HHS halts grants for nonprofit EcoHealth that funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan

 The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which permitted the grant, gave EcoHealth several opportunities to disprove that its experiments constituted gain-of-function research — but the group “failed to do so,” according to Brisbon.

That research also “likely violated protocols of the NIH regarding biosafety,” she added, with experiments conducted at biosafety level 2 — which according to Rutgers University molecular biologist Dr. Richard Ebright is comparable to the standards of safety at a typical dentist’s office.

Alarmingly, Brisbon revealed that NIH has yet to receive several materials from EcoHealth about its novel bat coronavirus research at the now-notorious Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) or from the Chinese lab itself.

Daszak, in sworn congressional testimony earlier this month, said he had not even asked Wuhan researchers — including longtime collaborator and WIV deputy director Shi Zhengli — for viral sequences since before the pandemic began.

Brisbon’s memo also referenced an internal probe of “allegations that WIV released the coronavirus that was responsible for the COVID-19 global pandemic,” though no EcoHealth or other US-funded grant has been tied yet to the outbreak.

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Brisbon said NIH has yet to receive materials from EcoHealth about its novel bat coronavirus research at the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) or from the Chinese lab itself.AFP via Getty Images

“EcoHealth Alliance is disappointed by HHS’ decision today and we will be contesting the proposed debarment,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “We disagree strongly with the decision and will present evidence to refute each of these allegations and to show that NIH’s continued support of EcoHealth Alliance is in the public interest.”

“EcoHealth Alliance provably defrauded the US government, provably breached contractual terns of US-government grants, and, through the reckless gain-of-function research it conducted in Wuhan, probably caused the COVID-19 pandemic, killing 20 million and costing $25 trillion,” Ebright told The Post.

“Nevertheless, EcoHealth Alliance was awarded more than $50 million in new US-government funding since the start of the pandemic with most of that funding earmarked for the same kinds of reckless virus discovery and virus enhancement research that likely caused pandemic.”

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Daszak in sworn congressional testimony earlier this month said he had not even asked Wuhan researchers — including WIV deputy director Shi Zhengli — for viral sequences since before the coronavirus pandemic.AP

The memo attached to the letter notes EcoHealth received a grant of more than $4 million from the NIH titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”

More than half a million dollars of that funding flowed to the WIV between 2014 and 2021, a Government Accountability Office report found last year, to conduct “genetic experiments to combine naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in hybridized (also known as chimeric) coronavirus strains.”

The grant was initially suspended in April 2020, with NIH’s then-principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak revealing in October 2021 that EcoHealth had violated the terms of its grant by performing the gain-of-function research.

The project had modified novel bat coronaviruses and made them 10,000 times more infectious for research on lab mice — but EcoHealth “failed to report” that to NIH.

Tabak stressed that the bat coronaviruses studied on the taxpayers’ dime in Wuhan could not have caused the COVID-19 pandemic because the “sequences of the viruses are genetically very distant.”

But other EcoHealth grant proposals have since come under scrutiny from experts like Ebright, who said “the evidence provided by the genome sequence” from another 2018 grant proposal project submitted to US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was a “smoking gun.”

Appearing before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on May 1, Daszak repeatedly denied that his group helped fund the gain-of-function experiments.

“EcoHealth Alliance and Dr. Peter Daszak should never again receive a single penny from the US taxpayer,” said COVID subcommittee chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), who had recommended a criminal investigation of Daszak before the hearing.

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In a May hearing before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Daszak repeatedly denied that his group helped fund the gain-of-function experiments.Getty Images

“Only two weeks after the Select Subcommittee released an extensive report detailing EcoHealth’s wrongdoing and recommending the formal debarment of EcoHealth and its president, HHS has begun efforts to cut off all US funding to this corrupt organization,” Wenstrup added.

“EcoHealth facilitated gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China without proper oversight, willingly violated multiple requirements of its multimillion-dollar National Institutes of Health grant, and apparently made false statements to the NIH,” he went on.

“EcoHealth’s immediate funding suspension and future debarment is not only a victory for the US taxpayer, but also for American national security and the safety of citizens worldwide.”

