Moody Monday: a choice

[mellowtigger]

As a kid, I thought those Choose Your Own Adventure books were lightly entertaining.  The adult version is less fun.

Some people like not knowing.  For instance, I'll never actually understand people who dislike spoilers for movies or books.  I always want more knowledge.  I find that more context helps me to understand a situation, both the thing itself and my reaction to it.  This might be the first time, however, that I declare some piece of information itself might be dangerous because it can be so easily misused.  Information alone that could lead to undesirable behavior: either hatred or despair.

“One must always be careful of books," said Tessa, "and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

So here's my offer today: I'll give you a link to an old Journal Of Virology report.  It's about a virus created over a decade ago in a biohazard lab.  You will learn nothing helpful or hopeful here, so feel free to skip it entirely.  I'm posting that link in the first reply below, where discussion is invited.

Separately, if you'd rather have a discussion about how people cope with sensitive knowledge (sort of), then try yesterday's post instead.

It's your choice to participate in either place, depending on your current equilibrium.  Keep yourself safe first.

Comments

[mellowtigger]

"Difference in Receptor Usage between Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) Coronavirus and SARS-Like Coronavirus of Bat Origin"
Journal Of Virology, published online 2007 Dec 12
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258702/ (archive version)

Fact: Researchers in 2007 successfully created a human ACE2-binding virus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology using source material from SARS-CoV-1 and HIV-1, with help from bats.

Conjecture: The implications are inseparable from the knowledge. What they describe sure does seem today, with 2.5 years of pandemic information behind us, like SARS-CoV-2. Or a precursor to it, with a decade of more experimentation afterward.

Discussion: So, after that figurative gut punch, how do you feel and what do you think about this knowledge? It's obvious that some people would take it and begin harassing random Chinese people online and offline. Or they will feel hopeless about our capability to survive this pandemic. Don't. Just don't. Not either of them.

This knowledge of the past adds nothing to our understanding of today's SARS-CoV-2 biology, so in that sense it's irrelevant data. Today's virus could still be a natural mutation in bats that crossed to humans. It is possible that the study accurately predicted the danger of bat coronavirus mutation and its danger to humans.

The study says that they manipulated only the spike protein, not the main body of the virus. If our minds begin to ponder even the tiniest implication, though, then it adds huge influence to our understanding of China's "Zero Covid" policy and the capitalist world's complete abdication of medical "harm minimization" long term. I remember like others from early in the pandemic when claims were made about airborne HIV. This new knowledge makes that pithy description difficult to escape as a scary possibility, doesn't it? We know there is a long list of similarities between the two infections. This tweet seems eerily prescient: "the world will have to end up on antivirals to control it". (See again: capitalism. Profit!) We've almost reached that understanding of Long Covid, a year after it was written.

Potential upside: We might learn from SARS-CoV-2 that a viral spike protein can, in and of itself, be dangerous. That's big news. I've heard for decades that the spike is just the "key" for delivery into cells while the viral body is the "package" which is dangerous. It has big implications for mRNA vaccines that duplicate a spike exactly. At least such vaccines have limited lifespan, while a full virus replicates dangerously.

[bitterlawngnome]

It doesn’t actually change anything for me personally. It became clear long ago that drug companies don’t want cures, so that’s not news. Does the origin of the virus matter? I can’t see that it does. Even if you had definitive evidence that it was deliberately created at Wuhan … what could/would you do with that info? Unless you think that the PRC is sitting on a cure?

[mellowtigger]

Close, I do think there's a potential pattern here. I am concerned that capitalism may think it has found the equivalent of a perpetual motion machine: the capability to profit BOTH from a response to a problem AND from creation of the problem itself. One data point is the bee situation, with profit to be made both from agriculture chemicals that still seem implicated in insect species destruction and "robobees" that can take over their pollinator function on farms. (See as another data point: water.) Similarly, it's already problematic that capitalism knows it's more profitable to treat a disease rather than cure it, but it would be worse if research can simultaneously create new problems that current technology (particularly the fantastic mRNA tech) can moderately address in treatment. The "tin foil hat" part of this idea is the unfortunate reality that any intentional release of pathogen is so legally problematic that it would always require plausible deniability. I suspect, instead, that maybe simple faith in human fallibility is enough to keep funding high risk labs that produce actionable disease treatment data.

The more people seeking to in/validate this plausible pattern of "perpetual profit", the better. It's far too dangerous to leave unidentified and unaddressed. Yes, I've become increasingly anti-capitalist as the years go by. There seems to be no low too low for profiteers to exploit, as long as it remains easy to externalize the costs. Neoliberalism has shaped this externalization problem for decades, and it must end. Our future looks better with more minds attending to this issue.

[mellowtigger]

I see there's a seemingly reputable source (and even blue-checked on Twitter) going all in on lab release. Somebody else does a better job of it by citing sources that raise reasonable questions. They're not alone, but it quickly devolves into unhelpful tin foil hat stuff. And, seriously, why are any of the people who show up in these threads still on their anti-vaccine kick? They've got a whole virus right there, easy to blame.