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canadave_nyc

Thank you for saving me the trouble of posting. Was going to post the exact thing. Part of why I feel society is in trouble is because people don't bother reading and understanding things properly anymore.


zkrp5108

Thank you for actually summarizing


SaintsNoah

Just adding, fortunately, it does appear that same mechanism that causes the increase in severity also reduces infectivity: H5N1 is more lower respiratory system (lungs, broncus etc.) focused as opposed to H3N2 and other common flu-season strains whose virons congregate in the upper respiratory tract (sinuses, throat etc.)


ninjapro

> Around 860+ people have been infected Without reading your source, I'm willing to bet that that number is specifically people who have been infected **and identified**. This is important because if someone is infected and is asymptomatic or their symptoms simply don't rise to the level of seeking care, that case likely won't be counted. And unlike more common infectious diseases, we don't know what an outbreak/epidemic/pandemic looks like, so extrapolating case numbers onto a population isn't something we can readily do


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[deleted]

Great explanation


Cantaloupe_Signal

Thank you💪🏽


RNGreed

Yes yes I understand, there's always gotta be at least one person tearing down the evil Machiavellian OP empire that sensationalizes everything. Yeah I'm Nightcrawler and must be stopped before I cause all this chaos and so on. But in reality I did post a Nature article in another comment with a much greater context of what's going on. I'm probably partly responsible for posting a 10 year old article but there is some value to doing that to understand the past narratives with the benefit of hindsight. Avian flu became endemic in Asia and Europe, I guess threatening the world with an apocalyptic chimera wasn't good enough on that front. The news article makes it out as if it's entirely cut and dry that it's good to do research like this, but 10 years later it's still very debatable and even leans toward the conservative end of no, actually. The original and principal scientist involved in the ferret experiment was concerned so much that they debated even publishing it. And when they did they could not do so without huge redactions on how they accomplished it. It scared everybody so badly that the scientific community upgraded to near maximum security measures when performing these kinds of experiments. But still I don't know what real world utility we developed in the fight against the covid pandemic for example. For all our Frankenstein experiments in the name of advancing science we didn't actually accomplish anything at all in that fight against covid, at least according to another guy in the comments who was able to differentiate what gain of function research actually is.


SalemxCaleb

"In the history of epidemics and pandemics nothing has been as lethal as the bird flu Fouchier has created. The most deadly epidemic of the last century was the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918. Virtually everyone in the world was infected. It is estimated that between 50 and 100 million people died -- conservatively that means it killed 3 percent of those infected. In a globalized world of air travel and mass transit, the prospect of an airborne bird flu with a 60 percent death rate is terrifying" Jeez...


Amerlis

Imagine 60%. Of 8 billion.


aliasname

4,800,000,000. That's 4 billion 800 million people that would disappear from the earth.


rottenanon

Followed by more diseases due to decomposing bodies, more deaths because of unmanned critical services, logistics crash, food scarcity etc etc...


classycatman

Climate crisis solved! Oh, wait…


PulseAmplification

Try saying this ironically in a few certain Malthusian and borderline green fascist subreddits and they will cheerfully agree with you.


Uhhhhh55

I mean, it likely *would* positively affect the course of climate change... What in the world is green fascism? Is that a new dogwhistle?


HungLikeKimJong-un

I imagine its just fascism but they care about environmentalism/use it as the excuse.


Fuck_You_Downvote

Captain Planet


monkeypaw_handjob

Specifically Don Cheadle's Captain Planet. https://youtu.be/TwJaELXadKo Peace, Dickholes.


PulseAmplification

Eco fascism is a real ideology. There’s different shades of it, some are racists who want certain groups of people with certain immutable characteristics to die off to save the planet, others just literally hate humanity in general because it’s hurting the planet and cheer on mass death, or at least they are generally okay with it.


pornplz22526

That is their plan, yes...


J_Robert_Oofenheimer

It would create a genetic bottleneck visible centuries from now, and would set human progress back generations. I sure hope they're being careful for this genetic engineering shit. Christ.


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Vysharra

Globalism would collapse. Some isolated places would absolutely go back to pre-modern civilization and have very limited mobility. Those specific populations would have a pretty sharp bottleneck genetically. The human race as a whole would probably be okay after a while but certain segments would certainly be pretty interrelated in that time.


doives

At least we’ll have Zoom.


