It’s not “hurt feelings.” He’s been on the cover of Time Magazine, which makes sense. But the nation’s leading infectious disease expert posing poolside for In Style is Trump-like. Just basking in the sun by the pool at the height of a pandemic that killed millions.
It’s not “hurt feelings.” He’s been on the cover of Time Magazine, which makes sense. But the nation’s leading infectious disease expert posing poolside for In Style is Trump-like. Just basking in the sun by the pool at the height of a pandemic that killed millions.
He's lounging? I literally haven't lounged in 20 months thanks to the pandemic. Been here in the bomb shelter since the start. I'm with you here.
It’s not “hurt feelings.” He’s been on the cover of Time Magazine, which makes sense. But the nation’s leading infectious disease expert posing poolside for In Style is Trump-like. Just basking in the sun by the pool at the height of a pandemic that killed millions.
Meh... trolling to get a rise out of people is trump like too.
Yeah who gives a shit when/how the virus got started at this point! Many lives could of been saved with a competent president but unfortunately we had an imbecile running the circus hence 100’s of thousand perished..
Well ya should care. How the hell do you prevent future pandemics without knowing how this one started?
We had a total playbook left behind by Obama administration! On how to handle a pandemic guess what Trumps administration did with it dismissed it, most virus start with humans involvement..
I get it, dude. Trump is an idiot. I'm not talking about Trump's handling of things. He was terrible as expected. I'm talking about the origin of the pandemic and how Fauci and others were quick to dismiss the lab theory. You say most viruses start with human involvement, but for quite a while there, Fauci was suggesting you're a conspiracy theorist to suggest the lab was the origin. And Facebook was censoring posts linking the virus to the Wuhan lab.
I already know Donald Trump is a shady asshole. It's Fauci who I'm interested in learning more about. Why be so dismissive of the lab theory? Covering his own ass knowing the NIH gave funding to the Wuhan lab?
fauci has not denied NIH gave funding to the wuhan lab, he denies funding was given specifically on the basis of gain of function research.
i think the pushback on the wuhan lab theory was because they knew full well what would happen (and did happen, to some extent) if it gained traction: racist attacks on chinese people. and because trump was suggesting china did it as a bioweapon. had fauci and others come out and said, at that point, "we don't know anything yet" instead of outright calling it false, people would have gone berserk, calling for WW3 on China. we could easily have had another cold war on our hands, during a pandemic, with trump at the helm.
that's a trifecta for a massive fuck up.
He hasn't denied funding, but in the earliest days of the pandemic (say last March), he wasn't exactly forthcoming with that information. That's why I think at the time, he was trying to minimize the lab theory; trying to get eyes off the lab and the NIH's funding.
I disagree with the second paragraph. I just don't get how it's racist to suggest Chinese scientists fucked up and that might the cause, but it's not racist to suggest that China's filthy, inhumane wet markets might be the cause. Why would one cause racist attacks on Chinese Americans and not the other? I also don't think saying "We don't know anything yet" would have led to people going berserk on China. But even if that was the fear, it's still better to be honest and say "we're not sure yet" than it is to dismiss one of the possible causes (the lab). That makes it looks as if scientists like Fauci were covering for China. So now you get the same anger towards China that you would've gotten a year ago, but coupled with anger towards people like Fauci who we're supposed to trust.
Agree that Fauci is and was a POS. Gutless puke. I’m not even sure the whole bunch of them who allowed that baby to lie month after month shouldn’t be held responsible for their non-actions. If Trump would have handled the whole thing honestly he’d be sitting in the WH right now. He was just too stupid to see it, his last opportunity to do something positive and he was just soooo stupid about it.
Completely agree. Trump had his chance to be a normal president in the midst of a real crisis, and he blew it. If he handled things correctly, he could've cancelled out a lot of the stupid bullshit from the first three years of his presidency.
In fact, if he didn't vilify Fauci and just stayed neutral, maybe everyone would see Fauci for what he is. But nope, Trump made him his enemy, so by proxy, he became an ally of the left.
so what "is" Fauci?
Attention-whore, fraud, partisan hack.
I'm sure you'll want examples.
Attention-whore: What type of "doctor" poses poolside for a style magazine?
Fraud: Well I believe this due to him dismissing the lab theory when he knows it shouldn't have been dismissed. Not to say that the lab 100% definitely the cause of the pandemic, but it shouldn't have been dismissed.
Partisan Hack: Refusing to give recommendations that BLM protests shouldn't occur. Now this guy gave dozens if not hundreds of recommendations of how many people should convene in a place, how far away they should be, who should be wearing masks, etc. But when asked on capitol hill if he'd recommend against BLM protests (with hundreds to thousands of people in the streets), he refused. Well a SCIENTIST shouldn't let the cause of the gathering weigh on his recommendation. If you can't gather for a rock concert because it's not safe due to the virus, then you can't gather for a George Floyd rally because it's not safe for the same reason.
probably one who was asked to do a cover story and probably felt it was another avenue to get straight talk out there without fuckstick damaging the messaging seconds after it was given?
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
It’s not “hurt feelings.” He’s been on the cover of Time Magazine, which makes sense. But the nation’s leading infectious disease expert posing poolside for In Style is Trump-like. Just basking in the sun by the pool at the height of a pandemic that killed millions.
Meh... trolling to get a rise out of people is trump like too.
It is. But you’re conceding here that Fauci, the scientist, is Trump-like.
Frankly, while being critical of that magazine picture, and certainly making fun of his first pitch, upsets some of you, I shouldn’t have posted that. It just distracts from the real issue that I was posting about before that; Fauci funding the gain of function research, which I’m sure was done in good faith. But when shit went wrong at the lab, he went to great lengths to discredit the lab theory even though that’s not being transparent. So on the levels of Trumpist behavior, I’d rather troll on a message board than lie to the public about important scientific information.
Fact-checking the Paul-Fauci flap over Wuhan lab funding
Rand Paul: Fauci is 'fooling with Mother Nature'
In
a May 11 hearing, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) asked top infectious-disease
expert Anthony S. Fauci about NIH funding of research in China. (The
Washington Post)
“Juicing
up super viruses is not new. Scientists in the U.S. have long known how
to mutate animal viruses to infect humans. For years, Dr. Ralph Baric, a
virologist in the U.S., has been collaborating with Dr. Shi Zhengli of
the Wuhan Virology Institute, sharing his discoveries about how to
create super viruses. This gain-of-function research has been funded by
the NIH. … Dr. Fauci, do you still support funding of the NIH funding of
the lab in Wuhan?”
— Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), remarks at a Senate hearing, May 11
“Senator
Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect
that the NIH has not never and does not now fund gain-of-function
research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
— Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in response.
This fact check has been updated with a statement by the National Institutes of Health
This showdown between Paul and Fauci quickly went viral last week. But the nature of their debate regarding the origins of the coronavirus
pandemic may seem obscure to many people. “Gain of function” is one of
those insider-y terms that are subject to different definitions. The
debate over such experiments predated the pandemic, but it has gained
new urgency as scientists investigate the origin of the virus that has
killed more than 3 million people around the world.
The
core of the dispute is this: Did the virus emerge from nature —
“zoonotically” from animals — or was it the result of a lab experiment
gone awry?
