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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32865 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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Two days ago this preprint was posted: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.13.512134v1.full.pdf

We generated chimeric recombinant SARS-CoV-2 encoding the S gene of Omicron in the backbone of an ancestral SARS-CoV-2 isolate and compared this virus with the naturally circulating Omicron variant. The Omicron S-bearing virus robustly escapes vaccine-induced humoral immunity, mainly due to mutations in the receptor binding motif (RBM), yet unlike naturally occurring Omicron, efficiently replicates in cell lines and primary-like distal lung cells. In K18-hACE2 mice, while Omicron causes mild, non-fatal infection, the Omicron S-carrying virus inflicts severe disease with a mortality rate of 80%. This indicates that while the vaccine escape of Omicron is defined by mutations in S, major determinants of viral pathogenicity reside outside of S.

They made a COVID variant that robustly escapes vaccine-induced immunity, is more infectious (if I'm reading this correctly) than Omicron and has a lethality of 80%. Now the lethality is only in humanized-lung mice not primates and the sample size for this particular part of the test was only 10, so 80% = 8/10. IMO this is a tiny silver lining in a Jovian-sized thundercloud.

Why are they doing this? Does the world really need the information that if you mess with parts of Omicron, COVID and the spike proteins, you get something that makes Ebola look benign? Do we really need super-COVID chimeras being fabricated by American scientists? If this work absolutely has to be done, could we not do it in Antarctica, behind a 6 month quarantine for anything or anyone that leaves? They actually did it in a BSL-3, not even a top level BSL-4 lab.

I think they shouldn't have done this work and certainly shouldn't have published it upon doing it and finding these results.

It really puts a dark spin on Boston's 'National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories' who helped with this operation. And of course, this got NAID funding too, so your American tax dollars are going towards this. There seems to be loop where bio-scientists decide to do really exciting, fulfilling work making chimeras, slicing up viruses and sticking them together, adding furin cleavage sites. Internally they wonder about the possibilities of human manipulation in the origins of COVID. But officially they stick to a party line that it's just a natural evolution. Otherwise all hell breaks lose, there's a massive blow to the credibility of their profession and an end to the gravy train of exciting, fun research and govt grants. And so because there's no official stance that the leak had anything to do with gain-of-function, of humanized cells in mice being used to test these horrors, then the fun continues!

I don't think it's possible to stop this work. The cat is out of the bag. Biotech gear isn't like Uranium centrifuges: it's cheap, stealthy, and easy to get up and running. Were never going to be secure as a species by relying on research suppression. Only effective defenses against these things will save us.

Anyone with high school chemistry, a garden shed, and an internet connection (probably with a VPN) can make TATP and make effective explosives and IEDs, yet bomb attacks are astonishingly rare outside of failed states. There is a difference insofar as a single effective bioattack could be catastrophic, but it’s also very hard to target effectively and trickier to politicise (is Allah really going to approve of creating a disease that kills millions of your co-religionists?). Of course it’s a very serious threat still.

I don't think it's quite as easy to get the knowhow on how to build bombs as you think. Famously the anarchist cookbook was a bunch of larping with fake instructions.

I'm not gonna Google it but I'm willing to bet no actionable results are going to come up

is Allah really going to approve of creating a disease that kills millions of your co-religionists?

If it hurts the Great Satan more than it hurts us, Allah will understand.

Any organization or state developing biological weapons demonstrates a lack of caring about collateral damage.

Does the world really need the information that if you mess with parts of Omicron, COVID and the spike proteins, you get something that makes Ebola look benign?

They actually did this with Ebola itself many years ago; they spliced the part of the virus that caused virulence into a cold virus (supposedly replication-deficient, of course). And yes, this got you a cold virus that would cause Ebola. I believe the intent was to determine which part of the virus caused the virulence and I think it was part of the research that resulted in the current Ebola vaccines.

What that paper is showing is that the spike protein isn't the only major determinant of virulence, which I believe is not the prevailing view, so it seems pretty interesting.

It also provides indirect evidence (not proof) that "Deltacron" (a supposed natural recombinant version of Omicron + Delta -- note that Delta did cause severe disease) doesn't really exist; if it did, we'd see a lot worse from it.

Why are they doing this? Does the world really need the information that if you mess with parts of Omicron, COVID and the spike proteins, you get something that makes Ebola look benign?

