Pfizer Responds to Covid Gain of Function Research Claims

Here is their agenda in their own words:

"Project Veritas journalists working undercover on their own or by, with and through idealistic insiders bring to the American people the corrupt private truths hidden behind the walls of their institutions."

That's classical investigative journalism. But given this mission statement it's pretty obvious why the left thinks they're being targeted: they managed to take over practically all powerful institutions, including media institutions that would once have held up Veritas style reporting proudly and given it awards. How many important American institutions are run by "powerful right wing figures", exactly? Maybe a handful at most? Now how many institutions explicitly and loudly align themselves with the agenda of the left (idpol, Follow The Sciencism etc)? It's uncountably more. Just given the sheer quantities of captured institutions in question, any Veritas style initiative will inevitably uncover more corruption on the left simply because that's where the power actually is.

He didn't say they plan to release new viruses, obviously none of the idiot scientists in this whole sorry saga actually intend to release the viruses they make. What we do know is they seem to delight in using vaccine development as the justification for fiddling with dangerous viruses, even though there's no clear link between the work Wuhan was doing and later vaccine development, that they much prefer doing dangerous work in very low safety conditions because the higher BSL levels are tedious and get in the way, and we also know that they'd rather engage in coverups than admit the possibility that a virus escaped from their own labs.

That's why the executive in the video states clearly that it's a secret, the journalist shouldn't tell anyone, and that the public would hate it if they found out.

Edit: reading a bit more, they say that their biggest scoop ever was an ABC News anchor saying she had the Epstein story and killed it due to pressure from the British Royal Family. So their top hit is actually one that attacks what is arguably the most conservative institution in Britain! It doesn't really get more "powerful right wing figure" than the Queen, yet Veritas didn't hesitate to reveal their machinations. So this far right claim is clearly just a smear.

The video is not just supposed to spark outrage with extreme conservatives who think giving "children" (I can't find any source specifying the age so this could be anything from 6 to 17) an opportunity to ask questions about sex is child abuse (or "grooming", "sexualizing children", etc), but also moderates who assume the worst because of how this "revelation" is reported on (after all, if it makes headlines, it must be bad).

To make a simplistic analogy (necessarily imperfect but sufficient for these purposes), consider instead a computer virus. If an antivirus company patches the binary in order to make it easier to study its behavior (for example, in order to make it more debuggable), that’s “engineering” the virus but it’s not “gain-of-function.” If the company instead patches the virus so that it can take advantage of a new 0-day exploit and spread further, that’s “gain-of-function.”

Whether gain-of-function research is capable of revealing new insight into transmissible diseases not obtainable elsewhere is a point of debate among biologists, but one can be well assured that a for-profit operation isn’t going to touch it with a ten-foot pole. Engineering the virus on the other hand, or in other words making mutations in viral components, is basically a description of “doing basic molecular biology” and is non-optional.

The sort of allegation that Pfizer is responding to is more or less the equivalent of someone recording an engineer calling themselves “hackers,” visiting “Hacker News,” then writing an exposé claiming that this proves Company X is in the business of computer crime.

The activity mentioned in the Pfizer press release that skirts closest to “gain-of-function” is actually a bit you didn’t mention at all, where they’re required by regulatory bodies to determine how the virus might resist an antiviral. Unlike computer viruses, biological ones mutate under treatment pressure. The closest analogy for a computer virus might be if it phones home and downloads a new payload to modify its behavior when it detects the presence of some antivirus software. For obvious reasons, studying how a pandemic virus would mutate in response to approved drugs is both necessary and icky, hence why Pfizer discussed its biosecurity measures. The distinction they make (rightly) between this research and a “directed evolution” or “gain-of-function” experiment, is that they’re reading out an answer to the question “Does the virus mutate when we treat with this antiviral drug, and if so, how?”, not culturing viruses iteratively in the presence of drug until they obtain an optimized treatment-resistant virus.