Posted on 10/25/2023 9:36:31 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Remember when Sen. Rand Paul accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of funding China’s Wuhan virus lab?
Fauci replied, “Sen. Paul, you do not know what you’re talking about.”
The media loved it. Vanity Fair smirked, “Fauci Once Again Forced to Basically Call Rand Paul a Sniveling Moron.”
But now the magazine has changed its tune, admitting, “In Major Shift, NIH Admits Funding Risky Virus Research in Wuhan … Paul might have been onto something.”
Then what about question two: Did COVID-19 occur because of a leak from that lab?
When Paul confronted Fauci, saying, “The evidence is pointing that it came from the lab!” Fauci replied, “I totally resent the lie that you are now propagating.”
Was Paul lying? What’s the truth?
The media told us COVID came from an animal, possibly a bat.
But in my new video, Paul points out there were “reports of 80,000 animals being tested. No animals with it.”
Now he’s released a book, “Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up,” that charges Fauci and others with funding dangerous research and then covering it up.
“Three people in the Wuhan lab got sick with a virus of unknown origin in November of 2019,” says Paul. The Wuhan lab is 1,000 kilometers away from where bats live.
Today the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Energy and others agree with Rand Paul. They believe COVID most likely came from a lab.
I ask Paul, “COVID came from evil Chinese scientists, in a lab, funded by America?”
“America funded it,” he replies, “maybe not done with evil intentions. It was done with the misguided notion that ‘gain of function’ research was safe.”
Gain of function research includes making viruses stronger.
The purpose is to anticipate what might happen in nature and come up with vaccines in advance. So I push back at Paul, “They’re trying to find ways to stop diseases!”
He replies, “Many scientists have now looked at this and said, ‘We’ve been doing this gain of function research for quite a while.’ The likelihood that you create something that creates a vaccine that’s going to help anybody is pretty slim to none.”
Paul points out that Fauci supported “gain of function” research.
“He said in 2012, even if a pandemic occurs … the knowledge is worth it.” Fauci did write: “The benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks.”
Paul answers: “Well, that’s a judgment call. There’s probably 16 million families around the world who might disagree with that.”
Fauci and the National Institutes of Health didn’t give money directly to the Chinese lab. They gave it to a nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance. The group works to protect people from infectious diseases.
“They were able to accumulate maybe over $100 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars, and a lot of it was funneled to Wuhan,” says Paul.
EcoHealth Alliance is run by zoologist Peter Daszak. Before the pandemic, Daszak bragged about combining coronaviruses in Wuhan.
Once COVID broke out, Daszak became less eager to talk about these experiments. He won’t talk to me.
“Peter Daszak has refused to reveal his communications with the Wuhan lab,” complains Paul. “I do think that ultimately there is a great deal of culpability on his part … They squelched all dissent and said, ‘You’re a conspiracy theorist if you’re saying this (came from a lab),’ but they didn’t reveal that they had a monetary self-incentive to cover this up,” says Paul.
“The media is weirdly un-curious about this,” I say to Paul.
“We have a disease that killed maybe 16 million people,” Paul responds. “And they’re not curious as to how we got it?”
Also, Our NIH still funds gain of function research, Paul says.
“This is a risk to civilization. We could wind up with a virus … that leaks out of a lab and kills half of the planet,” Paul warns.
Paul’s book reveals much more about Fauci and EcoHealth Alliance. I will cover more of that in this column in a few weeks.
Every Tuesday at JohnStossel.com, Stossel posts a new video about the battle between government and freedom. He is the author of “Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.”
Robert F. Kennedy JR makes the same sort of claims in his book The Real Anthony Fauci with over 100 citations following each chapter.
Robert F. Kennedy JR makes the same sort of claims in his book The Real Anthony Fauci with over 100 citations following each chapter.
” leaks out of a lab and kills half of the planet,”
A feature ... not a bug.
But now the magazine has changed its tune, admitting, “In Major Shift, NIH Admits Funding Risky Virus Research in Wuhan … Paul might have been onto something.”
