5 ms·

> and I feel few people actually have legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth Not to be glib, but what would be a legitimate scientific interes

by ethbr0 4y ago

> and I feel few people actually have legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth Not to be glib, but what would be a legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth? That this plausibly could have been of natural origin would seem to override any value in discerning where it actually came from. If it was a lab leak, "Oops." We hastened it occuring naturally by some amount of time. Lots of people died, but that would have happened in an inevitable spillover event anyway, albeit farther in the future. If it wasn't a lab leak, well there we are. Or, in other words, what would we do differently if it were a lab leak? Increase biocontainment protocols? Okay, so we've made human-origin less likely. We still have to deal with naturally-occurring in the future.

est31 4y ago
You raise good points, but note that not everyone is rational here. Covid has in fact shown irrational so many people are, even in the 21st century. If it were discovered to be a lab leak from something previously discovered in the wild, especially from a NIH funded lab, hell would break lose and it would hurt many aspects of biological and medical research.
- ETH_start 4y ago
  If authorities decide based on political considerations to not investigate a mistake that led to millions of deaths and tens of millions more lives destroyed, they lose an enormous amount of credibility in the eyes of the public. Full integrity is the only chance we have of having a healthy political atmosphere where the public can trust the establishment.
incrudible 4y ago
You underestimate the time value of not having a pandemic today, as opposed to perhaps hundreds of years in the future. Serial passage through humanized mice is not exactly something that happens in nature.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  That is a substantial value, to be sure. But I also look at it the other way: COVID was perhaps the smallest scale event that could produce fundamental change in the way we (as in, humans) approach biodefense and disease control. If we needed a wakeup call, better to have it now than ~2100, when we're estimated to reach peak population + continued concentration in cities.
  - lupire 4y ago
    Peak population => we didn't figure out population control, so we need a virus to help out.
  - taneq 4y ago
    This is what I've been saying all along. COVID-19 is just about the gentlest possible practice run for a seriously nasty pandemic. From what we've seen so far, if we did encounter something more deadly, we would not do well.
Izkata 4y ago
Simple: We don't have infinite funds to guard against both. It helps us decide where to focus our time and money.
briandear 4y ago
Perhaps we could hold those responsible accountable? Especially if it came from research Fauci said wasn’t happening but actually was? Specifically gain of function. Look at how BP got hammered for an oil spill. Why wouldn’t China proportional penalties given that if it were a lab leak it lead to a global economic and health disaster. That it was coincidence that the virus happening near a research facility where they were researching similar viruses is beyond belief. The mental gymnastics being used to discredit the lab leak (or intentional release) theory is astounding. People have been sent to prison for life on far weaker circumstantial evidence. What would we do differently? We put people like Fauci in prison for funding dangerous research that was specifically prohibited by the Obama admin —- then lying about it. We’d defund and disband the WHO for lying to our face while carrying water for China. Even the name “Covid” was made up to protect the Chinese. The WHO didn’t rename MERS, Zika, Ebola or any number of dangerous diseases with a regional connection. But for Covid? They bent over backwards to obfuscate Chinese responsibility. And Fauci? Lying to the American people and Congress over and over again while knowing good and well he helped fund it. And note the NIH and other US federal agencies aren’t required to disclose royalty payments from scientists in their employ. People making decisions about this virus literally got paid from the very corporations creating the treatments. If any scientist that had any influence got paid a single dollar from a company benefiting from their decisions — that’s a conflict of interest of extraordinary proportions. If an Army general gets paid a royalty from a defense contractor that general would be thrown in prison. Rick Marcinko went to federal prison for allegedly doing when happens all the time in our national health agencies. The world should be outraged and Fauci should be in prison. What would we do differently? Not fund Chinese research. Demand full and absolute transparency from our public health agencies especially when it comes to research funding and financial ties to those who profited immensely from this. Rand Paul’s questioning of Fauci was spot on. But people are too blinded by political parties to open their eyes.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  And if we did all of that, how much would it decrease our future risk of zoonotic spillover?
  - 4y ago
ellopoppit 4y ago
>what would we do differently if it were a lab leak? Increase biocontainment protocols? Ban gain of function research. There are many virologists who make compelling arguments that the hypothetical benefits of the research (which have yet to materialize) pale in comparison to the risks. Every day that goes by that GoF research fails to materialize any of its hypothetical benefits makes the case against it ever stronger.
tripletao 4y ago
