Dr. Anthony Fauci was the face of the U.S. government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He has sought to defend his own tenure in government in a new memoir published this week. He has also faced renewed congressional scrutiny in recent weeks. This Washington Examiner series, Fauci Unmasked, will look at his record and legacy. The first part looked at Fauci’s record of statements on masks, social distancing, and vaccines. This second part reviews his role as a person of interest in the investigation into the origins of the pandemic.
Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci has been a person of interest in the congressional investigation into the origins of COVID-19.
The former agency leader and White House Advisor during the pandemic re-emerged in headlines in recent weeks, following his first public appearance since his retirement in December 2022 in his high-profile public testimony this month before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. His memoir on his nearly 60 years of government service was also published this week.
The 15-month investigation into COVID-19’s origins has uncovered significant findings regarding potentially dangerous coronavirus research funded by the National Institutes of Health at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a preeminent research institution in the same city in China where the outbreak originated in late 2019.
Republican subcommittee staff confirmed for the Washington Examiner that the investigation into Fauci’s leadership and role in the debate over COVID-19 origins is still ongoing, even after his public testimony.
Fauci’s legal counsel has denied several interview requests with the Washington Examiner over the course of the subcommittee’s investigation and in advance of his book release.
Here is what the House investigation has uncovered so far.
During the early days of the pandemic, Fauci was a vocal proponent of the idea that the virus had a zoonotic or natural origin and publicly dismissed other theories of origin, such as a lab accident.
Subcommittee Republicans argue that Fauci during this early period was involved in writing one of the earliest and most publicized papers discrediting the lab leak theory, “The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2.”
The scientific opinion piece, published by Nature Medicine in March 2020, examines the genomic characteristics of the virus and argues that “it is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation” of a similar virus.
A month after “Proximal Origins” was published, Fauci responded to reporters at a White House briefing asking about the possibility of a lab leak briefing by telling them about the new research paper. Fauci said that “the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”
But what Fauci did not mention is that he, as well as former NIH Director Francis Collins, was a participant on a conference call on Feb. 1, 2020, with the eventual authors of the “Proximal Origins” paper.
Documents uncovered by the House indicate that the authors of the “Proximal Origins” paper were strongly supportive of a lab-leak origin prior to the call but changed their tune following the Feb. 1 meeting. Three days later, the research team submitted their draft of “Proximal Origins” to Nature for publication, dismissing the possibility of the lab leak.
The authors of the “Proximal Origins” paper, as well as Fauci and Collins, have denied that the NIH leadership commissioned the paper or were substantive players in its drafting. All of those involved in the conference call say that British virologist Jeremy Fararr organized the meeting.
At the time, Fararr was the director of the British health research nonprofit organization the Wellcome Trust, but Farrar became the chief scientist of the World Health Organization in 2023.
Republicans in the House and Senate continue to cite the unrecorded Feb. 1 call as evidence of Fauci, along with other U.S. and international public health leadership, being involved in suppressing support for investigating the possibility of a lab leak.
Fauci’s memoir, On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service, includes a very brief discussion of the origins of the virus in which he does not directly share his professional opinion. He does highlight, however, that top virologists across the world support the animal-to-human theory and that 75% of virus outbreaks occur from zoonotic spillover.
“Keeping an open mind about both possibilities does not mean that one cannot have an opinion. Possibility does not necessarily mean equal probability,” Fauci wrote in his new book. “If and when the origin of COVID is definitively proven, I and my public health colleagues will accept this conclusion.”
Subsequent federal investigations from Congress and the intelligence community have focused on the WIV, otherwise known as the Wuhan lab, not only for its strong connections to the Chinese Communist Party but also because of its large reservoir of bat coronaviruses that could have made it vulnerable to a lab accident.
Although the subcommittee has unearthed impropriety and potentially dangerous research at the Wuhan lab on the part of NIAID awardees, it has not demonstrated that Fauci knew of these activities prior to the outbreak of the virus.
NIAID funded coronavirus research at the WIV through a sub-award granted to the organization EcoHealth Alliance, a research body that investigates animal viruses in order to be better prepared for pandemics from zoonotic spillover.
