After several days of silence and while much of the nation was on riot watch Friday night, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer quietly issued a statement responding to the Project Veritas video of Pfizer research director Jordon Trishton Walker talking about Pfizer exploring “directed evolution” research on the COVID-19 virus.
Pfizer denies performing gain of function or directed evolution research on the virus.
However, it did say that on occasion it engineers a virus mutation, “In a limited number of cases when a full virus does not contain any known gain of function mutations, such virus may be engineered to enable the assessment of antiviral activity in cells.”
The statement reads:
New York, N.Y., January 27, 2023 – Allegations have recently been made related to gain of function and directed evolution research at Pfizer and the company would like to set the record straight.
In the ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research.
Working with collaborators, we have conducted research where the original SARS-CoV-2 virus has been used to express the spike protein from new variants of concern. This work is undertaken once a new variant of concern has been identified by public health authorities.
This research provides a way for us to rapidly assess the ability of an existing vaccine to induce antibodies that neutralize a newly identified variant of concern. We then make this data available through peer reviewed scientific journals and use it as one of the steps to determine whether a vaccine update is required.
In addition, to meet U.S. and global regulatory requirements for our oral treatment, PAXLOVID™, Pfizer undertakes in vitro work (e.g., in a laboratory culture dish) to identify potential resistance mutations to nirmatrelvir, one of PAXLOVID’s two components.
With a naturally evolving virus, it is important to routinely assess the activity of an antiviral. Most of this work is conducted using computer simulations or mutations of the main protease–a non-infectious part of the virus.
In a limited number of cases when a full virus does not contain any known gain of function mutations, such virus may be engineered to enable the assessment of antiviral activity in cells.
In addition, in vitro resistance selection experiments are undertaken in cells incubated with SARS-CoV-2 and nirmatrelvir in our secure Biosafety level 3 (BSL3) laboratory to assess whether the main protease can mutate to yield resistant strains of the virus.
It is important to note that these studies are required by U.S. and global regulators for all antiviral products and are carried out by many companies and academic institutions in the U.S. and around the world.
Fact-based information rooted in sound science is vitally important to overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic and Pfizer remains committed to transparency and helping alleviate the devastating burden of this disease.
Original Project Veritas statement released January 25 (excerpt):
Jordon Trishton Walker, Pfizer Director of Research and Development, Strategic Operations – mRNA Scientific Planner:
…Project Veritas released a new video today exposing a Pfizer executive, Jordon Trishton Walker, who claims that his company is exploring a way to “mutate” COVID via “Directed Evolution” to preempt the development of future vaccines.
Walker says that Directed Evolution is different than Gain-of-Function, which is defined as “a mutation that confers new or enhanced activity on a protein.” In other words, it means that a virus such as COVID can become more potent depending on the mutation / scientific experiment performed on it.
The Pfizer executive told a Veritas journalist about his company’s plan for COVID vaccines, while acknowledging that people would not like this information if it went public.
“One of the things we [Pfizer] are exploring is like, why don’t we just mutate it [COVID] ourselves so we could create — preemptively develop new vaccines, right? So, we have to do that. If we’re gonna do that though, there’s a risk of like, as you could imagine — no one wants to be having a pharma company mutating f**king viruses,” Walker said.
“From what I’ve heard is they [Pfizer scientists] are optimizing it [COVID mutation process], but they’re going slow because everyone is very cautious — obviously they don’t want to accelerate it too much. I think they are also just trying to do it as an exploratory thing because you obviously don’t want to advertise that you are figuring out future mutations,” he said.
“Don’t tell anyone. Promise you won’t tell anyone. The way it [the experiment] would work is that we put the virus in monkeys, and we successively cause them to keep infecting each other, and we collect serial samples from them.”
Walker drew parallels between this current Pfizer project and what may have happened at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
“You have to be very controlled to make sure that this virus [COVID] that you mutate doesn’t create something that just goes everywhere. Which, I suspect, is the way that the virus started in Wuhan, to be honest. It makes no sense that this virus popped out of nowhere. It’s bullsh*t,” he said.
“You’re not supposed to do Gain-of-Function research with viruses. Regularly not. We can do these selected structure mutations to make them more potent. There is research ongoing about that. I don’t know how that is going to work. There better not be any more outbreaks because Jesus Christ,” he said.
Walker also told the Veritas journalist that COVID has been instrumental for Pfizer’s recent business success:
Walker had a meltdown when he was confronted by James O’Keefe about his statements.
YouTube removed the original Project Veritas video on Friday and gave their account a strike
The video had about 800,000 views on YouTube before it was taken down. In contrast the video has over 20 million views on Twitter.