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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

#181

Post by cbsmith »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #152
cbsmith wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You have a very limited imagination. ;-) I assure you that extensive research into biological (not involving viruses), chemical, and nuclear weapons... and really a wide variety of weapons research is easily more dangerous. There's plenty of opportunity in other are…

I assume the biological samples need to get transported at some point anyway. The researchers would need to live on-site. Yes this would dramatically increase the cost. Personally, I think we just shouldn't do this at all.

> I assume the biological samples need to get transported at some point anyway. The researchers would need to live on-site. Yes this would dramatically increase the cost.

If you're worried about lab contamination, the risk is from the researchers moving amongst the population. I agree that you'd rather not, but I don't agree that regularly putting them on planes to and from major population centers really reduces the risk.

> Personally, I think we just shouldn't do this at all.

[Shrugs]. Some people are pro-pandemic.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#182

Post by cbsmith »

nvm0n2 wrote: post #167
cbsmith wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> According to the virologists who do it, not anyone else. That's not true. > Virologists conspicuously had no role in fighting COVID and didn't seem to contribute any particular knowledge to the NPIs or vaccines. I can't imagine your basis for saying this. Virologists isolated the signature genetic sequences for COVID-19. That was the basis for the development of testing & vaccines for COVID-19 (...and if you think…

Sequencing is something done by many types of biologist, there's nothing special about virologists there. No, this is a profession that really should not exist at all. GoF was banned in the past without consequence beyond causing them to engage in coverups of their own psychotic experimentations, it can be banned again with no loss to humanity. COVID simply wouldn't have happened if these experiments were banned.

> Sequencing is something done by many types of biologist, there's nothing special about virologists there.

Sequencing can be done by a high school student in a lab. Of course, to obtain a sequence for a novel virus, you have to do a lot more than that, but let's pretend that's all you have to do; the fact remains that the sequencing wasn't done by a high school student in a lab, but by virologists.

I agree that everything virologists do could be done by non-virologists. That doesn't mean that it's what happened, nor that it'd be a good idea.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#183

Post by Wowfunhappy »

cbsmith wrote: post #181
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume the biological samples need to get transported at some point anyway. The researchers would need to live on-site. Yes this would dramatically increase the cost. Personally, I think we just shouldn't do this at all.

> I assume the biological samples need to get transported at some point anyway. The researchers would need to live on-site. Yes this would dramatically increase the cost. If you're worried about lab contamination, the risk is from the researchers moving amongst the population. I agree that you'd rather not, but I don't agree that regularly putting them on planes to and from major population centers really reduces the…

> I don't agree that regularly putting [gain of function researchers] on planes to and from major population centers really reduces the risk.

This would have to not happen regularly. The researchers would need to stay for many months at a time, and undergo a separate quarantine before they re-enter society.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#184

Post by baja_blast »

nsvd wrote: post #174
dhdudbd wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>96% similar what does this mean

Less similar than a human and a chimp, who share 98.8% of their DNA (American Museum of Natural History).

But a human and chimp's have over 3 billion nucleotides in our genome. SARS2 only has 30 thousand, so the genetic distance between the two are at most decades, but with recombinants the timeline is much shorter

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#185

Post by JoshTko »

cbsmith wrote: post #148
JoshTko wrote: post #24

Any benefit from research of gain of function research is clearly outweighed by risk of lab leak. I.e if the estimated incremental realized benefit of better planning, better mitigation from a single gain of function research equaled X; the cost of a lab leak seems to be 100X~10,000X.

I'm not sure you establish the 100X-10,000X measure. How did you calculate the realized benefit? How do you quantify the relative impact of extinction?

The approximate loss of life for major outbreaks in the past 25 years (excluding Covid) was around 500K. In a best case scenario GoF could have mitigated maybe 20% of that or 100k. Let' say one research initiative as r, the chance of that research being successful as s, the chance of that research being on the exact virus causing the outbreak as v, the type of mutation research being the actual mutation the virus had as m, the chance that the government leveraged the research and took action to prepare accordingly to take advantage of that research as g, we get s * v * m * g = P probability of r mitigating outbreaks by 20%. P of r is probably around 1/100 or less. So you would probably want around at least 100 GOF research initiatives to save ~100K lives.

On the surface that might sound ok. However if we undergo a similar exercise of chances of Lab leak causing an outbreak we'll probably end up with a similar figure of 1/100. In a lab leak we'll have to contend with a more powerful variant of a pathogen that has caused a prior outbreak which may kill an order more people than the average outbreak. So perhaps a million deaths alone, or if we entertain that Covid was caused by a lab lead ~10m deaths, or 100x of 100k.

