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conix, Fauci and Paul, Round 2

Rather than clueless in Australia you should be seriously concerned about dishonest conservative comment everywhere. My post which you should have read long ago clearly stated there was disagreement as regards the definition of gain-of-function.

By Lori Robertson and Jessica McDonald

Posted on July 22, 2021 | Updated on August 19, 2021

At a July 20 Senate hearing, Republican Sen. Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, once again had a testy exchange over whether the U.S. funded gain-of-function research in China, with each man accusing the other of “lying.”

Paul also suggested that the research was tied to “4 million people dying around the world” from COVID-19, but then backed off the implication, saying, “No one’s saying those viruses” studied in the paper in question “caused it.”

Most of the exchange was like a flashback to the clash between the two men at a May 11 Senate hearing, which we’ve written about. But the senator also made a false claim about theories on the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19.

Paul said that “all the evidence is pointing that it came from the lab,” but there is no evidence linking the novel coronavirus to a lab — only speculation. As we’ve explained, many scientists with expertise in coronaviruses consider a lab escape unlikely and a natural spillover of the virus from an animal to a human the most likely scenario, based on the data we have so far. Several of those scientists summarized their reasoning in a July 7 paper, which has not yet been peer reviewed. Update, Aug. 19: The paper was published in the journal Cell on Aug. 18.

We’ll recap here what we’ve written about the contention between Paul and Fauci. For more, we refer readers to our two stories on these topics: “The Wuhan Lab and the Gain-of-Function Disagreement” and “The Facts – and Gaps – on the Origin of the Coronavirus.”

Gain-of-Function

As we wrote in May, there’s no dispute that some U.S. funding went to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. The disagreement is over whether the research the lab conducted with the money was gain-of-function research.

Nearly $600,000 from a National Institutes of Health grant to the U.S.-based EcoHealth Alliance went to the Wuhan lab, a collaborator on the six-year project to study the risk of the future emergence of coronaviruses from bats. The grant was canceled in April 2020.

The NIH, EcoHealth Alliance and the lead researcher in Wuhan all say the experiments weren’t gain-of-function — a type of research the U.S. government generally defined in 2014 as aiming to “increase the ability of infectious agents to cause disease by enhancing its pathogenicity or by increasing its transmissibility.”

There’s no evidence that Fauci lied to Congress, as Paul asserted in the July 20 hearing, given that the NIH unequivocally backs up Fauci’s statement that the grant-backed research “was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain-of-function.”

In a May 19 statement, NIH Director Dr. Francis S. Collins said that “neither NIH nor NIAID have ever approved any grant that would have supported ‘gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans.”

Scientists have differing opinions on what counts as gain-of-function research, however, and which experiments would yield valuable insights into pathogens and how to combat them, and which are not worth the risks.

Paul cited Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University and a critic of gain-of-function research, who disagrees with the NIH. Ebright has said that the EcoHealth/Wuhan lab research “was — unequivocally — gain-of-function research.” And Paul cited a 2017 paper, published in the journal PLOS Pathogens partly thanks to funding from that EcoHealth Alliance grant.

More - https://www.factcheck.org/2021/07/scicheck-fauci-and-paul-round-2/

Your conservative misrepresentation, misinformation and lies are killing American spirit.