If you didn't already have enough reasons to distrust Dr. Anthony Fauci, here's a new one, and it's a doozy.
Newly disclosed documents reveal that Fauci's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) had a formal institutional partnership with the CIA, one that provided cover for the agency's biological-threat research. This goes well beyond the previously known off-the-books meetings tied to the Wuhan lab origins controversy. Fauci's ties to American intelligence run far deeper than anyone outside a handful of investigators realized.
Documents that the Daily Caller obtained show an interagency agreement in which the CIA's Biological Technology Center launched a collaboration with NIAID focused on "forensic microbiology" involving potential bioterrorism agents. The CIA used its own funding to leverage NIAID's existing civilian research programs, tapping unclassified virus research to "augment and complement" its own research and development.
Make no mistake about it, this was not some casual arrangement between two federal agencies. It was a working partnership between America's top infectious disease bureaucrat and the nation's premier spy agency, built around some of the most dangerous pathogens on Earth.
Congressional investigators have spent years probing Fauci's ties to the intelligence community. Their findings include reports that Fauci visited CIA headquarters without anyone formally recording his entry, and that he took part in discussions on the agency's review of COVID-19's origins. Former Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), who chaired the House coronavirus subcommittee, wrote that "the information provided suggests that Dr. Fauci was escorted into Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Headquarters — without a record of entry — and participated in the analysis to 'influence' the Agency's review."
Rutgers University chemistry professor Richard Ebright said the newly disclosed documents show Fauci's NIAID may have crossed red lines on biological weapons research.
"Vice President Cheney assigned Fauci to head US biodefense research programs in 2002, including bioweapons-agents-development and bioweapons-agents-characterization research programs that approached, and arguably crossed, red lines set by the Biological Weapons Convention," Ebright explained. "The documents show early steps in the process of transferring funding for, and direction of, CIA and DoD biodefense projects to Fauci's agency, NIAID.”
The CIA-NIAID partnership grew out of a broader post-9/11 overhaul of federal biodefense. After the 2001 anthrax attacks, the Bush administration poured new funding into biodefense, and NIAID under Fauci became a central civilian agency for research on dangerous pathogens, while the CIA grappled with the growing difficulty of detecting biological weapons. A 2003 CIA memo titled "The Darker Bioweapons Future" warned that advances in biotechnology could make biological weapons far harder to identify than nuclear weapons, and called for "a much closer — and perhaps qualitatively different — working relationship between the intelligence and biological sciences communities," including scientists serving as a "living sensor web" gathering information from foreign researchers, universities, and conferences.
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Former CIA Senior Operations Officer James Erdman III testified before Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs that the line between public health and national security work became increasingly blurred after the early 2000s.
"The lines between public health and biodefense have been blurred beyond recognition ever since," Erdman said.
Erdman testified that NIAID, the intelligence community, the Pentagon, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and foreign researchers operated together for over 20 years without real oversight. "They received funding from NIAID and other agencies for vaccine research, USAID's PREDICT project, the [Pentagon’s] cooperative threat reduction program, and even worked with Chinese scientists on coronavirus and other pathogen studies pursuing vaccines," he said.
"There was no oversight monitoring how this web of relationships influenced research, policy, and public health in any holistic way for over 20 years," Erdman added.
If you thought our health institutions were really prioritizing public health, think again. These new documents establish that Fauci's CIA relationship was part of an institutional partnership stretching back years, spanning multiple presidential administrations and untold sums of taxpayer money. Fauci was a central node in a web connecting American intelligence, the Pentagon, and foreign researchers, far more than the mild-mannered public-health bureaucrat Americans were led to believe he was.
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