Fauci – “Godfather” of Gain-Of-Function Research – Broke Law to Fund Wuhan

Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul unmasked and undressed Dr. Anthony Fauci at a hearing on Capitol Hill Tuesday about the National Institute of Health’s funding of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, from where the Wuhan coronavirus that has killed hundreds of thousands likely escaped  Despite the feckless Fauci song-and-dance on funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s (WIV) deadly gain-of-function research, the fact is that Fauci fostered and funded such research here and illegally offshored it to Chinese researchers in Wuhan when the U.S. banned such funding here. As National Review reported:

Paul asked Dr. Fauci if he still supports National Institutes of Health funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where scientists performed gain-of-function research—i.e. making viruses more infectious and/or deadly—on bat coronaviruses. The EcoHealth Alliance diverted $600,000 in grants from the NIH to the WIV in the form of sub-grants from 2014 through 2019, for the purpose of studying bat coronaviruses.

“For years, Dr. Ralph Baric, a virologist in the U.S., has been collaborating with Dr. Shi Zhengli from the Wuhan Virology Institute, sharing his discoveries about how to create superviruses,” Paul said. “This gain-of-function research has been funded by the NIH. … Dr. Fauci, do you still support funding of the NIH lab in Wuhan?”…

The U.S. government has assessed that the WIV was conducting gain-of-function research in some form, reporter Josh Rogin noted in Politico in March. Jamie Metzl, an expert on gene editing for the World Health Organization, has also noted that the WIV performed gain-of-function research….

At least one study conducted at the WIV involving “recombination” of SARS-related coronavirus from bats cites the NIH as a source of funding, Richard Ebright, Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University, noted on Twitter.

Britain’s Cobra commission, equivalent to President Donald J. Trump’s virus task force, has seriously questioned the bat theory as a too convenient explanation pushed by a Chinese government that to this date does not allow outside inspection of the labs which might show their culpability and  criminal negligence in the global pandemic:

American biosecurity expert Professor Richard Ebright, of Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology, New Jersey, said that while the evidence suggests Covid-19 was not created in one of the Wuhan laboratories, it could easily have escaped from there while it was being analysed.
Prof Ebright said he has seen evidence that scientists at the Centre for Disease Control and the Institute of Virology studied the viruses with only ‘level 2’ security – rather than the recommended level 4 – which ‘provides only minimal protections against infection of lab workers’.

He added: ‘Virus collection, culture, isolation, or animal infection would pose a substantial risk of infection of a lab worker, and from the lab worker then the public.’

He concluded that the evidence left ‘a basis to rule out [that coronavirus is] a lab construct, but no basis to rule out a lab accident’.”

How could the press not know about the NIH funding and be curious about it? Could the lack of notice and discussion concerning why we were funding the possible, if not likely, source of a global pandemic was because Dr. Fauci became somewhat of a media favorite after his ambivalence and cautiousness towards President Trump’s virus response initiatives. Fortunately, the Daily Mail has provided us some fascinating information:

The Chinese laboratory at the center of scrutiny over a potential coronavirus leak has been using U.S. government money to carry out research on bats from the caves which scientists believe are the original source of the deadly outbreak.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology undertook coronavirus experiments on mammals captured more than 1,000 miles away in Yunnan which were funded by a $3.7 million grant from the US government.

Sequencing of the COVID-19 genome has traced it back to bats found in Yunnan caves but it was first thought to have transferred to humans at an animal market in Wuhan.

The revelation that the Wuhan Institute was experimenting on bats from the area already known to be the source of COVID-19 – and doing so with American money – has sparked further fears that the lab, and not the market, is the original outbreak source. …

According to documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday, scientists there experimented on bats as part of a project funded by the US National Institutes of Health, which continues to licence the Wuhan laboratory to receive American money for experiments….

As part of the NIH research at the institute, scientists grew a coronavirus in a lab and injected it into three-day-old piglets.

Say what? We helped fund this monster before it broke out of the lab? And we complain about China lying to us? We have been keeping the truth from ourselves.  What has Dr. Fauci kept quiet about these fascinating factoids? That NIH-funded research into piglets and coronavirus is worth a serious look:

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) (a member of the NIH) actually funded a study on Bat Coronavirus, which was a project that included scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese lab at the center of controversy over their bat research. That study confirmed in 2018 that humans have died from coronavirus.

Here’s an excerpt from the April 4, 2018 NIAID website entry entitled “New Coronavirus Emerges From Bats in China, Devastates Young Swine”: “A newly identified coronavirus that killed nearly 25,000 piglets in 2016-17 in China emerged from horseshoe bats near the origin of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV), which emerged in 2002 in the same bat species. The new virus is named swine acute diarrhea syndrome coronavirus (SADS-CoV). It does not appear to infect people, unlike SARS-CoV which infected more than 8,000 people and killed 774. No SARS-CoV cases have been identified since 2004. The study investigators identified SADS-CoV on four pig farms in China’s Guangdong Province. The work was a collaboration among scientists from EcoHealth Alliance, Duke-NUS Medical School, Wuhan Institute of Virology and other organizations, and was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. The research is published in the journal Nature. The researchers say the finding is an important reminder that identifying new viruses in animals and quickly determining their potential to infect people is a key way to reduce global health threats.”

