15 ms·

An eerily prescient quote from a paper[0] published in 2015, two of the authors of which are with Wuhan Institute of Virology: > Understanding the bat origin o

An eerily prescient quote from a paper[0] published in 2015, two of the authors of which are with Wuhan Institute of Virology: > Understanding the bat origin of human coronaviruses is helpful for the prediction and prevention of another pandemic emergence in the future. China has clearly contributed valuable research into bat coronaviruses. They had all the motivation to look into these after the first deadly SARS. I think it’s silly to presume CCP engineered a virus as part of some warfare strategy, or even to vilify/sanction them for a lab leak if it indeed was the cause (mistakes happen). However, CCP’s resistance to a proper thorough study of the origins of COVID is IMO not exactly appropriate. Active research was taking place in the vicinity of suspected ground zero. Lab escapes happen—there are well-documented cases of the original SARS virus leaking from a lab in Beijing in 2004 (killing at least one person). Why was this time such a scenario discarded as so ridiculously impossible at first, and is still considered “extremely unlikely”? Is it politics? [0] https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12985-015-0422-1 https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12985-...

IgorPartola 6y ago
My naive reasoning on why China didn’t create COVID-19 with the intention of using it is that I suspect (unburdened by education or the thought process) that engineering a virus is as difficult as coming up with a vaccine or treatment. If you are developing some kind of super virus to shut down the world economy and then immunize your own people to take advantage of the situation, wouldn’t you have the cure ready to go? Now, an unintentional leak would be theoretically possible with these initial intentions but then wouldn’t China still have a leg up on developing treatments? If so, wouldn’t we have seen that in their vaccine development? Of course you this is all uneducated speculation. Quite possible that engineering a deadly and very infectious virus is easier than creating a cure or a vaccine by orders of magnitude.
- DrJaws 6y ago
  an immediate immunization of your population would drive to a raise of suspicion and if someone found china guilty of that, would mean a world war against them.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    Given how many people died of the virus VS how many would die in a world war that seems like a highly illogical course of action.
    - ggggtez 6y ago
      By that sort of reasoning, when a nation rolls tanks into your borders, you should just let them do it because more people would die if you fight back. If a nation actually did that (release a bioweapon and pre-immunize their own citizens)... well World War is probably overselling it, but I could certainly imagine contained conflicts, sinking of cargo vessels, shooting down of planes, targeted assassinations... etc. It's very likely that every nation would have highly vested interests in making sure that whoever authorized that weapon was removed from this planet.
    - the_local_host 6y ago
      The reasoning wouldn't be how many people died of the virus vs. how many in a world war; it would be how many people die in a world war vs. how many might die if the adversary does increasingly worse things going forward. The threshold for fighting all-out can't be "as soon as the adversary does".
    - marcus_holmes 6y ago
      Pearl Harbour killed 2,403 Americans [0]. We're at 500,000 now with the virus, I think? That's more Americans than have been killed in all the 20th Century wars combined [1]. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...
- alfor 6y ago
  From what I read, it’s only about researchers looking to publish something interesting rather than some complicated planned CCP plans. It’s rather simple to do the so called ’gain of function’, you let the virus have it’s run with bat cells and add lots of human cells in petri with them. Because there is no immune system, the virus have not much to stop it. Slowly it adapt to human cells, you can change the type of cells so it can adapt to other receptors and so on. Those articles where published before the whole crisis erupted.
  - IgorPartola 6y ago
    Thanks, that makes a lot of sense.
  - Fomite 6y ago
    While there's some use to gain of function studies (they give us what genetic markers to look for for particularly human-adapted pathogens), researchers have been concerned about laboratory accidents for a long time. Like, it was a keynote talk at a conference I was at in 2008, which estimated a GoF study had an expected number of deaths of, IIRC, 1500. Every one - obviously in the form of a long-tailed but highly consequential outcome. One of the keys there is that's not uniquely Chinese as a problem. Those researchers were talking about American labs.
- MichaelBurge 6y ago
  > Quite possible that engineering a deadly and very infectious virus is easier than creating a cure or a vaccine by orders of magnitude. "Moderna designed its coronavirus vaccine in 2 days" was a headline I saw. And it's been approved by the FDA. So that seems demonstrably false. Multiple companies have come up with a vaccine by now, too.
  - IgorPartola 6y ago
    I know my argument is not solid at all. But you seeing a headline that is demonstrably not what we are even talking about does not convince me. If it took two days to create a cure and manufacture a billion doses we would be all fine now. Clearly nobody had a leg up on anyone in the race to a vaccine otherwise someone would have come out with “we have the vaccine and all the doses ready to go” in mid 2020.
  - thedailymail 6y ago
    To be fair, "designing" a vaccine is not the same as testing it to show that it is acceptably safe and effective in humans. That said, the time from design to deployment was amazingly short.
- andreilys 6y ago
  It's not about creating a virus from scratch, but taking an existing virus and performing gain-of-function research to select for certain things (like transmissibility).
  - abacadaba 6y ago
