‘Fraud and Subterfuge’: Experts Detail Actions of Public Health Officials during Pandemic

During testimony before a House Oversight subcommittee hearing on the coronavirus pandemic last week, a former National Institutes of Health (NIH) director admitted that the federal agency funded “gain-of-function” research that involved transforming animal viruses into human viruses at the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. The disclosure is the latest example in a series of revelations that have shown a pattern of deliberate deception undertaken by leading public health officials during the COVID pandemic.

During the hearing, Dr. Lawrence Tabak, former Acting NIH director and current principal deputy director, admitted that NIH did in fact fund “generic” gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based NGO. Evidence suggests that the Wuhan Institute may be linked to the origin of the COVID pandemic. Tabak’s testimony directly contradicts what former Chief Medical Advisor to the President Dr. Anthony Fauci, who also formerly served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified in May 2021 when he stated that “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

On Monday, Dr. Robert Malone, chief medical and regulatory officer for The Unity Project, discussed on “Washington Watch” how Fauci, EcoHealth President Dr. Peter Daszak, and other public health officials have attempted to manipulate the “gain-of-function” term, apparently in order to escape responsibility for the outbreak of the pandemic.

“[T]he hair-splitting goes a little deeper, as testified by Daszak, because in that case, EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology were dealing with a bat virus that wasn’t yet highly infectious to humans, but they were seeking to make it highly infectious to humans,” he explained. “So the whole ‘gain-of-function’ was intended to convert something that was not currently infectious to humans, to something that was. But under the current definition, that was allowed, that was not considered to be gain-of-function.”

As Malone went on to detail, attempts within NIH to cover up their connection to the Wuhan Institute and avoid accountability for the pandemic were extensive.

“[T]his goes deep,” he observed. “…[Dr. David] Morens, who [was] one of Dr. Fauci’s top lieutenants, was actively avoiding Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] requests by deleting emails and then directing Dr. Daszak, for instance, to correspond via Gmail rather than by the usual NIH email addresses. Dr. Morens had been tutored on how to … avoid Freedom of Information Act disclosures by a FOIA officer within NIH [in order to avoid] traceability within the federal email system. … [W]e have fraud and subterfuge, clear illegal activity going on in order to avoid accountability, and presumably to avoid Dr. Fauci having accountability.”

Further efforts by NIH to deceive the public have also recently been revealed. As COVID first began spreading in the spring of 2020, Fauci declared to the nation that evidence based on a peer-reviewed study showed that the virus likely jumped from animals to humans and did not originate from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute. But in subsequently unearthed emails, it was revealed that not only was the “study” Fauci’s idea, he also “helped edit it and had final approval of its contents.”

In addition, recent testimony from Fauci and former NIH Director Francis Collins divulged that the practice of “social distancing” — remaining six feet apart from other people — that was mandated across the country was in fact fabricated without any evidence to justify it. As noted by Wesley J. Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism, the practice “kept people from visiting hospitalized patients, holding the hands of dying loved ones, and attending funerals. It increased social isolation, led to suicides, and made life miserable in myriad ways, large and small.”

But in January, Fauci told lawmakers that the social-distancing guidance “sort of just appeared.” Moreover, Collins admitted during testimony that he did “not see any evidence” supporting social distancing. When he was further pressed on if he had ever seen any evidence to support a six-feet-apart rule, Collins responded, “No.”

Malone concluded by emphasizing that those involved in spreading deceptive information about COVID also included individuals in the private sector.

“Also implicated in the email chains were a number of people like Kristian Andersen at Scripps [Research] Institute in La Jolla and other individuals that participated in various … misleading communications, for instance in The Lancet, that vehemently denied that there was any chance that this virus originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. These people were stakeholders and defenders of the approved narratives and had been involved in the research endeavor and are now clearly implicated. It shows that we’ve got something deeper.”