zlacker

- There was GOF research done on US soil at UNC Chapel Hill which collaborated with WIV. They took a SARS-CoV-1 backbone and splied in a surface protein from another coronavirus and ran it through mice to produce a mouse coronavirus.

- There's no papers out of WIV indicating GOF research

> but you'll see through studying the records that it was the cover for military funding.

You're offering a blatant conspiracy theory now with no substantiation.

The funding to WIV had nothing to do with GoF and there's no evidence of anything else. But it HAD to be GoF research. Circular, evidence-free logic.

>>lamont+(OP)
> There's no papers out of WIV indicating GOF research

This is something I'm confused about. There are a bunch of papers from the WIV and the North Carolina lab which describe "reverse genetics", spike protein modification, and other obvious gain of function research which acknowledge funding from USAID and EcoHealth Alliance. (The most recently famous of these is Menachery et al, Nature 2015.) But it looks like the actual GoF was done at the Baric lab in North Carolina. The closest I could find was serial passaging experiments done at Wuhan to isolate viruses and test vaccines. One could argue that testing virus infectivity by serial passage is dangerous enough...

> The funding to WIV had nothing to do with GoF and there's no evidence of anything else.

The funding to EcoHealth Alliance specified GoF under such terms as "reverse genetics", "virus infection experiments ... humanized mice."

EHA may have put restrictions on how this money was used, but with the revelation in this article that WIV has lied about doing military research... I'm not so confident we can say no GoF was done there.