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Comment by cablm | Hacker News Reader

YouTube does not appear to censor Fauci for repeated deliberate misinformation and possible lying about gain of function funding.

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Even accepting your opinion on Fauci for a moment, the difference is that Bolsonaro's deception in these specific videos is a direct danger to millions of people right now.

Deceiving or misleading the public is never acceptable, and Fauci did make some errors of judgement. In practice we often give a pass to those who's views align with our own to some degree or other. Nevertheless, some deceptions are a lot more dangerous and can have lethal consequences for a lot more people, for far grubbier and selfish reasons than others.

It's not just his opinion, the NIH themselves admitted it [1] and the lab succeeded in making the coronavirus far more virulent:

> EcoHealth and its Wuhan partner constructed novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses — artificial, lab-generated viruses that do not have counterparts circulating in nature — that exhibited 10,000 times enhanced viral load and two to four times enhanced pathogenicity in infection studies in mice engineered to display human receptors on their cells (‘humanized mice’).”

It's equally if not more dangerous that the public has been deceived for so long about the true origin of the virus, because it's further ruined trust in the media, government and big tech by making this event highly politicised just because a few individuals in the US government wanted to hide their own crimes.

[1] https://news.yahoo.com/bombshell-nih-letter-bat-coronavirus-...

Well no, as the article points out the NIH does not accept that interpretation and believes the research doesn't meet the criteria for being classified as gain of function under the relevant policy. Furthermore they were deceived by the researchers and at that point had not been given the research data, and the outcome was not expected or a goal of the funding anyway.

I feel so much better now. Think I'll go back to sleep.

Well in this case we have a potential screwup, which doesn't seem to have had any consequences or to be directly related to the current crisis. On the other we have people wilfully lying, knowing that their lies will kill people, for their own political benefit.

The true origin of the virus? I don't think anyone credible is claiming that the coronavirus that they supposedly did GoF research on is the same coronavirus that causes covid-19. Stop spreading blatant misrepresentations and political propaganda on hn.

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