Stephen Macedo

“In March 2020, Democrats and Republicans shared a common and largely positive view of public health officials, with 74 percent of Democrats approving along with 84 percent of Republicans. Democrats persisted in that positive outlook over the subsequent years, but Republican opinion progressively soured, with only 29 percent approving of public health officials by May 2022.112”
― Stephen Macedo, In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us

“Notably, we now know that Daszak, Baric, and Wuhan Institute of Virology director Shi Zhengli collaborated on a 2018 proposal to the Defense Department’s research and development agency, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), “to collect SARS-like bat coronaviruses and insert a genetic component,” the furin cleavage site, to “enable them to more easily infect human cells.”68 The grant application was called “Project Defuse: Defusing the Threat of Bat-Borne Coronaviruses.” Emails subsequently obtained by U.S. Right to Know reveal that Daszak downplayed the Wuhan Institute’s role likely so as to avoid triggering concerns about biosafety, though “a lot of these assays can be done in Wuhan” and that doing them under the Wuhan Institute’s relatively lax biosafety level 2 conditions “makes our system highly cost-effective relative to other bat-virus systems.” Baric, whose University of North Carolina lab would conduct such research at a much more demanding biosecurity level 4, pointed out that in the United States, such research required at least level 3, especially when the viruses are able “to bind and replicate in primary human cells.” Noting China’s lax safety standards, Baric’s marginal comment in the draft grant application was: “US researchers will likely freak out.”69”
― Stephen Macedo, In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us