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The article notes that a lab leak or gain of function research or both are suspected because research with cultivated influenza strains was common at that time.

The article notes that a lab leak or gain of function research or both are suspected because research with cultivated influenza strains was common at that time. In contrast, attempts by researchers at Wuhan to consistently cultivate coronavirus were unsuccessful. That is why they decided to work with chimeras instead of pursuing gain of function research. All of this focus on the point of origin is misplaced. We know that there will be new viruses. What matters is how we respond to them. In this case the US response was completely botched. This is in part because the team that had been in place to deal with emerging virus threats was disbanded and also in part because the CDC was forced to focus on making the president look good instead of dealing with the virus. What is ultimately being argued here is that instead of being prepared and responding reasonably all we have to do is control research and nothing like this will happen. Unfortunately, this is obviously false.

TheBlight 5y ago
Disagree that it's misplaced. If it was caused by a lab leak it's easier to address before it happens next time via a simple change in protocols for this type of research e.g. all GoF work is done in an isolated environment not in the middle of major population hub.
- halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
  The means by which a virus appears is much less relevant than the response to the virus. We need a robust plan on dealing with viruses regardless of their origin. All this talk on trying to find the origin is missing the forest for the trees.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    This depends on the priors you assume for future events, e.g. if one ignores the GoF research and it therefore increases the likelihood of continued research, does that also increase risk of periodic outbreaks akin to this pandemic and a higher frequency than natural outbreaks from animal>human?
  - postingawayonhn 5y ago
    We need both. We need to have a better plan for dealing with future viruses but we should also look to make what changes we can to reduce the number of new viruses that jump to humans in the first place.
- Icathian 5y ago
  Just because this one was a lab leak doesn't mean the next one has to be. I think origin would be worth knowing just for the historical record, but ultimately it doesn't matter in the slightest.
  - nradov 5y ago
    It matters. Zoonotic viruses that jump to humans naturally tend to be less well adapted to human biology, and thus less contagious. That potentially gives us more time to respond before they evolve really dangerous human adapted variants. Whereas GoF research using human tissue or transgenic animals can produce viruses that are perfectly adapted to humans right out of the gate.
    - EGreg 5y ago
      That’s true. I don’t remember any other viruses being this contagious for a long time. Avian flu, swine flu, not nearly as contagious as Delta and spreading asymptomatically. Ebola - not as contagious. Perhaps AIDS was the closest.
      - bildung 5y ago
        Measles, Chickenpox, Rubella, Mumps, Polio, Pertussis, Smallpox, HIV as you mentioned, SARS, Diphteria and the common cold all have basic reproduction numbers >= original Covid, per wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number
        EGreg 5y ago
        None of them were “novel” or recently appeared — as the ones I mentioned
        ModernMech 5y ago
        What’s your definition of “recent”? Some of us remember when HIV starting infecting our friends. It doesn’t seem that long ago to me.
radu_floricica 5y ago
How on earth is wanting to know why I was locked in my house for months with men with guns patrolling the streets.... "misplaced"? This is what 50 years of postmodernism and cultural relativism broughts us. "Why" doesn't matter, don't search beyond what the consensus is telling you.
- ImaCake 5y ago
  It is valid to disagree with the parent comment about wanting to know why this all happened. But you carry a lot of ideological baggage along with it. "men with guns patrolling the streets" is the police and was routine before the pandemic. "50 years of postmodernism and cultural relativism" has nothing to do with what caused the pandemic and no one is saying that it does.
  - radu_floricica 5y ago
    In my country is was the literal army - first time in 30 years. As for dismissing "why for the sake of why" being the fault of cultural relativism... shrug to me it has the same smell.
- halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
  Because if we had a competent strategy for dealing with the virus, you wouldn't have been locked in your house for months. This is entirely a failure of government. The origin is for all intents and purposes irrelevant. "Why" ultimately doesn't matter because viruses can just spontaneously evolve in carrier animals, in a lab or by whatever other means causes a mutation where it is now infectious to us. People searching for the "why" are ultimately looking for blame when we should be looking ahead on how to stop the next one (and the current one).
  - AmericanChopper 5y ago
    > "Why" ultimately doesn't matter because viruses can just spontaneously evolve in carrier animals, in a lab or by whatever other means causes a mutation where it is now infectious to us. People are going to die in traffic accidents whether i drive home drunk tonight or not, so it probably doesn't matter what I do, right? Understanding why something happened is also a pretty important step in trying to prevent it from happening again. If you're having production incidents every day, "just get better at incident response" is probably not a very thorough solution.
EMM_386 5y ago
