Here is the alleged "smoking gun" paper shown briefly and discussed in the first linked video [video of Steve Hilton's special investigation for his Fox News show “The Next Revolution.”]:
While this may be fodder for conspiracy theorists, it does NOT describe any gain of function experiments. What it DOES describe are the researcher's efforts to catalog and characterize the coronaviruses that are circulating in a population of bats in a specific cave.
They chose these bats because of the similarity of the coronaviruses these bats carry to the SARS that could have become a pandemic back in 2001. (Actually, the authors of the study described it as a pandemic. But it was controlled very quickly and is now gone.)
They mapped the evolutionary relationships of the many strains of coronavirus they found in the cave. They found them all to be very similar, with the exception of one protein, called the "S protein," which was highly variable between different coronavirus strains.
The S proteins differ in a region called the "receptor binding domain" (RBD). Since the researchers thought that the RBD is important for coronaviruses to infect humans, they did some experiments in which they swapped the different S proteins into a strain of SARS that they know can infect humans and tested them. Indeed, two of the S proteins that they tested enabled the "recombined" viruses to enter into cells and replicate. Viruses containing the other S proteins did not infect cells.
Very importantly, nothing in this paper describes "gain of function." The researchers only tested naturally occurring components of naturally occurring viruses to see which ones could cause human disease.
This kind of research is important because there remains a fear that another coronavirus with deadly potential can emerge to cause a pandemic (which is what happened in 2019). The more we understand about the viruses and the factors that enable them to be pandemic capable, the better we can respond when such a virus emerges. Who knows, with more time and more research like this, there could be drugs in the pipeline to target the S protein, which could be used to treat the first affected patients and stop another pandemic capable coronavirus from spreading. Similar concerns about deadly pandemics have driven influenza research for the last century. The more we know, the better we are able to counter the threat.
The bat cave where those researchers collected their samples is a perfect incubator for such a virus--many strains of coronavirus are circulating in that cave, and new strains arise frequently through sharing genetic material and through various mutational mechanisms. In addition, bats are very good incubators of deadly viruses, because they are not affected the way humans are. Their immune systems protect them from viruses that would kill us. For this reason, bats have also given us Ebola, Marburg, and other deadly viruses that don't affect them nearly as severely.
Last, two points: one, that if researchers were clandestinely trying to create a pandemic virus, they would not publish papers that anyone can access in the scientific literature. Such work would be done in secret. Two, that Mother Nature is perfectly capable of creating pandemic organisms and has done so many times throughout history.
“if researchers were clandestinely trying to create a pandemic virus, they would not publish papers that anyone can access in the scientific literature.”
No, I don’t think that’s quite right.
They would publish papers, but what they would publish would be for the purpose of covering up or diverting attention from the criminal aspects of the research.