Well, this Statement by the President is interesting. It’s four paragraphs. This is paragraph 3.
I have now asked the Intelligence Community to redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion, and to report back to me in 90 days. As part of that report, I have asked for areas of further inquiry that may be required, including specific questions for China. I have also asked that this effort include work by our National Labs and other agencies of our government to augment the Intelligence Community’s efforts. And I have asked the Intelligence Community to keep Congress fully apprised of its work.
Update: I moved some comments here. That’s why comment time stamps are earlier than the post time stamp. Also: Tom found this news item.
Here is some good news: The U.S. intelligence is on the job when it comes to tracking down the origin of the Wuhan virus. Their great resources have enabled them to make impressive progress. Biden says they have narrowed it down to two possibilities: (1) it came from a lab or (2) it didn’t.
Don’t worry, Biden said the IC would “redouble” their efforts to find the source. That means 4x the effort if my math is correct. As with all things with an IC leak, the question about the leak of the Wuhan lab employees getting hospitalized is: Why did they leak this info last week and not a year ago?
I am stuck on my premise that China [the CCP actually] are bad actors. This article in the WSJ from March 2021 highlights my concern: “A team of scientists hoped a mission to Wuhan would provide some clarity about the coronavirus’s origins. New details about the team’s constraints reveal how little power it had to conduct a thorough probe.” https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-china-hunt-covid-origins-11616004512 The CCP have shown the ability to tightly control and manipulate both the paper trail and all the scientists involved. Any investigation will need to deal with them accordingly. The WHO and normal State Department channels are worse than useless in this investigation. Maybe our Spooks [DNI, CIA, NSA] can get to the bottom of it, but then most of the results will be classified. We are in a pickle.
Tom Scharf,
“Why did they leak this info last week and not a year ago?”
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Trump.
Russell,
“We are in a pickle.”
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Why? (real question)
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If it turns out there was an accidental release, that wouldn’t change the CCP. They are a totalitarian regime that wants to dominate the world and install similar regimes everywhere. If it was a migration from bats, the CCP would not be any less a threat to liberty.
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I think we can reasonably conclude that the CCP is never going to allow an honest investigation, which suggests they already know where the virus came from. But even absent proof of a lab escape, sensible policies, like strongly discouraging and defunding gain of function research, should be implemented ASAP. Which probably means not until Alzheimer Joe is out of office.
I think that if this did escape from a lab (or maybe I should say, if that becomes generally accepted as what happened) it will have two important effects. One would be the end of gain-of-function research, or at least of publishable research. The other would be to isolate China.
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It is clear that China is a serious enemy and that we have allowed ourselves to become far too vulnerable to them, especially regarding things like pharmaceuticals and strategic metals. But powerful forces in our society are cozy with the Chinese government: entertainment, mass media, big tech, many other corporations, academia, much of our foreign policy establishment, even members of Congress. Trump started the process of changing that. Events of the last year have made many realize the danger we are in. Establishing the Wuhan virus as made by the Chinese government, for whatever purpose, will accelerate that process.
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I think that great progress has already been made in the last year. It is only recognition of the Chinese Peril that is permitting the sea change with regard to the laboratory origin of the virus.
Russell,
[This remark is similar to the one that got dropped a couple days back.] It’s a given as far as I am concerned that governments both screw up and try to cover up their screw ups. The more powerful / totalitarian the government, the more extreme the screw ups and cover ups tend to be. But it’s not so much that I think our [US] politicians are any more good or noble or any such thing than any other politicians. It’s a systemic thing – it’s the nature of humans in power and a function of the degree of control over society those people in power have.
I essentially proceed from the premise that governments tell short term self serving lies to the extent they’re able, and that they direct the agencies they can influence to do so as well. A similar thing happens in the U.S. when Democrats are in power. It’s not that Democrats are any more immoral than anybody else; it’s just that a preponderance of social media / big tech leaders and media voluntarily cooperate with the obvious short term self serving lies that Democrat politicians tell.
I guess what I’m laboring to get at is, that’s the way it is. Details change but the principle remains the same. Possibly always was and always will be.
Shrug.
Russell Klier (Comment #202468): “I am curious as to the details of how this virus went from non-existent to a world wide scourge.”
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But what details are still needed? We can be pretty sure they started with some bat virus, probably RAT3G (too lazy to make sure I got that right). Certain features, like the furin cleavage group, were inserted by scientists. It was then passed repeatedly through either human cell cultures or humanized mice, so as to get it well adapted to humans. Some lab workers were accidentally infected (happens all the time) and took the virus home with them.
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I guess there is the question of the origin of the RBD in the spike protein. That seems to be pretty much unique, so it seems unlikely to have been designed. So where did they find it? A similar feature was found in a virus isolated from pangolins, but it seems they were infected in captivity. But that was, I think, in the spring of 2019. So that is a puzzlement.
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It would also be useful to know if the gain-of-function research was part of a Chinese military bioweapons program. I suspect we will never know, even if the intelligence community comes to a definite conclusion.
Mike M,
It is clear that China is a serious enemy …
I agree with this. I personally believe they will only become a more serious and dangerous enemy as time goes on. I think they know it too. Their power in the South China sea has only been growing over the last decade, they have been modernizing their navy over the last two decades, developing weapons systems, so on. I think the only reason Taiwan is still free today is because the Chinese know they will be able to take it even more easily down the road. But I think they’d have a decent chance of successfully taking it by force right now – more because of our leadership problems than military ones.
RE: statement by President
Whitewashing initiative or real deal? Time will tell.
I would have thought such a threat to national security as the virus has proven to be would have already received a high amount of scrutiny from the “intelligence” services. It has surely been of the utmost importance to discover whether it is natural or man made, and what happened. If they’ve nothing to offer by now, redoubling their efforts is not going to unearth anything they don’t already know, but have simply kept their mouths shut about out of political expedience.
Mark,
I agree with you that our government lies. But our governmental system means our government lies tend to be found out more easily.
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The CCP is more effective at keeping people from blowing whistles. The consequence is they tend to lie more often, more broadly and sometimes for quite trivial things.
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Mind you, the appearance of covering up in the CCP is not necessarily evidence of lying. The always “cover up” and sometimes for trivial reasons. Nevertheless: their actions do mean that lots of evidence for all theories is unobtainable.
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So for now, we have a two “main” theories.
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* A theory of “entirely natural” origin that has almost no identifiable path from the distant bat caves in Yunan to the outbreak in Wuhan. There is also no particular evidence of any infected animals at the market. (And testing was done.)
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* A multi-branched “lab leak” theory that may or may not involve genetic engineering.
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The first theory has a gaps like “how, precisely, did this get to Wuhan with no evidence of any infected animals or people before it broke out?” (Wuhan is really not near the bat caves.) and “Why haven’t we found a progenitor virus in the bats or pangolins?” Early discussion of the high probability of the natural hypothesis tended to be based on these progenitor viruses existing and suggested if we looked we would find them. We didn’t. That doesn’t disprove the hypothesis. But early on, the “reason” for the lack of concrete evidence was we hadn’t yet found them. The longer this goes on, the more one might speculate the reason we haven’t found it is that wasn’t the path.
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The second theory has gaps. But we know of steps that would have made that evidence disappear– poof! Excusable or not, lab materials were destroyed in Wuhan. And, of course, the other gap is we need to believe the CCP and scientists in the CCP are lying or at least giving misleading versions of the truth. But that’s SOP for the CCP. They lie alla-da-time!
Lucia,
I agree with you on all counts. I think the second theory more likely by occam’s razor, but it’s not a sure thing.
National Review’s take:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/the-considerable-if-circumstantial-evidence-of-a-wuhan-lab-leak/
It is the national review. So that does tend to lean right. But still.
This pretty much gets it right:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/cartoons-slideshow
1. The lab went out on a bat guano shovel mission and some low level employee in a low biosafety area tracked a real zoonosis specimen out of the lab or caught a “cold†while working with it.
2. Dual use research (real science and bioweapon shared goals) was performed, gain of function performed, and it walked out of the lab as above.
3. Explicit bioweapons research was being performed in a secret area of the lab and it accidentally walked out.
4. Either #2 or #3 and a malicious person intentionally released it.
5. The Chinese explicitly released a bioweapon on their own soil for their evil world domination purposes. Strange how they have it completely under control now, almost like some special vaccine is in their water supply, ha ha.
6. The evil Ruskies or Norks has an explicit bioweapons program and released their engineered virus in Wuhan as a diversion.
There has been intentional conflation in the media between many of these distinct theories in order to discredit them all, until recently. If there were any dual use or weapons programs going on in Wuhan, the Chinese government is not going to let loose a bunch of independent investigators with swabs to get to the truth.
It’s also possible that there was some nefarious research going on in Wuhan that has absolutely nothing to do with covid, but the Chinese don’t want it known, and thus aren’t going to allow an investigation even though they are not responsible for the pandemic.
It should be noted that I put forth an argument without mentioning Trump or having to write an anti-racist manifesto to signal to the correct thinking world that talking about this doesn’t make me a racist.
Tom,
What a racist thing to say… :p
Kidding!
In my view, antiracism is racism, so writing an antiracist manifesto wouldn’t help with demonstrating that you aren’t actually a racist.
But I strive for colorblindness, which is deemed racist, so there is that.
[Edit: It gets confusing. The Bee has a diagram that helps me sort these things out.]
One MUST make sure everyone understands that criticism of the Chinese government is not the same thing as criticism of the Chinese race. If race was a real thing that is, which it isn’t. This needs to be explicitly explained mostly because nobody has previously made this mistake before in endless articles on government actions, and because its obvious in the context that governments and race are not the same thing. So therefore one MUST explain it in no uncertain terms that it still isn’t happening this time either. I hope it is clear why this is necessary. So when my political opponents state the exact same theories I am stating, this is how they are racist and I am just following the science, because I am including this manifesto explaining how government is not the same thing as a race. Got it? Race != Government. I have no idea why it’s necessary to make this obvious to everyone who all knew this from the beginning.
