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Opinion
Open the Files: Fauci Should Not Take the Fifth on the Truth About COVID-19 Origins
Four years ago, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we called for an independent inquiry into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the pandemic, with full access to American as well as relevant Chinese records. The public was told from the very start of the pandemic that the origin issue was settled, that the virus was natural. But the issue most certainly was not settled, and every FOIA release, every whistleblower account, every Congressional document produced since 2022 has cast more doubt on this narrative and pointed instead toward a laboratory origin of the virus.
What Fauci should have said on July 29: "Here are my records. Here are NIH records. Compel the rest, and I will help you get the answer."
In January 2025 the Central Intelligence Agency finally aligned with that judgment, assessing "with low confidence that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin." The FBI reached the same conclusion with moderate confidence. So did the Department of Energy, which runs the national laboratories. Three American agencies and the German BND now favor a research-related origin. Yet that judgement has still not been evaluated in the light of all of the relevant American records bearing on the issue.
Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response coordinator, and National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci listen as President Donald J. Trump speaks with the coronavirus task force during a briefing in response to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic on Friday, March 20, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
We do, however, now know clearly how such a virus may have been made, because the recipe was written down. In 2018 Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance and Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology submitted a proposal to DARPA called DEFUSE. It set out a specific plan: use Baric's reverse-genetics platform—the technology he built and patented for assembling coronaviruses from synthetic fragments—to construct bat sarbecovirus backbones, including consensus sequences assembled from field samples, and then insert a protease site at the S1/S2 junction of the Spike protein.
A protease site is essential in order for these bat viruses to jump the “species barrier” between bats and humans, and in this case is called a furin cleavage site (FCS). When it first appeared, SARS-CoV-2 was the only known virus of its family (the clade of Sarbecoviruses) to carry such a site. It remains unique in this respect. Despite much sampling of viruses from the bats that serve as the reservoir species for these viruses, no other virus in this clade or family has appeared that displays the FCS, just as no animal has been found in China that was infected with a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2. These findings continue to cause great concern.
This novel FCS was the feature that most alarmed the virologists who first read the genome as it represents an evolutionary leap with no evidence that this had taken place in nature. Unknown to most, American scientists had proposed to build exactly this feature into precisely that kind of coronavirus, only two years before the outbreak of a novel coronaviral disease in Wuhan. Given the availability of a suitable template virus, the insertion of twelve nucleotides to form the FCS would be trivial and similar work had already been performed.
Our charge is not that there was American involvement in the appearance of this virus. Our charge is that Fauci and other US officials and scientists have blocked the search for the truth.
Now consider what was said behind closed doors. On January 31, 2020, leading virologists told Fauci that the genome looked engineered. Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust convened them the next day, and the day after sent Fauci and Francis Collins a tally of where they stood. Michael Farzan, who discovered the receptor used by SARS -CoV 1 and 2 to enter human cells, put the odds at sixty-forty or seventy-thirty for a laboratory accident. Edward Holmes stood at sixty-forty on the laboratory side. Farrar wrote that on a scale where zero is nature and one hundred is release, he was honestly at fifty.
None of this was disclosed. Six weeks later, five of those scientists published "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" in Nature Medicine, concluding that no laboratory scenario was plausible. Fauci promoted it from the White House podium as independent and definitive science. In a message released only this June, Collins told colleagues that the paper was work that he, Fauci, Farrar and Lawrence Tabak had "helped with but are appropriately not mentioned explicitly."
The arguments laid out in the paper were always scientifically weak, and have since collapsed, one by one. The authors said that building such a virus in a lab would be hard, yet a German team assembled one from synthetic fragments in under two weeks using a yeast-based system. The Proximal Origin experts said that a molecular feature adjacent to the furin cleavage site showed the virus had been shaped inside a living organism rather than in a laboratory. This feature (a group of sugars known as O-glycans) was predicted by the authors’ computer analyses—yet laboratory work showed that this feature did not actually exist. They also stated that a lab designer would have optimized the virus's grip on the human receptor via its Spike protein, yet Ralph Baric had already run an experiment showing that infection of human cells proceeds better if Spike protein binding to the receptor site is less than optimal. No correction to any of these errors in Proximal Origin has ever been published. The authors soon lost conviction in their own conclusions, as revealed in their own emails and Slack messages, yet they did not retract.
Security personnel stand guard outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan as members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus make a visit to the institute in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province on February 3, 2021.(Photo by Hector Retamal / AFP via Getty)
Baric himself was involved in the genesis of Proximal Origin, since he was on the February 1 call, in secret. His presence was disclosed to no one, he cannot explain how he got there, and at least two participants did not know he was there. Baric did not mention the DEFUSE proposal on the call, and has since claimed to have forgotten about it. The proposal sat in the files of the Pentagon and the intelligence community for eighteen months after the outbreak began, and no agency produced it; it surfaced through a whistleblower. When it did, the authors of Proximal Origin privately agreed they needed to “re-convince themselves that the resemblance was coincidence”—and one suggested they stay off email or carefully curate some emails for the freedom-of-information record. Baric has provided testimony, some of which has remained classified, presumably because of his links to the intelligence community.
A number of intelligence agencies (including the German BND and the CIA) favor a research-related origin and these agencies point toward a laboratory accident in Wuhan. If this were the case, it would not explain the need for such an elaborate coverup involving high level US government personnel and scientists from the UK, Australia and other countries. Scientists around the world are much more convinced of the existence of a coverup than they are by a natural origin of the virus, but relatively few have stated their views in public.
If the virus was indeed grown, engineered or reassembled in a lab, some of the technology used was American, the design was American, and some of the funding was American—and so are some of the records that would settle the matter: Baric's notebooks, freezer inventories, the sequences of viruses sampled by EcoHealth Alliance, records held at UC Davis for the PREDICT program under USAID, transfer agreements and shipping receipts between UNC and other US federal laboratories; as well as the NIH grant files showing whether the work proposed in DEFUSE but rejected by DARPA was funded in pieces by other US agencies. Every item could be produced by order of Congress this week. All have been withheld for six years.
Our charge is not that there was American involvement in the appearance of this virus. Our charge is that Fauci and other US officials and scientists have blocked the search for the truth. No inquiry can determine the truth based on the evidence at hand. So, open up the files. Convene an independent inquiry with subpoena power, insulated from the agencies whose own conduct is in question, and let the evidence fall where it falls. If it exonerates Ralph Baric and Anthony Fauci, as it may, they will have been cleared by evidence rather than by assertion—the only kind of exoneration worth having.
That is what Fauci should have said on July 29: "Here are my records. Here are NIH records. Compel the rest, and I will help you get the answer."
He instead invoked the Fifth, more than 100 times.
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