Lab wars: Inside one Democrat’s 20-year crusade to save the world from Anthony Fauci — Part 1: 2001-2014
The evidence continues to mount that the most likely source of the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was not a wet market as was originally claimed. The evidence likewise continues to mount that the research involved in the leak was likely gain-of-function research that was funded, at least in part, with our own tax dollars.
While much of the world has only recently woken up to this reality, one man, Dr. Richard Ebright, has been warning us for 20 years that this day was coming.
For 20 years, his warnings have largely been ignored, primarily thanks to Dr. Anthony Fauci.
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To most Americans, even those who follow the news closely, Fauci was helicoptered into their consciousness out of total obscurity in early 2020, when he became the public face of the government’s pandemic response. In many ways, though, Fauci could have been yanked out of central casting to play the role of television family doctor for the whole country — an image he carefully cultivated to project an air of competence and confidence to a shaken nation.
What most people did not know, though, was that for years, Fauci had been dogged by a very different sort of doctor — a researcher from Rutgers University who shunned the camera and preferred to keep his opinions in print. A man who made it clear with his appearance and his mannerisms that he never wanted to be an activist. A registered Democrat who supported Biden to the point of putting a Biden sign in his front yard, Ebright had always been convinced of one simple thing that he viewed to be above the petty fray of partisan politics: the government should not be spending our tax dollars to fund dangerous research on making viruses more deadly.
For years, Ebright and Fauci carried out a silent war, waged in print, visible mostly only to members of the small community of research scientists who conduct serious chemical and biological research. Over and over again the same refrain played out: Ebright warned the public that this research was making the public less safe, and Fauci insisted it was making the public more safe.
As we know now, Ebright was almost certainly right. However, it has taken four years — thanks to the concerted efforts of Fauci and his team — for the public to slowly come around to that realization.
But to understand where we are, it is first necessary to understand how we got here.
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Countless ink, both real and digital, has been spent examining Fauci’s every move taken since those fateful early days in 2020. Relatively little has been spent examining Fauci’s actions prior to 2020.
“[Dick Cheney] found one agency and one person willing to take that role… he found Anthony Fauci.”
Those actions, which are still largely shrouded in obscurity, may turn out to have been far more consequential than anything Fauci has done since he first appeared at the infamous press conference with former President Trump. You see, for the last two decades, Fauci has been by far the most important defender of what might be fairly called a bioweapons research program that the public now knows — albeit imperfectly — as “gain-of-function” research.
The U.S. government started the ball rolling on this dangerous research in the waning days of 2001. As you may recall, the al-Qaeda attacks of 9/11 were followed almost immediately by a series of high-profile anthrax attacks, in which prominent individuals in the U.S. were mailed envelopes with suspicious white powder that later tested positive for anthrax.
The Bush administration, led by then-Vice President Dick Cheney, became convinced that the government’s readiness to face bioweapons threats was weak and responded by prevailing upon Congress to pass a massive funding increase to research on both anthrax and new, “designer” viruses that did not yet exist but might potentially be created by enemies of the United States.
“Cheney, even before the anthrax mailings, felt that the U.S. biodefense posture was weak and was convinced that it could only be improved by carrying out an aggressive and assertive program of biodefense research that would include components that walked right up to the red line and, arguably, crossed the red line set by the biological weapons convention,” Ebright told Blaze News.
According to Ebright, Cheney became deeply frustrated that the Department of Defense maintained a biological weapons convention compliance office that reviewed every research proposal with bioweapons agencies by the Department of Defense. This biological weapons compliance office repeatedly thwarted dangerous research projects that Cheney wanted to see come to fruition.
And so, Cheney set out in 2003 to find an agency that would not have a biological weapons conventions compliance office that could take the lead and carry out these dangerous and legally questionable projects.
“He found one agency and one person willing to take that role, and the agency was the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases… and he found Anthony Fauci. And the resources that had been part of the Department of Defense moved almost in toto to NIAID, and the authority for all U.S. biodefense research went to the new biodefense research czar, Anthony Fauci, who then received a very large salary increase, making him the highest-compensated government employee,” Ebright said.
