Last month, Dr. Anthony Fauci defended a $3-million grant to the EcoHealth Alliance, a group with a troubling history.  

As  The  Epoch Times  reports, the grant comes only weeks after the National Institutes of Health, the parent bureaucracy to Fauci's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), terminated a grant to the Alliance that was routed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.   The WIV, controlled by China's Communist government, twice declined NIH requests "to hand over laboratory records so that it could review the research."

Fauci previously channeled grants through the EcoHealth Alliance to fund dangerous gain-of-function research at the WIV.   Such research, once banned in the United States, makes viruses more lethal and transmissible.   Fauci was "untruthful" about funding such research at the WIV.  

"It is disturbing that additional funding continues to be awarded for the same high-risk research that may have caused the current pandemic, before there has been a national investigation of the origin of the current pandemic," Richard Ebright,  a  molecular biologist with the Waksman Institute at Rutgers University,  told reporters.   Ebright was also disturbed  that "additional funding continues to be awarded to a contractor that the NIH has reported to have repeatedly and seriously violated contractual terms and conditions of a grant."

Fauci continues to tout the theory that the COVID-19 virus arose naturally in the wild.   That is not a matter of science, which involves data, testing, and replication.   By contrast,  Dr. Robert Redfield, a virologist and former director of the Centers for Disease Control, contended that  "the most likely etiology of this pathology in Wuhan was from a laboratory."  

Dr. Redfield recently went on record that "everyone had to agree to the narrative" enforced by Fauci and other health officials that the COVID-19 virus came from a "wet market" in Wuhan and not the Wuhan Institute of Virology.   And Fauci "clearly misled Congress" about gain-of-function research at the WIV.

For evidence of a lab leak, Fauci might take a look at the EcoHealth Alliance grant,  "Study of Nipah virus dynamics and genetics in its bat reservoir and of human exposure to NiV across Bangladesh to understand patterns of human outbreaks."   The Nipah virus was part of  a  cargo of deadly pathogens  transported to the WIV from Canada's National Microbiology Lab (NML) by  Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, a Chinese national who once headed the special pathogens program at the NML.   In 2017–18 alone, Dr. Qiu made at least  five trips to the WIV.  

One of Qiu's biggest defenders is former NML colleague Gary Kobinger, who now  heads the Galveston National Laboratory, a creation of Fauci's NIAID.   The GNL worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and previous GNL director James LeDuc helped WIV scientists avoid scrutiny over China's role in the pandemic.  

LeDuc signed three agreements to  destroy files, materials, and equipment, even after the deals had expired.   Those are hardly the only actions yet to receive the attention they deserve.   After Redfield cited evidence for a laboratory origin, the CDC director  got death threats.   No word of any investigation by the FBI.

Meanwhile, a ballpark figure for the money the EcoHealth Alliance should receive from American taxpayers is zero.   The term for the director of NIAID, and all NIH agencies, should be five years.   The best evidence for that is Fauci himself, in government for more than 50 years and NIAID boss for 38 years.   According to  Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), Fauci never should have had the job in the first place.

Mullis,  who earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry at U.C. Berkeley, is on record that Fauci "doesn't understand electronic microscopy and he doesn't understand medicine.   He  should not be in a position like he's in."

Fauci's bio shows no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry.   The NIAID boss has  often reversed himself, but now he claims that "I represent science" and charges that those who criticize him are attacking science itself.   The late Angelo Codevilla had good reason to call out Fauci as a "Deep State fraud."   For details, see  The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  

Fauci, 81, represents white-coat supremacy, rule over the people by unelected medical bureaucrats.   He controls public health policy and spending on medical research, an unacceptable concentration of power.

Fauci wields executive-level power but never has to face the voters and shows little if any accountability to the people.   By all appearances, informed consent and the rule of "first do no harm" mean nothing to this medical doctor.  

The NIAID boss claims he will  leave government  in December.   Leave or stay, Dr. Anthony Fauci should top the list for a full congressional investigation.  

Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the  Independent Institute  in Oakland, California.

Image: Pixabay.