Last May, the Fact Checker video team reported
that the “balance of the scientific evidence strongly supports the
conclusion that the new coronavirus emerged from nature.” A joint report
by the World Health Organization and China, released in February, said a
lab escape of the virus was “extremely unlikely.” But last week, a
group of 18 preeminent scientists published a letter in the journal Science
saying a new investigation is needed, because “theories of accidental
release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable.”
If the lab leak is found at fault, Paul was suggesting, then the U.S. government was partially responsible.
The Facts
Let’s start with the basics. What is gain-of-function research?
In
many ways, it 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.
But
it’s one thing to experiment with fruit flies and another thing when
the research involves genotypes of potential pandemic pathogens and
functions related to transmissibility or virulence in humans.
That’s
when “gain of function” becomes controversial. The idea is to get ahead
of future viruses that might emerge from nature, thereby allowing
scientists to study how to combat them. But many believed the research
was potentially dangerous.
In a 2011 opinion article
published in The Washington Post, Fauci and two co-authors noted that
“the question is whether benefits of such research outweigh risks. The
answer is not simple. … Safeguarding against the potential accidental
release or deliberate misuse of laboratory pathogens is imperative.” In
2014, such research was paused for three years as the government set up a review process to oversee funding, known as the Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight (P3CO) framework.
In
Wuhan, China, where the first cases of the coronavirus emerged in late
2019, at least two labs studied coronaviruses that originate in bats — the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention (WHCDC).
Both are close to the seafood market that was originally deemed the
source of the outbreak. The WIV is about eight miles away. The WHCDC is
right around the corner.
The WIV is where one of the world’s foremost experts on bat viruses, Shi Zhengli,
works. The WIV has a biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory, the most
secure, where researchers wear protective suits. But some of WIV’s more
controversial experiments on bat coronaviruses are believed to have been
done at BSL-2 labs, where researchers wear white lab coats and gloves,
as in a dental office.
W. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University had co-authored an influential letter in March 2020 that the coronavirus was “not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” He recently told former New York Times reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr.
that the BSL-2 revelation was significant, even though there still is
no direct evidence of a lab leak. “That’s screwed up,” he said. “It
shouldn’t have happened. People should not be looking at bat viruses in
BSL-2 labs. My view has changed.”
In
any case, is there evidence that NIH funded such gain-of-function
research at WIV? To some extent, that depends on the definition of gain
of function, which, as we noted, is open to dispute.
For instance, in 2017, WIV published a study
that said researchers had found a coronavirus from a bat that could be
transmitted directly to humans. WIV researchers used reverse genetics to
deliberately create novel recombinants of wild bat coronavirus
backbones and spike genes, then tested the ability of these chimeric
(man-made) viruses to replicate in — not just infect — a variety of cell
lines. The article reported the discovery of novel coronavirus backbone
and spike combinations that do not exist in nature and are capable of
replicating efficiently in human cells with the angiotensin-converting
enzyme 2 (ACE2), the protein that provides the entry point for the
coronavirus to hook into and infect human tissue.
The article, under its list of funders, included: the National Institutes of Health.
The NIH grant
that funded the project said it would study “the risk of future
coronavirus (CoV) emergence from wildlife using in-depth field
investigations across the human-wildlife interface in China.” The grant
description included this line: “Test predictions of CoV inter-species
transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential)
will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and
receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range
of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.”
To
some experts, that certainly sounds like gain-of-function research,
though we should note that, based on what has been disclosed publicly by
WIV, none of the virus samples used to conduct these experiments were
or could have been transformed to be the new coronavirus that causes the
disease covid-19.
“The research was — unequivocally — gain-of-function research,” Richard H. Ebright of Rutgers University,
a longtime critic of such research, told The Fact Checker. “The
research met the definition for gain-of-function research of concern
under the 2014 Pause.”
(Our colleague Josh Rogin reported
that this 2017 research article prompted U.S. diplomats and scientists
to visit the WIV facility. Afterward, they sent a cable to Washington
expressing concern about the safety standards there, intended as “a
warning about a potential public-health crisis.”)
But Robert Kessler, a spokesman for the nongovernmental organization EcoHealth Alliance
that NIH funded, said claims about funding gain-of-function research
are based on a misunderstanding of the grant’s role in the research. He
said EcoHealth provided WIV $133,000 a year, except for $66,000 in 2020
(when the grant was terminated by the Trump administration), for a total
of about $600,000.
“The
NIH has not funded gain-of-function work,” Kessler said in email
exchanges. “EcoHealth Alliance was funded by the NIH to conduct study of
coronavirus diversity in China. From that award, we subcontracted work
with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to help with sampling and lab
capacity.” He said the citation in the paper was mainly the result of
researchers’ desire to cite any possible research that contributed to
the findings, with much of the funding coming from the National Natural
Science Foundation of China. (Another funder listed was USAID’s Predict program, which helped collect animal viruses and also funded EcoHealth.)
“As
described in the paper, all but two of the viruses cultured in the lab
failed to even replicate,” he said. “None of them had been manipulated
in order to increase their ability to spread, all the researchers did
was insert S [spike] proteins in order to gauge their ability to infect
human cells.”
Kessler
added that “much of that work [described in the grant] wasn’t done
because the grant was suspended. But GoF was never the goal here.” As he
put it, “gain of function research is the specific process of altering
human viruses in order to increase their ability (the titular gain of
function) either to spread amongst populations, to infect people, or to
cause more severe illness.”
“The
Baric laboratory has never investigated strategies to create super
viruses,” he said. “Studies focused on understanding the cross-species
transmission potential of bat coronaviruses like SHC014 have been
reviewed by the NIH and by the UNC Institutional Biosafety Committee for
potential of gain-of-function research and were deemed not to be gain of function.”
“We
never introduced mutations into the SHC014 [horseshoe bat coronavirus]
spike to enhance growth in human cells, though the work demonstrated
that bat SARS-like viruses were intrinsically poised to emerge in the
future,” he added. “These recombinant clones and viruses were never sent
to China. Importantly, independent studies carried out by Italian
scientists and others from around the world have confirmed that none of
the bat SARS-like viruses studied at UNC were related to SARS-CoV-2, the
cause of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
We
gave NIH six days to respond to questions and though we were promised a
statement, none was received. That’s fishy. Fauci, speaking to the
United Facts of America fact-checking festival on May 11, said
Paul’s statement was “preposterous.” He said the research was “a very
minor collaboration, as part of a subcontract of a grant, we had a
collaboration with some Chinese scientists.”
Update, May 19: The National Institutes of Health issued a statement
to The Fact Checker which in part said: “NIH has never approved any
grant to support 'gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that would
have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans. The
research proposed in the EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. grant application sought
to understand how bat coronaviruses evolve naturally in the environment
to become transmissible to the human population.” When gain-of-function
research was paused, “this grant was reviewed again and determined by
experts to fall outside the scope of the funding pause.”
In a separate statement
also issued May 19, NIH Director Francis S. Collins said: “NIH strongly
supports the need for further investigation by the World Health
Organization (WHO) into the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.”
“Despite
Dr. Fauci’s denials, there is ample evidence that the NIH and the
NIAID, under his direction, funded gain of function research at the
Wuhan Institute of Virology,” said Paul spokeswoman Kelsey Cooper. “In
light of those facts, the question Dr. Paul asked was whether the
government has fully investigated the origin of the disease, which it
clearly has not. This research and the lab should be thoroughly
investigated and opened to public scrutiny.”
