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.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050325234239.h...
"epigenetic modifications, activate cells of the innate immune system, such as monocytes, macrophages and natural killer cells"
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.
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.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7133e2.htm [2] https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices/watch/xdr-typhoid-fever...
All that aside, your comment does not really prove that "nature cannot come up with something so transmissive", which was the claim here.
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.
Lab-leak != Lab-made
Which is the main argument against this kind of function research - there’s little gain compared to the risk.
“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.
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
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.
They have to determine what happened so they can do root cause analysis and institute procedures to make this less likely to occur again.
https://news.yahoo.com/china-locks-down-65-million-095328796...
> It said that outbreaks have been reported in 103 cities, the highest since the early days of the pandemic in early 2020.
Crazy, it's like the rest of the world moved on but China is still in 2020.
Cheap made in China crap that doesn't work. I kid, sort of.
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.
https://bartram.substack.com/p/update-on-the-failure-of-the-...
"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)
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/all-cause-deaths-and-vacc...
Analyzing US data is harder. But you can see an attempt to control for various factors and get to the root of it here:
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/lying-with-statistics-us-...
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:
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/us-covid-test-positivity-...
Same was seen in the UK. Negative 300% effectiveness in some age groups, at the point where the HSA stopped publishing data:
https://dailysceptic.org/archive/vaccine-effectiveness-hits-...
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 May [2021], researchers reported that two coronaviruses in dogs recombined in Malaysia. The result was a hybrid that infected eight children."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/science/bat-coronaviruses...
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.
This was the crux of my point.
I understand that most of the major viral pathogens have emerged in the last 10,000 years, since urban society replaced hunter-gatherer culture.
It has not been difficult to bring what naturally evolved under control in developed countries.
"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."
Immune by Philipp Dettmer
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
I hope you've brought yours.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecuri...
For me it was up there with 'I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility'[1] by qntm.
I had meant to read up some more of Andy Weir but had spaced it.
Thanks for the links y'all!
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.