[HN Gopher] "This shouldn't happen": Inside the virus-hunting no...
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"This shouldn't happen": Inside the virus-hunting nonprofit
EcoHealth Alliance
Author : jashkenas
Score : 116 points
Date : 2022-03-31 18:12 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vanityfair.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vanityfair.com)
| nl wrote:
| Is it any surprise meetings around this topic are contentions?
|
| Fauci was receiving credible death threats and even on this topic
| thread here there are a number of dead comments with comments
| similar to (and I quote): _Fauci must be executed for us to move
| forward._
|
| The idea that people voice approval for executing people they
| disagree with is so repugnant and contrary to the idea of civil
| discourse I don't find it surprising people start yelling in
| science meetings about the topic.
| pvarangot wrote:
| So I don't think a single person is to blame for the COVID-19
| pandemic. I think it was bad (and maybe even happened at all!)
| because of a systemic failure of the scientific medical
| community. Now, if you believed a single person or a small
| group of persons where to blame for it, you don't think they
| should be executed? I think it's a valid position to have. It's
| not mine, but I wouldn't censor it or call it contentious. I'm
| willing to personally kill someone for way less than that. I
| just don't think the someone to blame for the pandemic exists,
| but if I did yeah I would think they deserve to die.
| 323 wrote:
| Hypothetically speaking, if it is ever proved that SARS-CoV-2
| was indeed leaked from a lab, and that the people working there
| are guilty of gross negligence and the evading of gain of
| function controls, what do you think the punishment should be?
| Considering ~20 million world wide excess deaths.
|
| Or should they just be forgiven because they were scientists
| with good intentions.
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| The death sentence for everyone in the decision-making chain
| would not be excessive.
| nickff wrote:
| The even bigger (to me) question would be what level of
| liability would be attributed to people who granted funding
| or otherwise supported the work. Would they be charged with
| 20MM counts of contributory negligence? This situation does
| seem to have been "foreseeable" in the legal sense.
| goodluckchuck wrote:
| Millions of people have died over the past couple of years. I
| think it's important to know why.
|
| If someone released this plague on purpose, then it would be
| the clearest case for the death penalty that has ever occurred.
| Do you honestly disagree?
| brazzledazzle wrote:
| Engineering this virus intentionally for research purposes
| and releasing it on purpose are very different things. If we
| still haven't demonstrated the former conclusively why are we
| even discussing what the consequences should be for the
| latter?
| 5lerg45y4y5 wrote:
| Imnimo wrote:
| A lot of this is tough to evaluate as a lay person. For example:
|
| >From the 75-page proposal, a striking detail stood out: a plan
| to examine SARS-like bat coronaviruses for furin cleavage sites
| and possibly insert new ones that would enable them to infect
| human cells.
|
| >A furin cleavage site is a spot in the surface protein of a
| virus that can boost its entry into human cells. SARS-CoV-2,
| which emerged more than a year after the DARPA grant was
| submitted, is notable among SARS-like coronaviruses for having a
| unique furin cleavage site. This anomaly has led some scientists
| to consider whether the virus could have emerged from laboratory
| work gone awry.
|
| Should I interpret it as a would-be unbelievable coincidence that
| they would be working on the very same furin cleavage site that
| is unique in CoV-2? Or should I interpret it as obvious - maybe
| the furin cleavage site is the most important part for
| infectiousness, and so we should expect any new human-infecting
| virus to have changes there, and should also expect that to be
| the area scientists focus on.
|
| Without expert knowledge, I have no way to tell, but it feels
| like the sort of thing I could very easily interpret incorrectly
| one way or the other.
| popcube wrote:
| I will guess this is because the number of enzymes that we can
| use is small, and each enzyme only work on specific site. So,
| check the specific site of each enzyme are first step.
| 323 wrote:
| Quite a few experts said originally that the furin cleavage
| site (FCS) is the "smoking gun" evidence that the virus is lab
| modified.
|
| But then other experts said that it's just a coincidence that
| could arise naturally.
|
| Now we learn that EcoHealth had these plans to insert FCS's in
| viruses, yet they stayed quiet during the whole FCS debate and
| didn't mentioned it until it was found out from FOIA'd emails.
|
| And not only that they didn't mention it, they kept saying it's
| just a coincidence and to say otherwise is a conspiracy theory.
