At his appearance before Senator Rand Paul’s committee on Wednesday, spectators could see in Anthony Fauci both victim and villain. On the one hand, here was a gray-haired scientist, much respected for his handling of the AIDS crisis, being badgered repeatedly with insulting “gotcha” questions which he was clearly not going to answer. On the other hand, Senator Paul laid a grave charge against him: that he had funded dangerous research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, where the Covid-19 virus was most probably concocted and from which it escaped, eventually killing some 20 million people; and that Fauci had then, with considerable success, promoted a report that the virus had arisen naturally so as to cover up his role in this historic calamity.
A few days earlier, in something of a low blow, Paul had released online the contents of Fauci’s diary. This document shows Fauci obsessed with his TV appearances, which he notes almost daily under a regular heading marked “Press.” He offers accounts of his interactions with celebrities such as Julia Roberts and Barbara Streisand and mentions the numerous cash prizes he began to receive. In the course of the hearing, it emerged that Fauci had directed his staff assiduously to enter him for these prizes, from which he raked in more than $1 million, though it is illegal for a civil servant to do so, according to Senator Josh Hawley.
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Perhaps the most jarring aspect of the diary is Fauci’s intoxication with the fame that his White House position brought him during the pandemic. “The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable,” reads the entry for May 21, 2020. “It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable” in the world, he wrote. “Countless profiles on me in multiple media. I cannot even read all the things that are written about me since I am so busy. . . . POTUS seems to be enamored of me even though I am taking the spotlight away from him. We are developing a very unique and interesting relationship.”
Fauci’s formidable bureaucratic power had accumulated steadily since 1984, when he became director of the NIAID, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He was known among journalists for always returning calls, sometimes late at night. Journalists tend to be loyal to good sources, and Fauci built up a devoted following of medical reporters who fed from his hand and gave him favorable coverage.
His power increased yet further after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the subsequent anthrax releases. Congress put him in charge of all biodefense efforts, a program that spent $1 billion annually and helped Fauci become one of the highest paid civil servants, his salary eventually reaching $480,000.
At this pinnacle of power, Fauci made a questionable decision. In 2009, his agency funded research in Holland that made an animal flu virus more transmissible, a procedure blandly called “gain of function.” Scientists who felt such research should be barred or tightly regulated mounted a vigorous protest—but Fauci, together with Francis Collins, then his nominal boss and head of the National Institutes of Health, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in 2011, titled “A Flu Virus Risk Worth Taking,” that enhancing viruses in the lab afforded insights that couldn’t be attained any other way.
A year later, Fauci wrote in a technical journal that “Scientists working in this field might say—as indeed I have said—that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks.”
Given that the possible risks in this case included a pandemic, no single person should have had the power to take such a decision. But Fauci had that power. His agency funded virus research throughout the world. He brushed past a short-lived research moratorium that critics managed to erect.
On January 31, 2020, Fauci received an email from scientists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. The group reported that after analysis of the recently sequenced Covid-19 virus, they found “the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” In plain English, the virus seemed manmade.
Andersen and his group were told to write a report for publication. But Fauci was aware, or became aware, of an unwelcome fact. His own agency had funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located at the center of the new epidemic, to manipulate viruses. The funding was not direct but funneled through the EcoHealth Alliance of New York, which exerted little if any supervision over the Wuhan research.
Fauci wielded direct influence over the research funding of Andersen and others in his group. This may or may not have had anything to do with their remarkable change of mind, but within a few days, they reversed their conclusion. In their “Proximal Origins” report, published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, they wrote that “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
This conclusion was of enormous benefit to Fauci and Collins because it protected them from the charge of having funded the research that caused the pandemic. They carefully shaped the report during its preparation while concealing their role so as to make the report seem independent of their influence. In an email of March 6, 2020, released by Senator Paul before this week’s hearing, Collins forwarded an advance copy of “Proximal Origins” to colleagues with the note “FYI, this is work that Tony [Fauci], Jeremy, Larry and I helped with, but are appropriately not mentioned explicitly in the paper.”
Fauci now had the perfect weapon with which to push the natural-origin theory of the virus. He presented the Proximal Origins report to the public, and to intelligence agencies, as the independent work of leading experts. The medical press that he had long cultivated backed him all the way, dismissing the lab origin as a conspiracy and ignoring evidence to the contrary. The intelligence agencies, which he knew well because of his direction of biodefense research, ate from his hand as gullibly as the journalists.
In September 2021, a research project came to light that had been proposed to the Defense Department some three years earlier. The authors, who included Shi Zheng-Li of the Wuhan Institute, proposed to engineer a virus up to 25 percent different in its nucleic acid sequence from the SARS-1 virus and to insert into it a genetic element called a furin cleavage site. The proposal was rejected, but evidence that Shi may have found alternative funds to achieve it lies in the existence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself: the virus emerged in Wuhan just over a year later. Its nucleic acid sequence differs by 20 percent from that of the SARS-1 virus and—unlike all known natural viruses of its class—it has a furin cleavage site. It would be a truly amazing coincidence for a natural virus with all the features of this recipe to emerge at just the right time and place to cause the pandemic. A rather simpler explanation is that Shi did exactly what she had explicitly proposed to do and that the virus leaked from her lab.
You might think that the document revealing all this, known as the DEFUSE proposal, would have been widely discussed in the mainstream media, or even accepted as a smoking gun for the lab leak argument. But such was their loyalty to Fauci that medical journalists failed to devote much, if any, coverage to DEFUSE, a shameful mark of journalistic bias.
Fauci’s assertion that the Covid-19 virus had arisen naturally achieved wide acceptance—except among the Andersen group. As time passed, its members were wracked with doubts that they failed to share. Senator Paul has released over 1,000 pages of Slack messages exchanged among the group’s members. These make depressing reading for anyone who expected scientists to behave in a detached and objective way about a matter of national, let alone global, importance. The Slack messages brim with vituperative attacks on anyone who favored the lab leak theory. Opponents are derided with schoolboy nicknames and ad hominem aspersions. When the Slack authors did discuss evidence, their concerns grew. “Our paper was pretty strong in saying ‘there’s no way’, but I have less confidence in that statement at this stage,” Andersen messaged the others on June 11, 2020.
That same day, they shared what seem to be estimates on the relative probabilities of natural versus lab origin. Andersen’s reckoning was for a 70 percent likelihood of natural origin, 30 percent of lab leak. A colleague guessed 80/20, revised to 90/10.
Despite the energetic use that Fauci was making of their published statement against lab leak, the Slack messages contain no suggestion that the authors should level with the public about their doubts. They betrayed their profession’s principles and share with Fauci the blame for having deceived the public, government, and media for so long about the virus’s most probable origin.
Fauci did not defend the natural origin position at Senator Paul’s hearing. In his long silences—he invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times, despite his 2025 pardon from President Biden—even his supporters could hear a failure to deny some incontrovertible facts. He supported an extensive program of gain of function research without seeking the public advice and consent of independent scientific experts. He let his grantees fund dangerous viral manipulations at the Wuhan Institute in unsupervised and unsafe laboratory conditions. When the SARS-CoV2 virus escaped from the Wuhan lab, as it almost certainly did, he engineered a seemingly independent report that blamed the pandemic on nature instead of on the research that he had calamitously funded.
But Fauci can be blamed for only so much. The pandemic’s 20 million deaths rest squarely on the shoulders of the Chinese government that controlled the research in Wuhan, let it proceed in unsafe conditions, and to this day has covered up all the relevant information in its possession.