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oromagi

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MAR-a-LAGO CLASSIFIED PAPERS HELD US SECRETS about IRAN and CHINA
Got that?

Republican=anti-democracy
Democracts=pro-democracy

Be sure to vote carefully- could be your last.
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Dr ANTHONY FAUCI's COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS to the 2022 GRADUATING CLASS of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
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@Public-Choice
-->@oromagi
That simply isn't true.  Natural immunity is superior to vaccine immunity in many long-term efficacy studies we have to date:
  • Jeez, man.  All  these sources (which you clearly did not read) agree with Johns-Hopkins and Dr. Fauci (and responsible medical care professoinals everywherem) refuting your claim that natural immunity is superior to vaccinne.
"The history of the anti-vaccination movement is replete with examples of opposition to vaccination grounded in a concern that vaccines are contrary to nature and compromise purity.  A common trope among the anti-vaccination movement is that natural immunity is therefore superior to ‘artificial’ vaccine-induced immunity. This is a grave mistake and a form of the naturalistic fallacy.   It is ‘natural’ to become immune through contracting infection but it is also natural to die from serious infections."
"A second related claim, widely advocated among the anti-vaccination movement, is that it is better to acquire immunity through natural infection rather than through vaccination. Rather than suggesting the alleged superiority of natural over vaccine-induced immunity itself (as suggested by the first claim), this second claim relates to the alleged superiority of gaining immunity via a natural rather than artificial process on certain unorthodox understandings of the role of ‘the natural’ in the aetiology of health and disease. Yet, for the vast majority of people, this claim is also patently false, since the risks of serious illness and dying from natural infection are considerably higher than those of vaccination. It would be prudentially irrational to choose to be infected rather than to have the vaccine, for those who are vulnerable to COVID-19. A public health strategy that pursued ‘natural’ herd immunity would lead to vastly higher morbidity and mortality than one that pursued vaccine-induced herd immunity."

The researchers also found that people who had SARS-CoV-2 previously and received one dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine were more highly protected against reinfection than those who once had the virus and were still unvaccinated...
Thålin and other researchers stress that deliberate infection among unvaccinated people would put them at significant risk of severe disease and death, or the lingering, significant symptoms of what has been dubbed Long Covid. The study shows the benefits of natural immunity, but “doesn’t take into account what this virus does to the body to get to that point,”

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/969293
"It has been well established that natural infection alone provides short-lived protection from infection, showing the importance of vaccination, regardless of infection history. Because vaccination protects against severe disease and death, it is safer for individuals to be vaccinated before rather than after natural infection."

"Recent studies have shown that vaccination confers more durable protection against severe outcomes of hospitalization and death than against symptomatic and asymptomatic infection....The highest and most durable protection was observed in participants who received one or two doses of vaccine after a primary infection. Strategic use of booster doses of vaccine to avert waning of protection (particularly in double-vaccinated, previously uninfected persons) may reduce infection and transmission in the ongoing response to Covid-19."

So to claim so brazenly that vaccine immunity is better is to ignore studies published in reputable peer-reviewed medical journals.
Wow.   What about the brazeness of  citing four studies  studies published in reputable peer-reviewed medical journals, never even noticing that all four studies totally disagree with your claim?

Dr. Fauci has consistently supported the science and to deny the superiority of natural immunity is simply good science and telling the truth.

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Dr ANTHONY FAUCI's COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS to the 2022 GRADUATING CLASS of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
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@Public-Choice
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Dr Fauci also systemically denied the superiority of natural immunity
  • The science is clear that natural immunity is inferior to vaccination.
    • Johns-Hopkins:
    • The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a report on Oct. 29, 2021, that says getting vaccinated for the coronavirus when you’ve already had COVID-19 significantly enhances your immune protection and further reduces your risk of reinfection.
    • A study published in August 2021 indicates that if you had COVID-19 before and are not vaccinated, your risk of getting re-infected is more than two times higher than for those who got vaccinated after having COVID-19.
    • Another study published on Nov. 5, 2021, by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) looked at adults hospitalized for COVID-like sickness between January and September 2021. This study found that the chances of these adults testing positive for COVID-19 were 5.49 times higher in unvaccinated people who had COVID-19 in the past than they were for those who had been vaccinated for COVID and had not had an infection before.
    • A study from the CDC in September 2021 showed that roughly one-third of those with COVID-19 cases in the study had no apparent natural immunity.
  • It would be irresponsible of Fauci to not follow the science.  I don't know what "systematically" is supposed to mean in your claim.  HIs system has been to follow the science.
and hyped both mask wearing and non-mask wearing over the course of the pandemic.
  • Hyped is an exageration. 
    • Wikipedia:
      • In a March 8, 2020, interview, Fauci stated that "right now in the United States, people [who are not infected] should not be walking around with masks", but "if you want to do it, that's fine".  [so- "hyped" is an exageration]
      •  In the same interview, Fauci said that buying masks "could lead to a shortage of masks for the people who really need" them: "When you think masks, you should think of healthcare providers needing them".[47][49] When Fauci made this comment, America's top surgical mask maker was struggling to produce enough masks to meet the increased demand.[49] 
      • On April 3, the CDC reversed course, quoting recent studies that showed asymptomatic transmission of the virus, thus advocating for the public to wear non-surgical masks to reduce community transmission while Fauci advocated for wearing facial coverings in public.[48] Fauci's shifting advice on wearing face masks drew criticism, which Fauci responded to by arguing that changes in policy were necessary as scientists learned more about COVID-19.[12]
      • Fauci's information was correct on Mar 9th reflecting the science and supply problems.  Fauci's changed recommendation followed the CDC's reversal and new information about how much virus could live in the air around an infected human.
    • You claim that Fauci's pandemic advice was fake but you FOX News twitter propaganda is really only about Paul's false claims that Fauci funded "gain-of-function" research in Wuhan which  I have throuroughly debunked here. 
      • Do you have any actual examples of Fauci providing false information during the pandemic?
  • All of this seems quite responsible and in line with mainstream medical advice throughout the pandemic.




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Dr ANTHONY FAUCI's COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS to the 2022 GRADUATING CLASS of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Coronavirus Origins

It is still uncertain how SARS-CoV-2 originated, but many scientists suspect the virus “spilled over” into humans from an animal. There is no evidence the virus was created in a lab, let alone as part of any U.S.-funded research.

A June 2021 Facebook post claimed that “Fauci knew the virus was likely engineered,” because of an email he received from Kristian Andersen, a professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research. In that Jan. 31, 2020, email to Fauci, Andersen said that there were “unusual features” of “a really small part of the genome” of the coronavirus that “(potentially) look engineered.” He mentioned others, too, found “the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”

But Andersen said in his email that more analysis was necessary and “opinions could still change,” which is what later happened.

On March 17, 2020, Nature Medicine published an article by Andersen and other scientists that said they determined that the coronavirus likely originated through “natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer,” or “natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer.” The authors added that they “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” because they “observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features … in related coronaviruses in nature.”

Former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro falsely claimed that Fauci “killed a lot of people” by funding some bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The institute is in Wuhan, China, where the first COVID-19 cases were identified.

“Analysis of published genomic data and other documents from the grantee demonstrate that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant are genetically far distant from SARS-CoV-2 and could not possibly have caused the COVID-19 pandemic,” then-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins said in an Oct. 20, 2021, statement, referring to an analysis posted to the NIAID’s website. “Any claims to the contrary are demonstrably false.”

Republican Sen. Rand Paul accused Fauci of lying when Fauci said in a May 2021 Senate hearing that “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” But there’s no evidence that Fauci lied to Congress, as Paul asserted in a July 20, 2021, hearing, about funding gain-of-function research — which the U.S. government generally defined in 2014 as aiming to “increase the ability of infectious agents to cause disease by enhancing its pathogenicity or by increasing its transmissibility.” 

Fauci has said that the research that was funded “was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain-of-function,” and the NIH has said the same. The issue is that scientists have differing opinions on what counts as gain-of-function research.

Paul has posited that Fauci, among others, “could be culpable for the entire pandemic,” if the SARS-CoV-2 virus leaked from a Wuhan lab that was conducting gain-of-function research. But there is no proof of a lab leak, and there is evidence that the bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant could not have caused the pandemic. 

In December 2014, the NIH posted a photo of Fauci and former President Barack Obama touring the NIH Vaccine Research Center at the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The photo showed Obama speaking about Ebola research with Dr. Nancy Sullivan, of NIAID, and Fauci was shown standing next to Sylvia Burwell, who was the health and human services secretary at the time.

But the years-old photo was circulated in 2020 along with the false claim that the image showed “Dr. Fauci, Melinda Gates and Barack Obama at the Wuhan Lab in 2015,” suggesting a connection to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Other Claims

A series of reports in 2021 from a group that opposes federal funding for research relying on animal testing prompted dozens of readers to ask us if Fauci had a history of cruelty to animals, specifically beagles.

The NIAID admitted to FactCheck.org in a statement that Fauci was involved in the process of awarding funding for a number of research projects that used beagles as test subjects. But the agency denied that it funded one particular project in Tunisia that went viral on social media because of images from a published study that showed sedated beagles with their heads stuck in mesh cages filled with diseased sand flies.

Fauci is among the many federal employees who are required to submit an annual public financial disclosure report to their employing agency or department. His reports — which list his assets, income, employment agreements and other financial information — are available upon request from the NIH’s FOIA office. 
But in a January congressional hearing, Republican Sen. Roger Marshall asked Fauci if he would be willing to publicly release “a financial disclosure form,” suggesting that Fauci’s reports are not available to the public and are being hidden by “the big tech giants.”

In 2005, Fauci told the Associated Press that he donates royalty payments he receives from the licensees of products and treatments he helped develop while working for the NIH.

But that detail was not mentioned in a number of May posts about reporting on millions of dollars in royalties paid to Fauci and other NIH scientists since 2009.


Fauci’s family has been the subject of false attacks as well.
His wife, Dr. Christine Grady, is not the sister of Ghislaine Maxwell, a former British socialite who was sentenced this year to 20 years in prison for recruiting girls and young women for accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Social media posts falsely claimed that Christine had her last name changed from Maxwell to Grady.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.


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Dr ANTHONY FAUCI's COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS to the 2022 GRADUATING CLASS of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
CORRECTING MISINFORMATION  about Dr. FAUCI

Dr. Anthony Fauci has announced that in December he will step down from his positions as chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden and as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and its laboratory of immunoregulation.

Fauci has worked for the National Institutes of Health since 1968 and has been the director of NIAID since 1984. In that time, he has advised seven U.S. presidents on infectious disease threats such as HIV and AIDS; the West Nile, Ebola and Zika viruses; and more.

But most of the public may know him as the face of the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic, first as a member of former President Donald Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force and now as a member of Biden’s response team. Not everyone has been a fan.

Republican politicians and conservative media outlets have continually criticized his efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19, questioned his motivations for promoting vaccination against it, and speculated on what he knows about the origin of the virus. GOP members of Congress have promised to investigate Fauci and have him testify before Congress if Republicans retake control of the House or Senate next year.

Here are some of the false and misleading claims about Fauci, his work and his public health guidance that we have written about since the pandemic began in 2020. 

COVID-19 Guidance

In a February 2020 NBC interview, over a week before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, Fauci said that “right now at this moment” the risk to the public was “low” and there was “no need” for people “to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis.” However, he added that “this could change,” that people needed to be wary of “community spread,” and that the coronavirus could develop into a “major outbreak.” 

Trump wrongly claimed that month that Fauci was saying, “This is no problem. This is going to blow over.”


Conservative commentator Liz Wheeler made a series of false claims about Fauci in a January 2021 video titled “Fauci lied to you AGAIN.” 

She claimed that he “lied” about the rate or ratio of people with confirmed cases of COVID-19 who had died, which we did not find to be the case. 

She said “Fauci said lockdowns work,” which she then said was “obviously false” and based on “zero scientific evidence.” But experts we consulted said that there was research showing that travel restrictions and stay-at-home orders were effective in slowing the spread of COVID-19. 

Wheeler also stated that Fauci “admitted he lied to us” when he initially said early in March 2020 that widespread use of face masks was not necessary. She said Fauci only said that to “manipulate us into not buying masks so that there wouldn’t be a shortage for health care workers.”

At the time, Fauci said he was “not against” anyone wearing a mask if they wanted to, but he warned that if everyone wore them it “could lead to a shortage of masks for the people who really need it,” particularly health care providers and people who were ill.

Then in April 2020, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that everyone wear face coverings in public because of virus transmission from asymptomatic carriers, Fauci also began encouraging universal mask use. He said in an interview two months later that he and other health officials truly did not realize the degree to which infected people without symptoms were spreading the virus, which led to the shift in masking guidance. That does not mean that he “lied” to the public.


The NIAID told us that Fauci has spent much of his career treating patients at the NIH Clinical Center– including, recently, those with COVID-19. But Republican Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz, who has criticized Fauci’s pandemic guidance and previously called for him to resign, falsely claimed that “Fauci’s never taken care of patients,” while suggesting that Fauci does not approach COVID-19 from a “patient care” perspective.

Fauci has said in interviews that he still sees patients because it’s part of who he is as a physician.


As COVID-19 cases declined early in 2022, Fauci noticeably made fewer media appearances to talk about the pandemic, especially as other newsworthy events, such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, began to dominate the national news coverage. Some Republican politicians and conservative pundits falsely suggested that doing fewer interviews meant that Fauci had “disappeared” from public view because he had become so unpopular – which was not the case.


Vaccines and Treatments

In a March 2020 interview with Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of the company now known as Meta, Fauci emphasized the importance of conducting clinical trials to determine vaccine safety before distribution. He cited examples of vaccine candidates for other viruses, such as HIV and respiratory syncytial virus, that were found to be harmful during the evaluation process. 

“This would not be the first time, if it happened, that a vaccine that looked good in initial safety actually made people worse,” Fauci said of the COVID-19 vaccines, which were still being tested at the time. Ultimately, in clinical trials and real-world conditions, the COVID-19 vaccines available in the U.S. were found to be safe and effective. 

Fauci did not admit that “Covid Vaccines May Actually Make People ‘Worse,'” as a viral headline published in December 2021 misleadingly claimed. The story lifted Fauci’s comments out of context to give the false impression that he had recently said the approved and authorized vaccines would do more harm than good.


Fauci also said in a June 2020 interview that a COVID-19 vaccine could begin to be manufactured “even before you know it works.” That would allow the vaccine to be widely distributed more quickly, but only “if in fact it is effective,” he said.

Fauci’s remarks were twisted in a viral meme that falsely suggested he supported administering a COVID-19 vaccine before the clinical trial process was completed.


Then in a December 2020 CNN interview, just days before the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine was granted emergency authorization by the Food and Drug Administration, Fauci made a distinction between the vaccine’s effectiveness against the COVID-19 disease and against infection with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes that illness.

He said the vaccine was found to be “very good” at protecting individuals “against clinically recognizable disease.” However, he said it was uncertain “at this point, that the vaccine protects you against getting infected.”

A popular video distorted Fauci’s remarks to falsely suggest that he said the vaccine doesn’t “protect you from covid.”

In a May 2021 Senate hearing, Fauci estimated that “probably around 60%” of his NIAID colleagues had been vaccinated against COVID-19 at the time. Viral online posts distorted his comments to misleadingly claim that half of employees at federal health agencies “are refusing” the vaccines, which Fauci never said. 

At the time, NIAID told us that 67% of the NIH staff were vaccinated, but the “actual number may be higher” because reporting was voluntary.

Hydroxychloroquine is an antimalarial drug that has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a treatment for COVID-19. But a Gateway Pundit story shared on Facebook in June 2021 declared, “SMOKING GUN: FAUCI LIED, MILLIONS DIED — Fauci Was Informed of Hydroxychloroquine Success in Early 2020 But Lied to Public Instead Despite the Science.”

The story was based on two emails that were sent to Fauci in February 2020. In one email, two doctors expressed the possibility that the drug could be effective against COVID-19. Fauci forwarded the email to an NIH deputy director who works in microbiology and infectious diseases and wrote: “Please take a look and respond to them. Thanks.”

In the other email, a pharmacologist made reference to “data from 2005 showing inhibition of SARS infection,” which is a different disease caused by a different coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) from the one that leads to COVID-19. We previously wrote about a 2005 study that found the drug prevented the spread of that SARS virus in cell culture — which is not the same as working in humans.

Those emails are not evidence that hydroxychloroquine is effective against COVID-19, or that Fauci kept this from the public. In fact, randomized controlled trials — the highest standard of evidence — have found that hydroxychloroquine isn’t beneficial in treating hospitalized COVID-19 patients. 

Remdesivir is an antiviral medication approved by the FDA to treat COVID-19. The drug was invented by the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, which receives any profit from sales of the drug as a treatment for COVID-19. 

A viral social media post falsely claimed that Fauci was “pushing” remdesivir because he “invented” it with Bill Gates and they would profit from its use.
Fauci does not hold a patent for remdesivir, and a spokesperson for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation told USA Today that the foundation also was not involved in the invention or development of the drug.

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Dr ANTHONY FAUCI's COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS to the 2022 GRADUATING CLASS of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
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@Avery
I can't agree with Fauci's original quote that he "had nothing to do" with closing down schools. He did use his big, national platform to say, "the schools should be closed".
  • Not really.  I mean he spoke those a specific words but always in the context that it should not be a national shut-down, it should be local decision-making.  Certainly, you have to admit that a Governor like DeSantis is far more responsible for shutting down shcools than Dr. Fauci because unlike Dr. Fauci he had actual authority to shut down schools and unlike Dr. Fauci, he applied a "one-size-fits-all" statewide policy while ignoring Fauci's strong advice to treat school closure according to regional circumstance.  Based on the evidence and if you are reading what Fauci actually rather than what people like DeSantis say about him, then Fauci was objectively more 'pro open schools" than DeSantis or Trump or many other prominent Republican decsion-makers who falsely scapegoatted Fauci later on.  DeSantis was actually selling t-shirts saying "Don't Fauci my Florida"pretending that the decisoin was not his to make- I call that quite cowardly.
That is going to have some amount of influence on the people making the decision.
  • Objectively, the decision-makers were far more cautious than Fauci's recommendations.  At the height of the pandemic, when 3,000 people a day were dying, Fauci was actively, publicly calling on schools to open  while very few polticians had the guts to make such a recommendation.


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Dr ANTHONY FAUCI's COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS to the 2022 GRADUATING CLASS of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
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@Avery
they had bat samples for no apparent reason, of which definitely don't have similar genetic profiles to Covid-19. Yep, and I'm sure EcoHealth Alliance just stared at the bat samples and did nothing with them, too. I'm sure that the research in Wuhan, which isn't known to study coronavirus in bats at all (and if it did, it's definitely not gain-of-function research, either), didn't use any of its EcoHealth Alliance funding to study anything else How China's 'Bat Woman' Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus - Scientific American .
  • excellent proof that you lack basic context about Wuhan.  After SARS broke out in 2003, virologists around the world were astonished to discover that bats in Southeast Asia and particularly in the caves around were just chock full of coronaviruses with zoonotic potential.  WHO and US scientist strongly urged China to build a lab in Wuhan that focused on coronaviruses, bat coronaviruses particularly, bat coronaviruses that might cross over into humans most particularly.  US and CHinese scientist weren't collecting massive amounts of  bat samples for "no reason"  Scientists knew since 2003 that COVID-19 was coming, was more or less inevitable and wanted a lab in Wuhan to serve as a lookout.  It is not a fucking coincidence, the lab at Wuhan discovered COVID-19 early and sounded the international alarm a full eight weeks before COVID-19 reached pandemic potential in the US.  Wuhan was purpose built for that exact reason.  American researchers were developing an mRNA vaccinne for 15 years for that exact emergency that smart scientists accurately predicted would happen.
The standard I am specifically using is that the NIH funded the Wuhan lab (through EcoHealth Alliance).
  • Nobody has ever denied that Ecohealth sent a very small amount of money to Wuhan but it was not for "gain-of-function" research or virological research of any kind, it was just for gathering samples.  When your sources claim the Dr. Fauci was funding COVID- that's a total lie.  When your sources claim the NIH was funding something risky in China- that's a total lie.  
  • It is hard to believe you genuinely don't understand this distinction.  You are just scraping for some kind of conspiracy where none exists.

