7 ms·

Can We Wipe Out All Coronaviruses for Good?

37 points by imheretolearn 6y ago

sriku 6y ago
When it comes to our bio-ecosystem, I'm repelled by this kind of a question as, in general, I don't believe we understand ecosystems with complex interacting parts well at all .. and are therefore not well placed to make such sweeping changes to it .. at least not consciously. The seminal book on this (for me) has been Dietrich Dörner's "The Logic of Failure".
- jrockway 6y ago
  We've wiped viruses off the face of the planet before, and I don't think it's causing us much harm. Eradicating smallpox has apparently saved 5 million lives a year! The question you'd have to ask is whether some low level amount of coronaviruses is important to human survival. It seems like it's not. We have certainly seen the opposite effect -- people get pretty sick when you kill off all their gut bacteria (it lets unhelpful bacteria reproduce, and the bacteria actually perform digestive functions). Unfortunately, we didn't really realize that until we developed the technology to kill bacteria indiscriminately, so I see the worry. But I doubt anyone will be harmed by having too few coronavirus infections, so I'm probably not worried this time.
  - guscost 6y ago
    Smallpox is: - Spread by contact - Off-the-scale virulent - Trivial to turn into a vaccine - Not present in animal reservoirs
    - jrockway 6y ago
      I think this particular thread is debating the ethics and unintended consequences of eradicating all coronaviruses, not how possible it would be to actually do.
      - guscost 6y ago
        The original question starts with the word “Can”, and the answer is [going to be] no.
        ianai 6y ago
        Do you have a reference for no? They seem to have had luck making vaccines so far.
        guscost 6y ago
        Do you have a reference for a vaccine that confers near-total near-lifetime immunity? That would be a prerequisite.
        rfrey 6y ago
        The investigation is “can we”, not “have we”.
        ianai 6y ago
        Just to clarify, I wasn’t looking to put anyone on defense there - so, apologies. Off the top of my head, “How to Survive a Pandemic” by Michael Greger suggests pandemics may be an emergent, new-normal. Many of the factors which led to this pandemic are not going to be mitigated without broad, deep, and costly changes to how agriculture function. The medications used in raising and killing cattle, chicken, pigs, and etc combined with the scale of those activities act as a breeding ground for viruses which are statistically likely to become pandemics.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jan_Inkepa 6y ago
    Not a scientist or medical person, but I believe its accepted that there is linkage of fever and cancer inhibition (because non-cancerous cells tend to cope better with environmental stresses than cancerous ones). It's not at all my field, but a very cursory search shows statements like this https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4006373/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4006373/ 'Lower risk for cancer has also been associated with a history of febrile viral diseases.'
    - ianai 6y ago
      Right. Some cancers can be better targeted with chemo by first stressing the body with a fast. The non cancerous cells identify the fast as a time to set up guards for harshness, but the cancerous cells do not. So the cancerous cells get hit full blast by the chemo while the healthy cells are prepared from the reaction to the fast. I would posit though that fasts are probably a better way to generally help fighting cancers than a life of yearly coronavirus infections.
    - IgorPartola 6y ago
      But this brings up the question of whether we could create a similar response on purpose and in a controlled fashion, rather than letting a bunch of viruses do what they do in the wild?
      - inglor_cz 6y ago
        Even syphilis was once treated by giving the patient malaria - with 20 per cent mortality rate, though. (Still better than suffering from lues in the pre-antibiotic world.) I am all for a controlled fashion.
  - romanoderoma 6y ago
    > We've wiped viruses off the face of the planet I believe it is correct to say we eradicated the disease but we don't know if the virus died Smallpox still exists in the form of monkeypox in the wild and as rabbitpox in labs FDA approved a new drug to treat smallpox (only tested on monkeys and rabbits infected with monkeypox and rabbitpox) in 2018 because smallpox resurgence does remain a realistic threat and having a stock pile of at least two different vaccines that attack the virus in different ways is the only way to prevent it from becoming drug resistant
  - disown 6y ago
