BAIER: Fresh questions are being raised about what American scientists and federal health officials knew about how and where the Coronavirus originated and whether they tried to suppress conflicting evidence. It’s not a mere abstract second-guessing. Understanding the origins was key then and remains so. To deal with the virus that has proven stubbornly persistent.
Tonight what we learned of the evolving U.S government response.
January 2020, the world first learns that patients in Wuhan, China are suffering serious complications from an unknown virus. And we soon realize infections from a novel coronavirus are fueling a fast-spreading global pandemic. By mid-month the first U.S. case of COVID is reported in Washington state. Health experts conclude the outbreak is due to human-to-human transmission.
Federal officials – scrambling to contain its spread – offer mixed messages.
[January 28, 2020] ALEX AZAR (HHS Secretary): We are urging China more cooperation and transparency are the most important steps you can take toward a more effective response.
[January 24, 2020] FAUCI (National Institute of Health (NIH)): It’s really a big difference with the Chinese this time now they look like they are being quite transparent and cooperative with us.
BAIER: But did such a deadly virus emerge, so swiftly, so suddenly from a central Chinese province.
New internal communications from the National Institute of Health obtained by Fox News show in the earliest days of the crisis, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of Agency’s Infectious Diseases Institute is warned COVID may have leaked from a Chinese government-run lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
January 27th, [2020,] Fauci is told the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases [NIH] has been indirectly funding the Wuhan lab through EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based scientific nonprofit that had been working with novel coronaviruses.
January 31st, Dr. Kristian Andersen, a noted virologist at the Scripps Lab privately tells Fauci that after discussions with his colleagues, some of COVID-19’s features, potentially look engineered and: “The genome is inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” Meaning, the virus may have been genetically manipulated.
Fauci reacts immediately and organizes an all-hands-on-deck conference call with colleagues. He tells the deputy director of the agency, Dr. Hugh Auchincloss of the urgency: “It is essential that we speak this AM. Keep your cell phone on… Read this paper as well as the email that I will forward to you now. You will have tasks today that must be done.”
Later that day, Auchincloss confirms a study into experiments with the novel Coronavirus funded through the NIAID may not have gone through proper biosafety review and oversight. He tells Fauci: Their staff “try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad.”
Hours later, Fauci convenes a conference call with a dozen worldwide virologists. Notes of that hastily convened meeting obtained by Fox News reveals suspicions of a Wuhan lab leak are suppressed over concerns that public revelations of Chinese government involvement would do, “great potential harm to science and international harmony.” [wrote Dr. Francis Collins, NIH Director]
“Further debate about such accusations would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.” [wrote Ron Fouchier, Erasmus MC Department of Viroscience]
But some immunologists are not convinced. Dr. Michael Farzan [Scripps Research] is quoted as saying: “I think it becomes a question of how do you put all this together, whether you believe in this series of coincidences, what you know of the lab in Wuhan, how much could be in nature – accidental release of natural event? I am 70:30 or 60:40.”
Another scientist at the meeting, Dr. Robert Garry of Tulane University is more adamant: “I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from the bat virus or one very similar to it to nCoV where you insert exactly 4 amino acids 12 nucleotide that all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function. That, and you don’t change any other amino acid in S2? I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature… Of course, in the lab it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you wanted.”
BAIER: Fauci and others pointed at evidence that the virus first originated in a seafood and wild market in Wuhan, but any scientific consensus is complicated by the market being shut down and scrubbed clean by Chinese authorities with crucial evidence destroyed or hidden from international scrutiny. Outside access to the lab is also restricted.
Dr. Garry later says a consensus is reached for drafting a report: “1. Don’t try to write a paper at all – it’s unnecessary; or, 2. if you do write it[,] don’t mention a lab origin as that will just add fuel to the conspiracists.”
On that call, Fauci and director Collins are again told about separate State Department warnings about lax safety protocols inside the Wuhan lab. It’s unclear whether those warnings were expressed to White House officials. Nevertheless, despite the conflicting evidence presented by the virologists at that meeting, Collins seems convinced: “I am coming around to the view that a natural origin is more likely. But I share your view that a swift convening of experts in a confidence inspiring framework (WHO seems really the only option) is needed, or the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate.”
