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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

1) talk about failure to read a room

2) even the alleged learning from the experiment: "The conclusion of the study is that mutations in the spike protein of the Omicron variant are responsible for the strain’s ability to evade immunity people have built up via vaccination, infections, or both, but they are not responsible for the apparent decrease in severity of the Omicron viruses."

...does not hold up, because this was in mice. Ordinary lab rats were immune to the original strain of covid-19, but not to Omicron, which shows that it is not at all unlikely for there to be significant differences in the resistance of rodents to one strain or the other, compared to humans.

So, they made a hybrid covid-19 strain, that could conceivably have been as contagious as Omicron but as lethal as the original strain. Nice work, folks.

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Well the mice the researchers used were genetically modified mice to have human ACE2 receptors which is standard practice in Virology. But! I will say it 100% is not worth the risk, just last year a researcher in Taiwan got infected with the delta variant in the same level lab BSL3, so any dangerous or novel virus they create has a real possibility of escaping.

Also it's not like this type of research helped us predict or even fight the pandemic. Millions have been spent on studying and modifying wild coronaviruses and it not only failed to predict this pandemic, but none of the research helped in anyway combating it. For example the Ecohealth Alliance the main collaborators with the WIV has still to this day refused to share research and data they have collected over the years. So either the research is worthless and thus why are we funding it despite the dangers, or they have something they want to hide.

This particular research helps to understand how important this particular variant of the spike protein is.

When future virus variants are discovered and sequenced, this information helps understand what to expect. Because the virulence of new Variants can't be estimated for months after their first detection.

This particular variant that didn't exist until humans combined two variants into a new one?

Which is simulating what could and probably will happen in nature, before it really happens

Or could cause it to happen. There's still a decent chance the original covid wouldn't have happened if people weren't doing this type of research.

There is zero indication of the Virus having originated in a lab. Some hand-waving, no actual evidence. No genomic signature. No merging of known lineages (which would happen). No plausible mechanism (to those who know the subject).

Much more likely: This Virus originated just like the thousands before it. From ordinary Human-to-animal contact. Virus particles pass from animals to Humans trillions of times a year. Most of the time exactly nothing happens at all. Even rarer are actual transmissions. Still rarer are chains of transmission that allow the Virus to evolve into an actual threat.

I love how everyone involved always jumps on the most extreme version of the lab leak hypothesis "Chinese government made COVID super weapon" and then use that to discount everything else instead of admitting the much more nuanced reality of the situation.

The lab leak hypothesis has a range from "This virus was created and released by the Chinese government as a bio-weapon against the US and to kill off their own aging population" at the extreme. To the "The virus was being studied at the Wuhan Virology Institute and someone one got lax on safety protocols got exposed accidentally and then took the train home."

Most people that seem to argue against lab leak, seem to assume everyone ascribes to the first position, whereas the majority of the people that believe in the lab leak subscribe to the later position, including myself.

The conflation and smearing that happens whenever an accidental lab leak is brought up, makes me suspicious. As an example, I used to edit Wikipedia articles in the area, but I gave up, because some editors made a concerted effort to discredit it as a "conspiracy theory" and had boundless energy to shut it down.

It seems to be the opposite to the much vaunted "fearless scientific transparency" that's sold to the public as a hallmark of science.

I guess that in a generation or two, when vested interests move on, there may be more willingness to explore this.

> The lab leak hypothesis has a range from "This virus was created and released by the Chinese government as a bio-weapon against the US and to kill off their own aging population" at the extreme. To the "The virus was being studied at the Wuhan Virology Institute and someone one got lax on safety protocols got exposed accidentally and then took the train home."

And people on either end of that spectrum should be expected to have substantial evidence to support their position since the far simpler and common scenario is that it wasn't leaked from the lab at all. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" applies much more to the government bio-weapon crowd, but it still absolutely applies to the 'employee mistake' theory too.

