Dr ANTHONY FAUCI's COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS to the 2022 GRADUATING CLASS of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

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I can't agree with Fauci's original quote that he "had nothing to do" with closing down schools. He did use his big, national platform to say, "the schools should be closed".
  • Not really.  I mean he spoke those a specific words but always in the context that it should not be a national shut-down, it should be local decision-making.  Certainly, you have to admit that a Governor like DeSantis is far more responsible for shutting down shcools than Dr. Fauci because unlike Dr. Fauci he had actual authority to shut down schools and unlike Dr. Fauci, he applied a "one-size-fits-all" statewide policy while ignoring Fauci's strong advice to treat school closure according to regional circumstance.  Based on the evidence and if you are reading what Fauci actually rather than what people like DeSantis say about him, then Fauci was objectively more 'pro open schools" than DeSantis or Trump or many other prominent Republican decsion-makers who falsely scapegoatted Fauci later on.  DeSantis was actually selling t-shirts saying "Don't Fauci my Florida"pretending that the decisoin was not his to make- I call that quite cowardly.
That is going to have some amount of influence on the people making the decision.
  • Objectively, the decision-makers were far more cautious than Fauci's recommendations.  At the height of the pandemic, when 3,000 people a day were dying, Fauci was actively, publicly calling on schools to open  while very few polticians had the guts to make such a recommendation.


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CORRECTING MISINFORMATION  about Dr. FAUCI

Dr. Anthony Fauci has announced that in December he will step down from his positions as chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden and as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and its laboratory of immunoregulation.

Fauci has worked for the National Institutes of Health since 1968 and has been the director of NIAID since 1984. In that time, he has advised seven U.S. presidents on infectious disease threats such as HIV and AIDS; the West Nile, Ebola and Zika viruses; and more.

But most of the public may know him as the face of the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic, first as a member of former President Donald Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force and now as a member of Biden’s response team. Not everyone has been a fan.

Republican politicians and conservative media outlets have continually criticized his efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19, questioned his motivations for promoting vaccination against it, and speculated on what he knows about the origin of the virus. GOP members of Congress have promised to investigate Fauci and have him testify before Congress if Republicans retake control of the House or Senate next year.

Here are some of the false and misleading claims about Fauci, his work and his public health guidance that we have written about since the pandemic began in 2020. 

COVID-19 Guidance

In a February 2020 NBC interview, over a week before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, Fauci said that “right now at this moment” the risk to the public was “low” and there was “no need” for people “to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis.” However, he added that “this could change,” that people needed to be wary of “community spread,” and that the coronavirus could develop into a “major outbreak.” 

Trump wrongly claimed that month that Fauci was saying, “This is no problem. This is going to blow over.”


Conservative commentator Liz Wheeler made a series of false claims about Fauci in a January 2021 video titled “Fauci lied to you AGAIN.” 

She claimed that he “lied” about the rate or ratio of people with confirmed cases of COVID-19 who had died, which we did not find to be the case. 

She said “Fauci said lockdowns work,” which she then said was “obviously false” and based on “zero scientific evidence.” But experts we consulted said that there was research showing that travel restrictions and stay-at-home orders were effective in slowing the spread of COVID-19. 

Wheeler also stated that Fauci “admitted he lied to us” when he initially said early in March 2020 that widespread use of face masks was not necessary. She said Fauci only said that to “manipulate us into not buying masks so that there wouldn’t be a shortage for health care workers.”

At the time, Fauci said he was “not against” anyone wearing a mask if they wanted to, but he warned that if everyone wore them it “could lead to a shortage of masks for the people who really need it,” particularly health care providers and people who were ill.

Then in April 2020, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that everyone wear face coverings in public because of virus transmission from asymptomatic carriers, Fauci also began encouraging universal mask use. He said in an interview two months later that he and other health officials truly did not realize the degree to which infected people without symptoms were spreading the virus, which led to the shift in masking guidance. That does not mean that he “lied” to the public.


The NIAID told us that Fauci has spent much of his career treating patients at the NIH Clinical Center– including, recently, those with COVID-19. But Republican Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz, who has criticized Fauci’s pandemic guidance and previously called for him to resign, falsely claimed that “Fauci’s never taken care of patients,” while suggesting that Fauci does not approach COVID-19 from a “patient care” perspective.

Fauci has said in interviews that he still sees patients because it’s part of who he is as a physician.


As COVID-19 cases declined early in 2022, Fauci noticeably made fewer media appearances to talk about the pandemic, especially as other newsworthy events, such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, began to dominate the national news coverage. Some Republican politicians and conservative pundits falsely suggested that doing fewer interviews meant that Fauci had “disappeared” from public view because he had become so unpopular – which was not the case.


Vaccines and Treatments

In a March 2020 interview with Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of the company now known as Meta, Fauci emphasized the importance of conducting clinical trials to determine vaccine safety before distribution. He cited examples of vaccine candidates for other viruses, such as HIV and respiratory syncytial virus, that were found to be harmful during the evaluation process. 

“This would not be the first time, if it happened, that a vaccine that looked good in initial safety actually made people worse,” Fauci said of the COVID-19 vaccines, which were still being tested at the time. Ultimately, in clinical trials and real-world conditions, the COVID-19 vaccines available in the U.S. were found to be safe and effective. 

Fauci did not admit that “Covid Vaccines May Actually Make People ‘Worse,'” as a viral headline published in December 2021 misleadingly claimed. The story lifted Fauci’s comments out of context to give the false impression that he had recently said the approved and authorized vaccines would do more harm than good.


Fauci also said in a June 2020 interview that a COVID-19 vaccine could begin to be manufactured “even before you know it works.” That would allow the vaccine to be widely distributed more quickly, but only “if in fact it is effective,” he said.

Fauci’s remarks were twisted in a viral meme that falsely suggested he supported administering a COVID-19 vaccine before the clinical trial process was completed.


Then in a December 2020 CNN interview, just days before the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine was granted emergency authorization by the Food and Drug Administration, Fauci made a distinction between the vaccine’s effectiveness against the COVID-19 disease and against infection with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes that illness.

He said the vaccine was found to be “very good” at protecting individuals “against clinically recognizable disease.” However, he said it was uncertain “at this point, that the vaccine protects you against getting infected.”

A popular video distorted Fauci’s remarks to falsely suggest that he said the vaccine doesn’t “protect you from covid.”

In a May 2021 Senate hearing, Fauci estimated that “probably around 60%” of his NIAID colleagues had been vaccinated against COVID-19 at the time. Viral online posts distorted his comments to misleadingly claim that half of employees at federal health agencies “are refusing” the vaccines, which Fauci never said. 

At the time, NIAID told us that 67% of the NIH staff were vaccinated, but the “actual number may be higher” because reporting was voluntary.

