etc. is infinitely easier...

Sure, but safety requires everyone be perfect about their handling 100% of the time. If a mistake happens, just once, with the wrong lab materials, that's it. And humans will always make mistakes, no matter how bulletproof we think the process is.

That's a false equivalency though; whether or not this was a lab accident, there will be future pandemics which aren't (like every single previous one in history).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu

Except another very recent one was also a lab accident. So, no, not every single previous one was, and 2 of last 3 will have been from labs.

Except that virus was genomically identical to another virus in the 1950s.

These thing's aren't being made in labs, they're being stored there but the actual reality is this: none of the countries being so interested in this have any ability to influence the country's these things happen in.

So your effective response protocol may as well just blackbox the problem: "there is a new novel virus, how do we respond?"

No one's going to be invading China to drop napalm on biological research facilities they've collectively decided without the CCP's involvement are "risky".

First, I think you've misunderstood the significance of that genetic similarity in the 1977 pandemic, since your use of the word "except" doesn't make sense. That genetic similarity is itself the evidence that the pandemic was probably of unnatural origin. After 27 years of natural transmission, the 1950 virus should have picked up mutations along the way. It didn't, thus the widely-accepted theory that it spent those intervening years in a laboratory freezer:

> The reemergence was probably an accidental release from a laboratory source in the setting of waning population immunity to H1 and N1 antigens

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra0904322

So the statement above that "every single previous one [pandemic] in history" was of natural origin is probably false. The 1977 flu killed about 700k people worldwide, less than SARS-CoV-2 but more than a typical flu season.

To emphasize, humanity doesn't have the technology to invent viruses de novo. A lab-manipulated virus is always going to be derived from a naturally-evolved virus, whether that's in simple ways (like storage in a freezer for 27 years) or complex ones (like genetic engineering). The question is the causality--if a pandemic was caused by the actions of scientists, then if not for those actions, those thousands/millions of people would still be alive.

Second, why would we need to invade China? The USA was literally funding this research, so couldn't we just stop doing that?

If SARS-CoV-2 arose from a lab accident, then China certainly deserves special blame for the coverup. But before that, this wasn't a political topic--it was an obscure academic debate between a small subset of virologists who wanted to perform certain risky experiments, and other academics who thought that risk was unacceptable. It's quite possible that the CCP is currently wishing they'd blamed the whole thing on a rogue, American-funded researcher early on. If they had, then it's quite possible that narrative would have stuck--it would be stupider than what most people seem to believe now, but not by much.

Finally, the indifference you express above is bizarre to me. Do you believe the same thing about Chernobyl, that it's better for us to devote all our resources to improving treatment for cancer (which will also occur naturally, with or without nuclear meltdowns) and none to preventing meltdowns? If not, how is this different?

Exactly. This is what I meant by "not actionable".

How is lab safety “not actionable”? Is it some special field of science where all improvements and progress has stopped? I don’t understand your point.

Haven’t more people died from SARS-Cov-2 than nuclear weapons, why we can’t have international conventions and inspections on dangerous virological research?

It's not actionable for the US to force China to do something, sure. China doesn't want to suffer through another global pandemic either, so it would be useful to them to know if they need to improve lab safety standards. In fact, that information would be useful and actionable for all countries that have viral research labs.

There are plenty of actions beyond military options like economic, political, and legal. China could be isolated financially with trade embargos for example. US treasuries and other nations instruments that China owns could be seized and extinguished. Bank accounts can be seized. There are many actions that could be taken if countries really desired. However, the alluring call of cheap manufacturing and a large population to market goods toward clouds most countries from taking any actions.

There hadn’t been one at this scale for 100 years, who’s to say how long it would have been till the next natural one, I for one would rather not have experienced a global pandemic even if a natural one was due in 50 years

The 68 flu killed between 1-4 million, so the high end in that one would be comparable to what we see with covid.

1-4 that didn’t shutdown the wold isn’t comparable to covid nearing 4 million verified and likely far higher despite many actions and lockdowns taken. I’d much rather have lived through a 68 flu then covid thank you

The 68 was a lot more deadly amongst the young. Shutting the world was a political decision not a fact of the virus' behavior.