The HHS letter to Daszak also drew attention to other NIH grants it received to study viruses in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam and other Southeast Asian nations, all of which are “uniquely focused on either emerging infectious disease, highly transmissible pathogens, or novel viruses.”

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Wenstrup in his statement added that his subcommittee’s “investigation into EcoHealth and the origins of COVID-19 is far from over,” with another hearing planned to grill Dr. Anthony Fauci.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology was barred for 10 years from receiving any HHS grants in July 2023, months after both the FBI and US Energy Department determined a lab leak was the most likely cause of the COVID pandemic.

Wenstrup in his statement added that his subcommittee’s “investigation into EcoHealth and the origins of COVID-19 is far from over,” with high-profile public hearings planned in the coming weeks to question Tabak and former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci.

“There must be full accountability, both civil and criminal, for EcoHealth and EcoHealth’s officers — particularly its president, Peter Daszak,” Ebright declared.

“And there must be full accountability for the US-government officials who enabled, abetted, and covered up EcoHealth’s misdeeds and who obstructed investigation of EcoHealth’s misdeeds.”

https://nypost.com/2024/05/15/us-news/hhs-halts-grants-for-nonprofit-ecohealth-that-funded-gain-of-function-research-in-wuhan/

Car theft might be better barometer of state of crime than other measures

 Americans can be forgiven for suffering from whiplash regarding law and order. 

In recent weeks the Biden administration and many news outlets, including USA Today and The Hill, have touted declines in violent crime statistics to argue that America is becoming a safer place. 

“Right now, with 2023 figures and early 2024, the trends are all pointing down, in a positive direction,” Jeff Asher, whose New Orleans-based AH Datalytics is developing his own “Real-Time Crime Index,” told RealClearInvestigations. 

Conservative outlets, including City Journal and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, assert that minor declines in headline grabbers like homicides fail to capture what is really happening in the U.S. 

From 2017 to 2019, the U.S. had an average of 16,641 homicides a year. In 2021 and 2022, however, the country saw considerably more bloodshed, with an average of more than 22,000 annual homicides. Even if the 2023 number drops slightly, it will still represent a large increase over the recent past, before the pandemic and racial upheaval set in motion in 2020.

Many criminologists say this illlustrates one of the problems with the official numbers that are at the center of public debate: They give a distorted impression of true levels of crime. They note that crime stats have become notoriously incomplete in recent years. In some years many big cities did not report their numbers to the FBI, and there are such wide discrepancies in these tallies that the picture they provide has more blur than clarity.

Declining arrest rates and slowing police response times to 911 calls also help explain why polls show Americans believe crime is rising. The experts say the numbers only give some sense of lawbreaking, while most Americans – the vast majority of whom are not crime victims in a given year – are influenced by their largely media-driven perception of whether society feels orderly. 

“There are social media videos of people walking into a CVS and walking out with a shopping cart full and there seems to be no consequences – that’s part of the problem,” said Jay Town, former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. “And then you have people arrested a dozen times and they’re out with no bail. There are no consequences, and thus there are more criminals in the street.”

Americans may fall back on such perceptions in part because the official reports are incomplete and rife with error. “I don’t think with any crime statistics we can ever be precise,” said Asher.

For decades, the traditional gold standard for criminologists was the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, annual compilations by the Bureau of stats provided to it by state and local law enforcement agencies. The FBI’s data, which currently show declines in several criminal categories, especially homicide, provide the basis for many of the stories arguing that, in terms of crime, the U.S. situation is improving.

But the FBI statistics aren't what they used to be, according to several criminologists who pointed to gaps in coverage and apparent errors. The problem began in 1988 when the bureau began to move toward a complex new system of reporting – the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). It promised to provide more comprehensive detail and enable authorities to pinpoint high-crime areas, criminals, and victims more accurately.

But the transition proved to be a herculean task, so much so that the FBI allowed departments to delay their full adherence to the program even after the feds doled out $120 million to agencies to assist with compliance. Still, in 2020, 2021 and 2022, either all or some of the biggest police forces in the U.S. -- New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles -- did not provide data.

