Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Fauci Emails Bolster Suspicions of Wuhan ‘Lab-Leak’

Once-Trusted Expert Falls From Grace

What a turnaround.

Once widely ridiculed as a racist “conspiracy theory,” the notion that SARS Cov-2 was leaked (accidentally or not) from the Wuhan Institute of Virology has gained increasing traction across the political spectrum in recent weeks.

The publication of groundbreaking scientific papers, and burgeoning evidence of laboratory manipulation all point to the likelihood that the virus was man-made, as opposed to having naturally evolved.

These suspicions have been bolstered by the release of thousands of emails from and to Dr. Anthony Fauci, long-time head of NIH and head of the White House corona task force.

Obtained through a freedom of information act (FOIA) request by news outlets, the emails have been heavily redacted. But a number of significant communications apparently escaped the censor’s pen. Their contents highlight Fauci’s ties to the Wuhan lab and its researchers, suggesting he knew much more about Covid-19’s origins than he let on.

The emails revealed that the once-trusted Dr. Fauci was aware as early as Jan. 2020 that top scientists were concerned that the virus that would go on to kill an estimated 3 million people world-wide was possibly engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

A number of emails reveal that Fauci was worried that U.S. funding he had directed to the Wuhan lab might have been used for controversial “gain-of-function” experiments that could possibly be linked to the escape of the deadly SARS2 virus.

Gain-of-function is an innocent-sounding term that refers to a risky laboratory enterprise in which a virus is made much more lethal and infectious. This activity has been outlawed in the United States but is permitted in China.

Fauci Was Informed Early in the Pandemic

On Jan. 31, 2020, shortly after the SARS-CoV-2 genome had been decoded, immunologist Dr. Kristian Andersen, head of a team of five leading virologists, emailed Dr. Fauci that there were “unusual features” in the virus “that look engineered.”

“On a phylogenetic tree, the virus looks totally normal and the close clustering with bats suggest that bats serve as the reservoir,” Andersen wrote. “The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome, so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.”

Andersen went on to note that he and his team “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”

Leading scientific voices have called the discovery of a “furin cleavage site” on the virus, one of the “unusual features” identified by Anderson, a smoking gun pointing to human manipulation.

Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told Fox News that Fauci did not relay any of the correspondence about the lab leak theory to the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force in early 2020.

“Part of the troubling thing that we’re seeing with these emails that are coming out is, not only do they seem to correspond with what President Trump and  Mike Pompeo said in terms of the origins of the virus,” Meadows said, “but it indicates that Dr. Fauci had knowledge, or at least a suspicion, of things not happening in an evolutionary manner very early on, and he didn’t share that … That’s very troubling and something that we do need to get to the bottom of.”

“Those emails reveal several things that should be of interest to a free press,” wrote The Hill, “and yet, most media are ignoring these revelations, despite huge domestic and worldwide implications.”

Fauci, for his part, has dismissed the many questions and sharp critique sparked by his emails as “all nonsense,” matters “ripe for taking out of context.”

More than a year after he received the first warnings that the virus may have come from the lab, and despite mounting evidence in a Wall Street Journal report indicating three Wuhan lab workers got sick in November 2019 with symptoms consistent with Covid-19, Fauci publicly insisted the virus was not man-made.

“The idea, I think, is quite far-fetched that the Chinese deliberately engineered something so that they could kill themselves, as well as other people. I think that’s a bit far out,” he told CNN, skirting the subject of an accidental leak as if it wasn’t part of the discussion.

Congressional Hearings Force Admissions

Yet, following the release of the emails and the high-profile attention the lab-leak theory was receiving in the media and academia, Fauci finally acknowledged the “lab-made” Covid theory may have some weight.

He also admitted there was no way to guarantee that Chinese researchers at Wuhan were not using generous American grants to perform “gain of function” experiments.

Fauci made these startling admissions after being blasted in congressional hearings by Senator Rand Paul, R-KY and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-GA, after his email correspondence came to light.

