EXCLUSIVE: Fauci’s Institute Worked Hand In Glove With CIA, New Documents Confirm

Anthony Fauci’s division at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) provided cover for sensitive CIA research on bioterrorism threats, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

An undated interagency agreement between the CIA and Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) appears to shed light on the origins of the institute’s involvement in biodefense. The CIA’s Biological Technology Center (BTC) initiated the collaboration on “forensic microbiology” on bioterrorism bugs for the intelligence community (IC).

CIA funds would be used to leverage pre-existing civilian research efforts in a way that would benefit both CIA and NIH, the documents state. Unclassified basic research on viruses “will be used to augment and complement” CIA research and development, the document says.

The CIA had “robust” capabilities to detect and identify viruses but wanted to go further, the documents indicate. The project sought to do “forensic comparative analyses,” but the documents do not define this term. The work would study complete viruses rather than examining one gene at a time.

The CIA would help NIAID obtain the germs, the contract shows. Work produced under the collaboration would be considered sensitive, not classified, but the CIA must give permission before data were shared.

Fauci collaborated with President George W. Bush to remake the NIAID into a biodefense research hub in the shadow of the 9/11 anthrax attacks, according to public reporting.

“Vice President Cheney assigned Fauci to head US biodefense research programs in 2002, including bioweapons-agents-development and bioweapons-agents-characterization research programs that approached, and arguably crossed, red lines set by the Biological Weapons Convention,” said Rutgers Chemistry Professor Richard Ebright, a longtime critic of NIAID’s pivot to this work, after reviewing documents shared by DCNF. “The documents show early steps in the process of transferring funding for, and direction of, CIA and DoD biodefense projects to Fauci’s agency, NIAID.”

Fauci and the CIA did not respond to a request for comment.

The document states that the BTC falls under CIA’s Advanced Technologies and Programs (ATP). Two other partners named in the documents are the Intelligence Technology Innovation Center (ITIC) and the private nonprofit Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), located just outside of NIH headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, now called the J. Craig Venter Institute.