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Why Are We Helping the Communist Chinese Develop Biological Weapons?
At this point, I thought it was impossible for my government to disappoint me. Apparently, I was mistaken. Our ironically named National Institutes of Health (NIH) has just acknowledged that it was helping the Communist Chinese develop biological weapons. “Gain of function” research simply means developing viruses that are more dangerous than the ones that exist naturally. There is only one reason to engage in such research: to kill a lot of people, millions and millions, all over the world. Why else would you want diseases that are more deadly than the ones we already have? I’m not surprised that communists want to develop such weapons. But why are we helping them? If you think I’m making this up, check out the first sentence from this morning’s news story:
Despite repeated denials by NIAID Director Anthony Fauci that his agency used American taxpayer money to fund Chinese gain-of-function research on bats infected with coronaviruses, the National Institutes of Health – which oversees NIAID – admitted in a letter to House Oversight Committee ranking member James Comer, R-Ky., that a “limited experiment” was indeed conducted.
Perhaps I’m missing something here. But I can’t imagine what it might be.
We’re helping the Communist Chinese develop biological weapons. Maybe we’re helping a little. Maybe we’re helping a lot.
But why are we helping at all?
The National Institutes of Health. Helping the Communist Chinese develop biological weapons. Who on earth thought that was a good idea?
I was going to write a clever post about this. But I don’t feel like it. This is just too horrifying.
My God …
Published in General
What do you mean “enemy?” Our top negotiators with the Chinese have been telling the CCP for years “our success is measured by your success.” OK, so the CCP thinks “our success is measured by your decline and defeat.” Potato potahto.
That’s a good point.
I’m reminded of the destruction of native peoples around the world by western disease during the imperial European migrations of the 17th and 18th centuries. Natives of North, South and Central America, as well as the aboriginals of New Zealand and Australia, were all nearly wiped out by influenza and smallpox carried by European settlers and imported by African slaves. These isolated peoples had no natural defense or resistance to these diseases.
So imagine just how devastating an engineered, novel, deadly and easily transmittable pathogen could be. So playing with potentially deadly viruses and making them more easily transmitted or harmful is about as risky an endeavor as can be imagined. And yet folks don’t seem to be very alarmed by what took place in that Wuhan lab. The evidence seems clear that such a virus was created and released into the general population, but that circumstance is deflected, downplayed, denied and dismissed. The fact that US dollars were knowingly used to provide funds for this research just makes the situation outrageous.
But the question is, why? First, imagine a wicked pathogen, then a vaccine. Give the vaccine to yourself and your allies, then hold the rest of the world hostage. Corona viruses are not usually much of a threat to humans, but they do cause about an estimated 20% of common colds. Let’s start there. Sounds like a plot worthy of the an authoritarian regime and its military, does it not?
Now let’s say we’re working on a cure for the common cold, or at least the Corona virus version of a cold. Maybe we can get our western rubes to fund some of our Corona virus research. They know that a more virulent version of a Corona virus can help efficiently develop a cold vaccine or treatment in the lab. With a deadly virus, we can quickly know whether any vaccine or treatment is effective, because the mice live. Otherwise, they succumb quickly.
Am I getting warmer?
The problem with all this is an escape from the lab. But the feckless supporters of this research in the West, the co-conspirators, run interference. They know that they can easily be implicated in this artificial, engineered pandemic. So they change the subject and use the horror of the pandemic as a club to regularly bash their political opponents and deflect blame away from themselves. Unwilling to lose an opportunity created by crisis, even if they participated in its conception, they pretend to seize control. They issue mandates, pervert science and use the pandemic to separate their political adversaries (the maskless, unvaccinated and mandate deniers) from the obedient masses.
It’s almost worked.
Pretty dark. If it were fully orchestrated, it would not have been released anywhere near the source. The cascade of bad policy was a combination of pandemic stupid and kneejerk statism. It is frightening that our collective cognitive and character deformities knocked out much of our resistance to power-grabbing by morons.
That’s not the only reason. But the good reasons do tend towards hubris. And I can’t think of any good reason for farming out such research to another country, especially one with a bad record on human rights.
Happens all the time around here. The local fire departments set buildings on fire so they can practice. They’re usually very careful about which buildings, though. They don’t like collateral damage.
President Eisenhower warned about it at the same time he warned about a military-industrial complex.
All the “good” diseases (smallpox, polio, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, hepatitis, MMR, etc,etc) already had vaccines and the developers of some of those got Nobel prizes. So, the only option left was to create a new disease that required a vaccine, so that the developers could get a Nobel prize. What are the odds that the developer of mRNA vaccines will NOT get a Nobel nod next year? Or that Fauci will not share in that prize? Nice cap to a distinguished career, would it not be? Just publicly directing the response to that novel disease should garner Fauci that prize. I’m sure he’s been coveting that honor his entire career. Now he can almost taste that achievement! He can almost reach out and touch it! Ah. The fame! Ah, the grandeur! The World at his feet, worshipping him like a deity—lighting candles OF HIm To HIM! The mind soars! The heart swells! Immortal fame and honor! Pasteur? An amateur Koch? A Pygmy! Salk? A has-been! Jenner? Pure luck!
