Mystery as more Fauci emails surface and raise questions about his links to Covid lab leak - after he was accused of secretly conspiring with the CIA
- Emails show Dr Fauci went into 'damage control' when EcoHealth funding ended
- EcoHealth grants were overseen by Dr Fauci's department at the NIH pre-Covid
- READ MORE: EcoHealth Alliance gathering pathogens with pandemic potential
More questions are being raised about Dr Anthony Fauci's ties to the Covid lab leak theory after the release of a tranche of new emails.
The former White House advisor, 83, was hit with a series of new allegations this week including that he secretly conspired with the CIA to squash debate about the origins of the virus.
Leaked documents also showed that Dr Fauci's top aide intentionally tried to hide his discussions about the virus's genesis by using his personal email.
And now new messages show Dr Fauci was engaged in some form of 'damage control' at the time his department was being probed about funding to the Chinese laboratory feared to have started the pandemic.
The April 2020 email, sent between Dr Fauci's aide and a third-party group who distributed government grants to China, suggests they were concerned about backlash coming from the probe.
Dr Anthony Fauci (speaking to DailyMail.com in July 2023)
Dr Peter Daszak (pictured left alongside Dr Anthony Fauci) is behind EcoHealth Alliance at the center of concerns over the origins of Covid
EcoHealth Alliance, headed by Dr Peter Daszak, helped fund research at the Wuhan lab using grants from Dr Fauci's department, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID).
The lab had enjoyed part of a $3.3 million in US taxpayer funds since 2014 to conduct experiments on bat coronaviruses.
At the end of 2019, the virus that would eventually spark a global pandemic emerged in Wuhan with early cases linked to a seafood market just eight miles away from the lab.
In April 2020, when 787,000 Americans had gotten sick and 42,000 had died of Covid, EcoHealth hit a regulatory snag.
Dr Michael Lauer, the NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research, communicated to EcoHealth at the time that its grant funding for the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology would be placed on hold.
The funding would not be reinstated until EcoHealth could fulfill a long list of criteria, including to provide the sample of coronavirus that the lab used to sequence what soon became a global pandemic and to share with NIH how the lab responded to concerns raised by the State Department in 2018 about lab safety.
Pictured: The Wuhan Institute of Virology, where scientists engineered viruses
Lauer also wanted to find out why WIV didn't mention that the RaTG13 virus, similar to SARS-CoV-2, was found in a mine where people got sick a Covid-like illness in 2012, and why they didn't follow up on this.
Dr Lauer further required EcoHealth Alliance to set up an independent inspection team to check WIV's facilities and records, especially to see if they had the SARS-CoV-2 virus before December 2019.
The team would be asked to review all of WIV's fieldwork, like collecting animals and samples from caves or outdoor areas.
In newly-published emails between President Peter Daszak and NIAID senior scientific adviser Dr David Morens, who worked closely with Dr Anthony Fauci, the two discussed the government's guidelines for conducting research on viruses called the Strategic Plan for Covid-19 Research.
EXCLUSIVEResearcher who may have made Covid still receiving $50million from US
Daszak insisted that the research being conducted in Wuhan satisfied government regulations for safe experimentation.
But the disruption in funding apparently troubled Dr Fauci, who led the department charged with dispersing grants to organizations like EcoHealth.
At the time, Dr Fauci had also been under growing fire over what he knew and didn't know about the origins of the devastating virus.
Dr Morens wrote to Daszak: 'Even while remaining silent you should be clearly documenting these things for potential future use, in your own defense, and for history.
'Tony [Fauci] is now fully aware I think and is I am told involved in some sort of damage control, but again I am not in the loop.'
This is around the same time Dr Fauci is reported to have taken clandestine trips to CIA headquarters in Virginia off the record to meet with Covid investigators and, according to Senate Republicans, 'influence' the Covid origins investigation.
Peter Daszak, for his part, now maintains that there was nothing suspicious in the emails when read in their entirety, and show that EcoHealth 'was appropriately communicating with senior staff at the NIH, or who formerly worked at NIH, to try to identify ways to reinstate a grant that had been terminated unexpectedly and arbitrarily, then suspended with onerous conditions.'
