A Public Message to Anthony Fauci

Let Me Help You Remember What Went Wrong.

In what can only be described as a New York Times public image rehabilitation attempt, former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci comes across as a Pontius Pilate - his hands washed of any responsibility for his central role as a, if not the primary, driver of public health policies that nearly destroyed the United States of America.

Dr. Fauci, we remember. We ALL remember. Here is my message to help YOU remember. Let’s start with how you helped the Biden administration threaten ALL of our jobs, but the article does not mention that. It does not mention your central role in the lockdown - in fact,

you flatly deny that your actions or policies led to any school closings or factories shut down. How is it that governors across the U.S. decided “essential” and “non-essential” businesses, and you stood by and never protested?

In August 2020 you said publicly: “If someone refuses the vaccine in the general public, then there’s nothing you can do about that. You cannot force someone to take a vaccine.” Then on September 10, 2021 — the day after Biden announced the OSHA Emergency Temporary Standard covering ~80–100 million workers — you told PBS: “I myself am quite favorably impressed by that and feel strongly that that is what we should be doing.” On November 4, 2021, testifying before the Senate HELP Committee, when Sen. Romney asked directly whether mandates would save lives, you said: “We know that vaccines absolutely save lives. And we know that mandates work.”

Also on record in a Michael Specter audiobook, Summer 2021: “It’s been proven that when you make it difficult for people in their lives, they lose their ideological bullshit, and they get vaccinated.” It was played back to you at the June 2024 hearing. You did not retract it.

The mandate had no testing option for federal workers or healthcare workers — it was vaccinate or lose your job. You were the Chief Medical Advisor sitting in the White House at the time. You did not object.

We all remember, also, your key role as a driver of the lockdown.

• You sent Dr. Clifford Lane — your NIAID deputy — to China with the WHO Joint Mission in February 2020

• Lane returned and wrote: “China has demonstrated this infection can be controlled, albeit at great cost. This is the bottom line.”

• Lane told you directly: “From what I saw in China, we may have to go to as extreme a degree of social distancing to help bring our outbreak under control”

• You testified he had “every reason to believe” Lane’s evaluation

• You then admitted: social distancing “even by somewhat difficult means” involving “essentially the entire community” was possible in the U.S.

Your methodological problems:

1. Lane visited after China had already locked down — he could only observe what was happening, not whether the lockdown caused the decline

2. Chinese data was demonstrably unreliable — WHO had tailored confidentiality forms “to China’s terms” (FOIA-obtained emails, Judicial Watch, March 2021) and a January 2020 WHO epidemiological analysis was marked “strictly confidential”

3. The WHO-China Joint Mission report itself was controlled: all activities were “arranged by the Chinese Government’s National Health Commission” (per a Feb. 15, 2020 internal WHO email)

Additionally — and this one is devastating — the March 9, 2020 White House Coronavirus Task Force guidelines were grounded in an Australian preprint posted just four days earlier, March 5, not peer-reviewed, whose own authors acknowledged the underlying evidence was of “relatively low” quality and found limited or no benefit for five of the six social distancing measures examined. You forwarded it to Birx and Redfield the night before the press conference and it was presented as independent scientific support.

There is so much more. So here, Dr. Fauci, is your own record.

What REALLY Went Wrong

Dr. Fauci, you were not a passive messenger trapped inside a broken system. You were one of its primary architects. The deepest failure was not one bad interview or one wrong forecast. Or not being wrong early enough (masking). It was the conversion of surveillance counts into clinical facts, endpoint-limited trial efficacy into coercive certainty, and weakly evidenced behavioral rules into national doctrine.

The Alibi That Does Not Hold

Dr. Fauci, you represent yourself as a victim, someone, as though you were trapped inside a bad century — the appointed face of public health in a country too fractured to hear reason. You claim that the task before you was impossible. To sow this level of doubt (“If I could not do it, no one can”) seethes with narcissism. But that requires a healthy dose of self-delusion.

