The team's results, posted as a preprint in BioRxiv earlier this month, proposed a handful of ACE2 variants suspected of boosting SARS-CoV-2 binding and, potentially, host susceptibility, along with several variants predicted to dial down ACE2 interactions with the viral spike protein that may be protective.

"What we can conclude is that this new virus has evolved new modality to interact with the ACE2 receptor," Jura noted. "Unfortunately, it seems like there are polymorphisms in the human population that will make some individuals more susceptible to binding this virus because these mutations are enhancing this unique part of the interface."

Seshagiri noted that such insights might make it possible to design potential therapeutic versions of ACE2 that are particularly adept at binding coronavirus spike proteins, thereby preventing the viruses from interacting with an individual's own ACE2 receptors, for example.

In a recent Cell paper, a team from Sweden, Spain, Austria, and Canada proposed its own strategy for engineering soluble, clinical-grade forms of the human ACE2 protein that appeared to dial down early-stage infections by SARS-CoV-2 in otherwise susceptible cell types.

"We are not the first to come up with the idea of saying ACE2 could be a therapeutic," he said, though he suggested that engineering soluble forms of the receptors protein that bind well to SARS-CoV-2 may serve as a strategy for "future proofing" against the emergence of these and other related viruses down the road.

The researchers plan to profile ACE2 polymorphisms in still more human samples for the final version of the study, which will likely be submitted for peer review in the coming weeks, Seshagiri said.

He and MedGenome CEO Rayman Mathoda noted that the diagnostic company, which is active in India and other emerging markets, is also a founding member of a GenomeAsia 100K project.

"We've made a very intentional effort to build on a data-focused set of efforts, where we take our proprietary data as we grow, but build in other data source," Mathoda said.

The investigators are not alone in attempting to establish a baseline understanding of ACE2 variation across and within populations.

At the University of Siena in northern Italy, Alessandra Renieri and her colleagues have been delving into ACE2 genetic variation using available exome sequences for some 7,000 healthy participants in the Network of Italian Genomes project. As they reported in a preprint posted to MedRxiv in early April, the investigators saw significant variation in ACE2 in that retrospective dataset, including both common and rare, missense variants predicted to influence the protein's stability and its interactions with the coronavirus viral spike.

"There is pretty wide genetic variability," Renieri said. "There are both polymorphisms, so variants found in a percentage of the population, and there are also rare variants a lot of rare variants."

It may be possible for the individual centers participating in the Network of Italian Genomes to recontact individuals in the future to try to find out who became infected with SARS-CoV-2 and to assess ACE2 variation alongside clinical outcomes, Renieri noted, though she cautioned that "ACE2 is just one of the many genes that could be involved."

For the reCOVID project, members of the team are seeking funding through the European Commission's Innovative Medicines Initiative IMI2 call for proposals to do functional analyses on ACE2 and other genes, for example, in the hopes of developing candidate therapeutics.

Renieri is also part of a team that been working since mid-March to prospectively collect samples from 2,000 COVID-19 patients at least 21 different hospitals in Italy as part of the GEN-COVID study, part of the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative.

For that project, researchers in Italy will use whole-exome sequencing to assess patient samples collected in conjunction with very detailed clinical information, she explained, while collaborators in Finland will genotype the samples for a related genome-wide association study.

Continued here:
A gene that could unlock the mysteries of COVID-19 - ModernHealthcare.com

TORONTO, April 21, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Along-standing regulatory requirementto bringvaccinesto marketinvolvestesting them onanimal models prior to clinical trials with humans.Although thisseems like a very good safety measure for humans,most people donot know that90% of whatworked on animal models didn't workforhumans andinsomecaseseven caused harm.

This acceptance of a 10% predictive rate using animal models is in stark contrast with the85-90% predictive rate using modern vitro technologies. According to veterinarian Dr. Andre Menache, "the requirement for testing on animal models dates back to theNuremberg Codes of 1947 and is still the norm in national and international legislation today."

Liz White, Director of Animal Alliance of Canada, a national animal advocacyorganization, states, "What most people do not know is that mice are resistant to the COVID-19 virus. Mice are forced through genetic engineering to have the human version of the enzyme that causes COVID-19. Researchers then use the mice to test a vaccine in order tomeet regulatory requirements before starting clinical trials on humans. This process seems scientifically flawed."

We need a vaccine to combat COVID-19 (SARS-CoV2), a virus globally ravaging populations and economies today. Consequently, we need to discuss and challenge testing on animal models when we should be using human relevant models. According to Dr. Menache, "there are some high-performance technologies of the 21st century we can use for example 'MIMIC' (Modular IMune In vitro Construct). It's an in vitro model of the human immune system." According to Michael Rivard, vice president of corporate development at VaxDesign, "the information you get from this type of test is far beyond what you'd get out of a mouse study both because it's humans and because you can see the effect across a spectrum of genotypes".

Because we're in an emergency situation, researchers decided to test new treatments directly on volunteer patients. Importantly, these are drugs that have already been tested on animals for their intended uses.

In the recent past, there have been other COVID related viruses, like SARS, for which we still don't have a vaccine. Dr. Menache states, "Perhaps the COVID-19 pandemic will help us to question some of our outdated scientific practices as well as the obsolete regulations that still impose them."

We urge the Trudeau government and theresearch community to establish a research institution whose mandate is the exploration and development of human-relevant research not using animal models to create a better future for all of us,said White. We need to move our research objectives out of the 19th century and into the 21st century.

