A major article on COVID-19 origins was published today in Der Spiegel, Germany’s leading news magazine. Here is a link. Because the article is in German and behind a paywall, I hope my German friends will forgive me for posting the (unofficial, bootleg) English translation below.
Fauci Under Fire
Washington and New York, Alexander Sarovic, July 23, 2024, 4:06 PM
There it was again, the familiar face. The eyes were glassier than before, the wrinkles deeper, the features more rigid. Anthony Fauci had aged in retirement, and the MPs could see it when he appeared before them in Congress in early June.
It was the scientist’s first appointment on Capitol Hill in Washington since his resignation a year and a half ago. A committee of the US House of Representatives that is investigating the authorities’ handling of the corona virus had invited him. The discussion focused on the origin of the virus, Fauci’s role during the pandemic and the anger at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which he had headed for almost four decades.
Fauci walked through the chamber to the witness stand. He looked past the photographers, sat down and listened to the statements of several lawmakers. Later, he raised his right hand in an oath and read a statement.
The 83-year-old spoke about his long career, his achievements in the fight against AIDS, Ebola and Corona – a life in the service of science and disease control. Fauci continued, the accusations against which he now has to defend himself are all the more absurd. His institute had nothing to do with the outbreak of the pandemic, and he himself had nothing to do with any “cover-up”.
As the country’s most important disease expert, Fauci helped steer the United States through the pandemic. For nearly three years, he explained to citizens how they could protect themselves against the virus. He spoke about social distancing, masks and vaccines, soberly and evenly, with a New York accent and the soothing manner of a family doctor. Fauci clashed with President Donald Trump. This made the scientist a hate figure for many Republicans and, almost reflexively, a hero of liberal America.
Not much has changed. Fauci’s testimony in the committee was followed by around three hours of tedious political theater: The Republicans, who control the committee with their majority, attacked him in sometimes shrill tones. The Democrats flattered him and supported him unconditionally.
In the bickering, it was almost forgotten that representatives of both parties had worked together on the matter. In the weeks and months leading up to the hearing, they made documents public and interviewed witnesses. The committee did not provide any evidence that the NIAID or other US authorities were involved in the outbreak of the pandemic.
But the MPs have uncovered abuses in and around Fauci’s institute that are related to the search for the origin of the virus. At the heart of the matter are important questions: Why was the theory that the coronavirus could have escaped from a laboratory so quickly branded a conspiracy theory? And what role did Fauci play in this? The committee is investigating emails and hidden chats, collusion and a lack of oversight of risky experiments, even possible criminal offenses.
The investigation is important, beyond the search for the origin of the pandemic. It is about democratic control and the citizens’ trust in science.
- The dispute over the laboratory thesis
The question of how Sars-CoV-2 got into humans remains unanswered to this day . Did it jump from animals to humans, either directly from a bat or via an intermediate host such as a raccoon dog ? Or did it escape from a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the pandemic?
Two out of three US citizens now believe the latter. The majority of scientists working in the field, however, believe that a natural origin, a so-called zoonosis, is more likely. The question also divides the responsible US secret services and ministries into two camps.
So far, none of them can say with certainty how the disease came into the world. The data is too scant, even in the fifth year after the outbreak of the pathogen that has killed millions of people worldwide. Authorities in China are still blocking access to genetic sequences, databases and locations that could be crucial in the search for the origin of the pandemic.
In retrospect, it seems all the more astonishing that the question was considered answered early on in the West. For almost a year and a half, the majority of scientists, politicians and the media assumed that the disease originated naturally. Facebook temporarily marked posts that supported the laboratory theory as false information.
Today, the question is being openly discussed again, thanks in part to the work of Jamie Metzl. The Asia expert and former advisor to the World Health Organization (WHO) urged that a laboratory leak be taken seriously as a possible cause in the first weeks of the pandemic. He pointed out early on that two institutes in Wuhan were researching coronaviruses, some of them using risky methods and without adequate protection. He later testified about his efforts – and the resistance he encountered – before the same congressional committee that recently questioned Anthony Fauci.
On a rainy New York Sunday, Metzl is sitting in a café on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He is a triathlete and ultramarathon runner, wiry and well-trained, a young-looking man in his mid-fifties with thinning blond hair. In a few hours he will fly to Dubai to give a speech to university graduates. He has nevertheless made time for the meeting; the question of the origin of the coronavirus still haunts him to this day.
