January 23, 2020:
Fauci had an 8am, in-person meeting with Dr. James LeDuc. LeDuc ran one
of the few BSL-4 biocontainment labs in the country (think: moon-suit
stuff), at the University of Texas Medical Branch, where he has long-trained Chinese scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) lab in BSL-4 biosafety procedures.
Emails acquired by FOIA from the U.S. Right To Know
(USRTK) organization revealed that LeDuc was sending backchannel emails
with his Wuhan colleagues to get information on the novel coronavirus
outbreak, and even soliciting edits and corrections from Wuhan’s so-called “bat lady” Shi Zhengli for his April 2020 Congressional testimony.
LeDuc’s emails show he was communicating with his virologist colleague Yuan Zhiming, who was in charge of the WIV BSL-4 lab. LeDuc wrote an op-ed published on January 24 about his U.S.-China working relationship.
It’s possible this drop-by visit by LeDuc was to let Fauci know what he was hearing from Wuhan, and perhaps, not put that news in email.
By
4:30 that afternoon, LeDuc and former Ft. Detrick BSL-4 biolab director
Dave Franz joined Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert Kadlec for a
conference call, a call revealed in USRTK’s document production from the University of Texas (pg 3409).
Franz emailed a brief note
that same day “to facilitate [the] call.” The email described his and
LeDuc’s work since 2007 as establishing a relationship with Chinese
scientists (pg 115).
In other words, LeDuc was in town to talk about China and the Wuhan lab with top-HHS and former military biolab officials.
Thus,
while the public discussion was and would remain that the virus had a
natural origin, behind the scenes, people were being briefed on the
U.S.-Chinese scientists’ interactions and the Wuhan lab itself.
Top-Secret Meetings
Unreported
until now, throughout late January and February 2020, Fauci was in
meetings with the National Security Council (NSC) and in top-secret
settings – including in the White House Situation Room. Fauci was also
in small, “restricted” meetings with the NSC.
Were all these
top-secret meetings known to the President, and do they give the
impression people-in-the-know thought the virus had a natural origin?
January 14 and 16, 2020:
Fauci has a 9am “Novel Corona Virus PCC/Synch Meeting” with Phil Ferro,
NSC and Executive Office of the President, on the 14th and a “Novel
Corona Virus Touch Base” with Ferro on the 16th.
January 20:
China announced to the world that the virus has human-to-human
transmission, an admission that they had a possible pandemic virus on
their hands.
January 21: Fauci’s NSC meeting gets a new name (“nCoV-PCC”) and the meeting now includes secure video teleconference (SVTC).
January 21: Fauci is interviewed by The Wall Street Journal reporter Betsy McKay on the listed topic “Coronavirus & HIV Papers.” Is she asking Fauci about an upcoming scientific paper
(published January 31st by Indian scientists, but quickly withdrawn by
the authors, amid intense criticism) that noted an “uncanny similarity”
between the HIV virus and the spike protein in the Covid-19 virus?
Because bats don’t contract HIV, such a similarity would point to a lab creation for the novel virus.
An hour earlier, Fauci had a call with Peter Hotez about an “Anti-SARS vaccine candidate.” Hotez is an NIH-funded, Texas-based scientist and vaccine researcher, who had a $6 million NIH grant since 2012 studying a “SARS vaccine for biodefense.” Hotez developed a non-mRNA vaccine model, that won recent approval for distribution in some foreign countries, such as India.
January 22:
The COVID-19 meetings with Fauci rise to a new level as Fauci’s
calendar shows him in the White House Situation Room (“WHSR”), from
~1:30-3 this day for “nCoV PCC”
January 24:
From ~1:30-2:30 Fauci has a “nCoV Small Group Discussion” at the EEOB,
next to the White House, in “Anthony’s Office” Room 381. (nCoV stands
for novel coronavirus and was the reference given to Covid-19, before it
was officially named SARS-CoV-2.) This is one of the few times no last
name is listed on Fauci’s calendar. The meeting entry in our FOIA
production is cut off but includes “***Please ”, the entry also
includes an attachment, which NIH currently has not released to
OpenTheBooks.com.
“Anthony’s Office” Clue from February 5: From
2:30-3:30pm on Feb. 5, Fauci’s calendar shows an EEOB “Restricted Small
Group” meeting with Anthony Ruggierro, who is listed as with the
Executive Office of the President/NSC. Anthony Ruggierro, according to
his public LinkedIn page,
was NSC “Special Assistant to the President, Senior Director for
Counterproliferation and Biodefense” at the time of the meeting. Thus,
it’s likely the January 24th EEOB meeting in “Anthony’s Office” was with
the same man as the Feb. 5th meeting: Anthony Ruggierro.
January 27, 2020: From 2:30-3:30pm, Fauci has an “NSC Deputy Call” in the NIH SCIF.
(SCIF stands for “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility” and is
usually a room reserved for sensitive or classified briefings.) Trump’s
National Security Council Deputy at the time was Matthew Pottinger. The
subject of the call is not noted on the calendar.
(Also on January 27th, Fauci met with the CEO of Moderna, Stephane Bancel.)
January 28, 2020: A Fauci/NSC Covid-19 meeting was previously disclosed by Sharri Markson, who reported in her book What Really Happened in Wuhan
that Pottinger called the January 28 meeting with Fauci, HHS Secretary
Azar, and CDC Director Redfield just after Pottinger heard from Chinese
dissident and human rights activist Wei Jingsheng about the virus
breaking in China.
From January 16 through January 29,
with few exceptions, Fauci’s weekday calendar shows a Covid meeting,
either in person or by phone via secure video teleconference (SVTC) with
Phil Farro, who is with the Office of the President and the NSC.