Liz White, Director, Animal Alliance of CanadaCell (Canada): 416-809-4371Email: liz@animalalliance.ca

Dr. Andre Menache, CEO of Antidote Europe, is a European Veterinary Specialist in Animal Welfare Science, Ethics and Law and a member of theEuropean College of Animal Welfare and Behavioural Medicine. He is a zoologist and a veterinary surgeon with a particularinterest in medical law and was instrumental in amending the Declaration of Helsinki (DH) see DH here:https://www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-declaration-of-helsinki-ethical-principles-for-medical-research-involving-human-subjects/

Dr. Menache,BSc (zoology), BSc(Hons), BVSc, MRCVSCell (France):+33 6 23 42 62 95 Email:andre.menache@gmail.com

Excerpt from:
What Animal Alliance of Canada would like everyone to know about COVID-19 Vaccine Testing - GlobeNewswire

There has beenno scientific findingthat the novel coronavirus was bioengineered, but its origins are not entirely clear. Deadly pathogens discovered in the wild are sometimesstudied inlabs and sometimes made more dangerous. That possibility, and other plausible scenarios, have been incorrectly dismissed in remarks by some scientists andgovernment officials, and in the coverage of most major media outlets.

Regardless of the source of this pandemic, there is considerable documentation that a global biological arms race going on outside of public view could produce even more deadly pandemics in the future.

While much of the media and political establishment have minimized the threat from such lab work, some hawks on the American right like Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., have singled outChinese biodefense researchers as uniquely dangerous.

But there is every indication that U.S. lab work is every bit as threatening as that in Chinese labs. American labs also operate insecret, and are also known to beaccident-prone.

The current dynamics of the biological arms race have been driven by U.S. government decisions that extend back decades. In December 2009, Reuters reported that the Obama administration was refusing even to negotiate the possible monitoring of biological weapons.

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Much of the left in the U.S. now appears unwilling to scrutinize the origin of the pandemic or the wider issue of biowarfare perhaps because portions of the anti-Chinese right have been sovocal in making unfoundedallegations.

Governments that participate in such biological weapon research generally distinguish between "biowarfare" and "biodefense," as if to paint such "defense" programs as necessary. But this is rhetorical sleight-of-hand; the two concepts are largely indistinguishable.

"Biodefense" implies tacit biowarfare, breeding more dangerous pathogens for the alleged purposeof finding a way tofightthem. While this work appears to have succeeded in creating deadly and infectious agents, including deadlier flu strains, such "defense" research is impotent in its ability to defend us from this pandemic.

The legal scholar who drafted the main U.S. law on the subject, Francis Boyle, warned in his 2005 book "Biowarfare and Terrorism" that an "illegal biological arms race with potentially catastrophic consequences" was underway, largely driven by the U.S. government.

For years,many scientistshave raised concerns regarding bioweapons/biodefense lab work, and specifically aboutthe fact that huge increases in funding have taken place since 9/11. This was especially true afterthe anthrax-by-mail attacks that killed five people in the weeks after 9/11, which the FBI ultimately blamed on a U.S. government biodefense scientist.A 2013 study found that biodefense funding since2001 hadtotaled at least $78 billion, and more has surely been spent since then. This has led to aproliferation of laboratories, scientists and new organisms, effectively setting off a biological arms race.

Following the Ebola outbreak in west Africa in 2014, the U.S. governmentpaused fundingfor what are known as "gain-of-function" research on certain organisms. This work actually seeks to make deadly pathogensdeadlier, in some cases making pathogens airborne thatpreviously were not. With little notice outside the field, the pause on such research was lifted in late 2017.

During this pause, exceptions for funding were made for dangerous gain-of-function lab work. This included work jointly done by U.S. scientists from the University of North Carolina, Harvard and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This work which had funding from USAID and EcoHealth Alliance not originally acknowledged was published in2015 in Nature Medicine.

A different Nature Medicine article about the origin of the current pandemic,authored by five scientists andpublished on March 17,has been touted by major media outlet and some officials including current National Institutes of Health directorFrancis Collins as definitively disproving a lab origin for the novel coronavirus. That journal article, titled "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2," stated unequivocally: "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus." This is a subtly misleading sentence. While the scientists state that there is no known laboratory "signature" in the SARS-Cov-2 RNA, their argument fails to take account of other lab methods that could have created coronavirus mutations without leaving such a signature.

Indeed, there is also thequestion of conflict of interest in the Nature Medicine article. Some of the authors of that article, as well as aFebruary 2020Lancet letter condemning "conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin" which seemed calculated to minimize outside scrutiny of biodefense lab work have troubling ties to thebiodefense complex,as well as to the U.S. government. Notably, neither of these articles makes clear that a virus can have a natural originand then be captured and studied in a controlled laboratory setting before being let loose, either intentionally or accidentallywhichis clearly a possibility in the case of the coronavirus.

Facts as "rumors"

This reporter raised questions about the subject at a news conference with a Center for Disease Control (CDC) representative at the now-shuttered National Press Club on Feb. 11. I asked if it was a "complete coincidence" that the pandemic had started in Wuhan, the only place in China with a declared biosafety level 4 (BSL4) laboratory. BSL4 laboratories have the most stringent safety mechanisms, but handle the most deadly pathogens. As I mentioned, it was oddthat the ostensible origin of the novel coronavirus was bat caves in Yunnan province more than 1,000 miles from Wuhan. I noted that "gain-of-function" lab work can results in more deadly pathogens, and that major labs, including some in the U.S., have had accidental releases.

