Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I think previous candidates for new pandemic viruses did mislead us as those never got far enough to become a true pandemic. Those were scarier than SARS-CoV2 by lethality, but were manageable by the usual epidemiological tools. Now we've also seen how a virus can spread that is far more contagious, and how we are unable to stop such a virus.
What I found scary about SARS-CoV2 is just how much it improved between variants. It didn't have any special features like influenza to increase its potential there. It simply had the numbers, enormous amounts of hosts to evolve in. So potentially any virus that is able to spread as far initially could be able to evolve in a similar manner.
I think avoiding many if not most gain-of-function experiments is a reasonable lesson to learn from this pandemic.
Help me out, I don't see the thread of logic from your previous points...
If those experiments have a chance to repeat a similar pandemic, I don't think any of them are worth that risk.
Spanish Flu was likely an animal-jump, baed on research done on corpses retrieved from the arctic circle. H1N1 was an animal jump. HIV was a multi-virus infection followed by an animal jump. If COVID was human-made and not an animal-jump, that's still three deadly natural pandemics that we want this research to be able to prevent in the future.
These are not the only two options. An animal virus could be enhanced in a lab, then jump to humans, and then the “animal-jump” terminology is just a misdirection away from the lab work. “Human-made” as a term is a similar misdirection in this scenario, trying to make the human involvement claims sound overstated, again trying to point away from the lab.
I’m not saying you are doing misdirection, but I think some people framing it that way are.
I think it’s important to recognize the full nuance of what is likely in the middle, instead of just looking at highly unlikely and opposed extreme scenarios.
If we really have to do it, then we can do it in the middle of a desert with quarantine procedures instead of near/in population centers.
You have a very limited imagination. ;-) I assure you that extensive research into biological (not involving viruses), chemical, and nuclear weapons... and really a wide variety of weapons research is easily more dangerous. There's plenty of opportunity in other areas like materials science, genetics, etc., as well.
> If we really have to do it, then we can do it in the middle of a desert with quarantine procedures instead of near/in population centers.
Now you'll want to have an ultra-secure means of transporting highly dangerous biological samples, not to mention research teams & observers, at very high speeds to the middle of a desert. Are you sure you've improved the risk profile?
They very much are not.
Viruses and bacteria are unique in the fact that they can harm the whole globe as opposed to chemical and other disasters that will likely only harm the immediate area.
And harming the whole globe is all the more certain for infectious diseases if you put them in the middle of a large city with lots of air travel.
> Now you'll want to have an ultra-secure means of transporting highly dangerous biological samples, not to mention research teams & observers, at very high speeds to the middle of a desert. Are you sure you've improved the risk profile?
Why would you need to transport things at high speed for speculative research involving newly generated viruses/bacteria?
I never said anything about analysing things involving people who are actively infected, but there the disease is already out in the public, so the risk profile is completely different.
First of all, you added in bacteria, which are not viruses.
However, this statement isn't a useful statement "X is unique because it can harm the whole world, as opposed to Y that will likely only harm the immediate area".
The implication is that X will almost always harm the whole world, and Y will almost always impact the immediate area, but that's not necessarily true.
(I would remind you the "1% chance we'll ignite the entire atmosphere" of the Manhattan Project. Fortunately, any future nuclear weapons we might develop will almost certainly be less powerful... oh wait.)
It also implies that the risk of X and the risk of Y doing harm are equivalent, and that's undoubtedly not true. It's ignoring the reality that nature is already doing X all the time, and primarily in high population centers.
> And harming the whole globe is all the more certain for infectious diseases if you put them in the middle of a large city with lots of air travel.
I would think it'd be all the more certain if you're regularly putting the researchers working in the lab, along with any biological samples they might have, on flights to and from such large cities.
Pandemic risk is a systemic problem and has to be evaluated as such. Controls/mitigations you have in place generally have way more impact than where the experiments are run, and it's really not as simple as "well if the lab is away from people that reduces the risk".
> Why would you need to transport things at high speed for speculative research involving newly generated viruses/bacteria?
Because this research is not isolated from reality. Much of what they do is take samples from the real world, observe virology in the real world (both human and non-human populations), and work with front line healthcare workers who are usually the first to see new viral threats. Without that you pretty much eliminate the value of the research entirely.
> I never said anything about analysing things involving people who are actively infected, but there the disease is already out in the public, so the risk profile is completely different.
The threat doesn't come directly from a virus that is already out in the public. It comes from how a virus that is already out there might evolve. You appear to believe that nature is conducting fewer and less significant experiments in evolving viruses than people in labs. I don't think that is supported by the evidence.
The pandemic risk profile with a virus that is already out in the public is that it might evolve into something that has never been out in public before. Nature is conducting these experiments every day, all day. I'd be more worried about the outcomes of those experiments than anything going on in a lab.
Would that that were true. I'm curious how you explain how your perception aligns with the reality that no lab, anywhere, at anytime since the outbreak, has been able to produce COVID-19 variants as fast as occurred naturally.
Nature is experimenting all the time, with the overwhelming majority of viruses out there, with absolutely no interest in controls, mitigations or protections for the human population... and nature is far trickier to observe. We've gotten pretty good at reducing the risk from nature, but make no mistake, even with all the GoF research we could possibly hope for, it far outpaces our capacity to experiment. The only advantage GoF labs have is that they can direct their research in specific areas where there is greatest risk. That's the whole challenge.
Personally, I think we just shouldn't do this at all.
If you're worried about lab contamination, the risk is from the researchers moving amongst the population. I agree that you'd rather not, but I don't agree that regularly putting them on planes to and from major population centers really reduces the risk.
> Personally, I think we just shouldn't do this at all.
[Shrugs]. Some people are pro-pandemic.
This would have to not happen regularly. The researchers would need to stay for many months at a time, and undergo a separate quarantine before they re-enter society.
So you would add months of delay, significantly impaired observability, and far less agility to our response to emerging threats. Congratulations, you've just increased risk.
Otherwise we are in the dark with unknown unknowns which is not a good place. So the risk here of doing research is manageable.
I am not a vegan.
