The current head of a U.S. health authority directly criticized Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), who was once called "America's doctor." The claim is that the former director played a leading role in covering up the origin of the COVID-19 virus. This is causing a stir in tandem with former President Joe Biden's sweeping pardon of Fauci just before leaving office.
On the 26th (local time), the New York Post reported that Marty Makary, Director General of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), appeared on the popular podcast Pod Post One and said, "Dr. Fauci led a massive cover-up regarding the origin of COVID-19." Makary, formerly a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, is known as someone well-versed in the inner workings of the medical community.
Director General Makary claimed that the former director moved in an organized manner to block the "lab leak theory" that COVID-19 leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. He said, "Even the medical establishment barely knew how deeply Fauci was involved in this massive cover-up operation."
At the center of the controversy is a paper written in Feb. 2020 titled "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2." The paper supports the claim that the coronavirus arose naturally. It later played a decisive role in dismissing the Wuhan lab leak theory as a conspiracy theory. Director General Makary revealed, "This paper was commissioned by Fauci and former National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins."
According to Director General Makary, in late Jan. and early Feb. 2020, just before COVID-19 began to feature prominently in U.S. news, the former director was busy even at 3 a.m., sending emails and making calls to urgently convene virus-related scholars across the United States. Meeting records show that the scholars initially offered the view that "the virus appears to have leaked from the Wuhan lab."
But the situation changed abruptly a few days later. Scientists who attended the meeting began submitting letters to medical journals asserting the exact opposite, that "the virus did not come from a lab." Director General Makary said, "Some of the authors later received research funding amounting to millions of dollars from agencies overseen by Fauci." Eight weeks after the paper's publication, Fauci stood next to then-President Donald Trump at a White House news conference and dismissed the Wuhan lab leak theory on the paper's basis.
The revelations are drawing even more controversy in tandem with former President Biden's "Fauci pardon." In Dec. last year, near the end of his term, Biden granted Fauci a sweeping pardon covering all offenses from Jan. 1, 2014, to the date of the pardon signature. Director General Makary raised the possibility that the pardon was related to the cover-up allegations, saying, "Whether Fauci was directly involved in experiments or financed them, he is 100% implicated in the cover-up." He said, "Fauci's use of science as a tool of political propaganda is relatively recent," calling the episode an "American tragedy."
The New York Post said Fauci's side did not immediately respond to a request for comment.