7 ms·

There may be proof in there that somebody lied about something related to the lab leak. In this case, of course funding is a trail of breadcrumbs, and even if t

by corty 5y ago

There may be proof in there that somebody lied about something related to the lab leak. In this case, of course funding is a trail of breadcrumbs, and even if there were no relation, a coverup would be likely. Because it makes the funders look bad at least. Real proof that COVID-19 originated in one of the Wuhan labs will probably never be found, there was time enough for a coverup of those facts. But in any case, whether lab leak or not, a few things have become crystal clear imho: Research must really strongly improve its safety around possibly infectious materials. Even researchers working with the stuff consider a lab leak a real possibility. BSL-1 is practically a clean kitchen and BSL-2 is any common hospital before the current Corona measures. Even BSL-3 and -4 facilities are located in habitated urban areas. Researchers freely enter and leave without quarantine, have contact with an unsuspecting population, go to normal hospitals, infect other patients there. Viruses are much much more dangerous than radioactive or chemical materials. A tiny radiation or chemical leak will have tiny consequences. A tiny virus leak can still infect all of humanity. Also, I'm not qualified enough to comment on whether gain-of-function research is necessary and useful. But I would strongly suggest that given the possible consequences, together with the aforementioned woefully inadequate safety measures, it should be reevaluated. And confined to lonely islands at the end of the world with monthly airdropped supplies, entering or leaving only once a year after destruction of all samples and two months quarantine.

