Fauci withheld information on China's coronavirus experiments
For half a year, Anthony Fauci and Kentucky senator and physician Rand Paul have been locked in a battle over whether the National Institutes of Health funded dangerous "gain of function" research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and whether that research could have played a role in the pandemic.
Against Senator Paul's aggressive questioning over three separate hearings, Fauci adamantly denied the charge. "The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology," he said in their first fracas on May 11, a position he has steadfastly maintained.
Recently, however, a tranche of documents surfaced that complicate Fauci's denials.
The documents, obtained by Freedom of Information Act requests, show that the NIH was funding research at the Wuhan lab that involved manipulating coronaviruses in ways that could have made them more transmissible and deadly to humans—work that arguably fits the definition of gain-of-function.
The documents establish that top NIH officials were concerned that the work may have crossed a line the U.S. government had drawn against funding such risky research.
The funding came from the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which Fauci heads.
The resistance among Fauci and other NIH officials to be forthcoming with information that could inform the debate over the origins of COVID-19 illustrates the old Watergate-era saw that the coverup is often worse than the crime.
In the past, Fauci has made strong arguments for why this type of research, albeit risky, was "necessary to prevent future pandemic"s, and he could have done so again.
But the NIH has dragged its feet over FOIA requests on the matter, handing over documents only after
The Intercept took the agency to court.
The apparent eagerness to conceal the documents has only raised suspicions about the controversial research and put the NIH on the defensive.
Fauci told ABC, "neither I nor Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the NIH, lied or misled about what we've done."
The episode is a self-inflicted wound that has further eroded trust in the nation's public health officials.
https://www.newsweek.com/how-dr-fauci-other-officials-withheld-information-chinas-coronavirus-experiments-1652002