Fauci must answer for his role in Wuhan’s COVID lab

There are details emerging about the Wuhan Institute of Virology that merit further exploration

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Dr Anthony Fauci (Getty)
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We still don’t know the origins of COVID-19, a full year and a half out from the start of the pandemic. The Chinese government initially claimed that the virus was spread through a wet market in the Wuhan province or that it perhaps came to China from parts of Europe in frozen food trucks. Almost immediately, any inquiries into how the outbreak started beyond the CCP’s original story were brushed aside and dubbed conspiracy theories by the US’s corporate media. Quite why is a question that should trouble any independent-minded person.

When Sen. Tom Cotton, after…

We still don’t know the origins of COVID-19, a full year and a half out from the start of the pandemic. The Chinese government initially claimed that the virus was spread through a wet market in the Wuhan province or that it perhaps came to China from parts of Europe in frozen food trucks. Almost immediately, any inquiries into how the outbreak started beyond the CCP’s original story were brushed aside and dubbed conspiracy theories by the US’s corporate media. Quite why is a question that should trouble any independent-minded person.

When Sen. Tom Cotton, after viewing intelligence, suggested that perhaps the virus leaked from the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, the largest bio safety laboratory for studying BSL-4 coronaviruses, news outlets such as the Washington Post declared his comment a ‘debunked conspiracy theory’ even as some of its own journalists raised the same questions. When a World Health Organization team visited Wuhan earlier this year, the Chinese government was uncooperative. An investigative team that had been largely sympathetic to China — nothing to do with Beijing’s support and contributions to WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, of course — could not rule out the possibility of a lab leak, either accidental or deliberate.

There are now more connections emerging from the Wuhan Institute that should be explored further. These connections involve the United States government, the National Institutes of Health and Dr Anthony Fauci — and he should have to explain them before Congress.

These questions could of course pose complications to the mainstream media storyline that Fauci is a great hero, a man lionized, even fetishized by the political left for being the antithesis to then-president Donald Trump. If the NIH and Anthony Fauci played any role in financing or assisting the Wuhan Institute, including outsourcing the study of BSL-4 novel coronaviruses, the good doctor should have to answer for it.

To boil things down: the United States was outsourcing the study of novel coronaviruses to a group called EcoHealth Alliance, a group which according to NPR was doing the bulk of collection of coronavirus samples from bats and transferring those samples and research to the Wuhan Institute.

The original grant money provided to EcoHealth was $3.7 million, $76,000 of which was slated for the Wuhan Institute. This funding was approved with the backing of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the agency that Anthony Fauci heads, according to Newsweek.

That contract was canceled in April 2020. Those grants were approved by the National Institute of Health. According to a blockbuster piece in New York magazine, one of the first outlets to take the lab leak hypothesis seriously, EcoHealth Alliance ‘has channeled money from the National Institutes of Health to Shi Zhengli’s laboratory in Wuhan, allowing the lab to carry on recombinant research into diseases of bats and humans’.

Dr Shi Zhengli is a notable expert in bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute. She had been studying the effects of bat viruses on humans when ‘in 2012, six men set to work shoveling bat guano were sickened by a severe lung disease, three of them fatally. Shi’s team took the samples back to Wuhan and analyzed whatever fragments of bat virus she could find. In some cases, when she found a sequence that seemed particularly significant, she experimented with it in order to understand how it might potentially infect humans. Some of her work was funded by the National Institutes of Health and some of it by the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency of the Department of Defense via Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance.’

Peter Dasazk of EcoHealth Alliance gave an interview to the Bulletin in December 2019, shortly before the first reports of the COVID-19 outbreak where he ‘talked in glowing terms of how researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been reprogramming the spike protein and generating chimeric coronaviruses capable of infecting humanized mice’.

Right now, all of this is just circumstantial evidence, largely due to the CCP blocking any meaningful investigation of the Institute. But the circumstantial evidence is piling up. People in the US have a right to know what role, if any, our own government played in this pandemic.

Were the NIH and US government recklessly outsourcing research to a laboratory in Wuhan, where there were reports of safety concerns dating back to 2018?

Of course there is no suggestion that the NIH or Anthony Fauci is responsible for unleashing this pandemic on the world, though the media outlets that staunchly defended him are ducking their responsibility to get to the bottom of this story. At least some politicians, like Rep. Mike Gallagher, are starting to ask the right questions.

Meanwhile, any suggestion of the NIH’s role in Wuhan is brushed off by the mainstream media and the Twitterati. But this is not a conspiracy theory. Once again our media is walking into a credibility trap which they may come to regret.

An unskeptical media is an irresponsible media. Journalists should be unafraid to trace the origins of this pandemic, no matter where their inquiries may lead.

By not doing so, they are committing a dangerous abdication of duty in favor of hero worship, and are ignoring the possibility that Dr Fauci, as well as several others in our government, know more than what they have let on so far.