In another disturbing report on what was happening at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and similar laboratories before the pandemic, we learned that researchers created viruses that had 10,000 times the viral load higher than their counterparts. of nature (meaning the engineering virus was significantly more infectious).
In addition, we also learned that laboratory researchers performed experiments on these improved viruses using “humanized mice.” These are mice that have been created with human cells or tissues, allowing researchers to study the response of human cells to medical treatments and, as you may have guessed, to disease. Read it as human experimentation without the danger of breaking any annoying pattern of ethics.
In 2014, funding was suspended for research on the gain of function that could make naturally occurring viruses more infectious because of the reasonable concern that playing God with deadly diseases could be very dangerous. This suspension was lifted in 2017 for projects that were subject to a review process by a special board to make sure the projects were worthwhile.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), led by Fauci’s “American Doctor,” Anthony, has decided not to mark the $ 3.1 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance to study coronavirus. of bat for review under the new guidelines. NIAID made this decision even though the grant application itself acknowledged the potential dangers in the research, noting that “fieldwork involves the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoV, while working in caves with a high bat density and the potential for inhaled fecal dust “.
Nearly $ 600,000 of the EcoHealth Alliance grant was earmarked for WIV to study and alter bat coronaviruses that would likely infect humans.
Therefore, we have researchers in the Wuhan lab who use nearly $ 600,000 in NIAID grants to improve the infectivity of bat coronaviruses and observe their effectiveness in mice that contained human cells and tissues.
All this begs the question: why?
Why would government-funded scientists actively work to design deadly viruses to make them more likely to infect humans?
Is it for the prospect of lucrative government contracts for the armament of these viruses? Is it because of a megalomaniacal arrogance stemming from the innate human drive to mess with things we shouldn’t do? Or is it that they’ve somehow never seen a movie or read a book (there are dozens, if not hundreds) of that kind of research that went horribly wrong?
Scientists dedicated to gaining function claim that research will help identify new emerging diseases and allow them to develop therapeutics, including vaccines, for those diseases before a pandemic arrives. However, some prominent scientists do not believe that the research has yielded enough benefits to be worth the risks. Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch said in 2017 that the gain in function has done “almost nothing to improve our preparedness for pandemics, and yet it has risked creating an accidental pandemic.”
“I have not seen any of the vaccination companies say that they need to do this work to make vaccines. I have not seen evidence that the information that people are pursuing can be made widespread use on the ground, ”Johns Hopkins Health Center Director Thomas Inglesby told Vox.
Even if COVID-19 was not accidentally leaked from the laboratory in late 2019, the actions of American and Chinese scientists show an impressive lack of respect for nature and the possible apocalyptic consequences of their experiments.
We have seen the damage that can occur with natural diseases when they are armed. The plagues unleashed by Unit 731, the Japanese biological weapons research unit during World War II, killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians, and the plot to release a plague in the U.S. was only thwarted by the surrender of the United States. Japan in 1945.
A small leak of anthrax spores that had been improved at a Soviet biological weapons facility, through investigations confiscated in Unit 731 after World War II, killed more than 60 people in the nearby city. of Sverdlovsk in 1979. Known as the “biological Chernobyl”, Sverdlovsk’s anthrax leak was blocked by Soviet authorities for almost twenty years.
Think about how much our world has changed in relation to a virus that has a mortality rate of about 1%. We saw a massive economic downturn in 2020, empty grocery stores as people searched for food and other necessities, suspicions, fear and even hostility among neighbors over mandatory government closures and mask requirements, and an unprecedented crackdown on personal liberties throughout the supposedly free Western World.
What if an improved disease with a much higher mortality rate escaped any of the dozens of laboratories around the world that conduct this type of research? Wuhan researchers were potentially already working in this project. Subsidies allowed them to combine elements of various MERS-related coronaviruses to create new hybrids. MERS is a respiratory disease similar to COVID, but has a mortality rate of almost 33%.
Perhaps the most terrifying part of this situation is that a viral superweapon as we have seen in countless movies and TV shows that does not need to kill 90% of the human population to cause a social collapse. In fact, a virus with a mortality rate of 5-10% would probably be enough to paralyze our globally highly interconnected world.
A highly communicable disease with a 5-10% mortality rate would almost certainly cause major disruptions to the global supply chain, empty grocery stores, depleted gas pumps, food riots, martial laws and a devastating blow to the economy. world. More people would probably die because of conflicts over resources, not just between countries, but between cities, counties, and perhaps even individual neighborhoods, than the virus itself. The comfortable on-demand civilization we have built is extremely fragile and only needs an interruption like a new plague to bring it all down.
These augmented diseases are potentially as dangerous to human civilization as any nuclear arsenal and deserve the same caution and supervision as our most powerful conventional weapons. Still, we seem to have a scientific community that believes there is nothing wrong with modifying life-threatening organisms near dense urban areas and international travel centers.
The hubris of the current scientific community rivals Oppenheimer’s observation that “he had become death, the destroyer of the worlds” after the test of the first atomic bomb in 1945, and may end up having consequences. much more serious for the human race.
Hayden Daniel is the Daily Caller’s opinion editor.