Today I am pleased to publish an invited guest post by Sigrid Bratlie, molecular biologist and author of The Wuhan Mystery. An earlier version of this post was first published in Norwegian at Minerva. —RP
Behind the controversy over Anthony Fauci’s silence lies decades of American investment in risky virus research as part of a global arms race – and new questions about how authorities, scientists and intelligence handled the suspicion of a laboratory leak.
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that few American bureaucrats in recent years have been more polarizing than Anthony Fauci — best known as the leader of the US pandemic response.
Now the debate is raging after he was found in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions about the origins of the pandemic under oath. Republicans have made him almost solely responsible for everything that went wrong during the pandemic. Democrats call it a conspiratorial vendetta and an attack on science.
The rhetoric is disappointingly superficial on both sides — and so is the coverage in most media so far, which portrays the whole thing as vengeful Republicans against a somewhat inexplicably silent Fauci.
The matter is far more complex.
A new and more dangerous world
There are at least two, each complicated, layers to this story. The first is about decades of misguided bipartisan policy on research into dangerous viruses. The second is about how the US government and academia have communicated the relationship between this strategy and the origin of the virus from 2020 onward. The first may have had disastrous consequences for global health security; the second has contributed to eroding trust in American democracy.
In 2001, the United States was shaken by terror. First the September 11 attacks, then letters containing anthrax spores sent to journalists and politicians . President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney laid out an ambitious strategy against biological threats and appointed Fauci to lead the effort. He worked in the health administration, but in practice had responsibility for both the civilian and military sectors.
In his recently published diary, we see what that entailed. He produced white papers that would give the US cover to circumvent the Biological Weapons Convention in order to conduct research in the legal gray area. He was planning to go to Iraq with the CIA to search for Saddam Hussein’s bioweapons, weapons that the US administration used as a main justification for the war, but which were never found. Fauci led and funded US research into dangerous viruses both at home and abroad over many decades – which provided ample opportunities for collecting intelligence in countries that were otherwise inaccessible.
There was no shortage of warnings, especially when the research Fauci funded took a turn toward so-called gain-of-function research to make natural viruses more dangerous in the laboratory. Experts heatedly debated whether this created an unacceptable risk of a pandemic. Fauci believed the risk was acceptable and sent money to research on genetically modified SARS-like viruses in Wuhan, among other things. Warnings from State department diplomats about poor security at the laboratory and that the research could be misused by China for military purposes (dual use) were ignored.
The US strategy was a response to a world that Americans perceived as more dangerous after 9/11. The question is whether it also contributed to making the world more dangerous. The subsequent question would be: How would the people who were partly responsible for this strategy react to information that the strategy they had contributed to might have led to a catastrophe?
Risky strategy
When a SARS-like virus broke out in Wuhan in late 2019 – just a year after scientists there, in collaboration with US scientists, had applied for funding to conduct experiments on SARS-like viruses that included the insertion of furin sites – a distinctive feature of SARS-CoV-2 — alarm bells should have rung.
That is to say: They did, but not in public: Several leading virologists privately told Fauci in late January 2020 that they suspected a lab leak. Fauci’s own internal communications indicate that he too was alarmed and launched internal investigations into whether their own research projects in Wuhan could have anything to do with the matter.
Just a few days later, however, Fauci told the world that “we know that such viruses have a natural origin, other claims are to be considered conspiracy theories .” This was before there was a single published study on COVID-19 origins, before he had investigated matters related to the research he funded in Wuhan, and at a time when the scientists he consulted in the backroom were deeply divided and still believed that lab leakage was at least as likely an explanation as natural origin.
Yet, the same scientists shortly afterwards published the controversial article “Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” with the conclusion that a lab leak was not even plausible.
They themselves have claimed that they changed their opinions through a normal scientific process, but later released internal communications show that uncertainty persisted and that they were far less convinced of their conclusions than they stated publicly.
More evidence has recently emerged to support these suspicions. In June 2020, three months after the paper was published, lead author Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Institute in the US wrote privately to his co-authors that he
“found both scenarios [lab leak and natural origin] to be equally probable”,
that “we said in the paper that this work is performed ‘all over the world’, but that’s not true – it has been going on exclusively in Wuhan, at BSL-2 [a low safety level]”
and that “most scientists I talk to believe there is a likely connection to the lab”.
Andersen justified his renewed skepticism in part by new information that had come out at the time, but the problem is that this communication is part of a pattern: Fauci and these scientists communicated aggressively in public about natural origins, while all doubts were kept private. Furthermore, when there is a significant lack of data and information about the matter under scrutiny, it is irresponsible to conclude definitively, as Andersen and his colleagues did already in March 2020.
New information has repeatedly caused them to doubt their own conclusions. In the summer of 2021, it became known that researchers in Wuhan and the US had planned to produce a SARS-like virus with a furin site – the main characteristic of SARS-CoV-2 – in 2018 (The DEFUSE proposal).
Andersen and his colleagues were outraged and wrote to each other that “it really isn’t beyond plausibility that someone went ahead and tried some of this stuff” and that it was neither technically difficult nor scientifically illogical to make such a virus in a lab – the opposite of what they had argued in the Proximal Origin article.
Influenced US intelligence
Where did this gap between public and private communication come from? The answer is likely complex, involving a set of political considerations, academic vested interests, and private ties. But the scientists were not operating in a vacuum.
