You're on a site centered around technology and don't seem to acknowledge the scientific process...
You cannot, with 100% accuracy, model a virus that is mutating in a population that includes the entire planet. We have things we know worked in the past, we try them, and we then modify our next move based on the results. We don't say "well we got that one wrong so now we're just not going to try anything". If every scientist took the approach you're suggesting we'd still be eating raw meat and living in caves.
Lab-made viruses like that have a close to zero chance of being more successful in the wild, even if the researchers had attempted that goal.
Evolution can try gazillions of variations. Humans can't. No, computer simulation doesn't help that much. No, drawing conclusions from differences in natural strains also doesn't help.
Parroting Christopher Hitchens: what is presented without proof can be dismissed without proof
Mutations that have a real impact on the RNA of the virus are incredibly rare. Most random mutations and errors replicating don't produce any meaningful change in the virus and you have to get very unlucky for a deadly mutation to happen.
We should stick to scientific rationalism even if it has limits. There has been too much opportunistic fear-mongering and questionable decision making playing advantage off the back of a natural virus.
This thing obeys the laws of physics, kills people in a particular pattern and can be managed with scientific tools we have had forever. There is simply no need for everybody to be hysterical yet again, when the science of the virus can be so easily spelled out for the masses.
But noo, we have to have a boogeyman to build a network of cultural changes. This particular mechanism of hijacking a natural disaster for control is embarrassingly transparent.
Your argument, like many people made at the time this started, is purely technical. It only considers the virus itself to be the thing needing to be solved, rather than considering second-order effects.
Viruses will always mutate. We can either let nature beat us to the punch or we can attempt to race nature. Also there’s a lot of literature on BSL 4 labs with crazy safety lapses (e.g. labs using duct tape to seal leaks and what not). If we wanted to treat BSL 4 with the same safety culture of modern nuclear technology we could. This is ultimately a policy problem, not a technical problem (e.g. shutting down dangerous labs and defunding the researchers running offending labs).
> Isn't that the whole crux of the debate and dilemma in the first place?
It's not like researchers are "engineering a virus to do exactly what they want it to do", what they do is observe the evolution of cultures of viruses, in an environment that's conductive to it, to see where that ultimately leads.
All of that also constantly happens in nature, but in a controlled lab environment we can accelerate and observe this process, like in a simulation, to see what viruses might be capable of evolving to be dangerous to us in the long term.
Sure, an argument can be made how that's one way of how we could end up creating and releasing such a virus ourselves, but even then: Wouldn't it be preferable for that to happen in a controlled research environment, instead of it just emerging in some remote obscure place? At least then are in a way better position to understand why and how it happens, giving us an edge in fighting it.
All valid points, but let’s be real scientists and work the other way? Can you conclusively rule out that this virus wasn’t engineered (and then maliciously covered up) in a lab? The reason this approach is important is because the stakes here are higher. This means people who should have been careful weren’t, and are responsible for the death of millions and they’re happy continuing to cover up their part in it.
The more important part here is an investigation on the origins of the virus is more about beurecracy than the actual science so unless you can conclusively prove that this virus could have never been engineered by a human you should stop bringing “improbability” of all of these processes as why we should trust these scientists.
We are always running grand experiments in virology, evolution never stops. We know the outcome of evolution, that is novel viruses pop up and kill massive numbers of people.
My take of your entire thread is we let these natural processes kill millions because we fear a significantly smaller long term risk.
counter example: we won't know how to fight a robot apocalypse unless we go ahead and develop some super-intelligent kill bots ourselves, so we can train against it and develop strategies. Given enough time and random variation, someone or some government is bound to create them, so we should not stick our heads in the sand or let fear-mongering stand in the way of research.
In reality COVID-19 required several key mutations to be as harmful and to bind as effectively to human cells as it did. The likelihood of all of these mutations occurring naturally, in animals only, without intermediate variants to observe and develop immunity against, is very small. If only 64 amino acids must mutate exactly correctly to create the deadly variant then it would require 4^64 or 2^128 mutations, which is a large number. Assuming it mutates 100B times per year, that's still more years 3e27 years.
For example, this experiment on more transmissible HIV requires hundreds of acids (600-1000, and a 32 amino prefix).
The point being that creating extremely unlikely events to "see what would happen" is only justified if the risk of the observation is less than the natural risk of the event. If the risk of a world-ending pandemic is 1e-128 per year, and the risk due to human-made viruses is 0.1%, then "not sticking your head in the sand" has raised your risk by an astronomical factor.
No, you’re assuming a counterfactual that isn’t necessarily true. If the virus hadn’t come along, humanity as it stands today may not exist but whatever animal was infected could potentially have kept reproducing / another virus would accomplish what happened anyway. Those are far more likely scenarios.
You’re taking an impossible to prove hypothetical that would require omniscient level reasoning and predictive powers to prove or disprove - it’s not a productive line of reasoning and you’re falling into the exact same trap you’re accusing others of doing. The WWII example is also highly flawed because that one was experts making strategically reasonable calls. Worrying about some hypothetical virus that in the distant future is critical is not strategically reasonable - it’s science fantasy.
