Earlier: Your Taxpayer Dollars at Work: Federal Scientists Plan On Concocting A More Lethal Monkeypox Virus
From Nick Patterson’s Substack:
Patterson started out doing Alan Turing–like codebreaking for British intelligence, then did a decade at the Renaissance hedge fund (the one that is so good that they won’t let outsiders invest in it because it makes so much money only the partners and workers get to invest), and then went to work as the key employee at David Reich’s ancient DNA lab.
So listen to what Mr. Patterson has to say. I don’t offer my own opinion on the origin of COVID because it’s over my head, but I know enough to listen to somebody with this track record:
I was not intending to write more about COVID-19 and the need for much more regulation of extraordinarily dangerous research, but recent events have made me change my mind. My readers will know that I believe that it is overwhelmingly likely that COVID-19 was a virus engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), that escaped by accident.
Very briefly, a proposal was made in 2018 to engineer a virus that would look remarkably like COVID-19, and study its properties at WIV. It is just too much of a coincidence that the COVID outbreak should then begin in Wuhan. However we are losing this argument in the court of public opinion – see for example a recent article in Foreign Policy magazine Conspiracy Theories About COVID-19 Help Nobody. There are contrary informed voices though. For instance: Sachs:link describes the views of Jeffrey Sachs, on the inadequate investigation of COVID origins, and where the truth may lie.
It seems that some people who disbelieve that COVID-19 was caused by a lab leak, argue that there is no reason to think that gain-of-function research that creates very dangerous pathogens needs strict regulation. There is no logic to this. Whatever the origins of COVID, there is no doubt at all that Peter Daszak of EcoHealth and WIV wished to carry out an enormously dangerous experiment with little benefit to science or medicine. Such work needs to be prevented.
Now, last week, a preprint was published, Here is a link. BU:link by a research group at Boston University. From the abstract:
We generated chimeric recombinant SARS-CoV-2 encoding the S gene of Omicron in the backbone of an ancestral SARS-CoV-2 isolate and compared this virus with the naturally circulating Omicron variant. The Omicron S-bearing virus robustly escapes vaccine-induced humoral immunity, mainly due to mutations in the receptor49 binding motif (RBM), yet unlike naturally occurring Omicron, efficiently replicates in cell lines and primary-like distal lung cells. In K18-hACE2 mice, while Omicron causes mild, non-fatal infection, the Omicron S-carrying virus inflicts severe disease with a mortality rate of 80%.
In layman’s terms they took two strains of COVID-19, one being highly transmissible, the other causing relatively high mortality after infection. They combined the two strains and made a virus which by testing they showed to be both highly transmissible and highly lethal in mice.
The scientific benefits of this work are very minor… The risks are obvious, a lab escape could have killed millions.
Work like this is not technically very hard. I guess that more than a thousand labs could have done it. …
Maybe this is the answer to the Fermi Paradox?
… We need laws to stop this, strict regulation and enforcement, and violations punishable under the criminal code, including long prison sentences for the principal investigators.
… Indeed, what could possibly go wrong
