{"id":2347,"date":"2023-03-27T14:27:43","date_gmt":"2023-03-27T19:27:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/?p=2347"},"modified":"2023-03-27T14:27:43","modified_gmt":"2023-03-27T19:27:43","slug":"why-are-we-still-funding-gain-of-function-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/?p=2347","title":{"rendered":"Why are we still funding gain-of-function research?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Some scientists warn that the studies are an \u2018extinction-level risk\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"data:image\/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns='http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg'%20viewBox='0%200%20370%20247'%3E%3C\/svg%3E\" data-lazy-src=\"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/image-126.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"zeen-lazy-load-base zeen-lazy-load wp-image-2348\"\/><noscript><img decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"682\" src=\"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/image-126.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2348\" srcset=\"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/image-126.png 1024w, https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/image-126-300x200.png 300w, https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/image-126-770x513.png 770w, https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/image-126-370x247.png 370w, https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/image-126-293x195.png 293w, https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/image-126-120x80.png 120w, https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/image-126-240x160.png 240w, https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/image-126-390x260.png 390w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/noscript><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>If someone had asked you in winter 2019 your views on gain-of-function research, you would likely have given them a blank look. But since the Covid pandemic, and with the&nbsp;<em>Wall Street Journal&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807b7b0a\">revealing<\/a>&nbsp;in February that the US Department of Energy now thinks Covid-19 is likely to have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, gain-of-function research \u2014 often conducted to make viruses more infectious and more deadly \u2014 is a matter of enormous significance and should be at the forefront of a national conversation about the very real risks it poses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For more than a century virologists have worked to identify and understand viruses, whether or not they\u2019re pathogens, for reasons ranging from pure science to applications in everything from agriculture to vaccines. \u201cGain-of-function\u201d research takes things further and involves creating \u201cchanges resulting in the enhancement or acquisition of new biological functions or phenotypes.\u201d The worry about a grisly \u201cscience gone wrong\u201d scenario that could result from messing around with pathogens has existed even longer \u2014 indeed, it doesn\u2019t take a wild imagination to see that a lab disaster could cause a real-world catastrophe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And in 2019, along came Covid-19, killing around 7 million people globally \u2014 a catastrophe, to be sure, but with a fatality rate of under 1 percent, far from the worst-case scenario. For reference, think about H5N1, or avian influenza, whose human case-fatality rate stands near a terrifying 60 percent. While H5N1 is very rarely transmitted between humans, the nightmare situation is plenty terrifying: What if a group of enterprising scientists succeeded when they tried to find out if they could make H5N1 transmissible through the air? The resulting pandemic might very well wipe out most of humanity within a few short (very nasty, very brutish) months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The disturbing reality is that scientists have already more or less done that. In 2012, not one but two separate groups of scientists, led by Ron Fouchier in the Netherlands and Yoshihiro Kawaoka in Japan, infected ferrets with H5N1 \u2014 mustelids are not only more closely related to humans than birds, they\u2019re famously vulnerable to influenza. The virus adapted to the mammals in a way that indicated it could infect humans through droplets. These experiments were so \u201csuccessful\u201d that the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosafety, or NSABB, an independent committee that advises the Department of Health and Human Services, delayed publication of the results. Publication of the papers, the NSABB noted, \u201ccould potentially enable replication of experiments that had enhanced transmissibility of H5N1 influenza (in ferrets) by those who might wish to do harm.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It took little more than two months for NSABB to be overruled by then-NIH chief Francis Collins and then-head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci. From that moment, the gain-of-function gloves were off. Since the publication of those two papers in spring 2012 gain-of-function research has not only become orders of magnitude more sophisticated, it has become much more widespread \u2014 and more dangerous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For its proponents, gain-of-function research gives scientists a virological crystal ball, which helps them understand which viruses could pose a major risk to human populations. With this research in hand, proponents argue, governments can create surveillance programs geared to these specific pathogens, as well as dedicate more resources to vaccine research to defend against them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But opponents of gain-of-function research argue that this approach has never been vindicated by real-world results. The Covid-19 pandemic is a tragic proof point: while the US runs a billion-dollar virus surveillance effort, it was local Chinese doctors who identified the virus and raised the alarm. And prior experimentation on coronaviruses, these advocates argue, provided no benefit to the creation of the Covid-19 vaccines. Instead, these experiments just create more risk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cGain-of-function and synthetic biology are increasingly risky because the technology has advanced in quantum leaps in the past decade especially; the cost has become much lower and the range of actors who could utilize published, open-access methodology