There are two indicators, one simply how close it was to a virus lab doing similar studies, and two how immediately and blindly people denied that they could be any connection.

They'd have had to investigate before making a claim, and had not, so obviously they're lying.

A concerted conspiracy to deny an option is some evidence for that option being true.

I don't claim it did come from a lab, but that anyone stating categorically that it did not is lying.

Why is

- a virus unusually adapted to being transmitted between people

- which was released next to one of a handful of labs on earth that studied it

- that the Chinese government and several American scientists tried to cover up

- normally found a thousand of miles away

- that we can't find an origin for unlike SARS and MERS (with far more looking)

isn't also an at least equally extraordinary claim?

> I love how everyone involved always jumps on the most extreme version of the lab leak hypothesis "Chinese government made COVID super weapon" and then use that to discount everything else instead of admitting the much more nuanced reality of the situation.

I think a decent argument could be made that this phenomenon (in its abstract form, not specifically this variation of it) is more dangerous than covid, or even a virus much more dealy. Who knows how much damage this does to the world considering how widely it exists?

"Gain of Function" research is brought up very often in this context.

A natural virus would first need to get into the lab in order to escape from it. I'd argue it's a lot harder and less probably for a bat Virus - which isn't adapted to Humans yet - to be collected by a lab, then infect a researcher, then continue the chain in Humans, rather than the same virus making it from the Jungle to a Human population without involving some researchers. Even more likely, Sars-Cov-2 widely circulated in the intermediary hosts and had thousands of contacts with Humans until one lineage "stuck" because it finally matched.

How would we know if there would be a genomic signature if the database of viruses Wuhan worked with wasn't opened up?

There is not plausible mechanism for anyone from the Wuhan laboratory to get sick with a virus they are studying? This happened several times, and happens 100's of times a year (not Wuhan specifically but labs).

There is some circumstantial evidence it was a lab leak. Like the virus doesn't naturally occur in the Wuhan district, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology is one of the few in the world that study coronaviruses and do gain of function research. Unlike SARS and MERS where we discovered the origins quickly, we still don't know the origins of covid-19. I don't know how you leap to the conclusion it was of natural origins when we don't even know what those natural origins are.

We don't know if it's a lab leak or not, but they do happen and they've fairly common. (10's-100's per year)

The Virus has been sequenced to death. Gene editing technology leaves traces. Hard to explain, but it's partly because of the technology and partly because evolution erodes statistical anomalies in a certain way.

There is no plausible way to "gain of function" your way into a pandemic Virus. Researchers can make a Virus gain a function. Usually by making it lose a few others. There is also no plausible way that an unmodified Virus collected from labs just happens to be the next hot shit on the pandemic scene. If there is a Virus with that potential, you wouldn't need researchers and a leak from a BSL-3 lab to make it go viral, it would just happen on its own.

Except it's not a simulation, it is causing it to "really happen". The only difference hinges on the ability of human institutions to keep it contained, which at the very least we have reason to be concerned about.

A pandemic virus circulating in the wild is an incredibly fine-tuned machine. Just mashing together integral parts from two quite different genomes is not going to result in a Variant that is tuned enough. In order to make a Virus virulent and transmissive, it needs to evolve through multiple, probably dozens of hosts, and only if that is on a broad scale, like thousands of such lineages, does it have a chance of success.

Even one lab leak isn't enough. The Virus would most likely die out on its own, if not it would get outcompeted by naturally developing variants. The risk of a lab leaking a variant in a way that it would outcompete natural strains is so miniscule compared to natural variants arising and doing the same, it's not worth mentioning.

Do we have definite proof that the original SARS-CoV-2 hasn't escaped the lab?

To what standard? It's the same game with climate change. When only 1% of the scientists dissent, that gives certain people enough confidence to believe the opposite of what the 99% believe.

I'm always skeptical when people say x% of scientists agree or disagree with a given hypothesis. Most of the time these numbers are flat out wrong or misleading. Most scientists have very complex views on their own domain. Those complexities lead to a very nuanced understanding of topics that we lay people don't fully understand. Most have subtle disagreements on most topics.

