Whether or not anything shady was happening, the conflict of interest is clear.
As head of that agency, it's also his job to share his professional opinion with the public. For this, his reward is a public servant's salary. Seriously, what's he getting here for his supposed "deception"?
So it is not a conflict of interest because of the sum of money? Someone doesn't need to gain anything to be in conflict, by definition: "a situation in which the concerns or aims of two different parties are incompatible."
Do you at least think he had a duty to disclose his involvement/investment in gain of function research? Specifically with the Wuhan lab at the center of this?
> As head of that agency, it's also his job to share his professional opinion with the public. For this, his reward is a public servant's salary. Seriously, what's he getting here for his supposed "deception"?
Did you know he's the most highly paid government official? His measly public servant salary only paid him $417K. [0]
[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/01/25/dr-...
> His measly public servant salary only paid him $417K.
The top scientist in the country, with several Ph.Ds, 50 years of experience in a both public leadership and an incredibly complicated branch of biology, is making roughly what a staff engineer at a FAANG company makes...and you are complaining? That's the bargain of the century. He's a sick fuck for actually sticking it out - he could have bailed and consulted on "return to the office" for all the big tech and entertainment companies. He is 80 years old, working insane hours, and probably would have made more money in 6 months than he has in his whole public career from a really nice beach. You will never convince me that THIS is the smoking gun that proves Dr. Fauci corrupt, finally, after 50 years in public service. It's too stupid.
Maybe he's covering his own ass? Maybe he's trying to protect gain of function research? He was, after all, the most vocal proponent that the risks with gain of function research were worth it. [0]
> The top scientist in the country, with several Ph.Ds, 50 years of experience in a both public leadership and an incredibly complicated branch of biology, is making roughly what a staff engineer at a FAANG company makes...and you are complaining? That's the bargain of the century. He's a sick fuck for actually sticking it out - he could have bailed and consulted on "return to the office" for all the big tech and entertainment companies. He is 80 years old, working insane hours, and probably would have made more money in 6 months than he has in his whole public career from a really nice beach. You will never convince me that THIS is the smoking gun that proves Dr. Fauci corrupt, finally, after 50 years in public service. It's too stupid.
Oh, ok. So before his only reward was his "public servant salary", but now that you know he's the most highly paid government official (including the President) his salary is now being compared to FAANGs and he's underpaid. What a sacrifice.
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3484390/
Edit: Fix typo.
It’s called self-policing elsewhere, and anybody would see the conflict of interest immediately at FAANG, for example. Was FB causing teen depression? Researcher says no. (Then it turns out the researcher had done consulting work for FB or had been in contact with FB, advocating that they use the timeline feed to run experiments on unsuspecting teens…
Oh please. The median CEO pay at a pharmaceutical company is nearly $5 million. It take all the way up to nearly $50 million per year, which someone with the incredible experience (not to mention government contacts) of Dr Fauci would be on the upper end of, and that's not too mention the tens of millions in signing bonus and retirement packages. [1]
1. https://www.biopharmadive.com/news/biotech-pharma-ceo-employ...
It's something he'd likely be concerned about, because he's been a big booster of gain of function research, and the Institute famously houses China's first BSL-4 lab, although the article claims the Bat Lady said prior to the pandemic they were only using BSL-2 and -3 labs for their coronavirus research. This assumes she'd know about all that was going on the Institute.
I assumed this was a typo the first time, but since you repeated it - it's gain* of function. As in a virus gaining a new function.
Did you even read that paper? I doesn't say what you are claiming at all. It says they're going to hold a conference to determine if it's worth the risks, and says they should continue the moratorium while they do more research. Ah jeez.
> Oh, ok. So before his only reward was his "public servant salary", but now that you know he's the most highly paid government official (including the President) his salary is now being compared to FAANGs and he's underpaid. What a sacrifice.
Compared to what he could be making right now? Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate his sacrifice — he's criminally underpaid for how valuable his skills and experience are to the country.
Firstly, he has no excuse to be ignorant. Secondly, I’d wager every administrator and CEO who has any involvement with viral biomedical research were making urgent albeit possibly discreet inquiries into any possible involvement around February 2020.
Placing blame isn't really all that important. Making sure none of this happens again for the same reasons is.
