Particularly now, when it looks increasing likely that the Wuhan Institute of Virology and their GOF research (US funded) on coronaviruses led to this pandemic. Even the ex-CDC Director has come out in favor of the lab leak theory. So, is this a good idea?

Can I Get a NO? A Loud, Resounding, Absolute NO.

Not in any rational, sane world that is intent on survival of the species, can we permit the continuance of this kind of research in its current form. Especially in the kinds of laboratories we currently use, where apparently, upgrading the walls to Swiss cheese would offer better protection than is currently available. Especially in the hands of scientists, politicians, media and a pharmaceutical industry all of whom have just schooled us on how to manipulate the human race.

How many millions more may pay with their lives for the greed, avarice or incompetence of the few? We haven’t yet held these individuals to account for the 2019 pandemic and here we are again, back on the roundabout, hell bent on laying the groundwork for a second one.

And that is really where the problem lies. It isn’t the science that’s flawed. GOF is a really useful tool, but like the most deadly assault rifle, it can be used for protection or for mass extinction. It depends on the hand that wields it and science has been coopted by individuals and companies that look only to profit and the pursuits of their political masters. In the process, we die, by the millions.

To depress you even further, we cannot walk this back. Not ever. The gene-manipulating genie is out of the bottle and there’s no putting it back. This type of research will still continue, even if it is outlawed at the highest levels. The potential rewards, which are huge, far outweigh the risks. The only solution is to manage it, somehow.

How Do We Fix This?

Elon, so glad you stopped by, as you, or a group of individuals (we understand not everyone can buy the bluebird of happiness on a whim) may very well hold the key to our continued existence, and no, I am not suggesting relocating Pfizer, Moderna and the rest of their motley crew doing pathogen research to Mars, although I’d probably chip in myself for the rocket fuel for that trip.

We know that the current logistical management for GOF needs to be better. Unfortunately, we cannot contain the viruses we work on safely within a facility without them escaping; even our highest levels of security, BSL4 labs, are breached. Every year, incidents occur across the globe, and we may even have the next potential pandemic underway as I write, that is how frequently it happens.

Logic dictates we either stop the practice (not happening) or take steps to ensure we don’t kill the entire global population, unintentionally, or otherwise. To do this, it is critical we remove the danger from populated areas.

We need to establish a global research facility, one of a kind, independently monitored and audited, that is as far removed from proximity to humanity as possible. The middle of the desert springs to mind, a dedicated center for viral research where, in the event of a breach, only the unfortunate scientists pay the price for their carelessness.

To overcome the strain of lengthy periods of isolation, a facility constructed for these purposes could be expanded to include schooling and retail therapy, allowing scientists to pursue their passions and research in a semblance of normality. Most of the pioneers and researchers engaged in Gain of Function are driven by the science, they are passionate and focused, and again, it is their work that is co-opted, rarely the individual.

Quarantines would apply to all personnel leaving the facility, requiring a five-day plus furlough in a Trump Hotel built five miles away. Driverless Teslas, repurposed for deliveries, would alleviate the need for contact with the outside world, and Elon, you could use this as a dry run for Mars.

Humor aside though, the idea has merit and may very well offer a way out of our current predicament. The only other viable alternative is to temporarily halt all research until we are able to fully automate facilities handling dangerous viruses. By that, I mean no human interaction at all. Experiments could be performed remotely, utilizing robotics. We are technically capable of this, but it would be incredibly expensive (I wonder who has a few billion in pandemic profits lying around), restricting who would be able to utilize this kind of technology.

Great Kindness or Greed? We All Hope the Former

Humans are capable of great kindness and innovation, but the danger with this type of research always defaults to the involvement of the human element. We are prone to making mistakes, ask all the unfortunate and very dead researchers working with these pathogens when they escape. Realistically, if safety is our paramount concern, and it should be, our only viable option is to remove GOF research from its proximity to our populations. Back to option 1.

This discussion is unfolding right now, preempted by the letter I referred to above. Perhaps the logic here was to get their case heard before all the wheels come off. When evidence surfaces, and it will, to corroborate the lab leak theory for the SARS virus, all bets will be off. The backlash will be spectacular and science, unfortunately will pay the price. Science we desperately need to cure the ills that have been ailing us for generations.

