Just hours before leaving office, former President Joe Biden issued a pardon for Anthony Fauci, granting the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases a pass for possible federal crimes going back to Jan. 1, 2014.
The pardon’s 10-year span seems to be anything but arbitrary.
‘Anthony Fauci, in his role as NIAID director, repeatedly and flagrantly, misfeasantly, violated US government policies.’
Florida Sen. Ashley Moody (R) asked Fauci during a congressional hearing on July 29, “Did you specifically ask that it be dated back to the beginning of 2014?”
As he had more than 100 times that day, Fauci declined to answer, citing the Fifth Amendment.
Nevertheless, Moody persisted, “I’m just very interested why it was this date. Did it have anything to do with the fact that 2014 was also the year that the NIAID or [National Institutes of Health] began funding EcoHealth Alliance’s ‘Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence’ grant?”
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While Fauci dodged Moody’s question, Dr. Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, revealed the damning significance of the pardon’s start date to Christopher Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman on the Tuesday episode of BlazeTV’s “Rufo & Lomez.”
“I can say that Anthony Fauci approved a research grant that supported high-risk virus discovery research and very high-risk virus gain-of-function research on SARS coronaviruses in Wuhan, China, starting in 2014,” Ebright told Rufo and Keeperman.
In 2014, EcoHealth Alliance — the now-defunct organization that was run by debarred British zoologist Peter Daszak, a Fauci ally — sub-awarded the NIH-NIAID grant for the project “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where dangerous experiments were conducted on coronaviruses.
Screenshot of documents obtained via FOIA by The Intercept
“I can also say that Anthony Fauci, in his role as NIAID director, repeatedly and flagrantly, misfeasantly, violated U.S. government policies that were put in effect in 2014 to protect the public from laboratory-generated pandemics — specifically a pause that was put in place in October 2014 that precluded federal funding of gain-of-function research on influenza viruses, MERS viruses, and SARS viruses,” Ebright claimed.
In the wake of several biosafety incidents at federal research facilities, the Obama White House and the Department of Health and Human Services announced on Oct. 17, 2014, that the government was “launching a deliberative process to assess the potential risks and benefits associated with a subset of life sciences research known as ‘gain-of-function’ studies.”
During this deliberation period, government funding was paused for new studies involving gain-of-function experiments on influenza, SARS, or MERS viruses. In addition to cutting off funding, the Obama administration urged researchers presently engaged in gain-of-function experimentation to “voluntarily pause their research while risks and benefits are being reassessed.”
The HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System website shows that the grant to EcoHealth Alliance was secured from the NIAID just months before the pause and that it continued receiving taxpayer funds well into the pandemic.
Ebright claimed further that while the federal pause “most definitely covered the research in that grant proposal,” Fauci and his office “continued the funding in flagrant violation, open violation of the pause.”
Ebright noted that the first Trump administration ended the 2014 pause on funding for gain-of-function research and conditioned new approvals on greater scrutiny “about proposed research involving enhanced potential pandemic pathogens,” or P3CO.
“Anthony Fauci personally approved for renewal the grant that was started in 2014, was approved for renewal in 2019 in violation of the P3CO policy. It was approved without the required HHS secretary-level review,” claimed Ebright.
“Anthony Fauci funded research that directly contributed to the cause of COVID, … to 20 million deaths, and $25 trillion in economic damages,” Ebright claimed in summary.
“It is plausible, I think, likely that the date of the pardon specifically matches the beginning of the approval of that grant and the series of misfeasant events beginning in late 2014 that continued the funding in violation of U.S. government policies.”
Blaze News did not immediately receive a response from a legal representative for Fauci.
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Christopher rufo, Rufo & lomez, Anthony fauci, Peter daszak, Ecohealth alliance, National institutes of health, Politics, Gain of function
