Should we expect a new twist in the “Fauci emails” affair and the controversy over the origin of SARS-CoV-2? New evidence overwhelms Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIH), a research center of the US Department of Health. A Republican House Committee in Congress claims to have discovered a new email, suggesting that Dr. Fauci has “pushed” the writing of a major article on the origin of SARS-CoV-2 in order to “disprove the theory” that the virus leaked from a laboratory.
More than 3 200 pages d’emails, which implicate Anthony Fauci since January 31, 2020, were revealed in June 2021 by several American media, including the Washington Post et Buzzfeed News. The exchanges raised several issues related to the pandemic, such as wearing a mask, the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine or above all, the origin of Sars-CoV-2.
The documents, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) which allows access to administrative documents, revealed the interest of scientists and the director of the NIH in the hypothesis of a leak of Sars- CoV-2 from a lab.
Anthony Fauci has been auditioned several times in the Senate about official anti-Covid policy after his revelations, including on the origins of the virus. One of the hearings, in January 2022, was also marked by a heated exchange between the US government adviser and Republican Senator Rand Paul.
The latter accused Fauci of wanting “obfuscate the truth” about the origins of the coronavirus and the funding, by another government agency, via l’ONG EcoHealth Alliancework of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
“Distorted”, the data on the pangolin “not convincing”
The NIH director claimed his institution had not funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan. His repeated assertions obviously did not convince the Republican representatives, who returned to the charge in January 2022 with new elements.
They were nine other emails, related to Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NAID), tropical medicine researcher Jeremy Farrar and geneticist Francis Collins.
????BREAKING????
We’ve released never before seen emails showing Dr. Fauci may have concealed information about #COVID19 originating from the Wuhan lab & intentionally downplayed the lab leak theory. @RepJamesComer & @Jim_Jordan want Fauci under oath. Time for answers. 1/2???? pic.twitter.com/p8aIBJ3nom
— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) January 11, 2022
Ces emails demonstrated that scientists have seriously raised the possibility that the virus has been genetically manipulated in a laboratory. In emails dating back to early February 2020, exchanged shortly after a videoconference with Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, researchers even estimated the chances that the virus had been manipulated at “40%” (editor’s note : Page 5).
Yet several of these researchers, whose names appear in the emails, will co-sign on March 2020 an article, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2”published in Nature Medicine and according to which is “unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulations”.
Another survey”on the origins of COVID-19 and federal government funding of gain-of-function research” was launched by Republican Brad Wenstrup, representing Ohio, at the mid-February 2023. “Three facts have already come to light: that COVID-19 likely originated from the Wuhan lab and that the Chinese Communist Party covered it up, US taxpayers’ money was funneled to the Wuhan lab for gain of office (. ..) and Dr. Fauci was aware of this information at the beginning of the pandemic”, lit-on.
The first results of this investigation were not long in coming. In note published Sunday, March 05, 2023the parliamentary committee announces new evidence about the article in question, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”.
According to this document, three days after the videoconference of February 01, 2020, “four of its participants wrote the article and sent a draft to Fauci and Collins”. More than two months later, the latter sent an email to Dr. Fauci asking if the NIH could “to dismiss” the hypothesis of a laboratory leak.
In August 2021, the Scripps Research Institute told members of Congress that Dr. Andersen, one of the authors of this article, “has ‘objectively’ investigated the origins of COVID and that Dr. Anthony Fauci has not attempted to influence his work”.
Asked in a interview of The New York Times on his about-face on the origin of the coronavirus, Professor Kristian Andersen claimed to have examined with his peers “data from coronaviruses found in other species, such as bats and pangolins, which demonstrated that features that at first seemed unique to SARS-CoV-2 were present in other related viruses.”
However, according to the Republican parliamentary commission (pages 4-5), “the paper was peer-reviewed with Nature Medicine” and “Andersen did not find the pangolin data compelling (…) privately, Dr Andersen did not believe the data on the pangolin were refuting a lab leak theory, although he said so publicly”.
“We may never know”
A change of mind that could only be explained, according to the note, by an “intervention”, that of Fauci, who “pushed” to write an article “refuting” laboratory leak theory. “The authors of this article have skewed the available data to achieve this goal”, lit-on.
On February 26, the American business daily The Wall Street Journal announced that the United States Department of Energy now considers the laboratory leak as the origin of Covid-19 “most likely”.
Information to which Anthony Fauci did not fail to reactcamped on its positions. “I don’t see any data on a lab leak. That’s not to say it couldn’t have happened… We all need to keep an open mind to all the possibilities… we we may never know the origin of the pandemic”, he told the Boston Globe.
The parliamentary committee headed by Brad Wenstrup will hold its first hearing on the issue this Wednesday, March 08.