for performing such research is limitless,\u201d says Professor Raina MacIntyre, an epidemiologist who serves as principal research fellow at Australia\u2019s National Health and Medical Research Council. Along with other notable figures in the field, MacIntyre is part of Biosafety Now, an organization advocating for greater oversight and regulation of gain-of-function and synthetic biological research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There\u2019s good reason for such alarm. Risky virus research being done around the world spans the epidemiological spectrum, including at the highest level of biosafety, BSL-4. Such projects include work on highly contagious pathogens like orthopoxviruses and influenza as well as some with astronomical fatality rates \u2014 hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola and Marburg, which can kill up to nine in ten of those it infects. Last year, an American researcher testified in a Senate hearing that Chinese researchers were experimenting with Nipah, a bat virus that is one of the world\u2019s most deadly and a CDC-designated bioterror agent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now there are dozens of ongoing coronavirus studies. Most at BSL-4 level are focused on SARS-CoV-2, the Covid-19 virus. Last year, there was understandable outrage when it was revealed that researchers at Boston\u2019s NEIDL, one of America\u2019s four biocontainment facilities, had \u2014 in the middle of the pandemic \u2014 performed gain-of-function research on SARS-CoV-2, combining two strains to make an even more dangerous new artificial one (prepandemic research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology took place at BSL-2, the safety level used to study salmonella.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At the heart of such research lies an idea that can be difficult to understand: danger is not an incidental byproduct of the research; it is central to it. \u201cThe nature of this work is to start with a potential pandemic pathogen and enhance either its ability to transmit or its ability to cause disease,\u201d says Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers who has been a vocal opponent of gain-of-function research. \u201cThese are pathogens that are not present in nature, not circulating in nature, not circulating in humans or in livestock, in crops or even in the wild. These are pathogens that might not come to exist in years, decades, centuries or millennia, but which are brought into existence through laboratory manipulation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This notion \u2014 creating viruses that can cause a pandemic in order to study how they behave \u2014 is easy to miss because there is no scientific equivalent, even in weapons research. Ebright, also a member of Biosafety Now, characterizes this laboratory risk as \u201cexistential, extinction-level risk.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And much of it is, of course, funded by taxpayer dollars; even today, there is still almost no congressional oversight into what kind of virological experimentation is being done, or how it\u2019s funded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Part of the explanation lies in the events of September 2001, when, a week after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, letters containing a suspicious white powder were mailed around the country. In early October,&nbsp;<em>Sun&nbsp;<\/em>photojournalist Bob Stevens was hospitalized in southern Florida with flu-like symptoms. The next day, he was dead of pulmonary anthrax.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Over the next three weeks, letters containing white powder showed up at major broadcast newsrooms and the offices of US senators. Four more people died from anthrax. With Ground Zero still smoldering, the national security apparatus was ablaze with fear of a new kind of warfare that key figures, notably vice president Dick Cheney, had obsessed over for years. October 2001 didn\u2019t merely change America\u2019s biodefense posture: It altered the course of the biological sciences forever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>After 2001, virus research surged: In 1997 the government\u2019s biosecurity budget was $137 million; by 2004 it had grown more than 3,000 percent, with the federal government spending $14.5 billion in the period. The US made a modest first attempt at imposing regulation on infectious-disease research in 1997 when it forbade the transfer of certain kinds of viruses, bacteria and toxins between labs without CDC approval, after an American researcher requested a strain of plague from an NGO that stores microorganisms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Despite increased biodefense spending, regulation has lagged. As research funding ramped up, the Bush administration was busy reorganizing America\u2019s biodefense structure \u2014 by putting it into a silo. That silo was the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease, headed by Anthony Fauci, who, almost overnight, became the most powerful person in America\u2019s science establishment. Far from the kindly pandemic savior he\u2019s been portrayed as by parts of the media, Fauci had long been America\u2019s biodefense chief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s this that explains how, with relative ease, Fauci and his NIH boss Francis Collins \u2014 both of whom Ebright calls \u201cardent\u201d proponents of gain-of-function research \u2014 were able to override the NSABB\u2019s decision to halt the publication of the 2012 bird-flu experiments. Fauci called the shots in biodefense, and everyone knew it. This top-down structure defanged regulation, but it also had another even more worrisome effect: it made biodefense oversight nobody\u2019s problem. According to Ebright, the molecular life-sciences silo has been perceived by policymakers as \u201cimpenetrable,\u201d both because of its national security implications and its technical nature. \u201cAfter Cheney and Bush were gone,\u201d says Ebright, \u201ctheir [biodefense] agenda continued in place. It was tempered at the edges under the Obama administration and ignored during the Trump administration and Biden administration, but it has continued largely as it was set out.