I hate to say it (because I agree the risks are significant), but I suspect the need to use this as a tool to model both probable futures and not-yet-understood behaviors of viral mutation may be arguments in favor of continued GoF research, despite the risk. I concur with other commenters that maybe we should be putting this stuff in the wilderness behind service providers that must undergo quarantine procedure before returning to densely-populated areas.
The research must have been pretty misleading then, because all the experts appeared to be taken by surprise by the fact that it mutated at all, given their original plan was "two shots and done". Something that has now become promoting infinity boosters to a world that has stopped listening (uptake of the current round is extremely low).
But again, why should we listen to claims about virology? People who have been living in ivory caves may not realize this, but it's been proven beyond all doubt that the entire profession engaged in a conspiracy against the public to mislead people about the likelihood of a lab experiment gone wrong. Not just the many authors of the proximal origins paper, but so the other scientists who saw this coverup happening in public and said nothing.
And I'm sorry you feel misinformed, but nothing I read ever suggested anyone was taken by surprise by its mutagenic rate. To the extent experts thought it might be a "two shots and done" virus, they were overly optimistic about policy and vaccination uptake; were the vaccine manufactured and rolled out quickly enough and deployed globally, it could have been cut off from human reservoirs and died out, but a combination of logistics and public distrust meant we missed that window and now it's endemic. Its mutation rate pretty much guarantees it'll be with us indefinitely as long as the public has the stomach to tolerate that.
If you know it came from a lab then there's a chance that the lab workers have knowledge that can help fight it. If you lie and claim it couldn't have come from a lab, that whole line of investigation gets closed off.
> they were overly optimistic about policy and vaccination uptake
They were overly pessimistic and were making those claims back when they thought they'd only get 60-70% uptake. This is the famous Fauci admission that his claims about herd immunity were made up in response to opinion polls. Uptake was higher than expected and effectiveness was drastically lower.
This business whereby scientists are always innocent, it's only politicians and the media that misrepresent them, is crap. Scientists lied and manipulated a naive and plastic public deliberately in order to protect and advance their own careers, they did it at scale and nobody in that community seems to care. Smart people now understand that scientists are both less honest and less wise than both politicians and journalists as a group. At least the latter groups have strong internal competition and different factions trying to establish what's true. Scientists seem to behave as a bloc regardless of what's right or wrong.
How do they protect and advance their careers by being wrong?
That's why the vaccine protects against serious illness and death, because at that point the virus has spread beyond the mucous membranes.
It's more likely that people misinterpreted "after two shots quarantine is no longer necessary" as "the disease is eradicated after two shots."
Can you expand on the multi-virus infection thing?
According to the virologists who do it, not anyone else. Virologists conspicuously had no role in fighting COVID and didn't seem to contribute any particular knowledge to the NPIs or vaccines.
That's not true.
> Virologists conspicuously had no role in fighting COVID and didn't seem to contribute any particular knowledge to the NPIs or vaccines.
I can't imagine your basis for saying this. Virologists isolated the signature genetic sequences for COVID-19. That was the basis for the development of testing & vaccines for COVID-19 (...and if you think they aren't involved in development of tests and vaccines beyond that...).
No, this is a profession that really should not exist at all. GoF was banned in the past without consequence beyond causing them to engage in coverups of their own psychotic experimentations, it can be banned again with no loss to humanity. COVID simply wouldn't have happened if these experiments were banned.
Sequencing can be done by a high school student in a lab. Of course, to obtain a sequence for a novel virus, you have to do a lot more than that, but let's pretend that's all you have to do; the fact remains that the sequencing wasn't done by a high school student in a lab, but by virologists.
I agree that everything virologists do could be done by non-virologists. That doesn't mean that it's what happened, nor that it'd be a good idea.
So they don't get points for being first, when they're the ones who created the problem in the first place.
The real world is not nearly that tidy. Most of the Wuhan lab researchers' counterparts don't even speak Chinese, and you're imagining some kind of international conspiracy to drum up a disease and the cure for it.
Oh, to have the naive optimism of the conspiracy theorist. A lot of my projects would be so much more easy if people worked that way.
> Part of me wishes the international virology community was as coordinated as you imagine
It's pretty damn coordinated and we have the receipts to prove it. Sorry for you if you're not in the loop, but when you read chat transcripts, meeting notes, and emails where they literally organize a conspiracy to shut down all public discussion, and no virologists stand up to say, "this stance is not accurate", then we may as well consider virology to be globally coordinated.
By the way, cut the condescending tone about conspiracy theorists. They utterly won this round, beyond all possible doubt. The people who blithely dismiss any possibility of academic conspiracy turned out to be the naive ones. The people who posited a conspiracy to suppress discussion of lab leaks can now point to reams of hard evidence where scientists literally say they're going to publish statements they don't believe for political reasons, where they say they're going to engineer a SARS-CoV-2 like virus, where they say they're going to do it in order to develop a vaccine against it. Basically every conspiracy theory turned out to be true. You should respect that a lot more!
You're saying that without regard to the measure of risk, or what risks exist if we don't do those experiments.
That gives me hope regarding H1N1, if it happens, we might be able to keep it under control.
There is good evidence that those who had SARS-CoV-1 had immunity that covered SARS-CoV-2. This immunity lasted for more than a decade.
> What I found scary about SARS-CoV2 is just how much it improved between variants.
Perhaps a leaky spike only vaccine was a particularly bad choice and the extent to which it drove these variants is not clear. There is additional debate amont the "virologist" community about this specific outcome.
> most gain-of-function experiments
I simply do not trust for profit drug companies to do this work. I certainly don't trust governments to do it either. Further, the idea that we can correctly estimate how nature is going to perform and then front run those outcomes in the laboratory is entirely insane and is explicitly anti-science.
But you trust nature to do this work? ;-)
> Further, the idea that we can correctly estimate how nature is going to perform and then front run those outcomes in the laboratory is entirely insane and is explicitly anti-science.
Well, this eliminates a great deal of research areas completely outside virology. Climatologists aren't needed. Seismologists aren't needed. Meteorologists become largely irrelevant. Much of cancer research, forestry, etc. isn't needed. Certainly no need to take measures for forecasted hurricanes or tsunamis.
