> A virus being engineered to be an order of magnitude less virulent seems unlikely to say the least.
From what I gathered it’s not suggesting specific genetic traits were engineered, but rather that they were experimenting and one of those experiments could have accidentally been released(?).
Yes, but is the theory is that one experiment, in the context of a gain analysis, was made in order to see how the virus might evolve to be much less severe?
Why would a gain analysis try to find ways in which a virus could be made weaker? I don't doubt that an accidental release is feasible, though very very unlikely, but why would an experiment make a less severe virus in the first place?
>Why would a gain analysis try to find ways in which a virus could be made weaker?
To better understand the mechanisms that make it weak or strong?
Plus, why would it have to be "made weaker" as opposed, accidentally made weaker? If they were experimenting they would have all sorts of varieties/results... it's not like every experiment to make it stronger would make it stronger... surely some could fail and make it weaker!
If I were to make a great bio weapon that would do the maximum damage, I will have these attributes:
1. Spread it easily;
2. Don't kill the ones who spread it most easily (the young);
3. Be lethal enough to overwhelm the system.
And so I have the Covid-19.
Of course it is all post-fact analysis. but it also answers your question of why would an experiment make a less sever virus in the first place - to address the biggest problem of an infectious agent as a bioweapon, i.e. a virulent virus ends up killing too many too fast to be highly infective and 'effective'.
And if I were to make a bioweapon, I would think about long-term impact.
(1) Millions disabled is far worse than millions dead.
(2) Attacks can come in multiple pieces. The first virus might do damage to make people especially vulnerable to the second virus. If I can protect my population against the first one /or/ the second, my people are safe.
My opinion is it's just a matter of time before we see bioweapons, and we should be ready. If not before COVID19, then now. Our vulnerability is very obvious.
We should treat this as an emergency prep drill, and make sure businesses can operate remotely, kids can learn remotely, we have PPE, and the infrastructure is in place for essential work. That also wouldn't collapse the economy.
Infectious bioweapons are a horrible idea in a highly connected world for the reason we can all plainly see: they don’t respect national borders.
It is an old-fashioned notion of a weapon that only made sense when there was little exchange between the citizens of states in opposition, like the U.S. and USSR.
China, for whom international trade is a crucial part of their strategy, would not work on an infectious disease weapon unless they simultaneously developed a vaccine to protect their own people. The fact they are not currently vaccinating their population, or even in the lead in developing a vaccine, is extremely strong proof that COVID-19 did not originate as a Chinese bioweapon candidate.
If a lab in China had been working with this virus at all, they would have had at minimum working cultures of it, and potentially multiple strains and experience modifying them. Cultures alone would have put them ahead of western pharma companies in developing a vaccine—even in the case of an unplanned release.
The fact that they’re not ahead is compelling proof that this virus was as new to Chinese medicine as it was to everyone else.
> The fact that they’re not ahead is compelling proof that this virus was as new to Chinese medicine as it was to everyone else.
I appreciate your argument, but are you sure that they are not ahead? I don't have personal knowledge, but (for example) there was a Reuters article last week with a headline that included that claim "China leads COVID-19 vaccine race": https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-.... If somehow it was proved that they are indeed ahead, would you consider this compelling proof in the opposite direction? I think I'd consider both directions to be weak evidence, but neither to be anything near proof.
If there is a country that benefited most from this virus, it's Russia. Crippling economies of China and especially US (with additional misinformation to make people not wear masks).
Why would a country that wanted to deploy a bio weapon started on it's own land? It's not like travel to other countries was restricted.
Also Russia is not a country that would have qualms about affecting own citizens. Putin get to power by coordinating bombings on apartment complexes and blaming Chechens for it.
Well, let's break down this hypothetical a bit more:
(1) "Work on" is different from "release." If I were China, I would not release a bioweapon, but I might work on one. The US and USSR worked on nuclear weapons but did not release them. There are 200 nations. Some of them almost certainly have secret bioweapons programs.
(2) As China showed, they could handle a COVID19-level bioweapon attack while the US can't. US has several times as many /dead/ as China had /infected./ In a war, if I were China, I might release one too if I had one.
(3) If I were planning a sneak attack, as I said, a multipart bioweapon might make sense. If something like COVID19 damages the lungs, and makes people vulnerable to PICORNA21, and only 80,000 of my citizens caught COVID19, while millions of Americans did, it seems pretty safe. Especially if I know I can do another lockdown, and the US can't. Release PICORNA21, lock down, wait for millions of paralyzed Americans, and take my rightful spot back in the world.
