Michael Ejercito wrote:
> HeartDoc Andrew, in the Holy Spirit, boldly wrote:
>> Michael Ejercito wrote:
>>
>>> https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism/comments/1fgpeky/should_we_blame_fauci_for_the_covid_pandemic/
>>>
>>> Should We Blame Fauci for the COVID Pandemic?
>>> America's COVID celebrity is facing scrutiny for funding risky research
>>> that may have sparked the pandemic—and for allegedly covering it up.
>>> Christian Britschgi | From the October 2024 issue
>>>
>>> Share on FacebookShare on XShare on RedditShare by emailPrint friendly
>>> versionCopy page URL
>>> An illustration of Anthony Fauci and some viruses | Illustration: Joanna
>>> Andreasson
>>> (Illustration: Joanna Andreasson)
>>> In June 2024, Anthony Fauci appeared before the House Select
>>> Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic for a contentious confrontation
>>> with congressional Republicans. But it opened on what might have sounded
>>> like an amicable note, as the subcommittee's chairman, Rep. Brad
>>> Wenstrup (R–Ohio), played up Fauci's sainted status: "There were drinks
>>> named after you. You got bobbleheads made in your likeness. You were on
>>> the cover of Vogue. You threw out the first pitch at a Washington
>>> Nationals game."
>>>
>>> Fauci was the closest thing the world of public health had to a rock
>>> star. For nearly 40 years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci had
>>> served as the influential but unassuming director of the National
>>> Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a subsidiary of
>>> the National Institutes of Health (NIH) housed within the sprawling U.S.
>>> Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
>>>
>>> That post made Fauci the federal government's de facto top pandemic
>>> expert across the dozens of agencies—from the Centers for Disease
>>> Control and Prevention (CDC) to the Food and Drug Administration to the
>>> Office of the Surgeon General—that share responsibilities for preventing
>>> and responding to disease outbreaks. Fauci steered the U.S. government's
>>> response to AIDS, Zika, Ebola, and swine flu. He oversaw billions in
>>> annual research grants aimed at stopping the next disease outbreak.
>>>
>>> When COVID struck, Fauci was the face of public health when public
>>> health was all anyone was talking about.
>>>
>>> His celebrity also made him a partisan lightning rod. Democrats saw him
>>> as a steady, straight-talking scientist who struck a pleasing contrast
>>> to a chaotic Donald Trump recommending crank COVID cures in White House
>>> press conferences. For many conservatives, he was a hate figure
>>> responsible for locking down the country without regard for civil
>>> liberties or collateral damage. But by that June 2024 congressional
>>> hearing, Fauci was at the center of a new array of controversies.
>>>
>>> In 2023, the incoming Republican House majority had reorganized the
>>> coronavirus subcommittee to investigate the origins of the COVID-19
>>> pandemic. The information they'd uncovered, supplemented by years of
>>> dogged investigative journalism, was damning for Fauci and his agency.
>>>
>>> Fauci had long denied his agency had ever funded controversial
>>> gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in
>>> Wuhan, China, where the COVID-19 pandemic originated. But weeks before
>>> Fauci's testimony, a senior NIH official admitted that the NIAID had
>>> funded such research. Days later, President Joe Biden's administration
>>> would strip EcoHealth Alliance—the nonprofit that the NIAID had paid to
>>> do that gain-of-function research—of its federal funding, citing the
>>> organization's lack of transparency and oversight failures at the WIV.
>>>
>>> Soon after, the select subcommittee revealed that Fauci's senior
>>> scientific adviser, David Morens, told EcoHealth scientists in emails
>>> that Fauci would "protect" the group from public scrutiny about the
>>> pandemic's origins and that Morens could pass any needed communications
>>>from EcoHealth to Fauci via a private back channel that was safe from
>>> public records requests.
>>>
>>> The day of Fauci's testimony, the Harvard- and MIT–affiliated biologist
>>> Alina Chan argued in The New York Times that a lab leak at the WIV was
>>> the probable cause of the COVID-19 pandemic.
>>>
>>> Together, the revelations painted a picture of Fauci as a dissembling,
>>> denying, power-grabbing bureaucrat who repeatedly used slippery
>>> arguments to dodge public oversight of a controversial, high-risk
>>> agenda—an agenda that may have led to the very pandemic his job was to
>>> prevent.