We do just fine estimating how nature is going to perform and identifying what to do in anticipation of it. There's a lot of variables involved, so we don't always get it exactly right, but we sure do a lot better making forecasts and reacting to them than when we don't.
What work is that? Unnaturally bringing bats and pangolins together in a meat market? The only "real world" excuse ever offered.
> Climatologists aren't needed.
I've read their reports and their annual revisions. I'm not convinced they're needed, and since the "science" here is purely a wild guess using models projected backwards in time to fit existing data, the results aren't particularly meaningful either.
> Seismologists aren't needed. Meteorologists become largely irrelevant. Much of cancer research, forestry, etc. isn't needed. Certainly no need to take measures for forecasted hurricanes or tsunamis.
Do any of these require you to invent novel phenomenon to "study?" If not, then your comparison is purely the making of a strawman.
> but we sure do a lot better making forecasts and reacting to them than when we don't.
Interestingly.. was any "forecast" of the virus they created in a lab provided to anyone? Even if we did have it, would it have made a difference in timelines? You clearly see the exact problem.
GoF research in virology is specifically to replicate what happens in nature in hopes of forecasting outcomes and giving us more time to respond to them. If it isn't doing what happens in nature, it is, by definition, a failure.
> I've read their reports and their annual revisions. I'm not convinced they're needed, and since the "science" here is purely a wild guess using models projected backwards in time to fit existing data, the results aren't particularly meaningful either.
Those "guesses" have proven to amazingly insightful. You may not find them useful, but even energy companies have found these forecasts useful for their business.
> Do any of these require you to invent novel phenomenon to "study?" If not, then your comparison is purely the making of a strawman.
Yes, they do. More precisely, I would say they involve artificially controlled experiments that are used to forecast outcomes in nature.
...and I wasn't making a comparison or a strawman. I was taking your statement as an assertion, and identifying that in fact many scientific fields employ methods that you describe as "anti-science".
> Interestingly.. was any "forecast" of the virus they created in a lab provided to anyone?
No. One might almost think that perhaps "the virus" wasn't created in a lab. It's unlikely, given the large number of virologists who've said it wasn't created in a lab, but maybe?
> Even if we did have it, would it have made a difference in timelines?
Yes. Hugely, particularly for testing. Most of the vaccine development cycle is tied up in testing for safety and such, so the impact there is smaller, but it's not zero.
> You clearly see the exact problem.
I do. I don't think it's the same problem that you are seeing.
> GoF research in virology is specifically to replicate what happens in nature
And yet in both the leaked chats and third party analysis, they talk extensively about how the RNA sequence doesn't match what they'd expect from natural evolution. Not only was it highly adapted to humans right from the get go, but there was the furin cleavage site too. The strange and artificial looking nature of it created suspicion immediately which is why they engaged in a conspiracy to shut down and censor discussion of it.
So that doesn't seem like they're just replicating nature.
That is a tiny tiny number of people, measured in thousands at most.
Does that somehow prevent you from getting them to express those antibodies and then cloning them?
WIV collected samples from bat populations to find novel coronaviruses. Processing those samples was not done in a BSL-4 facility, but instead in BSL-2 labs. Some of those samples, like RaTG13, were as close as 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2. Even if COVID didn't require GoF research to spill over into humans, and was a purely natural spillover, actively collecting novel viruses and processing them in a low-BSL lab is a recipe for disaster.
BSL-4 is reserved for pathogens known to be dangerous to humans. This policy effectively translates to treating novel viruses as safe until proven otherwise, which is reckless.
If so, it seems a bit misguided to be taking issue with BSL-this-vs-that handling wild bats when BSL-fuck-all members of the public are still using them as a food source.
Pre-COVID it was already well understood that bats are viral reservoirs. It didn't prevent wet markets from selling wild bats. The labs are of focus due to GoF, in lieu of GoF there's already that level of exposure happening in the Chinese food supply.
what does this mean
so, darned close honestly. to be clear, I'm not saying RaTG13 is the source of the lab leak - it's just too different - but I am saying that it's much closer than the original SARS, and thus had no business being analyzed in a BSL-2 lab.
It would take passage through billions of organisms to turn RaTG13 into SARS-CoV-2.
Which is probably what happened naturally through many, many millions of bats (and whatever intermediate animal) being infected and passing it on. Something that is well outside the scale of serial passage experiments in a lab.
There's also the possibility of recombination events, which can instantly cause significant drift. Now consider the case of the Mojiang miners, who contracted and slowly succumbed to viral pneumonia in 2012 after inhaling bat guano. WIV found, like, a dozen beta-coronaviruses in that cave alone (including RaTG13.) The miners could have been exposed to several at once, which recombined and adapted quickly to their new home in human lungs. Again, unlikely to have been SARS-CoV-2, since the pandemic almost certainly would have happened already, but whatever they had was virulent enough to kill half of them.
And virulence != transmissible. They got sick by inhaling everything that was floating around in that mine. To get more people sick you'd need to take them all to that mine.
Recombination to produce a viable and more successful virus is also very rare, that is unlikely to have happened to any of those miners, much less several of them (over populations it becomes likely but there we're talking many millions of infections as well).
Is there some scifi solution to step outside of the game? Are the problems involved in understanding the systems involved (to the extent that you can predict realistic risk and mitigate) solvable?
I don't know the level of realistic risk for a devastating virus naturally occurring, nor the potential for us to address it without this kind of research, so I don't know what is within reason here. It would be cool to see any studies that attempt to address these two questions.
Edit: And a systematic review of past and considered lab leak scenarios probably wouldn't hurt either. If we still have to do this work, and just decide it must be done by isolated monks/robots in space, for humanity ending risks I guess that's worth discussing
If we assume it is directly proportional to the number of people (more people to encounter animals, more people to incubate potential pandemics), there were roughly 450 billion people-years lived between the Black Plague and the Spanish Flu and the Spanish Flu and COVID-19.
That would put the next zoonotic spillover around 2065.
It discounts all factors we are ignoring and pretends we can establish an accurate duration between rare events with a few occurrences
With earthquakes you at least have stress accumulating over time, even if the stress is not necessarily accumulating or being released at a constant rate.
