The Poster Boy of "Covid Science" Pleads the Fifth

If there was an international poster boy for official Covid “Science,” surely it was Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the Covid years. He was one of the most sought-out and influential voices of “Science” on national and international media, a go-to authority on everything from the efficacy of masking to the safety of vaccines. Those who questioned his authority and good faith were dismissed as delusional, paranoid, or irresponsible. However, the cumulative evidence, including email records and more recently, revelations from Fauci’s own diary, do not paint Fauci in a flattering light.

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For example, according to diary entries released by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Fauci privately wrote (on January 26, 2020) that "now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier,” weeks before he began reassuring the public that a natural spillover at a Wuhan wet market was the likely origin.

A little over a week later, following a February 1, 2020 conference call with a dozen leading virologists and evolutionary biologists convened to discuss whether the virus looked engineered, his own notes record that “there was not total agreement” among the group — of the eleven scientists on the call, only two were convinced the virus had emerged naturally.

While the lines reported from Fauci’s diary do not state categorically that he personally accepted the lab-leak theory, they do show he was aware that opinion was divided on the matter within the scientific community, and that the natural origins thesis was not something “the science” supported in any definitive way.

Indeed, even one of the authors of a paper highly critical of the lab origins theory (“The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2,”), Kristian Andersen, wrote in an email to Fauci dated 31 January 2020, “Eddie, Bob, Mike and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”

Yet a few days after receiving this email, Fauci told the public in a podcast that lab-leak talk was in “the realm of conspiracy theories without any scientific basis.” It would take him until 2024, under oath, to concede that the lab-leak hypothesis was not “inherently” a conspiracy theory after all.

The latest evidence of Fauci’s wilful misrepresentation of the “settled” science on a matter of grave public interest, the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, may scandalise those who looked up to Fauci as a valiant defender of “Science” but it will not be particularly shocking to those who have already observed Fauci’s bizarre and scientifically arbitrary flip-flopping on pandemic measures like masking and lockdowns.

You judge a man’s character by his actions, not just by his credentials or reputation. An individual might be the most adulated “voice of science” on the planet, but that means nothing if his actions betray the trust of the public.

Fauci, while he was prolific in his public health tips, from masking to vaccination, was himself heading up an agency - the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases - that sponsored bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, research some believe contributed to the eventual outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

For the purposes of proving Fauci acted in bad faith during the pandemic, it doesn’t actually matter whether or not a leak from Wuhan caused the Covid outbreak, or whether NIAID-funded research played a contributory role in such an outbreak. All that matters is that Fauci went out of his way to discredit the lab-leak hypothesis, knowing full well that it could not be ruled out from a scientific perspective, and knowing that his connections with Wuhan could potentially inflict substantial reputational damage on him personally and institutionally, if the lab origins thesis gained traction.

Last Wednesday, the incriminating evidence of his diary entries and emails was presented to him at a Senate hearing before the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, evidence suggesting he used his very substantial authority to mislead the public and shield himself from scrutiny for his involvement with the Wuhan lab. Instead of defending his actions, he invoked the Fifth Amendment (the “right to remain silent”) ad nauseam. He painted himself as the victim of a hit job, describing the release of his diary as an attempt to embarrass and intimidate him.

But he is not the victim here. The victims are ordinary citizens, who were compelled, on his recommendation, to accept an experimental vaccination as a precondition for remaining employed; who believed, on his authority, that cheap masks would protect them from an airborne virus; who believed, on his authority, that shuttering schools and businesses across the country would protect people’s health and well-being; and who accepted, on his authority, that those advocating the lab origins of Covid on reasonable scientific grounds had gone off the deep end.

God knows, if I were in his position, and was being pushed to come clean, for once and for all, about my self-serving, reckless and deceitful behaviour, I might well run scared and plead the Fifth too.

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