> All of this focus on the point of origin is misplaced. What matters is how we respond to them. We won't be around to respond to them when the next engineered one is potentially much worse. This is an enormously dangerous global issue, we need to address origins.
- flybrand 5y ago
  There is a scenario where the origin story really matters: If the origin story implies that the vendor is dishonest, then don’t trust that same vendor to solve the problem.
- skohan 5y ago
  Yes absolutely it's incredibly relevant if world-crippling viruses are being engineered in labs, and should be a topic for public policy discussion. COVID has been many times more damaging to the world than the bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If we're at the point where science is capable of creating such pathogens, then we have to also consider the fact that this technology can make its way into the hands of bad actors. That's a very different state of affairs than saying we need to be ready for a pandemic of natural origin which may occur every 100 years or so.
  - EMM_386 5y ago
    > Yes absolutely it's incredibly relevant if world-crippling viruses are being engineered in labs, and should be a topic for public policy discussion. The problem here is that countries can wrap this research under the banner of "natsec" and then there can be no further discussion. I see no way around that outside of crossing our collective fingers. > COVID has been many times more damaging to the world than the bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Precisely. And this can be considered the "easy" version compared to what could potentially be created. It's a nightmare scenario, and it's far more dangerous than nuclear weapons (unless that resulted in the end of civilization / "mutually assured destruction"). It could literally wipe out the planet before we have time to respond to it. Similar in that regard I suppose. > we have to also consider the fact that this technology can make its way into the hands of bad actors Those would have to be some really, really bad actors if they are willing to take out the entire planet, crossing all ideological and political boundaries. I'm sure smarter minds than me are keeping an eye on this.
AmericanChopper 5y ago
> That is why they decided to work with chimeras instead of pursuing gain of function research. The distinction between gain of function research, and creating lab made chimeric viruses is purely semantic. If you were doing gain of function research, you'd spend most of your time creating chimeric viruses. The argument is that "not all chimeric virus experiments are gain of function research, because you might be conducting those experiments for reasons other than making the virus more harmful". It's just a big semantic contrivance, and the only reason this distinction was every made in the first place is because a certain public figure claimed numerous times that the NIH had never funded gain of function research in Wuhan, only for that later to turn out to be a lie, with the excuse being "oh yeah, but that wasn't _real_ gain of function research".
- ImaCake 5y ago
  Isn't a chimera akin to putting part of one organism with another? I think this would make the astrazeneca vaccine a chimera (Adenovirus with SARS-COV2 spike protein). Obviously the AZ vaccine has not causes a pandemic so maybe the distinction is very important here.
  - AmericanChopper 5y ago
    The vaccine isn't a chimera virus, and the controversial research isn't similar to processes used to make the vaccines. The research in Wuhan involved sequencing genomes from cornoaviruses found in bat guano, blood and saliva, mixing different sequences together, and using that to create brand new chimera viruses that could be cultured in a lab. Then testing the new viruses they'd created to see if they could infect human tissue, and perform other experiments that were motivated ultimately by a goal of creating a broad spectrum coronavirus vaccine. None of this is part of a disputed conspiracy theory, you can read about it here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-function-risky-bat-virus-engineering-links-america-to-wuhan/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-... If you were attempting to create a viral bioweapon, this is exactly the sort of research you'd do. Mixing parts of different viruses together, and seeing what the new viruses did. The distinction here entirely comes down to the motives of the research. The reason the NIH funded this research to take place in China, is because those research practices had been prohibited in the US as the risks involved were seen as poorly understood. The argument that "that's not gain of function research because..." is just a contrivance of a poorly defined piece of jargon.
ImaCake 5y ago
America has a history of responding poorly to pandemics. They let HIV rip through their population before getting serious about it. Regan famously denied it was even happening. It is interesting to contrast this with Australia's quick public health response that saved a lot of lives. It is easy to see similarities with COVID responses, but two timepoints and n=2 do not make for quality statistics. Hopefully the USA does better with whatever pandemics come for us all in the next decades. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_Australia
- lettergram 5y ago
  The nature of the USA is not to have a federal response. A fairer way to review this is at the state level. That being said, Fauci lead the charge on the AIDS pandemic and this one ...
  - ImaCake 5y ago
    That's a good point. Australia has a similar federalist structure as the USA, although we have less than 10 states/territories of any consequence. The COVID response has a been fix of both state and commonwealth (federal). The commonwealth closed the borders, but because health is delegated to states/territories it was up to each state to manage the testing, contact tracing, and lockdown rules. The main issue in Australian politics right now is border closures which have been used by every state to greater or lesser degrees. The commonwealth hates the border closures, but the states, pandering to their state based support, mostly love it (except NSW).
