Disease X is an unknown pathogen capable of causing a devastating pandemic. This term was coined by the World Health Organization in 2018 and was under discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week.
Unfortunately, the announcement at the summit by WHO leader Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus that we need an international pandemic treaty to fight against Disease X is toothless when you consider the lack of real international cooperation in the past combined with the WHO’s track record of obfuscating the truth about emerging pathogens. Plus, some of the same scientists who have vowed to protect us continue to put us at risk of a Disease X by tinkering with dangerous viruses.
Despite the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, many kinds of potentially dangerous gain-of-function research continue in the U.S., China, and around the world. If, in fact, COVID-19 originated from a lab rather than from nature, it could have been part of a biodefense strategy to develop a vaccine against human pathogens or a bioengineered virus from another country. Keep in mind that COVID-19, though it spreads rapidly, is not particularly lethal (there were more than 700 million documented cases worldwide with around 7 million deaths).
But a recent preprint raises serious concern that research intended to make coronaviruses more lethal is still ongoing. Apparently, Beijing University’s College of Life Science and Technology, in coordination with the Research Center for Clinical Medicine at the Fifth Medical Center of PLA General Hospital in Beijing, China, a hospital of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, has been conducting this kind of research. A pangolin coronavirus, known as GX-P2V, was reportedly being cultured in animal cells there when a deadly mutation occurred. According to the preprint, Shi Zhengli (known as the bat woman) has also been working on this virus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where COVID-19 may have originated.
But in Beijing, the new mutation of GX-P2V enabled this virus to infect mice with the same human receptors that the COVID virus uses to enter our cells. One difference — the new virus appears to be far more deadly. Now why would researchers be trying to develop new coronaviruses that are more virulent than COVID?
Keep in mind that the experiments weren’t stopped at this point. In fact, these mutant viruses were cloned and tested until it was discovered that the new virus entered the brain and many other organs and was uniformly fatal to several mice. The researchers defended their experiment, saying, “This underscores a spillover risk of GX_P2V into humans and provides a unique model for understanding the pathogenic mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2-related viruses.”
But from where we sit, the excuse that gain-of-function research is somehow protecting the world from natural spillover from animal viruses is quite hollow, especially given the recent ferocious pandemic that unleashed a virus which continues to cause illness and death. Whether that virus came from nature or from a lab, it is clear that gain-of-function work did not protect us from COVID-19.
Unfortunately, a far more nightmarish reality than even COVID may be possible if this continues. Wherever COVID-19 came from, it is an inefficient killer, frequently causing asymptomatic infection and infrequently causing severe illness or death. A virus with 100% mortality, even in small numbers of humanized mice, is something that should keep us up at night.
It is especially disconcerting to consider that the Chinese military appears to be part of the research process in this case from their close vantage point at General Hospital in Beijing.
We are continuing to call for a full moratorium on this kind of gain-of-function research, where viruses are manipulated to test their potential. With the current state of science and ongoing advances in artificial intelligence, we believe that we can glean all the information we need without the inherent risk.
Unfortunately, we can’t export or enforce a worldwide moratorium. We need to recognize that bioengineered, in addition to naturally-occurring, pathogens pose a threat to our nation’s security. We are woefully unprepared. We need a scaled-up biosecurity system that is the equal to other superpowers and proportional to the threat. We need it now.
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Marc Siegel is an American physician, clinical professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center, and Fox News contributor. Robert Redfield is an American virologist who served as the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and as the administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
