Should We Blame Fauci for the COVID Pandemic?

 https://reason.com/2024/09/14/faucis-pandemic/

Should We Blame Fauci for the COVID Pandemic?

America's COVID celebrity is facing scrutiny for funding risky research that may have sparked the pandemic—and for allegedly covering it up.

Christian BritschgiFrom the October 2024 issue 

(Illustration: Joanna Andreasson)

In June 2024, Anthony Fauci appeared before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic for a contentious confrontation with congressional Republicans. But it opened on what might have sounded like an amicable note, as the subcommittee's chairman, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R–Ohio), played up Fauci's sainted status: "There were drinks named after you. You got bobbleheads made in your likeness. You were on the cover of Vogue. You threw out the first pitch at a Washington Nationals game."

Fauci was the closest thing the world of public health had to a rock star. For nearly 40 years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci had served as the influential but unassuming director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a subsidiary of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) housed within the sprawling U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

That post made Fauci the federal government's de facto top pandemic expert across the dozens of agencies—from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to the Food and Drug Administration to the Office of the Surgeon General—that share responsibilities for preventing and responding to disease outbreaks. Fauci steered the U.S. government's response to AIDS, Zika, Ebola, and swine flu. He oversaw billions in annual research grants aimed at stopping the next disease outbreak.

When COVID struck, Fauci was the face of public health when public health was all anyone was talking about.

His celebrity also made him a partisan lightning rod. Democrats saw him as a steady, straight-talking scientist who struck a pleasing contrast to a chaotic Donald Trump recommending crank COVID cures in White House press conferences. For many conservatives, he was a hate figure responsible for locking down the country without regard for civil liberties or collateral damage. But by that June 2024 congressional hearing, Fauci was at the center of a new array of controversies.

In 2023, the incoming Republican House majority had reorganized the coronavirus subcommittee to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. The information they'd uncovered, supplemented by years of dogged investigative journalism, was damning for Fauci and his agency.

Fauci had long denied his agency had ever funded controversial gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Wuhan, China, where the COVID-19 pandemic originated. But weeks before Fauci's testimony, a senior NIH official admitted that the NIAID had funded such research. Days later, President Joe Biden's administration would strip EcoHealth Alliance—the nonprofit that the NIAID had paid to do that gain-of-function research—of its federal funding, citing the organization's lack of transparency and oversight failures at the WIV.

Soon after, the select subcommittee revealed that Fauci's senior scientific adviser, David Morens, told EcoHealth scientists in emails that Fauci would "protect" the group from public scrutiny about the pandemic's origins and that Morens could pass any needed communications from EcoHealth to Fauci via a private back channel that was safe from public records requests.

The day of Fauci's testimony, the Harvard- and MIT–affiliated biologist Alina Chan argued in The New York Times that a lab leak at the WIV was the probable cause of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Together, the revelations painted a picture of Fauci as a dissembling, denying, power-grabbing bureaucrat who repeatedly used slippery arguments to dodge public oversight of a controversial, high-risk agenda—an agenda that may have led to the very pandemic his job was to prevent.

Fauci argued it was all much ado about nothing. At the hearing, he said the gain-of-function research the NIAID had funded in Wuhan wasn't of concern and couldn't have sparked the pandemic; that he had no back channel with his senior scientific adviser, who he didn't even work that closely with; and that while a lab leak wasn't a conspiracy theory, he couldn't be expected to know everything that happened in China. His story was that he had acted in good faith, in the name of science, and that he wasn't culpable.

Yet when one considers Fauci's record and the accumulated evidence about a lab leak origin of COVID-19, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that he is probably at least partially culpable for the pandemic itself and actively worked to obscure that fact. As Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University molecular biologist and fierce Fauci critic, says of the series of choices that led to dangerous pandemic research being conducted in Wuhan with U.S. tax dollars: "There are few decisions that are so centrally linked to a single person and that person's pathologies, and that person is Anthony Fauci."