Villagers and their torches aren’t particular about what they set fire to, and in this instance, they have good cause and science will burn.

Any solution that removes the risk of exposure to pathogens from accidental spillage, cannot obviously account for nefarious intentions, sadly something the industry is rife with. Another thorn in the side of ethical science that needs to be overcome and security at this remote facility would need to be ironclad.

GOF Can Result in Life-Saving Drugs or Danger

We’d like to spark a proper conversation on this subject, involving people who have the resources (Elon, you still here?) to implement solutions that are in the interest of both science and public safety. The two parties must find a way to safely coexist.

It is also worth mentioning that gain of function is far more than what the public perceives it to be. The technology is critical to developing new drugs, new cancer treatments and many other practical uses that do not focus on weaponizing pathogens. Making a virus more deadly may utilize Gain of Function technology, but it represents only a fraction of the industry’s use of the technology.

If you have thoughts on the matter or would like to publish something relating to this, please feel free to reach out to Medika Life via DMs on Twitter. You’ll find us hugely receptive.

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In a recent interview, the so-called “Batwoman” as she is referred to, Chinese virologist, Dr. Shi Zhengli, spoke to a New York Times reporter to offer her side of the story. We think she should have maintained her silence as it is doubtful she will be given a fair hearing by a largely illiterate press. Figure out that oxymoron!

The story of the moment becomes the narrative the press promotes and we suggest, based on their dubious track record over the last year, that they should keep their opinions and let science get on with what it does best. They are ill-placed and apparently ill-equipped to distinguish fact from fiction or engage in simple reporting.

Who is Dr. Shi Zhengli, and what does she have to say?

She started out as a research assistant at the Wuhan Institute for Virology (WIV), with a focus on aquatic viruses. She trained in France and later pivoted to bats in 2004 after SARS broke out. She is widely recognized as a leader in the field and is a generous collaborator. She is not a Chinese Communist Party member.

To facilitate her research, she has spent years collecting bats from caves across China, investigating how the coronavirus can jump from animal to human, and she embraces the term many now use to refer to her, “Batwoman”. She is driven, highly educated, and passionate about her work.

“In all the work we do, if just once you can prevent the outbreak of an illness, then what we’ve done will be very meaningful”

Here are some of the statements she made to New York Times reporter, Amy Qin, in their recent telephone conversation.

• She has denied reports that three workers at the WIV were sick with flulike symptoms in Nov 2019 and she asked for their names.

“We were sitting in a meeting and wondering who these people could be,” she said.

• On Gain-of-Function (GOF) research, she said her research did not count as GOF because she did not set out to make a virus more dangerous, but to understand how it might jump across species.
• She also addressed concerns about biosafety and said she would publish more about an incident relating to the Yunnan miners soon.

What emerges from the interview, according to Qin, is that Dr. Shi Zhengli is now feeling angered and anguished. She is drawing a clear line in the sand, identifying science and the rest of the word as two distinct entities. She states that any future engagement will be with her colleagues and the field of science.

It’s not difficult to see why she feels let down or why the world may view her opinions as suspect.

The Covid pandemic has become many things over the last year and a half. It has been politicized and weaponized by almost every segment of our global communities, appropriated for their own agendas, none of which recognize or respect science. In fact, few even begin to understand the complex issues that lie at the heart of the virus’s origins, but that matters little.

In Shi’s own words;

“This is no longer a question of science. It is speculation rooted in utter distrust.”

Can we believe her?

It’s impossible to say, for a number of reasons. Firstly and most troubling, is China itself. They’re not known for their transparency and have closed ranks over Wuhan, the laboratory, and its research. Dr. Zhengli may very well want to share additional research with her international colleagues but that would undoubtedly require Beijing’s consent.

It’s doubtful at this point if they would be accommodating. Pandemic relationships with China became immensely strained under the Trump regime and haven’t improved under Biden. Under normal circumstances, the flow of scientific information between China and its Western counterparts is actually remarkably transparent.