In 1968:

- The population was much less densely gathered

- The world population was roughly half what it is today

- There was much less air travel

- Testing was much worse

- Statistics about mortality were much less evenly gathered

There are worse things than lockdown.

Yes, and proper handling of nuclear bombs is infinitely easier than losing them or accidentally dropping them on your own soil, but the United States still managed to mess that up every now and then...

Mistakes seem to happen despite just about any amount of preventative measures in our world.

Imagine my surprise when I learned that one of the 3 incidents with fully assembled weapons happened about 15 miles from where I live.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash

In software you would never do a postmortem without understanding the root cause of the incident. If this was caused by a lab leak, or even gain-of-function research, that seems like a pretty important detail.

But that's not what you would start with. If you have an incident and discover that your response plan was hilariously inadequate, you would prioritize making more robust response plans because even if you can prevent that exact incident from happening again, there will be other disasters.

You're writing as if somehow general pandemic response has been deprioritized in favor investigating the lab leak theory, which is absurdly far from reality.

This incident has cost millions of lives and possibly undone decades of progress on reducing poverty worldwide. It is worth pursuing multiple angles in parallel.

Pandemic response in the USA was atrocious, and it's politically convenient for those who support the administration that was responsible to try to deflect blame however they can. So I'm very skeptical of the motives of people that keep posting stuff like this.

The academic community is pretty opposed to the trump administration, which also is the one blamed for the covid response. Don't see why they'd be bending over to defend it there.

Conversely, if you discover that the cause of the issue was inadequate controls during virus research then you should absolutely start with fixing those.

Put it this way, if the cause of the worldwide pandemic was because it leaked from a lab then you should fix the lab.

Saying this as layman that warned for years about virus engineering, this is just a given. The mere potential should be enough. However, speculation without evidence and mitigation is bad.

Regardless you would do both? And knowing it was gain of function research in a lab is an easy “let’s stop doing that” moment

My engineering org practices blameless postmortems too, and I am an extremely strong advocate of them, but a blameless postmortem is not the same thing as a postmortem that refuses to identify or address root causes. And here, there is some possibility that the current pandemic was the result of specific risks that we, collectively, took.

Earlier in the pandemic I saw a focus on the risks of "wet markets" for zoonotic transmission; although that hasn't panned out so far as a theory for COVID-19, if wet markets present a significant risk of creating pandemics (note: if! I don't know they do), we should evaluate possible restrictions and regulations on them.

More recently I've seen discussions of "gain of function" research on bat coronaviruses, and allegations that some dangerous research on coronaviruses was being carried out in BSL-2 laboratories. Regardless of whether COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak (or whether we ever prove it was), if some specific of research presents a significant risk of creating pandemics (again, if!), we should evaluate possible restrictions and regulations on them too.

Pandemics are, I think, inevitable; it would be foolish to ignore trying to prepare for the next one. But the chance of a pandemic is very possibly not set in stone; it would be equally foolish to ignore trying to bring that risk down. And I categorically reject the argument we need to pick one or the other to focus on; I think we can focus on every step of the chain.

Funny thing, no matter what you do, there will be a pandemic similar to this one or worse. What you're doing is prolonging the time until regulations and checks failure. Potentially ignoring the fact that there will be unknown or covert actors ignoring all of these safeties.

Instead, we would do much better to improve our tools for handling these issues by looking at successful and unsuccessful containment protocols, failed attempts to distribute a vaccine quickly enough etc.

Look, there's a pretty plausible story (see, eg, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...) right now that we, as a society, have spent a significant amount of effort performing research that had a relatively high risk of accidentally creating and releasing a pandemic virus into the wild, and then it may well have done exactly that. It's not a wild idea that we should 1) figure out if this story is true and 2) if it is, stop doing it.

> Potentially ignoring the fact that there will be unknown or covert actors ignoring all of these safeties.

I don't mean this as negatively as it sounds, but I literally don't understand the argument you're making here. It feels like it's of the form:

"Because <bad actor> might do <bad thing>, there's no point trying to encourage anyone from not doing <bad thing>."