“A laboratory origin is plausible,” says Metzl. “It was that way from the beginning.”
But to his surprise, many media outlets dismissed the laboratory theory in the first weeks of the coronavirus pandemic as a playground for conspiracy theorists and supporters of then-President Donald Trump. Trump railed against China from March 2020 onwards, partly to distract from his own failure in the fight against the epidemic.
But Metzl was and is the opposite of a Trump fan in almost every respect: He is a Democrat and worked for the National Security Council in the White House under Bill Clinton. He counts high-ranking representatives of the Biden administration among his friends and is also well connected internationally.
Metzl used his contacts, teamed up with virologists and biosecurity experts, data experts and researchers. Their work contributed to a turning point in early 2021: WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus made it clear that the laboratory theory had not been refuted. The first virologists declared that they considered a laboratory accident to be the most likely cause. US President Joe Biden instructed his secret services to get to the bottom of the origin of the virus.
Today, Metzl is calling for an international investigation into the origins, open and based only on data. When he thinks back to how absolutely the laboratory theory was rejected at the beginning of the pandemic, he is reminded of a controversial article in a scientific journal.
Metzl, who is otherwise rather moderate in tone, speaks of “baseless propaganda” disguised as science. The article and Fauci’s role in its creation continue to occupy the committee in the US Congress to this day.
- Did a group of experts mislead the public?
The coronavirus had long since spread around the world when the journal Nature Medicine published an article entitled “The Proximal Origin of Sars-CoV-2” on March 17, 2020. In it, five renowned researchers gave a clear answer to the question of the origin of the virus: “Our analyses clearly show that Sars-CoV-2 is neither a laboratory construct nor an intentionally manipulated construct,” the scientists wrote. They did not consider “a laboratory-based scenario to be plausible.”
The impact was enormous. The post was clicked millions of times. It became a reference for media, which declared the laboratory theory a conspiracy theory in fact-checks. Anthony Fauci praised the work of the scientists at a press conference in the White House. He cited them to dispel rumors about a possible laboratory accident.
What Fauci did not mention: The authors had internally expressed considerable doubts about what they would later publish as their results. Fauci himself was aware of these doubts because he had closely followed the creation of the article and, according to one of the authors, had “initiated” it.
In the weeks before publication, the epidemic expert exchanged emails with Jeremy Farrar, then head of the Wellcome Trust, a large London-based funding foundation. Also involved in the correspondence were several of the later authors of the article and other virologists who advised them.
A number of scientists suspected early on that the virus could very well have been created in the laboratory, and that this was more likely than a natural origin. The reason for this was a special feature in the spike protein, the so-called furin cleavage site. This helps the pathogen to penetrate human cells and makes it much more contagious.
He could not imagine “a plausible natural scenario,” wrote one of the later authors of the article in an email in early February 2020. It was the exact opposite of what the public read just weeks later. The emails only gradually became public in June 2021; to this day, they fuel the suspicion that the change of heart may not have had any scientific reasons.
Fauci and others involved in the exchange vehemently opposed this, in the US Congress and also in early 2023 in SPIEGEL . A telephone conference with European colleagues such as the Berlin virologist Christian Drosten and new data had changed the authors’ minds. Science at work, nothing else.
The new data came from a Chinese study describing a coronavirus from a pangolin, says Edward Holmes, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney and one of the authors of the article, over the phone. This convinced him to change his initial opinion.
However, the Republicans in the Corona Committee have made chat messages from the authors from those days public. They show that several authors considered a laboratory origin to be plausible even after the conference. An escape of the virus was “so damn likely,” wrote the later lead author of the article, Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research in California, to his co-authors via chat.
The study from China also did not convince several of Edward Holmes’ colleagues. Minutes after seeing the gene sequence, they were certain: the pathogen from the pangolin was not nearly similar enough to Sars-CoV-2 to be a natural precursor.
The authors incorporated arguments into the drafts of their article, some of which they rejected internally as “rubbish.” Some of the contradictory statements were made on the same day. The emails and messages do not give the impression of an open-ended analysis. Instead, they sound like a search for arguments for a desired result.
Andersen, for example, as the chats show, still had strong doubts about the article’s conclusions even after it was published. But there was no sign of this in his public appearance – on the contrary. The scientist became one of the most vehement critics of the laboratory theory. He even dismissed a Nobel Prize winner on social media who pointed out the furin cleavage site.
Why?