>>>
>>> Fauci argued it was all much ado about nothing. At the hearing, he said
>>> the gain-of-function research the NIAID had funded in Wuhan wasn't of
>>> concern and couldn't have sparked the pandemic; that he had no back
>>> channel with his senior scientific adviser, who he didn't even work that
>>> closely with; and that while a lab leak wasn't a conspiracy theory, he
>>> couldn't be expected to know everything that happened in China. His
>>> story was that he had acted in good faith, in the name of science, and
>>> that he wasn't culpable.
>>>
>>> Yet when one considers Fauci's record and the accumulated evidence about
>>> a lab leak origin of COVID-19, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that
>>> he is probably at least partially culpable for the pandemic itself and
>>> actively worked to obscure that fact. As Richard Ebright, a Rutgers
>>> University molecular biologist and fierce Fauci critic, says of the
>>> series of choices that led to dangerous pandemic research being
>>> conducted in Wuhan with U.S. tax dollars: "There are few decisions that
>>> are so centrally linked to a single person and that person's
>>> pathologies, and that person is Anthony Fauci."
>>>
>>> We may never know the full story of the pandemic's origin. But if this
>>> were a bureaucratic whodunit, the most likely suspect would be Fauci.
>>> COVID-19 was Fauci's pandemic.
>>>
>>> Pushing Risky Research
>>> Prior to COVID-19, Fauci had long supported funding pandemic research
>>> that other scientists found risky, if not downright dangerous.
>>>
>>> In 2005, as NIAID director, he praised researchers who'd used a grant
>>>from his agency to resurrect the virus that had caused the Spanish flu
>>> pandemic. Better understanding that virus would help prevent future
>>> diseases, he argued. "The certain benefits to be obtained by a robust
>>> and responsible research agenda aimed at developing the means to detect,
>>> prevent and treat [future pandemics] far outweigh any theoretical
>>> risks," he said in an October 2005 statement co-authored with then–CDC
>>> Director Julie Gerberding.
>>>
>>> This wasn't a universal opinion at the NIAID. The agency's chief
>>> scientist described this approach to pandemic prevention as "looking for
>>> a gas leak with a lighted match."
>>>
>>> Fauci would continue to praise and fund this kind of research. In 2011,
>>> researchers at the University of Wisconsin and at Erasmus University
>>> Medical Center in the Netherlands managed to manipulate the virus H5N1
>>> (which had been responsible for a 2004 bird flu epidemic in Asia) to
>>> transmit between mammals, a "gain of function" for a virus that had
>>> heretofore only been able to pass from infected birds to humans. One of
>>> the researchers involved in the work would say the enhanced pathogen
>>> they'd created was "very, very bad news" and "probably one of the most
>>> dangerous viruses you can make." Fauci was more sanguine, telling The
>>> New York Times that "there is always a risk. But I believe the benefits
>>> are greater than the risks."
>>>
>>> When the influenza research community adopted a temporary moratorium on
>>> gain-of-function research in response to the H5N1 experiments, Fauci
>>> begrudgingly accepted it as necessary to calm public opinion. He still
>>> insisted this work's potential to stop the next pandemic far outweighed
>>> any "theoretical risks" it posed.
>>>
>>> Deadly outbreaks of bird flu and severe acute respiratory syndrome
>>> (SARS) in the early 2000s, and the anthrax mailings that followed the
>>> September 11 terror attacks, had both the public health and the national
>>> security establishments attuned to "biosecurity" threats.
>>>
>>> At the same time, researchers were rapidly improving their ability to
>>> create and manipulate viruses in the lab. This offered the potential for
>>> creating new vaccines, therapeutics, and pest control measures. It also
>>> raised the risk that a new pandemic might be accidentally released from
>>> a lab.
>>>
>>> In the mid-2000s, President George W. Bush's administration commissioned
>>> reports on how "dual-use research of concern" might be subjected to some
>>> sort of risk-benefit analysis. But Fauci consistently argued against the
>>> idea that their agencies should have to abide by additional guardrails
>>> when funding risky research into pandemic pathogens.
