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Comment by criticalmass2 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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."

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