    > We've wiped viruses off the face of the planet before Only recently. Widespread vaccine use is a fairly recent phenomenon. > Eradicating smallpox has apparently saved 5 million lives a year! It certainly saved lives but we really don't know how much. Every estimate is off of cherrypicked data. > But I doubt anyone will be harmed by having too few coronavirus infections, so I'm probably not worried this time. You just said we fucked up with bacteria and then you brush off viruses. There was a time when the scientific consensus was to snuff out every small fire to prevent wildfires. Now we realize how horribly naive that was. By preventing small localized fires, we allowed kindle wood to mass which fueled gigantic wildfires. That fires are natural and helps forests clear and rejuvenate itself. The same thing with parents and kids avoiding food/sickness. It lead to food allergies ( some of which can be deadly ) and poor adult immune system. Now we know a bit of sickness helps strengthen the immune system and introduction to a wide variety of foods helps prevent food allergies. The history of humanity/science/etc is we were wrong. But as long as we learn and move forward, that's what is important.
- ramraj07 6y ago
  I remember one of bill burrs rants in his podcast after he watches the Ted talk about eradicating mosquitoes, he compares the arrogance of that person to a dude who proclaims he's going to rewire his homes electric connections and ends up short-circuiting everything. Perfect comparison.
guscost 6y ago
We can’t even wipe out mosquitos. Just tweeted this: > We lost the “War on Terror”, we lost the “War on Drugs”, and as long as we keep declaring war on fundamental forces of nature, we will keep losing. The only way to win is not to play.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  Hopefully you aren't tweeting that from one of the many areas where malaria was endemic, prior to mosquitoes being wiped out long and frequently enough for the human reservoirs to dry up. Cause ya know, that was pretty worthwhile.
  - guscost 6y ago
    Look up the definition of “eradicate”, and also note that you’re talking about a parasite. The best (read: cheapest) hope for “vector controlling” mosquitos until the malaria parasite was extinct globally was probably DDT, until it was banned.
    - maxerickson 6y ago
      I'm responding to the "not to play" in your comment, not the eradicate. Just because we didn't eradicate human feeding mosquitoes doesn't mean it wasn't hugely worthwhile to play the game of controlling them.
      - guscost 6y ago
        That statement is in the context of “War on X”, and it is a quote from a movie where the “war” is a total war of mutually-assured destruction.
        maxerickson 6y ago
        Yes, I understand that it was 'poetic'. My point is that it doesn't apply to things like mosquito control, it's just defeatism, eliminating malaria was a great thing for countries that did it, not a nuclear holocaust.
est31 6y ago
Link to paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abe9403 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abe9403 Already the authors list is very impressive. Lots of people!
pessimizer 6y ago
Why not get a vaccine against a single coronavirus first, boss.
- krustyburger 6y ago
  The fact that it has never been done indicates that it will require a new approach. If the new technique we find allows us to deal with all coronaviruses in one fell swoop, so much the better.
sto_hristo 6y ago
In such a complicated and big world? I don't think so. It certainly won't be as "easy" as defeating smallpox.
Amorymeltzer 6y ago
No. >The problem sparks when a viral strain, normally happily living in a bat, pig, or rodent That's the rub right there. One of the reasons we were successful with smallpox is there wasn't an animal reservoir. One virus + no animal reservoirs + good vaccine = can be successful. Multiple known viruses and strains with multiple reservoirs and no good vaccines means this will not happen. More to the point, this isn't really what the paper was looking at all. The actual (OA) publication[1] identified common and conserved areas which could potentially be used to study and target viruses throughout out the family. This might help with human SARS-CoV2 therapeutics, but it's main benefit is showing how molecular analyses will help fight future coronaviruses. It does not ask or answer whether we can "engineer a universal vaccine against the entire viral family" nor did it "[draw] up a scientific recipe to potentially end coronaviruses once and for all." 1: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/10/14/science.abe9403 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/10/14/scie...
xiphias2 6y ago