The NIH does not fund research. The US Congress funds research. In addition, "risky" virus research is necessary, which is why the Congress continues to fund it. We don't know how many animal viruses are out there. We don't know how many of them can infect humans. We don't know how many of them are pandemic capable. We, the scientific community, would rather do research to answer these questions than wait until one of these viruses crosses over into a human population and sparks a pandemic. The more we know ahead of time, the more prepared we are to handle a new pandemic when it happens.
“Three people in the Wuhan lab got sick with a virus of unknown origin in November of 2019,”
It's pretty common for people to become infected with respiratory viruses in the winter. The fact that three lab members who work in close proximity caught a respiratory infection around the same time is meaningless. Clearly, they did not display the symptoms that alerted Chinese physicians that they were dealing with a previously unknown pathogen.
Today the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Energy and others agree with Rand Paul. They believe COVID most likely came from a lab.
The FBI? A criminal investigation agency? The DOE, whose scientists know absolutely nothing about the etiology of infectious disease? On what scientific basis do these non-medical science agencies determine that the SARS-CoV2 virus could originate in a lab? The scientific community, the experts that actually study virus diseases, does not think that the virus came from a lab. All of the available data indicates that the virus crossed into humans at the Wuhan seafood market located several miles away from the virology lab. The first identified cases were in people who were at or near the market.
I should probably point out that the lab leak accusation is meant to imply that the Chinese scientists actually created or modified a virus to make it into a human pathogen. It is technically very difficult and probably impossible to intentionally design a virus that will infect humans and transmits in such a way that it becomes a pandemic virus. In order to do so would require a much more detailed understanding of human metabolism and of protein structure than currently exists. Plus, a human being would not be able to create that virus--it would require a supercomputer to crunch all of the data (that doesn't exist yet). It is technically possible to modify existing viruses (we do this all the time), but no one can know without testing whether the modifications will have the anticipated effect. It was done with the misguided notion that ‘gain of function’ research was safe.
My goodness, this term "gain of function" is thrown around so much by people who have no idea what it even means.
The scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology wanted to know if a bat virus that they had isolated was capable of infecting humans. However, they did not want to do this study with the bat virus directly. So, instead, they decided to take only the spike protein from the bat virus and put it on a human virus, so that the human virus would have human virus insides but be covered with bat virus spike protein on the outside. If that human virus covered with bat virus spike protein remained capable of infecting human cells, that would demonstrate that the actual bat virus might be capable of infecting humans. There was no gain of function here, only a preservation of function. A gain of function would have been to take a bat virus that was incapable of infecting humans and to alter it so that it could infect humans--an experiment that was never done.
He replies, “Many scientists have now looked at this and said, ‘We’ve been doing this gain of function research for quite a while.’ The likelihood that you create something that creates a vaccine that’s going to help anybody is pretty slim to none.”
The purpose of researching the characteristics of viruses is not to create vaccines. It is to understand how those viruses interact with the human body and how serious of an infection would result from that interaction.
Development of the vaccine technology that allowed for the Covid vaccine to be developed, tested, and approved so quickly started in the 1990s. The SARS-CoV2 virus did not exist back then, nor was it needed for vaccine development. Moderna did most of the vaccine R&D using an influenza virus. Fauci and the National Institutes of Health didn’t give money directly to the Chinese lab
Fauci was director of NIAID, not NIH. As the director of NIAID, he did not have any oversight of how the parent agency NIH distributed funds. Not that it really matters. The pertinent point is that the US government had and still has a strong interest in preventing epidemics and pandemics and continues to fund research towards this goal. Why does the US government have a strong interest in research designed to prevent or mitigate pandemics? Because when citizens die, they no longer pay taxes to fund all of the politician's pipe dreams. The politicians want that money. Therefore, they want citizens to remain alive.
IMO, Fauci is an arrogant little monster.
He and Kennedy are the lone warriors that want to see this little evil bastard pay for what he did as well as he financiers and government officials that funded it all and planned it.