If I was placing a bet, I'd say Wuhan researchers regularly got a handle on patents zero for cross species infection. In the course of the research a virus infected workers because of lax, sloppy, or otherwise inadequate controls; then despite the threat in order to save face government did everything they could to hide the mistake until it was far too late for anything to really be done about it.
Zerohedge was reporting this early on, and Twitter banned them for "misinformation".
A situation in which you've (a) contributed to decision-making on multiple public funding priorities including this lab and (b) state a judgment that lab was not the source of the outbreak isn't a conflict of interest, it's everyday policy life. Especially given that there's nothing glaringly wrong with the reasoning Fauci gave for that judgment in the article you linked.
If you think that reasoning has shortcomings, by all means, feel free to actually come up with something resembling a counterargument instead of vaguely implying "whether or not anything shady was going on."
He is far from the top paid government official. That honor, by a long shot, in nearly every state in the country, goes to college athletic coaches[1].
In this case, Fauci has sort of a small, debatable conflict. His personal stake is not money per se, but his reputation and clear preference for gain-of-function research. If it came out that gain-of-function research caused the pandemic, and Fauci was one of the leading cheerleaders for that since the early aughts AND Fauci may have provided some of the funding for this particular research, then Fauci would stand to lose quite a bit of reputation and standing. That's a real adverse incentive to determine that lab leak of a gain-of-function virus is not possible.
If his job is to share his opinion to the public, then he has a conflict of interest with respect to that decision, since the public doesn't know if Fauci-the-expert is talking or Fauci-the-reputation-seeking-bureaucrat. If he had merely disclosed any of his involvement with restarting funding of gain-of-function research in 2017 or his past advocacy for gain-of-function research, that would significantly resolve the conflict.
In my opinion, Fauci is simply an opportunistic bureaucrat and a liar (I repeat myself), and the conflict of interest claim against him is weak. Peter Daszam has much, much more problematic conflicts of interest. This is a guy who (1) discredited fellow scientists in the Lancet for considering an alternative hypothesis and (2) led a sham WHO investigation into the WIV lab, all while funneling NIH grant money to WIV, not complying with disclosure and review requirements and standing to lose his career if gain-of-function were to be seriously discredited. It would be hard for him to be more conflicted.
Also, for what it's worth, Fauci is the highest paid federal employee. He makes more than the president. Most "public servants" make $150k/year or less. Not to mention, Fauci had also made a book deal as a result of his celebrity.
Local mainstream “fact checkers” have even called Covid-19 a “right-wing conspiracy theory” in early 2020.
We do have representatives that are meant to have final say, but they went AWOL mentally.
The ideology behind throwing around this kind of allegations is: all facts are fabricated by somebody, nobody can be trusted (they all have a conflict of interest), so we can as well make up our own "alternative facts" that fit our ideology best. In the end, it's just "us against them", so arguments and facts don't matter any more.
As a side-note: I doubt that Fauci just spontaneously pushes out his personal opinion about this kind of affairs, so I suppose his organization largely agrees with him. All corrupt and in a "conflict of interest"? And I think his position should definitely be paid better than the president. Why not?
None of this says anything about Fauci as a person. He might be opportunistic, a bureaucrat, and whatnot, but that is hardly relevant in this context (other than discrediting everything he says).
It was a $3.7million dollar grant to EcoHealth Alliance, which I wouldn't doubt he was involved with. $600,000 was sent from EcoHealth to Wuhan Institute of Virology.
I think yes. Perhaps not upfront, perhaps not in the following days or weeks. But if your organization had funded a laboratory's gain of function research, and that laboratory is suddenly the topic of global speculation for potentially leaking a virus, a virus which is ostensibly a product directly of your funding and became one of the deadliest global pandemics ever... I think it would be hard to not know at some point.
More explanation of that here... https://youtu.be/jMr-fGmRGco?t=246
Yes. But not everyone becomes the leading figure in a global pandemic which has killed 3.7 million people and thrown the world into complete disarray. At the point where you realise you're in that position, the correct, ethical thing to do is put all your cards on the table.
The moratorium, referred to officially as a “pause,” specifically barred funding any gain-of-function research that increased the pathogenicity of the flu, MERS or SARS viruses. It defined gain-of-function very simply and broadly as “research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease.”