The second issue revolves around science itself. It’s a tedious and painstaking process to track down the source of any virus. While well-documented evidence from renowned virologists tends to suggest that the SARS-CoV2 virus is natural, there is also evidence that suggests it has been with us for a lot longer than we previously thought.

So most of the valid virology voices seem to support Dr. Zhengli’s statements. The simple fact is this. We just don’t know enough or have access to sufficient evidence to be able to make any claims relating to a laboratory leak or any other theory. More time is required and more research, based on real science, needs to be performed.

This takes time, sometimes years, and into the black void, created by a lack of information, step the press. If they cannot report news, well then, why not create it. That is not the role of any responsible or ethical journalist. Sadly, the media industry has proven itself to be utterly bereft of any morals and they will continue to muddy the waters with unsubstantiated and misinterpreted data.

Watch this space as the press, quacks, hacks, and pseudo-scientists set about the word by dissection and dismemberment of Dr. Shi Zhengli and her statements.

The post Dr. Shi Zhengli, Wuhan’s Batwoman Speaks Out on Covid and Lab Leak Theory appeared first on Medika Life.

What role has GOF played in all of this? Therein lies the crux of the debate, it either had everything to do with the virus or nothing or has perhaps contributed to it. There is evidence in favor of each of these scenarios, both for and against. Even science and its practitioners are divided on the topic and laypeople around the globe interpret a rambling cohort of random and often incorrect “facts” to arrive at their own conclusions. 

This discussion doesn’t relate to the SARS-CoV2 virus or its origins. It is solely about Gain of Function research. Are there risks associated with it, what are those risks, and is the scientific community justified in continuing to do the research? Is there sufficient evidence to suggest a global ban on this type of research?

We thought we’d play devil’s advocate, posing both sides of the argument for and against the discontinuation of GOF research. To start us off, let’s establish exactly what Gain of Function research entails.

What is Gain of Function research, exactly?

Gain-of-function research refers to the serial passaging of microorganisms to increase their transmissibility, virulence, immunogenicity, and host tropism by applying selective pressure to a culture. So in other words, in layman’s terms, it’s about creating something nastier, tougher, and more deadly than the original by manipulating it in a laboratory.

Why would we want to do this? Aside from the obvious answer of weaponizing disease, there are a number of very valid scientific reasons for this research.

Also, to be clear, associating Gain of Function research as being mutually exclusive to influenza or coronaviruses is patently wrong. The field is immense and it is totally imprecise to equate GOF studies only with influenza transmission experiments. Virology is founded on adaptation approaches, and these have broad utility because they provide phenotypic evidence of a genotypic change when combined with a discriminatory biological assay.

Gain of Function studies are mostly applied in virology (to viruses) and have revealed many details regarding the biological mechanisms behind virus transmission and replication. Obviously, everything we can learn about the enemy is useful. How a virus evolves is a key part of our strategy to defeating it, developing vaccines, and knowing where to watch out for potential vectors. Gain of Function allows us a window into this world.

The high replication and mutation rate of viruses commonly leads to escape mutants, lineages that have acquired changes to their genome that lessen or eliminate the affinity of natural or vaccine-induced antibodies towards the virus, while not notably lowering survival. Most people now associate these words and terms with SARS-COV2 and its mutations and discussions about its origin.

Most mutations a virus acquires aren’t helpful to virus function, but in some cases mutation can both enhance virulence and allow better immune escape. For example, early studies regarding the E484K mutation of the spike protein of severe acute resSARS-CoV-2 suggest that affinity towards the ACE2 receptor, the target of the virus, is enhanced, while neutralization by serum antibodies sourced from patients having recovered from wild type SARS-CoV-2 are evaded more effectively.

In simple terms, the virus evades our natural immunity by developing new ways of attacking us and these include “hiding” by not triggering signals our immune system has trained itself to look out for. Influenza is an excellent example, returning year after year with a new book of tricks, and boom, you’re down with the flu again.

Gain of Function allows scientists to encourage these mutations in a laboratory setting where they can study the process and figure out ways of keeping our medicines and vaccines one step ahead of the curve. The potential for unearthing an as yet unknown key to controlling viruses may very well lie in the pursuit of this research.

