Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is the highest-paid federal bureaucrat. He earned nearly $417,608 annually as of 2019. That’s more than the president, who earns $400,000. And more than congressmen, who earn $175,000.
No wonder he doesn’t think he must answer questions from Representatives Chip Roy of Texas, Bill Posey of Florida, and 10 other congressmen. They wrote to him on July 28 to ask about his agency’s funding of dangerous genetic experiments that fortified bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute for Virology in Red China.
Fauci, of course, heatedly denies NIAID funneled U.S. taxpayer money to the Chinese Reds to create fortified viruses. The evidence strongly suggests that Chinese scientists used that money to create the modified SARS-Cov-2 virus, which caused the COVID-19 pandemic.
The congressmen asked Fauci to reply within 30 days. He didn’t. On Thursday, Roy and Posey politely reminded Fauci that they would appreciate an answer.
Many Questions
The July letter asked myriad questions about e-mail exchanges between Fauci and “other stakeholders in the virology community [that appear] to be part of an effort to mislead the American people on the origins of COVID-19 and gain-of-function research.”
They pointed to an e-mail from Dr. Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute on January 31, 2020, in which Andersen said the virus appeared to be genetically engineered:
Wrote Anderson:
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.
The e-mail apparently upset Fauci. On February 1, 2020, he e-mailed NIAID Principal Deputy Director Dr. Hugh Auchincloss. “It is essential that we speak this AM,” Fauci wrote. “Read this paper as well as the e-mail that I will forward to you now. You will have tasks today that must be done.”
That e-mail included an article from Nature by American scientists Ralph Baric, Zhengli Shi, and others that noted, “a SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence.” Shi is China’s notorious Bat Lady, so known because she works with coronaviruses, and previous reporting shows, manipulated them to infect human lung tissue.
[wpmfpdf id=”138739″ embed=”1″ target=””]That article is important because it is, in a sense, the smoking gun. Auchincloss e-mailed Fauci to say the agency funded gain-of-function experiments because the Baric-Bat Lady paper says so. The agency paused that research in 2014, then restarted it in 2017. “The paper you sent me says the experiments were performed before the gain of function pause but have since been reviewed and approved by NIH,” the letter says.
From there, the congressmen asked about e-mail correspondence that suggests Fauci and the other “stakeholders” — multiple scientists listed in the letter — hatched a plan to squelch the notion that Fauci’s agency funded Shi’s highly dangerous work.
That occurred after a secret teleconference between Fauci and the others, four of whom, including Anderson, “later published a paper titled ‘the proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2′ in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020,” the congressmen wrote:
This paper was highly influential in shaping our nation’s response to the pandemic. In the paper, the doctors concluded that “… we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
On March 6, 2020, you received an email from Dr. Andersen who thanked you for “your advice and leadership as we have been working through the SARS-CoV-2 ‘origins’ paper.” You later praised his work on the paper on March 8, 2020.
Thus did the dozen congressmen ask Fauci about his handling of the Baric-Bat Lady article, including the recipients to whom he sent it.
The letter also asked about his testimony before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, at which he denied funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. When Senator Rand Paul told Fauci that his agency did indeed subsidize gain of function research, Fauci told the Kentucky Republican that he didn’t know what he was talking about.
But Fauci “also said Baric was not doing gain-of-function research,” the letter continued:
Yet, the February 1, 2020 Auchincloss email clearly suggests that Baric and Shi were conducting gain-of-function research with NIH funding. For the purposes of your email exchange, what was the definition of “gain-of-function” used? Is the research discussed in “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence” considered to be gain-of-function by the NIH?
They also want the notes from the teleconference.
[wpmfpdf id=”138738″ embed=”1″ target=””]What Does He Know?
The second demand for information is just the latest trouble for Fauci.
On Monday, the Intercept published more evidence that his agency did indeed fund the potentially catastrophic research. Gain of function means enhancing the virus genetically, in this case, to infect humans. Richard Ebright, head of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University, alleges that Fauci was “untruthful” in his testimony before the Senate HELP committee.
Biden backs Fauci and has joined what can only be called a deception. Having read grant documents the Intercept unearthed, top experts say the agency did indeed fund the controversial research.
Given the virus institute’s connection to the People’s Liberation Army, the takeaway from the story is this: Fauci used U.S. tax dollars to help the Chinese Reds create what might be a bioweapon. No one would have known had the potentially fatal bug not infected lab workers, who then spread in Wuhan. Athletes attending the World Military Games helped spread it globally.
As for Fauci and the questions those congressmen want answered, given what he told Senator Paul, they shouldn’t expect an answer anytime soon.
H/T: The Daily Caller