In your April 2023 interview with David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times Magazine, you asked: “Show me a school I shut down. Show me a factory I shut down. Never.”

That framing is too convenient. You did not need gubernatorial authority to be causally central.

On March 29, 2020, you appeared on CNN and stated: “We feel the mitigation we are doing right now is having an effect. The decision to extend this mitigation process until the end of April is a wise and prudent decision.”¹ On April 2, 2020, you told CNN’s Anderson Cooper: “I don’t understand why” every state had not yet issued a stay-at-home order.² Then, on April 13, 2020, a Reuters dispatch reported: “Top U.S. health expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Monday that President Donald Trump listened to his advice when he recommended that mitigation efforts be taken to stop the spread of the coronavirus.”³

That is not the profile of a detached observer. It is the profile of a chief legitimating authority whose pronouncements converted uncertain judgments into national policy — and whose institutional gravity shaped every governor’s calculus that followed.

The defense is not merely strategically convenient. It is epistemically evasive. The stronger case against you is not that you fabricated data, personally locked doors, or bear sole responsibility for every institutional failure. The stronger case is narrower and more devastating: you publicly advanced, defended, and normalized a response architecture that made clean scientific inference impossible — and you did so from the most visible platform in American public health.

It’s incredible that we have to teach you that simply because you did not personally lock the door on any business does not mean you did not shut down hundreds of thousands businesses, many of them permanently.

I say this not as a partisan critic. I am neither a Democrat, nor a Republican. I say it as someone who tracked the response from the earliest days, who raised many of these alarms in real time and in writing, and who was ignored, censored, and deplatformed for doing so.

What I Knew, When I Knew It — and What Happened to Me for Saying So

Before cataloguing your failures, let me establish something relevant to their assessment: the warnings were available. Some of the strongest and earliest warnings came from me. The record is timestamped and archived.

The lab origin (early 2020). I was the first to publicly identify a likely laboratory origin for SARS-CoV-2, based on functional motif analysis of the virus’s spike protein — work I published and archived before the scientific consensus had coalesced against the hypothesis. I also wrote to Ralph Baric to inform him that, based on that analysis, he likely had a SARS-CoV-2-like virus in his freezer. Documentation of this work is archived at jameslyonsweiler.com. When someone at NIH changed the data behind the scenes, I stepped forward and told the world that the results would not be reproducible with new downloads. The subsequent suppression of laboratory origin hypotheses — in which you participated by lending your credibility to the zoonotic consensus before the evidence warranted certainty — delayed a reckoning that has never fully arrived.

The PCR false-positive crisis (early 2020). I was also the first to publicly warn that RT-qPCR deployed as a mass population screen — rather than a confirmatory clinical diagnostic — would generate enormous numbers of false positives and render case counts uninterpretable as measures of disease burden. My YouTube video on this was, of course, censored. I submitted a detailed manuscript to major public health journals. It was returned without review as “not helpful” (Peter Hotez). I wrote to Peter Marks at FDA to warn him and to urge that empirical estimates of false positive rate (FPR) and false discovery rate (FDR) be required before regulatory reliance on PCR-derived counts. I subsequently ran NAATEC and funded empirical studies of FPR and FDR through Sin Han Lee’s laboratory. These records are available and verifiable.⁴

Spike protein pathogenicity and pathogenic priming (April 2020). In April 2020 — months before this became a subject of mainstream scientific discussion — I publicly warned that the spike protein itself was pathogenic and urged the removal of unsafe epitopes from vaccine constructs. I coined the term “pathogenic priming” to describe the mechanism by which spike-only immune responses to spike could become dysregulated. I wanted the polyepitopic immunity that excluded unsafe epitopes would be superior. My warnings was dismissed. The subsequent peer-reviewed literature on spike-mediated endothelial dysfunction, post-vaccination myocarditis signal in younger males, and post-vaccination syndromes has rendered the dismissal untenable as a basis for certainty. The original work is archived and dated at jameslyonsweiler.com.