All manipultion is a lie of some sort.
Prove it.
Talk about getting your panties in a bunch over nothing lol.
  • I don't call false accusations that somebody mass murdered millons of people "nothing."   There's a lot of mental illness on this site.  If somebody believes your false accusations and does harm to Dr. Fauci based on your claim that he is a mass murderer, do you think you bear responsibility?
I want to know why it did happen because this man was heavily involved in dealing with the Covid-19 outbreak. It's important to know if gain-of-function research was being conducted, because that could mean a plandemic. 
  • What is "it" in this sentence?  Many smart scientists have taken a hard look a the possibility that COIVD-19 was deliberate or designed but the whole nature of the virus and its emergence from a well known vector suggest it would be a stupid, pointless, impossible to control design which is borne out by the fact that if China did it deliberately they hurt themselves harder than they hurt anybody else.

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Dr ANTHONY FAUCI's COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS to the 2022 GRADUATING CLASS of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
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@Avery

None of what you wrote here proves that Covid-19 came from a wetmarket.
  • I am not trying to prove that COVID-19 comes from a wet market.... scientists say they don't know where it came from, remember?
  • I am arguing that you are deliberately slandering Fauci without evidence when you claim, "Anthony is partly responsible for Covid. He helped secure funding for the gain of function research conducted in Wuhan"
    • To make your claim, you must prove that COVID came from the research lab in Wuhan.
I could get into how peer review means virtually nothing, or how this is all Ad Hominem (again), but none of that matters if the paper is correct, so I'm just going to focus on that.
    • Again, you clearly don't understand ad hominem if you think that calling out a scientific claim for not revealing what procedures it followed counts as ad hominem.
    • Nothing requires you to adhere to basic scientific standards for the formulation of your beliefs but then nobody in government or science will or ought to take your claims seriously.  If you are going to claim that Fauci knew about some kind of dangerous research in Wuhan, you must be able to show evidence that is both willing stand up to basic fact-checking such as peer review and applies those standard voluntarily.
Is there any evidence to show that this potential problem actually affected the paper?
  • Yes.  It's like claiming you have Royal Flush in poker but refusing to show your cards.  Nobody has any reason to believe your claim.
This is not a specific critique of the paper.
  • Yes it is.  That specific critique is that this paper does not adhere to basic scientific standards of proof, documentation, fact-checking, data sharing, etc.
Firstly, where is it shown that the "natural origin" theory is the consensus in the "scientific community?". Seems like a bare assertion.
  • The fact-checker provided you with five citations backing this statement.  Why are you pretending they didn't?
Secondly, where does this critique contend with the facts I referred to above:

(1) no animal in/surrounding/involved in the Huanan market had traces of Covid-19, and
  • You originally claimed  "None of the animals in the Huanan wetmarket initially tested had traces of coronavirus (around 2000 samples), and zero animals from 209 other wetmarkets around China (around 80,000 samples) has traces of coronavirus" but in fact many, many new SARS like coronaviruses were found.  SInce viruses rapidly mutate after zoonotic transfer, it is not particular surprising that no COVID-19 was found.  We don't know exactly what the virus looked like before it infected humans but it probably didn't look exactly like COVID-19.
(2) none of the first detected Covid-19 patients had anything to do with the Huanan wetmarket, and
(3) of the patients who did have contact with the Huanan wetmarket (during the initial outbreak), none of them had Covid-19?
It's rejected based on the above facts.
  • So, yeah, your "analysis" is pulling from easily falsified fake news.  Your source doesn't even have simple, basic fact right.
You need to demonstrate why the findings are based on "initially incomplete examination of the scientific evidence", rather than just blindly stating it.
  • All I have to demonstrate that you are knowingly, creully making up evil, false accusations about a guy for no good reason.  That is totally accomplished.
I refer to the explanations above (i.e. nobody involved in the Huanan wetmarket having Covid-19, none of the animals in the Huanan wetmarket having Covid-19 etc.)
  • Fake news, gullible.
LOL. Why would we acknowledge that when it's untrue?
  • Yeah, right.  Your dude has totally proved the origins of COVID and hundreds of goverments and hundreds of thousands of scientists are all working together is some conspiracy to cover up the facts.  Use basic common sense.
  • Both of these are frequently noted sources of fake news, one from the right, one from the left.  I'm beginning to think I'm wasting time on a fake new junky with zero legit research skills.
How the hell do you think someone is going to research for months on end and then publish extensive research on this?
  • He didn't publish in any science journal. 
But since the NIH has never claimed that COVID-19 definitely orginates from bats that is not the NIH backtracking or changing narrative.
They're still claiming it as of March this year: "Research evidence suggests that SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV originated in bats"
  • I see.  So the problem  here is that you don't comprehend that "research suggests" is an entirely different standard than "definitely orginates."
AFAIK, there was no official statement as to what caused Covid-19, but they allowed a litany of research to be published which concluded that it was likely Covid-19 started from the wetmarket:

"As for the vast majority of human viruses, the most parsimonious explanation for the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is a zoonotic event. The documented epidemiological history of the virus is comparable to previous animal market-associated outbreaks of coronaviruses with a simple route for human exposure." The origins of SARS-CoV-2: A critical review (nih.gov) 

"Substantial evidence to suggest the source of transmission of the virus occurred within the Wuhan wet market" Illicit Wildlife Trade, Wet Markets, and COVID-19: Preventing Future Pandemics - PubMed (nih.gov) 

"The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic" The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic - PubMed (nih.gov) 
  • Exactly.  This is exactly what responsible  science is saying:  very, very likely, most parismonious, substantial evidence.  Not a proven fact, not 100% proof that your lab theory is bullshit, just very, very likely that your theory is bullshit.  SInce you have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are easily persuaded by tabloids and .pdfs that reinforce your predjudices and totally immune to the system of careful gatekeepers and factcheckers that try hard to inform the public what is nonsense and what is real, I really don't think you are capable of producing an argument for your claim that Dr Fauci is responsbile for COVID or that Dr. Fauci ever lied about gain-of-function research.


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MAR-a-LAGO CLASSIFIED PAPERS HELD US SECRETS about IRAN and CHINA
MAR-a-LAGO CLASSIFIED PAPERS HELD US SECRETS about IRAN and CHINA
Iran’s missile program, U.S. intelligence work aimed at China were among the most sensitive material seized by the FBI, people familiar with the matter say
By Devlin Barrett
Published October 21, 2022 at 11:00 a.m. EDT

Some of the classified documents recovered by the FBI from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and private club included highly sensitive intelligence regarding Iran and China, according to people familiar with the matter. If shared with others, the people said, such information could expose intelligence-gathering methods that the United States wants to keep hidden from the world.

At least one of the documents seized by the FBI describes Iran’s missile program, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation. Other documents described highly sensitive intelligence work aimed at China, they said.

Unauthorized disclosures of specific information in the documents would pose multiple risks, experts say. People aiding U.S. intelligence efforts could be endangered, and collection methods could be compromised. In addition, other countries or U.S. adversaries could retaliate against the United States for actions it has taken in secret.

The classified documents about Iran and China are considered among the most sensitive the FBI has recovered to date in its investigation of Trump and his aides for possible mishandling of classified information, obstruction and destruction of government records, the people said. The criminal probe is unfolding even as the Justice Department and a district attorney in Georgia investigate alleged efforts by Trump and others to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and as a House select committee has subpoenaed the former president seeking documents and testimony related to those allegations.

Trump has denied wrongdoing in having the documents at Mar-a-Lago, claiming in a recent television interview that he declassified any documents in his possession, and that a president can declassify information “even by thinking about it.” National security lawyers have derided those claims.

A spokesman for the former president did not respond to requests for comment Friday morning. But after this article published online, Trump posted on social media, decrying what he called leaks “on the Document Hoax” and suggesting that the FBI and the National Archives and Records Administration were trying to frame him.

“Who could ever trust corrupt, weaponized agencies, and that includes NARA,” Trump wrote. “ … Also who knows what NARA and the FBI plant into documents, or subtract from documents — we will never know, will we?”

Some of the most sensitive materials were recovered in the FBI’s court-approved search of Trump’s home on Aug. 8, in which agents seized about 13,000 documents, 103 of them classified and 18 of them top secret, according to court papers.

Those papers were the third batch of classified documents recovered in the course of the investigation. Boxes voluntarily sent from Mar-a-Lago to the National Archives and Records Administration earlier this year were found to contain 184 classified documents, 25 of which were marked top secret, according to court records. In June, Trump’s representatives responded to a subpoena by giving investigators 38 additional classified documents.

The Washington Post has previously reported that one of the documents seized in the FBI search described a foreign country’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities. The people discussing the case would not say if that intelligence related to Iran, China or some other nation. Iran’s missile program and nuclear capabilities are closely watched by the Western world; U.S. intelligence agencies believe Tehran is close to having enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon, but has not demonstrated the mastery of some technologies necessary to deploy such weapons, such as the ability to integrate a nuclear warhead with a long-range delivery system.

The people familiar with the matter said that many of the more sensitive documents Trump or his aides apparently took to Mar-a-Lago after he left the White House are top-level analysis papers that do not contain sources’ names. But even without individual identifiers, such documents can provide valuable clues to foreign adversaries about how the United States may be gathering intelligence, and from whom, the people said.

Some of the seized documents detail top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are not informed about them, The Post reported in September. Only the president, some members of his Cabinet or a near-Cabinet-level official could authorize government officials to know details of these special-access programs, people have said. Investigators conducting the Mar-a-Lago probe did not initially have the authority to review that material.

The new information about the documents obtained by The Post highlight what current and former intelligence officials say was the inherent risk posed by removing highly classified material from strictly guarded government buildings and keeping them in a private club filled with staffers, guests and visitors.

David Laufman, a former senior Justice Department official who handled cases involving mishandling of classified information, said the “exceptional sensitivity” of the material found at Mar-a-Lago will count as an aggravating factor as prosecutors weigh whether to file charges in the case.

“The exceptional sensitivity of these documents, and the reckless exposure of invaluable sources and methods of U.S. intelligence capabilities concerning these foreign adversaries, will certainly influence the Justice Department’s determination of whether to charge Mr. Trump or others with willful retention of national defense information under the Espionage Act,” Laufman said.

The FBI referred questions about the documents to the Justice Department, which declined to comment for this article.

Trump and his most ardent supporters have dismissed the criminal probe as an effort to undermine the former president — who remains the most influential figure in the Republican Party and talks openly about running for the White House again in 2024.

Officials at the National Archives began seeking the return of government records from the Trump administration last year, after officials came to believe that some records — such as letters from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un — were unaccounted for, and perhaps in Trump’s possession.

After months of back and forth, Trump agreed in January to turn over 15 boxes of material. When archivists examined the boxes, they found 184 documents marked classified, including 25 marked top secret, which were scattered throughout the boxes in no particular order, according to court filings.

Archives officials notified the Justice Department, and authorities soon came to believe that Trump had not turned over all the classified material in his possession. Justice officials secured a grand jury subpoena in May, seeking any documents still at Mar-a-Lago that bore classified markings. In response, Trump’s advisers met with government agents and prosecutors at Mar-a-Lago in early June, handing over a sealed envelope containing another 38 classified documents, including 17 marked top secret, according to court papers.

According to government filings, Trump’s representatives claimed at the meeting that a diligent search had been conducted for all classified documents at the club.

That meeting, which included a visit to the storage room where Trump’s advisers said the relevant boxes of documents were kept, did not satisfy investigators, who were not allowed to inspect the boxes they saw in the storage room, according to government court filings.

Five days later, senior Justice Department official Jay Bratt wrote to Trump’s lawyers to remind them that Mar-a-Lago “does not include a secure location authorized for the storage of classified information.” Bratt wrote that based on the visit, it appeared classified documents “have not been handled in an appropriate manner or stored in an appropriate location.”

“Accordingly, we ask that the room at Mar-a-Lago where the documents had been stored be secured and that all of the boxes that were moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago (along with any other items in that room) be preserved in that room in their current condition until further notice.”

Agents continued to gather evidence that Trump was apparently not complying with either government requests or subpoena demands. According to people familiar with the investigation, security camera footage showed boxes being carried from the storage area after the May subpoena was issued — and a key witness told the FBI that he moved the boxes at Trump’s instruction.

With that evidence in hand, the Justice Department decided to seek a judge’s approval to search the former president’s home.



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@Avery
When I say the coronavirus, everyone but you seems to understand I'm referring to the one which caused the pandemic. You're just being obtuse.
  • Not any scientist of any stripe would conflate the two.  That's like accusing somebody of murder and then later saying "well, actually he killed a mammal.  Everybody knows that humans are mammals"    The common cold is a coronavirus.  Scientists researching the common cold don't need to follow the same protocols as scientists researching SARS. 
  • Since you are judging a scientist who would not conflate the two, you should judge Fauci according to a scientist's standards.

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@Avery
This contention here is pretty relevant because it appears that the research conducted in Wuhan would be considered gain-of-function with the historical definition, but not the new NIH definition.
  • Please answer as directly as possible.  What research in Wuhan are you talking about?  

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When Fauci says "and even if it was", he starts referring to a non-NIH version -- he doesn't only mean the NIH version now.

Furthermore, he shouldn't be entertaining what others might think because their definition should be wrong to him. His response to Rand Paul should have been, 'the NIH was not funding gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab'.   But those weren't the responses given. Instead, we got the contradictory 'it's not and even if it was, it's according to the guidelines'. Fauci's own words contradict himself.

  • WTF?
    • Dr. Anthony Fauci: (59:49) Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
    • Dr. Anthony Fauci: (01:01:43)  I don’t favor gain-of-function research in China. You are saying things that are not correct.
    • Dr. Anthony Fauci: (01:03:20)  I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done, and I’m fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China. However, I will repeat again, the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded gain-of-function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
    • Dr. Anthony Fauci: (01:04:10)  I fully agree that you should investigate where the virus came from. But again, we have not funded gain-of-function research on this virus in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. No matter how many times you say it, it didn’t happen.
    • Dr. Anthony Fauci: (01:05:00)  Yeah. I mean, I just wanted to say, I don’t know how many times I can say it, Madam Chair, we did not fund gain-of-function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
  • Senator Paul had deceptively switched the subject to Dr. Baric's research in North Carolina so it would have been  non-responsive and confusing to make some reply about research Wuhan to that specific question.
  • Do you still stand by your OP claim that Fauci was lying about gain-of-function research in Wuhan?  And if yes, why?

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Will Novice Pass Oromagi?
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@Mharman
The fault is yours "Hillary Clinton.... could cause a war with us" would only be correct grammar if you were Russian, right?   and I did not accuse, only asked with some expression of doubt.
  • I think we have already had it.  I think Novice lost badly by any objective standard for rational debate but he won the popular vote anyway.  As I've long predicted, quantity must eventually outpace quality given the present ratings system but that doesn't give me any motivation to engage in debates in future, does it?


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Tulsi Gabbard, Truth teller to the DNC, leaves Democrat party.
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@bmdrocks21
You said "you imposed your no-fly zone against us". So either you are accusing me personally or me as a collective member of Russia as having imposed that no-fly zone.

  • POST #37:  "The fault is yours "Hillary Clinton.... could cause a war with us" would only be correct grammar if you were Russian, right?   and I did not accuse, only asked with some expression of doubt."

Not supporting a foreign country also doesn't make me a traitor. Neither I nor Gabbard is under any obligation to support Ukraine.
  • POST #2: Republicans like Mitt Romney and Adam Kinzinger are not calling Gabbard  a traitor because she fails to support Ukraine.  They clearly state that Gabbard is a traitor for deliberately spreading QAnon/Russia's false propaganda that the United States Military was developing bioweapons in the Ukraine in violation of  many international treaties, which Russia cited as justification for striking US facilities. Since Gabbard is active military  in Psy-ops with top secret clearance and has sworn her allegiance to that institution, her enlistment of support against that military is correctly labeled as treasonous.  Nobody has said anything about your obligations to anything.
Agreement among politicians among two parties doesn't make a position not extremist.
  • No, what makes a position extremist is distance from the poltical center.  When the majority of moderates from both both parties agree that a certain position is correct, that is what makes a posistion "not extremist."
And there is no need to get hung up on me calling her a psycho. That's irrelevant. The relevant point is that Russia (or any other country) can support a US candidate without making that candidate a puppet, shill, or traitor.
  • The Russian dictator's stated goal of restoring totalitarian dominance in Europe is a threat to peace, democracy, capitalism, equality and freedom worldwide.  Any US poltical candidate who is comfortable enough with Putin's agenda to merit Russian support is disqualified from poltical office on that basis alone.  Advocates for democracy and a global economy have a problem with Putin's plans for the world, period.
And the fact is, Hillary's foreign policy positions made her very unpopular with Russia.
  • You mean unpopular with Putin, the Russian dictator.  No rational observer would suppose that Putin's foreign policy represents the interests of the Russian people.
And supporting policies that could easily lead to an armed conflict over a fairly unimportant country's territory is something I would consider extreme and not in our interests.
  • Putin is clearly dedicated to a policy of fairly continuous, slowly escalating armed conflict on any and all its borders.  There is no question of whether Russia is avoiding armed conflict, they are actively aggressively pursuing armed conflict.   The only question is whether the international community stands together to oppose unlawful invasions or waits to fall piecemeal to expansionist dictators.
Russia has provided direct military aid to Assad. Russia has historically supported Assad. Why would putting a no-fly zone that could target Russian military planes be something that in any way keeps him in power? Russia vetoed draft resolutions from the UN that were demanding Assad's resignation. It is clear that these no-fly zones threatened Assad, not help him.
  • Since I used the Iraq example, I think it is obvious I meant a no-fly zone as opposed to US ground forces invading just as a no-fly zone in Iraq proved a cheap and efficient means of suppressing Hussien's influence, protecting the Kurdish and Shia groups as US allies, discouraging Iranian incursions when compared to the Republican preference for ground invasion which proved very costly and ultimately destabilized all of those interests.  I'm not necessarily defending no-fly as a strategy, I'm just explaining that from the moderate's perspective no-fly zones were a proven stablilization technique
A coalition of NATO-led powers imposed a no-fly zone in Libya and Gaddafi got sodomized with a bayonet.
  • A win as far America was concerned and also effective in Kosovo.
He isn't insane, he knows that he has no hope of winning a fight against NATO. He is barely winning against Ukraine with far less equipment, money, and manpower (even with foreign help) than most singular NATO nations.
  • Disagree about sanity.  Hyperagressivon, narcissism, sadsim- strong psychopathic traits that are pretty common to all dictators.  Also strong indicators of some kind of  profound neurological disorder- most likely Parkinson's.  Putin has had to delay a number of important public appearances, apparently because he is often suffering from an unpresentable state. 
  • Strongly disagree that Russia is winning in any sense of the word.  Notice the guys who blew up the Crimean Bridge were Russians  The guys who shot up the Russain training base were Russians.  A lot of prominent influencers are falling out of windows or dying under unusual circumstances which suggests a large degree of resistance within the Russian elite.  A lot of unusual fires and infrastructure failures suggest a large degree of resistence from the proletariat as well.  As I've said elsewhere, I think we are in Putin's endgame now and I doubt he will be alive 2 years from now, however thing play out.  Just yesterday, Russia evacuated the single major regional capitol they managed to acquire, Kherson, which tells us that Russia thinks they've lost that hub for the winter- along with fresh water and fuel pipelines to Crimea.  If Russia has to evacuate Crimea this winter I don't think any Russian can keep pretending that they winning something.
Ukraine wasn't valuable enough relative to the risks.
  • False.  As we've already seen Ukraine is vital to feeding North Africa, the Middle East and Russia.  Ukrainian democracy is also vital to protecting democracies in smaller, surrounding states.  A democratic Ukraine is the best argument possible for democracy in Russia.
NATO isn't invading countries, but it is an expanding military alliance that was meant to keep Russia out.
  • Doesn't have to be that way.  If the Russian people were willing to support democracy and territorial integrity (I think they do, generally), there is a very realistic long term path for Russia to join the European community.
NATO expansionism is obviously a catalyst for this conflict. We had a good opportunity post-Cold War to have a friendly relationship with the Russians, but continuously expanding NATO was like spitting in their face.
  • NATO turned down Ukrainian membership twice in 2008 and 2014 precisely to deprive Putin of the justification for this unlawful invasion which he pursued anyway.



