Loose Ends (148)

Okay, who had “underwater volcano” on their Bingo card for 2022?

It must be quite difficult to be a New York Times columnist. From today’s Maureen Dowd column:

Biden was elected to be Not Trump, to be a comfortable old shoe. He overpromised and underdelivered. People wanted competence and stability and instead we get incompetence and instability.

But. . .

As hapless as Biden and his coterie are, we can’t give up on the president because he’s all that stands between us and the apocalypse at the hands of Trump, DeSantis, Pence, Kristi Noem and future Chief Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Cue DeSantis is worse than Trump and Hitler in three, two. . .  Oh, wait: Already under way.

What the world needs now is a Kamala Harris Random Platitude Generator. And we’ve got one!

Dodgy gain-of-function research? Who, us? St. Anthony Fauci (blessed be his name) and Francis Collins in the Washington Post in 2011 writing under the telling headline, “A flu virus risk worth taking“:

Two recent studies co-funded by the National Institutes of Health have shed light on how this potentially grave human health threat could become a reality. Working carefully with influenza viruses they have engineered in isolated biocontainment laboratories, scientists in Europe and the United States have identified several mechanisms by which the virus might evolve to transmit efficiently in the ferret, the best animal model for human influenza infection. This research has allowed identification of genetic pathways by which such a virus could better adapt to transmission among people. This laboratory virus does not exist in nature. . .

Given these uncertainties, important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory. . . Safeguarding against the potential accidental release or deliberate misuse of laboratory pathogens is imperative. 

Well done, guys. You ended up creating the very thing you said you were aiming to avoid.

Collins has recently retired. Why does Fauci still have a job?

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