When future virus variants are discovered and sequenced, this information helps understand what to expect. Because the virulence of new Variants can't be estimated for months after their first detection.
If it is not able to get funding for being done in such a lab, that's probably because the potential learning does not justify such $$ cost. Which means it's also not worth the risk.
You are correct that the virulence of new variants is hard to predict. That very fact means you shouldn't be making new ones, and assuming you can predict how virulent your new one is going to be (and thus how hard it will be to contain).
New variants are created all the time by natural transmission. Including the recombination of two different strains. So the controlled, artificial recombination is like a grain of sand in a bucket of sand. And even if it "escapes", the escaped variant would still have to evolve and prove itself.
Experts don't see this as a risk.
Much more likely: This Virus originated just like the thousands before it. From ordinary Human-to-animal contact. Virus particles pass from animals to Humans trillions of times a year. Most of the time exactly nothing happens at all. Even rarer are actual transmissions. Still rarer are chains of transmission that allow the Virus to evolve into an actual threat.
The lab leak hypothesis has a range from "This virus was created and released by the Chinese government as a bio-weapon against the US and to kill off their own aging population" at the extreme. To the "The virus was being studied at the Wuhan Virology Institute and someone one got lax on safety protocols got exposed accidentally and then took the train home."
Most people that seem to argue against lab leak, seem to assume everyone ascribes to the first position, whereas the majority of the people that believe in the lab leak subscribe to the later position, including myself.
It seems to be the opposite to the much vaunted "fearless scientific transparency" that's sold to the public as a hallmark of science.
I guess that in a generation or two, when vested interests move on, there may be more willingness to explore this.
And people on either end of that spectrum should be expected to have substantial evidence to support their position since the far simpler and common scenario is that it wasn't leaked from the lab at all. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" applies much more to the government bio-weapon crowd, but it still absolutely applies to the 'employee mistake' theory too.
They'd have had to investigate before making a claim, and had not, so obviously they're lying.
A concerted conspiracy to deny an option is some evidence for that option being true.
I don't claim it did come from a lab, but that anyone stating categorically that it did not is lying.
- a virus unusually adapted to being transmitted between people
- which was released next to one of a handful of labs on earth that studied it
- that the Chinese government and several American scientists tried to cover up
- normally found a thousand of miles away
- that we can't find an origin for unlike SARS and MERS (with far more looking)
isn't also an at least equally extraordinary claim?
I think a decent argument could be made that this phenomenon (in its abstract form, not specifically this variation of it) is more dangerous than covid, or even a virus much more dealy. Who knows how much damage this does to the world considering how widely it exists?
A natural virus would first need to get into the lab in order to escape from it. I'd argue it's a lot harder and less probably for a bat Virus - which isn't adapted to Humans yet - to be collected by a lab, then infect a researcher, then continue the chain in Humans, rather than the same virus making it from the Jungle to a Human population without involving some researchers. Even more likely, Sars-Cov-2 widely circulated in the intermediary hosts and had thousands of contacts with Humans until one lineage "stuck" because it finally matched.
There is not plausible mechanism for anyone from the Wuhan laboratory to get sick with a virus they are studying? This happened several times, and happens 100's of times a year (not Wuhan specifically but labs).
There is some circumstantial evidence it was a lab leak. Like the virus doesn't naturally occur in the Wuhan district, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology is one of the few in the world that study coronaviruses and do gain of function research. Unlike SARS and MERS where we discovered the origins quickly, we still don't know the origins of covid-19. I don't know how you leap to the conclusion it was of natural origins when we don't even know what those natural origins are.
We don't know if it's a lab leak or not, but they do happen and they've fairly common. (10's-100's per year)
There is no plausible way to "gain of function" your way into a pandemic Virus. Researchers can make a Virus gain a function. Usually by making it lose a few others. There is also no plausible way that an unmodified Virus collected from labs just happens to be the next hot shit on the pandemic scene. If there is a Virus with that potential, you wouldn't need researchers and a leak from a BSL-3 lab to make it go viral, it would just happen on its own.