    Also doesn't necessarily have to be that, maybe the guy who went in the cave to collect samples got sick on the way home. Or maybe some guy harvesting guano for his farm got sick on the way home. The only thing we know for sure is we'll probably never know, and also that the CCP is sketchy
- ggggtez 6y ago
  I'll not conclude anything, but I will say that engineering a virus is an order of magnitude easier than a vaccine. It's a pure mapping problem. There are thousands of known viruses that affect humans. But most viruses don't have thousands of vaccines. Additionally, there are constraints. The only contraint on a virus is that is needs to reproduce, and cause harm. Any kind of harm will do, and any kind of spreading is fine. But the vaccine needs to not hurt the person (at least, don't hurt them worse than the virus would). Even if both processes involved similar techniques, the constraints on virus production are more favorable to the researcher than vaccine production. To get back to whether China or any nation would intentionally create a biological weapon, however...: most industrialized countries realized a long time ago that bioweapons tends to be a bad strategy. Most western countries stopped their bioweapons programs back in the 70s for the simple reason that there was no reasonable use-case for a bioweapon that isn't done better by simply bombing something (or more recently-hacking their infrastructure). Bioweapons are strategically useful for small nations, and terrorist groups.
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    > But the vaccine needs to not hurt the person People underappreciate just how complicated and time-consuming this is. Immune systems are terrifying things, on trigger alert (they have to be!), and you have to tickle it just right without making everything explode.
Aeolun 6y ago
> However, CCP’s resistance to a proper thorough study of the origins of COVID is IMO not exactly appropriate. It is, in fact, highly suspect. I’m not at all positive that it indeed leaked from a lab in Wuhan, but the fact they won’t let an independent investigation anywhere near it makes me lean more strongly towards that as a possibility. The description of the last investigation into the origins of the virus felt more like a ‘guided tour’.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  It can be pride over shame of incompetence maybe ? the wuhan labs are said to be lacking in standard safety biohazard practices.. so investigating may reveal that.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    You gotta remember the culture, and that everything in China is political. You can't just say "oops" and learn the lessons. Any investigations will have the goal not of finding the truth, but of minimising damage to the political powers that control it.
    - refenestrator 6y ago
      That's not a cultural thing, it's a universal human/organizational thing.
      - acdha 6y ago
        It’s certainly widespread but the cultural component is important to how strong the reaction is. China certainly isn’t alone in having it but the political stakes are a powerful amplifier.
        refenestrator 6y ago
        The cultural component is just flavor. Who suffered consequences for getting Iraq wrong, or the financial crisis? Fortune passes everywhere.
neolog 6y ago
Don't sanction for the mistake, sanction for the nontransparency.
- Hoasi 6y ago
  > Don't sanction for the mistake, sanction for the nontransparency. Sanction the CPC for non-transparency and their constant lies to their and the world's population. Demand liability.
andrewflnr 6y ago
My impression was that "lab escape" was conflated with "deliberate release" by conspiracy types early on, and once that took hold it became impossible to talk rationally about the accidental escape hypothesis.
- SkyMarshal 6y ago
  That's been my impression too fwiw. There's now a large segment of people who are primed to immediately accept the conspiracy theory over the Hanlon's Razor principle: "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity (or accident)".
  - TrispusAttucks 6y ago
    Sure. We could also invoke Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. A coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan China miles away from a Virology Lab that studies coronavirus and has in the past exercised gain of function research on cornoviruses specifically with novel lung ACE2 bind may have had a lab accident and a live virus broke out if the lab. The problem is the media labeling common sense as conspiracy and conflating the two.
    - cameldrv 6y ago
      Exactly. If there were an Anthrax outbreak in Ft. Detrick, MD, everyone would be immediately assuming the lab was involved. Wuhan is the Ft. Detrick of Coronaviruses.
      - aww_dang 6y ago
        There were two incidents at that facility. The first led to a building being condemned. The second was a more nebulous investigation into the yet unsolved 2001 anthrax attacks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Hatfill#Lawsuits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Hatfill#Lawsuits
      - FabHK 6y ago
op03 6y ago
Its not inappropriate. They know they are dealing with characters in the US govt who have a track record of cooking up stories about Aluminium tubes and WMDs to push the herd in whatever direction they want.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
chrisandchris 6y ago
> [...] China has clearly contributed valuable research into bat coronaviruses. They had all the motivation to look into these after the first deadly SARS. I think it’s silly to presume CCP engineered a virus as part of some warfare strategy, or even to vilify/sanction them for a lab leak if it indeed was the cause (mistakes happen). [...] Maybe it‘s just me, but I do not have enough trust in humans that they will say „hey shit happens, do just better next time“. I mean, we are pretty good today in blaming others just so someone gets blamed.
batpangolin 6y ago
It's not eerily prescient at all. It has been known a long time and the subject of much research that viruses jumping from bats to humans is one of the most likely, and most dangerous sources of new infectious diseases in humans.

