Fauci instructed scientists who dismissed the laboratory hypothesis
Christian Skaug 12/04/2023 11:34
Anthony Fauci during a hearing on the origin of the coronavirus in the US Senate on July 20, 2021. Photo: J. Scott Applewhite Pool via AP / NTB.
In early 2020, US infection control chief Anthony Fauci gave instructions for the preparation of a scientific article which concluded that the coronavirus could not have leaked from a laboratory. He then officially referred to the article during a presidential briefing as if it were independent research, when in reality it was he himself who had coordinated the work.
According to a memo from the special subcommittee in the House of Representatives investigating the outbreak of the coronavirus and other corona-related matters, in which Fauci’s email correspondence on the matter is revealed.
Why would Fauci manipulate the supposedly scientific information about the origin of the coronavirus? Apparently because he wanted to hide his own connections to the Wuhan laboratory, writes Ashley Rindsberg on March 9 in the news magazine Tablet.
Fauci, who called the laboratory hypothesis a conspiracy theory, fabricated a consensus about the origin of the corona outbreak with the help of science writers and the media, states Rindsberg. He is an American journalist and author, who is known for exposing misleading journalism in the New York Times in his book “The Gray Lady Winked” . Rindsberg also accuses scientific journals, which in theory should be guarantors of sound science, of collusion and betrayal.
The article that dismissed the laboratory hypothesis was entitled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” and was published in Nature Medicine on 17 March 2020, and was widely discussed among others by Document. A month later, it was used officially by Fauci:
“There was a study recently that we can make available to you, where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences and the sequences in bats as they evolve,” Fauci said at a presidential briefing on April 17, 2020, exactly one month after “Proximal Origin” was published. “And the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”
The virologists Fauci hailed as “highly qualified” without mentioning that he himself had pulled the strings were Kristian G. Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes and Robert F. Garry.
The main entrance to the virology laboratory in Wuhan. Photo: Ureem2805 / Wikimedia Commons.
Fauci’s motivation appears to have been to cover his own tracks, says Rindsberg – specifically the tracks that led to the Wuhan laboratory, where the coronavirus may have been the result of controversial and potentially very dangerous research that Fauci himself sponsored:
For years, according to a report at The Intercept, the National Institutes of Health (where Fauci served as a director) directed government grants to the Chinese facility where multiple investigations by federal agencies have now concluded that the virus likely originated. The funding was specifically to fund the controversial gain of function (GoF) research that intentionally engineers deadly viruses in order to study them.
The head of infection control himself took resolute action after the outbreak, probably to limit the damage to his own reputation and called an important emergency meeting:
Fauci seemed so alarmed by the optics that in January 2020, he sent an email to his deputy, Hugh Auchincloss, with the single-word, all-caps subject line “IMPORTANT”—something he does not do in the hundreds of pages of other emails released to the public
In the email, Fauci referred to an article that the Wuhan Institute had published in 2015. It is unknown what happened during the meeting, but shortly afterwards all the media agreed that the virus was not laboratory-made.
This could succeed because the people who are called science journalists do not really do journalism, but instead act as uncritical communicators to the public of what the scientists announce, believes Rindsberg.
They see their role as translating the lofty work of pure science for a general audience, rather than as professional sceptics whose job it is to investigate competing interests, claims, and trillion-dollar funding streams in the messy world of the all-too-human scientists .
Right from the start of the pandemic, the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN did nothing but be megaphones for the scientific journals Nature, Science and Lancet, Rindsberg continues. Other publications did not seem to count for a day with what was written in these three was given the status of “science” itself.
Peter Daszak, head of the EcoHealth Alliance. Photo: Twitter.
The Lancet had itself contributed to the propaganda operation about the origin of the virus by publishing the famous letter from 27 scientists led by Peter Daszak, in which the laboratory hypothesis was condemned as a conspiracy theory.
Just like Fauci, Daszak was also out on crisis management errands. He too could be linked to the Wuhan laboratory:
What the 27 scientists neglected to mention is that their statement was organised by Peter Daszak, a co-author of the letter who is also the president of the NGO that facilitated U.S. government funding to the lab in Wuhan, where the FBI and Department of Energy have concluded is the likely source of the pandemic.
The meeting Fauci initiated took place after Kristian Andersen had suspected that the coronavirus had been manipulated:
As emails obtained from Freedom of Information requests revealed that Fauci arranged the call just days after receiving an email from Andersen expressing concerns he shared with several other prominent virologists that parts of the virus looked engineered. Andersen wrote that he and a few fellow researchers “all find the [SARS-CoV-2] genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
Christian Andersen. Still image: Scripps Research / YouTube.
But after the meeting, Andersen suddenly changed his mind and then he and his co-authors began writing the article for Nature Medicine. It was finished in record time with the exact opposite conclusion.
Andersen, Holmes, and Gary (in addition to Andrew Rambaut) began circulating a draft of “Proximal Origin” three days later, making claims that contradicted the findings Andersen had presented to Fauci in his initial email less than a week prior.
The story has even more elements, but the lesson is quite clear: It is not possible to place blind trust in what is published scientifically, even at the very highest level, especially not when such large interests are involved.
What should have been, Norwegian science journalism completely ignores that the world of science can be corrupted in this way. But why should it alone be an exception at a time when hardly any institutions fulfil their function?
When the defence is no longer a defence, the school no longer a school, the church no longer a church, the royal house no longer royal, the art not artful, conservatives not conservatives and not even women necessarily women there is no reason to feel confident that journalism is still journalism, or that science is still just as scientific every time.
As for the latter, it is not too difficult to come up with examples outside the world of viruses either.
In this age of decline, each of us must build some mental monastic walls around our own sanity so as not to end up as brainwashed, babbling zombies.