> A virus being engineered to be an order of magnitude less virulent seems unlikely to say the least.

From what I gathered it’s not suggesting specific genetic traits were engineered, but rather that they were experimenting and one of those experiments could have accidentally been released(?).

Yes, but is the theory is that one experiment, in the context of a gain analysis, was made in order to see how the virus might evolve to be much less severe?

Why would a gain analysis try to find ways in which a virus could be made weaker? I don't doubt that an accidental release is feasible, though very very unlikely, but why would an experiment make a less severe virus in the first place?

>Why would a gain analysis try to find ways in which a virus could be made weaker?

To better understand the mechanisms that make it weak or strong?

Plus, why would it have to be "made weaker" as opposed, accidentally made weaker? If they were experimenting they would have all sorts of varieties/results... it's not like every experiment to make it stronger would make it stronger... surely some could fail and make it weaker!

If I were to make a great bio weapon that would do the maximum damage, I will have these attributes: 1. Spread it easily; 2. Don't kill the ones who spread it most easily (the young); 3. Be lethal enough to overwhelm the system. And so I have the Covid-19. Of course it is all post-fact analysis. but it also answers your question of why would an experiment make a less sever virus in the first place - to address the biggest problem of an infectious agent as a bioweapon, i.e. a virulent virus ends up killing too many too fast to be highly infective and 'effective'.

And if I were to make a bioweapon, I would think about long-term impact.

(1) Millions disabled is far worse than millions dead.

(2) Attacks can come in multiple pieces. The first virus might do damage to make people especially vulnerable to the second virus. If I can protect my population against the first one /or/ the second, my people are safe.

My opinion is it's just a matter of time before we see bioweapons, and we should be ready. If not before COVID19, then now. Our vulnerability is very obvious.

We should treat this as an emergency prep drill, and make sure businesses can operate remotely, kids can learn remotely, we have PPE, and the infrastructure is in place for essential work. That also wouldn't collapse the economy.

Infectious bioweapons are a horrible idea in a highly connected world for the reason we can all plainly see: they don’t respect national borders.

It is an old-fashioned notion of a weapon that only made sense when there was little exchange between the citizens of states in opposition, like the U.S. and USSR.

China, for whom international trade is a crucial part of their strategy, would not work on an infectious disease weapon unless they simultaneously developed a vaccine to protect their own people. The fact they are not currently vaccinating their population, or even in the lead in developing a vaccine, is extremely strong proof that COVID-19 did not originate as a Chinese bioweapon candidate.

Not a proof at all. It just shows that it can't be a planned release.

If a lab in China had been working with this virus at all, they would have had at minimum working cultures of it, and potentially multiple strains and experience modifying them. Cultures alone would have put them ahead of western pharma companies in developing a vaccine—even in the case of an unplanned release.

The fact that they’re not ahead is compelling proof that this virus was as new to Chinese medicine as it was to everyone else.

> The fact that they’re not ahead is compelling proof that this virus was as new to Chinese medicine as it was to everyone else.

I appreciate your argument, but are you sure that they are not ahead? I don't have personal knowledge, but (for example) there was a Reuters article last week with a headline that included that claim "China leads COVID-19 vaccine race": https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-.... If somehow it was proved that they are indeed ahead, would you consider this compelling proof in the opposite direction? I think I'd consider both directions to be weak evidence, but neither to be anything near proof.

They are ahead by a few weeks, yes.

If there is a country that benefited most from this virus, it's Russia. Crippling economies of China and especially US (with additional misinformation to make people not wear masks).

Why would a country that wanted to deploy a bio weapon started on it's own land? It's not like travel to other countries was restricted.

Also Russia is not a country that would have qualms about affecting own citizens. Putin get to power by coordinating bombings on apartment complexes and blaming Chechens for it.

Well, let's break down this hypothetical a bit more:

(1) "Work on" is different from "release." If I were China, I would not release a bioweapon, but I might work on one. The US and USSR worked on nuclear weapons but did not release them. There are 200 nations. Some of them almost certainly have secret bioweapons programs.