CDC Principal Deputy Director Anne Schuchat saidthatbased on the information she had seen, the virus was of "zoonotic origin." She also stated, regarding gain-of-function lab work, that it is important to "protect researchers and their laboratory workers as well as the community around them and that we use science for the benefit of people."

I followed up by asking whether an alleged natural origin did not preclude the possibility that this virus came through a lab, since a lab could have acquired a bat virus and been working on it. Schuchat replied to the assembled journalists that "it is very common for rumors to emerge that can take on life of their own," but did not directly answer the question. She noted that in the 2014 Ebola outbreak some observers had pointed to nearby labs as the possible cause, claiming this "was a key rumor that had to be overcome in order to help control the outbreak." She reiterated: "So based on everything that I know right now, I can tell you the circumstances of the origin really look like animals-to-human. But your question, I heard."

This is no rumor. It's a fact: Labs work with dangerous pathogens. The U.S. and China each have dual-use biowarfare/biodefense programs. China has major facilities at Wuhan a biosafety level 4 lab and a biosafety level 2 lab. There are leaks from labs. (See "Preventing a Biological Arms Race," MIT Press, 1990, edited by Susan Wright; also, a partial review in Journal of International Law from October 1992.)

Much of the discussion of this deadly serious subject is marred with snark that avoids or dodges the "gain-of-function" question. ABC ran a story on March 27 titled "Sorry, Conspiracy Theorists. Study Concludes COVID-19 'Is Not a Laboratory Construct.'" That story did not address the possibility that the virus could have been found in the wild, studied in a lab and thenreleased.

On March 21, USA Today published a piece headlined "Fact Check: Did the Coronavirus Originate In a Chinese Laboratory?" and rated it "FALSE."

That USA Today story rel
ied on the Washington Post, which publishedawidely cited article onFeb.17headlined,"Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked." That article quoted public comments fromRutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard Ebright, but out of context and only in part. Specifically, the story quoted from Ebright's tweet that the coronavirus was not an "engineered bioweapon." In fact, his full quote included the clarification that the virus could have "entered human population through lab accident." (An email requesting clarification sent toPost reporterPaulina Firoziwas met with silence.)

Bioengineered From a lab

Other pieces in the Post since then (some heavily sourced to U.S. government officials) have conveyed Ebright's thinking, but it gets worse. In a private exchange, Ebright who, again, has said clearly that the novel coronavirus was not technically bioengineered using known coronavirus sequences stated that other forms of lab manipulation could have beenresponsible for the current pandemic. This runs counter to much reporting, which is perhaps too scientifically illiterate to perceive the difference.

In response to the suggestion that the novel coronavirus could have come about through various methodsbesides bioengineering made by Dr. Meryl Nass, who has done groundbreaking work on biowarfareEbright responded in an email:

The genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 has no signatures of human manipulation.

This rules out the kinds of gain-of-function (GoF) research that leave signatures of human manipulation in genome sequences (e.g., use of recombinant DNA methods to construct chimeric viruses), but does not rule out kinds of GoF research that do not leave signatures (e.g., serial passage in animals). [emphasis added]

Very easy to imagine the equivalent of the Fouchier's "10 passages in ferrets" with H5N1 influenza virus, but, in this case, with 10 passages in non-human primates with bat coronavirus RaTG13 or bat coronavirus KP876546.

That last paragraph is very important. It refersto virologist Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, who performed research on intentionally increasing rates of viralmutation rate by spreading a virus from one animal to another in a sequence.The New York Times wrote about this in an editorial in January 2012, warning of "An Engineered Doomsday."

"Now scientists financed by the National Institutes of Health" have created a "virus that could kill tens or hundreds of millions of people" if it escaped confinement, the Times wrote. The story continued:

Working with ferrets, the animal that is most like humans in responding to influenza, the researchers found that a mere five genetic mutations allowed the virus to spread through the air from one ferret to another while maintaining its lethality. A separate study at the University of Wisconsin, about which little is known publicly, produced a virus that is thought to be less virulent.

The word "engineering" in the New York Times headline is technically incorrect, sincepassing a virus through animals is not "genetic engineering." This same distinction has hindered some from understanding the possible origins of the current pandemic.

Fouchier's flu work, in which an H5N1 virus was made more virulent by transmitting it repeatedly between individual ferrets, briefly sent shockwaves through the media. "Locked up in the bowels of the medical faculty building here and accessible to only a handful of scientists lies a man-made flu virus that could change world history if it were ever set free," wrote Science magazine in 2011 in a story titled "Scientists Brace for Media Storm Around Controversial Flu Studies." It continues:

The virus is an H5N1 avian influenza strain that has been genetically altered and is now easily transmissible between ferrets, the animals that most closely mimic the human response to flu. Scientists believe it's likely that the pathogen, if it emerged in nature or were released, would trigger an influenza pandemic, quite possibly with many millions of deaths.

In a 17th floor office in the same building, virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center calmly explains why his team created what he says is "probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make" and why he wants to publish a paper describing how they did it. Fouchier is also bracing for a media storm. After he talked to ScienceInsider yesterday, he had an appointment with an institutional press officer to chart a communication strategy.

Fouchier's paper is one of two studies that have triggered an intense debate about the limits of scientific freedom and that could portend changes in the way U.S. researchers handle so-called dual-use research: studies that have a potential public health benefit but could also be useful for nefarious purposes like biowarfare or bioterrorism.

