My impression is that one of the key defenses that the Fauci/NIH/EcoHealth/etc. offered for their research in Wuhan was that it was technically not Gain of Function, even if some parts of it might sound like Gain of Function to the layperson, which seems in tension with this claim.
It not only sounds that way to a lay-person. The NIH stopped the EcoHealth grant that was partly paying for the research in Wuhan for a short time in 2016. When they renewed the grant Peter Dasek from EcoHealth wrote back:
“This is terrific! We are very happy to hear that our Gain of Function research funding pause has been lifted.”
Fauci himself wrote on the 1st February 2020 and email that had one of the study in the attachment with the file name “Baric, Shi et al—Nature medicine—SARS Gain of function”.
What Fauci/NIH/EcoHealth is saying seems to be something like “when people say ‘gain of function’ they really mean ePPP and the research they funded in Wuhan wasn’t ePPP because we never put it through the P3O process that could have decided that it was an ePPP”.
It not only sounds that way to a lay-person. The NIH stopped the EcoHealth grant that was partly paying for the research in Wuhan for a short time in 2016. When they renewed the grant Peter Dasek from EcoHealth wrote back:
“This is terrific! We are very happy to hear that our Gain of Function research funding pause has been lifted.”
Fauci himself wrote on the 1st February 2020 and email that had one of the study in the attachment with the file name “Baric, Shi et al—Nature medicine—SARS Gain of function”.
What Fauci/NIH/EcoHealth is saying seems to be something like “when people say ‘gain of function’ they really mean ePPP and the research they funded in Wuhan wasn’t ePPP because we never put it through the P3O process that could have decided that it was an ePPP”.