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by westcort 505 days ago
I have previously shared this little known, but factual, event on Hacker News. It is simply a Wikipedia article--the 1977 Russian Flu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu). This is not my statement, note this well dang, and read or argue with the editors of Wikipedia if you want (not me), but the following statement stands firm:

"Genetic analysis and several unusual characteristics of the 1977 Russian flu have prompted many researchers to say that the virus was released to the public through a laboratory accident, or resulted from a live-vaccine trial escape"
2 comments
braiamp 505 days ago
> Reanalysis of the H1N1 sequences excluding isolates with unrealistic sampling dates indicates that the 1977 re-emergent lineage was circulating for approximately one year before detection, making it difficult to determine the geographic source of reintroduction. We suggest that a new method is needed to account for viral isolates with unrealistic sampling dates.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2887442/

I will have to have a discussion with the editors of that page.

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westcort 505 days ago
Read carefully, "...have prompted many researchers..." To change the text, one would need to change the minds of all of the many researchers, and have them administer retractions. Argue over what happened in that year, I guess, but the fact remains that the genetic clock of viral mutation does not stop unless a virus is kept in storage. Also, was the year of mutational change accrued from 1976 to 1977 or from 1918 to 1919? Either way, no question, the virus that caused the 1977 Russian flu spent time in a lab.
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tripletao 505 days ago
Exactly. The paper linked in the grandparent is questioning the exact date of reintroduction, not whether reintroduction occurred. The usual guess seems to be

> the result of vaccine trials in the Far East involving the challenge of several thousand military recruits with live H1N1 virus (C.M. Chu, personal communication)

https://www.nature.com/articles/nm1141

That part is genuinely uncertain though, and probably unanswerable. Historical surveillance was weak, and those who do have information may not wish to implicitly confess to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

No one is seriously questioning that it spent ~20 years in a lab freezer. There was some speculation about virus frozen in the Arctic or such; but since that's never been observed to happen any other time, and multiple labs were known to be working with frozen and thawed virus, I think that's pretty abandoned.

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Terr_ 505 days ago
Tangentially, risks like that are why I'm really frustrated-with/exasperated-by certain mRNA-vaccine scaremongers: Ones who act as if older techniques were already fine and sufficient.

Ex: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/vaccine-derived-p...

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zmgsabst 505 days ago
It can both be the case that old methods have risks and new methods have greater risks, eg, underestimating mRNA distribution in the body, leading to mRNA replication in heart tissue, and higher than expect dangerous side-effects.

In general, people prefer understood risks to new risks because the system is better adapted to them — both biologically and politically.

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