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It is with great anger that I say they're doing it again. Indeed, they never stopped.
https://biosafetynow.substack.com/p/you-couldnt-make-body-bags-fast-enough
They're making super dangerous airborne diseases in ferrets... For no good reason at all. Would this be dangerous for people? Who knows? You'd have to test it which is ethically and logically even more dangerous. So there is no value to this research. All we know is that 'this specific disease could be super dangerous' and they helpfully put its genome up on the internet.
If the disease is dangerous to humans like it is for ferrets and does leak out, then we're in for COVID with huge lethality rates, 30% rather than a measly 0.3%.
I think there is a real blindspot about people's motivations that many don't fully appreciate. There were all these conspiracy theories going around about how COVID was a US bioweapons attack against China or Iran, a plot to shackle everyone with vaccines... But so far as I can tell nobody had anything to gain besides publishing some 'good' papers. These scientists were just doing science with complete disdain for the risks. They were going out to caves to gather these coronaviruses and bring them to Wuhan. Daszak/Ecohealth were using humanized mice (mice that behave immunologically like humans) to assess pandemic potential of bat coronaviruses. They wanted to insert some furin cleavage sites too.
Then we get a virus in Wuhan. It's closest ancestor was from Laos. How did it get to Wuhan? In a truck. How did Covid get so good at infecting people? It was engineered, with those humanized mice. How did it get that weird furin cleavage site? Artificially.
And naturally the Wuhan virology database disappears due to 'hacking attempts' just before this virus is released. So nobody quite knows what viruses they were working with... Ironically this completely undoes even the silly scientific angle, they made all this effort to make a database of viruses and then conceal it forever due to 'hacking'.
And none of this is even helpful in any serious way! Who cares? The amount of super-dangerous viruses that could possibly exist is beyond measure. At least with AI there are some positive usecases.
Claude choked up even thinking and researching about this stuff that human scientists are getting paid to do. They keep doing it, there is no sign that they've stopped, even after the last lab leak killed tens of millions of people and made a huge inconvenience for everyone on the planet, they somehow persuaded everyone it was low-class to conspiracize about it. Everyone was just supposed to get over the experts bringing us Torment Nexus 1, Torment Nexus 2, 3 and 4 are still in the works (funded by taxpayers). The experts find that the experts were not to blame, there was some bat pangolin farce instead. They'll do it again unless stopped. GOF bioresearchers delenda est.
I think this misunderstands what they are trying to do. There has been, for a long time, a large community studying virus evolution and spread. And if you monitor influenza, globally and in different species, you ideally would want to know what you're actually looking for. No use having petabytes of genetic data, but no way to actually analyze it, or really, make some useful predictions.
Gain of function research tries to help with that. Identify which changes/mutations are actually worth watching. Identify what will spread fast, what will go airborne, what will kill, and what might jump to humans. They hope that next time, we'll have a bit more advance warning, or maybe a vaccine approaching the effectiveness of the polio shot. Having so damn much antigenic drift won't safe influenza if the vaccine directly targets what makes this specific strain so successful.
And all this isn't just a "saving humanity" moonshot/insurance against a black swan event. There's very practical applications - it would be nice if we didn't have to destroy 100 million chickens every 5 years because the farms got infected with bird flue, again.
At least that's the dream. Whether that's actually doable and/or worth the risk is another question. Maybe those people should really be send to Antarctica, or onto a decommissioned oil rig only serviced by a very slow ship. Maybe their current security measures are fine, I haven't updated on the COVID lab leak story an a while. But during the thick of it, I found the arguments of the counter-side more convincing.
Correct. The problem is that prominent researchers care more about socialization than safety, and laugh at the idea.
No, that's not the problem. "Prominent researchers" don't ever get close to the contagious ferrets unless it's necessary for a press photo to go with the release of their most recent Nature paper... The people producing the data on the oil rig lab, or in the antarctic darkness or who are stuck on the slow quarantine supply boat are grad students and lab techs. They'll do it for the paper, the title, the story and the love of the game.
The problem is that oil rigs and research labs in Antarctica are more expensive than university basements in cities.
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