A zoonotic spillover is pure repeated throws of the dice, no accumulated pressure.
Large-scale wet markets or bushmeat markets increase the chances because there are more rolls of the dice.
However there is no reason to believe that such misadventures take place in a single generation and immediately produce a viable and successful agent.
Producing something that spreads to humans but not will will none the less produce many orders of magnitude more useful and numerous dice rolls. Such actions may not be immediately obvious even if they were fatal. People after all get sick and die all the time.
I doubt we have enough data to meaningfully forecast risk.
My own self-critique above was more that, even if you could accurately deduce that there is a 1.54e-12 chance per person-year of a person encountering a novel disease that can spread as a global pandemic, you can't then schedule the next one for 450 billion people-years later, when the probability exceeds 50%, because it's a random occurrence and there's nothing stopping it from happening after ten or a trillion throws of the dice.
But I'll still stand by the logic of my original back of the envelope number; insomuch as the risk is proportional to the population, we should expect the next global pandemic twice as fast as the last one, and I think there's a good chance many of us will be alive to see it (as opposed to the gap between the Spanish Flu and COVID-19, where the survivors of the first were infants for the last and centenarians for this one).
Of course there is, of course they already use it, and of course the people who think banning research is the peak of enlightenment aren't remotely interested in making this kind of distinction.
That would either save the planet, or go a long way in that direction.
On the surface that might sound ok. However if we undergo a similar exercise of chances of Lab leak causing an outbreak we'll probably end up with a similar figure of 1/100. In a lab leak we'll have to contend with a more powerful variant of a pathogen that has caused a prior outbreak which may kill an order more people than the average outbreak. So perhaps a million deaths alone, or if we entertain that Covid was caused by a lab lead ~10m deaths, or 100x of 100k.
Ultimately it seems GoF research is playing with fire without knowing if the effort actually will reduces total deaths on net.
A much more effective route seems to simply invest in rapid sequencing, rapid wastewater monitoring, PPE stocking/distribution policies, more effective local lockdown procedures/policies.
You mention rapid sequencing, rapid wastewater monitoring, PPE stocking/distribution policies, and more effective local lockdown procedures/policies. Those would all be factors that would reduce the value of "X" (as in, the consequences of bad outcomes in either scenario), rather than any coefficients in front of X.
I don't necessarily agree that the past 25 years, particularly if you are excluding COVID, is a meaningful representative sample... unless you want to compare it to the loss of life from GoF over the past 25 years excluding COVID. In that case, I'd challenge you to demonstrate a loss of life from GoF research that is over 10K. Given the ~100K lives estimate, that puts it at 10x greater benefit than not doing GoF research.
> However if we undergo a similar exercise of chances of Lab leak causing an outbreak we'll probably end up with a similar figure of 1/100. In a lab leak we'll have to contend with a more powerful variant of a pathogen that has caused a prior outbreak which may kill an order more people than the average outbreak.
There's a number of false assumptions here. Your threat assessment seems more rooted in works of fiction than reality. That the probability is equivalent is highly debatable, particularly since it is far easier (and cheaper) to apply risk mitigations to a virology lab than to society as a whole. It's also not a given that a lab leak means we'll have to contend with a more powerful variant of a pathogen. Even if it were a more powerful variant of a pathogen, that does not necessarily relate to a higher death toll. In fact, SARS-COV-2 was far less virulent than SARS-COV-1, and that's a significant contributor to why it had so much more impact.
Even if we ignore ALL of that, in the even that there was an outbreak from a virology lab doing GoF research, that would mean we would be much further ahead on research to combat the virus than if said virus were to occur in the wild. We'd have shorter times to have disease profiles, tests, epidemiological models, and vaccines, and the impact of shorter times is exponential. While it is conceivable that a leak from a lab leads to a higher death count, it is far more conceivable that a virus that didn't come from a lab would end more lives.
> if we entertain that Covid was caused by a lab lead ~10m deaths, or 100x of 100k.
Spanish flu, which existed before anyone knew how to do GoF research, killed far more people than COVID-19. At the lowest estimate, it's about 17 million people, and at the high end closer to 100 million people. The population of the world at the time was ~1/4 the population when COVID-19 hit the scene, so on a per capita basis COVID-19 isn't in the same league. AIDS, which we've been able to track back to its natural origin, has killed 42 million people. The Bubonic Plague killed... 75+ million, or about a third of the European population.
Nature is way better at killing us than any lab.
> Ultimately it seems GoF research is playing with fire without knowing if the effort actually will reduces total deaths on net.
Another way to think of it is that international trade & travel is playing with fire without knowing if the effort actually will reduce total deaths or not. We could therefore return to the days of the horse and buggy, or we could continue with the practice and put in place mitigations, like GoF research, to mitigate the risks it entails.
But looking at the reported events (that have made their way onto Wiki), since 2000 we've had lab leaks and "incidents" in the US (repeatedly.. to say the least), Japan, Taiwan, China, Russia, UK, Australia, France, the Netherlands, and many more places. That includes incidents at BSL-4 labs, the highest biosecurity rating. And the leaks/incidents involve some pretty crazy stuff: polio - lab worker was infected without anyone's knowledge, ebola - lab worker infected at a BSL-4 lab, smallpox - vials of active smallpox found casually laying around in cold storage at a rando facility, anthrax - 75 exposed, and more.
It seems completely obvious from the absurd volume of reported incidents that we're bee-lining to a global biosecurity accident, almost certainly far more serious than COVID, completely of our own making, again.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
But it has become apparent that the research team did not clear the work with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which was one of the funders of the project. The agency indicated it is going to be looking for some answers as to why it first learned of the work through media reports.
Emily Erbelding, director of NIAID’s division of microbiology and infectious diseases, said the BU team’s original grant applications did not specify that the scientists wanted to do this precise work. Nor did the group make clear that it was doing experiments that might involve enhancing a pathogen of pandemic potential in the progress reports it provided to NIAID.
https://www.statnews.com/2022/10/17/boston-university-resear...
The completely hypothetical effects of not making a change in just one area of virology research which is highly criticized by many in the scientific community.
