Scientists gone batty drinking own gain-of-function potion?

EcoHealth Alliance and the Extended Viral Phenotype

by eugyppius


Viruses are simple replicators. They consist of only a few proteins, and their sole purpose is to multiply themselves. This simplicity has often deceived us. The last eighteen months have been a lesson in their complex, unpredictable, often clearly strategic behaviour. They are selected to interact with our habits, our cultures and our societies in ways that advantage their replication. Like all replicators, they have what Richard Dawkins would call an extended phenotype – a broader pattern of effects on their environment well beyond their specific interactions with host cells.


The extended phenotype of MDV, the alphaherpesvirus behind Marek’s Disease, encompasses not only the illness it causes in chickens, but the very vaccines we have developed against it. Through the brute force of its replication, MDV called these vaccines into being. In many ways they further MDV’s interests. They represent a great part of MDV’s genome, industrially produced by humans, and gene replication is all that the genome of MDV really wants. Still more, these vaccines, once they are given to chickens, allow MDV to operate at excessive rates of virulence and replication without killing its hosts. Humans copying MDV, preparing chickens to be more durable MDV hosts – this is all MDV’s extended phenotype, which has reconfigured our behaviour for its own benefit.


We can expand this theory of the extended phenotype to the point of absurdity. We can go all the way to conceiving of our present circumstances as the extended phenotype of SARS-CoV-1, which first infected humans in 2002. Of course, SARS-1 stopped replicating after just a few thousand hosts, but not before inspiring a whole program of research that, in the end, proved deeply advantageous to most of the SARS-1 genotype. Prominent virologists, entire governments and NGOs all fell under the mysterious spell of SARS, fantasising for years about its genes and embarking upon lunatic hunts for more SARS virions in remote Chinese caves. Ultimately, they succeeded in producing and releasing to the world an enhanced version of SARS, known today as SARS-2, which is 80% similar to the original SARS-1 genome. All those genes free to replicate widely once more.


This new virus has an extended phenotype of its own, of course. It has hypnotised our whole world. A vast part of our pharmaceutical industry now works for the virus, producing genetic instructions for its most critical anatomical feature, its masterpiece, the spike protein. Most of our governments want nothing more than to inject instructions for spike into all of mankind. Not only does our slavish replication of virus RNA represent a victory for SARS-2 in itself. As with MDV, putting instructions for legacy spike into the cells of billions of humans also facilitates spread in ways we did not anticipate and still do not fully understand. The worldwide public health establishment fought for a year to prevent the development of far more effective natural immunity to SARS-2, thus ensuring a clear path for the insane spike protein injections and their infection enhancements. And then there is all of the worshipful research on SARS-2, ever eager to cede this virus ominous and magical properties. From top to bottom, this is the behaviour of the extended SARS-2 phenotype.



If you think this is taking things too far, consider the grant proposal that the notorious EcoHealth Alliance, headed by Peter Daszak, submitted to DARPA in 2018. These are the American NGO collaborators with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the proposal provides a direct window onto the program of research that gave us second-edition new-and-improved SARS. The proposed “research” involves activities so obviously reckless that they border on evil: Relentless bat sampling in Yunnan caves thought to be the approximate origin of SARS, creating chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses optimised to infect humans, introducing these optimised viruses to humanised mice so they might actually infect cells, spraying aerosolised spike proteins or virus vectors into caves to “boost” bat immunity – these and more are what the scientists associated with EcoHealth Alliance proposed to do. It is at base a bizarre scientised worship of SARS and its replication, and beyond that an effort of the lingering extended phenotype of SARS-1 to resurrect itself in some form and return to human hosts. It succeeded.



The DRASTIC researchers who released the leaked proposal have their own commentary, and I encourage you to read it. What follows is merely an overview of five astounding moments.



