Emails show Fauci was WARNED at the start of pandemic that COVID may have been 'engineered'

Leading virus experts were warning Dr Anthony Fauci COVID-19 may have been created in a lab while he publicly played such claims down, newly-released emails show.

A Freedom of Information Act request saw thousands of Fauci’s emails released from last spring – including multiple discussions about COVID being man-made, some of which were later redacted.

Fauci was warned that the coronavirus was possibly ‘engineered’ in a lab before the pandemic started and seemed to be taking it seriously behind closed doors while downplaying the idea in public.

Fauci’s foes such as Sen. Rand Paul called for him to be fired on over the emails on Twitter on Wednesday, with the hashtag #FireFauci gaining in popularity. 

At 7:30am, Paul Tweeted, ‘Told you #firefauci … Can’t wait to see the media try to spin the Fauci FOIA emails.’

Four hours later – shortly before noon – Paul Tweeted again saying, ‘But even more importantly than being a hero, he was a fraud. A massive fraud. The newly released trove of emails to and from Dr. Fauci makes that abundantly clear.’ 

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene also seized the opportunity to criticize Fauci, who’s considered America’s top infectious disease expert. 

‘After reading through Anthony Fauci’s leaked emails, it’s more clear than ever that our country needs to #FireFauci,’ she Tweeted. 

In a Jan. 31, 2020 email – more than two months before the World Health Organization characterized COVID-19 as a pandemic – Fauci forwarded a copy of Science magazine article titled ‘Mining coronavirus genomes for clues to the outbreak’s origins’ to two people. 

US virus researcher Kristian Andersen and Sir Jeremy Farrar, who runs a global health charity in Britain, were on the receiving end of the email.  

‘This just came out today. You may have seen it. If not, it is of interest to the current discussion,’ wrote Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. 

Andersen, who runs a viral genomics lab at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, wrote back, ‘The problem is that our phylogenetic analyses aren’t able to answer whether the sequences are unusual at individual residues, except if they are completely off.

‘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.’

Andersen also noted that he and others ‘all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory’ but added that ‘there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change.’

On March 30 and April 1, Andersen sent dozens of tweets in a thread after the World Health Organization released its report about the origin of the coronavirus. 

In the thread, he included a tweet saying, ‘First of all, I have very carefully considered the possibility of a lab leak, dating back to January, 2020. A committee under the White House OSTP/NASEM was set up in response to these enquiries and I remain a member of that committee today.’

On Wednesday, after Fauci’s emails went viral, he tweeted a reply to Australian reporter Sharri Markson downplaying the idea of a cover up. 

‘I know it’s super mundane, but it isn’t actually a “massive cover-up,” Sharri. It’s just science. Boring, I know, but it’s quite a helpful thing to have in times of uncertainty,’ Andersen tweeted. 

Two days later – February 2, 2020 – Farar sent an email to Fauci and other US health officials sent a ZeroHedge article wit the headline ‘Coronavirus Contains “HIV Insertions,” Stocking Fears Over Artificially Created Bioweapon.’

The messages were included in a batch of more than 3,200 of Fauci’s emails from January to June 2020 that were obtained and published by Buzzfeed on Tuesday. 

The emails show Fauci received ‘a flurry of correspondence about the theory that coronavirus leaked from a lab in Wuhan,’ Buzzfeed reported, including one email sent to Fauci on April 16, 2020 by Francis Collins. 

Collins, the director of the National Institute of Health, wrote ‘conspiracy gains momentum’ in the subject line and included a link to a Mediaite news article referencing comments made a day earlier about the Wuhan lab leak theory by Fox News anchor Bret Baier. 

The contents of Collins’ email was redacted. 

Fauci replied on April 17 at 2.45am but his response also was blacked out. Fauci requested a ‘quick call’ with Collins in one of his earlier replies.

The other email recipients included NIH Deputy Director Dr Lawrence Tabak, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Deputy Director Clifford Lane and NIH spokesman John Burklow. 

