The Reputations of Researchers at the Erasmus Institute & National Poultry Research Center

Reviewing the literature on researchers experimenting with H5N1.

On September 19, 2011, Scientific American published an article titled What Will the Next Influenza Pandemic Look Like? As the authors noted:

Mysterious mutations
Topping the worst-case scenario list for most flu experts is a pandemic of H5N1, the "bird flu" which has killed about six in 10 people who have gotten it—a total of at least 550 people since 2003—and has laid to waste hundreds of millions of domestic fowl and wild birds.

Fortunately, so far, it has not been transferred from human to human and has passed to us only via direct contact with animals. But any flu can change rapidly, mutating in each new host. So researchers wonder: Could the dreaded H5N1 ever morph into a disease that could spread among people, via a cough or sneeze, to attach to nasal or tracheal membranes, as the seasonal flu does every year?

To help answer this question, Ron Fouchier, also of Erasmus Medical Center, and his team "mutated the hell out of H5N1" and looked at how readily it would bind with cells in the respiratory tract. What they found is that with as few as five single mutations it gained the ability to latch onto cells in the nasal and tracheal passageways, which, Fouchier added as understated emphasis, "seemed to be very bad news."

The variety that they had created, however, when tested in ferrets (the best animal model for influenza research) still did not transmit very easily just through close contact. It wasn't until "someone finally convinced me to do something really, really stupid," Fouchier said, that they observed the deadly H5N1 become a viable aerosol virus. In the derided experiment, they let the virus itself evolve to gain that killer capacity. To do that, they put the mutated virus in the nose of one ferret; after that ferret got sick, they put infected material from the first ferret into the nose of a second. After repeating this 10 times, H5N1 became as easily transmissible as the seasonal flu.

The lesson from these admittedly high-risk experiments is that "the H5N1 virus can become airborne," Fouchier concluded—and that "re-assortment with mammalian viruses is not needed" for it to evolve to spread through the air. And each of these mutations has already been observed in animals.

Many scientists agreed with Ron Fouchier that he had done “something really, really stupid.” In the United States, Dr. Thomas Inglesby—a bioterrorism expert and director of the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center—remarked:

It's just a bad idea for scientists to turn a lethal virus into a lethal and highly contagious virus. And it's a second bad idea for them to publish how they did it so others can copy it.

Another prominent American critic was microbiologist Richard Ebright of Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey, who asserted: “This work should never have been done.”

In addition to warning about the risks of Fouchier’s work on H5N1, Professor Ebright was an early critic of GOF work on SARS coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as was noted in a 2017 report titled Inside the Chinese lab poised to study world's most dangerous pathogens.

While many eminent virologists were apparently surprised when SARS-CoV-2 emerged from Wuhan, Professor Ebright had been warning about this grave risk for years.

In 2022, the Intercept published a detailed investigative report on Ron Fouchier and his colleague Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The report, titled Experimenting With Disaster, recounted two lab accidents at Kawaoka’s lab and criticism of how these accidents were handled.

Regarding the USDA National Poultry Research Center: By its own admission (see Research Project: US-UK-China Collab: Predictive Phylogenetics For Evolutionary and Transmission Dynamics of Newly Emerging Avian Influenza Viruses), since 2021, the lab has been conducting serial passage experiments on mallard ducks using H5NX (especially clade 2.3.4.4).

As the project description states:

The roles of host-related factors and innate immunity on virus evolution will be determined in vitro and in vivo through two approaches: (1) Using chicken, quail, and duck embryonic fibroblasts and tracheal organ cultures as models of domestic and wild bird hosts; secondly, in vivo passage of viruses through mallard ducks and Chinese goose species to predict evolution in natural hosts; thirdly, viral evolution and transmission dynamics of avian influenza virus (AIV) infection in Japanese quail as an indicator species of potential to jump into mammalian hosts …

Note that in vivo passage is precisely the “really, really stupid thing” that Ron Fouchier admitted to doing with ferrets.

Not only is National Poultry Research Center performing these experiments in Athens, Georgia, it is collaborating with colleagues at laboratories in China. When U.S. Senator Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, questioned why the U.S. Department of Agriculture was doing these experiments, the USDA shot back:

Any time Senator Ernst has a question for USDA about our research or our commitment to helping America’s farmers mitigate animal diseases like highly pathogenic avian influenza, she should reach out to us directly before putting misinformation in a press release or public letter. This particular research project was applied for in 2019 and was approved in 2020, and despite the Senator’s assertions, this is not ‘gain-of-function’ research.

Note that the USDA asserts that “this is not ‘gain-of-function’ research”— even though its own Project statement asserts it will conduct in vivo passage of viruses through mallard ducks.

Much of the literature on serial passage characterizes it as a form of gain-of-function research. In his e-mail correspondence with Jeremy Farrar and Eddie Holmes in February 2020 on the subject of SARS-CoV-2, the three men discussed the possibility the virus had emerged from serial passage experiments. As was reported in the Nation about their e-mails:

Holmes sent the summary to Farrar, who forwarded it to Fauci and Collins. It sparked a speculative discussion among the three men about the kind of laboratory work that could have inadvertently created the virus. Their speculations centered on “serial passage” or “repeated tissue culture passage,” a practice in which a virus is evolved in a lab by repeatedly passaging it through mice, other lab animals, or cell culture. In some cases, this technique involves passing viruses through the bodies of mice that have been genetically altered to express certain human proteins. The technique can also make it possible for scientists to “fairly rapidly select for more pathogenic variants [of a virus] in the laboratory,” as Garry would note in a later e-mail.

During this same period of early, private discussions about SARS-CoV-2, Professor Ron Fouchier wrote an email (on Feb. 2) to this group stating:

It is my opinion that a non-natural origin of [the virus] is highly unlikely at present. Any conspiracy theory can be approached with factual information.

Bearing this in mind, I couldn’t help noticing that Ron Fouchier is one of the authors of Transatlantic spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 by wild birds from Europe to North America in 2021 which posits a natural mode of transmission of H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b across the Atlantic one year after it purportedly emerged naturally in Northwest Europe.

All of the above raises the question:

1). Do researchers at the Erasmus Institute and the USDA National Poultry Research Center have good reputations for prudence and transparency?

2). If so, do they deserve their good reputations?

3). Should the American people simply trust the purported scientific authority of eminent virologists such as those performing GOF experiments at the Erasmus Institute, the USDA and its affiliated labs in China?