Anthony Fauci Lied Before Congress and the American People, But Will President Biden Do Anything?
Evidence finds that Fauci has not been truthful about his role in funding research tied to the pandemic’s origin.
6 minute read
A new investigative documentary by the U.K.'s Channel 4 detailed some of the strongest evidence to date that the COVID19 pandemic may have started from a lab leak in Wuhan, China. At the very least, the documentary’s interviews with experts and review of documents made explicit how China has misled the world about its research with dangerous pathogens while it promoted ludicrous conspiracies that the pandemic may have started in the United States.
The documentary clarified one other point: Anthony Fauci lied before Congress and the American public when he claimed during a congressional hearing that he has not funded gain-of-function research conducted by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But President Biden has campaigned on honesty and decency. The question now for President Biden is, “What will you do with Fauci now that he has broken the law and violated the public trust by lying before Congress?”
In a segment that runs a little under two minutes, Fauci distorts reality and denies that he has funded gain-of-function studies at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The term gain-of-function refers to taking a virus or other pathogen and changing it to become more transmissible, or more lethal.
Contradicting Fauci’s claims, Newsweek reported well over a year ago that the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the organization led by Fauci, funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions for work on gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.
In 2019, with the backing of NIAID, the National Institutes of Health committed $3.7 million over six years for research that included some gain-of-function work. The program followed another $3.7 million, 5-year project for collecting and studying bat coronaviruses, which ended in 2019, bringing the total to $7.4 million.
Around this same time last year, former Acting Director of the CIA Michael Morell confirmed Newsweek’s reporting to Politico, stating that the U.S. would share blame if the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan because American agencies funded research at that lab through government grants from 2014 to 2019.
Fauci certainly knew that the WIV he was helping to fund conducted gain-of-function studies, because it has been common knowledge. For example, the State Department released a fact sheet earlier this year about the Chinese government’s “deadly obsession with secrecy” concerning WIV research that included gain-of-function studies and collaboration on secret projects with the Chinese military.
The WIV’s gain-of-function studies were also obvious to the Washington Post back in March, when they called for an independent investigation into the pandemic’s origin, because understanding how the virus began infecting people is critical to prepare for future pandemics.
A senior researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Shi Zhengli, was working on “gain of function” experiments, which involve modifying viral genomes to give them new properties, including the ability to infect lung cells of laboratory mice that had been genetically modified to respond as human respiratory cells would. She was working with bat coronaviruses that were genetically very similar to the one that caused the pandemic. Could a worker have gotten infected or inadvertent leakage have touched off the outbreak in Wuhan?
A few months later, Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs confirmed in an essay that Fauci’s NIAID funded gain-of-function research at Wuhan, which Sachs described as gain-of-function research of concern (GoFRoC). Dr. Sachs leads a commission formed by a medical journal called The Lancet to investigate how the pandemic began.
It is in fact common knowledge in the US scientific community that NIH has indeed supported genetic recombinant research on SARS-like viruses that many scientists describe as GOFROC. The peer-reviewed scientific literature reports the results of such NIH-supported recombinant genetic research on SARS-like viruses.More specifically, it is clear that the NIH co-funded research at the WIV that deserves scrutiny under the hypothesis of a laboratory-related release of the virus.
Just adding this up, that’s the State Department and the Washington Post calling out the Wuhan Institute of Virology for performing dangerous gain-of-function studies, and Newsweek, a former Acting CIA Director, and Columbia’s Dr. Jeffrey Sachs stating that Fauci funded this research at the WIV.
And yet, Fauci has testified twice before Congress that he never funded gain-of-function research at Wuhan. In the last incident in July, Senator Rand Paul asked Fauci to explain why he had lied before Congress, and Fauci responded, “If anybody is lying here, Senator, it is you.”
Despite Fauci’s bloviating, it’s obvious he broke the law and misled Congress. This is not my personal opinion; I was required to know and enforce the relevant provisions of the law during the three years I ran investigations in the Senate. On two occasions I had to consult with Senate Legal Counsel and then warn people about lying to Congress.
In one case, I caught Emory University misleading the Committee with misinformation they provided regarding a professor who was secretly taking money to give marketing talks for GlaxoSmithKline. I then wrote the President of Emory University a letter warning him about the legal repercussions he could face with the Department of Justice for making false statements or misleading a congressional investigation.
A week later, Emory took action and removed the professor from his position.
To continue, Channel 4 pushed aside any doubt that Fauci lied while testifying before Congress with an interview of Stanford’s David Relman, a research physician who has long advised the federal government on potential pandemics. After a brief clip of Fauci denying during a congressional hearing that he funded gain-of-function research at the WIV, the camera switches to Relman, who explains that Fauci’s NIAID did fund gain-of-function studies at the WIV.
How do we know? They published it. And to answer the question, “Was it supported by the NIH?” The answer is, “Yes. Indirectly, but yes.”
How do we know? The paper says right on the front page “supported by NIAID, NIH.” It says it right there.
Watch the exchange.
And here’s the 2017 gain-of-function paper published by lead author Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology with funding from Fauci’s NIAID.
Fauci lied while testifying before Congress. Fauci lied to the American people. Several lines of evidence make this clear. But catching Fauci lying and breaking the law does little good, because the Department of Justice prosecutes people for lying to Congress, and the Department of Justice is run … by the Biden administration.
So what is President Biden going to do about this?
(Note: Readers wishing to watch the Channel 4 documentary “Did Covid Leak from a Lab in China?” can find it here on YouTube.
International Court of Justice?