A new Special Report from Fox News is bringing the heat down on Fauci, raising questions about COVID’s origins, how much he knew, and whether he suppressed conflicting information.
The documents contained within the report were detailed in an episode of Special Report with Bret Baier, which explored the early days of the outbreak and purportedly showed that Fauci, the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), was warned early on that the virus may have originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
In the timeline laid out by Fox News, Fauci was told on January 27, 2020, that the NIAID had been indirectly funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology through EcoHealth Alliance. This is an American scientific non-profit organization that was working with novel coronaviruses much like COVID-19.
On January 31, Dr. Krisitan Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Lab, privately informed Fauci that, after a discussion with other virologists, they determined that COVID-19’s features look possibly engineered and that the “genome is inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
Andersen stressed that the situation needed to be looked at with more scrutiny, at which point Fauci organized an “all-hands-on-deck conference call” with colleagues, where he was purportedly told that dangerous experiments with novel coronaviruses may not have gone through proper review and oversight.
Hours afterwards, Fauci organized a call with dozens of virologists worldwide. Notes from the meeting obtained by the Fox News Special Report reveal that suspicions of the lab leak theory were suppressed due to concern for how the public would react to the news that the Chinese government may have been involved in the virus’ development.
The political concerns were raised by Francis Collins, who led the National Institutes of Health (NIH) at the time. Collins allegedly argued that “science and international harmony” could be harmed by accusations against the Chinese government and distract researchers from their duties.
As Fox News reported:
Fauci and others in the meeting pointed to evidence that the virus originated in a seafood and wild animal market in Wuhan, which was complicated by the market being shut down and scrubbed clean by Chinese authorities.
A consensus was reached in the call that the lab origin should not be mentioned in a paper because it will add “fuel to the conspiracists,” and Collins appeared convinced that natural origin of the virus was “more likely.”
Just four days later, five researchers who were on the call authored preliminary findings abandoning their early private beliefs that the virus was likely the result of a lab leak.
It is unclear what new evidence prompted the reversal of opinion, but private communications show that various drafts were sent to Fauci and Collins for approval.
Per the timeline of events, the first public draft was produced on February 16 but failed to clamp down on the lab leak hypothesis. For several months afterwards, Fauci and Collins allegedly worked to kill speculation and even communicated with each other on the day then-President Donald Trump declined to dismiss it, allegedly stating that it was “something NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy.”
In the email obtained by Fox News, Collins provides a link to an earlier Special Report segment on the lab leak hypothesis, with Fauci allegedly informing Collins to simply ignore the story, calling it a “shiny object that will go away.”
Fauci would continue to push against the lab leak theory in the months thereafter. The Special Report found that two authors of the scientific report Fauci touted were “in close contact with Fauci and awarded millions in grants from his agency.”
As Fox News reported:
A year later, President Biden tasked the U.S. intel community with investigating the origins of COVID, but the report was inconclusive, largely due to China’s unwillingness to assist.
In August, after the lab leak theory gained more scientific traction, Collins told Special Report that he is open to the possibility the virus originated in a lab while dismissing the idea that it was made from scratch by humans.
In his last interview before leaving NIH, Collins stood by the theory that the virus originated in nature.
