Newly-released Emails Show Fauci Commissioned the 2020 Study Used to Disprove the Lab Leak Theory
At what point will people stop holding him up as a national hero?
Newly-released emails uncovered by House Republicans probing the pandemic definitively prove that Anthony Fauci knowingly misled not just the American people, but the entire world. Those emails show that he commissioned and had final approval on a scientific paper written specifically to disprove that covid came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
On February 1, 2020, Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins (then director of the NIH), and at least eleven other scientists convened a conference call to discuss covid. During this call, Fauci and Collins were warned that covid may have not only been leaked from the WIV, but been “intentionally genetically manipulated” to be especially infectious to humans as part of gain-of-function research.1 A mere three days later, four participants on that conference call authored a now infamous paper entitled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” in which they abandoned their belief that covid was the result of a laboratory leak, and which was then sent to Fauci for editing and approval.2
The new emails also reveal that Fauci “prompted” Dr. Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute to lead the writing of the Proximal Origins paper and that the goal was to “disprove” the lab leak theory. Previously, Scripps had stated that Andersen “objectively” investigated covid’s origins and that Fauci hadn’t attempted to influence his work. We now know that this was false.
A little more than two months after the paper was published, on April 16, 2020, Collins emailed Fauci expressing dismay that the paper had failed to dismiss the lab leak hypothesis and asked if more could be done to “put down” the theory. The very next day, after Collins explicitly requested that more public pressure be ramped up, Fauci stood behind a podium at a White House press conference and cited that paper as evidence that the lab leak theory was “improbable” while pretending that it had nothing to do with him and he didn’t know the authors.
“There was a study recently,” he told reporters when asked if the virus could have come from a Chinese lab, “where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences … in bats as they evolve and 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.
“So, the paper will be available. I don’t have the authors right now, but we can make it available to you.”
Time for People to Open Their Eyes
You’d have to be willfully blind not to see the forest for the trees at this point.
Fauci, a Machiavellian gonif if ever there was and patron saint of neurotic liberals the world over, long claimed that “the evidence says the coronavirus could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated.” Meaning that covid couldn’t possibly have originated from the WIV. Of course, Fauci played a key role in suppressing the evidence. This has been obvious for a long time now.
Consider the case of Dr. David Asher, a former state department official tasked by the Trump administration to lead a probe into the origins of the coronavirus. According to Asher, “We were finding that despite the claims of our scientific community, including the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Fauci’s NIAID organization, there was almost no evidence that supported a natural, zoonotic evolution or source of COVID-19. The data disproportionately stacked up, as we investigated, that it was coming out of a lab or some supernatural source.”
Well, what happened to this David Asher guy? How come we didn’t hear more about his probe?
Because the Biden administration, at the behest of Fauci, aborted the probe as soon as it got the chance. Something to do with “concerns over the reliability of the findings.”
What did the probe find?
Many things. None of which conformed to Fauci’s narrative. Like, for instance, what Asher learned from biostatisticians when he inquired about the probability that covid came from nature and not from a lab. The answer he was given? Approximately 1 in 13 billion.
To say nothing of the fact that state department officials were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the WIV’s gain-of-function research because it would bring unwelcome attention to the U.S. government funding it.
Yes, Fauci and his gang tried so very hard to convince the public that the lab leak hypothesis was “improbable” specifically because it’s so probable that covid did in fact originate from the WIV. I dove into this in a very long recent post, but the evidence positively screams genetically-engineered-virus-that-escaped-from-a-lab. Covid’s furin cleavage site — a feature never before found in any of the other hundreds of coronaviruses out in the wild and which made this new virus preternaturally contagious among humans — is about as obvious as it gets.
What exactly is a furin cleavage site?
Those little red things are called spike proteins, and they’re the key to how the virus is able to enter human cells. Within these little red spike proteins, right in the middle, lies the furin cleavage site. What makes this so abnormal is how perfectly placed the furin cleavage site is, a positioning that allows the virus to cleave human cell membranes and infect the cells. It’s almost as if the virus was specifically designed to be extremely infectious to humans.
No other coronavirus has this oddity. And, coincidentally, adding a furin cleavage site to a virus to increase its pathogenicity is a long standing gain-of-function practice.
“But Dr. Fauci said they weren’t doing gain of function stuff at the WIV! He said so when he testified in front of Congress!” This is essentially what a now former subscriber recently said to me in an email.
Yup, he did indeed. And when Kentucky Senator Rand Paul suggested that Fauci had lied to Congress, Fauci stated that the research doesn’t actually “qualify” as gain-of-function, even though it’s literally the very definition of gain-of-function research—something that even the Fauci-loving New York Times has seen fit to print.
