Brownstone Institute
Anthony Fauci’s Very Bad Week
From the Brownstone Institute
It’s not been Anthony Fauci’s best week.
Forever intent on managing his image and public opinion on the pandemic response, he accepted a seemingly safe interview on CNN. The reporter was someone he trusted, Michael Smerconish, who tossed in what he believed to be a softball question.
He asked Fauci about the Cochrane study on masks by Tom Jefferson, and, in particular the author’s comments to Brownstone fellow Maryanne Demasi. Jefferson flat out said that masks don’t work to control viruses. Smerconish simply wanted Fauci’s response.
Fauci, who might have been expected to perform better, stumbled very badly. He said that while on a population level mask evidence is weak, the evidence is stronger on an individual level. That of course is a bit of a head-scratcher, especially since he cited none of the supposed studies.
Actually, it makes no sense at all. The whole point of the Jefferson paper was to examine the best-possible evidence. The results were exactly the “science” that Fauci has touted for years. The big difference is that the results completely contradict Fauci himself. Is this guy a pathological liar?
You can watch the snippet:
CNN's @smerconish confronts Dr. Fauci with the latest evidence that masks, even N95s, made "no difference" in the pandemic. Fauci responds by basically conceding that point while adding the nonsensical claim that masks work on an "individual basis," or something.
Smerconish ends… pic.twitter.com/tZB62saxOL
— Scott Morefield (@SKMorefield) September 3, 2023
After the exchange, Smerconish reported that he texted Fauci an apology for the way the interview went, assuring him that it was not intended as a “gotcha” interview. He reported that Fauci texted him back but didn’t want to share the contents because he didn’t have permission. Interesting. I’m pretty sure that a reporter under normal circumstances would certainly share that information. But as we know, Fauci is in a league of his own.
In addition, some very interesting email correspondence came out, thanks to a FOIA request by US Right to Know. The communication to Fauci was courtesy of Fauci’s chief of staff Greg Folkers and on behalf of Fauci’s frequent co-author David Morens. The date was January 27, 2020, about the time that China’s experience with SARS-CoV-2 was making the news all over the US. (I wrote my first article against lockdowns for Covid the next day.)
“EcoHealth group (Peter Daszak et al), has for years been among the biggest players in coronavirus work, also in collaboration with Ralph Baric, Ian Lipkin and others,” wrote Folkers. In the past 5 years, and working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, they had discovered hundreds of coronaviruses circulating in China. Further, the memo said, “clinical signs of bat SARS-CoVs in mice were not prevented with a vaccine candidate against SARS-CoV, and were not treatable with most monoclonal therapies being developed.”
Here is the full memo:
The timing here checks out against Jeremy Farrar’s own memoir:
“By the second week of January, I was beginning to realise the scale of what was happening. I was also getting the uncomfortable feeling that some of the information needed by scientists all around the world to detect and fight this new disease was not being disclosed as fast as it could be. I did not know it then, but a fraught few weeks lay ahead. In those weeks, I became exhausted and scared. I felt as if I was living a different person’s life. During that period, I would do things I had never done before: acquire a burner phone, hold clandestine meetings, keep difficult secrets. I would have surreal conversations with my wife, Christiane, who persuaded me we should let the people closest to us know what was going on. I phoned my brother and best friend to give them my temporary number. In hushed conversations, I sketched out the possibility of a looming global health crisis that had the potential to be read as bioterrorism. ‘If anything happens to me in the next few weeks,’ I told them nervously, ‘this is what you need to know.’”
Wow, these guys believed they would be off’d! That’s some crazy stuff there.
These weeks were the critical turning point. China had already locked down. Farrar reports that “the world had all the information it needed by 24 January: a potentially fatal novel respiratory disease that could spread between people without symptoms, with no vaccines or treatments, that had already ravaged a huge, highly connected Chinese city.”
