Obama, Fauci, and the Making of a Pandemic

While Obama now accuses Trump of being responsible for the deaths of 400,000 people, it was a crucial decision made by Obama himself that set in motion the events that led to the pandemic.

Recently, President Obama accused President Trump of responsibility for 400,000 Covid deaths because Trump allegedly ignored Obama’s Covid plan:

“400,000 people…would've been alive if Donald Trump had just paid attention and tried to follow the plan that we gave him.”

Obama’s narrative is, of course, entirely fabricated. We know this because Trump delegated his pandemic response to Anthony Fauci. In fact, Fauci admitted in July 2020 that Trump had done everything that Fauci wanted. Therefore, if anyone is to blame for Covid deaths, it is Fauci. Or so one might have thought. In reality, Obama himself played a significant role in laying the groundwork for the pandemic. 

Few people are aware that Obama made a significant error in 2014—whether intentional or not—that directly contributed to the Covid pandemic. Given that Obama now has the audacity to blame Trump, it is essential to document the true story of how the emergence of Covid can be traced back to Obama.

The story begins in 2011 when scientists funded by Fauci took a virus that was not a threat to humans, specifically the H5N1 avian flu virus, and manipulated it to become airborne, thereby making it very dangerous for humans. In fact, their explicit intent was to render the virus hazardous to humans, supposedly to investigate the potential consequences if such a virus were to emerge in nature.

What these Fauci-funded scientists did is known as gain-of-function; a virus literally gains a function, the ability to infect humans. As an aside, the idea of scientists intentionally creating viruses in the laboratory to study the potential evolution of natural viruses has always been a complete fallacy—one that has rarely been challenged. Viruses can mutate in countless ways, and manipulating a virus in a lab offers no insight whatsoever into the millions of different ways that viruses evolve in nature. In reality, there has never been any tangible benefit from these experiments. They represent a combination of a giant grift and vanity projects. Scientists want the money and the kudos. That is the crux of the matter.

The Fauci-funded avian flu experiments sparked significant public backlash. In an attempt to address this criticism, Fauci wrote an editorial for the Washington Post, asserting that while lab accidents posed a risk, the purported benefits of gain-of-function experiments were a “risk worth taking”. But it was to no avail. The Obama administration decided to impose a moratorium on gain-of-function experiments. What seemed to be a prudent decision was undermined by a specific exemption that is rarely, if ever, discussed.

Obama's moratorium spans a mere two pages. At first sight, everything looks clear and simple:

“effective immediately, the U.S. Government (USG) will pause new USG funding for gain-of-function research on influenza, MERS or SARS viruses”

However, there is a little-noticed footnote—indeed, the only footnote included in the moratorium—that undermines all the positive efforts. This footnote states that the gain-of-function funding ban can be circumvented “if the head of the USG funding agency determines that the research is urgently necessary” (figure 1). Technically, the head of the USG funding agency could be any number of individuals, including those within the Department of Defense. But the text of the moratorium, particularly its emphasis on the specific types of viruses and experiments that Fauci was focused on, suggests that this exception was inserted with him in mind. Given Fauci’s long-standing influence and dominance within the federal government since 1984, it would not be surprising if he orchestrated the inclusion of this exception. But even if that were not the case, the fact that the carve out exists, rendering the entire moratorium, for all intents and purposes, useless, falls within Obama’s responsibility. 

Figure 1

Thus, having been granted the prerogative by the Obama administration to bypass the gain-of-function ban, Fauci proceeded to do just that. While we may not be aware of all the instances in which Fauci funded gain-of-function experiments despite the ban, we do know of at least one hugely significant case, as it ultimately led to the creation of Covid. In 2016, Eric Stemmy, a program officer in Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) found out that the experiments funded by Fauci at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, through a shady organization called EcoHealth Alliance, were creating viruses that were significantly more dangerous than the natural viruses from which they originated. Upon identifying this violation of federal regulations, specifically the gain-of-function ban, Stemmy halted the funding to EcoHealth.

EcoHealth immediately petitioned NIAID to have its funding reinstated. Emails, which were only uncovered years later, reveal that EcoHealth was successful in this endeavor. Despite the undeniable correctness of Stemmy's assertions—that the Wuhan lab was utilizing U.S. government funds, allocated by Fauci, to develop dangerous viruses—Stemmy was swiftly overruled, and funding to EcoHealth was restored. According to the carve out in Obama’s moratorium, only Fauci was authorized to restore funding. The overruling of the funding ban prompted EcoHealth’s president Peter Daszak to write (figure 2) to NIAID just a few weeks after Stemmy had halted the funding, expressing gratitude for the restoration of the gain-of-function funding:

"This is terrific. We are very happy to hear that our Gain of Function research funding pause has been lifted."

Daszak’s email, dated July 11, 2016, not only proves that Fauci was financing experiments at the Wuhan lab but also confirms that those experiments involved gain-of-function research. Fauci would later deny having engaged in either of these activities.

Figure 2

Had those experiments stopped in 2016, it is almost certain that there would not have been a Covid pandemic. While much of the focus has been on the monetary aspects of Fauci’s funding of the Wuhan lab, a far more significant factor in the origin of the pandemic is that the funding provided the Wuhan lab with the international recognition and esteem necessary to obtain advanced Western biotechnology.

One crucial part of the chain of events that led to Covid was the fact that the Wuhan lab was able to procure highly advanced humanized mice from Ralph Baric, the godfather of gain-of-function experiments. These humanized mice mimic human lung tissue and are essential for “training” newly created lab viruses to infect humans. It is unlikely that the Wuhan lab would have been able to obtain these mice had the 2016 ban on U.S. funding for the Wuhan lab remained in place instead of being overturned by Fauci pursuant to Obama’s carve out.

Another significant link in the chain of events that led to Covid is the collaboration in 2018 between the Wuhan lab, Baric, EcoHealth, and the U.S. Geological Survey to create the DEFUSE blueprint for creating Covid-like viruses. It is almost certain that DEFUSE served as the foundation for Covid. The idea that these parties, particularly the U.S. partners, would have collaborated to develop such a blueprint in 2018—had the 2016 funding ban on the Wuhan lab remained in effect—is inconceivable. The Wuhan lab and EcoHealth would have been off-limits.

Notably, none of the DEFUSE partners ever publicly disclosed their roles in creating the blueprint, nor even the existence of the blueprint. The public only found out about DEFUSE when it was leaked by a whistleblower in September 2021. 

It is for all these reasons that Fauci panicked in January 2020 when an article in Science Magazine, which had otherwise been extremely deferential to him, indirectly revealed that he had been funding the Wuhan lab all along. Within hours of the article's publication, Fauci convened his now-infamous secret teleconference among major research funders and funding recipients to cover up the origins of Covid.

While we are not suggesting that Obama is directly responsible for Covid, the chain of events that led to the pandemic—beginning with Fauci's decision to overturn the funding ban on the Wuhan lab—can be traced back to the carve out in Obama's moratorium.

If Obama had any sense of shame, he would reflect on his own role in the deaths of 20 million people rather than blaming Trump.