Here’s What We Know About Key Questions Fauci Refused To Answer

Anthony Fauci stonewalled questions from Sen. Rand Paul at a highly-anticipated congressional hearing on Wednesday.

But Paul has released an avalanche of new documents related to his investigation. That trove, plus documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and a separate investigation in the House, shed light on Paul’s questions.

Though Fauci refused to reply, some of Paul’s questions during the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing can be answered from Fauci’s own writing and other evidence.

Fauci did not reply to a request for comment.

Did Fauci And His Inner Circle Say Different Things Publicly And Privately?

Paul: “For years Anthony Fauci has been the public face saying this has come from nature. It’s the marketplace, it’s the marketplace, it’s the marketplace. … But what we find is that what he was saying in public is different than what he was saying in private.”

Fauci and the virologists in his inner circle all privately wrestled with scientific evidence contradicting the idea COVID had originated from a Wuhan wet market, even as they gave the public the impression they were certain it had emerged there.

Fauci privately noted in his diary by late January 2020 that the wet market was not the pandemic’s source, but a superspreader event.

“The first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market,” Fauci wrote of the wet market outbreak that began in late December 2019.

Fauci was also in communication with China CDC Director George Gao. Gao had cried about the revelation that the wet market was not the pandemic’s source on the phone with his American counterpart, CDC Director Bob Redfield.

“George was very sensitive and understandably defensive since he was the one who said early on that there was no human to human transmission and that the original 27 cases in the wet market reported on December 31, 2019 were animal to human when actually human to human transmission was occurring weeks before,” Fauci said in his diary on Feb. 3, 2020. “Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.”

Gao would go on to state this publicly. Fauci never did.

Paul contrasted Fauci’s early private doubts about the Wuhan wet market being the pandemic’s origin with his repeated emphasis on wet markets in press interviews. He played a compilation of Fauci talking about the risks of wet markets on cable television.

“It just boggles my mind that how when we have so many diseases that emanate out of that unusual human-animal interface that we don’t just shut [wildlife markets] down,” Fauci said on Fox News in April 2020.

Fauci repeatedly steered the press, the scientific community, and the U.S. intelligence community to his handpicked clique of virologists. He championed their work when they identified the wet market as the virus’s origin.

New documents released by Paul reveal more of the virologists’ private discussions.

After the leak of a 2018 U.S.-China grant proposal that some scientists have likened to a blueprint for COVID in September 2021, the virologists said they needed to “re-convince” themselves of their preferred theory.

“It really isn’t beyond plausibility that someone went ahead and tried some of this stuff. We just need to re-convince ourselves it is coincidence,” said University of Edinburgh virologist Andrew Rambaut.

“Correct – that’s the problem. There’s a big difference between ‘the lab was working on bat [coronaviruses]’ to ‘the lab was modifying bat [coronaviruses] using features we see being unique to [SARS-CoV-2],'” replied Scripps Institute virologist Kristian Andersen.

Andersen and Rambaut did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Was The Wuhan Lab Capable Of Engineering Novel Coronaviruses?

Paul: “One of the experiments that was pretty common was that they would take the backbone of a SARS virus…then they would dig through bat guano 300 feet underground, find other viruses, and stick the [spike] protein on the backbone. … Were the scientists at the Wuhan Institute capable of inserting a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus?”

Papers in the scientific literature and grant proposals show that the Wuhan lab specialized in manipulating novel coronaviruses.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology spliced novel spike proteins that the lab scientists sampled in nature into other coronavirus “backbones” in the lab, generating new viruses that do not exist in nature, according to a 2015 Nature Medicine paper.

Grant documents from EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that directed National Institutes of Health money to the Wuhan lab, also describe experiments on engineered novel coronaviruses.

The U.S.-China grant proposal that some liken to a blueprint for COVID, and drafts of that proposal obtained through FOIA, lay out plans to work with furin cleavage sites, a mutation found in the COVID virus and not found in other related coronaviruses.

Documents obtained through FOIA show that the scientists informed the U.S. government they would be doing the work in a high security lab in North Carolina while secretly planning to outsource the experiments to Wuhan.