In my book The Wuhan Mystery, I accuse Fauci of steering the scientific narrative about the origins of the pandemic unreasonably strongly in the direction of natural origin, both through his own public statements and by influencing the scientists who addressed the question. For example, released communications show that he was one of those who initiated the Proximal Origin paper and helped with its content, but significantly downplayed his involvement in public.
Now I expand on the accusation: He also steered US intelligence agencies away from the lab leak theory.
Fauci has previously maintained, under oath, that he had nothing to do with the intelligence community in connection with the origin of the pandemic. New information paints a different picture: In May 2026, a CIA whistleblower testified, under oath, that the agency concluded in the summer of 2021 that a lab leak most likely caused the pandemic, but that an agency leader ordered analysts to change their conclusion after Fauci came to visit.
The whistleblower’s claims are supported by internal emails from the intelligence service released a few weeks later :
An email, written by the head of the CIA analysis team, describes how Fauci, during a June 2021 meeting, objected to the team’s assessments and suggested they instead talk to his preferred experts, particularly Kristian Andersen, who supported natural origin. Another email confirms that the lab leak conclusion was dropped as a consequence of this meeting, just before publication.
A third email states that:
“The Intelligence Community took direction straight from NIH ... the people who funded the Wuhan lab ... A complex web of money and politics influencing analysis.”
I have no objection to the intelligence community seeking input from external scientists (although US intelligence also has its own experts). But in a situation where the scientific arguments could not produce definitive proof, other intelligence information is of course very relevant to understanding the probability of different scenarios. That is precisely why it is problematic if Fauci, in his role and with his conflicts of interest, tried to influence the intelligence community’s conclusions.
Silence as defense
These circumstances would have been difficult for Fauci to explain away in the hearing on July 29 this year. He had a dilemma: Telling the truth about how he under-communicated the possibility of a lab leak and how he steered others in the same direction would have been too explosive, but lying would have been too risky.
President Biden gave him a preemptive pardon in January 2025 for actions dating back to 2014, but it does not cover new offenses, such as lying under oath. This is why, in my opinion, Fauci chose to take the Fifth Amendment and remain silent — under the pretext of a political witch hunt.
But we are not dependent on Fauci’s testimony to find better answers about what triggered the pandemic and what role the US has played if it was caused by a lab leak. The fact that we still — more than six years after the pandemic began — do not have all the facts on the table is because, from the US perspective, full transparency could point to a lab leak that was not only due to bad choices made by an individual, but also deliberate, bipartisan policy over several decades.
Greater transparency would also show that the cover-up that took place during the pandemic has been well known in both the US government and the US intelligence community. The information we have available has largely been forced out through FOIAs and document leaks — not transparency and willingness to clean up the mess by responsible politicians and government. Thousands of documents remain classified, even though the Republican and Democratic parties jointly passed a law in 2021 requiring everything to be made public.
Political responsibility
We deserve better.
We deserve to be informed about one of the biggest and most impactful events of our time, and that all parties avoid making it a political game.
I don’t care whether it’s the Republicans or the Democrats who ultimately get to the bottom of this matter, just as I don’t care which of them takes credit for the Epstein files finally seeing the light of day.
Instead of pointing to one political scapegoat, we should stand together to hold decision-makers accountable across the political spectrum and across countries.
And we should of course expect the same from scientists and academics. That is perhaps the most disappointing thing about the whole debate about the origin of covid: That scientists have become political actors, who communicate selectively and strategically, who are not open about conflicts of interest, who can be subjected to pressure and who exert pressure on others.
The debate about the origin of the virus continues, no conclusive answers can be given, and unfortunately we cannot trust that the same scientists who we now know kept quiet about their doubts repeatedly in both 2020 and 2021, now are open and without other agendas.
Transparency and accountability cannot be chosen when it suits, they are an essential part of a democracy.
You can listen to Sigrid Bratlie talking about her recent book with Bryce Nickels here:
Don’t go just yet — If you value invited guest posts here at THB, let me know by clicking that “❤️ Like” button.
Appreciated!
More from THB on Proximal Origin, the COVID-19 cover-up, and the origins of COVID:
Comments and discussion welcomed!
Thank you Roger and Sigrid. I agree that there are multiple layers to this story, and different scales of concern.
Beyond what Fauci and his minions did, and what the national and international government-science-establishment colluded to hide, what still bothers me more is the millions of people who begged for more. Far too many people, especially those who Thomas Sowell calls the "anointed" (self-proclaimed elitists), demanded an official if not doctrinal description of COVID, and an equally doctrinal set of public policies, backed up by onerous laws with strict enforcement. Except, of course, when their other doctrine conflicted. See the inane statements by "health officials" who excused and encouraged BLM rioters after demanding that the rest of us remain locked in our homes.
Yes, that masses of people act irrationally is nothing new. But COVID laid bare just how divided our societies are--not just politically but emotionally.
I put it at 99.9% certain that Fauci funded Covid, that he knew from the beginning it was from the Wuhan lab and then he did everything in his power to cover it up. The 0.1 is only because we don’t yet have a written confession.
He is being attacked because he is the face of it, and he loved every aspect of that, courted it.
He deserves to end his life in jail for what he has done, and that IS me being compassionate.