Opinion | Dr. Fauci Could Have Said a Lot More
If officials don’t trust the public, the public won’t trust them.
www.nytimes.com
Covid had just reached American shores on Feb. 9, 2020, when Newt Gingrich invited Anthony Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the British zoologist Peter Daszak onto his podcast, “Newt’s World.”
Mr. Gingrich would later sour on Dr. Fauci, accusing him of playing a key role in “the biggest scandal in American history” and calling him “one of the most destructive and dangerous people in American history.”
But on that earlier, more innocent day, Mr. Gingrich deferred to Dr. Fauci’s expertise, gushing that Dr. Fauci was “a national treasure.” At one point, Mr. Gingrich asked about something he had heard.
“There’s a sort of urban legend,” Mr. Gingrich prodded Dr. Fauci, “that there’s a biological warfare center in Wuhan and that the coronavirus escaped from that.”
“I’ve heard these conspiracy theories,” Dr. Fauci replied. “And like all conspiracy theories, Newt, they’re just conspiracy theories.” He added that while he could not say that scenario was impossible, “the things you’re hearing are still in the realm of conspiracy theories without any scientific basis.”
Dr. Daszak agreed that “all the evidence says” the virus crossed from animal to human either in a Wuhan market or in rural China, probably after originating in wild bats.
The two men could have told Mr. Gingrich a lot more.
They could have said that laboratories in Wuhan had indeed been studying bat viruses, including coronaviruses. Live bats were kept in the laboratories, and scientists occasionally carried out controversial forms of research in which viral strains are manipulated in ways that can make them more dangerous to humans. Both men worked for organizations that had a hand in moving U.S. taxpayer funds to the scientists in Wuhan — Dr. Daszak had been involved with Wuhan bat research for years; Dr. Fauci’s emails show his staff had recently reminded him of N.I.H. funding for the coronavirus work Dr. Daszak’s organization supported.
They could have acknowledged that while they believed the virus had reached humans as a zoonotic spillover from animals, accidental leaks are a known lab hazard and couldn’t yet be ruled out (even if the notion of using coronaviruses as a biological weapon was laughably improbable).
Instead they dissembled. The near-certainty with which Dr. Fauci spoke publicly of zoonotic crossover is somewhat incongruous with his private communications from that time. He knew there was real debate — he was in the thick of it. In public, he leaned hard into animal crossover; behind the scenes, he wrote that “I do not know how this evolved” but warned that he was concerned about “distortions on social media” of Covid’s origins.
The pandemic grievously eroded public faith in health authorities as well as news media, a sort of national unmooring often attributed to former President Donald Trump and others on the right who touted questionable treatments and pushed back against vaccine mandates, masks and closures.
But the full story of Covid information manipulation is much broader. In the past month we’ve learned that both the Department of Energy (which oversees its own network of laboratories and scientists) and the F.B.I. now consider it most likely that the pandemic started in the laboratories. Although those assessments were made, respectively, with “low” and “moderate” confidence, they forced the laboratory theory to be roundly, if begrudgingly, acknowledged as a plausible explanation for the origin of Covid.
And so we are left to wonder how a straightforward hypothesis got labeled first as a conspiracy and later as a reflection of racism. Retracing coverage and public comments, I found a cautionary tale: Those who seek to suppress disinformation may be destined, themselves, to sow it.
A familiar Chinese tendency to stonewall and evade foreign inquiries was on full display in Beijing and Wuhan as the world demanded answers about Covid’s origin. A similar impulse to shut down discussion, however, is suggested by the early public remarks of Drs. Fauci and Daszak, who found themselves thrust into fame overnight as journalists eagerly sought their insights.
By the time Dr. Fauci recorded the Gingrich podcast, he was involved in a private debate among some of the world’s most renowned biologists and virologists over how the virus had come to infect humans. Dr. Fauci recently acknowledged that half the participants in a now-notorious conference call to discuss Covid’s origin “felt it might be from a lab” — but at the time he gave little public hint of the seriousness of this debate.
I asked Dr. Fauci in a telephone interview about the largely one-sided nature of his public remarks. He’d always, at least, acknowledged the possibility of a lab leak, he said, but he couldn’t pretend to think both theories were equally probable. His entire career, he reminded me, centered for years on a virus — H.I.V. — that jumped into humanity from a chimpanzee. He then listed all the other outbreaks that he’d seen traced to animal origin: swine flu, MERS, even SARS-CoV-1.
“I can’t dissociate that in my mind, I can’t say, just, ‘I don’t know,’ the way you can,” he said. “I can’t, as a scientist, ignore the historical perspective that I’ve been deeply involved with my entire career.”
Emails released in a congressional inquiry indicate that Dr. Fauci was among the senior scientists who encouraged his colleagues to write a paper asserting that the new coronavirus had a natural origin. “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” published by Nature Medicine in March 2020, concluded “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is possible.”
“Our main work over the last couple weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory,” one of the authors, a researcher named Kristian Andersen, wrote in an email the day before the podcast dropped.
Then, in April 2020, Dr. Fauci pointed White House reporters to the publication, presenting it as compelling evidence of zoonotic crossover — without revealing that he had been involved with its creation and had even, according to the emails, given it his approval. (Dr. Fauci told me that he’s not sure he ever got around to reading the paper.)
By then, Dr. Fauci was fixed in the public imagination as a figure of reassurance and reliability. Mr. Trump was an easy foil — dishonest, childishly self-congratulatory and disturbingly capricious. And then there was Dr. Fauci — sober, rational and an emerging celebrity at a time when the public was extorted to “follow the science,” a tiresome phrase obscuring the necessarily disputatious nature of scientific progress.
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