The Pinocchio Test
There
is some smoke here, but we do not yet perceive the fire claimed by
Paul. To some extent, all money is fungible. But the EcoHealth funding
was not related to the experiments, but the collection of samples. The
NIH grant includes language that some say suggests gain-of-function
research; NIH says that is a misinterpretation. Paul’s statements about
Baric’s research also appear overblown. We wavered between Two and Three
Pinocchios, but decided on Two, because there still are enough
questions about the work at the Wuhan lab to warrant further scrutiny,
even if the NIH connection to possible gain-of-function research appears
so far to be elusive.
In
the absence of crucial evidence of how the new coronavirus began comes
many theories — one is that the virus accidentally escaped from a lab in
Wuhan, China. (Sarah Cahlan, Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
It’s not “hurt feelings.” He’s been on the cover of Time Magazine, which makes sense. But the nation’s leading infectious disease expert posing poolside for In Style is Trump-like. Just basking in the sun by the pool at the height of a pandemic that killed millions.
Meh... trolling to get a rise out of people is trump like too.
It is. But you’re conceding here that Fauci, the scientist, is Trump-like.
Frankly, while being critical of that magazine picture, and certainly making fun of his first pitch, upsets some of you, I shouldn’t have posted that. It just distracts from the real issue that I was posting about before that; Fauci funding the gain of function research, which I’m sure was done in good faith. But when shit went wrong at the lab, he went to great lengths to discredit the lab theory even though that’s not being transparent. So on the levels of Trumpist behavior, I’d rather troll on a message board than lie to the public about important scientific information.
I believe when all is said & done that Fauci tried to save as many lives as he could, which can't be said about your orange hero. You can whine about magazine covers and BLM and Chinese labs all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that Fauci tried to do his job while our president at the time turned his back on us in the worst pandemic to hit this country in a century. I get it, people need to vilify Fauci to try make trump look less bad. It is what it is. Was the guy perfect? Not at all, but he didn't walk away which would have been the path of least resistance, he stuck around & tried to do his job under absurd and unnecessary circumstances created by that orange fuckstick. I couldn't give a shit about how he throws out a first pitch, or whether or not he was on a magazine cover.
& talk about trump like... when all else fails, just say he throws like a girl.
It’s not “hurt feelings.” He’s been on the cover of Time Magazine, which makes sense. But the nation’s leading infectious disease expert posing poolside for In Style is Trump-like. Just basking in the sun by the pool at the height of a pandemic that killed millions.
Meh... trolling to get a rise out of people is trump like too.
It is. But you’re conceding here that Fauci, the scientist, is Trump-like.
Frankly, while being critical of that magazine picture, and certainly making fun of his first pitch, upsets some of you, I shouldn’t have posted that. It just distracts from the real issue that I was posting about before that; Fauci funding the gain of function research, which I’m sure was done in good faith. But when shit went wrong at the lab, he went to great lengths to discredit the lab theory even though that’s not being transparent. So on the levels of Trumpist behavior, I’d rather troll on a message board than lie to the public about important scientific information.
I believe when all is said & done that Fauci tried to save as many lives as he could, which can't be said about your orange hero. You can whine about magazine covers and BLM and Chinese labs all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that Fauci tried to do his job while our president at the time turned his back on us in the worst pandemic to hit this country in a century. I get it, people need to vilify Fauci to try make trump look less bad. It is what it is. Was the guy perfect? Not at all, but he didn't walk away which would have been the path of least resistance, he stuck around & tried to do his job under absurd and unnecessary circumstances created by that orange fuckstick. I couldn't give a shit about how he throws out a first pitch, or whether or not he was on a magazine cover.
& talk about trump like... when all else fails, just say he throws like a girl.
JFC
Trump’s not my hero. Didn’t even vote for him. I am not vilifying Fauci to make Trump look good. Nothing can make Trump look good. You partisans just can fathom that people be critical of and have dislike for both Trump and Fauci. Or Trump and Biden for that matter.
Trump's an idiot but Fauci was dismissing the lab as a source of the virus back in early 2020. But now he's he says he's "not convinced" the virus developed naturally. Now, things change and research evolves so maybe he knows more now. But he shouldn't have been dismissing the lab theory in early 2020. As much as Trump wanted people to think it came from the lab so he can call it the "China Flu" or whatever, Fauci didn't want people to think it came from the lab. I wonder why...
Here’s my first post from yesterday. First words: Trump’s an idiot. Yeah sure, he’s my “hero.”
It’s not “hurt feelings.” He’s been on the cover of Time Magazine, which makes sense. But the nation’s leading infectious disease expert posing poolside for In Style is Trump-like. Just basking in the sun by the pool at the height of a pandemic that killed millions.
Meh... trolling to get a rise out of people is trump like too.
It is. But you’re conceding here that Fauci, the scientist, is Trump-like.
Frankly, while being critical of that magazine picture, and certainly making fun of his first pitch, upsets some of you, I shouldn’t have posted that. It just distracts from the real issue that I was posting about before that; Fauci funding the gain of function research, which I’m sure was done in good faith. But when shit went wrong at the lab, he went to great lengths to discredit the lab theory even though that’s not being transparent. So on the levels of Trumpist behavior, I’d rather troll on a message board than lie to the public about important scientific information.
I believe when all is said & done that Fauci tried to save as many lives as he could, which can't be said about your orange hero. You can whine about magazine covers and BLM and Chinese labs all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that Fauci tried to do his job while our president at the time turned his back on us in the worst pandemic to hit this country in a century. I get it, people need to vilify Fauci to try make trump look less bad. It is what it is. Was the guy perfect? Not at all, but he didn't walk away which would have been the path of least resistance, he stuck around & tried to do his job under absurd and unnecessary circumstances created by that orange fuckstick. I couldn't give a shit about how he throws out a first pitch, or whether or not he was on a magazine cover.
& talk about trump like... when all else fails, just say he throws like a girl.
JFC
Trump’s not my hero. Didn’t even vote for him. I am not vilifying Fauci to make Trump look good. Nothing can make Trump look good. You partisans just can fathom that people be critical of and have dislike for both Trump and Fauci. Or Trump and Biden for that matter.
"You partisans" - pot meet kettle
I'm not a fan of any of them, truth be told, but your criticisms of fauci are piss poor, and when called out on it, you resorted to trolling.
so you are sure that Fauci is lying and, by extension, a "POS", but then say mickey's post is "good", even though it says there is no proof he was lying about gain of function grants.
After 2-year battle, House panel to interview Trump counsel
By MARY CLARE JALONICK and ERIC TUCKER
48 mins ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House Judiciary Committee is poised to question former White House counsel Don McGahn behind closed doors on Friday, two years after House Democrats originally sought his testimony as part of investigations into former President Donald Trump.
The long-awaited interview is the result of an agreement reached last month in federal court, and a transcript will be publicly released within a week. House Democrats — then investigating whether Trump tried to obstruct the Justice Department’s probes into his presidential campaign’s ties to Russia — originally sued after McGahn defied an April 2019 subpoena on Trump’s orders.
That month, the Justice Department released a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the matter. In the report, Mueller pointedly did not exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice but also did not recommend prosecuting him, citing Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president. Mueller’s report quoted extensively from interviews with McGahn, who described the Republican president’s efforts to stifle the investigation.
