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Comment by gibolt | Hacker News Reader

Difficult doesn't mean impossible. Trillions and trillions of chances for mutations to happen may lead to resistance over some period of time.

Hopefully not, but evolution is a powerful beast.

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Yes that is correct, it's pretty easy to create escape variants in the lab. I don't think people should be doing it with virus like HIV and SARS, but they do.

What about with coronaviruses?

SARS was caused by a coronavirus.

Fair argument for doing it with highly mutative viruses like coronavirus and influenza, because it gives you a chance to prepare.

I'm surprised people are still making that argument even after the pandemic showed us the risk is nowhere near worth the reward. Regardless you need to create a vaccine for the discovered virus (which can take less than a week, as was the case with covid). And then you still need to go through months of human trials.

I was hoping we were done risking starting pandemics by purposefully creating new deadly viruses.

Can you please cite a source that shares that it took "less than a week" for the COVID vaccine to be developed after discovery?

“You may be surprised to learn that of the trio of long-awaited coronavirus vaccines, the most promising, Moderna’s mRNA-1273, which reported a 94.5 percent efficacy rate on November 16, had been designed by January 13. This was just two days after the genetic sequence had been made public”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/moderna-covid-19-vac...

Isn't there a big difference between "designed" and "developed"? For instance the whole testing phase?

Which doesn't mean it is not impressively fast, but still it's not done in a week. Plus testing the covid vaccines was quick because there were many many people to participate in the tests.

Is this assuming, that Covid was lab made? Since I have not seen or read about proof of that theory, this comes across a bit like conspiracy theory.

the jury is still out on whether COVID originated from a lab. it seems very possible, but there is still little evidence that proves it was created in a lab.

Well, we do know COVID did leak from a lab in China at least one time: in 2021, a researcher in Taiwan was bitten by an infected mouse and contracted the disease.

Edit: My bad, as far as public knowledge goes, coronavirus leaked three times in China (SARS coronavirus 2x, COVID 1x), and once in Singapore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

As for Wuhan in November 2019, the Chinese government took several actions at that time which you would expect to be taken in response to a biosecurity incident: visits from biosecurity officials, remedial biosecurity training, and (coincidentally) government simultaneously began work on a COVID vaccine.

Only circumstantial evidence, though... so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Source: a study by the US senate, covered here by WSJ: https://archive.ph/Kh2Fr

Agreed. Making super viruses to show what could possibly happen, however unlikely, is the epitome of hubris. But boy is it a great to get funding.

I do wonder what the calculus is when comparing the chance nature could mutate and successfully introduce itself to the human population vs the chance of it escaping a lab after being created by humans to study gain of function, etc.

And where comes the human part in the equation? That some people think they are so smart no mistake can ever occur, like viruses escaping into the wild, proofs their lack of understanding.

Ah thats how we got Covid

HIV has a crazy high mutation rate, way larger than other viruses like SARS-COV-2 or the influenza virus. In an infected untreated human, you have at least one copy of the HIV virus produced for each base pair mutation within a day or so. In other words, if there is a single base pair mutation that makes HIV resistant to a single drug, HIV will adapt quickly. So that's why they quickly discovered to do double therapy, and nowadays one does triple therapy even, so that a virus has to randomly become resistant to three drugs at the same time.

this could happen, but hiv isn't contagious like the flu so even if there'll be an individual with such a strain - how likely it'll pass to others? Also, this drug limits replication, meaning there'll be less and less mutations over time compared to a fully spread virus

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