There have also been problems with the data that was submitted, including the news in 2022 of major problems with the St. Louis Police Department data, and more recent revelations that figures for sexual crimes provided by the New Orleans Police Department were wrong.

In Baltimore, the Police Department and various news reports put the total for 2022 homicides between 332 and 336, but the FBI’s dataset puts the number at 272. Baltimore police officials did not reply to RCI’s inquiries about the wide spread in the reported numbers, and if anyone in the city’s police department had brought the matter to the FBI’s attention.

The Baltimore department acknowledges its numbers may not be the same as those it submits to the FBI, but states on its website that “any comparisons are strictly prohibited.” 

Similarly, the police departments in Milwaukee and Nashville did not respond to questions about divergences between their stats on robberies and those from the federal bureau. Milwaukee police reported a 7 percent increase in robberies in 2023, but the FBI recorded a 13 percent decline. 

An FBI spokesperson told RCI, “It is the responsibility of each state UCR [Uniform Crime Reports] program or contributing law enforcement agency to submit accurate statistics and correct existing data that are in error.”

Criminologists cite other discrepancies in the official measurements they use to assess the situation. While FBI stats show declines in violent categories, the Department of Justice’s survey reports more people saying they have been victims of such crimes. The Centers for Disease Control figures for homicides, which have long moved in the same direction as the FBI’s, started exceeding the FBI’s in 2020 and the gap has widened since then.

“I wouldn’t say the FBI is cooking the books, but that the data they are putting out is half-baked,” said Sean Kennedy, the executive director of the Coalition for Law, Order and Security, which has pushed back against recent media reports that crime is falling noticeably in the U.S. 

“So it’s not a conspiracy but a rush job, and it’s giving people a false picture,” he told RCI. “They infer something is true, and then because it’s politically expedient they don’t bother correcting it.”

A Sharp Decline in Arrests

crimeresearch.org

Some criminologists say there is another, hidden dynamic within the crime statistics that helps explain why most Americans think crime is on the rise – the dramatic decline in arrests. Scouring FBI data, John Lott, the founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center, found that arrests for reported violent crimes in major cities fell 20 percent in 2022, from 42.5 percent in 2019 – the year before the COVID pandemic and BLM protests in response to George Floyd’s death while in police custody. 

The percentage of murder and rapes cleared by arrests fell to 40.6 percent from 67.3 percent in those years; for rapes from 33.8 percent to 17.4 percent, and arrests for reported property crimes in major cities dropped to 4.5 percent in 2022 from 11.6 percent in 2019.

It is not clear how much of this decline is due to reductions in the size of many departments – New Orleans, for example, reportedly lost 20% of its force between 2020 and 2022.

“There are lots of issues here, and I’m in disbelief about some of them,” said Lott. “It’s mind-boggling to me – we already know many crimes have always been underreported and now it seems to be, ‘Why bother reporting a property crime’ to the police? The bottom line is our law enforcement system seems in some ways to be falling apart, especially in the big cities.”

Calling the Cops ... and Then Waiting  

Longer responses to 911 calls, in minutes: “As a result, we’ve seen a significant problem with reporting of crime right now.”

Jeff-alytics/Substack

The plummeting arrest rates contribute to the general sense of lawlessness, a feeling compounded by surging increases in response times to calls. Comparing data for 15 law enforcement agencies from 2019-2022, Asher found only one city – Cincinnati – that reduced its response time, and that by 0.7 minutes. In New Orleans, the average response time nearly doubled, from 50.8 to 145.8 minutes, while Nashville saw a rise from 44.2 minutes to 73.8 minutes and New York City a 33-minute increase.

Some cities are even worse.

“If it’s not a shooting or a stabbing we’re up to about two hours for responding to property calls,” Jared Wilson, president of the San Diego Police Officers Association, told RCI. “As a result, we’ve seen a significant problem with reporting of crime right now.”

Wilson said auto thefts better capture the state of crime and perceptions of it: As thefts of essential registered property, they tend to be reported. In San Diego, Wilson said, those have risen year-to-year, with a whopping 27% jump in 2021, all of which contribute to people’s perception of increased criminal activity.

