
Why it matters where COVID came from - apsec112
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1306775734598250496.html
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phobosanomaly
At this point, I think learning how to manage a pandemic without destroying
the economy is the only question we should care about.

Pandemics will keep showing up regardless of if they're engineered or natural.
It may be a 100% antibiotic-resistant bacteria next time, or some weird prion
thing no-one thought about before, or the T-virus, or whatever's floating in
the atmosphere of Venus. Who knows.

If we learn to correct what we're doing right now, then even if this happens
again from a completely novel threat vector we didn't anticipate, we can
handle it quickly and effectively.

~~~
zdragnar
I am not entirely sure that we would learn those lessons from dealing with
covid-19. Much of the policy around it has been with the assumption that a
vaccine could be produced in a somewhat reasonable time line, and we just need
to hold out a bit longer.

The genome was sequenced increadibly quickly, and much of the vaccine work is
based on all of the research that went into dealing with SARS 20 or so years
ago.

A pandemic caused by something completely novel- whether a contageous and
infectious prion disease (does that even make sense?) Or T-virus or venus flu-
means that there will be far greater uncertainty than what we have been
dealing with. A vaccine wouldn't even make sense in the case of a pandemic
prion disease.

I think that Sweden had the right of things, but as others have pointed out
before (and likely will again) it is still too early to tell. Not only that,
but complicating matters is that every country captures statistics
differently- especially the US and UK versus Europe. Numbers get bandied about
quite a bit, and I suspect it will be many years before cool heads can
evaluate all of the confounding factors into what actually helped and what we
should do in the future.

~~~
phobosanomaly
What will be interesting is if we aren't able to develop a safe and
efficacious (enough) vaccine. We might need to find ways to make social-
distancing the status-quo for multiple years.

Edit: Hang on, why couldn't you make a vaccine against a prion? I can't see
why it's not possible theoretically.

~~~
guitarbill
presumably since the protein is usually present, and the prion is just has a
misfolded shape, it would be very tough to get the immune system to attack
just the prions... however, there's at least one paper that has researched a
vaccine in mice against a scrapie prion infection.

are there even treatments for any prion diseases? for BSE/mad cow disease,
they killed millions of cows. to this day, if you're from/were in the UK
during the outbreak, you can't give blood in quite a few countries.

and - surprise! - apparently prions could be spread via the air [0]. but it
isn't clear how this could occur naturally, so at least that's good news.

[0] [https://www.wired.com/2011/01/airborne-prions-
disease/](https://www.wired.com/2011/01/airborne-prions-disease/)

~~~
phobosanomaly
That's a cool question about treatments. I guess there's no FDA-approved
therapy for mad cow, but I did find this cool animal model using 'anti-
prions.'

"Here, we report a novel experimental strategy for preventing prion disease
based on producing a self-replicating, but innocuous PrPSc-like form, termed
anti-prion, which can compete with the replication of pathogenic prions."

"...a prophylactic inoculation of prion-infected animals with an anti-prion
delays the onset of the disease and in some animals completely prevents the
development of clinical symptoms and brain damage."

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5738294/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5738294/)

So that's more good news.

Edit: Hold on, that's the paper you were talking about, right? I didn't make
the connection until just now.

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jerome-jh
I am probably begging for downvotes, but here is a reasoning I came about
recently.

Virus mutations are not rare events. This is what supports the natural
evolution/selection/mutation of a wild virus into Sar-cov-2 hypothesis. People
often say that the "natural hypothesis" is far more likely than a virus
escaping a BSL4 lab. Let's look at that.

According to Wikipedia, there have been 3 virus outbreaks in "wet markets" in
the last 20 years
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_market#Health_concerns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_market#Health_concerns)).
That makes about 1 outbreak in 7 years.

That's for China as a whole. China is big. The probability of having a virus
outbreak in a particular town is of course somewhat lower. The particular town
we are looking at is Wuhan: this is the only city in China having a BSL4 lab,
and it did gain of function experiments on Coronaviruses.

