Pandemic

Christian Britschgi | From the October 2024 issue

In June 2024, Anthony Fauci appeared before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic for a contentious confrontation with congressional Republicans. But it opened on what might have sounded like an amicable note, as the subcommittee's chairman, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R–Ohio), played up Fauci's sainted status: "There were drinks named after you. You got bobbleheads made in your likeness. You were on the cover of Vogue. You threw out the first pitch at a Washington Nationals game."

Fauci was the closest thing the world of public health had to a rock star. For nearly 40 years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci had served as the influential but unassuming director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a subsidiary of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) housed within the sprawling U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

That post made Fauci the federal government's de facto top pandemic expert across the dozens of agencies—from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to the Food and Drug Administration to the Office of the Surgeon General—that share responsibilities for preventing and responding to disease outbreaks. Fauci steered the U.S. government's response to AIDS, Zika, Ebola, and swine flu. He oversaw billions in annual research grants aimed at stopping the next disease outbreak.

When COVID struck, Fauci was the face of public health when public health was all anyone was talking about.

His celebrity also made him a partisan lightning rod. Democrats saw him as a steady, straight-talking scientist who struck a pleasing contrast to a chaotic Donald Trump recommending crank COVID cures in White House press conferences. For many conservatives, he was a hate figure responsible for locking down the country without regard for civil liberties or collateral damage. But by that June 2024 congressional hearing, Fauci was at the center of a new array of controversies.

In 2023, the incoming Republican House majority had reorganized the coronavirus subcommittee to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. The information they'd uncovered, supplemented by years of dogged investigative journalism, was damning for Fauci and his agency.

Fauci had long denied his agency had ever funded controversial gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Wuhan, China, where the COVID-19 pandemic originated. But weeks before Fauci's testimony, a senior NIH official admitted that the NIAID had funded such research. Days later, President Joe Biden's administration would strip EcoHealth Alliance—the nonprofit that the NIAID had paid to do that gain-of-function research—of its federal funding, citing the organization's lack of transparency and oversight failures at the WIV.

Soon after, the select subcommittee revealed that Fauci's senior scientific adviser, David Morens, told EcoHealth scientists in emails that Fauci would "protect" the group from public scrutiny about the pandemic's origins and that Morens could pass any needed communications from EcoHealth to Fauci via a private back channel that was safe from public records requests.

The day of Fauci's testimony, the Harvard- and MIT–affiliated biologist Alina Chan argued in The New York Times that a lab leak at the WIV was the probable cause of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Together, the revelations painted a picture of Fauci as a dissembling, denying, power-grabbing bureaucrat who repeatedly used slippery arguments to dodge public oversight of a controversial, high-risk agenda—an agenda that may have led to the very pandemic his job was to prevent.

Fauci argued it was all much ado about nothing. At the hearing, he said the gain-of-function research the NIAID had funded in Wuhan wasn't of concern and couldn't have sparked the pandemic; that he had no back channel with his senior scientific adviser, who he didn't even work that closely with; and that while a lab leak wasn't a conspiracy theory, he couldn't be expected to know everything that happened in China. His story was that he had acted in good faith, in the name of science, and that he wasn't culpable.

Yet when one considers Fauci's record and the accumulated evidence about a lab leak origin of COVID-19, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that he is probably at least partially culpable for the pandemic itself and actively worked to obscure that fact. As Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University molecular biologist and fierce Fauci critic, says of the series of choices that led to dangerous pandemic research being conducted in Wuhan with U.S. tax dollars: "There are few decisions that are so centrally linked to a single person and that person's pathologies, and that person is Anthony Fauci."

We may never know the full story of the pandemic's origin. But if this were a bureaucratic whodunit, the most likely suspect would be Fauci. COVID-19 was Fauci's pandemic.

Prior to COVID-19, Fauci had long supported funding pandemic research that other scientists found risky, if not downright dangerous.

In 2005, as NIAID director, he praised researchers who'd used a grant from his agency to resurrect the virus that had caused the Spanish flu pandemic. Better understanding that virus would help prevent future diseases, he argued. "The certain benefits to be obtained by a robust and responsible research agenda aimed at developing the means to detect, prevent and treat [future pandemics] far outweigh any theoretical risks," he said in an October 2005 statement co-authored with then–CDC Director Julie Gerberding.

This wasn't a universal opinion at the NIAID. The agency's chief scientist described this approach to pandemic prevention as "looking for a gas leak with a lighted match."

Fauci would continue to praise and fund this kind of research. In 2011, researchers at the University of Wisconsin and at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands managed to manipulate the virus H5N1 (which had been responsible for a 2004 bird flu epidemic in Asia) to transmit between mammals, a "gain of function" for a virus that had heretofore only been able to pass from infected birds to humans. One of the researchers involved in the work would say the enhanced pathogen they'd created was "very, very bad news" and "probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make." Fauci was more sanguine, telling The New York Times that "there is always a risk. But I believe the benefits are greater than the risks."

When the influenza research community adopted a temporary moratorium on gain-of-function research in response to the H5N1 experiments, Fauci begrudgingly accepted it as necessary to calm public opinion. He still insisted this work's potential to stop the next pandemic far outweighed any "theoretical risks" it posed.

Deadly outbreaks of bird flu and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in the early 2000s, and the anthrax mailings that followed the September 11 terror attacks, had both the public health and the national security establishments attuned to "biosecurity" threats.

At the same time, researchers were rapidly improving their ability to create and manipulate viruses in the lab. This offered the potential for creating new vaccines, therapeutics, and pest control measures. It also raised the........

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