A new book from an investigative Australian reporter dives into how Dr. Anthony Fauci reportedly misled the Trump administration on gain-of-function research in China.
“Fauci’s public persona as a cautious, careful medical professional is contradicted by his central role in kickstarting exceptionally fraught gain-of-function research in the United States after the ban introduced in the Obama era, along with his role in funding coronavirus research in China in unsafe laboratories. Laboratories that intelligence agencies suspect may have sparked the pandemic,” Sharri Markson details in her new book, “What Really Happened In Wuhan.”
The book was released late last month and details how Fauci tried to convince White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to return funding to a research project in China, which was run by a U.S. nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance. The funding to EcoHealth was suddenly terminated last year after a decade of the project studying bats in China to identify coronaviruses.
While Fauci did not tell top Trump administration officials about funding gain-of-function research, emails released through a FOIA request showed Fauci was concerned about the NIH funding such projects, the book states.
“Fauci was clearly concerned in the very earliest days of the outbreak that his agency had funded gain-of-function work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, maybe even funding the laboratory that caused the pandemic. He had cause to be extremely worried, given scientists were telling him Covid-19 may have been genetically altered,” Markson writes.
Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, has also accused Fauci of lying about gain-of-function research, with the book saying that Fauci is essentially the “father of gain-of-function research,” according to Ebright.
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