The Department of Health and Human Services has begun debarment proceedings for both EcoHealth and its president, Peter Daszak, following failures to report findings from their research project at the WIV for nearly two years and for allegedly violating the terms of the grant by conducting potentially dangerous research.
Amid the hotly contested issue of the possibility of a lab leak, there is bipartisan consensus that the NIAID director’s office did not sufficiently monitor potentially dangerous coronavirus experiments at the WIV.
Fauci testified before the subcommittee in January that he was unaware of the EcoHealth grant until after the outbreak began in December 2019, despite the fact that he personally signed off on every NIAID grant.
When pressed on the issue, the former director said that he largely relied on grantees to be truthful and based his approvals on the recommendations of agency staff.
The subcommittee’s investigation into senior staff directly below Fauci, however, has uncovered both conflicts of interest in the grant approval process and potentially criminal violations of federal records laws.
Although the investigation has not uncovered any smoking guns implicating Fauci of knowledge of the pandemic’s true origins, it has uncovered evidence of key players in NIAID leadership boasting about their ability to hide smoking guns and to keep Fauci away from scandal.
The subcommittee has continued to unearth evidence since June 2023 that Fauci’s senior scientific adviser, David Morens, used his personal email address to engage in government business and took steps to intentionally hide communications from Freedom of Information Act requests, including deleting government records.
Morens also had a close personal relationship with Daszak, and evidence uncovered by the subcommittee points to Morens leveraging his position in NIAID to restore EcoHealth’s grant at the WIV.
Fauci publicly denounced Morens’s blending of personal and professional affairs as “inappropriate” and “a terrible thing” during his public hearing this month and took great lengths to distance himself from his former scientific adviser, saying that he never worked with Morens on policy issues.
Morens and Fauci worked together for over 26 years and authored upwards of 50 scientific papers together, with approximately 25 about COVID-19.
In an August 2020 paper, Fauci and Morens discussed the increasing prevalence of zoonotic spillover due to human encroachment into animal environments and cited research from Daszak and EcoHealth as a call to prepare for more animal-to-human pandemics.
Emails from Morens’s personal accounts also show that Morens and other senior staff at NIAID used special measures in communicating with Fauci so as to avoid a paper trail explicitly to protect Fauci from culpability.
An email from April 2021 showed Morens requesting Daszak to speak directly with Fauci in a way that is “not-FoIA-able,” with both parties agreeing that an unrecorded Zoom call would be the best format.
“We are getting FOIA’d non stop,” Morens wrote, “so it’s most important that Tony not have anything on the record that could come back to bite.”
During his public hearing before the subcommittee, the former NIAID director also emphatically denied ever using his personal email for government business. Prior to the event, the subcommittee requested the private email and phone records from Fauci starting in 2019 on all matters related to COVID-19.
More than four years after the initial outbreak, Fauci now says that the virus could have come from a lab incident at the WIV, but it could not have been an experiment funded by the WIV.
Fauci said that it is a “virological fact” that the virus did not come from any experiments funded by NIAID through the EcoHealth grant due to the genetic differences between SARS-CoV-2 and the U.S.-funded experiments.
“What I’m saying is that I cannot account, nor can anyone account, for other things that might be going on in China, which is the reason why I have always said and will say now I keep an open mind as to what the origin is,” Fauci said before the subcommittee in June. “But the one thing I know for sure is that the viruses that were funded by the [National Institutes of Health] phylogenetically could not be the precursor of SARS-CoV-2.”
Last year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report on COVID-19 origins finding that the FBI and the Department of Energy both suspected the virus to have originated from a lab incident at the WIV. The report also highlights that scientists at the WIV did create chimera, or combination, SARS-like viruses using genetic techniques that would make it difficult to detect intentional manipulation.
It is also worth noting that EcoHealth and Daszak had proposed to do research both in the United States and at the WIV that would have genetically manipulated a bat coronavirus to have several similar characteristics to what would become SARS-CoV-2. Specifically, the virus if created would have had a furin cleavage site, the trait that makes SARS-CoV-2 bind very efficiently to human lung tissue.
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EcoHealth proposed this project to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, under the Department of Defense, but it was rejected in part due to the cost.
When questioned by Congress about the DARPA grant, Daszak admitted that it would be impossible to know if his Chinese colleagues conducted the research without his organization’s involvement after the U.S. government rejected funding.