There are 108 towns with more than 1m population ([https://all-
populations.com/en/cn/list-of-cities-in-china-by...](https://all-
populations.com/en/cn/list-of-cities-in-china-by-population.html)). We're
going to make rough estimates: let's say there are 100 "wet markets" in China,
about one per city >1m. That makes the probability for a natural virus
outbreak in _a_given_ "wet market" to be 1 in 700 years.

The question to be answered is this one: what is the most likely event
between:

1/ a natural virus outbreak at Wuhan's "wet market"

2/ a modified virus "escaping" Wuhan's BSL4 lab

Hypothesis 1 has been estimated at 1 in 700 years. Do you believe the
probability of hypothesis 2/ to be much lower than 1/?

Would the probability of hypothesis 1/ be 1 in 100 years, would you still
thing it is much bigger than hypothesis 2/?

~~~
Fjolsvith
Hypothesis 3: Rogue actor, a la James Bond style.

~~~
shadowgovt
It happens (though without a motive, no real story here).

After September 11, the next immediate terrorist attack on US soil was the
anthrax scare. It was likely initiated by a specific researcher who had
relevant access to the lab and had been lodging complaints for years that US
authorities weren't taking anthrax threats seriously.

(The scientist in question never faced justice because they committed suicide
before the dragnet closed in on them ---
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks)).

------
stunt
Pandemic response was really chaotic. So much conflicting information from
politicians instead of relying on scientist and healthcare system to take care
of what message must be delivered about COVID19. Often just pure speculation
instead of proper emergency communication.

------
dusted
I know a doctor who works at multiple hospitals, she have talked about how
there are a lot more infections and strange ones, in the rural population,
things that jump from animals, that she never sees in the urban population.
Maybe there's just a general problem with hygiene ?

~~~
aerostable_slug
> things that jump from animals

My physician father was involved with a case where a drunken idiot decided to
go play on a beach filled with elephant seals. The deep tusk wound he earned
in one thigh had the local internists hitting the books to figure out what
rare and exotic marine bugs had infected the fellow... IIRC the guy lived, but
he was very ill.

Sometimes I wonder if he lives on in textbook case studies (with the requisite
black bars over his eyes in any photos).

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Spooky23
Original content:
[https://twitter.com/JeffLadish/status/1306775734598250496](https://twitter.com/JeffLadish/status/1306775734598250496)

Threadreaderapp is silly.

~~~
firloop
Normally I’d agree, but in this case Twitter abruptly ended the thread, hiding
it behind a click to ask me if I wanted Covid-19 info and show me tangentially
related content.

[https://imgur.com/a/LPXeSb4](https://imgur.com/a/LPXeSb4)

~~~
Spooky23
Twitter is amazing — it’s a company that exists in spite of itself.

------
Nbox9
The virus most likely came from close contact between animals and humans in
which humans wanted to consume the animal. Virtually all of the new infectious
diseases come from animal to human transmissions, and virtually all of those
come from either direct consumption of animals or from animal agriculture. The
total number of animals kept for agricultural purposes, plus the conditions
they are kept in, means we can expect more and more diseases to come from this
industry.

Shifting our food sources away from industrial animal agriculture would
significantly decrease the number of new infectious diseases we have to
encounter. This looks like lab grown meat, like plant based meat substitutes
such as Impossible, Beyond, and Oatly, like grass fed beef, like backyard
chickens, and it looks like less beef burritos and more bean burritos.

~~~
forgotmypw17
It would not be the first time nature is blamed for human activity, so I am
not sure what makes you so sure.

Two separate papers have come out saying pretty much the same thing, that
there is lots of evidence pointing to this virus being more likely engineered
(by modifying existing viruses) and that each piece of evidence also matches
papers put out by researchers working at the Wuhan-based virus research lab,
which is also where the outbreak is thought to have begun.

~~~
SomeoneFromCA
The problem is though that a lot more dangerous (than Covid) pathogen,
Influenza A H5N1 is waiting to jump from chicken on people, which is only
possible if people come into close contact with poultry. It has happened with
Pig Flu. Influenza by far is most dangerous pathogen around, it had shown what
it is capable of in 1918, and it may happen again.

