5 ms·

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

• rramadass 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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".
    • misja111 5y ago
      It's too late to keep politics out of this, politics were at the heart of this from the very start. Without politics the consequences of the outbreak would probably have been much less severe. In the beginning of January 2020, president Trump was already informed by an advisor who had close contacts in Wuhan that the outbreak was much more severe than China made it look like. But he chose not to act on that, because the USA were in the middle of closing a trade deal with China. However later that month he changed his mind when the first infections in the USA happened, and later even more when a Chinese official came out with a theory that it might actually have been an USA sports team that visited Wuhan in late 2019 that was the source of the Corona outbreak (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/asia/coronavirus-china-conspiracy-theory.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/asia/coronavirus-ch...) So this is not about 'people making this about China', it has been China from the start trying to cover this up and trying to make it about other countries. A more transparent Chinese policy would have given other countries the chance to react early and save thousands of lives.
      • dirtyid 5y ago
        >So this is not about 'people making this about China', it has been China from the start Military games / Fort Detrick vaping disease troll was in response to Tom Cotton and co. formally spewing lab leak theory. Note earlier date in Feb. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotton-coronavirus-conspiracy/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto... US politicized first, when soft measures failed a month after warning Wuhan lockdown. There was ample warning, enough that many of PRC neighbors with high traffic contained well with at least some effort in coordination. PRC position up until then was let science figure it out, Wuhan was very covid19 was first discovered but doesn't mean originated there. The brief domestic deflection in early Feb was possible import from ASEAN. Even early PRC "dis"info campaigns emphasized harsh lockdown not lockdown skepticism. Countries that didn't take Wuhan lockdown seriously got burned. Queue west being prominent source of exporting covid world wide by taking lax measures. This is seen in import statistic of every country that rigorously tracked imported covid cases - PRC exported very little cases, and essentially none few weeks after lockdown. North America / Europe, magnitudes more.
    • mattm 5y ago
      Completely agree. Let's say that it was an accidental leak. If you imagine that you were the one that was involved in the leak, how likely is it that you would want be held accountable? There's such a strong motive here for a cover-up, if a leak is the real cause. This isn't a China thing. It's a human thing. No one wants to be known as the person who destroyed the world like this.
• willmadden 5y ago
  SARS-2-CoV was almost assuredly not natural, and RaTG13 was a keyboard virus. The only question is if it was accidentally leaked or if it was intentional. We'll never know, the CCP destroyed the evidence. There are many videos and articles on this site about how SARS-2-CoV was not zoonotic. I don't necessarily blame China, but the funders of the research. https://www.peakprosperity.com/more-evidence-covid-19-may-not-be-natural/ https://www.peakprosperity.com/more-evidence-covid-19-may-no...
  • guesst 5y ago
    You're treating that question as settled. To me that is the mirror image of the media outlets trying to shut down an open question by claiming it's a "conspiracy" that has been "debunked". I would say what's needed is a credible, independent investigation, one that reasonable people can trust. We haven't had that yet.
    • thu2111 5y ago
      How is the article not that? Wade is a life long journalist, now independent, who has done extraordinary research, and who had relied heavily on research done by other independents as well, which is itself based strongly on credible micro-biology. Wade is nonetheless careful not to exaggerate his case but point out the mere balance of probabilities. I'm not sure you can get more credible or independent than his work.
    • willmadden 5y ago
      Did you review the materials? There is hard science proving SARS-CoV-2 isn't zoonotic. It was gain of function research.
• roca 5y ago
  One of the things Wade brings up is that gain-of-function research was justified by its proponents on the grounds that it would help prevent and/or deal with future pandemics. So a good question that needs to be addressed now is: did gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses help us deal with COVID19, and if so, how?
