Gain Of Function Started In The US

The Fox News segment above from last Friday raises a little-noticed issue that's also been puzzling me: why had a pretty wide spectrum of US actors been funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab? The segment begins with China raising an issue that was bound to come up -- they're saying don't blame us, this is a US funded project. It covers this starting at abouit 2:55. but Laura Logan also makes the point that gain-of-function research had been a Fauci agenda item for a long time, even before it moved to China.

This sent me to searching the web. I found this article from November 2015 in Nature:

An experiment that created a hybrid version of a bat coronavirus — one related to the virus that causes SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) — has triggered renewed debate over whether engineering lab variants of viruses with possible pandemic potential is worth the risks.

. . . The findings reinforce >suspicions that bat coronaviruses capable of directly infecting humans (rather than first needing to evolve in an intermediate animal host) may be more common than previously thought, the researchers say.

But other virologists question whether the information gleaned from the experiment justifies the potential risk. Although the extent of any risk is difficult to assess, Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, points out that the researchers have created a novel virus that “grows remarkably well” in human cells. “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” he says.

It appears that the particular study in question here was done at the University of North Carolina -- Chapel Hill, and it may have led in part to the moratorium on such studies between 2014 and 2017 that Fauci was able to bypass.

It's clear that the risks implicit in this research were well known and fully understood, and Laura Logan's point in the Fox segment is partly that it was sent to China to minimize the risk in the US. That sure worked.

I also went looking for the USA Today story cited in the Fox segment. The story by Alison Young was carefully isolated in the opinion section, and it ran on news dump Friday. It focuses on a February 1, 2020 conference call with Fauci and other gain-of-function researchers:

The teleconference on Feb. 1, 2020, appears to have played a pivotal role in shaping the early views of several key scientists whose published papers and public statements contributed to the shutting down of legitimate discussion about whether a laboratory in Wuhan, China, might have ignited the COVID-19 pandemic.

. . . Perhaps that’s because the early concerns among key scientists – like the conference call on Feb. 1, 2020 – were kept private until now. That call likely would have remained secret if not for documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

That teleconference was urgent enough it was scheduled on a Saturday afternoon.

. . . A day before the teleconference, Kristian Andersen, an expert in infectious disease genomics at the prestigious Scripps Research Translational Institute in California, had told Fauci first by phone and again later by email that the genetic structure of the virus looked like it might have been engineered in a lab.

. . . Andersen did not respond to repeated interview requests since last week. Late Thursday, a spokesperson said Andersen was traveling and unavailable.

Discussion of Andersen’s concerns had begun earlier on that Friday, Jan. 31, 2020, Fauci told me, when he had conferenced Andersen into a three-way call with Jeremy Farrar, director the Wellcome Trust, an influential and wealthy foundation based in London that funds global health research.

. . . “We agreed to convene by phone the next day,” Fauci told me. . . . Emails show the agenda for the one-hour meeting was short. . . . But details of what was said in the meeting, including extensive notes taken by one participant and further thoughts shared by others, were blacked out by the NIH before the emails were made public.

. . . Yet just three days after that Feb. 1 meeting, Andersen’s position on the virus’ potential origin changed dramatically. He had gone from having concerns about possible genetic engineering to telling another group of scientists “the data conclusively show” the virus wasn’t engineered, and calling suggestions of engineering “fringe” and “crackpot” theories.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Fauci, once it became clear that COVID was an engineered virus developed in a Chinese lab in a US-funded funded project, engineered a consensus to distract attention from this information and deflect blame from the people behind the project.

More is bound to come out. The USA Today story is potentially explosive, but the aggregators and blogs have so far completely missed it.