Five Years Later: Still No Accountability for Fauci's Covid Origin Cover-Up

Today marks the five-year anniversary of the cover-up that sought to bury the origins of Covid. On January 31, 2020, Anthony Fauci initiated a process that led to a secret conference call with a select group of scientists the following day. During this call, Fauci and others were explicitly told that the virus likely originated from a lab. Yet, within hours, these same scientists, at Fauci's behest, began drafting a paper titled “Proximal Origin” that would be used to aggressively push the opposite narrative: that Covid emerged naturally. This deception shaped public discourse for the next five years and effectively silenced questions about a possible lab leak.

We were among the first to uncover the details of this cover-up. When over 3,000 pages of Fauci’s emails were released under the Freedom of Information Act in early June 2021, we worked through the night to meticulously piece together what would reveal a shocking picture of corruption and fraud. The emails, with timestamps from different time zones—whether intentional or not—complicated efforts to determine the timeline and sequence of events. They exposed, for the first time, Fauci’s role in leading the effort to deliberately fabricate the fraudulent natural origin narrative.

Our original reporting exposed how key figures, including Fauci and Jeremy Farrar, actively guided the response to squelch discussion of a lab origin. We also revealed how these same individuals pressured scientists, scientific institutions and the media to align with their claims while concealing their true beliefs about the virus’s origins.

The first major red flag occurred a few days before January 31. In a January 27 email, the now-fired president of EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak, contacted Fauci’s office to offer guidance on how to handle media questions about the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Fauci's involvement in funding it. The subject line of Daszak’s email read: “Wuhan novel coronavirus - NIAID's role in bat-origin CoVs.”

Daszak had served as the conduit through which Fauci funneled money to the Wuhan lab for gain-of-function experiments. This arrangement, which began in 2014—the same year Fauci’s recent pardon from Biden took effect—was designed to bypass a ban on gain-of-function research imposed by the Obama administration.

January 31, 2020

On the evening of January 31, Fauci received an email from his chief of staff, Greg Folkers. The email contained no text, only a lengthy article published in Science magazine that evening. The article focused on the false theory that the Covid virus originated in a Wuhan seafood market, and the author went to great lengths to dismiss the lab leak theory, arguing that viral sequences “knock down the idea the pathogen came from a virology institute in Wuhan.”

However, the article also included a link to a 2015 experiment in which modifications were made to a SARS-like virus to make it more infectious in humans. The experiment involved Shi Zhengli, the director of the Wuhan lab. The article noted that the research “has been approved by the NIH” and was “supported by grants from the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases”—NIAID, the organization Fauci headed.

About an hour after receiving the article Fauci forwarded it to Jeremy Farrar, then head of Wellcome, the world’s largest pharmaceutical trust, and Kristian Andersen, a Fauci-funded scientist. Fauci wrote: “This just came out today. You may have seen it. If not, it is of interest to the current discussion.”

Andersen had previous experience in covering up a suspected lab leak, specifically the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone. Farrar, a hugely influential figure both at the WHO and in distributing billions in annual grants, had close ties to Chinese officials, including China’s CDC head Gao Fu, whom he had known since college.

Half an hour later, Fauci received a reply from Andersen, who stated: “The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%), so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.” Earlier in the day, Andersen had said the exact opposite, when he tweeted to contradict Senator Tom Cotton’s theory that the virus could have originated in the Wuhan lab, calling the analysis “completely flawed and wrong” and stating that it “can safely be ignored.”

February 1, 2020

Early the next morning, Fauci sent Hugh Auchincloss, NIAID’s principal deputy director and father of Congressman Jake Auchincloss, who has been trying to sabotage Robert Kennedy’s appointment as director of Health and Human Services, the 2015 Nature article linked in the Science article. This is the article that detailed the gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan lab and Fauci’s funding. Fauci included a strongly worded message, stating: “It is essential that we speak this AM. Keep your cell phone on.” Fauci added: “You will have tasks today that must be done.”

Fauci then sent the same Nature article to Lawrence Tabak, the Principal Deputy Director at NIH, a man who would later help Fauci cover up the origin of Covid. The email, marked as “IMPORTANT,” simply read “Here it is,” suggesting that the two men had spoken separately on the phone.

