The fall of Fauci and the unravelling narrative about COVID-19’s origins is something of a slow-motion train wreck.

As recently as 2021, White House Chief Medical Advisor and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci was hailed as a national hero and an icon of science.

To be fair, Fauci did much of the hailing. “I represent science,” he infamously boasted on CBS’s Face the Nation. Just months earlier, he had assured MSNBC host Chuck Todd, “Attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science.”

Now Fauci is the subject of an official Department of Justice criminal referral by Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky. Senator Paul has credibly accused Fauci of lying to Congress about his use of U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund risky gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

As for COVID-19’s origins, until recently, every man and his dog was accused of spreading misinformation—and was silenced on social media—for suggesting the virus came from the Wuhan lab.

We now know from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence that “all agencies continue to assess that both a natural and laboratory-associated origin remain plausible hypotheses to explain the first human infection.” The lab leak theory remains the FBI’s favored explanation for the origins of the pandemic and, after much kicking and screaming, one that many mainstream news outlets finally acknowledge as a possibility.

Most damning of all is the trove of emails and other memos sent between Fauci and his co-conspirators that have been forced out into the light of day thanks to Freedom of Information Act requests.

Perhaps the most influential peer-reviewed paper on COVID-19’s origins was “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020.

The paper argued COVID-19 “is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” Its authors penned public emails and appeared in interviews denouncing the lab leak hypothesis as “crackpot” and “conspiracy theories.”

The only problem?

In private communications, every one of the paper’s five authors feared that SARS-CoV-2—the virus that brought the world to a standstill for two years—may in fact have leaked from the Wuhan lab.

These eminent scientists consciously misled the world, publishing dogged claims they secretly questioned.

Consider just a sample.

Dr. Robert F. Garry told his colleagues via Slack:

Transmitting a bat virus like RatG13 in HeLa cells and then asking your graduate student to insert a furin site … would get you there. It’s not crackpot to suggest this could have happened given the GoF [Gain of Function] research we know is happening.

In a private email, Dr. Edward C. Holmes explained, “I favour natural evolution myself, but the furin cleavage site is an issue,” adding, “it’s the epidemiology that I find most worrying.” Other communications from the time suggest Holmes was even more doubtful, leaning “60-40 lab.”

Dr. W. Ian Lipkin wrote, “I am concerned that scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology did not take adequate precautions when growing bat viruses.”

Dr. Andrew Rambaut hoped to avoid a lab leak conclusion for political reasons, telling colleagues: “Given the sh*t show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release … We cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural processes.” Despite his stated agenda, he conceded, “Lab passaging might also generate this mutation.”

The paper’s lead author, Dr. Kristian G. Andersen, made perhaps the most overt admissions in private. “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario,” he wrote on Slack. He also said that “accidental escape is in fact highly likely—it’s not some fringe theory.”

Andersen privately celebrated the traction his misleading paper was gaining, writing, “We RUUUUUUULE. That’s tenure secured, right there.”

Game, set, match.

But the situation is even worse than you may think.

Fauci pretended to have no involvement in the paper’s publication, citing it from his White House ivory tower as though it were independent research.

In truth, it was Fauci who commissioned the paper in the first place and had the final say on its contents, according to an earlier set of emails uncovered by House Republicans.

Why?

To cover his tracks, of course.

Fauci had all the motive in the world to scuttle the lab leak theory because if it turned out to be true, it was he who helped fund the creation of SARS-CoV-2 using American treasure.

All of this news can rest heavy on everyday people. What can the average punter do about such high-level corruption?

Three things.

1. Find and support alternative, independent media. The fact that you’re reading Intellectual Takeout suggests you’re already doing this. Keep doing it. If you stumbled upon this page by accident, read related articles and find other trusted outlets that challenged COVID-19 narratives from the start. By spending years singing Fauci’s praise and promoting Proximal Origin uncritically, the corporate press has shown its hand. Unplug from the lies and tune in to the truth.

2. Tell a friend what you’ve discovered—or more precisely, what the FOI requests have exposed. Word-of-mouth is more powerful than talking heads on TV. Post this article on social media or email it to a friend and ask their thoughts. It could be the key that unlocks the prison of their mind.

3. Be encouraged that the truth is coming out. It always does.

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Image credit: “Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., NIAID Director” by NIAID on Flickr, CC BY 2.0. Image cropped.