Despite objections, Fouchier's article was published by Science in June 2012. Titled "Airborne Transmission of Influenza A/H5N1 Virus Between Ferrets," it summarized how Fouchier's research team made the pathogen more virulent:

Highly pathogenic avian influenza A/H5N1 virus can cause morbidity and mortality in humans but thus far has not acquired the ability to be transmitted by aerosol or respiratory droplet ("airborne transmission") between humans. To address the concern that the virus could acquire this ability under natural conditions, we genetically modified A/H5N1 virus by site-directed mutagenesis and subsequent serial passage in ferrets. The genetically modified A/H5N1 virus acquired mutations during passage in ferrets, ultimately becoming airborne transmissible in ferrets.

In other words, Fouchier's research took a flu virus that did not exhibit airborne transmission, then infected a number of ferrets until it mutated to the point that it was transmissible by air.

In thatsame year, 2012, asimilar studyby Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin was published in Nature:

Highly pathogenic avian H5N1 influenza A viruses occasionally infect humans, but currently do not transmit efficiently among humans. ... Here we assess the molecular changes ... that would allow a virus ... to be transmissible among mammals. We identified a ... virus ... with four mutations and the remaining seven gene segments from a 2009 pandemic H1N1 virus that was capable of droplet transmission in a ferret model.

In 2014, Marc Lipsitch of Harvard and Alison P. Galvani of Yale wrote regarding Fouchier and Kawaoka's work:

Recent experiments that create novel, highly virulent and transmissible pathogens against which there is no human immunity are unethical ... they impose a risk of accidental and deliberate release that, if it led to extensive spread of the new agent, could cost many lives. While such a release is unlikely in a specific laboratory conducting research under strict biosafety procedures, even a low likelihood should be taken seriously, given the scale of destruction if such an unlikely event were to occur. Furthermore, the likelihood of risk is multiplied as the number of laboratories conducting such research increases around the globe.

Given this risk, ethical principles, such as those embodied in the Nuremberg Code, dictate that such experiments would be permissible only if they provide humanitarian benefits commensurate with the risk, and if these benefits cannot be achieved by less risky means.

We argue that the two main benefits claimed for these experiments improved vaccine design and improved interpretation of surveillance are unlikely to be achieved by the creation of potential pandemic pathogens (PPP), often termed "gain-of-function" (GOF) experiments.

There may be a widespread notion that there is scientific consensus that the pandemic did not come out of a lab. But in factmany of the most knowledgeable scientists in the field are notably silent. This includes Lipsitch at Harvard, Jonathan A. King at MITand many others.

Just last year, Lynn Klotz of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Prolife
ration wrote a paperin the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientistsentitled "Human Error in High-biocontainment Labs: A Likely Pandemic Threat." Wrote Klotz:

Incidents causing potential exposures to pathogens occur frequently in the high security laboratories often known by their acronyms, BSL3 (Biosafety Level 3) and BSL4. Lab incidents that lead to undetected or unreported laboratory-acquired infections can lead to the release of a disease into the community outside the lab; lab workers with such infections will leave work carrying the pathogen with them. If the agent involved were a potential pandemic pathogen, such a community release could lead to a worldwide pandemic with many fatalities. Of greatest concern is a release of a lab-created, mammalian-airborne-transmissible, highly pathogenic avian influenza virus, such as the airborne-transmissible H5N1 viruses created in the laboratories of Ron Fouchier in the Netherlands and Yoshihiro Kawaoka in Madison, Wisconsin.

"Crazy, dangerous"

Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois, has condemned Fouchier, Kawaoka and others including at least one of the authors of the recent Nature Medicine article in the strongest terms, calling such work a "criminal enterprise." While Boyle has been embroiled in numerous controversies, he's been especially dismissed by many on this issue. The "fact-checking" websiteSnopeshas described him as "a lawyer with no formal training in virology" without noting that he wrote the relevant U.S. law.

As Boyle saidin 2015:

Since September 11, 2001, we have spent around $100 billion on biological warfare. Effectively we now have an Offensive Biological Warfare Industry in this country that violates theBiological Weapons Conventionand myBiological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989.

The law Boyle drafted states: "Whoever knowingly develops, produces, stockpiles, transfers, acquires, retains, or possesses any biological agent, toxin, or delivery system for use as a weapon, or knowingly assists a foreign state or any organization to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both. There is extraterritorial Federal jurisdiction over an offense under this section committed by or against a national of the United States."

Boyle also warned:

Russia and China have undoubtedly reached the same conclusions I have derived from the same open and public sources, and have responded in kind. So what the world now witnesses is an all-out offensive biological warfare arms race among the major military powers of the world: United States, Russia, Britain, France, China, Israel, inter alia.

We have reconstructed the Offensive Biological Warfare Industry that we had deployed in this county before its prohibition by the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, described by Seymour Hersh in his groundbreaking expose "Chemical and Biological Warfare: America's Hidden Arsenal." (1968)

Boyle now states that he has been "blackballed" in the media on this issue, despite his having written the relevant statute. The group he worked with on the law, the Council for Responsible Genetics, went under several years ago, making Boyle's views against "biodefense" even more marginal as government money for dual use work poured into the field and criticswithin the scientific community have fallen silent. In turn, his denunciationshave grown more sweeping.

