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by jpeloquin
1839 days ago
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I think you may be approaching the discussion more from the standpoint of where to assign blame specifically regarding COVID-19, and I'm more interested in the benefits from infectious clone technology and infection experiments in general, which covers the last 50 years [0], not just the work in 2R01AI110964 that is currently under criticism. So I yield on all Wuhan-related points. One thing that really confuses me though is why you say human testing is a requirement, when almost all work is done in cell & animal models. Usually human tests are restricted to treatments, and only those that have already gone through cell and animal testing to ensure as much safety as possible. I just want to emphasize this point because the thought of doing infectious clone testing on people is awful and the Common Rule is meant to prevent this kind of abuse [1]. Regarding "previous accidentally released viruses, which were believed to be naturally occurring variants, did not have this [highly infectious to humans] property." The ones that are notable enough to make it into reports kind of do. The 1977 H1N1 leak affected "20-70% of those under 20 years of age in school or military camp outbreaks in the first year" [2]. There were also several leaks of the 2002 SARS virus that could easily have gone the same way COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) did. China was the source of several of these leaks, so feel free to use this as evidence for a lax safety culture. [0] https://www.virology.ws/2009/02/12/infectious-dna-clones/ [1] https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/regulations/... [2] https://armscontrolcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Esc... |
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No, I'm approaching it from the standpoint of how to not have a pandemic like this happen again.
> I'm more interested in the benefits from infectious clone technology and infection experiments in general
What are the benefits? What benefits have we gained specifically from this research, that we wouldn't have gained without it?
> why you say human testing is a requirement, when almost all work is done in cell & animal models
Because we can't reliably predict what a virus will do to humans unless humans have been infected with it. Cell and animal models are nice, but they aren't the same as actual human patients.
> Usually human tests are restricted to treatments
Exactly. And that's for good reasons. And my point is that testing treatments isn't the same as testing the viruses themselves. The Wuhan lab wasn't testing treatments, they were testing viruses. So how treatments are tested, and how confident we feel that they are safe based on cell and animal testing, is irrelevant to work with viruses themselves.
> and only those that have already gone through cell and animal testing to ensure as much safety as possible.
And even then we find effects in humans that we didn't expect. And that's for treatments, where we have more control over the variables than we do with viruses themselves.
> The ones that are notable enough to make it into reports kind of do.
"Kind of" isn't the same thing. I'm not talking about how infective they got in the first year. I'm talking about the way SARS-CoV-2 was in the very first human patients we have records of, back in late 2019. The strains isolated from that time were already highly infective. Initial strains of previous viruses were not; they increased in infectivity as they spread in humans and evolved to adapt. That's what we expect to happen for a virus that naturally jumps to humans from some other source. But when we see a virus that is already highly infective in the first human cases we know of, that's an indication that it did not naturally jump to humans, but was specifically engineered in a lab to be more infective to humans.
> There were also several leaks of the 2002 SARS virus that could easily have gone the same way COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) did.
How do we know they could have?