Dr Anthony Fauci, the United States’ chief medical adviser during the early stages of the pandemic, has dismissed a book by News Corp investigative journalist Sharri Markson promoting the Covid-19 “lab leak” theory as a “bunch of nonsense” in newly released diary entries.
Fauci, 85, was subpoenaed this week by Republican senator Rand Paul to testify at a Senate hearing examining Covid-19 and his role in the US pandemic response.
The physician, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for decades before retiring in 2022, accused Paul of pursuing an “unhinged” campaign aimed at seeing him imprisoned and declined to answer questions at Wednesday’s hearing.
The session formed part of Paul’s long-running push to scrutinise the lab leak theory, which argues that the Covid-19 pandemic began with a release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Before Fauci’s appearance, Paul released 1,141 pages of the former adviser’s pandemic-era journal entries. In them, Fauci took aim at reporting in The Australian and at Markson’s book, which alleged that a Wuhan facility was “immersed in genetically manipulating bat-coronaviruses in perilous experiments”.
On 7 May 2021, Markson wrote in The Australian that Chinese military scientists had “discussed the weaponisation of Sars coronaviruses five years before the Covid-19 pandemic” and had anticipated that a third world war would be fought using biological weapons.
Fauci, who advised seven US presidents and became one of the most recognisable public health figures in the world in 2020, wrote privately that the article “does not make any sense”.
“Why would someone want to make an agent that could equally infect your own population. Something is wrong with this report. I will have to follow up on it,” he wrote.
Guardian Australia later found the “chilling” document produced by Chinese military scientists in the article was based on a discredited 2015 book containing conspiracy theories about biological warfare which is freely available on the internet.
Markson’s story was criticised as misleading and alarmist by China analysts. A deputy editor of Foreign Policy magazine and China expert, James Palmer, said the article had links to conspiracy theories about the origins of the coronavirus which are popular with the political right.
The story was published to promote Markson’s debut book, What Really Happened in Wuhan, which argued there was “no scientific consensus that Covid-19 has a natural origin” and that China had conspired to cover up the truth.
Fauci also took aim at Markson’s book, writing in his diary that “the same old crap is going on with the far right continuing to attack me”.
“The latest written by an Australian person who says I’m the father of gain of function research quotes from the infamous Richard Ebright saying that I’m a liar and I have misled everybody about gain of function,” he wrote. “What a bunch of nonsense! The far right continues to try and discredit me.”
Ebright is an American molecular biologist and proponent of the lab leak theory.
Markson told Guardian Australia “the majority of the intelligence community now concludes that Covid-19 likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory”.
“I led the way internationally exposing the role of Anthony Fauci’s agency funding 65 projects at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, funnelling the money through EcoHealth Alliance,” she said on Thursday.
The origins of the Covid-19 pandemic remain the subject of intense debate among scientists and the wider public.
There are two competing theories – the natural-origins hypotheses, which suggests the pandemic began when a close relative of Sars-CoV-2 jumped from a wild animal to a human through the wildlife trade, and lab leak theories, which argue that the virus emerged when Chinese scientists became infected through research-associated activities.
News Corp was approached for comment.
