Signatories to an open letter defending Fauci represent institutions that collectively received $1.8 billion from his agency in 2020 alone.
Questioned about his efforts to shut down inquiry into the lab-leak theory in the earliest days of the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci fell back on a familiar refrain: the attacks are political, just more fodder for anti-science partisans.
After all, the man leading the charge against Fauci is Rand Paul, the sharp-elbowed senator from Kentucky, and the venue for the viral, hostile exchanges between the two is the floor of the U.S. Senate.
If the criticisms leveled by Paul had any merit, Fauci and sympathetic reporters and pundits often imply, they’d be coming from fellow scientists and public-health experts — people who understand “The Science” and don’t traffic in the kind of “misinformation” Fauci so often accuses Paul of engaging in, and they’d be hashed out in academic journals and panels.
So why has the task of calling Fauci out for abandoning his role as a neutral public-health adviser fallen to partisans such as Paul and his fellow Republican lawmakers?
The answer is glaringly obvious, yet it’s received next to no attention from the press: Fauci wields control over a vast sum of money distributed annually to the very public-health experts and scientists who should be challenging him.
After the latest sparring session between Paul and Fauci, the “scientific community” jumped to Fauci’s defense. Eighty-four professors, scientists, researchers, and public-health school administrators signed an open letter praising Fauci’s “sagacious” guidance and lamenting the “politically polarized” times that led to such ruthless and unfair attacks from critics like Paul.
Seventy-four of those 84 signatories are affiliated with academic institutions that receive funding from the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which Fauci oversees. In total, those institutions received $1.8 billion from Fauci’s agency in 2020 alone, the most recent year for which funding figures are made available via the NIAID funding database.
While some of the “plandemic” attacks on Fauci amount to cruel and irresponsible slurs, the line of criticism that elicited that fawning letter was anything but.
Citing emails released last week by House Republicans, Paul accused Fauci and NIH director Francis Collins of working to bury evidence of a lab-leak just weeks into the pandemic, so as to avoid the uncomfortable geopolitical implications associated with the theory.
In a February 1, 2020, conference call with Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins, a group of top scientists enlisted by the NIH to provide their advice told the pair that the virus likely emerged in a laboratory setting. They were planning to publish a paper in the journal Nature Medicine making that point and wanted to give Fauci and Collins a chance to provide feedback ahead of publication.
Mike Farzan, an immunology researcher and the discoverer of the SARS receptor, Bob Garry, a virology expert, and Dr. Andrew Rambaut, a British evolutionary biologist, told Fauci and Collins that a particular feature of the virus known as a “furin cleavage site” suggested that the virus was the product of gain-of-function engineering.
There’s no evidence in the meeting notes that Fauci and Collins engaged with the substance of this argument. But somehow, when the paper was published on February 4, it had been revised to downplay the lab-leak theory the authors had thought so highly of just three days earlier.
Rather than responding to the substance of the argument made by the very experts they had consulted, Collins expressed concern that more needed to be done to publicly disparage the lab-leak theory.
“I share your view that a swift convening of experts in a confidence inspiring framework (WHO seems really the only option) is needed, or the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony….” Collins wrote in a February 2 email to Drs. Jeremy Farrar, Anthony Fauci, and Lawrence Tabak.
One month later, in March 2020, Collins said the lab-leak hypothesis was “outrageous.” Similarly, in May 2020, Fauci told National Geographic that Covid “could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated.”
Rather than confronting the evidence that Fauci and Collins were unwilling to consider a plausible origin story for Covid almost immediately after the virus emerged, their fellow scientists issued a long, collective “how dare you?”
“The criticism is inaccurate, unscientific, ill-founded in the facts and, increasingly, motivated by partisan politics. It is a distraction from what should be the national focus – working together to finally overcome a pandemic that is killing about 500,000 people a year,” the open letter reads. “We are grateful for Dr. Fauci’s dedication and tireless efforts to help the country through this pandemic and other health crises.”
According to Politico Playbook, which first published the letter, John Moore, a professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Weill Cornell Medicine and Zeke Emmanuel, former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Obama, “decided they had had enough of the attacks on Fauci.”
Weill Cornell received $45,015,080 from the NIAID in 2020 alone and the University of Pennsylvania, where Emmanuel serves as chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, received $57,822,177 in 2020.
Another signatory, Paul G. Auwaerter, M.D., is a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, which received $106,448,540 from the NIAID in 2020. Signatories representing universities such as Duke, Emory, and UC San Francisco signed with the knowledge that the institutions which cut their paychecks received upwards of 100 million dollars each from the NIAID in 2020 alone.
While Fauci is far from the sole authority responsible for dispersing those massive sums — the grant applications go through multiple levels of review within the NIH and are then approved by Congress as part of its budgeting process — he does have the authority to unilaterally reject grant applications, as the NIAID admitted in response to the White Coat Waste Project’s expose on the barbaric beagle experiments funded by the NIAID.
“Except in very limited circumstances, Dr. Fauci does not approve funding for grant applications on an individual basis,” the agency said as part of a long statement laying out the grant approval process (emphasis added).
The signatories could be forgiven for believing that crossing Fauci on such a heated public question might qualify as one of those “limited circumstances.” It’s also possible, if not more disturbing, that many of our leading scientists haven’t even followed the mounting evidence of Fauci’s duplicity, since engaging with it would require consciously compromising their integrity.
Defenders of the establishment will balk at the idea that representatives of the nation’s top scientific institutions could be led astray by pedestrian concerns about funding on such a vital question of public health. But how else can one explain the fact that the loudest and earliest proponents of the lab-leak theory — who appear increasingly prescient — are a collection of international misfits: European data scientists and unaccredited independent investigators who were reduced to publishing their findings on social media instead of leading medical journals?
This lack of accreditation is routinely wielded against them by proponents of the natural-transmission theory, but their distance from our top medical schools and research institutes may be exactly what allowed them to keep an open mind on a question of existential import.
James Bennett, a George Mason economics scholar, told National Review that while he hasn’t kept on top of the Covid-origin debate, he detects a dynamic similar to the one he identified in his co-authored book From Pathology to Politics: Public Health in America, which details how the public-health bureaucracy has been perverted by institutional incentives.
“One central truth always has and always will prevail: He who takes the King’s shilling inevitably and completely becomes the King’s man. Recipients of public funds controlled by Fauci (or anyone else) risks potentially serious economic (and, indeed, negative professional) consequences by straying even slightly what is currently accepted as the ‘perceived wisdom,’ Bennett wrote in an email. “Not only would Fauci likely respond, but his other grantees would rally round him — maybe in an effort to collect some of the potential ‘spoils’ — seeking favor.”