'An outrage': Biden admin hid report of US service members getting sick at Wuhan military games in October 2019



Nearly 10,000 athletes from over 109 countries traveled to Wuhan, China, to compete in the 7th Military World Games from October 18 to October 28, 2019.

Participants from various nations, including Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Luxembourg, reported taking ill with COVID-like symptoms at or after the games — a damning coincidence granted the games took place near the suspected origin of the virus, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where dangerous experiments were long performed with poor safety protocols on coronaviruses.

The Biden administration apparently sat on a December 2022 report indicating that some of the 263 members of the U.S. delegation who attended the games may have also caught COVID-19 or something just like it months before the supposed zoonotic leap at a wet market.

By concealing the document, the administration effectively left the public with then-Pentagon spokesman John Kirby's 2021 assertion to the Washington Post that there was no knowledge of American infections at the games and no evidence to indicate U.S. military personnel were infected before travel restrictions were implemented in early 2020.

The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act included a requirement that former President Joe Biden's then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin submit to congressional lawmakers a report on the military games detailing:

  • the number of American athletes and staff "who attended the 2019 World Military Games and became ill with COVID-19-like symptoms during or shortly after their return to the United States";
  • the results of any blood testing done on American participants;
  • the number of home station Pentagon facilities of participating members that experienced outbreaks in early 2020; and
  • whether the Pentagon discussed the illnesses surrounding the games with other militaries.

In addition to disclosing such information to the House and Senate armed services committees, the NDAA required that the Biden administration make the report publicly available.

'It is an outrage that the Biden White House and the 118th Congress Senate and House Armed Services Committees did not publicly release this information.'

The Washington Free Beacon reported that the Biden administration refrained from releasing the report to the public, and it wasn't until March 2025 when the Trump administration uploaded it to the Defense Department website that the document became widely accessible.

Contrary to Kirby's suggestion that there was no knowledge or evidence of infection, the Pentagon concluded that of the 263 total American participants in the game — of whom 2019 were military personnel — seven service members "exhibited COVID-19-like signs and/or symptoms during the timeframe of October 18, 2019, through January 21, 2020."

Members of the U.S. delegation to the games were not tested for COVID-19 or antibodies "as testing was not available at this early stage of the pandemic," so there is apparently no definitive proof these were indeed COVID-19 infections.

The report indicated the symptoms could have been caused by other respiratory infections and that all seven infected service members' symptoms resolved within six days.

The report noted further that there was "no statistically significant difference in COVID-19-like symptoms cases at installations with participating athletes when compared to installations without them."

Molecular biologist Dr. Richard H. Ebright of Rutgers University told the Free Beacon, "It is an outrage that the Biden White House and the 118th Congress Senate and House Armed Services Committees did not publicly release this information when it became available in 2022, but, instead, withheld this information for the duration of their terms."

"This new information strengthens U.S. and allied intelligence data indicating that COVID-19 was circulating in Wuhan in October-November 2019, U.S. and allied intelligence data indicating that researchers working with genetically enhanced SARS viruses at Wuhan Institute of Virology contracted COVID-19 in October-November 2019, and phylogenomic data indicating that the virus that causes COVID-19 entered humans in July-November 2019," added Ebright.

Sen. Jodi Ernst (R-Iowa) told the Free Beacon that the report helped put a nail in the coffin of the theory that the virus originated in a Wuhan wet market in December 2019.

"Taxpayers deserve to know the truth about COVID-19 origins, but the Biden administration concealed this information from the American people for years," said Ernst. "This report should have been made public immediately and not restricted to Washington insiders. If Americans visiting Wuhan were potentially infected with the COVID-19 virus in October 2019, those claiming the pandemic began in a wet market just two months later would be completely off base."

Ahead of the games — as early as August 2019 — hospitals in the region were apparently overwhelmed with an unseasonably high number of patients, while regional queries for the terms "diarrhea" and "cough" spiked on China's equivalent of Google.

An American researcher and several European researchers noted their suspicions in a September 2022 study that the Wuhan games "may have contributed to the dissemination of SARS-CoV-2" but indicated that "no official information has been made available despite reports that some foreign participants experienced Covid-19-compatible symptoms that were attributed to influenza or gastroenteritis."

French pentathlete Elodie Clouvel, Luxembourg swimmer Julien Henx, German volleyball player Jacqueline Brock, and Italian fencer Matteo Tagliariol also indicated they and/or members of their team got sick while in Wuhan.

Brock indicated in early 2020 that "after a few days, some athletes from my team got ill, I got sick in the last two days."

"I have never felt so sick," continued Brock. "Either it was a very bad cold or COVID-19."

Tagliariol told Corriere della Sera, "When we arrived in Wuhan, almost all of us got sick. But the worst was returning home. After a week I had a very high fever, I felt like I couldn't breathe."

Canadian military sources told the Financial Post in 2021 that one service member reported feeling "very sick 12 days after we arrived, with fever, chills, vomiting, insomnia."

Scores of Canadian athletes were apparently placed in isolation on their 12-hour flight home at the end of October. The athletes' symptoms included coughing and diarrhea.

The Canadian Department of National Defense told Blaze News last year that "some athletes experienced gastrointestinal symptoms on the flight to Wuhan for the Military World Games and during the return flight home to Canada."

