This is an excellent and thoughtful commentary. No bones about it, humanity writ large holds the keys to its own self-destruction at the hands of a few egotistical Faucimaniacs who could care less about the rest of us. Science needs to study and shore up its defenses before it is too late.
There is absolutely zero benefit to humanity and the living world from gain of function studies. Full stop. GOF should be globally outlawed and Fauci and his band of not-so-merry pranksters should absolutely be held responsible for the deaths and the global chaos that we have most certainly not seen the end of yet.
Although I agree that we were extremely lucky that the pathogen turned out not to be more virulent, I disagree about this: "The virus has not (yet) triggered a more severe response other than skepticism, public outrage, and investigations."
The virus, the pandemic, and its global mishandling by pseudo-science bureaucrats including Fauci have done potentially irreparable harm to the public's notion of what science is and what it can tell us. For at least a generation, countless babies will be thrown out with the bathwater as hundreds of millions of people around the globe for the rest of their lives will hear "science" and instantly knee-jerk in the opposite direction, overreacting to what happened in the pandemic beyond critical thinking and healthy skepticism and on into antagonism.
After the obvious lies about the mRNA COVID vaccines, how many millions will inherently distrust any and every vaccine of any kind for the rest of their lives? What are the consequences of that?
The silver lining of this disaster is finally more people see all our institutions more clearly, not just the science establishment. They are inherently corrupt. A decent, moral society puts some brakes on such rot. The West has degenerated to the point those moral checks have vanished. Much of the rest of the world, though not all of it, lacked such moral checks all along. I think the antagonism you bemoan is more rooted in critical thinking than the trust that preceded it. What's the answer? I don't think there is one. Given human nature, particularly the narcissism and psychopathy of those who seek and attain power and the gullibility of the masses, I see only darkness. We had things going in the right direction in the West for quite a while. We couldn't sustain it, and are reverting to a more typical, much worse state of human affairs.
The consequences of the distrust are positive. The institutional rot that has caused the justified distrust is the problem.
Thank you so much for your excellent coverage of the origins of COVID! I do have a question, though. You have consistently repeated the stated purpose of GoF research as being a wrong headed attempt to proactively develop vaccines for pathogens not yet in existence. Wrong headed is certainly correct, but I question the veracity of the establishment explanation for doing it. To me, the only plausible explanation for GoF research is to weaponize pathogens, in this case, a virus. The fact the the DEFUSE grant was submitted to DARPA, imo, underscores the likelihood of military, not humanitarian purposes.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this, Dr Washburne. Thank you again for your work!
Hey Nancy, thank you for your comment and kind words!
I'll see about writing a separate article on the DARPA PREEMPT call. I know a bit about this as I helped write part of a successful DARPA PREEMPT grant and can tell you all about that grant call, the good intentions and guardrails of the managers, and the field of study of pathogen spillover at large that helps us see the authenticity of DEFUSE, upweighting the significance of their proposal to insert a furin cleavage site in a bat SARS CoV as evidence of a non-natural origin.
TLDR DARPA rejected DEFUSE because the grant call was not about weaponizing pathogens or for any military purposes besides the larger goal of "preempting" pathogen spillover by (1) identifying "jump-capable" variants (wildlife pathogens able to infect humans) and (2) developing wildlife vaccines against those variants, thereby providing an immunological buffer in wildlife to protect them from variants of viruses that could jump into humans. DEFUSE proposed to make viruses not found in wildlife, and that was both very dangerous & outside the scope of the PREEMPT grant call, so DEFUSE was rejected despite being proposed by a heavyweight org in the field.
Interestingly, the Chinese Academy of Sciences funded related work just 1 month after DEFUSE was rejected. This raises the possibility that the CAS, willing to take greater risks if it meant coming ahead in the biotech landscape (and protecting the people of China from a SARS coronavirus in China), might have funded this same authentic proposal presumably with similarly innocent intentions of producing wildlife or possibly human vaccines against a scary hypothetical bat SARS CoV with a furin cleavage site.
