Last week, CIA whistleblower James Erdman told the Senate Homeland Security Committee that Dr. Anthony Fauci improperly “influenced” intelligence analyses about the origins of the COVID pandemic to downplay a laboratory origin in China. Aside from confirmation by the CIA man, most of what the hearing revealed was already known.
Dr. Fauci funded China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to conduct dangerous gain-of-function research, yet maintained that COVID emerged naturally in the wild. When medical scientists saw evidence of a laboratory origin, Fauci branded them conspiracy theorists, fringe epidemiologists, and so forth. (RELATED: Tracking Dr. Fauci’s Fallout)
In 2023, Sen. Rand Paul wondered if Dr. Fauci “convinced the CIA to dishonestly obscure the lab origin of COVID.” Paul referred Dr. Fauci for criminal charges, but the DOJ took no action. On his last day in the White House, Joe Biden pardoned Dr. Fauci, who was hardly alone in advancing the “proximal origin” theory. (RELATED: Dr. Anthony Fauci: What Exactly Did Biden Pardon?)
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which Dr. Fauci has headed since 1984, established the Galveston National Laboratory (GNL), a level 4 lab part of the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB). Taking the helm in 2009 was biologist James LeDuc, a veteran of the U.S. Army’s Medical Research and Development Command, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the World Health Organization (WHO).
On LeDuc’s watch, the GNL began collaboration with the WIV. After the emergence of COVID, a “conspiracy theory” emerged about a lab source in Wuhan. LeDuc had a theory of his own.
“The Chinese just happened to be in the place where this was discovered,” the GNL director told reporters. “These things happen. Unfortunately, the political climate has just been rather toxic to international collaboration. That’s a real shame because at the end of the day, pathogens don’t respect borders. If we’re not engaged in sharing information internationally, we’re going to be blindsided.”
In 2022, it emerged that China’s WIV had the right to ask the Galveston lab to return or destroy any records about their collaboration. That raised “a number of legal red flags” for the GNL. Taking over from LeDuc was Gary Kobinger, a former colleague of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu at Canada’s National Microbiological Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg.
As Israeli medical scientist Dr. Dany Shoham showed in China and Viruses: The Case of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, the Chinese national ran the special pathogens program at the NML. In 2017 and 2018, Dr. Qiu made at least five trips to the WIV. Dr. Qui was stripped of her security clearances in 2019 and is now reportedly back in China.
Gary Kobinger and James LeDuc are listed as adjunct professors of microbiology and immunology at the UTMB. The Homeland Security Committee might have a word with them, and also with Dr. Nancy Messonnier, longtime director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD) and the government’s first mouthpiece on COVID.
In a series of telebriefings in early 2020, Dr. Messonnier announced the arrival of a “novel coronavirus” emerging from the “Wuhan market.” When asked about travel from Wuhan, Dr. Messonnier said she was “not at liberty” to discuss it.
Dr. Messonnier began her career as an officer of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, a squad of “disease detectives” tasked with preventing dangerous viruses from arriving on American soil. With COVID, the EIS clearly failed, but Dr. Messonnier failed to reveal how the novel coronavirus escaped their notice.
Dubbed a “true hero” by CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, Dr. Messonnier suddenly resigned in 2021. She is now a professor at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health. The Homeland Security Committee might have a word with her and Dr. LeDuc. Unlike Dr. Fauci, they received no 11th-hour pardon from Joe Biden.
Did the COVID virus arise naturally in the wild or in the Wuhan lab? How did the vaunted Epidemic Intelligence Service fail to stop its arrival in the USA? Who told Dr. Messonnier she was “not at liberty” to talk about travel from Wuhan? The people have a right to know.
Erdman’s testimony displeased CIA spokeswoman Liz Lyons, who said the CIA accepts a lab leak as the most likely explanation for COVID. So she dismissed the hearing as “political theatre.” Maybe the committee could subpoena William Burns, Biden’s CIA director, for more details.
Dr. Fauci, who claimed to represent science, has been pardoned, but the committee might get him on the record, under oath. Last year, the former NIAID boss co-published “HIV and COVID-19: Shared Lessons From Two Pandemics,” making a case that the origin of HIV is “zoonotic,” which was not a contention at the time. For details, see Inventing the AIDS Virus by UC Berkeley molecular biologist Peter Duesberg, who passed away in January.
Dr. Fauci, whose bio shows no advanced degrees in biochemistry or molecular biology, branded Duesberg an “AIDS denialist,” the equivalent of “conspiracy theorist” and “fringe epidemiologist” for those who see a lab origin for COVID. White coat supremacists never have to say they are sorry, and in government medical bureaucracies, what goes around comes around.
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Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif.
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