>>>
>>> "It's safe to say NIH is always on the 'more science, less regulation'
>>> side. That was definitely true in this debate," Gregory Koblentz, a
>>> biosafety expert at George Mason University who's been a longtime
>>> participant in debates about how to regulate dual-use research, tells
>>> Reason.
>>>
>>> There are very good reasons to be wary about regulating scientific
>>> research. But the equation changes when the government itself is funding
>>> the research in question. Indeed, Matt Ridley—a science writer who
>>> co-authored Alina Chan's book Viral, about the origins of
>>> COVID-19—suggests that government funding itself is a big part of the
>>> problem. A profit-seeking private sector would never touch the kinds of
>>> research that was being done by EcoHealth Alliance in Wuhan, he argues.
>>> The odds that such research will identify the next pandemic virus and
>>> develop a profitable vaccine or therapeutic for it, he says, are too low
>>> for even the most starry-eyed venture capitalist.
>>>
>>> There was also the downside risk of a lab accident.
>>>
>>> In 2014, there was a series of embarrassing safety lapses at U.S.
>>> government labs, highlighting this risk.
>>>
>>> Dozens of CDC employees were potentially exposed to live anthrax samples
>>> shipped by mistake to labs not equipped to handle them. At another CDC
>>> lab, a less dangerous version of bird flu was accidentally contaminated
>>> with deadly H5N1. Vials of smallpox capable of infecting people were
>>> stashed in a cabinet at an NIH lab, where they'd apparently been sitting
>>> for decades. None of these incidents were direct results of
>>> gain-of-function research. But they heightened the concern that
>>> researchers working to enhance deadly pathogens might do so in unsafe
>>> settings.
>>>
>>> Oversight Avoidance
>>> In October 2014, President Barack Obama's administration paused federal
>>> funding of gain-of-function research that could make flu, SARS, or
>>> Middle East respiratory syndrome viruses transmissible via the
>>> respiratory route in mammals. It also started crafting a regulatory
>>> framework for vetting these experiments.
>>>
>>> In 2017, the White House produced the laboriously titled HHS Framework
>>> for Guiding Funding Decisions about Proposed Research Involving Enhanced
>>> Potential Pandemic Pathogens, which became known as the P3CO framework.
>>>
>>> Under P3CO, the NIH would forward grant proposals involving research on
>>> known pandemic pathogens or research that might create or enhance such
>>> pathogens to a new P3CO committee within HHS for a department-level
>>> risk-benefit analysis. The debates leading to the framework stressed the
>>> value of performing those risk-benefit assessments publicly and
>>> transparently. But the committee's deliberations would be kept secret.
>>>
>>> This framework also gave the NIH considerable autonomy to decide which
>>> grant proposals it would—and wouldn't—forward to the HHS for review.
>>>
>>> To date, the P3CO committee has vetted just three research proposals
>>> involving so-called enhanced potential pandemic pathogens, out of
>>> potentially dozens that should have been examined. Two out of three were
>>> allowed to go forward unaltered. The committee required the other to
>>> adopt additional safety mitigation measures, and the NIAID ultimately
>>> chose not to fund it.
>>>
>>> Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins, also an advocate of
>>> gain-of-function research, found a way to skirt the oversight process.
>>> They "realized that if they don't [forward proposals to HHS for review],
>>> there is no review," says Ebright, the Rutgers biologist and a longtime
>>> critic of gain-of-function research. "By willfully violating the policy,
>>> they could nullify the policy."
>>>
>>> This gap in the oversight system would become apparent when the NIAID
>>> failed to stop gain-of-function research being performed at the WIV.
>>>
>>> Dangerous Exceptions
>>> During his June 2024 testimony, Fauci said that he signed off on every
>>> grant the NIAID funded but didn't individually review each one. In a
>>> 2022 deposition, he admitted that he also might have signed off on some
>>> exceptions to the Obama administration's gain-of-function pause. But he
>>> couldn't recall specific examples.
>>>
>>> So it's possible that one exception Fauci might have signed off on was
>>> the work being performed by EcoHealth Alliance in Wuhan, China, and that
>>> work might have led directly to the COVID-19 pandemic.
