If lab leak is confirmed the correct course of action is to design new systems and protocols to prevent such a thing from happening again in the future. Failure to do so will result in more issues down the line. It's basic engineering.

If this kind of research is so important then maybe the nations of the world should buy a cruise ship and implement extreme isolation protocols between interactions, if that's the only way to safely perform that kind of research. Just as an example.

And this is (one reason) why so many are keen to believe Lab Leak - because then it was done by 'bad humans' and so can be fixed, instead of being (another) consequence of our encroachment on the natural world and indeed something that often just happens. Much easier to believe the 'baddies' have been found and 'brought to justice' than having to face up to the world we live in and our effect on it.

I agree but also disagree. There are too many conflicting interests and I don't think you will ever get a straight answer. People also can't look at the lab leak with a critical eye because they think it makes them look like trump lovers. I standby my original assertion that a country in grief will collectively go through the stages of grief of which denial is the first. Similar to 9/11 when we convinced ourselves that our foreign policy had nothing to do with terrorist attacks and 2008 when we convinced ourselves bailing out failing industries was a good idea. 20 and 10 years later and we changed our tunes on those things. In 2033 we will finally accept that a lab-leak was most likely but only after the other 6 stages...

In 2008 we had to bail out the banks, otherwise everything would have gone under. Indeed, I believe that a defining moment of the GW Bush presidency was when he told the head of the Federal Reserve (I think?) to do whatever was necessary, with GWB providing political cover, and thus 'saved the world'. Where we screwed up was in not bringing to account (i.e. prison) many of the people responsible for letting things get as far as they did. We also used monetary policy too much when fiscal policy (i.e. bailing out Main Street) would have been better.

My understanding is that it took a while before the (natural) emergence of SARS and MERS was understood, and so for COVID most probably.

> My understanding is that it took a while before the (natural) emergence of SARS and MERS was understood, and so for COVID most probably.

The proximal host is the animal that transmitted the virus to humans. That host was identified for SARS-1 (civet cats) and MERS (camels) within about a year. For example, here's an article from 2003:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1140695/

The reservoir host is the animal in which most of the virus's genome evolved. That host (bats for both) took much longer to identify, through Dr. Shi's work at the WIV.

Since SARS-CoV-2 is very similar to SARS-1, we knew its reservoir host (bats) as soon as it was sequenced. We still don't know its proximal host. The proximal host is the critical question in establishing natural zoonotic origin--no one disputes that SARS-CoV-2 evolved mostly in bats, just whether its path into humans involved a research accident.

What? Why would anyone be punished for an unintentional lab leak? Scientists are also humans that can make mistakes.

But was it negligence? This is the difference between "a mistake" and "manslaughter".

Without knowing, and a proper investigation, we can't decide. If it was negligence, punishment is used for a variety of reasons. Often, it is the only way to get people to push back against employers.

And fines, are often the only way to get companies to care.

Its not about punishment, its about the 'just world' fallacy where bad things happen because of 'bad' people (whether through malice or incompetence). It allows us to hide from uncomfortable truths - in this case that pathogen spillovers are inevitable, and that our response has been typically woeful.

You can unintentionally harm someone and still be liable for that harm.

If a practicing engineer is ultimatrly responsible for a catastrophic outcome of a design they signed off on, I can see a case for shoddy virologists with bad lab practices being held ultimately responsible for what they ultimately leak.

When what you make has the potential to impact billions; no offense, but I expect you to be a bit more hardcore about your adherence to safe practices of your trade.

If this means the only people who end up becoming virologists and doing work that conceivably leads to the creation of pandemic pathogens are the most hardcore mf'ers with a boner for safety, perfectionism , and preserving their own skin; ...I'm actually okay with that.

I'll even sweeten the pot. Lets extend that to Software Engineers and get a PE program for that sorted.

Consistency after all.

Long story short: "Oopsie" as an excuse stops applying when your body count becomes non-zero.

> practicing engineer

That sounds like a call for professional licensure and personal financial penalties for failures. Ensuring financial ruin for GoF cowgirls and cowboys and their families would be a good start.

