And gain of function research is 1: real 2: fucking insane and 3: a plausible way we would have a true captain trips style pandemic.
Mainstream, and conceivably true, but lacking in evidence. Personally I find it rather implausible due to a lack of motivation for why the lab in question would be doing secret work on coronaviruses.
> fucking insane
I don't think this is a helpful way to have this debate. I don't know enough to have a strong opinion on this, but a majority of virologists seem to think it's necessary, so I wouldn't automatically label them as lunatics.
> a plausible way we would have a true captain trips style pandemic
Other plausible ways are a mutation from an existing pathogen or another zoonotic spillover event, which gain of function research could potentially predict or help mitigate.
what was secret about it? the lab in Wuhan was literally doing research in 2015 on how bat coronaviruses could adapt to spread in humans vs ACE2 receptors and developed their own strain: https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985
from the linked study: "Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. Additionally, in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis.... On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo. Our work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations."
I suppose they could have just received some samples and then that triggered an immediate outbreak before anyone heard of it, but having an instant spillover event from a handful bat samples with workers using biosecurity measures doesn't seem to me especially likely compared to the many more interactions humans have with animals outside lab settings. (For example, the tens of thousands of live animals kept caged in extreme proximity with each other and unprotected humans in the huge Wuhan wet market).
Thank you for saying this. We know xenophobic racist right wingers are saying that COVID came from China. But WHO-China investigation definitely proved that COVID came outside of China. Even western virologists have been supporting Chinese scientists. [1]
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
so anything short of a public confession by a CCP spokesman isn't enough?
Stricter control of GoF makes a lot of sense but the reason everyone was studying coronavirus pandemics in the first place is because we'd had several near misses and everyone in the virology community knew it was only a matter of time before the right circumstances allowed a spillover to do exactly what Covid19 did.
I’ll leave it at this: I would encourage everyone to do their own research on this and try to look past the elephant in the room of the politics angle.
Even some expert 'pre-reviewers' that received the advance of the most recent bombshell paper that supposedly proved an unnatural virus with lab origin missed obvious tells that completely invalidated the authors' claims. E.g. this thread; https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/15870905072887767...
If people do want to make up their own minds on this - I'd encourage you to track down people making falsifiable claims and then changing their priors based on the results of that research instead of people jumping from one conspiracy theory to the next to avoid changing their views.
As one data point, several prominent "lab leakers" on Twitter are now insisting that prior strains are fake and were invented by virologists since those strains disprove recent papers instead of considering that maybe those recent papers were flawed. It's bizarre to watch. (One of the authors of the most recent 'bombshell' LL paper claiming that two related field-collected coronaviruses are fake / manipulated: https://twitter.com/VBruttel/status/1584920770605621248)
Biology is such an enormously wide and diverse field that opinions of someone who’s not a virologist is often as relevant as an opinion of the software engineer.
I mean if you seriously believe that theory you are probably going to either end, start thinking about how to end, or significantly change how you develop, your career as a virologist. Of course it's not mainstream.
It’s pure tin hat thinking to say that “my idea is correct and everyone who has any expertise is compromised”. I don’t know what is right or not, but I know a lot of virologists (through work) without any personal interest in the case who don’t put much stock in the lab leak hypothesis.
So is denying climate change or the moon landings...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing_conspiracy_theori...
Despite actual pictures taken recently...
Ah yes, so I would assume that the WHO would conclusively say that the lab leak theory is incorrect then?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/09/who-sago-cov...
Oh... they say they are still investigating it and that the theory should be left on the table... but I guess the British Medical Journal would say it's total nonsense right?!
https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1656
Hmm... Maybe not, they say it's plausible too. Presumably Nature just flat-out tells us that it's a total conspiracy theory though right?!
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01529-3
Ah, they stay on the fence and say that it's plausible.
So it's not exactly like denying the moon landings, as I haven't heard NASA saying "the moon landings might have been faked, but we can't prove either way" anytime recently.
That's what baffles me here: "We cannot conclusively say it's wrong" so it must be right. When did that become a popular mode of reasoning? I can only assume people are so desperate to believe they will swallow this rather than accept reality.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
This always feels like the "we can't afford to fix climate change so we just will ignore the problem" take.
And given how fast viruses evolve, there’s no real alternative.
Is it "possible"? Yes, theoretically. But it's not at all trivial, and far down my worry list. It's bit like worrying that sharks are going to evolve wings and start flying around eating people.