    - burlesona 5y ago
      IIRC Australia has also used internal border closures between States. That is unconstitutional in the US and therefore never even considered.
  - tim333 5y ago
    The presidents at the time saying it's no problem seem to have been more of an issue than Fauci who at least tried to get things done.
lettergram 5y ago
> CDC was forced to focus on making the president look good instead of dealing with the virus. I saw this claim when the border was closed. But perhaps I missed other incidence? Can you cite a few?
rayiner 5y ago
> All of this focus on the point of origin is misplaced. We know that there will be new viruses. What matters is how we respond to them. In this case the US response was completely botched. It’s worth talking about better versus worse covid response, but that’s missing the forest for the trees. Most of the G7 didn’t do that much better: from Germany to Italy, and including the US, they’re all in the 1,200 to 2,200 deaths per million people range. Countries like Australia that did a little better, down at 700, are still having to have military-enforced lockdowns 18 months into the pandemic. Is it really possible that none of these advanced economies were adequately prepared? The next time this hits, are we really going to try this massively expensive lockdown approach again? That seems like madness to me.
- postingawayonhn 5y ago
  > Countries like Australia that did a little better, down at 700 Australia has had less than 1,200 deaths in total. That's 48 per million. Edit: NZ has only had 27 deaths in total. Only 5.4 per million.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- bildung 5y ago
  Response type absolutely matters. Sweden has 10x the death rate of Norway, for example. Norway, Finland, Denmark, even Cuba, a poor country with 3x the population density of the US is significantly below 700. Australia stands at 45, not 700, BTW.
  - cxpeople 5y ago
    Sweden has the same numbers as Germany. Sweden and Germany are very similar with respect to culture, clustering of people in cities, percentage of people with a migration background. Norway and Sweden are not. Turns out that Sweden and Germany have similar results: https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/why-does-no-one-ever-talk-about-sweden https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/why-does-no-one-ever-talk-abou...
tim333 5y ago
>What is ultimately being argued here is that instead of being prepared and responding reasonably all we have to do is control research and nothing like this will happen. I don't think that is being argued at all. The article ends "it remains likely that to this date, there has been no real-world example of a laboratory accident that has led to a global epidemic" which suggests the opposite.
IAmGraydon 5y ago
Your logic is absolutely drenched in bias. It makes me curious what you do for a living and where you’re from. You’re argument is like saying that instead of controlling the use of firearms, everyone should just walk around in bulletproof vests. It’s completely and utterly backwards. It is far more efficient to stop these events at the source.
- flybrand 5y ago
  Continuing on with the firearm analogy: If I’m hunting, and a misfire causes an accident, it matters how it happens. If it is the gun maker’s fault - I don’t purchase from them anymore. The origin story matters if we depend on a dishonest (possibly) vendor to cure a problem where they were part of the initial failure.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  > Your logic is absolutely drenched in bias. It makes me curious what you do for a living and where you’re from. ... Yes, let's do talk about bias.
- techbio 5y ago
  Your point of opposition to OP is noted, but your analogy misses on almost every point of comparison but that they are two things among many that contribute to untimely deaths. Live fire isn't exactly contagious, and people who interact with live fire with any frequency do wear vests. You might do better comparing firearms (begun with gunpowder in China a thousand years ago) to measles which also began[1] a thousand years ago. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/history.html https://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/history.html
rossdavidh 5y ago
Whatever one thinks the optimal response to a pandemic should be, the fact that several nations of western Europe (e.g. France) with much different policies, have per capita mortality the same or higher, suggests that the policies used were not a major determinant of the outcome. If you plot per capita mortality for France and Sweden, they are almost identical, swapping places five times so far. Currently Sweden is slightly lower, but really they're about the same. France and Sweden have policies at the opposite ends of the spectrum. If the differences between those two countries are not enough to make a measurable difference in mortality, then none of the policies used in western countries are making a significant difference one way or the other.
- autoliteInline 5y ago
  Exactly. There's a bunch of opportunities for understanding by looking at different political units, but it's all lost in the posturing.
- varelse 5y ago
  Why not focus instead on countries that did get this under control then? Some of them are even western.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    You mean island countries? South Korea is essentially an Island, since it has been completely shut off from NK for decades.
    - wbl 5y ago
      There is an entire ocean between the US and China.
    - varelse 5y ago
      If instead of studying the winners you obsess on justifying why you are a loser then it seems unlikely you will find success in tech or any other endeavor. Are they now offering a degree in excuses and rationalizations?
slibhb 5y ago
> All of this focus on the point of origin is misplaced. We know that there will be new viruses. What matters is how we respond to them. In this case the US response was completely botched. As far as I can tell, there are no grounds for claiming that the response to covid was botched. Botched compared to what? Also, when people talk like this, they always end up saying that we should respond to novel viruses by locking everything down right away, imposing quarantines, stopping flights, and so on. I see two problems with that. First, covid was already spreading globally when we became aware of it. And second, we are unable to tell if a novel virus will turn into a pandemic (scientists disagreed about SARS, MERS, and covid on this count). Adopting a policy that minimizes risks will be incredibly costly and often wasteful. To the extent that we can prepare for novel viruses, it seems to me that we should focus on developing fast and efficient machinery for creating and mass-producing vaccines. We did quite well at this (and so I don't think our response to covid was botched) but we could clearly do better. Imagine if, after isolating a virus in a lab, it took 3 months to create a vaccine and begin mass production. That's what we should aim for.
- nradov 5y ago
  Indeed SARS-CoV-2 had already spread to multiple countries at least by December 2019, and possibly earlier. That was way before anyone seriously proposed quarantines and travel bans. https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciab727/6356216 https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...
flybrand 5y ago
At the outset, I agreed that research into the origin is misplaced. However as time went on, a scenario emerged that made the origin story important - it’s about the ethics and integrity of the system. If the people and institutions at the origin lack integrity, and they are the same things we depend on for the solutions brought forward - then the origin story matters a lot. If you have a vendor that is good, and they make a mistake - you can trust them to fix it. If you have a dishonest vendor, then the last thing you should do is trust them to fix a problem they created. <this isn’t about the specifics - it’s about a scenario where the origin of a problem is directly relevant to solving a problem>
- someguydave 5y ago
  especially when the same people are: 1) responsible for funding very dangerous and questionable research 2) investigate their own failings 3) give advice on how every else ought to behave?!?
  - flybrand 5y ago
    100% It also explains how a lot of the guidance looks like projection - things they wish they’d been doing themselves ahead of the virus.
autoliteInline 5y ago
>All of this focus on the point of origin is misplaced. I think it matters quite a lot, but not for scientific reasons. If the point of origin is sloppy lab practice (maybe it's impossible to not be sloppy) and everyone lied about it, I want to know everything. Trust is a hard thing to re-gain but I really want to know where we all stand. Realistic calibration of your position vs. power centers is always a good thing. Personally I don't think responses were particularly botched, although it's tempting to think so for other political reasons. It's likely more a lack of real knowledge by anyone on what really makes for good public policy and the inability to do what it takes in any case.
- aught 5y ago
  > …I want to know everything. Trust is a hard thing to re-gain but I really want to know where we all stand. Realistic calibration of your position vs. power centers is always a good thing. I agree but that trust was never there. It has always been the case that the public cannot be trusted with information or full information that might cause any panic not because of the panic behavior itself but due to panic behaviors destabilizing markets. The former president had explicit selfish reasons for the direction but he also used it as a political tool attempting to use the panic in his favor and limit its influence: But both types of behavior are inappropriate and counterproductive to fighting a pandemic or any public emergency
  - autoliteInline 5y ago
    >I agree but that trust was never there. It largely was but misplaced. Walter Cronkite was never truthful, the Joint Chiefs of Staff rarely had your interest in mind. Public policy has always been people scrabbling for status while feigning morality.
frogpelt 5y ago
I think we can focus on both our response to widespread viruses and also making sure we aren’t shooting ourselves in the face by releasing novel viruses into the wild.
hourislate 5y ago
>What matters is how we respond to them. In this case the US response was completely botched. This is in part because the team that had been in place to deal with emerging virus threats was disbanded and also in part because the CDC was forced to focus on making the president look good instead of dealing with the virus. Your confrontational attitude and make believe reasons, dismisses you from any and all future discussions on this matter. You have demonstrated that your are unfit to comment. Please refrain from posting.
slumpt_ 5y ago
In the US’ defense, the response of many countries - including and perhaps foremost China - were botched. They were actively suppressing information about the virus early on when it could have significantly helped other countries prepare for what was coming.
LMYahooTFY 5y ago
I'll simply add to what other comments have said similarly, every aspect of this virus has its place, and the virus's origin is absolutely essential. We'll probably never know, and that's a horrifying thought. How do you learn from a mistake if it's never disclosed? Frankly, I find the attitude that we should not pay considerable attention to the possibility that we created and lost control of this virus to be worse than the event itself, as it primes us for further catastrophes of the same sort. The response to this virus having been manufactured and released should be as severe as our response to a nuclear weapon, or perhaps even more so.

