I've spent my entire career as a scientist and yes, I'm pretty careful about what I state as fact or proven knowledge. That was re-enforced in 2020 as we learned more and saw more published material come out at an ever-increasing rate. In addition, I was involved in several nightly clinical roundtable reviews (what did we do today? What did we learn today?) where we gleaned a lot of clinical pearls that played into published reports from cases or case series, uncontrolled drug trials, etc. There were literally days where I would change my opinions on treatment protocols, or even relatively hard data (test results and case numbers were never really hard data, despite protestations from a lot of social media pundits)several times in a 24 hour period simply because new, well-documented information came to my attention.
Why this admission? Because I was accused of not being truthful despite explaining my changes of opinion every time I made such a change. This was both in social media posts (Twitter was seeing a lot of science-exchange traffic) and in my updates to a large non-profit I supported. It was difficult to convince even people who generally believed me, and trusted my evaluations, that the landscape was changing that fast.
And to date, I've not seen evidence SARS-CoV-2 originated as a GoF lab experiment, nor that it emerged due to an intentional or accidental lab leak, but I've seen suggestions bordering on evidence (CCP transparency leaves a little to be desired) that the epicenter and index case did originate in the wet markets.

To the best of my knowledge, Tony Fauci did not, nor does he hold a patent on any vaccine, but Moderna had been working with NIAID for years on mRNA technology. But not on a coronavirus vaccine.

Doubt is key to science. I've not seen evidence of basic or gain-of-function research at WIV, but that doesn't specify or deny they were working on it. The CCP would prefer not to comment and that silence is likely to keep us in suspense re: WIV involvement.

The Trump administration's several decisions re: NIH and CDC contributed to the myriad failures in pandemic response and origin determination. As for GoF testing, adding ANY capability to a virus to study it better comprises GoF, not simply making it more virulent. Without GoF testing, we'd have a lot more difficulty studying potentially dangerous pathogens (beyond and including viruses). GoF testing for a bad rap during the pandemic because of a bit of misinformation regarding its uses.

No. The small outbreaks were not ignored but we didn't have the surveillance infrastructure in place to sequence them rapidly. And if we had sequenced them, we'd have gone, "Oh, damn, coronavirus" because we didn't have a sufficient index of suspicion for a novel coronavirus with multiorgan involvement that could rip through the population.

All depends on the type of work being done. If you were working on classified material (and had appropriate permissions to do so from home, you DID have to work on your work laptop. I was at NOAA during the Pandemic and didn't have a "work" laptop, but had requested a work desktop for home and was told to use my own personal system (computational modeling). When the VPN decided to stop playing with Linux, we played the game again, and I was denied again. So O created a work-around that exceeded security requirements, and got it approved by our in-house, and subsequently the NOAA security process. But it was all on personal hardware. I wasn't working on anything with any level beyond CUI.

Having spent a few hours of my life since 18 JAN 2020 looking at COVID-19 (the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2) and being somewhat familiar with coronaviruses, although I'll admit I know MUCH more now than I did then, it's pretty fair to assume SARS-CoV-2 originated in China, in Hubei Province. There's evidence that it was actually circulating in the US, and around the world... and certainly in China... somewhat earlier than the official date placed in early March for the US, and certainly well before the US initiated travel restrictions. Blood bank samples have found evidence of specific antigen and antibodies, and several unexplained outbreaks of non-influenza viral pneumonia were seen in 2019.
Whether the virus was under study at the Wuhan Institute of Virology we may never know due to the removal of US National Institutes of Health personnel somewhat before this outbreak. In fact early reports of the outbreak came through an Australian connection, and a Tweet from a Chinese clinician that was subsequently removed. It became pretty obvious that, once the Chinese Communist Party apparatus understood the potential magnitude of the outbreak they shut down communication, and attempted to defeat the disease internally, but too late.
But really, where the virus came from doesn't matter, as we can't put the genie back in the bottle. And China had more illnesses and deaths, proportionately, than the US did, and took more draconian measures than the US ever contemplated. And they were unsuccessful, even with a Zero-COVID policy, in stopping spread.
Most of the information held by the US regarding COVID origins has been pretty publically accessible, and openly discussed on multiple forums. For the most part, the GOP lawmakers have been responsible for attempting to hide accurate information on the disease, efficacy of masks and other non-pharmaceutical interventions, and vaccines. If there's a conspiracy, I suspect they should look in their own house.

Likely forced by a bunch of bean counters.

