Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Wednesday, June 05, 2024

No, you're wrong and stop watching NewsMax

Anthony Fauci did not lie about the origins of the Covid-19 virus and he did not suppress any evidence about it. He said consistently that we could not be certain of its origins. Also, he does not profit from or have any stake in any vaccine-related enterprise, nor are his personal fortunes affected in any way by whatever conclusion one might come to regarding the origins of the virus. Those are just made up lies. I don't publish comments that consist of lies. And you need to find better sources of information.


If you had bothered to read the NYT article I linked to, you would have read the following:

In May, citing failures in EcoHealth’s monitoring of risky experiments conducted at the Wuhan lab, the Biden administration suspended all federal funding for the organization and Dr. Daszak, and initiated proceedings to bar them from receiving future grants. In his testimony on Monday, Dr. Fauci said that he supported the decision to suspend and bar EcoHealth. . . .


In the end, American partners very likely knew of only a fraction of the research done in Wuhan. According to U.S. intelligence sources, some of the institute’s virus research was classified or conducted with or on behalf of the Chinese military. In the congressional hearing on Monday, Dr. Fauci repeatedly acknowledged the lack of visibility into experiments conducted at the Wuhan institute, saying, “None of us can know everything that’s going on in China, or in Wuhan, or what have you. And that’s the reason why — I say today, and I’ve said at the T.I.,” referring to his transcribed interview with the subcommittee, “I keep an open mind as to what the origin is.”

 

It is certainly a legitimate concern that, although the U.S. did not directly fund, or even know about, the dangerous research that was carried out at the Wuhan lab, it did fund other research at the lab without knowing about everything that was going on there.  I would agree that should not have happened.


In response to a comment (which I did publish) the rationale for conducting gain of function research that can create more dangerous pathogens is that it creates an opportunity to find ways of countering them before they might appear naturally. But it's certainly a legitimate debate whether this is a good idea, even with the most stringent security measures, because humans are fallible and security measures can fail due to negligence, miscalculation, or malice. I don't have a definite opinion either way but one argument that's hard to counter is that if we don't do it, somebody else will.

 

 

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