| fsckboy wrote:
| part of the claim of the furan cleavage "smoking gun" is that
| the sequence matches a sequence that was patented by Moderna
| 3 years before the Covid-19 outbreak
|
| (Hoping somebody here can shed further light. I don't want to
| spread misinformation, and I'm not able to corroborate this
| myself, so be skeptical; however we have seen a lot
| information manipulation or suppression in every direction
| the past few years, so be skeptical in the other direction
| too)
|
| https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10542309/Fresh-
| lab-...
|
| https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/moderna-patented-cancer-
| ge...
| usernomdeguerre wrote:
| And even outside the biological details, without cooperation
| from the Chinese government and the lab in question it seems
| any investigation into alternate explanations will be nearly
| unfalsifiable. From the article:
|
| >But as COVID-19 rampaged across the globe, the Chinese
| government's commitment to transparency turned out to be
| limited. It has refused to share raw data from early patient
| cases, or participate in any further international efforts to
| investigate the virus's origin...And in September 2019, three
| months before the officially recognized start of the pandemic,
| the Wuhan Institute of Virology took down its database of some
| 22,000 virus samples and sequences, refusing to restore it
| despite international requests.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| > Presumably, Daszak possessed a great deal of that inaccessible
| data. He said as much during a March 2021 panel organized by a
| London-based think tank: "A lot of this work has been conducted
| with EcoHealth Alliance.... We do basically know what's in those
| databases." Previously, EcoHealth Alliance had signed a pledge,
| along with 57 other scientific and medical organizations, to
| share data promptly in the event of a global public health
| emergency. And yet, in the face of just such an emergency, Daszak
| told Nature magazine, "We don't think it's fair that we should
| have to reveal everything we do."
|
| Even if they fucked up by committing a legitimate mistake doing
| honest work, the cover-up is a legit conspiracy and downright
| criminal.
| goodluckchuck wrote:
| 4tlkjgra wrote:
| maxharris wrote:
| Has anyone else looked into the things that former EcoHealth
| Alliance executive Dr. Andrew G. Huff (@aghuff on Twitter) has
| been saying since October? I am surprised that this article
| doesn't even mention him, despite the fact that he worked at EHA
| for some of the years in question.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| His Twitter thread is a mishmash of the zaniest conspiracy
| theories imaginable and plenty of concerning paranoia (the
| government is flying drones around his property to shut him up,
| "spooks" fired bullets through his mailbox, his vehicles were
| hacked, Hunter Biden funded labs in Ukraine to create pandemic
| viruses, and on and on) along with tons of promotion for his
| own book "The Truth About Wuhan - How I uncovered the biggest
| lie in history." He seems to have a psychology degree and a
| public health PhD and was a mid-level manager, who likely
| wouldn't have any insight at all into the research activities
| of the lab..
|
| Doesn't seem like an entirely trustworthy person..
| georgia_peach wrote:
| > _He seems to have a psychology degree and a public health
| PhD and was a mid-level manager, who likely wouldn 't have
| any insight at all into the research activities of the lab.._
|
| I don't believe a PhD in virology is necessary to understand
| that this is some risky business. Not being in-line for
| patent royalties (or retributions--prisoner's dilemma and all
| that) may have made his lips a little looser than those of
| his co-workers.
| president wrote:
| Would you apologize if you were proven wrong?
| oh_sigh wrote:
| You have proof that Hunter Biden funded labs in Ukraine to
| create pandemic viruses?
|
| That is not any kind of idea I ever entertained in the
| past, but it is so outrageous that yes, I would apologize
| to you on behalf of OP if you had proof of it.
| 4tlkjgra wrote:
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/xP8Xx
| macawfish wrote:
| The Intercept has published a whole series of articles on this
| topic, which include leaked emails from people involved:
| https://theintercept.com/collections/origins-of-covid/
|
| This article from the American Society of Biochemistry and
| Molecular Biology is also candid and informative:
| https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/policy/112121/gain-of-func...
|
| There are also clips out there of Ralph Baric talking openly
| about making modified viruses (can't find it now but I believe he
| mentions it in casually passing in this lecture:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE_H7dTqJXU ).
|
| I guess I get why these researchers are so cagey about sharing in
| simple terms what they do. The facts have a huge potential to be
| twisted and weaponized politically in this situation, and I'm
| sure the rationale for the research is very complicated.
