Rubio Sends Letter to Pfizer CEO on Alleged Gain-of-Function Research

Does anyone know the implications of this? i know that vaccines often have weakened virus in them. What are the implications of actively mutating a virus under lab condition? Is it something new? Or is it something already standard practice anyway?

https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public...izer-ceo-on-alleged-gain-of-function-research

 

"Gain-of-function research (GoF research or GoFR) is medical research that genetically alters an organism in a way that may enhance the biological functions of gene products. This may include an altered pathogenesis, transmissibility, or host range, i.e., the types of hosts that a microorganism can infect. This research is intended to reveal targets to better predict emerging infectious diseases and to develop vaccines and therapeutics. For example, influenza B can infect only humans and harbor seals.[1] Introducing a mutation that would allow influenza B to infect rabbits in a controlled laboratory situation would be considered a gain-of-function experiment, as the virus did not previously have that function.[2][3] That type of experiment could then help reveal which parts of the virus's genome correspond to the species that it can infect, enabling the creation of antiviral medicines which block this function.[3]

In virology, gain-of-function research is usually employed with the intention of better understanding current and future pandemics.[4] In vaccine development, gain-of-function research is conducted in the hope of gaining a head start on a virus and being able to develop a vaccine or therapeutic before it emerges.[4] The term "gain of function" is sometimes applied more narrowly to refer to "research which could enable a pandemic-potential pathogen to replicate more quickly or cause more harm in humans or other closely-related mammals.""

More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gain-of-function_research

 

The Wikipedia article gives what looks like a reasonable history. Ever since viral genomes have been sequenced and can be altered presumably people have been tinkering with them - maybe for fifteen years.

The implications are that at any time a deliberate mutation may prove to generate a virus that wipes out the human race without anybody predicting it would do that even if they were hoping for 'gain of function'.

The story seems to have been fairly effectively buried but I am reasonably sure that the lab in Wuhan was doing things, supported in one way or another by US NIH and UK scientists, in a way that could easily have not only caused the Covid-19 pandemic but something far worse. Whether or not the virus came from the lab it has become clear that such a 'new' virus could well have done.

My experience of working with the pharmaceutical industry is that some companies, and maybe now all, are ruthlessly commercial and unethical in their approach to these things.

 

I genuinely don't understand most of this debate. It's irrelevant whether it came as a result of manipulation, in the future it will be far easier to do that, at lower cost, so it will likely happen, along with natural infections. Pathogens will never stop creating outbreaks, epidemics and pandemic-level mutations. Both will be happening and the problems they case are the same.

Doesn't matter much if medical authorities botch the response anyway. Most decisions around mass infections and culling the disabled were far worse morally speaking. And that doesn't count the lies, oh the damn lies, the suppression of Long Covid alone is at least as scandalous as the worst case of an engineered virus.

Nature is perfectly capable of sending us the nastiest things, but the current state of medicine and public health clearly cannot handle even an easy mode virus. Better work on that disastrous response before going around trying to find people to blame it on, this failure was 100% organic and natural, a virus having a small tweak doesn't change any of that.

 

Gain of function research is a very bad thing. Incredibly reckless.

Regardless of what caused the present Pandemic, GF had ample capacity to create one.

 

Sometimes it is relevant. Sometimes accountability needs to matter. And the arrogance of it all can be terrifying.

 

Many thanks for this perspective.

No matter how clever someone is, or thinks they are, the complexities of nature can often prove them wrong. Which I suspect is why better scientists maybe have a degree of humility when it comes to scientific knowledge.

 

I wonder though (and I do not know either way): Once humans start doing highly targeted evolutionary experiments on a specific virus, is there a higher probability of more dangerous variants occurring more frequently - possibly much more dangerous and much more frequent? I don't know the answer to that, nor how to get to it, but it just feels like a possibility to me. Because the scientists would be doing something different to what nature does, else there would be no point doing it. And they are actively seeking more potent variants. Even if they are looking for ones that are less harmful to humans, mutations are a bit insensitive to that! Either a really potent one could be created and escape. Or could be created but its potency not realised until interactions with the outside world triggered it.

