After COVID-19 made gain-of-function research a household phrase — after the congressional hearings, after Dr. Fauci's definitional gymnastics, after The Intercept's FOIA-obtained documents showed NIH funding going to EcoHealth Alliance for bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — the narrative settled into something comfortable for the people who needed it to settle.
"We're looking into it." "New oversight frameworks are being developed." "This research has been paused."
What the narrative didn't offer was a clean ending. No lab was shuttered permanently. No international prohibition was signed. No researcher was prosecuted. The pause was a PR pause — a period of reduced visibility designed to outlast public attention, which, historically, doesn't last long.
Gain-of-function research — the practice of deliberately enhancing pathogen transmissibility or lethality to study how pandemics might evolve — didn't end. The definitions got renegotiated. The institutional review frameworks were rewritten in language that created categories of similar research that technically fell outside the newly coined prohibited classifications.
In the intelligence community, this is called a technical workaround. In the pharmaceutical industry, it's called regulatory arbitrage. In the lab, it looks the same as what came before.
Meanwhile, biosafety Level 4 labs — the highest containment classification, designed for the most dangerous pathogens on Earth — continue to be built and expanded globally, including in countries with less transparent regulatory environments than the United States. And the United States itself has a biosafety laboratory accident record that the CDC's own internal audits have documented as troublingly routine.
The experiment didn't stop. The experiment never stops. What changed is who's watching and how much of it they're allowed to see.
The next engineered pandemic — if there is one — won't arrive with a press release identifying its origins. It will arrive the way the last one did: with a lot of confident early statements that turned out to be wrong, and a lot of late admissions that turned out to be insufficient.
The lab that mattered will already have had three new names by then.
SOURCE LINK: https://theintercept.com/2021/09/09/covid-origins-gain-of-function-research-eco-health-wuhan/
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