NIH restarts bat virus grant | Hacker News Reader

NIH restarts bat virus grant

science.org

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EcoHealth should not be allowed to participate in Federal grants. If there is a reason we don't have confidence as a society where Covid came from, it's because of efforts taken by Ecohealth to short-circuit reasonable scientific inquiry. EcoHealth doesn't do science and should be banned.

I think this your point is very important to highlight. I'm very uncomfortable with all the posts that posit "Covid came from the lab" is a conclusive fact. There is considerable evidence, and it's certainly plausible, that it did come from a lab, but it's likely we'll never know with certainty.

That said, EcoHealth's cardinal sin was the Feb 2020 Lancet letter ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_letter_(COVID-19) ). There was clear conflict of interest in that letter, and in retrospect it did huge damage for the effort to study the origins of Covid. Like the saying goes "it's not the crime, it's the cover up". While it's not 100% clear there was an "original crime", that letter certainly looks like a coverup. For this letter alone EcoHealth should be banned from getting federal grant money.

It's additionally a shame that instead of pursuing this legitimate angle, many politicians and billionaires went off the deep end with the "prosecute Fauci" ranting, which made people feel forced to defend the EcoHealth side out of a sense of civility.

Nobody was forced to do anything. They defended ecohealth because they were told to do so by mainstream left wing media, who pushed that shaky narrative with no evidence purely because anything that disagreed with Trump was profitable

Every "scientist" associated with that fact-free cover-up should have already ended their career in disgrace.

We should warn these agencies that gain of function research is like playing Russian Roulette, but it would go in one ear and out the other.

Whatvare the arguments for gain of function research? Is there any reason to think the mutations gained as a virus adapts to mice with human lung tissue will resemble the ones it makes when it crosses in the wild? Or is it kind of like the old giant nuke plants, a way to peace-wash war tech?

Edit: Vouching for the reply wasn't enough to resurrect it. It was a claim with no support other than an appeal to authority, but that means you reply to it with a counter not bury it. It sidestepped the question of whether adapting an animal virus to humans has sufficient gain for the risk.

The term “gain of function” is used by different people in different ways. It is a broad category of research and the misguided attempts to categorize it as dangerous in one broad stroke are not helpful. To quote Dr. Fauci:

"If all gain-of-function stops, you will have no vaccines for flu. You will have no vaccines for any of the other diseases, because all of that manipulates a virus or a pathogen to gain a certain function to be able to make a vaccine."

I love me a flu vaccine. But if Covid-19 was the cost, I'm not sure it's worth it.

Also Fauci played a bit of Motte&Baily the other way, by defending ALL GoF research with that argument.

People opposed to gain of function are specifically opposed to attempts to make viruses more communicable or more dangerous

This seems disingenuous, afaik the contributions of GoF work (that enhances transmissibility, pathogenicity or immune escape of a virus) to widely deployed vaccines is minimal or zero.

EDIT: if downvoter(s) could provide specific examples of how GoF experiments have materially contributed to the development of ANY deployed vaccine I would be grateful (and update my position). For "the vaccines stop if GoF stops" to be true, it should be possible to name at least one vaccine which critically relied on GoF research, right?

> The project no longer involves collecting new bat samples or working with live viruses. WIV has no role beyond contributing more than 300 whole and partial genome sequences of SARS-related bat coronaviruses from its collection, Daszak says.

I join others in their skepticism, but, as a layman, I'd like to know: Is this gain-of-function research as described? What are the risks if the research doesn't involve live viruses?

Does it really matter? Given how much they've already obfuscated the semantics and definition of "gain of function," why should we trust that this time, they're really not doing anything resembling gain of function? And even if we could give them that benefit of the doubt, why should we? The board members of EcoHealth should be receiving federal prison sentences, not grant money.

At what point does a conspiracy become a fact? This results in another pandemic, it's not going to be pretty when gov't demands lockdowns.

Conspiracy and fact are orthogonal descriptors.

I don't understand this concept. I see it all over the internet. But I don't get it.

At what point did we stop believing it was possible for people to conspire to commit crimes?

Nobody disputes, for example, that the convictions of the Watergate conspirators - for the charge of conspiracy - was based in fact.

So how is it that we can now say that fact and conspiracy can't be part of the same pattern?

It's true that a huge majority of conspiracy theories are bogus and lack evidence. But it's also true that, albeit rarely, conspiracies do occur.

Orthogonal doesn't mean opposites, it means they're perpendicular i.e. unrelated.

I understand.

But they're not unrelated.

Sometimes a fact pattern reveals a conspiracy.

Your previous response indicates that you did not understand, and you are now backtracking.

Yes, I misinterpreted.

That's not what orthogonal means. Your counter-examples are exactly what orthogonal means; they are independent attributes.

Consider some other class of crime.

If I said, "the matter of whether a crime is premediated, and the fact pattern of that crime, are orthogonal attributes."