So before we plow ahead let’s clear the air. 

This article refers only to Gain of Function research in terms of its applicability to enhancing dangerous pathogens. 

Sounds really cool, where’s the problem?

And Gain of Function really is. One of the reasons we’ve been able to develop vaccines so rapidly for Covid, Moderna had a working model ready to go in a month, is thanks in no small part to GOF research. So there are clear and easily defined benefits to the research. There are, however, also very distinct dangers involved that we cannot afford to ignore. 

Without being dramatic, pursuing this line of research without properly ensuring its safety, could lead to an extinction-level event. Us being the species we wipe out. It’s an unlikely, but not impossible consequence.

In 2012 a paper was published in Science by Herfst et al., titled: Airborne Transmission of Influenza A/H5N1 Virus Between Ferrets. The group had genetically modified the A/H5N1 virus (Avian influenza) by site-directed mutagenesis and serial passages in ferrets, creating a strain that was airborne transmissible in ferrets.

This demonstrated that it was possible for the avian influenza virus to become airborne and that the strain was sensitive to certain antiviral drugs. The paper raised many concerns regarding the ethics and safety of creating such a virus. The risks of accidental or intentional malicious release caused the USA administration under Barack Obama to halt funding for gain-of-function research relating to influenza, SARS, or MERS in 2014. 

In 2016, under questionable advice from the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), the NIH overturned the moratorium on GOF research and resumed funding research, including projects run in Wuhan 

The dangers of Gain of Function lie on a number of fronts and it is these we will explore in-depth in this article. Our aim is to provide as balanced a discussion as possible on the topic. Here then a quick overview of what we will look at.

Laboratory Safety: Can we ensure that research and viruses and other organisms used in Gain of Function research stay where they are supposed to stay. In the confines of a laboratory? History tends to suggest no. How do we secure these facilities, keeping in mind they are global and subject to various different regulatory bodies, to ensure lab leaks do not occur? Can we human-proof them?

Military Engagement: Discover something deadly or set about building it and every single military complex on the face of the planet perks up its ears. Biological weapons are the most deadly, untraceable, and easily dispersed weapons on the planet. When every single human can act as a potential vector for spreading a virus, you can simply build it (or steal it), release it and sit back and watch.

Corporate Agendas: There’s a thin line here between conspiracy and corporate greed, but this is still a hugely valid concern, particularly now that we have the basic parameters for a global pandemic established, thanks to SARS-CoV2. As companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, The Gates Foundation and other large corporates dip their toes into Healthcare, we’d be well-served to remember these organizations serve their shareholders and the gods of capitalism. Our well-being is not on their checklist for global domination.

Laboratory Safety and Gain of Function Research

This is, on a personal level, where my largest concerns lie. These concerns are motivated by the following factors, all of which can and may contribute to the potential leaking of a deadly pathogen from a laboratory, and I am not alone. In 2014 scientists calling themselves the Cambridge Working Group urged caution on creating new viruses. In what may have been prescient words, they specified the risk of creating a dangerous 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.”

The human element

The most secure systems in the world are all subject to this one, flawed cog. The human one. Whether by intention (disgruntled or “bought” researchers) or accidental (overworked, momentary lapses of concentration) this risk can only be removed by isolating and automating processes completely. 

This could potentially be achieved by robotic automation, where robotic arms and machines can perform experiments in total isolation, without the need for a human to breach the working environment. Obvious drawbacks still exist to this system, including the need to physically introduce cultures into the secured environment, prohibitive costs for many facilities, and extending the time required for processing research. 

Automation still doesn’t overcome the major problem associated with this kind of research, that of human involvement. Smuggling out a pathogen remains a constant possibility, with many people within a facility having access to Biosafety Level 4 laboratories. The accidental infection of laboratory technicians also remains a very real risk.

The slow and painful dismantling of accepted dogma also poses a huge risk. We have only now, in the last few months accepted a massive body of evidence supporting the fact that coronaviruses can move about freely in the air, like the measles virus. They become aerosolized and don’t require water droplets. Six feet isn’t an obstacle, neither are walls and doors, so our so-called secured facilities may very well have been built on flawed science.