In other words, I think the truth may be a lot more boring & banal than more nefarious scenarios suggest. It was likely an accident, but an accident of highly risky research funded by agencies that didn't have the same guardrails as DARPA. If every agency in every country were like DARPA (especially ambitious countries like China, as Xi pushed labs very hard to produce breakthroughs without adequately supporting lab safety needs), then DEFUSE and research like it wouldn't be funded and we'd most likely never have had the pandemic.
P.S. It's publicly reported that some countries, such as North Korea and Russia, may have active biological weapons research programs. While I think those programs are incredibly reckless and they endanger human civilization (NK and RUS included), one thing to consider as a citizen (of whichever country you live in) is whether/how you'd like your government to protect you against an adversary's weaponized biological agents. How would we test a countermeasure such as a treatment or vaccine against an adversary's biological weapon, especially if the biological agent was developed by an adversary aware of state-of-the-art countermeasures and vaccines (and thus might entertain evading those defense?). How can we globally support and enforce biological nonproliferation efforts (and not just biodeterrence)? Any answer will have to factor in the existence of adversarial authoritarian regimes, illiberal democracies, and other black sheep of our idealized international community supporting a peaceful rules-based international order.
I won't pretend to answer this question for other citizens (just trying to inform people by synthesizing public info), but the answer to this question could very well determine the fate of humanity as not all adversaries are bound by our own system of government with its guardrails, reasonable ethics, & risk/reward assessments regarding the weaponization of biological agents. Scary stuff. Welcome to the 21st century.
Are the North Korean and Russian Bio-labs like the dozen or so the US established in Ukraine, or the US one in Georgia that has diplomatic immunity and apparently caused hundreds of local deaths, both human and animal?
Have a look at the research by a Bulgarian journalist at dilyana.bg and stop moralising about US checks and balances when we know for USians it is all about the Benjamins.
"our own system of government with its guardrails, reasonable ethics & risk/reward assessments"
I see no such things in the USA today. Decades ago they existed, but even then the corruption and greed was crippling. COVID made it visible to more people, so that's one good thing that came out of this fiasco.
we are stuck, The obvious utility of genetically targeted bioweapons tuned to specific human tribes will assure that minions of evil will continue to attempt to generate and test such bioweapons. On the flip side, evolution of released pathogens will then likely attack the tribe that was not the original target, as they will be the last large human population.
I agree we are stuck. We are who we are, and it ain't pretty. Bioweapons and nukes make the consequences of our foolishness potentially even worse than before. But it's what we've always done, on steroids if the worst happens. It's hard to imagine a nuclear or bioweapon disaster will never happen. The probabilities of avoiding it are close to zero. You can only dodge a bullet so many times before you don't.
I appreciate this article and it's well thought out in many way. So it's surprising to see unrealistic ideas put forth like:
"I believe we should widely fund basic and applied scientific research, and I also believe we should regularly evaluate novel technologies to assess their risks to our civilization."
Well, yeah, that would be nice. But where within our leadership, political and otherwise, are people who will do that evaluating and act appropriately? I would say - nowhere.
And this:
"Whenever the risks exceed a threshold of local “oopsies” and become capable of killing people or, worse yet, introducing threats to national and global security, such research should be more closely monitored, regulated, and perhaps conducted only by people in institutions that have national security mandates."
Well, in a better, more moral and functional society than the West has become this would be a great idea. In the current environment who, exactly will be doing the monitoring and regulating? I know - nobody we can rely on. In fact, the last people who should be doing such monitoring will be the ones doing it. That's not speculation, that's exactly where we are.
And this:
"Follow the Science? No thank you. Not without oversight."
I'll repeat myself - oversight by whom? It's a pipe dream to think there are trustworthy overseers.
Well said. Upton Sinclair used to say: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” No wonder Peter Daszak has trouble seeing the trouble with creating dangerous pathogens and testing them to see how infectious they really are.