You'd say: "That's not true - the fact pattern is how we determine whether there was evidence of premeditation."

It's the same for conspiracies. The fact pattern is not orthogonal; it's integral.

I took the go to mean whether something is a conspiracy and whether something is a fact aren't tied. You can have any of the permutations. I think very often you get what looks like conspiracy when there is actually no communication between parties, rather it is swarm behavior, each ant acting based on its observations and motives. But sometimes the ants have to chat, then it is a conspiracy.

You're right; I misunderstood the comment to mean, "the matter of whether something is a conspiracy, and the fact pattern of that thing, are unrelated."

But it seems like what the commenter meant was, "the matter of whether a given act is properly regarded as a conspiracy, and then the evidence supporting a particular instance of that act, are unrelated."

Rather the ones we thought were "conspiracy theories" (over the past few years at least) most of them turned out to be true. It might be really unpopular to say it here but the Biden admin really fucked up on this one big time. I presume most people, from all parts of the political spectrum, are not willing to go through another round of pandemic induced lockdowns, deaths of friends and family members, hospitalizations etc just because some careless mad scientists unleashed a lethal virus on the entire human population "by mistake". There is no excuse for this.

Majority of us (99%) do not have any level of expertise to gauge if this sort of Research is beneficial to humanity or not. We can only go by "belief" that those experts who are overseeing this get it right. That "belief" has been shaken big time post 2020. All the flip-flops by Fauci and Co has only contributed to denting the image of this part of the scientific community. And to restart it again, when we still have no conclusive evidence of what actually happened in the previous pandemic (I believe it is Wuhan lab that was responsible but my belief has no weight unless it is actually verified) we should not be restarting any such research.

Also such research must not be the purview of one single country or few countries (US/China). Permission must be sought from all member nations of UN before any such research is carried out as it has potential to wipe out humanity.

1) the rabbit jumped: (not conspiracy, fact could be true or false)

2) jfk was assassinated by the CIA: (conspiracy, fact could be true or false)

What concept are you referring to when you say you don't understand it?

I took the comment to mean, "the matter of whether something is a conspiracy is unrelated to the fact pattern of the event."

I apologize, for that's obviously not what you meant now that I see this comment.

But perhaps you can acknowledge that this assertion is pervasive on the internet: that if something is a conspiracy, it is so because of the beliefs of the believers, rather than the fact pattern of the event.

If you look at the comment I originally replied to, OP says something like "when does conspiracy become fact". In having a enough conversations about the topic of conspiracy, you realize people are conflating conspiracy as laying(lying?) on the spectrum of likelihood. So when they say "when does conspiracy become fact?" it sounds like our understanding of the topic evolves from being a conspiracy to instead being a fact. Why would the conspiracy aspect vanish into thin air? If it was a conspiracy then now it is a conspiracy with some sort of proof. It appears this bizarre redefinition of the meaning of conspiracy came from its incessant association with the word theory. If OP had instead said "when does conspiracy _theory_ become fact" I would have no qualms with the usage. But its hilarious how there are people on either side of this stupidly generic debate who cannot even properly understand the usage of the word conspiracy.

Agree in full.

Because of all the conspiracy theories, it is not going to be pretty if there's a lockdown in the future for any reason whatsoever. Indeed, I think governments will be very reluctant to order a lockdown even if it's the right thing to do. This has nothing to do with facts about virus research though.

It feels like (at least in my country) all the lockdowns were part of an experiment; try something else, see if it works. At some point they tried a curfew for a few weeks, it had an effect but people didn't like it and enforcement was a huge issue (naturally).

The other thing is that every time a measure was effective, they would stop doing it so that the cases would go back up again.

That said, as China proved, a totalitarian lockdown (where people were locked in their house) didn't work in the long run either. China got back to productivity faster though, and gave their population time for a vaccine to be developed and distributed.

Correlation is the mother of conspiracy.

"they would stop doing it so that the cases would go back up again" is quite the statement. How about this instead: "Extreme measures to slow down cases had obvious down sides and were used as sparingly as possible, and eased up when not as necessary"?

(Proven) correlation is not causation. It's correlation, meaning things are related. Causation would mean that something causes something else.

Correlation, meaning things are related, means that one of them might be the cause of another, or they could all be the effects of some unrecognized / unobserved phenomenon.

Correlation is the mother of conjecture; conspiracy is a bunch of people huddling in a small space breathing the same air and posting about it on twitter.

Correlation is the mother of conspiracy. Without correlation there's no blanks to fill in with baseless conjecture. With correlation you get to jump to all the conspiratorial conclusions without any further evidence.

That doesn't mean that all correlation results in conspiracy, but conspiracy loves correlation. Without the conspiracy part it's just a good starting point for scientific inquiry. The nuance is lost on the CO2 saturated tweeters.

> China got back to productivity faster though, and gave their population time for a vaccine to be developed and distributed.

