Im-Politic: So Fauci Finally Gets It on Lockdowns?

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Anthony S. Fauci, Biden administration, CCP Virus, China, coronavirus, COVID 19, facemasks, Im-Politic, lockdowns, social distancing, Wuhan virus, Xi JInPing, Zero Covid

Retiring U.S. chief infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony S. Fauci told us over the weekend that he’s just shocked by what he calls China’s pointlessly “draconian” Zero Covid policy to defeat the CCP Virus. And the Biden administration has been critical, too. To which the only reasonable response is, “Seriously?”

Not that Zero Covid hasn’t been an epic fail by Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. But the criticism from Fauci and the Biden presidency sure looks like the pot calling the kettle black.

If you’re skeptical, here’s Fauci’s response to a question noting perceptively that “you’re seeing things that we saw in this country when people didn’t like how Covid response — What is going on in China, and why do they seem to be in a worse place than anyone else in the world?”

“[T]heir approach has been very, very severe and rather draconian in the kinds of shutdowns without a seeming purpose. I mean, if you’re having a situation, if you can recall, you know, almost three years ago when we were having our hospitals overrun, you remember the situation in New York City, you had to do something immediately to shut down that flow. So remember we were talking about flattening the curve and the social distancing and restrictions and shutdown, which was never really complete, is done for a temporary period of time for the purpose of regrouping, getting more personal protective equipment, getting people vaccinated. It seems that in China it was just a very, very strict extraordinary lockdown where you lock people in the house but without any seemingly endgame to it.”

No one can reasonably criticize any public official for urging extreme and sweeping anti-virus measures during the pandemic’s early days – before its nature and especially its highly granular lethality (overwhelmingly concentrated in seniors and others with major health problems) were understood. For it could have been like the Black Death.

But of course Fauci, the rest of the official public health establishment, and left-of-center leaders like Biden, were championing these policies long after these patterns became known.

And more important, when it comes to comparing U.S. policies during his tenure with Chinese policies today, Fauci’s claim that he was only urging “social distancing and restrictions and shutdown” essentially until vaccination was widespread ignores his stated belief in March, 2020 that “It will take at least a year to a year in a half to have a vaccine we can use.” And of course getting enough arms jabbed to turn the CCP Virus tide was always going to take months more even if the rollout went perfectly (which was far from the case). And what if the vaccines were major flops?

So Fauci himself clearly felt that pretty draconian policies – despite their devastating impact on the economy, on education, and on Americans’ mental health – would be needed over a very long haul. Therefore, when it counted, his differences with the approach taken recently by China (which lacks vaccines even as effective as America’s imperfect – especially against transmission – versions) was one of degree, not of kind.

Just as bad, as with Xi Jinping, this conviction of Fauci’s didn’t seem to be greatly affected by the proven potential of natural immunity per se to help end the pandemic (especially as variants, predictably, became more infectious but less lethal), or by the emerging evidence of sharp limits (to put it diplomatically) to the utility of social distancing in and of itself, and masking – and even of widespread lockdowns themselves.

Fauci’s declaration that “a prolonged lockdown without any seeming purpose or end game to it…really doesn’t make public health sense” comes way too late to impact America’s strategy during the pandemic era.  But hopefully it will dissuade both politicians and the public health establishment from repeating these grave mistakes when the next pandemic – inevitably – comes the nation’s way.

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Im-Politic: A Rapidly Mounting Case Against Fauci – and His Former Boss

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Anthony S. Fauci, CCP Virus, China, Congress, coronavirus, COVID 19, Francis Collins, gain-of-function research, Im-Politic, lab leak, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, natural origin, NIAID, NIH, Wuhan virus

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci must be one of the luckiest people in the world, with Dr. Francis S. Collins not far behind. President Biden’s chief medical advisor and the recently retired head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have been leading charmed lives because evidence keeps emerging of their incredibly shady and quite possibly corrupt and illegal behavior in dealing with the China angle of the CCP Virus pandemic, and so far they’re getting off scot free.

As known by RealityChek readers, overwhelming evidence exists that Fauci, longtime head of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) lied to Congress when he denied under oath that his agency funded gain-of-function research at a Chinese virology lab in violation of federal government guidelines at the time. Such deceitful statements are criminal offenses and Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul has rightly asked the Justice Department for a criminal investigation. But how anxious do you think this Biden administration cabinet agency will be to look into someone whom the President himself has repeatedly touted as the world’s greatest expert on handling the pandemic?

This Fauci decision on gain-of-function funding, by the way (as opposed to misleading Congress about it) should be enough to put him in serious legal jeopardy. And ditto for Collins if he knew about Fauci’s action.

In the last month, however, recently released emails suggest two more major reasons for investigating Fauci and Collins.

The first concerns statements by both in their correspondence during 2020 and 2021 that they not only tried to suppress public discussion and consideration of Chinese responsibility for loosing the virus on the world – which has been clear enough from the numerous times they described as “fringe” and “conspiracy” thinking positions arguments made in support of the lab leak theory made by numerous eminent virologists and epidemiologists.

Now, thanks to a new group of emails – released by Republican members of the House Oversight and Reform Committtee – we know that the agencies for which Fauci and Collins have worked are trying to cover up the reasons that scientists tasked by the former during the pandemic’s early U.S. stages to examine the virus’ origins switched from viewing as solid and even convincing both main versions of the lab leak theory (that a naturally occuring coronavirus escaped due to Chinese carelessness, and that the pathogen that leaked was man-made) to staunch opponents of these ideas.

If such a cover up wasn’t taking place, why were virtually all the contents of the communications that could have shed light on the specific reason for this dramatic change redacted? Like scientific and medical information should suddenly be treated as a state secret?

Second, these emails also speak volumes about the motives of Fauci and Collins. Their sole aims, the wording strongly suggests, weren’t to make sure that pseudo-science didn’t distract and inhibit the nation’s response to the pandemic. Instead, they were also concerned with maintaining “international harmony” (as Collins put it in a February 2, 2020 message) and not doing “unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular” (according to one of the experts involved in the electronic discussions on the same day).

There’s nothing wrong with scientists worrying about the state of science worldwide and about dangers to the international cooperation that drives so much scientific progress. But there’s everything wrong (although it’s probably not a crime) for such scientists, and especially government scientists who have been appointed and not elected to their jobs, trying to stamp out any discussions – both inside and outside the government – involving an entirely possible danger to public health in order to advance the above aims, or for any non-scientific reason. In the American system of government, that call – which involves major and complicated scientific and non-scientific tradeoffs – must be made by elected officials. The appointed technocrats should be providing input reflecting their paticular expertise, and nothing more.

