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Jamestown Foundation Issues Commentary: In the Online Age, PRC Foreign Intelligence Evolves
WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 -- The Jamestown Foundation issued the following commentary on Oct. 2, 2026, in the foundation's China Brief Notes:
* * *
In the Online Age, PRC Foreign Intelligence Evolves
Matt Brazil
Executive Summary:
* Chinese intelligence efforts are increasingly moving away from human intelligence (HUMINT) collection to digital operations launched from within the People's Republic of China (PRC). The Ministry of State Security (MSS), military intelligence, and others have started to employ online recruiting to replace face-to-face contact for foreign assets.
* Beijing likely adopted ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 -- The Jamestown Foundation issued the following commentary on Oct. 2, 2026, in the foundation's China Brief Notes: * * * In the Online Age, PRC Foreign Intelligence Evolves Matt Brazil Executive Summary: * Chinese intelligence efforts are increasingly moving away from human intelligence (HUMINT) collection to digital operations launched from within the People's Republic of China (PRC). The Ministry of State Security (MSS), military intelligence, and others have started to employ online recruiting to replace face-to-face contact for foreign assets. * Beijing likely adoptedthe new model in response to the 2018 arrest of Xu Yanjun--the first MSS officer to be tried and convicted in the United States--which highlighted counterintelligence risks facing officers operating outside PRC borders.
* The MSS is using LinkedIn en masse to recruit and develop assets overseas. These operations frequently involve headhunter-style approaches and commercial pretexts to collect resumes and gather intelligence.
* Traditional HUMINT remains an important component of MSS tradecraft. MSS agents have started to integrate face-to-face contact in the PRC for managing their overseas contacts while their assets abroad deploy digital tools to facilitate operations.
-
Beijing's intelligence services are increasingly using massive, scattershot methods amenable to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to recruit foreign sources without sending their own officers abroad. They rely largely but not exclusively on online platforms, commercial consulting arrangements, and third-country intermediaries to identify, assess, and recruit targets, all while reducing the risk of counterintelligence detection. Meanwhile, People's Republic of China (PRC) intelligence officers and agents continue to employ traditional face-to-face human intelligence (HUMINT) methods outside of the PRC when they pose a better chance of success.
Numerous cases have surfaced in the last few months that indicate the scale and breadth of these espionage efforts. On the digital side, these include the seizure by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) of 13 Internet domains used to target U.S. citizens, including those with security clearances, as well as of additional domains used to target U.S. critical infrastructure (DOJ, June 10, August 26). On the HUMINT side, examples include the DOJ sentencing of a former senior adviser for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors to over three years in prison for "funneling sensitive Federal Reserve information to Chinese spies," and a former U.S. Army soldier pleading guilty to sending information on U.S. weapon systems to the PRC (DOJ, July 15, September 16; CNBC, September 30).[1]
Beijing may have perceived an inflection point beginning in 2018 when Xu Yanjun, the first Ministry of State Security (MSS) officer to be extradited to the United States, was arrested (Reuters, November 21, 2022; National Security Archive, accessed October 1). With advancements among foreign counterespionage services, the PRC's intelligence services may have concluded that recruiting and handling assets are best conducted from within the PRC's borders.
Prisoner Exchanges Highlight Risk and Suggest Change
Xu Yanjun was convicted in 2021, and his operative, Ji Chaoqun, was convicted shortly thereafter in 2022 (CNA, March 9, 2023; Guancha, Nov 28, 2024). In November 2024, however, both men were released and repatriated to the PRC, well before the end of their sentences. This was the first known instance where Beijing negotiated to recover intelligence personnel captured by the United States (Chicago Tribune, November 27, 2024; VOA Chinese, November 28, 2024)
In exchange, Beijing released two U.S. citizens convicted of "espionage" and one under a death sentence for drug trafficking. The lack of evidence from the Chinese side about these cases raises the possibility that Beijing decided to take the three individuals as hostages to trade for their nationals in the United States.[2] This swap was particularly notable as it marked the return of PRC intelligence personnel apprehended in the United States for the first time.[3]
As far as is publicly known, Beijing had previously eschewed efforts to recover its captured spies. In one prominent case, Chi Mak, who ran a highly effective and longstanding technology theft operation in southern California for 20 years before he was apprehended, was ignored after his 2007 conviction. He died there in October 2022 at age 82 (Substack/HUMINT, November 21, 2025; Sina.com, May 1, 2007).[4]
Commercial Platforms Keep Intelligence Officers at Home
Since the U.S.-PRC negotiated swap, PRC intelligence techniques have emphasized technology-enabled recruitment and handling, suggesting that Beijing views prisoner swaps as a tool only to be used on rare occasions. The MSS has developed a workflow that allows officers to remain within the PRC's borders, mitigating the risk of identification by hostile security services. As noted by the Belgian security service, the recruitment and handling of "individuals of interest" now "is often carried out in China or from China" (VSSE, January 14, 2025).
Five Eyes nation assessments covering cases across North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific between 2019-2026 describe a similar evolution in intelligence operations conducted by the People's Liberation Army (PLA). Chinese services increasingly conduct spotting and assessment at industrial scale through LinkedIn and other professional networking platforms, encourage targets to undertake seemingly legitimate paid consulting work as an initial step, and employ third-country and private-sector intermediaries as operational cut-outs. In this form, they have adopted the semiconductor industry's commercial talent-recruitment model (Five Eyes, March 6). The U.K. Security Service (MI5) has separately and specifically attributed comparable LinkedIn headhunter-style tradecraft--including two accounts identified as "Amanda Qiu" and "Shirly Shen"--to the MSS itself, indicating the online-recruitment shift spans both the civilian and military intelligence services rather than being unique to either (BBC, November 18, 2025).
The recruitment of former CIA and Defence Intelligence Agency officer Kevin Mallory in 2017 by the MSS was a precursor. Mallory, who was in financial difficulty, was approached on LinkedIn by a contact posing as a representative of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences--a think tank with documented ties to Chinese intelligence--and offered a paid "consulting" role. The relationship subsequently developed through in-person meetings in Shanghai rather than the United States (DOJ, May 17, 2019). Although Mallory was arrested before he could establish a long-term espionage operation, the case appears to have inspired, rather than discouraged, Beijing's confidence in remote recruitment methods.
Security services across Europe report similar patterns. MI5 Director General Ken McCallum disclosed in 2023 that approximately 20,000 Britons had been approached through LinkedIn by Chinese recruiters, more than double the roughly 10,000 users MI5 had said were being targeted online by all foreign intelligence services and criminals two years earlier (The Guardian, October 18, 2023). The Canadian Security Intelligence Service has separately warned that Chinese intelligence services advertise employment opportunities through front companies, leading applicants to unknowingly work on behalf of a hostile intelligence service. Comparable warnings have also been issued by Germany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), the Netherlands' General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD), and Czechia's Security Information Service (BIS) (BfV, 2020; AIVD, February 8, 2022; Euronews, September 16, 2024; CSIS Public Report, 2025). Such approaches continued this year, as demonstrated by the 2026 Kevin Zhang/Oriental Consulting operation, which reportedly netted substantial NATO and EU intelligence information (Hong Kong Free Press, March 28).
These industrial-scale approaches are particularly amenable to the deployment of artificial intelligence. AI systems can search and classify large numbers of publicly available professional profiles, identify combinations of access, expertise, foreign travel and possible financial or career vulnerability, and rank prospective targets for human review. Generative AI can then draft individualized approaches in the target's language, vary the supposed recruiter's identity and commercial pretext, and sustain preliminary conversations with many candidates simultaneously. The U.K. National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) assesses that AI already provides a "capability uplift" in reconnaissance and social engineering, making both more effective; it also enables more convincing approaches without the linguistic mistakes that traditionally exposed foreign phishing and influence efforts (NCSC, January 24, 2024).
Human Recruiters Remain Valuable
Despite this growing reliance on online recruitment--likely enhanced by AI--traditional human intelligence operations have by no means disappeared. Instead, they complement digital approaches and are employed when they present the best chance of success.
Two recent cases show how human recruitment is fused with technology-enabled tradecraft. Singaporean academic Dickson Yeo was recruited by Chinese intelligence contacts he met while giving a talk in Beijing, then set up a fictitious political consulting firm and used LinkedIn's contact-suggestion algorithm to identify and approach potential sources almost daily; he received more than 400 resumes, roughly 90 percent from people with U.S. military or government security clearances, before he was caught (Straits Times, April 2, 2025). Estonian national Gerli Mutso travelled to the PRC for coordination with PLA intelligence officers who used the cover identity of a fictitious "Beijing Information Association"; she then returned to Europe and recruited Tarmo Kouts, an Estonian scientist with access to NATO's Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation, who subsequently supplied classified defense-research material to the PRC. Mutso was convicted in 2022 and sentenced to eight and a half years; Estonia's Supreme Court upheld her sentence in 2023 while partially annulling other elements of the conviction (ERR News, June 17, 2023).
Even with the shared linguistic background between the PRC and Taiwan, PRC intelligence officers follow a comparable trajectory over time. The Ministry of National Defense (MND) has noted that PRC tradecraft moved from direct in-person contact to introductions via third parties met outside Taiwan, to an increasing recent focus on online recruitment (CNA, April 22, 2025; MND, April 23, 2025). This suggests the shift toward remote, intermediary-based recruitment is a general trend rather than one confined to harder-target Western countries.
Conclusion
PRC intelligence officers increasingly direct foreign recruitment from the safety of the PRC, relying on online platforms, commercial intermediaries, and locally based facilitators to conduct much of the initial contact and relationship building that was traditionally done abroad. The result is a model that reduces, but does not necessarily eliminate, operational exposure for Chinese intelligence personnel while allowing recruitment efforts to expand simultaneously, even exponentially, across multiple countries.
* * *
Matt Brazil is a Senior Analyst at BluePath Labs and a Senior Fellow at The Jamestown Foundation. He pursued Chinese studies as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, as an Army officer with tours in Korea and NSA, and as a graduate student at Harvard in their Regional Studies East Asia program.
* * *
Original text here: https://jamestown.org/in-the-online-age-prc-foreign-intelligence-evolves/
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
In the Online Age, PRC Foreign Intelligence Evolves
Matt Brazil
Executive Summary:
* Chinese intelligence efforts are increasingly moving away from human intelligence (HUMINT) collection to digital operations launched from within the People's Republic of China (PRC). The Ministry of State Security (MSS), military intelligence, and others have started to employ online recruiting to replace face-to-face contact for foreign assets.
* Beijing likely adopted ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 -- The Jamestown Foundation issued the following commentary on Oct. 2, 2026, in the foundation's China Brief Notes: * * * In the Online Age, PRC Foreign Intelligence Evolves Matt Brazil Executive Summary: * Chinese intelligence efforts are increasingly moving away from human intelligence (HUMINT) collection to digital operations launched from within the People's Republic of China (PRC). The Ministry of State Security (MSS), military intelligence, and others have started to employ online recruiting to replace face-to-face contact for foreign assets. * Beijing likely adoptedthe new model in response to the 2018 arrest of Xu Yanjun--the first MSS officer to be tried and convicted in the United States--which highlighted counterintelligence risks facing officers operating outside PRC borders.
* The MSS is using LinkedIn en masse to recruit and develop assets overseas. These operations frequently involve headhunter-style approaches and commercial pretexts to collect resumes and gather intelligence.
* Traditional HUMINT remains an important component of MSS tradecraft. MSS agents have started to integrate face-to-face contact in the PRC for managing their overseas contacts while their assets abroad deploy digital tools to facilitate operations.
-
Beijing's intelligence services are increasingly using massive, scattershot methods amenable to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to recruit foreign sources without sending their own officers abroad. They rely largely but not exclusively on online platforms, commercial consulting arrangements, and third-country intermediaries to identify, assess, and recruit targets, all while reducing the risk of counterintelligence detection. Meanwhile, People's Republic of China (PRC) intelligence officers and agents continue to employ traditional face-to-face human intelligence (HUMINT) methods outside of the PRC when they pose a better chance of success.
Numerous cases have surfaced in the last few months that indicate the scale and breadth of these espionage efforts. On the digital side, these include the seizure by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) of 13 Internet domains used to target U.S. citizens, including those with security clearances, as well as of additional domains used to target U.S. critical infrastructure (DOJ, June 10, August 26). On the HUMINT side, examples include the DOJ sentencing of a former senior adviser for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors to over three years in prison for "funneling sensitive Federal Reserve information to Chinese spies," and a former U.S. Army soldier pleading guilty to sending information on U.S. weapon systems to the PRC (DOJ, July 15, September 16; CNBC, September 30).[1]
Beijing may have perceived an inflection point beginning in 2018 when Xu Yanjun, the first Ministry of State Security (MSS) officer to be extradited to the United States, was arrested (Reuters, November 21, 2022; National Security Archive, accessed October 1). With advancements among foreign counterespionage services, the PRC's intelligence services may have concluded that recruiting and handling assets are best conducted from within the PRC's borders.
Prisoner Exchanges Highlight Risk and Suggest Change
Xu Yanjun was convicted in 2021, and his operative, Ji Chaoqun, was convicted shortly thereafter in 2022 (CNA, March 9, 2023; Guancha, Nov 28, 2024). In November 2024, however, both men were released and repatriated to the PRC, well before the end of their sentences. This was the first known instance where Beijing negotiated to recover intelligence personnel captured by the United States (Chicago Tribune, November 27, 2024; VOA Chinese, November 28, 2024)
In exchange, Beijing released two U.S. citizens convicted of "espionage" and one under a death sentence for drug trafficking. The lack of evidence from the Chinese side about these cases raises the possibility that Beijing decided to take the three individuals as hostages to trade for their nationals in the United States.[2] This swap was particularly notable as it marked the return of PRC intelligence personnel apprehended in the United States for the first time.[3]
As far as is publicly known, Beijing had previously eschewed efforts to recover its captured spies. In one prominent case, Chi Mak, who ran a highly effective and longstanding technology theft operation in southern California for 20 years before he was apprehended, was ignored after his 2007 conviction. He died there in October 2022 at age 82 (Substack/HUMINT, November 21, 2025; Sina.com, May 1, 2007).[4]
Commercial Platforms Keep Intelligence Officers at Home
Since the U.S.-PRC negotiated swap, PRC intelligence techniques have emphasized technology-enabled recruitment and handling, suggesting that Beijing views prisoner swaps as a tool only to be used on rare occasions. The MSS has developed a workflow that allows officers to remain within the PRC's borders, mitigating the risk of identification by hostile security services. As noted by the Belgian security service, the recruitment and handling of "individuals of interest" now "is often carried out in China or from China" (VSSE, January 14, 2025).
Five Eyes nation assessments covering cases across North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific between 2019-2026 describe a similar evolution in intelligence operations conducted by the People's Liberation Army (PLA). Chinese services increasingly conduct spotting and assessment at industrial scale through LinkedIn and other professional networking platforms, encourage targets to undertake seemingly legitimate paid consulting work as an initial step, and employ third-country and private-sector intermediaries as operational cut-outs. In this form, they have adopted the semiconductor industry's commercial talent-recruitment model (Five Eyes, March 6). The U.K. Security Service (MI5) has separately and specifically attributed comparable LinkedIn headhunter-style tradecraft--including two accounts identified as "Amanda Qiu" and "Shirly Shen"--to the MSS itself, indicating the online-recruitment shift spans both the civilian and military intelligence services rather than being unique to either (BBC, November 18, 2025).
The recruitment of former CIA and Defence Intelligence Agency officer Kevin Mallory in 2017 by the MSS was a precursor. Mallory, who was in financial difficulty, was approached on LinkedIn by a contact posing as a representative of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences--a think tank with documented ties to Chinese intelligence--and offered a paid "consulting" role. The relationship subsequently developed through in-person meetings in Shanghai rather than the United States (DOJ, May 17, 2019). Although Mallory was arrested before he could establish a long-term espionage operation, the case appears to have inspired, rather than discouraged, Beijing's confidence in remote recruitment methods.
Security services across Europe report similar patterns. MI5 Director General Ken McCallum disclosed in 2023 that approximately 20,000 Britons had been approached through LinkedIn by Chinese recruiters, more than double the roughly 10,000 users MI5 had said were being targeted online by all foreign intelligence services and criminals two years earlier (The Guardian, October 18, 2023). The Canadian Security Intelligence Service has separately warned that Chinese intelligence services advertise employment opportunities through front companies, leading applicants to unknowingly work on behalf of a hostile intelligence service. Comparable warnings have also been issued by Germany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), the Netherlands' General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD), and Czechia's Security Information Service (BIS) (BfV, 2020; AIVD, February 8, 2022; Euronews, September 16, 2024; CSIS Public Report, 2025). Such approaches continued this year, as demonstrated by the 2026 Kevin Zhang/Oriental Consulting operation, which reportedly netted substantial NATO and EU intelligence information (Hong Kong Free Press, March 28).
These industrial-scale approaches are particularly amenable to the deployment of artificial intelligence. AI systems can search and classify large numbers of publicly available professional profiles, identify combinations of access, expertise, foreign travel and possible financial or career vulnerability, and rank prospective targets for human review. Generative AI can then draft individualized approaches in the target's language, vary the supposed recruiter's identity and commercial pretext, and sustain preliminary conversations with many candidates simultaneously. The U.K. National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) assesses that AI already provides a "capability uplift" in reconnaissance and social engineering, making both more effective; it also enables more convincing approaches without the linguistic mistakes that traditionally exposed foreign phishing and influence efforts (NCSC, January 24, 2024).
Human Recruiters Remain Valuable
Despite this growing reliance on online recruitment--likely enhanced by AI--traditional human intelligence operations have by no means disappeared. Instead, they complement digital approaches and are employed when they present the best chance of success.
Two recent cases show how human recruitment is fused with technology-enabled tradecraft. Singaporean academic Dickson Yeo was recruited by Chinese intelligence contacts he met while giving a talk in Beijing, then set up a fictitious political consulting firm and used LinkedIn's contact-suggestion algorithm to identify and approach potential sources almost daily; he received more than 400 resumes, roughly 90 percent from people with U.S. military or government security clearances, before he was caught (Straits Times, April 2, 2025). Estonian national Gerli Mutso travelled to the PRC for coordination with PLA intelligence officers who used the cover identity of a fictitious "Beijing Information Association"; she then returned to Europe and recruited Tarmo Kouts, an Estonian scientist with access to NATO's Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation, who subsequently supplied classified defense-research material to the PRC. Mutso was convicted in 2022 and sentenced to eight and a half years; Estonia's Supreme Court upheld her sentence in 2023 while partially annulling other elements of the conviction (ERR News, June 17, 2023).
Even with the shared linguistic background between the PRC and Taiwan, PRC intelligence officers follow a comparable trajectory over time. The Ministry of National Defense (MND) has noted that PRC tradecraft moved from direct in-person contact to introductions via third parties met outside Taiwan, to an increasing recent focus on online recruitment (CNA, April 22, 2025; MND, April 23, 2025). This suggests the shift toward remote, intermediary-based recruitment is a general trend rather than one confined to harder-target Western countries.
Conclusion
PRC intelligence officers increasingly direct foreign recruitment from the safety of the PRC, relying on online platforms, commercial intermediaries, and locally based facilitators to conduct much of the initial contact and relationship building that was traditionally done abroad. The result is a model that reduces, but does not necessarily eliminate, operational exposure for Chinese intelligence personnel while allowing recruitment efforts to expand simultaneously, even exponentially, across multiple countries.
* * *
Matt Brazil is a Senior Analyst at BluePath Labs and a Senior Fellow at The Jamestown Foundation. He pursued Chinese studies as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, as an Army officer with tours in Korea and NSA, and as a graduate student at Harvard in their Regional Studies East Asia program.
