"History is who we are and why we are the way we are," said American historian David McCullough. When historians write about "The Great Pandemic of 2020" 100 years from now, what will they say about how that "hinge of history" shaped who we will be then? What will they say about our America at that time? What will they say 1,000 years from now?
Those histories will be written, shorn of the petty politics of the time and stripped of the raw emotions and fear many Americans felt toward our government. It won't include minor characters like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other hypocrites. But since historians heavily rely on first-hand accounts and original source material, it's a good bet that we'll see a lot of Anthony Fauci in any retelling of the pandemic and its times.
Fauci was kind enough (and stupid enough) to write his most intimate thoughts and feelings in a diary. He wrote this on a government-owned computer, making Fauci's inner musings the public's business. And the release of those more than 1,100 pages of his spectacularly narcissistic, self-congratulatory braggadocio will almost certainly have future historians asking one simple question:
Why wasn't this guy in jail?
It's been less than two months since that diary was made public, and researchers are still pulling astonishing nuggets of damning information out of it. Reason.com's Zach Weissmueller has taken a very deep dive into the diary's contents and has tried to connect dots that have been in clear view the whole time. In fact, Fauci himself came very close to making a circumstantial case that a leak from the Wuhan lab caused the pandemic.
Molecular biologist Alina Chan co-authored a book with Matt Ridley, a science writer who has investigated COVID-19's origins. The book, Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, contains enough evidence and inferences to nearly close the lab leak theory case.
"Even though the first class of cases identified was at the seafood market," Chan told Reason in 2021, "they never found any signs of animals that were infected by this virus." Contrast that with the fact that "within months of the 2003 SARS outbreak, authorities discovered previously infected animals being sold at markets in South China," Weissmueller writes.
Fauci's diaries reveal that, as early as January 26, 2020, he knew the Huanan Seafood Market "was not the source" of the virus, "it was the amplifier." He did still believe "somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans."
But five days later, Fauci documented a phone call that should have shaken that belief.
Jeremy Farrar, a biologist from the United Kingdom, told Fauci he was "very concerned" about an aspect of the virus called the "furin cleavage site" that he worried "could not have occurred naturally." The next day, a larger group discussed the evidence, and most of the scientists on the call agreed that "deliberate insertion" of a furin cleavage site that binds unusually well to human cells "was possible." One of the only two scientists who disagreed with that consensus was Ron Fouchier. But Fauci admitted in his diary that Fouchier's position could be "expected…since he was the original [gain-of-function] person" and wouldn't want to admit the research he had championed had caused a global catastrophe. Fauci also noted that "Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in [gain-of-function] in coronaviruses" to make them more transmissible to humans. This was close to a smoking gun.
"Ridley says he's shocked that Fauci sat on information that [it] took independent researchers and writer like himself and Chan to 'tease out of the appendices of papers and the obscure theses in Chinese laboratories that had been leaked by people,'" writes Weissmueller.
That "furin cleavage" wasn't even mentioned in the publication of "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2," an influential research paper being sold to the U.S. government by Peter Daszak, CEO of EcoHealth Alliance, the company funded by Fauci to carry out dangerous research at the Wuhan lab. It set the federal government's narrative that the virus likely emerged from a wet market in Wuhan.
Some of the scientists who signed the paper may have been directly responsible for creating the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, later known as COVID-19. They had a vested interest in maintaining the wet market theory at all costs. Fauci obliged by labeling any other theory a "conspiracy theory," and the media obliged in return.
It could very well be that future historians will have access to documentation that proves conclusively that COVID-19 was born in a lab and was accidentally released due to poorly trained technicians or some kind of unforeseen accident. Whatever happened, Anthony Fauci will almost certainly be one of the villains in this story.
He sat on vital information that might have helped in the early stages of the investigation into COVID's origins. He funded dangerous research at a lab he knew had a poor safety record. And worst of all, he stifled free inquiry and debate into COVID's origins by ruining the careers of scientists who disagreed with him and convinced Joe Biden to punish anyone who advanced the lab leak theory on social media.
Vainglorious, pompous, self-promoting, and without conscience, Anthony Fauci will eventually be seen for what he was: a civic disaster.
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