TheBlight 5y ago

Disagree that it's misplaced. If it was caused by a lab leak it's easier to address before it happens next time via a simple change in protocols for this type of research e.g. all GoF work is done in an isolated environment not in the middle of major population hub.

halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
The means by which a virus appears is much less relevant than the response to the virus. We need a robust plan on dealing with viruses regardless of their origin. All this talk on trying to find the origin is missing the forest for the trees.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  This depends on the priors you assume for future events, e.g. if one ignores the GoF research and it therefore increases the likelihood of continued research, does that also increase risk of periodic outbreaks akin to this pandemic and a higher frequency than natural outbreaks from animal>human?
- postingawayonhn 5y ago
  We need both. We need to have a better plan for dealing with future viruses but we should also look to make what changes we can to reduce the number of new viruses that jump to humans in the first place.
Icathian 5y ago
Just because this one was a lab leak doesn't mean the next one has to be. I think origin would be worth knowing just for the historical record, but ultimately it doesn't matter in the slightest.
- nradov 5y ago
  It matters. Zoonotic viruses that jump to humans naturally tend to be less well adapted to human biology, and thus less contagious. That potentially gives us more time to respond before they evolve really dangerous human adapted variants. Whereas GoF research using human tissue or transgenic animals can produce viruses that are perfectly adapted to humans right out of the gate.
  - EGreg 5y ago
    That’s true. I don’t remember any other viruses being this contagious for a long time. Avian flu, swine flu, not nearly as contagious as Delta and spreading asymptomatically. Ebola - not as contagious. Perhaps AIDS was the closest.
    - bildung 5y ago
      Measles, Chickenpox, Rubella, Mumps, Polio, Pertussis, Smallpox, HIV as you mentioned, SARS, Diphteria and the common cold all have basic reproduction numbers >= original Covid, per wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number
      - EGreg 5y ago
        None of them were “novel” or recently appeared — as the ones I mentioned
        ModernMech 5y ago
        What’s your definition of “recent”? Some of us remember when HIV starting infecting our friends. It doesn’t seem that long ago to me.

radu_floricica 5y ago

How on earth is wanting to know why I was locked in my house for months with men with guns patrolling the streets.... "misplaced"? This is what 50 years of postmodernism and cultural relativism broughts us. "Why" doesn't matter, don't search beyond what the consensus is telling you.

ImaCake 5y ago
It is valid to disagree with the parent comment about wanting to know why this all happened. But you carry a lot of ideological baggage along with it. "men with guns patrolling the streets" is the police and was routine before the pandemic. "50 years of postmodernism and cultural relativism" has nothing to do with what caused the pandemic and no one is saying that it does.
- radu_floricica 5y ago
  In my country is was the literal army - first time in 30 years. As for dismissing "why for the sake of why" being the fault of cultural relativism... shrug to me it has the same smell.
halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
Because if we had a competent strategy for dealing with the virus, you wouldn't have been locked in your house for months. This is entirely a failure of government. The origin is for all intents and purposes irrelevant. "Why" ultimately doesn't matter because viruses can just spontaneously evolve in carrier animals, in a lab or by whatever other means causes a mutation where it is now infectious to us. People searching for the "why" are ultimately looking for blame when we should be looking ahead on how to stop the next one (and the current one).
- AmericanChopper 5y ago
  > "Why" ultimately doesn't matter because viruses can just spontaneously evolve in carrier animals, in a lab or by whatever other means causes a mutation where it is now infectious to us. People are going to die in traffic accidents whether i drive home drunk tonight or not, so it probably doesn't matter what I do, right? Understanding why something happened is also a pretty important step in trying to prevent it from happening again. If you're having production incidents every day, "just get better at incident response" is probably not a very thorough solution.

