Disclaimer: This article isn’t specifically about the origin of the SARS-CoV2 virus. It merely presents facts relating to the American government’s funding of GOF research on foreign soil. We want the public to be aware of the very real and present dangers of gain-of-function experimentation, funded by American taxpayers and performed on foreign soil. You are free to draw your own conclusions on the origins of the virus, however, the funding and possible origins of the virus are now inseparable, so it is almost impossible to understand the one without involving the other. Please refer to the footer for further reading, acknowledgments, and resources.
There is a strong likelihood that U.S. taxpayers helped to fund the creation of a virus that has killed nearly 600 000 Americans. In this article, we will show you, how, since 2015, the National Institute for Health (NIH) and the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious disease (NIAID), knowingly provided funding to a specific group of American scientists and their institutions and businesses despite a moratorium. The publically stated intent of these scientists was to develop a more infectious version of the coronavirus and to achieve their ends they chose a Chinese scientist working out of a laboratory in Wuhan in China.
We will also highlight post-pandemic responses from the same individuals. A concerted and well-orchestrated effort to deny any possibility of this novel coronavirus being manufactured in a laboratory. If we, in point of fact, accept as truth their very public disclaimers on the impossibility of producing the pandemic’s coronavirus strain in the Wuhan laboratory or elsewhere then, at best, the scientists are guilty of defrauding the US government and the NIH by claiming funding for fictitious research.
In August of 2020, fully eight months into the pandemic and with American deaths climbing rapidly, the NIH announced publicly their intention to fund further research into viruses, again selecting many of the same actors for grants.
It was our discovery of this 2020 announcement that prompted Medika to publish this piece. Clearly, no lessons have been learned from the pandemic and despite the huge loss of life, both in the U.S.and globally, America will continue to fund gain-of-function research on viruses. An end must be put to this research, by any and all means, or the next pandemic could make Covid look like a cold by comparison. If that means exposing hard truths and holding America’s lofty healthcare institutions to account for their involvement in what can only be described as deadly research, then so be it.
On the topic of safety, viruses, and laboratories, since the SARS outbreak, many instances involving the accidental release of pathogens have taken place in labs around the world. Hundreds of breaches have occurred in the U.S., including a 2014 release of anthrax from a U.S. government lab that exposed 84 people. The SARS virus escaped four times from the Chinese National Institute of Virology in Beijing causing four infections and one death and also escaped facilities in Singapore and Taiwan.
Accidental release remains a constant danger and doesn’t require malicious intent. All it takes is for a lab worker to get sick, go home for the night, and unwittingly spread the virus to others.
This topic gets complicated really quickly, so we’ve decided to try and simplify it as best we can. First, we’ll introduce you to the players, the scientists at the heart of all of this and their organizations. Then we’ll explain a few of the terms and finally expand on the evidence. After that, you’re on your own. You will know at least part of the truth.
The Players
Peter Daszak, Ph.D., EcoHealth Alliance, Inc., New York City
Emerging Infectious Diseases-South East Asia Research Collaboration Hub
Southeast Asia
“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” a group of virologists and others wrote in the Lancet on February 19, 2020
Peter Daszak was in fact the author of this letter. An illuminating article recently published on the website U.S. Right to Know points to the web of deception surrounding this letter, issued in February by EcoHealth Alliance, at a point in the pandemic where any same scientists would have been more than a little hesitant to make any categorical statements on the origin of the virus. It was simply too early to discredit any theories. The article states;
Emails obtained by the U.S. Right to Know show that a statement in The Lancet authored by 27 prominent public health scientists condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin” was organized by employees of EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit group that has received millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer funding to genetically manipulate coronaviruses with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
He continued his tirade against laboratory synthesized viruses a few months later in June of 2020, this time resorting to the Guardian, a UK-based news publication.
Peter Daszak is listed as the third beneficiary on the August 2020 NIH grant for viral research referenced above. His project is shown below for further reference. His initial round of funding for a five-year project is $1.5 million.
