Miscellaneous Research Thread

I don't covid is a bioweapon or anything mad like that but I've seen a good amount of evidence over the years (I think there was a good article by Nicolson Baker and one by The Intercept but it was ages ago) it could well be a product of gain of function research, and I think that lab had been flagged for lax safety standards. And the virus mutates and spreads like nothing else, which makes me think gain of function research could be the cause but Im no expert.

The whole issue became so politicised immediately that it made it incredibly hard to know what was true. One of the American scientists loudly saying it was racist to suggest a lab leak at the start of the pandemic turned out to be involved with the gain of function research in Wuhan iirc. And of course the Trump camp used it to attack Biden and China and all these other conspiracies sprang up.

Either way I doubt the public will know for at least 50 years, if ever. There would be riots if it were confirmed to have been a lab altered virus.
 
EndME said:
The problem is, as others have already suggested, that there are seemingly people playing around in a lab without sufficient safety, such that a pandemic caused by people playing around seems a possibilty for the future, independenlty of what happened in the past.
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And the even larger problem is that we are unprepared to handle a leap within the normal bounds of viral evolution (regardless of where it came from) when we’ve had decades to learn
 
EndME said:
The problem is, as others have already suggested, that there are seemingly people playing around in a lab without sufficient safety, such that a pandemic caused by people playing around seems a possibilty for the future, independenlty of what happened in the past.
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And it is worth remembering that these leaks are common. There are at least 100 documented leaks of major pathogens and as Google AI points out, there are major pressures to conceal them. When my mother worked at the UK Central Public Health Lab I regularly heard of leaks. She came home infected with a major pathogen on one occasion (which was documented but concealed from public view). There were typhoid, smallpox, ebola, anthrax, TB, you name it, leaks. At least one previous pandemic is consistent with a lab origin. The original SARS leaked from labs 4-6 times. HIV has spread from labs on several occasions.
 
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V.R.T. said:
Ok. I'm not a scientist. It does spread incredibly fast though.
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Yes it’s somewhat more virulent than other viruses with comparable population levels. There are other viruses that are even more virulent, it’s just that many evolutionary benefits tend to also be trade offs—for example, increasing virulence [edit: may also] increase mortality which inherently limits spread. SARS-CoV-2 hit a somewhat of a sweet spot (in terms of human consequences) of virulence, incubation time, and mortality rate. Which is the type of thing that evolution inherently pushes towards (and frankly would have been a near impossible balance to strike deliberately working from a lab).

If you’re incubating and testing hundreds of thousands of strains in a lab constantly, that might increase the chances of hitting that unlucky jackpot. It’s still ultimately a drop in the bucket in terms of what happens naturally via e.g. cross species jumping. [Edit: though it should, quite obviously, be something that is better regulated even just for the immediate safety of those working in labs]
 
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jnmaciuch said:
deliberately
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To be clear, I wasn't claiming it is a deliberately engineered virus that was made as a bioweapon or whatever. I think it's possible it was something being messed around with in a lab by virologists engaged in gain of function research that escaped because of lax safety precautions. Those are very different things and lumping them in together is not logical, whatever you think of the likelihood of the latter.
 
A few potentially interesting papers from my recent search alerts that I haven't yet been able to look through but which probably won't need their own threads -

Patient-Made Knowledge Networks: Long COVID Discourse, Epistemic Injustice, and Online Community Formation (ArXiv preprint) [PDF]

Design and rationale of RECOVER-AUTONOMIC: a randomized platform trial evaluating interventions for Long COVID postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (American Heart Journal)

Rates of likely neurodivergence and variant connective tissue in patients with chronic pain/chronic fatigue: a case-control study (Journal of Psychiatric Research) [PDF]

Altered NGF and GDNF levels reveal neuroimmune dysregulation in COVID-19 patients (Nature Scientific Reports)

Also, completely unrelated to ME/CFS, a potentially quite significant advance in vaccinology published yesterday in Science:

Mucosal vaccination in mice provides protection from diverse respiratory threats [PDF]
 
V.R.T. said:
To be clear, I wasn't claiming it is a deliberately engineered virus that was made as a bioweapon or whatever. I think it's possible it was something being messed around with in a lab by virologists engaged in gain of function research that escaped because of lax safety precautions. Those are very different things and lumping them in together is not logical, whatever you think of the likelihood of the latter.
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I know, I mean that even by playing around and not knowing exactly what a given genetic change would do, it would be hard to replicate the synergistic effects of evolutionary pressure via deliberate human choices on what parts of the genome to change. You don’t know information about how a virus behaves at population-relevant parameters until it reaches the population. Even just making a bunch of random or literature-guided changes would be much less likely to [edit: strike that ideal balance] than normal evolution.

Is it impossible? No. It very well could be a relevant contributor in some instances. But it’s kinda like, in the aftermath of a massive data breach, focusing on people whose passwords contained personal details too easy to guess by their coworkers rather than infrastructure issues and algorithms that can brute force that kind of thing.
 
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Nightsong said:
A perceived injustice? Querying the ‘social’ in the biopsychosocial approach to vulvodynia

Includes a description of the author's experience with a "biopsychosocial" pain-management programme in New Zealand. Very familiar; many of the same issues that we face...

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I can relate to this. Everything changed for me after a vaginal infection at the age of 20. I was left with life long pain, tenderness, a changed vaginal composition. I don't know how many times I have had to explain what happened to me to doctors and no one has been able to help me.

This is an important area of research needing to done, which speciality? Gynaecology, immunology?
 
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