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Former National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci, EcoHealth Alliance boss Peter Daszak, and
elements of their inner circle were far from the only people in the Western medical establishment who actively downplayed the possibility that COVID-19 leaked from a lab where the likely patients zero executed dangerous experiments on coronaviruses with American taxpayer dollars.

Early in the pandemic, multiple scientific publications ran articles decrying “conspiracy theories” that suggested the virus may have originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Various authors argued, instead, that it was more likely that the virus made a cross-species leap into humans, possibly at a Chinese wet market.

Now that it’s abundantly clear that the lab origin theory was all along the
most likely explanation, molecular biologist Dr. Richard H. Ebright of Rutgers University and dozens of other scientists are seeking accountability for perceived efforts to cure the origins narrative. They have sent open letters to the editors of the journals Science, Emerging Microbes & Infections, and Nature Medicine, requesting the retraction of “scientifically unsound papers” concerning the origins of the virus.

“Scientists have a responsibility to science and the public to point out scientific misconduct, particularly scientific fraud, when they discover it,” Dr. Ebright told Blaze News. “This is especially true for scientific misconduct on matters of high public importance, like the origin of COVID-19.”

Emerging Microbes & Infections

The first of the four papers of interest was published online in Emerging Microbes & Infections on Feb. 26, 2020, and authored by
Shan-Lu Liu and Linda Saif of Ohio State University; Susan Weiss of the University of Pennsylvania; and Lishan Su of the University of Maryland.

The paper, entitled, “No credible evidence supporting claims of the laboratory engineering of SARS-CoV-2,” stated, “There are speculations, rumours and conspiracy theories that SARS-CoV-2 is of laboratory origin. Some people have alleged that the human SARS-CoV-2 was leaked directly from a laboratory in Wuhan where a bat CoV (RaTG13) was recently reported, which shared ∼96% homology with the SARS-CoV-2.”

After downplaying a number of possible lab-made culprits, including a
chimeric coronavirus that could replicate in human airway cells and possibly transmit to humans, the authors concluded, “There is currently no credible evidence to support the claim that SARS-CoV-2 originated from a laboratory-engineered CoV.”

The
June 14 open letter to the editors of the journal stated, “The authors’ and editor’s private email communications, obtained through an Ohio Public Records Act request, provide compelling evidence that there is clear basis to infer the paper may be the product of scientific misconduct, up to and including fraud.”

When Weiss, for instance, expressed uncertainty about how the
furin cleavage site could possibly end up in the virus naturally, her colleague Liu “completely agree[d]” but signaled a greater eagerness to dispel the notion that the “furin site may be engineered.”

Despite publicly suggesting there was no credible evidence of a lab origin, Weiss noted days before the publication of her paper:

Henry and I have been speculating- how can that site have appeared at S1/S2 border- I hate to think it was engineered- among the MHV strains, the cleavage site does not increaser (sic) pathogenicity while it does effect entry route (surface vs endosome). so for me the only significance of this furin site is as a marker for where the virus came from- frightening to think it may have been engineered.

Concealed doubts and persuasive counterpoints were not the only things said to have compromised the integrity of the paper.

University of North Carolina virus expert
Ralph Baric has long toyed with coronaviruses. Years ahead of the pandemic, he expressed an interest in continuing to experiment with a chimeric virus that could infect human lung cells. He even shared transgenic mice with the Wuhan lab where Chinese virologist Zhengli Shi was executing radical experiments.

In violation of publisher Taylor and Francis’ authorship policies, “Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli, despite clear conflicts of interest, made substantial contributions to the manuscript but were not credited as authors or acknowledged,” said the letter.

Besides secretly involving people with potential conflicts, Su, Liu and the journal’s editor-in-chief Shan Lu reportedly also had “privileged information about a SARS-CoV-2 infection in a Beijing lab in 2020,” but decided to keep this under wraps.

Su wrote to Lieu on Feb. 14, 2020: “Your former colleague was infected with sars2 in the lab?”

“Yes,” responded Liu. “He was infected in the lab!”

