The specific thing that they said they were trying to do was predict emerging pathogens and develop treatments and potentially vaccines for them in advance of them actually making a zoonotic jump. They were creating chimeric Coronaviruses to simulate natural recombination events, then infecting humanized mice with them to assess their potential for human emergence.
Does any of this research actually matter with the technology we now have? We can sequence a virus. We were able to build a vaccine in one day based upon the sequence. One thing I don’t understand is how the spike protein was identified as the important piece. Was this done by diffing sequences against other coronaviruses?
I’m bothered by the fact that GOF research was banned in the USA, and then the NIH setup funding for it in Wuhan. I think the need and safety of this research should come under serious scrutiny.