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Fauci was an enthusiastic and frequent champion of the program under his supervision. In NIH press releases dating back to its inception, Fauci regularly asked Congress for more money for the program and defended diverting millions of dollars from other programs.
Not all scientists, however, were convinced. As even the NIH concedes, the decision to divert money from other programs infuriated many in the scientific community — not only because the money was needed elsewhere but also because the money was being hastily thrown at many scientists who had little or no experience researching priority pathogens.
Ebright, for his part, raised yet another issue. “This drove a massive increase in the number of institutions and individuals with access to bioweapons agents,” Ebright told Blaze News. “This increased, rather than decreased, the risk of release of those agents.”
Ebright told everyone who would listen that it was a mistake to continue expanding funding that had the effect of increasing the number of people who handled dangerous pathogens — a refrain that made him unpopular both with the Bush administration and within the halls of NIAID.
Unfortunately, it would not be the last time that Ebright’s warnings in that 2004 article would prove to be prophetic.
In fact, Ebright was such a persistent antagonist to the Bush administration’s bioresearch program that the New York Times ran a positive profile on him in 2004 titled, “I BEG TO DIFFER: In a Lonely Stand, a Scientist Takes On National Security Dogma.” In the piece, Ebright specifically noted that the substantial majority of persons who had conducted germ attacks in recent history were not terrorists but were rather scientists who had gained access to the pathogens as part of their work.
Ebright’s concern would be wholly vindicated when the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks was discovered to be a biodefense researcher at Fort Detrick who had authorized access to the anthrax samples.
Unfortunately, it would not be the last time that Ebright’s warnings in that 2004 article would prove to be prophetic. Among other objections raised by Ebright to the proliferation of laboratories doing research on dangerous pathogens, Ebright specifically warned that laboratories “could leak” and that one day a dangerous pathogen could accidentally escape from one of these labs and cause havoc.
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Fauci and the NIH, meanwhile, were not listening to Ebright or anyone else’s objections. The scientific community as a whole, however, was growing sufficiently concerned that the National Academy of Sciences established a committee to review research that was being done on so-called “dual use” pathogens that had potential civilian use but also potential bioweapon use.
The committee issued a report in 2004 that identified seven ongoing studies of concern and recommended stringent federal oversight of these projects. These experiments today would be called “gain-of-function” research but were then known as “dual use” research of concern.
Fauci claimed that the research was necessary to improve the public health community’s response to the spread of the H5N1 avian flu in Asia.
The stringent federal oversight never materialized, but Ebright and fellow skeptics finally began to gain traction both with the public and with the government when Fauci’s NIAID and the CDC finally let their hubris get the better of them and bragged to the world that they had done something that imperiled the future of mankind.
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In October 2005, scientists from the CDC and NIAID proudly announced that they had reconstituted the H1N1 influenza virus, the same flu that was estimated to have killed 1% of the world’s population in 1918. Adjusted to today’s population, the death figures might well have topped 80 million.
Worse, because H1N1 has not been circulating in decades, the current world population has absolutely no immunity to this deadly strain of flu, meaning that it might well have been much more deadly in 2005 than it was in 1918.
The scientists responsible for the research, no doubt impressed by their own cleverness, bragged that they had reconstituted the virus by, in part, examining tissue samples from flu victims who were frozen in the tundra of Alaska.
Fauci himself personally vouched for the need for the research and defended its necessity. To explain why anyone would knowingly reconstitute a deadly virus thought to have perished from the earth, Fauci claimed that the research was necessary to improve the public health community’s response to the spread of the H5N1 avian flu in Asia. According to Fauci, “The new studies could have an immediate impact by helping scientists focus on detecting changes in the evolving H5N1 virus that might make widespread transmission among humans more likely.”
But then, in an instant, the partisan impressions of Fauci instantaneously turned a complete 180 degrees. Ebright watched it happen on live television.
