After reading https://www.factcheck.org/2021/07/scicheck-fauci-and-paul-ro... (happy for someone to provide a better source), I'm not sure I agree with the idea that Fauci is "full of shit" based off of this one exchange.
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.
> 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.