* * *
Original text here: https://jamestown.org/in-the-online-age-prc-foreign-intelligence-evolves/
[Category: ThinkTank]
Hudson Institute Issues Commentary: Boulder Has No Business Making Foreign Policy
WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 -- Hudson Institute, a research organization that says it promotes leadership for a secure, free and prosperous future, issued the following commentary to Wall Street Journal:
* * *
Oct 1, 2026
Wall Street Journal
Boulder Has No Business Making Foreign Policy
The Supreme Court takes up a lawsuit against oil companies that far exceeds legitimate local authority.
William P. Barr
When the Supreme Court returns for its new term on Monday, the first case it will hear is Suncor Energy v. Boulder County, which asks whether state and local governments may use state tort laws to ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 -- Hudson Institute, a research organization that says it promotes leadership for a secure, free and prosperous future, issued the following commentary to Wall Street Journal: * * * Oct 1, 2026 Wall Street Journal Boulder Has No Business Making Foreign Policy The Supreme Court takes up a lawsuit against oil companies that far exceeds legitimate local authority. William P. Barr When the Supreme Court returns for its new term on Monday, the first case it will hear is Suncor Energy v. Boulder County, which asks whether state and local governments may use state tort laws toimpose liability on American companies for the effects of global climate change.
Boulder County and the city of Boulder sued Suncor and Exxon Mobil in a Colorado court, claiming their community has been harmed by global climate change. The plaintiffs seek damages for local harms. Liability would be based not on the company's actions in Colorado but on the extent its worldwide production and sale of fuels are found to have contributed to greenhouse gases in the global atmosphere. A trial would give a local jury the authority to determine what share of global climate change each American company should be held responsible for. It is part of a wave of such litigation by left-leaning states and localities that aim at bankrupting fossil-fuel companies.
Read in the Wall Street Journal (https://www.wsj.com/opinion/boulder-has-no-business-making-foreign-policy-1a731264?mod=MorningEditorialReport&mod=djemMER_h).
* * *
Original text here: https://www.hudson.org/foreign-policy/boulder-has-no-business-making-foreign-policy-william-barr
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Oct 1, 2026
Wall Street Journal
Boulder Has No Business Making Foreign Policy
The Supreme Court takes up a lawsuit against oil companies that far exceeds legitimate local authority.
William P. Barr
When the Supreme Court returns for its new term on Monday, the first case it will hear is Suncor Energy v. Boulder County, which asks whether state and local governments may use state tort laws to ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 -- Hudson Institute, a research organization that says it promotes leadership for a secure, free and prosperous future, issued the following commentary to Wall Street Journal: * * * Oct 1, 2026 Wall Street Journal Boulder Has No Business Making Foreign Policy The Supreme Court takes up a lawsuit against oil companies that far exceeds legitimate local authority. William P. Barr When the Supreme Court returns for its new term on Monday, the first case it will hear is Suncor Energy v. Boulder County, which asks whether state and local governments may use state tort laws toimpose liability on American companies for the effects of global climate change.
Boulder County and the city of Boulder sued Suncor and Exxon Mobil in a Colorado court, claiming their community has been harmed by global climate change. The plaintiffs seek damages for local harms. Liability would be based not on the company's actions in Colorado but on the extent its worldwide production and sale of fuels are found to have contributed to greenhouse gases in the global atmosphere. A trial would give a local jury the authority to determine what share of global climate change each American company should be held responsible for. It is part of a wave of such litigation by left-leaning states and localities that aim at bankrupting fossil-fuel companies.
Read in the Wall Street Journal (https://www.wsj.com/opinion/boulder-has-no-business-making-foreign-policy-1a731264?mod=MorningEditorialReport&mod=djemMER_h).
* * *
Original text here: https://www.hudson.org/foreign-policy/boulder-has-no-business-making-foreign-policy-william-barr
[Category: ThinkTank]
Center of the American Experiment Issues Commentary: NIMBYs, Renewables & Affordability - Highlights From The Jon Justice Show
MINNETONKA, Minnesota, Oct. 3 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary:
* * *
NIMBYs, renewables & affordability: highlights from The Jon Justice Show
Written by Darren Nelson | October 2, 2026
I had my second appearance on The Jon Justice Show earlier this week on Monday the 28th of September. The focus was on NIMBYnomics, renewables and energy affordability.
A 55 seconds clip from that appearance can be found here => https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Qp6izVuksBI
My entire appearance ... Show Full Article MINNETONKA, Minnesota, Oct. 3 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary: * * * NIMBYs, renewables & affordability: highlights from The Jon Justice Show Written by Darren Nelson | October 2, 2026 I had my second appearance on The Jon Justice Show earlier this week on Monday the 28th of September. The focus was on NIMBYnomics, renewables and energy affordability. A 55 seconds clip from that appearance can be found here => https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Qp6izVuksBI My entire appearancecan be found here from 2:38:30 to 3:09:06 => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRMHcNVzrtE
Highlights from an AI-generated transcript follow next =>
Jon Justice (JJ): Talking about space. 2001: a spend odyssey (a bipartisan renewables policy). What is this all about? Policy fellow Darren Nelson joins us on the comfy sofa here at the Center of the American experiment. Good morning, Darren. Good to see you this morning, my friend.
Darren nelson (DN): Good morning. I have a couple speeches to do this week, one tomorrow at the Council of State Governments [CSG] for the Midwest [and the BIOBY mining and energy expo after that]. And [the CSG are] talking about nuclear power and [nuclear waste]. I'm just going to go there and talk about what's been happening with energy prices since 2001. Which is when sadly a Republican governor put in the first renewables piece of legislation, and then prices have largely taken off [in] 2002 onwards.
JJ: Let's get into the piece you have regarding NIMBYs, you labeled it NIMBYnomics. The one thing I appreciate about this is how you differentiate, and you're right, between the good NIMBY and the bad NIMBY. So talk a little bit about your piece, the public choice economics, not in my backyard, and what you broke down in this bipartisan phenomenon.
DN: I'm an economist. That's the way I tend to look at things for the most part. So there's a school of thought [from] the 1960s called public choice economics, and it gives the best insight into what NIMBYs are, why there's NIMBYs, and what you might be able to do about it. Because, as you said, there's bad NIMBY situations that you would like to overcome if you can. And what they suggest [is to] essentially buy them off legally. A better word is a compensation.
They often do have genuine concerns. Sometimes [these are] more psychological. So that's a lot harder to compensate for. But sometimes [NIMBY's are worried that something is] going to lower land values. There's going to be noise. There's going to be maybe pollution, that sort of thing.
Public choice economics is basically the economics of government and politics. Some Nobel Prize winning economists realized [that] supply and demand, self interest, don't stop when you get into the institution of government. Most people kind of realize politicians are fairly self interested for the most part. But bureaucrats [are] self interested too. They have some slightly different incentives, like being entrenched over time. Politicians want to win elections. They want at least legal kickbacks, or at least good jobs to come afterwards. Public choice formalized what a lot of people strongly suspected for centuries.
JJ: So when it comes to getting a better addressing this NIMBYism, what is the aspect of [public choice economics ] for you personally that you find most compelling in terms of when people are bringing forth these arguments?
DN: As an economist, I've always been really passionate about cost benefit analysis, or at least the concept behind it. Because politicians and other people involved in politics, they always claim there's just benefits to this thing, or there's just costs to this [other] thing. No, there's always costs and benefits to everything. And what's important to realize [too is] that they also impact people differently.
The NIMBY is driven by costs being greater than benefits in a particular situation. That's what's driving [them], and those costs can be monetary, but they can also be just genuinely psychological ones. And those are real, [as] people get very motivated by something they feel [is] bad, that's like a cost to them. Or sometimes the property values will go down, or sometimes both.
One I didn't actually mention in [my article], the good NIMBY that I have the most empathy for is the one who doesn't like the pickleball courts right next to their house. Because they are unbelievably loud. It looks like a very fun sport. I've never actually played it myself. And a lot of the people who are NIMBY about pickleball courts right next to them, love the idea of pickleball, they just don't want it near them. We could talk a bit broader about data centers and nuclear power. Some people don't want them anywhere, even if it's nowhere near them. Even if they like [to] use data centers [and] appreciate the fact they exist.
JJ: But it seems like we're not allowed to have those discussions within our media of the nuances of all this. Your articles drive into the heart [that] we need to have further discussions about the benefits [and costs] of [NIMBYs, nukes and data centers].
DN: One thing I want to kind of be provocative about is [that] the economic law of supply and demand [as well as] cost benefit analysis, [are] actually more scientific, more grounded in reality, than physics. Physics actually has at least three different theories of gravity. They talk about physics [as] the ultimate science [and] it [has] risen to the level of fact. Well, they don't even know what gravity is, much less even describe it in one theory. They [have] three theories [of] Einstein, quantum mechanics, and Newton.
I'm not saying economics has all the answers and it's always right, because there's different schools of thought within economics. And I'll be very transparent about that because most people aren't. Most people just go, this is what this science says or this is what this economics says. Okay. What's your school of thought that you're drawing upon? I'm drawing upon free market schools of thought. I think they're right. They don't have all the answers, but I'm going to be transparent, unlike our friends on the left who are never transparent on those fronts.
JJ: What is it you think they're going to be keying in on regarding your view when it comes to renewables?
DN: Look, [the conferences audience] may not be convinced by the kind of economics that I hit them with and the logic of why these [renewables] are inherently costly. When you start [to] subsidize stuff, [although] it's probably counterintuitive to some people, but ultimately you incentivize: those costs to go up and up; and the subsidies to get bigger and bigger.
It's often claimed that [renewables] were expensive once upon a time, but now they're not. You just subsidize them more and more and more and more. That's not really making them cheaper. You've actually incentivized them to do the opposite. So, okay, they may not be impressed by that logic, but [perhaps they will be by] the facts of what's actually happened to prices since 2002 in Minnesota. And not just Minnesota, [but] the Midwest and also the US in general, [prices] all took off from 2002, which is when Minnesota and a whole bunch of other states started to put in these renewable policies.
If prices start going up, you'll see the usage rates go down. And that's what we've seen [after] 2008. The actual total use of electricity in Minnesota hits a peak and it goes down across residential, commercial and industrial. And basically, one thing about energy is that it's [the] sort of product when it gets cheaper, you want to use more of it, and you can use it in all sorts of different ways. Energy is the master resource. You never want to be using, overall total, less. You might want to be more efficient in the use of it in one area, and start using it in more areas. We were using electricity a lot before the digital age, now it's on steroids in the digital age. All this digital stuff relies on electricity. There's no such thing as digital without electricity.
JJ: Darren Nelson, thank you so much for [your] time this morning. It's always great to talk with you. I encourage everybody to head on over to americanexperiment.org and check out Darren's writings. And good luck on your speeches this week.
DN: Hopefully they'll learn something, and we'll have a good chitchat afterwards. Thank you for having me, and "always a pleasure."
Note: "Always a pleasure." In memoriam of Dr. Yukio Hattori.
* * *
Darren Nelson is a Policy Fellow at Center of the American Experiment. darren.nelson@americanexperiment.org
* * *
Original text here: https://www.americanexperiment.org/nimbys-renewables-affordability-highlights-from-the-jon-justice-show/
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
NIMBYs, renewables & affordability: highlights from The Jon Justice Show
Written by Darren Nelson | October 2, 2026
I had my second appearance on The Jon Justice Show earlier this week on Monday the 28th of September. The focus was on NIMBYnomics, renewables and energy affordability.
A 55 seconds clip from that appearance can be found here => https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Qp6izVuksBI
My entire appearance ... Show Full Article MINNETONKA, Minnesota, Oct. 3 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary: * * * NIMBYs, renewables & affordability: highlights from The Jon Justice Show Written by Darren Nelson | October 2, 2026 I had my second appearance on The Jon Justice Show earlier this week on Monday the 28th of September. The focus was on NIMBYnomics, renewables and energy affordability. A 55 seconds clip from that appearance can be found here => https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Qp6izVuksBI My entire appearancecan be found here from 2:38:30 to 3:09:06 => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRMHcNVzrtE
Highlights from an AI-generated transcript follow next =>
Jon Justice (JJ): Talking about space. 2001: a spend odyssey (a bipartisan renewables policy). What is this all about? Policy fellow Darren Nelson joins us on the comfy sofa here at the Center of the American experiment. Good morning, Darren. Good to see you this morning, my friend.
Darren nelson (DN): Good morning. I have a couple speeches to do this week, one tomorrow at the Council of State Governments [CSG] for the Midwest [and the BIOBY mining and energy expo after that]. And [the CSG are] talking about nuclear power and [nuclear waste]. I'm just going to go there and talk about what's been happening with energy prices since 2001. Which is when sadly a Republican governor put in the first renewables piece of legislation, and then prices have largely taken off [in] 2002 onwards.
JJ: Let's get into the piece you have regarding NIMBYs, you labeled it NIMBYnomics. The one thing I appreciate about this is how you differentiate, and you're right, between the good NIMBY and the bad NIMBY. So talk a little bit about your piece, the public choice economics, not in my backyard, and what you broke down in this bipartisan phenomenon.
DN: I'm an economist. That's the way I tend to look at things for the most part. So there's a school of thought [from] the 1960s called public choice economics, and it gives the best insight into what NIMBYs are, why there's NIMBYs, and what you might be able to do about it. Because, as you said, there's bad NIMBY situations that you would like to overcome if you can. And what they suggest [is to] essentially buy them off legally. A better word is a compensation.
They often do have genuine concerns. Sometimes [these are] more psychological. So that's a lot harder to compensate for. But sometimes [NIMBY's are worried that something is] going to lower land values. There's going to be noise. There's going to be maybe pollution, that sort of thing.
Public choice economics is basically the economics of government and politics. Some Nobel Prize winning economists realized [that] supply and demand, self interest, don't stop when you get into the institution of government. Most people kind of realize politicians are fairly self interested for the most part. But bureaucrats [are] self interested too. They have some slightly different incentives, like being entrenched over time. Politicians want to win elections. They want at least legal kickbacks, or at least good jobs to come afterwards. Public choice formalized what a lot of people strongly suspected for centuries.
JJ: So when it comes to getting a better addressing this NIMBYism, what is the aspect of [public choice economics ] for you personally that you find most compelling in terms of when people are bringing forth these arguments?
DN: As an economist, I've always been really passionate about cost benefit analysis, or at least the concept behind it. Because politicians and other people involved in politics, they always claim there's just benefits to this thing, or there's just costs to this [other] thing. No, there's always costs and benefits to everything. And what's important to realize [too is] that they also impact people differently.
The NIMBY is driven by costs being greater than benefits in a particular situation. That's what's driving [them], and those costs can be monetary, but they can also be just genuinely psychological ones. And those are real, [as] people get very motivated by something they feel [is] bad, that's like a cost to them. Or sometimes the property values will go down, or sometimes both.
One I didn't actually mention in [my article], the good NIMBY that I have the most empathy for is the one who doesn't like the pickleball courts right next to their house. Because they are unbelievably loud. It looks like a very fun sport. I've never actually played it myself. And a lot of the people who are NIMBY about pickleball courts right next to them, love the idea of pickleball, they just don't want it near them. We could talk a bit broader about data centers and nuclear power. Some people don't want them anywhere, even if it's nowhere near them. Even if they like [to] use data centers [and] appreciate the fact they exist.
JJ: But it seems like we're not allowed to have those discussions within our media of the nuances of all this. Your articles drive into the heart [that] we need to have further discussions about the benefits [and costs] of [NIMBYs, nukes and data centers].
DN: One thing I want to kind of be provocative about is [that] the economic law of supply and demand [as well as] cost benefit analysis, [are] actually more scientific, more grounded in reality, than physics. Physics actually has at least three different theories of gravity. They talk about physics [as] the ultimate science [and] it [has] risen to the level of fact. Well, they don't even know what gravity is, much less even describe it in one theory. They [have] three theories [of] Einstein, quantum mechanics, and Newton.
I'm not saying economics has all the answers and it's always right, because there's different schools of thought within economics. And I'll be very transparent about that because most people aren't. Most people just go, this is what this science says or this is what this economics says. Okay. What's your school of thought that you're drawing upon? I'm drawing upon free market schools of thought. I think they're right. They don't have all the answers, but I'm going to be transparent, unlike our friends on the left who are never transparent on those fronts.
JJ: What is it you think they're going to be keying in on regarding your view when it comes to renewables?
DN: Look, [the conferences audience] may not be convinced by the kind of economics that I hit them with and the logic of why these [renewables] are inherently costly. When you start [to] subsidize stuff, [although] it's probably counterintuitive to some people, but ultimately you incentivize: those costs to go up and up; and the subsidies to get bigger and bigger.
It's often claimed that [renewables] were expensive once upon a time, but now they're not. You just subsidize them more and more and more and more. That's not really making them cheaper. You've actually incentivized them to do the opposite. So, okay, they may not be impressed by that logic, but [perhaps they will be by] the facts of what's actually happened to prices since 2002 in Minnesota. And not just Minnesota, [but] the Midwest and also the US in general, [prices] all took off from 2002, which is when Minnesota and a whole bunch of other states started to put in these renewable policies.
If prices start going up, you'll see the usage rates go down. And that's what we've seen [after] 2008. The actual total use of electricity in Minnesota hits a peak and it goes down across residential, commercial and industrial. And basically, one thing about energy is that it's [the] sort of product when it gets cheaper, you want to use more of it, and you can use it in all sorts of different ways. Energy is the master resource. You never want to be using, overall total, less. You might want to be more efficient in the use of it in one area, and start using it in more areas. We were using electricity a lot before the digital age, now it's on steroids in the digital age. All this digital stuff relies on electricity. There's no such thing as digital without electricity.
JJ: Darren Nelson, thank you so much for [your] time this morning. It's always great to talk with you. I encourage everybody to head on over to americanexperiment.org and check out Darren's writings. And good luck on your speeches this week.
DN: Hopefully they'll learn something, and we'll have a good chitchat afterwards. Thank you for having me, and "always a pleasure."
Note: "Always a pleasure." In memoriam of Dr. Yukio Hattori.
* * *
Darren Nelson is a Policy Fellow at Center of the American Experiment. darren.nelson@americanexperiment.org
* * *
Original text here: https://www.americanexperiment.org/nimbys-renewables-affordability-highlights-from-the-jon-justice-show/
[Category: ThinkTank]
Center of the American Experiment Issues Commentary: How the DFL Trifecta Hiked Sales Taxes and Hit Affordability
MINNETONKA, Minnesota, Oct. 3 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary:
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How the DFL trifecta hiked sales taxes and hit affordability
Written by John Phelan | October 2, 2026
In July 2022, Minnesota's average combined state and local sales tax rate was 7.49%, which was lower than in 16 other states, according to the Tax Foundation (Figure 1).
[View figure in the link at bottom]
For January this year, Tax Foundation data show that Minnesota's average combined state and local ... Show Full Article MINNETONKA, Minnesota, Oct. 3 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary: * * * How the DFL trifecta hiked sales taxes and hit affordability Written by John Phelan | October 2, 2026 In July 2022, Minnesota's average combined state and local sales tax rate was 7.49%, which was lower than in 16 other states, according to the Tax Foundation (Figure 1). [View figure in the link at bottom] For January this year, Tax Foundation data show that Minnesota's average combined state and localsales tax rate was up to 8.14%, which was now lower than in just 14 other states (Figure 2).
[View figure in the link at bottom]
The reason for this is a series of local sales tax impositions and hikes either passed or enabled by that "historic" 2023 DFL trifecta.
The first of these new taxes was a 1% sales tax imposed in the seven-county metro which came into effect on October 1, 2023: 0.75% to fund new transportation spending and 0.25% for new spending on housing.
