Just before leaving office, US President Joe Biden pardoned Anthony Fauci. However, he is currently facing intense scrutiny. His diaries and emails, which I shall call the Fauci papers, have been released and they tell a grim story about how the advisor for seven consecutive presidents systematically deceived the public during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Two weeks ago, US biochemist Jason Locasale, previous advisor for the National Cancer Institute, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and biotech firms, wrote an interesting article about Fauci, institutional corruption, and the collapse of scientific authority that I shall summarise, adding my own comments.
Fauci’s fall from grace is unmistakable but long after his dishonesty was documented, universities and medical institutions continue to celebrate and reward him as a heroic public servant with unmatched scientific authority, for reasons of self-protection.
The institutions did not produce and empower a single Fauci. They created thousands, but the pandemic spotlight made one of them famous and highly visible.
The Fauci papers offer an unusually revealing account of how he understood his role during the pandemic. They show a bureaucrat celebrity preoccupied with attention, status, prominent relationships, TV appearances, reputation, and his own place in history. His interest in how he was portrayed, whom he met, who praised him, and how his public image was developing consumes far more attention than any serious engagement with the origin of Covid-19, the vaccines, face masks, and the dire consequences of the lockdowns.
The deadly virus was made in China
In early 2020, Fauci and those around him realised that the pandemic might very well have been due to a lab leak of a virus manufactured in Wuhan with financial support from the NIH. This worried them. However, Fauci was secretly involved with the publication of the March 2020 paper in Nature Medicine, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” by Kristian Andersen and colleagues that claimed the virus had a natural origin.
The authors wrote that, “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” Their so-called analyses didn’t show anything; it was just rhetoric, and the arguments were logically flawed. The paper had an enormous influence on shaping public opinion and was viewed about 6 million times.
When I investigated back then what social media’s so-called fact-checkers said about the origin of the virus, I quickly found a fact check that called it false that someone had said the virus had been manipulated.
When one of my colleagues in 2021 posted a message about one of the best articles ever written about the origin of the pandemic, Facebook deleted it. The justification for this was a 4184-word fact check by Health Feedback. It was outdated by one year and they wrote that Kristian Andersen and colleagues had established that SARS-CoV-2 is of natural origin. They used superlatives to further their case, e.g. 27 people that signed a Lancet letter a month before the Andersen paper came out were called eminent scientists.
The Lancet letter was also deplorable and it also derailed the debate totally about the origin of Covid-19. Peter Daszak, the key culprit in the gain-of-function research that created the deadly virus, organised and drafted the letter. He urged colleagues involved in this research not to sign it: “We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice.”
The worst part of Daszak’s letter was this:
”The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin … Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus.”
There was no sharing of data. China hid everything that could incriminate them as being responsible for the pandemic through reckless experimenting with corona viruses and disregarding the safety instructions in the lab.
After 1.5 years with Daszak’s bullying, lies, and arrogance, people had finally had enough. The Paris Group of scientists called for his removal in a letter to the NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services because he had “withheld critical information and misled public opinion by expressing falsehoods.” They cited a tweet where Daszak claimed the Chinese labs he worked with had never kept live bats, even though by the Wuhan scientists’ own accounts, live bats were present at the facility since at least 2009.
The disinformation and censorship, which I also experienced, was second to none. It was very harmful for science and for public trust in science and cost millions of lives.
The Andersen paper was so scientifically dishonest that thousands of researchers called for its retraction, but Dr. Joao Montiero, the chief editor of Nature Medicine, didn’t even respond to the requests. He tweeted: “Let’s put conspiracy theories about the origin of #SARSCoV2 to rest and help to stop spread of misinformation - great work from @K_G_Andersen #covid19.”
The scandal is of epic proportions and Beijing had many useful idiots. In November 2021, Science Magazine portrayed Daszak as a hero who was subjected to a witch hunt:
The almost 5,000-word long laudatory article was celebrated by Science’s chief editor Holden Thorp in a tweet (no longer available): “This is riveting piece and also an excellent summary of the scientific issues. Going to make the lab leak crowd pretty jumpy.”
This is not the type of remark you expect from the editor of one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals. Science published this when the death toll was about 6 million and depicted Daszak as a scientist who works on preventing pandemics when it is extremely likely that he and the “bat lady,” Shi Shi Zhengli in Wuhan, created one, which he had covered up for during two years.
To dismiss plausible evidence about a lab leak without answering it is abhorrent, and, like Daszak, other dishonest scientists such as Andersen and Fauci called it a “conspiracy theory” when scientists disagreed with them about the origin of the virus. This was unheard of in science before 2020, and it has nothing to do with science but everything to do with politics and escaping culpability.
Andersen and Fauci lied when they testified in Congress and at press briefings in the White House. Fauci lied under oath, which is a felony, when declaring to Congress that the NIH had not funded gain-of-function research.
The Fauci papers reveal that he accepted or discarded information according to whether it advanced the preferred narrative, protected institutional authority, or preserved reputation. Contrary evidence was not evaluated neutrally but was treated as a political and professional threat. Fauci approached scientific disagreement more like a party in an adversarial legal proceeding than a scientist. Dissenting scientists became opponents to defeat.
It was too painful for the culprits to admit that their Frankenstein research in Wuhan created a monster. I have estimated that, adding the collateral deaths caused by the lockdowns, the Chinese virus killed 26 million people. The US-Chinese cover up is the biggest cover up in medical history and it’s also the worst. A molecular biologist from Harvard said that “It’s as if these scientists proposed putting horns on horses, but when a unicorn shows up in their city a year later, they write a paper describing every part of it except its horn.” The horn is the furin cleavage site, which the experimenters inserted to make harmless viruses deadly and transmissible to humans.
The research is called gain-of-function but should be called gain-of-lethality experiments. In 2023, the Sunday Times documented that the Chinese military was heavily involved with the research.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.