On Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Your World,” former NIAID Director and former White House Chief Medical Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci stated that there are “very few reasons” to engage in research “where you deliberately make a pathogen more transmissible or more pathogenic,” but “the whole scientific community feels that you have to have some degree of being able to manipulate organisms” and there is critical research that “involves manipulating organisms. You want to call it gain-of-function, it really is not in many respects, but when it is, it needs to be very well-regulated.”
Host Neil Cavuto asked, [relevant exchange begins around 9:20] “What are your views then — regardless of what happened here, I guess we’ll never know definitively, I know what the FBI and the Energy Department have said on this — but on gain-of-function research itself. Do you think it serves any value?”
Fauci responded, “Well, certain types of — again, the problem, Neil — and you and I have discussed this on previous interviews that we had over the years — is that it depends on what your definition of gain-of-function is. Again, if you’re looking at something where you deliberately make a pathogen more transmissible or more pathogenic, namely causing more severe disease, there [are] very few reasons to do that. But if you do, it should be done under very strict guideline conditions. So, that’s the thing that, if anything comes out of all of this back and forth arguing is that we’ve got to do two things: We’ve got to make sure that laboratory work that involves potentially pandemic pathogens [is] done under the most importantly-controlled conditions, and secondly, that we’ve got to make sure that we take a real good look at the animal-human interface and we look at the situations where there could be that jumping from species from an animal to a human. Both of those things need to be controlled.”
Cavuto then asked, “But what about not doing gain-of-function research at all, especially if there’s even the most remote possibly — we don’t know definitively — that not doing it all just is not worth the risk. What do you say?”
Fauci answered, “Well, take me out of the picture, Neil, and look at a whole array of virologists and scientists who do research that’s absolutely critical for the health of the country. Some of that involves manipulating organisms. You want to call it gain-of-function, it really is not in many respects, but when it is, it needs to be very well-regulated. If you shut off all gain-of-function research — did you get the flu shot this year, Neil? If you did, and you got it from an influenza vaccine, that was gain-of-function that made that influenza vaccine. So, that’s what people don’t understand.”
Cavuto then cut in to ask, “Some of the members of that committee had very low tolerance for even some of the kind of specific gain-of-function studies that you advocated, that they don’t think it should ever be allowed anywhere, let alone in China. You say?”
Fauci responded, “[Y]ou’ve got to take me out of this, because I’m a charged person…the whole scientific community feels that you have to have some degree of being able to manipulate organisms. When you do it, you’ve got to do it carefully and under very, very well-controlled conditions. I think the entire scientific community of virology and infectious disease would argue strongly that if you shut down all of that research, a lot of things that would be important for the health of the country would not be able to be done.”
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