Tag: research

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Accountability media and media people national politics & policies

Fauci’s the Focal Point

Dr. Fauci, Anthony Fauci, covid, science, research

Senator Rand Paul “has it in” for Fauci — said Dr. Anthony Fauci at last week’s Senate hearing. 

The former director of the NIAID and former Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden made it sound like the Kentucky senator was trying to put him in prison. But what Dr. Paul asked of Dr. Fauci was an apology — not jail-time.

Why, though?

“If we don’t want this to happen again, him acknowledging that he was wrong to fund this research will be a word of caution and warning to the next generation of people to come through,” the senator told Mark Halperin. “And the debate will have ultimately been won on ‘gain of function.’

“The danger of it.”

The point, Rand Paul says, is to stop the madness of this type of research.

Earlier in the interview he had noted that scientists had warned that the results at the Wuhan Institute of Virology should not be published. It would be a blueprint, or recipe, for a never-ending biological warfare by terrorists.

The whole interview is worth listening to. Mark Halperin does what so few journalists do when confronting a contentious issue: formulate each question in epistemically sound terms, for clarity. “Is that an established fact in your mind, or do you need to know more?” 

Here are some responses from Sen. Paul:

  • Fauci was a long-time supporter and financer of gain-of-function research: fact.
  • Fauci “was aware that they [the Wuhan researchers] were doing gain-of-function research” but Fauci would quibble over semantics, about the exactitudes of what qualifies as such: fact. (Fauci’s being evasive.)
  • Fauci funded that research: “without question” a fact.
  • Fauci lied about the wet market origin theory: fact.

There’s more. Let’s praise a journalist for asking clear questions and a politician for giving clear answers.

Especially about the coronavirus origin.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment too much government

Stop Causing the Next Pandemic

Covid, virus, research

A lab in Wuhan, China was fiddling with the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 when that virus was accidentally or intentionally released into the world.

I would like such a thing not to happen again. I adhere to the radical political doctrine that the world should not be repeatedly ravaged by avoidable pandemics. I especially don’t want to see a pandemic considerably worse than the COVID-19 pandemic.

But politicians and scientists continue to make pandemics more likely by permitting, paying for (with our money), and even defending the gain-of-function research that weaponizes viruses. 

Why, oh why? I hear you ask. The reason, they say, is so they can learn how to better combat these more virulent forms.

And if somebody happens to unleash a lab-enhanced virus capable of killing a third of the human race, will words like “sorry” and “oops” and “now we know how to stop it better the next time” undo the damage?

This danger is one theme of a talk given by U.S. Senator Rand Paul last November. As Paul, author of Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up, puts it, “To think that we can prevent future pandemics even as we continue to seek, catalog, and manipulate dangerous viruses is the height of hubris. . . . We must reform government and rein in out-of-control scientists and their enablers.”

Senator Paul echoes MIT biochemist Kevin Esvelt, who says “Please stop.” 

Let us have no more experiments “likely to disseminate blueprints for plagues.”

Policymakers and investigators have no inalienable right to threaten the well-being of us all.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency national politics & policies

The Latest Legislative Land Mine

The most prescient thing ever said about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare, was articulated by then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”

The medical reform package is quite the hodgepodge. Actually reading the whole thing makes taking on Middlemarch, War and Peace, and In Search of Lost Time a course of light entertainment.

The latest revelation from its thousands of pages? A passage prohibiting doctors from asking their patients questions about guns in the home.

The Washington Post reports that many gun control groups are incensed at the power of the NRA to limit their ability to “collect information”:

Physician groups and public health advocates say the cumulative effect of these restrictions undercuts the ability of the White House and lawmakers to make the case for new laws, such as an assault-weapons ban, in the face of opponents who argue that there’s no evidence such measures are effective. Advocates for regulating guns lament that reliable statistics are limited in part because physicians and health researchers who could track these patterns are being inhibited.

Considering the quality of previous doctor-led sociological studies into gun usage — and really, this is not a medical problem but a complex, society-wide issue far beyond the competence of medical training to comprehend — the prohibition might really best be described as a defense of scientific method.

But the big issue here is not the politics of “research.” It’s that a health care reform package passed nearly three years ago contains hot potatoes such as this, and we are only discovering them now.

Nancy, you were all too disastrously correct.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.