URGENT: A new Chinese paper shows (again) why gain-of-function research on risky viruses should be banned as a crime against humanity

It's all downside, except for the scientists who get paid to do it. What are we waiting for, another lab leak?

We don’t let medicinal chemists insist they can make designer opioids.

We don’t let nuclear engineers tell us they get to play with plutonium in private labs.

So why have we let virologists hijack the debate over whether they should be allowed to make risky viruses - especially respiratory viruses like the flu - even deadlier?

Over four years after Sars-Cov-2 escaped from a Chinese laboratory and killed millions of people, we are hardly closer to restricting, much less banning, the insane research tricks known as “gain-of-function.” Effectively, this work makes viruses and bacteria more dangerous - either more transmissible, more virulent, or both.

Even worse, the usual triad of scientists, the elite media, and Democratic politicians has blocked serious discussion of how restrictions might work in practice. While Republicans in the House of Representatives passed a bill in November to restrict gain-of-function research, the Senate and the White House have largely ignored it.

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(They can’t block ALL the discussion, though. Help me keep up the pressure.)

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And so dangerous viral research continues worldwide.

Another screaming red alert came earlier this month, in a story that should have received worldwide attention but instead was confined to the fringes of Twitter.

On Jan. 4, Chinese researchers published a “preprint” paper reporting the lethality of a modified pangolin coronavirus. The researchers used the new virus to infect mice that had been genetically altered to make the ACE2 protein, which is common in human cells and a target of Sars-Cov-2.

All of the ACE2 mice they infected with the pangolin coronavirus died, apparently from “late-stage brain infections.”

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(Lethal Infection. That’s not good, right?)

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But the coronavirus the Chinese researchers studied does not exist in nature.

It was created in a lab by being repeatedly “passaged” through cells.

Cell culture passage is a common laboratory technique that doesn’t necessarily have to be used for gain-of-function research. But it causes rapid mutations in coronaviruses. In their paper, the Chinese scientists refer to “the propensity of coronaviruses to undergo adaptive mutation during passage culture.”

In this case, the cell passage led the pangolin coronavirus to lose a chunk of its genetic base. The newly modified virus proved able to infect the brains of mice - once they had been genetically altered to be more like humans in their response to viruses. As the researchers wrote:

Surprisingly, all the mice that were infected with the live virus succumbed to the infection within 7-8 days post-inoculation, rendering a mortality rate of 100%.

The researchers infected only a handful of mice, and their finding doesn’t prove the virus would be lethal in humans, who have more layered and sophisticated immune defenses. Still, as they wrote, the research “underscores a spillover risk of [the modified coronavirus] into humans.”

Of course, the spillover is only a risk if it leaks from a lab.

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(I fixed the headline.)

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The usual rationale for such risky research is that it may help scientists determine which viruses may mutate to become future threats. Yet Covid itself shows the falsity of that premise.

Pretend that Sars-Cov-2 did not leak from a Chinese lab (though it did). In that case, it emerged in Wuhan, where advanced coronavirus research was being conducted. Yet that research offered scientists no warning into the virus’s potential risks or how to treat it until it had already spread beyond any possible containment.

Nor, despite massive efforts, have virologists predicted any Sars-Cov-2 variants in advance. Omicron in particular came as a surprise.

We simply do not know enough about how viruses mutate or interact with our immune systems (or other variants) to be able to predict what they will do. All we can do is respond to them once they emerge.

Gain-of-function research is also theoretically useful in creating advanced vaccines. But the failure of the mRNAs shows how clumsy our vaccine technology remains.

We can sequence viruses quickly once they become widespread threats and create jabs that will ramp up our immune systems using either mRNA or older technology. But the coronavirus and influenza viruses in particular mutate quickly, and vaccines may actually hamper our immune system as it tries to deal with new variants.

In other words, we can roll out “vaccines” for respiratory viruses very quickly, but that doesn’t mean they will work long-term. Generations of viral research has not solved this problem.

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What we do know is that research labs - in China, the United States, Russia, Europe, and everywhere else - regularly suffer leaks and safety crises. It doesn’t matter how well run they are, how competent the scientists are. People make mistakes even when they are working with the most dangerous of pathogens.

In May 2010, a 24-year-old French researcher named Émilie Jaumain cut open her thumb while cleaning a machine used to cut brain sections from mice infected with a version of mad-cow disease, which is caused by misfolded proteins called prions.

Nine years later, Jaumain died horribly after a prion disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob destroyed her brain.

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(Misfolded prions don’t care if you’re beautiful.)

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But despite decades of evidence that gain-of-function research on dangerous viruses has risks far greater than its rewards - and the damage from Covid - the public health bureaucracy, media, and Democrats have refused to take serious action to stop it.

The main reason for the reluctance, aside from financial concerns for a relative handful of scientists, appears to be that the media and Democrats (sorry, I repeat myself) do not want to admit they were wrong about the origins of Sars-Cov-2.

In 2020 and 2021, reporters like Apoorva Mandavilli of the New York Times tried to smear anyone who pointed out the potential link as a conspiracy theorist and anti-Asian.

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(Alas.)

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But the egos of reporters and Democratic lawmakers can no longer be an obstacle to reining in gain-of-function research. The risks are just too high to let it continue without international controls.

Figuring out exactly what research - on which pathogens, using which techniques - must be restricted is a difficult technical question. Convincing China and other countries to restrict this work will be even more complex.

But we have to try. Sars-Cov-2 was relatively innocuous compared to some of the beasts lurking in labs worldwide, yet it still did huge damage. We will have another leak of a respiratory pathogen that’s been souped up in a lab. Maybe it’s decades away, maybe it’s days.

And we may not be so lucky next time.