Was a Fauci 'funded' bat conference the first superspreader event of 2019?
Joe SchaeferBats are social mammals, just like us humans
Linfa and Dani left Wuhan in late November for an early December 2019 Singapore conference. They met up with Shi at their Duke Singapore campus, with its BSL3 bat lab, and all hopped in a cab for the quick 10-minute ride to the conference center.
By December 2019 a contagious bat vaccine, soon to be renamed SARS2, was already spreading outside of Wuhan. Since there was no PCR test, and they did not even know what it was, Dani, Linfa, and Shi continued their professional lives. This was a big international bat conference for a “small group” of specialized bat virologists.
Dani claimed “there was no chatter” but Singapore was probably ground zero for the spread of the Wuhan pneumonia. As the unnamed virus spread, “unbeknownst to the scientists attending,” a few started spreading rumors.
A 2019 NIH-funded transmissible vaccine research paper speculated about superspreader events like this one. The “individuals that are most likely to spread a disease (i.e., superspreaders)” within the small, tight international virology community are Shi, Linfa, and Dani. They are “highly connected nodes” and would socialize, like mammalian bats, starting the “process of vaccinating ‘acquaintances’ of randomly chosen individuals.”
The Gain-of-Function Party of 2019
The virologists attending this December 2019 Singapore conference were excited. They have been back in the Gain-of-Function business for two years, so it is time to discuss their latest animal vaccine products.
Gain-of-Function (GoF) research never stopped, as an anonymous longtime NIH official said: “If you ban GoF research, you ban all of virology.” He added, “Ever since the (2014) moratorium, everyone’s gone wink-wink and just done GoF research anyway.” Fauci in early 2019 said it was a sound decision to let the research officially resume.
Fauci’s NIH lifted the GoF pause the week before Christmas 2017, when everyone was leaving Washington D.C. The 50-year bureaucrat knew how to exploit a Presidential administration change. This was a leaderless time period when the HHS secretary (head of NIH, FDA, CDC) resigned in September 2017, but before his replacement was confirmed and sworn in January 2018. Fauci even discussed the musical chairs of HHS (2:00). This occurred during a two year period without a White House OSTP director.