"Their symptoms and illness course of one to three days were consistent with gastrointestinal illness, or a 'stomach flu,' and were managed as such," said a spokeswoman for the National Defense Department.

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Fauci cabalist, top gain-of-function scientist raise alarm about dangerous new experiments



One the world's most prominent gain-of-function researchers — whose methods were adapted by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology for work on chimeric viruses — and one of the scientists who helped furnish Anthony Fauci with what he needed to downplay the lab-leak theory are now sounding the alarm about dangerous new coronavirus experiments conducted by the Chinese.

Criticism may have been easier this time around, given that the critics and their friends do not appear to be directly linked to the dangerous research in question.

Ralph Baric and W. Ian Lipkin expressed concern in a March 3 New York Times op-ed that Chinese scientists "are experimenting with viruses in ways that could put all of us in harm's way."

Baric, a professor in the departments of epidemiology and microbiology at the University of North Carolina, is a leading proponent of gain-of-function research who successfully fought for an exemption from the Obama administration's moratorium on the dangerous practice in order to keep manufacturing artificial SARS-like viruses. He became an especially controversial figure during the pandemic, which has claimed the lives of over 7 million people worldwide.

Lipkin, the John Snow professor of epidemiology at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health, was one of the co-authors of the controversial March 2020 paper "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2," which Fauci used on multiple occasions to suggest to the American public that COVID-19 was not a lab leak but rather an animal virus that jumped to a human. Lipkin, who later thanked Fauci for his "efforts in steering and messaging" regarding the virus' origins, has reportedly long had a cozy relationship with Chinese communist authorities.

Baric and Lipkin indicated that they are particularly concerned about experiments conducted by WIV researchers and other Chinese scientists on a deadly coronavirus called HKU5-CoV-2. These experiments are detailed in a recent paper published in the scientific journal Cell.

The duo noted that the virus at the heart of the study "belongs to a subgroup of viruses that are classified alongside the one that causes MERS and that can have fatality rates far higher than that of the virus that caused the Covid pandemic."

While HKU5 can infect humans and has the potential to be far more lethal than SARS-CoV-2, Chinese scientists have apparently been meddling with the fully infectious virus in a lab with "insufficient" containment controls.

There are multiple biosafety level ratings for laboratories ranging from BSL-1 to BSL-4. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "each biosafety level builds on the controls of the level before it."

'Potentially dangerous research should not be done without proper precautions.'

A BSL-4 lab, for instance, is designed to handle microbes that are "dangerous and exotic, posing a high risk of aerosol-transmitted infections" that could prove fatal. Researchers in such a lab must manipulate the infectious agents using a gas-tight sealed container with a double HEPA filtered exhaust while wearing protective gear. Alternatively, they must wear a full-body, air-supplied positive pressure suit. Researchers must also undergo routine medical surveillance for signs of infection.

Such a high-security lab must also be located in a separate building or in a restricted zone of an existing building with double locking doors and provided with a dedicated supply of air along with decontamination systems.

Despite the dangers posed to the researchers and the rest of mankind, the Chinese researchers have instead been experimenting in a lab described as BSL-2 plus. BSL-2 labs are meant to handle only microbes that pose, at worst, moderate hazards to researchers and the environment.

"Decisions about what level of precaution is appropriate for research are typically made by a study's lead scientist and an institutional biosafety committee," wrote Baric and Lipkin.

The lead scientist on this dangerous study was Shi Zhengli, whose track record for safety is less than stellar and with whom Baric has previously collaborated.

According to a 2021 article in the MIT technology review, Baric asked Shi, who is the director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the WIV, for the genome of a new coronavirus Shi found in bat excrement. He apparently wanted to take the "spike" gene from the novel virus and stick it into a copy of a SARS virus he had on hand. Ultimately, Baric's team tested the resultant chimeric virus on humanized mice and in a petri dish of human airway cells and discovered that it could indeed infect humans.

Baric and Lipkin noted in their op-ed that while the relevant authorities in China apparently approved the dangerous new experiments on HKU5, "it is not sufficient for work with a new virus that could have significant risks for people worldwide."

"Work with viruses that have the potential to become threats to public health should be restricted to facilities and scientists committed to the highest level of safety," added the duo.

According to Baric and Lipkin, governmental and nongovernmental agencies that fund research on viruses should require "proof that investigators meet global standards." Additionally, scientific journals should insist on similar standards for the studies they accept.

The duo concluded, "Potentially dangerous research should not be done without proper precautions to prevent deliberate or accidental spread."

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Chinese scientist with reported ties to USAID finds new bat coronavirus that could infect humans like COVID



Chinese scientists have said that they discovered a new bat coronavirus that could infect humans in the same manner as the virus that causes COVID-19. The lead scientist in the new study has reported links to USAID.

According to a report from the South China Morning Post, the researchers are from the Guangzhou Laboratory, the Guangzhou Academy of Sciences, Wuhan University, and the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The lead scientist in the new bat coronavirus study reportedly had prior financial ties to the embattled United States Agency for International Development.

The new infectious disease is called HKU5-CoV-2. The new coronavirus was first identified in the Japanese pipistrelle bat in Hong Kong.