In addition, the Legislature also authorized more than three dozen cities and counties to seek voter approval of local sales taxes ranging from 0.25% to 1.25%. Table 1 shows those sales and use taxes imposed or increased between October 1, 2023, and July 1, 2025. In June 2023, I gave this example of how these might work:
Consider a retailer in Woodbury where a sale of $100 is subject to Minnesota state sales tax (6.875%) and Washington County Transit sales tax (0.5%) so that total sales tax is $7.38. Just across the St. Croix in Hudson, Wisconsin, a similar retailer making a sale of $100 would levy Wisconsin state sales tax (5.00%) and St. Croix county sales tax (0.5%) so that total sales tax is $5.50. Now, add to that Woodbury sale the 1.0% metro sales tax and Woodbury's own proposed sales tax of 0.5% and the sales tax on that $100 transaction rises to $8.88, 61% higher than in Hudson.
* * *
Table 1: Changes to sales and use taxes
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In November 2023, I noted that "sales taxes are not the worst way for a government to raise revenue," but I also pointed out that we have to ask, "how high are the other taxes the government levies?" and in Minnesota the answer is generally, "very," and they only ever get higher. Whether it is the property tax, gas tax, tab fees, or sales tax, the 2023/2024 trifecta made that heavy burden heavier and squeezed affordability for Minnesotans.
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John Phelan is an Economist at the Center of the American Experiment.
john.phelan@americanexperiment.org
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Original text here: https://www.americanexperiment.org/how-the-dfl-trifecta-hiked-sales-taxes-and-hit-affordability/
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
How the DFL trifecta hiked sales taxes and hit affordability
Written by John Phelan | October 2, 2026
In July 2022, Minnesota's average combined state and local sales tax rate was 7.49%, which was lower than in 16 other states, according to the Tax Foundation (Figure 1).
[View figure in the link at bottom]
For January this year, Tax Foundation data show that Minnesota's average combined state and local ... Show Full Article MINNETONKA, Minnesota, Oct. 3 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary: * * * How the DFL trifecta hiked sales taxes and hit affordability Written by John Phelan | October 2, 2026 In July 2022, Minnesota's average combined state and local sales tax rate was 7.49%, which was lower than in 16 other states, according to the Tax Foundation (Figure 1). [View figure in the link at bottom] For January this year, Tax Foundation data show that Minnesota's average combined state and localsales tax rate was up to 8.14%, which was now lower than in just 14 other states (Figure 2).
[View figure in the link at bottom]
The reason for this is a series of local sales tax impositions and hikes either passed or enabled by that "historic" 2023 DFL trifecta.
The first of these new taxes was a 1% sales tax imposed in the seven-county metro which came into effect on October 1, 2023: 0.75% to fund new transportation spending and 0.25% for new spending on housing.
In addition, the Legislature also authorized more than three dozen cities and counties to seek voter approval of local sales taxes ranging from 0.25% to 1.25%. Table 1 shows those sales and use taxes imposed or increased between October 1, 2023, and July 1, 2025. In June 2023, I gave this example of how these might work:
Consider a retailer in Woodbury where a sale of $100 is subject to Minnesota state sales tax (6.875%) and Washington County Transit sales tax (0.5%) so that total sales tax is $7.38. Just across the St. Croix in Hudson, Wisconsin, a similar retailer making a sale of $100 would levy Wisconsin state sales tax (5.00%) and St. Croix county sales tax (0.5%) so that total sales tax is $5.50. Now, add to that Woodbury sale the 1.0% metro sales tax and Woodbury's own proposed sales tax of 0.5% and the sales tax on that $100 transaction rises to $8.88, 61% higher than in Hudson.
* * *
Table 1: Changes to sales and use taxes
* * *
In November 2023, I noted that "sales taxes are not the worst way for a government to raise revenue," but I also pointed out that we have to ask, "how high are the other taxes the government levies?" and in Minnesota the answer is generally, "very," and they only ever get higher. Whether it is the property tax, gas tax, tab fees, or sales tax, the 2023/2024 trifecta made that heavy burden heavier and squeezed affordability for Minnesotans.
* * *
John Phelan is an Economist at the Center of the American Experiment.
john.phelan@americanexperiment.org
* * *
Original text here: https://www.americanexperiment.org/how-the-dfl-trifecta-hiked-sales-taxes-and-hit-affordability/
[Category: ThinkTank]
America First Policy Institute: Treasury Confirms Married Couples Can Give $3,400 Under the Education Freedom Tax Credit
WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 -- The America First Policy Institute issued the following news release:
* * *
Treasury Confirms Married Couples Can Give $3,400 Under the Education Freedom Tax Credit
October 2, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C--The America First Policy Institute (AFPI) applauded the U.S. Department of the Treasury for releasing proposed regulations implementing the Education Freedom Tax Credit (EFTC), the first federal scholarship tax credit and the largest expansion of school choice in American history.
In a major win for children across the country, the rules confirm that each spouse filing jointly ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 -- The America First Policy Institute issued the following news release: * * * Treasury Confirms Married Couples Can Give $3,400 Under the Education Freedom Tax Credit October 2, 2026 WASHINGTON, D.C--The America First Policy Institute (AFPI) applauded the U.S. Department of the Treasury for releasing proposed regulations implementing the Education Freedom Tax Credit (EFTC), the first federal scholarship tax credit and the largest expansion of school choice in American history. In a major win for children across the country, the rules confirm that each spouse filing jointlycan claim the full $1,700 credit. That means a married couple can give up to $3,400 to scholarship granting organizations (SGOs) and receive a dollar-for-dollar credit for every dollar donated. This provides needed clarity for millions of married households and will unlock more giving to SGOs, putting more scholarships in the hands of children.
Treasury released temporary regulations that set the procedures for the credit's successful launch, along with proposed regulations open for public comment through December 2026. Together, these rules give donors, SGOs, and states greater confidence as they prepare for the credit to open on January 1, 2027. The rules also reflect several recommendations AFPI made in its public comment last December.
"Governors in the 20 states that have not yet opted in, several of whom said they were waiting to review the regulations, now have answers and every reason to opt in," said Erika Donalds, Chair of Education Opportunity at AFPI. "Now the only question is whether their families get these scholarships or watch the dollars go to children in other states."
States that stay on the sidelines will forfeit billions in charitable giving, according to AFPI's analysis, as donations will instead fund scholarships for children in 30 other participating states.
"Under these rules, an Education Freedom Tax Credit scholarship can be seamlessly stacked with a state-level school choice program," said James Paul, Director of State Education Policy at AFPI. "States with existing programs can use the federal credit to supercharge school choice options for families."
Treasury has committed to future guidance clarifying qualified expenses and which specific learning environments are eligible for scholarships. AFPI will continue working to ensure children in homeschools, microschools, and hybrid programs aren't left out simply because their preferred education doesn't look like a traditional classroom.
* * *
Original text here: https://americafirstpolicy.com/issues/treasury-confirms-married-couples-can-give-3400-under-the-education-freedom-tax-credit/
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Treasury Confirms Married Couples Can Give $3,400 Under the Education Freedom Tax Credit
October 2, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C--The America First Policy Institute (AFPI) applauded the U.S. Department of the Treasury for releasing proposed regulations implementing the Education Freedom Tax Credit (EFTC), the first federal scholarship tax credit and the largest expansion of school choice in American history.
In a major win for children across the country, the rules confirm that each spouse filing jointly ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 -- The America First Policy Institute issued the following news release: * * * Treasury Confirms Married Couples Can Give $3,400 Under the Education Freedom Tax Credit October 2, 2026 WASHINGTON, D.C--The America First Policy Institute (AFPI) applauded the U.S. Department of the Treasury for releasing proposed regulations implementing the Education Freedom Tax Credit (EFTC), the first federal scholarship tax credit and the largest expansion of school choice in American history. In a major win for children across the country, the rules confirm that each spouse filing jointlycan claim the full $1,700 credit. That means a married couple can give up to $3,400 to scholarship granting organizations (SGOs) and receive a dollar-for-dollar credit for every dollar donated. This provides needed clarity for millions of married households and will unlock more giving to SGOs, putting more scholarships in the hands of children.
Treasury released temporary regulations that set the procedures for the credit's successful launch, along with proposed regulations open for public comment through December 2026. Together, these rules give donors, SGOs, and states greater confidence as they prepare for the credit to open on January 1, 2027. The rules also reflect several recommendations AFPI made in its public comment last December.
"Governors in the 20 states that have not yet opted in, several of whom said they were waiting to review the regulations, now have answers and every reason to opt in," said Erika Donalds, Chair of Education Opportunity at AFPI. "Now the only question is whether their families get these scholarships or watch the dollars go to children in other states."
States that stay on the sidelines will forfeit billions in charitable giving, according to AFPI's analysis, as donations will instead fund scholarships for children in 30 other participating states.
"Under these rules, an Education Freedom Tax Credit scholarship can be seamlessly stacked with a state-level school choice program," said James Paul, Director of State Education Policy at AFPI. "States with existing programs can use the federal credit to supercharge school choice options for families."
Treasury has committed to future guidance clarifying qualified expenses and which specific learning environments are eligible for scholarships. AFPI will continue working to ensure children in homeschools, microschools, and hybrid programs aren't left out simply because their preferred education doesn't look like a traditional classroom.
* * *
Original text here: https://americafirstpolicy.com/issues/treasury-confirms-married-couples-can-give-3400-under-the-education-freedom-tax-credit/
[Category: ThinkTank]
America First Policy Institute: Myths vs. Facts - Camp Safety
WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 -- The America First Policy Institute issued the following fact sheet:
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Myths vs. Facts: Camp Safety
October 2, 2026
MYTH: Camps are regulated like schools and childcare centers that serve the same children.
FACT: Camps face looser standards than schools, and many states exempt entire categories of camps from licensure and the inspection, screening, and registration that come with it.
* In many states, day programs, religious camps, and municipal recreation programs fall outside child care licensing, and the American Camp Association's voluntary accreditation covers ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 -- The America First Policy Institute issued the following fact sheet: * * * Myths vs. Facts: Camp Safety October 2, 2026 MYTH: Camps are regulated like schools and childcare centers that serve the same children. FACT: Camps face looser standards than schools, and many states exempt entire categories of camps from licensure and the inspection, screening, and registration that come with it. * In many states, day programs, religious camps, and municipal recreation programs fall outside child care licensing, and the American Camp Association's voluntary accreditation coversabout 2,400 of the more than 20,000 camps serving 26 million campers a year.
* A Bethany, CT, parks employee charged in 2024 with abusing children at the town-run camp had never been screened there, though he passed fingerprint and registry checks when the town's schools hired him in 2019. The state Office of the Child Advocate found the omission, "while egregious from the perspective of child safety, was not a violation of the law."
MYTH: A licensed camp that passes its state inspection is a safe camp.
FACT: Camp Mystic was licensed and passed its annual inspection two days before the July 4, 2025, flood killed 25 campers and two counselors. The inspection confirmed an emergency plan existed but not what it said.
* The inspectors were sanitarians, certified in clean water and waste disposal, not emergency response. The plan told campers to shelter in place during a flood and had no evacuation procedure; staff were never trained to evacuate.
* A flash flood warning went out at 1:14 a.m., but none of the 39 or more adults on site had an assigned emergency role, and evacuation began only after 3:00 a.m. The Texas Legislature's joint investigation found every camper had time to reach safety on foot.
MYTH: Every adult working at a camp has passed a background check.
FACT: Whether a camp worker is screened depends on the type of camp, its state, and how the worker was hired, and the checks that are run often miss out-of-state records.
* In an FBI pilot of national fingerprint checks, more than 6% of prospective volunteers had records of concern, 40% of them in another state. Congress made the check permanent in 2018, but implementation still lags.
* In Ohio, a registered sex offender worked for weeks at a children's camp through a staffing agency and the camp's cleaning contractor, and the camp did not know who he was.
* A 2025 Texas bill to write background checks into statute passed the House 128 to 3 and died without a Senate hearing. Similarly, Alabama's 2026 Sarah Marsh Heaven's 27 Camp Safety Act bars camps from retaining staff whose background check reveals a sexual or violent conviction but does not expressly require every camp to check every staff member.
MYTH: Parents can easily look up a camp's safety record before enrolling.
FACT: No national system tracks deaths, injuries, or abuse at camps, and parents usually cannot confirm a camp's license, see its inspection findings, or learn what happened there last summer.
* When a five-year-old nearly drowned at a New York camp, a county health inspector found too few lifeguards at the pool, a problem cited before, and his parents had no place to look up that history.
MYTH: Drowning is not a camp problem once a lifeguard is on duty.
FACT: Drowning is the leading cause of death for children ages one to four and the second leading cause of unintentional injury death for ages five to 14, and camp drownings have happened with lifeguards on duty and supervision rules on the books.
* Pools are among the most common features at day camps in the American Camp Association's member survey. In 2022, six-year-old T.J. Mister drowned at a summer camp run by St. Louis County, MO, and in 2024, a six-year-old drowned in a New Jersey day camp pool with a lifeguard on duty.
* New York mandates lifeguard ratios and swim assessments, yet all three non-fatal drownings at its regulated camps in 2025 involved deficiencies in those requirements.
MYTH: Families can hold a negligent camp accountable in court.
FACT: Waivers, charitable immunity, and confidential settlements often stand between families and accountability and keep the failures behind an injury or abuse case from public view.
* In some states, a parent's signed waiver bars a child's negligence claim unless the camp acted with gross negligence, recklessness, or willful misconduct.
* Trey Carlock, abused as a child by a director at Missouri's Kanakuk Kamps, settled under a nondisclosure agreement so restrictive his family says he feared discussing the abuse even in therapy. He died by suicide in 2019 at age 28. Missouri and Texas voided such agreements in 2025 under "Trey's Law."
MYTH: Stronger camp safety laws will close small, rural, and church camps.
FACT: When mandates outrun what camps can afford, safe camps shut down and no child is safer. The remedy is standards every camp can meet, not exemptions for the camps serving the most children.
* Roughly 80% of camps are nonprofits, with many of them faith-based. Texas's post-flood rules required fiber-optic service at every licensed camp. Rural operators put the cost above $100,000; 19 camps sued; and the state agreed to accept cellular, microwave, or satellite service instead.
* In Iowa, where church-related youth programs are exempt from child care licensing, deputies removed 88 children from a faith-based camp over abuse and endangerment allegations.
AFPI'S SIX PILLARS FOR SAFER CAMPS
The six pillars below define what every parent should expect from any camp in America. Achieving them requires state, local, and federal governments working together.
1. Preparedness: When disaster strikes, the adults in charge should already know what to do, which requires a plan suited to the campground and practiced by staff before the season begins.
2. Accountability and Coordination: Parents cannot verify a camp's flood risk, emergency plan, or hiring practices on their own and depend on state and local oversight, which works only when standards are written into law, county emergency officials know which camps operate locally, and operators who ignore a known danger face real consequences.
3. Rural and Remote Infrastructure: Many camps sit in remote areas with unreliable cell and broadband service, where a warning can be issued and never arrive. Every camp, wherever it is, should be able to receive emergency alerts and call for help.
4. Faith-Based and Nonprofit Camps: Most camps are nonprofits, many run by churches on limited budgets. They should meet the same safety and screening standards as every other camp, with reasonable timelines and help to comply and stay open, because exempting them leaves their campers less protected.
5. Screening & Abuse Prevention: Many camp workers never take a background check. Every employee and volunteer should pass a fingerprint-based check, every adult working with campers should be required to report suspected abuse, and settlements should not be allowed to keep abuse confidential.
6. Parental Communication and Transparency: Parents usually cannot find a camp's license status, inspection results, or safety record before enrolling. That information should be public, and every camp should be able to reach families reliably in an emergency.
* * *
Greg Glod
Director, Law and Justice
* * *
Original text here: https://americafirstpolicy.com/issues/myths-vs-facts-camp-safety/
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Myths vs. Facts: Camp Safety
October 2, 2026
MYTH: Camps are regulated like schools and childcare centers that serve the same children.
FACT: Camps face looser standards than schools, and many states exempt entire categories of camps from licensure and the inspection, screening, and registration that come with it.
* In many states, day programs, religious camps, and municipal recreation programs fall outside child care licensing, and the American Camp Association's voluntary accreditation covers ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 -- The America First Policy Institute issued the following fact sheet: * * * Myths vs. Facts: Camp Safety October 2, 2026 MYTH: Camps are regulated like schools and childcare centers that serve the same children. FACT: Camps face looser standards than schools, and many states exempt entire categories of camps from licensure and the inspection, screening, and registration that come with it. * In many states, day programs, religious camps, and municipal recreation programs fall outside child care licensing, and the American Camp Association's voluntary accreditation coversabout 2,400 of the more than 20,000 camps serving 26 million campers a year.
* A Bethany, CT, parks employee charged in 2024 with abusing children at the town-run camp had never been screened there, though he passed fingerprint and registry checks when the town's schools hired him in 2019. The state Office of the Child Advocate found the omission, "while egregious from the perspective of child safety, was not a violation of the law."
MYTH: A licensed camp that passes its state inspection is a safe camp.
FACT: Camp Mystic was licensed and passed its annual inspection two days before the July 4, 2025, flood killed 25 campers and two counselors. The inspection confirmed an emergency plan existed but not what it said.
* The inspectors were sanitarians, certified in clean water and waste disposal, not emergency response. The plan told campers to shelter in place during a flood and had no evacuation procedure; staff were never trained to evacuate.
* A flash flood warning went out at 1:14 a.m., but none of the 39 or more adults on site had an assigned emergency role, and evacuation began only after 3:00 a.m. The Texas Legislature's joint investigation found every camper had time to reach safety on foot.
MYTH: Every adult working at a camp has passed a background check.
FACT: Whether a camp worker is screened depends on the type of camp, its state, and how the worker was hired, and the checks that are run often miss out-of-state records.
* In an FBI pilot of national fingerprint checks, more than 6% of prospective volunteers had records of concern, 40% of them in another state. Congress made the check permanent in 2018, but implementation still lags.
* In Ohio, a registered sex offender worked for weeks at a children's camp through a staffing agency and the camp's cleaning contractor, and the camp did not know who he was.
* A 2025 Texas bill to write background checks into statute passed the House 128 to 3 and died without a Senate hearing. Similarly, Alabama's 2026 Sarah Marsh Heaven's 27 Camp Safety Act bars camps from retaining staff whose background check reveals a sexual or violent conviction but does not expressly require every camp to check every staff member.
MYTH: Parents can easily look up a camp's safety record before enrolling.
FACT: No national system tracks deaths, injuries, or abuse at camps, and parents usually cannot confirm a camp's license, see its inspection findings, or learn what happened there last summer.
* When a five-year-old nearly drowned at a New York camp, a county health inspector found too few lifeguards at the pool, a problem cited before, and his parents had no place to look up that history.
MYTH: Drowning is not a camp problem once a lifeguard is on duty.
FACT: Drowning is the leading cause of death for children ages one to four and the second leading cause of unintentional injury death for ages five to 14, and camp drownings have happened with lifeguards on duty and supervision rules on the books.
* Pools are among the most common features at day camps in the American Camp Association's member survey. In 2022, six-year-old T.J. Mister drowned at a summer camp run by St. Louis County, MO, and in 2024, a six-year-old drowned in a New Jersey day camp pool with a lifeguard on duty.
* New York mandates lifeguard ratios and swim assessments, yet all three non-fatal drownings at its regulated camps in 2025 involved deficiencies in those requirements.
MYTH: Families can hold a negligent camp accountable in court.
FACT: Waivers, charitable immunity, and confidential settlements often stand between families and accountability and keep the failures behind an injury or abuse case from public view.
* In some states, a parent's signed waiver bars a child's negligence claim unless the camp acted with gross negligence, recklessness, or willful misconduct.
* Trey Carlock, abused as a child by a director at Missouri's Kanakuk Kamps, settled under a nondisclosure agreement so restrictive his family says he feared discussing the abuse even in therapy. He died by suicide in 2019 at age 28. Missouri and Texas voided such agreements in 2025 under "Trey's Law."