In the 1990 book "Preventing a Biological Arms Race," scholar Susan Wright argued that current laws regarding bioweapons were insufficient, as there were "projects in which offensive and defensive aspects can be distinguished only by claimed motive." Boyle notes, correctly, that current law he drafted does not makean exception for "defensive" work, but only for "prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes."

While Boyle is particularly vociferous in his condemnations, he is not alone. There has been irregular, but occasional media attention to this threat. The Guardian ran a piece in 2014,"Scientists condemn 'crazy, dangerous' creation of deadly airborne flu virus," afterKawaoka created a life-threatening virus that "closely resembles the 1918 Spanish flu strain that killed an estimated 50m people":

"The work they are doing is absolutely crazy. The whole thing is exceedingly dangerous," said Lord May, the former president of the Royal Society and one time chief science adviser to the UK government. "Yes, there is a danger, but it's not arising from the viruses out there in the animals, it's arising from the labs of grossly ambitious people."

Boyle'scharges beginning early this yearthat the coronavirus was bioengineered allegationsrecently mirrored by French virologist andNobel laureate Luc Montagnier have not been corroborated by any publicly produced findings of any U.S. scientist. Boyle even charges that scientists like Ebright, who is at Rutgers, arecompromised because the university got abiosafety level 3 lab in 2017though Ebright is perhaps the most vocal eminent critic of this research, among U.S. scientists. These and other controversies aside, Boyle's concerns about the dangers of biowarfare arelegitimate; indeed, Ebright shares them.

Some of the most vocal voices to discuss the origins of the novel coronavirushave been eager to minimizethe dangers of lab work, or have focused almost exclusively on "wet markets" or "exotic" animals as the likely cause.

The media celebrated Laurie Garrett, the Pulitzer Prizewinning author and former senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, when she declared on Twitter on March 3 (in a since-deleted tweet)that the origin of the pandemic was discovered: "It's pangolins. #COVID19 Researchers studied lung tissue from 12 of the scaled mammals that were illegally trafficked in Asia and found #SARSCoV2 in 3. The animals were found in Guangxi, China. Another virus+ smuggled sample found in Guangzhou."

She was swiftly corrected by Ebright: "Arrant nonsense. Did you even read the paper? Reported pangolin coronavirus is not SARS-CoV-2 and is not even particularly close to SARS-CoV-2. Bat coronavirus RaTG13 is much closer to SARS-CoV-2 (96.2% identical) than reported pangolin coronavirus (92.4% identical)." He added: "No reason to invoke pangolin as intermediate. When A is much closer than B to C, in the absence of additional data, there is no rational basis to favor pathway A>B>C over pathway A>C." When someone asked what Garrett was saying, Ebright responded: "She is saying she is scientifically illiterate."

The following day, Garrett corrected herself (without acknowledging Ebright): "I blew it on the #Pangolins paper, & then took a few hours break from Twitter. It did NOT prove the species = source of #SARSCoV2. There's a torrent of critique now, deservedly denouncing me & my posting. A lot of the critique is super-informative so leaving it all up 4 while."

At leastone Chinese governmentofficialhas respondedto the allegation that the labs in Wuhan could be the source for the pandemic by alleging that perhaps the U.S. isresponsibleinstead. In American mainstreammedia, that has been reflexivelytreated as evenmore ridiculousthan the original allegation that the virus could havecome froma lab.

Obviouslythe Chinese government'sallegations should not be taken at face value, but neither should U.S. government claims especially considering that U.S. government labs were the apparent source for theanthrax attacks in 2001. Those attacks sent panic through the U.S. and shut down Congress, allowing the Bushadministration to enact the PATRIOT Act and ramp up the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, in October2001, media darlings like Richard Butler and Andrew Sullivan propagandizedfor war with Iraq because of the anthrax attacks. (Neither Iraq nor al-Qaida was involved.)

The 2001 anthrax attacks also provided muchof the pretext forthe surge in biolab spending since then, even though they apparently originated in a U.S. or U.S.-allied lab. Indeed, thoseattacks remain shrouded in mystery.

The U.S. government has also
come up withelaborate cover stories to distract from its bioweapons work. For instance, the U.S. government infamously claimed the 1953 death of Frank Olson, a scientist at Fort Detrick, Maryland, was anLSD experiment gone wrong;it now appears to have been an execution to cover up for U.S.biological warfare.

Regardless of the cause of the current pandemic, these biowarfare/biodefense labs need far more scrutiny. The call to shut them down by Boyle and others needs to be clearly heard and light must be shone on precisely what research is being conducted.

The secrecy of these labs may prevent us ever knowing with certainty the origins of the current pandemic.What we do know is this kind of lab work comes with real dangers. One might make a comparison to climate change: We cannot attribute an individual hurricane to man-made climate disruption,yet science tells us that human activity makes stronger hurricanes more likely. Thatbrings us back to the imperative to cease the kinds of activities thatproduce such dangers in the first place.

If that doesn't happen, the people of the planet will be at the mercy of the machinations and mistakes of state actors who are playing with fire for their geopolitical interests.

Continue reading here:
Did this virus come from a lab? Maybe not but it exposes the threat of a biowarfare arms race - Salon

Questions have been asked over China in recent days over how the coronavirus was made and transmitted from animal to human.

The US and the UK have both started investigations into China, with President Donald Trump questioning whether it was a mistake that got out of control or was it started deliberately.

Russia has taken advantage of the situation and had excess supplies of 60 tonnes of medical supplies which were sent to the US.

