61–70 of 253 posts
I'm glad that things are slowing down here. Virology research is one of those things no one ever thought about, but the fact that a single careless lab was able to release a virus that killed tens of millions around the world should be a wake up call that the researchers were outpacing the regulations. The entire industry around the world has to be heavily regulated at this point to prevent this from happening again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People are selfish. COVID may have started in China as a lab leak but the US likely funded it. Plenty of selfish reasons for people in government to squash the idea that COVID was a lab leak. If the lab leak turns out to be true I could see people demanding that the gallows be dusted off.
Even if it was accidentally leaked? That's extreme. I work with transgenic, not viruses, but mistakes happen and the death penalty for researchers is crazy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People are selfish. COVID may have started in China as a lab leak but the US likely funded it. Plenty of selfish reasons for people in government to squash the idea that COVID was a lab leak. If the lab leak turns out to be true I could see people demanding that the gallows be dusted off.
Even if it was accidentally leaked? That's extreme. I work with transgenic, not viruses, but mistakes happen and the death penalty for researchers is crazy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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...
Certain gain of function experiments, e.g. modifying an animal virus to be able to infect humans could create viruses that might behave very similar to SARS-CoV2 if leaked. We now know more about the potential consequences of such a leak, we have a full-blown pandemic as a benchmark. 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.
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This entire topic has gotten harebrained, so I’ll add to the fire: the part of our population that had a problem getting vaccinated would have responded much better to a perceived threat from a tangible adversary.
The purpose of a vaccine is to inoculate against a disease. The vaccine failed miserably at that. If the disease were actually deadly enough, more people would have chanced an experimental mRNA injection into their bloodstream vs taking the disease on via natural immunity. You didn't have to propagandize and gaslight people to take the smallpox vaccine: it was self evident how deadly the disease was. And yet, the wor…
Perhaps I am one of a small group but it still irritates me how politicized the origins of COVID were. It should never have been that way and it should never happen again. Lab leak, deliberate act, accident, or a mutation in the wild, the origins should have been rigorously challenged and pursued no matter the consequence.
One thing the pandemic certainly has shown is just how dangerous an otherwise unremarkable animal virus can be if it gains the ability to infect humans. Simply because nobody has a pre-existing immunity it gains enormous advantages in its ability to spread compared to similar viruses that are already endemic. I think previous candidates for new pandemic viruses did mislead us as those never got far enough to become a…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The purpose of a vaccine is to inoculate against a disease. The vaccine failed miserably at that. If the disease were actually deadly enough, more people would have chanced an experimental mRNA injection into their bloodstream vs taking the disease on via natural immunity. You didn't have to propagandize and gaslight people to take the smallpox vaccine: it was self evident how deadly the disease was. And yet, the wor…
Wow, I did a double take in your second paragraph thinking I was reading a comment I had left earlier, lol. 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 w…
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.
Perhaps I am one of a small group but it still irritates me how politicized the origins of COVID were. It should never have been that way and it should never happen again. Lab leak, deliberate act, accident, or a mutation in the wild, the origins should have been rigorously challenged and pursued no matter the consequence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't read much in the last year that didn't consider it extremely likely. The lab was receiving funding from other nations including the US, so I don't think hatred specifically and only for China is rational, but being rational is so cliche. What is 100% accepted and documented is that the lab in question had a history of repeated leaks and failures to follow protocol. When a Chinese nuke plant doesn't follow p…
Sorry, where is this documented that this lab is known for leaks? 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.