One aspect mentioned was that all the virology labs doing dangerous research would be moved outside of big cities. Then they concluded that such an act would be a terrible thing to do, since no virologist would want to work and live in the middle of nowhere.
It doesn’t have to be a negative thing but I do understand that getting pushed out of all urban areas in a hostile NIMBY culture we’ve developed could very well limit the field in many ways.
Or 90% do and 10% want to shut down the thing depressing their property values. The problem is that 10% votes and shows up to city council meetings.
>> http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/2015/7/richland-wash...
The idea that postdoc researchers are on the whole a bunch of hipster urbanites is laughable.
so far.
Current events point to a possible future that remembers covid as a footnote to the events this year.
You will never, ever keep people safe from something by plugging your ears and pretending it doesn't exist.
The fact that viruses can cause so much damage is exactly why we need even more research into dangerous viruses, not less.
Isn't this line of thinking going to create a dangerous feedback loop?
Scientists experiment to create the deadliest virus yet, this virus leaks (because part of being very dangerous is being very contagious), killing many, shutting down our life as we know it for years.
And what did we learn from it? We need more research, we need to experiment and create even more dangerous viruses, because it can cause so much damage?
Then repeat?
That's not going to end well (but I'm afraid that will happen).
^-- found the bugAll nukes should be decommissioned, and all countries should be open to independent inspectors. (I will never happen, but it _should_). This week, of all weeks, this should be clear.
Not staying ahead of the curve just means someone else will.
It doesn't help that any nuclear plant can make a "dirty bomb" btw, which is one more reason to be anti-nuclear. No nukes, no nuke weapons. Not a bad tradeoff all by itself. (And yes, such bans can be enforced, look no further than Iran's difficulty getting nuclear power going).
The Non-Proliferation Treaty is still a thing, and the US still plays ball with it.
Arms limitation treaties were an important thing until the US scrapped the ABM Treaty in 2002, followed almost immediately by Russia dumping START II, which is the closest real thing I can think of to what you said, differing in the kind of treaty involved and the decade the wheels came off.
It is perfectly accurate to say that they did so (and that it was a direct response to the US withdrawing from the ABM Treaty.)
> NATO's "nuclear sharing" makes a mockery of NPT
NATO’s nuclear sharing agreements predate the NPT, and no new ones have been entered since the NPT, and the continuation of the existing ones is consistent with the NPT.
Now it's too late for this crisis (and possibly humanity) but we must demand NPTs if/when this crisis is resolved.
yes please.
yes of course all nuclear WMD states (not just the biggest) need to abandon this losing game.
The good news is the rest of us have called time: https://banmonitor.org/tpnw-status
Many people got lost many year of life but don’t even know it.
The fact that it affect heart muscle that have almost no regenerative capacity is chilling.
Meanwhile we have coal power plants in the cities spewing out harmful particulates, gases and even radiation and people percieving them as safe because they live next to them.
> After 16 years of irregular service, the plant was closed permanently in 1992 by its operator, Portland General Electric (PGE),[3] after cracks were discovered in the steam-generator tubing. Decommissioning and demolition of the plant began the following year and was largely completed in 2006
> The Trojan steam generators were designed to last the life of the plant, but it was only four years before premature cracking of the steam tubes was observed.[citation needed] In October 1979, the plant was shut down through the end of the year for repairs.[14][15][16] The plant had an extended shutdown in 1984, with difficulty restarting.
> In December 1992, documents were leaked from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission showing that staff scientists believed that Trojan might be unsafe to operate.[26] In early January 1993, PGE chief executive Ken Harrison announced the company would not try to restart Trojan
> In 2005, the reactor vessel and other radioactive equipment were removed from the Trojan plant, encased in concrete foam, shrink-wrapped, and transported intact by barge along the Columbia River to Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington, where it was buried in a pit and covered with 45 feet (14 m) of gravel, which made it the first commercial reactor to be moved and buried whole.[31] It was awaiting transport to the Yucca Mountain Repository until that project was canceled in 2009.
Emphasis on small. Not a true secret; fully regulated and licensed. But they didn't talk about it!
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/kodak-reve...
