3 ms·

RATG13 was brought back to the lab in 2015. Sars-CoV-2 was more or less stable when it emerged into human populations, indicating it was already adapted to hum

by ratg13 5y ago

RATG13 was brought back to the lab in 2015. Sars-CoV-2 was more or less stable when it emerged into human populations, indicating it was already adapted to humans or humanized animals, and none of hundreds of millions of wild animals that could have brought this about have been found. We can handwave all this away, but it makes me uncomfortable.

lamontcg 5y ago
You don't get adapted to human via spreading through hACE2 expressing mice. You get adapted to humans via serial passage through humans. > none of hundreds of millions of wild animals that could have brought this about have been found. Based on the headline article it sounds to me like China has found them but they're not releasing that information publicly. It is probably an important factory farmed animal in China and they do not want to shut down the trade or have international pressure force them to shut down the trade. It may be as politically attractive to them as the idea that Obama should have shut down pig farming and ban bacon and pork chops if the 2009 H1N1 pandemic had been 10 or 100 times worse.
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  Prob shouldn’t be eating meat from China anyway. Due to the lack of regulations the animals are not given vaccines and such to prevent known illnesses in livestock. Tho there was an article a few years ago which said this is changing, some farms are now taking the hit on cost to vaccine their livestock as people are avoiding the meat in favour of imported meat for safety.
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    You're not going to get it from eating the meat. Its the farmhands who have direct contact with the live animals that are the issue. Or all the workers and buyers in the wet markets handling live animals (and cleaning up their shit). Vaccinating the animals would be a start towards being able to maintain the farming of animals while reducing the risks of future spillovers. And they may want to buy as much time as they can in order to put those kinds of safeguards in place before everyone starts screaming at them to shut it all down now, which is really my point.
notahacker 5y ago
We've already found another previously unknown naturally occurring bat coronavirus which is less dissimilar to SARS-COV-2 than RATG13 and better suited to binding to human ACE2 receptors. The most logical conclusion isn't "RATG13 is very far away from SARS-COV-2 so the lab must have done a lot of work to it", it's "wherever SARS-COV-2 came from, it wasnt RATG13 in the last five years". The reason why the "lab origin" argument gets sneered at so often even though there's nothing remotely implausible about the basic "lab leaks happen" bit isn't just the politics of it, but also the insistence of some of its most passionate proponents for chasing red herrings.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  "so the lab must have done a lot of work to it" That's sort of the core misconception right there. People don't understand that what we do in labs is pretty much just small scale incredibly shitty hacks that use exactly what nature does, but we can't possible scale it up. When labs do "serial passage" experiments that is just emulating nature and evolution and natural selection. We're changing the fitness function the virus needs to live within and then passing it through a dozen or so animals and seeing mutation and selection at work in the output. We can't do that on the scale of million or billions of animals in a lab. Serial passage through a million animals, however, is just another Wednesday afternoon to natural evolution. The white tailed deer in the United States are now a huge bioreactor doing a serial passage gain of function experiment to produce deer-adapted SARS-CoV-2. It is possible that Omicron came from a similar natural experiment in rodents. All our factory farmed animals are just large bioreactors for serial passage / gain of function experiments with millions of animals. No lab can ever scale up to those levels.

by ratg13 5y ago

lamontcg 5y ago

You don't get adapted to human via spreading through hACE2 expressing mice. You get adapted to humans via serial passage through humans. > none of hundreds of millions of wild animals that could have brought this about have been found. Based on the headline article it sounds to me like China has found them but they're not releasing that information publicly. It is probably an important factory farmed animal in China and they do not want to shut down the trade or have international pressure force them to shut down the trade. It may be as politically attractive to them as the idea that Obama should have shut down pig farming and ban bacon and pork chops if the 2009 H1N1 pandemic had been 10 or 100 times worse.

philliphaydon 5y ago
Prob shouldn’t be eating meat from China anyway. Due to the lack of regulations the animals are not given vaccines and such to prevent known illnesses in livestock. Tho there was an article a few years ago which said this is changing, some farms are now taking the hit on cost to vaccine their livestock as people are avoiding the meat in favour of imported meat for safety.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  You're not going to get it from eating the meat. Its the farmhands who have direct contact with the live animals that are the issue. Or all the workers and buyers in the wet markets handling live animals (and cleaning up their shit). Vaccinating the animals would be a start towards being able to maintain the farming of animals while reducing the risks of future spillovers. And they may want to buy as much time as they can in order to put those kinds of safeguards in place before everyone starts screaming at them to shut it all down now, which is really my point.

notahacker 5y ago

We've already found another previously unknown naturally occurring bat coronavirus which is less dissimilar to SARS-COV-2 than RATG13 and better suited to binding to human ACE2 receptors. The most logical conclusion isn't "RATG13 is very far away from SARS-COV-2 so the lab must have done a lot of work to it", it's "wherever SARS-COV-2 came from, it wasnt RATG13 in the last five years". The reason why the "lab origin" argument gets sneered at so often even though there's nothing remotely implausible about the basic "lab leaks happen" bit isn't just the politics of it, but also the insistence of some of its most passionate proponents for chasing red herrings.

lamontcg 5y ago
"so the lab must have done a lot of work to it" That's sort of the core misconception right there. People don't understand that what we do in labs is pretty much just small scale incredibly shitty hacks that use exactly what nature does, but we can't possible scale it up. When labs do "serial passage" experiments that is just emulating nature and evolution and natural selection. We're changing the fitness function the virus needs to live within and then passing it through a dozen or so animals and seeing mutation and selection at work in the output. We can't do that on the scale of million or billions of animals in a lab. Serial passage through a million animals, however, is just another Wednesday afternoon to natural evolution. The white tailed deer in the United States are now a huge bioreactor doing a serial passage gain of function experiment to produce deer-adapted SARS-CoV-2. It is possible that Omicron came from a similar natural experiment in rodents. All our factory farmed animals are just large bioreactors for serial passage / gain of function experiments with millions of animals. No lab can ever scale up to those levels.