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Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

>The report he finally did submit worried the agency’s grant specialists. It stated that scientists planned to create an infectious clone of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a novel coronavirus found in dromedaries that had emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and killed 35% of the humans it infected. The report also made clear that the NIH grant had already been used to construct two chimeric coronaviruses similar to the one that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in 2002 and went on to cause at least 774 deaths worldwide. (A chimeric virus is one that combines fragments of different viruses.) These revelations prompted the NIH’s grant specialists to ask a critical question: Should the work be subject to a federal moratorium on what was called gain-of-function research?

Wait what?! Is this new information ? Because this is incredibly troubling

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No it's not, and yes it is. That these laboratories were (and still are?) doing gain of function research - deliberately creating new variants of viruses to study them - has been known since the start of the pandemic (the results are published in reputable scientific journals, and a lot of the funding came from western medical research bodies). And it's definitely something I think we need to have a societal conversation about. Personally in light of recent events I feel like this is something we probably ought not to be doing.

Yeah I knew about GoF research but I didn't know they planned on doing it on MERS. Another troubling thing was that they basically ignored the moratorium so even if measures were taken to stop GoF... they were just ignored by using a foreign lab as a loophole?

To me it's mind-boggling that you could get arrested and fined for violating covid-related restrictions but people who did much much much more potentially dangerous stuff are not only getting away with it but also kept getting financed by the government. Even if covid turns out to not originate from a lab, just the insane potential risks that came from the blatant violations of the GoF moratorium should have been enough to land people in trouble. Especially since us commoners were punished based on the possibility that we could transmit the virus, whether we were infected or completely virus free didn't matter.

Yes, this is where the whole lab leak "conspiracy" came from.

The lab was doing GoF research with bat and pangolin Coronaviruses exploring if the spike protein can be modified to enter through the human ACE2 receptor. There are a number of papers from Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli on the topic with research done at the Wuhan lab.

I think your 'commoners' framing... is not helpful here.

You raise a few objectionable assertions that I think is good to contemplate: - GoF was never banned - The ban was NIH funding GoF - The ban was lifted in 2017 anyways - Is this risky? The ban on funding it doesn't mean it's risky, as per se. - The potential pie in the eye risk are infinite, but what are the realistic risks? That really depends on the technical details of how the research is done, and where it's done. - Compare and contrast to activities that are very dangerous and have nearly infinite catastrophic risks but we do every day: driving, flying, operating nuclear power plants, refining oil, and much much more.

All of this research came out of the desire not to be caught flat footed by the next version of SARS or MERS. Overall global research did in fact prep us for SARS-CoV-2. Vaccines "made in months" that have stood the test of efficacy and safety? Months if you ignore the years of research behind it.

Is this particular thing excessively dangerous or not? I'm not 100% sure. Most of the "this is unacceptable" seems to be coming from people who seem to have a visceral hatred of Dr Fauci and who as head of the NIH was indirectly responsible for this funding. But I don't find that a reasonable line of reasoning. One thing I know, is every scientist I know is not paid a boat load, and care deeply about what they are doing and why.

Perhaps GoF is too 'dangerous', but maybe we should also hear about how it can be made safe, how does it compare in hazardousness to other common things that are deemed 'safe' and what the benefits are.

Yep - we kept having near-misses with prior coronaviruses, so understandably, scientists were spending a ton of energy trying to figure out what makes them so pathogenic and how the animal-human jumps occur. Considering the fact that SARS and MERS both came from zoonotic origin (and IMO, Sarscov2 did as well) - we should really be spending our energy on the best research methods to prevent another pandemic, whether that's GoF research or something else.

Even if "we" figure out how the animal-jump can occur, it's not like "we" can stop it or even predict it.

And the probability that what is created in a lab will be close enough to what is naturally occurring in nature to be useful are none to zero.

> Even if "we" figure out how the animal-jump can occur, it's not like "we" can stop it or even predict it.

The first step is understanding. Until you understand how it happens, statements about whether or not you can prevent it do not make much sense to me.

For example: imagine you have not yet discovered that the unwashed hands of doctors are transmitting disease in a hospital. You might make a statement very similar to yours about how "even if we can figure out how people get sick, it's not like we can stop it".

That's true, but whether the understanding is worth the risk is questionable. It seems likely that we've managed to cause rather than prevent a pandemic with this particular research.

