The Grind:
During a town hall discussion with Jim Acosta earlier this week, Anthony Fauci, who previously served as the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director and as the chief medical advisor under the Biden administration, cautioned that another pandemic could happen soon. In fact, according to Fauci, “there will absolutely be an outbreak of another pandemic,” and it could happen as early as next year.
“So if we really want to prevent the next pandemic, and there will be one, there will absolutely be an outbreak of another pandemic,” Fauci said. “It may be next year or it may be in your […] grandchildren and your great-grandchildren’s lifetime.”
The Details:
Gee, possibly next year, huh? Another election-year pandemic sounds like a lot of fun, doesn’t it? That would be super convenient for one particular political party, don’t you think?
But was that even the worst of it? Fauci was arguably not trying to insist that a pandemic would come next year, but merely making the point that one could come at any time. What was worse was how he defended the NIAID’s clandestine efforts to fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“You don’t want to study bats in Fairfax County, Virginia, to find out what the animal-human interface is that might lead to a jumping of species,” Fauci explained. “So we had a modest collaboration with very respectable Chinese scientists who were world experts on coronavirus, and we did that through a sub-grant from a larger grant to EcoHealth.”
Gain-of-function research had been banned in the United States in 2014, but that didn’t stop the NIH from funding such research before the ban was lifted by the Obama administration days before he left office. Read more…