Then the possibility of a lab leak became very obvious in these days. “In the last week of January 2020,” he writes, “I saw email chatter from scientists in the US suggesting the virus looked almost engineered to infect human cells. These were credible scientists proposing an incredible, and terrifying, possibility of either an accidental leak from a laboratory or a deliberate release.”
This fits exactly with the above memo to Fauci. It was at this point that the cool-and-collected Fauci organized the authors of what became the “Proximal Origin” paper that denied it was a lab leak, the first draft of which was circulated on February 4. Among the authors was a virologist who had worked with EcoHealth.
You can look through the entire timeline and see that this all checks out. It seems ever clearer what was going on here. Fauci and his cohorts were alerted to NIH funding of the Wuhan lab. They became convinced of the very strong likelihood that this was a lab leak, accidental or deliberate. This began to make some sense of other reports from many months earlier of sick soldiers returning from the Military World Games. They panicked and they worked on a cover-up.
Why did they panic? Was it for fear of the public health consequences of a rapidly spreading virus? More likely, they panicked that they would rightly be blamed for it because the lab was funded through a third party by US taxpayers. They must also have known that they were doing gain-of-function research: the idea that labs create viruses and then also manufacture the antidote in the form of a vaccine. But according to the report on Fauci’s desk, no vaccine works for this one or others in this class of virus.
Fauci defaulted to the only action he could think of at the time: use lockdowns to minimize the spread. His staff had already taken a junket to Wuhan and returned with a report dated February 24, 2020 that said that lockdowns worked to suppress viral spread.
Lacking any better ideas, Fauci decided to push lockdowns as a way of minimizing the damage and keeping his reputation out of harm’s way by 1) denying the lab leak with a seemingly credible paper, and 2) causing a hugely distracting amount of chaos with a lockdown that they convinced Donald Trump himself to back.
This would of course wreck the Trump presidency, which was a bonus from the point of view of the military intelligence that was already working to implement protocols from their recently concluded “germ games.”
Next in line came the necessity to involve the New York Times, which on February 28 ran an article calling for the US to “go medieval” on the virus in addition to an article by Peter Dazsak himself on the op-ed page!
Four days later, Fauci told Michael Gerson of the Washington Post on March 2, 2020, that no vaccine would be needed to get over the pandemic. “Social distancing is not really geared to wait for a vaccine,” wrote Fauci. “The epidemic will gradually decline and stop on its own without a vaccine.”
Why would he say this? Again, Fauci had been told that no vaccine in China seemed to work. Plus, he is not a stupid man – coronaviruses mutate too quickly – and had years of attempts to vaccinate against AIDS without success. So his thinking was that using force to stop the spread was the only real option for a man who was seeking to “cover his ass,” as the expression goes.
The big problem with the plan, of course, was that there was no exit strategy. As soon as you open up, the virus is going to spread anyway. This was why Fauci welcomed all attempts at creating a vaccine anyway. At least the vaccine would provide an excuse to end the lockdowns.
But just in case it did not, he worked with his co-author David Morens on a big think piece that came out in Cell in August 2020. This was the paper that said lockdowns should really be permanent.
“Living in greater harmony with nature,” they wrote, “will require changes in human behavior as well as other radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.”
Despite Fauci’s wishes, the most extreme aspects of lockdowns gradually faded away in time, most anointed experts can pretend as if the vaccine ended the worst aspects of the pandemic (that’s why the mandates became necessary, if only to maximize uptake and confound the science), and Fauci keeps going on national television, despite his age and wealth, to dial back his responsibility for any aspect of it, including the lockdowns he is on record backing from February 26, 2020, onward.
In any case, this is a summary of current knowledge. There are of course many other layers to this onion, including the early involvement of the pharmaceutical companies and the extensive intervention by the Department of Defense. Sadly, much of the necessary information to sort through that thicket is wholly classified.
Thus ends Fauci’s not-so-good week. We’ll get to the bottom of this eventually.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
Anthony “I represent science” Fauci can now stand beside Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon in the history books as someone who received the poison pill of a preemptive pardon.
