Any reason why the National Institutes of Health would remove the abstract description from their own website of one of their funded projects?
Could it be perhaps, that the abstract someone incriminated them to a degree? Or maybe the the NIH officer in charge of public information said to herself or himself “Golly, this sure looks boring, nobody is ever going to read this, we should delete the words on this page, so that it will load faster.”
I couldn’t begin to guess. I’m clearly not a high-powered, highly-educated, influential medical research expert like the good folks at the NIH. I am just a disgraced physicist, arrested too many times to count on one hand, for public drunkenness and misdemeanor possession of a controlled substance. If a divorced brunette isn’t on the lips of your old pal Rick Yukon, then a bottle of cheap tequila will surely be. So I couldn’t begin to guess. But here is what I found when I entered the website for the NIH funding details for project number 5R01AI110964-05:
For some odd reason, and for which I cannot begin to guess, someone at the NIH removed the Project Number, the Contact PI, the Awardee, the Abstract and the Public Health Statement.
Now why would the NIH want to do something like that? Again, Rick Yukon is too stoopid to figure that one out. But Rick Yukon is at least drunk enough to try the Wayback Machine. And what did Rick Yukon find there? This …
It’s the description from the 2018 funding mechanism for $0.5 million or so of U.S. Taxpayer funds supplied to EcoHealth Alliance for their work in Wuhan to functionalize genetically-engineered Coronaviruses, on organisms including “humanized mice”, which are mice with genetically-engineered immune systems that closely resemble human immune systems.
Now, why in the world would the NIH want to scrub all that information? Odd, huh? Here are some snippets from the original NIH funding website, before it was deleted:
… This project will examine the risk of future coronavirus (CoV) emergence from wildlife using in-depth field investigations across the human-wildlife interface in China … A combined modeling approach will include phylogenetic analyses of host receptors and novel CoV genes (including functional receptor binding domains); … Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.
But I have to admit, the NIH page with the deleted text did in fact seem to load a bit faster than the page with actual words on it. So maybe we should thank the NIH for helping us to save a little time, instead of accusing them of removing incriminating evidence? And for all any of us know, by the time you read this, the good folks at the NIH might just put back the text back in. But the Wayback Machine knows all, sees all.
Luckily, the folks at Nature still consider websites to be an extension of their published journals, and they still have this paper up from 2015, warning us all about the dangers of genetically-engineering a bat virus, https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18787.
Enough of this batting of eyelashes. At some point, when the connection of some four million deaths is made to a lab-released genetically-engineered virus, the people of the USA and China will need to discuss how we plan to atone for this mess. Reparations are in order, in the opinion of your good ol’ boy Rick Yukon, US$100,000 per family. That comes to about $0.5 trillion, that We the People are rightly need to pay to the victims of this monumental fuck-up.
And when we reach deep into our pockets, and when we pull out every dime we can find and then start to find little more than lint, we might then decide that genetic engineering is the contemporary equivalent of the nuclear arms race; the debris of which will contaminate our natural genomes for millions of years. Biologists who have the gee-whiz tools of CRISPR and others will need to put down their weapons, and step away slowly from their lab benches. And the biologists who have wisely decided to study organisms, rather than build their own organisms, will need to assume ownership of the field of science that the Frankenstein-experts have trampled.
Edit: 8/4/2021 – I just checked the NIH page, the necessary info is back, and no longer blank. It may have just been a glitch with the process script that was supposed to fill in the web page.