#Covering up Fauci’s role in COVID leak: Devine

Powerful people are going to a lot of effort to protect Dr. Anthony Fauci’s reputation, despite mounting evidence of his role in funding dangerous research on bat coronaviruses in the Chinese laboratory believed to be the most likely source of the pandemic. 

It is clear that Fauci, the White House chief medical adviser, misled Congress when he denied that US money had paid for “gain-of-function” research in the ­Wuhan lab. 

Grant documents published this week by The Intercept show that the organization Fauci heads, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, funded research in Wuhan on a number of novel (new) bat coronaviruses. 

The aim of the research is spelled out in one 600-page grant proposal, titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” signed off on by Fauci: to force mutations on the coronaviruses to see if they would infect mice with “humanized” lungs. 

Dozens of such federal grants worth a total of more than $50 million have been provided since 2008 to EcoHealth Alliance, a New York based wildlife “charity” founded by an obscure British-born American scientist named Peter Daszak. 

He, in turn, funneled some of that money to the head of research at Wuhan, so-called “batlady” Shi Zhengli, with whom he had been collaborating since 2005. 

In the grant proposal, for which EcoHealth Alliance was given $3.1 million from 2014 to 2019, Daszak wrote that the Wuhan scientists would conduct “virus infection experiments in cell culture and humanized mice” and look for “spillover” from bats to humans. 

“We will do this by sequencing the spike protein genes from all our bat-[coronaviruses], creating mutants . . . We will also induce site mutations in S proteins.” 

Tinkering with a virus in the lab to make it more infectious to ­humans is the very definition of “gain-of-function” research, as stated by the US Department of Health and Human Services: “Research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease.” 

Fauci insisted before Congress in May and again in July that the National Institutes of Health never funded this sort of research. But, regardless of how Fauci personally defines the term “gain of function,” the upshot is that the Frankenstein research conducted in Wuhan with American money has been fingered as the most likely source of the virus that has killed millions of people. 

Fauci could have explained to Congress, as he did in a 2011 Washington Post op-ed, that “creating a dangerous virus in the laboratory is a risk worth taking.” That was an establishment scientific position until 2015 when the Obama administration, under pressure from scientists worried about a lab leak of a deadly virus, placed a pause on the research in the United States. 

Fauci could have explained that outsourcing this dangerous research to a Chinese lab was not a sneaky backdoor way around the pause. 

He could have explained that, back in 2014 and 2015, collaboration with China was acceptable and commonplace, not the traitorous act it is now considered to be. 

He could have explained why he never told anyone in the Trump White House that his agency had funded research on bat coronaviruses in a lab at the epicenter of the emerging viral panic in ­Wuhan at the end of 2019. 

He could have explained why he ignored e-mails sent to him by virologists last February saying the virus looked under the microscope as if it might have been “engineered,” and why he vehemently maintained until quite recently that it came from the wild and not from a lab leak. 

He could have been open and honest with the American people. But instead, he denied the undeniable, obfuscated and used sly debating tricks to avoid owning up to his agency’s knowledge and funding of the Chinese research. 

That is why people are suspicious of Fauci. And if he has been unjustly accused of lying, he deserves an opportunity to set the record straight in Congress immediately. 

Fauci’s outfit at the National Institutes of Health gave a total of $14 million to Daszak in various grants. But by far the largest donor to EcoHealth was the Department of Defense, which has given Daszak more than $40 million since 2014, almost all of it through its Defense Threat Reduction Agency, for the stated purpose of “combating weapons of mass destruction,” and most of it since 2017. 

A former EcoHealth employee says that Daszak disclosed some years ago that he had been “approached by the CIA in late 2015.” 

The employee believed that the CIA helped steer large chunks of federal funding to EcoHealth’s projects in parts of the world like China where they needed “human intelligence related to biological threats and capabilities. Many of these places are hard to collect good intelligence . . . Also, [the Department of Defense] was actively always asking for data, models, and analysis.” 

If the intelligence community knew about the dangerous research going on at Wuhan and was directing funding to it through Daszak, then it is complicit in a coverup over COVID-19. 

That would explain why the recent intelligence review of the origins of the COVID-19 ordered by President Biden looked curiously like a whitewash, at least the short, unclassified version we have seen. 

It could not even agree with most scientists and intelligence analysts in the UK and Australia that a lab leak in Wuhan is the most likely origin. 

“Most agencies also assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered; however, two agencies believe there was not sufficient ­evidence to make an ­assessment either way.” 

Such a conclusion beggars belief but it might explain why Daszak and Fauci seem to be protected from hard questions. 

If the American government played any part in the research that led to the lab leak that likely caused the pandemic, the world needs to know. 

But so far the only person pushing for answers is Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Fauci is about to be ­lionized in an eponymous documentary that casts him as the hero of the pandemic.