But then a footnote on p.2 of the moratorium document states that “An exception from the research pause may be obtained if the head of the USG funding agency determines that the research is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.”
This seemed to mean that either the director of the NIAID, Dr. Anthony Fauci, or the director of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, or maybe both, would have invoked the exemption in order to keep the money flowing to Dr. Shi’s gain-of-function research, and later to avoid notifying the Federal reporting system of her research.
Would love a citation or two. I remember the right-wing administration saying it would disappear as if by magic and Fox News saying "0 deaths" and that playing up covid was a left wing invention at least up to april or so.
If all of the 5B is spent on coronavirus research then it's a different story. Most likely it's spent on an incredibly wide array of topics.
In this case the lab didn't even work for him, it just got some small amount of funding from his organisation's budget but he had no say in it's operations. So he can comment on the work of his organisation, but not about the work of an organisation he partly funded?
We know perfectly well he is not an external observer. That's not the capacity in which he's commenting, any more than a president is commenting in an external or impartial capacity about the work of the executive branches, or e.g. UN agencies partly funded by the US.
The person at the top might not know what each recipient is doing, but is still accountable for the funding decisions that were made (and oversaw the people and process that made those decisions on the organisations behalf).
> Does it make any sense to say he can't comment on the work of an organisation he runs because he runs it?
Is a straw man argument, because what was said was that the conflict of interest should have been disclosed. And, not that he cannot make a comment.
Here's an interview with her... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhwrICQTcQg ... her opening statement (paraphrased) is "saving lives in the context of vaccines ... is about firstly maximising benefit and secondly about fairness and equity" ... make of that what you will.
At first the loosely defined right-wing were panicking about the virus. Myself included, although I wasn't really panicking, just getting myself mentally prepared that this might possibly be the second black plague that could wipe out a similar percentage of the population. Meanwhile the loosely defined left-wing was ridiculing it, laughing about it, saying that there is no evidence that the virus is dangerous and calling people fearmongers and racists (?). And then everything switched. As it turned out, the virus wasn't as nearly dangerous as I initially though it'd be and the left-wing suddenly started acting like we're all going to die.
Regarding:
> calling people fearmongers and racists (?)
I remember asian (or of asian descent) acquaintances being spit on and yelled at in the vein of "you're killing us!" on the subway for ostensibly looking Chinese (I'm guessing), at a time when the virus was already likelier to spread from other countries, and I'd say the more left leaning were pointing this out. People doing that don't reach that stage of racebased profiling independently without someone drumming up "chinavirus" as soon as it was no longer feasible to shrug it off. Is that maybe what you're referring to?
Fauci has been covering this up since early on. Have you not followed the story of the released emails from the FOIA request? He knew this research was being conducted. He gave cover to those who attacked people like Sen Tom Cotton, who was trying to get this looked into from the beginning.
For this, his reward is a public servant's salary
Fauci is the highest paid employee in the Federal government.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/01/25/dr-...
I've seen people talking about the rise in anti-asian hate crimes and it being incorrectly blamed on white supremacy, but that happened somewhat recently. At the point in time we're talking about I haven't really heard about anything too much, although it's not hard to imagine it being the case. I think it's to be expected, what are you supposed to do about it? Should you ignore the actions of Israel, because it's associated with Jews? Or actions of Russian government, because someone could discriminate a Russian person over that? Or what happens in some Islamic country? And we're fine with talking about about "systemic white supremacy", so I find these concerns to be hypocritical frankly. I also don't believe that pretending like the virus didn't originate in China would help anything. People might be stupid, but they're smart enough to figure out that this is just BS.
The lancet letter was at best extraordinarily premature.
I think we are in disagreement. I don't remember such a switch, nor can identify one browsing backwards.
> I think it's to be expected, what are you supposed to do about it? Should you ignore the actions of Israel, because it's associated with Jews? Or actions of Russian government, because someone could discriminate a Russian person over that? Or what happens in some Islamic country?
I doubt everyone in Israel agrees with the decisions of the state of Israel, just as half of Americans don't agree with any current administration. Even further beyond that you shouldn't equate every jew with Israel, just as you shouldn't every muslim with Iran.
Talking about China as it relates to covid is fine. Calling it "chinavirus" (repeatedly) has no practical benefit, and is only used as a polemic.
