One thing I did not realize is that US researchers who conducted gain of function research tried to downplay and discredit the possibility of the virus originating from the wuhan lab. There was an anti-lab theory Lancet statement signed by scientists, and "Daszak had not only signed but organized the influential Lancet statement, with the intention of concealing his role and creating the impression of scientific unanimity."
Plus there's all the stuff about the miners shoveling bat poop for weeks and then dying of coronaviruses, and the Wuhan institute collecting and doing gain of function research on these similar-to-SARS samples. And then several of the lab's gain of function researchers became ill in late 2019. And there's the weird renaming of samples to hide the unmatched closeness of the mine samples and covid. This is just the absolute surface of the article. There's too much to list here
Edit: here's another amazement for the list: "Shi Zhengli herself had publicly acknowledged that, until the pandemic, all of her team’s coronavirus research — some involving live SARS-like viruses — had been conducted in less secure BSL-3 and even BSL-2 laboratories." And the article says "BSL-2 [is] roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office."
I can’t find sources for this right now but apparently Dr Anthony Fauci played a key role in getting the ban lifted. He’s also the head of the NIAID ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Fauci ) which (apparently) is the ultimate source for all funding on gain of function research.
So the lead guy we’ve been listening to (and still are) for scientific advice on this pandemic is entangled in a massive conflict of interest.
Edit: I assume this is getting down-voted either because is sounds like conspiracy theory or just everyone has already heard it and it's not news. Fauci has already admitted having been involved in funding Wuhan - https://nypost.com/2021/05/25/fauci-admits-nih-funding-of-wu... - that on it's own should not have been something he first admitted to in May 2021, while holding such a responsible position. Looking for more sources right now...
Edit 2: In this article from December 2011 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-flu-virus-risk-wor... - you have Fauci making the case for creating viruses in a lab;
> "Given these uncertainties, important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory."
It doesn't explicitly mention gain of function but - while raising the concerns, it's arguing for research which would include gain of function. Meanwhile listening to this panel discussion which included Fauci from Nov 2017 - https://www.c-span.org/video/?437187-1/johns-hopkins-forum-e... ... again he's arguing for more aggressive types of research
How does any role he might (or might not have) played in GOF research create a conflict of interest in terms of his advice about the pandemic?
The conflict of interest is: was this statement actually what he believed to be true at the time, or was it to draw attention away from the Wuhan lab, so there wouldn't be ugly questions about why his organisation provided funding to it?
To me it seems like the right thing for Fauci to have done at the time was draw attention to the potential conflict of interest but that admission only became public last month - https://nypost.com/2021/05/25/fauci-admits-nih-funding-of-wu...
While the incident is ongoing, any attempts to prevent the problem from happening in the future are a complete distraction. Write down notes and ideas somewhere so we don't forget, but the priority is on solving the incident that actually happened and is causing problems. If you say "What if we fixed this longstanding piece of tech debt that led up to the incident," however reasonable it is to fix it in light of the fact that it caused an incident, it's useless to bring it up now if you can't fix the tech debt immediately to resolve the incident. Along the same lines, attribution is interesting if it will help you deal with what is going on (e.g., there's high load on a low-level system and you want to know if anyone deployed anything recently, so that you can ask them to roll back); it's not really interesting if you know what's broken (e.g., a machine is powered off and needs to be turned back on... figuring out who pressed the power button isn't yet relevant).
Similarly, "We should stop funding gain-of-function research" may (or may not) be a valid conclusion, but it wouldn't have dealt with COVID-19 in particular. It might be worth doing it to make sure there's no COVID-22.
Even if it turns out to be true that COVID-19 came directly from research that would not have happened if it were not for Fauci, absent a reason to believe that anyone's response to COVID-19 specifically would have been different if they knew that, I don't see any reason it was improper not to draw attention to it at the time, and quite a few reasons why it was proper to focus attention on the problem at hand.
His comments in that May 2020 article are spot-on. If we knew that it was engineered, then yes, publicizing the lab notes that were used to build it could perhaps speed up the process of a vaccine or other countermeasure (but COVID-19 had already been sequenced by January 2020 and the sequence published, and vaccines were already in development then). But theories like "what if the researchers brought it in from the wild, and then it escaped their lab" should just have prompted the response "yes, so what." It's interesting now to prevent the next COVID; it's irrelevant re COVID-19.
And I certainly don't see the conflict of interest - what was Fauci gaining? His continued role? Again, at the time, the role was not determining whether to fund gain-of-function research, the role was figuring out how to get rid of COVID-19.
You could say that the NIH should have paused all funding for new virus research projects (unless they specifically related to dealing with COVID-19 in the short term), but that would have been a good idea regardless of the NIH's previous role in funding.
Yes. Obviously you don't put an arsonist in charge of fighting fires, so if this information had come out early last year then he would have lost not only his role much sooner, but also his social status and career. If what's coming out now came out last year, Trump's replacement of him with Scott Atlas would have been more widely supported (maybe), and Biden may not have dared to put him back in his post.
That would have been a huge financial hit. Fauci does very well out of his position. "Very well" might even be an understatement. He is the highest paid federal employee [1], earning more in 2019 alone than the US President. Despite this fact, he has deflected questions about conflicts of interest by laughing it off and saying he has a "government salary", creating the impression he is paid far less than he really is.
Fauci charges between $50,000 and $100,000 per hour for motivational speeches [2].
Despite being theoretically in charge of a crisis situation in which nobody has time to ask how it started, Fauci has found time to write a book called, "Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward". He has also appeared on TV more than 300 times [3].
This is not a man who is too busy to investigate basic questions that may have direct relevance to developing treatments for the virus. And given that knowing where it came from would be of immense scientific value yet he has every incentive to cover it up, he is also not a man who should be running things.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/01/25/dr-...
[2] https://leadingmotivationalspeakers.com/speakers/anthony-fau...
[3] https://www.aier.org/article/fauci-has-chalked-up-300-media-...
Sure, but to go back to my analogy, you absolutely do put the guy who hit the power button by mistake in charge of pressing it again - they know exactly where it is and they're already in the datacenter. You put the team that deployed a new service that's DoSing your infrastructure in charge of rolling it back. You don't say "You broke the system, so we're finding someone else to do the rollback."
If the allegation is that Fauci intentionally funded a lab in Wuhan to work on gain-of-function research with the express purpose of having the virus escape and cause a global pandemic because Fauci is a murderer rivaling Hitler, that's a very different (and much harder to substantiate) claim than that he merely was causally involved in an accident and like anyone else wants the accident to not have happened.
And if that is the claim, the "conflict of interest" argument becomes clearer: Fauci is on the side of COVID-19 and in charge of stopping it. It's the same conflict of interest as putting an arsonist in charge of fighting fires.
Short of that, the idea that he had a conflict of interest is like the idea that the team that accidentally DoS'd the infrastructure has a conflict of interest because they each get Fauci-scale salaries and they might be fired. Technically yes, but we all know that firing them wouldn't help solve the problem and losing their expertise would make other things work, so it's not even on the table unless we suspect malice is involved.
(And if it is on the table, either at my workplace or in Fauci's case, so is criminal prosecution. Loss of salary is the least of your worries.)
You make comparison to tech workers. Sure, if someone makes a genuine honest mistake then you can argue they should be retained as they won't make that mistake again. But that does require deep and total honesty. If a tech worker caused an outage and then manipulated management for a year to cover up their involvement, there would be no such leniency.