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Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

nytimes.com

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Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#111

Post by michaelmrose »

saalweachter wrote: post #97
mkmk3 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naturally, there's an adversarial game playing out, and we accelerate it massively. If the results of our small games enter the larger playspace, we're damned, so I get your concern. 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…

> I don't know the level of realistic risk for a devastating virus naturally occurring 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.

This logic is as incorrect as the folks who say we are due for an earthquake.

It discounts all factors we are ignoring and pretends we can establish an accurate duration between rare events with a few occurrences

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#112

Post by kosievdmerwe »

sterlind wrote: post #99
shadowgovt wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, that sort of GOF research is at the top of the list of GOF utility. Because animal virii making the jump to humans is the risk factor the international epidemiology community tries to protect against, for the very reasons you've highlighted: the harm when it occurs and the frequency with which it occurs (rare, but often enough to create a once-a-century firestorm, at least). Spanish Flu was likely an a…

Do you actually need GoF research to prevent animal spillovers? Did GoF research help us develop the COVID vaccines? Or does GoF research mostly demonstrate the risks of spillover? Because I think we're now well aware of the risks, and ought to avoid poking the bear any further.

I literally can't think of a more dangerous kind of research that we could be doing as a species than messing around and making viruses more dangerous.

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.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#113

Post by [deleted] »

somenameforme wrote: post #110
fzeroracer wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize early on into the pandemic our hospital systems were struggling with the amount of patients that had to come in and see urgent care, right? As in, other people with more treatable conditions were dying because hospitals were filled up and there were no staff or beds available. Like this is just an objective fact. COVID now is far more mild because of vaccination and how the virus has evolved (Omnicron bei…

Vaccines have no effect on whether a virus mutates to become milder or more virulent. Effective vaccines, which prevent spread, can eliminate a disease, but clearly the COVID vaccines failed on that front. So for instance the Spanish Flu was an unimaginably brutal disease that primarily killed people in the 20-40 year old range! [1] Just terrifying stuff. But it never disappeared. It's still with us today as a varian…

[deleted]

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#114

Post by jvdvegt »

istjohn wrote: post #45
pmarreck wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's giving me an endless reCaptcha loop on Firefox

The owner of archive.is does that to people running PiHole.

I'm not using PiHole but I also get the endless recaptcha loop. I am using Firefox though. Is Privacy Badger the culprit, or uBlock Origin?

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#115

Post by shadowgovt »

sterlind wrote: post #99
shadowgovt wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, that sort of GOF research is at the top of the list of GOF utility. Because animal virii making the jump to humans is the risk factor the international epidemiology community tries to protect against, for the very reasons you've highlighted: the harm when it occurs and the frequency with which it occurs (rare, but often enough to create a once-a-century firestorm, at least). Spanish Flu was likely an a…

Do you actually need GoF research to prevent animal spillovers? Did GoF research help us develop the COVID vaccines? Or does GoF research mostly demonstrate the risks of spillover? Because I think we're now well aware of the risks, and ought to avoid poking the bear any further.

This paper at least [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8490979] argues that GoF research (in particular done in 2015 regarding transplantation of spike proteins into SARS-CoV-1) was instrumental in prediction of the rate of mutation of the spike protein, which factors into models of virulence, reinfection, immunity, whether the spike is a viable target for creation of a vaccine at all, etc. It also therefore informs research spending; the hard data on being able to say "Hey, if this bat virus gene mixes with this human virus we're gonna have a bad time" can inform the kind of virology research we focus on, and the hard data on "We cultured a virus like this years before COVID-19 happened; here's how it behaved in the lab" informs what vaccination and detection approaches might be viable.

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.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#116

Post by tootie »

earthboundkid wrote: post #80

I mean, good? They did cause a global pandemic costing trillions of dollars and millions of lives, so maybe they should just chill TF out for a while?

Everyone in this thread seems awfully convinced. There is as of yet no proof that's the case. Nor that GoF created the strain. Both are just conjecture. Seems pretty foolish to end valuable research to appease people who fear things they don't understand.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#117

Post by tootie »

tmaly wrote: post #19
xracy wrote: post #16

I get that there are a lot of arm-chair experts who think this was a lab-leak. But we're making many large jumps here from: 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-mong…

I have not kept up with this topic. What does the evidence point to? Has any new evidence surfaced in the past year?

There's really none. The biggest evidence is the fact that an animal reservoir was never found and it was found relatively quickly during the first SARS and MERS outbreaks. There's no evidence from the lab itself and no evidence the virus that reached the public was subject to GoF. And just general distrust of China.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#118

Post by dkarl »

avar wrote: post #43
pocketsand wrote: post #3

It's a bummer to be a scientist whose work is stymied by these concerns. 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 simila…

There's the completely reasonable compromise of continuing to conduct this research at an isolated Antarctic station, at a quarantined oil platform etc. Instead these labs are all near major population centers, with researchers freely mixing with the general population.

That's a completely reasonable compromise. I think the reason it doesn't get mentioned is that nobody would bother doing it under those constraints. Scientists would not choose to work on it at such great personal cost, and the financial cost would mean that other kinds of research would be better uses of money.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#119

Post by dhdudbd »

sterlind wrote: post #107

Another lesson we should learn from the pandemic, aside from the risks of GoF research, is that searching for novel viruses in animals can be extremely dangerous. 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'…

>96% similar

what does this mean

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#120

Post by mardifoufs »

RandomLensman wrote: post #93
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know, it's crazy right? There are people here that just blindly assume that because the NIH lied about 1-degree indirectly funding gain of function research on coronaviruses at China's only level4 bio lab, where workers were just happened to be some of the first that got sick, where security protocols were admitted to being flawed, and the Chinese government came in and deleted data... that any of this means it cam…

Anyone can cherrypick what they believe - it just doesn't mean much in the real world. With respect to the lab leak hypothesis largely a US phenomenon, though.

Uh? It's basically what everyone believes almost everywhere I went. In North Africa for sure, in Canada it's a bit less common but still extremely widespread. So I'm not sure you meant by it being a US only phenomenon? If anything it's actually a pretty divisive debate in the US,.
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