MYTH: Stronger camp safety laws will close small, rural, and church camps.
FACT: When mandates outrun what camps can afford, safe camps shut down and no child is safer. The remedy is standards every camp can meet, not exemptions for the camps serving the most children.
* Roughly 80% of camps are nonprofits, with many of them faith-based. Texas's post-flood rules required fiber-optic service at every licensed camp. Rural operators put the cost above $100,000; 19 camps sued; and the state agreed to accept cellular, microwave, or satellite service instead.
* In Iowa, where church-related youth programs are exempt from child care licensing, deputies removed 88 children from a faith-based camp over abuse and endangerment allegations.
AFPI'S SIX PILLARS FOR SAFER CAMPS
The six pillars below define what every parent should expect from any camp in America. Achieving them requires state, local, and federal governments working together.
1. Preparedness: When disaster strikes, the adults in charge should already know what to do, which requires a plan suited to the campground and practiced by staff before the season begins.
2. Accountability and Coordination: Parents cannot verify a camp's flood risk, emergency plan, or hiring practices on their own and depend on state and local oversight, which works only when standards are written into law, county emergency officials know which camps operate locally, and operators who ignore a known danger face real consequences.
3. Rural and Remote Infrastructure: Many camps sit in remote areas with unreliable cell and broadband service, where a warning can be issued and never arrive. Every camp, wherever it is, should be able to receive emergency alerts and call for help.
4. Faith-Based and Nonprofit Camps: Most camps are nonprofits, many run by churches on limited budgets. They should meet the same safety and screening standards as every other camp, with reasonable timelines and help to comply and stay open, because exempting them leaves their campers less protected.
5. Screening & Abuse Prevention: Many camp workers never take a background check. Every employee and volunteer should pass a fingerprint-based check, every adult working with campers should be required to report suspected abuse, and settlements should not be allowed to keep abuse confidential.
6. Parental Communication and Transparency: Parents usually cannot find a camp's license status, inspection results, or safety record before enrolling. That information should be public, and every camp should be able to reach families reliably in an emergency.
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Greg Glod
Director, Law and Justice
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Original text here: https://americafirstpolicy.com/issues/myths-vs-facts-camp-safety/
[Category: ThinkTank]
America First Policy Institute: Coverups and Concealment at NIAID - Fauci's Role in COVID-19
WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 -- The America First Policy Institute issued the following expert insights:
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Coverups and Concealment at NIAID: Fauci's Role in COVID-19
October 2, 2026
Topline Points
* Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly presented certainty to the American public while his own personal records revealed doubt, conflicting evidence, and concerns he never disclosed. No unelected bureaucrat should ever wield that level of unchecked power without transparency and accountability.
* Scientists should inform policy, not dictate it. Fauci's role during the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the danger of ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 -- The America First Policy Institute issued the following expert insights: * * * Coverups and Concealment at NIAID: Fauci's Role in COVID-19 October 2, 2026 Topline Points * Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly presented certainty to the American public while his own personal records revealed doubt, conflicting evidence, and concerns he never disclosed. No unelected bureaucrat should ever wield that level of unchecked power without transparency and accountability. * Scientists should inform policy, not dictate it. Fauci's role during the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the danger ofallowing disputed scientific judgements to drive coercive mandates without oversight or consideration of the trillion-dollar public health decisions affecting American patients and the American economy.
* Fauci's personal records reveal a public official whose arrogance and pursuit of fame led to negligence and disastrous public health decisions that disrupted schools, ruined businesses, destroyed families, and devastated the American economy.
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Introduction
For six years, Dr. Anthony Fauci has offered the country a consistent account of his conduct during the COVID-19 pandemic. He has repeatedly stated that he followed the "science" and articulated the "truth" to the public. However, Dr. Fauci's own contemporaneous notes prove otherwise.
Fauci kept thousands of pages of personal notes and journal entries on a taxpayer-funded government computer and server at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Those records capture what Fauci was saying when he thought the public was not listening. Privately, he estimated COVID-19 could resemble a "bad influenza," took personal credit for shutting down schools and businesses, discussed concerns the virus could have emerged from a lab leak while publicly downplaying the People's Republic of China's (PRC) involvement in the virus's origin, and even chronicled his "explosive" "national and international fame." The records contained self-congratulatory reflections, contradictory medical recommendations, and celebrities' private health information. Further, he placed his trust in an unreliable and compromised World Health Organization (WHO) and failed to be forthcoming or consistent about numerous facts known only to him and select federal health officials.
In July 2026, the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), released the records of Fauci's disturbing journal entries after they were obtained from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Fauci was subpoenaed to testify on the many disconcerting and alarming admissions made on his government computer before the Committee on July 29, 2026. But he declined to answer substantive questions about what he had written, invoking the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times. However, the journal he declined to explain speaks for itself.
His own journal, written for an audience of only himself, along with the emails, text messages, and testimonies that followed, reveal the truth about the interference and obfuscation: that Fauci continuously lied, misled doctors and scientists, and allowed a nation to suffer while privately congratulating himself on his own deception. The private conclusions he reached and the decisions he made disrupted the education of millions of children, devastated small businesses and the lives of working Americans, split families apart, and left economic and social consequences that lasted long after his arbitrary restrictions were lifted.
Fauci Funded Coronavirus Gain-of-Function (GOF) Work Against Presidential Orders
Fauci was likely motivated to cover up the lab leak theory, in part, by his decision to blatantly and willfully fund work at the Wuhan lab. Despite significant review processes and scrutiny created by the Obama Administration in 2014 intended to halt virtually all types of gain-of-function research, Fauci and several of NIAID's grant recipients (namely Peter Daszak and Ralph Baric) continued to push forward with their Chinese academic partners. In his journal entries, Fauci made light of this, accusing Michael Imperiale, Ph.D., and Richard Ebright, Ph.D.--both virologists who had warned extensively against gain-of-function research--of spreading a "far right wing" conspiracy that Daszak and Fauci worked together to intentionally release the virus[1]. Yet, Daszak, as an NIAID grantee, had been in direct contact with Fauci's immediate staff about the gain-of-function coronavirus research he was conducting in Wuhan--despite the funding pause (effectively a moratorium) initiated by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy on the very same research.
Gain-of-function research was so widely concerning to the international research community that even President Obama paused funding of "certain gain-of-function research projects," including those "that reasonably may be anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS [in a way that enhances] transmissibility." Despite that specific language, Peter Daszak's proposal via EcoHealth Alliance, approved by Erik Stemmy[2] (who oversaw coronavirus research under Fauci) of the NIAID, characterized it as a plan to "create MERS chimeras containing bat CoV spike genes [but with bat CoV that was] not very closely related to MERS (63-66% homology to MERS S protein), and the anticipation is that the chimeras will all be attenuated compared to MERS and unable to use the human receptor [emphasis added]." This plan was approved under the requirement that if any of the experiments resulted in a "enhanced virus growth greater than 1 log of [parent]" then Daszak would be expected to stop all experiments and report the findings to NIAID and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Instead of following the President's direct order to end this specific, dangerous GOF work, Fauci and his agency deliberately allowed it on their own terms.
Rather than closely tracking the dangerous research NIAID funded outside the President's directive, NIAID let it go unchecked. As a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NIAID directs grant money to grantees through grant officers (in this case, Jenny Greer and Erik Stemmy) and could have ended the program on any basis, but deferred to EcoHealth Alliance's self-monitoring. EcoHealth Alliance did not notify either institution, despite the explicit expectation that any increase in virus pathogenicity would immediately halt experimentation and prompt notification to relevant parties. EcoHealth Alliance withheld this experimental data until submitting its fifth annual grant report, which it failed to upload in a timely manner, as required, in 2019, allowing the research to continue despite what would have triggered a "stop work" order from NIAID. EcoHealth violated the terms of its grant and failed to submit until 2021, well after the pandemic had begun. The delayed annual report reveals that the base parent strain WIV1 had a survival rate of 71.4%, whereas the modified strain rWIV-SHC014 had a survival rate of only 25%--thereby meeting and exceeding, by NIH's later judgment, the 1-log threshold. NIAID's actions and Anthony Fauci's complicity both deserve emphasis: both blatantly ignored the letter and intent of White House memoranda and its delineated standards, refused to hold the grantee accountable to basic reporting requirements, and consequently gave a dangerous research product the runway to spiral out of control and eventually morph into a catastrophic pandemic.
The fact that this work took place at WIV amplified the risks. The biosecurity level (BSL) at which the experiments took place, BSL-2, was of a lower risk profile than was appropriate; staff from the U.S. Embassy in the PRC noted in cables that the facility "has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators" and was likely not capable of properly operating at BSL-4, the highest standardized level of biosecurity.
Fauci, in his role as NIAID director, as well as numerous NIAID staff, had ample knowledge that gain-of-function research on coronaviruses could result in harm to Americans. The dangerous SHC014 spike referenced was identified by Ralph Baric in a 2015 study as a systemic risk, writing that "if SHC014 spike-containing viruses recombined with virulent CoV backbones [Note: exactly the research that Daszak was conducting] then epidemic disease may be the result in humans." Both Baric and Daszak co-submitted a proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2018, specifically pitching this project as military research to proactively study (and enhance) these diseases to better protect military service members. The proposal itself, though submitted to DARPA and ultimately unfunded, included Vincent Munster of NIAID and others at HHS, suggesting some level of NIAID involvement. The 2018 report for the Daszak grant, which was reviewed by NIAID, also mentioned that gain-of-function proposals similar to the WIV1 grant were discussed "within National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Office [and] Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency." In other words, NIAID leadership had ample opportunities to recognize that their grant project was developing a chimeric virus that was perfectly suited to create a pandemic.
There is little doubt that Fauci and his agency funded this work and blatantly turned a blind eye to its monitoring; Fauci was well aware of the portfolio that included coronavirus research. Fauci was individually made aware of Daszak's efforts on coronavirus research in October of 2017, with Daszak specifically emailing Anthony Fauci, Erik Stemmy, and David Morens about his grant proposal and noting that "[the] work was supported by a NIAID [grant] that Erik Stemmy is the Program Officer for, and that I'm [principal investigator] on." The email followed an in-person meeting between Fauci and Daszak at the 2017 Cell Symposium, where both men spoke.
Even if not for this meeting, Fauci, as chair of NIAID's Advisory Council, which, according to its own page, "reviews and approves NIAID research concepts [and provides] final review of all NIAID research and training grants," had direct oversight and should have been directly aware, by nature of his position as director, of the impropriety of this grant, the recipients' conduct, and the inherent risks of the research, and yet it continued. Negligent monitoring of both the direct recipient--EcoHealth Alliance--and the subrecipients, such as WIV, permitted much riskier conduct than would otherwise have occurred. NIH officials--specifically Erik Stemmy and Jenny Greer--took EcoHealth Alliance at its word that "its work was not subject to the GOF pause [and] recently published work [has demonstrated] that similar chimeric viruses exhibited reduced [infectiousness]."[3] Stemmy and Greer initially flagged the proposal but adopted Daszak's justifications as a reason to approve the request despite the underlying literature from the coronavirus research space showing that WIV1 had the capacity to infect human airway cells.
This failure of oversight is even more flagrant because NIAID program officers are explicitly tasked for "uphold[ing] government regulations on the appropriate use of federal grant funds," including ensuring that funded research does not violate White House memoranda or other programmatic standards.
Fauci was informed, in talking points prepared for him on January 27, 2020, of the potential connection between NIAID, Peter Daszak, and the then-burgeoning outbreak in Wuhan, and seems to have been alarmed so much as to have deliberately evaded FOIA by reaching out to Hugh Auchincloss "on [his] cell" to handle "tasks that must be done," with an email attachment of "Baric, Shi et al - Nature Medicine - SARS Gain of function.pdf" in the topline. Fauci would later clarify in deposition that these "tasks" included being "briefed on the scope of what our collaborations were and the kind of work that we were funding in China." In this context, Fauci's answer makes clear that, despite NIAID's disbursement of funds for the Daszak project, Fauci was either intentionally ignorant of or uninformed about grants he was statutorily tasked with reviewing until late January.
The funding of the Daszak program was a failure of both NIH and NIAID officials, who were either misled or critically underestimated the risk of what they were funding. Regardless, Anthony Fauci boldly defended the work and was likely involved in lifting the gain-of-function restrictions in 2017 through the promulgation of P3CO, though Daszak's work had already (improperly) been underway. Even if Daszak's work could have passed P3CO, it began improperly during the pause, and that status may have further contributed to it not being reviewed.
In either case, by January 27, 2020, the record leaves Fauci with nowhere to hide from responsibility. By then, Fauci had reason to believe that Daszak--using money NIAID had specifically provided--was conducting dangerous coronavirus research in Wuhan under his watch. He scrambled to ask his staff to determine exactly what his agency had funded and the extent of their collaborations; that much is fact. The government safeguards designed to prevent dangerous coronavirus experiments failed under his leadership. Fauci cannot be separated from the research NIAID financed, approved, and oversaw.
Fauci Covered Up the COVID-19 Lab Leak
Fauci knew the Wuhan Institute of Virology received NIAID funding through EcoHealth Alliance to conduct gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses. Fauci also knew that his agency's funding of Peter Daszak's research likely contributed to the beginning of COVID-19.
Just before the January 27 email mentioned above, Fauci's journal shows early awareness of this fact: on January 26, 2020, Fauci wrote that it was apparent the Wuhan wet market was "not the source, [but] the amplifier," primarily because of evidence of infections in early December, and that he believed it was where the virus may have "jumped from animals to humans." On January 31, Fauci's journal includes his notes from a call with several researchers, one of whom noted: "mutations around the furine [sic] cleavage site of the spike protein could not have occurred naturally since it would require an evolutionary 'jump found nowhere in bat isolates' [... and that it] could have been deliberately inserted [in a lab]." This concern being raised grows even more alarming when Fauci writes the day after that gain of function was possible because "Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in [gain of function] in coronaviruses to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor [emphasis added]." Fauci knew that Dr. Shi (and consequently, Shi's research partner, Peter Daszak) were working in Wuhan on coronaviruses.
To cover up the lab-leak theory, Fauci helped draft "The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2", later published in Nature in March 2020. Fauci's later notes in the journal from June of 2021 assert that the gain-of-function theory itself was debunked in "a Nature [journal] paper in 2020." The issue is that Fauci and other officials illegitimately guided the paper's conclusions and deliberately shaped them, undermining it as an independent scientific work. Fauci was, between his notes and conduct and 2020, engaged in significant cognitive dissonance if he was referring to the Nature paper as proof that the virus was of natural origin. The "Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2" paper was:
* Written to Explicitly "Disprove" Lab Leak: Kristian Andersen's email included a message sent to German researchers that the main body of work in the paper was meant to "disprove any type of lab theory [but] the scientific evidence isn't conclusive enough to say that we have high confidence in [any of the theories]." Beginning the paper from this premise is not a legitimate scientific inquiry.
* Improperly Influenced by Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, and Jeremy Farrar: The authors of the paper wrote and would later admit directly that the paper was "prompted" by these three above-named individuals. In later communications, Francis Collins wrote that countering the lab-leak narrative was important to preserving "science and international harmony," and further that some of the authors were improperly changing beliefs because they were, according to a 2023 House Oversight Committee report, "concerned with Dr. Fauci's and Dr. Collins' thoughts."
* Contradicted the Authors' Own Beliefs About a Lab Leak: The conclusion to the Proximal Origin journal article claimed definitively that "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible [...] SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or purposefully manipulated virus," and yet Andersen wrote in internal communications that "[if] people think it is difficult to make a CoV [virus] from scratch [one group] did it in a week" and "argument[s] about [gain of function in SARS viruses] not being feasible is not true."
* Written to Cover Up NIH Funding of GOF: An email from Anthony Fauci to Hugh Auchincloss on February 1, 2020, is widely believed to indicate that Fauci had realized (or had been told by his staff) that NIH/NIAID was funding coronavirus experiments conducted by Peter Daszak in conjunction with the Wuhan Institute of Virology that his agency funded; in short, Fauci was statutorily responsible for oversight and likely aware that, if COVID emerged from a lab, his agency was responsible for funding such research.
Despite all this information, Anthony Fauci continued to dispute and dismiss assertions that COVID could have emerged from a lab. From the publication of "Proximal Origin" onwards, Fauci deferred to the paper as fact, claiming that the paper--which Fauci never publicly disclosed he guided--was correct and unassailable science. In a National Geographic interview from May 5, 2020, Fauci referred to the paper as having "a number of very qualified evolutionary biologists [who have said] it evolved in nature and then jumped species." Fauci would later say, under oath before the Senate in May of 2021, that lab leak allegations were "entirely and completely incorrect." Fauci held this position despite several federal agencies declaring that a lab leak was not only plausible, but a probable cause of COVID-19. For example, the Defense Intelligence Agency considered a lab-leak hypothesis via recombination as early as March 2020, with an internal presentation slide on the "furin cleavage site" withheld from public releases, as well as several slides on "research underway" at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Fauci Knew the People's Republic of China Was Lying to the World
The PRC's response to COVID-19 was heavily shaped by its experiences during the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreaks of 2002-2004, when lackluster public health infrastructure and misreporting led to more infections and deaths than otherwise would have occurred. The then-director of the WHO during SARS, Gro Harlem Brundtland, admitted that "it would have been definitely helpful if [the WHO] had been able to help [China] at an earlier stage [...] next time something strange and new comes anywhere in the world[,] let us come in as quickly as possible." The PRC, at the time, engaged in extensive censorship and cover-up operations to limit the spread of information both domestically and internationally, which likely contributed to the outbreak. The World Health Organization's International Health Regulations of 2005 were adopted in response to the SARS outbreak, and the WHO also encouraged the PRC to improve domestic public health tracking systems, particularly given the PRC's inability or unwillingness to disclose information to the WHO when needed.
However, these systems' usefulness depends on the host country's willingness to disclose data to international health officials during potential outbreaks and on those officials' willingness to act on it. Employees at NIAID communicated with Ping Chen, the director of NIAID's office in the PRC, who forwarded a cable dated January 7, 2020, from the American Embassy in Beijing, along with notice that "[the Embassy] has ruled out SARS, MERS and flu." The cable reads:
"China's response to an outbreak of pneumonia cases of unknown origin in Central China's Wuhan city has been marked by increased transparency compared to past outbreaks, such as the 2003 SARS epidemic. While PRC health officials have released timely and open general information about the outbreak, a lack of epidemiologic data including an "epi curve" (a summary of dates of onset of the illness), characteristics of infected individuals, and other basic epidemiologic information - hinders better risk assessment and response by public health officials. [...] Director [Robert] Redfield offered U.S. CDC technical support; however, China CDC has not yet responded to the offer [emphasis added]."
Domestically, the PRC's instinctive response was to cover up and delay. Unknown to Western media at the time, from approximately January 5 to January 17, 2020, the PRC was experiencing a surge in cases as "hundreds of patients were appearing in hospitals not just in Wuhan but across the country." Despite coming to the conclusion that they were facing a "pandemic from a new coronavirus," Wuhan continued with mass events, and the PRC allowed "millions [to begin] traveling through [Wuhan] for Lunar New Year celebrations." This continued into later parts of January, when the WHO was provided "very minimal information [... only] minutes before it appears on [China Central Television]."
The WHO was also likely aware of human-to-human transmission, despite communicating that "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" was available in the PRC. In fact, PRC actions were already inconsistent with that messaging by January 2020. Chinese authorities were taking extreme isolation measures, such as welding the doors of infected persons, trapping them in their domiciles, on top of extreme contact-tracing and other monitoring measures.
The WHO's politicking--namely, refusing to back travel restrictions for political reasons--contributed significantly to this problem. The United States enacted travel restrictions by February 2, 2020, but the WHO continued to "advise against the application of travel or trade restrictions" on the grounds that such measures were "ineffective." Such opposition may have cost hundreds of thousands of lives globally, driven mostly by fear of lending credence to concerns about the virus during its early stages and perhaps indirectly leading to the correct casting of blame on the PRC.