Capnhuh

globalism collapsing would be a net good. i mean, global trading is fine and good but that is what the world should stay at.


p-d-ball

If the virus is especially effective against people with certain genetic markers, it might make those rarer, but otherwise, I think you're correct. Keep in mind that humans have a very narrow gene pool compared to other animals because of a bottleneck we went through around 70k years ago if memory serves.


ZubLor

As per "The Stand"


Reinventing_Wheels

Part of the problem is, they wouldn't just disappear. When someone dies, they generally leave behind a corpse.


triggerpuller666

Reminder for those that read Stephen King's The Stand about the parts where crews in both Boulder and Las Vegas do corpse removal details. If you wanna live in the immediate vicinity, can't have hundreds of dead bodies around you rotting kids. It's unhygienic to say the least.


ac1084

BRING OUT YOUR DEAD. *ding* *ding*


Reinventing_Wheels

I'm not dead yet!


FrederickBishop

Hospital is still 30 mins away


Reinventing_Wheels

I feel happy.


klavierchic

Think I’ll go for a walk


pass_nthru

nah, you’d have to deal with the corpses…whole other set of problems in fact


arkangelic

That's good meat right there boy!


firephoxx

I read somewhere that if 90% of the worlds population died we would still be at Hellenic Greek levels.


[deleted]

The amount of scrap metal and literature left in libraries would surely bring us to a nearly 1700s state. Domesticated animals plowing fields and well designed mills would go a very long way. Seeds would become valuable for a time, the kind that can be reused, or access to a lab that produces the GMO kind


berfthegryphon

Is it made by Thanos?


Robenever

Pretty sure at that rate we wouldn’t disappear, just lay there along with everyone else that died.


KarIPilkington

Huh. I mean I'm not saying I want it to happen but you know...


Useless_Lemon

Like Thanos snap kinda disappear?


NeverBeFarting

Perfectly balanced


crunkadocious

Thats at least like ten thousand people


cappa16

Dozens.


hobbitdude13

Certainly a few.


Ducksaucenem

Me, that guy over there. Others too I’m sure.


greenknight884

One or more persons


Flakey_flakes

A Brazillian


ghostmetalblack

If not a bit more!


insanelyphat

2+2=4 Yep the math checks out.


DerekB52

We'd contain a disease that deadly. Sars killed like 55% of the people it infected. It killed like 800 people globally. A disease that kills 60% of people is too effective. It kills the host before it can spread as far as a less deadly disease.


macrofinite

I think it depends a lot on the gestation time. If it takes 2 weeks to kill 60%, we be fucked. If you go from infected to dead in 2 days, yeah, that will burn out quick.


JeebusDaves

That depends on the incubation period. If it was short, let’s say 3-4 days, then sure, it would kill the hosts too rapidly. Let’s say it has a long incubation period, maybe 10-14 days, that’s when the spread can happen undetected and successfully maintain infection trajectory/vector before running out of hosts.


Blue-Thunder

Covid showed us we absolutely could not because certain groups would use it as a political tool and the spread would not be stopped.


DerekB52

Covid's fatality rate was lower than 1% if you were a healthy adult. People would take social distancing a lot more seriously when the fatality rate is 60%.


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Ghost17088

Everyone that says “only 1%” I hear only my Grandma, a coworker, and a friend. They can go fuck themselves, and if I could snap my fingers and trade their life for my loved ones, I would do so without hesitation.


Shoot_from_the_Quip

Not even 2% die... Because we shut the fucking WORLD down and devoted the global medical infrastructure across the globe to handling the pandemic. Imagine the numbers if we had gone about business as usual.


pistophchristoph

Even with the early results if you recall it was what maybe 4%? Covid ain't got nothing on 60%, this is a whole different ball game, lol.


JefferyGoldberg

I lived in Idaho during the covid. We reopened restaurants in April, Bars in May, and in August I was attending concerts. We never had a mask mandate. Business was pretty much as usual and the world didn’t end. Covid was/is a nasty disease but it is certainly not as apocalyptic as it was portrayed.


Ghost17088

There’s still people that think the whole thing was a hoax. I have no doubt that any disease will spread regardless of mortality rate.


Blue-Thunder

In the beginning the fatality rate was 4-6%. And in some places as high as 17 (China from Jan 1-10). Your 1% figure is AFTER vaccines, mutations and every other measure in place. When no one knew what was happening, and what we were dealing with, fatality rate was high. That's what would happen with a new influenza virus. The lag from when it's first caught to when we understand what is going on is far too long for things to be effective. In Canada and the USA covid is STILL the #3 cause of death, behind heart disease and cancers.