In their messages, the authors not only discuss technical issues; they also consistently show concern about the external impact of their contribution. There would be a “shit show” if someone accused the Chinese of a laboratory accident, wrote one of them in the joint chat. Andersen agreed: He couldn’t stand it when politics was mixed with science, but in this case it was unavoidable.
Jamie Metzl believes that the authors of the article were essentially acting out of idealism. They wanted to protect their own research field and the collaboration with their colleagues in China. Nevertheless, they “deliberately manipulated” the public debate, and that cannot be justified.
Anthony Fauci left several of SPIEGEL’s inquiries unanswered. Before Congress, he denied having influenced the article. Fauci claims today that he has always been “open to the possibility of a laboratory origin.”
The statement is in clear contradiction to his behavior at the beginning of the pandemic: The epidemiologist did not tell citizens about the suspicions of the experts with whom he exchanged emails at the time. The public only found out about it much later, after reporters had requested access to the files and sued for the unredacted emails.
- Risky research, lack of oversight
It is not only the Republicans in Congress who accuse Fauci of misleading the public out of self-interest. An open discussion of the laboratory theory would not only have posed uncomfortable questions to those in power and the authorities in China. It would also have drawn early attention to Fauci himself.
The former NIAID chief had been a champion of so-called “gain of function” research for years . This includes high-risk work on viruses and has therefore long been controversial . But in Fauci, it had an influential advocate.
In addition, his institute supported risky research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) before the pandemic. His chief of staff pointed this out to Fauci just a few days before the call with Andersen’s scientists, as the emails show. The WIV has one of the world’s largest collections of SARS-like coronaviruses. Proponents of the laboratory theory consider an accident at the institute to be the likely cause of the pandemic.
The Republicans also base their accusations against Fauci on this collaboration. Fauci countered this before the congressional committee, saying that the research projects that the NIAID funded in China could not have produced the coronavirus.
But the committee’s work has shown that the American sponsors and partners did not have a clear picture of what the Chinese scientists were doing with the money from the USA.
This is particularly evident in the case of the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA). The New York-based foundation, which is dedicated to epidemic prevention, acted for years as the American link to the institute in Wuhan. It raised research funds from the NIAID and other US authorities and distributed them to scientists in Wuhan and elsewhere.
Since mid-May, this has been over for the time being. Joe Biden’s Ministry of Health has temporarily blocked the EHA’s access to public funding. The ministry has made serious allegations against the foundation: it did not adequately supervise a particularly risky experiment at the institute in Wuhan and did not inform the US Biomedical Authority of the results in a timely manner. The researchers had genetically modified a coronavirus in such a way that it became significantly more contagious in laboratory mice with human-like lungs.
The head of the EHA, Peter Daszak, has long been one of the most controversial figures in the debate about the origin of the pandemic. In the early days of Corona, the British-American research consultant played a key role in ostracizing the laboratory theory as a conspiracy theory, for example in a podcast appearance with Fauci in early February 2020.
“I don’t want to answer that question. It has nothing to do with the origin of Corona.”
Shi Zhengli, chief virologist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
However, during his numerous public appearances, Daszak failed to mention that less than two years before the pandemic, he had applied to the US Department of Defense for $14 million in funding for a sensitive research project called “Defuse .” Scientists were to create SARS-like viruses with a special feature: the furin cleavage site. The WIV was to work on this project alongside other institutes. Proponents of the laboratory theory consider this project to be one of the most important clues in the debate about the origin of the virus.
The public only learned about the application in the fall of 2021 through a leak. The Pentagon had rejected funding. However, some experts fear that some of the planned experiments may have been carried out anyway. “You don’t write applications like this out of the blue,” Martin Wikelski, director of the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Biology in Radolfzell, told SPIEGEL at the time. In most cases, some of the experiments for which the research funding was requested had already been carried out.
Daszak contradicts this on the phone. It would have been extremely unusual to make a project like “Defuse” public. After all, his application was rejected and it is very unlikely that the WIV would have implemented such an expensive project without the money from the Pentagon.
SPIEGEL asked Shi Zhengli, the WIV’s chief virologist, whether her institute began its work without funding from the USA. “I don’t want to answer that question,” the scientist wrote by email. “It has nothing to do with the origin of Corona.”
Shi’s colleague Daszak wants to challenge the US Department of Health’s decision to withdraw funding from his NGO. His foundation has always met all of the biomedical authority’s requirements, he says on the phone. He considers the ban to be a political step, unthinkable “without this lab leak stuff,” for which there is still no evidence. He has known the researchers in Wuhan for 15 years, he says. He would have noticed if anything suspicious had happened.