HKU5-CoV-2 is a coronavirus that is part of the merbecovirus subgenus, which also includes the virus that causes Middle East respiratory syndrome.

Researchers claim that HKU5-CoV-2 uses the ACE2 receptor to infect organisms. The ACE2 receptor is the same receptor used by SARS-CoV-2 to infect human cells.

"We report the discovery and isolation of a distinct lineage (lineage 2) of HKU5-CoV, which can utilize not only bat ACE2 but also human ACE2 and various mammalian ACE2 orthologs," the study said.

The researchers wrote, "Authentic HKU5-CoV-2 infected human ACE2-expressing cell lines and human respiratory and enteric organoids. This study reveals a distinct lineage of HKU5-CoVs in bats that efficiently use human ACE2 and underscores their potential zoonotic risk."

"Bat merbecoviruses, which are phylogenetically related to MERS-CoV, pose a high risk of spillover to humans, either through direct transmission or facilitated by intermediate hosts," the scientists stated.

The researchers from China added, "The potential human spillover risk of animal merbecoviruses remains to be investigated."

The study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Cell on Tuesday.

The study was led by Shi Zhengli — a leading virologist who had been the director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Zhengli is often dubbed the "bat woman" by her colleagues because of her extensive research on bat coronaviruses since 2004, including virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves.

The World Society for Virology said of Zhengli, "Her group has discovered diverse novel viruses/virus antibodies in bats, including SARS-like coronaviruses, adenoviruses, adeno-associated viruses, circoviruses, paramyxoviruses and filoviruses in China."

The lead scientist in the new bat coronavirus study reportedly had prior financial ties to the embattled United States Agency for International Development.

A 2021 article in Vanity Fair noted: "Shi Zhengli herself listed U.S. government grant support of more than $1.2 million on her curriculum vitae: $665,000 from the NIH between 2014 and 2019; and $559,500 over the same period from USAID. At least some of those funds were routed through EcoHealth Alliance."

According to 990 tax exemption forms it filed in 2018 with the New York state attorney general’s Charities Bureau, EcoHealth Alliance received as much as $15 million a year in grant money from federal agencies, including the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and USAID.

The article spotlighted emails obtained by a Freedom of Information request, including one sent by Peter Daszak, a zoologist and former president of EcoHealth Alliance. The email showed that Zhengli allegedly carried out potentially dangerous gain-of-function experiments.

Under the subject line, “No need for you to sign the 'Statement' Ralph!!,” he wrote to two scientists, including UNC’s Dr. Ralph Baric, who had collaborated with Shi Zhengli on the gain-of-function study that created a coronavirus capable of infecting human cells: “you, me and him should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way.” Daszak added, “We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice.”

During a House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing in March 2023, former U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield said he believes American tax dollars funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.

Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) asked Redfield, "Is it likely that American tax dollars funded the gain-of-function research that created this virus?”

Redfield replied, "I think it did, not only from NIH, but from the State Department, USAID, and DOD."

Zhengli has gone on record to say that she does not believe in the lab-leak theory that COVID-19 came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology — a biosafety level-4 lab, which requires the highest level of safety protocols and equipment because of the study of high-consequence biological agents.

Blaze News reported in July 2021 that Zhengli purportedly had "collaborated with two military scientists on coronavirus work, one of whom is now deceased under unknown circumstances."

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Elon Musk’s Claim Linking USAID To Bioweapons Isn’t As Far-Fetched As The Deep State Wants You To Think

'Where it went wrong is when the virologists got the idea to manipulate the viruses'

Despite Biden’s pardon, Anthony Fauci still faces legal perils. Here they are.



Joe Biden’s pardon of Dr. Anthony Fauci may protect the former National Institutes of Health official from immediate criminal prosecution, but some critics say he is not completely out of legal jeopardy and that public sentiment might still condemn the man who became known during the COVID-19 pandemic as “Mr. Science.”

In the days before Biden offered the pardon to Fauci, along with other critics of Donald Trump, some experts who have followed Fauci’s career and handling of the pandemic, as well as members of the Trump transition team, reiterated their assertion that Fauci perjured himself on several occasions during the pandemic — especially regarding his agency’s links to the lab in Wuhan, China, that may have created the virus that causes COVID-19.

Biden’s pardon negates the two Senate referrals for criminal activity. But future hearings could still require Fauci to respond to evidence that he may have perjured himself.

The pardon addresses any COVID-related offenses and is backdated to 2014 — the year a U.S. ban on so-called "gain of function" virus research took effect. Fauci has been accused of outsourcing that research to China.

Despite reporting that Trump is bent on revenge, the appetite among MAGA appointees for holding Fauci accountable hasn’t been particularly vocal. But former Senate investigator Jason Foster, who now runs the whistleblower nonprofit Empower Oversight, says that Biden’s pardon creates new legal jeopardy for Fauci.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has vowed to continue investigating COVID’s origins, and sources tell RealClearInvestigations that Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and House Republican investigators plan to do so as well. When testifying in those inquiries or answering written depositions, Fauci will be unable to dodge questions by invoking his Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination.

“They can ask him if he lied before, replow old ground,” Foster said. “And if he lies about any prior lie, he can be prosecuted for that or held in contempt.”

