Ask Me Help Desk - NIH gain of function funding in Wuhan

An internal investigation found that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) did not execute proper oversight of EcoHealth Alliance, which was awarded nearly $8 million in federal research grants to study bat coronaviruses in the Wuhan lab.

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Specifically, NIH did not ensure EcoHealth in a timely manner submitted a progress report that was 2 years late and that NIH concluded contained evidence of a virus with growth that should have been reported immediately; did not ensure EcoHealth publicly reported required subaward data; and did not follow proper procedures to terminate an award to EcoHealth

The National Institutes of Health and EcoHealth Alliance Did Not Effectively Monitor Awards and Subawards, Resulting in Missed Opportunities to Oversee Research and Other Deficiencies, A-05-21-00025 (hhs.gov)

In other risky bio-research news . Sen Roger Marshall (R Kansas ) has been working with the USDA to replace research that was being done on Plum Island NY (home of Lyme disease) to a new National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility in Manhattan, Kansas that is to be built .
Sens. Marshall, Moran Announce $3.4 Million for KSU to Build Core Lab Facility - Senator Roger Marshall (senate.gov)

But last year Marshall took to Twitter to complain about gain of function research in Boston.
Dr. Roger Marshall on Twitter: "This research must stop immediately. It is unconscionable that NIH sponsors this lethal gain of function virus research through Boston University and EcoHealth Alliance in densely populated areas, creating potential to kill more people than any singular nuclear weapon." / Twitter

Much better do do this :"lethal " research in a university in his less populated state.

Another sacred cow of the government / compliant press misinformation cabal destroyed .

The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress. The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory.

A Lab Leak in China Most Likely Origin of Covid Pandemic, Energy Department Says - WSJ

Maybe now we can start the process of accountability for the million+ Americans who were killed by this man made virus .

Jonathan Turley has the right take on this .

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However, for my part, the most alarming aspect was the censorship, not the science.
There will continue to be a debate over the origins of COVID-19, but now there will be an actual debate.
For years, the media and government allied to treat anyone raising a lab theory as one of three possibilities: conspiracy theorist or racists or racist conspiracy theorists.

COVID lab leak is a scandal of media and government censorship (nypost.com)

OK so now 2 Federal agencies agree that covid came from the lab in Wuhan. (DOE and FBI) The so called 'low confidence ' qualifier is because the Chinese still do not cooperate in the investigation. This comes from supposed new information which will be passed along to other Fed agencies that still cling to the meat market theory .

There have been almost 7 million deaths worldwide from the virus ;1.1 million in the US . More than 103 million cases have been reported in the US.

Soon the government will agree that China covered up the origins ;lied about it's transmissibility . ;AND allowed Chinese nationals to travel abroad in the crucial months of November /December /January /February 2019-20 before travel bans went into effect . The question then becomes how should the Chinese pay for the millions dead and the uncountable economic destruction the virus caused ?

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However, for my part, the most alarming aspect was the censorship, not the science.
There will continue to be a debate over the origins of COVID-19, but now there will be an actual debate. For years, the media and government allied to treat anyone raising a lab theory as one of three possibilities: conspiracy theorist or racists or racist conspiracy theorists.

This should be the greatest concern of the whole deal. It plainly seems to be true and should alarm all of us.

especially since Director Wray admitted that the FBI has had the lab leak view for “quite some time now”
FBI Director Wray acknowledges bureau assessment that Covid-19 likely resulted from lab incident | CNN Politics

The Senate voted unanimously to direct the DNI to declassify any covid related intelligence.

Senate passes Covid Origins Act - KVIA

Question . If the Repubs had not won the majority in the House would we have ever learned that 2 Federal agencies (DOE and FBI) concluded that covid originated in the Wuhan lab ? These agencies were preparing summaries of their view in anticipation of being summoned to testify to the House .

What price will Herr Doctor Fauci pay for his deceptions ? Perhaps nothing because he conveniently retired in December . He is the one who sent US funding to the lab for gain of function research ; and then covered it up after confronted by Sen Rand Paul.
Will we ever get an apology from Apoorva Mandavli, the lead covid reporter for the Slimes ? She called the lab leak theory racists . She got a Nobel Prize for her coverage .

Will the Chinese controlled WHO ever come clean ? I doubt it . How could they when world wide at least 750 million people have been infected and over 7 million killed by the virus ? The virus shut down nations .It gave tin pot rulers from national leaders to local mayors unprecedented dictatorial power.

What possible punishment could be given for such a wide spread atrocity ?

Does it matter from which lab Covid originated?

actually yes .The lab involved was being paid by the US government to weaponize viruses .

HHRG-117-GO24-20211201-SD004.pdf (congress.gov)

The real admission is that it was created in a lab .The lie Herr Doctor was advancing was that it was a zoonotic leap from bats in western China to humans in eastern China .

Did Dr. Fauci affirm that or just throw it out as a possibility?

Herr doctor outright denied the possibility that the lab he was paying to do GOF research had leaked the virus . He repeatedly said it came from a meat market and that it was of zoonotic origin. .We can now stop all pretense . Covid is a chimera engineered in the Wuhan lab.

So where did Covid originate?

it was engineered in the Wuhan lab. I am certain of that ;just like I am certain that Lyme disease was engineered in the federal Plum Island Animal disease center ....directly across the Long Island sound from Lyme Connecticut ...ground zero for the disease .