Hydroxychloroquine is an antimalarial drug that has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a treatment for COVID-19. But a Gateway Pundit story shared on Facebook in June 2021 declared, “SMOKING GUN: FAUCI LIED, MILLIONS DIED — Fauci Was Informed of Hydroxychloroquine Success in Early 2020 But Lied to Public Instead Despite the Science.”

The story was based on two emails that were sent to Fauci in February 2020. In one email, two doctors expressed the possibility that the drug could be effective against COVID-19. Fauci forwarded the email to an NIH deputy director who works in microbiology and infectious diseases and wrote: “Please take a look and respond to them. Thanks.”

In the other email, a pharmacologist made reference to “data from 2005 showing inhibition of SARS infection,” which is a different disease caused by a different coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) from the one that leads to COVID-19. We previously wrote about a 2005 study that found the drug prevented the spread of that SARS virus in cell culture — which is not the same as working in humans.

Those emails are not evidence that hydroxychloroquine is effective against COVID-19, or that Fauci kept this from the public. In fact, randomized controlled trials — the highest standard of evidence — have found that hydroxychloroquine isn’t beneficial in treating hospitalized COVID-19 patients. 

Remdesivir is an antiviral medication approved by the FDA to treat COVID-19. The drug was invented by the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, which receives any profit from sales of the drug as a treatment for COVID-19. 

A viral social media post falsely claimed that Fauci was “pushing” remdesivir because he “invented” it with Bill Gates and they would profit from its use.
Fauci does not hold a patent for remdesivir, and a spokesperson for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation told USA Today that the foundation also was not involved in the invention or development of the drug.

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Coronavirus Origins

It is still uncertain how SARS-CoV-2 originated, but many scientists suspect the virus “spilled over” into humans from an animal. There is no evidence the virus was created in a lab, let alone as part of any U.S.-funded research.

A June 2021 Facebook post claimed that “Fauci knew the virus was likely engineered,” because of an email he received from Kristian Andersen, a professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research. In that Jan. 31, 2020, email to Fauci, Andersen said that there were “unusual features” of “a really small part of the genome” of the coronavirus that “(potentially) look engineered.” He mentioned others, too, found “the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”

But Andersen said in his email that more analysis was necessary and “opinions could still change,” which is what later happened.

On March 17, 2020, Nature Medicine published an article by Andersen and other scientists that said they determined that the coronavirus likely originated through “natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer,” or “natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer.” The authors added that they “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” because they “observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features … in related coronaviruses in nature.”

Former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro falsely claimed that Fauci “killed a lot of people” by funding some bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The institute is in Wuhan, China, where the first COVID-19 cases were identified.

“Analysis of published genomic data and other documents from the grantee demonstrate that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant are genetically far distant from SARS-CoV-2 and could not possibly have caused the COVID-19 pandemic,” then-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins said in an Oct. 20, 2021, statement, referring to an analysis posted to the NIAID’s website. “Any claims to the contrary are demonstrably false.”

Republican Sen. Rand Paul accused Fauci of lying when Fauci said in a May 2021 Senate hearing that “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” But there’s no evidence that Fauci lied to Congress, as Paul asserted in a July 20, 2021, hearing, about funding gain-of-function research — which the U.S. government generally defined in 2014 as aiming to “increase the ability of infectious agents to cause disease by enhancing its pathogenicity or by increasing its transmissibility.” 

Fauci has said that the research that was funded “was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain-of-function,” and the NIH has said the same. The issue is that scientists have differing opinions on what counts as gain-of-function research.

Paul has posited that Fauci, among others, “could be culpable for the entire pandemic,” if the SARS-CoV-2 virus leaked from a Wuhan lab that was conducting gain-of-function research. But there is no proof of a lab leak, and there is evidence that the bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant could not have caused the pandemic. 

In December 2014, the NIH posted a photo of Fauci and former President Barack Obama touring the NIH Vaccine Research Center at the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The photo showed Obama speaking about Ebola research with Dr. Nancy Sullivan, of NIAID, and Fauci was shown standing next to Sylvia Burwell, who was the health and human services secretary at the time.

But the years-old photo was circulated in 2020 along with the false claim that the image showed “Dr. Fauci, Melinda Gates and Barack Obama at the Wuhan Lab in 2015,” suggesting a connection to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Other Claims

A series of reports in 2021 from a group that opposes federal funding for research relying on animal testing prompted dozens of readers to ask us if Fauci had a history of cruelty to animals, specifically beagles.

The NIAID admitted to FactCheck.org in a statement that Fauci was involved in the process of awarding funding for a number of research projects that used beagles as test subjects. But the agency denied that it funded one particular project in Tunisia that went viral on social media because of images from a published study that showed sedated beagles with their heads stuck in mesh cages filled with diseased sand flies.

Fauci is among the many federal employees who are required to submit an annual public financial disclosure report to their employing agency or department. His reports — which list his assets, income, employment agreements and other financial information — are available upon request from the NIH’s FOIA office. 
But in a January congressional hearing, Republican Sen. Roger Marshall asked Fauci if he would be willing to publicly release “a financial disclosure form,” suggesting that Fauci’s reports are not available to the public and are being hidden by “the big tech giants.”

In 2005, Fauci told the Associated Press that he donates royalty payments he receives from the licensees of products and treatments he helped develop while working for the NIH.

But that detail was not mentioned in a number of May posts about reporting on millions of dollars in royalties paid to Fauci and other NIH scientists since 2009.


Fauci’s family has been the subject of false attacks as well.
His wife, Dr. Christine Grady, is not the sister of Ghislaine Maxwell, a former British socialite who was sentenced this year to 20 years in prison for recruiting girls and young women for accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Social media posts falsely claimed that Christine had her last name changed from Maxwell to Grady.

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Dr Fauci also systemically denied the superiority of natural immunity and hyped both mask wearing and non-mask wearing over the course of the pandemic.

His credentials are not fake by any means, but his pandemic advice certainly was.

