by Scott Hounsel at RedState
In the early days of the pandemic, I found Dr. Anthony Fauci to be the typical government bureaucrat: well-meaning, but inept and ultimately unnecessary in the larger picture. Over the course of the pandemic, and especially due to the investigative reporting I’ve done on the origin of COVID-19, I’ve come to believe that Fauci’s desire to control the narrative on this subject deals squarely with his culpability in creating the pandemic in the first place.
While larger media outlets are now highlighting things reported here in May and June, such as NIH funding of gain-of-function research (or, research that makes viruses more deadly or contagious) at Wuhan and the conflict of interest of the vast majority of the Lancet letter’s signatories, they’re dancing around the bigger story:
Dr. Fauci, the NIAID, and the NIH ignored a ban on gain-of-function research instituted by the Obama administration in 2014 and continued to fund it until the Trump administration revoked funding in April 2020, and knowingly continued to fund research undertaken at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
These facts and many others were revealed in my May 13 piece, “Dr. Fauci’s Testimony to Rand Paul on ‘Gain-of-Function’ Research Certainly Seems Like It Was Untrue.”
As we’ve reported and as Fox News Channel’s Steve Hilton brought out nearly 10 months ago, Dr. Fauci has long been a cheerleader of GoF research. In 2011, Fauci and NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins went on an offensive regarding gain-of-function research, suggesting that such experiments, regardless of the associated dangers, are necessary. The next year, Fauci testified before Congress on the topic again, suggesting again that the benefits of the research outweigh the risks. Throughout the next couple of years, many within the scientific community became alarmed about gain-of-function research, especially after scientists created several chimeric viruses in labs that, had they gotten out, could have spelled global disaster. Yet, Dr. Fauci’s unqualified support continued.
As a result of the serious concern expressed about creating new, more lethal, and more transmissible viruses, the Obama Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services issued a moratorium on US funding of gain-of-function research, which took effect in 2014. At the time, there were more than a dozen studies that fell under the HHS order, including a study being performed by Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina.
Below is a copy of the letter sent to UNC:…
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