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

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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: A Pandemic of Coverups?

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Anthony S. Fauci, CCP Virus, censorship, coronavirus, COVID 19, EcoHealth Alliance, Facebook, Fauci, Fauci emails, Google, Im-Politic, lab leak, Mark Zuckerberg, National Institutes of Health, NationalPulse.com, natural origin, NIH, Peter Daszak, social media, The New York Times, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Wuhan lab, Wuhan University, Wuhan virus, Zeynep Tufekci

What a June it’s been so far for anyone who’s always been skeptical of claims that anyone linking the CCP Virus’ emergence to virology facilities in Wuhan was trafficking in fringe-y conspiracy theories. Many crucial pieces of the puzzle are still missing. But June’s developments should make it harder than ever to dismiss not only the possibility that a natural or engineered version of the virus escaped from the lab, but that U.S. public health authorities ignored official prohibitions on funding so-called gain-of-function work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that they and other powerful American institutions even acted to suppress news of their Wuhan connections.

After all, it’s already been a month in which no less than Anthony S. Fauci appeared to emphasize that the virus featured characteristics not normally found in the wild. The longtime head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Biden’s chief science advisor told a New York Times interviewer that

“This is an unusual virus because about a third to 40 percent of the people get no symptoms at all. Yet it’s capable of killing 600,000 Americans. We’ve never had a situation like that where a virus that would be benign or almost half the people or 40 percent of the people and yet kill so many people.”

And this after declaring that

“I’m not an evolutionary virologist, but those who are look at the virus, and they say it’s absolutely totally compatible with something that evolved from bat viruses because of the closeness to. But we don’t have that extra link that’s come in, but there’s nothing they see in there that makes you think it was something that came from a lab.”

Clear as mud, right?

It was also a week in which another New York Times contributor made an observation indicating that even if the the Wuhan Institute of Virology whose research Fauci and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) overall helped finance wasn’t engaged in federally prohibited gain-of-function experiments, it still might have created the pathogen in question where none existed before. According to Zeynep Tufekci,

“Just trying to culture bat viruses in the lab can create risks that the scientists may not even be aware of. While trying and failing to cultivate one strain, they might inadvertently culture another one they don’t even know about. It’s even possible, [Stanford University neurobiologist and bioengineer Michael Lin] told me, that viruses can coexist in a single sample and quietly recombine, giving rise to something novel but undetected.”

In other words, creating the specific SARS-CoV-2 virus that has swept over the world might not have been the goal of the Chinese scientists in question. But this virus might have resulted from their efforts to simulate natural processes. If you or loved ones have suffered from the virus medically, or from the economic and other public health damage it’s caused, this is likely to look like a distinction without a difference. It’s also likely to raise further questions about why U.S. public health agencies funded clearly risky research in a facility they’ve acknowledged they couldn’t monitor adequately.

It’s also been a month in which, thanks in part to that New York Times Fauci interview, more reasons emerged to wonder whether Fauci and social media giants Facebook and Google conspired (yes, the word would be justified in these instances) to suppress reporting on the lab leak theory – in Google’s case because it, too, had helped pay for the Wuhan lab’s work at various times recently.

In January, 2020 – when the CCP Virus was declared a public health emergency by the World Health Organization (WHO) – Facebook began a campaign to “keep harmful misinformation about COVID-19 from spreading on our apps” and direct customers “to resources from the WHO and other health authorities through our COVID-19 Information Center and pop-ups on Facebook and Instagram with over 350 million people clicking through to learn more.” Throughout the pandemic period, WHO of course has been a major actor trying to debunk any version of the lab leak theory.

Given Fauci’s own clear interest in drawing public attention away from the possibility that his agency helped create the virus, it’s more than a little interesting that in March of that year, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent Fauci an email that the recipient told Times interviewer Kara Swisher, who covers Big Tech, “hey, is there anything that we can do to help out to get the messages out, the right public health messages? I have a very important medium here in Facebook. Can I help? And as a matter of fact, if you guys don’t have enough resources and money to do some of the things you want, just let us know.”

Fauci took Zuckerberg up on his offer but nothing is known about the details of this arrangement because although this email exchange has been made public (with redactions that are odd to say the least since it’s hard to imagine any national security secrets changed hands), the content of follow-up communications (which surely included not only emails but phone conversations) remain under wraps.

Can we all agree that all of this material should be released ASAP, so that we won’t have to accept Fauci’s word that “any thought” that his dealings with Zuckerberg had to do with censoring inconvenient virus-related truths “is total conspiracy theory and total flight of fantasy”? Especially since Facebook didn’t announce until May 26 of this year that “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.” (The company has said nothing about the possibility that the virus escaped a Chinese lab in natural form.)

As for Google, news of its own dodgy CCP Virus-related practices came out on June 9. Shortly thereafter, the company’s own virus and China connection was revealed. A website called TheNationalpulse.com produced proof that Google “funded research conducted by Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance – a controversial group which has openly collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology” on that controversial bat virus research.

Google insists that “The one-off philanthropic grants referenced are years old and had nothing to do with COVID,” and that ‘We have engaged precisely zero times with this organization on any work related to COVID or the Wuhan lab.” But as the National Pulse post showed, one of the studies co-sponsored by Google – from 2018 – described itself “conducted in Guangdong Province, China, to characterize behaviors and perceptions associated with transmission of pathogens with pandemic potential in highly exposed human populations at the animal-human interface….” So it’s easy to conclude that Google also wanted to draw attention away from and discredit the idea that the Institute had anything to do with the pandemic’s outbreak.

Finally, June has been a month when the news came out that in June, 2020, a group of Wuhan University scientists asked the NIH to delete from a key medical genomics database data CCP Virus genome sequences they gathered from patients in that city in January and February.

The scientists claimed their reasons for the request were technical, and no evidence of deceitful intent has appeared. For its part, the NIH says that it receives such requests all the time, and typically complies. Fair enough. But given the importance of such very early pandemic stage information in determining the virus’ origins, and given China’s extensive efforts to keep data from this crucial early pandemic period secret, why on earth didn’t the NIH at least report the request and its response right away? Could it be because of its own funding of virus research in Wuhan?

As I said above, many major pieces of these puzzles remain missing.  But many are now in place also, and if ever there was a subject that screamed out for a comprehensive official investigation of the relevant actions and relationships at least of the U.S. players, with broad subpoena power, you’d think a pandemic that’s killed more than 600,000 Americans and sickened and disrupted or flat-out ruined the lives of tens of millions more amply fits the bill.