We ‘Need’ to Do Things ‘That Make a Pathogen More Transmissible or More Pathogenic,’ and ‘Some’ Call that Gain of Function

During a portion of an interview aired on Tuesday’s edition of PBS’ “American Masters,” former NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci argued that there are “a number of experiments that need to be done on viruses” that would require “doing something under certain circumstances that make a pathogen more transmissible or more pathogenic, which some people refer to as gain of function.”

Fauci stated, [relevant remarks begin around 1:12:35] “There [are] a number of experiments that need to be done on viruses. How are you going to know whether or not they’re capable of infecting humans unless you examine them? Which means doing something under certain circumstances that make a pathogen more transmissible or more pathogenic, which some people refer to as gain of function.”

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He also stated, “Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) was insidiously throwing into his little questions that the work that was done in the Wuhan lab, funded by a small grant from NIH — a strong implication that that created a virus that made COVID. I have 10,000 grants throughout the world. What they’ve done is…they’ve looked at various grants and they make something of it that it isn’t. The microbe they were working on, not only was not SARS-CoV-2, it would be molecularly impossible for them to turn it into SARS-CoV-2.”