I’m not sure how realistic your example is. Prior to discovering handwashing, were scientists doing things they knew had the potential to get literally everyone morbidly sick, just to try figuring out how it worked?

> The first step is understanding.

This is a slogan with no logical value.

> Until you understand how it happens, statements about whether or not you can prevent it do not make much sense to me.

Except we do understand. It seems to me that you are lacking is basic scientific knowledge. Virus mutates naturally and become more virulent due to evolution.

> For example: imagine you have not yet discovered that the unwashed hands of doctors are transmitting disease in a hospital. You might make a statement very similar to yours about how "even if we can figure out how people get sick, it's not like we can stop it".

We can control our hands, we can't control viruses in nature.

The problem is, there's no real clinical benefit that comes out of gain of function research. Virologists claim that there is, but they can't point to examples of where it helped us actually treat or prevent something.

Basically they're creating bigger and bigger fires and claiming that doing so somehow helps firefighters. Next we'll have nuclear weapons researchers claiming that higher yields are good to know about so we can work out how to protect against stronger explosions.

The potential benefit is developing novel viruses. That's it. They will likely be infectious. Hopefully, ahem, your operating protocols prevent the release of that virus and you study it in model organisms to figure out metabolic pathways to fight it before such a real virus occurs naturally.

I suppose I'm operating from the belief that everyone cares about preventing possible virologic doomsday weapons. I'm sure quite a few people have not the slightest concern.

So, we need to do more research until we will find an ultimate weapon against viruses.

As an alternative, we need to stop development of new viruses, both naturally and in labs, including Russian and North Korean labs.

> Compare and contrast to activities that are very dangerous and have nearly infinite catastrophic risks but we do every day: driving, flying, operating nuclear power plants, refining oil, and much much more.

What? The risks for each of those, even the nuclear power plant operation, are extremely limited and localized. GoF research has potential near-extinction levels of risk. Nuclear weapons are the ony thing on remotely the same tier IMO. It's not to say that GoF is not a good idea, as clearly there is potential benefit. But to compare it to the risks of driving a car is apples to radioactive oranges.

Stupid GoF research has those risks. Totally eliminating a research methodology because of possible bad actors is just like how nuclear energy was delayed for decades because of green ooze.

With all respect to nuclear threat. It doesn't self replicate.

It’s not just about bad actors. It’s that the techniques (serial passaging) aren’t even controllable in the sense that we don’t know what will result.

GoF is often not lab engineering and the outcomes are not predictable and the range of possible danger is almost infinite. Even from perfectly well intentioned actors.

Not knowing the result is the point. You develop novel viruses that you may not be able to imagine and then study how they impact an organism. This is useful.

I agree with your sentiment, but you are contradicting yourself

Nuclear accidents cannot be [1] limited and localized, and also [2] at the same tier as GoF (...since GoF outcomes are certainly not [1]).

There was no contradiction. The difference was nuclear power plant vs nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons vs. nuclear power plants. Even terrorist attacks on nuclear power plants or maximum meltdowns aren't GoF tier. Only nuclear war.

I don't have any particular opinion on fauci and 2 years ago I'd have agreed on pretty much everything you said. The issue though is not necessarily the GoF research by itself. If the scientists involved did not try to completely silence everyone, cover their tracks and basically stonewall any potential investigation, I wouldn't see the problem.

From my point of view, you simply cannot assess the risk when the main party involved in taking and being responsible for said risk has proven itself to be so shady. We all know that there areinherent dangers to this type of research, but we can't account for human deception and tribal wagon circling on top of that.

The proponents of GoF could've come clean, been transparent and welcomed the scrutiny considering the insane magnitude of the situation. But they have not! Even if it turns out that this is purely zoonotic, the trust is rightfully broken imo. Maybe research should continue, even on GoF, but consequences should now be clear. The article details such a long pattern of deliberate obfuscation, gaslighting and outright manipulation that it's becomes impossible to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Also, considering that we went through the biggest pandemic of the past century during which most people have seen their lives literally dictated by arbitrary (and very low) risk thresholds that authorities have decided to follow... it would be a bit rich to now just say that we have to live with the risks of scientists fucking up and that we have to let the pros handle it. Yes screw ups happen, but asking billions of people to just live with the consequences won't work.