Third, two conservative-leaning news organizations (see here and especially here) have obtained NIH documents showing that some of the scientists who changed their minds and indeed began leading the charge to debunk the lab leak theories got big increases in grant funding from Fauci’s NIAID (and by extension, Collins’ NIH). In other words, these experts could well have done these government scientists’ bidding in exchange for a payoff.

None of this new material is enough to declare anyone guilty of anything. But it’s full of information demanding a far-ranging probe. During the Watergate era, Congress rightly sought to determine whether there was a “cancer on the Presidency.”  Especially as an era of pandemics may well be starting, the possibility of a cancer on the public health establishment should be equally alarming. 

Im-Politic: Omicron Looks Fairly Mild – Except Against a Key Biden Virus Claim

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Anthony S. Fauci, Biden, Biden administration, CCP Virus, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus, COVID 19, hospitalization, Im-Politic, Omicron variant, vaccination, vaccines, Wuhan virus

I was struck by the statement made by Anthony S. Fauci on Tuesday that the Omicron variant of the CCP Virus is so hyper-infectious that it will “ultimately find just about everybody.” I wasn’t struck by the words of President Biden’s chief medical adviser because Omicron has found me healthwise. Instead, I was struck because the pandemic keeps finding my blogging – even when I don’t intend to write about it.

And so it’s been today. I started out planning to post an item about the Ukraine crisis and globalization (which I will definitely turn to), but Mr. Biden’s latest virus-related remarks have jerked me right back to the pandemic. Specifically responsible was his claim that unless many more Americans become fully vaccinated, Omicron’s rapid spread will mean that the nation’s hospitals will be crowded with resisters who contract unusually severe cases, leaving “little room for anyone else who might have a heart attack or an injury in an automobile accident or any injury at all.”

This point makes perfect sense. Even if Omicron’s effects are relatively mild for most victims, if the absolute numbers of cases are high enough, even a relatively small percentage of infections serious enough to require hospitalization would be enough to overwhelm the hospital system. And if, as Mr. Biden and so many others insist, the overwhelming majority of those hospitalized are unvaccinated individuals, then the case for mandatory vaccination would look open and shut.

But to use one of the President’s favorite phrases, “Here’s the deal.” Even if every American was fully vaxxed and boosted, if Fauci is right about Omicron’s eventual reach, then the hospital system will get overwhelmed anyway. Just do the math.

The whole U.S. population is a little above 330,000,000. If everyone gets Omicron, that’s 330,000,000 cases. How many are resulting in hospitalizations? The President says that unvaccinated Americans are “seventeen times more likely to get hospitalized” from the CCP Virus than the vaxxed.

This figure seems to come from the latest data kept by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which finds that for every 100,000 American adults, 67.8 “Covid-19-Associated Hospitalizations” take place each week, versus a rate of only 3.9 hospitalizations for the fully vaccinated. That’s a big difference. But if you project those numbers out to the full 330,000,000 population rather than a sample of 100,000, you get 12,870 fully vaxxed hospitalizations each week.

That figure is a lot smaller than the number of “staffed (operational) acute care beds” in America (534,964, according to the latest count from the American Hospital Association). It’s also a lot smaller than the number of intensive care unit beds (96,5960).

But all by itself, it seems to be enough greatly to stress the heathcare system, given that (as the President noted), it’s got many other responsibilities; given that the 12,870 figure represents the number of new hospital patients added each week; and given that many of these fully vaxxed CCP Virus patients are going to stay hospitalized for a certain period even as new patients in this category keep coming in. 

At the same time, the CDC data on fully vaxxed Covid hospital patients surely creates an understatement for one big reason: They only go up to the week of last November 20. Therefore, they predate the recording of the first U.S. Omicron case (last December 1.)

The United States still lacks comprehensive nation-wide statistics on Omicron-related hospitalizations of the fully vaxxed. But some preliminary numbers indicate that their impact on hospitals will be catastrophic. For example, for the week of last December 27 (more than a month after the latest CDC numbers but just as the first Omicron case was reported), New York State found that 4.59 out of every 100,000 city residents who had been fully vaccinated were hospitalized for the CCP Virus.

That’s a positively infintestimal number. But multiply it out by the total 330,000,000 U.S. population, and that’s more than 1.5 million virus-related hospitalizations of the fully vaxxed. And even if you doubt that these numbers would hold for the entire country (because the United States is big and diverse), a breakthrough hospitalization rate only half that high would still produce more than 750,000 such cases.    

Some more recent figures are even more alarming. As of January 6, the Las Vegas, Nevada area experienced 27,205 breakthrough virus cases (e.g., number of infections of the fully vaxxed), of which 873 were hospitalized. That’s 3.21 percent. Ohio’s official Covid-19 dashboard says that of 53,819 state residents counted as “Covid-19 Hospitalizations,” since January 1, 2021, 2,991 have been  fully vaccinated. That’s 5.56 percent.

According to this January 6 post, in Connecticut, “The overall percentage of fully vaccinated people hospitalized with COVID has also risen to 32 percent, from about 20 percent early last week.”

Massachusetts has reported that as of early January, the state’s hospitals were treating 2,970 patients with confirmed cases of the CCP Virus. Of these, 1,348 were fully vaccinated. That’s more than 45 percent!

In fact, once again, if these numbers are too high by a factor of two, they still add up to overwhelmed hospital systems.

Help is on the way in the form of recently approved treatments (though it looks like due to Biden administration shortsightedness or caution, they’ll be kind of scarce for several months), and in the distinct possibilities that the Omicron wave will crest sooner rather than later, and that follow-on virus strains will be even less virulent. What’s more certain is that Omicron is making a complete – and unnecessarily divisive – mockery of Mr. Biden’s continuing “pandemic of the unvaccinated” claims.

Im-Politic: It’s Time for Them to Go

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Anthony S. Fauci, Biden adminstration, CCP Virus, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, children, coronavirus, COVID 19, Fauci, FDA, Food and Drug Administration, hospitalization, hospitalizations, Im-Politic, Mary T. Bassett, misinformation, New York State, pediatric vaccination, public health, Rochelle Walensky, schools, testing, vaccinations, vaccine mandates, vaccines, Wuhan virus

As the New Year brings Americans their third calendar year of coping with the CCP Virus, it’s abundantly clear that there’s no such thing as a firing offense when it comes to the nation’s leading public health authorities. And it’s been evident in not one but two cases over the last week alone.

