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>The report he finally did submit worried the agency’s grant specialists. It stated that scientists planned to create an infectious clone of Middle East Respira

• travisathougies 5y ago
  No this is not new information. Rand Paul has been on this for a long time, but has been censored from most platforms because of it.
  • naoqj 5y ago
    Wait a few years until you hear about the biochem weapons labs in Ukraine.
    • travisathougies 5y ago
      I'm confused about this comment. The biochem weapons lab in Ukraine are accusations Putin has made but has not substantiated, whereas the GoF research being done in Wuhan is known and there is ample evidence from many sources, including this Vanity Fair article. If you have a problem with the article's contents, please post your own comment on the main feed instead of making snark comments on mine. Thanks.
      • Proven 5y ago
        • jazzyjackson 5y ago
          > Hunter Biden's little Ukraine-related consulting business related to biolabs If the Russian defense ministry was a reliable source, Russia might have annexed Ukraine a little sooner. I wouldn't take anything out of state media at their word; I agree NYT can't be trusted, but how is Russia Today better?
        • ceejayoz 5y ago
          It's not Star Wars; you don't have to work so hard to cram all the different characters together into one single plotline like this.
        • dEnigma 5y ago
          I don't quite understand. Are you saying that Hunter Biden consulted for bio-weapon labs in Ukraine?
          • speeder 5y ago
            I believe he is referencing this: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10652127/Hunter-Biden-helped-secure-millions-funding-military-biotech-research-program-Ukraine.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10652127/Hunter-Bid...
      • native_samples 5y ago
        The WIV doing dangerous GoF on Coronaviruses were widely described as unsubstantiated allegations by misinformation spreaders who had no evidence at all, right up until people managed to break through the propaganda and censorship. Now as far as you're concerned it's known, because Vanity Fair wrote about it. But here's the thing. Vanity Fair wrote about this theory in 2020 too: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/why-scientists-believe-the-wuhan-lab-coronavirus-origin-theory-is-highly-unlikely https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/why-scientists-belie... “The Discussion Is Basically Over”: Why Scientists Believe the Wuhan-Lab Coronavirus Origin Theory Is Highly Unlikely. Trump and Mike Pompeo’s favorite blame-China theory makes great propaganda—but dubious science. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/inside-the-the-viral-spread-of-a-coronavirus-origin-theory https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/inside-the-the-viral... "An opinion-section column and a British tabloid story are hardly enough to give the Wuhan lab theory full mainstream credibility" The quantity of things that are true yet lack "mainstream credibility" is quite large, because the self-appointed mainstream isn't very good at figuring out what's true. The Ukraine labs story comes from evidence gathered from Hunter Biden's laptop, which, if we recall, resulted in the New York Post story about it being immediately frozen by Twitter in an unprecedented manner. You couldn't even share links to it privately. Justified because the story was "Russian misinformation" except it wasn't, and now even the NYT has admitted the contents are authentic. What was on that laptop, well: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10652127/Hunter-Biden-helped-secure-millions-funding-military-biotech-research-program-Ukraine.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10652127/Hunter-Bid... The Russian government held a press conference Thursday claiming that Hunter Biden helped finance a US military 'bioweapons' research program in Ukraine. However the allegations were branded a brazen propaganda ploy to justify president Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine and sow discord in the US. But emails and correspondence obtained by DailyMail.com from Hunter's abandoned laptop show the claims may well be true. The emails show Hunter helped secure millions of dollars of funding for Metabiota, a Department of Defense contractor specializing in research on pandemic-causing diseases. He also introduced Metabiota to an allegedly corrupt Ukrainian gas firm, Burisma, for a 'science project' involving high biosecurity level labs in Ukraine. If you rely on places like Vanity Fair then you'll always be behind the curve on these things, constantly saying that yesterday's lunatic fringe conspiracy is obviously reasonable, whilst today's is not.
  • sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
    i'm not worried about it big brother keeps us safe and happy he helps me so i can't ever be wrong
  • pvarangot 5y ago
    Look I find Rand Paul as amusing as the next guy and I like that he has a voice, but he's been censored because he sounds insane. I watched most of the discussions with Fauci honestly it's just two old dudes that hate each other trying to get the other dude to say the thing that will give them their political win.
    • mattcwilson 5y ago
      Insane as he comes off sounding to you, what do you make of his position on this subject?
