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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
Clinton was, well, Clintonesque:
The Senate vote on the issue late in the Clinton Administration was bipartisan, and heavily Republican:
George W. Bush enthusiastically signed it. How’s that workin’ out for us?
In reality, the CCP saw the fall of the USSR as a warning, and took action to avoid the USSR’s mistakes, and rather than becoming a “normal” country has systematically carried out an evolving total war against the US, taking care not to engage the US’s particular strengths.
Back in the spring of 2020, Luc Montagnier, the recipient of a Nobel for his work on HIV, thought that whoever was behind the research in the Wuhan lab was looking for an HIV vaccine. Covid-19, he said, has snips of HIV in it, and he was certain that it was engineered. Maybe that was its purpose, but however you examine it, it’s also a bioweapon, and from whatever angle you examine Fauci, he looks like a criminal.
Perhaps more to the point, the current pandemic is eerily reminiscent of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. A new virus, a new disease associated with it, terrible deaths, and, lo and behold, Tony Fauci is in the middle of it, charged by his critics with withholding effective treatment (Bactrim and other sulfa drugs) and with pushing AZT, which, they say, killed thousands.
Epidemiologist Harvey Risch, of Yale, told the story to Mark Levin, although YouTube has of course pulled the video. As reported in The New American, “Dr. Fauci and the FDA are doing the same thing that was done in 1987 and that’s led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans who could have been saved by usage of this drug [hydroxychloroquine],” Dr. Risch told Levin. “And this is the same thing that the FDA has done. It’s outrageous.”
And Fauci isn’t?
What exactly is that supposed to accomplish? Just because it’s on the record doesn’t mean he can’t successfully deny that he said it.
Yes, he has been doing that, and that much is good.
I want to say that too, emphatically.
I do respect and admire what Rand Paul has been doing over the course of the pandemic. Very much.
But I was frustrated when I watched it. Fauci either did or did not sign these documents. What a complete and utter waste of time this Senate hearing was without the actual evidence on the table.
There should have been a press packet prepared by Rand Paul’s staff with the papers with Fauci’s signature on them, and Paul’s staff should have included a brief note summarizing what the papers were.
Obviously, what Rand Paul did that day did not in fact do any good. Everything stayed the same after that hearing.
I can’t fathom how Washington operates. Our little town meetings do better.
Sunday morning coffee thinking: Over the years, I’ve edited quite a few journal articles in the sciences. What I always find stunning, and frankly reassuring in most respects, is how tiny the steps are that science takes. By the time the variables are limited to test for one specific thing, science experiments advance knowledge at an infinitesimally slow pace. That’s a good thing in general, but it means that it easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees.
This is why these science advisory committees were established in the first place. In fact, most universities used to have such committees whose sole purpose was to evaluate master’s thesis applications. The committees would evaluate the applications to ensure that the student had proved that the research had not been done before (that discovery process used to take the first year of a master’s student’s two- or three-year academic stint) and that the experiment would be a real contribution to the cause of improving the human condition.
Counting the global publishing of science experiments, today there are probably a million papers published every year. (The Human Genome Project, funded privately, was actually little more than the assembly of a database that put all of the international work on DNA sequencing in one place.) The CDC and NIH are supposed to be monitoring these experiments for ethics and morality concerns. They are supposed to be watching the road ahead, where these experiments could lead eventually.
What I think I have seen over the past two years is that the systems we put in place a hundred years ago, and even two hundred years ago, to ensure that the sciences didn’t end up blowing up the world are no longer working very well. Getting the answers we need is often taking too long. The “fomite” research was ridiculously elaborate and painful to watch. Seriously, how long does it take to spray some virus on a slide and see what kills it? The Lysol company did not get permission to say on its label that it killed the covid-19 virus for a year. This is a company whose area of expertise is “fomites.” Meanwhile dangerous experimentation, like the gain-of-function testing, seems to be slipping by unnoticed.
We should all be concerned about these systems given our ability to play with DNA.
Thirty-some years ago to pursue some fairly specific topics in medical journals I would have to set aside as much as a full day to go to the NIH Med Library or the Library of Congress and often have to wait while some kind staffer brought the bound volumes from the stacks.
As technology made the finding part easier it also appears to have created weird new incentives to be politically au courant or crank out virtual clickbait. Funding was always more likely for proposed pathways to a cure but when science was more about what is of interest to scientists when they are doing science, arcane projects to answer some “basic science” questions probably had a better shot at funding than now.
Politicization not only redirects funding but denies publication to inconvenient results and less scrutiny for PC outcomes.
Funding has always been about small “p” politics and social contacts but when the creation of those social arrangements is also shaped by ideological constraints, the more tacit pressure to defend biased, poor science from outside scrutiny. The “Climategate” emails are Exhibit A for that phenomenon.
CDC/FDA/NIH do not have the resources to replicate every study. They have strong incentives to protect themselves from embarrassment for being associated with fraud or failure but that defensive course of action usually follows a discovery made by third parties.
You didn’t mention any effect in this area (ethics and morality) possibly caused by the diminishment of religion in our society? Is that part of this change?
No question there is a serious ethics problem in research.
Is the decline in religion a cause or a result of our collective decline. Cain turned away from God because of the shame of killing his brother, not the other way ‘round. Are our behaviors turning us away from that which enlivens and strengthens conscience?
I admit freely and openly that I really enjoyed every single day of GW’s two terms in office. It was such a relief to me to not have any more of Clinton and not to have to worry about Al Gore that I enjoyed following GW’s work as it described every day through the NYT and WSJ.
One of my favorite things he did was how he handled the stem cell debate. He gathered together many experts:
He organized a three-day retreat with many of these leaders (I’m sorry I cannot find a link to this historic event), the purpose of which was to look at this issue from every religious and moral perspective. This council was the result of that conference.
I really admired the approach, of gathering people together to discuss an important issue. He did that a lot during his two terms in office. It’s what I would do if I were a president. :-)
PS: Years later, he held a party at the White House for children who had been “snowflake babies.” Those children vividly made his point about the embryonic research–and his fears of “farming” them for research.
The Chinese military has targeted DNA profile information throughout the world and is engaged in developing biological weapons that will not affect Han Chinese, but will affect everyone else. Yet we continue to share DNA information with the Chinese.
We need a realistic way to stop buying goods from China. All our products have country of origin printed on them. Why cant we get with the times and include this on online product descriptions? China requires ‘made in china’ on a lot of their products. They skirt the law too. I was over there working in a wire plant. They bought CAT5e wire without printing from a company near me in MA and would just print their name on it. This sounds like a bright spot for our economy but it wasn’t. They would have produced it if they could.