> And we're fine with talking about about "systemic white supremacy", so I find these concerns to be hypocritical frankly.
I don't equate every white person with white supremacy, including myself. I don't see the hypocrisy.
Fauci's elevation to sainthood was way too premature. His constant media appearances where he hasn't been questioned on any of this should be an object lesson to the public on media bias and the subsequent narrative bubbles that impact our society.
It's not surprising that the same people pushing Michael Avenatti as the next great politician have been the same people promoting Fauci.
The “engineered” component is about the Furin cleavage site on the sars-cov-2 spike protein.
The virus shares 92% genetic similarity to bat coronaviruses, except the spike protein, which is nearly identical to a pangolin coronavirus(which is otherwise only ~38% similar) with one key exception: The Furin cleavage site using “lab standard” sequences.
The gene sequence for the amino acids in the furin site in CoV-2 uses a very rare set of two codons, three letter words so six letters in a row, that are rarely used individually and have never been seen together in tandem in any coronaviruses in nature. But these same ‘rare in nature’ codons turn out to be the very ones that are always used by scientists in the laboratory when researchers want to add the amino acid arginine, the ones that are found in the furin site. When scientists add a dimer of arginine codons to a coronavirus, they invariably use the word, CGG-CGG, but coronaviruses in nature rarely (<1%) use this codon pair. For example, in the 580,000 codons of 58 Sarbecoviruses the only CGG pair is CoV-2; none of the other 57 sarbecoviruses have such a pair.That isn't true at all. Mere disclosure (e.g. "Full disclosure: I ran gain of function research for years at NIH, a couple years ago got a ban on gain-of-function research lifted at the White House and our team is currently looking into whether WIV received our funding") is sufficient to mitigate most conflicts of interests. Conflicts of interest exist all the time, but they're fairly easy to disclose (as long as someone has an ethical backbone), and in extreme cases can be mitigated with things like divestment or blind trusts (in the case of financial conflicts of interest).
Suppose your doctor was also a paid consultant for a pharmaceutical company, advising them on their new drug X. One day, your doctor starts telling you all of the benefits of drug X for certain medical issues you have, and she's very enthusiastic about it. If she simply disclosed, "full disclosure: I'm consulting with the manufacturer on the effects of this drug; that said, I really believe in it," wouldn't that entirely change the ethical dynamic vis-a-vis nondisclosure? If she disclosed, you could get a (non-conflicted) second opinion, or maybe you implicitly trust your doctor and go along with her recommendation as is. But if she didn't disclose and you later learned some other way that she has this conflict, you would lose trust.
This is what happened with Fauci and the gain-of-function crowd. They stood on the pedestal of unbiased scientific expertise, failing to disclose their conflicts, and then enabled the browbeating of anyone with alternative hypotheses (literally anyone: scientists had their professional reputations and research funding threatened; social media users had their accounts suspended or posts deleted). Without alternative hypotheses, science entirely falters. Full disclosure on the part of Fauci and especially Daszak would have gone lightyears in evaluating their credibility.
I should note that conflicts of interest do not change facts or true scientific conclusions themselves; that would be ad hominem. But conclusions are typically dependent on myriad facts, and experts have a much better idea about the universe of discourse around these facts than laypeople. A conflicted expert may thus present cherry-picked facts that support his conclusions, ignoring those that cut against them. To be fair, non-conflicted scientists may do this as well, but their credibility is only harmed insofar as they should have addressed countervailing evidence when presenting conclusions. Having a non-disclosed conflict of interest undermines a scientist's credibility and a commitment to ethical inquiry.
In my opinion, the scientific community has severely undermined their ethical and persuasive capital over the past year and even longer. If disclosure were a normal part of scientific discourse where it impacted policy, we likely would have more people who believe that vaccines work, that climate change is a threat (though likely not an apocalyptic one) and that the scientific process generally works. Instead, we have this browbeating culture where not trusting the "experts" is like some sort of scarlet letter, at least until we learn the experts were looking out for their own interests and suddenly they lose their luster. I love science, so I wish the scientific community would get its fucking act together so that large segments of the population on my "side" start to believe in the scientific method again.
Finally, lost in all of this is the fact that gain-of-function was supposed to produce vaccines more rapidly. As far as I can tell, this never happened. The vaccines we received had been researched for a decade through a different program not funded by NIH, and did not depend on gain-of-function research, but instead used unmolested SARS viruses.
Well, I definitely remember left-leaning people ridiculing it when people were buying out the toilet paper, saying that there is no virus and stuff.
> I don't equate every white person with white supremacy, including myself. I don't see the hypocrisy.
And I don't equate every Chinese person with the virus or the Chinese government. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the criticism is that the narrative or the words you use, even if factually correct, might cause some people to have prejudice against the members of a certain group. You're (maybe not you specifically, I don't know) concerned about backlash against Chinese people over the virus, but you aren't concerned about the backlash against white people over systemic racism theory. That's what I find hypocritical.
But yeah, "china virus" might be a little bit over the top.
I can't scroll to find the original tweets but many Trump loyalists were very early on the Covid concerns– while the left was ridiculing any concern with articles like what I linked above. See https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/03/coronavirus-mik... and https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/why-some-early-maga-.... Tucker Carlson talked constantly about the Covid from very early on as well.
From your vanityfair link:
> As Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and much of the GOP parroted the president’s no-worries line, MAGA originals like Steve Bannon and Mike Cernovich sounded the alarm.
I did notice the difference in Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity coverage, but you're right, there seems to have been a split within the grouping. Seeing as how many on the right are Trump loyalists (to a fault), that was the generalization I was drawing.
Yeah, the Vox one is bad.
EDIT: Please don't downvote Pyramus. He asked a legitimate question and as far as I can tell followed HN rules. There are ~7.7B people who are not in the US.
I would agree with the "even longer". I think it most noticeably started with the scientific community's intermixing of concerns regarding climate change with political forces who have had their own agendas. It's made it extremely difficult even for scientifically-minded and informed people like myself to sort through the bullshit vs the good information. People without even my background have no hope of knowing whom to trust, so they've fallen back to just trusting their political inclinations.
This past year and the politicization around pandemic issues has definitely seen an increase in the the problem, though. It's been a sad year for Science. Hard-won public trust in scientists has been thrown away. You can see it in the hesitancy to get the vaccine.
My company wants to know if my brother in law works for a competitor. It won't change my job, but they will be careful to ensure that I don't work on things that it would matter if I let something slip over dinner.
I didn't even realize buying up toilet paper during early pandemics was partisan, but I definitely remember memes about how inconsiderate it is to buy up years worth of toilet paper at once, emptying the cache for everyone else with no indication that toilet paper manufacturing was affected. I admit I made fun of this too, but drew no political association to it. It had nothing to do with (the existence of) the virus.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the criticism is that the narrative or the words you use, even if factually correct, might cause some people to have prejudice against the members of a certain group.
Yeah, I guess, but I don't think there's any valid and accurate criticism that would lead anyone to blame random Chinese people.
> You're (maybe not you specifically, I don't know) concerned about backlash against Chinese people over the virus, but you aren't concerned about the backlash against white people over systemic racism theory. That's what I find hypocritical.
I haven't experienced any backlash against white people for any and all systemic racism built by other white people. I still do not see your point.
Regardless of whether this was a lab escape or not, there's a 100% chance of a pandemic virus happening again.
Concerns about COVID were being cast as "racist" by the Left and the media (but I repeat myself) in the beginning: https://news.yahoo.com/pelosi-denies-she-downplayed-coronavi...
https://twitter.com/newsmax/status/1246131288664408064
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JZ0Ruh89f0
If you don't remember that, then you should question your information sources. I remember the accusations of racism online quite vividly as I voiced my concerns in early February that people should start taking precautions: buying quarantine supplies, PPE, etc.
Tucker Carlson had some early reports on COVID and was attacked for fear-mongering by his usual left-leaning political opponents.
So maybe he finds out before making statements?
I've lost faith in Fauci when he admitted he lied about the efficacy of masks early on in the pandemic. He literally came out and stated he lied in order to make sure frontline healthcare workers had enough PPE. That was the most insane statement I've ever heard a public health leader make - lying about healthcare to the public that may result in more infections. That is how you destroy public trust.
What's sad is that the population would understand if you just told them the truth, namely that masks help, but our frontline works desperately need them so getting them masks and PPE is a priority.
> I haven't experienced any backlash against white people for any and all systemic racism built by other white people. I still do not see your point.