While Nixon was pardoned for specific charges related to Watergate, the exact crimes for which Fauci was pardoned are not specified. Rather, the pardon specifies:
Baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety, and financial security of targeted individuals and their families. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong – and in fact have done the right things – and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated and prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances.
In other words, the dying breath of the Biden administration appears to be pardoning Fauci for crimes he didn’t commit, which would seem to make a pardon null and void. The pardon goes further than simply granting clemency for crimes. Clemency usually alleviates the punishment associated with a crime, but here Biden attempts to alleviate the burden of investigations and prosecutions, the likes of which our justice system uses to uncover crimes.
It’s one thing to pardon someone who has been subjected to a fair trial and convicted, to say they have already paid their dues. Gerald Ford, in his pardon of Richard Nixon, admitted that Nixon had already paid the high cost of resigning from the highest office in the land. Nixon’s resignation came as the final chapter of prolonged investigations into his illegal and unpresidential conduct during Watergate, and those investigations provided us the truth we needed to know that Nixon was a crook and move on content that his ignominious reputation was carve d into stone for all of history.
Fauci, meanwhile, has evaded investigations on matters far more serious than Watergate. In 2017, DARPA organized a grant call – the PREEMPT call – aiming to preempt pathogen spillover from wildlife to people. In 2018 a newly formed collaborative group of scientists from the US, Singapore, and Wuhan wrote a grant – the DEFUSE grant – proposing to modify a bat sarbecovirus in Wuhan in a very unusual way. DARPA did not fund the team because their work was too risky for the Department of Defense, but in 2019 Fauci’s NIAID funded this exact set of scientists who never wrote a paper together prior or since. In late 2019, SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan with the precise modifications proposed in the DEFUSE grant submitted to PREEMPT.
It’s reasonable to be concerned that this line of research funded by Fauci’s NIAID may have caused the pandemic. In fact, if we’re sharp-penciled and honest with our probabilities, it’s likely beyond reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a consequence of research proposed in DEFUSE. What we don’t know, however, is whether the research proceeded with US involvement or not.
Congress used its constitutionally-granted investigation and oversight responsibilities to investigate and oversee NIAID in search of answers. In the process of these investigations, they found endless pages of emails with unjustified redactions, evidence that Fauci’s FOIA lady could “make emails disappear,” Fauci’s right-hand-man David Morens aided the DEFUSE authors as they navigated disciplinary measures at NIH and NIAID, and there were significant concerns that NIAID sought to obstruct investigations and destroy federal records.
Such obstructive actions did not inspire confidence in the innocence of Anthony Fauci or the US scientists he funded in 2019. On the contrary, Fauci testified twice under oath saying NIAID did not fund gain-of-function research of concern in Wuhan…but then we discovered a 2018 progress report of research NIAID funded in Wuhan revealing research they funded had enhanced the transmissibility of a bat SARS-related coronavirus 10,000 times higher than the wild virus. That is, indisputably, gain-of-function research of concern. Fauci thus lied to the American public and perjured himself in his testimony to Congress, and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has referred Fauci’s perjury charges to the Department of Justice.
What was NIAID trying to preempt with their obstruction of Congressional investigations? What is Biden trying to preempt with his pardon of Fauci? Why do we not have the 2019 NIAID progress report from the PI’s who submitted DEFUSE to PREEMPT and later received funding from NIAID?
It is deplorable for Biden to preemptively pardon Fauci on his last day in office, with so little known about the research NIAID funded in 2019 and voters so clearly eager to learn more. With Nixon’s preemptive pardon, the truth of his wrongdoing was known and all that was left was punishment. With Fauci’s preemptive pardon, the truth is not yet known, NIAID officials in Fauci’s orbit violated federal records laws in their effort to avoid the truth from being known, and Biden didn’t preemptively pardon Fauci to grant clemency and alleviate punishment, but to stop investigations and prosecutions the likes of which could uncover the truth.
