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Two days ago this preprint was posted: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.13.512134v1.full.pdf
They made a COVID variant that robustly escapes vaccine-induced immunity, is more infectious (if I'm reading this correctly) than Omicron and has a lethality of 80%. Now the lethality is only in humanized-lung mice not primates and the sample size for this particular part of the test was only 10, so 80% = 8/10. IMO this is a tiny silver lining in a Jovian-sized thundercloud.
Why are they doing this? Does the world really need the information that if you mess with parts of Omicron, COVID and the spike proteins, you get something that makes Ebola look benign? Do we really need super-COVID chimeras being fabricated by American scientists? If this work absolutely has to be done, could we not do it in Antarctica, behind a 6 month quarantine for anything or anyone that leaves? They actually did it in a BSL-3, not even a top level BSL-4 lab.
I think they shouldn't have done this work and certainly shouldn't have published it upon doing it and finding these results.
It really puts a dark spin on Boston's 'National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories' who helped with this operation. And of course, this got NAID funding too, so your American tax dollars are going towards this. There seems to be loop where bio-scientists decide to do really exciting, fulfilling work making chimeras, slicing up viruses and sticking them together, adding furin cleavage sites. Internally they wonder about the possibilities of human manipulation in the origins of COVID. But officially they stick to a party line that it's just a natural evolution. Otherwise all hell breaks lose, there's a massive blow to the credibility of their profession and an end to the gravy train of exciting, fun research and govt grants. And so because there's no official stance that the leak had anything to do with gain-of-function, of humanized cells in mice being used to test these horrors, then the fun continues!
To put in defense nerd terms: If you want to having meaningful and useful capacities for future conflicts, you must generate a robust and threatening opposing force. You have to look at what you have, and commit serios months of planning and pallets of money to asking "How would I destroy my own army as safely as possible?", you need to circulate it and get commentary and run war games and do all sorts of wacky shit, because if you don't the first time you come up against something that you didn't specifically design for, you are fucked.
Hence, this. You can make arguments that it does more harm than good, or is risky. On the other hand, we have seen that just assuming every tomorrow will be like yesterday and things are just gonna be fine tomorrow is fucking stupid.
So, it's down to risk assessment; which is a notoriously easy field that humans are naturally good at.
If you want useful capacity for future conflicts, you shouldn't publicise the specifics of how the weapon works! If you're going to do this kind of dangerous research, why publish it freely for others to copy? What if some unscrupulous businessman decides "I'll make this virus by following their instructions, release it, short markets and make loads of money"? Then there is the potential for other state/non-state terrorists to use it. And if you are going to do this kind of dangerous research, do it somewhere remote and extremely secure, not a BSL-3 (not even BSL-4) lab near a major city.
I absolutely think this stuff does more harm than good. COVID originated from Wuhan lab. I base this conclusion off the absence of any known biological transmission (after the cave bats in Laos that were infected with the closest biological ancestor). Nobody found the pangolin, the missing link for the natural emergence case remains missing. We know that Wuhan lab was importing bats from caves in Laos, amongst other places. We know Daszak of Ecohealth in Wuhan was asking for money to insert furin cleavage sites into these bat coronaviruses - COVID was a bat virus with a furin cleavage site. The cleavage site, important for how the disease develops, is unlikely to emerge naturally without other changes to the genome - yet this is what happened. It was probably done artificially by the Ecohealth people who were asking for money to do just that (the US turned them down for the initial grant a few years prior to COVID but they could've found another source of funds).
Even Daszak himself admits that this specific kind of research is the most dangerous we could possibly be doing, using humanized mice to make a virus that's familiar with infecting us humans.
And say we do do this research - what do we get out of it? We make a more powerful version of COVID, or a dangerous kind of virus that doesn't yet exist in the wild. Do we make vaccines for potential viruses that only exist in the lab? There are surely hundreds, thousands, millions of potentially horrendous diseases we could make. We can't make vaccines for all of them.
You go from "this is unlikely to happen naturally" to "it was probably artificial, and I know who did it!". That looks like a huge leap to me.
Are you an expert on molecular biology, epidemiology, etc.? I'm not. I'm getting most of my information from this Wikipedia article, checking out the references, googling. My impression is that the investigation of the lab-leak theory was initially hindered when Trump endorsed the theory, which made it part of the culture war, but now it's back on track: it's no longer a taboo topic, people are looking into it and there's a healthy discussion going on, which should eventually produce some kind of consensus.
Every claim about ‘no evidence’ in the wiki article should be treated adversarially. The DEFUSE grant seems like a close to a smoking gun as we can expect. The work justifying grants and the work paid for by grants are often chronologically inverted, where you get novel data, ask for money to generate said data, then use that money to get new data which you later ask for more money to get. Research is not cheap so the funding streams have to be gamed if you want your lab assistants to keep getting paychecks, so a good PI is not going to wait for a specific grant approval to start a particular line of investigation that looks fruitful.
I’m personally at 90/10 that it was a lab leak, with the remainder being that EcoHealth alliance was doing sketchy GoF and/or bio-‘defense’ work that would look bad even if they weren’t directly responsible for COVID-19 itself. Jeffery Sachs has had some interesting stuff to say about conflicts of interest with most of the people investigating the lab leak hypothesis in the early days if you want to dig a bit deeper.
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