RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Neither NIH nor NIAID have ever approved any grant that would have supported ‘gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans,” said National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins in a May 19 statement.

In October, weeks after Collins announced his resignation, the NIH admitted funding a “limited experiment” to test if bat coronaviruses were “capable of binding” to a human receptor.

That exposes National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) boss Dr. Anthony Fauci as a liar, but there’s more to the man. It was recently revealed that Fauci’s NIAID funded cruel experiments on beagles in a Tunisian lab. Any investigation of Fauci should consider his treatment of human beings, particularly in his home state of New York.

According to a January 30 report by state Attorney General Letitia James, thousands more nursing home residents may have died from COVID-19 than Gov. Andrew Cuomo publicly acknowledged. As investigators learned, nursing home deaths had been undercounted, even in facilities the state health department had made public.

As ProPublica noted, “the true death toll among nursing home residents was not mentioned in Cuomo’s much-publicized memoir on his leadership successes handling the pandemic.” The story launched an outcry, even among Democrats and the establishment media.

On February 15, Gov. Cuomo defended his pandemic response and the next day, Fauci appeared on CNN with Jim Scietto. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Scietto recalled, had “argued that his state was following federal guidelines when he ordered those long-term care facilities to accept patients returning from hospitals. I wonder, can you clarify that. Was he really following federal guidelines to do this?”

“You know, Jim, I can’t,” Fauci responded. “I mean, excuse me. I really am – I’m honestly not trying to erase your question, but I’m not really sure of all the details of that, and I think if I, if you make a statement, it might be wrong or taken out of context. So, I prefer not to comment on that.” In reality, Dr. Fauci had already clarified the details.

As Fox News recalled, last July Fauci told PBS that New York responded “properly” and “correctly” to the pandemic. According to the state department of health, more than 15,000 seniors perished from COVID in nursing homes and related facilities, far higher than the 9,000 Cuomo acknowledged. An independent investigation could determine whether these were casualties of federal policy, but the probe should not stop with Fauci.

NIAID, with its budget of more than $6 billion, is part of NIH, with a budget of nearly $52 billion. About 80 percent of the NIH budget “funds extramural research through grants, contracts, and other awards.” An independent investigation could determine how many NIH grants funded gain-of-function research, beyond the revelations after Collins announced his retirement. As it happens, the NIH boss is not the only one to jump ship.

Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD), suddenly retired in April and has hired on with the Skoll Foundation as executive director for pandemic prevention and health systems. The reason for her sudden retirement wasn’t exactly clear.

Centers for Disease Control boss Dr. Rochelle Walensky described Messonnier as a “true hero” with “significant contributions” during the pandemic. In a series of telebriefings in early 2020,  Messonnier predicted “more cases of a novel coronavirus associated with the ongoing and expanding outbreak in Wuhan, China.”

It was a “new virus” and “at some point, we are likely to see community spread in the U.S.”

The virus was “highly contagious,” Messonnier explained, and “there’s essentially no immunity against this virus in the population because it’s a new virus.”

When reporters asked if China was telling the truth, Messonnier was evasive. One reporter asked about the link between travelers from China and coronavirus cases in Washington State. “I think that’s an interesting hypothesis,” Messonnier said, but there were “alternate explanations of the same findings.”

At no point in the briefings did Dr. Messonnier deviate from the line advanced by the People’s Republic of China, a Communist dictatorship. In fact, Messonnier said, “we should be clear to compliment the Chinese on the early recognition of the respiratory outbreak center in the Wuhan market, and how rapidly they were able to identify it as a novel coronavirus.” That is odd behavior for a “true hero” of the pandemic, unless Messonnier is a hero for China.

Dr. Messonnier began her career as a member of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), a division of the CDC tasked to keep deadly pathogens from arriving on American soil. The EIS had its vaunted “disease detectives” on the ground in China, but obviously failed to prevent the “novel virus” from arriving stateside and spreading among the public.

According to UC Berkeley molecular biologist Peter Duesberg, author of Inventing the AIDS Virus, the EIS is a “medical CIA” functioning primarily as an “informal surveillance network” that “can act as unrecognized advocates for the CDC viewpoint, whether as media journalists or as prominent physicians.” An independent investigation could uncover the role of the EIS in the pandemic, and the same goes for Messonnier, Collins and Fauci.

As they press for an investigation, embattled Americans should keep in mind the casualties, especially the thousands of elderly victims in New York. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “They are dead. You are alive. Do your duty. The world must know all about it.” And to adapt Milan Kundera, the struggle against white coat supremacy is the struggle of memory against forgetting.