~grins~
According to the Left, if you support terrorists who seek to kill Jews solely because they are Jews, that is not Antisemitism. Because simply being critical of the Israeli government is obviously not Antisemitism.
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But if you criticize the Chinese government for oppressing the Chinese people, that is racist.
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I used to think the Left were fools. Now I know better. The Left is evil. Although I still think that many who unthinkingly support evil leftist policies are fools.
Mike,
I used to go back and forth on the question all the time. I read something recently (wished I’d saved the link) that suggested that progressives have replaced their moral compass with something like this:
1) The least powerful in any conflict is right,
2) The least white in any conflict is right,
3) The lowest ‘class’ in any conflict is right.
There may be something to this thinking. I suspect when one’s moral sense gets replaced thus, technically speaking I think it can be called evil.
I usually try to avoid the conclusion that people I disagree with are evil. I think there is a good bit of misguided mixed in there. But misguided enough eventually gets pretty darn close to evil IMO.
Mike M,
“I used to think the Left were fools. Now I know better. The Left is evil. ”
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You are late to the party my friend. I concluded that the left is profoundly evil (in both intent and behavior) decades ago. There is no compromise with the left, because they are incapable of substantive compromise. Theirs is a religious view of the world, with all the mad distortions religious belief brings, and which makes substantive compromise philosophically impossible. Profoundly evil and destructive is the only accurate description.
I guess I was a bad boy. A comment went to moderation. Not sure what I wrote which prompted this.
Here it is again:
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Mike M,
You are late to the party my friend. I concluded that the left is profoundly evil (in both intent and behavior) decades ago. There is no compromise with the left, because they are incapable of substantive compromise. Theirs is a religious view of the world, with all the mad distortions religious belief brings, and which makes substantive compromise philosophically impossible. Profoundly evil and destructive is the only accurate description.
Steve — you entered a slightly different name. One starts with sf the other sdf. WordPress thought that was a “first comment” by a new email address.
I am intrigued. Suppose that intell community presented convincing evidence that the virus originated in the Wuhan lab, what do you expect the consequences to be:
1/ for geopolitical situation?
2/ for US domestic politics?
Phil,
I’d love to come up with a juicy, inventive, interesting answer. I’m a little bummed out to have to admit I don’t think it’ll make a darn bit of difference in the end.
I think we do what we do (and generally other countries do what they do) because of China’s economy and military and whatever implications, realities, and constraints those things impose. But at the end of the day, I don’t think anyone would be surprised at either answer, and I can’t see how it’d really matter.
Sorry about that.
[Edit: Even regarding midterms in 2022, I think it’ll be old news and forgotten by then.]
Oh, what the heck do I know. Maybe there will be all sorts of impacts I’m just too dense to see.
Well, I asked because it didn’t seem likely to me that it would make any real-world difference, but other people might have a better perspective especially on US domestic politics.
One thought that occurred to me is that China is likely to become the dominant industrial power, maybe scientific power, at some point in the future with all the implications for military power and influence. A zero-trade “war footing” with China would delay that but the implications for consumers and sellers would be a tough sell. Trump did his best but not to point of forcing US companies to source elsewhere. Not sure a “China released the virus on world” story would be enough though.
Phil,
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No idea! It ought to have consequences for some funding decisions relative to research. I don’t think it will affect the elections much. Refusing to “redouble” might have affected the elections though. To some extent, this issue can’t get behind us if the attitude is “Shut up, we aren’t going to look into that because [insert current reason].”
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Honestly though, I don’t think we are going to establish where this came from.
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Obviously, we’ve had natural outbreaks in the past. So natural is not implausible. If lab leak was utterly implausible, that would pretty much be it.
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But the lab leak is not implausible. Lab leaks have happened in the past. In fact: Sars has leaked from Chinese labs. (I read it’s happened twice.)
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That makes two not-implausible theories. I’m not even sure it makes sense to try to say which is “more probable”. This is one of those things where alternate plausible theories can’t really be deemed highly improbably until we have clear and convincing evidence a mutually exclusive theory is true.
Also, you can’t really set up experiments to test the theories or their consequences. This is a theory about an event that already happened. It’s not like testing to determine whether F=ma or even “does this vaccine prevent Covid” both of which we think continue to happen over time and so are then testable.
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I also think it’s an event where the “evidence” that might have existed was spoiled. Perhaps all the cleaning up of the Wuhan market and all the tossing of samples at the lab were entirely legitimate acts. Nevertheless that stuff is gone. And it’s no secret China lacks transparency. Their government lies. AND they can succeed in shutting people up. Information that might have existed may very well be gone or totally wrapped up.
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I think at some point, the intelligence community may just have to say: We tried. Definitive information we need to determine which is more probable doesn’t exist. Scientists and others can argue about which theory they favor. But really, unless something important is discovered, I think we aren’t ever going to know.
Phil,
I don’t think China released the virus is going to prevent them from being economically dominant. Something might prevent it, but not that!
Just random things so I might remember them:
First known case of covid was not at the wet market
https://www.livescience.com/first-case-coronavirus-found.html
Hmm message didnt appear. Try again.
Basically – I agree with Lucia on all counts. So current fuss is just going through the motions because it would look bad if government didnt?
Phil,
The spam plugin I installed seems overly enthusiastic. I posted about it yesterday. I’ve white listed the range for your IP. That should keep you from being blocked but is not a full solution.
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I’m not sure the gov’t is only going through the motions because it would look bad if they didn’t. I do think it would be useful if the found out where it came from. I’m just not optimistic they will. Even if they do, the public may not learn more because there may be security reason to keep some stuff under cover.
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But I do think continuing to say “Hrumph… we aren’t even investigating. The lab leak is just a conspiracy theory” would not have helped the Dems in the midterms. It might not be a big deal, but it would be a talking point and not in their favor.
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Late this summer we’ll hear what we hear. 🙂
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By the way, I posted the stuff about the first case because one of the (supposedly) “strong” bits of evidence in favor of the zoonotic case and not leak is the “first” cases were at the wet market. But perhaps those weren’t the first cases. If not, that takes that out of the “in favor of zoonotic” bin of evidence. (I haven’t found anything saying the Nov 17 patient was NOT covid.)
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I also haven’t found any articles telling us stories about who this patient was. If it were the US, we’d likely have reporters telling us where he worked, what he did, who his family was, what his favorite soup was. Heck, the whole family and several neighbors would all probably be interviewed by Oprah to tell us how they felt about being this sort of “first”. If there was anything juicy to report, neighbors would be ratting out the family on the National Enquirer!
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But it’s China. So, no. Just some middle aged guy from Hubei.
Lucia,
I believe the Chinese government investigated this person for contacts, background, etc. They are not going to disclose anything. Did he work at the hospital were the sick lab workers went? Did he have any sort of contact with someone from the laboratory? We are not ever going to know. And nobody in China is going to know either…. the CCP makes such inconvenient people disappear. That is not a conspiracy theory, it is the reality of the CCP.
Lucia,
Re the first known case…. Every shred of information from inside China that I read I say to myself why does the CCP what me to read this. Everything we know that happened inside China I assume has been created by or sanitized by the government and we only know it because the CCP wants us to know it.
Russell Klier,
The West needs a leader with enough conviction and courage to give a speech about the CCP like Ronald Reagan’s “Evil empire” speech about the Soviet Union. It is the profound immorality of the CCP’s treatment of its citizens which needs to be pointed out, and pointed out consistently. Someone like Boris Johnson could give that speech (pointing out the CCP’s repression in Hong Kong), but I doubt he has the courage. Biden has Alzheimer’s, and he is just able to parrot (with flubs) whatever the lefties that control him put on the teleprompter, so he won’t make that speech. Maybe the next US president…. unless it is Kamala.
Russell,
I think your suspicion is mostly valid. But some things get out before sanitation. In this case, the doctor was also disciplined and we know steps were taken to prevent the story from spreading. It at least looks like something the higher ups were unprepared for. No one “knew” they weren’t supposed to let the story out. It got out.
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But, as SteveF and I note: we (the world) knows almost nothing about the backstory of this guy. We know age, that he was from Hubei province and it was a he.
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Details should be important. It’s important even if you are testing the Chinese preferred “Covid got to China through frozen fish!” story. I mean: was he a cook who handled imported thawed fish? Was he someone who worked collecting waste disposed from the Wuhan lab? Was he a pangolin smuggler? Had he recently prepared or dined on bat soup? Was he a local vegetarian math teacher who never prepared food and owned no pets? Had he just gotten back from vacation spelunking in caves? Did any of his family get “colds”? Or have any symptoms? (They are still alive. You could at least ask.)
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The answer to these (and more) wouldn’t give any definitive answers. But it could gives us some (admittedly) weak evidence for and against theories.
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The Chinese must know the answer to some of these. For example: what he did for a living. They are natural questions to ask and other than possibly the one about illegal smuggling people would just answer honestly. If WHO was investigating the probability of any theories these sorts of questions should be asked.
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Us not knowing doesn’t mean “cover up”. It just means “This is China. Information shut down is the norm.” But this information has the potential to inform the answer.
The lab and zoonotic theories are not equally plausible. Not even close. They were both plausible a priori. But there is not a single bit of evidence in support of the zoonotic theory, even though there ought to be at least some evidence, such as a similar virus in animals. There is a ton of evidence in favor of the lab leak. Some circumstantial, some suggestive,and some damning. The evidence for the lab leak easily meets the legal standard of beyond a reasonable doubt.
Lucia, The whole story could all be a ruse….ever bit of it. The guy and doctor might be plants. We have no way of discerning fact from fiction in this story.
The effect of convicting the Chinese of making the Wuhan virus would mainly be to stiffen resolve to take actions that ought to be taken. Many of those are happening to some degree anyway. Just how far it would go is hard to say.
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Some possibilities:
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Push for full diplomatic recognition of the Republic of China.
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Boycotts of companies that grovel before China. The NBA and Disney are the most obvious examples.
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Repatriation of critical manufacturing, like pharmaceuticals, semiconductor chips, and strategic metals. That probably won’t happen much without government action.