“I actually am very concerned for the possibility of SARS-2 infection by lab people. It is much more contagious than SARS-1. Now every lab is interested in get a vial of virus to do drug discovery. This can potentially [be] a big issue. I don’t think most people have a clue,” wrote Shan Lu.

Despite weighing in heavily on the paper, Lu elected not to be included in the coauthorship, stating in a Feb. 12, 2020, message, “I definitely will not be an author as you guys did everything. It can also keep things somewhat independent as the editor.”

Extra to collapsing the distance between author and editor, Lu subsequently admitted he accepted the paper with “basically no review.”

— (@)

“Taken together, the authors’ and editor’s private communications indicate the paper is a product of scientific misconduct, up to and including fraud, by the authors and by the Editor-in-Chief of
Emerging Microbes & Infections, Shan Lu,” said the open letter. “Now that these documents have come to light, we urge Emerging Microbes & Infections to issue an Expression of Editorial Concern for this paper and to initiate a retraction process.”

Taylor and Francis, the publisher of the journal, said in a statement to Blaze News, “We can confirm that the Editor of the journal forwarded the open letter to Taylor & Francis on 14th June and that our Publishing Ethics & Integrity team are investigating the concerns raised, in accordance with the Committee on Publication Ethics guidelines and our Editorial Policies.”

Nature Medicine

The journal Nature Medicine published the controversial paper “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” on March 17, 2020, which Fauci used on multiple occasions to suggest to the American public that COVID-19 was not a lab leak but rather an animal virus that jumped to a human.

Blaze News
previously reported that 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, “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

Andersen, a Danish evolutionary biologist and Scripps Research Institute immunology professor, was especially doubtful in private about the conclusion he gave his name to.

On Jan. 31, 2020, Andersen
wrote to Fauci, “You have to look very closely at the genome to see features that are potentially engineered. … I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie [Holmes], Bob [Garry], Mike [Farzan], and myself all find the genome to be inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”

On Feb. 8, Andersen
stated, “Passage of SARS-like CoVs have been ongoing for several years, and more specifically in Wuhan under BSL-2 conditions. … The fact that Wuhan became the epicenter of the ongoing epidemic caused by nCoV is likely an unfortunate coincidence, but it raises questions that would be wrong to dismiss out of hand. Our main work over the last couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory, but we are at a crossroad where the scientific evidence isn’t conclusive enough to say that we have high confidence in any of the three main theories considered.”

Andersen also
expressed concern about a paper penned by Ralph Baric and Zhengli Shi concerning the apparent insertion of furin cleavage sites into SARS, which he and his colleagues figured for a “how-to-manual for building the Wuhan coronavirus in a laboratory.”

Last month, Ebright and five others
wrote to Joao Montiero, the chief editor of Nature Medicine, requesting a retraction. They noted that documentation obtained through public records requests along with congressional testimony from Andersen and Garry “provide conclusive evidence of misconduct.”

The letter does not mention Fauci’s
alleged involvement in the development of the paper but instead World Health Organization scientist Jeremy Farrar’s unacknowledged role in the “paper’s development, including its prompting, organizing, editing, and approval.”

‘It is imperative that this misleading and damaging product of scientific misconduct be removed from the scientific literature.’

“This omission of a significant role played by the head of a funding agency, allegedly to maintain his ‘independence,’ represents a serious breach of publishing ethics that completely undermines the credibility of the journal and calls into question the motivation behind the paper,” said the letter. “The classification of the paper as an ‘opinion’ rather than a ‘research article’ further exacerbates the issue, as the authors’ intentional withholding of Farrar’s involvement damages public trust in the editorial process.”

Ebright and scores of other scientists
pressed Nature Medicine last year for a retraction as well, noting in an open letter dated July 26, 2023, “It is imperative that this misleading and damaging product of scientific misconduct be removed from the scientific literature. We, as STEM and STEM-policy professionals, call upon Nature Medicine to publish an expression of editorial concern for the paper and to begin a process of withdrawal or retraction of the paper.”

Blaze News reached out to Montiero for comment, but he did not respond by deadline.

