As someone with a background in clinical virology who worked at USAMRIID in the late 1980s, I agree with you on COVID origins…but the claim about Ebola and Marburg being ‘born of GOF research’ doesn’t hold.”
Marburg virus was first discovered in 1967 during a natural zoonotic outbreak in lab workers handling African green monkeys imported from Uganda. The virus was completely unknown to science before then. In 1967, modern genetic engineering tools didn’t exist (restriction enzymes arrived in 1970; reverse genetics for RNA viruses came much later), and the very concept of today’s high-risk “gain-of-function” experiments to enhance human transmissibility or virulence hadn’t been developed.
You simply can’t perform GOF on a virus that hasn’t been discovered yet, using technology that hadn’t been invented. It was a classic spillover from the natural bat reservoir via monkeys…not a lab-created bioweapon. Post-discovery work (including routine rodent adaptation for animal models at places like USAMRIID) came decades later and had nothing to do with its origin.
The same timeline and scientific logic applies to Ebola (first identified in 1976). Decades of genomic, phylogenetic, and ecological studies confirm both are ancient naturally evolving filoviruses from African bat reservoirs.
Paying attention to long-standing voices is fine, but extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence…which isn’t there for this one on filoviruses.
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