Dr. Anthony Fauci has been the leader of the federal government’s politically based responses to Covid-19 since day one of the pandemic.  The director since 1984 of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he now serves as President Biden’s leading advisor on the issue. Last year, Fauci repeatedly undercut President Trump when he was working for the 45th president. And now he’s all in for Joe Biden.

In recent years, people on the left who lie and break the law – from the streets to the suites – have rarely been held accountable. One of them, in the opinion of many, is Dr. Anthony Fauci.  Fauci is more responsible than anyone else for promoting lockdowns, mask mandates, and experimental vaccines rather than inexpensive, effective treatments for Covid-19. While most conservatives have lost faith in “Dr. Doom,” it has seemed like he would never be held to account for what he has done or that he would ever be compelled to relinquish his lifelong, incredibly influential, and highly remunerative bureaucratic perch.

But – keep your fingers crossed – that may be about to change. The serious unraveling of  Fauci’s undeserved reputation as “an American hero” and “the most trusted voice on Covid-19” has finally begun.

In the past several weeks, a number of things happened to alter the status quo Fauci-is-god spin. For months now, outlying reporting, from reputable sources – including whistleblowers like virologist Dr. Li-Meng Yan who escaped from Red China – has maintained that the origin of Covid-19 was the Wuhan Institute of Virology. According to these sources, the virus was either a bioweapon or a horrific experiment that got loose by accident from the Wuhan lab. After being dismissed as a conspiracy theory, these possibilities to explain the coronavirus have now gained significant ground and gone mainstream.

On May 2, Nicholas Wade, a 30 year veteran of the New York Times as a science writer and editor, published a lengthy article, “Origin of Covid – Following the clues,” that examined and pretty much confirmed the hypothesis of the virus’s creation in the Wuhan lab. Tucker Carlson at Fox News, who has the number one show on all of cable news, building on the work of his colleague Steve Hilton who first reported on this subject last January, highlighted Wade’s article on the origins of Covid-19 on Monday, May 10. Carlson added an emphasis on Fauci’s role, noting Fauci’s pushing masks and lockdowns. He wondered if this behavior was “a cover for something else. Could it be that Tony Fauci is trying to divert attention from himself and his own role in the COVID-19 pandemic?”

Screenshot Tucker Carlson Tonight, Fox News Channel May 10, 2021

That high profile line of inquiry let the cat out of the bag.

The following day, Fauci was grilled by Republican Senators when he appeared at a U.S. Senate hearing.

Gain of function research in China and a possible U.S. role

Even before Fox News’s reporting one week ago, momentum for taking a serious look into Covid-19’s origins was starting to build. In an opinion piece in the Washington Post on May 6, “Congress is finally investigating the lab accident covid-19 origin theory,” for example, Josh Rogin took note of the developments and confirmed that “It is clear that the NIH and other U.S. agencies don’t want to have their activities investigated” – most likely because of what might be revealed.

The Wuhan lab conducted experiments involving “gain of function” research on viruses like the coronavirus basically to enhance them so they would be more deadly to humans. Gain of function is a controversial form of study that involves boosting the infectivity and lethality of a pathogen. It is the weaponization of the coronavirus. This is the kind of research that you would expect would come out of a place like Germany during World War Two.

And Fauci, it appears, was allegedly a major supporter of this line of “research.” Documents, including published scientific studies, and the accounts of those involved attest to the fact that – in Carlson’s words – “those experiments [in China] were funded by American tax dollars. . .  approved and directed by Tony Fauci in Washington.”

Previously, these reports were to be found in the alternative media or on less prominent programs like Steve Hilton’s The Next Revolution (Sunday nights on Fox News) or Stephen K. Bannon’s War Room: Pandemic. Now, on May 10, they were trumpeted on the number one program on all of American cable news. And not only on Carlson’s conservative opinion program: later that week, Fox News’s daily signature news department program Special Report began airing a series of probing segments (including here and here) on the origins of Covid-19.