Is that...right? Because if so, do you also feel like police forces and laws against murder and assault are a distraction from medical research devoted to savings the lives of people wounded in violent crimes?

I think it's reasonable to suggest that "setting houses on fire less often" or "banning setting other people's houses on fire" or "mandating more fire safe construction" are all complementary strategies to "getting better at extinguishing house fire".

You can do both. If a plane crashes, you find out the cause. During that evaluation, if you also find that the pilots response to the engine failure was also wrong, you fix that too.

There is a noticeable trend here of gatekeepers crying foul when others decide to talk about this. They try to shame you into silence, claiming that you are caring about the wrong thing, as if you cannot pay attention to more than one issue simultaneously.

Whenever there is a trend of similar talking points on a hot topic it makes me wonder how much of that is influence from outside groups.

Please don't resort to sinister explanations without evidence, when a topic is plainly divisive. It's an extremely tempting but low-quality discussion move that the site guidelines explicitly ask everyone here to refrain from:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If there's specific reason to believe that comments here are somehow being manipulated, that's different and you should email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it. (That's in the site guidelines as well.) But the overwhelming majority of the time, there's zero suggestion of any such thing, other than people disagreeing, which is evidence of nothing but that the topic is divisive.

I've posted hundreds if not thousands of explanations of this over many years at this point: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

Speculation about it might be detrimental. So it seems like a bad tradeoff unless one can find evidence one way or the other, and what constructively to do about it first.

The link you posted still says we need to find out root causes. It just says some extra stuff about how to provide psychological safety so that people are more forthcoming and we are better able to get to the root causes.

You will not find a sane engineer on the planet who says "we don't need to find the root cause, we just need to move ON and move FORWARD". Such nonsense is the domain of politicians.

I disagree. If it was indeed gain of function research in China that caused covid we should immediately stop doing that sort of research and ban it. There’s a reason it’s been controversial and many virologists have jobs on the line when it comes to its origins

It was banned in the USA around 2013, then Fauci and Straszak shifted funding to continue it in Wuhan to get around the USA bans. Virologists signed on to the article promoted by Straszak claiming the wet market fantasy as Fauci and Straszak control much of the funding in virology.

> then Fauci and Straszak shifted funding to continue it in Wuhan

A nested conspiracy theory is just what we need for some more political polarization in the USA. Score!

This information is publicly available and was mentioned in Wade's article. It wasn't against the law to fund it, there were loop holes in the rules that allowed circumvention with sign off from Fauci and likely another guy Collins from the NIH. So no need to dismiss this with the tired conspiracy claims.

The convenient use of the word “conspiracy theory” usually indicates a lazy evaluation of the facts from what I’ve observed. The threat of “polarization” adds even more to the lack of rigor. Should we just ignore concepts and discussion if it is not generally agreed upon or upsets a group of people?

Unfortunately that's the way the game seems to be going. Have a huge interest in statistics and want to comment against the election results - better be very careful if you make unpopular assertions and need funding. Same thing appears here.It would be a very career limiting to make claims that are similar to the orange man's claims around the origin, the ability of otc medications like HCL or invermecithin to help early on decrease the severity.

Thanks for mentioning the election example. The word “lies” is a proxy for lack of rigorous journalism as well. When journalists claim that opinions / criticism about something as complicated as an election are “lies”, their bias is quite obvious. It’s as if there is no nuance allowed.

In the case of the election, "lies" is a perfectly appropriate word, since the people claiming voter fraud were lying about the possibility of fraud. No fraud was actually found, and everyone investigating found nothing to suggest any fraud was happening or likely.

So yes, if you stand up and claim that there was rampant voter fraud that changed the outcome of the election, you are at best misinformed, and at worst lying.

I wouldn't even call this voter fraud stuff "conspiracy theories". It's gaslighting and destabilizing propaganda by an administration that failed to get reelected.

Your second paragraph is more reasonable but it is in conflict with the first.

