Why did Tony Fauci say under oath he barely knew top coronavirus scientist Ralph Baric – when in fact Fauci hosted a daylong 2013 meeting where Baric laid out his plans for risky research?
Guest Post by Alex Berenson
Peter Daszak – another scientist connected to China whom Fauci claimed under oath not to remember – was also at the 2013 meeting. Poor Tony, stuck with such a severe case of the “I don’t recalls.”
The evidence has been hiding in plain sight for years.
On June 24, 2013, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci invited a small group of top coronavirus researchers to an all-day brainstorming session at a conference center at the National Institutes of Health.
The subject was nominally an outbreak of a new illness called MERS, or Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, a lung disease caused by a novel coronavirus. At the time, about 70 people had contracted the virus. Almost 40 had died, an eye-popping fatality rate, making MERS more lethal than smallpox.
Despite its lethality, MERS appeared to be a minor health threat, because it did not spread rapidly or easily. So the scientists – and one scientist in particular, Dr. Ralph S. Baric, the world’s top expert on coronaviruses – spent the day talking about threats from not just MERS and its potential evolution, but novel coronaviruses generally.
Fortunately, the NIH has preserved a complete video record of the conference, which lasted almost six hours (not including a lunch break). It is available here.
And, on many different levels, from beginning to end, it is astonishing.
The video directly refutes Fauci’s denial under oath of knowing Baric and Peter Daszak, the British zoologist who along with Baric was a key link between the American government and the Chinese virologists in Wuhan whose work likely caused the SARS-Cov-2 epidemic.
In a deposition in 2022, Fauci said of Baric, a North Carolina microbiologist who has studied coronaviruses for decades, “I doubt if I’ve ever met him.” He characterized Daszak as not even an “acquaintance.”
Yet Daszak and other officials in his group EcoHealth Alliance are present at the meeting, which Fauci opened with a speech. Nine months later, Fauci would again cross paths with Daszak, when Fauci spoke on a panel in Washington about emerging infectious diseases, part of a two-day conference that Daszak had moderated and helped create.
But as the world’s preeminent coronavirus researcher, Baric was even more important to Fauci. As he opened the June 2013 meeting, Fauci spoke openly of wanting to be sure he constantly had new viral threats that would ensure his research budget would continue to grow.
Nothing more perfectly illustrated the potential threat of emerging infectious disease than the coronavirus – a seemingly minor pathogen that suddenly had erupted into a lethal outbreak, the second in a decade.
“Now we have a new one [disease] to put on the map for our friends [in Congress] who support us in these rather constrained times,” Fauci said in his opening address. He wasn’t joking or speaking metaphorically – he showed the scientists the actual map.
—
—
After his talk, Fauci took a seat alone in the front row to listen to the conference’s first invited speaker explain the growing threat of coronaviruses and how scientists and the NIH could work to fight them.
That speaker?
None other than Baric, who went on to dominate the day’s discussion. Not only did he give the first presentation, he returned after lunch to give another. He took over questioning repeatedly. One of the other scientists referred to him as an “eminence grise.” Another joked the NIH would be cutting Baric a check for a million dollars, no strings attached.
No wonder that seven years later, in February 2020, as Covid exploded out of China, Fauci would spend his extremely valuable time bring Baric into his offices for another private meeting to discuss the new epidemic – and its possible origins. Under oath, Fauci claimed not to remember anything about that meeting either, though it had taken place barely two years before.
—
(From page 32 of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci’s deposition in Missouri v Biden, given under oath on Nov. 23, 2022.)
—
So just why would Fauci go so far out of his way to deny knowing Baric? Why make such an implausible claim?
The rest of the video from June 24, 2013 offers as good an explanation as any, showing just how far Baric was willing go in trying to bring coronaviruses to heel – even if doing so raised the risk of a lab-created epidemic far deadlier than one that any natural coronavirus had ever caused.
