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During a two-day closed-door interview last week before the U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci said “I don’t recall” more than 100 times in response to lawmakers’ questions about the COVID-19 pandemic.
But independent journalist Paul D. Thacker, who has investigated Fauci and the origins of COVID-19 and reported his findings on his Substack, The Disinformation Chronicle, told “The Defender In-Depth” this week that Fauci’s testimony last week was filled with lies.
“From what was released thus far [from the interview], I didn’t really see anything new,” Thacker said. “I saw Fauci just sort of saying the same thing that he’s said over again … He’s already said these untrue statements before.”
Such statements by Fauci pertained to issues such as controversial gain-of-function research funding of such research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China under his watch.
According to Thacker, Fauci has repeatedly contradicted himself on such matters, and his statements last week are no exception.
“Fauci has, on some occasions, said things over and over again and then come out and said something totally different,” Thacker said. “He now says that he never thought that … it was a conspiracy theory to say that the pandemic could have started from the lab. He’s said the opposite many times.”
‘The man has a problem with lying’
According to Thacker, an email trail beginning in January 2020 shows Fauci and the agency he directed for decades — the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — were “funneling money” into the Wuhan Institute of Virology and to researchers and organizations who were working with that laboratory, including the Wellcome Trust and Dr. Jeremy Farrar, and the EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak, Ph.D.
“[In] the first month of the pandemic, what we see are some internal emails from the NIH [National Institutes of Health, NIAID’s parent agency] discussing what they knew internally about a group called EcoHealth Alliance, which is at the center of all this … They had direct ties,” Thacker said.
“These emails are actually discussing … the funding that was going directly from Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance into Wuhan, and then also concerns about that type of research that was going on in Wuhan, which involved manipulation of viruses,” Thacker said, referring to gain-of-function research.
“NIH knew internally what was happening,” Thacker said. “For the next year, we were then lied to, and anyone who brought this stuff up was told that they were lying.”
On Feb. 1, 2020, Fauci and several prominent virologists communicated via email and a call “to discuss what they think happened in the pandemic,” Thacker said. During these communications, “There was concern that the virus might have been manipulated … that this virus was not natural.”
Yet, the product of these communications was the now-infamous “Proximal Origin” paper published in Nature Medicine, which shot down the lab-leak theory of COVID-19 and instead promoted a narrative that the virus crossed over from animals to humans.
According to Thacker, emails and documents show that Fauci played a significant role in the publication and subsequent promotion of this paper.
“We know he was involved because he was sent the draft of the paper multiple times, and we know it was the draft of the paper because what he was sent, complete phrases and thoughts, ended up in the final product,” Thacker said.
Thacker said:
“They were funding research in Wuhan, the NIH was … [Fauci] knew all of this. There were concerns from the virologists that this thing could have been genetically manipulated. And then something like eight days later … he went on Newt Gingrich’s podcast … and said ‘Oh, Newt, that’s a conspiracy theory.’ And then he turned back around and said that he’s never called it a conspiracy theory.
“The guy has an ability to constantly say the opposite of what he said prior … The man has a problem with lying. He’s a pathological liar, and he’s been caught repetitively. The problem he has is there is a paper record.”
‘The narrative has never made any sense’
Referring to several influential research papers, including “Proximal Origin,” that promoted the zoonotic theory of COVID-19’s origin, Thacker said they served “to all create this narrative and to sort of emphasize it and repeat the same narrative over and over again: ‘conspiracy theory,’ ‘no possible lab accident,’ ‘Wuhan.’”
“When you look back on all this stuff, which took many years to unravel, what you find out is this was all done behind the scenes … It was all orchestrated, some of it was [by] Anthony Fauci, some of it was Jeremy Farrar,” Thacker said.
“And then the other people involved were all these virologists who were conflicted because they were taking money” from Fauci, the NIH and the Wellcome Trust, Thacker added, noting that “many of them had ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
“That’s why we are here four years later, still talking about this stuff, because we were lied to for so long. And it’s taken this long to figure out all those lies and put this paper trail together,” Thacker said.
According to Thacker, science publications and their journalists played a role in perpetuating the government’s lies and narratives.
“What these papers really did is they bought off the science-writing community, because they then point to these studies … ‘It’s just science, just follow the science.’ So that became a narrative, which still, you’re seeing it to this day, despite all the emails coming out showing these guys lied [and] orchestrated a coverup,” Thacker said.
Thacker added:
“Their narrative has never made any sense. They’ve never been able to make it make any sense. The science writers out there [are] much more concerned with defending Fauci. They’re much more concerned with defending money and grants for this type of activity to continue.”
Thacker, who contributed to the release of the “Twitter Files,” said that while reviewing documents at Twitter headquarters, he located an email from “one of the top lawyers at Twitter who was involved in censorship … who was involved in meeting with the FBI and determining what was and was not ‘false and misleading information.’”
This email, said Thacker, “discussed Fauci” and referred to him as “the expert on the coronavirus pandemic response.”
“I think that kind of tells you all we need to know,” Thacker said.
Public ‘becoming more and more savvy’
“What this pandemic did was devastating to a lot of people across the planet, it harmed economies. And to this day, we still have no accountability either for how we dealt with the pandemic or how it possibly could have started,” Thacker said. “The issue is whether they’re going to be able to really nail him down,” referring to Fauci.
Noting that the U.S. Senate previously referred Fauci to the U.S. Department of Justice, Thacker said “the problem with that [is that] those referrals [are] then caught at the other end at the Department of Justice by political appointees” who were appointed by President Joe Biden, “the guy who Anthony Fauci was advising.”
“There is zero possibility that anyone over at the Department of Justice is going to prosecute the medical adviser to the president who gave them their job,” he added.
Thacker, a former U.S. Senate investigator, explained that closed-door interviews in Congress are primarily geared toward “getting someone down on the record … getting them in a transcribed interview to make statements that they then can’t say the opposite when they’re in public.”
This serves as a prelude for a public hearing — in which Fauci is scheduled to appear before the U.S. House later this year.
Thacker said that the public hearing is likely “going to be a food fight” where Fauci is “going to do his Anthony Fauci duck-and-dodge.”
“My guess is we’ll see stories pop up in The New York Times, Science Magazine or Nature, to sort of undermine anything that might possibly make Fauci look bad,” Thacker said. “It’s going to be just … ‘we’ve done nothing wrong and we’re not doing it anymore.’ That’s going to be the answer.”
Thacker said the good news is the public is increasingly aware of what’s happening.
“I think people are becoming more and more savvy to the fact that this stuff doesn’t make any sense,” he said.
Watch this week’s ‘The Defender In-Depth’:
