I think we should be putting pretty substantial probability mass on the possibility that Omicron was the result of a successful, secret project to create a less-severe but more-contagious strain of COVID-19 in a lab, release it, and have it crowd out the original strain.
The cruxes of this belief are:
The genome of Omicron is not consistent with natural evolution, in any environment
Omicron produces substantially less severe disease than any earlier strains of COVID-19
Producing substantially less severe disease isn’t something that happens by default, if you’re manipulating a virus in a lab
If you’re already manipulating COVID-19 in a lab with all the difficulties that entails, making a less-severe variant does not add significant difficulty on top of that
If you do have a less-severe lab-grown variant of COVID-19, and you think it probably confers cross-immunity to older variants, you will probably do a moral calculation that finds it’s good to release it on purpose.
This could be done unilaterally by a small group or even a single individual, in any of a very large number of biology labs all over the world
I’m not fully confident in any of these cruxes, but consider each of them highly probable.
If this were publicly confirmed to be true, I would expect the public reaction to be strongly negative, even if the project was good on net. So I would expect anyone trying to do this would choose secrecy, would support their decision to remain secret, and would tentatively support their decision to undertake the project in the first place, depending on details related to how much less severe the variant is, how strong the cross-immunity is, and how these were verified.
(I have not seen anyone else suggest this possibility, and I think this possibility falls inside an almost-universal blind spot people have; people incorrectly assume that nothing done in secret and with a conspiratorial flavor can ever be well-intentioned and good.)
I think that hypothesis is <<1% likely because very few people care about doing good strongly enough to entertain act utilitarian master plans of this sort, and the ones who do and are action-oriented enough to maybe pull it off hopefully realize it’s a bad idea have a morality that allows this. I mean if you put resources into this specific plan, why not work on a universal coronavirus vaccine or some other more robustly beneficial thing that won’t get you and your collaborators life in jail if found out.
- Evolution from the original Wuhan strain seems less likely to generate cross immunity than taking newer strains. If someone were shooting for cross immunity, wouldn’t they use newer strains? (Assuming that you can still make them less harmful if you select for that.)
- Omicron doesn’t actually give enough cross immunity at all, and presumably that sort of thing would have been easily testable. If someone wanted to do this on purpose, they’d be complete idiots because they essentially released a second pandemic (Delta and Omicron may well co-exist, especially in countries that don’t have a lot of vaccines that will get rid of Delta quickly).
Edit: Ah, you talk about cross immunity to older variants. Maybe your theory is that the project would have happened before Delta and somehow it took longer to spread after initial release? I mean, that’s probably coherent to imagine but seems way more likely some people were messing around with rodents for more narrow (but misguided) reasons.
If you’re already manipulating COVID-19 in a lab with all the difficulties that entails, making a less-severe variant does not add significant difficulty on top of that
That seems wrong. It seems that today we have little evidence that doesn’t come from the clinical history of humans that points towards it being less severe. To know that whatever change you made makes it less severe in humans you actually need to test it in humans. Doing human testing is quite complicated. Even if you do this in some African country where you can take over some remote village to do human experimentation, that’s a lot of work and there’s potential for the NSA/CIA to get wind of such a project.
Furthermore, your thesis doesn’t explain why the spike protein has so much more mutations than the other proteins. It makes sense that the South African gain-of-function experiments that tested whether the virus can evolve around antibodies against the spike protein produce such a result but it doesn’t make sense that you would find that pattern if someone would just want to design it to be less harmful.
I would also highlight this as seemingly by far the most wrong point. Consider how many Omicron cases we now have and we still don’t know for sure it’s significantly less severe. Now consider how many secret cases in humans infected with various novel strains you’re working with you would need to enact in a controlled environment to be confident enough that a given strain is less severe and thus it makes sense to release it.
An epidemiologist once told me it is common knowledge among epidemiologists that immunity to a given variant of the common cold is not very long, perhaps a year. I have not been able to easily find a link demonstrating this though. If this is true it would ruin the moral calculation.
Not to me. Though I don’t have domain knowledge here. All I really have to say is that these people that do have domain knowledge see a path for natural evolution. I don’t mean to say that this demonstrates the evolution was natural, just that human intervention was not required.
I think we should be putting pretty substantial probability mass on the possibility that Omicron was the result of a successful, secret project to create a less-severe but more-contagious strain of COVID-19 in a lab, release it, and have it crowd out the original strain.