In 2014 Obama defunded hypervirilization efforts n the US as too dangerous. About 12 people in the world remember that. Gain of function ant hypervirilization are only different by degrees. Same outcomes.
No one is king to be held responsible because fauci was given a prez commendation by trump. They stood shoulder to shoulder, signing blank checks to big pharma, restricting our travel, our work.. all the ehile cities were literally full n fire.
To ensure the tyranny is irrevocable Trump signed mail in ballots with fauci there smiling.
Accountability starts at the top and trump is untouchable. His approval of homosexuality gave us trannys in kindergarten classes.
With republicans like these and his buddy McCarthy to finance it all.. who needs dems.
He offered the dems DACA… suddenly caravans of invaders. He did that.
Well that was quite a piece. If you like and respect Fauci, you are the only one.
Covid came out of Wuhan, you don’t contest that do you?
He gets plenty of respect. Here is his latest honor. LOL.
I’m trying to understand what you’re trying to drive at. Is it your contention that this SARS-COV2 virus was not the result of a lab accident from Wuhan?
There are two main points here. First, the virus outbreak started several miles away from the lab at the Huanan Seafood Market. The initial patients all lived or worked near the market and many of them had visited the market. While it is possible (but highly unlikely) for researchers at a lab to get infected with an organism that they are studying, had this happened, the outbreak would have spread from a point either at the lab or at the homes of the researchers. Think of how waves spread when you throw a pebble into the water. A communicable outbreak spreads in a similar manner.
SARS-CoV-2 infection at the Huanan seafood market.
The second point is that there is utterly no evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is anything other than an animal virus that jumped into humans. The virus sequence is stored in a publicly available database. Anyone who knows how can access and analyze the sequence using bioinformatic tools available through the internet. I have done this, as I am sure thousands of other scientists have done. I found no evidence that this is either a created or a modified virus. There were no signs of genetic engineering. Further evidence that the virus originated in bats is the fact that the Wuhan scientists found strong homologies between SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses currently circulating in bats.
(No reference for this paragraph because I wrote it based on research methods and general biochemistry/molecular biology knowledge. I can provide a link to the virus sequence and to the bioinformatics systems if you want.)
One thing about viruses: even though SARS-CoV-2 most likely originated in bats (could be another animal, but bats are the prime suspects), it probably did not exist a few years ago. Viruses mutate rapidly, and when they mutate, the newer forms take over while the older ones disappear. This has occurred during the course of this pandemic. The original SARS-CoV-2 virus is gone, and there are currently 9 different variants in circulation. Most of the circulating variants are of the XBB lineage. In bats, the original virus will have been replaced with other variants of SARS-CoV-2 as well, and they are not the same as the variants circulating in humans.
Actually, thousands of scientists respect Fauci, as well as many others who are not scientists but are familiar with his work. Between 1965 and 2023, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci was an author on over one thousand publications. I have never personally met a scientist who had over 200 publications in their career. Dr. Fauci was appointed to head the NIAID in 1984. The NIAID is a fairly large agency. I have known a number of heads of much smaller agencies; none of them had time for research because of all of their duties related to being heads. Yet Dr. Fauci remained involved in research and was an author on almost 800 papers while he was heading NIAID.
The respect that the scientific community and those who value science hold for Dr. Fauci is well-deserved.
Covid came out of Wuhan, you don’t contest that do you?
No, of course not. All of the evidence points to the fact that the virus jumped into humans at the Huanan Seafood Market located in Wuhan, China.
SARS-CoV-2 infection at the Huanan seafood market.
This occurred because the Chinese have a nasty practice of capturing wild animals and selling them at live markets. We don't do this in the US, so zoonotic (animal origin) outbreaks do not occur much here.
RE: The FBI? A criminal investigation agency? The DOE, whose scientists know absolutely nothing about the etiology of infectious disease?
Firstly, I would not dismiss the FBI as merely a criminal investigation agency. Part of criminal investigation is studying and investigating BIOLOGICAL origins of crimes. The FBI has one of the largest DNA and Molecular biology labs in the world. I would not underestimate their forensic capabilities at all.
