The game has changed for influenza virus scientists and the agencies that support them. As researchers, we must realize that we are critical players in the process of policy and decision making related to DURC, but we are not the only players. Before embarking on certain types of research, we must ask ourselves critical questions about whether there are alternative ways to answer the research questions at hand. When no reasonable alternatives exist, we must take the scientific approach to making the argument for conducting such experiments before they are performed. The voluntary moratorium on the controversial issue of gain-of-function research related to the transmissibility of highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza virus is providing us the time and space we all need to work together and get this right, and it should be continued until we do so (5).
A nice article on the ethics of GOF and a little about the pause by the Obama administration in 2014.
Here’s DHHS’s guidelines on funding and doing research with “enhanced” pathogens through GOF.
LOL. Upthread I made a rhetorical point that obviously no-one would suggest the US would pay China to make a bioweapon. But apparently, yeah, there are some posters here who think Fiendish Fauci would apparently do that, because mwahahaha.
Well indeed it’s better that we collaborate on these things because…we need better understanding on these things.
Because, in the real world, what this research is actually for is better understanding of these viruses so that we can spot threats early and create more effective vaccines and treatments more quickly. Plus generally understand nature better, which always brings benefits.
Hopefully this will happen following Covid, but political stunts like this make me fear that funding will become even more pathetic that it has been historically.
There’s a big difference between defending GoF research in principle (with numerous caveats and reservations, as there were in his 2012 paper) and knowingly breaking the law to fund GoF research, on a known deadly virus, in a nation widely considered to be a threat to the US. You were suggesting the latter.
If SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the lab, it does not follow that it must have been engineered via gain-of-function experiments.
RNA viruses (including coronaviruses) mutate. It’s not an uncommon event. One could conceive of a scenario in which a coronavirus under study mutated into SARS-CoV-2 and then escaped from the lab - which, again, has not been demonstrated.
Exactly. And a lab is not even needed because there are shitloads of coronaviruses in the wild, many of which are endemic in bats in Yunnan province. We know this for some strange reason. Perhaps there’s a lab out there that studies it and publishes those studies. I hear Fauci’s a fan.
Ugh, my landlord not only believes what Rand Paul is saying about Fauci, he believes there’s absolute proof that Fauci is responsible for the coronavirus, and that he should be executed for it.
There are multiple things being discussed here and some people seem to be conflating them.
Could the current novel coronavirus have been leaked from the Wuhan lab? Maybe it was – they do research on coronaviruses there, and it’s certainly possible that a lab worker was infected by a natural strain and that’s how it escaped from the lab.
Was GoF research happening at the lab? Maybe it was. However, that doesn’t mean the US was funding it. And, even Rand Paul admitted that the GoF research isn’t what led to this particular coronavirus. @Sam_Stone seems to be conflating that.
What this coronavirus engineered? Apparently not – the usual markers for that kind of work doesn’t appear to be present in the novel coronavirus. People who talk about the lab leak hypothesis constantly conflate the lab leak with bio-weapons research and other genetic engineering.
That’s what make these conversations so frustrating. When reasonable people discount the lab leak hypothesis, what they mean, or what I mean anyway, is that, while patient zero may have gotten it from the lab, it was apparently not due to any genetic engineering or bio-weapons research. Who cares, really, whether patient zero was a lab worker or a wet market browser? But, it seems to be politically beneficial for some people to conflate the weapons research, or GoF research, with the lab leak, even though those are really separate questions.
That back-and-forth between Paul and Fauci really made this clear – Paul was conflating GoF research with this virus, but in the middle, admitted that he doesn’t think that research led to the pandemic. Then, why is he so concerned about GoF research?
Of course not. How are you going from ‘Fauce is a fan of Gain of Function research’ and might have outsourcd it to a Chinese lab, to ‘Fauci wanted to fund a Chinese bioweapon?’
