Fauci argued benefits of gain-of-function research outweighed pandemic risk in 2012 paper

In a newly resurfaced paper from 2012, Dr. Anthony Fauci argued that the benefits of gain-of-function research are worth the increased risk of a potential pandemic-causing lab accident.

The Weekend Australian unearthed a paper Fauci wrote for the American Society for Microbiology in October 2012 in which he argued in support of gain-of-function research. Such research involves making viruses more infectious and/or deadly. Experts have raised the possibility that the COVID-19 pandemic could have originated from a potential lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, where gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses have been conducted.

Despite the risks involved, Fauci called gain-of-function experiments “important work” in his 2012 writing:

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? 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?

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