And I'm really glad you didn't. Not every Chinese experienced any backlash either. That's great for them too. But not everyone was so fortunate. Example from a BLM protest: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5ebji8
There was no trend or array of stories. Just one lady who said she had someone denying it on their deathbed with zero corroboration, and then she got 2 days of news cycle.
This is Fauci (serving under Trump) saying in January 2020 that he didn't think it was a threat, or am I missing something?
Are you saying that a then Trump official, now Biden official was speaking out of partisanship?
> I remember the accusations of racism online quite vividly as I voiced my concerns in early February that people should start taking precautions: buying quarantine supplies, PPE, etc.
I stocked up on ~3-4 weeks worth of supplies too, and replenished bi-weekly since early february, as well as many of my friends, neither of whom politicised it.
> Tucker Carlson had some early reports on COVID and was attacked for fear-mongering by his usual left-leaning political opponents.
Do you mean his fellow network hosts?
https://i.insider.com/5e5959a6fee23d09e47eae94?width=951&for...
https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/imag...
People are too quick to notice conflicts of interest. Everyone of us lives a life filled with such conflicts, yet we manage somehow to rise above, for the most part. Fauci seems like a nice guy to me.
I'm not disagreeing with the importance of US R&D spending, which is huge (25-30% of global spend), or that Fauci is an important public health official.
I'm simply telling you that the rest of the world is mostly indifferent to the persona Fauci, based on what I'm observing in the EU & UK and extrapolating to Asia.
Hindsight is wonderfully clear.
Maybe you should be in charge since you are so clearsighted and clearly so wise.
Nice try and trying to equate Fauci with Avenatti - please return to the cable Fox hole which you emerged from.
Maybe elsewhere, but not in America. This is one of the most selfish/individualist countries on earth.
There was an article from a popular outlet I've been particularly surprised about, since left-wing media otherwise mostly took the pandemic seriously here and around the world, and tried to stay science-based.
This article remained in my memory because they present themselves as fact checkers and are popular with many prominent people in my primary political and media spectrum.
They politicised covid early on and claimed it is just an anti-open-borders / anti-foreigners campaign: "The secret reasons why conservatives want you to be afraid of coronavirus": https://www.volksverpetzer.de/politik/rechte-panik-corona-vi...
This is from 27th January 2020, while many people here on HN likely have read the first concerning reports about this virus at the end of December 2019. I started being careful from mid January.
Until today this page self-righteously claims that "the available facts at that time" pointed towards nothing to be concerned about in the Western world, which is simple not true if you took your research seriously.
I mentioned that Men in Black scene. There were several other topics where I could find concerning evidence by carefully browsing otherwise questionable sources very early on – the lab leak theory (ProjectEvidence, Zerohedge), the aerosol transmission, that mask wearing is reasonable, the unclear and potentially harmful effects of the spike protein itself –, while I've been completely ignoring such websites before covid. ( Other things like people just dropping dead on Chinese streets did not turn out true ofc. )
[0] “In a telephone interview the next day, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covi...
I don't like these "strategic" lies either. And I agree the population in general would understand, but I think there'd still have been plenty of people that would've hoarded every mask possible, and at the time they had to make decisions based on possible scenarios, whereas now we have hindsight. Especially if things were handled differently in the beginning and the mask vs non-mask polarization manifested differently, who knows.
Interestingly, the application is designed for a very specific workflow, audit and review as part of the intake, but has no facilities for auditing after the fact. The data and relationships exist and there is a wealth of information in the database including known conflicts of interest but there's no easy way to query or browse this data from the application unless you're reviewing a specific grant or application.
For example:
The application doesn't allow you to search for persons by location and doesn't show you grants associated with persons. Rather you can only see persons associated with grants.
You can search for institution by address but again, it doesn't show you grants associated with an institution.
These interfaces were designed to just update Persons or Institutions when changes occur. They weren't intended as a way to back into a Grant or Application.
And many people did hoard masks, and toilet paper, and sanitizers. So Fauci solved nothing except destroy trust in public health authorities. It also wasn't the last time that he lied for 'people's own good'.
I believed him. I did. I don't believe him anymore.
That's a disgusting statement. People are people. And the vast majority of people in every country are good people.