The mask evidence: layer-by-layer documentation. I tracked your mask guidance trajectory (flip-flop) in real time with documentary specificity. The CDC website moved from recommending 20 layers of cloth, to 16, to 1, in lockstep with evolution of your public positioning. Archived snapshots via the Wayback Machine document this progression. I argued from the beginning that cloth masking without empirical evidence of efficacy — and without honest communication about its population-level limitations — would produce a false-confidence effect that would increase exposure risk among the most vulnerable. You later acknowledged in the Wallace-Wells interview that “at the population level, masks work at the margins — maybe 10 percent.” That was the thesis I had been advancing — and being penalized for advancing — for years.

Early treatments and censorship. I was among the first to host interviews with Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Pierre Kory on the subject of early outpatient treatment protocols. Those videos were selectively removed from YouTube. I was removed from Twitter. I remain shadowbanned on Facebook to this day. The message being suppressed was not misinformation. It was an attempt to inject public health response pluralism and methodological realism into a discourse that had been artificially narrowed. The dates of content removal are documented.

Let’s Talk About Hospital Protocol Deaths. Combined with these failures, I predicted the downstream mortality burden from untreated secondary bacterial pneumonia resulting from disrupted primary care and hospital avoidance due to high false positives in the allegedly quantitative PCR testing. That signal appeared in subsequent excess mortality analyses: Over 90% of people who died on ventilators “from COVID” died from sepsis or bacterial pneumonia.

The warnings existed. They were submitted through legitimate channels and brought to the public. They were suppressed, ignored, or returned without review. You and the institutions you led were not operating in an epistemic vacuum. You were operating in one in which inconvenient signals were systematically de-amplified while convenient ones were amplified into national certainty.

The Measurement Regime Was Broken Before Politics Arrived

The dominant narrative of American pandemic failure attributes the disaster to political divisiveness, vaccine hesitancy, and MAGA anti-science psychology. You advanced this explanation repeatedly in the Wallace-Wells interview and in your post-retirement public remarks. It is typical of your dishonesty by commission and omission, incomplete in a way that exculpates the measurement architecture you validated.

CDC’s own 2020 Interim Case Definition and its 2021 revision both state in plain language that surveillance case definitions “are not intended for clinical diagnosis or determination of an individual’s health needs.”⁵ Yet the case counts generated under those definitions were presented to the American public — and used by you — as though they were clean equivalents of clinically validated disease burden.

The death-counting framework compounded this. CDC/NCHS guidance for certifying COVID-19 deaths explicitly permitted probable and presumed cause-of-death designations when a laboratory-confirmed diagnosis could not be made but circumstances were deemed compelling.⁶ Provisional death count technical notes acknowledge that counts included deaths where COVID-19 was listed as “presumed or probable.”⁷ These methodological choices are not trivial footnotes. They mean that the headline death tallies driving policy — including the 1.1 million you cited in the Wallace-Wells interview as evidence of national failure — were never uniform measures of viral causation.

My preprint with colleagues formalizes the inferential consequences: CDC’s death ascertainment logic admits one true-positive pathway and at least six false-positive pathways. Under this framework, expanding testing can increase absolute false positives even as the false positive rate remains nominally stable. “Died with” is structurally capable of being misread as “died from” at every step from certificate to dashboard to policy brief.⁸ These are formal properties of the measurement architecture, not conspiracy theories.

Due to the unaccounted false positives in diagnoses, there is no legitimate way to know whether the net effects of vaccines was more or less hospitalization or deaths from the COVID-19 vaccines.

The measurement disorder preceded the political disorder. The divisiveness you sowed by claiming early on that resistance was political made it worse. The political divisions in the country did not create the party line difference on vaccines. You created it. You should have been calling for consensus building across party lines. You should have valued the wisdom of the minority.

Earlier, clearer and stronger messaging is not the solution if the message is a lie.

You Treated Contaminated Surveillance as Policy-Grade Fact

The charge here is not that you wrote the CDC case definitions or personally designed the death-counting rules. The charge is that you stood atop the public health hierarchy while those rules were operationalized and did not maintain the categorical boundary that CDC itself stated in plain English.

