Twenty years ago, between 1998 and 2003, the budget of the National Institutes of Health doubled. This was a routine task after several years of declining defense spending after the Cold War and at a time when government enterprise budgets tended to be slightly higher or slightly higher. continuation of previous years.
It was a bipartisan project, implemented through two senators, Republican Arlen Specter and Democrat Tom Harkin, with the support of the Clinton and Bush administrations, and for years in which, unless it was an 18-month interval, Republicans had majorities in both parties. Cameras.
At the time, I thought of it as a clever idea. Haven’t fitness studies produced cures and advanced remedies for many diseases and conditions?Weren’t fitness studios the most productive thing the government could spend money on after national defense?
Now I’m not so sure. After watching public health agencies flounder and buckle in the face of the COVID-19 outbreak, and in light of testimony and retrospective evidence most commonly from Republican House hearings, it seemed to me that putting all those huge sums of money into a small organization of government bureaucracies wasn’t such a smart idea.
Centralization aims to prioritize and produce efficiency, but it can also make intellectual diversity disappear and serve the self-centered interests of leaders.
Case in point: The question of whether COVID-19 was the result of a leak from the Communicable Diseases Laboratory in Wuhan, China, funded largely through Francis Collins’ NIH and Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. I’ve come back to this topic several times, in June 2021, March 2023, July 2023, November 2023, December 2023, and February 2024.
Clearly, Fauci and Collins’s centralization of huge sums of money for studies has produced this shift in perspective among scientists with professional qualifications but with a nonpublic ethic characteristic of a much older profession. Then, with mind-boggling dishonesty, Fauci responded to the press. the article as if it had nothing to do with it.
The question remains open, even if it is very likely that a laboratory leak is responsible. However, given Chinese secrecy, there is not and possibly never will be an undeniable answer. However, Fauci and Collins tried to propose one almost immediately. They asked NIH-backed scientists, adding some who thought the lab leak theory was most likely, to write a “scientific” paper claiming that a lab leak was not “plausible. “Facebook and other social media platforms have stepped in to remove and debunk this disadvantaged theory.
Why these lies and cover-ups? The facts suggest that Fauci, accompanied by Collins, sought to divert attention from the “gain-of-function” studies that NIAID had sponsored and funded at the Wuhan lab in the past.
Such studies aim to make a virus more transmissible, most likely so that scientists are informed about how to fight it. But, with hospital wards full of COVID-19 patients, Fauci evidently didn’t need to make that point. Instead, in later testimony before Senator Rand Paul, he formulated complex sliding definitions and argued that he had never pushed gain-of-function studies at all.
It is no wonder that an institutional leader capable of such dishonesty would support, as Fauci recently admitted, a two-meter distance and the mandatory use of masks for schoolchildren, without any clinical evidence. Others, adding deficient students in union-run public schools have paid the price.
Not once during the pandemic, as Joseph Nocera and Bethany McLean reported, the U. S. government’s vast fitness studio apparatus has been a major part of the pandemic. The U. S. Department of Homeland Security has conducted or funded randomized control trials of COVID-19 treatments or protocols.
Others have done better. Former New York Times journalist Nicholas Wade and British journalist Matt Ridley continued to investigate and, in articles and books, provide arguments and evidence for the lab leak theory. Over time, the FBI and Biden’s Department of Energy concluded that COVID-19 was more likely spread through a lab leak.
The case is partisan in nature, as Democrats protect Fauci and left-wing journalists, such as the New York Times’ Apoorva Mandavilli, claim that the theory has “racist roots,” even though the only significant racism opposing Asians today comes from selective college admissions. . offices and street and subway thugs.
The downside for Republicans is that former President Donald Trump has agreed to Fauci’s recommendations. The downside for Democrats is that their defense of Fauci and their disdain for the lab leak theory are undermined by President Joe Biden’s review of the evidence. .
The challenge is not so much partisan as institutional. The centralization of fitness studies within a massive NIH and Fauci’s dominance over NIAID for 38 years have produced, in an emergency formula, not clever science but bad science. security formula have ended up creating a formula doomed to failure.