Again, 2 years ago I'd have said that we need to take the risk because it can have tremendous benefits. But as much as appealing to "commoners" might sound lazy, there's still something deeply wrong when we see a much stronger and visceral reactions/consequences to maskless "karens" than we do to the individuals involved with orgs like the EcoHealth alliance. Yes it's maybe a populist take, but at some point the elitism becomes so blatant that even populism makes sense

> Overall global research did in fact prep us for SARS-CoV-2.

Didn't feel like it.

We had a vaccine candidate within a few days as I recall. That's miraculous.

That was mostly due to advances in mRNA technology, no? Moderna was able to design the vaccine in days mostly because of it's RNA tech, not because it was prepared for a coronavirus pandemic.

Definitely mRNA advancements played a huge role, but it certainly sounds like coronavirus research played its part.

https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2021/0...

All that was needed was knowing spike is a target.

The tail risk of taking viruses and deliberately making them more dangerous is not even comparable to the tail risks of flying, driving, or (imo) operating nuclear power plants. This is either a profoundly ignorant statement or just disingenuous. Like seriously, this is a mind boggling statement you just made

This is missing basic understanding risk management.

Parent is solely focused on probability, when what really matters is outcome.

Lets say that for every 10 years: 1) p of lab leak is 0.002% vs 2) p of nuclear accident is 0.03%

Although (2) is much more probable, from a risk management perspective, (1) is unacceptable because risks compound over time and critically, the domain of outcomes are vastly less localized and certain than (2).

The conspiracy theory (at this point, is it even one?) is that they want to create a virus that targets only certain ethnic group, like SARS2 did to some extent, or at least being a able to have the vaccine before everyone else, which also happened to some extent.

Because otherwise there are no valid reasons to create this kind of pathogens in labs; the chance the bugs created there will be similar to the naturally occurring ones are basically none and even less so that the vaccines or treatment will be or remain efficient treatment.

> they want to create a virus that targets only certain ethnic group

Ok that is totally made up.

There are plenty of reasons that researchers make dangerous pathogens that have nothing to do with ethnic cleansing.

Some of these methods even get published despite the risks that the knowledge presents https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.10875

Can you explain what you mean by “totally made up?”

Are you saying literally no one at all wants this? Just that there are also other reasons to do the research? Something else?

I think that the covid pandemic is highly unlikely to be the result of such research. It's much more likely to be the result of research into how to prevent future pandemics and treat coronaviruses.

Ok, I think that’s reasonable. At the level of individual research directors, I agree that probably the large majority of them have good intentions.

My concern is that there aren’t just altruistic research directors. There are funders. There are politicians. There are militaries. There are covert agents. And I get really concerned how easy it is for actors with less savory, noble intentions to coopt naive researchers into participating in a larger agenda.

It’s super convenient for everyone to be able to have the plucky, innocent, earnest research director come out with shining optimism about the potential. And it’s a convenient reason not to totally slam the brakes on research that, for better or worse, may lead (may have led) to global pandemic.

Not sure what the GP's point was but I'll just point out that there is literally a conspiracy theory being circulated right now that says just that. It's being used in Russia to justify the war in Ukraine.

> Ok that is totally made up.

https://guardian.ng/features/health/bioweapons-designed-to-k...

"A new report from Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk says that world governments have failed when it comes to preparing against threats like futuristic bioweapons powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and genetic manipulation. Such weapons would have to power to target specific DNA, and kill certain races of people leaving other swaths of the population unharmed."

Additional information from a biochemist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjfvHOcfEUQ

> There are plenty of reasons that researchers make dangerous pathogens that have nothing to do with ethnic cleansing.

Such as? The article you posted merely states that it is possible and that they "wish" it will lead to more vaccine research, without saying how.

This was a thing a few years ago.

There were alleged leaks from a whistle-blower from the CCP regarding developing bio-weapons that targeted specific gene sequences attributed to certain ethnicities.

>no valid reasons to create this kind of pathogens in labs; the chance the bugs created there will be similar to the naturally occurring ones are basically none and even less so that the vaccines or treatment will be or remain efficient treatment.

This is literally the purpose of gain of function virology research. Modify bugs in ways that could be seen in nature and explore vaccines and treatments.

> Modify bugs in ways that could be seen in nature and explore vaccines and treatments.

There are no reasons to believe the mutants created in laboratories will arise in nature nor that the vaccines or treatments will be effective compared to what nature does. Added to the fact that GOF research never produced any kind of meaningful treatment or response so far and given how they are dangerous and leaks happen all the time; they should be outright banned.