Surveillance definitions were not meant for clinical diagnosis. The country was governed as though they were.

That categorical collapse — from surveillance signal to clinical fact to policy mandate — was not merely a communications failure. It was an epistemic one. And it was one you could have corrected from the most powerful public health platform in the United States. Once the numbers acquired the status of facts, dissent from policy conclusions drawn from those numbers became dissent from science itself. That rhetorical architecture was built on a foundation you helped pour.

The Vaccine Trials Did Not Answer the Questions Used to Justify Mandates

There are other reasons why net vaccine effect is unknowable. Pfizer’s pivotal Phase III efficacy result was computed on COVID-19 cases with onset at least 7 days after the second dose.⁹ Moderna’s primary endpoint used cases with onset at least 14 days after dose two.¹⁰ I was the first to call out this obvious case-counting window bias in The Defender. Peter Doshi and Kaiser Fung subsequently documented in the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice that these case-counting windows materially affected the headline efficacy calculations.¹¹ Doshi had already warned in a 2020 BMJ analysis that the trials were not designed to tell us whether COVID-19 vaccines would save lives at population scale.¹²

Fenton and McNeil also worked on this problem and tried to warn. These are documentary facts, not hostile reinterpretations. A headline efficacy number derived from a delayed case-counting window is not the same as an all-randomized, intention-to-treat estimate of net population benefit that includes the period immediately following vaccination. The distinction was largely erased in public messaging.

Fung, Jones, and Doshi additionally identified multiple sources of bias in the observational vaccine effectiveness studies that supplemented the trial data, including healthy vaccinee bias, depletion-of-susceptibles bias, and surveillance artifact from differential testing by vaccination status.¹³ The McLachlan, Neil, and Fenton analysis further documented that vaccine-status miscategorisation — assigning recently vaccinated individuals to the unvaccinated reference group during the period of potential immune depression — can systematically inflate apparent efficacy estimates.¹⁴

You did not merely celebrate a promising result. You helped translate an endpoint-limited finding, derived from trials not designed to measure population-level survival benefit, into what can only be characterized as unconditional national certitude — which was then used as the evidentiary basis for mandates.

Your claim that the vaccine would have saved more lives is vapor.

You DID Endorsed Mandates Before Their Consequences Were Understood

On August 29, 2021, you told CNN that mandating COVID-19 vaccines for children to attend school in person was “a good idea” due to a strong benefit-risk ratio.¹⁵ On August 10, 2021, you told MSNBC: “I’m going to upset some people on this, but I think we should [require teacher vaccinations]... I mean, we are in a critical situation now.”¹⁶

Then, in your January 2024 closed-door testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic — transcript released May 31, 2024 — the following exchange took place:

Majority Counsel: “Do you think mandating vaccines can result in some hesitancy?”

Dr. Fauci: “I think one of the things that we really need to do after the fact, now, to — you know, after-the-game, after-the-event evaluation of things that need to be done, we really need to take a look at the psyche of the country, have maybe some social-type studies to figure out, does the mandating of vaccines in the way the country’s mental framework is right now, does that actually cause more people to not want to get vaccinated, or not? I don’t know. But I think that’s something we need to know.”¹⁷

Read your own words carefully. You supported a coercive policy instrument affecting children’s school attendance and adults’ employment — and then acknowledged, after the fact, that the downstream effect of that instrument on hesitancy and trust had not been adequately studied before you endorsed it.

The stronger formulation is not that you confessed mandates were wrong. It is that you supported coercion while the evidence needed to predict its social effects was absent. In a culture that professes to be evidence-based, that is not a minor process error.

Nationally Consequential Rules Appeared Without Documented Evidentiary Basis

In your January 2024 closed-door congressional testimony, the following exchange took place regarding six-foot social distancing (House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Interview of Dr. Anthony Fauci Part 2, January 9, 2024, p. 183 of 246):

Majority Counsel: “Do you recall when discussions regarding, kind of, the at least a 6 foot threshold began?”

