Shut down the bio-war operations

 

Demand an Immediate Global Ban on Gain-of-Function ‘Biomedical’ 

and ‘Biodefense’ Research!

 

PETITION

By Organic Consumers Association

I call on the U.S. and all world governments to stop funding and to immediately shut down all Gain of Function research, including the genetic engineering of viruses.

A growing number of scientists and experts now believe that COVID-19 originated in a lab, likely in Wuhan, China, as the result of gain-of-function experiments.

Scientists have been conducting gain-of-function research for decades, despite warnings about the risks, and questions about the benefits.

In July, 2014, 327 international scientists signed a consensus statement  calling for a moratorium on gain-of-function research, or what the group called “Potential Pandemic Pathogens.”

Citing biolab safety lapses, the Cambridge Working Group wrote:

“For any experiment, the expected net benefits should outweigh the risks. Experiments involving the creation of potential pandemic pathogens should be curtailed until there has been a quantitative, objective and credible assessment of the risks, potential benefits, and opportunities for risk mitigation, as well as comparison against safer experimental approaches.”

On the advice of scientists, gain-of-function research was shut down in 2014. Unfortunately, funding resumed in 2017. It’s time to shut it down again, permanently.

Taking a virus and engineering it to be as infectious and transmissible as possible to humans serves no reasonable purpose, certainly non commensurate with the potential risks.

Conducting these experiments in light of hundreds of reports of safety violations, accidents and near-misses—as disclosed in a 2015 investigation by USA Today—is the very definition of insanity.

Scientists Marc Lipsitch and Alison P. Galvania, both signers of the Cambridge consensus statement argued in 2014 that gain-of-function research violates the Nuremberg Code of ethics. In a paper they co-authored they wrote:

“The Nuremberg Code, a seminal statement of clinical research ethics, mandates that experiments that pose a risk to human life should be undertaken only if they provide humanitarian benefits that sufficiently offset the risks and if these benefits are unachievable by safer means.”

The COVID-19 global pandemic has ravaged human lives and brought global economies to the brink of collapse.

But what’s perhaps more devastating than the pandemic itself, is the knowledge that this virus was knowingly engineered in a lab by scientists for no other reason than that they could—because the technology, and the funding, were readily available.

It’s time to recognize that there is no benefit worth the existential threat posed by this reckless, and pointless, gain-of-function research.

It’s time to direct our financial and human resources to solving threats like global warming, instead of creating disasters for which no good solutions exist. 

Sign here