Did Dr. Kary Mullis have it right? The Nobel Prize winning designer of DNA testing via polymerase chain reaction (PCR) claimed Fauci "doesn't know anything, really, about anything, and I'd say that to his face...he should not be in a position like he's in...those guys have got an agenda...Tony Fauci does not mind going on television...and lie directly into the camera."
Not afraid to challenge the scientific fraternity, Mullis had reservations about climate science, and openly questioned whether it was solely the HIV retrovirus that causes AIDS.
Mullis died in 2019, just before the world most needed him.
Indeed, it would have been problematic for the shepherds of the pandemic such as Fauci if the inventor of the PCR test said that it was not the right tool to test for Covid. Years later, new voices would rise up to challenge Fauci, Pfizer, and Moderna, among others. Precious few of those voices belong to members of the House and Senate.
Enter a new report from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, titled “Interim Staff Report into Risky MPXV Experiment at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.” ("Monkeypox" was hastily renamed after pandemic-weary citizens on social media pointed out that it was spreading almost exclusively in the gay community. Also cited in the rebrand: concerns of racist undertones.)
Emily Kopp, a reporter at U.S. Right to Know, wrote about the House E&C report, which she claims, "details disturbing stonewalling around plans to engineer a pandemic capable mpox virus." By Kopp's count, the NIH subterfuge had gone on for 9 years.
The mpox experiment first came to light in a September 2022 article in Science.
The gain-of-function project proposed by NIAID virologist Bernard Moss would splice genes conferring high pathogenicity from the clade I virus into the more transmissible clade II virus. The new “chimeric” (combined) virus could have retained up to a 15 percent fatality rate and a 2.4 reproductive number, a measure of transmissibility indicating every sick person could infect up to 2.4 people on average, giving it pandemic potential.
The committee’s attempts to learn more about the experiment were met with stonewalling.
NIAID maintains the experiment was never conducted, but has never provided any contemporaneous documents to support that claim such as emails or lab notebooks, according to the committee’s report.
The lack of engagement from NIAID, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Health and Human Services does not comport with the idea the experiment was never conducted and that there is nothing to hide, according to the committee.
HHS and NIH misled congressional investigators for nearly a year and a half, falsely denying that Moss had obtained formal approval for this gain-of-function experiment.
The committee launched its investigation in October 2022 but was only permitted to view key documents in camera in March 2024, which confirmed NIH’s formal approval of the experiment.
(emphasis mine --Ed.)
Fauci recently retired from his NIAID position, as did his boss, Francis Collins, Director of the NIH. The pair have since been seen on the college commencement circuit, speaking as if from the same script, decrying "fake news" and "conspiracy theorists."
One hopes, as Kopp does, that the two administrators who have taken Fauci's and Collins' positions, Jeanne M. Marrazzo and Monica Bertagnolli, respectively, will seek to change the NIH/NIAID culture from secrecy and smugness to one of greater transparency.
The entire medical community needs to earn back untold public quantities of trust. The NIH/NIAID monolith seems a good place to start.
Fauci's fatuous claim, that "I represent science" will hopefully dog him in his dotage as much as Sen. Rand Paul has these past several years. In the meantime, it's up to investigative reporters and curious citizens to press for information through FOIA requests and archived internet data.
