The Pandemic Risk of “What I’ve Never Seen Before”

By MIKE MAGEE The world of medical science largely closed ranks last month in defense of Tony Fauci. Dr. Fauci had been hauled before the Senate Homeland Security Committee to face hostile entrapment by long time critique Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Taking no chances, his lawyers had the former head of NIH’s Infectious Disease division plead the 5th to avoid entrapment, fines, and even imprisonment. It has been five years since Dr. Fauci appeared on MSNow (formerly MSNBC) and encourage viewers to “keep an open mind” when it came to “gain-of-function” research and the origins of the Covid pandemic. Since then, a 2025 WHO report stated “As things stand, all hypotheses must remain on the table.” That includes the possibility that the viral tragedy resulted from the inadvertent release of a genetically engineered virus from the Wuhan, China, laboratory of Shi Zhengli, a virologist trained at the University of North Carolina. The risky experiments, termed “gain-of-function” studies, were justified as super-secure, safe, predictive, and preventive. Shi returned to her labs in 2018 and 2019 with grant funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and the Department of Defense via an intermediary, the New York based non-profit EcoHealth Alliance,whose funding was retracted in 2024. Their coordinator-in-chief was one Peter Daszak. Daszak is known for adopting militarized terms in the battle against global infectious diseases. In 2020 he wrote in the New York Times, “Pandemics are like terrorist attacks: We know roughly where they originate and what’s responsible for them, but we don’t know exactly when the next one will happen. They need to be handled the same way — by identifying all possible sources and dismantling those before the next pandemic strikes.” Daszak’s argument that risks involved in Shi Zhengli’s Wuhan bat virus research were justified as defensive and preventive was convincing enough to the NIH and the Department of Defense that his EcoHealth Alliance was funded from 2013 to 2020 (contracts, grants, subgrants) to the tune of well over $100 million – $39 million from Pentagon /DOD funds, $65 million from USAID/State Dept., and $20 million from HHS/NIH/CDC. Daszak’s position within the scientific community was controversial. In fact, in 2014, a group of concerned scientists called the Cambridge Working Group issued this statement: “Accident risks with newly created ‘potential pandemic pathogens’ raise grave new concerns. Laboratory creation of highly transmissible, novel strains of dangerous viruses, especially but not limited to influenza, poses substantially increased risks. An accidental infection in such a setting could trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible to control.” All of this, it seems, would be “old news” except for last week’s dramatic announcement that “For the first time, scientists have used artificial intelligence to create new kinds of viruses, raising hopes for medical advances while also raising the disturbing possibility that the technology could someday be used to invent dangerous pathogens.” It has been 23 years since scientists first constructed a synthetic viral genome. But Evo, a creative science AI newcomer, produced by OpenAI has apparently broken new ground – on its own. Well not completely. Its’ masters primed the pump by feeding the AI engine with nine trillion nucleotides (the human genome has 3 billion) obtained from millions of diverse species. The scientific engineers focused down on a well-known virus that is generally active primarily in attacks on the bacteria, E-coli. It’s called Phi X-174. It has been utilized for some time in genetic engineering exercises. But in this case, it (along with some 15,000 close chemical relatives), was feed into Evo with the instruction to create new novel viruses of its own. And create it did, spitting out some 700,000 variations, most non-viable. From these, the human masters chose 285 DNA combos which they injected onto bacterial petri dishes. In 16 cases, they were able to visualize a “hit.” That is, the injected viral newcomers demonstrated activity against the bacteria. Not all scientists cheered the findings. The potential usefulness in medicine and biotechnology, including the treatment of genetic disorders and cancer, are real. But the downside could be potentially catastrophic. For example, Johns Hopkins scientist, Dr. Moritz Hanke said, “There’s just a huge disconnect. You could say, ‘Hey, genomic language model, make me an influenza genome that is modified to be more transmissible or to be more lethal.” Connecting the dots, lessons learned from the Covid pandemic, and Dr. Fauci’s availing himself of 5th Amendment protections, somewhat overshadowed the announcement of new HHS federal rules governing and restricting Gain-of-Function research. But HHS in response to Evo’s AI creations stated that computer-based research “is not prohibited by this policy unless it involves an entity of concern.” But as the Covid pandemic well illustrated, that knowledge may arrive too late. We have indeed entered a brave new world. Dr. Hanke summed up the risk succinctly with this question, “What is the risk of what I’ve never seen before?” Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex. (Grove/2020) Categories: Health Policy, Health Tech, Mike Magee