Ebright disagreed. As noted in a Nature article at the time, Ebright blasted Fauci and the CDC for having “constructed, and provided procedures for others to construct, a virus that represents perhaps the most effective bioweapons agent now known.”
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These days, almost all discussion about Anthony Fauci is viewed exclusively through a partisan lens. If you criticize Fauci, you must be a Republican, and probably one of those crazy right wingers to boot. If you support Fauci, you must be a Democrat. To those who have watched Fauci’s career closely, the remarkable phenomenon is how thoroughly partisan perception of Fauci flipped, suddenly and instantaneously, in the early days of the pandemic.
Prior to 2020, Fauci was the subject of frequent and strident criticism from many of the liberal institutions that have since ruled any criticism of his actions out of bounds. In fact, if anything, Fauci (who was appointed to his post during the Reagan administration) was often seen as a creature of the Bush/Cheney administration and thus was extremely fair game for criticism by both Democrats and the media.
Ebright himself fits solidly in this camp. During Tuesday’s hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Ebright flatly stated, “I’m a registered Democrat. I voted for Biden. I had a Biden sign on my lawn.”
In fact, if anything, prior to February of 2020, Fauci was probably more well liked, to the extent that he was known at all, among Republicans than Democrats.
But then, in an instant, the partisan impressions of Fauci instantaneously turned a complete 180 degrees. Ebright watched it happen on live television.
“When he had the good fortune to share screen with Trump and facepalmed Trump when Trump was making an ignorant statement, he became a progressive icon and progressive saint,” Ebright noted.
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But back in 2005, as the public was starting to sour on the Iraq war and on the Bush administration’s conduct in the war on terror in general, Fauci and his research were getting the attention of many critics, particularly on the left. And thus the New York Times, which has largely forgotten that it is possible to criticize Fauci, ran an unflattering profile on this research titled “Why Revive a Deadly Flu Virus?”
According to Ebright, if the government had acted on the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences report, this experiment would never have taken place. “The experiments produced a new agent that had not been present on the planet in decades, that the population had no immunity to, and that, had it accidentally been released, would likely have caused a large-scale pandemic with significant, major loss of life,” Ebright told Blaze News.
In a remarkable exchange, Fauci admitted that neither the military nor the public at large was in actual, serious danger of a biological attack and that the larger danger was the freak-out over the possibility of an attack.
“There was much congressional interest at the time in why the NIH had performed this research with no risk-benefit analysis. The response from the NIH director at the time and in particular from the NIAID director at the time, Anthony Fauci, was to double down on the idea that this research was essential and that had the NIH not funded it, that would have been the mistake,” Ebright continued.
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In a fascinating twist, during this time period when Fauci was publicly defending to members of Congress the vital need for funding for this kind of risky research, he gave an interview to Margot Fromer of Oncology Today in which he struck a very different note.
There, in a publication directed at scientists, Fauci all but stated that the research he was defending to members of Congress was not really necessary at all but was merely the function of public panic. Discussing the anthrax attacks that had provided the genesis for the whole gain-of-function program, Fauci agreed with the interviewer that the attacks were a “nonevent” and further stated that “the biological impact was trivial — more people died of influenza during that period — compared with the psychological impact.”
In a remarkable exchange, Fauci admitted that neither the military nor the public at large was in actual, serious danger of a biological attack and that the larger danger was the freak-out over the possibility of an attack. According to Fromer’s summary of Fauci’s remarks, which were not directly quoted, Fauci believed that the “civilian population is more vulnerable, but judging from the reaction to the anthrax situation, they are more in danger of scaring themselves into immobility than dying from an attack that will probably never come.”
And then in 2011, scientists attempted to publish a pair of studies that were so dangerous that the resultant outcry from the scientific community forced Congress to take note again.
