There’s much to criticize Fauci for over the pandemic response and reluctance to consider an artificial origin. But we shouldn’t conflate that with culpability for starting the pandemic. The documents released by Rand Paul offer no evidence that Fauci sponsored an “arms race” with China to engineer coronaviruses and/or countermeasures. On the contrary, he deserves criticism for his lack of attention to the BW threat from China and from coronaviruses.
In Ralph Baric’s recent interview with Senator Paul’s staff, he claims to have interacted with Fauci four times over the years, and only once before the outbreak:
and that:
This is corroborated by the first section of Fauci’s diary. There are few mentions of SARS and MERS, and no indication anyone suspected a BW. Baric doesn’t rate a mention either (at least in the years 2001-15 -unfortunately Rand Paul hasn’t released the section from 2016-19).
In 2005, Baric wrote an article about the terrorist potential of SARS. It was an appeal for attention at a time pathogens with weaponization potential attracted lavish funding. As epidemics go, SARS was small and short-lived and had very minor impact on the US. Seasonal respiratory diseases take orders of magnitudes more lives each year. From a public health perspective SARS is only interesting in the context of terrorism.
While coronavirus research received a small amount from the biodefense funding pool, the real “arms race” - to develop and stockpile vaccines and other countermeasures - focused on known BW agents from the Soviet arsenal (e.g. anthrax, plague, smallpox) and others causing virulent disease with weaponization potential (e.g. Ebola). Even today, many in biodefense regard coronaviruses as too mild to be bioweapons. Yet Covid-19 killed tens of millions, sickened billions, and devastated the global economy. Too mild? We should dread SARS-CoV-3 if AMMS research into neurovirulence and/or ethnic targeting bears fruit.
SARS created a blind spot
Many scientists dismissed SARS as a BW before it was even sequenced.
Although Julie Gerberding claimed to be keeping an open mind to a BW, a week after this statement CDC scientists identified the pathogen as a coronavirus. She never discussed SARS again in this light, although bioterrorism using other agents continued to be a CDC preoccupation. At the time, human coronaviruses had a reputation as “common cold” viruses. With the virus not even sequenced, Richard Ebright typified the attitude of many scientists - it wasn’t pathogenic enough and happened in the wrong part of the world.
For scientific advice on SARS, the NIC turned to three scientists: Fauci, Stephen Ostroff from CDC, and Joshua Lederberg of Rockefeller University.
Lederberg’s past holds a cautionary tale. In the early 1980’s, as a member of the NAS Committee on International Security and Arms Control, he met regularly with counterparts from the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1979 there was an outbreak of anthrax in the city of Sverdlovsk that killed 66 people. The CIA and DIA had hard evidence of a cover-up including the decontamination of a nearby military installation. This led to a formal accusation that the USSR was violating the BWC. In 1986, Lederberg was invited to inspect the site. Following his visit, he sided with the Soviets that the outbreak was likely zoonotic, adding that “wild rumors spread around every epidemic”. After the fall of the USSR, it was confirmed that the deaths were caused by an accident at a BW research facility that released an aerosol plume of anthrax - weaponized in contravention of the BWC.
Ostroff was best placed of the three to offer evidence-informed advice. The US CDC managed to get two of its scientists into China under the WHO banner. But they were waylaid in Beijing for weeks, barred from entering Guangdong - the purported site of its emergence. It was only after the WHO threatened China with a travel ban that authorities granted permission for a 5-day fact-finding tour. The WHO team seemed satisfied with Guangdong CDC’s account of their contact tracing measures, but could confirm little for themselves - other than it probably wasn’t what officials claimed.
In a Congressional hearing on SARS, Ostroff faced one or two probing questions on the BW issue. His response was “wait and see what scientists come up with”.
AMMS were up to the task, engaging with scientists from CSIRO and Institut Pasteur to build the case for a natural spillover. An epidemiological link was rapidly found to an animal sometimes sold as exotic cuisine - the civet cat. This was enough to placate most skeptics. Fabricating a false link could have been easily accomplished by adulterating samples with viral RNA. But most scientists would dismiss such an idea as the product of an overactive imagination and wouldn’t think to take precautions against tampering.
I’m reminded of sinologist Simon Leys who warned of the dangers of an underactive imagination when dealing with Communist regimes.
IC analysts with a China background had suspicions, but even these rare voices of caution fell silent after the civet link was announced.
