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Former CDC head says he thinks virus was a lab leak.

Napoleon said:
There are 12 or 13 pathogens known to have been weaponized and manufactured in biological warfare programs. I think it’s a terrible idea to expand access to level 4 pathogens.
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I wasn't aware of weaponized viruses. I see the concern, but I also see that you say governments (I'm guessing that a small percentage of ~federal governments have weaponized viruses) say they don't do that anymore.

My question is: How would a government prevent whoever they want to protect from getting the disease (or a variant, after release as a weapon)?

My answer to prevention is: They have to have and administer an effective vaccine.

But can't we assume that the weaponized virus can and will mutate after release and being hosted?

Does mutation occur ~naturally in labs?

In other words, a weapon that is not controllable and has "a life and ~mind of its own" is a danger to everyone, so isn't that (if I'm correct) a deterrent for rational people?
 
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Antiwar said:
My problem is with what the USG does to other people and countries, which is a lot. The video "The Coming War on China" gives an idea of some of what they've done.
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Thats a full length film...it might take a while to have time to see the whole thing. I saw a clip of it only.
 
Napoleon said:
I think it’s a terrible idea to expand access to level 4 pathogens.
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Okay, but let's explore that idea.

First, I think you have assumed that following the suggestions of the Covid-19 prevention article would result in more probability that it will be weaponized. Maybe you think it's probable that Covid-19 was weaponized.

What's going on with studying Covid-19, currently? Is it being studied in Level 4 labs?

And, wouldn't governments already have access to viruses if that virus is present in their territory? Should we try to prevent scientists from searching for viruses? I think not.
 

scientists DO and ARE studying all kinds of potentially dangerous viruses in labs right now. They are doing gain of function research with all kinds of viruses and pathogens, whether or not the virus originated in their territories.

I agree there should be scientists watching these potential dangers. One of the reasons the Covid vaccines came online so quickly was due to the research done at the Wuhan lab and others.

I said earlier (or maybe that was another thread) that a lot of virologists, in disputing the “bio-weapon” argument, made the comment, that if it was supposed to be a bio-weapon, it was a really crappy one compared to the current state of that technology.
 

One of the problems with weaponized pathogens is that there are no guarantees that what’s known as “collateral damage” won’t occur. These are not precision weapons - they’re designed to inflict maximum debilitation and casualties. Do they have vaccines? Who knows. The assumption should be no..at least not enough to treat civilian populations.

Mutations don’t occur naturally in labs since these are controlled environments and the pathogens are isolated. That is, assuming there’s no animal experimentation going on. Generally the only mutations that occur are those designed by the scientists working with the pathogens.

One would imagine that these provide some sort of MAD deterrent and States continue to research and develop them. The concern is less that there will be a deliberate release of these pathogens than an accident.


My concern is not weaponization per say. Not every Level 4 pathogen is weaponized. The issue is that the more labs and people you have working with these pathogens the greater the likihood that there will be an accident that allows dangerous pathogens to escape into the wild. It is a distinct possibility that this is what happened with COVID-19.
 
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Antiwar said:
And, wouldn't governments already have access to viruses if that virus is present in their territory? Should we try to prevent scientists from searching for viruses? I think not.
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One final note about this. When scientists are studying these pathogens they’re going to very remote areas all over the world and harvesting animals and fungi. The odds that the things they’re finding out there would naturally lead to a pandemic are pretty slim owing to that. Except for the fact that they’re bringing them back to labs in densely populated areas for study. So if for some reason they have a failure of containment protocols then they could accidentally unleash deadly pathogens that humans would otherwise not have been exposed to.
 
Don't all viruses originate in the wild?
 
 
Antiwar said:
Don't all viruses originate in the wild?
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sort of. Scientists can take viruses from the wild and make “chimeras” of them with other viruses that never would have met their other half in the wild. In fact, if you delve into what’s possible these days, it’s kind of staggering the manipulation humans can do now.
 
The two possibilities for Covid-19 are:
1. It transmitted to humans from close contact with a carrier animal.
2. It transmitted to humans from a lab that isolated it from a carrier animal.

Correct?
 

The technology isn’t there yet, but there has been interest for a long time on the part of intelligence agencies in the development of viruses tailored for a specific individual.
 
Antiwar said:
The two possibilities for Covid-19 are:
1. It transmitted to humans from close contact with a carrier animal.
2. It transmitted to humans from a lab that isolated it from a carrier animal.

Correct?
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Yes, and number two is the most likely of those options.
 

In the US there is a distinction between "State run labs" and "Corporate run labs".

In the PRC there is little (if any) distinction between "State run labs" and "Corporate run labs".

In the US, the "State run labs" (i.e Ft. Detrick) concentrate on research for which there is no known immediate prospect of turning a profit (such as "developing weaponized disease causing agents and the defences against them") and "Corporate run labs" concentrate on research for which there is a known immediate prospect of turning a profit (generally be finding a way around some other corporation's 'intellectual property rights').

In the PRC some of the "State run labs" concentrate on research for which there is no known immediate prospect of turning a profit (such as "developing weaponized disease causing agents and the defences against them") and some of the "State run labs" concentrate on research for which there is a known immediate prospect of turning a profit (generally be finding a way around some other [preferably non-Chinese] corporation's 'intellectual property rights').
 

I don’t believe there are any corporate level 4 labs in the US. These are all government or university labs and even that is a grey area.
 
Napoleon said:
Yes, and number two is the most likely of those options.
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According to who? I've heard that humans continual encroachment on Nature is a problem. And we use animals for food, much more and much more sloppily than labs work with viruses. Maybe the better solution involves drastically reducing animals used for food? Maybe lab meat is a possible good solution for multiple problems?
 
ElChupacabra said:
I'm not sure. I've read information pitching both sides of the argument, but neither are conclusive.
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Agreed. We know Swine flu jumped from pigs to humans.


We know that West Nile virus jumped from birds to humans.

We know that Ebola jumped from bats to humans.

We know histoplasmosis is a fungus disease carried from birds or bats to human.

So the chances are just as likely it was a natural virus that jumped from an animal or bird to a human.

Perhaps more likely than from a lab.
 
Antiwar said:
The two possibilities for Covid-19 are:
1. It transmitted to humans from close contact with a carrier animal.
2. It transmitted to humans from a lab that isolated it from a carrier animal.

Correct?
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again, sort of. The two parts of the virus (bat, pangolin?) don’t fit together naturally in any way we’ve established as fact yet. So the idea is that they were put together by scientists in order to perform some gain of function research.

may have been cycled through animals (dead or alive) or even human cadavers, to see what would happen.
 

Mutations do occur naturally in labs, any time a virus or bacteria reproduces there is a chance it will mutate in a lab or not. Lab often introduce conditions to make mutations happen more often
 

I doubt that. I mean, I as a middle class American can decide to stop eating animals because I have the luxury of doing so. Very poor people in other countries are going to eat what they can find. And yeah, viruses come out of nature and cause pandemics, but usually much slower than the new Coronavirus, giving scientists and watchdogs time to sound the alarm.
 
The current understanding is that Covid-19 is composed of two unique parts from two different carrier animals?
 
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