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Comment by boeingUH60 | Hacker News Reader

Nothing seems certain at this point, but, let’s say the pandemic was actually caused by a lab leak. That’ll mean the world was brought to an economic standstill and millions of people died because of the errors and carelessness of some people…will there be consequences? What will be the assurance that such deadly mistake won’t occur again?

If it was actually a lab leak, then it’ll definitely rank as the most costly and fatal mistake in the 21st Century. I can hardly wrap my head around it; human error causing damage on a mythical scale. Scary stuff.

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The only reason to not say it was a lab leak is to avoid embarrassing those responsible, China first and America second.

But little by little people will start accepting that.

What should the consequences be? At the very least a tightening of the controls around labs doing bio research. Of course, this amounts to nothing if someone is allowed to outsource research to labs in countries that don't follow the stringent procedures. So, anybody who does such outsourcing shares the full responsibility if things go wrong.

What about Covid itself? China and America need to provide reparations. How much? Clearly in the trillions, maybe double digit trillions.

How about those who obstructed the investigations? I think they should face justice, and it's not unreasonable to expect that some would go to prison for their obstructions.

Both in China and America? For sure in America, where the arm of justice has a long reach. In China, if Xi wants a well functioning Party, yes, he should sent those who obstructed to jail, for if he tolerates that, his Party will go in decay.

This is what diplomacy is for.

We need treaties tightly regulating all biolabs around the world. Any countries not agreeing with the treaties should be blacklisted from entering entering or exiting countries that are part of the treaty, perhaps even restricting trade as well.

The decontamination protocols and entry / exit procedures for every biolab should be unified, worldwide, with strict and regular third-party circular auditing around the world. This allows labs to maintain their secrets; only the perimeter / filter are subject to this.

That would be the sensible course of action as a matter of Earth defense.

> What should the consequences be?

The abolition of modern virology, roll the clock back on them a hundred years. Allow the development of vaccines for extant viruses, but completely ban all Dr Frankenstein activities with viruses. No more "invent a virus in a lab to beat nature to the punch" horse shit, with is flagrant weapons development under the cover of civilian research. As soon as the virus started circulating through the population, did these researchers share their knowledge and help develop a vaccine? No, they buried their involvement and covered up everything they knew. They were no help at all, and never intended to be. Burn their books which describe how it is done, and silence the people who already understand it with the threat of criminal imprisonment for sharing their knowledge. Encourage major religions to amend their rules with strong taboos against this research, and institute harsh economic sanctions against any nation that doesn't participate in this ban.

Does this seem extreme? It shouldn't. This field of research has the power to kill billions and no demonstrable upside. It is even more dangerous than nuclear weapons; because at least a technician at a nuclear weapon production facility would be hard pressed to release his work on the global public of his own initiative. Smuggling a virus out of any lab is trivial, all it takes is a single madman's willingness to sacrifice himself as patient zero.

We're the villagers in an "evil wizard" scenario. The wizards have been meddling in dangerous forces beyond the understanding of common people, and it's getting people killed. The solution is to storm the wizard's tower and throw the wizards off the top of it.

> The abolition of modern virology, roll the clock back on them a hundred years.

This kind of sloppy hyperbole is tremendously damaging, feeding the false narrative that we must choose between the benefits of modern virology--smallpox wasn't eradicated until 1977!--and the catastrophic risks of experiments on novel potential pandemic pathogens.

Almost all modern virological research involves either existing pathogens already present in humans, or novel pathogens in systems incapable of replicating in humans. The WIV's research was a narrow exception, and one that was controversial long before this pandemic. For example, here's David Relman asking Ralph Baric a question about those risks, back in 2014:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw-nR6-4kQQ&t=2466s

That narrow area carries almost all the risk of a catastrophic research accident, and has yet to deliver any significant benefit. It could be banned with minimal impact on almost all modern virological research. That narrow regulation is what we need, and there are people (like the new NGO Protect Our Future) working to draft and enact it. Your conflation between modern virology in aggregate and that narrow area doesn't help them, and I hope you will stop.

