This originally appeared today on the Brownstone Institute site - https://brownstone.org/
It has not yet made it to their Substack yet, but I felt it was important enough to cut/paste and re-post. It was written by Brownstone director Jeffrey A.Tucker - https://twitter.com/jeffreyatucker
Please do visit the website. I apologize for the odd copying of the Congressional letter. Also,, I’ve left comments open for this piece.
Jeremy Farrar’s book from August 2021 is relatively more candid than most accounts of the initial decision to lock down in the US and UK. “It’s hard to come off nocturnal calls about the possibility of a lab leak and go back to bed,” he wrote of the clandestine phone calls he was getting from January 27-31, 2020. They had already alerted the FBI and MI5.
“I’d never had trouble sleeping before, something that comes from spending a career working as a doctor in critical care and medicine. But the situation with this new virus and the dark question marks over its origins felt emotionally overwhelming. None of us knew what was going to happen but things had already escalated into an international emergency. On top of that, just a few of us – Eddie [Holmes], Kristian [Anderson], Tony [Fauci] and I – were now privy to sensitive information that, if proved to be true, might set off a whole series of events that would be far bigger than any of us. It felt as if a storm was gathering, of forces beyond anything I had experienced and over which none of us had any control.”
At that point in the trajectory of events, intelligence services on both sides of the Atlantic had been put on notice. Anthony Fauci also received confirmation that money from the National Institutes of Health had been channeled to the offending lab in Wuhan, which meant that his career was on the line. Working at a furious pace, the famed “Proximal Origin” paper was produced in record time. It concluded that there was no lab leak.
In a remarkable series of revelations this week, we’ve learned that the CIA was involved in trying to make payments to those authors (thank you whistleblower), plus it appears that Fauci made visits to the CIA’s headquarters, most likely around the same time.
The letter from the Congressional oversight committee:
The Honorable Christi A. Grimm Inspector General
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General
330 Independence Avenue SW Washington, D.C. 20201
Dear Inspector General Grimm:
The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (Select Subcommittee) has received concerning information regarding the Central Intelligence Agency’s investigation into the origins of COVID-19.
According to information gathered by the Select Subcommittee, Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, played a role in the Central Intelligence Agency’s review of the origins of COVID-19. The information provided suggests that Dr. Fauci was escorted into Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Headquarters—without a record of entry—and participated in the analysis to “influence” the Agency’s review. Our goal is to ensure the scientific investigative process regarding the origins of COVID-19 was fair, impartial, and free of alternative influence.
The Select Subcommittee’s goal is to ensure accountability and transparency. The American people deserve the truth—to know the origins of the virus and whether there was a concerted effort by public health authorities to suppress the lab leak theory for political or national security purposes. Accordingly, information regarding specific movements of Dr. Fauci throughout the pandemic is reasonable and hardly intrusive, especially considering he is no longer employed by the federal government, he is no longer a protectee of the Inspector General, and we are not requesting any information regarding his current movements.
To assist the Select Subcommittee with its investigation, we request the following documents and information as soon as possible but no later than October 10, 2023:
1. Documents sufficient to show any Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General authorized, supported, or otherwise affiliated movements of Dr. Anthony Fauci from January 1, 2020 through December 31,
2022 into any CIA owned, operated, or occupied building, including but not limited to the George Bush Center of Intelligence.
2. All documents and communications between or among employees or contractors of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General regarding the admittance or entry of Dr. Anthony Fauci into any CIA owned, operated, or occupied building, including but not limited to the George Bush Center of Intelligence.
3. All documents and communications between or among employees or contractors of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General and employees or contractors of the CIA regarding the admittance or entry of Dr. Anthony Fauci into any CIA owned, operated, or occupied building, including but not limited to the George Bush Center of Intelligence.
4. All documents and communications between or among employees or contractors of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General and employees or contractors of the U.S. Marshals Service regarding the admittance or entry of Dr. Anthony Fauci into any CIA owned, operated, or occupied building, including but not limited to the George Bush Center of Intelligence.
5. All documents and communications between or among employees or contractors of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General and employees or contractors of the Department of Health and Human Services, including but not limited to the National Institutes of Health and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, regarding the admittance or entry of Dr. Anthony Fauci into any CIA owned, operated, or occupied building, including but not limited to the George Bush Center of Intelligence.
In addition to these documents, we request you make Special Agent Brett Rowland available for a voluntary transcribed interview at a date to be determined. Accordingly, the Committees will contact you to schedule the interview. The Committees reserve their right to conduct follow-up interviews or request testimony from other witnesses pertinent to our investigation.
The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic is authorized to
investigate “the origins of the Coronavirus pandemic, including but not limited to the Federal Government’s funding of gain-of function research” and “executive branch policies, deliberations, decisions, activities, and internal and external communications
related to the coronavirus pandemic” under H. Res. 5. To schedule the briefing or ask any follow-up or related questions, please contact Select Subcommittee staff at (202) 225- 5074.
