Almost two years into “15 days to slow the spread,” Americans should have learned a very significant fact about Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases: He has a troubled relationship with the truth. 

Since June, the highest-paid employee of the federal government has been caught in two major falsehoods, the more important being his mulish denial that his agency subsidized research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where the notorious Bat Lady, Shi Zhengli, genetically enhanced a bat coronavirus to infect human beings. That research is called “gain of function” because it fortifies a microbe’s infectious ability. An American scientist provided the know-how, and American taxpayers the money, to create the enhanced SARS-CoV-2 that spread across the globe.

Second, in May 2020 Fauci falsely said the virus almost certainly did not spring from the Bat Lady’s lab, where poorly trained technicians were a major concern for U.S. science diplomats. After e-mails surfaced in June that thanked him for all but dismissing the lab-leak theory, Fauci then claimed he never blithely dismissed the theory, now all but established fact.

One might say Fauci — whose salary as of 2019 is $417,608 — lied about these matters, which would imply intent to deceive. Or one might say he doesn’t know what his agency is doing. Or one might say that, at 80 years old, he’s an elderly man who just can’t remember. Whatever one says on those counts, one must say one thing: Fauci must either retire or be fired.

Gain of Function Subsidized

Fauci does not deny that his agency sent millions to the Bat Lady’s lab in Wuhan, as Fox News and Newsweek reported last year. But the octogenarian, who graduated from Cornell University medical school 55 years ago, does deny the money paid for the perilous gain-of-function research that created the virus that caused COVID-19 and just happened to interest the People’s Liberation Army. The PLA hoped to weaponize it, aerosolize it, and use it to bring down an enemy nation’s medical system. 

Infected lab workers spread the virus in Wuhan, the site of the Military World  Games that brought thousands of athletes into the city just as the virus was getting legs. They, in turn, spread it globally when they returned home, as we noted in our article House Report All But Proves Lab-leak Theory in the September 20, 2021 issue of The New American.

The takeaway from all that is this: Fauci furiously denies his agency played a role in creating the virus by funding the experiments, which two American scientists, writing in the Washington Post, warned could end in disaster if an enhanced virus escaped the lab.

For instance, in a testy exchange with Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on July 20, during testimony before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, Fauci denied for the second time that his agency subsidized the experiments.

“You do not know what you are talking about,” Fauci fumed after the senator warned him that lying to Congress is a felony, and reminded the angry doctor of his false testimony in May. 

The Bat Lady, Paul said, “credits the NIH [National Institutes of Health] and lists the actual number of the grant.” Shi’s paper describes experiments in which “she took two bat coronavirus genes, spike genes, and combined them with a SARS related backbone to create new viruses that are not found in nature.”

Those viruses “were shown to replicate in humans,” Paul continued:

These experiments combined genetic information from different coronaviruses that infect animals, but not humans, to create novel artificial viruses able to infect human cells. Viruses that in nature only infect animals were manipulated in the Wuhan lab to gain the function of infecting humans. This research fits the definition of the research that the NIH said was subject to the pause in 2014 to 2017, a pause in funding on gain of function, but the NIH failed to recognize this, defines it away, and it never came under any scrutiny. Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist from Rutgers, described this research in Wuhan as the Wuhan lab used NIH funding to construct novel chimeric SARS related to coronaviruses able to infect human cells and laboratory animals. This is high-risk research that creates new potential pandemic pathogens, potential pandemic pathogens that exist only in the lab, not in nature. This research matches — these are Dr. Ebright’s words — this research matches, indeed epitomizes the definition of gain of function research, done entirely in Wuhan, for which there was supposed to be a federal pause. Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11th, where you claimed that the NIH never funded gains-of-function research in Wuhan?

“Senator Paul, I have never lied before the Congress, and I do not retract that statement,” Fauci replied. “This paper that you were referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain of function.” 

Paul: “You take an animal virus and you increase its transmissibility to humans. You’re saying that’s not gain of function?”

Fauci: “Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly. And I want to say that officially, you do not know what you are talking about, okay?”

Paul: “This is your definition that you guys wrote. It says that scientific research that increases the transmissibility among animals is gain of function. They took animal viruses that only occur in animals, and they increased their transmissibility to humans. How you can say that is not gain of function.”

Fauci: “It is not.”

Paul later tweeted the Bat Lady’s “verbatim admission” that NIH funded her work, and cited a microbiologist from MIT who said “certain techniques that the researchers used seemed to meet the definition of gain-of-function”

But Fauci bumped into a bigger problem weeks later. The Intercept disclosed two more grants found in a 900-page trove of government documents obtained with a freedom of information request. Funneled through scientist Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, those grants subsidized gain-of-function research. 

“The documents contain several critical details about the research in Wuhan, including the fact that key experimental work with humanized mice was conducted at a biosafety level 3 lab at Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment — and not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as was previously assumed,” the website reported. It continued:

The documents raise additional questions about the theory that the pandemic may have begun in a lab accident, an idea that Daszak has aggressively dismissed.