Scientists can definitely make mistakes. What circles around lab leak that's most interesting was the rampant indictments that discussing it made you a conspiracy theorist, which prevented it being discussed or investigated for over a year after the pandemic started. Around that time, the only thing that was acceptable to discuss was zoonotic origins.

The original Lancet article: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

The retraction: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

> And this is (one reason) why so many are keen to believe Lab Leak - because then it was done by 'bad humans' and so can be fixed, instead of being (another) consequence of our encroachment on the natural world and indeed something that often just happens.

In my experience it's rather that "lab leak" means "bad foreigners we're already hating did this to everyone, why won't we nuke them already or something", when the alternative would be to actually think about failing healthcare, vulnerable supply chains, lack of trust in institutions, etc.

"Lab leak" is a cop-out. It should lead to improving procedures in biolabs, but people there are already doing it anyway, because they're smart enough to think about possibilities ("oh, even if it was a wet market issue this time, the next one might be someone here fucking up; let's review the procedures to make that less likely to happen"). For general population, the media and political sphere, it's just a permission to dismiss and ignore any potential fixes ("You say spending more on X would reduce the spread of the virus? It's not like the last one was because of problem with X - it came from a foreign lab, nothing X can do about it!").

"Encroachment on the natural world" is mostly orthogonal to that. We are going to keep encroaching on it anyway, and the way to do it safely is to do those fixes that "lab leak" gives an excuse for not doing.

>> We are not going to let this ruin trade relations even more ($$$ LOL) so you're just going to have to forget about it.

> If lab leak is confirmed the correct course of action is to design new systems and protocols to prevent such a thing from happening again in the future

I'm not sure why people choose to assume their simple solutions are somehow insightful. You aren't going to be able to reach into most countries to intervene in any other way than simple sanctions at best. The protocol of "asking country X please knock it off" is not productive, as it's not going to result in any specific change, it hurts trade, and every country is doing it to some degree despite previous agreements on the world stage (basic Game Theory).

This is what the GP described, yet someone still thinks that nobody involved, understands "basic engineering". Very smart people do this kind of work with money and lives at stake. Let's give a little rope to people with big responsibilities, to try to understand the motivations rather than assume they are ignorant.

If, hypothetically, it did leak from a lab, there are two important things that should happen:

1- China has suffered more than enough to revaluate protocols around virus handling. The pandemic has done more to undermine confidence in their government than anything else in decades. They've got plenty of reason to be invested in change if change is warranted

2- The US government could put stronger regulations in place around funding companies that turn around and fund foreign labs (such as ecohealth) unless those projects can demonstrate compliance with new, safer protocols. What you call simple sanctions, I call the power of the purse.

All of this happens only if we determine whether the existing protocols, or lax enforcement of them, gave rise to the spread of the virus.

Just shrugging it off and saying "meh, it's hard so why bother" is a recipe for future man-made disasters.

I know, basic engineering, so simple and straightforward right? And when a country says "no", I assume we issue a series of stronger and stronger worded warning letters to them right?

The US isn't capable of preventing its own citizens from acquiring weapons and performing terrorist attacks with them. The idea that we'll be able to enforce controls on labs in foreign countries seems pretty far fetched given that. And as the tech advances, I suspect it will democratize like any other technology so that a lone enthusiast can design their own viruses in a home lab. I'm not particularly an optimist about what it portends.

But it is in the best interest of all countries. Unlike nuclear weapons where the damage can be isolated to one area, highly contagious weapons are impossible to control and will end up hurting themselves as well.

When it scales down to individual bio-hackers though, I feel like that virus is bound to be made.

I suspect the world would be better off if all knowledge of nuclear weapons were eradicated. I doubt on a few levels that the damage can really be isolated given proliferation. Baby Boomers were found to have significantly elevated levels of strontium-90 in their baby teeth attributed just to atmospheric testing. That did result in a treaty to ban the practice, but nuclear weapon research continued and continues today. I doubt any country will willingly stop viral research; especially because there are legitimate medical reasons for such research, though I suspect weapon applications are inextricably intertwined as well.