As of 2018, EcoHealth Alliance and their collaborators had established operations at three high-risk caves in Yunnan. Bats whose viruses had never bothered anyone but a few locals before (with the arguable exception of the SARS outbreak itself) were now constantly in contact with researchers intent on extracting their viruses and enshrining these pathogens in a city laboratory 1800 kilometres away.
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KEY DOCUMENTS


DARPA PREEMPT program (HR00111880017):

- Brief introduction’: www.darpa.mil/program/preventing-emerging-pathogenic-threats

- Press release: www.darpa.mil/news-events/2018-01-04 (archived version)

- Grant Opportunity: www.grants.gov/web/grants/view-opportunity.html?oppId=300198

- Copies of some of the main Grant Opportunity files: bit.ly/39yeFNj

- Description of the Selected teams: www.darpa.mil/news-events/2019-02-19

The teams are led by (1) Autonomous Therapeutics, Inc., (2) Institut Pasteur, (3) Montana

State University, (4) The Pirbright Institute and (5) the University of California, Davis.

Most of the teams are made of US, UK or Australian partners, plus one partner in Estonia

(Tartu) and the Institut Pasteur network in Asia. None of the teams include Chinese partners.

- Examples of funded PREEMPT projects:

○ $9.37mln award for UCDavis team PREEMPT project

○ Montana State University team PREEMPT project.



CONTEXT & SUMMARY


These leaked documents describing bat research proposed by EcoHealth Alliance should be

considered in light of the following context:

On August 27th

, 2021, the US intelligence community issued a 502-word summary of the conclusions

drawn up by the joint investigation ordered by President Biden in late May. Conspicuously absent

from the brief statement were any indications that the evidence presented in testimony to Congress

had been part of the intelligence community analysis - at least not in the unclassified version that

was released.

The lifting of the gain-of-function (GOF) moratorium in late 2017, via the Potential Pandemic

Pathogen Care and Oversight framework (P3CO), has allowed GOF research with SARS-like

coronaviruses to resume with very few practical limits. In particular the absence of clear definitions of

GoF, creative interpretations of the guidelines, and rather discretionary decisions to refer research

projects or not, all contributed to reducing the effectiveness of the P3CO framework - despite the fact

that other agencies of the US federal government actively maintained the GOF standards.

DRASTIC recently became aware of documents which show that EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) in

concert wIth the WIV were looking towards implementing an advanced human pathogenicity BatCoV

research project that clearly qualifies as GoF, in a grant proposal submitted to a funding proposal call

by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the spring of 2018. The EHA / WIV

proposal (named ‘DEFUSE’) was ultimately rejected for full funding (but leaving open the door for

partial funding), in part because it skirted the GOF guidelines.

In other words, a branch of the federal government had already judged aspects of EHA’s research,

and the corresponding shared research plan with the WIV, as falling under the definition of GOF, only

for HHS to approve similar work without P3CO review in 2018 and 2019. In particular, the P3CO

framework was designed to allow greater flexibility for vaccine development, and in June of 2018 the

NIH’s Vaccine Research Center (VRC) expanded its existing partnership with Moderna to include

full-scale research into a pan-coronavirus (CoV) vaccine platform. EcoHealth Alliance repeatedly

took advantage of this flexibility to continue their work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology

DRASTIC has reviewed the contents of these documents They detail past achievements and

planned experiments in collaboration with researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV),

East China Normal University (ECNU), UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke-National University in Singapore, the

USGS National Wildlife Health Center (NWHC) and Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

The grant proposal includes some elements of research that are already public via scientific papers,

as well as other elements that have never been made public; these include vaccinating wild bats

using aerosolized viruses and further work on published and unpublished CoV strains that could fill

the extant gaps in our understanding of the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

These grant proposal documents also show a staggeringly deep level of involvement of EHA with

the WIV, on matters of national interest (such as DURC), for instance by proposing that the DARPA

grant pays a good chunk of key WIV researchers salaries, or that some of these WIV researchers

should be invited to DARPA headquarters in Arlington. All the while without proper risk assessment

and considerations for ethical and social issues ...