      • pvarangot 5y ago
        I would say I agree with his position more than any other senator, but I think he focuses too much on what Fauci did or didn't know or do about gain of function research and not enough on actually investigating where the virus came from. I don't care about Fauci, I think Paul wants to out him to show a political victory but honestly that wouldn't change anything. The idea of the senate committee was to investigate the lab leak theory, but Paul made it about investigating Fauci and I think that was not for the benefit of the people but for his own personal campaign agenda and that sucks.
        • jmaygarden 5y ago
          I agree with you, but he doesn’t really have the authority to push the investigation in any other way than to roast whoever he has access to in public meetings. There isn’t congressional support to pass a resolution or bill to do so. He holds minority views within a minority party, and he is just one legislator, not an executive. In other words, the only way that Rand Paul can influence the situation in any meaningful way is through political means. So, I find it hard to fault the theatrics with Fauci as distasteful as there are.
          • pvarangot 5y ago
            He has an army of publicly funded staffers and has resources that I would never dream off and will never have in my life to actually do research into where the virus came from. He can do all the theatrics he wants as long as he's also using his resources for something that is not digging dirt on Fauci also. I don't buy when politicians start being all like "look I agree with you and that's my end game but first we need to get rid of this guy, and then we win the election, and then we put this other guy in that position and then and then and then". It's not true he can't do better now, it's just not convenient to him and since it's convenient to me I will not support him.
• nicoburns 5y ago
  No it's not, and yes it is. That these laboratories were (and still are?) doing gain of function research - deliberately creating new variants of viruses to study them - has been known since the start of the pandemic (the results are published in reputable scientific journals, and a lot of the funding came from western medical research bodies). And it's definitely something I think we need to have a societal conversation about. Personally in light of recent events I feel like this is something we probably ought not to be doing.
  • mardifoufs 5y ago
    Yeah I knew about GoF research but I didn't know they planned on doing it on MERS. Another troubling thing was that they basically ignored the moratorium so even if measures were taken to stop GoF... they were just ignored by using a foreign lab as a loophole? To me it's mind-boggling that you could get arrested and fined for violating covid-related restrictions but people who did much much much more potentially dangerous stuff are not only getting away with it but also kept getting financed by the government. Even if covid turns out to not originate from a lab, just the insane potential risks that came from the blatant violations of the GoF moratorium should have been enough to land people in trouble. Especially since us commoners were punished based on the possibility that we could transmit the virus, whether we were infected or completely virus free didn't matter.
    • s1artibartfast 5y ago
      Yes, this is where the whole lab leak "conspiracy" came from. The lab was doing GoF research with bat and pangolin Coronaviruses exploring if the spike protein can be modified to enter through the human ACE2 receptor. There are a number of papers from Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli on the topic with research done at the Wuhan lab.
    • ryanobjc 5y ago
      I think your 'commoners' framing... is not helpful here. You raise a few objectionable assertions that I think is good to contemplate: - GoF was never banned - The ban was NIH funding GoF - The ban was lifted in 2017 anyways - Is this risky? The ban on funding it doesn't mean it's risky, as per se. - The potential pie in the eye risk are infinite, but what are the realistic risks? That really depends on the technical details of how the research is done, and where it's done. - Compare and contrast to activities that are very dangerous and have nearly infinite catastrophic risks but we do every day: driving, flying, operating nuclear power plants, refining oil, and much much more. All of this research came out of the desire not to be caught flat footed by the next version of SARS or MERS. Overall global research did in fact prep us for SARS-CoV-2. Vaccines "made in months" that have stood the test of efficacy and safety? Months if you ignore the years of research behind it. Is this particular thing excessively dangerous or not? I'm not 100% sure. Most of the "this is unacceptable" seems to be coming from people who seem to have a visceral hatred of Dr Fauci and who as head of the NIH was indirectly responsible for this funding. But I don't find that a reasonable line of reasoning. One thing I know, is every scientist I know is not paid a boat load, and care deeply about what they are doing and why. Perhaps GoF is too 'dangerous', but maybe we should also hear about how it can be made safe, how does it compare in hazardousness to other common things that are deemed 'safe' and what the benefits are.
• blurbleblurble 5y ago
  A paper from 2008: Synthetic recombinant bat SARS-like coronavirus is infectious in cultured cells and in mice https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0808116105 https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0808116105 One of the listed authors is Ralph Baric.
• chaostheory 5y ago
  Coincidentally, the moratorium on gain of function research was dropped during the Trump administration, though I believe funding to Wuhan’s virology institute started in the Obama administration.
• TrispusAttucks 5y ago
  Don't worry we can just change the agency's definition of "gain-of-function" in the continued War on Words.
• rvba 5y ago
  This is basically bioweapon research, I posted a link about it before and it got flagged.