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You are getting downvoted because it's muckraking. There is nothing shady about NIAID giving a (verrrry small for this type of research) grant to a foreign rese
by arrosenberg 5y ago
You are getting downvoted because it's muckraking. There is nothing shady about NIAID giving a (verrrry small for this type of research) grant to a foreign research lab, which is doing research about a topic of interest. That's how you ensure the U.S. government gets a copy of the results.
- ricksunny 5y agoSince when has muckraking taken a pejorative meaning - especially one that would justify somebody’s downvote. The early 20th century muckrakers enabled much-needed and widespread reform.
- LegitShady 5y agoThere is a lot of evidence that Fauci had quite a bit of conflict of interest, and knew about the gain of function research long before he denied it to Rand Paul in May. It's not muckraking. There is heavy smoke, and people denying the existence of fire while trying to get people to stop looking for it.
- harryf 5y agoI'm not saying it's shady to provide that funding. What I'm saying is it demonstrates conflict of interest. Last year in May 5 2020 Fauci dismissed the idea that the virus came from a lab that his own organisation was providing funds to - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthony-fauci-wuhan-lab-coronavirus-source-dismissal/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthony-fauci-wuhan-lab-coronav... Whether or not anything shady was happening, the conflict of interest is clear.
- arrosenberg 5y agoIt's not a conflict of interest because Dr. Fauci wasn't gaining anything. The agency he is head of is specifically interested in infectious disease and has a large budget for grants. $120K per year pays for a couple plate of genetic samples and tech time to run them. Maybe in China you can run a few more for that cost, I don't know. As head of that agency, it's also his job to share his professional opinion with the public. For this, his reward is a public servant's salary. Seriously, what's he getting here for his supposed "deception"?
- bostonsre 5y agoJust playing devil's advocate, not convinced fauci had any malicious intentions, but he has one of the most highly public jobs in America, he gets to keep his job/power and maintain a future in politics. But he definitely does not seem like some power hungry egomaniacal player to me. His beliefs before and after and actions after the outbreak seemed to be consistent with someone that was trying to do the right thing for our country.
- colechristensen 5y agoI don't know about malice, but covering up or downplaying the possibility of a global pandemic being caused by activities he was involved in or encouraged... shit can be corrupt even if a person is not trying to take advantage of a situation. Placing blame isn't really all that important. Making sure none of this happens again for the same reasons is. If I was placing a bet, I'd say Wuhan researchers regularly got a handle on patents zero for cross species infection. In the course of the research a virus infected workers because of lax, sloppy, or otherwise inadequate controls; then despite the threat in order to save face government did everything they could to hide the mistake until it was far too late for anything to really be done about it.
- ethanbond 5y agoSo you’re criticizing a scientist for expressing skepticism toward a scenario that had (especially at the time) very limited evidence, and then just placing your own bet on a far more extreme, also non-substantiated version?
- eutropia 5y agoThe article states that at the time people were denying the possibility of a lab leak, there was a lack of credible evidence for zoonosis. If I’m evaluating hypotheses, it’s generally better that I wait for hard evidence before ruling one out. e.g. some kind of patient zero animal population. The lancet letter was at best extraordinarily premature.
- tootie 5y agoFauci is clearly dismissing the notion that it was engineered. He says pretty clearly that if a natural virus escaped the lab it would still be a natural virus and hence not a useful topic when it comes to treating it. I don't think he ever said it wasn't possible just that there's no reason to believe it. And it's understandably not his primary concern to figure out.
- um_ya 5y agoI think this whole thing is a great example of why you don't ban alternative viewpoints, even if considered "conspiracy theories". Zerohedge was reporting this early on, and Twitter banned them for "misinformation".
- JesseMReeves 5y agoThat newspaper scene from Men in Black. I’ve relived it a number of times over the past year particularly. Local mainstream “fact checkers” have even called Covid-19 a “right-wing conspiracy theory” in early 2020.
- loopz 5y agoPeople were dying of covid in hospital beds, still believing the virus is fake narrative.
- Workaccount2 5y agoI just want to point out that there is no real evidence of this. Statistically, I'm sure it happened at least once, you can find one example of anything, but this phrase originates with a single anecdotal story from a single nurse. There was no trend or array of stories. Just one lady who said she had someone denying it on their deathbed with zero corroboration, and then she got 2 days of news cycle.
- loopz 5y agoThere were random interviews in the capitol saying all these weird stuff from the internet, and people in US often know someone who'd be convinced this way. So its not like this crazy stuff is hard to prove is prevalent (pun intended) among certain groups. What is hard is actually putting figures on it when worldviews get so warped due to circular logic. This is bad, because there are real reasons people are upset. Underlying reasons that need to be properly addressed.
- jcrawfordor 5y agoWould Fauci have even known? Budget numbers say NIAID clears around $5 billion in grant funding per year and this grant was more at the $100k per year level. Another source shows that NIAID receives around 3,000 grant applications per year and that's just in two of their multiple grant types. It seems most likely to me that the grant was approved and funded by a subject-area committee without Fauci being involved at all. I would guess that when he "admitted to it" was probably the first time he knew.
- Throwawayaerlei 5y agoWhat's been highlighted of the FOIA released emails so far suggests he didn't know if his NIAID was funding Wuhan Institute of Virology SARS type coronavirus gain of function experiments, but he was quite concerned that might be the case. Look for the one where he tells someone to keep his cell phone on. It's something he'd likely be concerned about, because he's been a big booster of gain of function research, and the Institute famously houses China's first BSL-4 lab, although the article claims the Bat Lady said prior to the pandemic they were only using BSL-2 and -3 labs for their coronavirus research. This assumes she'd know about all that was going on the Institute.
