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Comment by teh_klev | Hacker News Reader

> why would they stop when DARPA blocked it

Because the Trump administration decided that along with a bunch of other offshore collaboration funding decided to pull the money (America First!). There's a Vincent Racaniello episode on Microbe TV that explained what happened there. I don't remember the episode but here's his channel:

https://www.youtube.com/c/VincentRacaniello/videos

I think if folks would listen more to virologists than the press they'd find out that it's incredibly difficult to engineer new viruses (that's actually in his coursework - also on his channel), but it's also incredibly difficult to create stable "gain of function" (for weaponising) which has been suggested as the source of SARS2 and that whole Wuhan conspiracy theory thing.

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But why would one denial from one particularly finicky funding source (Trump-era US agencies) make researchers – who thought they were doing essential work – stop such essential work? Why wouldn't they use other funding, possibly from overhead funding or prior grants, or from other less-finicky funders? And in a jurisdiction – China – where many of the same limits or reporting-requirements might not exist?

Are virologists the only humans who, thwarted by one jurisdiction's limits, give up without considering doing their career-making, essential-to-humanity work elsewhere?

> …it's incredibly difficult to engineer new viruses… [and] …also incredibly difficult to create stable "gain of function"…

Indeed, but humans do incredibly difficult things all the time. In fact, they're often attracted to the challenge, and seek funding to help them do it, and often don't let a 'no' from any one funder stop them from bootstrapping work in other ways.

It's also incredibly difficult to engineer & get approval for vaccines to a brand-new disease, but that got done, recently, faster than ever before.

It was incredibly difficult to create nuclear weapons, but a lot of countries have done it independently.

Given the significant number of dangerous pathogen escapes from disease labs, it's also "incredibly difficult" to keep dangerous contagions safely contained. It's comparatively easy to accidently let them out!

Covid wasn't a brand new disease. They had most of the research necessary to create a vaccine completed two years before the outbreak. We would likely have had the Johnson and Johnson vaccine by July of 2020 if Trump hadn't shut down the pandemic response team purely because it was created by Obama. They were the ones already preparing the ground work necessary for a vaccine to existing SARS Corona virus diseases that had already emerged as far back as 2011. Project Warp Speed wasn't so successful because it provided funding or cut red tape, most of the vaccines we got didn't even participate. We got vaccines so fast because nearly a decade of related research had already been completed.

My point is it would have required a virtual miracle for the proposed gain of function research to have produced something that could have escaped in the time framed that is possible regarding the rejected grant request. Additionally, good research has proven that Covid couldn't have been due to gain of function research either.

If that is the case why did Peter himself say a covid vaccine was impossible at the Nipah conference in 2019?

The 2019 nipah conference was December 09-10. The first COVID patients with symptoms had only entered the hospital the previous day and the epidemic was still unrecognized. Why was anyone talking about a vaccine for a disease no one knew existed at an unrelated virus conference? Can you source anything to that effect?

All 3 vaccines used in the US received funding through Operation Warp Speed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed

Most of your points about coronavirus vaccine research also apply to coronavirus gain-of-function research: scientists have been studying these viruses for decades. They've also been proposing – & sometimes doing! – gain-of-function-like work on these same viruses for years.

And why would it take a "virtual miracle" to accomplish via purposeful lab work the same thing that a 'wholly natural origin' explanation would suggest happened by dumb luck in natural recombinations?

What if it was both 'natural origin' and a 'lab leak'? For example, perhaps a wholly natural zoonotic event created the novelty, but it wasn't circulating in humans until after researchers found that crossover-ready virus in the wild – doing research similar to that in this just-revealed proposal – & brought it to Wuhan for study. Then, either with or without further 'gain-of-function' tinkering, inadvertently let it loose into an urban population?

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