You can have even substantial disagreements with other people in your field without negating the possibility that the bulk of your field is in directional alignment with respect to the core of the matter.

Climate change is a perfect example: 99% of people who study climate likely agree that a) the Earth is getting warmer on average, b) the warming is substantially exacerbated by human-derived emissions, and c) the medium- and long-term destabilization due to that warming has meaningful potential to have catastrophic effects any biomes, including those inhabited by humans. They likely disagree amongst themselves on a) how much warmer and over what timeline, b) how much of the warming is caused by humans, and c) what the specifics and timeline of the catastrophic effects are likely to be.

In situations like the above, attempts to paint disagreement over magnitude as disagreement over direction are misleading at best and disingenuous at worst.

You are totally correct. The problem goes both ways. One camp will say there is significant disagreement on this issue therefore we need to act in a certain way. While the other side will say the scientists all agree so we have to act another way. But you have to be very specific about the claims you're make when you say scientists agree or disagree on a matter. You also cannot extrapolate even slightly when you do.

For example you have made some very specific claims about the climate change consensus. But people often simply say X% of scientists agree on climate change, without defining what they mean about climate change.

All of this is also done to support a given course of action. Those courses of action only make sense with a very specific model of climate change. Often a model that is not totally accurate or agreed upon. Then they often incorrectly quote the scientist. Such as Al Gore's famous prediction “Some of the models suggest to Dr Maslowski that there is a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.” When Dr Maslawski was not predicting anything as dramatic. In the other camp you have appeals to Freeman Dyson. But he does agree that man has altered the climate. He simply doesn't think drastic action is required, and that we will be able to counter its impact. Not surprising from the guy that came up with the ideas to harvest the entire energy output of the sun.

The details matter and the appeal to authority that all the scientists agree with me is not as good as an argument on the facts.

You can't handle the facts.

Seriously. If you don't want to believe what 99% of the experts say, and don't know shit about the actual science - which takes years to understand - it's a pretty good bet you're wrong. Lot's of things can't be broken down to a level non-experts can understand.

Of course, I'm sorry I forgot you are the source of all truth and all who disagree with you don't know anything about actual science. I thank you for my chastisement. I will commence with the self flagellation immediately.

An Analysis of the Origins of the Covid-19 Pandemic: Interim Report [pdf] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33360216

You must know that virologists routinely "serial passage" viruses through animal hosts? Evolving a candidate virus "through multiple, probably dozens of hosts" is what virology labs do.

And lab leaks happen All The Time. SARS-1 escaped labs on six separate occasions.

Serial passage actually weakens a Virus because this kind of evolution selects for properties that aren't useful for transmission outside the lab. And virulence usually decreases as well. Animal studies of this nature just don't have the numerical power to modify such properties intentionally.

We have one other piece of evidence: Ecohealth Alliance will not share lab notebooks from Wuhan. As a Bayesian horse, you’ll know this “explains away” the natural origin hypothesis. The belief in a natural origin actually goes down.

Bullshit. Absence of information means the uncertainty is not reduced...

In fact it seems like a reasonable assumption that on many days at a BSL-3+ lab, we're trusting at least one hungover graduate student who is operating on two hours of sleep at 9 in the morning, not to commit human error while implementing biosafety protocols to protect against the accidental release of a synthetic pathogen to the local urban population.

Another comment in this thread suggested building these labs in a desert or some other extreme environment where scientists can be isolated for months at a time. This seems like an obviously necessary mitigation against the unknown risk of introducing synthetic pathogens that haven't been created in billions of years of evolution. And yet, the secretive groups funding and regulating this research instead choose to build their labs in urban centers. Why?

An obvious answer is it's expensive to build and hard to staff and maintain labs in extreme environments.

Bioweapon labs have a history of being built on small islands for this reason.