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@Avery
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Here is the letter that prefaced Fauci's recommendations.


It looks like around March Fauci was advising for the closing of schools.
  • This is a letter addressed to Fauci on Mar 16th with many scientists calling for a nationwide shutdown. Clearly, if Fauci wanted all schools shut down, public support like this would have given Fauci polticial cover.   Instead,  I have already documented Fauci's response 4 days later when he quite clearly states that decision must be made locally, not nationally.  Again, I will point out that Fauci is ahead of Trump, who only supported Governors making the call 7 days after this letter.

  • This interview is March 6th, ten days before the above pressure, 2 weeks before the press conference where Fauci became a public enemy of the right for contradicting Trump with the truth.  
  • Even this early, Fauci is quite consistent:
    • "What I'm seeing and what I think we'll see, Howard, is not an official country-wide mitigation.  I think the public will essentially make their own decision.  People will be doing things like decreasing travel by doing the kinds of things that you mentioned- cancelling conferences, encouraging people to not work in the workplace if they could do it at home.  They're going to be doing that anyway, so I don't think it's going to be like a public health mandate, but people are going to start hunkering down a bit.  Because you see them doing it spontaneously anyway."

Around May 2020 there are a ton of articles describing fights with Trump on whether school restrictions should be lifted.
  • By May, the question of spring semester is essentially over and the debate was about how to re-open schools in the fall.  I have already including quotes above showing Fauci strongly supporting re-opening schools in the fall with vigorous measure like distancing and masking.  When Paul accusses Fauci on May 12th of supporting school closure and doesn't give Fauci any time to respond, Sen. Alexander makes a point of returning to the question and asks Fauci point blank whether he's recommmending schools remain closed in the fall and Fauci unequivocally says no.
.

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@Avery
Sure, but it doesn't matter whether I'm being manipulated or not.  What matters is whether the video is correct or not.  
  • All manipultion is a lie of some sort.
Fauci certainly has influence when he speaks on t.v, so he isn't absolved totally of the charge.
  • When Fauci speaks on TV he pretty consistently says the decision should be made locally and that his recommnedation is to to keep schools open whenever possible.   He pretty consistently backs the local decision-makers in their decisions but he also is a frequent advocate pushing for schools to open.  While I can find lots of examples of Fauci saying closed schools should be opened or closed schools should stay closed for a while longer, I can't find any examples of Fauci sayng that particular open schools should be closed in contradiction to local decision-makers. In spite of Republicans consistent scapegoating of Fauci as the source of school closures, I think the evidence shows that Fauci was more on the side of open schools than the state and local decision-makers who's authority he supported.  DeSantis is a pretty good example of how the political scapegoating worked.  On Easter weekend, when the US had rapidly surpassed any other country in COVID deaths, DeSantis stated that all FL schools would re-open by May since nobody under 25 years old had ever died of COVID.  Asked about DeSantis, Fauci replied that without getting into FL specifically, re-opening schools right now would definitely increase the  impact of the virus and that he'd want to get closer to May before making that decision.  He also corrected the DeSantis's misinformation by stating that there were definitely some Americans under 25 who had died from COVID.  DeSantis' reaction to Fauci's non-criciticsim was to make t-shirts saying, "Don't Fauci my Florida."  Honestly, I don't see any connection between Fauci's rational truth telling and DeSantis' emotional response.

It would also be interesting to see any evidence that Fauci talked about shutting schools before they were closed, if it exists.
  • Why so passive?  Why do you wait for others to bring you propaganda rather than researching the evidence for yourself?  Every task force press conference is available online.  
[Stuff about Trump and Rand]
Not relevant to the topic at hand: whether Fauci contradicted himself or not.
  • Just about any public figure that gives hundreds of interviews and press conferences is going contradict themselves every once in a while. An occaisional contradiction is far less relevant than the overall messaging of public figures, right?   The question is whether Trump and Paul are unfairly scapegoating Fauci for giving pretty consistent good information to cover up the fact that they themselves are guilty of delberately spreading false information for poltical gain.
Based on what you're saying, I think Fauci had very little to do with the schools closing.
  • So that means that pretty much all of Republican media, Republican polticians, etc are knowingly misinforming you and scapegoating a worthy civil servant.   Still don't care about being manipulated?

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Dr ANTHONY FAUCI's COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS to the 2022 GRADUATING CLASS of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
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@Avery

So, let's revise your stance based on these facts.
  • Based on some guy's non-scientific pdf?  No thank you
Be extremely specific: what fact do you claim NIH "backtracked" on?  What "initial narrative" has changed?
The NIH and I agree that the NIH's letter in Oct 2012 is 100% consistent with all prior NIH statements and all of Dr. Fauci's testimony regarding EcoHealth and Wuhan.  You can't say "backtrack" without first explaining what you are talking about.  In prior posts, you pointed to false headlines but I have demonstrated in detail how those headlines were malicious lies (and you have not refuted).
Here's me being extremely specific: the original story about the coronavirus originating in bats is wrong.
  • But since the NIH has never claimed that COVID-19 definitely orginates from bats that is not the NIH backtracking or changing narrative.
The original story about the coronavirus originating in a wetmarket is wrong.
  • But since the NIH has never claimed that COVID-19 definitely came from the Wuhan live animal market that is not the NIH backtracking or changing narrative.
The original story that the NIH did not fund the Wuhan lab is wrong.
  • The original story is that the Ecohealth alliance used $119,000/year of its NIH grant to pay for bat samples from Wuhan.
  • So did any NIH funds make thier way to Wuhan?  yes
  • Did the NIH fund any research in Wuhan?  no
  • Did the NIH fund any "gain of function" research in Wuhan?  no
  • Did the NIH fund any virological lab work in China?  no
  • Is your claim that Dr. Fauci   "is partly responsible for Covid [because] he helped secure funding for the gain of function research conducted in Wuhan"  even remotely true under any defintion of "gain of function" "helped secure funding" or "research" that you care to use? No,  Absolutely not.
  • Did the NIH or Dr. Fauci ever backtrack or change its narrative in any way ever about Ecohealth alliance giving $119,000/year to China?  No, it did not
  • Did the mouse model experiment that Dr. Tabak talks about in the letter you keep linking to take place in Wuhan or with the knowledge or participation of any Chinese scientist?  no
    • There was never a point where NIH denied the $119,000/yr payment to Wuhan for bat samples or changed it narrative.  When Dr. Fauci denies funding any gain of research in Wuhan that collection of samples could not qualify as gain of function research in any possible sense.  Paul wants to argue that any money given to Wuhan for any reason amounts to "funding research" but Paul's definition is a radical departure from any normal understanding of "funding research" and neither the NIH nor Dr. Fauci need adhere to Paul's overreach.
I have repeatedly said that the NIH funded the Wuhan lab, thus THEY worked together.
  • The NIH never funded virological research at Wuhan.  If you are going to change the standard to "they worked together" then all virology labs in every nations all share data, findings, peer review etc and there's certainly nothing there inconsistent with standard NIH, virological process, certainly nothing that NIH denied or would need or want to deny.  International scientific cooperation is to encouraged is a hallmark and foundation of all modern science.
  • Furthermore, the lab in Wuhan was built with US's enthusiastic encouragement to promote higher safety standard in Chinese research and to serve as a kind of smoke alarm for further SARS-like viruses since research showed the Wuhan region to be so rife with potential for zoonotic crossover- a function that Wuhan delivered excellently in the case of COVID, as far as we can tell.
Anyway, you dodged my point: the other variants they were testing (using the NIH grant money) could have been coronavirus -- they only denied testing some of the variants. 
  • Now you are just  flaunting your pronoun fuckery. 
    • Who is the first they? 
    • Who is the second they? 
  • The only variants tested using NIH grant money were tested in America. 
  • I'm not aware of any specific denial of any test of any specific variant... who and what are your referring to when you claim; "they only denied testing some of the variants."




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@Avery
Okay, I understand your argument better now.

So, **if** coronavirus research were funded by the NIH, and that research involved making a coronavirus more effective against humans, that would qualify for 'gain-of-function' research via the new 2011/2012 definition.
  • False.  For coronavirus research to be "gain-of-function" according to NIH standards, it must have a demonstrated potential for human pandemic.  That is "SARS, MERS, and avian flu strains in humans" as Dr. Baric succinctly explained in POST #9
(a) I still contend that the NIH funded the Wuhan Virology lab through Ecohealth Alliance NIH-Document-Production-Cover-Letter-2021.10.20_McMorris-Rodgers.pdf (house.gov)  
  • Which letter I went through in POST #27 in some detail and bolded and underlined  for you the parts where the NIH very specifically explains how this is not "gain-of-function" and is not SARS2 and could not be SARS2
    • It is not good faith argument to just keep repeating your contention while ignoring the fact I have blown your contention to pieces.
    • Your argument is "Fauci funded COVID-19"  and "Fauci lied about it"  This letter very specifically proves that both of your arguments are 100% false.  You have to address my arguments.  You can't repeat the fake news a third time and link to the same letter that proves your news as fake three times.
    • What is the physical link between the NIH funded research on mice in North Carolina and Wuhan? 
    • What proof do you have that WIV1 can become SARS- the geneolocial  equivalent of claiming that a chimpanzee gave birth to a live human?
(b) The definition is a bit of a bait-and-switch because it's possible for Fauci to say that gain-of-function research is not being conducted (in accordance with the new 2011/2012 definition), whilst gain-of-function research is being conducted via the old definition (that everyone besides the NIH is using).
  • False.  Fauci never ever baits-and-switches.  He is NIH.  He was a part of coming up with the definiton of "gain-of-function."  When Fauci says "gain-of-function" he only means the NIH version.  That's why Fauci says "...and even if it was" in his May 11th testimony- he never considers such research gain-of-function although others might, right?
Again, this is the issue with the NIH controlling the language as to what they are doing: the murderers are defining murder.
  • False and again you are just repeating your argument without bothering to address my counterargument that already disproved this argument.  The NIH had to go through peer review, Congressional approval, inspector general oversight, hundreds of commitees and meeting.  This is reasonably  like the Dept of Justice updating their definition of murder it is nothing at all like a murderer updating his definiton of murder.  Please address my arguments rather than just repeating shit over and over.
But we're not talking about "thousands of different coronavirus strains".
  • Well then you need to stop saying coronavirus and start saying SARS2 because when you say "Wuhan working on coronaviruses" that includes thousands of possiblities that have nothing to do with humans.

We're talking about the initial strand and its origin, because that will tell us who/what made it:
(1) The first reported cases of coronavirus were in the Wuhan area
  • true
(2) None of the animals in the Huanan wetmarket initially tested had traces of coronavirus (around 2000 samples), and zero animals from 209 other wetmarkets around China (around 80,000 samples) has traces of coronavirus 
  • False.  
    • The initial research revealed a close evolutionary relationship between SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-related bat viruses (Wu et al. 2020). Especially, the identification of the virus RaTG13 in Rhinolophus affinis bats sampled from Yunnan province of China, which is 96.1 per cent identical to SARS-CoV-2 at the whole-genome sequence level, indicated a probable bat origin of SARS-CoV-2 (Zhou et al. 2020b). Subsequently, other close relatives of SARS-CoV-2 were identified in bats sampled from Yunnan province of China (Zhou et al. 2020a), Japan (Murakami et al. 2020), and Thailand (Wacharapluesadee et al. 2021). Importantly, a virus named BANAL-52 discovered in Rhinolophus malayanus bats from Laos is closer to SARS-CoV-2 than any known viruses and has a potential for infecting humans (Temmam et al. 2022). All these data indicate that bats are a natural reservoir host of SARS-CoV-2.
    • we immediately performed a surveillance investigation in mammals in and around Wuhan after we identified an unknown coronavirus as the etiologic agent of COVID-19. As a result, canine alphacoronavirus were identified in raccoon dogs, while SARS-CoV-related coronaviruses and recombinant viruses of SARS-related and SARS-CoV-2-related coronaviruses were found in bats. However, no SARS-CoV-2 or the close relatives of SARS-CoV-2 were found in these mammals.
      • coronaviruses were screened in the lung, liver, and intestinal tissue samples from fifteen raccoon dogs, seven Siberian weasels, three hog badgers, and three Reeves’s muntjacs collected in Wuhan and 334 bats collected around Wuhan. Consequently, eight alphacoronaviruses were identified in raccoon dogs, while nine betacoronaviruses were found in bats. Notably, the newly discovered alphacoronaviruses shared a high whole-genome sequence similarity (97.9 per cent) with the canine coronavirus (CCoV) strain 2020/7 sampled from domestic dog in the UK. Some betacoronaviruses identified here were closely related to previously known bat SARS-CoV-related viruses sampled from Hubei province and its neighbors, while the remaining betacoronaviruses exhibited a close evolutionary relationship with SARS-CoV-related bat viruses in the RdRp gene tree and clustered together with SARS-CoV-2-related bat coronaviruses in the M, N and S gene trees, but with relatively low similarity. Additionally, these newly discovered betacoronaviruses seem unlikely to bind angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 because of the deletions in the two key regions of their receptor-binding motifs. Finally, we did not find SARS-CoV-2 or its progenitor virus in these animal samples.
      • https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/8/1/veac046/6601809
    • (that is- they looked at 362 animals in Wuhan, mostly bats and discovered 17 new coronaviruses similar to SARS2.  (oh fuck) The viruses most similar to SARS2 are found in bat caves 800 miles from Wuhan).

(3) Bayesian analysis by Steven C. Quay shows that a wetmarket origin has a chance of 0.2%, whilst a lab leak has a chance of 99.8% (same source, but here's a video that quickly goes through his findings: SARS-CoV-2 Bayesian Analysis by Steven Carl Quay MD Phd – The Published Reporter® ) 
  • Many red flags here:  not published in any science journal, no peer review, paid advertising, Quay is a legitimate M.D. but this paper is really nothing more than a .pdf file posted online.
    • "Examining the structure and format of the document it becomes immediately clear that this is not a real scientific study but a report that contains scattered data and images. Nowhere in the paper is there an explanation of the protocol used to select the items included in the author's analysis, nor of the process followed to arrive at the final conclusions or to eliminate possible data selection bias as it occurs typically in meta-analyses of scientific research....While Bayes' theorem is an extremely useful scientific tool when used correctly, it is also known for its ability to superficially justify pseudoscientific hypotheses when used incorrectly. The theorem does not derive objective probabilities, but relies entirely on the probabilities given to it and the way in which those probabilities are introduced....The third argument that the paper takes into account is three of the key studies that support the unanimity of the natural origin of the virus. The paper briefly describes all 3 studies as so problematic that it doesn't even consider them to renew the possibility of a natural origin of the virus....Essentially, at this point the paper rejects all the evidence that leads the scientific community to the consensus of natural origin, having questionably examined only a small part of the studies in question. At the same time, this rejection takes place in the place of an act, while the document then proceeds to a series of acts, each of which individually increases the probability of laboratory origin alone. Finally, the probabilities used in each act are subjective, and are based on the initially incomplete examination of the scientific evidence. Thus, with correspondingly biased practices, each editor is able to "prove as highly probable" almost any view he has decided to support in advance.
    • The paper in question is not a scientific study, but a report with confusing information and images without any explanation of the data selection protocol or the research process the author followed to reach his conclusions. The "study" in question has not been peer-reviewed, so no one has verified the accuracy of the data it presents or the conclusions, and therefore the claim that it proves that SARS-CoV-2 was manufactured in a laboratory is untenable.    https://www.ellinikahoaxes.gr/2021/02/13/study-dr-steve-quay-proves-sars-cov-2-was-lab-made-misinformation/
    • That is, your paper takes 193 pages to unscientifically declare that if we disregard all other explanations as invalid without any explanation, then the possibility of the subjectively preferred explanation is made to seem likely artifiicially.
    • Let's acknowledge that any medical professional with any honest insight into the origin of COVID-19 would be sure to publish in a  prestigious venue with peer review and enjoy the reputational benefits for the rest of her career.  The fact that Dr. Quay avoids scientists and goes straight to the tv cameras suggests his awareness that his conclusions are crap.
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Sorry, I should have cleaned that up better.
-->@Avery
-->@oromagi
Half your response is rubbish that can be lumped into two categories, so I'll address that first:

(1) I'm not Rand Paul and I'm not here to defend everything he said, so you should stop making those assumptions. I'm sure it would be far easier to attack my arguments if they were the same as Rand Paul's, but you're actually going to have to read what I write, rather than respond to stuff you already know. The video I originally linked was show the context in which Fauci said something, not to argue Rand Paul's argument Dr ANTHONY FAUCI's COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS to the 2022 GRADUATING CLASS of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY (debateart.com) . 

(2) Ad Hominem is a waste of everyone's time. I don't care what you think of the Nypost, Rand Paul or whoever. I care about the validity of arguments.
  • Let's recall your original thesis
    • "You can list all the awards you want, but that doesn't excuse the disastrous consequences of this man's actions.  Anthony is partly responsible for Covid. He helped secure funding for the gain of function research conducted in Wuhan. He is also on record lying about this ("does not fund gain-of-function research and if it is" -- massive contradiction): Exchange between Sen. Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci - YouTube  Keep all this in mind as Anthony talks about the "profound ways" Covid impacted these students."
    • That is- you called Fauci disasterous, responsible for COVID, and a liar and the only thing even close to evidence you present is Rand Paul's testimony.
    • Please reconcile these two statements.  If ad homs and Paul make my arguments "rubbish"  you must explain why your ad hom and Paul are not rubbish.  What consistent standard is being applied here?