Andrew Noymer, associate professor of population health and disease prevention at the University of California, Irvine, said such hearings are necessary for scientific and historical reasons. “I’m hopeful that he will now come clean about everything he knows about the origins of the virus,” Noymer said. “For the sake of public trust in science — explaining what killed 20 million people — that a complete account is much more important than speculation about what criminal penalties he may have avoided.”

“These pardons will not stop Department of Justice investigations,” said one adviser to the Trump transition team, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We expected this and look at it as a predicate to get truth from people who can no longer use the Fifth Amendment. Now we can bring every one of them in front of a grand jury.”

A legacy of deception

There is no consensus on Fauci’s handling of the pandemic. Legacy media outlets promoted Fauci throughout the pandemic as “America’s doctor” who “sticks to the facts” and applauded him as “the nation’s top infectious disease expert.” When he retired from the NIH after five decades in 2022, the New York Times granted him space on its opinion page to advise the next generation of scientists, citing his own accomplishments.

Numerous social media outlets have provided a polar opposite perspective. Several X accounts have uploaded videos that show Fauci’s inconsistencies. For example, Fauci claimed in early 2022 interviews that he never recommended lockdowns, but later said he recommended shutting the country down. Independent journalist Matt Orfalea circulated another set of clips that show Fauci claiming he kept an “open mind” about how the pandemic started while alleging in others that the evidence pointed against a lab accident and “strongly” in favor of a natural spillover.

As Fauci’s flip-flops generated attention in Republican circles and on social media, he charged that such criticism was “totally preposterous,” adding, “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.”

Fauci’s many contradictory statements even caught the attention of a New York Times contributing opinion writer, Megan K. Stack, who chastised Fauci for “the largely one-sided nature of his public remarks” about the possibility that the pandemic started from an accident at a lab his agency had helped fund — the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Initially, Fauci dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” the possibility of a Wuhan lab accident on a Feb. 9, 2020, podcast hosted by Newt Gingrich. Afterward, Fauci reversed himself, stating in several interviews that he had always kept an open mind.

Later reports zeroed in on Fauci’s secret involvement in prominent March 2020 research, called the “proximal origin” paper, that turned public and scientific sentiment against the possibility of a lab accident. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the paper concluded, adding, “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” Published in the prestigious Nature Medicine journal, the “proximal origin” paper is the most-cited scientific paper of 2020.

Subsequent emails showed that Fauci helped guide the “proximal origin” paper to publication, as congressional probers found, “without revealing that he had been involved with its creation and had even, according to the emails, given it his approval.”

Distancing himself from his own emails, Fauci later told the Times that he wasn’t sure he even got around to reading the paper. But the House later released a multiday deposition of Fauci in which he was asked about his involvement in the “proximal origin” paper. Under oath, Fauci admitted to having received and read several drafts of the paper.

But while dissembling to the media is not a crime, lying to Congress is illegal. And the Department of Justice has two referrals from Congress already requesting that Fauci be prosecuted for lying under oath.

Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Lies as legal jeopardy

Fauci’s habit of bending the truth, as some see it, was notably on display at a July 2021 Senate hearing when Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican, bored into the funding Fauci approved for gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. While Fauci attempted to downplay his financial involvement with the Chinese government lab, reports were already percolating.

In April 2020, Newsweek reported that Fauci had approved a grant for risky gain-of-function virus research at the Wuhan lab. The Washington Post editorial board in March 2021 then called for an independent investigation into EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit funded by the Fauci-run National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. With this grant, EcoHealth subcontracted research to the Chinese, the Post noted, to do experiments involving “modifying viral genomes to give them new properties, including the ability to infect lung cells of laboratory mice that had been genetically modified to respond as human respiratory cells would.”

Fox News reported Sunday that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has barred EcoHealth Alliance Inc. and its former president, Dr. Peter Daszak, from receiving federal funds for five years. EcoHealth allegedly failed to report dangerous gain-of-function experiments to the government, which eventually led to the five-year ban.

A month before Fauci’s hearing with Paul, Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs confirmed that U.S.-funded research at the WIV consisted of gain-of-function virus research that could have started the pandemic. “[I]t is clear that the NIH co-funded research at the WIV that deserves scrutiny under the hypothesis of a laboratory-related release of the virus.” At that time, Sachs led a commission formed by a British medical journal, the Lancet, to investigate how the pandemic began.

But when Paul began grilling Fauci about these details and called him out for what he characterized as evasive answers, Fauci pointed the finger back at Paul. “If anybody is lying here, Senator, it is you,” Fauci said. Paul then sent a criminal referral to the Department of Justice requesting that it investigate whether Fauci had committed perjury.

“He definitely misled the senator,” said former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield. When Redfield looked at all the evidence, including still-classified information, he said the weight falls in the direction of a lab accident. “Fauci manipulated the public to believe there was only one possible cause for the pandemic, a natural spillover.”

Months after Paul’s referral to the Justice Department, liberal news nonprofit ProPublica released new documents confirming the Wuhan lab had conducted such studies. “Grant money for the controversial experiment came from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is headed by Anthony Fauci,” ProPublica reported on September 9, 2021.

“NIH admits funding risky virus research in Wuhan,” Vanity Fair reported a week after ProPublica, referring to a letter the NIH sent to Congress.

