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Comment by stonogo | Hacker News Reader

None of these Substack-based lab-leak hysteria pieces ever address "so what?" I see nothing here to convince me that Omicron is a lab leak as opposed to an animal reservoir, where the author includes "seems to have come from mice" as evidence for the former and not the latter, which is confused.

Regardless, there is nothing actionable about any origin theory aside from "be mad at some unnamed scientist" or, as some of these conspiracy-theory vendors would prefer, "be mad at science in general."

So, what is the call to action here? Stop researching gain of function entirely?

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> Stop researching gain of function entirely?

Yes, this was very explicitly stated. And this is nowhere near the first call to do so (a lot of very respected scientists were calling for a stop to GoF research before the pandemic).

Whatever claims GoF research had beforehand of helping w/ pandemic preparedness have evaporated, because none of the successful responses to the pandemic (vaccines, antivirals) have relied on GoF research whatsoever. It appears to a high risk with no reward.

Millions of people are dead. I think it's worth having an objective public debate about what steps would be appropriate to reduce the risk of this happening again. I don't see that "be mad at science" has anything to do with an insistence on an honest exploration and testing of hypotheses.

Neil deGrasse Tyson sums up the scientific approach as follows: "Test ideas by experiment and observation. Build on those ideas that pass the test, reject the ones that fail. Follow the evidence wherever it leads. And question everything." Cosmos (2014).

Why is that approach considered so anathema when it comes to hunting down the killer of millions of people?

I suspect you have a bit of a straw man in mind. The opposition would likely say something like: "GoF is the best means at our disposal to fight diseases much worse than COVID".

I suspect that the opposition then is not considering the gravity of this research being responsible for the deaths of millions.

Which is obviously absurd, so there is definitely something else going on.

I suspect:

1. You don't know what my position actually is, as I haven't stated it

2. You are confusing assertion and evidence

In order to be even remotely convincing, you would have to show that the risk/reward ratio of GoF is stacked against GoF. Right now, you're just aggressively telling us that it is.

You'll note that no matter how bad you demonstrate COVID to be, the opposition could (rightly!) claim that there are potentially worse diseases. And no matter how bad you postulate a future GoF-related outbreak might be, they could postulate a scenario in which humanity were saved by GoF.

This is a hard question. It's literally a philosophical one. I really wish you wouldn't be so snarky.

Well you still didn't told us whats your position is, but maybe you can answer my question:

HOW GoF helped us to fight Covid? How the process that most likely played a huge role of creating the virus also helped us fighting it? Everyone how defends GoF tells us plebs, it helps us to fight future epidemics, but no one give us an example how it is helping the current one.

Friend, I think you maybe clicked the wrong reply link? I didn't say anything about GoF research at all.

Assuming that we ever get the honest and open public debate about COVID-19's origins, and if it was a lab leak from WIV and was related to GoF research, then certainly the potential benefits of GoF research would be weighed against the potential dangers. I don't take a position one way or another in that conversation at this point, because I think it's premature.

The fight we are facing right now is whether we're even allowed to have that debate or whether any discussion of the WIV as a possible origin is stamped out as anathema.

I find myself on the side of "follow the evidence" and "question everything" rather than "you're a conspiracy theorist if you even entertain this idea."

Perhaps I read into your comment more than was warranted.

However, "follow the evidence" applies to science. You are describing an ethical question, which means you are doing philosophy.

"Where did SARS-CoV-2 come from?" is a scientific question. It certainly could have ethical implications, granted, but that does not make it not a question suitable for scientific inquiry.

You’re right, it seems I read into your comment too deeply, probably given the context of a GOF related article. Please accept my apology.

No apology necessary, thank you for the pleasantness in hashing it out. :)

We just need to hope that whoever discovers that much-worse-than-covid virus doesn't scratch their nose at the wrong time and carries it to the world.

I think much of the interest in theories of lab leaks, or various other theories - credible or not, are mostly propelled with the same thrust as groundbreaking science itself: they want to find some truth about the world that's been unnoticed or less discussed.

This is what motivates conspiracy theories and scientific discoveries alike. It's even true about flat Earth kids, however misguided they may be.

The "so what?" is always an after thought, and often is irrelevant to the goal of simply finding something new.

There are a lot of implications if this is a lab leak, including: - Are labs involved in this research sufficiently secure? Do we need to raise the standard of security? - Is the cost-benefit of gain of research worth it? - Should China be forced to pay reparations/ sanctioned for hiding the source? All of these conversations depend on whether its a lab leak.

I would add to that: "is it an intentional means of destabilizing the West?"

To be clear: I see no evidence that Omicron is even a second lab-leak, much less that it's part of a sinister plot. My point is that there are immediate geopolitical implications, in addition to the scientific and public-health implications you have highlighted.

Which makes it even more ridiculous that random people on the internet are coming up with the lab leak theories and that American intelligence agencies, spanning 2 wildly divergent administrations, have not said anything to support this.

Yes, we agree. This thread is about the implications of the lab-leak v2 theory, assuming it were true.

> IC analysts assess that a natural origin and a laboratoryassociated incident are both plausible hypotheses for how SARS-CoV-2 first infected humans. Analysts, however, disagree on which is more likely, or whether an assessment can be made at all, given the lack of diagnosticity of the available information. Most agencies are unable to make higher than low confidence assessments for these reasons, and confidence levels are tempered by plausible arguments for the opposing hypothesis. For these hypotheses, IC analysts consider an exposure that occurs during animal sampling activity that supports biological research to be a laboratoryassociated incident and not natural contact.

[0]: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Declass...

https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan...

I'm confused. Is Dr. Ferguson and Dr. Vonagen's observations about s/sn ratio not decent evidence towards this? It seems quite good statistically to me.

Maybe. I haven’t read the article yet. I’m one of those comments-first kind of people.

Definitely intrigued, now!

> I see nothing here to convince me that Omicron is a lab leak as opposed to an animal reservoir

The majority of the the piece goes to arguing exactly that. What's the counter?

> The majority of the the piece goes to arguing exactly that. What's the counter?

To the person you're quoting's benefit, there is evidence given, but it doesn't convince them. That's all they are saying.

There's nothing hysterical about the article. Nor do they encourage the reader to conclude they should "be mad at a scientist/science in general". In fact they explicitly encourage the reader to believe and engage with scientists; just, you know, the ones that don't have obvious conflicts of interest around virology and specifically GoF research, who have been some of the most visible and vocal in speaking out against the Lab Leak theory. Also there's a clear call to action, which is to stop GoF research. Did you even read tfa?

>stop researching gain of function entirely?

Yes

Seriously. The incentive for these researchers is awful. Their goal is to take a virus that maybe isn’t a threat and find a way to manipulate it to see how it could be a threat if it somehow naturally mutated into some specific otherwise engineered form. It’s the only way to justify their job. No one will subsidize researchers who come up with “nothing to see here”.

Yes.

> We need to make efforts to stay informed about what’s happening with these viruses and the status of GoF research. We need to tell our friends and families, to use whatever platform we might have, big or small, to promote the end of this research. We need to get this in the public eye, so the public can demand change. We need to demand change, and not take no for an answer.

How many SARS lab leaks should we tolerate? It has happened before and killed people and with this attitude will continue to happen.

https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/82/6/news.pdf?ua=1

> So, what is the call to action here? Stop researching gain of function entirely?

I'd say it's this:

> We need to decide whom to believe: the people with a lot to lose and their not-very-parsimonious or plausible-sounding explanations, which receive almost all the media attention; or the people with expertise and parsimonious explanations who don’t have a dog in this fight.

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