Gain-of-function research

If someone had asked you in winter 2019 your views on gain-of-function research, you would likely have given them a blank look. But since the Covid pandemic, and with the Wall Street Journal revealing in February that the US Department of Energy now thinks Covid-19 is likely to have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, gain-of-function research — often conducted to make viruses more infectious and more deadly — is a matter of enormous significance and should be at the forefront of a national conversation about the very real risks it poses. For more than a century virologists have worked to identify and understand viruses, whether or not they’re pathogens, for reasons ranging from pure science to applications in everything from agriculture to vaccines.

Neither the political left nor the political right understands Anthony Fauci. To the left, Fauci is a patron saint to be thanked and worshipped. They fashion candles, hymns and magazine covers after him. They canonize him much the same way they canonized Ruth Bader Ginsburg, though I suspect that if you stopped them on the street and asked for details of a Ginsburg opinion, they would come up empty beyond screaming “Notorious RBG.” Anthony Fauci is venerated much the same way. The right has compared Fauci to Nazi ministers of information, a Luciferian demigod drunk on pandemic power, a liar and hypnotist willing to do anything to retain his newfound celebrity and near-total grip on pandemic messaging — a grip that only solidified after Joe Biden’s presidential election.

“I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done, and I’m fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China. However, I will repeat again: the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded ‘gain-of-function’ research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”  That was Dr Anthony Fauci during a May 2021 congressional hearing. It kicked off a months-long national media effort to frame questions around gain-of-function research and US-taxpayer-funded virus manipulation as a Royal Rumble between Fauci and Senator Rand Paul. When he testifies or sits for friendly network interviews, Fauci depends on semantics.

Anyone wishing to appreciate the nature of our two-tier society needs only to contrast the fate of St Anthony Fauci with that, say, of General Mike Flynn or any of the dozens of political prisoners who are, many of them, being held without charge in appalling conditions in a Washington, D.C. prison even as I write. Fauci has been a carbuncle on the countenance of American life at least since he help spread the myth of heterosexual transmission of AIDS in the 1980s. The new Chinese flu was custom made for his brand of panic-mongering and totalitarian posturing. Just a few weeks ago, he was saying that it was “too early” to say whether we would be allowed to gather for Christmas.

I want to prepare you for something right off the bat — nothing is going to happen to Anthony Fauci. He’s not going to prison. He’s not going to be brought up on perjury charges. He’s going to be allowed to retire quietly from his post, with presidential honors, and slip into a cast member role on Dancing with the Stars, although The Masked Singer seems more appropriate. Now that we’ve settled this and tempered any expectations a pitchforked mob might have, let's examine the latest bombshell reporting from the Intercept.

A top editor at the New York Times instructed Times staffers not to investigate the origins of COVID-19, two Times employees confirmed today. ‘In early 2020,’ a veteran Times employee tells me, ‘I suggested to a senior editor at the paper that we investigate the origins of COVID-19. I was told it was dangerous to run a piece about the origins of the coronavirus. There was resistance to running anything that could suggest that [COVID-19 was manmade or had leaked accidentally from a lab].' The global pandemic was then in its early stages. Donald Trump was running for reelection and calling SARS-CoV-2 the ‘Chinese virus’.