CATHOLIC FRANCIS COLLINS & 9TH COMMANDMENT

Here's my conversation with Francis Collins (@NIHDirector), director of the NIH and one of the most impactful science leaders in history. I asked the difficult questions and Francis answered with humility and brilliance. This conversation gave me hope. https://t.co/BcA7kXrTiY   pic.twitter.com/cIpjT4A9Yh

— Lex Fridman (@lexfridman) November 5, 2021

The only value I found in this interview is to watch a leading government official lie, lie, lie with the complicity of a young journalist who got the interview on the promise to not contradict, drive down, or ask any real meaningful questions but instead to allow the interview to be constructed as a kind of defense used to legitimize mass murder.  But he's a catholic, so that's okay.  Does Collins violate the 9th Commandment?  To ask it is to answer it.

Collins lies brazenly, shamelessly, and repeatedly in the interview,

You should have asked him about the ninth commandment (eighth commandment in some faiths) and the "sanctity of truth."

— Richard H. Ebright (@R_H_Ebright) November 6, 2021

From the start: 

Science at its best is our social hope. So it’s been difficult for me, as it has during the pandemic, to become a source of division.  What I would love to do in this conversation with you is to touch on some difficult topics, and do so with humility and empathy so that we may begin to regain a sense of trust in science.  And once again science can become a source of hope.  Is that okay with you? 

I love the goal. 

Let’s start with some hard questions. 

You called for thorough, expert-driven, and objective inquiry into the origins of COVID-19, so let me ask, “Is there a reasonable chance that the COVID-19 gene leaked from a lab?

I can’t exclude that.  I think it’s fairly unlikely.  I wish we had more ability to ask questions of the Chinese government and learn more about what kind of records were in the lab that we’ve never been able to see.  But most likely, this was a natural origin of a virus probably starting at a bat perhaps traveling at some other intermediate, yet-to-be-identified host and finding its way into humans.

Richard H. Ebright cites example after example of Francis Collins, a Catholic, lying.  

2:47

I think we might know if we find that intermediate host. With SARS, it was 14 years before we figured out it was the civet cat

people’s immune cells are taken out of their body and treated with a genetic therapy that revs up their ability to discover the cancer that that patient currently has maybe even at Stage IV, and then give them back, as those old Ninja warriors go after the cancer and it sometimes works dramatically.  That’s gain-of-function.  You gave that patient a gain in their immune function that may have saved their life.  So you’ve got to be careful not to say that gain-of-function is bad.  Most of what we do in science that’s good involves quite a bit of that.  And we’re all living with gain-of-functions every day.  Taking off his glasses, he says, “I have a gain-of-function because I’m wearing these glasses; otherwise, I wouldn’t be seeing you as clearly, I’m happy with that gain-of-function.”

6:30

so, that’s where a lot of confusion has happened.  The kind of gain-of-function, which is now subject to very rigorous and very carefully-defined oversight, 

6:37  is when you are working with an established human pathogen that is known to be potentially causing a pandemic, 

6:44  and you are enhancing, or potentially enhancing its transmissibility or its virulence.  We call it EPPP, Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogen.  

6:59  That requires this very stringent oversight, worked out over 3 years by the National Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity that needs to be looked at by a panel that goes well beyond NIH to decide “are the benefits worth the risks in that situation?”  Most of the time, it’s not worth the risk.  Only 3 times, in the last three or four years, have experiments been given permission to go forward—they were all on influenza.  So I will argue that if you’re worried about the next pandemic, the more you know about the coming enemy, the better chance you have to recognize when trouble is starting.  So if you can do it safely, studying influenza or coronaviruses—like SARS, MERS, and SARS-CoV-2—would be a good thing to know about.  But you have to be able to do it safely because we all know--lab accidents can happen.  I mean look at SARS where there have been lab accidents and people have gotten sick as a result.  We don't want to take that chance unless there's a compelling scientific reason.  

8:11   That's why we have this very stringent oversight.  The experiments being done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a sub-award to our grant to Eco-Health in New York 

8:24   did not meet that standard of requiring that kind of stringent oversight.  I want to be really clear about that because there's been so much thrown around about it.  

8:30  Was it gain-of-function?  Well, in the standard use of that term that you would use 

8:48

8:53

9:11

9:13 9:16, 9:22, 9:30, 9:37, 9:56, 10:04, 10:19, 10:21, 10:33, 10:41, 10:50, 11:13, 11:50, 13:11, and 13:34 (and that is just the first 15 minutes).