Paul sent a second referral to the Department of Justice in July 2023, reiterating his demand that Fauci be investigated. At that time, House investigators released emails showing that in early 2020, Fauci admitted that scientists were concerned the COVID virus had been engineered and researchers in Wuhan were engaged in gain-of-function research.

“Everything he has been telling us from the very beginning has been a lie,” Paul told Fox News. “We have documented it’s a lie, and it’s a felony to lie to Congress.”

Biden’s pardon negates the two Senate referrals for criminal activity. But future hearings could still require Fauci to respond to evidence that he may have perjured himself and open him up to future prosecution if he stands by statements that can be proven to be false.

Hiding the use of private email

Another area of potential inquiry is Fauci’s congressional testimony last summer denying his use of private email to conduct official business. “Let me state for the record that to the best of my knowledge, I have never conducted official business via my personal email,” Fauci wrote in his sworn statement to Congress.

This testimony seemed to contradict evidence in a 35-page memo compiled by Republican investigative staff. One email showed Fauci’s second in command, Dr. David Morens, suggesting that someone speak with Fauci through an unofficial, private channel. In another email, Morens wrote that he would contact Fauci on Gmail.

After Fauci’s testimony, the writer of this article reported in the DisInformation Chronicle that Morens had connected KFF Health News reporter Arthur Allen with Fauci on Fauci’s private email back in May 2021. The NIH did not respond to comment about Fauci’s use of private email to conduct government business with reporters.

In a second example, the New York Post reported that the watchdog group the White Coat Waste Project accused Fauci of lying to Congress about his private email use after the group released documents showing Fauci was back-channeling with a Washington Post reporter on his private email.

“I will send you an e-mail via my gmail account,” Fauci wrote in an email dated Oct. 29, 2021, to Washington Post reporter Yasmeen Abutaleb.

Fauci’s lawyer told the Post that Fauci was discussing a personal matter with the Washington Post reporter, although he did not explain what this personal matter was.

Justin Goodman, senior vice president at the White Coat Waste Project, said the evidence is clear that Fauci contacted the Washington Post about issues regarding his NIH work and then denied it to Congress. “He should be prosecuted, not pardoned.”

Follow the money

Congressional hearings might also delve into Fauci’s involvement in research misconduct with the “proximal origin” paper and a grant he approved for the paper’s lead author, Scripps Research Institute’s Kristian Andersen.

“There needs to be a criminal investigation of this grant and paper,” said a former law enforcement official who has worked with congressional staff investigating Fauci and his grants. “Nobody inside the executive branch has taken ownership of this.”

'It’s been a huge paradigm shift to see a hero actually turn into a villain.'

Shortly after the COVID virus outbreak, Fauci began discussing with several virologists, including Andersen, how the pandemic started. In a Feb. 1, 2020, email, Andersen wrote to Fauci that he had analyzed the COVID virus genetic sequence and “some of the features (potentially) look engineered.” Andersen added that while opinions could change, he and other virologists felt the virus was not natural or consistent with “expectations with evolutionary theory.”

Later that same day, Fauci held a phone call with Andersen and other virologists and then emailed that the scientists were suspicious that a “mutation was intentionally inserted” into the virus. Other emails show that Fauci was concerned that his funding for research in China may have led to the COVID virus.

Despite their initial suspicions, Andersen and other virologists reversed course six weeks later and published the “proximal origin” paper on March 16, 2020, that absolved Fauci of funding research that led to the pandemic. Fauci then promoted the Andersen “proximal origin” paper to reporters at a White House briefing on April 17 without disclosing that he had helped marshal the study into publication.

A month later, Fauci signed off on an $8.9 million grant to Kristian Andersen. Both Andersen and Fauci have denied that the grant was quid pro quo for Andersen publishing the “proximal origin” paper that absolved Fauci, but the group Biosafety Now has called twice for the paper to be retracted.

“It is imperative that this clearly fraudulent and clearly damaging paper be removed from the scientific literature,” reads an online petition signed by over 5,000 scientists.

Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University and co-founder of Biosafety Now, said that Fauci should have been prosecuted for “criminal conspiracy” for his secret involvement in the “proximal origin” paper. Ebright added that the grant Fauci gave to Andersen after he published the paper likely also involved criminal behavior.

With Republicans running both the Senate and House, investigations of Fauci will likely continue as members resume digging into any NIH culpability in funding research that started the pandemic. Trump’s CIA nominee, John Ratcliffe, told House members during a 2023 hearing that classified intelligence points toward a lab accident. Ratcliffe is likely to be confirmed, and a Trump transition team source said he would likely then declassify that information, further undermining Fauci’s claims that the pandemic started from a natural spillover.

Ongoing investigations of Fauci, RCI has been told, will only further erode his credibility, even if criminal charges can no longer be filed. “This pardon means he can no longer be brought to justice,” said an adviser to the Trump transition team. “But it guarantees he will be further exposed.”

“I trusted everything Fauci said during the pandemic, and I did everything he told me,” said Bri Dressen, a former preschool teacher in Saratoga Springs, Utah. “I masked, wiped down my groceries with alcohol, kept my kids away from other kids so they wouldn’t catch the virus, and then I got vaccinated.” Dressen ended up injured by AstraZeneca’s vaccine as a volunteer in the company’s clinical trial and founded React19.org, whose 36,000 members advocate on behalf of victims of COVID vaccine harm.