Dr. Fauci: “You know, I don’t recall. It sort of just appeared. I don’t recall, like, a discussion of whether it should be 5 or 6 or whatever. It was just that 6 foot is—”

Majority Counsel: “Did you see any studies that supported 6 feet?”

Dr. Fauci: “I was not aware of studies that — in fact, that would be a very difficult study to do.”¹⁷

Later in the same session, on the subject of masking children:

Majority Counsel: “Do you recall reviewing any studies or data supporting masking for children?”

Dr. Fauci: “You know, I might have, Mitch, but I don’t recall specifically that I did.”¹⁷

These are not retrospective internet accusations. They are your statements in an official, transcribed proceeding, released by the House Select Subcommittee on May 31, 2024.

Nationally consequential rules governing school operations, classroom density, business closures, and the masking of children — rules enforced with the full moral authority of public health emergency declarations — were implemented with a level of expressed certainty that your own subsequent testimony cannot tie to documented evidentiary review. The harm came not only from the errors themselves, but from the certainty proportioned far beyond the evidence.

The Country Was Blinded to Breakthrough Dynamics at the Moment It Most Needed Clarity

The May 2021 CDC MMWR on vaccine breakthrough (vaccine failure) infections states that beginning May 1, 2021, the agency “transitioned from monitoring all reported vaccine breakthrough infections to investigating only those involving hospitalization or death.” The same report acknowledges that the national surveillance system likely substantially undercounted all infections among fully vaccinated persons.¹⁸

This transition occurred precisely when vaccination rates were being used to justify intensified pressure on the unvaccinated and to present vaccination as the pathway back to normality. The data system that would have tested population-level transmission claims at scale was quietly dismantled.

A public health authority who asks the nation to accept mandates and social coercion has an affirmative obligation to maintain the data streams needed to evaluate whether those mandates rest on reality. A system that cannot distinguish signal from artifact cannot support coercion.

Your leadership, not objection to it, failed.

“Divisiveness” Is Not a Sufficient Diagnosis - Not When You Sowed It

In the Wallace-Wells interview, you return repeatedly to one explanatory framework: the American pandemic failed because of political divisiveness, anti-science sentiment, and MAGA psychology. “Some very strange psychodynamics were going on in our country,” you told Wallace-Wells.

That framework is not completely wrong. Divisiveness was real. Vaccine hesitancy cost lives - if the vaccine actually saves lives. But, now that you know that we know that you cannot possibly know the net effect of the vaccines on mortality (pathogenic priming and post-vaccine syndrome aside!) your account is profoundly incomplete as an account of failure — and your incompleteness is not accidental. It locates the primary source of failure in the public rather than in the measurement and evidentiary architecture you validated.

You cannot blame politics. You have to accepted that, like computing, public health is Garbage-In, Garbage-Out.

You fed the public health machinery garbage.

The methodological failures I have described were not products of divisiveness. They were products of institutional choices: surveillance definitions that blurred population-level signal and individual-level fact; death-counting rules that admitted probable and presumed causation as equivalent to confirmed causation; trial designs that excluded early post-vaccination cases from primary efficacy calculations; behavioral rules implemented with certainty their evidentiary base could not support; and a breakthrough surveillance system dismantled before it could test the claims driving national policy.

Those failures existed before the culture wars intensified them. They would have existed in a politically unified country. Blaming divisiveness without confronting the measurement disorder underneath it is not a diagnosis. It is a deflection that, if uncorrected and reversed, will lead to the same types of failure in the future.

Conclusion: Fauci Was the Failure

Dr. Fauci, a photograph of your kitchen is published in the Wallace-Wells piece. Among the fridge magnets: “Trust Science.” You did not use Science. You used hubris.

Image from the NYT Times article. Close inspection (see inset) shows Fauci, aka “The Science”, self-celebrating every time he opens his refrigerator door.

