Fauci in another questionable episode

In addition to Fauci initially peddling the obvious lie that masks wouldn't help keep people safe from Covid-19 infection, it appears he was also in on delaying a report about coronavirus research in China.

A progress report detailing controversial U.S.-funded research into bat coronaviruses in China was filed more than two years after it was due and long after the corresponding grant had concluded. The U.S.-based nonprofit the EcoHealth Alliance submitted the report to its funder, the National Institutes of Health, in September 2020.

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The annual report described the group’s work from June 2017 to May 2018, which involved creating new viruses using different parts of existing bat coronaviruses and inserting them into humanized mice in a lab in Wuhan, China. The work was overseen by the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is headed by Anthony Fauci.

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Neither the NIH nor the EcoHealth Alliance offered an explanation for the date of the report or responded to questions from The Intercept about whether another version of the report had been submitted on time and, if so, in what ways that version may have been altered.

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The progress report and other documents were released by the NIH over a year after The Intercept and others requested them.

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“NIH has a public responsibility to be fully transparent on why it gave funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, whether it considered the potential of a possible accidental leak of dangerous bat viruses, and the ethics of approving the study,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor at Georgetown University’s school of law and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. “Overall, it is important to fund good basic research on bat viruses, but the project has been shrouded in uncertainty and lacks full transparency.”

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The progress report is just one of many missing puzzle pieces that could shed light on the question. In June, evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom reported that key data from Wuhan had been deleted from an NIH database, a move allowed by NIH rules but that is nonetheless unusual. From a Google Cloud server, he recovered 13 partial viral sequences collected from people in the city in the early days of the pandemic. These added to evidence that the coronavirus was circulating in the city long before the December 2019 outbreak at the city’s Huanan seafood market, which was a major focus of the recent WHO report on the origins of the pandemic. It turned out that researchers from Wuhan University had emailed the NIH in June 2020 to request that the sequences be deleted.

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The documents released to The Intercept are also missing a year-five progress report, covering the crucial period of June 2018 to May 2019, which was due in September 2019, according to NIH guidelines. Scientists said that NIH program officers sometimes overlook reports for the final reporting period, but taken together with the odd date on the year-four report, the omission raises questions that the agency should answer.   TheIntercept

The NIH is doing no one any favors by being opaque about virus research.  (And what else?)  Is it any wonder people don't trust the government on Covid?   (Not to suggest you shouldn't get the Covid-19 vaccination.  You should.)

Humanized mice.  WTF?  Is that mice that lie, cheat and steal?  Or is that the Congressional Republicans?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Where did Covid-19 start?

This isn't going to help people trust the scientists.

From an Intercept email:

The closest relative of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is a virus found in bats. So how did it jump to humans?

Many scientists believe that the virus passed to humans through natural spillover, making the jump in a setting such as a wet market or rural area where humans and animals are in close contact.

But by suing the National Institutes of Health under the Freedom of Information Act, The Intercept has uncovered explosive documents that are bringing renewed attention to the lab-leak theory, which posits that the virus may have escaped from a lab, possibly as part of research funded in part by the U.S. government.

These documents do not provide “smoking gun” evidence of a lab leak. But they show what one expert called “exactly the scenario imagined by many lab-leak scenario proponents” occurring in a Wuhan lab, with scientists intentionally making coronaviruses more dangerous in order to study them.

The records uncovered by The Intercept provide evidence that the NIH has funded this controversial “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — challenging the accuracy of denials by Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The U.S. government resisted releasing these documents, which raise questions about the NIH’s previous claims about coronavirus research. But the public has a right to know what kind of experiments the U.S. has funded and whether they could have led to this pandemic — and if the government is still funding risky research that could lead to future pandemics.

Our reporters interviewed 11 scientists for their article, taking care to reach out to experts with a range of views on this complex issue. The scientists were unanimous on one point: The specific experiment funded by the NIH described in these documents could not have led to the pandemic, because the viruses being studied were not closely enough related to the virus that causes Covid-19. However, the fact that this unpublished research was going on raises serious questions about whether other activities at the Wuhan lab could be linked to the pandemic — and about what has not yet been disclosed.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Christ, these people

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.