Straight Talk Md: Health | Medicine | Healthcare Policy | Health Education | Anesthesiology

Last week, Adrian Jones, Daoyu Zhang, Steven Massey, Yuri Deigin, Louis Nemzer, and Steven Quay reported out on an ingenious analysis of genomic datasets from NCBI that indicate a lab in Wuhan was performing potentially risky genetic engineering manipulations on a novel coronavirus that was previously unreported. The manipulation? Inserting a MERS spike protein into a previously unreported coronavirus. MERS has a case fatality rate of over 30%. What is clear from the analysis is that at least one lab in Wuhan was performing risky gain-of-function research on unreported coronaviruses before the pandemic started, the kind that could have created SARS-CoV-2. It also shows that risky GOF research is being conducted in Wuhan that has no identifiable medical benefit, but has the potential to create a pandemic level pathogen. Today I interview Steven Massey, a professor of bioinformatics that has been actively researching the origin of SARS-CoV-2 since the pandemic began and one of the authors of this significant di