OPINION:
It was one of the most important virus briefings in the White House’s 2020 pandemic original series.
Dr. Anthony Fauci stood at the press room podium on April 17, 2020, sharing the stage with President Trump to his left, to declare that the coronavirus causing COVID-19 was created naturally, from wild animals. It could not have been invented in communist China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab funded by the National Institutes of Health through a middleman to conduct “gain-of-function” research.
He cited a study, feeding Democrats and a determined Washington liberal news media what they wanted to hear: China exoneration.
“There was a study recently that we can make available to you, where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve,” said Dr. Fauci, who led NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “And the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human. So, I mean, the paper will be available. I don’t have the authors right now, but we can make that available to you.”
Dr. Fauci didn’t say he was, in effect, one of the authors. He had held a Feb. 1 conference call with them and then edited the final article, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” published that March by the journal Nature Medicine. “Proximal” became the go-to science to rebut and ridicule lab theorists.
However, credible dissent emerged in the years since Dr. Fauci’s sure-sounding verdict. The FBI in 2023 and the CIA this year said a human-carried virus leak from the Wuhan lab was the “most likely” pandemic start.
I would add, why does Dr. Fauci think the communist police state went out of its way to hide the outbreak, arrest whistleblowers, clean out the lab and offer fantasies about how the pandemic began?
A moral, responsible government would have done the opposite to ensure that 7 million people globally didn’t die of COVID-19. Communists, however, are criminals and not ethical. In 2023 and 2024, the Republican majority House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic also concluded that the bug was man-made.
On April 18, a COVID-19 earthquake erupted at the White House.
Mr. Trump told the real COVID-19 history in a matter-of-fact White House webpage that replaced the Biden/Fauci/liberal news media virus history. Recall that The New York Times called people who endorsed the lab leak theory “racist.”
The title on a flashy Trump-dominated homepage: “Lab Leak: The True Origins of COVID-19.”
The White House skewers Dr. Fauci by approving Rep. Brad Wenstrup’s 500-plus-page subcommittee report on Dec. 4.
“The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 publication — which was used repeatedly by public health officials and the media to discredit the lab leak theory — was prompted by Dr. Fauci to push the preferred narrative that COVID-19 originated naturally,” the White House states.
It adds: “The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature. Data shows that all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans. This runs contrary to previous pandemics where there were multiple spillover events. … Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with COVID-like symptoms in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market. … By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced. But it hasn’t.”
Next, the White House singles out Fauci associate Peter Daszak, a British-born zoologist and former president of the government contractor EcoHealth Alliance. The webpage says Mr. Daszak “used U.S. taxpayer dollars to facilitate dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China.”
After the House select subcommittee determined that EcoHealth violated grant rules, the NIH, in one of the last major acts of the Biden administration, barred EcoHealth and Mr. Daszak from receiving federal money.
The White House website states: “EcoHealth President Dr. Peter Daszak obstructed the Select Subcommittee’s investigation by providing publicly available information, instructing his staff to reduce the scope and pace of productions, and doctoring documents before releasing them to the public. Further, Dr. Daszak provided false statements to Congress.”
The White House also says, “Fauci’s senior adviser, Dr. David Morens, deliberately obstructed the Select Subcommittee’s investigation, likely lied to Congress on multiple occasions, unlawfully deleted federal COVID-19 records, and shared nonpublic information about NIH grant processes with EcoHealth President Dr. Peter Daszak.”
The White House website also ridicules one of Mr. Trump’s favorite targets: The D.C. “swamp.”
“Public health officials often mislead the American people through conflicting messaging, knee-jerk reactions, and a lack of transparency,” it states. “Most egregiously, the federal government demonized alternative treatments and disfavored narratives, such as the lab leak theory, in a shameful effort to coerce and control the American people’s health decisions.”
Ironically, those who believed the virus might have been engineered were among the virologists who joined forces to write the “Proximal” research paper. Dr. Edward Holmes said in a private message that the virus “seems to have been pre-adapted for human spread since the get-go,” according to the House subcommittee.
However, the lab scenario did not sit well with editors at the British journal Nature. They rejected the article, which sent authors scrambling to rewrite the paper to rule out the lab as a virus source. This green eyeshade work won over the subjournal Nature Medicine, which published “Proximal” on March 17, giving Dr. Fauci time to tout it at the White House on April 17.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.
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