Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research • Hacker News Board

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#211

Post by nvm0n2 » Wed, Oct 18, 2023, 7:33 AM UTC

cbsmith wrote: post #182

nvm0n2 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ever…

Of course it was sequenced by virologists, they're the ones who were there at the start when they let it escape, they're the ones who were splicing cleavage sites into it and developing vaccines against what they'd developed. It's all in the grant application to read about there. Then they provided the sequences to allies via back channels early on.

So they don't get points for being first, when they're the ones who created the problem in the first place.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#212

Post by nvm0n2 » Wed, Oct 18, 2023, 7:37 AM UTC

cbsmith wrote: post #201

akira2501 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you trust nature to do this work? ;-) What work is that? Unnaturally bringing bats and pangolins together in a meat market? The only "real world" excuse ever offered. > Climatologists aren't needed. I've read their reports and their annual revisions. I'm not convinced they're needed, and since the "science" here is purely a wild guess using models projected backwards in time to fit existing data, the results ar…

> What work is that? Unnaturally bringing bats and pangolins together in a meat market? The only "real world" excuse ever offered. GoF research in virology is specifically to replicate what happens in nature in hopes of forecasting outcomes and giving us more time to respond to them. If it isn't doing what happens in nature, it is, by definition, a failure. > I've read their reports and their annual revisions. I'm no…

How exactly do seismologists or meteorologists do artificial experiments that replicate the phenomena they study?

> GoF research in virology is specifically to replicate what happens in nature

And yet in both the leaked chats and third party analysis, they talk extensively about how the RNA sequence doesn't match what they'd expect from natural evolution. Not only was it highly adapted to humans right from the get go, but there was the furin cleavage site too. The strange and artificial looking nature of it created suspicion immediately which is why they engaged in a conspiracy to shut down and censor discussion of it.

So that doesn't seem like they're just replicating nature.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#213

Post by nvm0n2 » Wed, Oct 18, 2023, 7:45 AM UTC

cbsmith wrote: post #196

baja_blast wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

> 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. Wow. Just wow. It's statements like this that make me think we should indeed halt all virology research, and really all medical research and development entirely. We deserve what we get.

All government funded work maybe, yeah? It wouldn't make much difference. The consumers of that sort of research are ultimately just pharma companies and they don't use it much because so little replicates to begin with.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#214

Post by nvm0n2 » Wed, Oct 18, 2023, 7:49 AM UTC

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).

I live in Europe. People do absolutely care, why would they not. Had lots of discussions about it here. What a weird argument this is anyway, proof by European? What is this?

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#215

Post by RandomLensman » Wed, Oct 18, 2023, 10:45 AM UTC

nvm0n2 wrote: post #214

RandomLensman wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I live in Europe. People do absolutely care, why would they not. Had lots of discussions about it here. What a weird argument this is anyway, proof by European? What is this?

Like on almost any topic, the majority of people doesn't care (and looking at media coverage, less so in the EU than in the US). If you force people via a survey to have a view on something like that the answers are not meaningful.

Some hobbyists caring and going down rabbit holes just doesn't mean much as far as what actually happened is concerned.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#216

Post by saalweachter » Wed, Oct 18, 2023, 10:54 AM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #204

jiggawatts wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite true: zoonotic crossover events become more likely as more animals are brought together. Large-scale wet markets or bushmeat markets increase the chances because there are more rolls of the dice .

Are most zoonotic crossovers more than one step or are most misadventures NONHUMAN => HUMAN? Either way if market activity doesn't change year on year then rate of dice rolls don't change on that front. However there is no reason to believe that such misadventures take place in a single generation and immediately produce a viable and successful agent. Producing something that spreads to humans but not will will none…

I mean, we, a random assortment of software engineers on HN, almost certainly lack the data and expertise to forecast the risk of a pandemic.