Throughout it all, Fauci tracked COVID-19 closely, beginning on January 2, 2020, and noted the rapid spread of the disease in Asia and the world more broadly, but claimed to "[know] nothing of this" regarding the PRC urging the WHO not to declare a public health emergency. He would later write on January 25 that he had a suspicion that the Chinese were not "telling us everything that is going on [...] why are the Chinese reacting so dramatically by essentially shutting down the entire country?" Fauci wrote further on January 26 that he was "very skeptical about the Chinese interpretation of their [virus] data," but Fauci also argued to Alex Azar the "down side [sic] (historically) in shutting out a country" when an outbreak occurs. In short, Fauci tracked the outbreak and knew the Chinese response was disproportionate to the measures they were taking domestically, yet still fought against pre-emptive domestic countermeasures.
This information, combined with Fauci's personal knowledge that the virus was extremely likely to have been modified and then released (accidentally or otherwise) from a lab, demonstrates some level of misconduct or negligence in Fauci's statutory and institutional obligations for grant oversight and compliance.
Fauci Knew that the World Health Organization was Lying for the PRC
COVID-19 spread from the PRC, and the PRC's instinctive political response was to attempt to cover up the outbreak. The WHO's ability to politically confront the PRC was implausible from the outset because the PRC exercises significant control over the WHO through its Director.
The election of Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of Ethiopia in the 2017 World Health Organization Director's race had many downstream effects, but the most visible was that Tedros's selection was not a medical decision but a political one. During his time as the Minister for Foreign Affairs as a member of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF, a Maoist political party and armed insurgent group that overthrew the country's government in 1991), Tedros very deliberately cultivated close ties with the PRC through numerous meetings and even co-authoring propaganda pieces for China's state newspaper with its foreign minister, Wang Yi. The TPLF's Maoist sympathies and development history with Ethiopia made Tedros the PRC's preferred candidate, with the PRC's Ambassador to Ethiopia remarking at a 2018 ceremony that "[we] offered him our firm support during his election campaign [...] because he is an African; because he is an Ethiopian - competent and qualified."
Tedros' credentials as a health official are questionable, given allegations that his tenure as health minister resulted in widespread ethnic discrimination against non-Tigrayan Ethiopians as well as three cholera outbreaks that took place under his watch. In particular, Tedros was accused of "[using] donor-supported resources and aid as a tool to consolidate power" and contributing to worse health outcomes for Amhara Ethiopians through "refusing emergency healthcare [to Amharans] because of their affiliation with the opposition party" via "[withholding] of food and fertilizer."
Tedros' backing from the PRC came with strings attached, as the campaigns of those running for director-general made clear. Both finalists campaigned extensively in the PRC, widely viewed as the kingmaker, but Tedros had a longer track record with the PRC and likely won on that basis, despite his opponent's tenure as a health official, rather than as "health minister" under dubious circumstances. Upon Tedros assuming office, however, his decision-making immediately came into question: his refusal to declare a "public health emergency of international concern," or PHEIC, during the Ebola outbreaks of 2018-2019. A PHEIC is how the WHO requests international assistance to contain a public health emergency, and when Tedros refused to declare a PHEIC for Ebola, The Lancet called the decision "more political than technical."
This happened again with COVID-19; in hindsight, the WHO's refusal to declare a PHEIC boggles the mind. COVID-19 spread quickly because of Wuhan's relative connectivity within the PRC. Rather than share data on this fast-moving virus, the PRC was sharing "very minimal information" with the WHO according to an internal WHO email dated January 6, 2020. Reports from the Central Intelligence Agency and Germany's equivalent intelligence service both alleged that the PRC was specifically pressuring the WHO not to declare a public health emergency. After-action reviews by independent bodies found that "the outbreak in Wuhan is likely to have met [PHEIC criteria] by the time of the first meeting [on] 22 January," yet the declaration was delayed another week. Fauci even acknowledged this in April of 2020, when asked whether earlier action could have lessened the severity of the spread, and that such earlier action would only have been possible with PRC officials; Fauci replied: "It looks that way."
Fauci was aware that the PRC controlled the WHO and that Tedros was compromised, yet did not act to protect Americans from the WHO's fundamental bias. When pressed in interviews about why the PHEIC declaration was being delayed, Fauci wrote in his journal on January 22 that he "did not want to outguess the WHO," even as he acknowledged two days prior that it was a "situation with no question about person-to-person transmission." When Fauci was pressed by Lena Sun of the Washington Post on the rumors that officials in the U.S. government were "saying that the Chinese got to Tedros to convince him not to declare a PHEIC since it would harm their reputation," Fauci wrote, "I said [emphasis added] I knew nothing of this." Fauci's choice of language here is noteworthy.
Later, in February, despite all this information, Fauci defended Tedros from accusations that "[Tedros] would immediately tell the Chinese [about COVID-19 possibly being a gain-of-function lab leak]," even though Fauci acknowledged that several reputable epidemiologists and specialists believed that it was artificially created. Fauci would later in February write that "[Alex] Azar feels that Tedros [is] bowing to Xi Jinping who does not want USA [on a multi-national team in China...] tough situation since Tedros and WHO depends [sic] greatly on China and often bows to them," yet still deferred to the PRC on issues of information, multinational organizations, and virus origin.
Other countries acted in their own self-interest, knowing the WHO's bias. Taiwan specifically requested information from the World Health Organization on December 31, 2019, seeking clarification regarding an increase in pneumonia-like cases in Wuhan, and clarified that it was isolating and testing several infected individuals because Taiwan suspected human-to-human transmission was possible. The WHO never followed up with information, likely partly because the PRC continued to insist that Taiwan be excluded from the WHO. Significant warning time may have been lost because of the WHO's political judgments on this point alone, and Fauci kowtowed to political interests at the WHO. It is extremely unlikely that Fauci did not know any of the facts about the PRC's sponsorship of Tedros, particularly given his deliberate lack of comments to Lena Sun of the Washington Post in January of 2020, or the unreliability of the PRC in its disclosure of the facts, especially due to Fauci's knowledge of gain-of-function in Wuhan.
Fauci Knew that the Vaccine Wouldn't Stop the Spread, But Pushed It as a Requirement for Millions of Americans
The COVID-19 vaccines were presented to the American public as the one and only path out of the pandemic and lockdowns. Mask and vaccine requirements and the #StopTheSpread campaign rested on one premise: that vaccines would keep people from infecting one another and would protect vulnerable populations. Yet Anthony Fauci hid that the vaccines did not provide the level of protection against infection and transmission that the public was initially led to believe, when in fact he understood their ability to do so was extremely limited. By the summer of 2022, he and other senior health officials understood the #StopTheSpread narrative had been incorrect and chose to intentionally keep it out of the public view rather than let it interfere with the ongoing mandates.
In an August 13, 2022, journal entry, Fauci described what he called "drama" between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and its director, Rochelle Walensky, over a public statement the agency had prepared. Working with Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and other high-level health officials, Fauci wrote that they had gotten the CDC "pulled back from making the statement that the vaccines were not effective at all in preventing infection and transmission." His stated reason had nothing to do with the science, and instead, an honest public statement, he wrote, "would conflict with" the push that was underway to get Americans to take the new bivalent booster that September, and separately "would undermine the DOJ's efforts and mandates for vaccines under certain circumstances." The CDC's own scientific judgement about vaccine effectiveness was, by Fauci's own account, edited for the public to avoid interfering with the Justice Department mandates.
Fauci said that while the CDC softened the language used on its website, a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) published that same week still had what he called the original "damning language," prompting an angry call from Biden health advisor Larry Horowitz, who predicted Walensky would be fired once White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain returned from his vacation. She was not, but this entire encounter shows that the "drama" and unprofessionalism behind closed doors were the real drivers of public health policy at the time, not the science that the health officials were aware of.
Finally, in June 2024, Fauci testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic about whether the COVID-19 vaccines stopped transmission. Fauci acknowledged that the first generation of vaccines did have some effect against infection and transmission, but emphasized the protection was "not 100 percent" and "not a high effect." More importantly, he admitted that the durability of protection against infection was "relatively limited," while protection against severe disease, hospitalization, and death lasted longer. Fauci further conceded that this distinction was not fully understood at the beginning of the vaccine campaign. According to his testimony, officials initially believed that vaccination would prevent infection and therefore prevent transmission. However, as time went on, it became clear that this protection was not as strong as they had told the public.
The public health response increasingly treated vaccination as a means of controlling transmission throughout society. Mask and vaccine requirements, among other restrictions, were justified on the premise that they would prevent individuals from spreading the virus to others around them. Fauci himself later acknowledged that this premise did not hold true for long. In fact, in one interview, Fauci acknowledged that despite being vaccinated and receiving multiple booster doses, he still became infected with COVID-19. He explained that the vaccines had not protected him from infection, but believed they had protected him from a severe disease. In his own words, the vaccines "do very well in protecting you against severe disease," but "don't do as well in preventing infection," a statement that is irrelevant to low-risk populations. All of this would be fine if the entire vaccine campaign were not based on the #StopTheSpread narrative that led Americans to believe they were putting those around them at risk by denying the vaccine.
Fauci Knew the Vaccine Could Lead to First-Trimester Miscarriages
Pregnant women had been excluded from the initial COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials entirely, meaning that when the vaccines rolled out to the public in December 2020, no one--including Fauci--actually had safety data on how the vaccine affected pregnancy. In fact, it is not uncommon for vaccine clinical trials to exclude pregnant women; however, Dr. Fauci had privately identified potential concerns with pregnant women taking the vaccine and chose to repeatedly tell the public they were safe anyway. Newly released text messages from Anthony Fauci's government-issued phone show that Fauci himself identified a specific, plausible mechanism for miscarriage risk within weeks of the vaccine rollout, and then spent the next several months reassuring the public, specifically including pregnant women, that there was nothing to worry about.
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Figure 1. Text Exchange Between Vivek Murthy, Anthony Fauci, and Rochelle Walensky; Jan. 25, 2021
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Note: Dr. Fauci's private text messages, provided by Chairmen Ron Johnson and Rand Paul (full exchange linked here (https://www.ronjohnson.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/text-message-Fauci-redacted_Redacted.pdf).
On January 25, 2021, then-Surgeon General nominee Vivek Murthy texted Fauci and then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky asking whether there was any reason to prefer vaccinating pregnant women earlier or later in pregnancy. Fauci initially downplayed the question entirely, writing that there was "no data or theoretical reason" to prefer one timing over another. But minutes later, without prompting, he raised precisely such a theoretical concern on his own. Because many people ran fevers and had strong immune reactions after the second dose, he wrote that reaction "theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester." Walensky agreed it was "a good point," and Murthy went on to flag his own worry that the World Health Organization's caution around the vaccine for pregnant women could prove "damaging to public confidence."
This exchange is significant because, behind closed doors, three of the most powerful health officials in the country privately agreed there was a reason to worry about first-trimester miscarriage, yet none of them raised that concern with the American public.
Instead, on February 3, 2021, about a week after that text exchange, Fauci appeared in a Journal of the American Medical Association livestream and told the public that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had found "thus far no red flags" concerning pregnant women. His overall message was reassuring to concerned pregnant women, and he did not share the concerns he had personally raised days earlier. He would continue to spread the same reassuring note for months afterward, later telling the public it was "pretty clear that pregnant women should get vaccinated." Fauci never disclosed that he had discovered a pathway to miscarriage that, by his own admission in the text chain, no one yet had the data to rule out.
Beyond Fauci keeping his apprehensions private, there are far more concerns with pregnant women receiving the vaccine in the first place. Pregnant women are, on average, young and otherwise healthy--completely outside the population to whom COVID-19 posed the greatest threat. CDC's own data show that more than 81% of confirmed COVID-19 deaths occurred in people over the age of 65, with the death rate for that group being roughly 97 times higher than for those aged 18-29. As Fauci himself would go on to concede years later, the vaccines were not effective at preventing infection and transmission in the first place (see section above). Fauci continuously pressured a low-risk population (young, healthy women) into accepting an unknown risk to their unborn children for no gain other than damage to public confidence in the vaccine.
The first trimester of pregnancy is the period of organogenesis, or the 12-week window in which a baby's major organs and structures form for the first time. Since most birth defects occur during the first trimester, as the major structures of the body form during that window, clinicians and health providers are generally extremely risk-averse about activities that could impact the baby. After the first trimester, the baby becomes progressively less vulnerable to external threats. Despite knowing this, Fauci said that the fever and immune response common after the second vaccine dose "could be associated with miscarriage in the first trimester," rejecting the sensible risk aversion that practitioners generally have towards women in their first trimester.
In addition, the primary safety data federal officials relied on to reassure the public was not built to ensure safety in the most vulnerable weeks of pregnancy. The Shimabukuro study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM)--the CDC's own safety analysis of the vaccine in pregnancy--enrolled 827 pregnant women, but 700 of them (85%) received their first vaccine dose in the third trimester. This is long after organogenesis has been completed and the period that carries the largest miscarriage risk has passed. The study's own statisticians later acknowledged this was a large flaw with the study, and a subsequent letter to NEJM noted that women vaccinated in the third trimester "should be excluded" from any miscarriage-rate calculation entirely, because they had already passed week 20 in their pregnancy at the time of their vaccination. But the damage was already done. Countless news outlets had already cited this flawed study to prove the vaccine's safety for pregnant women.
The risk Fauci identified privately was never quantified, never ruled out, and never disclosed to the women deciding whether to vaccinate. Unborn children are the most vulnerable population, and Fauci put them at risk repeatedly during the COVID-19 pandemic by manipulating their mothers for his own glorification, showing how many vaccines he had pushed onto the public.
Fauci Knew Closing Schools and Businesses Was Detrimental and Social Distancing Was Arbitrary--He Pushed for the Mandates Anyway
School closures, universal masking, and the "six feet apart" rule were all justified under the umbrella of "social distancing," and Fauci privately acknowledged serious doubts about each, even as he continued to promote them publicly.
On school closures, Fauci wrote on February 23, 2020, that "children have very low rate of infection," yet states such as New York and California nonetheless used his advice to justify closing schools. By April 10, 2020, when asked about Governor Ron DeSantis' plans to reopen Florida schools by May, Fauci remarked that he believed "children in school could spread the virus." His own thinking remained inconsistent: later entries from August 2020 acknowledged the "psychological effects on children [...] dependence on schools for breakfast and lunch [... and] deleterious effects on working parents," yet Fauci continued to condition any "approval" of reopening on state infection rates. When the President insisted on opening schools at all costs, Fauci continued to disagree, supporting his allies in urban areas who wanted to keep schools closed at the behest of the teachers' unions. On July 28, 2020, he joined a fireside chat with Randi Weingarten, the head of the largest teachers' union in America. He said that while getting kids back to school is important, the safety of the students, teachers, and staff is the most important. That same day, Weingarten said the union would consider lawsuits and strikes if reopenings were "unsafe." The unions would point to Fauci's statement through 2021, going so far as to pressure the CDC not to change any safety metrics that would explicitly lead to schools reopening.
He would not concede the point publicly until 2024, admitting that "keeping [schools closed] for a year was not a good idea"--a striking reversal given that his own journal entries at the time excoriated those who questioned his advice.
Fauci's approach to universal masking, particularly in schools, followed the same deceitful pattern of private doubt and public certainty. In his now-notorious email to Sylvia Burwell, released via a 2021 FOIA request, Fauci described "the average mask you buy in the drugstore" as "not really effective." That assessment was never rectified for the public, and Fauci never used his platform to push for a different approach. Instead, the policy that reached schools was a blunt, one-size-fits-all mandate resting on the same masks Fauci privately doubted, imposed on millions of children regardless of age or risk. School closures and mandatory masking together produced significant long-term harm to America's children. Countless studies now document COVID-era learning loss that erased years of test score gains, worsened mental health among children, adolescents, and teenagers, and caused lasting damage to the speech, language, and emotional development of the youngest children forced into remote learning or masked in-person instruction.
The "six feet apart" rule that underpinned all of these policies--and reshaped American life for over a year--has similarly obscure origins. It was first promulgated in a February 11, 2020, notice from the CDC, which described medium risk as being seated "within 6 feet (two meters) of a traveler with symptomatic laboratory-confirmed 2019-nCoV infection," a standard drawn from commercial air travel and estimated as "approximately 2 seats in each direction" from an infected person--not a general-purpose social distancing rule.
That metric came under scrutiny almost immediately from within the first Trump Administration. Then-Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Abuse Elinore McCance-Katz wrote in a June 2020 memo to the CDC that she "hope[s] that CDC will revisit this decision or at least tell us that there is more and stronger data to support this rule than what I have been able to find online [...] if not, they should pull it back." As McCance-Katz later elaborated in 2022, her concerns stemmed from isolation standards that "lacked a balanced approach that consider[s] all health and mental health needs" of Americans. CDC ignored her request and never revised the standard. Meanwhile, Fauci actively promoted the rule to the public and took credit for its real-world consequences. In an April 10, 2020 interview, he said, "the perfect solution" was for "everyone at all times" to stay six feet apart, and pushed to apply that standard "broadly throughout the country." He was not just describing the federal regulation from an outside perspective. His diary personally shows how he talked officials into applying the rules:
"I spoke with Bill de Blasio (Mayor - NYC) and convinced him based on what I was saying publicly and my conversation tonight to close the NYC schools (he had already decided based on what I was saying on TV). I went on to tell him he should close the bars and restaurants in NYC. He said that he would base this on my recommendation. I had a similar call with Ann O'Leary, the COS of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. Ann said that based on my TV appearances today and yesterday, the Governor has decided to close the schools in California as well as the bars and restaurants [emphasis added]."
The following day, he wrote about pushing federal guidelines to "close schools where there is community spread"--the same six-foot standard McCance-Katz said the CDC had no data behind. Additionally, former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb alleged in 2021 that the CDC's initial internal request had been for 10 feet, with 6 feet adopted as a compromise--though this claim is difficult to reconcile with the timing of the CDC's actual February 2020 guidance.
Fauci eventually confirmed there was never a scientific basis for the rule. He would later tell the House Oversight Committee in 2024 that six-foot restrictions "sort of just appeared [...] it sort of just appeared, that six feet is going to be the distance [...] I've seen in literature [...] the spray and what the distance of the spray is." Separately, Fauci mentioned in a House hearing that "there wasn't a scientific evaluation" of the six-foot threshold, and that the CDC likely relied on droplet studies from "years ago." Despite disclaiming personal responsibility for the guidance, Fauci--as the government's most visible and influential voice on the pandemic--was well positioned to challenge it and did not.
The cumulative damage from these measures was immense, and its effects persist today. Even as social distancing became the norm in March and April of 2020, numerous warnings were issued about the potential catastrophic economic damage that would soon be underway; then-preliminary analysis from the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that up to "28 percent of annual per capita consumption" could be lost due to social distancing, a significant loss in a heavy consumption economy such as the United States. Post-pandemic assessments on state-mandated closure policies estimate up to "$475-580 billion [in losses], and that this cost was borne disproportionately by firms through lower profits." All of it--school closures, masking, and six feet of distance--traced back to guidance that, by Fauci's own admission, simply "just appeared."
Fauci Cherry-Picked Data to Support Draconian Health Measures
In a February 8, 2020, journal entry, Fauci recorded a call that morning with then-CDC Director Tom Frieden. The two men, he wrote, were "on the same page" that the outbreak was behaving like "a bad influenza" in its transmissibility, and that the true number of infections was almost certainly far larger than the day's confirmed case count of 34,867. Working from the larger denominator, Fauci calculated that the case fatality rate (CFR) would be "more like 0.2-0.3% rather than 2.0%."