Science

Ebright, Stanford University epidemiologist
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and dozens of other scientists signed another open letter on June 14 to the editors of the journal Science with regards to two papers: “The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic,” and “The molecular epidemiology of multiple zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2,” both of which named Jonathan Pekar of the University of California, San Diego, as an author along with Andersen, Holmes, Garry, evolutionary biologist Andrew Rambaut, and Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona.

Blurbs leading into the papers, which were both largely funded by Fauci’s NIAID — whose parent agency
supported and financed research at the Wuhan lab — and published on July 26, 2022, stated, “The precise events surrounding virus spillover will always be clouded, but all of the circumstantial evidence so far points to more than one zoonotic event occurring in Huanan market in Wuhan, China, likely during November–December 2019.”

According to the scientists seeking retractions, the analyses and the premises of “Worobey et al. 2022 and Pekar et al. 2022 are unsound,” and the papers may be “products of scientific misconduct, up to and including scientific fraud.”

“Phylogenomic evidence, epidemiological evidence, and documentary evidence all indicate that SARS-CoV-2 entered humans in July-November 2019,” says the letter. “Arguments based on data for the Huanan Seafood Market on or after mid- to late December 2019 — as in Worobey et al. 2022 and Pekar et al. 2022 — cannot, even in principle, shed light on spillover into humans that occurred one to five months earlier, in July-November, 2019.”

— (@)

The open letter noted that Andersen, Garry, Holmes, and others knew full well that the “premises and conclusions of their paper were invalid at the time the paper was drafted.”

A spokesman for American Association for the Advancement of Science, the publisher of the Science family of journals, confirmed to Blaze News that it had received the letter.

“We follow COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) processes to address any concerns raised on published papers and are doing so here,” said the spokesman.

The AAAS spokesman noted in a subsequent email, “We will follow up when we make a final decision.”

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I lost my best friend almost exactly four years ago, in the waning days of May 2020. Although I am sure he is listed somewhere as a casualty of the pandemic, the actual story of his death is slightly more complicated.

He suffered all his life from severe Crohn’s disease. He had a bad flare-up at the worst possible time: February 2020, just as pandemic panic was nearing its peak. After a failed surgery that was intended to remove a problematic part of his small intestine, doctors determined that he needed an entirely new small intestine and ordered a small intestine transplant.

Here in 2024, three years after the fact, Fauci has ceased to be a person. He is now a totem.

The hospital that was treating him was not capable of performing this operation, so plans were made to transfer him to another facility. Unfortunately, almost immediately thereafter, my friend caught COVID while in the hospital, and his transfer to another hospital that might have helped him was forever delayed.

Because his condition was so poor at the outset, he had to go on a ventilator for respiratory support for weeks to address the COVID. By the time he recovered from the effects of COVID, his intestines had developed a fistula, and complications of the fistula eventually took his life.

Until the end, he remained conscious and was able to communicate, at least via text message. He was a very social person, and his one complaint about his time in the hospital was that he was not allowed to see anyone.

Day after day he expressed his wish to me to see an actual friendly face who was not a nurse. I wanted to go sit with him. I asked hospital staff if I would be allowed if I signed a waiver or whatever they required so that he would not have to spend what we both knew would likely be the last few weeks of his life alone.

I was refused.

The COVID-19 pandemic, combined with the hysterical protocols instituted in response to it, killed my best friend — and worse, made him die alone.

Where does the anger lead?

George Floyd died just a couple of days before my friend did. I barely noticed at the time; I was so consumed by anger and grief over what was happening. My friend’s desire, expressed frequently to anyone who knew him well, was for his ashes to be spread in California, where he always said he was happiest while in college.

As it became clear that COVID-19 protocols would also deny him this last dignity, events in the world at large began to sink in. I watched in amazement and slowly mounting anger as city after city was wracked by throngs of shouting people marching in the streets, with nary a mask in sight and no one telling them to get back inside and isolate.

