Fauci’s shadowy COVID power plays made America far less safe
From the very start of the pandemic, Anthony Fauci was putting his own agenda ahead of the public interest, using his power behind the scenes to quash questions about COVID’s origins. It was about protecting him, not the nation.
The good doctor, emails uncovered by the House Oversight Committee have revealed, ordered up a paper in February 2020 to end all argument over whether the virus had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Yet in April Fauci went before the American people and cited that paper to forward his claim that the virus came from nature, as if he had nothing to do with the work.
Worse, the ugly order went out after Fauci, National Institutes of Health head Francis Collins and others engaged in a conversation with four scientists who themselves had raised concerns over signs pointing to lab origins of the pandemic.
The whole affair looks like desperate butt-covering. Fauci himself had managed to loosen Obama-era restrictions on gain-of-function research, which engineers viruses to attack humans in the name of learning how to counter them. He oversaw grants via the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance that funded such research at the Wuhan lab.
After that chat, those four scientists did a 180 in their beliefs and produced the requested paper. Two, Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry, ran projects that got millions in grant money from 2020 to 2022 from the NIH purse whose strings Fauci significantly controlled.
Was a promise of pay for compliance understood? Remember, Fauci had draft approval authority over that paper; Andersen said he had “prompted” it.
Nor were these Fauci’s only shady power moves. He aligned with Big Tech — notably Mark Zuckerberg — early in the pandemic to quash any dissident public voices on the lab-leak theory. These included a 2020 Post column by Steven Mosher, which Facebook throttled as disinfo.
Meanwhile, EcoHealth chief Peter Daszak was engaged in his own long campaign to quash lab-leak discussion, engineering a near-blackout on the issue in science journals and also playing a key role in the World Health Organization “investigation” that rejected the idea. And Fauci’s NIH in turn showered EcoHealth with more grants than ever.
Fauci now claims to have “an open mind” on the lab-leak theory, after spending years doing his best to quash it. Count that as yet more butt-covering.
He has plenty else to answer for, such as his private connivance with Collins to attack the Great Barrington Declaration, a criticism by independent-minded scientists of the disastrous COVID policy responses (like lockdowns) Fauci advocated for.
But Fauci’s use of his power to protect himself stands out as the very opposite of public service. The House probe is beyond necessary to ensure such abuses are never repeated.