> This seems like an obviously necessary mitigation against the unknown risk of introducing synthetic pathogens that haven't been created in billions of years of evolution.

I'd wager that it's likely that the COVID variant that was made in a lab was also created through evolution at some point. Every infected person with the virus has billions of viral replications taking place in their body, and each virus itself will have its own mutations. There's a high chance such mutations already took place, somewhere and in someone/something, but those mutants never created their own worldwide outbreaks.

I think it's worthwhile to understand how mutations can affect a virus at the heart of a pandemic. Finding such mutations in the wild is a roll of the dice, and the chances of encountering something like it rise the longer and more widespread the epidemic is.

None of that is practical. In reality, biosafety procedures in those labs are extremely good at preventing any incidents. If you think it's easy to infect yourself as a BSL-3 researcher, you probably have that impression from watching a movie or TV show.

That's why isolating the researchers is not necessary. Also you underestimate the number of such labs and the amount and variety of work that such labs are doing. "Synthetic Pathogens" are not a thing. Synthetic viruses are hardly pathogenic at all.

If it's not practical to mitigate against some risk, then the potential reward isn't high enough. Ignoring the risk and continuing without optimal mitigation is only a logical course of action if the potential reward outweighs the possible downside.

If research is sufficiently dangerous to necessitate a BSL-3+ lab, then it should have to meet a correspondingly high bar for demonstrating its potential reward. It's not clear to me that gain of function research could ever make such a justification.

In an ideal world, we could do this research with remote controlled robots in an orbiting space capsule. If we can't do that yet, then we could at least do it in a desert. Otherwise, shouldn't we be asking the local population to approve each research proposal that could lead to a local outbreak of a dangerous virus?

> This particular variant that didn't exist until humans combined two variants into a new one?

Nature created a very similar hybrid earlier: "Deltacron" was in the news in March 2022.

The gene that encodes the virus’s surface protein — known as spike — comes almost entirely from Omicron. The rest of the genome is Delta.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/science/deltacron-coronav...

His team described three patients in France infected with a version of SARS-CoV-2 that combines the spike protein from an Omicron variant with the "body" of a Delta variant.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

And apparently the combined Virus was outcompeted by other Omicron lineages. Otherwise that "Deltacron" would have become a prominent or at the very least an extant variant.

If this research does help us to understand that, it should be done in the highest level safety protocol labs, which this was not.

If it is not able to get funding for being done in such a lab, that's probably because the potential learning does not justify such $$ cost. Which means it's also not worth the risk.

You are correct that the virulence of new variants is hard to predict. That very fact means you shouldn't be making new ones, and assuming you can predict how virulent your new one is going to be (and thus how hard it will be to contain).

The safety protocols have been deemed satisfactory. You overestimate the risk.

New variants are created all the time by natural transmission. Including the recombination of two different strains. So the controlled, artificial recombination is like a grain of sand in a bucket of sand. And even if it "escapes", the escaped variant would still have to evolve and prove itself.

Experts don't see this as a risk.

I read this and dream of the day where the common cold is cured. And it makes it all seem worth it.

There is no common cold. There are over 200 distinct viruses that cause the illness we call "a cold."

s/common cold/over 200 distinct viruses that cause the illness we call "a cold."/

Sure, but investigators need to treat this subject with reverence. Unlike pretty much every other discipline on earth, this one has the potential to disrupt billions of lives from a single mistake.

Virologists were the first ones that jumped to say Covid wasn't a lab leak, yet what they should have been saying was, "we'll get to the bottom of this and then, even if wasn't a lab leak, work to make sure that outcome never comes to pass."

Instead we got a blame game, accusations of racism, and everyone not in their field was called stupid or incapable of understanding the situation if we asked for more light to be shed in the subject.

Also, what happened to the scientific method? There was a whole lot of certainty being prematurely thrown around.

This hubris won't do.

I don't know how Covid came about, and at this point the only reason to know is to prevent the next one. But no matter the case, whatever is next better not be from a lab.