IgorPartola 6y ago

My naive reasoning on why China didn’t create COVID-19 with the intention of using it is that I suspect (unburdened by education or the thought process) that engineering a virus is as difficult as coming up with a vaccine or treatment. If you are developing some kind of super virus to shut down the world economy and then immunize your own people to take advantage of the situation, wouldn’t you have the cure ready to go? Now, an unintentional leak would be theoretically possible with these initial intentions but then wouldn’t China still have a leg up on developing treatments? If so, wouldn’t we have seen that in their vaccine development? Of course you this is all uneducated speculation. Quite possible that engineering a deadly and very infectious virus is easier than creating a cure or a vaccine by orders of magnitude.

DrJaws 6y ago
an immediate immunization of your population would drive to a raise of suspicion and if someone found china guilty of that, would mean a world war against them.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  Given how many people died of the virus VS how many would die in a world war that seems like a highly illogical course of action.
  - ggggtez 6y ago
    By that sort of reasoning, when a nation rolls tanks into your borders, you should just let them do it because more people would die if you fight back. If a nation actually did that (release a bioweapon and pre-immunize their own citizens)... well World War is probably overselling it, but I could certainly imagine contained conflicts, sinking of cargo vessels, shooting down of planes, targeted assassinations... etc. It's very likely that every nation would have highly vested interests in making sure that whoever authorized that weapon was removed from this planet.
  - the_local_host 6y ago
    The reasoning wouldn't be how many people died of the virus vs. how many in a world war; it would be how many people die in a world war vs. how many might die if the adversary does increasingly worse things going forward. The threshold for fighting all-out can't be "as soon as the adversary does".
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    Pearl Harbour killed 2,403 Americans [0]. We're at 500,000 now with the virus, I think? That's more Americans than have been killed in all the 20th Century wars combined [1]. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...
alfor 6y ago
From what I read, it’s only about researchers looking to publish something interesting rather than some complicated planned CCP plans. It’s rather simple to do the so called ’gain of function’, you let the virus have it’s run with bat cells and add lots of human cells in petri with them. Because there is no immune system, the virus have not much to stop it. Slowly it adapt to human cells, you can change the type of cells so it can adapt to other receptors and so on. Those articles where published before the whole crisis erupted.
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  Thanks, that makes a lot of sense.
- Fomite 6y ago
  While there's some use to gain of function studies (they give us what genetic markers to look for for particularly human-adapted pathogens), researchers have been concerned about laboratory accidents for a long time. Like, it was a keynote talk at a conference I was at in 2008, which estimated a GoF study had an expected number of deaths of, IIRC, 1500. Every one - obviously in the form of a long-tailed but highly consequential outcome. One of the keys there is that's not uniquely Chinese as a problem. Those researchers were talking about American labs.
MichaelBurge 6y ago
> Quite possible that engineering a deadly and very infectious virus is easier than creating a cure or a vaccine by orders of magnitude. "Moderna designed its coronavirus vaccine in 2 days" was a headline I saw. And it's been approved by the FDA. So that seems demonstrably false. Multiple companies have come up with a vaccine by now, too.
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  I know my argument is not solid at all. But you seeing a headline that is demonstrably not what we are even talking about does not convince me. If it took two days to create a cure and manufacture a billion doses we would be all fine now. Clearly nobody had a leg up on anyone in the race to a vaccine otherwise someone would have come out with “we have the vaccine and all the doses ready to go” in mid 2020.
- thedailymail 6y ago
  To be fair, "designing" a vaccine is not the same as testing it to show that it is acceptably safe and effective in humans. That said, the time from design to deployment was amazingly short.
andreilys 6y ago
It's not about creating a virus from scratch, but taking an existing virus and performing gain-of-function research to select for certain things (like transmissibility).
- abacadaba 6y ago
  Also doesn't necessarily have to be that, maybe the guy who went in the cave to collect samples got sick on the way home. Or maybe some guy harvesting guano for his farm got sick on the way home. The only thing we know for sure is we'll probably never know, and also that the CCP is sketchy
ggggtez 6y ago
I'll not conclude anything, but I will say that engineering a virus is an order of magnitude easier than a vaccine. It's a pure mapping problem. There are thousands of known viruses that affect humans. But most viruses don't have thousands of vaccines. Additionally, there are constraints. The only contraint on a virus is that is needs to reproduce, and cause harm. Any kind of harm will do, and any kind of spreading is fine. But the vaccine needs to not hurt the person (at least, don't hurt them worse than the virus would). Even if both processes involved similar techniques, the constraints on virus production are more favorable to the researcher than vaccine production. To get back to whether China or any nation would intentionally create a biological weapon, however...: most industrialized countries realized a long time ago that bioweapons tends to be a bad strategy. Most western countries stopped their bioweapons programs back in the 70s for the simple reason that there was no reasonable use-case for a bioweapon that isn't done better by simply bombing something (or more recently-hacking their infrastructure). Bioweapons are strategically useful for small nations, and terrorist groups.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  > But the vaccine needs to not hurt the person People underappreciate just how complicated and time-consuming this is. Immune systems are terrifying things, on trigger alert (they have to be!), and you have to tickle it just right without making everything explode.