That private assessment is significant because Fauci had already recognized a fundamental problem with the public COVID-19 mortality figures. The number of confirmed cases represented only a fraction of the people who had actually been infected. If the denominator was substantially larger because of undiagnosed, asymptomatic, and minimally symptomatic infections, then the CFR would fall dramatically. Fauci was not just aware of this possibility; he estimated that the CFR could be as low as 0.2-0.3%. This figure would have been much closer to the mortality rate of severe influenza than the 2% figure widely cited at the time.
Fauci put a similar argument in print as well. In a February 28, 2020, New England Journal of Medicine article he co-authored, Fauci acknowledged that if asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic infections were several times more numerous than reported cases, the CFR could be "considerably less than 1%." The article stated that the overall consequences of COVID-19 might ultimately be more akin to those of severe seasonal influenza, which the article placed at approximately 0.1% CFR, than to the CFR of SARS or MERS. However, Fauci did not share this estimate with the public when he had the opportunity.
Just a few weeks after this journal entry, on March 11, Fauci testified before Congress, stating that the initial mortality rate started at 2% and rose to 3%. He then acknowledged that counting minimally symptomatic and asymptomatic infections would lower the figure to approximately 1%. That was still much higher than the 0.2-0.3% CFR Fauci had privately written on February 8. And Fauci did not present the 0.2-0.3% estimate to Congress. Instead, he contrasted COVID-19 with seasonal influenza, which he said had a mortality rate of 0.1%, and told Congress that even the 1% estimate would make COVID-19 "10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu." After all, to Fauci, if COVID-19 could harm more people, it would strengthen the integrity of his argument to the public and, therefore, increase his platform and power to dictate to the American people.
Fauci had an extremely large public platform, which is a privilege and gift in a crisis. Instead of explaining the nuances and distinctions, highlighting positive epidemiological evidence (such as child transmission), or charting a practical path forward, he chose to amplify anecdotes or simple case numbers to justify his draconian call to expand public health emergency powers. His own journal shows that by May 21, 2020, he was well aware of the extraordinary amount of media attention he was given. He wrote that his "national and international fame" was "explosive," described himself as the "most famous and talked about person in the country," and noted "countless profiles" of him across multiple media outlets. He also said many outlets were covering White House press conferences. Fauci had every opportunity to tell the public the truth about the CFR. He appeared before Congress, attended White House press briefings, and was consistently featured across national television and print media. His February 8 journal entry records appearances on Fox and Friends, WTOP Radio, and MSNBC on the same day he privately estimated a 0.2-0.3% CFR--a statistic that could have been instrumental in shaping the public health response.
Similarly, Fauci understood the problems with using the raw case count to calculate COVID-19's lethality long before he sent the country into a complete lockdown--and he understood it well enough to publish it, under his own name, in a peer-reviewed journal he knew the public was not going to read or report on. When it came time to justify the restrictions his agency recommended, he used inflated figures rather than the more accurate numbers he knew. A CFR near that of a seasonal flu does not justify shutting down schools, businesses, and daily life for well over a year. Fauci had the data to know which number was closer to the truth, and he chose, repeatedly, to leave the public with the one that supported the interventions and mandates he was already recommending.
Fauci Knew the Vaccine Came with Adverse Health Effects
Anthony Fauci was among the most notable advocates for the COVID-19 vaccination in the U.S. He publicly received his first dose of the Moderna vaccine at the NIH Clinical Center on December 22, 2020, saying he had "extreme confidence" in its safety and effectiveness. He then received the second dose on January 19, 2021. Several months later, Fauci had a medical event involving his lungs. In his journal on June 19, 2021, Fauci said he had an acute, right-sided chest pain that caused his physician to order a CT scan. The first radiologist believed that the lesion on his right lung could be cancer, causing Fauci to write he "felt like [he] got hit like by a Mack truck." After multiple physicians reviewed his imaging, they concluded the lesions were more likely inflammatory. One finding was described as definite. Fauci wrote, "I had pulmonary infarct in the right lowest segment that was definite."
Pulmonary infarction occurs when blood flow is blocked to part of the lung, most commonly by a blood clot. Thrombotic and thromboembolic events (including pulmonary embolism, deep-vein thrombosis, and other forms of thrombosis) were reported by patients after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. A review of cardiovascular complications following mRNA COVID-19 vaccines identified thrombosis and pulmonary embolism among reported events, including cases following Moderna's mRNA-1273 vaccine. Another review identified pulmonary embolism, deep-vein thrombosis, and other thromboembolic complications after COVID-19 vaccination.
Fauci's pulmonary infarct was significant enough that his physicians recommended immediate treatment with Eliquis, a blood thinner. Fauci said that a Johns Hopkins radiologist reviewing the scan agreed that the pulmonary infarct was the "only definite thing on the film" and recommended that he begin anticoagulation. Fauci never disclosed his health issues, which came alarmingly close in timing to his second vaccine dose, to the public. Instead, he told the public he had "extreme confidence" in the vaccine's safety and effectiveness while privately suffering health issues that could very well be related.
Conclusion
The information in Anthony Fauci's journals, emails, text messages, and other contemporaneous accounts raises serious concerns about what Fauci and other federal health officials knew privately versus what they communicated publicly. His words consistently show that he recognized early on that there was uncertainty about COVID-19's mortality rate, acknowledged the problems and limitations of school closures and social distancing, and later described efforts to prevent the CDC from publicly stating that vaccines were not effective at preventing infection and transmission. His records also show he was aware early on of questions about the virus's origins and NIAID's connections to coronavirus research in Wuhan, and that he took the PRC's and WHO's statements at face value despite knowing he was likely being lied to. At the same time, Fauci remained one of the most influential voices in shaping the country's response to COVID-19. Americans relied on his public statements to understand how at-risk they were for contracting COVID-19 and the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines. Fauci's public accounts were often far less candid and far less accurate than the information he wrote and communicated privately.
At best, Fauci was an ineffective and incompetent leader of NIAID, unable or unwilling to enforce the basic grant oversight and reporting requirements his own agency's rules demanded. At worst, he was personally responsible for the very research that caused a pandemic, and then spent years concealing that possibility from the public. Either conclusion is inexcusable for a man who held one of the most powerful positions in American public health for nearly four decades. He designed a culture that allowed this to happen: grant officers who took an applicant's self-reporting at face value instead of verifying compliance, program staff who treated White House directives as suggestions rather than requirements, and a director who prioritized his own institutional reputation over candor with Congress and the public. All of these contributed to a system where risky research proceeded unchecked, and inconvenient truths were managed rather than disclosed.
As Fauci assumed leadership at NIAID, he centralized his control and expanded funding at NIAID and NIH, using a combination of the Global War on Terror and overhyped pandemics[4] to increase the institutions' grantmaking capacity by massively expanding their budgets and ultimately increasing NIAID's budget by upwards of 130%[5]. Fauci's extensive documentation of his media presence in his journals can be attributed to the prominence that he acquired in the aftermath of the October 2001 anthrax attacks; the expansion of NIAID's portfolio, combined with his status as a tenured career government employee, meant he was often viewed as an impartial arbiter of biodefense and pandemic risk. His agency's involvement in gain-of-function research, and his pre-emptive defusal of increasing concern on the issue by "[taking] the bull by the horns," demonstrate a political acumen that helped him survive so many successive presidencies and ultimately centralize much of the informal power of the government's pandemic response in his office.
Despite his political acumen, Fauci's behavior at NIAID repeatedly exceeded scientific boundaries. Fauci's broader conduct as director of NIAID is troubling on its own, simply by examining its funding decisions. Offending projects included significant questionable behavior, including funding studies that involved harvested fetal tissue and the deliberate infection of beagle puppies with parasitic sand fly larvae; in both cases, it was later realized that NIAID had failed to sufficiently vet the research for compliance with federal scientific standards. The Ebola records Chairman Paul released in September 2026 show the same behavior at work long before COVID-19. In 2015, under a NIAID task order, researchers at the Army's infectious disease institute at Fort Detrick vaccinated monkeys against Ebola and then exposed them to the virus as a fine aerosol, an engineered exposure that carried it deep into the lung in a way natural infection does not, and the vaccinated animals developed lung damage the control animals did not.
Fauci learned that his own agency had funded and helped design the study only when Department of Defense officials said so at a White House briefing, after which he wrote that it "should have been a classified experiment that never should have been done in the first place" and argued the findings should be withheld because they "could indicate a vulnerability." His deputy Cliff Lane meanwhile told NIAID scientists to hold further Ebola work, warning that "one might consider this dual use research," and NIAID's Peter Jahrling wrote that he would "keep the rest off Email." This behavior of exceeding programmatic standards in research also extended to his assumed role in pandemic preparedness.
Pandemics are a fact of nature that no amount of institutional oversight can fully prevent, and no government can control every variable that produces the next outbreak. What we can control is how prepared the population is when one arrives. Seasonal influenza and other common illnesses are consistently more lethal for people with underlying health conditions, and the same holds true for pandemic pathogens. As the Trump Administration has consistently said, the single most reliable protection any individual has against a future pandemic is being as healthy as possible before it starts, which should be the goal of public health agencies. Their goals should not be, as Fauci did, to create pandemics to learn how to prevent them.
The Trump Administration and the NIH have taken real steps to clean up NIAID's leadership, working to ensure the institute is staffed by people who take seriously both the promise of the research they fund and the responsibility that comes with funding it. In addition, the administration has dropped the old three-pillar strategy that included pandemic preparedness. The new plan has two pillars: the infectious diseases that currently most affect Americans, plus immunology, allergy, and autoimmune disease. Biodefense and pandemic preparedness are no longer on the NIAID website, and the grant portfolio in those areas is under review. Remaining biodefense and advanced-countermeasure work has been shifted to the Department of War as a military-led partnership.
As the leader in basic science research, NIH cannot repeat this failure. Scientists, researchers, and grant officers across the agency need to remind themselves that their decisions carry consequences beyond the walls of a laboratory, and that oversight exists precisely because self-policing failed here.
Decisions made and defended by Fauci and the agencies he directed impacted schools, businesses, families, public health policy, America's national security, and medical decisions across the country. Examining Fauci's journal entries shows that the health officials entrusted with protecting the public were far from forthcoming about what they knew, what they did not know, and what they chose to tell the American public. Fauci had extraordinary influence, access to information, and a massive public platform where he could have expressed his doubts, contradictions, and concerns he spent so much time writing about in his journal amid his self-glorifying entries. Six years after the pandemic began, the American people deserve an honest accounting of how those decisions were made, what precisely was known at the time, and why one individual was permitted to be more concerned with his reputation and public appearance than his transparency with the public while the country he was responsible for protecting was crumbling at his feet.
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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
Hannah Anderson is the Senior Director of Healthy America Policy at the America First Policy Institute.
Royce Hood is the Senior Analyst for China Policy at the America First Policy Institute.
Erin Passarello is a Policy Analyst for the Healthy America team at the America First Policy Institute.
Hannah Anderson, Senior Director, Healthy America
Royce Hood, Senior Analyst, China Policy
Erin Passarello, Analyst, Healthy America Policy
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Original text here: https://americafirstpolicy.com/issues/coverups-and-concealment-at-niaid-faucis-role-in-covid-19/
[Category: ThinkTank]
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Coverups and Concealment at NIAID: Fauci's Role in COVID-19
October 2, 2026
Topline Points
* Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly presented certainty to the American public while his own personal records revealed doubt, conflicting evidence, and concerns he never disclosed. No unelected bureaucrat should ever wield that level of unchecked power without transparency and accountability.
* Scientists should inform policy, not dictate it. Fauci's role during the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the danger of ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 -- The America First Policy Institute issued the following expert insights: * * * Coverups and Concealment at NIAID: Fauci's Role in COVID-19 October 2, 2026 Topline Points * Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly presented certainty to the American public while his own personal records revealed doubt, conflicting evidence, and concerns he never disclosed. No unelected bureaucrat should ever wield that level of unchecked power without transparency and accountability. * Scientists should inform policy, not dictate it. Fauci's role during the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the danger ofallowing disputed scientific judgements to drive coercive mandates without oversight or consideration of the trillion-dollar public health decisions affecting American patients and the American economy.
* Fauci's personal records reveal a public official whose arrogance and pursuit of fame led to negligence and disastrous public health decisions that disrupted schools, ruined businesses, destroyed families, and devastated the American economy.
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Introduction
For six years, Dr. Anthony Fauci has offered the country a consistent account of his conduct during the COVID-19 pandemic. He has repeatedly stated that he followed the "science" and articulated the "truth" to the public. However, Dr. Fauci's own contemporaneous notes prove otherwise.
Fauci kept thousands of pages of personal notes and journal entries on a taxpayer-funded government computer and server at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Those records capture what Fauci was saying when he thought the public was not listening. Privately, he estimated COVID-19 could resemble a "bad influenza," took personal credit for shutting down schools and businesses, discussed concerns the virus could have emerged from a lab leak while publicly downplaying the People's Republic of China's (PRC) involvement in the virus's origin, and even chronicled his "explosive" "national and international fame." The records contained self-congratulatory reflections, contradictory medical recommendations, and celebrities' private health information. Further, he placed his trust in an unreliable and compromised World Health Organization (WHO) and failed to be forthcoming or consistent about numerous facts known only to him and select federal health officials.
In July 2026, the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), released the records of Fauci's disturbing journal entries after they were obtained from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Fauci was subpoenaed to testify on the many disconcerting and alarming admissions made on his government computer before the Committee on July 29, 2026. But he declined to answer substantive questions about what he had written, invoking the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times. However, the journal he declined to explain speaks for itself.
His own journal, written for an audience of only himself, along with the emails, text messages, and testimonies that followed, reveal the truth about the interference and obfuscation: that Fauci continuously lied, misled doctors and scientists, and allowed a nation to suffer while privately congratulating himself on his own deception. The private conclusions he reached and the decisions he made disrupted the education of millions of children, devastated small businesses and the lives of working Americans, split families apart, and left economic and social consequences that lasted long after his arbitrary restrictions were lifted.
Fauci Funded Coronavirus Gain-of-Function (GOF) Work Against Presidential Orders
Fauci was likely motivated to cover up the lab leak theory, in part, by his decision to blatantly and willfully fund work at the Wuhan lab. Despite significant review processes and scrutiny created by the Obama Administration in 2014 intended to halt virtually all types of gain-of-function research, Fauci and several of NIAID's grant recipients (namely Peter Daszak and Ralph Baric) continued to push forward with their Chinese academic partners. In his journal entries, Fauci made light of this, accusing Michael Imperiale, Ph.D., and Richard Ebright, Ph.D.--both virologists who had warned extensively against gain-of-function research--of spreading a "far right wing" conspiracy that Daszak and Fauci worked together to intentionally release the virus[1]. Yet, Daszak, as an NIAID grantee, had been in direct contact with Fauci's immediate staff about the gain-of-function coronavirus research he was conducting in Wuhan--despite the funding pause (effectively a moratorium) initiated by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy on the very same research.
Gain-of-function research was so widely concerning to the international research community that even President Obama paused funding of "certain gain-of-function research projects," including those "that reasonably may be anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS [in a way that enhances] transmissibility." Despite that specific language, Peter Daszak's proposal via EcoHealth Alliance, approved by Erik Stemmy[2] (who oversaw coronavirus research under Fauci) of the NIAID, characterized it as a plan to "create MERS chimeras containing bat CoV spike genes [but with bat CoV that was] not very closely related to MERS (63-66% homology to MERS S protein), and the anticipation is that the chimeras will all be attenuated compared to MERS and unable to use the human receptor [emphasis added]." This plan was approved under the requirement that if any of the experiments resulted in a "enhanced virus growth greater than 1 log of [parent]" then Daszak would be expected to stop all experiments and report the findings to NIAID and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Instead of following the President's direct order to end this specific, dangerous GOF work, Fauci and his agency deliberately allowed it on their own terms.
Rather than closely tracking the dangerous research NIAID funded outside the President's directive, NIAID let it go unchecked. As a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NIAID directs grant money to grantees through grant officers (in this case, Jenny Greer and Erik Stemmy) and could have ended the program on any basis, but deferred to EcoHealth Alliance's self-monitoring. EcoHealth Alliance did not notify either institution, despite the explicit expectation that any increase in virus pathogenicity would immediately halt experimentation and prompt notification to relevant parties. EcoHealth Alliance withheld this experimental data until submitting its fifth annual grant report, which it failed to upload in a timely manner, as required, in 2019, allowing the research to continue despite what would have triggered a "stop work" order from NIAID. EcoHealth violated the terms of its grant and failed to submit until 2021, well after the pandemic had begun. The delayed annual report reveals that the base parent strain WIV1 had a survival rate of 71.4%, whereas the modified strain rWIV-SHC014 had a survival rate of only 25%--thereby meeting and exceeding, by NIH's later judgment, the 1-log threshold. NIAID's actions and Anthony Fauci's complicity both deserve emphasis: both blatantly ignored the letter and intent of White House memoranda and its delineated standards, refused to hold the grantee accountable to basic reporting requirements, and consequently gave a dangerous research product the runway to spiral out of control and eventually morph into a catastrophic pandemic.
The fact that this work took place at WIV amplified the risks. The biosecurity level (BSL) at which the experiments took place, BSL-2, was of a lower risk profile than was appropriate; staff from the U.S. Embassy in the PRC noted in cables that the facility "has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators" and was likely not capable of properly operating at BSL-4, the highest standardized level of biosecurity.
Fauci, in his role as NIAID director, as well as numerous NIAID staff, had ample knowledge that gain-of-function research on coronaviruses could result in harm to Americans. The dangerous SHC014 spike referenced was identified by Ralph Baric in a 2015 study as a systemic risk, writing that "if SHC014 spike-containing viruses recombined with virulent CoV backbones [Note: exactly the research that Daszak was conducting] then epidemic disease may be the result in humans." Both Baric and Daszak co-submitted a proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2018, specifically pitching this project as military research to proactively study (and enhance) these diseases to better protect military service members. The proposal itself, though submitted to DARPA and ultimately unfunded, included Vincent Munster of NIAID and others at HHS, suggesting some level of NIAID involvement. The 2018 report for the Daszak grant, which was reviewed by NIAID, also mentioned that gain-of-function proposals similar to the WIV1 grant were discussed "within National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Office [and] Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency." In other words, NIAID leadership had ample opportunities to recognize that their grant project was developing a chimeric virus that was perfectly suited to create a pandemic.
There is little doubt that Fauci and his agency funded this work and blatantly turned a blind eye to its monitoring; Fauci was well aware of the portfolio that included coronavirus research. Fauci was individually made aware of Daszak's efforts on coronavirus research in October of 2017, with Daszak specifically emailing Anthony Fauci, Erik Stemmy, and David Morens about his grant proposal and noting that "[the] work was supported by a NIAID [grant] that Erik Stemmy is the Program Officer for, and that I'm [principal investigator] on." The email followed an in-person meeting between Fauci and Daszak at the 2017 Cell Symposium, where both men spoke.
Even if not for this meeting, Fauci, as chair of NIAID's Advisory Council, which, according to its own page, "reviews and approves NIAID research concepts [and provides] final review of all NIAID research and training grants," had direct oversight and should have been directly aware, by nature of his position as director, of the impropriety of this grant, the recipients' conduct, and the inherent risks of the research, and yet it continued. Negligent monitoring of both the direct recipient--EcoHealth Alliance--and the subrecipients, such as WIV, permitted much riskier conduct than would otherwise have occurred. NIH officials--specifically Erik Stemmy and Jenny Greer--took EcoHealth Alliance at its word that "its work was not subject to the GOF pause [and] recently published work [has demonstrated] that similar chimeric viruses exhibited reduced [infectiousness]."[3] Stemmy and Greer initially flagged the proposal but adopted Daszak's justifications as a reason to approve the request despite the underlying literature from the coronavirus research space showing that WIV1 had the capacity to infect human airway cells.