Fauci is fan of GoF because he thinks it’s necessary to figure out how viruses mutate to infect humans and how to combat them in humans. No one remotely said Fauci wanted to fund a bioweapon - not Rand Paul, and certainly not me.
Potato, po-tah-toe. If you sharpen a stick that stabs someone, inadvertently or not you crafted a weapon. You’ve suggested, without any evidence, that Fauci effectively would use shady means to sharpen sticks when the US has banned such things. So, you are maintaining your stance on this?
I think you’re right to make a clear distinction between these various accusations.
And I think you’re right that Paul is deliberately obfuscating the distinction, banking on people who are already inclined to be anti-fauci hearing only what they want to hear (and sadly, it seems there are probably plenty of people like ekedolphin’s landlord who apparently fell for this).
But let’s already be clear that even the basic lab-leak hypothesis is already far-fetched, not a reasonable position to take at this time.
Because even the simplest version of the hypothesis requires the following to happen:
The SARS virus being studied mutates massively in vitro (none of the markers of human engineering are here, even if we had the ability to make such large-scale changes to a virus, which we don’t).
A catastrophic failure in lab protocol then leads to employee(s) becoming infected
The virus then happens to take hold across town*, in the one other place where a virus outbreak could potentially have started, in a wet market known for selling wild, rare animals.
It’s hardly the most parsimonious explanation, and people jumping to it already are doing so for political reasons and/or a jumped-to conclusion based on the “sneaky china” meme.
* People sometimes confuse different labs and say that the WIV was just a few hundred meters from the wet market. Actually it’s on the other side of town.
Your suggestion was that Fauci circumvented the law, and knowing all the risks he himself outlined in his 2012 paper, funded GoF research in a potentially hostile nation on a dangerous virus.
Why would he take such a risk, what’s the plan here?
And yeah, what you’re suggesting would be creation of a bioweapon, regardless of the fact that you have not used this word yourself. And regardless of whether Fauci would actually want it to be used as such – if I’m making a gun then I’m making a weapon, regardless of whether I intend to shoot people with it or hang it over my fireplace.
I think the lab leak could have happened with a virus being studied that was already able to jump to humans – because if it happened in the wet market, that’s what it was. We largely agree, but I don’t think step one is required. Anyway, it’s a minor point.
But that needs additional Occams-vulnerable stuff, like another strain of SARS that the lab knew of, but the world still doesn’t, and even the Chinese government’s actions have been as though they don’t know about it either
(I know people think China can and does hide everything, but that’s why I say *actions*; bearing in mind that this virus started in China, you’d think they’d pull out all the stops to contain it. Certainly in the early days it seemed China was going to be the most hurt by this. “Finding” the wild source, and getting the world’s virologists on to it, could well have been critical).
@Tfletch1 posted this upthread, but I’ll post it again since I’m going to comment on it.
Dr. Fauci’s “defense” of gain of function research can be found concludes with…
The game has changed for influenza virus scientists and the agencies that support them. As researchers, we must realize that we are critical players in the process of policy and decision making related to DURC, but we are not the only players. Before embarking on certain types of research, we must ask ourselves critical questions about whether there are alternative ways to answer the research questions at hand. When no reasonable alternatives exist, we must take the scientific approach to making the argument for conducting such experiments before they are performed. The voluntary moratorium on the controversial issue of gain-of-function research related to the transmissibility of highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza virus is providing us the time and space we all need to work together and get this right, and it should be continued until we do so.
In light of this statement, the idea that he would also support a back channel way to fund gain of function research in Wuhan because he was a “big fan” of gain of function is clearly ridiculous, conspiracy theorist nonsense.
Yep. But given who is arguing from the other side of this, is it really any surprise this is Qanon level critical thinking? Seems par for the course to me.
Nearly everyone who knows anything about epidemiology, virology, and pandemic response “defends” (as in advocates) careful, responsible, controlled GoF research, because duh.
This is one of those technical niches that has escaped into the mainstream discourse and is being discussed irresponsibly by uneducated people who don’t understand what it is.