This is where it becomes more sinister. You have to consider that other countries are doing the same research, and developing super bugs that only they have the treatment for

Gain of function isn't about predicting future natural mutations. It's about generating virus that can be used in dish and animal model studies, often blending features of existing viruses.

They are banned. It is bioweapons research but under a different name.

And, frankly, the purpose does not make it valid.

The research should not be done because it has not proven to provide beneficial treatments.

> doing gain of function research - deliberately creating new variants of viruses to study them

What do they learn from these studies? The drawbacks to GOF is clear - but what are the potential gains that makes the risks worthwhile?

Disclaimer: I think the virus leaked from a lab because scientists are usually more stupid and reckless than what their funders think they are, so maybe I'm insane and you shouldn't listen to me because I can affect your mental health. Also what I will write may be very dangerous misinformation so be careful because if you keep reading you consent to being misinformed. This writing is known by the state of California to cause cancer.

There's two objectives of this type of research. One is that after you have the new virus you can try different drugs on it, so that if gets out you can rapidly control it. Usually the drugs you try are ones that the company you work for sell or have a patent for. I think creating a pathogen and then testing how you can cure it with stuff that you can sell for a big profit creates a conflict of interest if it's also your responsibility to be sure it's not released, but apparently I'm pretty alone in this conspiranoic belief.

The other objective is creating a bioweapon, or getting ready for one. The US allegedly withdrew from researching bioweapons in an offensive manner but offensive and defensive research are very similar in that field because you speculate what viruses your alleged adversaries have and then recreate them to try the vaccines against them.

One other rationale I've seen is to create self-disseminating vaccines: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-020-1254-y

Yeah but that's like a very long-term goal for which it's not even clear there's a legal framework or even a market for such products.

Do you mean it's a long term goal in terms of ability or in terms of policy? Cause as far as I know there's been at least one experiment doing this already, all the way back in 2001:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11483281/

Policy a bit but mostly market, I think it can be done. People already show with their wallets that they prefer to get either "meat products" where the origin of the meat is dubious and hidden so you are probably getting scraps and meat from factory farms, and on the other end they want free range no antibiotics products. This pathogen vaccine thing doesn't make sense in factory farming and would "polute" free range, and for a good reason.

Hmm, yeah idk about the industrial agriculture market either. But a lot of the papers about these argue that this stuff is necessary to prevent climate change driven zoonotic diseases. So I guess the "market" would be governments. The lack of clear legal framework might stop some countries from trying this stuff out but probably not all of them.

If it's going to be anything like GMO soy that Monsanto pushed into the Buenos Aires government in Argentina because "it was the future and we need it to feed the world after climate change" then maybe they'll try it on another third world "weak" or "cheap" government. Also BTW after that the US passed the law saying if something is GMO it needs to be on the label and there was a huge campaign against GMO foods so they pushed out the farmers using GMO in most of the third world out of the US market. Lovely.

I wouldn't be surprised if it goes the same way, push the little guy into trying it and then push everything else in the supply chain so that their meat can only be used for low margin cheap shit.

Even if scientists are competent, virus can be leaked because of someone else stupidity. For example, look at blast in «Vector» lab, Novosibirsk, RF, Sep 16 2019, where Russian first responders entered into biosafety level 4 lab without protective equipment, then opened every door checking for fire and stole some equipment. How you protect your lab from that?

I keep hearing this a lot, but how do "we as a society" have a "conversation" about something, exactly? Twitter?

Yes. And here, and Facebook, and at the bus stop, in the office breakroom, around the dinner table, etc.

And hopefully enough of the people in those conversations then write their representatives.

That's adorable. The reality looks more like an inflamed populist movement mounted atop a bucking orange baffoon.

Somehow the world came to a consensus that nuclear weapons should never be used, and that genocide and slavery are reprehensible. Creating and/or modifying viruses to better infect humans belongs on the short global "don't do" list.

Not doing gain of function research is like not doing disaster recovery drills or penetration tests at the tech companies.

gain of function research is more like inventing novel nuclear weapons more likely to kill humans to study bomb shelter and anti radiagion technology than any drill. the pathogens created are not drills.

Only if nuclear weapons would evolve by its own, and on insanely much higher speed than what you can invent.

But if the drills end up killing thousands or the pen tests end up causing massive data breaches, wouldn't you agree that the pen tester or drill organizer should be held liable? Or do you just let them do it again because it's just a risk we need to take

If you leak pathogen - sure. But there’s no proof of any kind that it happened, and people fear mongering greatly overestimate abilities of gain of function. It’s like Skynet vs current state of an AI.

