Anthony Fauci’s emails: ‘All is well despite some crazy people in this world’ | Hacker News Reader

Anthony Fauci’s emails: ‘All is well despite some crazy people in this world’

washingtonpost.com

14 pointsirtefa25 comments

At least one of the emails [0] shows Fauci had evidence of a possible lab leak in January 2020. If the virus' genome is inconsistent with evolutionary theory, that's a major red flag - and very early on in the pandemic.

We should continue to search for the reservoir animal and continue to pressure China to provide blood tests from researchers at the Wuhan lab. Without either exculpatory evidence for the Wuhan lab or clear evidence that it was a reservoir animal, the Wuhan lab leak theory should not be dismissed

Fauci was still saying [1] a reservoir animal was the most likely cause of the jump to humans a few days ago, despite having contrary evidence before almost anyone else.

I don't know why he isn't qualifying that more, but it's hard to see how it's not politics.

[0]https://twitter.com/JamesCTobias/status/1399811395043004418/...

[1]https://youtu.be/ilt_NcaIIRk?t=143

The third tweet in the thread you linked[1] demonstrates why it would have been a bad idea to treat those initial findings as a "major red flag".

[1]: https://twitter.com/JamesCTobias/status/1399882478488334337

The third tweet demonstrates nothing.

The linked Nature paper in the third tweet [0] may demonstrate why a reservoir animal is more likely than the virus being artificially engineered, but damned if I can understand the reasoning in it. Maybe someone with a biology background or just plain smarter than me can explain it better.

In any case, my original point still stands, without exculpatory evidence for the Wuhan lab or the discovery of a reservoir animal, the lab leak theory should not be dismissed and any attempt to do so is just politics.

[0]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

one of the simplest forms of engineering a virus is called; serial passageing with artificial selection

this means passing the pathogen from one individual to others then selecting based on desired character to inocculate the next cohort of hosts; this will amplify the frequency of the desired character.

this process will also occur naturally, accompanied by natural selection.

this produces a genome that is devoid of the base pair level artefacts that can be observed when molecular genetic tools are used to edit and splice a genome. molecular editing produces sequence artefacts its like leaving a bit of your scissors behind when you cut a string. this is easy to spot; a smoking gun.

artifically directed selection is not easy to spot but would be evident in the case that frequencies of characters or traits are not distributed according to the laws of transmission genetics

Fauci is a scientist, not a politician. His emails show that he follows the scientific method. This means conclusions can change as new, more convincing evidence is uncovered.

I can tell from the headlines about this that there was nothing juicy in these and that Fauci is a boring medical professional. Unreal that the guy is 80

Did you read some of the emails? There was already talk about the virus being engineering. The one about the CCP government cleaning paper money in Wuhan is quite telling.

watching the mainstream media from the past few days sure makes it seem like they're preparing to throw Fauci under the bus now that truth is starting to come out

Did you read the article? It is is nothing but positive praise of his ability to be so available via email and stand up for science, what "truth" are you referring to?

I read the article, but I have the ability to research things for myself and not take a single article's word for something. it's not like one can't find the emails and read them on their own, without an article spinning things a certain way.

At first I felt good that we had an expert leading us in this endeavor, this pandemic, the more this guy talks the less trust and faith I have an anything he hast to say. Now he just seems like a political hack.

After reading that article (and after having worked in and with government) I don’t see how the contents of this article and your comment are connected? I’m not seeing any political manoeuvring exposed in this write-up? What in that article led you to draw this conclusion?

They're not, the early posters in this thread are just trying to create drama

>"despite some crazy people in this world"

Is making biological weapons of mass destruction crazy?

Fauci does not think so.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-flu-virus-risk-wor...

That editorial advocates nothing of the sort. It's talking about studying viruses in the lab to improve our ability to fight them, and specifically mentions the risks involved and the need to keep these studies/viruses secure.

Yes, but these studies involve creating new, more dangerous viruses, that are not found in nature. We then depend on perfect containment to avoid sparking a pandemic, despite numerous examples of even high level containment failing.

You could say the exact same thing about nuclear energy and nuclear weapons and yet they have seen massive and widespread use.

Dangerous things need to be contained really well, regardless of whether this virus leaked or not.

Natural dangerous respiratory virus outbreaks do occur from time to time so it's better to be ready against them which also steels us against lab leaks.

Personally, I think that on balance, nuclear energy is a positive thing. It generates a lot of carbon and pollution free electricity. When containment is lost, the consequences are at least mostly localized.

With this GoF research, the potential downside is extremely large. COVID was really bad. As it is, it's responsible for 3.5 million confirmed deaths so far. This is several orders of magnitude worse than Chernobyl.

This isn't even the worst case scenario though. GoF work has also been done with enhanced flu viruses that could have IFRs above 10%. With something like that you could be looking at upwards of 100 million deaths. Those are really extreme consequences, on par with a total nuclear exchange between the US and USSR.

And then, what do we get out of all of this? For all of the Coronavirus GoF research they did, how did any of that help us at all against COVID?

It's still a _highly_ biased characterization of the editorial. Your take here is nuanced and fair, and I would not disagree at all. The comment I responded to was drastically different.

What is "biased" about calling dual use technologies such as artificially enhanced viruses weapons of mass destruction?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-use_technology#Biologic...

Any hint of nuance or context is absent, it implies that he specifically advocates for their creation _as_ weapons of mass destruction when the opposite stance is evident in the article, it's paywalled so many people won't check, it has little to nothing to do with the HN story.

actually these studies involve discovering the transmission and heritability rules of; genetic traits of concern regarding human pathogenisis. these ^Are^ viruses found in nature manipulated so as to allow inferences to be made regarding origin and change of trait frequency distribution across the pathogens population .

The politically correct term that the editorial is advocating for is gain of function research.

Here's a quote from one of the referenced NIH studies in the editorial which makes it plain:

>"laboratory experiments that resulted in viruses with enhanced transmissibility in mammals"

Gain of function enhanced viruses are inherently dual use, so calling them biological weapons of mass destruction is not hyperbole.

It's FUD.

What is?

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