You are correct, I was mostly interpreting his post to be about a purposefully engineered virus with specific properties. One could throw darts and hope to get "lucky" by recombining and tweaking existing pathogens. That individual would be wrong a lot, but with concerted effort might find something. I'm not sure that is new technology though. This could have been done at least 15 years ago.
One point that I didn't have time to make was that high mortality is not generally evolutionarily advantageous. Even if you cooked up a strain that was especially nasty, it could take considerable effort to prevent it from mutating in the wild into something less so, since the mutated virus would have a survival advantage of not killing its host. Unlike machines, a creator can't really control what happens to a biological system in the wild as it interacts with the environment. In the scenario you describe, there is considerable uncertainty as to whether it would actually spread as engineered.
This is the crux of what I've clearly done a poor job of saying: we know so little that all these scenarios still rely on incredible amounts of luck more than technology.
And what is the probability that out of the thousands of viruses we identify the exact one that mutates in the exact manner as researches induce in the lab? The possible mutations a virus could take are astronomical, and conditions in a lab using humanized mice models are not something that would ever happen in the wild. Efforts are better spent on surveillance not prediction! https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-018...
I do not mean any offense to you personally with this comment.
I think science should be limited to scientists, and this is a good example. I am not a researcher but I know enough to know what I do not know. People saying that this "virus mutates quickly" is not only wrong but makes it scarier than it is.
Every virus mutates when it is in a new host. A variant is created when that mutation confers some survival benefit.
But COVID actually mutates MUCH SLOWER than influenza!!!!
"Both viruses depend on a viral RNA polymerase to express their proteins, but only SARS-CoV-2 has a proofreading mechanism, which results in a low mutation rate compared to influenza."
"The average mutation rate of SARS-CoV-2 remains low and steady, and is much slower than other RNA viruses such as influenza viruses. Unlike coronaviruses, influenza viruses (which cause the flu) are prone to changes through processes called antigenic drift and antigenic shift.3,4"
The only thing that makes SARS2 a bigger problem that the flu is the R value, or how fast it spreads. Flu is between R1 and R2, while Delta was between R5 and R7.
So the issue is not one of mutations, but of spread. Vaccines do not stop the spread and that is a problem. Even when vaccinates you have no symptoms but you will catch the virus and create mutations.
A total worldwide lockdown, IMO, would have stopped this dead because of the low mutation rate. But unfortunately governments favored the economy over lives. And I also blame Fauci and Trump for not making enough N95 masks and Fauci actually discouraging their use in the beginning.
At this point it is with us forever since wildlife will continue to spread it. Eventually it will settle to a place where it kills X amount of people and we will be OK with it as we have become OK with the flu killing 30,000 to 70,000 people a year.
Interesting points. I guess the fact that it couldn't be stopped is really the deal breaker, unless there was a kill switch in the design of the virus (maybe some kind of antidote you could take?).
Regarding mutability, I am not an expert at all. However, some viruses mutate more than others, so I imagine there could be some way to control the mutability and maybe even prevent it from happening with self repair mechanisms?
Do you know what is this idea usually named? I tried searching for it, but I couldn't find much.
In any case, it feels like it is a field humans should research (and probably already are), because the risk for biological weapons is quite high; and currently our western society is not even prepared to unite and get a vaccine, so I'm not sure how we would react to a riskier pandemic.
There are a number of details about it which are the same as the plans from 2018. I don't think it's reasonable to think the plans of scientists don't get revised as they work. And as soon as the virus starts spreading, even in test mice in the lab, it will start to mutate. So it is entirely possible that what leaks from a lab is a natural mutation off of an engineered virus.
Trying to use difference in details in this case to sow doubt isn't reasonable in my opinion because it's details that are realistically impossible to nail down.
If you read the article carefully, it leaves the two options open, refusing to conclude, with a preference towards a natural mutation. BTW the virus may have jumped from animals to humans inside the lab itself. What is BS is "mutations occur in the wild permanently, so that's the most likely hypothesis". In this particular case, that's unfounded and specifically what I am challenging.
Additionally, in the same way a banana would never occur in nature, many of these experiments researchers conduct are extremely unlikely or out right impossible. For wild viruses crossing over to humans it needs to go through many mutations and people before becoming adapted and highly infectious towards humans. But in a lab you can insert the exact mutation to make it highly infectious towards humans without having to mutate. For example right now the bird flu which can infect humans who have ingested bird droppings, but it can't spread human to human.
The conditions in the lab are just so artificial the predictive power is practically worthless, especially when you consider the massive possibility space. Just like you'd never find something like a banana evolve to it's current state in the wild, you would won't find these viral chimeras just popping up out of no where.
You cannot, with 100% accuracy, model a virus that is mutating in a population that includes the entire planet. We have things we know worked in the past, we try them, and we then modify our next move based on the results. We don't say "well we got that one wrong so now we're just not going to try anything". If every scientist took the approach you're suggesting we'd still be eating raw meat and living in caves.
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