Fauci Blamed Trump For Lab Leak Theory Taking Off, Diary Shows

Anthony Fauci blamed President Donald Trump for the public’s concern that the COVID-19 pandemic had emanated from a laboratory in Wuhan to which Fauci’s institute had shipped funding and high-risk coronavirus experiments, newly released documents show.

Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul on Wednesday released new pages of the daily diary that Fauci had stored on government servers with entries stretching from December 2021 to May 2022. The entries give the starkest view yet into Fauci’s thinking as his preferred narrative around the pandemic’s origins — that it originated from a wet market in Wuhan — began to crumble.

By the end of 2021, scientists and journalists pursuing the so-called “lab leak theory” had evaded earlier censorship efforts, defied bullying in the scientific community and broken containment.

Fauci often wrote in his diary about his intention to set the story straight in his forthcoming memoir. Rather than reflecting on his decisions to champion gain-of-function research that makes viruses more deadly in the lab, Fauci sought to portray the hypothesis that COVID had resulted from a lab accident as a Trump-backed conspiracy against him.

“****Very important issue to discuss in the book. The entire controversy with China as the source of the outbreak and the lab leak theory stems from the tension between Trump and China,” Fauci wrote in a March 21, 2022.

Fauci faulted Trump for ordering the termination of a grant from Fauci’s institute at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to EcoHealth Alliance, an infectious diseases nonprofit that discovered novel coronaviruses and enhanced them in lab experiments with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

“Please remember that when it was brought to the attention of Trump that the NIH was funding a grant at Wuhan where the outbreak was first recognized, Trump ordered, with no evidence to support any suspicion, that we cancel the grant,” Fauci wrote.

Despite Fauci’s contention that the termination had been unjustified, four years later EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak saw debarment by the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services. HHS said it sought to “protect the public interest” by ending the group’s funding after evidence mounted of reckless biosafety practices and shifting statements to federal regulators about a delayed grant report covering the period immediately before the pandemic’s outbreak.

Fauci said that conditions had been placed on EcoHealth that “they essentially were not able to meet.”