`Gain of Function` and the Origins of Covid

Dangerous research in Wuhan which had previously been shut down was quietly switched back on by the US in 2017.

One of the strangest things about modern media is that the most bizarre and shocking stories are mentioned and then quickly forgotten.

A few months ago the former chief of the US Center for Disease Control (CDC), declared it was likely that Covid-19 leaked from a lab.

For most of 2020, if anybody suggested such a thing, one was considered some kind of QAnon, conspiracy theorist fanatic.

Yet, when the CDC chief, Dr Robert Redfield, who would have received classified briefing on the virus, gives the highest level of official credence to such a theory, even that does not open up any kind of meaningful discussion in the media concerning the consequences of Covid being a lab leak.

Sure, people joke around about the virus`s origins and mention the question in passing, but no concentrated thought is given to the disturbing implications if in fact Redfield is right.

This is not good enough and once again demonstrates how corrupt the media is.

For if Redfield is correct in saying that Covid came from a lab, he is not saying that the virus is some kind of Chinese weapon - the implications are more shocking than that - he means rather that something went wrong in the bowels of the global system of virology, that very same system which now rules the world from within the interlocking web of the World Health Organisation, governments, and NGOs.

Redfield`s claim, and the need to ascertain its credibility, has become even more urgent. Last week, Washington Post and CNN journalist, Josh Rogin, made a startling claim of his own regarding the kind of research which was being done in Wuhan up to 2019, research known as “gain of function” research, research which was meant to have been shut down, and, which, according to Rogin, was quietly started up again at the behest of US government scientists.

In short, there may be a reason why the US, post-Trump, is not that keen to accuse China of having made a tragic and insanely criminal error in one of their labs - the US may have played a vital role themselves in the entire tragedy.

The lab leak claim calls into question the credibility of all the players in the game because all of them are implicated in the kind of research these labs do - the World Health Organisation, Bill Gates, the Chinese government, the White House, Anthony Fauci - a lab leak as the source of Covid incriminates them all.

To understand why this is the case, let`s go back to what Redfield said and why. Then we can turn to the lab in question in Wuhan and the question of who funds its work and what work it does. As you will discover, the answers to these questions are fairly shocking.

This is what the former CDC head, Dr Redfield, said on CNN in March this year:

“I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, you know, escaped. Now, other people don't believe that, that's fine. Science will eventually figure it out. It's not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in the laboratory to infect the laboratory worker.

“I do not believe this somehow came from a bat to a human. And at that moment in time, the virus came to the human, became one of the most infectious viruses that we know in humanity for human to human transmission. Normally, when a pathogen goes from a zoonotic to human, it takes a while for it to figure out how to become more and more efficient.”

Focus on this next part:

“Most of us in a lab, when trying to grow a virus, we try to help make it grow better, and better, and better, and better, and better, and better so we can do experiments and figure out about it.”

We all know Wuhan is significant because that is where the virus first emerges and we have the first lockdown.

Now you are not meant to notice the in-your-face most obvious thing about Wuhan: it has a really important lab in it that studies coronaviruses. The Wuhan Institute of Virology has one of the world`s largest collections of bat coronaviruses. It should always have been the prime suspect as the Covid source. Talk of wet markets were so absurd that even official Chinese sources dismissed them fairly soon in the course of the pandemic.

So why is there this lab in China that sits on a time bomb of seething viruses?

And do they “help to make it grow better” there, to use the words of Redfield?

This idea of growing viruses “better” takes us into the shocking world of gain of function research.

The king of this world is Anthony Fauci, the short, raspy-voiced 80 year-old who was made famous to the globe these past months as he told the world when it may be safe again to hug, to go to work, to look at the world bare-faced.

In 2011, Fauci, who has long been the head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which falls under the National Institutes of Health (NIH),  wrote in the Washington Post that “much good can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory”.

The basic idea was this - there are terrible influenzas in the world that sometimes cross over to humans from birds. Were such influenzas to become generally transmissible amongst humans, we would have a massive pandemic. Therefore, to get ahead of the problem, we should generate for ourselves a bird influenza virus in a lab that can infect human beings widely, so we can study it. I mean, what could go wrong?

This is the essence of gain of function research. Help a virus “gain function”, and then learn from it.

Call me a sceptic. This sounds nuts.

It gets worse.

Fauci and his team actually sent money to the Wuhan lab, which was involved in similar kinds of experiments in the aftermath of the Sars scare, focusing on coronaviruses from bats.

