The U.S. knows something about the research conducted at the WIV, because American taxpayer dollars helped fund it. This was the crux of last week’s dispute between Sen. Rand Paul and Anthony Fauci, who had cast doubt on the lab-leak hypothesis in the past. In their latest bout, the Kentucky Senator accused Dr. Fauci of lying to Congress, a federal crime, when he said this year that the National Institutes of Health had never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan. The exchange descended into shouting.
The reality is complicated. The NIH gave almost $600,000 to the WIV through a nonprofit over several years to study bat coronaviruses. Mr. Paul cited a 2017 paper from WIV researchers that included experiments combining parts of viruses to study how to better infect human cells. But Dr. Fauci said the project was “judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain-of-function.”
This might be technically true, as a 2014 federal government definition describes such research as that which “increase the ability of infectious agents to cause disease by enhancing its pathogenicity or by increasing its transmissibility.” But some scientists think the government definition is too limited and can allow de facto gain-of-function research to bypass safety protocols. Rutgers molecular biologist Richard Ebright says the NIH-funded work “was—unequivocally—gain-of-function research.”
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Rand Paul was right, of course. Engineering a virus to where it is able to infect human cells IS gain of function research.
But look at the Fauci definition of GOF research: “increase the ability of infectious agents to cause disease by enhancing its pathogenicity or by increasing its transmissibility.
If your brain has a logical bent to it, you might recognize that as a distinction without a difference and at least one [uncompromised] and respected molecular biologist would agree with you. If you add a widget to a mouse trap so that it traps chickens, the mouse trap has *gained function*.
In principle, the definition of GOF is that ridiculously straightforward. Similarly, when virologists add a spike protein that enables a non-transmissible virus to enter human cells—and become at least theoretically transmissible, THAT is GOF research.
Clearly, the government definition of GOF was ‘engineered’ to provide cover [in the form of plausible deniability] for Fauci and some others who have been collaborating with Chinese virologists on *gain of function research* for years. And they did this in spite of an Obama era ban on GOF research. Did Dr. Baric or other virologists teach Chinese virologists any lab techniques? Did they share gene splicing technology with them?
No wonder they wanted to bury the lab origin theory. This stinks.
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