The issue involves misplaced incentives. Scientists have an incentive to apply for certain grants, and the National Science Foundation and NIH have an incentive to spend their federal funding. Scientists are thus incentivized to draw attention to "black swan" events and ask for funding to prevent these events. And they are incentivized to conduct riskier and riskier research until, let's say, a "human error event" occurs, and here we are.*

*Assuming the lab leak was accidental, rather than intentional

let's remember that the US helped fund this research too https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...

And if it comes to light that it was not a natural disaster- that this funding contributed to it- then we should cut off said funding until better protocols, enforcement and accountability are in place

If it turned out to be not a lab leak, fine, carry on. If it was a lab leak, why on earth should I be complacent about my tax dollars contributing to the next one?

How about ethnic genocide? I guess we won't let that end the relationship either? We totally should though. I'm ready to vote for any candidate that furthers this goal.

Right since covid only effected western countries. If it were "ethnic genocide" it was a pretty shitty one.

I'm pretty sure the person referencing "ethnic genocide" was referring to China's internment and genocide of their Muslim population in western China, not COVID.

I think their point is that if genocide wasn't enough to motivate us to change our relationship with China, then a revelation about COVID originating from a Chinese lab probably isn't going to do much to move the needle either.

I'm pretty sure this qualifies as genocide, because the word "genocide" is in the title.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples

The world has always been joyfully ok with a country killing its own people.

Muslims in Xinjiang are not Han Chinese. You're buying into the propaganda. In any case, the world should not be okay with this.

If you want the US to care, it's probably better not to mention that they're Muslims though. I've noticed they just call them Uyghurs and suspect that's the reason.

then nobody should talk to US

what should your ideal candidate think after reading these?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes

https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/2649_665393/202...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_genocide

Thankfully I exist in 2023. I would not have supported apartheid for Black Americans.

I would like to remind you that the USA are selling billions in weapons every year to Bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia, responsible of the killing of the journalist Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi, dismembered in a Saudi consulate in Turkey by killers sent by the prince, who is using those weapons to bomb people in Yemen.

Unfortunately people in US don't even know where Yemen is or that there is a war that they are supporting together with a bloody dictator. Because they do not want to intervene directly, if a single US soldier dies, everybody at home will know about this war, started in 2015, with the excuse of the terrorism, it only created newborn real terrorists that have fallen in the hands of Iran and Al-Qaeda. They send drones though, at least 370 thousand people have died, mainly for the consequences of war (famine, lack of drinkable water, diseases, displacement). A war that the US have no intention of stopping.

You know who's doing one of the best jobs in the area? China and Russia. Yes, those China and Russia. They recognize the international recognized government and have no contacts with the factions close to Iran. They also haven't killed or armed anybody. Their diplomacies have been constantly at work together with EU members for a cease-fire. Unlike the US. They know that an unstable Yemen is detrimental for China, even though people are dying, they do not care: there is money to be made.

Thanks for reminding us how dangerous ignorance is.

Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. This subthread was a noticeable step in that direction and we want the opposite here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34949969.)

I'm very sorry to see this. I thought better of HN moderation.

What do you have to say to the Uighur women who claim mass rape at the hands of the Chinese State?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-chi...

> Every American touched by covid knows this in the back of their head.

only Americans were touched by covid I guess...

> The first stage of grief is denial.

At least a leak is not intentional like killing hundreds of thousand of innocent people by bombing their homes.

Leak doesn't mean engineering a disease to kill some specific target, anyway, if China did it to kill Americans, it wouldn't be as bad as the Opium wars and the American invasion of China in 1900

The first U.S. multimillionaire, John Jacob Astor, made part of his fortune smuggling opium into China.

no one is going to care if the deaths were "intentional" or negligent.

not Americans.

They always need someone to blame.

Remember when they went to war with Iraq on fabricated evidence?

Remember when they wen to war with Afghanistan after 9/11, but Afghanistan had no responsibility whatsoever (again!) and 10 years later they handed the country back to Talibans?

Can we consider 9/11 an accident?

Would it be the same to you?

You know when really nobody talks about it?

When it's the US killing people out of negligence and incompetence and sheer arrogance.

Are you aware of this?

Do they talk about it in USA?

They never apologized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

***

can we also talk about this?

I'm quite sure how these poor people died makes a lot of difference for the families of the victims.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/18/us/airstrikes...