Why, then, was the NIH continuing this research? Well, according to Fauci, the NIAID had been obligated by Congress to prepare for the worst, even though he personally made it clear that he felt NIAID was mostly wasting its time: “It is prudent to be prepared, but as a matter of practicality, it would be almost impossible to inoculate everyone in the highly unlikely event of a smallpox attack,” Fauci said.
In other words, to Congress, Fauci was claiming that the science was vital and in desperate need of additional funding. To scientists who likely knew better, he claimed that it was Congress’ fault that his agency was doing this research.
Soon, Fauci would be forced to choose a unified public posture, and when he did, he came down solidly on the side of continuing this risky research.
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From 2005 through 2011, the issue largely lay dormant in the public’s mind. The nation had other fish to fry. The Iraq war was going poorly, the 2008 election happened, and then the financial collapse of 2008 led to a severe recession. Life moved on, and the public largely forgot that scientists were working behind closed doors to make viruses more deadly and transmissible for reasons that were not really comprehensible to most ordinary people.
And then in 2011, scientists attempted to publish a pair of studies that were so dangerous that the resultant outcry from the scientific community forced Congress to take note again. Two different groups, with NIH funding, genetically modified a version of the extremely dangerous H5N1 avian flu, which had demonstrated a 60% fatality rate in humanized mice.
The scientists genetically modified this deadly version of the flu to make it transmissible via respiratory droplets among ferrets, which were the best simulation for human transmissibility. It was the first time this deadly bird flu was able to cause airborne infections in mammals.
When the study was submitted for peer review, the results were so obviously dangerous that one of the peer reviewers immediately sought out officials in the Obama administration in an attempt to prevent the study results from being published, raising concerns that publishing the research would provide a recipe for terrorists to create what would likely have been the most deadly bioweapon known to mankind.
The internal pushback was so significant that newly installed NIH director Francis Collins submitted the results of the research to the NIH’s biosecurity board to finally — after the research was already done — assess the risk from these experiments.
The New York Times editors thundered, “We nearly always champion unfettered scientific research and open publication of the results. In this case it looks like the research should never have been undertaken because the potential harm is so catastrophic and the potential benefits from studying the virus so speculative.”
The board unanimously recommended that only the “general conclusions” of the research should be published without “details that could enable replication of the experiments by those who would seek to do harm.”
Unbelievably, Fauci and Collins rejected even this modest imposition of oversight on their research, as well as growing anger and frustration from Congress over what was widely perceived in Congress as disregard for the safety of the public in conducting these experiments. They instead began a public relations campaign to defend their research, co-authoring an op-ed with NIAID colleague Gary Nabel entitled, “A flu virus risk worth taking,” which ran in the Washington Post on December 30, 2011.
Their op-ed, in retrospect and in light of everything that has happened since, is laughably unpersuasive. Fauci and his co-authors conceded at the outset that the mutant virus they had created “does not exist in nature” and furthermore that “we cannot predict whether it or something similar will arise naturally, nor when or where it might appear.” However, the authors asserted, there was “concern” that such a mutation “could evolve naturally.”
In other words, to guard against the admittedly remote or at least unknown possibility that such a deadly virus could come into existence on accident, these scientists had created it on purpose.
In a refreshing moment of honesty, Fauci and his co-authors included a vital paragraph that should have been a fatal blow to the program entirely, admitting, “The question is whether benefits of such research outweigh risks. The answer is not simple. A highly pathogenic bird flu virus transmissible in humans could arise in ways not predicted by laboratory studies. And it is not clear whether this laboratory virus would behave in humans as it does in ferrets.”
Nonetheless, the authors insisted that creating these mutant viruses would help them identify the “Achilles’ heel” of these viruses in the event that they did break out into the public and further proclaimed that “safeguarding against the potential accidental release or deliberate misuse of laboratory pathogens is imperative. The engineered viruses developed in the ferret experiments are maintained in high-security laboratories.”
Having thus satisfied themselves (and apparently Congress and the public) that they were doing everything they could to ensure safety, they persuaded the review board, incredibly, to publish the entirety of this dangerous study without any redactions at all and went back to work on their risky experiments.
