Fauci Dances on the Line of a Perjury Charge As He Parses and Equivocates as to Whether the US Funded Gain-of-Function Research on Bat Viruses at the Wuhan Lab

by Ace

“Gain-of-function” is the deliberately anodyne jargon for giving a virus a potent new ability it didn’t have — like altering the protein spikes of a bat virus so that it can infect humans.
 
Which is precisely what Dr. Shi “The Bat Lady” was doing at the laughably-sloppy Wuhan Institute of Virology.
 
And the US government was funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology indirectly, by funding a group called “EcoHealth Alliance,” which in turn sent part of the money it got from the US government to Wuhan.
 
A bit of reading will help you spot Fauci’s evasions — and lies.
 
Michael Tracy writes of the powerful case that The Bat Lady made Covid-19 in her lab and let it escape.
 
And he writes of the media’s refusal to correct its prior claims that the lab-leak hypothesis was a “conspiracy theory” that was “debunked” within days of the covid outbreak making headlnes.

These declarations [that the lab-leak hypothesis is “debunked”] look dopier than ever after a new article was published this week by the journalist Nicholas Wade, who for many years was a science correspondent for the New York Times. At the very least, Wade demonstrates that the “lab-leak” theory ought not to be discounted. But he also goes much further, showing that the theory is in fact highly plausible. The article was first self-published on Medium, then later reproduced by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. While long, it’s worth reading in full even if (like me) you are effectively illiterate in the technical scientific details.In summary, here’s what one might call a “kicker” paragraph:

It’s documented that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were doing gain-of-function experiments designed to make coronaviruses infect human cells and humanized mice.

“Humanized mice” are genetically modified mice whose cells have human-like walls, which permits them to be used as test subjects to see if viruses will affect humans.
 

This is exactly the kind of experiment from which a SARS2-like virus could have emerged. The researchers were not vaccinated against the viruses under study, and they were working in the minimal safety conditions of a BSL2 laboratory. So escape of a virus would not be at all surprising.

Biosafety Level 2 is the same level of bio-security required in your local dentist office. It requires a facemask, some gloves, and signage indicating that this is a BSL2 area.
 
Obviously, viruses can easily escape this “security” regime.
 
And they frequently do.

In all of China, the pandemic broke out on the doorstep of the Wuhan institute. The virus was already well adapted to humans, as expected for a virus grown in humanized mice. It possessed an unusual enhancement, a furin cleavage site, which is not possessed by any other known SARS-related beta-coronavirus, and this site included a double arginine codon also unknown among beta-coronaviruses. What more evidence could you want, aside from the presently unobtainable lab records documenting SARS2’s creation?

I noted that covid-19 had a furin cleavage site just as you’d expect to see in an engineered virus, but I forgot to include the critical detail that this sort of feature is rare and is not found in any other SARS-related coronaviruses.

Wade also quotes the eminent virologist David Baltimore, the former president of CalTech and discoverer of an enzyme used in all PCR-based COVID tests, as saying:
 
“When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus… These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2.”
 
So there you have one of the most esteemed virologists in the world stating that the current body of evidence poses a “powerful challenge” to the theory that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated by jumping naturally from wildlife to humans, which is the theory that has been propagated ubiquitously across the media for the past 15 months. And this after we’d all been confidently told by journalists at major national outlets that an alternative hypothesis — that it originated by leakage at a lab — was no more than a “conspiracy theory,” and had been authoritatively “debunked.”

Tracey notes that the Washington Post was among the most aggressive outlets proclaiming that the lab-leak theory was “debunked” — but resorted to selectively quoting an expert who actually supported the possibility of a lab-leak as the source of covid by simply refusing to report that portion of his remarks:

This is interesting because one of the expert sources quoted in the Washington Post article as purportedly having “debunked” the lab-leak theory, molecular biologist Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, is also quoted in Wade’s new article giving strong credence to the theory. Moreover, Ebright affirmed in a declaration to me his view that the lab-leak theory has actually been the strongest hypothesis about the origin of COVID since… January 2020. A month before the Washington Post cited him as a preeminent “debunker” of the theory.

Ebright did say that the genomic analysis did not support the conclusion of an artificially engineered virus — which the Washington Post reported.
 
But he also said that the possibility of a lab leak was a very real possibility — which the Washington Post refused to report.
 
He wrote to Tracey, saying:

I was surprised that the February 17, 2020 article in WaPo quoted only my comments on the genome sequence and not my comments on the lab-accident hypothesis.

I think this guy means that the virus might have been natural, but it escaped from the lab it where was being experimented on. I’m not sure.
 
The Washington Post sure was determined to, um, “simplify” his testimony to conform to the narrative they chose (with no scientific expertise of their own) as the obviously-correct one.
 
Tracey writes:

Read more