Thanks!
DirectedEvolution
Karma: 3,584
My gut reaction is this is a map of the formerly low hanging fruit, now picked. My understanding is that most fur consumption is in China and Russia. China was willing to take extreme measures to try and suppress COVID, so maybe they’d be willing to shut down their fur trade to prevent an H5N1 pandemic? I feel pessimistic but I’m not sure why.
Editable “Important, Tractable, Neglected” critiques review
Here’s a review of ITN critiques I put together a couple years ago. I just dumped it in an editable Google doc. It’s set up to alert me if anyone makes changes so I can import them into the main post.
I think the main issue is the conceptual distinction between a “cause” and an “intervention,” or what you’re calling here a “solution.” Originally, I think they were using ITN as a quick first-pass heuristic for considering different cause areas on the scale of “global health” or “X-risk.” But lots of people also use it to look at specific interventions. As you point out, it’s totally possible to find an ITN solution within a non-ITN cause area. I think the idea of applying ITN to cause areas is to find issues where there are a lot of ITN solutions to be found in a probabilistic sense.
One reason, I think, to be a little suspicious of a “neglected” solution in a non-neglected cause area is that there’s more reason to think the particular solution is neglected for a reason. That’s not an absolute, just a heuristic. For example, I’m in biotech, and I work with a particular technology for molecular recognition, called “aptamers.” I’m interviewing for a job at a startup that works with this technology. If you looked at them as an aptamer biosensor company, they have little-no competition. But if you look at them as an assay company, they face massive competition. Thiel makes this point eloquently in Zero to One. It’s important to be aware enough of the dimensions of the issue to understand when a potential solution is truly neglected versus when it’s just lost among a sea of alternatives.
Do you know if farms can incentivize workers to wear respirators without requiring them? For example offering a pay bump if the workers consistently do it?
I’m not sure exactly when it became clear that we’re having a bad bird flu year, but it’s possible the mink farm outbreak wasn’t that big an update for the forecasters who were already seeing lots of transmission to mammals, just not among them.
Indeed :/
I suspect both are potential transmission routes. I think a ban on feeding them poultry is a good thing to consider. I’m also interested in examining how the poultry products they’re fed could be monitored, processed, or substituted in order to mitigate the risk. My guess is you get a lot more traction with making change when you can find an alterantive solution that works better for the farm from an economic perspective. Farms don’t want to risk their animals being culled due to an outbreak, but they also don’t want to face significant short-term cost increases in a competitive landscape.
Because the Spanish mink farm culling is the first of its kind, this is a new issue farms are facing and there may be substantial low-hanging fruit here in terms of feed alternatives.
That’s an excellent point and also a very helpful website to share, thank you.
Thanks for noting your confusion, I updated the language in the opening to be specific about this—the netting would block bird/mink or bird/pig contact, preventing the mammals from getting infected and thus becoming a system in which a mammalian-transmissible bird flu strain could evolve
Fighting fur on the demand side does seem more tractable than on the supply side. As I say, I’m worried that banning mink farming would result in a move to less responsible countries. But if you can make fur symbolize not only animal cruelty but also being “pro-pandemic” and socially irresponsible, I say go for it—it clearly is both of those things. If I could wave a magic wand and end the fur industry for good, I’d do it in a heartbeat.
Five ways to stop a bird->mink->human H5N1 pandemic
This is highly relevant to your interest in scaling trust:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Fu7bqAyCMjfcMzBah/eigenkarma-trust-at-scale
If you read the first sentence of her quote carefully, it does indeed require one egg per dose.
I don’t know how we’d handle the tradeoff between a rampaging 50% fatal bird flu and injecting 8 billion people with vaccine from appropriated and rush converted factory farm eggs, but it seems like an extremely bad choice to have to make.
I’m not even sure the egg supply is the most important bottleneck here. You have to grow virus in the eggs, then harvest, purify, package and distribute. Working in a bio lab myself, I am going to make an educated guess and say that converting a factory farm into a vaccine production facility would be no easy task, especially if H2H bird flu was already widespread.
