'Gain Of Function' Research

Fauci will be gone in 90 days?

Peter Barry Chowka

It turns out that all roads to Covid-19 – even more than we expected – lead back to Fauci. Finally, after a year of stonewalling and obfuscation, the news about Fauci’s apparent role in directing U.S. government funding to the notorious Wuhan Virology Lab – and the identification of that facility as the source of the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic – has gone incredibly mainstream. Previously, reporting and analysis on these issues had been the province of political outliers like Stephen K. Bannon and the guests on his six-day-a-week War Room Pandemic internet program – which is now getting renewed attention.

As I reported here in “Dr. Fauci Finally Unmasked” on May 17, the cat was coming out of the bag – and “inevitably the truth will out.” But I could not have imagined how quickly the tide against Fauci would turn.

May 27, the Times sent an email to tens of millions of people on its list, titled “The lab-leak theory is everywhere. We have an explainer.”

Two days earlier, the Washington Post published a lengthy article titled “Timeline: How the Wuhan lab-leak theory suddenly became credible.” This was a de facto mea culpa for the paper’s previous pathetic and politically-driven coverage without calling it an apology. It omitted mention of many sources including Steve Bannon and Red China refugee whistleblower Dr. Li-Meng Yan. It did take note of a scientific paper posted on February 6, 2020, by Botao Xiao, a molecular biomechanics researcher at South China University of Technology. The title of Xiao’s paper was “The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus.” It states that “the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.”

Leading the charge to bring these developments to the mainstream, building on the reporting and analysis of many others during the past year, has been Fox News. Last week, for example, Fox featured a variety of reports about the Wuhan Virology Lab being the source of Covid-19 on multiple programs – not only opinion shows but on hard news programs. For a number of days continuing to the present time, it seemed like every Fox News program was featuring reports on these subjects, often as the lead stories. This reporting was accompanied by accounts that Fauci allegedly directed at least $600,000 in National Institutes of Health research funds to the Wuhan lab where – evidence suggests – the funds may have been employed to support gain of function research.

Gain of function is the label put on the controversial work that some scientists do to enhance and weaponize natural animal viruses, making them deadly to humans. During the period between 2014 and 2017 when Fauci allegedly engineered this funding (through a third party), gain of function research was banned in the United States by order of the Obama administration.

Indeed, on May 27 and May 28, David Asher, the former lead investigator on the federal government’s Covid-19 origins probe that was started under President Trump but shut down by the Biden administration, was interviewed on Fox News. Asher defended the research, and according to Fox News:

Former State Department official David Asher said Friday the coronavirus was "optimized for transmission between humans" in a way no bat-borne coronavirus ever had been, leading him to believe an animal-based origin of the disease was almost impossible.

In March, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director during the Trump administration Robert Redfield said that he believed the virus most likely escaped from a lab

All of this circles back to Dr. Anthony Fauci. It has recently been reported and confirmed that the NIAID which he heads – the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases -- has granted at least $600,000 – and maybe several million dollars, according to Sen. Rand Paul – to the Communist Chinese scientists at the Wuhan lab for virus research! The first question is: Why is our National Institutes of Health doing this?

It looks even worse thanks to reports that starting in 2014 Fauci used his position to circumvent the prohibition of gain of function research by funneling NIH funds to Communist Chinese researchers at the Wuhan lab via a third party.

By the way, a lot of other research funded by the NIH – and Fauci’s NIAID in particular – is extremely questionable.

Last month, for example, David Daleiden, the founder of the pro-life activist group Center for Medical Progress, said on Fox News that Fauci should testify before Congress about the nearly $500,000 grant his agency awarded to the University of Pittsburgh to conduct research using aborted babies’ scalps grafted on to lab rats.

At the University of Pittsburgh, they were doing a study where they were taking the scalps of 5-month-old aborted babies, and they were grafting them onto lab rats and lab mice to see how much longer they could keep them growing for. You can actually see the photographs in the published study of little baby scalps grafted onto the backs of lab rats growing little baby hairs.

This study was funded by. . . multiple grants from the NIAID office, which is run by Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Fauci, Daleiden contended, owns “every bit of this study.”

On May 26, Sen John Kennedy of Louisiana had the opportunity to question Fauci at a U.S. Senate hearing on Covid-19. Fauci again denied under oath that his agency ever funded gain of function research at the Wuhan Lab. But when Sen. Kennedy pressed Fauci, there was an interesting admission.

More...

If the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis is true, expect a political earthquake