There's no indication WIV was doing any gain of function research.
WIV did collaborate with UNC Chapel Hill to do GOF research in America, in mice using a SARS-CoV-1 backbone.
The US government send funds to WIV to study SADS-CoV in pigs.
Circular logic is invoked to "prove" that those funds led to secret GoF research which has never been published or talked about on the basis that the pandemic arising in Wuhan is too much of a coincidence (and coincidences logically can never happen).
I wrote a long post in reply to this, but HN lost it :( :(
I feel that people are over-simplifying this issue greatly on both sides in this thread. Basically, it seems like the definition of GoF is not totally agreed upon even by top scientists. A lot hinges on intent/expectations, but of course scientists can't perfectly predict what will happen with these experiments.
It seems like the research referenced was not "GoF" research in the sense that it wasn't intended or predicted to cause GoF. But at the same time, going back to even 2015, there was criticism that this research was risky, even if it technically was not GoF research.
Some scientists also seem to think we should be doing more GoF research to learn more before the next pandemic.
These are the links I read, both of which I thought were pretty even-handed. For the record, I often think fact checking sites present totally biased nonsense, but in this case it seemed okay.
You still don't get SARS-CoV-2 out of any of the experiments they were doing. The experiments that have been done on chimeric viruses have been using SARS-CoV-1 or the SARS-CoV-1-presumed-progentor WIV1. RaTG13 is still 30-40 years worth of evolution away from being a SARS-CoV-2 backbone and you can't get it from randomly bolting on different hACE2 binding proteins to a RaTG13 backbone. And while the pangolin spike is closest to SARS-CoV-2 it is still not a perfect match.
So they were creating chimeras from a spike they found that was similar to the pangolin spike but has never been published. And they were combining that with a backbone that they found that was RaTG13-like but similarly has never been published. Even though their prior targets have been SARS-CoV-1 and WIV1 backbones, and they skipped over RaTG13, which would have been of more interest to study because of its association with the miners, to select an RaTG13-like backone of an unpublished virus. And then presumably they did all this in HELA cell lines expressing human ACE2 and did serial passage / gain of function so it became well adapted.
Then even if you have all this happen, you somehow need to get that virus up someone's nose. Because petri dishes don't cough. And we know that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't spread pretty much at all from surfaces. And you need to get a sufficient infectious dose. So someone had a party in the lab and decided to chop up a dish of proto-SARS-CoV-2 cultures and rail a line of it like it was coke or something.
Or, nature does chimeric (recombination) gain of function experiments all the time, and every confined animal farm in China is a bioreactor in a lab doing stochastic serial passage experiments with "lab workers" who have never even heard of biosafety levels.
> The Wuhan lab constructed novel chimeric viruses that combined spike genes from new bat SARS-related coronaviruses with the genomic backbone of another bat SARS-related coronavirus.
> These were viruses that were novel, not viruses that were present in nature.
A rando on twitter is not a source, they're just citing the same circular reasons speculation as assertive truth and there's no proof.
And your citation is to:
> Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus
Yes. There is a massive amount that we still don't know about the genoomic diversity of sarbecoviruses in bats in and around China. This is the kind of study that we need a whole lot more of. No idea what your point is.
There's not gain of function. The WIV1 virus already binds to hACE2, putting another spike on it and finding that spike also binds to hACE2 in vitro doesn't enhance its function at all. It does tell you how much that spike binds to hACE2.
You can debate if that's a good idea or not, but SARS-CoV-2 is way too distant from WIV1/SARS-CoV-1 to arise from any lab experiment with chimeric viruses. And its also too far away from RaTG13, which still needs decades of evolution to turn into SARS-CoV-2.
> The work met--unequivocally--the definition of gain-of-function research of concern under the 2014 Pause.
> The work met--unequivocally--the definition of potential pandemic pathogen enhancement under the 2017 HHS Potential Pandemic Pathogen Control and Oversight (P3CO) Framework.
She states specifically that she was not doing GOF research into how to make viruses more virulent or jump species. You can study how viruses jump species without making them jump species.
And if you disagree with that, do you have details of the experiments and how they were seeking to enhance existing viruses which goes beyond just speculation and circular logic?
> But in an email to the paper, Shi said her experiments differed from gain-of-function experiments since they did not seek to make a virus more dangerous. Instead they were trying to understand how the virus might jump across species.
They have already been caught lying about not having any bats in the lab and so far they haven't been acting like someone who's innocent.
WIV did collaborate with UNC Chapel Hill to do GOF research in America, in mice using a SARS-CoV-1 backbone.
The US government send funds to WIV to study SADS-CoV in pigs.
Circular logic is invoked to "prove" that those funds led to secret GoF research which has never been published or talked about on the basis that the pandemic arising in Wuhan is too much of a coincidence (and coincidences logically can never happen).