Wasn't China famously locked down long past the point where the rest of the world was back up and getting on with life? By the time we got to Omicron the vaccine appeared to be doing next to nothing and China was still locked down.

Both. China was both business as the new normal early on, but also stuck with the new normal far harder and longer than anyone else.

China was not locked down for two years, no. A lockdown is not "Any pandemic restrictions at all", it's "You are not allowed to leave your house except for food and testing." They did not have the latter for two straight years.

> By the time we got to Omicron the vaccine appeared to be doing next to nothing and China was still locked down.

It’s funny you say that. China disallowed their citizens from using western vaccines including Pfizer, Moderna and Astra Zeneca. Chinese citizens were only allowed to receive Chinese made vaccines. For all we know, they needed their lockdowns until so late because their own vaccines lacked efficacy in baseline protection.

The vaccine was never doing "next to nothing" it was always very effective at keeping you from dying a suffocating death. That's one of the three big things vaccines are supposed to do -- prevent infection, prevent transmission, and reduce pathology. The conspiracy propaganda tried to make it seem like a vaccine that allows a mild case is a failure, when that is, in fact, a success.

Who are they?

"Because of all the conspiracy theories" Why do you call them theories when they play out as described? Really it should be stated "Because of the government conspiracy to enact totalitarian rule..."

It has been proven the government was wrong about all of their Covid predictions and the methodology for care was flawed because it ignored basic care. Many people died because the government ignored actual science and set out to squelch those that disagreed. This is exactly what our government shouldn't be.

>governments will be very reluctant to order a lockdown even if it's the right thing to do

Under what possible circumstances will this be the right thing to do? It's already very apparent that the historically unprecedented worldwide Covid lockdowns have had a devastating effect on the prospects of the poorest in society, while seriously enriching the wealthiest (go and take a look at the Forbes rich list, and find someone who has lost money since 2020. You'll have to look very hard).

It's a "fact" when it's supported by a majority of evidence and withstands scrutiny over an extended period of time.

Which conspiracy are you referring to?

At what point in the day does it make sense to start reading the time off this broken clock I have?

First, nice name OP. ;)

Second, are there any bio people here who can weigh-in on why this is a good idea and how the potential benefits outweigh the risks?

Bioweapons seem like a terrible idea in general. The worst case scenario of any weapon system is that it’s used against its creators and we humans aren’t that good at controlling biology.

So what’s the benefit?

This has nothing to do with bioweapons. The reality is that throughout all of human history, viruses have evolved organically in the environment in such a way that they are infectious to humans. Viruses will continue to evolve and future pandemics will happen. This research is attempting to study how viruses might evolve in a way that is particularly concerning to humans so that we can be more prepared in terms of creating vaccines and understanding the preventive measures that can be taken in future pandemics.

> so that we can be more prepared in terms of creating vaccines and understanding the preventive measures that can be taken in future pandemics.

Did the existing decades of research help with that when COVID-19 organically and naturally spontaneously jumped to human hosts?

Yes! We understood within weeks how the virus infected cells. We had an INCREDIBLE head start than if we had to build all this science up from the ground.

Ok good. That’s good to know there was something positive.

Still seems that we sort of created a pretty terrible problem to use our new knowledge on though.

Can't tell if this is a serious question, but the answer is: yes, obviously. Without the decades of research the death toll would have been orders of magnitude higher. Consider the platform technology revolution in how vaccines are made (and the highly effective vaccines). Structure-based immunogen design, that also helped with the rapid development of antivirals. Consider for example that there are zero recorded deaths from an individual who was vaccinated, got infected, and then was treated with Paxlovid. The use of highly effective PPE in hospitals and other settings was also a result of decades of research into the spread of respiratory infections...

Also when you say "organically and naturally spontaneously jumped to human hosts", you do realize that every virus in history has done exactly that?

I'm not talking about virus research in general, I'm talking about the specific type of research EcoHealth Alliance was doing. You're not arguing that their research helped us develop hospital PPE, are you? My question is whether pre-pandemic research into hybrid coronaviruses was essential for the development of the vaccines or other treatments for COVID-19.

100% —this is also my original question.

The purpose of the research was to contribute to our understanding of emergent viruses. I mentioned several other contributions of that class of research, namely vaccine and antiviral development. Understanding how viruses mutate also informs our understanding of what PPE is necessary to prevent the spread of infection. So yes actually, this type of research does help us develop appropriate hospital protocols with respect to PPE.

With respect to EcoHealth specifically, consider the following statement from the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases:

"And if you look at the viruses that the $120,000-a-year grant was given through EcoHealth to the Wuhan Institute to do surveillance on, and you look at the viruses that they studied that they published in the literature, and that was in all of their progress reports, those viruses could not possibly ever turn into SARS-CoV-2, even if they tried to turn them into SARS-CoV-2, because they were evolutionarily so far from SARS-CoV-2 that anybody who knows anything about virology would say there’s nothing you could do to those viruses that would turn them into SARS-CoV-2. Yet what gets conflated is that the N.I.H. funded them, therefore you are liable for the lab leak if it’s a lab leak. It had nothing to do with what we did, because the viruses were unable to be made into SARS-CoV-2."

