GOF Research Warrants Vigorous Debate

For more than a year, the official institutional narrative of the global scientific community advised that there was broad consensus among virologists that SARS-CoV-2 was almost certainly a naturally occurring virus, and that there was no reason whatsoever to believe it had been deliberately altered and had escaped from a laboratory. As that narrative continues to crumble, we should demand answers if only to plot a better path forward.

The internet has become an increasingly complex part of modern society. As technology continues to expand access to both high-speed connections and cheap handheld devices, the rapid pace at which information can be broadly disseminated has become staggering. While the information was still traversing the globe with anything approaching that degree of saturation on a scale of days to weeks when the world experienced its last real global pandemic a century ago, it now takes only a few hours for individual tidbits to be fully absorbed into the collective conscience.

However, because getting information from the internet can be like trying to take a sip of water out of a fire hydrant, this can be both a good and bad thing. When a major global event takes place, the sheer volume of content that instantly becomes available can be overwhelming. When the topic is politically charged and culturally divisive, you can also bet that much of the coverage will cater to the biases of whatever demographic the producer is targeting. In other words, you can very easily find someone to tell you what you’d prefer to hear.

But even when a journalist has the most honest of intentions and works for an ethical publication, stories like the COVID crisis are amongst the most difficult to report on. When information is constantly changing and the subject itself is terribly complex, the challenges to getting it right are compounded greatly, especially with such a high premium falling on how quickly you get the information out to the public. In these instances, experts and institutions are paramount.

In nearly a quarter-century of journalism, I’ve never encountered a story that required as much research, self-education, and dedicated column inches as COVID-19. I authored 25 lengthy installments of the COVID Chronicles series, and a dozen or so other lengthy, COVID-related features. From nearly the beginning there were low-level murmurs about a possible lab leak in China, though they were all but drowned out by a loud chorus of experts and institutions who said that was almost certainly not the case.

Whenever a large contingent of experts express agreement on something the rest of us know very little about, it rarely gets challenged, especially when the most respected institutions in that field echo the same narrative on a subject that is a fast-moving target with many other moving parts. When it came to COVID-19, the most critical information the public was seeking was, How bad is this thing and what should we do to keep us and our families safe?Where it came from, was more commonly spoken in terms of partisan rancor.

Theories on how it came to be fell much further down the list in terms of news demand and, because of the institutional narrative that flowed from experts and institutions to the most credible sources were overwhelmingly favoring the institutional narrative, few experts, institutions, journalists, or publications–all of whom had the bulk of their resources trained at different questions–challenged it. Those who did, quickly found themselves relegated to the junk food aisle of their respective lane, whether they be a scientist, journalist, or any related institution. As such, the Wuhan lab leak story was broadly considered a fake news conspiracy theory unworthy of serious examination, especially when there were more pressing questions.

However, as the fog of war started to lift, that began to change. Scientists who had been biting their tongues spoke up, lending weight to a handful of dissidents who hadn’t gone along from the start. As the numbers increased, journalists and their publications followed and we are only now beginning to contemplate the sort of robust debate on the subject that is desperately needed. Let’s take a look at some of the most critical information.

Gain of function mutations confer new or enhanced functions to a protein, including things like the ability to jump species and/or be spread in airborne droplets. Essentially, gain of function (GOF) research attempts to quickly incite mutations that may or may not have otherwise occurred in nature over much longer periods of time, in order to study what would happen, the implications, and potential remedies.

Virologists have long warned that our modern world of factory farms and cheap air travel is highly conducive to the spread of novel viruses and, pre-COVID, warned that it was only a matter of time before we faced a pandemic that would rival the Spanish flu of 1918. New viruses crop up all of the time in food animals like pigs and chickens, sometimes mutating to the point where they can jump from an infected animal to a human. This is relatively rare in terms of how many novel viruses do not, but it happens often enough to be a valid concern.

Most viruses that achieve such an ability end there. However, they can undergo additional mutations that would then allow the virus to be spread from human to human. Once this happens, additional mutations could enhance its transmissibility and, as unlikely as such a scenario may be in the grand scheme of things, such an outcome is plausible enough that many scientists do not believe we should leave the fate of the species to chance. They argue that we should instead enhance such viruses in secure laboratories so that vaccines and therapeutics can be developed before that ever were to happen.

One of the early, controversial examples of gain of function research occurred in 2012 and involved the H5N1 virus (bird flu), a type of influenza that had gained the ability to jump from birds to humans, killing about 60 percent of those who contracted it. However, the virus did not seem to be able to pass from human to human. Researchers attempted to see if they could get the virus to jump to mammals, from which it would be more likely to gain human transmission abilities. Ferrets, which have similar respiratory systems to humans and are a common vector in animal to human transmissions, were used in the studies. Eventually, the virus successfully infected a ferret, and, just ten ferret to ferret transmissions later, it had gained the function of human transmission.