The Dayton Fire Department had a facility for that right across the street from one of my employers. Extremely distracting it was. But that was built for the purpose.
My employer had buildings that were no longer wanted, so were made available to the township fire department for practice. They were rural farm houses, mostly.
“Who on earth thought that was a good idea?”
The wicked, Godless and corrupt.
It is mind boggling, isn’t it? The only thing I can think of is it wasn’t intended as a biological weapon but some medical experiment. Or I bet that’s what our side thought but their side knew fully well it’s military applications.
The timing was really interesting. For what was being delivered could it have been any better? And look what we are getting now.
They could have developed their own vaccine for their own people before turning it loose on the rest of the world.
A better strategy is to have two strains. You release the less deadly strain (call it alpha) at home and develop natural immunity, then release a more deadly strain (call it delta) on your enemies. Or, you could just release the alpha, knowing that a delta variant would emerge after your country had natural immunity. Taking advantage of the crisis is easy with so many leaders that have been compromised. It could be a plot to a Bond movie.
Gain of Function has a number of applications besides killing people. For one, it is useful to try to study how the virus might evolve to become more dangerous. We do similar studies evaluating antibiotic resistance – if bacteria can rapidly develop resistance to an antibiotic, it needs to be used cautiously, likely in combination with another antibiotic with a different way of killing bacteria. For example, what if you wanted to determine whether COVID vaccines will provide protection against possible variants of Wuhan Coronavirus. If the variant is already out there, you are behind the curve.
There is also the reason @mimac mentioned, though that is not usually favored for pathogens unless you are willing to get the strictest scrutiny. There’s a lot more at the NIH Office of Science Policy Have you read any of these documents @drbastiat ?
All that said, gain of function research is extremely dangerous. This is like performing criticality experiments with plutonium, high explosive or rocket propellant synthesis and pilot plant work, or large scale work with biological toxins. (Have you ever held a small vial, knowing it contains enough toxin powder to kill hundreds of people, much less you?) This work requires the most dedicated researchers with experience working with dangerous pathogens and exacting standards.
Does anyone think of that when it comes to the CCP? Do they not have an appalling record of workplace safety and environmental violations?
That’s the real question. There are several labs in the United States with the capacity to do BSL-4 high containment work – that means gloveboxes, people in hazmat suits with external air supplies, exacting security, and a personnel reliability program to watch for inside agents. Every one of these laboratories is oversee by an Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC) composed of scientists as well as members of the general public. I know research groups that I would trust with Gain of Function research… and many that I would not. Why send money to do research in China, rather than support our US laboratories? NIH is a US government agency handing out taxpayer funds, after all?
Unless this was an end run around the rules on Gain of Function.
Not quite. Fauci was not in charge of the effort. He was not a voting member or chair of the NSABB that wrote up the guidance documents for reviewing Gain of Function research. I do know a couple of the voting members professionally. I do not see evidence that the Ecohealth Alliance grant met the high standards set for review of Gain of Function research.
However, those standards naturally only apply to research in the USA. I believe this was a run around the GoF standards, which is absolutely despicable. We are all paying the price for Fauci’s negligence and arrogance.
That’s an interesting theory. Had Fauci not been such a stick in the mud with people like Rand Paul who accuse him and Daszak of funding gain-of-function research, it would seem reasonable for him to admit it. Were this to happen, I’m confident our mainstream media, experts at shaping narratives, would be able to spin this to make it out to be a good thing. For now, the population will have to wait and see what appears in future news reports regarding this pandemic.
They are our enemy. We shouldn’t be working with them on anything . . .
I think the psychological profile of Fauci will be debated for centuries to come. A few months ago I heard a news clip of an exchange he and Rand Paul had in a congressional hearing over the gain of function testing. In the clip, Rand Paul asks Fauci directly and firmly, “Did you authorize gain of function testing?” To which Fauci replies just as firmly, “No, I did not.”
I was frustrated with Rand Paul, frankly, watching the exchange. Please, Senator, get your act together. Why isn’t the paper with Fauci’s signature on it in your hand right now? This is not middle school. This is the U.S. Senate.
And there was evidence available from the NIH. The evidence should have been part of the Senate proceedings that day.
Granted, I’m looking at Fauci from afar, but he does not strike me as ill in a mental health sense. I cannot figure out why he was so sure of himself that day. He didn’t even say, “I don’t know if I did or not. I authorize thousands of research projects every day.”
