10 ms·

We don't want to know. That may sound a bit glib but I think it's true. What would be the reaction if we could determine the outbreak was due to an unintentiona

• stormbrew 6y ago
  Also, even if it was an accidental release by china the situation the world finds itself in is at least as much the US' (and much of the rest of its sphere of influence's) fault for the extremely poorly coordinated response to the situation last year. China at least did something about its domestic spread. The US is a major global center of trade and travel, and in the end, much of the spread around the world is because there was basically no attempt to stop it from spreading through there. All roads lead to Rome.
• Judgmentality 6y ago
  > And let's not even begin to think what will happen if there were to be evidence that this was an intentional release. But don't you think it's important to know this?
  • Mountain_Skies 6y ago
    It's important to know and it's important not to know. Both paths have mostly negative outcomes. The best path is for it to have been natural, second best is accidental. Intentional is unfathomable and has unlimited downside. We should all hope that's not the case here.
    • wbsun 6y ago
      +1, the truth is not important at all. The most scary path would be intentional. I can't think of any other aftermath except for WWIII.
      • FpUser 6y ago
        >"I can't think of any other aftermath except for WWIII." Yeah sure. We've just lost 3 million lives, let's kill the rest of the planet as consolation. As fucked up as our politicians are I hope they are not ready to die.
      • Judgmentality 6y ago
        I'm not saying it wouldn't be scary, but I don't think we should be willfully ignorant. I want to know what happened. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.
      • AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        WWIII doesn't make a lot of sense. Nothing about MAD has gone away. And it would then be what, China vs. everybody? How would they even expect to prevail? More likely result is that most of the world would stop trading with them. Nobody would want to see a Made in China tag on anything. Which would in turn be very bad for the economy in China and lead to unrest. So the more likely outcome would be civil war in China.
    • thu2111 6y ago
      The article doesn't support the case for it being intentional. Negligence at best. One of the things Wade demonstrates is that China was most likely doing research on CoV viruses in ordinary labs with nothing more than gloves and a white lab coat. The standard photo of Dr Shi is of her in a pressurised bubble suit but that's bsl4 and virologists don't like working in those conditions because it slows them down. So the research grants say the work will be done at much lower safety levels. I guess at some point you enter a gray area where gross negligence and intentionality blur together. But the bioweapon idea shouldn't take hold because it's obviously wrong on its face: the virus has no characteristics that would make for a good weapon of any kind. For it to be intentional would require some kind of theory involving vaccinations but Europe's irrational shutdowns of their own vaccine programmes throws a wrench in the typical vaccine related conspiracy theories.
• nnash 6y ago
  It's absolutely pathetic how no matter what China does they just get a limp handed pass from people like you.
  • dang 6y ago
    Please do not take HN threads straight to flamewar hell. That is a guaranteed way to ruin the thread, especially when the topic is divisive to begin with, and it damages the commons. Personal attacks aren't ok either. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • Mountain_Skies 6y ago
    Do you want nuclear war? Seriously, what is the appropriate response if it turned out China did this on purpose? If you cannot give an answer to this, why criticize those who see the inherent danger that you have no solution to?
    • VectorLock 6y ago
      Thankfully there are alternative ways to sanction a country short of nuclear war.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        • NeutronStar 6y ago
          So America won't be able to use cheap labor for cheap price decimating the USA fracturing in the process?
    • dang 6y ago
      Please do not perpetuate flamewars. That's also in the site guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • 6y ago
• VectorLock 6y ago
  If it can get people to be more cautious in the future, it is absolutely worth it.
  • croes 6y ago
    I doubt that, mankind tends to repeat it's errors
  • goache 6y ago
    I cannot agree more - learning from mistakes is vital to preventing any further tragedies in the future
  • boomboomsubban 6y ago
    If it turns out to have transmitted from a zoological source, does that mean we don't need to worry about biolab security? And the same in reverse? Both sources are capable of being the origin, we should work on reducing the chance that either cause a similar pandemic.