The Russian state of defence giant Rostec delivered ventilators, via the Kremlin to New York two weeks ago, despite Russia having severe health implications across the country.

The US President Donald Trump said, this is a very nice gesture and he is not worried about Russian propaganda, not even a little bit.

During the 70s the former Soviet Union (FSU) were creating genetic engineering for the next generation of Biological weapons as were the Chinese.

The FSU were accused of making a clandestine and illegal offensive biological weapons program. The Soviet Bioweapons (BW) research and development program also sought out the most contagious and lethal bacteria such as plague, and viruses like smallpox.

Biopreparat was a huge military program with civilian cover, which was organised to develop and weaponise biological agents for BW.

Biopreparat and other Soviet BW research facilities operated under the highest security classification of Special Importance which is higher than Top Secret.

The US intelligence community did not even know it existed until 1989 when a top-ranking scientist from the BW program defected to the UK.

In October 1989, Dr Vladimir Pasechnik, the first primary source from inside the Soviet program, defected to the UK.

Pasechnik disclosed that the Soviets had genetically engineered bacteria and viruses, weaponised the microbes in a powder form, loaded them onto various munitions, and integrated BW into their doctrine and had specific plans for use of BW.

In the spring of 1992, a lower-level bench scientist who had worked on plague research in Pasechniks lab also defected to the UK, he has remained undercover and is referred to by code name Temple Fortune.

He fully corroborated Pasechniks previous account and informed the British government on Russias genetic engineering.

A decade later, after becoming President of Russia, Boris Yeltsen visited Britain in 1992. In a public speech, discussing biological warfare research.

Yeltsin stated that the Russians had undertaken research on the influence of various substances on human genes.

The revolution in molecular biology may have incidentally unleashed a new threat to mankind, the development of deadly bioweapons.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, is the lead agency for disease epidemics and tracks naturally occurring emerging infectious diseases worldwide.

The CDC have travelled all over the world and investigated outbreaks of Ebola hemorrhagic fever, Marburg virus, hantavirus, and other emerging diseases, more recently coronavirus.

The US Office of the Secretary of Defense have identified countries that maintain various levels of offensive biological warfare capabilities or research facilities, this includes Russia and China.

Both Russia and China have been genetically engineering pathogens for Biological warfare for decades.

A pathogen may be released clandestinely so there will be a delay between exposure and onset of symptoms, such as coronavirus.

Days to weeks later, when people do develop symptoms, they could immediately start spreading contagious diseases, as the world has witnessed since January 2020 with Covid-19.

A paper, released in 2002 entitled, Next Generation Bioweapons for the USAF Counterproliferation Center which provided information and analysis to assist the understanding of bioweapons.

Colonel Dr Michael Ainscough, USAF and a diplomat of American Board of Preventive Medicine in Aerospace Medicine, said in the paper that entire viruses may similarly be created, analogous to the natural mutation of the influenza virus.

A new strain of influenza could be created by induced hybridisation of viral strains, simply swapping out variant or synthetic genes.

Slightly altering a common virus like influenza to make it deadlier might be easier than manipulating rarer or other biologically complicated pathogens.

Some animal viruses, such as those found in bats, are so small that their entire genome could be stitched together, to from machine-synthesised fragments using current technology.

Adding, Mycoplasma, an organism that causes pneumonia in humans, has the smallest known bacterial genome.

An existing pathogen would be subtly genetically modified to be more difficult to detect, more virulent, or more resistant to drugs, all within the capabilities of todays biotechnology, according to the paper.

China has also been developing such Mycoplasma bacterial genomes, and both Russia and China have been closely working with each other for decades.

The Chinese Army has a role at the Wuhan Institute for Biological Products and at the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control & Prevention.

The report by South Chinas university revealed the theory of the origin of coronavirus.

Surgery was performed on the caged animals and the tissue samples were collected for DNA and RNA extraction and sequencing.

They were only 280metresfrom the seafood market and the WHCDC was also adjacent to the Union Hospital where the first group of doctors were infected during this epidemic.

It is plausible that the virus leaked around and some of them contaminated the initial patients in this epidemic, though solid proof is needed in future studies.

Conservative MP, Tobias Elwood the chairman of the British Defence Select Committee expressed concerns in Febraury over the Chinese Armys role at the Wuhan Institute for Biological Products and called, for the greater transparency over the origins of the coronavirus.

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Scientists from Russia and China have been creating 'genetic pathogens' for years | London Business News - London Loves Business

Is there anything that can be done to escape the death cult we seem trapped in?

One of the more radical visions for how to organize human society begins with a simple goal: lets resurrect everyone who has ever lived. Nikolai Fedorov, a nineteenth-century librarian and Russian Orthodoxy philosopher, went so far as to call this project the common task of humanity, calling for the living to be rejuvenated, the dead to be resurrected, and space to be colonized specifically to house them. From the 1860s to the 1930s, Fedorovs influence was present throughout the culturehe influenced a generation of Marxists ahead of the Russian Revolution, as well as literary writers like Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose novel, The Brothers Karamazov, directly engaged with Federov's ideas about resurrection.

After his death, Federovs acolytes consolidated his ideas into a single text, A Philosophy of the Common Task, and created Cosmism, the movement based on his anti-death eschatology. Federov left the technical details to those who would someday create the prerequisite technology, but this did not stop his disciples: Alexander Bogdanov, who founded the Bolsheviks with Lenin, was an early pioneer of blood transfusions in hopes of rejuvenating humanity; Konstantin Tsiolkvosky, an astrophysicist who was the progenitor of Russia's space program, sought to colonize space to house the resurrected dead; and Alexander Chizhevsky, a biophysicist who sought to map out the effects of solar activity on Earth life and behavior, thought his research might help design the ideal society for the dead to return to.