Betsy Branter Smith, a retired cop and spokeswoman for the National Police Association, said such issues contribute to a deteriorating relationship between citizens and the police. That unraveling, along with increasing hostility between police departments and district attorneys in some big cities like Philadelphia and Los Angeles, has made some cops less pro-active on the job.

 “It’s not so much hostility’’ toward cops, but frustration and resignation,” she said. “It’s time-consuming to be a crime victim, and if prosecutors aren’t going to do anything, why report it?”

Smith said many police officers, in turn, are frustrated by bail reform and other efforts that put many alleged lawbreakers back on the streets quickly. Yes, she said , many officers have almost certainly become less pro-active. “We know it, we see it. It’s a sad state of affairs for law enforcement. Cops represent the government, basically, and we’re losing faith in the government we’re supposed to represent.”

Then there is media coverage. Although “if it bleeds, it leads” journalism is not new, the steady flow of stories in traditional and social media of mass shootings, smash-and-grab crime sprees, cops beaten on the streets of Manhattan and young women punched in the face for no apparent reason spawn a sense of disorder. So too do migrants pouring across the southern border, students taking over campus quads, squatters commandeering other people’s homes, the rise of homeless encampments and open-air drug use in several major cities. 

“There is this tension there - this reality of visible signs of lawlessness and disorder that generate a feeling of unease,” said Rafael Mangual, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute of Policy Research.

Asher agreed: “People are inundated by pictures of lawlessness and there’s no doubt that contributes to a lack of a full awareness among Americans about what might actually be happening.”

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/05/14/should_you_believe_faulty_us_crime_stats_or_your_own_lying_eyes_its_a_tough_call_1031187.html

Biden Is the Real 'Threat’ – Not Trump

 In his bid for a second term, President Biden is launching an attack ad campaign titled “Terminate,” attempting to discredit challenger Donald Trump by using direct quotes on healthcare from the former President. In one video clip, Biden exclaims, “He’s coming for your healthcare, and I’m not gonna’ let that happen!” Supporting Biden, a group of former health officials called Trump a grave “threat ... to public health.”

The ads reference Trump’s assertions he will dismantle the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and reduce Medicaid enrollment lists.

Who is the greater threat to American health – Trump or Biden and progressive Democrats?

For years, Democrats have conflated insurance with care. Before the ACA was passed, former President Obama promised he would “reform health care in America,” and would “provide all the care Americans deserve.” Only after he signed his namesake legislation, Obama admitted he was reforming health insurance, not care. Likewise, Biden uses the words insurance and care interchangeably as though they were the same. 

Insurance is not care, even though Biden thinks it is and even though complicit media foist this fallacy on the public. 

People with government insurance, specifically Medicaid and Tricare (for veterans), have great difficulty accessing medical care. They wait so long for their insurance-guaranteed care, they die waiting in line. Such “death-by-queue” was reported in 47,000 veterans according to an internal VA audit as well as 752 Medicaid enrollees in Illinois.  Conversely, millions of Americans without insurance do get care via EMTALA (Emergency Medical Transport and Labor Act of 1986) with its unfunded mandate.

Biden’s conflation of care and insurance is intentional federal misinformation – it poses a threat to our health and to the truth.

Biden constantly touts the increased the number of people covered by government insurance. In fact, both Biden and at least five progressive governors plan to enroll millions more in Medicaid, especially illegal residents. Expansion of Medicaid rolls hurts the public by the seesaw effect. 

Data proves that as the number of government-insured people goes up, access to care goes DOWN! By giving government coverage to more people, Biden makes people wait even longer for care, especially with fewer doctors willing to see new Medicaid patients. Biden’s self-styled success of insuring more Americans actually is a threat to health as it reduces access and leads to death-by-queue.

Biden’s CoViD vaccine mandate was worse than a threat – it did severe damage to Americans’ health. It destroyed millions of American livelihoods, impaired the education of tens of millions of our children especially among impoverished minorities, and added trillions to the national debt. 

Clearly, Biden is a grave threat to public health. What about Trump and his plans –threat or not?

