Former White House Covid czar Dr Anthony Fauci privately ruled out a wet market in Wuhan, China, as the source of the pandemic as early as January 2020 despite years of subsequent statements to the contrary, according to explosive diary entries released by US Senator Rand Paul.The then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) wrote to himself on January 26, 2020: “It now appears using epi data and genomic data that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market.”“The infections spread among people weeks before the Chinese reported that they were dealing with a new infection and that gave the virus time to establish itself in multigenerational (sustained) spread,” he noted. “Remember, early on the Chinese were saying that there is no human to human transmission and all the original 27 cases were from the market.“Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier,” he underscored, adding that he was still convinced “somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans”.But in interviews throughout 2020 and 2021, Dr Fauci maintained that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid, did, in fact, originate in the Wuhan wet market.A now-infamous February 1, 2020 phone call that included at least 11 other scientists also debated the origins of Covid, with all but two participants leaning toward a natural spillover from animals to humans.“[T]he rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible and given the fact that Dr Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in GOF [gain of function] in coronaviruses to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor, we could not let this go,” Dr Fauci wrote.Dr Shi, sometimes referred to as the “bat lady” in previously disclosed government emails, was a longtime researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.The excerpts from more than 1000 pages of diary entries, which the Republican Senator from Kentucky published on Saturday, stunned some former Trump administration officials who worked directly with the NIAID chief on the White House Covid Task Force during the first year of the pandemic.“I was one of the seven original members of the Coronavirus task force — stood up in January 2020 — and he never said this to us, even as the source was a subject of intense interest,” Ken Cuccinelli, then the acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, wrote on X in response to Dr Fauci’s unearthed remarks.Asked during a Fox & Friends interview on April 3, 2020, whether wet markets should be closed to prevent viruses like Covid from emerging, Dr Fauci responded, “What we’re going through right now is a direct result of that.”CBS News’ Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan pressed the NIAID head nearly 20 months later about whether “the place of origin was not within the market itself.”“I don’t think you could say that,” Dr Fauci said on November 28, 2021. “I think you could say we don’t know how and where it originated. There were wet markets in Wuhan that are ample opportunity for a virus to jump from an animal that gets brought in from all parts of China that are very closely related physically to bat enclaves in caves and come to the market.”As late as June 2024, Dr Fauci tripled down in congressional testimony and in his memoir that one of the Wuhan wet markets was the most likely origin of the coronavirus.He wrote in On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service that “experienced evolutionary virologists” who “published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature” determined “the virus emerged as a natural spillover from infected animals brought illegally into the market.”The ex-NIAID director remained one of the foremost opponents of the so-called “lab leak theory,” along with former National Institutes of Health Director Dr Francis Collins, with Dr Fauci going so far as to prompt a scientific paper attempting to debunk the hypothesis while serving on the White House Covid Task Force.That paper, The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2, was authored by scientists whose internal debates over their natural origin hypothesis were revealed in Slack messages published by Senator Paul’s committee.“Our paper was pretty strong in saying ‘there’s no way’, but I have less confidence in that statement at this stage,” wrote co-author Kristian Andersen in a June 11, 2020 message.Dr Fauci had initiated and helped edit the study, which was published on February 17, 2020, but claimed at a White House press conference two months later: “I don’t have the authors right now, but we can make it available to you.”The Nature Medicine publication would show SARS-CoV-2 had “mutations” that were “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr Robert Redfield, the Energy Department, FBI, CIA and other scientists have all since determined that an accidental lab leak is the most likely explanation for the pandemic’s emergence in late 2019.Elsewhere in Dr Fauci’s diary, the doctor fretted about asymptomatic transmission of the virus as early as January 26, 2020, though publicly he downplayed the risks.“GAME ON!!! Things are changing rapidly,” he wrote. “Dr Ma Xiaowei, the Chinese Minister of Health gave a press statement saying that the incubation period of nCoV is 1 to 14 days and that the virus is being transmitted when people are asymptomatic!”“This has enormous implications for how we handle people from Wuhan (like our diplomats who are now on the way back from WUHAN, having been ordered to evaculate [sic]). Should we quarantine them. I am very skeptical about the Chinese interprepation [sic] of their data,” Dr Fauci added.In public remarks two days later, Dr Fauci told reporters: “The driver of respiratory outbreaks is symptomatic people, not asymptomatic carriers.”On Wednesday, Dr Fauci will testify before Senator Paul’s Senate Homeland Committee about his tenure at NIAID and handling of the US response to the Covid pandemic.Dr Fauci’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.This article originally appeared on NY Post and was reproduced with permissionRead related topics:China