> Or, in other words, what would we do differently if it were a lab leak? If the virus is a laboratory construct (e.g., a recombinant of two novel natural viruses with a human-chosen FCS; we can argue about how likely that was, but no genomic evidence can exclude that), then it would near-certainly never have existed without that laboratory manipulation. The pandemic could near-certainly have been permanently avoided simply by not constructing it. This was a matter of controversy long before the pandemic; such work was banned in 2014, but the ban expired in 2017: https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-lifts-3-year-ban-funding-risky-virus-studies?cookieSet=1 https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-lifts-3-year-ban... If the virus is naturally-evolved but sampled and released accidentally by scientists, then it might otherwise later have been released accidentally by infected non-scientists. It wouldn't have been necessarily though, especially since WIV researchers sampled remote bat caves that no other humans routinely entered. Sampling of sites with significant existing human traffic (farms, markets, tourism sites, etc.) seems like a clear benefit, a negligible increase in the existing risk of natural spillover. Sampling of remote sites without such traffic seems much less clear. There's something weird about public attitude to biological risks. When the government did a controlled burn in New Mexico that got out of control and destroyed hundreds of houses, everyone involved recognized that they'd screwed up, even though fires also occur naturally, and even though controlled burns are a valuable tool in controlling natural fires. It seems that intuition doesn't hold for lab-origin pandemics. The 1977 flu originated from scientific research (although the exact nature of that research--whether it was a failed vaccine, or a vaccine challenge trial, or an experiment at the bench--is disputed), and it killed about 700k people. No one seems to care, and I don't really understand why.
- elil17 4y ago
  I'd argue should be doing more to ensure lab biohazard safety regardless of the origin of COVID-19, which is one reason I don't think knowing the answer has a lot of practical significance.
  - tripletao 4y ago
    If you'd like to see greater regulation of biological research, then I'm pretty sure strong evidence that it killed millions of people would help with political support for that? So I'm not sure why we wouldn't look, especially when many obvious paths (e.g. subpoenas for all data potentially containing early viral genomes as contamination, like from Illumina's cloud services) remain unexplored.
golergka 4y ago
Game theory effects on future lab technicians, administrators and security personnel. We punish crime and criminal negligence to deter it in the future by public knowledge that it will be punished.
rzz3 4y ago
>Not to be glib, but what would be a legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth? Meaning, someone who didn’t walk in with a bias and look around the room for things that support said bias. This debate is packed with armchair experts who seem to have a larger interest in the politics than the science. >If it was a lab leak, "Oops." … Oops?! >Or, in other words, what would we do differently if it were a lab leak? Increase biocontainment protocols? If you’re like most of us on HN, at work, when we make big mistakes that cost our companies money and users, we have thorough retrospectives, learn from our mistakes, identify root causes, build for redundancy and high availability, and prevent the same incident from ever happening twice. That’s what I’d expect to see if the lab leak (which you strangely keep calling human origin, as if a naturally occurring virus can’t leak from a lab) were proven. > Okay, so we've made human-origin less likely. We still have to deal with naturally-occurring in the future. We have naturally-occurring forest fires, yet as a society, we sure seem to put a lot of effort into stopping “human-origin” fires. This sounds a bit “fuck it, why bother trying to make anything better, something bad will always happen”.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  > we sure seem to put a lot of effort into stopping “human-origin” fires Do we?
  - pixl97 4y ago
    After they start, but we are terrible at pretty much every type of prevention. See: built to burn
- burrows 4y ago
  > This sounds a bit “fuck it, why bother trying to make anything better, something bad will always happen”. I agree.
- toast0 4y ago
  > If you’re like most of us on HN, at work, when we make big mistakes that cost our companies money and users, we have thorough retrospectives, learn from our mistakes, identify root causes, build for redundancy and high availability, and prevent the same incident from ever happening twice. Depends on the process. If the retrospective process is a big PITA that goes nowhere, and management is only going to support changes that it wanted before the incident, regardless of any knowledge uncovered by the evidence, then minimize the reporting and hide under a rock for a while, try not to get management attention again. Which scenario seems more applicable to a government lab in Wuhan? I don't think we're going to get the straight information from the lab, because the incentives aren't there. If they admit they did it, everybody is mad, and CCP has to take action to save face, and the lab team doesn't want to face that. If they admit they didn't do it, nobody believes them. Outside of finding some lucky samples, like a good match from outside the area in say October or November, I don't think we're going to get anything definitive from forensic analysis of virus DNA. I'm not an expert in the field, but the same sequence gets interpreted different ways by different experts; and usually with some wishy-washyness. The data quality for the early pandemic isn't getting any better or more independent from the same officials we don't trust. If we can't get a story we trust from the horse's mouth, and we can't figure it out through forensic analysis, the best way forward is to figure out what interventions would be reasonable if we assume lab origin and what would be reasonable if we assume natural origin and do the practical interventions.
noobermin 4y ago
A lab leak would have enormous impact on the way we fund virology research, that's what would change.
anarticle 4y ago
There is no way to say if there would have been spillover, or it coming from nature. This feels a bit like the way people have said "every new variant is less dangerous." There are no guarantees on that one, there is equal possibility that COVID turns into something worse. COVID doesn't have to kill you, it just has to copy better. If it turns out it was a lab leak, from using SCID mice or other human analogues, we might get new systems to prevent such a thing from happening again. Maybe researchers have to work in a diving bell system, who knows. We get to decide! We can create whatever we think we need. The system is not fixed. Look at animal research support systems like IACUC, created in the 80s, and now a useful fixture in biomedical research. In the lab, we lament IACUC sometimes, but they are a good check in the system. Why couldn't someone like IACUC raise the bar? I agree with you that knowing it was a lab leak does not fix the past, and can increase the blame game near term. On the longer arc, it is important to know.

