3 ms·
The theory is quite clear, if you know which strains could hop to humans then you can prioritize monitoring them, just like we monitor influenza types in animal
by theptip 2y ago
The theory is quite clear, if you know which strains could hop to humans then you can prioritize monitoring them, just like we monitor influenza types in animal populations now.
The problem is just that P(avert catastrophe) is fairly low, and P(create catastrophe) is substantially higher.
- oneshtein 2y ago[flagged]
- throwaway290 2y ago> It's not about nature. It's about biological weapons. If Russians will create a new biological weapon (they do), then we must have a cure before they will use it in their fight with NATO. And the best solution is to research this... in China?
- oneshtein 2y agoYep, another continent from the home is the best place for such kind of research.
- throwaway290 2y agoIf you want to research a cure from engineered virus from one hostile country, paying another hostile country to do virus engineering research for you is surely great logic.
- oneshtein 2y agoChina was not a hostile country in 2014, before Russians started the war.
- theptip 2y agoI’m pretty sure there is funding on both sides; NIH vs DARPA for example. I suspect that NIH funds a lot more here and I’m skeptical that DARPA funds labs in China for this. The experiments WIV were doing were specifically targeted at identifying wild-type viruses that could cross over. This is not where you would start for a bioweapon. (Unless, tinfoil hat, you want to start a pandemic that looks like a zoonotic event. But that’s not the threat model the US military is worried about in the research they fund.)