“It was the steepest learning curve in my entire life. The people in authority like Fauci are the ones I shouldn’t have trusted,” Dressen said. “It’s been a huge paradigm shift to see a hero actually turn into a villain.”

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.

If Fauci Can’t Be Jailed For His Covid Cover-Up, Congress Should Make Him Explain It

The investigation into one of the biggest scandals in U.S. history doesn’t stop simply because Biden or Fauci says so.

Government Debars Notorious Fauci Crony, Gain-Of-Function Mastermind Peter Daszak

'Dr. Daszak lacks the present responsibility to participate'

Walz Helped Secure Funding For Research Center That Worked With Chinese Lab Linked To COVID-19 Pandemic

'Walz has longstanding connections to CCP-connected entities'

Blaze News original: In 2019, nearly 10,000 international athletes competed in Wuhan. The official story about illnesses continues to morph.



Early in the pandemic, there was a concerted effort to downplay the possibility that the COVID-19 virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where radical gain-of-function experiments were conducted on coronaviruses, sometimes with American funding. Now, it appears that the lab origin theory was all along the most likely explanation.

The exact timeline regarding the initial leak and subsequent spread remains, however, somewhat fuzzy. The Chinese regime's cover-up of the initial spread and its destruction of critical evidence have made it difficult to nail down precisely when and how the virus got out.

Blaze News recently discovered that China may not have, however, been the only nation reluctant to disclose illnesses in Wuhan in late 2019.

Playing games with the timeline

Months prior to the World Health Organization declaring COVID-19 a pandemic, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission reported a cluster of cases of pneumonia in late December 2019. The constituents of this cluster were far from being patients zero.

Three researchers meddling with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — including an EcoHealth Alliance subcontractor— became sick enough "with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness" that they needed to be hospitalized in November 2019.

Chinese state media indicated that the virus may have begun spreading as early September of that year but, in a desperate effort to assign blame elsewhere, suggested it kicked off in the United States.

Researchers at Boston University and Harvard Medical School analyzed satellite imagery of hospital parking lots in Wuhan as well as search queries on China's equivalent of Google from 2018 up until late 2019 and concluded that the virus may have begun spreading as early as August 2019.

"Between September and October 2019, 5 of the 6 hospitals show their highest relative daily [parking lot] volume of the analyzed series, coinciding with elevated levels of Baidu search queries for the terms 'diarrhea' and 'cough,'" said the study. "Our evidence supports other recent work showing that emergence happened before identification at the Huanan Seafood market."

In August, we identify a unique increase in searches for diarrhea which was neither seen in previous flu seasons or mirrored in the cough search data. While surprising, this finding lines up with the recent recognition that gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms are a unique feature of COVID-19 disease and may be the chief complaint of a significant proportion of presenting patients. This symptom search increase is then followed by a rise in hospital parking lot traffic in October and November, as well as a rise in searches for cough. While we cannot conclude the reason for this increase, we hypothesize that broad community transmission may have led to more acute cases requiring medical attention, resulting in higher viral loads and worse symptoms.

If the virus was in circulation by at least October, then a convention of nearly 10,000 athletes from around the world in Wuhan would have served as the perfect vehicle to take the virus global in short order.

In fact, some researchers have suggested that there was a good likelihood that the 7th Military World Games held in Wuhan from October 18 to October 28 — where delegates from 109 countries competed, in some cases near the Wuhan Institute of Virology — were indeed a super-spreading event.

Mixed messaging

Two Canadian military sources who requested anonymity because they were still serving in the Canadian military told the Financial Post in 2021 that there had been infections at the games.

One service member claimed he got "very sick 12 days after we arrived, with fever, chills, vomiting, insomnia. … On our flight to come home (at the end of October), 60 Canadian athletes on the flight were put in isolation (at the back of the plane) for the 12-hour flight. We were sick with symptoms ranging from coughs to diarrhea and in between."

Upon returning to Canada, the service member said his family members took ill and his symptoms got worse and expanded, such that he experienced fatigue, nosebleeds, fever, and breathing pains.

While tested by a military doctor "for various issues," he said he never was tested "for anything respiratory."

The other service member said, "One-quarter of us got sick, there and when we returned. Some were bedridden for weeks. This made us potential vectors for the virus. The military did nothing. I was sick and others were, too, with Wuhan symptoms. … I was eventually given a swab test, which measures only recent exposure, and told to carry on."

The Canadian athletes were apparently told by the surgeon general that their risk of having been exposed was "negligible."

Julia Scott, a communications adviser with the Canadian Forces Health Services Public Affairs Department, told the Post, "We are not aware of any CAF members or civilians becoming sick at the games or after they returned. There have not been any COVID-19 cases identified amongst this group."

"As their stay in Wuhan was well before COVID-19 pandemic was declared and before anyone was aware of the virus, members were not tested upon their return. Testing for COVID-19 was not available in Canada prior to January 2020," continued Scott. "Once we were aware of potential risks, the CAF and Department of National Defence took immediate precautionary measures to avoid any illness or additional exposure to CAF members related to the novel coronavirus."

