Miss a day, miss a lot. Subscribe to The Defender's Top News of the Day. It's free.
The author of an op-ed published last week in The New York Times confronted Dr. Anthony Fauci with his own words and used them to accuse Fauci of sowing disinformation.
Journalist Megan Stack wrote that while Fauci today maintains that from “Day 1” he had an “open mind” about the possibility that COVID-19 leaked from a lab, that’s not true.
Stack pointed out that in February 2020, during an appearance on Newt Gingrich’s podcast, Fauci said the lab-leak theory was a “conspiracy theory,” when Gingrich asked him about the “urban legend … that there’s a biological warfare center in Wuhan and that the coronavirus escaped from that.”
Recounting Fauci’s response, Stack wrote:
“‘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.’”
Stack also wrote about how Fauci orchestrated the publication of the March 2020 Nature Medicine study, which was key to downplaying the possibility of the lab leak.
She described how Fauci promoted that paper widely as the “science” behind the origins of COVID-19, using it as evidence of zoonotic crossover in a White House press conference.
Fauci and EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak together worked behind the scenes to delegitimize the lab-leak theory, she wrote, failing to share key information and their own conflicts of interest with the public.
For example, she said, they failed to tell the public about ongoing research “in which viral strains are manipulated in ways that can make them more dangerous to humans,” also known as gain-of-function. And they didn’t disclose their own role in funding that work at the Wuhan lab.
Stack’s revelations were not news to investigative journalist Paul Thacker, who previously covered Fauci’s comments on Gingrich’s podcast and Fauci’s orchestration of the Nature Medicine paper.
“It’s great to see the New York Times catching up,” Thacker wrote today on Substack, adding:
“There’s an old saying in this profession, ‘You haven’t made it in journalism until the New York Times rips you off.’”
Stack said Fauci “displayed a Hamiltonian distrust of ordinary people” in lying about masking and moving the herd immunity target, among other things.
Thacker said this is not the first time Fauci was caught “misremembering things.”
“It’s just the first time the New York Times has deigned to confront him on his dissembling,” he added.
Thacker also posted a YouTube video called “Fauci vs. Fauci,” which illustrates more of Fauci’s conflicting statements on issues including funding gain-of-function research, masking, vaccine efficacy, lockdowns, natural immunity, end of the pandemic and vaccine adverse events.
Watch here:
