Here's The Frammis

I've always been drawn to the vocabulary of the gamblers, pimps, thieves, and con artists in Jim Thompson's noir thrillers. In that world, "frammis" has a specific meaning, roughly the structure of the whole nefarious deal, the outline of the con. The Wuhan lab leak story is fast-moving, but I think I'm beginning to see the frammis here.

In 2014, the Obama White House announced a "pause" in funding for the type of gain-of-function research that led to the Wuhan lab leak. According to the NIH at that time:

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced(link is external) today that the U.S. government will undertake a deliberative process to assess the risks and benefits of certain gain-of-function (GOF) experiments with influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses in order to develop a new Federal policy regarding the funding of this research. . . . “GOF studies” refers to scientific research that increases the ability of any of these infectious agents to cause disease by enhancing its pathogenicity or by increasing its transmissibility among mammals by respiratory droplets.

In light of the quickly-emerging consensus that the whole COVID pandemic was the result of a gain-of-function lab leak, the "pause" could hardly have been more justified. But in 2017, the "pause" was lifted, and this meant that funding for GOF research resumed. According to the NIH in a December 19, 2017 release:

Today, the National Institutes of Health announced that it is lifting a funding pause dating back to October 2014 on gain-of-function (GOF) experiments involving influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses. GOF research is important in helping us identify, understand, and develop strategies and effective countermeasures against rapidly evolving pathogens that pose a threat to public health.

There are two interesting issues here. One is that the 2014 pause is described as a White House initiative, but the 2017 lifting of the pause was apparently the initiative of the NIH, the deep state, not the White House. By 2017, the White House was the Trump administration, and quite possibly nobody there was familiar with the policy decisions that led to the 2014 pause. Did NIH clear lifting the pause with any higher authority? The second question is that the 2017 announcement lifting the pause goes on to describe an "HHS P3CO Framework" that reviews and approves GOF funding. This designation appears in the Fauci e-mail trove. I'll return to it below.

But more important, we're at the linchpin of the frammis: a decision was made to resume funding GOF research. This means somebody got money that hadn't got it before the pause was lifted. Who was this? For whose benefit? Who drove the process of lifting the pause in NIH? If we answer these questions, we're going to make some progress.

There's a subtext to the whole early 2020 Fauci e-mail trove, and that's that by late January-early February, it was plain to Fauci and a few others that a lab leak of a dangerous virus had occurred some months earlier in Wuhan. They immediately undertook a high-priority hush-hush effort first, to minimize the danger of the leaked virus, and second, to cover up the leak. This suggests to me that Fauci and others at his level in NIH had guilty knowledge of circumstances behind the 2017 lifting of the pause.

(This also explains Fauci's flip-flops as the crisis arose in late winter 2020: he first minimized the virus, telling people to go on cruises, saying masks weren't necessary, and decrying Trump's China travel ban. They were part of an early strategy of nothing-to-see-here, which broke down, at which point Fauci had to adopt a pose of benevolent tyranny and lockdowns, accompanied by a coordinated media effort to apotheosize him.)

A Feb 1, 2020 e-mail from Fauci to his chief deputy, Hugh Auchincloss, reflects this urgency and suggests some of the structure in the frammis:

“Hugh: It is essential that we speak this AM,” Fauci wrote. “Keep your cell phone on … Read this paper as well as the e-mail that I will forward to you now. You will have tasks today that must be done.”

. . . “The paper you sent me says the experiments were performed before the gain of function pause [in October 2014] but have since been reviewed and approved by NIH,” Auchincloss emailed Fauci later in the day. “Not sure what that means since Emily is sure that no Coronavirus work has gone through the P3 framework. She will try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad.”

The P3 framework Auchincloss mentions is presumabvly the NIH approval process noted in the 2017 release from NIH. But it appears that Fauci bypassed the P3 framework as it applied to the Wuhan lab. A little-noticed story from this past April says,

A board created to oversee research that could make dangerous pathogens more contagious did not review a National Institutes of Health grant that funded a project in Wuhan, China to genetically modify bat-based coronaviruses, according to a new report.

The nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance received federal funding for its research without undergoing an independent review by the Potential Pandemic Pathogens Control and Oversight (P3CO), according to the Daily Caller.

The grant included $600,000 in funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the lab where some experts believe COVID-19 first leaked into the human population in late 2019.

Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard H. Ebright told the Daily Caller that the offices of the director for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — the subagency that funded EcoHealth — and the NIH have “systematically thwarted — indeed systematically nullified — the HHS P3CO Framework by declining to flag and forward proposals for review.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci is the director of the NIAID while Dr. Francis S. Collins leads the NIH.

So the 2014 pause was lifted in 2017, under puzzling circumstances, but a P3 framework was implemented to review GOF research -- except that Fauci then bypassed the framework that allowed the pause to be lifted.

Somebody really, really wanted EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan lab to get money. There's a closely related story at RedState on how Peter Daszak, the President of EcoHealth Alliance, began soliciting signers via e-mail on February 10 for a letter to The Lancet denouncing the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory. (Nearly all the signers had financial ties or relationships to Daszak and EcoHealth that weren't disclosed.)

I think this story has legs. My guess is that whistleblowers and disgruntled people will be coming forward, more each day.