Wednesday, 8:30 AM ET: Live Commentary on Anthony Fauci Hearing With Dr. Matt Bivens

While watching hearings on pandemic origins, Matt Bivens and I will also review details from Dr. Anthony Fauci's Diaries

“The Farrar phone call was different. The people on the phone felt that the mutations around the furin cleavage site of the spike protein could not have occurred naturally since it would require an evolutionary jump that they found nowhere in bat isolates. They bring up the possibility that this could have been deliberately inserted and either accidentally released or deliberately released by a crazy person in the lab, the former being the most likely.”

— From the diaries of Dr. Anthony Fauci, January 31, 2020

Dr. Anthony Fauci never told the president, the media, Congress, anyone about any evidence suggesting the Covid-19 pandemic was caused by a lab accident or leak from the Wuhan Institute in China. The public was deceived about this, not just by Dr. Fauci but by much of the scientific community. The consequences of that decision have still not been wrestled with, considering the millions of deaths worldwide.

“That’s the story here,” says former CDC Director, Dr. Bob Redfield. “It was created by science. That scientific decision had more consequences of loss of human life than all nuclear bombs.

On the heels of Senator Rand Paul’s release of hundreds of pages of Fauci’s personal diaries, the former head of NIAID will testify before the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee tomorrow beginning at 8:30 AM ET. It’s hard to remember a more consequential Congressional standoff. Will Fauci offer any new information? Will he be more candid about the origins of the pandemic? Will he hide behind piles of “I don’t recall” answers? One imagines the latter is most likely, but there is a chance for real drama tomorrow.

Dr. Matt Bivens, who was working was on the proverbial front lines in an Emergency Room in southern Massachusetts when the pandemic arrived, will be joining me to provide live commentary on the hearings. You can find us on X, @mtaibbi or at:

The release of Fauci’s diaries, coupled with the hearings, will mean I’ll have to put my reporter hat back on in coming weeks. Racket ran many stories on the origins of Covid-19. In July of 2023 I worked with Michael Shellenberger and Alexandra Gutentag of Public on one in particular that seemed sure to have a major impact.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic retrieved the private slack discussions of five scientists — Dr. Kristian Andersen, Dr. Robert Garry, Dr. Andrew Rambaut, Dr. Edward Holmes, and Dr. Ian Lipkin — who authored a crucial paper for Nature Medicine called “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” which became the chief reference for news media in establishing a natural or zoonotic origin for the Covid-19 virus. Whenever any news outlet speculated that the disease might have originated as, say, a lab accident, the “Proximal Origin” paper was cited as the authority to shoot it down.

The first time I looked at those slack messages, I thought they were a head shot, fatal to the credibility not only of those five scientists, but of the senior health officials with whom they interacted at the outset of the pandemic, like Jeremy Farrar and Drs. Francis Collins and Fauci.

The chats, after all, showed the scientists all but endorsing the idea of a lab leak. Referencing the “furin cleavage site” in the Fauci diary quote above, Andersen wrote, “The presence of furin moves me a posteriori slightly more towards accidental release.” In another note he wrote, “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely because they were already doing this work.” Dr. Garry added, “The major hangup I have is the polybasic cleavahe [sic] site… it’s not really a natural process.” The most damning line, to me, came from a Holmes comment about the famed “wet market” theory: “No way,” he wrote, “the selection could occur in the market.”

In a normal media environment these texts would have prompted an all-out investigation into what happened in the U.S. health bureaucracies. Why were so many high-ranking officials steered away from any investigation of the Wuhan laboratory? Why were four (at least) different U.S. government agencies funding work at a Chinese military lab? How was it that so-called gain-of-function research appeared to be continuing with American backing, long after a moratorium had been announced? Last but not least, why was the press so unwilling to investigate Fauci, who as far back as 2011 printed an article in the Washington Post arguing that “important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory,” insights whose benefits outweighed the risks even of a pandemic:

Once Fauci’s communications with the “Proximal Origin” authors became public, a functioning press would have been off and running with a major investigation. It did not take that step only because Fauci had been propped up in the press as a rational, dependable anti-Trump, the figure a frightened country could turn to in a panic.

If the press didn’t keep investigating, Senator Paul and his staff did, hammering away until it procured new documents and secured the hearing. Tomorrow may prove uneventful, but there’s at least a chance we’ll get an important answer or two. I’m also looking forward to watching alongside old friend Dr. Bivens, who has a wealth of knowledge on the subject, and questions of his own, arising from his clinical experience. More to come, but please come by tomorrow.