Stop Gain-of-Function Research. Now.

By Dick Russell, Special to The Kennedy Beacon

The mainstream media is spinning a coming “bird flu” pandemic but what they ought to be writing about is how urgently we should stop Gain-of-Function research.

As Clayton Baker recently wrote in a Brownstone Institute article titled, “Bird Flu Is a Rerun of the Covid Playbook”: “…. As is so often the case with our government, those who claim to be trying to solve the problem – our so-called ‘public health’ and ‘pandemic preparedness’ ‘experts’ – are actually the ones who created the problem.”

https://x.com/avpac_us/status/1892050443225682018?s=46

In December, a study concerning bird flu viruses circulating in cows discovered that a single mutation could trigger something much more capable of attacking the human upper respiratory tract. And mutations are precisely what Gain-of-Function (GOF) experiments are designed to make happen — a laboratory-induced genetic change that intentionally modifies a virus or a pathogen to express itself abnormally or take on a whole new purpose. For example, some GOF research is intended to develop bioweapons that manifest in the form of deadly viruses.

But the stated scientific goal is to better understand how viruses and pathogens interact with people, leading to development of medical countermeasures.

This is the kind of research the NIH was funding through an intermediary, EcoHealth Alliance, at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. Which is where the Department of Energy, the FBI and the CIA now have stated the same hypothesis, that COVID-19 somehow escaped from the Chinese lab and went on to infect people across much of the globe. This is contrary to the longstanding insistence of Dr. Fauci and his associates that the coronavirus originated in bats circling the Wuhan wet market, not the adjacent laboratory.

Whatever happened that ended up killing millions (while earning billions for Moderna, Pfizer and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) with their genetically-modified mRNA vaccines), controversy over GOF research didn’t go away. It’s worth remembering that, back in 2011, two separate animal studies appeared about the dangerous avian H5N1 virus being modified to spread between ferrets. These were conducted far from China – in Madison, Wisconsin and Rotterdam, Holland – but concerns arose over whether publication of the results could be utilized by bioterrorists. Eventually publication went ahead, but in 2014 a series of accidents in federal biocontainment labs prompted the Obama administration to announce a pause on federal funding for eighteen GOF studies involving influenza.

Two National Academy of Science workshops ensued to analyze the risks and benefits of the experiments and, in 2017, the NIH decided to lift the moratorium. As COVID loomed on the horizon, some of the GOF research was quietly allowed to start up again under a revised federal oversight process, which soon came under fire for keeping its details secret.

“We are now being asked,” said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, “to trust a completely opaque process where the outcome is to permit the continuation of dangerous experiments.” He wasn’t alone. Thomas Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins, added; “Details regarding the decision to approve and fund this work should be made transparent.” Rutgers University microbiologist Richard Ebright called the lack of openness “disturbing and indefensible” and wondered why safer alternative methods hadn’t been considered.

Inside the same Midwestern lab that first sparked the debate, NIH-funded GOF studies on the bird flu virus resumed in earnest. These occurred within an enhanced biosafety level-3 enclosure at the University of Wisconsin’s Influenza Research Institute. In one experiment, lead virologist Yoshiro Kawaoka reportedly mixed the bird flu strain with the Spanish flu virus that killed millions after World War One; the experiment resulted in a respiratory virus with human transmission capability.

As before, ferrets were pulled out of their cages and exposed to a lab-engineered viral strain. And then an accident occurred. A lengthy article in USA Today by investigative reporter Alison Young recorded how an air-purifying regulator had somehow disconnected from a unit supplying safe, filtered air. Suddenly the detached hose was dangling loose in the lab’s possibly contaminated air. Yet the university chose not to notify public health officials about the incident or consult about discontinuing a quarantine on an affected trainee. They simply claimed that no real exposure had taken place.

In 2022, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during President Trump’s first term, warned in an interview: “I believe the great pandemic is still in the future, and that’s going to be a bird flu pandemic for man. It’s going to have significant mortality in the 10 to 50% range.”