Here we go again! As if one pandemic wasn't enough! Ridiculous!

Subtitle:

Revised award to EcoHealth Alliance will no longer involve studies of hybrid coronaviruses

FWIW. I don't know if that will make anyone feel any better about it.

It doesn't. Once bitten twice shy...

From the article there's also supposed to be additional review of further grants to deny anything that might look like gain of function research.

My laymen's take is that monitoring viruses for spillover is still important, maybe more important than ever, and gain of function research has negligible benefits and probably shouldn't happen? On that basis, what's presented in this article seems to be on the right track.

Obligatory: What could possibly go wrong?

Better to study and be prepared, than to stick our head in the sand and pretend emerging infectious disease aren't a recurrent factor in our lives.

I mean, modifying a bat virus to be more infectious to human and then doing so in a lab that only requires masks not full body suits. How many millions died, how many suffered, what did we lose?

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that is a terrible idea. “Sticking our head in the sand” appears to not fit this use case very well

That's not really the case here. Gain of function research can not be justified using this argument.

There are so many potential mutations that putting specific evolutionary pressure on a virus in order to "prevent" only those specific effects has such low efficacy considering the size of the problem space.

GOF research has provided very little in terms of benefits, and many argue it's simply been a way to disguise bioweapons research after the Geneva convention.

(Agree with you, but - sorry - as a practitioner in the law of armed conflict, I have to point out that the Biological Weapons Convention didn't take effect until more than a quarter century after the Geneva Conventions of 1949.)

The NIH, the scientists doing the research, and most other experts in the field disagree. Partisan politicians are the ones yelling about how dangerous it is. I think I'll listen to the experts.

Do you say the same thing about AGI?

You mean the ones who get their paycheck from this research don't want to lose their job?

Do you really know what "most" of the experts agree or disagree with? It seems like you'd have to be an expert yourself to know that.

Are you referring to "experts" in the field such as Peter Daszak?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_letter_%28COVID-19%29?w...

Even if that’s the case, which could be possible, it would be nice to have some accountability for the accident that led to the covid pandemic and lockdowns, and a transparent accounting of why even after all that, the risk from not doing this research is greater than that of restarting it

The evidence for the lab leak theory is weak. You're assuming facts that most experts dispute.

The evidence for every other theory is even weaker by any objective standard, though.

EDIT: the evidence in favor of wet market zoonosis is what, exactly? "It's always been zoonosis in the past" plus "we (claim to have) first found this in a wet market" and maybe also "there's some RNA fragments in the wet market samples that show interesting animals plus covid"? As far as I'm aware that's it.

Sure, but then if we're gonna create and study viruses that can erase significant percentage of our population, why not do that on some remote island with one month of required onboarding/offboarding quarantine for all of the scientists involved?

They literally study viruses that don’t infect humans but they purposely mutate them so they can study the “what if they mutate in real life” - this is cover to study bioweapons

If you want bioweapons, you'd start with viruses that conveniently already infect humans, and probably wouldn't indiscriminately infect the whole world including yourself.

counter example: we won't know how to fight a robot apocalypse unless we go ahead and develop some super-intelligent kill bots ourselves, so we can train against it and develop strategies. Given enough time and random variation, someone or some government is bound to create them, so we should not stick our heads in the sand or let fear-mongering stand in the way of research.

In reality COVID-19 required several key mutations to be as harmful and to bind as effectively to human cells as it did. The likelihood of all of these mutations occurring naturally, in animals only, without intermediate variants to observe and develop immunity against, is very small. If only 64 amino acids must mutate exactly correctly to create the deadly variant then it would require 4^64 or 2^128 mutations, which is a large number. Assuming it mutates 100B times per year, that's still more years 3e27 years.

For example, this experiment on more transmissible HIV requires hundreds of acids (600-1000, and a 32 amino prefix).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2836558/

The point being that creating extremely unlikely events to "see what would happen" is only justified if the risk of the observation is less than the natural risk of the event. If the risk of a world-ending pandemic is 1e-128 per year, and the risk due to human-made viruses is 0.1%, then "not sticking your head in the sand" has raised your risk by an astronomical factor.

The idea that the mutations that happen in a lab setting whether direct editing or serial passaging would ever resemble anything that would happen in the wild is as likely as expecting a store bought banana evolving in the wild.

What would it even mean if we created covid 19 in a lab and it was accidentally released? Would it change anything? Would anyone be held responsible?

It's important that people know the truth.

In an ideal world, we'd realize through cost benefit analysis that seeking out novel strains of animal viruses and bringing samples of them back to labs, especially in an era where lab leaks are common (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...), and then further doing gain of function research on those viruses to enhance them for further testing, might not be the best idea. At least until we had better methods of securing such facilities.

