Fauci Now Claims To Have ‘Open Mind’ About COVID Lab-Leak Theory

In January, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealed that Dr. Anthony Fauci not only initiated efforts to cover up evidence pointing to a Chinese lab as the origin of COVID-19, but that he actively shaped a highly influential academic paper that excluded the possibility of a lab leak.

Fauci’s involvement with the paper wasn’t acknowledged by the authors, as it should have been under prevailing academic standards. Neither was it acknowledged by Fauci himself, who denied having communicated with the authors when asked directly while testifying before Congress – which we now know is a bald-faced lie.

The article, Proximal Origin, was co-authored by five virologists, four of whom participated in a Feb. 1, 2020, teleconference that was hastily convened by Fauci, who serves as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and Jeremy Farrar, who heads the UK-based Wellcome Trust, after public reporting of a potential link between the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China and the COVID-19 outbreak, according to the Epoch Times.

The initial draft of Proximal Origin was completed on the same day the teleconference, which wasn’t made public, took place. Notably, at least three authors of the paper were privately telling Fauci’s teleconference group both during the call and in subsequent emails that they were 60 to 80 percent sure that COVID-19 had come out of a lab.

(Oh, and at least three virologists involved in the drafting of Proximal Origin have seen substantial increases in funding from the agency since the paper was first published)

Fast forward six months, and the World Health Organization (WHO) finally admitted that the lab leak theory – while maintaining that it’s not the most likely scenario – is a possibility that “needs study.”

Now, Fauci is suddenly ‘open minded’ about the theory.

As the Daily Mail reports, Fauci told Fox News’ Bret Baier on Friday: “We have an open mind but it looks very much like this was a natural occurrence, but you keep an open mind.”

Baier grilled Fauci about a claim he made in April 2020, after being sent a link to a report made by Baier himself, that saw Fauci dismiss the lab leak theory as ‘a shiny object that will go away.’ 

The Fox News anchor said: ‘When you read the email from Kristian Andersen who says…”one has to look really closely to see some features (potentially) look engineered.”

‘And you say this is a shiny object and it will go away. It does not look like you’re open minded to it.’

Fauci appeared to try to deflect by flattering Baier, saying: ‘Bret, I know youre a good person, I know you a long time. 

‘If you take a group of emails when people are considering and thinking out loud, and stop there, and don’t look at the weeks of consideration by the same people who wrote the same emails… in published peer review literature, they explain why they thought it was a natural occurrence.’ -Daily Mail

 Watch:

In February 2020, California-based virologist Kristen Anderson (who has since deleted more than 5,000 tweets) speculated that COVID looked to be genetically engineered.

Dear @K_G_Andersen can you please explain what “Inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory” or “some features look engineered” means pic.twitter.com/qhc4k1Noyz

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 2, 2021

And two months later, emails reveal that  then-National Institutes of Health Director Dr Francis Collins emailed Fauci a link to a Fox Report claiming ‘multiple sources’ believed COVID had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology – writing “Wondering if there is something NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy, with what seems to be growing momentum.”

Last October, a top NIH official admitted that the US-funded so-called “gain-of-function” research in Wuhan, China – and that the US nonprofit which conducted it, EcoHealth Alliance – led by the controversial Peter Daszak, “failed to report” that they had created a chimeric bat coronavirus which could infect humans.

As we noted last September, proof that the US funded of GoF research was blown wide open thanks to materials (here and here) released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by The Intercept against the National Institutes of Health, revealing that EcoHealth was paid to make chimeric SARS-based Covid that they confirmed could infect human cells.

While evidence of this research has been pointed to in published studies, the FOIA release provides a key piece to the puzzle which sheds new light on what was going on.

“This is a roadmap to the high-risk research that could have led to the current pandemic,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director of U.S. Right To Know, a group that has been investigating the origins of Covid-19 (via The Intercept).

We also learned in September that 18 months before the Pandemic, Daszak applied for a grant to release enhanced airborne coronaviruses into the wild in an effort to inoculate them against diseases that could have otherwise jumped to humans, according to The Telegraph, citing leaked grant proposals from 2018.

New documents show that just 18 months before the first Covid-19 cases appeared, researchers had submitted plans to release skin-penetrating nanoparticles containing “novel chimeric spike proteins” of bat coronaviruses into cave bats in Yunnan, China.

They also planned to create chimeric viruses, genetically enhanced to infect humans more easily, and requested $14million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) to fund the work.

Daszak hoped to use genetic engineering to cobble “human-specific cleavage sites” onto bat Covid ‘which would make it easier for the virus to enter human cells’ – and included plans to commingle high-risk natural coronaviruses strains with more infectious, yet less deadly versions. His ‘bat team’ of researchers included Dr. Shi Zhengli from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as well as US researchers from the University of North Carolina and the US Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center.

And now Fauci is ‘open minded’ to the possibility of a lab leak.