Scientists Admit Covering Up Fauci’s Role in Lab Leak Due to ‘Political’ Pressure

According to congressional investigators, top scientists have given testimony claiming that they assisted Dr. Anthony Fauci in concealing his involvement in the Covid lab leak.

During their appearance before the Republican-led Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, these scientists revealed that they chose to cover for Fauci due to political pressure.

The subcommittee's findings indicate that Fauci, along with then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins and a group of virologists, utilized flawed science to avoid blaming China for the COVID-19 pandemic.

In their investigation, the subcommittee has received over 8,000 pages of documents and more than 25 hours of testimony related to the influential study titled "The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2," published in the prestigious journal Nature. This study played a significant role in dispelling allegations of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

Although privately acknowledging that the natural-origins theory was implausible, the study's official authors—Kristian Andersen, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward Holmes, and Robert Garry—concluded with unwavering certainty that a laboratory-based scenario was not feasible.

Unfortunately, the authors failed to disclose in the publication's ethics declarations that Dr. Anthony Fauci, who supervised coronavirus research funding at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, had commissioned and edited the paper.

Subsequent investigations have confirmed that Fauci did indeed commission and edit the paper, further raising concerns. Additionally, Fauci provided substantial grants to the scientists around the time of the paper's publication.

What makes matters even more troubling is that Fauci repeatedly cited this paper to support his and Collins' favored theory of zoonotic origins. He even referenced it during White House briefings to bolster his claims.

The subcommittee recently released additional correspondences between the official authors of the paper, which further compound the issue. These communications suggest that those involved were aware of the political implications and sought to preserve "international harmony" rather than accusing China of any accidental release of the virus.

One of the authors, Rambaut, expressed the desire to avoid accusing China, stating that they should ascribe the virus's origins to natural processes due to the lack of evidence for a specifically engineered virus. Andersen agreed with this approach, acknowledging the injection of politics into science but considering it unavoidable given the circumstances.

Another email released by the subcommittee came from Ron Fouchier, who was also on the conference call with Fauci and the paper's future authors. Fouchier expressed concern about any potential fallout China might face, asserting that attributing the virus's release to human action would harm both science in general and science in China.

In a separate email, Collins implied that a unified front supporting the natural-origin theory was necessary to prevent conspiracy theories from dominating public discourse, which could harm science and international harmony.

It is worth noting that under Collins' leadership, the National Institutes of Health provided funding to EcoHealth Alliance, an organization led by Peter Daszak, who also denies the lab-leak theory. Ben Hu, a subcontractor for EcoHealth Alliance and the lead researcher at the Wuhan lab for gain-of-function research on SARS-like coronaviruses, was one of the first three lab researchers infected with COVID-19 in November 2019.

The subcommittee identified two possible motives behind the efforts to downplay the lab-leak theory: the virologists either aimed to protect China and maintain diplomatic relations or sought to reduce the likelihood of stricter biosafety and laboratory regulations.

Interestingly, the subcommittee did not explore the possibility that individuals associated with Fauci might have wanted to shift the blame away from the Western medical administrative establishment and its potential shared responsibility with the Chinese communists for the millions of deaths caused by the pandemic.