Monday, June 21, 2021

Global -178,000,000/3,900,000; USA – 33,400,000/600,000 Did an Instagam live with FGOTUS Doug Emhoff and Dikembe Mutombo to encourage people to get vaccinated. We are putting a full-court press in encouraging people to get vaccinated. Did TIKTOK interviews (rapid fire questions) from 8 young TIKTOK “influencers who amazingly have millions of followers FOX News is blasting me for saying that an attack on md is an attack on science. I am going to go on the offensive against them. To me, it is a badge of honor to be criticized by FOX. Important article in the Post today by Joel Achenbach (see below) PRESS: NY Times by Carl Zimmer and James Gorman: Fight Over Covid’s Origins Renews Debate on Risks of Lab Work Excerpt from above NY Times article: “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. Peter J. Hotez Updated Jun. 21, 2021 4:43AM ET / Published Jun. 21, 2021 3:35AM ET Alex Wong/Getty Being a scientist was not exactly fun during the height of the coronavirus pandemic in America. But somehow, even as cases and deaths are way down in the United States, the attacks on us are worse than ever. Take Anthony Fauci, a punching bag for the far right since the earliest days of the outbreak. The “Fire Fauci Act,” a twisted piece of legislation first introduced by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in April, gained additional Republican support this past week, now reaching at least a dozen House members. That leaders of the GOP would go out of their way to reduce Dr. Fauci’s salary to zero and ultimately force his retirement must be examined for what it really is. This is no simple beef with someone who was frequently targeted by the administration and its allies under Donald Trump. It is, instead, a piece of a much larger and systematic anti-science project on the far right, one that is increasingly hard to separate from the Stop the Steal myth powering the right-wing fringe. CNN: 'Let me give you a flash': Hear Dr. Fauci fire back at critics https://cnn.it/35FZOy9 Washington Post Health Scientists battle over the ultimate origin story: Where did the coronavirus come from? By Joel Achenbach