While the Judiciary panel eventually won its fight for McGahn's testimony, the court agreement almost guarantees its members won’t learn anything new. The two sides agreed that McGahn will be questioned only about information attributed to him in publicly available portions of Mueller’s report.
Still, House Democrats kept the case going, even past Trump’s presidency, and are moving forward with the interview to make an example of the former White House counsel. House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said the agreement for McGahn's testimony is a good-faith compromise that “satisfies our subpoena, protects the Committee’s constitutional duty to conduct oversight in the future, and safeguards sensitive executive branch prerogatives.”
It is unclear what House Democrats will do with the testimony, which they sought before twice impeaching Trump. The Senate acquitted Trump of impeachment charges both times.
As White House counsel, McGahn had an insider’s view of many of the episodes Mueller and his team examined for potential obstruction of justice during the Russia investigation. McGahn proved a pivotal — and damning — witness against Trump, with his name mentioned hundreds of times in the text of the Mueller report and its footnotes.
McGahn described to investigators the president’s repeated efforts to choke off the probe and directives he said he received from the president that unnerved him.
He recounted how Trump had demanded that he contact then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to order him to unrecuse himself from the Russia investigation. McGahn also said Trump had implored him to tell the deputy attorney general at the time, Rod Rosenstein, to remove Mueller from his position because of perceived conflicts of interest — and, after that episode was reported in the media, to publicly and falsely deny that demand had ever been made.
McGahn also described the circumstances leading up to Trump’s firing of James Comey as FBI director, including the president’s insistence on including in the termination letter the fact that Comey had reassured Trump that he was not personally under investigation.
And he was present for a critical conversation early in the Trump administration, when Sally Yates, just before she was fired as acting attorney general as a holdover Obama appointee, relayed concerns to McGahn about new national security adviser Michael Flynn. She raised the possibility that Flynn's conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak — and his subsequent interview by the FBI — left him vulnerable to blackmail.
Trump’s Justice Department fought efforts to have McGahn testify, but U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in 2019 rejected Trump’s arguments that his close advisers were immune from congressional subpoena.
President Joe Biden has nominated Jackson to the appeals court in Washington.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
so you are sure that Fauci is lying and, by extension, a "POS", but then say mickey's post is "good", even though it says there is no proof he was lying about gain of function grants.
confusing....
I’ll just copy my same response to you on this from yesterday. Nobody says he’s lying about gain of function grants…..
”He hasn't denied funding, but in the earliest days of the pandemic (say last March), he wasn't exactly forthcoming with that information. That's why I think at the time, he was trying to minimize the lab theory; trying to get eyes off the lab and the NIH's funding.”
So mickeyrat’s post does say what I already acknowledged yesterday, but it also has a lot of other info and links. Hence, a good post.
so you are sure that Fauci is lying and, by extension, a "POS", but then say mickey's post is "good", even though it says there is no proof he was lying about gain of function grants.
confusing....
I’ll just copy my same response to you on this from yesterday. Nobody says he’s lying about gain of function grants…..
”He hasn't denied funding, but in the earliest days of the pandemic (say last March), he wasn't exactly forthcoming with that information. That's why I think at the time, he was trying to minimize the lab theory; trying to get eyes off the lab and the NIH's funding.”
So mickeyrat’s post does say what I already acknowledged yesterday, but it also has a lot of other info and links. Hence, a good post.
you "completely agreed" with a post saying he was a serial liar. so what is he lying about?
It’s not “hurt feelings.” He’s been on the cover of Time Magazine, which makes sense. But the nation’s leading infectious disease expert posing poolside for In Style is Trump-like. Just basking in the sun by the pool at the height of a pandemic that killed millions.
Meh... trolling to get a rise out of people is trump like too.
It is. But you’re conceding here that Fauci, the scientist, is Trump-like.
Frankly, while being critical of that magazine picture, and certainly making fun of his first pitch, upsets some of you, I shouldn’t have posted that. It just distracts from the real issue that I was posting about before that; Fauci funding the gain of function research, which I’m sure was done in good faith. But when shit went wrong at the lab, he went to great lengths to discredit the lab theory even though that’s not being transparent. So on the levels of Trumpist behavior, I’d rather troll on a message board than lie to the public about important scientific information.
I believe when all is said & done that Fauci tried to save as many lives as he could, which can't be said about your orange hero. You can whine about magazine covers and BLM and Chinese labs all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that Fauci tried to do his job while our president at the time turned his back on us in the worst pandemic to hit this country in a century. I get it, people need to vilify Fauci to try make trump look less bad. It is what it is. Was the guy perfect? Not at all, but he didn't walk away which would have been the path of least resistance, he stuck around & tried to do his job under absurd and unnecessary circumstances created by that orange fuckstick. I couldn't give a shit about how he throws out a first pitch, or whether or not he was on a magazine cover.
& talk about trump like... when all else fails, just say he throws like a girl.
JFC
Trump’s not my hero. Didn’t even vote for him. I am not vilifying Fauci to make Trump look good. Nothing can make Trump look good. You partisans just can fathom that people be critical of and have dislike for both Trump and Fauci. Or Trump and Biden for that matter.
"You partisans" - pot meet kettle
I'm not a fan of any of them, truth be told, but your criticisms of fauci are piss poor, and when called out on it, you resorted to trolling.
It is what it is.
None of those criticisms were poor at all. He hasn’t been transparent about the possibility of it originating in the lab. And the trolling wasn’t some last resort. It’s just that if people are gonna focus more on me posting the magazine cover (which isn’t all that relevant) than me talking about his lack of transparency, then here’s something else you can focus on that’s irrelevant.
so you are sure that Fauci is lying and, by extension, a "POS", but then say mickey's post is "good", even though it says there is no proof he was lying about gain of function grants.
confusing....
I’ll just copy my same response to you on this from yesterday. Nobody says he’s lying about gain of function grants…..
”He hasn't denied funding, but in the earliest days of the pandemic (say last March), he wasn't exactly forthcoming with that information. That's why I think at the time, he was trying to minimize the lab theory; trying to get eyes off the lab and the NIH's funding.”
So mickeyrat’s post does say what I already acknowledged yesterday, but it also has a lot of other info and links. Hence, a good post.
you "completely agreed" with a post saying he was a serial liar. so what is he lying about?
No I didn’t. The post I “completely agreed” with is below. It’s in regards to Trump fucking up by vilifying Fauci from the onset….
Yeah who gives a shit when/how the virus got started at this point! Many lives could of been saved with a competent president but unfortunately we had an imbecile running the circus hence 100’s of thousand perished..
Well ya should care. How the hell do you prevent future pandemics without knowing how this one started?
We had a total playbook left behind by Obama administration! On how to handle a pandemic guess what Trumps administration did with it dismissed it, most virus start with humans involvement..
I get it, dude. Trump is an idiot. I'm not talking about Trump's handling of things. He was terrible as expected. I'm talking about the origin of the pandemic and how Fauci and others were quick to dismiss the lab theory. You say most viruses start with human involvement, but for quite a while there, Fauci was suggesting you're a conspiracy theorist to suggest the lab was the origin. And Facebook was censoring posts linking the virus to the Wuhan lab.
