Well I hope that at least the next lab-made pandemic will insert some beneficial mutations to humanity.
In a way, the lab-leak hypothesis is comforting, because it means that nature with its own means did not manage to manufacture such a highly-transmissive disease, despite the facts of modern life, record human population and rates of travel. If it is not lab-made, then nature may do this again soon with another virus.
> Well I hope that at least the next [..] pandemic will insert some beneficial mutations to humanity.
Sometimes this is indirect; there is some debate on why some Europeans have immunity to HIV, the current hypothesis is that it’s a result of us surviving the Black Plague.
Also why Africans did not suffer such large number of fatalities per population.
A younger population but we are one of the few regions in the world still giving the TB/Polio vaccine at birth.
"epigenetic modifications, activate cells of the innate immune system, such as monocytes, macrophages and natural killer cells"
> (...) it means that nature with its own means did not manage to manufacture such a highly-transmissive disease (...)
I think I'm less optimistic than you in this matter. There's at least one counter-example to that statement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu that has the same order of magnitude of deaths as COVID-19, but in a world where population was ~4x smaller and I'd expect less mobile / interconnected.
Nobody actually knows how many people died of Spanish flu. Look at the range of estimates provided and where they come from - you'll discover that the distribution is enormous, partly because the high estimates come from epidemic models. But such models always seem to overshoot by large amounts, so their estimates aren't credible.
Putting that to one side, Spanish flu happened in the context of:
- A society that didn't know viruses existed at all, only bacteria.
- The very recent discovery of aspirin, which was believed to be a wonder drug that could cure anything. Doctors didn't know what doses were safe and had a habit of prescribing lethal overdoses to people suffering from the flu.
- Widespread censorship by the authorities due to WW1. It became known as "Spanish Flu" mostly because the censorship was just less aggressive there, so that's where reports emerged from first.
For tech firm employees systematically censoring reports of bad reactions to vaccines, there are lessons here that still apply to the modern day. Spanish Flu would probably have been less deadly in a society with less censorship, and which was less likely to mass prescribe brand new miracle pharma products.
I do think this is an appropriate counter-example, but I’m curious how much modern medicine would change the impact (and preserve the case for optimism).
Rapid vaccine development does indeed give some cause for optimism. Some counters that I'd have to that would be a potential resurgence of polio in the US [1] and the appearance of drug-resistant pathogens (typhoid fever in this case) [2], just to keep us on our toes and curb our enthusiasm...
Bacteriology was already developing at that time, first vaccines were already in use (for none other than a viral disease!), and the existence of a pathogen smaller than bacteria was already hypothesized. The response to Spanish flu was also eerily similar to what was recommended in the first year of COVID: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#/media/File%3AIl....
All that aside, your comment does not really prove that "nature cannot come up with something so transmissive", which was the claim here.
> the lab-leak hypothesis is comforting, because it means that nature with its own means did not manage to manufacture such a highly-transmissive disease
We are well past the point where nature is our greatest enemy.
A lab leak of such consequences has the attention of every hostile organization out there. Imagine the scale of hurt you could achieve, yourself remaining pretty much immune to detection and prosecution, by doing the same thing but intentionally. Bye-bye unrestricted travel.
Luckily, before that happens, humans will have killed themselves off and turned the planet into Venus 2.0. That way, the rogue planet doesn't have to feel guilty of wiping out an advanced species.
Isn’t the lab leak hypothesis saying nature did this make this, but scientists who were studying (and allowing) the natural processes accidentally leaked it?
Which is the main argument against this kind of function research - there’s little gain compared to the risk.
Wuhan scientist working with EcoHealth alliance specifically wrote a grant proposal with intent to:
“We will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in [a type of mammalian cell commonly used in microbiology] and HAE cultures,”
They were denied over Gain of Function concerns, and bam a year later the only Sars virus to be ever observed with those exact human-specific cleavage sites at the S1 S2 junction ravages the planet starting 500m from WIV.