What we thought was sufficient protection for certain viruses simply wasn’t. It’s a simple mistake, but a fatal one based on 80-year-old research, and our inability to freely question accepted scientific dogma poses a very real risk in fields that deal with potential pandemic-capable pathogens.

How often do pathogens escape their laboratory confines? This is a question we can attempt to answer by looking back at the incidents listed over the last few decades. It is of course entirely possible that many have been covered up, particularly those originating from off-grid laboratories run by the military and other government agencies.

The paper referenced above makes for interesting reading and has this to say on the 1977 H1N1 virus that mysteriously resurfaced after a 20-year absence.

Public awareness of the 1977 H1N1 pandemic and its likely laboratory origins has been virtually absent. Virologists and public health officials with the appropriate sophistication were quickly aware that a laboratory release was the most likely origin, but they were content not to publicize this, aware that such embarrassing allegations would likely end the then nascent cooperation of Russian and Chinese virologists, which was vital to worldwide influenza surveillance.

The most plausible reason for a Chinese or Russian laboratory to thaw out and begin growing a c1950 H1N1 virus in 1976–77 was as a response to the US 1976 “swine flu” program, which resulted in a program to immunize the entire US population against H1N1 influenza virus. It was clearly a rational response for other countries with virology capabilities to explore making their own H1N1 vaccines. Thawing available frozen stocks of the virus was necessary because H1N1 was no longer circulating. 

Modern commentators have begun to articulate this connection between the 1976 Swine flu immunization program and the 1977 H1N1 re-emergence:

“Perhaps an even more serious consequence [of the 1976 swine flu episode] was the accidental release of human-adapted influenza A (H1N1) virus from a research study, with subsequent resurrection and global spread of this previously extinct virus, leading to what could be regarded as a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ epidemic.”(Zimmer 2009)

SARS, the laboratory escape artist 

SARS has not naturally recurred since 2003, but there have been six separate “escapes” from virology labs studying it: one each in Singapore and Taiwan, and in four distinct events at the same laboratory in Beijing.

• The first escape was in Singapore in August 2003, in a 27-year-old virology graduate student at the National University of Singapore. He had not worked directly with SARS, but SARS was present in the virology laboratory where he worked with West Nile Virus (WNV). Investigation showed that his preparation of WNV was contaminated with the SARS virus and that this was the likely origin of his infection.
• The second escape was in Taiwan in December 2003, when a SARS research scientist fell ill on a return air flight after attending a medical meeting in Singapore Dec 7- 10.
• On April 22, 2004 China reported a suspected case of SARS in a 20-year-old nurse who fell ill April 5 in Beijing. The next day it reported she had nursed a 26-year old female laboratory researcher who had fallen ill on March 25. Still ill, the researcher had traveled by train to her home in Anhui province where she was nursed by her mother, a physician, who fell ill on April 8 and died April 19. The researcher had worked at the Chinese National Institute of Virology (NIV) in Beijing.
• Several Chinese and international groups investigated the outbreak at the NIV and identified in retrospect two additional SARS laboratory infections at the NIV that had previously gone unrecognized and had begun in February 2004.

Foot and Mouth Disease, Pirbright, England 2007

Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) is a veterinary disease that affects primarily cloven-hoofed domestic animals (pigs, sheep and cattle). It has been eradicated in North America and most of Europe. It is highly transmissible, capable of spreading through direct contact and even through some prepared meats (sausages, airline food), on boots of farmworkers (or tourists’ shoes: that’s why there’s that question “have you visited a farm” on the re-entry customs checklist coming into the USA), and even by aerosol spread.

Two separate instances were recorded in 2007 of the virus escaping a facility in Pirbright tasked with producing vaccines against FMD for the veterinary industry. The outbreaks cost the UK an estimated 200 million pounds and the damage to the livestock and meat industry was substantial.

