Whatever toy gain of function research someone is doing in a lab vastly pales in comparison to the enormous gain of function 'experiment' we are right now performing worldwide with the continued high transmission rate of COVID-19.
Look at what variants like Omicron BA.5 and BA.4 have evolved into, they are quite possibly the most infectious and dangerous air spread pathogens known to man. These didn't come from a lab, we cooked them up by dropping all mitigations and pretending the pandemic was over instead of quashing this virus for good.
Source please? Everything I've read about latest Omicrons suggests that they are more transmissible, more likely to evade immunity, and substantially _less_ severe in terms of hospitalization and deaths. By and large, this is what you'd expect to happen at the end of a pandemic, regardless of our response.
"they are more transmissible, more likely to evade immunity"
Intrinsic severity of the virus doesn't change the fact it is the most transmissible virus we have ever seen in the world.
Even if it is intrinsically less severe than previous variants, because we are allowing it to spread to EVERYONE in the world we are seeing a much worse impact. Did you miss that in the US alone we've had over 160k deaths from COVID-19 just in the last 6 months of this year? No other virus has had this level of death in the same timeframe.
China has eradicated omicron. Shanghai had _zero_ cases of omicron reported on June 24th. A couple months ago they were seeing 25k+ cases a day. This is a city of 25 million people, the third largest and most dense city in the world. And yet somehow with a collective attitude and government support they beat back the virus and have fully reopened and returned to normal.
Contrast this with the United States where we have so far had over _one million deaths_ from COVID-19. In the same timespan China has seen just a few thousand deaths.
> When you say “we”, who do you mean exactly? How did they cook them?
The entire population of the western world. Every time COVID-19 infects a person and replicates it has the chance to mutate or introduce errors. If those errors in replication increase the fitness of the virus it will evolve to become a more powerful variant (i.e. gain of function). By continuing to allow hundreds of thousands of new cases and infections to occur daily we are increasing the chance of variants evolving. The _only_ way to stop variants is to stop transmission, period.
> Can you explain why you believe the pandemic is not over?
We are still averaging over 100k new cases a day in the US. And that's with almost all of the population using rapid tests that aren't counted in that measurement.
The only alternative to this experiment is China's currently policy. There isn't much of a middle ground because anything short of aggressive testing, lockdowns, and quarantine won't be enough to stop the spread.
No, we literally just need to mandate N95 masks in public settings and get the effective R value down near 1 again. Contact tracing and government support for paid sick leave, etc. would control it even further. At no point do harsh lockdowns have to happen.
> No, we literally just need to mandate N95 masks in public settings and get the effective R value down near 1 again.
But as soon as people take off masks, it starts spreading again. It's also getting less politically viable when ~70% of Americans have had covid (the CDC estimated 60% in late April).
> It's also getting less politically viable when ~70% of Americans have had covid (the CDC estimated 60% in late April)
This means nothing. The virus reinfects people with existing immunity. For example Senator Wicker from MS is on his _third_ infection: https://www.magnoliastatelive.com/2022/06/13/senator-roger-w... Two of those infections have been in the last four months alone!
We have to use NPIs like masking to stop the virus from spreading in order to stop new variants from evolving. There is no herd immunity. There is no natural immunity.
> Vaccines against the coronavirus may impair the body’s ability to produce a key type of antibody, thus potentially limiting the immune system’s defenses against mutated strains of the virus, a new study suggests.
> The study draws upon data collected during Moderna’s randomized control trial for its mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, from July 2020 through March 2021.
As someone in tech, what bothers me is all the attention AI gets for possible ethical problems, while biologists are doing some pretty scary experiments with potentially large-scale negative consequences, and they've gotten relatively little attention.
Not chinese biologists . Or Mexican biologists for all that matters (I'm from Mexico). I mean, there's a lot of countries capable of playing with viruses which dont have real practical controls.
You might argue that these achieve little in practice, and due to corruption amount to nothing more than fig leafs. But that doesn't invalidate the argument because AI researchers don't even wear that much!
It's also very weird that the same type of people who normally talk about corporations/governments covering up pollutants do not talk about how many people could die from a potential lab leak.
Every single pandemic before SC2 was of natural origin. You have to make a much more persuasive case than "people could die from a lab leak" to ban research that could plausibly reduce the death toll from the next pandemic.
Are you not familiar with the 1977 flu pandemic? About 700k people died. You can argue about whether that was a "lab leak" or (as Gronvall prefers) a mere "vaccine accident", but either is unnatural.