I recall reading, sometime in the last 2-3 years, and my wife's often told me, that the solo practitioner has to see a minimum of 48 patients per day in clinic to pay the bills. A few years ago, I suspect this included some salary for the practitioner. Today I bet the number of patients is higher, and the practitioner's take is smaller. My friends are leaving private practice in droves. They're going to hospital or (large) clinic practices. It's how they can earn a living.

HIPAA was envisioned to protect you, the consumer, from data mining, especially by insurers who wanted to use those data for rate adjustments and denials. Or so the theory went. What HIPAA became was a behemoth with an implementation plan designed to make data sharing nigh well impossible, and with costs to the health care provider, clinic and patient that were never anticipated.

I'll posit that a _GOOD_ implementation of an EMR, with a valid and robust data exchange plan, and which has accounted for the human factors aspects of physician, nurse, advanced practitioner, specialist, physical therapist and pharmacist, might reduce costs and provider errors. I'll state that, of the one's I've seen, and from colleagues I've talked to, it just doesn't exist yet.

Post Sandy, at the NYU Medical Center, they recounted the problems associated with no access to EHR after their systems went down. Bad enough when they were still in their own hospital, but very serious when they transferred patients to other hospitals. The story is that staff physicians, nurses and residents went with patient cohorts to the receiving hospitals and served as verbal medical records to get their patients situated best.

Well crafted database and server replication might help in a scenario like this, but so much of the infrastructure in NYC was broken, I doubt it would have.

This is an IT problem but it also extends beyond that simple statement. It requires human factors, so that the medical personnel can use it readily. It requires that common conditions be addressed (e.g., in obstetrics, it should be able to calculate EDC from LMP and project a due-date). I'll accept having separate adult, pediatric and neonate elements to help with dose calculations; that's not too bad and almost everyone's smart-phone can do those calculations close to automagically now. It needs customizable checklists for common procedures, AND an ability to go outside the checklist for issues/complications. It needs a good problem list generator and then a tracking system to allow repeat visits to recognize a problem list entry and bring it up at the next visit... or for a home phone call sooner if need be.

And did I mention it needs a data exchange format that really works? Recent experience: I had to see someone in a new city for care. My primary care physician's clinic (using a large EMR system they're abandoning in favor of EPIC) printed and faxed the whole chart to the doc's office in the other city. And when I asked the doc to send stuff back to my PCP? Yep. They faxed it all back (save the important stuff which didn't get sent at all).

EMR's something I've loked at for over 20 years and played with off and on. I was playing with it when the best way to automate was to create a lab-reporting system using VAX PDP-8's and DECterminals. Expensive? Slow? Yes but with a little screen building and database work, it was useful. I've watched HL7 and its predecessors over the years and they continue to get more robust, so getting the infrastructure standards in place isn't too hard.

What's hard is getting the INDUSTRY to stop being greedy and decide to interoperate. And to respond to the primary users, who are the medical professionals who have to hammer on the damned systems daily.

RFC1149/2549 coupled to a keyboard under a line of birds?

Several years ago, I had a netbook (before netbooks were cool) made by compaq. As this was in the days before every kid had a computer, and before, well, wifi, and before Facebook, I didn't succumb to today's general distractions. I took abbreviated notes in class often using vi. I'd find a quiet spot later, although the keyboard was too loud to do it in the library, reorganize the notes and rewrite them using complete sentences, add equations (via an equation editor), and generally make 'em useful. These served me well. I've gotta say, though, that the "improvements" to Notepad, Office, OpenOffice, etc., and the advent of tablets overall, has made it HARDER to use a computational platform to do what I did, rather than easier. I'm going back to pencil and paper.

And, I've found that the act of writing the notes, even when I never used them again, helped me better understand and recall the material from the lectures.

When I read the title, I assumed immediately that the intent was to use the word, 'queue' in appropriate context: Line'em up. Sorry, you blew it.

Boy, ain't that the truth. Ad, having a GS-5 doing the keyword reviews doesn't work well either.

Beat me to it...

There's a tendency now to try to use more common components in new satellites, especially for meteorology birds, while there's always new science, adapting existing hardware to do the work means you might get a couple of instruments on different spaceframes, and not cost as much as the gee-whiz one-offs. Someone already mentioned that R&D, testing, SRM&QA and launch services cost a bunch. If we COULD accomplish this, then restoring capabilities on-orbit would be great.

NASA had a "Flight Telerobotic Servicer" project in the early 90's. Don't know where it went but it did get a fair bit of support and a lot of good engineering talent was pointed at it. From my interactions with DARPA projects in the past, there's a fair chance that something useful will come out of this, even if the whole program is over-ambitious.