Thank you for your attention to this very important matter.
Suddenly we get some possible clarity in what has otherwise been a very blurry picture. The anomaly that has heretofore cried out for explanation is how it is that Fauci changed his mind so dramatically and precisely on the merit of lockdowns for the virus. One day he was counseling calm because this was flu-like, and the next day he was drumming up awareness of the coming lockdown. That day was February 27, 2020, the same day that the New York Times joined with alarmist propaganda from its lead virus reporter Donald G. McNeil.
On February 26, Fauci was writing: “Do not let the fear of the unknown… distort your evaluation of the risk of the pandemic to you relative to the risks that you face every day… do not yield to unreasonable fear.”
The next day, February 27, Fauci wrote actress Morgan Fairchild – likely the most high-profile influencer he knew from the firmament – that “be prepared to mitigate an outbreak in this country by measures that include social distancing, teleworking, temporary closure of schools, etc.”
To be sure, twenty-plus days had passed between the time Fauci alerted intelligence and when he decided to become the voice for lockdowns. We don’t know the exact date of the meetings with the CIA. But generally until now, most of February 2020 has been a blur in terms of the timeline. Something was going on but we hadn’t known just what.
Let’s distinguish between a proximate and distal cause of the lockdowns.
The proximate cause is the fear of a lab leak and an aping of the Wuhan strategy of keeping everyone in their homes to stop the spread. They might have believed this would work, based on the legend of how SARS-1 was controlled. The CIA had dealings with Wuhan and so did Fauci. They both had an interest in denying the lab leak and stopping the spread. The WHO gave them cover.
The distal reasons are more complicated. What stands out here is the possibility of a quid pro quo. The CIA pays scientists to say there was no lab leak and otherwise instructs its kept media sources (New York Times) to call the lab leak a conspiracy theory of the far right. Every measure would be deployed to keep Fauci off the hot seat for his funding of the Wuhan lab. But this cooperation would need to come at a price. Fauci would need to participate in a real-life version of the germ games (Event 201 and Crimson Contagion).
It would be the biggest role of Fauci’s long career. He would need to throw out his principles and medical knowledge of, for example, natural immunity and standard epidemiology concerning the spread of viruses and mitigation strategies. The old pandemic playbook would need to be shredded in favor of lockdown theory as invented in 2005 and then tried in Wuhan. The WHO could be relied upon to say that this strategy worked.
Fauci would need to be on TV daily to somehow persuade Americans to give up their precious rights and liberties. This would need to go on for a long time, maybe all the way to the election, however implausible this sounds. He would need to push the vaccine for which he had already made a deal with Moderna in late January.
Above all else, he would need to convince Trump to go along. That was the hardest part. They considered Trump’s weaknesses. He was a germaphobe so that’s good. He hated Chinese imports so it was merely a matter of describing the virus this way. But he also has a well-known weakness for deferring to highly competent and articulate professional women. That’s where the highly reliable Deborah Birx comes in: Fauci would be her wingman to convince Trump to green-light the lockdowns.
What does the CIA get out of this? The vast intelligence community would have to be put in charge of the pandemic response as the rule maker, the lead agency. Its outposts such as CISA would handle labor-related issues and use its contacts in social media to curate the public mind. This would allow the intelligence community finally to crack down on information flows that had begun 20 years earlier that they had heretofore failed to manage.
The CIA would hobble and hamstring the US president, whom they hated. And importantly, there was his China problem. He had wrecked relations through his tariff wars. So far as they were concerned, this was treason because he did it all on his own. This man was completely out of control. He needed to be put in his place. To convince the president to destroy the US economy with his own hand would be the ultimate coup de grace for the CIA.
A lockdown would restart trade with China. It did in fact achieve that.
How would Fauci and the CIA convince Trump to lock down and restart trade with China? By exploiting these weaknesses and others too: his vulnerability to flattery, his desire for presidential aggrandizement, and his longing for Xi-like powers over all to turn off and then turn on a whole country. Then they would push Trump to buy the much-needed personal protective equipment from China.
They finally got their way: somewhere between March 10 or possibly as late as March 14, Trump gave the go ahead. The press conference of March 16, especially those magical 70 seconds in which Fauci read the words mandating lockdowns because Birx turned out to be too squeamish, was the great turning point. A few days later, Trump was on the phone with Xi asking for equipment.
In addition, such a lockdown would greatly please the digital tech industry, which would experience a huge boost in demand, plus large corporations like Amazon and WalMart, which would stay open as their competitors were closed. Finally, it would be a massive subsidy to pharma and especially the mRNA platform technology itself, which would enjoy the credit for ending the pandemic.
If this whole scenario is true, it means that all along Fauci was merely playing a role, a front man for much deeper interests and priorities in the CIA-led intelligence community. This broad outline makes sense of why Fauci changed his mind on lockdowns, including the timing of the change. There are still many more details to know, but these new fragments of new information take our understanding in a new and more coherent direction.