We don’t ban pen tests, just because people who have 0 understanding of it are sacred of it.

There is obviously a risk of pathogen leak..

https://armscontrolcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Esc...

And there are highly qualified experts in the field who view GoF research as the most likely source of COVID-19, so on what basis are you so confident that it doesn't pose a major risk?

Lab leaks (even without GoF involved) are remarkably common events.

So shouldn’t be base our regulation on that reality?

There have been many documented instances of lab leaks. It's even happened with Covid-19 research[1] at least once that was reported, and with the virus being pandemic around most of the world I'd assume there were many other leaks that weren't reported because nobody could prove it came from a lab. And even if the evidence that the original Covid-19 resulted from a lab leak is weak the evidence that the Omicron variant came from a lab is much stronger.

Scientists are only human and bio research labs don't have the same culture of continuous improvement and lack of blame that have let the airline industry, say, get to its current level of safety.

EDIT: Oops, forgot to add the citation

[1] https://fortune.com/2021/12/10/taiwan-investigates-covid-lab...

A paper from 2008:

Synthetic recombinant bat SARS-like coronavirus is infectious in cultured cells and in mice

https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0808116105

One of the listed authors is Ralph Baric.

Don't worry we can just change the agency's definition of "gain-of-function" in the continued War on Words.

No this is not new information. Rand Paul has been on this for a long time, but has been censored from most platforms because of it.

Wait a few years until you hear about the biochem weapons labs in Ukraine.

I'm confused about this comment. The biochem weapons lab in Ukraine are accusations Putin has made but has not substantiated, whereas the GoF research being done in Wuhan is known and there is ample evidence from many sources, including this Vanity Fair article. If you have a problem with the article's contents, please post your own comment on the main feed instead of making snark comments on mine. Thanks.

The WIV doing dangerous GoF on Coronaviruses were widely described as unsubstantiated allegations by misinformation spreaders who had no evidence at all, right up until people managed to break through the propaganda and censorship. Now as far as you're concerned it's known, because Vanity Fair wrote about it.

But here's the thing. Vanity Fair wrote about this theory in 2020 too:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/why-scientists-belie...

“The Discussion Is Basically Over”: Why Scientists Believe the Wuhan-Lab Coronavirus Origin Theory Is Highly Unlikely. Trump and Mike Pompeo’s favorite blame-China theory makes great propaganda—but dubious science.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/inside-the-the-viral...

"An opinion-section column and a British tabloid story are hardly enough to give the Wuhan lab theory full mainstream credibility"

The quantity of things that are true yet lack "mainstream credibility" is quite large, because the self-appointed mainstream isn't very good at figuring out what's true. The Ukraine labs story comes from evidence gathered from Hunter Biden's laptop, which, if we recall, resulted in the New York Post story about it being immediately frozen by Twitter in an unprecedented manner. You couldn't even share links to it privately. Justified because the story was "Russian misinformation" except it wasn't, and now even the NYT has admitted the contents are authentic. What was on that laptop, well:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10652127/Hunter-Bid...

The Russian government held a press conference Thursday claiming that Hunter Biden helped finance a US military 'bioweapons' research program in Ukraine. However the allegations were branded a brazen propaganda ploy to justify president Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine and sow discord in the US. But emails and correspondence obtained by DailyMail.com from Hunter's abandoned laptop show the claims may well be true. The emails show Hunter helped secure millions of dollars of funding for Metabiota, a Department of Defense contractor specializing in research on pandemic-causing diseases. He also introduced Metabiota to an allegedly corrupt Ukrainian gas firm, Burisma, for a 'science project' involving high biosecurity level labs in Ukraine.

If you rely on places like Vanity Fair then you'll always be behind the curve on these things, constantly saying that yesterday's lunatic fringe conspiracy is obviously reasonable, whilst today's is not.

i'm not worried about it big brother keeps us safe and happy he helps me so i can't ever be wrong

Look I find Rand Paul as amusing as the next guy and I like that he has a voice, but he's been censored because he sounds insane. I watched most of the discussions with Fauci honestly it's just two old dudes that hate each other trying to get the other dude to say the thing that will give them their political win.

> two old dudes that hate each other trying to get the other dude to say the thing that will give them their political win.

That describes a huge proportion of contemporary politics.