Hackernews now advocating for burning books, wow. This is the end result in allowing political ragebait threads instead of focusing on tech and startups.

> Hackernews now advocating

THE HACKERNEWS?!

That's as dense as claiming we should punish the Cambridge Analytica incident by reverting the entire humanity's computing technology by a century. There are numerous perspectives in which you and I are the evil wizards simply because we're in this move-fast-and-break-things industry. Don't burn the field just to punish a few.

> China first and America second.

wtf????????????? I have no idea what you are on about

The US was paying for the research that lead to the virus outbreak. Simple as that.

[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_R01AI110964_7529

AND america? nah man China should pay reparations or face heavy sanctions and geopolitical isolation.

America founded research at the Wuhan lab [1], and more precisely exactly the research that lead to the virus outbreak.

  EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak have been working with Shi Zhengli, a virologist at the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology], for more than 15 years. Since 2014, an NIH grant has funded EcoHealth’s research in China, which involves collecting faeces and other samples from bats, and blood samples from people at risk of infection from bat-origin viruses. Scientific studies suggest that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus most likely originated in bats, and research on the topic could be crucial to identifying other viruses that might cause future pandemics. The WIV is a subrecipient on the grant.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02473-4

It would be very fortunate if American scientists and people in power are involved. At least then there is some hope of actually finding out what happened and seeking justice.

No one is going to pay any significant reparations for a couple.

1. Too many first world countries do not want to open up that can of worms because it might come back to bite them in the ass over the various things they have inflicted environmentally on the rest of the world.

The US and Europe for example are responsible for the overwhelming majority of greenhouse gases currently in the atmosphere--yes some other countries are now emitting comparable amounts to current US/EU emissions, but because CO2 stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years the US/EU emissions from the past 200 years still massively dominate and will for a long time.

2. Calculating the reparations amount due to a given country would require an analysis of how much of their losses were due to their poor handling of COVID. There's too much risk that such analysis could conclude for many countries that their net losses were way higher than they would have been had the country handled it better.

If you suffer $X loss but then only get say 1/10 $X in reparations because that analysis concluded that 90% of your loss could have been avoided if you'd handled it better, your citizens aren't going to be happy their government got the 1/10 $X in reparations. No, your citizens are going to be annoyed their government botched things making COVID 10 times worse than it had to be.

> it’ll definitely rank as the most costly and fatal mistake in the 21st Century

Ah, but the century is still young.

Very astute! The First! Lab escape happened in 2021. CRISPr was invented in 2000-2005ish. CRISPr cas9 around 2014.

BSL-4 labs have gone from 40 to 60ish in the last 25 years with another coming online almost every year.

BSL-3 labs are virtually uncountable and are in the 13000ish range in the USA alone (sorry, can't Remeber source)

Put it all together, and only an idiot STARTS with natural origin.

Also, there will be many many more.

So the only solution is to build my own BSL-4 lab and live inside it. We now have a "BSL-4 lab gap":

"We must not allow a mine-shaft gap!:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybSzoLCCX-Y

[I miss Peter Sellers!]

Based on what you suggest, there is every incentive for things to remain uncertain permanently. Any smoking gun will be hidden away and discredited.

> That’ll mean the world was brought to an economic standstill and millions of people died because of the errors and carelessness of some people…will there be consequences? What will be the assurance that such deadly mistake won’t occur again?

If history is any indicator, no, and there isn't any.

But if you're interested in establishing precedent for reckless behaviour damaging the world economy, and the health of millions of people, I understand that would open the developed world to a mountain of liability in the arena of climate change.

I'd still say the Iraq War was most costly and fatal mistake in the 21st Century.

Hard to compare, admittedly.

Based on what exactly? According to Wikipedia, the Iraq War produced a total death count of 25,071 and a total wounded count of 117,961. Also according to Wikipedia COVID-19 has produced a death count of 6,868,964 and an infection count of 674,809,997.

I'm all for complaining about US tactics, but it's 100% incorrect to try and claim that the Iraq War was "worse" than COVID-19.

