I agree with this wholeheartedly. We have a long way to go here.
Right?
Yes, in a test tube with 30,000 other gain of function modified virus test tubes, which was the likely environment that Covid arose in. The CCP would be jumping up and down pointing at the cave if they had a shred of evidence there was a natural source.
That said, I wonder if Obama was right to put the brakes on gain of function research in the first place. I mean, on one hand, we can discover novel cures for disease. On the other, we can devastate humanity across the planet.
I get it, I get irrational about this issue, and am open to being wrong. But Dr. Fauci getting “sassy” here deeply offended me.
Thanks. I feel sorry for every single family that lost (and continue to lose) a loved one during this mess. Sorry for being a contrarian on this issue if it causes pain for anyone.
Pretty much every bit of evidence presented this is artificial has come down to paranoia about China; people who know viruses do not think it is. But it’s true nobody has been able to pinpoint exactly where in nature it came from yet. Almost as if…tell me if this is crazy…viruses in China still need research before we know the answers to questions like that.
This kind of devastation is possible by how connected we all are, and epidemiologists have been warning about it for a while. The damage has been lessened by knowing what we are up against, and would have been a lot more if people had listened to their advice. Being caught blindsided by it would not have helped.
I’m tremendously sorry you lost someone to this. I genuinely am. But you are blaming the wrong people, the ones trying to understand and prevent outbreaks like this, instead of the ones who cared more about keeping the economy going and then tried to scapegoat researchers to excuse themselves.
The answer always lies in more evidence. The lab leak theory was always a dark horse, and as more data is analyzed, it is looking less likely. Not disproven, but considerably less likely. The studies being done in Wuhan were, as far as we know, (a huge qualifier) not the source of the sars-cov-2 that we are dealing with. Scientists were studying those viruses because they were predicted and expected to become a problem at some point. And those predictions were quite correct.
Yes, we do. The CDC has field teams that do as much analysis as they can on-site. They also study it at the CDC where they have the equipment to do different analysis, recognizing that they are doing so on variants of the virus that aren’t current.
Even saying “at some point” is an extreme softball because SARS and MERS were already big problems and the common cold killed all those alien invaders.
“Fauci lied because a study that says the funders didn’t have say or knowledge of its publication combines a bunch of different researcher’s work that includes gain of function research based on a definition released after the study was written” is certainly the world of gotchas we live in.
Well, if the article cited in this article is the research that Rand Paul is upset about it is here:
This research is clearly not gain-of-function research as it is a study of three viruses found in the wild that would be able to attack humans based on some of their characteristics. I mean, it doesn’t take a whole lot of reading skills to understand that finding three virus variant in bats and then testing them does not constitute changing a virus.
From the National Review article, I would question whether Dr. Ebright has either very poor reading comprehension or whether he was just lying for the sake of scoring political points.
Put simply, it is how we stay alive. Understanding any disease, particularly novel ones requires knowing everything we can. It allows us to prepare defenses in advance of a threat actually materializing. The previous decade + of research on the genomes of coronaviruses has made every step of our rapid rollout of treatments and vaccines possible. This is true from the early days of the structure analysis, which was aided by work done on MERS by people like Dr. Nianshuang Wang. If people like him hadn’t been altering MERS genome a half decade ago, we probably wouldn’t have a vaccine today. And sadly we can’t know which branches are vital lifesaving measures and which aren’t until we have a lot of hindsight. Dr. Katalin Kariko’s MRNA research wasn’t even enough to keep her on a tenure track, until it became one of the largest medical advances of recent decades.
To adapt the apocryphal Willie Sutton quote, that’s where the viruses are.
If we took your view of not doing the research, or at least not doing it with China we would be a few years further behind on our vaccine rollout, at a minimum. How many extra lives are you comfortable with to follow that view?
Regarding comments that Fauci dad was a doctor, his entirety of academic work was gain of function, blah, blah cult of personality.
His dad was a pharmacist.
His variety of academic and research work covers many area - HIV, Ebola, SARS, some of the most important work done in rheumatology over 20 years and protection against bio weapons.
Pretty varied. And hardly a cult of personality to respect that level of achievement and contribution to world health.
I’m amazed that people don’t even bother to read the minimum before having “opinions”.
Fauci has contributed to the understanding of how HIV destroys the body’s natural defense system, progressing to AIDS. He has outlined the mechanisms of induction of HIV expression by endogenous cytokines.[18] Fauci has worked to develop strategies for the therapy and immune reconstitution of patients with the disease, as well as for a vaccine to prevent HIV infection. His current research is concentrated on identifying the nature of the immunopathogenic mechanisms of HIV infection and the scope of the body’s immune responses to HIV.
In 2003, the Institute for Scientific Information stated that from 1983 to 2002, “Fauci was the 13th most-cited scientist among the 2.5 to 3.0 million authors in all disciplines throughout the world who published articles in scientific journals.”[2]”
Yes, Rand Paul and I have opposite governing philosophies. Paul wants the government to do nothing other than arrest Paul’s neighbour for assault. Whereas I generally like things the government does but found arresting Paul’s neighbour to be a significant overreach.
The NYT opinion piece (by a distinguished researcher) doesn’t mention Fauci or the NIH directly funding the alleged Chinese engineering of what supposedly became COVID-19. EcoHealth Alliance, which did receive direct funding from the NIH and sub-contracted some analysis work to the Wuhan lab, is only discussed in regard to that NGO defending a 2015 Chinese experiment to bioengineer a chimeric coronovirus using local bat material (emphasis on “a” rather than “the”) in order to research its efficacy at infecting human cells. That experiment was documented in Nature Medicine at the time for any interested party to read about.
So how exactly does that article, which is more about the controversy over such bioengineering in the scientific community as well as that community’s concerns over potential lab leaks, make Paul “more right than Dr Fauci on this subject”?
If you genuinely want to discuss the possibility of a lab leak in the case of COVID-19 (Fauci is on the record on being open to that as a possibility) or about the ethics and advisability of bioengineering viruses for medical research in general, this is not the topic for that.
Finally, if you’re oh-so concerned about polarisation, you might consider Paul’s goal of framing Fauci as a key figure in a moronic right-wing conspiracy theory being spread amongst his supporters. That, and Fauci’s response to his implication, is what the FPP of this Topic is about.
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