I have spent my career in science, doing and supporting biomedical research since 2020. I trust the scientific process deeply, but, as any good scientist should, I remain eternally curious and even skeptical of its product. I trust it as a process requiring epistemic discipline, proportional certainty, and honest acknowledgment of measurement limits. The real currency in science is not knowledge. It is uncertainty. What you validated during the pandemic was not science in that sense. It was the political apparatus of science — the CDC imprimatur, the NIAID credential, the Lancet seal — applied to an evidentiary stack that could not bear the weight of the certainty you placed upon it.

Your largest unacknowledged contribution to the failed U.S. response was not merely that you made mistakes. It was that you gave institutional authority, public confidence, and moral force to a system that converted provisional, conditionally valid and biased signals into unconditional national certitude — and then used that certitude as the basis for coercion. Surveillance was treated as diagnosis. Association was treated as causation. Endpoint-limited efficacy was treated as population-level benefit. Once those category errors hardened into policy, the United States could generate endless numbers without regaining inferential control.

That is why the response felt simultaneously data-saturated and scientifically unstable.

I raised these concerns in real time. So did tens, then hundreds, then thousands of others. We were censored, de-platformed, returned without review, and dismissed as anti-science. The irony is that we were defending science — the version that requires proportional certainty, honest uncertainty quantification, and the intellectual courage to say “we do not know” when we do not know.

Your system was a system that could never objectively distinguish signal from artifact. Thank goodness such as system can never support coercion.

That is what REALLY went wrong - for you.

What Fauci Got Right

The one-half of bit of credit I must give to you, Dr. Fauci, is this comment reported in the article

“I have always felt when there are people pushing back at you, even though they in many respects are off in left field somewhere,” Fauci says, “there always appears to be a kernel of truth — maybe a small kernel or a big segment of truth — in what they say.””

The reason why you only get 1/2 credit is that this is, for you, the correct thing to say to improve your public image. But you have not always felt that way. After The Great Barrington declaration and and Jay Bhattacharya’s far wiser risk-stratification approach to vaccination came to light, you tried to alienate him to science by labeling him a fringe epidemiologist. That was your M.O. for decades: Destroy any hint of dissent by threatening to dissolve entire research funding portfolios at Universities if they did not silence their objective scientists. We know all about this pattern of behavior.

It is good to see you admit that hearing dissent is at least important enough for people to think you believe that. Finally, after so many decades of destroying dissenters like Dr. Judy Mikovits for trying to warn the public of adventitious viruses in vaccines, you have finally whispered a hint of truth.

That’s a start. You might become a scientist one day after all.

Appendix - The Fauci Lab Origins Cover-Up Timeline

January 27–31, 2020. Andersen calls Fauci and tells him he believes COVID-19 “would have been engineered” based on unusual genomic features. Fauci emails back. Andersen then writes to Fauci that the features make up “a really small part of the genome” and that he and colleagues “find the genome consistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” Note the direction of travel: the phone call expressed the lab-origin concern; the written email was already moderating from it. His initial stated hypothesis to Fauci was nonetheless lab origin — and that is what the February 1 conference call was convened to address.

February 1, 2020. Fauci and Collins convene a conference call with approximately twelve scientists. During the call — per the House Select Subcommittee investigation — Fauci twice suggested to Andersen the drafting of a paper on the origins question. This is the only known intervening event between Andersen’s stated lab-origin hypothesis and his subsequent public reversal.

February 2, 2020. Dr. Andrew Rambaut writes to the other call participants: “Given the shit-show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape, so we are content with ascribing it to natural processes.” That is not a scientific statement. It is a political one.

February 4, 2020. A draft of what becomes “Proximal Origin” is sent to Fauci and Collins.

February 8, 2020. Andersen writes to the February 1 conference call participants that the work has been “focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory.” In the same email he states the paper was “prompted by Jeremy Farrar, Tony Fauci, and Francis Collins.” His own words, in his own email, sent to his own colleagues.