WastingMyTime89 5y ago
> Also, I'm not qualified enough to comment on whether gain-of-function research is necessary and useful. But I would strongly suggest that given the possible consequences, together with the aforementioned woefully inadequate safety measures, it should be reevaluated. But people have been saying that for at least a decade. There was a moratorium in the USA for a couple of years. The EU produced a lot of guidance. It was viewed as enough and it might have been in a world where international actors are reasonable, transparent and act in good faith. The issue is that COVID have definitely proved that it is not the world we currently live in and some actors are part of the international community in names only.
- corty 5y ago
  In that case, diplomatic pressure and travel and trade restrictions would be necessary. One would have to treat the whole irresponsible country harboring an unsafe lab just like that unsafe lab. I think this is also the real problem around Fauci's financing deception: He knowingly financed unsafe research in China, which not just gave them money but also the implicit acknowledgement that they are doing it right.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwaway210222 5y ago
    1. can you define "unsafe lab"? 2. is so, and if such a lab is found in the USA, do you really see a future where Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, Mexico, and Brasil stop buying Microsoft products and Apple toys? Come now, let's be serious.
    - corty 5y ago
      1. An unsafe lab is one, where pathogens can possibly get out with a non-negligible probability. And where those pathogens are infectious and deadly enough to be of concern. 2. Microsoft products don't carry biological viruses, because most of them are software. Microsoft hardware comes out of China I'd guess. Apple also doesn't produce most hardware in the US. Besides, computer hardware can be sterilized. Biological matter, like food and drink are more of a concern. And there is already a lot of regulation around those, e.g. you cannot get imported German sausage or French cheese in the US, and you cannot get US chicken in the EU for those reasons. You also cannot travel anywhere from an Ebola-affected region for example. I am very serious. But I'm really not sure what you are getting at.
      - throwaway210222 5y ago
        Thanks for answering. Let's address point 1), now that we have a definition: 1. Unsafe labs: a) Since 1903, the vast majority of known bio-lab incidents have been in the USA and then the next largest group is their western allies;[1] so any solution must address this, no? b) this 2105 USA Today article describes just 10 recent bio-lab incidents, including this gem: "In November 2013, a University of Wisconsin researcher in an ABSL-3 punctured skin with a needle loaded with H5N1 avian influenza. The researcher was quarantined for seven days in an empty home." or this: "Between April 2013 and September 2014, eight individual mouse escapes were reported at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill." or this: "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention inspectors and University of Michigan officials found materials labeled as Brucella, a select agent, outside the BSL-3 containment area in April 2012." And as a finale [3]: "Scientists inadvertently switched samples designated for live Ebola virus studies with samples intended for studies with inactivated material. As a result, the samples with viable Ebola virus, instead of the samples with inactivated Ebola virus, were transferred out of a BSL-4 laboratory to a laboratory with a lower safety level for additional analysis." There are (literally) hundreds more examples. So having established that unsafe labs abound in the USA (per your definition), let's move to point 2 in your suggestion: "diplomatic pressure and travel and trade restrictions " What possible restrictions of any kind do you possibly see any ally of the USA enforcing in any future "world-wide, no-execptions-to-the-rule agreement" scenario, given that they already tolerate all this incompetence? And that's just the Western allies. Do you see any third-world, dollar-dependent, tourist economy placing any restrictions on American tourists because a rate escaped from a lab? So, for the sake of brevity, did you really mean: "the USA and its allies must put diplomatic, travel, and trade restrictions on China?" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity... [2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/05/29/some-recent-us-lab-incidents/25258237/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/05/29/some-recent-u... [3] [https://thebulletin.org/2019/02/human-error-in-high-biocontainment-labs-a-likely-pandemic-threat/ https://thebulletin.org/2019/02/human-error-in-high-bioconta...
NGRhodes 5y ago
> Researchers freely enter and leave without quarantine, have contact with an unsuspecting population, go to normal hospitals, infect other patients there. Just to be clear, which/what labs are you referring to here ?
- corty 5y ago
  All of them. Even a BSL-4 lab is just a day job. In the evening, you get out of the lab area through the airlock, take off the suit, shower and go home to your family. After shopping and a quick beer of course. Followed by going to the movies.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    We probably couldn't realistically conduct research under conditions where you had to live in confinement for the duration of research with weeks long cooling off periods between visits to the real world. You simply wouldn't be able to find personnel to sweep the floors let alone bright motivated researchers.
    - corty 5y ago
      There is a long waiting list for research at the south pole. Also, if that research is important enough, it can be sufficiently high-paid, so that people willing to do it can be found. If there isn't enough money for that, that research is obviously not important enough. If it isn't important enough to spend that money on, it also isn't important enough to justify the risk to society.
      - native_samples 5y ago
        Interestingly enough, some decades ago there was an outbreak of common cold virus at a British Antarctic research base. The catch: at the time of the outbreak the researchers had been isolated there for months, with no contact with the outside world. It was investigated and no origin for the infection could be found. No new supply crates had been opened, for example. Quite what this implies for COVID is unclear, because the field of epidemiology seems to have forgotten about this incident and never investigated deeply. It's worth noting though that there have been repeated cases of outbreaks in New Zealand that couldn't be traced back to any contact with anyone who had crossed the border. Personally I suspect that SARS-CoV-2 can be carried by the wind and maybe in the upper atmosphere - that has certainly been asserted for different viruses in the past - but that's heresy at the moment because it would provide a theoretical reason why lockdowns and mask mandates don't seem to have any effect. Anyway, not really directly related to your point, but the mention of isolated research bases reminded me of it.
lamontcg 5y ago
We know it wasn't engineered and wasn't due to gain of function. SARS-CoV-2, RatG13 and RmYN02 evolved from a common ancestor decades ago: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33500788/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33500788/ If SARS-CoV-2 was a spike spliced onto a backbone it wouldn't look like they evolved from each other (similar to a photoshopped picture with different shadows and noise). It also didn't arise from serial passage since the distance is large enough that the 1,000 base pair difference would take passage through many, many millions of animals, not something that could be accomplished in a lab. 30-50 years of evolution is an awful lot of serial passage, and only nature can accomplish that large of a serial passage experiment. It is also very unlikely that the lab found SARS-CoV-2 or the immediate ancestor and cultured the live virus without publishing the sequence. They did culture WIV-1 and used the WIV-1 backbone, but they also published the sequence years before they did that and did it all in the open. That's the reason why people know about that. Before the pandemic there would be no reason to keep a SARS-CoV-2 sequence secret, and they earned their living by sequencing sarbecoviruses and publishing them. And still its unclear how a lab leak would happen with this virus, since you need to both culture the live virus and somehow aerosolize it and snort it in -- as we've learned it doesn't transmit by surfaces and restaurants doing deep cleaning after COVID issues are just engaging in sanitation theater. The actual bioreactors where it formed are all sitting right out in the open. All the bat caves across China, all the factory farms which have tightly packed intermediate animal hosts. All the humans interacting with those animals through factory farming or collecting bat guano for fertilizer. All the mixing that occurs by those animals being transported across china. There's a million times more serial passage and animal-animal or animal-human contact happening right out in the open.
- tim333 5y ago
  Not true. We know it didn't come from any viruses that have been published but the Chinese have been pretty diligent at taking down databases and hiding information and there are almost certainly many viruses they have that we don't have the details of that they could have used. I have to say the data hiding is pretty suspicious. If it was a natural virus it would be useful to have a look at WIVs extensive research on bat coronaviruses and have a look at the other nine they took from the Mojang mine along with RaTg13. If they have nothing to hide why hide that stuff as soon as we have a pandemic that it would be relevant for?

