David Zweig has an excellent new piece in the Free Press laying out in incriminating detail the legion deceptions of Anthony Fauci to hide U.S. Government funding of gain-of-function virus research in Wuhan. Here’s an excerpt.
On April 17th 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 17th 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 11th 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. …
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. …
If you want to understand why there has been such a collapse of trust in our public health leaders, this story is a good place to start.
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. …
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 May 2021, Collins released a statement that said:
Neither NIH nor NIAID have ever approved any grant that would have supported “gain-of-function” research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans.
Why would Collins put out a statement denying what is clearly true? In a word: Wuhan.
Though complex, the facts here are unequivocal. The NIH gave millions of dollars to a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance. From that pot of money, EcoHealth funnelled hundreds of thousands of dollars in sub-awards to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Grant applications to NIH from EcoHealth explicitly spell out work involving the creation of deadlier or more transmissible pathogens. It said the researchers would use infectious clone technology and humanised mice (i.e., rodents that are engineered to have human receptors for viruses) to test the ability of newly created coronaviruses to infect humans.
Yet in November 2021, when Senator Rand Paul questioned Fauci in a Congressional hearing about his funding of this research and its connection to the WIV, Fauci responded “gain-of-function is a very nebulous term” and that a considerable amount of effort had been spent “to give a more precise definition to the type of research that is of concern that might lead to a dangerous situation.” Paul shot back, “You’re defining away gain-of-function. You’re simply saying it doesn’t exist because you changed the definition on the NIH website!”
Worth reading in full.
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