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@Avery
-->@oromagi
Half your response is rubbish that can be lumped into two categories, so I'll address that first:

(1) I'm not Rand Paul and I'm not here to defend everything he said, so you should stop making those assumptions. I'm sure it would be far easier to attack my arguments if they were the same as Rand Paul's, but you're actually going to have to read what I write, rather than respond to stuff you already know. The video I originally linked was show the context in which Fauci said something, not to argue Rand Paul's argument Dr ANTHONY FAUCI's COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS to the 2022 GRADUATING CLASS of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY (debateart.com) . 

(2) Ad Hominem is a waste of everyone's time. I don't care what you think of the Nypost, Rand Paul or whoever. I care about the validity of arguments.
  • Let's recall your original thesis
    • "You can list all the awards you want, but that doesn't excuse the disastrous consequences of this man's actions.  Anthony is partly responsible for Covid. He helped secure funding for the gain of function research conducted in Wuhan. He is also on record lying about this ("does not fund gain-of-function research and if it is" -- massive contradiction): Exchange between Sen. Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci - YouTube  Keep all this in mind as Anthony talks about the "profound ways" Covid impacted these students."
    • That is- you called Fauci disasterous, responsible for COVID, and a liar and the only thing even close to evidence you present is Rand Paul's testimony.
    • Please reconcile these two statements.  If ad homs and Paul make my arguments "rubbish"  you must explain why your ad hom and Paul are not rubbish.  What consistent standard is being applied here?


The other half is worth responding to, so I'll do that now:

Okay then. You, the NIH and me agree that if a research team were looking into making a coronavirus more effective against humans, then that would be considered (via the new 2011/2012 NIH definition) as gain-of-function research. 
  • False.  It still could not be NIH "gain-of-function" since that American designation only applies to research funded by the NIH and no research team in Wuhan has ever been funded by the NIH, any more than the US would permit the Chinese government to direct American research.
Okay, I understand your argument better now.

So, **if** coronavirus research were funded by the NIH, and that research involved making a coronavirus more effective against humans, that would qualify for 'gain-of-function' research via the new 2011/2012 definition.

A couple things then:

(a) I still contend that the NIH funded the Wuhan Virology lab through Ecohealth Alliance NIH-Document-Production-Cover-Letter-2021.10.20_McMorris-Rodgers.pdf (house.gov)  

(b) The definition is a bit of a bait-and-switch because it's possible for Fauci to say that gain-of-function research is not being conducted (in accordance with the new 2011/2012 definition), whilst gain-of-function research is being conducted via the old definition (that everyone besides the NIH is using). So, the Wuhan lab can be engineering the coronavirus to better attack humans, yet it's not 'gain-of-function' in the new, 2011/2012 definition.

Again, this is the issue with the NIH controlling the language as to what they are doing: the murderers are defining murder.

  • There are thousands of different coronavirus strains, 7 of which have evolved to infect humans, 3 of which have demonstrated pandemic potential in humans.
    • Is it possible that Wuhan was trying to make some coronavirus more effective against humans?  Yes.
      • Is it likely?  No
      • Is there any evidence suggesting such activity?  No
But we're not talking about "thousands of different coronavirus strains". We're talking about the initial strand and its origin, because that will tell us who/what made it:

(1) The first reported cases of coronavirus were in the Wuhan area
(2) None of the animals in the Huanan wetmarket initially tested had traces of coronavirus (around 2000 samples), and zero animals from 209 other wetmarkets around China (around 80,000 samples) has traces of coronavirus A Bayesian analysis concludes beyond a reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 is not a natural zoonosis but instead is laboratory derived | Zenodo 
(3) Bayesian analysis by Steven C. Quay shows that a wetmarket origin has a chance of 0.2%, whilst a lab leak has a chance of 99.8% (same source, but here's a video that quickly goes through his findings: SARS-CoV-2 Bayesian Analysis by Steven Carl Quay MD Phd – The Published Reporter® ) 
(4) The part of the coronavirus that interacts with humans was 99.5% optimized for human-to-human transmission (same source)

So, let's revise your stance based on these facts:
  • Is it possible that Wuhan was trying to make some coronavirus more effective against humans?  Yes.
  • Is it likely?  Yes
  • Is there any evidence suggesting such activity?  No
whereas the NIH's backtracking and other official statements rejecting the initial narrative came around in October 2021 
  • Be extremely specific: what fact do you claim NIH "backtracked" on?  What "initial narrative" has changed?
  • The NIH and I agree that the NIH's letter in Oct 2012 is 100% consistent with all prior NIH statements and all of Dr. Fauci's testimony regarding EcoHealth and Wuhan.  You can't say "backtrack" without first explaining what you are talking about.  In prior posts, you pointed to false headlines but I have demonstrated in detail how those headlines were malicious lies (and you have not refuted).
Here's me being extremely specific: the original story about the coronavirus originating in bats is wrong. The original story about the coronavirus originating in a wetmarket is wrong. The original story that the NIH did not fund the Wuhan lab is wrong.

they specifically deny that the virus variants listed cannot have produced the deadly Covid-19 variant. I can accept that part of the argument, however that doesn't mean the other variants they were testing (via gain-of-function research) did not produce the deadly Covid-19 variant. 
  • Notice how you are now playing the same shell game as Paul. 
    • Your first "they" is a pronoun indicating the NIH
    • Your second "they" is a pronoun indicating the scientists in Wuhan
    • You changed the subject of your sentence and concealed that change by using the same pronoun for both- not good.
This is nonsense lol.

I have repeatedly said that the NIH funded the Wuhan lab, thus THEY worked together.

Anyway, you dodged my point: the other variants they were testing (using the NIH grant money) could have been coronavirus -- they only denied testing some of the variants. 

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Honestly, Oro is the biggest apologizer for corporate elites, you have to wonder what awards they gave him as well.....
Best Biscuits and Gravy in Denver 1992

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  • Ultimately, Fauci's opinion on school closures remains roughly the same through the pandemic- schools closures are a real harm that should be avoided but weighed against the harms of local outbreaks and in all cases the decision has to be made locally. 
  • June 4th, 2020  In his interview, Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said: “Children can get infected, so, yes, so you’ve got to be careful. You got to be careful for them, and you got to be careful that they may not spread it. Now, to make an extrapolation that you shouldn’t open schools, I think, is a bit of a reach.”  He also said opening schools “depends on the level of viral activity” in a particular area and it is time to be “creative” in reconfiguring classrooms to ensure students are not seated too close together.  “In some situations, there will be no problem for children to go back to school,” he said. “In others, you may need to do some modifications. You know, modifications could be breaking up the class so you don’t have a crowded classroom, maybe half in the morning, half in the afternoon, having children doing alternate schedules. There’s a whole bunch of things that one can do.”
  •  August 3, 2020  K-12 schools and colleges can reopen, but safety should come first, Fauci says
  • Nov 29th (the beginning of peak COVID) "We get asked it all the time. You know, we say it -- not being facetiously, as a sound bite or anything -- but, you know, close the bars and keep the schools open is what we really say," he said. "Obviously, you don't have one size fits all. But as I said in the past … the default position should be to try as best as possible within reason to keep the children in school or to get them back to school."
  • Dec 31st, 2020 (Middle of peak COVID)  Schools can safely reopen, even when there’s substantial community transmission  Fauci said the coronavirus acts very differently from the flu when it comes to children.  With the coronavirus, children seem to have lower levels of infection than the broader community. “That was almost counterintuitive, but it’s turning out to be that way,” Fauci said.  “What we should do is to do everything to support the maintenance of the children in school. ... If you really want to get society back to some form of normality, one of the first things we have to do is to get the children back in school.”
  • By the way, Trump wasn't saying anything about getting kids back in school at this point, really hadn't said much about the pandemic for months.  The entire  political apparatus was either coasting or planning to overthrow the government at this point.  Fuck the kids.
  • Jan 20, 2021, Fauci finally has influence again as Biden's Chief Medical advisor just as we hit record COVID death, hospitals crashing, medical supply shortages, etc.
  • Feb 12, 2021   “You should try to get as many teachers as you possibly can vaccinated as quickly as you possibly can,” Fauci said. “But to make it a sine qua non that you don’t open a school until every teacher is vaccinated, I think is not workable, and probably most of the teachers would agree with that ... You don’t want to essentially have nobody in school until all the teachers get vaccinated.”
  • May 13th, 2021  Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, said Thursday that schools in the fall should be open “full blast” five days a week after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that people who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 resume life without masks or other restrictions.
  • Sept 9th 2021    Surging Covid-19 cases – and the increasing proportion reported in children – are causing many health experts to worry about the outlook as the school year gets underway across the entire country.  But Dr. Anthony Fauci said there shouldn’t be a big uptick “if we do it right.”  “We’ve gotta get the school system masked in addition to surrounding the children with vaccinated people,” said the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “That’s the solution.”

In summary, the video clip is just MAGA propaganda.  If you do the hard work of researching the truth rather than lazily believing the latest doublethink rewrite of events Tucker tell you to believe this week, it's clear that Dr. Fauci is being correct and honest in this interview:

KARL: Obviously, these are local decisions.  But was it a mistake in so many state, in so many localities, to see schools closed as long as they were?

FAUCI: I think in some – I don't want to use the word mistake, Jon, because if I do it get taken out of the context that you’re asking me the question on.

KARL: Well, did it – was it – did we pay too high a price?

FAUCI: I would – yes, I would say that what we should realize and have realized, that there will be deleterious collateral consequences when you do something like that. This idea that this virus doesn't afflict children is not so. It does. We've lost close to 1,500 kids so far.
(true and consistent with Fauci's warning on March 12, 2020)

KARL: But – but much less than the older population, obviously.

FAUCI: Yes. Oh, of course.

KARL: Yes. Yes.

FAUCI: But you shouldn't discount that it does afflict children. So, it isn't without consequences. If you go back, and I ask anybody to go back over the number of times that I’ve said we've got to do everything we can to keep the schools open, no one plays that clip. They always come back and say, Fauci was responsible for closing schools. I had nothing to do.
(true and true)

KARL: Yes. I mean you’re – you’re – you’re –

FAUCI: I mean let's get down to the facts.

KARL: You’re not the head of a school board.

FAUCI: Exactly.

KARL: But – but – but a lot of schools were – were closed. A lot of -- there was a lot of remote learning.

FAUCI: Right.

KARL: It went on for -- in some – in some jurisdictions for the better part of two years.

FAUCI: Right. Exactly.

KARL: And we've seen the impact. We’ve seen what’s happened in terms of lower reading scores, lower math scores.

FAUCI: Absolutely.

KARL: And who knows the psychological impact.

FAUCI: Right.

KARL: I mean it was a steep cost.

FAUCI: It was. The most important thing is to protect the children.

KARL: So was there a lesson here, future pandemics, that one thing is -- is more of a focus on that, is how can we protect the kids and get them back to school...

FAUCI: Exactly...

KARL: more quickly?

FAUCI: ... do both.  And the way you do that, you get the people who interact with the children to be vaccinated and masked. You provide ventilations in the schools. You try to keep them in the schools safely. The most important thing is to protect the children.

We're all interested to see your response.
  • I am doubtful


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I find the video he linked rather convincing at showing some of Fauci's hypocrisy.
  • Well that's too bad since there's a bunch of pretty obvious clues that this video is manipulating you
    • Notice that the video doesn't give you any context or timestamp for Fauci's comments, in fact the editor has zoomed in on Fauci in order to keep identifying information off the screen.
    • Notice the way the video cuts to popular movie clips to demonstrate to you how you are supposed to react, how this video wants you to feel about the information you are receiving.
    • Notice the way the editor manipulates the original vid with frame zooms to give you that "eye-popping" effect
    • Notice the editing as Fauci's comments are repeated, the video changes to black and white and the audio is slowed down to make Fauci's voice sound demonic- a classic technique in political smear advertising.
      • Greyparrot's video is not providing you data for analysis, he is telling you what emotion you are supposed to be feeling.
  • So, let's look at the facts.
    • The clip from which Faci is quoted as saying "the schools should be closed" is from  a PBS News Hour interview with Judy Woodruff  done on Mar 20th, 2020- so that's right at the beginning when experts were still hoping to contain a general pandemic.  Here is the exact quote in context:
      • Judy Woodruff:
        Speaking of spring break, there has been conflicting advice to Americans this week in different states about whether schools should be closed or open, day care centers.
        What is your best advice on that right now?
      • Anthony Fauci:
        You know, it really varies from location to location.  And you want to listen to the local — state and local health authorities. But you also would hope that they are looking at the guidelines that are coming from the federal level, because they are only guidelines. They say you should. They don't say you must.
        But they should at least be looked at. So, clearly, in certain circumstanc, particularly in areas where there's community spread, the schools should be closed.
    • By this date, 46 States had already shut down their public schools so when Fauci says he had nothing to with those closures he is 100% accurate. The admnistration had only declared a public emergency a week before and made no recommendations about school closure.   Fauci's first statement on school closures came on Mar 12th (when Trump was still promising that COVID would go away with warmer weather and there would be no pandemic) when he said:
      • YOU HAVE TO TAKE IT BY A STATE-BY-STATE BASIS. THE ONE THING I DO ADVISE AND I SAID THIS IN MULTIPLE HEARINGS AND MULTIPLE BRIEFINGS, THAT RIGHT NOW, WE HAVE TO START IMPLEMENTING BOTH CONTAINMENT AND MITIGATION. AND WHAT WAS DONE WHEN YOU DO CLOSING THE SCHOOLS IS MITIGATION. WE HAVE TO TRY AS BEST AS WE CAN TO DISTANCE OURSELVES FROM EACH OTHER,
      • Trump finally weighed in on the 23rd, (when he promised it would all be over by Easter) re-iterating exactly what Fauci said:
        • THE GOVERNORS OF THE VARIOUS STATES WILL HAVE LOT OF LEEWAY. IF WE OPEN UP, WHEN WE OPEN UP, THE GOVERNORS IN CERTAIN STATES, FOR INSTANCE, YOU GO TO SOME OF THE STATES JUST MENTIONED. THOSE SCHOOLS WILL BE OPEN. MANY CASES THEY'RE OPEN NOW. [apparently Trump was not aware that more than 95% of schools in the nation were closed at this point] BUT THE SCHOOLS WILL BE OPEN. IN OTHER CASES, GOVERNOR CUOMO, GAVIN NEWSOM OF CALIFORNIA, CERTAIN GOVERNORS WILL HAVE A DECISION TO MAKE. THEY'LL KEEP THEM CLOSED. THEY'RE GOING TO HAVE LEEWAY. WE'RE GIVING THE GOVERNORS LEEWAY.
    • But Mar 20th was also the date that Fauci became MAGA's political enemy.  3 days before Trump was Fauci's biggest fan:
      • "He's become a major television star for all the right reasons."
      • But on Mar 20th, Fauci publicly disagreed with Trump on a statement of fact:
        • At a long-winded White House briefing on Friday, President Trump enthusiastically and repeatedly promoted the promise of two long-used malaria drugs that are still unproven against the coronavirus, but being tested in clinical trials.
          “I’m a smart guy,” he said, while acknowledging he couldn’t predict the drugs would work. “I feel good about it. And we’re going to see. You’re going to see soon enough.”
          But the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, delicately — yet forcefully — pushed back from the same stage, explaining that there was only anecdotal evidence that the drugs, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, may be effective.
          •  On 15 June 2020, the FDA revoked its emergency use authorization, stating that it was "no longer reasonable to believe" that the drug was effective against COVID-19 or that its benefits outweighed "known and potential risks"
            • That is, Fauci = true Trump = lie
      • After that, Fauci was mostly disinvited from the White House pressers.  By Apr 12th, Trump was tweeting that Fauci should be fired and restricting his television appearances.
        • So, you can't really credit Fauci with any Federal decision-making between Mar 20 and the Biden Adminstraton.
  • Which didn't keep Paul from trying.  During a May 12th hearing, Paul condemned Fauci for suggesting that there was no evidence yet available about how much immunity infected people had acquired and insisted that immunity was good for at least 2 or 3 years (totally false).
    • Senator Rand Paul: (01:33:38) We’re opening up a lot of economies around the U.S. and I hope that people who are predicting doom and gloom and saying, “Oh, we can’t do this. There’s going to be the surge”, will admit that they were wrong... (01:35:15)I think we ought to have a little bit of humility in our belief that we know what’s best for the economy. And as much as I respect you, Dr. Fauci, I don’t think you’re the end all. I don’t think you’re the one person that gets to make a decision.  We can listen to your advice, but there are people on the other side saying there’s not going to be a surge and that we can safely open the economy and the facts will bear this out.
    • Dr. Anthony Fauci: (02:02:24) (responding later)  That obviously very difficult of the unintended consequences of trying to do something that broadly is important for the public health, and the risk of having a return or resurgence of an outbreak and the unintended deleterious consequences of having children out of school. We fully appreciate that. I don’t have an easy answer to that. I just don’t. You just have to see, on a step by step basis as we get into the period of time with the fall about reopening the schools, exactly where we’ll be at the dynamics of the outbreak.  (02:03:01) I might point out something that I think has been alluded to throughout some of the questions that we have a very large country and the dynamics of the outbreak on different, in different regions of the country. So I would imagine that situations regarding school will be very different in one region versus another, so it’s not going to be universally, or homogeneous. But I don’t have a good explanation, or solution to the problem of what happens when you close schools, and it triggers a cascade of events that could have some harmful circumstances.
[Let's note that you call Fauci hypocritical but this is the exact same language he used two years later.]

    • Senator Lamar Alexander: (03:24:07)....What I thought I heard was that Dr. Fauci said that vaccines are coming as fast as they ever have, but it’ll be later in the year at the earliest before we see that, but there’s some treatments that are modest, but are promising. There could be more, but that that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go back to school. That would be more of a testing strategy. Am I right, Dr. Fauci? You didn’t say you shouldn’t go back to school because we won’t have a vaccine by the fall?
    • Dr. Anthony Fauci: (03:25:05)No, absolutely not Mr. Chairman. What I was referring to is that going back to school would be more in the realm of knowing the landscape of infection with regard to testing. And as Admiral Giroir said, it would depend on the dynamics of the outbreak in the region where the school is. But I did not mean to imply at all, any relationship between the availability of a vaccine and treatment and our ability to go back to school. You’re quite correct.
[Of course, Paul was quite wrong and dishonest when he promised America that would be no surge.  Fauci was entirely honest when he said we would have to wait and see.]


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@Avery
>@Greyparrot
I really enjoy these short, succinct videos that expose the hypocrisy.

Great find.