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Stiff import duties on goods made in China.
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Complete ban on Chinese companies, such as Huwei, providing critical tech.
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Treating China like a western country re CO2 emissions.
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Complete ban on import of goods made with slave labor.
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Strict economic sanctions related to genocide of the Uyghurs.
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Those are just off the top of my head. All would depend on public opinion, either because the public would have to act directly or because the public would demand action by their governments. So what would matter is if China gets convicted in the court of public opinion.
Phil,
BTW, I looked up vaccination rates in NZ. You guys need to get vaccinated! (I’m guessing you are supply limited right now though. So keeping the doors shut will still work for you for a while. New variants and low vaccination rates is still scary though!)
MikeM,
I think that’s your wishlist of what to do to China. I think you aren’t going to get any of those. Anyway, most or possibly all of them shouldn’t be linked to the virus.
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If we think genocide of the Uyghurs is wrong (which it is and we do) and it’s happening (which seems to be the case),then that’s something we should have a sanction for if possible. It’s the right thing to do whether or not the lab leak theory is true. (And it’s not happening.)
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Something similar should be said vis-a-vis CO2. Or slave labor.
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It’s ridiculous to say the Chinese should get a pass on this if the zoonotic theory is correct, but pummeled if it’s a lab leak!
Three Wuhan virology lab workers hospitalized in November 2019…. and the Lancet article (by Chinese MD’s!) showing the first a confirmed case on December 1, and not associated with the Wuhan seafood market. Coincidence? Maybe, but the sequence is consistent with spread of a novel coronavirus, most closely related to a known bat virus, from a lab doing gain-of-function research on bat virus. I agree the CCP generally keeps things secret which would be embarrassing, like “oops…. we accidentally released a virus that killed several million people and cost the world trillions of dollars to deal with”.
Lucia,
“If we think genocide of the Uyghurs is wrong (which it is and we do)”
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Unfortunately the CCP thinks it is the right thing to do. They are simply evil, at least by any non-communist measure of morality.
If it became obvious that it was a lab leak, then it might put a damper on the whole Belt and Road thing. A likely reason that Italy was one of the original hot spots was that China has made a lot of investments in Italy since 2015 and Italy has bought into Belt and Road. So a lot of Chinese have been visiting the country. A major purpose of B&R, IMO, is to get the countries involved heavily indebted to China.
Russel,
Sure. The whole thing could be a ruse. Heck, the report that people who got sick in the first pulse included some who had stalls at the wet market could be a ruse too. The report that everyone at the Wuhan institute got tested for antibodies and was negative could be a lie. Everything could be a ruse.
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So we are left needing to judge how likely something is to be a ruse.
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I judge that guy being sick is less likely to be a ruse of lie than the claim that everyone at the Wuhan institute was tested for Covid and came out negative. Principle in my judgement is that that story came out just as the shit hit the fan. Even though CCP has a habit of covering stuff up, they can’t cover up everything. They need to know there’s something to cover up.
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Now, I can think of a reason to create a ruse. But that reason would be because they knew the virus was “out there” and thought they could control it. But the most probable storyline I can think of where they knew that is they was a lab leak and they knew it. In which case they would want to sprinkle in extra details that suggest a connection to “not a lab leak”.
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So if that was their motive for creating a ruse, I would imagine they would go whole hog and “discover” he had been smuggling a variety of animals. Or they would have intentionally picked a guy who worked at the wet market to kick it all off.
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We know Covid itself isn’t a ruse. It got out of China. Individually, almost every other individual thing could be a ruse. But, they can’t all be ruses. Some sort of hypothetical ruses would have you asking, “why fake that? And given the timing and so on, is that a likely ruse. And If it’s a complicated involved ruse, why that ruse at that time?”
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So yes, could be a ruse because almost anything can be. But I think that guy existing is less likely to be a ruse or mis-information than tons of other things.
More detail on early patients
https://jnm.snmjournals.org/content/61/6/782
Could Li reporting be a ruse? Sure. I judge it unlikely.
Could Zhang Jixian acting vigorously to contain a virus be a ruse? Sure. I judge it unlikely.
lucia (Comment #202509): “I think you aren’t going to get any of those. Anyway, most or possibly all of them shouldn’t be linked to the virus. … It’s ridiculous to say the Chinese should get a pass on this if the zoonotic theory is correct, but pummeled if it’s a lab leak!”
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Mostly true (see note). So what is your point?
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There are powerful forces within our society that are willing to submit to China. Some may be merely shortsighted but some would actually be happy to see the USA submit to China.
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Those forces are not going to be effectively countered without a public outcry. That outcry is building. Perhaps it will be enough to force effective action, but probably not. It is not just that powerful forces are opposed, but also that effective action will be inconvenient. The public recognizing the role of the Chinese government in the disaster of the last 16 months will definitely add to the outcry. Possibly enough to make a real difference.
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Of course it is ridiculous to link things like the Uyhgurs to the lab leak. So what? It is politics. Ridiculous “logic” is the norm.
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I never said that the PRC should or should not get a pass on various things depending on whether the lab leak is true. I said that whether or not they *will* get a pass depends on what gets accepted as true.
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What will happen and what should happen are very different things, a fact that most of us learn early in life. A lesson that many never learn is that what is true and what is accepted as true are two different things.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #202512): “If it became obvious that it was a lab leak, then it might put a damper on the whole Belt and Road thing. … A major purpose of B&R, IMO, is to get the countries involved heavily indebted to China.”
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Excellent point. Of course, the purpose of making countries indebted to China is to make them subservient to China.
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Recognition of the role of the Chinese government might provide cover for countries renouncing their B&R debts, on the grounds that China owes reparations. That would be a big blow to China’s imperial ambitions.
Even if the virus origin was zoonotic, China still bears a large responsibility for the rapidity of the early spread because they allowed international travel to and from Wuhan to continue after they had locked down internal travel. Likely it had already spread outside China before that happened, but still….
I don’t think the implications of the Wuhan lab theory is very political, although that is the angle most of the media coverage takes. The important implications are about the scientific process, which is why ‘S’cience is being a bit defensive here.
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The implications are lackluster biosafety and if gain of function is implicated then that process (and anything that smells like it) must be banned.
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Safety protocols in biolabs will need to be tightened in a very vigorous way. It may be the case that this needs to happen even if this pandemic was sourced from an animal. I don’t get the feeling these protocols are adequate given the number of accidents that have already happened, but I’m not an expert in this area. It is definitely a low probability / high impact area, similar to nuclear safety.
I don’t think “the left†is evil. There are some people over there that are just pushing for more power for themselves and their peer group. Some of their ideas are not very workable, and almost all of them that are crazy never make it to implementation. Defund the police is not enjoying mass adoption for example.
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A lot of this is just social dynamics gone haywire. Many of the worst examples obtain either social or political power by espousing simple answers to really hard and intractable problems. Blame whitey. Blame the police. Math is racist. Etc. You know what doesn’t get you elected? These are really hard problems that are generational in nature, are somewhat self inflicted, require long term cultural change in the community, and I’m not going to be able to fix these problems while I’m in office except to start nudging things in the right direction.
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Somehow a program of literally defunding the police for an answer to police abuse and high crime seems more plausible as a near term experiment. Well … I say let them try that. 30 years from now the same people who once espoused simple answers to complex problems will be giving this lecture to young people who aren’t going to listen and need to learn the lesson the hard way.
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Murders in cities of over a millions people increased at a record rate last year. Enjoy your simple answers, sometimes things are not perfect, but are implemented that way with known defects because it’s a near optimal solution.
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The way to get to these near optimal hybrid solutions is by playing tug of war between the left and right in the US. We don’t need to play tug of war with hand grenades though.
Well now we have proof! Covid was developed at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md. “As U.S. calls for focus on covid origins, China repeats speculation about U.S. military base”
http://www.enhancemyvocabulary.com/word-roots_latin.html
Tom a few things,
1) You say:
I don’t know what your standard for mass adoption is. I read here that more than 20 major cities have ‘reduced police budgets in some form, and activists are fighting to ensure that is only the start’.
You note that
Now, without even looking at any data I’d expect the uptick in violenrt crime has multiple causes, but I’d also expect ‘defund the police’ and many of the surrounding related happenings in our society (BLM riots for example) to have something to do with that.
I certainly don’t advocate solving social or political problems domestically using hand grenades.
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Question – is justice for individuals (as opposed to the social or racial justice preached by CRT) good? What would evil look like, in your view? Is it a matter of intent, or results, does bad policy have anything to do with it / are policies that lead to increased violent crime evil? Real justice or injustice?
Mark
[Edit : don’t know where that ‘Hopefully,’ came from. Removed.]
For the most part, the Chinese people very much like their government. One could interpret this as the Iraqi’s also liked Saddam when he was president, because they were all asked by government authorities with guns and that was their answer.
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However if you are a Chinese citizen there is a lot to like. China was a backwater third world country 50 years ago mired in poverty, now they are a global power. Their embrace of economic capitalism with government socialism is working for them.
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Lots of that progress helps the world. CSFC (cheap sh** from China) fills our houses, especially the lower classes of America. Their manufacturing prowess is immense. Visit China and see the immense scale of their factories, it’s pretty amazing.
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There’s plenty not to like and it isn’t hard to see them misusing their power for global domination … just like everyone else has who had the opportunity. They are a threat and an opportunity at the same time.
I’d like to repeat and expand on or clarify my earlier view slightly.
I think that to adopt this as a standard of moral right and wrong is incorrect. This does not closely approximate moral right or wrong. To judge right and wrong using improper standards I think is evil.
I think it is debatable how many progressives believe the above. Perhaps few. Perhaps this summary is not nuanced enough. Perhaps many things. But at least as a starting point – I think that if people exist out there who have adopted the above criteria in lieu of standard decision making about what is right and wrong, then those people are evil. From a technical standpoint, I don’t see what meaning the words good and evil have, unless they pertain to actions [undertaken] based on moral decisions.
