Comment by deugo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deugo | Hacker News Reader

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> There is exactly fuckoff zero evidence that funding wound up supporting gain of function research for anything.

From the Fauci e-mails: People Fauci directly worked with seemed surprised and shocked to learn otherwise, and could not even instantly say if their funding had made it abroad.

There are papers resulting from GoF research of concern at the WIV. There are grant proposals, which specify the exact modifications they will do to Bat SARS to increase infectivity on mice with humanized lungs. How can you speak so certain, if you are unaware of this?

> And giving China money to study diseases in pigs happening in China that are closely related to a human disease that we were worried about it (or maybe a close relative) spilling over into humans only makes sense.

It makes sense, but you'll see through studying the records that it was the cover for military funding. What was the Defense Threat Reduction Agency funding doing at the WIV where military researchers shared floors with civilian researchers working on the same animals? Making sense to research spillover?

- There was GOF research done on US soil at UNC Chapel Hill which collaborated with WIV. They took a SARS-CoV-1 backbone and splied in a surface protein from another coronavirus and ran it through mice to produce a mouse coronavirus.

- There's no papers out of WIV indicating GOF research

> but you'll see through studying the records that it was the cover for military funding.

You're offering a blatant conspiracy theory now with no substantiation.

The funding to WIV had nothing to do with GoF and there's no evidence of anything else. But it HAD to be GoF research. Circular, evidence-free logic.

> There's no papers out of WIV indicating GOF research

This is something I'm confused about. There are a bunch of papers from the WIV and the North Carolina lab which describe "reverse genetics", spike protein modification, and other obvious gain of function research which acknowledge funding from USAID and EcoHealth Alliance. (The most recently famous of these is Menachery et al, Nature 2015.) But it looks like the actual GoF was done at the Baric lab in North Carolina. The closest I could find was serial passaging experiments done at Wuhan to isolate viruses and test vaccines. One could argue that testing virus infectivity by serial passage is dangerous enough...

> The funding to WIV had nothing to do with GoF and there's no evidence of anything else.

The funding to EcoHealth Alliance specified GoF under such terms as "reverse genetics", "virus infection experiments ... humanized mice."

EHA may have put restrictions on how this money was used, but with the revelation in this article that WIV has lied about doing military research... I'm not so confident we can say no GoF was done there.

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