I wonder if Oromagi will respond to this.
Officially, Greyparrot has requested a safe space immunity from me for the last two years.  Since I refuse to stoop to responding in kind, Greyparrot gets to make comments on my shit all day every day but officially I'm not supposed to ever reply.  I try hard to never read his posts or look at his many, many youtube clips since it just frustrates me that I'm not allowed to debate him.
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@Shila
These scrolls contained, among other writings, every book in the Old Testament (except Esther).
  • And multiple copies of most books but as I said, just crumbled fragments of the majority of these.
Until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, the earliest copy of the complete Old Testament was from A.D. 900.
  • Since nothing like a complete Old Testament was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls it is still true that "the earliest copy of the complete Old Testament [is] from A.D. 900."
Scholars compared this copy with the Dead Sea Scrolls (produced around 1,000 years earlier) and found that the Old Testament had been handed down accurately through the centuries.
  • Remarkably accurate over a thousand years, yes.  For example, one of the most perfectly preserved passages is the 166 words of Isiah 53, in which there are only 17 differences over 1000 years.
“ … the historical books of the Old Testament are as accurate historical documents as any that we have from antiquity and are in fact more accurate than many of the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, or Greek histories. These Biblical records can be and are used as are other ancient documents in archaeological work.”
  • I think everybody believe this to be true even before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.  Let's note that "as accurate historical documents from antiquity as any"  is profoundly low standard of accuracy by modern standards.
not only does archaeology confirm that the Bible is historically accurate, but
  • Well, some of the Bible is historically accurate, some of the Bible is pretty obvious bullshit.  The Dead Sea Scrolls do not establish that Jonah lived for three days inside a whale, for example.
professional archaeologists actually use the Bible as a guide in their work.
  • definitely true
The great Jewish archaeologist Nelson Glueck, who is known to be one of the top three archaeologists in history, has stated the following: "No archaeological discovery has ever contradicted a single, properly understood Biblical statement."
  • Not surprising since archaeology is only going to uncover the presence of large public buildings but not say, burning bushes or unicorns.  
  • But the absence of some archeological discoveries can be said to be dispositive- no sign of  global flooding in the last 10,000 years or Noah's Ark on Mt. Ararat, for example.



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@Avery
Okay then. You, the NIH and me agree that if a research team were looking into making a coronavirus more effective against humans, then that would be considered (via the new 2011/2012 NIH definition) as gain-of-function research. 
  • False.  It still could not be NIH "gain-of-function" since that American designation only applies to research funded by the NIH and no research team in Wuhan has ever been funded by the NIH, any more than the US would permit the Chinese government to direct American research.
Your only contention now is that the research done in Wuhan cannot be proven to involve making a coronavirus more effective against humans (of which I obviously contest). 
  • False. I contend that no evidence exists suggesting that COVID-19 originated from any Fauci (or NIH) related activity of any kind.
  • There are thousands of different coronavirus strains, 7 of which have evolved to infect humans, 3 of which have demonstrated pandemic potential in humans.
    • Is it possible that Wuhan was trying to make some coronavirus more effective against humans?  Yes.
      • Is it likely?  No
      • Is there any evidence suggesting such activity?  No
    • SARS2's four closest relatives were all found in bat populations AFTER Jan 2020- RaTG13,  BANAL-52, BANAL-103 and BANAL-236.  Is it possible that Wuhan discovered one of these strains earlier than reported and started trying to make it more effective against humans?  It is not impossible but it would be the stupidest, least scientific way to either study SARS-like viruses or to develop a bioweapon.  Essentially, Wuhan scientists would have to be acting in a totally random, non-scientific way.
  • My original contention was that Dr. Fauci is a praiseworthy public servant.  You are the one who came to this forum disputing that- saying that Dr. Fauci lied to Paul about "gain-of-function" and created COVID-19 in Wuhan. (Which also implies a massive coverup by most of  world's scientific community).
    • For all of your talk, you have yet to provide any evidence to support either of your OP claims.
I repeat: are you arguing against Paul or me? I'm making my own arguments. If you want to talk to Paul, go do that.
  • Glad as I am that your are now running away from Paul's terrible lies about Fauci on May 11th, I'll remind you that the only factual claim you made in your first post POST #4 was Paul's:
and you doubled down in your second post, POST #7

  • The only reason you've even heard of research by Dr. Baric or Dr. Shi is because of Paul's lies on May 11th.
    • The only reason NY Post is pumping out false headlines about the NIH is to lend credibility to Paul's false accusations, not based on any independent investigation or reporting.
  • If there are any differences between Paul's conspiracy theories about Fauci and your conspiracy theories about Fauci, you have yet to explain those differences.
whereas the NIH's backtracking and other official statements rejecting the initial narrative came around in October 2021 
  • Be extremely specific: what fact do you claim NIH "backtracked" on?  What "initial narrative" has changed?
  • The NIH and I agree that the NIH's letter in Oct 2012 is 100% consistent with all prior NIH statements and all of Dr. Fauci's testimony regarding EcoHealth and Wuhan.  You can't say "backtrack" without first explaining what you are talking about.  In prior posts, you pointed to false headlines but I have demonstrated in detail how those headlines were malicious lies (and you have not refuted).
  • This Lancet article and I are in complete agreement  that you are quite wrong.
    • "Although considerable evidence supports the natural origins of other outbreaks ....overwhelming evidence for either a zoonotic or research-related origin is lacking: the jury is still out. On the basis of the current scientific literature, complemented by our own analyses of coronavirus genomes and proteins,  we hold that there is currently no compelling evidence to choose between a natural origin  and a research-related origin."
    • IF you believe your own reasonable, expert source when it tells you that nobody can yet say what is responsible for COVID, then you must accept that your original thesis statement, "Anthony is partly responsible for Covid" is a nasty lie with no factual basis.
they specifically deny that the virus variants listed cannot have produced the deadly Covid-19 variant. I can accept that part of the argument, however that doesn't mean the other variants they were testing (via gain-of-function research) did not produce the deadly Covid-19 variant. 
  • Notice how you are now playing the same shell game as Paul. 
    • Your first "they" is a pronoun indicating the NIH
    • Your second "they" is a pronoun indicating the scientists in Wuhan
    • You changed the subject of your sentence and concealed that change by using the same pronoun for both- not good.
If a company were in charge of funding questionable research, and said company were also in charge of defining what is questionable research, would it not be a good idea for said company to change the definition of questionable research, so that the research is far more acceptable?
  • The advantage that a company in such a position has over the NIH is that the company only has to please the shareholders while the NIH has to satisfy the ethical concerns of thousands of colleagues, stakeholders, Congress, inspector-generals, etc., etc, etc.  That is why the NIH definition process had to be done completely in the open and took three years to go into effect.
I won't have my time wasted by entertaining Ad Hominem as logically valid.
  • Whatever, man.  No scientist is going to accept the NY Post as evidence for something and neither should you.

I haven't directly referred to Paul's arguments
  • False.  You twice directed us to Paul's dishonest trickster interrogation of Fauci on May 11th as the only source for your claim.
  • I have already given you the entire text of that exchange and explained line by line how Fauci was honest and Paul dishonest.  If there is any point in that exchange where you still think Fauci is lying about something, you should identify the exact statement and how it varies from the facts as specifically as you are able.






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Is Josephus a real historical figure?
Well, the history of the world is pretty short if you are going to hold it to that high standard.  The only contemporary writing that confirms the existence of Alexander the Great is a little chunk of clay written in ancient Babylonian- we couldn't even translate it until pretty recently.  I don't think there's any datable manuscript that contemporaneously confirms the existence of  Jesus or Socrates or Buddha or Mohammed, King Solomon,  Homer, Pythagoras, Sun-Tzu, Confucius,  Moses, Hannibal, etc.
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don't we have any evidence from any person living back then with documents from their own time? 
Not a reasonable expectation.  The Dead Sea Scrolls are the most ideal circumstance- written on high quality papyrus and vellum with special preservatives, tightly wrapped into scrolls, sealed in jars, stored in limestone caves out in the dry desert without any bugs or mold and still, two thousand years later, even though we have identified 950 separate scrolls only a handful of manuscripts really  held together and most of it is just thousands of little fragments, a very small percentage of the original works. Manuscripts were incredibly rare and valuable and popular targets for destruction as politics and religions and language changes.

Consider that the first book in America, the Bay Psalm Book was made of far superior material. In the following 380 years we haven't had any major linguistic or religious or political shifts that might cause a popular destruction of such a book.   And because that book was always an expensive luxury item  (the last one sold for $14 million) and a religious item it was far less likely to be discarded or destroyed than most other books over those centuries.  Even so, of the 1600 original prints, only 12 are known to survive, most are in terrible shape.  That's less than 1% preservation over 380 years of good conditions for preservation.  Even though the Emperor Vespasian ordered many copies of Josephus' histories to be made, we're still only talking about tens of copies, not hundreds or thousands.  Those few copies written on unpreserved organic materials had to survive language changes, multiple religious shifts, hundreds of political upheavals.  The literacy in the Roman Empire was around 10%.  1 in 10 people even knew what to even do with words on a page.  By 800, the literacy rate in Europe was less than half that.  One in twenty could read anything and not one in one thousand could read ancient Latin or Greek and those were all clergyman.

I don't think it is reasonable to think that the absence of those manuscripts today can serve as any proof that those manuscripts were not written when tradition upholds.  That's not to say that is proof that they were around then, either.  I just think it would be miraculous if any original 1st century Roman manuscript survived today.   The Vatican has preserved  a few scraps left of a Gospel of John from 120 AD- that's about as good as it gets.

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Josephus was quite famous in his lifetime, first as a Pharisee and a rebel against Rome, then as prophet who predicted the death of Nero which got him access to Vespasian as a Hebrew translator and author and he became a famous slave and servant when Vespasian made Emperor, then he became a free Roman citizen who was a close fiend and translator of Titus before and during his reign as Emperor.  

Both Suetonius and Dio Cassius were contemporaries of Josephus and mention him in their works (the Nero prophesy was particularly famous).  By 200 AD, scholars in Alexandria like Origen are so familiar with Josephus that they can quote certain passages from memory even though they don't have a copy of his work at hand.

The fact that 4th century Christians were relying heavily on Josephus for a picture of 1st century Jewish life certainly suggests that the 4th century considered Josephus an authentically first century source.

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@Avery


Finally, there is clearly conflict of interest if we're accusing the NIH of doing (through the Wuhan lab) gain-of-function research, whilst they are the ones in charge of the definition. Would you trust a murderer to fairly redefine the term "murder", if she was on trial for it?
To extend your metaphor, a US Senator falsely accuses a US Attorney General of financing a murder in China because the FBI once purchased a bunch of criminal records from China.  The Attorney General's honest and correct response is that he has little information about said murder and no jurisdiction to make that determination but the forensic information he does have suggests natural causes, not murder.  Furthermore, the legal definition of murder may be different in China.  In any case, the AG can state unequivocally that the FBI did not fund any Chinese murderers.

Again, You have claimed that Fauci is partly responsible for Covid, but have failed to provide any evidence to support your outlandish conspiracy theory.

"So, Fauci funded the Wuhan lab (despite lying about it), through an intermediary (Ecohealth Alliance), which then researched a coronavirus to be more effective against humans (gain-of-function research). Thus, Fauci is partly responsible for the coronavirus." -- evidence cited above in my following thread comment:
  • You are just repeating  your conspiracy theory's thesis.  I have disproved that Fauci  lied about anything during his May 11th exchange with Paul and EcoHealth's survey of WIV1 viruses could not have resulted in COVID-19- in fact it would be more genetically likely for a human woman to magically give birth to a live chimpanzee then for WIV1 to magically transform into SARS2.
You have claimed that  the Wuhan lab was conducting research into making a coronavirus more effective against humans but this claim is more than any US or international intelligence is willing to support.  What evidence supports this claim?

The sources I cited have the evidence.
You have cited headlines without bothering to read the articles themselves which disprove your claim utterly.  This "evidence" is dismissed with a derisive snort.

I'm sure it is not necessary to point out that the NY Post is not a reliable source for factual information.  Even aside from its dogshit reputation
This is Ad Hominem, so we should just ignore it.
Wikipedia states:

Valid ad hominem arguments occur in informal logic, where the person making the argument relies on arguments from authority such as testimony, expertise, or a selective presentation of information supporting the position they are advocating. In this case, counterarguments may be made that the target is dishonest, lacks the claimed expertise, or has a conflict of interest.
Since the Columbia Journalism Review is the most prestigious voice in English language professional journalism, let's consult that top  expert for their opinion regarding the quality of the NY Post as a source of truthful information:

"New York Post is no longer merely a journalistic problem. It is a social problem—a force for evil." Jan/Feb 1980

"But today’s front page of the Post is a black mark in the annals of newspaper history, and it shows that the Murdoch paper deserves no benefit of the doubt. Any pretense of professionalism—as thin as it might have been—is gone." Apr 2013 (regarding fake news published about the Boston Marathon bombing)

"As Bannon famously once said, “The real opposition is the media, and the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Such a strategy is not primarily dependent on the quality and credibility of the shit; it’s the flooding part that’s the most important. Last month, Matt Gertz, of Media Matters for America, noted, in a piece jumping off Bannon’s quote, that because the “newshole”—newspaper pages, broadcast segments, and so forth—is finite, you can game it if you can pump out more toxicity than there’s room to report. “Trump and his allies have overwhelmed the system,” Gertz wrote. “There’s just too much shit.” Oct 2020  From "Flooding the Zone with the New York Post"

Professional Journalists officially consider the NY Post a disgrace to journalism and definitely not a newspaper in the traditional sense of providing news.  When MAGA wants to pump out a lie, they take it to the WSJ first, if the WSJ won't print it, they take it to Fox, if Fox refuses to put their name behind it, they take it to the NY Post- the liar of last resort.

Are you arguing against Paul or me?
WTF?  Your whole original thesis in POST#4 was "Rand Paul claims..."  If you are done promoting Paul's lies then this conversation is over.

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@Avery
I'm struggling to find a random definition which does not describe what the Wuhan lab was doing.
Your struggle is personal.  Nothing in your definitions is inconsistent with what I've said, you just don't understand what you are cut and pasting.

Recall these explanations-

POST#6:
Gain of function, in many ways, is basic biological research. It’s done all the time 
POST#8:
"Human beings have practiced gain-of-function for the last 2,000 years, mostly in plants, where farmers would always save the largest seeds from the healthiest plants to replant the following year. The reason we can manage to have 7 billion people here on the planet is basically through direct or indirect genetic engineering through gain-of-function research. The simple definition of gain-of-function research is the introduction of a mutation than enhances a gene’s function or property—a process used commonly in genetic, biologic, and microbiologic research.
In virology, historically, attenuated vaccines were generated by gain-of-function studies, which took human virus pathogens and adapted them for improved growth in cell culture, which reduced virus virulence in the natural human host.
So gain-of-function has been used in virology and microbiology for decades as a part of the scientific method. But that classic definition and purpose changed in 2011 and 2012, when researchers in Wisconsin and the Netherlands were funded to do gain-of-function research on avian flu transmissibility."
Now, notice how your definitions a, b, and d are entirely consistent with farmers conserving seeds 2000 years ago.  Those definitions do not describe a controversial technique- they describe much of biology as a science.  Domesticating a wolf into a dog, for example, is "changing the genome of a biological entity"  Selecting almond trees for less cyanide content is " modify[ing] a biological pathway in a cell line or an organism in order to enhance or broaden the scope of some particular process."  

If you oppose gain-of-function research by these definitions then you oppose the domestication of plants and animals that allowed human civilization to begin.

Definition c is the NIH's definition. Recall Dr.  Baric' s explanation in POST #9:

"A committee at NIH makes determinations of gain-of-function research. The gain-of-function rules are focused on viruses of pandemic potential and experiments that intend to enhance the transmissibility or pathogenesis of SARS, MERS, and avian flu strains in humans. WIV1 is approximately 10% different from SARS. Some argue that “SARS coronavirus” by definition covers anything in the sarbecoronavirus genus. By this definition, the Chinese might be doing gain-of-function experiments, depending on how the chimera behaves. Others argue that SARS and WIV1 are different, and as such the experiments would be exempt. Certainly, the CDC considers SARS and WIV1 to be different viruses. Only the SARS coronavirus from 2003 is a select agent. Ultimately, a committee at the NIH is the final arbiter and makes the decision about what is or is not a gain-of-function experiment."

Whether you choose to comprehend it or not, when Paul says that NIH is funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan he has no facts about what research is done in Wuhan.  When Paul says that Dr. Baric' s WIV1 chimera research is gain-of-function it is true in  the generic, non-scary sense and a fucking lie in the NIH specific scary sense.  When Paul says that EcoHealth Alliance was doing gain-of-function that's a nasty, evil lie because Paul is enough of a doctor to understand that EcoHealth wasn't working with human virus or making any virologic changes at all.  When Paul says that Dr. Shi is gain-of-function research at Wuhan that is probably true since the scary NIH definition does not extend to Chinese research and the non-scary definition applies to most of virology.  Nevertheless, Paul is claiming to know a fact without evidence and responsible scientists only note that Chinese research is too secretive to describe with certainty.

Your failure to comprehend this fact is not an argument.

Also, the NIH ended up admitting to doing gain-of-function research anyway (I linked Yahoo News this time, rather than NYPost, because I didn't want you to become upset like we see later) NIH Admits to Funding Gain-of-Function Research in Wuhan, Says EcoHealth Violated Reporting Requirements (yahoo.com) 
Repeating your lies doesn't make them more true.   Just like the NYPost article, the letter is linked to in the article and the letter very specifically refutes Yahoo's claim that "NIH Admits to Funding Gain-of-Function Research in Wuhan"

Here's that letter, you should read it for yourself instead of accepting the headline as proof!

It is important to state at the outset that published genomic data demonstrate that the bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. and subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) are not and could not have SARS-CoV-2.  Both the progress report and the analysis attached here again confirm that conclusion, as the sequences of the viruses are genetically very distant .....

This progress report was submitted to NIH in August 2021.... (that is, the NIH did not have this info in May when Fauci testified)....

EcoHealthAlliance was testing if spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model In this limited experiment, laboratory mice infected with the SHC014 WIV1 bat coronavirus became sicker than those infected with the WIV1 bat coronavirus.   As sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to do. Regardless, the viruses being studied under this grant were genetically very distant from SARS-CoV-2 ...

[So, neither SHC014 or WIV1 can be gain-of-function because neither virus exists in humans, also gain-of-function research must be intentional, unexpected results never qualify as gain-of-function].

***The research plan was reviewed by NIH in advance of funding, and NIH determined that it did not to fit the definition of research involving enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential(ePPP) because these bat coronaviruses had not been shown to infect humans.   As such, the research was not subject to departmental review under the HHSP3CO Framework ***

[That could not be more clear:  this research is not gain-of-function, this virus had zero pandemic potential and no changes were being made to this naturally occurring bat virus.   Furthermore, as Dr. Baric put it, "we didn’t gain any function—rather, we retained function. Moreover, the chimera was attenuated in mice as compared to the parental mouse-adapted virus, so this would be considered a loss of function."]

"While it might appear that the similarity ofRaTG13and BANAL-52 bat coronaviruses to SARS CoV-2 is close because it over laps by 96-97%, experts agree that even these viruses are far too divergent to have been the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2. Fo comparison, today's human genome is 96% similar to our closest ancestor ,the chimpanzee. Humans and chimpanzees are thought to have diverged approximately 6 million years ago. The analysis attached confirms that the bat coronaviruses studied under the EcoHealth Alliance grant could not have been the source of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID- 19 pandemic

I don't know why you would trust the headline and not the letter itself but once you read the letter it is a 100% clear  that the headline "NIH Admits to Funding Gain-of-Function Research in Wuhan"  is stating the exact opposite of the truth.  The NIH, then and now, comprehensively (and since the NIH has the final word, irrefutably) denies funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan.

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Saying "watch this 4 hour video" or "read this book" is strong evidence that there is no cohesive, fact-based argument to be made. Fauci's not perfect but his scientific achievements  and record of public service  are legendary and all of this conspiracy shit is just more blind QAnon cultist bullshit.  
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@Vici
the words of your daddy speaks louder than your long bombastic post. 