"...it came pre-loaded with nearly 1.5kg of uranium enriched up to a level of 93.4 per cent, which is just about right for an atomic warhead."
I think it is about 10-15km from center of Moscow.
https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi...
or at least, more recent than Chernobyl?
> the death toll of history’s two nuclear disasters we have added the death rate that Markandya and Wilkinson (2007) estimated for occupational deaths, most from milling and mining. Their published rate is 0.022 deaths per TWh.
> The sum of these three data points gives us a death rate of 0.07 deaths per TWh. We might consider this an upper estimate.
> For example, included in this database were deaths related to an incident where from a water tank ruptured during a construction test at a solar factory. It’s not clear whether these supply chain deaths should or shouldn’t be attributed as a death from solar technologies.
Deaths: Nuclear 0.07 vs Solar 0.02.
Greenhouse gasses: Nuclear 3 tonnes vs Solar 5 tonnes
Here's one from 2012[1] where they breakdown nuclear deaths to include Chernobyl and Fukushima and remove those (i.e. electricity). Nuclear wins by a lot.
Or a 2014 study[2] showing nuclear beating solar rooftop (note, concentrated solar is a lot safer than rooftop. Concentrated is actually safer than nuclear but the death rates are so small I'm not sure why we're arguing over them).
There's plenty of sources showing nuclear's death rates are roughly the same as solar, wind, and hydro. All of which are 2 orders of magnitude below biomass and natural gas and 3 below coal and oil. Similarly also 2-3 orders of magnitude less than coal, natural gas, and oil (1 magnitude less than hydro).
These discussions are absurd. We just end up sitting here quibbling over a small tradeoff between emissions and deaths (a very difficult thing to measure) while we just keep producing gas, oil, and coal. Pick your battles. When we have a clean grid we can quibble over these numbers because at that point they will be significant. But at this time they aren't even close. If you want to complain about the cost of nuclear, sure, that's a fair and honest discussion we can have. But there is no evidence to suggest that nuclear isn't safe and green. This is very concerning when it represents 50% of the zero carbon emission energy in the US.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/rates-for-each-energy-so...
I've picked my battle and I've picked a winner. solar has been giving me more power than I know what to do with for years. More than 10% of my suburb has rooftop, there are 3 small grid arrays within 100k, and a 10gw plant being built down the highway that will produce enough untapped energy to kickstart new manufacturing.
> More than 10% of my suburb has rooftop, there are 3 small grid arrays within 100k
Great! I'm not anti-solar. Nor is anyone I know that is pro-nuclear. We tend to also be pro-renewables. It is just that nuclear shouldn't be taken off the table when we're facing a crisis.
I mean, this is a solved problem in many fields. In medicine, for example, the way you convince good doctors and nurses to work in rural hospitals is to pay them a lot more.
I imagine that might be helpful in making it more likely that an outbreak could be contained, but I wonder by how much. If I understand correctly the Pirbright Institute in England has a history of leaks, and is believed to have caused the 2007 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. The lab is situated far from cities, but that didn't stop the outbreak. [0]
(Of course, as foot-and-mouth disease affects livestock, rather than people, I imagine that putting the lab in a city might actually have been better in that particular case.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-and-m...
That is what it looks like whem you run of straws to grasp in order to maintain your favorite theory...
And they don't have to cover up a lab leak, nearly all of them are not involved in any lab leak to cover up, most may just be unwilling to believe that it could've been a leak for personal convenience.
So the science doesn't trust The Science?
So pathologists and virologists see reality as a default high risk of pandemic, with an optional managed risk of high-BSL research labs near population centers. And that total risk is dominated by the former.
But the general public doesn't react well when you run around screaming "Nature is constantly dreaming up better ways to kill us! And the latest creation might hitch a ride out of the forest any day now!" Which leads to some odd pro/con weighing in the public debate.
Experimenting with deadly viruses in a major population center is like testing in production if your an AWS or Azure engineer. You might not care too much if it doesn't work, but your screwing over everyone else for your convenience if something does go wrong.
Covid was a warning. But scientists are going to ignore that and the science? And we're going to make excuses for that?
What could go wrong?
In which case, all of that is predicating on this actually being a lab leak.