Peter Daszak, Ph.D., EcoHealth Alliance, Inc., New York City
Emerging Infectious Diseases-South East Asia Research Collaboration Hub
Southeast Asia; 1 U01 AI151797–01
Kristian G. Andersen, Scripps Research
On the 17th of March Andersen published a letter in the journal Nature Magazine. As a letter, rather than a paper, the document would escape the rigors of peer review. It is, was, and remains an opinion piece, published by Andersen with the intent of discrediting attempts to suggest the SARS-CoV2 virus was of mand made origin. Its authors were a group of virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute.
“Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the five virologists declared in the second paragraph of their letter.
Andersen is listed as the second beneficiary on the August 2020 NIH grant for viral research referenced above. His project is shown below for further reference.
Kristian Andersen, Ph.D., Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California
West African Emerging Infectious Disease Research Center (WAEIDRC)
West Africa; 1 U01 AI151812–01
Ralph S. Baric, Coronavirus Researcher, University of North Carolina
Dr. Baric is a coronavirus expert at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC). He has developed genetic techniques to enhance the pandemic potential of existing bat coronaviruses, working in collaboration with Dr. Zheng-li Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and with the EcoHealth Alliance.
Dr. Shi Zhengli, Lead researcher, Wuhan Institute of Technology
Dr. Shi is a Frech trained virologist and a frequent visitor to the U.S. was mentored by Dr. Ralph S. Baricat at the University of North Carolina, where he shared his work with her on coronaviruses, in particular a technique he had developed to amplify the pathogenicity (danger) of the coronavirus. Their work focused on enhancing the ability of bat viruses to attack humans so as to “examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs [coronaviruses].”
In November of 2015, they created a novel coronavirus by taking the backbone of the SARS1 virus and replacing its spike protein with one from a bat virus (known as SHC014-CoV). This manufactured virus was able to infect the cells of the human airway, established by in vitro tests performed on cell cultures of airway tissue.
The SHC014-CoV/SARS1 virus is known as a chimera because its genome contains genetic material from two different viruses. If the SARS-CoV2 virus did originate in Dr. Shi’s lab, then the SHC014-CoV/SARS1 chimera would have served as the prototype. The potential danger of this concerned many observers and prompted intense discussion. Dr. Baric and Dr. Shi referred to the obvious risks in their paper but argued they should be weighed against the benefit of foreshadowing future spillovers.
Nerd Speak (terms explained)
Understanding Gain-of-Function
Essentially, in simple English, Gain-of-Function (GOF) is the act of enhancing a virus in a laboratory with a singular goal; to make it more deadly to humans. In its simplest form, GOF is about “weaponizing” one of the most dangerous and least understood things on the planet. Viruses. As biologists embarked on this path, the scientific community was divided on the matter, Ethics and safety were the two obvious primary concerns.
Scientists have since recreated the 1918 flu virus, shown how the almost extinct poliovirus can be synthesized from its published DNA sequence, and introduced a smallpox gene into a related virus. Chimeras (a new hybrid microorganism created by joining nucleic acid fragments from two or more different microorganisms) are now commonplace.
These enhancements of a virus’s capabilities are known as gain-of-function experiments and we’ve been at it for decades. Coronaviruses elicited particular interest because of their spike proteins, (we all know the image by now) which jut out all around the spherical surface of the virus and determine which species of animal the virus will target. Reprogram that spike and you open a whole new world of possibilities for the virus. In 2000 Dutch researchers earned the gratitude of rodents everywhere by genetically engineering the spike protein of a mouse coronavirus so that it would attack only cats.
Applications for GOF experimentation are varied and include vaccine development and creating bioweapons, so interest in the technology extends from scientific circles to the military and government agencies. Historically, it has been one of the best-funded fields in scientific research in the last decade.
In a perfect world, the scientific benefits of research from GOF experimentation would be unquestionable. We don’t however live in a perfect world. Complete, or inadequate lack of oversight with regards to safety protocols and the ensuing risk of these viruses escaping into the wild, and ethical abuse of research by military agents and governments are only two of a long list of reasons why we cannot be trusted to engage in this research.
This excellent 2013 article from the Federation of American Scientists entitled Science and Security: The Moratorium on H5N1 “Gain-of-Function” Experiments takes a closer look at the risks.
