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How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory

donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com

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Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory

#31

Post by dsyrk »

mc32 wrote: post #14
p1necone wrote: post #5

Working out the initial cause of this Covid outbreak is far far far less important/actionable than working out what we should do differently when (not if) another virus starts spreading. This concept should be familiar to those in tech already: https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/

Unless the release was due to gross negligence --like an outage is due to really bad decisions by someone. In those cases blamelessness is not productive and conducive to more mishaps,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu

But it keeps happening and maybe labs working with such viruses need much more careful procedures or shouldn’t perform risky gain of function research for example.

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory

#34

Post by [deleted] »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #17
ahupp wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In software you would never do a postmortem without understanding the root cause of the incident. If this was caused by a lab leak, or even gain-of-function research, that seems like a pretty important detail.

But that's not what you would start with. If you have an incident and discover that your response plan was hilariously inadequate, you would prioritize making more robust response plans because even if you can prevent that exact incident from happening again, there will be other disasters.

[deleted]

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory

#35

Post by s5300 »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #12
p1necone wrote: post #5

Working out the initial cause of this Covid outbreak is far far far less important/actionable than working out what we should do differently when (not if) another virus starts spreading. This concept should be familiar to those in tech already: https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/

Well I mean never letting Covid out (if that is the source) would have prevented 7-13 million extra deaths this year so it is worth thinking about how we don’t let another one out if it is possible. I disagree that it is less actionable. I am a former scientist. Proper handling of lab waste etc. is infinitely easier than having the whole world lock down, wear masks, and rapidly develop mRNA vaccines to try and put th…

Yes, and proper handling of nuclear bombs is infinitely easier than losing them or accidentally dropping them on your own soil, but the United States still managed to mess that up every now and then...

Mistakes seem to happen despite just about any amount of preventative measures in our world.

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory

#36

Post by tolbish »

lukeholder wrote: post #9
p1necone wrote: post #5

Working out the initial cause of this Covid outbreak is far far far less important/actionable than working out what we should do differently when (not if) another virus starts spreading. This concept should be familiar to those in tech already: https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/

You can do both. If a plane crashes, you find out the cause. During that evaluation, if you also find that the pilots response to the engine failure was also wrong, you fix that too.

There is a noticeable trend here of gatekeepers crying foul when others decide to talk about this. They try to shame you into silence, claiming that you are caring about the wrong thing, as if you cannot pay attention to more than one issue simultaneously.

Whenever there is a trend of similar talking points on a hot topic it makes me wonder how much of that is influence from outside groups.

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory

#37

Post by p1necone »

creato wrote: post #27
Godel_unicode wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's not what you would start with. If you have an incident and discover that your response plan was hilariously inadequate, you would prioritize making more robust response plans because even if you can prevent that exact incident from happening again, there will be other disasters.

You're writing as if somehow general pandemic response has been deprioritized in favor investigating the lab leak theory, which is absurdly far from reality. This incident has cost millions of lives and possibly undone decades of progress on reducing poverty worldwide. It is worth pursuing multiple angles in parallel.

Pandemic response in the USA was atrocious, and it's politically convenient for those who support the administration that was responsible to try to deflect blame however they can. So I'm very skeptical of the motives of people that keep posting stuff like this.

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory

#38

Post by XorNot »

dsyrk wrote: post #29
Godel_unicode wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a false equivalency though; whether or not this was a lab accident, there will be future pandemics which aren't (like every single previous one in history).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu Except another very recent one was also a lab accident. So, no, not every single previous one was, and 2 of last 3 will have been from labs.

Except that virus was genomically identical to another virus in the 1950s.

These thing's aren't being made in labs, they're being stored there but the actual reality is this: none of the countries being so interested in this have any ability to influence the country's these things happen in.

So your effective response protocol may as well just blackbox the problem: "there is a new novel virus, how do we respond?"

No one's going to be invading China to drop napalm on biological research facilities they've collectively decided without the CCP's involvement are "risky".

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory

#39

Post by cletus »

So I generally give like zero weight to conspiracy theories. That being said, I don't believe anyone can reasonably claim with any degree certainty that Covid was a lab-leak BUT the WHO investigation simply hasn't done their due diligence to a sufficient degree to eliminate this theory.

Unfortunately the WHO's credibility is trained here. In the early days of the pandemic the WHO bent over backwards not to upset China. More to the point, it took China's denials on face value.

So it's more than a year after the pandemic started before the WHO investigators got any sort of access to investigate (which, incidentally is not a good look for neither China or the WHO).

But here are two demonstrable and known shortcomings of the WHo investigation:

1. In 2019 there was a database of coronaviruses that China had. In late 2019 it was taken offline. Super-weird timing. By itself that doesn't prove anything but the WHO hasn't investigated it. Did they ask? If not, why not?

2. Wuhan labs do investigate coronaviruses. The WHO has never been given access to what coronaviruses they have.

It is weird that 1-1.5 years later we're still unsure of the origin (unlike, say, SARS or MErS).

Oh and, for the record, I don't believe for a second this virus was in any way engineered.

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory

#40

Post by Lazare »

p1necone wrote: post #5

Working out the initial cause of this Covid outbreak is far far far less important/actionable than working out what we should do differently when (not if) another virus starts spreading. This concept should be familiar to those in tech already: https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/

My engineering org practices blameless postmortems too, and I am an extremely strong advocate of them, but a blameless postmortem is not the same thing as a postmortem that refuses to identify or address root causes. And here, there is some possibility that the current pandemic was the result of specific risks that we, collectively, took.

Earlier in the pandemic I saw a focus on the risks of "wet markets" for zoonotic transmission; although that hasn't panned out so far as a theory for COVID-19, if wet markets present a significant risk of creating pandemics (note: if! I don't know they do), we should evaluate possible restrictions and regulations on them.

More recently I've seen discussions of "gain of function" research on bat coronaviruses, and allegations that some dangerous research on coronaviruses was being carried out in BSL-2 laboratories. Regardless of whether COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak (or whether we ever prove it was), if some specific of research presents a significant risk of creating pandemics (again, if!), we should evaluate possible restrictions and regulations on them too.

Pandemics are, I think, inevitable; it would be foolish to ignore trying to prepare for the next one. But the chance of a pandemic is very possibly not set in stone; it would be equally foolish to ignore trying to bring that risk down. And I categorically reject the argument we need to pick one or the other to focus on; I think we can focus on every step of the chain.

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