pandemic
Explanation
The comic shows a playground scene where a girl stands with arms outstretched, triumphantly declaring to a group of other children: "HA! No touch required! Just by looking in your direction I have infected you all!"
The caption below reads: "Later, the boys demanded the girls shut down the Cooties Gain of Function research center."
This comic merges two very different cultural references into one joke. The first is the classic childhood game of "cooties" -- a fictional contagion that children (typically in elementary school) claim is spread by touch, usually across gender lines (boys claim girls have cooties, and vice versa). The "infected" child must touch someone else to pass the cooties along.
The second reference is to "gain of function" research, a real and controversial area of virology where scientists deliberately modify pathogens to make them more transmissible or virulent, ostensibly to better understand and prepare for potential pandemics. This became a major topic of public debate during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, with heated arguments about whether gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology may have played a role in the origin of SARS-CoV-2.
The joke imagines that the girls have conducted "gain of function" research on cooties, engineering them to spread without physical contact -- just by looking. This mirrors real-world fears about scientists making airborne pathogens more transmissible. The boys' demand to "shut down" the research center echoes real political debates about regulating or banning gain-of-function research. The humor comes from mapping a deadly serious scientific and political controversy onto the utterly trivial childhood game of cooties, deflating the gravity of the real debate while also poking fun at how seriously children take their playground rules.