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The pandemic changed that calculus, upsetting the status quo in ways that even loyalists find difficult to resist. In Congress, this has translated into a wave of oversight that the biodefense sector has never before encountered. In 2021, Iowa senator Joni Ernst introduced the Fairness and Accountability in Underwriting Chinese Institutions (FAUCI) Act that would ban gain-of-function research funding. Jim Comer, now chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, and Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, have used their powers to bring new information to light, including with calls for testimony. And Florida senator Marco Rubio last year called for Harvard to clarify its involvement with Fauci and the Chinese real estate firm Evergrande (in response to&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/thespectator.com\/topic\/fauci-harvard-and-the-ccp\/\">my reporting<\/a>&nbsp;for&nbsp;<em>The Spectator<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What\u2019s clear, however, is that the political impetus remains squarely on one side of the aisle. That is largely to do with an equivalent of \u201cTrump Derangement Syndrome\u201d that we might call the Fauci Effect. \u201cAnthony Fauci had the great privilege in 2020 of sharing a screen with Donald Trump,\u201d says Ebright. \u201cHe face-palmed on television once and that made him a Democratic Party icon to those unaware of his actual role and his actual actions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While Fauci\u2019s famous face-palm at a March 2020 press conference certainly helped his cause, it\u2019s only part of the story. The other part is money. As biodefense funding has ramped up, a quiet but effective lobbying effort has bloomed around it. The heavyweight in the field is the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, or BCB, an organization whose \u201cteam\u201d web page lists a who\u2019s-who of DC powerbrokers, including co-chairs Joseph Lieberman and Tom Ridge and commissioners Donna Shalala, Tom Daschle and Fred Upton. Donors include Danish pharmaceutical company Bavarian Nordic, which makes vaccines for viruses like monkeypox and Ebola; the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a biotech trade association; and Open Philanthropy, the philanthropy of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz and his wife Cari Tuna.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The group\u2019s influence became fully evident in summer 2021, when the Biden administration announced a $65 billion pandemic-preparedness program that used space exploration as its organizing metaphor: Only months earlier, in January, the BCB released \u201cThe Apollo Program for Biodefense,\u201d which advanced the idea that the US must embrace the ethos of the Apollo program to effectively fight pandemics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While top-down influence in Washington has pushed for more funding, more research and more risk, grassroots activism opposing this advance is spreading. NEIDL, the Boston biocontainment facility where gain-of-function research produced a new SARS-CoV-2 variant during the pandemic, has faced local opposition since its inception, with residents, city council members and experts weighing in. \u201cWe are talking about bringing some of the most deadly agents into a very, very highly densely populated area in the inner city,\u201d a Boston city councilor said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Such concerns have been supported by a number of leaks from NEIDL, including reports on lab mice and a series of lab-related infections. But the weight of the biodefense establishment, and the influence of Boston University, eventually overcame years of lawsuits and activism. More importantly, the creation of biosafety labs has continued apace, with new ones springing up around the country, many run by private research companies subject to much less oversight than big government BSL-4 labs that are impossible to keep out of the public eye.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The reason for the lack of oversight is that biosafety labs come in so many shapes and sizes, from those run by pharmaceutical labs to closed military sites to academic institutions like NEIDL, that creating regulation to cover all areas is a task authorities have been unwilling to confront. But that hasn\u2019t made the need less pressing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cPeople in the community have questions [about gain-of-function research] that our profession isn\u2019t providing answers for,\u201d says Bryce Nickels, a researcher at Rutgers\u2019s Waksman Institute of Technology and a principal at Biosafety Now. \u201cWe have an issue where biolabs are doing research, the public doesn\u2019t know what they\u2019re doing, the scientists who could tell them what they\u2019re doing don\u2019t want to, and it leads to this erosion of trust. And maybe that trust can never be restored again.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Regardless of new pushback, gain-of-function research isn\u2019t going anywhere but forward. What\u2019s clear is that the public is awakening to the gain-of-function arms race \u2014 some military, some private, some scientific. Unlike the nuclear arms race, which requires massive resources, this race can be pursued in tiny spaces, with relatively small budgets. Despite this, the effects of error or unforeseen outcomes will be nothing short of global.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>This article was originally published in\u00a0<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/spectator.us\/subscribe\">The Spectator<\/a><em>\u2019s April 2023 World edition.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Original Article: <a href=\"https:\/\/thespectator.com\/topic\/funding-gain-function-research-biodefense-fauci-covid-ebright\/\">https:\/\/thespectator.com\/topic\/funding-gain-function-research-biodefense-fauci-covid-ebright\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some scientists warn that the studies are an \u2018extinction-level risk\u2019 If someone had asked you in winter 2019 your views on gain-of-function research, you would likely have given them a blank look. But since the Covid pandemic, and with the&nbsp;Wall Street Journal&nbsp;revealing&nbsp;in February that the US Department of Energy now thinks Covid-19 is likely to have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, gain-of-function research \u2014 often conducted to make viruses more infectious and more deadly \u2014 is a matter [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-covid"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2347"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2349,"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2347\/revisions\/2349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nakedpolitics.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}