Fauci’s Woman in China: The Buried Warnings from Wuhan

Most Americans don’t know this, but for years before the Covid outbreak, Anthony Fauci’s organization—the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)—had a representative on the ground in China. Her name was Chen Ping. Based at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, she acted as Fauci’s eyes and ears inside China, regularly reporting back to NIAID headquarters in Bethesda.

We were the first to report on Chen Ping’s role in 2021, based on publicly available sources like her publications and online profile. That early reporting was later confirmed by a major trove of documents released through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by Judicial Watch, which contained some of Chen’s internal communications with Fauci’s office. And now, a new set of FOIA documents—released under pressure from independent journalist Jimmy Tobias—has brought this story back into focus. Although heavily redacted and largely devoid of new revelations, the emails confirm what’s been clear for some time: NIAID censors are still working overtime to suppress this part of the Covid origin story.

Chen Ping email from April 30, 2025 FOIA release

The documents we do have paint a disturbing picture: Chen raised red flags for years about what was happening at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)—and those warnings were either ignored or buried. She flagged biosafety failures. She questioned the kind of research NIAID was funding. She alerted Fauci’s office that the WIV was assembling a highly dangerous Ebola virus. She flagged signs the lab was engaged in commercial vaccine development as early as 2018—work that now looks strikingly similar to mRNA vaccine research, applied to viruses the lab itself was creating.

Chen wasn’t a whistleblower in the traditional sense. She was a career bureaucrat doing her job—raising internal concerns, documenting risks, and asking uncomfortable but necessary questions. What makes her story so devastating is not just the content of her warnings, but how her agency treated them: with silence, stonewalling, and at times, outright suppression.