Pressed further, Fauci later said he couldn’t be certain whether Chinese scientists at the WIV “kept their word” and “avoided using U.S. funding” to conduct alteration experiments that may have led to the pandemic, and that “there’s no way of guaranteeing” what the $600,000 given to the lab was used for; he insisted it was gifted for “a modest collaboration with very respectable Chinese scientists who were world experts on coronaviruses.”
A funny thing happened on October 20th, 2021, not long after Senator Paul and Fauci faced off: The NIH admitted it had funded gain-of-function research at the WIV.
Specifically, the research involved testing different spike proteins on coronaviruses.
Coincidentally, on the very same day of this admission, the definition of “gain-of-function” was changed on the NIH website. Prior to October 20th, the website said that gain-of-function research “describes a type of research that modifies a biological agent so that it confers new or enhanced activity to that agent.”
The definition appeared under the title “Gain-of-Function Research Involving Potential Pandemic Pathogens.”
“The subset of GOF research that is anticipated to enhance the transmissibility and/or virulence of potential pandemic pathogens, which are likely to make them more dangerous to humans, has been the subject of substantial scrutiny and deliberation,” the website previously stated.
But on October 20th, the day the NIH made the admission, the page that had defined “gain-of-function” was removed from the website. That page is now titled, “Research Involving Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogens.”
Concealment Implies Guilt
It hardly needs saying that Fauci would be implicated if covid escaped from the WIV.
But ironically, if he’d been forthright about what he knew and when he knew it and informed government officials that the NIH had been using American taxpayer dollars to fund the kind of exceedingly sketchy research at the WIV from which covid likely originated, it’s unlikely Fauci would’ve faced any real consequences (not that he will now). After all, even though he was the one to fund the research, and even though he effectively ignored the U.S. moratorium on gain-of-function experimentation by outsourcing it to arguably the shadiest and least trustworthy country in the world, and even though the Department of State had specifically warned that safety standards in specifically that lab were woefully insufficient and that such negligence could very well prove disastrous in the not too distant future,3 it’s not as if Fauci or any other American for that matter allowed the virus to escape. It was China. And I imagine that Fauci wouldn’t have found much difficulty in getting people to place blame on one of our staunchest adversaries.
But it’s clear that Fauci is obsessed with his legacy, which he was trying to protect. Now, however, not only is that legacy tarnished, but he’s been repeatedly exposed as a liar.
Here again it must be highlighted how the mainstream media failed to give any coverage at all to the fact that the individual in charge of our pandemic response just so happened to have very troubling ties to the lab from which covid could very well have originated. Instead, they lionized him. When it became clear that Fauci wasn’t especially fond of Trump, Democrats and their media handmaidens rallied to portray him as a symbol of authority, an expert whose public standing was integral to our continued health and safety, a valiant foil to the bad orange man and his mean tweets and his lack of respect for The Science™.
Ergo, all criticism and scrutiny of the bad orange man’s noble adversary, he of the Keebler Elf resemblance resigned to indentured servitude within the depraved bowels of the Trump administration, was officially off the table.
I think Fauci’s acolytes and sycophants now find themselves stuck in the awkward position where acknowledging one lie/distortion means having to acknowledge all of his lies/distortions. The thing is, though, retrospective falsification — the unconscious distortion of past experiences to conform to a person’s needs in the present — is de rigueur within the bubbled world of the Left, so it’s unlikely they change tunes.
It must be asked, though: At what point will people stop holding Fauci up as a national hero?
Amazingly, the NIH continues to fund coronavirus studies conducted by EcoHealth Alliance, the group assisting with gain-of-function research in Wuhan. Despite claiming otherwise on multiple occasions, Fauci knew the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) had funded EcoHealth Alliance, the WIV was a subgrantee of EcoHealth, and EcoHealth was not in compliance with its grant reporting. Fauci also knew that the NIAID worked with EcoHealth to craft a grant policy to sidestep the gain-of-function moratorium at the time. This new policy allowed EcoHealth to complete dangerous experiments on novel bat coronaviruses — with very little oversight — that would have otherwise been blocked by the moratorium.
It’s difficult to overstate how influential that paper ended up being. As of January 2023, it had been accessed more than 5.7 million times and cited by more than 2,000 media outlets.
Fauci is responsible for making the decisions to fund the projects that produced the virus that killed 7 million people, and now we have proof that he was responsible for the cover-up. How is this not criminal?
All one needs to do is express dislike for Trump and the entirety of the establishment apparatus will come to your defense and paper over your every crime.