If I give the benefit of the doubt then the motive was strictly research meant to study bat virus so they could be prepared with a vaccine remedy when and if there was an outbreak .(note that a vaccine was ready to market suspiciously soon after the outbreak ). But I could buy into more sinister motives too.

You used the word "chimera". Merriam-Webster defines that as "an imaginary monster compounded of incongruous parts" and "an
illusion or fabrication of the mind". So I got confused by your post.

it is also a scientific term

Chimera (virus) - Wikipedia

Game, set, and match.

WSJ opines

Oh, good grief, whether Covid-19 emerged naturally or from a laboratory leak is not “beside the point” as even some scientists now argue. This comes as another U.S. intelligence agency—connected with the national labs run by the Energy Department—has joined the FBI in judging a lab leak to be the most likely source of the outbreak.
In fact, Covid’s emergence remains so shrouded in mystery that we can’t know what lessons it teaches until we know the mechanism. But how Covid first infected a human being is probably the single most important question for preventing future pandemics given the difficulty of stopping a new respiratory virus once it’s spreading.
Nor is the question merely binary. If a natural occurrence, did the transmission to a human take place in a Wuhan wet market or somewhere else? Was it brought to the market by an infected human handler or an infected animal? How many species did it pass through? How long had it been circulating among humans? Why did it suddenly explode in Wuhan? Did it undergo changes in a human host before sparking a global epidemic?
We don’t know and won’t without access to early human and animal samples that the Chinese have refused to share.

The lab-leak alternative also embraces a world of permutations. Was the virus fetched out of a cave unwittingly by a researcher, who transmitted it to others? Was it deliberately collected and then escaped? What experiments was it subjected to? Was it modified?
Under some plausible scenarios, whether the original infectee was a bat researcher or a farmer in his field who was peed on by a bat is a distinction almost without a difference. Under others, the world was put at risk by the calculated actions of scientists.
To be of any use, the lessons will have to be a lot more specific than “Don’t traffic in wild animals for any purpose,” or “Don’t go into a bat cave,” or “Don’t handle or experiment with dangerous viruses in a lab.”

To say the origin question is of debatable or secondary interest, as some now do, smacks of the original impulse to suppress the lab leak debate for partisan or ideological reasons.
In the real world, where I hope Covid scholars are finally deciding to live, we are extraordinarily well supplied with lessons—up to our ears in them—about how to respond once human-to-human contagion has occurred and such a virus is loose in the world. By “such a virus,” it’s crucial to specify because many refuse to learn the lesson, we mean a virus whose effects are sufficiently mild for most humans that it’s not economically and politically realistic to halt its spread and extinguish its existence.
The chances are slight to vanishing that an easily transmitted respiratory virus can be contained once human-to-human spread has been detected. Almost the only hope lies in preventing its emergence in the first place. We have ample lessons of what to do, and what not to do, when a Covid-type pandemic is happening. The big payoff will come from the pandemics that never happen because we denied them the opportunity.
Moreover, for reasons that were well-understood before anyone heard of Covid-19, Asia has historically been a key player in the emergence of new respiratory infections. Even the conventional story of the catastrophic 1918 pandemic has been upended in recent years by historians suggesting, based on multiple lines of evidence, that the “Spanish flu” originated in China.
The next pandemic also has a large probability of coming from China or via China from its near southern neighbors. That’s why nailing down Covid’s exact history matters. This column identified early and often the incoming Biden administration’s rational incentive for wishing the question away, the better to coax a locked-down and paranoid Beijing regime back into dialogue with the U.S. over economic and national-security issues. A truly successful China policy, however, will be one that elicits Beijing’s cooperation in getting to the bottom, for the good of all humanity, of how Covid-19 began.

A slight hope emerges with the demotion of Zhao Lijian as China’s deputy Foreign Ministry spokesman. Mr. Zhao was the apparent author and chief promoter of China’s alternative theory, positing that the virus was brought to Wuhan by U.S. military personnel attending the World Military Games in November 2019.
Mr. Zhao’s pet theory, which continues to be tweeted by Chinese diplomats, has an unfortunate feature in common with the lab-leak theory: Both depend on early human or animal infections or transitional versions of the virus not being found in China. Identifying early manifestations of the virus, however, is exactly how we find out when and how Covid first infected humans.
China Remains the World’s Pandemic Risk - WSJ

Now this is slick

Herr Doctor Fauci funded through his agency a "study" to disprove the lab leak theory .It was called “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” .

It was published in 'Nature Medicine '

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Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.

The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 | Nature Medicine

He then went on to use the study as evidence that the lab leak theory was debunked misinformation.
This is beyond a doubt Congress has his emails on the subject.

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New evidence released by the Select Subcommittee today suggests that Dr. Fauci“prompted” the drafting of a publication that would “disprove” the lab leak theory, the authors of this paper skewed available evidence to achieve that goal, and Dr. Jeremy Farrar went uncredited despite significant involvement.

2023.03.05-SSCP-Memo-Re.-New-Evidence.Proximal-Origin.pdf (house.gov)

This is becoming a common practice in science. When a study comes out a good bet is to follow the money . Who funded the study and why ?

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When a study comes out a good bet is to follow the money . Who funded the study and why ?

That sure seems to be the case in this instance. It would be interesting to see Rand Paul's response to this.