|
| That said in my opinion there needs to be transparency around
| these kinds of incredibly risky ecological engineering projects.
|
| Another thing,"self-disseminating vaccines": there are
| researchers who propose the creation and release of engineered
| viruses in animal populations adjacent to people (to prevent
| pandemics with zoonotic origins of course!):
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-020-1254-y
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=self-disseminating+vacc...
|
| It's hard to ignore the double edged sword of research like this
| though. Is there any question that this "biosecurity" technology
| has inherently troublesome uses as bioweaponry? The potential for
| sabotage by misanthropic / malthusian actors is also really
| unsettling. The game theory involved is probably really gnarly
| and I can only wonder what twisted offspring of mutually assured
| destruction intelligence agencies are using to grapple with this
| stuff, and to rationalize this kind of research.
|
| During the cold war there was a kind of presumption that every
| life is worth protecting. Unfortunately I have a feeling that
| with the reality of climate change this belief is not as
| universal as it once was. I worry that it's quite common for
| people in positions of power to have Malthusian beliefs about
| overpopulation and stuff in the face of climate change.
|
| (To be clear, I'm not in any way suggesting covid-19 was
| intentionally released as a tool of depopulation. I'm making a
| point about the game theory that has so far prevented nuclear
| catastrophe... I have trouble seeing what holds it together under
| the normalization of ethical frameworks that see depopulation as
| necessary, and wondering how that factors into the chess games
| that governments, defense agencies and their propagandists are
| playing right now...)
| mardifoufs wrote:
| >The report he finally did submit worried the agency's grant
| specialists. It stated that scientists planned to create an
| infectious clone of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a
| novel coronavirus found in dromedaries that had emerged in Saudi
| Arabia in 2012 and killed 35% of the humans it infected. The
| report also made clear that the NIH grant had already been used
| to construct two chimeric coronaviruses similar to the one that
| caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in
| 2002 and went on to cause at least 774 deaths worldwide. (A
| chimeric virus is one that combines fragments of different
| viruses.) These revelations prompted the NIH's grant specialists
| to ask a critical question: Should the work be subject to a
| federal moratorium on what was called gain-of-function research?
|
| Wait what?! Is this new information ? Because this is incredibly
| troubling
| travisathougies wrote:
| No this is not new information. Rand Paul has been on this for
| a long time, but has been censored from most platforms because
| of it.
| pvarangot wrote:
| Look I find Rand Paul as amusing as the next guy and I like
| that he has a voice, but he's been censored because he sounds
| insane. I watched most of the discussions with Fauci honestly
| it's just two old dudes that hate each other trying to get
| the other dude to say the thing that will give them their
| political win.
| sorry_outta_gas wrote:
| i'm not worried about it big brother keeps us safe and happy
| he helps me so i can't ever be wrong
| naoqj wrote:
| Wait a few years until you hear about the biochem weapons
| labs in Ukraine.
| travisathougies wrote:
| I'm confused about this comment. The biochem weapons lab in
| Ukraine are accusations Putin has made but has not
| substantiated, whereas the GoF research being done in Wuhan
| is known and there is ample evidence from many sources,
| including this Vanity Fair article. If you have a problem
| with the article's contents, please post your own comment
| on the main feed instead of making snark comments on mine.
| Thanks.
| Proven wrote:
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| > Hunter Biden's little Ukraine-related consulting
| business related to biolabs
|
| If the Russian defense ministry was a reliable source,
| Russia might have annexed Ukraine a little sooner. I
| wouldn't take anything out of state media at their word;
| I agree NYT can't be trusted, but how is Russia Today
| better?
| dEnigma wrote:
| I don't quite understand. Are you saying that Hunter
| Biden consulted for bio-weapon labs in Ukraine?
| speeder wrote:
| I believe he is referencing this:
|
| https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10652127/Hunter-
| Bid...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's not Star Wars; you don't have to work so hard to
| cram all the different characters together into one
| single plotline like this.
| nicoburns wrote:
| No it's not, and yes it is. That these laboratories were (and
| still are?) doing gain of function research - deliberately
| creating new variants of viruses to study them - has been known
| since the start of the pandemic (the results are published in
| reputable scientific journals, and a lot of the funding came
| from western medical research bodies). And it's definitely
| something I think we need to have a societal conversation
| about. Personally in light of recent events I feel like this is
| something we probably ought not to be doing.
| f7ebc20c97 wrote:
| I keep hearing this a lot, but how do "we as a society" have
| a "conversation" about something, exactly? Twitter?