However, in a meeting of the Congressional Committee in early May, Daszak had to admit that after 2015 he had neither had access to the WIV’s laboratory books nor knowledge of its virus samples.
- Intrigue among old friends
Daszak came under criticism early on because of his collaboration with the WIV. The Trump administration cut off funding for him and his Chinese partners as early as April 2020. But Daszak had friends in important positions, not least in the NIAID.
One of them was David Morens, an advisor to Anthony Fauci for many years. He was supposed to help Daszak get the cut funding back. The Corona Committee questioned Morens in May and made some of his emails public. The documents show a man who was so vehement in his friend Daszak’s interests that he allegedly broke the law. They also fuel suspicions that employees of Fauci’s agency had destroyed official emails related to the debate about the origin of the corona virus.
In the emails, Morens, Daszak and other scientists strongly criticized proponents of the laboratory theory. They lambasted media that revealed new information about Daszak’s NIAID-funded collaboration with the WIV in the fall of 2021. Morens placed particular emphasis on one thing: the circumvention of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
This is based on a simple idea: with important exceptions, citizens have a right to insight into the work of authorities; after all, they finance their work with their tax money. FOIA requests are an indispensable tool for US media.
Morens’ emails raise the question of whether Fauci himself was involved in circumventing such requests, or at least knew about them. “I can send Tony things via his private G-mail address or give them to him directly at work or at his home,” Morens wrote in April 2021. Fauci is “too smart” to have things sent to him “that could cause trouble.”
In October 2021, the month after the “Defuse” motion became known, Morens wrote another email to Daszak. Fauci was trying to “protect you” and thus his “own reputation,” it said.
When asked, his lawyer said that Morens would not say anything more about the matter. Morens apologized to the MPs for the emails, which also contained a sexist comment about an employee of the CDC. He said he had not realized that the deleted emails were official documents.
Fauci distanced himself from Daszak and Morens before the committee. The latter was not a close confidant, despite his high-sounding title of “Senior Advisor.” He said he knew nothing about Morens’ commitment to Daszak and never spoke about protecting him. “To the best of my knowledge,” he himself never conducted official business via his private email, said Fauci. His defenders among the Democratic representatives also tried to portray Morens as a single bad apple.
But the documents suggest that other NIAID employees also disregarded the law. Morens wrote in an email that he learned how to circumvent the regulations from a “FOIA lady” at the institute. According to other documents, Fauci’s former chief of staff Gregory Folkers also apparently tried to evade requests. According to them, he deliberately misspelled terms, presumably to circumvent the keyword search for FOIA requests. Two of the spellings: “Ec~Health” and “anders$n”. Folkers said he was part of Fauci’s inner circle. He had conferred with his boss daily during the pandemic, he told the committee.
The events do not paint a good picture of the agency that Fauci headed for decades: The institute promoted risky virus experiments, but apparently barely supervised them. In addition, several employees appear to have violated the Freedom of Information Act. Fauci may keep his distance from individual employees. But as head of the institute, he bore responsibility.
- Damaged trust
The Republicans in Congress have long been exploiting the events surrounding Fauci. Every attack against the pillar saint of the Democrats can help them in the election year.
Jamie Metzl, who Morens and Daszak also criticized in their emails, criticizes the political trench warfare. He says it only distracts from the search for the origin of the pandemic. He is “a fan of Dr. Fauci” and admires his contribution to the fight against AIDS, says Metzl. But there is justified criticism of the epidemiologist.
The emails do not prove that those involved know the origin of the epidemic and are hiding it. But they show contempt for the right of citizens and the press to information, and this in a part of the scientific community that has been criticized for years as being too closed off .
This is harmful, even beyond the question of the origin of the corona, says Filippa Lentzos. The biosecurity expert from King’s College London is working on a set of rules for research that carries pandemic risks. To do this, she has joined forces with scientists from all over the world, including advocates of the laboratory theory as well as researchers who believe a zoonosis is more likely.
At the beginning of the year, the group presented a draft of international standards that are intended to help the world protect itself against zoonoses as well as laboratory accidents.
“This will only work if citizens trust the experts,” says Lentzos. However, events like those at the NIAID damage trust in science. In the age of fake news, this is all the more annoying, says the expert. “It endangers our democracies.”