I disagree that it is less actionable. I am a former scientist. Proper handling of lab waste etc. is infinitely easier than having the whole world lock down, wear masks, and rapidly develop mRNA vaccines to try and put the genie back in the bottle.
Sure, but safety requires everyone be perfect about their handling 100% of the time. If a mistake happens, just once, with the wrong lab materials, that's it. And humans will always make mistakes, no matter how bulletproof we think the process is.
Except another very recent one was also a lab accident. So, no, not every single previous one was, and 2 of last 3 will have been from labs.
These thing's aren't being made in labs, they're being stored there but the actual reality is this: none of the countries being so interested in this have any ability to influence the country's these things happen in.
So your effective response protocol may as well just blackbox the problem: "there is a new novel virus, how do we respond?"
No one's going to be invading China to drop napalm on biological research facilities they've collectively decided without the CCP's involvement are "risky".
> The reemergence was probably an accidental release from a laboratory source in the setting of waning population immunity to H1 and N1 antigens
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra0904322
So the statement above that "every single previous one [pandemic] in history" was of natural origin is probably false. The 1977 flu killed about 700k people worldwide, less than SARS-CoV-2 but more than a typical flu season.
To emphasize, humanity doesn't have the technology to invent viruses de novo. A lab-manipulated virus is always going to be derived from a naturally-evolved virus, whether that's in simple ways (like storage in a freezer for 27 years) or complex ones (like genetic engineering). The question is the causality--if a pandemic was caused by the actions of scientists, then if not for those actions, those thousands/millions of people would still be alive.
Second, why would we need to invade China? The USA was literally funding this research, so couldn't we just stop doing that?
If SARS-CoV-2 arose from a lab accident, then China certainly deserves special blame for the coverup. But before that, this wasn't a political topic--it was an obscure academic debate between a small subset of virologists who wanted to perform certain risky experiments, and other academics who thought that risk was unacceptable. It's quite possible that the CCP is currently wishing they'd blamed the whole thing on a rogue, American-funded researcher early on. If they had, then it's quite possible that narrative would have stuck--it would be stupider than what most people seem to believe now, but not by much.
Finally, the indifference you express above is bizarre to me. Do you believe the same thing about Chernobyl, that it's better for us to devote all our resources to improving treatment for cancer (which will also occur naturally, with or without nuclear meltdowns) and none to preventing meltdowns? If not, how is this different?
Haven’t more people died from SARS-Cov-2 than nuclear weapons, why we can’t have international conventions and inspections on dangerous virological research?
- The population was much less densely gathered
- The world population was roughly half what it is today
- There was much less air travel
- Testing was much worse
- Statistics about mortality were much less evenly gathered
There are worse things than lockdown.
Mistakes seem to happen despite just about any amount of preventative measures in our world.
This incident has cost millions of lives and possibly undone decades of progress on reducing poverty worldwide. It is worth pursuing multiple angles in parallel.
Put it this way, if the cause of the worldwide pandemic was because it leaked from a lab then you should fix the lab.
Earlier in the pandemic I saw a focus on the risks of "wet markets" for zoonotic transmission; although that hasn't panned out so far as a theory for COVID-19, if wet markets present a significant risk of creating pandemics (note: if! I don't know they do), we should evaluate possible restrictions and regulations on them.
More recently I've seen discussions of "gain of function" research on bat coronaviruses, and allegations that some dangerous research on coronaviruses was being carried out in BSL-2 laboratories. Regardless of whether COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak (or whether we ever prove it was), if some specific of research presents a significant risk of creating pandemics (again, if!), we should evaluate possible restrictions and regulations on them too.
Pandemics are, I think, inevitable; it would be foolish to ignore trying to prepare for the next one. But the chance of a pandemic is very possibly not set in stone; it would be equally foolish to ignore trying to bring that risk down. And I categorically reject the argument we need to pick one or the other to focus on; I think we can focus on every step of the chain.