With a 60 percent death rate among humans, H5N1, were it ever to gain airborne transmissibility among our species, could pose an existential threat to mankind. It would obviously be great to have effective vaccines and therapeutics in advance of potential mutations that could see such a virus transition to a global pandemic. However, almost a decade later, we’ve got nothing but Tamiflu and some spotty vaccines that, like other influenza vaccines, quickly see their effectiveness reduced by constant mutations. That begs the question, was it a foolish idea to give it increased functionality in the first place?

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is a research institute specializing in the study of coronaviruses that is administered by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (a state-controlled institution). It has strong ties to the Galveston National Laboratory in the United States, the Center for International Infections Research in France, and the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada. It has also benefited from considerable funding from those countries, most notably the U.S.

Researchers at the lab were actively involved in GOF research on coronaviruses found in horseshoe bats at the time of the outbreak. Think about that for a moment. There was a laboratory doing gain of function research on coronaviruses in the very place where the virus originated, yet the institutional narrative, nearly top-to-bottom, became near certainty that the two things were unrelated–even though the popularized "wet market" theory, when examined in retrospect, seems like little more than an otherwise plausible guess, and that’s only if there was not a laboratory monkeying around with the same kind of viruses right down the road.

There are also other red flags virologists have pointed out that make a natural mutation seem less likely. First among them is the fact that it seemed to immediately have both the ability to jump from another animal to humans and be transmitted human to human, skipping a step, if you will. Next is the so-called "furin cleavage site" on the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, a unique attribute responsible for its relatively high infectivity compared to related viruses, the origin of which still puzzles researchers. Its proclivity to spread indoors rather than outside is also curious for a virus that was said to have evolved in the wild.

This is all compounded dearly by the fact that Chinese researchers had been previously criticized by the global scientific community for not enforcing rigorous safety standards regarding such research, including at the Wuhan lab just a year before the appearance of SARS-CoV-2. In 2018, a U.S. embassy delegation to the lab found its safety standards so lax that they sent those concerns to Washington in an official cable. In 2013, senior scientists warned that the new viral strains created by researchers in a different Chinese lab who mixed bird-flu virus with human influenza could escape from the laboratory to cause a global pandemic killing millions of people, calling it "appalling irresponsibility." Not that American labs have been free from such criticism. In 2014 alone, workers at a CDC lab in Atlanta were accidentally exposed to live anthrax; live smallpox was found in a freezer at a non-secure NIH lab outside of Washington, DC; and H5N1 was accidentally shipped from an Atlanta biosafety lab to a poultry lab in Athens, GA. In other words, human error seems every bit as dangerous as mother nature.

The traditional politics involved are somewhat obvious. Chinese officials would clearly not be excited about the prospect of having to own up to such a mistake, even if it was the most honest of accidents, given the unprecedented consequences. Because then-President Trump, in the midst of a trade war with our biggest economic rival, was enthusiastic about blaming China from the start, that meant that the roughly half of Americans who were united against him were less inclined to be open to the idea, especially when the experts and institutions were telling them not to be.

Perhaps more importantly, however, the issue has shone a light on the fact that scientific communities are no more altruistic or immune to political infighting than those in other fields. It is troubling, to say the least, that so many highly credentialed scientists were uncomfortable voicing their opinions on the matter, allowing bureaucratic institutions to capture a narrative that seemed to speak for science at large when it is now clear that it did not. We live in a world where expertise increasingly takes a backseat to political power and while we’ve seen the dismal effects of politicians and their political lackeys moving away from the guidance of much better-educated analysts in fields like economics and climate science there may not be a field in which that could be more dangerous than virology.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health, are the two most influential proponents of GOF research and funding in the United States and, in 2017, were instrumental in ending a moratorium on GOF research that had been in place since 2014. That would seem to be a potential conflict of interest given their roles in the pandemic response, their influence on research funding, and the enormous platform given to Fauci on President Trump’s COVID-19 task force. In other words, none of that would seem likely to inspire scientists who valued their careers to go off script from the institutional narratives.

There are good reasons to do gain of function research, including to detect how pathogens respond and adapt to vaccines and therapeutic treatments. However, there are also, clearly, very good reasons why we should not be creating potentially cataclysmic viruses that can more easily escape into nature, either accidentally or nefariously, than they are likely to provide an answer to some future problem we ultimately may or may not face.

And when the scientific community is split on an issue, it seems even more prudent to crawl before we walk and–let’s be clear–the U.S., in particular, has been running toward GOF research at breakneck speed in terms of authorization and funding. We need a robust national conversation on the issue in which people resist the urge to descend into tribal, partisan camps. This is too important to pick a side based on who you most wish to be wrong instead of a common desire to get it right. It’s not hyperbole to suggest that the future of mankind could be at stake.