COVID Origins Coverup Was Fauci’s First and Highest Priority

It’s clear that Anthony Fauci was fairly certain that he had funded the Gain-of-Function research that likely created the COVID virus from the very beginning of the pandemic, and that his top priority was covering up that fact. 

It was priority #1, even before addressing the public health danger. 

Obviously, neither he nor any of us could be 100% certain without data about the genetic sequences that only the Wuhan lab had at the time of the escape, and so far we have no evidence that Fauci had access to that, since NIAID and the NIH were remarkably lax about keeping track of what results came from their grants, but it’s clear that at the very least Fauci thought it was much more likely than not that COVID-19 was an engineered virus, and that he was responsible in part for its creation. 

How can I be certain of that fact? After all, Fauci could be the evil dwarf that he is without also being responsible in this particular case. 

Wow. This email is devastating to Fauci’s credibility.

On Feb 1, he was privately acknowledging scientist concerns about Covid having mutations that did not seem natural and gain-of-function of function research in China that would encourage such mutations. https://t.co/8Br55hkLTb

— AG (@AGHamilton29) July 14, 2023

Reaching that conclusion is simple enough: most of his effort in the first few months of the pandemic was focused on killing the lab leak hypothesis and reinforcing the idea that only crazy conspiracy theorists would suggest it was anything but a naturally occurring virus, despite the fact that most of the scientists he spoke with suspected otherwise. 

🚨Fauci’s own diary just dropped.

Feb 1, 2020. The secret call that produced “Proximal Origin.”

12 scientists on the line.

Only 2 thought the virus was natural.

The other 10 — per Fauci’s own notes — “felt that deliberate insertion was possible.”

They flagged Shi Zhengli’s… pic.twitter.com/t3YW8SdXA2

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) July 26, 2026

🚨Fauci’s own diary just dropped.

Feb 1, 2020. The secret call that produced “Proximal Origin.”

12 scientists on the line.

Only 2 thought the virus was natural.

The other 10 — per Fauci’s own notes — “felt that deliberate insertion was possible.”

They flagged Shi Zhengli’s gain-of-function work on coronaviruses in Wuhan by name.

8 days later, Fauci went on Newt Gingrich’s podcast: 

“I’ve heard these conspiracy theories. And like all conspiracy theories, Newt, they’re just conspiracy theories.”

Then Facebook and Twitter banned you for saying the same thing his own scientists were telling him privately.

Fauci commissioned the ‘Proximal Origins’ paper, specifically telling Kristian Andersen and Andrew Rambaut that he needed it (he also edited it secretly, and pushed Nature to publish it); Andersen had sequenced the genome and discovered very suspicious evidence of engineering, contacted NIAID, and that led to Fauci assigning to Andersen the task of convincing others that this was a conspiracy theory. I’m not going to go through all the evidence that Andersen never believed with certainty then or subsequently that this was the case, since that point has been demonstrated many times. 

Did Fauci’s favorite clique of virologists – the world’s most influential on the question of COVID’s origins – simultaneously argue for a wet market in public and say they were concerned about a Wuhan lab leak in private? Yes. pic.twitter.com/ziYkZhqKmG

— Emily Kopp (@emilyakopp) July 29, 2026

There is no question that Andersen et al. knew they were “debunking” a theory that could be, and likely was, true. In return, millions of dollars in grant money flowed into their coffers, as well as professional benefits. Their paper became the most-read and referenced scientific paper in history, guaranteeing professional success. 

Do you remember when @TomCottonAR was repeating a “fringe theory” that “scientists have dismissed”?

An explosive take for the dumb online rubes, right @nytimes? pic.twitter.com/dH0lCubDsx

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) July 29, 2026

Fauci then, from the podium of the White House and standing next to the President of the United States, presented the paper as proof that the virus was of natural origin, even pretending not to know who wrote it. He commissioned it and edited it as a secret author, got it published, and then presented it as independent and irrefutable work. 

Here is the quote from the April 17, 2000 White House briefing:

“There was a study recently that we can make available to you, where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve. And the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human. So, I mean, the paper will be available — I don’t have the authors right now, but we can make that available to you.”

He had edited that paper, hiding his authorship. 

From that moment on, the mantra was that the lab leak theory was “debunked,” and much of Fauci’s effort during his media campaign and his grooming of journalists was directed at ensuring that Narrative™ was reinforced. And it most certainly was, along with every other Fauci-promoted theory on how to fight COVID itself. 

Fauci became The Science™. 

Or what about @washingtonpost, who said that @TomCottonAR “keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked.” pic.twitter.com/REYliz7ZuQ

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) July 29, 2026

Has someone been fired for this, @ABC?