It's also not true, but even if it was, he has no right to lie to people about their healthcare and well-being. You can't do that because this kind of lie actually hurt people who would have wore a mask (homemade or otherwise) but didn't (and maybe got sick or died), all because they trusted him.
So if this COVID-19 origin hypothesis is true and it took only 8 to 19 years for a lab leak of a gain of function experiment to cause the worst pandemic in a century, we ought to be very interested in making sure this happens a lot less often. Ideally not at all, but I see no way to impose a world wide ban on this type of research.
According to Andersen, the CGG codon isn't quite as rare in coronaviruses. He also comments that the stability of the CGG codon in the Furin cleavage site has been remarkably high over the course of the pandemic, which is a hint that the CGG codon may be selected for and crucial for the virus.
Quoting him:
> Now, the codons. Here, Baltimore is talking about the two codons coding for the first two arginines (R) following the P - CGG. The CGG codon is rare in viruses because it's an example of an unmethylated "CpG" site that can be bound by TLR9, leading to immune cell activation.
> Despite being rare, however, CGG codons are found in all coronaviruses, albeit at low frequency. Specifically, of all arginine codons, CGG is used at these frequencies in these viruses:
> SARS: 5% SARS2: 3% SARSr: 2% ccCoVs: 4% HKU9: 7% FCoV: 2%
> Nothing unusual here.
> Furthermore, if we go back to the FCoV sequences and compare them to SARS-CoV-2 at the nucleotide level you'll see that FCoV also uses CGG to code for R immediately following the P. The next R is CGA (non-CpG) in FCoV, while it's CGG in SARS-CoV-2 - one nucleotide difference.
> We see CGG multiple times in different ways - here's an example comparing another "PR" stretch between SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, and SARS-CoV in the N gene. Note how SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 both use CGG, while SARS-CoV-2 uses CGC for the first R, while later R's are coded by CGT or AGA
> One final point about the CGG codons in the FCS - if they were somehow "unnatural", we'd see SARS-CoV-2 evolve away from "CGG" during the ongoing pandemic. We have more than a million genomes to analyze, so what do we find if we look at synonymous mutations at the "CGG_CGG" site?
> Remarkably stable. Specifically, CGG is 99.87% conserved in the first codon and 99.84% conserved in the second.
> This is very strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 'prefers' CGG in these positions.
What you're doing is called "gas lighting".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrJwjYPQvhQ
Avenatti was ALL over the place in left-leaning media, receiving endless accolades.
Please don't repeat that. If you do even a little bit of research, you'll see that he didn't say that, and by repeating it you're lowering the dialog you want to raising.
That this should be done under the strictest protocols is obvious (and internationally-monitored, no less).
But pretending that dice aren't continually rolling in nature and hoping for the best seems shortsighted.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177
Thanks for your unsubstantiated comment though
So its not like this crazy stuff is hard to prove is prevalent (pun intended) among certain groups.
What is hard is actually putting figures on it when worldviews get so warped due to circular logic. This is bad, because there are real reasons people are upset. Underlying reasons that need to be properly addressed.
That doesn't mean we'll be able to provide safe vaccines for sufficiently novel pathogens, behind Moderna's candidate was a decade and a half of research into making safe vaccines for SARS type coronaviruses, with researchers at the NIH finding one solution in 2017 for the antibody-dependent enhancement issue that had been plaguing such attempts starting with SARS and inactivated whole virus vaccines.
A fast pandemic can also get a long distance before you can ramp up production and vaccinate 8 billion people, with vaccines that so far need freezing for shipping, and medical grade refrigeration afterwords until used. Plus you need to make at least 8 billion syringes and needles and so on.
It's terrible how badly this was reported on.
No he was not.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/04/24/disinfectan...
CGG-CGG is the most potent furin cleavage site because it works on the outer cell membranes and on the interior. Viruses that have it will outcompete all others -- but all this means is that SARS-Cov-2 with the CGG-CGG FCS has been well adapted to humans since the beginning of the pandemic and less potent mutations haven't been able to keep up. There's no "natural/unnatural" axis to consider. The most infectious virus "prefers" to be the most infectious, indeed. It's tautological. Evidence of efficacy doesn't disprove laboratory alteration.
I would point out that the some primary points against GOF utility in the 2014 survey report weigh very differently now: (1) lack of viral genetic surveillance at national levels, (2) inability to quickly generate novel vaccines, (3) inability to distribute vaccines worldwide.