“The emails paint a disturbing picture of Dr. Fauci, from the very beginning, worrying that he had been funding gain-of-function research,” Sen. Rand Paul told Fox News. “And he knows it to this day, but hasn’t admitted it.”

Fauci Email: ‘The Typical Mask Is Not Effective’

The emails revealed Fauci as someone who has publicly espoused contradictory and erratic stances, often not aligned with his own privately held views. In one email, he expressed reservations about whether ordinary masks work in preventing corona virus, even as he led the crusade for draconian mask mandates and supported school closings across the nation.

“The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit to keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you,” Fauci wrote to former Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell in February 2020.

In public, as is well-known, he insisted that masks could spell the difference between life and death.

“You’re telling everybody to wear a mask, whether they’ve had an infection or a vaccine,” Sen. Paul said to Fauci in a March congressional hearing. “If we’re not spreading the infection, isn’t it just theater?”

“Here we go again with the theater. Let’s get down to the facts,” Fauci retorted. “Let me just state for the record that masks are not theater. Masks are protective!”

Liberal Media Suppressed ‘Lab-leak’ Arguments

Following Fauci’s cues, media attempts to squelch evidence pointing to a lab leak were successful for over a year.  A Washington Post reporter mocked the lab-leak speculation as a “fringe theory” that “has been repeatedly disputed by experts.”

“New research explores how conservative media misinformation may have intensified the severity of the pandemic,” the Washington Post wrote.

CNN’s headline from May 5, 2020 was perhaps most brazen, declaring Fauci had “crushed” then-President Trump’s theory on the lab leak.

After quoting both men, Chris Cillizza finished mockingly with, “Only one of these two people is a world-renowned infectious disease expert. And it’s not Donald Trump.”

But as leading European media such as BBC and the Guardian began reporting on emerging evidence of Wuhan’s likely role in the pandemic, British intelligence re-assessed the theory and upgraded its probability from “remote” to “feasible,” according to the Sunday Times.

This was followed by the startling May 26 announcement by President Biden that he was ordering a review of the pandemic “lab leak” theory, after he shut down a previous probe into its origins.

As the tide shifted, Fauci once again blandly flip-flopped, telling reporters that he’s “not convinced” the coronavirus developed naturally, despite insisting this was the case for over a year.

“No, actually,” Fauci, said. “I am not convinced about that, I think we should continue to investigate what went on in China until we find out to the best of our ability what happened.”

On the heels of this reversal came Fauci’s email dump, when more than 3,200 of his emails from January to June 2020 came to light, exposing his propensity for talking out of both sides of his mouth and withholding vital information about the possible origins of SARS Cov-2.

GOP Calls for Fauci’s Firing

These failures have eroded the man’s credibility, fueling growing calls from GOP leaders for his resignation or firing.

Congressional Republicans have also launched an effort to get to the bottom of the origin of Covid-19, including what Fauci knew about it and when, as well as whether U.S. taxpayer dollars funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute.

Records show that from 2014-19, the National Institutes of Health under Fauci’s direction sent $3.4 million to the Wuhan Lab through the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance. Was any of that money used for gain-of-function experiments?

In a revealing April 2020 email, EcoHealth Alliance chief Peter Daszak effusively thanked Fauci for shielding EcoHealth from a possible scandal by “publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin. Your comments are brave, and coming from your trusted voice, will help dispel the myths being spun around the virus’ origins.”

“Big Tech was censoring posts about the Wuhan lab leak. The media was calling people who talked about the Wuhan lab leak conspiracy theorists,” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La. tweeted. “All while Fauci himself was emailing about Covid-19 possibly leaking from the Wuhan lab. Let that sink in.”

Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, who introduced a bill last month, called the Fauci Incompetence Requires Early Dismissal (FIRED) Act, tweeted that it was “time for Americans to hear from other voices. Dr. Fauci has lost credibility.”

