The Sorcerer’s Apprentices

When government scientists use private email for official business, delete “smoking guns,” and write “Tony doesn’t want his fingerprints on origin stories,” maybe they're engaged in conspiracy?

8 minute read

Today’s guest essay comes from David Robertson

In the most famous scene of Walt Disney’s 1940 film, Fantasia, Mickey Mouse plays the sorcerer’s apprentice, slaving away to clean his master’s home, until the sorcerer ceases casting spells and retires for a nap. Donning his master’s magic hat, Mickey then summons forces which quickly escape his ability to contain them.

The film offers a timely metaphor for our current pandemic moment, where investigations continue exposing leading public health officials who conspired to conceal that they funded reckless “gain-of-function” virus research through the Mickey Mouse operation of Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, research that likely summoned COVID-19 into existence. Unlike in Fantasia, however, today’s world is not bewitched by one clumsy apprentice, but rather, by a sprawling international network of scientists and expert officials.

For those of us who have long suspected the COVID virus leaked from a US-funded lab in Wuhan, the last month of testimony before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has been revelatory. So when Tony Fauci appears before the Committee tomorrow, you better believe I will be watching.

A little over a week ago, Democrats and Republicans came together in a bipartisan roasting of David Morens, Anthony Fauci’s leading advisor for over two decades, who congressional investigators caught using his private email to willfully conceal official business from the public and deleting government emails with “anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”

Most telling of all were Morens’ private communications with none other than EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak—Morens’ personal friend and the man long suspected of being at the center of any lab origin scenario. In one flagrant example indicating the immense stakes of this investigation, Morens wrote to Daszak: “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.”

Three weeks before Morens’ congressional flogging, Daszak finally acknowledged, in his own testimony before the Committee, that he does not know what viruses his collaborators at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) might hold. Yet, since the pandemic’s beginning, he has publicly professed countless times to have inside knowledge that the WIV did not have any virus that could have led to COVID-19.

“Look, first, the idea that this virus escaped from a lab is just pure baloney,” Daszak told Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, in April 2020. “I’ve been working with that lab for 15 years. And the samples collected were collected by me and others in collaboration with our Chinese colleagues … There was no viral isolate in the lab. There was no cultured virus that’s anything related to SARS coronavirus 2. So it’s just not possible.”

Daszak gave similar misleading statements to Science Magazine in November 2021 and to The Intercept during a March 2022 interview.

Back in June 2020, Morens and Gerald Keusch, who is also implicated in Morens’ email fiasco, offered “independent” support to Daszak’s fabricated claims in a paper they coauthored. Morens and Keusch were confident an accidental release could be ruled out “because no laboratory had the virus.” And using terminology that echoed Daszak’s statements to Democracy Now, they claimed a lab escape was “impossible without a viral isolate present.”

It’s not clear where Morens and Keusch received such privileged information about the internal goings on at the lab in Wuhan, China, however, fully one-third of the citations (12/36) in their article referenced pieces authored by Daszak—the man they were defending and with whom they were in continuous email contact at this time.

Recent facts concerning whether NIH grant money funded dangerous gain-of-function virological research at the WIV have also added further evidence that Anthony Fauci, Morens’ direct superior at the time, perjured himself by giving misleading testimony to Congress. During a May 2021 Senate hearing, Fauci testified, “The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

Senator Rand Paul then called Fauci out in a letter to the Justice Department, noting that Fauci funded a gain-of-function study published by WIV scientists in 2017; Stanford’s David Relman corroborated this in a British documentary on COVID.

University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric confirmed in a congressional deposition released the day of Daszak’s congressional flaying that EcoHealth’s NIH-funded research in Wuhan resulted in a “gain of function phenotype.”

A couple of weeks later, the current director of NIH, Lawrence Tabak, also acknowledged during a Committee hearing that NIH has in fact funded “generic” gain-of-function research at the WIV.

Despite these phenomenal revelations from the last month of testimony, Democrats and the mainstream press seem stuck in February 2020. Back then, anyone daring to ask if a lab accident started the pandemic was dismissed by the New York Times for promoting a “fringe theory” that the Washington Post claimed was “already debunked.”