It was also unhelpful that China had enthusiastic supporters at high levels. Closer engagement with China has been sought by successive US administrations, corporations, academia, and even the Pentagon:
The biodefense complex has participated in these trust/co-operation/dialog-building exercises. Notable projects include the PREDICT/EcoHealth/WIV collaboration to identify novel pathogens, and ex-USN Captain Gregory Gray’s One Health evangelizing with AMMS’ Wuchun Cao. There have also been regular bilateral conferences which brought together US scientists in the biodefense domain (e.g. Ralph Baric and David Franz) with counterparts from Chinese institutions - including the AMMS. Delegates include all the top suspects: Ruifu Yang, Yigang Tong, Wuchun Cao, Changchun Tu.
Baric has been consulting to the IC on coronaviruses for many years and he maintains a high-level security clearance. Yet he also seems incredibly naive with respect to China’s BW capability and intentions. At a January 2019 bilateral conference in Harbin, attended by several of the AMMS, he shared insights on host-switching and increasing virulence - no doubt pleased to have an attentive audience.
Baric divulged one of these insights in his recent interview. He claimed to have never shared it with anyone, and asked that it be struck from the record, warning it was dangerous if discovered by terrorists. But not too dangerous to share with AMMS?
Baric on several occasions seemed overly eager to assist Chinese scientists. It’s possible he has never been briefed that China is an adversary, not an ally. His naivete is far from unique. Since the demise of the USSR the biodefense complex has perceived the BW threat to come from rogue states, Jihadist networks, home-grown religious cults, and “lone-wolf” US scientists. China has never been classed as a rogue state but welcomed into the fold - partly for its influence over certified rogue state North Korea.
Helpless Hotez and Hopeless Holmes
Another case study in naivete is Peter Hotez. He was Principal Investigator on a long running SARS/MERS vaccine project which employed the mysteriously deceased AMMS scientist Yusen Zhou, and his AMMS-educated widow Lanying Du.
I managed to get some answers from Hotez on Twitter once. Incredibly, he claimed not to know Yusen Zhou, who had been in the news due to rumors he had fallen - or been pushed off a roof. He knew Zhou’s wife Lanying Du though. She continues to work in the US - an expert on receptor binding, proteolytic cleavage, coronavirus entry methods. Why has she never appeared in hearings?
I informed Hotez about Zhou’s PLA background and asked whether he might pose a security risk. He pleaded ignorance of such mundane considerations. No clue about geopolitics or BW programs. Not his job.
So, whose job is it then?
The USG part of the biodefense complex is split between a plethora of agencies within DoJ (FBI), DoE (National Labs), HHS (CDC, NIH, NIAID, BARDA, ASPR, FDA), DHS (NBACC, FEMA, CWMD, CBP), DoD (DTRA, DARPA, DIA, NCMI, GEIS, NAMRU-1/2/3, USAMRIID, Walter Reed, USNHRC, DHA), State Dept., USAID, CIA, ODNI (BSEG, NCBC, NIC), USDA (NBAF), OSTP, NSC, OPPR, NSF…did I miss any? Of course there will be duplication of roles, gaps where no-one seems to be responsible, and crossed lines of communication and command.
As the largest government employer of bioscientists, NIH ought to be capable of assembling an internal team to look at the origins issue. Instead Collins and Fauci outsourced the task to external academics, mostly zoologists, rather than experts in synthetic biology, many with close relationships and collaborations with Chinese colleagues. They’ve been shown to be readily influenced, motivated by exclusive access to data and collaborations - opportunities for a high-impact paper.
Eddie Holmes is an exemplar. Although initially suspecting an artificial origin, he was manipulated by an old chum from Oxford days - Tommy Lam - who also happens to be a protege of Wuchun Cao. Lam directed Holmes attention to the pangolin coronavirus RBD, which Holmes claims convinced him the virus was natural. Lam may not have initially shared the provenance of the pangolin covs, and Holmes did no due diligence. When confronted in the media about the PLA connections Holmes was unrepentant and indignant. Despite acknowledging that some Chinese data is - in his words - “bullshit”, he has continued to put his name on papers by Chinese scientists - some with military connections.
Recently on X, Emily Kopp commented on a new paper by former FBI virologist Jason Bannan, saying he had written about PLA links to the Wuhan lab. Bannan dropped in to set the record straight. He hadn’t.
Brennan is an “accidental lab-leaker” a viewpoint which has become an acceptable alternative to natural origin, while BW remains taboo. Brennan’s assessment seems to be founded on the same public-domain information we’ve all seen - the DEFUSE proposal being central. If he’s representative of FBI thinking, it’s concerning. There’s important HUMINT and SIGINT that the FBI should have been collecting about the AMMS/WIV links to Yusen Zhou, Lanying Du, Fang Li, Stanley Perlman, Peter Hotez, Ralph Baric and US-based Chinese scientists. If they have investigated these leads, they haven’t shared anything, or charged anyone. Perhaps they were “confused by DEFUSE” wasting resources looking into the misdemeanors of US administrators and scientists. The only charge they’ve brought to date is against David Morens for violating Federal email policy. If Baric, Daszak or Fauci had been culpable in starting the pandemic, surely they would have uncovered something?