Even one lab leak isn't enough. The Virus would most likely die out on its own, if not it would get outcompeted by naturally developing variants. The risk of a lab leaking a variant in a way that it would outcompete natural strains is so miniscule compared to natural variants arising and doing the same, it's not worth mentioning.
Climate change is a perfect example: 99% of people who study climate likely agree that a) the Earth is getting warmer on average, b) the warming is substantially exacerbated by human-derived emissions, and c) the medium- and long-term destabilization due to that warming has meaningful potential to have catastrophic effects any biomes, including those inhabited by humans. They likely disagree amongst themselves on a) how much warmer and over what timeline, b) how much of the warming is caused by humans, and c) what the specifics and timeline of the catastrophic effects are likely to be.
In situations like the above, attempts to paint disagreement over magnitude as disagreement over direction are misleading at best and disingenuous at worst.
For example you have made some very specific claims about the climate change consensus. But people often simply say X% of scientists agree on climate change, without defining what they mean about climate change.
All of this is also done to support a given course of action. Those courses of action only make sense with a very specific model of climate change. Often a model that is not totally accurate or agreed upon. Then they often incorrectly quote the scientist. Such as Al Gore's famous prediction “Some of the models suggest to Dr Maslowski that there is a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.” When Dr Maslawski was not predicting anything as dramatic. In the other camp you have appeals to Freeman Dyson. But he does agree that man has altered the climate. He simply doesn't think drastic action is required, and that we will be able to counter its impact. Not surprising from the guy that came up with the ideas to harvest the entire energy output of the sun.
The details matter and the appeal to authority that all the scientists agree with me is not as good as an argument on the facts.
Seriously. If you don't want to believe what 99% of the experts say, and don't know shit about the actual science - which takes years to understand - it's a pretty good bet you're wrong. Lot's of things can't be broken down to a level non-experts can understand.
And lab leaks happen All The Time. SARS-1 escaped labs on six separate occasions.
Another comment in this thread suggested building these labs in a desert or some other extreme environment where scientists can be isolated for months at a time. This seems like an obviously necessary mitigation against the unknown risk of introducing synthetic pathogens that haven't been created in billions of years of evolution. And yet, the secretive groups funding and regulating this research instead choose to build their labs in urban centers. Why?
> This seems like an obviously necessary mitigation against the unknown risk of introducing synthetic pathogens that haven't been created in billions of years of evolution.
I'd wager that it's likely that the COVID variant that was made in a lab was also created through evolution at some point. Every infected person with the virus has billions of viral replications taking place in their body, and each virus itself will have its own mutations. There's a high chance such mutations already took place, somewhere and in someone/something, but those mutants never created their own worldwide outbreaks.
I think it's worthwhile to understand how mutations can affect a virus at the heart of a pandemic. Finding such mutations in the wild is a roll of the dice, and the chances of encountering something like it rise the longer and more widespread the epidemic is.
That's why isolating the researchers is not necessary. Also you underestimate the number of such labs and the amount and variety of work that such labs are doing. "Synthetic Pathogens" are not a thing. Synthetic viruses are hardly pathogenic at all.
If research is sufficiently dangerous to necessitate a BSL-3+ lab, then it should have to meet a correspondingly high bar for demonstrating its potential reward. It's not clear to me that gain of function research could ever make such a justification.
In an ideal world, we could do this research with remote controlled robots in an orbiting space capsule. If we can't do that yet, then we could at least do it in a desert. Otherwise, shouldn't we be asking the local population to approve each research proposal that could lead to a local outbreak of a dangerous virus?
Nature created a very similar hybrid earlier: "Deltacron" was in the news in March 2022.
The gene that encodes the virus’s surface protein — known as spike — comes almost entirely from Omicron. The rest of the genome is Delta.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/science/deltacron-coronav...
His team described three patients in France infected with a version of SARS-CoV-2 that combines the spike protein from an Omicron variant with the "body" of a Delta variant.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...