Newly declassified U.S. documents released by outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard have revived accusations against Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former top U.S. infectious disease official and Biden’s chief medical adviser during the pandemic. According to a report in the New York Post, the materials suggest Fauci may have denied in Congress that the National Institutes of Health funded dangerous coronavirus research in Wuhan, then soon afterward withheld potentially relevant information from intelligence officials about the virus’s origin.
The central issue is Fauci’s May 2021 congressional testimony. He said the NIH did not finance so-called gain-of-function research at the Wuhan institute, meaning experiments that alter viruses in ways that can make them more infectious or dangerous. But the documents released by Gabbard say that on June 4, 2021, Fauci met with CIA officials and discussed the theory that COVID-19 may have come from pangolins, asking for information about Chinese experiments on pangolin samples in fall 2019.
The files further allege that Fauci did not tell the CIA about other Wuhan lab research, including studies on bat coronaviruses that were indirectly funded with U.S. government money through an American nonprofit. They also say the CIA already knew at the time that Wuhan lab workers had fallen ill in late 2019, before the global outbreak. Fauci reportedly said it was important to obtain samples from those workers, while still steering attention toward Wuhan’s seafood market, which was then considered a possible source.
A whistleblower complaint was later filed with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, alleging Fauci’s congressional testimony was false and misled the public and U.S. oversight bodies. The New York Post said the complaint was not sent to the independent inspector general of the Health Department, but instead to Health Secretary Xavier Becerra, who was appointed by the Biden administration. ODNI said at the time the complaint was not urgent because Fauci was not an intelligence official and the matter did not directly affect the intelligence community.
Gabbard said the release was part of what she described as an effort to expose the truth about COVID-19’s origins. She argued that after years of “lies, censorship and cover-ups,” Americans deserve transparency, truth and accountability. The Justice Department is still reviewing possible legal options, even though the normal statute of limitations for perjury based on the 2021 testimony has already expired. The New York Post also noted that the CIA last year assessed with low confidence that a lab leak was the likely source of COVID-19, an assessment previously echoed by the FBI and the Energy Department.
