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
>
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>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 ?