Chinese takeaways

The UK is starting to manipulate its own viruses after the Covid Wuhan leak

Bryan Hubbard

News just in from our When Will They Ever Learn Department . . . disappointed by the slack security of their Chinese colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who let the Covid virus escape, UK scientists have decided to strike out on their own and manipulate viruses in the way only the Brits can.

Porton Down—the very name of this top-secret military research lair still sends a shiver down the spines of those of a certain age—is undertaking “gain of function” research on a host of viruses to understand how they might morph and evolve and to prepare a vaccine response in super-quick time.

It’s WDDTY’s belief that this was already happening in Wuhan. Could it be that research teams from Pfizer, AstraZeneca and the like were working alongside Chinese researchers at Wuhan to develop a Covid-19 vaccine? If that’s the case, it explains how it was produced in just 10 months when the usual rollout time for a novel vaccine is around 10 years.

China happened to be the first out of the blocks and produced its own Covid vaccine months before everyone else. It also stocked up on PPE kits before it officially announced the spread of the Covid virus in December 2019, which throws into question the timeline of the virus spread.

Now Porton Down is doing its own thing and has created a Vaccine Development and Evaluation Centre. It’s headed up by Prof. Dame Jenny Harries, who has been beloved by a grateful nation of Brits during the Covid epidemic. She told the BBC, “Covid, of course, is not a one-off.” And of course she’s right, because she and other research scientists will soon start working on creating Son of Covid.

The experiments at the new center are part of the UK’s China-sounding “100 Days Mission” to develop a vaccine against a new threat inside three months or so. The UK government waxes lyrical about the mission: “Imagine a scenario where Covid-19 had hit, but the world was ready . . . a responsive diagnostics sector swung into action, the research and development had already been completed and prototype diagnostics and therapeutics only needed tweaking before they could be subjected, along with vaccines, to rapid assessment,” a UK Cabinet Office website breathlessly muses.

It’s all within our reach. “We can have safe and effective DTVs (diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines) within a hundred days of a pandemic threat being detected. This requires preparation, investment and a no-regrets approach,” they say.

A no-regrets approach? Is that a “Hell yes, we manipulated a bat virus in downtown Wuhan, and yes, it killed 7 million people around the world, destroyed economies and ruined the education of our young, but we have no regrets. This was science in action” sort of no-regrets approach?

The new lab is cutting its teeth on Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, a deadly tickborne virus that is prevalent in Africa, the Balkans, the Middle East and Asia, and is researching a vaccine to counter it. It also hasn’t given up on Covid just yet and is still developing new variants to discover how infectious they could be.

But its prime focus will be Disease X, the next epidemic that will sweep through the world’s population with a similar deadly effect. Prof. Dame Harries anticipates the next threat will also come from animals just as the SARS-CoV-2 virus came from bats. Like Covid, Disease X could take the world by surprise and come out of the blue or, more precisely, out of a laboratory.

“We say Covid was the biggest public health incident for a century, but I don’t think any of us think it’ll be a century before the next,” she warned. No, with the likes of Porton Down on the case, we could speed up that scenario dramatically.

But what could go wrong? Quite a lot, as the Wuhan experiment demonstrated. And most have forgotten that the 2007 foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in the UK was the result of an effluent discharge from one of two laboratories in Surrey, either the Institute for Animal Health or the Merial Animal Health Laboratory. Both were researching new vaccines at the time.

The BBC heralds the launch of the Vaccine Development and Evaluation Centre as a triumph allowing us to stay one step ahead of these pesky viruses—failing to mention, even in passing, that the virus was created by humans in the first place.

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