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The COVID-19 pandemic was the most historically significant event of the first quarter of the 21st century in America. More consequential than Sept. 11. More seismic than Barack Obama or Donald Trump being elected president. More destabilizing than the BLM or campus riots or the January 6th breach of the Capitol. COVID-19 altered the trajectory of every facet of American life — our politics, our economy, our schools, our relationships — in ways that will take decades to fully measure and repair.
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This week, more than six years after the nation first locked down, we came closer than ever to understanding why the American government responded the way it did, and why so much of the response turned out to be destructive, divisive, and wrong.
At a Senate committee hearing Wednesday, a CIA veteran named James Erdman III testified under oath that a 2021 internal intelligence assessment — one concluding COVID-19 most likely leaked from a Wuhan laboratory — was deliberately suppressed by Biden administration officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origin, dismissed and ridiculed at the time by establishment media and Democratic leaders, has since become the accepted explanation for the pandemic’s origin. Today, numerous government agencies hold this view, including the FBI, the Department of Energy and its elite “Z” division, and the CIA — which spent years claiming it simply couldn’t say, before concluding in January 2025 that a lab leak was more likely than a natural origin. That conclusion, it bears noting, was not based on new intelligence, but on a fresh review of existing information ordered in the final weeks of the Biden administration.
According to Erdman, CIA analysts had initially voted five-to-one in favor of the lab leak conclusion internally. But that position was walked back following consultations with outside scientists recommended by Fauci. Erdman noted that these scientists mirrored the list of authors behind the now infamous 2020 Nature Medicine paper “Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” that declared that the virus was not a laboratory construct.
Only years later did it become clear that “Proximal Origin” had been organized and shepherded by Fauci and former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins. The authors submitted an initial draft to Fauci and Collins, who then returned it with edits suggesting a stronger dismissal of the lab-leak theory. The authors, including Dr. Kristian Andersen, revised the paper accordingly and submitted it to Nature Medicine. Two months after its publication, Fauci personally approved an $8.9 million grant proposal for Andersen.
Fauci would go on to cite “Proximal Origin” at press conferences without divulging any of this, giving the impression that it was independent evidence that supported his actions.
The reason Fauci needed that impression to hold was simple, and it was the same reason the lab-leak theory had to be buried from the start: Fauci himself had funded the research that may have caused the pandemic. As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he oversaw grants to EcoHealth Alliance — the U.S. nonprofit that funneled American taxpayer money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for exactly the kind of research now believed to have produced the virus.
If true — and there is mounting evidence to believe that it is — Fauci’s lab-leak cover-up stands to be among the most consequential lies ever told by an American leader. Beyond the legal jeopardy it places Fauci in personally — he testified under oath before Congress that “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” a claim his own agency’s acting director later contradicted — it raises a darker question: How much of what was done to Americans in the name of COVID-19 was done to protect not the public, but the man who may have helped cause it?
According to Erdman, public health policy “would have been very different had the American public been made aware” that the virus had originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, not from a wet market, as Fauci and his colleagues insisted at the time.
This is almost certainly true. A public that knew the virus likely escaped from a laboratory partially funded by the U.S. government would have been far less willing to submit to Fauci’s dictates. The mask mandates, vaccine mandates, and school closures that tore the social fabric and wrecked the economy were all predicated on Fauci’s singular authority as the nation’s chief medical expert — a distinction he cultivated diligently and one that would not have survived the truth.
Nor would the censorship regime that silenced dissenting scientists and destroyed careers. Nor the deference shown to a World Health Organization effectively controlled by Beijing. Nor the cooperative posture toward a Chinese government that obstructed every meaningful investigation into what it knew and when.
Nor would society have suffered from the deleterious effects of a lie so massive. Lies, by their nature, breed more lies and sever the bonds of trust between people caught in their web. COVID-19 was materially catastrophic, but also spiritually. The paranoia and division that festered during the pandemic’s darkest days — the suspicion of the unmasked, the shunning of the unvaccinated, the collapse of friendships and families as a result — were not organic responses. They were conditioned, trickling down from the top.
Had the public known about the high likelihood of the lab-leak or Fauci’s connection to the risky research that produced the virus, his authority would have crumbled. And that would have changed everything.
TRUMP 2.0 AND THE PRO-LIFE DILEMMA
Fauci will likely never stand trial. At 85 and protected by a presidential pardon given by Biden at the eleventh hour, prosecution is no longer realistic. But that should not prevent him or his collaborators from facing the historical reckoning they so richly deserve.
In the quiet hours of the night, may they know exactly what they did, and that we know it, too.