Case number one involves Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser. Fauci should already be in near-boiling legal water over the likelihood that he lied to Congress in denying that the National Institute of Alergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) never funded dangerous gain-of-function virus-related research in China. Now he’s just (unwittingly) admitted that he’s been guilty of pandemic-related fear-mongering of the first order on the vital issue of safeguarding children’s well-being.

Fauci has long warned about the dangers posed to minors by the virus and linked vaccination of pupils (along with mask requirements for them) to the goal of keeping schools safely opened. And he’s focused not only on pediatric infection numbers, but on hospitalization rates – widely considered a far more serious matter because they supposedly reveal the incidence of serious and potentially fatal infections. As he argued on NBC News‘ “Meet the Press” on August 8:

“There are a lot of children now – all you need to do is do a survey of the pediatric hospitals throughout the country, and you’re seeing a considerable number of young people who are not only infected but who are seriously ill….the numbers compared to the elderly are less, but that’s a false comparison. These kids are getting sick. We’ve really got to make sure we protect them.”

The alarmist nature of his comments should have been clear from the start, as, for example, that week, according to the CCP Virus data tracker maintained by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the virus-related rate of new hospital admissions for Americans under 17 averaged about 0.14 per 100,000 – which comes to an absolute number of about 100 total hospitalizations among the 73.1 million in that age group as of the latest U.S. Census Bureau figures.

But as I’ve explained, by that time, a national healthcare leader like Fauci should have been aware of the big problem with the hospitalization data in general – they rarely distinguished between patients who were hospitalized because of the virus, and patients hospitalized for other reasons who happened to test positive for the pathogen once admitted. In other words, many “Covid-related hospitalizations” have had nothing to do with Covid.

Here’s how one expert has explained the problem:

“[I]f you look at the children are hospitalized many of them are hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID. What we mean by that is that if a child goes in the hospital they automatically get tested for COVID and they get counted as a COVID hospitalized individual, when in fact they may go in for a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that.”

“So it’s over counting the number of children who are ‘hospitalized’ with COVID as opposed to because of COVID.”

This expert’s name? Anthony Fauci. But he didn’t make the admission until last week – when total national “Covid-related hospitalizations” for kids still numbered in the low hundreds.

Yet bizarrely, Fauci still favors vaccination for this highly secure demographic cohort, in line with the equally bizarre authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and recommendation from the CDC.  And this even though the jabs for five-to-fifteen years olds are approved only on an “emergency basis”; even though the evidence used seems to consist of a single trial of some 3,100 children; and even though – unlike far more vulnerable older Americans – these vaccine recipients will mostly have many decades from now for any side effects to emerge.

So on the grounds of spreading virus misinformation alone, Fauci should be gone.

Speaking of pediatric hospitalizations and misinformation, it’s also time to sack new New York State Health Commissioner Mary T. Bassett as well. Also last Monday, touting the imperative of pediatric vaccinations, she declared, “Many people continue to think that children do not become infected with COVID. This is not true. Children become infected with COVID and some will become hospitalized. The vaccination coverage remains too low. We need to get child vaccinations up, particularly in the 5-to-11-year-old age group.”

At this time, New York State had recorded 184 child covid hospitalizations (out of a total under-18 population of 4.18 million, according to the latest Census Bureau data). But alarmism wasn’t the worst of Bassett’s offenses. Instead, it was this jaw-dropping admission: 

“The numbers we gave on pediatric admissions weren’t intended to make it seem that children were having an epidemic of infection. These were small numbers that we reported in our health alert. That was based on 50 hospitalizations, and I’ve now given you some larger numbers, but they’re still small numbers. It really is to motivate pediatricians and families to seek the protection of vaccination.”

Lying to the public isn’t a criminal offense – and probably shouldn’t be.  But it sure should be a firing offense. 

According to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, who should be facing big job security questions herself due to the nation’s crying shortage of CCP Virus testing capability despite the Biden administration’s backing for sweeping vaccine mandates, her agency’s controversial decision last week on isolation for indivduals with asymptomatic cases stemmed partly from the “relatively low rates of isolation for all of this pandemic. Some science has demonstrated less than a third of people are isolating when they need to.”  Given Americans’ truth-challenged public health officials, reluctance to follow their advice and instructions is easy to understand.            

 

Following Up: Why the Fauci-Lied Charges Look Stronger than Ever

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Anthony S. Fauci, CCP Virus, Congress, coronavirus, COVID 19, EcoHealth Alliance, Fauci, Following Up, gain-of-function research, James Comer, Lawrence Tabak, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, NIAID, NIH, Obama administration, Rand Paul, science, virology, Wuhan lab

If Anthony S. Fauci hasn’t been lawyering up already to defend himself against charges that he lied to Congress in denying that he U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), for which he’s worked for so long, ever funded dangerous gain-of-function (GOF) research in a Chinese virology lab, he definitely should be now.

For unless he’s gotten a God complex from all the CCP Virus era adulation he’s received, and assumes he’ll never be held accountable for his actions by mere mortals’ systems of government, Fauci – who also serves as President Biden’s chief medical advisor – must recognize that the NIH just made clearer than ever to lawmakers not only that statements of his earlier this year to Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky were false, but that he knew at the time they were false.

As a post of mine on July 22 explained, although Fauci made his denials twice this year in response to questions from Paul, facts that were undoubtedly at Fauci’s disposal stated otherwise. Principally, the public record shows that at least three research grants approved by the NIH branch headed by Fauci (the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases – NIAID) sponsored research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that plainly fell under the U.S. government’s official definition of gain-of-function – which is the only definition that Fauci, a federal employee, should care about in connection with his official work.

More important, from a legal standpoint, in an article detailing its findings, one team of recipients explicitly described its work at “GOF.” Similarly, in a February, 2020 email exchange, both Fauci and a senior colleague showed that they were well aware that of this research. The concern stemming from the grant that they discussed was not whether this description was correct or not, but whether or not this research took place when it was still permitted by federal regulations.

That’s obviously important, but as I noted, it has nothing to do with the lying to Congress charge. For that’s not what Paul asked. He asked whether NIH had ever paid for such work in China at any time. And even more important, Fauci was surely aware both of these emails’ contents, and of the original grant. OK – it’s conceivable that he had forgotten all of this when first questioned by Paul. But it’s inconceivable that by the second appearances (at which he was given the chance to walk back his denial), he hadn’t done his homework.

