On April 17, 2020, with much of the country still in some form of lockdown and news of overwhelmed hospitals dominating the headlines, Dr. Anthony Fauci, then a member of the President’s Coronavirus Task Force, was asked a question toward the end of a White House press briefing: Was there a possibility that this novel virus came from a lab in Wuhan, China?
“There was a study recently,” Fauci said confidently, “where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve, and the mutations that it took to get to where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.” In other words, it wasn’t from the lab.
This moment set the template for much that would follow from Fauci over the next three years. That is, evasion, deception, and misdirection about his support of high-risk virology research and its connection to the possibility that a lab leak in Wuhan caused a worldwide catastrophe.
Fauci, who was the face of the public health community during the crisis, pushed the idea that the evidence strongly indicated that the virus was just a tragic, natural occurrence. He insisted, repeatedly, that an epidemic that started in Wuhan was unlikely to have been the result of an escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
But Fauci had an incentive to arrive at his conclusion about the deadly pandemic that started in Wuhan. The WIV was known for doing high-risk virology research studying and manipulating coronaviruses. Fauci, as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for almost 40 years, had funded such research at the WIV.
Fauci’s posture—dismissive toward the theory of the lab leak, and later, condescending toward those who entertained it—set what became the accepted narrative about the origins of the pandemic. It was a narrative that was parroted by the government, public health officials, and the media, and even enforced by social media platforms at the request of the Biden White House.
But last month, a trove of explosive emails and other documents were released by the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. These revealed evidence of Fauci’s and other officials’ behind-the-scenes involvement with scientists and journalists, demonstrating their efforts to quash the lab leak theory.