***

It's not China fault if during covid in USA Trump was President and people really believed that covid wasn't real and a lot of Americans died with a rate double than my Country which was already hit very hard BTW.

China handled it much better anyway.

It's talked about in many circles in the United States, mind. Not one year has gone by without a rant in my sphere about stupid boutique or ulteriorally motived wars, and a pining for the day the U.S. focuses more on solving domestic problems than foreign.

It just happens that for some stupid reason, neither the Republican or Democratic parties have a great track record of producing candidates that can manage to walk the line of foreign policy that minimally entangles us with very poorly advised foreign intervention.

Which is made all the more difficult when allies don't do their utmost in terms of defense spending. The U.S. doesn't need to always be the first bunch of people everyone looks to when some autocratic idiot starts rattling the saber again. This may even be made easier if we don't export advanced manufacturing business to places that value human life and time at approximately zero because it makes the quarterly reports look better.

After all, it's way harder to be an autocrat when no one will do enough business with you to keep the military sufficiently in your pocket. Or teach you how to make the machines that make arms or advanced weaponry. Or sell you said arms.

This is probably the most egregious example of "whataboutism" I've seen on HN.

I think you're missing the point.

To me the post was answering to someone claiming that

- Americans suffered the consequences of COVID because of China, which is arguably not true, they have handled the pandemic badly because of their own faults, incompetence and hubris (and a President in denial).

- The Americans are at the first stage of grieving over this, because they are obviously victims, while truth is they are often perpetrators that just don't care of the consequences of what they do, because if some non American dies, it's probably because they deserve it. During COVID they proved that they also don't care very much if someone of their own dies, because FREE MARKET OH YEAH! FLY EAGLE OF FREEDOM! Which has honestly been embarrassing, watching from outside.

If you were part of the 96% of the World population which is not American, you would know the feeling.

> If you were part of the 96% of the World population which is not American, you would know the feeling.

I'm not American, nor do I live in America.

And while I have some sympathy for pointing out "the world is not the US", the majority of the comment was bald whataboutism:

> "At least a leak is not intentional like killing hundreds of thousand of innocent people by bombing their homes. Leak doesn't mean engineering a disease to kill some specific target, anyway, if China did it to kill Americans, it wouldn't be as bad as the Opium wars and the American invasion of China in 1900. he first U.S. multimillionaire, John Jacob Astor, made part of his fortune smuggling opium into China."

What about "People in the USA are grieving because of China virus created to kill us, but we won't do anything against China because the first step of grief is denial"?

How does this sound?

It's completely normal to me to answer: well my friend, first of all a leak is a mistake, it's not intentional since, you know, the first who paid where the Chinese themselves, it would be pretty stupid to do it intentionally. But if you really think things go that way because people do not understand who's their enemy (the Chinese who want to kill you by engineering a virus), what about all the countries that the USA has relationships to, to their advantage only, after killing their citizen, without even apologizing?

Should they cut the links too?

What about what the USA and UK did to Chinese people?

There's a reason why they made a cultural revolution and chose communism, and no, being a "democracy" doesn't make your country automatically better.

Spoiler alert: American people have lost many relatives because of their government.

So maybe it's toward them that they should be angry and ask for a change.

Even if it was a lab leak, the right solution would be cooperation, so that it doesn't happen again (because next time could happen to the US...)

> what about all the countries that the USA has relationships to, to their advantage only, after killing their citizen, without even apologizing?

As I said: literally whataboutism. And that is just a distraction tactic used to deflect attention from the issue at hand.

In some limited circumstances it may be a legitimate tactic, for example, when it is relevant to highlight that the person making the accusation has a bias. For the most part, however, even if the person making the accusation is a hypocrite or has double standards, this does not mean that their accusation is false.

https://theconversation.com/whataboutism-what-it-is-and-why-...

It's completely legitimate to have a discussion about US imperialism. But not to try to deflect a discussion about Chinese recalcitrance by deflecting it like this.

A lot of people seem to think the lab leak premise is the same as the "engineered biological weapon" premise so if that become popular it'll probably only drive a perception of "weak government that betrays the citizens" even more than we've already got...