GOF Moratorium in the US
On the 17th of December 2017, the NIH announced an end to the moratorium on funding GOF research that had been introduced in 2014. To be clear, between the dates of October 2014 and effectively January 2018, it was illegal in the United States to provide funding for any Gain-of-Function research. Remember this, as we’ll refer to this point later. According to the 2017 statement by the NIH, published in Nature;
The US government has lifted its controversial ban on funding experiments that make certain pathogens more deadly or transmissible. On 19 December, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that scientists can once again use federal money to conduct ‘gain-of-function’ research on pathogens such as influenza viruses. But the agency also said that researchers’ grant applications will undergo greater scrutiny than in the past.
As to the why? In 2016, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) — an independent panel that advises the NIH’s parent, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) — concluded that very few government-funded gain-of-function experiments posed a significant threat to public health. With the hindsight of 2020, this was possibly the most flawed conclusion ever drawn.
The new safety guidelines recommended were a cop-out of epic proportions. The new policy outlined a framework that the HHS would use to assess proposed research that would create pathogens with pandemic potential. Such work might involve modifying a virus to infect more species, or recreating a pathogen that had been eradicated in the wild, such as smallpox. There were some exceptions, however: vaccine development and epidemiological surveillance did not automatically trigger a review.
The plan included an assessment of a project’s risks and benefits, and a determination of whether the investigator and institution were capable of conducting the work safely. It also said that an experiment should proceed only if there was no safer alternative method of achieving the same results. As you will see below, few if any of these new protocols were applied to the projects funded by the NIH that involved Peter Daszak, Ph.D., and his company EcoHealth Alliance, Inc, his appointed research surrogate, Dr. Shi Zhengli, or her Wuhan laboratory.
Projects appear to have simply been rubberstamped.
Laboratory Safety
There are four degrees of safety in a laboratory. The first is BSL1, followed by another three up to BSL4. BSL4 is the most restrictive and is designed for deadly pathogens like the Ebola virus. Wuhan is in possession of a BSL4 laboratory, and despite inspectors questioning its state of preparedness in a 2018 inspection, it remains in active use. Its safety was also never in contention with the coronavirus, however.
Prior to the pandemic, rules followed by virologists in China and elsewhere required that experiments with the SARS1 and MERS viruses be conducted in BSL3 conditions. All the other bat coronaviruses, however, could be studied in BSL2, the next level down.
BSL2 requires minimal safety precautions, including;
- wearing lab coats and gloves,
- not sucking up liquids in a pipette,
- putting up biohazard warning signs
Hardly the environment in which to be performing GOF experiments on a potentially deadly virus. Assuming success, you’d be dealing with a virus that was far more infectious than either SARS1 or MERS. A virus against which laboratory workers had not been vaccinated and which was bred with the sole intention of being transmissible in humans. This was also in direct violation of the NIH’s self-proclaimed rules dictating funding restrictions for GOF experimentation.
Following the money
What follows has been drawn in part from Nicholas Wade’s recent article on the Origins of The SARS-CoV2 virus, a link to which you will find in the footer.
A little background first to bring you up to speed and connect the dots and the people above. Dr. Baric had developed, and taught Dr. Shi, a general method for engineering bat coronaviruses to attack other species. The specific targets were human cells grown in cultures and humanized mice. These laboratory mice, a cheap and ethical stand-in for human subjects, are genetically engineered to carry the human version of a protein called ACE2 that studs the surface of cells that line the airways.
Dr. Shi returned to her lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and resumed the work she had started on genetically engineering coronaviruses to attack human cells. You may well ask how this known? It’s a matter of public record. Her work was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). And grant proposals that funded her work, which are a matter of public record, specify exactly what she planned to do with the money.
Total funding under this project, dating from 2014 to 2019 is $3,748,715. This page provides a clearer overview
The grants were assigned to the prime contractor, Dr. Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, who subcontracted them to Dr. Shi. Here are extracts from the grants for fiscal years 2018 and 2019. “CoV” stands for coronavirus and “S protein” refers to the virus’s spike protein.
“Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.”
and, in the 2019 project;
“We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential.”
We will sequence receptor binding domains (spike proteins) to identify viruses with the highest potential for spillover which we will include in our experimental investigations (Aim 3).
