Tony's Diary Package — page 786

{EXT WAR Daily Beast "When questioning Dr. Fauci last month, Senator Paul brought up one of the most cited examples of gain-of-function research, a study of coronaviruses done by Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina published in Nature Medicine in 2015. Working with data sent from Shi Zhengli, the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Dr. Baric and his colleagues built a new coronavirus from an existing one. All of the work was done in the North Carolina lab, and neither Dr. Zhengli nor members of her lab participated. The so-called chimeric virus that resulted was not more pathogenic than the parental virus, Dr. Baric said. "This work was approved by the N.I.H.., was peer-reviewed, P3CO reviewed and approved," Dr. Baric wrote in an email last month. The work also "involved a very different strain of beta coronavirus than the one that causes Covid-19," he said, and was considered low risk because of the particular strain in question. In the paper, he and his colleagues cautioned others about similar research. "The potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens," they wrote." Peter Hotez writing in the Daily Beast: The Unique Terror of Being a COVID Scientist After Jan. THE NEXT WAR It's no coincidence that one of the first guilty pleas in connection with the Capitol riot was of an anti-vaxxer.