It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that people were dying alone, deprived of even funerals, for absolutely no scientific reason at all. And it was becoming equally clear around the same time that the official story about where the pandemic came from was likely bogus — or if not bogus, certainly not as scientifically settled as leading lights, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, were making it out to be.

I don’t say all this to ask for pity. My story is merely one of millions like it in America and tens of millions more throughout the world.

My only point is this: I’ve had ample time and opportunity to stew in anger toward the medical establishment in this country and toward Fauci in particular.

And as I watched the debacle unfold before the House Coronavirus Select Subcommittee on Monday, I was seized by only one thought: This is pointless, and it needs to stop.

Getting to the truth

I have my own theories and beliefs about Fauci and his motivations, particularly when it comes to his actions to obfuscate the truth about the origins of the pandemic that has now killed millions. Suffice to say, those theories and beliefs are not flattering. I would like nothing more than for some way to be found to force Fauci to tell the whole, unvarnished truth about what he knew in those early days of the pandemic.

It should be evident by now that no such truth serum exists. And even if it did exist, it would likely only confirm that Fauci was covering his own backside in the possible event that it was discovered that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was responsible for the pandemic. There’s no real way, after all, that Fauci himself could have actually known where the pandemic started.

The reality is this: We had one shot to get an honest look at the evidence, and the World Health Organization responded by sending in a team that featured all the people who stood to gain the most from concluding that the pandemic had a natural origin, including of all people the now-disgraced Dr. Peter Daszak. The chances that the WHO task group was going to reach the truth were zero from the start, just based on how the group was conducted.

But we should not deceive ourselves. Even if honest brokers had been sent to China to investigate, the Chinese government was never going to allow a real investigation, as even the compromised WHO investigatory team was forced to admit. And the Chinese government is certainly not now going to let any actual investigation occur, short of a military invasion, which no country in the world (including the United States) will undertake.

And so we must content ourselves with the evidence we have, which is not enough to reach an ironclad conclusion. It certainly looks suspicious, and I know what I believe is the most likely source of the pandemic outbreak, but I am forced to concede that if I were called upon to prove it in a criminal court, I could not do it.

Forever and always, it seems that the best we will be able to do for ourselves when it comes to asking where the pandemic came from is “probably.” I want nothing more than to know for sure. I have spent more hours looking at this question than perhaps any other question I’ve put my mind to. And “probably” is as far as I can get.

Inept and embarrassing questions

As I watched Monday’s hearings, I was not surprised to learn that I still have plenty of capacity for anger over what has been done to us by the pandemic and also by our government in response to the pandemic.

The content of the hearings, though, made clear that continued anger at Fauci is distracting us from the bigger issue at hand. It’s also pointless. Everyone already knows what they think about Fauci, and those thoughts are likely impenetrable. The only thing more exasperating than the ineptitude of most of Fauci’s Republican interlocutors was the parade of Democrats doing their best impersonation of group of besotted Taylor Swift fans while clearly striving to be Fauci’s biggest white knight for the television cameras.

That this is personal to Fauci himself could not be clearer. Two weeks ago, one of Fauci’s top advisers, David Morens, testified before this same subcommittee about email exchanges in which he clearly advised key players in the potential lab-leak cover-up to hide emails from the public. Morens was unceremoniously blistered by both Republican and Democrat alike, with no less illustrious a right-winger than former NAACP President Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.) intoning at one point, “I think you are going to be haunted by your testimony here today. And it’s all on the record.”

Yet, sitting in the same chair, Fauci was summarily excused from responsibility for Morens by the same Democrats based on the facially laughable excuse that he didn’t really get any advice from his senior adviser.

The next virus that escapes from a lab might well be ten or a hundred times more deadly than COVID-19 was.

The number of people who have any sort of nuanced, fact-based view of Fauci and his actions is so small that it might as well be nonexistent. Here in 2024, three years after the fact, Fauci has ceased to be a person. He is now a totem, and which side of the partisan divide you sit on depends on whether you think the deity he represents is evil or benign.

This is a role that Fauci is happy to play, because it obscures the question that he doesn’t want you to ask, which is: Why would Fauci be desperate to cover up a leak from a Chinese lab in the first place? Why would it be important to him that people accept the natural origin theory?

