I'm not w/Jem on this, but I'm not w/the "good Dr." either. Sure, he did not train her to make a bioweapon, but as far as I can tell, they collaborated in gain of function research. The question here is, was the collaboration one sided (IOW, did China gain knowledge unknown to them before) or was disclosure equitable? Should this research have DOD restrictions on it? If not, why not? Was there lobbying to remove said restrictions? Why? What is the purpose of this research outside defense and counter defense? Is there therapeutic/vaccine development purposes? Did we go to China to bypass restrictions on said research like we're trying to w/nuclear fast reactors? Why is everyone involved trying to launder their reputation doing sketchy shit through science journals? I'm not completely opposed to international cooperation in science, after all, the Canadians helped w/the Manhattan Project. China is no Canada however, and we know what resulted from the Manhattan project. this article for instance is garbage. Ok, so you did not use the same strain of corona virus in which collaboration was made, so? Does that mean that what you learned in gain of function for one strain can't transfer over to another strain? The lancet journal article is published by those accused so I can't personally trust it until peer reviewed (maybe it's been the case since). I'll let the experts judge whether the "it came from nature" evidence is solid. What I've read point towards yes, but not w/o a shadow of a doubt and I suspect much of that came from this lancet article itself.
I am glad to see someone use some thinking skills from your team. I would point out dual use research which this was... was halted by Obama because of its application to bio weapons. Intent of the research is easily disguised as we really can't know peoples minds...
First let's discuss Gain of Function research which is common in the medical scientific community across the face of the earth. The actual medical intent of this type of research is to better predict emerging infectious diseases and to develop vaccines and therapeutics. We are seeing COVID conspiratorialists trying to push a non-scientific definition for Gain of Function research with the intention of making it seem like weaponization of a virus -- it is not. The reality is that this type of research is benign and common -- and serves to advance medical research improvements with drugs and vaccines while further understanding viruses. While there are concerns about Gain of Function research -- most experiments are vetting across the research community before being approved. Most of these efforts span multiple nations. However the COVID conspiratorialists have pushed a false narrative about weaponization of the COVID-19 virus in the Wuhan lab while trying to couple it to U.S. funding, EcoHealth and UNC Chapel Hill which is simply not true. Sadly these false narratives have caused threats against the scientists and their families. Furthermore the claims such as U.S. funding of COVID-19 being pushed by these Covid conspiracy pushers can be easily fact checked and found false Fauci: ‘There’s no way’ the coronavirus was made with U.S. research funds. Here’s why https://www.latimes.com/science/sto...us-was-made-with-u-s-research-funds-heres-why From the pandemic’s earliest days,Dr. Anthony Fauci has drawn political fire from COVID-19 skeptics. As director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Fauci is steeped in the scientific disciplines of virology, immunology and vaccine design. But critics, especially President Trump and his political allies, continue to excoriate him for supporting textbook public health measures like wearing face coverings and building immunity with vaccines. The latest example occurred this week on Capitol Hill, when Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) effectively accused Fauci of sending U.S. tax dollars to China so scientists there could soup up coronaviruses culled from bats and make them more dangerous to people. Then he accused Fauci of lying to Congress about the purported project. In a final shot, Paul said Fauci could be responsible for more than 4 million deaths worldwide. Fauci has stoically endured a lot of molten rhetoric over the past 18 months, but he did not accept these charges quietly. “Sen. Paul, you do not know what you’re talking about, and I want to say that officially,” Fauci said. “I totally resent the lie you are now propagating.” Paul told Fox News the following day that he will ask the Department of Justice to explore whether Fauci committed a felony by lying to Congress, a crime which is punishable by up to five years in prison. That would stem from Fauci’s May 11 assertion to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions that the National