But there is no "bury head in sand" option. Eventually something as transmissible and much more lethal is going to spread. At that point, it's too late. The reason SARS-CoV-2 had a vaccine a year later is because of previous work in exactly these sorts of facilities.
BSL labs are the safest places on the planet to work on dangerous pathogens. They aren't perfect. We should continually work to make them more perfect, and fund them to be so. But they're already multiple orders of magnitude more secure biologically than the alternates.
Any country on the planet can work with any dangerous pathogens they can get ahold of. In any way they want. You can only set standards, contribute foreign aid to fund improvement, and try to improve the safety level of the global community.
The "lab leak possibility means we shouldn't do lab research" argument feels like the suggestion that after Nagasaki the world should have abandoned nuclear weapons and ceased research.
In which case, we'd be living under the flag of whichever country ignored that and pursued it anyway.
They get to choose.
So you end up with the CDC in Atlanta or Ft. Detrick 50 miles away from Washington, DC. If you said "We're only going to do BSL-4 work at Enewetak," then a lot of work simply wouldn't get done, either because of logistical challenges or because no one wants to relocate there.
And on a personal note, as someone who's lived < 5 miles away from a BSL-4 lab, I slept like a baby. I knew that if the worst happened, from the environment outside the lab or the lab itself, the nearest ICU and associated institutions were staffed by some of the best infectious disease experts on the planet.
For civil or criminal convictions, the "innocent unless proven guilty" (for various standards of guilty) applies. For safety regulations making, in general "better safe than sorry" is the standard that needs to apply.
Whenever any group feels threatened with regulations that will cause them inconvenience or cost (eg. In this case Move research centers out of urban areas, stricter interpretation of which BSL standards apply to what research - virologists have said on record they were doing a lot of Coronavirus research in levels 2 or 3), there will be push back and an attempt to conflate the standards of civil/criminal conviction (ie. You can't prove X caused Y) with standards of policy making due to self-interest. You see the same sorts of issues with self regulation in the Finance industry, in the aircraft manufacture industry which predictably also led to crises.
Those have to be over-ridden at a soceital level which happened to various degrees after the 2008 crises in Finance and the 737 Max crises in Boeing/FAA.
In other words, in this particular case, whether we can find out what actually happened (very unlikely given so many intersecting conflicts of interest) really doesn't change the key points of what needs to happen going forward.
There would also be notoriety for the person that would blow the lid off a lab leak. There are plenty of other industries that have eaten there own.
If the lab leak hypothesis proves to be true US research funded by NIH may be the cause.
2007: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-foodmarket-idUSHKG2...
2012: https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2012/12/wet-markets-in-china-...
2013: https://qz.com/141596/chinese-bats-carry-viruses-primed-to-c...
2017: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/china-ground-z...
I was more aware of this danger and I guess the lab leak theory sounds more like a sci-fi plot to me before the pandemic.
Meat as a staple food is literally not genocide, because an actual animal genocide would literally lead to famine. Making silly comparisons like this doesn't make your position sound reasonable.
Maybe you want to call meat eating a moral crime, and you can make that argument, but you keep pulling in these tangential human-centric concepts like "war" and "genocide" in an attempt to make the normalized meat diet seem as morally perverse as possible, but I think the hyperbole is doing the opposite. If your position is the rational one, you shouldn't come across as irrational.
I have reflected upon it, and decided I don't care. Anyway, animals would be the last on the list of things to help if I decided to act truly ethically. It feels nice to pretend you're ethically superior though, posting photos of vegan food with an iPhone, so I won't blame anyone for it.
The argument that there are groups of food animals that constitute peoples in the sense used in the definition of genocide and that destroying them as a people is a necessary instrumental method to meat production is...not obvious.
So with the exception of gain-of-function research, it's not that it's worse exactly, but it's finally put "do we really need to be taking so many risks?" under the spotlight.
There was a virus, they knew there was a virus. They held a massive party with the virus, it got out to the world. Then they locked down.
https://www.thestar.com.my/news/regional/2020/02/06/wuhan-ne...
This is the (well documented and well known) event that should be the focus of ire towards the authorities in China.