Is whoever wrote this headline still writing headlines for your outlet?

Is there any reason anyone should trust your outlet if so? pic.twitter.com/LLFoQVaNHn

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) July 29, 2026

The effort to reinforce the Narrative™ was almost unprecedented. Fauci, his minions, and the media all worked overtime to suppress any dissent from this assertion through ridicule and censorship, up to and including getting scientists punished or even dismissed from positions, and when censorship was impossible, we were told over and over by the Best™ people and sources that you had to be crazy to believe otherwise, or even voice suspicion. 

The @AP said that the idea that “the virus was leaked” was a “conspiracy theory” as part of the “Debunked COVID-19 myths survive online, despite facts.”

All of this was wrong at the time. It looks even worse in hindsight. pic.twitter.com/hicWxyjOPd

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) July 29, 2026

And of course so much of the legacy media vitriol was inspired by Trump.

Here’s @ABC testing their garments about Trump’s pulling funding from the “Wuhan lab at heart of conspiracy theories.” pic.twitter.com/qEGPMQMtdk

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) July 29, 2026

I could go on and on, and there are people who are rooting out all the evidence, but you get the point. 

But you may ask, other than Fauci working to avoid responsibility, does this matter?

Why yes, yes it does. 

One of the very first things that scientists do when a novel virus emerges is search for its origin and to specifically identify where the jump from animals to humans took place. Enormous amounts of effort are put into this effort, and for some reason that barely happened in this case after the initial attempts failed. 

Michael is right, the weirdest thing about people who are energetically “natural origin” is they are inexplicably incurious about *how* this happened

Let’s say we *knew* the Covid virus was from a cross-over infection from an animal. We should *definitely* figure out which… https://t.co/YyvTPJ8Xl6

— PoIiMath (@politicalmath) July 29, 2026

Amidst all this discussion of the COVID origin docs released recently by the Senate committee, I remain dumbfounded by the CONTINUED lack of interest of the scientific community into where this pandemic came from. 

Whatever you think about the motivations of the people who wrote the Proximal Origins paper (and the documents certainly call those into question), the effect of this on the scientific community writ large was to signal that the official stance was “natural origin” and that any questioning of that claim, let alone investigations into it, were anti-science conspiracy theories.

I’m hardly a lab leak proponent – I’ve said all along that my prior was natural origins, although that’s shifted a bit with subsequence disclosures – but it was really quite ugly how even being publicly open to the possibility of lab leak was treated as an apostasy – despite the fact that many scientists agreed in private.

I hope scientists – especially those with political or other influence – will reflect on this and when called upon to discuss scientific issues of great public import will place far less emphasis on “controlling the narrative” and instead will emphasize protecting public inquiry and being personally open minded.

Michael is right, the weirdest thing about people who are energetically “natural origin” is they are inexplicably incurious about *how* this happened

Let’s say we *knew* the Covid virus was from a cross-over infection from an animal. We should *definitely* figure out which animal it was. To have a virus like this develop in an animal reservoir to such a potency and transmissibility among humans is a unacceptably high and continual risk.

We should be on a fire drill tracking the path this virus took from some bats in a cave in Yunnan in 2012 to Wuhan in 2020. This should occupy a great deal of our time and energy.

But it hasn’t. Why? Because trying to trace that path led to an immediate dead end. China tested tens of thousands of animals across hundreds of species and found nothing. No virus, no antibodies, nothing. It looks like Covid appeared out of thin air. Which it couldn’t have done because we KNOW that it came from an animal somewhere.

The scientific response to this cannot be “(shrug) guess we’ll never know”. It should be “this is the biggest and most important scientific mystery of our time and we are eager to unravel it”

But they aren’t eager to unravel it. They have shown almost no interest in solving this mystery. Why? 

We all know why: almost every scientist who would normally be involved in this effort either 1) believes that in all likelihood the virus was engineered and escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and/or 2) knows that it can be professional suicide to look too deeply into the subject. There are too many people who have staked their reputations and put their careers at risk—people who influence or control the flow of money and employment opportunities—for an open admission that the truth was buried. 

This ought to be recognized as the single-largest scientific scandal in human history, but of course it won’t be. And for the same reason that the establishment still insists that the lab-leak theory is fringe: the people who would punish the fraud are the people who committed it or at least helped cover it up. 

Editor’s Note: Every single day, here at HotAir, we will stand up and FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT against the radical Left and deliver the conservative reporting our readers deserve.

Help us continue to tell the truth about the Trump administration and its successes. Join HotAir VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.