>>>
>>> EcoHealth Alliance is a New York–based nonprofit that specializes in
>>> research on pandemic risk from emerging "disease hotspots" in the
>>> developing world. In 2014, it received a five-year, $3.7 million NIAID
>>> grant to collect virus samples from human beings and bats in China and
>>> then sequence and experiment on these viruses at the Wuhan Institute of
>>> Virology.
>>>
>>> This type of research was the passion project of EcoHealth's president,
>>> Peter Daszak. Daszak, who Vanity Fair has called "one part salesman, one
>>> part visionary," was known in D.C. circles for his invite-only cocktail
>>> parties for senior government officials involved in funding scientific
>>> research. He pitched this research as crucial for finding viruses that
>>> were likely to "spill over" from animals to humans. Once identified,
>>> vaccines and therapeutics could be developed preemptively to stop any
>>> outbreak.
>>>
>>> Critics argued this work was an inefficient way of spotting which of the
>>> thousands upon thousand of viruses circulating in nature might cause the
>>> next pandemic. But in 2016, EcoHealth revealed it was engaged in far
>>> more alarming work.
>>>
>>> In its second annual progress report to the NIAID, EcoHealth announced
>>> that it intended to create "chimeric" or hybrid viruses out of spike
>>> proteins, the part of a virus that allows it to enter and infect hosts
>>> cells, from SARS-like coronaviruses discovered in the wild and the
>>> backbone of another, already-known SARS virus.
>>>
>>> EcoHealth wanted to use these viruses to infect "humanized" mice—animals
>>> genetically manipulated to have human lung cells—to see whether any of
>>> them posed a pandemic risk. It proposed doing the research at the WIV,
>>> where many U.S. researchers considered the biosafety standards much too lax.
>>>
>>> This was exactly the kind of dangerous research that the
>>> gain-of–function pause and P3CO framework were intended to control. Upon
>>> receipt of EcoHealth's 2016 progress report, the NIAID program officer
>>> overseeing the grant told the nonprofit that its work appeared to
>>> violate the then-active pause on gain-of-function research. EcoHealth
>>> wouldn't receive its next tranche of grant money unless it could explain
>>> why it didn't.
>>>
>>> Daszak responded that the viruses they were working with hadn't been
>>> shown to infect people yet and were unlikely to do so, given how
>>> genetically different they were from the original SARS virus.
>>>
>>> Yet the plain text of the pause policy never required that viruses being
>>> experimented with already be shown to infect human beings. The idea that
>>> it would is "laughable," says Ebright. "The whole point of a policy that
>>> operates at the proposal stage, before the research has been done, is to
>>> prevent the construction and creation of such a pathogen."
>>> Illustration: Joanna Andreasson
>>> (Illustration: Joanna Andreasson)
>>> Nevertheless, in July 2016 the NIAID told EcoHealth it could proceed
>>> with its work on the condition that the chimeric viruses it had created
>>> didn't demonstrate higher growth rates than their naturally occurring
>>> cousins.
>>>
>>> Experiments run by EcoHealth in 2017 showed that its hybrid SARS-like
>>> coronaviruses exhibited much greater viral growth, and were much more
>>> pathogenic, in the humanized mice compared with natural variants. But
>>> EcoHealth didn't pause its work as promised. It also didn't report these
>>> results to the NIAID immediately. It only revealed them in a fourth
>>> annual progress report submitted April 2018.
>>>
>>> EcoHealth was plainly violating the terms imposed on its research in
>>> 2016. Its work had also not been forwarded to the P3CO committee for
>>> review. Yet the NIAID renewed its grant for another five years. In this
>>> second grant phase, EcoHealth proposed making more chimeric SARS-like
>>> coronaviruses containing features with "high spillover risk" to human
>>> beings.
>>>
>>> EcoHealth was scheduled to start this work in 2019. That year, the
>>> nonprofit should have submitted a fifth annual progress report to the
>>> NIAID. It didn't, claiming the NIAID's reporting -system had "locked
>>> them out"—a claim subsequently found false.
>>>
>>> When EcoHealth's year five report was eventually submitted two years
>>> late, in 2021, it showed that additional chimeric viruses created in
>>> Wuhan demonstrated both enhanced transmission and lethality in humanized
>>> mice.
>>>
>>> By that time, the COVID-19 pandemic was already well underway.
