Ms Kaminska was early-on concerned about various aspects of biotech, including such things as the Do-it-Yourself use of CRISPR by less-than-honorable people.
And speaking of less-than-honorable people, I am convinced that Anthony Fauci and his cronies, Daszak, Jeremy Farrar at Wellcome Trust, Ralph Baric, Kristian Anderson knew the Covid-19 pandemic was an airborne piece of nastiness, Anderson went so far as to email Fauci on January 31, 2020 that "SARS-CoV-2 has “unusual features” that “potentially look engineered”.
But instead of sharing that knowledge, they let the world stumble around trying to understand what we were dealing with.
Remember "wash your hands" constantly? Good general advice but irrelevant to fighting covid.
Lockdowns? Possibly the worst public health directive ever. You don't want people indoors, you want them out in the sun and the wind.
And on and on and on.
Sorry, rant over. Here's Izabella and the FT's Kiran Stacey with a much more measured look at the state of play.
From the Financial Times, November 17 2021:
US government funding for scientific research that splices deadly
viruses to make them more transmissible is under scrutiny amid safety
concerns
Late one Saturday evening in November 2013, a researcher at the high-security Influenza Research Institute in Madison, Wisconsin, did the one thing scientists working there feared most. Handling a needle loaded with a potentially deadly flu virus, the person accidentally pricked their finger, drawing blood. Realising the danger, the scientist immediately sprayed their finger with disinfectant and ran it under water. They were then advised to squeeze the wound in an attempt to draw out any infected blood. The researcher has not been identified, but their story is detailed in contemporary laboratory safety reports which have been seen by the Financial Times. They were told to put on new gloves, take a shower and isolate. Meanwhile their family was told to move to a hotel for a week so the scientist could quarantine alone at home.
The flu strain involved was not a regular seasonal virus. The contents of the syringe had been artificially created in the Wisconsin laboratory, by splicing together a mutated version of the H5N1 avian flu with a more regular human version. And it was not the first accident to occur in the laboratory. Just a week earlier, reports seen by the FT show a scientist had spilled liquid containing the H5N1 virus. H5N1 is known to be incredibly dangerous: 60 per cent of humans who become infected with it, die. The only positive is that it is unable to spread easily between humans. Yet, the flu virus created in the Wisconsin laboratory replicated quickly enough to spread between ferrets via respiratory droplets in the air. If the same were true for humans, the research team warned, it could trigger a global pandemic.
Up to 2013, this type of experiment — where a pathogen is enhanced to increase transmissibility or its ability to cause disease — had rarely been conducted on such potentially dangerous viruses. Yoshihiro Kawaoka, the head of the Wisconsin laboratory, had only revealed publicly that he could do such complex “gain-of-function” work on viruses two years earlier, much to the alarm of some of his peers.
The justification given for the work is that by manipulating the genetic make-up of certain viruses and isolating individual characteristics, scientists can work out what makes them most deadly, and how to identify future threats. Many working in the field say that drug companies would have found it much harder to create vaccines and treatments against Covid-19, for example, without gain-of-function work on Sars viruses, which helped explain how they infect human cells. And they insist it can be done safely.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison, said: “Since the onset of the work in Dr Kawaoka’s lab — the Influenza Research Institute — the university has adopted, created and implemented systems and processes to help us meet the highest standards of biosafety and biosecurity.” But letters between the university and the National Institutes of Health, which funded the programme and was overseeing it, show government officials were highly concerned by safety protocols following the accidents at the Kawaoka laboratory.
In the letters, released to the FT under the Freedom of Information Act, NIH officials identified several problems with the laboratory’s practices, including the use of a needle in the first place, and allowing the researcher to quarantine at home. There were no infections caused as a result of the incidents at Wisconsin, and both researchers were fine. But a small number of politicians and intelligence officials are wondering whether such an accident on the other side of the world might have triggered the Covid-19 pandemic.
While most scientists believe the virus first infected humans via animals, some — including one unnamed US intelligence agency — now believe it is more likely that the pandemic originated with exactly this kind of research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a world leader in gain-of-function work on coronaviruses. Between 2015 and 2020, the Wuhan lab was given around $600,000 of US taxpayer money via a third-party organisation called EcoHealth Alliance, run by the British scientist Peter Daszak. The federal government has spent far more on such work at home.
An FT analysis of publicly available figures suggests the US government has spent over $30m in the past 15 years on domestic research which could plausibly be classified by the US government as gain-of-function research on potential pandemic-causing pathogens. The dispute over what happened at Wuhan means this US-based work is now under greater scrutiny than ever before. “I believe this is the most dangerous scientific field in the world,” says Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University. “It does not matter whether Covid-19 actually leaked from Wuhan. Just knowing it could have should be enough for us to change our approach.”
It is a view echoed by others in the field. “It is only a matter of time before one of these pathogens escapes somewhere,” says Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at MIT’s Broad Institute. “Doing this research in a densely-packed city, as some researchers do, is like throwing a match into a forest in the middle of a drought.”....
....MUCH MORE
Speaking of money, how much loot has Fauci distributed in his almost 40 years at NIAID?
It is over $50 billion and might be as much as $200 billion (inflation-adjusted).
That buys a lot of loyalty.