Hell, if you're rural, it's pretty likely to have a nurse who doesn't really believe the current understanding of COVID
Whatever chilling effect it had, tall order at this stage of this general program of research or not, it's high time its advocates including yourself point to tangible progress of one sort or another, for we now can reasonably assess the risk side of the risk benefit trade off.
See this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398081 on why the advancements in vaccines don't even begin to cover the risks, or note as of now how long it looks it'll be before the Third World gets vaccinated against as much as is humanly possible, no sooner than sometime in 2022. Consider the possibility of a sufficiently good escape variant requiring another dose or two.
Consider how little the the whole world can afford the expense of a pandemic, and the Third World in particular, including viral surveillance of any sort, "molecular" (PRC based) tests or sequencing samples. And this time they're lucky, COVID-19 mortality risks are highly weighted with age, something that hits the young harder will hit them a lot harder.
Consider how many possible, probable, or proven lab escapes will it take before the world's governments clamp down on a lot more than gain of function research.
Yes, nature wants to kill us, although your itemized points also address that issue. It's just not very good at it, and almost all of that was before the germ theory of disease was accepted in the end of the 19th Century.
Humans are flawed, biased, and fundamentally limited creatures that are wrong a lot of the time. So we invented a system to evaluate hypothesis based on experiments, data, etc... A person speaking gospel or pushing a trust “The Science” while prematurely rejecting unproven hypothesis is NOT a scientist. They are no better than those who sought to banish or kill Galileo and the like.
The only true conflict would be Fauci's opinion on whether the virus was a lab leak. Which really only matters for political reasons.
That conflict would have no bearing on how to handle the covid pandemic.
"And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?
"So it'd be interesting to check that."
Pointing to his head, Mr Trump went on: "I'm not a doctor. But I'm, like, a person that has a good you-know-what."
> “So you are saying that the organisation you lead helped fund a lab that caused a pandemic, but that funding was without your oversight because you thought it wasn’t important/big enough for you to look at? Are you going to resign?”
Note, I don’t believe the above is a fair question, but Fauci has to be careful to not set himself up for a gotcha.
That's not to say it would have made any difference, unless per the article per the Bat Woman "The coronavirus research in our laboratory is conducted in BSL-2 or BSL-3 laboratories," "our" includes all the WIV's coronavirus research—it's a fair size outfit with a number of labs and there's no reason to assume she was the Principle Investigator for all of its coronavirus research—and he or a direct report could have insisted the funded research would be done at the BSL-4 lab or maybe one of the BSL-3 labs. This assume the gain of function research was being done at a lower level, which starting with the 2011 bird flu work in the West has been too often true, one or both of those labs were BSL-2, one of the reasons it was controversial and so alarming to a lot of people watching this including myself.
But it turned out without his knowledge gain of function research there was being funded by his institute through the EcoHealth Alliance, and in another email he's thanked by it's leader Peter Daszak for helping to push the zoonotic transfer explanation, which the latter was or had arranged through a group letter to The Lancet to be the only acceptable narrative until around now.
It would also have been good if someone had done a gut check on the EcoHealth Alliance's MO, which as described by a Rutgers' biological chemistry professor was "looking for a gas leak with a lighted match" by as the author of the Vanity Fair article as "bringing samples from a remote area to an urban one, then sequencing and growing viruses and attempting to genetically modify them to make them more virulent."
Again, nothing unique to the Alliance or China, the US is in the process of moving the research on animal pathogens done at Plumb Island, New York to college town Manhattan, Kansas. Which I'm sure is a much more pleasant place to work at, but just happened to be in the heartland of American animal agriculture. Someday one or more Congressmen who fought to bring home the bacon may be called to account for this, to the extent that ever happens.
We don't know that it was a lab leak or natural; and probably never will. There is the possibility the if it was a lab leak Fauci used his position to hide that evidence to protect himself.
Because of the above Fauci should have disclosed his potential conflict of interest. That way the rest of us can consider his actions to ensure we are more likely to catch him abusing his position.
The above is a normal thing that happens all the time. I'm accusing him of doing wrong by not disclosing this over a year ago. Do not expand that to accusing him of actually doing anything else wrong in handling the pandemic.