Around two hours later, Farrar sent out a group email announcing a 2 p.m. conference call for that day, February 1. His email emphasized that “information and discussion is shared in total confidence and not to be shared until agreement on next steps.” The email included a brief agenda with items like “Introduction, focus and desired outcomes” and “Summary and next steps.” A total of 13 people, including Farrar, were listed on the teleconference agenda.

The call, details of which remain largely unknown, lasted around 90 minutes. As a result of the call, Andersen and a group of Fauci-funded scientists were tasked with publishing the fraudulent “Proximal Origin” paper to categorically dispel the lab leak theory. According to one of the authors, the paper was complete in draft form that same day. Over the next few days, the authors exchanged revised drafts with Fauci and Farrar, who provided input and comments.

While the fraudulent Proximal Origin paper claimed that no “laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” the authors were privately saying the opposite, as revealed later when Congress subpoenaed their Slack messages. Andersen told his coauthors: “I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin' likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work, and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” He added, “The main issue is that accidental escape is in fact highly likely – it's not some fringe theory.” Co-author Robert Garry, who was also on Fauci’s secret call, admitted that Covid was “probably” made in a lab. Garry told the group, “I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. Do the alignment of the spikes at the amino acid level – it’s stunning.” He noted that a lab-created virus would easily explain the data, saying, “Of course, in the lab, it would be easy to generate the perfect 12-base insert that you wanted.” Co-author Andrew Rambaut, who was also on Fauci’s secret call, stated that Covid “easily could have” leaked from a lab.

While they were privately expressing their real beliefs, they published their fraudulent paper online on February 16 and in print in Nature Medicine on March 17, claiming the opposite.

Fauci infamously cited the fraudulent Proximal Origin paper from the White House podium on April 17, asserting it definitively proved that Covid came from nature. Fauci feigned ignorance of the authors, despite them acting on his instructions and under his guidance in crafting the paper.

NASEM and Lancet Deceptions

Two days after the secret conference call, Fauci and his group of hand-picked scientists misled the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) regarding the origin of Covid. This was particularly egregious, as NASEM had been tasked by the White House, under President Trump, to investigate the origins of the virus. Meanwhile, Farrar helped Daszak orchestrate another fraudulent article, published in The Lancet on February 19, condemning lab leak discussions as “conspiracy theories” that “create fear, rumours [sic], and prejudice.”

Fauci, preemptively pardoned for his role in outsourcing dangerous experiments to the Wuhan lab and later covering up Covid's origins, continues to parrot the same false narrative about a natural origin. Farrar was promoted to the position of WHO chief scientist. Andersen and the other Proximal Origin authors remain in good standing at their institutions. Only Daszak has faced any consequence, of sorts, when he was fired by EcoHealth earlier this month—though even that appears to be part of the cover-up, as he’s merely a scapegoat.

The consequences of this cover-up are immense. The natural origins narrative framed public discourse, shaped policy decisions, and suppressed legitimate scientific inquiry. It became a shield for those responsible for funding high-risk virus research, deflecting accountability from those who had the most to lose if the lab leak hypothesis gained traction.

The past five years have only reinforced what was clear from the outset: Covid originated in a lab, and the subsequent cover-up was not a matter of scientific uncertainty but of deliberate deception. Those orchestrating the effort had every reason to deflect attention from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, given their deep financial and institutional ties to its research, as well as their own dependence on grant funding and institutional standing. They feared scrutiny and acted swiftly to prevent it.

Worst of all, had the true origins of Covid not been covered up—had it been revealed what Fauci already knew, namely that Covid was engineered in a lab for efficient human transmission, something no natural virus could achieve so quickly—the pandemic would have unfolded very differently. Lockdowns, contact tracing, masking, and other measures were senseless against a virus designed to spread like wildfire. We could have focused resources on protecting the elderly while allowing healthy individuals to live normally, avoiding the farce of endless Covid theatrics.

This anniversary serves as a stark reminder of how easily public perception can be manipulated by those in power. The evidence was always there, hidden in emails and quiet conversations among scientists who knew the truth but chose to conceal it. Five years later, the world deserves full accountability.