Politics

Fauci Blamed Trump For Lab Leak Theory Taking Off, Diary Shows

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Anthony Fauci blamed President Donald Trump for the public’s concern that the COVID-19 pandemic had emanated from a laboratory in Wuhan to which Fauci’s institute had shipped funding and high-risk coronavirus experiments, newly released documents show.

Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul on Wednesday released new pages of the daily diary that Fauci had stored on government servers with entries stretching from December 2021 to May 2022. The entries give the starkest view yet into Fauci’s thinking as his preferred narrative around the pandemic’s origins — that it originated from a wet market in Wuhan — began to crumble.

By the end of 2021, scientists and journalists pursuing the so-called “lab leak theory” had evaded earlier censorship efforts, defied bullying in the scientific community and broken containment.

Fauci often wrote in his diary about his intention to set the story straight in his forthcoming memoir. Rather than reflecting on his decisions to champion gain-of-function research that makes viruses more deadly in the lab, Fauci sought to portray the hypothesis that COVID had resulted from a lab accident as a Trump-backed conspiracy against him.

“****Very important issue to discuss in the book. The entire controversy with China as the source of the outbreak and the lab leak theory stems from the tension between Trump and China,” Fauci wrote in a March 21, 2022.

Fauci faulted Trump for ordering the termination of a grant from Fauci’s institute at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to EcoHealth Alliance, an infectious diseases nonprofit that discovered novel coronaviruses and enhanced them in lab experiments with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

“Please remember that when it was brought to the attention of Trump that the NIH was funding a grant at Wuhan where the outbreak was first recognized, Trump ordered, with no evidence to support any suspicion, that we cancel the grant,” Fauci wrote.

Despite Fauci’s contention that the termination had been unjustified, four years later EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak saw debarment by the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services. HHS said it sought to “protect the public interest” by ending the group’s funding after evidence mounted of reckless biosafety practices and shifting statements to federal regulators about a delayed grant report covering the period immediately before the pandemic’s outbreak.

Fauci said that conditions had been placed on EcoHealth that “they essentially were not able to meet.”

An official in the office of NIH Director Francis Collins — Fauci’s boss which whom he sometimes had tension — requested that Daszak produce records about the coronaviruses discovered with NIH funding stored at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the high-risk experiments there.

Fauci said that this request for information from his grantee had led to the “demonization” of Daszak and caused the lab leak theory to take off.

“This led both to the deomization [sic] of Peter Dascak [sic] of EcoHealth and to an emergence of the theory of a lab leak and clouded the picture of our ability to further investigate the very likely cause of the outbreak which was a natural jumping of virus from an animal species to human,” he wrote.

At the time of the grant termination in 2020, Fauci’s institute awarded a new grant to EcoHealth, diminishing Daszak’s incentive to demand data from the Wuhan lab. Indeed, emails unearthed by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic show that Daszak never explicitly requested lab notebooks from the WIV, but simply informed his collaborator Shi Zhengli of the request from NIH.

Fauci further described himself as a victim of Trump.

“Because I am the director of NIAID [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] and was involved in somewhat of a conflict publicly with Trump, I then became the focal point of the building conspiracy theory that somehow or other NIH played a role in the outbreak,” he said.

EcoHealth Alliance exported 11,000 viral samples from Yunnan Province in China, where some of the closest relatives of the COVID-19 virus circulate, to Wuhan, the epicenter of the pandemic, with no apparent plan for ensuring the samples were not misdirected to bioweapons and remained accessible to the U.S. government.

It underwrote gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in Wuhan, an NIH employee said in 2024.

EcoHealth cowrote a 2018 grant proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) called “DEFUSE” with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric that calls for generating coronaviruses with the same unique features found in the COVID genome.

Fauci described an investigative report in January 2022 about the proposal as a “nothingburger,” the new diary entries show.