I suppose that Baric’s definition of “gain-of-function” didn’t apply when he and Zhengli Shi wrote of their research describing the creation of chimera of the original SARS virus intentionally designed to infect human respiratory tissue:
“we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. ...
On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo.”
Of course it was precisely this research that led to the moratorium on gain-of-function research, which was instigated by scientists concerned that it was fraught with risk and offered little reward (other than government grants to GoF researchers.)
Your tax dollars at work.
There is a great deal of playing word games, but it’s still significant that Baric signed the letter pushing for a full investigation (which has been thwarted by both US and CCP authorities to date).
As I understand it, the science can be argued on both sides, but there’s a simpler test.
The CCP, Fauci, and Ecohealth’s Peter Daszak are all evading, prevaricating, destroying evidence and generally acting like your standard-issue street criminal caught with the goods, and trying to explain away how he wound up in possession of someone else’s credit cards.
They’re dirty, and they know it.
We just don’t know the exact details yet.