Ultimately it seems GoF research is playing with fire without knowing if the effort actually will reduces total deaths on net.

A much more effective route seems to simply invest in rapid sequencing, rapid wastewater monitoring, PPE stocking/distribution policies, more effective local lockdown procedures/policies.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#186

Post by baja_blast »

cbsmith wrote: post #158
rurp wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't know if the virus came from a market either, so why would that be the default position? Especially since that position requires accepting a hell of a coincidence that the virus just happened to emerge near a lab working on gain of function research for that type of virus. China's lack of openness to investigating this should also skew us against giving them the benefit of the doubt, rather than the opposite.…

It's not a court case. There's not a burden of proof. What there is, is a risk analysis, which means you have to consider the risks of any particular action as well as in NOT taking the action. I've seen literally no discussion about the risks of NOT taking the action. I'm reminded of self-driving cars, because we're worried they might lead to the deaths of thousands of people each year. Meanwhile, over a million peo…

Well we spent over a decade and millions of dollars studying SARS coronaviruses and yet none of that work was of any help in fighting the pandemic. For example Ecohealth which was publicly funded with our tax dollars has still to this day refused to share it's research/samples/data despite being legally obligated to. The most charitable interpretation for refusing to share this information while millions of people are dying is that it is simply useless.

So why continue to fund such dangerous research if the research will be hidden when we actually need it?

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#187

Post by diogenes4 »

cbsmith wrote: post #176
diogenes4 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do not conflate people concerned about epidemics with narcissistic assholes.

Describing NIMBYism as "narcissistic assholes" is a gross oversimplification, and misses the point I'm getting at. In the US, you'll reliably get a lot more NIMBY response from "set up a nuclear power plant in the neighbourhood" vs. "set up a gas power plant in the neighbourhood". However, if you look at the risk assessment, the gas power plant is far more lethal to the neighbourhood.

> you'll reliably get a lot more NIMBY response from "set up a nuclear power plant in the neighbourhood" vs. "set up a gas power plant in the neighbourhood"

I don't associate the term "NIMBY" with either scenarios, just housing. I don't think there's much value to overloading it. It's not like anyone's trying to put a nuclear power plant in the middle of Boston to begin with.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#188

Post by peteradio »

cbsmith wrote: post #180
kosievdmerwe wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I assure you that extensive research into biological (not involving viruses), chemical, and nuclear weapons... and really a wide variety of weapons research is easily more dangerous. They very much are not. Viruses and bacteria are unique in the fact that they can harm the whole globe as opposed to chemical and other disasters that will likely only harm the immediate area. And harming the whole globe is all the mor…

> Viruses and bacteria are unique in the fact that they can harm the whole globe as opposed to chemical and other disasters that will likely only harm the immediate area. First of all, you added in bacteria, which are not viruses. However, this statement isn't a useful statement "X is unique because it can harm the whole world, as opposed to Y that will likely only harm the immediate area". The implication is that X…

Nature has a more limited tool kit and has limited ability to bring together virus genes that would otherwise not occur in the same nucleus.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#189

Post by kridsdale3 »

gosub100 wrote: post #137
gustavus wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I don't get, why is this all happenning in cities? Like I live in a place where one of the major employers is a government research facility and every day people go to the designated meeting point and a bus takes them the rest of the way, or they spend 45 minutes driving on a dirt road to the middle of nowhere to keep anything from work (in this case nuclear related stuff) from coming home with them. Why…

They already kind of do this (look up Michael Army Airfield near Tooele, UT where they store(d) VX nerve gas and destroyed it over a multi-year period). How are you going to persuade civilian scientists to move there? If one of them gets sick, how are you going to keep them from going to the hospital? Are they physically confined if they have a fever? (the base was in fact locked down several years back because an ac…

The scientists of the Manhattan Project moved to Los Alamos, basically the same as Nowhereland WY.

If this field is their career and their passion, they will do it.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#190

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

RandomLensman wrote: post #166
mardifoufs wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://pro.morningconsult.com/instant-intel/covid-19-lab-le... There you go, France, the UK, Italy and Spain all have a higher proportion (or even a majority) of people believing in the lab leak theory than in the US. Germany is very close too.

No-one cares (it's a non-topic) so not sure what a survey even means then (and the survey is 6 months old).

The first rule of digging a hole is stop.

But I’ll bite. You are saying that people in Europe over the last six month think that a lab leak is less likely now than they had? Hmm, hot take.

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