Fauci Edited Paper by NIH-Funded Group Tied to Wuhan Lab

Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci edited a research paper by the group that worked with a high-profile Wuhan lab to study dangerous bat virus while pushing back concerns that the facility could be the source of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The paper, titled “Nipah virus dynamics in bats and implications for spillover to humans,” was funded by eight federal programs, half of which were from the NIAID that Fauci will head until this December.

Members of the nonprofit research group EcoHealth Alliance, which became a conduit for the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct risky bat research using U.S. taxpayer dollars, make up over half of the roughly two dozen authors on the paper.

Fauci edited the paper in 2020 after receiving it for review that Jan. 8, two weeks before COVID-19 brought Wuhan into a complete lockdown. Peer-reviewed scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, better known as PNAS, approved it in September that year and published it two months later.

The extent of Fauci’s input into the paper is unclear. As a public servant of four decades, Fauci has also edited scientific papers notably on the subject of HIV. But Fauci’s editorial role, given the group’s history of ties with the Wuhan lab and the funding it received from his agency, nonetheless, raised eyebrows among critics.

Tristan Daedalus, the government affairs director for White Coat Waste Project that has been tracking the EcoHealth and Wuhan lab’s collaboration, saw in the case a “self-licking ice cream cone.”

“First, Fauci champions dangerous animal experiments to balloon his $6 billion budget. Next, he doles it out via grants to EcoHealth and other white coats in the U.S. and abroad. He and his colleagues then personally edit and approve