The conventional answer is that he sought to avoid personal and professional embarrassment for having potentially funded the WIV with grant money that his agency approved. That may well play a part, but I don’t think it has played the most significant part in Fauci’s calculus at all.

I think Fauci, who is 83 and was close to retirement even at the beginning of the pandemic, is and always has been much less interested in protecting his own image than he is in protecting the kind of research that may well have caused the lab leak — research that he devoutly believes in.

Research that, without exaggeration, threatens the future of humankind.

I am talking, of course, about gain-of-function research, a phrase that as yet has only pierced the consciousness of the very most online and politically committed individuals.

That is something that needs to change, and it needs to become a nonpartisan issue, because the next virus that escapes from a lab might well be ten or a hundred times more deadly than COVID-19 was.

Dangerous experiments

Fauci, of course, has been a champion of gain-of-function research since long before COVID-19 ever existed. And he has needed to champion it, because before the COVID-19 pandemic, there was bipartisan, ongoing, and constant concern about whether it should be allowed at all.

The controversy first erupted in 2011 when a team of scientists funded by the NIH intentionally created a version of the bird flu that had an astonishing 60% fatality rate and then blithely bragged about it in a paper they sought to publish.

This obviously dangerous experiment touched off a firestorm that might have been contained exclusively to the scientific community if one of the scientists involved in peer review had not flagged a concerned official in the Obama administration. Fauci responded by taking the extraordinary step of co-authoring a Washington Post op-ed defending the need for gain-of-function research.

After years of back-and-forth, the Obama administration finally announced a moratorium on gain-of-function research in 2014, and since that time, Fauci has been fighting a tireless rearguard action to revive public funding for research that makes viruses deadlier. He also, by all accounts, worked with his superior Francis Collins to ensure that researchers were able to find loopholes in the moratorium.

Finally, in 2017, Fauci prevailed upon the Trump administration to lift the moratorium. You would be forgiven for being confused at this point if you’ve followed the modern political discourse, which has suggested that only the ultra MAGAs of the world oppose gain-of-function research.

The reality is the exact opposite: The Democrats were the first to see the danger of this research, and they were right. Republicans reversed them, and they were wrong.

Most of the media is frankly not interested in knowing the particulars of the issue, but they know that Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) seems to be strongly against gain-of-function research, so they assume it must be great. And around and around goes the dumb discourse about the most important issue of the last century.

The real threat

I don’t think we need any more show hearings where Anthony Fauci is alternately yelled at and feted upon. Anthony Fauci is gone. He’s never coming back to government service. By all means, people should argue about his legacy, and that book is definitely not yet closed. I have no problem with heated debate over Fauci’s legacy, but the reality is that Fauci isn’t an ongoing threat.

Gain-of-function research is. And gain-of-function research continues to exist. Worse, it’s continuing to get more and more dangerous. Incredibly, the U.S. Department of Agriculture was revealed earlier this year to have begun a new study in 2021 on an even more dangerous avian flu with, incredibly, the Chinese Academy of Sciences — an institution that oversees the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

And this is exactly what Anthony Fauci wants. He truly believes in his heart that it is the right thing for humanity for these risky experiments to go forward. He might even be right. I certainly don’t begrudge him having that opinion.

But what I do begrudge him are his efforts to keep the rest of us ordinary folks out of having an informed say on what he and his colleagues are doing with our tax dollars in the name of research. I do begrudge his dishonest campaign to split hairs with Rand Paul over what his agency has been doing in clear violation of the spirit of both the Obama gain-of-function moratorium and the P3CO framework.

The best way to fight back, though, is not to haul him in front of cameras and yell at him. He seems more or less immune to that, and he certainly at this point cannot be made to say anything he has not already said. Every one of these appearances probably just serves to help some clever businessmen to sell more of those ridiculous shirts with his face on them to his liberal fans.

The best way to fight back is to turn our attention back to where it belongs: on the risky research he’s likely been hoping we’ll forget. Our survival, quite literally, might depend on it.