Institutes of Health never funded so-called gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — the type of work that would give a virus new and more dangerous capabilities. Paul’s claims rest on some very specific assumptions, not all of which have been demonstrated to be true. In science, at least, assumptions must be verified if the conclusions that emerge from them are to be taken seriously. Due to repeated interruptions, Fauci didn’t get a chance to respond to all of Paul’s charges at this week’s hearing. Let’s consider them now and see how well they are, or could be, backed by evidence. Assumption 1: NIAID funded gain-of-function at the Wuhan Institute of Technology. In 2014, the institute Fauci directs awarded a five-year, $3-million grant to the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance for a project titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” That project focused heavily on China, where novel coronaviruses had emerged from animals on several occasions. The work promised to explore the potential pandemic risk of such viruses by gathering samples from the field, studying viruses in the lab, and developing models about how they could evolve and spread in real life. In an interview, Fauci said that roughly $600,000 of the grant money went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Scientists there — many of them U.S.-trained — were tasked with nailing down the precise origins of the original SARS-CoV-1 virus that arose in China’s Guangdong Province in 2002. They were also asked to “help us understand what we need to look for” to spot “what might be an inevitable subsequent SARS outbreak.” That grant allowed scientists to test coronavirus samples harvested from wild animals and their habitats to see whether they were capable of infecting human cells. To do that, the WIV researchers created an experimental “backbone,” a piece of inactivated virus that serves as a standardized testbed. Then, to examine a particular coronavirus sample, they spliced off its spike protein and fused it to the backbone before exposing it to human cells in lab dishes to see if it would grow. At the time, there was a prohibition against using federal funds for gain-of-function research. That specifically barred “research projects that may be reasonably anticipated” to make influenza and SARS viruses more transmissible and/or more virulent in mammals “via the respiratory route.” WIV’s adherence to that prohibition was monitored, and if in the course of an experiment a virus appeared to have been made potentially dangerous, the instructions were clear: “The experiments must stop and you’ve got to report to the [NIAID] immediately,” Fauci said. This bit involves a bit of trust. After all, some changes in transmissibility or virulence occur naturally during lab experiments, and watching for those changes is part of the point of doing them. To document when and how a virus might become capable of jumping to humans, it’s crucial to identify where genetic mutations arise, under what circumstances, and how they may change a virus’ behavior. But observing such changes and making them are two different things. The purpose of the WIV research was to investigate coronaviruses that were known to circulate in animals (but had not been seen in humans) and to explore their capacity to invade human cells. That makes it hard to say whether the altered virus’ ability to invade human cells was a function “gained” or was merely uncovered by WIV scientists. In addition, genetic tampering or editing will typically leave behind discernible marks. In a recent “critical review” of the origins of SARS-CoV-2, an international group of virologists notes that the virus “carries no evidence of genetic markers one might expect from laboratory experiments.” Assumption 2: Scientists funded by NIAID increased the virulence or transmissibility of the coronaviruses they sampled. Scientists at WIV created hybrid viruses, or chimeras, when they spliced the spike proteins of actual coronaviruses onto viral testbeds — a procedure that makes it easier to isolate the effects of the spike protein, which is key to invading cells. Two chimeras made with spike proteins from bat coronaviruses were able to infect human cells. Paul, who has a medical degree and trained in ophthamology, said such experiments “create new viruses not found in nature,” which is true. The work “matches, indeed epitomizes, the definition of gain-of-function” research barred by the NIH. “Viruses that in nature only infect animals were manipulated in the Wuhan lab to gain the function of infecting humans,” he said. But that view is subject to debate among scientists. Fauci said the practice of combining spike proteins from the wild with a lab-made viral backbone was standard laboratory