Inquiring minds want to know. I want to know. More importantly, Congress’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic wants to know.
Dr. Anthony Fauci made at least one secret visit to the Central Intelligence Agency’s headquarters in McLean, Virginia to “influence” the agency as it tried to figure out if Sars-Cov-2 had leaked from a Chinese lab.
That bombshell allegation came yesterday from the Congressional subcommittee examining the origins of and response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Fauci’s hidden efforts in 2020 to discourage scientists from examining if the risky Chinese “gain-of-function” research he supported led to the pandemic have been extensively documented. Now the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic claims it has evidence he tried to steer the investigations inside the intelligence community too.
In a letter yesterday to Christi Grimm, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, subcommittee chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) said his staff had “gathered” evidence of Fauci’s secret visit.
Fauci “was escorted into Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) headquarters—without a record of entry—and participated in the analysis to ‘influence’ the Agency’s review” on the origins of Covid-19, Wenstrup wrote. [Emphasis added.]
Wenstrup demanded Grimm provide all records related to Fauci’s “movements” to any CIA “owned, operated, or occupied” buildings, including its headquarters – formally called the George Bush Center for Intelligence, after the 41st president, who served as the CIA’s director in 1976.
Wenstrup also asked that HHS make Brett Rowland, the special agent who headed Fauci’s personal security detail, available for a “voluntary transcribed interview.”
The subcommittee posted the letter on Twitter last night. It has received 1.6 million views so far.
Wenstrup did not specify where the committee had received its information.
But two weeks ago, he separately wrote the CIA to report “new testimony from a highly credible whistleblower” claiming the agency had given analysts “significant financial incentives to change their COVID-19 origins conclusion from a lab-leak to zoonosis [animal origin].”
The whistleblower reported the CIA had set up a seven-person team to examine the origins of Sars-Cov-2. Six analysts concluded, albeit with low confidence, that the virus had “originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.” But the team’s senior officer disagreed, according to Wenstrup’s earlier letter.
The senior officer then paid the junior team members to “change their position,” the whistleblower claimed. Ultimately, the CIA said it could not “determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic,” according to a government report released in June.
Given Fauci’s longstanding connections with the American biodefense community, it is not surprising the CIA would have asked him for his opinion on the origins of the coronavirus.
But the fact that Fauci allegedly tried to hide his connection with the agency is striking – and of a piece with the way he tried to steer the public debate around the origins of Sars-Cov-2 away from the possibility that the virus had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. As early as February 8, 2020, Fauci called the lab leak hypothesis “conspiracy theories without any scientific basis.”
He knew better.
Days before, he had convened a conference call with top virologists to examine molecular clues suggesting the virus had been manipulated in a lab. He then secretly pushed those virologists to write a crucial paper suggesting otherwise. Instead, the paper called for “detailed understanding of how an animal virus jumped species boundaries to infect humans so productively.”
What Fauci failed to disclose until much later was that his agency had funded exactly the type of research that could have produced Sars-Cov-2 – at the same Chinese lab in Wuhan that was and remains the most likely source of the leak.
Lucky for Fauci, he was in a position to make sure that both intelligence agencies and supposedly independent scientific investigators stayed as far as possible from that “conspiracy theory.”
Not for nothing did the New York Times once call Fauci “the J. Edgar Hoover of biology.”
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