Dr. Anthony Fauci ostensibly argued in 2012 that conducting experiments through “gain-of-function” research on contagious viruses to make them more potent was worth risking a pandemic.
He wrote for the American Society for Microbiology in October 2012 concerning the public health benefit of these experiments as long as they have significant oversight.
The claim by Fauci in his article was first picked up by The Australian. He also stated that there should be a pause concerning such studies until researchers could figure out how to conduct them more transparently.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology was conducting gain-of-function experiments when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in China in late 2019. It is now being widely posited by experts that the lab possibly had an accident that released the virus.
BOMBSHELL! Dr Fauci in 2012 wrote that “gain of function” research to juice up bat viruses was worth risking a pandemic: “the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks. It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature” @SharriMarkson scoop https://t.co/S7ILuzgnNw pic.twitter.com/iwyPCPctId
— Miranda Devine (@mirandadevine) May 28, 2021
In Fauci’s paper, he acknowledged that the research was very risky and could potentially lead to a deadly lab accident. He also said that the chances of that happening were rare and that the work was “important” because the experiments would help the scientific community prepare for naturally-occurring pandemics.
“In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic?” he wrote in 2012. “Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario – however remote – should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision? Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks.”
Fauci asserted that it was “more likely” that a natural pandemic would occur and “the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky.”
The virologist did note, however, that the scientific community “must respect that there are genuine and legitimate concerns about this type of research, both domestically and globally.”
“We cannot expect those who have these concerns to simply take us, the scientific community, at our word that the benefits of this work outweigh the risks, nor can we ignore their calls for greater transparency, their concerns about conflicts of interest, and their efforts to engage in a dialog about whether these experiments should have been performed in the first place,” Fauci admonished. “Those of us in the scientific community who believe in the merits of this work have the responsibility to address these concerns thoughtfully and respectfully.”
The paper dealt with the “highly pathogenic” H5N1 influenza virus and recommended a pause on gain-of-function research at the time. Fauci believed the moratorium on that research should continue “pending the resolution of critical policy questions concerning the rationale for performing such experiments and how best to report their results.”
Fauci made a statement before Congress in 2012 regarding gain-of-function:
(Video Credit: The Sheridan Files)
Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also allegedly did not alert senior White House officials before he lifted the ban on gain-of-function research back in 2017.
On May 11, Dr. Fauci reversed his position where he once claimed that COVID-19 occurred naturally versus leaking from the Wuhan lab. He now says he’s “not convinced” that the virus developed naturally and that authorities need to determine “exactly what happened.”
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