A narrative slide

Blaze News recently asked the Canadian Department of National Defense whether its awareness about CAF members or civilians becoming sick at the Wuhan games, as expressed to the Post, has shifted in the years since.

In reply, a spokeswoman for the National Defense Department repeated much of what the department had previously told the Post but revealed that it "has subsequently been determined that some athletes experienced gastrointestinal symptoms on the flight to Wuhan for the Military World Games and during the return flight home to Canada."

"Their symptoms and illness course of one to three days were consistent with gastrointestinal illness, or a 'stomach flu,' and were managed as such, consistent with typical contact precautions when managing patients with mild gastrointestinal illness," added the spokeswoman.

The Mayo Clinic lists the following as symptoms of the stomach flu: diarrhea, nausea, stomach cramps, muscle aches, headache, and fever.

It appears the stomach flu could possibly be mistaken for COVID-19 or vice versa, given that the symptoms listed for COVID-19 by the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention include diarrhea, nausea, muscle aches, and headache.

The Canadian Department of National Defense has yet to respond to Blaze News' follow-up questions regarding the basis and timing of its subsequent determination, as well as whether the athletes' supposed gastrointestinal illness has been ruled out as COVID-19.

The spokeswoman's suggestion that athletes were sick en route to Wuhan may muddy the waters, especially since China has proven desperate in the past to claim Western forces brought the virus to Wuhan, potentially via the games.

For instance, Chinese operatives seized upon the theory that Maatje Benassi, a U.S. Army reservist who competed in Wuhan, was patient zero after she crashed during a cycling competition there and suffered a concussion.

Blaze News has reached out to coaches and scores of athletes from various countries who competed in Wuhan as well as officials linked to the International Military Sports Council — the outfit that organizes the competitions — for a better sense of the kind of illnesses that supposedly broke out at the games as well as where they may have originated.

While so far, there has been a deafening silence about infections at the games, it was not so early in the pandemic.

Early allegations of infection

There were multiple reports and admissions of infections at the games early in the pandemic by athletes besides the anonymous Canadians.

French pentathlete Elodie Clouvel, part of the French delegation invited to participate at the games, indicated in early 2020 that she and many other athletes likely contracted COVID-19 at the games, reported the American Prospect.

"We were in Wuhan for the World Military Games at the end of October. And afterwards, we all fell ill. Valentin missed three days of training. Me, I was sick too. … I had things I had never had before. We weren’t particularly worried because no one was talking about it yet," said Clouvel. "A lot of athletes at the World Military Games were very ill. We were recently in touch with a military doctor who told us, ‘I think you had it because a lot of people from this delegation were ill.'"

Luxembourg swimmer Julien Henx told RTL Radio that two of his teammates got sick during the competition and stated, "There were 200,000 Chinese volunteers there, who went home in the evening and could very well have transmitted the virus to them."

German volleyball player Jacqueline Brock indicated in early 2020 that "after a few days, some athletes from my team got ill, I got sick in the last two days."

"I have never felt so sick," continued Brock. "Either it was a very bad cold or COVID-19."

Italian fencer Matteo Tagliarol told Corriere Della Sera, "When we arrived in Wuhan, almost all of us got sick. But the worst was returning home. After a week I had a very high fever, I felt like I couldn't breathe. The illness didn't go away even with antibiotics, I recovered after three weeks and remained debilitated for a long time. Then my son and my partner got sick. When people started talking about the virus, I said to myself: I've caught it too."

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Heritage report breaks down precisely how to hold China accountable for the COVID-19 cover-up, $18 trillion in damages



There have a been multiple efforts in recent years to hold the Chinese regime accountable in full or in part for the pandemic. For instance, Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) introduced the China Lied, People Died Act last year, which would have prohibited "the availability of Federal funds for programs, projects, or activities in the People's Republic of China until amounts made available for COVID-19 relief in the United States have been reimbursed, and for other purposes."

Like Nehls' bill, most efforts to make Beijing pay for its maleficence have gone sideways or nowhere at all. According to the Heritage Foundation's Nonpartisan Commission on China and COVID-19, not all is hopeless.

The commission, chaired by former Director of National Intelligence and Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe (R), released a report Monday both assessing the cost of the pandemic and outlining ways that China can be made to answer for its role in maximizing the fallout of COVID-19.

The report noted that while other states, organizations, and individuals may have played contributing roles in the pandemic, "China has been in a league uniquely of its own in its active and aggressive opposition to honesty, transparency, and accountability regarding the virus and its spread."

"This behavior by the Chinese government, more than anything else, was the proximal origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, added the report."

Cover-up

The Heritage commission's report underscored both the intentionality and impact of the Chinese regime's cover-up of the spread of COVID-19.

"There were seven weeks during which Chinese officials could have shown good faith and honored their international commitments to try to prevent a domestic epidemic from becoming a global pandemic," said the report. "They consistently chose to do otherwise."

Blaze News previously detailed how Chinese authorities delayed warning the world about the emergency of COVID-19 and silenced those individuals who tried to raise the alarm.

While it appears the virus began spreading by the fall of 2019 at the latest, communist officials waited until Dec. 31, 2019, to alert the World Health Organization, then claimed, "The disease is preventable and controllable."