Putting another checkmark in my influenza column, is his conscience clear? Is that why he is so confident about this?
He’s an odd duck, for sure. His job over the past forty years has been to motivate other countries to take steps to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. He has been good at it. He is revered as a science-fiction-like superhero around the world. He still has not resigned over this. He continues in his job, and in fact he has been promoted.
What I am worried about now is that the CDC believes the flu has disappeared because of all the pandemic control measures. Dr. Fauci is thinking, “I’ve finally stopped the flu with this combination of control measures: vaccines, masks, contact tracing.”
That’s why we have to get to the bottom of this virus-creation story. There’s a lot riding on the truth.
The government always gives itself ways to do an end run around its own regulations. That’s a major problem with the whole progressive project.
Good observation.
If you’re a member of Congress, you always give the administrative guy on the stand an out. A memorable one was from a senator who allegedly was a prosecutor in a former life. It was something like, “What can I tell the people back home about this dastardly thing you’ve done.”
What an idiot. The guy on the hot seat can always put together some word soup. The people back home don’t need a senator to be their news boy, either.
I think the most likely scenario remains an accidental release of the virus from the Wuhan lab. Whether at some point the China government said “let it rip” to make sure the world went down with it, I don’t know. On the other hand, viruses do their virus thing and once released it would spread.
Whether US funded research is directly tied to this specific virus also remains unknown. While of interest, it is also secondary to the bigger questions. Was it wise to pursue this research anywhere? Even if so, why in China given the lack of transparency into what was actually happening at the Wuhan lab? And, regardless of the specifics of the origin of Covid-19, where is the accountability for the deception and coverup regarding the possibility of a lab leak that was engineered by Fauci and his associates from the start of the pandemic and that continues to this day?
Full disclosure: My work for the last 30-some years of my working life was made possible by government grants for scientific research. My salary was directly funded by a federal grant for a couple of years in there, and it was less directly supported in others. Like Maggie Thatcher and Newt Gingrich, I’m in favor of government-funded basic research, as well as some other types.
However, I recognized early on, long before I learned that President Eisenhower had warned about it, that funding that’s almost exclusively from the government is a system that’s out of balance. And the few non-profit foundations that fund research tend to be government-adjacent, so don’t contribute much to diversity of funding.
My masters thesis advisor got a lot of funding from a power utility company for studies of environmental problems in public waterways–problems that tended to be associated with that industry. A lot of his grad students did their research using that money, and at least one of them (a recently returned Vietnam vet, the only one in our group) wrote a thesis that was not appreciated by the funder. If all of them wrote reports like that, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the funding would have dried up, but maybe it wouldn’t have, as these utility corporations are under public scrutiny.
Anyhow, it’s a problem no matter which way you look at it.
Further to lack of accountability for the coverup, on January 31, 2020 a virologist from Scripps sent an email to Fauci and others in which the possibility of a lab leak was raised. The next day that virologist, Fauci, and others held a conference call. On February 4, the Scripps virologist sent an email to the group saying the lab leak theory was a conspiracy theory, which then became the official public narrative from “the experts“. We know those events occurred because the emails were released this year in response to a FOIA request. However, almost all the substance of the emails was redacted! What conceivable legally protected interest was there in redacting what was supposedly a technical discussion among experts? Why are EcoHealth and NIH continuing to withhold other documents about funding and grants from Congress and the public?
My first thought was, and still is, this was a stupid lab accident. The denials, the frantic search for solutions, the reluctance by anyone involved to provide credible information, and the over reactions, all point to human failing.
Rand Paul already knew the answer. What he wanted was Fauci saying on the record that he did not, which is what he got.
At least Paul has been calling this garbage out consistently from the start. I can’t think of too many others who have so flatly called bullsh*t when they saw it. I must have missed Mitch McConnell’s press conference where he announced new guidelines on what CDC and NIH can declare and enforce on the American people, their jobs, their lives, their relationships, their freedoms.
For our own good, because they’re smarter than us rubes.
True. But on the upside for Fauci et al, if the Chinese lab did screw the pooch and if Congress or a small army of Plaintiffs’ lawyers started demanding answers, nobody hides the ball better than Chinese commies. Good luck trying to get a paper trail if you have to start at that end.
Hide the ball? Don’t you mean hide the heads? As in no witnesses much less a paper Trail.
Why? Because we’ve been following a bipartisan delusion with respect to the Chinese Communist Party for many decades, and it’s taken on many lives of its own.
The delusion: deeper economic ties with China would improve democracy and human rights.
In what may have been Ronald Reagan’s greatest mistake, he basically took over Jimmy Carter’s policy for China:
His successor doubled down. (Emphasis added.):
[Continued]