This is an excellent and thoughtful commentary. No bones about it, humanity writ large holds the keys to its own self-destruction at the hands of a few egotistical Faucimaniacs who could care less about the rest of us. Science needs to study and shore up its defenses before it is too late.
There is absolutely zero benefit to humanity and the living world from gain of function studies. Full stop. GOF should be globally outlawed and Fauci and his band of not-so-merry pranksters should absolutely be held responsible for the deaths and the global chaos that we have most certainly not seen the end of yet.
Although I agree that we were extremely lucky that the pathogen turned out not to be more virulent, I disagree about this: "The virus has not (yet) triggered a more severe response other than skepticism, public outrage, and investigations."
The virus, the pandemic, and its global mishandling by pseudo-science bureaucrats including Fauci have done potentially irreparable harm to the public's notion of what science is and what it can tell us. For at least a generation, countless babies will be thrown out with the bathwater as hundreds of millions of people around the globe for the rest of their lives will hear "science" and instantly knee-jerk in the opposite direction, overreacting to what happened in the pandemic beyond critical thinking and healthy skepticism and on into antagonism.
After the obvious lies about the mRNA COVID vaccines, how many millions will inherently distrust any and every vaccine of any kind for the rest of their lives? What are the consequences of that?
The silver lining of this disaster is finally more people see all our institutions more clearly, not just the science establishment. They are inherently corrupt. A decent, moral society puts some brakes on such rot. The West has degenerated to the point those moral checks have vanished. Much of the rest of the world, though not all of it, lacked such moral checks all along. I think the antagonism you bemoan is more rooted in critical thinking than the trust that preceded it. What's the answer? I don't think there is one. Given human nature, particularly the narcissism and psychopathy of those who seek and attain power and the gullibility of the masses, I see only darkness. We had things going in the right direction in the West for quite a while. We couldn't sustain it, and are reverting to a more typical, much worse state of human affairs.
The consequences of the distrust are positive. The institutional rot that has caused the justified distrust is the problem.
Thank you so much for your excellent coverage of the origins of COVID! I do have a question, though. You have consistently repeated the stated purpose of GoF research as being a wrong headed attempt to proactively develop vaccines for pathogens not yet in existence. Wrong headed is certainly correct, but I question the veracity of the establishment explanation for doing it. To me, the only plausible explanation for GoF research is to weaponize pathogens, in this case, a virus. The fact the the DEFUSE grant was submitted to DARPA, imo, underscores the likelihood of military, not humanitarian purposes.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this, Dr Washburne. Thank you again for your work!
Hey Nancy, thank you for your comment and kind words!
I'll see about writing a separate article on the DARPA PREEMPT call. I know a bit about this as I helped write part of a successful DARPA PREEMPT grant and can tell you all about that grant call, the good intentions and guardrails of the managers, and the field of study of pathogen spillover at large that helps us see the authenticity of DEFUSE, upweighting the significance of their proposal to insert a furin cleavage site in a bat SARS CoV as evidence of a non-natural origin.
TLDR DARPA rejected DEFUSE because the grant call was not about weaponizing pathogens or for any military purposes besides the larger goal of "preempting" pathogen spillover by (1) identifying "jump-capable" variants (wildlife pathogens able to infect humans) and (2) developing wildlife vaccines against those variants, thereby providing an immunological buffer in wildlife to protect them from variants of viruses that could jump into humans. DEFUSE proposed to make viruses not found in wildlife, and that was both very dangerous & outside the scope of the PREEMPT grant call, so DEFUSE was rejected despite being proposed by a heavyweight org in the field.
Interestingly, the Chinese Academy of Sciences funded related work just 1 month after DEFUSE was rejected. This raises the possibility that the CAS, willing to take greater risks if it meant coming ahead in the biotech landscape (and protecting the people of China from a SARS coronavirus in China), might have funded this same authentic proposal presumably with similarly innocent intentions of producing wildlife or possibly human vaccines against a scary hypothetical bat SARS CoV with a furin cleavage site.