I don’t know what you’re basing that on. I don’t see how anybody can possibly know that about a country without a free press and one that is subject to government censorship.
The main blame from the defund the police crowd for the increased homicide rate is the pandemic. I doubt it, but we are about to find out. Crime rates have a lot of factors, but decreasing police budgets and allowing even more criminals on the streets to fix high crime is laughable. Let them do that and lets measure the results. The people can fix that insanity with elections over time.
A very plausible “release” from the Wuhan lab was not a release of an engineered virus, but rather just due to culturing of the many (hundreds?!?) of collected coronvirus strains from bats in China.
As U.S. Views Of China Grow More Negative, Chinese Support For Their Government Rises
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/23/913650298/as-u-s-views-of-china-grow-more-negative-chinese-support-for-their-government-ri
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Taking China’s pulse
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/
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It’s impossible to say how reliable this data can be, but almost everything I have seen shows high overall satisfaction inside of China.
From your first link,
From your second link,
I don’t think we really know. Not saying it’s impossible you’re correct.
WRT the Chinese liking their government: My observation is they don’t talk about it… except in Hong Kong, where they don’t say much good about it. Criticizing the CCP can get you put in jail (or worse). It would seem difficult to get an honest answer about liking the government under those circumstances.
I think the Chinese would already have done the ruse, except that genetic tracking is a smoking gun to expose most of those attempts. Perhaps they are smart enough to know a failed coverup is worse than the original sin. My guess is they are testing every bat inside their borders with a massive effort … unless they already know the answer. If they aren’t trying hard to test animals then that should tell us something.
Tom wrote: “Their embrace of economic capitalism with government socialism is working for them.”
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Haven’t they embraced fascism?
Dave,
mmm. It’d depend on whether or not one thinks Xi Jinping is a dictator I’d think. Certainly, he’s powerful. Could he disband the Politburo Standing Committee and get away with it? I don’t know. Could the PSC depose him? …
I can’t answer.
Traditionally, we categorize communist and fascist as different things, even though they share many characteristics. It suffices for me to say ‘totalitarian’ about both usually.
SteveF (Comment #202526): “A very plausible “release†from the Wuhan lab was not a release of an engineered virus, but rather just due to culturing of the many (hundreds?!?) of collected coronvirus strains from bats in China.”
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I think that if that were so, the Chinese would have long ago announced that they had found the zoonotic source, while pretending that it was a new virus that they had not previously identified.
SteveF,
I’m not at all sure you an postulate a natural source for the furin cleavage link in the spike, particularly the specific coding in one part. If you can’t, that means that the virus was engineered.
Here’s a preprint of a paper on the problem:
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202102.0264/v1
Here’s a quote from an article about the preprint:
DeWitt,
The problem with it being a purely engineered virus is that even outside the Furin cleavage site and the ACE2 receptor region (which is completely different from the RaTG13 bat virus), there is enough difference in the viral RNA base pairs (without much consequence to function) from the RaTG13 virus that some authors have estimated 3 to 8 decades would be needed for those differences to accumulate. I am not sure if that estimated divergence time is accurate (haven’t read the background information) but if it is accurate, then an engineered virus would have to start with a related bat coronavirus other than RaTG13, but the sequence for a bat virus closer to covid-19 than RaTG13 has never been published.
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OTOH, we know that some workers cleaning up bat guano in China died mysteriously years ago, and we also know that there are many (hundreds?) of bat coronaviruses. So it could be that covid-19 was already around, but had never been picked up by a person, or maybe didn’t have the Furin cleavage site until very recently. In any case, the escape from the lab doesn’t have to be an engineered virus, it could just be a nasty human pathogen that had never been identified and was carried out by lab workers.
SteveF (Comment #202535): “there is enough difference in the viral RNA base pairs (without much consequence to function) from the RaTG13 virus that some authors have estimated 3 to 8 decades would be needed for those differences to accumulate.”
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3-8 decades to accumulate in nature. Far less time to accumulate in many generations of forced passage through cells in culture, or perhaps in humanized mice.
Lucia. Yup on vaccinations but progress is limited by supply. We cannot manufacture our own and hard to make a case for priority over other countries. Border workers and families were vaccinated first, (and rule is that all frontline workers are either vaccinated or redeployed). Nearly done health and rest homes, and some places starting on over 65 and high risk. Not expecting fully open border till 2022.
Mike M,
Yes, it is possible that random accumulation of mutations in a virus is much more rapid in a cell culture. But do you have any data which shows that is the case? It is not something I have heard of.
SteveF,
Maybe I misunderstood. I was thinking of forced evolution of the virus. I suppose that non-functional mutations would not be so different in culture, other than having a lot of generations. But do we really know that the difference from RaTG13 would take many decades? I would imagine that would depend on how accurately you can define non-functional mutations.
SteveF,
Maybe total accumulation of mutations is proportional to (Number of Viruses) and they can have a lot of them in cell cultures? Dunno, but maybe that could make the number of differences across the population larger? Anyway, I admit to knowing very little about that.
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I am interested in reading about “humanized mice” and how they are used. I’ve read papers announcing new ‘mouse models’. So I know they engineer them. But I don’t know the full range of uses. If anyone has links to anything (reliable) discussing that, I’d like to read it.
You do not want the India variant let loose in a large unprotected population. It will be uncontainable rather quickly.
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There is no amount of money at this point that would be considered a bad investment into getting the world vaccinated ASAP. This means ramping up vaccine production by all means necessary. This is largely ignored in the media, who are obsessed with displaying good intentions that would wish vaccines into existence instead of tracking down the critical paths of production and putting pressure where necessary. They really don’t understand production and they don’t even try to.
Here is the 2012 Fauci paper on gain-of-function research that has been in the news: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3484390/
Mostly, it is a bureaucrat sounding like a bureaucrat. But a couple bits are of interest:
So a deadly virus can not escape from a proper research lab? The only risk is from an irresponsible maverick? We know that is not so.
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But of course he says nothing about how such experiments might prevent a pandemic.
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Not for the first time I ask myself: This guy is the best we’ve got?
“The West needs a leader with enough conviction and courage to give a speech about the CCP like Ronald Reagan’s “Evil empire†speech about the Soviet Union. ”
How about Scott Morrison of Australia then? Ask his Business roundtable how well that is working out from them.
Reagan could say what he liked about the Soviets with no concerns for the supply chains of his major companies, nor the income and cost of goods for his voters. I dont think any Western leader has that luxury. And frankly I dont see what good it would it do either. I think the CCP would continue to deny and it would have no chance of influencing regime-change in China.
As to Chinese satisfaction with government, well a desire for a orderly hierarchical society with a “strong leader” at top is hardly unique to the Chinese. (eg witness outrage at BLM riots and Capitol riot). CCP works on idea that rising living conditions matter a lot more to people than freedom of speech (not something the Chinese have ever really had) etc on a day to day basis.
I think change has to come from within and what the west has to figure out is what the most effective way of promoting that. A zero-trade might do it, but it would have to be unified front and it would cost a monumental about of economic pain. I think much of the west cares a lot more about rising living standards than the fate of the Uighurs. Big talk by comparison is relatively cheap (but China will retaliate if they can), but I doubt effective at all. It might even be counterproductive (rally CCP around leader).
Lucia,
“Maybe total accumulation of mutations is proportional to (Number of Viruses) and they can have a lot of them in cell cultures?”
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If a mutation is advantageous, then having more viruses mutating make a favorable mutation more likely. But these appear to be random mutations which do not infer significant selective advantage. I don’t see how having more viruses growing makes any difference.
“It might even be counterproductive (rally CCP around leader).”
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Telling the truth about an immoral totalitarian government is the right thing to do. That is enough for me. The Uighurs and lots of others in China might actually agree.
Steve, agree that it is the right thing to do. However, if my income went down the tubes as result, I am pretty sure I would try to rationalize being “diplomatic”.
Mike M. (Comment #202542)
This is a claim. One should obviously ask if it’s true. We know viruses jump from animals to people. We can get an estimate of how often they jump and then cause a pandemic. We can also have an estiate of how often human viruses mutate and become more deadly or more infective. (e.g. flu.)
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But estimating the probability of a virus escaping from some lab somewhere strikes me as application of the Drake equation. How many labs are there? 1? 2? 10? 100? 1000? Where are they? Cities? Remote areas? How well controlled are things in labs? What are all the possible events that could possibly result in a release? ( There may be a mega-shit-ton of highly improbable sounding events that collectively result in a higher probability of release than anyone estimated.)
I mean, look at the path Fauci imagines
Yep. This could happen.
Here’s another one — which might happen in Fauci’s “not so great” lab. Imagine someone was somehow sloppy and failed to dispose of infected “mouse models” properly. So a dead mouse ends up in the normal trash. Suppose a swarm of animal rights activists swarm the lab and wreck havoc? There are all sorts of things short of the scientist getting sick that could propagate the virus. The janitor could get sick. An intern trainee could get sick.
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There are factors relative to “Nature” that we know and that could make the probability of a pandemic from a lab leak higher than nature:
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1) We know some of the genetic changes studied are intended to make something more virulent. Those in nature are not.
2) We know there are people in the labs. So the virus has a direct path to people. In contrast, people aren’t normally in the bat caves in Yunan.
3) We know those people usually live in populated towns and interact with other people. So on infected person is likely to come in contact with other people. Lots of “nature” is rural or remote areas, so mutation that happens in nature may die out before it comes in proximity with a human,
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There are other features that might make a lab leak less likely to trigger a pandemic. But if we start multiplying the total amount of research and the total number of labs, the probability of lab leak necessarily increases especially if the quality of the lab security nosedives.
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Honestly, I doubt we can really estimate the ‘probability of a lab leak’ much less ‘the probability of spawning a pandemic as a result of a lab leak’. Maybe it’s currently higher than the probability of a pandemic kicked off by a zoonotic leap; maybe it’s lower.