    • VectorLock 6y ago
      If its origins are from a biolab in China, that means the precautions of at least that biolab in China are inadequate.
• bpodgursky 6y ago
  Um, we could stop doing gain-of-function research for one. This would be a pretty important datapoint on that risk analysis.
  • JoshuaDavid 6y ago
    I agree that gain-of-function research is very much playing with fire, but who is "we" that could stop doing gain-of-function research? The worst outcome, in my opinion, would be that all of the cautious ethical scientists stop doing gain-of-function research, organizations stop publishing safety guidelines because after all who needs safety guidelines when the research itself is illegal, and the only remaining people doing gain-of-function research are either irresponsible (grad student who doesn't know or doesn't care, and definitely doesn't have the equipment to do it safely) or nefarious (bioweapons research). I see somewhat of a parallel with security research for computers -- you can try to ban it, and it will probably reduce the total research volume, but it will also decrease the level of openness and harm mitigation of the research that does remain.
  • imiric 6y ago
    I'm a layperson, but AFAIU GoF research in principle is a good thing. It helps us anticipate future viruses, study how they impact humans, and prepare for an eventual outbreak. It's obviously very risky to do, but we should focus on adopting and enforcing better security practices to minimize the risks, not ban GoF altogether.
    • ajuc 6y ago
      For one we could make these viruses in some remote base with no people in 100 km radius instead of a megacity with an international airport.
• guesst 6y ago
  The China aspect is probably a red herring. Gain-of-function research was internationally funded, including by the US. The perils had been pointed out for years by virologists [1], some of whom managed to get an editorial in the New York Times against it [2]. If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if), the nation or lab it happened in is just the proximate cause. Deeper responsibility would lie with the institutions and individuals that pushed it despite the risks. No one knows the answer to this (edit: I mean to whether covid escaped from a lab), but it's an open question that deserves credible investigation. Having the investigator be one of the principal funders of the research being investigated is such...bad optics, to put it nicely, that one wonders how anyone thought that would be ok. [1] https://mbio.asm.org/content/3/5/e00360-12 https://mbio.asm.org/content/3/5/e00360-12 [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/an-engineered-doomsday.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/an-enginee...
  • rramadass 6y ago
    You make a very good point (and thanks for the links). However i would not let China off the hook until we have figured out exactly what happened. If nobody is held "accountable" (for a certain definition of this word) it is bound to happen again and the next time it most certainly will be "biological warfare". This needs to be treated as seriously and as comprehensively the way we treat Nuclear Weapons.
    • guesst 6y ago
      I really think it's just the other way around. The more people make this about China, the less likely we are to find out the truth. If it's used as a geopolitical chess piece, it will get bogged down forever in political mud, which is kind of where the question is right now anyways. People will decide what they think about it based on how they feel about China. That's crazy.
      • rramadass 6y ago
        Whether we like it or not, the narrative has already become about China. That is the reality. Geopolitics, Military brinkmanship, Economic realities all are at play here. In spite of all this muddying, our Scientists/Investigators need to work together to get at the truth. Else the Racists/Jingoists/Warmongers will paint a facade to further their nefarious agendas. Condoning it now will truly open the Pandora's box of "Biological Weapons".
• serial_dev 6y ago
  I get what you say, but if we ignore how things happened, it's more likely to happen again. A similar, though obviously still very different, example that came to my mind is Chernobyl. The incident made bad reactor designs and their consequences visible to all, and in the long run, it improved nuclear reactors' safety. How would you feel that after Chernobyl, there was no research on why it happened, and people would have said "well, what's happened happened, there is no way to change that, so why investigate"? If we never figure out (and we don't even attempt) how the virus came to be (wet market, lab accident, intentional release, eating raw exotic animal, or just a normal mutation, I don't know, I'm not an expert, but saying the options I heard so far), the same circumstances will be continue to be available, and sooner or later, another (potentially worse) pandemic will hit us. However, as you mentioned, there are negative effects of knowing things, so I wish whenever we do find out what and how happened, nations could do a "blameless post-mortem" (in case it was unintentional).