Insane as he comes off sounding to you, what do you make of his position on this subject?

I would say I agree with his position more than any other senator, but I think he focuses too much on what Fauci did or didn't know or do about gain of function research and not enough on actually investigating where the virus came from. I don't care about Fauci, I think Paul wants to out him to show a political victory but honestly that wouldn't change anything. The idea of the senate committee was to investigate the lab leak theory, but Paul made it about investigating Fauci and I think that was not for the benefit of the people but for his own personal campaign agenda and that sucks.

I agree with you, but he doesn’t really have the authority to push the investigation in any other way than to roast whoever he has access to in public meetings. There isn’t congressional support to pass a resolution or bill to do so. He holds minority views within a minority party, and he is just one legislator, not an executive.

In other words, the only way that Rand Paul can influence the situation in any meaningful way is through political means. So, I find it hard to fault the theatrics with Fauci as distasteful as there are.

He has an army of publicly funded staffers and has resources that I would never dream off and will never have in my life to actually do research into where the virus came from. He can do all the theatrics he wants as long as he's also using his resources for something that is not digging dirt on Fauci also.

I don't buy when politicians start being all like "look I agree with you and that's my end game but first we need to get rid of this guy, and then we win the election, and then we put this other guy in that position and then and then and then". It's not true he can't do better now, it's just not convenient to him and since it's convenient to me I will not support him.

Rand Paul knows Fauci suppressed information and lied to congress. He has to attack his credibility and management of the pandemic to open the door for further investigation.

In his position he can't investigate where the virus actually came from. Absolutely all formal channels were blocked by widespread censorship, which is why the investigation was done by groups of anonymous internet users like DRASTIC, and relies so heavily on leaked documents. How exactly is a Senator meant to make that happen?

As a member of the legislative branch, Paul's role is fairly narrow: he can summon the people who actually do the work to ask them pointy questions, and try to build support for changing the law. If you look at how things are done in the UK Parliament or other legislative bodies in democracies, it's no different. The question of who is in power is the key one they focus on because they can't micro-manage the details of every possible government agency.

I think with him being the highest paid employee In The entire U.S. federal government and being the figurehead controlling the restrictions on our lives for 2+ years then caring about him is justified.

Unfortunately this is the way he must proceed in order to bring about change, within the confines of his role and the law.

I do think even in this very narrow role he may be succesful. There seems to be sufficient support built-up for an investigation to happen before long, whereas less than a year ago this seemed unfathomable.

He sounds insane because the media you consume tells YOU he should sound insane.

“A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.”

― Kurt Vonnegut,

I don't have anything in particular against insane people, most of my family has anger issues, I didn't have a happy childhood, I have friends with degenerative conditions, etc, etc ,etc... Rand Paul sound insane to me because I have a great deal of experience with both down to earth and psychotic people, grounded and dissociative people, all in real life. Based on that experience, Paul's performance in the committee looks more like what an intoxicated autistic individual edging a psychotic breakdown looks like _in real life_ and not on TV or the media, than what a down to earth honest legislator trying to investigate a mass pandemic looks like.

I understand he uses that character to push water down to his mill. That doesn't excuse his behavior on my regard and most of all it doesn't excuse his complete inaction doing actual research into where the virus came from instead of digging dirt on Fauci.

He sounds totally normal to me, honest and serious, but very much normal. Maybe we’ve become so accustomed to bullshit and sugarcoating that we’ve unwittingly reframed seriousness and rigor into seeming ludicrous?

> Paul's performance in the committee looks more like what an intoxicated autistic individual edging a psychotic breakdown looks like

I thought so, too. His presentation was overly theatrical. But on the other hand, he has been vindicated on most of the points he made against Fauci. Any reasonable person would consider what they were doing gain-of-function research. I don't think Fauci has any maniacal plans or backroom pharma deals going on, he's just a corrupt bureaucrat trying to cover his ass for a series of incompetent decisions.

A guy can be drunk and autistic while at the same time being 100% correct.

Just because you’re an expert in crazy people and you see them everywhere doesn’t mean this particular one is wrong.

And honestly, if you were a senator and had inside information that convinced you the pandemic was deliberate and funded by the US government, I would hope you’d act a little unhinged, too.

This is basically bioweapon research, I posted a link about it before and it got flagged.

Coincidentally, the moratorium on gain of function research was dropped during the Trump administration, though I believe funding to Wuhan’s virology institute started in the Obama administration.

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