Here's a compendium of all the times Dr. Fauci not only disagreed with the science but also with himself:

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Dr Fauci also systemically denied the superiority of natural immunity
  • The science is clear that natural immunity is inferior to vaccination.
    • Johns-Hopkins:
    • The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a report on Oct. 29, 2021, that says getting vaccinated for the coronavirus when you’ve already had COVID-19 significantly enhances your immune protection and further reduces your risk of reinfection.
    • A study published in August 2021 indicates that if you had COVID-19 before and are not vaccinated, your risk of getting re-infected is more than two times higher than for those who got vaccinated after having COVID-19.
    • Another study published on Nov. 5, 2021, by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) looked at adults hospitalized for COVID-like sickness between January and September 2021. This study found that the chances of these adults testing positive for COVID-19 were 5.49 times higher in unvaccinated people who had COVID-19 in the past than they were for those who had been vaccinated for COVID and had not had an infection before.
    • A study from the CDC in September 2021 showed that roughly one-third of those with COVID-19 cases in the study had no apparent natural immunity.
  • It would be irresponsible of Fauci to not follow the science.  I don't know what "systematically" is supposed to mean in your claim.  HIs system has been to follow the science.
and hyped both mask wearing and non-mask wearing over the course of the pandemic.
  • Hyped is an exageration. 
    • Wikipedia:
      • In a March 8, 2020, interview, Fauci stated that "right now in the United States, people [who are not infected] should not be walking around with masks", but "if you want to do it, that's fine".  [so- "hyped" is an exageration]
      •  In the same interview, Fauci said that buying masks "could lead to a shortage of masks for the people who really need" them: "When you think masks, you should think of healthcare providers needing them".[47][49] When Fauci made this comment, America's top surgical mask maker was struggling to produce enough masks to meet the increased demand.[49] 
      • On April 3, the CDC reversed course, quoting recent studies that showed asymptomatic transmission of the virus, thus advocating for the public to wear non-surgical masks to reduce community transmission while Fauci advocated for wearing facial coverings in public.[48] Fauci's shifting advice on wearing face masks drew criticism, which Fauci responded to by arguing that changes in policy were necessary as scientists learned more about COVID-19.[12]
      • Fauci's information was correct on Mar 9th reflecting the science and supply problems.  Fauci's changed recommendation followed the CDC's reversal and new information about how much virus could live in the air around an infected human.
    • You claim that Fauci's pandemic advice was fake but you FOX News twitter propaganda is really only about Paul's false claims that Fauci funded "gain-of-function" research in Wuhan which  I have throuroughly debunked here. 
      • Do you have any actual examples of Fauci providing false information during the pandemic?
  • All of this seems quite responsible and in line with mainstream medical advice throughout the pandemic.




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That simply isn't true. Natural immunity is superior to vaccine immunity in many long-term efficacy studies we have to date:





So to claim so brazenly that vaccine immunity is better is to ignore studies published in reputable peer-reviewed medical journals.
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Misleading Claim on Natural Infection
Wheeler proceeds to question why people who have previously had COVID-19 are being vaccinated — and in the process, misleadingly claims that natural infection is “better” than immunization.
“Why are people who’ve already had COVID-19 and recovered from it getting the vaccine?” she asks. “You might say, well, to protect against reinfection. But nope, according to a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which followed 12,541 health care workers for 31 weeks after they’d had COVID, six months into the study they found natural immunization was solid. They found only two cases of asymptomatic reinfections. So why are we vaccinating people who’ve already recovered from COVID? They don’t seem to be at risk of reinfection and natural immunization is better than artificial immunization. It makes no sense.”
As we’ve written, many vaccines don’t provide quite as good immunity as that triggered by an infection, but that hardly means going that route is better, as contracting the disease is inherently risky. And there are numerous vaccines, such as those that protect against tetanus and human papillomavirus, or HPV, that produce superior immunity than natural infection. (For more, see our SciCheck story “Paul Misleads on Natural Infection and COVID-19 Vaccines.”)
For the coronavirus, it’s not yet known how immunity from vaccination compares with that from infection. Some initial signs suggest that the vaccines produce higher levels of infection-blocking neutralizing antibodies than those seen in patients recovering from COVID-19, but the strength and duration of immunity from both natural infection and immunization remain an area of investigation. Regardless, getting vaccinated is far safer than contracting the novel coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2. 
It’s true that people who have previously had COVID-19 likely have some immunity for a certain amount of time and therefore aren’t at high risk of becoming reinfected soon. For this reason, some experts have proposed that people who have had COVID-19 should not be prioritized for immunization.
But there’s no way to know for certain whether a person is immune — the so-called correlates of immunity have yet to be worked out for COVID-19 — and it’s unclear how long immunity might last.
As a result, the CDC website states, “Due to the severe health risks associated with COVID-19 and the fact that re-infection with COVID-19 is possible, vaccine should be offered to you regardless of whether you already had COVID-19 infection.”
Elsewhere, the agency recognizes the lower risk to individuals who have previously had COVID-19, adding that it’s reasonable for people with infections in the last three months to choose to delay vaccination, at least while vaccines remain in short supply.
The CDC also advises that people with active coronavirus infections wait until they’ve recovered to receive a shot and for anyone who has received monoclonal antibodies or convalescent plasma to delay vaccination for at least 90 days, as those therapies might prevent the vaccine from working.
It’s worth noting that even though the study Wheeler cited does suggest reinfection is rare, she botched some of the details. While 12,541 health care workers were included, not all of them had COVID-19. Instead, only 1,265 tested positive on a particular antibody test, suggesting they probably had been previously infected. Two of those individuals then went on to test positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus with a PCR test.
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That simply isn't true.  Natural immunity is superior to vaccine immunity in many long-term efficacy studies we have to date:
  • Jeez, man.  All  these sources (which you clearly did not read) agree with Johns-Hopkins and Dr. Fauci (and responsible medical care professoinals everywherem) refuting your claim that natural immunity is superior to vaccinne.
"The history of the anti-vaccination movement is replete with examples of opposition to vaccination grounded in a concern that vaccines are contrary to nature and compromise purity.  A common trope among the anti-vaccination movement is that natural immunity is therefore superior to ‘artificial’ vaccine-induced immunity. This is a grave mistake and a form of the naturalistic fallacy.   It is ‘natural’ to become immune through contracting infection but it is also natural to die from serious infections."
"A second related claim, widely advocated among the anti-vaccination movement, is that it is better to acquire immunity through natural infection rather than through vaccination. Rather than suggesting the alleged superiority of natural over vaccine-induced immunity itself (as suggested by the first claim), this second claim relates to the alleged superiority of gaining immunity via a natural rather than artificial process on certain unorthodox understandings of the role of ‘the natural’ in the aetiology of health and disease. Yet, for the vast majority of people, this claim is also patently false, since the risks of serious illness and dying from natural infection are considerably higher than those of vaccination. It would be prudentially irrational to choose to be infected rather than to have the vaccine, for those who are vulnerable to COVID-19. A public health strategy that pursued ‘natural’ herd immunity would lead to vastly higher morbidity and mortality than one that pursued vaccine-induced herd immunity."

The researchers also found that people who had SARS-CoV-2 previously and received one dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine were more highly protected against reinfection than those who once had the virus and were still unvaccinated...
Thålin and other researchers stress that deliberate infection among unvaccinated people would put them at significant risk of severe disease and death, or the lingering, significant symptoms of what has been dubbed Long Covid. The study shows the benefits of natural immunity, but “doesn’t take into account what this virus does to the body to get to that point,”

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/969293
"It has been well established that natural infection alone provides short-lived protection from infection, showing the importance of vaccination, regardless of infection history. Because vaccination protects against severe disease and death, it is safer for individuals to be vaccinated before rather than after natural infection."

