The Covid Origins Saga Is More Complicated Than Either Side Wants to Admit

Over and over, Dr. Anthony Fauci, an infectious disease doctor who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years, invoked his Fifth Amendment rights during a highly anticipated hearing before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (HSGAC).

“On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution,” Fauci repeated over the course of three hours in answer to every question from Republican and Democratic senators alike, looking alternately pained and stone-faced.

It was a spectacle that illuminated the deep and lingering ideological divide over America’s broken Covid-19 response, while shedding little light on the consequential question of how the pandemic began.

In a storied public health career in which he advised seven presidents, Fauci led the response to the HIV/AIDS crisis, helped craft the PEPFAR program, which allowed the U.S. to fund lifesaving AIDS drugs for Africa, and led America’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

His testimony on Wednesday came as part of an ongoing campaign by Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who chairs the HSGAC, to uncover information about the origins of the pandemic as well as scrutinize Fauci’s role in leading the response. Paul recently released new documents, which include over 1,000 pages from Fauci’s personal diaries to private Slack messages between virologists allied with him to a transcribed interview with Dr. Ralph Baric, one of the world’s leading coronavirus researchers. Baric had pioneered techniques used by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including one that allowed researchers to invisibly splice components of viruses together without leaving a trace

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who vilified Fauci in his conspiratorial 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, obtained Fauci’s diary entries from government servers and gave them to Paul’s committee. On X, Kennedy’s sister Kerry Kennedy called the release of Fauci’s diary a “clear violation” of Fauci’s privacy. RFK Jr. argued that the diary entries were not private, as they were composed on government computers.

MAGA politicians and right-wing influencers have long sought to recast Fauci as an arch villain, aiming to blame him both for sparking the pandemic and restricting freedoms during it, at a time when every country wrestled with the difficult questions of balancing individual liberties with protection of the most vulnerable, especially before the development of a Covid-19 vaccine. They have aimed to imprison him, or at the very least prove that he deceived the public. The 85-year-old scientist, once hailed as a hero, faces continuous death threats and now pays for his own security detail.

As Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said to Senator Paul at the hearing, after he had ejected Fauci’s attorney when he tried to sit at the witness table, “You are single-mindedly fixated on seeing Dr. Fauci prosecuted for imaginary crimes, and you are so invested in that outcome that you have created a personal brand around it.”

But as more documents have emerged through freedom of information requests, subpoenas and declassification, it is also clear that Fauci championed risky virology research, his institute helped fund some of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s most controversial known experiments, and worked behind the scenes with a small group of top virologists to steer the evolving public narrative away from a laboratory origin, once the pandemic began.

More than six years later, there is still no “smoking gun” proof for either of the two prevailing hypotheses of Covid-19’s origins, that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a laboratory accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology or from a natural jump from an infected animal. Nor is there direct evidence linking Fauci, or research at the WIV that NIAID funded while he was director, to the pandemic.

In the last few months, however, a release of new documents, some partly declassified by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under Tulsi Gabbard, and some obtained by Senator Paul’s committee through subpoenas, show that, even as leading scientists and certain government officials, including Fauci, publicly argued against a lab leak, in private, at various times, they deemed it credible and even equally likely.

Their assessment came in part due to unusual features of the virus. Those include a furin cleavage site, a distinctive segment of SARS-CoV-2’s genetic code that makes the virus more infectious by allowing it to more efficiently enter human cells, raising the question of whether the virus was engineered.

Since 2023, both the Department of Energy and the CIA have shifted their assessments towards a lab leak as the likelier origin, joining the FBI, which was the first intelligence agency to assess with moderate confidence that SARS-CoV-2 originated from a laboratory accident. Four intelligence agencies, along with the National Intelligence Council, assess a natural origin for Covid-19.

One thing that also clearly emerges from the documents: as the world was engulfed by crisis, and the American public needed transparency, the effort by Fauci and scientists allied with him to obscure or downplay the U.S. government’s entanglement with the Wuhan Institute of Virology likely weakened America’s ability to pressure China to release more information.

On January 26, 2020, as the virus was emerging, Fauci wrote in his journal, “Now we know the [Huanan seafood] market was not the source, it was the amplifier. Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.” The scientists allied with him would later argue that the market was the pandemic’s origin, serving as the spot where the virus first leapt from an infected animal to humans. (No infected animal has ever been identified.)

In his diary, Fauci then mentions a February 1, 2020 conference call, one that later became the subject of intense scrutiny. He had gathered top virologists to discuss the origin of the virus. His entry makes clear that the majority on the call “felt that deliberate insertion” of a furin cleavage site “was possible” due to the type of risky research the WIV had been pursuing. “We could not let this go.”

Yet by March of 2020, they had let it go. Four of the scientists on the call, all of whom had raised concerns about a lab leak, and a fifth author, published a scientific letter in Nature Medicine, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” asserting that “any type of lab-based scenario wasn’t plausible.”

Emails obtained through freedom of information later showed that Fauci had worked behind the scenes to help shape the publication. But at the time, his role in the letter was not publicly known.

On April 17, 2020, at the White House podium, Fauci fielded a question from a reporter: Could SARS-CoV-2 have come from a lab? He responded that a recently published analysis from a “group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists” had concluded that the virus was “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”

That positioning of the Proximal Origins letter played a significant role in relegating even factual questions about the possibility of a laboratory accident to the conspiracy-theory dustbin. To this day, there remain unanswered questions about what led the scientists involved to shift their assessments between the February 1 call and the publication of their lab-leak disavowal some six weeks later.