The Heritage commission's report noted that even when China finally got around to informing the WHO, it "withheld vital information," including the type of virus behind the illness, the actual number of infected persons, and insights into human-to-human transmission.

A Five Eyes intelligence dossier accused the Chinese regime in May 2020 of engaging in an "assault on international transparency" to the "endangerment of other countries," reported the New York Post.

The intelligence dossier indicated that Chinese officials had scrambled to bury evidence of the virus and its origins, "destroying" lab samples, censoring evidence of spread, and denying sample requests from other countries.

Extra to destroying lab evidence, the Heritage commission noted that Chinese authorities barred researchers and scientists, especially those linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, from sharing information about the virus their peers had likely engineered.

While lying to the world about the virus, the Department of Homeland Security intelligence service indicated that "the Chinese Government intentionally concealed the severity of COVID-19 from the international community in early January while it stockpiled medical supplies by both increasing imports and decreasing exports."

Not only did China deceive the world and exploit the deception, it locked down domestic travel while allowing infected Chinese citizens to travel internationally. According to the New York Times, 175,000 people left Wuhan on Jan. 1, 2020, alone. A total of 7 million people left Wuhan that month before travel was restricted, thousands of whom were infected.

The Heritage commission's report noted that there were 1,300 direct flights from Wuhan to 17 cities in the U.S. before the American government restricted travel on Jan. 31, 2021 — a move China and the WHO recommended against.

Costs

The commission noted that as of last month, over 1.1 million Americans were estimated to have been slain by the foreign-born virus. COVID-19 claimed the lives of roughly 28 million people worldwide.

Besides filling morgues and leaving empty chairs at dinner tables around the country, the report noted the pandemic drove roughly 97 million people worldwide into poverty; dropped the world's collective GDP by several points; sent unemployment skyrocketing; ejected billions of children out of classrooms, setting them back academically; and adversely impacted vulnerable persons' mental health.

'The Chinese government must be held accountable for its role in obfuscating the truth about the COVID-19 pandemic.'

The report emphasized that in the U.S., the pandemic left behind not only broken hearts and stunted children but also financial burdens.

The Heritage commission estimated that as of December 2023, the total cost of the pandemic in the U.S. had exceeded $18 trillion.

Deaths accounted for over $8.6 trillion of the total cost. Lost income alternatively accounted for $1.82 trillion of the total; chronic conditions for $6.02 trillion; mental health issues for $1.98 trillion; and educational losses for nearly a half-trillion dollars.

Comeuppance

The Heritage commission determined that "the Chinese government and its affiliates can be and should be held liable for damages to the United States and its people caused by Chinese negligence and malfeasance related to the COVID-19 pandemic."

To hold China accountable, however, the report noted that lawmakers must revise the U.S. Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act to remove "a foreign sovereign's immunity in the specific context of the extraordinary circumstances of global pandemics that lead to more than one million excess deaths of American citizens and residents and are caused by a foreign state."

With FSIA amended to no longer stand in the way of holding China liable for damages, the commission indicated there would be several possible causes of action, including negligence; strict liability for abnormally dangerous activities; public nuisance; anti-competitive behavior; fraudulent misrepresentation; and civil Racketeer and Corrupt Organization Act violations.

In addition to targeting China generally, the commission indicated that two Chinese airlines that have subjected themselves to U.S. jurisdiction — China Southern Airlines Company Ltd. and China Eastern Airlines Company Ltd. — could also be fair game, along with Chinese manufacturers of personal protective equipment and the Chinese National Pharmaceutical Group.

The commission made clear, however, that there are other ways to skin a cat.

The commission made multiple recommendations, including:

  • Congress should create a reparations task force to cover claims against China and explore ways to expand U.S. federal court jurisdiction such that Chinese individuals and agencies can be held liable for U.S. civil claims.
  • Congress should pass former Republican Wisconsin Rep. Mike Gallagher's BIOSECURE Act to "begin decoupling U.S. government and commercial supply chains from Chinese state-backed companies."
  • Congress should pass a law requiring an audit of all American funding for biomedical and other such research activities in China, where the working presumption is that all research should be canceled unless "relevant sponsors can demonstrate that their research projects are overwhelmingly in the public interest and entail extremely low risk of harm."
  • The president should impose sanctions on Chinese officials and organizations linked to the cover-up of the virus and its initial spread and get serious about the threat of gain-of-function research.
  • The president should block U.S. outbound investment in the Chinese biotechnology sector.
  • The president should lean on the WHO to hold China accountable for violating Articles 6 and 7 of the International Health Regulations.

A failure by American leaders to act would incentivize the CCP "to persist in its nontransparent, noncooperative, and even hostile behavior," said the report.

Ratcliffe said in a statement, "The Chinese government must be held accountable for its role in obfuscating the truth about the COVID-19 pandemic — a pandemic that caused more than 1 million American deaths and $18 trillion in economic damage in the United States."

"While most of our government and media have focused on legitimate concerns about the origins of the virus, we must also focus on how the [Chinese Communist Party's] lack of transparency and distortion of facts accelerated a global pandemic, regardless of how COVID-19 originated," added Ratcliffe.

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