Viruses – The Health Care Blog

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

Sep 2, 2026

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and the Department of Defense via an intermediary, the New York based non-profit EcoHealth Alliance,whose funding was retracted in 2024.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.

Zombie Viruses of the Permafrost

Jan 24, 2024

By KIM BELLARD

We’ve had some cold weather here lately, as has much of the nation. Not necessarily record-breaking, but uncomfortable for millions of people. It’s the kind of weather that causes climate change skeptics to sneer “where’s the global warming now?” This despite 2023 being the warmest year on record — “by far” — and the fact that the ten warmest years since 1850 have all been in the last decade, according to NOAA.

One of the parts of the globe warming the fastest is the Arctic, which is warming four times as fast as the rest of the planet. That sounds like good news if you run a shipping company looking for shorter routes (or to avoid the troubled Red Sea area), but may be bad news for everyone else. If you don’t know why, I have two words for you: zombie viruses.

Most people are at least vaguely aware of permafrost, which covers vast portions of Siberia, Alaska, and Canada. Historically, it’s been literally frozen, not just seasonally but for years, decades, centuries, millennia, or even longer. Well, it’s starting to thaw.

Now, maybe its kind of cool that we’re finding bodies of extinct species like the woolly mammoth (which some geniuses want to revive). But also buried in the permafrost are lots of microorganisms, many of which are not, in fact, dead but are in kind of a statis. As geneticist Jean-Michel Claverie of Aix-Marseille University, recently explained to The Observer: “The crucial point about permafrost is that it is cold, dark and lacks oxygen, which is perfect for preserving biological material. You could put a yoghurt in permafrost and it might still be edible 50,000 years later.”

Dr. Claverie and his team first revived such a virus – some 30,000 years old — in 2014 and last year did the same for some that were 48,000 years old. There are believed to be organisms that ae perhaps a million years old, far older than we’ve been around. Scientists prefer to call them Methuselah microbes, although “zombie viruses” is more likely to get people’s attention.

He’s worried about the risks they pose.

Ecology and Technical Advance

Feb 4, 2022• 0

By MIKE MAGEE

It is fair to say that the vast majority of Americans know more about viruses today than they did 24 months ago. The death and destruction in the wake of COVID-19 and its progeny have been a powerful motivator. Fear and worry tend to focus one’s attention.

Our collective learnings are evolving. We have already seen historic comparisons to other epidemics. Just search “The 10 worst epidemics” for confirmation. But one critical area which has been skimmed over, and only delicately probed (if at all) is the ecology or “the ecological point of view.”

For those interested, let me recommend “Natural History of Infectious Disease” published in 1972 by Nobel laureate and Australian biologist Sir Macfarlane Burnet and his colleague David O. White.

Chapter 1 begins: “In the final third of the twentieth century, we of the affluent West are confronted with no lack of environmental, social, and political problems, but one of the immemorial hazards of human existence is gone. Young people today have had almost no experience of serious infectious disease…For the first time in history deaths in infancy and childhood are not predominantly from infection.” But a few sentences on, they add this addendum, “Infectious diseases may be almost invisible, but it is still potentially as important as ever it was.”

Americans are all too familiar with the living biologic organism named COVID-19. By now, they know what it looks like, the role of its outer spikes, its nuclear makeup, and genetic alterations that allow the creation of derivative variants and vaccines. But in addition to its biological science, it also has an ecological life as well.