After rebuking Morens during the hearing, for instance, Democrat Debbie Dingell pivoted to denying that Morens’ extensive communications with Daszak through private backchannels had anything to do with the origin of COVID. “I worry that we are once again blurring the lines between professional misconduct and the separate question of the origins of COVID-19,” Dingell told Morens.

Dingell’s remark was all the more bizarre given that she did not explain why she thinks Morens and others engaged in such flagrantly criminal behavior, and then lied about it for years.

Call me a conspiracy nutter, but when I see high ranking officials using their private emails to conduct official business, calling on people to delete “smoking guns,” and writing “Tony doesn’t want his fingerprints on origin stories,” it makes me think that maybe, just maybe, there was an effort to hide official business in private emails, delete smoking guns, and keep Tony’s fingerprints off such matters.

Nor are these COVID apprentices limited to actors in the US or to those who have so far appeared before the Committee. At the very beginning of the pandemic, Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, and Jeremy Farrar orchestrated the infamous “Proximal Origin” paper by recruiting willing collaborators and puffing up their sloppy opinion piece into an illusion of scientific consensus that COVID-19 must have a natural origin.

It is increasingly apparent that the most likely scenario for the pandemic’s origin involves high ranking US officials channeling funds to Daszak’s Mickey Mouse operation in Wuhan before it all went terribly, if predictably, wrong. So when it all went topsy-turvy, it’s no surprise that scientists and NIH officials who knew the most about what was going on in Wuhan acted first and foremost to move their discussions off publicly scrutinized channels and collude to save their own skins.

But despite the hard falls of several apprentices, we are yet to confront the sorcerer behind the scientific hubris that likely gave us COVID-19.

Following Morens’ testimony, Kentucky Republican, Senator Rand Paul, referred Morens to the Department of Justice for concealing and destroying federal records. Paul then called for Morens to be offered immunity on condition that he “testify to what Anthony Fauci was doing.”

Fauci will appear tomorrow before the Select Subcommittee, forcing everyone to wind the clock back four years to the very beginning of the pandemic.

“It is essential that we speak this AM. Keep your cell phone on,” Fauci emailed his deputy Hugh Auchincloss, on February 1, 2020. “You will have tasks today that must be done.”

Is Fauci’s email early evidence of the sorcerer outsourcing the coverup to his loyal apprentices?

Over a year later, David Morens confirmed that NIH had orchestrated a conspiracy to hide relevant information from Congress and the public. “I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house,” Morens emailed Daszak. “He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

Six months later, Morens wrote to Daszak (from his private email, naturally): “Peter, from Tony’s numerous recent comments to me, and from what Francis [Collins] has been vocal about over the past 5 days, they are trying to protect you, which also protects their own reputations.”

How would NIH efforts to “protect” Daszak—the man facing accusations that his Wuhan research caused the pandemic—also “protect” the reputations of Collins and Fauci? Might the answer be the glaringly obvious one: NIH’s funding for Daszak’s reckless gain-of-function research in Wuhan?

Is the sorcerer who channeled funds to poorly overseen, reckless gain-of-function research in Wuhan about to be unveiled?

During a private interview with the Committee, Fauci claimed he did “did not recall” relevant COVID-19 information over 100 times. But when the hearing starts and Fauci is sworn in to uphold the truth, will Democrats and Republicans come together and press him to clear up his faulty memory and explain the mountains of damning evidence already brought to light? Will Congress let the public see Fauci’s private correspondence, his “secret back channel,” as Morens so delicately put it?

Will the Select Subcommittee help the public decipher the black magic behind the origin of COVID-19, serving to restore some of the trust in public institutions which has been corroded by scientific hubris and efforts to conceal possibly the greatest public health scandal in history?

Or will they protect an individual highly proficient at transmuting damning evidence into love stories in the New York Times?

David Robertson recently obtained a PhD in the History of Science Program at Princeton University. He has previously written about COVID-19 for The Washington Post, The BMJ, The Boston Globe, STAT, and The American Journal of Public Health.