"Recent studies have shown that vaccination confers more durable protection against severe outcomes of hospitalization and death than against symptomatic and asymptomatic infection....The highest and most durable protection was observed in participants who received one or two doses of vaccine after a primary infection. Strategic use of booster doses of vaccine to avert waning of protection (particularly in double-vaccinated, previously uninfected persons) may reduce infection and transmission in the ongoing response to Covid-19."

So to claim so brazenly that vaccine immunity is better is to ignore studies published in reputable peer-reviewed medical journals.
Wow.   What about the brazeness of  citing four studies  studies published in reputable peer-reviewed medical journals, never even noticing that all four studies totally disagree with your claim?

Dr. Fauci has consistently supported the science and to deny the superiority of natural immunity is simply good science and telling the truth.

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@oromagi
When Fauci says "and even if it was", he starts referring to a non-NIH version -- he doesn't only mean the NIH version now.

Furthermore, he shouldn't be entertaining what others might think because their definition should be wrong to him. His response to Rand Paul should have been, 'the NIH was not funding gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab'.   But those weren't the responses given. Instead, we got the contradictory 'it's not and even if it was, it's according to the guidelines'. Fauci's own words contradict himself.
  • WTF?
    • Dr. Anthony Fauci: (59:49) Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
    • Dr. Anthony Fauci: (01:01:43)  I don’t favor gain-of-function research in China. You are saying things that are not correct.
    • Dr. Anthony Fauci: (01:03:20)  I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done, and I’m fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China. However, I will repeat again, the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded gain-of-function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
    • Dr. Anthony Fauci: (01:04:10)  I fully agree that you should investigate where the virus came from. But again, we have not funded gain-of-function research on this virus in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. No matter how many times you say it, it didn’t happen.
    • Dr. Anthony Fauci: (01:05:00)  Yeah. I mean, I just wanted to say, I don’t know how many times I can say it, Madam Chair, we did not fund gain-of-function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
  • Senator Paul had deceptively switched the subject to Dr. Baric's research in North Carolina so it would have been  non-responsive and confusing to make some reply about research Wuhan to that specific question.
  • Do you still stand by your OP claim that Fauci was lying about gain-of-function research in Wuhan?  And if yes, why?
I'm talking specifically about the 'we weren't doing gain-of-function research, and if it was' moment, not the entire interview (of which Fauci repeatedly denies it).

It's that one moment which raising questions to me. If the answer was so clear to him, why did he fumble with his words and make a contradictory statement? Could it be a Freudian slip? Was it merely an accident and there's nothing else to it? 

This contention here is pretty relevant because it appears that the research conducted in Wuhan would be considered gain-of-function with the historical definition, but not the new NIH definition.
  • Please answer as directly as possible.  What research in Wuhan are you talking about?  
The gain-of-function research (using the non-NIH definition) which lead to the lab leak and thus Covid-19.


On a completely different note, you appeared to drop quite of few of my arguments Dr ANTHONY FAUCI's COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS to the 2022 GRADUATING CLASS of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY (debateart.com), some of which have relevant traction in this conversation: 

(1) It's a conflict of interest to have the NIH have the final say on the definition of gain-of-function, using the murderer analogy: "But your counterargument agreed with me, you just argued that there were more steps involved. It's still like a potential murderer campaigning for a change in the definition of murder, spending two years getting that passed, and then using the changed definition to kill a bunch of people because it's not murder anymore."

(2) The argument involving the American lab 'accidentally' doing gain-of-function research: "Whilst this is not 'gain-of-function' in the 2011/2012 NIH definition sense, let's put into plain English what has happened: they've made a virus that is BETTER capable of making humans sicker. This is due to humans sharing the ACE2 receptor which was the part tested on the mice. So, this is gain-of-function in the historical sense.

The letter does protest that this was "an unexpected result", but they've still done it: they've still modified a virus to make it more effective at attacking humans. THAT'S what matters most, not whether it perfectly fits an abstract definition."

None of what you wrote here proves that Covid-19 came from a wetmarket.
  • I am not trying to prove that COVID-19 comes from a wet market.... scientists say they don't know where it came from, remember?
  • I am arguing that you are deliberately slandering Fauci without evidence when you claim, "Anthony is partly responsible for Covid. He helped secure funding for the gain of function research conducted in Wuhan"
    • To make your claim, you must prove that COVID came from the research lab in Wuhan.
You've deleted the context in which I responded. The context was that you tried to show that coronavirus (not Covid-19 specifically) did exist in animals and patients in Wuhan Dr ANTHONY FAUCI's COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS to the 2022 GRADUATING CLASS of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY (debateart.com) . My counter-argument was that none of them had Covid-19, which means that "none of what you wrote here proves that Covid-19 came from a wetmarket". If you had have proven Covid-19 did originate then, the conversation would end -- that's why I said what I said.

I could get into how peer review means virtually nothing, or how this is all Ad Hominem (again), but none of that matters if the paper is correct, so I'm just going to focus on that.
    • Again, you clearly don't understand ad hominem if you think that calling out a scientific claim for not revealing what procedures it followed counts as ad hominem.
    • Nothing requires you to adhere to basic scientific standards for the formulation of your beliefs but then nobody in government or science will or ought to take your claims seriously.  If you are going to claim that Fauci knew about some kind of dangerous research in Wuhan, you must be able to show evidence that is both willing stand up to basic fact-checking such as peer review and applies those standard voluntarily.
Let me put it this way: is something wrong if it's not 'peer reviewed?' Can the truth only be found in journals?

Why not stop wasting everyone's time and just prove the arguments in the paper wrong, instead of saying 'it could be wrong because it didn't do x', or 'it's not peer reviewed?'

Is there any evidence to show that this potential problem actually affected the paper?
  • Yes.  It's like claiming you have Royal Flush in poker but refusing to show your cards.  Nobody has any reason to believe your claim.
LOL. What good is saying "yes" and then not showing the evidence, you dunce xD

This is not a specific critique of the paper.
  • Yes it is.  That specific critique is that this paper does not adhere to basic scientific standards of proof, documentation, fact-checking, data sharing, etc.
You need to show this rather than state it, and then show how it impacted the paper.

Firstly, where is it shown that the "natural origin" theory is the consensus in the "scientific community?". Seems like a bare assertion.
  • The fact-checker provided you with five citations backing this statement.  Why are you pretending they didn't?
Oh right.

"Five citations" = scientific community consensus.

How silly of me to not understand.