>>>
>>> 'Not Following the Policy'
>>> In 2021, Fauci said the NIH "has not ever and does not now fund
>>> gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology." That
>>> wasn't true. What EcoHealth was doing in Wuhan clearly met the widely
>>> understood definition of gain-of-function research.
>>>
>>> In his June 2024 testimony, Fauci dodged accusations that he lied by
>>> saying that while EcoHealth's work might have met a generic definition
>>> of gain-of-function research, it didn't meet the precise definition
>>> established in the P3CO framework.
>>>
>>> Fauci said that every time he mentioned gain-of-function research, "the
>>> definition that I use is not my personal definition; it is a codified,
>>> regulatory and operative definition." That definition, he said, "had
>>> nothing to do with me."
>>>
>>> On the contrary, regulatory definitions had quite a bit to do with
>>> Fauci. They were designed with the expectation that he and his fellow
>>> public health bureaucrats would use discretion and good judgment when
>>> making decisions. The relevant regulatory language included lots of
>>> "likelys and highlys and reasonably anticipated," says Gerald Epstein, a
>>> former director at the White House Office of Science and Technology
>>> Policy who wrote the P3CO policy. "These words are inherently
>>> subjective. You can't not be. You've got to be making judgment calls on
>>> something that does not yet exist." Those subjective definitions gave
>>> Fauci and his NIAID underlings considerable room to decide what research
>>> required additional review.
>>>
>>> Was the agency complying with the spirit of the policy? Epstein points
>>> to the total number of projects the NIH sent to the P3CO committee. "The
>>> fact that they found one project in seven years [that needed additional
>>> safety measures] tells me they were being too conservative," he says.
>>>
>>> Koblentz is more blunt. When the NIAID allowed EcoHealth to proceed with
>>> its work under novel conditions, he says, it "wasn't for them to decide.
>>> That was them not following the policy."
>>>
>>> Smoking Gun?
>>> The NIAID's failure to forward EcoHealth's experiments to the P3CO
>>> committee was, at minimum, a serious process failure. That failure may
>>> well have allowed for the creation of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Wuhan
>>> lab.
>>>
>>> In 2018, the same year that the NIAID renewed EcoHealth's grant for
>>> another five years, Daszak submitted a $14 million grant proposal to the
>>> Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), called DEFUSE.
>>>
>>> Once again, he proposed creating chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses
>>> selected for their ability to infect human beings. Early drafts of the
>>> DEFUSE proposal, uncovered by U.S. Right to Know reporter Emily Kopp,
>>> show that Daszak envisioned creating viruses with features present in
>>> SARS-CoV-2 and which do not appear in naturally discovered coronaviruses
>>> of the same family, including features that primed the virus to infect
>>> and spread in humans.
>>>
>>> Kopp's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests also revealed notes
>>>from Daszak and his collaborators on DEFUSE project drafts that
>>> suggested the EcoHealth president was deliberately trying to obscure the
>>> fact that these novel viruses would be created in Wuhan by omitting the
>>> names of Chinese researchers from the proposal. An early draft of DEFUSE
>>> also proposed creating novel coronaviruses in Wuhan because it used
>>> lower biosafety precautions than what would be used in the U.S.,
>>> describing the lower safety standards as "highly cost-effective."
>>>
>>> In a note on this early draft, University of North Carolina
>>> epidemiologist and pioneer gain-of-function researcher Ralph Baric, a
>>> proposed collaborator, said that U.S. researchers would "freak out" were
>>> such research done at Wuhan's typical biosafety levels.
>>>
>>> DARPA ended up rejecting the DEFUSE proposal. But it remains possible
>>> that the Chinese researchers secured separate funding for the work.
>>> Ebright suggests that EcoHealth could also have used NIH funding from
>>> its renewed grant for the work, given how much overlap there was between
>>> the two proposals.
>>>
>>> Ebright is unequivocal in his assessment that the research described in
>>> EcoHealth's progress reports, its 2018 grant renewal application, and
>>> the DEFUSE proposal, including the early draft and notes, combine into
>>> "smoking gun" evidence in favor of the COVID pandemic having been
>>> created at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
>>>
>>> "It all falls together. We know what they were doing in the years
>>> preceding 2019. We know what they proposed to do in 2019. We knew how
>>> they proposed and where they proposed to do it," says Ebright. "It is
>>> exactly what the virus' emergence tells us."