Currently it seems to me that the bottleneck for developing the vaccines is the time of trials. Hopefully we’ll have approved DNA / RNA vaccines in less than a year with less side effects than previous vaccines. When that happens, I guess our response time as a species for viruses can get better as well.
- fasteddie31003 6y ago
  I've been following Moderna's vaccine from the beginning. It was developed in 25 days from first virus DNA synthesis. https://www.modernatx.com/modernas-work-potential-vaccine-against-covid-19 https://www.modernatx.com/modernas-work-potential-vaccine-ag... but it's going to take maybe a year to be approved by the FDA. All phase 3 trials are looking good. I personally would take this vaccine right now but the FDA will not allow me to do this. How is the FDA's reputation going to hold up when they approve all these vaccines a year or more after they were created and cost the lives of millions and trillions of dollars? The FDA had no pandemic vaccine approval protocol which could have speed up the process. They could have used challenge trials with young healthy people. I can think of a pre approved process for mRNA vaccines where the delivery methods are approved but the only thing that changes is the mRNA payload. I blame the government healthcare organizations for a lot of the impact from covid-19. First, they were anti-mask during the first major increase in the virus and now they are being overly cautious in approval of vaccines. They are way off on their cost - benefit math.
  - XorNot 6y ago
    Unlike COVID-19 which is spreading a lot in the US (due to lack of coordinated government action) and which other countries have more or less stamped out and are controlling (Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan etc.), a vaccine will actually be given to something like 80-90% of the population. So whereas the US has currently had a total of about ~10 million cases to date, this represents about 3.3% of the total population. There have been about 200,000 deaths so far, so the US case-fatality rate is about 2% - note, the mortality rate is most likely quite a bit lower overall since it's spreading so much. This is simply deaths vs. observed cases. EDITED(got the math off by a factor of 10 here previously - at 0.01% fatality it's not 360,000 - that said, see comments below, actually establishing that in clinical trials is not easy): Let's suppose we rush through a vaccine that turns out to cause fatal complications in 0.01% of the population, and we give it 90% of the population. Straight up - we've just killed 36,000 people. But that's assuming that the complications are binary - but COVID-19's complications aren't binary, and neither would negative side-effects be. So we might kill a bunch of people, and injure tens of thousands more seriously. Or we might have inadequately diverse trials and miss a whole population of potential negative side-effects (a classic problem in a lot of trials: university aged students with the distribution of whichever university developed the product are over-represented in samples). You cannot rush clinical trials. To even stand a hope of getting to 0.01% risks you need a population of at least several thousand in your trial. You need to monitor them aggressively because hopefully you have good data that whatever can go wrong will be slow enough you can intervene, but...there are always risks. Clinical trials can and do go badly wrong and people involved in them are taking a selfless risk for the betterment of the rest of us - and that's a very different proposition to declaring "this'll probably be fine" and not collecting the data.
preordained 6y ago
Everyone who is answering in the negative here, no matter how sincere and what efforts they are making to discuss this rationally is getting downvoted. A. Why? Can we not act like this? B. Off topic, but whoever thought the downvote button was a good idea? It will always be a disagree/spite you button...wherever you find such a thing. It doesn't help. It never helps. Flag flagrant bad actors for mods to address, discuss anything else like adults.
- esalman 6y ago
  200 scientists collaborate to an experiment and publish promising results. Dudes on the internet say it is bs.
- troughway 6y ago
  We need an HN-like website without a downvote button. Community commentary around STEM-related subject matter.
  - karmakaze 6y ago
    I feel like we need one with downvotes on the submissions.
- NewOrderNow 6y ago
  People are allowed to do whatever they want it is up to the mods to handle business. My question is why are you cosplaying as a mod?
  - NewOrderNow 6y ago
    As usual, a bunch of non-commutative human beings rewarded for hiding and not sharing their Authoritarian opinion about controlling humanity under your very ADULT response

