Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says that former White House coronavirus adviser Anthony Fauci likely played a large role in the creation of SARS-CoV-2 and called for an investigatory commission into the United States’s involvement in the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Kennedy, in an interview with talk show host Tucker Carlson published Monday, said that Fauci, in his role as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, funded potentially dangerous research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China that many intelligence agencies have assessed could have sparked the COVID-19 pandemic. 

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Carlson specifically asked Kennedy why former President Joe Biden issued a full preemptive pardon for Fauci on his last day in the White House on Jan. 20 before the inauguration of President Donald Trump. 

“I would be speculating, but I think that he had a lot of liability on creating coronavirus,” Kennedy said. “He was funding precisely that research, and he was giving them the technology.” 

Although Kennedy did not reference it by name in the interview, the health secretary was referring to gain-of-function research, which has been a hotly debated topic in the scientific community for decades.

Colloquially, gain-of-function research refers to genetic manipulation of a pathogen to make it more infectious or easily transmissible. The practice has been banned indefinitely by the Trump administration.

Former President Barack Obama put a moratorium on gain-of-function in 2014 following potentially dangerous experiments involving highly lethal avian influenza earlier that decade. The moratorium lasted for three years, ending in 2017.

Biden’s pardon for Fauci preemptively waived him of liability for any crimes committed between 2014 and 2024, overlapping with the Obama-era moratorium and the start of the pandemic. 

Kennedy also referred to NIAID-funded research by University of North Carolina scientist Ralph Baric, who, before the pandemic, created the technology to conceal whether or not a pathogen had been genetically manipulated in a lab.

Baric was also a known associate of key players at the Wuhan Institute of Virology before the pandemic. 

When Carlson asked if Fauci could ever be prosecuted or otherwise held accountable for funding dangerous research, Kennedy said that the only way forward would be to have a nationwide Truth Commission, similar to what transpired in South Africa in the aftermath of apartheid. 

“In those cases, what happens is you have a commission that hears testimony on what exactly happened, and anybody who comes and volunteers to testify truthfully is then given immunity from prosecution. Just so the public knows who did what,” said Kennedy. 

“People who are called and don’t take that deal, who perjure themselves, then they can be prosecuted criminally,” Kennedy said.

The Washington Examiner attempted to contact Fauci for comment through his employment at Georgetown University School of Medicine, where he has been a distinguished faculty member since 2023. Fauci did not respond. 

Carlson also asked Kennedy about the safety of mRNA vaccine technology, which was first made commercially available with COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

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Kennedy said that he is not satisfied with the information collected so far on the safety of mRNA vaccines, but that his “opinion about that is irrelevant.” He says he is not the only one within the Trump administration’s health department who is dubious of the new vaccine technology.

“I would say there’s a lot of skepticism in this agency about mRNA vaccines, about mRNA technology, about the status of it now, about whether it’s safe,” Kennedy said. “Safety studies simply have not been done, but there is enough anecdotal reports of people getting profound injuries that may or may not be associated with it, and we’re going to answer those questions.”