As far as I’m aware the first source of the lab-leak idea is Alina Chan of the Broad Institute. The below links give some of the background:
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2020/09/09/alina-chan-broad-institute-coronavirus/
https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/alina-chan-dichron-interview
https://slate.com/technology/2021/04/covid-lab-leak-theory-pandemic-research.html
EStimate of biosafety breaches:
https://www.volkswagenstiftung.de/sites/default/files/downloads/Summary_Report_HS_Dual_Use_Research_on_Microbes.pdf
Phil,
“I am pretty sure I would try to rationalize being “diplomaticâ€.”
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How unfortunate. And when the CCP moves militarily against the 23 million in Taiwan, will you rationalize that as well? Toleration of criminal behavior only encourages more criminal behavior.
Maybe I’m late to the party on this one… I found it on Twitter [so it must be true]: “And Dr. Peter Daszak, who the US media quotes often, is conflicted. He sent NIH and DOD money to Wuhan to modify viruses! And he’s a WHO investigator.” I have been doing deep Google research on it and I think it’s true. https://apnews.com/press-release/business-wire/science-pandemics-public-health-coronavirus-pandemic-asia-f43b4682b22541e1b932964b53f0a4aa
Lest we forget…. For Memorial Day I have been reading the history of the battles “The Pennsylvania Volunteers” fought in during the Civil war. The horror of Antietam is just incomprehensible. My great- great grandfather, Johannes Klier was a foot soldier in this unit at this battle. : Chapter Three Malvern Hill -Antietam, “The sun of September 18th, 1862 at Antietam rose to light one of those scenes of suffering and anguish which humbled the pride of man by the exhibition of his weakness and cruelty. Twenty thousand men killed or wounded the day before were lying on that narrow battlefield.” It staggers the mind. History Sixty-first Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861-1865 https://books.google.com/books/about/History_Sixty_first_Regiment_Pennsylvani.html?id=ww82AQAAMAAJ
The NBA, Disney, and Hollywood have no problem taking the knee for China, and I assume most other corporations will do the same for access to that market. Of course it is enraging that they do this while also virtue signaling on random issues with US politics.
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I flew from China to Taiwan and was treated to 30 minute long propaganda film on how Taiwan was really part of China and everyone was just super happy about the whole thing. Smiling children and all.
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China is smarter than the previous USSR, they sacrificed their socialistic economic idealism for more power. They knew economic leverage was at least as important as military leverage and behaved accordingly. IMO they also responded to Trump better than anyone, they just ignored all his antics and dealt with what he did and responded in kind. Transactional, not histrionics. No fainting couches and no long lines of opinion leaders denigrating the destruction of “democracy”.
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The US is way too obsessed with their own inside baseball to stay focused on China for more than ten seconds. I don’t foresee any coordinated anti-China campaign until China does something really dumb. What I see is a well calibrated campaign of iterative power gathering. See how Hong Kong was dealt with. If I was to sum up their geopolitical strategy in an advanced policy white paper it would have 8 words: China wins because they don’t listen to Twitter.
Steve, frankly I think USA will tolerate it in end. I doubt China will move till it knows it can win and I don’t think US has stomach for a nuclear war.
But on current situation, is ranting about an Evil Empire going to do any good or are you proposing something stronger.?
(PS I am guessing that Australian news seldom makes it to US, but you might like to look at current spat with China. I think you would approve.)
Regarding ranting about an Evil Empire, I think speaking the truth as we perceive can be more useful than is often thought. Take Solzhenitsyn for example.
Maybe the CCP will fall on the day that enough people in China feel strongly enough that it should fall. Maybe people struggling to find and tell the truth about what’s going on in there will hasten that day.
Maybe not.
*shrug*
Phil,
“But on current situation, is ranting about an Evil Empire going to do any good or are you proposing something stronger?”
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I would suggest arming the Taiwanese to a level that the CCP will continue to think it not worthwhile to attack. The very worst possible (weak Obama/Biden-like) approach would be to limit arms sales to Taiwan to please the CCP; that way lies inevitable catastrophe for the 23 million souls on Taiwan.
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WRT something stronger: it makes sense to have plenty of projected military capability (carrier task forces, etc.) to let the CCP know that attacking Taiwan will be a very expensive proposition. I do not think even the CCP is crazy enough to entertain nuclear war, but in terms of both offensive and defensive capability (nuclear) they are at a huge disadvantage… at least for now.
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But at bottom, the CCP is bad people doing bad things to innocents, and it diminishes the lives of all. Resisting the CCP is a moral imperative.
Biden has done OK by Taiwan so far, from what I read:
https://asiatimes.com/2021/04/us-pushes-and-tests-chinas-red-line-on-taiwan/
Blinken at least is making the appropriate noises:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/11/antony-blinken-china-aggression-taiwan
Moving the USS Ronald Regan out of the Pacific to support US Troop withdrawal from Afghanistan suggests that our carrier availability is a little strained right now though.
Probably nothing will come of any of this. PRC will probably wait on Taiwan, at least that seems to be the conventional thinking.
A lot happening on the lab-leak idea, looks like there will soon be a peer-reviewed paper that makes some very strong claims, news about it (along with a pre-publish version) can be found here: https://www.minervanett.no/angus-dalgleish-birger-sorensen-coronavirus/the-evidence-which-suggests-that-this-is-no-naturally-evolved-virus/362529
The article is from July of 2020, so not at all new. The pre-print version was rejected by multiple journals; I don’t find this at all surprising. The authors are offering a speculative sequence of events consistent with published work, and conclude a lab release is most plausible. That would be more suitable as a blog post or an editorial than a scientific journal. The authors could be correct, but they really offer nothing that comes close to proof of lab creation.
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I note also that they predict in the pre-print that m-RNA viruses wouldn’t work…… but they worked very well. That calls their technical judgement into question.
Today’s reported cases (7 day trailing average) in the USA are the lowest since April 1, 2020. The nightmare is coming to an end.
Yesterday Massachusetts gov Charlie Baker lifted the state mask mandate, and I saw about half the people in two different stores not using masks. Some retail establishments are (apparently) continuing to insist on masks, but that will probably end sooner rather than later.
Although there has been a sea change as regards the lab origin of the Wuhan virus, here is CNN still pushing the idea that the lab leak is an unfounded conspiracy theory:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/29/world/covid-19-theories-intl-cmd/index.html
The author completely ignores the mass of scientific evidence supporting the lab leak. But perhaps that is just because science is way too hard for him. His explanation for why bats are a likely source for zoonotic viruses is the only thing of value in the piece, and that is for its unintentional humor:
Here is something of a counterweight to the defeatism of people like Phil Scadden re China:
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-05-28/chinas-inconvenient-truth
I find the analysis less than convincing since it seems to view China through a WEIRD lens. But it is useful as a reminder that China is not without significant internal problems and is far from invincible.
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We ought to be doing everything we can to both free ourselves from Chinese power and make it as hard as possible for them to deal with their own problems. It is worth remembering how quickly the USSR fell from its status as a superpower.
MikeM,
I thought a big reason for “why bats” tend to spawn lots of viruses is that the congregate in huge numbers and so create a huge pool in which viruses can mutate. (High body temperatures that allow them to survive also factors in here.)
On this
Yes. It also is hard to prove. And that this one was caused a zoonotic jump has not been proven.
.(And fwiw: So we know the conclusion of “most” specialists in the field? I think we don’t. Heck, I think we don’t even know if “most” specialists have made any conclusion. Some are stepping forward right now and saying, “Ehrmmm… that’s not my conclusion.”)
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Both the possibility of pandemics due to spillover and lab leaks were predicted as plausible before this one happened. The latter is discussed as a danger during GOF research and was one of the arguments for a moratorium. The idea that this was possible was sufficiently convincing to result in a moratorium.
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So it isn’t as if the notion that there could be a lab leak that might result in a pandemic wasn’t even considered before the Covid outbreak.
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The reason different scientists discuss different possibilities is that all of them are speculating. All of these are possible. We don’t have proof of how it happened, so we don’t know which of these happened.
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We also don’t know if any did.
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Well, the idea that researchers were doing GOF research isn’t itself a conspiracy theory. The Obama pause on the research was over and that pause never applied to China.
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The most that can be said is with regard to this specific sub-theory that would fit under “one of the many possible lab-leak scenarios” is we don’t have any particular evidence they were specifically doing GOF on RatG13 nor that they turned it into SARS-CoV-2. But then we almost certainly don’t have specific evidence on many internal research projects!
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That doesn’t mean speculation that this might have happened is a “conspiracy theory”.
Here the fact that it is hard to trace is seen as evidence in favor of zoonotic leaps. But it is equally hard to trace what happened in a laboratory leak, which can be undetected. And it’s even harder to trace what happened in a lab leak in a country that is known to be extremely non-transparant with it’s own people and the world!
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And just what is this “vast preponderance” in favor of this path? As far as I can see, the main arguments are this is the way zoonotic pandemics (or even just epidemics or even some non-pandemic diseases) from entirely new viruses kicked off in the past. (Well, of course.) There is some ignoring of other data. (Ignoring the fact that no animals in the wet market tested positive for COVID even though they tested. And not mentioning that there is some evidence Covid infected some people before the outbreak at the Wuhan market.
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I have seen some arguments advanced against the a GOF branch of the lab leak based on interpretations of the specific changes in the RNA. (But virologists seem to interpret that evidence differently.) But Covid itself being engineered is just one branch of the lab leak theory.
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What we have is two theories both of which we would expect to be very hard to prove. Neither has been proven. Neither has much specific evidence in its favor. It’s all circumstancial and there isn’t much more in favor of one vs the other.
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As far as I can see as it applies to this specific event there is not a huge amount of evidence in favor of either one.
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The unstated thing in many of these articles is that many of the points against the lab leak count only if we believe the Chinese government and people running the lab are all entirely truthful and fully transparent. And also even if they are, there could be things even they don’t know. (I mean… think Ollie North. Somethings that were going one weren’t known to lots of people.)
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As an example: consider the report that everyone at the Wuhan Virology institute was given an antibody test an everyone was negative. I actually believe everyone (or nearly everyone) was given an antibody test. I think their government would want to do that. But I think that they would tell us everyone was negative whether or not that was true. And I think it is highly unlikely contrary evidence would come out. (I think even people in the institute would be told they had no antibodies, the head of the institute would be told there were no positives and so on.)