Well, the road to pandemic hell was paved with seemingly good intentions, at least on our part. We were not only funding Chinese research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but we also knew the lab was a leaky, unsafe, ticking time bomb in 2018, according to leaked State Department cables:

Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats….

In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and health. Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet.

What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.

“During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” states the Jan. 19, 2018, cable, which was drafted by two officials from the embassy’s environment, science and health sections who met with the WIV scientists. …

The Chinese researchers at WIV were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support, mainly because its research on bat coronaviruses was important but also dangerous.

The feckless Fauci, who has lied about masks and everything else, denied funding Wuhan lab research that led to the creation of the Wuhan virus. Yet his long interest in the subject has justifiably led him to be dubbed by Josh Rogin of the Washington Post as the “godfather” of gain-of-function research:

Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin torched the media for staying silent as the coronavirus outbreak developed into a pandemic under Dr. Anthony Fauci’s watch.

In an interview with Megyn Kelly Wednesday, Rogin revealed that scientists who wish to speak out on details of COVID-19 are barred from doing so since research funding comes from organizations like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) which are influenced or run by Fauci.

“I often talk to scientists who say the same thing, that say, ‘Listen, we really want to speak out about this, but we can’t do it. Why can’t we do it? Well, we get all of our funding from NIH, or NIAID… which is run by Dr. Fauci,'” he said on Kelly’s podcast. “And so we can’t say anything like ‘Oh, gain-of-function research might be dangerous, or it might have come from a lab, because we’re going to lose our careers, we’re going to lose our funding, we’re not going to be able to do the work.'”

Gain-of-function research, which puts pressure on the transmissibility and mutation of pathogens, was advanced five years prior to the coronavirus outbreak in China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology–which receives funds to conduct related research from the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) which is overseen by Fauci.

“The head of the funding, the head of the entire field, really, is Anthony Fauci,” he said. “He’s the godfather of gain-of-function research as we know it. That, again, just what I said right there, is too hot for TV because people don’t want to think about the fact that our hero of the pandemic… might also have been connected to this research, which might also have been connected to the outbreak.”

Certainly Facebook and Twitter don’t want anyone to talk about anything but World Health Organization drivel concerning the Wuhan virus. Criticism of feckless Fauci and China wil get your posts deleed and your accounts canceled. Yet some interesting sources have taken notice. FNC’s Tucker Carlson recently discussed a piece by former NYT Science editor Nicholas Wade which suggests that the Wuhan coronavirus likely escaped from a laboratory where gain-of-function research was being done. If this is true, Carlson suggested, there should be a criminal investigation:

It’s an amazing story. It is a shocking story. In a functional country, there would be a criminal investigation into Tony Fauci’s role in the COVID pandemic that has killed millions and halted our country, changing it forever. So why isn’t there a criminal investigation into Tony Fauci’s role in this pandemic?

Good question. And the fact is, as the Gateway Pundit observes, “Dr. Fauci Likely Broke US Regulations and US Law When He Funded Wuhan Lab to Continue Coronavirus Projects That Were Banned in US in 2014”:

A month ago we reported that Chinese Doctor Shi Zhengli was part of a team working on a coronavirus project jointly with US doctors in 2014 before it was shut down by the DHS for being too risky.

After the US research project was shut down, Dr. Shi continued her coronavirus research in Wuhan, China.

Doctor Shi Zhengli from China was part of a team, including Doctor Ralph S. Baric from North Carolina, that published an article in a 2015 edition of Nature Medicine.

In the article they discussed bat coronaviruses that showed potential for human emergence. The article was published in 2015.

This report was published shortly after their project was defunded by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

The HHS in 2014 sent a letter to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where they announced they were going to defund the program.

Dr. Ralph S. Baric was identified in the letter.

After the work stopped in the US, the Chinese moved forward with the project and ran research and development in Wuhan at the Wuhan Virology Center. From Shi Zhengli’s papers and resume, it is clear that they successfully isolated the coronavirus in the lab and were actively experimenting with species to species transmission.

Now we can report that the leader of the US task force overseeing the country’s response to the China coronavirus, Dr. Tony Fauci, was the one who funded the Wuhan bat virus work and kept it going.

If these research projects were banned in the US was it legal and appropriate for Dr. Fauci and NIAID to use taxpayer dollars to continue to fund the research in Wuhan, China?

Was Dr. Fauci ever going to explain his conflict of interest?

Apparently not, Fauci used grants and sub-contractors to fund dangerous research that has ended up killing millions, research banned in the U.S. Fauci circumvented, and arguably breaking U.S. regulations. He may not only be a serial fraud and liar but a mass murderer as well. So why indeed isn’t there a criminal investigation into Tony Fauci’s role in this pandemic?