Do you deny as stated by many news agencies that the CIA stated or leaked that Russian agents impacted the 2016 election? What about the 2020 election? Is the CIA lying? Did Russian agents or other hackers just sit that one out?

There is so much evidence of election fraud and odd irregularities throughout the United States … the question is whether there was enough of it to impact the results. Arizona came down to 0.3% of the vote and Georgia was razor thin as well. States like these are decided by how votes are counted in a single county (Fulton and Maricopa in these cases) due to the high population concentration in a region of the state. Questioning the results (regardless of which political party) is not lying especially given the thin margins; it is healthy for democracy and gives more confidence in future election results.

> gaslighting and destabilizing propaganda by an administration that failed to get reelected.

That's it, right there. And then when cornered like the lying rats they are, they will claim "people are saying", "a lot of people feel", and "we're just asking questions." No, sorry. I thought the rightwing in the US was the ones don't care what people are saying, how they feel about things, because facts are facts? Oh, and I also thought it was part of the responsibility of being an elected political leader to tell the damn truth and not just "ask questions".

Actual facts are now a conspiracy theory?

What if doing the first thing helps us do the second thing?

Is it? If this virus came about via GoF research in a lab, the solution for "next time" is:

1. Stop doing GoF research

2. Better lab containment processes

A serial arsonist was burning homes in a Midwest suburb. As regular home-burnings occurred, the residents became upset with the fire department. ‘Why was it taking so long to put the fires out?! Why can’t we have better fire hoses, or faster fire engines?! Maybe the town tax dollars should pay for private enterprises to go around and moisten homes, making them less flammable?’ Another group of residents were trying to convince their neighbors that they should be trying to catch the culprit. They felt they had some pretty compelling clues as to who the arsonist was. But they were shouted down, ‘No, no, no.’, they hand waved. ‘Working out who started the fires is far far far less important/actionable than working out what we should do when (not if) another [fire] starts spreading’

Oh the absurdity.

In my experience, blameless postmortems can be really useful for the process of getting to the bottom of things and creating a plan of action, but can also enable people who are reckless or incompetent, and make it difficult to ensure that the people who really need to learn something from their failures have actually learned something.

As applied to this situation, it doesn't really matter. The Chinese government has a vested interest in any investigation being labeled inconclusive. Whether it was a lab leak or a result of unhealthy agricultural practices, China doesn't want egg on its face. They'll do everything in their power (which is a lot) to avoid having the finger definitively pointed at them.

People died. ALOT of people. I think an FAA crash investigation where they try to pinpoint EXACTLY where the problem or chain of problems were is more relevant here. Or the Challenger investigation.

Don't miss that the entire gravity of this line of questioning is that if COVID19 did escape from the lab, our entire response to a lab leak would be different and save lives then a zoonotic emergence scenario.

Working out what we should do differently when (not if) another virus starts spreading is far far far less important than figuring out how to stop another such virus from spreading.

Understanding the root cause is a logical way to do that.

> Working out the initial cause of the Covid outbreak is far far far less important/actionable . . .

I think the saying "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" applies.

In this case more like 50 tons of cure.

Unless the release was due to gross negligence --like an outage is due to really bad decisions by someone. In those cases blamelessness is not productive and conducive to more mishaps,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu

But it keeps happening and maybe labs working with such viruses need much more careful procedures or shouldn’t perform risky gain of function research for example.

Playing the opposite game with all recommendations from China and the WHO would have been a good start. I think responsibility and fear of discovery are at the core of how crucial information was suppressed and distorted leading to nonsensical actions like the SF rally for Chinatown in late February 2020.

Part of this has resolved itself since every piece of information is no longer being evaluated on whether it helps or hurts Trump.

from a technical perspective, maybe (I don't agree with that, but I can see both side of the argument)

from a legal/international relations perspective, absolutely not

if this was a preventable bio-research accident rather than an act of God or Nature, there are huge ramifications for China's place in and relation to the world

at this point I wouldn't be shocked if it was an accidental leak or an intentional leak by the Chinese, an intentional leak by the US or even an intentional leak by another country to provoke US/China tensions

a forest of mirrors

Reply on news.ycombinator.com