Yeah, that Bulletin article is excellent.
Nicholas Wade did a great job of collecting readily available evidence, all of it preceding the outbreak, that points directly at Shi, Daszak, Baric and the people who funded their Gain of Function research as the culprits who unleashed the Covid-19 virus on the world.
It looks like it was done unwittingly, but they had plenty of warning that what they were doing with GoF was exceedingly dangerous.
Several years ago I was learning about CRISPR, the technology that has made gene editing so simple you could do it in your garage. And if you wanted to try it with hot zone pathogens you might be able to create a near-extinction virus just for the hell of it. Shi and friends appear to have done it out of negligence and stupidity. Fortunately Covid didn’t turn out to be nearly as lethal as SARS-1 and MERS.
It is indeed fortunate!
They think SARS1 burned itself out because it is only transmissible when the patient is symptomatic, so contact tracing and quarantine of contagious individuals was sufficient to finally contain it. It killed about 8,000 worldwide first, though, and had a case fatality rate of about 10%.
Not so with Covid19, which can be transmitted before symptoms appear — so it looks like we’re stuck with it, along with the Corona viruses that can cause common colds. Let’s hope it keeps getting milder and milder.
Personally, I think this type of GoF research should stop.
I get why the researchers want to keep on with it. Not only the grant money, but their interest in doing this work as well. They love the process and the challenges. Remember how, as little kids, we would get all absorbed in building something or other out of Tinker Toys or Legos and imagine we could build this really cool thing if we only had more, or they made them in different shapes or sizes? I think they get caught up in that mindset, too.
The original purpose was to benefit mankind. But so far as I know, this GoF research has yet to identify a real-world case of a virus’s incipient leap from animals to humans or predict the emergence of any new disease. I could be wrong and would appreciate correction if I am.
It also looks like Shi went well beyond the bounds of likely mutations of that bat virus. Wade doesn’t say so, but a close reading gave me that sense. I get trying to figure out the worst case scenario, but it appeared she was starting to take “what if” too far and perhaps into the territory of “what if space aliens blew up Mars?” What are the chances? You can’t say zero, but ... I can see why some think she might have actually been trying to develop a bioweapon. Me, I think she just got carried away. Had she truly had the goal of creating a bioweapon, she would have confined the work to the BSL4 lab, and her big bosses would have insisted on it.
I can understand why these researchers don’t want to admit their life’s work should be stopped, that the risks far outweigh any potential benefit. But it appears to me they do. Yet no one is talking about this, no one is all up in arms about it. There’s no debate. Odd, isn’t it?