Lab leak involves bio-engineering because it involves gain of function research. Bio-engineering can be used in a testing setting but it could also be used to make a weapon. I highly doubt China was stupid enough to make a bioweapon and not immunize its citizens first.

The significance of getting people to investigate, and if all things are true, confirm lab leak is that it puts an impetus on the importance of controls and second is a corrective measure for all the people who colluded to suppress lab leak being discussed. I am very interested in seeing those people held accountable in very direct ways, even if they were under false impressions at the time. That starts with all the names on that infamous open letter.

A lab leak doesn’t mean gain of function, bio-engineered virus, or other engineering. It just means that the virus was spread via a lab leak.

> The October 2021 report said that there was a consensus that Covid-19 wasn’t the result of a Chinese biological-weapons program. But it didn’t settle the debate over whether it resulted from a lab leak or came from an animal, saying that more information was needed from the Chinese authorities.

In what way is gain of function not bio-engineering? You're modifying a virus and subjecting it to human-like tissue to observe the results. Lab leak and gain of function are inexplicably tied.

I don't know what point the quote is getting to. I already said it wasn't a bioweapon.

You could bio-engineer a virus without gain of function, I presume. My point was that a lab leak does not also mean bio-engineering.

I heard that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had inserted furin cleavage sites into random types of viruses in the past and that SARS-CoV-2 is unique among coronaviruses for having a furin cleavage site, but this[0] says otherwise:

``` Furin cleavage sites occurred independently for multiple times in the evolution of the coronavirus family, supporting the natural occurring hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2. ```

0: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33340798/

Yeah, instead it was sheer incompetence and arrogance. They screwed up because they poorly handled the virus while doing something they should never have been doing: gain-of-function research. We need to stop that research, and we can't let them defend it with any nonsense excuses.

> Yeah, instead it was sheer incompetence and arrogance. They screwed up because they poorly handled the virus

allegedly, with a very low confidence.

now let's check how Americans handle their military bases.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/06/military-bas...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/23/us-soldiers-...

https://gijn.org/2022/08/22/investigating-toxic-military-bas...

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/11/09/cdc-conduct-h...

https://www.eenews.net/articles/high-levels-of-forever-chemi...

Would you please stop taking HN threads further into flamewar? You have a long history of doing this on HN. I don't want to ban you again but if you keep this up, we'll have to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't know what you're talking about.

This is not a flamewar, it is what is called "counter reasoning".

There are people claiming that USA (and only USA) suffered because someone else's incompetence, but I lost a friend during COVID in the USA because of the undeniable underestimation (to say the least) that the Presidency of US showed.

He would have lived if he was in China.

So, please, if you have to ban me, do it, publicly, so a record will remain that in this forum criticizing the US leads to a ban.

There's no better way to prove my point: US is not better than China when their interests and their image is on the line. They would do anything to silent critiques, including killing innocents.

Like they have done to so many people in my Country, for no other reason than being not 100% aligned with their colonial plans.

Please, do what you have to do, I won't stop criticizing the US mentality whenever i deem it necessary. Because, you know, when I was young I was a supporter of the US because they fought against the "single thought", but now they have become it.

If the "hacker news" has become the place where an yet unproven mistake is proof of "incompetence" or worse "a genocidal plan", than HN is no different from VK.

This sort of fulminating rhetoric is obviously not what HN is for. We've banned you for it many times and if you don't stop, we'll have to ban you again. It has nothing to do with criticizing the US or any other country or thing; it has to do with not following the site rules and consistently violating the intended spirit of the place. Plenty of other commenters manage to be critical without doing that, and that's fine.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Are you suggesting that a more correct course of action would be some kind of punitive retribution so those of us who survived suffer in the hopes that those most responsible suffer a little more than we do?

The idea that we would hurt our own economic future out of grief/vengeance is bizarre. So yes, everyone does know what you suggest, and we’re all OK with it.

It's pretty sickening that a coronavirus lab in China that the US was completely involved with both financially and through scientific cooperation can be reframed as more nationalistic anti-China bullshit. The US isn't keeping things peaceful with China for the sake of trade relations, it's actually threatening China constantly. The US is keeping quiet about the lab leak theory because it was just as responsible for that lab as China was, and it wants to distract from that fact.