In the matter of Randy's raving about Fauci, the hyper-partisans are falling in line.
Medical experts adhere to the scientific reality. It is a matter of science, and knee-jerk judgments by ideological fanatics will not be the determinant of where the truth resides.
If the politician is telling the truth when he claims that he plans on asking the Department of Justice to open a criminal inquiry into Fauci for lying to Congress, the findings of that inquiry will be the only valid resolution. If no such inquiry is requested, that will be an admission of the fraudulence of the charge.
Experts are siding with Dr. Anthony Fauci in the dispute with Sen. Rand Paul over whether experiments done on bat coronaviruses conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology constituted gain of function research...
Robert Garry, a virologist and professor at Tulane University, described the experiments as being a study as to whether the bat coronaviruses could infect humans. What they didn't do, he told Newsweek, was make the viruses "any better" at infecting people, which would be necessary for gain-of-function research.
Gain-of-function is a controversial research method that involves manipulating pathogens to give them a new aspect, such as making viruses more transmissible or dangerous to humans. Dr. Vincent Racaniello, a virologist at Columbia University, said the "key" to the research not being gain-of-function is the viruses the researchers started with could already infect human cells because they could bind to the ACE2 receptor, a protein that serves as the entry point for coronaviruses to infect human cells...
"If you started with a bat virus that could not infect human cells and then gave it the ability to do so, that would be a gain-of-function. But that is not what they did there," Racaniello said. "They didn't give it a new property."..
"When all the heat of the pandemic dies down would it be appropriate to take a look at some of this guidance and reconsider it? Sure, it would be foolish not to," Garry said.
However, Garry added that crossing the line between restricting dangerous gain-of-function experiments and basic virology where scientists "swap bits and pieces of viruses" could hinder the worlds' ability to study viruses that could be harmful to humans and "know what's out there."...
Dr. Gregory Gray, a Duke University professor, disagreed with Paul's assessment that the experiments attempted to increase the virus' transmissibility. He characterized it as "lifting the hood" on a virus to see how it works.
Brett Giroir, former President Donald Trump's coronavirus testing czar... acknowledged it may not be "technically 'gain-of-function research.'"
Stuart Neil, a professor of virology at King's College in London, admitted it was a "grey area" in a Twitter thread explaining the debate. However, he reasoned that the grant was determined not to involve gain-of-function research because scientists were replacing a function in a virus that already had the ability to infect humans rather than giving that ability to a virus that could not infect humans.
Regardless of how it's viewed in retrospect, Neil argued that at the time the grant was awarded, the NIH didn't think it constituted gain-of-function research and therefore Fauci was not lying.