“Fauci lost my trust long before this,” commented Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas. “Never contextualizing his statements, never giving honest risk assessments, always treating us like we are too stupid to do anything but lockdown and wear masks forever. The emails show it was worse than we thought.”

SCRAMBLING TO GET ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY

In the face of mounting pressure, mainstream media in the United States including elite liberal voices, have quietly reversed course on the notion that the virus had been manipulated in the Wuhan Institute.

Liberal outlets, including New York Times, CNN and NPR, have gone from pouring scorn on the idea to taking it seriously, using the fig leaf of new information about Wuhan lab workers being infected in the fall of 2019 with a Covid-like illness.

“Fact checks” have now been updated with editor’s notes about why the theory is no longer “debunked.”

ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl noted that reporters who brushed aside statements by former President Trump and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that linked the virus’s origins to Wuhan “now have egg on their faces.”

Even if Trump did make the statement, it might turn out to be the truth,” he said.

New York Times reporter David Leonhardt also conceded that many journalists dismissed the lab-leak theory solely because Cotton, a longtime critic of China, proposed it.

“I think people made this mistake. I think a lot of people on the political left and a lot of people in the media made the mistake. They said, ‘wow if Tom Cotton is saying something, it can’t be true.’ Or they assumed that. And that’s not right,” he said on CNN.

Reporters Explain Why They Couldn’t Do Their Job

Some reporters excused their dropping the ball on a matter of burning concern to Americans by blaming the Trump administration. They said Trump’s claims “were often accompanied by anti-Chinese rhetoric,” so they automatically tuned him out, explained Washington Post reporter Glen Kessler.

As if juvenile, unprofessional behavior of this sort were actually justified.

The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin sounded a rare note of journalistic integrity for the paper when he blasted reporters for their sudden about-face. The facts on the ground had not changed out of the blue, he said, accusing journalists of bias, “general incompetence” and even “TDS,” short for Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson ascribed the media blackout about Wuhan’s possible culpability to the desire to protect government elites “who were worried that their funding of experiments at the Wuhan Institute would be exposed. They had used American tax dollars to fund reckless experiments in China that in the end likely created Covid-19,” Carlson said.

“If that fact were to become public, it would be over. They would be shamed, and ridiculed – possibly even indicted. Their professional lives would be done.

Carlson said their solution was to impose “medical martial law” to dampen questioning and to collude on a cover-up.”

The Deeper Scandal

“If it turns out that the Covid pandemic was caused by a leak from a lab in Wuhan, China, it will rank among the greatest scientific scandals in history,” wrote a New York Times op-ed. “[This] dangerous research… carried out in a poorly safeguarded facility, thuggishly covered up by a regime more interested in propaganda than human life, was catastrophic for the entire world.

“But this possible scandal, which is as yet unproved, obscures an actual scandal,” the writer said, emphasizing the “long refusal by too many media gatekeepers to take the lab-leak theory seriously.”

“Rewind the tape to February of last year,” the article urged, “when people such as Senator Tom Cotton began pointing to a disturbing fact: the odd coincidence of a pandemic originating in the same city where a Chinese lab was conducting high-end experiments on bat viruses.

“And the fact that the Chinese government lied and stonewalled its way through the crisis.”

The silence of the media when these issues cried out for investigation and exposure is an enduring scandal, the article pointed out.

Unusual for the New York Times, the op-ed went on to bash those who put their faith in the World Health Organization, “which has served as a mouthpiece for Chinese regime propaganda.”

A joint WHO-China mission had determined in March that the lab leak theory was “extremely unlikely.” Critics, however, have said the previous investigation conducted by the World Health Organization lacked transparency.

“The WHO mission was a joke…it was filled with a bunch of people who had no relevant expertise…they didn’t get to interview the researchers and the staff in the lab…they didn’t get the records,” stated Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. “They basically sat in a conference room and got some coffee and doughnuts and were fed a PowerPoint set of lies by Chinese communist apparatchiks.”

During a recent interview, Cotton noted that China’s aggression and refusal to cooperate with the upcoming investigation suggests they have something to hide.