It was against this background of legitimately indisputable facts that the NIH finally issued a statement that seeks to clear the air about its connection with the Wuhan lab. The statement, which came in the form of an October 20 letter from NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak to Kentucky Republican Congressman James Comer, doesn’t explicitly comment on Fauci’s statements. But although it does insinuate that no one at NIH is to blame for any Wuhan-related confusion on the part of Members of Congress, it keeps him in hot water nonetheless.

For not only does it leave those indisputable facts completely undisputed. It makes two relevant claims that quickly dissolve under even casual scrutiny.

The first centers on Tabak’s allegation that the contractor in question, the New York City-based EcoHealth Alliance, violated the terms of its grant by failing to notify anyone at NIH that some of the experiments it helped conduct in Wuhan created an engineered version of a bat coronavirus that infected human cells ten times faster than the natually occuring version of that virus. According to Tabak, “EcoHealth failed to report this fining right away, as was required by the terms of the grant.”

That’s on EcoHealth, of course. But if it was concealing information from NIH, then doesn’t that mean that Fauci’s denials to Paul, however inaccurate, simply stemmed from ignorance and not a desire to mislead? Unfortunately for Fauci, no. Because as NIH recently told The New York Times, EcoHealth didn’t simply fail to report these results “right away.” The organization was two years late. And since this revelation came only this past August, Fauci must have known of its tardiness this past May and July, when he expressed his flat denials to Paul. In other words, Fauci knew he lacked all the facts needed to support his statements. But he made them anyway. And the difference between such statements and a deliberate falsehood is what, exactly?

Tabak’s second Fauci-relevant claim is even more easily dispensed with. It raises the question of defining gain-of-function research once again, and emphasizes that EcoHealth’s work “did not fit the definition of research involving enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential” – and therefore wasn’t prohibited under the prevailing regulations governing GOF research – because the bat coronaviruses being used “had not been shown to affect humans.”

Yet this argument still leaves Fauci with several big problems. First, as I wrote above, recipients for one of the NIH grants for Wuhan work stated explicitly that they were engaged in GOF research. Their results were published in November, 2015 – which means that at least part of the research was performed after October, 2014, when the Obama administration ordered a three-year pause in such work.

Plainly this evidence flatly contradicts Fauci’s insistence that NIH-funded GOF research took place in Wuhan. So does a comparison of the grantees’ description of their project and the Obama administration’s definition of the kind of work that was not to be supported:

“[R]esearch projects that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route.”

Moreover, “The research funding pause would not apply to characterization or testing of naturally occurring influenza, MERS, and SARS viruses, unless the tests are reasonably anticipated to increase transmissibility and/or pathogenicity.”

The pause was lifted at the end of 2017, and replaced with a review process that would allow funding gain-of-function research under certain conditions. As you can see, there are lots of them. Indeed, there are so many that Fauci (who was doubtless involved in the drafting) could be forgiven strictly speaking if he concluded that he’d gotten pretty close to a green light for resuming NIH funding for all manner of GOF work.

But it’s crucial to remember that Paul never asked Fauci whether NIH had ever funded GOF research in China that was legal at the time. He asked him whether NIH had ever funded GOF research in China – period. And nothing in the post-pause GOF funding guidelines changed the 2014 official definition of GOF – the definition that was controlling for Fauci and other federal employees. All the new guidelines did was stipulate when GOF research anywhere could be legally funded.

Nor did Tabak’s letter do anything to help Fauci on this score. Although he’s correct in noting that the new guidelines don’t proscribe research with pathogens with no record of infecting humans, this qualification is contained nowhere in the still-operative official U.S. government definition of GOF – which covers enhanced infectiousness and transmissibility in all mammals.

There’s a third claim made by Tabak that actually doesn’t directly bear on Fauci’s guilt or innocence, but very nicely illustrates why the NIH deserves absolutely zero credibility on CCP Virus origins issues. That’s the claim that EcoHealth didn’t mislead anyone, either, however late it was in keeping the agency informed. That’s because the organization supposedly didn’t expect the results it got.

As Tabak wrote (though, as with the rest of his letter, he oddly he didn’t specifically link this point to th e Fauc-lied controversy), “As sometimes occurs in science, [the much greater infectivity etc of the engineered viruses] was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to do.”

Yet it’s obvious that the researchers – and the NIH itself – expected that they might display some enhanced capability. Why else would the agency have instructed EcoHealth to “report immediately” a ten-fold-or greater increase in its infectiousness – or any increase in its infectivity?

Tabak also apparently left on the table another suggestion that EcoHealth and NIH (and by extension Fauci) should be let off the hook on substantive grounds (in terms of conducting and supporting gain-of-function research) in addition to NIH (and by extension Fauci) should be let off procedurally (because of EcoHealth’s failure to report its results promptly: It’s the suggestion that because the gain-of-function results were unexpected, that the relevant experiments weren’t about gain-of-function in the first place.

What, however, could be more absurd? For example, scientists began trying to develop a polio vaccine in the 1930s. They didn’t succeed until 1953. Can anyone seriously believe that the failed efforts don’t qualify as polio vaccine research? Ditto for the long string of failures to develop an AIDS vaccine. Or a U.S. rocket that could lift a satellite into space. Or the story of practically every scientific discovery or progress in engineering, or for that matter in the social sciences.

It’s true that Fauci could have easily and truthfully answered Paul’s questions with a statement along the lines of the following in speaking about the post-gain-of-function pause experiments: “At the time of this work, government guidelines permitted NIH to support GOF research in China and everywhere else if its review process determined that such work was justified, and that determination was in fact made.”

That’s not, however, what he said – evidently because his top priority wasn’t factual accuracy, but ensuring that neither he nor NIH could be tainted by association with supporting potentially dangerous research in China – which would have further exposed he and NIH to charges of dreadful judgment (considering their lax attitude toward reporting deadlines and the underlying decision to work with a foreign regime with a long history of keeping secrets and spreading information.

More important from the Fauci-lied standpoint, though, is that there’s no way he could have answered the questions about the pre-pause research truthfully without admitting that NIH had indeed funded some GOF work at the Wuhan lab.

