Remember the blow-up last summer between Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Dr. Anthony Fauci over gain-of-function research?
Paul charged that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had supported such research in China. “Senator Paul,” Fauci fired back, “you don’t know what you are talking about, quite frankly.”
“Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared to be channeling the frustration of millions of Americans when he spoke those words during an invective-laden, made-for-Twitter Senate hearing on July 20,” imagined Katherine Eban recently in Vanity Fair. “You didn’t have to be a Democrat to be fed up with all the xenophobic finger-pointing and outright disinformation, coming mainly from the right. . . .”*
Nevertheless, Ms. Eban added, “Paul might have been onto something.”
Might?
Last week, the NIH sent a letter to Congress admitting that its grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, laundered through the infamous EcoHealth Alliance, resulted in research that even the NIH acknowledges was gain-of-function.
Sen. Paul knew what he was talking about; Dr. Fauci did not.
NIH was quick to defend Fauci, arguing the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President was in the dark last summer about the controversial research because EcoHealth Alliance was two years late in reporting. For its part, EcoHealth Alliance “appeared to contradict that claim,” telling Vanity Fair, “These data were reported . . . in April 2018.”
“Given all of the sensitivity about this work,” Stanford University microbiologist Dr. David Relman remarked to Vanity Fair, “it’s difficult to understand why NIH and EcoHealth have still not explained a number of irregularities with the reporting on this grant.”
Is it?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Eban concluded her sentence with this clause: “up to and including the claim that COVID-19 was a bioweapon cooked up in a lab.” Her assertion that “the right” was calling COVID a “bioweapon” is a canard designed to prematurely halt any inquiry into even the possibility. When Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) simply said there needed to be an investigation of the Wuhan lab, he was fiercely attacked by big media and the lab leak theory was suppressed on Facebook and Google.
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
2 replies on “Settled Science”
Anthony Fauci wanted to be a hero. He had done a wretched job with HIV, and the history books were already saying as much. He knew that a major SARS epidemic was a real possibility, and he thought that, if he got ahead of that, it would offset his earlier failure. So he cut corners, towards a plan to develop and then defeat a sooped-up SARS virus in a lab, so that they’d be ready. And, once again, he did a wretched job, entrusting work to a sloppy lab, which lab let the sooped-up virus escape, actually causing a pandemic of the sort that he’d wanted heroically to defeat.
Since then, his behavior has been driven partly by a felt need to hide his responsibility,
and partly by his desire still to be seen as a hero.
Moreover, when some of the pharmaceutic companies figured-out what had happened, they had him over a barrel.
Why can’t we just come right out and say Fauci lied through his teeth…