Secondly, where does this critique contend with the facts I referred to above:

(1) no animal in/surrounding/involved in the Huanan market had traces of Covid-19, and
  • You originally claimed  "None of the animals in the Huanan wetmarket initially tested had traces of coronavirus (around 2000 samples), and zero animals from 209 other wetmarkets around China (around 80,000 samples) has traces of coronavirus" but in fact many, many new SARS like coronaviruses were found.  SInce viruses rapidly mutate after zoonotic transfer, it is not particular surprising that no COVID-19 was found.  We don't know exactly what the virus looked like before it infected humans but it probably didn't look exactly like COVID-19.
There we go. We're on the same page now: Covid-19 was not initially found in the Huanan wetmarket.

(2) none of the first detected Covid-19 patients had anything to do with the Huanan wetmarket, and
(3) of the patients who did have contact with the Huanan wetmarket (during the initial outbreak), none of them had Covid-19?
It's rejected based on the above facts.
  • So, yeah, your "analysis" is pulling from easily falsified fake news.  Your source doesn't even have simple, basic fact right.
Oh right. I didn't realize Covid-19 (the 19 is short for the year 2019, btw) started on Jan 2 2020, which is when your source had compiled the data for. So dumb of me to think that the initial four patients back in 2019 were the first patients for Covid-19.

LOL. Why would we acknowledge that when it's untrue?
  • Yeah, right.  Your dude has totally proved the origins of COVID and hundreds of goverments and hundreds of thousands of scientists are all working together is some conspiracy to cover up the facts.  Use basic common sense.
I will use basic common sense: you've not represented my argument correctly.

There's no "hundreds of government" and "thousands of scientists" covering up anything, in my argument. It's Fauci and a few friends covering up their connections to gain-of-function research and the eventual lab leak in Wuhan. 

  • Both of these are frequently noted sources of fake news, one from the right, one from the left.  I'm beginning to think I'm wasting time on a fake new junky with zero legit research skills.
More Ad Hominem. Not surprised. But the fact that you think people who disagreed with the wetmarket narrative could freely speak is mindblowing -- just shows how disconnected from reality you are with that.

You didn't even read what I wrote because you said "both" and there are three sources.

How the hell do you think someone is going to research for months on end and then publish extensive research on this?
  • He didn't publish in any science journal. 
Yeah, that's my point. When people are silenced for having dissident views, they CAN'T do that.

But since the NIH has never claimed that COVID-19 definitely orginates from bats that is not the NIH backtracking or changing narrative.
They're still claiming it as of March this year: "Research evidence suggests that SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV originated in bats"
  • I see.  So the problem  here is that you don't comprehend that "research suggests" is an entirely different standard than "definitely orginates."
So, when I say, "Dr Quay's research suggests that the wetmarket origin is almost certainly wrong', and you say, 'you're dead wrong because of x, y and z', I can now say 'wtf you talking about? I didn't say it definitively did. I only said research suggested that!' 

Slimy.

#71
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they had bat samples for no apparent reason, of which definitely don't have similar genetic profiles to Covid-19. Yep, and I'm sure EcoHealth Alliance just stared at the bat samples and did nothing with them, too. I'm sure that the research in Wuhan, which isn't known to study coronavirus in bats at all (and if it did, it's definitely not gain-of-function research, either), didn't use any of its EcoHealth Alliance funding to study anything else How China's 'Bat Woman' Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus - Scientific American .
  • excellent proof that you lack basic context about Wuhan.  After SARS broke out in 2003, virologists around the world were astonished to discover that bats in Southeast Asia and particularly in the caves around were just chock full of coronaviruses with zoonotic potential.  WHO and US scientist strongly urged China to build a lab in Wuhan that focused on coronaviruses, bat coronaviruses particularly, bat coronaviruses that might cross over into humans most particularly.  US and CHinese scientist weren't collecting massive amounts of  bat samples for "no reason"  Scientists knew since 2003 that COVID-19 was coming, was more or less inevitable and wanted a lab in Wuhan to serve as a lookout.  It is not a fucking coincidence, the lab at Wuhan discovered COVID-19 early and sounded the international alarm a full eight weeks before COVID-19 reached pandemic potential in the US.  Wuhan was purpose built for that exact reason.  American researchers were developing an mRNA vaccinne for 15 years for that exact emergency that smart scientists accurately predicted would happen.
Imagine reading my response and not thinking it's sarcastic xD

It's just very strange that a non-lab engineered Covid-19 had a 99+% optimization rate for human-to-human transfer (SARS had about 17%), that all these grants and testing is being done on different coronaviruses, that Trump sets up a Covid task force 3 months before the outbreak, that 'anti-vaxxer' is pushed into the public discourse many months before the big outbreak, and that all this preparation is being done before a big outbreak. The list goes on.

If it were just one or two strange things, then fair enough to call it a wild conspiracy. But it's dozens.

The standard I am specifically using is that the NIH funded the Wuhan lab (through EcoHealth Alliance).
  • Nobody has ever denied that Ecohealth sent a very small amount of money to Wuhan but it was not for "gain-of-function" research or virological research of any kind, it was just for gathering samples.  When your sources claim the Dr. Fauci was funding COVID- that's a total lie.  When your sources claim the NIH was funding something risky in China- that's a total lie.  
  • It is hard to believe you genuinely don't understand this distinction.  You are just scraping for some kind of conspiracy where none exists.
Lol @ $100,000 being a "very small" amount of money.

Sorry, but people just don't gather samples for no reason. They're doing something with them. Even your narrative above admits this. And again, there becomes a great issue when we realize that Covid-19 is 99+% optimized, that the wetmarket is basically an impossibility etc. You just can't keep dancing around these facts whilst saying "total lie". You need to have explanations for these.

All manipultion is a lie of some sort.
Prove it.
You didn't prove it. Even your quote states "can be", rather than 'is' or 'must be'. It's a possibility, not an absolute.

Try again.

Talk about getting your panties in a bunch over nothing lol.
  • I don't call false accusations that somebody mass murdered millons of people "nothing."   There's a lot of mental illness on this site.  If somebody believes your false accusations and does harm to Dr. Fauci based on your claim that he is a mass murderer, do you think you bear responsibility?
Empty virtue-signaling. 

So fake.

I want to know why it did happen because this man was heavily involved in dealing with the Covid-19 outbreak. It's important to know if gain-of-function research was being conducted, because that could mean a plandemic. 
  • What is "it" in this sentence?  Many smart scientists have taken a hard look a the possibility that COIVD-19 was deliberate or designed but the whole nature of the virus and its emergence from a well known vector suggest it would be a stupid, pointless, impossible to control design which is borne out by the fact that if China did it deliberately they hurt themselves harder than they hurt anybody else.
"It" is this: why Fauci's contradictory sentence was spoken (the one we've analyzed a bunch already).

