In Major Shift, NIH Admits Funding Risky Virus Research in Wuhan

As usual, the news is not about what happened but how it may have been covered up.

In the end, you need research on viruses to understand how they work and how to stop them. And the fact that the public should be treated like children and that transparency would lead to misunderstanding is shortsighted.

They also should spend some time explaining what gain-of-function means. It means adding "functionality" to a virus to increase their transmissibility to new species for example. If you research a virus to understand it and, in the course of your experiment, increase the transmissibility, it is not gain-of-function because the gain was not the objective. It's all a matter of intentions.

Are we going to stop trying to understand viruses? No but we definitely be transparent about it and make sure that we do it securely. Which is probably not what happened in Wuhan.

"On September 20, a group of internet sleuths calling themselves DRASTIC (short for Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19) released a leaked $14 million grant proposal that EcoHealth Alliance had submitted in 2018 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

It proposed partnering with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and constructing SARS-related bat coronaviruses into which they would insert “human-specific cleavage sites” as a way to “evaluate growth potential” of the pathogens. Perhaps not surprisingly, DARPA rejected the proposal, assessing that it failed to fully address the risks of gain-of-function research.

The leaked grant proposal struck a number of scientists and researchers as significant for one reason. One distinctive segment of SARS-CoV-2’s genetic code is a furin cleavage site that makes the virus more infectious by allowing it to efficiently enter human cells. That is just the feature that EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology had proposed to engineer in the 2018 grant proposal. “If I applied for funding to paint Central Park purple and was denied, but then a year later we woke up to find Central Park painted purple, I’d be a prime suspect,” said Jamie Metzl, a former executive vice president of the Asia Society, who sits on the World Health Organization’s advisory committee on human genome editing and has been calling for a transparent investigation into COVID-19’s origins."

Regardless of the pandemic's origin, I find it difficult to understand why the US and China would collaborate on biotechnology research that could be weaponized easily, when the two countries are constantly at each other's throats with offensive hacking campaigns and saber rattling around the South China Sea.

"Analysis of published genomic data and other documents from the grantee demonstrate that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant are genetically far distant from SARS-CoV-2 and could not possibly have caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Any claims to the contrary are demonstrably false."

https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statem...