I already know Donald Trump is a shady asshole. It's Fauci who I'm interested in learning more about. Why be so dismissive of the lab theory? Covering his own ass knowing the NIH gave funding to the Wuhan lab?
fauci has not denied NIH gave funding to the wuhan lab, he denies funding was given specifically on the basis of gain of function research.
i think the pushback on the wuhan lab theory was because they knew full well what would happen (and did happen, to some extent) if it gained traction: racist attacks on chinese people. and because trump was suggesting china did it as a bioweapon. had fauci and others come out and said, at that point, "we don't know anything yet" instead of outright calling it false, people would have gone berserk, calling for WW3 on China. we could easily have had another cold war on our hands, during a pandemic, with trump at the helm.
that's a trifecta for a massive fuck up.
He hasn't denied funding, but in the earliest days of the pandemic (say last March), he wasn't exactly forthcoming with that information. That's why I think at the time, he was trying to minimize the lab theory; trying to get eyes off the lab and the NIH's funding.
I disagree with the second paragraph. I just don't get how it's racist to suggest Chinese scientists fucked up and that might the cause, but it's not racist to suggest that China's filthy, inhumane wet markets might be the cause. Why would one cause racist attacks on Chinese Americans and not the other? I also don't think saying "We don't know anything yet" would have led to people going berserk on China. But even if that was the fear, it's still better to be honest and say "we're not sure yet" than it is to dismiss one of the possible causes (the lab). That makes it looks as if scientists like Fauci were covering for China. So now you get the same anger towards China that you would've gotten a year ago, but coupled with anger towards people like Fauci who we're supposed to trust.
Agree that Fauci is and was a POS. Gutless puke. I’m not even sure the whole bunch of them who allowed that baby to lie month after month shouldn’t be held responsible for their non-actions. If Trump would have handled the whole thing honestly he’d be sitting in the WH right now. He was just too stupid to see it, his last opportunity to do something positive and he was just soooo stupid about it.
Completely agree. Trump had his chance to be a normal president in the midst of a real crisis, and he blew it. If he handled things correctly, he could've cancelled out a lot of the stupid bullshit from the first three years of his presidency.
In fact, if he didn't vilify Fauci and just stayed neutral, maybe everyone would see Fauci for what he is. But nope, Trump made him his enemy, so by proxy, he became an ally of the left.
my bad. I read this "who allowed that baby to lie month after month shouldn’t be held responsible for their non-actions" as referring to Fauci. I now realize it was in reference to Trump.
my bad. I read this "who allowed that baby to lie month after month shouldn’t be held responsible for their non-actions" as referring to Fauci. I now realize it was in reference to Trump.
It’s all good. If anything reposting that can reaffirm my stance that I don’t like Trump, as someone earlier suggested he’s my “hero” cause I’m not a fan o’ Fauci.
It’s not “hurt feelings.” He’s been on the cover of Time Magazine, which makes sense. But the nation’s leading infectious disease expert posing poolside for In Style is Trump-like. Just basking in the sun by the pool at the height of a pandemic that killed millions.
Meh... trolling to get a rise out of people is trump like too.
It is. But you’re conceding here that Fauci, the scientist, is Trump-like.
Frankly, while being critical of that magazine picture, and certainly making fun of his first pitch, upsets some of you, I shouldn’t have posted that. It just distracts from the real issue that I was posting about before that; Fauci funding the gain of function research, which I’m sure was done in good faith. But when shit went wrong at the lab, he went to great lengths to discredit the lab theory even though that’s not being transparent. So on the levels of Trumpist behavior, I’d rather troll on a message board than lie to the public about important scientific information.
I believe when all is said & done that Fauci tried to save as many lives as he could, which can't be said about your orange hero. You can whine about magazine covers and BLM and Chinese labs all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that Fauci tried to do his job while our president at the time turned his back on us in the worst pandemic to hit this country in a century. I get it, people need to vilify Fauci to try make trump look less bad. It is what it is. Was the guy perfect? Not at all, but he didn't walk away which would have been the path of least resistance, he stuck around & tried to do his job under absurd and unnecessary circumstances created by that orange fuckstick. I couldn't give a shit about how he throws out a first pitch, or whether or not he was on a magazine cover.
& talk about trump like... when all else fails, just say he throws like a girl.
JFC
Trump’s not my hero. Didn’t even vote for him. I am not vilifying Fauci to make Trump look good. Nothing can make Trump look good. You partisans just can fathom that people be critical of and have dislike for both Trump and Fauci. Or Trump and Biden for that matter.
"You partisans" - pot meet kettle
I'm not a fan of any of them, truth be told, but your criticisms of fauci are piss poor, and when called out on it, you resorted to trolling.
It is what it is.
None of those criticisms were poor at all. He hasn’t been transparent about the possibility of it originating in the lab. And the trolling wasn’t some last resort. It’s just that if people are gonna focus more on me posting the magazine cover (which isn’t all that relevant) than me talking about his lack of transparency, then here’s something else you can focus on that’s irrelevant.
So now the problem isn't that he was lying, it's that he wasn't transparent about something being a possibility.
Got it. Not the strongest point IMO, but take what you can get I guess.
RE: The magazine cover, that was one of your three big critiques of him, calling him an attention whore for it. But now it isn't all that relevant? But at the same time, it ISN'T a piss poor criticism?
my bad. I read this "who allowed that baby to lie month after month shouldn’t be held responsible for their non-actions" as referring to Fauci. I now realize it was in reference to Trump.
It’s all good. If anything reposting that can reaffirm my stance that I don’t like Trump, as someone earlier suggested he’s my “hero” cause I’m not a fan o’ Fauci.
I knew you weren't a fan of trump. but maybe refrain from generalizing "your partisans". many of us aren't fans of any of the leaders, dem and repub, but just prefer the Pumpkin to be gone.
It’s not “hurt feelings.” He’s been on the cover of Time Magazine, which makes sense. But the nation’s leading infectious disease expert posing poolside for In Style is Trump-like. Just basking in the sun by the pool at the height of a pandemic that killed millions.
Meh... trolling to get a rise out of people is trump like too.
It is. But you’re conceding here that Fauci, the scientist, is Trump-like.
Frankly, while being critical of that magazine picture, and certainly making fun of his first pitch, upsets some of you, I shouldn’t have posted that. It just distracts from the real issue that I was posting about before that; Fauci funding the gain of function research, which I’m sure was done in good faith. But when shit went wrong at the lab, he went to great lengths to discredit the lab theory even though that’s not being transparent. So on the levels of Trumpist behavior, I’d rather troll on a message board than lie to the public about important scientific information.
I believe when all is said & done that Fauci tried to save as many lives as he could, which can't be said about your orange hero. You can whine about magazine covers and BLM and Chinese labs all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that Fauci tried to do his job while our president at the time turned his back on us in the worst pandemic to hit this country in a century. I get it, people need to vilify Fauci to try make trump look less bad. It is what it is. Was the guy perfect? Not at all, but he didn't walk away which would have been the path of least resistance, he stuck around & tried to do his job under absurd and unnecessary circumstances created by that orange fuckstick. I couldn't give a shit about how he throws out a first pitch, or whether or not he was on a magazine cover.
& talk about trump like... when all else fails, just say he throws like a girl.
JFC
Trump’s not my hero. Didn’t even vote for him. I am not vilifying Fauci to make Trump look good. Nothing can make Trump look good. You partisans just can fathom that people be critical of and have dislike for both Trump and Fauci. Or Trump and Biden for that matter.
"You partisans" - pot meet kettle
I'm not a fan of any of them, truth be told, but your criticisms of fauci are piss poor, and when called out on it, you resorted to trolling.