37 points by imheretolearn 6y ago

When it comes to our bio-ecosystem, I'm repelled by this kind of a question as, in general, I don't believe we understand ecosystems with complex interacting parts well at all .. and are therefore not well placed to make such sweeping changes to it .. at least not consciously. The seminal book on this (for me) has been Dietrich Dörner's "The Logic of Failure".

jrockway 6y ago
We've wiped viruses off the face of the planet before, and I don't think it's causing us much harm. Eradicating smallpox has apparently saved 5 million lives a year! The question you'd have to ask is whether some low level amount of coronaviruses is important to human survival. It seems like it's not. We have certainly seen the opposite effect -- people get pretty sick when you kill off all their gut bacteria (it lets unhelpful bacteria reproduce, and the bacteria actually perform digestive functions). Unfortunately, we didn't really realize that until we developed the technology to kill bacteria indiscriminately, so I see the worry. But I doubt anyone will be harmed by having too few coronavirus infections, so I'm probably not worried this time.
- guscost 6y ago
  Smallpox is: - Spread by contact - Off-the-scale virulent - Trivial to turn into a vaccine - Not present in animal reservoirs
  - jrockway 6y ago
    I think this particular thread is debating the ethics and unintended consequences of eradicating all coronaviruses, not how possible it would be to actually do.
    - guscost 6y ago
      The original question starts with the word “Can”, and the answer is [going to be] no.
      - ianai 6y ago
        Do you have a reference for no? They seem to have had luck making vaccines so far.
        guscost 6y ago
        Do you have a reference for a vaccine that confers near-total near-lifetime immunity? That would be a prerequisite.
        rfrey 6y ago
        The investigation is “can we”, not “have we”.
        ianai 6y ago
        Just to clarify, I wasn’t looking to put anyone on defense there - so, apologies. Off the top of my head, “How to Survive a Pandemic” by Michael Greger suggests pandemics may be an emergent, new-normal. Many of the factors which led to this pandemic are not going to be mitigated without broad, deep, and costly changes to how agriculture function. The medications used in raising and killing cattle, chicken, pigs, and etc combined with the scale of those activities act as a breeding ground for viruses which are statistically likely to become pandemics.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jan_Inkepa 6y ago
  Not a scientist or medical person, but I believe its accepted that there is linkage of fever and cancer inhibition (because non-cancerous cells tend to cope better with environmental stresses than cancerous ones). It's not at all my field, but a very cursory search shows statements like this https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4006373/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4006373/ 'Lower risk for cancer has also been associated with a history of febrile viral diseases.'
  - ianai 6y ago
    Right. Some cancers can be better targeted with chemo by first stressing the body with a fast. The non cancerous cells identify the fast as a time to set up guards for harshness, but the cancerous cells do not. So the cancerous cells get hit full blast by the chemo while the healthy cells are prepared from the reaction to the fast. I would posit though that fasts are probably a better way to generally help fighting cancers than a life of yearly coronavirus infections.
  - IgorPartola 6y ago
    But this brings up the question of whether we could create a similar response on purpose and in a controlled fashion, rather than letting a bunch of viruses do what they do in the wild?
    - inglor_cz 6y ago
      Even syphilis was once treated by giving the patient malaria - with 20 per cent mortality rate, though. (Still better than suffering from lues in the pre-antibiotic world.) I am all for a controlled fashion.
- romanoderoma 6y ago
  > We've wiped viruses off the face of the planet I believe it is correct to say we eradicated the disease but we don't know if the virus died Smallpox still exists in the form of monkeypox in the wild and as rabbitpox in labs FDA approved a new drug to treat smallpox (only tested on monkeys and rabbits infected with monkeypox and rabbitpox) in 2018 because smallpox resurgence does remain a realistic threat and having a stock pile of at least two different vaccines that attack the virus in different ways is the only way to prevent it from becoming drug resistant
- disown 6y ago
  > We've wiped viruses off the face of the planet before Only recently. Widespread vaccine use is a fairly recent phenomenon. > Eradicating smallpox has apparently saved 5 million lives a year! It certainly saved lives but we really don't know how much. Every estimate is off of cherrypicked data. > But I doubt anyone will be harmed by having too few coronavirus infections, so I'm probably not worried this time. You just said we fucked up with bacteria and then you brush off viruses. There was a time when the scientific consensus was to snuff out every small fire to prevent wildfires. Now we realize how horribly naive that was. By preventing small localized fires, we allowed kindle wood to mass which fueled gigantic wildfires. That fires are natural and helps forests clear and rejuvenate itself. The same thing with parents and kids avoiding food/sickness. It lead to food allergies ( some of which can be deadly ) and poor adult immune system. Now we know a bit of sickness helps strengthen the immune system and introduction to a wide variety of foods helps prevent food allergies. The history of humanity/science/etc is we were wrong. But as long as we learn and move forward, that's what is important.
ramraj07 6y ago
I remember one of bill burrs rants in his podcast after he watches the Ted talk about eradicating mosquitoes, he compares the arrogance of that person to a dude who proclaims he's going to rewire his homes electric connections and ends up short-circuiting everything. Perfect comparison.

