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The post Bail fund backed by Kamala Harris and Joe Biden staffers bailed out alleged child abuser, docs indicate appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>A bail fund promoted by Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris and many staffers on Joe Biden’s campaign helped release an accused child abuser, documents obtained by Fox News indicate.
Timothy Wayne Columbus, a 36-year-old-man, is charged with first-degree criminal sexual conduct for allegedly penetrating a girl in 2015 when she was about 8 years old. A warrant was issued for his arrest on June 25. But he was later bailed out of jail and according to a court document, filed to have his bail money returned to Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF), the organization Harris and many Biden staffers asked their followers to donate to during the rioting in Minneapolis earlier this year.
The story was first reported by Alpha News MN and The Daily Caller.
“If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota,” Harris tweeted on June 1.
BIDEN VP PICK HARRIS PROMOTED GROUP THAT PUT UP BAIL FOR ALLEGED VIOLENT CRIMINALS
The allegations against Columbus are macabre. The arrest warrant in the case states that the girl Columbus allegedly assaulted lived with her grandmother, who regularly spent time with her friend “Tim,” while the girl was seven and eight years old. When the girl was about eight, the victim told police, “‘Tim’ laid her on her couch and held her down as he unbuckled his pants and then pulled down her pants. Victim stated he then ‘put his thing inside me.'”
The warrant continues: “Victim states ‘Tim’ told her not to tell anyone and continued to penetrate her. Victim did not tell anyone what happened at the time but years later told a family member.”
The warrant also says that the grandmother said she has seen Columbus tell the girl “This is our secret” at one point and that the grandmother suspected Columbus had hurt the girl in some way. The girl’s mother said ‘she learned years later ‘something happened.'”
BIDEN BUNGLES DEM TICKET, REFERS TO ‘HARRIS-BIDEN ADMINISTRATION IN CAMPAIGN SPEECH
The maximum sentence for the crimes Columbus is accused of is 30 years in prison. Columbus denied the allegations to police.
Bail money is essentially collateral to ensure a person shows up for future court dates. If a person pays bail, then appears for their court dates, that money is refunded. When bail funds like MFF pay bail for people, they have the defendants — in this case Columbus — sign documents requesting that the money be returned to the fund. This allows the bail funds to then use the money to pay somebody else’s bail in the future, unless a defendant does not show up for their court date. Then the bail fund simply loses the money.
In Columbus’ case, bail was set at $75,000 for conditional release and $300,000 for unconditional release. The document on which Columbus requests his bail money be returned to MFF does not indicate the amount. But a July 1 order recorded on the Minnesota courts website indicates that Judge Tamara Garcia ordered Columbus’ conditional release.
Columbus is not the first alleged violent criminal MFF has helped secure the release of.
FOX 9 reported earlier this summer that MFF had raised $35 million in the wake of George Floyd’s death in the custody of the Minneapolis Police Department. A recent update on its website indicates that it has spent at least $3,475,000 bailing people out of jail in recent months, with just $210,000 of that being spent bailing out protesters and rioters who were arrested in the unrest immediately following Floyd’s death.
FOX 9 also first exposed some of the non-protesters being bailed out by MFF, including Darnika Floyd, who was charged with second-degree murder after allegedly stabbing a friend to death, and Christopher Boswell, who is facing charges of sexual assault and kidnapping. The group put up $100,000 on behalf of Floyd and $350,000 on behalf of Boswell.
Boswell had previously been convicted twice on sexual assault charges and was prosecuted by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., when she was the Hennepin County attorney.
MFF has an official policy that it does “not make determinations of bail support based on the crimes that individuals are alleged to have committed.”
“MFF believes that every individual who has been arrested by the police is innocent until proven guilty, and if a judge deems them eligible for bail, they should not have to wait in jail simply because they don’t have the same income or resources as others with more privilege,” MFF says on its website.
The Biden campaign is in favor of ending cash bail on the grounds that it is discriminatory against those who don’t have the financial means to pay their bail.