CNN breaks down the production process:
Just to make it more convenient, here’s her quote:
Worryingly, all but one of the approved vaccines are produced by incubating each dose in an egg. The U.S. government keeps hundreds of thousands of chickens in secret farms with bodyguards. (It’s true!) But the bodyguards are presumably there to fend off terror attacks, not a virus. Relying on chickens to produce vaccines against a virus that has a 90 percent to 100 percent fatality rate among poultry has the makings of the most unfunny which-came-first, the-chicken-or-the-egg riddle.
I’m going to make an educated guess that these farms are screened off from contact with wild birds. However, it might be a real challenge to scale up production to the levels required to produce the billions of doses of vaccine that would be required for a vax campaign on the scale of COVID-19.
Chickens lay about one egg per day, unless they’re broody. If there are half a million chickens in these facilities, it would take them 71 years to produce enough eggs for 13 billion vaccine doses.
Thanks Peter!!!
One thing I’d emphasize, even though it’s just a subjective opinion. I think that the points scale is OOMs, not a linear scale.
Just as an hypothetical example, imagine a disease that had everything bad listed here, except it didn’t kill anybody. Obviously there would be something bad about it that was making it lead to quarantines, newspaper coverage, hospital overwhelm, and a race for treatments. But unless the typical outcome is “as good as dead,” the single fact that nobody dies from it makes it seem a lot less concerning than a disease that does everything else bad and kills a lot of people.
Agreed. Here’s the account I would give, using my pandemic prediction checklist framework.
Currently, H5N1 scores a 5⁄14. COVID scored a 13⁄14.
+1 point: You’d have a death toll of > 2,000, 5x beyond when we saw the stock market crash during COVID
+1 point: Almost certainly, the disease would have altered to be transmitted efficiently from human to human via respiration. Human-to-human H5N1 will lead to a very serious response to contain it, and if we can’t contain it at a few poultry/mink farmworkers, that’s a sign it spreads very efficiently.
+1 point: That transmission mechanism would likely mean it has led to community spread
+1 point: Almost certainly this would be front page news because bird flu is scary even when it’s mostly just in birds and animals and sporadically in farmworkers.
Possible +1 point: Once we get to 10,000 deaths, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where that’s true but it’s contained to a single country. Could happen (a Chinese mink farm leads to efficient human transmission; a Wuhan-on-steroids lockdown isolates it perfectly from the rest of the world), but doesn’t seem likely.
Possible +1 point: If it’s limited to one country, they might choose to quarantine the region to contain it. Global spread may see a return to things like travel bans to island nations or other serious containment measures. Pretty easy to imagine a situation with at least one going on.
Possible +1 point: A 50% CFR from a respiratory infection could easily overwhelm hospitals
Possible +1 point: If we started to see all these problems, that would almost certainly motivate pharma to rush for mRNA vaccines and other tools
That puts it at anywhere from a 9⁄14 for the “almost certain to occur by 10,000 deaths” checklist items to a 13⁄14 (a score that’s far more plausible to me).
I’m working with the assumption that we can either test for it sufficiently well, or that given how deadly it is, we just enforce zero tolerance for social contact for any symptoms of illness. If we had testing difficulties, failed to enforce strict social distancing, or had to deal with asymptomatic spread, then I think by the time we’re at 10,000 deaths, we’re probably already at a full-blown 14⁄14 situation that, if not already categorized as a pandemic, is well on its way.
Feel free to peruse my old posts at LessWrong.
Edit: Peter did the useful work, but also, Here’s Why I’m Hesitant To Respond In More Depth
I think it wouldn’t be a problem if either the question had been phrased in terms of the expected number of human-to-human cases, or if there were other questions for specific orders of magnitude. I think the latter could still be done, and it would contextualize the first question.
Yeah, that’s where I’d look next. I also linked to a proposed mink farm ban in the USA, although it got shut down pretty hard by lawmakers with mink farms in their states.