It's hilariously absurd to compare people who don't want a dual use bioweapons research facility in their neighborhood to NIMBYism.
In the US, you'll reliably get a lot more NIMBY response from "set up a nuclear power plant in the neighbourhood" vs. "set up a gas power plant in the neighbourhood". However, if you look at the risk assessment, the gas power plant is far more lethal to the neighbourhood.
I don't associate the term "NIMBY" with either scenarios, just housing. I don't think there's much value to overloading it. It's not like anyone's trying to put a nuclear power plant in the middle of Boston to begin with.
You might not, but the broader population associates NIMBY with any scenario where a neighbourhood pushes back against some kind of change in that neighbourhood (adding a prison, a power plant, a half-way house, a school, a bar, trains, airports, etc.). There are NIMBY responses to pretty much any change, and the magnitude of that response tends to have little bearing on the relative merits of the change.
> It's not like anyone's trying to put a nuclear power plant in the middle of Boston to begin with.
No. For the most part no one is putting nuclear power plants anywhere in the US. However, there are other power plants in Boston (and for good reason). This is a direct byproduct of the NIMBYism I'm talking about.
Nevertheless, pumping the brakes here is sensible.
I get the sense that researchers feel a certain injustice that geopolitics is affecting scientific decisions by their funding bodies. Funding should be decided on the scientific merit of their proposals. In a vacuum, that makes sense.
Seen more widely, though, the decisions of the NIH and similar funding bodies are shot through with political considerations. For example, it would be hard for a physician scientist to attend a conference in the last few years where considerable resources were not devoted to equity issues.
My point here is that we already contextualize what work we fund by political decisions, for better or worse. In this circumstances, we continue to do so, but we in particular pause funding on research that may, in some form, be responsible for the deaths of millions of people and the disruption of lives of billions. That's a sensible choice.
Instead these labs are all near major population centers, with researchers freely mixing with the general population.
Like I live in a place where one of the major employers is a government research facility and every day people go to the designated meeting point and a bus takes them the rest of the way, or they spend 45 minutes driving on a dirt road to the middle of nowhere to keep anything from work (in this case nuclear related stuff) from coming home with them.
Why the hell are we putting biological virology institutes in the middle of the major population centers instead of the middle of nowhere?
Like there's plenty of unused land in the west, hell WY has like 2 dozen people living there, it seems that would be safe.
If this field is their career and their passion, they will do it.
Have you looked at the answers to these questions?
If they can't be bothered to work in a safely remote location then they don't actually believe in their work and are blind to the risks and history of lab leaks.
These are stakes as high as any single event in human history. Given the danger we're talking about, whether or not a few professors get a grant and have a good career is simply not even worth discussing. The fact that it is even discussed shows that the priorities of the virology community are wildly misplaced.
In China, there has been almost a complete information blackout after COVID. Most of what we know that points to a leak that actually comes from China has been accidentally disclosed or was published before the pandemic.
In the U.S. and Europe, it's sadly largely the same story. We now know through FOIA requests that the authors of the pivotal Proximal Origin thought privately that there was a significant likelihood that SARS2 was lab derived, but what they published was that "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible." They also sought to conceal some of the true authors of the paper in order for it to appear more independent and credible. They, and their colleagues then relentlessly smeared and called conspiracy theorists, anyone who publicly said the very same things that they said privately to each other.
EcoHealth and DARPA refused to provide a copy of the DEFUSE grant proposal. It ultimately had to be leaked by an anonymous source in the government. When it finally came out it ended up being more or less a direct blueprint for how you'd create SARS2 from existing bat viruses, and it was submitted just a year before the outbreak started in Wuhan. One of the collaborators on that project was to have been the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Throughout, (and there is much more), not a single person who has brought any of this to light has been a virologist. Some have been biologists in other fields, some have been outside the scientific establishment entirely.
Being responsible for an animal that harbors a virus that could kill 10,000,000 people or more if you make a mistake is an awesome responsibility, and only people of the utmost integrity can be trusted with something that dangerous. What we've seen is that sadly, nowhere near this level of integrity exists in the virology community.
What we learned from the FOIA requests is that some authors initially privately believed a lab leak was more likely and some believed that a natural origin was more likely, but after they discussed the evidence, they all agreed that it supported the latter. https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/15951210808005386...
Get in line.
Include building a completely hermetically sealed underground facility.
Sign away the ability to interact with the world at large for the duration of the experiment.
All samples and potentially contaminated equipment is to be incinerated/vitrified upon conclusion of the experiment.
If you think you are good enough to play God with manufacturing new pandemic pathogens, okay. Fine. I sure hope you're really willing to sacrifice it all for your work. Because otherwise, the answer should be no by default.
I know it's not definitive it was a lab leak, but many US agencies including, notably, the Department of Energy, say it's likely it was.
And when you change the headline to reflect that, it sure does change the message.
> The IC assesses that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, probably emerged and infected humans through an initial small-scale exposure that occurred no later than November 2019 with the first known cluster of COVID-19 cases arising in Wuhan, China in December 2019.
And that:
> As of August 2021, we still have not observed genetic signatures in SARS-CoV-2 that would be diagnostic of genetic engineering, according to the IC’s understanding of the virus. Similarly, we have not identified any existing coronavirus strains that could have plausibly served as a backbone if SARS-CoV-2 had been genetically engineered.
Also:
> The WIV previously created chimeras, or combinations, of SARS-like coronaviruses, but this information does not provide insight into whether SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered by the WIV.
And:
> Early in the pandemic, the WIV identified that a new virus was responsible for the outbreak in Wuhan. It is therefore assessed that WIV researchers pivoted to COVID-19-related work to address the outbreak and characterize the virus. These activities suggest that WIV personnel were unaware of the existence of SARS-CoV-2 until the outbreak was underway.
And as far as spillover from collected samples in the lab goes:
> They also see the potential that a laboratory worker inadvertently was infected while collecting unknown animal specimens to be less likely than an infection occurring through numerous hunters, farmers, merchants, and others who have frequent, natural contact with animals
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Declass...
A prior declassified report found:
> Prior to the pandemic, we assess WIV scientists conducted extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis. We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Report-...