The vast majority of cosmists were, by the 1930s, either murdered or purged by Stalin, muting the influence of their ambitious project but also leaving us with an incomplete body of work about what type of society resurrection requires or will result in, and whether that wouldas some cosmists believe nowbring us closer to the liberation of the species. Now, I think it is obvious thatdespite what todays transhumanists might tell youwe are in no position, now or anytime soon, to resurrect anyone let alone bring back to life the untold billions that have existed across human history and past it into the eons before civilizations dawn.

To be clear, I think cosmism is absolute madness, but I also find it fascinating. With an introduction to Cosmism and its implications, maybe we can further explore the arbitrary and calculated parts of our social and political order that prioritize capital instead of humanity, often for sinister ends.

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What? Who gets resurrected? And how?

At its core, the Common Task calls for the subordination of all social relations, productive forces, and civilization itself to the single-minded goal of achieving immortality for the living and resurrection for the dead. Cosmists see this as a necessarily universal project for either everyone or no one at all. That constraint means that their fundamental overhaul of society must go a step further in securing a place where evil or ill-intentioned people cant hurt anyone, but also where immortality is freely accessible for everyone.

Its hard to imagine how that worldwhere resources are pooled together for this project, where humans cannot hurt one another, and where immortality is freeis compatible with the accumulation and exploitation that sit at the heart of capitalism. The crisis heightened by coronavirus should make painfully clear to us all that, as J.W. Masonan economist at CUNYrecently put it, we have a system organized around the threat of withholding people's subsistence, and it "will deeply resist measures to guarantee it, even when the particular circumstances make that necessary for the survival of the system itself." Universal immortality, already an optimistic vision, simply cannot happen in a system that relies on perpetual commodification.

Take one small front of the original cosmist project: blood transfusions. In the 1920s, after being pushed out of the Bolshevik party, Bogdanov focused on experimenting with blood transfusions to create a rejuvenation process for humans (theres little evidence they do this). He tried and failed to set up blood banks across the Soviet Union for the universal rejuvenation of the public, dying from complications of a transfusion himself. Today, young blood is offered for transfusion by industrious start-ups, largely to wealthy and eccentric clientsmost notably (and allegedly) Peter Thiel.

In a book of conversations on cosmism published in 2017 titled Art Without Death, the first dialogue between Anton Vidokle and Hito Steyerl, living artists and writers in Berlin, drives home this same point. Vidokle tells Steyerl that he believes Death is capital quite literally, because everything we accumulatefood, energy, raw material, etc.these are all products of death. For him, it is no surprise were in a capitalist death cult given that he sees value as created through perpetual acts of extraction or exhaustion.

Steyerl echoes these concerns in the conversation, comparing the resurrected dead to artificial general intelligences (AGIs), which oligarch billionaires warn pose an existential threat to humanity. Both groups anticipate fundamental reorganizations of human society, but capitalists diverge sharply from cosmists in that their reorganization necessitates more extraction, more exhaustion, and more death. In their conversation, Steyerl tells Vidokle:

Within the AGI Debate, several solutions have been suggested: first to program the AGI so it will not harm humans, or, on the alt-right/fascist end of the spectrum, to just accelerate extreme capitalisms tendency to exterminate humans and resurrect rich people as some sort of high-net-worth robot race.

These eugenicist ideas are already being implemented: cryogenics and blood transfusions for the rich get the headlines, but the breakdown of healthcare in particularand sustenance in generalfor poor people is literally shortening the lives of millions ... In the present reactionary backlash, oligarchic and neoreactionary eugenics are in full swing, with few attempts being made to contain or limit the impact on the living. The consequences of this are clear: the focus needs to be on the living first and foremost. Because if we dont sort out societycreate noncapitalist abundance and so forththe dead cannot be resurrected safely (or, by extension, AGI cannot be implemented without exterminating humankind or only preserving its most privileged parts).

One of the major problems of todays transhumanist movement is that we are currently unable to equally distribute even basic life-extension technology such as nutrition, medicine, and medical care. At least initially, transhumanists vision of a world in which people live forever is one in which the rich live forever, using the wealth theyve built by extracting value from the poor. Todays transhumanism exists largely within a capitalist framework, and the countrys foremost transhumanist, Zoltan Istvan, a Libertarian candidate for president, is currently campaigning on a platform that shutdown orders intended to preserve human life during the coronavirus pandemic are overblown and are causing irrevocable damage to the capitalist economy (Istvan has in the past written extensively for Motherboard, and has also in the past advocated for the abolition of money).

Cosmists were clear in explaining what resurrection would look like in their idealized version of society, even though they were thin on what the technological details would be. Some argue we must not only restructure our civilization, but our bodies so that we can acquire regenerative abilities, alter our metabolic activity so food or shelter are optional, and thus overcome the natural, social, sexual, and other limitations of the species as Arseny Zhilyaev puts it in a later conversation within the book.

