4-24-2020 In December 2009 Reuters reported that the Obama administration was refusing even to negotiate the possible monitoring of biological weapons….The legal scholar who drafted the main U.S. law on the subject, Francis Boyle, warned in his 2005 book "Biowarfare and Terrorism" that an "illegal biological arms race with potentially catastrophic consequences" was underway, largely driven by the U.S. government….A 2013 study found that biodefense funding since 2001 had totaled at least $78 billion, and more has surely been spent since then. This has led to a proliferation of laboratories, scientists and new organisms, effectively setting off a biological arms race. …
During this several year pause in synthetic virus research/development, exceptions for funding were made for dangerous gain-of-function lab work. This included work jointly done by U.S. scientists from the University of North Carolina, Harvard and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This work — which had funding from USAID and EcoHealth Alliance not originally acknowledged — was published in 2015 in Nature Medicine….
Indeed there is also the question of conflict of interest in the Nature Medicine article. Some of the authors of that article, as well as a February 2020 Lancet letter condemning "conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin" — which seemed calculated to minimize outside scrutiny of biodefense lab work — have troubling ties to the biodefense complex, as well as to the U.S. government. Notably, neither of these articles makes clear that a virus can have a natural origin and then be captured and studied in a controlled laboratory setting before being let loose, either intentionally or accidentally — which is clearly a possibility in the case of the coronavirus. …
CDC Principal Deputy Director Anne Schuchat stated, regarding gain-of-function lab work, that it is important to "protect researchers and their laboratory workers as well as the community around them and that we use science for the benefit of people."
I followed up by asking whether an alleged natural origin did not preclude the possibility that this virus came through a lab, since a lab could have acquired a bat virus and been working on it. Schuchat replied to the assembled journalists that "it is very common for rumors to emerge that can take on life of their own" but did not directly answer the question. She noted that in the 2014 Ebola outbreak some observers had pointed to nearby labs as the possible cause, claiming this "was a key rumor that had to be overcome in order to help control the outbreak."
This is no rumor. It's a fact: labs work with dangerous pathogens. The U.S. and China each have dual-use biowarfare/biodefense programs. China has major facilities at Wuhan — a biosafety level 4 lab and a biosafety level 2 lab. Much of the discussion of this deadly serious subject is marred with snark that avoids or dodges the "gain-of-function" question.
Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard Ebright in a private exchange, Ebright — who, again, has said clearly that the novel coronavirus was not technically bioengineered using known coronavirus sequences — stated that other forms of lab manipulation could have been responsible for the current pandemic.
In response to the suggestion that the novel coronavirus could have come about through various methods besides bioengineering — made by Dr. Meryl Nass, who has done groundbreaking work on biowarfare — Ebright responded in an email:
The genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 has no signatures of human manipulation. This rules out the kinds of gain-of-function (GoF) research that leave signatures of human manipulation in genome sequences (e.g., use of recombinant DNA methods to construct chimeric viruses), but does not rule out kinds of GoF research that do not leave signatures (e.g., serial passage in animals). [emphasis added]
Very easy to imagine the equivalent of the Fouchier's "10 passages in ferrets" with H5N1 influenza virus, but, in this case, with 10 passages in non-human primates with bat coronavirus RaTG13 or bat coronavirus KP876546.
That last paragraph is very important. It refers to virologist Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, who performed research on intentionally increasing rates of viral mutation rate by spreading a virus from one animal to another in a sequence. The New York Times wrote about this in an editorial in January 2012, warning of "An Engineered Doomsday." The word "engineering" in the New York Times headline is technically incorrect, since passing a virus through animals is not "genetic engineering." …
Fouchier's flu work, in which an H5N1 virus was made more virulent by transmitting it repeatedly between individual ferrets, briefly sent shockwaves through the media. "Locked up in the bowels of the medical faculty building here and accessible to only a handful of scientists lies a man-made flu virus that could change world history if it were ever set free," wrote Science magazine in 2011 in a story titled "Scientists Brace for Media Storm Around Controversial Flu Studies." It continues:
The virus is an H5N1 avian influenza strain that has been genetically altered and is now easily transmissible between ferrets, the animals that most closely mimic the human response to flu. Scientists believe it's likely that the pathogen, if it emerged in nature or were released, would trigger an influenza pandemic, quite possibly with many millions of deaths.