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Yeah I knew about GoF research but I didn't know they planned
| on doing it on MERS. Another troubling thing was that they
| basically ignored the moratorium so even if measures were
| taken to stop GoF... they were just ignored by using a
| foreign lab as a loophole?
|
| To me it's mind-boggling that you could get arrested and
| fined for violating covid-related restrictions but people who
| did much much much more potentially dangerous stuff are not
| only getting away with it but also kept getting financed by
| the government. Even if covid turns out to not originate from
| a lab, just the insane potential risks that came from the
| blatant violations of the GoF moratorium should have been
| enough to land people in trouble. Especially since us
| commoners were punished based on the _possibility_ that we
| could transmit the virus, whether we were infected or
| completely virus free didn 't matter.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Yes, this is where the whole lab leak "conspiracy" came
| from.
|
| The lab was doing GoF research with bat and pangolin
| Coronaviruses exploring if the spike protein can be
| modified to enter through the human ACE2 receptor. There
| are a number of papers from Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli on
| the topic with research done at the Wuhan lab.
| ryanobjc wrote:
| I think your 'commoners' framing... is not helpful here.
|
| You raise a few objectionable assertions that I think is
| good to contemplate: - GoF was never banned - The ban was
| NIH funding GoF - The ban was lifted in 2017 anyways - Is
| this risky? The ban on funding it doesn't mean it's risky,
| as per se. - The potential pie in the eye risk are
| infinite, but what are the realistic risks? That really
| depends on the technical details of how the research is
| done, and where it's done. - Compare and contrast to
| activities that are very dangerous and have nearly infinite
| catastrophic risks but we do every day: driving, flying,
| operating nuclear power plants, refining oil, and much much
| more.
|
| All of this research came out of the desire not to be
| caught flat footed by the next version of SARS or MERS.
| Overall global research did in fact prep us for SARS-CoV-2.
| Vaccines "made in months" that have stood the test of
| efficacy and safety? Months if you ignore the years of
| research behind it.
|
| Is this particular thing excessively dangerous or not? I'm
| not 100% sure. Most of the "this is unacceptable" seems to
| be coming from people who seem to have a visceral hatred of
| Dr Fauci and who as head of the NIH was indirectly
| responsible for this funding. But I don't find that a
| reasonable line of reasoning. One thing I know, is every
| scientist I know is not paid a boat load, and care deeply
| about what they are doing and why.
|
| Perhaps GoF is too 'dangerous', but maybe we should also
| hear about how it can be made safe, how does it compare in
| hazardousness to other common things that are deemed 'safe'
| and what the benefits are.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Yep - we kept having near-misses with prior
| coronaviruses, so understandably, scientists were
| spending a ton of energy trying to figure out what makes
| them so pathogenic and how the animal-human jumps occur.
| Considering the fact that SARS and MERS both came from
| zoonotic origin (and IMO, Sarscov2 did as well) - we
| should really be spending our energy on the best research
| methods to prevent another pandemic, whether that's GoF
| research or something else.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| Even if "we" figure out how the animal-jump can occur,
| it's not like "we" can stop it or even predict it.
|
| And the probability that what is created in a lab will be
| close enough to what is naturally occurring in nature to
| be useful are none to zero.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > Even if "we" figure out how the animal-jump can occur,
| it's not like "we" can stop it or even predict it.
|
| The first step is understanding. Until you understand how
| it happens, statements about whether or not you can
| prevent it do not make much sense to me.
|
| For example: imagine you have not yet discovered that the
| unwashed hands of doctors are transmitting disease in a
| hospital. You might make a statement very similar to
| yours about how "even if we can figure out how people get
| sick, it's not like we can stop it".
| mardifoufs wrote:
| I don't have any particular opinion on fauci and 2 years
| ago I'd have agreed on pretty much everything you said.
| The issue though is not necessarily the GoF research by
| itself. If the scientists involved did not try to
| completely silence everyone, cover their tracks and
| basically stonewall any potential investigation, I
| wouldn't see the problem.