As an aside, in the US, previous law had banned it on the continental US, so FMD virus was only held in the USDA Plum Island facility off of Long Island (in a facility originally built in the 1950s for anti-animal BW work). Currently, a replacement facility under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) is under construction in Manhattan, KS and will become the new home of this incredibly infectious and highly transmissible virus. It seems we don’t learn our lessons.

It is clear that accidents occur in laboratories. To suggest they don’t is both dishonest and disingenuous. The question we need to be asking now is given the current chaos on the heels of the Covid Pandemic, can we afford any new accidents? Although there is no concrete evidence to support the laboratory leak in Wuhan, it cannot completely be dismissed yet either.

Can scientists and science assure us there will be no future mishaps? The answer to that has to be no. So there remains a risk, a global risk. The question we then need to ask is this. Do the benefits we are afforded by GOF research justify the potential risks?

The Military and Weaponizing Diseases

GOF serves two purposes in this setting. It allows for the creation of more deadly pathogens and it allows scientists to study the way in which these pathogens can be combated. This is where the lines of ethical arguments, safety, and practical enforcement become blurred.

This technology is comparable to the nuclear capability of a country. If we stop all GOF research, how are we then able to protect ourselves against rogue states that do not comply with a global ban on GOF research? Biological agents are undoubtedly the new preferred weapon of choice for many countries for very obvious reasons.

• Biological agents can decimate a targetted population whilst leaving all infrastructure unharmed.
• The cost of developing these agents is minimal in comparison to say for instance a nuclear arsenal, or an ICBM platform.
• The nature of the weapon makes its covert development far simpler to achieve.
• Countermeasures or vaccines can readily be introduced to protect a local population.
• Militant groups can seek to secure these agents through financial incentives, or simple theft from laboratories that do not engage sufficient security protocols.

Clearly, if you have no compunction about wiping out millions of innocent lives, a biological agent is your weapon of first choice. This is not lost on governments across the globe, and each government engages in its own clandestine efforts to stay up to speed in the virus wars. Their tool of choice is Gain of Function.

By restricting GOF research to military laboratories, you restrict the potential risks of theft. You cannot remove this risk completely, as again, we are dealing with human beings, but you can ensure the risk is dramatically reduced. The flipside of this coin isn’t that great though. The military is not renowned for transparency and the regulation and safety monitoring of these facilities by impartial external agencies would prove nigh on impossible.

Additionally, the focus of military financed research will lean heavily toward the weaponization of the viruses it studies. To sanction this is comparable with strapping a load of dynamite to your back and tossing lit matches over your shoulder. 

It’s a catch 22 and irrelevant of what the global scientific community decides about GOF research, you can rest assured that military agencies across the globe will continue irrespective. The genie is out of the bottle and we cannot put it back. Many find themselves uncertain as to whether we should even try and from a military perspective, the argument of preparedness holds water.

Corporate greed and that thin line in the sand

Welcome, all our conspiratorial compatriots, to the juicy bits. Supposition and wild conjecture based on rumor, possibility, and the public whipping post, to which we have all bound ourselves with the unbreakable bonds of capitalism. Our scrambled financial history of Keynesian economics and Friedman has bred financial behemoths, monsters controlled by individuals rather than governments, and therein lies our problem.

These companies, owned by individuals like Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg, and others are driven by one singular purpose. He who dies with the most wins. While there are considerable donations made and charitable organizations founded, the motives and ambitions of these individuals remain the subject of intense debate. Covid has presented and highlighted the next frontier. Healthcare. And the respective owners of the monsters are falling over each other to get to the front of the queue.

If you think large corporations would be discouraged by killing off a few million people to conquer a single global market, think again. If you had to remove all the unhealthy, disease-causing, potentially toxic and carcinogenic items from your local supermarket chain’s shelves, you’d probably be left with a single shelf of produce. American consumers are being fattened and slaughtered by large businesses. It’s been happening for decades, and most consumers never realize it.

So the question here boils down to this. Who is the more evil? Your local Costco or a large corporate who decides to “manage” a future pandemic? If you’re killing your customer over two decades using fat-laden poisons or in two months with a designer virus, there really isn’t any difference, is there.

