Fauci on CNN - could be manipulated " a bit"

[womanofthehills]

Fauci on CNN Newsroom

JUST IN – Fauci Now Says A Lab Leak Could Still Be Considered As Coming From Natural Origins

"A lab leak could be that someone was out in the wild maybe looking for different types of viruses in bats, got infected, went into a lab, and was being studied in a lab, and then came out of the lab. But if that's the definition of lab leak, then that's still a natural occurrence.

The other possibility is someone takes a virus from the environment that doesn't actually spread very well in humans, and manipulates it a bit, and accidentally it escapes or accidentally infects someone and then you get an outbreak.”

[liberal_mama]

1. I saw his interview today with Jim Acosta. Fauci seemed a bit nervous and had changed his tune to

consider it could have been a lab leak.

In the beginning, Fauci really scrambled to get the science journals to dismiss the idea that it was a lab leak.

A lot of the emails have since come out from FOIA requests and an article on the topic was published a few days ago.

What puzzles me is why did they want it to look like it was almost certainly a spillover event?

[Phoenix61]

3. Because it most likely is a spill over event?

The “lab leak” theory that was being advanced in the beginning was the leak of a manipulated virus not the leak of a naturally occurring virus. It’s why gain of function research was in the news.

[womanofthehills]

4. I think maybe because Eco Health Alliance was funding Wujan research

& DARPA, NIH, State Dept & NIAID gave grants to EHA. Our scientists wrote papers with their scientists. Also, at Univ of Texas we were training their young scientists and Ralph Barik of Univ of NC & Shi Zhengli were trading bat samples and writing research papers together about corona viruses.

Our scientists & their scientists worked together & I think we should have kept better tabs on their lab.

[yardwork]

7. And because of those decades of work, we had a vaccine within a few years.

These scientists have worked tirelessly for decades. They knew coronaviruses were a threat to human health. It is ridiculous to blame them for the pandemic that they have spent their lives trying to prevent.

It's the worst kind of anti-science. It's demonizing people by association. It's the same as blaming doctors and nurses for killing patients who died of COVID.

[Celerity]

8. In Major Shift, NIH Admits Funding Risky Virus Research in Wuhan

A spokesman for Dr. Fauci says he has been “entirely truthful,” but a new letter belatedly acknowledging the National Institutes of Health’s support for virus-enhancing research adds more heat to the ongoing debate over whether a lab leak could have sparked the pandemic.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-risky-virus-research-in-wuhan

October 22, 2021

snip

On Wednesday, the NIH sent a letter to members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce that acknowledged two facts. One was that EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City–based nonprofit that partners with far-flung laboratories to research and prevent the outbreak of emerging diseases, did indeed enhance a bat coronavirus to become potentially more infectious to humans, which the NIH letter described as an “unexpected result” of the research it funded that was carried out in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The second was that EcoHealth Alliance violated the terms of its grant conditions stipulating that it had to report if its research increased the viral growth of a pathogen by tenfold.

The NIH based these disclosures on a research progress report that EcoHealth Alliance sent to the agency in August, roughly two years after it was supposed to. An NIH spokesperson told Vanity Fair that Dr. Fauci was “entirely truthful in his statements to Congress,” and that he did not have the progress report that detailed the controversial research at the time he testified in July. But EcoHealth Alliance appeared to contradict that claim, and said in a statement: “These data were reported as soon as we were made aware, in our year four report in April 2018.”

snip

Early last month, The Intercept published more than 900 pages of documents it obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the NIH, relating to EcoHealth Alliance’s grant research. But there was one document missing, a fifth and final progress report that EcoHealth Alliance had been required to submit at the end of its grant period in 2019.

In its letter Wednesday, NIH included that missing progress report, which was dated August 2021. That report described a “limited experiment,” as the NIH letter phrased it, in which laboratory mice infected with an altered virus became “sicker than those infected with” a naturally occurring one.

snip

[yardwork]

6. I disagree with that characterization.

The right wing has tried and tried to use this pandemic as a weapon against science and scientific inquiry.

Fauci is trying - yet again - to explain science to people who are determined to see something malicious. Now the DOE and FBI are putting out politically-slanted "studies" that are just the same old anti-science mischaracterizations.

If Fauci is nervous it's because he's up against a political juggernaut that is determined to make him and every other scientist look evil. It must be exhausting. He's in his 80s. What a service he has provided to us all, for decades.

[John1956PA]

2. In 2020 Dr. Fauci said the steps in the evolution of C-19 virus seemed to have naturally occurred.

Dr. Fauci stressed the natural-evolution theory in order to rebut arguments that the Wuhan laboratory manufactured the virus from scratch. I think Dr. Fauci was probably correct to take that position. Unfortunately, by taking that position, Dr. Fauci opened himself up to criticism that he was totally convinced the contagion started in the wet markets rather than by exiting from the Wuhan laboratory.

[lapucelle]

5. Dr. Fauci didn't sound nervous to me,

and I'm not sure why the headline reads

Fauci Now Says A Lab Leak Could Still Be Considered As Coming From Natural Origins

This is not a "new" point of view.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

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Dr. Fauci is clear in his explanation. It's basic science that if a naturally occurring virus leaks from a lab where it is being stored/studied, that the virus itself still has natural origins.

Problems arise when laypeople erroneously conflate a naturally occurring virus that leaked from a lab with a virus that originated in a lab. Similarly, a novel virus manufactured in a lab (thus "originating" in the lab) is not the same thing as an outbreak of disease originating via a lab leak of a naturally occurring virus.

Here's the video from the interview.

https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2023/03/11/fauci-responds-to-covid-lab-leak-theory-acostanr-vpx.cnn