And there’s a final point that needs to be mentioned:  Is the Tabak letter the best that NIH can do to exculpate Fauci of the lying charges and all concerned of  allegations of whopping misjudgement? If so, I’m doubly convinced that Fauci specifically should be seeking legal aid. If you’re still a fan, feel free to send your suggestions to:

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci

Director

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

5601 Fishers Lanes, MSC 9806

Bethesda, Maryland 20892-9806

Im-Politic: Fauci Doctors the Facts Again

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Anthony S. Fauci, Biden administration, Bureau of Labor Statistics, CCP Virus, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Chris Wallace, coronavirus, COVID 19, essential workers, Fauci, Fox News, Im-Politic, law enforcement, mortality, Officer Down Memorial Page, police, vaccine mandates, vaccines, Wuhan virus

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, had a ready answer this past Sunday when a news anchor asked him whether or not he bears any responsibility for the growing criticism he’s attracted during the CCP Virus pandemic:

“[I] have stood — always making science, data, and evidence be what we guide ourselves by. And I think people who feel differently, who have conspiracy theories, who deny reality that’s looking em straight in the eye, those are people that don’t particularly care for me.

“And that’s understandable because what I do and I try very hard is to be guided by the truth. And sometimes, the truth becomes inconvenient for some…people, so they react against me. That just is what it is. There’s not much I can do about that…”

Actually, here’s something he can do about it. He can stop presenting facts that are not only completely free-floating but so devoid of any context that they become completely misleading – as he did on the same program.

Asked by Fox News‘ Chris Wallace whether vaccine mandates should be enforced for essential workers like police – many of which oppose the requirements, Fauci declared,

“We now know the statistics, more police officers die of COVID than they do in other causes of death. So, it doesn’t make any sense to not trying to protect yourself as well as the colleagues that you work with.”

Fauci’s claim is correct strictly speaking – at least according to this organization that tracks police deaths in the line of duty. But comparing police virus deaths with other causes of police fatalities has zero to do with how especially susceptible or not officers are to Covid. In fact, the only valid way of determining the relative vulnerability of these law enforcement personnel is to compare their CCP Virus experiences – in this case, mortality – versus that of their closest population-wide peer group.

And what these data make plain as day is that police nationwide are much less likely to die of the virus than those most like them demographically.

The peer group in question is working age adults, and this source pegs their population at 170,975,648 as of last year. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that through October 13, they’d suffered 233,965 deaths. “involving” the CCP Virus (which RealityChek regulars know is a problematic concept). So that’s a mortality rate of 0.14 percent.

The number of police officers whose deaths have been attributed to having contracted the disease on duty is 479 according to the aforementioned Office Down Memorial Page. And the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has pegged the nationwide number of police and sheriff’s patrol officers at 654,900. Do the math, and you get a death rate of 0.07 percent. That’s only half the level for the working age adult control group.

Surely one big reason for this disparity is that law enforcement personnel are healthier as a rule than their closest demographic peers. But far from “explaining away” Fauci’s mistake, it’s a point so obvious that he should know it. He should also realize that because, like other essential personnel, policemen and women stayed on the job during the worst of the virus, stayed on it long before vaccines were available, and worked jobs that required lots of personal contact, many surely contracted Covid – and recovered, thereby acquiring natural immunity. Despite his enthusiasm for the mandates, as even Fauci has admitted, this inconvenient (for vaccine zealots) truth of virology is tough to square with calls for mass, indiscriminate, and forced jabbing.

I’m enough of a believer in vaccines’ effectiveness and in the seriousness of the CCP Virus that I cringe every time I hear some pundit or news talker argue that members of the public health establishment like Fauci and the politicians that follow them have supported vaccine mandates and other forms of anti-virus business and behavioral curbs primarily because they’re control freaks. But every time I hear such folks so blatantly and sanctimoniously peddle this kind of misinformation, it makes me wonder.

Im-Politic: So You Think Biden’s Vaccine Mandates Reflect “The Science”?

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Anthony S. Fauci, Biden, CCP Virus, CNN, coronavirus, COVID 19, Im-Politic, immunity, Mainstream Media, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, public health, RealClearPolitics.com, vaccination, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, vaccines, Wuhan virus

Can we just finally stop pretending that the Biden administration’s approach to mitigating the CCP Virus has anything to do with “The Science.” And don’t take my word for it. Take the word of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, longtime director of the federal National Institute of Allergy and Chief Medical Advisor to the President.

As the President insisted emphatically, and even angrily, in his speech Thursday, “This [now] is a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” and this situation is entirely the fault of Americans who aren’t “doing the right thing” to protect themselves “and those around you — the people you work with, the people you care about, the people you love”; and of “elected officials actively working to undermine the fight against COVID-19.”

So in order to prevent vaccine hesitancy for whatever reason “to stand in the way of protecting the large majority of Americans who have done their part and want to get back to life as normal,” he decided to impose a series of sweeping vaccine mandates for both federal government workers and large numbers of private sector employees.

As I pointed out this past Wednesday, the (big) problem with this strategy is that it completely ignores the huge numbers of Americans who don’t need vaccines because their exposure to the virus has left them immune. I should have added that, consequently, they can’t spread it to others unless they themselves get reinfected. As a result, the Biden strategy threatens to deprive tens of millions of Americans of their livelihoods, and the U.S. economy of production and demand that it still urgently needs, for no good medical reason at all.

And guess what? Fauci clearly agrees with me (and the others who have made the same point). Yesterday, during a CNN appearance, he was asked about

“a study that came out of Israel about natural immunity, and basically, the headline was that natural immunity provides a lot of protection, even better than the vaccines alone.

“What do people make of that? So as we talk about vaccine mandates, I get calls all the time, people say, I’ve already had COVID, I’m protected. And now the study says maybe even more protected than the vaccine alone. Should they also get the vaccine? How do you make the case to them?”

Fauci’s answer?

“You know, that’s a really good point….I don’t have a really firm answer for you on that. That’s something that we’re going to have to discuss regarding the durability of the response.

“The one thing that paper from Israel didn’t tell you is whether or not as high as the protection is with natural infection, what’s the durability compared to the durability of a vaccine? So it is conceivable that you got infected, you’re protected, but you may not be protected for an indefinite period of time.

“So, I think that is something that we need to sit down and discuss seriously, because you very appropriately pointed out, it is an issue, and there could be an argument for saying what you said.”

But it seems Fauci didn’t “sit down and discuss seriously” this complication with Mr. Biden. Or maybe the President decided to ignore input from someone who’s supposed to have personified “The Science” lately, and steam ahead anyway.

Of course, this would be a great subject for the Mainstream Media (MSM) to investigate. (Forget about Congress as long as it’s controlled by the Democrats.) But that’s not where the smart money is. After all, if you Google some obvious search terms like “Fauci” and “a really firm answer” and as of this writing (a little after 3 in the afternoon today, EST), and no MSM hits come up. But searchers are told that “It looks like these results are changing quickly. If this topic is new, it can sometimes take time for results to be added by reliable sources.” Oh.

