Lab Leak Theory: What Did Dr. Fauci Know and When?

By 

Jordan Sekulow

|
June 7, 2021

President Biden’s Chief Medical Advisor and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Anthony Fauci, has received tremendous criticism over 3,200 pages of his emails sent at the beginning of the pandemic that were released to Buzzfeed through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. At a time when Americans were in dire need of honest scientific research and nonpartisan evidence-based guidance from Dr. Fauci, he did not deliver.

Around February 2020, Americans first started hearing about COVID-19. A month later, our world shut down. As the virus rapidly spread and claimed lives, Dr. Fauci consistently told the public that it was transmitted from bats to humans. He shut down any possibility of it being man-made in a lab. However, as we've detailed, back on January 31st of 2020, Dr. Fauci forwarded an article to U.S. virus researcher Kristian Andersen that clued into the idea that the coronavirus was indeed engineered and thus supported the lab leak theory.

Kristian, who is the head of a viral genomics lab in California responded to the article with this email:

The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered. . . . I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Rob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. But we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change.

So, Dr. Fauci was presented with science based evidence that supported the idea of the lab leak theory at the very beginning of this health crisis. However, only a couple of months later in May of 2020, Dr. Fauci made definitive statements in an interview that no such evidence existed: 

If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what’s out there now, the scientific evidence is very, very, strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated . . . Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that (this virus) evolves in nature and then jumped species. 

Now, as news outlets and Dr. Fauci are starting their apology tours, admitting evidence is in fact pointing to the lab leak theory being correct, they have lost the trust of many Americans.

ACLJ Senior Advisor for National Security and former Acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell comments on the sudden change of heart in Washington, D.C.:

Look . . . if you go back to the DNI website on April 30th, 2020 there is a statement from the entire Intelligence Community, an Intelligence Community wide statement is extremely rare. In that statement, we make very clear that this started in China and it was either in the lab or in the wet markets. And we briefed reporters to say – the lab leak is the leading hypothesis. This is where our Intelligence Community is going and this is what they are investigating. Since then, the people in Washington who just protect the ruling party [the Left] have completely changed their tune. Yet, I can attest to the fact that we told Washington Post reporters, CNN reporters, and New York Times reporters of this exact lab leak theory and they ignored it because they didn’t fit into their politics at the time.

The ACLJ is taking action to find the truth. As we told you, the Biden Administration shut down the investigation led by our very own ACLJ Senior Counsel for Global Affairs Mike Pompeo when he was Secretary of State into the origins of COVID-19. We filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the U.S. Department of State, National Institutes of Health, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to find out why this investigation was shut down. We need to make sure that we won’t be in this exact same situation again as the Wuhan Institute of Virology is still operating today, and we must hold China accountable for the lives of approximately 4 million people worldwide who died as a result of this pandemic.

Today’s full Sekulow broadcast is complete with even more analysis of Dr. Fauci emails that were released through Buzzfeed’s FOIA Request. Read our detailed analysis of these emails here.

Watch the full broadcast below.