So create something that doesn’t exist in nature and see if you can kill it. Steven Quay, MD, PhD

Until well into the Covid pandemic most people had never heard of “gain of function” research in viruses. Now, it seems everyone has at least a vague understanding of the term. The public knows it has something to do with making a natural virus more dangerous to humans in some way and that this may have played a role in the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid or, as I personally prefer to call it, the Wuhan virus, for its origin in Wuhan, China. Since that seems offensive to some people, I will use the politically acceptable Covid.

Gain of function involves several things. It may involve one, several, or all of these. These include the following:

1. Creation of a virus that does not exist in nature.
2. Taking an existing virus and modifying it in several ways:
3. Make it more transmissible to  humans, especially if from an animal source.
4. Make it more infectious, i.e. easier to spread.
5. Make it more virulent, i.e. deadly.
6. Make it able to evade detection by our immune system.
7. Make it able to spread without prelimimary symptoms, i.e. asymptomatic spread.

No’s. 6 and 7, are regarded by many countries, including the US as impermissable. Oddly, the others are not. I have seen this mentioned with references in the past, but my search for these sources has been a failure. I cannot but wonder if they were not taken down.

Jay Battacharya, MD is Professor of Medicine at Stanford University where he received his MD and a PhD in Economics. He is a senior Fellow of the Hoover Institute at Stanford. He has published peer-reviewed papers on public health policy since long before Covid. Dr. Battacharya carried out the first population serologic studies of Covid to determine its penetration in the community. The results of this, which were available as early as April 2020, showed that the virus would not be, could not be, stopped by lockdowns, a conclusion that the next few years confirmed unequivocally.

Martin Kulldorff, PhD is a biostatistician, epidemiologist, and Professor in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is a member of the FDA’s Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee, and a former member of the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Subgoup of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. He developed the software used by the FDA and CDC to monitor drug and vaccine safety.

Sunetra Gupta, PhD is an epidemiologist in the Department of Zoology at Oxford University and heads a team of infectious disease epidemiologists. She has published multiple papers on the transmission of infectious diseases and is on the Scientific Advisory Board of Collateral Global, an organization that studies the global impact of Covid-19 restrictions.

Kansas recently became the first state in the US to pass a bill that defines gender as the biological sex at birth. That this was necessary and, in any way controversial, speaks to the lunacy of the times in which we live. It would be one thing if the push to redefine the sexes only came from fringe ideologues with an agenda to radically disrupt traditional mores and established norms, including one of the most basic and universally accepted, which goes back to the dawn of man: the reality of two biological sexes- male and female.

It is entirely another thing when physicians begin to question biological reality to advance a narrative that has nothing to do with science and everything to do with ideology. In this case, it is the relatively recent movement to abolish sex and gender as anything other than social constructs that are fluid and infinitely variable. This has given us an ever expanding number of genders, including the best one, which is non-gendered (does anyone have a clue what that means, including the people who claim this?). Basically, you are whatever you say you are, or feel you are, or think you are. Emotion rules the day. Your gender can change as often as you wish and, what’s more, everyone around you is required to accept and approve of whatever gender you are at any particular moment. No dissent is allowed unless you want to be labeled a “hater”, “transphobe”, or other pejorative.

Beth Oller, MD is a family physician in Kansas who testified against this bill. Dr. Oller’s objection to this bill boils down to two provable falsehoods. One is alleged agreement among doctors about the inability to define what a woman is. The other is the frequency with which individuals are born where sex assignment is not absolutely clear.

She claims that there is some general consensus on the part of doctors regarding definitions of biological sex or, should I say, lack thereof. “For decades scientists and physicians have agreed that there is no sufficient way to define what makes someone a woman, and that there is a myriad of variation. No true physician or scientist would claim to be able to distill the intricacies of this into a simple binary.” I love how, to be true, you have to accept her premise. This is typical progressive wokeism in medicine. Either believe as I do or you are delegitimized and have no place in the discussion.