It's not stupid at all to find out as much information about the origin as possible. Finding out the answers could allow us to know whether it's a plandemic, whether China deliberately let it loose (even if it ended up biting them harder), whether it was released by careless/disgruntled employees etc. Knowing that information would allow countries to better react in the future to viral outbreaks or retaliate against the source. There's plenty of useful information to be gleaned.

I can't agree with Fauci's original quote that he "had nothing to do" with closing down schools. He did use his big, national platform to say, "the schools should be closed".
  • Not really.  I mean he spoke those a specific words but always in the context that it should not be a national shut-down, it should be local decision-making.
Yes really. Do you think everyone listened to all the context? I mean, we have the Youtube video, and all the video comments accusing Fauci of closing the schools, as proof that people don't listen to the context. So, to get up and say "the schools should be closed" are going to be all the words some people hear.

Certainly, you have to admit that a Governor like DeSantis is far more responsible for shutting down shcools than Dr. Fauci because unlike Dr. Fauci he had actual authority to shut down schools and unlike Dr. Fauci, he applied a "one-size-fits-all" statewide policy while ignoring Fauci's strong advice to treat school closure according to regional circumstance.  Based on the evidence and if you are reading what Fauci actually rather than what people like DeSantis say about him, then Fauci was objectively more 'pro open schools" than DeSantis or Trump or many other prominent Republican decsion-makers who falsely scapegoatted Fauci later on.  DeSantis was actually selling t-shirts saying "Don't Fauci my Florida"pretending that the decisoin was not his to make- I call that quite cowardly.
I don't even know who that is lol.

You have a bad habit of sledgehammering other people into these Fauci conversations. Whether it's Rand Paul, Donald Trump and now this guy, I seem to have to remind you every reply that I'm not these people, I'm not defending them and we're talking about Fauci.

That is going to have some amount of influence on the people making the decision.
  • Objectively, the decision-makers were far more cautious than Fauci's recommendations.  At the height of the pandemic, when 3,000 people a day were dying, Fauci was actively, publicly calling on schools to open  while very few polticians had the guts to make such a recommendation.
And maybe the decision-makers would have been more cautious without Fauci voicing his opinion.

If you've got a top health guy (Fauci) saying stuff, decision-makers will at least listen.
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You are just repeating yourself and have proved immune to rational argument.  Let's see if we can put a period on your crazy accusation and put a close to this thing.

Scientific American once published a CONSPIRACY THEORY CHECKLIST that I sometimes like to rely on.

Let's recall your conspiracy theory: 

Anthony is partly responsible for Covid. He helped secure funding for the gain of function research conducted in Wuhan. He is also on record lying about this ("does not fund gain-of-function research and if it is" -- massive contradiction): Exchange between Sen. Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci - YouTube
  1. Proof of the conspiracy supposedly emerges from a pattern of “connecting the dots” between events that need not be causally connected. When no evidence supports these connections except the allegation of the conspiracy or when the evidence fits equally well to other causal connections—or to randomness—the conspiracy theory is likely to be false.
    • Check.  Avery believes that because Dr. Fauci answered "Dr. Baric does not do gain-of-function research, and if it is, it’s according to the guidelines and it is being conducted in North Carolina, not in China." to Rand Paul's question, "Do you fund Dr. Baric’s gain-of-function research?," Dr. Fauci must have funded gain-of-function research conducted in Wuhan.
      • This theory has been disproved in excrutiating detail:
        • Dr. Baric's WIV1 research was not gain of function research
        • Dr. Baric's WIV1 research was not conducted in Wuhan
        • Avery ignores the fact that Fauci directly denies funding any gain-of-function research in Wuhan and focuses on the fact that Dr. Fauci said "even if it does" to a question unrelated to Wuhan as evidence of gain-of-function research in Wuhan.
          • Avery's claim that this is proof that Dr. Fauci is "is also on record lying about"  gain-of-function research in Wuhan is fasle since Dr. Fauci was not talking about Wuhan at the time.   Dr. Fauci specifically denies funding any gain-of-function research in Wuhan 5 times in 5 minutes during the same line of questioning but Avery irresponsibly ignores all the relevant responses and focuses like a laser beam on a response to a queston that was not about Wuhan as evidence for Wuhan. 
            • This inconsistency has been pointed out to Avery multiple times and he simply repeats the argument without demonstrating any comprehension of that argument's rrelevancy to thesis.
  2. The agents behind the pattern of the conspiracy would need nearly superhuman power to pull it off. People are usually not nearly so powerful as we think they are. 
    • Check.  To pull this off, Dr. Fauci would need to have successfully deceived the Congressional Budget Office, NIH oversight commitees, CIA and FBI investigations, Inspector General investigations, and a Trump administration that was hyperactively motiviated to destroy Dr. Fauci's career for publicly disagreeing with Republican disinformation campaigns.  How Dr. Fauci managed to hypnoptize all of these checkpoints and funnel some secret cash to China so that they could bio-bomb the world is never explained.  
  3. The conspiracy is complex, and its successful completion demands a large number of elements.
    • Check.  To pull this off, Dr. Fauci would need to have successfully deceived the Congressional Budget Office, NIH oversight commitees, CIA and FBI investigations, Inspector General investigations, and a Trump administration that was hyperactively motiviated to destroy Dr. Fauci's career for publicly disagreeing with Republican disinformation campaigns.  How Dr. Fauci managed to hypnoptize all of these checkpoints and funnel some secret cash to China so that they could bio-bomb the world is never explained.  
  4. Similarly, the conspiracy involves large numbers of people who would all need to keep silent about their secrets. The more people involved, the less realistic it becomes.
    • Check. Literally thousands of scientists and government employees would have to be covering up a secret research program in Wuhan.
  5. The conspiracy encompasses a grand ambition for control over a nation, economy or political system. If it suggests world domination, the theory is even less likely to be true.
    • Check.  It is a secret plot by Dr. Fauci and the Chinese government to infect the world that kills a small percentage of old and fat people.
  6. The conspiracy theory ratchets up from small events that might be true to much larger, much less probable events.
    • Check.  Avery infers a plot to infect the world rom Dr. Fauci saying "and if it is"
  7. The conspiracy theory assigns portentous, sinister meanings to what are most likely innocuous, insignificant events.
    • Check.  Avery infers a plot to infect the world rom Dr. Fauci saying "and if it is"
  8. The theory tends to commingle facts and speculations without distinguishing between the two and without assigning degrees of probability or of factuality.
    • Check.  Avery cites as evidence Dr. Quay's .pdf that essentially states, "if we ignore all prior scientific findings, the odds that Wuhan manufactured COVID is better than 98%"  Just pulling probabilities out of the subjective air.
  9. The theorist is indiscriminately suspicious of all government agencies or private groups, which suggests an inability to nuance differences between true and false conspiracies.
    • Check.  Avery trusts every source who profits by lying (tabloids, Dr. Quay)  and ignores every source who does not profit, (All government, science, journalists)
  10. The conspiracy theorist refuses to consider alternative explanations, rejecting all disconfirming evidence and blatantly seeking only confirmatory evidence to support what he or she has a priori determined to be the truth.
    • Check


#73
Avery
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@oromagi
You are just repeating yourself
No. It appears you wanted an excuse to drop all my arguments. 

and have proved immune to rational argument.  
Nice generic ad hom.