We may never know the full story of the pandemic's origin. But if this were a bureaucratic whodunit, the most likely suspect would be Fauci. COVID-19 was Fauci's pandemic.

Pushing Risky Research

Prior to COVID-19, Fauci had long supported funding pandemic research that other scientists found risky, if not downright dangerous.

In 2005, as NIAID director, he praised researchers who'd used a grant from his agency to resurrect the virus that had caused the Spanish flu pandemic. Better understanding that virus would help prevent future diseases, he argued. "The certain benefits to be obtained by a robust and responsible research agenda aimed at developing the means to detect, prevent and treat [future pandemics] far outweigh any theoretical risks," he said in an October 2005 statement co-authored with then–CDC Director Julie Gerberding.

This wasn't a universal opinion at the NIAID. The agency's chief scientist described this approach to pandemic prevention as "looking for a gas leak with a lighted match."

Fauci would continue to praise and fund this kind of research. In 2011, researchers at the University of Wisconsin and at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands managed to manipulate the virus H5N1 (which had been responsible for a 2004 bird flu epidemic in Asia) to transmit between mammals, a "gain of function" for a virus that had heretofore only been able to pass from infected birds to humans. One of the researchers involved in the work would say the enhanced pathogen they'd created was "very, very bad news" and "probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make." Fauci was more sanguine, telling The New York Times that "there is always a risk. But I believe the benefits are greater than the risks."

When the influenza research community adopted a temporary moratorium on gain-of-function research in response to the H5N1 experiments, Fauci begrudgingly accepted it as necessary to calm public opinion. He still insisted this work's potential to stop the next pandemic far outweighed any "theoretical risks" it posed.

Deadly outbreaks of bird flu and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in the early 2000s, and the anthrax mailings that followed the September 11 terror attacks, had both the public health and the national security establishments attuned to "biosecurity" threats.

At the same time, researchers were rapidly improving their ability to create and manipulate viruses in the lab. This offered the potential for creating new vaccines, therapeutics, and pest control measures. It also raised the risk that a new pandemic might be accidentally released from a lab.

In the mid-2000s, President George W. Bush's administration commissioned reports on how "dual-use research of concern" might be subjected to some sort of risk-benefit analysis. But Fauci consistently argued against the idea that their agencies should have to abide by additional guardrails when funding risky research into pandemic pathogens.

"It's safe to say NIH is always on the 'more science, less regulation' side. That was definitely true in this debate," Gregory Koblentz, a biosafety expert at George Mason University who's been a longtime participant in debates about how to regulate dual-use research, tells Reason.

There are very good reasons to be wary about regulating scientific research. But the equation changes when the government itself is funding the research in question. Indeed, Matt Ridley—a science writer who co-authored Alina Chan's book Viral, about the origins of COVID-19—suggests that government funding itself is a big part of the problem. A profit-seeking private sector would never touch the kinds of research that was being done by EcoHealth Alliance in Wuhan, he argues. The odds that such research will identify the next pandemic virus and develop a profitable vaccine or therapeutic for it, he says, are too low for even the most starry-eyed venture capitalist.

There was also the downside risk of a lab accident.

In 2014, there was a series of embarrassing safety lapses at U.S. government labs, highlighting this risk.

Dozens of CDC employees were potentially exposed to live anthrax samples shipped by mistake to labs not equipped to handle them. At another CDC lab, a less dangerous version of bird flu was accidentally contaminated with deadly H5N1. Vials of smallpox capable of infecting people were stashed in a cabinet at an NIH lab, where they'd apparently been sitting for decades. None of these incidents were direct results of gain-of-function research. But they heightened the concern that researchers working to enhance deadly pathogens might do so in unsafe settings.

Oversight Avoidance

In October 2014, President Barack Obama's administration paused federal funding of gain-of-function research that could make flu, SARS, or Middle East respiratory syndrome viruses transmissible via the respiratory route in mammals. It also started crafting a regulatory framework for vetting these experiments.