What this means, in non-technical language, is that Dr. Shi set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. Her plan was to take genes that coded for spike proteins possessing a variety of measured affinities for human cells, ranging from high to low. She would insert these spike genes one by one into the backbone of a number of viral genomes (“reverse genetics” and “infectious clone technology”), creating a series of chimeric viruses. These chimeric viruses would then be tested for their ability to attack human cell cultures (“in vitro”) and humanized mice (“in vivo”). And this information would help predict the likelihood of “spillover,” the jump of a coronavirus from bats to people.
The methodical approach was designed to find the best combination of coronavirus backbone and spike protein for infecting human cells. The approach could have generated SARS-CoV2-like viruses, and may well have created the SARS-CoV2 virus itself with the right combination of virus backbone and spike protein.
Did Dr. Shi succeed? According to Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and leading expert on biosafety;
“It is clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was systematically constructing novel chimeric coronaviruses and was assessing their ability to infect human cells and human-ACE2-expressing mice. It is also clear that, depending on the constant genomic contexts chosen for analysis, this work could have produced SARS-CoV-2 or a proximal progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.”
“Genomic context” refers to the particular viral backbone used as the testbed for the spike protein.
Peter Daszak has spent the last year and a half vociferously denying science’s ability to produce a coronavirus in a laboratory. He’s even published the Lancet letter we referenced above, ably supported by his fellow GOF colleagues. This despite the clear, published intention of his company, as per the NIH project above, of doing exactly that. In an almost prescient, ill-timed interview at a scientific conference in December of 2019. Daszak put his foot in it. Forward to around minute 28 of the interview.
He talks in glowing terms of how researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been reprogramming the spike protein and generating chimeric coronaviruses capable of infecting humanized mice.
“And we have now found, you know, after 6 or 7 years of doing this, over 100 new sars-related coronaviruses, very close to SARS. Some of them get into human cells in the lab, some of them can cause SARS disease in humanized mice models and are untreatable with therapeutic monoclonals and you can’t vaccinate against them with a vaccine. So, these are a clear and present danger….”
Obviously, that danger was neither clear enough nor obvious enough to Peter Daszak.
Daszak mentions in the interview above, the Wuhan researchers had been unable to develop vaccines against the coronaviruses they had designed to infect human cells. They would have left the researchers as defenseless against the SARS-CoV2 virus if it were generated in their lab as their Beijing colleagues had been against SARS.
“Since 1992 the virology community has known that the one sure way to make a virus deadlier is to give it a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction in the laboratory,” writes Dr. Steven Quay, a biotech entrepreneur interested in the origins of SARS2. “At least eleven gain-of-function experiments, adding a furin site to make a virus more infective, are published in the open literature, including [by] Dr. Zhengli Shi, head of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
and finally, on the topic of origin, from David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of CalTech.
“When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus. These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2.”
What should at this point be glaringly apparent is that an unnatural origin theory(i.e. a laboratory gain-of-function engineered virus) for SARS-C0V2 is far more probable than you’ve been led to believe. In early January of 2021, the American government spoke out, releasing a “Fact Sheet” pointing a finger at Dr. Shi and her colleagues in Wuhan. They blamed Chinese authorities for stonewalling the WHO investigators, but we would argue that answers to questions relating to research in Wuhan can be answered far more accurately by those most trying to evade them, and it’s not the Chinese.
These individuals are far closer to home and were intimately involved in Dr. Shi’s work. The American scientists who through the NIH, bankrolled Wuhan’s research, notable individuals like Peter Daszak and his company Ecohealth Alliance, Dr. Ralph Baric and his colleagues at UNC, and other colleagues tied to the GOF research and funding grants referenced above.
The case for laboratory origin is far more substantive than a mere wild conspiracy and there has been a concerted effort by GOF scientists globally to ensure the possibility of engineering is dismissed out of hand. We have just shown you a cohesive digital paper trail spanning years, as outlined above, funded by the NIH and NIAID, managed by the same American scientists, and deployed on foreign soil (China). This is not a fabrication, nor is it a wild rumor or conspiracy. There is strong reason to suggest that Chinese authorities may have been as much in the dark as their foreign colleagues, but we now know who really holds the answers,
The choice of a China-based facility for research mattered, for a number of reasons.