No idea why DOE continues to think it was a lab leak, other than we can't definitively prove it wasn't and since ChinaBad(tm) we have to assume it was.
"One IC element assesses with moderate confidence that the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was the result of a laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. These analysts give weight to the inherently risky nature of work on coronaviruses."
Based on the quote (if the one IC element is in fact the DOE) is seem they are basing it on the "inherently risky nature of the work on coronaviruses.
I do find it interesting this was given with moderate confidence but the natural occurring is only given low confidence. Any idea how the whole confidence level is determined?
See the second bullet point on key takeaways.
https://www.intelligence.gov/assets/documents/702%20Document...
The DOE seems to have assigned "moderate" confidence to the idea of a lab leak on the basis of zero concrete evidence. Taking the assessment on the whole it seems obvious to me that the argument from them is weak, but the assessment can't come out and just state that in plain English.
Why are we giving so much wait to the organization that says "Energy" in the name over one that says "Health" in the name? And is there a convincing reason that's not: "It's the department I agree with the most on this issue."
Given that lab escapes have happened multiple times and might have caused a global pandemic, the burden of proof should be on showing that the research is worth the significant risk it carries.
Defaulting to assuming that the risks are negligible and everyone concerned is scared for no reason is an absurd and dangerous take.
What there is, is a risk analysis, which means you have to consider the risks of any particular action as well as in NOT taking the action. I've seen literally no discussion about the risks of NOT taking the action.
I'm reminded of self-driving cars, because we're worried they might lead to the deaths of thousands of people each year. Meanwhile, over a million people die each year in car accidents. Conclusion: best to let those million people die each year.
So why continue to fund such dangerous research if the research will be hidden when we actually need it?
Wow. Just wow.
It's statements like this that make me think we should indeed halt all virology research, and really all medical research and development entirely. We deserve what we get.
I spent a long time investigating the effectiveness of everything governments did during COVID. None of it worked and a lot of it backfired badly, lockdowns being only one of the most prominent examples. Even the vaccine programme was a disaster: the data claiming otherwise turns out to have all been juked in various ways. We'd have been better off without governments doing anything at all.
That's an awfully bold claim, unless you have proof that covid-19 occurred naturally. Defaulting to your preferred reality and ignoring the potential risks is not a responsible way to guide research policy.
or initiate
>the next pandemic virus.
When in reality we all know China said it maybe came from a wet market in the same city (as the only Level4 biolab), because someone ate a bat.
You and I have higher burdens of proof than these "conspiracy theory" pushers.
There you go, France, the UK, Italy and Spain all have a higher proportion (or even a majority) of people believing in the lab leak theory than in the US. Germany is very close too.
Some hobbyists caring and going down rabbit holes just doesn't mean much as far as what actually happened is concerned.
But I’ll bite. You are saying that people in Europe over the last six month think that a lab leak is less likely now than they had? Hmm, hot take.
There will be an opinion but that doesn't mean anyone cares about it or there is discussion about it.
Wait, is this canon now? If so, how is China going to not garner the hatred of the entire world?
To my knowledge, as of 3 months ago, the only “tangible” evidence for a lab leak was that china cleaned up before the WHO arrived and could better investigate.
You are the first person I have ever seen, after hundreds of articles, claim that the lab is known for leaks.
That is where I thought I got it from, but I don't see it just scanning through. Either it came from somewhere else, or I got it confused in the section where they were talking about a Beijing lab. If so they have my apologies.
Edit:https://www.voanews.com/a/covid-19-pandemic_chinese-lab-chec...
> Two State Department cables show that American embassy officials in Beijing made several visits to the research facility and sent two official warnings back to Washington in early 2018 about the lab’s inadequate safety measures. This was at a time when researchers were conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats, The Washington Post reported, citing intelligence sources.
The thing that China does which deserves the most hatred, however, is not the accident: It is the coverup. It's one thing to fuck up; it's another thing to hinder investigation of the fuckup, while trying in vain to "save face," which ends up just resulting in more deaths. A sincere person or organization would say "OK, one of us screwed up, now please help us fix it". It's literally the most basic ethics/honesty lesson we teach kids (at least in the West)- "if you screwed up, 'fess up, and the punishment will be less":
> While the U.S. investigates, officials say the Chinese government’s continuing lack of transparency, including with respect to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, raises questions over how the outbreak began. Officials also accuse Beijing of still not sharing all of their data with the international community.
> Instead, there is Chinese evidence that the lab had safety problems. VOA has located state media reports showing that there were security incidents flagged by national inspections as well as reported accidents that occurred when workers were trying to catch bats for study.
All evidence points to zoonotic spillover, aggravated by our encroachment on previously undisturbed natural areas and global warming.
Sadly, it was both political useful ('the Chinese did it!'), and ideologically useful ('a few faulty humans did this, like in the movies'), to blame the lab in Wuhan. By doing so, we can absolve ourselves of blame, and of need to take action - action both to mitigate the effects of this pandemic, and to prepare for the next. The next being an inevitability, just a question of when (within 10 years is my uneducated guess)
That's leaving aside the specious claim that there's no evidence of lab leak. The evidence of first outbreaks being near the lab are evidence of it being a lab leak, just as the first outbreaks going through a wet market are evidence of natural evolution. We have evidence for both theories.
Much easier to identify a few bad actors (which can then be 'punished' so this 'never happens again') instead of the crapness of people in general (which crapness ensures that this will happen again, with bodybags and lockdowns, and probably quite soon)
what evidence?
in any case, thats fancy language for: "Donald Trump was a proponent of the lab leak hypothesis so we had to come up with an alternate theory lest we appear to be in agreement with Donald Trump...so we've decided that it was people eating Pangolin Soup"
The folks claiming that there is evidence only for their theory are incorrect.
Was this created in a lab? Was this leaked from a lab? Is there something inherently dangerous about studying viruses in labs? Full NIMBY.
The positive externalities of this are good jobs around virology study to try and prevent the next pandemic. But we're just leaning super hard into fear-mongering here. How many people in the comments of this article really describe the processes used at each of these labs to prevent the viruses from getting out? How many can say how effective those practices are? We've still not proven that COVID was a lab-leak, so we're attempting to say that something that otherwise has a very safe record is dangerous based on what might have happened.
