IDRGAFF

It's interesting to speculate that as much as the US (especially Trump) have firmly blamed the pandemic on China - and China has blamed the US - it's looking increasingly like both great powers share responsibility.

If only we could cooperate on other major issues! Like nuclear proliferation and climate change. I wonder why we apparently worked together on developing plagues. Also (still haven't a clue why it was considered in our mutual best interests) on ways of upping the "effectiveness" of their mortality. (Thoughts?)

And yet without cooperating on coming up with effective treatments and vaccines. I can see working together on plagues as a deterrent to their spread.

It would be a "beneficial" application (to the originator of such a disease) to come up with such a plague at the same time they developed a cure and/or vaccine available only to their own people. What, though, could be the national interest of developing together such a disease without a cure or preventative measures?

Could someone please hypothesize on why (as is apparently the case) these two great competitors worked together on developing this SARS-like disease for which there was no remedy. And also working on how to make it increasingly potent. (Do I understand right that the US is said to have helped sponsor the research?)

It seems to me to have been completely inexplicable teamwork between the two countries' expert virologists/epidemiologists with no upside for either one. (And with catastrophic economic consequences for both. Surely projecting about such possible outcomes must have been part of overall design considerations).

I think the Chinese were trying to figure out how to prevent another MERS or SARS epidemic, neither of which affected the US. Those two epidemics had much higher fatality rates than SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19).

Would it be possible for scientific research to be used for military/political reasons? Of course.

quote:

Originally posted by wtg:
I think the Chinese were trying to figure out how to prevent another MERS or SARS epidemic, neither of which affected the US. Those two epidemics had much higher fatality rates than SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19).

Yes, that's the hypothesis about why the Chinese were preemptively working on how to protect themselves against a MERS-like disease (indeed MERS has a much higher mortality rate - close to 50%?), and likewise against a COVID SARS precursor entity which was in between MERS and COVID in lethality.

But what about my questions about the apparent cooperation between the US and China in the WUHAN lab?? I thought it was acknowledged by now that there had been American contributions to the research. (At least, if the FAUCI accusation is proven. Not?)

I'm sure there are all sorts of collaborative efforts happening in science in labs all over the world. Or above the world. Heck, there are scientists from several countries on the ISS right now. The world is becoming a smaller and smaller place, so it is in our joint interests to work together to prevent a pandemic.
Peter Daszak is British, and he's part of the circle of entities that were involved in coronavirus research.

Here's a 2005 paper on how bats are a natural reservoir for coronaviruses. I see Chinese, American, British, and Australian scientists among the co-authors.

https://zenodo.org/record/3949088

I have no clue as to how lab funding for scientific research is handled between (or among) countries.

Just for some background, here's an article from Nature about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and about BSL-4 labs in general. It's from 2017.

quote:

The Chinese Academy of Sciences approved the construction of a BSL-4 laboratory in 2003, and the epidemic of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) around the same time lent the project momentum. The lab was designed and constructed with French assistance as part of a 2004 cooperative agreement on the prevention and control of emerging infectious diseases.

quote:

The opportunities for international collaboration, meanwhile, will aid the genetic analysis and epidemiology of emergent diseases.

quote:

Many staff from the Wuhan lab have been training at a BSL-4 lab in Lyon

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.21487

edit: This 2021 article also has a lot of history and interesting info, including caption under a picture of a masked man. So Daszak is a bundler of sorts, which tells you how some of the funding of these labs happens.

quote:

Peter Daszak, who repackaged U.S. government grants and allocated the funds to research institutes including the WIV, arrives there on February 3, 2021, during a fact-finding mission organized in part by the World Health Organization.

https://www.vanityfair.com/new...er-covid-19s-origins

Clearly, there has been long-standing cooperation among several countries. And concerns from multiple fronts.