guscost 6y ago

We can’t even wipe out mosquitos. Just tweeted this: > We lost the “War on Terror”, we lost the “War on Drugs”, and as long as we keep declaring war on fundamental forces of nature, we will keep losing. The only way to win is not to play.

maxerickson 6y ago
Hopefully you aren't tweeting that from one of the many areas where malaria was endemic, prior to mosquitoes being wiped out long and frequently enough for the human reservoirs to dry up. Cause ya know, that was pretty worthwhile.
- guscost 6y ago
  Look up the definition of “eradicate”, and also note that you’re talking about a parasite. The best (read: cheapest) hope for “vector controlling” mosquitos until the malaria parasite was extinct globally was probably DDT, until it was banned.
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    I'm responding to the "not to play" in your comment, not the eradicate. Just because we didn't eradicate human feeding mosquitoes doesn't mean it wasn't hugely worthwhile to play the game of controlling them.
    - guscost 6y ago
      That statement is in the context of “War on X”, and it is a quote from a movie where the “war” is a total war of mutually-assured destruction.
      - maxerickson 6y ago
        Yes, I understand that it was 'poetic'. My point is that it doesn't apply to things like mosquito control, it's just defeatism, eliminating malaria was a great thing for countries that did it, not a nuclear holocaust.

est31 6y ago

Link to paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abe9403 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abe9403 Already the authors list is very impressive. Lots of people!

pessimizer 6y ago

Why not get a vaccine against a single coronavirus first, boss.

krustyburger 6y ago
The fact that it has never been done indicates that it will require a new approach. If the new technique we find allows us to deal with all coronaviruses in one fell swoop, so much the better.

sto_hristo 6y ago

In such a complicated and big world? I don't think so. It certainly won't be as "easy" as defeating smallpox.

Amorymeltzer 6y ago

No. >The problem sparks when a viral strain, normally happily living in a bat, pig, or rodent That's the rub right there. One of the reasons we were successful with smallpox is there wasn't an animal reservoir. One virus + no animal reservoirs + good vaccine = can be successful. Multiple known viruses and strains with multiple reservoirs and no good vaccines means this will not happen. More to the point, this isn't really what the paper was looking at all. The actual (OA) publication[1] identified common and conserved areas which could potentially be used to study and target viruses throughout out the family. This might help with human SARS-CoV2 therapeutics, but it's main benefit is showing how molecular analyses will help fight future coronaviruses. It does not ask or answer whether we can "engineer a universal vaccine against the entire viral family" nor did it "[draw] up a scientific recipe to potentially end coronaviruses once and for all." 1: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/10/14/science.abe9403 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/10/14/scie...