In 2017, the White House produced the laboriously titled HHS Framework for Guiding Funding Decisions about Proposed Research Involving Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogens, which became known as the P3CO framework.

Under P3CO, the NIH would forward grant proposals involving research on known pandemic pathogens or research that might create or enhance such pathogens to a new P3CO committee within HHS for a department-level risk-benefit analysis. The debates leading to the framework stressed the value of performing those risk-benefit assessments publicly and transparently. But the committee's deliberations would be kept secret.

This framework also gave the NIH considerable autonomy to decide which grant proposals it would—and wouldn't—forward to the HHS for review.

To date, the P3CO committee has vetted just three research proposals involving so-called enhanced potential pandemic pathogens, out of potentially dozens that should have been examined. Two out of three were allowed to go forward unaltered. The committee required the other to adopt additional safety mitigation measures, and the NIAID ultimately chose not to fund it.

Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins, also an advocate of gain-of-function research, found a way to skirt the oversight process. They "realized that if they don't [forward proposals to HHS for review], there is no review," says Ebright, the Rutgers biologist and a longtime critic of gain-of-function research. "By willfully violating the policy, they could nullify the policy."

This gap in the oversight system would become apparent when the NIAID failed to stop gain-of-function research being performed at the WIV.

Dangerous Exceptions

During his June 2024 testimony, Fauci said that he signed off on every grant the NIAID funded but didn't individually review each one. In a 2022 deposition, he admitted that he also might have signed off on some exceptions to the Obama administration's gain-of-function pause. But he couldn't recall specific examples.

So it's possible that one exception Fauci might have signed off on was the work being performed by EcoHealth Alliance in Wuhan, China, and that work might have led directly to the COVID-19 pandemic.

EcoHealth Alliance is a New York–based nonprofit that specializes in research on pandemic risk from emerging "disease hotspots" in the developing world. In 2014, it received a five-year, $3.7 million NIAID grant to collect virus samples from human beings and bats in China and then sequence and experiment on these viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

This type of research was the passion project of EcoHealth's president, Peter Daszak. Daszak, who Vanity Fair has called "one part salesman, one part visionary," was known in D.C. circles for his invite-only cocktail parties for senior government officials involved in funding scientific research. He pitched this research as crucial for finding viruses that were likely to "spill over" from animals to humans. Once identified, vaccines and therapeutics could be developed preemptively to stop any outbreak.

Critics argued this work was an inefficient way of spotting which of the thousands upon thousand of viruses circulating in nature might cause the next pandemic. But in 2016, EcoHealth revealed it was engaged in far more alarming work.

In its second annual progress report to the NIAID, EcoHealth announced that it intended to create "chimeric" or hybrid viruses out of spike proteins, the part of a virus that allows it to enter and infect hosts cells, from SARS-like coronaviruses discovered in the wild and the backbone of another, already-known SARS virus.

EcoHealth wanted to use these viruses to infect "humanized" mice—animals genetically manipulated to have human lung cells—to see whether any of them posed a pandemic risk. It proposed doing the research at the WIV, where many U.S. researchers considered the biosafety standards much too lax.

This was exactly the kind of dangerous research that the gain-of–function pause and P3CO framework were intended to control. Upon receipt of EcoHealth's 2016 progress report, the NIAID program officer overseeing the grant told the nonprofit that its work appeared to violate the then-active pause on gain-of-function research. EcoHealth wouldn't receive its next tranche of grant money unless it could explain why it didn't.

Daszak responded that the viruses they were working with hadn't been shown to infect people yet and were unlikely to do so, given how genetically different they were from the original SARS virus.

Yet the plain text of the pause policy never required that viruses being experimented with already be shown to infect human beings. The idea that it would is "laughable," says Ebright. "The whole point of a policy that operates at the proposal stage, before the research has been done, is to prevent the construction and creation of such a pathogen."

