So, our own government utilized Gain of Function to take a minor Bird Flu and alter it to spread to other species, particularly mammals. This was a purposeful act that was accomplished back in 2011. And now it seems that they might be threatening to release it before the 2024 election. They want to kill off our animals, our pets, our livelihoods. We can't let them.

I found the information below from several articles from 2019:

In 2011, researchers in Wisconsin, the Netherlands, and Japan alarmed the world by revealing they had separately modified the deadly avian H5N1 influenza virus (BIRD FLU) so that it spread between ferrets (mammals). Advocates of such Gain of Function (GOF) studies say they can help public health experts better understand how viruses might spread and plan for pandemics.

But by enabling the bird virus to more easily spread among mammals, the experiments also raised fears that the pathogen could jump to humans.

Critics of the work worried that such a souped-up virus could spark a pandemic if it escaped from a lab or was intentionally released by a bioterrorist.

After extensive discussion about whether the two studies should even be published (they ultimately were) and [after] a voluntary moratorium by the two labs, the experiments resumed in 2013 under new U.S. oversight rules.

One of the projects has already received funding from the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland, and will start in a few weeks [2011]; the other is awaiting funding.

The outcome may not satisfy scientists who believe certain studies that aim to make pathogens more potent or more likely to spread in mammals are so risky they should be limited or even banned.

Some are upset because the government's review will not be made public. "After a deliberative process that cost $1 million for [a consultant's] external study and consumed countless weeks and months of time for many scientists, we are now being asked to trust a completely opaque process where the outcome is to permit the continuation of dangerous experiments," says Harvard University epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch.

But concerns reignited after more papers and a series of accidents at federal biocontainment labs. In October 2014, U.S. officials announced an unprecedented "pause" on funding for 18 GOF studies involving influenza or the Middle East respiratory syndrome or severe acute respiratory syndrome viruses. (About half were later allowed to continue because the work didn't fit the definition or was deemed essential to public health.)

There followed two National Academy of Sciences workshops, recommendations from a federal advisory board, and a new U.S. policy for evaluating proposed studies involving "enhanced potential pandemic pathogens" (known as ePPPs).

In December 2017, NIH lifted the funding pause and invited new GOF proposals that would be reviewed by a committee with wide-ranging expertise drawn from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in Washington, D.C., and other federal agencies . Clarification, 9 February, 2019 10:30 a.m.: This story has been updated to clarify that one goal of the controversial experiments is to make the H5N1 virus transmissible in mammals (often ferrets), not humans.