- There would have been minimal to no oversight of the project.
- In the event of any unfortunate incidents, the virus was on foreign soil.
- The restrictive conditions of BSL4 safety protocols could easily be ignored in favor of a more lax NSL2 environment.
- If the proverbial doo-doo ever hit the fan, deniability and accompanying accountability would be far easier to address.
Viruses are notorious escape artists as we’ve already shown and possibly no one is more aware of this than the scientists themselves. Given the incredibly sensitive nature of the work the scientists were undertaking and the harmful potential of the bioweapons they were intent on developing, no government in its right mind would endorse performing these tasks in their mortal enemy’s basement? Was Washington simply asleep and blissfully unaware or was the decision intentional?
In theory, the CCP could have appropriated Dr. Shi’s project at any point during development, affording them a weapon of devastating effect that was funded by America. Irony anyone?
The NIH continues its funding
So who benefited from the latest round of virus research funding from the NIH in 2020? Sadly, very few surprises. Ecohealth Alliance is at the forefront again, Daszak was awarded a little over $1.5 million, a 2020 downpayment on a five-year project. For interest, you can see the full list of grants he has been awarded here, in a relationship with the NIH stretching back to 2004 that has netted his company millions.
The stated goals of their new project are as ambiguous and concerning as the 2014–2019 project. One of the listed goals,
1) Identify, characterize and rank spillover risk of high zoonotic potential viruses from wildlife, by analyzing previously-archived wildlife samples, conducting targeted wildlife surveillance, and using serology & PCR assays to identify novel viruses. These will be characterized to assess risk of spillover to people, and a series of in vitro (receptor binding, cell culture) and in vivo (humanized mouse and collaborative cross models) assays used to assess their potential to infect people and cause disease;
Sound familiar? Gain-of-function continues unabated and the NIH continues to fund it. Rather than waiting about for round 2 of the careless scientists unleashing death on the planet, we feel now may be the time to act. Allowing for the possibility, and the evidence strongly suggests its a possibility that cannot be ignored, that Dr. Shi, Daszak, Baric, and colleagues cooked up the SARS-CoV2 virus between them, any further research funding involving any of the names linked to the projects listed above should be terminated with extreme prejudice pending a very transparent review of the facts.
Our concern here is not to their guilt or innocence, but to their cumulative knowledge and ability to repeat the disaster that led to the outbreak in 2019, this time with more deadly consequences. The genie is truly out of the bottle, it has been for well over two decades, ever since the scientific community turned a collective blind eye to the pursuit of gain-of-function research. The entire community bears responsibility in part for the pandemic, should the virus prove to be engineered.
We should also point out in fairness to the scientists in Wuhan that it is common practice among scientists working across borders to share both data and samples. Any developments in the Wuhan lab would undoubtedly have been shared, certainly with EcoHealth Alliance, with UNC (Ralph Baric), and possibly with Andersen from Scripps Research. Leaks may not only have occurred in Wuhan.
In fact, and we’ve no way of determining this, the fruits of Dr. Shi’s labor could have gone global, long before December of 2019. As noted in an earlier article, traces of the SARS-CoV2 footprint have turned up in places like Italy and France, predating the January pandemic announcement by months. Gain of Function scientists are all too well aware of the ramifications of their work, and much of it occurs behind closed doors, away from prying eyes and oversight.
Are there benefits to GOF Research?
Unquestionably. However, the flawed argument of GOF for vaccine development doesn’t hold water in our opinion. Nature is capable of producing billions of possible variants of a virus, given the time and right conditions. For each possible version we can cook up in our far from secure laboratories, nature has a million alternatives. The only use of a vaccine developed to combat a manufactured virus is if that virus is unleashed, whether by accident or intentionally, on the public. The vaccine would, in all likelihood prove useless against a natural version of a virus that follows its own evolutionary curve.