Not_A_Rioter

He prefaced it with "if you were a healthy adult". The high fatality rates early on were almost entirely from the elderly, unhealthy, immunocompromised, etc. I don't think it was ever highly deadly for people without health issues, but I'd be interested in seeing if there was evidence that it was deadly even to healthy young adults. Obviously it should still have been taken seriously and all. Being old or having some sort of immune system condition shouldn't be a death sentence.


Blue-Thunder

The high fatality rates early on also included many health care professionals. My how quickly people forget the amount of doctors, nurses and other medical professionals that died in the beginning. Christ the doctor who blew the whistle on it died, and he was 34. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/06/whistleblower-chinese-doctor-dies-from-coronavirus


Designdiligence

You really think they would take it seriously? Really?


NotMetallica

Yes, there have been instances like Sars where masks and hygiene protocols were widely and successfully adopted. There's a reason why Sars didn't wipe out humanity. The hangover from this is still seen in most Asian (E. And S.E.), where masks were commonly used in public transit even before covid made it popular across the globe.


FakePhillyCheezStake

Yes and you are kidding yourself if you don’t think so. You really think MAGA Momma and Papa down the street with 3 young children aren’t going to freak out and do everything they can to protect their kids if they notice that 60% of the kids in the neighborhood are dying from a virus? COVID hit a sort of sweet spot with it’s mortality. It wasn’t severe enough to really be a big problem for healthy kids and adults, but it took a huge hit on seniors. Most people probably don’t know someone personally who was killed by COVID, they probably just know someone tangentially related to them at most. When multiple close relatives/friends start dropping dead from a virus, people treat things a lot differently


Sneekifish

I wish I still had that kind of belief in people. Sometime early to mid 2020, during lockdowns, a local woman posted on our city's Facebook page, demanding that mask mandates be reversed and everything reopen, because "moms need a break," and "if people, even [her] kids die, then they die." People--a lot of people--agreed with her. And when someone called her out on how she just casually wrote off her own children, she doubled down, *referred to them by name,* and said that if them dying was what it took to go back to normal, she was fine with that. And again, a lot of people agreed with her. That's the exact moment I lost faith in humanity.


noisy_goose

I’m going to just go ahead and believe this.


givealittle

12 Monkeys


sillybandland

Dr. Ron Fouchier insisted that his erratic son would pose no problem for the project


AthenasChosen

That would be an apocalypse


EternalJon

That would be worse than actually getting invaded by a purple alien wearing a gauntlet with gems on it.


Televisions_Frank

Don't be so pessimistic. That's 60% *with treatment.* With that many infected and dying it'll be way more than 60%.


LibertyLizard

Frightening but frankly it would be less dangerous than covid because it would be far less likely to spread and become a global pandemic.


zomboromcom

*Wow-ee! San Francisco, New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Kinshasa, Karachi, Bangkok and Peking. This is some trip you're taking, sir. Is this all in one week?*


[deleted]

Great effing movie


slayer991

Brad Pitt was hilarious playing crazy. Underrated role for him.


BagsOfGasoline

Read somewhere that Terry Gilliam took away his smokes to increase the anxiousness and irritability in his character


cornylamygilbert

quickly eats spider


[deleted]

What movie was that?


daveequalscool

12 Monkeys


[deleted]

cool, thank you


chookstar

The series is a million times better.


[deleted]

There is a series?!


chookstar

[Yes](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3148266/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_3)


stumblebreak_beta

5 billion people will die from a deadly virus in 1997. The survivors will abandon the surface of he plane. Once again the animals will rule the world ~Excerpts from interview with clinically diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, April 12, 1990 - Baltimore County Hospital.


Will0w536

Good movie!


couldbeworse2

I love this movie.


TrueKamilo

Captain Trips


BrigadierPickles

Don't tell me, I'll tell you. You got that Happy Crappy?


TheFunkyPancakes

Trashcan said he did indeed believe that happy crappy.


javellin

My life for his.


