I think it was the lying. As in dead bodies lying about.
Also the:
From The New Atlantis, Spring 2025 edition:
For years, scientists kept the debate about risky virus research among themselves. Then Covid happened. As President Trump prepares to crack down on virology research, the expert community must face up to its own failures.
Shortly after the outbreak of the Covid pandemic in early 2020, rumors started to circulate that the virus that triggered it came from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. This story was quickly rejected by expert institutions and mainstream media outlets as an empirically baseless and even racist conspiracy theory — a verdict propagated through social media by fact checkers who deemed such claims to be misinformation.
The scientific community’s “overwhelming” conclusion, declared a now infamous letter in The Lancet in March 2020, was that “this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” and jumped from animals to humans. Yet as the pandemic worsened, it became clear that the alleged scientific consensus around the natural origins of Covid-19 was tenuous at best and disingenuous at worst. By the spring of 2021, the so-called “lab leak” hypothesis had gone sufficiently mainstream that it was the subject of widespread media coverage and even an official White House investigation. Rather than resolving the issue, that investigation further highlighted the divisions within the expert and intelligence communities.
The ongoing battle over “Covid origins” — a tale of deception and coverup to some, a lesson in politicization and disinformation to others — is by now familiar, if complicated and contested. While mainstream scientific opinion still holds that the virus likely originated with a natural spillover, the lab leak hypothesis is no longer dismissed out of hand and has in fact been endorsed, albeit with “low” or “moderate” confidence, by several federal agencies, including, most recently, the C.I.A. Revelations about the reckless behavior of researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, combined with the uncooperative and duplicitous response of the Chinese government, have offered strong circumstantial evidence of foul play. Meanwhile, the defensive and at times egregious behavior of some within the scientific community here in the United States only exacerbated the concerns of those who suspected them of complicity.
As with so many other scientific controversies in our political life, public opinion on Covid origins has come to track — and serve as a signifier for — partisan identity. This bodes ill for dispassionate investigation, which we must have if we want to know the truth about what actually threw the world into chaos for years and killed 27 million people.
At the same time, the controversy over Covid origins thrust into the center of our culture wars a substantive debate in science policy that has been raging among experts for decades, and will continue regardless of when or whether the true origin of the virus is established. That debate turns on the risks and benefits of the very kind of research alleged to have caused the pandemic.
On the one hand are virologists, specialists in the subfield of microbiology who study viruses. Many of them have long argued that experiments in which pathogens are genetically manipulated in ways that can render them more pathogenic, virulent, or transmissible — so-called “gain-of-function” experiments — provide invaluable sources of knowledge to help us prepare for future pandemics. On the other hand are critics, including microbiologists as well as experts in biosecurity, biosafety, and public health, who have long questioned whether these experiments are worth the risk. One of their primary concerns has been that rather than helping us prepare for future pandemics, gain-of-function experiments conducted on potentially dangerous pathogens could accidentally trigger a pandemic — precisely the kind of scenario some believe transpired in Wuhan in late 2019.
In the years leading up to Covid, the debate over gain-of-function research played out in the pages of scholarly journals and inside Washington bureaucracies in a largely technical language befitting those expert institutions. The result of this long and often highly fractious dispute was a new policy framework, released in May 2024, that was designed to strike the right balance between benefits and risks. That framework was in the early stages of implementation when Donald Trump won the presidency a second time. Now, there may be no balance left to strike.
Trump — along with key advisors such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., his Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Jay Bhattacharya, his nominee for director of the National Institutes of Health — is poised to ban gain-of-function research via executive order. Whether such an order effectively becomes the permanent policy of the administration or gets refined by executive agencies into yet another policy framework remains to be seen. But one thing appears almost certain: the virologists who argued so vehemently for the importance of their research have suddenly found themselves completely sidelined.
How did we get here? Why did the virologists lose the debate over gain-of-function research? And what lessons can we glean from their failure? The history of this debate, and my conversations with experts on both sides of it, point to a conclusion that many in the scientific community may find hard to swallow: that the governance of gain-of-function research was never a technical problem to be solved internally by specialists themselves, however pure their motives and however valuable their expertise. Rather, it was always a political issue of public concern, requiring accountability by the scientists and moral deliberation by the country. By failing to fully grapple with this reality, the experts brought upon themselves the crisis of public doubt that was looming over them.
Why Make Viruses Intentionally More Dangerous?