I’m not a Constitutional scholar prepared to argue the legality of this maneuver, but I am an ethical human being, a scientist who contributed another grant to the PREEMPT call, and a scientist who helped uncover some of the evidence consistent with a lab origin and quantify the likelihood of a lab origin from research proposed in the DEFUSE grant. Any ethical human being knows that we need to know what caused the pandemic, and to deprive the citizenry of such information from open investigations of NIAID research in 2019 would be to deprive us of critical information we need to self-govern and elect people who manage scientific risks in ways we see fit. As a scientist, there are critical questions about bioattribution that require testing, and the way to test our hypotheses is to uncover the redacted and withheld documents from Fauci’s NIAID in 2019.
The Biden administration’s dying breath was to pardon Anthony Fauci not for the convictions for crimes he didn’t commit (?) but to avoid investigations that could be a reputational and financial burden for Anthony Fauci. A pardon to preempt an investigation is not a pardon; it is obstruction. The Biden administration’s dying breath is to obstruct our pursuit of truth and reconciliation on the ultimate cause of 1 million Americans’ dying breaths.
To remind everyone what we still need to know, it helps to look through the peephole of what we’ve already found to inspire curiosity about what else we’d find if only the peephole could be widened. Below is one of the precious few emails investigative journalists pursuing FOIAs against NIAID have managed to obtain from the critical period when SARS-CoV-2 is believed to have emerged. The email connects DEFUSE PI’s Peter Daszak (EcoHealth Alliance), Ralph Baric (UNC), Linfa Wang (Duke-NUS), Ben Hu (Wuhan Institute of Virology), Shi ZhengLi (Wuhan Institute of Virology) and others in October 2019. The subject line “NIAID SARS-CoV Call – October 30/31” connects these authors to NIAID.
It is approximately in that time range – October/November 2019 – when SARS-CoV-2 is hypothesized to have entered the human population in Wuhan. When it emerged, SARS-CoV-2 was unique among sarbecoviruses in having a furin cleavage site, as proposed by these authors in their 2019 DEFUSE grant. Of all the places the furin cleavage site could be, the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2 was in the S1/S2 junction of the Spike protein, precisely as proposed by these authors.
In order to insert a furin cleavage site in a SARS-CoV, however, the researchers would’ve needed to build a reverse genetic system, i.e. a DNA copy of the virus. SARS-CoV-2 is unique among coronaviruses in having exactly the fingerprint we would expect from reverse genetic systems. There is an unusual even spacing in the cutting/pasting sites for the enzymes BsaI and BsmBI and an anomalous hot-spot of silent mutations in precisely these sites, exactly as researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have done for other coronavirus reverse genetic systems. The odds of such an extreme synthetic-looking pattern occurring in nature are, conservatively, about 1 in 50 billion.
The virus did not emerge in Bangkok, Hanoi, Bago, Kunming, Guangdong, or any of the myriad other places with similar animal trade networks and greater contact rates between people and sarbecovirus reservoirs. No. The virus emerged in Wuhan, the exact place and time one would expect from DEFUSE.
With all the evidence pointing the hounds towards NIAID, it is essential for global health security that we further investigate the research NIAID funded in 2019. It is imperative for our constitutional democracy, for our ability to self-govern, that we learn the truth. The only way to learn the truth is to investigate NIAID, the agency Fauci led for 38 years, the agency that funded gain-of-function research of concern, the agency named in the October 2019 call by DEFUSE PI’s, the agency that funded this exact group in 2019.
A preemptive pardon prior to the discovery of truth is a fancy name for obstruction of justice. The Biden administration’s dying breath must be challenged, and we must allow Congress and the incoming administration to investigate the possibility that Anthony Fauci’s NIAID-supported research caused the Covid-19 pandemic.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
This article was co-authored with Mary Beth Pfieffer.