>>>
>>> Poisoned Debate
>>> We probably won't ever definitively discover the origins of COVID-19.
>>> Officials in both the U.S. and China ensured that.
>>>
>>> Chinese officials obstructed any investigation into the Wuhan Institute
>>> of Virology. In September 2019, the Associated Press reported, the
>>> institute took its database of viruses offline. It also hasn't made
>>> public lab notebooks and other materials that might shed light on
>>> exactly what kinds of work it was doing in the lead-up to the pandemic.
>>> In late 2019, the Chinese government also exterminated animals and
>>> disinfected the Wuhan wet market. If COVID did leap from animal to human
>>> in the Wuhan market, as many natural origin proponents argue, that
>>> evidence is gone.
>>>
>>> What we're left with is studying the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 virus
>>> itself and whatever information can be gleaned from the U.S.-funded
>>> research that went on at Wuhan leading up to the pandemic.
>>>
>>> On both fronts, Fauci, his underlings at the NIAID, and NIAID-funded
>>> scientists involved with work at Wuhan have worked to conceal
>>> information and discredit notions that COVID might have leaked from a lab.
>>>
>>> In late January 2020, Fauci's aides flagged the NIAID's support of
>>> EcoHealth's Wuhan research in emails to their boss. A few weeks later,
>>> Fauci and Daszak would go on Newt Gingrich's podcast to dismiss the idea
>>> that COVID-19 came from the Wuhan lab, calling such arguments
>>> "conspiracy theories."
>>>
>>> Both men also worked to shape the discourse behind the scenes away from
>>> any focus on a lab leak. Daszak organized a group letter of scientists
>>> in The Lancet, the U.K.'s top medical journal, declaring that they
>>> "stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that
>>> COVID-19 does not have a natural origin." Daszak did not disclose his
>>> relationship to the Wuhan lab when organizing this letter; The Lancet's
>>> editor would eventually concede that this was improper.
>>>
>>> In testimony to the House coronavirus subcommittee in May 2024, Daszak
>>> would claim the "conspiracy theories" mentioned in the Lancet letter
>>> referred only to such wild early pandemic notions that COVID had pieces
>>> of HIV or snake DNA inserted into it. He said a word limit prevented him
>>>from being more precise.
>>>
>>> Fauci, meanwhile, would help corral virologists into publishing the
>>> widely cited "proximal origin" paper in early 2020. In the paper, the
>>> authors flatly declared that "we do not believe any type of
>>> laboratory-leak scenario is plausible."
>>>
>>> Yet troves of private messages and emails released by the House
>>> subcommittee's investigation show that the authors privately expressed
>>> far more openness to a lab leak theory.
>>>
>>> One of the paper's authors, Scripps Research evolutionary biologist
>>> Kristian Andersen, privately rated a lab leak as "highly likely." But
>>> Andersen had a pending $8.9 million grant application with the NIAID as
>>> the paper was drafted. That grant was later approved. In an email, one
>>> of the paper's authors, Edward Holmes, references "pressure from on
>>> high" during the drafting process.
>>>
>>> The authors of the proximal origin paper say they merely had their minds
>>> changed while drafting the paper. They were just following the
>>> scientific method.
>>>
>>> Ridley, the science writer, has a much less charitable assessment of
>>> their behavior.
>>>
>>> "That's scientific misconduct at the very least," he says, "to write a
>>> paper that says one thing and to think it's wrong in private."
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Hiding the Evidence
>>> There may be more we don't—and won't ever—know about Fauci's own
>>> communications with Daszak and other NIH officials about EcoHealth's
>>> work in Wuhan.
>>>
>>> In May 2024, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic
>>> released a tranche of emails between Fauci's senior scientific adviser
>>> David Morens and Daszak, in which the two strategized about how to get
>>> EcoHealth's federal grant reinstated (after it was terminated by the
>>> Trump administration in 2020) and how the nonprofit should respond to
>>> NIH investigations into its grant work.
>>>
>>> Across multiple emails to Daszak, Morens mentioned that he frequently
>>> had conversations with Fauci about Daszak and EcoHealth. He said Fauci
>>> was trying to "protect" Daszak.