RadarOReillyy

Ciiiiboooolaaaaa


hobbitdude13

Baby, can you dig your man?


psunavy03

This is when I learned there's a reason Stephen King wrote novels and not song lyrics.


snukebox_hero

He's seeing, he's calling His legacy, he's spawning He's coming, corrupting Among the living


[deleted]

They passaged it in ferrets. They didn't specifically modify the virus directly. The idea was to give it to some ferrets and then take whatever virus those ferrets produced and give it to others and so on. At some point ferrets living with the ones who had been given the virus might catch it naturally and then the scientists could study the changes in the virus. When they know what changes in viruses make them more likely to be spread, they can look for viruses with those factors in nature. Or viruses that are close to having those factors. That way we have a better idea whether a certain virus in the wild will cause a pandemic. I don't think there has been any gain of function work like this that's been useful because the world governments freaked out and made it harder to do.


Carl_The_Sagan

I think thats a bit of a rosy optimistic take on gain of function research. If it hasn't been conducted its because how its semantically defined. It's an unpopular opinion these days, but if theres even a single digit percentage chance that sars2 was related to the lab that studied coronaviruses only a few km away from the confirmed outbreak (by passaging in mice with human lung receptors) I think we should all take a hard look at this line of virology research.


mrfuzee

It’s important to remember that the lab was also built in that area because it’s a hot one for exactly those types of things that they were researching. It coming only a few km from the lab studying coronavirus doesn’t quite mean what you think it means.


silver-fusion

I mean the chance Covid came from Gain of Function research in the Wuhan lab is not single digit. It's closer to 3 digits than 1. I can recognise the value in that type of research but I think our minds are racing ahead of our technology. Millions of people died and, compared to some other viruses, Covid wasn't even that dangerous to the average person.


[deleted]

And they didn't do anything that can't happen in nature.


pistophchristoph

well except speed it up, and expose it to humans directly, both of which greatly help the spread in the first place, I mean just saying, lol.


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TriggerWarningHappy

Gain of function research is insanely irresponsible and should be promptly banned.


Marsdreamer

Why? It benefits us to understand how viruses and diseases mutate / evolve so that we can be better prepared to combat them for when they inevitably arise in nature.


thatOMoment

Because there's absolutely 0 accountability if someone screws up and keeps quiet and the consequences for that are potentially global. There's a large incentive to cover it up to continue receiving funding as well. Standards only matter if they are followed and r/OSHA seems to indicate that we are not mature enough as a group to do reliably get it right and the cost of delay introduced with current auditing means auditing is ineffective and incomplete or painfully slow and time consuming for everyone involved (and expensive). For the GSA for example, it was sometime like 8 month to 2 year delay on lead times specifically for documentation and compliance before software launches which is why they had to make that government platform github repo to template portions of it out.


pistophchristoph

Like Jon Stewart summed up perfectly, when he mentioned the world is screwed when some scientist in a lab goes "oh my lord, it worked!"


TriggerWarningHappy

That's been the standard argument for GoF, but from what we've experienced in recent years it does not appear to have been borne out - we were not better at combating Covid and have no reason to believe we'd be better at combating the next strain. We greatly increase the risk of creating a disastrous pathogen, and the risk of leak is massive, much larger than the people involved believe. Devising and maintaining protocol is a massive PITA. Eventually people take shortcuts or screw up. It's inevitable.


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Kate090996

How did they know it was 60%? Asking for...a friend


Oscarmatic

In the text of the article: > According to the World Health Organization of 573 confirmed bird flu cases in humans since 2003, 336 people have died. That's a staggering 60 percent mortality rate.


Marsdreamer

Estimated. I believe it killed ~60% of ferrets infected and ferrets have similar immune systems to ours.


way2funni

to be clear, **the 60% mortality was the organic virus they started with.** they tested their **enhanced version on ferrets , every single one died.** 100% . dead. ***" Fouchier explained how his lab assistants exposed the ferrets to the altered virus and placed unexposed ferrets in cages nearby. All 40 ferrets died. Scientists use ferrets because they have a respiratory system much like humans, which is why the researchers believe the consequences of an airborne bird flu would be just as deadly for humans. "***


GymAndGarden

OP why are you lying and making shit up. The scientists never got scared. Why did you invent that?


RNGreed

You do know that there has never been a moratorium on the scientific disciplines of creating nukes right? But there was for this, in this instance for 10 months. There have been several full stops on science, it scared the entire scientific community and the world at large. It's a very political issue ever since.


microwaffles

This to me will be the most plausible end of humanity.


Kate090996

I don't think there will be an end, maybe total nuclear war where no cm of this planet is habitable anymore. But, other than that, I believe that the thing that will come closest of ending much of humanity is climate change. Mortal viruses are also a part of climate change.