BIDEN CHANGES TINE ON MASK MANDATE, NOW SAYS HE MAY HAVE LEGAL AUTHORITY TO ENFORCE IT
“Cash bail is the modern-day debtors’ prison,” it says on its website. “The cash bail system incarcerates people who are presumed innocent. And, it disproportionately harms low-income individuals. Biden will lead a national effort to end cash bail and reform our pretrial system by putting in place, instead, a system that is fair and does not inject further discrimination or bias into the process.”
In addition to Harris, numerous Biden staffers promoted the Minnesota Freedom Fund during the George Floyd riots.
“While massive criminal justice and immigration reform is needed immediately we have to do what we can now. Let’s continue to support @MNFreedomFund. #GeorgeFloyd Who’s Next?” one Biden organizer named Patrick McCarthy tweeted.
“Cash bail is discrimination against the poor and must be abolished Let’s keep up this support for the @MNFreedomFund. Who’s next?” another named Sal DeFrancesco said.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
Reuters reported at least 13 Biden staffers publicized donations to MFF.
Republicans and the Trump campaign have slammed the Biden campaign over the donations to the group that helped bail out not only rioters by also people accused of serious violent crimes.
“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have to answer for why they supported a group that helped a man accused of sexually penetrating a child,” Republican National Committee Rapid Response Director Steve Guest said Thursday.
“As vice president, Joe Biden oversaw cuts to police funding and now as a candidate he says he wants to redirect funding away from police,” Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said in a statement on a previous report about MFF. “His staff mocked police as worse than ‘pigs,’ called for defunding the police, and now we know his campaign helped bail out violent criminals, rapists and would-be cop killers.”
The Biden campaign did not immediately return a request for comment on this report.
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]]>The post Dr. Fauci backed funding for controversial Wuhan lab studying origin of coronavirus appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>April 29, 2020 | 1:14am | Updated April 29, 2020 | 1:49am
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the coronavirus task force, had previously backed funding for a controversial lab in Wuhan, China that has been studying the coronavirus in bats, reports said.
Fauci’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases had shelled out a total of $7.4 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab — which has become the center of theories about the origin of Covid-19, according to Newsweek.
The National Institute of Health, which oversees the NIAH, shut down all funding to the lab last week.
“At this time, NIH does not believe that the current project outcomes align with the program goals and agency priorities,” a deputy director at the agency wrote in a letter obtained by Politico.
There is “increasing confidence” among officials in the Trump administration that the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab is the original site of the virus. A report by Fox News said embassy officials warned in January 2018 about inadequate safety there.
NIH defended their funding of the lab in a statement to Newsweek.
“Most emerging human viruses come from wildlife, and these represent a significant threat to public health and biosecurity in the US and globally,” the statement read.
“Scientific research indicates that there is no evidence that suggests the virus was created in a laboratory.”
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]]>The post Dr. Fauci Backed Controversial Wuhan Lab with Millions of U.S. Dollars for Risky Coronavirus Research appeared first on Virus Reports.
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Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Dr. Anthony Fauci is an adviser to President Donald Trump and something of an American folk hero for his steady, calm leadership during the pandemic crisis. At least one poll shows that Americans trust Fauci more than Trump on the coronavirus pandemic—and few scientists are portrayed on TV by Brad Pitt.
But just last year, the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the organization led by Dr. Fauci, funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions for work on gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.
In 2019, with the backing of NIAID, the National Institutes of Health committed $3.7 million over six years for research that included some gain-of-function work. The program followed another $3.7 million, 5-year project for collecting and studying bat coronaviruses, which ended in 2019, bringing the total to $7.4 million.
Many scientists have criticized gain of function research, which involves manipulating viruses in the lab to explore their potential for infecting humans, because it creates a risk of starting a pandemic from accidental release.
SARS-CoV-2 , the virus now causing a global pandemic, is believed to have originated in bats. U.S. intelligence, after originally asserting that the coronavirus had occurred naturally, conceded last month that the pandemic may have originated in a leak from the Wuhan lab. (At this point most scientists say it’s possible—but not likely—that the pandemic virus was engineered or manipulated.)
