The Fauci Story Arc Misfires

The most interesting story yesterday was the Washington Post's publication of selections from 866 pages of Dr Fauci's e-mails from March and April 2020 obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. Legacy US media has scrambled to scrub the revelations, doing its best to make them non-controversial or even slightly favorable, but among them are some fascinaing data points. Via RedState:

Another email dated April 11, 2020, from Janet Tobias, CEO of Ikana Health Media, was addressed to Fauci with a cc to Patricia Conrad, NIH Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff. This email lets the cat out of the bag that Fauci allowed himself to be filmed in the midst of the pandemic response, because Robert Iger, executive chairman of The Walt Disney Companies and NatGeo, wanted to maintain momentum on an already established documentary on Fauci’s life and work.

The e-mail read:

“I think we have landed in the right place for the film about your life. Nat Geo, Disney, and Bob Iger himself, all understand the need for discretion now but are wildly supportive about releasing a film that will celebrate the importance of your life, science and public health.

The piece notes that this was during April 2020, when very little was known about the virus, its origins, or its potential effect. Neertheless, it sounds as though the lizard people who run the media had already focused on Fauci as the central figure of the pandemic. This focus continues. Fauci is set to release a book in November, clearly as part of a media strategy:

The book, titled “Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward,” recently became available for pre-order.

Jordan Peterson, though, has already issued 12 Rules for Life. In fact, he's about to issue 12 more. How can Fauci keep up?

Another revelation is an effort in April 2020 to label the lab leak hypothesis of COVID's origin a "conspiracy theory". Via the New York Post,

The theory that the coronavirus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China was dismissed as a “conspiracy” by National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins in April of last year, newly released emails show.

The email from Collins to current White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci and others is part of a tranche of more than 3,200 pages of emails obtained by Buzzfeed News and published Tuesday.

On April 15, 2020, Fox News anchor Bret Baier reported that US officials were increasingly confident that the virus “likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory. . ."

. . . The following day, April 16, Collins forwarded a link to a Mediaite writeup of Baier’s “Hannity” appearance to Fauci, NIH Deputy Director Dr. Lawrence Tabak, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Deputy Director Clifford Lane, and NIH spokesperson John Burklow under the subject line “conspiracy gains momentum”. The rest of the message is redacted.

Fauci sent a reply to Collins at 2:45 a.m. April 17. That response is also redacted.

. . . The following day, April 18, Fauci received an email from Peter Daszak, president of the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, thanking him “for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

Via The Australian:

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.

. . . 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”.

. . . 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.

I think these are signs the narrative has also escaped from the lab.