I think the arrogance of thinking its possible to do this research safely with any containment procedures is ridiculous. Yes, you can make the chances of a leak extremely minimal, but you can't rule it out when humans are involved and the consequences are so extraordinary that there just isn't an acceptable trade-off.

Fully automated underground bunkers stocked with precursor pathogens and humanized lab rats equipped with firebombs with the intention of complete evisceration at conclusion of experiment. Dig a deep hole in the desert crane drop in the prepared apparatus wait for experiment results, burn it all down. None of these precautions would prevent someone from using the results of the experiment for ill purposes.

Yes but there is a lot of waste in a system like that and after 10 years of spotless safety record the MBAs will start dismantling it, like re-using facilities instead of firebombing, and the re-fitting inevitably requires some humans on-site etc.

Ok, so put a big fence around it and then find a way to turn people into zombies and fill the fence with said zombies so nobody would even dare go inside the fence.

A seriously creepy thought that I've had (that I certainly don't agree with) -

It could be a way for governments to quickly and affordably "cull the herd" of expensive to support elders, immune compromised, sick, and infirm individuals. In doing so, it would free up capital, resources, housing, jobs, etc. for the younger workforce.

This is of course only a creative musing, not a proposal for an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory.

"I try not to think about it too much. But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to" [1]

- Sam Altman, OpenAI

[1]: https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-ceo-survivalist-prepper

I can't for the life of me understand the personality cult of Sam Altman. He gives off sociopathic vibes, and looks (probably thanks to plastic surgery) creepy.

WEF Young Global Leader, class of 2016

On a very basic and obvious level, it'd change the protocols required to work with the virus. Researchers and organizations would take safety more seriously.

It's China so someone would be held responsible. Exactly who would be a matter of political expediency more so than actual responsibility.

I would speculate that if it were lab created, having access to the initial genetic material and procedure that was used to create it would be of great scientific value in understanding how viruses jump species.

Someone would say "business as usual", somewhere.

What would it even mean if we created covid 19 in a lab and it was accidentally released?

Perhaps this may provide enough precedence to codify more specific laws, regulations, certifications, liabilities and consequences that affect funding availability, multiple levels of insurance requirements and lab safety requirements. Additionally there could also be more consequences for side-stepping direction from leadership to cease and desist research in a particular area when the risk was already deemed too great. The attitube of "It's easier to say sorry than it is to say please" should not apply to high risk research regardless of how much money could be potentially gained.

In my opinion this is important to address sooner than later. Covid may be a short walk in the park compared to the risk we are about to experience with Precision Medicine [1] also known as dual-use biology.

Would anyone be held responsible?

Proving intent is difficult without emails, contracts, voice conversations, etc... Even if these audit trails existed it is more likely to be covered up to protect all nations involved from international blow-back. More likely these people may be quietly found negligent and lose the ability to fund or manage future projects. They and their associates become a toxic investment risk thus possibly discouraging future behavior assuming only negligence was involved. A new set of people take their place and the world rinses and repeats.

I can not prove intent but I can see incentive. One need only watch V for Vendetta to see the parallels.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734114

>> What would it even mean if we created covid 19 in a lab and it was accidentally released? Would it change anything? Would anyone be held responsible?

Nothing. No. and No. "Scientists" were proposing research that would create essentially the Covid19 virus. I'm not sure if they ever got funded, but maybe that was being carried out at the Wuhan lab. The facts are: people wanted to create Covid19 (or something nearly like it). We found out what can happen if that type of thing gets out (whether it occurred naturally or in a lab). Those same people want to carry on with exactly the kind of "research" they were doing before, as if we've learned nothing from a global pandemic caused by a virus just like the ones they want to play with.

The fact we can't prove Covid19 came from a lab is beside the point. Given what people are working on, it may as well have been a lab leak since the result would be essentially identical to what happened, and they refuse to understand that - quite intentionally it seems.

I love the appeal to the "independence" of science from politics, after what may have been the single most materially and socially destructive scientific disaster since the invention of the atom bomb. We'll just act like none of that ever happened and continue with impunity.

Act like what didn’t happen?

They were trying to create SARS-Cov-2 to study methods of treating or managing it, and quite likely they succeeded only in creating it. We may never know for sure, but if you read the original grant proposal its clear they were trying to engineer a variant of bat coronviruses that could cross into humans.

>they were trying to engineer a variant of bat coronviruses that could cross into humans.

Right, because bat coronaviruses very famously have never crossed into humans. Google "SARS-CoV-1".

SARS cov 1 never caused a global pandemic. There were less than 10,000 cases and less than 1000 deaths. It wasn't specifically engineered to easily bind to human receptors, so this probably limited its reach.

The reason it never caused a global pandemic had nothing to do with how transmissible it was, and everything to do with early detection and limited Draconian measures to contain it.