- myfavoritedog 5y agoThe email trail is damning. Fauci knew that the possibility was there. Instead of pushing for discovery and transparency of what actually happened, he publicly and vehemently denied the possibility and gave fuel to those who wanted to call the "lab leak theory" people "conspiracy nuts". Fauci's elevation to sainthood was way too premature. His constant media appearances where he hasn't been questioned on any of this should be an object lesson to the public on media bias and the subsequent narrative bubbles that impact our society. It's not surprising that the same people pushing Michael Avenatti as the next great politician have been the same people promoting Fauci.
- devtul 5y agoThe bar is really low if the person helps push the narrative.
- loonster 5y agoFor conflict of interest, please see Fauci's wife.
- harryf 5y agoWow you weren't kidding. His wife, Christine Grady, Christine is Chief of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. She's cited in papers on "conflicts of interest" in medicine. They must have some interesting dinner table talk... Here's an interview with her... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhwrICQTcQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhwrICQTcQg ... her opening statement (paraphrased) is "saving lives in the context of vaccines ... is about firstly maximising benefit and secondly about fairness and equity" ... make of that what you will.
- wwweston 5y ago"Conflict of interest" primarily describes situations in which you're deciding policy that applies to personal financial stake. A situation in which you've (a) contributed to decision-making on multiple public funding priorities including this lab and (b) state a judgment that lab was not the source of the outbreak isn't a conflict of interest, it's everyday policy life. Especially given that there's nothing glaringly wrong with the reasoning Fauci gave for that judgment in the article you linked. If you think that reasoning has shortcomings, by all means, feel free to actually come up with something resembling a counterargument instead of vaguely implying "whether or not anything shady was going on."
- simonh 5y agoFauci was responsible for the work of large swathes of the US medical research establishment, and was questioned on that work on a daily basis. Does it make any sense to say he can't comment on the work of an organisation he runs because he runs it? In this case the lab didn't even work for him, it just got some small amount of funding from his organisation's budget but he had no say in it's operations. So he can comment on the work of his organisation, but not about the work of an organisation he partly funded? We know perfectly well he is not an external observer. That's not the capacity in which he's commenting, any more than a president is commenting in an external or impartial capacity about the work of the executive branches, or e.g. UN agencies partly funded by the US.
- okamiueru 5y agoWhy is disclosure of potential conflict of interest made out to be such a high bar? And why do you put arguments forth that did not exist in what you replied to? > Does it make any sense to say he can't comment on the work of an organisation he runs because he runs it? Is a straw man argument, because what was said was that the conflict of interest should have been disclosed. And, not that he cannot make a comment.
- simonh 5y agoOk, that's fair, but what I'm saying is no reasonable person would consider Fauci to be an independent observer of any of this. That's just not his role.
- hindsightbias 5y agoThe conflict of interest is with Trump. He lifted the ban and should take all the blame for any bad outcome from gain-of-function research. Instead he pushed a deliberate leak conspiracy as cover.
- scrubs 5y agoPlain Jane American here: my gut sense is something is off : you do not give funding to the Chinese (that's government to government) for research in this area. Something does not sit right. In the recent 25 years the US outsourced too much ... There's no implied or explicit coequal on this kind of R&D.
- dTal 5y agoWhy wouldn't you? All the research is (supposed to be) shared with the world anyway. If you're interested in a topic, and some other country is also interested, and they have a lab ready to go - why not throw some money at them to study your thing? Cheaper than building your own lab - especially when the phenomenon is regional.
- chasd00 5y agoHow could you ever expect the CCP to be even remotely honest in any “share this with the world” R/D scenario?
- snowwrestler 5y agoAt the height of the Cold War, when the U.S. and Soviet Union governments were sworn enemies and on the verge of shooting nuclear weapons at each other, U.S. and Soviet scientists collaborated openly and productively on a wide variety of subjects. Even with government funding. It’s not unusual to expect scientists to collaborate openly across national borders despite political winds, and in fact it is desirable.
- kelp 5y agoAlso funding the research is one way to ensure the results are shared.
- mnw21cam 5y agoBecause they are competing on a vaguely equal footing with all the other researchers around the world. Funders want published results in return for funding, and will typically give funding to the researchers that have the perceived highest chance of publishing results if given the money. This incentivises researchers to publish anything they can. It means that money gets sent to China if it looks like the Chinese researchers are likely to make good use of it and return results. That's how academia works.
- intricatedetail 5y agoOne simply don't give funding to an openly racist state that runs concentration camps. That's insanity!
- wkearney99 5y agoby that same metric doing business with the US could likewise be problematic. Are you calling for that to stop, too?
- bryanwb 5y agoIt isn't muckraking. Fauci has a clear conflict of interest. Further he argued in favor of GoF research while acknowledging it could lead to a pandemic. He literally wrote that in an academic paper. https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fauci-argued-benefits-of-gain-of-function-research-outweighed-pandemic-risk-in-2012-paper/ https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fauci-argued-benefits-of...
- loveistheanswer 5y agoFrom Fauci's paper: >In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic? Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario... >Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks. It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature, and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky. So the basic risk calculation Fauci is using (which is disputed by many scientists and virologists) is this: Lives saved by GoF research > lives lost by inevitable lab leak + lives lost by inevitable natural pandemic Gain of function research has been going on for decades now. What evidence is there that this research has actually served its purpose to help save lives? Did GoF help us at all with the current pandemic?
- playingchanges 5y agoThe FT quotes: ‘120,000 a year for bat surveillance’. Seems negligible as an outsider.