You want a global replace, so the end is "/g"... but I feel you lol.

This is incorrect. I have posted the correction. Which I will repeat here for convenience: s/is no common.*/are over 200 distinct viruses that cause the illness we call “a cold.”/

Lol, I didn’t think this would be a thing… but I would think in your statement that you would want a fix for the multitude of viruses that are considered “conmmon colds” right? That’s what I meant.

So you would want a global replacement.

s/is no common.*/are over 200 distinct viruses that cause the illness we call “a cold.”/

> There are over 200 distinct viruses that cause the illness we call "a cold."

Probably far, far more than that if you count the inevitable mutations that occur during replication.

It's a feature of how our language, labeling systems, and brains can only grapple with so many things. We rarely need to be so precise.

There are millions of human cells in your body right now that don't share "your" DNA [1] due to mutation or specialization (somatic recombination, Barr bodies, etc.)

We've known this since trying to apply species categories.

[1] "your" DNA becomes a population average sometime after fertilization.

Discrete classification of continuous phenomena is always going to be messy. Humans create discrete categories because they are useful to humans, but it's always important to remember the map is not the terrain.

what? nearly nobody's dying from the common cold. covid kills hundreds of people every day. how is fucking around with covid worth a common cold cure?!

Common colds push many people on the brink of death over the edge. But to your point, the years of potential life lost (YPLL) when that happens is minimal.

> Common colds push many people on the brink of death over the edge

Be nice if you could provide some backup cos I've not heard of this, or any idea how bad it is.

We don't know what would happen to humans when the immune system isn't challenged regularly. Especially in the younger years. It's just best to get a couple of colds a year and call it day. Or if you have kids like me, a couple of colds every month haha.

> or they have something they want to hide.

Indeed. I recommend this interview with Jeffrey Sachs, who headed Lancet's commision to investigate Covid-19.

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2022/10/jeffrey-sachs-lessons-...

You may find your eyebrows a couple inches higher after listening :-)

No thanks, I'd rather trust virologists and the people who are doing the actual engineering. I don't trust directors/executives, by definition. They have ZERO idea about nearly anything, other than sounding confident.

Another interview that Jeffrey Sachs did: https://youtu.be/morj-3rdWwM

sibling throwaway youtube link to interview with Jeffrey Sachs should not be dead.

Disagree as much or as little as you see fit with him. Nothing there needs to be suppressed.

How did it get to be dead? Seems odd.

> Also it's not like this type of research helped us predict or even fight the pandemic. Millions have been spent on studying and modifying wild coronaviruses and it not only failed to predict this pandemic, but none of the research helped in anyway combating it.

I was under the impression this research was partly responsible for quickly identifying parts of the virus that are conserved in evolution, thus making them good targets for mRNA vaccines. If vaccine manufacturers had targeted proteins that have high rates of mutation, it would allow the virus to evade vaccine immunity faster, potentially making vaccines useless by the time they were actually rolled out.

The spike protein was selected because the virus was already well-adapted to humans and they assumed changes to the spike protein would make it less-fit and not able to infect as readily. They were wrong.

> If vaccine manufacturers had targeted proteins that have high rates of mutation, it would allow the virus to evade vaccine immunity faster, potentially making vaccines useless by the time they were actually rolled out.

This is what happened - the variant later named Delta was first identified in Oct 2020, long before the vaccines were released. If anything the vaccines helped it become the dominant one.

I guess I would have assumed the opposite? A virus that just jumped from bats to humans is expected to evolve pretty quickly in the binding domain as it “learns” to better target human ACE2. I thought the reason they targeted spike was that it’s on the surface of the virus and so an obvious target for antibodies to attach, whereas if you target some structural proteins deep inside the viral structure you’re taking a risk that the antibodies won’t be able to reach them.