Nevertheless, in July 2016 the NIAID told EcoHealth it could proceed with its work on the condition that the chimeric viruses it had created didn't demonstrate higher growth rates than their naturally occurring cousins.

Experiments run by EcoHealth in 2017 showed that its hybrid SARS-like coronaviruses exhibited much greater viral growth, and were much more pathogenic, in the humanized mice compared with natural variants. But EcoHealth didn't pause its work as promised. It also didn't report these results to the NIAID immediately. It only revealed them in a fourth annual progress report submitted April 2018.

EcoHealth was plainly violating the terms imposed on its research in 2016. Its work had also not been forwarded to the P3CO committee for review. Yet the NIAID renewed its grant for another five years. In this second grant phase, EcoHealth proposed making more chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses containing features with "high spillover risk" to human beings.

EcoHealth was scheduled to start this work in 2019. That year, the nonprofit should have submitted a fifth annual progress report to the NIAID. It didn't, claiming the NIAID's reporting -system had "locked them out"—a claim subsequently found false.

When EcoHealth's year five report was eventually submitted two years late, in 2021, it showed that additional chimeric viruses created in Wuhan demonstrated both enhanced transmission and lethality in humanized mice.

By that time, the COVID-19 pandemic was already well underway.

'Not Following the Policy'

In 2021, Fauci said the NIH "has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology." That wasn't true. What EcoHealth was doing in Wuhan clearly met the widely understood definition of gain-of-function research.

In his June 2024 testimony, Fauci dodged accusations that he lied by saying that while EcoHealth's work might have met a generic definition of gain-of-function research, it didn't meet the precise definition established in the P3CO framework.

Fauci said that every time he mentioned gain-of-function research, "the definition that I use is not my personal definition; it is a codified, regulatory and operative definition." That definition, he said, "had nothing to do with me."

On the contrary, regulatory definitions had quite a bit to do with Fauci. They were designed with the expectation that he and his fellow public health bureaucrats would use discretion and good judgment when making decisions. The relevant regulatory language included lots of "likelys and highlys and reasonably anticipated," says Gerald Epstein, a former director at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy who wrote the P3CO policy. "These words are inherently subjective. You can't not be. You've got to be making judgment calls on something that does not yet exist." Those subjective definitions gave Fauci and his NIAID underlings considerable room to decide what research required additional review.

Was the agency complying with the spirit of the policy? Epstein points to the total number of projects the NIH sent to the P3CO committee. "The fact that they found one project in seven years [that needed additional safety measures] tells me they were being too conservative," he says.

Koblentz is more blunt. When the NIAID allowed EcoHealth to proceed with its work under novel conditions, he says, it "wasn't for them to decide. That was them not following the policy."

Smoking Gun?

The NIAID's failure to forward EcoHealth's experiments to the P3CO committee was, at minimum, a serious process failure. That failure may well have allowed for the creation of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Wuhan lab.

In 2018, the same year that the NIAID renewed EcoHealth's grant for another five years, Daszak submitted a $14 million grant proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), called DEFUSE.

Once again, he proposed creating chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses selected for their ability to infect human beings. Early drafts of the DEFUSE proposal, uncovered by U.S. Right to Know reporter Emily Kopp, show that Daszak envisioned creating viruses with features present in SARS-CoV-2 and which do not appear in naturally discovered coronaviruses of the same family, including features that primed the virus to infect and spread in humans.

Kopp's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests also revealed notes from Daszak and his collaborators on DEFUSE project drafts that suggested the EcoHealth president was deliberately trying to obscure the fact that these novel viruses would be created in Wuhan by omitting the names of Chinese researchers from the proposal. An early draft of DEFUSE also proposed creating novel coronaviruses in Wuhan because it used lower biosafety precautions than what would be used in the U.S., describing the lower safety standards as "highly cost-effective."

