Grace wrote: ↑Fri Jun 04, 2021 4:27 pmThank you for clarifying that RZehr. Beings Fauci lied about the NIH funding of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, I don't think he is trustworthy.
That claim has been vigorously fact-checked by various sources since the claim was made by Senator Rand Paul. For example:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... b-funding/
The dispute between Sen. Rand Paul and Dr. Fauci was about whether the NIH was funding "gain of function" research in Wuhan.
Bottom line? they found that Sen. Paul is the one lying about the facts, not Fauci:
Robert Kessler, a spokesman for the nongovernmental organization EcoHealth Alliance that NIH funded, said claims about funding gain-of-function research are based on a misunderstanding of the grant’s role in the research. He said EcoHealth provided WIV $133,000 a year, except for $66,000 in 2020 (when the grant was terminated by the Trump administration), for a total of about $600,000.
“The NIH has not funded gain-of-function work,” Kessler said in email exchanges. “EcoHealth Alliance was funded by the NIH to conduct study of coronavirus diversity in China. From that award, we subcontracted work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to help with sampling and lab capacity.” He said the citation in the paper was mainly the result of researchers’ desire to cite any possible research that contributed to the findings, with much of the funding coming from the National Natural Science Foundation of China. (Another funder listed was USAID’s Predict program, which helped collect animal viruses and also funded EcoHealth.)
“As described in the paper, all but two of the viruses cultured in the lab failed to even replicate,” he said. “None of them had been manipulated in order to increase their ability to spread, all the researchers did was insert S [spike] proteins in order to gauge their ability to infect human cells.”
Kessler added that “much of that work [described in the grant] wasn’t done because the grant was suspended. But GoF was never the goal here.” As he put it, “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.”
In a lengthy statement to The Fact Checker, Baric — who signed the letter calling for a new investigation — also pushed back against Paul’s assertions at the hearing.
“The Baric laboratory has never investigated strategies to create super viruses,” he said. “Studies focused on understanding the cross-species transmission potential of bat coronaviruses like SHC014 have been reviewed by the NIH and by the UNC Institutional Biosafety Committee for potential of gain-of-function research and were deemed not to be gain of function.”
“We never introduced mutations into the SHC014 [horseshoe bat coronavirus] spike to enhance growth in human cells, though the work demonstrated that bat SARS-like viruses were intrinsically poised to emerge in the future,” he added. “These recombinant clones and viruses were never sent to China. Importantly, independent studies carried out by Italian scientists and others from around the world have confirmed that none of the bat SARS-like viruses studied at UNC were related to SARS-CoV-2, the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
We gave NIH six days to respond to questions and though we were promised a statement, none was received. That’s fishy. Fauci, speaking to the United Facts of America fact-checking festival on May 11, said Paul’s statement was “preposterous.” He said the research was “a very minor collaboration, as part of a subcontract of a grant, we had a collaboration with some Chinese scientists.”
Update, May 19: The National Institutes of Health issued a statement to The Fact Checker which in part said: “NIH has never approved any grant to support 'gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans. The research proposed in the EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. grant application sought to understand how bat coronaviruses evolve naturally in the environment to become transmissible to the human population.” When gain-of-function research was paused, “this grant was reviewed again and determined by experts to fall outside the scope of the funding pause.”
In a separate statement also issued May 19, NIH Director Francis S. Collins said: “NIH strongly supports the need for further investigation by the World Health Organization (WHO) into the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.”
“Despite Dr. Fauci’s denials, there is ample evidence that the NIH and the NIAID, under his direction, funded gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” said Paul spokeswoman Kelsey Cooper. “In light of those facts, the question Dr. Paul asked was whether the government has fully investigated the origin of the disease, which it clearly has not. This research and the lab should be thoroughly investigated and opened to public scrutiny.”
The Pinocchio Test
There is some smoke here, but we do not yet perceive the fire claimed by Paul. To some extent, all money is fungible. But 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. Paul’s statements about Baric’s research also appear overblown. We wavered between Two and Three Pinocchios, but decided on Two, because there still are enough questions about the work at the Wuhan lab to warrant further scrutiny, even if the NIH connection to possible gain-of-function research appears so far to be elusive.