The spike protein was selected because prior research into SARS and MERS showed that vaccines targeting the spike had the best immune response as compared to other proteins. They were aware it could mutate because the spike of SARS2 was different than SARS or MERS.

Also vaccines against the ancestral stain are still quite effective at preventing serious disease against every variant we've seen so far.

I don't know what point you are trying to make but you are basing it on incorrect information.

This is an important point. The research that, as I understand it (and IANAVirologist), helped jump-start the covid-19 vaccines was related to SARS and MERS, two coronaviruses that were already known to have infected humans, often lethally (and thus of urgent importance to study).

Nobody (that I know of) objects to virologists studying existing viruses such as SARS and MERS. If the researchers in the article had just been studying wild-type covid-19, well it still should have been in a highest-safety lab, but it would have been less objectionable than this. Labs which are below the highest level of containment, could and should be studying coronaviruses of the sort that cause common colds (there are 4 of them, as I understand it). Making new (or hybrid) ones is not something that any but the highest level of containment facilities should be allowed to do.

> Millions have been spent on studying and modifying wild coronaviruses and it not only failed to predict this pandemic [...]

Huh? Coronaviruses have been pointed out as a big area of concern for decades, at least.

What would you have expected as a prediction, exact date and time and genetic sequence?

If they had predicted it with any high degree of accuracy, many people would've considered that as proof that they caused it anyway.

I think the other part that is appalling is they did this in Biosafety Level 3 labs instead of 4 when COVID has basically brought the entire world to its knees for 3 years. What is wrong with the biosafety review committee?

Also, they completely skirted the NIAID approval process, putting the public at risk, will anyone see jail time for that?

The result of the research is very valuable. It helps predict the attributes of future novel strains.

In reality, infectious success and malignancy are highly anti-correlated, strongly. The combined Virus (which probably has existed in a very similar form in the wild somewhere!!) is actually a lot less dangerous than the two sources.

Also: Both Viruses have become a lot less dangerous to the world population because of immunity.

Why is that valuable? It takes weeks if not days to synthesize a vaccine for a new strain. It then takes months if not years, and massive investment, to test it for safety and efficacy. How the hell does shortening the weeks part of this at the expense of potentially requiring a new expensive test, in case the experiment leaks, make any sense?

Creating a vaccine was not the purpose of this research.

The problem with new variants is that it takes months to know how virulent and how transmissible it is. Such research enables better prediction from the point of detecting and sequencing such variants.

We know now that Omicron's spike protein is responsible for the better transmission and better immunological evasion. If we see a new variant with Omicron's spike protein, but modified, we can first of all tell it's going to be better at evasion. If there are changes in parts that are highly selected, it's probably more transmissive. If that part is less selected-for (there are ways to tell from the sequence) we have a clue that it is probably a little less transmissive. We also know that the spike protein is less associated with the virulence. Which means researchers have to keep looking for what makes the Virus deadly. This could lead to more effective vaccines and antibody treatments or even antiviral agents. Knowing which protein to target is half the game.

“Such research enables better prediction from the point of detecting and sequencing such variants.”

It’s good because the researchers word salad said it was good OK

> It helps predict the attributes of future novel strains.

Prove it.

This alone has convinced me, these scientists need to be investigated and punished for biological terrorism. This represents an insane lack of ethics. Did they forget, we've been in a multi-year pandemic lockdown.

Establishing the efficacy of a non-existent and artificial pathogen is useless on it's own. Like I bred this dog, and i know for a fact because of it's brown snout its lethality went down 20%. no you don't. it's a whole chimeric dna operation. not a binary tree.

Looks like there needs to be a criminal line drawn somewhere.

> 1) talk about failure to read a room

The people most upset in the room are the same people who have been screaming that Covid was not a lab accident. I wonder why they would be upset at someone showing how easy it is to weaponize a coronavirus?

One of the worst "gotcha" takes I've read in a while. I'm sure people who believe covid was a lab leak are _also_ upset with this.

Try not to interpret everything around you with an us vs them lens.

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