>>>
>>> Throughout these emails, Morens urged Daszak to email him on a personal
>>> email account to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests, openly
>>> admitted to deleting emails to shield them from FOIA, and said that the
>>> NIH's FOIA staff had advised him on how to hide information from records
>>> requests through deletions and strategic misspellings.
>>>
>>> Most conspicuously, Morens sent a brief reply to Daszak in April 2021 in
>>> an email chain in which the two had been discussing mounting scrutiny
>>>from Republicans and some scientists of EcoHealth's Wuhan work.
>>>
>>> "PS, i forgot to say there is no worry about FOIAs," Morens wrote. "I
>>> can either send stuff to Tony [Fauci] on his private gmail, or hand it
>>> to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send
>>> him stuff that could cause trouble." In another email, Morens mentioned
>>> having a "backchannel" to Fauci.
>>>
>>> Asked about Morens' comments at the June hearing of the coronavirus
>>> subcommittee, Fauci denied having substantive conversations about
>>> EcoHealth with Morens and said that his senior scientific adviser was
>>> not someone he worked terribly closely with, outside collaborating on
>>> scientific papers.
>>>
>>> The Next Pandemic
>>> Fauci's best defense is that he ran a sprawling agency that doled out
>>> billions of dollars in grants. Even the most detail-obsessed
>>> administrator couldn't possibly keep track of every single program and
>>> project. And U.S. officials had limited control over what happened in
>>> the distant, opaque Wuhan lab.
>>>
>>> But even if that's true, it's an admission of administrative negligence,
>>> since the oversight protocols weren't followed. It also implies a
>>> dramatic failure of the risky research that Fauci championed for
>>> pandemic prevention. As Ridley says, the pandemic "occurred with the
>>> very viruses that there was the most attention paid to, in the very area
>>> where there was the most research going on, where there was the biggest
>>> program looking for potential pandemic pathogens, and yet they failed to
>>> see this one coming." At a minimum, gain-of-function research didn't
>>> protect the public from the pandemic.
>>>
>>> Meanwhile, the more direct case against Fauci is strong: Not only was he
>>> an ardent supporter of research widely believed to be risky, but he
>>> manipulated bureaucratic protocols in order to avoid scrutiny of that
>>> research, then responded evasively when called to account for his
>>> actions. At least one of the programs born out of Fauci's risky research
>>> crusade was pursuing exactly the type of viral enhancements that were
>>> present in COVID-19, and that research was conducted at the Wuhan
>>> virology lab in the very same city where the virus originated. Lab leak
>>> proponents cite the virus's transmissibility as evidence for a Wuhan
>>> leak: After all, EcoHealth was trying to create pathogens primed to
>>> spread rapidly in humans.
>>>
>>> The evidence is not fully conclusive. But it seems reasonably likely
>>> that Fauci pushed for what his peers repeatedly said was dangerous
>>> research, that some of that dangerous research produced a deadly viral
>>> pathogen that escaped the lab, and that Fauci helped cover up evidence
>>> and arguments for its origins.
>>>
>>> It is more than a little bit ironic that, throughout his career, Fauci
>>> fought against restrictions on gain-of-function research, casting those
>>> restrictions as counterproductive shackles on scientific progress. When
>>> a pandemic did finally break out, he would also be an ardent supporter
>>> of imposing the most restrictive controls on the general public.
>>>
>>> "Elderly, stay out of society in self-isolation. Don't go to work if you
>>> don't have to," Fauci told Science in March 2020. "No bars, no
>>> restaurants, no nothing. Only essential services." When asked in July
>>> 2022 what he might have done differently during the pandemic, Fauci said
>>> he'd have recommended much stiffer restrictions.
>>>
>>> Did Fauci, so revered as a man of science, have any evidence to support
>>> his program of lockdowns and social controls? His eventual admission in
>>> congressional testimony that the federal government's social distancing
>>> guidance was a guesstimate that "sort of just appeared"—and one that
>>> turned out to be ineffective at controlling the pandemic—bolsters the
>>> conclusion that the pandemic restrictions that shuttered schools,
>>> churches, businesses, and countless social gatherings were, in fact,
>>> ineffective tools of control. Indeed, most American efforts to control
>>> the pandemic proved ineffective: not just lockdowns and capacity
>>> restrictions, but also mask mandates, testing, and contact tracing.
