Wuhan Institute of Virology

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic that killed millions of people across the world, taxpayers may still fund one of the ethically plagued American organizations that worked closely with the Chinese lab where the pandemic is believed to have originated. The inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services testified to Congress this week that she did not recommend that EcoHealth Alliance, the NGO accused of gross conflicts of interest and mismanagement of its relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology be suspended or debarred — the process by which the federal government bans any funding to an NGO.

Dr. Anthony Fauci sat for a seven-hour deposition last week as part of a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana. The suit claims that the Biden administration colluded with social media platforms to censor information surrounding the origins and circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as information that went against CDC guidelines and mandates around vaccines and efficacy masks. Fauci, the NIAID and chief medical advisor to President Biden (and others), didn’t say much. In fact he used the term “I cannot recall,” or some variation, over 190 times.

Neither the political left nor the political right understands Anthony Fauci. To the left, Fauci is a patron saint to be thanked and worshipped. They fashion candles, hymns and magazine covers after him. They canonize him much the same way they canonized Ruth Bader Ginsburg, though I suspect that if you stopped them on the street and asked for details of a Ginsburg opinion, they would come up empty beyond screaming “Notorious RBG.” Anthony Fauci is venerated much the same way. The right has compared Fauci to Nazi ministers of information, a Luciferian demigod drunk on pandemic power, a liar and hypnotist willing to do anything to retain his newfound celebrity and near-total grip on pandemic messaging — a grip that only solidified after Joe Biden’s presidential election.

With a laboratory leak in Wuhan looking more and more likely as the source of the Covid pandemic, the Chinese authorities are not the only ones dismayed. Western environmentalists had been hoping to turn the pandemic into a fable about humankind’s brutal rape of Gaia. Even if “wet” wildlife markets and smuggled pangolins were exonerated in this case, they argued, and the outbreak came from some direct contact with bats, the moral lesson was ecological. Deforestation and climate change had left infected bats stressed and with nowhere to go but towns. Or had driven desperate people into bat-infested caves in search of food or profit. Green grandees were in no doubt of this moral lesson. “Nature is sending us a message.

“I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done, and I’m fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China. However, I will repeat again: the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded ‘gain-of-function’ research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”  That was Dr Anthony Fauci during a May 2021 congressional hearing. It kicked off a months-long national media effort to frame questions around gain-of-function research and US-taxpayer-funded virus manipulation as a Royal Rumble between Fauci and Senator Rand Paul. When he testifies or sits for friendly network interviews, Fauci depends on semantics.

I want to prepare you for something right off the bat — nothing is going to happen to Anthony Fauci. He’s not going to prison. He’s not going to be brought up on perjury charges. He’s going to be allowed to retire quietly from his post, with presidential honors, and slip into a cast member role on Dancing with the Stars, although The Masked Singer seems more appropriate. Now that we’ve settled this and tempered any expectations a pitchforked mob might have, let's examine the latest bombshell reporting from the Intercept.

What do you do when a health crisis gets politicized beyond reason? You send in a bunch of hyper-partisan agencies to investigate, of course! For months, anyone who doubted that the coronavirus originated from a wet market in Wuhan was labeled a fringe, tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist. The 'serious people' in our media, as Jonathan Karl labeled them, mocked the likes of former president Donald Trump, Sen. Tom Cotton and Sen. Rand Paul for even broaching the subject. However, towards the end of Trump’s administration, classified information revealed that in November 2019, three workers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology went to a hospital due to flu-like symptoms. The press would have been totally fine ignoring this inconvenient information.

A top editor at the New York Times instructed Times staffers not to investigate the origins of COVID-19, two Times employees confirmed today. ‘In early 2020,’ a veteran Times employee tells me, ‘I suggested to a senior editor at the paper that we investigate the origins of COVID-19. I was told it was dangerous to run a piece about the origins of the coronavirus. There was resistance to running anything that could suggest that [COVID-19 was manmade or had leaked accidentally from a lab].' The global pandemic was then in its early stages. Donald Trump was running for reelection and calling SARS-CoV-2 the ‘Chinese virus’.

In a Department of Homeland Security Senate hearing in April 2012 on ‘Biological Security: The Risk of Dual-Use Research’, Dr Anthony Fauci admitted that the National Institute of Health partnered with the Department of Defense on controversial dual-use research projects. Dual-use research, of which gain-of-function research is a kind, can involve examining the ability to manipulate natural viruses to become more transmissible or possibly even a bioweapon. Gain-of-function research has found its way into the pandemic lexicon due to the resurgence of questions regarding the origins of COVID-19.

Good news everybody — you can finally post what you always thought about how the pandemic started on Facebook without being muzzled. The Silicon Valley giant, which has around 2.85 billion users, had been banning posts that claimed COVID-19 was man-made. But now, according to a company spokesperson, ‘In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made from our apps.’ The ‘lab-leak’ theory — that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China — has gradually gained mainstream acceptance in the months since Trump lost the election. Nicholson Baker horrified New York magazine readers in January by bringing up the hypothesis.

The theory that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese laboratory has completed its year-long trudge — from fringe nutjob idea to mainstream and expert-approved opinion. Leading scientists and epidemiologists such as none other than Dr Anthony Fauci were so quick to dismiss the ‘lab talk’. It was first portrayed as a hare-brained wild and tacitly racist conspiracy theory driven by paranoid Republican senators and fever-dream right-wing media. Now it is seen as not only an acceptable theory worth more study, but one that has broken through into the mainstream. This has happened in a matter of days. Where does Sen. Tom Cotton go for his apology?