Even in the 'steelman' case of a lab leak in the '77 H1N1 - it was a natural virus that later escaped and caused the pandemic. Even if it was some accident involving the 1950's H1N1, that means the natural 1950s H1N1 was capable of causing a pandemic...
We really need to come to terms with the fact that whether we research them or not, there are going to be increasing numbers of pandemic-capable viruses spreading in human populations.
If I tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 and then visited a nursing home without a mask, exhaling the natural virus all over the home's vulnerable residents, then I'm pretty sure you'd say I'd done something terrible. I think you'd be right. It's obvious to most people in most circumstances that even if a pathogen exists in nature and naturally causes some degree of death and sickness, a human who enables that pathogen to cause a greater degree of death and sickness is doing something bad. This is especially true if they're doing so maliciously (e.g., in biological warfare), but still true even if they're merely reckless (e.g. my nursing home visitor, or that flu shot nurse who reused the syringes).
So why does this intuition fail when the virus passes through a lab? The 1946-1957 flu virus was indeed natural, but the 1977 pandemic of that same virus was near-certainly not--without the activities of the scientists involved, the virus would probably have stayed safely in the freezer forever. The scientists also had the option not to put it in the freezer in the first place, in which case it would have probably just gone extinct. That scientific activity almost certainly caused those deaths.
Maybe it's just that one death is a tragedy, and 700k deaths are a statistic? When the last smallpox death (so far, at least) occurred following a lab accident in the UK, the director of the lab in question killed himself out of guilt, even though that lab was basically in compliance with the standards of the time. Perhaps he just had an unusually sensitive conscience; but I wonder if the scale of death in the 1977 flu pandemic (or this pandemic now, if it turns out to be unnatural) is simply so great that people can't engage with it, and their usual moral mechanisms just shut down.
In engineering school, we're taught from the first week that our work has the potential to kill people, and that it's our fault if it does. If a structural engineer responded to a building collapse simply by explaining that buildings are very important for society and that many people would die of exposure without them, then his colleagues would be mystified, and perhaps concerned for his mental health. We're expected to study and learn from our failures, in order not to repeat them. The argument that "X has benefits, therefore we can ignore its costs completely" is so ridiculous that I've never heard it spoken.
Yet a vocal subset of virologists are somehow able to make just that argument for their discipline, shrugging off the deaths they cause as a "natural" cost of doing business, unworthy of study or thought--and a significant fraction of the public accepts it! I find this strange, and terrifying. Don't you?
There's no proof of "gain of function" experiments at all or specifically linked to Sars-Cov-2. It is heavily unlikely that such an experiment would switch a virus from un-pandemic-able to pandemic-able. The mechanisms to do that are entirely theoretical.
So it's not clear at all that gain of function would have been able to create a Virus like Sars-Cov-2 out of a hypothetical bat virus. And there is no evidence any such research has been going on. Nor is there any evidence the virus has passed through the Wuhan lab in question at all.
When Australia proposed an international investigation into the origins, in direct response, China started cyber attacks, resentencing Australian prisoners to death, and used economic warfare.
This seems like a conversation we can not have, if China has any say in it. And for a natural origin spillover event, it sure wants to have its say...
If your claims are true, then the fact that I (and others) didn't know this is seriously disturbing. I think a lot of people would have doubled down and pushed for alot more pressure and investigation into all of China's dealings across the board, if they had known.
At the very least it's an indictment on our media which should be pointing out these curious coincidences. Instead I think they have other motives.
I don't know about the other two but Australian coal was put under sanction by china in the wake of their call for an investigation. This, ironically, was quite bad for china since it indirectly led to power cuts in some provinces because they couldn't use the lower grade of coal otherwise available.
Most people are referring to PRC (AKA mainland China, nominally communist) not ROC (AKA Taiwan, a republic) when they say China (at least in the west), so your statement is true but not particularly helpful in this context.
From the Wikipedia link: "A lab worker was bitten and infected by a mouse infected with the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant at a high-biosecurity facility in Taipei [Taiwan in December of 2021]".
From there, news articles speculate that "this will add credibility to the lab leak theory [if confirmed]" and this "gives legs to Wuhan lab leak theory," which is hardly conclusive.
I don't see how this incident would indicate that SARS-CoV-2 initially came out of a lab. It demonstrates a possible vector out of a lab, but I'm guessing that's already a well-known vector when dealing with lab animals, and it doesn't provide any evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was actually developed in a lab or initially spread from one.
Even if this one wasn’t a lab leak, the next one very well could be. The risk/reward profile of that sort of research is insanely unfavorable.