This failure of oversight is even more flagrant because NIAID program officers are explicitly tasked for "uphold[ing] government regulations on the appropriate use of federal grant funds," including ensuring that funded research does not violate White House memoranda or other programmatic standards.
Fauci was informed, in talking points prepared for him on January 27, 2020, of the potential connection between NIAID, Peter Daszak, and the then-burgeoning outbreak in Wuhan, and seems to have been alarmed so much as to have deliberately evaded FOIA by reaching out to Hugh Auchincloss "on [his] cell" to handle "tasks that must be done," with an email attachment of "Baric, Shi et al - Nature Medicine - SARS Gain of function.pdf" in the topline. Fauci would later clarify in deposition that these "tasks" included being "briefed on the scope of what our collaborations were and the kind of work that we were funding in China." In this context, Fauci's answer makes clear that, despite NIAID's disbursement of funds for the Daszak project, Fauci was either intentionally ignorant of or uninformed about grants he was statutorily tasked with reviewing until late January.
The funding of the Daszak program was a failure of both NIH and NIAID officials, who were either misled or critically underestimated the risk of what they were funding. Regardless, Anthony Fauci boldly defended the work and was likely involved in lifting the gain-of-function restrictions in 2017 through the promulgation of P3CO, though Daszak's work had already (improperly) been underway. Even if Daszak's work could have passed P3CO, it began improperly during the pause, and that status may have further contributed to it not being reviewed.
In either case, by January 27, 2020, the record leaves Fauci with nowhere to hide from responsibility. By then, Fauci had reason to believe that Daszak--using money NIAID had specifically provided--was conducting dangerous coronavirus research in Wuhan under his watch. He scrambled to ask his staff to determine exactly what his agency had funded and the extent of their collaborations; that much is fact. The government safeguards designed to prevent dangerous coronavirus experiments failed under his leadership. Fauci cannot be separated from the research NIAID financed, approved, and oversaw.
Fauci Covered Up the COVID-19 Lab Leak
Fauci knew the Wuhan Institute of Virology received NIAID funding through EcoHealth Alliance to conduct gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses. Fauci also knew that his agency's funding of Peter Daszak's research likely contributed to the beginning of COVID-19.
Just before the January 27 email mentioned above, Fauci's journal shows early awareness of this fact: on January 26, 2020, Fauci wrote that it was apparent the Wuhan wet market was "not the source, [but] the amplifier," primarily because of evidence of infections in early December, and that he believed it was where the virus may have "jumped from animals to humans." On January 31, Fauci's journal includes his notes from a call with several researchers, one of whom noted: "mutations around the furine [sic] cleavage site of the spike protein could not have occurred naturally since it would require an evolutionary 'jump found nowhere in bat isolates' [... and that it] could have been deliberately inserted [in a lab]." This concern being raised grows even more alarming when Fauci writes the day after that gain of function was possible because "Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in [gain of function] in coronaviruses to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor [emphasis added]." Fauci knew that Dr. Shi (and consequently, Shi's research partner, Peter Daszak) were working in Wuhan on coronaviruses.
To cover up the lab-leak theory, Fauci helped draft "The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2", later published in Nature in March 2020. Fauci's later notes in the journal from June of 2021 assert that the gain-of-function theory itself was debunked in "a Nature [journal] paper in 2020." The issue is that Fauci and other officials illegitimately guided the paper's conclusions and deliberately shaped them, undermining it as an independent scientific work. Fauci was, between his notes and conduct and 2020, engaged in significant cognitive dissonance if he was referring to the Nature paper as proof that the virus was of natural origin. The "Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2" paper was:
* Written to Explicitly "Disprove" Lab Leak: Kristian Andersen's email included a message sent to German researchers that the main body of work in the paper was meant to "disprove any type of lab theory [but] the scientific evidence isn't conclusive enough to say that we have high confidence in [any of the theories]." Beginning the paper from this premise is not a legitimate scientific inquiry.
* Improperly Influenced by Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, and Jeremy Farrar: The authors of the paper wrote and would later admit directly that the paper was "prompted" by these three above-named individuals. In later communications, Francis Collins wrote that countering the lab-leak narrative was important to preserving "science and international harmony," and further that some of the authors were improperly changing beliefs because they were, according to a 2023 House Oversight Committee report, "concerned with Dr. Fauci's and Dr. Collins' thoughts."
* Contradicted the Authors' Own Beliefs About a Lab Leak: The conclusion to the Proximal Origin journal article claimed definitively that "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible [...] SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or purposefully manipulated virus," and yet Andersen wrote in internal communications that "[if] people think it is difficult to make a CoV [virus] from scratch [one group] did it in a week" and "argument[s] about [gain of function in SARS viruses] not being feasible is not true."
* Written to Cover Up NIH Funding of GOF: An email from Anthony Fauci to Hugh Auchincloss on February 1, 2020, is widely believed to indicate that Fauci had realized (or had been told by his staff) that NIH/NIAID was funding coronavirus experiments conducted by Peter Daszak in conjunction with the Wuhan Institute of Virology that his agency funded; in short, Fauci was statutorily responsible for oversight and likely aware that, if COVID emerged from a lab, his agency was responsible for funding such research.
Despite all this information, Anthony Fauci continued to dispute and dismiss assertions that COVID could have emerged from a lab. From the publication of "Proximal Origin" onwards, Fauci deferred to the paper as fact, claiming that the paper--which Fauci never publicly disclosed he guided--was correct and unassailable science. In a National Geographic interview from May 5, 2020, Fauci referred to the paper as having "a number of very qualified evolutionary biologists [who have said] it evolved in nature and then jumped species." Fauci would later say, under oath before the Senate in May of 2021, that lab leak allegations were "entirely and completely incorrect." Fauci held this position despite several federal agencies declaring that a lab leak was not only plausible, but a probable cause of COVID-19. For example, the Defense Intelligence Agency considered a lab-leak hypothesis via recombination as early as March 2020, with an internal presentation slide on the "furin cleavage site" withheld from public releases, as well as several slides on "research underway" at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Fauci Knew the People's Republic of China Was Lying to the World
The PRC's response to COVID-19 was heavily shaped by its experiences during the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreaks of 2002-2004, when lackluster public health infrastructure and misreporting led to more infections and deaths than otherwise would have occurred. The then-director of the WHO during SARS, Gro Harlem Brundtland, admitted that "it would have been definitely helpful if [the WHO] had been able to help [China] at an earlier stage [...] next time something strange and new comes anywhere in the world[,] let us come in as quickly as possible." The PRC, at the time, engaged in extensive censorship and cover-up operations to limit the spread of information both domestically and internationally, which likely contributed to the outbreak. The World Health Organization's International Health Regulations of 2005 were adopted in response to the SARS outbreak, and the WHO also encouraged the PRC to improve domestic public health tracking systems, particularly given the PRC's inability or unwillingness to disclose information to the WHO when needed.
However, these systems' usefulness depends on the host country's willingness to disclose data to international health officials during potential outbreaks and on those officials' willingness to act on it. Employees at NIAID communicated with Ping Chen, the director of NIAID's office in the PRC, who forwarded a cable dated January 7, 2020, from the American Embassy in Beijing, along with notice that "[the Embassy] has ruled out SARS, MERS and flu." The cable reads:
"China's response to an outbreak of pneumonia cases of unknown origin in Central China's Wuhan city has been marked by increased transparency compared to past outbreaks, such as the 2003 SARS epidemic. While PRC health officials have released timely and open general information about the outbreak, a lack of epidemiologic data including an "epi curve" (a summary of dates of onset of the illness), characteristics of infected individuals, and other basic epidemiologic information - hinders better risk assessment and response by public health officials. [...] Director [Robert] Redfield offered U.S. CDC technical support; however, China CDC has not yet responded to the offer [emphasis added]."
Domestically, the PRC's instinctive response was to cover up and delay. Unknown to Western media at the time, from approximately January 5 to January 17, 2020, the PRC was experiencing a surge in cases as "hundreds of patients were appearing in hospitals not just in Wuhan but across the country." Despite coming to the conclusion that they were facing a "pandemic from a new coronavirus," Wuhan continued with mass events, and the PRC allowed "millions [to begin] traveling through [Wuhan] for Lunar New Year celebrations." This continued into later parts of January, when the WHO was provided "very minimal information [... only] minutes before it appears on [China Central Television]."
The WHO was also likely aware of human-to-human transmission, despite communicating that "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" was available in the PRC. In fact, PRC actions were already inconsistent with that messaging by January 2020. Chinese authorities were taking extreme isolation measures, such as welding the doors of infected persons, trapping them in their domiciles, on top of extreme contact-tracing and other monitoring measures.
The WHO's politicking--namely, refusing to back travel restrictions for political reasons--contributed significantly to this problem. The United States enacted travel restrictions by February 2, 2020, but the WHO continued to "advise against the application of travel or trade restrictions" on the grounds that such measures were "ineffective." Such opposition may have cost hundreds of thousands of lives globally, driven mostly by fear of lending credence to concerns about the virus during its early stages and perhaps indirectly leading to the correct casting of blame on the PRC.
Throughout it all, Fauci tracked COVID-19 closely, beginning on January 2, 2020, and noted the rapid spread of the disease in Asia and the world more broadly, but claimed to "[know] nothing of this" regarding the PRC urging the WHO not to declare a public health emergency. He would later write on January 25 that he had a suspicion that the Chinese were not "telling us everything that is going on [...] why are the Chinese reacting so dramatically by essentially shutting down the entire country?" Fauci wrote further on January 26 that he was "very skeptical about the Chinese interpretation of their [virus] data," but Fauci also argued to Alex Azar the "down side [sic] (historically) in shutting out a country" when an outbreak occurs. In short, Fauci tracked the outbreak and knew the Chinese response was disproportionate to the measures they were taking domestically, yet still fought against pre-emptive domestic countermeasures.
This information, combined with Fauci's personal knowledge that the virus was extremely likely to have been modified and then released (accidentally or otherwise) from a lab, demonstrates some level of misconduct or negligence in Fauci's statutory and institutional obligations for grant oversight and compliance.
Fauci Knew that the World Health Organization was Lying for the PRC
COVID-19 spread from the PRC, and the PRC's instinctive political response was to attempt to cover up the outbreak. The WHO's ability to politically confront the PRC was implausible from the outset because the PRC exercises significant control over the WHO through its Director.
The election of Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of Ethiopia in the 2017 World Health Organization Director's race had many downstream effects, but the most visible was that Tedros's selection was not a medical decision but a political one. During his time as the Minister for Foreign Affairs as a member of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF, a Maoist political party and armed insurgent group that overthrew the country's government in 1991), Tedros very deliberately cultivated close ties with the PRC through numerous meetings and even co-authoring propaganda pieces for China's state newspaper with its foreign minister, Wang Yi. The TPLF's Maoist sympathies and development history with Ethiopia made Tedros the PRC's preferred candidate, with the PRC's Ambassador to Ethiopia remarking at a 2018 ceremony that "[we] offered him our firm support during his election campaign [...] because he is an African; because he is an Ethiopian - competent and qualified."
Tedros' credentials as a health official are questionable, given allegations that his tenure as health minister resulted in widespread ethnic discrimination against non-Tigrayan Ethiopians as well as three cholera outbreaks that took place under his watch. In particular, Tedros was accused of "[using] donor-supported resources and aid as a tool to consolidate power" and contributing to worse health outcomes for Amhara Ethiopians through "refusing emergency healthcare [to Amharans] because of their affiliation with the opposition party" via "[withholding] of food and fertilizer."
Tedros' backing from the PRC came with strings attached, as the campaigns of those running for director-general made clear. Both finalists campaigned extensively in the PRC, widely viewed as the kingmaker, but Tedros had a longer track record with the PRC and likely won on that basis, despite his opponent's tenure as a health official, rather than as "health minister" under dubious circumstances. Upon Tedros assuming office, however, his decision-making immediately came into question: his refusal to declare a "public health emergency of international concern," or PHEIC, during the Ebola outbreaks of 2018-2019. A PHEIC is how the WHO requests international assistance to contain a public health emergency, and when Tedros refused to declare a PHEIC for Ebola, The Lancet called the decision "more political than technical."
This happened again with COVID-19; in hindsight, the WHO's refusal to declare a PHEIC boggles the mind. COVID-19 spread quickly because of Wuhan's relative connectivity within the PRC. Rather than share data on this fast-moving virus, the PRC was sharing "very minimal information" with the WHO according to an internal WHO email dated January 6, 2020. Reports from the Central Intelligence Agency and Germany's equivalent intelligence service both alleged that the PRC was specifically pressuring the WHO not to declare a public health emergency. After-action reviews by independent bodies found that "the outbreak in Wuhan is likely to have met [PHEIC criteria] by the time of the first meeting [on] 22 January," yet the declaration was delayed another week. Fauci even acknowledged this in April of 2020, when asked whether earlier action could have lessened the severity of the spread, and that such earlier action would only have been possible with PRC officials; Fauci replied: "It looks that way."
Fauci was aware that the PRC controlled the WHO and that Tedros was compromised, yet did not act to protect Americans from the WHO's fundamental bias. When pressed in interviews about why the PHEIC declaration was being delayed, Fauci wrote in his journal on January 22 that he "did not want to outguess the WHO," even as he acknowledged two days prior that it was a "situation with no question about person-to-person transmission." When Fauci was pressed by Lena Sun of the Washington Post on the rumors that officials in the U.S. government were "saying that the Chinese got to Tedros to convince him not to declare a PHEIC since it would harm their reputation," Fauci wrote, "I said [emphasis added] I knew nothing of this." Fauci's choice of language here is noteworthy.
Later, in February, despite all this information, Fauci defended Tedros from accusations that "[Tedros] would immediately tell the Chinese [about COVID-19 possibly being a gain-of-function lab leak]," even though Fauci acknowledged that several reputable epidemiologists and specialists believed that it was artificially created. Fauci would later in February write that "[Alex] Azar feels that Tedros [is] bowing to Xi Jinping who does not want USA [on a multi-national team in China...] tough situation since Tedros and WHO depends [sic] greatly on China and often bows to them," yet still deferred to the PRC on issues of information, multinational organizations, and virus origin.
Other countries acted in their own self-interest, knowing the WHO's bias. Taiwan specifically requested information from the World Health Organization on December 31, 2019, seeking clarification regarding an increase in pneumonia-like cases in Wuhan, and clarified that it was isolating and testing several infected individuals because Taiwan suspected human-to-human transmission was possible. The WHO never followed up with information, likely partly because the PRC continued to insist that Taiwan be excluded from the WHO. Significant warning time may have been lost because of the WHO's political judgments on this point alone, and Fauci kowtowed to political interests at the WHO. It is extremely unlikely that Fauci did not know any of the facts about the PRC's sponsorship of Tedros, particularly given his deliberate lack of comments to Lena Sun of the Washington Post in January of 2020, or the unreliability of the PRC in its disclosure of the facts, especially due to Fauci's knowledge of gain-of-function in Wuhan.
Fauci Knew that the Vaccine Wouldn't Stop the Spread, But Pushed It as a Requirement for Millions of Americans
The COVID-19 vaccines were presented to the American public as the one and only path out of the pandemic and lockdowns. Mask and vaccine requirements and the #StopTheSpread campaign rested on one premise: that vaccines would keep people from infecting one another and would protect vulnerable populations. Yet Anthony Fauci hid that the vaccines did not provide the level of protection against infection and transmission that the public was initially led to believe, when in fact he understood their ability to do so was extremely limited. By the summer of 2022, he and other senior health officials understood the #StopTheSpread narrative had been incorrect and chose to intentionally keep it out of the public view rather than let it interfere with the ongoing mandates.
In an August 13, 2022, journal entry, Fauci described what he called "drama" between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and its director, Rochelle Walensky, over a public statement the agency had prepared. Working with Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and other high-level health officials, Fauci wrote that they had gotten the CDC "pulled back from making the statement that the vaccines were not effective at all in preventing infection and transmission." His stated reason had nothing to do with the science, and instead, an honest public statement, he wrote, "would conflict with" the push that was underway to get Americans to take the new bivalent booster that September, and separately "would undermine the DOJ's efforts and mandates for vaccines under certain circumstances." The CDC's own scientific judgement about vaccine effectiveness was, by Fauci's own account, edited for the public to avoid interfering with the Justice Department mandates.
Fauci said that while the CDC softened the language used on its website, a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) published that same week still had what he called the original "damning language," prompting an angry call from Biden health advisor Larry Horowitz, who predicted Walensky would be fired once White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain returned from his vacation. She was not, but this entire encounter shows that the "drama" and unprofessionalism behind closed doors were the real drivers of public health policy at the time, not the science that the health officials were aware of.
Finally, in June 2024, Fauci testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic about whether the COVID-19 vaccines stopped transmission. Fauci acknowledged that the first generation of vaccines did have some effect against infection and transmission, but emphasized the protection was "not 100 percent" and "not a high effect." More importantly, he admitted that the durability of protection against infection was "relatively limited," while protection against severe disease, hospitalization, and death lasted longer. Fauci further conceded that this distinction was not fully understood at the beginning of the vaccine campaign. According to his testimony, officials initially believed that vaccination would prevent infection and therefore prevent transmission. However, as time went on, it became clear that this protection was not as strong as they had told the public.
The public health response increasingly treated vaccination as a means of controlling transmission throughout society. Mask and vaccine requirements, among other restrictions, were justified on the premise that they would prevent individuals from spreading the virus to others around them. Fauci himself later acknowledged that this premise did not hold true for long. In fact, in one interview, Fauci acknowledged that despite being vaccinated and receiving multiple booster doses, he still became infected with COVID-19. He explained that the vaccines had not protected him from infection, but believed they had protected him from a severe disease. In his own words, the vaccines "do very well in protecting you against severe disease," but "don't do as well in preventing infection," a statement that is irrelevant to low-risk populations. All of this would be fine if the entire vaccine campaign were not based on the #StopTheSpread narrative that led Americans to believe they were putting those around them at risk by denying the vaccine.
Fauci Knew the Vaccine Could Lead to First-Trimester Miscarriages
Pregnant women had been excluded from the initial COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials entirely, meaning that when the vaccines rolled out to the public in December 2020, no one--including Fauci--actually had safety data on how the vaccine affected pregnancy. In fact, it is not uncommon for vaccine clinical trials to exclude pregnant women; however, Dr. Fauci had privately identified potential concerns with pregnant women taking the vaccine and chose to repeatedly tell the public they were safe anyway. Newly released text messages from Anthony Fauci's government-issued phone show that Fauci himself identified a specific, plausible mechanism for miscarriage risk within weeks of the vaccine rollout, and then spent the next several months reassuring the public, specifically including pregnant women, that there was nothing to worry about.
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Figure 1. Text Exchange Between Vivek Murthy, Anthony Fauci, and Rochelle Walensky; Jan. 25, 2021
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Note: Dr. Fauci's private text messages, provided by Chairmen Ron Johnson and Rand Paul (full exchange linked here (https://www.ronjohnson.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/text-message-Fauci-redacted_Redacted.pdf).
On January 25, 2021, then-Surgeon General nominee Vivek Murthy texted Fauci and then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky asking whether there was any reason to prefer vaccinating pregnant women earlier or later in pregnancy. Fauci initially downplayed the question entirely, writing that there was "no data or theoretical reason" to prefer one timing over another. But minutes later, without prompting, he raised precisely such a theoretical concern on his own. Because many people ran fevers and had strong immune reactions after the second dose, he wrote that reaction "theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester." Walensky agreed it was "a good point," and Murthy went on to flag his own worry that the World Health Organization's caution around the vaccine for pregnant women could prove "damaging to public confidence."
This exchange is significant because, behind closed doors, three of the most powerful health officials in the country privately agreed there was a reason to worry about first-trimester miscarriage, yet none of them raised that concern with the American public.