January 22: Fauci has an hour and half blocked off for the Covid meeting in the White House Situation Room.
January 27:
If he didn’t know before, emails released to the U.S. House Oversight
and Reform Committee reveal that on this date, Fauci got definitive word
from his staff that NIAID, his institute, funded a bat coronavirus
grant to EcoHealth Alliance who collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of
Virology and Dr. Ralph Baric. If the virus was from the WIV, Fauci now
knew he had funded the Chinese lab.
January 31: Fauci is in the Oval Office, meeting, presumably, with the President.
February 4:
By this date, according to released emails, Fauci and the federally
funded scientists he consults with, have decided that Covid-19 came from
nature via a bat, through some intermediate species. Behind the scenes,
they are drafting papers arguing that any position besides a natural
origin is a conspiracy theory.
Yet, Fauci keeps meeting
with Anthony Ruggiero, NSC’s biodefense and China expert (1/25 and 2/5).
Are they thinking Covid may have come from a lab leak?
February 11:
Fauci has a meeting with Dr. Ralph Baric, the University of North
Carolina coronavirus scientist, arguably the nation’s foremost expert on
bat coronaviruses. The meeting includes Emily Erbelding, the Director
of the NIAID Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases.
Baric
had a long-working relationship with the Wuhan lab, and, it would later
be revealed, applied (unsuccessfully) for a $14 million DARPA grant
with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and EcoHealth Alliance to insert a
furin cleavage site into a chimeric bat virus and passage it through
“humanized” mice to see if it had pandemic potential. Some virologists have called that leaked document a recipe for the Covid-19 virus.
The
Fauci/Baric meeting backs up against the NSC meeting with Phil Ferro.
It’s not clear where Baric is during the meeting, if in-person or by
phone. Was Baric on the NSC call or listening in?
(Previously at Forbes, I wrote
about how Fauci continued to fund scientists like Baric and Fouchier by
giving exemptions and narrowly defining scrutinized research –
circumventing funding bans by Presidents Obama and Trump.)
February 17: “Proximal Origins,” a paper that Fauci apparently helped edit
and was organized by NIH-funded Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance,
stated that the Covid-19 virus was from nature and called any suggestion
otherwise a conspiracy. Largely based on this paper, scientific
discussion and social media posts suggesting a lab leak were censored as
misinformation.
Other Items of Interest
Between
25 November 2019 and 26 February 2020, Fauci does three events with the
American Society of Microbiology (ASM): a “Biothreats” discussion
(11/25/2019); the ASM biothreats conference (1/29/2020); and meets with
the ASM board (2/26/2020).
January 7 and 9, 2020: Fauci did his
first interviews on corona: 1. With CTV (Canadian TV) on the “pneumonia
outbreak in China”; and 2. With Voice of America (VOA) on the “Wuhan
pneumonia.” We couldn’t find the interviews published anywhere on the
internet.
While the NIH keeps a public record
of interviews Fauci conducted since January 27, 2020, we identified 34
other interviews with him discussing the conronavirus from January 7 to
January 26.
Between January 27 and February 24, Fauci meets
or has calls with Stephane Bancel, the CEO of Moderna (1/27); Jeremy
Farrar of Wellcome Trust (British health non-profit focused on vaccines)
(2/1); Biotech executive and former NIH staffer Gary Nabel (2/6); and
Johnson & Johnson Chief Scientist Paul Stoffels (2/24).
February
7: Fauci receives training on personal protective equipment (PPE).
Given his varying recommendations on PPE early in the pandemic, it would
be interesting to know what training he received.
March 18: Fauci logged a meeting entitled “code red” with a follow up meeting on March 20th. No further details were listed.
March
26: Fauci did four YouTube hits of 15 minutes each. Fauci’s calendar
titled these events: “FDA Califf Request”—likely referencing Robert
Califf. At the time, Califf was leading healthcare strategy at Alphabet
(Google and YouTube parent company). Robert Califf is the current U.S.
Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the former
commissioner under Obama.
Summary
The
official work calendar is an historic hour-by-hour documentation of Dr.
Anthony Fauci in the months leading up to and during the publicly
announced Covid-pandemic.
Even with this topline calendar transparency, NIH admits to holding an additional 60,000 pages of backup documentation. The federal court is allowing us to ask for specific items.
Therefore, if there is a specific document of oversight interest, please send our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com a message via the ‘contact us’ portion of our website.
The historic release of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s work calendar leaves all of us with more questions than answers.
It’s incumbent upon Congress to exert its right to oversight.
Note: We
reached out for comment to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation and other top scientists mentioned on Fauci’s calendar.
None gave us comment by our deadline.
Additional Reading:
Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Little Known Biodefense Work. It’s How He Became The Highest Paid Federal Employee. Published October 20, 2021 | Forbes
Breaking: Fauci’s Net Worth Soared To $12.6 Million During The Pandemic – Up $5 Million (2019-2021). Published September 28, 2022 | OpenTheBooks.Substack.com
Dr. Anthony Fauci: The Highest Paid Employee In The Entire U.S. Federal Government Published January 21, 2021 | Forbes
No, Fauci’s Records Aren’t Available. Why Won’t NIH Immediately Release Them? Published January 12, 2022 | Forbes
How Fact-Finding Fauci Led To My Cancellation At Forbes | March 9, 2022 | OpenTheBooks.Substack.com
Judicial Watch: Fauci Emails Show WHO Pushing For A Press Release “Especially” Supporting China’s Response To The Coronavirus | Judicial Watch | October 23, 2020