There are a lot of claims by right-wing media that Fauci funded gain-of-function research. I don't see any evidence of it.
Right-wing media also have a habit of taking short, misleading excerpts from their sources to make their case seem stronger. Here's a longer excerpt from Fauci's 2012 paper on gain-of-function research. Clearly he did not say that a leak was worth the risk of a pandemic. He said gain-of-function work and the resulting knowledge was, in his opinion, worth the inherent risks:
"“In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if [a gain-of-function] scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic?” he wrote. “Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario – however remote – should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision?
“Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks.
“It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature, and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky.”
“Within the research community, many have expressed concern that important research progress could come to a halt just because of the fear that someone, somewhere, might attempt to replicate these experiments sloppily. This is a valid concern.”
Your team wants to cast Fauci as a villain but the fact is that he's working to save everyone's asses despite efforts to the contrary by Trump and, sadly, millions of misled Americans like yourself.