Unfortunately for Fauci and Collins, the glaring danger inherent in their work was too large to be ignored, and the Obama administration was beginning to take notice of the growing chorus of voices in the scientific community who were raising the alarm about gain-of-function research. Even the New York Times published a blaring editorial entitled “An Engineered Doomsday” in January 2012 condemning the “frightening” ferrets experiments and summarily rejecting the weak arguments mustered by Fauci and Collins in favor of their continuation and publication.
Speaking probably for everyone who was not directly receiving research funding to conduct this work, the New York Times editors thundered, “We nearly always champion unfettered scientific research and open publication of the results. In this case it looks like the research should never have been undertaken because the potential harm is so catastrophic and the potential benefits from studying the virus so speculative.
“Unless the scientific community and health officials can provide more persuasive justifications than they have so far, the new virus, which is in the Netherlands, ought to be destroyed.”
Although the editorial did not single out Fauci or Collins by name, it likewise blasted their failure to exercise oversight over the program before its details came to light. “In the future, it is imperative that any such experiments be rigorously analyzed for potential dangers … not after the fact, as is happening in this case,” the editors wrote.
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Finally in 2013, the Department of Health and Human Services began to impose at least some half-hearted attempts at oversight over Fauci’s and the NIAID’s work. That year, HHS established an oversight committee that was supposed, in theory, to have imposed a before-the-fact review of risky research like the ferret experiments.
The report also found, astoundingly, that “select agent materials” had been transported throughout the building using, of all things, Ziploc bags.
The oversight program, such as it was, was immediately subverted by both Fauci and Collins, who demonstrated their contempt for the committee’s work by dismissively dubbing it the “Ferrets Committee.”
According to Ebright, whose contention is supported by multiple scientists who spoke anonymously to the Washington Post in 2021, Fauci and Collins subverted the committee’s oversight work by essentially defining “gain-of-function” out of existence. If you have ever found yourself wondering how Fauci has been able to repeatedly tell Rand Paul with a straight face that his agency does not fund gain-of-function research, it is because he has over a decade of experience doing it.
This might have continued forever, had a series of embarrassing accidents in 2014 not made it abundantly clear that Fauci’s and Collins’ protestations regarding “rigorous safety precautions” were wholly and completely empty.
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The first major accident to embarrass the small community that had been defending these experiments occurred in June 2014, when dozens of workers at the CDC were exposed to live anthrax in a debacle so thorough that then-CDC director Tom Frieden was forced to admit, “I will say that I’m just astonished that this could have happened here.”
A shamefaced Frieden was dragged before Congress, where he admitted that he was “angry” and “upset” and promised that he was working “around the clock” to make sure it would never happen again.
If anything, Frieden was understating the extent of embarrassment the incident brought on the CDC and in particular on its bioterrorism laboratory. A USDA inspector investigating the leak found a number of grievous and obvious violations of protocol that dated back to 2011, back when Fauci and Collins were confidently assuring the public that risky virus research was only happening in the very safest of facilities.
Instead, the USDA found, among other things, that some anthrax containers were summarily missing. Others were found stored in unlocked refrigerators in an “unregistered hallway” that was accessible to anyone in the building. The report also found, astoundingly, that “select agent materials” had been transported throughout the building using, of all things, Ziploc bags.
The USDA’s report found that the exposure had occurred because the researchers “failed to follow a scientifically derived and reviewed protocol that would have assured the anthrax was deactivated,” leading a number of scientists to work on anthrax without any protective equipment at all. The researchers could perhaps be forgiven for not following proper protocol, however, because the inspector found that the researchers had “limited knowledge” of what the protocol was even supposed to be and further stated that the label “did not have a standard operating procedure that would make sure the transfer of the material would be safe.”
It is worth remembering at this point that three short years earlier, Fauci and Collins had assured the public that research on a virus that killed 60% of humanized mice was safe because it was being conducted in laboratories they assured the public were safe.