 

NIH requested ethics paper: Gain-of-Function Research: Ethical Analysis

Abstract

Gain-of-function (GOF) research involves experimentation that aims or is expected to (and/or, perhaps, actually does) increase the transmissibility and/or virulence of pathogens. Such research, when conducted by responsible scientists, usually aims to improve understanding of disease causing agents, their interaction with human hosts, and/or their potential to cause pandemics. The ultimate objective of such research is to better inform public health and preparedness efforts and/or development of medical countermeasures. Despite these important potential benefits, GOF research (GOFR) can pose risks regarding biosecurity and biosafety. In 2014 the administration of US President Barack Obama called for a “pause” on funding (and relevant research with existing US Government funding) of GOF experiments involving influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses in particular. With announcement of this pause, the US Government launched a “deliberative process” regarding risks and benefits of GOFR to inform future funding decisions—and the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) was tasked with making recommendations to the US Government on this matter. As part of this deliberative process the National Institutes of Health commissioned this Ethical Analysis White Paper, requesting that it provide (1) review and summary of ethical literature on GOFR, (2) identification and analysis of existing ethical and decision-making frameworks relevant to (i) the evaluation of risks and benefits of GOFR, (ii) decision-making about the conduct of GOF studies, and (iii) the development of US policy regarding GOFR (especially with respect to funding of GOFR), and (3) development of an ethical and decision-making framework that may be considered by NSABB when analyzing information provided by GOFR risk-benefit assessment, and when crafting its final recommendations (especially regarding policy decisions about funding of GOFR in particular). The ethical and decision-making framework ultimately developed is based on the idea that there are numerous ethically relevant dimensions upon which any given case of GOFR can fare better or worse (as opposed to there being necessary conditions that are either satisfied or not satisfied, where all must be satisfied in order for a given case of GOFR to be considered ethically acceptable): research imperative, proportionality, minimization of risks, manageability of risks, justice, good governance (i.e., democracy), evidence, and international outlook and engagement. Rather than drawing a sharp bright line between GOFR studies that are ethically acceptable and those that are ethically unacceptable, this framework is designed to indicate where any given study would fall on an ethical spectrum—where imaginable cases of GOFR might range from those that are most ethically acceptable (perhaps even ethically praiseworthy or ethically obligatory), at one end of the spectrum, to those that are most ethically problematic or unacceptable (and thus should not be funded, or conducted), at the other. The aim should be that any GOFR pursued (and/or funded) should be as far as possible towards the former end of the spectrum.

 

I think your concerns are very realistic. Natural mutation is a bit like randomly changing a letter in a Shakespeare sonnet. 99.999% of the time what you get is a sonnet that isn't quite right and gets replaced by a correct version. Deliberate human mutation is more like deliberately changing a letter that changes the whole meaning of the poem - maybe changing he to she or love to live.

Ultimately it is a matter of statistics, since natural mutation could do that very occasionally, and does. But it is interesting that there are really very few examples of completely new infections in historical times other than infections that look to have been brought to new human populations by human tampering. Obvious examples are smallpox and syphilis, exchanged across continents with travel to the Americas. More recently HIV probably originated in another species. Covid-19 probably has an origin from another species facilitated by man, whether in a lab or a market.

Human stupidity is a remarkably powerful force. People seem to forget that the ability to do clever new things tends to bring the power to do very stupid new things.

 

Thanks. A great easy to understand analogy.

Amen to that.

 

Obligatory:

 

But strains are a different species.

When it comes to new strains, humans got a history with nudging nature.

 

Hubris.

 

How do you know, though, that the 'small' tweak as you call it, can't become something much larger and deadlier than intended? It might not have been the intended result, but when you play around with nature, you don't ever know for sure what the end result might end up being - good or bad.

 

Very much so. The overconfidence of presuming to predict outcomes in complex systems having the potential to be catastrophically unpredictable.