Name: The Questions Around Gain of Function Research
Uploaded: 2021-10-13T17:54:42.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Questions Around Gain of Function Research' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-10-13. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Questions Around Gain of Function Research' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-10-13. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan Experience.
Did you read the email leaks, the emails from Peter Datzik?
And yeah, all the different discussions that they had about their concerns that
they were responsible for this through gain-of-function research.
They applied for a grant to specifically do a, to insert a furin cleavage site,
which is that particular part of the virus that raised so much concern.
Yeah, I mean, look, the thing is, like, this gets back, this gets back to the
same thing I think we're dancing around a little bit, which is I don't know
sometimes what to do with this.
It's highly suspicious.
I think of this, sometimes the way I think about my teenage kids, they're not
telling me everything here.
Now, do I automatically assume they're totally guilty of everything I think
they're guilty of, or is there something else going on here, you know?
I think China has not, part of being prepared in my World War C book is that we
have to have a world health organization that's actually empowered to be able
to do things.
It's just, it's too beholden, I think, to China.
And there was a letter that came out from Peter Daszak in February of last year
that he wrote in The Lancet, along with a bunch of other people, saying this
thing, you know, this is ridiculous to suggest that this had somehow been bioengineered
at a lab, you know?
Meanwhile, the internal email suggested that he had very different concerns.
That's, that's, that's worrisome.
And I said that to Peter, I said, Peter, this, this is not making sense.
And what did he say?
He said, hey, there's no evidence that the virus ever existed in this lab.
There's no evidence that it leaked out of the lab.
Well, that's because they destroyed a lot of evidence.
They, they, they, they, this is concerning.
They, they deleted in, how many, how many, how much evidence did they delete in
2019?
I mean.
Some stunning amount.
Well, the entire database went down.
Yeah, exactly.
Now, I said what, I said to him, you were a part of the WHO investigation.
Did you see the database now?
It's been over a year later.
He said, no, when I said, is that not of concern to you?
He said, look, he goes, it was a public database.
They were worried about hacking.
And, and so that's why they took it down.
I said, if it was a public database, why were they worried about hacking?
You know, what were they, what were they trying to hide?
You know?
So I don't, I don't know, Joe, what to make of it.
It's the, the, the, there's clearly, as you said earlier, I think you said,
where there
is smoke, there is fire probably.
But can I say conclusively?
No.
And, and part of me thinks we may never know.
We don't have a system in place at a, at a sort of global level to mandate that
these
things actually come to light.
Yeah.
We don't treat this like we treat Department of Defense issues.
We don't treat, you know, we, we should be thinking about this more from a
defense standpoint
rather than a, a public health preventive standpoint.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Um, when you see Fauci being grilled by Rand Paul and he denies that they were
doing gain
of function research, what are your, your thoughts on that?
Because by any definition that was gain of function research, right?
Gain of function research is taking a virus.
We, we should probably Google the exact definition, but what my impression is
that gain of function
means you are imparting new ability to this virus to infect humans, right?
The idea is that you're juicing it up and making it more contagious, right?
That's right.
And, and that type of research has been done.
And in fact, I think it was in 2015, I think in the, in the Netherlands
somewhere.
But if the NIH was, was giving funding to EcoHealth Alliance and EcoHealth
Alliance was funding
that kind of research, and then Fauci is not being honest about that.
I think, I think the NIH is clearly funding EcoHealth Alliance and EcoHealth
Alliance is
clearly giving grants to Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Here's how they answer the question when I asked them, including Francis
Collins, who's
the head of the NIH.
They, they define gain of function research as this, you have a known bad
contagious pathogen
and you're going to essentially do a, you know, use the backbone of another
known bad pathogen
and you're going to splice them together, essentially.
You're taking one thing that you know to be bad and contagious and splicing it
with something
else that you know to be bad.
That is, you're expecting this to be worse than what you started with.
If you're taking a novel virus and you don't know how contagious this is, and
you're basically
saying, look, I want to, I want to isolate the spike protein on this new virus.
I'm going to put it on the backbone of something I do know.
And make it contagious to humans.
We'll see how it behaves at that point.
Does this actually start to behave as something super contagious or not?
The, the, the possibility is that it could, but they're not sure.
So this is nuanced.
And, you know, a lot of people have taken issue with it, including scientists
who work in
the field, but the strict definition is that you got to know for gain of
function research,
you know that it's going to lead to gain of function.
So maybe the problem is using the term gain of function.
Yeah.
If we instead abandon any sort of a nomenclature that might be problematic and
say,
were they doing experiments to make viruses more contagious to people?
The answer would be yes.
Yeah.
Were they doing experiments that could lead to viruses being more contagious?
Yes.
Yes.
I think that that's right.
That is, that is research that is done to try and figure out, I mean, a lot of
these pathogens
they, they examine, they're, they're not contagious.
They put the spike protein and they put some component of the virus onto the
backbone of a
known thing and it doesn't do much.
So they say, well, we don't have to worry about this, but it could turn into a
situation
where you take a component of a new virus, you put it on the backbone of a
known virus,
and it does lead to something much more contagious.
And that's what a lot of people are concerned about here.
I mean, you know, there was the part of those emails, as you know, Joe, were,
were emails
that were sent to Fauci January of last year, where Christian Anderson raised
this concern.
He subsequently wrote a paper saying, hey, those changes that we saw, I thought
that that
was clear evidence of bioengineering.
But now I've seen evidence of those same abnormalities in existing naturally
occurring viruses.
So now I don't think that's, that's the problem, but it's just, it's, it's
going back and forth.
And, you know, frankly, we may never know for sure.
Watch the entire episode for free, only on Spotify.