(2) As China showed, they could handle a COVID19-level bioweapon attack while the US can't. US has several times as many /dead/ as China had /infected./ In a war, if I were China, I might release one too if I had one.

(3) If I were planning a sneak attack, as I said, a multipart bioweapon might make sense. If something like COVID19 damages the lungs, and makes people vulnerable to PICORNA21, and only 80,000 of my citizens caught COVID19, while millions of Americans did, it seems pretty safe. Especially if I know I can do another lockdown, and the US can't. Release PICORNA21, lock down, wait for millions of paralyzed Americans, and take my rightful spot back in the world.

(4) China is not the only player. Bioweapons are rapidly moving into the range of clever undergrad students, not to speak of terrorist organizations, rogue nations, etc.

I'm not trying to badmouth China here. I don't even think China is the major threat; just that the US should be ready for something like COVID19 intended as a weapon.

Also, as points of fact: (a) China is vaccinating its military already. (b) China has no reason to vaccinate its population yet; their lockdown has worked. If China did vaccinate their population already, as you point out, that would be clear proof this was engineered by China.

You missed out one critical element of a highly contagious bioweapon: you have to be able to protect your own population. Otherwise it's a self-own.

(This is why nobody has really used bioweapons in warfare to date, with the exception of some questionable reports that the USSR had a really lethal weaponized smallpox strain on some of their ICBM warheads, as a balance-of-terror multiplier.)

While this doesn't prove that COVID19 isn't a bioweapon, it strongly suggests that it got loose long before whoever designed it anticipated. Unless, of course, it was developed by the world-leading Vietnamese biological warfare institute (hey, look at their fatality figures)! (That was sarcasm, by the way.)

Not if you’re a communist regime. Remember, in communism, there is no individual. Everyone belongs to the state.

>If I were to make a great bio weapon that would do the maximum damage

You must not know much about bioweapons, then. By any measure, SARS-CoV-2 is a very, very poor bioweapon.

Think about it... it infects everyone but for the most part younger people don't die from it or even become incapacitated. It's mostly killing the elderly or people who have pre-existing conditions.

Effectively, SARS-CoV-2 helps the nation that's infected with it prepare for conventional conflict... it leaves younger people able to fight in the military and with some immunity to the weapon, it greatly reduces the need to care for the elderly or those in poor physical condition, freeing up workers for weapons production or logistics.

It's easy to stop this supposed "weapon" from spreading, just social distance and wear a mask... if everyone does it, the attack is ineffective.

Any country that attacked another using SARS-CoV-2 as a weapon would be suiciding. All the virus would accomplish is making the youngest, most able portion of the target population very angry and reducing the number of non combat capable people they have to take care of.

But wait, you say... the US is having a much higher impact from the virus.

That's because our leadership has failed outright and continues to do so at many levels. Calling the virus a hoax, politically motivated re-openings, the support of ignorance instead of science, conspiracy theories... all due to poor leadership.

Which of course is the real reason this tinfoil hat theory that the virus is a weapon hasn't died yet. Convincing a large number of people that it's a weapon would remove responsibility from Trump and the GOP for failing so incredibly badly, or at least make them look better in the run-up to the election.

The truth is that SARS-CoV-2 isn't a weapon, it's a pandemic which the US could have quickly suppressed and defeated, but did not because our corrupt, inept government worships ignorance instead of enlightenment.

Or what if the virus was intentionally released to remove a costly population demographic (old & infirm) that no longer have a cost benefit for the CCP/PRC GDP. Keep in mind that we still don't have valid numbers from China so we don't know how many died though back-channel reports say the reported numbers are much too low. The virus may very well have performed its intended purpose and any damage to enemies of the CCP is just iceing on the cake.

Good question! But I just write javascript :) very interesting stuff

Just looking at it from an effect perspective, it’s clear that the much more virulent variant was much easier to keep under control.