Instead, we would do much better to improve our tools for handling these issues by looking at successful and unsuccessful containment protocols, failed attempts to distribute a vaccine quickly enough etc.
> Potentially ignoring the fact that there will be unknown or covert actors ignoring all of these safeties.
I don't mean this as negatively as it sounds, but I literally don't understand the argument you're making here. It feels like it's of the form:
"Because <bad actor> might do <bad thing>, there's no point trying to encourage anyone from not doing <bad thing>."
Is that...right? Because if so, do you also feel like police forces and laws against murder and assault are a distraction from medical research devoted to savings the lives of people wounded in violent crimes?
I think it's reasonable to suggest that "setting houses on fire less often" or "banning setting other people's houses on fire" or "mandating more fire safe construction" are all complementary strategies to "getting better at extinguishing house fire".
Whenever there is a trend of similar talking points on a hot topic it makes me wonder how much of that is influence from outside groups.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If there's specific reason to believe that comments here are somehow being manipulated, that's different and you should email [email protected] so we can look into it. (That's in the site guidelines as well.) But the overwhelming majority of the time, there's zero suggestion of any such thing, other than people disagreeing, which is evidence of nothing but that the topic is divisive.
I've posted hundreds if not thousands of explanations of this over many years at this point: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
You will not find a sane engineer on the planet who says "we don't need to find the root cause, we just need to move ON and move FORWARD". Such nonsense is the domain of politicians.
A nested conspiracy theory is just what we need for some more political polarization in the USA. Score!
So yes, if you stand up and claim that there was rampant voter fraud that changed the outcome of the election, you are at best misinformed, and at worst lying.
I wouldn't even call this voter fraud stuff "conspiracy theories". It's gaslighting and destabilizing propaganda by an administration that failed to get reelected.
Do you deny as stated by many news agencies that the CIA stated or leaked that Russian agents impacted the 2016 election? What about the 2020 election? Is the CIA lying? Did Russian agents or other hackers just sit that one out?
There is so much evidence of election fraud and odd irregularities throughout the United States … the question is whether there was enough of it to impact the results. Arizona came down to 0.3% of the vote and Georgia was razor thin as well. States like these are decided by how votes are counted in a single county (Fulton and Maricopa in these cases) due to the high population concentration in a region of the state. Questioning the results (regardless of which political party) is not lying especially given the thin margins; it is healthy for democracy and gives more confidence in future election results.
That's it, right there. And then when cornered like the lying rats they are, they will claim "people are saying", "a lot of people feel", and "we're just asking questions." No, sorry. I thought the rightwing in the US was the ones don't care what people are saying, how they feel about things, because facts are facts? Oh, and I also thought it was part of the responsibility of being an elected political leader to tell the damn truth and not just "ask questions".
1. Stop doing GoF research
2. Better lab containment processes
Oh the absurdity.
As applied to this situation, it doesn't really matter. The Chinese government has a vested interest in any investigation being labeled inconclusive. Whether it was a lab leak or a result of unhealthy agricultural practices, China doesn't want egg on its face. They'll do everything in their power (which is a lot) to avoid having the finger definitively pointed at them.
Don't miss that the entire gravity of this line of questioning is that if COVID19 did escape from the lab, our entire response to a lab leak would be different and save lives then a zoonotic emergence scenario.
Understanding the root cause is a logical way to do that.
I think the saying "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" applies.
But it keeps happening and maybe labs working with such viruses need much more careful procedures or shouldn’t perform risky gain of function research for example.
Part of this has resolved itself since every piece of information is no longer being evaluated on whether it helps or hurts Trump.
from a legal/international relations perspective, absolutely not
if this was a preventable bio-research accident rather than an act of God or Nature, there are huge ramifications for China's place in and relation to the world
at this point I wouldn't be shocked if it was an accidental leak or an intentional leak by the Chinese, an intentional leak by the US or even an intentional leak by another country to provoke US/China tensions
a forest of mirrors
This concept should be familiar to those in tech already: https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/