The White House has changed a page on its website, replacing a mundane compendium of advice about Covid vaccines, treatment and testing with a Hollywood-style poster of Donald Trump striding through the giant words “LAB LEAK”. This is followed by an image of Anthony Fauci (Trump’s top Covid adviser in his first term) with his head in his hands next to a copy of the preemptive pardon he was granted by Joe Biden “for any offences against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in… from Jan 1, 2014”.
Sensationalism of this kind from the presidency may hinder rather than help the search for the origin of Covid and an accounting of the pandemic’s mismanagement. It provoked a rush to shore up what is left of the campaign to paint the lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory, though some critics seemed more interested in the style than substance. Angela Rasmussen, a sometimes vitriolic virologist, called it “truly a triumph of graphic design, but most of these points are not accurate” while a Washington Post columnist noted severely that “the font fades toward the bottom of each word”.
The webpage presents Anthony Fauci with his head in his hands next to a copy of the preemptive pardon he was granted by Joe Biden
The topic deserves more serious debate: the five-year attempt to cover-up and suppress all discussion of the lab leak theory is not a Hollywood-style fable; it is a Watergate-style scandal. Fauci did not cause this scandal, but his role in making it possible cannot be avoided. He was handed by George W Bush immense and largely unaccountable power over virology and bioweapons in the wake of 9/11. He held the top job at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for almost 40 years, becoming one of the highest paid federal employees ever. His salary, budget and power dwarfed that of other bureaucrats and most elected officials.
Fauci defended “gain of function” experiments – when many biologists worried that it was akin to sticking humanity’s hand into a basket full of cobras. When President Obama suspended federal funding for such work in 2014, Fauci’s agency diverted large sums of money to China, via an organisation called the EcoHealth Alliance (hence, presumably, the date of his pardon). There it is alleged to have been spent on putting humanity’s hand into a basket of vipers instead: bringing SARS-like coronaviruses into a city-centre laboratory in Wuhan, doing gain-of-function experiments and infecting humanised mice.
When humanity got badly snake-bitten in 2019, Fauci “prompted” the writing of a paper rubbishing the claim that there were vipers in the basket. Five scientists obediently authored the paper, arguing a position that – we know from their subpoenaed emails and messages – some of them privately disagreed with.
Donald Trump with Anthony Fauci in 2020 – JIM WATSON/AFP or licensors
There is a glaring double standard here. Scientists are happy to sensationalise future risks to humanity from runaway climate change or malevolent artificial intelligence. Ten years ago, they were keen to warn about the risks of virology labs, too. In a 2015 meeting of the Royal Society and the National Academies of Science on “Gain of Function and Options for Regulation”, the work of the Wuhan Institute of Virology was “singled out as the project most likely – of all projects in the world – to trigger a pandemic”, according to Congressional testimony. Yet today they dismiss such risks and lecture the White House on its choice of fonts.
However, if the Trump administration really does think a “LAB LEAK” is the “true origin of Covid-19”, as its website says, then why is it not opening the books? Since appointing strong lab leak believers to key positions, the White House has revealed few further details of what happened in early 2020 to cover up the scandal. The flood of evidence that Fauci’s elves were hiding things and frustrating freedom of information requests (by using private email addresses, strategically misspelling names and so forth) came from Congress last year, not the Executive.
Then last week, to the horror of lab leakers, Fauci’s temporary replacement was announced: Jeff Taubenberger, described by the journalist Hans Mahncke as “a gain-of-function fanatic who was knee-deep in the Covid origin cover-up”. He is the man who thought it a good idea to dig up the corpse of a woman in Alaska who died of influenza in 1918, extract that virus from her lungs and reconstruct it.
When will we see action rather than rhetoric, say those who excavated the mountain of evidence that a Wuhan lab leak almost certainly caused the pandemic?
Matt Ridley is the co-author with Alina Chan of ‘Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19’
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