In the past, Trump has called the ACA a “tragedy” and a “dismal failure.” He said, “Obamacare sucks” while promising to repeal it. These remarks form the basis of Biden’s “Terminate” campaign. However, as reported by CNN (April 12, 2024), Trump said, “I’m not running to terminate the ACA... We’re going to make the ACA much better than it is right now and much less expensive for you.” How he intends to do this is unclear but streamlining the bureaucratic morass would be a good place to start.

The ACA created a massive, truly Byzantine BARRCOME – bureaucracy, administration, rules, regulations, compliance, oversight, mandates, and enforcement – that cost $1.76 trillion. An organizational roadmap of the ACA makes the LA freeway system look like three straight lines.  The ACA is so difficult to use Washington had to create a whole new class of bureaucrats called Navigators. As more money is spent on bureaucracy, less money is available for patient care.

Trump may or may not be a threat to ACA coverage depending on what he does to it. However, reducing BARRCOME would both improve access to care and reduce the national debt.

The other Biden charge against Trump is that he will cull the rolls of Medicaid, which Democrats say means Trump’s “coming for your healthcare.”  Recall the purpose of Medicaid: “to increase benefits under the Old-age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance System,” not to insure one quarter of the entire population (85.5 million Americans.) It was never intended to supplant private insurance yet millions who lost their jobs because of CoViD lockdowns also lost their employer-supported insurance and had to go on Medicaid. 

When Biden touts millions of “new jobs” he created (really jobs recovered from lockdown losses), these are people who no longer need Medicaid coverage as they are eligible for employer-supported private insurance. If Trump removes them as well as those who are not medically vulnerable from Medicaid rolls, this will benefit the country in two ways. By the same seesaw effect noted above, reducing the number of government-insured Americans will increase access to care. Spending on Medicaid will go down, with a salutary effect on the national pocketbook.

Trump’s plans are unlikely to harm the public: they may in fact help. Biden’s actions have done severe and obvious damage. His plans for the future will make things even worse.   

Biden is the threat, not Trump.

Deane Waldman, M.D., MBA is Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics, Pathology, and Decision Science; former Director of the Center for Healthcare Policy at Texas Public Policy Foundation; former Director, New Mexico Health Insurance Exchange; and author of the multi-award winning book Curing the Cancer in U.S. Healthcare: StatesCare and Market-Based Medicine. 

https://www.realclearhealth.com/blog/2024/05/15/biden_is_the_real_tthreat__not_trump_1031617.html

Ex-CDC Director Warns Gain-of-Function Research on Bird Flu Could Spark ‘Great Pandemic’

 Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has issued a grim warning about the dangers of gain-of-function research, predicting that scientists tinkering with making the bird flu virus more infectious is what will trigger the next “great pandemic.”

Dr. Redfield, who in the past railed against the use of U.S. tax dollars to fund gain-of-function research at the Chinese virus lab at the heart of the COVID-19 origin controversy, is once again sounding the alarm on the dangers of risky scientific experiments going badly awry.

In a recent interview on NewsNation, Dr. Redfield recalled a recent op-ed he wrote in The Wall Street Journal calling for a moratorium on gain-of-function research, which involves altering the properties of a pathogen, such as its virulence, in order to study its potential impact on human health.

Proponents of such research argue it can help scientists better learn how the virus behaves and spreads, and so come up with counter-measures more effectively. Opponents say the potential benefits are outweighed by the risks such research poses as it makes viruses more lethal.

“I don’t think that research should be done,” Dr. Redfield told NewsNation. “That’s the real threat. That’s the real biosecurity threat, that these university labs are doing these bio-experiments that are intentionally modifying viruses—and I think bird flu I think is going to be the cause of a great pandemic—where they are teaching these viruses how to be more infectious for humans.”

Dr. Redfield’s remarks come amid a multi-state outbreak of the Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) H5N1 virus, commonly known as the bird flu, in dairy cows. The virus has been detected in 42 dairy cattle herds across nine states as of May 13, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Only one case of human infection with the virus has been reported.

Bird Flu Gain-of-Function Research?