“They are not only incompetent and negligent in this laboratory if the virus came from the lab, but malevolent; by showing complete disregard for the lives of their own subjects in addition to lives around the world,” he said.

Speaking to Fox News, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he was glad the new administration was coming around to the lab leak theory.

“That virology lab [in Wuhan] is still up and running. It’s still probably conducting the same kinds of research it was conducting that may have well led to this virus escaping from that laboratory. Only the Chinese Communist Party knows the answer, the world deserves the answers and they have to tell us.”

 

*****

‘GAIN-OF-FUNCTION IS WORTH THE RISK’ –ANTHONY FAUCI

In a newly resurfaced paper from 2012, Dr. Anthony Fauci argued that the benefits of gain-of-function research are worth the increased risk of a potential pandemic-causing lab accident.

The Weekend Australian unearthed a paper Fauci wrote for the American Society for Microbiology in October 2012, in which he argued in support of gain-of-function research. Such research involves making viruses more infectious and/or deadly and is illegal in the United States.

Despite the risks involved, Fauci called gain-of-function experiments “important work” in his 2012 paper:

“In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic? Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario – however remote – should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision?

“Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks.”

In view of these chilling words, no one should be surprised at the choices Fauci has reportedly made regarding gain-of-function experiments that seem likely to have led to his above-mentioned pandemic-scenario playing out in real time.

How tragic that a man espousing a morally perverse philosophy at odds with his country should wield such sweeping authority over the lives of millions.

*****

BOMBSHELL REPORT SAYS SARS COV-2 ‘HAS NO NATURAL ANCESTOR’

Nearly a year and a half since Covid-19 was detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the question of how the virus first emerged remains a mystery.

As calls to trace the origin of the virus grow around the world, a new study conducted by British Prof. Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sorensen, claims that the virus was created in a lab and has “no credible natural ancestor.”

Dalgleish is a London oncology professor known for breakthrough work on a vaccine for HIV. Sorensen is a virologist and chair of the pharmaceutical company Immunor, which developed a coronavirus vaccine candidate called Biovacc-19.

The UK’s Daily Mail cited the new study that asserts the virus was created by Chinese scientists working on a “gain of function” project in the Wuhan lab. The research, according to the report, posits that scientists took a natural coronavirus “backbone” found in Chinese cave bats and spliced onto it a “new spike,” turning it into the deadly Covid-19.

The study claims that it found “unique fingerprints” in Covid-19 samples, which the authors say could have only arisen by human manipulation in a lab. The authors pieced together how Chinese scientists, some working with American universities, allegedly built the tools to create the novel coronavirus.

“The study alleged ‘deliberate destruction, concealment or contamination of data’ at Chinese labs and notes the silencing and disappearance of scientists in China who spoke out about the activities,” said news agency ANI.

The 22-page paper was published in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery. The authors wrote they have primary evidence “of retro-engineering in China” since last year, but were ignored by academics and major medical journals.

Sorensen said that four amino acids on the spike had a positive charge, which causes the virus to tightly cling to the negatively charged parts of a human, making the virus more infectious.

“The laws of physics mean that you cannot have four positively charged amino acids in a row. The only way you can get this is if you artificially manufacture it,” Dalgleish told DailyMail.com.

“The implication of our historical reconstruction, we posit now beyond reasonable doubt, of the purposively manipulated virus SARS-Cov-2, makes it imperative to reconsider what types of gain–of-function experiments it is morally acceptable to undertake,” they wrote.

The study claims that Chinese scientists “retro-engineered” the virus, in order to make it look like it evolved naturally.

“We think that there have been retro-engineered viruses created. They’ve changed the virus, then tried to make out it was in a sequence from years ago,” Dalgleish told Daily Mail.

“We have seen lab leaks and we know they’re happening. We also know from the reports we’ve seen, that coronavirus is worked on in BioSafety Level 2 or 3 labs,” he said. “If they do gain-of-function in such [low security] labs, what do you expect?”

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