Dr. Anthony Fauci is always very careful about whom he grants interviews to. We know this from the trove of emails released so far.
Preferred are friendly, deferential, adoring interviews. Out of the question are any from overly inquisitive or hostile interviewers or venues. But he can’t always perfectly control content. Every once in a while, a reporter throws in a serious question that provokes an answer that goes beyond his usual “I’m-the-Science” routine.
“As part of the probes into the lab leak, EcoHealth Alliance, which conducted so-called gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in China, there are reports that it is again being funded by your agency,” Diamond said. “Why are you confident, doctor, that EcoHealth is a good funding partner?”
Fauci’s answer: Because otherwise he and NIH would have sued and won.
“If they ever brought that in court, they could sue us and win that in a microsecond, so you’ve got to be careful. ...
“If something is peer-reviewed, gets a high recommendation for funding, you can’t arbitrarily decide, ‘I just don’t want to fund it’ because people don’t like them.”
Then, the reporter moved on.
Not to put too fine a point on this, but it truly does sound like someone is being blackmailed. That’s what it means effectively to say: Cough up $3 million or I will sue. Is that what Fauci is saying that Daszak was doing, even if only implicitly? It’s completely bizarre. Also, since when is there a court-enforced right of any nonprofit to get millions in funding from an agency that is supposed to be supporting scientific research with public benefit?
I asked some of my friends in the scientific community and none could come up with a single instance of some organization, scientist, or institution successfully suing the NIH for the failure to fund. They all found the claim to be utterly ridiculous.
So if this isn’t believable at all, why in the world would Fauci raise the specter of legal reprisal? Freudian slip?
When the news of this funding came out over the weekend, many of us were completely gobsmacked. We had all assumed that Fauci and all his cohorts around the world would take a strategy of sweeping this whole mess under the rug as quickly and deeply as possible. We never imagined that Fauci would be so brazen, aggressive, and unapologetic as to sign off on another $3 million to the party that was part of provoking this incredible crisis for the entire world.
“EcoHealth Alliance hasn’t been forthcoming about how it used National Institutes of Health grants for coronavirus research in China that may have resulted in the Covid-19 outbreak. Yet Anthony Fauci on his way to retirement this year is rewarding the outfit by giving it more money for ... coronavirus research.
“Early in the pandemic, EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak tried to shut down debate over the virus’s origins by coordinating a letter from scientists in The Lancet that condemned the lab-leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory. We’ll probably never know for certain how the virus originated, but the evidence for a lab leak has grown stronger with time.
“It’s likely that a coronavirus will again jump from animals to humans as MERS and SARS did, so more research in this area is worthwhile with the proper care and protection against a lab breakout. But aren’t there organizations with better records than EcoHealth Alliance to do it?
“The NIH has repeatedly rapped the outfit for failing to monitor its partners and to comply with its grant terms. In August, the NIH told the House Oversight Committee that it has requested on two occasions that [EcoHealth Alliance] provide NIH the laboratory notebooks and original electronic files from the research conducted at WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology]. To date, WIV has not provided these records.’”
Oh sure. That’s a great bromide but how much control do we the people have over the funding decision of Fauci and the agency? The answer is none. True, Congress allocates the money and can cut the budget. But no one seems to have any oversight or control over disbursements in any detail apart from the deep-state bureaucrats running the committees.
And let’s just say it: $45 billion is a heck of a lot of money. With that kind of money comes vast power, along with the prospects of groupthink stagnation as well as corruption.
“Because the NIH is not only not funding it, they’re not doing it, and they’re relying on two really flawed studies that the CDC put out. This is the distortion of science itself, shutting down scientific discussion and that should be our greatest lesson.”
If you think back to those days, you remember Fauci parading all over the media for a year, going on about all that he and his colleagues were discovering about “the science” and how it meant we had to stay locked down and masked up. It turns out that not much COVID-related science was being produced at all, particularly not on burning issues such as masks and natural immunity.
Instead, he and others were making things up the whole time.
One area that would have been incredibly fruitful was research on early treatment. That was being done all over the world, with the result that many countries such as India minimized deaths. In this country, the CDC/NIH machinery actually leaned on pharmacies not to distribute approved repurposed medicines that were actually being prescribed by doctors!
Untangling the interests, networks, committees, and real reasons for this astounding debacle will take many years. Many people want to forget about it all and pretend life is normal and that the gravy train should just keep operating as it always has.
One of those people is the well-funded EcoHealth Alliance and its well-connected head Daszak. But, hey, at least he doesn’t have to sue Fauci. The NIH’s $3 million at least made that potential lawsuit go away. Many other commentators had a different phrase for it: hush money.
If anyone has a reason to sue the NIH, it’s the American people.
