Scott Gottlieb: I was told Fauci briefed European health officials early last year on the possibility of a lab leak HotAir

Whether you theorize that Chinese scientists were trying to improve SARS-CoV-2 in order to create a bioweapon or trying to improve it via gain-of-function research in order to anticipate how a truly dangerous virus might evolve in nature, the point is that the pathogen that began infecting people in Wuhan in late 2019 was relatively mild even as lethal as it was. The fact that the coronavirus has already mutated into more efficient strains like the British and Indian variants is further evidence per Rasmussen and Goldstein that the original version of SARS-CoV-2 wouldn t have been ready for prime time if it were genetically engineered.

Although that leads me to wonder if maybe the virus was at some intermediate stage of being engineered if/when it leaked from the lab. The way animal passage gain-of-function research works, as I understand it, is that scientists take a harmless virus and infect it into an animal, where it will mutate naturally, then harvest that mutated virus and inject it into a second animal, where it ll mutate again, and so on. I lack the scientific background to answer this question but here it is for those who have that background: Could it be that the virus unleashed on Wuhan was in the process of being engineered via animal passage but escaped from the lab before scientists had managed to perfect it to its most efficient, transmissible form? That is, if the process were expected to involve viral passage through, say, 20 animals, what if there was a lab leak after the tenth pass?

via hotair.com

RTWT. This at least suggests the PRC is not about to unleash an EOTWAWKI virus upon us. It might have been a lab leak of a collected but not modified virus, for instance. And lots of other (relatively, for totalitarians) benign alternatives.

Scott Gottlieb is wicked smart, depressingly smart. Still, it’s a good thing if we have to have a class of elite overlords that some of them are as smart as Dr. Gottlieb. Have you noticed that he speaks as if he’s on 2x speed? And that while he’s not always straightforward, he’s always precise? Quite unlike Dr. F. If I were president, I would make him some sort of high official. I would resign and let him be president. Of course, I’m not sure why he’s covering for Dr. F here, who seems up to his eyeballs in smarmy self-promotion and now CYA. Perhaps Dr. G will disappoint in the end as so many have before him.