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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.
This is the ultimate black pill.
Not that few thousands people (at most) are playing Russian roulette with gun pressed to the collective head of all mankind, but that the mankind as a whole DNGAF.
This is not like fossil fuel industry, that is absolute necessity or like AI that promises unlimited knowledge, wealth, power and control.
With gain of function, only thing it gains are some papers and articles published in prestigious journals no one will ever read.
And no one, including the most rich and powerful, sees problem with it, even when they could perish together with billions of plebes when the next oops happens.
It would not take much to end it. Imagine, for example, if someone close to Putin and trusted by him (yea, there is probably few such people, if any) explained to Vladimir Vladimirovich what is gain of function research and what it does.
It would be hard, VVP is Soviet boomer raised to worship science and experts, but he is legit most powerful individual in the world (or maybe second most powerful, no one knows what checks and balances actually exist in Chinese politburo. There are effectively none in Russia).
And VVP really does not want to die, not in nuclear war and even less while coughing his lungs off. It would not take more than few dozen scientists worldwide meeting unlucky accidents for the rest to give up and find some other work.
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