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I find this very frustrating. If COVID-19 was a lab leak - wether it had involved gain of function related or just unwisely moving viruses from the animal kingd

I find this very frustrating. If COVID-19 was a lab leak - wether it had involved gain of function related or just unwisely moving viruses from the animal kingdom into human spaces - what good did any of it do? Apparently our ability to create vaccines doesn't hinge on messing around with the viruses before they infect humans. COVID-19 vaccine was created after the fact, and it hardly prevented a major global catastrophe. I just don't see the argument. It sounds like pure imagination - by making viruses more dangerous or increasing the odds we'll expose ourselves to novel ones, someday we'll have the technology to prevent any pandemic. How many millions of lives lost and trillions of dollars wasted before that happens? When is it just not worth it? It seems not worth it to me now. If it's a bioweapons program, I don't see why we need to be playing along. It's not like nuclear deterrence - someone releases a weaponized virus, the whole world gets infected. It's like a nuke that blows up the entire world.

shadowgovt 4y ago
> Apparently our ability to create vaccines doesn't hinge on messing around with the viruses before they infect humans. The COVID vaccine built heavily on previous research with flu,. Zika, rabies, and cytomegalovirus.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
  > The COVID vaccine built heavily on previous research with flu,. Zika, rabies, and cytomegalovirus. All viruses that are already around. Agree that creating novel viruses is not with the risk.
baja_blast 4y ago
Additionally, in the same way a banana would never occur in nature, many of these experiments researchers conduct are extremely unlikely or out right impossible. For wild viruses crossing over to humans it needs to go through many mutations and people before becoming adapted and highly infectious towards humans. But in a lab you can insert the exact mutation to make it highly infectious towards humans without having to mutate. For example right now the bird flu which can infect humans who have ingested bird droppings, but it can't spread human to human. The conditions in the lab are just so artificial the predictive power is practically worthless, especially when you consider the massive possibility space. Just like you'd never find something like a banana evolve to it's current state in the wild, you would won't find these viral chimeras just popping up out of no where.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  Remember this? "H5N1 is a type of avian flu virus that occurs naturally in various types of birds but has surfaced in humans in the last ten years. Although human cases of H5N1 are rare, the virus has a 60% mortality rate." "They reasoned that it'd be better to tinker with H5N1 in the lab and gain knowledge for its prevention than sit back and wait for mother nature to concoct a human-friendly strain. Both teams of researchers artificially mutated H5N1 to spread easily amongst ferrets. Ferrets are commonly used as stand ins for humans in influenza studies. To clarify what I mean by "easily" spread, at the end of Fouchier's study the strain had gained the ability to transmit through the air- an unprecedented feat!" https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/viruses101/avian/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/viruses101/avian/
- rhacker 4y ago
  The other thing too is that were just going to do ACE2 receptor research from now til the next pandemic, which I'm sure will have NOTHING to do with ACE2.
brippalcharrid 4y ago
The treaties in place to restrict biological weapons have exclusions that permit the development (and use) of incapacitating agents. The DoD/NIAID/Daszak/Fauci model has been that a hostile nation would release a biological weapon that would compromise the ability of members of the Armed Forces to engage in combat operations over a period of months or years, and to address this they had planned to be able to quickly marshal a new transfection to induce neutralising antibodies [in the relevant groups before they were deployed to combat zones], hence the focus of research into these particular areas from the defence establishment and its partners over the last few decades.
- ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
  Thank you. This is the first time I've seen a true steelman of the pro-GoF poisition.
hotpotamus 4y ago
I would say that viruses, like a lot of other aspects of life, are chaotic and capricious both in their evolution and their affects on an individual humans (COVID really drove that home for me in that it killed some and was asymptotically carried by others). But we demand explanations where there are none, and so we create them ourselves or accept them from others.
CamperBob2 4y ago
I find this very frustrating. If COVID-19 was a lab leak - wether it had involved gain of function related or just unwisely moving viruses from the animal kingdom into human spaces - what good did any of it do? If the increased focus on mRNA vaccine research due to the COVID outbreak leads to successful new anticancer therapies, we could make up for the COVID death toll in a hurry, and benefit enormously from subsequent availability. In no event is "don't research this, it's too scary" ever the right answer. The question is how to do it safely. For instance, I don't understand why gain-of-function research is less regulated than, say, nuclear research. The work needs to happen, but our risk assessments are hopelessly out of whack.
- nsxwolf 4y ago
  The pandemic forever cured me of my willingness to participate in Trolley Problems. I would say harming people over some vague future promise of helping them is, from this point forward, always the wrong decision.
darkarmani 4y ago
> COVID-19 vaccine was created after the fact, and it hardly prevented a major global catastrophe. What? It immediately dropped the death rate. How many more millions of lives would it have to have saved to get notice?
- creato 4y ago
  Knowing about the virus ahead of time wouldn’t help much. By far the most expensive (in time and money) part of a publicly available vaccine is testing it. It is impossible to test a vaccine under any reasonable procedure we have today before the virus is a full blown pandemic. The best case scenario for putting this kind of research into practice is saving two weeks off a months or years long development schedule. It might not even work. Frankly the risk reward trade off here is so laughably bad that I can’t understand why it’s even a debate.
  - darkarmani 4y ago
    Ah! I read the parent's comment in a different way, but i see what he was trying to say now. He wasn't saying the vaccine didn't do anything, but that not having it developed before covid19 started wasn't the biggest blocker.
admax88qqq 4y ago
> Apparently our ability to create vaccines doesn't hinge on messing around with the viruses before they infect humans. COVID-19 vaccine was created after the fact, and it hardly prevented a major global catastrophe. I don't think you can make that conclusion. Sure we didn't make the vaccine before covid existed. But virology research in general certainly builds the body if knowledge required to synthesize vaccines. Did the Wuhan lab research help the covid vaccines? Maybe not, but it's really _really_ hard to know ahead of time which avenues of research will yield breakthroughs.