In a 17th floor office in the same building, virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center calmly explains why his team created what he says is "probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make" — and why he wants to publish a paper describing how they did it. Fouchier is also bracing for a media storm. After he talked to ScienceInsider yesterday, he had an appointment with an institutional press officer to chart a communication strategy.
Fouchier's paper is one of two studies that have triggered an intense debate about the limits of scientific freedom and that could portend changes in the way U.S. researchers handle so-called dual-use research: studies that have a potential public health benefit but could also be useful for nefarious purposes like biowarfare or bioterrorism.
Despite objections, Fouchier's article was published by Science in June 2012. Titled "Airborne Transmission of Influenza A/H5N1 Virus Between Ferrets," it summarized how Fouchier's research team made the pathogen more virulent:
Highly pathogenic avian influenza A/H5N1 virus can cause morbidity and mortality in humans but thus far has not acquired the ability to be transmitted by aerosol or respiratory droplet ("airborne transmission") between humans. To address the concern that the virus could acquire this ability under natural conditions, we genetically modified A/H5N1 virus by site-directed mutagenesis and subsequent serial passage in ferrets. The genetically modified A/H5N1 virus acquired mutations during passage in ferrets, ultimately becoming airborne transmissible in ferrets.
In other words, Fouchier's research took a flu virus that did not exhibit airborne transmission, then infected a number of ferrets until it mutated to the point that it was transmissible by air.
In 2014 Marc Lipsitch of Harvard and Alison P. Galvani of Yale wrote regarding Fouchier and Kawaoka's work:
Recent experiments that create novel, highly virulent and transmissible pathogens against which there is no human immunity are unethical ... they impose a risk of accidental and deliberate release that, if it led to extensive spread of the new agent, could cost many lives….
Lynn Klotz of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation wrote a paper "Human Error in High-biocontainment Labs: A Likely Pandemic Threat”: Incidents causing potential exposures to pathogens occur frequently in the high security laboratories often known by their acronyms, BSL3 (Biosafety Level 3) and BSL4. Lab incidents that lead to undetected or unreported laboratory-acquired infections can lead to the release of a disease into the community outside the lab; lab workers with such infections will leave work carrying the pathogen with them. If the agent involved were a potential pandemic pathogen, such a community release could lead to a worldwide pandemic with many fatalities. Of greatest concern is a release of a lab-created, mammalian-airborne-transmissible, highly pathogenic avian influenza virus, such as the airborne-transmissible H5N1 viruses created in the laboratories of Ron Fouchier in the Netherlands and Yoshihiro Kawaoka in Madison, Wisconsin.
Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois, has condemned Fouchier, Kawaoka and others — including at least one of the authors of the recent Nature Medicine article in the strongest terms, calling such work a "criminal enterprise”: Since September 11, 2001, we have spent around $100 billion on biological warfare. Effectively we now have an Offensive Biological Warfare Industry in this country that violates the Biological Weapons Convention and my Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989. So what the world now witnesses is an all-out offensive biological warfare arms race among the major military powers of the world: United States, Russia, Britain, France, China, Israel, inter alia....
The work they are doing is absolutely crazy. The whole thing is exceedingly dangerous," said Lord May, the former president of the Royal Society and one time chief science adviser to the UK government. "Yes, there is a danger, but it's not arising from the viruses out there in the animals, it's arising from the labs of grossly ambitious people.”…
The secrecy of these labs may prevent us ever knowing with certainty the origins of the current pandemic.
-SAM HUSSEINI Twitter: @samhusseini https://www.salon.com/2020/04/24/did-this-virus-come-from-a-lab-maybe-not--but-it-exposes-the-threat-of-a-biowarfare-arms-race/
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