Why did Biden pardon Fauci?

Joe Biden left it until the last minute to issue a pre-emptive pardon of Anthony Fauci for any offense committed since 2014 in his work on “the White House Coronavirus Task Force or the White House Covid-19 Response Team, or as Chief Medical Advisor to the President.” Yet surely Covid began in 2019, not 2014?

The significance of 2014 is that this was when the Obama administration responded to anxiety among some scientists about a series of experiments that made influenza viruses potentially more dangerous to people — by banning federal funding for any such gain-of-function experiments.

Yet from June 2014 money flowed from Fauci’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases to support experiments which led to gain-of-function research in Wuhan in China via an organization called the EcoHealth Alliance. There, SARS-like viruses “gained” the function in certain experiments of becoming 10,000 times more infectious in humanized mice. (Both the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance have denied any wrongdoing.)

“So let me get this straight: Fauci’s pardon goes all the way back to 2014, the year he started funding the labs that eventually helped create the chaos we’ve all been living through,” wrote the science journalist Dr. Simon Goddek on hearing news of the pardon.

Fauci hotly denied to Congress that he had ever funded gain of function experiments in Wuhan, telling senator Rand Paul “You do not know what you are talking about.” He claimed that one particular narrow definition of gain of function did not apply in this case because it did not include animal viruses, only human ones. Besides, the EcoHealth president, Peter Daszak, wrote an email in 2016 to Fauci’s colleague saying “we are very happy to hear that our gain of function research funding pause has been lifted” (my emphasis).

Senator Paul was pulling no punches on Monday: “If there was ever any doubt as to who bears responsibility for the Covid pandemic, Biden’s pardon of Fauci forever seals the deal. As Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee I will not rest until the entire truth of the coverup is exposed. Fauci’s pardon will only serve as an accelerant to pierce the veil of deception. Ignominious! Anthony Fauci will go down in history as the first government scientist to be preemptively pardoned for a crime.”

As Paul hints, this is not the end of the matter. Biden’s pardon applies only to federal prosecutions, not state ones. And it also makes it harder for Fauci in any congressional hearings to “claim the Fifth’”since he could not implicate himself in a crime for which he is immune. More generally, the pardon seems to imply guilt. The Biden White House says not, but then the Biden Justice Department said a few months ago that “accepting a pardon from Donald Trump is ‘a confession of guilt’ for your crimes.” They cannot have it both ways. (Dr. Fauci denies any criminal wrongdoing, stating that “there are no possible grounds for any allegation or threat of criminal investigation or prosecution of me.”)

Had he been prosecuted by the Trump administration, Fauci could have been accused of at least three offenses: funding research that was forbidden, some of which may have led to a terrible pandemic, lying to Congress about it and covering up evidence to obscure the origin of Covid. 

His emails and testimonies relating to the early months of the pandemic appear to reveal a consistent pattern of trying to deflect attention from the possibility that the outbreak began with an accident in the very Wuhan laboratory his agency had had funded. In those early weeks, remember, people thought the epidemic would probably blow over and be soon forgotten rather than pored over by investigators for years.

A few days before the pardon was announced, Peter Daszak and EcoHealth were officially debarred from receiving future federal funding on the recommendation of Congress. Daszak was fired by EcoHealth at the same time, perhaps so he could receive severance payments, which resigning would not allow. 

There is something approaching full-scale panic in the American scientific bureaucracy at what the Trump administration may reveal in the coming months about what went on in Wuhan with the support of American grants and American expertise.