In other words, I think the truth may be a lot more boring & banal than more nefarious scenarios suggest. It was likely an accident, but an accident of highly risky research funded by agencies that didn't have the same guardrails as DARPA. If every agency in every country were like DARPA (especially ambitious countries like China, as Xi pushed labs very hard to produce breakthroughs without adequately supporting lab safety needs), then DEFUSE and research like it wouldn't be funded and we'd most likely never have had the pandemic.
Thank you for your very thorough Anna interesting reply! I learned a lot and look forward to your forthcoming articles.
P.S. It's publicly reported that some countries, such as North Korea and Russia, may have active biological weapons research programs. While I think those programs are incredibly reckless and they endanger human civilization (NK and RUS included), one thing to consider as a citizen (of whichever country you live in) is whether/how you'd like your government to protect you against an adversary's weaponized biological agents. How would we test a countermeasure such as a treatment or vaccine against an adversary's biological weapon, especially if the biological agent was developed by an adversary aware of state-of-the-art countermeasures and vaccines (and thus might entertain evading those defense?). How can we globally support and enforce biological nonproliferation efforts (and not just biodeterrence)? Any answer will have to factor in the existence of adversarial authoritarian regimes, illiberal democracies, and other black sheep of our idealized international community supporting a peaceful rules-based international order.
I won't pretend to answer this question for other citizens (just trying to inform people by synthesizing public info), but the answer to this question could very well determine the fate of humanity as not all adversaries are bound by our own system of government with its guardrails, reasonable ethics, & risk/reward assessments regarding the weaponization of biological agents. Scary stuff. Welcome to the 21st century.
Are the North Korean and Russian Bio-labs like the dozen or so the US established in Ukraine, or the US one in Georgia that has diplomatic immunity and apparently caused hundreds of local deaths, both human and animal?
Have a look at the research by a Bulgarian journalist at dilyana.bg and stop moralising about US checks and balances when we know for USians it is all about the Benjamins.
"our own system of government with its guardrails, reasonable ethics & risk/reward assessments"
I see no such things in the USA today. Decades ago they existed, but even then the corruption and greed was crippling. COVID made it visible to more people, so that's one good thing that came out of this fiasco.
we are stuck, The obvious utility of genetically targeted bioweapons tuned to specific human tribes will assure that minions of evil will continue to attempt to generate and test such bioweapons. On the flip side, evolution of released pathogens will then likely attack the tribe that was not the original target, as they will be the last large human population.
I agree we are stuck. We are who we are, and it ain't pretty. Bioweapons and nukes make the consequences of our foolishness potentially even worse than before. But it's what we've always done, on steroids if the worst happens. It's hard to imagine a nuclear or bioweapon disaster will never happen. The probabilities of avoiding it are close to zero. You can only dodge a bullet so many times before you don't.
I appreciate this article and it's well thought out in many way. So it's surprising to see unrealistic ideas put forth like:
"I believe we should widely fund basic and applied scientific research, and I also believe we should regularly evaluate novel technologies to assess their risks to our civilization."
Well, yeah, that would be nice. But where within our leadership, political and otherwise, are people who will do that evaluating and act appropriately? I would say - nowhere.
And this:
"Whenever the risks exceed a threshold of local “oopsies” and become capable of killing people or, worse yet, introducing threats to national and global security, such research should be more closely monitored, regulated, and perhaps conducted only by people in institutions that have national security mandates."
Well, in a better, more moral and functional society than the West has become this would be a great idea. In the current environment who, exactly will be doing the monitoring and regulating? I know - nobody we can rely on. In fact, the last people who should be doing such monitoring will be the ones doing it. That's not speculation, that's exactly where we are.
And this:
"Follow the Science? No thank you. Not without oversight."
I'll repeat myself - oversight by whom? It's a pipe dream to think there are trustworthy overseers.
Well said. Upton Sinclair used to say: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” No wonder Peter Daszak has trouble seeing the trouble with creating dangerous pathogens and testing them to see how infectious they really are.