Contrary to claims that he was being muzzled and prevented from speaking out under the Trump administration, U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci himself admitted, in his correspondence with certain people, that he wasn't being silenced at all.
Emails of Dr. Anthony Fauci, medical advisor to President Joe Biden, have been made public for the first time following the outbreak of the global COVID pandemic, the Christian Post (CP) reported. Over 3,000 pages of emails were obtained by Buzzfeed News and Washington Post through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, all of which were dated between January and June 2020-the most crucial months at the start of the COVID pandemic.
In some emails, the 80-year-old infectious diseases expert denied that he was "muzzled" by the Trump administration.
"I have been very explicit in stating publicly that I am not being muzzled or censored," Dr. Fauci wrote in an email dated March 2, 2020, as reported by CP. "I say exactly what I want to say based on scientific evidence, I have stated this on multiple TV programs over the past few days including at a major press conference with many, many reporters present including several TV cameras."
Dr. Fauci, who gained polarizing reactions from American citizens throughout the past 18 months, argued that he "could not possibly be more public about this. No censor. No Muzzle. Free to speak out."
Despite initial reports in April 2020 that COVID was a man-made virus and that the World Health Organization (WHO) was deep inside China's pocket to cover up any lab leak, Dr. Fauci insisted that the virus, which has now taken over 3.5 million lives globally, was not man-made and was the result of an "unusual human-animal interface" in a Wuhan market.
The infectious disease expert argued, "the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human."
Dr. Fauci also corresponded with Peter Daszak, a zoologist and president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that was later revealed to have received federal funding from the U.S. which it handed over to the Wuhan lab to support the study of coronaviruses. EcoHealth Alliance reportedly received $598,000 between 2014 to 2019.
The Trump administration through the NIH cancelled a five-year grant amounting to $3.7 million, because it no longer believed that the work supported the "program goals and agency priorities" of NIH, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Dr. Daszak told WSJ, "Our work is part of protecting the U.S. citizen against diseases like COVID-19."
In his emails to Dr. Fauci, Dr. Daszak expressed his gratitude for "stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology."
Dr. Daszak, who admits to having a longstanding "collaboration" with the Chinese Communist Party, has long been vocal about his support of the wet market theory, telling NPR in in March that wildlife farming was the "most likely pathway [for the coronavirus to spread to Wuhan]," completely overlooking the fact that nearby stands the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where coronaviruses studies were being conducted.
Dissatisfied with both the WHO investigation into COVID and the initial U.S. intelligence report, President Biden has ordered further analysis into the Wuhan lab leak theory, which recently has gained traction due to resurfacing reports. British intelligence is now collaborating with the U.S. to uncover the true origins of COVID. The new inquiry did not sit well with the Chinese.
Chinese CDC director George Gao, who apologized to Dr. Fauci for being quoted in Science Magazine saying that it would be a "big mistake" to not tell people to wear masks in the spring of 2020, the Washington Post reported. Gao then asked to "work together to get the virus out of the earth," to which Dr. Fauci agreed.
He replied, "We will get through this together."
