The bioweapons bore

Are they wildly imaginative hyper-embroidered fairy tales?

Adapted from Nick Hudson’s Twitter thread

How many of you are, like me, sceptical about the entire bioweapons and gain-of-function story? ‘Gain-of-function’ research aims to take natural viruses and enhance them in the laboratory to make them more transmissible or virulent.

My sense is that the pressure to over-elaborate or even completely fake viral outbreaks emanates from decades of failure in this field. The following observations drive my scepticism:

• Almost all the virologists I've heard or spoken with are prone to making declarative and sweeping statements about how viral nucleotide sequences or particular proteins lead to real world phenomena, often preceded by the statement, "We know that ..." This is peculiar. If the main theories of viral processes are sound, we must acknowledge how remarkable it is that the minute quantum of data in a SARS-CoV-2 virion (just 30,000 RNA bases) compresses all the information required to bedeck the complex process of the viral life cycle.

• There's clearly a radical level of complexity at play, with proteins interacting with one another and with diverse environments (in the cell, the serum, and hostile places outside the body). Claims about how genomes map to phenomes should thus be tentative and humbly stated. Even lab animal serial passage results are elicited in a setting profoundly different from human society. Any ‘function’ gained is unlikely to stumble upon the exquisite balances required to see the virus ‘succeed’ as a community pathogen.

• Viruses are likely ancient, and our deep evolutionary history is surely a tale of intricate co-evolution. It is hard to imagine how any significant ecological niche would not have been colonised by them many times. Why then is there an expectation of a ‘novel’ virus arising? We discern only the narrowest slice of viral reality as we probe sequences. Yet seldom is any viral taxonomy or phylogeny accompanied by appropriate expressions of doubt or uncertainty. The pace with which conjecture is taken as axiomatic is breathtaking.

• As SARS-CoV-2 has made blindingly obvious, morbidity is multifactorial. Healthy, fit individuals were not decimated by Covid. The whole idea of a deadly virus seems dubious. A story must always be told of accompanying poverty, poison, life choices, self-abuse, diet or cognition. This is so much the case with SARS-CoV-2 as to render pointless any attempt to set a point estimate for its fatality rate, other than to observe that it is very low—negligible for most. Furthermore, the iatrogenic component of deaths attributed to Covid was substantial, as PANDA described in this article on the outbreak in northern Italy.

• It seems that in many cases a virus is neither necessary nor sufficient to account for the vague clusters of maladies that purport to describe the disease with which the virus is allegedly associated.

I therefore do not see in the biodefense industry a sensible strategy against a manifest risk; more the stuff of wildly imaginative just-so stories and hyper-embroidered fairy tales.

The bizarre Project Veritas sting and its vapid target – Pfizer’s Director of Worldwide R&D Strategic Operations, and ‘Scientific Planner’ (whatever that is), Jordon Trishton Walker – risk perpetuating this dubious construct. If there is gain-of-function to fret about, it stems from the evolutionary pressure from inflicting an epitopally narrow, necessarily non-sterilizing jab into billions of bodies. This article by Dr Kevin McKernan puts that case clearly. As he says, "All they need to do [to get gain-of-function going] is to get mutagens approved for C19 treatment and such drugs illegal to speak out against."

What we have in biodefense, it seems, is a resource-gobbling, society-destroying, bad viral meme. I've been asking questions along these lines for a while—for example, here at the ‘Question Everything’ Lockdown Summit in August 2021. Those questions have generated much discussion, but I've yet to hear anything close to a refutation of the conjecture central to this article. I'm all ears. Give it your best shot.