(4) China is not the only player. Bioweapons are rapidly moving into the range of clever undergrad students, not to speak of terrorist organizations, rogue nations, etc.
I'm not trying to badmouth China here. I don't even think China is the major threat; just that the US should be ready for something like COVID19 intended as a weapon.
Also, as points of fact: (a) China is vaccinating its military already. (b) China has no reason to vaccinate its population yet; their lockdown has worked. If China did vaccinate their population already, as you point out, that would be clear proof this was engineered by China.
You missed out one critical element of a highly contagious bioweapon: you have to be able to protect your own population. Otherwise it's a self-own.
(This is why nobody has really used bioweapons in warfare to date, with the exception of some questionable reports that the USSR had a really lethal weaponized smallpox strain on some of their ICBM warheads, as a balance-of-terror multiplier.)
While this doesn't prove that COVID19 isn't a bioweapon, it strongly suggests that it got loose long before whoever designed it anticipated. Unless, of course, it was developed by the world-leading Vietnamese biological warfare institute (hey, look at their fatality figures)! (That was sarcasm, by the way.)
>If I were to make a great bio weapon that would do the maximum damage
You must not know much about bioweapons, then. By any measure, SARS-CoV-2 is a very, very poor bioweapon.
Think about it... it infects everyone but for the most part younger people don't die from it or even become incapacitated. It's mostly killing the elderly or people who have pre-existing conditions.
Effectively, SARS-CoV-2 helps the nation that's infected with it prepare for conventional conflict... it leaves younger people able to fight in the military and with some immunity to the weapon, it greatly reduces the need to care for the elderly or those in poor physical condition, freeing up workers for weapons production or logistics.
It's easy to stop this supposed "weapon" from spreading, just social distance and wear a mask... if everyone does it, the attack is ineffective.
Any country that attacked another using SARS-CoV-2 as a weapon would be suiciding. All the virus would accomplish is making the youngest, most able portion of the target population very angry and reducing the number of non combat capable people they have to take care of.
But wait, you say... the US is having a much higher impact from the virus.
That's because our leadership has failed outright and continues to do so at many levels. Calling the virus a hoax, politically motivated re-openings, the support of ignorance instead of science, conspiracy theories... all due to poor leadership.
Which of course is the real reason this tinfoil hat theory that the virus is a weapon hasn't died yet. Convincing a large number of people that it's a weapon would remove responsibility from Trump and the GOP for failing so incredibly badly, or at least make them look better in the run-up to the election.
The truth is that SARS-CoV-2 isn't a weapon, it's a pandemic which the US could have quickly suppressed and defeated, but did not because our corrupt, inept government worships ignorance instead of enlightenment.
Or what if the virus was intentionally released to remove a costly population demographic (old & infirm) that no longer have a cost benefit for the CCP/PRC GDP. Keep in mind that we still don't have valid numbers from China so we don't know how many died though back-channel reports say the reported numbers are much too low. The virus may very well have performed its intended purpose and any damage to enemies of the CCP is just iceing on the cake.
> Why would a gain analysis try to find ways in which a virus could be made weaker?
You're presuming it was for gain analysis. What if the intention was different? What if you were ultimately considering the virus for bio-warfare and wanted to hide that intention?
If we're going to explore theories this fits the evidence, or is at least possible.
I read that viruses, as a whole, are trending to be less severe because highly lethal viruses kill the host faster than it can spread. They could be researching ideas like this.
Accidental releases of viruses from labs have happened quite regularly. It's a serious concern.
The UK was first introduced to the uselessness of Imperial College and their epidemiological modelling by an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001 amongst livestock. It resulted in mass killing (by humans) of animals. Eventually the epidemic disappeared, amongst great acrimony and disaster for farmers.
In 2007 foot and mouth appeared again. This time, the virus was traced to the source of the outbreak. It came from a lab in Pirbright where the virus had been stored for research. Two government orgs were connected by pipes, and the pipes had been allowed to rust due to a budget dispute over which org should pay for repairs:
Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday they have identified 34 incident reports involving bioterror pathogens mishandled at CDC labs that were “inadvertently” not disclosed in 2014 to congressional investigators who had asked for the information
From what I gathered it’s not suggesting specific genetic traits were engineered, but rather that they were experimenting and one of those experiments could have accidentally been released(?).