People seem to talk past one another when considering the claim of whether vaccines "reduce transmission."
If vaccines have any impact on whether someone gets sick, and it appears they do, the necessarily they would have to "reduce transmission." The people lucky enough to completely dodge infection as a result of their vaccine won't be passing that illness on to others.
However, if transmission is still high enough that anyone who isn't locking themselves down is going to get exposed to the virus many times, maybe the vaccine doesn't "reduce transmission." How much does it matter if you're exposed 80 times in a vaccinated population instead of 100 times in an unvaccinated population? If there's a 10% chance of infection at each exposure, then the probability of not getting infected goes from roughly 26 / 100,000 in the vaccinated scenario to 21 / 100,000 without.
Of course those numbers are made up, but I can't find any resources that will tell me how much vaccinating your community reduces the odds of individual infection.
The slowing of transmission may matter for scarce medical resources, but there may also be very little reduction in the odds that an individual will eventually be infected.
Yeah Balsa should definitely think about ways to curb (halt) GoF research. I have no idea how to do this. You somehow need buy in from the research community... which is to say they have to give up their research and funding. Yeah that is not going to happen.
With enough $, compliance can be induced. For example: federal highway funds are contingent on states having all kinds of regulations (eg drinking age of 21). If Balsa controls big grants, they can deny them to any institution doing GOF, regardless of what the grant was for.
I'm an epidemiologist and work in a BSL-2 lab, I can vouch that Zvi's coverage of this BU incident is pretty good. If you're interested in a deeper dive, I wrote about it here:
>>> How do we write a law that stops people from doing and building this?
"It shall be an affirmative defense to homicide in any degree that the decedent had engaged in virological gain of function research in the past year."
I did not have the same "this is permanent midnight" reaction to the NYT suggestions. I'm generally done changing behaviors due to personal COVID risk, but I have elderly parents and grandparents I'll be seeing over the holidays (all have avoided covid so far) and thought something like NYT's suggestions seemed reasonable: at least timing my booster to maximize effectiveness around Christmas, perhaps mini-quarantining, perhaps testing and masking when I wouldn't otherwise.
Are these recommendations really so objectionable?
IMO it depends on how cautious your relatives are. If they're living what I would consider normal then I think they're pretty likely going to get exposed from someone besides you, so the benefits of your efforts seem small. WDYT?
Someone needs to put a million dollar bounty on the head of a prominent GoF researcher. Even if it doesn't get claimed, it should be enough to scare these researchers into oblivion.
Blanket statements such as "ban gain of function" research sound good, but what we really want is to ban research where the potential downside is enormous and the potential upside is small or non-existent. I don't think this particular research qualifies as being clearly off the tail end of the cost-benefit curve, and we should recognize that there is, in fact, a curve.
To go a little farther, I think your statement, "It wouldn’t actually have 80% mortality in humans when it leaked out. It would still be horrific, and plausibly put our entire civilization in danger," is in direct conflict with this analysis, "But what if? What if this chimeric strain turned out to be more lethal than expected in the human population? What happens if you take an older strain of the virus and swap in the Omicron-level spike; doesn't that have the potential for trouble? Well, we've already seen a "natural experiment" like that, as Florian Krammer points out. There was a strain back in March called XD, which was a Delta that had the Omicron spike protein in it (via recombination). XD did not take off in the human population and did not seem to be more of a problem than the other strains, which is why you've probably never heard of it. "
Basically, the plan was to create a less-deadly virus and find out just how less deadly this one change would be. The evidence points to them actually having created a less-deadly virus. I suppose there is some risk that they might have created a more-deadly virus, but given that a similar sort of chimeric virus was already found in the wild and was, in fact, less deadly, I think you've got this one a bit wrong.
That reminds me that some people were thinking that Omicron may have been lab created. It’s lineage apparently skipped some generations, diverging from early strains and not descending even from beta: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8727245/
I also remember seeing some speculation, based on this fact about lineage, that perhaps someone had created and released Omicron on purpose to displace deadlier variants.
"How do we write a law that prevents people from doing this?" XY problem. Should we really feel constrained to legal means in stopping people actively trying to destroy civilization?
This seems off to me. Isn't the evidence that vaccines do reduce transmission but not by enough to materially impact the course of the pandemic?
People seem to talk past one another when considering the claim of whether vaccines "reduce transmission."
If vaccines have any impact on whether someone gets sick, and it appears they do, the necessarily they would have to "reduce transmission." The people lucky enough to completely dodge infection as a result of their vaccine won't be passing that illness on to others.
However, if transmission is still high enough that anyone who isn't locking themselves down is going to get exposed to the virus many times, maybe the vaccine doesn't "reduce transmission." How much does it matter if you're exposed 80 times in a vaccinated population instead of 100 times in an unvaccinated population? If there's a 10% chance of infection at each exposure, then the probability of not getting infected goes from roughly 26 / 100,000 in the vaccinated scenario to 21 / 100,000 without.
Of course those numbers are made up, but I can't find any resources that will tell me how much vaccinating your community reduces the odds of individual infection.
The slowing of transmission may matter for scarce medical resources, but there may also be very little reduction in the odds that an individual will eventually be infected.
"I don't know who needs to hear this"
Is dumb twitter shit that makes me tune out of anyone attempting to make a serious point
Yeah Balsa should definitely think about ways to curb (halt) GoF research. I have no idea how to do this. You somehow need buy in from the research community... which is to say they have to give up their research and funding. Yeah that is not going to happen.
Crypto bounties on the heads of GoF researchers. Only one needs to be claimed before GoF researchers are too scared to do it any more.
Ahh in my world violence is not an option.
With enough $, compliance can be induced. For example: federal highway funds are contingent on states having all kinds of regulations (eg drinking age of 21). If Balsa controls big grants, they can deny them to any institution doing GOF, regardless of what the grant was for.
I'm an epidemiologist and work in a BSL-2 lab, I can vouch that Zvi's coverage of this BU incident is pretty good. If you're interested in a deeper dive, I wrote about it here:
https://bellandblackbird.substack.com/p/boston-university-gain-of-function
>>> How do we write a law that stops people from doing and building this?
"It shall be an affirmative defense to homicide in any degree that the decedent had engaged in virological gain of function research in the past year."
Or, if you want to go after institutional incentives:
"Any institution of higher learning where virological gain of function research has taken place shall be stripped of its accreditation."
I don't understand this:
> The larger your state, the less of an issue ‘can’t cross state lines’ poses
I would think large state create more of an issue (farther to travel to get out of state), not less.
Right. The problem here is not 'I want out' it is 'if I leave the state my rights to do things all go away.'
This is what I just emailed to my congressman:
Criminalize gain of function research.
I don't want to die.
Some Boston University scientists just published a paper on how they mixed COVID variants
to combine the infectiousness of one with the virulence (higher fatality rate) of another.
Every experiment like this is risking a lab leak. Protocols are never perfect
and are never followed perfectly. Even a tiny chance of escape is unacceptable when many
millions of lives are stake.
Banning the federal government from funding this stuff would be a good start.
But millions of us will be just as dead if the lab leak is privately funded.
Gain of function research should be a federal offense.
I did not have the same "this is permanent midnight" reaction to the NYT suggestions. I'm generally done changing behaviors due to personal COVID risk, but I have elderly parents and grandparents I'll be seeing over the holidays (all have avoided covid so far) and thought something like NYT's suggestions seemed reasonable: at least timing my booster to maximize effectiveness around Christmas, perhaps mini-quarantining, perhaps testing and masking when I wouldn't otherwise.
Are these recommendations really so objectionable?
IMO it depends on how cautious your relatives are. If they're living what I would consider normal then I think they're pretty likely going to get exposed from someone besides you, so the benefits of your efforts seem small. WDYT?
Someone needs to put a million dollar bounty on the head of a prominent GoF researcher. Even if it doesn't get claimed, it should be enough to scare these researchers into oblivion.
I struggle to identify what was done here as gain of function. Here's a good alternative viewpoint from Derek Lowe: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/gain-function-not-so-fast
Blanket statements such as "ban gain of function" research sound good, but what we really want is to ban research where the potential downside is enormous and the potential upside is small or non-existent. I don't think this particular research qualifies as being clearly off the tail end of the cost-benefit curve, and we should recognize that there is, in fact, a curve.
To go a little farther, I think your statement, "It wouldn’t actually have 80% mortality in humans when it leaked out. It would still be horrific, and plausibly put our entire civilization in danger," is in direct conflict with this analysis, "But what if? What if this chimeric strain turned out to be more lethal than expected in the human population? What happens if you take an older strain of the virus and swap in the Omicron-level spike; doesn't that have the potential for trouble? Well, we've already seen a "natural experiment" like that, as Florian Krammer points out. There was a strain back in March called XD, which was a Delta that had the Omicron spike protein in it (via recombination). XD did not take off in the human population and did not seem to be more of a problem than the other strains, which is why you've probably never heard of it. "
Basically, the plan was to create a less-deadly virus and find out just how less deadly this one change would be. The evidence points to them actually having created a less-deadly virus. I suppose there is some risk that they might have created a more-deadly virus, but given that a similar sort of chimeric virus was already found in the wild and was, in fact, less deadly, I think you've got this one a bit wrong.
That reminds me that some people were thinking that Omicron may have been lab created. It’s lineage apparently skipped some generations, diverging from early strains and not descending even from beta: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8727245/
I also remember seeing some speculation, based on this fact about lineage, that perhaps someone had created and released Omicron on purpose to displace deadlier variants.
> You can’t scale what won’t sell.
Man... you don’t know how much you just made me go “oh shit! I had that same thought but this is phrased so much more elegantly.”
"How do we write a law that prevents people from doing this?" XY problem. Should we really feel constrained to legal means in stopping people actively trying to destroy civilization?