A series of newly uncovered emails, discovered by the GOP House Subcommittee investigating the origins of the coronavirus, is fueling a fresh debate over the role that Dr. Anthony Fauci may have played in trying to shut down investigations into the origins of Covid-19.
In a memo released Sunday, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic accuses Fauci of prompting a scientific study to disprove any speculation that the virus came from a Chinese lab.
According to the memo,
New evidence released by the Select Subcommittee today suggests that Dr. Fauci “prompted” the drafting of a publication that would “disprove” the lab leak theory, the authors of this paper skewed available evidence to achieve that goal…
In addition, the Subcommittee writes that on February 1, 2020, Dr. Fauci along with Dr. Frances Collins and 11 other scientists, were warned on a call that coronavirus may have been leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China — and may have been intentionally genetically manipulated.
Several days later, three of the participants on the call authored a paper dispelling the notion that the virus may have originated at a Chinese lab in a paper called, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”, allegedly at Fauci’s prompting. They sent the draft to Fauci for editing and approval ahead of its publication in Nature Medicine.
The House Oversight committee also included an email written by the study’s author, Dr. Kristien Anderson, as part of their evidence against Fauci. Dr. Anderson submitted the paper to Nature Medicine on Feburary 17, 2020 with a cover email that read, “There has been a lot of speculation, fear-mongering and conspiracy theories put forward in this space. [This paper was] Prompted by Jeremy Farr, Tony Fauci, and Frances Collins.”
On April 17, 2020 when Dr. Fauci was questioned by the press about the possibility of the virus having originated from a Chinese lab, Fauci cited the same study that the committee alleges he played a role in commissioning.
“There was a study recently,” Fauci said from the White House podium, “where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences…in bats as they evolve and the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now and it is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.” He promised reporters that he would make the authors available to the media.
In recent days, there has been a renewed focus on China and the role China may have played in the Coronavirus pandemic. Last week, the U.S. Energy Department concluded that Covid-19 “most likely” originated from a lab leak in China. Meanwhile, the FBI reached the same conclusion. The CIA, and other intelligence agencies, remain undecided and the White House says there is “no consensus” on where the virus originated.
In May 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported that the intelligence report commissioned by Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had yielded evidence linking The Wuhan Institute of Virology to the origin of Covid-19 amid revelations that at least three employees at the lab had become sick enough that they sought hospital care in November of 2019.
China has repeatedly denied that the virus came from one of its labs.
Read the House Subcommittee’s memo entire here.