Crazy virus comes from where said crazy viruses are literally made and studied.
Occams Razor suggests a lot, but more importantly, smart risk management dictates that you treat the lab as if it is the source; absent some sort of clear risk-related reason that these experiments are likely to do more good than harm.
So I suppose the correct question is -- what are we getting from these labs that's worth the risk of leaks?
Yeah, nah, that one is only "more believable" propped up by e.g. xenophobia and racism. Falls way too neatly into "look at the weird Chinese people they eat bats" or whatever.
Pretty flimsy compared to "lab that literally does this kind of virus all day."
"Crazy" is an odd characterization, but let's go with it. Where are "crazy viruses literally made"? Well, more often than not, in nature. So...
Coronaviruses (SARS specifically) have leaked from Chinese labs twice in the last 20 years. These aren't really even controversial incidents, the PRC admitted it. [2]
Lab leaks of pathogens aren't really that uncommon, to the extent Wikipedia has a huge list including labs from all over the world. [1]
tl;dr: viruses escape from labs, so it was never a far-fetched scenario.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
Now tell me, how did all of those accusations and investigations help in the pandemic?
The main purpose behind determining if it's a lab leak is not to 'make jumps'. It's so that we know. It's important we know because it's how science and policy get done. Putting our fingers in our ears and covering our eyes and pretending it doesn't matter is irresponsible.
> We've still not proven that COVID was a lab-leak, so we're attempting to say that something that otherwise has a very safe record is dangerous based on what might have happened.
How is anyone supposed to prove or even provide evidence of such a thing if China doesn't cooperate? And that's really the reason this has exploded. China is not cooperating. No one knows, and that's suspicious.
Even if, as you say, all indicators point to gain-of-function research being useful, I think we should all be able to agree that labs that are not open to being investigated by international, neutral bodies should not be involved in conducting them. The possibility of cover ups is too great.
My argument here is "We don't know that this was created in a lab, and it's unreasonable to assume it was when we have evidence that it wasn't created in a lab." It's even more unreasonable to create policy based on this wild speculation.
> How is anyone supposed to prove or even provide evidence of such a thing if China doesn't cooperate? And that's really the reason this has exploded. China is not cooperating. No one knows, and that's suspicious.
Difficulty in obtaining evidence doesn't change the burden of proof from "proving a positive" to "disproving a negative".
"Suspicious" is not "damning evidence." But also my understanding is that scientists have studied the virus and determined it doesn't have any of the hallmarks they would expect from a human-altered virus.
Unless something major has changed, I don't believe we have firm evidence either way.
> Difficulty in obtaining evidence doesn't change the burden of proof from "proving a positive" to "disproving a negative".
When difficulty obtaining evidence has to do with geopolitics, rather than science, then yes it becomes very diferent. Because geopolitics, and people, you can convince, investigate, and hold accountable. Science and nature less so. That's why this is important.
Anyway, your entire purpose making your argument is to question the need for any investigation it seems. That is why it seemingly excuses the fact that we have not actually investigated the lab in any meaningful way. I don't believe this is acceptable.
We also haven't proven it wasn't a lab leak.
> so we're attempting to say that something that otherwise has a very safe record is dangerous based on what might have happened.
I'm not sure how good the record really is[0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)#P...
Your second point is better taken.
Who has the burden to demonstrate that GoF research is safe given our uncertainty of whether COVID was lab created and subsequently leaked? This issue isn't of purely academic interest. We must consider the costs to society of a leak vs the benefits of that research. From where I'm sitting, the benefits are non-existent relative to the costs. Given the massive negative utility of a leak compared to benefits of the research, the burden of proof is on those who want to continue doing GoF research to demonstrate safety and value.
Your burden of proof would make some sense if, of all the places in the world, the outbreak didn't happen near a "leading" lab in GoF research on bat viruses.
I mean: if people were to die due to irradiation near some uranium-enrichment facility but there was no proof that any radioactive material leaked, the reasonable stance would still be that some fuck up happened in that uranium-enrichment facility.
People would have to proof it was a lab-leak if the outbreak happened in some city where there weren't any research done on viruses.
But as it is an undisputable fact that the biggest pandemic in modern history happened due to a virus outbreak beginning in a place exceptionally close to a lab doing research on similar viruses, the burden of proof is on those claiming it's not a lab leak.
Moreover it's a known fact communism uses propaganda as one of its most powerful tool so nothing coming out of chinese officials can be trusted.
You want to point out it wasn't proven it was a lab leak, which is true. But people can point out it wasn't proven it wasn't a lab leak either. And that is totally on-topic.
What does the evidence point to?
Has any new evidence surfaced in the past year?
The conversation DID ask if it was a leak. Then they studied the evidence and only after studying the evidence did they publicly sign that it was probably of natural origin.
They had already studied the evidence on February 2 when they had the slack conversations. No new evidence appeared.
Then they said out loud that they were changing the paper's conclusions away from their actual beliefs because of the political consequences:
> “Given the shit show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possible distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content to with ascribing it to natural processes.”
> “Yup, I totally agree that’s a very reasonable conclusion,” Andersen responded. Although I hate when politics is injected into science – but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstance. We should be sensitive to that.”
https://theintercept.com/2023/07/21/covid-origin-nih-lab-lea...
Your opinion has been shaped by a massive disinformation campaign.
Some of these fears and comments reminds me a lot of comments around the nuclear accident in Japan. The actual issues stemmed from poor safety measures and protocols, not nuclear itself. That's assuming that the lab leak theory is even true and not just a convenient tool for politicians to use as a wedge.
It seems like the GoF research shows a lot of "oh look we made a super virus. It would be very bad if a virus did this in nature." Perhaps we can get some data on specifically _how bad_ that particular function would be. What do we get beyond that? Like you said, are there any other benefits that outweigh the risks?
Maybe we're all just really bad at understanding risks. I see a lot of comparisons between nuclear power. We know exactly how much dangerous material is in a nuclear reactor. Those physics don't evolve. Nuclear material doesn't reproduce and reinfect endlessly. A nuclear power plant needs a chain of failure to be harmful. A virus only needs one particle to infect.
