An undeniable example of news media distributing propaganda rather than reliable information was their suppression of the now-vindicated lab leak theory of
COVID’s
origin and the arrogant assertion that it was false. If you pondered this theory out loud on social media in 2020, you were likely to be banned and bizarrely called a racist by journalists too lazy or politically biased to seek the truth.
One would expect better from scientists and
public health
officials, but sadly, they have been just as bad.
Dr. Anthony Fauci
once referred to himself as the embodiment of science. During the pandemic, he received acclaim from the worst media sources of COVID disinformation, such as CNN and MSNBC. But according to new information, Fauci held a conference call with a handful of scientists in early February 2020 in which he stressed the need to make people stop talking about a possible lab leak origin of COVID. In the words of one of those scientists from a subsequent email, Fauci “prompted” Dr. Kristian Andersen and others to draft a paper debunking the lab leak theory titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.”
There’s nothing wrong with trying to prove or disprove something. That is what science is. But the Fauci paper was the product of motivated reasoning, which is a great sin against science. It could be fairly referred to as a cover-up. Although there is ample speculation, the precise reasons for the cover-up must now be thoroughly investigated.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic
released a memo
last weekend documenting the history of this paper, the sole purpose of which appears to have been to stanch talk about an obvious explanation — that the novel coronavirus might have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The institute studied precisely those bat viruses, and it is a few paces from the wet market that had become the focus of early speculation. It would be a remarkable coincidence if the virus had nothing to do with the lab — altogether astonishing and implausible.
During peer review of the Fauci paper, Andersen admitted in writing his referees that the DNA sequences of coronaviruses in pangolins did not “refute a lab origin” hypothesis. In other words, the paper was not a refutation or even a genuine rebuttal of the lab leak theory. But Andersen and his co-authors skewed the evidence to fit their narrative and discussed it as if it were. Fauci, who had commissioned, edited, and approved the paper, would later cite it to discount the lab leak theory as far-fetched during an April 2020 White House press conference. While discussing the paper, Fauci hid his own involvement in creating it and concealed his close ties to all of the authors. In fact, he pretended not to know who the authors were.
“I don’t have the authors right now,” he told the assembled reporters, “but we can make it available to you.” He falsely represented the paper as an independent confirmation of what he was saying. It was neither independent nor a confirmation.
Now that the lab leak hypothesis is considered the most likely explanation of COVID’s origin, Fauci must be obliged to explain himself. He cannot be allowed to claim ignorance and walk away the way lazy pundits do.
What drove Fauci to mislead the public so flagrantly? Had he not been intimately involved in the paper’s creation, one might blame him only for being sloppy and citing a bad study without understanding what was in it. But he must have understood that this paper contained no refutation of the lab leak hypothesis and that there probably could be no refutation. He was not following the science; he was doing damage control and public relations. Just as when he initially discouraged the public from using masks, he was spreading what he believed to be a “noble lie” to affect behavior on a mass scale — in this instance, to stop people from speculating about a truth that he considered too dangerous or too embarrassing for public discussion.
The deeper question is why Fauci and the others were so eager to discredit the lab leak hypothesis that they would be so deceptive. What were they trying to hide? What secret motive did they have?
Investigations must continue. National and global public health communities are rotten to the core. Now that the purported “science” of COVID’s origin has been exposed as a fraud, lawmakers must exercise their oversight role over the National Institutes of Health and get to the bottom of this. Taxpayers should not be misled by their employees.
