U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D–IL) claims that Anthony Fauci is a “brilliant scientist” whose “work has helped save tens of millions of lives.”
IN FACT, Fauci funded gain-of-function research that likely caused the Covid-19 pandemic, lied about it to Congress, and repeatedly botched the response to the outbreak, potentially killing tens of millions of people. Here are the specifics:
- In 2012 — 7 years before SARS-CoV-2 emerged — Fauci wrote in an academic journal that a “moratorium on gain-of-function research” for a “highly pathogenic” virus “should continue” until certain conditions are met, but “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.”
- During 2014 to 2019, Fauci’s division of the National Institutes of Health [NIH] gave $1,413,720 of U.S. taxpayer money to Communist China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology via a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance.
- On February 1, 2020 — one month after the first cases of C-19 were reported — Fauci emailed some of his colleagues that he and NIH Director Francis Collins spoke with “several highly credible scientists” who “were concerned about the fact that upon viewing the sequences of several isolates” of SARS-CoV-2, “there were mutations in the virus that would be most unusual to have evolved naturally in the bats and there was a suspicion that this mutation was intentionally inserted.”
- In the same email, Fauci wrote, “The suspicion was heightened by the fact that scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine the molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan.”
- One day later on February 2, virologist Robert Garry of Tulane University — who participated in the meeting with Fauci — wrote about the molecular structure of C-19, “I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature,” but “in the lab it would be easy to generate” it.
- Two days after that on February 4, Garry and other scientists who were in contact with Fauci and had privately written that C-19 was likely created in a lab, sent to Fauci the draft of a paper in which they claimed, “It is unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation.”
- After that paper was formally published, Fauci touted it during an April 2020 press conference to allege that the structure of the virus was “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”
- Testifying before Congress in 2021, Fauci denied 3 times that the NIH ever funded “gain-of-function research” at the Wuhan Institute.
- In 2023, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that some of the money Fauci’s team gave to the Wuhan Institute was used to fund “genetic experiments to combine naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in hybridized” coronavirus strains.
- Buried in a footnote, the same GAO report reveals that the research to create these coronaviruses “was not subject to” a “gain-of-function research funding pause,” and the lab conducted a “limited” experiment “to test whether the spike protein from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses” could bind “to the human ACE2 receptor,” which is exactly what SARS-CoV-2 does.
- The NIH claimed that this research “could not have been the source” of the “Covid-19 pandemic” because “NIH analyzed” the “experiments” and “concluded that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses were genetically distant from SARS-CoV-2.”
- However, a study published by the journal Nature in 2022 found that “SARS-CoV-2 progenitor bat viruses genetically close to SARS-CoV-2” “circulate in cave bats living” in “northern Laos,” and NIH grant documents for EcoHealth Alliance show that Fauci’s team funded “experimental work” at the Wuhan Institute to “understand the ability of bat coronaviruses to bind to human receptors” with bats from multiple locations, including “Laos.”
- With regard to the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) — which is supposed to ensure government accountability and transparency — Fauci senior advisor Dr. David Morens exchanged a series of emails in 2021 with EcoHealth Alliance in which he told them that he “learned from our foia lady how to make emails disappear.”
- Morens also wrote, “I deleted most of those earlier emails,” “NOTHING gets sent to me except to my gmail,” “I can either send stuff to Tony [Fauci] on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house” because “he is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble,” and “we are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them.”
- After the pandemic began, Fauci multiplicatively overstated the C-19 death rate, which caused hysteria and prompted lockdowns that have and will shorten the lives of millions of people.
- Fauci repeatedly pushed for face masks in spite of the fact that no randomized controlled trial has ever found that masks have clinically meaningful benefits, dozens of studies show that they cause significant harms, and decades of studies prove that contagious respiratory diseases are mainly spread by microscopic aerosols that easily penetrate cloth and surgical masks.
- Fauci repeatedly called for a permanent end to handshakes and insisted, “I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again,” displaying further ignorance of the fact that C-19 and other contagious respiratory diseases are primarily spread by aerosols, not hand-to-hand contact.
- Fauci downplayed the potency and durability of naturally acquired immunity, which ultimately ended the pandemic.
- Fauci declared that 99.2% of all Covid deaths were among the unvaccinated, when in reality, more than half of these deaths were among the fully vaccinated.
- Fauci incessantly promoted Covid-19 vaccines, even after gold-standard randomized controlled trials involving 73,000 people found no evidence that these injections save more lives than they take.
- On his last day in office, President Biden gave Fauci a “full and unconditional pardon” for “any offenses against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in” since 2014.
- In today’s U.S. Senate hearing on the origin of the pandemic, Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times in response to questions about his role in it.