  • jjcc 6y ago
    >but if we ignore how things happened, it's more likely to happen again. This is legitimate reason to have a good investigation and find out the real cause of the virus. From pure technical point of view it is absolutely right. However because of the cognitional defects of our cave man brain due to the quick social and technology progress outpaced the nature evolution process, the OP's strategy shows wisdom. Let me explain: There are 3 cases that can present the same reason: 1.Your case which I think it's sincere request for improvement of the procedure to avoid future disaster. 2.There's a known hidden agenda based on some ideology but asking for investigation. A good example is what Dick Cheney and a group of his associates did. They had no interests to understand truth. A reason for investigation is a excuse for fool people 3.(This one is difficult to understand) There's an unintentional hidden agenda mixed with the legitimate reason that the guy who ask for truth might not be aware of hidden agenda. There are a lot of example in another community not available to English reader. The closest example is Australia Prime minister Morrison. It's very controversial and speculative. Most HNers' won't have the necessary insight to understand this example but I believe presenting a weak example is better than nothing. With case 2 and especially 3, OP's strategy is better than yours. That's why I said OP's shows wisdom: Avoid conflicts and more loss as a whole. Sometime a correct conclusion in the scope of leaf could be a wrong conclusion in the scope of tree. But maybe correct again in the scope of Forest. I'm not claiming my conclusion is better than yours. I might be in the "tree" level. I'm saying you are looking at a pure technical point of view. OP's thinking is bigger. (edit) reformat and word correction
• yosito 6y ago
  China can't reimburse the world. You're right. But China is poised for economic hegemony in large parts of the world and has an alarmingly authoritarian government with disregard for human rights. Their handling of COVID ought to be a reason for countries to push back against their attempts at hegemony. And before anyone accuses me of racism: I am speaking about the Chinese government, not Chinese people, who are the first victims of the government.
• secondcoming 6y ago
  What's to stop the rest of the world from confiscating chinese overseas assets or writing off loans owed to china?
  • ajuc 6y ago
    Resulting economic crisis. There's very few things "too big to fall" that are bigger than China.
• refurb 6y ago
  There is value in just the truth being known, even if nothing comes of it. The Truth and Reconciliation tribunals the UN puts on (e.g. South African apartheid) are a good example. Just achieving a common understanding of what happened has value all by itself.
• herbst 6y ago
  The second main reason we are where we are is that many western countries did nothing, some even less than nothing by actively spreading the virus by hosting religious or political events. If we are playing the blame game we should be playing it right.
• curation 6y ago
  It is easy to claim the opposite using this binaric logic: The US has lost the covid war to China with the most deaths in the world. The desperate fear of China's economic dominance which seems unstoppable alongside the fact that they do not invade and bomb countries (so if we do that to them we will have a really big propaganda job to convince people). So how do we convince China is really bad? Oh I know. Leak a deadly virus near their lab. Frame them. Keep it in your back pocket in case the cultural genocide framing fails. This is why these polemics lead nowhere. Rather, we have no evidence conclusive either way. The desire to speculate from our side, only feeds anti-Asian attitudes.
• tomjen3 6y ago
  If this was intentional, then I don't know what we can or should do. China may not be able to fully compensate the world financially, but if you win a billion dollar lawsuit against me, you won't get your money, but you will still get my car and anything else I own.
• bhk 6y ago
  The growing prevalence of this line of thinking explains the current "post truth" environment, wherein we are assaulted with disinformation from previously trustworthy institutions.
• smsm42 6y ago
  Yes we do. China won't be held accountable anyway, as many major power weren't held accountable for many atrocities they did. But knowing the truth still has value. And telling the truth when we know it also has value - as does lying when we know the truth has a negative effect too.