So again, I ask - even if it's true, so what? It's impossible to conclusively prove, and even if proven what exactly is proven? That an accident occurred? OK, so what?
The article attempts to answer this:
> The vitriol also obscures a broader imperative, Relman says, which is that uncovering the virus’s origins is crucial to stopping the next pandemic. Threats from both lab accidents and natural spillovers are growing simultaneously as humans move steadily into wild places and new biosafety labs grow in number around the world. “This is why the origins question is so important,” Relman says.
However the reality is from the perspective of the USA it doesn't even matter. Even if China was malicious and deliberately sent it off to us, it could've been easily stopped but we didn't do it. Unless we're going to go to war over this it seems like a pointless exercise as conclusive evidence will never emerge as it requires cooperation from China.
We're worrying about whether it was created from labs in China, meanwhile we couldn't even prevent a massive superspreader event in Boston via the Biogen conference, filled with people who already has an awareness of the virus to begin with.
Even now as I type this cases of the variant are increasing and the amount of people taking the vaccine is decreasing and silly accidents like the J&J fiasco are occurring. Not to say that we can't explore both things simultaneously, but it's pretty obvious that the return on investment will differ - one will do... what exactly? And another will prevent more cases.
Aside from that, though, we can consider international treaties against gain of function research? International inspections? Have a debate on whether this type of research is allowed? Create improved international procedure standards for Biolab safety?
I mean, it has killed more people than American killed in WW2. Maybe a root cause analysis and better procedures are justified?
edit: corrected stat
Updated international laws.
Possible banning of gain of function research.
Stronger safety procedures.
Hilarious that we want to punish China but we won't punish our own politicians.
Another point: just because there's some uncomfortable conflict over the investigation doesn't mean we should abandon and investigation, in fact it probably means we should investigate more vigorously.
What difference does it make? Let's say that it's both lab-grown and wild game. OK, so that means we should scrutinize both. OK, then. Now what?
No amount of scrutiny can prevent an accident from occurring. It's not as if this pandemic happens every year. We're talking about a once in a century event. Not to mention some countries prevented the virus from spreading within their own countries very effectively, and others, well, did not.
Total deaths in WW2 estimated at approx 70 million. [1]
Johns Hopkins estimates COVID-19 deaths are approaching 3 million. [2]
Yes, I agree. However I believe what should be analyzed is why certain countries failed to contain it. Whether it was a lab accident or wild game doesn't really matter. There's no way the entire world could prevent accidents or people from interacting with wild animals.
At the end of the day the most effective thing is to ask why it spread as much as it did in your own country.
There are politicians in our (USA) own country that denounced COVID even as recently as this January. People who fabricated data (Cuomo), who peddled poor science (Trump), etc. etc.
Don't misunderstand me, China definitely deserves their share of the blame, but I just believe that share is small. Ultimately the USA's response to COVID could've been much, much better by pretty much every metric imaginable.
And let's just act like COVID is over, either.
Prior to that, people did get sick, and public investigations were mounted to pinpoint the problem. Nobody wanted to admit to themselves that they were to blame, that they had hurt or killed someone, but the society benefited from the momentary discomfort and those hard truths.
The situation is more like you're McDonalds and everyone at your store and your competitors stores are getting food poisoning.
Instead of properly understanding why contaminated food is arriving at your store and stopping the poisoning within your store, you're researching whether or not the contaminated food originated at Burger King.
It's not bad to research whether or not the contaminated food originated at Burger King, but regardless knowing that isn't going to stop the food poisoning from spreading within your store.
I like this analogy because there are already food safety laws just like how there are safety standards for working within a lab. Regardless, accidents happen, and people get poisoned. Kind of like the Chipotle outbreaks.
I don't think this is the argument.
China was affected by it immediately to, so it would seem that this wasn't intentional.
The question is what exactly was the Wuhan lab studying, why, and funded by whom. We already know part of this was funded by the US Government.
The information is all online about their studies specifically with ACE2 and coronaviruses, and suddenly we end up with a global pandemic where the virus latches onto human ACE2. Originating in Wuhan.
If you buy tacos from Chipotle and they sell you a tainted taco on accident. You get sick. Hopefully you survive. In any case you will want Chipotle to do a thorough investigation to prevent it from happening again.
Now would you want McDonalds to research Chipotle or stop outbreaks in their own stores? Seems pretty obvious to me. Perhaps I'm missing something?