SARS-CoV-2 was not only not engineered to bind to human receptors, it was not engineered at all and there is no credible person or source that makes this claim.

It was more transmissible and critically people were infectious for 2-3 days before experiencing symptoms, whereas that period was less than a day with SARS-Cov-1, that was a critical difference.

The period of 1 day of transmissibility before symptoms is the exact same with influenza virus. Influenza, very famously, was not transmissible enough to cause a pandemic at all, ever, and totally does not continuously circulate throughout the entire world to this day.

Oh wait.

It doesn't sound like you really know what you are talking about, but are just here to try to flame war. Plenty of credible people in biomedical fields believe it is possible the virus was engineered and have published about why...it isnt really worth responding to that claim, you can just look it up. As for the other claim, yes the binding affinity to ACE2 is lower in original SARS and this probably limited it as well as other attributes of that virus:

"Although the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV S proteins are similar, the binding affinity of the SARS-CoV-2 S protein to the ACE2 receptor is much higher as compared to SARS-CoV, which may account for its increased transmissibility."

> there is no credible person or source that makes this claim.

The issue here is that for many people taking your position, making the claim makes you not credible. By definition, there can be no credible source making that claim, because to make that claim revokes your credibility.

Whatever happens, I don't think people will tolerate another lockdown ever again for at least two generations.

I know in florida there could be literally airborn aids and people will still go out and live life, myself included. COVID lockdowns were a test of how much the government could push without backlash.

I feel so badly for the kids that lost their last two years of high school for what?

For what?

I dunno, to prevent overflowing hospitals from having to turn people away because everyone who ‘did their research’ conveniently start trusting doctors again when they get a bad case.

airborne aids isn't the doomsday scenario, airborne ebola is.

I just finished listening to _The Hot Zone_, and that virus is truly scary.

Are you forgetting that the lockdowns had to happen because authorities (Trump, not CDC) pissed away a month of exponential growth doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on "ignore it and it will go away" instead of jumping on measures to reduce Rt? They only blinked when faced with the imminent prospect of having hospitals spill out into parking lots full of people slowly dying for want of a respirator.

The pandemic was incompetently managed, but "ignore COVID harder" is the exact brand of incompetence that made the pandemic worse than it had to be.

"Worse for who?" is the question a lot of people should have asked. I'm not responding to this thread anymore. People are still cultish about this discussion.

Worse for everyone. It's absolutely wild that you think elementary public health is a conspiracy.

Many Countries which did little had better results. Arguable that all efforts outside protecting nursing homes were futile or harmful.

By "many countries" do you mean "Sweden, if you cut off the data right before their big wave"?

It isn't just Sweden and even where you may have some questions about the data, it is no small thing for countries which put fewer restrictions to have rates which are of the same magnitude as those with heavier restrictions, given the huge costs.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rate...

"I would go on living my life with literal airborne HIV... [other] people are still cultish about this discussion"

If it was Trump's fault, why was most of the developed world in lockdown too?

The degree of how locked down one was and for how long varied greatly depending on where you were.

The lockdown was significantly worse in most European countries than in the US for a long time.

The lockdowns went on far longer than the "flatten the curve" phase. I think the lessons learned here were:

1. Once something like this escapes its confines and starts spreading as COVID did, it is here to stay and any lockdowns that are not to avoid hospital capacity problems just prolong the inevitable

2. Compromised people due to health conditions and age should definitely lay low when there is an outbreak. But locking down a populace at great financial and other costs does not help them. In fact it probably causes more harm as the cycle is prolonged. The more healthy people that recover the better.

Trump did his things based on stubbornness and stupidity. Persisting lockdowns and draconian restrictions past the hospital situation being resolved was also not wise either. I live in NY and in April 2020 locking down was essential. It was very bad with the hospitals and nursing homes being ravaged.

> The lockdowns went on far longer than the "flatten the curve" phase.

Did they? Is the table on wikipedia wrong? Outside of California (which I feel no desire to defend), it looks like the actual lockdowns were 0-3 months.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lockdowns

0-3 months doesn't sound nutty to me. Perhaps 3 months was a bit on the high side, sure, but it's also on the high side of actual policy. What does strike me as nutty was the extreme rhetoric around extremely basic Rt reduction measures. Washing hands, social distancing, wearing masks, taking temperatures, installing spit shields etc just don't deserve nearly the same level of vitriol as the lockdowns themselves, but people seem awfully keen to fudge the distinction. Next time we should start those measures out of the gate but I am worried that people will jump right back into the game of pretending that basic public health measures = extreme oppression, sending us down the exact same path as 2020.

Sorry but I consider social distancing measures and forced mask wearing to be "lockdowns", colloquially, as do many other people.

The life-altering consequences of COVID policy lasted much, much longer than three months.

Don't we have enough evidence from China it was the other way around? They seemingly imposed the most restrictive lockdowns in the world, and it took them the longest to get rid of the largest scale crisis.

