Fauci Dances on the Line of a Perjury Charge As He Parses and Equivocates as to Whether the US Funded Gain-of-Function Research on Bat Viruses at the Wuhan Lab

"Gain-of-function" is the deliberately anodyne jargon for giving a virus a potent new ability it didn't have -- like altering the protein spikes of a bat virus so that it can infect humans.

Which is precisely what Dr. Shi "The Bat Lady" was doing at the laughably-sloppy Wuhan Institute of Virology.

And the US government was funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology indirectly, by funding a group called "EcoHealth Alliance," which in turn sent part of the money it got from the US government to Wuhan.

A bit of reading will help you spot Fauci's evasions -- and lies.

Michael Tracy writes of the powerful case that The Bat Lady made Covid-19 in her lab and let it escape.

And he writes of the media's refusal to correct its prior claims that the lab-leak hypothesis was a "conspiracy theory" that was "debunked" within days of the covid outbreak making headlnes.

These declarations [that the lab-leak hypothesis is "debunked"] look dopier than ever after a new article was published this week by the journalist Nicholas Wade, who for many years was a science correspondent for the New York Times. At the very least, Wade demonstrates that the "lab-leak" theory ought not to be discounted. But he also goes much further, showing that the theory is in fact highly plausible. The article was first self-published on Medium, then later reproduced by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. While long, it's worth reading in full even if (like me) you are effectively illiterate in the technical scientific details.

In summary, here’s what one might call a "kicker" paragraph:

It's documented that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were doing gain-of-function experiments designed to make coronaviruses infect human cells and humanized mice.

"Humanized mice" are genetically modified mice whose cells have human-like walls, which permits them to be used as test subjects to see if viruses will affect humans.

This is exactly the kind of experiment from which a SARS2-like virus could have emerged. The researchers were not vaccinated against the viruses under study, and they were working in the minimal safety conditions of a BSL2 laboratory. So escape of a virus would not be at all surprising.

Biosafety Level 2 is the same level of bio-security required in your local dentist office. It requires a facemask, some gloves, and signage indicating that this is a BSL2 area.

Obviously, viruses can easily escape this "security" regime.

And they frequently do.

In all of China, the pandemic broke out on the doorstep of the Wuhan institute. The virus was already well adapted to humans, as expected for a virus grown in humanized mice. It possessed an unusual enhancement, a furin cleavage site, which is not possessed by any other known SARS-related beta-coronavirus, and this site included a double arginine codon also unknown among beta-coronaviruses. What more evidence could you want, aside from the presently unobtainable lab records documenting SARS2's creation?

I noted that covid-19 had a furin cleavage site just as you'd expect to see in an engineered virus, but I forgot to include the critical detail that this sort of feature is rare and is not found in any other SARS-related coronaviruses.

Wade also quotes the eminent virologist David Baltimore, the former president of CalTech and discoverer of an enzyme used in all PCR-based COVID tests, as saying:

"When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus... These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2."

So there you have one of the most esteemed virologists in the world stating that the current body of evidence poses a "powerful challenge" to the theory that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated by jumping naturally from wildlife to humans, which is the theory that has been propagated ubiquitously across the media for the past 15 months. And this after we'd all been confidently told by journalists at major national outlets that an alternative hypothesis -- that it originated by leakage at a lab -- was no more than a "conspiracy theory," and had been authoritatively "debunked."

Tracey notes that the Washington Post was among the most aggressive outlets proclaiming that the lab-leak theory was "debunked" -- but resorted to selectively quoting an expert who actually supported the possibility of a lab-leak as the source of covid by simply refusing to report that portion of his remarks:

This is interesting because one of the expert sources quoted in the Washington Post article as purportedly having "debunked" the lab-leak theory, molecular biologist Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, is also quoted in Wade's new article giving strong credence to the theory. Moreover, Ebright affirmed in a declaration to me his view that the lab-leak theory has actually been the strongest hypothesis about the origin of COVID since... January 2020. A month before the Washington Post cited him as a preeminent "debunker" of the theory.

Ebright did say that the genomic analysis did not support the conclusion of an artificially engineered virus -- which the Washington Post reported.

But he also said that the possibility of a lab leak was a very real possibility -- which the Washington Post refused to report.

He wrote to Tracey, saying:

I was surprised that the February 17, 2020 article in WaPo quoted only my comments on the genome sequence and not my comments on the lab-accident hypothesis.

I think this guy means that the virus might have been natural, but it escaped from the lab it where was being experimented on. I'm not sure.

The Washington Post sure was determined to, um, "simplify" his testimony to conform to the narrative they chose (with no scientific expertise of their own) as the obviously-correct one.

Tracey writes:

I personally don't have any vested interest in believing the lab-leak theory; if anything, confirmation of the theory as true would undoubtedly accelerate an already-ramping-up New Cold War conflict between the US and China, which I generally oppose for a variety of reasons. But I'm primarily interested simply in knowing whether the theory is true, whatever implications this might have for my other political and moral commitments. Clearly, though, much of the rest of the media doesn't operate on the same epistemic principle.

A number of factors likely contributed to these journalists proclaiming hard-and-fast certainty about this issue, despite having no grounds for such certainty. Many likely thought they were heroically combating anti-Asian xenophobia by dismissing a theory that could’ve assigned some measure of culpability to Chinese state authorities for the origination and spread of the virus, although it's unclear why this should have implicated individual Chinese-Americans. Either way, lying or misrepresenting stuff in the name of combating xenophobia can't be justified journalistically, and is liable to backfire anyway.

