We’ve heard a lot about the origins of COVID 19, about the lab in Wuhan, and about the experiments being done there.
But the information shared by Tucker Carlson on Fox News last night kind of blew me away.
Was Tony Fauci funding the lab that released this plague on the earth?
And if so, why is he still chief medical officer to the President of the United States?
Tucker Carlson: Anthony Fauci let the coronavirus pandemic happen, why isn't there a criminal investigation?https://t.co/SICduxwlPF
— TongaYork (@YorkTonga) May 11, 2021
I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about the story.
Here’s what Tucker said last night:
So that lab, conducting research on the coronavirus, and how to make it transmissible to human beings, resulted almost certainly infected a lab researcher and spread from there. The first coronavirus patients didn’t come from the so-called wet market as we heard. That was a lie. The first patients of the coronavirus were employees at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Once again, why would the Wuhan lab be conducting experiments like that in the first place? Well, we know that Tony Fauci had authorized payment for the research. For five years — from 2014 to 2019 — the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Fauci runs, and has for decades, pumped money to a group called the EcoHealth Alliance.
The EcoHealth Alliance, run by a man called Dr. Peter Daszak, contracted with Dr. Shi to conduct gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.
Just before the pandemic became public knowledge — on December 9, 2019 — Peter Daszak sat for an interview that was streamed online. In that interview, he bragged about how easy it is to manipulate coronaviruses in lab experiments.
PETER DASZAK: Coronavirus is a pretty good… You can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. It’s spike protein, Spike protein drives a lot of what happens with the coronavirus, zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, build the protein. And we worked with Ralph Barrack at UNC to do this. Insert into a backbone of another virus and then do some work in the lab.
Just days after he said that, it became clear that this new version of coronavirus, this novel coronavirus, what we now call COVID-19, was running rampant through Wuhan then China then the world. Since the pandemic began, Peter Daszak, not surprisingly, has appeared on virtually every media platform available to him to deny, in the most strenuous and dismissive terms, that the Wuhan lab could be in any way linked to the outbreak, since he has very personal motives for claiming that. “The idea that this virus escaped from a lab is just pure baloney,” he said last year. But that’s a lie. It’s not pure baloney.
…
The WHO’s investigation into the origins of the virus was fraudulent, and that matters to public health globally. But one thing you’ll notice is that Tony Fauci did not say that. Why? Because once again, he’s implicated in it, personally. The gain-of-function research that Peter Daszak was bragging about in the video we just showed you had, in fact, been banned explicitly by the U.S. government. There was a federal moratorium on the funding of exactly the kind of gain-of-function experiments that went on in the Wuhan lab, to disastrous effects. So why didn’t the feds halt its funding to the lab in Wuhan? That is a central question, and Nicholas Wade looked into it.
Here’s what he found: “Someone wrote a loophole into the moratorium. The moratorium specifically barred funding any gain-of-function research that increased the pathogenicity of the flu, MERS or SARS viruses. But then a footnote on p.2 of the moratorium document states that ‘An exception from the research pause may be obtained if the head of the USG funding agency determines that the research is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.'”
And that’s exactly the loophole that was exploited. Who signed off on this? Tony Fauci — possibly along with Francis Collins, the director of the NIH — invoked that special exception in order to keep funding the Wuhan lab, and the deadly experiments that were going on there. The experiments that clearly went so wrong.
According to Richard Ebright, “Unfortunately, the NIAID Director [Fauci] and the NIH Director exploited this loophole to issue exemptions to projects subject to the pause – preposterously asserting the exempted research was ‘urgently necessary to protect public health or national security — thereby nullifying the pause.”
This wouldn’t have happened if Tony Fauci didn’t allow it to happen. That is clear.
So to summarize, the gain-of-function research being done at Wuhan, increasing the pathogenicity of the flu virus, was banned. Except for a loophole that invokes a special exception for research that is is “urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.” And Tony Fauci would have had to sign off on that exception since the US government was funding the company (Eco-Health) that funded the research at Wuhan.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave.
