The media blackout on Fauci’s damning emails

Last week saw another batch of emails drop from Anthony Fauci, and another media blackout as to their contents. The strategy by the press in cases like this has been pretty straightforward: ignore the story, wait for right-leaning media or Republicans to pick it up, then frame any attacks on the subject as tainted by partisanship.

Last week, when confronted once again by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, Fauci responded with more hyperbole and ad hominem. The media, meanwhile, framed the exchanges as “Rand Paul Attacks!” and “Anthony Fauci defends!” They refused to look at the information in the emails that Paul was asking about, refused to ask questions about them, refused to even report on them. They are interested in the bloodsport, not the truth. The reason for that is simple: the truth is becoming very problematic for the man who once conflated himself with science itself.

The only reporting done on the emails by the New York Times, for instance, was a video clip from the Associated Press regarding the exchange with Senator Paul. What has not been covered with any sort of journalistic enthusiasm is the topic of the emails themselves, the most damning yet, which suggest that Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, the former head of the NIH, purposefully downplayed the possibility of a lab leak in Wuhan, China, at the start of the pandemic because it might have damaged “international harmony” in the scientific community.

The emails surround a now-infamous February 1 conference call in 2020 that involved Collins, Fauci, and EcoHealth Alliance head Peter Daszak, who has come under scrutiny for receiving grant money from Fauci’s NIAID to conduct gain of function research in China. Daszak is perhaps the most important figure of the pandemic, and has received generous protection from Fauci for reasons that Fauci has not yet explained.

On the February conference call, several scientists expressed their concerns that Covid-19 had engineered characteristics and had possibly even been made by lab workers in Wuhan. Immediately after the call, Collins and Fauci set out to downplay this theory in public and squash any dissent from a zoonotic origin in the media.

At best, Fauci and Collins looked like they were engaged in a PR operation to protect colleagues like Daszak. At worst, it was much, much more nefarious than that.

The problem for the mainstream media now is that too much of a paper trail has been left by Collins, Fauci and others to simply push the narrative that Republicans are weaponizing Fauci’s emails.

The problem for Fauci and his media allies is that the truth is going to come out eventually, with or without their cooperation, transparency, and intellectual curiosity. There is no Donald Trump to suck the oxygen out of the news cycle anymore. At this point, it all looks like malpractice, both by the mainstream media in ignoring Anthony Fauci’s emails and by Fauci himself.