shadowgovt 4y ago

> Apparently our ability to create vaccines doesn't hinge on messing around with the viruses before they infect humans. The COVID vaccine built heavily on previous research with flu,. Zika, rabies, and cytomegalovirus.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
> The COVID vaccine built heavily on previous research with flu,. Zika, rabies, and cytomegalovirus. All viruses that are already around. Agree that creating novel viruses is not with the risk.

baja_blast 4y ago

Additionally, in the same way a banana would never occur in nature, many of these experiments researchers conduct are extremely unlikely or out right impossible. For wild viruses crossing over to humans it needs to go through many mutations and people before becoming adapted and highly infectious towards humans. But in a lab you can insert the exact mutation to make it highly infectious towards humans without having to mutate. For example right now the bird flu which can infect humans who have ingested bird droppings, but it can't spread human to human. The conditions in the lab are just so artificial the predictive power is practically worthless, especially when you consider the massive possibility space. Just like you'd never find something like a banana evolve to it's current state in the wild, you would won't find these viral chimeras just popping up out of no where.

throwaway4aday 4y ago
Remember this? "H5N1 is a type of avian flu virus that occurs naturally in various types of birds but has surfaced in humans in the last ten years. Although human cases of H5N1 are rare, the virus has a 60% mortality rate." "They reasoned that it'd be better to tinker with H5N1 in the lab and gain knowledge for its prevention than sit back and wait for mother nature to concoct a human-friendly strain. Both teams of researchers artificially mutated H5N1 to spread easily amongst ferrets. Ferrets are commonly used as stand ins for humans in influenza studies. To clarify what I mean by "easily" spread, at the end of Fouchier's study the strain had gained the ability to transmit through the air- an unprecedented feat!" https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/viruses101/avian/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/viruses101/avian/
rhacker 4y ago
The other thing too is that were just going to do ACE2 receptor research from now til the next pandemic, which I'm sure will have NOTHING to do with ACE2.

brippalcharrid 4y ago

The treaties in place to restrict biological weapons have exclusions that permit the development (and use) of incapacitating agents. The DoD/NIAID/Daszak/Fauci model has been that a hostile nation would release a biological weapon that would compromise the ability of members of the Armed Forces to engage in combat operations over a period of months or years, and to address this they had planned to be able to quickly marshal a new transfection to induce neutralising antibodies [in the relevant groups before they were deployed to combat zones], hence the focus of research into these particular areas from the defence establishment and its partners over the last few decades.

ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
Thank you. This is the first time I've seen a true steelman of the pro-GoF poisition.

hotpotamus 4y ago

I would say that viruses, like a lot of other aspects of life, are chaotic and capricious both in their evolution and their affects on an individual humans (COVID really drove that home for me in that it killed some and was asymptotically carried by others). But we demand explanations where there are none, and so we create them ourselves or accept them from others.

CamperBob2 4y ago

I find this very frustrating. If COVID-19 was a lab leak - wether it had involved gain of function related or just unwisely moving viruses from the animal kingdom into human spaces - what good did any of it do? If the increased focus on mRNA vaccine research due to the COVID outbreak leads to successful new anticancer therapies, we could make up for the COVID death toll in a hurry, and benefit enormously from subsequent availability. In no event is "don't research this, it's too scary" ever the right answer. The question is how to do it safely. For instance, I don't understand why gain-of-function research is less regulated than, say, nuclear research. The work needs to happen, but our risk assessments are hopelessly out of whack.

nsxwolf 4y ago
The pandemic forever cured me of my willingness to participate in Trolley Problems. I would say harming people over some vague future promise of helping them is, from this point forward, always the wrong decision.

darkarmani 4y ago

> COVID-19 vaccine was created after the fact, and it hardly prevented a major global catastrophe. What? It immediately dropped the death rate. How many more millions of lives would it have to have saved to get notice?

creato 4y ago
Knowing about the virus ahead of time wouldn’t help much. By far the most expensive (in time and money) part of a publicly available vaccine is testing it. It is impossible to test a vaccine under any reasonable procedure we have today before the virus is a full blown pandemic. The best case scenario for putting this kind of research into practice is saving two weeks off a months or years long development schedule. It might not even work. Frankly the risk reward trade off here is so laughably bad that I can’t understand why it’s even a debate.
- darkarmani 4y ago
  Ah! I read the parent's comment in a different way, but i see what he was trying to say now. He wasn't saying the vaccine didn't do anything, but that not having it developed before covid19 started wasn't the biggest blocker.

admax88qqq 4y ago

> Apparently our ability to create vaccines doesn't hinge on messing around with the viruses before they infect humans. COVID-19 vaccine was created after the fact, and it hardly prevented a major global catastrophe. I don't think you can make that conclusion. Sure we didn't make the vaccine before covid existed. But virology research in general certainly builds the body if knowledge required to synthesize vaccines. Did the Wuhan lab research help the covid vaccines? Maybe not, but it's really _really_ hard to know ahead of time which avenues of research will yield breakthroughs.