FBI has a domestic focus, and only a small team dedicated to China who are kept extremely busy with espionage, hacking, smuggling etc. Former Director Christopher Wray said they open a new China-related investigation twice a day, with ~2000 open at any time, most of which never result in prosecution.
The DIA also made an assessment in favor of lab-leak and are currently fighting a legal battle with USRTK to keep part of it secret (why?). From the unredacted material we’ve already seen it seems it may also be overly reliant on OSINT - some even harvested from Twitter. They seem to have been on the right track in noting the importance of the pangolin cov (a clue to AMMS involvement) but elsewhere in the presentation the focus is on WIV, rather than the more capable and sinister AMMS.
An opportunity to connect the dots arose on 4th June 2021. Fauci was briefed by the Weapons and Counterproliferation Mission Center of the CIA. The information of most interest is the specific intelligence that pangolin coronaviruses had been transferred from Beijing to Wuhan. This is a key piece of evidence that implicates the PLA - the Beijing lab can only mean the AMMS Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology haunt of pangolin wrangler Yigang Tong.
Recollections of this meeting differ between the CIA and Fauci. Whether Fauci’s interest was piqued by the PLA link has been redacted by ODNI. Why? This is valuable SIGINT/HUMINT - perhaps the only such snippet we’ve seen, and only because Fauci wrote it down. The IC would justify the redaction on the need to protect “sources and methods”. Given the nexus of pangolin covs and humanized mice, research focuses of long-term collaborators Yigang Tong and Yusen Zhou respectively, and Zhou’s links to the US, it’s conceivable that Zhou was a source.
The Emperor Strikes Back
In mid-2021 China was preparing an attack in the cognitive domain, and I suspect this has largely stalled or distracted USG origins investigations for the 5 years since. With Biden’s announcement of a 90-day review of intelligence on the origin, Chinese officials and state media stepped-up a propaganda campaign alleging Ralph Baric and/or USAMRIID BW research was to blame and they must be investigated.
In July 2021 a Marine Corps Major Joe Murphy, temporarily embedded in DARPA on a 12 month fellowship, discovered a rejected proposal document titled DEFUSE in a Top Secret drive shared with intelligence agencies. He claims the folder had been empty for a year, and one day it wasn’t (good thing he checked regularly). As it had no security marking, he thought it appropriate to leak it to Project Veritas and Drastic.
The DEFUSE leak framed by misinformation deflected culpability for a lab-leak back onto WIV’s US collaborators Daszak and Baric. Rumors still circulate that after the proposal was rejected, the collaborators went ahead and did it anyway. After five years of investigations, hearings and FOIA releases there’s still no evidence for this. Some have moved on to claim that DEFUSE is a “blueprint” which enabled WIV to make SARS-CoV-2 alone. This is false. The proposal contains no scientific insights that weren’t already in publicly available literature, while similar experiments have been done since the time of SARS.
DEFUSE was made public on 21st September, 2021. Coincidentally the same day Institut Pasteur published the Banal sequences, and China’s Institute of Pathogen Biology published a massive survey of bats purporting to show no SARS-CoV-2 related viruses still existed in China. Taken together, this is strong evidence that either SARS-CoV-2 is natural - or - if it had been made in a lab, it was perhaps a US lab. Institut Pasteur’s Banal-52 sequence superseded WIV’s RaTG13 as closest backbone, and the pangolin coronavirus was made redundant as the source of the RBD, clearing the AMMS of engineering it. If you accept all this as genuine, as most lab-leakers did. Even China-hawkish Republicans started to look askance at Ralph Baric.
I don’t accept the Banal sequences are genuine. Or the IPB data (even Eddie Holmes didn’t believe that). And DEFUSE - though a real document - has been profoundly misinterpreted and falsely labeled a “blue-print”.
After 5 years of no progress on a natural or accidental origin, it’s time to investigate the third alternative.
Four simple tips for the Complex
China is currently the top BW threat. Brief scientists on China risk. Data from Chinese sources must be treated with skepticism.
Have some technical/scientific expertise in-house.
Be aware that BW attacks will involve efforts to misattribute the origin. Disinformation might be laundered through prominent western scientists and involve the fabrication of scientific data and/or contamination of samples.
BW deployment may also be accompanied by cognitive warfare designed to disrupt economies, seed social unrest, damage public health and foment fear. Transparency is the key to building public trust - not secrecy, lies and coercion.