[pjc50]

> Vaccines aren't something you need urgently in a crisis

.. what were you doing in 2020?

> you are unlikely to need to make a novel vaccine over the course of a war

The lab leak people are probably wrong, but in the present era we're a lot closer to "hook AI up to a CRISPR machine and generate a biological weapon" than we have ever been.

Everyone seems to assume that we might get in a war that we recognize and can fight with the tools of WW2, ships and tanks, rather than a war we don't recognize fought with weapons we don't understand and have no counter for. Or, more likely, simply get bought out at the top. Why fire a missile when you can buy a political party for a mere £5m?

[XorNot]

> .. what were you doing in 2020?

Waiting several years for widespread vaccine availability, and practicing good hygiene and social distancing.

Viruses aren't so good at seizing and holding territory.

[ben_w]

As I recall, the economic damage of the pandemic was ~ "it's worth spending ten billion dollars to make the vaccinations arrive one day sooner": https://www.newsweek.com/operation-warp-speed-what-deal-opin...

(And that was just the cost to the USA, not the world as a whole).

[XorNot]

Which does not change the fact that the pandemic was a peacetime crisis where it was possible but not practical to keep most systems running if needed.

Coronavirus wasn't bullseyeing vaccine shipments in the Pacific or taking down air freighters.

EDIT: I mean I don't know why you think this is a catch-22: countries pursue both capabilities, and the UK has a pharmaceutical industry and on shore manufacturing capabilities.

Whereas many industrialized nations are struggling to keep steel making capabilities on shore and running. So why is steel special? Because currently it's the one we're in danger of losing (and much harder to ship globally even if you have allies).

[toast0]

> Viruses aren't so good at seizing and holding territory.

Neither is infantry that's sick with the flu, which may have been a factor in the ending of of WWI.

Tis hard to practice good hygiene and social distancing in the trenches.

If one side had better access to vaccines or access to better vaccines in a conflict during a pandemic, it would be significant, regardless of how the pandemic came about.

[timschmidt]

> The lab leak people are probably wrong

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Testimony-Qu...

[defrost]

That is indeed the testimony of Steven C. Quay, one of "the lab leak people" that are asserted by GP to be probably wrong.

Very few people would claim that there is no testimony for the lab leak claim, it's simply that relatively few domain scientists support that claim.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_C._Quay

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory

[timschmidt]

> relatively few domain scientists support that claim

I spent a decade at a national Science and Technology Research Center responsible for a twelfth of NSF's research budget. We studied biology at all scales and the algorithms it uses to solve difficult problems. I've looked for holes in Quay's testimony and didn't find any big ones. Most of his claims seem to be independently verified.

One thing I can say from my decade of experience is that scientists are not dumb people, and are acutely aware of how their work is perceived, and the connection that has to their research funding. You'll find as many scientists warning about the dangers of lax lab regulation as you will coal miners warning about climate change. Private conversations are very different.

[Hikikomori]

What kind of expertise should you possess to be able to comment on a lab theory?

Even if lab leak is true, what is the proposal, that we do not study viruses at all?

[timschmidt]

> What kind of expertise should you possess to be able to comment on a lab theory?

Enough.

> Even if lab leak is true, what is the proposal, that we do not study viruses at all?

People love to think in black and white. All on or all off. It is metabolically inexpensive to reduce reality to the binary. But reality is all the colors in between. To the best of anyone's ability to reconstruct the events which led to the outbreak (I think Quay makes a compelling case in that testimony which summarizes a great deal of investigative work by others) many things went wrong. Many of which were predictable. Many choices were made. All that suggests opportunity to reduce risk through less extreme means: restricting gain of function research to higher-BSL labs, removing those labs further from population centers, more closely monitoring inflows and outflows around such research, changes are possible in the review and approval process, the list of possibilities is extensive.

What would your motivation be for seeing it any other way?

[Hikikomori]

>Enough.

So someone with expertise in other non relevant fields is enough? Yet people that have expertise in relevant fields dispute his conclusions and its not relevant somehow?