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Could I be wrong? Sure. But I have zero confidence in the “factoid” that no one at the Virolgy institute came out anti-body positive. I think we essentially have non-information on that.
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In the end, I think: We. Just. Don’t. Know.
(But as I said before: I think we will never know.)
Mike,
I agree China has it’s internal problems. Nothing inevitable about Chinese world domination.
Lucia,
“I think we will never know.”
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I agree, it is unlikely we we ever know for sure. If there was an intermediate species, there is no evidence of it (unlike the first SARS and MERS, where that species was quickly identified). If the virus jumped directly from bats to people, there is no evidence of the “genomic adjustment” to humans as was seen clearly with both the first SARS and with MERS. The addition of a four amino acid sequence to provide a Furin cleavage site with zero mutations in the surrounding spike protein sequence seems utterly improbable “in the wild”. Perhaps all the expected signs of species jump will be identified, but that seems very unlikely.
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OTOH, it seems to me less likely the CCP will announce “Yes, we had a lab escape of a gain-of-function virus and it killed all those millions” even if that is exactly what happened! So it is very likely no source will ever be proven.
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But if we admit there is even a slight chance it was a lab release, then in terms of policy that lack of proof should make no difference: doing gain-of-function experiments with human pathogens is madness, and should be prohibited by both national laws and international treaty. It is simply too dangerous with little plausible benefit.
lucia,
Yes, the article was bonkers. At one point I actually went back to make sure I read the date right and that it was not from May 2020.
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The fact that bats congregate in large numbers is part of why they are such a terrific source of new viruses. But another big factor is that they have weird immune systems. Their immune systems are content to tolerate low level viral infections. As a result, any given bat is likely to be infected by a bunch of different viruses at the same time. That allows for creating new viruses by recombination and also allows bats to be great vectors for spreading viruses.
lucia,
Apparently CNN thinks it couldn’t be a lab leak of an engineered virus because no one has ever thought that could happen. Umm, let’s see, how about Stephen King’s The Stand, not to mention all the pre-pandemic articles on the dangers of GOF research.
We don’t know that SARS-CoV-2 was a descendant of RaTG13 or was engineered from it. So speculation about how many generations it would take to mutate RaTG13 to SARS-CoV-2 in the wild may not be particularly relevant. The preprint and a news article based on it I linked above have a phylogenetic tree diagram that shows RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 as having been descended/derived from the same ancestor. OTOH, maybe I’m reading the chart incorrectly.
SteveF,
No. I think we will never know.
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There is also a theory that the US genetically engineered a virus and released it in Wuhan. Obviously, if our government did that, they also would not say: “Oh. Yeah. We totally did that!”
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For theory:
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-truth-and-the-whole-truth-on-the-origins-of-covid-19/
Part of the theory is that has “just the right” IFR while making people sick and a high transmissibility and we know their values before the attack. The “just right” IFR is supposed to be good for economic attacks. Ok.
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Anyway, this one , our GOF scientists have to be super-doooper-stupendously good at engineering more than one variant, and they know totally know tailor the magnitude of both IFR and transmissibility of two variants. (One is for China one is for Iran.) But then they have to be incompetent at other things. (Like not making a third really innocuous variant that transmit, doesn’t make anyone sick but give you immunity and spreading that around outside China and Iran.)
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DeWitt,
Really?!?!?!
CNN hasn’t apparently read as widely as Mike M who brings us this Fauci quote from 2012:
The possibility of a pandemic featured prominently in the decision to have a moritorium!!
” doing gain-of-function experiments with human pathogens is madness”
Clap, clap. Couldn’t agree more.
Re: Taiwan. I seriously doubt that there is any immediate threat to Taiwan.
1/ I doubt China can be confident of winning (yet). They would need to be reasonably sure that their missile capability can overwhelm and sink a US carrier group.
2/ More importantly, the resultant trade shock from such a attack would generate serious unrest. (at the moment).
Strengthening Taiwan will make not a jot of differences to the Uighurs.
Mike M. My views of inside China are formed largely from a colleague (ex-israel with chinese wife) who used to spend half the year in south China, but also from other friends still teaching in the North. They would strongly agree that CCP is not monolithic. Short protests about working conditions, local authority decisions are common, quickly suppressed (especially on media), but often effective as CCP clings to power by appeasement.
Sabre-rattling about Taiwan appeases nationalists but a maintaining a rising standard of living is more important.
On the other hand, I think the scrap with Australia is important. China doesnt have to care what remarks Australia makes but it is flexing muscle with trade sanctions aimed squarely at Morrison’s voter base but which have minimal to no impact on China. The aim is cow Australia (and similar tactics with India and others). Do this to enough countries and you can lessen the trade shock of a war. It is also interesting because it is blatant breach of WTO rules and it will be interesting to see if they will abide by a WTO ruling.
They are betting on Western powers being too concerned about economics impacts to do more than spout words but they are working to suppress that too.
Of course, you can support the Australian situation easily. Go and buy a good Aussie red wine.
MikeM
I’d read about recombination yesterday. (Article about Vietnam and virus.)
That really made me wonder if we know how long it would take for a changes to occur. It would imagine mutation and recombination would allow faster over all changes. Of course, this is merely wonder and imagine because I just read this can happen yesterday and have no details!
Also: What if a virologist wanted to study recombination? Either to measure how fast it happened, or what changes were more likely and so on. So they infected something with two types of viruses and were trying to see what they got?
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Maybe no one has reported giving that a try. Is it insane to imagine someone would give it a whirl? ( I don’t think we have any virologists here who could actually answer that. But I would want to know.)
Phil, I have no quarrel with your statement and reasoning regarding Taiwan and China. I basically agree with you.
I completely agree that all previous animal spillover virus outbreaks did not come from lab leaks. All very serious people who believe in science agree with this.
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It is an important point that similar virus outbreaks have come from animal spillover. It is a logic fallacy that this proves covid was from the same thing, although one could argue that this makes it more likely given very little other evidence. The circumstantial evidence for a lab leak adds a lot of uncertainty.
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It should be noted that even when labs are operating with known extremely dangerous pathogens, lab leaks still occur:
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Sverdlovsk (aerosolized and weaponized) anthrax leak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak
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“On 2 April 1979, spores of Bacillus anthracis (the causative agent of anthrax), were accidentally released from a Soviet military research facility in the city of Sverdlovsk, Russia (now Yekaterinburg). The ensuing outbreak of the disease resulted in the deaths of at least 66 people, although the exact number of victims remains unknown.[1] The cause of the outbreak was denied for years by the Soviet authorities, which blamed the deaths on consumption of tainted meat from the area, and subcutaneous exposure due to butchers handling the tainted meat. All medical records of the victims were removed to hide serious violations of the Biological Weapons Convention that had come in effect in 1975. The accident is sometimes referred to as “biological Chernobyl”.
The threat of China needs to be taken very seriously. They are not yet a serious threat to the US, but the given trajectory makes this only a decade or two away. One can argue the US’s industrial capability won WWII. We won’t beat China’s manufacturing prowess by writing good software and having Facebook ban China.
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The good news is that China in its recent history has not been one that has shown much interest in rogue international operations to expand its empire. They show very little interest in being the world’s policeman and don’t start wars and invade other countries on a regular basis like some … errr … other countries I can think of, ha ha. I wouldn’t mind handing off world policeman duties anyway in a lot of cases. Let China screw up the Middle East for a while, it’s their turn.
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They also really don’t have a lot of friends for whatever reason. Even in the US the left and right can at least agree that we don’t like China very much in between calling each other the most despicable people on the planet who both hate democracy. Most of Asia dislikes each other for things that happened centuries ago. I’m no Asian scholar but my sense is that the crap will hit the fan regionally over there before it spills over to the West.
Tom – loved your comment. 🙂 And you made some excellent points. but I still think you go out and buy a bottle of Aussie wine (and saying even while NZ relationships with Oz are very strained).
Tom Scharf (Comment #202576): “The good news is that China in its recent history has not been one that has shown much interest in rogue international operations to expand its empire.”
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Uh, no. Ask anyone in Hong Kong. Or Taiwan. And that is not all.
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In 2017, China started to build a road through part of Bhutan, the purpose of which was to threaten India. The Indian army backed them down. Now they are building villages on Bhutan’s territory. The purpose seems to be to pressure Bhutan to swap the territory China wants for the territory China is effectively seizing.
https://thefederalist.com/2021/05/28/in-bhutan-china-takes-disputed-territory-without-firing-a-shot/
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Then there is China’s adventurism in the South China Sea, building artificial islands, putting military bases on them, so as to claim the South China Sea as their waters and to project force against their neighbors.
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And the Belt and Road business is all about imperialism. Smart imperialism, but imperialism none the less.
Tom,
Remember the Anthrax in letters scare around 2001? Well, some was the Ames strain. (Originated in a government lab in Ames Iowa). (See https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/paul-keim-we-were-surprised-it-was-the-ames-strain/ ) It was “lab (military) grade” anthrax.
The idea that deadly stuff in labs doesn’t get out (aka “leak”) is simply false. Maybe in that case Bruce Ivens, an scientist at Fort Deitrich mailed it out. Maybe it got out by some other path. But in terms of likely hood of things getting out of labs: it got out.
Things get out.
Here’s one answer to a previously posed question:
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https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/the-sudden-rise-of-the-coronavirus-lab-leak-theory
“Chinese scientists have reportedly tested fifty thousand samples from three hundred species of wildlife, searching for the missing link, and hadn’t yet found one carrying sars-CoV-2. “The fact is, no one has found sars-CoV-2 anywhere other than in humans,†Relman said. “So that strikes me as a little odd.—
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Here’s my fringiest and conpsiratoriest theory I can think of. The Chinese are bioengineering covid to put back into bats so they can discover the covid origin!
