Fauci, Paul, and Gain-of-Function

Senator Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci famously argued in a hearing in July about whether NIH funded forbidden (not to be funded) gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This has been bothering me for some time because it should be easy to find out who is lying, yet no one is making reliable conclusions. The problem is, nearly everyone is obfuscating in one way or another.

Here is what I have found:

• Paul tried multiple times to vaguely link the research to Covid, and then backtracked those links. This is a huge red herring.
• The Obama white house initiated a funding pause on "gain-of-function research projects that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route."
• In the context of virology, 'gain-of-function' means modifying a virus to allow it to do something it could not do originally.
• The research in question modified a bat virus to see if it could infect human cells (enhanced transmissibility).
• Fauci says the research in question was not gain-of-function.
• The virus that was modified was not SARS, but rather SARS-like.

It is hard to interpret Fauci's statement in a way that would make it true, but it is possible:

• We have to interpret "gain-of-function" to mean research that is forbidden by the pause, rather than its usual definition.
• We have to interpret the pause to apply literally to SARS itself, and not SARS-like.

So why does Fauci not spell this out? Because he has calculated that obfuscation is preferable to hiding behind a meaningless technicality or admitting error.