Thread by @Ayjchan

Ralph Baric's interview with @RandPaul shows the dangers of allowing scientists & funders to decide what gain-of-function is permissible.

Baric said Defense Dept announced funding for GOF research & NIH did not consider genetic engineering of animal coronaviruses to be GOF.

@RandPaul Baric claims he does not have unpublished SARS-like virus sequences.

Given that he cannot recall a lot of things like a damning research proposal from 2018 where he was going to put furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses, it's better to check his lab records & databases.

@RandPaul There were several US scientists on the 2018 Defuse proposal. Apparently, when news of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan broke, none of them thought to check their emails and shared documents with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They all could not recall.
documentcloud.org/documents/2106…

@RandPaul This seems to apply to the Defense Dept as well. In 2020, it seems no one went back to check the research proposals and communications with EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology - in the U.S. gov's possession.

@RandPaul And it seems that Defense Dept rejected their 2018 proposal mainly because it was going to interfere with wild bats... not because it was going to start a pandemic killing tens of millions of people and costing the US trillions in economic damage.

@RandPaul Conversations continued into 2020 between EcoHealth Alliance and Defense Dept on which parts of Defuse to fund.

Surely Peter Daszak could not have "I cannot recall" the Defuse proposal under these circumstances.
researchgate.net/publication/39…