‘Benefits outweigh the risks’? Fauci accused of ‘ramming through’ dangerous virus research funding without telling White House

 Note.  Where this is going with the "after action" on the coronavirus?  I don't know.  What I do know is that there will be a bit of bloodletting before it's all over.  Gov's will catch hell.  In my opinion, many over reached, and once the majority (or even large minority) of the population gets their heads up and realizes what they allowed (the draconian lockdowns), I think hell will fall on them.  Same with the medical profession.  I believe they overstepped hard too. Can't leave out the teachers either.  A generation of kids will be scarred for life and will be socially/intellectually stunted.  Forget my musings and let's get to the article...

via RT

The Biden administration’s Covid-19 czar, Anthony Fauci, was keenly aware of how dangerous gain-of-function virus research was, but reportedly pushed for its renewal without alerting the White House during the HHS churn in 2017.

Fauci, the director of the Nat­ional Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), “did not alert senior White House officials before lifting the ban on gain-of-function research in 2017,” Australian journalist Sharri Markson claimed in a report published on Friday.

“It kind of just got rammed through,” one former Trump administration official told Markson. “I think there’s truth in the narrative that the [National Security Council] staff, the president, the White House chief-of-staff, those people were in the dark that he was switching back on the research.”

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The NIH announced it was resuming gain-of-function research on December 19, 2017. It cited the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) guidance on such funding, released earlier that day. At the time of issuing the guidance, the HHS was run by acting secretary Eric Hargan. Secretary Tom Price had resigned at the end of September, over spending $1 million on private jets for travel. His replacement Alex Azar wouldn’t be sworn in until January 29, 2018.

If Fauci was responsible for pushing through the resumption of funding, that would directly contradict his own argument from a few years prior. In a 2012 article published in MBio, the journal of the American Society of Microbiology, Fauci said scientists alone should not decide on the fate of such research, which he described as risky but worth it. 

While gain-of-function research is very important, Fauci argued, the researchers “can no longer be the only players in the discussion of whether certain experiments should be done.” The voluntary moratorium against such research – in effect at the time – is good and should continue, he argued, “until policy decisions could be articulated” with the help of global and national public opinion, experts, and public officials. Two years later, in 2014, the Obama administration officially imposed a moratorium on funding gain-of-function research.

Highlighting that article, Markson highlighted Fauci’s admission that gain-of-function research is risky, citing the example of a hypothetical case of a pandemic breaking out if a scientist doing the research became infected by accident.

“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,” he wrote. 

Here