Tucker cites a piece by science writer Nicholas Wade as one of his main sources. It’s worth reading in its entirety but here is a section of the article:
From June 2014 to May 2019 Dr. Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance had a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, to do gain-of-function research with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Whether or not SARS2 is the product of that research, it seems a questionable policy to farm out high-risk research to unsafe foreign labs using minimal safety precautions. And if the SARS2 virus did indeed escape from the Wuhan institute, then the NIH will find itself in the terrible position of having funded a disastrous experiment that led to death of more than 3 million worldwide, including more than half a million of its own citizens.
The responsibility of the NIAID and NIH is even more acute because for the first three years of the grant to EcoHealth Alliance there was a moratorium on funding gain-of-function research. Why didn’t the two agencies therefore halt the Federal funding as apparently required to do so by law? Because someone wrote a loophole into the moratorium.
The moratorium specifically barred funding any gain-of-function research that increased the pathogenicity of the flu, MERS or SARS viruses. But then a footnote on p.2 of the moratorium document states that “An exception from the research pause may be obtained if the head of the USG funding agency determines that the research is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.”
This seems to mean that either the director of the NIAID, Dr. Anthony Fauci, or the director of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, or maybe both, would have invoked the footnote in order to keep the money flowing to Dr. Shi’s gain-of-function research.
“Unfortunately, the NIAID Director and the NIH Director exploited this loophole to issue exemptions to projects subject to the Pause –preposterously asserting the exempted research was ‘urgently necessary to protect public health or national security’ — thereby nullifying the Pause,” Dr. Richard Ebright said in an interview with Independent Science News.
When the moratorium was ended in 2017 it didn’t just vanish but was replaced by a reporting system, the Potential Pandemic Pathogens Control and Oversight (P3CO) Framework, which required agencies to report for review any dangerous gain-of-function work they wished to fund.
According to Dr. Ebright, both Dr. Collins and Dr. Fauci “have declined to flag and forward proposals for risk-benefit review, thereby nullifying the P3CO Framework.”
In his view, the two officials, in dealing with the moratorium and the ensuing reporting system, “have systematically thwarted efforts by the White House, the Congress, scientists, and science policy specialists to regulate GoF [gain-of-function] research of concern.”
Further information from Newsweek:
A decade ago, during a controversy over gain-of-function research on bird-flu viruses, Dr. Fauci played an important role in promoting the work. He argued that the research was worth the risk it entailed because it enables scientists to make preparations, such as investigating possible anti-viral medications, that could be useful if and when a pandemic occurred.
The work in question was a type of gain-of-function research that involved taking wild viruses and passing them through live animals until they mutate into a form that could pose a pandemic threat. Scientists used it to take a virus that was poorly transmitted among humans and make it into one that was highly transmissible—a hallmark of a pandemic virus. This work was done by infecting a series of ferrets, allowing the virus to mutate until a ferret that hadn’t been deliberately infected contracted the disease.
The work entailed risks that worried even seasoned researchers. More than 200 scientists called for the work to be halted. The problem, they said, is that it increased the likelihood that a pandemic would occur through a laboratory accident.
Dr. Fauci defended the work. “[D]etermining the molecular Achilles’ heel of these viruses can allow scientists to identify novel antiviral drug targets that could be used to prevent infection in those at risk or to better treat those who become infected,” wrote Fauci and two co-authors in the Washington Post on December 30, 2011. “Decades of experience tells us that disseminating information gained through biomedical research to legitimate scientists and health officials provides a critical foundation for generating appropriate countermeasures and, ultimately, protecting the public health.
Nevertheless, in 2014, under pressure from the Obama administration, the National of Institutes of Health instituted a moratorium on the work, suspending 21 studies.
Three years later, though—in December 2017—the NIH ended the moratorium and the second phase of the NIAID project, which included the gain-of-function research, began. The NIH established a framework for determining how the research would go forward: scientists have to get approval from a panel of experts, who would decide whether the risks were justified.
Where is the investigation into whether the actions of Dr. Fauci and the banned research conducted on novel coronaviruses led to this pandemic?
To quote Tucker, “In a functional country, there would be a criminal investigation into Tony Fauci’s role in the COVID pandemic that has killed millions and halted our country, changing it forever. “
But I’m not sure we’re living in a functional country anymore.
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