In 2014, Fauci`s organisation sent money to the Wuhan lab, via a New York intermediary, to analyse coronaviruses. Money continued to flow for years to Wuhan and the funds were only pulled last year, after pressure from Trump.

In 2014, the White House placed a moratorium on gain of function research after studies were released showing bird flu had been juiced up sufficiently to allow it to spread between ferrets. There were also concerns about some accidents at biosecure labs.

However, the moratorium gets lifted in 2017, not by the White House, but by the National Institutes of Health, at the apparent behest of Fauci. This nugget of information comes from Josh Rogin last week, stated during an interview on Joe Rogan`s podcast.

According to Rogin, Fauci is such a fervent believer in gain of function research, he uses the chaos of the Trump Administration to assert his own policy preferences, almost unilaterally.

Rogin has already broken some other important news when he leaked diplomatic cables from US officials who, as part of the collaboration on coronaviruses, had visited the Wuhan lab in 2018, where they learned that Chinese researchers had discovered coronaviruses with spike proteins that were particularly well-suited to grabbing onto human lung cells.

Rogin, writing for Politico last month, recounts:

“Knowing the significance of the Wuhan virologists’ discovery, and knowing that the WIV’s top-level biosafety laboratory (BSL-4) was relatively new, the U.S. Embassy health and science officials in Beijing decided to go to Wuhan and check it out. In total, the embassy sent three teams of experts in late 2017 and early 2018 to meet with the WIV scientists, among them Shi Zhengli, often referred to as the `bat woman` because of her extensive experience studying coronaviruses found in bats.

“When they sat down with the scientists at the WIV, the American diplomats were shocked by what they heard. The Chinese researchers told them they didn’t have enough properly trained technicians to safely operate their BSL-4 lab. The Wuhan scientists were asking for more support to get the lab up to top standards.”

These US officials sent their warnings back to the US, but within a few months rising tensions with China meant the US no longer had access to labs there like the one in Wuhan, despite having funded it:

Rogin goes on:

“The Wuhan Institute of Virology had openly participated in gain-of-function research in partnership with U.S. universities and institutions. But one senior administration official told me the U.S. government had evidence that Chinese labs were performing gain-of-function research on a much larger scale than was publicly disclosed, meaning they were taking more risks in more labs than anyone outside China was aware of. This insight, in turn, fed into the lab-accident hypothesis in a new and troubling way.”

This hidden research was said to include genetically engineering mice to give them human-like lungs so as to infect them with coronavirus.

US intelligence reports from Wuhan make mention of reports that Wuhan lab workers begin getting sick in September 2019…

Returning to Redfield, after he made known his belief that Covid is the result of a Wuhan lab error, he was subject to a barrage of criticism. Some accused him of simply being racist against Asians. Many, like Fauci, insist that because there is no hard evidence of a lab leak, it is more likely the virus just naturally spilled over from bats. Although, there are no bat colonies anywhere near Wuhan! Another obvious fact you are not meant to notice.

But what critics of Redfield do not seem to understand is that if he is right, the US is just as much to blame as the Chinese for Covid. And that figures like Fauci and other experts are so compromised they could not possibly be expected to give an untainted opinion on the matter.

Rogin, in one of his Washington Post columns, points out a further implication. If the lab leak hypothesis is correct, then it was the very effort to prevent a pandemic that caused a pandemic.

The world`s most esteemed scientific minds decided that supporting the housing of bat viruses in this Wuhan facility below was a good way to get ahead of a possible pandemic.

These same people, all connected around the world, still believe they deserve our trust.

They are preparing vaccine passes for your safety. (Look for the teaser trailer for Covid 21 below from the EU Commissioner.)

It is time to disabuse ourselves of the notion that there are trustworthy experts gathered in a room somewhere fighting for our best interests.

Scientists and bureaucrats, like everybody else, want power and attention. Figures like Fauci are not just going to turn the Covid lights off one day. You must realise that this past year has been the best year of his life. He is on the cover of Time magazine as the `guardian`of the year. CNN celebrates his birthday. Despite being so scarily wrong about gain of function, and being over 80, he is the highest paid government worker in the US and a top advisor to Biden.

The impulse to do gain of function research carries on in the impulse to enforce social distance and to wrap the world in plastics.

If you have the power to do something quite startling, and are able to justify it as a public good albeit ever so tenuously, human nature dictates you will exercise this power for as long as nobody stops you.