by corty 5y ago

WastingMyTime89 5y ago

> Also, I'm not qualified enough to comment on whether gain-of-function research is necessary and useful. But I would strongly suggest that given the possible consequences, together with the aforementioned woefully inadequate safety measures, it should be reevaluated. But people have been saying that for at least a decade. There was a moratorium in the USA for a couple of years. The EU produced a lot of guidance. It was viewed as enough and it might have been in a world where international actors are reasonable, transparent and act in good faith. The issue is that COVID have definitely proved that it is not the world we currently live in and some actors are part of the international community in names only.

corty 5y ago
In that case, diplomatic pressure and travel and trade restrictions would be necessary. One would have to treat the whole irresponsible country harboring an unsafe lab just like that unsafe lab. I think this is also the real problem around Fauci's financing deception: He knowingly financed unsafe research in China, which not just gave them money but also the implicit acknowledgement that they are doing it right.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway210222 5y ago
  1. can you define "unsafe lab"? 2. is so, and if such a lab is found in the USA, do you really see a future where Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, Mexico, and Brasil stop buying Microsoft products and Apple toys? Come now, let's be serious.
  - corty 5y ago
    1. An unsafe lab is one, where pathogens can possibly get out with a non-negligible probability. And where those pathogens are infectious and deadly enough to be of concern. 2. Microsoft products don't carry biological viruses, because most of them are software. Microsoft hardware comes out of China I'd guess. Apple also doesn't produce most hardware in the US. Besides, computer hardware can be sterilized. Biological matter, like food and drink are more of a concern. And there is already a lot of regulation around those, e.g. you cannot get imported German sausage or French cheese in the US, and you cannot get US chicken in the EU for those reasons. You also cannot travel anywhere from an Ebola-affected region for example. I am very serious. But I'm really not sure what you are getting at.
    - throwaway210222 5y ago
      Thanks for answering. Let's address point 1), now that we have a definition: 1. Unsafe labs: a) Since 1903, the vast majority of known bio-lab incidents have been in the USA and then the next largest group is their western allies;[1] so any solution must address this, no? b) this 2105 USA Today article describes just 10 recent bio-lab incidents, including this gem: "In November 2013, a University of Wisconsin researcher in an ABSL-3 punctured skin with a needle loaded with H5N1 avian influenza. The researcher was quarantined for seven days in an empty home." or this: "Between April 2013 and September 2014, eight individual mouse escapes were reported at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill." or this: "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention inspectors and University of Michigan officials found materials labeled as Brucella, a select agent, outside the BSL-3 containment area in April 2012." And as a finale [3]: "Scientists inadvertently switched samples designated for live Ebola virus studies with samples intended for studies with inactivated material. As a result, the samples with viable Ebola virus, instead of the samples with inactivated Ebola virus, were transferred out of a BSL-4 laboratory to a laboratory with a lower safety level for additional analysis." There are (literally) hundreds more examples. So having established that unsafe labs abound in the USA (per your definition), let's move to point 2 in your suggestion: "diplomatic pressure and travel and trade restrictions " What possible restrictions of any kind do you possibly see any ally of the USA enforcing in any future "world-wide, no-execptions-to-the-rule agreement" scenario, given that they already tolerate all this incompetence? And that's just the Western allies. Do you see any third-world, dollar-dependent, tourist economy placing any restrictions on American tourists because a rate escaped from a lab? So, for the sake of brevity, did you really mean: "the USA and its allies must put diplomatic, travel, and trade restrictions on China?" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity... [2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/05/29/some-recent-us-lab-incidents/25258237/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/05/29/some-recent-u... [3] [https://thebulletin.org/2019/02/human-error-in-high-biocontainment-labs-a-likely-pandemic-threat/ https://thebulletin.org/2019/02/human-error-in-high-bioconta...