According to the last sentence in the extract you posted, they're studying the causes of pathogenicity and vaccine escape in Omicron. Without looking into it further, this seems like a very worthwhile research topic, with immediate applicability.

Otherwise all hell breaks lose, there's a massive blow to the credibility of their profession and an end to the gravy train of exciting, fun research and govt grants.

There is no "gravy train". Anyone working on this kind of research could easily be making twice as much money working in industry (biotech/pharma). They're working on this because they care.

I think they’re working on it because they enjoy the status offerings and respect, which may be chipped away if people realize how dangerous and civilization-ending the risks are. There is no more chance that they do the work because they care than a given plumber, police officer or teacher.

A plumber, police officer or teacher can't easily switch to a different employer and get twice the pay. Many people probably do decide to become police officers or teachers (not sure about plumbers) because they care, but once they do, they're locked in, unless they want to start an entirely different career from scratch.

I don't know what "status offerings" are, but I don't think working in academia is much higher-status than working for a biotech company, especially given the difference in pay. Isn't income the primary determinant of status?

But then why would anyone become an academic or a researcher? Do people become maths professors because they care, or because they like the work and status? But working on a virus in a lab gives even more respect than being an academic, at least pre-pandemic. As much as I love race for the prize by the flaming lips.

To put in defense nerd terms: If you want to having meaningful and useful capacities for future conflicts, you must generate a robust and threatening opposing force. You have to look at what you have, and commit serios months of planning and pallets of money to asking "How would I destroy my own army as safely as possible?", you need to circulate it and get commentary and run war games and do all sorts of wacky shit, because if you don't the first time you come up against something that you didn't specifically design for, you are fucked.

Hence, this. You can make arguments that it does more harm than good, or is risky. On the other hand, we have seen that just assuming every tomorrow will be like yesterday and things are just gonna be fine tomorrow is fucking stupid.

So, it's down to risk assessment; which is a notoriously easy field that humans are naturally good at.

Responsible disclosure might look a bit different if blackhats killed hundreds of thousands every year, and patches were unreliable, cost billions, and required worldwide effort.

If you want useful capacity for future conflicts, you shouldn't publicise the specifics of how the weapon works! If you're going to do this kind of dangerous research, why publish it freely for others to copy? What if some unscrupulous businessman decides "I'll make this virus by following their instructions, release it, short markets and make loads of money"? Then there is the potential for other state/non-state terrorists to use it. And if you are going to do this kind of dangerous research, do it somewhere remote and extremely secure, not a BSL-3 (not even BSL-4) lab near a major city.

I absolutely think this stuff does more harm than good. COVID originated from Wuhan lab. I base this conclusion off the absence of any known biological transmission (after the cave bats in Laos that were infected with the closest biological ancestor). Nobody found the pangolin, the missing link for the natural emergence case remains missing. We know that Wuhan lab was importing bats from caves in Laos, amongst other places. We know Daszak of Ecohealth in Wuhan was asking for money to insert furin cleavage sites into these bat coronaviruses - COVID was a bat virus with a furin cleavage site. The cleavage site, important for how the disease develops, is unlikely to emerge naturally without other changes to the genome - yet this is what happened. It was probably done artificially by the Ecohealth people who were asking for money to do just that (the US turned them down for the initial grant a few years prior to COVID but they could've found another source of funds).

Even Daszak himself admits that this specific kind of research is the most dangerous we could possibly be doing, using humanized mice to make a virus that's familiar with infecting us humans.

And say we do do this research - what do we get out of it? We make a more powerful version of COVID, or a dangerous kind of virus that doesn't yet exist in the wild. Do we make vaccines for potential viruses that only exist in the lab? There are surely hundreds, thousands, millions of potentially horrendous diseases we could make. We can't make vaccines for all of them.

Re. Lab leak: I accept you can believe in a rational and consistent way; but it still seems odd how hard people have committed to the hypothesis purely on the absence of evidence. We know COV loves to recombinate and be a little bitch, we know that the tell-tale spike protein developed once in nature and was present but for one amino acid in the local population, we know that cov-19 can change significantly and remain infectious because it has three times in the wild.

All the data we have points to zoonotic origin, given that the last seven times this happened it came from an animal and that the first cases were traced back to a fucking wet market; I'm gonna need more than vibes before I change my position.