procedure. This particular backbone was adapted from pieces of a bat virus “never known to infect humans,” he said. The experiments were reviewed at many levels by qualified professionals in virology, who judged that it was not gain-of-function work. “We’re looking at spike proteins of bat viruses that are already out there,” Fauci said. “We’re not manipulating them to make them more or less likely to bind to human cells. We’re just asking, ‘Do they, or not?’” He said the assurances he provided the Senate committee in May were similarly vetted up and down the NIH. “Neither NIH nor NIAID have ever approved any grant that would have supported ‘gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans,” NIH Director Francis Collins said in a statement issued on May 19. One thing is clear: Federal scientists now have broad latitude to define whether a line of research could result in an “enhanced potential pandemic pathogen.” A 2017 document from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services allows the NIH to proceed if expert reviewers determine that it is “scientifically sound,” the pathogen that could be created “is a credible source of a potential future human pandemic,” and the investigator and his or her institution “have a demonstrated capacity and commitment to conduct [the research] safely and securely.” Assumption 3: The coronavirus chimeras escaped the WIV lab, either accidentally or deliberately. Whether SARS-CoV-2 emerged from the Wuhan lab is the subject of ongoing debate and investigation by scientists and the U.S. intelligence community. While the World Health Organization initially judged the prospect of a lab leak “extremely unlikely,” the organization’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has since said that “all hypotheses remain on the table.” President Biden has given the intelligence community until late August to conduct a review of the facts and “bring us closer to a definitive conclusion” about which of two scenarios — a laboratory accident or human contact with an infected animal — began the chain of events that led to the pandemic. Fauci rules out only one scenario: that the viruses examined under the NIAID contract initiated the pandemic. Assumption 4: Viruses that were altered in the Wuhan lab with NIAID funds seeded the pandemic. This is the leap of logic that Fauci, in an interview, called “absolutely inflammatory” and “slanderous.” It is also the claim that is most difficult to support with evidence. “Is it conceivable that somewhere in the Wuhan institute they were looking at viruses that may have leaked out? I’m leaving that to the people who are doing the investigation to figure out,” Fauci said. But there is “one thing that we are sure of,” he added: “The grant that we funded, and the result of that grant — given in the annual reports, given in the peer-reviewed literature — is not SARS-CoV-2.” How can he be so sure? There is just too much evolutionary distance between the coronavirus samples the Wuhan scientists were working with — all of them genetically sequenced and detailed in published work — and the virus that causes COVID-19. This is what Fauci meant when he told lawmakers this week that it was “molecularly impossible” for the viruses examined by WIV to evolve into SARS-CoV-2: Generally, the overlap between the genomes of the viruses in the lab and that of SARS-CoV-2 was no more than 80%. In evolutionary terms, that’s a chasm. In their critical review, the international group of virologists note that SARS-CoV-2 and its closest known relatives have an overlap of about 96%. That “equates to decades of evolutionary divergence,” they wrote. Given that, Fauci said, “there’s no way” the viruses studied at WIV could have evolved into the virus that has caused 4 million deaths around the world. Would it be possible to bridge that gap with some deft splicing and dicing in a lab? Perhaps, but if so, telltale marks likely would have been left behind. Those have not been seen by scientists who went looking. Those same scientists have noted that, were someone looking to make a coronavirus as transmissible as possible, he or she would have changed the spike protein in ways that were already known to improve the virus’ ability to spread.
dual use research was banned by Obama for a reason. Your article admitted and Baric even said they created mice with human like lungs and to see if the chimera's they engineered could infect humans.... the viruses did infect. That is gain of function... i.e. bio weapon's possible. They took a virus which could not infect humans and made one that could. 2. Finally Fauci lie about it being molecularly possible is not longer valid. Many top scientists state that the virus most likely did escape from the lab... so its clearly molecularly possible.
