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Comment by 2-718-281-828 | Hacker News Reader

„In a limited number of cases when a full virus does not contain any known gain of function mutations, such virus may be engineered to enable the assessment of antiviral activity in cells.“

via https://nitter.net/Tim_Roehn/status/1619281947741806592#m

so they practice gain of function.

and i bet they don't do that in the us. wasn't there some interesting back and forth about ominous us led bio engineering labs in the ukraine? someone with a link to that senate hearing with rand paul iirc. </TFH>

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"It is important to note that these studies are required by U.S. and global regulators for all antiviral products" - i think this bit of the paragraph you highlighted changes the meaning somewhat.

Exactly this.

It is laughable that the conservatives/Republicans/Fascists of my country (US) are all against evil X. And they literally do not understand what evil X is. But they are indeed against it.

It is hard to see what the end game of this nonsense. I am sure there is an ending part to it but so far it is just dummies saying gain of function over and over hoping it sticks.

conservatives/Republicans/Fascists of my country

Speaking of saying something over and over and hoping it sticks..

There's sufficient evidence to back up that statement.

big pharma definitely isn't known for handing large sums of money to regulators and outright creating many regulations to entrench themselves and creating a moat for startups. These multi-billion dollar multinational corporations having nothing but the publics best interest at heart and don't care about profit at all

In addition to the fact that pharma tends to write their own regulations, as ren_engineer pointed out, it's ambiguous what "these studies" refers to. It could refer only to the "in vitro resistance selection experiments" mentioned, and not require gain-of-function engineering - a requirement I would find highly surprising.

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