As for the Department of Energy, we might complain about duplicate work by agencies but it DOES have its own molecular biologists like for instance in the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory where they employ teams of among others:
Microbial, genetic and cellular biologists
Environmental scientists
Analytical and interfacial chemical scientist
Radiological scientists
Information analysts and
Sensing and measurement technologists.
So, let’s not be too dismissive of the scientific capabilities of these agencies ( yes, even though we think we waste too much tax money on them ).
I would not say that their scientists know nothing ( your words ) about infectious diseases. How do you know that they don’t have such expertise in house? They have millions in tax money that they can employ.
I am very familiar with the FBI, to the point where they have set up investigation headquarters right outside of my office. (That was fun... not.)
My point, which I guess I did not express very clearly, was that a low-level confidence report issued by the FBI or the DOE without actually consulting the experts who could have told the report authors what is actually possible or not is not a reliable source. Even when it was published, the authors of that report (who are NOT experts in the subject) did not place high confidence, and by now, it is pretty much gathering dust everywhere except in antivax/antiscience websites.
There are certain experts who can explain exactly the feasibility of creating or modifying a virus. Those experts would have an extensive background in molecular biology, someone who is familiar with RNA and DNA and has the knowledge and tools to engineer them. An environmental scientist, for example, would not have a clue about how to do that. The government employs a LOT of molecular biologists across a number of agencies. And they talk to each other.
RE: Even when it was published, the authors of that report (who are NOT experts in the subject)
Do you know the background of the authors of the report?
bot
RE: Fauci was director of NIAID, not NIH. As the director of NIAID, he did not have any oversight of how the parent agency NIH distributed funds. Not that it really matters.
Sorry, it’s hard to buy this argument.
There is evidence to show that Dr. Anthony Fauci was involved in the approval of funding for the coronavirus research in Wuhan. As the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Fauci was one of the senior officials who reviewed and approved the grant application submitted by EcoHealth Alliance, the non-profit organization that conducted the research.
The grant application was reviewed by a panel of experts, and Dr. Fauci was one of the officials who signed off on the panel’s recommendation to fund the research.
Dr. Fauci of course, defended the decision to fund the research, arguing that it was important to study bat coronaviruses in order to develop vaccines and treatments for future pandemics. He has also stated that the research was conducted in accordance with all applicable safety guidelines. Whether the research was gain of function or not is not the subject of this particular, specific post, ONLY THAT FAUCI WAS INVOLVED.
However, some critics have argued that Dr. Fauci should have known that the research was risky, and that he should have done more to oversee the grant.
The NIH has conducted an internal review of the grant, and the review found that the NIH had not adequately overseen the grant. The review also found that EcoHealth Alliance had not complied with all of the grant’s requirements.
And to say that Fauci was hands off in the Wuhan funding is to ignore the evidence.
In 2023, the GAO released a report that found that the NIH had funded coronavirus research in Wuhan from 2014 to 2021. The report also found that the NIH had not adequately overseen the grant to EcoHealth Alliance. The report mentions that Dr. Fauci was one of the senior officials who reviewed and approved the grant application submitted by EcoHealth Alliance.
Numerous media outlets have reported on Dr. Fauci’s involvement in the funding of coronavirus research in Wuhan. For example, a 2021 article in The New York Times reported that Dr. Fauci was one of the officials who approved the grant to EcoHealth Alliance.
A 2022 article in Science cited a number of documents that showed that Dr. Fauci was involved in the decision-making process for the grant to EcoHealth Alliance.
Overall, there is a strong consensus among experts that Dr. Fauci was involved in the funding of coronavirus research in Wuhan. This is supported by a number of reliable sources, including the NIH website, a US government report, and numerous media reports.
The only question then is WHAT KIND of research was done through the funding? Did WIV use the money also for research not stipulated in the funding agreement?
That again is a question to be answered in another post.
But to say that Fauci did not exercise oversight responsibilities is to simply turn a blind eye to the existing evidence.