Zhilyaev also invokes Federovs conception of a universal museum, a radicalized, expanded, and more inclusive version of the museums we have now as t
he site of resurrection. In our world, the closest example of this universal museum is the digital world which also doubles as an enormous data collector used for anything from commerce to government surveillance. The prospect of being resurrected because of government/corporate surveillance records or Mormon genealogy databases is sinister at best, but Zhilyaevs argumentand the larger one advanced by other cosmistsis that our world is already full of and defined by absurd and oppressive institutions that are hostile to our collective interests, yet still manage to thrive. The options for our digital worlds development have been defined by advertisers, state authorities, telecom companies, deep-pocketed investors, and the likewhat might it look like if we decided to focus instead on literally any other task?

All this brings us to the question of where the immortal and resurrected would go. The answer, for cosmists, is space. In the cosmist vision, space colonization must happen so that we can properly honor our ethical responsibility to take care of the resurrected by housing them on museum planets. If the universal museum looks like a digital world emancipated from the demands of capital returns, then the museum planet is a space saved from the whims of our knock-off Willy Wonkasthe Elon Musks and Jeff Bezos of the world. I am not saying it is a good or fair idea to segregate resurrected dead people to museum planets in space, but this is what cosmists suggested, and its a quainter, more peaceful vision for space than what todays capitalists believe we should do.

For Musk, Mars and other future worlds will become colonies that require space mortgages, are used for resource extraction, or, in some cases, be used as landing spots for the rich once we have completely destroyed the Earth. Bezos, the worlds richest man, says we will have "gigantic chip factories in space where heavy industry is kept off-planet. Beyond Earth, Bezos anticipates humanity will be contained to O'Neill cylinder space colonies. One might stop and consider the fact that while the cosmist vision calls for improving human civilization on Earth before resurrecting the dead and colonizing space, the capitalist vision sees space as the next frontier to colonize and extract stupendous returns fromtrillions of dollars of resource extraction is the goal. Even in space, they cannot imagine humanity without the same growth that demands the sort of material extraction and environmental degradation already despoiling the world. Better to export it to another place (another country, planet, etc.) than fix the underlying system.

Why?

Ostensibly, the why behind cosmism is a belief that we have an ethical responsibility to resurrect the dead, much like we have one to care for the sick or infirm. At a deeper level, however, cosmists not only see noncapitalist abundance as a virtue in of itself, but believe the process of realizing it would offer chances to challenge deep-seated assumptions about humanity that might aid political and cultural forms hostile to the better future cosmists seek.

Vidokle tells Steyerl in their conversation that he sees the path towards resurrection involving expanding the rights of the dead in ways that undermine certain political and cultural forms,

The dead ... dont have any rights in our society: they dont communicate, consume, or vote and so they are not political subjects. Their remains are removed further and further from the cities, where most of the living reside. Culturally, the dead are now largely pathetical comical figures: zombies in movies, he said. Financial capitalism does not care about the dead because they do not produce or consume. Fascism only uses them as a mythical proof of sacrifice. Communism is also indifferent to the dead because only the generation that achieves communism will benefit from it; everyone who died on the way gets nothing.

In another part of their conversation, Steyerl suggests that failing to pursue the cosmist project might cede ground to the right-wing accelerationism already killing millions:

There is another aspect to this: the maintenance and reproduction of life is of course a very gendered technologyand control of this is on a social battleground. Reactionaries try to grab control over lifes production and reproduction by any means: religious, economic, legal, and scientific. This affects womens rights on the one hand, and, on the other, it spawns fantasies of reproduction wrested from female control: in labs, via genetic engineering, etc.

In other words, the failure to imagine and pursue some alternative to this oligarchic project has real-world consequences that not only kill human beings, but undermine the collective agency of the majority of humanity. In order for this narrow minority to rejuvenate and resurrect themselves in a way that preserves their own privilege and power, they will have to sharply curtail the rights and agency of almost every other human being in every other sphere of society.

Elena Shaposhnikova, another artist who appears later in the book, wonders whether the end of deathor the arrival of a project promising to abolish itmight help us better imagine and pursue lives beyond capitalism:

It seems to me that most of us tend to sublimate our current life conditions and all its problems, tragedies, and inequalities, and project this into future scenarios, she said. So while its easy to imagine and represent life in a society without money and with intergalactic travel, the plot invariably defaults to essentialist conflicts of power, heroism, betrayal, revenge, or something along these lines.

In a conversation with Shaposhnikova, Zhilyaev offers that cosmism might help fight the general fear of socialism as he understands it:

According to Marx, or even Lenin, socialism as a goal is associated with something elsewith opportunities of unlimited plurality and playful creativity, wider than those offered by capitalism. ... the universal museum producing eternal life and resurrection for all as the last necessary step for establishing social justice.

In the conversations that this book, cosmism emerges not simply as an ambition to resurrect the dead but to create, for the first time in human history, a civilization committed to egalitarianism and justice. So committed, in fact, that no part of the human experienceincluding deathwould escape the frenzied wake of our restructuring.

Its a nice thought, and something worth thinking about. Ours is not that world but in fact, one that is committed, above all else, to capital accumulation. There will be no resurrection for the deadthere isnt even healthcare for most of the living, after all. Even in the Citadel of Capital, the heart of the World Empire, the belly of the beast, the richest country in human history, most are expected to fend for themselves as massive wealth transfers drain the public treasuries that mightve funded some measure of protection from the pandemic, the economic meltdown, and every disaster lurking just out of sight. And yet, for all our plumage, our death cult still holds true to Adam Smith's observation in The Wealth of Nations: "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind."

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The Proto-Communist Plan to Resurrect Everyone Who Ever Lived - VICE