RUTHFULLY YOURS

“What is your opinion on how COVID became so well adapted to humans?” Margaret Brennan of CBS News asked Dr. Anthony Fauci, Joe Biden’s chief medical advisor, on March 28.

“You know, Margaret, that’s an argument that goes back and forth,” said Fauci, who has headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984. “A very plausible explanation for this is that this virus jumped from an animal host, a bat to maybe an intermediate host and then to a human.” The “other theory” is that it “accidentally escaped” from “a lab.”

“I think the most likely one is that in nature, in the wild, it adapted itself,” Fauci concluded. Brennan showed no interest in the science behind that astounding statement.

“All right,” she said, “And as you’re acknowledging there, no evidence. We’re still looking at it. We’ll continue following it. Dr. Fauci, thank you for your opinion and your perspective.” Had Brennan done her homework, she might have found “evidence” that the virus was indeed the product of a lab. For example, she could have asked Fauci if “gain of function” research enabled COVID-19 to become well adapted to humans.

Gain of function research as Nidhi Subbaraman explains in Nature, “involves making pathogens more deadly or more transmissible.” As the Office of Science Policy of the National Institutes of Health puts it, this research can “enhance the pathogenicity or transmissibility of potential pandemic pathogens (PPPs)” and that can raise “biosafety and biosecurity concerns.”

Fauci in 2012 cited the risks of such research, wondering “what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic?” The NIH banned gain of function research in 2014 but revived it in 2017 with no objection from Fauci. Three years later, after a global pandemic, Fauci’s August 2020 “Emerging Pandemic Diseases: How We Got to COVID-19” paper is silent on any role this dangerous research might have played in the COVID-19 outbreak. If anybody comes away from that suspicious of a coverup, it would be hard to blame them.

Fauci’s NIAID also funded China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), where gain of function research could be conducted in secret, with no accountability, and which received shipments of deadly pathogens from a lab in Canada. The pathogens included the Nipah virus, able to jump between humans and as Tom Blackwell of Canada’s National Post explained, “a threat to cause a widespread outbreak.” On the role of China in general and the WIV in particular, Fauci has been evasive, to say the least.

Margaret Brennan might also have asked Fauci where he earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry or molecular biology. As it happens, Fauci’s bio shows no advanced degrees in those disciplines, so strictly speaking he is not a virologist. That could account for the way he goes “back and forth” on just about every aspect of the pandemic. In the early going, he favored prophecies based on computer models, and scientific statements were hard to find.

Fauci earned a medical degree in 1966 and two years later was hired on with the National Institutes of Health. In the 1990s Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, Ph.D. in biochemistry from UC Berkeley and inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), said Fauci “doesn’t understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he’s in.”

Fauci’s prediction that AIDS would ravage the entire nation proved totally wrong, but he stayed on the job as head of NIAID. Fifty-three years after he entered government, Fauci bags a salary of $417,608—more than the president of the United States. NIAID now boasts a budget of more than $6 billion, an increase of 3.1 percent over the previous fiscal year.

Fauci is a powerful politician who never has to face the voters. That also comes through in his emerging pandemic diseases paper, which calls for “strengthening the United Nations and its agencies, particularly the World Health Organization.” In January, Fauci told his “dear friend,” WHO boss Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, that Joe Biden signed letters “retracting the previous administration’s announcement to withdraw” from the WHO. The United States, Fauci said, “also intends to fulfill its financial obligations to the organization.”

Those are purely political functions but Fauci, now 80, is still hailed as the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases. In reality, he’s the nation’s leading white coat supremacist, and as Angelo Codevilla puts it, a “deep state fraud.”