Dr. Fauci did not respond to Newsweek’s requests for comment. NIH responded with a statement that said in part: “Most emerging human viruses come from wildlife, and these represent a significant threat to public health and biosecurity in the US and globally, as demonstrated by the SARS epidemic of 2002-03, and the current COVID-19 pandemic…. scientific research indicates that there is no evidence that suggests the virus was created in a laboratory.”
The NIH research consisted of two parts. The first part began in 2014 and involved surveillance of bat coronaviruses, and had a budget of $3.7 million. The program funded Shi Zheng-Li, a virologist at the Wuhan lab, and other researchers to investigate and catalogue bat coronaviruses in the wild. This part of the project was completed in 2019.
A second phase of the project, beginning that year, included additional surveillance work but also gain-of-function research for the purpose of understanding how bat coronaviruses could mutate to attack humans. The project was run by EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit research group, under the direction of President Peter Daszak, an expert on disease ecology. NIH canceled the project just this past Friday, April 24th, Politico reported. Daszak did not immediately respond to Newsweek requests for comment.
The project proposal states: “We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential.”
In layman’s terms, “spillover potential” refers to the ability of a virus to jump from animals to humans, which requires that the virus be able to receptors in the cells of humans. SARS-CoV-2, for instance, is adept at binding to the ACE2 receptor in human lungs and other organs.
According to Richard Ebright, an infectious disease expert at Rutgers University, the project description refers to experiments that would enhance the ability of bat coronavirus to infect human cells and laboratory animals using techniques of genetic engineering. In the wake of the pandemic, that is a noteworthy detail.
Ebright, along with many other scientists, has been a vocal opponent of gain-of-function research because of the risk it presents of creating a pandemic through accidental release from a lab.
Dr. Fauci is renowned for his work on the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1990s. Born in Brooklyn, he graduated first in his class from Cornell University Medical College in 1966. As head of NIAID since 1984, he has served as an adviser to every U.S. president since Ronald Reagan.
A decade ago, during a controversy over gain-of-function research on bird-flu viruses, Dr. Fauci played an important role in promoting the work. He argued that the research was worth the risk it entailed because it enables scientists to make preparations, such as investigating possible anti-viral medications, that could be useful if and when a pandemic occurred.
The work in question was a type of gain-of-function research that involved taking wild viruses and passing them through live animals until they mutate into a form that could pose a pandemic threat. Scientists used it to take a virus that was poorly transmitted among humans and make it into one that was highly transmissible—a hallmark of a pandemic virus. This work was done by infecting a series of ferrets, allowing the virus to mutate until a ferret that hadn’t been deliberately infected contracted the disease.
The work entailed risks that worried even seasoned researchers. More than 200 scientists called for the work to be halted. The problem, they said, is that it increased the likelihood that a pandemic would occur through a laboratory accident.
Dr. Fauci defended the work. “[D]etermining the molecular Achilles’ heel of these viruses can allow scientists to identify novel antiviral drug targets that could be used to prevent infection in those at risk or to better treat those who become infected,” wrote Fauci and two co-authors in the Washington Post on December 30, 2011. “Decades of experience tells us that disseminating information gained through biomedical research to legitimate scientists and health officials provides a critical foundation for generating appropriate countermeasures and, ultimately, protecting the public health.”
Nevertheless, in 2014, under pressure from the Obama administration, the National of Institutes of Health instituted a moratorium on the work, suspending 21 studies.
Three years later, though—in December 2017—the NIH ended the moratorium and the second phase of the NIAID project, which included the gain-of-function research, began. The NIH established a framework for determining how the research would go forward: scientists have to get approval from a panel of experts, who would decide whether the risks were justified.
The reviews were indeed conducted—but in secret, for which the NIH has drawn criticism. In early 2019, after a reporter for Science magazine discovered that the NIH had approved two influenza research projects that used gain of function methods, scientists who oppose this kind of research excoriated the NIH in an editorial in the Washington Post.
“We have serious doubts about whether these experiments should be conducted at all,” wrote Tom Inglesby of Johns Hopkins University and Marc Lipsitch of Harvard. “[W]ith deliberations kept behind closed doors, none of us will have the opportunity to understand how the government arrived at these decisions or to judge the rigor and integrity of that process.”
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