Speaking of “reliable sources, however, Fauci’s admission isn’t even featured on CNN’s own website! Here’s what its search engine tells you: “Your search for Fauci ‘a really firm answer’ did not match any documents.” I was only able to find the transcript because I’d read about Fauci’s remarks on a decidedly not mainstream news site, and as the link above shows, finally came across it on the RealClearPolitics.com news aggregator site.

Maybe Fauci himself will speak up, before the vaccine mandates actually begin, or before they beging inflicting real economic damage on unvaccinated Americans and an entire economy that relies heavily on them? After all, he felt pretty free to contradict or correct President Trump when he felt the need. (Google “Fauci contradicts Trump.”)  But I wouldn’t bet on that, either, since he was already praising Mr. Biden even before the election.

In all, this information loop seems to be closed, at least till the 2022 Congressional elections, which could create the possibility of at least one house of Congress checking and probing the Executive Branch. For now, though, what word describes the fix in which this leaves the country better than “sickening”?           

Im-Politic: Delta Fear is Leading The Science, Not Following It

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Anthony S. Fauci, Biden, CCP Virus, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus, COVID 19, Delta variant, hospitalizations, Im-Politic, infections, lockdowns, masks, public health, vaccine passports, Wuhan virus

Sorry, but I’m not that comforted by the fact that Anthony S. Fauci is now saying  that “I don’t think we’re going to see lockdowns” because of the rapid spread of the Delta variant of the CCP Virus.

That’s because (1) President Biden’s top medical advisor has been such a single-minded backer of broad curbs on economic activity despite their devastating costs to both workers and businesses, not to mention the educational and non-virus public health crises they’ve worsened (like deaths from opioid overdoses); and (2) because he and the rest of the lockdown crowd keep harping on fatally flawed measures of virus dangers that have triggered previous lockdowns, and that are especially prominent and misleading because of Delta’s unusual transmissability. The two most important are case numbers and hospitalization increases.

Normally, the number of victims of a given disease and how that number’s been changing would be crucial gauges of the threat it poses to a population at large and of the effectiveness of mitigation steps already taken.

As has been known since the early phases of the pandemic, however, the CCP Virus can be present asymptomatically. That is, many individuals might not know they’re hosting it, either because they’re still feeling perfectly healthy, or because the effects are so mild that they’re judged not worth dealing with – or reporting to the health providers on which governments at all levels in the United States rely heavily for the virus data, and that form the basis for their policy responses.

As a result, literally no one knows how many Americans have been affected by the CCP Virus and, even more important, how that number has been changing. The same goes for the Delta variant. And therefore, literally no one knows the actual national health consequences of its virulence, and especially what percentage of those who have caught Delta are now or will become seriously ill, or have died or will succumb. Those are the Delta statistic — not simple numbers recorded instances of serious illness or mortality, however distressing they are on humanitarian grounds — that matter in assessing the peril posed by this strain, and in formulating responses whose net effects economically, socially, and health-wise aren’t worse than the disease/

To understand this distinction further, think about what’s known about Delta-related hospitalizations. The most accurate answer is “Very little so far in the way of hard data.” Indeed, as pointed out last week by the American Society for Microbiology, “Research is ongoing to determine if Delta infection is associated with increased hospitalization and death.” But that hasn’t prevented a pandemic of claims that it’s been a  primary driver of admissions lately. (See, e.g., here and here — among a gazillion other articles.)

Let’s assume, however, that the narrative is true. If so, since June 27 through the end of last week, when according to the Washington Post‘s very convenient virus tracker, the number of virus-hospitalized Americans hit its lowest level since the spring of 2020, the number of such patients has increased from 16,403 to 49,498 (through July 31), or 33,095. That sounds like a lot of hospitalizations, and the percentage gain (the numbers have nearly tripled), seems even worse. So Delta looks pretty dangerous, right? But again, what’s the context – that is, what’s the share of Americans infected with Delta who get seriously ill enough to get hospitalized?

As of two weeks ago, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the new strain was responsible for just over 83 percent of all new American CCP Virus cases. That was up from just over 30 percent on June 19 – just about the time virus-related hospitalizations hit their latest bottom. From that time through the end of July, just under 1.352 million total new virus cases have been recorded. So assuming that over the entirety of this period, Delta variant cases made up about 75 percent of these, their total at comes to 1.014 million.

Let’s further assume, in sync with the evidence-free narrative, that all of the new hospitalizations can be blamed on Delta. This would mean that 3.26 percent of the total new Delta cases (that 33,095 figure) were serious enough to require hospital care. Does that number justify even thinking about new lockdowns, much less calling them (only sort of) unlikely?

But don’t forget the asymptomatic cases! According to a new CDC estimate, as of mid-2020, 83 percent of total virus cases in America were asymptomatic – i.e., not recorded. Since so much has changed then – mainly, mass vaccination – that 83 percent figure probably doesn’t hold any more. A reasonable guess might be that 33 percent is now more like it (since about half of the total population is now fully vaccinated and many more Americans have either natural or acquired immunity).

If that’s right, the number of new Delta strain infections is more like 1.5 million, not one million. And the hospitalization rate is more like 2.21 percent. So the notion that “the war [against the virus] has changed” because of this recent mutation, as contended by an internal federal health document obtained by the Washington Post, looks recklessly alarmist.

Further, such views look even wilder and crazier given the likelihood that Washington’s methods for defining cases and virus-related hospitalizations have produced seriously exaggerated counts.

After all, detecting the virus’ presence in an individual is only one of several sets of criteria that the CDC uses to conclude there’s a CCP Virus case to be counted. For example, for individuals that have been in contact with even a probable case of the virus, or who are members of designated vulnerable groups, a positive virus diagnosis can be justified if they display a headache and a sore throat at the same time. Or a sore throat and a runny nose. Or fatigue and a fever. Or if he or she is simply has a cough.

Even the CDC lab test standards for declaring a virus case via testing are dodgy, primarily because the main determinant seems to be the simple presence of the SARS-COV-2 pathogen that causes the disease. Unfortunately, these standards don’t seem to take into account how microorganisms like viruses can enter hosts and form “colonies” that result in no tissue infection and indeed don’t interact with the host at all. And as no less than the World Health Organization has pointed out, “Detection of viral RNA does not necessarily mean that a person is infectious and able to transmit the virus to another person.” Indeed, for all intents and purposes, it means that someone can be hosting the virus but shouldn’t be considered a case at all. One recent study suggests that this pattern is found in more than a tenth of positive cases.

