Don't Kill Bill
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I am not saying any of this is wrong but,The Paul/Fauci discussion has 2 parts:
1. Is the EcoHealth Alliance work in Wuhan, funded by NIH/NAID, gain of function work?
2. Did the COVID-19 pandemic result from that work?
Let's start with 2 as this is the conclusion Paul wants to make and what prompted the "the only person lying here is you" jab by Fauci. Paul tried on numerous occasions to tie the work done at Wuhan to the pandemic. If you watch the complete exchange it is how he framed his questions. Based on all the information available (ie the grant abstract and resultant publications) this is impossible. This was simply not the type of work being funded. As I stated above, someone could have been working outside the scope of the grant, but that is always possible regardless of the grant or organization.
On the GOF. Based on the way I (and other waaaaaayyyy smarter people) read the US governments definition of GOF work in the 2014 U.S. Government Gain-of-Function Deliberative Process and Research Funding Pause on Selected Gain-of-Function Research Involving Influenza, MERS, and SARS Viruses - October 17, 2014 (phe.gov) I do not think the research was GOF. By a VERY literal definition of GOF (which is what I think Dr. Ebright is using) it would be, but that would mean every experiment ever done in science would be creating, or using, gain of function organisms.
- want to study the human insulin gene for diabetic research? You make a GOF mouse that expresses it
- want to study safely study Yersinia pestis (the bacteria that causes the "plague")? You insert a gene from one of the virulence associated plasmids into the benign background strain Yersinia pseudotuberculosis
- want to study the SARS-COV spike protein in a safe background (which is what EcoHealth wanted)? You make a chimera using the S protein and a well defined, attenuated, mouse viral backbone and infect human cells.
This is how research is done, and no scientists I have ever worked with would seriously consider any of the above examples as actual GOF research. The issue is in the wording, not in the reality. The twitter thread by Alina Chan (linked it he BBC article) does a good job of discussing this.
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A long Edit:
I should clarify my last statement. I am approaching this as a microbiologist, not as a scientist in general. I was trained to always be conscious of considering GOF when designing experiments. For instance, a classical method of creating bacterial gene deletions is to replace the gene with an antibiotic resistance gene and then grow the bacteria on/in a media containing the antibiotic. The reason for this is 2 fold: 1) the only way for the gene to be expressed is for the antibiotic resistance gene to replace the gene you want to knock out so.... 2) The bacteria still surviving will have your gene knocked out and all other cells will be killed.
The bacteria I worked on, Streptococcus pneumonia, has been around long enough that most strains in the wild are unfortunately resistant to ampicillin (a penicillin derivative) but still susceptible to cephalosporin class drugs. For this reason we would use ampicillin as our marker but never use a cephalosporin class drug. Either method will provide that strain with a GOF it did not have, but only in the latter drug will the GOF confer an advantage should it escape the lab. Any time we made knock ins/outs we always had to map out with our PI the possible outcomes for just this reason.
I think it has a third part though. Fauci is talking to the public he is paid by, to inform them, he knows there is a common misconception about a term like gain of function he should make that clear.
Sexual relations as per Bill Clinton. Saying well we never defined the term and legally I'm in the clear doesn't mean he wasn't avoiding the point. Yes its embarrassing but also its important if you want to be believed.