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More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

nytimes.com

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Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#181

Post by fumbly »

baja_blast wrote: post #169
fumbly wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current plan is to 6x the funding for gain-of-function research, from $200 million to $1.2 billion, in the name of pandemic prevention. That's one serious reason for wanting to investigate whether gain-of-function research may have caused the current one. The risks of such research have been in open debate for years, and the Obama administration even banned it for a while. It's not a far-fetched possibility, and…

> The current plan is to 6x the funding for gain-of-function research, from $200 million to $1.2 billion, in the name of pandemic prevention. Do you have a source for this? Because if true this would be extremely frightening, even if Covid is natural the research is just too risky. GoF research should be banned, I mean it's entire justification for conducting this research in the first place is that it "helps predict…

"Also, current plans are to expand worldwide collaboration on risky virus research sixfold, through the $1.2 billion Global Virome Project. Shouldn’t we figure out if this research sparked the pandemic before drastically expanding it?"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/cong...

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#182

Post by ska »

eplanit wrote: post #20
mensetmanusman wrote: post #3

Part of me thinks that we should almost not waste the time to find out. Spend the effort on preparing for the next one, by improving air filtration etc. Politics is too deeply entrenched, it will be an impossibility to uncover the truth.

Preparation for the next event _requires_ understanding the origin of this one to the greatest extent possible. I think it's very wrong to shy away from inquiry of the truth out of fear of politics.

I'm sympathetic to this view, but the flip side of it is we don't do much about currently identified pandemic vector risks such as swine CAFO operations; why would we expect new information (if any) affect our behavior any more than that?

If it's expensive to mitigate and hard to quantify, it's always going to be an uphill battle.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#184

Post by arrozconcosas »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #167

What does it matter, beyond natural curiosity, whether it was released from a lab or not? It is of no real consequence because: (1) if it *was* released from a lab, its highly suspect that it was intentional due to it infecting China's own citizens; if it was some kind of "attack" you would think they would plant it somewhere else. (2) this is somewhat of the price we (as a society) pay for experimentation on disease…

If it was by accident, then it calls into question the quality controls over labs. It isn't "equally likely to happen anywhere" if the quality and safety standards vary by location. Operating a lab with poor safety standards is not "bad luck".

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#185

Post by jjtheblunt »

lovemenot wrote: post #110
jjtheblunt wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've asked myself the same, and can only think of two reasons why they focus on if it came from a lab. (1) people like dramatic scandalous stories, in general. (2) knowing such might drive some prevention of whatever mistake lead to such from recurring.

It is certain that some series of events led to the pandemic. There exists a class of people who, without necessarily being driven by other motivations, generally try to find out what is really going on. We call such people scientists. No need to focus on motivation. Curiosity should be enough.

well said: i'm one of the class you mentioned!

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#186

Post by dxuh »

mirekrusin wrote: post #18

What's the point? Regardless if it leaked from the lab or not we have to prepare for the future the same way.

If the lab leak is real, then we should absolutely use this as a reason to stop Gain of Function research or at least establish institutions that ensure the safety of such research, preferably across international borders. The point being that you want to avoid something like this ever happening again.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#188

Post by xxpor »

arrozconcosas wrote: post #184
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #167

What does it matter, beyond natural curiosity, whether it was released from a lab or not? It is of no real consequence because: (1) if it *was* released from a lab, its highly suspect that it was intentional due to it infecting China's own citizens; if it was some kind of "attack" you would think they would plant it somewhere else. (2) this is somewhat of the price we (as a society) pay for experimentation on disease…

If it was by accident, then it calls into question the quality controls over labs. It isn't "equally likely to happen anywhere" if the quality and safety standards vary by location. Operating a lab with poor safety standards is not "bad luck".

The problem is: what is anyone going to do about it? China will never admit it, even if it is true (I have no position one way or the other).

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#189

Post by jrockway »

908B64B197 wrote: post #146
kossTKR wrote: post #112

What i find weird is the extreme and very unscientific agression among certain virologist: "If you think SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a lab, please unfollow me. " https://twitter.com/macroliter/status/1390720308265508871 Then you have other academics in the comments saying nothing is certain yet, and other prominents labs like Gupta Labs at Cambridge and Bloom Lab from Seattle saying there could be multiple explanati…

> What i find weird is the extreme and very unscientific agression among certain virologist Would be interesting to dig further into who is funding their research.

That sounds like the worst of the Internet in action. You disagree with someone's off-handed remark on social media, so you want to remove their funding source?

I guess that's pretty popular, but I have to say I don't care for it.

Many people are still in the bargaining stage of COVID response -- if we find that some person made this virus and released it into the wild, we just send them to prison and the problem goes away. That's a very human reaction to the problem, but unfortunately it doesn't actually work. We have to clean up this colossal mess regardless of whether it was man-made or not, and we have to reckon with the millions that died and will never come back.

Finding someone to blame is just a distraction, and I imagine that many people want to move past that distraction and eradicate the disease. The learning can come later when we're collectively more calm.

I doubt that anyone was funded to create SARS-CoV-2 and then try to suppress discussion about it on Twitter. I think the "unfollow me if you think it's man-made" is just a short-circuit to avoid flamewars and distraction. It probably isn't a belief against doing a blameless postmortem so that we can handle things like this better in the future.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#190

Post by mateo1 »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #167

What does it matter, beyond natural curiosity, whether it was released from a lab or not? It is of no real consequence because: (1) if it *was* released from a lab, its highly suspect that it was intentional due to it infecting China's own citizens; if it was some kind of "attack" you would think they would plant it somewhere else. (2) this is somewhat of the price we (as a society) pay for experimentation on disease…

It's quite surprising that so far I've never read your first point, not once, in any article. Another point is that if some other actor was planning to release this virus in China, they'd definitely do it in Wuhan.

In the end, this discussion doesn't even matter. The fact is that we, the non-specialists with no access to hard evidence, will probably never know what happened, and in fact it does not matter at all.

The origin of the virus is completely irrelevant to its consequences and the potential for accidental or purposeful releases of new viruses, engineered or not, is still there regardless. We're lucky(?) we got ample warning of what biological threats can do, and we got it with a low mortality and morbidity virus.

After all, trying to infer the origin of the virus by it's mutations and features is a bit like trying to infer if a computer virus is made in Russian by the inclusion of Cyrillic variable names or something, anyone can put them in there, so it's basically not even evidence.

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