> Why would a gain analysis try to find ways in which a virus could be made weaker?

You're presuming it was for gain analysis. What if the intention was different? What if you were ultimately considering the virus for bio-warfare and wanted to hide that intention?

If we're going to explore theories this fits the evidence, or is at least possible.

I read that viruses, as a whole, are trending to be less severe because highly lethal viruses kill the host faster than it can spread. They could be researching ideas like this.

maybe to be safe and minimize the consequence of accidents?

maybe you can still arrive to the same conclusion, regardless of suppressing or amplifying a trait?

Why do you think it's very, very unlikely?

Accidental releases of viruses from labs have happened quite regularly. It's a serious concern.

The UK was first introduced to the uselessness of Imperial College and their epidemiological modelling by an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001 amongst livestock. It resulted in mass killing (by humans) of animals. Eventually the epidemic disappeared, amongst great acrimony and disaster for farmers.

In 2007 foot and mouth appeared again. This time, the virus was traced to the source of the outbreak. It came from a lab in Pirbright where the virus had been stored for research. Two government orgs were connected by pipes, and the pipes had been allowed to rust due to a budget dispute over which org should pay for repairs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-and-m...

There's a long history of biolabs leaking and being found to be dangerous. It's not at all unlikely given this shoddy history.

https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/the-long-histo...

the New York Times (8/5/19) reported: “Deadly Germ Research Is Shut Down at Army Lab Over Safety Concerns”

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/17/reports...

"Hundreds of bioterror lab mishaps cloaked in secrecy"

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/06/23/undisclosed-cd...

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday they have identified 34 incident reports involving bioterror pathogens mishandled at CDC labs that were “inadvertently” not disclosed in 2014 to congressional investigators who had asked for the information

Oh and here's one from December 2019:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03863-z

Chinese institutes investigate pathogen outbreaks in lab workers

> why would an experiment make a less severe virus in the first place?

Wouldn't that make it seem safer to study?

Is this actually the case? This paper [1] seems to indicate that there are multiple types of gain-of-function research, not just an increase in virulence. In fact, the paper specifically discusses “transmissibility”, which would seem to support the argument of the paper under discussion: “In short, SARS-CoV-2 is possessed of dual action capability. In this paper we argue that the likelihood of this being the result of natural processes is very small”

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK285579/

Sure. The issue is that there would have to be gain-of-function research to reduce virulence and (maybe, it's not entirely clear) to increase transmissivity.

There is no evidence for that AFAIK, and I don't understand why a lab would do a gain of function experiment and reduce function instead.

It strikes me as reducing virulence would be a responsible first step before conducting research on increasing transmissivity of a deadly virus.

Do you have the study where they would have reduced virulence for these reasons? Because reducing the virulence of a virus to such a level that a large part of the population don't even get any symptoms seems odd to say the least.

Also, it's not even clear that COVID-19 is that much more infectious (or at all) than SARS, it seems to me that its explained well enough by so many people brushing it off or not even realizing they have it because it's so much less severe.

Reasons a [malicious|altruistic] actor might do that:

You have the ability to use it to induce fear and therefore behavioral changes. Positive cases are valuable.

Plausible deniability.

Mistakes.

Response.

Testing (as parent pointed out).

Assume it's academic research.

Introducing feature X (regardless of effect) allows you to study X.

You do it to learn more about X, not because you particularly want to engineer something more virulent or lethal.

Yes, exactly, which is discussed in the paper. The goal of gain of function research isn’t about “let’s make viruses that do crazy shit,” it’s a method of hypothesis testing. When you can successfully add (or remove) stuff then you can test hypotheses that would otherwise not be testable.

Reduce virulence compared to what? SARS-1? But they are not talking about SARS-1, they actually were talking about some other random bat viruses, which have zero virulence in humans.

Au contraire, you would expect random bat viruses to be incredibly virulent in humans.

Really? How is that? Proof? Link?