Iraq only produced a death count of 25k? Do Iraqis not count?

Also almost all of the violence post war should be somewhat attributable to the invasion; we broke the basket to secure oil rights (and some argue to also keep the petrodollar as the world reserve currency)

The cost was way more than the cherry-picked stats you present

When it comes to the Iraq War, according to the Wikipedia, and let me quote it

> "An estimated 151,000 to 1,033,000 Iraqis died in the first three to five years of conflict."

Then that famous video of "Madeleine Albright Saying Iraqi Kids' Deaths 'Worth It'" talked about half million children.

https://www.newsweek.com/watch-madeleine-albright-saying-ira...

You seem to assume no Iraqis were killed, which is pretty odd.

In "costly and fatal", I also include that the Iraq War arguably marks the end of the US as the world's only superpower. Both in terms of cost and moral status, it was a huge abdication of status.

There's a reasonably high chance that SARS-2 covid virus leads to a minor or moderate decrease in average lifespan (due to the effects on the vascular system and wreacking havoc on all sorts of organs) and that it will continue to circulate in humanity forever.

If that's the case it'll just slowly outscale any singular event like the Iraq War over multiple human generations of deaths and damage.

> What will be the assurance that such deadly mistake won’t occur again?

Whatever assurances you want will be a fantasy.

There has never been accountability among the elite class and there won't be, because whatever mistakes they make only affect everybody else.

It's like a video game - imagine the game characters you 'mistreat' asking what consequences you will be facing. You'd cackle at game designers having thought of such an amusing feature and proceed to go right back to doing as you please.

It's about the same in real life.

What’s even more difficult to wrap your head around should be the poor response to the pandemic; the lack of regard for the vulnerable (citizens) and the poor (nations).

>millions of people died because of the errors and carelessness of some people…

Which people? Should a lab tech in China receive consequences because religious people in America believed in the promises of their pastor and went to church and were sickened?

The most costly and fatal mistake so far.

Let me play the game. If covid was caused by a lab leak, I think the right question to ask is: who benefits (did benefit) by the leak? And remember that number of dead people is something that governments don’t care about (i.e., governments easily go into war every now and then: it’s clear they couldn’t care less about civilians).

> who benefits (did benefit) by the leak

The worlds billionaires, combined, made more money in 2020-2022 than the previous 20 years combined. When there’s that much money involved, one must be a little suspicious.

Another question you should ask: Who insisted it almost certainly wasn’t a lab leak, and who possibly had motives to deny it?

I dunno actually, who has actually been arguing that it couldn’t be a lab leak? I’ve generally seen people arguing the position: there’s no evidence for it having been a leak. This second hand story about a low-confidence classified report doesn’t push me much in either direction. It is possible, though.

What do we do if it leaked? Dangerous thing are handled in labs. We should double check the handling protocols based on the unknown possibility that it was a leak, just to be safe. I bet there are more dangerous things than COVID in all sorts of labs.

Both the FBI and Energy Dept are saying it was an unintended leak.

It's simpler. Tools x labs x pathogens and funding x risk of escape = risk.

ALL categories are going up. Ergo, risk is going up exponentially.

No need for conspiracies. Just a proper parsing of the words "lab leak"

How do you embrace "lab leak" without also embracing a conspiracy to conceal the virus's origins after it escaped into the wild?

Or has the term "conspiracy" just been fully redefined to mean "a thing that can't happen" at this point?

Even if we accepted the idea that "governments don't care", it's still made up of people that act out of self interest. How would they protect themselves and their loved ones from the same fate that they so callously cast upon the rest of us? I think Hanlon's Razor applies: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect"

> How would they protect themselves and their loved ones from the same fate that they so callously cast upon the rest of us?

A good question, but worth noting that they do seem to have in fact done so. I struggle to think of a single-higher up of any significance who was felled by SARS-CoV-2, despite the fact so many of them are octogenarians. Colin Powell maybe, but his blood cancer was clearly the more proximate cause of his death. A few in Iran, but, well.

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