Trump was always downplaying the virus and giving unscientific advice to the US. He wanted to be the spokesperson(centerstage)giving updates instead of the experts.
He squandered away sound expert scientific advice substituting his own.
Birx has no favor in my eyes. What she says these days have no merit... too little too late, solely to regain her reputation.
The gain of function story re: Fauci has been reputed. It remains a favorite despite the facts.
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The Facts
This is a complex story, on many levels. We are going to keep focused on what was disclosed in the NIH letter and in the release of grant updates by EcoHealth by the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Intercept.
Gain of function, in many ways, is basic biological research. It’s done all the time with flies, worms, mice and cells in petri dishes. Scientists create novel genotypes (such as arrangements of nucleic acids) and screen or select to find those with a given phenotype (such as trait or ability) to find new sequences with a particular function.
But it’s one thing to experiment with fruit flies and another thing when the research involves genotypes of potential pandemic pathogens and functions related to transmissibility or virulence in humans.
That’s when gain of function becomes controversial. The idea is to get ahead of future viruses that might emerge from nature, thereby allowing scientists to study how to combat them. But increasingly many scientists have decided the research was potentially dangerous — and, especially in China, not done with the proper safety precautions.
Even now, it’s not clear whether the research funded by EcoHealth in China amounted to gain of function. When the Intercept obtained EcoHealth documents in September, seven of 11 scientists who are virologists or work in adjacent fields
told the Intercept that the work appeared to meet NIH’s criteria for gain-of-function research. Obviously, it’s a matter of dispute within the scientific community.
But Cotton claimed NIH admitted that it had funded gain-of-function research. That’s wrong. No such admission appears in the letter, and NIH officials continue to insist that the EcoHealth work using NIH funds did not constitute gain-of-function research.
The repeated claim that Fauci lied to Congress about ‘gain-of-function’ research - The Washington Post
