Dr Anthony Fauci still has questions to answer
Joe Biden ended his presidency by pre-emptively pardoning political allies and family members who had yet to be charged with any crimes. One pardon stands out: that of Dr Anthony Fauci. Pardoning Fauci won’t make investigations into the origins of Covid-19 go away.
The pardon recites that Fauci is cleared of “any offenses against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014, through the date of this pardon arising from or in any manner related to his service as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force or the White House Covid-19 Response Team, or as Chief Medical Advisor to the President.”
Why 2014, six years before Covid-19 arrived on American shores? Why cover Fauci’s roles in three different jobs?
There are a lot of accumulated grievances against Fauci. Many of them are political and scientific, not legal. Remember the six-foot social distancing rules that dominated school and business closures? Fauci admitted in 2024 that they weren’t based on any scientific studies at all.
He admitted that he did not recall seeing any evidence supporting the masking of young children, or of the costs of that policy, even though he had recommended that they be masked. Before he was pro-mask, he said in March 2020, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask” – because he was worried about a shortage of masks for doctors and nurses. Critics of the Covid-19 vaccines have also blamed Fauci. The list goes on.
The more serious hot water for the 84-year-old doctor, however, has been bubbling up from the origins of the Covid-19 virus and allegations that he lacked candour in testimony to Congress. In the past year, this has expanded to a House investigation into accusations of a pattern in Fauci’s corner of the National Institutes of Health of deliberately scheming to conceal information from public disclosure and oversight.
The story begins in 2014, when EcoHealth Alliance, an American research group led by Dr Peter Daszak, was awarded a $3.7 million NIH grant to study potential coronaviruses from bats. That autumn, the Obama White House publicly announced a moratorium on “gain-of-function” research into respiratory viruses – in other words, research into making a virus more contagious, more transmissible to humans, or more deadly.
While such research can develop more scientific knowledge useful in fighting viruses, the moratorium responded to concerns that too many recent lab accidents raised the spectre of releasing what one group at the time called “potential pandemic pathogens”. Fauci had written a paper in 2012 arguing that gain-of-function research was worth the risks.
The moratorium lasted for three years, yet from 2014 through 2019, EcoHealth Alliance was funding the collection and manipulation of bat coronaviruses by virologists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Covid-19 pandemic emerged from Wuhan, where it became visible by November 2019.
An email sent to Fauci in late January 2020 suggests that he knew his agency was funding gain-of-function research into novel coronaviruses in Wuhan. “EcoHealth group (Peter Daszak et al), has for years been among the biggest players in coronavirus work,” wrote Fauci’s chief of staff Greg Folkers, noting how NIAID had financed its research in Wuhan “for the past 5 years”. A Congressional investigation established that Fauci and Dr Francis Collins (the head of NIH) were then on a conference call where they were warned that Covid-19 may have leaked from the WIV.
Their almost immediate reaction was to help other scientists on the call produce a paper entitled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” that sought to convince the scientific community and the public that the virus had a natural origin. In April, Collins emailed Fauci complaining that the paper hadn’t succeeded and asking him to do more to “put down” the lab-leak theory. The next day, Fauci promoted the paper’s conclusions from a White House podium. He continued throughout the spring of 2020 to argue that the virus had “evolved in nature and then jumped species”.
Daszak, meanwhile, argued against certain public disclosures from the WIV research, which he said would bring “very unwelcome attention”. Earlier this month, EcoHealth Alliance was debarred for five years from receiving federal grants.
When queried by Senator Rand Paul in May 2021, Fauci insisted that NIAID had “not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology”. But his later defences of that testimony relied upon what a congressional investigation found to be hairsplittingly misleading definitions of what constitutes “gain-of-function” research.
Paul, now the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, has accused Fauci of perjury, and said after Biden’s pardon that “I will not rest until the entire truth of the coverup is exposed. Fauci’s pardon will only serve as an accelerant to pierce the veil of deception.”
When Republicans took over the House in 2023, they launched a Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic spearheaded by Ohio congressman Dr Brad Wenstrup. The committee’s report concluded that “Dr Fauci’s testimony was, at a minimum, misleading”.
Amid all of this, the subcommittee dug into how NIH and NIAID appeared to plot to avoid scrutiny under the Freedom of Information Act. A series of damning emails emerged from David Morens, a senior NIAID adviser under Fauci since 1998 who had co-authored dozens of scientific papers with Fauci. Fauci downplayed his ties to Morens.
Morens told EcoHealth Alliance in emails “to keep all communications like this on private email so that it can’t be retrieved via a FOIA”. He wrote in June 2020 that “we are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them.” (Apparently, he wasn’t that smart.)
In a February 2021 email, Morens wrote that he “learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts, so I think we are all safe.” He also wrote that he “learned the tricks last year from an old friend, Marg Moore, who heads our FOIA office and also hates FOIAs”.
Moore told the subcommittee through her lawyer that she would invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The committee also alleged that Folkers appeared to misspell keywords so they wouldn’t be flagged in FOIA searches, such as writing “Ec~Health”.
Morens wrote of a “secret back channel”, noting that he could “either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work”. Fauci, he said, was “too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble”. Morens maintained to the House committee that his references to that channel were a joke, and that he didn’t realise the emails he sent on his personal account constituted official government business.
Biden hasn’t pardoned everyone around Fauci. And even if no criminal charges result, it seems unlikely that Congress is done with its investigations into NIAID and Covid-19.
Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review