In a note on this early draft, University of North Carolina epidemiologist and pioneer gain-of-function researcher Ralph Baric, a proposed collaborator, said that U.S. researchers would "freak out" were such research done at Wuhan's typical biosafety levels.

DARPA ended up rejecting the DEFUSE proposal. But it remains possible that the Chinese researchers secured separate funding for the work. Ebright suggests that EcoHealth could also have used NIH funding from its renewed grant for the work, given how much overlap there was between the two proposals.

Ebright is unequivocal in his assessment that the research described in EcoHealth's progress reports, its 2018 grant renewal application, and the DEFUSE proposal, including the early draft and notes, combine into "smoking gun" evidence in favor of the COVID pandemic having been created at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

"It all falls together. We know what they were doing in the years preceding 2019. We know what they proposed to do in 2019. We knew how they proposed and where they proposed to do it," says Ebright. "It is exactly what the virus' emergence tells us."

Poisoned Debate

We probably won't ever definitively discover the origins of COVID-19. Officials in both the U.S. and China ensured that.

Chinese officials obstructed any investigation into the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In September 2019, the Associated Press reported, the institute took its database of viruses offline. It also hasn't made public lab notebooks and other materials that might shed light on exactly what kinds of work it was doing in the lead-up to the pandemic. In late 2019, the Chinese government also exterminated animals and disinfected the Wuhan wet market. If COVID did leap from animal to human in the Wuhan market, as many natural origin proponents argue, that evidence is gone.

What we're left with is studying the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself and whatever information can be gleaned from the U.S.-funded research that went on at Wuhan leading up to the pandemic.

On both fronts, Fauci, his underlings at the NIAID, and NIAID-funded scientists involved with work at Wuhan have worked to conceal information and discredit notions that COVID might have leaked from a lab.

In late January 2020, Fauci's aides flagged the NIAID's support of EcoHealth's Wuhan research in emails to their boss. A few weeks later, Fauci and Daszak would go on Newt Gingrich's podcast to dismiss the idea that COVID-19 came from the Wuhan lab, calling such arguments "conspiracy theories."

Both men also worked to shape the discourse behind the scenes away from any focus on a lab leak. Daszak organized a group letter of scientists in The Lancet, the U.K.'s top medical journal, declaring that they "stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin." Daszak did not disclose his relationship to the Wuhan lab when organizing this letter; The Lancet's editor would eventually concede that this was improper.

In testimony to the House coronavirus subcommittee in May 2024, Daszak would claim the "conspiracy theories" mentioned in the Lancet letter referred only to such wild early pandemic notions that COVID had pieces of HIV or snake DNA inserted into it. He said a word limit prevented him from being more precise.

Fauci, meanwhile, would help corral virologists into publishing the widely cited "proximal origin" paper in early 2020. In the paper, the authors flatly declared that "we do not believe any type of laboratory-leak scenario is plausible."

Yet troves of private messages and emails released by the House subcommittee's investigation show that the authors privately expressed far more openness to a lab leak theory.

One of the paper's authors, Scripps Research evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, privately rated a lab leak as "highly likely." But Andersen had a pending $8.9 million grant application with the NIAID as the paper was drafted. That grant was later approved. In an email, one of the paper's authors, Edward Holmes, references "pressure from on high" during the drafting process.

The authors of the proximal origin paper say they merely had their minds changed while drafting the paper. They were just following the scientific method.

Ridley, the science writer, has a much less charitable assessment of their behavior.

"That's scientific misconduct at the very least," he says, "to write a paper that says one thing and to think it's wrong in private."

Hiding the Evidence

There may be more we don't—and won't ever—know about Fauci's own communications with Daszak and other NIH officials about EcoHealth's work in Wuhan.

In May 2024, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a tranche of emails between Fauci's senior scientific adviser David Morens and Daszak, in which the two strategized about how to get EcoHealth's federal grant reinstated (after it was terminated by the Trump administration in 2020) and how the nonprofit should respond to NIH investigations into its grant work.