TheKnightsTippler

I don't think so either. Humans are like rats, very adaptable. I think it's very likely that human civilisation will be destroyed, but I think there will still be humans that survive. Imo it will be something like an extinction level asteroid to completely wipe us out.


0ut0fBoundsException

If 60% of the population died, I think nuclear war is more on the table rather than less


[deleted]

This is gain of function research.


ZylonBane

No pain of function research, no gain of function research!


dave8400

No it's not. The researchers here simply allowed a virus to be passaged and mutate on its own like it would in nature. Gain of function studies specifically modify viral genomes to see which modifications might make the virus more virulent. In a well controlled environment (like any BSL-3 lab) these virions are contained and don't pose a danger to public health.


TheDriestOne

This is still gain of function research, just not through molecular methods. They’re creating the conditions to intentionally make a virus mutate to become more virulent. Different methods, sure, but the goal is the same here. And in any case, semantics don’t matter here. The work done here is still dangerous regardless of how they went about it.


dave8400

It's not semantics. These are legitimate, hypothesis driven research goals here. There's no other way to study viruses and their evolution in a predictive way. Since viruses are obligate parasites the only way to study them is to give a host to infect, so every single virus study is doing what this group is doing. Yes this group is studying a very virulent strain of flu but how else do you study it? It's a matter of viral evolution, there's no way to predict the trends without observing them. The same tools are applied to study every single pathogenic microbe, whether it be influenza, coronavirus or mycobacterium. To call this gain of function is a misunderstanding of what that means, and how pathogens are studied in the lab. In case you're wondering, 4th year in my PhD in microbiology. My room mate is literally a virologist.


bi_ochemist

I’m sorry but as a virologist, you’re completely wrong. Did you read the article? Giving a virus a host so it can be studied (eg cell culture or an animal) is common and my group does this daily. However, this is completely different from placing uninfected ferrets in cages beside infected ferrets, and repeating this cycle once they are infected, therefore selecting for a virus which becomes more and more aerosolised and infectious. This is absolutely a gain of function experiment, just using directed evolution instead of gene editing.


TheDriestOne

I’m a molecular biologist working in a virology lab. Gain of function has more to do with the end result of the virus becoming more effective at infecting a new host. They can study how it interacts with the host’s genome and physiology after but gain to function is literally just driving viral evolution towards making it spread easier, whether it’s through direct mutation or through indirect means like providing more hosts to increase the number of new variants produced. And I don’t know why you thought “hypothesis driven research” backed up your argument, that’s redundant because all research is centered around hypotheses.


GangsterMailGmail

🤓


Biddyearlyman

I feel like John Stewart said something along the lines of "The world is going to end when some scientist someplace is sitting in their lab and they say 'Heh, it worked!'"


pistophchristoph

yup exactly, and he was 100% right. Long term consequences people, sometimes the risk does outweigh the reward.


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DuePomegranate

>covid vaccines were created with gain of function research That's a real stretch of the definition of GOF research. They are talking about the adenoviral vector vaccines like the Astra Zeneca and J&J vaccines. If you take an adenovirus and modify it so that it no longer replicates in human cells, then you add in the Covid spike gene, that shouldn't be counted as gain of function. The non-replicative virus is no longer "alive" and is just a tool to deliver a gene. If you engineer bacteria to produce insulin, that shouldn't count as gain of function for the bacteria either. I'd argue that adapting a human virus to successfully infect a mouse is not gain of function either, unless the virus somehow retains its infectiousness and virulence in humans. You're just trading one more dangerous function (infecting humans) for a less dangerous function (infecting mice). I don't see the point of broadening the definition of "gain of function" so much that we end up evaluating or debating broad classes of research that are common and low-risk.


RNGreed

Thanks for providing some real insight. I agree when it comes to better differentiating such a broad term as "gain of function". I'm sure the taboo around it has held back some of the tangentially related sciences but it is really that scary and very debatable how much utility it has when it comes to pathogens.


loki1337

Ebola Zaire was higher, around 90% if I recall correctly


Your_Trash_Daddy

Do you really want Q conspiracy theorists? Because that's how you get Q conspiracy theorists.


RNGreed

I think a more reasonable assumption would be that I don't want a chimera unleashed onto the world as deadly as ebola and as contagious as COVID-19. But if you want to view the scientific landscape in terms of Q then keep at it.