In a seismic political shift, Republicans have laid claim to an issue that Democrats left in the gutter—the declining health of Americans. True, it took a Democrat with a famous name to ask why so many people are chronically ill, disabled, and dying younger than in 47 other countries. But the message resonated with the GOP.
We have a proposal in this unfolding milieu. Let’s have a serious, nuanced discussion. Let’s retire labels that have been weaponized against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., nominated for Health and Human Services Secretary, and many people like him.
Start with discarding threadbare words like “conspiracy theory,” “anti-vax,” and the ever-changing “misinformation.”
These linguistic sleights of hand have been deployed—by government, media, and vested interests—to dismiss policy critics and thwart debate. If post-election developments tell us anything, it is that such scorn may no longer work for a population skeptical of government overreach.
Although RFK has been lambasted for months in the press, he just scored a 47 percent approval rating in a CBS poll.
Americans are asking: Is RFK on to something?
Perhaps, as he contends, a 1986 law that all but absolved vaccine manufacturers from liability has spawned an industry driven more by profit than protection.
Maybe Americans agree with RFK that the FDA, which gets 69 percent of its budget from pharmaceutical companies, is potentially compromised. Maybe Big Pharma, similarly, gets a free pass from the television news media that it generously supports. The US and New Zealand, incidentally, are the only nations on earth that allow “direct-to-consumer” TV ads.
Finally, just maybe there’s a straight line from this unhealthy alliance to the growing list of 80 childhood shots, inevitably approved after cursory industry studies with no placebo controls. The Hepatitis B vaccine trial, for one, monitored the effects on newborns for just five days. Babies are given three doses of this questionably necessary product—intended to prevent a disease spread through sex and drug use.
Pointing out such conflicts and flaws earns critics a label: “anti-vaxxer.”
Misinformation?
If RFK is accused of being extreme or misdirected, consider the Covid-19 axioms that Americans were told by their government.
The first: The pandemic started in animals in Wuhan, China. To think otherwise, Wikipedia states, is a “conspiracy theory,” fueled by “misplaced suspicion” and “anti-Chinese racism.”
Not so fast. In a new 520-page report, a Congressional subcommittee linked the outbreak to risky US-supported virus research at a Wuhan lab at the pandemic epicenter. After 25 hearings, the subcommittee found no evidence of “natural origin.”
Is the report a slam dunk? Maybe not. But neither is an outright dismissal of a lab leak.
The same goes for other pandemic dogma, including the utility of (ineffective) masks, (harmful) lockdowns, (arbitrary) six-foot spacing, and, most prominently, vaccines that millions were coerced to take and that harmed some.
Americans were told, wrongly, that two shots would prevent Covid and stop the spread. Natural immunity from previous infection was ignored to maximize vaccine uptake.
Yet there was scant scientific support for vaccinating babies with little risk, which few other countries did; pregnant women (whose deaths soared 40 percent after the rollout), and healthy adolescents, including some who suffered a heart injury called myocarditis. The CDC calls the condition “rare;” but a new study found 223 times more cases in 2021 than the average for all vaccines in the previous 30 years.
Truth Muzzled?
Beyond this, pandemic decrees were not open to question. Millions of social media posts were removed at the behest of the White House. The ranks grew both of well-funded fact-checkers and retractions of countervailing science.
The FDA, meantime, created a popular and false storyline that the Nobel Prize-winning early-treatment drug ivermectin was for horses, not people, and might cause coma and death. Under pressure from a federal court, the FDA removed its infamous webpage, but not before it cleared the way for unapproved vaccines, possible under the law only if no alternative was available.
An emergency situation can spawn official missteps. But they become insidious when dissent is suppressed and truth is molded to fit a narrative.
The government’s failures of transparency and oversight are why we are at this juncture today. RFK—should he overcome powerful opposition—may have the last word.
The conversation he proposes won’t mean the end of vaccines or of respect for science. It will mean accountability for what happened in Covid and reform of a dysfunctional system that made it possible.
Republished from RealClearHealth
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