The bat coronavirus grant provided EcoHealth Alliance with a total of $3.1 million, including $599,000 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology used in part to identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans. Even before the pandemic, many scientists were concerned about the potential dangers associated with such experiments. The grant proposal acknowledges some of those dangers: “Fieldwork involves the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs, while working in caves with high bat density overhead and the potential for fecal dust to be inhaled.”

Daszak, of course, led the effort to squash the lab-leak theory, but in any case Ebright, head of the Waksman Institute for Microbiology at Rutgers, spoke to the Intercept, and in a long thread on Twitter called Fauci’s claims “untruthful.” Ebright had already confirmed the experiments for Nicholas Wade, who, in May this year, wrote the 11,000-word piece for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that proved NIAID’s subsidies funded the controversial experiment.

On Twitter, Ebright buried Fauci’s claims that he told the truth before the committee. Ebright also targeted Fauci’s boss, Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health. Collins had 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.”

The Intercept documents, according to Ebright, “confirm the grants supported the construction — in Wuhan — of novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses that combined a spike gene from one coronavirus with genetic information from another coronavirus, and confirmed the resulting viruses could infect human cells.” Ebright continued:

The materials reveal that the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses also could infect mice engineered to display human receptors on cells (“humanized mice”).

The materials further reveal for the first time that one of the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses — one not been previously disclosed publicly — was more pathogenic to humanized mice than the starting virus from which it was constructed and thus not only was reasonably anticipated to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity, but, indeed, was *demonstrated* to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity.

Then Ebright delivered the gut punch that knocked the wind out of Fauci’s fulsome denials and could well help Paul’s push for the Department of Justice to investigate Fauci.

“The documents make it clear,” Ebright wrote, “that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful.”

 Shortly thereafter, a dozen GOP congressmen wrote to Fauci demanding an explanation. 

That missive provided even more evidence that Fauci certainly knew his agency funded the gain-of-function research, including internal NIAID e-mails from Fauci and others who discussed it. Fauci and NIAID officials shared a paper written by the Bat Lady and American scientist Ralph Baric, and published in Nature, that discussed the research at the Wuhan lab. 

Denying the Lab Leak

The congressmen reminded Fauci of just what those e-mails showed. Some had already surfaced in news reports.

On January 31, Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute wrote an e-mail to Fauci suggesting that the virus did indeed leak from the lab in Wuhan. Wrote Andersen:

The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered…. Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.

In other words, Fauci had good reason to believe the virus did not, as the Chinese Communists claimed, leap from bats to humans through the filthy wet markets of Wuhan, which sell exotic animals, including bats that carry coronaviruses, for human consumption. Fauci knew almost from the beginning of the pandemic, as the economy shut down, unemployment rocketed through the roof, and Americans locked themselves in their homes to “slow the spread,” that the Asiatic pathogen was souped up in and escaped from a lab.

Yet the congressional inquiry also noted an article published in Nature Medicine that discussed the origins of the virus and pooh-poohed the lab-leak theory. That piece from March 17, 2020, also by Andersen and others, said “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” Andersen thanked Fauci for his “advice and leadership” in writing the piece.

On April 18, Daszak thanked Fauci for “publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

Continued Daszak:

From my perspective, your comments are brave, and coming from your trusted voice, will help dispel the myths being spun around the virus’ origins. Once this pandemic’s over I look forward thanking you in person and let you know how important your comments are to us all.

Despite knowing that the Bat Lady likely created the virulent pathogen, in May 2020, Fauci told National Geographic that the super-germ was not man-made. It did not, he said, escape from the poorly-run, malfunctioning lab in Wuhan. “If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what’s out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated,” he told National Geographic.

The magazine headlined its piece with this certitude: “Fauci: No scientific evidence the coronavirus was made in a Chinese lab.”

“Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species,” Fauci told the credulous eggheads at the venerable science magazine.

That piece was published on May 4 and contradicted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who said the day before that the U.S. had evidence of a lab leak. “Remember, China has a history of infecting the world, and they have a history of running substandard laboratories,” Pompeo said.

President Trump said the same thing on April 20. That sent the leftist media into paroxysms of Trump Derangement, and is one reason they never probed the matter. Indeed, thanks to Fauci and Communist Chinese propaganda, the leftist media confidently asserted that the lab-leak hypothesis was a “debunked conspiracy theory,” an unwarranted claim it enthusiastically repeated until Wade’s piece appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and news surfaced that three lab workers were sickened in November of 2019. After that, the dam broke, and the media conceded that Trump was probably right. Amusingly, the leftist media blamed Trump for their own refusal go after the lab-leak theory. He was, as a writer for Vanity Fair called him, the “bomb-thrower in chief.” It was, as always, Trump’s fault.

Of course, Fauci hasn’t answered the GOP congressmen, but in any event he dissembled again on the matter in June. After the damning e-mails from Daszak and Andersen surfaced early this summer, Fauci claimed he never dismissed the lab-leak theory or deliberately suppressed it.