xiphias2 6y ago

Currently it seems to me that the bottleneck for developing the vaccines is the time of trials. Hopefully we’ll have approved DNA / RNA vaccines in less than a year with less side effects than previous vaccines. When that happens, I guess our response time as a species for viruses can get better as well.

fasteddie31003 6y ago
I've been following Moderna's vaccine from the beginning. It was developed in 25 days from first virus DNA synthesis. https://www.modernatx.com/modernas-work-potential-vaccine-against-covid-19 https://www.modernatx.com/modernas-work-potential-vaccine-ag... but it's going to take maybe a year to be approved by the FDA. All phase 3 trials are looking good. I personally would take this vaccine right now but the FDA will not allow me to do this. How is the FDA's reputation going to hold up when they approve all these vaccines a year or more after they were created and cost the lives of millions and trillions of dollars? The FDA had no pandemic vaccine approval protocol which could have speed up the process. They could have used challenge trials with young healthy people. I can think of a pre approved process for mRNA vaccines where the delivery methods are approved but the only thing that changes is the mRNA payload. I blame the government healthcare organizations for a lot of the impact from covid-19. First, they were anti-mask during the first major increase in the virus and now they are being overly cautious in approval of vaccines. They are way off on their cost - benefit math.
- XorNot 6y ago
  Unlike COVID-19 which is spreading a lot in the US (due to lack of coordinated government action) and which other countries have more or less stamped out and are controlling (Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan etc.), a vaccine will actually be given to something like 80-90% of the population. So whereas the US has currently had a total of about ~10 million cases to date, this represents about 3.3% of the total population. There have been about 200,000 deaths so far, so the US case-fatality rate is about 2% - note, the mortality rate is most likely quite a bit lower overall since it's spreading so much. This is simply deaths vs. observed cases. EDITED(got the math off by a factor of 10 here previously - at 0.01% fatality it's not 360,000 - that said, see comments below, actually establishing that in clinical trials is not easy): Let's suppose we rush through a vaccine that turns out to cause fatal complications in 0.01% of the population, and we give it 90% of the population. Straight up - we've just killed 36,000 people. But that's assuming that the complications are binary - but COVID-19's complications aren't binary, and neither would negative side-effects be. So we might kill a bunch of people, and injure tens of thousands more seriously. Or we might have inadequately diverse trials and miss a whole population of potential negative side-effects (a classic problem in a lot of trials: university aged students with the distribution of whichever university developed the product are over-represented in samples). You cannot rush clinical trials. To even stand a hope of getting to 0.01% risks you need a population of at least several thousand in your trial. You need to monitor them aggressively because hopefully you have good data that whatever can go wrong will be slow enough you can intervene, but...there are always risks. Clinical trials can and do go badly wrong and people involved in them are taking a selfless risk for the betterment of the rest of us - and that's a very different proposition to declaring "this'll probably be fine" and not collecting the data.

preordained 6y ago

Everyone who is answering in the negative here, no matter how sincere and what efforts they are making to discuss this rationally is getting downvoted. A. Why? Can we not act like this? B. Off topic, but whoever thought the downvote button was a good idea? It will always be a disagree/spite you button...wherever you find such a thing. It doesn't help. It never helps. Flag flagrant bad actors for mods to address, discuss anything else like adults.

esalman 6y ago
200 scientists collaborate to an experiment and publish promising results. Dudes on the internet say it is bs.
troughway 6y ago
We need an HN-like website without a downvote button. Community commentary around STEM-related subject matter.
- karmakaze 6y ago
  I feel like we need one with downvotes on the submissions.
NewOrderNow 6y ago
People are allowed to do whatever they want it is up to the mods to handle business. My question is why are you cosplaying as a mod?
- NewOrderNow 6y ago
  As usual, a bunch of non-commutative human beings rewarded for hiding and not sharing their Authoritarian opinion about controlling humanity under your very ADULT response