This is also that man who said the U.S. didn't fund gain-of-research.
So grain of salt.
So grain of salt.
Rand Paul: You take an animal virus and you increase its transmissibility to humans. You’re saying that’s not gain of function?
Anthony Fauci: Yeah, that is correct. And Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly. And I want to say that officially, you do not know what you are talking about, okay? You get one person … can I answer?
> gain-of-function — a type of research 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.”
What does Fauci claim the meaning of gain-of-function is, which excludes "take an animal virus and you increase its transmissibility to humans"?
> A few of their [2017] experiments combined different elements of viruses to better understand what’s required to infect human cells. Specifically, the 2017 research used the backbone of WIV1, a bat SARS-like virus reported in 2013, and swapped in the spike protein of two newly identified bat coronaviruses to see if they, like WIV1, can use the human ACE2 receptor to enter human cells. [...]
> Is that gain-of-function? Again, there are different definitions and opinions on that. We reached out to the NIH asking for a more detailed explanation of why the 2017 paper didn’t meet its definition, and we’ll update this story if we get a response.
What I do know is that if you accept the role of expert, spokesperson, face of the crisis, whatever, your Prevarication Budget is zero. Once one thing you say is caught out as not being true, people wonder about everything else you have said.
I think Fauci's testimony is misleading because when Fauci say's no gain of function research was done then his questioners think that means no one was messing with viruses in a way that could have accidentally created a more dangerous virus. But apparently that is still possible under the NIH definition. This happens very frequently when people testify in Congress. They use words in a way that is interpreted in one way by the listener and then when that interpretation is found false they claim the words were meant to mean something different. It is very difficult to work out whether they were being honest and accidentally misled their listeners or whether it was deliberate.