|
| From my point of view, you simply cannot access the risk
| when the main party involved in taking and being
| responsible for said risk has proven itself to be so
| shady. We all know that there is inherent dangers to this
| type of research, but we can't account for human
| deception and tribal wagon circling on top of that.
|
| The proponents of GoF could've come clean, been
| transparent and welcomed the scrutiny considering the
| insane magnitude of the situation. But they have not!
| Even if it turns out that this is purely zoonotic, the
| trust is rightfully broken imo. Maybe research should
| continue, even on GoF, but consequences should now be
| clear. The article details such a long pattern of
| deliberate obfuscation, gaslighting and outright
| manipulation that it's becomes impossible to give them
| the benefit of the doubt.
|
| Also, considering that we went through the biggest
| pandemic in past century during which most people have
| seen their lives literally dictated by arbitrary (and
| very low) risk thresholds that authorities have decided
| to follow... it would be a bit rich to now just say that
| we have to live with the risks of scientists fucking up
| and that we have to let the pros handle it. Yes screw ups
| happen, but asking billions of people to just live with
| the consequences won't work.
|
| Again, 2 years ago I'd have said that we need to take the
| risk because it can have tremendous benefits. But as much
| as appealing to "commoners" might sound lazy, there's
| still something deeply wrong when we see a much stronger
| and visceral reactions/consequences to maskless "karens"
| than we do to the individuals involved with orgs like the
| EcoHealth alliance. Yes it's maybe a populist take, but
| at some point the elitism becomes so blatant that even
| populism makes sense
| arcticfox wrote:
| > Compare and contrast to activities that are very
| dangerous and have nearly infinite catastrophic risks but
| we do every day: driving, flying, operating nuclear power
| plants, refining oil, and much much more.
|
| What? The risks for each of those, even the nuclear power
| plant operation, are extremely limited and localized. GoF
| research has potential _near-extinction_ levels of risk.
| Nuclear weapons are the ony thing on remotely the same
| tier IMO. It 's not to say that GoF is not a good idea,
| as clearly there is potential benefit. But to compare it
| to the risks of driving a car is apples to radioactive
| oranges.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| The conspiracy theory (at this point, is it even one?) is
| that they want to create a virus that targets only certain
| ethnic group, like SARS2 did to some extent, or at least
| being a able to have the vaccine before everyone else,
| which also happened to some extent.
|
| Because otherwise there are no valid reasons to create this
| kind of pathogens in labs; the chance the bugs created
| there will be similar to the naturally occurring ones are
| basically none and even less so that the vaccines or
| treatment will be or remain efficient treatment.
| rcpt wrote:
| > they want to create a virus that targets only certain
| ethnic group
|
| Ok that is totally made up.
|
| There are plenty of reasons that researchers make
| dangerous pathogens that have nothing to do with ethnic
| cleansing.
|
| Some of these methods even get published despite the
| risks that the knowledge presents
| https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.10875
| ars wrote:
| > doing gain of function research - deliberately creating new
| variants of viruses to study them
|
| What do they learn from these studies? The drawbacks to GOF
| is clear - but what are the potential gains that makes the
| risks worthwhile?
| pvarangot wrote:
| Disclaimer: I think the virus leaked from a lab because
| scientists are usually more stupid and reckless than what
| their funders think they are, so maybe I'm insane and you
| shouldn't listen to me because I can affect your mental
| health. Also what I will write may be very dangerous
| misinformation so be careful because if you keep reading
| you consent to being misinformed. This writing is known by
| the state of California to cause cancer.
|
| There's two objectives of this type of research. One is
| that after you have the new virus you can try different
| drugs on it, so that if gets out you can rapidly control
| it. Usually the drugs you try are ones that the company you
| work for sell or have a patent for. I think creating a
| pathogen and then testing how you can cure it with stuff
| that you can sell for a big profit creates a conflict of
| interest if it's also your responsibility to be sure it's
| not released, but apparently I'm pretty alone in this
| conspiranoic belief.
|
| The other objective is creating a bioweapon, or getting
| ready for one. The US allegedly withdrew from researching
| bioweapons in an offensive manner but offensive and
| defensive research are very similar in that field because
| you speculate what viruses your alleged adversaries have
| and then recreate them to try the vaccines against them.
| [deleted]
| alkjlk43t34t wrote:
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