Re. the research: Again, it's risk assessment o'clock. I'd need to know how much benefit we get out of gain of function research (which is a bit beyond my capacity unfortunately) to say whether the risks are worth it; given that minor accidents seem to happen about once a year when you look at historical lab leaks. There have been no major leaks (unless cov-19 is our huckleberry); but if we don't get anything out of it we probably shouldn't wait for one.

but it still seems odd how hard people have committed to the hypothesis purely on the absence of evidence

I wouldn't call the leaks related to EcoHealth "absence of evidence".

I saw those; they have shifted my view not at all beyond just knowing that GOF research was conducted in wuhan, which is already enough to move lab leak hypotheses from lizard person to rational but unlikely.

How about the part where the people involved in the research go around twisting the arms of other researchers into publicly proclaiming the lab leak theory is a lizard person level conspiracy?

The cleavage site, important for how the disease develops, is unlikely to emerge naturally without other changes to the genome - yet this is what happened. It was probably done artificially by the Ecohealth people who were asking for money to do just that (the US turned them down for the initial grant a few years prior to COVID but they could've found another source of funds).

You go from "this is unlikely to happen naturally" to "it was probably artificial, and I know who did it!". That looks like a huge leap to me.

Are you an expert on molecular biology, epidemiology, etc.? I'm not. I'm getting most of my information from this Wikipedia article, checking out the references, googling. My impression is that the investigation of the lab-leak theory was initially hindered when Trump endorsed the theory, which made it part of the culture war, but now it's back on track: it's no longer a taboo topic, people are looking into it and there's a healthy discussion going on, which should eventually produce some kind of consensus.

But the theory utterly damns the very people who are needed to produce a consensus. If we accept that negligent GoF research caused 6.5 million deaths and the immiseration of hundreds of millions more, then there will be a massive public outcry. And what about the people who tried to cover it up? Fauci might well expect to be lynched. If the lableak is accepted then there'll be huge reams of paperwork for biolabs to do before they touch a virus ever again, they'll have to go through endless committee hearings over who knew what when, funding will probably be stripped away from them. It'll be Armageddon for the whole community.

There's been a lot of dubious science going on conveniently trying to blame this on natural spillover as opposed to the lableak:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.10.511625v1

And then there was the Feb 2020 letter that Daszak helped organize that condemned the lableak as a conspiracy theory, despite the clear conflict of interest with his own activities there.

Every claim about ‘no evidence’ in the wiki article should be treated adversarially. The DEFUSE grant seems like a close to a smoking gun as we can expect. The work justifying grants and the work paid for by grants are often chronologically inverted, where you get novel data, ask for money to generate said data, then use that money to get new data which you later ask for more money to get. Research is not cheap so the funding streams have to be gamed if you want your lab assistants to keep getting paychecks, so a good PI is not going to wait for a specific grant approval to start a particular line of investigation that looks fruitful.

I’m personally at 90/10 that it was a lab leak, with the remainder being that EcoHealth alliance was doing sketchy GoF and/or bio-‘defense’ work that would look bad even if they weren’t directly responsible for COVID-19 itself. Jeffery Sachs has had some interesting stuff to say about conflicts of interest with most of the people investigating the lab leak hypothesis in the early days if you want to dig a bit deeper.

Now the lethality is only in humanized-lung mice not primates and the sample size for this particular part of the test was only 10, so 80% = 8/10.

Note that these mice are much more vulnerable to COVID than humans, in the same study 100% of the mice infected with wild-type COVID died. It would presumably still be a worse variant than anything going around now, but not 80% fatality levels of worse.

Since SARS-CoV-2 causes fatal infection in K18- hACE2 mice3, we leveraged this situation to compare the animal survival after viral infection. In agreement with the results of body-weight loss and clinical score, WT and Omi-S caused mortality rates of 100% (6/6) and 80% (8/10), respectively. In contrast, all animals infected with Omicron survived (Fig. 3c).

Imagine for a minute Anatoly Dyatlov had better political connections and was simply moved to run a different nuclear reactor after Chernobyl.

In a sense it's not surprising that he would continue acting brazen. In fact some attribute his carelessness to the precious nuclear accidents he was a part of and survived.

We didn't punish anyone for the mistake so nobody learned anything.

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