The term "lab leak" is ambiguous (deliberately I guess) as to whether the virus was modified in the lab before it leaked, or if the lab leaked an unmodified virus.
But the preponderance of evidence is that the leaked virus was modified before it was leaked. The critical spike protein in SARS_CoV2 is coded uses a sequence of amino acids that has never been seen before in any other coronavirus. I forget the names, but there are certain common amino acids that can be coded using several different functionally-identical DNA (RNA) sequences, and the SARS-CoV2 one looks like the sequences used in labs and humans, and never seen before in natural viruses. One nobel laureate in biology described this as a "smoking gun" that this was a lab leak when they first heard about it.
I disagree, I hope that lableak confirmation will push for a reassessment on the risk reward ratios for research. It may slow down scientific process, but we can now see that the dangers, if catastrophic enough, even if minimal, may not warrant it.
I can’t believe anyone would seriously say ‘it doesn’t matter how it happened.’ That’s like the NTSB holding a press conference and saying it doesn’t matter why the 747 crashed and killed 500 people.
They have to determine what happened so they can do root cause analysis and institute procedures to make this less likely to occur again.
People will rationalize any argument as long as their sacred cows are protected (we must defend SCIENCE it's under attack from the ignorant!) or enemies eviscerated.
It is not very effective from what I've seen. They would have been better off contracting with Pfizer or other Western companies that had effective vaccines.
Cheap made in China crap that doesn't work. I kid, sort of.
Irrelevant - our vaccines are also worthless by this point. They don't work against Omicron and there's no difference in infection or fatality rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated by now. There hasn't been for months. Or actually, infection rates are usually reported to be higher in the vaccinated group but by how much depends on age and number of doses. There was a difference at the beginning, although it's unclear how reliable that data actually is (even in the west).
Such a controversial statement requires sources. A quick Google seems to disagree (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/united-states-rates-of-co...), although I don't have the energy to dig into it more than that since I hardly have the burden of proof.
The devil is in the details. That's a graph of deaths that are COVID positive at or shortly before death. I said "fatality rates" without that qualification. Hopefully we both agree that vaccines are useless if they just change cause of death without reducing actual mortality rates.
It's usually better to use UK data than US. US/CDC data is rather useless and corrupted (e.g. they like to classify someone as unvaccinated if the hospital couldn't quickly find proof they are vaccinated, which isn't at all the same thing). No country has quality data and the UK's has its own problems, but in general the UK statistical releases provide more data and more accurate data. Same biology everywhere so that shouldn't be an issue.
"It appears that things have got somewhat worse since last week’s report, with the hospitalisation and death rates in the double vaccinated (not boosted) exceeding that seen in the unvaccinated for all aged over 70, and with a higher death rate in those aged over 60 as well. What’s more, there now appears to be practically no benefit of vaccination with two doses of vaccine for those aged under 60, in terms of the remaining protection against hospitalisation and death."
Another analysis on the UK data (lots of graphs etc)
Equality of outcome should not be a surprise because this is what happened in the Pfizer trial as well. Actually slightly more deaths in the vaccine arm than the placebo arm, in the end, so this should be our prior expectation. They argued this was not a problem because it was not statistically significant, which is not a logical way to use statistical significance.
W.R.T. infections, again US official data is released in corrupted/useless ways but there is some useful data from the private sector. It shows what I'm talking about:
Nature does not 'manage to manufacture'. Genomic changes occur by random chance.
For example, nature did not intend to manufacture smallpox, when that became a thing 4-5000 years ago. Instead, some random pox virus (like monkey pox) infected some people and random changes happened to produce smallpox, which became endemic in the human population. Then, another mutation happened that caused hemmorhagic smallpox to become a thing and to start killing people (the vast majority of smallpox strains do not have high death rates, although they can cause bad disability, although no one knows if they would with modern medicine).
So nature can produce anything a human can. But certainly, human intervention to make a disease worse can also make terrible diseases.
