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When I do incident command at my workplace, there are two goals in dealing with an incident: solving the problem, and preventing it from happening again. They a
by geofft 5y ago
When I do incident command at my workplace, there are two goals in dealing with an incident: solving the problem, and preventing it from happening again. They are both extremely important, but they happen in order.
While the incident is ongoing, any attempts to prevent the problem from happening in the future are a complete distraction. Write down notes and ideas somewhere so we don't forget, but the priority is on solving the incident that actually happened and is causing problems. If you say "What if we fixed this longstanding piece of tech debt that led up to the incident," however reasonable it is to fix it in light of the fact that it caused an incident, it's useless to bring it up now if you can't fix the tech debt immediately to resolve the incident. Along the same lines, attribution is interesting if it will help you deal with what is going on (e.g., there's high load on a low-level system and you want to know if anyone deployed anything recently, so that you can ask them to roll back); it's not really interesting if you know what's broken (e.g., a machine is powered off and needs to be turned back on... figuring out who pressed the power button isn't yet relevant).
Similarly, "We should stop funding gain-of-function research" may (or may not) be a valid conclusion, but it wouldn't have dealt with COVID-19 in particular. It might be worth doing it to make sure there's no COVID-22.
Even if it turns out to be true that COVID-19 came directly from research that would not have happened if it were not for Fauci, absent a reason to believe that anyone's response to COVID-19 specifically would have been different if they knew that, I don't see any reason it was improper not to draw attention to it at the time, and quite a few reasons why it was proper to focus attention on the problem at hand.
His comments in that May 2020 article are spot-on. If we knew that it was engineered, then yes, publicizing the lab notes that were used to build it could perhaps speed up the process of a vaccine or other countermeasure (but COVID-19 had already been sequenced by January 2020 and the sequence published, and vaccines were already in development then). But theories like "what if the researchers brought it in from the wild, and then it escaped their lab" should just have prompted the response "yes, so what." It's interesting now to prevent the next COVID; it's irrelevant re COVID-19.
And I certainly don't see the conflict of interest - what was Fauci gaining? His continued role? Again, at the time, the role was not determining whether to fund gain-of-function research, the role was figuring out how to get rid of COVID-19.
You could say that the NIH should have paused all funding for new virus research projects (unless they specifically related to dealing with COVID-19 in the short term), but that would have been a good idea regardless of the NIH's previous role in funding.
- thu2111 5y agoAnd I certainly don't see the conflict of interest - what was Fauci gaining? His continued role? Yes. Obviously you don't put an arsonist in charge of fighting fires, so if this information had come out early last year then he would have lost not only his role much sooner, but also his social status and career. If what's coming out now came out last year, Trump's replacement of him with Scott Atlas would have been more widely supported (maybe), and Biden may not have dared to put him back in his post. That would have been a huge financial hit. Fauci does very well out of his position. "Very well" might even be an understatement. He is the highest paid federal employee [1], earning more in 2019 alone than the US President. Despite this fact, he has deflected questions about conflicts of interest by laughing it off and saying he has a "government salary", creating the impression he is paid far less than he really is. Fauci charges between $50,000 and $100,000 per hour for motivational speeches [2]. Despite being theoretically in charge of a crisis situation in which nobody has time to ask how it started, Fauci has found time to write a book called, "Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward". He has also appeared on TV more than 300 times [3]. This is not a man who is too busy to investigate basic questions that may have direct relevance to developing treatments for the virus. And given that knowing where it came from would be of immense scientific value yet he has every incentive to cover it up, he is also not a man who should be running things. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/01/25/dr-anthony-fauci-the-highest-paid-employee-in-the-entire-us-federal-government/?sh=1ed4a1b5386f https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/01/25/dr-... [2] https://leadingmotivationalspeakers.com/speakers/anthony-fauci https://leadingmotivationalspeakers.com/speakers/anthony-fau... [3] https://www.aier.org/article/fauci-has-chalked-up-300-media-appearances-over-past-year/ https://www.aier.org/article/fauci-has-chalked-up-300-media-...
- stef25 5y agoThis is a global pandemic that came out of China. In the worst possible case, Fauci hid the fact that an org he's involved in donated a minuscule portion of its budget to the lab from where the virus leaked due to incompetence. It's not like he took the vial home for lulz and dropped it on the subway. His role in the origin of this thing is so small it's irrelevant. The only thing that's up for discussion is that he may not have been 100% correct during one of his many public statements, hardly something that can be held against him considering the shitcreek the whole world is in. Personally I'd give the guy some credit for everything he's done right, I mean he's been at it since 1968. What is there to gain by nailing him to the cross, or pointing out his income and book deals?