Smoking Gun? Or did Vanity Fair just shoot their mouths off?

[Freeduhdum]

First Point:
this excellent Vanity Fair article points out some serious questions that we must demand answers to.

Second Point:
It seems to me politically, the Biden administration now wants the masks and lockdowns to go away and the economy to recover, moving forward it will increasingly be critical to their political survival.


Key Point from the Vanity Fair Article:

"Then came the revelation that the Lancet statement was not only signed but organized by a zoologist named Peter Daszak, who has repackaged U.S. government grants and allocated them to facilities conducting gain-of-function research—among them the WIV itself. David Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, ran the State Department’s day-to-day COVID-19 origins inquiry. He said it soon became clear that “there is a huge gain-of-function bureaucracy” inside the federal government."

Final Point:
We clearly now know that tax payer dollars went to the Wuhan lab

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins

Edited June 7, 2021 by Sheryl
statements not sunstantiated by the link given, and defamatory stetments, removed by Moderator

[mtls2005]

Haven't read Fauci's emails. Am disinclined to do so.

 

Re: the Vanity Fair article, it was a decent article, read it on release, but not the copious links.

 

Haven't followed the fall-out.

 

Am against "gain-of-function" experiments, unless someone can make a damned good reason for them on a case-by-case basis.

 

The U.S. funding of these type of experiments is quesitonable. More so our funding of these sorts ofe xperiements in China.

 

Having a virology lab in a densely packed city is an obvious no-no. Move it back closer to the bat-guano cave, in a remote area. BSL 4 lab is a requirement.

 

Accidental lab leak seems plausible. Still unclear how accurate those intelligence reports of sick workers at the WIV in late 2019 are?

 

The Lancet letter is a bit skeevy, and Peter Daszak comes across as a total skeeve.

 

Dr. Fauci is responsible, ultimately, for public health. The source of the pandemic is important, obviously, but not something I'd judge Dr. F on.

 

Finally, 

 

9 hours ago, Freeduhdum said:

Dr. Rand Paul

 

 

Gack. He's an Opthamologist (non-practicing) who never graduated from (undergraduate) college.

 

Puh-leeeze.

 

[Jeffr2]

43 minutes ago, mtls2005 said:

Haven't read Fauci's emails. Am disinclined to do so.

 

Re: the Vanity Fair article, it was a decent article, read it on release, but not the copious links.

 

Haven't followed the fall-out.

 

Am against "gain-of-function" experiments, unless someone can make a damned good reason for them on a case-by-case basis.

 

The U.S. funding of these type of experiments is quesitonable. More so our funding of these sorts ofe xperiements in China.

 

Having a virology lab in a densely packed city is an obvious no-no. Move it back closer to the bat-guano cave, in a remote area. BSL 4 lab is a requirement.

 

Accidental lab leak seems plausible. Still unclear how accurate those intelligence reports of sick workers at the WIV in late 2019 are?

 

The Lancet letter is a bit skeevy, and Peter Daszak comes across as a total skeeve.

 

Dr. Fauci is responsible, ultimately, for public health. The source of the pandemic is important, obviously, but not something I'd judge Dr. F on.

 

Finally, 

 

 

 

Gack. He's an Opthamologist (non-practicing) who never graduated from (undergraduate) college.

 

Puh-leeeze.

 

I do believe that the small amount of funding from the US was in support of research into viruses after SARS came out. Makes sense to try and figure out how and where it made the jump to humans.

[Sheryl]

A post linking to an (at least as yet) unsubstantiated and sensationalist article in a British tabloid has been removed

[Sheryl]

The OP has been edited to remove all statements not supported by the link given (which was a lot). Likewise replies to same were removed.

 

After much consideration i decided to keep the thread open retaining those parts of the OP that are factually supported by the link given, as the Vanity Fair article is balanced and worth reading.

 

One point people should be clear on is that the Wuhan Institute had funding from many, many sources, like all research labs. And, as is normal practice, their published articles list all the funding sources that contributed to any part of the published research. This does not mean that all listed donors supported all aspects of the research, in fact usually not the case. To understand what funding came for what purpose one has to examine the specifics of the different grants.

 

The NIH grant in question  was not  a grant to the Wuhan Institute, it was a grant to a US research organization, EcoHealth Alliance.  EcoHealth in turn made a much smaller subgrant to the Wuhan Lab to cover collection and analysis of viral samples -- not  any sort of "gain of function" research.