It is what it is.
None of those criticisms were poor at all. He hasn’t been transparent about the possibility of it originating in the lab. And the trolling wasn’t some last resort. It’s just that if people are gonna focus more on me posting the magazine cover (which isn’t all that relevant) than me talking about his lack of transparency, then here’s something else you can focus on that’s irrelevant.
So now the problem isn't that he was lying, it's that he wasn't transparent about something being a possibility.
Got it. Not the strongest point IMO, but take what you can get I guess.
RE: The magazine cover, that was one of your three big critiques of him, calling him an attention whore for it. But now it isn't all that relevant? But at the same time, it ISN'T a piss poor criticism?
Ok.
That lack of transparency is in the same realm as lying. He knew that the lab was plausible, and dismissed people that suggested it as conspiracy theorists.
Attention whore was one three critiques, but not a big one like you’re making it out to be. By far the smallest actually. Certainly not one that is relevant to Fauci’s influence on the public. That’s why I said I regret even mentioning it. It’s small potatoes compared to being a scientist that dismissed the possible (and let’s face it, likely) cause of a disease.
my bad. I read this "who allowed that baby to lie month after month shouldn’t be held responsible for their non-actions" as referring to Fauci. I now realize it was in reference to Trump.
It’s all good. If anything reposting that can reaffirm my stance that I don’t like Trump, as someone earlier suggested he’s my “hero” cause I’m not a fan o’ Fauci.
I knew you weren't a fan of trump. but maybe refrain from generalizing "your partisans". many of us aren't fans of any of the leaders, dem and repub, but just prefer the Pumpkin to be gone.
You might know but someone else said “Your hero Trump” and suggested I’m bashing Fauci to make Trump look better. That just seems like epitome of believing “you’re on one side or the other”
maybe all this Fauci talk would be better suited for the coronavirus thread. Eliminate Trump from the equation.
It’s not “hurt feelings.” He’s been on the cover of Time Magazine, which makes sense. But the nation’s leading infectious disease expert posing poolside for In Style is Trump-like. Just basking in the sun by the pool at the height of a pandemic that killed millions.
Meh... trolling to get a rise out of people is trump like too.
It is. But you’re conceding here that Fauci, the scientist, is Trump-like.
Frankly, while being critical of that magazine picture, and certainly making fun of his first pitch, upsets some of you, I shouldn’t have posted that. It just distracts from the real issue that I was posting about before that; Fauci funding the gain of function research, which I’m sure was done in good faith. But when shit went wrong at the lab, he went to great lengths to discredit the lab theory even though that’s not being transparent. So on the levels of Trumpist behavior, I’d rather troll on a message board than lie to the public about important scientific information.
I believe when all is said & done that Fauci tried to save as many lives as he could, which can't be said about your orange hero. You can whine about magazine covers and BLM and Chinese labs all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that Fauci tried to do his job while our president at the time turned his back on us in the worst pandemic to hit this country in a century. I get it, people need to vilify Fauci to try make trump look less bad. It is what it is. Was the guy perfect? Not at all, but he didn't walk away which would have been the path of least resistance, he stuck around & tried to do his job under absurd and unnecessary circumstances created by that orange fuckstick. I couldn't give a shit about how he throws out a first pitch, or whether or not he was on a magazine cover.
& talk about trump like... when all else fails, just say he throws like a girl.
JFC
Trump’s not my hero. Didn’t even vote for him. I am not vilifying Fauci to make Trump look good. Nothing can make Trump look good. You partisans just can fathom that people be critical of and have dislike for both Trump and Fauci. Or Trump and Biden for that matter.
"You partisans" - pot meet kettle
I'm not a fan of any of them, truth be told, but your criticisms of fauci are piss poor, and when called out on it, you resorted to trolling.
It is what it is.
None of those criticisms were poor at all. He hasn’t been transparent about the possibility of it originating in the lab. And the trolling wasn’t some last resort. It’s just that if people are gonna focus more on me posting the magazine cover (which isn’t all that relevant) than me talking about his lack of transparency, then here’s something else you can focus on that’s irrelevant.
So now the problem isn't that he was lying, it's that he wasn't transparent about something being a possibility.
Got it. Not the strongest point IMO, but take what you can get I guess.
RE: The magazine cover, that was one of your three big critiques of him, calling him an attention whore for it. But now it isn't all that relevant? But at the same time, it ISN'T a piss poor criticism?
Ok.
That lack of transparency is in the same realm as lying. He knew that the lab was plausible, and dismissed people that suggested it as conspiracy theorists.
Attention whore was one three critiques, but not a big one like you’re making it out to be. By far the smallest actually. Certainly not one that is relevant to Fauci’s influence on the public. That’s why I said I regret even mentioning it. It’s small potatoes compared to being a scientist that dismissed the possible (and let’s face it, likely) cause of a disease.
he dismissed it publicly. which is exactly what he should have done, regardless of what his real thoughts were on the matter. it's tantamount to "no comment".
It’s not “hurt feelings.” He’s been on the cover of Time Magazine, which makes sense. But the nation’s leading infectious disease expert posing poolside for In Style is Trump-like. Just basking in the sun by the pool at the height of a pandemic that killed millions.
Meh... trolling to get a rise out of people is trump like too.
It is. But you’re conceding here that Fauci, the scientist, is Trump-like.
Frankly, while being critical of that magazine picture, and certainly making fun of his first pitch, upsets some of you, I shouldn’t have posted that. It just distracts from the real issue that I was posting about before that; Fauci funding the gain of function research, which I’m sure was done in good faith. But when shit went wrong at the lab, he went to great lengths to discredit the lab theory even though that’s not being transparent. So on the levels of Trumpist behavior, I’d rather troll on a message board than lie to the public about important scientific information.
I believe when all is said & done that Fauci tried to save as many lives as he could, which can't be said about your orange hero. You can whine about magazine covers and BLM and Chinese labs all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that Fauci tried to do his job while our president at the time turned his back on us in the worst pandemic to hit this country in a century. I get it, people need to vilify Fauci to try make trump look less bad. It is what it is. Was the guy perfect? Not at all, but he didn't walk away which would have been the path of least resistance, he stuck around & tried to do his job under absurd and unnecessary circumstances created by that orange fuckstick. I couldn't give a shit about how he throws out a first pitch, or whether or not he was on a magazine cover.
& talk about trump like... when all else fails, just say he throws like a girl.
JFC
Trump’s not my hero. Didn’t even vote for him. I am not vilifying Fauci to make Trump look good. Nothing can make Trump look good. You partisans just can fathom that people be critical of and have dislike for both Trump and Fauci. Or Trump and Biden for that matter.
"You partisans" - pot meet kettle
I'm not a fan of any of them, truth be told, but your criticisms of fauci are piss poor, and when called out on it, you resorted to trolling.
It is what it is.
None of those criticisms were poor at all. He hasn’t been transparent about the possibility of it originating in the lab. And the trolling wasn’t some last resort. It’s just that if people are gonna focus more on me posting the magazine cover (which isn’t all that relevant) than me talking about his lack of transparency, then here’s something else you can focus on that’s irrelevant.
So now the problem isn't that he was lying, it's that he wasn't transparent about something being a possibility.
Got it. Not the strongest point IMO, but take what you can get I guess.
RE: The magazine cover, that was one of your three big critiques of him, calling him an attention whore for it. But now it isn't all that relevant? But at the same time, it ISN'T a piss poor criticism?