EMM_386 5y ago

> All of this focus on the point of origin is misplaced. What matters is how we respond to them. We won't be around to respond to them when the next engineered one is potentially much worse. This is an enormously dangerous global issue, we need to address origins.

flybrand 5y ago
There is a scenario where the origin story really matters: If the origin story implies that the vendor is dishonest, then don’t trust that same vendor to solve the problem.
skohan 5y ago
Yes absolutely it's incredibly relevant if world-crippling viruses are being engineered in labs, and should be a topic for public policy discussion. COVID has been many times more damaging to the world than the bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If we're at the point where science is capable of creating such pathogens, then we have to also consider the fact that this technology can make its way into the hands of bad actors. That's a very different state of affairs than saying we need to be ready for a pandemic of natural origin which may occur every 100 years or so.
- EMM_386 5y ago
  > Yes absolutely it's incredibly relevant if world-crippling viruses are being engineered in labs, and should be a topic for public policy discussion. The problem here is that countries can wrap this research under the banner of "natsec" and then there can be no further discussion. I see no way around that outside of crossing our collective fingers. > COVID has been many times more damaging to the world than the bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Precisely. And this can be considered the "easy" version compared to what could potentially be created. It's a nightmare scenario, and it's far more dangerous than nuclear weapons (unless that resulted in the end of civilization / "mutually assured destruction"). It could literally wipe out the planet before we have time to respond to it. Similar in that regard I suppose. > we have to also consider the fact that this technology can make its way into the hands of bad actors Those would have to be some really, really bad actors if they are willing to take out the entire planet, crossing all ideological and political boundaries. I'm sure smarter minds than me are keeping an eye on this.

AmericanChopper 5y ago

> That is why they decided to work with chimeras instead of pursuing gain of function research. The distinction between gain of function research, and creating lab made chimeric viruses is purely semantic. If you were doing gain of function research, you'd spend most of your time creating chimeric viruses. The argument is that "not all chimeric virus experiments are gain of function research, because you might be conducting those experiments for reasons other than making the virus more harmful". It's just a big semantic contrivance, and the only reason this distinction was every made in the first place is because a certain public figure claimed numerous times that the NIH had never funded gain of function research in Wuhan, only for that later to turn out to be a lie, with the excuse being "oh yeah, but that wasn't _real_ gain of function research".

ImaCake 5y ago
Isn't a chimera akin to putting part of one organism with another? I think this would make the astrazeneca vaccine a chimera (Adenovirus with SARS-COV2 spike protein). Obviously the AZ vaccine has not causes a pandemic so maybe the distinction is very important here.
- AmericanChopper 5y ago
  The vaccine isn't a chimera virus, and the controversial research isn't similar to processes used to make the vaccines. The research in Wuhan involved sequencing genomes from cornoaviruses found in bat guano, blood and saliva, mixing different sequences together, and using that to create brand new chimera viruses that could be cultured in a lab. Then testing the new viruses they'd created to see if they could infect human tissue, and perform other experiments that were motivated ultimately by a goal of creating a broad spectrum coronavirus vaccine. None of this is part of a disputed conspiracy theory, you can read about it here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-function-risky-bat-virus-engineering-links-america-to-wuhan/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-... If you were attempting to create a viral bioweapon, this is exactly the sort of research you'd do. Mixing parts of different viruses together, and seeing what the new viruses did. The distinction here entirely comes down to the motives of the research. The reason the NIH funded this research to take place in China, is because those research practices had been prohibited in the US as the risks involved were seen as poorly understood. The argument that "that's not gain of function research because..." is just a contrivance of a poorly defined piece of jargon.

ImaCake 5y ago

America has a history of responding poorly to pandemics. They let HIV rip through their population before getting serious about it. Regan famously denied it was even happening. It is interesting to contrast this with Australia's quick public health response that saved a lot of lives. It is easy to see similarities with COVID responses, but two timepoints and n=2 do not make for quality statistics. Hopefully the USA does better with whatever pandemics come for us all in the next decades. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_Australia

lettergram 5y ago
The nature of the USA is not to have a federal response. A fairer way to review this is at the state level. That being said, Fauci lead the charge on the AIDS pandemic and this one ...
- ImaCake 5y ago
  That's a good point. Australia has a similar federalist structure as the USA, although we have less than 10 states/territories of any consequence. The COVID response has a been fix of both state and commonwealth (federal). The commonwealth closed the borders, but because health is delegated to states/territories it was up to each state to manage the testing, contact tracing, and lockdown rules. The main issue in Australian politics right now is border closures which have been used by every state to greater or lesser degrees. The commonwealth hates the border closures, but the states, pandering to their state based support, mostly love it (except NSW).
  - burlesona 5y ago
    IIRC Australia has also used internal border closures between States. That is unconstitutional in the US and therefore never even considered.
- tim333 5y ago
  The presidents at the time saying it's no problem seem to have been more of an issue than Fauci who at least tried to get things done.