Ultimately Chipotle is already incentivized to figure it out themselves, unless the argument is Chipotle is intentionally infecting their own customers?
Going back to the original point - what the USA should do for its own citizens won't change regardless of whether COVID was an accident, from wild game, etc.
Whatever you think about this, it seems unbelievably foolish to locate these labs in the middle of metropolises.
If you believe McDonalds in this analogy should be investigating the origins of Chipotle's problems as opposed to resolving their ongoing issue then we'll just have to agree to disagree.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/02/03/9628119...
no it's not. it might be impossible to prove the negative, but if it did come from the lab there should be physical records and first hand witnesses.
> so what
so maybe we make it a point to have the lab shut down so this doesn't happen again? maybe we publicly acknowledge there are secret teams working on secret science and viruses that can kill people en masse?
but you have a point, it's always easier to embrace nihilism than tackle hard problems head on.
However we ended up unbanning it and we still do it now. If the goal is to simply stop this type of research in its entirety, there's still no point of trying to get China to stop as we have no authority in China (or any other country) to begin with. Even if China were to claim they've stopped we have no way of knowing.
Let's just assume China did have a lab accident. OK, then what? We tell them to stop doing it? Let's say they agree. In the future they decide to start doing it again. The entire thing is pointless to begin with. We can't get our own citizens to consistently wear masks and we think we're going to substantially change China's behavior here - hilarious.
That's a different question from "what difference does it make"
> What consequences are you thinking of that we haven't already done? Sanctions, trade tariffs, political condemnation of an authoritarian state? There are many steps to pressure China before an open war is declared.
> Hilarious that we want to punish China but we won't punish our own politicians.
Why not both? I think Trump is already punished a bit, he lost the election.
Are you serious?
So effectively this becomes a situation of "oh yeah they should've not had that accident, oh well." In the USA we've had the same problem ourselves (lab accidents with pathogens), and we banned gain of function research and ended up removing the ban a few years later.
The entire exercise is meaningless. Note - I'm not even saying we shouldn't research the origins of COVID, what I'm saying is, the result doesn't really matter.
Hmmm...if it could "easily" have been stopped, then why did every single country in Europe and North America simultaneously fail to do so?
And yeah, maybe China doesn't wanna think that way, but let's find out first, and second find out why.
On the other hand there are some great ways to think about this politically. If by "we" you mean the U.S. we don't really have a leg to stand on as far as respect from the international community right now anyway, so any fight we bring to China is basically one on one.
Other countries besides the U.S. would be able to wring significant concessions from China if they chose to a) believe collectively that it was China's malfeasance that caused the pandemic, and b) stood together to demand a response.
Ok but they can do both, right? I mean, I can improve my performance by looking at my own performance, but also watching others.
Moreover, the US can exert a lot of pressure on other countries to meet certain standards and reduce risk. Knowing what went wrong will help determine standards.
It's not like lab-leak-causes-disease only happens once. This happens all the time, just like aircraft incidents. If incidents weren't investigated and tracked, planes would be riskier than they are.
It’s either from wild animals, it was an accident, or it was spread with malice. In all scenarios we already have procedures around gain of function research, limiting interaction with animals in markets and biological weapons, respectively.
If the prevailing theory was that it came from an asteroid that would be interesting.
I personally doubt China would pay anything even if it was a lab accident. I guess we’ll see.
Is there a viable other option?
Don't these facilities require large numbers of extremely highly educated staff?
It would be like not caring which oil rig exploded off the Gulf, spilling untold barrels of crude — not caring about what parts failed, and why.
It's pretty absurd to say that it makes no difference whether or not the virus was a lab leak or not. The answer to that question changes the posterior risk estimates of such research and therefore our international funding and domestic regulatory priorities.
There's also such a thing as soft, diplomatic nudges. Not everything is "force X to do Y when they want not-Y".
The CCP prohibited the virus's genetic sequence from being published. After a lab published it, it was shut down.
>On 11 January, Edward C. Holmes contacted Zhang for permission to publish the virus's genome. Zhang granted permission, and Holmes published the genome on virological.org that day.[1][3] The Chinese government had prohibited labs from publishing information about the new coronavirus, though Zhang later said he did not know about the prohibition.[3] The next day, the Shanghai Health Commission ordered Zhang's laboratory to close temporarily for "rectification".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Yongzhen#COVID-19_pand...