February 17, 2020. The preprint is posted publicly. Dr. Lipkin thanks Farrar for “shepherding” it. Farrar responds that he will “push” Nature to publish.

February 20, 2020. Three days after the preprint is already public, Andersen writes: “We all really, really wish we could do that [definitively disprove a lab origin], but unfortunately it’s just not possible given the data.” The evidentiary limitation he acknowledged here was not a reason to delay — the paper was already out.

March 17, 2020. Final publication in Nature Medicine. The lab origin is now called “implausible.” Nature had rejected an earlier draft for not being dismissive enough of the lab hypothesis; the authors revised and strengthened the dismissal accordingly to achieve publication.

April 16, 2020. Collins emails Fauci expressing dismay that Proximal Origin had not fully “put down” the lab leak hypothesis and asking whether NIH can do more. (Characterized in House Select Subcommittee staff memo, March 5, 2023.)

April 17, 2020. The next day — the day after Collins asked for additional public pressure — Fauci cites Proximal Origin from the White House podium when asked whether COVID-19 leaked from a lab.

Notes on Follow-Up Funding:

Andersen and Garry — WARN-ID / CREID grant, $8.9 million, five years. The grant number is U01AI151812. It was awarded by NIAID — Fauci’s agency — to Andersen (Scripps) and Garry (Tulane), the two lead authors of Proximal Origin, along with five international co-investigators. The grant was announced publicly by Scripps on August 27, 2020 — approximately five months after Proximal Origin was published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020.

The critical NIH records fact, reported by The Intercept: the grant was not finalized until May 21, 2020 — two months after publication. Andersen testified to Congress in July 2023 that the grant had been applied for in June 2019 and scored in November 2019, and therefore could not have been influenced by the February 2020 call. The Intercept reported that Andersen “knew that was false” — because the grant was not finalized until May 2020, meaning Fauci’s agency gave final sign-off after Proximal Origin was published, not before.

Garry’s NIAID funding increase. Garry received $7 million in NIAID grants in 2020, compared to $5.7 million in 2019 — a $1.3 million increase in the year Proximal Origin was published. He received $6.6 million in 2021.

Daszak — EcoHealth CREID grant, $7.5 million. Peter Daszak, through whose organization NIAID had funded coronavirus research at WIV, received a separate CREID grant of $7.5 million establishing the EID-SEARCH network in Southeast Asia. The CREID initiative as a whole distributed $82 million over five years across eleven grants. EcoHealth was subsequently debarred from federal funding by HHS at the close of the Biden administration.

The Andersen email to Fauci and Collins, March 6, 2020. Nine days before Proximal Origin’s final publication, Andersen emailed Fauci and Collins thanking them for their “advice and leadership” on the paper and offering them an opportunity to comment. Andersen’s congressional testimony characterized this as a professional courtesy since they were on prior email chains. The subcommittee characterized it as evidence of ongoing editorial involvement.

The Intercept finding on the grant timeline. Andersen’s sworn testimony stated the grant “was scored and reviewed by independent experts in November 2019” and therefore predated the February 2020 call. What he did not say — and what NIH records show — is that Fauci personally gave final sign-off on the CREID award after Proximal Origin was published. The DOJ has since opened an inquiry to Nature Medicine citing the possibility the paper was a quid pro quo for the CREID grant.

Notes and Sources

1. Fauci, Anthony S. Remarks on CNN. March 29, 2020. Cited in: Reuters/WEF, “President Trump has extended his stay-at-home guidelines,” March 30, 2020.

2. Fauci, Anthony S. CNN Town Hall with Anderson Cooper. April 2, 2020. Reported: ABC News, “Trump resists a nationwide stay-at-home order. Fauci says ‘I don’t understand why’ some states not acting,” April 3, 2020.

3. Reuters Wire Service. “Fauci says Trump listened to his advice about coronavirus mitigation.” April 13, 2020. Distributed via Reuters; published by The Star (thestar.com.my), April 14, 2020; HuffPost, “Fauci Says Trump Actually Listened To Him About Coronavirus Mitigation,” April 13, 2020.