by ethbr0 4y ago

est31 4y ago

You raise good points, but note that not everyone is rational here. Covid has in fact shown irrational so many people are, even in the 21st century. If it were discovered to be a lab leak from something previously discovered in the wild, especially from a NIH funded lab, hell would break lose and it would hurt many aspects of biological and medical research.

ETH_start 4y ago
If authorities decide based on political considerations to not investigate a mistake that led to millions of deaths and tens of millions more lives destroyed, they lose an enormous amount of credibility in the eyes of the public. Full integrity is the only chance we have of having a healthy political atmosphere where the public can trust the establishment.

incrudible 4y ago

You underestimate the time value of not having a pandemic today, as opposed to perhaps hundreds of years in the future. Serial passage through humanized mice is not exactly something that happens in nature.

ethbr0 4y ago
That is a substantial value, to be sure. But I also look at it the other way: COVID was perhaps the smallest scale event that could produce fundamental change in the way we (as in, humans) approach biodefense and disease control. If we needed a wakeup call, better to have it now than ~2100, when we're estimated to reach peak population + continued concentration in cities.
- lupire 4y ago
  Peak population => we didn't figure out population control, so we need a virus to help out.
- taneq 4y ago
  This is what I've been saying all along. COVID-19 is just about the gentlest possible practice run for a seriously nasty pandemic. From what we've seen so far, if we did encounter something more deadly, we would not do well.