GOF presents us with all the risks and almost no benefit. The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) got it spectacularly wrong in 2018, their recommendations no doubt coerced by lobbyists from within pharma, military, and other pressure groups. There’s a lot of money to be made in this field if you’re willing to gloss over the risk. We were happy to do so in 2018 and now in 2020, armed with hindsight, we still pursue the same foolish policy, expecting a different result. The very definition of madness.
Remember earlier in this article we alluded to the GOF moratorium? How was the NIH able to continue funding this research during the moratorium? The first three questionable grant payments made to the EcoHealth Alliance project between 2015-2018 fell under the moratorium. How were the payments justified?
The water gets murky
Really murky, really quickly. To save you scrolling back up, here is the link again for the moratorium document. Keep in mind that the moratorium had specifically identified three types of viruses as being of particular concern when GOF was involved, namely influenza, MERS, and SARS viruses. A footnote appears on p2 and it was this escape clause that was used to justify the payments. The clause reads as follows;
“An exception from the research pause may be obtained if the head of the USG funding agency determines that the research is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.”
By interpretation, whoever was in charge of the money at that point, had to authorize these payments. Either the director of the NIAID, Dr. Anthony Fauci, or the director of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, or maybe both, would have invoked the footnote in order to keep the money flowing to Dr. Shi’s gain-of-function research. Interestingly, Dr. Fauci is listed as one of the members of the NSABB. In an interview with Independent Science News, Dr. Richard Ebright was quoted as making the following statement;
“Unfortunately, the NIAID Director and the NIH Director exploited this loophole to issue exemptions to projects subject to the Pause –preposterously asserting the exempted research was ‘urgently necessary to protect public health or national security’ — thereby nullifying the Pause,”
The Potential Pandemic Pathogens Control and Oversight (P3CO) Framework, which required agencies to report for review any dangerous gain-of-function work they wished to fund, was created when the Moratorium was ended in 2017 to ensure the public would remain protected.
Again, according to Dr. Ebright, both Dr. Collins and Dr. Fauci;
“have declined to flag and forward proposals for risk-benefit review, thereby nullifying the P3CO Framework. They have systematically thwarted efforts by the White House, the Congress, scientists, and science policy specialists to regulate GoF [gain-of-function] research of concern.”
Whatever the reasons, and there could be many including national security, for Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins’s lack of transparency regarding GOF research the conclusion of their actions is incontestable. The National Institutes of Health was supporting gain-of-function research, of a kind that may have generated the SARS-CoV2 virus, in an unsupervised foreign lab that was doing work in BSL2 biosafety conditions.
GOF research should be halted immediately, and its scientists and funding mechanisms subjected to intense scrutiny with regards to their activities and involvement in events leading up to Wuhan in 2019. The only world in which the pursuit of this branch of science could be pursued doesn’t exist. Safety, real safety, would require the following.
- Complete transparency with regards to projects
- Restricting research to BSL4 facilities only
- Insections and policing of any facilities engaged in GOF
All the above are simply a wishlist of impossible conditions. Restrictive and unenforceable, particularly with increasing military involvement in research, both the scientific community and their regulators would be unable or unwilling to comply or enforce any of these conditions. Simply put, GOF is how we create the next pandemic. It may very well have created this one, so can we seriously run the risk of another?
In 2014 scientists calling themselves the Cambridge Working Group urged caution on creating new viruses. In prescient words, they specified the risk of creating a SARS2-like virus.
“Accident risks with newly created ‘potential pandemic pathogens’ raise grave new concerns,” they wrote. “Laboratory creation of highly transmissible, novel strains of dangerous viruses, especially but not limited to influenza, poses substantially increased risks. An accidental infection in such a setting could trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible to control.”
Resources
- Nicholas Wade: Medika Life would like to extend our thanks to Nicholas Wade for his thorough and illuminating article on the origins of the SARS-CoV2 virus. We have leaned heavily on his work to create this article and would highly recommend you read his piece for a far more detailed examination of the arguments for and against a laboratory origin for the virus. Nicholas Wade is a science writer, editor, and author who has worked on the staff of Nature, Science, and, for many years, the New York Times. His credentials are beyond reproach and his arguments balanced and weighted.
- NIH RePORT: Managed by the NIH,a treasure trove of searchable information relating to funding, grants, and research stretching back years.