The term “gain of function,” little known to the public prior to Covid-19, is one of those terms that no one seems to like but is difficult to avoid, however imprecise or misleading it may be. Broadly speaking, it refers to a method of genetically manipulating organisms to confer new traits or enhance existing ones. The technique is widespread in the life sciences, and most of its uses are benign and uncontroversial. Yet the term “gain of function” itself is not strictly scientific, having first emerged in the context of policy debates over the governance of pathogen research. And it is in that context that gain of function has proved controversial.In the spring of 2012, two earth-shattering papers appeared almost simultaneously. The first, published in the leading British science journal Nature, described an experiment by an international team of researchers supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). It showed that a genetically manipulated variant of H5N1 — commonly known as bird flu — could be transmitted between ferrets through respiratory droplets. A month later, the second paper appeared in the leading American journal Science, reporting the results of another NIH-supported experiment conducted by a different international team, showing that a genetically manipulated variant of H5N1 could be transmitted between ferrets via respiratory droplets or aerosols.
Together, these two experiments revealed for the first time that H5N1 — a highly deadly virus with a mortality rate of around 50 percent in humans — could become transmissible between mammals. The discovery raised the possibility that bird flu could pose a direct pandemic threat to humans. Both papers concluded by recommending pandemic preparedness, and further experiments to inform such preparedness.
But what if these experiments themselves increased the risk of a bird flu pandemic? Recall that in both experiments the researchers first had to genetically modify the virus to demonstrate the possibility of airborne transmission. The very idea that making pathogens more dangerous can help prevent future pandemics may well seem counterintuitive. Why would scientists want to take a pathogen that currently poses a relatively low risk to humans — about a thousand cases worldwide in two decades — and deliberately make it more dangerous? The conventional response is that the knowledge obtained from such gain-of-function experiments, when conducted in sufficiently high-security laboratories with appropriate safety protocols, is indispensable to pandemic preparedness and response.
Gain of function is a useful technique because it allows scientists to study characteristics of organisms they might not otherwise observe in nature. In pathogen research, its defenders maintain, the technique enables virologists to discern which pathogens pose the greatest risks and under what circumstances — which helps anticipate public health threats — and to develop tools, such as vaccines and surveillance systems, to respond to potential outbreaks.
Yet the experiments described in the two 2012 papers sparked heated debate among experts even before they were published. A foreign government, an article in Undark reported, deemed one of the paper’s contents “so risky that it could not be sent via the postal service or attached to an email.” The most prevalent concern was that by publishing the results of the experiments, the authors could be providing a blueprint for bad actors looking to build bioweapons. There were calls to restrict publication, recalling physicists’ futile effort to keep the discovery of nuclear fission secret in the lead-up to World War II....
....MUCH MORE
Readers who have been with us for a while may recall this series of posts:
December 2011
"UPDATE: Dutch Scientists Agree to Redact Details of Super-lethal (50% Kill Rate) Genetically Modified Bird Flu"
Psychotic Dutch Scientists: "Killer flu doctors: US censorship is a danger to science"
The grins and giggles guys [a little alliteration? -ed] we first met in "Dutch Scientists Have Genetically Altered the H5N1 Bird Flu Virus to Make it More Contagious" (could kill half humanity) are back in the news.
From The Independent:
Dutch lab that created deadly bird flu virus attacks America for redacting its research....
December 2012
More Wacky Dutch Scientists: "Dutch to send mobile clinics to euthanise people in their own homes"
Let's hope they get the right address.
Earlier we posted on the Dutch scientists who
a) Weaponized bird flu to the point that it could kill half the people in the world.
b) Planned to publish the recipe.
c) Got crabby when told that might not be a good idea.
Here's another group....
The third chapter of the nuttiness:
Psychotic Dutch Scientists: "Killer flu doctors: US censorship is a danger to science"
Chapter the Fourth:
World Health Organization: Okay to Publish Super-lethal Bird Flu Recipe
May 1, 2023
RISK: Don't Look Now But H5N1 Bird Flu Has Been Found To "Efficiently" Spread In Certain Mammals
And F***ed up:
Via "L’olandese del Coronavirus. Ed altri scriteriati."
Oh, and this "Fouchier study reveals changes enabling airborne spread of H5N1":
A study showing that it takes as few as five mutations to turn the H5N1 avian influenza virus into an airborne spreader in mammals—and that launched a historic debate on scientific accountability and transparency—was released today in Science, spilling the full experimental details that many experts had sought to suppress out of concern that publishing them could lead to the unleashing of a dangerous virus....