lettergram 5y ago

> CDC was forced to focus on making the president look good instead of dealing with the virus. I saw this claim when the border was closed. But perhaps I missed other incidence? Can you cite a few?

rayiner 5y ago

> All of this focus on the point of origin is misplaced. We know that there will be new viruses. What matters is how we respond to them. In this case the US response was completely botched. It’s worth talking about better versus worse covid response, but that’s missing the forest for the trees. Most of the G7 didn’t do that much better: from Germany to Italy, and including the US, they’re all in the 1,200 to 2,200 deaths per million people range. Countries like Australia that did a little better, down at 700, are still having to have military-enforced lockdowns 18 months into the pandemic. Is it really possible that none of these advanced economies were adequately prepared? The next time this hits, are we really going to try this massively expensive lockdown approach again? That seems like madness to me.

postingawayonhn 5y ago
> Countries like Australia that did a little better, down at 700 Australia has had less than 1,200 deaths in total. That's 48 per million. Edit: NZ has only had 27 deaths in total. Only 5.4 per million.
- deleted 5y ago
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bildung 5y ago
Response type absolutely matters. Sweden has 10x the death rate of Norway, for example. Norway, Finland, Denmark, even Cuba, a poor country with 3x the population density of the US is significantly below 700. Australia stands at 45, not 700, BTW.
- cxpeople 5y ago
  Sweden has the same numbers as Germany. Sweden and Germany are very similar with respect to culture, clustering of people in cities, percentage of people with a migration background. Norway and Sweden are not. Turns out that Sweden and Germany have similar results: https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/why-does-no-one-ever-talk-about-sweden https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/why-does-no-one-ever-talk-abou...

tim333 5y ago

>What is ultimately being argued here is that instead of being prepared and responding reasonably all we have to do is control research and nothing like this will happen. I don't think that is being argued at all. The article ends "it remains likely that to this date, there has been no real-world example of a laboratory accident that has led to a global epidemic" which suggests the opposite.

IAmGraydon 5y ago

Your logic is absolutely drenched in bias. It makes me curious what you do for a living and where you’re from. You’re argument is like saying that instead of controlling the use of firearms, everyone should just walk around in bulletproof vests. It’s completely and utterly backwards. It is far more efficient to stop these events at the source.

flybrand 5y ago
Continuing on with the firearm analogy: If I’m hunting, and a misfire causes an accident, it matters how it happens. If it is the gun maker’s fault - I don’t purchase from them anymore. The origin story matters if we depend on a dishonest (possibly) vendor to cure a problem where they were part of the initial failure.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> Your logic is absolutely drenched in bias. It makes me curious what you do for a living and where you’re from. ... Yes, let's do talk about bias.
techbio 5y ago
Your point of opposition to OP is noted, but your analogy misses on almost every point of comparison but that they are two things among many that contribute to untimely deaths. Live fire isn't exactly contagious, and people who interact with live fire with any frequency do wear vests. You might do better comparing firearms (begun with gunpowder in China a thousand years ago) to measles which also began[1] a thousand years ago. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/history.html https://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/history.html

rossdavidh 5y ago

Whatever one thinks the optimal response to a pandemic should be, the fact that several nations of western Europe (e.g. France) with much different policies, have per capita mortality the same or higher, suggests that the policies used were not a major determinant of the outcome. If you plot per capita mortality for France and Sweden, they are almost identical, swapping places five times so far. Currently Sweden is slightly lower, but really they're about the same. France and Sweden have policies at the opposite ends of the spectrum. If the differences between those two countries are not enough to make a measurable difference in mortality, then none of the policies used in western countries are making a significant difference one way or the other.

autoliteInline 5y ago
Exactly. There's a bunch of opportunities for understanding by looking at different political units, but it's all lost in the posturing.
varelse 5y ago
Why not focus instead on countries that did get this under control then? Some of them are even western.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  You mean island countries? South Korea is essentially an Island, since it has been completely shut off from NK for decades.
  - wbl 5y ago
    There is an entire ocean between the US and China.
  - varelse 5y ago
    If instead of studying the winners you obsess on justifying why you are a loser then it seems unlikely you will find success in tech or any other endeavor. Are they now offering a degree in excuses and rationalizations?