While Dr. Redfield said that there’s a “pretty heavy” species barrier (consisting of a five-amino-acid change) for the virus to overcome through natural mutations to become infectious to humans, he said that barrier could easily be erased by human meddling.

“In the laboratory, I could make it highly infectious for humans in months,” he said, while urging his colleagues in the scientific community not to tempt fate and to reject gain-of-function research on the bird flu virus.

Dr. Redfield’s warning comes just weeks after cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough’s colleagues alleged in a post on the Courageous Discourse blog that the USDA has been collaborating with the Chinese Academy of Sciences since 2021 on research that includes “serial passage” of the bird flu virus through mallard ducks.

“Serial passage is considered gain-of-function research as it mimics a natural zoonotic jump in an accelerated fashion, leading to enhanced transmissibility among different species,” wrote John Leake and Nicolas Hulscher. “This method has a history of artificially introducing novel pathogens into the wild.”

Mr. Leake and Mr. Hulscher said that the bulk of the USDA’s research on avian flu viruses is being conducted at the U.S. National Poultry Research Center, Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory (SEPRL) facility in Athens, Georgia.

One ongoing research project on the bird flu virus that involves collaboration between the USDA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences entails the carrying out “in vivo challenge work” at the SEPRL facility, which involves the introduction of the bird flu virus into a living organism—typically animal—to observe its behavior, immune responses triggered by the virus, and replication dynamics and pathogenicity.

Mr. Leake and Mr. Hulscher alleged that several months after the start of “this gain-of-function attempt” in 2021, a new H5N1 virus (clade 2.3.4.4b) appeared in wild birds in the United States, leading to the current outbreaks.

While a number of researchers propose that the current H5N1 viruses were brought to North America by wild migratory birds from Asia, Mr. Leake and Mr. Hulscher said this is “questionable” and urge investigation into whether there may have been a leak at the SEPRL facility.

“Urgent investigation is required to ensure there were no lab leaks at the SEPRL facility in Athens, Georgia, or any other facility that could lead to the escape of lab-modified strains of H5N1 bird flu,” they wrote.

The Epoch Times has reached out to the USDA with a request for comment on Dr. Redfield’s warning, on the claims made in the Courageous Discourse article, and on whether the USDA considers the SEPRL studies on bird flu viruses gain-of-function research.

Gain-Of-Function and COVID-19

The question of whether U.S. tax dollars were used to fund gain-of-function research in China on coronaviruses has been in the spotlight for some time and remains steeped in controversy, in part because the definition of what exactly constitutes such research is a matter of some debate.

Dr. Redfield has insisted that taxpayers ended up unknowingly funding risky gain-of-function research at  the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the Chinese lab at the center of the lab-leak origin theory of the virus that caused COVID-19.

He made the remark while responding to questions during a March 8, 2023, session of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

“I think there’s no doubt that NIH was funding gain-of-function research,” Dr. Redfield told Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.), who then asked the former CDC official, “Is it likely that American tax dollars funded the gain-of-function research that created this virus?” referring to the hypothesis that the pathogen behind COVID-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan.

He replied in the affirmative, adding that he believes funding came from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other federal agencies.

This has been disputed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), as well as by former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, and others.

“The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Dr. Fauci said at a Senate hearing on May 11, 2021.

Dr. Collins said in a statement on May 19, 2023, that “neither NIH nor NIAID have ever approved any grant that would have supported ‘gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans.”

In his testimony on Capitol Hill, Dr. Redfield said that the COVID-19 pandemic presented a “case study” on the potential dangers of gain-of-function research and called for such work to be halted.

“While many believe that gain-of-function research is critical to get ahead of viruses by developing vaccines, in this case, I believe it was the exact opposite, unleashing a new virus on the world without any means of stopping it and resulting in the deaths of millions of people,” he said.

“Because of this, it is my opinion that we should call for a moratorium on gain-of-function research until we have a broader debate and we come to a consensus as a community about the value of gain-of-function research,” he added.

Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is preparing for a scenario in which the bird flu starts to spread among humans.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/ex-cdc-director-warns-gain-of-function-research-on-bird-flu-could-spark-great-pandemic-5649152