Anthony Fauci's Deceptions
A trove of emails, Slack messages, and other documents reveal Fauci's behind-the-scenes involvement. 'Tony doesn't want his fingerprints on origin stories.'
By David Zweig
On April 17, 2020, with much of the country still in some form of lockdown and news of overwhelmed hospitals dominating the headlines, Dr. Anthony Fauci, then a member of the President's Coronavirus Task Force, was asked a question toward the end of a White House press briefing: Was there a possibility that this novel virus came from a lab in Wuhan, China?
"There was a study recently," Fauci said confidently, "where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve, and the mutations that it took to get to where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human." In other words, it wasn't from the lab.
This moment set the template for much that would follow from Fauci over the next three years. That is, evasion, deception, and misdirection about his support of high-risk virology research and its connection to the possibility that a lab leak in Wuhan caused a worldwide catastrophe.
Fauci, who was the face of the public health community during the crisis, pushed the idea that the evidence strongly indicated that the virus was just a tragic, natural occurrence. He insisted, repeatedly, that an epidemic that started in Wuhan was unlikely to have been the result of an escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
But Fauci had an incentive to arrive at his conclusion about the deadly pandemic that started in Wuhan. The WIV was known for doing high-risk virology research studying and manipulating coronaviruses. Fauci, as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for almost 40 years, had funded such research at the WIV.
Fauci's posture--dismissive toward the theory of the lab leak, and later, condescending toward those who entertained it--set what became the accepted narrative about the origins of the pandemic. It was a narrative that was parroted by the government, public health officials, and the media, and even enforced by social media platforms at the request of the Biden White House.
But last month, a trove of explosive emails and other documents were released by the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. These revealed evidence of Fauci's and other officials' behind-the-scenes involvement with scientists and journalists, demonstrating their efforts to quash the lab leak theory.
The recently disclosed private communications, first reported by Public and Racket, lay bare that the "highly qualified" authors of the paper that Fauci had asserted in April 2020 likely disproved a lab leak--what became known informally as the "Proximal Origin" paper--actually had extensive uncertainty about the virus being the result of a natural event. This was grossly at odds with what became their published position.
The paper that Fauci recommended was published on March 17, 2020. But in February, just the month before, Kristian Andersen, one of the paper's authors, wrote a Slack message to his colleagues saying: "[T]he lab escape version of this is so friggin' likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario."
Robert Garry, another co-author, wrote on Slack the same month: "It's not crackpot to suggest this could have happened, given the Gain of Function research we know is happening." Ian Lipkin, yet another co-author, emailed on February 11 that there was the "possibility of inadvertent release. . . at the institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of bat CoV research pursued there and the site of emergence of first human cases we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess."
These are but a few examples of their correspondence.
Contrary to Fauci's seeming objectivity about the paper, according to documents released by the House subcommittee, in February 2020 Fauci, along with Francis Collins, then head of the National Institutes of Health (which oversees NIAID), took part in a conference call with a number of scientists, including several of the paper's authors, prompting them to begin work on what would ultimately be the Proximal Origin paper.
On March 6, as the paper was headed toward publication, the virologists had changed their minds about the distinct possibility that the virus came out of the Wuhan lab. Andersen wrote to Fauci, Collins, and Jeremy Farrar, then a health advisor to the British government and director of the Wellcome Trust, an influential public health organization. He thanked them for their "advice and leadership as we have been working through the SARS-CoV-2 'origins' paper." Fauci replied two days later, telling Andersen, "Nice job on the paper."
Indeed, Fauci and Collins were so closely involved with the paper that in internal communications among the paper's five authors they referred to the pair as the "Bethesda Boys" (a reference to NIH headquarters, in Bethesda, Maryland).
At the time of the paper's drafting, which went on at least from February through early March, when it was accepted by the journal Nature Medicine, Andersen had an $8.9 million grant under review by NIAID. The grant was approved in May.
Fauci funded this research will billions of taxpayer dollars, then lied to us about it.
...
During his decades as head of NIAID, Fauci oversaw the distribution of billions of dollars each year in research grants and contracts, some of which were awarded explicitly for what is commonly referred to as "gain-of-function research of concern." This research involves manipulating viruses to become more transmissible and/or deadly in humans, with the hope that doing so might help advance development of vaccines and therapeutics against threats that don't exist but theoretically might in the future.
As I previously reported in The Free Press, it is an intensely controversial practice, with many scientists vehemently opposed to it. Kevin M. Esvelt, an evolutionary and ecological engineer at MIT, wrote in a 2021 opinion piece: "I implore every scientist, funder, and nation working in this field: Please stop." Purposefully creating a pathogen that could wipe out millions of people--regardless of its hoped-for benefit--is "insanity," global security and biodefense expert Dr. Laura Kahn told me.
Fauci has long been a vocal advocate for this type of research. And, despite pleas for it to stop, for at least a decade this dangerous research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and NIAID. This connection was affirmed by Fauci, and is documented in published papers: NIH and NIAID are listed as financiers of the project in the acknowledgements of the most infamous gain-of-function study in history.
And I have documented that at least several NIH/NIAID-funded studies were involved in potentially creating more deadly coronaviruses.
There is no ambiguity: the NIH and NIAID have funded and supported this work. Yet Fauci, and his then-boss Collins, during the Covid years, repeatedly obscured and even outright denied their involvement.
In the second video below -- and linked here -- Matt Taibbi has also cited parts of these "scientists'" emails in which they admit among themselves that it would be very, very bad for them personally (and financially, and maybe legally) if evidence should arise that this virus was manufactured at Wuhan, but then take solace in the fact that, given Wuhan's secrecy, proof of Wuhan's creation of the virus would almost certainly never come to light.
So they breathe a sigh of relief: We're safe. And -- this is the implication, not what they explicitly say-- it is safe for us to lie to cover our own asses, because the proof that we're lying will never surface.
I have a theory about why Fauci's and the federal "health expert" blob were so insistent that the government institute actual fascism to stop the spread of the virus: They knew damn well that they themselves had created this bug, and so every single death was on their heads -- both in terms of conscience and potential future criminal liability -- so proposed totalitarian means they otherwise wouldn't have considered to stop their own Frankenstein's monster.
Below, Taibbi cites the parts of the emails in which the authors of the "Proximal Origins" paper confess about how bad things could get for them if it should ever be discovered that their Dr. Frankenstein gain-of-function tinkering led to the murders of millions.
Seems like they acknowledged having a vested interest large enough to lie, huh?