The allegations aimed at Fauci, based on a variety of records, are that his NIH Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases provided millions of dollars of U.S. government funding to a third party that used the money to help fund the deadly research at the Wuhan China lab. This action allegedly circumvented a prohibition of funding further gain of function research that was ordered by the Obama administration in 2014. Ultimately, it was this research – engineered as a bioweapon or resulting in an accidental release of the enhanced virus – that likely led to the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic.

Carlson said on May 10, “More than any other single American, Tony Fauci is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.”

When an article about his Monday broadcast was published at Fox News dot com, it was titled “Anthony Fauci let the coronavirus pandemic happen. Why isn't there a criminal investigation?”

Carlson further asserted – in a summary of his program’s reporting:

For five years – from 2014 to 2019 – the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Fauci runs, and has for decades, pumped money to a group called the EcoHealth Alliance. The gain of function research had been banned by the U.S. during that period, at the behest of the Obama Administration! The allegation now is that Tony Fauci. . .invoked that special exception in order to keep funding the Wuhan lab, and the deadly experiments that were going on there. The experiments that clearly went so wrong.

Fauci grilled on Capitol Hill

On Tuesday, May 11, Fauci was one of the witnesses at a hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee on the government’s Covid-19 response. Several of the committee’s Republican members, notably Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), grilled Fauci on the subject of gain of function research and the NIH’s possible role in funding it in China. It was video clips of Paul’s challenges to Fauci, and Fauci’s replies, that went viral and further established the subject as an important one.

Fox News’s reporting and the questioning of Fauci at the May 11 hearing could not be ignored by the MSM. As the Washington Post reported (and tried to spin) the story on May 12 in an article titled “Rand Paul and the GOP effort to blame Fauci for the coronavirus”:

For much of the past year, Republicans have decried lead government coronavirus expert Anthony S. Fauci’s prescriptions for mitigating the pandemic — including masks, social distancing and keeping society shut down.

But increasingly in the past week, the effort has taken on a new flavor — with suggestions that Fauci might be personally to blame for the advent of the virus itself.

There remain major questions about just how the virus emerged, including the idea that it somehow escaped a lab in the city of Wuhan, China, where the virus originated. The theory, which was once highly speculative and which was downplayed by top medical experts such as Fauci, is suddenly being treated more seriously, though there is no conclusive evidence either way.

But while some Republicans have criticized the initial dismissal of that theory as evidence of a lack of curiosity from the media and health officials about the origins of the virus — or even some kind of pro-China or anti-Trump bias — the theories about Fauci’s complicity take things to another level. [emphasis added.]

Dr. Anthony Fauci takes questions from Sen. Paul during Senate committee hearing May 11, 2021

Source: Video at Senate Committee Website

At the May 11 hearing, Sen. Paul questioned Dr. Fauci during his allotted seven minutes:

Sen. Rand Paul: Dr. Fauci, do you still support funding of the NIH funding of the lab in Wuhan?

Dr. Anthony Fauci: Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. . . [note: it is likely that Fauci misspoke in this reply.]

Paul: Do you support sending money to the Wuhan Virology Institute?

Fauci: We do not send money now to the Wuhan Virology Institute.

Paul: Do you support sending money? We did under your tutelage. We were sending it through EcoHealth. It was a sub-agency and a sub-grant. Do you support that the money from NIH that was going to the Wuhan Institute?

Fauci: Let me explain to you why that was done. The SARS-CoV-1 originated in bats in China. It would have been irresponsible of us if we did not investigate the bat viruses and the serology to see who might have been infected in China.

Paul: Or perhaps it would be irresponsible to send it to the Chinese government that we may not be able to trust with this knowledge and with this incredibly dangerous viruses….

Fauci: I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done, and I’m fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China. However, I will repeat again, the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded gain-of-function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. [emphasis added.]

The full hearing transcript can be read here. Sen. Paul’s questioning of Fauci on gain of function begins 59 minutes and 43 seconds into the transcript.

On May 12, Sen. Paul called Fauci a liar for his testimony the day before.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., claimed on Wednesday that Dr. Anthony Fauci lied to Congress when he denied that the National Institute of Health was funding research at the controversial Wuhan lab.