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Interesting factoid:
“The original animal source of the sars pandemic (bats) was not pinpointed until 2017, fifteen years after the global outbreak. (Incidentally, the discovery was made at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.) ”
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From 2017:
Bat cave solves mystery of deadly SARS virus — and suggests new outbreak could occur
Chinese scientists find all the genetic building blocks of SARS in a single population of horseshoe bats.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9
“The killer strain could easily have arisen from such a bat population, the researchers report in PLoS Pathogens1 on 30 November. They warn that the ingredients are in place for a similar disease to emerge again.”
lucia (Comment #202572): “That really made me wonder if we know how long it would take for a changes to occur. It would imagine mutation and recombination would allow faster over all changes.”
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Well, you can tell random mutations from recombination since one is random and the other is an entire chunk of RNA. I don’t think you can really put a time scale on recombination.
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If the Wuhan virus came from RaTG13, then it would have gotten a chunk of the spike protein via recombination, either in an unidentified intermediate or in a laboratory. But if the former, it still leaves a bunch of mysteries such as the identity of the intermediate, how it got all the way to Wuhan, and where the furin cleavage group came from.
Tom,
Funny. I don’t know enough to know if it’s possible or impossible. I mean, if you can infect bats with Covid, you could do it and then “find” it.
Tom Scharf (Comment #202580):
They found the intermediate vector, palm civets, in a matter of months. And they found similar viruses in bats very early on. So maybe there were some details that took time to fill in.
Tom’s nature article says this about recombination of viruses similar to SARS
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9
MikeM
I’m sure you can tell the difference early on. My thought is having two processes for strains being created is that you can get new strains faster. Recombinations screws up the ability to just estimate the time between one virus another by the number of different individual random mutations. If the one you found came into being through some random mutations and some recombinations, then it would be “related” in some sense to the various things that recombined.
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Presumably virologists though this, of course. But three days ago I assumed divergence in RNA viruses was mutation by mutation.
Perhaps China will do what many countries who acquire global power do, use that power for regional domination. It’s best to prepare for that because that is what usually happens. They are using a playbook that is quite tattered from previous use by others.
So let’s try to think of the worst job you can have as a virologist.
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“The most challenging work is to locate the caves, which usually are in remote areas,†says Cui. After finding a particular cave in Yunnan, southwestern China, in which the strains of coronavirus looked similar to human versions4,5, the researchers spent five years monitoring the bats that lived there, collecting fresh guano and taking anal swabs1.”
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Sounds like intern work to me!
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From the same article, you can see the rationalization for GOF experiments:
“But Changchun Tu, a virologist who directs the OIE Reference Laboratory for Rabies in Changchun, China, says the results are only “99%†persuasive. He would like to see scientists demonstrate in the lab that the human SARS strain can jump from bats to another animal, such as a civet. “If this could have been done, the evidence would be perfect,†he says.”
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Genetic engineering to prove SARS came from bats.
Phil Scadden,
I never really liked Aussie wines, red or white. I find them overpriced for their quality, and almost always stainless steel aged, not oak aged. They are ‘bright’ in up-front flavor, but not very complex. The Chards are particularly one-dimentional that way. Some people like that style, but I don’t.
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The Chinese need Aussie coal. I think they will find a way to work things out. I’m all for giving Australia diplomatic support at the WTO over China breaking trade rules.
Lucia,
The RaTG13 strain has a “recombined” segment from another (distantly related) virus. That recombined segment is 10% to 30% different from closely related coronaviruses, but reasonably close to covid-19; that is where the ACE2 receptor is (IIRC). There are many single-point mutations elsewhere, but they represent at most 1% or 2% of the amino acids. The only ‘block’ mutation of multiple amino acids outside the recombined segment is the addition of the four for the Furin cleavage site. That looks to me where a laboratory manipulation is most likely; virologists knew some years ago a Furin cleavage site increases pathogenicity.
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Wild speculation: A virologist added the Furin cleavage site to a virus closely related to RaTG13 then used human cell lines or ‘humanized’ mice to let the virus adapt/optimize for humans. After escape, no ‘adjustment’ to the human host is needed. Unlike the original SARS, the virus starts a pandemic because it is already optimized and highly contagious. The 1% to 2% difference compared to RaTG13 is just the result of the virus optimizing itself for human hosts.
steve,
Thanks!
Tom Scharf (Comment #202586): “Sounds like intern work to me!”
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Those are known as “graduate students”. 🙂
SteveF (Comment #202588): “The RaTG13 strain has a “recombined†segment from another (distantly related) virus. That recombined segment is 10% to 30% different from closely related coronaviruses, but reasonably close to covid-19; that is where the ACE2 receptor is (IIRC)”
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I don’t understand. I think the RBM (receptor binding motif, which is part of the receptor binding domain) is the part of RaTG13 that is very different from the Wuhan virus.
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Last year, I found the following, which provides a lot of background: https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748
My notes have the following quote:
Time for me to reread that article.
Mike M,
Yes the recombinant segment (in covid-19) with the ACE2 receptor does look relatively close to a pangolin strain, but very different from the pangolin strain elsewhere along the spike sequence.
lucia,
I should have added a /sarc tag to my comment about CNN. Clearly there was a lot of information out there about lab escapes, both potential and actual, that CNN obviously ignored by doubling down on the lab leak being a ridiculous conspiracy theory meme.
China has some serious demographic problems from the one child policy. There’s a large excess of men in that generation and the median age of the population is going up. Maybe they think the need a war to kill off the male surplus.
I wrote the above before I checked the WSJ site. Lo and behold, one of the top articles is about China’s demographic problem:
Of course allowing couples to have three children doesn’t mean that it will happen. I don’t think any country with a declining birth rate that has tried to increase it has even slowed the decline, much less reversed it.
Well, that’s weird. The /b tag to turn off bolding didn’t work. I even tried deleting the ‘b’ and ‘/b’ and it didn’t work.
Edit: I forgot to end the link with a /a.
DeWitt,
Yeah. I’d read about the continued low birth rate in China. Turns out kids who grew up as only kids and whose cohort were all only kids don’t want to have a ton of kids! Also, perhaps, current generations grandmothers who (evidently) not infrequently had their mothers babysit their one child may not be eager to now babysit multiple grandchildren!
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(https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1006338/for-chinas-weary-grandparents%2C-two-kids-mean-double-the-trouble )
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Interestingly, they seem to still prefer having boys.
Yes, the boy bias was a big problem with one child only. I read stories of planeloads of picked up “orphan” babies coming from China and almost every one of them was a girl. I can’t remember what the number was, but abortions had a very heavy girl bias as well.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/open-air-effect-gave-the-south-a-break-from-covid-19-spring-surge-but-vaccination-rates-point-to-threat-11622470692?mod=hp_lead_pos10
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“Another factor that is becoming better understood by researchers is humidity. According to an October study co-authored by Dr. Marr that has yet to be peer-reviewed, viruses like SARS-CoV-2 that are packaged inside a fatty membrane, thrive in environments below 40% relative humidity, while they become less stable and spread less actively as moisture in the air increases above that level.”
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If that is true, perhaps it would have been useful to know that 12 months ago. In FL it is hard to get your AC down to 40% humidity in the summer anyway.
Tom Scharf,
Yet another Chicken Little article. Everyone in the press and a lot of ‘experts’ seem to continue to take confirmed cases as the true measure of infection acquired immunity, if they consider convalescent immunity at all. I will be very surprised if there is a significant surge this year because there are only a few states where there might be a significant pool of susceptible individuals.
The only state in the South that has confirmed cases less than 8%, which, IMO, is suggestive of a significant pool of susceptibles is Virginia. Hawaii and Vermont, OTOH, need to vaccinate as many as possible because they’re below 4% confirmed cases.
One of the the great things about the CCP is that it allows you to see the utter horror of stupid policy. Historically, China has a culture where sons are expected to help support their aging parents. China adopts a one-child-only policy. Obvious result: girls are (ultrasounded and then) aborted, or abandoned after birth, or even murderer after birth.
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Now that the demographics of China are badly messed up, they face the problem of too few potential wives… shocking, I know. In a decade or two, they will have the additional problem of a demographic crash, with fewer and fewer younger people supporting more and more elderly.
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The CCP is profoundly stupid and evil. It comes from them usurping the personal choices that people should make…. about everything, not just how many children to have.
DeWitt,
I agree, those states with few cases relative to their population are at risk of resurging covid-19 unless they have very high vaccination rates. ~12% of the population with confirmed cases seems to make resurgence impossible…. suggesting at least ~24% of the population combined asymptomatic/symptomatic cases (let’s not argue about the details; could be a little higher or lower).
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States with strong “lockdown” rules (like Michigan) suffered a worse late resurgence than other states, no doubt because fewer people had been exposed and recovered. And Whitmer is an idiot, with idiotic policies, which doesn’t help.
DeWitt,
I should add, I don’t much care about the vaccination rate among the under 40 set….. so long as they stay away from unvaccinated Grammy and Grandpa, they can get their immunity the hard way if they want.
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But the sad reality is nearly all covid-19 deaths in the USA from now on will be among people over 40 who refused to be vaccinated. I know 6 people over 65 who refuse the vaccines…. IMHO, it is utterly bonkers. Incomprehensible, really.
SteveF,
The Czech Republic had their last peak case rate at 12.3% of the population with confirmed cases. I think that may be close to worst case, i.e. lowest multiplier possibly meaning better testing.
I should go back and look up the article published early on that predicted a much bigger second surge after lockdowns were either eased or stopped being closely followed. That was about when the dominant meme became the lockdowns could crush the virus rather than just temporarily flattening the curve. Remember how so many lives would be saved by implementing lockdown protocols sooner rather than later? But that was when at least some people thought that IHME ‘projections’ actually meant something.
Don’t get too excited about the low number of new cases in the US the last two days. A lot of states that should still be having new cases didn’t report over the three day weekend, Florida, e.g. When they catch up today, don’t be surprised if the press reports that new cases have ticked up.
SteveF (Comment #202601): “States with strong “lockdown†rules (like Michigan) suffered a worse late resurgence than other states”.