NGRhodes 5y ago

> Researchers freely enter and leave without quarantine, have contact with an unsuspecting population, go to normal hospitals, infect other patients there. Just to be clear, which/what labs are you referring to here ?

corty 5y ago
All of them. Even a BSL-4 lab is just a day job. In the evening, you get out of the lab area through the airlock, take off the suit, shower and go home to your family. After shopping and a quick beer of course. Followed by going to the movies.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  We probably couldn't realistically conduct research under conditions where you had to live in confinement for the duration of research with weeks long cooling off periods between visits to the real world. You simply wouldn't be able to find personnel to sweep the floors let alone bright motivated researchers.
  - corty 5y ago
    There is a long waiting list for research at the south pole. Also, if that research is important enough, it can be sufficiently high-paid, so that people willing to do it can be found. If there isn't enough money for that, that research is obviously not important enough. If it isn't important enough to spend that money on, it also isn't important enough to justify the risk to society.
    - native_samples 5y ago
      Interestingly enough, some decades ago there was an outbreak of common cold virus at a British Antarctic research base. The catch: at the time of the outbreak the researchers had been isolated there for months, with no contact with the outside world. It was investigated and no origin for the infection could be found. No new supply crates had been opened, for example. Quite what this implies for COVID is unclear, because the field of epidemiology seems to have forgotten about this incident and never investigated deeply. It's worth noting though that there have been repeated cases of outbreaks in New Zealand that couldn't be traced back to any contact with anyone who had crossed the border. Personally I suspect that SARS-CoV-2 can be carried by the wind and maybe in the upper atmosphere - that has certainly been asserted for different viruses in the past - but that's heresy at the moment because it would provide a theoretical reason why lockdowns and mask mandates don't seem to have any effect. Anyway, not really directly related to your point, but the mention of isolated research bases reminded me of it.

lamontcg 5y ago

We know it wasn't engineered and wasn't due to gain of function. SARS-CoV-2, RatG13 and RmYN02 evolved from a common ancestor decades ago: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33500788/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33500788/ If SARS-CoV-2 was a spike spliced onto a backbone it wouldn't look like they evolved from each other (similar to a photoshopped picture with different shadows and noise). It also didn't arise from serial passage since the distance is large enough that the 1,000 base pair difference would take passage through many, many millions of animals, not something that could be accomplished in a lab. 30-50 years of evolution is an awful lot of serial passage, and only nature can accomplish that large of a serial passage experiment. It is also very unlikely that the lab found SARS-CoV-2 or the immediate ancestor and cultured the live virus without publishing the sequence. They did culture WIV-1 and used the WIV-1 backbone, but they also published the sequence years before they did that and did it all in the open. That's the reason why people know about that. Before the pandemic there would be no reason to keep a SARS-CoV-2 sequence secret, and they earned their living by sequencing sarbecoviruses and publishing them. And still its unclear how a lab leak would happen with this virus, since you need to both culture the live virus and somehow aerosolize it and snort it in -- as we've learned it doesn't transmit by surfaces and restaurants doing deep cleaning after COVID issues are just engaging in sanitation theater. The actual bioreactors where it formed are all sitting right out in the open. All the bat caves across China, all the factory farms which have tightly packed intermediate animal hosts. All the humans interacting with those animals through factory farming or collecting bat guano for fertilizer. All the mixing that occurs by those animals being transported across china. There's a million times more serial passage and animal-animal or animal-human contact happening right out in the open.

tim333 5y ago
Not true. We know it didn't come from any viruses that have been published but the Chinese have been pretty diligent at taking down databases and hiding information and there are almost certainly many viruses they have that we don't have the details of that they could have used. I have to say the data hiding is pretty suspicious. If it was a natural virus it would be useful to have a look at WIVs extensive research on bat coronaviruses and have a look at the other nine they took from the Mojang mine along with RaTg13. If they have nothing to hide why hide that stuff as soon as we have a pandemic that it would be relevant for?