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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.
GOF is dangerous, but it's not useless. The Ebola vaccine was developed on top of GOF research on Ebola (including making an airborne variant)
I have not heard of this, but a quick perusal of the literature has not turned up anything that supports your claims.
There's no airborne variant of Ebola, even an artificial one, AFAIK. There were experiments on aerosolizing it, and the VSV vaccine was tested for ability to protect from aerosol exposure in Macaques, as a proxy for protection against bioterrorism.
I do not see a reason to phrase the claim the way you do, there appears to be little to support the claim that GOF helped with the vaccine (beyond the usual need to test the vaccine on the actual pathogen), let alone that GOF was strictly necessary for the purpose of making a vaccine. We make vaccines all the time without GOF, I do not see how it is a requisite. Ebola is not that special as a disease.
I do not want to jump to claiming that you are intentionally lying or being misleading, but I do still think you are factually incorrect, and I must insist on citations.
Edit: To be clear, I am specifically talking about GOF for virulence and lethality.
Out of curiosity, are airborne and droplet borne viruses that structurally similar to contact or food/water borne viruses? Is airborne Ebola like worrying about cars suddenly flying like planes, or are we talking a few base pairs for smaller adaptations?
Roughly, yes, depending how wide your lens is and precisely what you mean by structure. Most airborne viruses are RNA based, but many bloodborne pathogens (Ebola, HIV, HCV, etc) are also RNA viruses. If you meant shape, icosahedral is most common but there's plenty of variety and overlap between bloodborne/airborne (Ebola is long and filamentous).
More than 'structure' (depending what you meant by that), you should pay attention to tropism. Ebola expresses surface proteins that enable it to initially infect immune cells, then various endothelial (blood vessel) and other structural cells which are not accessible in the airways. COVID has a surface protein that binds ACE2, which is expressed on the surfaces of airways, part of the gut, etc. Other viral proteins are also key for proliferating in a given cell type, but you can get a lot of mileage out of just looking at the spike proteins and which receptors they bind.
Could you make turbo airborne Ebola by grafting COVID spike protein onto the surface of the Ebola capsid, and misting some into a volunteers face? Hey, sounds like a Nature paper to me!
...but also probably not, I doubt it would work without a pretty significant engineering effort beyond that simple change. So more akin to cars flying like planes. I'm not aware of any viruses that are known to have drastically changed routes of transmission like that.
I was thinking things like size, envelope, and things like that. IIRC norovirus is physically robust as viruses go: is that a trade off against airborne transmission? But it's been a long time since I took a biology class.
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