This seems... like a naive read of the "political context." It seems like there is far more interest in finding a useful target for blame than any real discussion of how to keep research like that safe, which will likely happen in approximately the same scale whether this WAS a lab leak or not, if only because the specter of it being one has done quite a lot to scare people.
I think this badly misses the point. Nobody who uncritically promotes lab leak theories is saying 'scientific hubris must be tempered by civic responsibility!' or the like. They'are using it to argue that China launched a bioweapon upon the world, or unscrupulous deep state bureaucrats/freemasons/illuminati did it to cover up the nefarious goings on of this or that politicians etc. etc.
For those people, it's not a medical/scientific ethics & society debate centered around a spirited but civil disagreement between various nerds about the risk calculus. It's a political football thrown about with the goal of breaking as many windows as possible. To ignore this is to consign oneself to the role of a pawn.
We seem to be sorely lacking in elder statesmen/graybeard type figures who are willing to step into a muddied discourse and create a reasoned discussion from the insanity. There’s obviously a huge demand for such figures (see: the early days of Fauci) but we’re only getting grifters, blatantly political operatives, and those with huge conflicts of interest.
But since the author will never actually be held to account for being wrong, and certainly isn't putting any money where his mouth is, here we are.
A weaponized strain would be designed deliberately to be indistinguishable from a natural origin, so there will be no proving that without documents or a confession. An incidental genesis would be an intentional chimera, produced just for research, that got loose. An accidental genesis would be very like a natural origin, but just in lab animals based on strains handled in the lab, maybe even mixed with a natural strain brought in by accident, even incubated unbeknownst in a lab employee.
Personally, I doubt we will ever know more than we do now. All four are possible, all four should be guarded against in the future. But guarding against weaponized viruses is arbitrarily hard. Russia probably still has casks of weaponized smallpox stored underground somewhere. US and China, too, possibly.
To me, the "strength" of the covid-19 is evidence of successful lab experiments, not a fluke contagion. As the pandemic variants showed, natural evolution of viruses tend toward being less lethal. So why did Sars-Cov-2 start overpowered and get weaker?
As viruses can make the jump from one species to another, then it should not be hard to imagine how easy it would be to engineer that same outcome; that is all "gain of function" experiments do: try to emulate a pipeline for viral mutation.
That virulence (contagiousness) is also evidence though. Yes, an airborne respiratory viruses needs to be more contagious than other types, and a more contagious virus needs to be less deadly, or natural selection is going to do its thing (people die before spreading it). Sars-COV-2 was LESS contagious and more deadly than a typical respiratory virus. That is called evidence.
Smallpox was overwhelmingly more deadly, and its spread was not limited, even without airborne transmission. Measles was also overwhelmingly more deadly, did rely on airborne transmission, and afflicted us century in and century out.
Research into viral function, absent military intent, has no reason to experiment with making the infection more deadly. The primary research goal is to discover what may affect virulence, and try to anticipate and understand what may occur naturally, and then discover ways to block those.
As plane crashes have gotten rarer, the ability of the government (in the US, anyway) to maintain in-house expertise sufficient for the job, has declined, I think not coincidentally. Not sure what the solution is for airlines, but in any case for virus outbreaks we have (fortunately) too few cases to maintain an independent profession of investigators (I hope I am not naive in saying this).
No, it reflects badly on your profession if you don't do your job properly. And I bet most scientists and virologosts understand this.
Is that the case?
They do gain of function research, breeding deadlier viruses, and then what? Do they use this to pre-develop vaccines?
For example, we already knew that the spike protein was critical in reproduction of the covid-19 virus, whereas we might not have known as much about that if we had no virology labs (I'm not an expert in the field, I might be wrong here).
But, for any particular line of research, your question is still a valid one. Is this particular research likely to have a payoff worth the (inevitably non-zero) risk? The issue is how (and who) to make that decision.
Can they all claim, and prove, to be free of foreign influences and allegiance?
This, I think, is the crux of our problem. Almost anyone who knows enough about the field to have an informed opinion, is involved enough to have an incentive to convince the world that it was not their profession, that unleashed this. Scientists are human, not demons but also not angels. It would be hard to convince yourself, that your profession was responsible for this. We should listen to what they have to say, but not expect them to be dispassionate and unbiased investigators of the question.