Scientists involved in Fauci’s apparent ‘cover-up’ of possible COVID lab origin admit effort was ‘political,’ out of fear of a ‘sh** show from China’

Anthony Fauci told Americans to “follow the science.”

Following the facts, the Republican-led Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has found that Fauci, with the help of then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins and a cadre of willing virologists, “employed fatally flawed science” to “avoid blaming China for the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The subcommittee indicated that to date, it has received over 8,000 pages of documents and over 25 hours of testimony from those involved in the impactful March 2020 study published the journal Nature, “The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2.”

Despite privately discussing the prospect that the natural-origins theory was rubbish, the paper’s four official authors — Kristian Andersen, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward Holmes, and Robert Garry — concluded with dogmatic certainty, “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

The authors did not specify in the publication’s ethics declarations that then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, who oversaw the funding of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, commissioned and edited the paper — which congressional investigators have since determined he did.

This is all the more troubling because Fauci repeatedly cited this paper on the national stage, including once from the White House podium, to bolster his and Collins’ preferred zoonotic origins theory.

On Monday, the subcommittee published additional damning correspondences between the paper’s official authors, noting, “This is one of the single most impactful and influential scientific papers in history … express[ing] conclusions that were not based on sound science nor in fact, but instead on assumptions.”

The subcommittee concluded that this is “the anatomy of a cover-up.”

It appears from the correspondence that those who worked ardently to set the narrative that COVID-19 was not the accidental byproduct of a leak at the Chinese lab where dangerous experiments were conducted on coronaviruses knew their cause was “political” and sought not jeopardize “international harmony.”

The subcommittee highlighted Monday how Rambaut, communicating with his coauthors over a private Slack channel on Feb. 2, 2020, wrote, “Given the sh** show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possible distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural processes.”

In reply to Rambaut’s suggestion that they run a smoke screen for a regime that may be responsible for the manufacture and spread of a pathogen that killed millions worldwide, Andersen said, “Yup, I totally agree that that’s a very reasonable conclusion. Although I hate when politics is injected into science – but its impossible not to, especially given the circumstances. We should be sensitive to that.”

The subcommittee released another email sent by Ron Fouchier — one of the scientists who was on the Feb. 1, 2020, conference call with Fauci and the paper’s future authors — wherein he too expressed concern about the possibility of China facing any fallout over the pandemic.

Fouchier claimed, “An accusation that nCoV-2019 might have been engineered and released into the environment by humans (accidental or intentional) would … do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.”

Collins, also on the conference call, intimated in a Feb. 2, 2020, email that a united front behind the natural-origin theory “is needed, or the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony.”

The NIH under Collins long provided federal funds to EcoHealth Alliance run by fellow lab-leak theory denier British zoologist Peter Daszak. EcoHealth’s subcontractor Ben Hu, whom TheBlaze previously noted was the WIV’s lead on gain-of-function research on SARS-like coronaviruses, happened to be among the three lab researchers first infected with COVID-19 at the Wuhan lab in November 2019.

The subcommittee identified two possible motives behind the apparent efforts to downplay the lab-leak theory: The virologists either wanted to “defend China and play diplomat” or “lessen the likelihood of increased biosafety and laboratory regulations.”

The subcommittee did not raise the possibility that those in Fauci’s orbit might have also wanted to displace the possible culpability that elements of the Western medical administrative state might share with Chinese communists over the deaths of millions.

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