As if that wasn’t scary enough, Redfield went on to make a direct accusation that COVID-19 emanated not out of a lab in Wuhan but from one at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. China’s “accountability is not following the international health regulations after they realized they had a problem,” Redfield said, adding that “there is a real possibility that the virus’s birthplace was the GOF research lab run in North Carolina by Dr. Ralph Baric.” It’s noteworthy that Baric’s work was not banned by the moratorium imposed in 2014.

At a congressional hearing, Senator Rand Paul (R-TN) also pointed the finger at Baric, citing the scientist’s collaboration with Dr. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Virology Institute, “sharing his discoveries about how to create super-viruses.” The senator added, “This gain-of-function research has been funded by the NIH.”

By then, where the virus came from had become highly politicized, which wasn’t helped by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s obfuscation in an email trail released under the Freedom-of-Information Act [FOIA]. This January, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal, FBI Senior Scientist Jason Bannan revealed that the Bureau had been intentionally excluded from an August 24, 2021 briefing of President Biden, where only proponents of the animal origin theory were invited. Senator Ron Johnson recently issued a subpoena demanding Fauci’s emails and other documents that the Biden administration had illegally redacted and withheld.

As RFK Jr. wrote in the opening chapter to his 2023 book, The Wuhan Cover-Up: “As the world now knows, Dr. Fauci sought through his gain-of-function experiments to deliberately develop highly virulent, easily transmissible coronavirus pathogens purposely souped-up to be capable of causing a global pandemic. Dr. Fauci justifies his long fascination with these perilous conjurations as useful for anticipating and improving pandemic preparedness, and for developing preemptive vaccines for animal viruses before they jump to humans. Yet, if that’s truly the case, how is it that we were still so woefully unprepared when a pandemic hit?”

Marc Lipsitch, of Harvard, says that altering viruses to make them more dangerous, even in a highly controlled lab setting, doesn’t produce results as significant as suggested by advocates. A mutated virus created in a lab won’t necessarily match how it mutates in the wild. The risks of GOF research simply aren’t worth the potential gains, Lipsitch strongly believes; scientists and health officials should stay focused on “basic epidemiology and veterinary questions.” What animals were infected, which people were exposed, who became infected and how sick did they get? “I can’t think of any route by which gain-of-function studies could have informed, much less answered these questions,” Lipsitch said in January.

Renowned cardiologist and NIH critic, Dr. Peter McCullough, has called for a shutdown of all GOF labs while warning that animal culling and bird flu vaccines would only create “more resistant strains.”

When RFK Jr. was still running for president as an independent in 2024, he posted on X: “24 different pharmaceutical companies are racing to develop a bird flu vaccine – for cows! How many more are working on a bird flu vaccine for humans? Moderna’s stock price has gone up 40% since bird flu moved into cows. The company is worth over $20 million more than it was 3 months ago. The market knows that the government plans to use mRNA vaccines for emerging infections, regardless of whether the public wants them.”

Soon after his inauguration in January, Trump was reported to be preparing an executive order curtailing GOF funding. In my view, that makes a lot more sense when it comes to public health than making drastic cuts to Medicare and Medicaid that 160 million Americans rely upon. Thankfully, this week, Trump stated that those programs, and Social Security, won’t be touched.

In May of 2024, after four years of evasion, NIH deputy director Lawrence Tabak admitted to Congress that, in the months and years before the COVID-19 pandemic, American taxpayers had funded GOF research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. According to the Government Accountability Office, the NIH and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) provided more than $2.1 million in grant funding to three Chinese research labs that included GOF experiments with coronaviruses between 2014 and 2021.

And that was the tip of the iceberg. Ralph Baric, leading light in GOF science, had received more than 150 NIH grants prior to the pandemic. His colleague, Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, received millions more from U.S. military, intelligence and health agencies to fund bioweapons-related research in Wuhan.

If we’re going to have a tax rebellion like our forefathers did, let’s make it about those GOF gadflies. As Kennedy ended his 2024 post on X: “We need to stop playing with fire. My administration will shut down the gain-of-function labs on day 1, while we figure out what they are doing. We will end these lab-grown plagues for good.”

In the Trump administration, he is now in a position to do just that.

Dick Russell is the author of the authorized biography The Real RFK Jr: Trials of a Truth Warrior. He has written two other recent pieces about him at www.substack.com/dickrussell