Read more carefully.  Fauci' s financial statements are public record.  Unless he's hiding that income from the IRS, then he hasn't collected those royalties for years.  He is not required to tell us what charities he gives his income to.

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@Vici
 he also killed people by giving them bad aids medication.
A cruel and ignorant lie.  There was a time when AZT was the only effective treatment for AIDS, it was highly toxic and research establishing effective dosage was years away.  AIDS activists like Larry Kramer raged at Dr. Fauci for years, demanding more research money, more drugs of better efficiency, more transparency regarding government, more influence in government decision-making.  Although as head of NIAID, Fauci could only control a small part of the government response, Fauci met with the activists, took the heat for decades and worked tirelessly to improve.  Fauci become and now remains one of the World's leading  experts in HIV, heading  up the most promising projects working on vaccines and prevention drugs like Prep.  Today, Fauci can legitimately claim as much of the credit for the much longer lifespans of people with HIV as any other scientist on Earth.  In 1989, Larry Kramer considered Dr. Fauci  his arch-enemy representing all that was slow and unresponsive in pandemic response.  It wasn't until years later that Kramer realized that Dr. Fauci was the only government official who came to all the meeting, who listened to all the complaints and promised to do better.  Even though it wasn't his job and the Reagan/Bush admins didn't give a shit if every gay man died, Fauci made it his job and his life mission to make life better for people infected with HIV and for gay men in particular.  By the end of his life, Larry Kramer  world remember Fauci as "the only true and great hero" among govt. officials during the AIDS crisis.  Criticizing Fauci alone for not immediately knowing how to treat AIDS while failing to recognizing how instrumental Fauci's organizational and scientific  and personal emotional care contributions were and are  to HIV prevention and treatment is like faulting a single fireman for not saving everybody when the World Trade Center towers fell.
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@Vici
he gets millions from vaccines (thus corruption and conflict of interest)
As one of the most prolific scientists in history, Fauci's participation in the invention of many important drugs and vaccines has earned him tens of millions of dollars in legal royalties all of which Fauci has donated to charity for the last twenty years to remove any accusation of corruption or conflict of interest. (fat lot of good that did him).  Unlike his accusers, Fauci's financial reports are openly available online and confirm that Fauci gives away more in earned royalties than his entire salary.  Because Fauci is a Rear Admiral in the Navy (heading up top secret bioweapons defense) as well as the Chief  for 48 years of one of the largest US government agencies- Fauci is also the best paid US government employee in history and is worth about $10 million, most of that in a diversified portfolio of non-pharma investments.    If  Fauci was in the private sector keeping all his earned royalties, he'd likely be worth hundreds of millions and long since retired.

SciCheck Digest
A nonprofit recently reported that, since 2009, the National Institutes of Health and many of its scientists received an estimated $350 million in royalties for developing experimental treatments. Some kept the money, but Dr. Anthony Fauci has said that he donates royalties he receives to charity — a detail left out of some online posts about the payments.

Full Story
In 2005, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the Associated Press that he donates royalty payments he receives from the licensees of products he helped develop while working for the National Institutes of Health.

But that detail was not mentioned in a number of recent online posts about new reporting on royalties paid to Fauci and other NIH scientists since 2009.

Earlier this month, OpenTheBooks.com, a self-described government watchdog organization, reported on about 1,200 documents it obtained from the NIH. The documents reportedly show that, in the previous decade, the NIH and hundreds of the agency’s current and former researchers received tens of thousands of royalty payments from third parties for drugs and other treatments they invented.

“Recently, our organization at OpenTheBooks.com forced NIH to disclose over 22,100 royalty payments totaling nearly $134 million paid to the agency and nearly 1,700 NIH scientists,” Adam Andrzejewski, the group’s founder and CEO, wrote in a May 9 report. “These payments occurred during the most recently available period (September 2009 – September 2014).”

He said the group is still waiting to receive 1,800 pages of documents from the NIH about royalty payments from 2015 to 2020, but estimates that “between fiscal years 2010 and 2020, more than $350 million in royalties were paid by third-parties,” such as pharmaceutical companies, “to the agency and NIH scientists – who are credited as co-inventors” on NIH patents.

The payments are legal, but Andrzejewski argued that they represent a potential conflict of interest and should be fully disclosed to the public. But many details, such as who made the payments and the individual amounts, were redacted in the documents, he said.

“When a federal bureaucrat pops up on television giving us health instructions, who has paid them and for what research and technology?” he asked in his post. “When a patient agrees to a clinical trial or experimental treatment, what financial interests are involved?”

He added, “Rather than relentless redactions and prolonged court battles, it’s past time for the government to disclose royalty payments as a matter of routine.”
What the documents did reveal, Andrzejewski said, is that in the period from September 2009 to September 2014, Fauci received 23 royalty payments; Dr. Francis Collins, who was NIH director from 2009 to 2021, received 14 payments; and Dr. H. Clifford Lane, the NIAID deputy director for clinical research and special projects, received eight payments.

But the post on OpenTheBooks.com, which is titled “Fauci’s Royalties And The $350 Million Royalty Payment Stream HIDDEN By NIH,” never mentioned that Fauci has said he donates his royalties to charity. (That piece of information is mentioned in a separate fact sheet about the group’s investigation.)

Similarly, when actor and comedian Russell Brand read almost all of Andrzejewski’s original report in a 16-minute YouTube video that has over 1 million views since May 15, Brand also did not mention that Fauci said long ago that he does not keep the money he receives.

Instead, Brand said: “Well, there you go. Anthony Fauci, who was heralded as a saint, seems to me like he may have feet of clay. Seems to me that he may be fallible. Seems to me that he may accept payments.”

Also, a May 11 Epoch Times article quoted several Republican lawmakers criticizing Fauci because of the royalties. But the article did not add Fauci’s prior statements about not keeping the money.

Royalties paid to Fauci and other NIH scientists drew scrutiny at least once before, in 2005. The AP, based on information obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, reported that, in 2004, more than 900 current and former NIH researchers received royalty payments totaling $8.9 million for drugs and other inventions they developed while employed by the government.

“Government scientists have collected millions of dollars in royalties for experimental treatments without having to tell patients testing the treatments that the researchers’ had a financial connection, according to documents and interviews,” the AP said.

The news agency reported that Fauci and his deputy, Lane, had both received about $45,000 in royalties between 1997 and 2004 for interleukin-2, a potential AIDS treatment that they developed with another NIH physician, Joseph Kovacs.

“Both doctors said they were extremely sensitive about the possibility of an appearance of a conflict of interest and took steps on their own to address it even as they waited for their agency to do what they believed should have been done all along — fully disclose the payments to patients,” the AP said.

Fauci told the AP that he tried to refuse the royalties, but was told by officials that he was legally obligated to accept the money. He also said he was told he should not disclose the payments on his federal financial disclosure, which is available to the public upon request, because the payments were considered federal compensation instead of outside income.

He said he opted to donate his royalties instead. “I’m going to give every penny of it to charity … no matter what the yearly amount is,” Fauci was quoted saying.
The AP said Lane kept the royalties he received, but occasionally provided patients with journal articles that noted he was listed on the patent for interleukin-2.
At the time, the NIH had only recently implemented a policy to disclose its scientists’ financial stakes to patients, the AP reported.

We are not able to confirm whether Fauci donated his past royalty payments as he said, nor did the NIH or NIAID say what Fauci’s practices are now.

In a statement to FactCheck.org, the NIH said: “Royalty payments to NIH inventors are considered income and NIH does not track how individual employee incomes are spent, beyond what falls under federal financial disclosure requirements.”

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Tulsi Gabbard, Truth teller to the DNC, leaves Democrat party.
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@bmdrocks21

No? “Could cause a war [against Russia] with us [America]” See: took just a little bit of dissent for you to accuse me of being Russian.
The fault is yours "Hillary Clinton.... could cause a war with us" would only be correct grammar if you were Russian, right?   and I did not accuse, only asked with some expression of doubt.

Thank you for proving my point. I’m not only a traitor- I’ve ceased to be American!
I can't tell what point you suppose you've proved.  Republicans think Gabbard a traitor, I only asked if you were a Russian.  If you had proved to be a Russian, it would not make any sense to call you a traitor.

Russia preferred Trump because of what Trump said relative to what Hillary said, not what other Republicans and Democrats said.
You missed the point.  You were suggesting that Clinton was the extremist by characterizing her as a "psycho hawk."  By establishing that moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats agreed on opposing Russian objectives in Syria with a no-fly gives the lie to your suggestion of extremism.

The Kurds were fighting out of their own interests and we paid them monthly stipends and sent lots of weapons to them. Basically mercenaries with a temporary mutual interest
That's right.... our allies of thirty years until Trump betrayed them immediately after a single, still unexplained phone call from the Turkish dictator.

Did you not learn from Iraq that perhaps it isn’t wise to topple leaders for the sake of “democracy” in the Middle East?
Which is why Clinton policy kept Hussein in power with a no-fly zone through the '90's until Republicans waged a fake war based on evidence Republicans falsified.  Clinton's Syria no-fly zone was clearly a policy designed to leave Assad in place.

Russia won’t dare touch a NATO country. If they did, I’d 100% support an active war against them.
I wish the history of dictators supported such confidence.  History tells me that Putin will keep taking, as fast or as slow as European resistance permits until he is dead.  

And Ukraine wasn’t valuable enough to let into NATO compared to the risk.  And post- Cold War NATO expansionism all the way up to one country beyond Russia’s border seems to be somewhat of an accelerant leading to this conflict.
NATO is not invading new countries and forcing them into that alliance.  Participation in NATO is expensive and voluntary.  Eastern European countries join NATO because their assessment is that you are wrong and Putin will keep eating Europe until Europe stops him.



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Tulsi Gabbard, Truth teller to the DNC, leaves Democrat party.
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@bmdrocks21
Because Clinton was a foreign policy hawk psycho that wanted to put no-fly zones in Syria which could cause a war with us.
So you identify as Russian?  I'm surprised, I thought you were an American.

Keep in mind that Clinton was joining mainstream Republicans (pre-Trump) like John Kasich, Jeb Bush, John McCain, Lindsey Graham in supporting no-fly zones.  Also recall that Obama considered no-fly a serious and supportable option although he ultimately refrained.  Let's also recall that Russia did not give a single fuck about provocation when you imposed your no-fly zone against us weeks after Trump got into office or at the Battle of Khasham a year later.  From the pro-Western Civilization point of view, confronting Russia in an already de-populated Syria and exposing your weakness as a fighting force in 2017 would probably  have proved a far better option than waiting for Putin's full blown invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with the added advantage of preserving pro-Democracy forces in Syria and our alliance with the Kurds and possibly discouraging Erdogan's re-alignment with Putin.

To paraphrase another foreign policy psycho, Donald Rumsfeld:  "All I can say is if history has taught anything, it's that weakness is provocative. It entices people into doing things that they otherwise would not do. The course of action that says 'Don't make [Putin} unhappy or mad because he might do something' is kind of like feeding an alligator hoping it eats you last."



Moscow Times, July 7th: 
The speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament threatened Wednesday to “claim back” Alaska if the United States froze or seized Russian assets as punishment for its invasion of Ukraine.
“Let America always remember: there’s a piece of territory, Alaska,” Vyacheslav Volodin said at the last session of parliament, the State Duma, before it goes on summer break.
“When they try to manage our resources abroad, let them think before they act that we, too, have something to take back,” Volodin said.
He noted that deputy speaker Pyotr Tolstoy had proposed holding a referendum among Alaskans to join Russia.
“We don’t interfere in their domestic affairs,” Volodin responded, holding back laughter, after applause from State Duma deputies.

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Dr ANTHONY FAUCI's COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS to the 2022 GRADUATING CLASS of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
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@Avery
You claimed:

  • [Fauci] helped secure funding for the gain of function research conducted in Wuhan.
  • [Fauci] has denied being involved in gain-of-function research
  • while also denying that Dr Baric's lab was at all involved in gain-of-function research
    • Fauci contradicts himself by saying "if it is" doing the gain-of-function research, it's according to guidelines etc."
If you have read my posts with anything like comprehension, then you now understand that all of these claims are disproved by a single, easily verified fact:  

  • Since 2012 in the US, the NIH  alone defines what research is gain-of-function and what research is not. When the NIH advises Congress that Dr. Baric' s research is not gain-of-function, they do so as the final authority on the matter. The determination of gain of function has a set of specific criteria which Dr. Baric's research and EcoHealth Alliance research does not match and so officially, as a matter of governmental and scientific record neither project is gain-of-function no matter how many time others repeat that lie.
  • Although we know that US standards for for restricting research based on transmissibility are much higher than Chinese or even WHO standards, US access to Chinese research is quite limited.  The NIH does not evaluate gain-of-function in Chinese virology.
  • This simple fact makes everything Fauci said on May 11th true and much of what Paul claimed an outright lie.
You have claimed that Fauci is partly responsible for Covid, but have failed to provide any evidence to support your outlandish conspiracy theory.
You have claimed that  the Wuhan lab was conducting research into making a coronavirus more effective against humans but this claim is more than any US or international intelligence is willing to support.  What evidence supports this claim?

I'm sure it is not necessary to point out that the NY Post is not a reliable source for factual information.  Even aside from its dogshit reputation, the cascade of falsehoods contained just within your two citations discredit you.

For example, the NY Post  claims "Letter confirms Wuhan lab’s COVID-19 leak was funded by US taxpayers." Confident that 99% of its gullible readership will buy the headline and never read the letter which states unequivocally:
  • "While it might appear that the similarity of RaTG13 and BANAL-52 bat coronaviruses to SARS CoV-2 is close because it overlaps by 96-97%, experts agree that even these viruses are far too divergent to have been the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2. For comparison, today's human genome is 96% similar to our closest ancestor, the chimpanzee. Humans and chimpanzees are thought to have diverged approximately6 million years ago. The analysis attached confirms that the bat coronaviruses studied under the EcoHealth Alliance grant could not have been the source of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID- 19 pandemic ."
The NY Post headline states the opposite of the truth.  Why would you rely on such propaganda bullshit as evidence?

The other headline states:  "NIH admits US funded gain-of-function in Wuhan"  Again, this is the opposite of the facts.  The NIH consistently states that EcoHealth Alliance's project was not gain of function and the NIH is the final word on that label. 

Paul's argument amounts to 'money is fungible.'  Since one subcontractor paid  techs at Wuhan $133,000/year for 5 years for bat samples, and since Paul is wildly speculating  without any evidence and almost no scientific support that same lab manufactured COVID, therefore all of NIH is complicit in the manufacture of COVID.  This is the rational equivalent of saying that since the US Embassy in Beijing pays China for its electricity and since China is complicit in covering up the existence of the Abominable Snowman, the whole US State Department is complicit in concealing the Yeti.

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Dr ANTHONY FAUCI's COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS to the 2022 GRADUATING CLASS of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
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@Avery

Paul is dishonestly gish-galloping Fauci, interrupting and exclaiming and shell gaming while Fauci is only trying to correct Paul's original lie.

Sen. Rand Paul: (59:43)
Dr. Fauci, do you still support funding of the NIH funding of the lab in Wuhan?
(loaded question, the NIH does not fund Chinese research)
Dr. Anthony Fauci: (59:49)
Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
(true)
Sen. Rand Paul: (01:00:06)
Do they fund Dr. Baric?
Dr. Anthony Fauci: (01:00:09)
We do not fund gain-
Sen. Rand Paul: (01:00:11)
Do you fund Dr. Baric’s gain-of-function research?
Dr. Anthony Fauci: (01:00:13)
Dr. Baric does not do gain-of-function research, and if it is, it’s according to the guidelines and it is being conducted in North Carolina, not in China.
(true.  the most nuanced answer would be the way Baric answered above: "Human beings have practiced gain-of-function for the last 2,000 years....gain-of-function has been used in virology and microbiology for decades as a part of the scientific method. But that classic definition and purpose changed in 2011 and 2012.  In the pre-2012 sense, all of  virology is "gain-of-function research," in the post-2012 sense, "a committee at NIH makes determinations of gain-of-function research. The gain-of-function rules are focused on viruses of pandemic potential and experiments that intend to enhance the transmissibility or pathogenesis of SARS, MERS, and avian flu strains in humans."   Dr. Baric's research does not meet the the post-2012 NIH defined sense of "gain-of-function."  Dr. Shi's research in Wuhan may or may not be considered "gain-of-function" according to the US standard.  Dr. Baric credited Dr. Shi for providing the WIV1 genetic sequence via email in the name of good science but beyond this standard scientific cooperation, Dr. Baric shared no material, resources, funding, or methodology with the lab in Wuhan and Paul is deliberately preventing Dr. Fauci from providing that nuanced understanding.)
Sen. Rand Paul: (01:00:24)
You don’t think concerning a bat virus spike protein that he got from the Wuhan Institute into the SARS virus is gain of function?
(false.  Dr. Shi emailed Dr. Baric the genetic sequence of WIV1.  Dr. Baric never received a protein from Wuhan, wasn't SARS, wasn't gain-of-function)
Dr. Anthony Fauci: (01:00:30)
That is not-
Sen. Rand Paul: (01:00:31)
You would be in the minority because at least 200 scientists have signed a statement from the Cambridge Working Group saying that it is gain of function.
(false.  The Cambridge Working Group's 2014 opposition to all further gain-of-function research predates Dr. Shi's discovery of WIV1 and Dr. Baric's reversal research)
Dr. Anthony Fauci: (01:00:39)
Well, it is not. If you look at the grant and you look at the progress reports, it is not gain of function, despite the fact that people tweet that, they write about it-
(true.  Notice that Paul has changed the subject to research in Wuhan while Fauci is still talking about what he knows:  the NIH and Dr. Baric's research.  Classic Senatorial bait-and-switch)
Sen. Rand Paul: (01:00:50)
Do you support sending money to the Wuhan Virology Institute?
Dr. Anthony Fauci: (01:00:53)
We do not send money now to the Wuhan Virology Institute.
(true)
Sen. Rand Paul: (01:00:55)
Do you support sending money? We did under your tutelage. We were sending it through EcoHealth. It was a sub-agency and a sub-grant. Do you support that the money from NIH that was going to the Wuhan Institute.
(now Paul is talking about the $133,000/year EcoHealth paid Wuhan gather bat samples using NIH funding- not Dr. Shi or Dr. Baric's chimeric research)
Dr. Anthony Fauci: (01:01:08)
Let me explain to you why that was done. The SARS-CoV-1 originated in bats in China. It would have been irresponsible of us if we did not investigate the bat viruses and the serology to see who might have been infected in China.
(true)
Sen. Rand Paul: (01:01:29)
Or perhaps it would be irresponsible to send it to the Chinese government that we may not be able to trust with this knowledge and with this incredibly dangerous viruses.
(false.  Dr. Baric's research was not shared with China.  EcoHealth only paid a little money for their sample gathering services)
Sen. Rand Paul: (01:01:40)
Government scientists like yourself who favor gain-of-function research maintain the disease arose naturally.
(False.  Almost all scientists agree that the origin is complicated, mysterious, almost certainly originating naturally-  perhaps through multiple species, perhaps via multiple or even many crossover transmissions all of which argue against a lab leak.  Almost all scientists agree that China is inhibiting a full investigation into origins and should allow full international forensic access)
Dr. Anthony Fauci: (01:01:43)
I don’t favor gain-of-function research in China. You are saying things that are not correct.
(true)
Sen. Rand Paul: (01:01:50)
Government defenders of gain of function, such as yourself, say that COVID-19 mutations were random and not designed by man. But interestingly, the technique that Dr. Baric developed forces mutations by serial passage through cell culture that the mutations appear to be natural. In fact, Dr. Baric named the technique the “No See ’em” technique, because the mutations appear naturally. Nicholas Baker in the New York Magazine said, “Nobody would know if the virus had been fabricated in a laboratory or grown in nature.” Government authorities in the US, including yourself, unequivocally deny that COVID-19 could have escaped a lab, but even Dr. Shi in Wuhan wasn’t so sure. According to Nicholas Baker, Dr. Shi wondered could this new virus have come from her own laboratory. She checked her records frantically and found no matches. “That really took a load off my mind,” she said. “I had not slept for days.”
(Notice the shell game- Dr. Baric's reverse genetic technique was never "gain-of-function" and never shared with China.  Dr Shi was worrying about her own chimeric reversal technique which had nothing to do with NIH or Dr. Baric and over which the US  and NIH has no control or insight or participation.  Paul is deliberately conflating these entirely independent efforts.)
Sen. Rand Paul: (01:02:46)
The director of the gain-of-function research in Wuhan couldn’t sleep because she was terrified that it might be in her lab. Dr. Baric, an advocate of gain-of-function research admits the main problem that the Institute of Virology has is the outbreak occurred in close proximity. What are the odds? Baric responded, “Could you rule out a laboratory escape? The answer in this case is probably not.”
(That's right, according to leading virologists like Dr. Baric, the odds are low but not zero)
Sen. Rand Paul: (01:03:12)
Will you in front of this group, categorically say that the COVID-19 could not have occurred through serial passage in a laboratory.
(No responsible scientist would.  What a fucking poser)
Dr. Anthony Fauci: (01:03:20)
I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done, and I’m fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China. However, I will repeat again, the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded gain-of-function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
(true)
Sen. Rand Paul: (01:03:44)
But you do support it in the US. We have 11 labs doing it, and you have allowed it here. We have a committee to do it, but the committee is granted every exemption. You’re fooling with Mother Nature here. You’re allowing super-viruses to be created with a 15% mortality. It’s very dangerous. I think it was a huge mistake to share this with China. It’s a huge mistake to allow this to continue in the United States. We should be very careful to investigate where this virus came from.
("You’re allowing super-viruses to be created with a 15% mortality." = evil fucking lie
"I think it was a huge mistake to share this with China." = evil fucking lie)
Dr. Anthony Fauci: (01:04:10)
I fully agree that you should investigate where the virus came from. But again, we have not funded gain-of-function research on this virus in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. No matter how many times you say it, it didn’t happen.
(true)
Sen. Rand Paul: (01:04:23)
You’re parsing words. You’re parsing words. There was research done with Dr. Shi and Dr. Baric. They have collaborated on gain-of-function research where they enhance the SARS virus to infect human airway cells. They did it by merging a new spike protein on it. That is gain of function. That was joint research between the Wuhan Institute and Dr. Baric. You can’t deny it.
(evil fucking lie.  Dr. Shi emailed the WIV1 gene sequence.  Dr. Baric never shared his methodology with China.  Fauci must deny it.  Any honest man would.)
Patty Murray: (01:04:48)
Senator Paul, your time has expired.
Patty Murray: (01:04:50)
Dr. Fauci, I will let you respond to that. We need to move on.
Dr. Anthony Fauci: (01:04:54)
Excuse me?
Patty Murray: (01:04:56)
I will allow you to respond to that, and then we’ll move on.
Dr. Anthony Fauci: (01:05:00)
Yeah. I mean, I just wanted to say, I don’t know how many times I can say it, Madam Chair, we did not fund gain-of-function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
(true)