• thu2111 5y ago
  The article in question (assuming it's the same one I read on his blog) actually does tell us these things. The research was largely funded by the United States and the funding would appear most likely to have been signed off by ... Anthony Fauci. So if that's true then the guy ultimately responsible in money terms is the guy who the government put in charge of fighting it, almost certainly without realising. This set of events ensures that whatever the truth, we can never expect an honest investigation of any kind from the governments (plural) that would appear responsible.
• kbenson 5y ago
  > 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. That's the rational response. The fact that it can be played for political gain means it will be played for political gain, regardless of how rational it is. Look at the whole mask debacle of the last year. If we assume people can and do act rationally, then both sides wouldn't have played it up as much and made it a defining issue or lied about portions of it, but instead we had both people and organizations/parties using it to rally their base (on both sides) and an authority that decided to use half-truths to trick people into doing what they thought they should do given the resources available at the time (to put it kindly). That's the reality of the world we lived in for the last 12 months, and I see no reason to assume it's all of a sudden different. I'm not sure that means we shouldn't know, but let's be real clear on what the the likely outcome is if it's found to have escaped from some lab in China, regardless of who funded what or who was working on it, and that's that it would be a complete and utter shit show for the West and China, and possibly the entire world.
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• inciampati 5y ago
  > If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if), It seems like we don't have evidence, but the natural evolutionary experiment that's occurred provides a staggering amount. We can see from the virus phylogeny that: 1. The virus entered the human population in October 2019. All known SARS2 sequences are related in a single clade that, under very soft assumptions about mutation rate, would coalesce in late fall 2019. The first sequences we got, in early 2020, had only a handful of mutations between them. Nothing has ever arisen outside of this clade. 2. The virus entered humans with it's spike protein already fully adapted to the human ACE receptor protein. We can see this because there was not an accelerated evolution in this protein. We did not see changes in the viral genome resulting in a significant phenotypic change until the b.1.1.7 and other "third wave" variants arose. This stands in intense contrast to every other zoonotic transfer we know of. Adaptation always occurs because biology is different enough that different viral configurations provide immediate gain, and through continuous mutation the virus is exploring a huge space of these all the time. The fact that it doesn't mutate rapidly indicates it is near a strong local optimum. One way of understanding the significance of this is by thinking of the virus as a learned model which is learning a solution to the problem of its own survival. What this evidence shows is that is appeared already optimized. We see this because over an incredible number of update steps (many quadrillions perhaps, with each human infection being like a minibatch, and each viral replication like a step) there was no significant reduction in test loss (viral survival). We randomly picked a perfect initial model. Either that first virus was lucky in a way that is similar to guessing a perfect solution, which has a probability so low as to be fanciful, or it had already in incorporated all the readily-usa le information about the human ACE receptor. Do we have evidence? What is the probability of this pattern occuring in the case of a natural spillover? It's 1:atoms-in-the universe level. Finding a virus already so optimized to humans by randomly sampling from existing ones is like the kind of collision probability level that we comfortably use to build cryptocurrency castles that assume key non-collision. In the case of a virus optimized by serial passage in the lab? Frankly it's indistinguishable from that.
  • alexnewman 5y ago
    Except if china covered up that it was a lab leak for political reasons, one can argue the entire pandemic was their fault. Alas, the crime is covering it up, even if all the institutions set the safety standards. No different than any other crime. It’s like hiding a chemical fire when it’s burning down your neighbors house and then they throw water on it and make it worse.
• BlueTemplar 5y ago
  I remember an article from about a decade ago where a virologist was saying that China shouldn't be trusted with the highest danger (lvl 4?) labs (IIRC at the time when Westerners were about to or starting to help them build them) because Western labs themselves could barely (or not) be trusted with something as dangerous, and (s)he expected the Chinese to not be able and/or not be willing to fully respect the procedures involved. This article suggests that lvl2 protocols were indeed used for lvl4 biohazards.
  • guesst 5y ago
    Right, but the Western sponsors of the work would have been aware of this. This whole thing was a major dispute among virologists, major enough to end up in a NYT editorial. That makes the lab escape scenario an international failure, not a national one.