Dangerous Games
The Omicron coronavirus variant was likely the fastest-spreading virus in human history. It swept the world like a firestorm, unprecedented in its fury.
Researchers at Boston University have announced the creation of a chimeric variant of super-transmissible Omicron, achieved by taking genes from Omicron and splicing it back into an ancestral variant of SARS-CoV-2. This human made virus has an 80% mortality rate in transgenic mice genetically engineered to express human ACE2 receptors, which normally experience Omicron as nothing more than an annoyance, as it is with most human beings. The chimeric virus possesses omicron’s infectivity with a lethality closer to earlier strains of Covid. If released somehow, this virus has a potential to kill millions of people, especially if it can sidestep existing immunity. Meanwhile, scientists at Imperial College London have performed similar experiments on hamsters.
Such research into manipulating viruses and observing their potential gain of function is a most likely root cause of the pandemic, as well as a likely leaked source of the Omicron variant itself.
The long, sad history of lab escapes of SARS (and possibly ebola) just in the past twenty years demonstrates the futility of containment in a domain of constant failures, and that was before ultra-transmissible Omicron emerged as a platform. The risks of an even worse outbreak (and associated responses to it) are now critical. It is not feasible to prevent a breach in containment of a virus worse than SARS-CoV-2. It is a matter of when, not if. One little accident may destroy the world as we know it.
Moreover, the next occurrence may not result from capricious negligence. The distributed nature of the pandemic means that anyone now has access to Omicron as an extremely infectious delivery platform, including authoritarian governments, terrorist groups, and apocalyptic cults.
SARS-CoV-2 isn’t the only surprise super-transmissible epidemic being messed around with. In a US government lab in Bethesda, Maryland, virologists will be equipping highly-transmissible Monkeypox with genes from a more deadly strain to increase its harm. Moreover, advances in synthetic biology are creating new forms of infection unlike anything seen before in nature, which could aid security by adding some protection against horizontal gene transfer, or reduce security by making ultra deadly pathogens that are 100% resistant to our immune processes.
Decades of dangerous Gain of Function research has not led to any significant protective scientific breakthrough, offering only some general improved knowledge of biological processes. If there was ever a crucial necessity for leadership by intergovernmental organizations, this is it. The whole world must make it as taboo to perform such manipulation on viruses as it is human cloning.
Supply chains need to be cryptographically linked to track sales and locations of key equipment, even tracking breakages/decommissioning. Techniques similar to those which prevent banknotes from being photocopied need to be employed to prevent dangerous sequences from being printed. It's extremely challenging, considerably more so than nuclear anti-proliferation. It will also frustrate a lot of good research, but we now have no alternative.
The years since the spring of 2020 have felt like hell, but they are nothing compared to what's likely coming around the corner, now that experiments are being undertaken on super-transmissible deadly pathogens potentially worse than those found in nature itself.
Critical biosecurity lessons for humanity have not been learned. We will be forced to repeat them until we have understood the message – if there is anyone left to hear it.