The Gates Foundation has already spread its reach into the WHO, vaccine trials, and development, and yes, Gain of Function research. Bill Gates, without a single shred of medical or scientific training relating to these fields, is dictating global health policy or attempting to. He is not alone. The fortunes to be made from global vaccines are not to be sneezed at and arguably, all you need is a product that caters to a demand. 

How you set about creating that demand is where the issues arise. 

Before you dismiss this as a flight of fancy, remember the world you are I now live in. One that in January of 2020 would have seemed like a dystopian fairytale, had you described it. We have to assume the worst of manipulative corporations that have ALL profited hugely from the pandemic. Allowing them potential access to gain of function research is in my humble opinion, a terrible idea.

Back to reality and today

Where does all this leave us? It’s an almost foregone conclusion that the term Gain of Function will become a household name over the next few months as we ramp up our (what I believe to be futile) efforts to track the origin of SARS-CoV2. The virus may or may not present its origin when it and science meet in a mutually agreeable place at a date of its choosing.

The role played by GOF research will remain at the forefront of the discussion and its very presence in the discussion, whether it is eventually shown to be complicit or not, should sound a warning call to both science and those that seek to protect our societies. Laboratories across the globe are currently engaged in GOF research. Even now as I write this, many will be rushing ahead on projects and multi-tasking, all too aware of the ax that now dangles above the neck of GOF.

This in itself presents additional opportunities for laboratory breaches. 

We’ve been having this discussion for a while now. This 2015 article in Nature entitled “Gain-of-function experiments: time for a real debate” highlights just how long we’ve been debating the benefits of GOF research and also provides an excellent defense for the technology. In the article the author frames the problem as follows; (PPP refers to Potentially Pandemic Pathogens)

Creating PPPs — a subset of GOF experiments involving creation of novel, virulent, transmissible viruses — is one of these approaches. Unlike other GOF experiments, the creation of PPPs entails a unique risk that a laboratory accident could spark a pandemic killing millions. The question is not whether to carry out research on PPPs or to do nothing; it is whether to have a portfolio of approaches to defeat viruses without creating a pandemic risk, or whether to include PPP experiments in that portfolio. For example, we should decide whether devoting our limited resources for flu research towards PPP creation experiments — which are expensive, often underpowered, low-throughput and often poorly generalizable5, and which create pandemic risk — is better than using those resources to enhance the rest of the portfolio for flu preparedness.

We need to sit down as a global community and address Gain of Function now. Scientists need to produce a foolproof design, perhaps an enhanced version of BSL4, for future experimentation that all but eliminates the risk of escape and we need to ensure that any changes are implemented and rigorously policed. Organizations like the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) have proven themselves hopelessly unsuited to either determining risk or monitoring facilities.

An independent body, divorced from the role of science, needs to be established to monitor global GOF research involving PPP. The question now is who that would be and the World Health Organization is clearly not a candidate. They have proven themselves, over the duration of the pandemic, to be woefully ill-equipped to either address the demands of new emergent science or to cope with the dynamics of imminent threat. To date, they’ve been hugely non-commital on what they refer to as dual use research of concern (DURC).

All in all, it’s a series of events that will require a level of cooperation beyond anything we’ve been able to achieve over the course of the pandemic and that may prove to be its undoing. We may just simply resort to bans or moratoriums on a country-by-country basis that restrict GOF research on anything that could remotely be considered an end-of-days pathogen.

The research scientists rushing about their laboratories trying to force five years of research into an ever-narrowing window may already have seen the writing on the wall.

I’ll leave you with a quote from David A. Relman, from the 2015 Nature article referenced above. Do click on the referenced article in the quote.

More than twice a week in US laboratories, there is a ‘possible release event’ or a ‘possible loss event’, even if we look only at select agents — some of the most dangerous pathogens. For every 1,000 lab-years of work in BSL-3 laboratories in the United States with select agents, there are at least 2 accidental infections.

The post Gain of Function Research. Have We Opened Pandora’s Box? appeared first on Medika Life.

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

1. 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.
2. NIH RePORT: Managed by the NIH,a treasure trove of searchable information relating to funding, grants, and research stretching back years.

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