Comment by tripletao | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tripletao | Hacker News Reader

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There is zero evidence that anyone, anywhere in the world was working to develop SARS-like bioweapons. The gain-of-function research in question would have been basic research, intended to develop more dangerous variants of the viruses in order to predict future pandemic emergence, develop more universal vaccines, etc. I believe this research was reckless and should never have been funded (by the USA!) or permitted, even considering only what they knew at the time. It wasn't malicious, though.

In any case, beyond gain-of-function, the WIV and Wuhan CDC also had the biggest program in the world to sample novel SARS-like coronaviruses from nature, from remote bat caves that no other humans had any reason to enter.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/coronaviru...

If SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally-evolved virus accidentally released by scientists, then Wuhan is the obvious place for it to emerge. That could have been directly from a lab, or a researcher could have become infected on a sampling trip, traveled home from the sampling sites (~900 miles away, to be clear; Wuhan was not an expected natural spillover region), and seeded the infection there. None of this is anywhere close to proven, but the previous dismissal of any unnatural origin as a "conspiracy theory" was an outrageous, unscientific smear.

> There is zero evidence that anyone, anywhere in the world was working to develop SARS-like bioweapons

How do I square that with this claim from the article?

> Eleven of its 23 coauthors worked for the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, the Chinese army’s medical research institute. Using the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR, the researchers had engineered mice with humanized lungs, then studied their susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2. As the NSC officials worked backward from the date of publication to establish a timeline for the study, it became clear that the mice had been engineered sometime in the summer of 2019, before the pandemic even started. The NSC officials were left wondering: Had the Chinese military been running viruses through humanized mouse models, to see which might be infectious to humans?"

What this describes seems like it could be circumstantial evidence of the PLA developing bioweapons. Certainly it isn't proof of anything, and as evidence it's not very strong. But I wouldn't call it 'zero.'

"Running viruses through humanized mouse models" is a pretty normal (though frightening) part of virology. For example, Ralph Baric was doing it back in 2005:

https://www.pnas.org/content/102/23/8073

So if the Chinese military had in fact been doing this, I'd guess it was just basic research, in the same way that lots of American basic research links back to DARPA. Of course they fund it because they believe there might be a military application, but I see no reason to think that application would be bioweapons (vs. the same kind of beneficial applications described in the open literature).

Offensive bioweapons researchers don't publish their results in scientific journals.

Perhaps "no evidence" would have been better phrasing than "no reason"? I do think it's possible that some Chinese (or American, or British, or ...) military officer has at some point wondered if coronaviruses would make good bioweapons, but there's still no evidence.

They don't seem like obvious candidates to me, though. Both SARS v1 and SARS-CoV-2 show unpredictable, stochastic person-to-person spread, via super-spreader events. For a bioweapon that would ideally infect all the enemy but no one else, that's the last thing you want, hard to reliably get started and hard to reliably stop once it starts. So that reinforces my belief that if SARS-CoV-2 was of unnatural origin, it was almost certainly an accident during basic research.

You don’t think non-scientists have any reason to go into remote bat caves even though bat guano is an incredibly valuable substance?

How would guano miners then get to Wuhan and get sick without leaving a trail of infections along the way?

Good question; I would guess that like SARS and MERS, whichever viruses they picked up, assuming that's what happened, didn't transmit well.

That's one of the independent vectors the author mentions that makes so many of us suspect very specifically a lab leak of a gain of function experiment: the virus started out very well adapted to humans.

A lot of emerging viruses are well adapted to humans… that’s why become outbreaks. How can you judge what level of adaption is expected vs unexpected in a virus.

Most virologists say the way this virus works is unlike anything they’ve seen or expected so they can’t imagine how a human would have engineered it. Why do you think your feeling about the virus’s level of adaptation trumps the experts opinions?

How can you judge what level of adaption is expected vs unexpected in a virus.

It's a long article so I don't expect you to find the argument in it; it highlights the work of Alina Chan who compared a fast mutation rate of SARS-CoV as it better adapted itself to human to SARS-CoV-2. Here are titles of three of them I've saved but not read, May through September of last year:

SARS-CoV-2 is well adapted for humans. What does this mean for re-emergence?

Single source of pangolin CoVs with a near identical Spike RBD to SARS-CoV-2

COVID-19 CG: Tracking SARS-CoV-2 mutations by locations and dates of interest

"A lot of emerging viruses are well adapted to humans…"

This is literally not true.

Most virologists say the way this virus works is unlike anything they’ve seen or expected so they can’t imagine how a human would have engineered it. Why do you think your feeling about the virus’s level of adaptation trumps the experts opinions?

1) Citation on "most" please. The world is a big place, so you will be able to find a citation for any opinion. If you are going to say "most" then please back it up with a source.

2) gain-of-function research doesn't require a human to engineer a new virus. It is a way to essentially speed up evolution and allow nature to do the heavy lifting. You're arguing points that no on here is making.

Very easily, you can get to the other side of the world before you even become infectious, which can be days after contracting the virus. Even if there were a trail of infectious they were probably chalked up as the flu and is likely to be undetected. If it was spreading then the virus may not have been adapted enough for the explosive growth we saw in Wuhan.

Non-scientists obviously go into bat caves all the time, for guano collection, mining, etc. This certainly is a possible pathway for the emergence of zoonotic diseases, including SARS-CoV-2. Those aren't the bat caves I was referring to, though.

The WIV and Wuhan CDC sent grad students to hike through the wilderness to remote bat caves too far from any road or farm to have been exploited yet for any practical use. They chose those caves based on their expert predictions of where they expected to see the greatest diversity of novel coronaviruses.

There's obviously far fewer WIV grad students than guano harvesters; but the risk per person seems orders of magnitude higher, for an expert deliberately seeking a virus vs. a merely indifferent laborer. So that seems like a new and non-negligible risk to me, and thus one that requires investigation. Note that I'm not alone in this; Marc Lipsitch, for example, often mentions this possible pathway.

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