CHINESE GAIN-OF-FUNCTION

From Alex Berenson:

We don’t let medicinal chemists insist they can make designer opioids.

We don’t let nuclear engineers tell us they get to play with plutonium in private labs. 

So why have we let virologists hijack the debate over whether they should be allowed to make risky viruses - especially respiratory viruses like the flu - even deadlier? 

Over four years after Sars-Cov-2 escaped from a Chinese laboratory and killed millions of people, we are hardly closer to restricting, much less banning, the insane research tricks known as “gain-of-function.” Effectively, this work makes viruses and bacteria more dangerous - either more transmissible, more virulent, or both. 

Even worse, the usual triad of scientists, the elite media, and Democratic politicians has blocked serious discussion of how restrictions might work in practice. While Republicans in the House of Representatives passed a bill in November to restrict gain-of-function research, the Senate and the White House have largely ignored it. 

And so dangerous viral research continues worldwide. 

Another screaming red alert came earlier this month, in a story that should have received worldwide attention but instead was confined to the fringes of Twitter. 

On Jan. 4, Chinese researchers published a “preprint” paper reporting the lethality of a modified pangolin coronavirus. The researchers used the new virus to infect mice that had been genetically altered to make the ACE2 protein, which is common in human cells and a target of Sars-Cov-2.

All of the ACE2 mice they infected with the pangolin coronavirus died, apparently from “late-stage brain infections.”

But the coronavirus the Chinese researchers studied does not exist in nature.

It was created in a lab by being repeatedly “passaged” through cells. 

Cell culture passage is a common laboratory technique that doesn’t necessarily have to be used for gain-of-function research. But it causes rapid mutations in coronaviruses. In their paper, the Chinese scientists refer to “the propensity of coronaviruses to undergo adaptive mutation during passage culture.” 

In this case, the cell passage led the pangolin coronavirus to lose a chunk of its genetic base. The newly modified virus proved able to infect the brains of mice - once they had been genetically altered to be more like humans in their response to viruses. As the researchers wrote:

Surprisingly, all the mice that were infected with the live virus succumbed to the infection within 7-8 days post-inoculation, rendering a mortality rate of 100%.