“The health official who conspired with Anthony Fauci to downplay suggestions Covid-19 leaked from a Wuhan laboratory has revealed he lies awake at night agonising about the chain of events they set in motion,” reports Sky News:
The former Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response at the US Department of Health, Dr Robert Kadlec, has told Sky News he feels obligated to reveal confidential discussions he had with Dr Fauci, America’s top infectious diseases adviser, about diverting attention away from the lab leak theory.
In his first television interview, to air on Sky News on Tuesday night, he also warns of another pandemic emerging from high-risk experiments in laboratories globally, saying the lessons from Covid-19 haven’t been learnt.
“The tools of science to do this kind of synthetic biology, this risky research has not been limited to China. It happens in the United States. It’s happening in a lot of places in the world and we could have another one of these (pandemics) if we don’t accept that,” he says in the new Sky News documentary “What Really Happened in Wuhan, the Next Chapter.”
Dr Kadlec, who worked for presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump and lead American efforts to develop a Covid-19 vaccine, said his intention in initially downplaying a lab leak was to encourage co-operation from China in the early days of the outbreak.
But the public denial of the lab leak theory spiralled and the proposition Covid may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology turned into a conspiracy.
“I wake up at usually about 2 or 3am and think about it honestly, because it’s something that we all played a role in,” Dr Kadlec says.
“Yes, we had some successes, we had some other non-successes, meaning failures. And part of the reason I’m still committed to trying to… bring this subject up is at least to say, it’s important to know now what happened.
Dr Kadlec felt that Fauci had other reasons for wanting to divert attention away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He said Fauci was likely worried about his reputation if it eventuated that his agency had funded the gain-of-function research that sparked the outbreak.
“That would be a natural reaction of him or anybody, particularly I think, for him saying, what could this do to me and to our institute as a consequence if we were found to have some culpability or some involvement in this?”
United States agencies, including Dr Fauci’s, were funding research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology via a not-for-profit organisation, EcoHealth Alliance.
The Energy Department and the FBI concluded this year that COVID-19 likely leaked from a Chinese laboratory. The London Sunday Times later reported that COVID-19 was engineered by the Chinese military using US funding. The U.S. funding came through the EcoHealth Alliance, as critics of Anthony Fauci previously surmised.
This is quite a revelation. As Jamie Metzl notes, “COVID-19 was the greatest crime of the 21st century to date. Twenty million people are dead from a totally avoidable pandemic. It’s time for an international tribunal.”
This is not the only deadly virus to come from a Chinese lab. An earlier “Russian flu” that killed 700,000 also likely came from a lab leak in China. Yet, when people like evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein suggested the possibility that the virus leaked from a Chinese government lab in 2020, they were dismissed by the mainstream media as kooks. In February 2021, Facebook banned any mentions of the lab leak, following “consultations” with “the World Health Organization.” But the possibility was always obvious to experts. In private, Anthony Fauci and NIH officials worried about the possibility of a lab leak they publicly denied as a “conspiracy theory.”
Yet, in a fact-check it later retracted, PolitiFact gave a Tucker Carlson guest a “Pants on Fire” for the “debunked conspiracy theory” that COVID came from a lab. MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace similarly claimed that “Donald Trump [is] turning his intelligence community to now investigate a conspiracy theory about COVID coming from a lab in Wuhan.” And when Republican Senator Tom Cotton suggested the virus came from a lab, the Washington Post similarly implied that it was a conspiracy theory, reporting that “Sen. Cotton (R-Ark.) repeated a fringe theory suggesting ongoing spread of a coronavirus is connected to research in the disease-ravaged epicenter of Wuhan.” A New York Times reporter dismissed the possibility of a lab leak, saying that the lab leak theory has “racist roots.” In 2020, the Associated Press dubbed the COVID-19 lab leak theory a debunked conspiracy theory.
