pknopp
Diamond Member
- Jul 22, 2019
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“Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario – however remote – should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision? Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks.”
He wrote that it was “more likely” that a pandemic would occur naturally and “the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky.”
Gain-of-function experiments are the sort of work that was being conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology when the COVID-19 pandemic first started in China in late 2019.FeatureChina
However, he noted the scientific community “must respect that there are genuine and legitimate concerns about this type of research, both domestically and globally.”
“We cannot expect those who have these concerns to simply take us, the scientific community, at our word that the benefits of this work outweigh the risks, nor can we ignore their calls for greater transparency, their concerns about conflicts of interest, and their efforts to engage in a dialog about whether these experiments should have been performed in the first place,” Fauci wrote.
“Those of us in the scientific community who believe in the merits of this work have the responsibility to address these concerns thoughtfully and respectfully.”
Thoughtful and reasoned..
And there is NO evidence that such work caused this pandemic
We have NO business creating new viruses. Whether or not this work created it the cost of a pandemic is not worth the risk of something we shouldn't do to start with.