Here's What We Know About Key Questions Fauci Refused to Answer

Documents Shed Light on Questions About COVID-19 Origins Raised at Senate Hearing

Sen. Rand Paul questioned Anthony Fauci during a July 2023 hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on matters related to the origins of SARS-CoV-2. Fauci declined to answer several questions directly. Subsequent releases of documents by Paul, along with materials obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and a House investigation, provide additional details on the topics discussed.

Fauci did not respond to a request for comment on the documents.

Public and Private Statements on the Origin of the Outbreak

During the hearing, Paul stated that Fauci had publicly attributed the start of the pandemic to a wet market in Wuhan while expressing different views in private communications. Records show that by late January 2020, Fauci wrote in a personal diary that the first known infection occurred in early December 2019 and was not linked to the Huanan Seafood Market, which reported cases beginning in late December. The same diary entry noted that “somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.”

Fauci also recorded a conversation with U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield regarding China CDC Director George Gao. According to the diary, Gao expressed concern about earlier statements that there was no human-to-human transmission and that the initial 27 cases were animal-to-human. The diary entry states that human-to-human transmission had occurred weeks earlier. Gao later made public statements consistent with this revised understanding. No public statements by Fauci directly addressing the market’s role as the initial source after the diary entry have been identified in the available record.

In April 2020, Fauci appeared on Fox News and discussed the risks associated with wildlife markets, stating that diseases can emerge from the human-animal interface and that such markets should be shut down. He directed attention to work by a group of virologists who concluded the outbreak began at the market. Internal messages among some of those virologists, released by Paul, show they discussed the need to “re-convince” themselves of a natural origin after reviewing a 2018 grant proposal involving bat coronaviruses. University of Edinburgh virologist Andrew Rambaut wrote that it was plausible someone had attempted related experiments and that the group needed to determine whether the features were coincidental. Scripps Research virologist Kristian Andersen replied that the distinction between work on bat coronaviruses and modification using specific features seen in SARS-CoV-2 was significant. Neither scientist responded to requests for comment on the messages.

Laboratory Capabilities and Proposed Experiments

Paul also asked whether researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology possessed the technical ability to insert a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus. Published papers and grant materials describe work conducted at the institute involving the insertion of novel spike proteins, collected from bats, into coronavirus backbones to create viruses not known to circulate in nature. A 2015 paper in Nature Medicine reported such chimeric virus construction.

Grant documents from EcoHealth Alliance, which received National Institutes of Health funding and subcontracted work to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, outline plans to study engineered coronaviruses. Drafts of a 2018 proposal involving U.S. and Chinese researchers included discussion of furin cleavage sites, a feature present in SARS-CoV-2 but not in closely related sarbecoviruses. Correspondence obtained through FOIA requests indicates that the researchers initially informed U.S. officials that certain experiments would occur in a high-containment laboratory in North Carolina, while later records show the work was planned for the Wuhan facility.

The documents released by Paul and obtained through FOIA do not include direct evidence that the specific genetic features of SARS-CoV-2 were created through these proposed experiments. They do record the scientific discussions and proposed methods described above.

Additional Context on Diary and Communications

The January 2020 diary entry by Fauci that noted the market was not the site of the first infection also contained the statement that the virus had jumped from animals to humans at some point. The article’s presentation of the entry focused on the first portion without including the concluding sentence. No records have been produced showing that Fauci was asked in public settings after the diary entry to state whether the market was or was not the initial source.

The second-hand account of Gao’s telephone conversation with Redfield appears only in Fauci’s diary and has not been independently corroborated in the released materials.

The Daily Caller News Foundation, which produced the original reporting, is an organization whose work has been rated as having a right-of-center perspective by media watchdogs. The documents cited in this article are the same primary materials referenced in the earlier coverage.

These records document the sequence of private notes, grant proposals, and published papers. They do not resolve the question of how SARS-CoV-2 first entered the human population.