“These guys were messaging each other about how the virus looked like it was engineered and then after speaking with Fauci, switched gears quickly and published the Proximal Origins letter,” Jason Bannan, the FBI scientist who led the Bureau’s investigation into Covid-19’s origin, tells Rolling Stone. Meanwhile, he says, “Fauci was advising [the intelligence community] to listen to those experts, so he continued to promote them.”

In May 2020, one month after Fauci touted the Proximal Origins paper and its conclusion of a natural origin from the White House podium, the Z division of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory — an elite group of federal government scientists who advise the intelligence community — issued a classified report which argued that an accidental lab leak was equally possible.

“We assess all of the necessary conditions for an accidental release of a laboratory-modified coronavirus — specifically a coronavirus adapted to recognize human cell receptors — were present at the Chinese Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in mid-to-late 2019,” the report states. “As a result, we place equal weight on the hypothesis that the COVID-19 virus was a result of laboratory modification, along with that of a natural outbreak or the release from a laboratory of a naturally occurring virus.”

Though the report, recently released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, remains heavily redacted, it states that the WIV could have possessed precursor viruses that were genetically similar to SARS-CoV-2, could use reverse genetic systems to modify coronaviruses, was testing to see if related coronaviruses could enter human cells and could have accidentally released the virus.

In private, as revealed in Slack messages released by Senator Paul, the scientists allied with Fauci were assessing similar possibilities.

In June 2020, Kristian G. Andersen, director of Infectious Disease Genomics at the Scripps Research Translational Institute in California, told his colleagues on a Slack message chat, “The part I’m really struggling with is that at the end of the day, we really don’t have any hard evidence one way or the other — and especially given some of the recent evidence, we also can’t rule out that somebody actually put [the furin cleavage site] in there…. Our paper was pretty strong in saying, ‘There’s no way,’ but I have less confidence in that statement at this stage.”

He took issue with the accuracy of their own Proximal Origins letter, stating, “We’re dealing with the fact that WIV had been doing culturing of bat [coronaviruses] for over a decade exactly to understand what it takes for these viruses to emerge in humans [in biosafety level 2). We describe this in the paper and say that this work is performed “all of the world,” but that isn’t true — it has exclusively been going on at WIV.”

He then admits that in the absence of data, “I find both scenarios to be equally probable.”

Despite the scientists’ public assertions that there was a scientific consensus of a natural origin, Andersen writes that since publishing Proximal Origins, “I have explained to a ton of scientists (and policy makers) over and over again why this is a natural virus, and I have been pretty surprised to learn that most scientists I talk to believe there is a likely connection to the lab.”

Scientific theories often evolve and viewpoints change with new experiments and data. But even 18 months after publishing Proximal Origins, the doubts persisted.

In September 2021, Eddie Holmes, a professor of viral evolution at the University of Sydney, wrote to his colleagues in the Slack channel, “We still have no evidence for [SARS-CoV-2] in that lab and they must have sequenced it first. But it is very striking that a bat-derived [coronavirus] with [a furin cleavage site] turns up in a city that was on a grant proposing to muck around with [furin cleavage sites] in bat-derived [coronaviruses].”

That same month, a 2018 grant proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was leaked. In Project DEFUSE, the WIV’s lead coronavirus researcher Shi Zhengli, along with several U.S. collaborators including Ralph Baric, applied for funding to collect bat samples from caves in Yunnan Province, transport them to the WIV, extract and manipulate the viruses they contained, and engineer cleavage sites into them, much like the one that later emerged in SARS-CoV-2. To many scientists, the grant — which was not funded by DARPA — looked like a road map to the pandemic.

(Rolling Stone reached out to a spokesperson for Fauci, and to Kristian Andersen and Eddie Holmes for comment for this story, but did not immediately receive a response.)

The debate over Covid origins comes down to an essential question, as I first reported early on in the pandemic: Why, in all places in the world, did the outbreak begin in the city with a laboratory housing one of the world’s most extensive collection of bat viruses, doing some of the most aggressive research?

That research, known as gain-of-function, aims to alter pathogens to make them more virulent and transmissible to humans, as a way to study how to protect against them. Critics have long flagged the dangers of such research, likening it to looking for a gas leak with a lighted match.

In the years since the pandemic began, a concerning picture has emerged of the WIV doing gain-of-function experiments in laboratories with a low biosafety level. That pattern, along with the possibility that it was working with similar undisclosed viruses, led the FBI to conclude by the spring of 2021, with moderate confidence, that SARS-CoV-2 had originated from a lab.

And while some scientists argued that an analysis of available data provided “dispositive evidence” of a natural origin, the messages released by Senator Paul show how, even as those virologists publicly lambasted those arguing for a lab leak, in private they appeared to agree with them. “These authors who so aggressively pushed natural origins, they express very strong concerns that COVID-19 was genetically engineered,” says Alina Chan, a nonprofit biosecurity researcher who spoke out early about a possible lab leak. “When they saw the DEFUSE proposal, they knew that it was very plausible that the virus leaked from a lab that caused a pandemic.”

None of this proves a lab leak. But it does show that Fauci, and an allied group of scientists, coordinated a message that a natural origin was obvious — at a time when it was anything but. Had the waters not been so muddy, the U.S. government could have launched a credible and effective investigation of Covid-19’s origins. However, China has further stymied the release of information about the virus, making it all but impossible to definitively conclude how the pandemic began.

In his closing statement, Senator Paul asked of Fauci, “Did his actions lead to the largest man-made plague in history?”

One thing is certain. Today’s hearing got us no closer to answering that question.