This research seems relevant;

>Our key result is that hosts most closely related to humans harbour zoonoses of lower impact in terms of morbidity and mortality, while the most distantly related hosts—in particular, order Chiroptera (bats)—harbour highly virulent zoonoses with a lower capacity for endemic establishment in human hosts.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.201...

True, but to be dangerous the have to pass cross species barrier, before that event, virulence is exactly zero. So, random bat viruses have zero virulence in people.

Edit: I'm very wrong about the terminology here.

---

CoV-2 is way more virulent than SARS, as evidenced by the fact it's spread across the entire world. SARS might spread more easily from contact, and it does more damage once it's inside you, but that's only one component of virulence. MERS is also not really comparable - it's very difficult to transmit between humans.

I get what you're saying but practical effects just matter more than isolated metrics. Viruses that transmit asymptomatically are more likely to be virulent, because you can't isolate patients. If you're trying to engineer a virus, you want to make it transmit faster than it kills people and you want to make it hard to quarantine.

You're confusing virulence and infectivity. Virulence is specifically how severe a virus is. For example, one might say that Hepatitis is more virulent than the common cold.

You're right, I am. I should have focussed on the point that asymptomatic transmission and lack of severity may be a feature in an engineered virus, not a bug.

What I know is that a virus like Ebola, which kills almost everybody who is untreated, cannot be that successful as a virus like Covid19 or HIV, because it gets no chance to spread. The corona virus is so successful because it can spread without killing everybody.

How can you argue that the outcome of a test is known before that test is performed? That’s why the test is made in the first place.

> SARS-CoV-2 is much less virulent than SARS or MERS.

Can you provide sources for that? I thought it was the opposite.

Virulence :

1. the severity or harmfulness of a disease or poison.

COVID-19 - has an fatality rate of around 0.5-1%, according to the best methodologies we have, in various environments, with recent papers suggesting that it might be even less lethal in places where medical care is sufficient.

In comparison, the best data for SARS fatality rates is of around 11% (!).

This means that SARS-CoV-2 is around ten times less virulent than SARS. MERS is even worse than SARS.

Now, SARS-CoV-2 is likely even more infectious than SARS, but part of that is because it's less severe, meaning that you can spread it even without being sick.

Thanks, I had my definitions wrong :)

Should we go by the crude fatality rate since the data around COVID-19 isn't rock solid yet right? Shouldn't we measure COVID-19's virulence by the IFR aka infection fatality rate instead? As of today with 14,194,795 cases and 599,438 deaths, COVID-19's infection fatality rate is 4.23%. By comparison, SARS only had 8,098 cases and only 774 deaths, giving it an IFR of 9.56%.

4.23% is a case fatality rate, or CFR, not IFR.

The issue is the SARS had a lot less cases, and was more virulent. There is no evidence for asymptomatic spread of SARS, and almost every single infection was accounted for using contact tracing.

Therefore, it makes sense to use the best guess at IFR for both. The best guess for IFR for COVID-19 is around 0.3-0.9%, depending on the state of the healthcare system.

SARS however, seems to have a very low rate of asymptomatic carriers : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3371799/ , of around 7%. Of those 7%, it is expected that the vast majority are detected, as there were very few cases of SARS of unknown origin (IE, no contact with an infected person). On the other hand, COVID19 is believed to have asymptomatic infection rates of as high as 50%, and even at the very beginning there were tons of cryptic transmission.

Therefore, it is likely that the CFR of SARS is very close the IFR. Using a high-estimate for the IFR of COVID19 and comparing it to the CFR of SARS should yield a very good comparison for virulence of the two viruses.

Therefore, SARS is indeed in the ballpark of 10x more virulent than COVID19.

We need to be really careful about the claims of asymptomatic infection.