“I would say what Dr. Fauci said yesterday was verifiably false,” alleged Paul during an appearance on America’s Newsroom.

The plot thickens: China’s plan to employ the coronavirus as a weapon was revealed in a 2015 publication

A little over a week ago, the largest mainstream newspaper in Australia and the country’s only national paper, The Australian, published an eye-opening article that has gained virtually no notice here. The paper’s investigative reporter Sharri Markson reported that according to documents that she had obtained, leading Chinese Communist Party scientists floated the idea of a virus-based bio-weapon to take down the West – in 2015!

The Australian article, published on May 7, was headlined “‘Virus warfare’ in China military documents.”

Chinese military scientists discussed the weaponisation of SARS coronaviruses five years before the COVID-19 pandemic, outlining their ideas in a document that predicted a third world war would be fought with biological weapons.

The Australian article is behind a paywall but an editorial about it, “Covid as biological war? China paper needs answers,” can be read here. In its article about the story, “‘New Era’ May Be Upon Us,” the Daily Telegraph, another leading Australian newspaper, reported:

Forget the prospect of war with China. We may already be at war – but simply failed to recognise the weaponry.

Sharri Markson on SkyNews May 9, 2021

Australian television picked up the story. On May 9, SkyNews Australia reported “Chinese document discussing weaponising coronaviruses provides ‘chilling’ information.” In the article about the television report:

Sky News host Sharri Markson has assessed “chilling” details from a document produced by Chinese military scientists, in which they discussed weaponising SARS coronaviruses five years before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Ms Markson said the book was written by People’s Liberation Army scientists and senior Chinese public health officials in 2015.

The documents describe SARS coronaviruses as heralding a “new era of genetic weapons” and said they can be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human –  disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed in a way never seen before.”

The Chinese-language paper is called “The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons.”

“The document also talks about the psychological terror that bioweapons can cause. It’s chilling,” Ms Markson said. . .

“The significance of this paper is that it offers a rare insight into how senior scientists at one of the PLA’s [People’s Liberation Army] most prominent military universities, where high levels of defence research were conducted, were thinking about biological research.”

This development was reported in India, at dnaindia dot com.

The executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), Peter Jennings, said the document is as close to a “smoking gun as we’ve got. I think this is significant because it clearly shows that Chinese scientists were thinking about military application for different strains of the coronavirus and thinking about how it could be deployed.”

The Epoch Times, which excels in covering otherwise underreported news from Asia, reported the story on May 9.

The newly discovered Chinese military paper is titled “The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons.” Eighteen authors at the highest levels of China’s military and academic hierarchy wrote the 263-page paper. It was obtained by DoS in May 2020 and independently authenticated by digital forensics specialist Robert Potter. Additional details of the paper will be published in Sharri Markson’s September book on the origins of COVID-19, “What Really Happened in Wuhan” (HarperCollins).

As time goes on, inevitably the truth will out – in this case, thanks to Fox News, Nicholas Wade, Stephen K. Bannon, Sharri Markson, the Australian media, and many other uncorrupted truth-seeking sources. As Brian Kilmeade noted on Fox News Primetime on May 13, Covid-19 is “The biggest liability case in the history of man.”

The battle for the real truth about Covid-19 has just begun – but fourteen months into the pandemic, there are finally some encouraging signs.

Addenda: In response to the recent reporting from Australia, the usual left wing and mainstream media outlets, including The Guardian, dissed the story. Predictably, as well, official sources in China responded. As The Australian noted, “Beijing denies producing bio-weapons after The Australian’s revelation over weaponising SARS coronavirus.”

Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran journalist who writes about politics, media, popular culture, and health care for American Thinker and other publications.  He also appears in the media, including recently as a contributor to OANN, BBC World News, The Glazov Gang, and Fox News.  Peter's website is https://peter.media  His YouTube channel is here.  For updates on his work, follow Peter on Twitter at @pchowka.

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