Across multiple emails to Daszak, Morens mentioned that he frequently had conversations with Fauci about Daszak and EcoHealth. He said Fauci was trying to "protect" Daszak.

Throughout these emails, Morens urged Daszak to email him on a personal email account to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests, openly admitted to deleting emails to shield them from FOIA, and said that the NIH's FOIA staff had advised him on how to hide information from records requests through deletions and strategic misspellings.

Most conspicuously, Morens sent a brief reply to Daszak in April 2021 in an email chain in which the two had been discussing mounting scrutiny from Republicans and some scientists of EcoHealth's Wuhan work.

"PS, i forgot to say there is no worry about FOIAs," Morens wrote. "I can either send stuff to Tony [Fauci] on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble." In another email, Morens mentioned having a "backchannel" to Fauci.

Asked about Morens' comments at the June hearing of the coronavirus subcommittee, Fauci denied having substantive conversations about EcoHealth with Morens and said that his senior scientific adviser was not someone he worked terribly closely with, outside collaborating on scientific papers.

The Next Pandemic

Fauci's best defense is that he ran a sprawling agency that doled out billions of dollars in grants. Even the most detail-obsessed administrator couldn't possibly keep track of every single program and project. And U.S. officials had limited control over what happened in the distant, opaque Wuhan lab.

But even if that's true, it's an admission of administrative negligence, since the oversight protocols weren't followed. It also implies a dramatic failure of the risky research that Fauci championed for pandemic prevention. As Ridley says, the pandemic "occurred with the very viruses that there was the most attention paid to, in the very area where there was the most research going on, where there was the biggest program looking for potential pandemic pathogens, and yet they failed to see this one coming." At a minimum, gain-of-function research didn't protect the public from the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the more direct case against Fauci is strong: Not only was he an ardent supporter of research widely believed to be risky, but he manipulated bureaucratic protocols in order to avoid scrutiny of that research, then responded evasively when called to account for his actions. At least one of the programs born out of Fauci's risky research crusade was pursuing exactly the type of viral enhancements that were present in COVID-19, and that research was conducted at the Wuhan virology lab in the very same city where the virus originated. Lab leak proponents cite the virus's transmissibility as evidence for a Wuhan leak: After all, EcoHealth was trying to create pathogens primed to spread rapidly in humans.

The evidence is not fully conclusive. But it seems reasonably likely that Fauci pushed for what his peers repeatedly said was dangerous research, that some of that dangerous research produced a deadly viral pathogen that escaped the lab, and that Fauci helped cover up evidence and arguments for its origins.

It is more than a little bit ironic that, throughout his career, Fauci fought against restrictions on gain-of-function research, casting those restrictions as counterproductive shackles on scientific progress. When a pandemic did finally break out, he would also be an ardent supporter of imposing the most restrictive controls on the general public.

"Elderly, stay out of society in self-isolation. Don't go to work if you don't have to," Fauci told Science in March 2020. "No bars, no restaurants, no nothing. Only essential services." When asked in July 2022 what he might have done differently during the pandemic, Fauci said he'd have recommended much stiffer restrictions.

Did Fauci, so revered as a man of science, have any evidence to support his program of lockdowns and social controls? His eventual admission in congressional testimony that the federal government's social distancing guidance was a guesstimate that "sort of just appeared"—and one that turned out to be ineffective at controlling the pandemic—bolsters the conclusion that the pandemic restrictions that shuttered schools, churches, businesses, and countless social gatherings were, in fact, ineffective tools of control. Indeed, most American efforts to control the pandemic proved ineffective: not just lockdowns and capacity restrictions, but also mask mandates, testing, and contact tracing.

If nothing else, Fauci's role in the pandemic—as a public health rock star with suspicious links to the virus's origin—is a lesson in the dangers of resting too much power and authority in the hands of any one official. Throughout the pandemic, Fauci's mantra was "follow the science." But in practice, that seems to have meant "follow Fauci." Too often, America did.