> lockdowns had to happen because authorities (Trump, not CDC) pissed away a month of exponential growth

This does not match my recollection. Not to get all political, but I was headed to a conference in Belgium just weeks prior to the lockdowns starting wearing a full-face respirator and got made fun of by the TSA agents in the Atlanta airport because the CDC was telling people that masks were unnecessary/didn't work. I was wearing said respirator, because I had been deeply attuned to the news of what was going on around the world well ahead of any real concern or alarm bells in the US. I remember very clearly that the first major action to be taken by the US government was a travel restriction/travel ban on flights entering the US from China, and this was done via an executive order by Trump which was lambasted broadly in the news media and by politicians across the aisle as being racist and bigoted. I remember just months later that those same talking heads were happy to say that not enough had been done soon enough and that we should have instituted a similar travel ban earlier and more broadly.

Trump's administration definitely screwed up the pandemic response, not the least of which by basically throwing out the playbook on exactly how to respond to a pandemic that had been built painstakingly after the previous challenges we had with SARS, MERS, and H1N1. I am in no way defending Trump here, but I think making this political and trying point fingers isn't an accurate recollection. The entire US government failed to appropriately respond, this includes elected officials from both political parties, as well as the appointees and bureaucrats. Yes, this /very much/ includes the CDC that bald-faced lied about the effective usage of masks for months in the beginning of the pandemic. Luckily many people, like myself, are capable of understanding the basic physics of air movement and understand that masks can very much be effective if worn properly and so we went out and did just that. I managed to avoid being infected until early 2022 (Omicron) despite being required to travel multiple times, including internationally, because I effectively used PPE.

The most infuriating thing about all of this, as the OP of this thread points out, is that very likely the entire pandemic was caused by a lab leak after the virus was created during gain of function research, and yet, we will never actually know. The evidence of what occurred has been destroyed or muddled for political reasons by everyone involved, including both parties in the US, not just the Chinese. It's a huge mess, and a huge failure of governments around the world, and everyone involved is hoping that normal folks will forget about it and move on with their lives like nothing happened, or better yet, argue about it politically for the dumbest reasons. Your comment equates to "Trump bad, CDC good", but actually the truth is "Trump bad, CDC bad, everyone involved pretty much bad".

You're dead right. This was a no-win situation for any politician.

Had they done little, people would be in hysterics that nothing was being done because $FOREIGN_COUNTRY had stricter rules in place.

Had they done a lot, people would be in hysterics that freedoms were being curtailed unnecessarily because $FOREGN_COUNTRY had weaker rules in place.

No-win? People love firm leadership in a time of crisis. It was almost a no-lose, but Trump found a way. If he had reluctantly accepted basic public health measures from the start or even pivoted into them when things got serious ("Stop the China Virus! Wear a MAGA Mask!") people would have loved him for it. He would still be president.

Instead, 3 years later, half the country believes that masks are tyrannical government oppression and IR thermometers are gulag training.

No, these two mistakes are not equal. Not remotely.

The CDC didn't think it had the political capital to press the mask issue. Until it did, and then the policy changed. It was a delay of weeks on one Rt reduction measure of many.

Trump, OTOH, placed all of his chips on "ignore it and it will go away in April," delayed all the other Rt reduction mechanisms for longer, lost the bet, and activated his entire voter base to cover. He could have pivoted and managed them (Wear a MAGA mask! Stop the China Virus!) but he chose not to. The FUD he stirred on basic public health measures swirled for years and we still haven't seen the end of it. Just look at this thread.

In terms of the public health implications, one of these is a 1x problem, the other is a 100x problem.

> The FUD he stirred on basic public health measures swirled for years and we still haven't seen the end of it. Just look at this thread.

By this, I take it you're implying I'm a Trump supporter and that is why I responded the way I did. You are mistaken, and I suggest you re-read what I actually wrote.

Nothing you have said in reply to me refutes the substance of my statements, you are just trying to deepen the politicization of something that was nearly a universal government fuckup, and I mean universal both across political alignments, but also geographically around the world.

> you're implying I'm a Trump supporter

Comparing two mistakes separated by orders of magnitude in consequence is a conservative talking point for a reason. I genuinely believe you when you claim to not like him, but you are supporting him by pushing this comparison, even if you don't like him.

> but you are supporting him

That's not how that works.

I believe you are commenting in an entirely politically-motivated way and are not responding in good faith to my reply to your original comment. At this point I don't think we can have a productive conversation, so I wish you the best and I'm going to move on to a better use of my time.

It would have grown around the world anyway...

If anything lack of respirators saved lives. With hindsight we now know that putting people on respirator was actually the thing that killed them - not COVID. All this hospital heroic in New York and around the country was huge mistake and most people who were in hospital at the time should have stayed home.