Finally, the hospitalization numbers may be the least reliable of all. In the first place, the reporting system used by the CDC covers only about ten percent of the American population. Moreover, all you need to qualify for the CDC’s definition of a CCP Virus-related hospitalization is to be admitted into such a facility for any reason within 14 days of a positive test. As a result, if you need to be hospitalized for, say, cancer, and you’ve tested positive for the virus during the previous two weeks, you’re considered hospitalized for the CCP Virus.

It’s the same issue that the country has been dealing concerning whether various deaths are “from” or “with” Covid. And genuinely complicated judgment calls are involved. But for that very reason, public health officials should be awfully careful when they talk about devastating consequences of infections in and of themselves.

So the bottom lines are that the sharp recent increase in CCP Virus cases – including of course Delta variant cases – look overwhelmingly to be asymptomatic or mild; that even these numbers define positivity way too broadly, thus representing a major exaggeration and therefore affecting the nation’s health only marginally at best; and that, similarly, there’s probably even less even to true hospitalization rates that are already meager enough than meets the eye.

If Fauci, or anyone else in the Biden administration or in the ranks of restrictions fans had been pointing out any of these absolutely vital nuances since the virus’ Delta phase began, I’d have more faith in assurances about avoiding new lockdowns or any significant new business or behavior curbs. That they haven’t tells me that if such deeply mistaken and needlessly damaging (as known since the virus’ early period) measures aren’t yet on the lockdowners’ table, they’re not too far off — and so far, that would represent leading the science, not following it.  

Im-Politic: Why It Sure Looks Like Fauci Lied

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Anthony S. Fauci, Biden administration, CCP Virus, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Congress, coronavirus, COVID 19, EcoHealth Alliance, gain-of-function research, Im-Politic, Medium.com, MERS, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Nature, NIAID, Nicholas Wade, NIH, perjury, Rand Paul, SARS, Shi Zheng-li, Washington Post, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Wuhan virus

Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul wants the Justice Department to investigate whether President Biden’s top medical adviser, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, committed the crime of lying to Congress when he claimed that the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in which he’s a senior official “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)” in China.

And if I was Fauci, who is also the long-time director of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, I would be lawyering up. For if the Biden Justice Department is a truly non-political law enforcement agency, Fauci is going to have a heck of a time proving both that his statement (which he’s made in testimony at least twice) wasn’t a deliberately told falsehood. (See here and here for these instances.)  

Before I explain why, it’s important to specify what Paul’s charge is not about. It’s not about whether the grants given by Fauci’s agency to the WIV funded any research that went into actually creating the CCP Virus specifically. Therefore, contrary to Fauci’s statement (found in the Washington Post report linked above), it’s not about whether he bears any responsibility for causing this pandemic.

Nor is Paul’s charge about whether these U.S. government agencies financed such research in defiance of a three-year pause on such activity mandated by the Obama administration in October, 2014.

Nor – and this is crucial – does Paul’s charge have anything to do with the controversy among virologists about defining gain-of-function research.

As I explained in this post, these kinds of questions are all important, and should be looked into.

But what Paul is claiming is that Fauci lied in contending that NIAD and NIH never funded activity that is defined explicitly by the U.S. government. That matters because as a federal official, Fauci presumably is required to use this definition as his definition. And whereas in the above-linked May 30 post, I wasn’t convinced of Fauci’s guilt, the evidence demonstrating that NIAD and NIH funded work that matches now looks pretty cut and dry to me – especially since Paul last week gave Fauci a chance to climb down from his claim, and since new evidence has emerged.

Let’s start with that definition of gain-of-function: According to the announcement of the gain-of-function pause, new funding would be suspended

“for gain-of-function research projects that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route. The research funding pause would not apply to characterization or testing of naturally occurring influenza, MERS, and SARS viruses, unless the tests are reasonably anticipated to increase transmissibility and/or pathogenicity.”

Now for the two pieces of evidence that should have Fauci awfully worried.

The first consists of an article published in 2015 in the journal Nature by a team of U.S., Swiss, and Chinese scientists (the latter from the WIV), which examined the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations.”

The authors went on to explain that, using reverse genetics, they “generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.” A chimeric virus, according to this definition, is one “made by inserting the genetic material of one virus into the genome of another, safe surrogate, and these introduced sequences are passed on when the virus replicates.”

The article is important because it lists among funders for this project the two NIH branches – one of which is Fauci’s NIAID. Moreover, it specifies that

“Experiments with the full-length and chimeric SHC014 recombinant viruses were initiated and performed before the GOF research funding pause and have since been reviewed and approved for continued study by the NIH.”

Talk about a smoking gun! The authors obviously made this statement to preempt charges that either they or the NIH violated the pause. But just as obviously, they were concerned about it to begin with because they themselves considered the work to be “GOF” (gain-of-function).

And why wouldn’t they? The purpose of using reverse genetics to create a virus that doesn’t exist in nature was to examine “the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations” because such naturally occuring pathogens had demonstrated the ability of “cross-species transmission” that could affect humans.

They created the new virus precisely in order to mimick the kind of natural mutation that could theoretically take place in the original virus to find out whether such a mutated pathogen could infect human respiratory systems. And they discovered that some of them could.

Even more important: so evidently did Fauci. On Saturday, February 1, 2020 – during the very earliest stages of the virus’ spread in the United States, Fauci sent the following email message to aide Hugh Auchincloss:

“It is essential that we speak this AM. Keep your cell phone on. I have a conference call at 7:45 AM with [Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex] Azar. It will likely be over at 8:45 AM. Read this paper as well as the email that I will forward to you know. You will have tasks today that must be done.”

The paper was the 2015 Nature article. Auchincloss’ response began:

“The paper you sent me says the experiments were performed before the gain of function pause but have since been reviewed and approved by NIH.”

He continued, “Not sure what means since Emily is sure that no Coronavirus work has gone through the P3 framework.” And then somewhat oddly, he concluded, “She will try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad.”

Emily is Emily Erbelding, who heads much of NIAID’s international research program. The P3 framework is a system created by the Health and Human Services Department to guide “funding decisions on individual proposed research that is reasonably anticipated to create, transfer, or use enhanced PPPs [potential pandemic pathogens].

That last sentence is odd because the Nature article clearly credited NIAID as a funder.

