- Just to point out ..
Posted by Shyaku
on May 26, 2021, 8:44 pm, in reply to "Re: A Chinese PhD Thesis Sheds Important New Light On The Origin of the COVID-19 Coronavirus"
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NIH is both a campus, with a series of institutes with labs, and a funding agency for external grants (called the “extramural program”). Grants from that program are reviewed by scientists from outside NIH. The people working in the labs on the NIH campus have no interest in reviewing and approving external grants - they already have their money, their own funding is pretty much automatic. Faucci is nominally head of both arms, though his main research interests are on the NIH campus. I am not saying that Faucci would not have contacts in the extramural program if he wanted to have them, but a motive is not immediately apparent, his own research history is not in coronaviruses. If it were the military, I would say “Yeah sure” they could easily be interested. Also, it may seem a bit surprising, but $600,000 is just not that much in the grand scheme of biomedical research costs. An average NIH extramural grant provides $250k/yr. This is one reason why the total NIH budget is close to $40 billion. Interesting to see how this pans out ... It is possible it came from a mine in Yunan in 2012 and the sample was stored at WIV, or COVID-19 could have been a different outbreak with something even more similar that hasn’t been traced. Everything beyond that speculation as far as I can see: We have a pretty indiscriminate killer that has killed pretty indiscriminately. Qui bono? A point to note: The RdRP region of an RNA virus genome is THE MOST CONSERVED region of its genome, it encodes an enzyme that cannot tolerate many mutations. So 96% conservation in this region will be accompanied by lower conservation in other regions. Now back to t’grindstone ... Best regards, Shyaku. |