Ok.
That lack of transparency is in the same realm as lying. He knew that the lab was plausible, and dismissed people that suggested it as conspiracy theorists.
Attention whore was one three critiques, but not a big one like you’re making it out to be. By far the smallest actually. Certainly not one that is relevant to Fauci’s influence on the public. That’s why I said I regret even mentioning it. It’s small potatoes compared to being a scientist that dismissed the possible (and let’s face it, likely) cause of a disease.
Likely? No. We get zoonotic disease transmission all the time, and the last significant pandemics have been zoonotic, so no, transmission from wild animals was always more likely. It’s never a good idea to fan the flames of xenophobia and irrationality.
my small self... like a book amongst the many on a shelf
Now Fauci is an "attention whore" because he did one photo shoot for in style magazine. Really? Come on. I know you are not a Trump fan, but a lot of the things you are saying about him could very easily have come out of Trump's mouth, and probably did.
Comments
Pearl Jam bootlegs:
http://wegotshit.blogspot.com
probably one who was asked to do a cover story and probably felt it was another avenue to get straight talk out there without fuckstick damaging the messaging seconds after it was given?
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Pearl Jam bootlegs:
http://wegotshit.blogspot.com
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Fact-checking the Paul-Fauci flap over Wuhan lab funding
“Juicing up super viruses is not new. Scientists in the U.S. have long known how to mutate animal viruses to infect humans. For years, Dr. Ralph Baric, a virologist in the U.S., has been collaborating with Dr. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Virology Institute, sharing his discoveries about how to create super viruses. This gain-of-function research has been funded by the NIH. … Dr. Fauci, do you still support funding of the NIH funding of the lab in Wuhan?”
— Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), remarks at a Senate hearing, May 11
“Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect that the NIH has not never and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
— Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in response.
This fact check has been updated with a statement by the National Institutes of Health
This showdown between Paul and Fauci quickly went viral last week. But the nature of their debate regarding the origins of the coronavirus pandemic may seem obscure to many people. “Gain of function” is one of those insider-y terms that are subject to different definitions. The debate over such experiments predated the pandemic, but it has gained new urgency as scientists investigate the origin of the virus that has killed more than 3 million people around the world.
The core of the dispute is this: Did the virus emerge from nature — “zoonotically” from animals — or was it the result of a lab experiment gone awry?
Last May, the Fact Checker video team reported that the “balance of the scientific evidence strongly supports the conclusion that the new coronavirus emerged from nature.” A joint report by the World Health Organization and China, released in February, said a lab escape of the virus was “extremely unlikely.” But last week, a group of 18 preeminent scientists published a letter in the journal Science saying a new investigation is needed, because “theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable.”
If the lab leak is found at fault, Paul was suggesting, then the U.S. government was partially responsible.
The Facts
Let’s start with the basics. What is gain-of-function research?
In many ways, it 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.
But it’s one thing to experiment with fruit flies and another thing when the research involves genotypes of potential pandemic pathogens and functions related to transmissibility or virulence in humans.
That’s when “gain of function” becomes controversial. The idea is to get ahead of future viruses that might emerge from nature, thereby allowing scientists to study how to combat them. But many believed the research was potentially dangerous.
In a 2011 opinion article published in The Washington Post, Fauci and two co-authors noted that “the question is whether benefits of such research outweigh risks. The answer is not simple. … Safeguarding against the potential accidental release or deliberate misuse of laboratory pathogens is imperative.” In 2014, such research was paused for three years as the government set up a review process to oversee funding, known as the Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight (P3CO) framework.
In Wuhan, China, where the first cases of the coronavirus emerged in late 2019, at least two labs studied coronaviruses that originate in bats — the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention (WHCDC). Both are close to the seafood market that was originally deemed the source of the outbreak. The WIV is about eight miles away. The WHCDC is right around the corner.
The WIV is where one of the world’s foremost experts on bat viruses, Shi Zhengli, works. The WIV has a biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory, the most secure, where researchers wear protective suits. But some of WIV’s more controversial experiments on bat coronaviruses are believed to have been done at BSL-2 labs, where researchers wear white lab coats and gloves, as in a dental office.
W. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University had co-authored an influential letter in March 2020 that the coronavirus was “not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” He recently told former New York Times reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. that the BSL-2 revelation was significant, even though there still is no direct evidence of a lab leak. “That’s screwed up,” he said. “It shouldn’t have happened. People should not be looking at bat viruses in BSL-2 labs. My view has changed.”
In any case, is there evidence that NIH funded such gain-of-function research at WIV? To some extent, that depends on the definition of gain of function, which, as we noted, is open to dispute.
For instance, in 2017, WIV published a study that said researchers had found a coronavirus from a bat that could be transmitted directly to humans. WIV researchers used reverse genetics to deliberately create novel recombinants of wild bat coronavirus backbones and spike genes, then tested the ability of these chimeric (man-made) viruses to replicate in — not just infect — a variety of cell lines. The article reported the discovery of novel coronavirus backbone and spike combinations that do not exist in nature and are capable of replicating efficiently in human cells with the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), the protein that provides the entry point for the coronavirus to hook into and infect human tissue.
The article, under its list of funders, included: the National Institutes of Health.
The NIH grant that funded the project said it would study “the risk of future coronavirus (CoV) emergence from wildlife using in-depth field investigations across the human-wildlife interface in China.” The grant description included this line: “Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.”
To some experts, that certainly sounds like gain-of-function research, though we should note that, based on what has been disclosed publicly by WIV, none of the virus samples used to conduct these experiments were or could have been transformed to be the new coronavirus that causes the disease covid-19.
“The research was — unequivocally — gain-of-function research,” Richard H. Ebright of Rutgers University, a longtime critic of such research, told The Fact Checker. “The research met the definition for gain-of-function research of concern under the 2014 Pause.”
(Our colleague Josh Rogin reported that this 2017 research article prompted U.S. diplomats and scientists to visit the WIV facility. Afterward, they sent a cable to Washington expressing concern about the safety standards there, intended as “a warning about a potential public-health crisis.”)
But Robert Kessler, a spokesman for the nongovernmental organization EcoHealth Alliance that NIH funded, said claims about funding gain-of-function research are based on a misunderstanding of the grant’s role in the research. He said EcoHealth provided WIV $133,000 a year, except for $66,000 in 2020 (when the grant was terminated by the Trump administration), for a total of about $600,000.
“The NIH has not funded gain-of-function work,” Kessler said in email exchanges. “EcoHealth Alliance was funded by the NIH to conduct study of coronavirus diversity in China. From that award, we subcontracted work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to help with sampling and lab capacity.” He said the citation in the paper was mainly the result of researchers’ desire to cite any possible research that contributed to the findings, with much of the funding coming from the National Natural Science Foundation of China. (Another funder listed was USAID’s Predict program, which helped collect animal viruses and also funded EcoHealth.)
“As described in the paper, all but two of the viruses cultured in the lab failed to even replicate,” he said. “None of them had been manipulated in order to increase their ability to spread, all the researchers did was insert S [spike] proteins in order to gauge their ability to infect human cells.”
Kessler added that “much of that work [described in the grant] wasn’t done because the grant was suspended. But GoF was never the goal here.” As he put it, “gain of function research is the specific process of altering human viruses in order to increase their ability (the titular gain of function) either to spread amongst populations, to infect people, or to cause more severe illness.”