The story linked in Collins’ original email was based on an April 15 broadcast on Fox News during which Baier told fellow anchor Sean Hannity that ‘multiple sources’ believed COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan lab before accidentally escaping.

‘This is from multiple sources who have been briefed at the beginning part of the origins of China and the beginning of the virus. They’ve also seen documents, open source and classified,’ Baier said. 

‘We’ve asked to see those documents directly, but they are saying that it is increasingly likely, that there is increasing confidence that the virus – COVID-19 – started in a Wuhan lab.

‘They’re saying it occurred naturally because China was trying to show that they could be as good or better than the US in handling viruses, discovering viruses, and that this was a botched effort to contain this and it got out to the population.

‘They are 100 percent confident that China altered the data, the statistics, they did a lot of things to contain the information. Meanwhile, they cut down, as you mentioned, travel from Wuhan internally, but left the international flights going, and there obviously is how you have a spread like this.’

Evidence has been mounting of late that supports the theory that the pandemic began as an accidental leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 

President Joe Biden last week ordered a 90-day intelligence review to investigate the possibility and several high-profile public health experts have come out in recent months saying they believe that’s how COVID-19 started. 

Former CDC director Robert Redfield told CNN in March that he believes the virus ‘escaped’ from a Wuhan lab and started spreading as early as September 2019. 

Even Collins appeared to change his tune as recently as last month while speaking to senators when he told them the Wuhan lab leak theory couldn’t be completely ruled out. 

‘It is most likely that this is a virus that arose naturally, but we cannot exclude the possibility of some kind of a lab accident,’ he said. 

There is continued discussion over whether COVID is a naturally-occurring virus that leaked by accident, or a more sinister genetically-modified virus that was meant to be confined to the Wuhan institute.

The media and academics long heaped scorn on the lab leak hypothesis, insisting that it was a fringe conspiracy theory and even racist after Donald Trump embraced the idea. 

But new evidence, including reports of three workers at the Wuhan lab who fell seriously ill with COVID-like symptoms in November 2019, has forced a sober reassessment among doubters. 

‘I think a lot of people have egg on their face,’ ABC News Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl admitted on Sunday. ‘Some things may be true even if Donald Trump said them.’

‘Because Trump was saying so much else, that was just out of control… but now serious people are saying it needs a serious inquiry,’ he said. 

Facebook also has been forced to reverse its policy censoring posts speculating that the virus was engineered in a lab, amid serious questions about the ‘gain of function’ experiments being done on coronavirus strains at the Wuhan lab. 

China continues to furiously deny that the virus behind COVID-19 escaped from its lab in the original epicenter, accusing the United States of taking a ‘dangerous stance’ in calling for a full investigation into the possibility.

It comes after another trove of Fauci’s emails, published by the Washington Post, revealed his cozy relationship with China’s top infectious disease expert during the early days of the pandemic.    

The emails were exchanged between Fauci and Dr. George Gao – the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention – in March and April of last year.

Fauci did not ask any questions about the origins of the virus.  

In March, Gao had told Science magazine that it was a ‘big mistake’ for US experts (including Fauci) to tell their citizens that they did not need to wear face masks. 

A subsequent email shows that Gao was anxious as to how Fauci would interpret the remark. 

He messaged Fauci on March 28 saying: ‘I saw the Science interview… That was journalist’s wording. Hope you understand. Lets work together to get the virus out of the earth.’

Fauci warmly replied:  ‘I understand completely. No problem. We will get through this together.’ 

On April 3, Fauci formally reversed his stance on mask-wearing, telling Americans that they should cover their noses and mouths to stop the spread. The top doctor was slammed by numerous pundits and millions of Americans for giving mixed messages. 

He later said he did so to try and prevent members of the public panic-buying masks when hospitals were struggling to obtain adequate supplies of PPE.  

Less than a week later, Gao emailed Fauci again expressing his support amid the onslaught of attacks. 

‘I saw some news (hope it is fake) that you are being attacked by some people. Hope you are well under such a irrational situation,’ Gao wrote on April 8. 

‘Thank you for your kind note. All is well despite some crazy people in this world,’ Fauci replied three days later.