Izkata 4y ago

Simple: We don't have infinite funds to guard against both. It helps us decide where to focus our time and money.

briandear 4y ago

Perhaps we could hold those responsible accountable? Especially if it came from research Fauci said wasn’t happening but actually was? Specifically gain of function. Look at how BP got hammered for an oil spill. Why wouldn’t China proportional penalties given that if it were a lab leak it lead to a global economic and health disaster. That it was coincidence that the virus happening near a research facility where they were researching similar viruses is beyond belief. The mental gymnastics being used to discredit the lab leak (or intentional release) theory is astounding. People have been sent to prison for life on far weaker circumstantial evidence. What would we do differently? We put people like Fauci in prison for funding dangerous research that was specifically prohibited by the Obama admin —- then lying about it. We’d defund and disband the WHO for lying to our face while carrying water for China. Even the name “Covid” was made up to protect the Chinese. The WHO didn’t rename MERS, Zika, Ebola or any number of dangerous diseases with a regional connection. But for Covid? They bent over backwards to obfuscate Chinese responsibility. And Fauci? Lying to the American people and Congress over and over again while knowing good and well he helped fund it. And note the NIH and other US federal agencies aren’t required to disclose royalty payments from scientists in their employ. People making decisions about this virus literally got paid from the very corporations creating the treatments. If any scientist that had any influence got paid a single dollar from a company benefiting from their decisions — that’s a conflict of interest of extraordinary proportions. If an Army general gets paid a royalty from a defense contractor that general would be thrown in prison. Rick Marcinko went to federal prison for allegedly doing when happens all the time in our national health agencies. The world should be outraged and Fauci should be in prison. What would we do differently? Not fund Chinese research. Demand full and absolute transparency from our public health agencies especially when it comes to research funding and financial ties to those who profited immensely from this. Rand Paul’s questioning of Fauci was spot on. But people are too blinded by political parties to open their eyes.

ethbr0 4y ago
And if we did all of that, how much would it decrease our future risk of zoonotic spillover?
- 4y ago

ellopoppit 4y ago

>what would we do differently if it were a lab leak? Increase biocontainment protocols? Ban gain of function research. There are many virologists who make compelling arguments that the hypothetical benefits of the research (which have yet to materialize) pale in comparison to the risks. Every day that goes by that GoF research fails to materialize any of its hypothetical benefits makes the case against it ever stronger.

tripletao 4y ago

> Or, in other words, what would we do differently if it were a lab leak? If the virus is a laboratory construct (e.g., a recombinant of two novel natural viruses with a human-chosen FCS; we can argue about how likely that was, but no genomic evidence can exclude that), then it would near-certainly never have existed without that laboratory manipulation. The pandemic could near-certainly have been permanently avoided simply by not constructing it. This was a matter of controversy long before the pandemic; such work was banned in 2014, but the ban expired in 2017: https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-lifts-3-year-ban-funding-risky-virus-studies?cookieSet=1 https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-lifts-3-year-ban... If the virus is naturally-evolved but sampled and released accidentally by scientists, then it might otherwise later have been released accidentally by infected non-scientists. It wouldn't have been necessarily though, especially since WIV researchers sampled remote bat caves that no other humans routinely entered. Sampling of sites with significant existing human traffic (farms, markets, tourism sites, etc.) seems like a clear benefit, a negligible increase in the existing risk of natural spillover. Sampling of remote sites without such traffic seems much less clear. There's something weird about public attitude to biological risks. When the government did a controlled burn in New Mexico that got out of control and destroyed hundreds of houses, everyone involved recognized that they'd screwed up, even though fires also occur naturally, and even though controlled burns are a valuable tool in controlling natural fires. It seems that intuition doesn't hold for lab-origin pandemics. The 1977 flu originated from scientific research (although the exact nature of that research--whether it was a failed vaccine, or a vaccine challenge trial, or an experiment at the bench--is disputed), and it killed about 700k people. No one seems to care, and I don't really understand why.

elil17 4y ago
I'd argue should be doing more to ensure lab biohazard safety regardless of the origin of COVID-19, which is one reason I don't think knowing the answer has a lot of practical significance.
- tripletao 4y ago
  If you'd like to see greater regulation of biological research, then I'm pretty sure strong evidence that it killed millions of people would help with political support for that? So I'm not sure why we wouldn't look, especially when many obvious paths (e.g. subpoenas for all data potentially containing early viral genomes as contamination, like from Illumina's cloud services) remain unexplored.