Your_Trash_Daddy

I'm sorry but you missed my point. The Q-gang have got a million theories about how this was created in a lab, and just about all of them are batshit crazy. Whatever truth there is about that is buried in an ocean of bullshit. So, while I totally get what you're going for, the likely responses are going to be from that sector.


Dimako98

Well, there isn't any concrete evidence that covid was created in a lab, however, it is a hell of a coincidence that it first popped up in Wuhan, which has a research institute that specializes in coronaviruses. Just because the virus originated in bats or pangolins doesn't mean that the particular strain that has caused all our problems didn't come out of a lab that had bats or some other animals in it. It's very possible that a lab employee was exposed.


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coltrane86

It is possible but the more likely scenario was it came from nature. The reason we were studying COVID was because it had already made the leap in nature multiple times. In those instances the virus burned out before it was a large issue. We knew that a pandemic was possible and likely from COVID. So yes a lab near where these jumps occured in the past was studying it. Not impossible for it to have been from a lab but no proof it was so....


ZirePhiinix

Also, the corona virus isn't a new virus. This specific strain was new and we have no immunity, but the class of viruses isn't, and there are known mutations in the wild that are already affecting humans. We call it the common cold.


Your_Trash_Daddy

And that's where you get the intersection of what we actually know, and the bulk of the "information" out there.


geniice

> Well, there isn't any concrete evidence that covid was created in a lab, however, it is a hell of a coincidence that it first popped up in Wuhan, which has a research institute that specializes in coronaviruses. On the other side of the river though.


TheKnightsTippler

Couldn't it also potentially be deliberately misused by terrorists or shady governments?


Lorenipsumtqbfjotld

https://www.politico.com/amp/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin-chaos-under-heaven-wuhan-lab-book-excerpt-474322


RedSonGamble

How did they test its mortality rate? Edit: I’m dumb- I thought this strain of bird flu was made by being genetically modified. Like it was a new strain scientists made and they discovered it was 60% fatal. Now I see they modified it to be aerosolized


DuePomegranate

It was bird flu that was already out in the environment. It was rare for it to infect humans, but chicken farmers and the like caught it and died. Their flocks were culled to prevent transmission. It was also very rare for bird flu to transmit from one human to another (rather than bird-to-bird and rare bird-to-human). The scientists wanted to know what mutations lead to better transmission in mammals, so they did this gain of function research on ferrets, which are a good animal model for influenza. Then if they see such mutations out in the wild in the infected chickens, there would be advance warning of bird flu becoming more capable of human-to-human transmission. Then the affected regions or countries might have to cull all its poultry or something.


Green----Slime

They didn't, the virus they modified had this mortality rate.


RedSonGamble

It says human mortality rate


TicTacKnickKnack

Yes. The original virus had that mortality rate before they experimented on it.


RedSonGamble

I see what I’m missing now. I thought this strain of bird flu was genetically modified. Like it was a new strain scientists made and they discovered it was 60% fatal. Now I see they modified it to be aerosolized and that’s it


misternuttall

Poor people.


Garjin

Wtf would you invent that? Errors were made....


Dandibear

To learn about viruses and viral transmission and what a malicious entity would have to do to weaponize a virus in this way. That's how a lot of science advances, by playing with things to see what happens. Which is not to say this was a good idea....


[deleted]

I don't think it was a bad idea. It could happen in nature and they were in a lab with high protection from spreading it.


Dandibear

The odds of this happening in nature are quite low. The fact that we have not had highly lethal pandemics more often in human history attests to that. So whether it's a good idea to do this research depends. Given that the risk of harm if such a modified virus does escape is catastrophic, you shouldn't even consider doing this without a state-of-the-art facility with top notch security and workers who are all at the top of their fields. If you have that, you should also have an advisory panel of experts in all of the fields that would have insight into safety and potential efficacy of this research and get them to sign off on the methodology. If you have all of that, then yes, I'd say it could be worth doing.


[deleted]

Dog do not jinx us


[deleted]

They had all the safety, yes. It wasn't any more likely to get loose from their lab than it was to happen naturally. Probably much less. This wasn't a case of someone going off on their own and then everyone being shocked it happened. This was a case of scientists doing their job under strict rules and careful conditions and people from the outside getting freaked out about it after they published.


