It would probably be useful in preventing the next pandemic.
The origin of the virus remains one of the biggest, most important and most contentious unknowns of the pandemic. “Absolutely we need to know where it came from,” says David Robertson, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Glasgow, UK. “We have to be worried that that could happen again.”
But throughout that article, Robertson pours cold water over the lab leak hypothesis/conspiracy theory.
e.g .
The Wuhan Institute of Virology has reported working with a virus called RaTG13, which is the closest-known relative of SARS-CoV-2 with a genome sequence similarity of 96.2 per cent. But even this is genetically quite distant from SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 clearly isn’t its immediate progenitor, says Robertson. “They weren’t working on the right viruses,” he says.
His argument, if there is one, seems to be: if it could have happened, it must have happened.
And his proof is: he’ll get the studio audience to laugh at you if you dispute him.
I think the original cause of a growing pandemic is exponentially less important than what you do once you find one headed your way. There have always been disease outbreaks. There will always be disease outbreaks. Our collective reaction to that is what will determine if it is quickly contained and mitigated, or if it is allowed to spread. Clearly, in our (the US) case, the choice by those in power with the ability to do something about it was to
Dismantal the department which had the responsibility to respond and prepare for pandemics (Pandemic response team set up in the Obama administration which Trump dismantled because Obama had set it up).
Deny the pandemic was real, even while people were dying left and right.
Refuse to purchase required medical supplies, ppe, and life-saving equipment.
Try to block individual states from implementing mitigation actions, such as mask mandates and lock downs.
Refuse to invoke response protocols to increase manufacturing of much needed medical supplies and ppe.
No help at all to the States, make them find medical supplies on their own.
Confiscate medical supplies from the States when states purchases them on their own.
Promote bogus fake cures such as bleach.
Propagate conspiracy theories targeting anyone who tries to do anything about the pandemic, such as attacks on people wearing masks, or attacks on businesses trying to protect their employees and customers by asking them to wear masks
Propagate conspiracy theories trying to convince people not to get vaccinated
It’s like our government (and certain segments of our society) did everything they possibly could to try to increase the spread of the pandemic and maximize the death toll. It’s like they were fighting for team Covid.
We’ve always had disease breakouts, and we always will. What will happen when the next one comes around? Are we going to end up with the same counterproductive responses?
Good enumeration! #4 and above requires substantial evidence, and would generally start falling into the ‘constructed virus’ case that people have repeatedly argued against. As the number rises, there’s a substantial increase in burden of proof. #3 and below still are based off a naturally occurring virus, so the real question is a matter of timing. If the lab had an accident, they still released a naturally occurring, wild virus. By the end of the day, the lab’s there because dangerous viruses occur naturally there.
However, because ‘truthiness’ favors whatever makes us a good story (representativeness heuristic), we forget that there’s probably a much wider variety of viruses in the wild than there are engineered ones in the lab. It makes a good story that ‘someone made a mistake’ but sans evidence all we’re doing is pattern matching with noise.
I think when you are deciding how much good you can do by posing a perspective, you have to think hard about all the people and arguments you are propping up. This is a good argument to make if you want to fan anti-Asian racism, anti-China xenophobia, and increase the level of conspiracy theory thinking in the world today.
I doubt any industry has given more thought to safety procedures. There will always be negligence, even if the penalty for such is grim. I can’t see how the benefit of knowing what went wrong comes anywhere close to the damage all this hate and paranoia is inflicting.
As long as nothing really points to 5 or 6: who cares! If china is being unresponsible in their foodmarkets or their virology labs has no bearing whatsoever on how we get rid of the virus.
And 5 and especially 6 seem very unlikely to me. If it was one of those two it was a rather unsuccesful. A bioweapon needs to be much more effective than a mortality rate of (max) a few percent in bad situations. And it should spread much less easy back to your own people.
It’s possible, but the problem is primarily that the viruses don’t jump directly from bats to humans… or if they do, that then entirely changes the zoonosis theory, plus there’s the bit I’ve seen multiple places that the virus doesn’t infect bats very well, which would indicate an intermediate animal(s) which they’ve yet to find even one of (or bats with this virus).
It’s not so much that I want to believe the virus is a lab escape, it’s just there’s a distinct lack of evidence (that I’ve found, happy to read otherwise) for either zoonosis, or lab escapes… and the zoonosis should actually leave lots of it.
CV-19 is almost certainly a naturally evolved virus: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
(tl/dr the virus does things that look like they ‘shouldn’t’ work according to current knowledge, so if a human was making it up they’d have done it a different way)
Which doesn’t rule out the “accidental leak of virus they were studying” hypothesis, but if it naturally evolved in a lab, it could have done the same in the wild as well.
Citation?
Zoonosis would have to happen exactly once for it to spread into humans. Why would we have data on it now? What other zoonotic disease did we discover the animal reservoir for in two years?
Viruses don’t all of a sudden gain the ability to jump species with one random mutation, and as was the case with MERS, it took many, many jumps between Camels and humans to get to a point where it could reliably infect humans. Go read up on zoonosis a bit more, especially in bat-human transmissions, with respect to the large differences in our immune systems.
We discovered the animals reserviors for both the previous SARS within a much shorter time scale than two years. Plus we also found a lot of evidence of it jumping back and forth in terms of tests done on animals and humans when it was identified. Something which I’ve not seen for Covid-19.
Also, influenza, the zoonotic disease reserviors are well known, which is why they’re able to have a vaccine every year.
I am not trying to counter your point. I just would like to know if that is standard for disease outbreaks in general? Looking beyond other coronavirus outbreaks, what is a reasonable timeframe for finding animal reservoirs? It hasn’t been done for Ebola yet, has it?
Ebola comes from bats supposedly… fruit bats it seems (going to read up if that’s a best guess, or something more solid), but in the case of highly infectious pandemic causing diseases, they try and gain as much info as possible, and finding the animal source is a big part of that puzzle, if only to understand what else might be lying in wait there.
I won’t drag racism into this discussion, but let’s just say there’s a little less money available for that sort of research when the people who die from it are poor and black.
MERS likely was first seen in 2007, so, no, not faster than two years. Also most animal vectors are a bit smaller and harder to catch than a dromedary. There’s still questions on Ebola’s non-human reservoir. SARS-CoV-1 was identified in 2002, the animal reservoirs identified in 2017.
It’s going to be difficult to find these reservoirs if there’s widespread demonization of scientists whose day job it is to find these reservoirs.
At this point, I’m very much in the “We’ll never know” camp, and I have resigned myself to that. I would like to know, of course, but I don’t see a scenario where this isn’t still debated 50 years from now, like the Kennedy Assassination. There are possibilities and likelihoods for a whole bunch of theories, but nothing definite. If it was zoonotic, we will never know that for sure at this point. And if it was a lab leak, well, there are people who will make sure we don’t know that either.
I’m not sure if you’re throwing the demonization comment at me, but I’ll assume not…
MERS was possibly seen then (in the early stages of zoonosis), but only identified in 2012 in a patient… can’t find anything as of yet as to the time of identifcation of the reservior, but plenty of papers in 2016 treat the Camels source as a known thing.
Either way, when these became serious diseases (ie, not just one patient), they had loads of resources thrown at them, and this information came out fairly quickly,c-19 is another level compared to those two, and still it isn’t known… I suppose it could be Chinese recalitrance to be linked to the origin of the outbreak, or something else?