...

But the most obnoxious aspect is the journalists' utterly unfounded projection of total and complete certainty -- as if they’re infallible purveyors of sacred knowledge when, in reality, they're just engaging in the same off-the-cuff speculation as anybody else. And then their refusal to admit error, thus leaving the "misinformation" they produced splashed across the internet. Anyone who in February 2020 acted like they had all the answers about the origins of a catastrophic new virus was either too haughty or stupid to recognize how nonsensically they were behaving. But that’s the debased media landscape we're all stuck with, alas.

One thing that makes me scream to myself is the media's smug insistence that the threat of "disinformation" is too grave to allow them to report in a balanced way about both sides of a story, and it's their job -- and their particular expertise -- to simply decide what the truth is.

How the hell can they decide what the truth is? They are the least-educated of anyone in the educated classes in America. Their only post-graduate schooling is brief and is not about any subject matter apart from information gathering, organizing, and writing.

Lester Holt doesn't know a goddamned thing about a goddamned thing -- but he's now pronouncing that the stakes are too high to report both sides of an issue, and so the semi-educated Communications Majors and other dolts working in the media will now resolve all questions regarding history, economics, religion, philosophy, and science.

How's that workin' out for you so far, Geniuses?

Have you really studied up on furin cleavage sites?

Tracey writes further of his attempt to draw out any comment, correction, or retraction from the "journalists" who so-confidently used their Scientific Expertise (granted by the University of the State of Delusion) to dismiss any possibility of a lab leak.

None of the "journalists" he asked questions of would offer any response.

Steven Miller/Redsteeze writes a good article about the case for Fauci's complicity in covid's creation:

There are now more connections emerging from the Wuhan Institute that should be explored further. These connections involve the United States government, the National Institutes of Health and Dr Anthony Fauci -- and he should have to explain them before Congress.

These questions could of course pose complications to the mainstream media storyline that Fauci is a great hero, a man lionized, even fetishized by the political left for being the antithesis to then-president Donald Trump. If the NIH and Anthony Fauci played any role in financing or assisting the Wuhan Institute, including outsourcing the study of BSL-4 novel coronaviruses, the good doctor should have to answer for it.

To boil things down: the United States was outsourcing the study of novel coronaviruses to a group called EcoHealth Alliance, a group which according to NPR was doing the bulk of collection of coronavirus samples from bats and transferring those samples and research to the Wuhan Institute.

The original grant money provided to EcoHealth was $3.7 million, $76,000 of which was slated for the Wuhan Institute. This funding was approved with the backing of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the agency that Anthony Fauci heads, according to Newsweek.

That contract was canceled in April 2020. Those grants were approved by the National Institute of Health. According to a blockbuster piece in New York magazine, one of the first outlets to take the lab leak hypothesis seriously, EcoHealth Alliance 'has channeled money from the National Institutes of Health to Shi Zhengli's laboratory in Wuhan, allowing the lab to carry on recombinant research into diseases of bats and humans'.

Dr. Shi is Chinese, but I still think it's worth noting that "shi" in Japanese means "Death," so this is Doctor Death.

Dr Shi Zhengli is a notable expert in bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute. She had been studying the effects of bat viruses on humans when 'in 2012, six men set to work shoveling bat guano were sickened by a severe lung disease, three of them fatally. Shi’s team took the samples back to Wuhan and analyzed whatever fragments of bat virus she could find. In some cases, when she found a sequence that seemed particularly significant, she experimented with it in order to understand how it might potentially infect humans. Some of her work was funded by the National Institutes of Health and some of it by the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency of the Department of Defense via Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance.'

Peter Dasazk of EcoHealth Alliance gave an interview to the Bulletin in December 2019, shortly before the first reports of the COVID-19 outbreak where he ‘talked in glowing terms of how researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been reprogramming the spike protein and generating chimeric coronaviruses capable of infecting humanized mice'.

Right now, all of this is just circumstantial evidence, largely due to the CCP blocking any meaningful investigation of the Institute. But the circumstantial evidence is piling up.

Below is video of Rand Paul asking Fauci very fair questions -- and Fauci answering with equivocations, quibbling, and, frankly, lies.

Note the following sorts of parsing Fauci engages in:

1. Equivocating about whether the US is currently funding gain-of-function research as opposed to whether it did during the period when covid was created -- Trump ended all funding in April 2020. But we funded this kind of Frankenstein-virus creation before that.

2. Claiming the US didn't fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology, when he knows damn well that the US funded the EcoHealth Alliance, which itself diverted money to the Wuhan Institute. When Rand Paul points out that a "sub-agency" gave money to Wuhan through a "sub-grant," Fauci shuts up. But he does insist on maintaining his Topline Lie that the US did not fund Wuhan.

3. Quibbling about whether the type of genetic experimentation the US funds is "gain-of-function" experimentation or some other type.

4. Quibbling about whether the US funds gain-of-function experimentation in Wuhan -- or merely in America, with Dr. Dasack performing experiments in the US while cooperating with his Wuhan partner Dr. Shi who herself is doing the same types of experiments --in a lab funded with US money!

Watch the below and evaluate for yourself if Fauci is being candid and trying to inform the American people, or if he's being deceptive and deliberately misleading them.

posted by Ace at 04:10 PM

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