The Fauci Legend Will Not Die!

The ferocity of the Covid coverup is a thing to behold.

Mother Jones on Dr. Anthony Fauci:

The diary entries contain plenty of cringeworthy moments—Fauci congratulating himself on how famous he had become, for example, and basking in the attention of female celebrities like Julia Roberts and Barbra Streisand. What they don’t contain—much to the dismay of Paul and Fauci’s other critics—is any kind of smoking gun proving that the public health leader deliberately misled the American people.

I wonder what Mother Jones would consider a smoking gun. On February 9th, 2020, appearing on the Newt Gingrich podcast “Newt’s world,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said the idea that Covid-19 came from a lab was a “conspiracy theory… without any scientific basis.”

This was eight days after Fauci took part in a conference call with eleven other prominent scientists, including NIH Director Francis Collins, Wellcome Trust Director Jeremy Farrar, UK Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance, Scripps Research Translational Institute Director Kristian Anderson, Germany’s Christian Drosten, University of Sydney Professor Edward Holmes, the University of Edinburgh’s Andrew Rambaut, Tulane Virology Professor Robert Garry, University of Dundee Professor Mike Ferguson, and Ron Fouchier and M.P.G. Koopmans from the Erasmus Medical Center.

Thanks to the diary, we now know that just three of the scientists in that call — Fauci himself, plus the German Drosten and gain-of-function expert Fouchier — advocated for natural origin. Here’s how Fauci characterized the others:

“The rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible, and given the fact that Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in GOF in coronaviruses to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor, we could not let this go.”

This is Fauci in writing explaining that 9 of 12 scientists at a key meeting he attended at the beginning of the pandemic felt that “deliberate insertion” of a key mutation was possible, in part because a prominent Chinese scientist known to all had been working on that exact sequencing problem just miles from where the first cases were reported. To repeat the smoking gun line: “Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in [gain-of-function] to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor.”

For Fauci to subsequently say in public that the notion of laboratory release was without “scientific basis” was clearly deceptive. It was deceptive when at a White House briefing on April 18th he said, “the mutations that [Covid] 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.” It was deceptive not to tell the public he’d been in constant communication with the authors of a Nature Medicine paper he kept citing as proof of this theory, authors who described him as having “prompted” the paper to begin with.

Fauci’s deception was proven long before the release of the diary, anyway. Three years ago a House Committee released an email by Fauci referencing that same February 1st meeting, noting that scientist described the mutations as “most unusual to have evolved naturally,” resulting in a “suspicion that this mutation was intentionally inserted.” Why did they think this? In Fauci’s own words:

The suspicion was heightened by the fact that scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine the molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan.

This is the public health official who repeatedly told the public he believed the virus evolved naturally and denounced the lab leak theory as ignorant nonsense. Did we ever hear him talk about leading scientists remarking to him about the novelty of the Covid-19 mutation? Did we hear him mention that his close colleague Jeremy Farrar called a 2105 paper written by the University of North Carolina’s Ralph Baric with China’s Zhi Zhengli “a how-to-manual for building the coronavirus in a laboratory”? Its title, after all, was “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence.”

MoJo wasn’t the only outlet to shrug at the hearing and the diaries. NPR chose the “chilling effect” thesis, quoting New Jersey Senator Andy Kim in saying the Fauci hearings might dissuade “the next generation of people who might consider stepping up to serve our nation.”

CNN ran multiple iterations of the argument that Senator Rand Paul’s questioning of Fauci was just sour grapes, just the price of fame. “This is an assault on science and scientists, and, unfortunately, Dr. Fauci is in that seat,” said guest Dr. Scott Ratzan on the channel. “Thirty-eight years of service to the country, one of the best-known scientists in infectious disease, unfortunately, has taken a lot of heat for… issues that were not fully his.”

CBS medical correspondent Céline Gounder stressed she’d read all of Fauci’s diaries, and her big takeaway was a version of, “Who among us hasn’t taken a selfie with a celebrity?” (Nate Burleson — shame on you, dude — chimed in to say, “It’s human nature.”) She dismounted by saying, “The occasional comment about Barbara Streisand is not the headline here.”

Poring through document releases is dull. In Fauci’s case, the significant passages are about the February 1st meeting, plus another saying a failure to address certain media reports would look like Fauci and fellow officials were “covering things up,” and later entries conceding things like “we do not have good vaccinations to prevent infection.” The diary’s most remarkable quality, however, is that it’s full of passages blithely contradicting public statements. Exactly unlike the suggestion of Mother Jones, it shows he was withholding information from the public throughout. That’s on top of years of FOIA and Congressional releases showing the same thing.

Put it all together, and it still doesn’t drag a network like CBS past, “Who doesn’t love a celebrity selfie?” When it comes to knocking these people off a lie, it really does take a village.