>>>
>>> If nothing else, Fauci's role in the pandemic—as a public health rock
>>> star with suspicious links to the virus's origin—is a lesson in the
>>> dangers of resting too much power and authority in the hands of any one
>>> official. Throughout the pandemic, Fauci's mantra was "follow the
>>> science." But in practice, that seems to have meant "follow Fauci." Too
>>> often, America did.
>>>
>>> This article originally appeared in print under the headline "Fauci’s
>>> Pandemic."
>>
>> In the interim, we are 100% prepared/protected in the "full armor of
>> GOD" (Ephesians 6:11) which we put on as soon as we use Apostle Paul's
>> secret (Philippians 4:12). Though masking is less protective, it helps
>> us avoid the appearance of doing the evil of spreading airborne
>> pathogens while there are people getting sick because of not being
>> 100% protected. It is written that we're to "abstain from **all**
>> appearance of doing evil" (1 Thessalonians 5:22 w/**emphasis**).
>>
>> Meanwhile, the only *perfect* (Matt 5:47-8 ) way to eradicate the
>> COVID-19 virus, thereby saving lives, in the UK & elsewhere is by
>> rapidly (i.e. use the "Rapid COVID-19 Test" ) finding out at any given
>> moment, including even while on-line, who among us are unwittingly
>> contagious (i.e pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic) in order to
>> "convince it forward" (John 15:12) for them to call their doctor and
>> self-quarantine per their doctor in hopes of stopping this pandemic.
>> Thus, we're hoping for the best while preparing for the worse-case
>> scenario of the Alpha lineage mutations and others like the Omicron,
>> Gamma, Beta, Epsilon, Iota, Lambda, Mu & Delta lineage mutations
>> combining via slip-RNA-replication to form hybrids like "Deltamicron"
>> that may render current COVID vaccines/monoclonals/medicines/pills no
>> longer effective.
>>
>> Indeed, I am wonderfully hungry (
>> https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.cardiology/c/6ZoE95d-VKc/m/14vVZoyOBgAJ
>> ) and hope you, Michael, also have a healthy appetite too.
>>
>> So how are you ?
>
> I am wonderfully hungry!

While wonderfully hungry in the Holy Spirit, Who causes (Deuteronomy
8:3) us to hunger, I note that you, Michael, are rapture ready (Luke
17:37 means no COVID just as eagles circling over their food have no
COVID) and pray (2 Chronicles 7:14) that our Everlasting (Isaiah 9:6)
Father in Heaven continues to give us "much more" (Luke 11:13) Holy
Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23) so that we'd have much more of His Help to
always say/write that we're "wonderfully hungry" in **all** ways
including especially caring to "convince it forward" (John 15:12) with
all glory (Psalm112:1) to GOD (aka HaShem, Elohim, Abba, DEO), in
the name (John 16:23) of LORD Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Amen.

Laus DEO !

Source:
https://narkive.com/74K96Xvb.8

Positive control on USENET:
https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.cardiology/c/7ixdk7t6Bk8/m/xpbS2z7QAAAJ

Suggested further reading:
https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.cardiology/c/5EWtT4CwCOg/m/QjNF57xRBAAJ

Shorter link:
http://bit.ly/StatCOVID-19Test

Be hungrier, which really is wonderfully healthier especially for
diabetics and other heart disease patients:

http://bit.ly/HeartDocAndrew touts hunger (Luke 6:21a) with all glory
( http://bit.ly/Psalm112_1 ) to GOD, Who causes us to hunger
(Deuteronomy 8:3) when He blesses us right now (Luke 6:21a) thereby
removing the http://WDJW.great-site.net/VAT from around the heart

....because we mindfully choose to openly care with our heart,

HeartDoc Andrew <><
--
Andrew B. Chung, MD/PhD
Cardiologist with an http://bit.ly/EternalMedicalLicense
2024 & upwards non-partisan candidate for U.S. President:
http://WonderfullyHungry.org
and author of the 2PD-OMER Approach:
http://bit.ly/HeartDocAndrewCare