The trove of Covid-related documents Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has released in recent days has revived the question of accountability for the government’s Covid response — specifically for those who crafted that response, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), whose pandemic policies were based on a web of lies.
Portions of Fauci’s personal diary and emails released by Paul reveal what can only be described as a pattern of deliberate deception — about Covid’s origins, its fatality, Fauci’s role in school closures, the effectiveness of the Covid vaccine and adverse reactions to it, and U.S. funding for gain-of-function research in China that may have led to the pandemic.
There’s almost nothing, it seems, Fauci didn’t lie about. But his lies about Covid’s origins and U.S. funding for gain-of-function research stand out because they’re closely related, and they might give federal prosecutors a chance finally to indict him for lying to Congress — if he repeats those lies when he appears before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee on Wednesday. Fauci of course received a legally dubious preemptive pardon from President Joe Biden the day before he left office in 2025, covering a period stretching back to 2014. That pardon likely dissuaded Trump’s Justice Department from pursuing perjury charges against Fauci, but in any case the statute of limitations for those crimes expired on May 11 of this year.
As Hans Mahncke has argued in these pages, Wednesday’s Senate hearing offers an opportunity for lawmakers to elicit from Fauci the same false responses he’s given in the past about the origins of Covid and the role of the National Institutes of Health in funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China. Republican lawmakers have said that Fauci’s presidential pardon will not shield him from prosecution if he once again perjures himself in Wednesday’s hearing.
To understand the gravity of Fauci’s deceptions and why he should be criminally charged for them, we need a bit of historical context. When Covid first appeared in China at the end of 2019, the most plausible explanation was that it escaped from a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where researchers had been conducting dangerous “gain-of-function” research, combining viruses to create hybrids for the supposed purpose of understanding future diseases. Part of this work was funded by EcoHealth Alliance, which had subcontracted a 2014 NIH grant to the Wuhan lab for gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.
Yet Fauci has testified multiple times under oath that the NIH and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Fauci ran, never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan. During a tense exchange with Sen. Paul in May 2021, Fauci stated this categorically. When Sen. Paul asserted that the NIH had indeed funded such research, Fauci snapped at him, “You are entirely and completely incorrect,” he said. “The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” At a follow-up hearing two months later Fauci declined to retract that statement, angrily pointing a finger at Sen. Paul and shouting, “if anybody’s lying here, senator, it is you!”
In making that dramatic assertion, Fauci was relying on a narrow, technical definition of “gain-of-function,” which was only formalized by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in January of 2017 — by which time gain-of-function research had been ongoing in Wuhan for years. Yet Fauci’s past statements, as well as notes in his recently released private diary, indicate that what the Wuhan lab was doing — with NIH grant funding — was indeed gain-of-function research.
For example, the diary includes an entry from February 1, 2020, when Fauci convened a conference call with a group of scientists who would go on to write the infamous “proximal origins paper,” published in March 2020 in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine, that dismissed the lab-leak theory. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the authors wrote. “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
But Fauci’s notes from that conference call reveal that of the dozen scientists on the line, 10 believed “felt that deliberate insertion was possible” — that is, deliberate insertion of the spike protein that enabled the virus to infect humans, meaning Covid could have been created in lab. Only two of them thought it had “zoonotic” origins, that it came from animals, bats or maybe pangolins, and jumped to humans naturally.
Fauci not only never revealed his role in the creation of the “proximal origins” paper, which he later cited as an independent authority to dismiss the lab-leak hypothesis as a “conspiracy theory,” but he also appears to admit in his diary that what was happening in Wuhan was indeed gain-of-function research. In his notes about the call and the discussion of Covid’s origins, Fauci mentioned that the majority of the scientists who thought deliberate insertion was possible cited “the fact that Dr. Zheng Li-She at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in GOF in coronaviruses to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor.”
Here, “GOF” is a reference to gain-of-function. Dr. Zheng Li-She is China’s renowned “bat woman,” who began collaborating with EcoHealth Alliance CEO Peter Daszak back in 2004 on gain-of-function research aimed at making bat coronaviruses more infectious to humans.
Daszak is widely thought to be the unnamed co-conspirator in the May indictment of David Morens, a former senior advisor to Fauci. The Justice Department has charged Morens of conspiring against the United States and destroying records related to Covid’s onset, among other crimes. According to the federal indictment, Morens agreed to help a co-conspirator (Daszak), described as the head of a US-based nonprofit (EcoHealth Alliance), restore a canceled NIH grant for research about bat coronaviruses. The grant was canceled amid allegations that Covid came from the Wuhan institute, which received significant portions of the grant funding.
In other words, the government’s case against Fauci’s former senior advisor is premised on the claim that the NIH did fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan, a fact Fauci seems to acknowledge in his diary entry from February 1, 2020.
If Fauci reiterates his previous claim on Wednesday in his Senate testimony, that the NIH has never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan, he’ll have to explain why he referenced the gain-of-function work in Wuhan that was funded by Daszak’s NIH grant.
All of this is just once facet in a labyrinth of lies Fauci has created around Covid and the dangerous research that likely caused the pandemic. His denials about NIH funding for gain-of-function served a larger narrative about Covid’s origins pushed by Fauci and others in government at the time. The purpose of the narrative, it now seems clear, was to shield themselves from accountability for their role in creating the virus and unleashing a global pandemic.
That’s why the zoonotic origins theory became the unofficial line on Covid, and anyone who doubted it or suggested the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab was dismissed for pushing a “conspiracy theory,” as Fauci has said repeatedly — including a week after that February call, on Newt Gingrich’s podcast, saying “I’ve heard these conspiracy theories. And like all conspiracy theories, Newt, they’re just conspiracy theories.”
If they were conspiracy theories, they nevertheless were and are the best explanation of Covid’s origins — and Fauci lied, repeatedly, to suppress them.
We cannot, as some have suggested, simply declare a “Covid amnesty” and dismiss all this as ancient history. The government’s pandemic response was based on deception, manipulation, and subterfuge — perpetrated by the very people we were supposed to be able to trust. That’s a huge problem for a country like ours. It’s difficult to maintain a republic of free citizens if the government isn’t considered trustworthy, but it’s impossible if the citizens know the government is actively lying to them.
Without accountability for people like Fauci, Americans will never be able to trust our government again. Here’s hoping Sen. Paul and his colleagues on Wednesday elicit the same lies from Fauci that he’s been telling for years. It shouldn’t be too difficult. By now he probably believes they’re true.