Instead, on February 3, 2021, about a week after that text exchange, Fauci appeared in a Journal of the American Medical Association livestream and told the public that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had found "thus far no red flags" concerning pregnant women. His overall message was reassuring to concerned pregnant women, and he did not share the concerns he had personally raised days earlier. He would continue to spread the same reassuring note for months afterward, later telling the public it was "pretty clear that pregnant women should get vaccinated." Fauci never disclosed that he had discovered a pathway to miscarriage that, by his own admission in the text chain, no one yet had the data to rule out.
Beyond Fauci keeping his apprehensions private, there are far more concerns with pregnant women receiving the vaccine in the first place. Pregnant women are, on average, young and otherwise healthy--completely outside the population to whom COVID-19 posed the greatest threat. CDC's own data show that more than 81% of confirmed COVID-19 deaths occurred in people over the age of 65, with the death rate for that group being roughly 97 times higher than for those aged 18-29. As Fauci himself would go on to concede years later, the vaccines were not effective at preventing infection and transmission in the first place (see section above). Fauci continuously pressured a low-risk population (young, healthy women) into accepting an unknown risk to their unborn children for no gain other than damage to public confidence in the vaccine.
The first trimester of pregnancy is the period of organogenesis, or the 12-week window in which a baby's major organs and structures form for the first time. Since most birth defects occur during the first trimester, as the major structures of the body form during that window, clinicians and health providers are generally extremely risk-averse about activities that could impact the baby. After the first trimester, the baby becomes progressively less vulnerable to external threats. Despite knowing this, Fauci said that the fever and immune response common after the second vaccine dose "could be associated with miscarriage in the first trimester," rejecting the sensible risk aversion that practitioners generally have towards women in their first trimester.
In addition, the primary safety data federal officials relied on to reassure the public was not built to ensure safety in the most vulnerable weeks of pregnancy. The Shimabukuro study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM)--the CDC's own safety analysis of the vaccine in pregnancy--enrolled 827 pregnant women, but 700 of them (85%) received their first vaccine dose in the third trimester. This is long after organogenesis has been completed and the period that carries the largest miscarriage risk has passed. The study's own statisticians later acknowledged this was a large flaw with the study, and a subsequent letter to NEJM noted that women vaccinated in the third trimester "should be excluded" from any miscarriage-rate calculation entirely, because they had already passed week 20 in their pregnancy at the time of their vaccination. But the damage was already done. Countless news outlets had already cited this flawed study to prove the vaccine's safety for pregnant women.
The risk Fauci identified privately was never quantified, never ruled out, and never disclosed to the women deciding whether to vaccinate. Unborn children are the most vulnerable population, and Fauci put them at risk repeatedly during the COVID-19 pandemic by manipulating their mothers for his own glorification, showing how many vaccines he had pushed onto the public.
Fauci Knew Closing Schools and Businesses Was Detrimental and Social Distancing Was Arbitrary--He Pushed for the Mandates Anyway
School closures, universal masking, and the "six feet apart" rule were all justified under the umbrella of "social distancing," and Fauci privately acknowledged serious doubts about each, even as he continued to promote them publicly.
On school closures, Fauci wrote on February 23, 2020, that "children have very low rate of infection," yet states such as New York and California nonetheless used his advice to justify closing schools. By April 10, 2020, when asked about Governor Ron DeSantis' plans to reopen Florida schools by May, Fauci remarked that he believed "children in school could spread the virus." His own thinking remained inconsistent: later entries from August 2020 acknowledged the "psychological effects on children [...] dependence on schools for breakfast and lunch [... and] deleterious effects on working parents," yet Fauci continued to condition any "approval" of reopening on state infection rates. When the President insisted on opening schools at all costs, Fauci continued to disagree, supporting his allies in urban areas who wanted to keep schools closed at the behest of the teachers' unions. On July 28, 2020, he joined a fireside chat with Randi Weingarten, the head of the largest teachers' union in America. He said that while getting kids back to school is important, the safety of the students, teachers, and staff is the most important. That same day, Weingarten said the union would consider lawsuits and strikes if reopenings were "unsafe." The unions would point to Fauci's statement through 2021, going so far as to pressure the CDC not to change any safety metrics that would explicitly lead to schools reopening.
He would not concede the point publicly until 2024, admitting that "keeping [schools closed] for a year was not a good idea"--a striking reversal given that his own journal entries at the time excoriated those who questioned his advice.
Fauci's approach to universal masking, particularly in schools, followed the same deceitful pattern of private doubt and public certainty. In his now-notorious email to Sylvia Burwell, released via a 2021 FOIA request, Fauci described "the average mask you buy in the drugstore" as "not really effective." That assessment was never rectified for the public, and Fauci never used his platform to push for a different approach. Instead, the policy that reached schools was a blunt, one-size-fits-all mandate resting on the same masks Fauci privately doubted, imposed on millions of children regardless of age or risk. School closures and mandatory masking together produced significant long-term harm to America's children. Countless studies now document COVID-era learning loss that erased years of test score gains, worsened mental health among children, adolescents, and teenagers, and caused lasting damage to the speech, language, and emotional development of the youngest children forced into remote learning or masked in-person instruction.
The "six feet apart" rule that underpinned all of these policies--and reshaped American life for over a year--has similarly obscure origins. It was first promulgated in a February 11, 2020, notice from the CDC, which described medium risk as being seated "within 6 feet (two meters) of a traveler with symptomatic laboratory-confirmed 2019-nCoV infection," a standard drawn from commercial air travel and estimated as "approximately 2 seats in each direction" from an infected person--not a general-purpose social distancing rule.
That metric came under scrutiny almost immediately from within the first Trump Administration. Then-Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Abuse Elinore McCance-Katz wrote in a June 2020 memo to the CDC that she "hope[s] that CDC will revisit this decision or at least tell us that there is more and stronger data to support this rule than what I have been able to find online [...] if not, they should pull it back." As McCance-Katz later elaborated in 2022, her concerns stemmed from isolation standards that "lacked a balanced approach that consider[s] all health and mental health needs" of Americans. CDC ignored her request and never revised the standard. Meanwhile, Fauci actively promoted the rule to the public and took credit for its real-world consequences. In an April 10, 2020 interview, he said, "the perfect solution" was for "everyone at all times" to stay six feet apart, and pushed to apply that standard "broadly throughout the country." He was not just describing the federal regulation from an outside perspective. His diary personally shows how he talked officials into applying the rules:
"I spoke with Bill de Blasio (Mayor - NYC) and convinced him based on what I was saying publicly and my conversation tonight to close the NYC schools (he had already decided based on what I was saying on TV). I went on to tell him he should close the bars and restaurants in NYC. He said that he would base this on my recommendation. I had a similar call with Ann O'Leary, the COS of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. Ann said that based on my TV appearances today and yesterday, the Governor has decided to close the schools in California as well as the bars and restaurants [emphasis added]."
The following day, he wrote about pushing federal guidelines to "close schools where there is community spread"--the same six-foot standard McCance-Katz said the CDC had no data behind. Additionally, former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb alleged in 2021 that the CDC's initial internal request had been for 10 feet, with 6 feet adopted as a compromise--though this claim is difficult to reconcile with the timing of the CDC's actual February 2020 guidance.
Fauci eventually confirmed there was never a scientific basis for the rule. He would later tell the House Oversight Committee in 2024 that six-foot restrictions "sort of just appeared [...] it sort of just appeared, that six feet is going to be the distance [...] I've seen in literature [...] the spray and what the distance of the spray is." Separately, Fauci mentioned in a House hearing that "there wasn't a scientific evaluation" of the six-foot threshold, and that the CDC likely relied on droplet studies from "years ago." Despite disclaiming personal responsibility for the guidance, Fauci--as the government's most visible and influential voice on the pandemic--was well positioned to challenge it and did not.
The cumulative damage from these measures was immense, and its effects persist today. Even as social distancing became the norm in March and April of 2020, numerous warnings were issued about the potential catastrophic economic damage that would soon be underway; then-preliminary analysis from the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that up to "28 percent of annual per capita consumption" could be lost due to social distancing, a significant loss in a heavy consumption economy such as the United States. Post-pandemic assessments on state-mandated closure policies estimate up to "$475-580 billion [in losses], and that this cost was borne disproportionately by firms through lower profits." All of it--school closures, masking, and six feet of distance--traced back to guidance that, by Fauci's own admission, simply "just appeared."
Fauci Cherry-Picked Data to Support Draconian Health Measures
In a February 8, 2020, journal entry, Fauci recorded a call that morning with then-CDC Director Tom Frieden. The two men, he wrote, were "on the same page" that the outbreak was behaving like "a bad influenza" in its transmissibility, and that the true number of infections was almost certainly far larger than the day's confirmed case count of 34,867. Working from the larger denominator, Fauci calculated that the case fatality rate (CFR) would be "more like 0.2-0.3% rather than 2.0%."
That private assessment is significant because Fauci had already recognized a fundamental problem with the public COVID-19 mortality figures. The number of confirmed cases represented only a fraction of the people who had actually been infected. If the denominator was substantially larger because of undiagnosed, asymptomatic, and minimally symptomatic infections, then the CFR would fall dramatically. Fauci was not just aware of this possibility; he estimated that the CFR could be as low as 0.2-0.3%. This figure would have been much closer to the mortality rate of severe influenza than the 2% figure widely cited at the time.
Fauci put a similar argument in print as well. In a February 28, 2020, New England Journal of Medicine article he co-authored, Fauci acknowledged that if asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic infections were several times more numerous than reported cases, the CFR could be "considerably less than 1%." The article stated that the overall consequences of COVID-19 might ultimately be more akin to those of severe seasonal influenza, which the article placed at approximately 0.1% CFR, than to the CFR of SARS or MERS. However, Fauci did not share this estimate with the public when he had the opportunity.
Just a few weeks after this journal entry, on March 11, Fauci testified before Congress, stating that the initial mortality rate started at 2% and rose to 3%. He then acknowledged that counting minimally symptomatic and asymptomatic infections would lower the figure to approximately 1%. That was still much higher than the 0.2-0.3% CFR Fauci had privately written on February 8. And Fauci did not present the 0.2-0.3% estimate to Congress. Instead, he contrasted COVID-19 with seasonal influenza, which he said had a mortality rate of 0.1%, and told Congress that even the 1% estimate would make COVID-19 "10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu." After all, to Fauci, if COVID-19 could harm more people, it would strengthen the integrity of his argument to the public and, therefore, increase his platform and power to dictate to the American people.
Fauci had an extremely large public platform, which is a privilege and gift in a crisis. Instead of explaining the nuances and distinctions, highlighting positive epidemiological evidence (such as child transmission), or charting a practical path forward, he chose to amplify anecdotes or simple case numbers to justify his draconian call to expand public health emergency powers. His own journal shows that by May 21, 2020, he was well aware of the extraordinary amount of media attention he was given. He wrote that his "national and international fame" was "explosive," described himself as the "most famous and talked about person in the country," and noted "countless profiles" of him across multiple media outlets. He also said many outlets were covering White House press conferences. Fauci had every opportunity to tell the public the truth about the CFR. He appeared before Congress, attended White House press briefings, and was consistently featured across national television and print media. His February 8 journal entry records appearances on Fox and Friends, WTOP Radio, and MSNBC on the same day he privately estimated a 0.2-0.3% CFR--a statistic that could have been instrumental in shaping the public health response.
Similarly, Fauci understood the problems with using the raw case count to calculate COVID-19's lethality long before he sent the country into a complete lockdown--and he understood it well enough to publish it, under his own name, in a peer-reviewed journal he knew the public was not going to read or report on. When it came time to justify the restrictions his agency recommended, he used inflated figures rather than the more accurate numbers he knew. A CFR near that of a seasonal flu does not justify shutting down schools, businesses, and daily life for well over a year. Fauci had the data to know which number was closer to the truth, and he chose, repeatedly, to leave the public with the one that supported the interventions and mandates he was already recommending.
Fauci Knew the Vaccine Came with Adverse Health Effects
Anthony Fauci was among the most notable advocates for the COVID-19 vaccination in the U.S. He publicly received his first dose of the Moderna vaccine at the NIH Clinical Center on December 22, 2020, saying he had "extreme confidence" in its safety and effectiveness. He then received the second dose on January 19, 2021. Several months later, Fauci had a medical event involving his lungs. In his journal on June 19, 2021, Fauci said he had an acute, right-sided chest pain that caused his physician to order a CT scan. The first radiologist believed that the lesion on his right lung could be cancer, causing Fauci to write he "felt like [he] got hit like by a Mack truck." After multiple physicians reviewed his imaging, they concluded the lesions were more likely inflammatory. One finding was described as definite. Fauci wrote, "I had pulmonary infarct in the right lowest segment that was definite."
Pulmonary infarction occurs when blood flow is blocked to part of the lung, most commonly by a blood clot. Thrombotic and thromboembolic events (including pulmonary embolism, deep-vein thrombosis, and other forms of thrombosis) were reported by patients after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. A review of cardiovascular complications following mRNA COVID-19 vaccines identified thrombosis and pulmonary embolism among reported events, including cases following Moderna's mRNA-1273 vaccine. Another review identified pulmonary embolism, deep-vein thrombosis, and other thromboembolic complications after COVID-19 vaccination.
Fauci's pulmonary infarct was significant enough that his physicians recommended immediate treatment with Eliquis, a blood thinner. Fauci said that a Johns Hopkins radiologist reviewing the scan agreed that the pulmonary infarct was the "only definite thing on the film" and recommended that he begin anticoagulation. Fauci never disclosed his health issues, which came alarmingly close in timing to his second vaccine dose, to the public. Instead, he told the public he had "extreme confidence" in the vaccine's safety and effectiveness while privately suffering health issues that could very well be related.
Conclusion
The information in Anthony Fauci's journals, emails, text messages, and other contemporaneous accounts raises serious concerns about what Fauci and other federal health officials knew privately versus what they communicated publicly. His words consistently show that he recognized early on that there was uncertainty about COVID-19's mortality rate, acknowledged the problems and limitations of school closures and social distancing, and later described efforts to prevent the CDC from publicly stating that vaccines were not effective at preventing infection and transmission. His records also show he was aware early on of questions about the virus's origins and NIAID's connections to coronavirus research in Wuhan, and that he took the PRC's and WHO's statements at face value despite knowing he was likely being lied to. At the same time, Fauci remained one of the most influential voices in shaping the country's response to COVID-19. Americans relied on his public statements to understand how at-risk they were for contracting COVID-19 and the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines. Fauci's public accounts were often far less candid and far less accurate than the information he wrote and communicated privately.
At best, Fauci was an ineffective and incompetent leader of NIAID, unable or unwilling to enforce the basic grant oversight and reporting requirements his own agency's rules demanded. At worst, he was personally responsible for the very research that caused a pandemic, and then spent years concealing that possibility from the public. Either conclusion is inexcusable for a man who held one of the most powerful positions in American public health for nearly four decades. He designed a culture that allowed this to happen: grant officers who took an applicant's self-reporting at face value instead of verifying compliance, program staff who treated White House directives as suggestions rather than requirements, and a director who prioritized his own institutional reputation over candor with Congress and the public. All of these contributed to a system where risky research proceeded unchecked, and inconvenient truths were managed rather than disclosed.
As Fauci assumed leadership at NIAID, he centralized his control and expanded funding at NIAID and NIH, using a combination of the Global War on Terror and overhyped pandemics[4] to increase the institutions' grantmaking capacity by massively expanding their budgets and ultimately increasing NIAID's budget by upwards of 130%[5]. Fauci's extensive documentation of his media presence in his journals can be attributed to the prominence that he acquired in the aftermath of the October 2001 anthrax attacks; the expansion of NIAID's portfolio, combined with his status as a tenured career government employee, meant he was often viewed as an impartial arbiter of biodefense and pandemic risk. His agency's involvement in gain-of-function research, and his pre-emptive defusal of increasing concern on the issue by "[taking] the bull by the horns," demonstrate a political acumen that helped him survive so many successive presidencies and ultimately centralize much of the informal power of the government's pandemic response in his office.
Despite his political acumen, Fauci's behavior at NIAID repeatedly exceeded scientific boundaries. Fauci's broader conduct as director of NIAID is troubling on its own, simply by examining its funding decisions. Offending projects included significant questionable behavior, including funding studies that involved harvested fetal tissue and the deliberate infection of beagle puppies with parasitic sand fly larvae; in both cases, it was later realized that NIAID had failed to sufficiently vet the research for compliance with federal scientific standards. The Ebola records Chairman Paul released in September 2026 show the same behavior at work long before COVID-19. In 2015, under a NIAID task order, researchers at the Army's infectious disease institute at Fort Detrick vaccinated monkeys against Ebola and then exposed them to the virus as a fine aerosol, an engineered exposure that carried it deep into the lung in a way natural infection does not, and the vaccinated animals developed lung damage the control animals did not.
Fauci learned that his own agency had funded and helped design the study only when Department of Defense officials said so at a White House briefing, after which he wrote that it "should have been a classified experiment that never should have been done in the first place" and argued the findings should be withheld because they "could indicate a vulnerability." His deputy Cliff Lane meanwhile told NIAID scientists to hold further Ebola work, warning that "one might consider this dual use research," and NIAID's Peter Jahrling wrote that he would "keep the rest off Email." This behavior of exceeding programmatic standards in research also extended to his assumed role in pandemic preparedness.
Pandemics are a fact of nature that no amount of institutional oversight can fully prevent, and no government can control every variable that produces the next outbreak. What we can control is how prepared the population is when one arrives. Seasonal influenza and other common illnesses are consistently more lethal for people with underlying health conditions, and the same holds true for pandemic pathogens. As the Trump Administration has consistently said, the single most reliable protection any individual has against a future pandemic is being as healthy as possible before it starts, which should be the goal of public health agencies. Their goals should not be, as Fauci did, to create pandemics to learn how to prevent them.
The Trump Administration and the NIH have taken real steps to clean up NIAID's leadership, working to ensure the institute is staffed by people who take seriously both the promise of the research they fund and the responsibility that comes with funding it. In addition, the administration has dropped the old three-pillar strategy that included pandemic preparedness. The new plan has two pillars: the infectious diseases that currently most affect Americans, plus immunology, allergy, and autoimmune disease. Biodefense and pandemic preparedness are no longer on the NIAID website, and the grant portfolio in those areas is under review. Remaining biodefense and advanced-countermeasure work has been shifted to the Department of War as a military-led partnership.
As the leader in basic science research, NIH cannot repeat this failure. Scientists, researchers, and grant officers across the agency need to remind themselves that their decisions carry consequences beyond the walls of a laboratory, and that oversight exists precisely because self-policing failed here.
Decisions made and defended by Fauci and the agencies he directed impacted schools, businesses, families, public health policy, America's national security, and medical decisions across the country. Examining Fauci's journal entries shows that the health officials entrusted with protecting the public were far from forthcoming about what they knew, what they did not know, and what they chose to tell the American public. Fauci had extraordinary influence, access to information, and a massive public platform where he could have expressed his doubts, contradictions, and concerns he spent so much time writing about in his journal amid his self-glorifying entries. Six years after the pandemic began, the American people deserve an honest accounting of how those decisions were made, what precisely was known at the time, and why one individual was permitted to be more concerned with his reputation and public appearance than his transparency with the public while the country he was responsible for protecting was crumbling at his feet.
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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
Hannah Anderson is the Senior Director of Healthy America Policy at the America First Policy Institute.
Royce Hood is the Senior Analyst for China Policy at the America First Policy Institute.
Erin Passarello is a Policy Analyst for the Healthy America team at the America First Policy Institute.
Hannah Anderson, Senior Director, Healthy America
Royce Hood, Senior Analyst, China Policy
Erin Passarello, Analyst, Healthy America Policy
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Original text here: https://americafirstpolicy.com/issues/coverups-and-concealment-at-niaid-faucis-role-in-covid-19/
[Category: ThinkTank]