Let's discuss the pause on Gain of Function research under the Obama administration - it was never banned. There was merely a pause for a period of time while updated guidelines were put into place to ensure all efforts would be safe. The Obama administration lifted the pause in 2019. At the beginning of the pause efforts that were underway were allowed to proceed after a review. All the GOF research funded by NIAID was properly approved and allowed to proceed. Work continues on policies for 'gain of function' research https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2015/10/work-continues-policies-gain-function-research Oct 02, 2015 Nearly a year has passed since the Obama administration announced a moratorium on controversial "gain-of-function" (GOF) research, and the advisory board charged with coming up with guidance for how the government funds such projects and weighs the risks and benefits met this week to hear updates from working groups and receive more input on their deliberations. The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) is playing the lead role in formulating policies for work on studies that enhance pathogenicity, transmissibility, or host range of a pathogen with the goals of better understanding disease and developing vaccines and drugs. The experiments have triggered "dual-use" worries—that methods could be used not only for beneficial purposes but also to engineer bioterror threats. Some experts have also raised concerns about an intentional or accidental release of the experimental pathogens, especially in light of recent safety lapses involving federal facilities. The Obama administration first announced the moratorium on Oct 17, and early indications were that it would take about a year for the NSABB to hammer out a federal funding policy and a risk-benefit assessment. However, the latest estimate is for the recommendations and risk assessment to be finalized in the spring of 2016. Last December the administration allowed a handful of GOF studies to resume, some involving Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and influenza. An NSABB working group is tackling the funding policy recommendations, and in March the government awarded a $1.1 million contract to Gryphon Scientific to formally assess the risks and benefits of GOF work. The NSABB's meeting on Oct 28 was streamed live online and will soon be available in an online audio archive. Christopher Viggiani, PhD, the NSABB's executive director at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), said the group was briefed on the progress of funding policy development and received an update on Gryphon's work so far on the risk-benefit assessment. He said members also discussed a host of related ethical, legal, and policy issues and heard input from the public. (More at above url) Feds lift gain-of-function research pause, offer guidance https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-per...t-gain-function-research-pause-offer-guidance Dec 17, 2019 The National Institutes of Health (NIH) today lifted a 3-year moratorium on funding gain-of-function (GOF) research on potential pandemic viruses such as avian flu, SARS, and MERS, opening the door for certain types of research to resume. The action coincides with today's release of a US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) framework for guiding funding decisions about proposed research involving pathogens that have enhanced potential for creating pandemics.
now you are arguing about paused vs banned.. the point is that dual use research can be used for bioweapons and... now out of a coronavirus millions have died. A coronavirus... which most likely came from the Scientists lab... that Baric trained in gain of fucntion research ... and even sent mice with human lungs to...mice with human lungs to test for whether a virus could infect humans.. You are an insane commie scum for covering for them.
this... is all you need to know to see you are being a commie from vanity fair. Under the subject line, “No need for you to sign the “Statement” Ralph!!,” he wrote to two scientists, including UNC’s Dr. Ralph Baric, who had collaborated with Shi Zhengli on the gain-of-function study that created a coronavirus capable of infecting human cells: “you, me and him should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way.” Daszak added, “We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice.”
Yet... there is no sign in the COVID-19 virus of any human engineering or bio-engineering manipulation -- as documented by many mainstream scientists who provided significant in-depth information on this. As I stated many times in the past -- it is possible that COVID-19 leaked out of a research lab in China inadvertently due to poor safety control measures. However there is no evidence of any bio-engineering that made COVID-19 weaponized via GOF-- which is the nonsense being pushed by fringe conspiracy theorists. Furthermore nations do not do their bio-weapons research in labs which have western scientists from many nations present in all the time. There was even an Australian scientist present in Wuhan throughout the entire outbreak. Nations perform their bio-weapons research in military base labs where only their citizens with top-secret clearances can get access to. The Gain of Function methods are something that have been around for decades -- the Chinese military would not need any assistance from the UNC researchers on the how to do this. I would also point out that a coronavirus is a fairly poor starting point for a bio-weapons creation program -- there are much more deadly and infectious viruses that would be used as the starting point.
you are lying your ass off.... you are spouting the shit they wrote when Trump was in office and Fauci and Dazsak and Baric were creating a consensus. Since then that consensus has reversed, Did you actually read the BBC material or the vanity fair article. Have you seen all the scientists saying that the lack of the animal zero... is also evidence this is not natural. If you did ... you would not be lying like this. At best... your side has a poor argument.. 2. Even if there is no proof Covid 19 was engineered... the argument that your team of scumbags transferred gain of research training, tech and funding to the Dr. Shi and the Red China lab... is irrefutable... Baric already admitted it.