RE: now, it is pretty much gathering dust everywhere except in antivax/antiscience websites.
That means little to me.
As an analogy…
Even as we speak, hundreds of January 6 protesters are incarcerated without a trial date. They are in effect “gathering dust” in their jail cells waiting for Justice. What then? Does this mean they are guilty of insurrection? Where’s Justice when it’s needed?
Then Speaker Kevin McCarthy promised to release and make public ALL of the Jan 6 surveillance tapes. What he did was release a small portion which showed that the Viking guy who is even as I write this, still in jail, was ESCORTED by security and allowed to enter the capitol building where he did not engage in any violent behavior or vandalism of any kind.
Where are the rest of the videos?
So, based on your gathering dust and fringe anti-vax arguments, all those websites demanding justice for the Jan 6 prisoners are like anti science conspiracy theorists….
My point is the mere IGNORING of a report does not in and of itself invalidate it’s claims.
I was directly addressing the statement made by some magazine that "In Major Shift, NIH Admits Funding Risky Virus Research in Wuhan." That statement did not implicate NIAID, but the NIH. While it is true that the NIH oversees NIAID, there are also other agencies within the NIH "umbrella" as well as the research that the NIH itself directs funds towards. If the research had been signed off by NIAID, the magazine headline should have said so.
I understand that the antivax/antiscience conspiracy narrative paints Dr. Fauci as some sinister character who hides in his office all day and funds dangerous research to create new viruses to kill off humanity. This narrative is just plain wrong, in so many ways. Dr. Fauci does not have some huge stream of money coming from who-knows-where to fund research. Research is funded by Congress and no other entity. As for grant proposals, anyone is allowed to respond to a "request for proposals." These are published periodically in various places; I believe that the Federal Register publishes many of these proposals. The request for proposal defines the scope of research; the respondents write a proposal that fits within the defined scope. They submit the proposal, which is then reviewed by a committee of scientists with expertise in the subject matter. So, if the proposal was submitted to NIAID, a group of virologists, biochemists, infectious disease specialists, etc., would review the proposal and give it a score based on originality, scientific merit, feasibility, etc. The highest scoring proposals are sent up to higher level for review. Then the higher level reviews a summary of the proposal and determines whether it fits into the scope of research outlined in the request for proposals. This is an iterative process, in which the proposals are rewritten and reviewed many times. Only at the end of the process does the agency head have any personal involvement in the proposals. He can review the summary or read the entire proposal, but basically, he signs off on the work done by his subordinates in reviewing and revising the proposal.
Whether or not we should be funding research in China is debatable, since the Chinese government is fully capable of funding research. But the fact is that zoonotic transmission of novel pathogens into humans remains a top concern for governments all over the world. Every government that can afford to do so funds research into zoonotic disease. Governments that can't afford to do so ask for funding from the US and sometimes invite the US to set up research laboratories in their countries. Historically, pandemic pathogens originate in animal reservoirs. The Black Death came from rats. Influenza comes from birds. Coronavirus diseases come from a variety of mammals. Etc. Ideally, we will eventually know enough to be able to prevent pandemics from ever occurring--but we are a long way from that point.
I am well aware that the fear-mongering conspiracy narrative is that research into novel pathogens should be avoided at all costs because it is simply too dangerous. However, what is far more dangerous is not doing that research and then having to scramble to figure out what is going on once the epidemic or pandemic hits. The Black Death was so devastating because the research techniques needed to figure out what was happening were still centuries in the future.
Oh, one last editorial comment. I find it highly ironic that, on the one hand, there is a huge conspiracy created to foster the belief that Dr. Fauci personally funded the Chinese to develop a bioweapon virus to wipe out humanity, while on the other hand, the conspiracists tell you that Covid is such a mild virus that no one should worry about it and all of the concern about it is just hype. So, which is Covid? A bioweapon that wipes out humanity, or a mild virus like cytomegalovirus that infects almost everyone without anyone even knowing they are infected? It can't be both...
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