In nature, it makes no sense for a virus to be both highly transmissible and highly deadly. Any such virus would cease to exist after having run amok in such a way in its hosts. Therefore, any extremely deadly virus should be looked at with similarly extreme criticism, especially if / when it adapts and becomes a better behaving parasite.
Nature, and evolution, don't follow motive based logic. Random mutations that are temporarily beneficial but are detrimental to the long term do happen.
To put it another way, a cell mutates based off of random chance. It doesn't have desires. We only have to go back as far as 1918 to see an example of a virus that could not have been engineered and was highly transmissible and highly deadly. As you say, in the long term that doesn't work out- the virus in that case mutated to be much more mild- which is why you won't see viruses like that surviving for long. But it still doesn't make sense to assume viruses evolve according to a motivation based logic.
You're assuming that viruses don't have natural reservoirs. For example, viral hemorrhagic fevers, particularly filovirus VHFs, are both highly transmissible and highly deadly -- accounting for their history of rapid, fast-growing, and quickly-diminishing epidemics amongst humans -- but have stable zoonotic reservoirs that allow them to circulate freely across those populations. (Bats' unique immune system, like camelids, makes them a particularly good evolutionary proving ground for viral evolution, so they serve as a reservoir and a source of ongoing viral mutations.)
No, it was the neolithic, and in particular animal husbandry that was the culprit rather than simply urbanization which was a later emergence. And when you contrast new world peoples who had very few animals to domesticate, there's only one disease thought to have originated there: syphilis. This is despite the records of highly concentrated populations in various regions in the New World.
"In the world our human immune system evolved in hundreds of thousands of
years ago, infectious diseases could not become a major problem because, with a
few exceptions, when you survive an infectious disease, you usually don’t get it
again. Either it kills you or it leaves you completely immune to it for the rest of
your life. For the vast majority of human history our species lived in small tribes
that were spread thin and, for all intents and purposes, pretty isolated from each
other. An infectious disease simply could not become a dangerous threat and
establish itself in our ancestors effectively. Because if it infected a tribe, it would
infect every available person in no time and then die off because there would be
no one left to jump over. So our evolution did not really have to consider these
sorts of pathogens that much.
"As we became farmers and city dwellers our lifestyle changed forever—and
so did the diseases that targeted us. Living close together created a perfect
breeding ground for infectious diseases. Suddenly, in evolutionary terms, there
were hundreds or even thousands of victims to infect. As our ancestors were not
aware of the nature of microorganisms or even basic hygiene and they did not
yet possess tools like soap and indoor plumbing, there was not much they could
do—on the contrary, their lack of understanding made things worse.
"And when they began domesticating and living together with animals in
close quarters, often even sleeping in the same rooms, some pathogens jumped
over. Our new lifestyle turned out to be the perfect environment for the
pathogens of our new animal friends, to adapt to humans and vice versa. As a
consequence, virtually every infectious disease we know today arose in the last
ten thousand years. From cholera, smallpox, measles, influenza, and the
common cold to chicken pox."
Our immune systems were evolving 100 thousand years ago, and they still are now.
If we weren't able to handle new diseases, everyone would have died from covid, not some percent of a percent. Our immune systems are very very capable for handling pathogens
So does Guns, Germs, and Steel and Sapiens, and Dawn of Everything and so does 1491 - and for all they do touch on disease what I've said comports with them.
The main deterrent here is that it's too easy for the leaders of the evil government to end up being infected too. Even if you target a virus at specific genetics or make a secret vaccine, it's impossible to predict how it might evolve once it's out in the wild. At least given current technology, viruses can't be controlled well enough to make good weapons.
Nature certainly manufactured HCoV-OC43, another betacoronavirus very similar to SARS-CoV-2. It is the leading suspect for causing a worldwide pandemic which killed a lot of people starting in 1889.
In a way, the lab-leak hypothesis is comforting, because it means that nature with its own means did not manage to manufacture such a highly-transmissive disease, despite the facts of modern life, record human population and rates of travel. If it is not lab-made, then nature may do this again soon with another virus.