A lot of people - rightly so- complain about central banks printing money to fund wars. However, not enough is said about all the money printing that happens to fund shoddy, immoral and dangerous Fiat Science. [No American citizen voted to print US dollars to torture beagle puppies in NIH funded labs, for example!]
We've all suspected that the genome of the SARS-CoV2 virus was genetically enhanced, and that the lab leak from Wuhan started the pandemic. The mainstream media has been an NIH apologist. It seems like they are now ready to throw Fauci and Collins under the bus. (Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2021/a-science-in-the-shadows/). Here's a revealing excerpt from the long, but brilliant article.
"[In 2011], One of the NIH-funded researchers, Ron Fouchier in Rotterdam, had altered H5N1 to make it more dangerous — so that it spread through respiratory droplets among caged ferrets, mammals that were the best simulation for humans’ susceptibility. Fouchier and his counterpart in Wisconsin, Yoshihiro Kawaoka, were seeking to learn more about the H5N1 strain, especially how it mutated.
Paul Keim, a Northern Arizona University geneticist who was then chairman of the NIH biosecurity board, recalled that his colleagues were concerned about the risk of publishing.
“We were saying, ‘Wow — it’s highly transmissible with a 60 percent mortality rate,’ ” Keim said. “You could kill 4 billion people in a flash, because these viruses go around the world.”
On Nov. 30, 2011, the board unanimously recommended that key research methodologies should be withheld from publication.
The board’s vote directly challenged the stewardship of Fauci and Collins, because the pathogen-altering research had been approved by NIH with no external review or publicity.
“They had made the decision to fund this work,” said Imperiale, who was on the board at that time. “It was awkward for them.”
[From 2011: Federal panel asks journals to censor reports of lab-created ‘bird flu’]
Fauci and Collins responded by working privately to reverse the biosecurity board’s recommendation — while publicly defending the need for the research, according to interviews and records.
Publicly, Fauci and Collins, along with a third NIH official, co-authored an essay, published by The Post on Dec. 30, 2011, concluding that the risks of the Rotterdam and Wisconsin experiments were worth taking.
The three men wrote that “important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory.” The experiments with ferrets, they said, were aimed at filling “important gaps in knowledge” regarding human transmissibility" .