4. Lyons-Weiler J et al. Studies of false positive rate and false discovery rate in RT-qPCR-based COVID-19 surveillance. NAATEC / Sin Han Lee, 2020–2021. Archived at jameslyonsweiler.com and popularrationalism.substack.com.

5. CDC, 2020 Interim Case Definition and 2021 Case Definition for COVID-19. Both documents state explicitly: surveillance case definitions are not intended for clinical diagnosis or determination of an individual’s health needs.

6. CDC/NCHS. “Guidance for Certifying Deaths Due to COVID-19.” DOI: 10.15620/cdc:124588. Key language: probable/presumed death-certificate reporting is acceptable when diagnosis cannot be confirmed definitively but circumstances are compelling.

7. CDC/NCHS. Technical Notes: Provisional Death Counts for COVID-19. Key language: counts include laboratory-confirmed and clinically confirmed deaths, and deaths where COVID-19 is listed as “presumed or probable.”

8. Lyons-Weiler J et al. “Has CDC’s COVID-19 Death Ascertainment and Diagnosis Protocol Condemned Public Health and Medicine to a Sisyphean Task?” Preprint. Documents one true-positive and at least six false-positive ascertainment pathways under CDC’s framework.

9. Polack FP et al. “Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine.” N Engl J Med 2020. PMID: 33301246. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2034577. Primary efficacy endpoint: cases with onset ≥7 days after dose 2.

10. Baden LR et al. “Efficacy and Safety of the mRNA-1273 SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine.” N Engl J Med 2021. PMID: 33378609. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2035389. Primary efficacy endpoint: cases with onset ≥14 days after dose 2.

11. Doshi P, Fung K. “How the case counting window affected vaccine efficacy calculations in randomized trials of COVID-19 vaccines.” J Eval Clin Pract 2024;30(1):105–106. PMID: 37452751. DOI: 10.1111/jep.13900.

12. Doshi P. “Will covid-19 vaccines save lives? Current trials aren’t designed to tell us.” BMJ 2020;371:m4037. PMID: 33087398. DOI: 10.1136/bmj.m4037.

13. Fung K, Jones M, Doshi P. “Sources of bias in observational studies of covid-19 vaccine effectiveness.” J Eval Clin Pract 2024;30(1):30–36. PMID: 36967517. DOI: 10.1111/jep.13839.

14. McLachlan S, Neil M, Fenton N. “The extent and impact of vaccine status miscategorisation on covid-19 vaccine efficacy studies.” Accepted/in press, Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice. Related preprint DOI: 10.1101/2024.03.09.24304015.

15. Fauci, Anthony S. CNN interview with Amanda Sealy. “School Covid-19 vaccine mandates are a ‘good idea.’” August 29, 2021.

16. Fauci, Anthony S. MSNBC interview. Reported: NPR, “Fauci Supports Vaccine Mandates For Teachers,” August 10, 2021; U.S. News & World Report, “Fauci Endorses Teacher Vaccine Requirements as Local Mandates Spread,” August 10, 2021.

17. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Interview of Dr. Anthony Fauci Part 2, January 9, 2024. Transcript released May 31, 2024. Key exchanges: (a) six-foot distancing, p. 183 of 246; (b) masking children; (c) vaccine mandate hesitancy. Full transcripts available at: oversight.house.gov.

18. CDC MMWR. “COVID-19 Vaccine Breakthrough Infections Reported to CDC — United States, January 1–April 30, 2021.” Key language: beginning May 1, 2021, CDC transitioned from monitoring all reported vaccine breakthrough infections to investigating only those involving hospitalization or death.

James Lyons-Weiler, PhD is a biomedical research scientist and science communicator. He writes at popularrationalism.substack.com and maintains a timestamped archive of analyses, predictions, and public warnings related to COVID-19 at jameslyonsweiler.com. He is Editor-in-Chief of the peer reviewed journal, Science, Public Health Policy & the Law.