This is where I see a gap. How does it actually inform vaccine design? Are there not enough wild viruses to play with?
Sun Tzu.
How do you think you can devise a vaccine if you don't know the virus? They experiment to find out what are the weaknesses of the enemy (i.e. proteins and other markers), so that they can target it. If the next pandemy is caused by a similar strain: ta-dam you have the vaccine already (or at least you know what to target).
Very early on after the virus genome was released a group of Indian researchers quickly noted that the virus had been deliberately engineered and they were quickly shut down,
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v2....
then one Peter Daszak who was financing GoF research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology got a group of scientists to publish a paper saying it was not engineered and the Chinese were not involved in any such thing.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Here is the BBC featuring Peter Daszak given Wuhan a clean bill of health while forgetting to tell viewers about his relationship with the Wuhan institute - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-56002216
Peter Daszak's Ecohealth Alliance passing on NIH funding to WIV - with receipts - https://www.foxnews.com/video/6227902415001
We now have leaked Slack conversations from a group of scientists who jumped in to say the virus was a naturally evolved was admitting privately in the conversations that the evidence pointed to deliberate engineering.
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2023/07/19/so-friggin-likely-an...
Isn't that the same Kristian Andersen who received a huge load of money from Tony Fauci after backtracking on the lableak/artificial origins theory?
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/03/scicheck-no-evidence-scien...
Now here are some researchers who maintain that the new variants did not evolve naturally.
If the lab leak turns out to be true I could see people demanding that the gallows be dusted off.
That's extreme. I work with transgenic, not viruses, but mistakes happen and the death penalty for researchers is crazy.
We weren't at war this time, but pandemics are inextricable from international politics for the same reason everything else that has massive impact on people's health and safety across national borders is inextricable from international politics.
I agree with you on the desire for depoliticization of the topic, but I lack a mechanism to get there; it's not like an independent agency run by, say, the UN would be free of politics on this topic.
And it has been years; if some one did it deliberately then they failed to capitalize on it.
First if it was a leak, we'd have to cut off all funding and shared resources just to be safe, which we have already done.
Next there would have to be some investigation that China would naturally be adversarial to. If it was natural they would want to collaborate (they are refusing to collaborate for the most part).
At its core, no. But there were a lot of people caught in the crossfire of information who simply got scared. For many of them, seeing SARS-CoV-2 as man-made could have counteracted that anxiety.
It was clear very early on that for the vast majority of the population (over 99%) there was no tangible threat from Covid. And yet the theater of Covid was carried on. I still remember the footage out of Wuhan in early 2020 that scared the bejeezus out of me, of people just falling over in the middle of the streets and people with hazmat suits showing up and carting people off. Only in retrospect can we see that was all a production. People don't literally fall over in the middle of the street from Covid infection, fine one minute and near dead the next.
So from that background, why would you trust anything the government tells you, when the government showed no good faith effort to seek truth or be reasonable? Many who pitched the lab leak theory were dismissed, shut down, censored, and ridiculed. From the same conformists that sought to manipulate healthy young people into taking an unnecessary vaccine and to give up a portion of their youth to terror and tyranny.
Inoculation means to prevent disease. The mRNA vaccines were extraordinary at preventing Covid, the disease. Sterilisation is a nice to have, but far from mandatory--modern polio vaccines aren't sterilising.
> didn't have to propagandize and gaslight people to take the smallpox vaccine: it was self evident how deadly the disease was
A meaningful fraction of Americans, Brits and Canadians are generally against inoculation [1].
He said was. The disease was deadly, now it's threat to you is extremely low. If you weren't aware, we stopped vaccinating for small pox in 1972, as soon as it was no longer a threat in the United States. It would not be globally eradicated until 1979.
And I think that's largely the problem many people have. Forcing vaccinations for diseases that pose little risk is illogical. In looking up information on this topic I somehow stumbled onto this [1] page. For instance now the seasonal flu vaccine is required for immigrants, and even in some schools!?
The flu poses an extremely negligible risk to both of these groups. It's hard not to see the motivation behind this as being simply directing ever more $$$ to big-pharma interests, which the people making these rules are often directly invested in. It doesn't feel like rational public health guidance, and that destroys trust.
[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/immigrantrefugeehealth/laws-regs/vaccina...
But right on, I feel exactly the same. I do plant transformation and we call these experiments, mRNA "transient-expression" assays, as in, transiently transgenic. It was so weird from my perspective that we were going to start using the common lab technique to test genes on people.
The only two facts I needed were that over 80% of people that have had COVID never even knew they had it, it's that mild. And of the people that even show symptoms it have over a 99% recovery rate.
This depended strongly on which variant you got. Early on, it was inefficiently deadly. (In its current form, I don't think Covid is a problem.)
> over a 99% recovery rate
Fewer than 1% of Americans died from Covid [1]. On a case fatality basis, about 99% survived. Lack of mortality != recovery.
COVID now is far more mild because of vaccination and how the virus has evolved (Omnicron being far more mild than the earlier variants).
And obviously there were no vaccines for the Spanish Flu.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Patterns_of_fatali...
Like what you've done there is a fallacy a lot of people commit, that they conflate seasonal viruses, colds, allergies etc with the flu. But when you actually get the flu, you know it.
When there were local smallpox outbreaks in the West in the 20th century there were drastic containment measures.
Age Range : Deaths : Group Population as Percent of total US Population
55-64 : 159k : 12.9%
65-74 : 256k : 10.1%
75-84 : 300k : 4.9%
85+ : 311k : 1.8%
COVID was only especially dangerous to the extremely elderly, and particularly those with severe preexisting conditions. So for instance that 65-74 age group, you have about 34 million people, and only 256k deaths. Think about the numbers in that 34 million with cancer, severe diabetes, heart failure, etc. But then you go the 85+ group and with 1/6th as many people, ended up with about 20% more total deaths.
[1] - https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta... (for the % of population data)
To state different: Was the unknown/disputed origins the catalyst for some not getting vaccinated?