On lockdowns - you have to do them 100% (China, Australia, New Zealand) or just give up. Half measures just do not make sense - you get a lot of pain with very little to show for it. For US specifically 100% lockdown was never an option - building wall with machine gun encampment to stop movement on both Canadian and Mexican border was not feasible, definitely not on timeline of days or at most weeks.

In the end Fauci, NIH, and medical establishment etc just made zero difference to COVID or COVID deaths. Missed school and ballooned debt are the only legacy of their efforts.

> With hindsight we now know that putting people on respirator was actually the thing that killed them - not COVID.

Do you have links on this? I'd love to know more.

Of course they don't. This is nonsense.

There are studies that said "if you were on mechanical ventilation early on in the pandemic, you were highly likely to die". Oh my! Ventilators sound bad, right? Doctors were reserving ventilators for the most critically ill people that needed them. The same patients who were most likely to die (ill, old, etc) from COVID were put on ventilators. It wasn't the ventilators, it was the god damned virus.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7682899/

Hospitals put people on respirator who should have never been on it and then in New York in 2020 it was compounded by sever lack of nurses which led to shoddy care - essentially intubated and sedated patients were on their own with no help or monitoring. Relatives were not allowed in. When you are on respirator you have few days to recover and then you are starting to die due to lung damage - and 3-7 days were not enough to fight COVID so people just died. The same people would have been fine and recovered from COVID on their own.

To be fair, doctors noticed it fairly quickly (but too late for New York) and now usage of respirators for COVID is much much rarer.

My guess nobody talks or highlights blunders of New York because it goes against doctors/nurses are heroes of COVID mantra and not very relevant to current debates on COVID.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-ventil...

Oh god help us, the HN tech bros believe they're doctors now.

What's your explanation for all the other countries that also had lockdowns despite Trump not being president there?

This thing was impossible to contain, regardless of which talking head was in charge.

Florida did lockdowns right.

They flattened the curve and then managed limited social resources.

Many other states just went into irrational and indefinite Long term lockdowns. Illinois for instance was locked down for months and months despite having enourmous hospital capacity - the lack of which was the whole reason for entering the lockdown in the first place. It just didn't make sense after a while except as a political tool.

Early on there was a lot of metrics-driven decision making, and metrics changed as new information came to light. That was good. Florida would still lockdown if done in that light - not without bellyaching but yes it would. When the metrics go out the window so too would Florida's compliance.

The death rate per capita seems to suggest Florida probably could’ve done better. 20th highest death per capita out of the 50 states.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/covid19_mortality_...

Doesn't Florida have lots of elderly people?

Aren't elderly people entitled to life?

Covid mainly was a threat to life for the elderly. I'd be curious to see a covid death by state chart side by side with the states average age. If Florida has more elderly a middle of the pack performance might be exceptional.

If you contrasted nursing home covid deaths to high school covid deaths you'd see high schools "did better", but that probably has nothing to do with policy.

What I think you're getting at - and please correct me if I'm wrong - but we should only protect citizens from external health risks greater than the most healthy young adult can bear. If you are disabled, ill, or otherwise more at risk for illnesses, you are not worthy to protect. Certainly not as much as a young adult.

At no point does any of that say that. Really none of what I said is even opinion at all, no idea how you got to that conclusion.

The initial great, great grandparent comment said something like "Florida had a horrible response to COVID". Your response was to state Florida has more elderly than other states, apparently refuting the fact that Florida's response to COVID was horrible. Why? Because it seems like mostly only old people died. This indicates that adequate precautions were not taken to protect the elderly.

The type of trolling you're doing isn't cute.

Florida is also a magnet for old people, and old people are a magnet for dying from COVID. I wonder how they did if we control for age?

Is it OK for old people to be culled from time to time? Or should Florida, knowing they had a higher than average number of obese, hypertensive, and elderly people, have done more to protect these vulnerable populations? Control for age, and it just shows how awful Florida's response was.

And 7th highest median age, so 20th for deaths per capita for a virus far more lethal by age would be positive performance:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_terr...

There are lots of metrics available to optimize for or use as guidance. The choice of which metrics to pay attention to is a politcal matter.

I don't know that any state made it a policy to optimize for a reduced death rate directly. They chose hospitalizations in the early days and then I think metrics disappeared, or only the R value was loosely paid attention to. That's my point.

If death rate wasn't a chosen metric then it's irrelevant.

Fear gets your population to largely go along with horrendous gov't actions. I've seen it twice in my life, America's actions post 9/11 and COVID lockdowns. Terror over nuclear annihilation from the USSR allowed western gov'ts to fight Korean/Vietnam war with drafted citizens also.

If that fear returns then the population will go along with whatever terrible intervention is proposed, at least until that fear dissipates.

>Whatever happens, I don't think people will tolerate another lockdown ever again for at least two generations.

Some wont, but some people actually miss it and it was the best thing that ever happened to them.

The cognitive dissonance is that extreme in all those who blindly trusted the words of evil politicians and pharma companies.

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