Enormous protest against vaccine passes and COVID mandates outside the Parliament building in Wellington, New Zealand today. Here, protesters perform the Haka, a traditional MΔori dance. pic.twitter.com/KXInDs7tbY
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/BcA7kXrTiYpic.twitter.com/cIpjT4A9Yh
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."
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.
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.”
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,
6:37is when you are working with an established
human pathogen that is known to be potentially causing a pandemic,
6:44and 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
8:24did 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).
Lab origin? "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." And the last people you want to listen to on SARS-2's origin are the virologists, since Fauci controls their industry. https://t.co/AiMbvdhrt0https://t.co/kiAe7bZPRA