In any event, though, what’s most important is that Auchincloss’ main concern seemed to have been whether any NIAID gain-of-function funding was approved during the pause (which he notes the authors denied). He doesn’t seem to dispute that the experiments qualified as GOF.

Fauci’s main concerns are less clear. Did he understand the broader possibility that NIAD may have helped create the virus? Not strictly according to his phrasing. But his words plainly connote major concern about something. Moreover, there’s no public record here or anywhere else of him denying that the grant financed GOF work until Paul raised it in May.

Yet this Nature article-related evidence doesn’t exhaust the list of concerns Fauci should have. In his excellent May examination on Medium.com of the debate over the virus’ origins, former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade describes in detail NIAID grants in 2018 and 2019 that he contends clearly funded research that falls under the official definition of GOF.

In his words, the grants were intended to enable WIV virologist Shi Zheng-li

“create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. Her plan was to take genes that coded for spike proteins possessing a variety of measured affinities for human cells, ranging from high to low. She would insert these spike genes one by one into the backbone of a number of viral genomes …creating a series of chimeric viruses. These chimeric viruses would then be tested for their ability to attack human cell cultures…and humanized mice….And this information would help predict the likelihood of ‘spillover,’ the jump of a coronavirus from bats to people.”

These grants appear to have been compliant with U.S. government policy when they were approved, since the funding pause was lifted at the end of 2017. But again, that isn’t what Paul believes may be a crime on Fauci’s part. The alleged crime has to do with Fauci’s claim that neither NIH nor NIAID ever funded GOF experiments in Wuhan at any time.

The most detailed defense of Fauci has come from the NIH sub-contracter through which its funds were funneled to the WIV – a non-profit called the EcoHealth Alliance. But they don’t even come close to letting Fauci off the hook.

For example, Alliance spokesman Robert Kessler told the Washington Post that

”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.”

But of course, collecting the samples was integral to the project. And since NIH is in the dock here, its claim of misinterpretation proves nothing.

Moreover, even Kessler didn’t seem satisfied with this argument, as he went on to contend that “As described in the paper, all but two of the viruses cultured in the lab failed to even replicate.” Not only does this mean that two of them did. His claim recalls notoriously spurious claims on the order of “Sure, I stole the money. But I didn’t steal very much.”

As for Kessler’s insistence that “GoF was never the goal here,” the authors’ own reference to abiding by U.S. government GOF guidelines shows that this was exactly the goal.

Finally, as indicated by my reference to the (legitimate) scientific debate over defining GOF, Kessler may have been right when he told the Post that “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.”

But this position has nothing to do with the charge against Fauci, since the U.S. government definition that should have been controlling his decisions never limited its scope to “altering human viruses.” And in fact, how could it? The origins of the MERS and SARS viruses it mentions still haven’t been pinned down. But according to the NIH itself, research suggests they both “originated in bats.” And of course, the authors of the 2017 Nature paper agree, since they described called their work investigating whether viruses found in non-human mammals could mutate to infect humans.

In the U.S. criminal justice system, you’re innocent until proven guilty.  So legally speaking, Fauci deserves the benefit of the doubt.  Also, evidence might be uncovered absolving him of Paul’s charge.  But the existing evidence looks so compelling, a perjury charge is so serious, and Fauci’s role in CCP Virus-fighting policy remains so important, that Paul’s planned investigation request looks entirely reasonable. 

Moreover, Fauci himself should welcome the probe, for if conducted properly, it could lift this cloud over his head once and for all.  Opposing an investigation, by the same token, can only fuel suspicions that he has something to hide.       

Im-Politic: From Inside the Wuhan Lab

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Anthony S. Fauci, Bloomberg.com, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Danielle Anderson, gain-of-function research, Im-Politic, lab leak, Michelle Fay Cortez, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, NIH, Ralph Baric, Shi Zeng-li, virologists, virology, WIV, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Wuhan virus

That was some scoop by Bloomberg.com’s Michelle Fay Cortez the other day, bagging an interview with the last (and only) non-Chinese scientist to work in the Wuhan, China lab suspected of being the origin point of the CCP Virus and the pandemic it’s spawned.

Danielle Anderson apparently wasn’t working on coronaviruses per se, but her views are of special interest not only because she has first-hand knowledge of the Chinese researchers who were, and of the safety standards at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Her views are of special interest because she’s the only person with such knowledge who isn’t vulnerable to Chinese regime threats against herself or her family or friends.

So when the Australian virologist speaks highly of the integrity of Wuhan colleagues and of the lab’s safety policies, she deserves to be taken seriously. Ditto for her claim that, although U.S. intelligence agencies are reported to have determined that three WIV researchers became sick enough with flu-like symptoms to have sought hospitalization in November, 2019 – about a month before physicians in Wuhan first reported to Chinese health officials the appearance of a novel coronavirus – she knew of no such illness among Institute staff. So that appears to undercut the argument that the three researchers’ illness tightly connect the pandemic to work done at the lab.

Nonetheless, in many ways, Anderson’s statements generally leave the lab leak theory – as opposed to the contention that the virus’ emergence had nothing to do with the WIV and jumped naturally from animals to humans – decidedly alive and kicking.

For example, Anderson’s praise of the WIV’s safety culture seems retricted to its BSL-4 facility – a lab that supposedly met the highest internationally used standards for handling dangerous pathogens. But Dr. Shi Zheng-li, China’s lead bat virus expert, has stated on the record that she’s conducted her coronavirus research in facilities at the Institute that meet less exacting safety requirements.

Moreover, her suggestion that using a form of gain-of-function research known as reverse genetics to increase the infectiousness of viruses is too difficult to have taken place at the WIV is contradicted by two important facts. First, this is precisely the kind of work at that lab that was paid for grants from the U.S. government’s National Institutes of Health and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (the latter of course headed by Dr. Anthony S. Fauci). Second, the WIV doubtless got the grants largely because Shi and a U.S. coronavirus researcher named Ralph Baric had in fact used the technique to create a novel coronavirus as early as 2015. (See this post for documentation.)

Perhaps most important, although she doubts the WIV gave the world the CCP Virus, Anderson made clear that she “could foresee how [an accident spawning the virus] could maybe happen, declared that “I’m not naive enough to say I absolutely write this off,” and said that she thinks, in Cortez’ words, that “an investigation is needed to nail down the virus’s origin once and for all.”

Which leaves me with only one criticism of Cortez’ interview: Given her distinctive vantage point, why didn’t she ask Anderson why she thought China has done everything possible to prevent such a probe?