Just four days later [February 4, 2020], five American, British and Australian researchers who are all on that Fauci conference call, author preliminary findings that abandon their earlier private beliefs that COVID was likely the result of a laboratory leak. It’s unclear what new evidence prompted such a drastic 180. But private communications show the various drafts of their report are sent to Fauci and Collins for editing and approval. The records do not reveal if they, in fact, edited the new version.
February 16th, the first public draft is published online. [‘The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2’ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9%5D
Weeks later a final version of that report is posted. Again, a total reversal of what those virologists wrote in private emails earlier.
March 17th, in Nature Medicine: “Our analysis clearly shows that COVID is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” But that was not enough to tamp down what multiple sources inside and outside government believed, that the Wuhan lab was, indeed, the COVID ground zero.
[April 15, 2020] [Bret Baier reported:] “Multiple sources say this may be the costliest government cover-up of all time by China… There is a growing belief that the COVID-19 virus originated in the Wuhan lab, not as a bioweapon but as China’s effort to find and deal with viruses to show the world China was as good as or better than the U.S. on that front.”
[April 15, 2020] Later that day President Trump is asked about our reporting. [Trump said:] “More and more we are hearing the story. We are doing a very thorough examination of this horrible situation that happened.”
The next day April 16th a frustrated Collins emails Fauci, “Wondering if there is something NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy.” Collins’ email includes a link to our “Special Report” and FoxNews.com reporting.
A day later, Fauci replies: “I would not do anything about this right now. It is a shiny object that will go away in times [sic].”
But hours after that from the White House press briefing room, Dr. Fauci publicly endorses the animal market theory: “The mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”
More than a month later, we now learn doctors Drs. Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry, two of the authors of that scientific report who were in close contact with Dr. Fauci are awarded a nearly $9 million research grant from Fauci’s agency.
A month after that Dr. Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, the group that did the original U.S.-funded experiments with the Chinese at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, received a $7.5 million grant over 5 years from Dr. Fauci.
[May 26, 2021] President Biden a year later tasks the U.S. Intelligence community to probe the COVID origins, but its August report was inconclusive due in large part to China’s unwillingness to assist with the investigation.
As the lab leak theory gains more scientific traction around the world, Dr. Collins publicly says he’s at least open to that possibility.
[August 12, 2021] BAIER: You clarify that you thought it was not a weaponized thing from the Chinese but that it may have been a lab accident. It seems more and more pointing that way. Are you confident saying that …?
DR. COLLINS (NIH Director): You know, I don’t think I have any more new information to be able to tip the balance. Certainly possible that this was somehow understudied in the lab even though it was not human-engineered from scratch. I’m quite confident of that.
[December 19, 2021 ] But months later in his last interview before leaving NIH last month, Collins tells Fox News he stands by the natural origins theory: “We still don’t know. There is no evidence really to say. Most of the scientific community, myself included, think that is a possibility but far more likely this was a natural way in which a virus left a bat maybe traveled through some other species and got to humans and there was no lab leak involved. We won’t know until China decides to open up about this which they have not done and shame on them for that.
BAIER: Fauci says Chinese cooperation should be the goal.
[June 3, 2021] FAUCI: “Obviously, you want openness and cooperation. One of the ways you can get it don’t be accusatory…The accusatory part about it is only going to get them to pull back even more.
BAIER: And that is what has so frustrated scientists and held professionals inside and out of government as they have tried to cope with an exploding lethal pandemic for more than 2 years with incomplete or inaccurate facts.
[June 29, 2021] “Whether it was engineered or not, if we would have known earlier and there wasn’t a cover-up, we could have saved lives.”
BAIER: Dr. Robert Garry, who was on that February 2020 conference call with Dr. Fauci, tells The Intercept news organization he changed his mind on the COVID origins based on new information he and his colleagues received and that “no one was trying to mislead the public.” We should note China continues to deny its Wuhan lab was the COVID source, but last July refused cooperation with a second stage of an international probe into the pandemic’s origins. U.S. lawmakers want more answers too with ranking members of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees. Republicans in recent days asking president Biden’s HHS secretary for greater access to Dr. Fauci and NIH emails and notes from the earliest days of the pandemic and they want to interview Fauci himself. They say the current administration continues to hide the truth. We provided our story to Dr. Fauci’s people and NIH. As of airing tonight, we have not heard a response.
American Thinker
FactReal 
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