Aeolun 6y ago

> However, CCP’s resistance to a proper thorough study of the origins of COVID is IMO not exactly appropriate. It is, in fact, highly suspect. I’m not at all positive that it indeed leaked from a lab in Wuhan, but the fact they won’t let an independent investigation anywhere near it makes me lean more strongly towards that as a possibility. The description of the last investigation into the origins of the virus felt more like a ‘guided tour’.

agumonkey 6y ago
It can be pride over shame of incompetence maybe ? the wuhan labs are said to be lacking in standard safety biohazard practices.. so investigating may reveal that.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  You gotta remember the culture, and that everything in China is political. You can't just say "oops" and learn the lessons. Any investigations will have the goal not of finding the truth, but of minimising damage to the political powers that control it.
  - refenestrator 6y ago
    That's not a cultural thing, it's a universal human/organizational thing.
    - acdha 6y ago
      It’s certainly widespread but the cultural component is important to how strong the reaction is. China certainly isn’t alone in having it but the political stakes are a powerful amplifier.
      - refenestrator 6y ago
        The cultural component is just flavor. Who suffered consequences for getting Iraq wrong, or the financial crisis? Fortune passes everywhere.

neolog 6y ago

Don't sanction for the mistake, sanction for the nontransparency.

Hoasi 6y ago
> Don't sanction for the mistake, sanction for the nontransparency. Sanction the CPC for non-transparency and their constant lies to their and the world's population. Demand liability.

andrewflnr 6y ago

My impression was that "lab escape" was conflated with "deliberate release" by conspiracy types early on, and once that took hold it became impossible to talk rationally about the accidental escape hypothesis.

SkyMarshal 6y ago
That's been my impression too fwiw. There's now a large segment of people who are primed to immediately accept the conspiracy theory over the Hanlon's Razor principle: "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity (or accident)".
- TrispusAttucks 6y ago
  Sure. We could also invoke Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. A coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan China miles away from a Virology Lab that studies coronavirus and has in the past exercised gain of function research on cornoviruses specifically with novel lung ACE2 bind may have had a lab accident and a live virus broke out if the lab. The problem is the media labeling common sense as conspiracy and conflating the two.
  - cameldrv 6y ago
    Exactly. If there were an Anthrax outbreak in Ft. Detrick, MD, everyone would be immediately assuming the lab was involved. Wuhan is the Ft. Detrick of Coronaviruses.
    - aww_dang 6y ago
      There were two incidents at that facility. The first led to a building being condemned. The second was a more nebulous investigation into the yet unsolved 2001 anthrax attacks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Hatfill#Lawsuits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Hatfill#Lawsuits
    - FabHK 6y ago

op03 6y ago

Its not inappropriate. They know they are dealing with characters in the US govt who have a track record of cooking up stories about Aluminium tubes and WMDs to push the herd in whatever direction they want.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

chrisandchris 6y ago

> [...] China has clearly contributed valuable research into bat coronaviruses. They had all the motivation to look into these after the first deadly SARS. I think it’s silly to presume CCP engineered a virus as part of some warfare strategy, or even to vilify/sanction them for a lab leak if it indeed was the cause (mistakes happen). [...] Maybe it‘s just me, but I do not have enough trust in humans that they will say „hey shit happens, do just better next time“. I mean, we are pretty good today in blaming others just so someone gets blamed.

batpangolin 6y ago

It's not eerily prescient at all. It has been known a long time and the subject of much research that viruses jumping from bats to humans is one of the most likely, and most dangerous sources of new infectious diseases in humans.