slibhb 5y ago

> All of this focus on the point of origin is misplaced. We know that there will be new viruses. What matters is how we respond to them. In this case the US response was completely botched. As far as I can tell, there are no grounds for claiming that the response to covid was botched. Botched compared to what? Also, when people talk like this, they always end up saying that we should respond to novel viruses by locking everything down right away, imposing quarantines, stopping flights, and so on. I see two problems with that. First, covid was already spreading globally when we became aware of it. And second, we are unable to tell if a novel virus will turn into a pandemic (scientists disagreed about SARS, MERS, and covid on this count). Adopting a policy that minimizes risks will be incredibly costly and often wasteful. To the extent that we can prepare for novel viruses, it seems to me that we should focus on developing fast and efficient machinery for creating and mass-producing vaccines. We did quite well at this (and so I don't think our response to covid was botched) but we could clearly do better. Imagine if, after isolating a virus in a lab, it took 3 months to create a vaccine and begin mass production. That's what we should aim for.

nradov 5y ago
Indeed SARS-CoV-2 had already spread to multiple countries at least by December 2019, and possibly earlier. That was way before anyone seriously proposed quarantines and travel bans. https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciab727/6356216 https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...

flybrand 5y ago

At the outset, I agreed that research into the origin is misplaced. However as time went on, a scenario emerged that made the origin story important - it’s about the ethics and integrity of the system. If the people and institutions at the origin lack integrity, and they are the same things we depend on for the solutions brought forward - then the origin story matters a lot. If you have a vendor that is good, and they make a mistake - you can trust them to fix it. If you have a dishonest vendor, then the last thing you should do is trust them to fix a problem they created. <this isn’t about the specifics - it’s about a scenario where the origin of a problem is directly relevant to solving a problem>

someguydave 5y ago
especially when the same people are: 1) responsible for funding very dangerous and questionable research 2) investigate their own failings 3) give advice on how every else ought to behave?!?
- flybrand 5y ago
  100% It also explains how a lot of the guidance looks like projection - things they wish they’d been doing themselves ahead of the virus.

autoliteInline 5y ago

>All of this focus on the point of origin is misplaced. I think it matters quite a lot, but not for scientific reasons. If the point of origin is sloppy lab practice (maybe it's impossible to not be sloppy) and everyone lied about it, I want to know everything. Trust is a hard thing to re-gain but I really want to know where we all stand. Realistic calibration of your position vs. power centers is always a good thing. Personally I don't think responses were particularly botched, although it's tempting to think so for other political reasons. It's likely more a lack of real knowledge by anyone on what really makes for good public policy and the inability to do what it takes in any case.

aught 5y ago
> …I want to know everything. Trust is a hard thing to re-gain but I really want to know where we all stand. Realistic calibration of your position vs. power centers is always a good thing. I agree but that trust was never there. It has always been the case that the public cannot be trusted with information or full information that might cause any panic not because of the panic behavior itself but due to panic behaviors destabilizing markets. The former president had explicit selfish reasons for the direction but he also used it as a political tool attempting to use the panic in his favor and limit its influence: But both types of behavior are inappropriate and counterproductive to fighting a pandemic or any public emergency
- autoliteInline 5y ago
  >I agree but that trust was never there. It largely was but misplaced. Walter Cronkite was never truthful, the Joint Chiefs of Staff rarely had your interest in mind. Public policy has always been people scrabbling for status while feigning morality.

frogpelt 5y ago

I think we can focus on both our response to widespread viruses and also making sure we aren’t shooting ourselves in the face by releasing novel viruses into the wild.

hourislate 5y ago

>What matters is how we respond to them. In this case the US response was completely botched. This is in part because the team that had been in place to deal with emerging virus threats was disbanded and also in part because the CDC was forced to focus on making the president look good instead of dealing with the virus. Your confrontational attitude and make believe reasons, dismisses you from any and all future discussions on this matter. You have demonstrated that your are unfit to comment. Please refrain from posting.

slumpt_ 5y ago

In the US’ defense, the response of many countries - including and perhaps foremost China - were botched. They were actively suppressing information about the virus early on when it could have significantly helped other countries prepare for what was coming.

LMYahooTFY 5y ago

I'll simply add to what other comments have said similarly, every aspect of this virus has its place, and the virus's origin is absolutely essential. We'll probably never know, and that's a horrifying thought. How do you learn from a mistake if it's never disclosed? Frankly, I find the attitude that we should not pay considerable attention to the possibility that we created and lost control of this virus to be worse than the event itself, as it primes us for further catastrophes of the same sort. The response to this virus having been manufactured and released should be as severe as our response to a nuclear weapon, or perhaps even more so.