Bombshell emails over what Anthony Fauci knew

Anthony Fauci was told as early as February 2020 that Covid-19 exhibited unusual viral characteristics which could have been engineered in a lab.

US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci in Washington in May. Picture: AFP

America’s top medical adviser Anthony Fauci was informed as early as February 2020 that Covid-19 exhibited unusual viral characteristics which could have potentially been engineered in a lab, according to emails published.

A trove of private correspondence, obtained by The Washington Post and Buzzfeed, reveal some of the crucial moments leading up to the pandemic in early 2020 when Dr Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, sought urgent information regarding the nature and origins of Covid-19.

Dr Fauci, who led the US response to the outbreak, previously rejected claims that Covid-19 leaked from a laboratory setting, but reversed his position in May, admitting that he was “not convinced” the virus had developed naturally and more needed to be done to investigate its precise origins. In one email from Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in California, Dr Fauci was told that Dr Andersen and his fellow scientists had to “look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered”.

The email dated February 1, 2020 said Mr Andersen and three other respected colleagues had discovered a genome “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory”.

Dr Andersen, despite his email, later authored a paper published by the Nature which concluded that he did not believe “any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”.

In another email from that same day, Dr Fauci wrote to his deputy at the NIAID, Hugh Auchincloss, attaching a 2015 research paper which described the so-called “gain-of-function research on coronaviruses”, which is designed to make them more deadly and transmissible.

Dr Fauci, who has repeatedly denied involvement in gain-of-function research, wrote: “Hugh, it is essential that we speak this AM … Read this paper … you will have tasks today that must be done.”

Dr Auchincloss replied: “The paper you sent me says the experiments were performed before the gain of function pause but have since been reviewed and approved by (the US National Institutes of Health) … will try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad”.

The Australian last week reported that Dr Fauci had previously supported the contentious gain-of-function experiments, which some virologists suspect might have led Covid-19 to inadvertently escape from a Wuhan laboratory.

In March 2020, Dr Fauci also corresponded with Chinese Centre for Disease Control director George Gao, after then Donald Trump blamed China for the outbreak of the virus.

Dr Fauci wrote to Dr Gao saying there are “crazy people in this world”, adding they would both “get through this together”.

Dr Gao also apologised to Dr Fauci for criticising the US for not wearing masks, describing it as a “big mistake”.

“How could I say such a word ‘big mistake’ about others?,” Dr Gao wrote.

“That was journalist’s wording. Hope you understand … Lets work together to get the virus out of the earth.”

Dr Fauci responded, saying “I understand completely. No problem. We will get through this together.”

Weeks later, as Dr Fauci faced mounting criticism for his handling of the pandemic, Dr Gao wrote to him again. “I saw some news (hope it is fake) that you are being attacked by some people.”