BAIER: We have shown you this timeline before. The origins of COVID-19, what happened over the months. But with new information and new details, just within the past few days, we thought we would go through it again.
More than three years ago this mysterious virus began to spread in Wuhan, China. The World Health Organization said at the time initial COVID-19 cases seemed to be connected to a wet market in the city of Wuhan.
But, behind closed doors, a new theory was discussed that the virus originated in a lab. Some officials pushed back publicly on that idea but over time, agencies and experts have increasingly begun to support the lab leak theory.
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.
[January 24, 2020] FAUCI: It’s really a big difference with the Chinese this time now they look like they are being quite transparent and cooperative with us.
In January of last year, Fox News obtained internal communications from the National Institutes of Health. Those emails from the earliest days of the crisis revealed NIH head Dr. Anthony Fauci was 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 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.”
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: “Read this paper as well as the email that I will forward to you now. You will have tasks today that must be done.”
Fauci also holds a conference call with a dozen virologists from around the world. Some immunologists were not convinced the virus occurred naturally. Dr. Robert Garry of Tulane University wrote, “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.”
Notes of the meeting also revealed those 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.”
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.”
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.
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].”
A month later we learn doctors Drs. Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry 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.
[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 or closer to 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.
[August 2021] Eight intelligence agencies participated in a review of the coronavirus origins. Four of those, along with the National Intelligence Council, judged with low confidence that the virus likely originated from natural exposure.
[July 22, 2022] FAUCI: We think it’s more likely that it was a natural evolution.
BAIER: You still believe that? There are more and more organizations that point right to a lab leak.
FAUCI: No, no. That’s not so, Bret.
BAIER: I mean, there are more people saying it. We are hearing it around the world.
FAUCI: More people saying it doesn’t mean there’s more evidence of it… If you take a group of emails where people are considering and thinking out loud and you stop there, and don’t look at the weeks of careful examination by those same people that wrote the emails and then say you know now that we have looked at it, in the published peer review literature, they explain very clearly why they think it’s a natural occurrence.
[Feb. 2023]: The Energy Department determined with low confidence the virus likely spread from a mishap at the Wuhan lab. However, some Biden officials and Dr. Fauci have not changed their view on the origins.
[February 27, 2023] JOHN KIRBY (National Security Council spokesman): Their work is still ongoing. There hasn’t been a final conclusion arrived at here.
FAUCI: We may not ever know. That’s unfortunate but that’s the possibility that we might not ever know.
BAIER: The Energy Department joins the FBI in supporting the lab leak theory. FBI Director Christopher Wray spoke for the first time about that assessment on “Special Report.”
[February 28, 2023]: CHRISTOPHER WRAY (FBI Director): The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan. Let me step back for a second. You know, the FBI has folks, agents, professionals, analysts, virologists, microbiologists, etc. who focus on the dangers of biological threats which include things like novel viruses like COVID. And the concerns that in the wrong hands some bad guys, a hostile nation-state, a terrorist, a criminal, the threats that those could pose. So here you are talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab that killed millions of Americans. And that’s precisely what that capability was designed for. I should add that our work related to this continues and there is not a whole lot of details that I can share that aren’t classified. I will just make the observation that the Chinese government seems, to me, has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here.
BAIER: Director Wray’s comments were as definitive as any official has said publicly about the origins of COVID. Two agencies though remain undecided in determining those origins. China meantime continues to deny the lab leak theory saying this week, rehashing that will only hurt the reputation of the United States. Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill are also investigating the origins of COVID and have launched a select committee over that matter and the U.S. taxpayer dollars that were funneled into the Wuhan lab.
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