Let's see if we can put a period on your crazy accusation and put a close to this thing.

Scientific American once published a CONSPIRACY THEORY CHECKLIST that I sometimes like to rely on.
You go on to strawman all of my arguments (yes, all), all while dropping everything I wrote last to you. You certainly wrote some good arguments previously, but dropping everything, strawmanning and smushing the strawmans to make it look like my argument is a whacko conspiracy theory, is a concession in my book.

I'm not inclined to continue with you, now that you've resorted to this. I think my time would be better spent writing my argument out line-by-line in a new thread, rather than correcting every mistake you made.

Ciao meow.
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@Greyparrot
The link doesn't work for me.
#75
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try googling the real anthony fauci movie...it is a documentary made by robert kennedy jr
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It's funny because I did that and I'm only getting the book as a result. Seems like there has been an effort to remove his work.

Also, I made a more generic thread on what I think are the origins of Covid-19. I don't have every detail, but I've got some that might be of interest to you: Covid-19 was a plandemic lab leak (debateart.com) . Happy to see critique as well. 
#77
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The world should thank Dr Anthony Fauci for helping Wuhan get ahead of it’s virus program.


The Chinese city of Shanghai started administering an inhalable COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday in what appears to be a world first.

The vaccine, a mist that is sucked in through the mouth, is being offered for free as a booster dose for previously vaccinated individuals, according to an announcement posted on an official city social media account.

Needle-free vaccines may persuade people who don't like getting a shot to get vaccinated, as well as help expand vaccination in poor countries because they are easier to administer.

13 days later

#78
Public-Choice
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@oromagi
Oh for goodness sake, just admit you agree Dr. Fauci said they perform gain of function research already.

That was the longest "well you're right but you're wrong because of some oddball definition" I ever read in my life.

They admitted it. The NAIAD admitted it. The fucking State Department admitted it. Dr. Fauci later admitted it. Dr. Fauci has a long history of contradicting himself and he is responsible for fucking up the AIDS crisis. He's a huckster and fraud:




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@Public-Choice

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." -Goebbels

-->@oromagi
Oh for goodness sake, just admit you agree Dr. Fauci said they perform gain of function research already.
  • POST#51
That was the longest "well you're right but you're wrong because of some oddball definition" I ever read in my life.
  • Who said that?  The notion that the NIH funded gain-of-function research in China is an obvious lie told by dishonest politicians looking for witches to lynch
They admitted it.
  • False
The NAIAD admitted it.
  • False
The fucking State Department admitted it.
  • False
Dr. Fauci later admitted it.
  • False
Dr. Fauci has a long history of contradicting himself and
  • You cant be the face of government on the frontline of newly emerging diseases for 60 years without contradiction.  Good scientists don't much worry about the public appearance when the consensus of science changes their mind.
he is responsible for fucking up the AIDS crisis.
  • POST#18
He's a huckster and fraud:
  • False



#80
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@oromagi
The notion that the NIH funded gain-of-function research in China

Oi vey...

State Department:

The WIV has a published record of conducting “gain-of-function” research to engineer chimeric viruses. But the WIV has not been transparent or consistent about its record of studying viruses most similar to the COVID-19 virus, including “RaTG13,” which it sampled from a cave in Yunnan Province in 2013 after several miners died of SARS-like illness. . .

The United States and other donors who funded or collaborated on civilian research at the WIV have a right and obligation to determine whether any of our research funding was diverted to secret Chinese military projects at the WIV.
NAIAD:

The research that NIH approved under the grant to EcoHealth Alliance with a subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China sought to understand how animal coronaviruses, especially bat coronaviruses, evolve naturally in the environment and have the potential to become transmissible to the human population.  This research included studying viral diversity in bat reservoirs, surveying people who work in live animal markets or other occupations with high exposure to wildlife for evidence of bat coronavirus infection and analyzing data to predict which newly discovered viruses pose the greatest threat to human health. . .
This is literally the NAIAD paper explaining the research they funded to the WIH about bat coronaviruses. They swear this had nothing at all to do with COVID-19, but their assumptions are based on "people say differently." But we now know it was a lab leak from the WIH, so that is a load of horseshit.

Dr. Fauci:

In the video the person literally quotes Dr. Fauci verbatim.

Do I need more or will you concede now? 
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@Public-Choice

The WIV has a published record of conducting “gain-of-function” research to engineer chimeric viruses. But the WIV has not been transparent or consistent about its record of studying viruses most similar to the COVID-19 virus, including “RaTG13,” which it sampled from a cave in Yunnan Province in 2013 after several miners died of SARS-like illness. . .
  • true
The United States and other donors who funded or collaborated on civilian research at the WIV have a right and obligation to determine whether any of our research funding was diverted to secret Chinese military projects at the WIV.
  • Does not contradict Dr. Fauci or any statement by NIH at any point.  Everybody agrees the Chinese goverment should be more transparent.
This is literally the NAIAD paper explaining the research they funded to the WIH about bat coronaviruses. They swear this had nothing at all to do with COVID-19, but their assumptions are based on "people say differently."
  • False.  You're so bad at reading your own sources.
    • " In this regard, the chimeric viruses that were studied (i.e., the WIV-1 virus with the various spike proteins obtained from bat viruses found in nature) were so far distant from an evolutionary standpoint from SARS-CoV-2 (Figure 1) that they could not have possibly been the source of SARS-CoV-2 or the COVID-19 pandemic.  The body of the scientific data from this award including the bat coronavirus sequences published in the scientific literature and public databases makes this conclusion readily apparent to anyone with experience in and knowledge of virus phylogeny and evolutionary biology."
    • The WIV1 coronavirus share 96% of DNA with SARS2.  By comparison, pigs share 98% of DNA with Humans.  It is much, more likely that a pig could be genetically modified into a human in a lab than WIV1 could be could be turned into  SARS2.  That does not mean that Wuhan wasn't messing around with other viruses, some of which with greater potential to mutate into COVID.  We don't know but to assume a lab leak must reside in lack of information is "god of the gaps" fallacious.  Particularly, as we understand the virus better.
But we now know it was a lab leak from the WIH, so that is a load of horseshit.
  • False.  This is a conspriacy theory lacking any real evidence. 
    • "In October 2021, the U.S. Intelligence Community released a report assessing that the Chinese government had no foreknowledge of the outbreak and the virus was likely not engineered.  The report did not conclusively favor any origin scenario. Of eight assembled teams, one (the FBI) leaned towards a lab leak (with moderate confidence), four others and the National Intelligence Council leaned towards zoonosis (with low confidence), and three were inconclusive.  In May 2021, British intelligence agencies said a Chinese lab leak was "feasible".  July 2021 Politico-Harvard poll found 52 percent of Americans believe COVID-19 leaked from a lab (including 59 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats), compared to 28 percent that believe COVID-19 resulted from human contact with an infected animal.
      Most scientists have remained skeptical of the idea, citing a lack of supporting evidence, while a minority regard both a lab leak and natural origin as equally valid. Some scientists agree a lab leak origin should be examined as part of ongoing investigations, though they have expressed concerns about politicization.  In July 2022, two papers published in the journal Science described new epidemiological and genetic evidence that the pandemic likely began at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market and did not come from a laboratory      ."
Dr. Fauci:

In the video the person literally quotes Dr. Fauci verbatim.
  • Extreme deception.  "the person" is Kansas Senator Roger Marshall.  Here is the exact passage Marshall is quoting in 2012
    • "Scientists working in this field might say—as indeed I have said—that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks. It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature, and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky. However, we must respect that there are genuine and legitimate concerns about this type of research, both domestically and globally. We cannot expect those who have these concerns to simply take us, the scientific community, at our word that the benefits of this work outweigh the risks, nor can we ignore their calls for greater transparency, their concerns about conflicts of interest, and their efforts to engage in a dialog about whether these experiments should have been performed in the first place. Those of us in the scientific community who believe in the merits of this work have the responsibility to address these concerns thoughtfully and respectfully."
      • In 2012, Fauci calls for greater transparency and respect for public concern regarding viral research.  Great.  Fine.
  • Marshall states several outright falsehoods in this speech.  We have every reason to understand that Marshall knows he is lying to the public and is willfully, purosefully misinforming the public here in his role as a public official sworn to tell the public the truth.

2:21
but gain a function still still continued at the university of north carolina research 
  • Not during the moratoriaum, they didn't.  That is an outright slanderous lie.
2:24
north carolina research later that we shared with dr she the bat lady
  • Dr. Shi shared the genetic sequence of WIV1 with UNC via email and so got her name on the paper. 
    • UNC did not share any research with Dr. Shi and for the Senator to say so is a slanderous lie.
    • UNC mice research was not gain-of-function research
      • UNC strongly supports gain-of-function research and does many gain-of-function research projects.  This expiriment was not one of them.
      • This expiriment was partially funded by NIH but was not gain of function and shared no data or funding with CHina.
2:42
scientists to pause their gof studies dr fauci offshored that offshored the paws research to china not once but twice in 2012 dr fauci gave a new grant to peter dasik's eco health alliance for influence research in china and then again in 2014 dr fauci gave another grant to dasic for sars research in china dasic partnered with who the wuhan institute of virology
  • EcoHealth is the only US NGO focusing on zoonotic transfers of virus due to deforestation and human-wildlife interactions.  To study such transfers at a zoonotic hotspot like Wuhan, EcoHealth must have data, which comes from samples.  Obviously, the Chinese govt does not allow US scientists to travel to China and collect thier own bats and rats and pandolins and racoon dogs so EcoHealth pays people in China to do that sample collection.  Since such collection obviously carries a high risk of exposure to viruses that famously, frequently jump to humans, the purpose lab in Wuhan does that collection.  For five years, EcoHealth paid the $119,000/year for five years for that service.  To say that transaction represent "funding" of research in Wuhan is a lie.
  • The US is not privy to the nature and methods of most research in Wuhan.  SInce China is not as careful about gain-of-function research as Dr. Fauci, they probably are doing research we would call gain of function but we don't know that for a fact.  Nor do we know how careful they're being. 
    • Has Dr. Fauci been one of the leading scientists in the world calling for internation super-transparancy when it comes to gain-of-function research?  Yes.
    • Does Dr. Fauci have any control over what Chinese do?  No.  
    • Should the NIH continue to fund EcoHealth including small amounts of money  paid to collect samples around Wuhan?  Absolutely.  The US needs such samples to create their own data and come to conclusions independent of China regarding Wuhan-centric coronaviruses.  If we don't get our own samples, then China gets to monopolize the data and so monopolize the conclusions about Wuhan-centric coronaviruses like SARS and SARS2 and MERS.  If you want American scientist to pursue the truth independent from China, we've got to be able to collect some fucking samples without evil polticians pretending they've discovered some sinister is going on and duping gullible idiots for political gain.
    • There are hundreds of gate-keepers and decision-makers involved in any NIH grant, including Congressional oversight and funding.  To say that Dr. Fauci funded this or Dr Fauci offshored  is to ignore a massive democratic system of checks and balances as well  as  total fucking scapegoating.  Anybody who thinks Fauci controls NIH grants is ignorant of the process.
  • Marshall should lose his physician's liscence for deliberately spreading public health misinformation during a pandemic.
    • Marshall keeps going on as if continued NIH support for gain of funding is some secret plot but that's insane.  The only reason we were able to stop the spread of SARS and MERS was gain of function research.  The only reason we were able to develop a COVID vaccine in a miraculous ten months was because of prior gain of function research.  The benefits of gain of function research far outweigh the risks but there are substantial risks, which is why Dr. Fauci was part of a smart nationwide upgrade of gain of function protocols starting in 2012.
Do I need more or will you concede now? 
  • Not one poltician has provided one shred of proof that NIH or Dr. Fauci told anything but 100% truth about funding gain of function research in China.  I need you to provide some evidence of STFU.  Being ignorant of the facts is not proof.  Staying ingorant of the facts after somebody takes the time to explain it you is not okay.
  • As Dr. Fauci said long ago, lab leaks are a real concern and many countries doing research are not being transparant enough or careful enough. 
  • As Dr. Fauci said long ago, China has an ethical obligation to share their research and methodology regarding viruses with potential for human pandemics and China's biological lab standards are far below what the US calls sufficient.  Fauci has publicly called for the details of the three lab employees who the FBI thinks were  hospitalized in Nov 2019 with particular focus on whether this was SARS2 or some predecessor.
  • The lab leak theory is not ruled out, not impossible but after a couple of years of research, the lab leak theory is also not very likely considering the nature of the virus and its apparent ancestry.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9348752
  • To say "we now know it was a lab leak from the WIH" is to believe motivated politicians and not scientists or intelligence agents with far less to gain from seducing gullble fools with sensational conspiracy theories.