On the one hand, I really don't want it to be true. On the other hand, I'd rather have it be a lab mistake than some random mutation, as the former is at least something that can be reduced in the future. I wouldn't be surprised if this leads to a moratorium on types research of some kind. I mean, this has been the nightmare scenario for gene research, too.
I disagree. For this mutation to occur naturally may have taken millennia or longer, perhaps infinity. There's an aspect here of (to borrow from Silicon Valley's brilliant ending) 4 minute mile-ism. It was considered impossible until it wasn't, and then it was routine. Now that this thing is out there, it could be routine insofar as the mutation barrier is super low now. It just needs to mutate enough to evade whatever the eventual vaccine is, and we're fucked over and over. The large energy well has been overcome by tinkering, so it's possible only small ones remain. Hopefully the other side of that coin is that it weakens over time, a la the flu and other coronaviruses. But maybe not. We don't know the behavior of partially unnatural/chimeric viruses in the wild. I think if this is true it's a worst case scenario. China may have to be isolated from the international community. There's no punishment that fits the crime here, but it is a crime against humanity (again, if true). Acts of God sort of have to be accepted, even if grudgingly. And as bad as evil is, at least there's a logic that can be countered. But outright negligence when playing with nukes is intolerable, unforgivable, and warrants the strongest possible sanction.
This is probably the worst paragraph I've read in weeks, thanks. An ability to mutate quickly/often might explain why some are testing positive and/or even relapsing weeks after triumphing over some version of covid-19. We should have better stats on that in just a few weeks. "should"
How quickly can we sequence a mutated covid and develop a new vaccine? How do mutations in covid correlate with ease of developing an updated vaccine, i.e. is the previous vaccine a good starting point? Will it take a year to respond to each annual mutation, rendering vaccines almost useless? Presumably, there exist people with experience developing annual vaccines for influenza? These are all rhetorical questions that I'm shouting into the e-wind, no worries.
I think it depends a lot on immunology, which we don't have a good handle on yet (and won't for some time). The reason you can keep getting the same cold over and over is that the disease is mild and doesn't evoke a strong antibody response, so many people lose their immunity in a few years. Colds, as we've all learned, are coronaviruses. So that's ok the bad ledger. But I've read that SARS left people with strong immunity for 10 years or more, so that's in the good ledger. Hopefully because of the severity of SARS2, we'll also see strong antibodies in lots of people. That will lower the vaccine barrier a lot.
'bl00 is right, it's anecdata. But, as you know, that'd be our first clue that covid-19 joins the common cold and influenza in the list of "seasonal mutations we have to worry about". If it's possible that covid-19 could mutate into a much deadlier form, I better start taking more psychedelics ASAP. Milk my time on Earth for all it's worth, and get on better terms with the grim reaper.
Important research doesn't absolve anyone of responsible conduct. I'm sitting in a lab right now stressing the fuck out about making a human use product perfect, because I don't want to risk giving one already really sick and likely to die person sepsis. IT LITERALLY KEEPS ME UP AT NIGHT. If the consequence were global catastrophe instead of killing someone a week quicker than they were already dying, I like to hope I'd consider that pretty heavily.
Having grown up with megadeath, there's a set of mental gymnastics you can perform to keep your psyche limber enough for genocide. You start with some othering and follow it up with a heapin' helpin' of just-following-ordersism. You can also do some patriotism stretches whereby anything you do to increase your prowess on the battlefield is saving the lives of the only people who matter. The Chinese have always been the only people who matter. This is why the Opium Wars still scar their collective psyche: it was the first time in history that The Chosen Ones had their asses handed to them and everyone, from Chiang Kai-shek onwards, has based their foreign policy on the urgent and inevitable correction of the celestial order.
I don't think we're disagreeing much or at all - I may have misused 'on the other hand'. I totally agree that this is a horrible, terrible, history-defining capital-B Bad Thing if it's confirmed to be true. And I probably don't grasp the consequences nearly as well as you do. But just a week or two ago, there was a discussion about the mutation rate of coronaviruses and that covid-19 may be an indication of a slow natural process happing faster than expected. And part of me is vaguely...relieved? if it turns out to be human error instead of a future of dozens if not hundreds of new coronaviruses popping up. Despite it still being a terrible thing that has happened. I mean - at least have tools to kneecap further clearly-a-bad-idea-in-hindsight-research. We can exercise agency. Unless I'm completely missing what you mean here, this is exactly my point too. I wasn't dismissing the gravity of the neglience in any way.And as bad as evil is, at least there's a logic that can be countered.
Let me restate that you are correct that human error would be a better cause if and only if we can contain and kill the thing. That's a big if. But in that case, we can presumably put the genie back in the bottle and design and adhere to international safety standards going forward. My fear is that we have created something unkillable. Time will tell, to use a banality.
I guess something like that. Obviously it's a bit early to be talking in those terms, since we don't even have good testing, let alone a vaccine. At least if we had testing, we could probably use convalescent serum (antibodies from patients who are recovered), and it might confer some immunity. That's under testing right now, but I don't have a lot of faith even in that, because to do that properly you need to be able to titrate the dose. That's impossible without relatively precise serology. I keep reading that it's going to be online "next week" and then that week comes and goes with nothing to show.
I'm with b_b. There are plenty of bad places that nature could go eventually that we can quickly. I've been reading a number of these articles, and in the simplest terms, researchers have been asking questions like: "Can I make a bat virus infect human cells if I do this?", then trying it, and publishing their results. Sometimes the changes are specific and intentional, but in many cases, the scientists are driving the viruses to evolve in animals or in culture in artificial conditions. One can appreciate how this research can be elucidating, but one can also appreciate how this research could create conditions that needn't elucidation prior to them being artificially constructed.
But Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, says that gain-of-function studies “have done almost nothing to improve our preparedness for pandemics — yet they risked creating an accidental pandemic”. He argues that such experiments should not happen at all.