Dr. Fauci won’t see you now. The man who served as America’s top medical adviser during Covid had to be subpoenaed to appear before the Senate this week. Wanted to hear his expert opinion? Too bad. Almost every question received the same response. “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.”
Anthony Fauci’s silence is the perfect coda to the madness of the Covid era. We were told, again and again, to “trust the science.” But the science establishment didn’t trust us. Information was withheld, facts were twisted and opinions suppressed. Fauci was given a sweeping presidential pardon by Joe Biden. Yet even now, years later and immune from consequences, Dr. Fauci doesn’t want to talk.
Fauci’s silence is the perfect coda to the madness of the Covid era
One of the central unanswered questions of the Senate hearing was about the origins of Covid-19. The lab leak theory is the most obvious example of a pernicious and politicized approach to information. We know, from reporting in The Spectator, that in January 2020 Fauci was alerted to the fact that the virus’s genetic data looked suspicious. “Some of the features (potentially) look engineered,” he was told by a California researcher with whom he was corresponding. A series of world-leading scientists told Fauci that they believed the genome was “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
The problem for Fauci was that under his leadership, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases had funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Between 2014 and 2019, NIAID paid almost $600,000 for research into bat coronaviruses. The grant application was personally signed by Fauci.
Within a few days, he was encouraging colleagues to write a paper asserting that Covid had a natural origin. “Our main work over the last couple weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory,” one of its authors wrote in an email. Soon, the establishment position was that the lab leak theory was dangerously wrong. MSNBC called it “one of Trumpworld’s most favorite conspiracy theories.” NPR said it was a “baseless conspiracy theory.” When Fauci was asked about the lab leak theory at a White House press conference in April 2020, he pointed to that same paper as evidence of its untruth. The genetic data, he said, “is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”
By the time Biden entered office, a full information lockdown was under way. From documents released by the House Judiciary Committee, we learn that a senior Facebook executive emailed Mark Zuckerberg explaining that the social media site had begun censoring Covid material. “In February 2021, in response to public pressure and tense conversations with the new [Biden] Administration, we started removing” any references to the “Wuhan lab leak theory.” Pressure was put on YouTube and Amazon too.
All this is worth repeating, partly because Fauci refused to answer questions about it. But it also demonstrates a strange divergence between the progressive establishment and the American right. The former seem intent on controlling information. They are the ones who set up misinformation units and pressure gatekeepers to restrict certain ideas.
The right – the likes of Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson – are routinely attacked for interviewing people with unsavory views. It’s unacceptable, we are told, to give a platform to those such as professional wacko Alex Jones, Holocaust revisionist Darryl Cooper and the Russian President Vladimir Putin. Whatever you think of such people, the decision to interview them is based on the premise that the public – you and me – are grown-up enough to reach our own conclusions. That premise was abandoned during Covid.
Today, the FBI, CIA, the Department of Energy and the German Federal Intelligence Service have all concluded that, on balance, Covid was in some way engineered. That is what Fauci was told, too, at the very start of the pandemic. He is clearly not responsible for all of the Covid-era censorship. But he was a key player, someone who was involved in coordinating the Covid response at the highest level. His silence when questioned is the most damning evidence of all.
This article originally appeared in the Americano newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.
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