This strain may have emerged from gain-of-function research conducted at two specific facilities: the USDA Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory (SEPRL) in Athens, Georgia, and the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. //

smalltownoklahoman. | March 11, 2025 at 12:42 pm
Why is it being done at all? Who thinks it’s a good idea to take a known virus and amp it up into something that can kill millions? Just to satisfy some scientists curiosity? H1N1 in the late 70’s was a GOF research project that “oops!” just happened to escape. It’s clear that humans just aren’t responsible enough to continue to play these games and any countries that allow it need to be punished severely, including our own. Would Covid exist if we weren’t funding the research and teaching Chinese scientists how to conduct it? //

GWB in reply to Sanddog. | March 11, 2025 at 1:47 pm
Primarily the research exists (ostensibly) for two reasons:
First is to then play around and see how things work. This is research for knowledge’s sake.
Second is the idea that you can then make vaccines and treatments for these things (especially novel ones, yay!) and be better prepared when something appears out of the wild. (Or when something shows up from an enemy’s bioweapons lab.)

I get the first one. And if people could be trusted to be really safe and have only the best motives and all that, it might be supportable for those who place Reason high on a pedestal.

The second one does make sense. Sorta. The problem there is that how do you distinguish between someone making a weapon and someone actually building defenses against a weapon? By what they tell you? Simply by who they work for? Yeah, pull the other one.

Sanddog in reply to GWB. | March 12, 2025 at 12:30 am
There isn’t a single vaccine or treatment that has come out of these experiments. //