My own self-critique above was more that, even if you could accurately deduce that there is a 1.54e-12 chance per person-year of a person encountering a novel disease that can spread as a global pandemic, you can't then schedule the next one for 450 billion people-years later, when the probability exceeds 50%, because it's a random occurrence and there's nothing stopping it from happening after ten or a trillion throws of the dice.

But I'll still stand by the logic of my original back of the envelope number; insomuch as the risk is proportional to the population, we should expect the next global pandemic twice as fast as the last one, and I think there's a good chance many of us will be alive to see it (as opposed to the gap between the Spanish Flu and COVID-19, where the survivors of the first were infants for the last and centenarians for this one).

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#217

Post by peteradio » Wed, Oct 18, 2023, 10:58 AM UTC

cbsmith wrote: post #194

peteradio wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. Would that that were true. I'm curious how you explain how your perception aligns with the reality that no lab, anywhere, at anytime since the outbreak, has been able to produce COVID-19 variants as fast as occurred naturally. Nature is experimenting all the time, with the ove…

Variants are tiny natural changes.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#218

Post by peteradio » Wed, Oct 18, 2023, 11:14 AM UTC

nvm0n2 wrote: post #212

cbsmith wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What work is that? Unnaturally bringing bats and pangolins together in a meat market? The only "real world" excuse ever offered. GoF research in virology is specifically to replicate what happens in nature in hopes of forecasting outcomes and giving us more time to respond to them. If it isn't doing what happens in nature, it is, by definition, a failure. > I've read their reports and their annual revisions. I'm no…

How exactly do seismologists or meteorologists do artificial experiments that replicate the phenomena they study? > GoF research in virology is specifically to replicate what happens in nature And yet in both the leaked chats and third party analysis, they talk extensively about how the RNA sequence doesn't match what they'd expect from natural evolution. Not only was it highly adapted to humans right from the get go…

Exactly, there doesn't seem to be any restraint to creating viruses that would match a naturally occurring pathway. Viruses are simple enough that you can do statistical analysis and determine how many years it would take for such an occurrence to take place in nature. Humans have the tools to create viruses that wouldn't occur in the wild before the heat death of the universe.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#219

Post by cameldrv » Wed, Oct 18, 2023, 11:15 AM UTC

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…

In the article they talk about four researchers that may have trouble getting a grant due to the changed political environment. Seven million people are confirmed to have died from COVID, and the excess worldwide mortality since the beginning of the pandemic is 27 million. Both of these numbers are larger than the number of Jews that died in the Holocaust.

These are stakes as high as any single event in human history. Given the danger we're talking about, whether or not a few professors get a grant and have a good career is simply not even worth discussing. The fact that it is even discussed shows that the priorities of the virology community are wildly misplaced.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#220

Post by shadowgovt » Wed, Oct 18, 2023, 12:13 PM UTC

nvm0n2 wrote: post #210

shadowgovt wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 there…

> instrumental in prediction of the rate of mutation of the spike protein The research must have been pretty misleading then, because all the experts appeared to be taken by surprise by the fact that it mutated at all, given their original plan was "two shots and done". Something that has now become promoting infinity boosters to a world that has stopped listening (uptake of the current round is extremely low). But a…

Arguing over the origins was completely orthogonal discussion to figuring out how to mitigate spread and severity, and I think most virologists made the wise decision to stay out of a fundamentally political argument. It doesn't matter if the virus came from the moon as long as we can quarantine and vaccinate against it.

And I'm sorry you feel misinformed, but nothing I read ever suggested anyone was taken by surprise by its mutagenic rate. To the extent experts thought it might be a "two shots and done" virus, they were overly optimistic about policy and vaccination uptake; were the vaccine manufactured and rolled out quickly enough and deployed globally, it could have been cut off from human reservoirs and died out, but a combination of logistics and public distrust meant we missed that window and now it's endemic. Its mutation rate pretty much guarantees it'll be with us indefinitely as long as the public has the stomach to tolerate that.