By way of explanation for how one of the agency’s scientists could accidentally have mailed a package that might have released one of the deadliest viruses known to man into the general public and then failed to report it for over six weeks, the CDC’s own report condemned many of its own employees for “a lack of sound professional judgment.”
A shamefaced Frieden was dragged before Congress, where he admitted that he was “angry” and “upset” and promised that he was working “around the clock” to make sure it would never happen again.
Almost immediately, it happened again.
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In July 2014 it was revealed that a worker for the CDC had “rushed through” safety procedures in order to get to a meeting in a timely fashion and had inadvertently sent samples of a highly deadly strain of avian flu to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
USDA researchers only realized something was wrong when the strain, which was supposed to be mild and non-lethal, promptly killed an entire flock of chickens. The USDA researchers sequenced the virus and discovered to their very great surprise that it was not the mild H9N2 strain of avian flu, as it was labeled, but instead was the deadly H5N1 strain.
The time was finally ripe for the Obama administration to attempt to rein in Fauci and Collins
Worse, subsequent investigation revealed that the incident had happened in March, had been reported to the CDC in May, but had not been reported to the public or to anyone else until July.
Ebright and others were incensed. In a quote to Reuters at the time, Ebright said, “The matter needs to be referred for civil and/or criminal investigation.”
His anger, if anything, was understated. By way of explanation for how one of the agency’s scientists could accidentally have mailed a package that might have released one of the deadliest viruses known to man into the general public and then failed to report it for over six weeks, the CDC’s own report condemned many of its own employees for “a lack of sound professional judgment.”
As noted by Reuters at the time, the CDC’s own report further found that “there was no approved procedure for what the scientist was doing, colleagues who might have noticed a breach were frantically rushing to finish experiments ahead of a February scientific meeting, and the lab director had a ‘heavy work load’.”
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Not to be outdone, Fauci and Collins’ NIH joined the party in July 2014, when a worker who was cleaning out an unsecured storage room in a joint FDA/NIH facility discovered six vials of smallpox, as well as several other vials filled with dangerous and exotic pathogens.
Workers in the facility were not even notified of the discovery of these pathogens that had apparently been lying about for decades until reports surfaced in the media. As noted by the Washington Post at the time, “One scientist, who works in the building and spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said he learned about it Tuesday when his supervisor read a media report.”
Unbelievably, rather than promptly destroying the vials, the FDA and NIH turned the vials over to the CDC, which, according to Nature, “confirmed that powder contained in the vials contained variola (smallpox) virus DNA. They are now attempting to grow the virus in cell culture under the highest level of containment to determine whether it is still viable, and expect results in two weeks.” (Emphasis added). The samples, which were indeed viable, were later allegedly destroyed in front of inspectors from the World Health Organization.
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The time was finally ripe for the Obama administration to attempt to rein in Fauci and Collins. Faced with a string of public embarrassments that demonstrated in the most graphic way that the supposedly safe laboratories that conducted risky virus research were anything but, a working group was formed featuring Ebright and other scientists, who prevailed upon Obama administration officials to institute a moratorium, or “pause,” on funding for gain-of-function research.
I asked Ebright how he was finally able to convince policymakers that Fauci’s program needed to be curtailed.
“Something you need to keep in mind is that there was a change in administration, from the Bush-Cheney administration to the Obama administration. Which meant that the policies we were talking about were not Obama’s policies, and that made them politically addressable. It was possible to interface with the Obama administration and make the case that this research was not providing public health benefit and was actually degrading rather than enhancing national security,” Ebright told Blaze News.
Given this reality, and given the cavalcade of embarrassments befalling the biodefense sector, it was possible in that time period to “gain the Obama administration’s attention through their Office of Science and Technology Policy.” Finally, Ebright and his colleagues were able to get a “pause” on the research put in place and thus end this risky research, or at least temporarily stop it.
Or so everyone thought.
The reality, of course, was that neither Fauci nor Collins had any intention of letting bureaucrats stand in the way of their work, as they would soon demonstrate to the world.