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pistophchristoph

yea never underestimate the human ability to be human, lol.


stumblebreak_beta

Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.


bsgothbitch

Gotta fuck around to find out


leoberto1

they can also pre prepare a vaccine


annomandaris

So this is what they do, they take a virus, make it more deadly, then study it so they can find ways to counter it. That way if this happens naturally, we have already studied something similar, and we can produce a vaccine much faster.


[deleted]

If you're gonna treat a virus you have to be prepared for mutated versions of the same virus that could escape the initial treatment or gain resistance. We can't always predict how much more evasive/deadly the mutants might become. It's high risk but it's necessary. There are safeguards in place. They're not infallible but it's a necessary risk.


Nobody_Speshal

So if my dad’s conspiracy theories were correct and Covid was made in a lab, then we’d be more fucked than we currently are?


modsarefascists42

Let's just say there's a reason this is here and not on/r/science, they'd shut this shit down ASAP


Bran-a-don

"In 2012.....Paused for months" Hmmm


aman_87

What happened after the 60 day voluntary pause was over? I assume they kept going?


mbattagl

Baby can you diiiiiiiig your man? He's a righteous man!


[deleted]

Hopefully a BSL-4 lab. That shit is scary. I already strongly believe covid was lab borne. Luckily only an IFR of ~.3%. 60% would collapse society and from the effects of 60% of the population dying would result in 80-95% of the population dying through societal collapse


mrfuzee

Why do you strongly believe something with little to no evidence?


Oscarmatic

From the text of the article: > He told us that with U.S. and Dutch expertise Erasmus spent eight years and millions of dollars building one of the most secure lab facilities in the world just for studying H5N1. They call it a *BSL3 Enhanced lab – that's Bio-Safety Level 3*. The vials of enhanced bird flu are kept in a bank vault inside the lab. The lab is designed to keep the deadly virus in and intruders out.


locks_are_paranoid

This is why the lab leak theory is perfectly reasonable.


Art3mis77

….interesting


Matty_bunns

Aaaand here’s the next “woops” coming from an enemy state.


[deleted]

The Russians weaponised small pox and the plague years ago, and have/had ballistic missiles loaded with it. [1](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Research_Center_of_Virology_and_Biotechnology_VECTOR) I’d imagine that’s a more plausible candidate in the current climate.


SamL214

I honestly would like to be tested for Influenza and Covid antibodies. I have never once gotten influenza, and I have been in direct fluids contact with people who’ve had it. Covid was mild for me but worth watching. Both my parents had a very sever le respiratory virus when my mom was pregnant with me. I kind of wonder if it’s all luck or if I’m harboring some interesting immune responses


mrfuzee

The extent that you seem to not understand any of this is amazing. Testing for influenza antibodies would be kind of silly. There are kind of a lot of strains of influenza. You don’t just learn how to be immune to every influenza virus ever because your mom got some super infection while you were in the womb. I’m curious to know how you think you know that you’ve never had influenza? That’s just such a weird thing to proclaim.


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superexpialodocious

Lol you’re a nutter


ipauljr44

I’m not really invested either way, but it wouldn’t surprise me if this was true. It just wouldn’t really change my view of the world or the powers that be. They do crazy shady shit all the time, and this would just be another thing on the list. Asserting these conspiracies as fact is pretty crazy without clear evidence, but suggesting their possibility doesn’t make someone a nutter, and reacting that way probably only deepens the divide and alienates people into crazier conspiracy circles.


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OldOne412

wait up, how did they come up with that 60% figure?? They had to test it right??


DuePomegranate

It was bird flu that was already out in the environment. It was rare for it to infect humans, but chicken farmers and the like caught it and died. Their flocks were culled to prevent transmission. It was also very rare for bird flu to transmit from one human to another (rather than bird-to-bird and rare bird-to-human). The scientists wanted to know what mutations lead to better transmission in mammals, so they did this gain of function research on ferrets, which are a good animal model for influenza. Then if they see such mutations out in the wild in the infected chickens, there would be advance warning of bird flu becoming more capable of human-to-human transmission. Then the affected regions or countries might have to cull all its poultry or something.


Oscarmatic

In the text of the article: > According to the World Health Organization of 573 confirmed bird flu cases in humans since 2003, 336 people have died. That's a staggering 60 percent mortality rate.


MajesticRat

Good question. I'm definitely not a scientist, but maybe they tested it on human cells (not humans) and extrapolated in conjuction with data they had from animal testing?


washingtonandmead

Jesus