golergka 4y ago

Game theory effects on future lab technicians, administrators and security personnel. We punish crime and criminal negligence to deter it in the future by public knowledge that it will be punished.

rzz3 4y ago

>Not to be glib, but what would be a legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth? Meaning, someone who didn’t walk in with a bias and look around the room for things that support said bias. This debate is packed with armchair experts who seem to have a larger interest in the politics than the science. >If it was a lab leak, "Oops." … Oops?! >Or, in other words, what would we do differently if it were a lab leak? Increase biocontainment protocols? If you’re like most of us on HN, at work, when we make big mistakes that cost our companies money and users, we have thorough retrospectives, learn from our mistakes, identify root causes, build for redundancy and high availability, and prevent the same incident from ever happening twice. That’s what I’d expect to see if the lab leak (which you strangely keep calling human origin, as if a naturally occurring virus can’t leak from a lab) were proven. > Okay, so we've made human-origin less likely. We still have to deal with naturally-occurring in the future. We have naturally-occurring forest fires, yet as a society, we sure seem to put a lot of effort into stopping “human-origin” fires. This sounds a bit “fuck it, why bother trying to make anything better, something bad will always happen”.

ethbr0 4y ago
> we sure seem to put a lot of effort into stopping “human-origin” fires Do we?
- pixl97 4y ago
  After they start, but we are terrible at pretty much every type of prevention. See: built to burn
burrows 4y ago
> This sounds a bit “fuck it, why bother trying to make anything better, something bad will always happen”. I agree.
toast0 4y ago
> If you’re like most of us on HN, at work, when we make big mistakes that cost our companies money and users, we have thorough retrospectives, learn from our mistakes, identify root causes, build for redundancy and high availability, and prevent the same incident from ever happening twice. Depends on the process. If the retrospective process is a big PITA that goes nowhere, and management is only going to support changes that it wanted before the incident, regardless of any knowledge uncovered by the evidence, then minimize the reporting and hide under a rock for a while, try not to get management attention again. Which scenario seems more applicable to a government lab in Wuhan? I don't think we're going to get the straight information from the lab, because the incentives aren't there. If they admit they did it, everybody is mad, and CCP has to take action to save face, and the lab team doesn't want to face that. If they admit they didn't do it, nobody believes them. Outside of finding some lucky samples, like a good match from outside the area in say October or November, I don't think we're going to get anything definitive from forensic analysis of virus DNA. I'm not an expert in the field, but the same sequence gets interpreted different ways by different experts; and usually with some wishy-washyness. The data quality for the early pandemic isn't getting any better or more independent from the same officials we don't trust. If we can't get a story we trust from the horse's mouth, and we can't figure it out through forensic analysis, the best way forward is to figure out what interventions would be reasonable if we assume lab origin and what would be reasonable if we assume natural origin and do the practical interventions.

noobermin 4y ago

A lab leak would have enormous impact on the way we fund virology research, that's what would change.

anarticle 4y ago

There is no way to say if there would have been spillover, or it coming from nature. This feels a bit like the way people have said "every new variant is less dangerous." There are no guarantees on that one, there is equal possibility that COVID turns into something worse. COVID doesn't have to kill you, it just has to copy better. If it turns out it was a lab leak, from using SCID mice or other human analogues, we might get new systems to prevent such a thing from happening again. Maybe researchers have to work in a diving bell system, who knows. We get to decide! We can create whatever we think we need. The system is not fixed. Look at animal research support systems like IACUC, created in the 80s, and now a useful fixture in biomedical research. In the lab, we lament IACUC sometimes, but they are a good check in the system. Why couldn't someone like IACUC raise the bar? I agree with you that knowing it was a lab leak does not fix the past, and can increase the blame game near term. On the longer arc, it is important to know.