HeartDoc Andrew 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!

Michael