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Dr ANTHONY FAUCI's COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS to the 2022 GRADUATING CLASS of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Is all that standard for other facilities in the US and internationally?

No, I don’t think so. Different places have different levels of BSL-3 containment operations, standard operating procedures, and protective gear. Some of it is dependent on how deep your pockets are and the pathogens studied in the facility. An N95 is a lot cheaper than a PAPR.
Internationally, the US has no say over what biological safety conditions are used in China or any other sovereign nation to conduct research on viruses, be they coronaviruses or Nipah, Hendra, or Ebola.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology was making chimeric coronaviruses, using techniques similar to yours, right?

Let me make it clear that we never sent any of our molecular clones or any chimeric viruses to China. They developed their own molecular clone, based on WIV1, which is a bat coronavirus. And into that backbone they shuffled in the spike genes of other bat coronaviruses, to learn how well the spike genes of these strains can promote infection in human cells.

Would you call that gain-of-function?

A committee at NIH makes determinations of gain-of-function research. The gain-of-function rules are focused on viruses of pandemic potential and experiments that intend to enhance the transmissibility or pathogenesis of SARS, MERS, and avian flu strains in humans. WIV1 is approximately 10% different from SARS. Some argue that “SARS coronavirus” by definition covers anything in the sarbecoronavirus genus. By this definition, the Chinese might be doing gain-of-function experiments, depending on how the chimera behaves. Others argue that SARS and WIV1 are different, and as such the experiments would be exempt. Certainly, the CDC considers SARS and WIV1 to be different viruses. Only the SARS coronavirus from 2003 is a select agent. Ultimately, a committee at the NIH is the final arbiter and makes the decision about what is or is not a gain-of-function experiment.

Definitions aside, we know they were doing the work in BSL-2 conditions, which is a much lower safety level than your BSL-3 plus.

Historically, the Chinese have done a lot of their bat coronavirus research under BSL-2 conditions. Obviously, the safety standards of BSL-2 are different than BSL-3, and lab-acquired infections occur much more frequently at BSL-2. There is also much less oversight at BSL-2.

This year, a joint commission of the World Health Organization and China said it was extremely unlikely that a lab accident had caused SARS-CoV-2. But you later signed a letter with other scientists calling for a thorough investigation of all possible causes. Why was that?

One of the reasons I signed the letter in Science was that the WHO report didn’t really discuss how work was done in the WIV laboratory, or what data the expert panel reviewed to come to the conclusion that it was “very unlikely” that a laboratory escape or infection was the cause of the pandemic.
There must be some recognition that a laboratory infection could have occurred under BSL-2 operating conditions. Some unknown viruses pooled from guano or oral swabs might replicate or recombine with others, so you could get new strains with unique and unpredictable biological features.
And if all this research is being performed at BSL-2, then there are questions that need to be addressed. What are the standard operating procedures in the BSL-2? What are the training records of the staff? What is the history of potential exposure events in the lab, and how were they reviewed and resolved? What are the biosafety procedures designed to prevent potential exposure events?
Living in a community, workers will be infected with pathogens from the community. Respiratory infections occur frequently. No one is exempt. What are the biosafety procedures used to deal with these complications? Do they quarantine workers who develop fevers? Do they continue to work in the lab or are they quarantined at home with N95 masks? What procedures are in place to protect the community or local hospitals if an exposed person becomes ill? Do they use mass transit?
This is just a handful of the questions that should have been reviewed in the WHO document, providing actionable evidence regarding the likelihood of a laboratory-acquired-infection origin.

Should they have been doing such experiments in a BSL-2 lab?

I would not. However, I don’t set the standard for the US or any other country. There’s definitely some risk associated with these and other SARS-like bat viruses that can enter human cells.
We also know that people who live near bat hibernacula [bat caves] have tested positive for antibodies against SARS-like bat viruses, so some of these viruses clearly can infect humans. While we have no idea whether they could actually cause severe disease or transmit from person to person, you want to err on the side of increased caution when working with these pathogens.
As a sovereign nation, China decides their own biological safety conditions and procedures for research, but they should also be held accountable for those decisions, just like any other nation that conducts high-containment biological research. As other nations develop BSL-3 facilities and begin to conduct high-containment research, each will have to make fundamental decisions about what kind of containment they use for different viruses and bacteria, along with the underlying biosafety procedures.
This is serious stuff. Global standards need to exist, especially for understudied emerging viruses. If you study hundreds of different bat viruses at BSL-2, your luck may eventually run out.

Do you think their luck ran out?

The possibility of accidental escape still remains and cannot be excluded, so further investigation and transparency is critical, but I personally feel that SARS-CoV-2 is a natural pathogen that emerged from wildlife. Its closest relatives are bat strains. Historical precedent argues that all other human coronaviruses emerged from animals. No matter how many bat viruses are at the WIV, nature has many, many more.
At this time, there’s really no strong and actionable data that argues that the virus was engineered and escaped containment. As the pathogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 is so complex, the thought that anybody could engineer it is almost ludicrous.
When you think about the diversity of SARS-related strains that exist in nature, it’s not hard to imagine a strain that would have the complex and unpredictable biological features of SARS-CoV-2. As scientists, we tend to do experiments, read the literature, and then think we understand how nature works. We make definitive statements regarding how coronaviruses are supposed to emerge from animal reservoirs, based on one or two examples. But nature has many secrets, and our understanding is limited. Or as they said in Game of Thrones, “You know nothing, Jon Snow.”

In addition to the WIV and you, are other groups doing coronavirus engineering?

Before covid-19, there were probably three to four main groups globally. That’s changed dramatically. Now the number of labs doing coronavirus genetics is likely three or four times higher and continuing to increase. That proliferation is unsettling, because it allows many inexperienced groups, globally, to make decisions about building and isolating chimeras or natural zoonotic [viruses].
By “inexperienced,” I mean that they are applying previous discoveries and approaches in the coronavirus field, but perhaps with less respect for the inherent risk posed by this group of pathogens.
People are making chimeras right now for the variants of concern, and each of those variants is providing new insights into human transmissibility and pathogenesis.

So the virus itself is contributing to gain-of-function knowledge?

The virus is a master at finding better ways to outcompete its ancestors in humans. And each of these successful SARS-CoV-2 variants outcompetes the old variants and reveals the underlying genetics that regulate increased transmissibility and/or pathogenesis. And that information is being learned in a real-time setting and in humans, as compared to the avian-flu-transmission scenario, which was conducted under controlled artificial conditions in ferrets. I would argue that the real-time knowledge is more relevant and perhaps more unsettling than the research conducted in animal models under high containment.
Given our scientific capabilities today, every new emerging virus that causes an outbreak in the future can be studied at this level of granularity. That is unprecedented. Each could provide a classic recipe for potential dual-use applications in other strains. [Dual-use biological research is that which can be used to develop both therapeutics and bioweapons.]

Anything else about this that keeps you up at night?

The number of zoonotic coronaviruses that are poised to jump species is a major concern. That’s not going away.
Also, the biology of this virus is such that its virulence will most likely continue to increase rather than decrease, at least in the short term.

Why is that?

The transmission events occur early, while the most severe disease occurs late, after the virus is being cleared from the body. That means transmission and severe disease and death are partially uncoupled, biologically. Consequently, it doesn’t hurt the virus to increase its virulence.
If you are one of the people waiting to get the vaccine, your risk is going up with each new variant. These variants are dangerous. They want to reproduce and spread and show increased pathogenesis, even in younger adults. They have little concern for you or your family’s health and welfare, so get vaccinated.
That is the saddest thing about the pandemic. For an effective public health response, you need to respond as a national and global community with one voice. You must believe in the power of public health and public health procedures. Politics has no place in a pandemic, but that is what we ended up with—politically inspired mixed messaging.
How did that work out for America? Did we get diagnostics online quickly? No! Did we use the two-to-three-month lead time to stock hospitals with PPE or respirators? No. Rather, Americans received the message that the virus wasn’t dangerous, that it would go away or that the summer heat would destroy it. We heard rumors that mask wearing was detrimental, or that unproven drugs were miracle cures.
Some say that the true tragedy is the hundreds of thousands of Americans who didn’t need to die [but did] because the greatest nation in the world did not respond to a pandemic in a unified, science-based manner. Taiwan responded with a unified public health response and had only handfuls of cases and few deaths. The US led the world in deaths and numbers of cases. Why are the failures leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans not the subject of rigorous investigation?


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Dr ANTHONY FAUCI's COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS to the 2022 GRADUATING CLASS of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
MIT Technology Review recently asked Baric to explain what constitutes a gain-of-function experiment, why such research exists, and whether it could have played any role in the pandemic. The interview has been edited and shortened for clarity.

Q: Now that Rand Paul has announced on the floor of the Senate that you’re creating superviruses and performing gain-of-function experiments, this seems like a good time to talk about your work.

Ralph Baric: Well, let me start off by saying that we’ve never created a supervirus. That’s a figment of his imagination and obviously being used for political advancement. Unfortunately, the way social media works today, this fabrication will be repeated many times.

How do you define gain-of-function research?

Human beings have practiced gain-of-function for the last 2,000 years, mostly in plants, where farmers would always save the largest seeds from the healthiest plants to replant the following year. The reason we can manage to have 7 billion people here on the planet is basically through direct or indirect genetic engineering through gain-of-function research. The simple definition of gain-of-function research is the introduction of a mutation than enhances a gene’s function or property—a process used commonly in genetic, biologic, and microbiologic research.
In virology, historically, attenuated vaccines were generated by gain-of-function studies, which took human virus pathogens and adapted them for improved growth in cell culture, which reduced virus virulence in the natural human host.
So gain-of-function has been used in virology and microbiology for decades as a part of the scientific method. But that classic definition and purpose changed in 2011 and 2012, when researchers in Wisconsin and the Netherlands were funded to do gain-of-function research on avian flu transmissibility.

Those were the experiments that took H5N1, which had a high mortality rate in humans but low transmissibility, and made it highly transmissible through respiratory avenues.

The NIH, the FDA, the CDC, and the WHO all held meetings to identify the critical topics in influenza research that were least understood. What information and insight would better prepare us for flu pandemics that emerge from animal reservoirs in the future? The number-one conclusion was that we needed to understand the genetics and biology of flu emergence and transmission.
In response, the NIH called for proposals. Two researchers responded and were funded, and they discovered genetic changes that regulated H5N1 transmissibility in ferrets.
After that, they were labeled as rogue scientists, and gain-of-function was defined in negative terms. But in fact, they were working within the confines of the global health community’s interests.
Then again, the other side argues that regardless of how safe your BSL-3 or BSL-4 research infrastructure is, human beings are not infallible. [Pathogen labs are assigned a biosafety level rating of 1 to 4, with 4 being the highest.] They make mistakes, even in high-containment facilities. Consequently, the risks may outweigh the benefits of the experiment. Both sides of the argument have justified concerns and points of view.

In addition to concerns over a lab escape, there were also concerns about whether the knowledge of how to do such experiments might fall into the wrong hands.

That’s certainly part of the issue. And there was a fair amount of debate about whether that information [about genetic changes associated with flu transmission] should be made public. There are two or three instances in the virology literature of papers that are a potential concern.
Some consider my 2015 paper in this light, although after consultation with the NIH and the journal, we purposely did not provide the genetic sequence of the chimera in the original publication. Thus, our exact method remained obscure.
However, the sequence was repeatedly requested after the covid-19 pandemic emerged, and so after discussion with the NIH and the journal, it was provided to the community. Those who analyzed these sequences stated that it was very different from SARS-CoV-2.

How did that chimeric work on coronaviruses begin?

Around 2012 or 2013, I heard Dr. Shi present at a meeting. [Shi’s team had recently discovered two new coronaviruses in a bat cave, which they named SHC014 and WIV1.] We talked after the meeting. I asked her whether she’d be willing to make the sequences to either the SHC014 or the WIV1 spike available after she published.
And she was gracious enough to send us those sequences almost immediately—in fact, before she’d published. That was her major contribution to the paper. And when a colleague gives you sequences beforehand, co-authorship on the paper is appropriate.
That was the basis of that collaboration. We never provided the chimeric virus sequence, clones, or viruses to researchers at the WIV; and Dr. Shi, or members of her research team, never worked in our laboratory at UNC. No one from my group has worked in WIV laboratories.

And you had developed a reverse-genetics technique that allowed you to synthesize those viruses from the genetic sequence alone?

Yes, but at the time, DNA synthesis costs were expensive—around a dollar per base [one letter of DNA]. So synthesizing a coronavirus genome could cost $30,000. And we only had the spike sequence. Synthesizing just the 4,000-nucleotide spike gene cost $4,000. So we introduced the authentic SHC014 spike into a replication-competent backbone: a mouse-adapted strain of SARS. The virus was viable, and we discovered that it could replicate in human cells.
So is that gain-of-function research? Well, the SARS coronavirus parental strain could replicate quite efficiently in primary human cells. The chimera could also program infection of human cells, but not better than the parental virus. So we didn’t gain any function—rather, we retained function. Moreover, the chimera was attenuated in mice as compared to the parental mouse-adapted virus, so this would be considered a loss of function.

One of the knocks against gain-of-function research—including this research—is that the work has little practical value. Would you agree?

Well, by 2016, using chimeras and reverse genetics, we had identified enough high-risk SARS-like coronaviruses to be able to test and identify drugs that have broad-based activity against coronaviruses. We identified remdesivir as the first broad-based antiviral drug that worked against all known coronaviruses, and published on it in 2017. It immediately was entered into human trials and became the first FDA-approved drug for treating covid-19 infections globally. A second drug, called EIDD-2801, or molnupiravir, was also shown to be effective against all known coronaviruses prior to the 2020 pandemic, and then shown to work against SARS-CoV-2 by March 2020.
Consequently, I disagree. I would ask critics if they had identified any broad-spectrum coronavirus drugs prior to the pandemic. Can they point to papers from their laboratories documenting a strategic approach to develop effective pan-coronavirus drugs that turned out to be effective against an unknown emerging pandemic virus?
Unfortunately, remdesivir could only be delivered by intravenous injection. We were moving toward an oral-based delivery formulation, but the covid-19 pandemic emerged. I really wish we’d had an oral-based drug early on. That’s the game-changer that would help people infected in the developing world, as well as citizens in the US.
Molnupiravir is an oral medication, and phase 3 trials demonstrate rapid control of viral infection. It’s been considered for emergency-use authorization in India.
Finally, the work also supported federal policy decisions that prioritized basic and applied research on coronaviruses.

What about vaccines?

Around 2018 to 2019, the Vaccine Research Center at NIH contacted us to begin testing a messenger-RNA-based vaccine against MERS-CoV [a coronavirus that sometimes spreads from camels to humans]. MERS-CoV has been an ongoing problem since 2012, with a 35% mortality rate, so it has real global-health-threat potential.
By early 2020, we had a tremendous amount of data showing that in the mouse model that we had developed, these mRNA spike vaccines were really efficacious in protecting against lethal MERS-CoV infection. If designed against the original 2003 SARS strain, it was also very effective. So I think it was a no-brainer for NIH to consider mRNA-based vaccines as a safe and robust platform against SARS-CoV-2 and to give them a high priority moving forward.
Most recently, we published a paper showing that multiplexed, chimeric spike mRNA vaccines protect against all known SARS-like virus infections in mice. Global efforts to develop pan-sarbecoronavirus vaccines [sarbecoronavirus is the subgenus to which SARS and SARS-CoV-2 belong] will require us to make viruses like those described in the 2015 paper.
So I would argue that anyone saying there was no justification to do the work in 2015 is simply not acknowledging the infrastructure that contributed to therapeutics and vaccines for covid-19 and future coronaviruses.

The work only has value if the benefits outweigh the risks. Are there safety standards that should be applied to minimize those risks?

