6 ms·

> The 1977 virus was already circulating in the population, hence why it ended up as a vaccine. The 1957 flu evolved naturally, but it went extinct in the wild

> The 1977 virus was already circulating in the population, hence why it ended up as a vaccine. The 1957 flu evolved naturally, but it went extinct in the wild. By 1976, it wasn't known to be circulating anywhere. It then reappeared in 1977 with an almost identical genome, without the mutations it should have picked up in 20 years of cryptic spread. This is consistent with storage in a laboratory freezer, and very little else. The exact site of reintroduction isn't known, but it's generally believed to be a vaccine challenge trial in China: > Although there is no hard evidence available, the introduction of this 1977 H1N1 virus is now thought to be the result of vaccine trials in the Far East involving the challenge of several thousand military recruits with live H1N1 virus (C.M. Chu, personal communication). https://www.nature.com/articles/nm1141 https://www.nature.com/articles/nm1141 So the scientists who undertook that trial (or whatever the activity was) caused that pandemic. If not for their actions, those 700k people wouldn't have died. Of course a different flu virus would have circulated, but 700k was much worse than an average season. Does that not concern you? The reckless trial caused those influenza deaths, just as surely as the leak at Bhopal caused those poisoning deaths. The long chain of transmission between the site of reintroduction and the site of the deaths doesn't change the causality--if those researchers hadn't reintroduced the virus, then those patients wouldn't have died. > Unlike plane accidents, diseases and pandemics happened way before labs that could leak them. That's not a meaningful statement. Cancer happened way before radiological accidents that could induce them, and most cancer is natural; but Edison's X-ray tube nonetheless killed his assistant. When a new technology creates a new way to die, a period will exist in which it hasn't killed anyone yet; but someone can still be first. The correct guide is therefore the most similar pre-existing technologies, which in this case have already killed 700k people. It's possible that by failing to take any lesson from that, researchers at the WIV have now killed an additional 7M. If that's the case, then I hate to think what comes next.

YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
Where did the 700k number come from? This was a discussion about "prior probability", according to the terminology that you introduced. I pointed out that if you really want to use "prior probability" then you have to take into account the, well, prior. probability. Of the two events you're considering. Even if you insisted on the 1977 virus being an instance of a lab escape causing a pandemic, the prior probability of that kind of event would stay zero, maybe with a desultory and lonely 1 after three or four decimal zeroes. So, zero. Are you using "prior probability" in a figurative sense? Are you saying that we should set our priors according to personal preference rather than observed frequency of real-world events? If so, well I guess you're a true Bayesian then and I salute you, but please make that clear. >> That's not a meaningful statement. Yeah, thanks a lot for the respectful debate there. You should read again the bit where I point out the difference between prior and conditional probabilities and if you really want to use the terminology "prior probability" make yourself more familiar with it.
- tripletao 2y ago
  > Where did the 700k number come from? It came from the first article that I linked, by a medical doctor and professor of epidemiology. From that article: > Over the ensuing years, after its emergence in 1977, the virus went on to infect a significant portion of the worldwide population, killing roughly 700,000 people. I'm not aware of any controversy over that number. It seems like people don't quite believe it, as if it's impossible that researchers would kill 700k people with no consequence, so it must be wrong or fake somehow. They're just as dead as from any other cause though, and the failed challenge trial (or whatever it was) caused the deaths. And no one cares, and I don't really understand why. It may partially be the delayed discovery, since research-related origin was denied at the time. (Quite familiarly, the WHO wrote in 1978 that "laboratory contamination can be excluded because the laboratories concerned either had never kept H1N1 virus or had not worked with it for a long time".) It may also be the long distance between the initial cause and the death, in the same way as for pollution, climate change, etc. > Even if you insisted on the 1977 virus being an instance of a lab escape causing a pandemic, the prior probability of that kind of event would stay zero, maybe with a desultory and lonely 1 after three or four decimal zeroes. So, zero. The flu vaccine was invented about 80 years ago, so a pandemic arising from it couldn't have occurred before that. We obviously haven't had 10,000 to 100,000 pandemics since then. The definition is loose, but counting introductions of pathogens into humans with a combination of novelty and mortality sufficient to get scientific attention over that period, I get maybe a couple dozen. If we count only pandemics with deaths comparable to the 1977 flu's 700k then it's fewer; but I think it makes sense to include SARS-1, MERS, etc. If I had to guess knowing only that such a novel pathogen had just been introduced, I'd thus bet with p ~ 5% that it was a research accident. If I had to bet knowing only that a novel pathogen had been introduced sometime in the past million years, then my estimate would of course be lower; but I don't see how that's relevant here. For SARS-CoV-2 I believe additional evidence significantly increases the probability, as discussed in other comments.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago

YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago

Where did the 700k number come from? This was a discussion about "prior probability", according to the terminology that you introduced. I pointed out that if you really want to use "prior probability" then you have to take into account the, well, prior. probability. Of the two events you're considering. Even if you insisted on the 1977 virus being an instance of a lab escape causing a pandemic, the prior probability of that kind of event would stay zero, maybe with a desultory and lonely 1 after three or four decimal zeroes. So, zero. Are you using "prior probability" in a figurative sense? Are you saying that we should set our priors according to personal preference rather than observed frequency of real-world events? If so, well I guess you're a true Bayesian then and I salute you, but please make that clear. >> That's not a meaningful statement. Yeah, thanks a lot for the respectful debate there. You should read again the bit where I point out the difference between prior and conditional probabilities and if you really want to use the terminology "prior probability" make yourself more familiar with it.

tripletao 2y ago
> Where did the 700k number come from? It came from the first article that I linked, by a medical doctor and professor of epidemiology. From that article: > Over the ensuing years, after its emergence in 1977, the virus went on to infect a significant portion of the worldwide population, killing roughly 700,000 people. I'm not aware of any controversy over that number. It seems like people don't quite believe it, as if it's impossible that researchers would kill 700k people with no consequence, so it must be wrong or fake somehow. They're just as dead as from any other cause though, and the failed challenge trial (or whatever it was) caused the deaths. And no one cares, and I don't really understand why. It may partially be the delayed discovery, since research-related origin was denied at the time. (Quite familiarly, the WHO wrote in 1978 that "laboratory contamination can be excluded because the laboratories concerned either had never kept H1N1 virus or had not worked with it for a long time".) It may also be the long distance between the initial cause and the death, in the same way as for pollution, climate change, etc. > Even if you insisted on the 1977 virus being an instance of a lab escape causing a pandemic, the prior probability of that kind of event would stay zero, maybe with a desultory and lonely 1 after three or four decimal zeroes. So, zero. The flu vaccine was invented about 80 years ago, so a pandemic arising from it couldn't have occurred before that. We obviously haven't had 10,000 to 100,000 pandemics since then. The definition is loose, but counting introductions of pathogens into humans with a combination of novelty and mortality sufficient to get scientific attention over that period, I get maybe a couple dozen. If we count only pandemics with deaths comparable to the 1977 flu's 700k then it's fewer; but I think it makes sense to include SARS-1, MERS, etc. If I had to guess knowing only that such a novel pathogen had just been introduced, I'd thus bet with p ~ 5% that it was a research accident. If I had to bet knowing only that a novel pathogen had been introduced sometime in the past million years, then my estimate would of course be lower; but I don't see how that's relevant here. For SARS-CoV-2 I believe additional evidence significantly increases the probability, as discussed in other comments.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago