UK experts helped shut down Covid lab leak theory - weeks after being told it might be true

[Amity Island]

 

[Bruce Stephens]

If it was (which is looking likely), a lab made/messed about with "thing", if they had promptly admitted this (assuming it was an accident and not deliberate), perhaps a global spread of this "thing" could have been avoided, if it was contained fully in Wuhan.

I still don't have the impression that that view is particularly common amongst virologists (or that it's increasing in popularity). Rather, they still think the theory is hard to disprove but unlikely: it's much more likely to be a natural crossover (somewhere) which somehow emerged at the Wuhan market. (Actually two crossover events.) If anything, I think the lab-leak idea is rather less popular amongst experts since https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715

Why do people still promote it? Some just be contrarian (I presume that's why you're doing it), some (like John Campbell) because it gets attention (i.e., they're grifting).

Some because it helps their political position: if you want to defend the relative inactions of (say) Trump, blaming it on the Chinese makes good sense. (Not that China is completely innocent: I think there's at least a chance that if they'd acted faster to try and contain it (rather than to try and cover up) at the beginning they could have contained it. Only a chance, though.

Similarly, if the crossover events are made more common (as they are) by us forcing ourselves closer to wildlife and if the basic message ought to be to try to do that less, and to build up our public health systems and to increase our surveillance of viruses and other diseases in wildlife that humans interact with, then that's rather costly. Much cheaper just to say that biolabs ought to get cuts in funding.

I'm sure some have combinations of motives.

Scientist Behind Wuhan ‘Lab Leak’ Theory Secured Funding from Pentagon’s Science Division – Byline Times

Nafeez Ahmed looks at the scientific credentials of the authors behind a book that has powered baseless speculation that the Chinese Government 'engineered' COVID-19

bylinetimes.com

 

[everydayupsanddowns]

I‘m very glad you aren’t saying any of that @Amity Island

It would be in exceedingly bad taste, and incredibly disrespectful to the tens or thousands of people who have died as a result of infection with sars-cov2 to have it described by anyone as “the so called virus”.

 

[Bruce Stephens]

It would be in exceedingly bad taste, and incredibly disrespectful to the tens or thousands of people who have died as a result of infection with sars-cov2 to have it described by anyone as “the so called virus”.

Also to the hundreds of thousands of healthcare professionals worldwide who're very familiar with flu and its common effects and who've been very clear that what they saw in early 2020 was different.

 

[Docb]

Used to work in nuclear labs and got used to the garbage trotted out by the anti nuclear lot about what went on in there. They were hopelessly off the mark. I imagine that those who work in virus labs feel the same.

 

[Docb]

Actually it would not be reasonable. Your splodge of paint could have come from anywhere - most likely from some half-baked protestor who saw something on facebook and wanted to get something to shout about on twitter or whatever. If a group of people close to your theoretical power station had "radiation sickness" then sure as hell a lot of people in the plant would have it worse. More importantly, if it were happening, the people inside the plant would be shouting louder and doing more about it than the armchair experts on Twitter.

Have you ever worked in such an environment? Have you ever written a safety case or sat on committees judging others safety cases? Have you ever been inside a nuclear reactor pressure circuit? Have you ever been in charge of a hydrogen laboratory? I doubt it, and I doubt whether any of these people you keep on referring to have either. Well, I have done all those things and believe me the picture they paint is so far from reality that it is best ignored.

Rant over. I'll go back to sleep on this subject - getting worked up over the nonsense promulgated by the uninformed will do me far more harm than all the years I spent working in and amongst radioactive materials.

 

[Bruce Stephens]

How have the "jabs" changed the virus? have the jabs created varriants (making things worse in the longer term)?

Vaccinating in the middle of a pandemic, surely is like, shutting the stable door after the horse has left?

Changes in immunity (through vaccination or infection) surely change the virus. A new variant has to do well in a population that's mostly been vaccinated and almost all have had exposure to a few variants. The surviving population is quite different to the population in early 2020.

I've no idea why anyone would think it's a bad idea to vaccinate while you're in a pandemic. Vaccination reduces serious illness and deaths and (to a lesser extent) reduce infection and transmission. Even if there was no reduction in transmission, reducing serious illness and deaths seem like exactly the kinds of effect that people in the middle of a pandemic would want.

It wasn't a bad idea to use vaccination against smallpox or polio, and it's surely not a bad idea to use against this virus. (It's still not a bad idea to vaccinate against polio, of course. Doesn't really prevent infection or transmission (OPV does, but only for a couple of months), sadly, but does dramatically reduce the chances of paralysis.)

 

[Bruce Stephens]

I agree with what you are saying, I am just uncertain about how effective it can be to vaccinate when the pandemic is already in full swing. Usually, like for example with the flu viruses, we try to get ahead and predict the strains before they become wide spread. Though I do understand the reason why.

Everyone's always agreed that the sooner you get a vaccine the better. The expectation early on was that it would take years (though apparently the teams working on the vaccines were pretty confident they'd have candidates much sooner, and just didn't know how effective they'd be). That's one of the arguments in favour of drastic restrictions like NZ: it allows more time for vaccines and other treatments to be developed.

I'd like to see what research our and other countries have done into purifying and isolating the sarscov2 virus.

I suspect if I did see that research I just wouldn't understand it. Virologists, infectious disease doctors, and everyone else in the field seems content that they're able to identify the virus (and sequence variants).

There've been vast numbers of publications on this virus, I presume to someone with suitable experience some would explain how the isolation was done (if it's not obvious to someone with suitable expertise anyway).

 

[Docb]

For goodness sake Amity Island, if you want to comment on vaccine development, I suggest you get a degree in microbiology, do a masters and a PhD in virus science and then spend a number of years working in the field. I think you might then find that drawing conclusions from snippets from Fox news and stuff put on the internet from people no better qualified than yourself is untenable, unhelpful, and hopelessly inaccurate.

Rant over (and it was from me, ex-scientist who has seen the damage done by half baked science promulgated by conspiracy theorists, as a person and not a moderator!)

 

[Bruce Stephens]

from the people working day in and day out in vaccine development, it's not some conspiracy theory or nonsense.

The vaccines were developed from a kind-of leaked sequence from China. And initially the thought (in Oxford) was to use it as a practice run in developing a vaccine quickly using the platform they'd developed.

As I understand it the new platforms (viral vector and mRNA, and for all I know protein subunit ones like Novavax) don't need actual virus, they just need the sequence. In another universe perhaps China supplies a made up sequence, so wasting the time of western scientists, but in our universe it turned out to be accurate.

And the virus has been (and is being) sequenced routinely. See https://nextstrain.org/sars-cov-2/

I've very limited understanding of how they do this, but I assume that they can. To assume otherwise relies on such a colossal conspiracy that you may as well go the whole way and deny that any viruses exist (which some do claim).

 

[Bruce Stephens]

Thanks @Bruce Stephens that's pretty much what I said.

The difference is that I don't see it as a problem. It gave the scientists a bit of a head start: rather than waiting for the sick and dead people to appear in the UK, they were able to start on a vaccine with just a sequence. (Similarly in other countries, of course.)

 

[Bruce Stephens]

Of course, having the sequence would only be a head start if you already had the technology to develop it into a vaccine? I take it then that they all had this technology?

They did, yes. The Oxford team had been working on exactly that: a platform that would allow quick development of a vaccine for new viruses. And they'd developed candidates for SARS1 and MERS (which I think didn't go anywhere for the usual reason: lack of funding). mRNA vaccines were also intended for this: just add the antigen sequence you want in the right place and you've got a vaccine.

Alternatively, what was stopping them from going down the traditional route or at least some of them going down that route to try any maximise the efficacy data once the vaccines were rolled out?

Money, mostly. The first vaccines were unexpectedly good and so it's much harder to get money to develop others. Having said that, there are lots of other vaccines of various kinds. WHO publishes a spreadsheet: https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/draft-landscape-of-covid-19-candidate-vaccines There's still an obvious need for cheaper and more convenient vaccines for poorer countries.

China developed two traditional inactivated virus vaccines. They just don't seem as effective as the (successful) mRNA vaccines, or the Novavax one. I presume other companies did some work on all the kinds of vaccine that are available, and I'm sure some of them got to Phase 3 trials and then didn't get much use because they weren't that good. (The EU bet quite a bit on the mRNA CureVac which turned out to be disappointing.)

 

[Bruce Stephens]

So.. in that data, it made reference to an inactivated vaccine called Valneva (traditional type vaccine), made in Edinburgh which got approval from the MHRA. I'd honestly never herd about this one. There is a link here in the BBC. It says it this:

"It outperformed the AstraZeneca vaccine on this measure in head-to-head tests."

"this measure" being levels of neutralising antibodies.

Yes, it's been approved in the UK but we cancelled the 100 million doses for some contractual reason. I wonder if the government judged we already had enough doses of mRNA vaccines for the expected take-up, especially since it seems clear they're not really trying to vaccinate children any more.

It feels shortsighted to me. The virus clearly seems to be causing damage to at least some people, and it feels possible (though not terribly likely) that offering choices other than mRNA might prompt more people to be vaccinated (and likely receiving a dose of some different vaccine will broaden the immune response of those of us who're already vaccinated).

I know they government is really hoping to be able to forget the pandemic, but people are still getting sick enough to stay off work, and some are still needing hospital treatment, with some still dying. The government ought to continue planning to offer vaccination to people of all ages, if only to reduce sickness.

(And why we've still not bought any Evusheld is just criminal, in my opinion. By the time we have evidence on whether it provides long term protection against Omicron it seems likely that it'll be too late to be useful.)

 

[Bruce Stephens]

Bruce, any ideas why each country/manufacturer chose not to sequence the virus independently for themselves rather than downloading it from China?

I presume it's a combination of time (they wanted to start as soon as they could) and they felt no reason to delay. Working from the sequence from China they were able to start in late January. I don't know when we had the first sequences from the UK, but it was probably around March.

And given the situation, nobody involved thought it was likely that the sequences wouldn't be trustworthy. The team in Wuhan were well known and known to be competent.