Getting to Know the Information
Why did Anthony Fauci conspire to deceive the public about the origins of COVID-19?
What caused the global pandemic?
The worldview summed up by the popular American slogan “follow the science” treated COVID-19 as a natural disaster, like an earthquake. Too much fuss about causes was in bad taste.
Despite its pretense of objectivity, the “scientific” account of the virus didn’t eliminate the impulse to assign good guys and bad guys but subtly shifted the locus of this effort. Rather than interrogating the small core of officials whose decisions directly impacted the pandemic, the suspicion of guilt was cast over the public at large. Fault lay with the hundreds of millions of people spreading the disease by refusing to wear masks, stay indoors and take vaccines.
Strangely, this framework remains largely intact despite mounds of evidence that senior public health officials deliberately misled the public. At minimum, there is proof of a successful information operation aimed at manipulating public opinion about the virus by covering up relevant details about its origins.1
The “lab leak” hypothesis that was once labeled as dangerous disinformation and aggressively censored now looks fairly tame, a mere accident, next to the possibility that COVID-19 was the result of joint US-Chinese government collaboration on research related to bioweapons.
Anthony Fauci should be able to shed some light on this. Fauci became the highest paid federal employee in the US by heading the government’s post-9/11 bioweapons program before he went on to lead the pandemic response under both the Trump and Biden administrations.
Trouble is he can’t remember.
Over two days and fourteen hours of testimony at closed-door hearings of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in January, Fauci told lawmakers over 100 times that he “did not recall” pertinent information about the origins of COVID-19 and his own decisions guiding the US pandemic response.
But emails from 2020 show Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), pressuring scientists who had privately admitted doubts about the natural origins of the virus to suppress their misgivings, ignore evidence that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was engineered and back the official narrative that the virus likely originated from a Chinese wet market.
This resulted in the infamous “Proximal Origins” paper published in Nature magazine in March 2020, which, having been written under Fauci’s supervision, was then held up by Fauci—without acknowledging his role in its crafting —as evidence that scientists had independently confirmed his claim that the virus could not have come from a lab and to claim that any speculation to that effect was spreading a dangerous conspiracy theory.
According to a CIA whistleblower, Fauci exerted a similar influence over that agency’s analysts to change their account of the pandemic and affirm the natural origins thesis.
Fauci and others involved in manufacturing a consensus on the origins of COVID-19 were not simply mistaken in their scientific analysis. They were aware of US ties to the Wuhan lab and took pains to hide the record of that involvement and their efforts to cover it up.
“Tony doesn’t want his fingerprints on origin stories,” wrote Dr. David Morens, Fauci’s senior adviser at NIAID, in an email from July 2021.
In another email, Morens wrote that he would “always communicate on gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly.” As a precaution, Morens said he would “delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”
Kristian Andersen, the lead author of the Proximal Origins paper, advised colleagues: “We should all just stay on Slack, that’s what we should do—and not use email.”
Robert Garry, a co-author on Proximal Origins, had worried in a 2020 email prior to its publication that failing to mention the evidence suggesting a lab leak would look “like a cover up.” Almost four years later, the cries of coverup that Garry feared have proved largely ineffectual. Aside from leading to bad press for the scientists involved, the Proximal Origins paper appears to have done its job, buying time during the critical initial period of pandemic policy-making and blame-assigning to construct the official consensus.
Earlier this month, a new trove of records showed that EcoHealth Alliance, the US government-backed nonprofit run by Fauci associate Peter Daszak that funded dangerous “Gain of Function” research into bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, submitted a grant proposal to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2018 to work on coronaviruses that are strikingly similar to SARS-CoV-2. DARPA rejected the proposal known as DEFUSE according to the records obtained by US Right to Know, but that does not rule out the possibility that it ultimately went forward with backing from a different funder. It describes plans to design a virus that would be exceptionally transmissible due to scientists adding furin cleavage sites at the S1/S2 junction of the spike protein—a feature found in SARS-CoV-2.
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Like most reasonably healthy people in my age group, I experienced COVID as something like a moderate flu. My work as a writer at an online publication was only minimally affected by the global lockdown. What interests me about the pandemic is that it both demonstrated and reified the power of a new form of political authority based on narrative and information management.
Informational control, which I take to be the dominant form of power in the U.S. today and characteristic of digital societies worldwide, generates profit by accumulating and organizing vast quantities of information. It generates power by controlling access to that information. The essential byproduct of this system is secrecy, which protects the powerful while blinding the public, as I described a year ago in an essay about the quickly forgotten scandal over President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.
…An enormous, opaque system of secrecy—so opaque we don’t know how enormous it is—has captured American politics. The principle of democratic self-governance is obviously incompatible with that system, but so too is the sanity of individuals living inside of it. Americans who want to join in their country’s civic life now find that the main way to participate is by following the trail of clues leaked by official sources while trying to solve elaborate, rigged puzzles about the nature of reality. It’s no surprise the country is going nuts.
As a technical matter, Anthony Fauci should not be able to just forget what happened. Like the rest of us, his every move has been captured in digital records that should provide a more thorough accounting beyond what he can personally recall.
Don Lueders, who spent more than two decades as an electronic records management consultant, working for the White House and various intelligence agencies, has been helping me understand how the government handles information.
“Agency records management is how HHS [U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] agencies maintain their institutional memory,” he texted me as a follow-up after we spoke by phone. Federal agencies, including HHS are required to conduct annual self-assessments on their digital records management. But as Lueders explains, despite awarding themselves high scores, these agencies routinely ignore the rules. By concealing and deleting their digital correspondence and other records, government officials evade accountability for their actions.2
During COVID and in the runup to the 2020 election, federal agencies working in concert with para-governmental groups used their leverage over social media companies and backdoor access to the Internet to manipulate information at a grand scale. Under the banner of “fighting disinformation” tens of millions of social media posts, YouTube videos, and Google searches were censored to alter what Americans thought about matters like Hunter Biden’s laptops, vaccines, and the origins of COVID. Yet, the same informational control system that is outwardly governing the perceptions of millions of people apparently cannot audit itself.