Certainly. We do everything at BSL-3 plus. The minimum requirements at BSL-3 would be an N95 mask, eye protection, gloves, and a lab coat, but we actually wear impervious Tyvek suits, aprons, and booties and are double-gloved. Our personnel wear hoods with PAPRs [powered air-purifying respirators] that supply HEPA-filtered air to the worker. So not only are we doing all research in a biological safety cabinet, but we also perform the research in a negative-pressure containment facility, which has lots of redundant features and backups, and each worker is encased in their own private personal containment suit.
Another thing we do is to run emergency drills with local first responders. We also work with the local hospital. With many laboratory infections, there’s actually no known event that caused that infection to occur. And people get sick, right? You have to have medical surveillance plans in place to rapidly quarantine people at home, to make sure they have masks and communicate regularly with a doctor on campus.


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Dr ANTHONY FAUCI's COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS to the 2022 GRADUATING CLASS of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
-->
@Avery
Anthony is partly responsible for Covid.
  • false
He helped secure funding for the gain of function research conducted in Wuhan.  He is also on record lying about this ("does not fund gain-of-function research and if it is" -- massive contradiction
  • Wikipedia summarizes Rand Paul's deception here fairly succinctly:
    • In a congressional hearing on May 11, 2021, about Anthony Fauci's role as the Chief Medical Advisor to the United States Office of the President, senator Rand Paul stated that "the U.S. has been collaborating with Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Virology Institute, sharing discoveries about how to create super viruses. This gain-of-function research has been funded by the NIH." Fauci responded "with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect...the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research [conducted at] the Wuhan Institute of Virology."  The Washington Post fact-checking team later rated Paul's statements as containing "significant omissions and/or exaggerations".   NIH funding to the EcoHealth Alliance and later sub-contracted to the Wuhan Institute of Virology was not to support gain-of-function experiments, but instead to enable the collection of bat samples in the wild.   EcoHealth Alliance spokesperson Robert Kessler has also categorically denied the accusation.
    • EcoHealth Alliance was paying technicians from the  Wuhan lab $133,000/year  to go out and collect bat samples for their research in South Carolina. Nobody could call that  "gain of function" research and so Fauci was 100% truthful here and Rand Paul (as usual) a god-damned liar.
      • "Gain of function, in many ways, is basic biological research. It’s done all the time with flies, worms, mice and cells in petri dishes. Scientists create novel genotypes (such as arrangements of nucleic acids) and screen or select to find those with a given phenotype (such as trait or ability) to find new sequences with a particular function."  -Washington Post
      • All virology labs do work that Paul might term "gain of function, including research done by EcoHealth Alliance.
  • The inference deceptively drawn by Paul that there is some sort of connection to be drawn between the NIH grant to EcoHealth and COVID-19 is 100% bullshit and no responsible person would repeat that lie.
  • Scientific consensus then and now is that SARS2 most likely emerged from the same place as SARS1- the live animal market in Wuhan.  The conspiracy theory suggesting COVID-19 came out of the lab in Wuhan has no supporting evidence in virology but given the lab's proximity to the point of origin and the secrecy enforced by the Chinese govt, there will probably always remain a gap in certainty about COVID-19's origin that politicians like Paul will exploit.

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Lord of the RIngs
Well, it ends up being a complete re-write from Tolkien but I think most of it works.  I'll watch next season although I suppose I'll probably wait years for it.  Have you seen David Eggers The Northman?  Super epic fun that Tolkien would have enjoyed muchly methinks.
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Quid Pro Joe tries to bribe Saudi Arabi
BIDEN VOWS 'CONSEQUENCES' for SAUDIS AFTER OPEC CUTS OUTPUT
By AAMER MADHANI@APNEWS

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden said Tuesday there will be “consequences” for Saudi Arabia as the Riyadh-led OPEC+ alliance moves to cut oil production and Democratic lawmakers call for a freeze on cooperation with the Saudis.

Biden suggested he would soon take action, as aides announced that the administration is reevaluating its relationship with the kingdom in light of the oil production cut that White House officials say will help another OPEC+ member, Russia, pad its coffers as it continues its nearly eight-month war in Ukraine.

Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Rep. Ro Khanna of California introduced legislation that would immediately pause all U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia for one year. This pause would also halt sales of spare and repair parts, support services and logistical support.

But it remains to be seen how far Biden is willing to go in showing his displeasure with the Saudis, a vital but complicated ally in the Middle East. Biden came into office vowing to recalibrate the U.S. relationship because of Saudi Arabia’s human rights record but then paid a visit to the kingdom earlier this year.

Biden said in a CNN interview he would look to consult with Congress on the way forward, but stopped short of endorsing the Democratic lawmakers’ call to halt weapons sales.

“There’s going to be some consequences for what they’ve done, with Russia,” Biden said. “I’m not going to get into what I’d consider and what I have in mind. But there will be — there will be consequences.”

John Kirby, a White House National Security Council spokesman, said Biden believes “it’s time to take another look at this relationship and make sure that it’s serving our national security interests.”

Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Tuesday the White House has no timeline for its review nor has the president appointed an adviser to serve as point person.

Meanwhile, officials underscore the central role that Saudi Arabia plays in addressing broader national security concerns in the Middle East.

Blumenthal and Khanna unveiled their legislation one day after Sen. Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, said it was unacceptable that OPEC+ had moved to cut oil production and effectively assist Moscow in its war on Ukraine. Menendez promised to use his position as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to block any future arms sales to the Saudis.

Menendez did not warn the White House before announcing his intention to block future Saudi arms sales, Kirby said.

OPEC+, which includes Russia as well as Saudi Arabia, announced last week it would cut production by 2 million barrels a day, which will help prop up oil prices that are allowing Russian President Vladimir Putin to keep paying for his eight-month invasion of Ukraine. The production cut also hurts U.S.-led efforts to make the war financially unsustainable for Russia, threatens a global economy already destabilized by the Ukraine conflict and risks saddling Biden and Democrats with newly rising gasoline prices just ahead of the U.S. midterm elections.

Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud told Saudi-owed Al Arabiya on Tuesday that his government’s justification of the production cuts was “purely economic.”

Biden and European leaders have urged more oil production to ease gasoline prices and punish Moscow for its aggression in Ukraine. Putin has been accused of using energy as a weapon against countries opposing Russia’s invasion.

“They are certainly aligning themselves with Russia,” Jean-Pierre said. “This is not a time to be aligning with Russia.”

As for the Saudis, Sen. Blumenthal said, “We cannot continue selling highly sensitive arms technology to a nation aligned with an abhorrent terrorist adversary.”
However, the White House takes note that its weapon sales to Riyadh serve, in part, as an important counterweight in the region to Iran, which is quickly moving toward becoming a nuclear power.
“There’s 70,000 Americans living in Saudi Arabia right now, not to mention all the other troops we have throughout the region,” Kirby said. “So, it’s not only in our interest that missile defense in the region become more integrated and cooperative. It’s in the interest of our allies and partners in that part of the world as well.”

Still, the pressure is mounting for Biden. As a candidate for the White House, he vowed that Saudi rulers would “pay the price” under his watch for the 2018 killing of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the kingdom’s leadership. Biden said that he’d look to make the oil-rich country a “pariah.”

But in July, amid rising prices at the pump around the globe, Biden decided to pay a visit to Saudi Arabia. During the visit, he met with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who he once shunned as a killer for the death of Khashoggi. The U.S. intelligence community determined that the crown prince, often referred to by his initials MBS, likely approved the killing of Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. MBS denies he was involved.

The Saudis have also drawn international criticism for airstrikes killing civilians in the years-long war between the kingdom and Houthi rebels in Yemen — as well as for embargoes that exacerbated hunger and pushed Yemen to the brink of famine.

“Saudi Arabia’s disastrous decision to slash oil production by two million barrels a day makes it clear that Riyadh is seeking to harm the U.S. and reaffirms the need to reassess the U.S.-Saudi relationship,” Khanna said. “There is no reason for the U.S. to kowtow to a regime that has massacred countless civilians in Yemen, hacked to death a Washington-based journalist and is now extorting Americans at the pump.”
___
Associated Press writer Ellen Knickmeyer contributed reporting.


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SUBPOENA for TRUMP, WARNINGS for DEMOCRACY
Jan. 6 takeaways: Subpoena for Trump, warnings for democracy
By MARY CLARE JALONICK and ERIC TUCKER@APNEWS

WASHINGTON (AP) — The House Jan. 6 committee took the extraordinary action of subpoenaing former President Donald Trump on Thursday as it issued a stark warning in its final public hearing before the midterm election: The future of the nation’s democracy is at stake.

The panel’s October hearing, just weeks ahead of the midterm election, focused on Trump’s state of mind on Jan. 6, 2021 as he egged on his supporters with false claims of election fraud, pushed to accompany them to the Capitol while lawmakers were counting the votes, and then did nothing for hours as the mob violently breached the building.

The committee is set to shut down at the beginning of next year, and was making its final public arguments ahead of a report expected in December.

“We are obligated to seek answers directly from the man who set this all in motion,” said Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the panel’s vice chairwoman and one of two Republicans on the nine-member committee. “And every American is entitled to those answers. So we can act now to protect our republic.”

A SUBPOENA FOR TRUMP — BUT NOT PENCE

The subpoena for Trump is a major escalation in the probe. After signaling for months that they may leave the former president alone, the unanimous 9-0 vote “for relevant documents and testimony, under oath” was definitive.

The committee had long debated whether to seek testimony from or subpoena Trump or former Vice President Mike Pence. Neither has spoken directly to the committee. While Trump has been hostile to the probe both in court and in public, Pence’s lawyers had engaged with the panel for several months with no clear resolution.

Still, several of Pence’s closest aides have complied with the investigation, with several of them providing great detail about his movements and state of mind as he resisted Trump’s pleas to somehow object to the certification of electoral votes that day and try to overturn their defeat.

In contrast, the committee showed several clips of Trump allies refusing to answer questions before the panel.

Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat, said the committee was “able to nail down every salient detail in pretty much every element of the offense” except for certain details about what Trump was doing and saying as the insurrection unfolded.

‘CONSIDER WHETHER WE CAN SURVIVE’

The lesson of the committee’s investigation is that institutions only hold when people of good faith protect them without regard to political cost, Cheney said during the hearing.

“Why would Americans assume that our Constitution and our institutions in our Republic are invulnerable to another attack? Why would we assume that those institutions will not falter next time?” Cheney asked.

The warnings come as Trump is still refusing to acknowledge that he lost his reelection to Joe Biden and is considering another run in 2024 — and as many Republicans who deny Biden’s win are running in the midterm elections at all levels of government. Many states have replaced election officials who resisted Trump’s pressure campaign.

“Any future president inclined to attempt what Donald Trump did in 2020 has now learned not to install people who could stand in the way,” said Cheney, who lost her own Republican primary this August. “Consider whether we can survive for another 246 years.”

PELOSI AND SCHUMER, IN HIDING

New video aired by the panel showed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reacting emotionally to the news that her colleagues were donning gas masks in the House chamber as rioters neared. She quickly went to work trying to reopen the Capitol.

Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer were seen in unidentified secure locations and talking to security officials. The footage included a conversation between Pelosi and Pence, who was also in a secure location, discussing their return to the session to finish certifying Biden’s victory.

The footage was filmed by Pelosi’s daughter, Alexandra Pelosi, according to two people familiar with the video who requested anonymity to discuss it.

The two leaders are seen working to bring the National Guard to the Capitol amid an hours long delay. At one point, Schumer said he was going to “call up the f’n secretary of DOD,” referring to the Defense Department.

“We have some senators who are still in their hideaways,” Schumer said on the phone. “They need massive personnel now.”

SECRET SERVICE REVELATIONS

The committee has obtained more than 1.5 million pages of documents from the Secret Service in recent weeks. They revealed some of that information in the hearing, including an email from within the agency on Dec. 11, 2020, the day the Supreme Court rejected one of Trump’s attempts to undermine the vote.

“Just fyi. POTUS is p—-d — breaking news —- Supreme Court denied his law suit. He is livid now,” one anonymous Secret Service email said.

Other emails showed that the agency had ample warnings of violence in the weeks and days ahead of the insurrection.

An alert received by the agency on Dec. 24 said multiple online users were targeting members of Congress and “instructing others to march into the chambers,” said California Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democratic member of the panel.

CABINET OFFICIALS

The committee showed prerecorded interviews with Cabinet members, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, Attorney General William Barr and Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, who said they believed that once the legal avenues had been exhausted, that should have been the end of Trump’s effort to remain in power.

Pompeo, who was interviewed by the panel since its last hearing in July, said in his videotaped testimony that he believed that once the Electoral College certified the vote, that was the end of the process for contesting the election. “We should all comply with the law at all times, to the best of our ability — every one of us,” Pompeo said.

Chao, who is married to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, said she decided to resign after the insurrection because it was “impossible for me to continue given my personal values and my philosophy.”

At the same time, Trump continued to push the false claims of fraud to his millions of supporters.

“President Trump knew the truth. He heard what all his experts and senior staff was telling him,” said Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, the committee’s other Republican. “His intent was plain: ignore the rule of law and stay in power.”

CRIMINAL REFERRALS

Cheney addressed one of the committee’s remaining questions at the beginning of the meeting, saying that the panel “may ultimately decide to make a series of criminal referrals to the Department of Justice.”

Members of the panel have long suggested they may suggest charges for Trump or others based on their own evidence. While such a referral would not force any action, it would place political pressure on Attorney General Merrick Garland as the department has pursued its own investigations surrounding Jan. 6. And the committee has yet to share any transcripts from its more than 1,000 interviews.

Still, “we recognize that our role is not to make decisions regarding prosecution,” Cheney said.
___
Associated Press writers Michael Balsamo, Farnoush Amiri, Kevin Freking and Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.


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What city is in the most sports-related anguish?
Albuquerque
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Tulsi Gabbard, Truth teller to the DNC, leaves Democrat party.
TULSI GABBARD's BIGGEST POLITICAL DONOR in 2021 is a PUTIN APOLOGIST

NEO-NAZIS BOAST 'We got TULSI in the DEBATES'
Racist website takes credit for boosting Democratic presidential hopeful

ACCUSED RUSSIAN AGENT gave to ONE POLITICIAN: TULSI GABBARD
Russian-American national Elena Branson was indicted this week for lobbying for pro-Kremlin policies while not registered as a foreign agent. She gave to one U.S. politician.

HILLARY CLINTON SUGGESTS RUSSIANS are GROOMING TULSI GABBARD for THIRD-PARTY RUN
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Tulsi Gabbard, Truth teller to the DNC, leaves Democrat party.
SENATOR MITT ROMNEY ACCUSED TULSI GABBARD of 'PARROTING FALSE RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA' after he COMMENTS on BIO-LABS in UKRAINE
Kelsey Vlamis@Business Insider
Mar 13, 2022, 11:53 PM

  • Sen. Mitt Romney said former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard's "treasonous lies may well cost lives."
  • His remarks followed comments from Gabbard about US-funded biolabs in Ukraine.
  • Russia last week baselessly accused the US of funding the development of bioweapons in Ukraine.
Republican Sen. Mitt Romney strongly condemned former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, seemingly responding to comments she has made in recent days about US biological laboratories in Ukraine.

"Tulsi Gabbard is parroting false Russian propaganda. Her treasonous lies may well cost lives," Romney said in a tweet on Sunday afternoon. A representative for Romney did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment on what specifically he was referring to.

Earlier in the day, Gabbard, who ran for president in 2020, posted a video on Twitter repeating claims about US-funded biolabs in Ukraine. She also appeared on Fox News host Tucker Carlson's show last week and said she was "deeply concerned" about claims of bioweapons in Ukraine.

Russia has spread a baseless claim that the US is funding the development of bioweapons in labs in Ukraine. Russian and Chinese state media amplified the claims, while the US warned they could indicate that Russia is planning to use chemical weapons in its invasion of Ukraine.

In a fact check of Russia's biolabs claims, The New York Times reported that there are biological labs in Ukraine that are backed by the US in an effort to prevent bioweapons from being made or used.

The Washington Post reported the labs study African swine fever, which infects pigs rather than humans, with the goal of preventing it from spreading. The Post also reported funding for the Ukraine labs was initially authorized by the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

Representatives for Gabbard did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Meanwhile, Russian TV played clips of Carlson and Gabbard, The Daily Beast's Julia Davis reported. Mother Jones reported the Kremlin sent a memo instructing state media to feature Carlson "as much as possible" because he "sharply criticizes" the US and NATO.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger also lashed out at Gabbard in a tweet in response to her comments: "Actual Russian propaganda. Traitorous. Russia also said the Luger center in Georgia was making zombies. Tulsi should go to Russia."

Representatives for Romney and Kinzinger did not respond to requests for comment.


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r/amitheasshole-related 4chan greentext poses an interesting question
So we know that she's underage and he's old enough to want to be willing to raise the child- probably done with college, at least.  The age difference would be informative, here. Her choice was abortion and his choice was parenthood and she respected his choice enough to make the sacrifice of going through pregnancy and childbirth for a child she did not want.  In most states, she was legally required to terminate her  parental rights and with that came the legal right to deny further contact.  You can't condemn a mother for not choosing adoption over abortion and then later condemn the mother for not wanting to connect with the unwanted child.  Future mothers will prefer abortion to risking the guilt and emotional complexity of being confronted by an unwanted child decades later.

I think she has made some sacrifices and respected the father's choices and now the father has a state recognized responsibility to respect the birth mother's choice of non-participation.   We would have to know a lot more details before we could start with moral condemnations.  What if the father was her volleyball coach, for example? 12 years later she could very well have friends and family who know nothing about this child and such revelations might bring real harms to a lot of other people.  Ultimately, not enough information but if you really want to discourage abortions in this country, you are going to have to respect a birth-mother's right to no future contact.
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Trump’s mentor was gay - Do Trump supporters know this?
I would not call Roy Cohn's sexuality a surprising revelation.  For example, Cohn is an important character in the Pulitzer Prize winning play Angels in America.  The main character is dying of AIDS but Cohn's gay nurse steals Cohn's AZT after his death in exchange for being possessed by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg for the purpose of singing the Jewish Prayer for the Dead over Cohn (Cohn first rose to fame prosecuting the Rosenbergs).  Amazing scene played by Al Pacino as Cohn, Jeffrey Wright as Belize the nurse and Meryl Streep as Ethel Rosenberg in the movie.

Not everybody knows that Roger Stone is gay in the same sort of tradition as Cohn.  He was far more of an insider in the Republican party until the National Enquirer reported on his habit of advertising for gymrat hunk hookups in Miami and NY and Bob Dole had to fire him from his position as his campaign's Youth Outreach Manager.  If you are wondering what ever happened to Milo Yiannopoulis he is basically Stone's dark Apprentice (and also intern for Marjorie Taylor Greene)

Let's not forget that Cohn also introduced Trump and Stone to Jeffrey Epstein.  When you understand that Stone and Epstein spent decades in New York hooking up powerful people with secret sex partners for leverage and blackmail, Trump's seemingly strange ability to make people self destruct their respectable careers for him makes more sense (Lindsey Graham, Rudy Giuliani, Alan Dershowitz, Bill Barr, Ken Starr, etc).  I think that's why the GOP destroyed Madison Cawthorne's career overnight just for saying that there was a lot of drugs and gay sex at the heart of Republican politics.  I assume that blackmail is the core dynamic that holds the GOP together right now, Roy Cohn's great legacy.
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