When Will Fauci be Fired? Dr. Anthony Fauci has been accused of lying under oath to Congress about U.S. subsidies for gain-of-function research to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which unleashed the SARS-CoV-2 virus on the world. Almost two years into “15 days to slow the spread,” Americans should have learned a very significant fact about Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases: He has a troubled relationship with the truth. Since June, the highest-paid employee of the federal government has been caught in two major falsehoods, the more important being his mulish denial that his agency subsidized research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where the notorious Bat Lady, Shi Zhengli, genetically enhanced a bat coronavirus to infect human beings. That research is called “gain of function” because it fortifies a microbe’s infectious ability. An American scientist provided the know-how, and American taxpayers the money, to create the enhanced SARS-CoV-2 that spread across the globe. Second, in May 2020 Fauci falsely said the virus almost certainly did not spring from the Bat Lady’s lab, where poorly trained technicians were a major concern for U.S. science diplomats. After e-mails surfaced in June that thanked him for all but dismissing the lab-leak theory, Fauci then claimed he never blithely dismissed the theory, now all but established fact. One might say Fauci — whose salary as of 2019 is $417,608 — lied about these matters, which would imply intent to deceive. Or one might say he doesn’t know what his agency is doing. Or one might say that, at 80 years old, he’s an elderly man who just can’t remember. Whatever one says on those counts, one must say one thing: Fauci must either retire or be fired. Gain of Function Subsidized Fauci does not deny that his agency sent millions to the Bat Lady’s lab in Wuhan, as Fox News and Newsweek reported last year. But the octogenarian, who graduated from Cornell University medical school 55 years ago, does deny the money paid for the perilous gain-of-function research that created the virus that caused COVID-19 and just happened to interest the People’s Liberation Army. The PLA hoped to weaponize it, aerosolize it, and use it to bring down an enemy nation’s medical system. Infected lab workers spread the virus in Wuhan, the site of the Military World Games that brought thousands of athletes into the city just as the virus was getting legs. They, in turn, spread it globally when they returned home, as we noted in our article House Report All But Proves Lab-leak Theory in the September 20, 2021 issue of The New American. The takeaway from all that is this: Fauci furiously denies his agency played a role in creating the virus by funding the experiments, which two American scientists, writing in the Washington Post, warned could end in disaster if an enhanced virus escaped the lab. For instance, in a testy exchange with Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on July 20, during testimony before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, Fauci denied for the second time that his agency subsidized the experiments. “You do not know what you are talking about,” Fauci fumed after the senator warned him that lying to Congress is a felony, and reminded the angry doctor of his false testimony in May. The Bat Lady, Paul said, “credits the NIH [National Institutes of Health] and lists the actual number of the grant.” Shi’s paper describes experiments in which “she took two bat coronavirus genes, spike genes, and combined them with a SARS related backbone to create new viruses that are not found in nature.” Those viruses “were shown to replicate in humans,” Paul continued: These experiments combined genetic information from different coronaviruses that infect animals, but not humans, to create novel artificial viruses able to infect human cells. Viruses that in nature only infect animals were manipulated in the Wuhan lab to gain the function of infecting humans. This research fits the definition of the research that the NIH said was subject to the pause in 2014 to 2017, a pause in funding on gain of function, but the NIH failed to recognize this, defines it away, and it never came under any scrutiny. Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist from Rutgers, described this research in Wuhan as the Wuhan lab used NIH funding to construct novel chimeric SARS related to coronaviruses able to infect human cells and laboratory animals. This is high-risk research that creates new potential pandemic pathogens, potential pandemic pathogens that exist only in the lab, not in nature. This research matches — these are Dr. Ebright’s words — this research matches, indeed epitomizes the definition of gain of function research, done entirely in Wuhan, for which there was supposed to be a federal pause. Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11th, where you claimed that the NIH never funded gains-of-function research in Wuhan? “Senator Paul, I have never lied before the Congress, and I do not retract that statement,” Fauci replied. “This paper that you were referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain of function.” Paul: “You take an animal virus and you increase its transmissibility to humans. You’re saying that’s not gain of function?” Fauci: “Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly. And I want to say that officially, you do not know what you are talking about, okay?” Paul: “This is your definition that you guys wrote. It says that scientific research that increases the transmissibility among animals is gain of function. They took animal viruses that only occur in animals, and they increased their transmissibility to humans. How you can say that is not gain of function.” Fauci: “It is not.” Paul later tweeted the Bat Lady’s “verbatim admission” that NIH funded her work, and cited a microbiologist from MIT who said “certain techniques that the researchers used seemed to meet the definition of gain-of-function” But Fauci bumped into a bigger problem weeks later. The Intercept disclosed two more grants found in a 900-page trove of government documents obtained with a freedom of information request. Funneled through scientist Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, those grants subsidized gain-of-function research. “The documents contain several critical details about the research in Wuhan, including the fact that key experimental work with humanized mice was conducted at a biosafety level 3 lab at Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment — and not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as was previously assumed,” the website reported. It continued: The documents raise additional questions about the theory that the pandemic may have begun in a lab accident, an idea that Daszak has aggressively dismissed. The bat coronavirus grant provided EcoHealth Alliance with a total of $3.1 million, including $599,000 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology used in part to identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans. Even before the pandemic, many scientists were concerned about the potential dangers associated with such experiments. The grant proposal acknowledges some of those dangers: “Fieldwork involves the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs, while working in caves with high bat density overhead and the potential for fecal dust to be inhaled.” Daszak, of course, led the effort to squash the lab-leak theory, but in any case Ebright, head of the Waksman Institute for Microbiology at Rutgers, spoke to the Intercept, and in a long thread on Twitter called Fauci’s claims “untruthful.” Ebright had already confirmed the experiments for Nicholas Wade, who, in May this year, wrote the 11,000-word piece for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that proved NIAID’s subsidies funded the controversial experiment.