The problem with this concept is it becomes impossible to detect false positives. In fact it makes the test the ground truth rather than actual observable clinical sickness. Any bug in the test thus creates a pseudo-epidemic:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00047325.htm

If you look at that paper you can see it admits that other research studies found no asymptomatic infection at all. Others on the other hand said they saw it. So there's no real consensus that this phenomenon actually exists in this case, and the asymptomatic people didn't seem to transmit the virus at all (so why are we all wearing masks now then?).

The numbers involved are tiny. Their conclusions are based on the antibody test returning positive without symptoms for just 6 people. The amount of antibodies found in the asymptomatic cases was significantly lower than for other cases, leading to the question of whether they were picking up noise at the edge of the test's capabilities and whether they truly understand how the test works (given that there weren't many SARS-CoV-1 cases, there'd be limited cases on which to test or calibrate it).

Isn't there often a trade-off between virulence and infectiousness in viral transmission?

See "A transmission-virulence evolutionary trade-off explains attenuation of HIV-1 in Uganda" https://elifesciences.org/articles/20492

That trade off is made by evolution. I don't see why scientists in a lab would make that trade off in a gain of function analysis - you can just make it more infectious and keep (likely increase) the level of virulence.

Since evolution isn't involved in the proposed mechanism, I see no reason why such a trade-off would occur.

I think you presume a level of mastery over artificially engineered viruses that just doesn't exist. Is it obvious before a modification is made to a virus strand whether it will be more or less virulent? Besides, engineering for virulence can easily get yourself killed. Furthermore it didn't necessarily have to be engineered for nefarious purposes. It could have been an experimental virus that accidentally escaped and that's all.

Perhaps depends on your goals. Virulent enough to cause global panic and show how a totalitarian state can respond better to a pandemic than democratic stated. But not virulent enough to actually kill everyone.

Similarly SARS and MERS were perhaps too virulent and could thus easily be controlled by screening for symptoms, while the new coronavirus can spread without symptoms, which could possibly be attributed to the lower virulence.

Now this sounds exactly like something Donald Trump has been saying all this time, and such conspiracy theories don't contribute much to the discussion.

If thousands of deaths in China, a complete lockdown that hit the economy incredibly hard and perhaps more crucially, the total breakdown and potential reshaping of the global supply chain, which China has been benefitting from massively, is something that the Chinese gov wants to to achieve, then such conspiracy theories might hold water. I think it's plain to see how nonsensical they are.

Also, nobody made the US look bad but themselves. This is obvious if you compare COVID responses in countries like Germany with those in the US.

Which professional published best case death estimate did the US not beat?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23407130

Excess deaths are the only accurate measure.

Then it was truly unavoidable for the us to keep getting worse and worse, for some reason more in states full of people who think masks are mind control (a total mystery that we will never understand), while other countries are seeing things get better.

It's not that mysterious how tribalism, fear, and the discomfort of admitting being wrong, just to name a few contributing factors, can result in people holding irrational beliefs.

They're not a different species, they're people. If you give into the urge to treat them as "other", as inferior, or as a different "tribe" to be defeated you're not as different from them with their ridiculous beliefs as you might like to think.

We? No. You don't understand. That's fine. You can learn.

https://stpauls.vxcommunity.com/Issue/Us-Experiment-On-Infan...

You ignored the Q you responded to. "Which professional published best case death estimate did the US not beat?"

The "a total mystery that we will never understand" was intended to be fairly obvious sarcasm. My mistake.

That's not completely true. Some of those pressures still apply to artificial viruses once they're released. Highly dangerous viruses get quarantined, and viruses that produce symptoms quickly (and don't transmit asymptomatically, or have a shorter window) are more obvious. Both of those properties reduce real-world transmissability, which is all that actually matters.

I'd argue that SARS-CoV-2 is very far from the Pareto optimal trade-off in infectivity and virulence. There are viruses that are both more virulent and more infectious.

Maybe, but I can't imagine it's easy to reach it, or really establish it. Too many variables to predict.

Like to be clear I don't think it was deliberately engineered to be optimal. If it's engineered at all I'd imagine it's an experiment that escaped.