In a lengthy statement to The Fact Checker, Baric — who signed the letter calling for a new investigation — also pushed back against Paul’s assertions at the hearing.
“The Baric laboratory has never investigated strategies to create super viruses,” he said. “Studies focused on understanding the cross-species transmission potential of bat coronaviruses like SHC014 have been reviewed by the NIH and by the UNC Institutional Biosafety Committee for potential of gain-of-function research and were deemed not to be gain of function.”
“We never introduced mutations into the SHC014 [horseshoe bat coronavirus] spike to enhance growth in human cells, though the work demonstrated that bat SARS-like viruses were intrinsically poised to emerge in the future,” he added. “These recombinant clones and viruses were never sent to China. Importantly, independent studies carried out by Italian scientists and others from around the world have confirmed that none of the bat SARS-like viruses studied at UNC were related to SARS-CoV-2, the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
We gave NIH six days to respond to questions and though we were promised a statement, none was received. That’s fishy. Fauci, speaking to the United Facts of America fact-checking festival on May 11, said Paul’s statement was “preposterous.” He said the research was “a very minor collaboration, as part of a subcontract of a grant, we had a collaboration with some Chinese scientists.”
Update, May 19: The National Institutes of Health issued a statement to The Fact Checker which in part said: “NIH has never approved any grant to support 'gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans. The research proposed in the EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. grant application sought to understand how bat coronaviruses evolve naturally in the environment to become transmissible to the human population.” When gain-of-function research was paused, “this grant was reviewed again and determined by experts to fall outside the scope of the funding pause.”
In a separate statement also issued May 19, NIH Director Francis S. Collins said: “NIH strongly supports the need for further investigation by the World Health Organization (WHO) into the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.”
“Despite Dr. Fauci’s denials, there is ample evidence that the NIH and the NIAID, under his direction, funded gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” said Paul spokeswoman Kelsey Cooper. “In light of those facts, the question Dr. Paul asked was whether the government has fully investigated the origin of the disease, which it clearly has not. This research and the lab should be thoroughly investigated and opened to public scrutiny.”
The Pinocchio Test
There is some smoke here, but we do not yet perceive the fire claimed by Paul. To some extent, all money is fungible. But the EcoHealth funding was not related to the experiments, but the collection of samples. The NIH grant includes language that some say suggests gain-of-function research; NIH says that is a misinterpretation. Paul’s statements about Baric’s research also appear overblown. We wavered between Two and Three Pinocchios, but decided on Two, because there still are enough questions about the work at the Wuhan lab to warrant further scrutiny, even if the NIH connection to possible gain-of-function research appears so far to be elusive.
Two Pinocchios
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Show MoreNot today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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I get it, people need to vilify Fauci to try make trump look less bad. It is what it is. Was the guy perfect? Not at all, but he didn't walk away which would have been the path of least resistance, he stuck around & tried to do his job under absurd and unnecessary circumstances created by that orange fuckstick.
I couldn't give a shit about how he throws out a first pitch, or whether or not he was on a magazine cover.
& talk about trump like... when all else fails, just say he throws like a girl.
JFC
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I'm not a fan of any of them, truth be told, but your criticisms of fauci are piss poor, and when called out on it, you resorted to trolling.
It is what it is.
confusing....
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The House Judiciary Committee is poised to question former White House counsel Don McGahn behind closed doors on Friday, two years after House Democrats originally sought his testimony as part of investigations into former President Donald Trump.
The long-awaited interview is the result of an agreement reached last month in federal court, and a transcript will be publicly released within a week. House Democrats — then investigating whether Trump tried to obstruct the Justice Department’s probes into his presidential campaign’s ties to Russia — originally sued after McGahn defied an April 2019 subpoena on Trump’s orders.
That month, the Justice Department released a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the matter. In the report, Mueller pointedly did not exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice but also did not recommend prosecuting him, citing Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president. Mueller’s report quoted extensively from interviews with McGahn, who described the Republican president’s efforts to stifle the investigation.
While the Judiciary panel eventually won its fight for McGahn's testimony, the court agreement almost guarantees its members won’t learn anything new. The two sides agreed that McGahn will be questioned only about information attributed to him in publicly available portions of Mueller’s report.
Still, House Democrats kept the case going, even past Trump’s presidency, and are moving forward with the interview to make an example of the former White House counsel. House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said the agreement for McGahn's testimony is a good-faith compromise that “satisfies our subpoena, protects the Committee’s constitutional duty to conduct oversight in the future, and safeguards sensitive executive branch prerogatives.”
It is unclear what House Democrats will do with the testimony, which they sought before twice impeaching Trump. The Senate acquitted Trump of impeachment charges both times.
As White House counsel, McGahn had an insider’s view of many of the episodes Mueller and his team examined for potential obstruction of justice during the Russia investigation. McGahn proved a pivotal — and damning — witness against Trump, with his name mentioned hundreds of times in the text of the Mueller report and its footnotes.
McGahn described to investigators the president’s repeated efforts to choke off the probe and directives he said he received from the president that unnerved him.
He recounted how Trump had demanded that he contact then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to order him to unrecuse himself from the Russia investigation. McGahn also said Trump had implored him to tell the deputy attorney general at the time, Rod Rosenstein, to remove Mueller from his position because of perceived conflicts of interest — and, after that episode was reported in the media, to publicly and falsely deny that demand had ever been made.
McGahn also described the circumstances leading up to Trump’s firing of James Comey as FBI director, including the president’s insistence on including in the termination letter the fact that Comey had reassured Trump that he was not personally under investigation.
And he was present for a critical conversation early in the Trump administration, when Sally Yates, just before she was fired as acting attorney general as a holdover Obama appointee, relayed concerns to McGahn about new national security adviser Michael Flynn. She raised the possibility that Flynn's conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak — and his subsequent interview by the FBI — left him vulnerable to blackmail.
Trump’s Justice Department fought efforts to have McGahn testify, but U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in 2019 rejected Trump’s arguments that his close advisers were immune from congressional subpoena.
President Joe Biden has nominated Jackson to the appeals court in Washington.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
”He hasn't denied funding, but in the earliest days of the pandemic (say last March), he wasn't exactly forthcoming with that information. That's why I think at the time, he was trying to minimize the lab theory; trying to get eyes off the lab and the NIH's funding.”
So mickeyrat’s post does say what I already acknowledged yesterday, but it also has a lot of other info and links. Hence, a good post.
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Pearl Jam bootlegs:
http://wegotshit.blogspot.com
Pearl Jam bootlegs:
http://wegotshit.blogspot.com
Pearl Jam bootlegs:
http://wegotshit.blogspot.com
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my stance that I don’t like Trump, as someone earlier suggested he’s my “hero” cause I’m not a fan o’ Fauci.
Pearl Jam bootlegs:
http://wegotshit.blogspot.com
So now the problem isn't that he was lying, it's that he wasn't transparent about something being a possibility.
Got it. Not the strongest point IMO, but take what you can get I guess.
RE: The magazine cover, that was one of your three big critiques of him, calling him an attention whore for it. But now it isn't all that relevant? But at the same time, it ISN'T a piss poor criticism?
Ok.
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Pearl Jam bootlegs:
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maybe all this Fauci talk would be better suited for the coronavirus thread. Eliminate Trump from the equation.
Pearl Jam bootlegs:
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