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Many sensible people predicted that we would all end up at the same place, with attempts at control at best affecting how long it would take to get there. The obvious exception being place like NZ who managed to almost complete isolate while waiting for the vaccine.
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Confirmed “cases” in the USA are 10.0% of population. 39 states are in the range from 9.0% (WV) to 12.0% (AZ). That is easily consistent with variations in the ratio of actual infections to positive tests.
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Three states have high reported case rates:
ND 14.4%
SD 14.1%
TN 12.6%
The Dakotas had very few cases until the fall, so their higher reported cases might well be due to infections occurring during an efficient testing regime. I don’t know what the story is with Tennessee, but it is not so high compared to the national average.
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Nine states have low reported totals:
VA 7.9 %
MD 7.6 %
NH 7.2 %
DC 6.9 %
WA 5.7 %
ME 5.0 %
OR 4.7 %
VT 3.9 %
HI 2.6 %
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Maryland and DC got hit hard early, so maybe they have high ratios of infections to positive tests. I don’t know what to make of Virginia. Hawaii consists of islands that really cracked down on travel. The others are in the extreme NW (WA, OR) and extreme NE (VT, NH, ME). Curious.
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It looks like we have reached something like herd immunity, to the extent that is a valid concept. With maybe 40% of the population and 50% of adults infected. Because of heterogeneity, natural herd immunity level is lower than for vaccination. And of course, the effectiveness of vaccination is reduced by vaccinating those already immune.
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A state that has 40% with acquired immunity and 50% randomly vaccinated has 70% immune. A state that has 20% with acquired immunity and 50% randomly vaccinated has 60% immune. Not so different. So I doubt the states with lower case totals are at significantly higher risk, with the possible exception of Hawaii.
The differences between the NE and NW corners of the country are pretty obvious in age adjusted deaths rates: https://healthy-skeptic.com/2021/05/27/age-adjusted-state-death-rates/
The 7 states with under 100 deaths per 100K (age adjusted) are in the extreme NE (VT, NH, ME), NW (WA, OR, AK) or isolated from the rest of the country (AK, HI).
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I wonder what the pattern is like in Canada.
Mike M,
The states in the northeast with low rates have no high population centers and had pretty extreme lockdowns for most of the pandemic.
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The WA and OR have relatively low population density and had EXTREME lockdowns and social distancing rules. I visited Seattle last November and there was only takeout food, masks everywhere (including streets and parks), most people working from home, and completely empty public transportation…. I watched 6 city buses pass while I waited for an uber, without a single passenger on any of them… and even getting an uber to the airport was nearly impossible. The company I visited had only about 10% of their lab staff working.
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Alaska? Pretty empty.
SteveF, Not my field but I remember victory over the Polio virus 🦠It was eradicated. Shouldn’t the goal be the same for the China virus…. and wouldn’t that mean that nearly everybody gets the jab?
Russell,
I think it depends on how rapidly the covid-19 virus mutates. If the virus mutates enough to evade immunity from an earlier infection or vaccination, then eradication becomes just about impossible. Imagine the difficulty of eradicating polio if everyone in the world needed a vaccination for each newly evolved strain… say one a year or even more often.
Fortunately, polio did not evolve rapidly, and immunity lasted indefinitely.
SteveF (Comment #202607): “The states in the northeast with low rates have no high population centers and had pretty extreme lockdowns for most of the pandemic.”
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New Hampshire is mostly suburbs and exurbs of Boston. A big chunk of Maine’s population lives in the Portland metro. That is a bigger population center than any in Montana, Wyoming, or the Dakotas.
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SteveF: “The WA and OR have relatively low population density and had EXTREME lockdowns and social distancing rules.”
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Almost everyone in Washington and Oregon lives in areas of high population density. It sounds like their restrictions were similar to New Mexico. Certainly no more extreme than Michigan, California, New York, Minnesota, etc.
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As far as the end state is concerned, it is clear that civil liberty violations have had little or no effect. It looks like population density was not a big factor.
Except, even after 30 years, Polio is on the ropes, but still capable of a come back. The big difference is that polio has severe impacts for children, which tend to engender a more committed response.
SteveF, Russell,
Corona Virus clearly does mutate. That’s why we are seeing variants. Those variants are at least somewhat meaningful, though so far we aren’t seeing significant breakthrough the vaccines. And we know recombination is possible. So who knows? Maybe we’ll get breakthrough.
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Even without breakthrough given travel, to eradicate it anywhere, we need to get the world vaccinated. (Honestly, I don’t think the US is capable of significant travel restrictions to keep out people who might be infected in other countries. I also don’t think we find that desirable. )
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My view right now is that as soon as they have a booster, I’m going to try to get to the front of the line. I want 90% effectiveness against all variants and I want near certainty for that. Others can make different choices!
Lucia, Since there seems to be a surplus of vaccines right now I was considering trying to get a booster from the existing formula. They are reported to be effective against the variants and it’s been six months since I had my first shot.
There isn’t much evolutionary pressure to evade vaccines right now. More transmissibility is what is making the virus more viable and this is winning the evolution race. For now… Lower transmission but vaccine escape loses the race in India for example. Once the global vaccine rates around the globe get higher we should have a higher possibility of vaccine escape, or one could evolve regionally in a high vaccine area which is mostly the west. This would then be efficiently shuttled around the globe just like the original virus was.
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It’s an open question how viable virus vaccine escape really is, I don’t think anyone has a clue, even after all those super useful gain of function experiments gave us valuable insights /sarc.
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There is no way this get eradicated inside of a decade IMO.
Florida took the whole weekend off in reporting cases. There should be a big spike coming out in the next couple days.
lucia (Comment #202612): “Corona Virus clearly does mutate.”
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Saying that a virus mutates is like saying that the sun comes up in the morning. Poliovirus mutates much faster than coronovirus.
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Eradication seems unlikely. It is taking over 6 decades to eradicate polio, and the stakes there are MUCH higher. If the coronavirus can transmitted as a mild upper respiratory infection between otherwise immune people, then eradication will not be possible.
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It is likely that once your immune system has seen the virus, either via infection or vaccination, then if future infections do occur they are likely to be very mild. So there is a good chance that the Wuhan virus will end up being endemic, causing just mild colds.
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But of course we don’t know that. That is the main reason that I am nervous about the vaccine.
DaveJR,
“The big difference is that polio has severe impacts for children,\”
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Well, depends on the age of the child. Very young children (say under 3 YO) almost never suffer severe impacts. Somewhat older children have a rate of paralysis of about 1 in 1,000 cases, while adults, and especially older adults, suffer paralysis at a rate of 1 in 70 cases. I have read that two of the three wild strains of polio have been completely eradicated, but one remains, and it circulates only in Pakistan and Afganistan. Apparently there are some Islamic preachers who claim the vaccine is a plot to kill Muslims or render them sterile. Many people who distributed the polio vaccine in these two countries have been murdered. That is what you can call extreme anti-vax!
Lucia,
If breakthrough cases of vaccinated people become common, I’ll sign up for a booster as well. But at least so far, there is no data supporting a significant frequency of breakthrough cases.
The psychosis of anti-racism, CRT, and anti-anti-racism, and anti-anti-anti-racism.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wealthy-loudoun-county-virginia-parents-face-threats-battle-over-equity-n1269162
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Very entertaining read. Somebody got called some names in middle school and the expected things happened. Well, slightly different things than my day which was a “sticks and stones” lecture followed by nothing.
MikeM
Yes. But it’s not the only thing I said. I went on to say some of the mutations are meaningful.
Perhaps. Nevertheless, we are witnessing coronavirus mutations that are meaningful interms of trasmissibility. These mutations are undergoing positive mutation. So there is some evidence that the mutation rate for coronavirus is sufficiently fast to warrant some concern we will need boosters.
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I’m afraid I don’t know what you are nervous about. I’m only “nervous” that the current one won’t give continued protection and we will need boosters. But I’m pretty confident we’ll have them in that case. If I didn’t think boosters were likely to come along then I’d be nervous. But I wouldn’t call this being nervous about the vaccine. I’d call it being nervous about possible mutation that would let the virus get around the current vaccine.
This paper discusses speed of mutation of Polio vs HIV and tries to understand why high mutation rate is not the definitive factor to how fast a virus evades the human immune system. They seek to understand why it is not the definitive factor.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-14174-2?utm_source=other&utm_medium=other&utm_content=null&utm_campaign=JRCN_2_LW01_CN_natureOA_article_paid_XMOL
lucia (Comment #202620): “we are witnessing coronavirus mutations that are meaningful interms of trasmissibility. These mutations are undergoing positive mutation. So there is some evidence that the mutation rate for coronavirus is sufficiently fast to warrant some concern we will need boosters.”
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Those are two different things; the fact that some mutations make the virus a bit more fit has nothing to do with the rate of mutation. Here is the important thing you are overlooking: this is a NOVEL VIRUS.
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That means, as you have no doubt noticed, that there have been lots and lots of cases. That means lots and lots of viral replication. That means lots and lots of opportunities for beneficial mutations.
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That also means that the virus is not perfectly adapted to humans. That means that there have been many possible mutations that make the virus more fit. Given the trillions (or should it be quadrillions?) of opportunities for those mutations to occur, it is not the least surprising that there have been a few that make the virus more fit, in an evolutionary sense.
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The poliovirus capsid protein is highly constrained by the fact that it must be able to bind to specific receptors on human cells. Just like the coronavirus spike protein.
MikeM
Yes. It’s a novel virus. I’m not overlooking it. But evidently, you think this is “the important thing”. But, its novel. So?
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I haven’t said the fact that some mutations make the virus a bit more fit indicates the rate of mutation.
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Yes: Lots of cases gives more chance of mutation.
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No: The virus is not perfectly adapted to humans. I haven’t suggetesd it. don’t know why you are telling me this.
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You don’t know how constrained it is. What we know is that mutations have occurred on that part. The virus doesn’t automatically die when that happens. So we have no idea how constrained it is.
Who is running the investigations?
Daszak was assigned to go to China and look into at one point.