“If you go back then, even though you lean towards feeling this is more likely a natural occurrence, we always felt that you gotta keep an open mind — all of us,” Fauci told CBS This Morning on June 16 this year.

“We didn’t get up and start announcing it, but what we said, ‘Keep an open mind and continue to look.’ So I think it’s a bit of a distortion to say that we deliberately suppressed that.”

No, it wasn’t a distortion. When Fauci said “we,” he meant those in the know, such as Daszak, whose outfit transmitted the grant to Wuhan that funded the deadly research. He just happened to be part of the team from the World Health Organization that exonerated the lab after a short, hours-long visit. Daszak also organized a letter from scientists to the Lancet that fingered wet markets as the source of the outbreak.

A separate issue is what role the State Department and U.S. intelligence agencies played in covering up the lab leak, as The New American reported in the July 5, 2021 issue in our article COVID Lab-leak Theory: Media Lied, People Died. Though Vanity Fair wrongly blamed Trump for the media’s foul-up on the lab-leak story, the magazine did reveal some stunning material. A top official at State, an internal agency memorandum showed, ordered underlings in the arms control and disarmament bureau to forget looking into the origin of the virus because it would “open a can of worms.” Another top official ordered underlings not to “say anything that would point to the U.S. government’s own role in gain-of-function research.” And the Office of the Director of National Intelligence publicly claimed that analysts agreed with the “wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified.”

That, of course, was false. In April 2020, intelligence sources told Fox News’s Brett Baier that the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab. They repeated that judgment to the network’s John Roberts nearly two weeks later.

What About Fauci and Collins?

The obvious question: What should be done with Fauci?

Rand Paul is right. Fauci’s role in the subsidies for the gain-of-function research and squashing the truth about the lab leak, both of which affected the U.S. response to the China virus, must be examined. That’s why Paul asked DOJ to review Fauci’s testimony. Fauci’s chief, Francis Collins, must be investigated, too.

Recall that Ebright, one of the top microbiologists in the nation, said Fauci and Collins were “untruthful” when they denied that their agencies paid the Bat Lady to enhance the infectious power of viruses so they would infect humans. Their denials could mean several things.

Suppose neither Fauci nor Collins knew what research the grants funded, or worse, that the grants even went through, which means they were “untruthful” — not intentionally, but because they fell asleep on the job.
That’s a firing offense anywhere but in the federal government. Fauci’s testimony, though, clarified one thing: He understood what Paul asked, and what Paul described as gain-of-function research. “It is not,” he said. That means he used a different definition of the term either to justify the grants initially, if he even was involved in approving them, or to justify them retroactively in his testimony. The latter would mean Fauci knew the grants paid to fortify the virus, but only under the bright lamp of Paul’s questions decided the research did not meet the definition of gain of function.

Ebright, who should testify before the Senate’s HELP committee, said the grants uncovered by the Intercept did indeed fund gain-of-function experiments, which certainly proves one of two things: Fauci doesn’t know what gain-of-function is, which isn’t possible, or, again, his unique understanding and definition of gain-of-function is not used by the vast majority of scientists such as Ebright.  
In either case, that would mean Fauci lied. Lying to Congress, as Paul said, is a felony. That, too, is a firing offense. All of this, except perhaps the falsehoods in sworn testimony, applies to Collins, given his public statements. 

Ebright chose his words carefully, and rightly so. He didn’t say the men lied, which, again, implies intent to deceive. That would be nearly impossible to prove.

But why the men were untruthful is immaterial. Gain-of-function has just one definition. And Ebright says the Bat Lady’s work that fortified SARS-CoV-2 fits that definition. If the men didn’t lie, they erred grievously and didn’t know what their agencies were subsidizing. While difficult to believe, let’s assume that’s possible.

Who, then, is minding the store at the $42 billion NIH and $6.2 billion NIAID?

Not that any of this speculation matters. If Fauci and Collins lied, nothing will happen to them, at least as long as Biden is in office. If they didn’t know what was going on, nothing will happen to them, as long as Biden is in office. The result is the same. Both men will keep their jobs.

That’s a hard pill to swallow, given what would happen to a man similarly situated in the private sector. Liars are fired. So are incompetents.

Only politicians, federal bureaucrats, and top military commanders enjoy immunity from punishment for mistakes: running up the national debt to $26 trillion, mismanaging myriad agencies, revealing the nation’s war plans to the enemy, and launching drone strikes that kill children in foreign countries.

Or, in this case, paying to create a genetically-enhanced supervirus that has killed millions (reportedly) and brought down the U.S. and global economy after politicians used it to create a mass panic, which has enabled a significant expansion of state and federal police power justified as public health measures. New York and California have mandated vaccine passports. So has New Orleans, Louisiana. Australia is verging on totalitarianism.

Like those others, Fauci and Collins will never be held responsible.

R. Cort Kirkwood is a longtime contributor to The New American. He was a newspaperman for more than 25 years.