The cruxes of this belief are:
The genome of Omicron is not consistent with natural evolution, in any environment
Omicron produces substantially less severe disease than any earlier strains of COVID-19
Producing substantially less severe disease isn’t something that happens by default, if you’re manipulating a virus in a lab
If you’re already manipulating COVID-19 in a lab with all the difficulties that entails, making a less-severe variant does not add significant difficulty on top of that
If you do have a less-severe lab-grown variant of COVID-19, and you think it probably confers cross-immunity to older variants, you will probably do a moral calculation that finds it’s good to release it on purpose.
This could be done unilaterally by a small group or even a single individual, in any of a very large number of biology labs all over the world
I’m not fully confident in any of these cruxes, but consider each of them highly probable.
If this were publicly confirmed to be true, I would expect the public reaction to be strongly negative, even if the project was good on net. So I would expect anyone trying to do this would choose secrecy, would support their decision to remain secret, and would tentatively support their decision to undertake the project in the first place, depending on details related to how much less severe the variant is, how strong the cross-immunity is, and how these were verified.
(I have not seen anyone else suggest this possibility, and I think this possibility falls inside an almost-universal blind spot people have; people incorrectly assume that nothing done in secret and with a conspiratorial flavor can ever be well-intentioned and good.)
I think that hypothesis is <<1% likely because very few people care about doing good strongly enough to entertain act utilitarian master plans of this sort, and the ones who do and are action-oriented enough to maybe pull it off hopefully realize it’s a bad idea have a morality that allows this. I mean if you put resources into this specific plan, why not work on a universal coronavirus vaccine or some other more robustly beneficial thing that won’t get you and your collaborators life in jail if found out.
Also some details wouldn’t add up:
- Evolution from the original Wuhan strain seems less likely to generate cross immunity than taking newer strains. If someone were shooting for cross immunity, wouldn’t they use newer strains? (Assuming that you can still make them less harmful if you select for that.)
- Omicron doesn’t actually give enough cross immunity at all, and presumably that sort of thing would have been easily testable. If someone wanted to do this on purpose, they’d be complete idiots because they essentially released a second pandemic (Delta and Omicron may well co-exist, especially in countries that don’t have a lot of vaccines that will get rid of Delta quickly).
Edit: Ah, you talk about cross immunity to older variants. Maybe your theory is that the project would have happened before Delta and somehow it took longer to spread after initial release? I mean, that’s probably coherent to imagine but seems way more likely some people were messing around with rodents for more narrow (but misguided) reasons.
To expand on this: https://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/unilateralist.pdf
That seems wrong. It seems that today we have little evidence that doesn’t come from the clinical history of humans that points towards it being less severe. To know that whatever change you made makes it less severe in humans you actually need to test it in humans. Doing human testing is quite complicated. Even if you do this in some African country where you can take over some remote village to do human experimentation, that’s a lot of work and there’s potential for the NSA/CIA to get wind of such a project.
Furthermore, your thesis doesn’t explain why the spike protein has so much more mutations than the other proteins. It makes sense that the South African gain-of-function experiments that tested whether the virus can evolve around antibodies against the spike protein produce such a result but it doesn’t make sense that you would find that pattern if someone would just want to design it to be less harmful.
I would also highlight this as seemingly by far the most wrong point. Consider how many Omicron cases we now have and we still don’t know for sure it’s significantly less severe. Now consider how many secret cases in humans infected with various novel strains you’re working with you would need to enact in a controlled environment to be confident enough that a given strain is less severe and thus it makes sense to release it.
What’s “substantial” probability mass mean here?
These folks think Omicron is consistent with natural evolution in a mouse. I thought their paper was pretty interesting:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.14.472632v1.full.pdf
An epidemiologist once told me it is common knowledge among epidemiologists that immunity to a given variant of the common cold is not very long, perhaps a year. I have not been able to easily find a link demonstrating this though. If this is true it would ruin the moral calculation.
Would passaging look different than ‘natural evolution’ in a mouse? It is after all just evolution, inside a mouse.
Not to me. Though I don’t have domain knowledge here. All I really have to say is that these people that do have domain knowledge see a path for natural evolution. I don’t mean to say that this demonstrates the evolution was natural, just that human intervention was not required.