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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.
While I am far from 100% certain that Covid was a lab leak, I take the possibility seriously. I share your frustration with GOF research, there is no way in hell that the potential benefits are proportional to the risks.
Unless the lab is working in Antarctica, or at least a highly isolated environment with strict screening and quarantine for all workers (weeks to months) and far from population centers, it is a stupid game played for stupid prizes. If your primary motivation is a well stuffed CV, then I would not object if you were hit by a car. If the people doing it genuinely believe they are acting in the public interest, I am dismayed, and would still seek lawsuits for unconscionable negligence.
The best place to intentionally make hyper virulent and lethal novel pathogens is somewhere in the orbit of the Moon. If you can't do that yet, it's best not to try in the first place.
Just to reiterate those proportions: 7.1 million confirmed deaths, estimated 19-36 million deaths. Make the math easy and call it 10 million deaths. If you think there is a 1% chance it was lab leak then that is 100k deaths caused by lab leak.
My mother is a PhD microbiologist. She hasn't actively worked in the field in decades. Last time she did lab work it was for Monsanto's agriculture/husbandry products. I've argued with her about GoF research. She got upset with Rand Paul when he was grilling Fauci about GoF research. I felt at the time it was more of a circle the wagons type reaction, aka she saw a Scientist getting attacked by a politician and blue tribe brain had her reflexively defending the scientist. Never-mind the facts that Fauci is more of an administrator, and Rand Paul was an MD for longer than Fauci did anything resembling lab work.
In separate conversations I removed the names and political events and she agreed on the danger of these medical experiments. She even added additional reasons to be scared. Her descriptions of labs she worked in were not what you'd hope for with people handling potentially dangerous biological samples. But even agreeing on the danger of the experiments she didn't think they should be banned. Her objection is that "Gain of Function" research is way too broad of a term and could ban far more useful research. For example, messing around with Yeast so that it can ferment an additional fruit or vegetable for alcohol consumption could be considered "gain of function" research.
I respond back 'well then just ban working with the deadly pathogens'. She hits back that E. coli can be very dangerous but is used in a bunch of research simply because its ease of use.
It goes on: Ok, how about just banning GoF related to transmissibility or virulence. Well apparently that might ban vaccine research for existing viruses.
You end up in a situation where the people best suited to recognize and stop the dangerous forms of microbiological research are the same people that want to conduct it in the first place. Which is where we were 2019.
I generally think that its ok to trust scientists and that they can self regulate with their dangerous toys, and that was my viewpoint for biological research back then. Now I'm in alignment with everyone here, fuck this research, it needs to end and we can't trust you with these dangerous toys. Scientists, you had your chance to self regulate. Sorry if we are wrong about the cause, but we can't trust you to investigate yourself, and even a 1% chance of lab leak means you killed 100k people. I still can't convince my mom though.
A permanent end to such research would cost us the possibility of spotting potential pandemics before they occur naturally, and having preparations in place to stop them, thus condemning the Human Race to forever living under the Sword of Damocles of pandemics with death tolls in the 7-/8-digit range at best, and 9/10 digits at worst. (I once came across a story of a post-collapse society which believed that preventing people from dying of infectious disease was morally wrong because it 'interfered with the balance of Nature', i. e. denying her the ability to commit mass homicide whenever she felt like it; it was at that moment that I realised that I understood the meaning of the word 'cuck', and that my disagreement with the frog-posters was a matter of my considering the relevant 'race' to be one that includes Charlemagne, Sejong, Mansa Musa, Hiawatha, and all 400+ of these people.)
However, recent progress in spaceflight has opened the possibility that dangerous research could be conducted away from inhabited planets; thus potentially hazardous biological experiments do not need to be permanently ended, merely delayed until a secure bio-lab can be constructed in a heliocentric orbit away from earth.
I don't think that is true at all. Some of the most likely crossover diseases are from livestock. And tracking livestock diseases would not fall under the umbrella of GoF research.
Assessing a livestock disease seems as safe as having livestock in the first place, so there is no added risk.
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